The Weasel Behind The Mulberry Bush

A pleasant sounding woman called me from the VA this morning to see how I was doing after my morning in the operating room yesterday. I had literally just gotten outta bed, walked over to where my computer is parked, pushed on the off-on button to boot it up, and the phone rang. She identified herself and ask me how I was feeling this morning, and that sort of forced me to check inside to be able to answer her question, and discovered that I felt great. Really good. Happy inside. How wonderful for a change.

I think my euphoria this morning has to do with my not eating much after I got out of the hospital to come home, and getting a full, uninterrupted night of sleep. My poor, over-burdened, tormented gastro-intestinal tract finally got some relief what with being mostly empty, and not stuffed to the gills by it's owner attempting to deal with all the crap that backed up on it for a couple of decades of trying to get over being separated from it's family.

I used the expression "it's family", not "his" family. I don't think of myself as a particular gender anymore. Just old. Neither yea or nay, wright or wrong, weak nor strong, but almost as if I had no body with which to identify myself as a unit of life at all. A citizen of some make-believe country that thinks it's a phoenix and/or can fly.

I sleep in my bed with my head pointed north. I got no good reason. I heard a rumor. That's apparently good enow for me, because that's how it happens. I sit at my computer with my back to my bed and my head pointed south. Opposites attract, that's why reality stays in the same room, but backwards from when I'm participating in the dream time. Janus.

When I got this bedroom flooring down enough to move my stuff back into this room from downstairs it seemed to put things right again. Lots of stuff left to do. It'll still be there to be done when I croak. The world would be less complicated if when some friend or relative comes here and finds me dead as a doornail to flick one of the Bics I got laying around, and burn me and my wino's hootch flat to the ground, dust into dust, but with a definitive flare.

I took the methotrexate prescribed to me again this morning. That's the only reason why it's Tuesday anymore. God used to have reasons I suppose, but it was more than likely Julius Caesar who upped the ante on reasons for it being Tuesday in particular, that is, instead of say, Thor's day, when I was born under mostly good stars.

Methotrexate's well known side-effect of nausea has muffled the goodness I was feeling earlier, but just being alive does that too. Shit happens. Thangs change. Making the constant adjustment life demands of me to survive means that I don't get to act independent nearly as often as I might like.

My so-called integrity is questioned each time I put myself in the hands of some institution. In the culture I live in, people are institutionalized at a very young age, and kept there for as long as their caretakers can afford. Both of my parents got their paychecks from the State. They deliberately sought out the security of a State teaching jobs after they survived the Great Depression.

That "peace at any price" form of security was what I rebelled at as a pubescent teen in order to establish my own identity as a person in my own right. Looking back, it was a sort of stupid thing to do, but what choice did I have or does anybody have if they're born homo sapiens.

In an early Chinese novel a description was offered by an old royal court official who got pensioned, but was still allowed a cubicle at the castle. He told his friend that he whiled away the days with, that the older he got, the more meditation seemed to be his only friend. That seems to be the case with me too. How else can thoughts that cause me to doubt my own worthiness be nipped in the bud? I've spent a lotta time lately watching the bubbles rise slowly to the top.

The Dreaded Day Is Over, And I Ain't Dead Yet

I got up early this morning, and did what I was instructed to do to be ready to have "the procedure" performed UPON me. The whole deal was anticlimactic. As entertainment, except for the OR drugs, it was just more hanging around in big, institutional waiting rooms waiting until the jig is up.

My loyal youngest brother cheerfully took me back over to the VA again this morning, after having had his services falsely commandeered due to my personal lack of understanding about what was going to happen on the first round of appointments.

The only impressions I have of what happened today is about what happened before anything happened, and then afterward when whatever happened was all over.

In other words, it wasn't long after the OR team nurse put in the ubiquitous IV and taped it down in a very professional manner, that any control over my response to what might have or could have happened after that was seriously impeded. This ain't my first rodeo. I've lost control over my intent previously in similar situations. I was pretty sure when the pleasant, smiling woman inserted a syringe needle into the input node on the IV asked me to repeat my name and the last four numbers of my social security number, that I'd be a goner.

I first became consciously aware again of what was going on in my immediate environment because I was commanded to. "Wake up. Our work is done. I'll help you sit up in bed, then put your clothes back on, and we might see you later if you have another appointment."

What was I to do but obey? I had been in a "no-mind" situation for some undetermined amount of Earth ti-me, and now that I had made the return to the ti-me of the day by command, the only thing I could think of next was to cave immediately and just do it.

When she helped me sit up and handed me the plastic bag with my clothes in it, she smiled, competently turned heel and left me to my own devices. I heard my brother talking his junk in the next room, and that brought everything in focus. That's just his way of telling me, "I'm here." Nice fellow, my youngest brother. The perfect foil for my villain act. We have literally worked side by side over half the country.

Preparing The Way

My old body is so weird these days. I've been playing the major and minor scales on the piano again. Not much, just for the last few days. Before that I had avoided doing that because of pain and stiffness in my wrists and fingers. I seem to have a little more flexibility recently, so I've gone through the motions again. Slowly, deliberately, and for sure, not like I'm planning a future in the concert halls or much at all.

The next thing I wanna practice on the piano is making those runs up and down the keyboard. Doing that's gotta a name, but I don't remember it just now. I'm a little blowed away by the fast I'm doing now to prepare for having the colonoscopy procedure done tomorrow morning. I haven't done much fasting in a good long time. When I was in my twenties, thirties, and forties I did a lotta fasting. Some of it involuntarily because I lived like a bum and sometimes food was slim pickings.

Fasting, however, was usually deliberate. I'd just decide for some arbitrary reason that I needed to clean my system out and I'd stop eating. Usually for a minimum of three days. The longest I ever fasted was a half day short of thirty days. Today is the first day I've been completely without any food, but I'm doing it under doctor's instructions. They don't want anything to remain inside my colon to obscure the view of the camera.

In four hours I start by drinking the first 12 ounce bottle of citrate of magnesium, and then an hour later I start consuming a gallon of this stuff known as GoLightly. That's supposed to clean me out. I don't know the details of what does what, and I don't particularly wanna know. I'm doing what I'm gonna do because I've been told that's what my part of the deal is. Tomorrow morning, I gotta get up around five o'clock and drink the other 12 ounce bottle of citrate of magnesium. I guess for the final clean-out so my colon will be squeaky clean for the camera.

I'm still nervous about what the camera might find, but I'm resigned to the idea that I'm better off knowing for sure, than driving myself to distraction guessing. I keep getting the idea that I've unconsciously arranged to have this procedure done for my own reasons, without really knowing what the procedure itself entailed. Part of my nervousness has to do with self-blame. "What in God's name could I have been thinking? These people are going to put a piece of hardware up my ass, and it's not designed to help me reach a sexual climax.

I do have some sharp pain in this one spot when it's under stress. The worst happens because of constipation and hard stools. One of the side-effects of the prescription medicine I'm taking. The way I see it, I either hurt myself trying to get those hard stools out of my body or the hard stools provoked a pre-existing condition.

I'm prone to think it is the former problem, but mostly because what I studied in yoga warned me about straining to get hard stools out. The warning was specific in stating that you can hurt yourself by trying too hard. Usually hemorrhoids at the rectum, but further inside too. Sometime they repair themselves over time, and other times surgery is required. I never had no surgery or any serious problems with hemorrhoids. My rheumatologist at the Durham VA doubled my prescription for calcium and vitamin D capsules, and that really seemed to help with the constipation.

If you've read any of my blog entries over the last few days, you know I've been a little upset over a news article about a Senate investigation into some unuseful practices going on at some of the VA hospitals that directly involved this colonoscopy procedure that's to be performed on me tomorrow morning. My initial fears have been resolved. I'm convinced that's because I screamed bloody murder to somebody who could actually do something about my fears. Sometime, even I get lucky.

I've had two doctors from the VA in Durham to call me here at home this last week to express their concern, and to help me understand what i need to know to come to my own resolution and contentment about how I got upset. That's not representative of a cold and heartless bunch of bureaucrats who don't care if I live or die. I know who is responsible for this care, and I felt their compassion immediately when I first encountered them. Some people are just naturals when it comes to healing. They're worth more than their weight in gold.

There is some I've noticed in general about the VA hospital doctors that I really like. They appear to be more willing to let me participate in their diagnosis by listening closely to me. Sometime too closely. I listen to them too, and ask questions if I can, but sometimes there is a language problem that I'm afraid I'll hurt their feelings if I act like they don't speak English well. Some don't. I believe I can adapt better than them. I've studied statecraft because of the need, but that don't mean I was that great a student.

One area in the VA hospital's doctor's authority I never question, and bend over backward to go along unquestioningly if I can, and that's the medicines they prescribe. If I don't understand why they're prescribing a particular medicine, I ask them lots of questions about it, but I never challenge them. It's my body, but I brought it of my own free will to their house.

Empathy, But Not Much Sympathy

One of the reasons I don't let people get up next to me emotionally is that I sometime feel what they feel to the point that it seems like I take what makes 'em feel bad and work it out through my own body. I've played around with this idea for a long time now, and I'm very familiar with the response I get to my way of saying it.

I had to stop writing for a moment to listen to Tom T. Hall sing about "old dogs and children, and watermelon wine...". I'm not a big fan of country music, but some of their story-tellers have had a profound affect on me. Even as I sat here and watched this old man perform again I was truly impressed with how easily he moved me emotionally in the same way he did when we were both much younger. I guess what I really seem attracted to nostalgically are the various singer/songwriters who perform their own music worse than anybody who makes the big hits with them. It seems evenly divided between the various genres of music, but the connecting factor is that they write and perform. LIke I did, of course.

I wax pretty empathic at times. Especially with my two brothers. My younger brother was working a Sperry Railcar up in Maine on a job I worked too, but got fired for replacing my bosses' 80 proof vodka with 150 proof white likker, and his sneak-drinking didn't turn out the way it usually did. My brother had some sort of intestinal twistage thing happen, and he like to have died. At the local hospital where a huge majority of the population were of French descent and Catholic, he got so ill they called in a priest who performed the last rites on him

I was down in Louisiana working a shrimp boat, and I started writing a poem with some strong sense of urgency, but without knowing why. From two thousand miles away I described a situation poetically that matched my brother's piteous state of health. He survived, of course, but barely. The hospital had called my parents as his next of kin, and my mother went up there. Out of her mind with her middle boy. I'm thinking that probably added a bunch of psychic intensity to the situation.

Later, when he told me what happened and gave me a first-hand account of what he experienced, I asked him how, if he was on death's door, could he have known the Catholic priest administered last rites? He told me, quite cockily, I might add, that he knew he was dying even before the nurses called the priest, but he "knew" he was dying from outside of his body.

He told me he somehow left his body and all the pain it was suffering, and that when the priest came in the room, he was watching what happened from where he hovered over in the corner of the room up in the ceiling. Soon after the priest left the room, my brother said he left the room too, leaving his dying body on the bed.

I think he said he had accepted that death was inevitable, and he floated/flew outside into the north woods of Maine, and suddenly he found himself riding on the antlers of a huge bull moose as it ran crashing through the woods after a female moose. He's told me this story many times. Usually at my request. He gets a mischievous look in his eye when he gets to the part about riding on the moose's head, but over the years he's told a fairly consistent story.

Later, he found himself back in his body, and my mother was on her knees beside his bed begging him to not leave her here. I don't think this brother reads my blog, but if he did, he'd tell me I didn't listen to a word he said. Okay, I made up the bit about our mother, but maybe she's watching over my shoulder to see if I wrote something kind about her.

More recently, my youngest brother went to his doctor for a regular check-up, and ended up at the regional hospital where he got some sort of pacemaker installed. All four of his siblings went to their own heath care professional to see if they were having a heart attack, and none of us knew about what the others had done or about our brother going to the hospital in the first place.

I think this sort of thing happens more with families that move around a lot, and the only people they know well or feel they can depend on are the members of their natal family that moves around with them. Like service brats and preacher's kids. In the last couple of decades, this lifestyle seems to have affected more and more families.

Getting The Rug Snatched From Beneath Your Feet

I'm beginning to understand why Apple and other OEMs are not jumping through their butt to accommodate the incorporation of SSDs in their products. Particularly Apple, because they're just a couple of months away from the gold release of Snow Leopard, their new 64-bit Operating System.

The exciting thing about the 64-bit system is that it will accommodate lots of DRAM memory. Hundreds of gigabytes of DRAM memory. Samsung just brought out a 32 Gigabyte DRAM memory chip. If I had a 64-bit processing chip in my Mac Mini, with a 64-bit operating system and two memory slots I could install two 32 gigabyte memory chips in those two slots and have twice as much DRAM as I have data on my hard drive.

The flash memory used in the SSDs is not nearly as fast as DRAM memory. Actually, with just 32 gigs of DRAM in my Mac Mini I could upload all the data on my hard drive into memory when I boot up, and the hard drive wouldn't even be used. I got twice as much stuff on my hard drive as I need or like to have.

Except for a faster boot-up with an SSD, once the bootstrapping happened, my little Mac Mini would be really, really, really swift. It will be like having a RAM cache in a PCI slot, but the memory bus controller to the CPU is or will be on the block of the processing chip itself. The DRAM memory bus is closer to the fire of the CPU than the SATA bus.

This new operating system will be out in September and on sale for the fabulous price of $24. But, my Mac Mini only has a 32-bit CPU in it. It's possible to upgrade to a 64-bit chip, but that doesn't solve the problem of the slow Intel motherboard video chip set don't get the video system up to snuff. The newer Macs now use a Nvidia chipset that's nearly twice as fast as the Intel chipset.

In other words, I'm planning to buy a new computer ti accommodate the 64-bit operating system, but it could be a used one if it's got a 64-bit CPU and the price is right. The video system is important in Snow Leopard because of a new software development that allow the operating system to use the video graphics chips for extra processing power when they've not busy doing video. It can also use the CPU for additional video processing power if the CPU is not busy.

Presently, I can't foresee why a home user will need any more computer power than is expected to be on the market in the next three months. The enterprise and corporate worlds will always need more, but for the home user, once you have more usable DRAM than you have data on your hard drive, and multiple processors of various hue and cry running directly from the memory system, speed for the foreseeable future, even for games and perhaps holodecks will not be as much of a problem.

My friend Rainey got some shocking news and called me yesterday morning. His ex-wife, who was his high school sweetheart, and the mother of his three nearly-grown kids, died in her sleep last night, and her daughter found her when she went to wake her up to take her to school. The autopsy is scheduled today. I went over to his house before dark and stayed there until three this morning. I should have left earlier, but I didn't know when enough was enow.

The woman's death was shocking to everybody. Mid-forties. Very unexpected. My friend's and his children's lives are changed forever yesterday. I don't have any experience with something like this. Both of my ex-wives are alive and kicking at last notice. He decided to have a few drinks to see if it would help him get his true feeling out on the table so he could deal with them. His emotions seemed so amped he never really even got woozy from his drinks. Balancing this out and incorporating it into his new reality might take longer than can be expected because he can't know what to expect.

The Holy of Holies

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Hierarchies of structure reflect the chains of the blind.

~ Isabella Riley

There are several ways of looking at this. One of them is to use the "hierarchies of structure" until they become "the chains of the blind" by habituation, and then I have them forever, to use or not use as it pleases me. Two of the hierarchies of structure I used this morning was to practice meditation and to play the major and minor scales on my piano. It's been a while since I practiced either since I've been reflecting on the implications of the diagnosis of two kinds of arthritis and osteoporosis within the last year.

I've only taught myself to play the major and minor scales in the last couple of years, and I have been impeded to some degree in establishing a habit because my wrists and hands hurts whether I'm trying to play or not. The prescription medicine has really helped recently. I've been playing what I could, even though I haven't practiced the full set of scales lately. Today, though slowly, I'm back in the groove. YMMV

One of the attributes of meditating I accepted as true fifty years ago was, that, to whatever degree of competency I accomplished in meditating, I would start from that learned point if I stopped meditating for a while, and picked it up again. Other people don't seem to think that's possible, but to me it's because they made it that way for themselves through belief.

Granted, that may be so simply because I believed it about meditation right away, and if I hadn't believed it, and practiced it in good faith until it became a chain of blindness, I wouldn't have been able to almost immediately get to the state of being it took me forty years of meditating to get to.

I've tried to describe what I've learned through my own experience about holy spots in the human body. Some Oriental cultures call those spots chakras, but descriptions of them are all through the holy books of most other major and minor religions. It's not odd to me at all that one Einstein groupie accused me of "pulling my unscientific theories outta my ass." He is right. Why would I not? I'm a bottom up sort of guy. Taurus, Sun and Moon. "It takes two bowls..."

I read somewhere (back in the last millennium, when they had something they called books and newspapers) that some people consider the perineum the "holy of holies" in regard to location and purpose. Tain't this, tain't that (neti/neti). The perineum is located in between the rectum and the sexual organs, man and woe-to-man alike. Its a holy spot in the body because certain decisions are made FROM there (like with all holy spots), but it's the holy of holies because the decision to draw each breath is made there, and ninety odd percent of the ti-me, the decision for taking each breath is made outside of human consciousness.

Some people, including me, realizing that poignant facticity seems key to saying what can be seen there in real ti-me. For me, no matter what I've read in the various graven images, the purpose of establishing a regular practice of meditating is to reach for the state of being FROM which I can watch the decision that's made to draw each breath, just in case I might wanna input a different result, such as to stop breathing, and to keep my stopping still.

As of yet, I haven't gone too far when I've stopped breathing in order to find out how far I can go. For all I know, there may not be a limit, but perhaps a gateway. I wanna see if I can decide for myself if I can pass through that gateway of my own volition. not having a sayso can be a real drag, man. My deliberately stopping my breathing is just part of the deal though. Simultaneously, on occasion, I have also stopped my heartbeat FROM that same state of being, and my fear of going too far with that IS part of it is what cowards me out.

I aimed for that state of being in my sitting this morning. Home, sweet home. Carelessly, I had taken a couple of sips of coffee before I decide to sit down to it. Knowingly sipped it. I made the coffee myself. The caffiene may have been responsible for my sudden inspiration to sit, but it's more likely that it's my fear of death. My initial thoughts that it might interfere might have been why I never went past stopping my breathing... yet.

Having that colonoscopy performed on me next Monday is not something I am going to take lightly. I can. I know how. I got the tools. It's just that, I'm not only naturally curious, but my pedantic caution is self-imposed. Lots of things could go wrong even with the best intentions of all concerned.

I'm less worried about unsterilized scopes. I've been assured they're being extraordinarily caution about that, and I have to believe them. What I'm worried most presently is, not only what the surgeons gonna do during this squeamish deed to my po' rectum and colon while they're at it, but what they're gonna find when they do, and if there's a way to fix it without too much damage already done to go on. As a distraction, I've decided to worry about whether the walls of my rectum will withstand the pressure of the air they're gonna blow my guts up like a balloon with for a looksee.

I feel that whatever the condition my condition is in weakens the gut walls, and if they rupture during this procedure, I could bleed to death before they could stop it. I wonder if I could make a deal with them to stand back and let it happen if such were to be so. Hmm... is there a way I could turn my blood lime green so they'd be so startled into such confusion by the sight of such a thing they'd run for their lives? Naaa.. I already think they figure I'm a spy for the Feds, even if it doesn't make sense at all. They'd keep me alive to save their own ass. No blame.

Sometime I make myself too interesting to people I should have figured for being a nemesis. How can they not know with deep certainty that whatever they've made me into for their own sake, is too good to be true? Hey! I'm watching you, but I'm also watching out FOR you. Well, when I go to the FOR place. You better git it on you own while you can still know it's me that's doing that when you get excited. I never wanna return when I move to that state of being where I can do for-myself-for-the-other. I don't care how purty you are. '-)

The Janitor Of Your Possessions

I've already started fasting for the colonoscopy procedure to happen, so I guess I'm gonna just take the chance that all the publicity about the lack of sterilizing the equipment between patients will cause the people that's gonna do it to me to be more cautious. When I wrote yesterday that my real fear was what the doctors will find with those cameras, I realized that was my basic reason for fussing over this. Then, I started looking for positive qualities about the people who told me what to expect during the pre-op conversations.

I did a lot of fasting up until I had that ruptured disc operation. The operation really helped, but it took a long time to get there, and my pride and integrity was in shambles by the time the neurologist performed the procedure. Months of agony. My newest favorite doctor made a comment about me having problems with the medical profession, but I don't agree with her. My problem is the same ol'/same ol'. It's with authority. In the medico's case, it's simply the fact that I have to hand over my authority for making decision about what happens with my person to another person. It doesn't matter what their profession is.

I just got a telephone call from the VA Surgery Clinic. They called to remind me of my appointment on Monday. None of those people identify themselves. I figure they got a reason. I may or may not agree with it. The conversation went exactly how I wanted it to go. I was able to bring up the news article in a humorous way.

She never let me finish, but interrupted me, and told me they were perfectly aware of what had come out in the news, and the clinics that didn't pass the sterilization check were de-certified until they can step up. That's all I really wanted. I wanted for them to acknowledge what had become public and reassure me they're doing as much as they can do to prevent me from being a victim of such carelessness. I feel better about what's going on. I'll be there on Monday. I may be dead by Tuesday, but I'm going in... Aiiiiyeeeeee!!!

That's all I can really ask from people who have grown contemptuous of a long-time job simply because of familiarity. Tenured professors can be the very opposite of what you might want yo' children to be mentored by. Many of them teach "life lessons" instead of what their expertise indicates.

Practically every situation that concerns me these days has to do with bureaucrats routinely taking advantage of older people through inflated utility bills. They seem to figure they better get what they can before the doctors and lawyers or the investment bankers and the Ponzi scheme artists get it all.

Both rich and po' people are no more than the janitors of they possessions. Christ may have been right to say his followers should give their possessions away. Building up treasures on Earth attracts the ghouls and buzzards who want what you worked for, and that's the kind of people you'll be encountering as long as you have something THEY value. What a drag, man. Double bind. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

They know they're doing it deliberately because it's probably true that many older people who live by themselves are too senile or demented to demand they stop the abuse. "It takes two bowls..." It will happen to me too. Since my children aren't around to protect their own interests, there probably won't be anything left for them to inherit by the time the government robs me blind.

In More Ways Than One

I haven't read the online news like I usually do each morning. I'm afraid I'll believe a lie that it could take more time than I wanna devote to what might just turn out to be mere gossip. I did that a week ago and in an instant became convinced the bastards over at the VA endoscopy department intend to use an exploratory procedure to murder me through feigned carelessness. Two hours after I got through talking to the very people who would be performing or supervising the procedure, I'm reading about how carelessness and not sterilizing the cameras between uses has been the ruin of many a po' boy.

I got a few copies of the CNN headline news article about a Senate investigation into the incurable diseases veterans are getting from unsterilized equipment. It didn't just scare me, it frightened me deeply, and everyone I've talked to about it thinks I'm being ridiculous and naive. The technicians involved wouldn't knowingly put their patients in needless jeopardy.

They're telling this to a person who had an ancient saying drilled into him while handling 5" artillery shell projectiles like buckets in a fire brigade. "Remember men, familiarity breeds contempt, you gotta remember that what you're getting familiar with doing, and possibly becoming contemptuous of, and getting careless... if you get careless with one of these projectiles carrying 55 pounds of explosives... and every man in line has 55 pounds of explosives in their hands to boot... allowing yourself to daydream while resupplying a warship can result in death."

Both of the technicians or doctors who held the pre-op sessions with me told me directly that they each had over twenty years experience doing the procedure I am scheduled to have performed. They seemed to hold me in contempt while we were conversing. I literally got pissed and spoke up to one of them about her condescending attitude and addressing me as a child. To her credit, she apologized, and from then on she appeared to be sincere about doing the right thing by me and by herself.

I'm sure I would be just as apprehensive about undergoing this procedure if I had not seen the news article. They're gonna so some rude stuff to me, hopefully for a ethical and moral end. It's a sort of run-of-the-mill procedure. Both my brother's have had it done, but they had it done in a civilian hospital that can be sued up the yingyang for proven carelessness. I can't sue the government if the instruments aren't sterilized, and the diseases I will probably get from whoever got the procedure done earlier that morning won't know my ass from a hole in the ground.

It seems like to me that just by having this exploratory procedure done to find out if there is anything unusual going on in my colon that I'm putting my life at risk un-necessarily. Sure, I'm scared of what the cameras might find in there as much or more than anything else, but I'd like to be fairly sure that's the only thing I gotta deal with. Unseen enemies have always brought a lethal feeling to my fear.

I can't imagine anybody reading about my personal problems, but this is how I've always dealt with them. I've written them out where I could "see" all the possibilities of dangerous situations if I've had time. Many times I haven't, and only survived by wit and grit. I don't expect it to work forever. I expect my final words to be, "Rats, foiled again."

I'm becoming convinced the reason learning and using astrology and the scientific method lead to the same end. The system one uses doesn't seem to matter. After I had my remembering vision at the age of thirty years old I started studying the occult. It started out by my following this guy around the country and learning to do the Tarot layouts, but then it became apparent that pretty much all the occult is base on astrology, and once I found a method that didn't reek of black magic I went about learning it in the same way I learned anything else. No stone left unturned.

I can't imagine a person attracted to the scientific method in the way I was to the occult would go about learning what they needed to get started just as pedantically. Over the years, and in particular the last decade, I've grown to think that my ability to concentrate for long periods of ti-me could be associated with some form of autism. People really seem discombobulated when I reach for answers beyond the consideration of their presence. It's like they're not there, and they seem to hate it.

I like the results I get from withdrawing from current events. There's nothing mystical about it. I'm merely daydreaming and considering wot's sot before me by the me-singer I created to go find the proof I need to carry on with my verbal assault of their senses with shock and awe. The simple fact that I can reach plausible solutions to their imaginary problems sometimes leaves them rolling in the aisle, and others are left with the need for a Heimlich maneuver from choking on their own bile. '-)

The people who created nuclear power put together something that only occurred in nature and maybe only randomly then. I'm suggesting that before electrons became 'named things' they were no such things in themselves. People used the scientific method to create electrons, much less atomic or hydrogen weapons.

What I'm contemplating presently, mostly on the back burner, is that I created the arthritis and osteoporosis I've been diagnosed with because that's what my natal chart in astrology predicted I'd have health problems with. I think it happens in the same way that the pearls have created via imitation and mimicry the units of life they have put together as an attempt to escape back into open space where they came from.

It's an incremental, inch-by-inch dealio, such that, as in my particular case, by the ti-me I figured out how this happened, I had become too aged to undo the mess I'd made of my skeletal system. Foiled again. Why am I always the last to know?

I've given myself until tomorrow to make a final decision about having the colonoscopy procedure canceled. It seems like a form of suicide if I don't go along for the ride, unsterilized cameras or no, because I could have serious, but repairable damage in my colon; and yet another form of suicide because I've become more and more aware that allowing the procedure to be performed could provide me with worse problems than I already have.

It's not like I have anybody around to talk to about this. I know who I'd like to talk to about it, but I've only met them once or twice. Odd that, and totally unacceptable. It's a bit of a moral or ethical problem, but without me knowing for sure what those kind of problems are. I may be too much of a coward to stand up for myself, and if that proves to be true, why would I want to live forever? I'm familiar with suicide-by-cop, but this is another proposition all together. I may require more ti-me to adjust, but I ain't got long in more ways than one.

Signing My Own Death Certificate

The song from the Broadway play A Little Night Music titled Send In the Clowns has always attracted me and something about it caused me to stop and give ear. I only knew a line or two of the lyrics. One day I looked the lyrics up on the internet, and I've been memorizing all the words just to have something definitive to sing when I practice the bel canto scales I used to know.

I try to go through some of the studies and exercises a little each day. The reason I do is a little sad. But, the real sad part is what will happen if I don't. I'm alone so much with nobody around to use my voice to say words I start to forget how to talk, much less sing. It's the same with anything I had to learn. Like crawling, then walking, then screaming my head off until I could learn to use words. Eventually, if I live long enough, everything I ever learned in order to cope with being alive, will be lost in order to make the Return.

The chorus is the tricky part of Send In The Clowns. I never memorized that part of the song. If I hadn't looked the lyrics on the internet, I might never have realized I didn't know the notes of the chorus. I would have just skipped over it like it wasn't there. Why would I not? Memorizing this wonderful song will not earn me immortality no matter how well I do it.

Earlier today, I thought of doing a search on Google Video to see if there were videos of people performing the song. That way I could sing along with them and learn the tricky musical line of the chorus. Actually, it's just one line that stumps me, and if I can get that down pat, I'll be good to go.

The real reason I got interested in learning the lyrics of this song was watching a video of Steven Sondheim explaining the circumstances of his originally composing the song. He wrote it the way he did because of the specific actress who played the part of Desiree who sang the song on stage.

He said this actress had every other characteristic he wanted for her to carry the part, but she wasn't the kind of singer who liked to stretch words out via the vowels, and so he wrote the song to fit the way she naturally sang, and doing that made her song the seminal tour de force it's become.

What the composer said in that video tempered what I heard the famous singers and actresses say when I watched their videos this morning. I had the inside scoop on why he wrote it the way he did. Barbra Streisand can't not stretch things out. The song was not written for her voice, as beautiful as it is in People.

Glen Close does a really good job, but she can't let it be a sad song, and it's a true funeral dirge for lost love. Judy Dench, Oscar winner and dubbed some sort of Dame by the Queen of England got it just right in my book. I'm prejudiced. so my opinion means little. When it comes to being an actress, she's top shelf, but so is Glen Close.

Some inauthentic female named Sumi Jo literally changed Sondheim's words, and I didn't even finish her video before I went looking again, but eventually I stopped to marvel again at what needed to be there for me to do what I did about this one song.

Most of my youth was pre-television, much less home computers, search engines, and the internet. I have literally hitch-hiked three thousand miles dead broke to spend an hour or two in the stacks of some library to get information I couldn't get anywhere else. Now, such nonsense is accomplished by pointing and clicking on a link that will have even more links when I get there.

I seem to be moving to a position in life in which I don't need anybody for anything. I know myself that I could tell any person who asked me a question to go look up what they wanted to know on the internet and they would get oodles of information much more useful than what i have to offer. I.E., not only do I not need them, but they don't need me either. Not for intellectual purposes, and sometimes love.

Send In The Clowns is about a woman who had an affair and a child with a fellow who didn't know he was the child's father or even that she was pregnant when they broke up. Years later, they run into each other again, and she fools herself into thinking there is a second chance with him, but he's in love with another woman who has also borne him a child he does know about, and cant' desert, and so she's singing the song about careless love. Who doesn't understand that?

I'm writing a lot to make time fly. I'm gonna refuse to get that colonoscopy for all sorts of reasons. The main one is that I might not survive it, and not just by my own judgement either. The news article on CNN about how many of the VA hospitals are not sterilizing their instruments between procedures and the recipients of the procedure getting AIDS and other incurable diseases is sure a factor. I have no intention of submitting my body to people who aren't careful about what happens to it while it's in their care. How could I know whether I need to be concerned or not.

The thing is that this procedure was ordered by my regular doctor as an exploratory procedure to find out if something might be amiss, not because there was something obviously amiss. It wasn't ordered to cure or investigate some known or tersely indicated condition. I don't think my GI tract could stand it. For whatever the true reason, I gonna say no unless it's life or death, and there's a good chance I'm gonna die soon anyway.

The Golden Blob Blog

As I sit here typing my house is vibrating from the bulldozers working on the new airport runway the city/county government stole from my family. It was just the latest intrusion into what used to look a little like a national park. My father's pride and joy. On some other land to the northeast of my house are other bulldozers working on some private project the members of the airport authority privately own, as I understand it. Eminent domain, then privatization?

A person needs strong ideals taught to them when they are children. Strong enough hopefully for a lifetime. Strong enough to overcome the actual reality of the world. Your money or your life. Even for the people who administer the universality of it's truth. Your money or your life. The government will even help you get some money so they can take it away from you again with interest.

That's the hell of aging. It's how you're helped to die by your supposed saviors so they can pick your bones clean. I've written about how the County water department is ripping me off. A couple of days ago my brother sent me a link to an article where a 99 year old women was being taken to the cleaners by the DC water department. Apparently, it's an old government trick to rob retirees. They slowly steal them blind so they can dump them into death houses, where they can use you to drain your family dry.

I wrote yesterday about a heat stroke I had in my early teens that made more vulnerable to heat strokes, but being vulnerable also made me cautious to some extreme about how to survive in hot weather. I described the symptoms of the onset of what could lead to a heat stroke as being like having a wide headband around my skull such that I can easily locate the parameters of brain inside the skull. There is the ol' familiar refrains of the music of the spheres that grows in intensity as I get tired toward the end of the day.

When I woefully claim that "they're coming to get me, and haul me away", these days, I literally mean they're gonna take the house and property I live on away from me by eminent domain and bring in the heavy equipment and transform my borrowed property to borrowed time. My entire life has been seriously involved with the institutions I sought to escape from. I've known this a long time. It's the "why" I've tried to escape when it's obviously impossible for even the most vaingloriously of us is a mystery that has embraced me, indeed, swallowed me up.

It first truly appeared to me as a golden amorphous blob of moving light at the foot of my bed on the other side of town in the re-worked house on my father's first farm. I know exactly how it was turned into a crumbling tenant shack into a home for a family of seven on wit, grit, and my father's modest teacher's salary.

I remember this scenario as happening to me while I was alone, but that would probably have been impossible considering how the rooms and sleeping arrangements were laid out at the time. I was in a regular size double bed, and my two younger brothers slept in bunk beds one over the other in the corner of the room to the left of my head. My younger brother is four and a half years younger than me, and my youngest brother is eight years younger than me. They were dead to the world, as children are, when this golden blob appeared at the foot of my bed.

It was a "don't ask, don't tell" situation. I dove under the covers from sleep, and then peeked out, and there it was. I didn't ask it anything. I was struck dumb with terror. I pulled the covers back over my head. "It", the yellowish gold thang, didn't have a constant enough shape for me to make it into anything in particular to be afraid of. I think I was scared of watching myself become afraid without option, and that's the part of it that terrified me.

My head was under the quilt covers that had been in my parents families for a long time. They smelled like moth balls. They were heavy. If it got cold enough that you needed several of them to stave of the cold, the weight of them could give me night mares that I was getting crushed. Some of them were real scratchy because the cloth they were pieced together from come from flour sacks or even commercial chicken feed sacks.

You might think as a child or young teen that quilts this tough would even keep out ghosts or spirits that glowed in the dark. You'd be wrong about that in my opinion. My families ancient hand-me-down quilts were no match for the golden blob to stretch itself out flat above me, and then lowered itself over and around me and consumed me like I was a speck of food being eaten by an amoeba.

This was another case in which terror of the most extreme kind paralyzed me, and held me in it's grip until I embraced it without reserve. I used to say I understand this sort of being terrified, but more completely now that it's happened consciously more than once. What's particular or peculiar about this experience is that I can only keen that it's "terror" after the fact.

Before this golden glob/blob settled down over me and enveloped me within itself I was a typical teenaged kid with all the angst and nervous energy a young person of this age usually has, but after this goldenness enveloped me inside of itself, all that fear and nervousness dropped away, and I consciously and individually experienced total ecstasy for the second time in my young life. In this state of being that appeared to co-me from an external source

My situation went from being aware of my absolute terror at the very appearance of this "thing" in itself, and my relationship with it changed from complete terror to complete ecstasy in one fell swoop. Sometime I think I've spent the rest of my life attempting to cause that situation to repeat itself. I don't expect much now. Recently I've realized that most of the really profound experiences I've had with spirit only happen once and no mas. In other words, it's not up to me, but I don't feel like a victim.

I've been contemplating a weird thought that been on the back burner for a while. It concerns my personal study and use of astrology. Just two incidences that impress me. The zodiacal abode of the planet Saturn and the aspects it has with the other planets and signs and houses indicated that my biggest health problem would concern my skeletal structure, and I've been diagnosed with two different types of arthritis and osteoporoses in the last year.

Another configuration involving the Moon being in the Seventh House along with it's aspects indicate that I'd have all female children. i already had one female child with my first wife, and that was before I ever studied astrology. Then, after I started studying astrology and making lots of natal charts my second wife had two more female children.

I wonder what would have happened if I never studied astrology, but I have mastered other systems, and they could have and probably did affect the way life has gone for me as easily and/or just as well, if you can fancy that?

More Interesting Places

It was over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit right where I'm sitting most of yesterday. My old window unit air conditioner finally gave up the ghost when I tried to turn it on to cool the joint down. At least I had a couple of fans that still work. It's supposed to be cooler today with less humidity.

I went out and bought a new TV. The cheapest 32" they had at Wal-Mart. With taxes it cost $403. Its still the best one I've ever owned, and only the second new one I've ever bought. I'm learning to work the menu. Just this morning I learned to turn on the Daylight Savings Time feature to get the Time to show up correctly.

I could have gotten by with a smaller set than the 32" I bought. It's huge from where I'm sitting here at my computer. I didn't realize it would seem that big until I got it home and hooked up. Watching from my bed that's located just behind me, however, it's lots better than what I was using. It's more than twice as big as the old 15" computer monitor I have used in the past, and then with a digital converter box. Now, if I could afford to buy the satellite service and get more than the old network channels over-the-air with my ragged, used antenna, I'd feel like a real American.

It is directly because I bought the TV before I realized my ten year old a/c was finally dead, that I can't afford another A/C. I guess I'm gonna hafta find creative ways to stay cool. The warnings about how high temperatures affect old people and children more than those in between. I can tell the exact way it affects me. It's like I've been wearing a safety hat all day at work, and the residual feeling that continues for a while after I take it off. The top of my skull feels unaffected, sorta open and without pressure. It's like I have a sweat band around my head that's a little tight, but I'm not wearing anything on my head. I feel my brain inside my skull.

I had a heat stroke when I was a kid while I was plowing cotton with a mule. I don't know the truth of it, but I've heard that if you ever have a serious heat stroke, then you're susceptible to more heat strokes later. My father and younger brothers found me passed out unconscious at mid-day when they returned to where they left me working. Doctor Nance, our family doctor, and one of my favorite people on earth while he was still alive, told me I was lucky to be alive. I've never been convinced he was right.

It didn't hurt. I wasn't aware that I'd lost consciousness and fell over the plow round. The mule drug me to the end of the field where it could find some shade. I guess I could think the mule did it to save my life, but I don't. It saved it's own life. No blame. The one thing that came out of that experience though, is that now, as an old man who is vulnerable to the extreme heat of the long summer days in the South, if I wanna commit suicide, all I have to do is close all the doors and windows, shut down the fans, and I'll wake up dead.

As I wrote not long ago, I have thought of killing myself everyday since I was nineteen years old when realized in real time that one day I would croak, no if, ands, or buts about it. I was in the Navy, and had made one round trip to the Orient on the ship whose deck I was standing on when I had this profound experience. I was standing on the leeward side of this 5" twin gun mount just looking across the bay to the outline of the city of San Diego, California one misty afternoon when it happened.

The images that accompanied this event are not as clear to me now, fifty years later. I do remember that instead of seeking out a religious professional to cope with my extreme sorrow, I went down to Tijuana twelve miles away to the brothels, and got drunk and had sex with as many prostitutes in Boy's Town as I could afford for at least a couple of weeks.

Ridiculously, and in youthful ignorance, I tried to get somebody pregnant so I would leave some heir to show I have visited Earth. I didn't know how to seduce women for that purpose yet, but I eventually learned. This fool became the person who got a vasectomy to prevent that very thang from happening, but it was too late.

There is no other real reason to remain on Earth/Lesbos than to just leave your mark with it's true natives. Thanks to my remembering vision that happened ten years later at the age of thirty, I know there are more interesting places to live than on Earth. The squeamish paradox of having to be here is agonizing.

Judas Iscariot

Judas Iscariot

Judas is carrion, 
but a Lord of the Ring.
He sits back inviting 
the buzzards to bring
what's left of the others
who are carrion too.
Now, they live 
in the waste land
where the skies
are not blue,
but black and quite greasy
with ashes and soot,
and smells oddly of gases
and curry to boot.

"We are what we eat.",
so the soothsayers say,
but what we eat
becomes carrion
that returns to the clay,
if not lapped up 
by stray doGs
who are odd in that way,
because they howl 
at the Moon
where ol' Judas
holds sway. 

fmp, 6/09©

I'm a little disenchanted today. I guess it shows. I go over to the VA hospital in full trust that what will happen there will be to my best interest, only to come home to find the very people I trusted with my life are playing games with their patient's lives (my life). Those same people turned into monsters in my mind immediately. I could no more stop that from happening than I can un-see all those Nazi propaganda films in my youth. In my imagination now, they all spoke in suspicious Austrian-like accents, even though the man said he came from my home town.

I tell myself that I'm considering canceling my appointment to do the procedure, and if they ask me why I'm gonna tell them it's because of the disturbing news that made national headlines. I already have a couple of incurable diseases, and the very idea of encouraging them install a few more for the sake of an inside joke at the office is ludicrous. I'll just die of the diseases I already got.

If I'm gonna get the AIDS, I wanna get it having sex with some disreputable person who wants to give it to me out of pure spite, not to protect their religious tenets.

I finally went to the Wal-Mart and bought the cheapest 32" digital computer they had for sale. I pretty much had to if I want to watch television. I thought the converter box I paid good money for and used on my old 15" monitor that had an analog tuner broke, but it was the antenna amplifier that broke instead. The picture on this cheapest TV even without the amplifier is the best I've ever had. I'm astounded by the familiar announcer's faces and their complexion. Despite that, it's better than I expected.

Too Dumb To Educate Smart People

The nurse/physicians over at the VA went over my records with me to see if there would be problems with me undergoing the colonoscopy I am rescheduled for on the 29th. I got home last night after a very long period of puking, diarrhea, and unsatisfying sleep. I got on the computer and looked my e-mail and answered a couple, then I went to CNN news to see what had happened while I was off-line. One of the first headlines I saw was this one:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/16/veterans.colonoscopies/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

this is some seriously scary shit,. Literally. If you read the article it lists all kinds of sorrowful diseases that can be gotten from contaminated equipment that's not cleaned properly.

Immediately, I began to see myself as the victim of a group of bureaucrats led by some sort of Josef Mengele:

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

The nurse/physician didn't know I was in there until I got mad about her talking "baby talk" to me. She informed me in no uncertain terms that we were taking too long for her interview. She patronized me with this whiny "listen to me Dear..." as if to inform me I was outta my place with her or to inform me she had the power of life and death over me. She had worked at the VA Hospital for twenty-one years. When I upbraided her for copping a condescending attitude, she apologized and brightened considerable. Whether it was because I'd raised the ante for her enjoyment of sending me to the death chambers or not I couldn't tell.

The other nurse/physician was a man who claimed to be raised in my hometown. By admission he took twice as long to interview me as he normally would. I told him of how I had mistakenly thought I was scheduled to get the colonoscopy on this same visit, and he went off into explaining to me how they had to go through 20 different procedures before they performed the colonoscopy itself. I was a little confused why he was telling me that. Now, I realize he had already seen the headlines in CNN.

I'm satisfied today he thought I might be an undercover agent checking up on what they're doing to straighten this scandal out. I know perfectly well what sort of impression I can make on people if I want to. I went to school for it. True, I'm type-cast to playing heavies, but I got some range even though limited to that. He sort of, he kind of, he played around with questioning my religion. He asked me all sorts of questions that didn't seem aligned too well with checking out the condition of my colon.

I wonder where the decision he makes about which of these horrible diseases to kill me off with will take him. I certainly accept that "dead men tell no tales", but I'm innocent I tell ya'. I'm not there to threaten his 29 year government career and retirement program with some ill-wind or expose.

On the other hand, the best solution might be if they could just put me over the hump with anesthesia and my part of it would be over. That's good for me. Just never wake up. Having two incurable diseases that cripple you horribly first is not something to look forward to... unless I could learn how to get off sexually on pain. I'd lose my less than pristine reputation one way or the other. What a drag, man.

i got no other reason for being cocky than wit and grit. I know too many educated people who have depended on the appearance of it in their personality to get them through dire straits. I met them on the road where I was a itinerant bum who was there by choice, and they were not. Same as the insane asylum. If education don't help you it can kill you. Some people are supposed to find their own way by doing. They're better at educating themselves than others are.

Sometime I pretend I was told by my invisible friend when I was a kid to "go ye therefore". That's where I got the wit and grit. I got it merely by surviving. I think the game just got tougher since I was 65. The last five years have been disillusioning, but very informative. Namely that the Earth is a colder, more unfeeling place then I could have ever imagined or I would have. I didn't know it was colder than I thought for a good enough reason. To have a reason to live. Being constantly stunned by my own stupidity has probably added ten years to my life.

To Gain Hope From Pain

Last night and this morning have been unusual even for me. I lay down to take a nap around eight o'clock with the television on, and woke up at regular intervals at the end of each sleep cycle needing to relieve my bladder every time, and a lot each time. My body was ridding itself of fluids. Something wasn't right.

I decided to try to sleep until dawn. Finally, around 4:30 a.m., I got up anyway. i was nauseated and not feeling well. I had no trouble with constipation and relieved myself more fully than I had for a week. Fixed some coffee, then started puking my guts out and diarrhea up the yingyang. I don't know if this happened because my body is anticipating getting the colonoscopy done this afternoon or not. Either way, the technicians are not gonna find many obstacles to their explorations.

My younger brother will come and get me at 11:00, and we'll drive over to the VA together. I don't think there will be any need for him to stick around the hospital once he gets me there. The colonoscopy is scheduled for a specific time and I won't need him but for to drive me home. Everybody I know that has had this experience tells me I'll be really whacked out on the anesthetics.

I think he'll be able to run around Fayetteville as he wants to until about the time I'll be getting done. He has worked all over Fayetteville and has a clique of friends with which to divert his attention.

My body reacting like it has is not that unusual because that's the side-effect of the prescription medicine I'm taking. Methotrexate. I take eight pills at the same time one day a week. I do that on Tuesday, and so it's no surprise that side-effects showed up last night and this morning. Some weeks it doesn't happen at all.

When I told a medical friend about that, he quipped, "Ah, so the methotrexate has become a sacrament now... eh?" My honest answer was simply, "Yes." It could be any of the other medicines rheumatologists prescribe for rheumatoid arthritis these days. In the last couple of days I've begun to wonder if what the methotrexate is doing is allowing me to inure myself to the pain. It's not like the pain has gone away or the cause of it abated, the medicine allows me to tolerate it better.

My youngest brother and the UPS man who has handled his account for a couple of decades came into the diner where I was eating. They're confidantes enough to the point that the UPS man seems to have a running account of what's going on with me like I'd only expect a family member to know. He knew I'd been diagnosed with RA, and as a joke, reminded me of how I'd stated in the past that I'd like to figure out how to get off sexually on pain.

It'd be hard to deny I've spoke of it. I've written about it here. I thought I was just attempting to be witty. The idea of turning pain into pleasure is a constant in conversations where there are just men around. He likes irony. He grinned at me and asked me directly how I'm coming along with that. I might be doing already with coming along with that. One component needed for the ritual is present in spades. Pain.

Now, all I gotta do is learn how to turn what's already a major issue into a source of sexual pleasure. If I could get healed of rheumatoid arthritis I might be able to take a moral or ethic stand on the issue with an eye toward attracting the camaraderie of a group of decent, God-fearing folk that might get me an invite to the upper crust soirees, but nobody is offering me the slightest bit of encouragement to believe that miracle is gonna happen in the length of time I got left. My best hope to cope is masochism. '-)

Non-Alien Probes

Freakishly cool weather. Joyfully welcomed freakishly cool weather. By the end of the week it's supposed to get up into the 90°s (± 36° C). Although it probably took me at least fifteen minutes to insert the degree characters and boot up the calculator to find the Celsius equivalent, I enjoyed doing it this time because when I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard Mac OS the International Character Set is displayed in the upper file menu line as an American flag. If I click on it the dialog box with all the special characters pops up. If I double-click on a special character that's not on a regular keyboard, then that character is displayed wherever the cursor is blinking. Like this: ‡¿‽¶☀♧♡

I'm sure the same ritual has been a default available from some menu, but having it on the top menu line all the time seems to help me think of it as a regular thing to do rather than spelling out the words for the symbols instead. This is part of some computer coding language called Unicode. I don't know much about it. A correspondent from San Francisco who does computer programming for a living wrote that aside from it's other uses that it can be used to write code for music.

There is a distinct possibility that the colonoscopy the VA is performing on me tomorrow could bring heart-rending news, but here I am tonight wondering if I'm too old to learn to write programming code in LISP. The only problem I really foresee is not my age so much as the fact that I'd have to teach myself. I'd have to learn it on my own, and if I had enough ambition to get me over the hump with that, I'd have done it already.

I was in my fifties when I bought my first computer. I took some computer courses over to the Community College. I took a preliminary course in CAD and a silly business course in BASIC programming for office personnel. It was the only programming course the school offered at the time, and it was taught by my nemesis from when I was studying electronics.

The teacher was/is a true nerd and an ex-marine. In my opinion that's a lousy combination for being any kind of teacher of course material based on math and science. True to form, as a regular nerd he was a lousy communicator, but as an ex-marine it was difficult to ask questions to clarify his clumsy language strategies. He took questions from the class as a personal affront.

All this came to bear in this BASIC programming course. It was not a course designed for nerds, but for office personnel as a sort of familiarizing doodad so the the secretaries and file clerks could fathom what was going on around them, although they wouldn't be using BASIC for anything more than perhaps simple MACROS.

I was very disappointed in how the class transpired. The textbook costs $50. It has 22 chapters. The class never progressed beyond the first two chapters of that expensive textbook. The students taking the course were business students. They didn't grok binary systems. Like they'd never heard of them before. I wasn't much better. The best way I knew of binary systems was from the yin and yang of the I Ching I was obsessed by.

I think I might have gotten a lot more from a class in BASIC programming if there had been a real teacher. This guy's boss was a great teacher, but he didn't teach any programming courses. I learned more than I thought there was to know about capacitors in nature. About how electricity is stored in the ground and released by passing storm systems as lightening.

I guess I learned enough in general about how a programming language is used to get a computer to perform the correct functions to ask a real programmer simple questions. Somehow I've got it in my mind that learning any programming language would be similar to learning astrology, but only in that they're both systems for thinking about things. Programming seems like it would be sort of like learning to ask an oracle the right question.

I became a little intrigued by what I read on Hans Reiser's blog and other places, where the story of this guy who was a prodigy with programming, and his specialty was writing the code for file systems used by operating systems. In his case, specifically the filing system for Linux. Then, at the very time I was reading about his genius, he apparently killed his wife, and was subsequently convicted of murder.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_hansreiser

That was weird. Reading his comments about the difficulties he had getting the help he needed to debug his Linux filing system was very revealing to me about how one would have to think to make something like that happen. Code a file system, that is, not kill your wife. '-)

Several computer programmers have told me that if you have a knack for programming that it will more or less teach itself to you. It's not that having teachers is not a good thing, but to some degree you have to be a self-started and get possessed by the dedication it takes to reach a high level of proficiency on your own.

That's what I didn't have for an acting career although I actually did do my homework. I was surrounded by students who were dedicated to the craft in ways I knew deep inside I'd never come up with on my own. But, contrarily, I did have that dedication to keep on keeping on to learn astrology after I knew what the few teachers I had knew. I had to provide my own incentive to read a few more books or make another hundred natal charts. I never thought I'd do something like that on my own.

I've never needed anybody to push me into writing either. I've had some offers to help me develop the rudiments of writing mo' bettah. It seems silly in a way, but I've kinda always known what I was using writing for. I use writing to find out who-I-think-I-am-is. For some reason that's an incredibly difficult process for me.

I use writing to attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words. I've discovered over the years that I can't write fast enough to find the words I need to say what I see in my imagination if I first try to assess the veracity of those drifting thoughts. Drifting thoughts are slippery devils for me. Sometime I'm more easily distracted from following the trail of some drifting thought.

I started writing a little later today than usual, and when something I thought I could get involved with happened along, and I wrote a decent introductory paragraph to keep me focused, a housefly landed on my right forearm, and I had to stop until I murdered that fly. they're in cahoots, you know, flies are. That's which they cause such strong reactions and force even strong men to become a Lord of the Flies. '-)

I realize it's a strange thing to be writing about, but I've been more consciously aware of the landscape of my colon since my doctor told me she had made an appointment for me. Granted, I have deliberately looked straight into the possibility the surgeons will find something fatal going on in there, but there is also the fact that I'm gonna get drugged up and probed more deeply than any enema my mother gave me as a little boy.

I keep thinking of the stories I've occasionally encountered about people getting kidnapped and probed by odd instruments by aliens that look like preying mantis. I think it's perfectly normal for me to obsess on the possibilities either pro or con of what's gonna happen manana. It ain't gwine be "bizness as usual" tomorrow come hail or high water.

True Solitude Is The Obverse Of True Society.

If you agree with the pundits who claim that it's our opposable thumb that gives humans one of it's greatest advantages over the lesser animals, then having rheumatoid arthritis has definitely leveled the playing field, and I find myself unable to compete physically even with children when it comes to grasping thangs. I have a more difficult time grasping new ideas and technologies too, because I get lonesome for what I've lost when it comes to getting a grip. When I think about the "good ol' days" it usually involves me being handed a hard-to-open jar by a cute, demure young lady, and being asked to open it for them because I look like such a strong man. No mas.

The truth is that no one asks me to do anything for them that requires physicality for... just about anything. People come for me to listen to them. They ain't all that fond of having to listen to me in return. No blame. The things I say to them any more is just something to say when it's my turn to talk. Hopefully, from their point of view, a "something to say" that's easily interrupted by a sudden flash of insight.

To these people, I seem to hand them out like candy, but it's less complicated than that. The more difficult part for me is to keep my trap shut and let them rattle anything off in the hope that something they might say suddenly serves os the platform or ground for some "being" they never thought they'd "see" again. I interject keywords they don't know yet because they've merely been formally trained. They ain't got the lingo to wax normal down pat yet.

I'm one of the people you gotta fool into thinking your reason for being something you're not a natural at is good enow reason to pass over into where you shouldn't be by blood. The are other Fool Card holders you have to prove you have a good excuse to for other passages into the opposite arcane. Being a Fool Is a job for people who don't mind doing busy work.

Occupying the bench at the Fool's petition table located between the high arcane and the low arcane is not something for which an application or resume is carefully submitted. It's decided by individuals coming to the conclusion that temptations from either the left or right or from up or down are moot and all refutable, and then you wake up in the chair listening to these weird stories.

I like the story the guy told in the happiness video about how a man who won the lottery and a man who became a paraplegic were among a random group tested to see how their happiness fared. Four months after what happened took place, the researchers interview both men, and they were equally happy. Happiness seems to be able to be manufactured out of any dire strait. Sadness too.

There appear to be some people, including me, who are of the mind that happiness and sadness should not be pursued. Why bother? They come and go at what seems like their own accord. When I just happen to be happy I try to enjoy it, and when I'm sad, I try to enjoy that too. Why would I not?

I haven't got anything planned beyond this coming Wednesday. My VA doctor order a colonoscopy done Wednesday afternoon, and I'm becoming more convinced there is a possibility they'd gonna find a death-dealing condition in there such that I only have a month or two to live at most.

In consideration of my comments above about how humans create happiness and sadness, however, I gotta be careful not to cause these drastic measure to happen by my own hand.

Desperately Reaching For The Final Digital Straw

When the FCC threw the off-switch on analog TV signals, even though I have a converter box and an outside antenna that worked just fine before the the drop dead date, when it happened I lost all TV reception. Dead. Nada. Not a peep. I must have rescanned dozens of times. Nothing. The screen blinked Weak Signal incessantly. When I clicked on the Info button, I got "No Information". I became extremely frustrated because I had already switched and was receiving digital signals.

My brother stopped by during this period and I tried to pick his brain to find a solution to my situation. He was receiving a signal just fine, but he has a TV with a digital tuner, not a converter box. He told me he had just rescanned after the switchover, and everything was just dandy at his house. He asked me if I'd rescanned. Yes. He asked me if I'd called the FCC number for those having difficulties, no, I didn't know the telephone number.

I found the number on the internet. I called, and some kid came on. He was polite and read what he saw on the computer screen in front of him. Nada. He said he'd call a TV station near me and see if they had problems. We both knew they didn't. He was just trying to help. He put me on hold to make the call and I hung up.

In the end I was able to get it running by finding a setting that read "Default Settings" and resetting the converter box. This is where the miracle came into play. I still had the documentation that came with the converter box I brought home several months ago. The documentation had the PIN number that allowed me to reset the default settings. I actually got through this transition without having to beg for help. All fall down

The sign Gemini has been/was a bit of a mystery to me. A mystery because what confused me was transparent and right in my face. 

Since I was born when the Sun was at 0° 2" Taurus, it's been easy to figure how the Sun has progressed from my natal chart. The solar progression happens at the rate of 1° per year. Thirty years after the day I was born the Sun progressed into Gemini, and thirty years later it progressed outta Gemini into Cancer, the sign of the home. 

I received my remembering vision when I was thirty years old at sa-me ti-me my Sun progressed into the sign of Gemini. Not long after that I began living with a Gemini woman down in Key West. 

It was when I moved in with this Gemini woman (that I later married because she became heavy with child) that I was able to stay in one place long enough to begin studying the occult in a serious way. 

The most helpful feature I witnessed about this woman was the way she multi-tasked. I first noticed it when we were doing a tour of the country in her Volkswagen Beetle. She had never toured America. Too young. Too busy trying to get away from her mother. High school up near Cleveland, college in Florida, her first job in Key West, where, for better or worse, she found me. 

Anybody who has driven across the country from east to west for the first time learns that America is a large country. There are huge stretches of land west of the Mississippi River that gets to look exactly the same to an Easterner. She began reading a novel while i drove, and talked, and talked, and talked. I guess I was bored, but when she stopped reading long enough to point out that the odometer was about to add a bunch of zeros one time too many, I got mad at her and accused her of not paying attention to me.

She refuted my accusation calmly by repeating what I'd said. Sometime saying it better than me. Then, I accused her of not really reading her book, but pretending to read in order to ignore me. She recited what the book was about, and then read the last couple of pages out loud. I was excited and terribly confused. She was doing something I wasn't ready to believe was possible.

Certainly not possible for me. At least, up until that specific conversational exchange. I was more adept at doing one thing at a time better than most. I meditated. I dismissed the possible intrusions into my focus of singularity. On the other hand, watching her multi-task was a challenge for me. It's almost like I had been assigned a mentor to break me out of my rock-solid, fixed sign, Earthen mold.

Gemini is ruled by Mercury. Mercury also rules the sign Virgo. Mercury is exalted (at home in it's best location) in Aquarius, another fixed sign, which can be indicative of how the flightiness Mercury exudes in the two mutable signs it rules works best when kept in it's place. Mercury is in the worst sign it can have for a home in Sagittarius and Pisces, the other two mutable signs.

The four mutable signs are Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces. Mutable means unfixed. Amorphous. Without a nay-me-d direction. The very opposite of the four fixed signs of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius; and the four cardinal signs of Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn.

Mercury rules the local mind and lower education through Gemini, and the long-distant mind and higher education through Sagittarius. Mercury is in it's Fall (it's worst location for doing what it does best) in Sagittarius. It seems odd to me that higher education is a bad thing for the mind, but Sagittarius learns through doing, not playing kiss ass in a class room. The world is it's classroom, and nature is it's teacher.

In reflection, it seems very odd to me that I would have a life-changing visionary experience, move in with a lanky ex-model, and begin studying the occult with deep and abiding vigor. With the same "dedication" I lacked for studying drama and music. I didn't think the occult was a good fit for me, but the fact that I could generate a sense of dedication to anything after a very long dry spell of no inspiration was enough to keep me studying the occult no matter what other people thought of me for doing it.

Mercury in my natal chart is in the Cardinal sign Aries. I've read that this is the esoteric placement of Mercury, but I don't know what that means. Maybe it's esoteric in the sense of how Einstein used his natal placement of Mercury in Aries, i.e., "to go where no man has gone before". With the question being: How else can one find out how far they can go with something (like the theory of general relativity) if they don't go too far occasionally?

Going too far with one of their adventures appears to be the bane of the Mercury-in-Aries configuration. It's easy enough to discern through reading the astrological aspects that Mercury can play havoc with a placement in any of the mutable signs. It works best in the fixed sign Aquarius, and it's a better day when it's placed in any of the fixed signs, as long as it has a positive aspect to the Moon, but even a positive aspect between Mercury and the Moon, when the Moon is in it's fall in Scorpio, can be a hard row to hoe in a field fulla stumps.

I became intensely interested in the mechanics of how this Gemini woman could keep so many balls in the air at once. The keystone to this understanding appears to be how they deal with information. She didn't memorize anything she could find in the file cabinet of the stacks of any database. She didn't have to shuffle through a lotta baggage that could be acquired within minutes from a fixed source. That way, she had all the ti-me in the world to address the present moment with aplomb.

Less, But Obviously Also

None of the people at the class reunions I've been to in the last couple of years remembered me at all much, they remembered my father, the teacher. When my father died in 1995 his pall bearers were all his former star students. These grown men were all successful politicians who got together and bought him a wreath emblazoned with a banner that screamed "TEACHER OF TEACHERS." Hundreds of his former students came to his funeral. The king is dead. Long live the King (meaning themselves, of course.) No blame.

I had no birthright to gain from my father's death. Not like his students and my younger brothers did. I felt like I was being ignored in favor of other father's sons who gained the benefit of my father's idealism instead of me. The oldest son, but the middle child. Two older sisters into whose curious hands I was tossed like a doll. They had pins, my sisters did, and a notion for social experimentation.

I am the keeper of my older sisters' secrets, and the source of my younger brother's deepest shame. My upcoming death will bring a great sigh of relief for anybody who has ever been led to believe they had some arcane or ancient duty to love me. I have milked their faux duty for all the love they once dreamed they had and made butter with it. Why would I not? Ya gotta start somewhere, and it's usually with family and friends.

I absolutely did not want my own children to be exposed to the no-stone-left-unturned experimentation I put anybody and everybody around me through. I left the first one with her mother before she could crawl, and the second pair of children I loaded on their mother's back, and then give a solid whack on her proverbial flank to stampede her toward her own mother in California. I just saw all of them for the first time since 1982, and they're all doing swell. No kudos to me.

There was and is nothing I can do to stop life from happening to anybody. Much less my own spawn. The older I get, the more helpless I realize I am (and have been), especially as my physical body is constantly sulking because I never have found and initiated the secret of acquiring physical immortality. It's become a literal pain-in-the-ass lately.

My youngest brother kindly came by to see if I had any trash I wanted him to add to his big trashcan he has to haul out to the paved road. We chatted a bit with him standing beside his pickup truck. I reminded him that I needed his help to get to and from the hospital next Wednesday. He has already said he'd do it or see that it was done. I just wanted to remind him.

I told him that I was becoming concerned that the colonoscopy might have a lethal end to it, and that I was writing about the possibilities. He scowled like my father used to scowl. He don't want to know how I feel about it or anything else. He doesn't read my blog because my thoughts about what's wot sometime clash with what he thinks is wot, and there is no blame in that. I can't read his stuff unbiasedly either. It doesn't matter. I can't imagine him being any more ashamed of me than he already is. He has a deep sense of family duty. He wants to protect the world from me. Why would he not? Who would know better what the world don't?

My old wino's hootch is a wildlife habitat. I built it of green lumber straight from the sawmill without waiting for it to dry out and shrink down to some nominal size, before I proceeded to have it planed smooth and then use it as seasoned wood. The old man who owned the ancient sawmill that cut the tree trunks I brought to him, told me that his planer wasn't working as a condition for sawing my wood. On the other hand he cut up the trees into boards and planks at a cheap rate.

Nailing up green wood before it's seasoned is the reason my wooden house is like a refuge for sneaky crawly thinks like lizards and skinks. There are little recesses they can escape to all over my house both inside and out. Just now I was kicked back in this stuffed chair someone donated to the cause, and I saw a flicker of movement at the bottom left edge of the opened outside door.

It was a blue-tailed skink that's fairly common in this area. What's not common is how their iridescent colors catch the sunlight at various times and places. I don't actually know why blue-tailed skinks do what they do for, but the way I rationalized it's behavior, as if it did what I thought it did for the reasons I'd have if I were a blue-tailed skink or maybe not, is that it crawled out into the sunlight streaming through the open door to catch some rays.

It's common knowledge that reptiles persistently seek out the warmth of the Sun because they're cold-blooded. Like a solar-powered robots that only moves when it's collected enough sun to do what it's programmed to do... by aliens? LOL

Humans less, perhaps, but obviously also?

That's not a new idea and it may not exactly be myth. The notion that some force external to Earth uses this ideal planet to grow consciousness more or less like humans grow livestock for food and recreation. If such is so, then they're obviously not growing humans for meat. Dust to dust.. and all that jazz.

The biggest chance I ever took with my life was when I deliberately committed myself to the State Hospital for the insane. My friends and my mother helped me make it happen because I didn't give them much of a choice. My mother made all the arrangements. She said that she had been expecting me to come to this head. I wasn't gonna be satisfied with anything less. I wanted to know what crazy actually is, and so, they had to do it.

My mother rescued me. She didn't have to. After I'd been there for thirty days, she visited me and while we were out walking around the lawns around the huge industrial type buildings, she stopped, and then turned me to face her, and asked me if I had found out what I wanted to know? I admitted to her that I had. She instructed me to walk her to her car, and when we got there, she told me to get in, that we were going home. I started to question her... but, she shushed me, and pointed for me to do as I was told. I got in the car. She knew that since I had admitted myself I could leave anytime. But, if my mother had not intervened and brought me home, I might still be there.

The most useful thing I found out by committing myself to the insane asylum was how if I didn't make decisions for myself about entering depression that it could eat me alive. I was there. I was warned one by one by personal testimony. One of the permanent patients there in the same dormitory building with me was a guy I went to school with. Our families were friends. He was a child prodigy who blew it. He had moments of lucidity in which he told me how cautious I must be about entertaining ideas of nihilism and depression. He was warning me not to mess around with this stuff. To "nip it in the bud".

I did learn to do that. Maybe to an excessive degree at times. I do more than I need to in order to stop it in it's tracks. I can't say the temptation to submit to depression is lesser as much as I choose to believe that, for now, I'm quicker at the draw than depression is. I may be challenged as never before in the next week. It's so deliberately possible to me to get some depressing news in the next week. "Death always come unexpected."

Tortoise Shell Oracles And Fate

•
The possibilities of what showing up for that colonoscopy next Wednesday could have on my future has taken to dominating my thoughts presently. The fact that the surgeons might find some sort of cancer there, and immediately determine that it's too late to do anything about it. Admittedly, that's the extreme case, but my doctor at the VA scheduled me for a colonoscopy directly because she wanted to know if that situation exists in fact. She also tentatively made me an appointment with the eye clinic, but that's put off until after the colonoscopy. Everything is. My life is on hold.

Presently, it seems futile to read about events that will happen after June 17, 2009. There is a real possibility I might be well on my way outta this world in a relatively short amount of time from a pain in the ass. I wonder just what kind of reaction I might have if they tell me I'm in dire straits and about to croak. It's not like if I am, that I'll have to live with the shame of not "taking it like a man". My relatives might be embarrassed if I act cowardly, but I'll be gone to the sweet bye and bye. I don't care, at least at this juncture, I've been there many times even while occupying this body.

I watched this TEDtalk video again:

http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html

I didn't start out to hear it a second time. I just responded to the title about learning to listen and figured I probably couldn't ever know too much about that, and clicked to see whatever came up. As soon as I saw the woman demonstrating 'how to listen', however, I was very happy to sit down and watch it again.

There's something about her presentation that makes me weep with joy for what she has accomplished as a deaf person. It also makes me feel ashamed that I really haven't tried to accomplish anything with whatever musical talents I may have. My take is that I never attracted the right teacher. Either that or my fate wasn't supposed to take that particular primrose path.

This Evelyn Glennie has taken percussion to an end I can't even imagine was/is possible. I've realized in the past that I needed to know more about percussion and counting rhythms. Five or six years ago I bought a professionally made djembe drum and began playing what for me was in earnest. I felt emotionally met in some ways, but not inspired to sit and play hours on end.

I found it impossible to feign dedication and devotion simply because I mentally keened that's what it took to get where I might wanna end up at, if I had my way. After a couple of years I drifted over to trying to learn the various scales on the piano, and found out by the difficulties I began having that I have rheumatoid arthritis, and I'm lucky I can still type.

Writing stuff is what makes time fly for me. It's no struggle at all to get lost in saying what I see for hours on end. It's not just creating the images I like to conjure that is even the most of it, but editing what I create from attempting to capture drifting thought is what make time evaporate.

That's a big deal to me. I searched all my life for an activity that was so interesting to me that I'd get lost in the very doing of it. It only happened when I bought my first computer in 1988 (or so), and then got an online account with the local ISP. I was literally convinced to get an online account by having it proved to me that I could join a discussion group about NLP. I live in a small rural town in the Bible Belt of the Old South. There wasn't many books about NLP in the local libraries, and there wasn't gonna be any.

I only discovered that I could write for hours on end and lose track of time when I had the chance to exchange e-mails with people who were much more familiar with NLP than me. Even after my lust to understand NLP abated, I still liked the idea of belonging to e-mail discussion groups, especially after I started keeping a blog.

If I were use my daily writing habit to describe Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey", I might describe the editing of what I attempt to capture with words the part of the journey that happens after I get back from the dreamtime and am trying to manifest what I brought back from the pearl of great price in my hidden wallet into the sensory dimension.

I don't seem to get so infuriated with myself as much anymore when after I've worked for hours on capturing and editing for prime time the drifting thoughts I've encountered as a vagabond and passerby, then discover after I've published online that my editing itself was flawed.

I wrote about something yesterday that I spent entirely too much time editing to screw it up with typos or omissions. I worked and worked at it. Thought I had it down pat. Published it. Then, when I was re-reading it here, I realized that I had forgotten to re-insert an "I" that I intentionally erased, but I forgot to go back and re-insert that "I", and the whole piece didn't make any sense. "For loss of a nail... "
_

Look At The Birdie

I don't know how to make the web links I publish here active. You might have to cut and paste the address below into your browser to get it to work, but the link below is worth the trouble if you like to look at pictures of owls. I somehow managed to find and get a RSS feed to this site in one of the old USSR countries and they regularly post interesting pictures. I don't know who runs this site, but they're very talented.

http://halbot.haluze.sk/images/2009-06/4998_sovy15.jpg

If  Jung had a leg to stand on with his statement , "Religion
is a defense against the experience of God.", then I must
admit that you people have gone to fanatical extremes. How 
on Earth has it gotten to the point where you BELIEVE that 
memorizing this old crap will make your experience with God
 null and void?
_

I arrogantly posted the above remarks to a group of people who only exist to take my abuse. They don't seem to know that. From my impressions they appear to think I'm here to take their's. No blame.

It's the term "against" in Jung's quote that I'm currently exploring. I appear to have pretty much ignored it's implications when I first became fascinated with the quote:

"Religion is a defense against the experience of God." ~ C. G. Jung

http://www.minnesotareads.com/2009/04/the-power-of-myth/

The reason this quote interests me is because if there is any value in it, then it's in the possibility of discovering who God is for the initiate by the observable defense they put up to stop the "experience of God" from doing whatever it does if one doesn't defend themselves against whatever it is.

For me, the experience of God is some extreme awareness of paradoxical terror. I use the term "paradoxical" because when I am IS the terror itself I am is not afraid. It's only in my contemplation of or reflection of BEING inside the terror that I'm not aware of (or any "thing" else).

This brings up an old dilemma to me. Being, and where and how it occurs. Being is a posited situation. It's an impostor. It's imposed and deposed. Sometimes it's just not there. As if it's got other fish to fry. How rude!

A week from today I've got an appointment to go to the Veteran's Hospital in Fayetteville and have a colonoscopy performed. Thinking about it has been a real wake-up call. I've started remembering things. Particularly what happened to my old friend Noel Carter. Noel and I had two things in common. A genius IQ and a penchant for being a pain in the ass to other people. Noel died of colon cancer. He lived by being a pain in the ass, and he died from a pain in the ass. Selah

It absolutely would seem like poetic justice if I go get that colonoscopy next week, and they tell me the cancer is so far progressed they have to remove it like they did with Noel. Then, send me home to die with plastic bags and tubes for guts, like they did him. At least his family came to get him and helped him pass. Amateur.

My ex-wives and children could testify to how I've only been a pain in the ass to them. Mostly from pure selfishness. It only seems fitting as my true fate. I tried to do right by them and give my children a legitimate name, but they act like it was a curse instead of a blessing. No blame.

If I go down there's one thing I will not depend on. My siblings. Except for my older sister they acted like our parent's dying was a plague to be avoided. I gave up everything to go stay with them so they wouldn't end in the local death camp like castaways, and my siblings hardly ever came to visit them. They won't visit me either. C'est la mort!
_

"... What Careless Love Has Done"

I used to get excited when new technology showed up. Now most of the new hardware and software is designed for big corporations and enterprises, and the stuff made for individual consumers is made to appeal to those who have oodles of expendable cash. No blame. It's just that being able to go with the flow of how technology is opening up the world was very exciting, and now it's calmed down to the same ol'/same ol'.

Like many other Mac users I've been waiting for the big announcements from the Apple executives about what's new, and yesterday was the big day. They came out with a new iPhone, but I can't afford AT&T prices for their services, so that meant nothing to me. I don't read anything about the iPhone because the cost of doing business with AT&T make me feel like the lowest of the low when it comes to my limited income. My bad. I should have tried to get rich rather than understanding the world. I try to regret taking the path with heart that sot itself before me, but I get the giggles instead.

There was more information about the new operating system they're calling Snow Leopard. It's the 64-bit system I've been eager to purchase and use. The $24 price tag couldn't be much better. I paid $124 for the upgrade to the 32-bit Leopard system I'm presently using. As I've mentioned though, my Mac Mini has a dual-core Intel processing chip I'm fairly satisfied with, it's just not a 64-bit processing chip, but a 32-bit one.

In other words, I can't just pay $24 and get the new 64-bit operating system without either upgrading my processing chip to the 64-bit one ($400-500) or buy a new computer that has a 64-bit chip. upgrading might be a good deal for me if my Mac Mini motherboard had the Nvidia chip set instead of the slow, unimproved Intel chip set. But, from what I've read, my upgrading the processing chip I might have to pay even more than for a new computer.

One thing is for sure, I'll never go back to using a Windows box unless they made some real changes about security. I don't care whose fault Microsoft's security problem is or for what reason. I'd rather pay the higher initial price of one of the less expensive Macs because I know it's gonna be cheaper to own and to use in the long run than anything Microsoft has out on the market.

The 2 gigabyte DRAM upgrade makes my Mac Mini run as smooth as butter. I'm still tempted to buy an SSD to replace the spinning hard drive I use now, but the new memory has made a significant difference in a good way to my computing needs. Besides, I still haven't run across exact information about which SSD Apple offers with it's expensive models, and I gotta know that for my own satisfaction.

I just wrote something that came out exactly like I wanted. There is this guy who makes a habit of attacking everything the group moderator says and appears to do it to make her look less than his equal. Discussing it openly doesn't phase him. He reminded me of people I've known who got off on pain. They're constantly trying to piss people off so they'll hurt them. I've called it a form of rape. She has repetitively and explosively denied interest in being his bitch.

She commented earlier today about whether I think he realizes how obtuse and redundant he is about his obnoxious behavior and I found myself writing this:

"The paradox of it is that he seems to want to weaken you in order 
to protect you from people like him."

Writing this was doubly meaningful for me. The statement appears to indicate a deeper understanding of the concept of "paradox", and I wrote it to this woman who first made me realize I didn't understand the term paradox deeply enough to carelessly use it. Hah! I guess I showed her!  '-)