Brevity Is The Art Of Everything

We had a quick, soft rain shower in the middle of the day that cooled things down a bit. It was the advance of what might turn into a tropical storm that will pass over here in a couple of days. If it takes long than a couple of days for it to get here, it will probably arrive as a hurricane. We can stand the rain. The drought I wrote about in the spring got washed away, but it don't take long for rain water to sink down through the sandy loam we farm here. That's why we depend on tropical storms and hurricanes to bring us the water. The wind can be dangerous, but without the yearly rainfall being pumped up by a storm or two the farming gets too iffy.

Some people wonder why we whine about not getting enough rain when we're surrounded by swamps. It's a series of factors that make up the real facticity. As I mentioned above, most of the soil on the coastal plains have a lot of sandy areas. Either all the land in one area has been under the ocean or most of it, but about all of it has been the beach for the ocean for a period of time. Sand don't have enough organic materials (humus) to hold the water up to where the root of the plants can reach it.

Many of the native plants that have acclimated to living in a drought prone area have deep roots that enable them to survive. There is a kind of bermuda grass that's grown around here that's known as "coastal bermuda grass". It's roots go real deep. A hybrid has been developed whose roots go even deeper. This new hybrid gets green earlier in the spring and stays greener longer in the fall. I'm not sure, but I think that's because of the depths it roots get to. Coastal bermuda grass is usually grown to make hay out of around here.

I've heard many a lecture by my father about dirt. He was a high school agriculture teacher. As the advisor to the local Future Farmers Of America (FFA) organization, he was responsible to organizing the various contests they sponsor. Soil-judging was what one of the FFA contests was about. Week after week, year after year, my father would prepare his current students to enter these contests as a team. I was around much of the time.

If they won the local contests, they got to be in the State contests, and if they won there, they got to go to the national soil-judging contest, and that was a big deal to the local folk that there sons could go to a shindig like that and do well. They held my father in high regard for working with their children like this and helping them to see their potential. A lotta people respected my father. Especially after I left home and joined the Navy.

I don't remember how many different kinds of contests the FFA sponsors for high school students during the regular school year. At least five or six. They had livestock judging contests, seed-judging contests, tool-judging contests galore. As my father's oldest son I was told who to emulate of my father's students and who not to. My father was not one who didn't take his work home. The lectures didn't stop when he got home. I was just another animal to be institutionalized.

Sometime I write that I felt like I was different than the people around me, and all I had to do was to discover what that difference way, and I'd know who I was. I'd have my own identity. I sought being type-cast. I felt like it would have been a comfort to me to be recognized for my burlesque personality.

I'm not on some quest to understand how I'm different any more. I've come to realize that the only way I was different from anybody else was due to my desire to be different than anybody else, and candidly, I thought I did a mighty fine job of it. My mentors constantly hounded me with the aphorism "You can be anything you want to be." Eventually, I accepted that I could, and that there was no reason to stop being anybody I wanted to be just because some of the anybodies I became because I could, was any more rewarding than any of the other anybodies I could be if I wanted to. I found out I could acquire the rewards without playing the games I though were needed to get 'em. Those rewards. The ones that arrived due to my skill at playing the games. They were not so rewarding without the game to sacrifice myself to/for.

I was constantly compared to my father's best students and his worst students. I hated all my father's students. He spent all his time teaching them how to get ahead in life, and the only way for me to get any of his time at all was as just another of his students. I wasn't just taking on my father in order to establish my own identity at the age of puberty, I was taking on his entire repertoire of adoring students and parents. The numbers were stacked against me. The only strategy I felt was possible was to go away.

I still feel it was the right thing for me to do. I didn't realize it was probably a necessity in order for me to live the kind of life I'd dreamed of.

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

If you were to look back through the archives of my blogs you'd find this bit about "me" through and through it. I believe there is only One me, and each of us think we're it. The "it" we "think" we are is a subjective me. It's the most meaningful association we share together. You got your me, and I've got my me, and each of us possess as if chattel our own me, and it's The Big Lie.

I had to hate my parents and my sisters and brothers to establish my own identity. I had to establish my own identity to find out that what I've been calling "my" me is the sa-me me every other other is calling me too. It says so in the Old Testament as found in the Ten Commandments "Thou shalt have no other God before me." How many me's do you gnow?

If vacate my body and come over to your body, I can use your me just like it was mine because it is that. What travels between bodies ain't consciousness. What does travel between bodies doesn't have to know where it's at to be there. What's in a word?

If I install one of my poems into your experiential database either through ruse or misdirection, you will naturally like the way I use words better than the way you use words, and you'll start to use the lyrics of my poems in ways that seem interesting to you, but you won't know where they come from because you make them your own. I will. Passworded-backdoors to the psyche not withstanding.

Shocking events can transpire from this sort of dynamic/mojo. It's a two-was street. Sometimes a thoroughfare. I don't just use my own poetry. It's better that way. It's better to realize it's not my specific poetry that does the trick. I can take Robert W. Service's poem, The Cremation Of Sam Magee, and lead crowds of people through the streets and back alleys craving for closure. I've only memorized about half, if that much, of the poem.

The people who follow me seeking closure usually know this poem as well or better than me. When I was younger I thought it was more or less special to me for my own adventurous portrayals, but over time I started noticing that when I recited what I knew of the poem it always draws a crowd, strangers or no. I'm astounded by the commonality of my preferences with poetry.

I probably learned more about Poe by reciting certain of his poems in public and getting to watch how people reacted to hearing them. I somehow doubt Poe would have been as attractive to me if I hadn't memorized and recited his poems. They seem to take it that we share something profound in common from the manner in which I use Poe's words. It takes them a much longer time to realize I'm an asshole. Years and years.