False Hope And Cockiness

Sunday morning, and I got he PopShuffle drumbeat going on the digital piano. I don't really wanna hear it as much as I wanna be distracted by something in real time. The lawnmower across the field ain't working for me. It seems so mundane and week day. I booted up the TV to watch the Sunday morning news programs, but soon realized I wasn't gonna enjoy them because of getting tossed back and forth between news about the impending doom of hurricanes in the Caribbean and Republicans in Minnesota. I have negative, up close and personal experiences with all four elements and places.

I have to admit to be a political partisan. It's not ideal, and I didn't plan it this way, but I literally get physically ill at the very mention of Bush and evangelicals any more. To think and act that way would indicate to me that I'd really lost any respect for myself I had ever possessed. I feel like I've been manipulated into taking this extreme attitude, and I'm not in the least bit flattered that such is so. The pre-emptive strike of America against a political entity that had not directly attacked us was the biggest betrayal to my ethics and mores of any event in my lifetime. I felt more ashamed of that event for my native country than any other act I've witnessed. Even I'm not that mean-spirited and cruel. And then, on top of that, these same people started openly using torture on non-combatants and combatants alike. I know war is hell, but torture from Americans? It makes me wanna puke in disgust. To find out that by word and deed that our principles have been betrayed by our own elected officials sends us straight back to the Dark Ages, and worse.

I don't think it matters so much who gets elected in national office any more. Bush and Cheney have gone beyond the pale. The next President is going to follow the precedent and attempt to garner even more power to the executive branch, and then the other branches will fight back, and nothing for the people will get done.

I think the North Vietnamese who tortured John McCain still have control over him. I watched an interview with the Commandant of the Hanoi Hilton where he was held prisoner-of-war. He though McCain would make a great President. No blame from his perspective. McCain would not leave imprisonment when he had the opportunity because he was their bitch. He is still their bitch, and will do whatever they command him to do in loyalty to their purposes. That's my ill-considered and amateurish opinion after having studied the techniques of Oriental torture since during the Korean Conflict.

I watched the Barack Obama acceptance speech, and was myself moved to tears over what had transpired in just my own lifetime. I was raised to be the sort of Jim Crow person Martin Luther King preached against, and yet I knew that I was witnessing a true martyr in real time, and that it was me that was gonna have to change my ways. I didn't have a clue the whole country would change the way I had to before I even got started good. I voted for a mulatto in the Democratic primaries, and realized in real time that I sincerely think he's the best candidate. That was a little shocking.

Watching Obama's posturing during his acceptance speech reminded me of Mussolini. In a scary way. Both are or were Leos. Posturing is as natural to a Leo as modesty is to the following Sign, Virgo, but sometimes the lion eats the man, and we all pay the price for that. John McCain was born in Virgo. Bush was born in Cancer. Our choices are becoming negligible. Enough politics. I'm on the last week of taking steroids, so it'll go away by itself soon enow.

I've been through some shit the last couple of months. All Summer, even. An emotional hay ride. I've had a hard row to hoe. Been plowing in a field full of stumps. Nobody knows. They only got wot I give them, and yet, they still have to interpret my offerings as if wot I describe happened to them instead of me, and for their reasons instead of mine. It's lonely at the bottom, here in the woods where I am is allone except for the telephone.

The only thing I've heard about steroids has been mostly associated with athletes using them to get an edge in competition. I asked my friend who has medical training if Prednisone was the same sort of steroid the athletes use, and he didn't seem to think so. Taking this prescribed medicine to relieve the pain of the arthritis has been like a miracle. I was racked with more physical pain than I have ever experienced or had to endure in my life, and after my doctor at the VA gave me injections of steroids and started me on a program of taking 20 mg Prednisone tablets, in three days I was comparatively pain free.

Now, she's referred me to the VA at Durham where they have an arthritis clinic. It's been rumored that the staff at the Durham VA is somewhat associated with Duke Hospital, so it's likely that I'll get the latest and greatest care despite my unworthiness as a disenchanted, questionable war veteran. I feel a little guilty I didn't actually get gunshot to get the benefits.

Yesterday I had some visitors here at my house. My wino's hootch. One of them was good ol' Lynne, who brought Tom over for to introduce. We hit it off right away when he informed me he was a writer and wrote mainly about art. I like to talk to writers about writing. Soon, it became evident that we had a lotta other things in common, and it turned out that he was an Aries, and was a daring adventurer who hadn't held back on doing what he had to do to get a good taste of life. At last, somebody who knows how to entertain themselves besides me.

Still, in retrospect, I mourn over how the steroids made me act out immodestly and pre-emptively during Tom's visit. He didn't seem offended. Au contraire. I rationalize my braggadocio behavior by recognizing I had other, lesser pains before I started the steroids I didn't know were there until the steroids took them away also, and my delight and euphoria over this development pushed me right over the hump into being crass. Lynne got so disgusted with my bellicose posturing she practically got on her broom and flew south screeching. She's an Aries too.

I've been asked to join them at Lynne's new beach house she's in the middle of redecorating, but I probably won't go unless seriously encouraged. I hate to keep turning her invitations down. She might stop inviting me. Nobody wants that. It's just that she has too much to do there now to be the splendid hostess she's capable of being. Why, as her devotee, would I would settle for less from her than her very best. (Right. she may read this. lol)

Currently, I'm frying or saute-ing some chicken tenderloins in some butter with salt and pepper. Then, I'm gonna take two of them and smash them up to make a sandwich from. I need one of those tenderizing hammers with the checked heads to beat the tenderloins up with once they're cooked. That makes them flat enough to fit on some potato bread slices slathered with Duke mayonnaise. I guess I could put a splash of burgundy in the frying pay to feel continental. Otherwise not.

I got simple tastes food-wise, but only because I've never spent much time thinking about cooking beyond what makes it easy enough to swallow. I been hungry to the extreme more times than I oughta, and my habits from those times seems to have dispensed with the etiquette needed for ritual and ceremony. Just get it in there and don't starve. What else matters?

Probably a lot. Eating is more than just not starving. I know that. I've eaten food skilled cooks have fussed over on occasion. I wouldn't kick 'em outta bed for eating crackers. When I win the lottery, I'm gonna buy me a chef for Christmas.

I just got through weeping over how my life was radically changed by the civil rights advocacy of the Fifties and Sixties. I had been raised to believe in one sort of culture, and by the time I was full-grown in my early twenties that very culture had been criminalized by an act of law. This was especially prominent during my formative years, especially my teen-aged years, when life is confusing enough in the best of days.

Granted, it wasn't anything compared to what other people have had to go through during their teen years, but what I was given in good faith was taken away from all the rural southern boys like me, and there was really nothing to fight for to hold on to what we had been indoctrinated to believe was right. It wasn't right. It was obvious to any thinking person that suppressing other people so that they're not equal before the law for any reason has to be wrong. It just must be for the good of the whole. Even more for the good of the individual. Everybody should have the privilege of be-co-me-ing with any fate that appeals to them as long as there's no harm or foul to the other.

The civil rights struggle interceded in my life when ideally, I shouldn't have had to deal with it. It was a personal inconvenience, no matter how righteous the cause. The odd thing is, that even the short number of years between me and my younger brothers made a big difference in how it affected them, and my youngest brother, who is just eight years younger than me, still don't understand what my point is when I pule and whine about it these late days. No blame. Lucky boy. He's done well in life, and is more generous than I could ever be.

I don't know what made me a miser. I can be so niggardly and cheap toward other people it's a wonder I haven't been shot with shit and killed for stinking. "... hang me from th highest tree... Oh, woman, would you weep for me?"

The simple answer is "No." I don't attract that type of woman. They gotta be much tougher than that just to survive my odd idiosyncrasies. When I'm done with them, they're just ruined for any other man alive, because other, more powerful types can't measure up to my insight and understanding (Man, I just love these steroids. I could easily get addicted to this absurd cockiness).

I don't want no man's left-overs, I only wanna be with those impossible bitches other men CAN'T have for either love or money. I only seem to fall in love with the very best sort. I don't even have to pick or choose them. They know who they are when they give themselves up to me.

My Past Lives

The entry following this one was sort of written to mark the passing of time. Except for the 7 days I didn't write while I was in Washington state, I've tried to write something everyday, and the crap I wrote below is that. Now, I'm writing just to make ti-me fly, and it's even less justifiable than what follows. "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to."

I thought the crying jags would be over by now. They started when I received an invitation from the oldest daughter of my second marriage to attend her second marriage to a truck-driver named Doug. She wrote me an e-mail to say that she had talked to her mother, and that her mother had stated that she felt okay with me showing up for the wedding she would also attend. Just that mention was what started the weeping.

Weeping is an old story with me. That's how I segue from one situation to another. Weeping, and having elaborate self-conversations that can run on for at least a quarter century. But, seeing my ex-wife again face-to-face was not the same thing as having conversations with her ghost. I've been a sycophant with some modicum of skill and bravado for all of my life (especially my formative years), and I have a pretty good idea when I'm being summoned by the opposite sex to account for my misdeeds. My daughter became my mother to summon me before her mother, hopefully just before she becomes a mother herself.

I hate that I love women. If it wasn't for my conviction that a man has to be born that way, I would have surely converted to being an open homosexual, maybe even gay. As it is, I've lived the last 28 years as an eunuch. This, as the flip side of being a sex addict for the first 22 or so years of my adult life.

I think I must have been sexually abused from the day I was born, and then one day I got curious about the power that offered from the other side of the coin. Then, one day I got a vasectomy and stopped pursuing sex with other people, and eventually even stopped masturbating. Doing that seems just crazy for a Taurus/Scorpio orientation. I took the art of seduction to extremes... only to abandon it en toto? What a drag, man.

I used my skills on the way home from the wedding on the short hop from Memphis to Raleigh-Durham. I seduced this young engineer who had been married less than a year as a diversion to make time fly on the last leg home. I didn't seduce him sexually, but religiously, and yet by the time the hour and a half flight was over he was squirming to do anything to mark our ti-me together. Who doesn't need a better defense against their Jungian experience with God?

It wouldn't have made any difference whether the person who chose the seat beside me had been on that airplane by either age or gender. I needed time to fly. I know what needs to be there for that to happen, and nobody else on earth. Everybody else on earth has to interpret from my behavior what their's might be.

I lost Jung's quote about what religion is. It's something like "Religion is each person's defense against their experience of God." I been juking this notion around for a week or so now, and the more I bring it into the conversation, the more I grok what Carl Gustav was trying to say. I find myself agreeing with Jung a lot. That could mean anything.

There's a reason why I find that quote so interesting. It brings up the negative aspect of God I call The Terror, and another quote I don't know the exact source of, "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."

I recall a specific incident that revealed an attribute of the horrific aspect of God that took precedent over any other "idea" I may have had of it. My friend Billy and I did hypnosis together in order to take him through his actual birth process, and when he got to that "place" he was just before he dived into a physical body in order to be-co-me human. I asked him what it felt like previous to his embodiment. He told me he was dreadfully afraid. He couldn't describe what was so terrifying to him in that state of being.

Suddenly, the question I needed came to me, and I asked him if he had only taken a human body to escape this dreadful fear, and he answered me simply. "Yes." Then, I asked him if that same terror would be waiting for him when the human body he took to escape it lost it's integrity and died. Again, "Yes."

I finally understood my own sense of the terror of death. It's not the dying, but the fear of what's waiting beyond the pale. It's the same irrefutable force that's always waiting through eternity, and not even God is God over it.

At first I thought I was weeping from the sheer physical pain I was experiencing, and now I think to myself that I'm weeping for joy at the lack of that sa-me pain. I waited for so long for my ex-wife and I to have that face-to-face conversation. I couldn't be happier with the results of it. I felt like the Three Bears. It was not too much or too little. I found myself saying some of the most shocking things. I almost sounded human. So, why am I still weeping?

It may be because I also saw my daughters for the first ti-me in all those years. I wasn't there for them. They weren't there for me. It was a repeat of what happened with my first daughter with my first wife. I passed by where I thought they lived many times, but couldn't go knock on the door because of my immense shame. I am is the unforgivable and the unforgiven. That may be universal with Everyman. A species flaw. Romantic love is tyranny of the most odious sort. Only the detachment of the wounded Grail King can survive the very sentimentalness of it.

How Would I Gnow?

I seem a little disenchanted this morning to be taking my last full-sized steroid pill. For the next five days I'll be taking a half of a pill, and that will be the end of the series of Prednisone as medication for my rheumatoid arthritis. The fact that I received written verification by letter from my doctor that what I'm experiencing is a recognized dis-ease with recognized predictable symptoms ain't exactly a thrill a minute either, but that's nothing compared to how this medicine has relieved what's probably bound to return at some time in the future.

The physical pain I've experienced over the last few months is the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life. I think I"ve been pretty fortunate to have lived for at least sixty-nine years without suffering any more pain than I have. The fact that steroids were available to completely take that horrific pain away in just a few days is a miracle to me, and not a religious miracle at all. Such a treatment can be repeated. I don't know how long it can do that again, but my doctor says it can, although she herself don't know how many times that could happen.

I have been able to play my piano again without pain for the last week and a half, and yet I haven't. Not any for more than just a few minutes just to see if I could do it without instigating those malefic results. Candidly, attempting to push through the pain of the arthritis was probably the worst response I could have engendered. I'm not anxious at all to reconstitute that pain. I guess I wasted the money I couldn't really afford to spend on that digital keyboard, because I don't care if it sits there and rots down to the last plastic fiber, I'm not going to do that to myself again for either love or money.

I don't know much about having love or money enough to spend either recklessly. As far as money is concerned, I must have unconsciously taken a vow of poverty. I'm not so sure what I did, in this regard, was so unconscious or not. I did make some religious vows when I was awfully young that precluded having much money to pay my way though difficult situations, so that I would stay on the side of the lowly. My father was ridiculously idealistic and lectured constantly on the subject. In America, I've always been among the poorest of the poor, and if nothing else it's assured me that no woman in her right mind would ever claim that she loved me for my money. I''ve never been with a woman that had less resources than me.

I sat in the closest proximity I've been for the last 27 years with the onliest woman I've actually really loved in my whole life, including my natural-born mother, and realized that in real time for the first time in all my life that I was capable of romantic love. How could I have been so stupid and treated her so carelessly and been so totally ignorant of my callousness? I became aware of that why in those few moments. I didn't have enough to offer her to keep her satisfied with loving me, and I didn't have anymore to give. I had to let her find her own bliss, and it slowly killed me. I don't feel human anymore, and haven't for a very long time.

I probably just lied. I just typed what I wrote with tears streaming from my eyes. I think I sort of have to be human to cry. I guess I'm just feeling sorry for myself. I've tried to let other people love me "before it's too late." I'm convinced those fools that have tried to let me love them have been sincere. At least, to the degree that they too wanted someone to love them back, and took a chance on me. I have despicable double standards. They simply didn't measure up, and I ended up the son-of-a-bitch. No blame.

Three Orders Of Magnitude

I keep thinking about the saying I adopted from a man who soon murdered his pretty young wife. Oh, to think the thoughts of genius.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/hans-reiser-sen.html

I became interested in Hans Reisner's story before he killed his wife by reading about how, as a boy genius, he invented the file system for the Linux Operating System. The article I read mentioned that he kept a blog and provided a link.

I found myself fascinated by what he had written about how hard it was to get good help when you're working on a personal pet project. File systems appear to have to be debugged with a more persnickety intent than some software programs, and that was the rub for Hans Reisner.

He couldn't hire the help he needed to debug his file system to the nth degree. He couldn't entice some competent person to go the distance his file system needed to be debugged for either love or money. At some point, he had to do those final repairs himself, because the file system was his pet project. It was his baby.

I took his point with similar experiences in my own life where I had pet projects I wanted to get legs and walk upright on their own two feet. I couldn't seem to get the help I needed for love or money either. Many, many times I would find myself reduced to begging, and at that juncture my pleading became the proof-positive evidence that it was not gonna happen. What a drag, man.

At least the resulting frustration didn't carry over into me killing my wife. Well, not literally anyway. I can only be shamed for being a wife-beater. Not framed for premeditated murder. Both my ex-wives are alive, kicking, and at last peek... looking good... thank you very much.

I don't have the particulars on the tip of my tongue, but I suspect it was when the spirit that built and occupied this body found it's intent ruptured by it's getting kneed in the groin by a jealous god, that I was able to arrange a barter to trade my old body for this slightly damaged one. What's I'm implying is that if that knee jerk reaction hadn't have happened, I would have to have Returned in the customary way and wait for another opportunity to get embodied.

It's chancy. That could take millions of Earth years. One of the best ways is to make a lateral movement instead of the old up and down one. All that's needed is a warm body some younger spirit had bad luck with, and is willing to make a deal to exchange bodies. The gist if which is they take your old, worn-out body and wait for it to die, and then they can make the Return honorably with no blame attached for self-murder.

I got this body fifty-five years ago, and even with it's compromised testicles, it's mo' bettah than rolling around heaven all day without a body yearning for something I don't have control over to happen.

Yesterday or maybe the day before I had a friend describe to me a vision he had of a astronomical situation that involved two radiant sun-like objects revolving around a central point between them. Around this configuration, as he drifted away from it for perspective, was a smaller planet whose orbit enveloped the two radiant objects. He told me one of those binary objects was larger than the other or vice-versa.

One of the interesting aspects of his description for me was how, when I asked him if his normal way of seeing things was intact during his vision, he described pretty much the same thing I experienced during my remembering vision. His vision of the two solar objects and the planet that encircled them was a sort of value-added experience he only "caught" as if a drifting thought. It's reality was as certain to him as any other. It had all the earmarks of being an experience instigated by his own volition. I wondered if that took three orders of magnitude to manifest that sight to his consciousness?

I Kept Screaming For Her To Shut Up! Shut Up!

Francis Bacon:  Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination "for the better moving of the will."

This quote is the short version of the original one Ben quickly adopted and memorized. I didn't really think about it twice until he did that. It's not unusual behavior for him. He's a real card. He knows all the latest jokes that he carefully memorizes. He knows all the words to the country songs over the last forty years. He drinks Budweiser and Black Jack, and confesses, if you press him, to his love for a fundamental version of Christianity that currently goes by the label "evangelical".

Rhetoric is a indeterminable word to me. I know what it means, and yet I don't. Here's the link to a website that has a page full of famous people's descriptions of what rhetoric is:

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lunsford/pages/defs.htm

This is what I love about the internet. If I really wanna become an accomplished pundit on rhetoric, all the materials I might need to make that happen is just a click away. There has always been a part of me that regretted not taking enough time to consider studying how to be a librarian in college. I didn't take a single class in librarianism. I avoided it as if it was the plague. I thought being a male librarian might not suit my fancy. I thought I needed a tougher cover story than that. I was right. But now, it doesn't even matter anymore.

I became aware while I was in college, after four years in the Navy, that if I did use my GI Bill money to study what librarians did for a living it would serve me well. It would have worked out fine if I had followed through. I might have been a valuable enough researcher to attract deep-pocketed customers, but it might have been a real stretch for me to put their needs before my own. I am is a jealous god.

It's easy for me to recognize that a trained librarian could produce the study materials I might need for any particular project in a much more efficient and professional way that anything I might institute, but the internet search engines, specifically Google, obviated my regret for not manning up to learn logistics in a bookly way.

I'm really impressed with how I've evolved in getting the best search results I can get by what I type into the dialog box and hit enter. I just start typing keywords in no particular order. I don't use any punctuation marks to separate the words, I just type in every word I think might relate to the topic at hand and take my chances. The more related terms or expressions I can type on the entry box the greater the chance is that I'm gonna get a lotta pertinent hits in the first five result page links.

Today I searched for an author by typing down as many of the words of the lyrics of the song. I typed in four words in the lyrics I though were in the same lyric line. Maybe the first twenty links on the results page produced a multiplicity of sources for the author's name and all the lyrics whether the web master had a right to offer them up or no.

So, when I checked the mail today I saw that I had received a letter from the VA Hospital. I sort of expected it to contain the logistical information about my next appointment. My doctor kept asking me questions about my trip to Washington with the idea of scheduling me with an appointment after I returned.

The letter wasn't exactly about an appointment, and yet it was informative. It was the results from all the x-rays they did on my body. It told me that the results for rheumatoid arthritis were positive, and that I was going to have to go to the VA Hospital in Durham because they had an arthritis clinic there. I don't know what any of that means except that this diagnosis puts me in another category of patient. I have something definitively wrong they can pigeon-hole me with. My regular doctor seems to have already ordered some more radiation treatment. I've been told radiation is one of the only therapies they use. I don't know how it works to improve osteoporosis.

Finally having that talk with my ex-wife after 27 years apart is still haunting me. Just call me stupid, but I didn't really feel the separation that severely. Especially when we started talking as if no ti-me at all had passed. At least that's my perception of what happened between us. She was just as appealing to me as ever.

I wanted to kiss her. She's a great kisser. At least she was. I didn't kiss her. I just kinda wanted to for old time sake, but I knew the whole time we talked, that we'd both go back to where we come from alone. There was never any doubt about that. No quarter. No quarter. I know how she is, and that she wants a whole lot more from a man than I got to offer. I guess that's how I ended up a shaman (shamed man, wounded healer) living out in the woods on the edge of town by myself. I knew that twenty-seven years ago. She told me to my face. Why would she not? It left an indelible impression that I've never bothered to challenge since. No blame.

As For Myself

The quote below comes from a book entitled Blink. Page 114 in the paperback version, and not prominently located, but still, the info I projected into it intrigues me.

"As Keith Johnstone, one the founders of improv theater, writes: "If you stop reading for a moment and think of something you wouldn't want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you'll have thought of something worth staging or filming. We don't want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face with a custard pie, and don't want to suddenly glimpse Granny's wheelchair racing toward the edge of a cliff, but we'll pay good money to attend enactments of just such events."

I've never known what I might write about that the other would pay for to read. The manner in which I've conducted my affairs interests me a great deal, but I can't imagine that anybody would pay good money for the opportunity to curl up with it on a bearskin rug in front of a blazing log fire, and read until there was nothing left of it but warm ashes.

I don't seem to have any trouble inculcating weird predicaments for people to react to. Maybe the stinger is that I don't easily consider certain situations I wouldn't presuppose myself in for any reason. Like being trapped in a fire realizing it was really gonna hurt. I don't be hallucinating scenarios of that gross sort. I'm much too delicate by nature.

On the other hand, I have imagined Granny encountering several sorts of tragedy from which she never survived. Tha' bitch. She couldn't resist taking me down a notch or two every time we crossed paths. Scorpio females. The scourge of the universe. They're all in cahoots. Every Scorpio woman I ever met became my sadistic ol' grandmother on my mother's side, and my mother was her favorite coven apprentice. I have two older sisters that were taught the way. Thus, I was able to warn my two younger brothers to be cautious of their evil ways. But me? I never stood a chance against a determined woman, and I couldn't get excited about any other kind. I had to have something to fight against to fathom my best shit, and no woman of mine could ever survive as a sissy.

Not only were there women ruling me from above, my three female children ruled me from below. My two wives (read victims) were the only ones of this group that could be considered a harem. I never had sex with my sisters or children, so they never really fit the harem category, but I was always surrounded by women in my formative years. That is, up until around the time I was sixty years old.

So, what does my trials and tribulations with the opposite sex have to do with situations I wouldn't want to happen to me, or someone I loved?

I don't know. What has happened to me for good or ill is just what happened. I was probably paying attention to something else at the time anyway. My youngest brother and his wife and I were out in Washington State for the last week or so. The last day there we drove to the Northern Cascades for a looksee. It was easy to find. Just go north on InterState 5 and turn East on Highway 20. It takes you right through there without having to make another turn.

Two or three hours into the tour my brother pulled off into the parking area of a scenic view of a small dam with an attractive lake behind it. Lake Diablo. There was an asphalt path with a fence on the river side to follow in order to get the best view of this situation. I was stiff from being cooped up in the car so long, and found myself stutter-stepping a little to catch my balance.

I went with it. I had blisters on my left big toe because of an ill-fitting shoe, and it hurt, and I couldn't keep up with my brother and his wife, who are still in love after twenty-five years, and sort of considered this trip their twentieth honeymoon, and I was the third wheel. I yielded to the temptation and started walking like a spastic person who can't really control their body.

I glimpsed my brother and his wife scurrying ahead as if to pretend they didn't know me. I exaggerated my mimicry even more. Why would I not? There was nobody else there but the three of us the whole time we spent on that path, and we didn't meet anybody coming on to it on the way back to the car. It's my party, and I'll act retarded if I want to. I'm a natural at it. It's what I overcame to pass myself off as normal. I own it. People who can't not do it think I am is hilarious.

You see, that doesn't work for me as a story line for the stage or film as Johnstone states. It's not something I would hate to have happen to me or someone I love. For some arrogant reason I think I'm too skilled a story-teller to wax crude to achieve the desired commercially-oriented endgame. I have a double-standard that prejudices me in ways I can't easily espy. Cross my phony moral boundaries and see what happens. I can do that, but if you presume you can make mockery of my insincerity I will sulk and carry on like a spoiled brat.

I can be just that idiotic. I might attempt to punish you for my sins through projection. I might decide you should obey the rules of conscience I chose to make me into my kind of hero or make you suffer the pangs of hell for dissing my haughty presumptions. But, let me tell you this, devout reader, I'm much better at leaving you to your own devices than I used to be, and I've ALWAYS been more liberal about it than most, or so I say. But, why would I not?

Deliberately so. Golden Rule and all that jazz. I treat people like I wanna be treated (I instruct with feigned precision. Both my parents were teachers who didn't stop teaching when they got home. It's all I know as a birthright.), but over ti-me I learned not to ask too much of one person. But, everybody is not like that, and worse, they don't know what they're asking of me when they treat me the way they do. I just wouldn't treat people like that even as a loving favor.

Now. That's better. Maybe I can write about what I wouldn't do for-the-other if I wouldn't do it to them as for-myself.

Blinded By The Light

Some people have written me and asked me when I'm gonna write about my trip to Washington State to attend my daughter's wedding. The emotions are still raw, and I'm such a sissy that I'm a little embarrassed about how much time I spent crying. My brother and his wife witnessed some of it, but there was a lot more than they saw or anybody else. My ex-wife and two daughters saw none of it. I kept my cool pretty good in front of them, but I wasn't hiding anything. I was just in a different gear around them. I only had so much time there, and I didn't wanna self-indulge with the time I had. Granted, I was there for me, but I was mostly there FOR them, and I surprised myself by how I was able to give it up.

My brother did all the planning of the trip down to practically the last detail. What surprised me was how much he enjoyed it. I find out little by little when I realized he had thought of and attended to some detail I would suddenly realize he had taken care of, and make a remark of appreciation. He was truly pleased I noted, and often enow he would explain to me why he had decided the way he did.

That's where he messed up. Well, not "messed up" in a negative way. It simply means that if I make another trip (and I don't expect to), I probably won't have to beg him to perform the logistics like ordering tickets and getting reservations. He might feel insulted a little if I denied him that opportunity.

That's the most useful aspect of studying astrology for so long. Plotting out natal charts for so long paid off for me in amazing ways. Doing that before personal computers came along with their software programs for making charts made me a lucky man. I performed all the calculations by hand with a compass, a ruler, and pen and pencil using these big, thick ephemerides tomes I had to haul around from place to place if I wanted the numbers near me to reach for.

After all those years of study and interpreting the charts I did make for the other I could find some positive attribute of the other's personality that I could use to get along with each Signs eccentricities and trouble spots such that if I became aware of just their birthday, which no other information available, I could allow them the space they needed to indulge their own fantasies rather than the ones I assigned them for my own entertainment.

To me, everybody has a genius at their disposal whether they're aware of it or not. Sometimes, I can make them aware of that jinn, and introduce them to each other. A genius is a person who has a genie at their disposal. Unfortunately, it's not always clear sailing when various people find out they gotta turn them loose, but keep the bottle cork close at hand. Genies might accept suggestions, but they seem never to kowtow to demands. I've spent my adult life since my thirties convincing genies their masters didn't really mean to ignore them. Many times, the genies just ignore me.

I've kept a decent schedule taking my meds. I'm only taking two presently. Prednisone is the nayme of the steroid I'm taking, and a 600 mg hit of ibuprofen several times a day. I have to take food before both of them. I started out taking two 20 mg tablets of Prednisone for five days. Then a tablet and a half for five days, presently I'm taking one tablet a day, and in a couple of days I'll finish the steroids off taking one/half a tablet for the last five days.

Not only has all the symptoms of arthritis I whined and puled about gone, but even some other stiffness and soreness in my body I apparently accommodated over a long period of ti-me I wasn't aware of anymore. Swallowing this medicine sort of takes the miracle out of my healing, but the result is certainly miraculous to me.

This last bout started with the carpel tunnel symptoms and developed from there. The same way the only other time I had problems of this sort did once before. The embarrassing thing about it is that I did it to myself twice because the ergonomics was wrong. I repeated my original mistake. Dumb. Just dumb. I suspect that if I am careful about how my body addresses my two types of keyboards, I may be able to avoid repeating this mistake for a good long time.

Me and my brother and his wife was gone for essentially eight days. That's the longest I haven't written a blog entry for at least five years on a daily basis. It's the longest I've gone without smoking something including cigarettes for longer than that. Man, I was Jonesing like crazy. That was at least an adventure. I didn't get to drink much wine while I was gone either. My time was not my own. I was out there for-the-other. That can be so demanding for a person who spends 95% of their ti-me completely allone.

I don't know if I'll write about seeing my ex-wife and our two daughters. I don't know how they were ultimately affected by our visit. I was transformed. Okay, I'm still crying occasionally. Laying in bed this morning and realizing what was lost was more than I could bear for a while. I'm not sure "life is what you make it" anymore. Shit happens. Things change. Nobody knows.

Whistling My Way Past The Cemetery During The New Moon

I finally got the first good night's sleep in eight days of jet lag. I coulda pushed it and got even crazier. I won't describe how attractive that can be for me. Particularly with the demise of some respectable measure of rutting urges. God! Impotency can be sooo embarrassing. Fatigue, however, doesn't appear to require a turgid penis to reach for the stars. I get tired enow and physically exhausted, and I'm seeing and hearing stars across the entire breadth and depth of my senses, and I don't have to consciously know where I am is to be there. Your experience may vary.

This is sensory deprivation by proxy at it's finest. I learned about it being a homeless bum on the road for years. This was before psychedelics made dismissal of one's critical faculties de jour, but this path-with-heart is fraught with physical dangers such that perseverance for the ti-me it takes to get over the hump with fear and frustration is heart-breaking and shamefully daunting.

Some say the nomad is mad...

I would deliberately get so tired I couldn't keep my eyelids open. Once, I pushed the envelope for six continuous days and nights with no place to securely call my temporary home, and I would get so tired I couldn't listen to anything about anything anymore, even though a couple of days previously I might have seemed meltingly enamored of the sound of your voice calling my nayme.

Eventually, I would just wanna curl up into a fetal position in some relatively safe place, and die to the world of the senses, but I didn't. Again and again, I would just say no. Six days and nights, and on the seventh I rested. Before the sabbath, however, I hallucinated the souls of the dead screeching, "The fear of God is the bejinning of wisdom. It may be spoken."

"Really? No shit? Spoken?"

How the hell would I know? I'm just pretending to be the disinterested typist. Watching what appears on my monitor screen as I listen to my fingers going clickety clack on my fairly new, less noisy, aluminum-framed Apple USB-wired keyboard. Love it. I can't gnow what I'm writing about ahead of ti-me or the flow that gets me off won't happen. Presuming, of course, that I am is the culprit who feigns truth as a value-added, yet heretofore, unmarketed and/or unmarketable product.

Obviously, I'm capitalizing "The Terror" just to make the term special in some way. I'm using this expression to indicate God in it's negative aspect. It's as good a metaphor as any, as far as I'm concerned, but then again, I'm pretty lazy. I mean to relate this to a saying sung by the I seem familiar with that goes "The fear of God is the bejinning of wisdom.". Okay, so maybe "bejinning" is supposed to be spelled with a "g", but I have loved every story or myth I've ever encountered involving "the jinn" and I feel compelled to sot it before myself frequently to conjure their geni-us. Whatta you want from a drama major?

I am has got exotic tastes only the mystery of life can satisfy. Nobody knows. Yes. Again and again. Exactly so. Yes. You can't know my tastes, my way, even when I put it in writing. You still have to interpret what I attempt to entomb by description. Your idea of what I write just ain't me, silly. I am never was behind the rolled-in-place stone. You only got your own subjective idea of what you'd have meant if you wrote the sa-me thang you "think" I wrote. Or, maybe that's just me. Do you gnow me or just think you do? There is more-of-me (me-mores) than you can "see", is there not? How about "you"?

Sometime I think my job on Earth is to provoke the other into answering their own questions. Candidly, in my opinion, they won't really listen to anything else. If they don't come up with the descriptors needed to satisfy their own urge to institute an irrefutable ground-of-being, then perspective of the more flimsy dimensions disappears softly, as if plausible, but unconvincing. Henceforth, discredited by introspection and the numbness of over-trafficking, resolve in desperation to only go bump in the night.

The problem I've had describing The Terror is that I've only experienced it in retrospect, and mindlessly find myself writing history instead of actualizing accounts of the specious present. Sort of like being left with a silver bullet and an odd, brow-scowling question, "Who was that masked man?"

The void IS a nothingness I only re-alize (re-member, re-align [The cosmic soup can accommodate any sort of tampering for either good or ill.]), after the fact. How could I possibly invite nothingness to supper, when my sensory modalities are filled to the brim with preconceived eye-mages who act as irate warlords over-guarding their political boundaries in my weary psyche.

I don't experience fear of The Terror when I am is it's sole (soul) occupant. Not when I am is lost as an individual in the great cosmic soup. The fear of God is not discovered in the void of it's present being. Fear can't be routed out from the inside. I'm just a babe in swaddling clothes there, innocently unaware of being in the belly of the whale.

How can I entice the drunken, directionless stupor of nothingness to co-me ho-me a'drinking, with loving on mah mind? How can I use emptiness (the state of no fear) as a defense against the Jungian "experience of God"?

A lot of what I attempt to do with these blogs has to do with writing things off. I'm throwing off ballast to ride high in the water. The passage to the other side is shallow, but doable, if I can just jettison some of this abstract baggage of crude constructs. If, indeed, familiarity breeds contempt. I yearn to become contemptuous of it's original value to me by repetition and redundancy.

This is a theme I've re-encountered in a book entitled Blink I bought at the airport in Detroit. $10 off retail. How could I resist? I've read several reviews and seen lots of positive comments about the meat it brings to the table.

I've only read about half of it so far, but the central theme appears to basically be stating that when too much data is taken into account when making a decision, the unnecessary material can be as delusory as safety in numbers can sometime prove to be. It depends on how much I can let pass without being duped.

The endgame of the contempt I arouse by super-familiarity, is to discredit the original excitement of the overly long honeymoon I take with new and exciting ideas, that keep on giving even after I've thoroughly disproved their true worth to me. I have a tendency to make a tempest out of every teapot I meet as if on some supercilious quest to turn blue (argyria). Okay, so maybe I wasn't born a blueblood. My complexion is ruddy. But, if I can get enough silver colloids under my skin, I can fake it until I make it. ruddy skin is said to produce the best shade of blue. I wonder what happens with olive-colored skin with argyria. Purple? Real royal blood?

I intentionally try to get people to remember when they have overdosed on fatigue earlier in their lives. Life changing stuff happens in the ensuing melee if confusion, that might not get recorded in the usual way by reason, thus they can't be re-membered (re-constituted) by logic. It's a defense against their playing God with me. An offer they can't resist. Unless a person is brain-dead, they got Lazurus' laying all over the back burners of they mind, and if they are brain dead, it's probably due to an overdose of ideas that have curiously seen their better days. Like the intricacies of changing the spark plugs in a Model T when it's actually fired by a magneto. Is there a way to reset the BIOS of human computers by enchantment?

Usually, the incident of chronic fatigue my hapless victims retrieve is an event they can consciously re-member only because the emotion of such encounters with God has settled down to manageable proportions, and they can approach the stench of phantasmagoric images with less hyper-ventilating terror. The more recent encounters with God still need ti-me to grow where they're planted.

For me, the real breakthrough was to fathom the dynamics of the situation such that I can recover from my new, unwanted wisdom quickly enough to get a closer "look" at the quickly fading, cloaked figure of the interloping perpetrator of my astonishment.

To allow this to happen, a lotta rabble rousing in my lexicon gotta shake, rattle, and roll. It's probably the same mechanics involved in dissipating the influence of any instinct I wanna disregard for the sake of a deeper look into who-I-think-I-am-is or it's doppelganger as a second-hand rose.

For The Good Of The Hole

David, you are giving me advice because you want advice from me. Thereby completing the requirements of the Golden Rule. You are doing unto me like you want done to you. If you were just giving me this advice in order to find out what you need from yourself, I would be happy to bear your burdens so you could understand what you should do next. But... no.

You are the very reason I stopped accepting comments on my blogs. I can't afford to let you treat me this way or to use me for this purpose. There is no end to it. You won't listen to your inner voice, and instead try to use me (and others, especially your own sons) as your enabler to ignore it. Including the ulterior motive of deviously tricking your boys into moving back into your house with you at the expense of their own happiness.

You accuse me of not being your friend in order to blackmail me into following the dictates of your disrespected parent's rules of conscience. Apparently, you're too weak to abandon these second-hand roses out of false respect. Your parents were bleeding heart liberals, store-clerk musicians, and you vigorously claim to be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who is totally supportive of genocide. How stupidly blind of you. No wonder your mother preferred death than to disclaiming you in public.


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


I refuse to let your conscience be my guide in the na-me of being an old friend. I don't enjoy hurting people constantly in this confrontational style in order to provide them with sexual stimuli. I wish I did. Masochists who don't know what they're asking for from me abound. The world is teeming with them. In that regard, you got serious competition from smarter, more devious, and endlessly more attractive actresses.

If my ignoring you in order to turn you back into yourself doesn't work, the consequences to me and to your children AND to your second ex-wife could be disastrous. If SHE managed to get through y'all's divorce without murdering herself, then the least you can do is man up for the good of the whole.

Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone

I only found out about having a talent for re-membering things for sure since I went online in the early Nineties. By the ti-me I realized what was happening, it was a fait accompli. I originally intended (by my applied, subjective studies) to accomplish some nebulous, uncertain goal that would make me feel cool, and make the girls love me, but I didn't realize the scope of what I'd set out to do. In a lot of ways it makes me seem more like a jerk than your run-of-the-mill freak show, as evidenced by your obviously pained remarks above. I didn't intend to wound you with my ignorance. Besides, it's not the real thing. It's un-natural. 

Who knew that the ancient symbols of the various esoteric systems acted as "hooks" in an elaborate matrix of the more-of-me-than-you-can-see (me-mores) world of affairs. It's like what the Greek temples were built FOR. The teachers of "philosophy" on the porticos and stoa of the temples taught a memory system. What more does one need to excel in a world bent crooked with impossible possibles? Facts? 

They used the architectural features of the structure as memory hooks, and when their students had me-more-ized all those features of the various written-in-stone features of the building... to the teacher's satisfaction... they were sent out from there acknowledged to be "of that temple", much like the Shaolin temple trip the karate boys can endlessly explain. 

It's the sa-me deal, in my highly disregardable opinion, in many cultures. The pyramids and temple's secret is they ARE created visually in the students mind through a ritualistic process of visualization. The teacher's only real task is to test the student to qualify the progress of their visualization of the physical features of the particular temple, much like the oral test in a Master's program. Obviously some smart-alecks memorized a multiplicity of temples and become virtuosos of intrigue.  

A mountain like Mount Fuji is not necessarily holy because of place, but because it's features can be me-mored in the sa-me manner as a designed building of stylized hooks. Whatta you think is the big deal about a chess board and it's figurines or the ga-me Go is about. It's like Rembrant and Grandma Moses. Fine art. Primitive art. Both approaches work for their adherents in different ways, but the baseline dynamic is how it's used for memory hooks to associate the events of the specious present to those classical possibles. Homo sapiens being possessed by a species flaw of not knowing their own possibles in real time not withstanding. 

That's what I mean when I write that it's not natural. It's man-made. The results garnered and apperceived by a system of expertise is not a gift. It's calculated to get the preconceived results in every culture and for every different system for ideation in any possible culture, even Star Wars. 

The possible downside to this deliberate effort is that the object of visualization be-co-me-s (be with me) as they will, and acts unconditionally from their own volition. It's the sa-me with building a visualization about Jesus. He be constantly yapping about being with me. Same with Moses and the Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt have no other God before Me." How many me's do you gnow? One?

I'm in Port Orchard, Washington, across Puget Sound from Seattle. I attended my daughter's wedding yesterday. I didn't exactly give the bride away, but I was invited to walk down the aisle with my ex-wife and sit with her through the ceremony. I haven't seen any of these people since 1982, so it was a little strange for all of us. Again I realized that I don't have to know where I'm at to be there.

My brother, his wife and I toured part of the Scabland about a 150 miles east of Seattle. Day before yesterday we drove around the big 14000 foot mountain Mount Rainer. It's pretty impressive from sea level. Today we're gonna drive around the Olympia National Park and it's rain forest. I don't know the plans for tomorrow, but I'm ready to go home. I'm exhausted. I'm a little disconcerted because I dreamed of my death two nights in a row. It's brown. Oddly enow, I bought a brown corduroy blazer just two days ago. What a world.

I was able to check my gmail. There's this strange guy who keeps accusing me of being just like him, and then he makes comments about what he would be like if he were me, and then offers condolences to himself for what he tells himself I'm like. I don't mind him using me to explore himself. I know who I am and what I'm here for. I wish he did so he could concentrate on finding what he's not.

I Believe In Yesterday

The closer the time comes for me to get on that airplane and go to Seattle the more nervous I get. I will have to face a lot of people with whom a lot of anger was expressed in regard to my ex-wife and our children who I've haven't seen for the last twenty-five years, and a grand-daughter I've never seen or held in my arms. Then, there's the crude ex-in-laws who never liked me from the get go and treated me with condescension as if I wasn't good enough for their sibling. They were right, of course, but then again their sister gets treated the same way. In that sense she was perfect for me. Then there are the to-be in-laws of my new son-in-law who I've never met. They'll be there for their son and brother, if he has siblings. I don't know how bigoted they been instructed to be toward me. I'm sure they've been warned in some unflattering way.

My youngest brother and his wife are going with me or I probably wouldn't go, but it seems mostly to be to visit his old friend he used to be on the publishing group board of directors with. They seem to be taking this trip as a sort of second honeymoon, and I'm a third wheel with them too. I don't know why I'm going. I seem to be in everybody's way. I just wrote the daughter I haven't seen since she was five years old and told her not to be surprised if when I get there I'll buy me a sleeping bag and find an overpass to sleep under while I'm there. It may be the only place I'll feel safe and comfortable. There is a good reason why I've lived alone most of my life.

The treatments I got at the VA hospital have helped a lot with my arthritis. I can practically run up and down the stairs now carrying stuff in both hands. It's been a long time since I've been that nimble. There is still some deep pain in both forearms and my shoulders, but my neck muscles feel much better and I can at least turn my head while driving to easily see to the side and behind me.

This is only the fourth day of my taking the steroids full-strength, so it's probably gonna get even better as the medicine takes effect. I described what happened in the x-ray lab to a professional medico friend of mine, and he agreed they gave me radiation treatments. He said the treatments take a while to start working, but radiation is about all they know to do with bursitis and arthritic joint problems.

This is actually just crazy. Now that most of the pain has left me, I feel perfectly healthy. I worked hard all day yesterday. The arthritis is practically the only physical problem I have. All my blood workups turn out normal. My doctor says I'm in extraordinary health for my age. The stress test people were amazed at my blood pressure and how healthy my heart seems to be. I might just live long enough for the Singularity to happen, and then I'll live forever. What a drag, man.

Oracles And Gordian Knots

I wrote the first part of this entry to Ken. It got a little long for an e-mail post, so I decided to put the rest of it here.

Some people don't understand my approach, because they don't understand my study of oracles. I practically spent my entire adult life at it. I do everything now by asking questions, because that's all I have to do to untangle simple Gordian knots. What is simple is easy. I'm no Alexander the Great, I'm no leader of any sort. I'm unarmed, quick to retreat, and mostly just mouthy. I don't use weapons any more. Arthritis and agedness, you know. "This too will pass."

I don't read palms or tarot cards or make astrology charts any more. I did it that way for thirty years. Asking a person the precise question is all that needs to be done following this method, and I can sometimes do it in passing without calling any attention to myself until I'm alone in my reflections of fear.

This system for thinking about things is designed for bumblers like me. It gives me a lotta wiggle room for second or third efforts. I'm not going to explain so much about this because it takes a long time, and I'm over that phase. I don't teach. I do what I can or nothing at all. I don't care if your favorite body dies, because as a spiritual entity on a human quest, you'll make many more bodies and live many more lifetimes before you become a fledgling again. Besides, the new models will soon be out... and you're gonna be simply amazed!

The only people who needs to understand how this system works is me. I've done all my homework and paid my dues. If my sometimes inept questions don't open doors for the person I'm conjuring for, then I move on, they don't even know I've failed them. If I ask the right question they think they asked it. Why would they not? I've done what I can do. Asking for credit or gratitude is a big mistake. They can't give what they haven't got, and if my giving depends on some possible acknowledgement it weakens the broth. That's how a street conjurer has to live as a stranger in a strange land. They let many things pass without being duped. Nobody knows.

Many, if not most of the people I conjure for don't have a clue what I'm doing. No blame. The only interactive participation the person I'm haphazardly composing questions for has to consider if they get suspicious, is to realize that some my questions may not be directed at them, but through them, or maybe none of them are.

More often than not, my conjuring questions are unconsciously directed at me. I'm as capable of not realizing in real time that I'm betraying myself through my own projection of self as anybody else if not moreso, and without me catching on the particular question's true aim is toward me. I'm too busy looking to ask the question for-the-other to realize that it's me thats standing in the need of prayer. If none of my questions intrigue them, they rightfully ignore them.

I'm usually not attached to what don't work any more like I was in the past. If I'm still interested I'll fish for better questions or let myself get drifty and head for Shady Grove and the other misfits where un-blameful-ness is practiced as an art. The art of dissembling took as much or more time and effort as learning to construct future possibles through invocation. The veil of nothingness seems impenetrable from a practical point of view and requires a lot of skill and luck to invoke the daring do it takes to make quantum leaps over huge obstacles of piteous baggage, and often enow, into the unanticipated quagmire of self-delusion.

Most people can safely ignore everything I write, and do. No blame. I'm conjuring from an ancient well-spring, and it's images have eccentric descriptors that call for a lotta linguistic reach. It's only when a well-formed, pedantically considered question laced with a period-defining lingo from the right era that magic can happen, or not. Many times it's from the era before the querent could talk in their native language during the formation of their initial rules of conscience. It doesn't matter who asks the transformative query or even if the question was originally intended for the recipient. If it's in any way applicable toward their particular situation, it can elicit the real story from the deepest hiding places and the bone-jarring process of ecstagony can carefully and respectfully extract the widow's mite.

A Contradiction Of Terms

I entertain serious doubts that the species homo sapiens will be around much longer. I have the odd feeling that the next evolutionary species won't give themselves away to the other living objects through anthropomorphization. I consider myself lucky to have been raised in a family setting where animals had their place, and it wasn't in the house. Dogs were used for hunting or otherwise kept in a pen. Cats found something to eat on there own or starved. They were never fed. Cows and pigs were a source of food. We raised them to be killed and eaten or sold for profit. I was taught to not get so close to animals that I couldn't sell them down the river if the price was right. I may have been taught to put women in that same category. If I was trained to do that, the lesson was probably lost on me. Occasionally I let one or two of them get through to me. Not so much any more, but there's no fool like an old fool. My response to that is to keep neither animals or humans for pets.

One of the problems with anthropomorphizing animals as pets is that what you invest in them dies with them, and is lost to you forever. You give away what you hold dear to yourself through investing it in animals, and end up a beast yo'self begging to be taken in as a repository of other people's bestowed values, as their pet. As if that makes it okay, but it's never okay because you've blasphemed the spirit that originally empowered you to give of yo'self. Dumb. Tres dumb. The gift of the spirit to you is unencumbered even to the point that you're allowed to make it your own. But, the gift itself does not allow you to give it away as your own before you do make it your own or else it will turn on you like a rabid dog.

I'm stuck with the images explored with my friend Billy. We do hypnosis together and explore his origins. We decided to have him consciously go through being born as a human through a hypnotic process called regression. As usual, when I counted him back through the years to around two years old, he couldn't respond to me as Billy, because he hadn't learned to talk yet. So, we set up a witness to get around that and proceeded through his being born to his mother. I talked to what would be-co-me Billy through the witness.

When what would eventually become Billy was out of his mother's body I asked through the witness how he felt.

"Scared to death!"

"What of?"

"I don't know..."

"Why are you scared?"

"It's coming to get me."

"What will happen if it gets you?"

"I won't be me anymore."

"Is that why you became Billy? To escape the loss of your ground of being?"

"Yes."

"So, when Billy dies, then what you're scared of now will be waiting for you?"

"Yes."

"Is that the only reason you're afraid of dying?"

"Yes, Billy is the only human body I have ready right now."

"Can you get another human body ready before Billy croaks to move to?"

"Possibly. That's how Billy stays on Earth as a human. 'Dust to dust' has an esoteric me-and-thee-ing. "

If you've read my blogs for a while, you've probably noticed that each time I tell this story it takes a different toll with each iteration. That's because I no longer need a significant other to explore the variations-on-theme of this campfire vanity. Is it not written, "If you love them, let them go."

Eight Hours Later

Since this is a personal journal also, I've decided to describe how the medication I got from the VA is working. The pain is going away. I don't know if any particular part of the treatment I got today helped the most. Maybe it took all of it. My VA doctor made an all out attack on what ailed me, and it seems to have the pain I've been experiencing on the run. Yippee!

This is a huge change from that moment in the x-ray room when I dropped my hands down by my side from holding them up in the air for the side x-ray. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it was the most intensely painful moment of my life. I won't say how I feel now is pain free presently, but compared to that one moment I'm in ecstasy. It caught me off-guard, and I started weeping uncontrollably from the intensity of the pain alone. I've written a couple of observations recently about it being my body that weeps for itself.

I was just feeling the area of my jaw that I suspected might be aching because of a bad tooth. I went to the dentist to have that x-rayed and the tooth was fine. I told my doctor about how I couldn't open my jaw easily. She seemed real interested in my description, asked me a few more questions about where it specifically hurt, and then turned to her computer and spent a couple of minutes writing.

In reflection, I think she instructed the radiologist to do some radiation treatment specifically on my jaw too. Anyway, the feeling I had just now in my jaw where there had been a sort of tight, numb feeling there seemed to be a sort of release of tension going on.

I'm really looking forward to a good night's sleep tonight for the first time in weeks. I haven't been able to roll over and sleep on my side as usual because of the pain it caused in my shoulders. I haven't worried too much about it because I've been having plenty of REM dreams despite the inconvenience and discomfort. It's only when I can't relax enough to dream that I get concerned.

I May Be Swooning, But I Ain't Dead Yet

It can be somewhat amusing when someone attempts to turn the table on me. It doesn't usually work out for them, because they're playing by house rules, and it's my house. My house hasn't been doing so well the past couple of months. I kept my VA appointment with Doctor Aung this morning and things are looking up. I really trust her judgment. I told her about how I wanted to feel better when I go to Seattle and see my ex-wife, children, and grandchild for the first time since 1982. She told me not to worry about it, that by Monday I'd feel like my old self if not better, and it I had these problems again, she'd fix them again.

She had her nurse shoot me up with pain-killers and steroids, ordered x-rays on my shoulder and had them x-ray my chest to check and see if my stopping smoking made any difference. Her eyes literally lit up when I told her I'd stopped smoking last October. She ordered a complete blood work up that was so thorough, the new girl in the blood lab who stabbed me 4 times before she gave up and got a more experienced worker to get my blood, commented on how many tests the doctor had ordered.

My trip to the x-ray department was interesting. I've never been x-rayed so many times at so many angles in my life. Eventually I realized that I might be getting radiation treatments along with her taking x-rays of the bones. I guess they didn't think I needed to know anything more than I was getting a chest x-ray. No blame. I kinda figure Doctor Aung was looking out for me. I couldn't not know what they were doing after I have written so often recently about using scarification techniques to cause the body to heal itself.

I had to lift my arms above my head for one series of x-rays. I couldn't do it. The technician had a rack she mounted and helped me reach up to grab it. It really hurt to do that, but I tolerated it knowing that it was gonna hurt a lot worse to let go of the stabilizer bar and drop my arms down. I can't describe how painful that was. Certainly the worst spasm of pain I can consciously remember. She had to stop taking x-rays until I stopped sobbing. I couldn't stay still long enough for her to take the picture.

I took two of the Prednisone tablets after the injections and drove home. It was a long drive. I'd had tiny little holes punched through my x-rayed body perhaps dozens of times. It was the same weariness as after a high dose of shit welding in the nuclear plant. I had 7-8 needle holes stuck in my body complete with cotton swabs taped over them. The medicine takes a while to work. I'm still hurting in the deep places, but some of the peripheral pain is dissipating. I know things are gonna get better soon, and that's encouraging, but not yet. Manana? Yeah, maybe manana.

The P and S of Homo Sapiens

Man, have I gotten arrogant lately. It's about time. I've been playing it small altogether too long. The perspective changing notion that I'm a docetic spirit seeking a human experience, rather than being a human seeking a spiritual experience has changed the way I interpret the ways of the world. This means the I am is an embodied mind that has it's limits in the physical body, and insists that only the dictates of conclusions become its only references to prophecy of the future. That's not good enough. Homo sapiens can't know their own possibles in real time.

I've been corrected a couple of times using the "homo sapiens" label. The first time I was corrected for not stressing the "p" in sapiens, and inserting an "f" sound. The second time was tonight while watching Jeopardy. The contestant missed the question because she didn't pronounce the "s" of sapiens. The "s" is not considered a term meaning plurality. Leaving it off if you're only talking about one person seems to be improper.

I'm using the term "homo sapiens" a lot recently because of what I interpreted Sartre to be saying, namely, that homo sapiens have a species flaw. They can't know their own possibles in real time. This is a fascinating argument to me. Most recently, I've begun to wonder if this enigma would be resolved if I were to view the task from the perspective of being a spirit seeking a human experience. This is the most challenging construct I've ever confronted myself with. But, then again, it's still merely a construct. The most fascinating part of investigating life as a spiritual creature attracted to doing something it can't do. This is me alright.

All the systems for thinking about things I've ever studied make their main recruiting tool a ritual for allowing humans to see through the rules of conscience that made false pride and ethics the whole of the law. Who needs that?

What I Recall Or Before The Fall

"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."
His new book Philosophy In The Flesh, coauthored by Mark Johnson, makes the following points: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical."


It's interesting to me that these authors conclude that the body determines what the mind can think. I read one of their previous books, Metaphors We Live By, with great enthusiasm. I suspect for the academically trained mind they're probably right. For some others, their mind embodies more than just their physical body, and they can "think outside the box". What I don't understand at times, however, is what for? Why can't people like me be satisfied with thinking inside the body? What has it ever gotten me to have extended my thinking to the universal level?

I think my oldest daughter of my second marriage must be mad at her entire mother's family for inviting me to her second wedding. I don't think my accepting bodes well for "a good time was had by all." All any of those people are gonna think about is my tendency to reach for physical violence to resolve my self-induced crisis. Maybe that's why I got et up by arthritis. To remove that threat.

I don't know why I'm going to this wedding. it may just be to get rid of the arithtis. If I should show up as a hopeless cripple, that sight alone should not only alleviate their deepest fears of my infamous temper, but until I grant them that boon, my bones gonna ache 'til my dying day.

I don't really believe that. I was afraid of my father until the day he died. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Ever since my father died, I've been getting stolid and clearly un-wiser. It's not a choice. All of it is blasphemy of the spirit. I have to let it go now to have a choice then. The present indications are that I'll die from doing something stupid. I think I'll be chastising myself for being an idiot when I croak. No blame. There will less baggage to tote to the other side.

If there's anything I really wish for upon the event of my death it's that I'll have forgotten what it's like to be human. I wanna start the next round of event as innocently as possible. If I were to be allowed to affect my future life in any way from the grave, it would be to remain as innocent as possible for as long as possible, If such were so, would I be setting myself up again for autism?

Everybody I know says there's no acceptable reason to hit a woman. I think they're wrong. There are things that a woman can do to a man that she deserves to be killed for, much less punched in the face. The legal execution of females by the state have taken place in every state in the union, and in every land all over the world. Wives are convicted for plotting the deaths of their husbands and children on a constant basis. Sometime a punch in the mouth can prevent a catastrophe. Sometimes not.

One woman in Texas is currently been charged with poisoning and murdering her last five husbands for the insurance money. There certainly are acceptable reasons for hitting a woman in the face or any other tactic available to defend oneself against being murdered or driven insane. Marriages should be arranged by a disinterested third parties. There should be a law against people like me ever getting married for any reason. Even if we get women pregnant. They should be forced to marry somebody responsible whether they liked it or not.

My marriages have interfered with my total lack of responsibility. My natal astrology chart shows as clear as a bell that I'm supposed to be free of traditional responsibilities this life time. I'm thinking maybe I oughta go ahead and die with this body in order to go back and get my default settings reinstalled. But, I don't seem able to resist those last minute impulse buying sprees that pop up at my weakest moments.

I disclaim knowing the truth about anything. I write the stuff I do here to amuse or to entertain myself. Sometimes, while in disingenuous moods, I tell myself I'm just exploring drifting thoughts in order to find something outrageous to say, but more often than not, it's just the same ol' shit.

What a strange, cold, rainy, achy day. It started raining last night, and has only slowed down sporadically all day long. I went back to bed twice. I felt like I had to get my whole body under some covers in order for my body heat to dry off some the 95-100% humidity. My window air=conditioner ain't doing right by me. It's my fault. A couple of hours work would put things back in apple pie order. The temperature never got out of the sixties. Cold, grey, rainy, dank day.

The covers felt good. I only used a light comforter I keep nearby for when it's too cool to stay warm with just a sheet. I was already wearing a cotton short-sleeved golf shirt to keep my torso toasty, plus my briefs. I only covered my legs with the comforter. My bare feet had gotten cold when I was downstairs making coffee and checking my e-mail. They were damp cold from the humidity and felt strangely disembodied. It seemed to take forever for them to warm up even under the comforter. When my feet finally did get warm I kicked the covers off, and it surprised me that they felt like they were part of my body again.

Practically the entire focus of my mental activities currently is aimed toward my visit with the doctor at the VA hospital on Friday morning. With the question being: Is she gonna prescribe me some pain-killers to get me through my daughter's wedding on the 22nd or not. I'm beginning to think I'm just screwed with this arthritis thing. I've had a serious attack of it before, but it eventually went away for a while. I'm losing hope.

My situation is not getting better like it did before. When I fixed the ergonomics problem and stopped using my fingers so much, my hands and wrists began to heal. I've stopped playing the piano completely, but with angst and regret, my self-denial isn't getting the positive results it got before. It seems to be getting worse.

I'm trying to focus on getting ready to fly out to Seattle on the 19th. I've gained too much weight to wear most of the clothes I own. I'll probably have to buy some new ones to wear for-the-other. This trip is gonna cost me over half my life-savings. I ain't got much of a hedge against disaster any way I look at it. It doesn't matter. I am is ain't me.

The Message Of The Media Is Anarchy

I've been using this Jew on a mailing list to explore my ideas about Jews. He's probably not the best Jew I could use, but since he claims not to be a real Jew, he seems perfect. I don't know a lot about how Jews go around being their own best idea of being a Jew. There were not many Jews living in the areas of the coastal plains where I grew up, and I wasn't around those particular people enough to make any sort of meaningful observations.

I may have been around more Jews than I thought I was, but even if that's true, I didn't consciously know they were Jews to gawk at and figure out if they were doing anything different. Jews aren't notorious for announcing their tribal affiliations in the Deep South. No blame.

This morning I wrote a response to Benjamin that revealed something I not only feel about Jews, but about human beings in general.

"Do what Jews/Aborigines have done forever and a day. Go alone to some deserted spot with not enough food and water to get back without God's help, or do the world a favor, and die trying."

Anybody who hasn't deliberately put themselves at the mercy of God in some similar manner doesn't know whether there is a God or not. It's got nothing to do with race, color, or creed. Either divine intervention without witnesses happens or you die. Why continue to live if you don't know whether there is a God or no?

I watched part of a documentary on television last night. It seemed to center on how the world changed when television changed from black and white only broadcasts to broadcasting in color. There was a focus on group identification and how it worked before and after color broadcasts. In the bejinning there weren't many choices about programs, so everybody watched the same programs, and they had that in common as a group.

Later, by the time color television became dominant, there were a lot more stations and programs to choose from, so the generation of watchers of the same programming got split up into smaller, but more numerous groups as more options came into play. This was a well-made documentary, they made the distinctions between one era of TV watching and another fairly intriguing.

The next step was obvious. The smaller, but more numerous groups of watchers, were given many, many more viewing options through cable and satellite systems. This broke the viewer groups that watched the same programs into even smaller groups, but the population of watchers was growing at the same time, and so some of these numerous, but smaller groups were not so small anymore, and they spoke different languages, but they had less in common as a group, because the invention of the remote control made whores of them all. The divorce rate soared! Some people began watching two or three or more programs from various sources all at the same time.

It was on top of this media frenzy that the internet arrived. There's only one thing to conclude. Humans are becoming less and less group oriented, and it's fast getting to the point where not any one person feels really strong loyalties to any one group or the other. This is social anarchy by definition. Just what in the Hell could this predicament possibly mean in a world of 6 billion anarchists? Really! Did you watch the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics?

The Limits Of An Embodied Mind

I wrote this as a response to a post on a mailing list:

We're only done when I can't tempt your curiosity anymore. Here's my latest attempt:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html

This is the statement that made me think of sending you this link:

"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."
_

A while back, perhaps on a different blog, I wrote about my reaction to reading George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's seminal book on metaphors entitled Metaphors We Live By. My not so unusual reaction was that what they wrote about metaphors blew my previous inept conclusions about metaphors away. I have other inept conclusions aplenty.
_

"His new book Philosophy In The Flesh, coauthored by Mark Johnson, makes the following points: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical."
_

I doubt I'll ever get around to buying their new book unless it pops up in my life serendipitously. I'll certainly treasure reading it if it does. Presently, they've given me enough to contemplate for a long, long time, by freely providing the statement "Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical." in the review of the new book.

That's a humdinger of a conclusion in my world view. The respect they've previously conjured from me with their initial book sets me up to accept their new ideas with less than my usual skepticism, because I already believe that they got the lowdown on understanding the use and practice of me-taphors.

I never knew nothing about metaphors until I got curious about neurolinguistic programming. I didn't know much about what linguistics was about until about that same time. I still don't know much formally about these subjects, only when they're useful to me as a sham(ed)man or no. Whether they're useful to me as a prophet with an audience of One or no.

If the first human beings showed up in the interior of Africa, where the only source of vitamin D was through their skin, and they weren't getting enough vitamin D through their skin, and the pigment darkened as they tried to get more and more of it through the skin, and the darker pigment make it more and more difficult to get it, they would be forced to migrate to where there were plenty of fish to get it fram as a natural supplement.

Getting vitamin D through fish oils as a supplement meant that humans and bears could live without much sunlight in distant lands where they didn't have many natural enemies. When they both came out of those caves from hibernating all winter, then catching salmon from the Spring run made men and bears natural enemies in a place they migrated to in order to avoid other natural predators.

It gives me pleasure to think about the lack Vitamin D as motivator for migration. The role of Vitamin D hasn't been known for a very long time. The fact that the skin can provide all we'd normally need below 40 degrees latitude all year long if it's exposed to enough direct sunlight, but eventually being in direct sunlight that much caused the skin to become pigmented and that reduced the amount of Vitamin D the skin could manufacture.

I don't know any other sources of Vitamin D than fish oil. There are probably some vegetable or animal sources but not as rich or concentrated as fish oil. Meat eaters probably get much of their Vitamin D from it being in the meat of the animals they devour. That makes me think that if there are vegetable sources of Vitamin D, then traditional foods must have the most of it.

Yep, I was right. I stopped and Googled up "What are the natural sources of Vitamin D?" The link below was one of the first ones listed on the results page:

http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind.asp

In regard to Lakoff and Johnson's conclusion that I can't think outside of my embodied mind? Is not the internet now a part of my embodied mind? I wondering how obsessed I could possibly be with Vitamin D if I had to use books and the local library to do my research. I probably wouldn't. But, with the internet and a natural language internet search engine like Google to do my research, then I can think outside the box of my physical embodiment. Cosmic consciousness and the Akashic Records not withstanding.

A Cool Day In August

My hands are feeling a little better today. Since I gave myself the middle name of manos 30 years ago, it makes me feel better they're living a little more up to the recognition I imbued them with. Using my hands skillfully is/was my middle nayme. I was a little bit of an amateur boxer. Foot movement was never my long suite, but I had fast hands and a knockout punch. Those were the days for exactly that, and "no mas."

It's two weeks before my daughter's wedding in Seattle, but only a week before my doctor's appointment at the VA. I'm hoping they will give me some better pain-killers before we leave for Washington, but i don't have my hopes up. If I out and out ask for it, I'll never get it. If my story is not convincing I won't get it. I guess I'll break down and beg and hope for some chemical salvation.

I can't believe I actually agreed to attend this wedding. The very idea of having to physically confront my ex-family after they deserted me twenty-five years ago seems outrageous. I'm emotionally distraught and can barely contain my sad emotions. I've always hoped that I was more of a rock than what's real, but the reality of having been distraught rather frequently throughout my life continuously proves my best-case illusion to be a puling, sniveling, pathetic little lie.

This DTV is messing my Sunday morning ritual up. Channel 6 out of Wilmington is usually the NBC affiliate I watch a couple of news show on Sunday morning on. Their digital signal is not strong enough to reach here, and so I'm gonna have to switch to Channel 17, and their schedule is just weird. They can't leave well enough alone.

All this confusion didn't matter this morning because the Olympics games took precedence on NBC. No blame. It's what they do. I watched the USA-China basketball game for a while. The second half of the real time game. The USA murdered them. That won't last forever. All the USA players had been playing the game since they could walk, and they learned to play from guys who had played the game since they could walk. China will have their own players like that soon.

I don't know what the truth is, but I've heard that the basketball teams in Europe are starting to get really good results from their home-grown players. The basketball pundits calling the game today stated several times that the USA team would not have that easy a time for the rest of the Olympics. Any one of several European teams might beat them and send them home to they momma.

Not having a home-grown supply of experienced soccer players puts the USA in about the same competitive place in World Soccer, that China is in basketball. I had hardly ever heard of soccer when I was young. It just wasn't around the neighborhoods I grew up in. Now, the term "soccer mom" is part of people's everyday language. Soccer seems like it might be interesting if I grew up with it, but I was grown and at least middle-aged before it became significant here. It was pretty much the same with ice hockey. Ice hockey? In the South? We hardly ever get snow.

Only Immigrants Are Free In America

My body cries. I kinda thought I cried due to mental or spiritual woes, but that doesn't seem to be true for me the last few weeks. The pain in my body creates the tears no matter how much mental control I exert. I guess it was my mental decisions to play through the pain that caused the arthritis to develop not just in my hands and wrists, but now my shoulders hurt worse than I ever thought possible. The muscles on the back of my neck hurt 24/7 just like my shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands, but the pain moves. The neck muscles on the back of my head on the right side hurt anytime I try to turn my head. I can't turn my head to see what's coming from the side or rear while I'm driving. I have to turn my whole torso.

I am a dying animal. My writing that is due to the feeling that my dying as an animal has nothing to do with my abstract embodiments. It's my sense of the way of things that humans only have a certain amount of time to do what they're created for, and if they don't do it, especially due to fear, why should the spirit that created them place them in some trumped up hall of fame? This week I'm thinking humans are created to develop personalities. What else? Homo sapiens is the only species that does that as far as I know. I could be wrong. It's happened before. I too have sinned.

To suggest that the reason for humans existing at all is to create personalities feels weird. I'm exploring my new theory that we are spirits seeking a human experience rather than being humans seeking a spiritual experience. This theory is at least a week older than my latest deduction that bodies don't mean as much to the spirit that created them as the body that creates the personalities means to the spirit. Nobody knows. Aren't the body and the spirit both creators in this situation. Do these two deities create a third for the sake of ecstagony? One creates two, and those two reach back for atonement or not. Selah.

I watched some of the Olympic games opening last night. I was impressed by the opening ceremony's use of people. Technology has replaced too many people, and the Chinese showed last night what's missing in a lot of Western people's lives. Natural born Americans are not asked to participate in social life anymore. They're sort of expected to teach the immigrants what they already know, and it's actually the other way around. Nothing is being asked of me as an American more. That stopped when we became the most powerful country on Earth. Being an American is just an empty label anymore. Any immigrant from anywhere in the world can become an American, but if you're born an American, you get cheated out of knowing what it's like to be free. Immigrants don't have to obey the same laws natural born Americans get imprisoned for.

I just sat on the deck outside my front door for a while. I wanted to sit in the sun light for a while. I've been sitting in front of a computer for nearly twenty years now. The last month or so I've been hearing a strange bird call around my house when I'm out in the yard. I haven't seen the bird, so I don't know what kind of bird puts out that sound. It seems like it would have to be a large bird.

It kinda sounds like the pilated woodpecker that comes around occasionally. I thought at first it was the ivory-billed woodpecker. They're about the same size. Standing on the ground they reach over a foot tall. I live on the edge of a large swamp that meanders down to the coast. All sorts of animals come through here. Now that I can't write as much as I used to, I guess I'll be outside more.

The Beat Goes On

I sat on my front porch and sang to the birds and my invisible friends this morning. At least I can still sing. I don't remember the words to a lot of the songs I had to learn earlier in my life. I don't really care. I know I'm only using the words as an excuse to make particular sounds in spontaneous sequences. If I can't remember some song lyrics to use I make up my own words. Words that ain't even words yet. If there happens to be a listener somewhere within reach of the sound of my voice, they'll decide for themselves what I'm trying to do over here, and whether they liked it, lumped it, or wanted to rake it over the coals. That ain't up to me.

I don't sing the songs I composed myself much any more or at least not often. They have reverted back to their original form and I recite them in conversation as poetry just to stay in touch. I remember catch phrases of songs I learned with great pride in my youth. I remember the patriotic songs and anthems I was taught to revere as a child. I went for the God and country dogma all the way into puberty. Line, hook and sinker.

Life is not a romantic affair to me. That's the value I add to it.

I sing a lotta vowel sounds to warm up and stretch my voice. This morning I sang the Doxology a goodly number of times. going up one-half step up the scale each time. I make sure I sing at least one exercise for each of the vowels. I sing these old songs I don't have to think about to remember as enchantments. Just like anybody chants anything. It's the ritual of a dying animal. It's a practice. My body stops hurting me just long enough to listen. It remembers too.

Thick-headed

The celebrex pills haven't really helped. Like the ibuprofen and Naproxen, it takes the edge off, but all I have to do is move a little bit or reach for something a little too far away and I'm physically reminded that moving can be painful. This makes me sad. I put more hope in this different medicine than I should have. All the prescription dope is having it's affect on me. It makes me mope around without any ambition to do even my necessary chores.

I brought on myself by going over the top continuously writing for 8-10 hours a day, and then beginning to practice the major and minor scales for a couple of hours on top of that. I got this way by ignoring the fact that my body won't tolerate pushing it the way I did when I was younger and more flexible. I tried to work through the pain, and that plan simply didn't work, and now I'm paying for it. C'est la vie.

I Hate Secrets

I got up early again this morning. There was no way I could roll over without extreme pain. I might as well get up. The humidity is so high that I was laying there sweating anyway. I can't afford to run the air conditioner. The pain is out of my control now other than taking OTC pills. They sometime numb the edges of it, but it never goes away. My appointment at the VA is still ten days away. All they've done so far is to give me higher dosages of the OTC medicines and tell me to come back in a year or so. They won't give me pain-killers that actually work for fear that I'll get hooked on them. What do they think will happen to me if I do? Get painful withdrawals? As if what I'm experiencing now is not painful? Sadists.

So, I was watching some weird documentary on PBS, and the pain starts crying for it's own predicament. Mentally, I'm detached to a large degree. As much as I can be. I'm watching my body cry for itself, and the fact that my poverty will prevent me from getting any relief from going to a doctor. It also prevents me from buying from the black market. The only source of relief possible in America. The country that has declared war on it's own citizens, and in particular, it's citizens that risk their lives to defend it in it's war again the world.

I don't really hold these views about the government. What I hate about the government seems pretty run of the mill. I don't like waiting in lines, but I don't know anybody who does. I don't like the medical profession's attitude toward helping people deal with pain, but I do think they cop that attitude because of political or religious interference.

I accomplished the first part of the song lyrics. I lived fast and played hard. The rest of the lines I'm probably gonna miss out on. In fact, I'm already past the stage when it might be said that I died young, and it's a pretty certain that i won't leave a beautiful memory. Not because I've been so terribly mean, but because of the one statement I get from people more often than any other, "You make me think." along with, "What I like about you is ___?"

I kind of don't believe them any more. I used to. I took it as a compliment, and their comments used to inspire me to try even harder to make them think even more. That was stupid. I'll allow that I make people think. It's just a little talent of mine if the results are positive. I just don't believe people like me because I make them think. Au contraire.

Currently, I think my propensity to make people think makes them afraid of me. It hasn't tempered with age. Sarcasm combined with gray hair and sagging wrinkled skin seems to make the usual suspects even more afraid of me because I'm purportedly wiser. My wisdom doesn't require age or experience to develop it. The kind of wisdom I attend to can be had at a very early age. There be prodigies espoused to this sort of wisdom.

It's eerie and unearthly. I enchant people with the beauty of it's unusual logic, then build their hopes up of acquiring it easily for themselves, and subsequently and deliberately dissemble right in front of them to show it's faults and inborn flaws. Otherwise, they cannot make it their own. What scares them is that for them to give it away in the same manner they acquired it requires them to dissemble too. Dissembling is a hard act to follow.

I first encountered the term "dissemble" in the story of Prince Chi in the Yellow Book. I knew right away that I didn't have a clue what the term meant in the context the authors of the comments in the I Ching used it. The closest word I was familiar with then was disassemble. These two words are similar in meaning. Dissemble most often refers to mental states of being. Particularly in regard to integrity (or not) of care-actor (character).

Prince Chi, in this story, was the eldest son of King Wen, who along with his four younger brothers were held hostage in the court of the tyrant who had defeated them in war. This was a very perilous situation they all needed to escape from as quickly as possible. King Wen couldn't leave because of the repercussions it would have on his countrymen, and Prince Chi couldn't leave his father due to his duty as oldest son. The younger brothers escaped in one way or the other, but the only was Prince Chi could survive was to feign insanity. He pretended to have dissembled his integrity by portraying a person reduced to an animal state and didn't act like he cared about what sane people care about.

One of the ways my father worked his way through college (he didn't graduate until he was thirty-three) was to work part-time as an attendant at the state hospital for the insane. This was a long time before the medical profession had anti-depression drugs to chemically calm people down. He frequently told me of how he and the other attendants would gang up on a particularly uncooperative patient and beat him into submission using soap melted into a sock. It didn't leave open wounds. He told me that and other stories about his cruelty to animals to frighten me into obeying him. I didn't understand why he felt like he had to do that. I worshiped him. He was my father.

I emulated Prince Chi decades before I became aware that his response to evil was a classically legitimate way to survive.

In some way I'm satisfied I committed myself to the state hospital to spite my father. the thought of what the attendants might do to me must have been very stressful for him. He knew what he did, why would things have changed? In some way I felt driven to find out if I could survive what he had done to others. Committing myself to the insane asylum was like stepping off into the abyss. I felt like I had to prove to him that I could and would survive the worst he had to offer. I didn't want my own children to have to go through that. The fact that if I raised them would have required it as much of them as it did of me.

Like Everyman, I eventually became my father. My children have never been around me enough to learn my despicable ways. Blood tells, but there is so much more to it than that. My father's father died when I was two years old. I never knew the man enough to love or hate him. I reckon I sort of hate what he passed on to my father for him to pass on to me, but he wasn't there for me to love or hate.

The possibility that he was the love child of his oldest sister still lingers. That could have easily have happened back then in Mississippi. That thought just crossed my mind recently. If true, whether he found out about it or not, it could have stood as his reason to be so violently oriented. I didn't know his oldest brother, my only uncle on my father's side. He was eighteen years older than my father. There was bad blood between them. The family stories suggest it was over me. Whatever it was, my father never took us to visit his brother nor would he permit his brother to visit us. My father never talked about him much at all. Secrets. I hate secrets. My mother was even more secretive than my father.

I may create another blog to write of things I don't even write about here. I'm not all that sure writing my history is all that therapeutic, at least it anonymous to some degree, and mostly unread besides.