Truth-Telling At It's Worst

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I don't know the answer to that yet, and if I were you (which I am is not), I wouldn't bet the farm speculating that I'm gonna keep on looking until I do. There has to be a question in my mind for me to institute a quest on your behalf. It appears to me that many people I've serendipitously known in passing do not associate the term "quest" with the expression "question", and the additional three letters makes the latter unrelated to the former.

I went to a lot of trouble to contact a man I knew as a boy to see how his life had turned out. When we finally did get in touch at a reunion (of the school neither one of us finished high school at), I realized that my memories of a supposed friendship between us was non-existent. I'm not even surprised any more to discover I've deluded myself.

The memory of his true careactor back then at that sad reunion returned when he openly stated, "I'm still the meanest little sonofabitch around.", and then, oddly or not, started talking about his love for Jesus. I knew his mother. She wasn't a bitch, but a real heroine, so he could be lying about Jesus too.

It's too bad that people have to hate their own father and mother (according to the Gospel of Thomas), and their own siblings in order to acquire their own true identity. Well, maybe not so much bad as unfortunate. Particularly when the family they must rebel against is held in high regard living in the community in which they rebel against them. I didn't understand this while it was happening.

I don't think many people do understand the needs of puberty while it's happening to them, nor later in contemplative reflection. One day I sort of "woke up" to the fact that there wasn't gonna be a future, soon enow, in which I could reflect on old age, and how it was changing me incrementally, inch by inch until I croak. One thing I'm fairly sure of is that once I do stop breathing for good, the personality I use for contemplation dissipates into the nothingness and unexperienced terror of the abyss. One must have a body to experience terror with or it's simply not… terror. '-)

70 Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you."

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

About the only mutable thing going on about me is the facets of life associated with the planets occupying the sign Pisces, and the fact that my Sun inhabits the Sixth House, the natural home of Virgo. The rest is all fixed signs with a smattering of Cardinal signs thrown in for the sake of a little spice.

I don't know what's going on with my attempt to learn how to use AppleScript. I reduced my e-mail intake to personal posts and the mail from this AppleScript discussion group. It's a fairly active group, and I promised myself I would read each post and at least try to follow the conversation as best I can. My "best" is not all that wonderful presently.

I stopped using the website where I got a 45-day trial run. Somewhere along the line in this quest (based on a true question, but of questionable sincerity) I read a comment in a passing blog site where the author wrote about his approach to learning AppleScript to the effect that he was reduced to just staring at some script until he finally understood how to construct a script of his own making.

This staring approach is probably the only real hope I have of acquiring even a rudimentary use of AppleScript. I stopped using the web site to work the definitive AppleScript tutorial written by Apple employees because the time limitation was a sword over my head. My initial purpose in signing up for the trial period at PeachPit Publishers (Thanks!) was to find out if my motivation was real, and to find out if I needed to buy the book.

Well… maybe, and not right now. This is one of the benefits or detriments of being subscribed to this Apple-Sponsored e-mail discussion group about AppleScript. The main discussion on the list for the last few weeks is about how the upgrade to Snow Leopard with it's 64-bit operating system has effected AppleScript.

Every time Apple upgrades their operating system, these days (AppleScript used to be HyperCard and hasn't been AppleScript forever) they have to upgrade AppleScript to accommodate the changes. Recently, no longer than a couple of days ago, some well-thought of Apple pundit publicly asked in a highly publicized article, Is AppleScript Dead?

It appears as though I decided to attempt to learn AppleScript at an iffy juncture for the language itself. Some of the members of this company sponsored discussion group are Apple employees who are directly associated with what actually happens to AppleScript. Other members of the group have published books and tutorials about AppleScript. They appear to my neophyte's eyes to subtly argue about what's gonna happen to AppleScript in the face of so much of a change in direction for Apple.

One of the known conscious reasons I had for studying and using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes (I Ching) was that it's stated purpose was to teach it's adherents the art of statecraft. I was an active student for over thirty years. I needed to learn statecraft.

People kept telling me, "Boy, you just ain't right. You don't know at all how to act around decent people, do you?" What part of my interaction with my accusers seemed rude? I was just a kid. I didn't know. I went to acting school. What else was there for me to do? I attempted to learn to distinguish when I'm acting and how to be believable in unfamiliar roles, but all I can know about you is whether you got talent or not.

Neither group of people in the AppleScript community appear to convince the other that what they know is well-informed. Oh, they say they got the skinny, but they're not very believable. Programming languages appear to change with the times or die from disuse anyway. The people who learned it one way hate change. Sound familiar?

Like the Horse head nebulae in outer space where stars are born, once formed, the stars can have explosive results or get eaten up by a bigger system by which they're reduced to catching-as-catch-can in order to survive. But only if they attempt to survive as what they haplessly arrived as in the new system. Change can be so subtle and so individualistic in it's way that it really has to be studied as a separate subject from the larger and smaller wholes that it affects.

This resolves to be-co-me-ing. At least, that's how I view the world these days. Shit happens. Things change. To keep up with the changes requires one to let go of the old way of doing things. If you do that, then a hard rain is gonna fall. Be-co-me-ing is easier, and once learned and experienced provides the spice that is the variety of life.

It's troublesome at times for me to accept irrefutably that there is only One me such as the first of the Ten Commandments suggests. I've deluded myself time and again by assuming that once I do allow that atonement to happen, from then on, any dualistic temptations should default to my initial submission to grace.

It doesn't appear possible to let go of all pretenses to the throne of individuality once and for all ti-me in order to be done with it. Letting go of myself as the first person singular is a constant that has to be reinvigorated from external sources each and every time it's evoked into being. At least, that's the way it is for I am. For better or worse I am is (presently) a double-Taurus whose stubbornness is frequently insurmountable.

Be-co-me-ing is all about movement and rest, in my highly disregardable opinion, and movement and rest is all there can be without at-one-ment of movement and rest. That suggests the presence of both simultaneously is do-able. Meditation? I act like that's so. But my current question to myself is: Does atonement eliminate or obviate Being?
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Nebula homo sapiens

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I've begun to believe that the gold the alchemist seeks to create from lead evolves eventually to make a human from a carcass:

29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."

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

This seems to be one of the more mystical sayings found in the Gnostic Library in Egypt in 1945. I've studied the so-called mysteries since childhood almost exclusive to any other subjects. Practically everything I've studied on my own has been associated with understanding these mysteries, and this saying gets down to the nub of the paradox the mysteries introduce into the individual's desire for stability, and splits it wide-open.

I took a break from writing and cleaned up my bathroom a bit. I also installed the first lighting I've ever had in there, and moved the old chest of drawers from my mother's house to a more useful location in the room. It has a big round mirror in it, and when I cleaned it with my brilliant invention I saw myself in it for the first time in maybe twenty years. I get kinda slack some ti-me. That's how it is with triple fixed signs for Sun, Moon, and Ascendent.

There was a small snake under some of the trash that had accumulated on the floor. I scooped it up and tossed it outside. It will probably find it's way back inside for the cold weather that's always just a few months away. I killed the mother of these snakes, but they keep coming back to where they were born in the water tank of my commode. I prefer to think they find a way into my house because we're kindred spirits.

I found stuff I forgot I had, that I bought replacements for because I forgot I already had the original stuff. I didn't find any money. I've never had enough money to stash any away in some secret hiding place I forgot about. I ran across a big brown paper grocery bag that my sisters put some of my stuff they found at my mothers house. All the letters I wrote to her in my first hitch in the Navy.

Inside that bag was some pictures of my children and ex-wives, and the 14 carat wedding ring from my first marriage. It was with the stuff that was mostly from my second marriage. Initially, I thought it was the ring from that marriage, and then I remembered that I didn't want to spend money on a ring because I got blisters and sores from wearing this one. I still can't wear jewelry without my skin reacting adversely. I swear I was put here to be poor.

I still have my high school ring that I couldn't wear for the same reason, and pinkie ring an ex-girlfriend gave me. I could wear the pinkie ring longer without allergies because the band was narrow and it appeared to let the skin under it air out better. It was her father's ring. I've been intending to give it back to her for that reason, but I've been as slack about that as everything else.

My skin is real crazy now and it's all about the aging process. It bruises extremely easy, and takes forever to look normal again. The last series of bruises was on my left forearm that I used to lift up overhanging branches. There were several spots where thorns from various bushes stuck in my skin rather than just scratching it.

My skin didn't just form a scab and heal up. The chemicals on the thorns that make them hurt when you stick yourself with them literally killed the skin around the puncture point, and a hole appeared that has taken forever to heal. My brothers and I used to talk about how some old men used to wear heavy, tan, long-sleeved military shirts to work in even in the summer when it gets 95% humidity and 95°.

If we asked them why they did it, they said the heavy insulated them and kept them cool. I now think it was to protect their thin skin. If homo sapiens evolved from a water creature instead of from gorillas and apes like one crazy old woman claims:

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

Her ideas are based on subcutaneous fat layers like walruses and seals and polar bears have. Even if she's right, then getting old loses the subcutaneous fat that protects from beneath the outer layers of skin. On the other hand, the prescription drug methotrexate that I'm taking for rheumatoid arthritis was developed for people with skin cancer, and some weird skin growths I've had all my life appear to be disappearing. Maybe my subcutaneous fat will leave my belly and return to it's home beneath my skin.
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Cooking For Myself Has Become A Part Of My Yoga

It is all about ti-me with me lately. Particularly in the digital realm. My first computer experience was a Radio Shack TS-80 that had two huge floppy disk drives. One for the operating system (ms BASIC) and the other for applications. For me it was a substitute for an electric typewriter, but the editing part of simply amazing to me. The idea that I could prepare a piece totally before I printed in out astounded me. That it could do it at speeds I'd never thought possible was even more amazing.

Today I'm reading about a new input device that uses fiber optics for every peripheral now used to connect to the CPU that Intel introduced prototypes at their developer's convention that connected at 10 gigabyte speeds they expect to increase within two years to over 100 gigabytes. It's like trying to imagine how long it would take me to be able to imagine what it's like to possess a billion dollars while living on $600 a month income.

By reading the news sites it seems like Apple is the company that came up with this idea, and brought it to Intel to develop, because Intel has already developed the laser chips that make this port possible. It could be that's why Apple switched to Intel processor chips recently. They might have had this Light Peak cabling mojo going on the back burner for years:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/09/26/report_apple_pushed_intel_to_develop_light_peak_cabling.html

It's been my suspicion for several years now that truth happens instantly all the ti-me. We just can use language to describe what happens in real ti-me except in real ti-me, and most of that sort of prophesying is truly hit or miss. There seems to be a window that has a plus or minus factor in which the truly true is reliably the way things are conditioned by instantaneity, whatever in hell that is?

My conscious mind is quicker at grokking what's true in it's own time because I've learned by using computers every day for the last twenty-odd years that such a thing is possible. If I live long enough (without being engrossed by senility first) to experience using a computer with this Light Peak technology, I'll understand it even better, and maybe enough to for my self-generated abstract atmosphere needed to provoke the quantum leap necessary to make ti-me wholy complete.

The entire universe operates in this real time. Including homo sapiens and all other specieswhat happens here on Earth that has no limitations such as the sort of abstract ti-me humans came up with. The trick is to be consciously aware of "things/objects" occurring in their own ti-me.

I bought one regular sized container of parmasan/artichoke stuff, and I'm already addicted. I've never got it with the artichoke bit because it's not exactly a part of the culture I grew up in. I know parmesan because my younger brother once owned a popular pizza joint, but I still can't distinguish what the artichoke taste is when it's mixed with parmesan cheese. All I taste presently is the cheese.

This one container has captured my gastronomic fancy. I bought this stuff at the specialty cheese section located at the front of the grocery section of the Wal-Mart SuperCenter. It's the nearest grocery store to my house. I can drive straight to the parking lot without stopping one way there, and only one stop sign on the other way there.

That's not why I shop at Wal-mart. I mean, the convenience is great, but the real reason is that Wal-Mart don't buy the same brands of stuff year-round. They make deals the suppliers don't like, but they bring in different kinds of stuff than what people around here are used to, and artichokes is definitely one of those foods that might be considered exotic.

I'm starting to act like the food I eat is the medicine my body needs. I became aware of that about Italian cooking in one of the cooking shows that pop up on slow days on PBS. I think I'm starting to "get it". One of my guidelines presently took place when I started taking this medicine called methotrexate that was designed for cancer patients, but which was found extremely useful for treating rheumatoid arthritis. Methotrexate appears to be out and out chemotherapy, and acts like it.

The thing that connects my cooking food as medicine is the side-effect of methotrexate that introduces some serious, projectile vomiting nausea. Basically, when I started taking this prescription drug I had to eat what I could keep down. Now, a little later, and a long way from the projectile vomiting due to the drug, I'm figuring that what I can comfortably keep from puking up is what my body wants to heal itself.

Rainey has been on a diet of his own. We both started employing an Atkins type diet, and then Rainey got pissed off at some product in wheat flour, and he stopped eating that, but I didn't. Not to spite Rainey, of course, but because I could keep it down after I ate it, and some other things I couldn't. I think that's the way it needs to go. Diets are individualistic, and mostly, I figure, because of the genetic structures our bodies inherited.

Another food I seem to have taken to because it stays down is onions. For lunch, just now, I ate a bowl of a mostly vegetable stew I develop on a daily basis from a rue I made up as a starter for fresh vegetable and stuff I add to the mix. I eat sourdough bread that arise from a starter to go along with the idea. I don't expect to be baking no sourdough bread for myself, but there just ain't no telling where this diet bit is going. It's like part of my yoga.

Growing Up Poor In A Series of Small Towns

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It's another Sunday morning coming down. It has to be when Kris Kristofferson was featured on an Early Morning Show going back to Nashville where he got made famous by Johnny Cash. Both of these guys were/are excellent poets. The show run a famous movie scene with him in the bathtub with Barbra Streisand, and now I'm watching a piece on Streisand on another station, and this station showed the same scene. It's a communist plot. No blame. Who doesn't do that?

One of the reasons I get up on Sunday mornings is to check my PowerBall lottery ticket numbers to see if I'm fabulously rich. I do that on Thursday mornings too. This morning I didn't have a single number right. It's not that unusual. The two drawings before I had the Powerball number, but no other numbers to go with it. I forgive myself immediately for not being able to buy my friends, family, and complete strangers some useless, extravagantly expensive stuff they could never afford on their own.

I do feel like I've failed them in a way (I'm actually very lucky), but my not winning the lottery might actually save them from a fate worse than death. I'm inconsiderate enough when I'm dead broke. But, if my packets get deep I can be absolutely snooty about the cut of my jib. It's all lies, of course, but nobody knows their own lies are also lies. Most people lie about lying with grandiose aplomb, and without a clue they're lying they foolish hey-ids (heads) off.

The way I've lived my life would probably be the way I would continue to live, but with all the other needy others making me feel guilty about their lack. Their lack is my lack now, and I don't feel so bad about it because I'm inured to living in poverty. If I won the lottery I wouldn't feel any sorrier for poor people than I feel for my po'-assed self right now.

I oughta feel sorry for myself, but I've been there and done that and I didn't like acting that role. I made serious vows to myself I'd never let that happen again that I've kept. Shades of Scarlett O'Hara! What I realized during my voluntary stay at the state hospital was that it was up to me to make the decisions that gainsaid my fate.

That one enlightening realization may have an awful lot to do with why I live by myself and don't seek out or invite much company. I can't bear to watch people in general make decisions that will eventually drive them delusional, and there is nothing I can do about it. Besides, it's not my job. I'm too busy avoiding making decisions that will eat me alive.

The stuff I've studied all my life has been designed to provide me with the skills to recognize and take advantage of people who make these sorts of decisions that deprecate their own self-worth. I won't bother to describe how people react when they know they've been caught red-handed pretending to ignore the fact that they've sealed their own doom by their own hand.

When I learned about how people betray themselves by projection, it didn't take all that long to realize I did the sa-me thing. Granted, I wanted to know about how projection worked, but about how it worked with other people, not me! A child can be crushed by someone who stifles their ability to fantasize their own world. I got to be so fiercely independent I kept running away, but there was nowhere to hide. Everywhere I looked, there I am was. I see my past in other people. They are who I would have become if I hadn't insisted on being me.

My right hand knows what my left hand is doing. I couldn't resist. It's an age-old habit with me. People who do cross-stitch turn themselves into a publishing business. Particularly if they teach themselves to be ambidextrous as possible. It's blasphemous to do that, and can produce horrible results. They create graven images for people to worship.

Maybe this is what happens when art is made taboo. People can't discover who they've decided to idolize when they're kids and trying to decide what they're gonna be like when they grow up. Everybody mimics the behavior of their true models for life. I've discovered some real doozies I adopted even as a toddler. I decided I wanted to live like "a nigger on Saturday night" back in my Jim Crow youth.

I literally said that one day while I was buying my lunch during a work break while my mother was out of town. I went to a rural convenience-store just down the road from the first farm my father bought. The store was run that day by a couple of the owner's grand-daughters who were about my age give a year or two. I wanted to impress those girls, but at that age I didn't clearly understand why.

They liked to have me come in to buy something from them. They were just as flirty as I was, but I suspected they knew why they were being flirty more literally than I did. The younger girl grinned at me and asked me what I was doing there. I told her that momma was outta town, and they told me to come to the store and just buy something.

The young beauty asked me sassily, "Well, whatta ya wanna eat, Mister Big-Shot Man-About-Town?"

I answered, "Give me a slice of that hoop cheese, a couple slices of bologna, an RC Cola and a Moon Pie. My father works me like a nigger, so I might as well eat like one."

I never heard the end of that. Both girls almost fell to the floor laughing at how silly that sounded. That's just the effect I wanted my remarks to have on them, but I still didn't know why. I guess I sorta would, but several long, agonizing years later. Why am I always the last to know?

Those girls and I seem to have run into each other in several different locations. We discovered we lived in the same apartment complex in Charlotte, North Carolina. The first thing this girl said when she recognized me was "Are you still eating Moon Pies and drinking RC Colas?" The rest of what I said was implied. Nobody says nigger anymore. I sure don't, but I've lived like I thought niggers acted on Satiddy night. Wot's not to like about being that as well as this?
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Synesthesia?

My meditation practice seems to have taken a little turn. It has to do with my breathing. I've written about how the perineum is considered by some to be the holiest spot in the body. Due to some rather powerful experiences I've initiated using this idea of the root chakra holding this distinction I've oriented my practice sessions to this end for a few years now.

The latest iteration of this intent involves consciously dropping my lower belly to inhale, and by dropping my belly it creates a vacuum in my solar plexus that draws my inhales inward rather than me sucking the air in through a muscular effort designed to manipulate the solar plexus.

I've been practicing this while walking on the wide sidewalks at the strip mall. There is less traffic than ever to pay attention to. Like many shopping centers several of the larger stores have gone out of business. I count every breath I take during these walks.

I start with an exhale and inwardly count "One" when my right foot plants itself, then I take three steps and on the forth step I inhale and count "two", then three more steps, exhale and count "three", and continue up until I reach the exhale at the count of twelve, and I start out again at "One", I repeat this process again and again until I finish my walk.

Lately I've been consciously dropping my belly to draw the air inward on the even count numbers. It's a little unnatural feeling, but I think it's a better way to breath if I can get to where I do it unconsciously by habit. The "little turn" I wrote about above is not about what happens during my walking meditation, but when I sit to meditate.

I deliberately drop my belly to pull the air deep into my root chakra by the vacuum I create by doing that. Recently when I drop my belly down (I'm writing about doing the opposite of what many men do when they're near a pretty woman and suck it up) I let it stay pooched out in the most unflattering of ways.

Then, I watch the area around and just above my belly button sort of "fill up" with air and I feel a certain chemical taste as part of my inhales if I keep my belly flopped while I "breath" over it. I can taste my breath when I do it right. I'm not intentionally writing about synesthesia because I don't experience that straight up, but I may be experiencing in this situation a form of synesthesia that can be deliberately induced. This is very powerful for me. I know all along when I'm doing right with my practice session by the way my breath "tastes".

I've experienced this before, but didn't think of it as a "feature" of meditating, and I still don't

Earth-Where Angels Come To Learn Of Paradox

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I read this article on how these European countries are erecting huge antenna arrays in the Chilean desert about 16,000 feet up on a plateau that has extremely dry air:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/alma-telescope/

There are pictures at this web site that show how utterly desolated this part of Chile is. I can't imagine a reason many people would have for going up there except for some huge government-sponsored project like this. I have my own silly reasons for why all this space exploration came into being. They're looking for aliens, but the aliens they're looking for are already here.

The homo sapiens looking for aliens are themselves the aliens they're expecting to show up here from outer space. Is there something worse than us out there in the deep silence? Could be that's the reason so many different types of aliens seek refuge here on planet Earth? They co-me-d with Earth just like I'm led to believe I did through my remembering vision, but deep inside, each of us appear to dread that is refuge will also pass. The gnostics of all ages have gnown this. No rest for the weary:

86 Jesus said, "[Foxes have] their dens and birds have their nests, but human beings have no place to lay down and rest."

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

I've written for forty years about my remembering vision. I remind you that I had committed myself to the insane asylum previous to experiencing "having" this vision. Occasionally, I think betraying my intended life by shame (shamed man = shaman) was required for me to have the vision at all.

I had to give up all my chances of living a normal life if I wanted to understand life. I had to decide against taking my caretakers attitudes and so-called knowledge as my own to be-co-me my own person. It was up to me to decide for my family that my weirdness would have embarrassed them worse than my not being there, and I would have been forced to become what they needed me to be from reading fairy tales and nursery rhymes. This is one of the "old, old stories."

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

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

I can't imagine my daughters will accept my lame excuses for not fighting with their mother for custody. Through no fault of their own, they deserted me. Both of my daughters from my second family have a child of their own now. They will have to become what their children want them to be for their children's sake. They will do so in a half-assed manner because of me and their mother. That's one thing for sure I will never have to explain myself to them about. My children's dead grandmothers made sure of that. Both of them have gone through their own divorces and have other naymes, yet their mother still calls herself by my nayme. None of them know why for sure, but I do. No blame. I had thirty years to figure it out. Hell, in thirty years, even I ....

A woman (I guess) named Isabella who I've communicated with on an e-mail discussion group for 5-10 years has provided me with a lot of the incentive for insight I've used for writing what shows up here in my blog. One of the things me and this person share is a fondness for the writings and observations of Carl Gustav Jung (who s/he adamantly claims I misquote and don't have a clue about his intent, of course). She's probably right. I only admire the now deceased Jung as a fellow seeker. All three of us could be tragically wrong.

What this woman and I don't share is gnosis. I just assumed she had it revealed to her and would have accepted her claim as plausible except for how she has a habit of accusing other people of not possessing it. Maybe they do or maybe they don't. Who am I? She betrays the lie of being imbued with it herself by projecting her apparent lack of it via her accusations.

I like communicating with this impossibly rude bitch because she's such an unconventional liar. Fortunately, not as grandiose a liar as I'm captivated by like my ex-wives, otherwise I'd fall head over heels in love with her like I have with my children's mother. I can't do anything about what she chooses to reveal by projection. It's not my job. I like swapping insults with her. She has been useful to me without intending to. She brought my attention to fully focus on the term "paradox" and I appreciate as one of those "gifts that keep on giving" for me.

Astrologically, it's almost certain that one of the principles I came to earth school to learn was how something can be what it is and not be what it ain't simultaneously. This principle is scattered all over my natal chart. Starting with the opposition of where the Sun was in relation to the Sign that was rising on the eastern horizon of the earth at my first breath.

In astrology, a native's life goals are represented by the principles of the Sign and House the Sun occupies at first breath, but the daily, mundane goals and very personality is dictated by the attributes and qualities of the Sign and House on the eastern horizon of the Earth.

I was born just after sunset on a Thursday down in mideastern Mississippi to people who were born and raised there in families that had been their since the early land grants when Mississippi was part of the Louisiana Purchase. They moved here to North Carolina when I was two years old. I suspect neither of them had ever left Mississippi prior to that momentous decision. I supposedly had around twenty aunts and uncles, but I barely knew only a few of them and my cousins hardly at all.

All of my inauspicious beginnings were a paradox. Starting with the astrological fact that my life goals and my day-by-day goals (and personalities) were almost exactly opposite from each other. Adding or taking away from one did the opposite to the other. It seems like the one thing that I keep ignoring (to my detriment) is that the Sun was not only in the Sign of Taurus (as was the Moon), but it occupied the House of Virgo. I keep exposing my own dishonesty. Like my e-mail lady friend, I betray myself by projection. Who don't?

I had to stop going to the blue plate special waffle house I ate breakfast at for a long time. I broke away from going there most because I realized that I had surrounded myself with a rather large group of Neo-Conservatives that act one way and do another. People who do that are not unusual at all. It all come to a head during the last couple of years prior to the last Presidential election. They couldn't believe they were an actual minority, even in North Carolina where they've carried the day for the past decade or so. It hasn't always been that way, but their prejudice has been as far as I know since I've been born.

I talked with this guy called Mike off and on at breakfast at this place for nearly twenty years. I knew how he was, but I kinda thought that despite our differences in philosophy we were sort of like friends. As time passed, I began to realize that his interest in me was that he didn't understand how I could be so casual about how the government was taking over all our lives. I wondered how he thought it could not, since we are the government.

We drifted apart during those two years leading up to the Presidential election. He bragged about how good a job Bush was doing in the White House. Well, I couldn't just sit there and listen to that without comment, so I took my crossword puzzle book to another place to sit. Just before the election he had a massive heart attack. A couple of weeks ago he had a heart attack while he was driving and had a wreck that seriously hurt a woman and her children. They say he was dead before the wreck, but I'm not so sure. He appeared to be a bitter man.

I gotta be projecting, so I guess I am is a bitter man too. Maybe that's what Mike and I had in common, and it didn't have anything to do with our politics. He was a rich man the latter part of his life, and a community leader who understood the ins and outs of local politics. We couldn't have been more opposite.

I apparently took an unconscious vow of poverty when I was much to young to make such a decision. I've always made decisions I was too young for, but why would I not? That's just how it goes when a person has the planet Mercury parked in Aries when they're born. I take chances. I start wars for the fun of it because I think I'm immortal. I am actually is, it's just the body it made for itself isn't. What a drag, man. How else can a person know they've gone far enough if they haven't already been too far?

Aries is one interest astrology Sign/Greek god to study. Especially if you keep finding yourself intrigued by similarities in what the archetype Mars/Ares behaves in Greek literature. I not only have Mercury in Aries, but Saturn too. One of the strongest indicators for Aries in my natal is that the Sun had only crossed over from Aries to Taurus a mere two celestial minutes previous to my birth such that it's placement is officially Taurus 0˚02". If I had been born two minutes earlier I'd be an Aries and the Arian attributes would be leading me to my life goals instead of stodgy Taurus.

Either way, and in any case, it's not my fault the world is the way it is at any given moments. I don't even have power over my own situation, much less those of another. It hasn't helped me to win friends or influence people by being so stubborn, but you try to be flexible in temperament with your Sun and Moon in Taurus AND with a Scorpio rising. All fixed signs in aggressive Cardinal houses. It's not easy being translucent, yet emerald green to the core.
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Yeah, Yeah... How Much?

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It's been another long day with me on the road from about 7 a.m. until around three this after noon. I had to exchange the mouse I bought for one that worked with Macs. Since I bought it at Best Buy I could exchange it at any of them. I decided to go to Raleigh and do it there just to see some different scenery. I think just doing that preserves one's sanity.

Going to some place like the Raleigh area forces me to think about things differently. Just about every time I go up there something has changed. It's gotta be one of the fastest growing areas in the country, and there's no blame in that. North Carolina is the mid point between the metropolitan areas up in the Northeast and the resort areas further south along the East Coast corridor. It's a sort of neti-neti place. Not this, not that.

I bought a mouse that cost me $17 more than the first one. I ended up paying $80 for a freaking mouse. A miser like me. Paying that much money for a mouse? I can buy a mouse for $10. My argument with myself stopped the moment I got it working right. The only problem I have with it is that I still can't get it to double-click with one push of the button. It says it will do it. I got the setting locked in for it to do it, but no cigar.

The mouse wasn't the only thing I bought. I bought a food slicer. I saw a chef on TV using one and he was making quick work of some tomatoes and onions. The local stores didn't have anything I thought was useful, so I decided to look at the stores in the Crabtree Valley Mall.

I was about ready to leave when I thought about looking for the slicer. I didn't know what kind of store to look in. The slicer the chef was using looked pretty fancy and expensive. I went to a large Sears store thinking they might have something I could use. They didn't carry anything like that. At least I didn't see one, and there weren't any sales people to ask.

I caught a look outta the corner of my eye at this real fancy looking place that looked like they might have some kitchen supplies. There was a duded up young woman at the cash register. I walked up to her and described what had in mind. Her eyes seemed confused for a moment, and then she smiled and said, "You want a mandolin don't you?"

"What did you say…?", I could have sworn she said mandolin. What? For a moment I thought she must have taken me for my friend Rainey who plays a mandolin. My head swam for a minute.

"No," she said, "There, look over there on that shelf… is that what you're looking for?"

I was still lost for words. She said "Come, look at it. Mandolin is it's brand name." We walked over to the indicated shelf. She took hold of the handle and moved it back and forth over the sliders, and then I realized it was the same tool the chef had used.

"¿Quanto?"

I didn't really have to ask. I knew I didn't wanna pay their asking price. I stated that it seemed a little too big for my kitchen, and asked if they had something smaller that could be used by hand. They did. I followed her to another section of the store, and for $20 they had a smaller version that looked like it had the same quality as it's bigger, more expensive brother. I bought it. How could I not? She delivered the goods.

On my way home from Raleigh I pass near this little crossroads town that's supposed to have a famous restaurant that has a reputation for putting on a good home-made style buffet spread. It was around dinner time when I got to the Interstate 40 intersection that goes there. I've passed it dozens of times and never got off the Interstate to check it out. Today I did.

The little town was only a mile or two off the Interstate. There were only a half-dozen commercial building. The restaurant was one of them. I found a place to park and went inside. There was probably 150 people in there, and the food was exactly as described. It was very tasty. It cost $7.50. No checks. Just pay on your way out.
Ω

Tablet Computers I've Never Known

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http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/09/23/one_fifth_of_buyers_interested_in_apples_unseen_tablet.html

The tag on the link says it all. You don't even have to go read the article to know what it's all about. I'm one of those curious people who might buy a tablet computer from Apple. It's my speculation that the upcoming tablet is the real reason Apple upgraded to it's 64-bit operating system. It needed to open the upper limits of how much DRAM can be installed. 4 gigs of DRAM is not enough for a touch system to operate in near real time. The entire graphic system needs to be loaded in DRAM. Dynamic Random Access Memory. Open CL probably figures into what a tablet computer needs to do what they might be designed for.

All that really amounts to is a larger iPhone. What ordinary computer user could have known what would happen with the iPhone and all those thousands of apps people download to use. It's written that many an independent developer got rich writing simple applications for the iPhone. This seems to bring back the "personal" into personal computing. The big corporations have their mainframes and such, and the great unwashed have their iPhones. What else do they want. Mostly an iPhone with a bigger screen and a faster connection.

I'd probably be satisfied with a netback for what I use a computer for. Voice recognition would be super. I know what needs to be done to get voice recognition to where it needs to go. Growing up in the age of television people started imitating the voice style of the TV anchor men like Walter Cronkite and the other Midwestern voices like Johnny Carson and David Letterman.

I had a two-name major in college. Drama & Speech. That was the name of the Department. That's how they granted BA degrees. Speech classes were mandatory. I didn't mind. I like anything to do with learning more about the human voice. One of the most powerful things I ever learned was that only vowels can be sung. Consonants are just tools designed to chop up and shape the vowel tones.

My point is that the human voice has been and can be shaped to any plausible end. That's how voice recognition could get over the hump. They need to develop a software program that will teach humans how to pronounce words in a way that the voice recognition programs will understand them. Computers don't have the reach and scope of interpretation humans have. Visually, a human can figure out what a sign says if just the first and last letters of each word in the sign are correct.

They can do the same thing with speech. In other words, if my brother were to use a software program to train himself to speak in such a way that the voice recognition program on his computer would understand, I'd still be able to make out what he was saying, though his computer might not.
◉

A Rare Autumnal Soaker That's Just In Time

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I gotta do something about the floor my executive style office chair rolls around on. The wheels on the chair have seen their best days. I bought the chair on sale for about half price, but it still cost me plenty. It's got more levers for adjusting things than the average office chair, I suppose, but the wheels don't turn so easy now as they once did. Every other feature of the chair still works as advertised.

I been pricing the cost of replacement wheels. They would have to be better wheels that worked right. The supply houses want $7 a piece for 5 wheels. The wheels I've shopped for would have to be jury-rigged to work at all, because they're not specifically designed for use on an office chair, and the ones that are designed that way are not engineered well. Why would I bother to replace crap with newer crap? Except for the worn out wheels, this chair is just what I need, but I might not be willing to spring for wheels that might not work like I need them to. I'm thinking about buying just one to see if they'll do what I want them to, and if it don't work I can take it back for a refund. If it does work, then $35 to make a chair I'm otherwise happy with mo' bettah is actually fairly cheap when I think about the cost of buying a new one I might end up not liking so well.

I gotta have a comfortable chair beneath me to address the two keyboards that take up most of my time these days. The material its rolling around on now was not designed for this use. It's chipboard sub-flooring which is not holding up under the two hundred twenty pounds of pressure I put on the seat of the chair. If I don't get a tougher sort of fancy linoleum to put between the hard rubber wheels of the chair and the chipboard, the chips that make up the chipboard will come unglued one at a time until the floor is uneven and pockmarked. Then, all the work I did to get the chipboard down will have been in vain.

I built the hootch I live in. Mostly by myself, but a friend helped me remodel it when I had let it go down. Currently, the best I can say about it is that it's dried in for the time being, and it keeps me out of the weather and has a stove and a bathroom, but it ain't nothing to brag about. In fact the pictures of the place Saddam Hussein was captured at reminded me a lot of the bare essentials I gather about me to make living in one place for a long time seems to require. Not much, but more than I've ever gathered around me before when I'm not married. I've lived here allone longer than I was married to both of my ex-wives put together.

I just went downstairs and got my second cup of coffee from the French Coffee maker I bought cheap at Wal-Mart just to see how it worked, and if it worked at all. I'd never heard of such a thing until recently, and I've never seen one used by somebody else, so I flat didn't know. Now I do, and as far as whether I'm positively impressed by this device… I am… it allows a few dregs to seep through the stainless steel screen filter. The pot itself is made of glass, and it works like a charm.

Cleaning it is pretty easy too. I just remove the stainless steel filter and the plunger that makes it a "press", dump the grounds out in the yard, and refill the pot with hot water from the sink faucet, squeeze a dollop of dishwashing liquid into the hot water in the pot, and then use the plunger to wash the glass pot and the plunger simultaneously by moving the plunger up and down inside the pot like I'm churning butter. When I rinse the soap out I got a shiny clean pot for the next ti-me I get the urge for caffeine.

This process for brewing coffee satisfies some deep yearning, but it's obviously not for my childhood. Any coffee I had before I moved out of my parents house came as some sort of small reward. My mother used to buy green coffee beans at the A & P grocery store when we went to the regional towns nearest the little villages we lived in. When we moved to another town (there were actually only three of them in North Carolina) the regional town stayed the same, but when we moved here we had a choice of four fairly large towns to choose from nearby, including the state capital which is only an hour or so away.

As towns go, this one is probably only called a town rather than a village because it's the county seat, and it has a courthouse right in the center of town (where it's always a nuisance as far as traffic is concerned), but there is only around 7,000 official residents inside the "city" limits, and only 40-50,000 people in the entire county.

Like a lot of the small crossroads and railroad towns here in the coastal plains, the downtown area is fairly deserted and people do all their shopping at the three small strip malls in the suburbs around town. The strip mall where Wal-Mart SuperCenter is located has captured the markets around here. People literally "dress up" to shop there. That's because there isn't much choice. I think some of the local people shop at Piggly Wiggly out of spite for Wal-Mart taking over the Mom & Pop stores businesses. The difference in price can be exorbitant.

I have to write about what I know, but writing about what I know also questions whether what I know is valuable, and FOR what? The fact is that I don't do much these days that's in keeping with employed people who spend much of their time working for the money they need to live as high on the hog as they can afford.

One thing I can know about without going into town to pick up the local gossip is the weather as it cameos and goes at my house. It's sprinkling rain presently and has been all night. It's not a steady rain so much as that it's a steady plopping of large drops that makes a distinct noise when it hits the roof and the wooden deck just outside my open door. I gotta buy a screen door one of these days.

I've arranged it so that about the only e-mail I'm getting these days if from the AppleScript discussion group. It's a fairly busy group. There are regular contributors who tend to write several times a day, but a bunch of people pop in with plausible concepts that reveal a deeper understanding of wot's what? The conversation goes much deeper than mere AppleScript sometimes and references other programming languages. Especial Cocoa and some language called XCode. So, it seems plain to me why I haven't written but once, and that was an attempt at humor (which failed, btw).

I'm eating this one-pot stew/tomato-ey/italian sausage thingie that is a true cooking experiment for me. I started out by frying up some sweet onions that have a lotta purple in them, and once I get the crisp outta them and get them caramelizing a bit I start adding the slices of italian sausage and garlic and various kinds of diced tomatoes along with chopped green peppers, and a jalapeno for some spicy hotness.

As has become somewhat of a habit lately, I came back upstairs to write while this rude mixture cooked down into a sort of personal rue I'm concocting, and when I write time flies, and this rue I was cooking down cooked down a little too much, but it didn't taste too burnt to eat, if you've got a cast-iron stomach like I do.

I added a couple of cans of diced tomatoes to weaken what burnt taste there was, and added some more fresh chopped onions and peppers to give it a little bit of a fresher taste (okay, it was real close to being overcooked) and that helped a lot. I've kept adding to this rue daily, such that now I gotta go to the grocery store and get some more vegetables.

Today, however, I'm gonna add a couple of chicken breast that I'll thaw on top of the rue, and then cube the chicken up to let it cook enough to kill whatever, cut the stove off, and let the chicken marinate in the two-day old rue. It's turning out to be sort of a spicy, tomatory Brunswick stew. Maybe I'll stop by and get some Carolina style pulled barbecue meat to use in this rue. That would truly be Brunswick stew. Well… maybe. '-)
♤

Be-co-me-ing Yo' Own Parents Is Blasphemy

I have to buy lottery tickets. I don't hae a choice. I keep putting things off by saying I'll do them when I win the lottery, and if I don't keep a valid lottery ticket, then I'm just lying to myself, and know it. There, I was reading my ass off about AppleScript, and suddenly the lottery ticket thang came to mind, and what I wrote above is the nub of it.

Then, I had to write about it before I passed the notion on to eternity, so I had to boot up my word editor and start banging away at my computer keyboard keys (which are somewhat tender from previously banging away at my piano keys from last night).

AppleScript is why I stopped getting and replying mail from the Thomas e-mail discussion group. I don't learn much from the conversation that happens in that venue. I don't think anybody else does. It's just a weird way of communicating with people about stuff that most people don't really wanna talk about, because they don't think about that kind of stuff, they just live it unconsciously and don't even know why.

Spending my time reading the mail from the AppleScript e-mail group seems more profitable in a way I understand well. Many of the members of this Apple-sponsored group are so knowledgeable about this technical body of knowledge they write books on the subject.

The list is moderated or at least monitored by the same Apple employees who maintain the current AppleScript code to keep it in conformity with other programing languages supported by Apple (including how it relates to Windows), and how it interoperates with deeper levels of the total operating system whose roots are based on the BSD variation of Unix.

The Apple employees seem to have the final word about the changes that new technology (like the recent upgrade to the 64-bit system called Snow Leopard) brings. None of the list members really argue with them. The apparent fact that they can initiate a change in the AppleScript code keeps the technical information on the straight and narrow, and tacitly provides the final authority of any moot questions

This is very usable information that I can employ to operate my computer more efficiently in every way. As a matter of fact, I've learned more about computer hardware than I ever knew previously since I started this quest, and that's as an aside to what I'm learning about how software gets the hardware to do what it's told.

It's a good thing for me that I didn't realize what learning the Microsoft scripting language or BASIC would have done for me. I might have never switched back to Macs. A more pro-active reason I switched back was because Apple itself changed the root level of it's operating system over to a Unix-based format. It was the smartest move they made since they almost single-handedly created the home computer. It's not only why I thought seriously about changing back to Macs from Windows, it's why I tried to use Linux a few years ago.

My personal drive to learn things this way probably comes from having been raised by school teachers who always brought their work home with them, and it was like I never got otta school when I came home. Showing off something I learned on my own was the only way I could get the attention of my parents.

It's the same reason I became an expert on reading Tarot cards and palm reading and using astrology. It's why I instituted the I Ching as an oracle through visualization techniques that made it a permanent part of my mental faculties. It's for-the-other as a medium of exchange for people I wanna project upon to get to know more about who-I-think-I-am-is.

I stand under these systems for speculating about things (employing objects of the woe-to-the-id [woe-ill] {world}) in order to understand them, but I-am-does-IT-for-the-other. It is for-them that I sacrifice my ti-me as allone.

I love writing tossed word salad. Especially using hyphenation to break woe-ids up into possible root causes. I've only been doing this since I started using a computer to write, and only then, mostly, when I got online and started composing responses to supposed others in discussion groups. It continuously amazes me that they also assume I'm here too, and compose responses to my compositions.

I may end up forgiving my father for not letting me take Latin classes in high school. I finally understand it was because he ate lunch at the faculty table with the old biddy who was the school librarian and taught French and Latin. They were using me as a ping pong ball to toss insults back and forth to one another in a flirting game. He loved to flirt. I learned from him, but my bark is much, much worse than my bite.

I've never understood until recently why women would take my flirting seriously. I don't. To me it's just a way of passing time and getting what I want from females. I've heard the saying that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!" Who hasn't? Why I didn't get it when I didn't take the flirting I did as a habit my father encouraged seriously, is another question that's finally been answered.

I know exactly what I have to look out for when I start flirting with a Scorpio woman, and don't really mean it. A really sore asshole. That's what I have learned to expect by employing false sincerity to lure a female into doing my bidding in the hope that their act of passion will bring passion in response. Fat chance. I can be a cold-blooded snake-in-the-grass without knowing that's how I've reacted until I get chopped off at the knees for my stupidity.

For instance, say I go to some restaurant with a woman I like. It's a popular restaurant and we both know we'll be lucky to get the kind of service the restaurant got popular for having. Just assume, in order for me to make my point, that the server is a young person who can't be all that happy they're being used by everybody they serve to get what they came to the restaurant for, and I know how to get that person to come to our table as often as they can invent an excuse to do so.

I know all I got to do is say, "Lemme hold yo' hand a minute, chile, I wanna see if you're gonna drop dead before you bring back our order?" Very seldom do I get a refusal. They stick their hand in my face, and I take hold of it as if to tell their future life in a rare moment in the roar of the crowd and the smell of the greasepaint. I am is the opportunity that knocks.

I'm gonna tell 'em just enough to pique they curiosity. Remember me writing about how when the pearl that I am is came possessing three gifts? Will, Curiosity, and Memory? When I evoke a person's curiosity we are connecting a the soul/sole level. I'm not reaching for some persona level distinction, but FOR that which reaches the deepest kernel level of they ex-is-tense. Who cares what the personality "thinks" about it?

What if the woman I like well enough to be at that restaurant with her is the jealous type and can't understand why I'm doing what I know to do to get us the best service possible? I know the answer in the most intimate way possible. I was there. She went batshit crazy. That's what! And, it won't the first time or the first woman I've had go there on me and break bad! Damn! I was showing off for her. I'll never understand women.

I do know this much. If a woman won't let me show off for her, then I got no use for that woman. I'm not going to stop using my gifts and talents of gnosis in order to satisfy some within her own makeup that she doesn't understand nor try to. I'm still sorta on the prowl for a woman to show off for, but my anima may just not put up with her for my sake.

All of this because as a little boy I wanted to be just like my daddy. My daddy flirted with women as a way to communicate intimately with them, whether he followed through on any opportunities that might have arisen was not something I understood would dictate my future. It did though, and it's because I mimicked him in blind faith, I guess all the blame is mine.

The Death Rattle Of A Wino

♬
I went on quite a binge playing around on the piano yesterday afternoon and last night. I had the same problem last night I'm having this morning watching the Sunday morning news shows. Nothing on TV interests me much anymore. Instead of finding it entertaining it just irritates me. That's why I have to amuse myself with the ga-me-s I play allone. The "news" ain't news anymore, if it ever has been.

It's gotten to the point with me playing the major and minor chords on the piano daily is paying off for me a bit. Not a huge jump in skill levels, but fewer mistakes, and I'm starting to remember why I need to play the specific note with a specific finger as I go along. I also practice playing the 48 chord sequence I learned from the internet every day.

That's intriguing for me. I play the two note chords and speak the names of each of them outloud now. The grunt work I did to copy the notes from the internet on to a workbook full of empty staff lines took a lot longer than I originally thought it would. I kept messing up the design of how I needed to "see" the chords so that when I memorized them I wouldn't learn them wrong. Wrong according to whom? I can't imagine anybody will ever hear me play the piano. That's not why I'm doing this piano playing.

I can't rightly say for sure why I have kept trying to make this happen since childhood. It's something I should have done a long time ago, but I moved around too much. Pianos are not exactly known for portability. The digital piano I use now might be fairly portable for working around the country doing industrial construction work, as long as I kept a room by myself, but that was not always possible economically. It's still fairly unwieldy due to the fact that it's an 88-key style called it a "Yamaha Portable Grand".

I claim that learning to play the scales on the piano is the least I should have learned on a piano to give myself the confidence I needed to play music with other people. I should have learned to play the scales on the other instruments I play by memory. The idea of learning on the piano itself is basically because of the visualization factor of having the keyboard laid out right in front of me as a visionary tool for working out performance problems in my mind's eye. I started late. It took at least ten years to create a living zodiac in my psyche via a visualization ritual.

The big deal for me personally is just being able to play in any musical key for any reason at all. I detest the very idea of being limited to a few popular keys. I'd rather it be somebody else who is the spoil sport. I like being able to find the correct key for singing for different voices and not be stymied by being unable to go there. There are a lot of songs I never performed myself because I didn't know how to play in the key that had the notes my voice could comfortably reach.

Last night I was watching the music program on PBS called Austin City Limits. It's one of the programs on TV I still watch frequently. The performers was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I didn't feel nostalgic and started to change the station, but my piano was right in front of me between me and the TV set. I started tinkling around with the chords from the sequence I learned from the internet, when I realized one of the chords was the same one Tom Petty was playing, and I decided to see if I could find the other chords and follow along.

I did find the other chords. He was playing E minor using the pentatonic scale, and soon I realize I could play a few notes here and there. Not perfectly, of course, but not bad either. It was the first time I'd tried to play along with recorded music with the piano. That was pretty thrilling for me, so I didn't change TV stations. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers changed keys on the next song, and I rapidly found G minor on the keyboard and followed along the best I could. I come away knowing if I got one of Tom Petty's albums and worked at it incrementally, I could find something that would fit in with about any kind of music, and eventually, in about any key anybody wanted to play in.

Personally, being able to play along in every key a big deal for me. I'm not writing about playing brilliant solos, but contributing something that at least doesn't distract from a performer who could play lead. If I played with other people I'd prefer a support role.

It's my self-observation over the years of my own talents and abilities to contribute to group activities, is that I can get other people to perform at a higher level of skill than they previously thought they could. My personal goal is to accompany myself singing like I used to do with guitars and sec. A little late in the game, but better than never.

It's shocking to me presently that I'm writing about playing the piano at all, because I'm stunned I'm still playing any instrument at all. That's how bad the rheumatoid arthritis was not that long ago. I had a hard time wiping my own butt when I went to the bathroom. Typing these blog entries could be torture, and now I'm doing all those simple chores probably better than I have been able to do them for at least the last decade if not the last two or three decades.

Rheumatoid arthritis runs in my mother's family. I grew up hearing and seeing my Aunt Elizabeth deal with it. Eventually, she had all the joints in her hands surgically removed. The last time I saw her before she died at ninety years old she didn't know anybody and behaved (actually didn't behave or even move the whole visit).

My mother developed it later in life than her sister, but her hands looked tortured and writhed like snakes as if they had a twisted life of their own for years, and she lived to be ninety-three years old. When I was officially diagnosed a year or so ago, I had a very realistic image of how this could go. RA don't kill you. It does, in a lotta cases, seem to make some unfortunate souls wish they were dead.

Rattling on and on about how lucky I feel that these weird prescription drugs are working for me. They were not originally designed for arthritis, but for cancer and malaria patients. Of course, the side-effects can be devastating. The way I look at it, with the quality of life that's been restored to me, if the side-effects lead to an early grave instead of suffering the fate of a gnarly beast burdened with acute and ongoing pain, I'll take death in pill form with orange juice as a chaser any day over how things looked a year ago. What if I live?
♨

Reaching For Elbow Room On A Shrunken Planet

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A while back I wrote something in a sort of automatic writing mode, and when I returned to beta consciousness I realized that I had taken my way of composing music and applied it to evolution with the distinct implication that it's the nature of what evolves to do natural selection in a detached subjective way. By that I mean that each pearl/black hole unit that gets attracted to the Earth project evolves individually as well as aligning itself to imitate the mimicry of the other.

The metaphor I use is based on concentric circles or perhaps globes or orbs to accommodate the notion of omnidirectional. Here's a fair example of what I attempt to describe from the Wired web site:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/bubblenebula/

This is what I've been trying to describe in writing that the entity I am arrived as was like an oyster pearl in that the energy from it's empty center only radiated out just so far omnidirectionally, and as viewed from outside the limited radiation it has the luminous appearance of a non-physical object. This is the paradoxical dynamic that has shown up in one way or the other throughout my personal quest. Objects simultaneously are what they're not, and they're not what they are, and they can lean one way or the other of move up and down as it seems to suit their fancy, and everything still works out just dandy.

A couple of days ago I read about how some of the countries in the European union are removing all the stop lights and road signs for vehicles and pedestrians. They claim the rate of accidents have plunged by some huge percentage point. This reminds me of the antics of bird flocks and schools of fish swimming in perfect synchronicity. This can be demonstrated with artificial intelligence as well. It only makes sense that homo sapiens can move in coordinated symmetry.

I think a rock song that became popular around the same time as Woodstock. "Signs, signs, everywhere signs. Signs all over the place…". Maybe part of the Beatnik and Hippie movements were a grassroots protest about how both the political and religious interests were trying to get the great mass of humanity to swim or fly together in the way their own group did it, so everybody else would have to change their ways and not them. No blame.

Who wouldn't like that? Make everybody else in the world learn to read and write Southern United States colloquial English like I do. I've really resented having my cultural rug jerked out from under me after I was already old enough to vote in a Presidential election. I've questioned mightily why I've had to spend so much time having to adjust to a whole new way of conducting my affairs.

In some ways I took a positive attitude toward the new direction I was forced to take in my social behavior by an act of Congress. It's taken for granted academically that pubescent boys rebel against their parent's ways in order to find or create their own identity. I did rebel against my father's Jim Crow teachings as a matter of puberty and growing up, not so much because of the political tumult going on all around me.

The entire time the civil rights protest marches in Alabama and all over the South were in the headline news, I was serving in the United States Navy. I got out of the Navy just before the Civil Rights laws were passed. By the time I returned from my time in the service of my country, it was all over but the shouting.

I joined the newly desegregated Navy not realizing it had happened, and it didn't seem to matter much at all to me. I knew I was going to have to change my ways (whatever that meant). It seemed easier to test the waters of the new order by being stationed all the way across the country in California away from my Southern roots.

On occasion I have thought that joining the Navy and getting away from my roots of home and family was the best thing I could have done for myself in regard to giving myself some wiggle room to figure out how I was gonna adapt to the collapse of the Southern aristocratic way of life. My education started at the U.S. Navy Recruit Training Center in San Diego, California.

I started living in close proximity with other young men from all over the United States. There were no blacks in my recruit company, but that didn't stop a lotta tough guy prejudice from happening on a lot of levels of distinction. I wasn't in Kansas no more. I don't think being in the Navy away from home was probably any different than being away from one's parent's home for any reason. Like going away to college or getting a job in a city away from home. Going to numerous ports around the Pacific Rim for four years might have been a little exotic in ways. Not any more. The world has shrunken.
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Persian Lilac, White Cedar, Chinaberry or Bead Tree?

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I followed a link to the TEDtalk page again. How could I not? Some intriguing conversations get started there more often than not. They're a definite source of inspiration for me, so following the link I found at one of the social sites I go to for news was practically a habitual, robotic thing for me to do:

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

There's something beautiful about this unkempt, slovenly woman talking about what she's projecting on to the screen behind her. She casually shows the shapes and interactions I've been attempting to describe for decades as if it's the most natural thing to see and hear there can possibly be. As if to deny the implications practically makes one a dunce. If I didn't agree with her conclusions at such a deep gut level I might be offended.

Here's another TEDtalk by an old man who is a psychiatrist who has come to understand that some of the tossed-word-salad his patients have described for him have a basis in a commonly misunderstood reality that is in truth, vaporware. Some vaporware is more temporarily useful than other vaporware before it gets gaseous and disappears again. Things get created merely as a placeholder or Oasis on the way to the Forum:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html

Listening to this man chat about what various people see in their hallucinations intrigued me. It made me feel less alone. I've realized that if all the people who have had similar experiences as I have were to out themselves like I have, and this man has, it might make life a lot more comfortable for many more people ere now.

I've been obsessed with making it okay for what happened to me to be seen as fairly commonplace in the larger scheme of how things happen. I think this is how I've used my genius. I don't harbor the idea that what I do as an obsession is rational nor could it ever be. Irrationality gotta be there to balance out ration for the sake of the whole-y. Is the term "holiness" originally intended to be viewed as comedic in the same way as "truthiness"?

Something physical happened to me around the age of ten years old that I remember to this day. I didn't fall out of that chinaberry tree. The limb broke, and unfortunately I was out on that limb when that happened. I don't know how high in the air I was when the limb suddenly broke. I've used ten feet other times I've told this story. I have a tendency to exaggerate. It was a long way down for a little boy.

I landed flat on my back and it knocked the wind out of me, and I got panicky because I couldn't breathe. All I know is that at first I thought I was dead, then realized I couldn't be dead if I was worried about catching my breath.

The ground I landed flat on my back upon was packed hard by bare feet over a long period of time. Probably as long as the house in front of it had been built. The house was located at the intersection of two roads about a mile or so from the small town my family had moved to from an even smaller village not far away in order for my oldest sister to attend the twelfth grade level of high school so she could enroll in a University. It could have been to satisfy my father's ambitions just as handily.

The house we rented is remembered in our family by calling it "the yellow house". The road that ran beside it was the main road between two large military posts and was paved with concrete to connect those two military locations and paid for by the federal government. It was the only paved road in that part of the entire state.

North Carolina came to be known as "The Good Roads State" in my own lifetime, but not that far back. I think the laws that generated the taxes to build better farm-to-market roads throughout the state also foresaw the need to put an agriculture teacher in every high school in the state, and that's how my family ended up living in the Yellow House.

The other road that formed the aforementioned "intersection" wasn't much of a "road" as roads go. It was little more than an unpaved country lane for the people who lived off a larger country road that radiated out into a swampy area north and east of the military road. It was infrequently used by local farmers who were not going to the little town, but to a regional town called Kinston north and west of there where they had bigger stores and products to choose from. I loved going to Kinston with my entire family to shop at the A & P grocery store.

Seeing the Latino migrant families at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter reminds me of how it was back then as a kid. We'd get all goggle-eyed and wanna touch everything and embarrass our mother. Our oldest sister was a teenager about this time, and our antics humiliated her to no end, but nobody in my family liked going to Kinston back when we were a basic family unit living together than my oldest sister, the drama queen.

She's 79 years old now, and still a drama queen. She and her husband, who turned 83 a couple of days ago have been married for at least fifty years now. That's nothing to scoff at from a social point of view. I do it anyway. Staying married to the same person for all of your adult life is not the same thing as achieving immortality. Achieve immortality, and I won't hae a mumbling nasty thang to say to yo' powdered, lip-sticked face.

The Yellow House was originally built in the shape of an ell, and the front door and porch faced the little cutoff road. Behind the house and also along beside the paved road was a cow barn with a small hay loft and a corral-like pen in front of it, and a cow pasture behind that, also along the paved road.

This was the way it was sixty years ago, and there was barely any traffic on either of the roads both large and small, yet was routinely maintained by the state road scrapers, it served most usefully as a playground for us kids to play ball there.

As the crow flies we had a neighbor about a half mile away who had a couple of kids near my age. The other side of the paved road was the house of an older woman we called Miss Violet. I don't remember much about her except that she came running to help when I thought I was gonna get killed by a cow.

I was carrying a bucket of feed out to the barn to pour it into the trough the cows eat from. The trough was attached to the barn across the corral from the gate closest to the house. The big cow came toward me menacingly and wouldn't back off like she normally would. I didn't realize until my father pointed out later that the cow was after the feed in the bucket and not me. I understood the reasoning and agreed with the possibility that the cow was only after the feed that was in the bucket I was carrying. I didn't like the implication that I was too stupid to just put the bucket down and run if I was so scared.

For one thing, one of the first things that happen when I get scared is that my hands automatically ball into fists, and if I've got anything in my hands when fear inimitably possesses me, I can't drop it and run even if what I got in my hand is all they're after. It's how monkeys are snared by putting monkey goodies inside a coconut with a hole in it big enough for a monkey paw to get through empty-handed, but not if they grab the goodies and try to run away to eat them. They can't let go of the goodies to escape.

My original point for describing the geographical facts surrounding the Yellow House is that the area I fell out of the chinaberry tree when it's hollow, fragile limb broke, was that this area was in the nook of the L-shape of the Yellow House, and that's where the water pump was located, and where the clothes got washed, and where naked kids got their baths during summer when the rain ran off the tin roof to the sandy ground below where we stood ready with yellow lye soap to wash the summer sweat off our stinking little bodies.

The chinaberry tree was a part of a privacy hedge that had a bunch of chinaberry trees as a fence row. I've never known the scientific name of the chinaberry tree until just now when I realized I could easily Google it up.

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

Somehow the pictures in this Wikipedia article doesn't look like the chinaberry trees we have here in the Southeastern United States, but the pictures of the yellowish/golden berries do. I have a grove of them here on my own lot beside my driveway that leads out to the nearest paved road here.

The fruit of the chinaberry tree has played a role in my life from childhood when we would use them as ammunition for our homemade bamboo popguns. We used to use wild black cherries when they're green for the same reason. The trick was to find the right sized reed for the green china berries to fit into in order for a vacuum to be created between two chinaberries.
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Killing Myself Softly In Your Eyes

I deleted my Twitter account because I thought I was writing to nobody in particular. I like the idea of constraining a portion of my something to say to 140 spaces. I kept the Twitter dialog box call Safari 140 just to learn to keep things brief and still try to make sense with my efforts to communicate. That's the problem I had with Twitter, it may have everything to do with my attitude toward it, but the tweets I read from others were like letters to Santa Claus.

Today I have an appointment at the VA Hospital to see about getting a cataract operation performed so I can see once again out of my right eye. I play guessing games about how to navigate hoping the present doesn't intervene. Right now, I figure what eyesight I got left will last longer than my memory does, but what if I live?

There os no special reason to want to continue to live. It would certainly disappoint my detractors if I keep living. "I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you." It would be a great convenience for some that I would die and take my memory of what happened between us with me.

Like the neo-conservative, woman-hating, nigger-hating, queer-baiting seventy year old man I went to high school with. He's as queer as a three-dollar bill and knows I know his secret. He truly wants me dead. He might just murder me to shut me up. That might be a form of suicide. Killing what he sees of himself in me. I have blood kin that feels the same way.

One man whose palm I read and guessed that he had murdered somebody wants me dead. Palm-reading can be very dangerous for the reader. I revealed events I didn't realize were secrets until I looked up from their palm and saw the expression on their face.

It's not a one-way street. Others who have known some embarrassing truth about me have conveniently died too, and conveniently took their version of truth of my bad side with them. Why would the world not profit from my immediate death? Because nobody knows any more than what they project of themselves upon the other, and they make that up in some desperate need to be different from the other.

As Of Today, I Am Is Un-Twittered

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I composed a response to one of my three daughters today and closed it with a quote from the Gospel of Thomas. I have no idea how she'll receive that, and I may never know, she might be as close-mouthed as her mother was with me. I doubt it. She wrote me a very powerful account of what she experienced having her first child. This woman is not her mother or me, but her own person. I couldn't be more pleased. She's a lot like her older half-sister in that way. One to go.

I was just running a scenario in my mind's eye of how I might rationalize using a quote from a source some Christians seem offended by, mostly Catholics it appears because they really are the villains once again. Any organization like them are just as villainous by their very nature. Many of them came into existence as a response to the old system turning stagnant. Like the French Revolution. Royalty had become so entrenched the only way to re-establish some power to the common man was to chop the head off the snake.

Catholicism seems uniquely designed to grow a new head each time the old one dies or gets chopped off. That doesn't seem much difference than kingdoms and most dictatorships. I write about Catholicism because if you wanna explore the roots of Christianity you sorta gotta go there.

Contrarily, I just skipped over Catholicism and went straight for the roots. The book-burning Catholics didn't make it easy. For all practical purposes, they eliminated the competition, and for all intents and purposes Gnosticism was competition, but in a very small way. Not many people have gnosis imbued by revelation, and many of those forget it happened to them. To the ones who remember, however, it can get to be an obsession like any other unusual conviction.

In the dream sequence I was running in my mind about the concept of a messiah and where it might originate only one thing becomes fairly clear. The organized expression of mankind's primitive need for a world savior had roots deep in pre-history. What happened in what eventually became the United States of America is unknown except for relics and the only thing known about the relics are what's left of the aborigine's oral tradition.

It was the written language that captured America. Same as what happened to the Celts and the Druids. The adults held out against the Papists and their Latin Vulgate pretty good, but their children saw the usefulness of learning Latin or any other written language they were originally exposed to. Why would they not?

For all practical purposes it's the same with the immigrants to America. The first ones here might never learn English well enough to argue politics, but usually their children and especially their grandchildren learned to do it standing on their heads.

Although I lost a lot when I upgraded my Mac operating system to Snow Leopard by not having a 64-bit chip to take full advantage, I still got some interesting changes, and the text editor I've been using since I switched back to Macs had an amazing change. Amazing might be too strong a descriptor, but my age is showing. I actually didn't realize it was possible to do what they've done with TextEdit.

It's the spellchecker that's fascinating as I write. It doesn't highlight my typos and underline them in red as much. Instead it corrects them before I finish typing the word, and if I hesitate long enough, it finishes the damn word for me. For me? It's doing that for me? It's a freaking computer. I'm the one that jumps to the conclusion that this machine is doing me a personal favor. But, it kinda feels like it.

I've alway been a romantic. Which is code for saying that I get emotionally attached to my familiars. How else could I earn their trust? I can never trade cars. I have to buy a new used one and "give" the old used one away. That doesn't work well with ex-wives.

I watched a documentary about some lab monkeys that got deserted on an island just off Puerto Rico. The money for the research they were being used for, so they just opened the cages and left. No humans live on the island anymore. The monkeys naturally went native.

They were matriarchal. Their leaders were females and only females and the elite female's male children were allowed in the inner circle. The males lived in the fringes according to their male pecking order. The higher a specific male's ranking, the closer they were allowed near the inner circle of females and thus sexual favors.

There was a cameo of what happens to the old males who are too feeble to compete for procreational and recreational pleasures. Not much really, unless the old male had been a favorite of the alpha female, which meant that at some previous time he had been the alpha male, but even then, their real fate is that they wonder off to be alone and die.

Maybe I'm writing about this to elicit sympathy for getting old and undesirable sexually, but I think it's more about what I learned or confirmed for myself in regard to how the females of a matriarchy relate to the outer fringe of competing males. It seems like a lot of species are oriented this way, and I think homo sapiens are no different.

It's my sense of my self that I've sorta always known this basic reality, and generally, acted like it was so. Probably because so many of the planets in my natal astrology chart are in female signs like Taurus and Scorpio and Cancer and Pisces. What I've learned to recognize is the paradox about women and that looks are deceiving. I learned that by being there when my ex-wife got pregnant and used the LaMaze method to give birth to two babies.

I watched how the babies changed her physically, and her complete mental attitude toward me. Why would it not? How I thought and felt wasn't important to her anymore, and there was nothing either of us could do about it or perhaps, nothing either of us wanted to do anything about it. I may never know for sure. My role as a provider was all that mattered. As it should be. Unfortunately, for good or ill, that didn't set right with me.

I knew it had everything to do with matriarchy, and that no matter how I reacted to the cultural facticity of the situation I was on my way back into the fringes. I was too disgusted with myself to ever wanna compete again. I never recuperated from the humility I caused and received. I definitely wasn't the alpha female's favorite, and the alpha female herself wasn't even my wife.

It seems especially significant now that I remind you again of my disclaimer as a truth-teller. I don't know the truth. How could I possibly? I capture drifting thoughts with words or try to. Like imagining what the roots of man's need for a world savior might be like. I know what my gnosis shows me in that same imaginator. If what I capture appears or seems true to the reader, then they gotta look inside themselves for the truth they read into me.
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Do Avatars Have Teeth?

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Since I've upgraded to snow leopard on my Mac I've been discovering all sorts of new features. One of them accidentally when I was cleaning some spilled sauce off my keyboard. I knew all sorts of letters I touched during the cleaning would pop up on the word processor page I had open, but when the agreement for iTunes showed up and asked to be resolved I realized that I hadn't opened itunes since I upgraded the Mac. I clicked on the "Agree" button without a clue what I was agreeing to nor do I give a shit. I paid their asking price. Whatta they want, blood?

While it's true that I do get some physical. cardio-vascular sort of exercise, I don't always exert myself to the extreme that i have to sit down and rest for a while. Instead, I go for a longish walk or crawl onto my Cardio-Glider and operate it until I work up a hardy breath and a sweaty glow on my skin. I spend a lot more time sitting on my ass writing and meditating.

It was difficult getting anywhere last night with my meditation practice. I was still exhausted from messing with that worn-out riding lawnmower of my brother's, even after I took a shower and then a nap to regain my senses. After I finished my nearly finished blog entry, which happened a couple of hours after I'd napped for an hour, I figured it was time to meditate, but there was no stray thoughts to conquer, and thus no reward of ecstasy for my non-victory.

My optical world is coming into play again. Tomorrow I have an appointment at the VA to find out more about whether they will perform the surgery on my cataracts or not. I've had several hints that I might not be qualified to receive that service, because I was only shot at, but not hit by one of our country's enemies, but the fact that they approved a civilian eye exam and fit me up for a new pair of glasses might be a good sign. The constant sight of the Vets who weren't so lucky makes me feel guilty about using the VA occasionally, but not when I'm in pain. Sometime I forget that I'm dealing with a huge bureaucracy, and everybody there goes along to get along. Why would they do anything that might threaten their sweet government check, where 90% of their job security amounts to just showing up for work on time. I didn't study statecraft for thirty years for nothing.

My doctor, who originated in Vietnam, is quite wonderful even if I can't understand her frequently. She likes me. She told me a story of trying to get her 95 year old grandfather to stop smoking as an example of the futility she knew she was facing to get me to stop. She did though. I stopped for her. Inquiring about her grandfather's health from time to time has reaped huge rewards as far as getting things done that depend on her having a positive attitude toward me. The problem we both have at times is that she's fairly new to the system and she don't always know what to do to get me the help she is authorized to do. She makes up for it when she finds out. I wish I was like that myself. It helps, however, when I noticed that she's remembered, and I say something relevant.

It's events and situations like that I don't think I'm losing my gift for remembering. True, some other situations do not evoke details of some sorts of events. Like the formulae for figuring the take-out on odd-angled pipe bends. I haven't worked as a pipefitter proper in nearly twenty years. There's not a chance in hell I'll ever work as an industrial pipefitter for the rest of my life, even if I live another thirty years and get to be a hundred years old. Why on Earth would I actively remember something like that? I can look it up, and all the years of experience will come flooding back. Who needs that?

This a big deal for me presently. I watched both my father and mother age and eventually get to the point where they couldn't remember my name or that I was their own child. They got to the point they didn't remember their own parents or their siblings. Much less their siblings children. I think there is a difference in my situation, but it doesn't make any difference if there isn't.

Much of what makes a difference (if such is so) doesn't have anything to do with me and my subjective decision-making faculties. It has to do with human inventions like aspirin and penicillin. More specifically, it has to do in my case with the drugs that have been prescribed to me for the rheumatoid arthritis I'm being treated for.

Sure, the drugs the rheumatologists are using have very powerful side-effects, but none of them can compete with what the disease was/is doing to my body. I couldn't be sitting here writing this blog entry without some sort of medical intervention, and while my sitting here writing this crap doesn't mean anything to anybody but me, my body seems grateful it doesn't have to put up with the pain.

I'm really glad I don't have to treat this arthritis and osteoporosis by myself. I think it may be impossible for me to monitor their effect on me. As it is I have to return to the hospital every three months for blood tests to find out if something unpredictable has happened. How much would I have to know to take myself in the right direction? I didn't have the objectivity or the know-how to prevent the arthritis from occurring.

I didn't have a clue that it was impossible for my body to get the calcium it needed from dairy products. I didn't know that dairy products other than calcium are actually harmful to the adult body. If there was one thing I could have done for my body that I didn't do or know to do, it would have been to take a calcium/vitamin D supplement early on in adulthood, from a non-dairy source like coral or oyster shells. That way, I might still have more teeth. You ever notice that there ain't no old vampires? They got no fangs. They haven't got many other of their teeth either, but it's practically impossible to gum some victims jugular open in order to drink their blood?
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Too Pooped To Pop

An amazing thing happened that made me feel happy. I run across a version of MineSweeper that works real good on Macs. The odd thing for me is that I found it on the Mac web site. I had no idea they had that many games listed on their site until I ran across it yesterday. Most of the games are shareware or commercial and cost money, but there is a lotta freeware too. Apparently you can download all of them for a trial period.

The name of the program is called Another Mine, and it's at least as good as the Microsoft program. I found another Sudoku game there I like at the Mac site. It's very simplistic, but that's what I like about it. The only way I can boot it up though, is at startup, and if I close it I have to restart my computer to get it to boot up. So, I put it in startup, and then minimize it to the Dock when I'm not playing Sudoku.

The zonSudoku game (it's name) doesn't provide any preferences, but it does have one button that alters the whole idea of the game. The button is labeled Show Errors. It's very addictive. I take a not-so-wild guess, and then click on the button to see if I'm right or not. That's practically cheating, but the button just sits there and glares at me. How can I not use it. That's what I mean by writing that it changes the game. Why would I not et wot's sot before me?

Fall is in the air. I had to put on some clothes when I got up this morning to stay warm. I thought at first the cool weather was only associated with a cool front that dropped down out of Canada and it would soon move on out and it'd get warm again, then I realized that it's only another week until the autumnal equinox, and having a warm front will now be the exception to the rule.

I've just begun to realize that I might be having a side-effect to some of this medicine that I thought was more likely a sign of male menopause. I don't know if I'm right either way, but I think I'm getting hot flashes. It's more noticeable when the ambient temperature is cool with a light breeze. It oughta be cooling me down, but instead I'm perspiring, and the cool breeze on my damp skin is down-right uncomfortable. If I put on some clothes to compensate for the affect of the cool breeze, I get warmer, and when I take some clothes off to cool down and stop sweating, then it's too cool. What a drag, man.

I stopped writing for a while to go cut grass. I wore myself out doing it. I must have cut five acres of grass on a riding lawn mower. Hot out in the sun. Might have had a heat stroke. The mower blades picked up some wire that stopped it, and it took me at least an hour to cut it out with a pair of long-nosed pliers. They were all I had. Then, I ran over a piece of garden hose and it took me another hour to get that out, and finally the transmission on the lawn mower crapped out.

I never should have stopped writing. That happens all the time when I try to prove I'm just human.

Unforgettable

I read on the internet that all families are psychotic. I guess that includes the family I came from, and the children engendered by me. That makes sense to me for some reason. The idea of families is a little weird when I consider the notion. The concept of having family groups seems to be about procreation where some of homo sapiens more lauded attributes derived from, whereas most of the problems families have has to do with procreation. Taurus opposed to Scorpion. Procreation vs recreation. That's the axle my subjective psychotic wheels turn on when I consider family in opposition to being on my lonesome. As I have been for nearly thirty years now.

That's a strange term isn't it. "On my lonesome." On my lo-ne-so-me…

There was a real turning point in my mental life due to an out-of-body experience I had during an intense LSD-25 experience I had. It was a very strange night. My putting the acid in my body on that particular occasion was sort of like accepting a dare. I took two four-way hits of d-lysergic acid diethyl amide simultaneously. Enough for eight people to fully experience what it's like to trip out on acid.

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

An odd beginning for this experience was that we were gathered in a house down by the Tar River that a rock band i knew of was using for rehearsal. There were instruments all the front room and some people started using the microphones to talk to each other from two or three feet away. Somebody handed me a microphone and asked me to sing.

I wasn't getting off on the acid yet, but as I started to talk through the microphone my voice was garbled and I began doing the vocal exercises I use to clear my sinuses in order to sing well. I reckon while I was doing that the people there got fascinated by the sounds I was unintentionally making to clear the resonating chambers behind my nostrils.

It was during this part of the deal that the acid did start to distort my ordinary reality, and the sounds I was making took over my intention to sing along with the group, and I started exploring the weird places the acid was taking my voice. It wasn't long before I forgot what I was doing, and went to sit on a sofa across the room. Strangely, I was left alone when I did this.

Sitting on the couch all by myself I started feeling some tingling at the crown of my head. I closed my eyes to concentrate on finding out what caused the tingling. As soon as I focused my attention on the top of my head from an inside perspective, I saw a formation of white-looking clouds in my imagination that quickly changed in a huge swirl of white light similar to a torus or donut with the circle spinning to create an uplift in the empty center.

About that same time I heard my inner voice saying, "You are becoming one with the Creator" repetitively, and the vacuum in the torus was lifting me up into it, and when I left my body sitting there on the sofa and entered the white swirling light my inner voice finished the sentence with, "You are becoming one with the creator… of your own illusions."

Suddenly, I wasn't in the cloud of swirling white light anymore. I was in the same room. I could see my body over there on the couch. I wasn't in it. On the floor in front of the sofa toward the middle of the room, with the party continuing all around them were two college girls sitting on the floor chatting about their boyfriends to each other. I was a foot away from them, and they didn't act like I was there.

I guess my curiosity got the best of me. I knew I was out of body and the girls couldn't "see" me, and so I asked the closest girl to me if she wanted to have secretly have sex since nobody could see that going on right in front of them. The girl never stopped talking to her companion, but in the same voice she used to speak she said to me, "felix, leave me the hell alone. Can't you see I'm busy?" Eeeek! There were two of her. She had a doppelganger, and yet it didn't seem so odd to me that her doppelganger was talking to my doppelganger while my body was plainly visible over on the sofa at the sa-me ti-me her body was having a chat.

My return to my body sitting on the couch was not so spectacular as when I first left it. Sure, the swirling white light was still swirling along, but I seemed to be in a hurry to get back to my body, and when I returned to beta consciousness mumbling again and again "Everything is nothing but the idea that it's something, and could be anything at all." I understood why it was in a hurry. It was trying to remember what the sentence meant.

It meant that I realized in that brief out-of-body sojourn I had been taught the principle of projection, and I didn't wanna forget it… ever! It's the principle of projection that ex-is-t as the ground-of-being that led to the revelation that provided me with gnosis.