Oleomargarine As A Failed War Effort

How odd. I changed over to this site I set up specifically to get some idea of how many readers and subscribers the site attracts. This is done through feedburner.com and seems to work pretty good. I have a goodly number of subscribers and as many as a hundred hits a day. I'm gonna hafta perk up and start writing more interesting stuff.

I tried to get feedburner to work on my original blog, but I had messed around with the settings several years ago before Google bought blogger.com, and feedburner keeps refusing to register the site from that era. The feedburner installer claims I have an independent comments program in the settings from a long time ago. I don't know how to remove the code. So, to get the feedback a counter would provide me with, I set this new account in blogspot up because feedburner accepted it as legitimate.

A high school graduation party for the son of my middle brother was held next door at my youngest brother's house. Since I got invited several times last week by several people, and my brother and his wife stopped by my place yesterday afternoon to remind me the party was happening last night, I was pretty sure they wanted me to show up. They really didn't have to go to that much trouble. I thought my intention to attend was fairly translucent. They worry about me going senile and forgetting things. I enjoy letting them conclude it's worst than they thought.

The party was kind of a big deal. The boy only graduates from high school once. I gotta stop saying he's a boy. That is, if he is indeed still considered a boy, he won't be a boy long. About twenty-five people or more showed up. There might have been that many cars parked around the house. My nephew seemed excited that I showed up and I was pleased more by that than anything. We don't know each other well. The party was set up around a cook-out or barbecue with lots of food either cooked on the spot or brought ala carte by the various couples who showed up.

I stayed for an hour or so, and then came home. There were a gaggle of couples me and my ex-wife were friends with there, and I've begun to recognize lately that I just can't stand to be around old friends who knew us back then.

I know this has hurt my friend David more than anybody, but whether it's right or wrong, and although I still like those people personally, they witnessed one of the hardest things that has ever happened to me, and I haven't ever gotten over it, and don't expect to. My heart was broken, and I can never love again because I can never become human. That's my deepest sorrow, and the true bane of my ex-is-tense. God knows I've tried.

It's worse because I don't appear to be an unlovable person. There are people who want to love me and have me love them in return. It's not that I'm unwilling, particularly as I get older and have to face death alone or among strangers who only attend my death bed because they're paid to. It's entirely my fault and I certainly deserve this fate. "Hurt me. Beat me. Make me write bad checks."

I stopped writing a while to respond to the arrival of an e-mail from the Thomas group. It was from john, who seems to have undergone a Kundalini type conversion in the way he sees things and he's writing from a different perspective, whether he recognizes it or not.

I wrote a reply which contained this question: ... did they (the ancient Romans) worship these people (Emperors) as Gods then, in the same way people worship movie stars and rock musicians now? 

Some people appear to worship rock musicians as gods. Gods are gods. Whether it's in the ancient days or now. Right? Why would worship itself differ in form? Wouldn't it be the object of worship that skins the cat? This is not, apparently, the first time somebody has posed this question. I suppose this path of inquiry will inevitably lead to what people think "worship" actually indicates.

If some Dilbert decided to make a comparative study of a large number of videos taken of evangelical religious nuts at one of their meetings, and an equal number of videos of a bunch of rock and roll groupies acting out their adoration for their favorite rocker on the pulpit, would their rituals of worship be made up of the same human care-actor-is-tics?

It's not easy to not take control when the flow is rolling. It's hard not to think of the possible consequences of writing what I write, so I pretend it's not me, but some docetic god having it's say, and if my body has to die for it, at least it won't be for blasphemy. I just wrote a post to the Thomas group that was filled to the brim with my uncertainty. I can't predict the response I'll get, if any. Sometime no response has more power.

Blog-wise, this particular blog site provides me with just what I want. The ability to easily change the settings to reflect what I wanna live with. I do not wanna deal with people's comments. I'm not inviting comment. That's not what I write for. I write to see what I'll say. There are consequences enough without the proof of the pudding well-meaning people's comments provide. Basically, I don't wanna spend any time at all dealing with what people think of what comes outta my fingers. It's me or them. If I address the other's concerns, I have no time for my own concerns with what I've composed. It already takes most all day to do what I do.

My power-user brother next door makes a living off the internet. He is very patient about explaining to me what it means to be able to influence the search engines to return a results page with his site at the top of the list. He dared me to type the one word that his business is all about into the search page dialog box on my computer. I did, and sure enough, his web site link popped up at the top of the results page. He's not doing anything illegal to make that happen. It's just a routine business deal available to anybody who plays their cards right. He seems convinced most people just don't get it, and only because they don't know what to do. Moreover, they don't want other people to find out how ignorant they are about the simplest things, when all they really have to do is ask somebody. You just have to know the right question. That's not asking too much, is it?

This sort of arrangement seems rudimentary in the practice of doing business on the internet. You make a deal with the people who offer the services you need to be rendered. The general idea is that if you pat them on their back, they'll pat you on yours. You buy some service from them, and in return they will feature your site more prominently, which brings you more business, and in turn brings them more business. Ad (no pun intended) infinitum.