Day After Day, Night After Night

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I'm trying to set up an opening chapter for the novel writing contest. It's not fun for me to write biographically. I don't like remembering what went on earlier in my life. The truth being that I don't really know what went on earlier in my life because I was literally a different person at every stage of it. Unfortunate for writing biographically. I become a different person to write about different people I've been, and the person I am is now ain't long for this world no how.

When I write about my father these days I'm writing about a person who was nearly fifty years younger than I am now when I was born. He was thirty-three years old, and had only been married a couple of years to my mother, who already had a female child. He married a ready-made family. When I think about the decisions I made at that age, he obviously made better ones than I ever did, but even at that, like other young men who get thrust into relationships that have legal implications, the youthful ideals one has when they're young clash with putting food on the table.

I never realized that would be expected of me. Marriage was just something I read about in a book. I didn't realize that I would have to kowtow to the people I needed to help me put food on the table made my father look like a saint by comparison. I really don't think I have much control over my lack of insight into what I need must do for others just like it was done for me.

For much of my life I thought I was insane, because that's what people said about me when I was careless about doing what mattered to bring home the bacon. "Boy, you just ain't right! You don't know how to act around people who go out of their way to help you. You got no gratitude. Were you raised in a barn?" Well, sorta. In a way I was raised in a barn.

The real problem is that I'm kind of like a rainman. You know, like the careactor played by Dustin Hoffman in the title role of the movie Rainman. It's not as obvious with me. It just makes me seem rude and inconsiderate. From my long contemplated point of view, I really don't have any gratitude for the people who try to help me. I'm not even "cold as ice" as some have claimed in the past.

There are times you're just not there for me as a homo sapiens, or rather, you act like all the other animals I was raised to take care of from early childhood onward, and you respond to how I was taught to treat animals from day one, so why would I act like you are what you were taught you to be? Now, get over there and do what I tell you or I'll hit you with a big stick!

I haven't thought I am insane since I received my remembering vision. I am different from a lotta people, maybe most people, but not as many people as some might expect, because down deep many, if not most people are nuttier than I am about how to treat people. How could I not know if they treat me exactly like they accuse me of treating them?

There have been incidents in my life when even I became aware that I had treated people like the animals they really are that have caused me to wonder if I wasn't hugely different from other people, because I don't exhibit the characteristics of a person who feels compassion for-the-other.

One of those times was when I was in the Navy and around the age of 19-20 years old. The Navy didn't pay people much in those days, and I was constantly broke when I left the ship to go on liberty in the ship's home port of San Diego, California. Many times I didn't even have a quarter to take the city busses to get to town.

On this particular occasion I was walking along the big boulevard that ran from San Diego to the border of Mexico. The downtown area of Tijuana, Mexico is only twelve miles from downtown San Diego, and is a favorite place for young sailors from further back in history than the age of either of these places.

On this particular day I was too broke to go to Tijuana, and as I strolled along beside the constant traffic of the popular highway it started sprinkling rain, and I barely made it to an old service station for cars that had a shelter over where the gas pumps used to be. before it started pouring down rain.

Southern California is mostly desert, and it hardly ever rains. When it first starts raining anywhere the paved roads get slick, what with the waste petroleum products that settle on the roadbeds, but I expect it's more critical in the desert because it rains so little the residue builds up. I didn't think much about that because I was walking.

I was standing under the shelter of this out-of-business service station with maybe a dozen other people who had also taken shelter from the rain. We were all just standing around watching the rain and enjoying the moment when two couples on motorcycles came around the fairly moderate curve on the highway in front of the station.

The first motorcycle made it around the curve without an apparent problem, but the second motorcycle with a man and a woman had the wheels lose traction on the freshly wet road and literally flipped out from under the couple. The inertia of their weight kept them going straight ahead, but the bike flipped end over end toward the shoulder of the road and crashed into some parked cars.

The couple wore the typical black leather riding clothes, and they needed them desperately, because the concrete median between the four lanes of the highway was over a foot high, and both of them were thrust by their weight on the ridge of that concrete together pretty much in the same position they had been sitting on the bike, but the bike was gone.

The other people under the shelter with me all ran out to see if they could help these poor victims, but not me. I just stood there under the shelter as if nothing much had happened at all. I didn't have any feelings about what happened one way or the other. By the time the ambulance sirens came within hearing distance the rain had stopped, and I continued walking down the sidewalk quaintly amused that I had witnessed the entire affair.

I didn't really think about what that meant until I was telling a shipmate later when I returned to the ship later than night. It was when he got this astounded look on his face when he realized I was truly detached from feeling any emotions for the victims, that I realized my reaction or lack of it was a little off the beaten path.

The incident wasn't unusual for me. I watched a bunch of dogs playing together and chasing each other around like dogs are prone to do. They were out on the street in front of the house my family was living in at the time, and one of the dogs made the mistake of running out in front of a big truck coming down the highway.

The truck couldn't stop in time to keep from hitting the dog that had unexpectedly darted out in front of it, and the dog was immediately killed, and half the skin on one side of it's body was ripped off. The truck slowed down, but the driver could probably see there was no help to be had for the bloody mess left on the highway, so he kept going.

The interesting thing for me about this was that the other dogs the dead dog had been playing with came up and sniffed the body of their dead playmate, and then they went right back to playing around as if nothing at all had happened. I seem to be more like the playful dogs than like the people standing under the shelter with me in San Diego.

This is not true for me all the time. Many times, in the past, I have reacted with emotions so strong it gets away from me sometime, and instead of being detached from the situation I have reacted to in such a fashion, I can be literally debilitated for weeks. It seems better for me to walk away from emotionally tinged situations than to suffer the pangs of hell over something I can't control. I get dumbfounded, but I never know how it's gonna go one way or the other.

I don't think I'm gonna be able to make a fictional story up to write a legitimate novel. I don't know the truth of what happens, and I can't make up an interesting lie. Besides, like ever other homo sapiens animal I'm aware of, I project my idea of reality upon the other knowing full well that what I see "out there" is a judgment of what I'd be like if I was them.

I know from deep experience when other people are doing it, and I take advantage of the way they betray themselves in this manner, and writing a novel using characters I've known in the past would be self-betrayal by my own hand. Thus, felix MANOS peregrino. 1615
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The End Is Near

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I woke up early this morning knowing what kind of novel I want to write for this National Novel Writing Contest. I don't have a clue how or even if I'm going to do it. I'm still trying to figure out what to send these people as far as the writing itself goes. For all I know they're a bunch of hustlers wanting me to give them a story they can make money off of. I ran into that kind of people when I entered a poetry contest and found out it was a sham. On the other hand, if I wrote something good enough to steal there would be a certain satisfaction in that.

I am beginning already to hate the very idea of trying to put together a storyline of some kind. Since I don't know anybody but the person I make myself out to be I guess I'll have to develop a persona for the first person speaker who tells the story. If I can do that much by entering this contest it will be worth it. It might not be as difficult for me as I'm hyping it up to be, I made up felix from next to nothing. Of course, felix is forty years old now. Maybe this contest is his middle-age crisis.

I've lost the remote control for my TV set. It disturbs me to no end. I must have spent at least three or four hours looking for it. I rearranged my computer space. I put some shelving where my desk sat and move my desk further west by the same amount. This is a much better way than how I had it because the location of my computer desk was too close to the outside door. As usual, the first thing I think of is that somebody snuck into my house when I wasn't here and took it as revenge for some despicable deed I never done.

Since I went to that reunion luncheon with my high school classmates and noticed their reaction to me in a different light I've been wondering if their response to me is what controls my behavior toward them, and others, in general. I'm still contemplating that description of a certain type of person I heard on TV. "You know, he's like that kid in high school that everybody liked because he argued with the teachers."

My mild-mannered brother-in-law who IS a retired high school teacher and tennis buff screwed up and made the only negative remark about me I had ever heard him say. He told my mother (another retired teacher, now deceased) that he felt lucky he had never had to deal with a student like me. Oddly, my own mother agreed with him.

Her admission surprised me since she was the type of person (along with my father, also a public school teacher) who brought her work home with her, thus not only had she had to deal with me, but raised me to be that way. Maybe she and my father raised me to be that way, but I'm pretty much of a self-made asshole of the sort who refused their advise and made mockery of their so-called wisdom. Whatta guy... eh?

I know this about myself. How could I not? It's been a constant accusation since I swapped for this body with it's first owner. The crazy thing about it is that they all loved me for being that way with them. I don't mean to say they liked the way I acted, particularly if they were the authority I ridiculed, but they seem to love that there is someone around who will do what they afraid to do, even if that makes them the brunt of the joke.

Too bad I didn't understand all this when I was in high school. It probably wouldn't have made any difference. I wouldn't have or simply didn't know how to parley this loveable bad-boy careactor into getting them to have sex with me. It didn't happen. I was a virgin when I joined the Navy. Being a virgin was probably the reason I joined the Navy. Granted, I did join the Navy to see the world, doing it to lose my virginity was my true purpose.

I didn't argue with the teachers to be seen as a "bad boy" to attract the girls. For me there wasn't a clue the way I behaved made me attractive to the young girls. Around the time of puberty I began to realize that all adults were hypocrites. They expected me to follow the rules they ignored but gave lip service to. I became highly indignant about this, and not only argued with my teachers to gainsay their hypocrisy, but to call them out and out liars.

How could I have known when I was a kid that I was projecting and accusing them of being what I thought I was for having listened to such liars in the first place? With my current question being, did I somehow unconciously know that people secretly loved me for being brazen and arrogant? Was I brazen and arrogant only to gain their warm feelings toward me? Am I still doing that? I'd love it if it is true. Whatta way to go! 889

I read a bulletin or outline at the web site for this National Novel Month thingamajig that the entrant writers need to write 1,667 words a day to make the 50,000 word goal. I hadn't done the math to come up with the exact number yet, but I had figured in general to be upward of 1,500 words a day.

The word counter AppleScript script I'm using to count the words I write in TextEdit (the word editor that comes with the Mac operating system) has really put me on notice that my assumption that I wrote that much everyday of the week anyway wasn't realistic.

Sometime, when I might get on a roll, my word count per day might be 3,000 words or more if I counted the e-mails I composed in order to participate in the e-mail discussion groups I once belonged to. Usually, however, particularly on the blogs I write for, I just write until I ran outta something to say. The word counter script brings hard-core numbers to bear on what's wot.

The contest begins just after midnight Sunday night. Thats less than two days away. I didn't think I would get this nervous and jittery about this silly contest. I think the only prize is a t-shirt that everyone who finishes gets. The only real contest is the one each writer has with themselves.

I got no excuse for not doing this except for sheer cowardice. I've provided myself with the tools for creating believable careactors all my adult life. I could make a natal astrology chart for each character and have them react to all stimuli just like a real person. It makes me want my mommy. Bitch left me here alone, and neither of my ex-wives would become her just to help me be strong enough to write. 1200

I don't really wanna use the people I swore to remain faithful to for the rest of my life. I lied like a dog to both of them without a clue that what I told them was, in fact, lies. Okay, maybe I was a little suspicious that I was lying. Lying like I always lie because I don't always know the truth of how I feel, and even if I do, I don't have a prayer of it remaining true any longer than it takes for another lie to take its place. I've always been , incurably, and irrefutably curious about the next best thing.

My remembering vision should provide me with all sorts of descriptors about my careactor's character. Whether or not I'll be able to employ what I experienced throughout my evolution from pearl to homo sapiens might be considered sacrilegious or not to universal truth is yet to be seen. The only real writers I've known in person have murdered themselves whether the coroner agreed with that or no. There are not many people who have known me for long that don't think I'll end up killing myself. I know why, but that doesn't change my fate, but their own. What a drag, man.

If I decide not to use astrology to fill out the form of the careactors I employ, then I can always turn to the metaphors and sayings I studied for over thirty years in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. There again. the question of blasphemy comes into play. I can't use these things as freely as it might seem like I do.

There are limits I seem forced to observe. I can't know ahead of time what they are. Maybe these limits exists because I need to think I have some sort of morals and ethics. Not that I really do, of course, but I like to pretend I do for the sake of the other. The problem seems to be that I actually don't invest emotionally in other people.

If I were to re-read the stuff I've written in the past (it ain't gwine happen) it might be clear as a bell why I suspect I'm more than a little autistic. I feel like Pinocchio more often than is comfortable for me. I feel like a wooden toy I created myself who wants to be a real boy with feelings and everything, but there are times when I know there ain't a chance in hell.

Even when I majored in Drama and Speech and had lots of required courses in acting I merely acted like I was acting when it was just something to do in order to make at least a "B" in my major area of study. Sometime I sense that I didn't take the only course I needed to get a degree because I was a fraud. I only acted like I was a real actor, and it was that phony who took a bow and smiled at the rave reviews as if I knew a secret. 1713

I'm a little afraid of what's gonna come out when I'm writing just to reach a minimum word count, but on the other hand, that's kinda why I'm doing this contest thing. So, what's new? Double bind. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Selah
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All Fall Down

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The idea of getting caught in the spotlight is the double whammy for creatures like house flies. They have to get warmth and light from somewhere to operate, and yet they only have a short life time to do it. Flies seem especially ready to crawl on to my computer screen for their last gasp. I use a plastic flyswatter that doesn't scratch my monitor screen.

Too bad they don't know this ain't India, and that I ain't no Jainist who gently sweeps the bugs out of their path as they proceed down life's highway. Nothing good can come of my getting outta bed at quarter to three in the morning because I woke up grieving over the cruelty of living without purpose. SPLAT! Another fly bites the dust.

I wanna a victim to blame it all on that I've done all this, and I'm gonna die like a dog in a ditch no matter what. Surely it has to be my parents fault. They loved my siblings better than they did me, but then I became a parent, and I was no parent at all compared to them. If my parents were to blame, then my children are just waiting for the chance to murder me. No blame.

No problem. I got pills for this. I just swallowed one. That's probably the kindest way to deal with the foibles of old age. Maybe the doctors diagnosed me with an incurable disease in order to make it okay to prescribe some dope I'll never not need to get outta the physical pain.

It's coming back. They've had me on a low dose of Prednisone for about three months now. They intended for it to run out before my next appointment, and I haven't had any for about a week or better now. All the prescription medicine is tiny little pills, but I know about how powerful drugs can be that come in small packages.

I did not know exactly how running out of the steroid Prednisone would affect me, but I suspected the pain would return to some degree. To what degree, I'm just finding out. The pain picks its shots. The most obvious happens in my right wrist and thumb, but the most inconvenient pain happens in my neck and shoulders, and the pain there interferes with me being comfortable lying in bed.

Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night having to go to the bathroom, like now, I can't go back to sleep. The only thing to go to in sleep are my dreams, and that's why I don't particularly wanna go back to sleep. The nightmare that woke me up was about an acquaintance who visited me with a cocaine pipe.

Soon after his arrival, the cops show up, and he hands me the pipe with the cocaine in it that's not mine. Not only was I gonna go to prison, but I was truly innocent. I don't do coke. I don't like the way I act when I've tasted it, in the past, but I was gonna pay for my friends having a good time at my expense, but doing hard time. I should go back to bed to dream about that?

I wrote about how much I like having moved my computer back up stairs, but I haven't written that much about how my being back upstairs has affected my visitors. My computer is located in my bedroom, and people in general don't seem to like visiting me and sitting in my bedroom to talk. I think it's just too personal.

Last yesterday afternoon I moved my computer station further west in the room in order to put some commercial shelves back in better location from where they were before I worked on remodeling and restoring my house. The junk I have laying around all come from being stored on these particular shelves, and I've needed to put the shelves where they're gonna stay for a while in order to clean up the mess.

It takes me forever and a day to make up my mind about how I want to arrange my house. After twenty odd years of not completing it I still change my mind constantly about where doors, walls, and even stairs go. Presently, I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate the space created by my roofing over a ill-conceived second-floor balcony I had some romantic ideas about putting there. Bad idea for me. Having a roof and drying in a quarter of the space on the second floor gives me options and a lot more space to arrange my ill-gotten goods.

My "ill-gotten goods" were not stolen. They are hand-me-downs. Ill-gotten because I accepted other people's charity. My house furniture is messy, but when I look around, only part of it was given to me. In this room alone I bought and paid for most of what passes for "furniture" in it. The TV, computer, desks, the afore mentioned shelves. My piano and large djembe drum. but not my bed, aye, and there's the rub.

I didn't buy the bed I sleep in. The frame was left over from my oldest daughters ex-husband's father. She received it when his own children bought him a new bed because they were ashamed of the one he slept in, but there is nobody to feel shame over it for me. I guess I should have been a better father. Being any kind of father at all might have made them feel more generous toward me.

The mattress set I used is a mixture of the box spring that came with that bed, and the mattress came from my mother's bed after she died. No, she didn't die on this mattress. She died on a rented hospital bed. The same as my father.

After they each became bed-ridden a hospital bed was rented and placed in the family room that has the big sliding doors that opened up to the pastures down by the creek and river swamps so they could see what they had wrought during their stay on Earth. In the last years... years... neither of them gave a fuck. All their life's accomplishments meant absolutely nothing. I tried to tell 'em, but would they listen to me? No, I was just another thought they had to leave behind. No blame.

Maybe that's the one project I should undertake before I croak from pure sadness. That is, to buy myself my own bed to die in. I sure would enjoy sleeping in a new bed. A mattress that didn't arrive to my bedroom with pre-defined lumps in it. Something I could buy standard sized sheets for that would stay halfway unwrinkled all night long.

A twin bed would do. I don't have to worry about anybody sleeping with me for the rest of my life. A single width bed that is as long as a queen or king-sized bed. Six foot is too long for a standard size bed. The standard size was determine when people were shorter. A single sized bed would fit into my bedroom much better.

The pill I took at four a.m. worked just dandy. I went back to bed after I wrote the expression, "Aye, and there's the rub." When I woke up the sun was shining through the cracks in the wall of my bedroom, and I was in a much better mood. The one thing about these pills is that I don't dream when I take them.

I used to study my dreams when I was a stupid person back in my thirties and forties. Some pundits thought it was necessary for a person to reach enlightenment. I figured if that was the deal, then I should study the contents of my dreams in order to give myself a chance to become enlightened, whatever in hell that was.

It was another bullshit lie. I became enlightened by my remembering vision shortly after I turned thirty years old, but didn't realized thats what enlightenment was until I was around sixty. Seeking enlightenment as a quest was pretty much a waste of time because I didn't actually know what it was when I got it.

When I did get enlightened by vision and sacraments at thirty years old I didn't know to stop seeking it. That's typical for a native who has Mercury in Aries. Everything to do about Aries provides the chance that they'll overshoot the mark and have to find their way home from the outer reaches. I suspect some never realize they had already found what they were looking for a long time back. They don't actually care about enlightenment. Their quest is just for the excitement of the unknown adventure. They like not gnowing wh✰at might happen just around the bend.

I just walked out on my upper deck and pick a leaf from the bottom of the ornamental kale plant I bought down at Lowes. I was looking for another ornamental cabbage that was given to me as a present a couple of years ago. They stay green through most of the winter as long I bring them inside on the nights where there is a hard, killing frost. A regular frost just makes them tastier.

I can't keep these fall/winter plants on the ground level. The rabbits around my house know very well that they're delicious. They eat them for food. Having ornament shapes is lost on a rabbit when all they can see around them in the winter is dry brown grass that's tough to eat compare to a luscious green succulent kale plant.
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Writing 50,000 Words Of Prose In A Month?

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Sometimes the stuff I wanna learn requires that I go about it differently than I normally would, because I have to imitate and mimic the behavior and mannerisms of people who already know what I wanna know. One of the most difficult parts is the bejinning. Yeah, I meant to write "bejinning" instead of beginning. Thus illustrating my point above.

Obversely, by looking at these people I find out later I'm going to want to model in order to git something they got, I can't afford to condemn anybody before I get to know what they got I might want later, and that makes my future apprenticeship more difficile than it has to be.

It's gotten to where I hate to make a statement of certainty about any one thang because that might offend somebody whose cooperation I might need in that future I-am-is will use to work its way from the crowded, smelly seats up in the balcony to the center ring down below.

This is where the bejinning co-me-s into play. The bejinning is a constant state one can learn to fall in and out of without a conscious need for intention to stay steady on with merely one ongoing project. Can you spell m-u-l-t-i-t-a-s-k-i-n-g? Obviously then, the teaching is about trust, and how I-am-is don't ring it's bell by kowtowing to the dictates of the other. It rings for me... and... thee.

My I-am-is needs an audience because it needs confirmation that It-is-me (which, paradoxically speaking, it is and it is not. What a drag, man.) When I use the hyphenated term "I-am-is", I may be referencing a self-generated urge to power. IT can't happen without both me and thee, and what happens in real time when we each provide the other with a witness to each I-am-is's need for feedback.

Man, this is some crazy, tossed-word salad. I attempt to describe how IT takes both me and thee to make me-and-ing (meaning). As in the Biblical saying, "Where there are two or more together, there am I." I.E. , I-am-is.

The spirit or Christos is something that co-me-s into being as the result of the relationship we form by being in each others company. What we each gnow via our personal, subjective gnosis becomes known by the mere presence of the other. We gnow thangs about each other that we don't yet know. To gain knowledge of the other requires sacrificing the exclusivity of our personal gnosis in favor of giving our mutual presence me-and-thee-ing.

I love tossing words in the air to discover how they'll taste in their new configuration. This lust for what lies beyond me-and-thee-ing reaches deep into my soul all the way to the pearl of great price. That's why it's so expensive. I have had to pay through my ass to sit nakid in it's light.

It's a two-way street from my point of view. For the longest ti-me I thought I had to pay through my nose, and I do. But, the art of breathing can take a long ti-me to assess because it's subject to allergies of every sort.

The startling results of learning it, however, can be ascertained by any couple who has used the Lamaze Method of childbirth. In such a critical situation, the I-am-is and it's claim to fame becomes unified more under the auspices of gnosis rather than knowledge. "It's your fault, you.... bastard! You got me this way. Your child is trying to kill me." What? This child is the meaning of our sharing gnosis?

Obviously, the problem with paying through my ass required me to gnow, rather than to know, when I-am-is fulla shit. This angst happens too close to the perineum in proximity (or by proxy?). The perineum is considered by some cultures to represent the holiest spot in the human body. The root chakra. Breath is the vehicle by which one recognizes the connection between the root chakra and the crown chakra that travels via the eighth cranial nerve. Its not the only way information passes to and fro from heaven to the depths of the river Styx.

METAMORPHOSES

I dig my Self,
I-am-is a beautiful thing.
Its an addition to the whole
that is me.
For without my Self,
I could be no thing else,
without mi Me,
the world couldn't be.

So, I walk down the street
with a gleam in my eye,
and a definite "Go to hell!" look.
For the knowledge I've got
comes from gnowing myself,
and it doesn't come outta no book.

My emotions I feel,
and my feelings I gnow,
and that rapport,
is thicker than smoke.
I-am-is the outside in,
and the inside out,
and "Fuck you,
if you can't take a joke."

felix manos peregrino ~ June, 1969
Edited Today -> ad infinitum

855
I am perfectly aware that there are lots of other ways of learning what one needs to know to survive in a style to which they can become accustomed. Personally, however, I can't ken how they can do it if they don't have poetry they wrote as a child. I don't have much of that phase of my life around me now in my dotage. I burned most of it. Anything I could grab and toss in the fire once I got a good blaze going. It's only graven images.

The poetry I did keep was written during the period of my remembering vision, and most it was tossed or burnt or given away to the people I wrote it about or for. I've hardly written any poetry since I got together with the woman who was to become my second wife. She began writing poetry and I stopped.

There are people who have collected as much as they can of my poetry, but I made sure it was scattered all around because I was kind of scattered and all over the place myself in those days. It intrigued me just now to go through the small pile of poetry I have managed to keep because of how it related to my recent adoration of the term "paradox".

A woman I used to correspond with used paradox a lot. I wasn't sure if I knew what she meant, and so I not only looked it up in the dictionary, but did a web search for the etymology of it to look for root sources. I've used the term intentionally throughout my writing to drill it into my lexicon of frequently used words.

The poem I wrote above is one of the last poems I wrote during the period after my remembering vision and when I first got together with the woman who took over that part of my life for me. It was specifically designed to move me to another way of looking at life and it did. The most remarkable part about that was that this poem was an experiment that worked so powerfully I became sore afraid.

I me-more-d that poem specifically to repeat it over and over again. I had a goal in re-member-ing it through repetition and redundancy. I needed for it to be-co-me so familiar to me that it would bring contempt in it's train. From the spiritual to the mundane and back again. That's how children do it. To do it I must become a child again. Be-co-me-ing my own child again allows adult supervision. Good luck with that if you try it. The price is merely all yo' abstract possessions.

"Inch by inch, it's a cinch." ~ AU

The closer the date comes for the Novel-in-a-month contest, the more I worry about not writing novelistically. I don't know how to contain wot I have to say to other people's expectations. I really wouldn't mind doing it. I would if I already knew how and could just formalize a process that I had encapsulated by visualization. You know, like I'm doing now.

The header at the top of my blog was put there to announce in some formal way that I have decided that it's not my job to determine the veracity of the drifting thoughts I attempt to capture with words. It would be quite futile and useless because I don't know what's true and what's false.

My intellectual faculties run broad and deep, but that profundity is gained at the expense of speed. I can't catch the drifting thoughts with words and figure out whether my prey measures up to my various readers judgment. I might could please one, but not at the same time I reach for meaning for-the-other.

I can't figure out when I'm telling the truth or a lie, much less what a listener might hear me saying. I just touch type my way through the dreams that caches my interest in the moment. I'm trying to render comprehensible something that's imperceivable. It's not easy being a target of scorn, but it's just too much fun to stop the madness. 1555

Oh, goody, I've written 1555 words. I can stop and get something to eat now. I was perfectly willing to stop at 855 words, but I needed 700 more to meet the daily goal of the Novel contest. Worshiping graven images is about projection and is thus self-worship. I'll probably go to Hell for this.
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I Hate Focusing On A Specifically Defined Task

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For me, there is always gonna be those moments when I wanna give up on everything I'm trying do. I know, of course, that I can't let that continue, but while I know it, I don't gnow it. Gnosis don't work that way for me. Knowing something is cultural, gnowing something is guttural. The last four letters are the sa-me. Cul-tural and gut-tural. Knowing and gnowing. Dying and growing.

This morning I feel discouraged about where the piano thing is going. I seem to be attracted to a method of chording promoted by this guy who goes by the handle of sesameseed77. Here is a link to his channel on youtube:

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

The author of this video explains his system for figuring out piano chords in a seemingly random manner as one's fingers wander across the keyboard. At least that's what I figure he's teaching, or maybe that's what I'm filtering for to learn. Maybe I do this in the same manner I challenge authority I know that's not supported by the presence of the prevailing rabble.

This might be difficult to explain. Perhaps, in keeping with the notion of writing 50,000 words in the month of November during the National Novel Writing Month:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node

I should have a character for the "novel" I'm gonna start writing novel next Sunday describe what I've been reflecting upon. There is no doubt in my mind that the only thing I intend to do in November is write to meet the goal of 50,000 words. The hosts and rules say the "novel" doesn't really have to be good or make any sense.

I kinda don't know how to create a character to describe or explain what he's trying to do by teaching himself to play the piano by the information and tutorials he finds on the internet, but I'd bet my bottom dollar he'd end up looking and sounding like... me.

Putting words in other people's mouths isn't that easy for me to do. Even if that person is not real, but imaginary. This involves the concept of projection, and people do it all the time without knowing they're doing it, and there is no blame in that. Sometime watching that happen makes me sad.

I've been cussed out before and called a retarded idiot more often than I care to remember. Most of the time I didn't bother to deny it. What would be the point? Of course I'm a retarded idiot sometime, who isn't? That doesn't make me sad, and I don't usually get mad at the person who accuses me of being themselves. How could that help?

The sadness arrives with my realization that they're not talking about me, but themselves. It's the sa-me dynamic at play with most of the people I've met in real life. People "see" what they would think of themselves if they acted like they think I act. They expect me to obey their own rules of conscience when that's not possible.

It's impossible because I can't know what their rules of conscience are. They can tell me with elaborate details as to the particulars of what I should be doing so as not to offend them, but despite that supreme effort (maybe), I can only "hear" what I "think" they're saying.

These others are telling me the truth as they understand it with absolute sincerity, but they seem unaware they're betraying who-they-think-they-are and blaspheming their true identity for which they cannot be forgiven. The crazy thing about it is that I do the sa-me thing even though I understand the dynamic as thoroughly as humanly possible... for me... only for me. I only pretend to do it for the other because they simply won't have it any other way. Why would I not? "I am not a crook."

Maybe creating some fictional careactor to say what might be imprudent for me to claim as a matter of political expediency or even to make a good impression upon some shill for the etiquette crowd.

People only seem to want something you got in excess by methods so close to your bones you don't give credit where it's due. They think you won't even miss what they take from you, because what they take from you they figure you don't have to do anything special to get.

Rich people are merely the janitors of their possessions. It doesn't matter if what they're rich in isn't money. They hoard mental wealth too, and put it in treasure troves so other people have to pay up to see that it's actually there.

Why would they not? It's just something they can't avoid doing if they don't want their treasures stolen. If they're responsible for something that keeps you alive in the interim, and some thief comes to take their stuff while you're out on a limb, they'll protect their money before they'll think about saving your life.

I'm like that, and that's okay with me. It has to be or I won't get the things done that seem to be important to me currently. That's because in some ways I'm autistic. There are times when I don't feel your pain or care much if what I'm doing is putting you in distress. It's only later, when I get off by myself and contemplate my life, that I realize I might oughta have considered your emotional investment for living inside my nod.

I'm still trying to figure out how to have novel characters say and perform the thoughts and actions that define me as this or that. I mean, in reality, I do this exclusively and constantly without exceptions. I've learned a little statecraft, and had my public discourse shaped by humiliation and shame, but in my heart of hearts the other is always only there to play the roles I assign them to help me fulfill my heart's desires.

I think my heart of hearts may be a little burned out on being heartless. It's mad at me because I won't let it dance the wild fandango. No blame. I'd be mad at me too if had to toe the line of some morbid rules of conscience that was never designed or meant to take for true.

I haven't been running this autism rap for long. I think maybe it was a definition for Asperger's Syndrome that caused me to question myself about how that might fit. The whole deal revolves circuitously around how ti-me seems to fly when I'm having fun.

For instance, there are periods of time when I'm definitely gone from the present day situation, and I've known about that for a long time, but it wasn't until recently that I realized that what I do to have fun, but just in order to make ti-me fly.

When I return to Beta consciousness and realize that I've been gone for a long time without being aware of current events in the sensory dimension, and upon that startling return I sometimes remember that what just happened, did happen, because I was having fun swimming around at my leisure in the cosmic soup. 1197

I have to ignore everything that's going on in the sensory dimension to do that. "To ignore" is the root woid (word, woe-to-the-id) for the terms ignorant and ignorance. Ignoring the sensory dimension in order to have fun swimming around in the Akashic Oceans is three orders of magnitude more pleasurable than wading around still carrying my body weight in the cosmic soup.

That metaphor sucks, but I mean to indicate that there are levels of ecstasy so profound they can't be remembered because it takes all of my attention to focus on wot's what for me to exploit any more of the unknown or unknowable.

It seems to me that the abstract world I deliberately created as my whole world needs for me to deny the other for my own sake or I lose consciousness of that constructed world. I've become aware of the term "paradox" in a more vivid way recently that encapsulates a certain moment of confusion that I have to accept with some sense of equilibrium in order for me to transition for One to The Other.

The trick, it seems presently, is to carry the I-am-is along for the ride. So, can the I-am-is ex-is synonymous with what I'm labeling "consciousness"? What's it like to not associate intimately with the I-am-is? Lost? Away from ho-me? Or is it merely a state of Being that offers polarity to Is-ness.

So-me say I-am-is is all there IS to it. Is Being the sa-me as is-ness. If all that can be said of consciousness is that... It is..., then how can One ex-is. How can one exit is-ness? Ya gotta be outside of is-ness to Be aware IT is. To be conscious there IS an It. That's the paradox. It is what it ain't, and it ain't what it is. Rest and motion need each other to have separate me-and-thee-ings.

Maybe my real point of entering the National Novel Month thing is to find out if I have any more to say that I haven't said or written before. Writing the same thing over and over drives me nuts. Is this all there is? I feel a little stupid for proving I don't really have much to say. 1577

When I start writing for this contest I'll be posting what I write on a new blog I created just to save the title of an e-mail discussion group I finally deleted for lack of interest. I seem more interested these days in writing to anybody rather than for specificity.
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Sores On Lips That Run From The Brain

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It's absolutely necessary for me to be a little insane to capture drifting thoughts with words. I can't be anybody's preconceived self to justify my need to shift-shapes in order just to keep up with the specious present. In order to do that I have to consider the incoming as if plausible, but not convincing.

That puts the responsibility of the incoming white noise to get more attention to itself than I'm purposefully not willing to give. I know the price this Terror asks of me for being it's bitch. The outgoing is just as determined to take my attention with it into the deluded realms of the past. I suspect that's the main motivation for the spiritual quest of some to remain objective of both this and this in the rest and motion of yin and yang.

I had to stop writing and insert foam earplugs into my ears to assist me in concentrating on the task at hand. The assholes over at the airport running that diesel-engined earth mover that has a deliberate, attention-getting warning signal when it enters it's reverse gear, doesn't know or give a shit that what he's doing a thousand meters away is fucking with my focus.

The ignorant son of a bitch with the deliberately loud mufflers on the car his daddy gave him. He races up and down the highway to attract some young girl's attention to himself, but only transmits the signal to me that he's earning the wrath of God upon himself at the same time he thinks he's entrancing the dumb-ass baby factory's fancy, and by doing so, he incurs my death wish upon his loutish soul.

The mindless asshole two miles away doesn't have a clue I spent a considerable amount of time using a Neurophone to learn how to "hear" through my skin, and that his loud muffler-deficient grass-mowing machine really needs a tune-up and an overhaul. Although he's only doing what he's doing to earn money to feed his family, I hope he gets the swine flu and takes that home to his constantly abused pregnant wife instead.

It's a good thing that I'm a powerless old man who doesn't rule the world. Not a has-been who whiles the rest of his useless life away yearning for the power he once possessed or thought he did, but a never-was whose inane stupidity still pretends to hope of immortality.

My plight of despair is an ongoing state of futility. It's futile because it's caused by the weather. The one thing that having satellite weather reports available 24/7 is that I don't even have to pay that much attention to associate the affect of the high and low weather systems on the ambient noise levels at my house.

When the clear blue skies of a high pressure system appears, the sounds and echos in the close and nearby neighborhood that drive me nuts disappears.

When a low system takes it's place and the humidity rises and the overcast clouds block out the Sun, a low-pressure system keeps the aforementioned ambient sounds (made by animals, especially human beings and their infernal machines) smothered and resoundingly close to Earth, and my own legally deaf ears... "I KNOW!"

It's the absurdity of a legally deaf old man whining and puling disgustingly about the unwanted noise in his neighborhood thats enough to make some people lose faith in mankind. If he lived in some war-torn area where bombs of every variety were constantly and unexpectedly going off at all times of the day and night, that might warrant some pity, but not this.

It's always this or that, you know? It's enough to drive a gentle soul mad as a hatter or cause a feral madman to fill the world with music to stop the madness. His madness. My madness.

I found myself sitting on the throne and suddenly recognizing that I'm still mulling over the comment by the news anchor Chris Matthews. He was muttering his agreement with one of the pundits appearing on his Sunday morning show on NBC, possibly to assist him in describing his opinion. He nodded, and said, "Yeah, he's like that kid who always argues with the teacher that everybody liked in high school."

I don't remember hearing that description before, but it rang a bell with me because of what happened at a high school class luncheon recently. I have a way of confronting whoever assumes authority at these affairs. It's made me wonder about myself previously, because it seems to be a sort of overall constant throughout my life.

It's confusing to me. I seem to jump in rudely and have my say no matter the results. Later, when I think about my total rejection of etiquette when I impulsively rock the boat to draw attention to myself, I feel ashamed. Why would I act like that if I have experienced that sa-me humiliating sha-me a thousand times a thousand times? Am I really that dense? Really? Or, am I incapable of anticipating shame?

One of the possibilities is autism. These assaults on various people's pomposity so-me-ti-me give the appearance that I don't care how what I do makes people feel. Thats one way of looking at it, and I have spent a lifetime of giving that point of view consideration. People bring it to me. I have no choice when they get in my face with it. Sometime I think they do that because they've just been shown how. It's easier to mimic some behavior if it's attempted mo' close to the bone. 924

Some people tell me I gotta lotta nerve. It sure can look that way at times. From my perspective it's not necessarily true. To me, my behavior is not complicit nor done with malice or aforethought. I march to a different drummer. I respond to images others either ignore or don't perceive, but they act like what I see is there because of my total sincerity. That's not exactly true either.

When I bring up the notion that my rude behavior results from autism, it can seem to be an insult to autistic people who have greater powers of focus than my form of autism. I'm not studied in autism. I don't think of it as anything abnormal from what many people consider "normal" behavior. In my opinion it's a matter of the lure of concentration and the intricacies rendered by repetition and redundancy.

Some topics and subject and specific objects in time/space require more concentration that others of like kind, and to bring the kind of focus necessary to stand in the middle of it and be-co-me it in real ti-me, social customs and cultural values have to be jettisoned in favor os the eternal now. Now... that... takes a lotta nerve. Why? Because you gonna get shunned and humiliated by those who have other values.

Why even try to describe such better than this?

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent
because the massman will mock it right way.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten.
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with the darkness
and a desire for higher lovemaking
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are fare gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this, to die and so to grow.
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

Goethe

It was by being subjected to and constantly embroiled in the results of the massman that I concluded that the apprenticeship of be-co-me-ing a shaman is administered by them in order to watch those afflicted souls become what they cannot. Shamans don't teach their chelas to be shaman. They show their pupils how to turn shame and humiliation into prophecy and healing techniques that do what they do paradoxically. Understanding paradox is the path to atonement for so-me archetypes. Either shit or git off the pot!

I didn't know how signing up for this National Writing Month contest was gonna affect me here with my blog. The first thing that affected me was my need for a word counter. According to the rules, I read the entrant only turns in the word count of their effort up until the last couple of days when they turn the whole month's worth of writing in. I could be wrong about that. I haven't received any correspondence from anybody associated with this dealio. They could be a den full of thieves and murderers for all I know. I have only read about it in a MacWorld article where one of the editors is promoting it.

Once I did find an AppleScript that would count the words in Mac's TextEdit and began running the script to count how many words I write, finding out was my first real wake up call. I had randomly considered that the entries that I write for the blog were all over a thousand words each, so writing at least 1500 words a day should be a walk in the park.

Since I've been counting how many words I write each day for a few days now, it's become evident that I write more along the lines of a thousand words a day, and for the contest I'm gonna have to pump out half again that many to have 50,000 words in a single month. Just this many words is already 1,602, so I shouldn't have any problems. Sometimes I cut things off because I feel like even a thousand words a day is more than some of my readers wanna be exposed to in one sitting.

Will I type myself out of something to say even before the contest begins on the first of November. Stay tuned. Same Bat time. Same Bat station.
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Wake Up Ol' Sleepyhead!

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The word counter script I downloaded to count how many words are in each of my blog entries gets the job done in fine fashion. Here is the Apple VoiceOver site I found it at:

http://homepage.mac.com/kilburns/voiceover/downloads.html

This represents one of the positive reasons I'm attempting to become as familiar as I can with AppleScript. It's also one of the few reasons I've personally needed to learn AppleScript for. It's another of my projects I deliberately set aside time for. I think it's a good thing, but I don't find many reasons to write scripts.

I watched the news show I like again this morning. It's not as easy to do that with over-the-air digital TV. Frequently, especially Sunday mornings it seems, I can't pick up any NBC stations. That's just what happens because I chose a life of poverty in order to have the ti-me to sit down and write.

The anchor of the news program made a statement that really fits how people see me around here. I'm thinking of what happened at the Class Reunion Luncheon I attended the other day. Chris Matthew agreed with a description of one of the pundits he had on his show by saying, "Yeah, yeah... he's like the crazy kid in class that everybody likes because he argues with the teacher."

I sorta did that at the reunion luncheon. It might have all gone well if the leader of the pack, a retired banker and conservative, hadn't pointed me out by name to imply that I might pop up and say anything because I was crazy. That didn't work out for him so well because of my "crazy kid" response.

The guy I have impulsively chastised over the years has never really understood why it is that although our classmates agree I'm a little quirky (because of my arrogant remarks), they like me anyway. He carries the clique in his attempted rebukes of my careactor. I rouse the rabble by way of it.

At the end of the luncheon, the now seventy-year-old "girls" in my class that I not-so-silently lusted for came up to me with big smiles on their faces and told me they still love me for saying my piece. Right in front of their seventy-plus husbands who beamed over the silliness of what their wives just said. Why am I always the last to know?

There seems to be some sort of ritualistic dynamic going on in regard to how blatantly I challenge the prevailing authority. I get real bold, and then immediately retreat as if to imply that I didn't really mean to be an upstart. When the so-called authority I crazily challenge rises to respond to the challenge of my remarks, they're attacking a shamed man.

I seem to bring it as if a maniac, but then I'm immediately ashamed of myself for not controlling my impulsive nature, and it not really a joke or an anticipated strategy. I really don't expect myself to act like that. I truly regret not being more diplomatic and tactful.

Sure, when these pompous blowhards get on a roll with their false dignity and build themselves up at the other's expense, many other people besides me in the room would like to do what I did, but it's not polite nor politically expedient. They'd have to actually be angry to stand and deliver the kind of diatribe I sometimes do.

One of the "last to know" things I finally have caught on to is that my "diatribes" are like "calculated country cooking". They make the mundane seem more exotic. I say what I "feel" most other people present would like to say, but are too smart to do that. My impulsive remarks seem to equate to those of the kid who noticed that the Emperor was nakid. He got away with it because he was an innocent kid who wasn't mature enough to know better.

If I were to look at this astrologically (and you can bet the farm that I do that soon after discovery), the first attribute I might attend to in my natal chart would be the placement of Mercury in the sign Aries. Mercury in Aries in the Sixth House.

In my natal chart Mercury only has on major aspect. A Trine to the Midheaven in Leo. Trines represent a 120° angular relationship, and are considered the most beneficent aspect in astrology. The Midheaven represents the most intimate point of contact the chart native has with the public.

When I act impulsively in this abrupt manner the public generally likes me for it. The keyword is "impulsively". If I deliberately try to use this dynamic to bring attention to myself it usually causes the opposite effect, and the likelihood of incurring humiliation of the most powerfully repugnant sort is very strong. Who needs that?

Homo sapiens in general, that's who, and insecure conservative types who need a strong man to run their lives for them. On the face of it, they think it's me, especially some females who really are alpha females and not dyed-in-the-wool baby-factories... Dammit!

I have experienced a lotta pain, and apparently caused a lotta pain because of how this paradoxical dynamic comes into play in my life. On the upside it makes me appear as some sort of world savior to people who think they need one, but it doesn't take long until I betray their expectations, and become the exact opposite for reasons they appear incapable of grokking.

It's a double-bind or more. I'm damned if I rise to some occasions only a miracle could explain, and I'm damned if I do because it's unbelievable. It's hard to explain. How could I not know why and how what happens if it appears I'm causing whatever it is TO happen?

The answer is simple to me because I'm inside of it. It amazes me that their questions ever arose. I do and say what I do and say because I don't expect myself to do and say that, so I have no defense against the unexpected.

After its all over and I've had ti-me to retreat into my inner court and contemplate the me-and-thee-ing (me-and-ing, meaning) sometimes I can make sense of the proceedings, but only from my own point of view, and hardly ever to anybody else's satisfaction.

Once upon a time I thought I was safe from this thing happening here in the little town I was mostly raised in from the sixth grade. The people here knew my parents and they know my siblings, and like the early Christians stated, it's impossible to be a prophet or a healer in your home town.

I act crazy for my classmates. I did it the first time at our twentieth reunion by getting drunk and insulting people and embarrassing my young wife to no end. I didn't go back to any reunions for another thirty years. Then in the last year I've been to two "luncheons" where the classmates met at a local restaurant to spend some time together, and I acted crazy at both of them.

It wasn't deliberate. I expected to be shunned, but I wasn't. Over the years I've eventually realized most of the classmates never held nothing against me for the way I acted at the nefarious twentieth reunion. They don't seem to wanna be my friend and buddies, but they like me and the crazy way I do things. Maybe I can stop now, but will they "like me" if I do?

"Crazy" doesn't have the stigma attached to it early on. I was led to think that acting crazy was detrimental to one's place in society, but later on after I had my remembering vision I began to question my former conclusions about what "acting crazy" means.

One of the more significant metaphors I've encountered that puts "acting crazy" into perspective came from the classical Chinese oracle called the Book of Changes (I Ching). I studied it as a book of wisdom and used it obsessively as an oracle for over thirty years daily. I heard another saying, "Beware the man of one book.", so I figured I better have two books of wisdom at least. There's more of course.

The metaphor in the Book of Changes is about a prince of a man, literally, whose father the King was captured along with his family by the tyrant king who held them for ransom from their people. Prince Chi was the oldest son.

In his culture, as the eldest son he had a duty to remain with his father, but his four brothers found ways to escape on the advice of the father, and leave him and Prince Chi in the hands of the tyrant. The only way Prince Chi could remain with his father unharmed was to feign insanity.

This became a big deal to me. I had a good reason as far as I was concerned. I had feigned insanity myself, and voluntarily committed myself to the insane asylum to find out if I could pass myself off among the people who had been put there by a court of law. I could and did. They told me so.

My study of the Prince Chi metaphor in the Emperor's Yellow Book forced me to ask myself why I felt as though the only way I could survive was to pretend to dissemble in front of God and everybody. Prince Chi's motivation to do it was perfectly clear, but my own are suspect. Are they not?

1715. Enough is enow.
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Testing My Own Patience

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A tablet/reader that would stay connected to the internet so that a novelist could summon videos to further illustrate their point. It might be a miracle if some cosmopolitan soul could do all the video, audio, and writing for a production, but that won't be necessary to a competent director with a talent for logistics.

There should be a way for some enterprising person to make content of some cosmic proportions available to people who create docudramas(?) from the available resources to create their own productions using all available material.

Words appear to exist as limiters. Like words themselves. Only the vowels can be "sung". The consonants merely chop up the drone notes shaped by the vowels. The species homo sapiens may seem dominant at this sort of thing, but the more we find out about ourselves, the more we realize that with each new trait we discover we find other species that can do whatever it is... mo' bettah!

All life in any form, in my highly disregardable opinion, evolves from the same seminal source. A source I call The Pearl. I call it a pearl because the only way I can describe it's not so apparent configuration resembles an oyster pearl. More recently I've begun to consider that it could be the smallest of the small black holes. Seminal, you gnow?

The Pearl has three attributes which appear to be part of the dealio of being, in regard to wot it is. I agree with Sartre that's all that can be said of it namely_ it is. It is this; it is that; it gnows ten ways to skin a cat. Rather like the I-am-is. I am is this; I am is that; I-am-is knows tens ways to skin a cat. The One gnows. The Hordes of I am this and that only knows.

What "gnosis" IS has cosmic being and gnows thangs by singularity. Everybody has gnosis going on ALL the time, giving that process credence in One's own point of view is not an easy thing to do. It's too scary. It's scary because it's a paradox. It is what it ain't, and it ain't what it is.

Gnosis is genius. It's The Pearl. The Pearl evolved itself to the heights of be-co-me-ing homo sapiens. What's not god-like about that dealio? Haven't you heared it a thousand times a thousand ti-mes? "What's the deal, man, how does this thang go down?"

Isn't that ALL anyone wants to gnow? People have a tendency, in my opinion, to assume knowing so-me thangs is the sa-me as gnowing some things. Well, it is and it ain't. Yin and yang ain't the sa-me thang. Everybody knows that down to the last man/jack of them, and that last man/jack will be the only One who gnows.

Homo sapiens have forever on attempted in every possible way to invent protocols to advocate between gnowing and knowing. This most desirable of all atonements has been the ruin of many a poor boy. Even when you think you have it, you don't; and when you suspect you don't have it, and want to have it more than anything else (including life itself), then you do have it. That is, until you don't again.

Until I sorta fully realized I-am is and ain't at the sa-me ti-me I lived a consistent up and down style of being and not being that constantly threatened to drive me crazy while growing me wiser simultaneously. It's very trying to worship me as One god wot with the competition for attention between I-am, Me, and It. Curiosity, memores, and volition.

That's all a Pearl needs to evolve itself into anything it can find to imitate. All it needs is the tie-to-me (ti-me). Life has attached itself as a parasite on this particular planet like it has upon all other inhabitable planets, but it's sorta like trying to survive the winter in the sub-tropics as an out-and-out bum.

In the United States the bums spread out all over the country as the greening goes, and like monarch butterflies they spread out all over North American where the pickin's ain't so slim. But as the black ice and the drab brown leaves of grass drift southward, the white snow won't be far behind, and the bums drift south with them. 744

This is a weeding out process just like it is with the Monarch butterflies I've studied lately. They die to the process as they head north again and again three ti-mes. But, upon the return to the tropics for the winter, they do it in One life time, and it's the experience of the Return they take with them into the cocoon.

Homo sapiens also crave the One life and the me-more-s of the Return haunt them so, that they don't seem able to enjoy the fruits of the summer sojourns due to this constant nagging of the memory of going ho-me. Then, when the signs are right, they heed the call. No, not all humans. Just the bums and the snow birds, and the Monarch butterflies.

The Pearls evolved by be-co-me-ing homo sapiens and building shell to survive the cold and not follow their instincts to ho-me and death. The Pearls are themselves immortal, so why does it matter to them that they try to stay away from ho-me.

To what end? That's what I've been trying to figure out. To what end do The Pearls evolve themselves through all the various forms of life, and still look for some thang different to imitate and mimic? They already are what they're trying to become. Immortals. Do they make themselves into humans to knowingly experience death?

Sometimes I think about my friend Jamie. He had accomplished everything I knew to try, and yet, in the end, he killed himself with poison. I appear to have mimicked (me-me-d to make more of me to grow into his gnowing) a goodly number of people who have eventually murdered themselves. I guess I could invent a reason for their doing that, but they didn't need my input to have a reason (if they needed one) to do what they did. I admire them for not carrying on like ninnies until the bitter end.

I suspect something like that happens with sensory deprivation. Total darkness and absolute silence is not for everybody. Much less a strong degree of weightlessness at the sa-me ti-me. I built my own float tank. I used it for a couple of years before my mistakes in it's design caught up with me (same problem with the house I built from scratch). Nobody I enticed into getting in it to gain the hyped up benefits could stay inside for more that five minutes.

There is a lot to be learned from experiencing sensory deprivation, but I think it's usefulness is limited. It could appear that I was shown this by the fact that I let the tank go into deterioration, and the fact that my sojourn to find a real cave to meditate in was a dismal and humiliating affair that sent me ho-me packing. 1224

The numbers above is the word count. I went through a lotta frustration trying to find an AppleScript that would count the words in TextEdit. It was the first script I have attempted. I failed, of course, but my failure drove me to Google up a ready-made I could download. At first I didn't know the terms I needed to use to get this to happen.

A wordcount script has to be one of the simpler scripts to create in AppleScript. I don't know if I'll ever become competent at writing code in AppleScript, but at least I might learn the lingo I need to find a script somebody else wrote in order to use it myself.

The way this come down has a familiar ring to the way I like to get things done. I figure everybody got a genius for getting some things done. Over the years as Ive contemplated my life it appears as though my genius is for using other people's genius to my own ends.

They certainly don't mind. Many, if not most of the people whose genius I've conjured didn't know they had a genius who gnows thangs. Their witnessing their own genius at work doing what I need for my purposes was sometimes all they needed to get it to do the sa-me thang for them. Hardly ever have I had to teach somebody how to sing their own "Open Sesame."1465

This is around the number of words I'll have to write each day to have 50,000 words in order to complete the National Novel Writing requirements. I had to guess how many words I was writing each day in this blog. Using the wordcounting script has opened my eyes to factuality.

Trying to write this many words a day and keep it fairly interesting at the sa-me ti-me might be a challenge. I may only have a limited amount of stuff to say.
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All God's Children Got Shoes

The way my day has gone it's almost like I'm a working stiff again. I haven't had time to write or practice the piano scales. I went over to Fayettenam to see if I could find a set of tuning pegs for my old Silvertone classical guitar and buy some new strings for it and the mandolin.

The surprising thing is that I found all of it at the first music store I went to. I was especially surprised at their asking price. It was at least $20 cheaper than the price for the same brand of stuff online. Of course, by the time I pay for the gas to drive over there and back I probably haven't saved any money, but I have everything I need in my greedy swollen paws.

That's right, the swelling around my joints seems to be returning. All this work playing the scales and repairing my musical instruments may come to no good end if the rheumatoid arthritis starts acting up again. I con't afford to get all worked up about it. It's an incurable disease, and I have to take what it deals out.

When I wrote above that I found the stuff I needed to fix my guitar at the first music store I went to, that's not to say that I didn't check out what was available at a big flea market first. After all, I only needed one half of a set of tuning pegs, and if I could have found a cheap used guitar at the flea market I could get the tuning pegs off of it and use them on my old Silvertone. As long as they'll hold the strings in tune, how shiny they are don't matter.

I did find a little shop there that did have a few guitars, but they wanted more than they were worth, and I didn't feel like bartering with the Latino guy that ran the joint. I'm not good at bartering, and besides that, I'm fairly gullible, and can be talked into buying something I don't want easy enough.

Apple Gets Greedy And Sells Out

I wait for events to happen rather than to go looking for something to do. After all these years of practice I can do nothing at all quite well. Presently I appear to be reducing the number of events I rely on to keep myself entertained. I'm not all that sure why.

Nothing still ain't nothing, but it's free. ~ Kristofferson

I'm getting an attitude about learning AppleScript. It didn't help when I read in the MacRumors web site that Apple had applied for a patent to insert advertisements into it's operating system. For all I know they're doing it now. I'm already thinking about Linux again. I read some of the shocked comments on some the Mac sites and some people say Apple applied for the patent so that Microsoft and/or Google couldn't have it. Why would Apple want to stop them from doing something that would help Apple if they did? ☂

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/10/22/apple-exploring-ad-supported-operating-systems/

I may go offline altogether. The internet has been a useful source of information. All the libraries in the world rolled up into one, but where was it when I needed it to save me from my failed marriages. A failed marriage is like a failed state. That's how my life has been. I've lived my whole life as a failed state.

It's a little like people who get paroled from jail or prison and then find out that living in confinement is the only way they know how to live, so they do what they gotta do to get put back in prison where they at least know how to act on a day to day basis. I liked being married okay, I just didn't like being held to it. I don't know what moral careactor is really about, but I do know it's acting, and that's what I'm formerly educated in.

I asked the star football player from our high school days what he majored in during his glorified college days as a BMOC. That's how little I knew about his personal life although we were in the same grade level and played some sports together in high school. I didn't know what he studied and got a degree in.

Biology. That's what he told me. No wonder we were never very friendly in high school or since. He's another Bill Nye, the science guy. Every topic that interested or intrigued me just pissed him off. I sought to expand, he sought to contract. I like to open things up, he likes to shut them down. We should have found a way to work together.

Going to the reunion lunches and meeting with my old classmates again is usually a struggle for me. It seems like my relationship with this one guy epitomizes my reticence about gathering with this clan. We were all kids then. I agree with the folks who say that people don't really mature into their own personalities until they're around thirty years old.

Maybe we all get nervous because we don't really know who the other has realized through their own experience who they are. The guy who was the class president during our senior year married one of the prettiest girls in the class, and ended up killing himself twenty odd years ago down in Atlanta. Who would have thunk it?

Me. That's who would have and DID think it. I knew he was being forced to become something he couldn't live up to. He didn't know who he was, He needed to if he wanted to survive. What we have to give up to survive is always somebody else's rules of conscience.

I have strange feelings about discovering more about the Leo/Aquarius polarity. They share good points and bad points, but good for one us bad for the other. When they are conflicted they take on the negative attributes of the other. The good Samaritan is also the person to put the troubled man in the ditch by the side of the road in order to save him. Beware the ides and August and February.

Lazy Bones

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One of the ways evolution might occur would be like the electronic waves that pass through out bodies constantly on the east coast of the United States. When I consider the fact that my family felt lucky to pick up one radio station during the daylight hours and the thousands of signals from all sorts of sources in the environment now, the human body has to make room for humans to accommodate the additional white noise by rearranging it's procreational gene structures. In my way of thinking, what the current body experiences in the ambient environment they make the changes in their eggs and sperm to prepare the next generation for what it experiences locally.

The problem I see for this how people are constantly moving now from place to place. Some with extremely different environments. Will the brain receptors produced by this confusion lead to some form of autism?

It's been a slow day. I'm not much in the mood for anything. I spent five hours looking for some hardware for the classical guitar I'm restoring. One row of the tuning gear devices was missing when I found the old guitar in my attic. It turns out that these devices are different for nylon string classical guitars, and regular acoustic guitars that have steel strings.

I first checked to see if the local music shop had them in stock. They only had the tuning pegs for the steel string type guitars. When I went online and searched for a set of new tuning machines (they actually are machines with gears and everything). It looks like to get a mediocre set of tuners is gonna cost me $50-60. They have some for $250 I'm definitely not going to buy.

This may take some time. I may be on the verge of buying one of the new iMacs that were announced today. I've been waiting to see what they come out with, and it looks like the only thing that's not there is the upgrade to USB3. The CPU chips I thought might work out alright are not coming out until November the articles I read said, but if I wait until then, I might decide to wait a little longer to see if they add USB3.

The reviews that will happen over the next week or so will help me make a decision. The first CPUs to come out will be some of the fastest dual core chips the last iMacs had for the cheapest prices this go around. That's pretty good, but it's not the way the future is headed as far as CPUs are concerned.

I've been reading quite a bit on the new chips. They change speeds and run only as many cores or threads as they need to, all the way up to four cores and eight threads. This will be supported by the Open CL system that uses any processing chip on the motherboard including GPUs if they're not busy.

A big question about memory has been answered. The new iMacs will have four memory slots and have a limit of twelve gigs of Dram. I'd like to see the DRAM limits lifted, because 64-bit systems can address over millions of gigabytes of memory, still for a home consumer like me having twelve gigs of DRAM is probably more than I'll ever use.

I want something that will run SSDs pretty fast. I'm still gonna convert to that. I'm only waiting to see how the Mac system will support SSDs as far as being able to erase and reuse free space. It won't be that big a deal for a long time, because the speed of the Snow Leopard Operating System on 64-bits will probably blow me away by comparison of what I'm used to.
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Another Bodycount Reunion

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In an hour and a half I'm going to a Pizza Inn restaurant to have lunch with the remaining members of the Class of '57. It's only been what seems like a few months since the last time we met. That was the first reunion I'd attended since the 20th one. I got drunk and made a big fool of myself by insulting some people I expected to understand sarcasm as my favorite modality for expressing humor, but they didn't. I was truly shocked they were that limited in scope, but eventually I realized their lack of scope is the status quo.

On the other hand, I didn't really know what they meant when they would say that I was one of the smart people in the class. I didn't make really good grades in my classes, but I was told directly by teachers that my grades were in the upper third of my class.
I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that my family returned to Mississippi every summer for a couple of weeks for my parents to visit their parents and siblings. For me it was just another activity I didn't have any choice about participating in. I didn't think of our going to Mississippi as "traveling", as exemplified by the adage, "Travel broadens."

This must have seemed strange to the kids my age who thought getting to go to the capitol of North Carolina some sixty miles north of here gave them a real cosmopolitan outlook on life. I had a friend I hope to see today whose mother and father brought him here from Pennsylvania when he was pre-school like I was brought here from Mississippi, and I thought for a long time that Pennsylvania was a country in Europe, and I felt cool because I was hanging out with a foreigner.

Gotta go get dressed now. I'll write my impressions of the reunion when I get back.

There were around forty people at the luncheon/reunion. I recognized more people this time without their name tags, but it was still convenient to have them to glance at to be sure i knew who I was talking to. I made sure I sat with a difference group of people this time just to get to know them better. It shocks me a little that my former classmates seem to have a better opinion of me than I had previously thought. They seem more friendly and open toward me each time we get together. I suspect they always were, and it was me that thought different.
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An Old Silvertone Classical Guitar... Soon Reborn?

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Ŧhe quaint ways I amuse myself is constantly changing. Changing in the way I see... me. I got up this morning, and after I went downstairs to brew coffee and take my pills, I came back upstairs and started working on the classical guitar I'm attempting to restore.

I guess I'm using the term "restore" because I'm not changing anything about the guitar's design. In fact, the only repair that requires new wood is the one wooden brace beneath the top sound board just to the rear of the sound hole I replaced with a stronger design to keep the same problem from reoccurring.

The rest of the repairs amounts to me cleaning the old glue off where it popped loose over the years. As much from the changing ambient temperatures and extremes of humidity it went through as I carried it around the country hitch-hiking without much protection. I never expected this old guitar to be around this long. It's been most interesting to me to have taken it apart and to see how classical style guitars that use nylon or catgut strings are put together.

The process of working with wood is coming back to me a little at the time. I don't have many tools, so I'm having to make do with what I have. I remembered that I'd bought a small handsaw that had an aluminum handle that might come in handy. I was surprised I actually found it.

This little saw really has helped me with removing the old glue. The glue the guitar was put together with is as hard as a brick. Using sandpaper to get it off could take forever and a day. The saw is a sort of keyhole saw. It has a blade that tapers in width down to the tip. It appears designed for the narrow tip to fit inside a bored hole that allows cuts to be made to make a door handle fit inside the wooden doors without weakening the integrity of the grain by a crosscut.

The reason it works for removing the old glue is that the narrow blade is so flexible I can lay it flat up next to the protruding old glue and literally saw it off even with the flat of the guitar panel. The small aluminum handle can be lifted up from where the tip of the blade lays flat on the panel, and that flexibility gives the room and leverage to work the blade back and forth. I can't think of a general tool that would do it better.

After I removed the old glue and spent considerable time sanding things smooth I decided to put some additional glue on the braces. I'm waiting for this new glue to set on one side of each of the five braces where it's connected to the bottom panel. When that's done I'll put a bead of glue on the other side of the brace, and let the panel sit all night to dry.

I have to wait until my brother gets back from Atlanta to glue the bottom panel back on to the guitar body. Not only because he has a bunch of clamps that can be used to hold it in place until the glue sets, but because four hands are better than two.

The real stickler is getting everything lined up all around the ends and sides of the guitar before the glue sets. It's a lot like pouring concrete. You have to do what you got to do before it sets up. If the glue sets with the panel not aligned, I'll probably just take the guitar out to my trash pile and burn it up. I suspect this old Silvertone guitar is older than I am is.

I've just realized that I can set the height of the strings from the fret board while I'm gluing the bottom panel back on. All I have to do is put one string on the guitar before I glue it in place, and then lift or push down on the neck of the guitar to set the height of the strings. Then when I get it right, clamp it down and hold it there until the glue sets.
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Purpleheart Wood And Broken-down Geetars

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I didn't do any more work on repairing the mandolin today. My decision last night to use the purpleheart wood for the fret nut and as a bridge on the Silvertone Classical guitar delayed my progress until my brother and sister return from her granddaughter's wedding in Atlanta. It's my brother's wood and he's got it locked up in his business warehouse.

There is a family story about this particular stash of purple heart wood. It ended up here from having been used for harbor pilings down in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was said to stand up well against barnacles and other pests that attack the piers where the ocean vessels dock. It's been around here for years. I've helped my brother move it around to keep it dry a couple of times. Here is a link to a site that sells exotic woods that describes it:

http://www.thewoodbox.com/data/wood/purpleheartinfo.htm

He has boards of this wood that are an inch thick and twelve inches wide. Maybe twenty or more. It's probably worth a fair amount of money as exotic woods go, but I don't get the feeling that it's as rare as I once thought it was. I can't imagine I'll need more than a six inch by six inch piece of it to do what I wanna do.

The repair work I got going on the classical guitar is more complex than the work on the mandolin. I had to create a home-made jig to push the brace that had come loose back into the position it needed to be in. The top panel of the guitar body was bowed in where it was supposed to be flat. It has been that way for a long time and resists being pushed back into it's designed flattop position.

That one brace was a replacement piece where it had been repaired previously. I didn't make that repair. I suspect somebody tried to replace the original brace where the top panel sagged by working through the sound hole. They probably did the best they could considering how difficult it might be to have the limitation imposed by having to do everything through the sound hole.

I removed the bottom panel. Quite a bit of it had already come unglued and where it had it was easy to lift it up off the reinforced sides of the guitar body. Where the glue still held, however, was tedious and there was a real good chance the panel might break up if I didn't have a little luck getting it to separate from the stiff sides. Hopefully along the original glue line.

I used a medium large flat tip screw driver to pry it up. Some places I had to use a hammer to drive the screwdriver into the glue seam, but I was super cautious and had some good luck and got the panel off with only a little damage that can easily be repaired.

This is the first time I'm ever opened a guitar up like this. I was surprised as how much bracing there is inside where it's almost impossible to see without taking either the top or bottom panel off. The bottom panel has five braces that run from side to side all the way across the width of the body of the guitar.

All five of these braces are still glued in the middle of the brace, but the ends of them have come unglued. For a moment I thought maybe it was designed that way, but the glue marks along the ends of the braces told me different. I decided to glue each brace one at a time over the next few days.

The first one I glued today was the middle brace. I don't have the right tools to make it easy. Mostly I'm missing clamps, but I do have a couple of things that seem to have worked okay. One actual C clamp that worked quite well and a spring clip that I used for holding papers together.

It didn't take a lot of pressure to hold the wood together where I was gluing it. The instructions on the glue bottle states that I could take the clamps off after thirty minutes, as long as I didn't put any stress on the joint for 24 hours.

This first brace did require some pressure to pull the two pieces of wood tight where I was gluing them together. When I applied the glue and used the clamps to pull this first brace tight, the other four braces snuggled right up against panel. I doubt if I'll even have to clamp them in place when I glue them. More than likely, I'll have to pry them apart enough to get the glue all the way between them.

The last couple of days have been interesting. I've been remembering about how me and my brothers were all taught to use woodworking tools from an early age. We we all entered in tool judging contests where we each always had the highest scores in the state. Usually the highest. It's not like we were expected to become journeymen, just good enough to do what we could for ourselves if we couldn't afford to hire somebody.

By the time I get this guitar put back together I expect to have a good, strong instrument that has a fair tone and hopefully a clear ring to it. I'm thinking this glue I'm using is probably a lot better than the original glue due to the progress that's been made with glue materials and chemical knowhow.

I'm thinking the harder the glue becomes the more it will vibrate with the wood to get that "ring" I'm hoping for. It wasn't a bad sounding guitar even when it was falling apart. The real problem was that it wouldn't stay tuned for long.

By taking the back off of it I can see everything that has to be done. I don't think I can over-glue it as long as I wipe off the extra glue before it sets. I've been watching the glue turn color as it gets absorbed to some degree into the wood. It's a yellowish cream color when it comes out of the bottle, but as it dries it becomes clearer as if it's chemically bonding with the wood fibers.

If I take my time and do it right it will at least be a good practice instrument. I've claimed for a long time now that if I could ever learn to play the scales on a guitar I might turn out to be a pretty good player. I know that sounds weird to some people, but for me its a matter of confidence.

In the past when I tried to play music with other people they had to be able to play in the three or four keys I could play in or it was no go. I wasn't that much worse than many of the slackards like me I played with, but forcing other people to have to constrain themselves to my limitations was embarrassing to me, and that messed with my confidence. I didn't feel like I was really a musician if I was myself the bottleneck in playing with some variety and flexibility.

Again, a lotta that had to do with the fact that I moved around so much I didn't usually find myself in situations where I could keep the tools I needed to practice and learn about me. I was lucky to have that half-ass old Silvertone geetar. The one thing I had to offer a group was that I had a decent voice and I wasn't afraid to stand and deliver. Not having the confidence I wanted to play instruments along with the best of 'em was my crying shame.
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Saturn Returns And Passages

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The instructions on the wood glue bottle stated that the glue should be allowed to set for 24 hours before it was put under stress. The mandolin got a little more than that before I began tightening the strings on it. I decided to try to tighten them evenly across the bridge a little at a time, but it made me nervous. I expected the glue joint to bust open any time.

I got the strings to what I thought might be about half-way to what they'd need to be in order for the mandolin to be in tune and stopped. That worked out pretty good because late this afternoon Rainey came by on his way to his parent's house, and I asked him to see if he could tune it. He wasn't emotionally caught up in the repair like I was, and he went on about the business of tuning it without worrying about whether the newly glued joint was gonna hold or not.

Rainey had to stop messing with it too. The nut at the top of the fret board is not original and the makeshift doohickey that had been put in it's place was not glued down. the way it shifted kept the tuning unstable. I know what has to be done. I didn't know what material I was gonna use to make it happen until just this moment. A small piece of that purple wood my brother saved will do the trick. Its said to come from Brazil and is some of the hardest wood known to exist. For all practical purposes it has to be cut with a diamond-tipped saw blade. I might design a new bridge for the guitar out of purple wood too.

The the bridge on the body of the mandolin has got to be reworked too. A mandolin has eight strings, but only four tunings, E, D, G, and A. It's tuned just like a fiddle, but has two strings for each note instead of one. The problem with the walnut bridge is that the notches that the strings fit in as they pass over the bridge are not spaced right.

These bridge problems should be easy to fix, they're just time consuming, but I seem to be having more time than ever these days. For me, life seems to be about emotional investment. For a long time I thought it was about mind stuff, and from the perspective I view the world presently, I sure wish it was about mind stuff. I'm good at that. But, it's not about the abstract dimension much with me.

Perhaps what I'm reaching for as a descriptor has to do with keeping a certain emotional intensity in my relationship with the powers that be. There have been certain things that I got slack about in my sixties that made me realize I couldn't get slack about taxes and death.

I got audited by the State revenue department who demanded that I prove my employer paid my state taxes for the year 1997. I didn't take it so serious when they sent me these cheap little postcard requests for a copy of my tax returns. I thought it was a scam. Bad mistake.

I learned all over again not to fight city hall. The coldness with which they were gonna take my house and property and sell it on the courthouse steps to pay the penalties and fees they had assessed for my ignoring their cheap little postcards was a super wakeup call about getting slack with the government.

The very next year I got in trouble with the State for being late paying my car insurance policy. I ignored some mail again. I had to give myself some serious pep talks about paying my bills just as soon as I get them in the mail.

The fact that I live by myself means that I have to do everything that's gotta be done to protect myself again my own laziness and lack of moral careactor. Maybe it's moral character or maybe it's some sort of ethical dilemma, but sometimes I just don't play by the rules I unknowingly agreed to play by, and that causes problems.

For the first thirty years of my life I thought I was probably crazy because I had a lotta thoughts that didn't make sense for the claims I made to get the attention I so desperately needed.

I didn't really know what crazy was, so I had to find that out first before I could fulfill the requirements necessary to pass myself off as not having the wherewithal to be responsible for my own actions. By the time I got to be thirty years old I knew what crazy was, and knew I had nothing to fear but myself.

What I found out I needed to fear by the time I was thirty years old turned out to be the same thing I had to fear in my sixties, and my trifling, but intense encounters with the tax collectors. I got slack. Probably like learning to balance oneself on a slack rope as well as a tight rope. Two different approaches to the same end.

It wouldn't surprise me if I started wandering around and getting lost. I watched it happen to both my parents. They had people who would know they were gone and set out to find them. It could be days or even weeks if I wandered off and got lost in the woods before anybody would know I was missing.

It's no different than with my youngest brothers dogs. There have been a series of them that got old and wandered off to die. He'd get worried about them and find them and bring them back to the house to "save" them, but knowing full well that he wasn't really doing them a favor. That's how free-roaming dog die. Lots of dogs die tied to a chain or locked up in a cage. How indignant a way to die is that?

Both my parents were locked inside their houses to keep them from wandering off. Sometime they were aware they were prisoners in their own home. More often, it seemed, they were more concerned about not being allowed to go "home".

That's a weird process. My father nurtured a desire to go back to Mississippi in his eighties to feed the hunting dogs he had to leave with his parents when he moved to North Carolina in his mid-thirties. No amount of reasoning or logic could convince him the dogs had been dead for thirty odd years. He had to go "home" to feed them dogs.

So, I took him to Mississippi to find them hunting dogs. It was the only time we ever went to Mississippi alone together. It was not the most pleasant trip I've ever made. He had to tell me how to drive to show he was still in charge, and because he knew it irritated me.

That trip was like the sum total of our personal relationship of father and son. Cats and dogs. Apples and oranges. I only realized why that had to be so when I studied the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas via an e-mail discussion group I used for writing about my lifelong war with my father.

It took a long time for me to understand what individuation is. I knew for a long time before that it meant pretty much the same thing as the concept of enlightenment, but I didn't understand how one could imply the other.

The keystone for me was when I began to understand that my own quest was a quest for my true identity. Who am I? For a long time I felt as if I was on a fruitless sojourn, but I was wrong. I was "looking for" something I already possessed by revelation. That which satisfied my need for my true identity was revealed to me in a vision I generally call my remembering vision.

It took another thirty years for me to realize how my remembering vision revealed my true identity to me after the vision I experienced opened the floodgates of my true source as consciously as it's possible for a homo sapiens to experience.

In astrology these events are called Saturn Returns. The vision of how I came to Earth and of how I evolved into the entity that occupies this temporary body happened when Saturn returned to the spot it occupied at the mo-me-nt of my birth for the first ti-me, and my realization if what that vision meant happened when Saturn returned to the same place it was when I was born for the second ti-me.

I didn't know anything more about astrology than anybody else before my first Saturn Return. To me, as it seems to be to many people, astrology was something I looked up on the comic strip page in the newspaper. I'd never heard of or thought about the significance of Saturn completing it's first orbit around the Sun or that it took twenty-nine odd years for Saturn to do that.

In my late twenties, as in everyone's late twenties, if you follow the astrology gig whether for sport or fame and fortune, the final stages of Saturn's return to the place it was when I was born was terrifying for me personally. As far as I was concerned I was losing my mind.

It wasn't a joke to me. I really thought I was losing my mind, and I did, and I still believe it's the God's own truth that what I knew as the truth was nothing but a part of an even bigger, more global lie than merely a personal lie to deceive myself into thinking I was losing my mind.

Nobody believed me. When I told my so-called friends and family that I was losing my mind and going insane they pretty much laughed at me, and thought I was naive to think I could fool them with my acts of desperation.

I decided (with the "help" of a friend) to commit myself to the state hospital for the insane. I really thought that if I could just put on the right garments I that I would become believable. I'd become a patient and fit in with the people who were committed there by the State.

It didn't take long for me to realize that my fellow inmates at the State hospital for the insane didn't believe me either. I can't say they laughed at me too. Basically, they were even more dismissive of my trumped up behavior than the people outside of the State Hospital.

I stayed there for thirty days and left simply because I could. That was the deal when you commit yourself. You can just walk outta there anytime you like. Those people have too much on their plate as it is. If your craziness isn't hurting anybody but yourself, why bother them?

That happened just before I turned thirty years old. I never changed my mind about losing my mind. I was losing my mind. It really happened. The clarifying fact thirty years ofter the actual experience of wanting to be believed about how I was losing my mind was that it wasn't my mind I was losing. I lost the mind I seemed convinced I was supposed to have.

Good riddance! In my estimation it's true. My prayers were answered. It just took thirty more years for me to understand that the vision I had experienced had provided me with the information I needed to know in order to believe what I really am is truly me. Send in the clowns. It makes me feel like just another one of my brothers old dogs.

It's not like I'm gonna intentionally wander out into the swamps looking for a secret place to lay down and die. I figure I'll really believe I'm out there for a good reason. Like finding some good briar roots to carve into doodads, and get so embarrassed that I've forgotten where I'm at, that I'll just surrender and give myself up to the light.

Then, after three or four hours of feeling like an idiot I'll get up and come home.
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