-
I wrote a variation on the theme of Without A Plan:
In the times of past,
when I was a boy,
I listened to every Word,
and the meaning of my prayers
was to wash away
the guilt and fears of doing wrong.
I was very headstrong,
because I wrote my own song.
Just to settle down,
I bought a wife,
with the pictures that she saw
of her mother's smiling eyes.
She did not realize
that I was a man born
just for loving,
for a little while...,
and for that, Lawd,
even I can't smile.
Then, my chances come
for me to run
from all the Golden Rules...
to be the biggest damned fool!
To buy my way into the dreams,
to make thangs fit within my schemes,
and sweet Jesus,
how I screamed!
I could sing a song about pretty girls,
and all the friends I gnow.
But, the song I sing,
with a distant ring,
is about a man without a plan
to own the future
or kill the past.
Lawdy, at last.
fmp '72
Edited today, yesterday, and ad infinitum... '-)
It's raining as expected today. My brother and I got the underground pipe repaired. Thankfully, he was able to take his tractor that has a front-end loader on it and filled up the hole we dug out. I was dragging ass after we got it fixed. The rain today will solidify the dirt he put in the hole and we shouldn't have any trouble with it freezing.
I did more physical work repairing that busted pipe than I've done in a long time. Admittedly, I pushed it. I figured out yesterday that I stopped smoking tobacco one year and five months ago. I can push the envelope with physical work better now, so that's what I did. Still, I was happy when my youngest brother came and helped me. He's 62 himself, and got a pace-maker. He did real good.
I'm having a few drinks today. I went to the liquor store and bought a fifth of vodka and a fifth of Butterscotch cordial to mix it with. Damned tasty. This prescription medicine I'm taking only allows me to eat and drink what I can keep down, and booze is one of those things I can keep down.
I've always liked butterscotch candy. The taste of it when it's done right is as good as it gets for me. The butterscotch cordial though, is just liquid candy and it's to die for. Cheap, as far as booze goes, too. The miser in me just loves it.
My greediness has popped up again in my e-mail exchanges. I stand accused of not sharing my wisdom and understanding with the world at large for not writing my stories down for others to read. I don't feel so greedy. I give what i can. Some of the most important events that have happened to me that offered the wisdom to me is not something I can give away through graven images. Most people don't seem to think I got much to give, so I'm caught in this dilemma.
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.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
A Pine Tree Ate My Water Pipe
An interruption in the force has me hassling to get some water back in my house. I came back home from doing errands and saw my younger brother standing by the side of the road talking with the water meter guy from the County. They were standing right there by my water meter, so I figured I better check it out.
As I drove toward them my brother started waving me down. I stopped back aways from where they were, got out, and walked over to them to see what the problem was. There was obviously a problem, and as I greeted them I immediately knew the problem was mine. My underground water pipe that led from the county's meter next to the paved road was leaking. My brother seemed tickled when he told me that the busted pipe had already leaked 450,000 gallons of water between the water meter and my house. I was gonna have to pay for it. Not good. Not good at all.
I was a worried man. They showed me where the water had come up out of the ground before the meter man shut it off. It was a nice round hole about a foot in diameter. The ground around it was soaked to mush. My brother speculated that the pipe was burst by a young pine tree that had grown up right beside it since I had put the pipe in the ground a decade or so ago.
It turns out that the county has a plan that allows for leaks like this to happen once every two years. The meter man named Mike seemed nice, and he told me about it, and gave me the phone number to reach his boss. He seemed eager that I should call him right away. He said he had already talked to him about my situation.
I came to the house and called him. Mike's boss told me not to worry about it, we would negotiate a settlement price after they figured out my average bill for the last three months. He seemed to think everything will work out, but my problem is that it's up to them. I hate being under the gun.
I got a shovel, an axe, and some pruning loppers and went to start digging up around where the water came outta the ground. The rheumatoid arthritis isn't the best disease to have for digging up pipe in order to fix it. First, I had to clean all the underbrush and briars from where I had to dig. That alone took about an hour. Then I started digging, but it wasn't like digging in the regular sandy soil prevalent here on the coastal plains. I was digging in mud.
My practically new shoes only two weeks old look like crap. I worked until about dark time and began to see what had caused the problem. The roots of the pine tree had indeed caused the leak. There were two pipes buried in the same ditch. One went to my house and the other to my youngest brother who lives further back in the woods.
The two pipes were laying one on top of the other in the narrow trench we dug with a rented machine. The pine tree had a larger root that ran below the lower pipe, a root between the two pipes, and a root above both pipes. All the roots were larger than the pipes themselves.
I parked my car nearby so I'd have a place to sit down when i got tired. I knew I'd get tired whether I had RA or not. The medicine I'm taking for it makes me tired, and I'll be seventy in a couple of months. I worked for a while and then rested for a while.
I was working when this little red car passed by on the paved road. The paved road dead-ends about a 150 yards away where my parent's driveway used to be. I knew they would come back by, but I didn't expect them to stop. A young man and woman got out and ask if they could talk to me. I nodded, and they said they were newspaper reporters.
I talked with them for a while. The woman was supposed to be the writer, and she began to ask me questions. She was not very good at it. I got bored. The young man saw that I was getting jiggy on purpose because she didn't know how to listen. I shined them on and soon enow they left. Since then I wondered if they were just using the reporter gig to case out my house to rob me. I shoulda asked for ID.
I kept digging and chopping roots for a while longer, and then gave it up and came back to the house. I realized that I wouldn't have any water for coffee tomorrow, so I went to the grocery store and got a couple of gallons. I'm not looking forward to getting that pipe fixed tomorrow. It may be raining and I won't get anything done. What a drag, man.
As I drove toward them my brother started waving me down. I stopped back aways from where they were, got out, and walked over to them to see what the problem was. There was obviously a problem, and as I greeted them I immediately knew the problem was mine. My underground water pipe that led from the county's meter next to the paved road was leaking. My brother seemed tickled when he told me that the busted pipe had already leaked 450,000 gallons of water between the water meter and my house. I was gonna have to pay for it. Not good. Not good at all.
I was a worried man. They showed me where the water had come up out of the ground before the meter man shut it off. It was a nice round hole about a foot in diameter. The ground around it was soaked to mush. My brother speculated that the pipe was burst by a young pine tree that had grown up right beside it since I had put the pipe in the ground a decade or so ago.
It turns out that the county has a plan that allows for leaks like this to happen once every two years. The meter man named Mike seemed nice, and he told me about it, and gave me the phone number to reach his boss. He seemed eager that I should call him right away. He said he had already talked to him about my situation.
I came to the house and called him. Mike's boss told me not to worry about it, we would negotiate a settlement price after they figured out my average bill for the last three months. He seemed to think everything will work out, but my problem is that it's up to them. I hate being under the gun.
I got a shovel, an axe, and some pruning loppers and went to start digging up around where the water came outta the ground. The rheumatoid arthritis isn't the best disease to have for digging up pipe in order to fix it. First, I had to clean all the underbrush and briars from where I had to dig. That alone took about an hour. Then I started digging, but it wasn't like digging in the regular sandy soil prevalent here on the coastal plains. I was digging in mud.
My practically new shoes only two weeks old look like crap. I worked until about dark time and began to see what had caused the problem. The roots of the pine tree had indeed caused the leak. There were two pipes buried in the same ditch. One went to my house and the other to my youngest brother who lives further back in the woods.
The two pipes were laying one on top of the other in the narrow trench we dug with a rented machine. The pine tree had a larger root that ran below the lower pipe, a root between the two pipes, and a root above both pipes. All the roots were larger than the pipes themselves.
I parked my car nearby so I'd have a place to sit down when i got tired. I knew I'd get tired whether I had RA or not. The medicine I'm taking for it makes me tired, and I'll be seventy in a couple of months. I worked for a while and then rested for a while.
I was working when this little red car passed by on the paved road. The paved road dead-ends about a 150 yards away where my parent's driveway used to be. I knew they would come back by, but I didn't expect them to stop. A young man and woman got out and ask if they could talk to me. I nodded, and they said they were newspaper reporters.
I talked with them for a while. The woman was supposed to be the writer, and she began to ask me questions. She was not very good at it. I got bored. The young man saw that I was getting jiggy on purpose because she didn't know how to listen. I shined them on and soon enow they left. Since then I wondered if they were just using the reporter gig to case out my house to rob me. I shoulda asked for ID.
I kept digging and chopping roots for a while longer, and then gave it up and came back to the house. I realized that I wouldn't have any water for coffee tomorrow, so I went to the grocery store and got a couple of gallons. I'm not looking forward to getting that pipe fixed tomorrow. It may be raining and I won't get anything done. What a drag, man.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Emily Post Would Never Approve
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Gnosis, in my opinion, is a remembering of something we can't be civilized without, but of which we don't have to be conscious of for it to docetically do what it does anyway. It acts as an experiential database of all that we are or can be, ever. Glimpses. Like the dancer or musician that goes into trance or a star athlete of whom it has also been said, "Look! Just look at him. That's what God is like."
I studied the Enneagrams and learned from that about the chief difficulty (according to that system) in life is avarice, greed. I really didn't think that was the case, but decided to play pretend with the idea of it just to see if it turned out to be one of those bells that made me drool for it.
The reason I found it difficult to accept that my chief feature was avarice is that I had always abandoned or given everything I owned away every time I was called to the road. I even gave away stuff people gave to me because I was so poverty stricken the very sight of me made their hidden compassion upsurge into consciousness. Sometime for the first ti-me, or so they said. How much more giving could I be than to create a conscious awareness of a somethingness like compassion to people who never knowed they were possessed by it? Greedy? Hell, I was a virtual martyr!!
I'm always the last to know. It's the bane of my existence. It took maybe five years for me to realize that I'm a miser. A stone-hearted, selfish fool. There is a condition that must be met for my greediness to spring into action. The condition was part of the Enneagram dealio, but I ignored that part of it for a while. When I re-membered it from all the flotsam I encountered studying the Enneagrams that had little to do with me and my abhorrent chief feature, I understood the intent of it and I puled with joy, and drooled.
It was something I didn't create by adopting any of the various rules of conscience that surrounded me. I wasn't responsible for being the way the Enneagrams suggested I might be. The specific situation my avarice, greed, and selfishness way beyond reason popped up when I had to have the wherewithal I needed to get away by myself in order to reflect on the past. I realized I don't experience events that happen in my world in real time. Only later when no one is around to dispute my Word.
That's what I didn't know about that caused me to treat the other with askance when they wanted what I needed to get away by myself for myself. I neglected being-for-myself. I was taught that it was better to give than receive, and down-played what I needed for myself as bad taste. I actually read Emily Post quite often. Selfishness nor greediness is considered good taste. But, I needed it. I needed it for-myself.
I had little help realizing the truth when it came to doing for myself. It took a while to grok the fact that nobody was gone do one damned thing fer me. No blame. They didn't know. I had to go there by myself-for-myself. It was easy. I'm a natural at it. I just had to give myself permission. It never turned a head nor snubbed a nose. I slip away when the ti-me co-me-s, and it never raises a brow. Nobody knows.
I went to the store and bought 100 feet of garden hose and one of those multifaceted spray heads. I'm burning off around the edge of my lawn into the woods to prevent some accidental woods fire from burning the grass right up to my house and catching it on fire. I already had one length of hose, so I'm able to reach 200 feet out from my house in all directions.
I have already done a couple of burnings, but the last one almost got beyond the reach of my one length of hose. Today, after I hooked the new hose together with the old one I started a new fire on the north side of my house. The reason I love burning brush is that I was brought up that way. My father liked to clear land and burn off the wood piles. Sometime we would stay up all night watching what started out as huge fires to a kid.
Sometimes it feels weird to observe family traditions without a family to carry them forward. I guess I should have been more thoughtful.
Gnosis, in my opinion, is a remembering of something we can't be civilized without, but of which we don't have to be conscious of for it to docetically do what it does anyway. It acts as an experiential database of all that we are or can be, ever. Glimpses. Like the dancer or musician that goes into trance or a star athlete of whom it has also been said, "Look! Just look at him. That's what God is like."
I studied the Enneagrams and learned from that about the chief difficulty (according to that system) in life is avarice, greed. I really didn't think that was the case, but decided to play pretend with the idea of it just to see if it turned out to be one of those bells that made me drool for it.
The reason I found it difficult to accept that my chief feature was avarice is that I had always abandoned or given everything I owned away every time I was called to the road. I even gave away stuff people gave to me because I was so poverty stricken the very sight of me made their hidden compassion upsurge into consciousness. Sometime for the first ti-me, or so they said. How much more giving could I be than to create a conscious awareness of a somethingness like compassion to people who never knowed they were possessed by it? Greedy? Hell, I was a virtual martyr!!
I'm always the last to know. It's the bane of my existence. It took maybe five years for me to realize that I'm a miser. A stone-hearted, selfish fool. There is a condition that must be met for my greediness to spring into action. The condition was part of the Enneagram dealio, but I ignored that part of it for a while. When I re-membered it from all the flotsam I encountered studying the Enneagrams that had little to do with me and my abhorrent chief feature, I understood the intent of it and I puled with joy, and drooled.
It was something I didn't create by adopting any of the various rules of conscience that surrounded me. I wasn't responsible for being the way the Enneagrams suggested I might be. The specific situation my avarice, greed, and selfishness way beyond reason popped up when I had to have the wherewithal I needed to get away by myself in order to reflect on the past. I realized I don't experience events that happen in my world in real time. Only later when no one is around to dispute my Word.
That's what I didn't know about that caused me to treat the other with askance when they wanted what I needed to get away by myself for myself. I neglected being-for-myself. I was taught that it was better to give than receive, and down-played what I needed for myself as bad taste. I actually read Emily Post quite often. Selfishness nor greediness is considered good taste. But, I needed it. I needed it for-myself.
I had little help realizing the truth when it came to doing for myself. It took a while to grok the fact that nobody was gone do one damned thing fer me. No blame. They didn't know. I had to go there by myself-for-myself. It was easy. I'm a natural at it. I just had to give myself permission. It never turned a head nor snubbed a nose. I slip away when the ti-me co-me-s, and it never raises a brow. Nobody knows.
I went to the store and bought 100 feet of garden hose and one of those multifaceted spray heads. I'm burning off around the edge of my lawn into the woods to prevent some accidental woods fire from burning the grass right up to my house and catching it on fire. I already had one length of hose, so I'm able to reach 200 feet out from my house in all directions.
I have already done a couple of burnings, but the last one almost got beyond the reach of my one length of hose. Today, after I hooked the new hose together with the old one I started a new fire on the north side of my house. The reason I love burning brush is that I was brought up that way. My father liked to clear land and burn off the wood piles. Sometime we would stay up all night watching what started out as huge fires to a kid.
Sometimes it feels weird to observe family traditions without a family to carry them forward. I guess I should have been more thoughtful.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
It Won't Be Long Now
I went for a long walk today. I took a different route to get to about the same place I usually walk to. I've been trying to find a better way to get to where i was headed for a week or so now. Twice I turned into the woods that goes to my younger brother's back pasture too early, and I got stuck in a briar patch both times, and had to back outta there and find a way around the briars. I still got scratched up a bit. Today I walked further along before i cut back into the woods, and so it was a little more of a beaten path to follow. '
I walked to the back pasture and then took the usual dirt road back to my house. It was maybe a mile and a half walk. Most of it over plowed ground, so i got quite a bit of aerobic exercise. It's still too early for the spring buds to be forming, but the red bud maple branches are turning reddish. I've got a fair sized one growing just outside my bedroom window. It''s a full sized window and hasn't got a curtain on it yet. It may never get one, so that tree is the first thing I see every morning while I'm still laying in bed.
The interesting thing about red bud maples is that they're really one of the first signs of the coming of the green. The tiny little branches at the top of the tree are turning blood red. It's kind of spectacular when the sun rises over the horizon. The first rays of the sun strike the top branches of that red bud maple and the entire canopy of it comes alive even before the sun breaks the horizon. As the sun rises the redness follows the light down to the lower limbs of the tree. By mid-morning that special color fades into the brightness of the day.
I have to make a special effort to sleep eight hours a night. Getting six solid hours of sleep seems to be about all I need. I wake up after six hours, and only seldom can I go back to sleep again. Particularly in the winter, I stay up and watch the late shows on TV just so I'll be able to sleep in until the sun gets high enough to take the morning chill out of the air.
My summer routine is different because I don't have to wait until the sun comes up for it to get warmer. before I get outta bed. When It's warm I go to bed anytime and get up anytime, and getting eight hours sleep is not irregular because I usually take long naps in the middle of the day. Siesta.
I walked to the back pasture and then took the usual dirt road back to my house. It was maybe a mile and a half walk. Most of it over plowed ground, so i got quite a bit of aerobic exercise. It's still too early for the spring buds to be forming, but the red bud maple branches are turning reddish. I've got a fair sized one growing just outside my bedroom window. It''s a full sized window and hasn't got a curtain on it yet. It may never get one, so that tree is the first thing I see every morning while I'm still laying in bed.
The interesting thing about red bud maples is that they're really one of the first signs of the coming of the green. The tiny little branches at the top of the tree are turning blood red. It's kind of spectacular when the sun rises over the horizon. The first rays of the sun strike the top branches of that red bud maple and the entire canopy of it comes alive even before the sun breaks the horizon. As the sun rises the redness follows the light down to the lower limbs of the tree. By mid-morning that special color fades into the brightness of the day.
I have to make a special effort to sleep eight hours a night. Getting six solid hours of sleep seems to be about all I need. I wake up after six hours, and only seldom can I go back to sleep again. Particularly in the winter, I stay up and watch the late shows on TV just so I'll be able to sleep in until the sun gets high enough to take the morning chill out of the air.
My summer routine is different because I don't have to wait until the sun comes up for it to get warmer. before I get outta bed. When It's warm I go to bed anytime and get up anytime, and getting eight hours sleep is not irregular because I usually take long naps in the middle of the day. Siesta.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Unknown Tongues
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101 "Whoever does not hate [father] and mother as I do cannot be my [disciple], and whoever does [not] love [father and] mother as I do cannot be my [disciple]. For my mother [...], but my true [mother] gave me life."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
I'm a little obsessed by this saying in the Gospel of Thomas. I reflect on the meaning of it continuously. I experienced great difficulty with my parents. They're both dead now, but my siblings and I are not really close. How could we be with them apologizing to any and all for having a retarded brother they'd prefer to keep under wraps?
Why would i trust anybody who feels as if they must apologize for being kin to me or who claims on one hand to be my friend, and on the other, meekly apologizing for their attraction to me to others. and explaining their friendship with me is merely an act of compassion?
It's nobody's fault that I'm obsessed with reaching past the mundane methods of manifesting the world because I'm possessed by a calling to stand closer to the fire. I work a vocation as that of a shamed man (shaman). Learning to scare evil spirits away is not for everybody. I'd prefer something a little more glamorous myself, but I got what I paid for, and I always buy cheap in order to pretend what I give away is the pearl of great price.
Imagine hearing all the conversations going on all over the world at the same time. What if they were like drops of water and flowed in rivers that fish could live in and people could swim in. White noise. Pink noise. Noises the colours of the rainbow. All at once. In every language. In every accent. In every tongue ever spoken.
Could one fish in that stream for unknown tongues? Yes, but it's another one of those things that you can't demand proof for in the time it takes to tell it to the world. It takes a commitment in the same way catching a fish does. You might be lucky and get a fish to bite your bait, but then you gotta reel them in before they can figure out how to get your hook outta they throat.
What if you were to pretend you could separate just one of the conversations as a singularity among all the sounds made by all the conversations of the world going on at the same time? To create by imitating one of the voices of that single conversation among all the conversations going on simultaneously all over the world might take some doing. Would it not?
If you were able to isolate one voice from among the many, and repeat it by imitation to some significant other in real time, how would you know what language you were imitating by nayme? What if it was one of the precursors of ancient Ionian Greek that only ever existed as an ongoing vocal event in the oral tradition of that ti-me? Could even a gaggle of university trained institutionalized linguistics who specialized in dead languages tell you what you just said, if the language had never been engraved on a smooth surface?
Are you really a miracle worker if there is nobody around with the kith and ken to recognize you just worked a miracle mojo? Why would it matter if you didn't get the recognition you so richly deserve if nobody knows yo' nayme? It matters because of my most favorite line in the fairy tale world: The better to eat you with, my dear."
101 "Whoever does not hate [father] and mother as I do cannot be my [disciple], and whoever does [not] love [father and] mother as I do cannot be my [disciple]. For my mother [...], but my true [mother] gave me life."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
I'm a little obsessed by this saying in the Gospel of Thomas. I reflect on the meaning of it continuously. I experienced great difficulty with my parents. They're both dead now, but my siblings and I are not really close. How could we be with them apologizing to any and all for having a retarded brother they'd prefer to keep under wraps?
Why would i trust anybody who feels as if they must apologize for being kin to me or who claims on one hand to be my friend, and on the other, meekly apologizing for their attraction to me to others. and explaining their friendship with me is merely an act of compassion?
It's nobody's fault that I'm obsessed with reaching past the mundane methods of manifesting the world because I'm possessed by a calling to stand closer to the fire. I work a vocation as that of a shamed man (shaman). Learning to scare evil spirits away is not for everybody. I'd prefer something a little more glamorous myself, but I got what I paid for, and I always buy cheap in order to pretend what I give away is the pearl of great price.
Imagine hearing all the conversations going on all over the world at the same time. What if they were like drops of water and flowed in rivers that fish could live in and people could swim in. White noise. Pink noise. Noises the colours of the rainbow. All at once. In every language. In every accent. In every tongue ever spoken.
Could one fish in that stream for unknown tongues? Yes, but it's another one of those things that you can't demand proof for in the time it takes to tell it to the world. It takes a commitment in the same way catching a fish does. You might be lucky and get a fish to bite your bait, but then you gotta reel them in before they can figure out how to get your hook outta they throat.
What if you were to pretend you could separate just one of the conversations as a singularity among all the sounds made by all the conversations of the world going on at the same time? To create by imitating one of the voices of that single conversation among all the conversations going on simultaneously all over the world might take some doing. Would it not?
If you were able to isolate one voice from among the many, and repeat it by imitation to some significant other in real time, how would you know what language you were imitating by nayme? What if it was one of the precursors of ancient Ionian Greek that only ever existed as an ongoing vocal event in the oral tradition of that ti-me? Could even a gaggle of university trained institutionalized linguistics who specialized in dead languages tell you what you just said, if the language had never been engraved on a smooth surface?
Are you really a miracle worker if there is nobody around with the kith and ken to recognize you just worked a miracle mojo? Why would it matter if you didn't get the recognition you so richly deserve if nobody knows yo' nayme? It matters because of my most favorite line in the fairy tale world: The better to eat you with, my dear."
Sunday, February 22, 2009
How I Won The Battle And Lost The War
When I first read Elaine Pagels' book about the Gnostic Gospels I knew immediately that I had previously experienced what she was describing a state of being called gnosis. At first, I did not associate the subjective event she wrote about called "gnosis" as the same sort of event that serendipitously happened to me that I call my remembering vision. I've deliberately sought out unusual emotional experiences as if seeking them out was my call to adventure.
When I first wandered into the way of conducting my affairs I didn't realize that the manner in which I'd chosen to live my life was a fairly common way for some people to act if they had certain goals in mind. The most familiar expression of this goal was weakly known by me as the quest to find the holy grail. I was a huge fan of the stories and adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table at a very young age. I was a rabid fanboi of the comic strip about Prince Valiant. When i grew up I wanted to be an adventurer.
Nobody in the world could convince me that my own way of taking a chance with my life was impractical. It made for living a fair to middling domestic life of married with children impossible. Nobody could convince me for very long that I was throwing my life away by abandoning all sense of ethics or moral values to pursue a passing fancy. As far as I was concerned I was being polite to them by taking it on the road to live as a stranger in strange lands. I knew I would survive no matter what. I was promised.
Death is a nothingness I didn't create or justify by just saying no. To have consciousness requires actively, unceasingly denying the Other is me. What? I had to ask, didn't I?
If I had believed them I would still be where they first befuddled me. Maybe the only way to be more stubborn than a double Taurus is to be a triple Taurus. Sun, Moon, and Rising signs. I'll be seventy in a couple of months and I still haven't changed my mind. I honestly expected people to see the sense of what I was saying and praise me for my stick-to-it-ness. Naive. Extremely naive. So naive it hurt/s.
I never thought about creating adventures for myself to be the same as what others called a vision quest. A vision quest. the specific experience that provided me with what gnosis actually is. In less than 15 minutes I remembered everything I had ever made myself into since my arrival on Earth several billion years ago.
Whether I realized my remembering vision was what shamed-men call gnosis or not at the time of it's occurrence, when that extended database was revealed to my me, I-am-is started consciously using it immediately. I didn't know what it was doing. It didn't matter if I did or didn't because the results obtained from including it in my regular way of interpreting the world IS seemed more emotionally met than previously. My conclusions about how the world IS made me happier.
This new-found happiness came with a price tag. I couldn't share my sources without having to deal with a lotta disbelief about the state of my sanity. Sanity, in my gestalt, depends not on how well I explain myself to my accusers, but how well I explain myself to me. It's not what the world does that yanks my chain. It's the way i react to what the world does that yanks my chain. I can be very hard on myself. Candidly, if a stranger came up to me and started telling me that they had a sacred vision in which they "saw" themselves arrive on this planet billions of years ago, I might think they were nuts too. No blame.
The interesting aspect of this to me recently is to realize that I didn't start studying any of the occult systems until after this vision happened. It's almost as if having my extended past revealed to me acted as an impetus to study those systems to find a medium of expression. Using these systems made many people believe the systems I used were unbelievable, but not me. It was as if they saw me as some sort of victim for whom they felt compassion. None of that mattered as long as it allowed me to tell somebody what had happened to me. Classical psychoanalysis wasn't working for me. Years. Probably because I'm such a miser. Avarice is my chief feature. I can turn anybody I want to into an oracle, and nothing makes them happier than to be thought of that way. All because I'm just cheap.
I started studying hypnosis six years before my remembering vision occurred in late summer after my first Saturn Return. I saw an advertisement in the local paper about Harry Aaron's Hypnosis School in Irvington, New Jersey and felt driven to attend. At the time I thought I was taking hypnosis classes in order to facilitate impregnating as many females as I could before I croaked. By that statement i mean to imply that I thought I was taking hypnosis classes because I was "young, dumb, and fulla cum." It turned out to represent a lot more than using hypnosis to seduce women.
I think taking that night course in hypnosis was one of the most fatalistic events of my life. In reflection, I don't think I had much choice but to do it. I don't remember at all where the money to do it came from. I do remember where the money to attend the initial seminar at the Monroe Institute come from. I worked for it fair and square. I paid for the seminar with money I got for unemployment.
The dreams I've had for a long time now about being lost, either inside a chain-linked fenced industrial complex or a series of ante-bellum houses of grand size seems to have gone away for a while. I haven't satisfied myself that I understand them. Even though they take place in two completely different settings they seem connected. As if they both have the same source.
It has come to my attention that I never read the science fiction works of Philip K. Dick. I am familiar with a popular movie entitled Blade Runner that was based on one of his books, and another movie called Total Recall, but I never read the books. I'm pretty sure I never will.
The only scifi novels I ever read, I read to please somebody else. I don't know why these kinds of books didn't appeal to me. It's not like i didn't enjoy the stories. I liked adventure stories about knights of the round table. I stopped reading novels so much after I got out of the Navy.
I still read more than most people seemed to, but after I started using the sacraments in my latter twenties, fiction in general was not interesting to me so much. I read a bunch of non-fiction to support the development of my interest in the occult. Using that for a source allowed me to make up any kind of story that brought me the attention I wanted in real time.
After I got online in the early '90s in the last century and started writing a lot of prose instead of poetry I could publish anything I wanted to on the internet, and that changed everything about writing for me. I didn't have to write to please anybody, and as I'm often told, I never did anyway.
When I first wandered into the way of conducting my affairs I didn't realize that the manner in which I'd chosen to live my life was a fairly common way for some people to act if they had certain goals in mind. The most familiar expression of this goal was weakly known by me as the quest to find the holy grail. I was a huge fan of the stories and adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table at a very young age. I was a rabid fanboi of the comic strip about Prince Valiant. When i grew up I wanted to be an adventurer.
Nobody in the world could convince me that my own way of taking a chance with my life was impractical. It made for living a fair to middling domestic life of married with children impossible. Nobody could convince me for very long that I was throwing my life away by abandoning all sense of ethics or moral values to pursue a passing fancy. As far as I was concerned I was being polite to them by taking it on the road to live as a stranger in strange lands. I knew I would survive no matter what. I was promised.
Death is a nothingness I didn't create or justify by just saying no. To have consciousness requires actively, unceasingly denying the Other is me. What? I had to ask, didn't I?
If I had believed them I would still be where they first befuddled me. Maybe the only way to be more stubborn than a double Taurus is to be a triple Taurus. Sun, Moon, and Rising signs. I'll be seventy in a couple of months and I still haven't changed my mind. I honestly expected people to see the sense of what I was saying and praise me for my stick-to-it-ness. Naive. Extremely naive. So naive it hurt/s.
I never thought about creating adventures for myself to be the same as what others called a vision quest. A vision quest. the specific experience that provided me with what gnosis actually is. In less than 15 minutes I remembered everything I had ever made myself into since my arrival on Earth several billion years ago.
Whether I realized my remembering vision was what shamed-men call gnosis or not at the time of it's occurrence, when that extended database was revealed to my me, I-am-is started consciously using it immediately. I didn't know what it was doing. It didn't matter if I did or didn't because the results obtained from including it in my regular way of interpreting the world IS seemed more emotionally met than previously. My conclusions about how the world IS made me happier.
This new-found happiness came with a price tag. I couldn't share my sources without having to deal with a lotta disbelief about the state of my sanity. Sanity, in my gestalt, depends not on how well I explain myself to my accusers, but how well I explain myself to me. It's not what the world does that yanks my chain. It's the way i react to what the world does that yanks my chain. I can be very hard on myself. Candidly, if a stranger came up to me and started telling me that they had a sacred vision in which they "saw" themselves arrive on this planet billions of years ago, I might think they were nuts too. No blame.
The interesting aspect of this to me recently is to realize that I didn't start studying any of the occult systems until after this vision happened. It's almost as if having my extended past revealed to me acted as an impetus to study those systems to find a medium of expression. Using these systems made many people believe the systems I used were unbelievable, but not me. It was as if they saw me as some sort of victim for whom they felt compassion. None of that mattered as long as it allowed me to tell somebody what had happened to me. Classical psychoanalysis wasn't working for me. Years. Probably because I'm such a miser. Avarice is my chief feature. I can turn anybody I want to into an oracle, and nothing makes them happier than to be thought of that way. All because I'm just cheap.
I started studying hypnosis six years before my remembering vision occurred in late summer after my first Saturn Return. I saw an advertisement in the local paper about Harry Aaron's Hypnosis School in Irvington, New Jersey and felt driven to attend. At the time I thought I was taking hypnosis classes in order to facilitate impregnating as many females as I could before I croaked. By that statement i mean to imply that I thought I was taking hypnosis classes because I was "young, dumb, and fulla cum." It turned out to represent a lot more than using hypnosis to seduce women.
I think taking that night course in hypnosis was one of the most fatalistic events of my life. In reflection, I don't think I had much choice but to do it. I don't remember at all where the money to do it came from. I do remember where the money to attend the initial seminar at the Monroe Institute come from. I worked for it fair and square. I paid for the seminar with money I got for unemployment.
The dreams I've had for a long time now about being lost, either inside a chain-linked fenced industrial complex or a series of ante-bellum houses of grand size seems to have gone away for a while. I haven't satisfied myself that I understand them. Even though they take place in two completely different settings they seem connected. As if they both have the same source.
It has come to my attention that I never read the science fiction works of Philip K. Dick. I am familiar with a popular movie entitled Blade Runner that was based on one of his books, and another movie called Total Recall, but I never read the books. I'm pretty sure I never will.
The only scifi novels I ever read, I read to please somebody else. I don't know why these kinds of books didn't appeal to me. It's not like i didn't enjoy the stories. I liked adventure stories about knights of the round table. I stopped reading novels so much after I got out of the Navy.
I still read more than most people seemed to, but after I started using the sacraments in my latter twenties, fiction in general was not interesting to me so much. I read a bunch of non-fiction to support the development of my interest in the occult. Using that for a source allowed me to make up any kind of story that brought me the attention I wanted in real time.
After I got online in the early '90s in the last century and started writing a lot of prose instead of poetry I could publish anything I wanted to on the internet, and that changed everything about writing for me. I didn't have to write to please anybody, and as I'm often told, I never did anyway.
Friday, February 20, 2009
The You That The Other Sees As The Real You
E-mail has slowed down to nothing. I got no e-mail of any kind this morning. Not even any spam. I went to the Thomas website to see if I was still a member. Yep, in fact, me and the moderator are the only people who have posted for the last three days. Scrolling down the home page to where there is a chart that shows the history of monthly numbers of e-mails back to it's beginning in 1999, February has typically been a slow month. The slowdown probably has a lot to do with it being winter.
I watched a couple more of the TED talks this morning. Why would I not? No e-mail to read and respond to. Might as well listen to some experts carry on about their field of expertise. I seemed to be attracted to listening to people talk about DNA this morning. The link below was particularly fascinating to me because the guy talks about evolution, and in fact calls the next iteration of homo sapiens, "homo evoluti".
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html
Enriquez is not only interesting, but has a great sense of humor. It's difficult to tell some of these speakers from professional stand-up comedians. They're that good.
At least the sun is shining today. Not a cloud in the sky since the cold front passed through last night. I've been clearing out one area of my house lot between here and the paved road. I've planted several asparagus plants and a fig tree in the general area. It's on the south side of the woods around my house, so clearing that area up will give more room to plant things that need a lotta sun.
I'm trying to burn off a brush pile out in the edge of the wood that's been there rotting since last spring. The problem is that the rain that preceded the cold front got it all wet. It doesn't burn like it would if it was dry, so I have to help it along with scrap paper and some Coleman fuel I keep just for burning stuff. There is not much open flame to consume the wood swiftly, but it does smolder and burn a little at a time, and then I have to repile it to get it burning again. I'm getting some cardio vascular exercise. I just got up to check the fire and it had gotten out into the woods with a stiff wind. Miraculously, I was able to contain it before it got away from me bringing humiliation in it's train.
“ Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. ”
— Soren Kierkegaard
I am was familiar with this philosopher's name for a while without knowing too much about his philosophy. I liked the quote above, so I Googled up his name and started reading. Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article stated that some people consider Kierkegaard as the "Father of Existentialism". I didn't read that much before I got the connection with existentialism from my recent reading of Sartre.
I still couldn't explain existentialism even after having read Sartre and acted in some of the Theater of the Absurd dramas. I do know I'm interested in the same things that the purported Existentialist philosopher's write about. I enjoy reading their opinions without feeling emotionally met for the doing of it. It's just a rap. It's merely something to say when performing speech seems required at the moment.
I seem to have moved to some spot in my thinking where I take everything I'm gonna say from my audience's projections about themselves. I don't actually have "to know" very much specific data to carry on as if I do. I really do. It's just not about me. It's about and for the other.
I get them to tell me what they like and/or dislike about practically anything, and thereby gnow what they like and/or dislike about themselves. How could I not? If the other seems like a politically oriented person I ask them to tell me what they like about their party's major figure. Then, I ask them to tell me what they don't like about the other party's figurehead. Asking them to tell me what they like or dislike about Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have worked well for the last decade or so.
The way this works is one of the most paradoxical abstractions I'm aware of. It is what it's not, and it's not what it is. With the question being: Do you really want somebody like me to gnow what you like and dislike about your own person better than you do?
If I were to ask you what you liked and didn't like about anything, much less your views on politicians, whatever you described, either yea or nay, would be about who-you-think-you-would-be.... if and only if... you were them instead of you. You're not them instead of you. They're not you instead of being themselves. They don't do what they do for your reasons nor you for their reasons.
So, what's the big deal you might ask. The big deal is that 99.44% of homo sapiens don't realize in real ti-me that they're projecting their own idea of themselves on to and upon the behavior of other people. They don't "bring it on home to Jesus", as it were.
Al Pacino asks in one of his movie roles, "Are you talking to me? Are YOU talking to ME?" Confronting a real-life criminal (like the one in the role Pacino was playing in that movie) is not a good time to realize that you have betrayed your own cause by projecting your own unseemly careactoristics upon a "wiseguy".
To prevent that from happening is not an easy task. First of all, you gotta realize what you're doing in real-time. Most people never get beyond this initial step in the process. They identify with their own idea of themselves too tightly to be able to stand back from their personality and see it for what it is. It's something they created themselves that they have to take responsibility for or the jig is up. Taking responsibility for the persona you created yo'self by haphazardly adopting a nebulous group of previously existing rules of conscience is a somethingness most people rather not go toe-to-toe with for either love nor money.
The recognition of the self that's also you as others "see" you, requires that you find something in yourself that you didn't create or originate like you did your persona. There is not much of it to be found in any case. When you see just how much baggage you have to wade through to find it, you'll realize just how prolific an artist you've been. The needle in the haystack you're looking for is what the other sees you as, that you don't see yourself as. It's a bit tricky to figure out. Besides, what the other sees as the real you to them, that you don't see as you at all, is surely a "self" of your's just as much as the Self that you think the real you is.
I watched a couple more of the TED talks this morning. Why would I not? No e-mail to read and respond to. Might as well listen to some experts carry on about their field of expertise. I seemed to be attracted to listening to people talk about DNA this morning. The link below was particularly fascinating to me because the guy talks about evolution, and in fact calls the next iteration of homo sapiens, "homo evoluti".
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html
Enriquez is not only interesting, but has a great sense of humor. It's difficult to tell some of these speakers from professional stand-up comedians. They're that good.
At least the sun is shining today. Not a cloud in the sky since the cold front passed through last night. I've been clearing out one area of my house lot between here and the paved road. I've planted several asparagus plants and a fig tree in the general area. It's on the south side of the woods around my house, so clearing that area up will give more room to plant things that need a lotta sun.
I'm trying to burn off a brush pile out in the edge of the wood that's been there rotting since last spring. The problem is that the rain that preceded the cold front got it all wet. It doesn't burn like it would if it was dry, so I have to help it along with scrap paper and some Coleman fuel I keep just for burning stuff. There is not much open flame to consume the wood swiftly, but it does smolder and burn a little at a time, and then I have to repile it to get it burning again. I'm getting some cardio vascular exercise. I just got up to check the fire and it had gotten out into the woods with a stiff wind. Miraculously, I was able to contain it before it got away from me bringing humiliation in it's train.
“ Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. ”
— Soren Kierkegaard
I am was familiar with this philosopher's name for a while without knowing too much about his philosophy. I liked the quote above, so I Googled up his name and started reading. Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article stated that some people consider Kierkegaard as the "Father of Existentialism". I didn't read that much before I got the connection with existentialism from my recent reading of Sartre.
I still couldn't explain existentialism even after having read Sartre and acted in some of the Theater of the Absurd dramas. I do know I'm interested in the same things that the purported Existentialist philosopher's write about. I enjoy reading their opinions without feeling emotionally met for the doing of it. It's just a rap. It's merely something to say when performing speech seems required at the moment.
I seem to have moved to some spot in my thinking where I take everything I'm gonna say from my audience's projections about themselves. I don't actually have "to know" very much specific data to carry on as if I do. I really do. It's just not about me. It's about and for the other.
I get them to tell me what they like and/or dislike about practically anything, and thereby gnow what they like and/or dislike about themselves. How could I not? If the other seems like a politically oriented person I ask them to tell me what they like about their party's major figure. Then, I ask them to tell me what they don't like about the other party's figurehead. Asking them to tell me what they like or dislike about Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have worked well for the last decade or so.
The way this works is one of the most paradoxical abstractions I'm aware of. It is what it's not, and it's not what it is. With the question being: Do you really want somebody like me to gnow what you like and dislike about your own person better than you do?
If I were to ask you what you liked and didn't like about anything, much less your views on politicians, whatever you described, either yea or nay, would be about who-you-think-you-would-be.... if and only if... you were them instead of you. You're not them instead of you. They're not you instead of being themselves. They don't do what they do for your reasons nor you for their reasons.
So, what's the big deal you might ask. The big deal is that 99.44% of homo sapiens don't realize in real ti-me that they're projecting their own idea of themselves on to and upon the behavior of other people. They don't "bring it on home to Jesus", as it were.
Al Pacino asks in one of his movie roles, "Are you talking to me? Are YOU talking to ME?" Confronting a real-life criminal (like the one in the role Pacino was playing in that movie) is not a good time to realize that you have betrayed your own cause by projecting your own unseemly careactoristics upon a "wiseguy".
To prevent that from happening is not an easy task. First of all, you gotta realize what you're doing in real-time. Most people never get beyond this initial step in the process. They identify with their own idea of themselves too tightly to be able to stand back from their personality and see it for what it is. It's something they created themselves that they have to take responsibility for or the jig is up. Taking responsibility for the persona you created yo'self by haphazardly adopting a nebulous group of previously existing rules of conscience is a somethingness most people rather not go toe-to-toe with for either love nor money.
The recognition of the self that's also you as others "see" you, requires that you find something in yourself that you didn't create or originate like you did your persona. There is not much of it to be found in any case. When you see just how much baggage you have to wade through to find it, you'll realize just how prolific an artist you've been. The needle in the haystack you're looking for is what the other sees you as, that you don't see yourself as. It's a bit tricky to figure out. Besides, what the other sees as the real you to them, that you don't see as you at all, is surely a "self" of your's just as much as the Self that you think the real you is.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
It Don't Ask My Permission When It Moves
“ Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. ”
— Soren Kierkegaard
I like listening to the various TED talks. I get surprised about which talks I'll like and which ones don't have the appeal I first thought they would. This link is a list of all the talks available for the last few years:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks
This morning I listened/watched a couple of designers talk about what they do. I'm not so attracted to designing stuff, but some of my friends are, and it was for their sake that I listened to a couple of designer talks. I didn't like them very much. The first one I sat through, but the second one got a little too cutesy, and the video audience twittered as if on cue, so I moved on before it got halfway through.
I watched this one video where a guy from MIT demonstrated a new technology that incorporated the idea of smart blocks he called Siftables. He had a group of these blocks that were programmed to work together with other blocks, so that when they were put together they interacted in predictable ways. He claims, and I believe him, that technology of this sort is going to change the way education happens.
He took these Siftables to an elementary school and merely put them on a table surface in front of a bunch of kids around 6-7 years old. The only instructions he gave them was to ask them to see if they couldn't figure out what they did or could be used for, and started filming the results. Sure enough, the kids figured it out, and then some.
A surprising number of people that are chosen to give these talks figured out what it was that got them there without any formal training about the topic they became intrigued by. If they had a bunch of formal education it was usually in some other subject than the one they became obsessed by.
I read the letter I got that invited me to another class reunion again this morning. I had forgotten when it was supposed to happen in case I decide to go. One of the reasons I might not go is based on my lack of ability to account for how I've spent my life in a way my former classmates might understand.
I've talked to a few of them and the ones I've talked to react with contempt. No blame. They're not the only ones who respond to how I've conducted my affair in a negative manner. Most people do. All my blood relatives and ex-wives.
I could lie. Many, if not most of the people I attempt to communicate with would prefer that I lie or at least be less colorful in my description of the blatant, unvarnished truth. They don't seem to think I ought to enjoy being plain-spoken.
Some say the nomad is mad,
but they don't understand...
People in general don't seem to think about the not-mad aspect of nomadism. So-me nomadic types keep moving to avoid madmen. Since madmen are merely the flip side of nomads, it does appear to be futile to keep trucking.
I've been studying the Gospel of Thomas with an e-mail discussion group now for over five years on a near daily basis. Some scholars seek the Gnostics beginning in Greece, and others seem convinced it came from Egypt. I choose the latter. Since there's no proof either way, I figure my opinion is as good as anybody's, and so I think the Jews were the literati of the Pharaohs culture of Egypt, and when it got so crowded there they felt like they were living in their own shit, they moved on.
I get part of that idea from what has been supposed to have happened in the slash and burn cultures of Middle America. The Mayans that built all those pyramids around Mexico City had to move on for the same reason the Egyptian Jews made an exit they called and Exodus. The warrior culture like the Aztecs took over a ready-made cultural situation, but they couldn't manage it after the Mayans moved south and east of there. The Aztecs didn't have no Rosetta Stone to make sense of all the hieroglyphics of the creators who had left the premises.
Gnosis moves. As Dylan wrote, "The first ones now will later be last." Sometime the docetic spirit ain't there when you decide you need it. Why would it bother with you when it doesn't know you have a personality. There is no "you" for it. It comes and goes as it pleases, and what you "think" about it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
— Soren Kierkegaard
I like listening to the various TED talks. I get surprised about which talks I'll like and which ones don't have the appeal I first thought they would. This link is a list of all the talks available for the last few years:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks
This morning I listened/watched a couple of designers talk about what they do. I'm not so attracted to designing stuff, but some of my friends are, and it was for their sake that I listened to a couple of designer talks. I didn't like them very much. The first one I sat through, but the second one got a little too cutesy, and the video audience twittered as if on cue, so I moved on before it got halfway through.
I watched this one video where a guy from MIT demonstrated a new technology that incorporated the idea of smart blocks he called Siftables. He had a group of these blocks that were programmed to work together with other blocks, so that when they were put together they interacted in predictable ways. He claims, and I believe him, that technology of this sort is going to change the way education happens.
He took these Siftables to an elementary school and merely put them on a table surface in front of a bunch of kids around 6-7 years old. The only instructions he gave them was to ask them to see if they couldn't figure out what they did or could be used for, and started filming the results. Sure enough, the kids figured it out, and then some.
A surprising number of people that are chosen to give these talks figured out what it was that got them there without any formal training about the topic they became intrigued by. If they had a bunch of formal education it was usually in some other subject than the one they became obsessed by.
I read the letter I got that invited me to another class reunion again this morning. I had forgotten when it was supposed to happen in case I decide to go. One of the reasons I might not go is based on my lack of ability to account for how I've spent my life in a way my former classmates might understand.
I've talked to a few of them and the ones I've talked to react with contempt. No blame. They're not the only ones who respond to how I've conducted my affair in a negative manner. Most people do. All my blood relatives and ex-wives.
I could lie. Many, if not most of the people I attempt to communicate with would prefer that I lie or at least be less colorful in my description of the blatant, unvarnished truth. They don't seem to think I ought to enjoy being plain-spoken.
Some say the nomad is mad,
but they don't understand...
People in general don't seem to think about the not-mad aspect of nomadism. So-me nomadic types keep moving to avoid madmen. Since madmen are merely the flip side of nomads, it does appear to be futile to keep trucking.
I've been studying the Gospel of Thomas with an e-mail discussion group now for over five years on a near daily basis. Some scholars seek the Gnostics beginning in Greece, and others seem convinced it came from Egypt. I choose the latter. Since there's no proof either way, I figure my opinion is as good as anybody's, and so I think the Jews were the literati of the Pharaohs culture of Egypt, and when it got so crowded there they felt like they were living in their own shit, they moved on.
I get part of that idea from what has been supposed to have happened in the slash and burn cultures of Middle America. The Mayans that built all those pyramids around Mexico City had to move on for the same reason the Egyptian Jews made an exit they called and Exodus. The warrior culture like the Aztecs took over a ready-made cultural situation, but they couldn't manage it after the Mayans moved south and east of there. The Aztecs didn't have no Rosetta Stone to make sense of all the hieroglyphics of the creators who had left the premises.
Gnosis moves. As Dylan wrote, "The first ones now will later be last." Sometime the docetic spirit ain't there when you decide you need it. Why would it bother with you when it doesn't know you have a personality. There is no "you" for it. It comes and goes as it pleases, and what you "think" about it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Friendship With A Fist
It's dank and cold outside. It has rained a couple of times this morning, and by afternoon it's supposed to set in and rain all day and maybe tomorrow too. The TV weathermen seem very pleased about this because the yearly average for rainfall is down three inches, and this rain should bring the water table up to normal for the Spring surge of plants thrusting up through the Earth with the coming of the green.
I sit here with the space heaters noisily running to knock the edge off the cold inside my house, but never really heating it. I wear the same clothes inside that I wear outside. Just to think that in a couple of months I'll get up in the morning and never bother to put my shoes and socks on, is a pleasant thought right now. That's the only thing about winter besides it getting cold that I don't care much for. I don't like wearing clothes any more than i have to. That's the biggest attraction I used to have for spending the winter in Key West.
It seems silly to not like to wear clothes. I haven't had a place where I could run around nakid until I built my house. It's back off the paved road just so I could have some privacy. I don't run around nakid in front of visitors. I don't care if they see me nakid when they drive up, but I put on enough clothes to cover my old body to keep from making my guests uncomfortable. It's not a pretty sight to see me nakid these days, but since I don't keep any mirrors handy, I don't have to look at me.
One of the more shocking things about getting old is to see the old women I knew when we were both young. For some odd reason I didn't expect them to get old like me. They certainly have though. Two of them I knew fairly well died of breast cancer. That must have struck them as odd to have the very part of themselves that defined them as females going south on them.
I don't remember seeing either one of those women as adults beyond high school. As far as the female gender goes I don't understand what I feel like I need to know about them until they have babies. That changes everything about the way a woman thinks about herself. Up until they experience childbirth, I don't think most women have any idea of what they're really like, and if they don't, how can anybody else?
I got an invitation to gather with my graduating high school class at one of the local restaurants soon. They don't wanna wait another five years because of how many of us will probably die of old age before then. I deliberately did not go to the Fiftieth reunion, but I'm thinking of going to this affair just to update my visual impression of what the women look like. I've been told that some of them eat at the same cafe I do, but I don't recognize them. They no longer look like the 17 year old girls I see in my mind's eye when I associate with their maiden names.
There always seems to be somebody who gets drunk and makes a fool out of themselves at these high school reunions. I never thought it would be me, but it was. I was living in Mississippi when the Twentieth Reunion came up. I got very excited about driving up here to attend. An ear infection I had ignored decided to take a turn for the worse on the drive up, and when we got here we went straight to the Emergency Room. They shot me up with antibiotics and gave me some pain pills to make it through the reunion.
Either I forgot that pain pills and booze don't mix well or I just ignored that after just one strong slug of whiskey I was getting loopy. It only took one more drink to allow me to get stupid drunk and become the drunk from hell. A lotta people didn't respond well to my craziness, and refused to come to any more reunions if I was gonna be there. The very people who were my closest friends in high school. I was very ashamed of what I did, but my apologies later didn't seem to make any difference with them. No blame.
Maybe it's because I think I've paid for my mistakes that I'm thinking about attending this year. For thirty years I couldn't remember what I did and said while I was drunk that pissed these former friends off so bad they never wanted to be in my presence again for any reason. Nobody that knew would tell me anything, but eventually I was able to piece it together. It was just my normal sarcasm, but I was really drunk, and my sarcasm didn't come across as an attempt to humor in that condition.
I have regretted embarrassing my ex-wife and hurting my former friend's feelings for a long time. Now, my wife of the time and my friends of the time are no longer my wife and no longer my friends, and worse, I could have done all I did on purpose. I think I intended to end up living alone here in the woods by myself.
My former wives and my former friends seemed like obstacles to what I intended for myself all along. The problem is that I didn't know what I intended, even when I did what I did to make things happen the way they did for reasons unknown. They all said they loved me, with the problem being, that unbeknownst to them... they really did. Sometime i think I'm the only-est person in my world who knows what love IS. They know this, and reach out, but with a closed fist instead of empty-handed. They've gotten what they wanted from me and have nothing to give in return.
I sit here with the space heaters noisily running to knock the edge off the cold inside my house, but never really heating it. I wear the same clothes inside that I wear outside. Just to think that in a couple of months I'll get up in the morning and never bother to put my shoes and socks on, is a pleasant thought right now. That's the only thing about winter besides it getting cold that I don't care much for. I don't like wearing clothes any more than i have to. That's the biggest attraction I used to have for spending the winter in Key West.
It seems silly to not like to wear clothes. I haven't had a place where I could run around nakid until I built my house. It's back off the paved road just so I could have some privacy. I don't run around nakid in front of visitors. I don't care if they see me nakid when they drive up, but I put on enough clothes to cover my old body to keep from making my guests uncomfortable. It's not a pretty sight to see me nakid these days, but since I don't keep any mirrors handy, I don't have to look at me.
One of the more shocking things about getting old is to see the old women I knew when we were both young. For some odd reason I didn't expect them to get old like me. They certainly have though. Two of them I knew fairly well died of breast cancer. That must have struck them as odd to have the very part of themselves that defined them as females going south on them.
I don't remember seeing either one of those women as adults beyond high school. As far as the female gender goes I don't understand what I feel like I need to know about them until they have babies. That changes everything about the way a woman thinks about herself. Up until they experience childbirth, I don't think most women have any idea of what they're really like, and if they don't, how can anybody else?
I got an invitation to gather with my graduating high school class at one of the local restaurants soon. They don't wanna wait another five years because of how many of us will probably die of old age before then. I deliberately did not go to the Fiftieth reunion, but I'm thinking of going to this affair just to update my visual impression of what the women look like. I've been told that some of them eat at the same cafe I do, but I don't recognize them. They no longer look like the 17 year old girls I see in my mind's eye when I associate with their maiden names.
There always seems to be somebody who gets drunk and makes a fool out of themselves at these high school reunions. I never thought it would be me, but it was. I was living in Mississippi when the Twentieth Reunion came up. I got very excited about driving up here to attend. An ear infection I had ignored decided to take a turn for the worse on the drive up, and when we got here we went straight to the Emergency Room. They shot me up with antibiotics and gave me some pain pills to make it through the reunion.
Either I forgot that pain pills and booze don't mix well or I just ignored that after just one strong slug of whiskey I was getting loopy. It only took one more drink to allow me to get stupid drunk and become the drunk from hell. A lotta people didn't respond well to my craziness, and refused to come to any more reunions if I was gonna be there. The very people who were my closest friends in high school. I was very ashamed of what I did, but my apologies later didn't seem to make any difference with them. No blame.
Maybe it's because I think I've paid for my mistakes that I'm thinking about attending this year. For thirty years I couldn't remember what I did and said while I was drunk that pissed these former friends off so bad they never wanted to be in my presence again for any reason. Nobody that knew would tell me anything, but eventually I was able to piece it together. It was just my normal sarcasm, but I was really drunk, and my sarcasm didn't come across as an attempt to humor in that condition.
I have regretted embarrassing my ex-wife and hurting my former friend's feelings for a long time. Now, my wife of the time and my friends of the time are no longer my wife and no longer my friends, and worse, I could have done all I did on purpose. I think I intended to end up living alone here in the woods by myself.
My former wives and my former friends seemed like obstacles to what I intended for myself all along. The problem is that I didn't know what I intended, even when I did what I did to make things happen the way they did for reasons unknown. They all said they loved me, with the problem being, that unbeknownst to them... they really did. Sometime i think I'm the only-est person in my world who knows what love IS. They know this, and reach out, but with a closed fist instead of empty-handed. They've gotten what they wanted from me and have nothing to give in return.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Plausible, Yet Not Convincing
40. Jesus said, "A grapevine has been planted apart from the Father.
Since it is not strong, it will be pulled up by its root and
will perish."
41 Jesus said, "Whoever has something in hand will be given more, and whoever has nothing will be deprived of even the little they have."
42 Jesus said, "Be passersby."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
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I decided to combine The Gospel of Thomas sayings #40, #41, and #42 together to reflect on and try to find a possible relationship between these sequential saying. I think they may relate to a KJV story supposed told by Jesus when his disciples ask him what to do to be-co-me with him.
According to my memores they were told to "Go ye therefore unto all the world and preach the gospel. In my youthfulness I assumed that one's "gospel" was their own life story. The disciples had their own gospel/life stories, and as a disciple of me, I had my own life story.
So, when I did take to the highway and spent years hitch-hiking and bumming around the country, the stories I told of my life (my gospel) was all about me. When I first started out I didn't have much in hand to tell, and what there was, wasn't even mine for the most part. The little I had was taken away.
The stories I told to strangers about myself were lies. Not intentional lies. I didn't know each of them were a lie at first. I had been in the Navy for four years and had visited many cultures around the Pacific Rim. I deliberately put a lotta notches on my gun through negligence and total ignorance of the law of the streets. I'm still ignorant of the streets. When I came to some town, either large or small, my entire focus was to get to the other side of it as quickly and expeditiously as possible.
The only stories that seemed to be somewhat believable to the drivers who picked me up from the side of the road and the waitresses I talked to when I could afford a cup of coffee were my "sea stories" from when I was in the Navy. They told me that to accomplish what I set out to do by be-co-me-ing a friend of the world was to either learn to lie more convincingly or to stop lying.
Basically, I learned from "going ye therefore" that I had to get my sea stories straight. I had to tell my stories as if they were the gospel truth. Unfortunately that appeared to require that I "know" what the truth was to be able to tell the gospel truth. To do that, I had to confront my worship of "graven images".
The only familiarity I had with the expression "graven images" came from the Ten Commandments. Namely, one of the Commandments stated that one should not worship them. I figured the meant along the lines of The Golden Calf, and maybe some of them Greek Orthodox icons or statues of Jesus and his disciples.
It wasn't until I got a minimum wage job as a contract printing shop that I got a more complex idea of what more a graven image might be than religious relics. The main job this shop contracted for was imbuing big copper rolls with the images they would pick up ink and print text and graphic designs on various surfaces, usually some kind of paper. The name of this type of printing is called a rotogravure process. The big copper rolls rotated and printed the same pattern with every revolution they turned.
My job was to dip these big cylinders of copper into an acid vat to eat away the exposed copper to form the cavities that would hold the ink that would print the paper that passed by it. A lot of this company's business was with the tobacco companies, and the rolls I etched usually printed cigarette packaging. Slowly, I came to realize that the text on the packaging got there the same way the graphic images did. Words are engraved images the same as engraved pictures are. They're both graven images.
The best selling book in the entire world is a collection of graven images that instruct the reader not to worship graven images. What a dilemma for the Bible-based religions... eh?
As for how this relates to sayings #40, #41, and #42, and how they might possibly fit together in some unknowable linear fashion, I think #40 is about taking away the lies that have no subjective basis in experience, but are only the graven images one learns to quote as if they are derived from one's own experiential database. They are to be pulled up like a grapevine planted in the shade away from Father Sun.
Then, the process progresses to #41 where what little is left of the graven images one invests in is made bereft of all but the dubious contents of my own experiences (suspect because initially defined by graven images), and what is left is damned by faint praise.
The meaning of to "Be a passerby", is about how one allows "many things to pass without being duped." The way to do that is to abandon the assigned worth of passing thoughts by allowing them to be plausible, but without being convincing.
Since it is not strong, it will be pulled up by its root and
will perish."
41 Jesus said, "Whoever has something in hand will be given more, and whoever has nothing will be deprived of even the little they have."
42 Jesus said, "Be passersby."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
-
I decided to combine The Gospel of Thomas sayings #40, #41, and #42 together to reflect on and try to find a possible relationship between these sequential saying. I think they may relate to a KJV story supposed told by Jesus when his disciples ask him what to do to be-co-me with him.
According to my memores they were told to "Go ye therefore unto all the world and preach the gospel. In my youthfulness I assumed that one's "gospel" was their own life story. The disciples had their own gospel/life stories, and as a disciple of me, I had my own life story.
So, when I did take to the highway and spent years hitch-hiking and bumming around the country, the stories I told of my life (my gospel) was all about me. When I first started out I didn't have much in hand to tell, and what there was, wasn't even mine for the most part. The little I had was taken away.
The stories I told to strangers about myself were lies. Not intentional lies. I didn't know each of them were a lie at first. I had been in the Navy for four years and had visited many cultures around the Pacific Rim. I deliberately put a lotta notches on my gun through negligence and total ignorance of the law of the streets. I'm still ignorant of the streets. When I came to some town, either large or small, my entire focus was to get to the other side of it as quickly and expeditiously as possible.
The only stories that seemed to be somewhat believable to the drivers who picked me up from the side of the road and the waitresses I talked to when I could afford a cup of coffee were my "sea stories" from when I was in the Navy. They told me that to accomplish what I set out to do by be-co-me-ing a friend of the world was to either learn to lie more convincingly or to stop lying.
Basically, I learned from "going ye therefore" that I had to get my sea stories straight. I had to tell my stories as if they were the gospel truth. Unfortunately that appeared to require that I "know" what the truth was to be able to tell the gospel truth. To do that, I had to confront my worship of "graven images".
The only familiarity I had with the expression "graven images" came from the Ten Commandments. Namely, one of the Commandments stated that one should not worship them. I figured the meant along the lines of The Golden Calf, and maybe some of them Greek Orthodox icons or statues of Jesus and his disciples.
It wasn't until I got a minimum wage job as a contract printing shop that I got a more complex idea of what more a graven image might be than religious relics. The main job this shop contracted for was imbuing big copper rolls with the images they would pick up ink and print text and graphic designs on various surfaces, usually some kind of paper. The name of this type of printing is called a rotogravure process. The big copper rolls rotated and printed the same pattern with every revolution they turned.
My job was to dip these big cylinders of copper into an acid vat to eat away the exposed copper to form the cavities that would hold the ink that would print the paper that passed by it. A lot of this company's business was with the tobacco companies, and the rolls I etched usually printed cigarette packaging. Slowly, I came to realize that the text on the packaging got there the same way the graphic images did. Words are engraved images the same as engraved pictures are. They're both graven images.
The best selling book in the entire world is a collection of graven images that instruct the reader not to worship graven images. What a dilemma for the Bible-based religions... eh?
As for how this relates to sayings #40, #41, and #42, and how they might possibly fit together in some unknowable linear fashion, I think #40 is about taking away the lies that have no subjective basis in experience, but are only the graven images one learns to quote as if they are derived from one's own experiential database. They are to be pulled up like a grapevine planted in the shade away from Father Sun.
Then, the process progresses to #41 where what little is left of the graven images one invests in is made bereft of all but the dubious contents of my own experiences (suspect because initially defined by graven images), and what is left is damned by faint praise.
The meaning of to "Be a passerby", is about how one allows "many things to pass without being duped." The way to do that is to abandon the assigned worth of passing thoughts by allowing them to be plausible, but without being convincing.
Monday, February 16, 2009
How Can Great Wealth Settle For Poverty?
_
29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
-
I live in poverty. I have always lived in poverty. I don't know any other sort of life. I've never even reached the dazzling heights of lower-middle-class. It seems like to me that even though I am poor, and have always been poor, and most likely, I will die even poorer than I am is now. When a body gets old and helpless, as far as the medical profession is concerned, it's the old highway robbery yell-out "Your money or your life". Doctors don't become doctors to help their patients as much as to help themselves. No blame. I experience happiness and sadness within the limits of my poverty in equal measure to those who are as rich as Midas.
I might concede that other people appear to "see" my poverty as if it is all that I am or ever can be. They see me as if I am poverty itself. An untouchable. As poverty, I am is indeed that. I am is what they "see" they would be like if they walked the streets in my shoes, but for their own reasons. When the higher classes of people see me coming toward them on the sidewalk, they usually cross the street in order not to pass near me. As though poverty is contagious just by breathing the same air as they breathe. Whatta I know? Maybe they're right. They appear to be convinced they'll come down with some horrible disease that might lead them eventually to their deathbed, and if they can just manage to avoid being near me, they will remain immortal for another decade or so.
I don't know why people think they're immortal right up until they get sick like everybody else and die. How can anyone consider themselves to be immortal if their own parents have died before them? Died anyway, despite how they loved and adored them? Isn't love what gives people life and the very air they breathe? Isn't God love?
Why won't God's love keep you from getting sick of some deadly disease and killed with the ensuing and inevitable pain. I propose that God, whatever you've decided that is, never has caused sickness and death, and it never will. Of course, the "never" part can seem fairly trivial and unprogressive if one's experiential acknowledgment of how long "never will" lasts, and how it ends when they croak. There have been times when I've considered life itself to be a deadly disease. Is life like a childhood disease people think they will eventually grow out of?
Even though I live in poverty and I am the poverty I live in, I don't think I'm the poverty in which great wealth has come to reside as the saying above implies. If I were I think I'd be a more impulsive buyer than I am. It's difficult for me to make final decisions about buying things because I never seem satisfied that I have sufficiently "future-proofed" my purchase. Particularly in regard to high tech gadgets.
I just spent an hour or so looking at the TV sets for sale at newegg.com. I've shopped with them for years when I go to buy something over the internet because they've never argued with me about returning a product if I'm not happy with it. Once they even upgraded the gadget to the latest model when they sent me the wrong version of something and I complained.
This is not the first time I've spent an hour or so at an online site looking and reviewing TV sets. I'm not any closer to buying one than I've ever been. Budget-wise I can only afford a new TV or a new computer. The economic crisis seems to favor the reduced prices on LCD TVs, but the tech advances I've been lusting for a decade or more is just now arriving on the consumer market.
I started lusting for a 64-bit computer more than ten years ago. There were a few 64-bit chips around then, but no 64-bit operating system. Then AMD came out with 64-bit chips, and Windows and Linux came out with 64-bit OSes, but there were no drivers written for the individual consumer, just enterprise services for huge conglomerates that had money up the ying-yang.
This summer Apple is supposed to upgrade their Leopard Operating System to Snow Leopard, and all of it will be 64-bit, drivers and all. I don't need this computer to be happy with myself. I need it to satisfy a frivolous whim. The most important of all true impulse buyer's motivations available for prime time. The big deal is that it won't cost me an arm and a leg like it would have when I first started lusting for this 64-bit system.
The other technical advance I've been waiting to drop in price has been a solid stated drive that replaces the standard platter-spinning hard drive devices. They are bigger and cheaper than they have ever been in their short history. The fetch and deliver rates are approaching the speeds of regular DRAM memory. Whatever I buy it's gonna be faster than anything I've ever bought before, and relatively inexpensive at that.
The biggest improvement will be the video part of it. Apple has changed over to the Nvidia chipset that's lots faster than the Intel motherboard graphics chipset. Now they're using a video card AND the motherboard graphics unit in tandem AND the CPU together due some new technology coming in the Snow Leopard 64-bit Operating System.
"Similarly, a feature called Open Computing Language (or OpenCL), will let any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. Snow Leopard will also raise the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM and introduce a new version of QuickTime optimized for modern audio and video formats."
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/30/apple_to_unleash_first_builds_of_snow_leopard_since_wwdc.html
If this Open Computer Language works as advertised it will probably speed the graphics systems of most laptops up to the point that they can be used to play most video games right out of the box. Desktop systems appear to be going the way of all good things. If I understand this right, this new system level firmware will find and use any idle processor of any kind on the entire computer and it's peripherals to speed the graphics rendering up more than an order of magnitude or more. In my imagination I can envision the display manufacturers putting extra GPUs in the circuitry of the computer monitors and TV sets themselves just to advertise that you can speed things up just by buying their product instead. Why would they not? That plays directly into some people's "need for speed". I have a little bit of this speed need. I just can't afford it.
29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
-
I live in poverty. I have always lived in poverty. I don't know any other sort of life. I've never even reached the dazzling heights of lower-middle-class. It seems like to me that even though I am poor, and have always been poor, and most likely, I will die even poorer than I am is now. When a body gets old and helpless, as far as the medical profession is concerned, it's the old highway robbery yell-out "Your money or your life". Doctors don't become doctors to help their patients as much as to help themselves. No blame. I experience happiness and sadness within the limits of my poverty in equal measure to those who are as rich as Midas.
I might concede that other people appear to "see" my poverty as if it is all that I am or ever can be. They see me as if I am poverty itself. An untouchable. As poverty, I am is indeed that. I am is what they "see" they would be like if they walked the streets in my shoes, but for their own reasons. When the higher classes of people see me coming toward them on the sidewalk, they usually cross the street in order not to pass near me. As though poverty is contagious just by breathing the same air as they breathe. Whatta I know? Maybe they're right. They appear to be convinced they'll come down with some horrible disease that might lead them eventually to their deathbed, and if they can just manage to avoid being near me, they will remain immortal for another decade or so.
I don't know why people think they're immortal right up until they get sick like everybody else and die. How can anyone consider themselves to be immortal if their own parents have died before them? Died anyway, despite how they loved and adored them? Isn't love what gives people life and the very air they breathe? Isn't God love?
Why won't God's love keep you from getting sick of some deadly disease and killed with the ensuing and inevitable pain. I propose that God, whatever you've decided that is, never has caused sickness and death, and it never will. Of course, the "never" part can seem fairly trivial and unprogressive if one's experiential acknowledgment of how long "never will" lasts, and how it ends when they croak. There have been times when I've considered life itself to be a deadly disease. Is life like a childhood disease people think they will eventually grow out of?
Even though I live in poverty and I am the poverty I live in, I don't think I'm the poverty in which great wealth has come to reside as the saying above implies. If I were I think I'd be a more impulsive buyer than I am. It's difficult for me to make final decisions about buying things because I never seem satisfied that I have sufficiently "future-proofed" my purchase. Particularly in regard to high tech gadgets.
I just spent an hour or so looking at the TV sets for sale at newegg.com. I've shopped with them for years when I go to buy something over the internet because they've never argued with me about returning a product if I'm not happy with it. Once they even upgraded the gadget to the latest model when they sent me the wrong version of something and I complained.
This is not the first time I've spent an hour or so at an online site looking and reviewing TV sets. I'm not any closer to buying one than I've ever been. Budget-wise I can only afford a new TV or a new computer. The economic crisis seems to favor the reduced prices on LCD TVs, but the tech advances I've been lusting for a decade or more is just now arriving on the consumer market.
I started lusting for a 64-bit computer more than ten years ago. There were a few 64-bit chips around then, but no 64-bit operating system. Then AMD came out with 64-bit chips, and Windows and Linux came out with 64-bit OSes, but there were no drivers written for the individual consumer, just enterprise services for huge conglomerates that had money up the ying-yang.
This summer Apple is supposed to upgrade their Leopard Operating System to Snow Leopard, and all of it will be 64-bit, drivers and all. I don't need this computer to be happy with myself. I need it to satisfy a frivolous whim. The most important of all true impulse buyer's motivations available for prime time. The big deal is that it won't cost me an arm and a leg like it would have when I first started lusting for this 64-bit system.
The other technical advance I've been waiting to drop in price has been a solid stated drive that replaces the standard platter-spinning hard drive devices. They are bigger and cheaper than they have ever been in their short history. The fetch and deliver rates are approaching the speeds of regular DRAM memory. Whatever I buy it's gonna be faster than anything I've ever bought before, and relatively inexpensive at that.
The biggest improvement will be the video part of it. Apple has changed over to the Nvidia chipset that's lots faster than the Intel motherboard graphics chipset. Now they're using a video card AND the motherboard graphics unit in tandem AND the CPU together due some new technology coming in the Snow Leopard 64-bit Operating System.
"Similarly, a feature called Open Computing Language (or OpenCL), will let any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. Snow Leopard will also raise the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM and introduce a new version of QuickTime optimized for modern audio and video formats."
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/30/apple_to_unleash_first_builds_of_snow_leopard_since_wwdc.html
If this Open Computer Language works as advertised it will probably speed the graphics systems of most laptops up to the point that they can be used to play most video games right out of the box. Desktop systems appear to be going the way of all good things. If I understand this right, this new system level firmware will find and use any idle processor of any kind on the entire computer and it's peripherals to speed the graphics rendering up more than an order of magnitude or more. In my imagination I can envision the display manufacturers putting extra GPUs in the circuitry of the computer monitors and TV sets themselves just to advertise that you can speed things up just by buying their product instead. Why would they not? That plays directly into some people's "need for speed". I have a little bit of this speed need. I just can't afford it.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
New Grapes Only Grow On New Wood
Sometime I have to look at "both sides now" to distinguish one side from the other. Otherwise they look like the same thing. I was born just after sunset. Like anybody else born at sunset, the Ascendent sign will be the opposite sign of the Sun sign. I was born just after sunset in zero degree, two minutes Taurus, then my Rising sign has gotta be early Scorpio. It's the same dynamic that comes into play at any of the cardinal points of the zodiac. Ascendent; Midheaven; Descendent; and Nadir. In my case, that spectrum of opposites resolves to the angular aspect of opposition.
My lifetime goals and my mundane daily goals are indicated by a polarized spectrum located 180 degrees apart by sign in Taurus and Scorpio. Money is the keyword to the spectrum between these fixed power signs. Taurus represents a person's own money, and Scorpio represents a person's relationship with other people's money. The real opposition in my natal chart is the opposition between my dual goals. My life goal is what is represented by the Sun being just inside the first degree of Taurus, and located in the Sixth house just below the horizon.
The Ascendent sign in all natal charts is the sign found at the Eastern point of the horizon at the exact moment a person is born. In my natal chart it's the 6th degree of Scorpio. That's why it's said that my "rising sign" is Scorpio. The Ascendent sign and the Rising sign describe the same facticity in the zodiac. The characteristics indicated by the degree of the corresponding Ascendent sign is said to represent how the native of the natal chart will see the world, and how the world sees them. The Rising sign represents a person's personality. It's their mask they show themselves to the world through, and through which the world is filtered as it enters the plenitude to find what's possible for it there.
I was actually born about ten minutes after sunset all those years ago. The sun had disappeared below the horizon, but it's light still brightened the western sky and could possibly reflect off the ambient cloud formations to provide a mirage of goldenness in the approaching darkness that can give the sense of something extraordinary when the conditions are right. I was born in that twilight zone when that phenomenon is possible.
Whether a blessing or a curse, there was no "golden" ambience in the warm Spring air down in east Mississippi in mid-April, and nothing extraordinary was observed by competent witnesses and printed in the closest local newspaper (The Meridian Star) on that day of my birth. The quickly darkening sky was overcast with low clouds and it was sprinkling rain according to the research I did for 1939. I couldn't actually be sure it was raining the moment I drew my first breathe, but off and on rain was what the weather report in the newspaper said for the day before. Meteorology was such a primitive science at the time, that the media only reported on what happened the day before. Weather forecasting was still based on things like the length of the hair on a woolyworm and whether granny's arthritis was acting up.
_
The statements below were written as a comment upon the current saying in the Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion list. I like the way the comment concludes. What does that mean?
40. Jesus said, "A grapevine has been planted apart from the Father.
Since it is not strong, it will be pulled up by its root and will perish."
This saying, in my opinion, simply means that a domesticated plant such as a commercial grapevine that's planted where it's in the shade too much will not produce the desired characteristics in a wine grape, whether it's final product is put in new wineskins or old. No amount of tender, loving care nor the aid of exotic plant foods or thoughtful pruning will replace what sunlight does to grapes in bringing them to fruition.
Is this the polar opposite of the saying that warns about putting your light under a bushel?
Maybe this is a comment on how to deal with the various abstract ideals we fall in love with from time to time, that we eventually wanna let fade into the woodwork when they lose their initial usefulness. Cold turkey is one way of doing it. Yank it outta it's ground-for-being and expose it's root ideas to the open air of nothingness. Making THAT happen, however, is a horse of a different colour. All your invested hope and good intentions have to be abandoned just as surely as for a grapevine carelessly planted in the valley of the shadow of death.
My lifetime goals and my mundane daily goals are indicated by a polarized spectrum located 180 degrees apart by sign in Taurus and Scorpio. Money is the keyword to the spectrum between these fixed power signs. Taurus represents a person's own money, and Scorpio represents a person's relationship with other people's money. The real opposition in my natal chart is the opposition between my dual goals. My life goal is what is represented by the Sun being just inside the first degree of Taurus, and located in the Sixth house just below the horizon.
The Ascendent sign in all natal charts is the sign found at the Eastern point of the horizon at the exact moment a person is born. In my natal chart it's the 6th degree of Scorpio. That's why it's said that my "rising sign" is Scorpio. The Ascendent sign and the Rising sign describe the same facticity in the zodiac. The characteristics indicated by the degree of the corresponding Ascendent sign is said to represent how the native of the natal chart will see the world, and how the world sees them. The Rising sign represents a person's personality. It's their mask they show themselves to the world through, and through which the world is filtered as it enters the plenitude to find what's possible for it there.
I was actually born about ten minutes after sunset all those years ago. The sun had disappeared below the horizon, but it's light still brightened the western sky and could possibly reflect off the ambient cloud formations to provide a mirage of goldenness in the approaching darkness that can give the sense of something extraordinary when the conditions are right. I was born in that twilight zone when that phenomenon is possible.
Whether a blessing or a curse, there was no "golden" ambience in the warm Spring air down in east Mississippi in mid-April, and nothing extraordinary was observed by competent witnesses and printed in the closest local newspaper (The Meridian Star) on that day of my birth. The quickly darkening sky was overcast with low clouds and it was sprinkling rain according to the research I did for 1939. I couldn't actually be sure it was raining the moment I drew my first breathe, but off and on rain was what the weather report in the newspaper said for the day before. Meteorology was such a primitive science at the time, that the media only reported on what happened the day before. Weather forecasting was still based on things like the length of the hair on a woolyworm and whether granny's arthritis was acting up.
_
The statements below were written as a comment upon the current saying in the Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion list. I like the way the comment concludes. What does that mean?
40. Jesus said, "A grapevine has been planted apart from the Father.
Since it is not strong, it will be pulled up by its root and will perish."
This saying, in my opinion, simply means that a domesticated plant such as a commercial grapevine that's planted where it's in the shade too much will not produce the desired characteristics in a wine grape, whether it's final product is put in new wineskins or old. No amount of tender, loving care nor the aid of exotic plant foods or thoughtful pruning will replace what sunlight does to grapes in bringing them to fruition.
Is this the polar opposite of the saying that warns about putting your light under a bushel?
Maybe this is a comment on how to deal with the various abstract ideals we fall in love with from time to time, that we eventually wanna let fade into the woodwork when they lose their initial usefulness. Cold turkey is one way of doing it. Yank it outta it's ground-for-being and expose it's root ideas to the open air of nothingness. Making THAT happen, however, is a horse of a different colour. All your invested hope and good intentions have to be abandoned just as surely as for a grapevine carelessly planted in the valley of the shadow of death.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Reframing My Personal History After The Horse Got Away
I can't imagine how dull my life would be now if I had worked all my life. I hardly remember anything that happened during my working life. I never particularly wanted to be at any of the places working caused me to attend to. I don't remember stuff that happened due to someone else's decisions. I remember faces. Faces that responded to what I told them that they somehow told me with their faces what they wanted to hear. I did it as a favor I'd want done for me, and was.
I struggled with whether what I was looking for during my spirit quests was something the other calls "the truth". Maybe it's an ideal situation some people seek for when they don't know why they're doing what they're pretending to do what they're not actually doing.
I do know that "the truth", as a goal for my seeking has been replaced with apathy. It's difficult as an old man to actually give a shit what the truth is when the seeking of it was only a cover up for entertaining my vivid curiosity and imagination. Most of the time I bummed around North America without a dime to my nayme was to get away from being judged by familiarity.
I guess I remember other things than faces. I remember a sign some people would put on the license tag spot on the front of their cars. Instead of it being a license tag with numbers and letters used to identify the occupants of the automobile to the authorities, it identified the occupants by their religious beliefs, "God is my co-pilot."
There were literally years a couple of times when I might spend 300 days hitch-hiking by the side of the road, and I began to try to remember what the people who put this sign on the front of their car acted like. I guess I filtered for it. There was nothing else to do on the side of the road with all those people watching me... watching me... never directly, but peripherally... never quite "Out of sight, out of mind." I learned to look too dangerous to be ignored.
I was and never have actually been too dangerous to be ignored. Machiavelli claimed that it was more better to be feared than loved. When someone loves you they learn to ignore you as not even being an animal behind their self-generated mask they look back at you from behind. It's like you become a trusted pet. A self-aware trusted pet who might get peevish at being taken for granted, and wanna stir the still waters as a matter of principle. Why come they never know that's not what I see as an animal merely trying to survive the moment, much less the hour or God-forbid a full, sunlit day in peaceful resignation.
They usually locked their doors and rolled up their windows when they breezed by me scowling as if they were pissed off at whatever their God was for tempting them with my brutally naked, needy presence. If they really had trusted God to be their co-pilot they might have acted like "the good Samaritan" and stopped to help me in my extreme poverty. I tried to smile at them as they passed by with God-as-their-co-pilot to conjure a vision of their hypocrisy for them to stare at in their mind's eye... as they moved on down the road... outta sight... outta mind.
The people who did play out the good Samaritan never had no signs like that plastered all over their bumpers and fenders and windshields. They just pulled over to the side of the road, reached over and opened the passenger's side door to let me in, and smiled warmly as they asked, "Where ya' headed there, Bub, I ain't going fur, but you're welcome to ride as far as I'm going. Have you eat anything lately? There's a little cafe coming up down here that's famous for their cheese and nachos. I was thinking about getting a bite to eat. You hongry?"
You can't be a bum on the side of the road begging for a ride to nowhere if you're an atheist. It's when some idiot suddenly swerves off the road, slams on brakes, puts the car in reverse and backs toward you at a high rate of speed, that all the lies of disbelief fall away in a frenetic, frantic prayer for divine intervention. The crazy mofo always, always slams on brakes, screeches to a halt at the exact same moment the passenger's side door flies open, and the Elvis-impersonating drunk behind the steering wheel screams at you to "Git in the damn car! If you're waiting on me.. you're backing up!" in drugstore cowboy sing-song, you know you got yo'self a date with the sho 'nuff Devil's disciple. You might as well get in the damned car. You're going straight to Hell in an oily, black-cloud-spewing Buick made up of yo' deepest fears.
The scariest sight I used to see when I ran up to the car that stopped to pick me up would be somebody who had forced themselves to stop to obey some principle they didn't really believe in, and were scared to death about what they had done. Over and over again over all the years I bummed around and daily interacted with nothing but strangers, the saying "A scared man will hurt you." proved to be the God's own truth. Scared... and drinking hard likker to deny their own fear... is a undying patent for meanness.
I suspect all old men in their dotage daydream about what happened when they were younger and more daring. I don't know what I would think about if I hadn't have been a bum. I don't remember much about what happened when i went to work on some job site around the country.
Of course, there weren't many times I would work year 'round, but if I had worked 11 out of 12 months a year, like many men do, or more, I might not have much to remember now. I'm almost sure that's why many hard-working men don't live long after they retire. Working was their only reason for living. No blame.
Mostly, I remember being a fool. That's why I remember a lotta stuff. I'm pretty much of a perpetual fool. Nothing part-time about it. If I'm not being somebody else's fool, then I'm being a fool over being a fool. I remember the humiliation mostly. It was the humiliation that made me humble. The whole process only took forty-two years, and was completed when I hit my second wife with my fist in order to give her the permission she needed to take our children and leave me to die by myself. I could no longer be her fool, and I'm sad to death over it.
I can't stand to be around anybody who knew me before we parted. I can't not be around my brothers. They both knew her and loved her too. Probably more than me. Literally. It was them that made the arrangements to go to Seattle. They would have paid for my part of it if I had let them. I can't be their fool anymore either. It's just too late for idealism to raise the dead past to it's former levels of delusory dispensation.
I didn't really have to live up to my father's expectations. I've ranted about that forever, but it's not true. There was a moment in my history when I knew surcease from that burden, and I did not seek it out. I was surpassed by my younger brothers in my father's esteem and expectation during one specific moment in our mutual lives, though he would have never admitted it, because he didn't know what he had done. I was the only-est one who knew. I knew it by the look on his face.
When I was fourteen I got kneed in the groin during football practice. I'm fairly sure it was deliberately done by a shamed man. A boy a couple of years younger than me who had been horribly scarred by a gasoline fire. He hated me being so beautiful. No. I really was beautiful, and everybody knew it but me. Why am I always the last to know.
After practice my testicle were swelling, and I went to the coach to tell him what happened and ask him what to do. The coach was my father's co-worker. They ate lunch together nearly every day during the school year. They weren't particularly friendly. My father was a very opinionated person who liked to argue, and he was good at it, because he taught the subjects of argument and debate.
The coach told me to pull down my breeches and show him my problem. He looked, saw that I was indeed wounded, and it was arranged for me to be seen by our family doctor. There was nothing to be done but wait until the swelling went down, and when it did it didn't stop when my testicles got back to their original size, but atrophied still more until the left one was a mere shadow of itself.
The look on my father's face when our family doctor told him this incident might affect my ability to father children in some way, but he couldn't say how. We'd just have to wait to see if time healed all wounds. It didn't. My getting a vasectomy was my way of putting a lifelong habit of worrying about being a real man behind me. I had already done all the suffering over it before the vas diferens was snipped and sutured. I had my tubes tied.
My father's greatest pride was his talent and understanding about animal breeding. He literally bred his own breed of cows over his life time. At the same time I got hurt I was a part of his cattle judging team in the FFA. That was a big deal for him that I would come to know his lifetime knowledge about breeding cows. To continue his herd after he passed on. I was his oldest son, and the deal was set in his mind.
He saw my football injury in the same way he would have viewed the same thing happening to his prize bull. If I had been a bovine animal instead of a young boy, he would have either traded me off or sold me to the meat packing plant. I knew that. What to do about an unproductive animal had been part of our lifelong father/son discussions. As a breeder, my football injury made me expendable to his purpose. I literally saw all this happening in my father's face when the doctor told him I'd be lucky to ever have my own children. Not a bull, but an ox. A steer that just ate food off his table without providing him with heirs.
I might have spent the rest of my life attempting to reclaim my place in my father's eyes. It was in that very moment that I saw him shift his plans to my younger brothers that I knew I had been dismissed. Rightfully so. I should have understood that it wasn't personal, but it was. Very, very personal.
The problem might have been due to the fact that the injury did not affect my testosterone production. Neither did the vasectomy. I've been tested for testosterone levels several times. Most recently by the VA Hospital at my request. Why would I not. They take blood tests ever time I go over there. The test for testosterone levels is just one more check mark on a computer form. I wanted to know why I still suffer from desire even though I only exist as a shamed-man.
I didn't ask to get hurt. Particularly in that way. It might have been easier if I would have lost a leg or maybe even both legs, as far as my father was concerned. It wasn't even the guy who deliberately kneed me in the groin's fault. He didn't ask to be horribly scarred for life from spilling gasoline on a hot lawn mower. His brother either. I've wondered what their father thought about his own son's fates after their accident.
I write here literally to write things off that I've reacted to badly in the past. I don't know if I can write my father's rejection of me as a fully empowered progenitor of the continuation of his lineage. Thank God I don't have any male children. I've tried to wonder if my female children are mine, but the resemblance makes that seem foolish. I'm most comfortable being a fool.
I struggled with whether what I was looking for during my spirit quests was something the other calls "the truth". Maybe it's an ideal situation some people seek for when they don't know why they're doing what they're pretending to do what they're not actually doing.
I do know that "the truth", as a goal for my seeking has been replaced with apathy. It's difficult as an old man to actually give a shit what the truth is when the seeking of it was only a cover up for entertaining my vivid curiosity and imagination. Most of the time I bummed around North America without a dime to my nayme was to get away from being judged by familiarity.
I guess I remember other things than faces. I remember a sign some people would put on the license tag spot on the front of their cars. Instead of it being a license tag with numbers and letters used to identify the occupants of the automobile to the authorities, it identified the occupants by their religious beliefs, "God is my co-pilot."
There were literally years a couple of times when I might spend 300 days hitch-hiking by the side of the road, and I began to try to remember what the people who put this sign on the front of their car acted like. I guess I filtered for it. There was nothing else to do on the side of the road with all those people watching me... watching me... never directly, but peripherally... never quite "Out of sight, out of mind." I learned to look too dangerous to be ignored.
I was and never have actually been too dangerous to be ignored. Machiavelli claimed that it was more better to be feared than loved. When someone loves you they learn to ignore you as not even being an animal behind their self-generated mask they look back at you from behind. It's like you become a trusted pet. A self-aware trusted pet who might get peevish at being taken for granted, and wanna stir the still waters as a matter of principle. Why come they never know that's not what I see as an animal merely trying to survive the moment, much less the hour or God-forbid a full, sunlit day in peaceful resignation.
They usually locked their doors and rolled up their windows when they breezed by me scowling as if they were pissed off at whatever their God was for tempting them with my brutally naked, needy presence. If they really had trusted God to be their co-pilot they might have acted like "the good Samaritan" and stopped to help me in my extreme poverty. I tried to smile at them as they passed by with God-as-their-co-pilot to conjure a vision of their hypocrisy for them to stare at in their mind's eye... as they moved on down the road... outta sight... outta mind.
The people who did play out the good Samaritan never had no signs like that plastered all over their bumpers and fenders and windshields. They just pulled over to the side of the road, reached over and opened the passenger's side door to let me in, and smiled warmly as they asked, "Where ya' headed there, Bub, I ain't going fur, but you're welcome to ride as far as I'm going. Have you eat anything lately? There's a little cafe coming up down here that's famous for their cheese and nachos. I was thinking about getting a bite to eat. You hongry?"
You can't be a bum on the side of the road begging for a ride to nowhere if you're an atheist. It's when some idiot suddenly swerves off the road, slams on brakes, puts the car in reverse and backs toward you at a high rate of speed, that all the lies of disbelief fall away in a frenetic, frantic prayer for divine intervention. The crazy mofo always, always slams on brakes, screeches to a halt at the exact same moment the passenger's side door flies open, and the Elvis-impersonating drunk behind the steering wheel screams at you to "Git in the damn car! If you're waiting on me.. you're backing up!" in drugstore cowboy sing-song, you know you got yo'self a date with the sho 'nuff Devil's disciple. You might as well get in the damned car. You're going straight to Hell in an oily, black-cloud-spewing Buick made up of yo' deepest fears.
The scariest sight I used to see when I ran up to the car that stopped to pick me up would be somebody who had forced themselves to stop to obey some principle they didn't really believe in, and were scared to death about what they had done. Over and over again over all the years I bummed around and daily interacted with nothing but strangers, the saying "A scared man will hurt you." proved to be the God's own truth. Scared... and drinking hard likker to deny their own fear... is a undying patent for meanness.
I suspect all old men in their dotage daydream about what happened when they were younger and more daring. I don't know what I would think about if I hadn't have been a bum. I don't remember much about what happened when i went to work on some job site around the country.
Of course, there weren't many times I would work year 'round, but if I had worked 11 out of 12 months a year, like many men do, or more, I might not have much to remember now. I'm almost sure that's why many hard-working men don't live long after they retire. Working was their only reason for living. No blame.
Mostly, I remember being a fool. That's why I remember a lotta stuff. I'm pretty much of a perpetual fool. Nothing part-time about it. If I'm not being somebody else's fool, then I'm being a fool over being a fool. I remember the humiliation mostly. It was the humiliation that made me humble. The whole process only took forty-two years, and was completed when I hit my second wife with my fist in order to give her the permission she needed to take our children and leave me to die by myself. I could no longer be her fool, and I'm sad to death over it.
I can't stand to be around anybody who knew me before we parted. I can't not be around my brothers. They both knew her and loved her too. Probably more than me. Literally. It was them that made the arrangements to go to Seattle. They would have paid for my part of it if I had let them. I can't be their fool anymore either. It's just too late for idealism to raise the dead past to it's former levels of delusory dispensation.
I didn't really have to live up to my father's expectations. I've ranted about that forever, but it's not true. There was a moment in my history when I knew surcease from that burden, and I did not seek it out. I was surpassed by my younger brothers in my father's esteem and expectation during one specific moment in our mutual lives, though he would have never admitted it, because he didn't know what he had done. I was the only-est one who knew. I knew it by the look on his face.
When I was fourteen I got kneed in the groin during football practice. I'm fairly sure it was deliberately done by a shamed man. A boy a couple of years younger than me who had been horribly scarred by a gasoline fire. He hated me being so beautiful. No. I really was beautiful, and everybody knew it but me. Why am I always the last to know.
After practice my testicle were swelling, and I went to the coach to tell him what happened and ask him what to do. The coach was my father's co-worker. They ate lunch together nearly every day during the school year. They weren't particularly friendly. My father was a very opinionated person who liked to argue, and he was good at it, because he taught the subjects of argument and debate.
The coach told me to pull down my breeches and show him my problem. He looked, saw that I was indeed wounded, and it was arranged for me to be seen by our family doctor. There was nothing to be done but wait until the swelling went down, and when it did it didn't stop when my testicles got back to their original size, but atrophied still more until the left one was a mere shadow of itself.
The look on my father's face when our family doctor told him this incident might affect my ability to father children in some way, but he couldn't say how. We'd just have to wait to see if time healed all wounds. It didn't. My getting a vasectomy was my way of putting a lifelong habit of worrying about being a real man behind me. I had already done all the suffering over it before the vas diferens was snipped and sutured. I had my tubes tied.
My father's greatest pride was his talent and understanding about animal breeding. He literally bred his own breed of cows over his life time. At the same time I got hurt I was a part of his cattle judging team in the FFA. That was a big deal for him that I would come to know his lifetime knowledge about breeding cows. To continue his herd after he passed on. I was his oldest son, and the deal was set in his mind.
He saw my football injury in the same way he would have viewed the same thing happening to his prize bull. If I had been a bovine animal instead of a young boy, he would have either traded me off or sold me to the meat packing plant. I knew that. What to do about an unproductive animal had been part of our lifelong father/son discussions. As a breeder, my football injury made me expendable to his purpose. I literally saw all this happening in my father's face when the doctor told him I'd be lucky to ever have my own children. Not a bull, but an ox. A steer that just ate food off his table without providing him with heirs.
I might have spent the rest of my life attempting to reclaim my place in my father's eyes. It was in that very moment that I saw him shift his plans to my younger brothers that I knew I had been dismissed. Rightfully so. I should have understood that it wasn't personal, but it was. Very, very personal.
The problem might have been due to the fact that the injury did not affect my testosterone production. Neither did the vasectomy. I've been tested for testosterone levels several times. Most recently by the VA Hospital at my request. Why would I not. They take blood tests ever time I go over there. The test for testosterone levels is just one more check mark on a computer form. I wanted to know why I still suffer from desire even though I only exist as a shamed-man.
I didn't ask to get hurt. Particularly in that way. It might have been easier if I would have lost a leg or maybe even both legs, as far as my father was concerned. It wasn't even the guy who deliberately kneed me in the groin's fault. He didn't ask to be horribly scarred for life from spilling gasoline on a hot lawn mower. His brother either. I've wondered what their father thought about his own son's fates after their accident.
I write here literally to write things off that I've reacted to badly in the past. I don't know if I can write my father's rejection of me as a fully empowered progenitor of the continuation of his lineage. Thank God I don't have any male children. I've tried to wonder if my female children are mine, but the resemblance makes that seem foolish. I'm most comfortable being a fool.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Thousands Of Perfectly Round Orange BBs
I feel so stupid... again... for not reading the instructions and documentation for my brand-new Red Ryder BB gun. I wrote earlier about buying a cheaper (The Buck model) air rifle, but I took it back to Wal-Mart when i couldn't get it to work right, and bought the more expensive Red Ryder model to replace it. When i got back home and loaded it up with the orange-colored plastic BBs, it didn't work either.
The plastic BBs I bragged about using to be merciful to the squirrels (who have intruded my territorial imperative) I've declared war on, was the wrong sized shot for these specific BB guns. The classical copper-coated BBs are the right size. I just didn't read the labels that indicated what size BBs were inside the package. I went back to the store and bought some of the correct size. I didn't take the plastic ones back because I felt a little foolish for making such an unmanly mistake. "Guns? Sure, I know all about them. I'm a man, am I not?"
To be honest, this whole scenario may be strictly about those neon-colored, bright orange plastic BBs. I've been noticing them as I passed by where they sit on the shelf across the aisle from where the real guns are more securely located. There are clear plastic containers filled with BBs. Hundreds, if not thousands of perfectly formed metal and plastic orbs all the same size. On sale, cheaper by the dozen.
Maybe my fascination with these plastic BBs is like that many boys have for glass marbles. The traditional copper-coated BBs look great, but they don't fascinate me like the plastic ones do. I just like to look at them. I know a couple of guys who still have their marble collection from when they were boys. My own father did. His favorite appeared to be nothing more that a rounded stone that he called his "shooter".
I haven't seen nor heard one single squirrel since I got that air rifle working with the right-sized BBs. I think they're psychic. I think they inherently know I'm gonna burn their ass if they come around here irritating the hell outta me when I trying write or sleep in late in the mornings.
I was chatting with the black check-out lady about declaring war on squirrels, when the black man behind me in line told me I was "wasting my time" if I wanted to get rid of them squirrels. He demonstrably allowed (while leering appreciably at the young check-out lady) that I had to "pizen" them. Use rat poison, he said. "That'll get 'em." The check-out lady looked past me at him in agreement, and told about how her husband had been trying to get rid of some squirrels out of their eaves and attic for years.
It kind of put me on the defensive seeing as how they both agreed I was a damned fool for wanting to "not hurt the little critters". She said, "You don't wanna be messing around with them squirrels, Mister, they ain't nothing but rats with long fluffy tails. You go git you some of that green rat poison, and put this toy gun back on the shelf!"
It was a good thing I'd already paid for the BB gun. She might not have taken my money after such strong advice. I gathered up my parcels, backed off warning them off with my eyes, and bolted for the door while waving my receipt wildly to get past the greeter.
The plastic BBs I bragged about using to be merciful to the squirrels (who have intruded my territorial imperative) I've declared war on, was the wrong sized shot for these specific BB guns. The classical copper-coated BBs are the right size. I just didn't read the labels that indicated what size BBs were inside the package. I went back to the store and bought some of the correct size. I didn't take the plastic ones back because I felt a little foolish for making such an unmanly mistake. "Guns? Sure, I know all about them. I'm a man, am I not?"
To be honest, this whole scenario may be strictly about those neon-colored, bright orange plastic BBs. I've been noticing them as I passed by where they sit on the shelf across the aisle from where the real guns are more securely located. There are clear plastic containers filled with BBs. Hundreds, if not thousands of perfectly formed metal and plastic orbs all the same size. On sale, cheaper by the dozen.
Maybe my fascination with these plastic BBs is like that many boys have for glass marbles. The traditional copper-coated BBs look great, but they don't fascinate me like the plastic ones do. I just like to look at them. I know a couple of guys who still have their marble collection from when they were boys. My own father did. His favorite appeared to be nothing more that a rounded stone that he called his "shooter".
I haven't seen nor heard one single squirrel since I got that air rifle working with the right-sized BBs. I think they're psychic. I think they inherently know I'm gonna burn their ass if they come around here irritating the hell outta me when I trying write or sleep in late in the mornings.
I was chatting with the black check-out lady about declaring war on squirrels, when the black man behind me in line told me I was "wasting my time" if I wanted to get rid of them squirrels. He demonstrably allowed (while leering appreciably at the young check-out lady) that I had to "pizen" them. Use rat poison, he said. "That'll get 'em." The check-out lady looked past me at him in agreement, and told about how her husband had been trying to get rid of some squirrels out of their eaves and attic for years.
It kind of put me on the defensive seeing as how they both agreed I was a damned fool for wanting to "not hurt the little critters". She said, "You don't wanna be messing around with them squirrels, Mister, they ain't nothing but rats with long fluffy tails. You go git you some of that green rat poison, and put this toy gun back on the shelf!"
It was a good thing I'd already paid for the BB gun. She might not have taken my money after such strong advice. I gathered up my parcels, backed off warning them off with my eyes, and bolted for the door while waving my receipt wildly to get past the greeter.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Mo' Bettah
I believe that's why the spirit some call Jesus is reputed to hang around with the less fortunate. The fortunate are too busy being janitors to their possessions, because if they don't, then the Crows will steal they stuff and give it away to somebody who wants it more. People who live simpler lifestyles aren't any closer to God than more complicated people, it's just that they don't seem so occupied with abstract theory that if God does come around they are ready to notice.
Maybe that's what the priest class are for. The redistribution of wealth. Bernie Madoff was/is such a Crow in my opinion. I suspect that may be why the Arabs hate the Jews. I've never figured that out to my satisfaction. Why would I? Maybe it's not worth having more than you need when others are starving. We'll find out soon enow.
I've just declared war on the squirrels that have decided they own my house. I bought an air rifle that shoots plastic BBs. I don't wanna kill 'em. I just want them to feel unwelcome to my house. I built my house outta wood. The outside is cypress board and batten. They appear to think it's a dead tree, and technically they're right, but it's not alright with me for them to gnaw holes in it. Usually my yard is full of squirrels, but I haven't seen a single one since I unwrapped and loaded the air rifle.
I have an exercise machine I use that I'm pleased with. I did considerable research on these types of machines before I bought it. The reviews seemed to stress how complete the motion of it's glider movement worked, and how the design of it and the solid construction of it made it a good buy. I bought it from Sears because it was the same machine re-branded, and Sears was merely handy. It's lasted me a long time and seems to still work as advertised.
I don't use this machine nearly as much as I oughta, but who does, right? When I do use it I work the thing as long as it pleases me and then I stop. This medicine I'm taking makes me not wanna move around very much. I have to act with deliberation to get my heart rate up for a while. I like having this machine around for when the weather is rough outside.
I do another sort of exercise by using the outside stairs up to the second floor of my house. That really works my major leg and torso muscles, but it don't do much for my arms and shoulders. That's where my heart glider comes in well. It does exercise that part of me, but it's not really strenuous.
I'm a little freaked out now by my response to Elizabeth Gibson's wonderful metaphors. I keep finding new ones that in some way make the same conclusion. "LOOK, look there. Watch what's going on. That's how God is. That's how God is."
Maybe that's what the priest class are for. The redistribution of wealth. Bernie Madoff was/is such a Crow in my opinion. I suspect that may be why the Arabs hate the Jews. I've never figured that out to my satisfaction. Why would I? Maybe it's not worth having more than you need when others are starving. We'll find out soon enow.
I've just declared war on the squirrels that have decided they own my house. I bought an air rifle that shoots plastic BBs. I don't wanna kill 'em. I just want them to feel unwelcome to my house. I built my house outta wood. The outside is cypress board and batten. They appear to think it's a dead tree, and technically they're right, but it's not alright with me for them to gnaw holes in it. Usually my yard is full of squirrels, but I haven't seen a single one since I unwrapped and loaded the air rifle.
I have an exercise machine I use that I'm pleased with. I did considerable research on these types of machines before I bought it. The reviews seemed to stress how complete the motion of it's glider movement worked, and how the design of it and the solid construction of it made it a good buy. I bought it from Sears because it was the same machine re-branded, and Sears was merely handy. It's lasted me a long time and seems to still work as advertised.
I don't use this machine nearly as much as I oughta, but who does, right? When I do use it I work the thing as long as it pleases me and then I stop. This medicine I'm taking makes me not wanna move around very much. I have to act with deliberation to get my heart rate up for a while. I like having this machine around for when the weather is rough outside.
I do another sort of exercise by using the outside stairs up to the second floor of my house. That really works my major leg and torso muscles, but it don't do much for my arms and shoulders. That's where my heart glider comes in well. It does exercise that part of me, but it's not really strenuous.
I'm a little freaked out now by my response to Elizabeth Gibson's wonderful metaphors. I keep finding new ones that in some way make the same conclusion. "LOOK, look there. Watch what's going on. That's how God is. That's how God is."
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Alla, Alla, That's What God Is Like!
I guess I'm going through some predictable stage of grieving that I have an incurable disease I won't recover from and be my sa-me old unloved and unloving self. Now, I'm just mad at the world today that I'm sick night and day now, and the future ain't bright.
I read something in Sartre the other day that has me thinking too much about it. He stated that being-for-itself is Desire pure and simple, and if Desire leaves you, then so does being-for-itself. That's troubling to me. I don't know why. I'm not sure I care that one more facet of living troubles me. I feel like "only a troubled guest on the dark earth."
The Holy Longing
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent
because the massman will mock it right way.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten.
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with the darkness
and a desire for higher lovemaking
sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are fare gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced
this, to die and so to grow.
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
Goethe
I don't know anything else about Goethe than this poem. I possess the general idea that he was a recognized writer and philosopher, but the opportunity to read this poem he purportedly wrote is all I need.
I've been disturbed by listening to this woman's talk. I'm watching it again now:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
"Artistry always leads to anguish and death." This statement appeared to be the thrust of her attack. She wanted to change that perception of what pursuing one's craft actually means. It means a lot to me because of what I've "suffered" for my art that personally, wasn't all that negative.
The most significant part of watching this particular video and this specific woman was her comments on the dancer that God used to show itself to the world, and what he had to deal with the next morning when he no longer represented God. It doesn't work that way for me. My invisible friend has used me for expression off and on all my life. Like the dancer, I too have to get up the next morning.
This morning I started drinking vodka before nine o'clock. I gotta get some relief. The nausea produced by this prescription drug methotrexate is killing me. I'm beginning to believe I can put up with the pain of having my old body warped by the rheumatoid arthritis than being sick 24/7.
For some odd reason I thought of Elvis Presley in this context this morning. Mothers literally told their children, "Look, look at him. That's what God is like." All these years after he committed suicide in order to stop being what God's like for these people, they still buy mementos and relics and tell their children, "Look, look at Him, that's what God's like."
Elizabeth Gilbert is a young woman at forty years old. She still has to wear baggy clothes to hid her spreading figure despite the fact that she's now rich and famous. She does seem concerned about what it means to be used this way. I don't even know the title name of the book she became famous for. Those were the days. She seems worried she won't be pointed out as the person who portrays God anymore.
Mothers have pointed at me and told their children, "That's what God is like." Getting up the next morning to chop wood and tote water is a real change from when I had it going on. I've watched a lotta people go through this process. I ask. "Have you ever had people point out the excellence of yo' posturing?" Nobody has never said, "No."
I've acted like it's a mistake to continue to devote one's life to be-co-me-ing God. I've pushed people away from me that seem to insist it's my duty in so-me way. I have to get up and chop wood and tote water whether I have personified the way God is the night before or no. Why ruffle the waters?
I read something in Sartre the other day that has me thinking too much about it. He stated that being-for-itself is Desire pure and simple, and if Desire leaves you, then so does being-for-itself. That's troubling to me. I don't know why. I'm not sure I care that one more facet of living troubles me. I feel like "only a troubled guest on the dark earth."
The Holy Longing
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent
because the massman will mock it right way.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten.
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with the darkness
and a desire for higher lovemaking
sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are fare gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced
this, to die and so to grow.
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
Goethe
I don't know anything else about Goethe than this poem. I possess the general idea that he was a recognized writer and philosopher, but the opportunity to read this poem he purportedly wrote is all I need.
I've been disturbed by listening to this woman's talk. I'm watching it again now:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
"Artistry always leads to anguish and death." This statement appeared to be the thrust of her attack. She wanted to change that perception of what pursuing one's craft actually means. It means a lot to me because of what I've "suffered" for my art that personally, wasn't all that negative.
The most significant part of watching this particular video and this specific woman was her comments on the dancer that God used to show itself to the world, and what he had to deal with the next morning when he no longer represented God. It doesn't work that way for me. My invisible friend has used me for expression off and on all my life. Like the dancer, I too have to get up the next morning.
This morning I started drinking vodka before nine o'clock. I gotta get some relief. The nausea produced by this prescription drug methotrexate is killing me. I'm beginning to believe I can put up with the pain of having my old body warped by the rheumatoid arthritis than being sick 24/7.
For some odd reason I thought of Elvis Presley in this context this morning. Mothers literally told their children, "Look, look at him. That's what God is like." All these years after he committed suicide in order to stop being what God's like for these people, they still buy mementos and relics and tell their children, "Look, look at Him, that's what God's like."
Elizabeth Gilbert is a young woman at forty years old. She still has to wear baggy clothes to hid her spreading figure despite the fact that she's now rich and famous. She does seem concerned about what it means to be used this way. I don't even know the title name of the book she became famous for. Those were the days. She seems worried she won't be pointed out as the person who portrays God anymore.
Mothers have pointed at me and told their children, "That's what God is like." Getting up the next morning to chop wood and tote water is a real change from when I had it going on. I've watched a lotta people go through this process. I ask. "Have you ever had people point out the excellence of yo' posturing?" Nobody has never said, "No."
I've acted like it's a mistake to continue to devote one's life to be-co-me-ing God. I've pushed people away from me that seem to insist it's my duty in so-me way. I have to get up and chop wood and tote water whether I have personified the way God is the night before or no. Why ruffle the waters?
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk
I've been feeling lousy for days now. The only way I seem able to stop the nausea I get from taking this prescription drug methotrexate is to not eat at all or at least minimally. I haven't replied to much e-mail, and when I have it mostly negative comments. I don't feel good, why should you?
In the midst of my supreme disgruntlement I sought refuge in the trivia of social site links. Now, I'm happy I did because I stumbled across this TED video by Elizabeth Gilbert I hadn't watched before. The talk is given by this woman who found herself the author of a "freakishly" successful book. I've never heard of it, of course, because I stopped reading books from the NYT best-seller list a long time ago to follow my own dreams.
Like I mentioned, I've been in a lousy mood all week-end, and I needed some stimulus to get excited about... anything. I clicked on the link and Elizabeth popped up on stage by herself and began talking. One of the first things she spoke about got me interested right away in the subject of her sermon. She clarified for me for the first ti-me, the difference between what the Greeks called a daimon, and what the Romans called a genius. The difference is literally just the words themselves. They both described the sa-me phenomenon. A docetic spirit that interacts with humans when they are unknowingly in a receptive mood for such things to happen.
As this woman talked I began to feel like she was trying to explain something I've tried to "say" for a lifetime, and she was doing a better job of it than anything I'd done previously. In the end ga-me, it's always the metaphors people choose to get the me-ssage across. Exactly who chooses the metaphors is another question all together.
She spoke of a group of tribal people gathering together to watch a group of native dancers strut their stuff, but how after dancing all night, one of the dancers becomes imbued with the spirit and takes on the attributes of a god doing it's own thang. The tribal members respond in awe and point enthusiastically at the dancer. This is what they've been waiting for. They wake their children, point to the dancer, and tell them, "There! That's what God is like!" Tens of millions of people say the sa-me thing about rock and roll stars and Pavarotti. Not always, but at times certain people reliably heed the call that temporarily makes mutes of us all. With the question being: How do you live with having already performed your best, most impossible me-me-cry, after the fat lady sings?
She talks about what the particular dancer who came to prominence might have felt like the next morning when he realized he was still only human. She talked about how each of us has had our own moments when we suddenly exemplified the power of a docetic spirit. There is famous advice offered from former occupied entities who lived through the experience. They all seem to say, as this woman did, that you still have to "chop wood and tote water".
Basically this means to me that one has to remain a wannabe. Many people have watched me be-co-me that gandy dancer, and they seem to expect me to live up to their expectations and keep them amused for all ti-me. They don't appear to understand that daimon; that genius; that song and dance man ain't always there for me nor is it desirable for such to be so.
I kept looking at the outfit she wore to make the talk. To shoot the video. It was dark brown, with an over-skirt to muddy the water of her forty-ish figure, and emphasize her face. No blame. She has a good face. She makes an impressive speech. I hope you'll watch it. She's talking about us.
In the midst of my supreme disgruntlement I sought refuge in the trivia of social site links. Now, I'm happy I did because I stumbled across this TED video by Elizabeth Gilbert I hadn't watched before. The talk is given by this woman who found herself the author of a "freakishly" successful book. I've never heard of it, of course, because I stopped reading books from the NYT best-seller list a long time ago to follow my own dreams.
Like I mentioned, I've been in a lousy mood all week-end, and I needed some stimulus to get excited about... anything. I clicked on the link and Elizabeth popped up on stage by herself and began talking. One of the first things she spoke about got me interested right away in the subject of her sermon. She clarified for me for the first ti-me, the difference between what the Greeks called a daimon, and what the Romans called a genius. The difference is literally just the words themselves. They both described the sa-me phenomenon. A docetic spirit that interacts with humans when they are unknowingly in a receptive mood for such things to happen.
As this woman talked I began to feel like she was trying to explain something I've tried to "say" for a lifetime, and she was doing a better job of it than anything I'd done previously. In the end ga-me, it's always the metaphors people choose to get the me-ssage across. Exactly who chooses the metaphors is another question all together.
She spoke of a group of tribal people gathering together to watch a group of native dancers strut their stuff, but how after dancing all night, one of the dancers becomes imbued with the spirit and takes on the attributes of a god doing it's own thang. The tribal members respond in awe and point enthusiastically at the dancer. This is what they've been waiting for. They wake their children, point to the dancer, and tell them, "There! That's what God is like!" Tens of millions of people say the sa-me thing about rock and roll stars and Pavarotti. Not always, but at times certain people reliably heed the call that temporarily makes mutes of us all. With the question being: How do you live with having already performed your best, most impossible me-me-cry, after the fat lady sings?
She talks about what the particular dancer who came to prominence might have felt like the next morning when he realized he was still only human. She talked about how each of us has had our own moments when we suddenly exemplified the power of a docetic spirit. There is famous advice offered from former occupied entities who lived through the experience. They all seem to say, as this woman did, that you still have to "chop wood and tote water".
Basically this means to me that one has to remain a wannabe. Many people have watched me be-co-me that gandy dancer, and they seem to expect me to live up to their expectations and keep them amused for all ti-me. They don't appear to understand that daimon; that genius; that song and dance man ain't always there for me nor is it desirable for such to be so.
I kept looking at the outfit she wore to make the talk. To shoot the video. It was dark brown, with an over-skirt to muddy the water of her forty-ish figure, and emphasize her face. No blame. She has a good face. She makes an impressive speech. I hope you'll watch it. She's talking about us.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
A Tropical February Day
It's fairly warm outside. I have the front door open and the ambient sounds of birds, trucks, airplanes, and the occasional dog bark waft in through the sun-lighted doorway. A single crow seems to be cawing for company. I can't hear the crows it's calling to.
I checked my lottery numbers to see if I won the PowerBall last night. The apathetic mental dullness I impose to fend off the disappointment of continuously losing kept things on an even keel when I saw I didn't have any of the five numbers. Much less the Powerball number. Another day in Muddville. Mighty Casey has struck out.
I feel like an obligation to play the lottery for my mother's sake. It's not that that I wouldn't play the lottery except for her. She didn't live long enough to play legitimate state-sponsored lotteries that actual pay off. She played the ones that only led you on and didn't pay off. She was on the infamous "sucker's list". She would have enjoyed playing the State lotteries, so I do it for her.
I hear a hawk screeching away out above the pine trees. I can't tell one type of hawk cry from the others. Like owls at night. I do know an owl is hooting when I hear it, but I don't know what kind of owl the hooting belongs to. There is a big barn owl I've seen catch and eat one of the rabbits that live in the brushy undergrowth in the woods around my house. I walked toward where it was ripping the rabbit's flesh using it's talons and beak, and it wasn't so eager to abandon it's kill to me. I retreated. I didn't want it's food. That's why they have grocery stores.
I interact with the wild animals around my house much more than with humans. It's a little unusual for me to have guests more than once or twice a week. In the last year I've left my house to eat out or just cruise the area for a while less. I don't feel like a misanthropist, but it could be something like that.
Watching people has become somewhat like watching TV these days. In the past, I've seen snatches of the Jerry Springer Show and the Maury Povich Show. The problem for me is that what I see when I'm out and about is that a larger majority of the people around me live in that mode than don't.
In the sa-me way I find it difficult to watch the guests on those shows interact in the way that they do, I find it difficult to watch the same sort of behavior in real time at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter two miles away. I do it. There are only three grocery stores in town, and Wal-Mart is the closest one to my house by half. I can drive to their parking lot without running into a stop sign or a stop light.
I go there deliberately on Saturdays to see the people who work for a living. There are a lot of people in the US who don't work for a living during the regular work week, or any other time. I understand the old people or the handicapped people who can't work, but there are a lotta healthy people who get money from somewhere who never seem to work at all. I have to go to the Wal-Mart on the weekends to find out which is which.
I began to get less snooty about shopping at Wal-Mart when I decided to learn to drive the big semi trucks in my early sixties. One of the biggest problems I encountered was learning where I could park those big rigs just to go to some store to get personal stuff while I was on the road. Most business places ain't designed to handle big trucks. Wal-Mart was a very reliable place to do that.
Driving those big trucks was one of my most emotional losses I've experienced in regard to working for a living. Not only was I not a good truck driver, I miscalculated what the job was really like by a long shot. It was an error of personal judgment I regret. I lasted about six months at it, and had to walk away in defeat.
There was a connection between driving semis and working on shrimp boats I learned about the hard way, by doing it. The people who do it mostly because they have to do have that Marlboro man look of rugged independence, but truth of it was much gloomier to me. It was the knowledge of my experience that indicated to me that "look" was of haggard despair rather than individualism.
Working Cajun shrimp boats outta Louisiana and Texas was one of the first times I knowingly worked FOR people who couldn't read or write, but they were bi-lingual and clever beyond my expectations.
For a while I guess I had romanticized the cleverness that being illiterate requires, but in the end I realized that the biggest disadvantage in being illiterate is the inflexibility it imposes on the people who go to great lengths to defend their way of being, and are thus confined to living within those self-imposed defense parameters for fear of not being able to adapt to a new environment.
I've not met that many people that I knew for sure they couldn't read or write. If the percentages I've read about are anywhere near correct, then I should have met more. Particularly when I moved about in a nomadic, homeless fashion.
One way to tell is to ask for directions to go to some place they're aware of. They don't talk street signs, but describe artifacts of nature and the way certain buildings and groups of buildings LOOK like. They tell you what to listen for when you're in the right spot looking in the correct direction. It works. Sometimes mo' bettah.
I still reflect on the excursion my brother and his wife and I took to see "America's Alps" up above Seattle toward the Canadian border when we were out there to attend my daughter's wedding. We left InterState 5 and headed east to see this phenomena with the intention of going east far enough to take most of it in from the main highway, and then turning around and coming back to InterState 5 the same way.
These rugged mountains have a name I don't remember. A lot of this territory was part of a National Park, and more of it was a Washington State Park system. I really enjoyed looking at it, but I don't necessarily wanna see it again. Once is enough. I go back there all the ti-me in my mind anyway, along with all the other places I've been here on Earth. There is another me that does that. One the other can't gnow.
I checked my lottery numbers to see if I won the PowerBall last night. The apathetic mental dullness I impose to fend off the disappointment of continuously losing kept things on an even keel when I saw I didn't have any of the five numbers. Much less the Powerball number. Another day in Muddville. Mighty Casey has struck out.
I feel like an obligation to play the lottery for my mother's sake. It's not that that I wouldn't play the lottery except for her. She didn't live long enough to play legitimate state-sponsored lotteries that actual pay off. She played the ones that only led you on and didn't pay off. She was on the infamous "sucker's list". She would have enjoyed playing the State lotteries, so I do it for her.
I hear a hawk screeching away out above the pine trees. I can't tell one type of hawk cry from the others. Like owls at night. I do know an owl is hooting when I hear it, but I don't know what kind of owl the hooting belongs to. There is a big barn owl I've seen catch and eat one of the rabbits that live in the brushy undergrowth in the woods around my house. I walked toward where it was ripping the rabbit's flesh using it's talons and beak, and it wasn't so eager to abandon it's kill to me. I retreated. I didn't want it's food. That's why they have grocery stores.
I interact with the wild animals around my house much more than with humans. It's a little unusual for me to have guests more than once or twice a week. In the last year I've left my house to eat out or just cruise the area for a while less. I don't feel like a misanthropist, but it could be something like that.
Watching people has become somewhat like watching TV these days. In the past, I've seen snatches of the Jerry Springer Show and the Maury Povich Show. The problem for me is that what I see when I'm out and about is that a larger majority of the people around me live in that mode than don't.
In the sa-me way I find it difficult to watch the guests on those shows interact in the way that they do, I find it difficult to watch the same sort of behavior in real time at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter two miles away. I do it. There are only three grocery stores in town, and Wal-Mart is the closest one to my house by half. I can drive to their parking lot without running into a stop sign or a stop light.
I go there deliberately on Saturdays to see the people who work for a living. There are a lot of people in the US who don't work for a living during the regular work week, or any other time. I understand the old people or the handicapped people who can't work, but there are a lotta healthy people who get money from somewhere who never seem to work at all. I have to go to the Wal-Mart on the weekends to find out which is which.
I began to get less snooty about shopping at Wal-Mart when I decided to learn to drive the big semi trucks in my early sixties. One of the biggest problems I encountered was learning where I could park those big rigs just to go to some store to get personal stuff while I was on the road. Most business places ain't designed to handle big trucks. Wal-Mart was a very reliable place to do that.
Driving those big trucks was one of my most emotional losses I've experienced in regard to working for a living. Not only was I not a good truck driver, I miscalculated what the job was really like by a long shot. It was an error of personal judgment I regret. I lasted about six months at it, and had to walk away in defeat.
There was a connection between driving semis and working on shrimp boats I learned about the hard way, by doing it. The people who do it mostly because they have to do have that Marlboro man look of rugged independence, but truth of it was much gloomier to me. It was the knowledge of my experience that indicated to me that "look" was of haggard despair rather than individualism.
Working Cajun shrimp boats outta Louisiana and Texas was one of the first times I knowingly worked FOR people who couldn't read or write, but they were bi-lingual and clever beyond my expectations.
For a while I guess I had romanticized the cleverness that being illiterate requires, but in the end I realized that the biggest disadvantage in being illiterate is the inflexibility it imposes on the people who go to great lengths to defend their way of being, and are thus confined to living within those self-imposed defense parameters for fear of not being able to adapt to a new environment.
I've not met that many people that I knew for sure they couldn't read or write. If the percentages I've read about are anywhere near correct, then I should have met more. Particularly when I moved about in a nomadic, homeless fashion.
One way to tell is to ask for directions to go to some place they're aware of. They don't talk street signs, but describe artifacts of nature and the way certain buildings and groups of buildings LOOK like. They tell you what to listen for when you're in the right spot looking in the correct direction. It works. Sometimes mo' bettah.
I still reflect on the excursion my brother and his wife and I took to see "America's Alps" up above Seattle toward the Canadian border when we were out there to attend my daughter's wedding. We left InterState 5 and headed east to see this phenomena with the intention of going east far enough to take most of it in from the main highway, and then turning around and coming back to InterState 5 the same way.
These rugged mountains have a name I don't remember. A lot of this territory was part of a National Park, and more of it was a Washington State Park system. I really enjoyed looking at it, but I don't necessarily wanna see it again. Once is enough. I go back there all the ti-me in my mind anyway, along with all the other places I've been here on Earth. There is another me that does that. One the other can't gnow.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
The Moon As Mary Magdalene
This crazy woman, whose attitude I like very much, wrote about some medieval paintings in which Mary Magdalene was posed sitting with a human skull in the painting. A retired auto engineer (desperately waiting for Godot) responded to her suggestions or implications with wounded amazement, crying that he (the self-appointed Catholic scholar on the discussion list) was not aware of such heresy, or something close, and seemed to accuse her of blasphemy!
Another member of the Thomas group (apparently composed of mostly people claiming to be ex-Catholics [and obviously deluded due to the irrefutable fact that no such animal as an "ex"-Catholic actually exists on the planet Earth]), a goat farmer, took the Dilbert's remarks as a scholarly challenge (a self-confessed history buff and rural Texas-bon vivant), then performed his own web search, and found images of several old European paintings of Mary Magdalene w/skull (Golgotha) and provided the pertinent links to these images to the members of the discussion list.
The foxily crazy woman, whose masculine writing style is interesting to me as her comment on her life itself, then provided some links to other images of Mary Magdalene dressed in red silk and brocade holding a skull in her lap. Last week, after a lackluster period of forced reflection, she finally realized that Thomas (of The Gospel of Thomas fame, AKA Tomas, the twin) was deliberately and ulteriorly postured as Jesus's twin brother/doppelganger, ergo... Gemini, the Twins. A duly nay-me-d constellation in the ancient Greek zodiac, and eventually, symbolic of the twin boys who were raised by wolves and founded Rome.
I think she will finally realize that Mary Magdalene represents the Moon in astrology, just as Jesus represents the Sun, and the twelve apostles represent the constellations of the zodiac. The paintings of Mary Magdalene represent Taurus and Scorpio of the zodiac. That is, they symbolize procreation vs recreation. Mary is never represented as an old woman no long capable of having more babies. She represents the very concept of impregnability, Taurus, as opposed to woman as a dried up (non-menustrating), clever old hag/crone bearing poisoned apples and mirrors. Scorpio. Death, and re-creative sex.
AAAAAaaaaaiiiiiyyeeeeeee!!!
The hastily drawn metaphor above is the first ti-me I've ever used an old woman who has gone through menopause as a symbol of Scorpio or of Death, but it won't be the last. Why am I always the last to know?
People like me who have studied astrology just enough to be dangerous understand what can happen once your knowledge of the rudiments surpasses that of your critics, and you can easily prove that such is so. Who's gonna tell you "NO! No. You've broke the rules. It doesn't work that way. You can't ethically or morally do that and survive without having to murder your own self to stop the madness!" Nobody knows.
I can't imagine it's any different in nuclear physics except for acquiring the necessary hardware. If you had control of the hardware, nobody could stop you because you're a prophet with an audience of One. Nobody would have the experience or insight to understand your nefarious goals or even that your goals were nefarious unless you sat down with a few bottles of wine between me-and-thee, and throughly explained yourself to a competent listener.
If practically any nuclear physicist was hell-bent of destroying the world with a self-conceived nuclear holocaust, nobody would know. That's why after they got their mojo working toward that end, and if they suddenly regretted it, the only way the world could be saved would be for they themselves to murder they own self to save the world from their unobservable intent. Who else would gnow self-murder needed doing but the hypothetical perpetrator? Would this be some exotic form of vain-glorious, self-induced regicide?
If this is some peripheral form of regicide that happens when some brave soul ventures beyond the pale of commonality and tries to reap the whirlwind (Dragon) to prove his mettle to the ladies-in-waiting? Dragons are mythical and only ex-is-t by abstraction, but the sword that dubs the knight is sometime double-edged and created to cut through flesh and bone both ways. That's what you gotta do to kill the Medusa. Cut off one of her heads on the first slice and another on the backhand. Zippity-doo-dah! Bouncing heads and mixed-metaphors galore!
For some people like this who have educated themselves on some obscure or solemn topic beyond the reach of a competent critic, they tend to take their spawn with them when they go. It's really not unusual anymore to find out via the media that some husband and father has murdered his wife AND children, and then himself. I've seen stories of the wife killing all the children, then herself, and leaving the proposed monster father and husband to live with the shame of their tragic obliteration. To me, it's as if they're trying to not only stop the madness they have discovered in themselves, but by killing their own children they are trying to keep it from spreading like a disease.
I must have had an extreme reaction to seeing some photographs of some of the beggars of Bombay. The pictures were accompanied by sworn testimony that some or most of the beggars had maimed themselves to attract more pity towards themselves, and thus earn more alms. My immediate intuition was that they could have as easily (or not) have generated within themselves a tumorous cancer. I began to "believe" that's where diseases of all kinds come from originally. Despair. It's almost like a required course on the hero's journey. Not the breath-stopping seven-come-eleven roll of the dice, but snake-eyes. POOF!
Another member of the Thomas group (apparently composed of mostly people claiming to be ex-Catholics [and obviously deluded due to the irrefutable fact that no such animal as an "ex"-Catholic actually exists on the planet Earth]), a goat farmer, took the Dilbert's remarks as a scholarly challenge (a self-confessed history buff and rural Texas-bon vivant), then performed his own web search, and found images of several old European paintings of Mary Magdalene w/skull (Golgotha) and provided the pertinent links to these images to the members of the discussion list.
The foxily crazy woman, whose masculine writing style is interesting to me as her comment on her life itself, then provided some links to other images of Mary Magdalene dressed in red silk and brocade holding a skull in her lap. Last week, after a lackluster period of forced reflection, she finally realized that Thomas (of The Gospel of Thomas fame, AKA Tomas, the twin) was deliberately and ulteriorly postured as Jesus's twin brother/doppelganger, ergo... Gemini, the Twins. A duly nay-me-d constellation in the ancient Greek zodiac, and eventually, symbolic of the twin boys who were raised by wolves and founded Rome.
I think she will finally realize that Mary Magdalene represents the Moon in astrology, just as Jesus represents the Sun, and the twelve apostles represent the constellations of the zodiac. The paintings of Mary Magdalene represent Taurus and Scorpio of the zodiac. That is, they symbolize procreation vs recreation. Mary is never represented as an old woman no long capable of having more babies. She represents the very concept of impregnability, Taurus, as opposed to woman as a dried up (non-menustrating), clever old hag/crone bearing poisoned apples and mirrors. Scorpio. Death, and re-creative sex.
AAAAAaaaaaiiiiiyyeeeeeee!!!
The hastily drawn metaphor above is the first ti-me I've ever used an old woman who has gone through menopause as a symbol of Scorpio or of Death, but it won't be the last. Why am I always the last to know?
People like me who have studied astrology just enough to be dangerous understand what can happen once your knowledge of the rudiments surpasses that of your critics, and you can easily prove that such is so. Who's gonna tell you "NO! No. You've broke the rules. It doesn't work that way. You can't ethically or morally do that and survive without having to murder your own self to stop the madness!" Nobody knows.
I can't imagine it's any different in nuclear physics except for acquiring the necessary hardware. If you had control of the hardware, nobody could stop you because you're a prophet with an audience of One. Nobody would have the experience or insight to understand your nefarious goals or even that your goals were nefarious unless you sat down with a few bottles of wine between me-and-thee, and throughly explained yourself to a competent listener.
If practically any nuclear physicist was hell-bent of destroying the world with a self-conceived nuclear holocaust, nobody would know. That's why after they got their mojo working toward that end, and if they suddenly regretted it, the only way the world could be saved would be for they themselves to murder they own self to save the world from their unobservable intent. Who else would gnow self-murder needed doing but the hypothetical perpetrator? Would this be some exotic form of vain-glorious, self-induced regicide?
If this is some peripheral form of regicide that happens when some brave soul ventures beyond the pale of commonality and tries to reap the whirlwind (Dragon) to prove his mettle to the ladies-in-waiting? Dragons are mythical and only ex-is-t by abstraction, but the sword that dubs the knight is sometime double-edged and created to cut through flesh and bone both ways. That's what you gotta do to kill the Medusa. Cut off one of her heads on the first slice and another on the backhand. Zippity-doo-dah! Bouncing heads and mixed-metaphors galore!
For some people like this who have educated themselves on some obscure or solemn topic beyond the reach of a competent critic, they tend to take their spawn with them when they go. It's really not unusual anymore to find out via the media that some husband and father has murdered his wife AND children, and then himself. I've seen stories of the wife killing all the children, then herself, and leaving the proposed monster father and husband to live with the shame of their tragic obliteration. To me, it's as if they're trying to not only stop the madness they have discovered in themselves, but by killing their own children they are trying to keep it from spreading like a disease.
I must have had an extreme reaction to seeing some photographs of some of the beggars of Bombay. The pictures were accompanied by sworn testimony that some or most of the beggars had maimed themselves to attract more pity towards themselves, and thus earn more alms. My immediate intuition was that they could have as easily (or not) have generated within themselves a tumorous cancer. I began to "believe" that's where diseases of all kinds come from originally. Despair. It's almost like a required course on the hero's journey. Not the breath-stopping seven-come-eleven roll of the dice, but snake-eyes. POOF!
Friday, February 6, 2009
The Pascagoula Basin On Steroids
It was not only my parent's work as teachers they brought home with them in the late afternoons of the school year, but mostly their attitudes of student discipline in the classroom, to the ramshackle rental houses we lived in all over the coastal plains of southeastern North Carolina. It usually took a while after we got home in the afternoons for me to become their blood-kin child again, instead of just another student disputing their word.
About the only time I could be a little boy free of the academic evil eye (as school teachers my parents were agents of The State) was to take my library books and my trusty hatchet/tomahawk out into the edge of the woods where I hid away from prying eyes, and lived in my own fantasy world as regular children seem prone to do. The coastal plains are full of woods and there were always some patch of woods very close to wherever we lived. Like our neighbors, we lived on the sandy ridges between the swamps that drained the Appalachians and hinterlands further west into the Atlantic Ocean.
I not only had to compete with my siblings for my parent's attention (and they with me), but with my parent's students who absolutely adored them. Well, for the most part. It was easier to compete with their students who thought they were assholes then with their favorites.
I hated that my father spent more time with his students AFTER school, even, than with me and/or my siblings. And when he and my mother were at odds, he easily found some activity away from home with his student's projects than to come home to Momma. Momma be bad when she mad at her man.
There weren't many days they won't screaming and yelling and acting like they were gonna kill each other, sometime in easy perceptual range of our neighbors, and then turn around and scream at us kids if we did anything that might embarrass them as public figures. As an adult, that seems just crazy, but as a kid I didn't make the connection that they were actually performing the very acts they warned us against in the process of "teaching" us how to act. I doubt if they did either.
One of my default bugs that came with my software is that I give people credit for being a lot smarter than they themselves think they are. I get accused persistently of being a flatterer and bullshitter, but the problem is that I actually do think they're at least as smart as me, and maybe they could be, to be fair, but, on the other hand, they sort of have to cooperate and believe it themselves or it makes me look naive. Who isn't naive?
I've cruelly wondered just how intelligent my parents were. They were not the intellectual type, but smart enough to get four-year college degrees, even though it took them longer because they tried to go to college during the Great Depression, and they did. They had three children already with me as the baby when I father graduated from Mississippi State at the age of thirty-three.
If someone asked him why it took him so long, he would tell them he'd been too busy coon-hunting up and down the Pascagoula River basin. He was a great kidder. A real card. He was the only one of his nine siblings who even finished the seventh grade.
They had five children when my mother finally got her four year degree at the age of 48 years old. She taught on what was called a "B" certificate for lesser money and considerably less prestige among her co-workers for years. They both took a tremendous amount of pride in her/their accomplishments.
I don't know how to define "intelligence" when their raw personal accomplishments were seemingly met by tremendous determination. They wanted us to be proud of them, but we were children and didn't know what they had done. The other professional they socialized with were as accomplished or even more so than themselves.
We didn't/couldn't know the price they'd paid because their first three children were only born during the last of the depression, and the other two after World War Two. My oldest sister, a half-sister whose father was my mother's first husband, was old enough to remember the really hard times down in Mississippi before the family moved to North Carolina when I was two.
I distinctly remember the feeling I had after I had joined the Navy and was sent to California to go to Recruit training in San Diego. It was a completely different geographical environment, and wildly astonishing to me in that way, but the chief reason for my elation was that I was three thousand miles away from anybody who even knew who my parents were to tell on me. I was free. I could do what I liked, and pay for my own sins.
That first taste of real freedom I had from my parents attempts to institutionalize me makes me wonder this morning what moving from Mississippi to North Carolina a thousand miles away from home and hearth, where nobody even knew their name. They moved here to a ready-made job. My father's first actual job as an agriculture teacher, which was his college major, whereas he had taught high school math just outta college, and had to pay a politician 10% of his check each month to get that job.
Moving to North Carolina was a big career move for him, but he had to leave his aging, but beloved parents to fend for themselves at the home place. I wonder what new personal freedoms they discovered in North Carolina they hadn't had the opportunity to indulge in Mississippi. East central Mississippi around the Meridian area is still a very stifling place for free spirits to be fledglings.
I bet I start remembering how they opened up as individuals when they got away by themselves. I was there. Like any other child, I watched my parents like a hawk. I noticed everything as if my life depended on it. All my other kin folk were at least a thousand miles away, and I was a little boy. I was scared they were going to desert me somewhere or even give me away to some gypsies or something. I never had no place I could call home until I built this place, and nobody wants to share it with me because I'm a rude asshole who won't go along to get along. Damn!
I was in the Wal-Mart SuperCenter grocery a couple of days ago, and suddenly some child, some toddler, started screaming bloody murder at the top of it's lungs. My heart shriveled in my fear of death and I had to move all the way across the store to get away from the realization that's what I'll sound like again in my second childhood. The end is the bejinning and the bejinning is the end.
About the only time I could be a little boy free of the academic evil eye (as school teachers my parents were agents of The State) was to take my library books and my trusty hatchet/tomahawk out into the edge of the woods where I hid away from prying eyes, and lived in my own fantasy world as regular children seem prone to do. The coastal plains are full of woods and there were always some patch of woods very close to wherever we lived. Like our neighbors, we lived on the sandy ridges between the swamps that drained the Appalachians and hinterlands further west into the Atlantic Ocean.
I not only had to compete with my siblings for my parent's attention (and they with me), but with my parent's students who absolutely adored them. Well, for the most part. It was easier to compete with their students who thought they were assholes then with their favorites.
I hated that my father spent more time with his students AFTER school, even, than with me and/or my siblings. And when he and my mother were at odds, he easily found some activity away from home with his student's projects than to come home to Momma. Momma be bad when she mad at her man.
There weren't many days they won't screaming and yelling and acting like they were gonna kill each other, sometime in easy perceptual range of our neighbors, and then turn around and scream at us kids if we did anything that might embarrass them as public figures. As an adult, that seems just crazy, but as a kid I didn't make the connection that they were actually performing the very acts they warned us against in the process of "teaching" us how to act. I doubt if they did either.
One of my default bugs that came with my software is that I give people credit for being a lot smarter than they themselves think they are. I get accused persistently of being a flatterer and bullshitter, but the problem is that I actually do think they're at least as smart as me, and maybe they could be, to be fair, but, on the other hand, they sort of have to cooperate and believe it themselves or it makes me look naive. Who isn't naive?
I've cruelly wondered just how intelligent my parents were. They were not the intellectual type, but smart enough to get four-year college degrees, even though it took them longer because they tried to go to college during the Great Depression, and they did. They had three children already with me as the baby when I father graduated from Mississippi State at the age of thirty-three.
If someone asked him why it took him so long, he would tell them he'd been too busy coon-hunting up and down the Pascagoula River basin. He was a great kidder. A real card. He was the only one of his nine siblings who even finished the seventh grade.
They had five children when my mother finally got her four year degree at the age of 48 years old. She taught on what was called a "B" certificate for lesser money and considerably less prestige among her co-workers for years. They both took a tremendous amount of pride in her/their accomplishments.
I don't know how to define "intelligence" when their raw personal accomplishments were seemingly met by tremendous determination. They wanted us to be proud of them, but we were children and didn't know what they had done. The other professional they socialized with were as accomplished or even more so than themselves.
We didn't/couldn't know the price they'd paid because their first three children were only born during the last of the depression, and the other two after World War Two. My oldest sister, a half-sister whose father was my mother's first husband, was old enough to remember the really hard times down in Mississippi before the family moved to North Carolina when I was two.
I distinctly remember the feeling I had after I had joined the Navy and was sent to California to go to Recruit training in San Diego. It was a completely different geographical environment, and wildly astonishing to me in that way, but the chief reason for my elation was that I was three thousand miles away from anybody who even knew who my parents were to tell on me. I was free. I could do what I liked, and pay for my own sins.
That first taste of real freedom I had from my parents attempts to institutionalize me makes me wonder this morning what moving from Mississippi to North Carolina a thousand miles away from home and hearth, where nobody even knew their name. They moved here to a ready-made job. My father's first actual job as an agriculture teacher, which was his college major, whereas he had taught high school math just outta college, and had to pay a politician 10% of his check each month to get that job.
Moving to North Carolina was a big career move for him, but he had to leave his aging, but beloved parents to fend for themselves at the home place. I wonder what new personal freedoms they discovered in North Carolina they hadn't had the opportunity to indulge in Mississippi. East central Mississippi around the Meridian area is still a very stifling place for free spirits to be fledglings.
I bet I start remembering how they opened up as individuals when they got away by themselves. I was there. Like any other child, I watched my parents like a hawk. I noticed everything as if my life depended on it. All my other kin folk were at least a thousand miles away, and I was a little boy. I was scared they were going to desert me somewhere or even give me away to some gypsies or something. I never had no place I could call home until I built this place, and nobody wants to share it with me because I'm a rude asshole who won't go along to get along. Damn!
I was in the Wal-Mart SuperCenter grocery a couple of days ago, and suddenly some child, some toddler, started screaming bloody murder at the top of it's lungs. My heart shriveled in my fear of death and I had to move all the way across the store to get away from the realization that's what I'll sound like again in my second childhood. The end is the bejinning and the bejinning is the end.
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