The Reflection Of Direction

I keep putting writing an entry for my journal off until later and later in the day because I have a hard time typing. My hands don't work so well anymore. They still do what I tell them, but protest mightily. It seems like each day brings more deliberation to bear about doing it or not doing it. I don't have to think about typing, or didn't, my fingers followed my mind, right or wrong. I knew exactly when I was losing concentration because my fingers kept typing whet was on my mind when I wanted to change the subject.

I dreamed of being able to let this happen for a long time. When i did this on a musical instrument it was called "jamming" or some other term to indicate flow. One day I realized that the same principle could be applied to typing, and by letting myself fall into a flow I might discover something about myself I would not likely find out any other way. It's some of the stuff that's hidden or most likely forgotten that's working a mojo on a direction I wanna go currently.

I find out all kinds of things I forgot or never knew by reading what I type when I type it. It all depends on which mule I hook my plow up to mentally. In the last year or so I hooked it up to Sartre. I'm really glad I did. I read a little Sartre at bedtime most nights, and then get up in the morning and try to write something about what i thought Sartre meant when he wrote what his translator swears he did.

It took a long time to read that 800 page tome a little at a time at bedtime. I wasn't trying to get what he wrote right so much. That's not what I do. I just used his lingo to see what I'd write to explain what I thought he meant. Every word I wrote about what i thought Sartre meant was total and unjustified speculation. The same disclaimer I sometime write here on this blog.

I'm trying to capture the drift of things. Like the drift of Sarte's intentions when he wrote Being and Nothingness. I don't always "get it". Not even vaguely. I don't care. That's not what I'm attempting to do. I'm trying to "be-co-me" Sartre. Just for sport. I've claimed for a long ti-me now that there ain't but One me, and each of us "think" we're It. If there isn't but One me, then why shouldn't I be able to "be" with his "me" as it it were mine? I'm still going to express the me with my own persona, whether I'm using Sarte's me or my own, right?

I'm speculating that the biggest reason each of us don't realize in real time that the me we're claiming as our own is also everybody's else's is our need for self importance. Some people call that being on an "ego trip", but I'm not so sure. I think we all need a strong ego. To denigrate ego is a little too simplistic for me.

It may have something to do with what happens AFTER we achieve individuation that bells the cat. I'm talking about the process homo sapiens have to initiate around the time of puberty to establish their own identity separate from their familial or tribal identity. I suspect gaining our own identity only happens as a huge struggle to keep the love going between our caretakers and ourselves even though we're taking a different direction from what they planned for us.

Most of us have to defend our own subjective right to play God with our own lives. That's the only God-given right we got. The right to have say so over what we say IS so. That can be a hard row to hoe. That's plowing in a field full of hidden stumps. Things can come to a sudden stop. Right damned now!

I figure maybe we keep that defense FOR our right to play God with our own lives much longer than is needed. The more one gets established in their decision making as that entity we decided to be, then the less like anybody is going to challenge your right to be what you say you are.

There is a nicely drawn metaphor somewhere about the foibles of guarding your perimeters too vigorously. It was about the King of some domain who guarded his borders so aggressively it sometimes ended in war with his various neighbors. One day his neighbors got tired of fighting him all the time and formed an alliance. Then, they whipped his ass into total humiliation, and he was much easier to get along with afterward.

Who-we-think-we-are results from a bunch of rules of conscience we adopted to become somebody we admired for something they had that we didn't have. It's not that hard to change or reframe those initial rules of conscience if we decide to be-co-me so-me-one else. Granted, it may seem equivalent to killing your kinsmen for a while, and you might need Jesus or Krishna as yo' chariot driver and confidante for the first couple of battles, but it's a gimme when you've figured out how it got that way in the bejinning for everyman.

More Of The Sa-me, And Worse

It took a long time to get outta bed this morning. I didn't get much sleep. Every which way I turned something different hurt. The most consistently painful spot is the back of my neck. It's almost like the pain is in my skin. I can't keep my head on the same place on my pillow without what contacts the pillow causing me unbearable pain, and I have to move. Moving doesn't help much. I moved and laid on that part of my head and neck just moments before, and had to turn from it seeking relief. I have eighteen days left before my appointment at the arthritis clinic at the VA in Durham. That's the earliest I'll get any relief besides ibuprofen and the DMSO liniment. What a drag, man. I hate making do.

I've been trying all sorts of stretching exercises to see if that helped. I guess it did a little bit. Then, I meditated for a good hour and a half, and that made my brain hurt. That's not supposed to happen. Surgeons operate on brains without anesthesia. How could my brain hurt? I kept on doing my count in the hope that I'd reach a release point. Not much happened except that the area I previously sensitized during my former stint at meditating, instead of serving as a signal that I was breathing exactly right, caused a good deal of stress. Since this pain is caused by the inflammation of my joints, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that I'm suffering the pangs of hell.

The longer I experience this discomfort the more it reminds me of Kundalini. It moves. It don't ask permission. It goes where it will and does as it pleases. It's physically changing my body to the way it wants my body to be. Once upon a time I might have elicited some sort of bravado to make my kin proud. But, since I'm it's victim I don't appear to have a say. C'est la morte!

I'm Already Waiting For Groundhog's Day

The cold I've been struggling with seems to be a little better this morning. I'm still coughing up some really evil tasting crap, but my head is a little clearer. I haven't had a bad cold for years, and this one caught me off guard. It made me remember that catching a cold can be seriously debilitating. I might be a little more sympathetic when some other person mentions they have a cold.

The weather has been cold at night for a couple of days. The 7 day forecast reveals cool nights for the foreseeable future. It makes a difference here because although I have a short electric blanket I put over my feet at night, I don't heat my house except with a space heater. Getting outta bed in a cold room to put my clothes on is no different than when I was a kid. It's not that I have anything against central heating, it's just that I can't afford it.

I lay in the bed in the mornings until the sun comes up and begins to heat the air as much as it's going to. When the sunlight reaches the top of the red bud maple right outside my bedroom window, then i figure I might as well get outta bed. It's not as though there is a lot to look forward to. I'm old and getting more decrepit on almost a daily basis. If I were young and vital I'd be in some warm, sunny clime by now. I'd be sleeping on the ground probably, but it didn't matter then like it does now.

I read the story of that famous Greek guy who was forced to drink the hemlock potion for some reason. He described death as starting in his feet and extremities and how he was dying from the outer edges inward. I feel that sometimes. It's my hands losing their function that causes me the most woe. If you've ever had carpal tunnel problems you might know what I mean. I hesitate to reach for something to consider how much completing that mission might hurt. Wiping my butt in the bathroom is like climbing the final stage of Mount Everest.

That's what my life amounts to now. After all, this is a journal, and the whole point of it is to write about my daily life, and my daily adventures are mostly about the avoidance of pain, and telling bold lies I don't even believe.

I voted early yesterday. I'd heard about people doing it all over the place, but I wasn't sure I could do it here. When I went to breakfast last Friday the guy who proselytize me to agree with his extreme religious views told me that he had voted, and so I asked him for details about where to go and make it happen. Voting early took some of the election tension away. When the political ads come on TV and I use the remote control to mute them out, they're not quite as aggravating.

I didn't particularly vote for Obama as much as I voted against Bush. That's been my sentiment for the last three Presidential elections. I've intuited how incompetent this guy is to be the President from the get go. I can't imagine going out for a beer with him on a personal level. There is nothing about him that piques my curiosity, and that's a big deal to me when it comes to voting for somebody. If a person can create enough curiosity in me to cause me to wanna spend a while figuring them out, they can possibly get my vote, but Bush, just as a personality, is somebody I would cross the street to avoid. "Oh.... just shut the fuck up, and leave well enough alone!"

I think I've figured out what happened with the commercial fig tree cutting I bought from Lowe's. It started off real good. I planted it over by the edge of the woods on the north side of my house. That gave it plenty of exposure to the sun because that put it on the north side of the woods.

For the first month or so it really looked alive and I was under the impression that this time my brown thumb didn't prevail over my gardening. Then, the leaves began to shrink, and a couple of them even fell off, and I thought, "Here we go again.". I had put a little fertilizer on it, but not a lot. Just enough to encourage it to give it a go. I had a feeling the fertilizer wasn't the problem, and besides, somebody had told me it was probably a mole nibbling the roots.

It never died completely. The grapevine I put out the same day did. Kaput! While the fig cutting wasn't exactly dead, it wasn't looking good. I didn't walk over and look at it for a while because I figured it was a goner, and I didn't wanna witness the process. A couple of weeks ago I walked by it and noticed that it had a couple of new leaves on it. They were small leaves, but they were new growth leaves. My hopes soared. Soon, they were joined by a couple more new leaves, and now they're all full-sized and looking good.

I suspect I planted the bush too deep to begin with. I wanted to have a little shallow ground around it for watering it. The initial growth when i planted it came from the root mass that had already developed in the container it came in. When it used up all the nutrients those roots could provide it with, it went into a decline. That is, until it finally broke through to the ground outside the initial root ball, and the plant made itself at home. I won't really know if it's gonna thrive where I planted it until next year.

Whining As An Appropriate Segue To Nothingness

I"m sinking deeper into the mire. The further in time I get away from the release the steroids gave me, the more it sinks in that this problem may only be getting started. I'm having to take a different view toward pain than ever before, because before, pain was mostly a temporary event that came and went like somebody I used to know. Now, it's 24/7 in some one place or the other, and even all of the above.

When this latest and greatest session of rheumatoid arthritis struck me down, and then I got diagnosed with it at the VA, and I'm being sent to a special clinic at the Durham VA Hospital, I'm finding it more and more difficult to act like it's gonna get better. No more cheerfully singing "Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow..."

I sat in meditation for about an hour last night. Many times, If I can just find the right way to posture my body when I'm sitting or laying down, then it doesn't hurt so bad. I figured that if I gotta sit still to keep from hurting, then I might as well address my breathing and find out if I could remember how to get outta body. It seems like a long time since I've followed an established practice of meditation. I lost my habit a while back due to circumstances beyond my control.

I had a weird automobile accident on my way up to Nebraska to work. Nobody else was involved. I drove up there alone. I had gone through this small agricultural town and there was a railroad track that was raised about three foot above the ground. I guess it flooded occasionally in that area. The Platte River was nearby.

The road rose up to go over the track and then it went back down to regular elevation on the other side of the track. I couldn't see over the track to what was on the other side of it until I was on top of the tracks themselves. That's when I saw that the road made a sharp turn to the left and ran parallel to the tracks on out into the prairie.

I guess I was paying attention to the fact that the road unexpectantly turned left real quick after getting off the elevated railroad bed that I didn't see the huge pothole right in the middle of the curve. My left front tire dropped into it, but the body of the old worn-out van I was driving didn't start down until the wheel started coming up hard and fast on the other side of the large pothole.

The result was that as the wheel came up hard and the momentum of the van body went down, it drove the hard commercial-like seat up against my descending spine. The jolt ruptured a disc in my lower back, but I didn't realize it had for nearly a year. As a result of that accident I had to stop doing yoga all together, and I wasn't able to feel comfortable sitting in one spot until I get the ruptured disc repaired through surgery.

Yoga and meditation were old friends of mine since my early twenties. Particularly the very physical hatha yoga. I didn't always sit for a formal session of stretching and meditating because I was on the road a lot, and many times there just wasn't an appropriate place to get formal, so I did it a little here and there throughout the day, but I was doing it faithfully for a couple of decades or better.

Much of yoga and meditation is about breathing. Creating the habit of observing my breath took a while. I doubt if there's anybody ever who might brag that they knew everything there is to know about watching your breath. I just do it when I remember to, but it's not so infrequent that I bear shame. One of the most difficult times to do that is when I've stopped breathing altogether and find myself in a state of paying rapt attention to some activity or behavior that attracts my curiosity.

Sometimes terrified. Literally of the fear of death. hardly anybody has ever witnessed me encountering death. I'm always alone when that happens. For one thing, I don't like nobody to see me practice nothing at all. I don't care what it is that I'm practicing, I don't want nobody there. I want people to think that it's effortless to be me. Why would I not?

I usually encounter death when I'm practicing doing something that might seem impossible to do straight outta the package. Naturally, I don't read the documentation. I shouldn't have to explain why. How many people make a habit of taking things too far just to find out how far they can go? And, whatta ya do with that big a fool in the second place? Achieving a state of simultaneity in real time still gets iffy with me. There's still lots of things that I find difficult to let pass without being duped. Just one of those things can be a show-stopper. Nobody knows.

Experiencing God, And How To Defend Myself Against It

I waited a while to write this morning. I went out walking twice. When I went out to see if I had any mail in my RFD box on the paved road I met a Mexican man. He was standing in the driveway of the house-trailer located on the other side of the road talking to someone on a cell phone. I didn't particular wanna engage him in conversation. I tried to wave at him in a friendly manner and move on, but he said something and it would hard to ignore him. We were the only two people around.

We were in the classic dilemma. I couldn't speak Spanish and he couldn't speak English. The only thing I actually understood him to say was that his name was Herman and that he was living in the trailer house with some other migrant laborers. We shoulda bought that land back when we had to chance.

When I got back to the house I decided to drive over to the shopping center and get some more exercise walking on the sidewalk in front of the stores. On the way there I saw Herman was walking toward town. I gave him a ride as far as I was going. We tried to talk once again, but it went nowhere.

That cold I mentioned a couple of days ago is still eating my lunch. When I thought about it that way I decided to Google up the "feed a cold, starve a fever" controversy and settle in my mind which way it went for all time. It's not feed a fever. It's feed a cold, starve a fever. So, I started eating a little more.

The most remarkable thing to me about the internet is the search engine. It took me a long time to learn to use it when I encountered a question about something. My youngest brother has been helpful in my goal to do that. Every time I would ask him about something or the other he would ask me if I had searched the internet fo the answer, and refuse to talk to me about the topic until I did.

Many is the time I"ve sat here trying to remember the words to some song I learned as a boy, and suddenly remembered to type what I remembered into Google, and Voila!, what I had forgotten was right there on the results page, usually the first link. If there is an article about the subject or topic in Wikipedia, then that's usually the first link that appears. Google and Wikipedia must have some sort of deal going on.

Wikipedia is alright with me. I know better by now (I hope) than to take anything I read on the internet as the God's own truth. So, the general information provided by Wikipedia usually satisfies my curiosity, and often enow, they have several links to more detailed information.

This is troublesome for me in a way. I used to run all over the country trying to find the sources I needed to check out the subjects that entice my curiosity. What I'm trying to understand, whatever that is, has been the focus of my entire life. I've walked away from a many a sweetheart deal to pursue the understanding I need. Helplessly walked away, I might add. Couldn't stop myself. I always wanna know the other side of the story. That is sooo non-progressive.

What I'm saying is that for what I came here for, I can get it right here at home by searching the internet. Aye, and there's the rub. I hardly ever leave the house any more, and I spend altogether too much time online chasing rainbows. I do find the pot of gold occasionally, but I'm bad about giving or throwing things away.

That habit comes from my traveling days when I used to hitchhike to nowhere for months as at a ti-me. I had to tote every material object I owned in my hands or on my back. What I didn't actual need or use was considered just so much extraneous baggage. That taught me a lot about what I needed to get by. Usually, for me, it's been the right words.

Words are the way I defend myself against the experience of God. Words are my religion. I say that as a response to becoming aware of a quote by Carl Gustav Jung, whose work I greatly admire. He said something like, "Religion is one's defense against experiencing God." So, I've looked for the defense system I use to do that. When I wrote the above, that's the first time I got any answer. Of course, I only planted the seed a month or so ago. Recently, maybe.

I think I need words for to ask questions. Learning to ask the right question has been a big deal in my life, and nothing brought that more to the forefront then my using and studying the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. Eventually, after I'd been told to stop using the I Ching after thirty years, I realized that I had actually been asking myself the questions I posed to the Book of Changes.

That's what happened with the Jung quote. I wanted to find out what I'm acting like God is. This has nothing to do with what anybody else, either living or dead, and what they act like God is, but me. What about me? What am I acting like God is by using the defense system I've created with words to protect myself against?

The Grayish Light Of Pure Being

I feel more and more like an island unto myself lately. I've pretty much felt that way all along, but recently my mortality threatens as I reflect upon my death. Maybe it's because I studied acting for a while and I deliberately made the drama vocabulary an important part of my nayme game that I see people doing what they do because they choose certain behaviors like an actor chooses to play a role.

In other words, they do what they do because it's the expected behavior of the role they've chosen rather than because of how they think or feel. I won't let people love me because I know where that leads to, and I don't like it one bit. To get them to let me be, I have to convince them they're an island unto themselves also, and I get better at accomplishing that with age.

Sometime I think Being is a bigger deal in my life than I've allowed up to now. I suspect I've concentrated on trying to understand consciousness as my reason for being when just being without rhyme or reason is good enow. Being still and gnowing that I am is God oughta be the cat's meow in my life.

In the wisdom books it is written that there is only movement and rest. I figure being has more to do with the resting part. With the idea being that when I ex-is in a state of rest that all I do is that. I've entertained a bunch of different kinds of feelings of satisfaction while experiencing profound rest.

Probably the most profound state of intentional rest I've ever experienced happened serendipitously or haphazardly. I write that because in this particular situation I entered into being with some definite goal in mind. It was a form of meditation I read about in a book and I decided to work the ritual to see if it led me to an interesting spot.

I lived with my first wife in a townhouse apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time. This was a good arrangement for me and my wife because it gave us both some privacy by allowing both of us to be home at the same time, but one of us could go upstairs and create a sort of separate reality for ourselves.

That's what happened this day. Aftter asking my wife to guard my privacy while I went upstairs to meditate, I went to the spare bedroom, sat down and started working the meditation ritual. It's a simple process that's easy to imagine. I had to think of the hairs inside my nostrils as if they were seaweed on a coral reef being swayed by and forth in the tidal current.

When I breathed in the hairs that grow just inside my nostril would bend with the inhaled air going up through my nares, and when I exhales the same hairs bent the other direction. The focus was on just observing the wave-like action of the hairs in my nose as I breathed in and out.

The method included a counting pattern of base ten. I counted One silently on my beginning exhale, and Two on my inhale. The pattern was even numbers on the inhale and odd numbers on the exhale, but when I counted up to ten, I would stop and start at One again. Even meditation system I know uses a similar counting method.

After about a half-hour I matriculated up into a calm place. My breathing became effortless, and my mind was lucid and shining with light. My breathing became shallower and shallower as I dropped deeper into the ecstasy of release. I remember thinking about how well this new process was going.

Then, since my breathing had slowed down to where there were longer and longer spaces between my inhales and exhales, I decided to see what might happen if I just stopped breathing. Nothing. Nothing happened when I stopped breathing. This was amazing. This was pure being, and I just sat there in this soft grayish light in total peace but a persnickety curiosity.

In this state of calm my heartbeat seemed to be the only distraction. So out of sheer curiosity, I decided to see what would happen if I stopped my heart from beating. Nothing. Nothing happened because my heart simply stopped beating. This was more than amazing. I sat there in that grayish white light for what seemed like a good long time without breathing or my heart beating.

Eventually, I decided that my inexperience in doing stuff like this might get me in trouble I couldn't know about, and started my heart beating first, and then started breathing again. I don't know how long I sat there in pure being astounded beyond belief, but it had gotten dark outside. When I went downstairs to ask my wife how long I'd been up there, she had gone shopping.

That's never happened again. I've managed to rest in pure being infrequently, but I've never experienced that state where I could stop breathing and my heart from beating. Sitting in that grayish white state of pure being is fairly spectacular all by itself. The only description I've come up with that satisfies me to say it's like being an innocent, unborn babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. A year later I experienced full-blown Kundalini while walking down the beach one day. After that, I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Why would I not? What could top that?

If You Can't Say What You See, Blame It On The Reader

I just wrote this to somebody else, and as soon as I sent it out I realized I had to be projecting:

You refuse to admit you don't know something even
when everything you write betrays your pretensions.  
If you don't have the sustained focus to accumulate
reliable data upon which to make a judgment of expertise,
you dismiss it as fanciful and un-necessary. That seems
to happen a lot with you. If you can't say what you see,
you blame it on the reader.

God, I must be an aggravating SOB. I don't know how to begin noticing when i do this.

The Down Home Blues

What a lousy day! This cold is killing me. I'm coughing up and spitting up stuff that couldn't actually be a part of my body. Combined with the arthritis I'm having a hell of a day. This, right after I find out about and started using DMSO.

This stuff works. It doesn't cure anything nor does it get rid of all the pain. The one thing it does help a lot with with the pain in the back of my neck. This is one of the most inconvenient locations this arthritis attacks. Mostly at night when I lay my head down on a pillow. It seems like a surface pain, but it's miserable when I'm trying to sleep. I usually sleep on my side, but now it's almost like i have to because laying flat of my back causes my neck to hurt the worst. The DMSO does provide some relief for this area such that i can sleep better.

I'm finding out I was right about the steroids causing me to have a sore throat after I stop taking it. I finished the steroid series two days ago, and now my throat is hurting. It feels like the adrenaline glands. I can pretty well ignore it now that I know the cause. Ice cream makes it feel more better.

I don't feel the slightest philosophical today. I'm down in the dumps over all my health problems. If I survive, I'll write more later.

It's later. Something remarkable happened, and fortunately I had company this afternoon who helped me to understand what might have happened. I don't have to describe for anybody what it's like to have a lousy cold. I had all the lousy symptoms. I went to the drugstore and got some Nyquil, and looked for something that might dry up all this snotty fluid. I had never used it before, but decided to get some Claritin-D.

It worked really well. But, there is more. My arthritic symptoms dissipated. What could this be. Rainey explained to me that the chemicals that are causing my joints to hurt are called histamines. Claritin-D (and other OTCs) are called anti-histamines. This is just great! If I get to hurting too bad I'll just take some cold medicine. I'm not totally doomed to hell in a handbasket without surcease.

This pain I experience seems to start getting set, and once that starts I've found out from experience it's not gonna get any better unless I do something. What to do? What to do? Finding out that histamines are what's making things hurt is a big deal. There's gotta be a lotta natural anti-histamines in the world of nature. Besides that, how the hell are these histamines getting inside my body and making me feel like shit? I'm amazed I feel so much better since I took the anti-histamine pill.

I think the entire world is ready for this frigging Presidential Election to be over with. It started just after the last election. Is this what the life of the United States is gonna be about until the end of time. One election after the other until the world explodes? In all my years I've never seen anything to beat this. I've seen them start a year or so before the election, but this has been ridiculous.

The Chariot's 'Coming

An old correspondent, Thomas, wrote to suggest I should look into using a substance called DMSO on the trouble spots I have with arthritis. I never heard of it per se, but I am familiar with what it's used for. To mix it with medicines for them to be absorbed through the skin. I Googled it up:

http://www.dmso.org/articles/information/muir.htm

I can't find any material on my search that says don't use it or that there is something inherently dangerous in using. Vets use it on horses and other animals regularly. It has very limited use approved for humans. They use it anyway. Why would I not?

I wanted to try some of this stuff. I finished the series of steroids I'd been prescribed at the VA yesterday, and already my neck is tightening up. All the pain is gonna come back. I thought it might take a few days, but no.

It's for sale on the internet, but I didn't wanna wait. I decided to see if I could find some for sale locally. I went down to the agricultural supply place and asked them if they sold horse liniment. They allowed as how they did, and I asked specifically for DMSO. We walked over to the horse supplies shelf, and there it was. $8.01

When I got home I opened the plastic container up to see what it looks like. It's a clear gel. I dipped my finger in it not knowing how much it would take to cover both hands, and it didn't take much. That's good. It ain't gwine be costing me an arm and a leg to give this stuff a whirl.

The little dab I used to lathe both hands with it was actually more than needed, so I rubbed the excess off on the back of my neck, which is where I have the most pain. It's been a good thirty minutes now, and I'll have to say, something is definitely going on. The ring finger on my right hand has really been stiff and knotty for a couple of weeks now. Even the last series of steroids didn't alleviate all of the pain. I'm using it as the test bed for my hands. If it helps that finger at all the whole deal will have been worth it.

The back of my neck where I rubbed the excess DMSO off my hands is tingling mightily. It's not unpleasant. I can't decide whether it's the tingling that has me distracted from the onslaught of stiffness in my neck or whether the DMSO is working as advertised, but it's better with it on there than with it off. If I can just get some temporary relief occasionally I'll be a happier man.

It's been over an hour now, and the pain has be significantly interfered with. I walked over to talk with my brother next door, and sat for a while in the sun. I'm feeling considerably better now.

The World's Best Chili

I got a miserable cold. I keep a roll of paper towels handy just for the dripping. I haven't had a cold in a long time. This one caught me off guard. It wasn't a month ago that I got that flu shot at the VA. I thought that would have helped, but there is another factor at play. I took the last of a series of prednisone steroid pills this morning. Its my understanding that one of the side effects of steroids is that they weaken one's immune system, and that might be how this cold got a foothold on my body.

I've been using the sugar substitute Splenda to sweeten my coffee for a while. The quality of my coffee drinking experience has gone South substantially during this period, and I finally bought some sugar. Yesterday I noticed just how much better I'm enjoying my coffee these days. I got mixed up and put twice as much sugar as I would normally put in my cup, and was fairly amazed that putting more sugar in makes the coffee even sweeter. That doesn't happen with the Splenda.

Sometime it doesn't do any good for me to add my disclaimer here. Every few entries I explain that I don't know what the truth is. I just try to capture drifting thoughts with words and publish them on the internet. Language will undergo a radical change with the arrival of the WWW. Everything that possible could be said will be said here. Data mining programs are already at work cataloging this everything. Within a decade or so they'll publish this total output of man, and it won't take all that long to download your own copy of it. I'm just trying to make sure I contribute with my word salad.

I went out to my car to get something out of it. It's sitting in the sun. When i opened the door I realized that if I climbed in and sat in my car I'd get warm all over at the same time. So I did. I got a book of Sudoku puzzles I keep there and plenty of pens. I sat there and solved a medium hard puzzle until I started perspiring a little. What's a better sauna than a closed car sitting in the sun?

I made a slow cooker full of chili. It tastes so good I have to brag on myself a little. Damn, I'm a chili making fool! It's all I'll eat for the next four days or so. I already had chili for breakfast along with a couple of hot peppers. Maybe the capsaicin in the jalapenos will kill these cold germs that are trying to cannibalize my old body.

My First Cigarette And The Art Of Hiding

I'm still freaking on Jung's quote about religion being a person or group's defense against an experience of God. I'm thinking that if I could figure out my defense system or systems, then I could figure out what i'm acting like God is. I've always wanted to know. Just color me curious.

I'm thinking that attacking me with material that might cause me to wanna murder them outright and be done with it would have a god-like place in my life. I'm fairly sure I would padlock that tendency and codify it in such a way that nobody on Earth could get me that riled. But, they have. It's just a fact I have to live with, and yet nobody knows.

My desire for other people to obey or at least respect my rules of conscience could get me killed one day. It's much more insidious than being killed by a jealous husband when I'm 99 years old. Heaven can't wait.

I don't think I'm the only human being in the world who truly wants other people to obey their subjective rules of conscience. It seems universal to me. Maybe homo sapiens have a neuron receptor for it, and some people occasionally learn how to pick the lock.

That seems like a weird thing to write because I'm perfectly aware that it's an unlearning that does the trick rather than the other way around. Unlearning seems simple at first nod. Withdraw the emotional support offered to the false gods. That's what rules of conscience amount to. REM dreams that get labeled out of sheer boredom and ennui. When is enough enow?

People decide to look at certain events as precursors to the pain they're trying to keep from their door. It's by making this very effort that they meet their fate on the road they took to avoid it. Blinded by the light, I learned to sleep in weird places that nobody would even bother to look for a wounded animal. I lived for a long time like a wounded animal. Why would I not? It wasn't a joke. It still isn't.

I keep wondering if I first grokked the concept of hiding from the time this kid from New Jersey came down to North Carolina in the summers and stayed with his aunt to get him away from the big city where his parents went to work. My family moved a lot when I was a kid. No matter where I found myself I was always the new guy. I was very friendly with anybody who showed any interest. Why would I not? I was the new guy. I never knew the pecking order that had been established before I came to town.

His name was Bobby. He was visiting his aunt and was a stranger in a strange land, and I was just a stranger whose family had moved there because of my father's job. The only thing I really remember about him is that he had stolen some Old Gold non-filtered cigarettes from his aunt,, and he wanted to know if I wanted to smoke a cigarette with him.

I was ten years old or so. Nobody in my family smoked tobacco. I guess my curiosity got the best of me, and I wanted to see what the big fuss was about. I said okay, how do we do it? He told me we couldn't do it in the open. His aunt might find out and beat his butt. We had to hide and keep it a secret.

There wasn't much hiding to it. He led me to this shallow ditch at the edge of an open patch of ground my family used to keep a garden. There were other houses in the area, and the place we "hid" could probably be seen from the windows of any of those houses. He fished out a crumbled pack of cigarettes with around five cigarettes in it, he got two out of it, and handed me one.

He lit the cigarettes with a big kitchen match, and we squatted down in the ditch conspiratorially and puffed away. I think we tried to blow some smoke rings. We didn't inhale that I recall. Suddenly, his aunt called out her back door for him to come home, and he jumped up and ran toward the sound of her voice. That was the last time I ever saw Bobby. In reflection, "Bobby" might not have been a young boy, or even human.

Smoking that Old Gold cigarette with this weird-talking kid from New Jersey was one of the most exciting things that had happened to me as a boy up to that time. I discovered that I really liked hiding to do something I wasn't supposed to be doing.

I didn't smoke anymore cigarettes until I was almost eighteen years old, but I took to hiding and doing things I wasn't supposed to like a duck takes to water. I needed to know for myself about anything I got warned off of. If I went off and found me a hiding place, I could do whatever it was, found out whether I thought it was good or bad, and that made me feel sure of myself, whereas other kids seemed to not really know.

When I feel like I have the straight skinny on something because I've found out for myself through experience what it means to me, I have a tendency to harden to change. It's the bane of my ex-is-tense.

Pretending To Be The Other In Order To Be Yo'self

I may be fooling myself, but I think I've heard a couple of economists talking about the depression, and then suddenly remark something equivalent to, "Man, I can't even think about this money problem until this Election is over."

I get the distinct feeling a lot of people are putting their lives on hold until they find out how The Election is gonna go. Not me. I don't have much of a life to put on hold, but what little I got has got to be in at least suspended animation.

I'm actually beginning to believe that even the Republicans and Conservatives are realizing they've been duped by the Bush-Cheney cabal. They don't represent the ordinary common values of the Republicans,, and they may not love Jesus like they swear they do. They got fooled twice. You know the old saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Either way The Election goes it's one of the more explosive situations I've actually paid attention to in politics. Granted, there were long periods of time when I was younger that I didn't pay that much attention. I was too busy prowling. On the lookout for other people like me who were out there looking for me. The threat of death has a tendency to really focus one's attention. What I wanted to understand required additional incentive. "A man's gotta do..."

Whatever is going on now is global. It's hard to blame Bush for the global situation. Just for being a spoiled brat and getting us divided over his petty personal problems. There is probably no other time in the history of the United States that we need to be united and focused on the big picture.

I've been writing about a global situation. It's not like I intended to in an economical or political sense, but that's how what I thought I was writing about is coming down to ground level. That's how it's acting itself out. It's just a metaphor I made up for emergency situations in which I might have to risk behaving ridiculously to survive.

I certainly am glad I learned to feign insanity at an early enough age to be able to put it on and wear it when all hell is busting loose. Not only does one's need to feel important act as the largest stumbling block for the spiritual seeker, the need for self-importance can be a heavy weight to carry around when you're incarcerated. Getting put in a cage with a whole bunch of really pissed off people who are in the cage with you because they were already looking for trouble, is no place to insist that you're a big shot who deserves special treatment.

I didn't realize I was already an expert on the art of feigning insanity when I started using the Yellow Book as an oracle. It was not so much that I wasn't aware I was acting, and not really crazy. It's that I couldn't really be sure that I was really acting and not really insane. There's a thin line....

It was only when I encountered the careactor of Prince Chi in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching that I began to realize I might be smarter than I thought. Prince Chi was revered because of his talent for feigning insanity. In the Yellow Book they used the term "dissemble". If I hadn't have stopped to look up what that term meant in the dictionary I might have missed the whole point.

How was I supposed to know that sanity was something assembled? I figured sanity was merely the lack of insanity. If you weren't crazy, then you were probably sane. What that meant didn't seem to matter. I hadn't realized sanity was something I put together just to go to the county fair and win a prize with. But, if sanity can be dissembled, then it must upsurge into being by being assembled (the emblem of an ass).

Sanity is assembled by the act of choosing the rules of conscience a person figures will guide them into be-co-me-ing the kind of human being they truly admire and wanna be like. Homo sapiens are incredible mimickers. Even when they fuck they imagine themselves being somebody else doing it. "I'm fucking this bitch like i was a big-dicked horse so good she'll brag about it to her friends. 'Oh, what a good boy am I.'" Only boys can fuck a woman as if he was a horse. We never matriculate into being the real fucker. All of life is "as if".

Presently, such a ploy is how I'm deliberately considering the rheumatoid arthritis I've been diagnosed as being plagued with is what the Hindoos call Kundalini, the sacred fire. It moves. Not many people around here understand what I'm reaching for when I say that my joints are inflamed by a sacred fire. A fire is sacred when it doesn't burn you up. Some consider the light the planets reflect to be a sacred fire that doesn't burn. I was shocked that as idiotic as he can be sometimes, that Roger actually realized that. In some ways we got a lot in common.

Ask, And It Will Be Given

I'm feeling a little blase today. Lazy might be a better word for it. It's getting chilly at night now. While that makes for good sleeping, it also makes getting up during the night and in the mornings more of a challenge. I don't heat my house during the night when I'm in bed. I don't heat it much in the daytime either. I only got a space heater, and that's alright with me. At least the wind isn't blowing through my house like it used to for years.

I've always known I'm seen as a weirdo, but I rationalize my own behavior to go along with that. People come to my house and wonder how I've lived like this, and every year it's gotten better. It's just a hooch, man, not an investment. When I become immortal, I'll build a better house. On the other hand, if I become immortal, I won't need a house.

I guess I'm grateful to have any sort of way to get outta the weather. There have been lots of time when that wasn't possible at any one moment. I didn't have any place to get in out of the rain, much less to shield myself from a cold wind. I wasn't trying real hard. There was just only so much I was willing to do to live like other people. It never was a life or death situation as a general rule. For one thing I migrated south in the winter.

Not when I was working. I did work. Not unless I had to, but I did work. I had lots of jobs. I worked at a lotta different types of jobs until i learned how to weld pipe. Then I did pretty much the same job in different locations. I still had a lotta jobs. Road whore. Time jobs. Shutdowns. Two weeks at a time. The last job I had working in industrial construction was the longest job I had in construction, but I wasn't on my tools anymore. I drew a salary. They got gypped. They knew it and didn't wanna do anything about it. Ninety percent of a good job is just showing up on time.

I worked in quality control. On paper the job called for a degree in mechanical engineering, but I don't have any sort of degree. I had lots of experience specifically in the field i was working. I don't read blueprints any better than I read sheet music. I can figure either one of them out with time, I just don't sight read blueprints or musical scores. That's doing things the hard way as fair as I'm concerned.

Instead, I learned to make people into what they need to be to get things done. Most of the time they were very, very surprised to become conscious they could do what they never figured they could, but they were very, very pleased when they found out it was easy. Easy as long as I was around.

This has only been going on with some deliberation for about the last decade. Mostly after I woke up to hear an authoritative voice telling me to "Stop using the I Ching." I really didn't wanna do that. I'd been doing it practically daily for over thirty years. I didn't know how to conduct my affairs without it. That's probably why I was told to stop.

I did stop using the I Ching as an oracle, but i still had all these questions about life. If I don't have any questions about life, then I don't have a quest in life, and if I don't have a quest in life, then i don't feel human. i had to do something. Something that would be "like" using the I Ching as an oracle, but not actually.

I started using other people as oracles. Why would I not? They didn't know they couldn't do it. Well over ninety percent of them didn't know what an oracle is, much less that they could become One just because I asked them to. After all, when all was said and done I had stopped using the tarot cards for reading palms because I didn't like relying on physical implements. Abandoning the use of the Yellow Book and replacing it with people because more and more inviting.

I used to read palms as a way to get along when I was out on the road, and when I stopped for a while too. It was a fascinating way to relate to people. Only as a stranger. My reading palms was as haphazard as it might have appeared. I read everything I ever saw written on doing readings. Not just palms, but astrology, and Tarot card readings. It's just a form of what some people call channeling.

I don't channel any specific entity or see myself as channelling entities at all. It might be that i do, but I'm just not aware of it, and feel no need to pretend I am. As you might have read in the blog heading, I call it catching drifting thoughts with words. It's not the truth. I wouldn't know the truth if it bit me in the ass. It's just wot sots itself before me in real time and begs for expression. It wants to be a real boy too.

A Defense Against The Experience of God

I never thought about whether or not I could change the way I looked at my life until somebody in NLP told me convincingly that I could. It's not that I'm so stupid, but I'd just never thought about it before. When I quit screaming at my nemesis that they were liars, and started listening to what they had to say, I realized that this was a neat trick and I had to learn to do it. 

My only true plight in life has been about the rules of conscience I adopted in order to imitate the behaviors of people I admire. I imitated them because they were getting the responses from other people that I wanted for myself. I tried to mimic everything they said and did. In the more of me than you can see, I started learning to do that soon after the initial new-born stage. Children don't just start rolling over on their backs or start crawling until they realize they can. Sometime they figure it out by themselves, and other times they are deliberately led by example. They conquer a desired behavior by forming rules for develop strong habits to guide them along in their mimicry, and to remind them to be constantly diligent of the need to reframe less useful habits. They form rules to help them remember to do something again that feels right, and they teach themselves (in-tuition) to avoid doing stuff that constantly leads to disaster. 

Programmers have rules for writing computer code using specific languages that have their own rules. All designed to get specific results. The rules a person remembers adopting are pretty easy to reframe, it's the ones you forgot you put into play to do something you've already forgotten about, that provides the rub. All a person has to do to change their rules of conscience is to figure out which ones they adopted to make them into who-they-think-they-are from the time they learned to crawl as a baby. How can that be done? 

It took a long time to figure it out, but the way it works for me is to listen to what i accuse other people of being like. What I accuse the other of being like is exactly who I think I am... Is. I project my own idea of myself on to other people and act like they're who I think I am is instead of me. 

Realizing that I'm doing this in real time, projecting my idea of myself on to the behavior of the other, that is, at the sa-me ti-me as I am is doing it, can prove to be a formidable task. A dream within a dream. It's difficult to keep my stopping still and know that I am is a God. A false God unless you believe otherwise. The hardest part is to figure out who I am is. That's pretty simple. What is simple is easy, I am is me. I am makes the world around it into it's own idea of it's Self. It makes the world around me into what it "thinks" the world should be like, and that's almost always just like me. I am only perceives it own idea of itself in the world about it. I am IS me. The child is the father of the man.

Why would a person defend their own right to play God with their own lives? C.G. Jung stated: "Religion is each person's defense against their own subjective experience of God." I've twisted it around a little. It's the persona who accuses the other of being what they would be like if they were them that's the culprit. That's who is playing God. It's you that's playing God when you find yourself expecting other people to obey the rules of conscience you created to get yourself to act like somebody else. Solely to get what they have you wanted or lusted for. People play God to be Godly.

I just wrote about defending my right to play God with my own life yesterday. That's why I agree with the saying in the Gospel of Thomas that one must hate their parents and their sisters and brothers to be a follower of Me. It's mostly a puberty thing. It amounts to no more than some 14 year old girl screaming at her mother, "I hate you." We do what we do in puberty to establish our own identity, each of us in our own way gotta let go of our dependence on dutifully being what we think we were raised to be like.

Humans gotta abandon their family's ways or their tribe's ways in order to discover their own way. Eventually they discover they don't have a way unless they create it themselves. Their success in letting that happen all amounts to them defending their right to play God with their own life. If you look at your process very selfishly, you'll begin to understand Jung was right. The defense you raise to protect your right to play God with your own life IS your only real religion.

Cold Hands, Cold Heart

It's chilly out. The low last night is the high today. I've had to put on some clothes to feel comfortable. I've lost or misplaced my grey toboggan hat. I like it because it's not made of wool, but that warm fuzzy stuff. I'll probably never see it again. That's the way it is with me and hats. Here today and gone tomorrow.

I stopped by Rainey's house for a little while on the way home yesterday. He was taking a nap when I got there. He welcomed me, as you might expect from someone with so much social and cultural training, but I wasn't really welcome. Another problem was that the events I'd dealt with just previous had made me a little tired also. It doesn't seem like sitting around waiting to get my eyes examined and waiting to get my glasses made would be a tiresome thing, but it was. Rainey and I sat around trying to be polite when we didn't have our heart in it, and finally I came on home.

The whole time i was gone yesterday I wanted to be home. I had a really good reason for being out and about. I needed a new pair of glasses, but more than that I needed to know the condition the cataracts in my eyes were. I needed to know the parameters my insurance company uses to pay their part on a lens replacement operation, and whether whether the condition of my eyes warranted them paying. I kept hearing whispers, but nobody would tell me direct.

I was right and wrong all along. I worked myself into thinking about how nice it would be not to have to wear glasses anymore, and let myself be encouraged to think that if I played my cards right, then i wouldn't have to pay much to get it done. I proceeded on that assumption, and the surgeon went right along with me. No blame. It's the way he makes a living.

The potential problem that never really came about because of my caution was that I would have gotten the lens replacement operation that would have healed my cataract problem in that eye, but my insurance company wouldn't have paid,, and I would have to pay for the whole deal out of pocket. That would break me financially, and I'd still have only one eye fixed.

The whole eye deal has been much ado about nothing. I'm wearing new glasses that really improve my vision. I can close either eye and still see about the same thing in front of me. The frames are a lot lighter and they sit on my nose without pinching it so much.

The reason I wanted to be home yesterday is that everything I see out in the world anymore is the way it is because of my making it that way in my mind's eye. All the people. The entire countryside. All the stores and animals and stoplights... they're all the way they are because of the way I decide. At least to me they are. Whether they have individual careactoristics on their own without my input, who knows?

It kind of bothers me that the world depends on how I see it for it to be what it is to me. It really pisses me off sometime to think that for my world to change I gotta go to all that trouble of changing my mind so it can be so. That, plus the fact that it could and would be anything else besides what it currently appears to be just by a small shift in consciousness. Why bother?

I've been cutting my own hair for a few years now. It's easy enough. I bought a cheap pair of shears that have a quarter inch plastic spacer and I give myself a buzz cut, then take the spacer off and trim a little closer around my ears and the back of my neck. I just haven't done that lately. I got that seedy look going. I didn't change clothes or take a shower to get new glasses yesterday. I didn't brush my teeth. Nobody cared.

I was just another old man acting like many old men act. I'm not a prepossessing sight. People in general are more polite to older people. They let a lotta things pass. It's not like they're gonna get nakid with them and make wild, passionate love. They don't have to be on their P's & Q's any more than the old people, and so things can be much more relaxed and pleasant.

Sometimes it's not though. Realizing that I'm not sexually attractive to people who are still sexually attractive to me is not an easy burden to bear. Not for anybody probably. Sometime i have to deal with a deep anger that I have to change with the changes that go on with me. I don't always know it's there on the back burner waiting to boil over.

Most of the time i was actually young and sexually alluring to impregnable women I didn't even know it. Either that or thought it would last forever. By the time i began to understand that just my being young and sexually attractive was all it took to make that happen. I thought i had to do something to make myself stand out to attract the ladies. The whole time I was fooling myself, they knew it was them that made me stand out. I didn't.

By the time i figured it out I wasn't so young and sexually alluring, and something else actually did have to be done to turn heads. Then, by the time I got around to doing what I needed to do that hadn't needed doing just previous, I got old and didn't give a shit about being young or sexually alluring, even by hook or by crook.

I can practically guarantee anybody that with the onset of this arthritis I'm not concerned about looking or being sexually attractive. Even now while I'm taking steroids my thumb on my left hand is getting stiff and cramping. I have to force it straight so that it won't hurt as bad. I hope I learn to turn this pain into pleasure sooner than later.

I didn't know I was going to spend the day in Fayetteville until late last night. The stem on my eye glasses broke, and I haven't had a new prescription since the year 2000, so I woke up after my first sleep cycle and decided to drive over there to LensCrafters and get an eye examination and a pair of new glasses. I've told you about what a miser I am is, but getting the new glasses was a bigger deal than my having to go without food to buy them. I wanted Humana to get used to paying for something to do with my eyes.

I have cataracts in both eyes. I've known about it for years. The problem with having cataracts is that there is a fairly reliable remedy for removing them. That means decisions have to be made about money. I live real close to the bone. I'm also a little stupid about impulse buying. Bad idea when you live close to the bone.

When I first found out about the cataracts, the optomitrist who told me about them said I would have to have them removed in about a year. Later, I acted like that was so. A woman friend of mine got new lens put in for her cataracts and before the process was over she had 20/20 unaided vision in both eyes. She encouraged me to see if i could get it done using Medicare and my Humana account. I got pretty excited.

I went to the eye surgeon who does this sort of lens operation, and told him what I had in mind. He was more than willing to help me. I was scheduled to go to the hospital to get the lens in my right eye replaced, when some doubt about the insurance company paying off came into play. I cancelled the operation.

Something was wrong with the way I was thinking about this. Nobody would spell it out for me so that I had reliable feedback to make a sensible decision with. I decided to let a lot of things pass without being duped. I backed away and did nothing. I felt sort of foolish because i had written about and announced my intentions to the significant others among my family and friends. When I cancelled the operation I didn't exactly know how to explain myself, except to say that I got my own way.

The weeks and months went by and I still seemed to see pretty good with my old glasses. I've had a bunch of new glasses since my early forties. Enough new glasses to know how having them really helps. People asked me what I was going to do about my eyes. If they were bad enough off to have considered an operation in the first place, why wasn't I doing something about them? Why hadn't I been back to the doctor's office.

It's great to have people in my life that worry a little over me. Most people can take a look at me when I'm out in the public's eye and know without question that I'm not much of a neat freak. I'm fairly slack about a lot of cultural things that I oughta be more concerned with. I think more than I imagine has been simply because I haven't been able to see as well, and I appear to be ignoring things that I don't actually perceive.

On the drive home wearing my new glasses I kept looking to see what a difference the new prescription made. The sweet-natured Pisces woman who helped me pick out my new glasses commented a couple of times about how the doctor had really upped the magnifying power because I hadn't gotten a new prescription in a long time. I had driven all the way to this side of town when I began noticing some spots on the windshield, and other living things.

I hadn't seen them when I put the new glasses on and started driving. The drops they had put in my eyes to dilate them still made things look way too bright and weird because i couldn't narrow my focus. I guess by the time i had driven through Fayetteville and hit the open highway, the drops had worn off and I began to be able to focus my eyes again. I guess I really needed the new prescription. I had been a lot blinder than I thought.

I asked the optometrist who examined my eyes what the condition of the cataracts in my eyes are currently. He said they didn't seem to have grown much. I asked him if they were bad enough that my insurance company would pay for the lens replacement with no qualms about it. He told me he didn't think they were bad enough that the insurance people would pay. All I needed right now was a new pair of glasses. That eye surgeon was gonna do it anyway, and I'd have ended up paying for everything out of my pocket.

My eyes are about back to normal from being dilated now that I've been home a while. I'm adjusting to the increased power of the magnification little by little. I'm pretty pleased with getting this done. I know where I'm at with my eyesight, if nothing changes, and these new flex glasses are the cat's meow.

I did another errand while I was over in Fayetteville. I drove over to the VA Hospital to get the phone number of the Durham VA to check with them about my upcoming appointment there next month. These hospital people act crazy about missing an appointment, and threaten to throw you out of the clinic if you miss just one. The nice lady at the Fayetteville VA not only gave me the phone number I needed, but a map to tell me how to get there.

The reason I have to go to Durham is that they have a special clinic for arthritis there. I really, really, really don't wanna miss this appointment. They might have something going on there that gives me relief without having to constantly resort to steroids. I don't know all the side effects, but from the whispers I hear around me, I might not wanna find out until it's too late. In the interim, however, the steroids are my blessings from heaven.

Where The Dew Is Still On The Roses

I got my mojo working well enough yesterday to saw a 4' X 8' panel of sub-flooring in half and carry both halves up the outside stairs to the room I'm working on upstairs. I don't seem able to haul a full-sized panel up there without any help. Getting that flooring down in my old bedroom is a big deal now that winter is right around the corner. I can seal that room off better to heat it once I get the flooring in.

It's not like I don't have sub-flooring in that space already. It's been in there since I built the initial structure. The problem is that I went out into the woods, cut the trees down, hauled them to the sawmill, where ol' man Joe cut them up into the various sized timbers and planks I needed to build my house. I was kind of in a hurry to get the flooring down, so I didn't wait until the green lumber had dried out. It dried out where i nailed it in place. As a result, when the board did dry out, they shrunk, and left half-inch gaps between the boards in what's designed to be a solid floor.

The chipboard sub-flooring I'm putting in will not only cover up my mistakes, it will allow me to put a veneer of regular flooring on top of it and it will be brick-shithouse strong. I'll probably die of old age before I get that pretty veneer flooring down, but at least I'll be able to heat this room in the winter to stay warm. In fact, if I go to work and do right, I'll be able to efficiently heat or air-condition the entire upstairs.

I moved all my computer stuff downstairs in order to work upstairs. I have other furniture that was upstairs down here now too. My living room is a mess. I got more of everything I need all down here and I have to turn sideways just to get through some of the tight places.

Ideally, the work is more about getting my center of operations back upstairs. I like it up there. Particularly now that I have the outside decks and stairs installed. I can get up from my desk and walk outside on that deck and see all around my house (except the NW direction) from up high. I can move around up there in such a way as to park my body in the sunlight if the sun is shining that day. Being up a iittle higher gives me more visual freedom. There ain't much of that on the coastal plains. It's flat as a fly flitter here.

It may appear to some people that I've spent my entire life doing what I wasn't supposed to just find out why I'm not supposed to. One of the things a seeker like me ought not to be doing in buying lottery tickets and dreaming about winning millions of dollars to see how long it would take for me to throw it away. I didn't have a ticket for the PowerBall drawing Saturday, and I missed the dreaming. If I don't have a ticket I can't even dream of winning.

I rectified that mistake yesterday and went to the store and bought me a ticket with the same computer-picked numbers for ten drawings with the multiplier. Cost me $20, and will only satisfy my bad habit for about a month. But, I can dream. I'd give most of it to my ex-wives and children, of course, just to screw them up more than I already have. Why not finish ruining their lives by over-burdening them with money.

I don't really think I can ruin anybodies life any more than they can ruin mine. We can make each other miserable temporarily, but permanent ruination doesn't seem possible for humans. They can just dissemble and reframe to come up with something different.

I'm thinking about this rheumatoid arthritis and how it might ruin life as I know it, but rheumatoid arthritis is not a person,, and I don't think it has a conscience about what it does to the people it invades. When I found out that the Greek word "rheum" means "to flow" like a river I immediately thought of Rome and how it might have been nay-me-d for the up-river point it has running through it.

When it comes to something inside my body moving around as it will and rearranging it as if by divine right, then I gotta go to Kundalini and what I've experienced in that regard. I'm still convinced to some degree that it's here to help me learn to hate having physical bodies because it wants me to abandon them and get back to the garden. No blame.

"It Takes Two Cups..."

I'm not exactly "loose as a goose" this morning, but it's better. The prednisone is working. It's only a little surprising which part of my body give up it's pain first. My body is being changed by the disease and it's medicine. Maybe the stem cell researchers will find a way to alleviate some of the discomfort, but steroids do a pretty good job in the mean time.

I've spent pretty much my entire life playing mind games. In my opinion it doesn't make any sense to give myself a grade on my efforts. Nobody knows. Who could I brag to? The other would and can only interpret my palaver to mean what they thought they'd be saying, and so the whole deal would be a wash.

I haven't been satisfied with the models I've used to play mind games. I did finally acknowledge I was only playing them with myself. That realization may have been just another bejinning of the end. I mean, what else am I gonna do with an end but to be-jinn it. It's just another assigned construct. Is it not?

Working the idea of the essence I've claimed resembled a oyster pearl as a black hole is an interesting thing to do. Practically every attribute of the pearl fits with the notion of it being or acting like a black hole works for me. I don't know much technically about what black holes are actually like. I read Stephen Haw-king's tome. I had my remembering vision previous to his description of black holes, but his description of black holes fits what I experienced pretty closely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking

I don't know how I became familiar with cornucopias. Nursery rhymes and stories I guess. Until fairly recently cornucopias have remained in the mythological realm, and they still are, but I'm coming to the conclusion that a cornucopia is an ancient assigned structure for a black hole. Neither description nor any of mine are the thing-in-itself. Metaphors we live by.

Grokking how using a black hole as a descriptor would make a more useful metaphor for describing what i saw happening in vision. It only happened in the last couple of days. I've been trying to describe two types of consciousness' and how they work hand in hand as the sa-me thing in reverse polarity.

Where the future becomes the past with a black hole is the event horizon. That's the ring-pass-me-not where the nay-me-able objects can't escape the gravitational pull of the black hole. "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Which begs this question: How much will be left to compress in the eye of the storm when all hope is extracted from being? Probably not even enough to apply description. It be-co-me-s un-nay-me-able. Un-named, because indistinguishable. Indivisible. Thus, invisible. The unconscious mind at rest. Id. The It.

It's gotta go both ways. The flow has to be reversible for the dark hole to become the cornucopia. Everything inside the core of the abyss that's only a former shell of itself can be re-inflated with hope. Faith, hope, and charity?

In the I Ching it talks about this, and the question is asked, "How can this be done?", and the oracle answers, "It takes two cups..." Rest and motion?


50 Jesus said,
"If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'

If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.'

If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'"

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

Rheum Is Rome, It Moves

I was hoping when I got up this morning all the pain would be gone from just those two tablets of prednisone. That didn't happen. It looks like i'm gonna hsve to take the entire series of pills to get the results that might please me. So, I took two more pills this morning, and i'll find out what that does to the event horizon of my black hole.

I've been considering the pearl-like entity I came here as, as a teeny tiny black hole with two aspects. From the center of that black hole, every thing is no thing in particular. It's not so much an empty space. It's just that by dwelling in that null point all possible object possess no individuation for me, as the resident of the center of the black hole, perceives as any different that any other object in space, they all me-and the sa-me to me.

Outside the event horizon of the black hole that is me, however, all possible objects are not yet me, and are nay-me-able. Cornucopia (Id). The horn of plenty (plenitude) is small and closed on one end, and large and open at the other. I must have had the traffic going the other way.

I speculate about crap like this all the ti-me. I don't know the truth about any thing. I just make this stuff up to entertain myself. I attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words. I can't do that and decide if they're true or false at the same ti-me. Besides, you have to interpret this crap to me-and-thee with it. You see what you think the words meand (meaning = me-and-thee-ing) That's the only meaning anything has. The truth is merely what me and thee agree upon temporarily, if that.

From the center of my darkest abyss, there is only me, and no thee. From outside event horizon of the dark hole all possible theses are there for the taking. I.E., thetic and non-thetic ex-is-tense-s. The road I take to escape my fate is the road that leads me to it.

Later That Day

It's when I hold my head in a certain way that caused the pain to flair up in my neck again. I took the prednisone early, around eight o'clock maybe. The pain in my neck took until around three o'clock to ease off noticeably. I'm thinking, this is cool man. My neck was locked up like you might get a muscle cramp in yo' leg. For days on end it just locked down tighter. The discomfort in my neck was the thermometer I used to decide when to take the steroids. It was also the chief indicator that the steroids were working.

I don't really have a head ache. It's the muscles surrounding or involved with the vertebrae in my neck. There seems to be a lot of inflamed tissue there. I don't know whether it's the muscles or the bones themselves or both. I would swear that my brain aches. Literally. But, it doesn't hurt like a head ache. For a while, I had both.

The pain or tension there moves. Something is definitely going on. I have scary thoughts that the x-rays and blood work show that I'm eat up with a brain tumor and they've concluded it's too late to help. I'm a walking dead person. Well, I do. I consider everything. Why would I not?

It would be just my luck to achieve immortality now, and live forever and a day in extreme pain. Maybe I can convince some of those Greek gods to cough up some of that nectar they drink that heals all that ails you.

I may not know any Greek gods. I've met some very interesting Greeks. Every Greek that I've met swears they don't actually believe in the old Greek gods anymore. They love Jesus instead. Well, except for the ones who become Turkistans and decided to love Mohammed instead.

That was shocking to me. Almost as shocking as finding out that the Huns lived in Hungary. I had a brief, but unsuccessful love affair with this really bright woman of Greek descent. Her father was from the old country and grew up on one of the more populated Greek islands. Her mother was a first-generation Greek. Both her parents were born and raised in Greece. It was an arranged marriage between an old man and a young woman. She went along to get along. I met her. I read her palm. She had a long head line with a perfectly formed star on the upper end of it.

She told me stories that came down through her family about what life was like in the Greek islands. Very tough. This woman was a virtual Sheherazade. She told believable stories. She could have made them up on her own. She could have researched them academically. She could have learned the stories sitting at her parent's knee. One day her father told her to stop crying. She was a baby. When she didn't stop crying, he picked up by her little legs and threw her into a hot frying pan on the stove. She showed me the scar.

Everything else but the scar looked enticing. This woman was in my mid-forties and had the body of a teenager. She is a totally uninhibited person in some ways. Deep down, however, she seems like a victim. Bipolar. At least, that's what she told me the problem was. I knew what she wanted. I knew what she chose me for. I knew I probably wouldn't measure up. One thing I couldn't do. I couldn't refuse to be with her when she decided to delude herself with me.

All the women I've had serious relationships know they're special, and that my needs are just what they got to offer. I never had to beg none of them to be with me. As a matter of fact, they chose me for their own reasons by fooling me into thinking I seduced them. It always turns out that way. There has only been a handful I've fully engaged with. The women I might claim to have actually seduced didn't last long.

This woman had credentials up the ying yang. She was Phi Beta Kappa, and a true slut to beat the band. Capricorn. She wanted exclusivity with a wild passion. She want my exclusivity, yet not give it. I turned to old friends for comfort. I knew she couldn't hang with my down side. I couldn't hang when she was up. Constant mis-match.

My first wife's name was Glenda, and she was born in the masculine sign of Aries. Her father's name was Glenn. He was soft on the outside. My second wife's name was Carla, and she was born in the masculine sign Gemini. Her father's name was Carl, and was soft on the outside. This woman's name was Claudia, and was born in the feminine sign Capricorn. At least her father's name was not Claude, and he was a murderous terrorist and a crime boss. I thought we had a chance. I was too soft on the inside.

The Creator Of Immortality

The question is for me right now, is whether these two 20 mg tablets of prednisone will alleviate the pain I'm experiencing. I don't have that many of them. The doctor at the VA Hospital cut back the length of the dosage to two day intervals instead of five. I put off taking them until this morning. I wanted to witness how the pain would return. I'm watching from a much different perspective.

Rheumatoid arthritis is the pain that keeps on giving. Previous to being diagnosed with it I considered all the little aches and pains as temporary ill-nesses that would eventually go away. Up until the last couple of years they did go away, and when they didn't, and I received the results of the blood work from my doctor, I knew I'd have to deal with it for the rest of my life, barring a medical miracle.

I still ain't give it up to the idea that it's curable, my aunt had it for sixty odd years after she gave birth to her first child. It runs in the family on my mother's side. Like with me, her's didn't crank up until she was older.

Since I've come to expect that I'm going to have this dis-ease for the rest of my natural-born days, I figure I might as well turn my attention to what I can do to make myself as comfortable as possible until I do croak. Just now, the muscles in the fleshy part of my thumb started cramping, and I had to stop and force it to straighten out and stop hurting before I could go on. That doesn't bode well.

The most troublesome area of my body this disease is affecting in the back of my neck. I've had what amounts to a tension headache 24/7 for a week now. At night I have to keep rolling over to the other side to get some relief and some sleep. Precious sleep. Not only am I in intense pain, but I don't lose consciousness of it much by going to sleep. I feel my brain hurt in spasms that's worrisome.

Unless I can turn this pain into sexual pleasure I'm probably gonna hate my body when I croak. I can easily imagine the entirety of my mental powers will focus on that hatred, and it's all I'll be aware of when I shift gears.

I really hate the thought of being totally dependent on steroids to relieve this pain. They relieve the pain because they're the most powerful anti-inflammants known to man. The way it's described in the literature I'm in a slow process of self-immolation. Maybe there is a way I can speed the process up, and have it over with in a flash. A jumping jack flash. Pop goes the weasel.

I can say this with certitude. I'm already aware that this hurting can hurt so bad I would perform any act known to man to relieve it. I don't know how much good not having no shame will get me, but I've been practicing a long time now, and it seems like the life of this particular body is dancing on the precipice now.

I took the pills about two hours ago. Things are not any different yet except for the mental boost taking them gave me. That didn't last long. I'm wanting some real relief. It's all I want right now. I can't even think of any thing else for the sake of diversion.

I may regret learning to hear through my skin using the Neurophone gadget I bought. Even though the audiologist at the VA told me I was legally deaf. I'm hearing things that happen around the house to the point of irritability currently. Trucks that usually turn up the paved road almost a half mile away rattle my brain as they grind their way through their gears. I hear a pen full of dogs howling over two miles away, and the noise of the large mechanical room at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter two and a half miles away, as though it was next door. My brother's riding lawn mower drives me nuts sometime, when nobody else seems too disturbed by it.

So, I'm sitting here in debilitating pain, waiting to see how long it will take for the 40 mg of prednisone to take effect. hoping it'll ease the pain off to find out if I can stretch the pills I do have out a little longer. It's easier to tolerate pain if I have a sure way I can get relief from it in a reasonable amount of time. The persistent images of what I'm feeling right now progressing into sheer helplessness is not a happy thought.

This is like the calico print whirlpool I was confronted with when I inhaled three huge lungfuls of diviner's sage smoke into my lungs. The gingham whirlpool left my body behind and sucked the essence of me into into itself as this crazy, cackling, very familiar voice screeched, "Here we go again!" Back to everything turning into one thing again. It is me. I am is All of It which is Me. Then, BOOM1, everything I made myself into as amusement disappears, and there is only Me again. "...thou shalt have no Other."

This seems similar to my sister-in-law's vision of seeing God. The way she tells it, God showed itself to her. First as an old man with a long white beard and flowing white robes, and then BOOM!, he became a nakid child in her next heartbeat. The child laughed at her amazement, then BOOM! the child became an old man again, and the old man laughed at her amazement.

Whatever that is... IS... the creator. The creator of our own illusions. BOOM!

I suspect the docetic spirit that is the essence of me is teaching me to let go my abstract mental baggage and abandon the world of ideas I pump myself up with to feel important. This may be intended as a value-added experience, being a spiritual creature attempting to have a human experience, but the value-added part is not chosen by the human, which may be, in fact, being taught it's merely a pawn used to provide that added-value.

Bragging Contests As Misdirection

A friend wrote and asked me if I'd trying using capsaicin on my arthritis. I had to look it up. It's the stuff that makes hot peppers hot. I went to the grocery store and bought some jalapenos, sliced them up, and started eating them with that soup/stew I've had cooking for five days now (Presently, pease porridge HOT). I started sweating so profusely I practically used a roll of paper towels to get dry.

Why would I do that? Because the research I Googled up said that the two cultures who have the hottest food, Thailand and Mexico) have the lowest intestinal and colon cancer rates in the world. They're testing now to check and see if capsaiscin prevents various kinds of cancer. They're pretty sure capsaicin actually prevents cancer from happening in the intestinal tract for most people.

After I lost about five pounds sweating I remembered that my father had eaten cayenne peppers all his life. Green. He grew them in flower pots. He used to trick us kids into eating them to watch our faces when they burned us up.

I'm now thinking of peppers as a health deal. For the last couple of days i've used this strong nasal spray because my head has been stopped up. That just makes it worse when it wears off. Yesterday and this morning I haven't had any problems with a stuffed head. The jalapenos totally opened my sinuses up. Why am I always the last to know?

I've read something else that impresses me as probably being about right. The guy who promulgates this theory seems about as wacko as me. That's why I sort of trust his judgment. He thinks eating too much salt is what making people overweight. I eat a lotta salt. I used to do it deliberately because i worked a lot. When I worked in construction they hired me as a skilled laborer. I worked a craft and got paid good money to ply my skills, but it was still labor.

I started working in the fields by the time I was ten years old. Like a man. I carried my end of the bargain. I could heft a two-hundred pound bag of fertilizer on my shoulder without stepping outside a circle drawn around a bushel basket on my fourteenth birthday. The fertilizer weighed way more than I did. That's what farm kids did back then. There wasn't much else around to amuse ourselves.

The older I get and the more documentaries I see about the economic downfall of the South after the Civil War during reconstruction, the more I realize my memory of how poor everybody was when I was a boy. Living in the South was just hardscrabble.

Not only was Reconstruction hard, for all the known reasons, but there were two other events that made life hard in the rural South. Cotton boll weevils and the Great Depression. They were like the 1-2 punch for the economic health of the south. Still, the poor people rolled with the punches. What choice?

There were two events that made life better in the South. World War Two and the Civil Rights movement. Part of it had to do with World War One also. I'm thinking of the implications drawn from a popular song from that period. "How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm, After They've Seen Paree?"

I inherited a lot about this by osmosis through my father. I adored him. I wanted to be just like him. "I listened to every word..." He moved his family here from Mississippi. It was worse in Mississippi. I didn't grow up there. My father moved us here when I was two years old. I heard him say a many a time that living here was by grace. He really believed the coastal plains of the Carolinas was the closest place to heaven a human could be.

My mother and father talked about their families back in Mississippi. They both came from large families. I had twenty odd aunts and uncles combining all my mother's and father's siblings. I barely knew any of them. They talked about them as if we knew them, but we didn't. I don't ever remember meeting my father's oldest brother. My oldest sister was ten years old when we moved to North Carolina, so she remembered the most. My older sister was six. She was two years older than me. It was like all these people were in cahoots against me because I was too young to remember any of these people.

At least I had the fact that I was actually born in Mississippi to relate to my parents and my older sisters. My two younger brothers were both born in North Carolina. Compared to me and my sisters, they really didn't know much about who was what when the kinfolk down in Mississippi got talked about. As usual, that's the way it is with the middle child. I was caught in the middle with whatever that brings either yea or nay.

The only real event I'm not caught in the middle by is that I was born just after the New Moon. The first sliver of a crescent moon couldn't be seen because it was raining when I was born in mid-April two minutes after the Sun moved from the sign Aries into the sign Taurus. Slap dab in the middle again.

That's the facticity that eventually got me interested in astrology. It wasn't my fault. I wuz tricked. I didn't know wot I wuz becuz one astrology column on the comic strip page in one newspaper would I was say I was an Aries, and the astrology column in another newpaper would claim I was a Taurus. I was thirty years old before I found out what to definitively say when someone would ask me, "What's your sign?"

Finding out that I was born a Zero Degree Two Minutes Taurus carried a heavy price to pay. I had to get mixed up with the wrong kind of people. They weren't the wrong kind of people from my perspective, but what did I know? I had just been reborn following my first Saturn Return. I was lucky. I didn't have to know what a Saturn Return was to have it happen to me. I didn't, and it did.

I haven't been able to figure that out in a way that puts the matter to rest. As it were, I found out about what experiencing one's first Saturn Return after the fact of it doing what it did. Saturn returned to the spot in the heavens it was at the moment I was born. It's kind of a tedious deal. If you don't get reborn on Saturn's first return to where it was when you were born, then you have to wait another thirty years to get another shot.

This was a lot easier to understand because I had read and re-read the Evans-Wentz translation of The Tibetan Book many times before Saturn made it's return. Sometime when the Boogie Man comes to get you, you might oughta let him. Something had happened earlier on to make me realize this letting yo'self get got is the only way to fly. To do that with any self-assurance at all, first, you have to realize you are dead. Then, letting yourself be absorbed by the light is not so scary. Why would it be? You're dead. Why not give it a shot? Whatta you got to lose?

I wasn't kidding when I wrote yesterday that when I found out that hope was the only thing anybody had for sell, that the only activity that interested me anymore was to find out how to become immortal. Maybe it's futile to chase after immortality, but standing around bargaining for the best sounding deal on hope ain't nothing to brag about either.

When it comes to chasing after immortality as a way to conduct one's life, imbibing the sacraments is probably gonna come up on the agenda. I know a lotta psychonauts right also favored toward red wine too. Messing with the sacraments is like exploring the world beyond hope.

Yesterday I spent an hour or so reading about Freud's concept of The Id. I had asked somebody who oughta know to explain something to me about the id, when I realized it would be easier just to run a search on the internet. I typed in two words without any punctuation... id & ego. The results page logged ten zillion hits.

The first thing that caught my eye was that "id" is German. In English id means "it". Freud called it "the it". The it is an urge. An urge to life. This urge to life, which includes, of course, procreation, will screw a snake if it can get somebody to hold it still. It, the urge to life, has no moral or ethical considerations in itself, that's another part of the Freud trip. The Superego. Wouldn't you know it? The Ego sits half way between The Id and The Superego, and is known in Christianity as The Demiurge.

That was a couple of hours well spent. All I wanted to know was whether woe-ids (words) came from The Id, and how that related to id-eas and id-eation. Maybe that's how Freud's Superego tames the savage beast. It uses the Ego for misdirection. No blame.

Running Away From Home In Order To Find It

I wrote this brief bio of my life earlier this morning in an e-mail response.

>>I worked for RCA, wore a suit, was a star salesman
at 25, and then tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.
Really. For the rest of my life. It might be difficult to say
why. Maybe when I realized that hope is all anybody's
got for sell, I didn't see the point in settling down to do
that redundantly, and then die anyway. Immortality is
the only interesting, yet futile ga-me in town.<< 

The bio is only partly true. I served six years in the Navy before I went to work for RCA. I was a good salesman. I coulda been a contendah. I wasn't fully aware of it at the time. I never thought about making a career of it.

Despite all the moving around I've done in my life it's not natural. It shouldn't be. I guess I'd done so much of it, hitting the road was one of the most convenient ways of dealing with depression and frustration.

After I taught myself astrology I wondered how a double Taurus like me could possibly end up traveling so much. Taurus is the sign of inertia. Inertia is one of the keywords when you're talking about bovine-ness. In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes it is written in several Hexagrams and in several ways, "Care of the cow brings good fortune."

There has always been a small group of people who have for some reason acted like caring for me brought them good fortune. Others... not so much. A dynamic appears to come into play that I'm not consciously aware of as it happens. I've lived or rather stopped in at a lotta places around the country. Many times I've been flat broke when I got there. Pretty much lived close to the bone while I stayed there, but when I left, people always owed me money. If not money, then something.

People seem to make up their own mind about what I do that makes them feel grateful. Sometime unconsciously. They don't know why they're being nice to me. Many times I don't either. If I'm needy, I don't particularly care. "Fate catches up with me on the road I took to avoid it."

I don't know if that statement popped into Isabella's head originally or whether she was quoting some famous dead guy, but I really like it. I think I've already changed it a little. I'd probably feel guilty for stealing it from Isabella if I didn't know in advance that I'd find a way to make it my own. When I feel like I've done that I'll probably stop crediting Isabella. I can't even imagine she'd mind. Libra's have to give things away to stay balanced.

Recently, somewhere, I wrote about how performing words can be stoked by the depth of my understanding of them. It seems silly to say that what I do about words gives them power. Silly for an old man who doesn't even amount to a has been, but a never was. I coulda been, maybe, but I opted out. If I didn't actually have that option, then I'm gonna pretend I did anyway. Why would that matter at this phase of my ga-me?

In some ways I am is a momma's boy. I imitated her ga-me playing. I started doing cross-word puzzles to impress her and get some attention. I began to finish the puzzles that came in the newspaper when she couldn't. She'd get mad because she meant to come back and finish them herself. I thought she'd be proud of me for beating her at her own ga-me. Not really.

I learned to play solitaire by watching her play. She didn't brook no interference when she played solitaire. It was one of the ways she could get off by herself without leaving the house. It wasn't until later, after I'd become an adult, that I understood why she played solitaire. Solitaire and crossword puzzles are an acceptable way to disconnect from the maddening crowd.

I have to do that to stay sane. I have to get off by myself or I'll go nuts. I guess I've always sort of known that, but I didn't realize it in full consciousness until I studied the Enneagrams by listening to audio tapes while I was driving that semi-truck a few years ago. I don't experience what could be going on in real time. Only later, when I'm all by myself. Then, I experience it.

If I am is not able to get off by itself to perform this chore, then it abandons ship until it can. My life would have been much different if this had been beat into me as a child. Why am I always the last to know? I keep running into my fate by trying to get away from it. '-)

Meeting Your Fate On The Road You Took To Avoid It

I wrote and told Isabella that I was going to steal her comment. She didn't say yes, but she didn't say no either. I'm giving her credit, why would she sue me?

"If both are blind, they will fall into a hole. The key 
being, one of them has to not be blind. Doesn't matter
 which one, the roles change. Er, you face your fate on 
the road you take to avoid it. :)

Isabella
"

It's the last sentence that fascinates me. "... you face your fate on the road you take to avoid it." I think this is a Damascus metaphor. I read a story about a man in the MidEast who heard that Death was coming to get him, so he fled to Damascus. Later, someone talked to Death and asked him why he was leaving the man's village. His reply was that he had promised to meet the man in Damascus. In the Bible, Paul of Tarsus met his fate on the road to Damascus where he had been persecuting Christians. Both met their fate on the road they took to avoid it.

Another story I became familiar with about death involved a Tibetan lama. A Buddhist monk, as it were, who had lived in the wilderness teaching the students who came to him how to meditate. When he returned to his home monastery after years of living in very primitive conditions, a fellow monk asked him to sum up the understanding he'd gained living that way. His reply was, "Death always comes unexpected."

These two metaphors appear to possess something in common. It's dumb to live your life in a way that reflects a fear of death approaching. You can't know when it will arrive. You can't really wait for something that's not certain.

One of the things that pleases me presently is that the arthritis doesn't seem to interfere with my commands to my fingers. The parts of my body that hurt when I use my hands hurt when I use them, but they still do what I tell them to. What this amounts to is how badly do I wanna write or play the piano enough to endure the accompanying pain. I feel like I have to do it as long as I can do it. If this dis-ease progresses to the point where my fingers won't obey my commands, pain or no pain, I'll deal with that when it gets here.

Maybe that's why I like Isabella's statement. What's the point of taking a road to avoid my fate? More and more I just sit here without leaving the house, much less my property. I have an exercise machine I use to work up some aerobic wheezings, and the outside stairs I go up and down to get my blood moving.

My food trip is just lousy. For the last three days I've only eaten from this slow-cooker pot I put a bunch of canned vegetables and some frozen chicken breast in. I let it cook overnight, and the next morning i tasted it, and it was terrible. I went to the store and bought some cans of Ro*tel tomatoes and green chiles and dumped them into the mix.

After I let it simmer and mix in with the original batch I tasted the crap again, and it was much better crap. Pease porridge hot. Pease porridge cold. Pease porridge in the pot, four days old. This morning I dumped six more small chicken breasts in and added some water. What a way to die.