It's Hard To Believe What I Try To Write Off

I wrote the paragraph below earlier in an e-mail response, and I wanna explore it a little more with room to write.
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Everything that appears in my post and in your response only exists as abstract constructions. The difference either opinion makes depends on the mind set of the readers. I figure more people understand what I'm writing than understand what you're writing, and if you catch up with me by dumbing down, I'll still have less work to do than you to regain my superior communicating style over your incomprehensible, over-educated gobble de gook. LOL
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The person I'm exchanging notes with is a hard-boiled scientist who met Einstein as a ten year old prodigy. He is obviously a brilliant person who has written many scientific papers and is more adept at linguistics than many professionals. He argues for the science crowd. Why he does that with me is a mystery, but I'm a little flattered that he bothers, but not bullied. My point is that I am convinced that more ordinary people would hang around and have an actual two-way conversation with me than would hang around just to hear him lecture on a one-way exclusivity basis where he speaks a language they wouldn't bother to get a grip on, and if they could, why would they need to listen to him? I've never seen this guy, but I just know somehow that I'm a lot prettier than him. '-)

The topic we were writing about is astrology. Learning to make charts is not rocket science, but it's not easy either. The real difficulty comes with learning to speak the lingo to people who haven't bothered and won't bother to learn it. That's gotta at least have an equivalency with science, if not more so. The simple truth is that more people speak the science lingo than speak the astrological lingo, and it's a lot easier to get feedback for science talk than than it is for the same crowd to encourage one to speak the astrological lingo. It's more likely that the astrologer speaker will be abused by curses, and run outta town on a rail. It takes a lotta fortitude to even admit that I've studied astrology for over twenty years, much less make sense out of the reason I did that to people who are more likely to study science in school, and more likely than that to study the Bible at home.

The more a member of this Thomas e-mail discussion group takes a chance to communicate with me on this internet board, the better the chance is that they, like me, have painted themselves in a corner by going over the top studying some fanciful obsession to the point that the average person hasn't a clue what they're talking about.

The very reason I stopped studying astrology was the way using the lingo isolated me from the ordinary person I might meet who just does their job, takes care of their family, and hopes to get old and die without a lotta pain for their troubles. I think it would be the same problem my scientific friend would have using his specialty lingo.

A good friend I actually know in person speaks this science language so competently he does it for a living. Away from his day job, however, he appears to spend a lotta time trying to be accepted as a good ol' boy musician, who can play with any style of musician who takes the stage. He's doing it too. The man can definitely multi-task, in spades.

Being "well-rounded" can become a driving force when being shunned for isolating yourself by specializing in an over-the-top avocation most other people avoid like the plague. This is what brought me around to studying the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching for over thirty years on an almost daily basis. The lingo it uses contain mostly objects of nature like bushes and trees and lakes and ponds and hardly ever uses descriptions that would cause anybody pause. Yet, it honors complexity with a statecraft that might impress even Emily Post or Miss Manners.

It's taken me a long time to get old. Life hasn't been a fast lane challenge all the time for me. I've not worked at all for years on end. I lived like a bum, and that was a real challenge. It would have been a lot easier just to get a good steady job and wait to die.

When I was a bum and I came into some town with all that I owned in my hands or on my back or strapped around my shoulder, and I smelled to high heaven because I haven't bathed or showered for weeks, and only owned that one set of clothes (with a few other dirty extras that don't take away from my scent) anyway. I look like a bum because I was a bum (or was then), and there was no known reason for putting on airs, and yet I did.

It was embarrassing to have that pointed out time and again when i thought I'd rid myself of some particular pompousness I'd picked up as a child, but that culture stuff is layered, and peeling the onion appears to be an ongoing, lifetime job.

It's still hard for me to believe. A damned bum on the street with no way to hide it, and I'm still giving myself airs as if I'm a big shot. Living for the hope that lie will be murdered by faint praise.

I remember one particular event where I was standing by the side of the road outside some small town somewhere, and I was literally having this conversation with myself about how all the people passing me by didn't know what kind of person they were passing up. They didn't know that I came from respectable people.

They didn't know that I'd been taught for years on end to think I was somebody real special, and that I had a reputation to live up to. They just rolled up their car windows and locked their car doors as they passed me by, as if I was a nobody bum on the side of the road Usually muttering that there oughta be a law about people like me, running around the country like a scab on a sore, like it was my God-given right to do nothing instead of something, as if I were a free man.

Slave holders aren't free men. I was held in slavery by the images I was supposed to live up to, and those very images were enacted to be criminal by law now, and I was still plagued by what life was not going to be for me. The government made my caretakers into criminals, and being raised by them made me guilty by association.

I only thought I was a real American when I was a prepubescent child. I memorized all the words to all the patriotic songs. I knew all the anthems for all the military services. I knew at least the first verse and chorus to God Bless America and the Battle Hymn of The Republic... for which we stand... one nation... indivisible... but it was. I was raised to be different than what the law became just after I became a full-growed man. This was very confusing to a newly minted teenager desperately seeking his own identity in any way, shape, or form. I ran for my life.

I somehow knew I was not going to be able to stay home in the South to confront the fact that my whole culture had been disenfranchised by law. I had to go somewhere that had different ways for doing things so I could realize what there was about the way I'd been taught to be could be amended. After a couple of summer sessions at East Carolina Teacher's College (at the time), I accidently realized I could join the Navy and get outta town, and nobody could legally stop me this time. My parting was a very sad affair, but at least the country wasn't at war, and they couldn't have stopped me if it had been. I was off to see the world, and joyous beyond all rhyme or reason.

I think if I hadn't have gotten the hell outta Dodge I really would have gone truly irretrievably insane. I had troubles enow as it was. The first place I went to after I joined the Navy was to San Diego, California. All the way across the country. At least three thousand miles away from the Civil Rights woes that were going on back home. Nobody knew me or any of my near kin for 3000 miles. I was a totally ecstatic eighteen year old boy who fully intended to become his own man, and not at the disposal of an act of Congress to make life different than I wanted it to be.

Nobody I knew had the privilege or not of knowing what I was doing out there in California. Nobody. So, I did anything and everything I had the opportunity to do, especially if I'd been taught not to do it. What that amounted to basically was about booze and sex. I drank every kind of booze I'd ever read about in all the adventure stories and books I'd read as a kid, and permitted myself to have any kind of sex anybody else could dream up. It had to be them, because reading about sex in a book don't mean much unless you have had some sort of similar experience. I wanted to know everything. It's a freaking miracle I didn't get any diseases from those uninhabited depravities.

The Navy carried me to practically every significant country and culture around the Pacific Rim. When I wasn't on some voyage to Asia, I explored the highways and byways of California. Unchaperoned and unescorted. By the time I returned to the farm I knew a little something more than how to plow mules and chop cotton. I had prepared myself to at least hold my own against the heaviest tide of change to hit America since the Great Depression.

It was still too crazy for me to live in the South. I had made up my mind to let the old ways go and try to live a life of no blame. It's only been fifty years since I joined the Navy the first time. There is still a lot of bitterness among the people here my age. They want me to pretend things haven't changed behind closed doors. Yes they have. The old ways only happen behind closed doors. When I left the South by joining the Navy I sought to be a free man. I didn't wanna be enslaved by my prejudices. Even if I didn't know how many were buried in my past.

I don't think I'll ever be free of my past prejudices, but I don't have to be ruled by them when I discover they're there. I can at least be polite and act like I got some never mind. The people I was raised to be prejudiced about had as hard a time as I've had getting used to the changes. It's as humiliating to be called an "Uncle Tom" as it is to be called a racist. I don't think racists are any more racist than atheists are disbelievers while flattened out in a foxhole.