When Is Enough, Enow?

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A person sitting alone in their house out in the wood interacting with the digital world via their computer has no me-and-thee-ing (meaning)? With the question being: Is meaning necessary for integrity to ex-is-t. Perhaps, can integrity ex-is?

I figure it has to. Individuation can only happen as the result of denying what ain't me to institute nothingness as a barrier beyond the pale of the cosmic soup that serves as a ground-of-being for a subjective persona that represents the core of that wot upsurged originally from the All, that of which can only be said, yet remains whole if unspoken, it IS.

That may be a big deal for me to understand, but I don't exactly know why. I find myself randomly thinking about it frequently. I almost feel guilty about not needing to be around people physically anymore, if I ever did. In reflection, I seem to have spent much of my life trying to get away from being surrounded by the obligations I seem to find myself pledged to in some form or fashion.

I just wrote an e-mail to my ex-wife. She seems a little more willing to communicate presently, but that may be a delusion on my part. When I went to her (our?) daughter's wedding last year we spoke face to face for the first time in nearly thirty years. What she talked about most was what she called "our connection".

She was careful to tell me that our children were "her" children, but the psychic connection between us is "our connection". Sometimes, I think I married a dim-witted bitch and that's the exact source of our marital problems, but I'm projecting, so what's the point?

I composed my post to her as if we were only physically separated, but that "our connection" can be problematic when the news on TV is about forest fires that might be near where she supposedly lives in California. "Her" youngest daughter also lives somewhere in California, and I don't know where she lives either. I don't wanna know if that very knowledge might be considered malevolent.

There's a chance we might be able to correspond in a civil manner that would alleviate the responses I get on my end of "our connection". I guess I'm attempting to suggest that "our connection" is not a one-way affair. A channel of conscious communication between us might alleviate some of the worries she doesn't understand the source of either.

The truth of this situation is far from my ability to comprehend in reflection. I can only understand how this sort of thing happens in real time in the specious present as it reveals itself. If I attempt to store this plausibly unconvincing argument in long-term memory in order to contemplate it's possible me-and-thee-ing at my leisure, it just becomes a distorted bunch of crap that's not useful for alleviating my recurring angst.

What I'm actually exploring, as far as I am is consciously aware of in the beta state, is what I started writing this entry about. Do I actually need the face-to-face part of a relationship to enjoy it, and to use it as I ordinarily would if we were still sleeping in the sa-me bed together? I really liked that part of it, and feel deprived.

I sorta don't think we've been unfaithful to each other in that way, but only because we don't seem capable of doing it. It's ludicrous for me to assume her co-dependency in this way or would be, if she hadn't taken exception to point it out when we chatted in Seattle. She thinks I know her better than I'm actually aware of, but seem to act like I do anyway. I always have to go too far with this woman to grok when I've gone far enough. There are perfectly good labels that...

In fact, I'm fairly positive I can't be "in love" with another woman. Mostly because I've ever been all that sure I was "in love" romantically. I write that with so-me confidence because I tried to be "in love" with other women more than once. As usual, even when I was younger, I didn't perform the physical part of it very well in the first place, but that may have been forgivable to some large degree for moot reasons.

In the second place, however, I couldn't commit myself to those other women emotionally. There was one I particularly regretted not giving to. They never felt emotionally met because there's no room in my heart for another. Currently. Presently. Here in the Eternal Now! Nor has there been for thirty years. But, I got a thang about change and thirty year cycles.

My first wife was the culmination of my first thirty year phase of life, my second wife dominated the second thirty-year part, but I'm ten years into my third thirty-year cycle... and it looks emptier and even mo' bleak than ever when it comes to affairs of the heart. My grandchildren should theoretically be the love of my life now, but they don't know me, and regrettably, I don't know them either. C'est la vie...
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I'm Innocent, I Tell Ya', A Victim Of Circumstance

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I was watching the Wimbleton Finals the first time Roger Federer win. The beauty of his movement astounded me, and I knew he would win because of the way he used his feet. In the past, when I watched the beauty contests on TV, I was able many times to tell who the winner would be well before the elimination process brought it down to the ten finalists because of the way the women walked.

I don't think such grace can be taught or learned from modeling the other's behaviors. The other women who also had other attributes and talents that looked great, and in some instances, maybe a little better than the eventual winner I picked. I only wish I could pick the horses and lottery winners in such a way.

There were periods yesterday I found it difficult to contain myself. I reached points of understanding about music theory I've been attempting to grok for most of my life. The only course I ever took in music theory at college I failed because I didn't have enough of a background in reading music to play instruments. I'm beginning to believe I've acquired enough about reading and writing musical notation that I might be able to hang with a musical theory college-level course now. I might not pass it with any better than a mediocre grade, but I think I might get by with a passing grade.

I didn't know for sure, but I've thought all along that I needed a portal to make sense out of all the notes and chords so that I could accompany myself singing on the piano like I have done with the guitar and other instruments in the past. I could play just about any pop song or hymnal or patriotic song I learned as a child on the guitar to accompany my singing, but not on the piano.

I don't ever expect to be able to sight read sheet music. Reading other people's compositions is not the point of my attempting to make music. I learn what I wanna know of other people's ideas of what music amounts to by listening. I learn to out my own music by doing. Just like I learn what I got on my mind by writing, not thinking. Thinking is so slow and passe.

It's getting more difficult not to just take the prescribed painkillers in just the way the doctors have dictated in writing. Three times a day. I'm afraid if I do that I'll get hooked, and form a habit like smoking that might prove extremely difficult to manage. There is some part of me that I'm very familiar with that I'd like to give it up to. Especially when I think about what used to be my own families.

It's my fault that the marriages fell apart in both cases, and both had to do with "tuning in, turning on, and dropping out." It's Timothy Leary's fault. LOL

I don't believe that, of course, I entertained a lotta different ways of looking at life from early on before Timothy Leary acted out with his junk. The psychiatrists and psychologists I sat with told me they thought it was because I got confused about religion. In my opinion, I wasn't confused, but frustrated. I've been able to "see" through the hypocrisy since early childhood. Most children do, in my opinion (what else I got?), but they eventually give in to the desires and needs of their caretakers, and give up their disgruntlement with hypocrisy and go along to get along. I kinda wish I had too, but it didn't work out that way.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties I thought I owed it to myself to get psycho-analysed despite the fact that I couldn't afford to pay them because I was a bum. That's never stopped me from getting what I really wanna have. I turned the whole deal into just another government sponsored four-year scholarship after my GI Bill with extensions ran out. I applied to see a psychologist through the community health group at the college I attended on scholarship. I ended up getting psychoanalyzed for a dollar a session, part of which happened at Duke University where I'm getting treatment for rheumatoid arthritis via the VA Hospital across the street now.

My interaction with governments and bureaucracies is indicated by my natal astrology chart. It ought not to work the way it does, but I got aspects of opposition in two areas of my chart that cause practically all the troubles and all the rewards I get outta life. The one that affects my personal life the most is the opposition of the planet Neptune to the Venus/Jupiter conjunction located in the sign Neptune rules, Pisces.

There's another aspect to the conjunction of Venus/Jupiter in Pisces, and that's a trine to Pluto in Cancer by both planets. I don't know how Pluto being demoted to being a cluster of small planetoids instead of one small planet means. Previous to this new astronomical pronouncement, it was my natal chart ruler. It ruled the whole of my chart, so it's gotta mean something. I haven't decided what yet, and yet, it IS up to me, and that's the trick and the paradox of learning what's wot about life and about astrology.

The other oppositions besides the Neptune one to it's native sign is not about signs and houses so much as it is about certain planetary aspects relating to the planet Mars. Mars in my natal chart is located in the sign Capricorn where it's exalted. Mars in Capricorn is as good as it gets for Mars and all that it represents. Especially in regard to it's relation to Mars as the Greek god of war.

Capricorn is ruled by the planet Saturn. Saturn has it's own attributes. This influence on Mars being located in Saturn's home sign contains it's notorious reputation for being ready and eager for a fight at the slightest hint of a option to fight being there.

Mars rules the sign of Aries. Saturn rules the sign of Capricorn. That's why having Mars in Capricorn and having Saturn located in Aries becomes a situation of mutual reception. Both planets are located in each other's sign of rulership, and in square aspectual relationship. A "square aspect" means the planets are 90° apart, whereas an "opposition aspect" means the planets in the sky above are in a 180° relationship at the moment of birth.

Imprints. Ya' gotta think "imprints" if you wanna understand how to use astrology as a system for thinking about things. It's the ambient environment a child is born into that chooses the child's direction in life more than any other factor in my opinion. YMMV

Having Mars and Saturn in mutual reception at the ti-me of my birth is not an opposition like Neptune and the two benefics Venus and Jupiter is, it's worse. Square aspects between planets when a native is born and draws it's first breath are the pits, man, but I'm not only lucky because of the Venus/Jupiter conjunction (even opposed by Neptune), but I'm lucky because I only have two squares in my natal chart and two oppositions. I have thirty-three beneficial aspects.

The other opposition is not between planets. It's between the location of my natal Sun in zero degree, two minutes Taurus and my chart Ascendent, six degrees Scorpio. This not only represents a problem for me, personality-wise, but for the other who can't tell whether I'm lying to them or to myself. Neither can I. What a drag, man.

The problem lies in the fact that my daily goals are ruled by the uninhabited Scorpio ascendent, and my life goals are represented by the Sun (conjoined to the descendant) in Taurus. Sometimes I don't know whether I'm coming or going, but fortunately, neither does anyone else. Well, I say that, but I did meet this young (at the ti-me) Scorpio woman in Key West that just might have. I screwed that up, of course, by choosing the woman who was to become my eventually disenchanted second wife over her. Bad move, but not unusual at all in my life. I still think I chose love over adventure for a change.
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My Brother's Dogs

My brother's dogs from next door come in and out of this second floor room I use to type and sit in. I've known them all since they were puppies, and their mother since she was a young dog too. The dogs run free and can do whatever they like. There are hundreds of acres the family owns for them to hunt food. They just don't know what food is to hunt and kill it to eat.

Food comes from a big plastic-coated paper bag my brother stashes in a 55 gallon plastic barrel usually used for trash. It keeps the weather away from the food, and the dog food out of their own living quarters. Rainey could learn from this, but like the dogs, he doesn't know how. It's not as easy to fool humans as it is dogs, but they both learn the same way, buy imitating others. How else could they have evolved to be-co-me homo sapiens. Only the top of their species become humans. Top of their breed is not good enow.

This morning, only the mother dog has climbed up the outside stairs to visit me. The outside deck at the top of the stairs is as close as she will come to an elevated place to overlook her surroundings here on the flat coastal plains. There ain't even no hills of any size here, much less a cliff to look out from. I may be imagining it (how else?), but I "see" the call of the wild when she hesitates at the top of the stairs to look around.

Her children will come later. Some people might think the dogs come to see me because, although I don't feed them enough to make it worth their while, I'm part of the furniture of their realm. They come to see if their is any food over here. They don't know that. They don't know they're hunting by instinct for something to kill in order to survive. They don't know we're not friends.

They don't know their master is my brother. They only know I don't mistreat them or try to discipline them or try to get them to do tricks to impress my friends. I don't need them for that. I'm a much better barker than any of 'em. If I did, then I would have to use food as an enhancement, and if I gave them food as a reward to do tricks to make up for my lack of talent and ability to entertain myself and others, then they wouldn't need my brother and his wife, who actually use them for guard dogs to alert them if enemies try to sneak up on them. Even me.

Chokolat, the sire dog, top dog, dog of the month, and all around force to be tangled with has changed his ways since the arrival of an impregnable young female dog. I don't remember what they call her. She had nine puppies. I call her "Momma Dog". My brother and his wife gave away all but two of them.

The two they kept were a matched pair to start with by color. A perfect blend of whateverinhell breeds Chokolat is and whateverinhell mixed breed Mommadog is, as far as color goes. Chokolat has long hair and a black tongue and some pug and collie and should be living up in the far north than here in the South. Mommadog has some razorback hound in her, and is the most amazing spectacle to watch posture herself in such a way as to look over the savannah grasses of her ancestor's homeland, there don't exist here on the coastal plains.

Chokolat doesn't come over here anymore unless my brother visits. He guards the home place. Mommadog and her two grown children, Chokky and Lattee. Chokky is the male and has a big head and will get right in your face and dare you to pass him by. Lattee is just sneaky and will let you think she's intimidated, but she's just working with her mother to drive you two one of the male dogs.

They might not bite someone who approaches my house. They will sure as hell let me know a stranger is out and about, but if you go over to my brother's house where Chokolat and that food sack are like you're gonna mess with their food source, all bets are off.

I don't think I could have traveled around the country empty-handed if I didn't understand animals on some preliminarily genetic level. I may understand animals this way because I did travel around the country empty-handed. I found myself a nightly place to lay down in the open to rest and sleep just like the rest of the animals do that travel around. None of them with the reach and scope I had, except for the migratory birds and other like kind.

Like most other animals I had to find something to eat everyday from friendly humans or kill or threaten to in order to take it for myself. Almost exactly like my brother's dogs, but not for the sa-me reason. I know what food is. Food is my brother's dogs, for one thing. I could kill and eat them for food, but if they killed me because of their instincts, they wouldn't know my carcass was food until it started rottening. Their only regret for my dying would be that I knew how to open that garbage container that has what they know food to be inside.

My friendliness, when I was on the road, was like that sort of friendliness the visitors who come here think my brother's dogs exhibit toward me. We're both seemingly friendly because our real goal is food, and further away than one might think is the second reason I might appear to be friendly is sex. Iff'en I ain't et for a few days, sex is only a tool to get food. Well, back then it was, when seeking sexual partners was totally in vogue for wannabe young lovers.

Frankly, although I don't expect to be received well, much less believed or found to have a convincing argument, the biggest reason homo sapiens have succeeded as a species is our over-the-top ability to imitate anything and everything that moves, and especially wot don't. Take that one step further... what? You can't imagine that? Well, glory be!

How about the ability to not only imitate anything that IS or can be accounted for in the sensory dimension, but the particular talent and gifts for imitating or me-me-keen (mimicking) anything that ever was or could be in the future. That's what the new species beyond homo sapiens will be like, and if you're not there now, there's a real good chance it'll be your ancestors who will lose out on your chances to be absorbed by the white light. You might not pay for it now, but what about when you die and join them on the waiting list. That's gonna be hell to pay.

You do know I'm making this crap up as I sit here listening to the crows call each other to gather in the tall yellow pines left over from the hurricanes outside my opened outside door, right? Read the header again if you don't understand. I don't try to distinguish the veracity of the drifting thoughts I attempt to capture with words. There is just not enough ti-me. I am is too busy trying to choose descriptive terms that will not only get me over the hump with other people's idea of reality, I do it because essentially I may need to forgive other people's attempts to tell their truth in order to get them to share their food with me, and probably, although I deny it vehemently, secondly, and with extreme regret for my unqualified weaknesses, sex.

As a group, human beings are a lot like the pets they keep. They think food is what you buy at the grocery store. Like my brother's dogs they hunt without knowing it's actually food and sex they're sniffing around for. It's not their fault. It's what their caretakers taught them food is. They oughta hate their caretakers for making them into domesticated animals, but instead, like their pets, they lick the hand that provides them with rewards for learning new tricks. Why would they think or suspect in rare moments their feral nature is bad? In my opinion, this statement from the translated Gospel of Thomas is plausible:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me.
37 His disciples said, "When will you appear to us, and when will we see you?"
Jesus said, "When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample then, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
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Muggy Morning On The Coastal Plains

It's very muggy this morning. Why would it not be? It rained all night off and on. Maybe it accumulated a couple of inches. I didn't have much e-mail this morning because I changed the settings of one of the discussion groups I am subscribed to read it on the internet home page instead of from my Inbox, so all the e-mail I got this morning was all about the changes brought about by the new Snow Leopard Operating System from the AppleScript mailing list. Its my suspicion that I'm being conned into believing Snow Leopard is a big deal for people who use Apple products, and I believe it.

Moving into 64-bit computing across the board IS a big move for the whole digital community and comparable in it's technical problems to changing television from analog signals to digital signals. The results are not that startling or different, but getting those results has more range and scope. It's been underway for a long time, and even now it will take a fairly long time for the dust to settle.

The main drawing card of going to all this trouble is that it practically removes the limits of how much DRAM can be employed for a desktop operating system. The situation has changed from not being able to use more than 2-4 gigabytes of DRAM on a regular home computer to using way over a billion gigabytes.

That's the big deal about 64-bit computing. There are other advantages, but unless you're an IT professional they really don't matter, but the amount of DRAM that can be employed is key. Presently, in my highly ignorable technical expertise, Samsung just started making 32 gigabyte DRAM chips. That means that if I had deep enough pockets to buy two of these 32 gigabyte chips from Samsung and put them into the two memory slots I have on my Mac Mini, I'd have more DRAM on my Apple box than I have data on my hard drive.

Of course, since I haven't learned enough AppleScript to have an opinion one way or the other about the changes wrought in AppleScript by the new operating system, its not that big a deal for me one way or the other. I'm busy reading away though, trying to keep up with something that I never caught on to.

I wrote the other day about getting my legs tangled up in the bedsheets and falling to the floor while I was getting up to relieve myself a month or so ago, and I've had some discomfort in my left hip ever since. Everything that needs to be there to assist me with thinking that I've broken my hip has been right to to worry hell outta me. Then, a couple of nights ago I was doing some yoga to see if I couldn't stretch the muscles around the sore spot, and I experience a sharp POP! in one of the vertebrae in my lower back.

I knew at the time that either the soreness in my hip was gonna get better or maybe worse, and I had to wait a couple of days to find out which one. I'm getting more sure as time goes by it's getting better. The fall just popped something outta whack, and the yoga stretching popped it back into place again. At least, that's what I hope has happened.

In the past, when I read about coffee and how to get a better cup of it, I encountered a type o coffee pot I wasn't familiar with. It's called a French Press. As I read about it I got the impression that it might be a better mousetrap, but I didn't wanna risk my CC numbers with some group I've never done business with, and the price was fairly prohibitive as I remember it.

I was in Wal-Mart shopping for another coffee carafe to replace the fairly new one that broke recently. Both the old one and the new one broke at the same spot. On the curve transition from the side of the glass pot to the bottom. These carafes are manufactured from tempered glass, and are usually very strong and reliable. The bottom curve must be a design weakness. The problem for me is that the replacement pot cost almost as much as a whole new coffee maker.

I decided I might as well buy a new coffee pot, and was looking through the selection sot before me on the display shelves. On the bottom shelf I saw a weird looking glass thingie that caught my attention because of the label on it. "French Press". The first thing I did was look at the price label on the shelf edge beneath where it sot, and it said $19.95. Twenty bucks, and I could find out whether this deal worked for me or not. Sold!

This happened around nine o'clock at night. I didn't really wanna fix a cup of coffee this late to see if this dealeo worked for me. By the ti-me I got ho-me, however, my curiosity was too much to bear. Without washing it or anything I put some water on to boil, took the lid off the gadget, measured out the regular amount of coffee and dumped it into the bottom of the glass container.

While I was waiting fer my billy to bile I took a look at the "press" part of the French Press Coffee Maker. I've never seen one up close, and this was to be my introduction. It's a very simple design. It's like the old hand pitcher water pumps, except in this case the cylinder is made of glass, not cast-iron. The plunger doesn't have a leather seal at the bottom to push the liquid up through the relief valve.

Instead of the plunger forcing the water to go anywhere with a seal and a flap, it's made of very fine stainless steel mesh that allows the hot water that's poured in on top of the coffee grounds to pass through it, while keeping the coffee grounds to the bottom of the glass cylinder. Then, when I poured the results into my coffee cup, the grounds stayed in the bottom of the pot due to the stainless steel screen.

It tasted wonderful. Since there is not fiber filter like there is with a Mister Coffee style coffee pot, there is a little sediment from the grounds at the bottom of my cup when I'm done. Like there used to be when we made coffee with a percolator style pot, but without all that noise and the bitterness associated with repetitively running the same water through the same grounds. It's more like the results of simply boiling some water and throwing the grounds into it, and straining the grounds out while it's being poured.

I gotta get a bigger tempered glass container to use to heat the water in the microwave oven. The one cup tempered measuring cup I have now doesn't have enough room to make a full mug of coffee after part of it is absorbed by the coffee grounds during the making process. A cup and a half container of water brought to a boil in the microwave in three minutes should do the trick.

Description-wise, This is a much neater way for a single person or a couple to make coffee. Especially during the clean-up afterward. I just washed the stainless steel screen of the plunger off, rinsed out the glass cylinder, and sat it on the shelf where it takes up less space, doesn't need a electric outlet or wires on the counter top, and looks more elegant there than a cheap plastic doodad. All for $20. Now I know. It's all I ask or have ever.

My sister-in-law came just drove by to tell me that the oldest daughter of my second-wife gave birth to a boy child. Genetically, I guess that means I'm a grandfather again, but it hurts a little to always be the last to know, and to know that I'll never see this child or allowed any input to his development. This mother's daughter's sister never bothered to tell me she had a child for years. I only learned incidentally through somebody else then too. I guess i should have been a better person. The problem being, of course, is a little matter of whose idea of "better" instead of my own was I expected to choose from.

Editing Blog Entries And Debugging Scripts Are The Sa-me

Up early again this morning. It took forever it seemed to go to sleep even though I meditated for an hour before. Yesterday was too exciting, but I might have injured my back doing some stretches simply because I could. I took a pain pill and some muscle relaxers and hoped that sleep and some rest might help. I was bending over backward to stretch my belly from sitting so much, and there was a real popping of some bones where it has been hurting since I fell getting out of bed about a month ago. I hope it was a pop that put something back in place, but it still bothers me this morning, so only time will tell.

I'm writing my blog entry early because I have to go to Fayetteville today for several reasons. The main one is to take the optometrist report to the VA Hospital Eye Clinic to see if they will help me get these cataracts removed. There is nothing about the VA system that teaches a patient how to get the services they need. When I realized that it was up to me I started asking questions of the other veterans and the employees to find out the acceptable procedures. Thats how I found out how to get the cataract procedure started. I hope it works.

The other major reason I have to go to Fayetteville is to mail some letters including a check for my property tax. I loaned some money to a friend right when I needed it myself, but he's really struggling and I didn't wanna feel niggardly for not helping. He might literally give me the shirt off his back sort of thing.

I think I must be nearer to dying than I expect. Not that death can be expected, Tibetan lamas not withstanding. Things are going too good. I went through two powerful realizations yesterday. One after the other about some long time goals. I knew that memorizing that 48 chord sequence I copied from the internet could be very helpful, and I have pretty much memorized all 48 chords.

The reason I was able to do such a thing was the way the whole exercise was set up. It requires that the same sequence of notes be played each time I move up a half step. There are only two notes in each chord, but the bottom note of the first note is the root note of for all twelve keys.

By moving that first note down a half step and keeping the second note where it is four times, it reveals the the major seventh of the root, then moving the lower note another half-note it produces the dominant seventh of the root, and moving the bottom note another half-step produces the final chord of the series.

I haven't recognized the relationship of this final two-note chord enough to name it by memory yet, but I know how to find the name of it using the Circle of Fifths. I expect to have it memorized in the near future by associating it with the zodiac which I easily remember after having memorized it thirty years ago. Learning a classical method of visualization is mandatory for me, and has been since childhood.

The other realization I had yesterday involved my study of AppleScript. What I realized was not only will I be able to learn it to some degree of competency, but what really made me ecstatic was when I realized that debugging scripts produces the same determination in me that editing my writing does. Sometime I take four or five hours to edit a paragraph or two it only took me an hour to write, because that's just the way my mind works.

It's the same deal with my playing with expert level crossword puzzles. I buy them by the booklet full from the large book stores like Barnes and Nobles in the Games section. I hardly ever finish of these puzzles at the first sitting. I work them in ink, so I need to be sure I've got the right answer to the clue. The object is to finish the puzzle clean without any write-overs.

I don't use and reference material to finish these puzzles, but it could take me a couple of weeks to do it. I force myself to intuit all the answers without any help other than my own experiential database to reach for the the answers.

I enter some sort of state of being by these sorts of activities I can't get to any other way than by meditating or by use of the sacraments. Now I've found two other methods of getting there that I have always enjoyed. I didn't have to learn anything new, just to realize all these habitual ways of approaching the world lead to the same highly desirable state of being.

The real convincer to me that the effort I put into debugging a script is that it makes time fly. There are only certain behaviors I indulge in where I lose track of time because I get so engrossed in wot's sot before me.

Hot Enow For Margaritas?

The last days of summer. I don't have a good metaphor for how hot and muggy it is here. My air conditioner is busted and I can't afford another one. I'll deal. I always have. Well, I'll cope with wot's sot before me as long as I can, and then I won't anymore. C'est la morte!

I got up in the middle of the night because i went to bed early. I was exhausted mentally. My brain was exploding with possibilities for where my piano practice is taking me. I can play lead with either hand and bass with either hand, and I can play the scales with both hands together, but it's still difficult to play bass with the left hand and lead with the right hand together. Better though. A little better... maybe.

Yesterday I wrote about coming to a problem with the AppleScript tutorial that had me buffalo-ed. That's why I went to bed early. I only intended to take a nap to see if that would clear the cobwebs out. I never did figure out exactly what the problem was. It was a fairly short script with only about three or four lines of text and numbers, but compiled it's spreads out to a few words per line for the most part.

The point is that it wasn't that much content to check out, and yet I pored over it again and again for a couple of hours, and still couldn't compile or rather, sometimes it would compile, but it wouldn't Run. Early this morning when I got up from what was supposed to be a nap, about three a.m., I deleted the entire script and typed it in again, and it worked like a charm. There had to be a typo somewhere, but I simply couldn't find it. So, I resolved it instead.

I went back to bed and got up again around eight o'clock this morning. I played through my piano scales even before I had coffee and took my medicine. Then, it was back once more into the breach. Unfortunately, I soon ran into another typo in another script, and again I spent a lotta time looking for it, and couldn't find it, but this time I didn't take forever to re-type the script. Then, as I was retyping it I realized the mistake. I accidentally typed the letter "o" instead of a zero (0). Then, I remembered doing it while in real ti-me, and silently mentioned to myself I had to correct that, and then didn't. Jeez!

That's the one aspect of learning AppleScript that really pleases me. I've been able to find or resolve all the sample script errors I've encountered. I knew it could be this way because of a certain doggedness that has haunted me all my life. I don't think it's so because I'm what some people call a "perfectionist". I just like debugging stuff. Like editing my writing. Sometime I write for an hour, and edit what I wrote in an hour for four or five hours or more.

This is different. There's an end game that's definitive. Either the code I write compiles and runs or it don't. Thats much different than writing open-ended prose on a train to nowhere. In writing scripts, the proof is the results. For me, however, those results don't have to reflect some ultimate truth. Just the fact that I can get the computer to produce the results I reach for is enough.

I got the feeling today several times that if I keep this up I'm gonna be able to do some of the very things with a computer I would have done if I'd just known how. As a matter of fact, the tutorial seems to assume that the content of their efforts is about those simple things that many people wished they knew how to make happen. In part, that's what keeps me working at it.

There is a little larceny in my heart too. That seems to be part of the deal with me. It's that Scorpio Ascendent thing I guess. Either a snake-in-the-grass or the height of a soaring eagle. This larceny is not larceny at all, so I pretend I'm getting away with something because that seems to push me in one of the few ways I'll let myself be pushed.

What I'm referring to in that I signed up for a 45-day free jaunt at the web site tutorial. They apparently have lots of tutorials that their paying subscribers can use. They pay by the month. $23 a month, as I comprehend their spiel. I think the members can study any book they got there for that $23. Like I said, my youngest brother told me he participates with a group like this. He's seriously into FileMaker Pro.

I may be hooked by this free offer to the point that I give up their asking price. But, in the meantime, I'm using that 45 day free offer as incentive to finish this tutorial before the free offer evaporates and I gotta pay up or else.

I especially like the fact that AppleScript is written as much as possible in everyday English, and refers to the keywords as verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech. Not only does that make things easier to remember for a neophyte, but it's gonna help me organize my rhetoric around getting the results I want from the other with less effort, and for sure, less conspicuously. I just love playing word ga-me-s.

I studied neurolinguistic programming for a long time. I got a wall full of certificates of completion for various nlp trainer's courses. The entire idea of NLP is to program human beings, but for me it was only to program myself. What I learned was that I always had, but i coulda done mo' bettah. I guess I've put off studying programming itself. I don't seem to have recognized and found my way into one of the various portals that might lead me there. I did the logistics thing and organized the tools I'd need to work the Perl tutorial for Windows, but without a mentor who would get me over the rough spots I was pretty much screwed. Nobody showed up.

I should have known even then that certain things have to fall into place for me to get where I wanna go with various systems for thinking about things. I know a lot of them. Some, I've even mastered. I had to master just one thing first. I mastered the art of welding pipes of all things. It really didn't matter what I mastered, just that I mastered something. Anything. For me, although it might not work this way for others, mastering the skilled craft of welding and certifying for job after job for year after year was something I needed. I needed to learn how to become a master of anything I chose.

The personal attributes that allowed me to master pipewelding served as a model for mastering anything that mattered to me. The thing is, is that i'm not always sure whether something I'm trying to master actually matters to me or I'm doing it for-the-other. The way things seem to work for me is that I have to do something for-myself in order to do it for-the-other. I've heard others admit that it works the opposite way for them. They get what they need from doing-for-the-other in order to do-for-themselves.

It's kind of what I'm doing by teaching myself what I wanna know about playing the piano. In the same sense that all the music majors at the college I went to had to demonstrate a certain level of proficiency at the piano before they could get a bachelor's degree, no matter what their specialty was, I'm attempting to interweave all things musical I've picked up over the years into the piano as a container. I intend for the instrument itself to be the index of all I got going for me musically.

In the same way, I intend to use AppleScript to organize all things digitally. Well, as far as it goes with me. I've always known that beneath my unquenchable desire to show off, that I was always taking a chance of wandering off into territory where I'm as ignorant as a box of rocks. It's gonna get worse, and I'm gonna help it get worse as much as I can, and still defend myself against my experience of encountering God.

Being For Myself For The Other

I've been thrown off schedule by all these appointments I've had. I like my routine because I can always back track to where I forgot myself. For instance, I always park in the same row at the grocery store parking lot so I'll always give the appearance of not being lost, because I get lost in thought occasionally, and don't know exactly where I am when I return. I'm pretty used to that throughout my life. there have been lots of occasions when I woke up without a clue as to my whereabouts. Not necessarily because I went to sleep in an altered state, but because I got to where I was in the dark. You know, like my mother's uterus. I didn't even know what "light" was until I got a physical body that had some eyes.

My oldest daughter from my second marriage should have had her first baby by now. She was two weeks overdue herself. As usual, I'll be the last to know, and lucky to know at all. I didn't know when her younger sister had a girl child six years ago, until last year. I meant no more to any of those people than I've meant to my natal family. I think my second wife only had intimate relations with people she hated. Certainly not the people she actually communicated with. It shocked me to see her actually socializing with groups of people when she would never do that with me. Sex seemed to be about the only form of personal communication we ever had. I didn't even know how to insult her by throwing her own words back in her face. She expected me to understand her because I could read palms. It's not the same thing. Reading anything is better with subjective distance.

Relationships seem to be a matter of pace to me. I appear to make friends with runners when I'm into running, and I get friendly with meditators when I'm sick to death of running. It can go anyway at anytime and it really pisses some people off to personally witness me changing horses in mid-stream. All they have to do is change horses too, but the rules of conscience they adopted won't let them do that, and I refuse to get stuck with the sa-me ol'/sa-me ol' due to their fears and not mine. I've traveled too much. I've heard what "good friends" tell about each other to strangers passing through. I know better than to leap to the conclusions I'd have too, if I hadn't widened my scope by being something I wouldn't have been without perceiving the world through other people's eyes and ears. Travel in the sensory dimension broadens. Traveling in the non-sensory realms revealed by the sacraments narrows. Whatever distinguishes that "Bridal Chamber" between in and out, and up and down is wholy.

I drove myself a little nuts yesterday putting off logging into the AppleScript tutorial web site yesterday until late afternoon. If the truth were known, the only thing I got going for me as an individual is my ability to manage my tie-to-me (ti-me). Yesterday was critical for me as far as me-more-I-zing systems go. There has to be some sort of continuum or I seem to let go the tension I need to drive through to the end. It only takes on lapse of desire and the whole thing peters out. Hardly ever is there a redo.

So, I did log in and completed the fourth chapter. I stopped around ten o'clock last night at the end of the chapter, not only because it was a good stopping point, but because I was getting a little confused by the content I was attempting to absorb. So, today, I wanna start out in the middle of the last chapter and try to grok what was confusing me before i go on to Chapter Five. If I don't get it, I just won't be able to continue and hope I'll catch on later. That's not how it works with me, and I can't pretend it's a lie. I learn things incrementally in an evolutionary-like process. One thing builds on the other.

That's not to say that I don't take quantum leaps if they jump up at me, but I know all too well what it's like when my momentum fizzles and my expectation and anticipation of the wonderful results I'll have if I can just jump hard enough to make it over the abyssssss..... Aiiiyyyeeeeee!!!....... oh shit.... THUD!

Infrequently I think about what having read the Evans-Wentz translation of theTibetan Book of The Dead means. Especially the part about how families of the deceased pay a Tibetan lama to come read the Book of the Dead to the dead person aloud for three days after they croak. They say the idea of all burial ceremonies are to help the dead person's spirit realize their body is indeed dead, so they can pay attention to the process that transitions them from the realm of the living to the valley of the shadow of death.

Physical death in this sense doesn't appear to be much different than the death of anything, even the death of some arcane effort to install new soft- or firm-ware in the more-than-me through repetition and redundancy. The most difficult thing to realize is that it's actually and truly dead, and that any effort to resuscitate it will ultimately fail. Sometime, even after it takes seeing the corpse is literally rotting before I catch on (Why am I always the last to know?), that I finally do "give up the ghost".

Damn! Three paragraphs to say that I'm writing my blog early so I can log in to the tutorial and get a decent amount of progress made. Either that, or discover for sure that I can't get over the hump with the difficulties I encountered late last night.
_

More Is Less On Tuesdays

The feelings I get from pushing myself to keep on keeping on is mildly interesting to me. I got three main projects going other than eating, sleeping, and taking the prescription medicine per the doctor's orders. I may have missed a turn eith the pills yesterday. By the time I figured it out, it was time for the next dose, so I just shined it on.

Doing the AppleScript tutorial is important to me. It's also pressing. I got time limitations on how long I can get to the for-profit tutorial without paying $23 a month. The $23 a month, however, if I read the hype correctly, allows the payee to use any of the tutorials they publish and offer the online version for.

After I stumbled on the 45-day for free offer and signed up, my youngest brother told me he participates on-line with a tutorial site. I don't know if it's the same one or not. Presently, I'm only interested in learning AppleScript, but it can be the portal to the more sophisticated coding languages. I think if I learn what I can of AppleScript and some of the residuals that go along with it, I'm be happy with this effort.

I stopped after finishing Chapter 4 last night. I was driving myself to get through to at least Page 200 of over 800 pages, but I got to the end of Chapter three sooner than I expected, and shut down for the night. I think I have at least forty more days on the trial offer, and I hope to finish at least the first twelve chapters ere then.

Simultaneous to studying AppleScript I'm progressing with teaching myself to play the piano. I practiced the 48 Chord deal I copied off the internet. I copied the two-note chords one-by-one by starting and stopping the youtube video that had all the notes written as sheet music, but what I printed up by hand wasn't all that legible. I can read it if I keep looking for the right symbols, but then I couldn't remember from one playing to the next if I had chosen the right piano keys with the correct finger.

That was probably just an excuse to reframe the whole copying process to present to me the content in a way that worked best for me. After exploring several layouts I decided for using block letters separated by a forward slash laid out in a serial fashion so that I can look up and with a glance check to see if I'm pressing the right piano keys.

It's important to me to play something in all twelve keys to go along with playing all the major and minor scales. Eventually, I'll add the pentatonic scales to the major and minor scales. The new instruction book I bought at Books A'Million the other day has already been useful, and will probably prove to be a wise purchase. For the first thing, it's got a single page layout of the Circle of Fifths with only a brief paragraph at the top of the page to explain how it works in both directions. Like a natal astrology chart. Twelve signs. Twelve houses. Twelve piano keys. Twelve Disciples. It's all a wonderful game. I understand the logic of base-10, but like God, base-12 will never go away.

I'm actually too excited to start associated the Circle of Fifths to the Zodiac presently. My visualization of the zodiac and all the signs and houses and my fairly sophisticated understanding of the aspects and other astrological devices and symbols is locked in pretty tight. I haven't made many natal charts over the last decade or so, but the images are like Prego Spaghetti Sauce, "It's all in there!"

The proof of the pudding with my musical efforts on the piano is to play not from written music, but from the way I interpret what I perceived non-sensorially before it has be transfigured from existent abstract ideations into physical dimension objects. My goals for playing the piano are no different from what they are in writing this blog and the e-mails I exchange with complete strangers. I wanna capture drifting thoughts with sound rather than graven images. Which means, of course, that I still won't know how to read sheet music. It's not the music teachers I'm attempting to get a good grade from.

The Zodiac And The Circle Of Fifths

She writes, "You think everything is in your head. What use is remembrance."

No. i create everything I ideate extemporaneously from the miasmic stuff of dreams in full awareness it won't be able to maintain it's integrity as originally designed without the conscious implementation of some exhausting, dogmatic maintenance program I wouldn't dream of conjuring the patience for. Why, I beg of you, would I DO that?

I just woke up at three in the morning, and after I stumbled to the bathroom and back to bed, found that I wasn't sleepy. The temperature seems to be at that point that pulling a sheet over me is a little too warm, and pushing it off of me is too cool.

My fussiness seemed ridiculous suddenly, because I began to think about what my predicament might be like if I were a four-legged animal (like a deer) without a house to protect me from the weather or from those other animals who might perceive me as a predator toward them or a meal for them. For one thing, at least, I wouldn't be getting up in the middle of a dank, late summer's night, and booting up my computer just to have something to occupy my time until God arrives with the dawn as it's greatest glory.

There have been many mornings, in the past, when I might wake up about this time of the morning lying in the moist air alone in the dark, and if anything was alive and around me moving, it was probably not a good sign. Because I'm inside my house, it doesn't really make much difference. The only animal in this part of the country that could actually break down my door to come inside and kill and eat me would be a bear. Well, it COULD happen... or another human being... and that ain't most likely gonna happen because I'm ready for the bear.

The top of the inside of my mouth got burned by something I ate that irritated my gums right behind my front teeth. I was thinking back to when I might have eaten some hot food that might have caused this small discomfort, and realized the sore spot was probably caused not by physical heat, but by the acid in some ginger snaps I've been snacking on for a couple of days. I love a hot cup of dark-roasted coffee to soak ginger snaps in. Ginger is a strange root herb that has an odd affect on me. I get a box or sack of them and a pot of coffee to drink with them, and I'm in hog heaven. Of course, it does irritate the lining of my mouth.

I don't think any other animal besides homo sapiens have refrigerators and automatic washing machines, much less clothes they can put on and take off at four o'clock in the morning in just the right amount to adjust to the temperature and the humidity.

I'm having a little trouble keeping something that has happened to Ben. I haven't seen him for a long time, and I pretty much know why. His only son married a crackhead, she or both of them went on a binge and lost everything. They moved back into his parent's house. I don't know the son very well, and his wife not at all.

Their fall from grace was not unexpected. Ben asked me to do a natal chart on his wife and children. I told him what would happen, but shouldn't have. Nobody wants to or ever does much believe bad things happen to bad people. I don't like to admit that someone who I let near me in friendship would turn out to be an out and out no-good-nik that was gonna ruin an upstanding family I knew growing up.

Ben is a no-good-nik. That's an odd term to be calling a good ol' boy from Kentucky. I should have admitted this to myself a long-time ago. Especially when he tried to get me put in prison in Mexico. But, no, I still respond to the forgive and forget policy I was conned into by my caregivers when I was growing up.

He married the youngest daughter of one of my father's good friends. I'm beginning to think this guy was a crook that even my father should have been careful about, but maybe even my father was not the kind of man I've made him into in my mind. It's for damn sure that I'm not the kind of man I think I am is.

I took it to mean that Ben was probably a good person at heart because he married into what was, according to my father and the people of the same Baptist church we all went to, a "good family". Well, they were reputable enow in the community, but as a woman I thought was hot once said, "You only get to know how people really are when you do business with them." So, I paid her, and went on about my business. LOL She was right. I never saw her again. I should pay more people to be my friends and lovers. Oh, that's ... hmm...

I've messed around with a bunch of no-good-niks over my long life-time. So have they. Maybe my real education about life has been to not dig too deep into people's lives, because I might find myself. No, no, we wouldn't want that. So, why do I keep digging? Well, for starters, plain and simple, a man's gotta do something. Maybe it's like what was described about the great white shark on a nature show the other night, but also about all sharks. They have no natural buoyancy. If they stop swimming they sink to the bottom. It seems like sharks are natural bottom feeders. They don't have far to go to rest after they eat you up.

Gravity-wise, I reckon angels and sky gods have the least to worry about when it comes to getting et up by bottom feeders. That even makes me wonder about why it's called "eat up" sometimes rather than "chow down"? Maybe that's why the big cats have fangs to grab their victims around the throat to choke them to death before they chow down while the meat is still warm. I have a hard time imagining it's for compassionate reasons, but who knows?

i built this wino's hootch by myself without any blueprints because I'm real good at imitating other people do things. I even imitate animals and bugs and birds and plants (when I grow where I'm planted, and let go to fall where I lay when it's all over but the final, involuntary fart. Like a tire going flat. Psssssss..... t.

There is more to me than you can see, and vice versa, and that's why that specific "more" is a kind of less that makes it not that worthwhile to explore as a subjective goal that you expect to improve your handicap for the ga-me of living. The more or less keen manner homo sapiens are able to imagine the way things were once, and then be able to manipulate that pretend past into what it could be yet is inimitably individual, and impossible to think possible initially.

Just now I'm recovering from a little shock I had about music and how the circle of fifths can be associated for memory purposes with the zodiac. I copied the written notes from a youtube video on how to play 48 different chords using two notes together all played using the same half-step pattern into this empty scale notebook I bought. Here is the web site:

http://www.youtube.com/user/sesameseed77

The first part of the video uses the graphic of a keyboard with the keys that are used shown clearly as the sound is played. I tried to play along with the video, but kept getting confused. My piano keyboard is at right angle to my computer keyboard and monitor, so I had to look to 90° to my left to see which keys were being used to demo the sequences of four two-note chords in one key, before it changed keys and played another four chord sequence. Too much information at too awkward an angle.

That's why I copied the next part of the video that revealed the written notes on a staff with a key signature. I knew I'd have to do that eventually in order to not only remember the physical location of the notes on the keyboard, but to figure out the rest of the chord in question above and beyond the two notes used.

I had to recopy the whole sequence again because the way I did it the first time was too hard to see what came next. So, I reorganized the way I wrote it down to be able to make sure I had the right notes as I me-more-ize them. When I make things a part of my me-more-s I have to be very careful to get it right the first time, because changing it later is sometimes so difficult I virtually give up on a whole project rather than take the time to correct myself.

In my effort to relate this exercise to the Circle of Fifths to see if it has a recognizable pattern. I first saw/intuited that the final chord of the four chord series was labeled differently than the other three two-note chords. It was correct sequentially in that it moved up a half-note physically on the keyboard to continue the pattern started in the root key, but symbolically it changes the naming sequence to the Major 7th of the previous key if it's written in sharps, and enharmonically to the Major 7th if it's written using flats. I'll be astonished if I've written this in words correctly.

The deal here is that I've got to memorize the Circle of Fifths to be able to cross-reference the me-and-thee-ing of the notes of the piano. This has everything to do with visualization. I can "see" my natal chart in all it's details in my mind, and I can manipulate what I "see" there deliberately. Now if I can just "hear" what I "see" like I do in astrology, it might make my life more interesting. "Make" is a keyword I'm presently studying in AppleScript.

"I love it when a plan comes together."

~ George Peppard

AppleScript And Piano Scales

I'm occasionally amazed that I'm progressing right through this tutorial on AppleScript without many major problems. I've only had one sample script I couldn't resolve all the bugs eventually. Finally, in the interest of moving on I had to give it up and admit defeat, temporarily. As a matter of fact, I stopped working the problems to write this entry because I got too excited about finally catching on to a section that took a while to get through.

I've wanted to do this for a long time, but I didn't have the tools I needed to get started good previously. The fact that everything I need to do this scripting bit comes with the Mac operating system, and if something is wrong it's not because i haven't downloaded the right library or whatever. Another decisive factor, I think, is how the industry has moved along and every aspect of computing seems much easier. More and better organized tutorials for about anything a person wants to study shows up constantly.

One of the reasons I've wanted to learn a scripting or programming language is because I suspect I've got just the sort of mind that it takes to address the kind of problems a coder might run into. A lot about the reason I feel this way comes from my love for doing expert level crossword puzzles without resorting to external reference materials, and in ink. It's true. I give myself airs about this, but I gotta, it's part of the deal. Faking it until I make it has held a time-honored place in my personal Hall of Fame.

Some people get obsessed over details. I'm not as obsessed as some people I've encountered during certain pursuits or sojourns or quests. I would be if I had the drive, but I'm very comfortable with my lack of ambition. In fact, my real challenge is to find out just how little I can get by on or with. Avarice. Miserliness. According to the Enneagrams, that's my chief negative feature that I hae to overcome if I wanna go to heaven... or something.

Another facet of learning to code a little bit is that programming is about binary systems. The I Ching is a binary system. Yin and yang. I spent three decades mastering that system, and even then, nobody does or can know that but me. The only way I'll know if the binary system I learned from the Yellow Book is the same binary system as in digital computing systems is for me to learn to write code and see what happens.

I think learning AppleScript might be the best of both worlds for me in the sense that it employs Modern English as much as currently possible, but I'm also thinking about my belief that the way to get word recognition programs to work is to teach people to speak in a manner the machines find more relevant.

It's kind of like in the Drama and Speech classes I took in college. To become an actor that could play a lot of different careactors the drama student has to take speech classes to neutralize their native culture's way of speaking. In the United States acting students are taught that neutral way of speaking is a mid-western accent, and from that neutral zone they can adopt to any regional accent that features English.

AppleScript seems to be about half-way between numbers and words and allows for a person skilled in one to make do with the other. If a person is talented with both words and numbers they got entirely different options. I've tried to balance my preference for words out by laboriously struggling to acquire better skills with numbers, and maybe that's what I'm doing with this current effort to learn some semblance of a computer language.

I just did something I've wanted to do all along. I changed an existing script designed to get one result on another computer that has an application that's not on my computer to a script I can use on my own computer with the applications I have on it. I turned a script designed to open a URL in the tutorial to opening this blog site at the click of a button on my desktop.

I figured at first that learning how to get the right addresses for the basic applications I used on my computer might take a while, but the guys who wrote the tutorial anticipated my needs, and demonstrated how to get that information to make the scripts work locally. In fact, most of the targets on my own computer that have their own names that are different from the given examples can be elicits with one or two commands, and they can be copied and pasted with a couple of clicks.

The online tutorial I'm using doesn't allow me to copy their scripts in order to paste them into my Script Editor to see if they'll work. I have to type them in manually. It's not unusual for me to make several typos in the process. Contrarily, having to type all the code in by copying it word by word, symbol by symbol I'm learning a lot that way. A lot of it is repetitious like boilerplate stuff, and after I've typed it out so many times I've practically memorized some of the forms the content has to take. It's not that difficult to imagine that by the time I get to the end of the tutorial that's over 800 pages long (I'm on page 133) I'll have learned a lot of the fundamentals by rote.

I'm still fitting in some practice on playing the scales and some chord exercises on my digital piano. It's a great relief to turn from struggling through these scripting assignments to playing scales on my piano. Even then, however, I have to take a break and go walking just to keep from getting bedsores on my ass from sitting so long.

Another Saturn's Day In August

A frequent correspondent asked me: Do you perceive spirit as air?


When I read her question I wasn't sure how to answer, if at all. Something I sleepily wrote in the early hours soon after I got outta bed interested me, so I'm thinking of trying to come up with something plausible, but unconvincing in that direction.

I mentioned spirits as a possible different, perhaps more advanced species of life than homo sapiens. I suspect that what I might sensually perceive of "spirits" through my five senses may be compared to what a frog or a whale or a moose might perceive about what homo sapiens or a species of lilies might represent to themselves. For all I can honestly claim to know about that possible species, if such is so, my pedestrian efforts seem contrived, and futilely posture themselves as a defense gesture AGAINST my whimsical conjecture of them.

I use the term "conjecture" like I actually knew it's me-and-ing in it's entirety. Nothing could be further from the truth. I got shaky about whether I used it right and looked it up. No. Not conjecture, but rather what I assumed it's root word to be: conject. The spell-checker marks it, and claims the dictionary doesn't contain "conject". I had to use Google to come up with an archaic definition from an old dictionary:

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
(v. t.)
To conjecture; also, to plan.
(n.)
To throw together, or to throw.

I was looking this term up to compare in with project, as in projection or projecting in the psychological sense of the term. In both terms there seems to be something thrown together or thrown at something. If there is an advanced species associated with Earth, then the only descriptors that work for me is to toss something together AT what MIGHT be there, to see if any "thing" sticks to it's nothingness.

I figure it's been a while since I've written my disclaimer about knowing the truth about anything. Like the potential "sky gods" I write about, it's all conjecture aimed at indirectly exposing the rules of conscience I adopted, in the past, in order to be-co-me with the careactoristics I thought might get the girl or simply help me make it through the night.

I've lost interest in attempting to determine the veracity of what I write. I write to find out what's drifting through my mind's eye as pure amusement. Sometime, I capture drifting thoughts with words whose arrangements extemporaneously entertain me, and then it's once more into the breach to greedily scoop up more, more, more. Not because I want what I get, but for the thrill of the chase.

Consciousness itself could be considered a spirit in my world view. It appears to me to be an organizing force with round heels that can't say no to bringing order to practically any sort of chaos. Conflicted Virgo bitch emptying ashtrays with a vengeance. I'm strangely attracted by and/or to them. They bring out the best I got, and I still have to resort to threats of violence and rough sex they don't want, not to satisfy their sexual angst, but so they can stop dancing, and we can both finally get some sleep. 

Sometime I think the guardian of my sleep gate is as persnickety as a Virgo. It might have something to do with the sun residing in the Sixth House in my natal chart. The Sixth House is the natural home of Virgo, and as it is when I'm visiting any abode not my own, it's usually house rules that win the day, and Virgo has house rules even the princes of darkness have never been schooled in. 

THe sort of disassociation I'm referencing is as simple of going to sleep and losing awareness of the world you used your tools and rules of consciousness upon. As a state of being there doesn't seem to be much difference between laying down on a comfortable bed and gently letting of the beta consciousness world, and getting bopped the head from behind by a mugger to knock you out in order to rob you. Waking up may be a vastly different experience, but unconscious is still being "out like a light."

I started writing this entry as a reply to e-mail post again, and again it got rather longish and I wanted to continue writing in this vein or genre until it exhausted itself. That seems to be the way things are with me so-me-ti-me, My main hunting technique is the also the most ancient, and therefore the most documented and commented up with graven images. The technique just came to my attention, and immediately became irrefutable. It just makes too much sense for me to argue against it. It's to chase after animals until they're totally exhausted, whereupon all that is needed is the coup de grace. Mofos worn out. It seeks the death blow as if reaching for it. Selah

Really, when I heard/saw this research on one of the nature shows I knew it was the true biped way of doing things. Since ancient days the tribes send out "beaters" who work in unison to stampede whatever they're hunting, then they chase them so they can't rest. That's why bipeds don't need claws and tusks and fangs to hunt. It's just a matter of having more endurance.

If the prey turned on the beaters, the other beaters would distract it or them in a similar manner to how rodeo clowns lure the enraged bulls away from the thrown riders.

I edited the header at the top of the page. Did you notice?

Crazy Day That Ends Well

I daydreamed of a shocking device that needed a special room for it to work in the way it's designed. I designed it to be built in a prison to adjoin the whole where prisoners are placed for solitary confinement. It's a sensory deprived room where no sensory stimuli can pass either way except through observable microphones, but only one camera used only for safety purposes. The room is about sound. Both ordinary sound and sound that is silenced in the throat and presumably unspoken. In this specially rigged room, however, even the urge to speak can be monitored. The deal about this is that an electric shock strong enough to really hurt, but nothing that couldn't be recovered from in a coupla minutes. It's punishment for activating a specific behavior. Not for exhibiting the behavior that got you sent to be made whole. 

It's the same with the rest of the room. It could have any other comfort of home because it's not about punishment for but a certain behavior. The punishment would be only for speaking, and eventually, even thinking of it. 

The whole deal would have to be explained and demonstrated to the naughty person in a way that would allow them to make a considered decision. The monitor running the experiment would have to be somebody like me. Totally dispassionate. 

In this day dream I would wait until the prisoner realized he wasn't in the regular solitary confinement cell, but different, then I'd open by attacking his ego and fishing to get them to yell at me. When they did, they'd receive that no bullshit electric shock, and when they said "Ouch" or something more mundane, they'd get shocked again for that. Ad infinitum until they figured out to keep they trap shut. Oh, the angst!

Then, I'd piss them off again. Aiiiyyyeeeee!
Again: Aiiiyyeeeee
Again: aiiyeeee
Again: ai... ai
Again: ...uuugggh
Again; .....

Then, in my sweetest, loving, fatherly voice I might say: Here's the deal. In every case, it's been yo' mouf that got you in trouble at every level of what you call trouble you've ever been to. How would you like to learn the hard way to stop talking without thinking about what you're gonna say first? It's either that or do your regular time in the regular hole. 

If you choose to accept this mission, it's gonna hurt. Even if you get to where you can tolerate the pain, I'm gonna turn the rheostat up to the point where you can't tolerate it. Until you have to know there is a consequence to trying to get over through fakery or misdirection. The room equipment will be able to detect your intentions, and light you up like a candle, but without actually harming you. However, if you understand what's going on and keep returning until the mission is accomplished, this is what will happen (Not really, this is a dream and a hypothetical theory)

When you get to where you can control uttering even a single noise without getting shocked in response to me insulting the hell out of you, I increase the sensitivity of the room such that it can detect even your unconscious impulse to speak traveling through the eighth cranial nerve nanoseconds before it reaches your larynx and eventually even shock you for sinning in your heart. In this way you can learn to live a life of no blame, and that might not stop you from thrill seeking, but it might keep you from getting caught because you inadvertently jacked your jaws and incriminated yo'self. 

I just remembered the source/origin of this dream. Aiiyyee... and done forgot it. 

There are various and sundry ways to do this. My description seems very primitive. I never got around to waterboarding. Any way of detecting a human's speech apparatus in such a way that they could gain control of their impulse to speak irrationally in dire straits might work. On the other hand, you might run the risk of psychologically shutting down their entire impulse to speak altogether. What a drag man, but at least they couldn't yell at you for doing it. 

There is a software solution. Hypnosis. The watch dog could be an alias designed specifically to observe the onset of the speech impulse and sound an alarm for the subject to self-observe as a post hypnotic suggestion after the fact. Other alias could be designed as witnesses to testify to the veracity of the watch dog to be certain it's yapping ain't no false alarm. 

It's not a big deal though, because the only behavior to instigate in response to the watchdog would be to attempt to be consciously aware of the impulse to speak as it organizes itself to express itself in speech. It's not that one is attempting to keep their mouth shut to stay outta trouble (although that could happen as an aside), but to exercise volition/control over that impulse to discover if responding to a given stimuli impulsively is gonna help or hurt in the situation you find yourself reaching for a quick solution.

That's why looking before you leap is so popular as a teaching metaphor. Learning to let many things pass without being duped is part of what it takes to live a life of no blame. I could be wrong, but it seems like to me that most every system of expertise that involves protecting yourself teaches some form of being patient as one of the systems most useful strategies.

I spent much of the afternoon and most of the evening up until this point copying the written notes involved with an exercise on a youtube video for learning 48 different but related two-note chords in one fell swoop. Here is a link to the video that I'm trying to memorize, just click on the arrow and you'll easily understand the whole deal. I've tried to follow along on my piano as the video plays, but my fingers don't know where to go that quickly. So, that's what I've been trying to do by writing it all down.

As you can see, about halfway through the video it starts showing how the notes are written down as it plays them once again. I bought a spiral notebook of empty staff lines just to do stuff like this. The trick with the video is that after I click on the arrow I can stop and stop the video with the space bar. I found that out accidently. So I play the video until it gets to the part where the notes are written down, and I stop the video until I can write all the notes and symbols down in my staff book. I write down the letter names underneath them just like in the video.

I have to be sure I'm striking the right notes before I attempt to memorize these two note chords, because I do things like this with the intent of it being forever, and if I get careless and learn these chords and scales incorrectly, it could take years to correct the mistake if I ever do.

With all this information right dab in front of me, I try to figure out how these chords work out. It's easy to see the note on the right side of the two notes played together stays the same for two bars. The left note of the two descends one/half note at a time. The first chord is sounded, then the left note of the pair moves down a half-step, and that makes a Major Seventh chord, the left finger/note is moved down another half-step, and the sound is makes is the dominant seventh chord, move it again (keeping the right side note on the same key), and the chord you sound is the Major Seventh of ... hmmm... don't know how that counts out yet. Manana.

Attracting Young Minds To DARPA

I drove to Raleigh yesterday and did some shopping. I didn't get what I had in mind of buying, but I got what I got. Basically a new telephone. It's just a regular phone that requires a cable for my home. It's a neat little Panasonic jobbie I got from Best Buy. Mostly because a salesman came up and explained to me what I was looking for, and to recognize how speaker phone icons are placed on the packaging. It's a wireless phone, but only to it's base, but that's better than the old style handset with the coiled cable that keeps getting tangled up. I'm sending out e-mail messages for people to call me so I can find out if it works. Especially the speaker phone feature. I can't talk long with getting tired of holding the phone to my ear.

I may be a dollar short and a day late on that. Just after I'd bought the phone, and on my way back to my car through the huge shopping mall, I saw a booth out in the walkway about Clearwire's WiMax systems. I've read about WiMax moving into Raleigh, but I didn't think it would reach my home town for a while. But still, any information about what was going on might give me some insight about whether it might eventually get here. I opened my psyche to receiving, and the young black dude working the booth was on me in a flash.

He seemed hesitant, and I knew that was about my age and what would normally represent a certain digital ignorance (there's plenty of that) and was preparing to launch into a watered-down version of his sales rap, when I interrupted him and began asking questions about WiMax and how soon it would be here. When all was said and done, maybe by Christmas!

¿Cuánto? When I asked him the price just for internet without a telephone, he told me that would run about $30 a month for 768 mbps upload. He said packaged with a phone it would cost $50 a month. According to the pamphlet, it would cost me about the same thing it's costing me now. So, that's a bummer. I was looking forward to the competition lowering my rates.

I'm not going to change anything for a while yet. I wanna see how well WiMax works first. It IS wireless, and EVERYTHING affects wireless systems. The ambient weather to start with, and then there is solar flares and other astral events that affect wireless. Ideally. wireless is the way to go because when it's working right a person could move around anywhere they pleased without a dropped call. Like a iPhone done right.

The news I read this morning about Microsoft's exploration into White Space is in the works. That may mean that some work is being done to take advantage of the public frequencies to be used for what anybody wants. Like the frequencies used by most wireless devices including routers presently.

"White space is a term that's become popular to describe the frequencies analog TV broadcasts used, that got auctioned off to the highest bidder by the FCC. The bidders had to agree to let the general public use part of the frequencies for whatever they wanted. Pretty much like the cell phone frequencies mentioned above. The difference in the White space frequencies and the present cell phone frequencies is that the old analog TV frequencies penetrated obstacles like trees and walls like analog television signals did.

I don't know the deal on what's happening with the White space frequencies currently. The auction was held with drum rolls and fanfare, but it's only been a few months, and these things naturally take time. I think I remember that most of the bandwidth was acquired by commercial interests like the telcos, but Google has been involved with all the negotiating and are the main backers of getting the guarantee the public will get some of the bandwidth to use as it likes. The public, of course, includes Microsoft and Google. They're gonna do something, and whatever these high-rollers do is gonna affect the cost of what we do digitally together as a country with political boundaries.

I think a big part of why Obama got elected has to do with his age and the fact that he's fairly new in the political process. The leadership of the country under the conservatives resulted in a huge slowdown of the digital world, because it represents progress and taking chances on the future, and conservatives are.... guess what... conservative. By the time they get re-elected into office (yep, it's inevitable), then whatever progress can be made in getting the United States connected digitally, government and all, that's all that gonna happen until the liberals are brought back to catch up as catch can. The WiMax technology can do that, but so can it's competition.

Maybe it'll be a combination of all the viable technologies that are being implemented now or maybe some new invention will reorganize the entire communication effort into a result that's at least three orders of magnitude mo' bettah than we can yet imagine. It won't make much difference to the old people. They're slow to adopt to the existing miracles, but as we die off and each succeeding generation is more digitally aware, then analog will only be around as a relic, like rotary-dial phones are now.

My friend Rainey is teaching an on-line basic chemistry course or at least he's trying to. It's new at his department. He seems discouraged about the software programs they're using to make it happen. They were created by Microsoft, so that's a major stumbling block. Have you ever seen the science guys on TV try to make science interesting. They patronize. They condescend. They spoon-feed science like medicine that's good for you. The very guys who would entice you to be-co-me like them are not enticing. Bill Nye is not famous for his notorious following of sexy female groupies.

Why would Bill Nye's male students not notice that he is not a role model that's gonna solve anybody's sexual angst, much less their own by seeking to be-co-me like him? Young men wanna be like the bad boys who get the girls, not the flattops that preach about saving the world while they deceptively build bigger, more destructive bombs in their DARPA bought and paid-for research laboratories.

They oughta have musicians teach chemistry with long hair and pretty women clinging to their muscular thighs that the kicked-back professor has to drag around the lectern just to move or gesture. Science will never be sexy, but scientists need to hire sexy proxies to lure the lonely into their ranks. Surely nature has the equivalent of the ol' bait and switcheroo trick they can put under a microscope and learn to mimick?

Rainey might be able to make on-line science courses more successful. He seems to have all the right talents to make it happen. He's a power-user on the computer, and his new girlfriend Autumn seems to think he's sexy enough, at least for her. Rainey put me on the phone with her the other day, and though I couldn't actually see the stack of Bibles she stood on to say it over the telephone (not yet anyway), I could almost swear she swore it.

Solipsistic Melodrama In The Boonies

I'm still irritated at this jerk Ray Barber at MacScripter.net I wrote about in yesterday's entry for giving me grief over my reaching out for help in learning AppleScript. The process never got beyond me logging on to the site with the password they provided me with. As soon as I clicked on an article for newbies to see how to use the web site to it's best advantage, the process was interrupted and I was summarily banned even after I humbled myself to correct my mistakes in my first attempt to register.

With our only contact in our entire life centered around me trying to register with this site in order to facilitate my endeavor to learn AppleScript, this guy starts lecturing me and casting aspersions and apparently shooting at every song bird or Jack Sparrow that moves to relieve himself of some deep-seated angst again people who switch to Macs from PCs.

Ray Barber writes:
"Only your username is ever revealed to the public.
Your first and last name, as well as your email address
are private. {and stay that way}. (!!!) But most importantly,
macscripter.net is not your average BBS.  We've
implemented a lot of great features specific to scripting
[such as the protocol link and more].

As great as applescripting is, really bad things can be
done with it.  This is particularly true with the number of
folks who've migrated from PC to the Mac, and only
learning Applescript for the first time.

If you wish to register again using your proper name,
I'll be happy torelease the ban."

This dimwit is preventing me from participating on the list, and then bragging about what I'll be missing because I'm not registered. How can anybody trust somebody not to betray your personal information who simultaneously threatens you with rejection if you don't kowtow to their every psychotic demand?

I made an error in statecraft by wanting to use felix as a username, but furnished my legal name both times I tried to register. I apologized and asked for another chance to register. I practically abandoned my dignity and begged this unpleasant person to let me be a part of this group, then corrected my mistake of using felixmanos as a username, and now Ray Barber apparently wants me to beg him some more. No mas. At least, not until he takes a long vacation to get over himself.

I bought my first Mac in 1988, and this twerp is lecturing me about how dangerous AppleScript or HyperCard is in the hands of former PC users. What Mac owner hasn't had to learn both Windows and the Mac system if they indulge in the business world at all. Yadda, yadda, yadda, if you go online you have to deal with people who are deluded about their own self-importance, but it's not pleasant, even if that deluded person is me.

I actually did accomplish something yesterday besides letting this odd fellow upset me with his crude manners. I've been trying to discover the way the major and minor scales on my piano can mesh together to make practicing the scales one continuous process. I'm also starting to practice some arpeggios. I had one brief run of flow while practicing a five-finger exercise in Eb Major. I'm getting to the point where my plan to extrapolate all the songs I've been exposed to over the years straight from the redundancy and repetition of playing the scales everyday.

Learning AppleScript and learning to play the piano simultaneously is time-consuming for an old man who lives alone, particularly when I'm meditating so much these days. I just finished taking the methotrexate for my rheumatoid arthritis. I take ten pills all at the same time on Tuesday mornings along with the other quinine type pill and the prescribed dosages of calcium and vitamin D. I'll probably be nauseated to the max through tomorrow. Last week I got into a binge of projectile vomiting on Wednesday soon after I took my medicine and wasted the prednisone I'd just taken. I'll have to watch what I eat to keep it down.

This might seem like a real drag to some, but last fall I was in such pain that I could barely wipe my own ass or lift my hands up to my face to brush my teeth and I had to cope with serious pain just to feed myself, and now I'm practicing piano again? I'm grateful for the help I've gotten from the VA Hospital system. I'll get sick and die from something anyway, but they've made the interim much happier than it could have been.

Holy Moly

_
The master said to his slave, "Go out on the streets and 
bring back whomever you find to have dinner."

~From Saying #64 of The Gospel of Thomas
_

That's how some people seem to show up unexpectantly in other people's lives. They're the grinning idiots the slave returns with to take the place of the more desirable guests who have shunned and angered the Master by or with faint praise. 

Anybody can feel better to give rather than receive, that is, if they got something to give. If they look past their greed and avarice, everybody got something to give away or will get it. If for no other reason than just to receive the blessings associated with the fabled widow's mite. People give stuff away they don't actually need to get a blessing they don't need from a bum who has nothing but false gratitude to offer as a "Thank you very much, indeed!" are probably going to hell in some demon's sound-proof handbasket anyway, them what don't will turn into a pillow of salt. 

If I model people who only express with their thoughts and behaviors those attributes they themselves modeled from other people who in turn modeled they stuff from still other people... Where's the beef in this hamburger? All the so-called holy books of wisdom appear to suggest one get off this train of events and find a non-human to model one's behavior upon, and promptly declare some men gods to get around that obstacle.

The e-mail discussion group I subscribed to recently that's run from an Apple web site about AppleScript is really stimulating me to devote time to learning more about how to read and write scripts. The approach I'm using is totally receptive. I haven't written a reply to the group. I don't know enough to ask a question. I read the contents of every post, paying especial attention to reading the scripts and trying to understand why and how they get the results they do, or not get.

It's in this arena I seem to be making some progress. Today, I read this guy's post who was inquiring about the AppleScript Dictionary that has to be in each applications that claims to work with AppleScript. The Dictionary in each application is specific to that application, and if the Commands and whatever ain't in a specific application's Dictionary, even though it may be in other applications that use AppleScript, it ain't gwine fly.

I followed his description on my own machine from the Script Editor to it's drop-down menu heading Window and select Library, and in the dialog box that showed up when I click on Library, is a list of all the Dictionaries in all the applications. When I double-click on any one of them, another dialog box will show up with all the commands and their associated keywords that have to be kowtowed to in order for the scripts a scripter codes for that application to work as advertised.

All that from a post from a guy who didn't know what he was doing and asked for help from anybody but me. Yet, he unknowingly helped me over a bump in the learning curve I found sot before me. I was so thrilled I caught on to anything that shows up in that group's mailbox, that I felt like sending him a thank you note, but that would just be too damn weird and over-the-top. That's why I have issues with expressing gratitude. I can easily start babbling about stuff the other (usually a stranger) refuses to accept responsibility for. Jeez! Who could blame them for that?

I tried to register on this forum site called MacScripter and they banned me for life within an hour. That's pretty cold. The first time they banned me was because I used felix as my user name, but I used my legal name and gmail address to register. They sent me a password, but then banned me before I could use it. So, I wrote the webmaster and he decided to give me another chance, but if I screwed up this time, I was banned for life. So, I registered again using my legal name and my gmail address. They sent me another password, but once again banned me when I signed in (this time they even let me sign in as a member before they banned me), and two strikes and I'm out. What a harsh, hard to please bunch of weirdos. Maybe I'm better off without them.

This is what Ray Barber, the administrator of the MacScripter.net web site wrote to excuse his personal decision to ban me due to his extreme paranoia about an easily correctable technicality:

"Not that I feel the need to justify our rules policy, please understand the
reasoning behind it;

First off, we treat board security very seriously. By registering with your
legal, first and last name keeps out the rif-raf."

This eccentric technocrat has decided I'm "rif-raf" simply because I had the audacity to attempt to register at the MacScripter.net site to participate in the group discussions there, and in order to avail myself of the tutorials teaching a scripting language that comes free in every copy of the Mac operating system Apple sells to the general public in plain sight of God and everybody, and then, all of a sudden, this weirdo suit is attacking my ethics and morals as if I might betray the United States or give away military secrets because I wanna learn AppleScript? OMG!

This seems to be the same sort of dismissive mentality I encountered with the Linux crowd a few years ago. They used their need for self-importance and exclusivity to shut people out while pretending to want to help them. Oh, well, there are other sources. Hopefully, not all of them are as paranoid as these folks.
_

Lobos and Lobotomies

Is lucid dreaming, and it daytime equivalent, merely the homo sapiens adaptation to sleeping with one eye open, but not necessarily in trees, ever? Reflecting and contemplating the results of one's agony and ecstasy (ecstagony) are dual procedures incarnated for the sa-me purpose, to reveal the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of any particular moment of their current visitation of the good earth?


I have a habit of finding fault (projecting my negative attributes upon his behavior) with my younger brother. I do the sa-me thing with my youngest brother, but he got me into and over the hump with computers, so we see eye to eye infrequently as long as I dumb down to let him "protect" me. Yep, he's an Aquarius.  

My younger brother is apparently in love with diesel engines. Particularly ones with worn-out mufflers. He's driving a small pickup he musta got in a junk yard somewhere that ain't got nary a muffler on it. The old fool seems to ignore that the whole neighborhood can HEAR the way he sneaks around looking for somebody to didactically instruct on how to learn by doing. A favorite Sagittarius theme for sermonizing. But, that's not why I think he does it. 

My younger brother talks loud. He talks loud in order to be heard over the noise of a diesel engine. Even if there is no diesel engine running in the background. He's cunning, and aware of it in most all ways, but I don't think he's self-observed this one trait as thoroughly as he might milk it for. When he stops displaying these characteristics for me to project on, I might be left high and dry. 

I don't have a handle on how I might react if either of my younger brothers died before me. I found out through my father that I couldn't possibly have known how I'd react to his death. Not much at first. I was still caught up in maintaining the defense system I had built for protecting myself from him as a child. I was truly afraid of him even as he lay dying. It was only upon the occasion of his death when I laid my hand on his bald head to see if it was cold, did I start to stop fearing him. I'm not sure his final solution did the trick. 

My brothers and I have never physically assaulted each other, yet. Both of them are much more friendly and gregarious than me, and they seem to arrange to be in situations where their audiences accepts that their needs to speak up to be heard. It's just part of their extensive leadership training. They've had public speaking and debate training and competed on a national level for recognition and the tremulous, spooky now-ya-see-'em/now-ya-don't perks of public esteem. 

My younger brother, the Sagittarius, is or appears to be a contentious person too, but mostly as a ploy for fun and games. Along with a pushy, tendentious smirk that habitually appears as he gloats dismissively over the people who foolishly take him serious. He brashly attempts to bulldog people into doing something foolish that could possibly embarrass them, then he becomes his spirit guide Lobo, and goes for their throat. No blame. It's all the rage on the nature shows. Territorial imperative. All animals do it but One. 

He admits this himself. He holds an annual party each year to serve wild game that includes roadkill, and the guests are told, but not informed as to which is which. I trust fish products from China more than the possibility of drawing the short straw at my younger brother's primitive feasts.

Sigmoid Brain Stems And Thoughtlessness

Okay, maybe there were a few more objects without naymes yet that stuck around. Certainly not the Mona Lisa (but if I ever visit her, I bet I can make her smile too!). When I was a little boy our teachers took us to the State Museums. They had one picture by an artist named Thomas Cole. After the first time I saw that painting, I recognized his work immediately in any museum that contained them since I was 8 years old. Especially the ones in the National Galleries in Washington, D.C.. I don't know why. I don't paint much at all. I'd rather compose words and music on the fly to see if they can grow legs. My children are not always children. Sometimes they're born full-growed out of my haid. Some with legs, others not.  
 
I started taking piano lessons when I was in the third grade from my school mate's aunt. She wanted me to learn to read music and play what I read on the instrument to prove I had read what was on the printed page correctly. I was already being blackmailed into reading the KJV to my mother aloud to prove I had read it. So, I sullied up on her, and that was the end of that. 

Currently, in my dotage, I read stuff aloud to myself to prove to myself I've read it. My parents were both school teachers. They didn't stop teaching when they came home very often. I was in school all the time. Day and night. I dreamed of school work and how one day I would run away and never have to prove I had read something I was told to. One day, I ran away. When I came back, they didn't expect as much, but things has changed for them too. 

My mother was disappointed I refused to practice the piano, but she seemed glad to save the money the lessons cost. I don't remember much about how I ended up taking those early piano lessons or how long they lasted. It wasn't the only time I'd humiliate myself not responding to the poor teacher who was unlucky enough to have me assigned to their classes.

One of the more embarrassing moments I've experienced that appeared to come directly into being because of my sheer stubbornness happened when the cast was rehearsing for a fairly large production musical. I played one of the lead character roles in the musical. My character sang and danced with his daughter, the ingenue, and with the entire cast during the finale. I simply could not dance in unison with the cast. What I did instead caused me to stand out like sore thumb. It looked like I was selfishly trying to draw attention to myself. I became an object of scorn. No blame.

I learned something from that experience that I relive each time I'm involved with groups of people. Don't do it unless I mean it. It a simple matter of my being there or not. I do the sa-me thing all the ti-me. I do something a little different to draw attention to myself. Naturally, I don't think I'm gathering the attention to be selfish or to fulfill ulterior motives. Hmm... maybe a small slice of the latter. It isn't unusual at all for me to have ulterior motives. Why would I not? Nobody knows. My motives can be an open and shut case, and nobody knows out loud, because my translucency is subjectively apparent. It's only to the degree that you know yourself that you can act in accord with what you "think" you conclude about my unconscious motives. If I hide them from my own inquiring mind for my own reason, you'll never penetrate my persnickety, inculcated rituals of indifference via mimcry. How can one reach to apperceive motives of any kind for unfathomable and unseen ulterior motives.

Now, I practice playing the scales hours a day, and she still hasn't returned from her grave and patted me on my head for being a good boy. I'm glad too. I hated that dress they buried her in. She died with "The Scream" frozen on her face. She was practically a skeleton when she croaked anyway. When I imagine myself playing away at the scales, completely absorbed in seeking her dead approval, and imagine what might rise up out of her grave and approach me from behind, and lift her rotting hand to pat me on my haid.... ARRRRRRGGGGGGH!

My father taught public speaking, parlimentary procedure, and debate among his many skills to his students. I used to volunteer to get up in front of audiences and perform in the hope of getting his attention. He had so many children besides his own, he did know what to do. 

There were not many times I saw him happier than when he was surrounded by his students and adult admirers. I've watched them unconsciously fold their hands together in front of their face so that only their gleaming bright eyes would reveal their souls to him. The were like the lights of a Christmas tree shining in the darkness of the night. I wanted to be just like that when I grew up. When I finally was able to emulate my father, I ran away from those eyes and those shining souls, but that time I ran away it was for good. I only visited after that. For some reason it seemed disrespectful to draw a bigger crowd in front of him. It was easier than I thought. People just like to do that. They'll used anybody that will let them. Rabble rousers don't need special talents, just a death wish is needed to pull the lanyard.