Turpentine And Maple Syrup

This business of giving the appearance of holding tight with certain ideas and then abandoning them stretches out after first glance to be ostensibly confusing. Why? So I could use the term "ostensibly". Reading articles online can be a joyous thing to do since I'm overtly curious about what words mean. The Dictionary feature that comes with the Mac OS pisses me off infrequently. I got no excuse not to look up a word I don't sufficiently understand.

All I have to do is point the cursor at the word and right click on it, and the dictionary feature pops up with a definition that usually satisfies my curiosity. This usually allows me to move forward with less doubt about carrying out my intentions. Doubt is the devil. We're intimate acquaintances, but I don't think I would claim that we're good friends.

I spend a lot of time posturing. At first blush I became aware of it by maintaining a hatha yoga practice for a number of years, and finally connecting the idea of asanas (postures) with posturing. In this sense we all posture and pose before each other. Mostly, I think, to get our own way with the significant others we surround ourselves with. Some people call this web of lies non-verbal communication. In hypnosis school it was called non-verbal hypnosis.

The appearance of things
caught drifting in matter
then bespoken with a scheme of design
is less barter than it oughta
when it's out with some mother's daughter
then tarred and feathered
with raw turpentine.

There is an old boat landing in the south part of the county called Clear Run. It's on the Black River, which flows into the Cape Fear River, and from there into the port city of Wilmington. One of the chief products sent down to Wilmington from Clear Run was naval stores. Namely, southern yellow pine resin called turpentine. Fiddlers call it rosin. It's the same thing.

People gather at the old landing warehouse at Clear Run to play acoustic music on maybe the forth Saturday of each month. I've been there to hear the music a couple of times. It's okay, but old time music is not my cup of tea.

What fascinated me about going there was that there still a few blocks of turpentine resin there in the old building. Big blocks of it as big as a foot square and a yard tall. It looks just like the amber that ancient bugs are found in. It's the same material.

It's the same stuff that comes out of conifer trees when their bark is torn open. The people here in the coastal plains used to cut the bark of the longleaf pines to get the sap out of them in the same way the people in Vermont collected the sap from the sugar maples. They both cook the sap to move to the final product. Conifer tree sap melts together and then solidifies as it cools inside prescribed containers.

When I was a boy there was a roadside park where one of the largest colonial turpentine refineries was located. There was an artesian well there where spring water come up out of the ground through an open pipe. It was a popular spot for people going to the beach from up around the capital to stop. Local church groups used to have picnics there just about every Sunday.

The road was moved when the state went to improve it. A new bridge was built in a better crossing spot and they moved the road to accommodate the location of the new bridge. The new road was a lot wider with wide shoulders and had been engineered with the latest road-building techniques. Nobody went out of their way to stop at the old rest stop. It got to be a hangout for trouble makers, too many people got hurt there, and finally the state just fenced it off.

Nobody does that anymore. Most of the longleaf pines are gone. Cut and sold for lumber. These days hybrid pines that grow faster are planted and harvested by huge forestry product companies who clean cut hundreds of acres at a time for pulpwood to make paper products. After they harvest every twenty years or so, they replant the cut over land with seedlings, and the band plays on.

The Train From Spain

I decided to subscribe to the Twitter gig. At first blush, the e-mail way of communicating was way better than snail mail, but it's losing it's followers to other, more contemporary technologies. Every e-mail discussion list seems taken over by about 10-12 people who gang up on any newbies, and most of the existing conversation between those warlords is whining and puling about the madness the discussion group has resolved to, and then it usually loses it's wheels and dissipates into nothingness. I too have sinned.

I don't know anything about Twitter except that you get 140 spaces to say what you gotta say. I decided to follow David Pogue's twittering to get some idea of what people are doing. David is the tech editor of the NYT, but I have known about him for at least a decade because he used to write for the computer magazines I read. I read a really informative book he wrote on artificial intelligence.

For all intents and purposes, the kind of Twittering Pogue does seems associated with his job and his thousands of readers/followers. This ain't much use to me as an example. I don't have a job and only one follower. The one follower I have is a good one though. Twitter hooked me up to him because I happen to have his e-mail address in my Gmail Address Book, due to the fact that he's on my discussion list. Bob is a very bright person and an excellent writer.

I've decided to write rhymes in 140 spaces. It might be a swell place to create those Japanese haiku poems in such a limited space. I've never got the hang of them because they have such a specified form I can't tell if what I've written as a haiku actually is one. Maybe I'll Google up the rules again and see if I can finally understand haiku. For some reason I'm just not impressed. Sonnets either.

I apparently don't like observing rules about poetry. It probably has something to do with my youthful rebellion against authority I still follow for it's usefulness as form. My rebellious nature is not much more than the skepticism of a shamed man anymore. It's the kind of skepticism I must use to ostensibly deny the objects of the world in order to remain firmly ensconced in consciousness. Most of the poetry I write these days is disguised as prose.

I've tried writing haiku and sonnets before. Arguably, I get distracted by having to follow their forms than concerned with the content. The content is dictated for me by the form, and maybe that's the way it should be. I find that difficult because I need to write what I write to somebody, and these classical forms make me think I'm writing for somebody.

I've been repairing the shower drain. It's not rocket science. The water-proof grout I put around the shower drain got old and came loose from the bottom of the fiberglass shower floor and the drain pipe that is attached to it. It was just a matter of cleaning the old grout out and putting new grout in. The cleaning was the hardest part. I applied the new stuff that is supposedly of a superior quality and will last longer. It's probably better because it's been twenty years since I put the first stuff in place. Now, I just have to wait until the new grout sets to be able to use it.

I'm determined to began working on my house again. The most pressing job I have to do now is to get the sub-flooring in my old bedroom installed. My bed is in the new room Ben and I put in when we put a roof over what had been an open second-story balcony. I'm sleeping in there until I get this flooring in. When I do I'll move my bed back into that room, and use the new room for a study where I'll put my computer. It has lots of windows that let me look outside as I waste my life away.

Which is kind of the focus I have to move to now. I'm not getting as much outta being online as I once was, and ignoring the work I need to do on my house seems stupid because the discussions I've enjoyed in the past just ain't working for me any more. I've thought a lot about what the reason might be, but I'm not getting no satisfaction from my pondering. People do what they do for their own reasons. Thank God I'm only responsible for mine.

The leaves are already showing on my fig tree. If a late frost comes there won't be no figs this year. I might be able to cover some of them up if that happens. If it doesn't frost however, I'm expecting a bumper crop. My brother who lives a few hundred yards away came over with his pruning saw, and we pruned out from the center of the tree/bush to open it up more and keep the ripe figs close to the ground for picking.

The commercial fig cutting I planted last spring looks dead. It probably didn't help when the grass fire burnt over it. It was looking just as dead before that happened. the only hope I have for it is that the roots may have survived and will send up new shoots. It's a different variety of fig than my old tree and seems to blossom out later in the spring, but I might be fooling myself to delay the inevitable.

When we lopped off some of the older branches of my original tree to prune it back, I took what we cut off and made cuttings of them. I dipped the cut end in the rooting enzyme powder and plunged them into the ground. I put them in the same place where I put the same sort of cuttings last spring. I got one little leaf bud to come out on just one of the cuttings, but it died. The new ones already look dead.

On the face of it, I can't get another fig tree to grow on my property. I've been trying for years. I think maybe the old tree got a mojo on me, and kills all it's potential competitors before they can get a good start. The commercial cutting had a good start, but it's probably dead too. It's too woeful for words.

More Ignorant Prophecy

I just watched an interesting video called Did You Know?. The purported facts revealed in it are staggering for a rurally raised person like myself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDLIwlzkgY

Sure, I've traveled a lot for a person raised in farming communities. I've even been to China. The ship I served on in the Navy was shot at regularly by the Chinese artillery. Although my relations with the Chinese were contained and limited to a very brief time period of just under two years, off and on, it was a relationship of war and sex. That's much more intimate than the non-existant relationship I have with Europe and the Mediterranean countries. I've never been there. I don't feel like I'm lacking.

I think Europe will be caught in the land-locked squeeze between Russia and China. I'm expecting India to invade Pakistan soon. The largest number of human beings I've ever seen gathered in one spot was at a rock and roll festival called The Atlanta Pop Festival, but it wasn't held in Atlanta. South of there near Macon, Georgia. There were 650,000 people there. Many of them naked as a jaybird.

That's not many people. I thought it was, but I was wrong. There are events in India where 10,000,000 people amass together. If either China or India or both started sending out tentacles of humans mimicking army ants and living off the land... they could eat Europe and all the people, animals, and vegetation in it in a fairly short amount of time. Humans are not any different as predators than bacteria that spread like wild fire.

What if the limit of one child per couple was removed for just one year in China or the government failed. Rampant cannibalism. The food supply for so many people would be eaten before it could be cultivated, and then even the seed for a new crop would be eaten, and soon enow, there would not be a single edible plant or animal left on Earth. The only thing left to eat to stay alive would be other people. Even your own young.

It's been written as if true, that Earth is a place where the Gods raise humans as if cattle and now they got a bumper crop. When I think about cows I don't really believe that species of animals know we're raising them to take their off-spring's milk, and then kill them and eat them when they get old and/or sick.

We might not know the Gods are doing the same thing to us no more than the cow knows about our intentions toward it. Consciousness, as Sartre might say, is always OF something. If there is no thing there such as we make them appear through abstraction we can't keep the abstraction for a pet. Abstract constructs need a foundation for being or there's no such thang.

I couldn't stay the child my mother raised so when she got old I wasn't there for her anymore. My mother didn't know me for nearly ten years before she croaked. She just wanted to go home, but she couldn't find it. She discovered the Earth was a carcass, and once done, she couldn't go home again. What wanted to go home was what she left behind. I can't imagine my father wouldn't return for her like his oldest brother came for him.

It's a bit disconcerting for me to realize that I never escaped the way I was raised despite the price I paid to attempt it. My life has no meaning now because there is no "thee" for me. No significant other. Thus, no me-and-thee-ing. A bitter old man living alone with his mistakes... or not.

Not really. Like with the I Ching, the whole world is my oracle now. I don't turn back to the book, and the internet is becoming merely a palette upon which to create the very things that have condemned me to what the end brings clear. I turn any warm body around into the significant other I need for them to be momentarily, as long as I don't ask anything more of them than I would ask of myself. Whatever that means.

I guess I'm writing about meaning, and how the "thee" part of the quotient has expanded beyond what I was taught was the proper and prudent was to conduct my life. I think it's been that way for me for a long time, maybe always. I've probably been accused of treating people like I didn't need them more than any other complaint about me being the way I am is overall.

Sometime I think all I've ever needed from the world for was to get what I needed to be alone. I think that's why I hated my parents AND why I love this saying from the Gospel of Thomas that's got my back on that deal:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

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

I would have hated anybody who tried to civilized me and helped me to survive in a cruel, cruel world. All I wanted from them was the wherewithal to be alone. I just saw a piece on TV about Cezanne and the influence he had over the artists that followed him. The reason he was able to dedicate himself to his art and not paint to sell was that his parents were rich and sponsored his withdrawal from a greedy society.

Not me. It's only because my parents were not rich that I did it my way. They would have still had to been rich during the Great Depression to have been liberal enough to gimme the dough. If they had gotten filthy rich afterward they would treat me like they did because of what life had taught them.

My father thought the answer to life was to know how to work. If you knew how to work you could get through anything. That's not what he taught his students, most of them were farmer's sons and tenant farmer's sons who already knew how to work. He claimed to have taught them how to think, and he probably did.

I had no idea that children, and in particular male children, rebel against their parents around the age of puberty in a wild attempt to establish their own identity apart from that given to them by their family and caretakers in the communities in which they were raised. I didn't know it was natural and expected by the grown-ups. It made me feel really bad. I may have gotten a little help with that.

If I did, it wasn't necessarily because I needed it. I thought I was tough. I didn't need nobody, and I might go out of my way to prove it with my fists. It wasn't always a last resort either. I told myself I didn't start fights, I ended them. Right? Wrong! The fights I had in my youth were sort of started by me, but having to fight to defend the excuses I used to start them was a failure. I never intended for my sarcasm to end in fisticuffs. I intended for irony to make the impression I wanted to convey instead.

One of the reasons I unsubscribed from the philosophy group was that they insisted on their members remaining impersonal in their efforts to communicate, and because if that I didn't think they were communicating at all. Ostensibly, they seemed to be bragging on the reach of their technical lexicon. They appeared to be headed for the same place using the astrology jargon got me. After I reached a certain proficiency in "talking" astrology, there was nobody who knew enough of the lingo to enjoin me in conversation.

Granted, that's a little like it is working in construction. You get the big money to work yo'self out of a job. There's an end to it. When you finish building some plant to employ people who don't get paid much, it's time to arrange a layoff and start drawing unemployment. Why else would one do public work?

I got real fired up about participating in e-mail discussion groups. I literally thought I could stay home and communicate with like-minded people all over the world. I was right and yet I was wrong. I can communicate with people all over the world, but none of them are like-minded.

I've suspected that all along, but it took e-mail discussion groups to prove it to me in a way I could accept. The concept of projection does that job just fine. People betray the very aspect of themselves they wanna hide from the world by accusing another person of being that way. It's "been the ruin of many a po' boy, and Lord, I know I'm one."

The philosophy group participants were wallowing with people who betrayed themselves through projection. I have somehow lost the desire to show them just what they're doing. It doesn't matter because it wouldn't do any good for them, and just make me look even more like an asshole than I already do. What it is that I am nobody knows... but, I would say that. I just did.

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn about people is that they don't really wanna know that they're betraying only themselves when they accuse other people of having characteristics they have themselves. I base that on the false belief that I want them to tell me I'm betraying myself. I like to think I can take it. Sometimes I welcome that sort of information. Other times it might make me try to think of a way to murder you.

I don't know why I assume that most other people are seekers of truth. It's a stupid attitude to take. What good would it do if they found it? They'd only be accused themselves of being insane. It's not that the knowing the truth would make you insane, it's just that the truth can be very upsetting and pass into insignificance compared to the emotional turmoil it produces.

The real truth of how many wars get started gets buried with the multitude of victims it claims. Does the truth really matter if mass murder results in it's revealing? Doesn't teaching young Muslims that it's their right and duty to kill non-Muslims set them up to end up as victims themselves? Why wouldn't their potential victims kill them first like they would any rabid animal who doesn't need a reason to bite them?

I heard a journalist state on a news program that the world wasn't about to forget that Bush and company perpetrated torture upon the people it incarcerated. Now I'm reading online that Spain intends to bring this up before the World Court. This may wake the people up who supported these atrocities. I've thought about having a little fun teasing the conservatives down to the cafe, but it ain't over until it's over. I might find myself biting the hand that feeds me. Who needs that?

Ostensibly Yours, But Not Really

I'm feeling my age today. Images pop up in my mind that busy work won't stop them from coming. I unsubscribed from the philosophy discussion list. More proof that philosophy won't become what I want it to so I won't have to change my approach to it. It's more mathematical than suits me. At least the members that contributed on the philosophy discussion list seemed to think so.

The situation on that list was ostensibly commonplace. I don't know for sure if it's ostensibly anything yet. I've just started using the term "ostensible" for the last couple of days. I use "seem" and "appear" way too much and I've been on the lookout for some other words I can use just to avoid so much redundancy.

The meaning for ostensibly according to the Dictionary that comes with the Mac OS says this:

ostensibly |äˈstensiblē; əˈsten-|
adverb [ sentence adverb ]
apparently or purportedly, but perhaps not actually :
portrayed as a blue-collar type, ostensibly a carpenter.

The definition for ostensibly is quite similar to the expression "specious present" or perhaps the result of residing in the specious present. It enables one to view the eternal now as if it were plausible, but not convincing. I already use the term "purportedly" frequently. Ostensibly should fit right into what I attempt to describe a situation where something appears to fill the bill, but something is off-kilter. It's like when I smell a rat. Something fishy is going on.

I act like if I use a certain word in the way it was originally intended, then that word accumulates power it would normally not have. Frankly, it's a guessing game for me to be able to discern if my using a particular word in a certain way that I'm getting the results I'm filtering for, because I'm filtering for events I'm perfectly willing to make anything I want to of them.

It's like I've begun writing about using hypnogogic material to shape my dream images the way I wanna see them. I'm assuming that hypnogogic material is the same stuff that dreams are made of. I don't actually know what hypnogogic dream material is. Around ninety percent of the time I type the word hypnogogic the spell-checker lights up.

I'd like to find another description that would be apparent to most of the people I might attempt to communicate with. There are not many left willing to sit with me. It's not that people in general shun me, it's more like they wonder if what I got is contagious, and whatever it is, they don't want it. No blame.

I don't really want to think that I am subjectively responsible for creating the images of my dreamtime. Just recently I've been dreaming of getting trapped inside of these huge industrial complexes that are technological marvels. I'm a country boy. What the hell do I know about industrial complexes. That is easy. I worked in a lot of them during shutdowns to do temporary maintenance jobs. I helped build a lot of them from the ground up.

Okay, but how does what I merely "saw" extemporaneously in my dreams not only appear in pedantic detail, but I "live" there and use the facilities as if in real life. I can only assume that everybody else does too. In my dreams I run up and down stairs and through hallways and climb ladders and beat things with hammers, but I'm not really because I'm dreaming. I even know in dream time that I'm gonna wake up in a while, and all that I'm seeing and experiencing now will dissipate into nothingness, as if it never was "there".

I don't know if what happens in the daytime has those same attributes. Even sitting here now I know that what I see and experience presently will eventually go away when I enter the dream time. All that I am or seem is ostensible. The events of my daylight hours when all my sensory modalities are online and playing their roles cautiously cannot be carried with me inside the dome.

Currently, I'm wondering if there is as much separation between day and night as I've allowed myself to believe. I've read a lot about lucid dreaming and tried to get it going on my own volition. That hasn't worked out that well for me. I have lucid dreams occasionally. One in particular that I still re-member.

A couple of days ago I had an intuition pop into my mind's eye about how everything I've done to try to have lucid dreams at night is what I actually do when I'm awake and in my ongoing beta brainwave state of being. I'm aware that I'm awake and dreaming just like I'm supposed to be aware that I'm asleep and dreaming. Except that I'm taking control of and shaping my day dreams in the same way I've been encouraged to do in my dreams at night.

When I had my remembering vision I participated in what I saw and experienced in that vision in the same way that I see and participate in my nightly dreams, but I wasn't dreaming. It wasn't something I was gonna wake up from and soon forget. Because my remembering vision in which I was alive and participating in was just part of the deal. I was also just as alive and dreaming in my day time personality, which just happened to be entranced by some song lyrics printed on a dayglow poster board. Not only that, there was a third dreamer present who witnessed what the two dreams and dreamers were experiencing separately, yet simultaneously.

The very idea that much more could be going on in the situation in which my remembering vision took place than the day time dreamer and the night time dreamer being witnessed simultaneously. There could be lots more dreamers than merely the two dreamers the witness witnessed There could be legions of dreamers, all dreaming separate dreams, all witnessed by the One witness coherently. With the question being: How can one of the mere dreamers be-co-me that talented witness? It can't leave it's post. Why does it only invite those that have the ears to hear to be-with-me. Join the thousands of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

There is already a word for what I'm attempting to describe: omniscience. All knowing. That's what's really scary. The notion that there could be one witness and legions of dreamers that dreamed separately but simultaneously. I don't think it's something a dreamer can understand from the outside how it could be done. Only by being it. Being an integral part of it in real ti-me. Staying in the specious present is like a log-rolling contest. Ya' gotta have balance and some fancy footwork to stay afloat.

The Passage Of Ti-me

I kinda hate figuring out that hope is the only thing anybody got for sale. The more time that goes by, the more convinced I'm probably right. The implications of being right about hope being the only real commodity being bought and sold is a little disconcerting.

I just read this guy's experience of have a brain concussion during a snowboarding trip. He doesn't find out about it until it screws him up later. He has blood on his brain. The doctors operate, drain the blood, and he gets all better. He discovers the secret of life and that changes everything. Now, he wants to use this experience to offer people hope for a fee. A keep those cards and letters coming sort of "fee". A drop in the bucket, a widow's mite in the collection plate, "... hat's off to the red, white, and blue."

http://www.copyblogger.com/the-secret-of-life/

I began the web search "secret of life" following hearing a statement over TV that said, "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.", and it got stuck in my craw. The PBS channel was in between programs running some of their odious self-promotion and I wasn't paying attention much. I figured they were quoting some famous dead person they were gonna do a feature on later. I wrote it down just so I'd remember it.

I wondered if I could just write the sentence down in the Google entry box and see what popped up. Nothing directly, at least not at the top of the list of links at the top of the results page. The list of links were interesting though. I've never thought of running a search for what people consider to be the secret of life. I think the guy who got a subdural hematoma from a snowboarding accident concluded that if you "do what you love, then the money will come."

I still haven't found the author of the statement I heard on PBS. A script writer may have just made it up because it ostensibly spoke to the occasion. "Enjoying the passage of time" makes sense to me. If anything I do that turns out to be doing what I love, then it's gotta be enjoying the passage of time... so... where's the freaking money?

Nothing that has happen in my life recently has impressed me more than the inner turmoil I endured with having to take care of business when my water pipe from the county water meter to my house got a leak when a tree root expanded around the joint of the pipe. I had to deal with city hall, and the strong impressions I mention above were those of helplessness.

This incident cost me more in the long run than having my state taxes audited a while back, but having to recognize that I was helpless as an individual against the power of the state was the same feeling. My brother thought I oughta at least write a letter to the editor. It might make me feel better. I decided to just write a check and get them off my back. I still have to pay the meter fee because I own the property.

These events seem to fit real good in the pigeon hole with death and taxes. That seems to be what my life is about that no secret I've read about on the internet can intervene for me with. I've been diagnosed with an incurable disease that's well-known for inducing serious shape-shifting physical pain, and I'm being pestered by the power of the state for what resolves to "Give us your money or we'll take your life."

The fancy carriage that took me to the big dance is turning back into a pumpkin before it returns me to my wino's hootch. I shouldn't have believed so strongly in fairy tales. Nobody knows.

I Got The Twitter

I keep feeling that what's happening on the internet has been passing me by. My nature is that I wanna keep dealing with the world without learning anything new. Dagnabit! I have loved communicating by e-mail, but hated chat. I just didn't take to the chat format. I signed up for Twitter just to see where that takes me.

I put a Gadget for Twitter on the left side of this blog, and I guess you can sign up to follow my entries by clicking the included button below my latest entry, but I'm not clear on what else to do. Naturally, the first tweet I received was an e-mail saying that some Christian group is following my entries. I guess they're trying to save the world. They can read me all they want as long as I don't have to read their stuff.

When I signed up for an account I was given an option to see whether the people in my address book for gmail were also signed up as Twitterers. Only one guy I don't keep up with much. The sign-up program signed me up to follow his tweets. He's a pretty smart guy, so maybe he'll give me a few hints to get me started.

I described my real interest and vocation in a post yesterday that satisfies me it's my real interest and mild obsession. It seems like practically everything I do is somehow connected to me checking out and imitating those who appear to have it. Charisma is a broad topic that has lots of scope.

Lucid Dreaming vs Daydreaming

A question was asked about how often people have lucid dreams, and that question conjured this from me:

"I don't understand this. The dream cycles don't stop with the arrival of consciousness. Dreams are dreams like "parts is parts". Lucid dreaming is what one does when consciousness DOES arrive. Why would I count my daily lucid dreams if lucid dreaming is simply what I do when I'm conscious and hypnogogic dreaming is what I do when I'm not conscious?"

This seems to fill in some blanks about what consciousness is. Since I'm always the last to know, everybody in the world oughta already have realized this.

My vocation is to capture drifting thoughts with words. I don't care if the words I choose to represent the drifting thoughts I attempt to capture are true or false. I've done this for a long time and seem fairly sure of what I have to jettison to keep up with the tempo of the drifting thoughts I entertain. Drifting thoughts are like dreams to me, and they disappear just as quickly if anything interrupts the tenuous grasp I may hang on to them with.

One of the most fruitful tools or methods I began using for capturing drifting thoughts was palm reading. After I studied astrology for a long time and made my thousand natal charts from scratch (before computer software), I ran into this book about palm reading that had pages and pages of how the lines in people's palms might indicate actual events in their lives. The author also stated that if his readers had studied astrology, that's all they needed to read palms. I did and I began. Sometime for money. Most of the time not. Who doesn't like to hold hands with fifty to a hundred complete strangers in a typical day?

I don't know anything for certain. It's not like it matters to anybody but me, and I'm easy. I suspect the sleep cycle patterns don't stop when I wake up. I propose they're as continuous as our heart beat. Just like my heart don't stop beating when I got to sleep, I don't stop dreaming when i wake up in the morning. I start treating my daydreams as if they were what I am shaping to my own fancy. Just like the lucid dreaming descriptions say you gotta do to do lucid dreaming at night.

In the daylight hours when I'm normally conscious of my surroundings and performing my habituations as if an original thinker I am aware that I'm daydreaming. Maybe not at night when I'm dreaming. In bed, I may or may not realizing I'm dreaming when I dream. In the daytime I may not realize I'm daydreaming until I "wake up", but if I want to, I can deliberately let mysefl drift into daydreaming and shape the dream material as I want to.

Sometimes I could say things that really caused powerful reactions in people. Sometimes not. I didn't understand this until I began to read and study a book a friend gave me about the results being obtained about what happens when a person goes to sleep. I read about the universality of sleep cycles. Sleep laboratories wire people up to various detecting machines like EEG and EKG that tell them what phase of sleep the subject they're studying while they sleep is at in the universal sleep cycle.

The Om Chants

I believe we each create ourselves in our own image as if Gods. I can literally look out and modally perceive what the other has made themselves into for their own sake, But, if they attempt to explain why they made the choices to look the way they see themselves, I only hear what I think they're seeing. I only see what I hear them saying, as if I really consciously cognate a rose that is anything more than my idea of what a rose is, that is a rose like only I know for sure that roses are like. Who isn't selfish about how they smell roses?

It's warm enough today, barely, to leave the front door open and let my brother's dogs come in and out as they please. I don't think they're allowed to do that at his house without getting yelled at and maybe spanked, so when they come inside my house they do it very gingerly. They only stay for a little while as if they really were visiting, which they are. They not my dogs. I feed the the excess bacon grease from my frying pan occasionally. Especially if it's cold. Dry dog food ain't enough when it's cold. Some time I give each of them a strip of bacon if it stays cold too long. They look out for me too. They thing they own this place. "This land is my land. This land is your land. This land was made for me and you." ~ Woody

When they were puppies I recognized that I could stop them from following me home by screaming a C#6 at them, and they would tuck tail and run back under the shed where they were born. For the last couple of days I've been singing basso at them and patting them on their heads and backs in rhythm with the nursery rhyme I be singing. They get ever so jealous (anthropomorphically) of my ability to bark better than they do, and squirm their bottoms on the floor and howl at me. They try to bark like I'm singing. I would swear it's to impress me that they somehow understand what I'm doing.

Back when I kept a hatha yoga practice going on a daily basis for years at a time, it just seemed natural to sing a Hindu (maybe) chant Om ne padme Om. I thought that made me look slick with the green girls who frowned a lot and wore loose, slinky, see-through dresses. I used to remember the significance the creators attached to this om ne padme om chant. They seem to claim it's universal in the sense that it works no matter what your native language may be. It seems to work for me and I only have English.

I used chanting techniques daily for years and they really hoped me in the way it's claimed they will. There have been times when I have been so discombobulated by external events that the only thing that really worked toward leveling me out was to chant the same saying over and over until my frustration went away. Then, I might meditate. Chanting and singing both are ways of controlling the shape of the primeval scream. Pretty much like how wolves individually shape their own howling at the Moon, and loons screech to hear their calls echo over the waters.

In my opinion, humans use words for that. Words give humans ready-made shapes, tones, and tunings that can literally move mountains, and humans do. Sometime for no other reason than they can. Why would they not? Every life form needs some method for howling at the Moon. Isn't moving mountains by yodeling pretty much the same dynamic as a wolf howling at the Moon?

Chanting took a different turn after I began taking bel canto voice lessons sporadically in my twenties and thirties. I still do the Om chants most days, but I also do the warm-up exercises for that style of classical singing, and if I feel encouraged by how my voice warms up, I sing a good long time.

Fat Cats And Lead Hats

It isn't always up to each of us to either decide or act upon some uncontrollable situations. Call me eccentric (and solipsistic), please, but I think neutrinos have something to do with this. I know. I KNOW! It's an obsession. I've been told so many times even I believe it by now. But, I still think neutrinos have something to do with everything. Everything I tell you... Neutrinos Rule! LOL

I don't really know why. Personally, I just like the woid itself. N-e-u-t-r-i-n-o-s. I like it phonically and every other way. I'm a big fan! Whatta woe-to-the-Id (wo-id, word [one symbol short of being an entire 'world' in itself]) to make tossed word salad with!

Damn, that must have been a super-large solar flare recently. Neutrinos up the ying yang. Tossed word salad is about all I can reach for when the onslaught of neutrinos are busy changing and reframing the content of my entire body/brain by zipping right through me and the very ground/Earth I stand on non-stop. 

It's time to publish my disclaimer. I don't know the truth about anything. I select the words I write here up to satisfy an inner daemon that seems driven by a pre-reflective notion that the specious present waits for no man. The moving finger writes what it does and ricochets on down the road seeking only to keep it between the ditches during it's brief visit while celebrating some other dimension's holidays.

Have you ever been associated with nuclear power plants and all the lectures and safety classes that are forced upon the employees of all levels? They have a lot to say about what happens when the variously labeled "rays" go through your body. The bureaucrats who run these... these... machines... seem to insist thet you know why you can only accumulate so much damage to the cells in your body via that process before you gotta take a sabbatical from being there. Why? Because gamma rays act like neutrinos. The radiation acts like you ain't there when you really are. 

Sure, I know it's silly to use neutrinos as a metaphor for the messengers (me-singers) who carry the marching orders of the Sun that sends them here. The priggishly over-educated numerologists (devotees of Scientism) have made pompous claims that they have proved that solar flares are what make it so. Who am I to stop the Sun?

A lotta people over a long, long time have considered the Sun/Son their Father. Don't all father's evil-eyed stares (concocted to control their children's behavior in a glance) all have an odd, unfathomable glare to them that makes children shake in their galoshes? 

Is it not written that no man can gaze upon the face of God without being blinded by the light. It's like the behavior of tortured men brought forth in chains before their captor's master. Don't even dare to look up into IT'S face or IT might act like a junk yard dog and rip your throat out so that you can't even scream out the injustice of it all. 

Okay, that's more like the more ancient Gods. Heathen bastards! Modern Gods are nicer. You still get whacked, but you don't know why. How many times have you heard dying people in the media cry out in despair, "Why me, God? Why me... ?"

More and more people are considering buying themselves a lead hat to stop those neutrinos from causing so much entropy in their body. But, ya gotta think about it. The neutrinos not only go through your body as if it wasn't there, it also goes completely through the Earth as if the Earth wasn't here. What good would wearing a lead hat be?

Cancer is cell growth gone awry. The only hope a body has for replacing the cellular damage done by particles like neutrinos passing unobstructed through your body like x-rays or gamma rays is to heal the damage done by those sorts of interveners faster than they can tear your cells down. Fast cell growth is what cancer is. Life is controlled cell growth. If it doesn't happen fast enough to stave of the entropy of your closed system or it freaks out and grows cells faster than they can be accommodated, you end up quite dead. No blame. You knew you were taking a chance when you came here.

Coping With A Critical Shortage Of Sunlight

No matter what one's ambitions are, the one central issue that really matters with all goals is a person generally needs to get their story straight. Me more than most. If your brand of truth puts God on your side and you get a bunch of fan mail encouraging you to be even bolder, then that's another story. I wouldn't know about that. I don't know what God is any more than I know what the truth is. Sometime it seems like about any ol' truth is okay with me, because I don't know how to call the truth a liar. I'm attracted to Colbert's use of the term "truthiness". I'm easy. Just get close enough to some truthiness I can sort of agree with and I'll pretend to go along with you for the sake of moving on down the line.

I went to the cafe I go to a lot for lunch today. The only seat available was with this old man who prominently uses a walker and sets it out in the aisle where it gets in other customer's way. I'm trying to figure out if he does that deliberately. I'm getting nowhere with that. I've sat with him before. He drives over from a small town or village about twenty odd miles away to have breakfast on Sunday morning in this cafe in his Sunday's best. He's pretty spiffy. A goodly number of people speak to him and call him by name as they pass by the booth. I found myself a little envious of the attention he received. That's what you get for being a nice person. No blame. Next time. I'll be nicer next time, but I would say that, wouldn't I.

I understand the weird reasons I paint myself in a corner to isolate myself better now, but I haven't always acknowledged doing it for that reason. My acting that way has helped me deal with the world as I've created it with my priggish preferences. This trait has become more translucent and openly conscious to me for about a year now. I couldn't help noticing that I wasn't leaving the house as much as I was even a couple of years ago. I wasn't leaving that much even then.

This relatively new reclusive phase started about the time I began experiencing real and enduring pain in my joints from the arthritis. I became preoccupied with dealing with the pain. I kept expecting it to get better. I guess I was in denial that I had an incurable disease.

My last visit to the rheumatologist at the VA Hospital in Durham resulted in an upgrade on his initial diagnosis. He told me I have two kinds of osteoporosis instead of one along with the rheumatoid arthritis. This didn't bode well. He didn't cheer me up when he shrugged his shoulders and rudely pointed out:

"You'll be seventy soon, and stuff like this starts showing up around this time. You might as well get used to it. You're gonna be on this medicine that makes you extremely nauseated for the rest of your life." I could have done without the shrug.

The old man I was having breakfast with spoke with a ragged voice that sounded damaged in some way and he was difficult to understand. I remembered some of what he told me about himself from the other time I sat with him, and that helped me to figure out what he was talking about occasionally. If he got lost in what he attempted to tell me, then what I remembered helped me to ask him leading questions to get him back on track.

The dank chill in the Spring air brings back other memories of waiting for the weather to warm up and stay that way. I've been through lots of false Springs. Enough to not get my hopes up that barefoot weather comes and stays at this time of the year. It's gonna be cool and edgy this way for the entire seven-day forecast. Not really warm, but nearly freezing at night. It's warmer in Chicago for Pete's sake. At least the sun has come back out to stay a while.

I didn't think about the psychological affect of persistently cloudy gray days like the Northeast part of the country is famous for. I only became aware of it at all when it was talked about on the TV weather reports so much. I was intrigued when it was announced that people up in that area bought special house lights that simulated sunlight to fight off depression that apparently accompanies such dreary weather.

I still don't know a lot about the technical details of how that sort of depression happens. I do know after that I began to notice peripherally when there were a succession of cloudy gray days wherever I lived. I formed a conscious habit of paying attention to how a lack of sunlight affected me. Along with what I'm learning about vitamin D and how the production of it in one's skin can be important, I've became quasi-convinced there is something to what happens if you don't get enough sunlight. It's pretty much like the effect of the length of the days getting shorter and shorter after the summer solstice.

The lack of available sunlight, whether it's because clouds get in the sun's way or because the daylight hours get shorter due to the season, is the specific reason political and religious leaders have traditionally created a lot of holidays in the Fall months to ward off the holiday blues inflicted because of the days getting shorter. They have been doing it for as long as there has been a recorded history. Damned clever of them, don't ya think? The homo sapiens species is the best one we've created yet.

After New Year's it's a long dry spell of no holidays until Easter. Holidays are not needed because the daylight hours increase day by day. There is hope in the air. People began taking off some of their winter clothes and expose a lot more sexy skin. That alone is enough to entertain even restless natives. Holidays? Who needs them. Life's a beach...

Burying The Past Before It's Dead

What I did to impress my father that I was following in his footsteps didn't work out so well. I became the kind of person he wanted to help, but he didn't want his own son to be one of the ones he saved from what had been in store for him.

I just wrote about the Magazine Street Mission story in an e-mail I just composed. The frequency that it comes up in my writing implies that it has an extraordinary place of importance in my dream time.

I wrote about how I sat in the front corner pew of the Mission's rude chapel so I could watch the faces of the other bums and drunks seeking refuge from a night on the streets of New Orleans. The religious service we had to attend was the price of admission for an inside place to be. The cops in New Orleans were scarier than the crooks. That was then. I can't imagine anything has changed because of the hurricane. Why would it?

What impressed me about the descriptions I conjured for the e-mail response this morning was that what I saw when I looked back to watch those bewildered faces made me wanna find a way to communicate with them in a language they would listen to with some interest.

Learning what it would take to reframe my lexicon to one that might penetrate the effects of chronic fatigue seemed like an original challenge to me, but in reflection it may have been what my father intended all along. Maybe he tricked me with misdirection. Maybe not. He's been dead for well over a decade now. I can't ask him. I doubt he would offer me a digestible answer in any case.

My father's mission may have been the direct result of America's Civil War. Maybe even one of America's wars before even that. The story I'm most familiar with (and a lotta these hand-me-down stories haven't panned out) is that the reason my father's ancestors lived in the Alabama/Mississippi area down near Mobile was that the land they developed into a cotton plantation was a federal land grant given to veterans of this earlier war as a reward for their service to the country.

My father had a habit of telling a story about how some of the significant others in or about his natal family had a habit of referring to his obsession to formally educate himself with a condescending label of "Poor Bill". He was the first and only child in his family (he was the youngest) who completed the seventh grade, much less get a college degree. In other words, they thought he had gone bonkers to do without and sacrifice to get a head.

My father's fondest wish for me, before he turned to my younger brothers to satisfy his thoughts and aims, was that I would get a head too. It pissed him off to no end for me to attempt to convince him that I was born with a head, and since such was a fait accompli his ambitions for me were not appealing. He never forgave me. Considering what I became to defy him, I don't blame him. It is only important to me that I forgive him. I don't know how I would gnow if I had.

One of the habits or rituals I'd definitely have to work on is forgiving him for bringing his job home with him, and continuing to treat me as his student rather than his own son when school hours were over. He punished me by holding me up to the standards his best students achieved, and used his students to render most of the punishment. I was extremely jealous of the time my father spent with his favorite students.

His favorite students were carbon copies of Poor Bill. He believed in them the way he was himself ignored. He made up for what was missing in their life by providing himself as a model for his students to emulate as a replacement for their own fathers, who were Poor Bill's too.

After the Civil War came the cotton bollweevils, and then the Great Depression. There were real reasons why the economy of the Southeastern U.S. was in shambles. My father's grandfather died after he returned from fighting in the Civil War only to die of chronic fatigue and shell-shock. The ravages of the reconstruction years were deep and personal in every Southern family. They lost the war, and most of the working aged men who know how to make a living. Only the Southern woman carried the day.

There were a lotta men around when my father immigrated here specifically to teach agriculture who had not been raised by a progressive culture whose social activities were organized by beneficent leaders. They were killed or despoiled by the aftermath of man-made and natural disasters or they just left the South for greener pastures because it was such a sad place to be. The Southern states didn't get federal funds alloted like it was to most states until World War Two came and passed, even though they paid as much taxes as they could. War might be Hell, but losing a war is even more hellish.

For the most part my father's efforts to replace the inured Poor Bills were applauded by the real fathers and the community in general too. He had grassroots power for trying to make the brighter children of the poor farmers and even poorer tenant farmers and sometimes rich farmers better men than they could themselves.

It was the State of North Carolina that was responsible for bringing in professional help to get their agrarian economic engine in better working condition. They hired at least forty college graduate agriculture teachers from Mississippi alone, and a lot more from other states.

The farmers in North Carolina were so beat down by what happened to their economic system that they were reduced to just copying the behaviors of the wealthier farmers, and plowed when they plowed, planted when they planted, and harvested when the rich folk harvested too. The rebellious ones followed the Almanacs and planted by the cycles of the Moon.

the personality of my father couldn't have walked into a more auspicious situation. Even according to him it was love at first sight. The State really backed up their decision to educate it's farmers so they could lift themselves up by their own bootstraps by adopting an aggressive system for paving the farm roads to help them bring their farm products to the market. My father was living a dream. He didn't have much time for me except when he couldn't find somebody to fill up with his missionary zeal for bettering the world. By the time I was a teenager I wasn't listening anymore, and that cut him to the quick.

It saddens me to no end that my own children will not be able to sit down at their computers when they get old like me and write about their experiences with their father when they were young. I wasn't there. I left my first wife and child when my first child was a baby, and my second-wife left me when our two girls were only three and five years old. They know the people they work with better than they do their own father. Why would they not resent me every time they see their friends hug their father? They're barely curious about me now, as if an afterthought they soon ignore. No blame.

If I live long enough (and since it's written that the good die young, why would I not), then the time will come when I won't know who anybody is anymore. Both my mother and my father didn't rightly know precisely who me or my siblings were for years before they finally croaked. We took care of them anyway.

For me, if I live long enough, all the people who encounter me will not only be strangers to me because I'm demented, they really will be strangers who can't possibly know whether I was any particular kind of person at all. I'm only praying I can finally learn to get off sexually on pain. If that happens I'll know immediately because of the arthritis.

Careless Love

The more I write on the internet the more I realize that I don't have the right to write anything I like. It's not so much a freedom of speech issue as one of ethics. I would write that knowing full well I don't have a clue what "ethics" really amounts to. My best shot at having any would have been when I was being hypnotized into using hypnosis in an ethically responsible manner, and I always have, but only because i wuz hyp-no-tized! ;-)

I'm glad I was unknowingly hypnotized into using hypnosis in an ethical manner because I was being inducted into a professional association named the Ethical Hypnosis Association. I was being inducted into this professional group by it's founder and President, Doctor Milton Erickson, otherwise known (but not to me, yet) as Uncle Miltie.

Uncle Miltie came to the graduating ceremonies of the hypnosis school I had been attending. He handed out the Certificates of Completion to the graduates of Harry Aaron's Hypnosis School. Harry was teaching Ericksonian Hypnosis, so Uncle Miltie actually cared who learned it, because he flew all the way from Arizona to be there in New Jersey. We were each called to the front of the room where Doctor Erickson handed us our certificates and said something personal to each of the twenty-two brand new professionally recognized ethical hypnotists.

That "something personal" was loaded for bear. Uncle Miltie was famous for taking the shortest amount of time using the least number of words to change people's lives forever. Who knew? I didn't. Not until some twenty-odd years later when I became interested in a method called neurolinguistic programming. It was primarily based on the now deceased Milton Erickson's work. In that brief interchange with Doctor Erickson at the certificate ceremony at Harry Aaron's second-floor Hypnosis School, he gave me a valuable gift I'd need to live so irresponsibly some people wanna shoot me. It took a long time to realize that his unrequested gift to me was a sense of ethical behavior that's got legs and can travel light.

I don't feel as though I especially need to act ethically according to some pundit's well-intended advice. My duty is just to be aware that some people place a lotta value on ethics of unknowable cultures and customs, and for that reason alone I gotta watch out for people like that with the cautiousness of a person attempting to live a life of no blame. They're easy to spot. Either they're wearing a bow-tie or they're persistently hanging around looking goofy with someone who does. '-)

I enjoyed writing the paragraph below to this guy (he uses a guy's name) on this philosophy discussion list I subscribed to recently. I like the end part where I wrote about having to be a child to see this guy in his pompous, emperor-like ways, wore no clothes:

"I don't know what shelf you have decided to put yourself on. How could I? I only have the woids and expressions you write down to impress who- or whatever you sing to for your supper. Since I've never seen you with my eyes or heard you with my ears nor touched you or smelled you or tasted you, the only clues I have for grokking who-you-think-you-are is the way you appear to judge the other as if they were you instead of themselves. Even then, I have to interpret your judgments of the other (as if they were you), but if they're of the same ilk you appear to accuse them of being, only the child in me, Great Emperor, can see that you're nakid. '-)"

This guy didn't like what I wrote. He called me not-me-s (names) for writing it. He suggested I was not his sort of person and that he was never gonna communicate or recognize my solipsistic posts again. Oh God, another shunning. Personally, I don't know what the big fuss is about.

Candidly, I don't think this guy was ever gonna abide with me much from the gitgo. He appears to think I gotta be like he thinks I should be to be okay. I don't be culling for that so much, but life in general seems to. Maybe I'll pray for him (or not) later, but right now I'm curious about what I might have meant when I wrote about having to see through the other's pomposity with the eyes of a child. That actually seems do-able. Watching myself write that statement might indicate how close I need to keep my child's eyes near to me for use in capturing drifting thoughts. One of my more involved avocations.

What does this say about being able to "see" or "look" upon a multiplicity of events within my sensory scope with the soft eyes of a child to "see through" the accumulated true or false baggage of making believe? Meditate more? Stay closer to the fire? Listen to the softest inner voices? Is this done with the peripheral vision?

It's claimed by vision researchers on the internet somewhere, that homo sapiens can comprehend the least amount of useable sensory data for making sense of the purported "little" that it does comprehend. I seem convinced the data that is comprehended as visual content of the peripheral vision has been less filtered by what our caregivers force upon us in order to civilize us enough to live in the company of man. I suspect many of the images we encounter in the peripheral vision in full consciousness are from a very primitive aspect of homo sapiens that can't be ethically named and thus given life in our memories.

I'm attempting to say, in my opinion, that the raw data processed by the peripheral vision is probably pre-civilized stuff. The unfiltered stuff of the dreamtime, but it happens when we're awake with our eyes open. I don't mean to patronize, but the eyes have to be open for the peripheral vision to be operant, but I'm suggesting that the peripheral vision "sees" the same hypnogogic material seen in the unconscious sleep cycles at night. By the time this beta stage data passes through the mediation process of the adopted rules of conscience that happens before it's "seen" by the foveal vision, the rough edges have been smoothed or you'd re-act to the way of the world as if a feral animal that's most dangerous when it IS civilized. Talk about selling myself short! Damn! What a fool I've been...

That frightens me a little. Keeping my childish ways close to the surface of my personality might invite snide comments and attract muggers of all kinds to what they see as a weakness. the inner sense of the innocence of that which is most childish about me is that it might be more of a curse than a blessing, time-wise, I would have to devote a lot of attention to changing it's swaddling clothes in order to make being there a common practice.

The Uncreated

The temperature is supposed to get up into the mid-seventies (23-24 C) for the first time in a week or so. It's been cold and dank and cloudy for the last six days in a row. What a drag, man. The Sun is out in full force today, however, and I'm gonna take a long shower and lay around naked in the sun for a while just to luxuriate like a rich man.

I spent about two hours or so reading an article on the state of SSDs (Solid State Drives) at the Anandtech web site this morning:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

The guy that runs this site is a fine writer in general, but he's one of the best explainers of technology for all levels of experience I'm aware of. When he sets out to inform you about some new technology, what he writes is probably gonna be your best shot at understanding it unless you're as close to the fire as he is. He wrote a previous review of SSDs that practically changed the whole industry because he found them grossly lacking, and he said so in no uncertain terms. Brave lad. He bit the hand that feeds him to get them to do right. One of them did, and it made all the SSD manufacturers better for it.

I read the first article and found it very useful. This new article on SSDs is very timely. He openly admits that the Intel SSDs are as good as it gets, and although the improvements the other SSD manufacturers have made increased Intel's competitors marketability, Intel SSDs still rule the roost. They're more expensive, but for the superior performance thay offer Anandtech appears to think it's worth it.

Having to pay that huge penalty for my pipe springing a leak has dampened my excitement about the possibility of installing an SSD in my Mac Mini. I read where I'd have to upgrade my Operating System to do it anyway. The hard drive is the biggest bottleneck in the Mac Mini, and even one of the cheaper SSDs would change everything including the slow graphics. Shuttling data between a slow 5400 RPM hard drive and the motherboard graphics chips would change dramatically. I'll just have to sacrifice some other diversions that give me a little pleasure. How much I spend for food is about the only place I could watch my pennies. I'm overweight anyway.

I'm thinking more about memory systems lately. I've read somewhere the Koran was created by professional memorizers who listened to Mohammed's sermons, and then recited them to professional scribes. Islam seems like it''s based on these professional's capitalism. Why would it not be? Everything else is... or will be.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who is convinced that a person who has a highly developed long-term memory can make a middling living from remembering stuff that other people don't know how to preserve. Many of the systems of expertise some people practice amounts to the systematic way they employ memory pegs or hooks to associate with any event they wanna remember.

The constellations of stars can be used as pegs for remembering things. They're famous for being in the same place for long periods of time. This really is a complex way of remembering things. The learning curve can be daunting. Just look up into the heavens on a crisp cold winter night when the stars seem so close you can reach out and touch them. The appearance of them are so random that you can pick out any part of the sky canopy and find an assemblage of stars that look like the Little Dipper. Just keep looking in the same direction for a while with the intent of locating the Little Dipper where you're looking, and your mind will assemble what's there into what you're filtering for.

After you have memorized some of the Major Constellations you have to memorize the myths, stories, and metaphors associated with specific groups of stars. Some of which may be only recognizable by your mentor. Why not? Any group of stars can be used symbolically by anybody who decides what they want them to mean. It's the epitome of me-and-thee-ing.

There are natural holy spots on Earth that are holy spots because they have distinctive features that can serve as memory hooks. Mountains are particularly useful because normally they stay the shape they are for a long time. I used to have reason to drive to Drexel, North Carolina just off of I-40. On a clear day I could tell how close I was to Drexel by a small mountain called High Peak. It was located on the other side of I-40 from Drexel and served as a landmark. A holy place is usually loaded with landmarks for using as hooks to associate specific memories with.

Mount Rushmore is like that, but what makes it a holy spot is partly man-made. I've been there a couple of times. Mount Rushmore wouldn't attract much attention without the faces of four Presidents sculpted on it. Now, the sculptures make the surrounding mountains landmarks of a Mount Rushmore visit, and it's a dandy wholy spot. Bow-tied conservatives worshiping patriotism. '-)

Temples and museums and huge libraries are deliberately built with their own distinctive features for the specific purpose of be-co-me-ing a holy spot. People who commit the distinctive features of a certain edifice to memory for the purpose of using it's features and statuary as memory hooks are said to be "of that temple", just as college graduates are said to be of that university. The Greek temples had teachers like Plato and Socrates hanging around the stoas and porches. They lectured alright, but one of their main jobs was to help their students memorize every feature of that temple. I'm guessing it was actually the only lessons they needed to become professional memorizers to serve the tops. If they learned to read and write and work numbers, they were even more useful, and sometime exalted.

The printing press was probably responsible for graven images taking over the mental direction of homo sapiens. With a memory system like that of astrology or temples (as above, so below) in place, learning the various systems of graven images should be easier at every turn.

There is another source to consider than systems of expertise. That's a system without a learning curve. A pre-existing system that can only be brought into consciousness by being revealed for what it is. It is in place even before you are born and will be there when you die, after the learned systems will be dust unto dust long before you realize you never needed them.

What Does One Thing Have To Do With The Other

I'm still trying to describe gnosis as a remembering. I wrote a new description of some sort on this new discussion list that lets me write there. It seems like many of the people who post on this philosophy discussion list approach philosophy from an academic angle, and that means something different to me than it does to them, and vice versa.

I approach philosophy as a progression from poetry and they seek proofs through mathematics. I don't care if what I write is right or wrong (I don't have time to judge if I wanna stay in flow). Many of the other members seem pedantically obsessed with producing pure thought and truthiness from their own perspective. No blame. I don't know if they understand my sense of humor, but they haven't kicked me off the list yet.

I'm playing around with the idea that what a lot of people need to satisfy their urges is to get emotionally met by remembering all of themselves like what happened to me. One facet of the way this thing has matriculated is that I don't remember doing anything any differently than I regularly did as the onset of the vision.

If what i describe causes some person to remember that something similar happened to them it might really surprise me. I haven't kept what happened a secret. I've described it to lots of people lots of times. I've read about what happened to me happening to other people. A couple of times by a living writer I might could have had a conversation with.

The one person who appeared to find my remembering vision plausible committed suicide. I didn't find out about it for years. Maybe I didn't wanna know, but I forgot that I could have easily found out by Googling it up. He was a famous person. The news of his death by any means had to have been national news. He may have been dead for ten years before I found out. Unfortunately, that's not new for me at all.

I don't consider myself to be an idealist, but my father was. He preached idealism and having "high ideals". Maybe I've become my father in my dotage without realizing it, but it certainly don't feel like it to me. My mother didn't leave his side for the last ten years of his life. I'm certainly not like my father in that regard. It's looking more and more like my own prophecy will come true.

I've lived alone for the last twenty odd years, and I'll die alone like a dog in a ditch. Candidly, becoming the kind of man my father was on my deathbed is not a very realistic possibility. I've lived long enough after his death to view him more like an ordinary person instead of the way I perceived him as my father. I don't think he really asked for the troubles my birth brought him.

It was only after I read Elaine Pagels' book The Gnostic Gospels:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/pagels.html

and then joined an e-mail discussion group did I realize that my remembering vision was what these people were calling gnosis. I had thought of it more to do with Kundalini. This realization took thirty years to get to.

My realizing that this strange vision I had just after my first Saturn Return was gnosis started opening all sorts of doors for me. But, the most important thing I realized in recognizing what gnosis is, is that is is not something learned, but remembered. That was the keystone of my understanding something huge. Well, huge for me. Your milage may vary.

The real trick for me after realizing that I'd been made whole thirty years ago without realizing the remembering visions implications is to remember to realize I'm perceiving what's sot before me with a huge increase in insight. But, that insight can be used only for making sense out of what I "see".

I had the vision first, and then the realization of it's true value much, much later. I didn't realize that poem was prophecy until just now, but it doesn't surprise me. Many of the poems that fell in my lap after the remembering vision have been prophetic, but nobody knows. Why would they?

Dying And A Murderous Desire To Be Left Allone

The physical pain I experience from the rheumatoid arthritis is real and 24/7. Obviously, if I'm asleep then I'm not conscious of the pain, but when I wake up at the end of each 90 minute sleep cycle it's ghoulishly waiting for me. If I have to urinate, then this interlude between sleep cycles is when I'm going to become aware of bladder discomfort also. When I swing my legs over the side of the bed to get up, all the pain memores pop back into consciousness, but taking care of business in the bathroom seems to go okay until I crawl back into bed and go to pull the covers back over my body to warm back up after peeing.

Writing, for the most part, is about the only activity that allows me to let go of my body enough to make time fly. As I've noted continuously I don't care if what I'm writing is considered to be true or false. That's not up to me, but to my reader. Yes, if you're reading this, then you're my reader. For the period of time you attempt to cogitate this tossed word salad I own you. So does any other writer you read, and if we don't own you it's not your fault when you go looking for another temporary top to take your attention away from you for a while. Writing makes time fly for writers just as reading makes time fly for readers. Some people are both. All writers read what they wright. Playwrights not withstanding.

I drove to Wilmington to get out of the environment that seemed to have me trapped in it's conventions, and the change of scenery seemed to do what I've always relied upon it to do. I use self-conversations as a ritual to segue from one set and setting of catastrophe to the next. I have read where some Asian cultures consider self-conversations to be an enemy to rid oneself of, but I disagree. If I had been raised in a culture that supported those particular rules of conscience, then resorting to them for comfort might be used to change my mood toward some sort of righteousness, but that's not the case. I was raised most poignantly in the Southern United States in what's commonly referred to (for good reasons) as the "Bible Belt".

If I am in pain, discomfort, and dis-ease, and I wanna reach for something familiar as a way to concoct an attitude that will make me feel better, I have to reach for what's already there for me as raw materials. My subjective experiential database of past experiences. The very source of where I get the materials I use to accuse other people of my own self-generated "problems".

I gotta accuse other people of being who-I-think-I-am-is or I'd never find out which rules of conscience I adopted to become like the people who "have it made". When I meet or hear about somebody who has it made I try to put myself in the position of witnessing how they do what they do, and start imitating who-I-think-they-are. Why would I not? It's why I majored in Drama and Speech in college, and it's how I eventually became a homo sapiens after arriving on the planet Earth (fairly late in the ga-me) as a teeny tiny black hole and immediately began drawing stardust within my event horizon to make something out of nothing. It wasn't my idea. I just imitated the other teeny tiny black holes that arrived before me and did what they were doing.

Do not for a moment think I don't know how crazy this seems to many people, but for everything one group of people think I'm nuts for believing, there's an equal number of people who wanna put me on a pedestal for exhibiting the very same trait. Double-bind. Damned if I do; damned if I don't. There's no exclusivity to go along with this condition. I'm willing to believe there are not many exceptions to the rule, and if there are, I'm apparently not worthy enow to gnow.

Me-And-Thee-ing For Love

I have a reason for using this hyphenated expression to indicate a simile with "meaning". It's because truth can only happen between me and thee in real ti-me and nothing more. I'm thinking even to say only WHEN you and I are face to face. Just as soon as we look away from each other what WAS truth is instead mere history.

I just hate this. God help me when I think of those ti-me-s I've betrayed the truth that ex-is-ted between thee and me. It's how I've become a shamed man. A man of constant sorrow. I'm forever guilty of turning away from the truth that extemporaneously excludes the world of being-for-the-other to see you look at me as if your prey. I loved being your prey. When you consume me I grow back with fresh eyes, the better to eat you with my dear.

The situation with the pipe that got eaten by a pine tree root system had me in a dither. I just gave them the money without a fight. I won't fight city hall. It's not to die for. It's only money. They'll make more.

I decided to drive down to the ocean and back to give myself a chance to allow new scenery to give me fresh ideas. Hopefully something i could obsess on for a little while to get my mind off the way the fox got into the hen house.

The completion of Interstate 40 to the Atlantic Ocean port city of Wilmington has really provided me with something new to look at. I've been making that trip frequently for over sixty years. It's only an hour away. I haven't gone there much in the last few years. I-40 has changed everything. The capitalists have arrived and turned it into a shopping mecca larger than I had ever imagined.

Oddly enough, the one commercial enterprise that impressed me was a CostCo store across from the Corning campus where I worked a few months. I helped fit pipe to build a large addition to make fiber optic cables.

Hordes of people occupy both sides of US 17 along the beach north of Wilmington. Expensive places. Luxurious places. Places that lure hurricanes to come and show them who is boss. Nobody cares. They'll build more.

It's a little dangerous for me to be alone so much. I get so used to having my own way that having to adjust to the rights of others can catch me off-guard. It's not dangerous to anybody else. I just get grouchy and act nutty, but people are more likely to try to calm me compassionately than to react in fear. They seem to know I'm no threat to them better than I do.

I had a difficult time yesterday calming myself down from having to write that check for so much money. I live pretty close to the bone. I figure sometimes I need a little reminder that I'm not dead yet, and that for as long as I live I have to take care of my personal affairs for as long as I can or somebody will take care of them for me, and whether I like the way they're doing that or not.

One of my most profound and humiliating experiences was to see my father trussed up in a straight jacket because he wouldn't stop running around the hospital hallways nakid as a jaybird. He was in his second childhood and thought doing that would make the grown-ups laugh like they did when he really was a toddler. He had no idea he was 87 years old.

I walked into his hospital room at the county hospital where his home nurse had sent him for some reason, and there he was looking like the saddest little version me I'd ever seen reflected. The nurse told me what happened and that he could either behave or stay in the strait jacket. I felt so helpless because I knew that if I forced the issue to take the strait jacket off him he wouldn't get the treatment he was there for.

My memory of that occasion prevented me from unknown results I might have gotten when I was in a hospital for a back operation. I was all doped up and walking around with the wheeled cart that carried the bottles for my IVs, and when I looked out the hospital's windows and saw the neon lights of downtown I decided that I'd like to go to a cafe and sit down to a good cup of coffee. When i explained this to the nurse they called for a big strong orderly to watch me and keep me from leaving the hospital premises.

That's when i remembered my father in the strait jacket. I changed my tune immediately, explained myself, apologized for not thinking straight about my situation, went back to my room, and the orderly went away.

The Internet As World Mind

If people who can't do, teach; then what is it that philosophy teachers can't do?

Maybe they can't be-co-me oracles. If they can't respond to oracular questions ala the Sphinx, then they can't have the privacy of the desert to themselves. I don't remember what the penalty was for not answering the Sphinx' riddle, but there was a price to pay for wasting it's ti-me with trivialities.

I continue to be amazed that all I really have to do about wot's sot before me is to know the exact question to ask, and to be patient enough for the correct response to sink in to the person occupying the warm body that answered the call.

The average person you might meet walking down a street full of pedestrians don't realize they can be used as an oracle by anybody who knows how. It's even harder for them to realize they already have been, and/or were before they could stop themselves from saying the first thang that popped into they mind. Becoming an oracle for a complete stranger in the immediacy of now just ain't what most people expect to happen on a day to day walk in the park.

It's a little ridiculous of me to expect people who don't even know what an oracle is other than what they've read about that used to be so in some ancient past. Why would they not. How could the very idea of oracles enchant those who don't know what they are or do?

I consulted the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching daily or almost daily for over thirty years until I was told by my inner voice to stop doing that. It was only after I managed to stop using the written copy of the I Ching as an oracle that I realized that being stopped from using the book was the only way I could have realized I was supposed to ask my unending questions of real people. I hate to say it, but any warm body will do including my own.

I've already removed myself from the presence of others to some large, lingering degree that has even me worried a little. Using other people as oracles for a body of understanding they can't possibly see themselves as a container for is a lot like using an internet search engine like Google or Yahoo. Why would they compare themselves to such a digital portal as Google or Yahoo?

Unless a comparison of that sort was brought to their attention by an external source, they would never consciously know such a thing is possible. Once a person has been online for a while it's easy to understand how to use Google. When to use it takes a little longer. I had to be reminded by my youngest brother countless times to take my incessant questions to the internet and leave him alone. That was his way of habituating me to using a search engine to answer my own questions.

It shocks me a little to realize that the questions I usually want answered are not all that unusual. When I go to type in the subject or topic I want answers to, the drop down menu already has it listed as a common inquiry. I honestly thought I was a bit more complex than that. Granted, many of the questions I use Google for are questions of some doubt that I ever did actually know the real answer to.

Google is the old person's friend. It provides me with the commonly used words and descriptions I lose from the tip of my tongue. If I'm sitting at my computer I can use natural language questions or a list of associative words to "remember" what wasn't there for me just moments ago.

The internet as one huge world-wide database is still not large enough of a container to hold the evolutionary experiences of one person, and yet each person in the world contains a complete experiential database of everything they've ever made themselves into from the ti-me they arrived on planet Earth. That's talking about something very, very small. How small is truly moot. There doesn't seem to be an end to it. The people on that quest appear to be making it up as they go along, and creating smaller and smaller stuff to base their claim to fame on.

Burning Bushes

The new discussion groups I subscribed to aren't working out like I had hoped. I just unsubbed from one of them. I concluded it was the internet version of the Jerry Springer Show. Lots of name-calling and screaming in capital letters. The other one is a philosophy group, and oddly enow it has a lotta name-calling on it too. It seems filled to the brim with academic types that act like they're still trying to get good grades in some college course. Either that or teaching a college course. I've asked a couple of questions, but except for once I've been ignored. No blame.

I thought my last question was a good one. I asked this one guy why he concluded that the information the brain uses was only inside the brain. I was thinking about high powered electrical transmission line that radiate a magnetic field. The content of the copper wire is not just inside the wire but causes that magnetic field that surrounds it. I knew that my question might cause the guy to think I was going esoteric on him, and I was, but they were talking about brains as computers and how electricity affects mental processes. It wouldn't surprise me if whoever runs this group finds my offerings less than acceptable and kicks me out.

I seem to be moving to the point where that kind of thing doesn't matter too much to me anymore. The news that I'm gonna be taking methotrexate for the rest of my life seems to be the culprit. I've worked outside practically all day. I've been burning off the dried grass on my lawn and in the edge of the woods around my house. I've been burning in small patches because the wind has been up.

This work is a continuation of when I cleaned out some of the underbrush between my house and the pond when the sun sets over it most of the year. The two tornados that tore down the forest around my house left the woods around my house in a mess. It blew down or broke most of the forty year old yellow pines my father planted. I haven't really been out there trying to clean up so much. I was very disheartened by the loss of such a beautiful bunch of woods. They made my house look unique despite the fact that it's a rat hole. With the big trees gone, it's just a rat hole.

I've been working recently on the the north side of my house between here and the paved road. I'm about 150 yards back off the road, and the woods and underbrush and briar patches had taken over. The big fallen logs have all about rotted now, and I was able to take my axe and bust them up a lot easier than I thought. That's about the only way I can get them to dry out from the winter rains so they would burn. Soon enow, I'll be able to just take a little walk out into the woods and not have to fight off the briars and other entanglements. I might even plant a little fancy shrubbery and a flower plant or two. The rosemary bush I bought during the winter at a good price is gonna love the place I picked out specially for it.

The Me-and-thee-ing Of Vocation

This is a very odd site that sends out strange pictures. I can't read the language so I don't know where it's located. It's set up on RSS on my machine, but it should work just fine if you dial into it the regular way:

feed://halbot.haluze.sk/rss.php

I subscribed to a couple of e-mail discussion groups that seem to be about philosophy. One of them approved me quick, and I'm still waiting on the other. I chose groups that seemed active by the number of posts over the last few months. Some of the groups I checked out had lots of subscribers, but very few posts. One of them supposedly had 33,000 subscribers and only five or six posts for the whole month. The ones I subscribed to had consistent numbers over a long period of time.

I like reading e-mails from an active group if it's a subject I'm interested in. I get ideas to write about here in my blog from the discussion groups. I'm thinking I gotta get away from religion groups where lots of infighting occurs. Certainly more than meets my fancy. I feel like I've gotten to where I wanted to go with religion. I seem to be able to defend my religious view against all comers. So, why bother?

I read somewhere once that the Druids had ranks among their wandering priests with the highest being that of philosopher. The one under that was poet. I think it's kind of natural to matriculate from poetry to philosophy. Things get too big to be held in the container of poetry. Not only am I trying to expand my poetry into prose, I am trying to decode it and remember why I hid it away in nebulously connected words and phrases in the first place.

Wanting be more transparent demands that I make my abstract notions lucid. Lucid to me for the first part. A lot of the stuff I encounter in the dream time feels right, but I find it difficult to put into words that can be keened by the sensory dimension. In my remembering vision, ninety-odd percent of the experiential material doesn't and never did associate with words or even an integrated language of any sort. You gotta be an animal with some sort of brain for that.

The particular vision I had that revealed all the forms of life that I'd ever made myself into as a pearl of great price is a great challenge to put into words because they were never entered as sensory data. Many of the first forms of life I created via imitation of other pearls didn't have any sensory preceptors like eyes and ears. Tactile associations were about the best feedback from an external input source was about all they could hope for. Are all sensory preceptors made from skin?

I do seek to capture drifting thoughts like it states in the header at the top of the blog. I'm sort of convinced the "drifting thoughts" I seek to capture with words are me-mores from the other forms of life I created through mimicry.

To say that I attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words is a way of stating my intent for writing what I write here. The source for these drifting thoughts might seem a little unusual for those who hold no truck for visionary processes. If that's the case, why are you wasting your time? I'm not going to come around to your way of ideating. I like being stuck right where I am is.

One of the ways these kinds of memores attract my attention is by literally seeing something like an animal I made myself into by imitating other pearls who were imitating other pearls ad infinitum. Whatever us pearls/curls do, we do it in harmony. If we start evolving a grazing animal suitable for a specific set and setting we all do it by imitating the other pearls around us.

Not all the pearls are within the necessary proximity to see what all the other pearls are busy making themselves into. It might be the sa-me species, but there's gonna be a lotta variation on theme according to where you are in the pearl crowd and which pearls you're imitating. the ones on the outside of the core group won't get all the nuances of the main chance.

The people of a more conventional persuasion ain't gwine listen to no cockamamy ideas like this nor should they. I figure you gotta have a calling, and that resolves to you being one of those pearls yo'self. If your ground of being ain't that, then you might as well go read James Joyce to amuse yourself.

I read this description of what a "vocation" is written by Carl Jung:

To have vocation means in the original sense to be addressed by a voice ... whereupon they are at once differentiated from the others and feel themselves confronted by a problem that the others do not know about... - C.G. Jung

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extraordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God ... But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape ... He must obey his own law, as if it wee a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. - C.G. Jung

http://koti.mbnet.fi/amoira/jungvoc1.htm

Actually, there are two separate quotes both on the same page at the site I linked. They sort of need to go together to get the complete idea, but there is another quote from the Gospel of Thomas needed to circle the wagons:

82 Jesus said, "Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the kingdom."

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

I once saw a definition for "vocation" that opposed it to "avocation". A vocation can be concerned with how close one is to the voice that provides them with their calling. If the voice is heard as being nearby the vocation can be as strong a calling as that of an obsession. Terse, forceful. Whereas an "avocation" is a calling from a voice that's far away and commonly referred to as behavior like a hobby. It's a matter of how close you are to the voice that initiates the calling. Voca/vocal.

I figure the Gospel of Thomas saying (#82) is pretty much the same metaphor, but it's compared to a fire instead of a voice. There are a number of sayings in the Gospel of Thomas where the "Jesus said:"is about fire. Why would it not? Jesus, like Baal, was a sun God.

My Mother's Religion

I kept my second appointment with the rheumatologist at the VA Hospital in Durham yesterday. It didn't take as long this time. He doubled the amount of calcium + vitamin D he thinks I oughta be taking because of those broad spectrum vitamin D research projects that are just now producing viable results. He agreed that the problems I've had with dairy products probably came from me trying to get the calcium my bones needs from using dairy products as a source. The calcium pills I've been taking for months now get their calcium from coral and oyster shells instead.

This doctor told me he probably wouldn't be there for my next appointment. He served his apprenticeship at the VA and Duke Hospitals and is setting up for business in Fayetteville. He invited me to become his patient there. Fat chance of that on my income. I like his approach to medicine. I'd continue with him if I could afford it. I provoked him into telling me what I had guessed previously, I'm gonna be on methotrexate the rest of my life, which may not be that long because it lowers my immune system, and I could die of the common cold. Probably pneumonia like my father.

It's about time anyway. Four score and ten is enough to figure out what's going on upon the surface of this particular planet. Which addresses my real question: What if I don't die for a long time and the arthritis gets worse and worse? Talk about your twisted fate. My children will just love it. That is, until they realize they look a lot like me, from my mother's side. They don't know their genetic history, but it's not my fault or theirs either. I didn't leave them, and they didn't have a choice about leaving me. Too late now.

It was good to get outta town for a while. Durham is about a hundred miles away and Raleigh is between here and there. I left early to avoid being late for my appointment because of traffic, and coming home I didn't encounter much of the rush hour traffic. It only slowed to a crawl one time both ways which seems a little bit miraculous. We're getting hemmed in by the growing populations in both the Research Triangle and Wilmington. A lot of it has to do with the completion of InterState 40 down to the coast.

I seem to be attracting some opposition to what I write on the Gospel of Thomas e-mail group that I haven't encountered for a while. It's not unusual. Everybody else does too. It's been that way as long as I have been subscribed. People arguing their religion with other people arguing their religion. It's probably the same way on politically oriented e-mail discussion groups. I've never belonged to one of those. I don't even argue with myself about my political views. They're not really mine anyway. I didn't rebel against my parent's political views, only their religious views.

Actually, it's my mother's religious views I fought against. My father was fairly non-committal toward religion. He supported my mother's efforts to get us to go to Sunday School and church services, but many times he didn't go himself. They asked him to preach occasionally, but he wouldn't go up on the pulpit to do it. My father was a great orator. He ought to have been since that's basically what he taught in school. He thought getting young country boys to stand up in front of crowds of people and speak their piece was the best thing they could do for themselves. My brothers were very good at it. They still get asked to speak in front of the local men's groups more frequently than others.

I feel clumsy writing what I do on the Thomas group currently. I seem to have figured out my role in life mo' bettah than ever before. My remembering vision has taken on a deeper meaning to me, and made me whole. My opinion of what I'm supposed to do for the rest of my sorry life is to use this wholeness to look at my life and how the world is in a more complete way. I don't think gnosis can be taught, only revealed by forces beyond my control. The ex-Catholics appear to still think their priests and bishops can bestow gnosis. Why would they not? To each their own.

Experiencing gnosis is the only thing that matters for anybody I suspect, but it's not up to me to provide others with what's not mine to give. I've at least known that much for a long time. Being honest with the other about that really pisses people off, and it would be easy for me to pretend like I got the power to bestow gnosis, but it wouldn't be fair to myself nor profitable in a way I could enjoy.