It might be interesting to get outraged again. I did get outraged at the result of watching the movie Easy Rider. When the rednecks in the pickup truck came along side the main characters and blew them away with a shotgun blast I was incensed beyond control. I watched that movie in the company of my first wife. When we went outside the theater after the movie was over I stood out on the sidewalk screaming bloody murder at my anger over the results of the movie. It embarrassed her to no end. She could never have expressed her anger in such a way. Well, not until she met and married me. Later, I realized that's why she married me. I guess I'll never really understand people.
As the years passed I realized from my reaction to how that movie ended that's how people make money making movies, and eventually I stopped going to see them altogether. It didn't take that long either. I began to ask myself, "Why are you paying these people to deliberately upset you?" I didn't fully understand this dynamic until I recently read this statement in a book called Blink:
>> As Keith Johnstone, one the founders of improv theater, writes: "If you stop reading for a moment and think of something you wouldn't want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you'll have thought of something worth staging or filming. We don't want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face with a custard pie, and don't want to suddenly glimpse Granny's wheelchair racing toward the edge of a cliff, but we'll pay good money to attend enactments of just such events." <<
I only read this book recently. I bought it at a bookstand at the airport in Detroit during a short layover there. When I got to the quoted part I stopped reading the book until I got back home again, but it preyed on my mind. Since I've used the quote several times in the interim, I guess it's still preying on my mind. I'm thinking that if that's what I gotta do to write a novel that will make me rich, I guess I'll never be rich.
It's probably a good thing I didn't know this formula for success when I was younger and more vital. I have tremendous push for doing what i wanna do. The trick is that i gotta want to do it or it's a no go. I can't get it up to get started on somebody else's ambition, although i can pretend with some amount of convincing if they have something i want that I can pretend to wanna please them about.
One of the more pleasing things that has happened to me arrived as a the result of going online in my mid-fifties. I bought my first computer during the late 80's, but the internet didn't come around for a while after that. I had been reading about networking in the computer magazines published back then, but I never thought I'd be connected to a network because the work I did at the time didn't use computers at all.
There was a transition period between what I read about networking and the time the World Wide Web came into play. Mostly because of the invention of the browser. I started reading about the home user being able to download updates over the internet, so that when the first ISP came to my hometown that provided a local number to get online I was raring to go.
I went downtown to sign up. I played hard to get in order to have the guys that owned the new ISP to show me what use the internet was. What was I gonna get for my money. That's when I became aware of e-mail discussion groups. I knew about that before i even understood how e-mails worked.
I was interested in Neurolinguistic programming at the time. I hadn't been able to find any literature at any of the libraries or local bookshops, so when the ISP guy was showing me how the internet worked on the computer they had there at their shop, and one of the first topics that downloaded was about NLP I was hooked. I had to be online so I could learn more about NLP.
The importance of going online for me was due to my incessant craving to find out about NLP. I wanted to communicate directly with the people involved in this subject, and the only way available at the time to do that was to subscribe to an e-mail discussion group .
Little did I realize at the time that participating in the NLP e-mail group would lead to me learning to write in a prose style instead of poetry. I had to do that in order to communicate with the people involved in teaching NLP. I did get involved and spent extraordinary sums of money to get what I wanted. I never thought I'd pay for this sort of information, but when I did, I regretted not going ahead and paying before then. I've never understood economics very well. I still don't.
Going online was a big event in my life, but that's not what I'm trying to write about this morning. What I am writing about is finding out that I have a talent for remembering things that interest me in vivid detail. I guess I've always had a good memory, but I moved around so much I didn't get the feedback I needed to acknowledge it.
What happened was that the other members of the discussion groups I subscribed to started accusing me of keeping a file on each of them in order to remember what they wrote years before. At first I tried to defend myself against what seemed ridiculous to me, but after a while I realized how weird that was. My accusers didn't think they could do what they were accusing me of, so no defense I could come up with gave them any satisfaction.
When I finally accepted that I have an unusual ability to remember things and events for a very long time, that simple fact answered another question for me that had plagued me for most of my life. I am a great test taker. I first realized this when I joined the Navy and received higher scores than any of the 600 boys I took the entrance tests with, and during the entire time I was in the service, only one person had higher scores than me, and his scores were barely higher than mine. I got teased a lot about this. I had higher scores than any of the officers i served under, and that wasn't so good
After I got out of the Navy and went back to college I went to the Psychology Department there and asked to have my IQ tested, but only on the condition that they tell me what my score was. The guy who tested me had his Masters degree in testing and was working on his doctorate. When he finished grading the tests his eyes lit up, and he exclaimed, "You're the first genius I've ever tested." This proved to be worse than the officers in the Navy being envious of me and giving me shit. My ego went over the top.
I was very pleased to have a high IQ. It explained a lot to me about how the world responded to me the way it did, but I was very confused. I knew damned well there were a lotsa people way smarter than me, particularly when it came to math and science. It was not unusual for these people to make me look like a braggart and a fool. If I was a freaking genius, how did that happen?
Now, I realize that what it is, is my ability to remember things. Pure and simple. I can remember things other people conveniently forget. It drives me crazy. What hurts me the most is that I catch people that really matter to me in out and out lies. Lies I had to learn the hard way not to prove were lies. Learning diplomacy has been the bane of my ex-is-tense. They tell me lies that depend on ti-me. It doesn't do any good for me to get angry because they act like I'm too stupid to remember things they did and say. They don't remember things as well as I do. Eventually, I have to get away from them in some way, and that hurts real bad.
I've tried for most of my life to be just an ordinary Joe that gets along with people and has friends like most people seem to. I realize that I've fooled myself about that too. They don't keep friends any longer much than I do, if even as long. It's just that constantly having to forgive people for attempting to deceive me on purpose that interferes with the way things go. If I prove they're lying, they don't forgive me, so why should I be expected to forgive them? Because I have to if I wanna have friendly people around me. I do, but then again, I don't. It's an enigma I've never figured out... yet. '-)
Something is wrong with my throat. At first I thought it was a reaction to the flu shot I got at the VA Hospital. I managed to get outta getting one for a few seasons, but I kind of got blackmailed into getting one this year. In less than a week I will have stopped smoking tobacco for a year, but I may have waited too long. I have a tendency to get hysterical about the slightest ailment, and that may be what's going on with my throat. I've had a good run, so it doesn't really matter. I gotta die of something. People have always accused me of having a filthy mouth. I may prove them right.
I'm beginning to regret going to my daughter's wedding. Seeing my ex-wife upset me in the worst way. I was glad to get to see my daughters before I go, but my ex-wife's angry face will probably be the last thing I see when I croak. She is the worst or maybe the best liar I guess I've ever known. I shoulda kept my mouth shut.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
