Doing The Unasked For Without Permission

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The ted.com talks continue to fascinate me. there are over 500 if them to chose from here:

http://www.ted.com/

I've been a little picky about which videos I watch at that site. Watching any of them don't take long. I think they get 17 minutes to get their point across. The last time I visited to see if they had any new video to watch they had a video of Steve Jobs giving a graduation speech at Berkley. They ran the whole speech on youtube. Very interesting.

That's one of the reasons I like the TEDtalks. They feature individual speakers who are excited about what they do. It's contagious. Watching the TEDtalk videos is therapeutic and uplifting. I had no idea Steve Jobs came from such humble beginnings. In the past I figured he was just another trust fund kid who got lucky.

This morning I listened to this 8 year old girl play the violin and explain why she chose the violin over the piano. I have certain expectations when I witness a child prodigy perform. Mostly about the excellence of their talent. This little girl did a standup monologue between her songs and pulled it off with aplomb. How in the world... ?

Dean Kamin is an inventor who is probably most famous for coming up with the Segway scooter and prosthetic parts. He has been in the news frequently over the last decade or so. Usually in association with the Segway. I know what he looks like but had no sense of his personality, so when I saw that he was featured in a TEDtalk I decided to watch to see if I could catch his drift.

I didn't get very far into the video before I had to shut it down. Kamin possesses an eerie resemblance to an old friend called Noel Carter. He's dead now. He died of a pain in the ass when he was 52 years old. These two guys even looked alike in certain ways. They mutually possessed an inquiring mind. Noel's was encyclopedic by nature.

It didn't shock me so much that Noel died so young. He was a fragile dude. He was also a dyed-in-the-wool alcoholic and his drinking got worse as he got older. Noel was a story-teller. That was the basis of our relationship. I drank with him off and on for ten years in order to hear his stories. He was a tool and die guy who was a Nascar freak. He was a big fan of auto racing and was the chief mechanic on several racing teams at a very young age. A prodigy in his own set and setting. Kentucky. He liked country music.

I felt forced to listen to Noel's stories because not many people could listen to him without a lotta interruptions that demanded too many explanations over what should have been simple to understand if you were a genius, but for just about nobody else.

He liked to perform his stories. When he got to just the right point of inebriation he would suddenly thrust himself up in a single movement into a squatting position atop a government surplus bookkeeper's stool, and begin the beguine. I knew exactly where he was trying to get to in order to employ his encyclopedic understanding of a subject or topic of current interest, and I composed questions to ask him that would get him motor running.

We were useful to one another in that sense. He had accumulated all this encyclopedic, voluminous tomes of book-learning, but he couldn't boot it up without due cause. I was an I Ching freak whose total goal in life was to teach myself how to ask just the right question to elicit genius through the other as if myself. When it works, unsuspecting people be-co-me genies to fetch the boiler plate I need to goof on and eventually find the rhythm of the nayme of that tune.

I didn't fully realize the implications of what I was doing until later, but even before I woke up early one morning hearing a familiar voice telling me to "Stop using the I Ching." My inner voice must have been preparing me to use ordinary people for oracular consultations rather than the graven images of a translated Chinese Classical book.

Until my friendship with Noel I didn't realize that could be done. I suspect a lot of that lack of knowing had to do with my not associating with the sa-me people long enough in one stretch to catch on to the true dynamics of the mysterious ritualistic practices I had surreptitiously gained over decades of daily practice.

"Inch by inch, it's a cinch!" ~ Richard Sylvester's Mother

Using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle and studying it as a book of wisdom by using it as an oracle was an obsession that I let happen because as I used it to ask my most personal questions that came up about life every moment of my ex-is-tense transformed my outlook about a lotta early habits that weren't getting me the results I preyed for.

It took at least twenty years for me to learn to consistently produce well-formed questions that retrieved credible results from the oracle on a fairly regular basis. My only mentor in this situation arose when the reading I got from tossing the coins didn't make sense. This is a very enigmatic oracle. It answers your real question, and if you've ask about another topic as if that's the problem the oracles answer only confuses the inquirer.

In my opinion all the questions any homo sapiens requires an answer to can only be provided by themselves. There are lots of questions a person needs to have answered that might not need to have public knowledge about. What?? Try again...

I have questions about situations and events I don't want nobody else to know I have questions about. I suspect that's true for about anybody. Elsewise there would be no need for oracles to exist. That's not going to happen. Either people who need their questions answered need for an oracle to provide a convincing answer.

The trick is in learning how to turn people into oracles of universal reach. Practically none of them know that can be done, and probably fewer than that realize they can let go of their personal identity to go there to be-co-me that. Granted, if it was left up to them, they would have to wait on serendipity or random chance. No need for that if I know the right questions to ask. I don't need permission because they don't remember once they return to beta consciousness. They always seem to like me after that, but for reasons unknown. Friendliness embroidered with quizzical looks.

𠄯

It Is Only Me All The Time

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This new diet is changing my body. For better or for worse is hard to tell. I don't really understand how what's happening became as it is or what it has truly accomplished. I am is approaching one month of not eating meat except for one serving of curried shrimp on the 26th. I'm still eating junky crap I probably shouldn't eat. Presently, I'm just not eating meat.

I am is eating the crap he should eat as well as wot he shouldn't eat. The excessively expensive Omega juicer he bought makes that fairly easy. While I was reading a little about raw food diets it ran across the idea of squeezing the juice of an apple into some of the less tasty vegetables that are otherwise full of beneficial foodstuffs.

I bought one bag of reddish apples that didn't have to be all that pretty to appeal to me. I was gonna cut 'em up and stick them into the emasculating juicer anyway. I was real pleased with the result. I juiced some carrots and the last stalk of broccoli I'll ever use, then sliced one of the reddish apples and fed it to the juicer deliberately to find out if it would make drinking the carotine-ladened juice a more pleasant experience. Hmm.. very tasty. It worked as advertised.

The old "an apple a day" adage from my youth won't get outta my day-dreaming, so I bought another bag of apples to use in my juicer of the Granny Smith variety. I never have liked eating these apples so much because I've always had tender teeth that are prone to decay.

In the past, this particular variety of apples were too firm to really sink my mistreated and abused teeth into. I had to be too careful during the chewing of them to relax and enjoy how they tasted. My new chewing machine made short work of that, and for the first time I've learned to appreciate the spicy tang of Granny Smith apples.

Recently I wrote about a doubt being entertained about whether I am is allergic to carrot juice. My sinuses got stuffy and for while I found it difficult to breath easily, and these days as I drop in and out of meditation so easily that can be a real drag, man.

I love using that beatnik expression "a real drag, man". The beat movement was sorta on it's last legs by the ti-me I became aware of it by reading On The Road during my first stint in the Navy. Soon after I read the book and found the author's experiences extremely interesting, the Navy ship I was assigned to pulled into the Treasure Island shipyard just north of San Francisco, and I got to look around for the evidence in North Beach I was led to believe would be there. It wasn't, so I hooked up with a rich girl from Nob Hill and cut notches in my gun.

The exciting thing about Kerouac's descriptions:

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

was that while reading his novels I became aware that I could live a nomadic life style in North America. I already had a small bejinning. Making the Grand Tour of Europe was finally passe. In all my life I've never lusted in my heart to go to Europe or any of the "old countries". Every European I ever traveled in the States with proved something I suspected all along. These cultures are too steeped in tradition and paying old debts to be interesting to me.

If the "real truth" were actually available to me (even only me), entertaining the thoughts Jack Kerouac portrayed probably had more to do with my choosing to be-co-me a wanderer than any religious or philosophical motivation. Later, as I became an old man and finally stopped being able to jump and run at the slightest provocation (real or imaginary), I associated the lifestyle I led with spirit quests such as those taken by shamed men who had learned that only some God could eradicate they pain.

Weep and moan,
weep and moan,
and cry for one's own pity,
to live this live in such a way
is just a little shitty.
It clings like putty
to the soul and
pules for understanding,
but no one hears
with glued-up ears
the pleas of
silent
ranting...

I wrote this poem in deep and abiding despair a few months after I left my first wife for the second time. Within a month I had committed myself to the State Haspital. It's the same kind of rhetoric the Nigerian guy posted on the internet before he volunteered to blow himself up as a passenger in a jetliner. I got the help he didn't.

I guess I'm kind of arrogant about getting that help that I became aware I desperately needed. I played it a little too close to the edge of the abyss I literally jumped off of later on... even after I did my insanity bit. My self-perceived arrogance is due to my suspicions that I am is arranged every aspect of the whole deal.

I prayed as a child to understand the ways of the world. As an adult I preyed for understanding by living a nomadic lifestyle on purpose. I didn't know what to prey or pray for. I flew by the seat of my pants. Strange strangers-in-passing were my only mentors. One of them told me in a lucid moment he/it created momentarily to say, "What if you already have what you're looking for? Who/what has to get out of yo' way for you to understand understanding?"

It was me that wuz "standing in the need of prayer". Not my parent's child... who would do anything to feel loved and not be abandoned... because he was taught to. What a drag, man. I couldn't believe that to understand the way of the world I had to abandon everything I'd been taught to value?

It's not really true that I didn't have any transitional mentors. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a huge influence in my life, not necessarily because of anything he said to me (I never met the man in person or considered myself a follower, in the past), but because of what he lead the black community to do.

His bootstrap program to free his people of racial prejudice forced me to realize I was trained from birth to be one of his oppressors. This was what doing what myself as a child was taught to think the way of the world is like. The way Martin Luther King wanted me to observe in myself was the same way that my unmade conscience used my inner voice to demand that I observe in myself, and my piteous parent's child looked down that lonesome road and deeply keened that it didn't stand a chance against such odds.

Finally! At last! So-me understanding I could live with. I knew what to do now, but still didn't have a clue about how to logistically make the practical arrangements. I did not want to make those arrangements. I felt like Arjuna being told by Krishna that he had to kill his own kinsmen if he expected Him to drive the chariot.

Again, to me, this is all about be-co-me-ing. To be-with-me. To "Be with me...". In order to join in with another other one has to devalue who-they-think-they-are in order to let go of the conscience-driven persona. In order to stand under the me as represented by and within the other.

Maybe it's a leap of faith that the One me is over there in the Other, and it's the sa-me Me I-am-is convinced it takes for true. Perhaps that's the only "real" understanding one needs to take for the God's own truth. Nay-me-ly, that there is only One me, and each of us ideates ourselves out wot it IS. What else need one say than, "It is." What "is" actually ain't. It (whatever it is that is It) is wot it ain't, and it ain't wot it is.

The One me is like the pearl of great price. If you gaze upon it from outside it's non-ex-is-tent emanations you can read anything that can be labeled into it. If you enter the bridal chamber, however, you no longer looking at It from the outside in nor is it possible to ex-IS as legion, because within it's inner sanctum (sa-me)... It is only me all the ti-me.

∰

The Medicines I Live For

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The bone density test I went to the VA Hospital in Fayetteville for went without a hitch. I left a couple of hours early with the idea of going to this cafe I've eaten at sporadically over the years to have breakfast. It's changed owners and the omelette I ordered was okay, but it didn't have that special something that kept me coming back for more.

After I finished breakfast I still had a little time before my appointment at the hospital, so I took a new road from the restaurant to see if it would be shorter that the way I'd been going. I was really surprised at how much shorter and how much simpler the new route was.

I stopped at one of the large grocery stores over there because they usually carry the brand of burgundy I use. I was able to get a new can of the Folger's Black Silk coffee I like. I like dark roasted coffee. Folger's produces another dark roast coffee that I like just as well, but when I win the lottery, Folger's has seen the last of me.

There's nothing wrong with Folger's. I found out after the big hurricane that the coffee we get at the SuperCenter here is fairly fresh, because the plant that roasts, grinds, and packs it is near New Orleans, and they were shut down for a while. The grocery store here ran out of Folger's in two days. That means the coffee arrives here about a week after it's processed down there. That' as fast as the gourmet coffee-makers recommend.

The documentation I got with the Omega juicer I bought states that the juicer will grind coffee beans real fine. I haven't tried it yet, but if it comes out anywhere near the consistency of carrot pulp it oughta do really well. That means I might find some whole bean coffee that tastes mo' bettah than the Folger's for a reasonable price.

THAT WHICH YOU SAW

Our country is sick with an evil disease,
and all are uneasy just to do as they please,
but all that is easy is against the law,
and the which you see will be that which you saw.

To run from suppression is a natural act,
and to seek for sweet pleasure is a natural fact,
but to do so in public is a primitive sin,
but the dog comes a'scratching when the dog it wants in.

Now, there's one thing you gotta understand, my man,
that, there ain't nobody who can help things but you,
and all of yo' worries, and all of yo' woes
won't take care of themselves with no blues,
Lord, no one but you.

The question I ask in this riddle I play,
in the way that I ask it, in the way that I say,
"Do you think that it's bad to enjoy yo'self?",
if you do, pray to Jesus, because he's the only thing left.

So strip off your clothes and wear sackcloth and ash.
Weep loud with yo' mourning when you give in to the lash.
For it's perfectly clear that you hate your own birth,
and you pay for the pied piper for what he is worth.

fmp
August 31, 1971

☖

Discombobulation Over Uttering

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We have liftoff! All the wheatgrass we planted is now getting mature enough to put in the juicer. It's working out that if I use the scissors and snip the top blades of the wheatgrass of half a tray it's about the amount I need for one serving. I don't really know what I'm aiming for here. I figure to let the diet teach me what I need.

The original idea was to explore juicing wheatgrass. My sister-in-law got me cranked up about it. I was thinking real seriously about what the low carb diet I was on for the last couple of years was doing to me. I'm pretty sure it brought on the health crisis that preceded the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, but I was under a lotta stress at that time too.

I was married to this woman with whom I had two kids. When the kids were 3 and 5 years old this woman took them to California and divorced me because my part of the marriage was done. Men are expendable. This development was not to my liking. For one thing it proved how helpless I am to make life into what somebody else thinks it oughta be.

The reason I was under such stress was that my oldest daughter of my second marriage invited me and the members of my natal family to her second wedding. I hadn't laid my eyes on any of them for twenty-seven years. I was about to be shown that whatever control over my life I might have fooled myself into thinking I'd salvaged was not true.

Usually I can hide behind my extreme poverty to get outta doing anything I don't really wanna do. My miserliness is not only my savior, but my nemesis to boot. I didn't want to go to that wedding. I did not want to ever see those people again. We hadn't seen each other for nearly three decades. Why rattle the cage doors I'd built to live behind?

My youngest brother had no intention of letting me get out of confronting these women. The woman is sixty years old. Her daughters are both in their thirties now. He told me that he and his wife were going to the wedding. He would make all the logistical arrangements, and loan me the money to go if I was short on cash. When he put it that way my argument folded. Maybe it would bring some closure. I did want to see what they grew up to look like.

Seeing them again did change how I thought about them all. I think I got played. It doesn't surprise me much. Trying to find out how charismatics can so easily use me and abuse me has literally been my lifelong quest. They want me to think I'm human like they are, but I know I'm not.

I used to think I was a human being, and maybe I really was for a while. It's that Pinocchio metaphor that gets me every time. It's greed pure and simple. I'm a docetic creature who wants to be a real little boy instead of a puppet. That's what having visions will do to a docetic. It makes them have foolish dreams of becoming the image of themselves they invented. I-am-is... is not my body... it is me.

I never read Thomas Wolfe's book entitled You Can't Go Home Again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can't_Go_Home_Again

Why would I bother? The title sez it all. What need? I use the line of that title to goof on at times. Most recently I have discovered again that I can't go home again because I can't dismiss the remembering vision I had forty years ago. If you've read my blog enough it's easy to see I'm obsessed with it.

I didn't realize my remembering vision is what I was obsessed about. I didn't realize until the last few years that's why I suddenly started studying the occult from one end of it to the other. I kinda did know it was at the root of me jumping off that cliff in Yosemite. Well, after the fact I did.

I wrote in an e-mail post today that I had used the I Ching as a way to ask myself ten thousand questions. I'm the only one who knows whether that true or not. To me it's simple even if I do it by the numbers. I used the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Emperor's Yellow Book multiple times each day for over thirty years.

It wasn't unusual for me to form a question, write it down properly, toss the coins to obtain a Hexagram, study it intently as if I would truly find the answer to my written question for a while, then ask another question implying doubt that my first question wasn't answered. I learned over time that was a mistake. I might perform this ritual ten times or more a day. Eventually I was told in a dream to stop doing that. I did.

I have an obsessive personality. I oughta know. I created it by adopting existing rules of conscience. Not consciousness, but conscience. I adopted those rules of conscience to remind me to do what it took or takes to imitate the behavior of some other or others who appeared to get what I wanted by acting the way the did. I didn't know I was doing that until recently either.

To be-co-me what other people represent to me I had to abandon I meant to myself first. Not just once either, but each and every time I wanted to become someone else via mimicry I had to devalue what I had previously taught myself to hold in high esteem. Nice work if you can get it.

Especially when I realized that I couldn't save those others I followed. I found out I wasn't responsible for their behavior and the results it brought them. Their results were not the results I wanted or got. I thought they were getting the results I wanted for myself by acting the way I thought they did, only they didn't agree with me. No blame.

Nothingness has been on my mind lately. It's a perfect match.

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

~ Kris Kristofferson, from Me and Bobbi Magee

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Curried Shrimp For Christmas

❦

Eating curried shrimp at my sister's house last night was very obviously different than the diet I've been on for the last three weeks. I enjoyed myself gathering with the family. Nobody got shot. They never have, but family killings seems popular on the six o'clock news, and always seem to come unexpected at the holiday gatherings, so you never know.

My youngest brother called me just when I was getting ready to go. His wife was under the weather and didn't wanna go, so he wanted to know if we could ride together. I drove over to his shop, and then from there we took his truck to my sister's house. My oldest sister was the only one who didn't show up. They went to Atlanta to their oldest son's house.

I juiced up some wheatgrass this morning. It's kind of a messy thing to do. I'm drinking what came out of the juicer now. My sinuses are already beginning to clear up. This aspect of doing the raw food diet was unknown to me, but it certainly is appealing. Some fruits or vegetables have the opposite affect. I think it may be the carrots, but I haven't nailed the exact vegetable that's swelling my sinuses. When I do figure it out it will help me to know what to avoid.

Allergies and what causes them to happen in me is a subject I've never explored much. I don't know that I've suffered from them any more than anybody else. I'm not immune to the seasonal allergies that show up. The pollen that happens in the Spring affects me like it appears to affect the people around me, but some of it could be from my diet.

The allergy problems I have is something I wanna explore because any discomfort I have do to experiencing something I can avoid by just not exposing myself to it makes practical sense to me. I wouldn't mind going to a specialist who could put me through the various tests designed to find out if a person is allergic to something specific.

I don't know if I can my family doctor at the VA clinic I go to order up some tests for me. She takes care of me pretty good from my perspective. The problem I have at the VA is that nobody has ever told me what medical treatments I can get and how to make those arrangements. I've had to take chances and bullshit my way through procedures that I could have just as easily received instruction for and saved everybody a lot of trouble.

〄

Living On The Cheap

⸈

Christmas Day started out slow. Like any other day does with me. The sun has to get a little above the horizon before it's direct light (or whatever) stirs my soul. Sometime I claim that I'm a Sun worshiper and sometime I just look at it as the only true source of life I readily believe in. The Eskimos have it right. Hell is cold, not hot. A warm inside place to be is always a blessing unless it's a prison.

I have a picture of my only grandson beside my only granddaughter now. He has a cute birthmark on the right side of his face. His parents will never have to worry about describing him if he ever gets lost at the mall. I have a birthmark on my forearm. It's something I goof on sometime and wonder what it means. All the skin on my old body has wrinkled and changed except that birthmark. Everything about it has stayed the sa-me.

My brother's wife called me from her daughter's house where they were spending Christmas Eve with their twin grandsons and asked me if I'd feed their dogs. It's not a problem at all for me. Their house is next to mine further back in the woods on some land our parents gave all their children a lot to build a house on. Me and my youngest brother did.

They keep the dog food in one of those rolling trash cans that have a hinged lid on it. Inside there is a plastic scoop. Outside there are metal bowls of one kind or the other. I open the lid, use the scoop to fill the bowls with dog food. Close the lid and go ho-me. It gets me off my ass and doing something that requires movement.

It was a rainy, cold day again yesterday. My brother and his wife hadn't gotten ho-me yet, and I thought about their dogs being out in the weather. They have plenty of places like under storage buildings that they can get out of the weather, but they're dogs. They run out and bark ferociously at anything that moves that threatens their perimeter. They get wet. They stink like wet dogs. I figured they probably felt a little bit like they looked and smelled.

I had some meat I bought the day before I decided to go completely vegetarian and not eat meat until I do again. So, I gave it all to the dogs to cheer them up and rid myself of the temptation of having it look at me every time I opened the refrigerator door.

There wasn't a clue my generosity cheered the dogs up. They ate that baked ham and bacon as I doled it out to make sure all of them got some, then sniffed around to find out if they'd missed any, and jogged off like I hadn't even been by. They're still dogs that live a dog's life.

Several friends came by in the late afternoon to bring me a little present they fully intended to stay and share. A bottle of local wine for one. We popped the imitation cork out of it and threw it away. Duplin Winery. Hatteras Red. It tastes a lot like the wine people have always made at ho-me around here. Sweet. Very sweet, but it was a cleaner taste that does that winery proud.

The Duplin Winery is located on I-40 between here and Wilmington, but there are lots of grape growers and wineries developing in the Yadkin valley about 50-100 miles further inland. Big money wineries. It's already too late to invest without previously having a fortune to begin with.

If you go there and follow the roads on either side of the Yadkin River it's easy to visually see why it's a great place for grapes. I'm sorta glad that it's currently becoming well known and that vintners from all over the world are coming here to make wine. A better grade of red has gotta dribble down to me even if I have to drive over there to get it.

I'm gonna break my vegetarian diet tonight a little to eat some of my older sister's shrimp curry dish. She initially started cooking it back before she married, and she lived in a bachelorette's pad at Southport. Her neighbors were shrimpers and they were constantly giving her fresh shrimp to eat. She invited the family down to a shrimp curry feast.

It was the first curry dish I knew for sure was a curry dish that I'd ever eaten. I was besmitten. The curry she used produced the most delightful earthy taste I'd ever enjoyed but for smoked oysters, my all-around favorite seafood... except for scallops or smoked salmon.

It's not likely that I'll ever be a strict adherent to any diet, but I'm pretty serious about this raw food diet because I understand or seem to understand the fundamentals that support it, and I like the results I'm getting in regard to how my gut feels.

I've always sat around when I could, but when I had to make a living, like most people, I had to get off my ass and go do something to get the money to pay the bills. If I wasn't moving around because of that, I moved around to satisfy my curiosity, and I did it on the cheap.

I've written about how I ran away from my parent's home here in North Carolina and hitch-hiked to Mississippi to my ungrateful and ungracious grandparent's house when I was fifteen. I didn't have any money. I literally didn't know I would need any, and I didn't. That might have been my downfall if I was expected to work to get money to eat for the rest of my life.

I found out for a brief while on that journey that I could live off the fat of the land. At least in America. That running away trip only peaked my curiosity though. What really convinced me that I could go where I wanted to go when I wanted happened on my first month-long leave from the Navy.

The ship I was on had been gone for six months around the Pacific Rim countries, and not only had I saved a little money, but I had won some money playing poker with my shipmates. Unfortunately, that convinced me that I was a lucky gambler, and I decided to go through Las Vegas on my way ho-me on leave and build up my reserve cache of cash.

I lost all of it. Every dime. I had to hitch-hike from Las Vegas to North Carolina, and that trip was what convinced me I could survive just fine on the road for as long as I wanted to without a dime to my name. It was my the pride of my "name" that was costing me my freedom to roam aimlessly and to see and experience everything I'd ever read about as a boy.

I don't recommend living this way. There is a high price to pay. Friends and family. There are people I don't want to have control over my life, and having a wife and family gives them that control, and my wives and family helped them to exert that control by threatening them through me or vice versa. The only way I can be me is not have them. Let 'em find so-me other chump to use their children to betray.

There is nothing satisfying within my philosophy that allows me to be a domestic animal. Everybody including me just hates it, but then, when I tried to make them happy at my expense, nobody was happy and my attitude was in the way of their happiness.

I used to try to be mad at my parents for not totally convincing me that all they brought me into the world for was to continue the family line. It was my chief feature of avarice that forced the issue. Every scam artist will tell you that to get over the mark has to be greedy. Guess what avarice means.

That's how the charismatics that used me and abused me did the trick. I was born a greedy miser, and so I was "born to lose". I gotta get that tattoo. Man! It's the only thing that might save me from myself.

⸘

Johnny Cash As The New World Savior?

☖

Watching the Christmas shows on TV makes it clear to me that they're all about the Catholic version of what Christmas is for. In this way, the Catholics own Christmas. The other so-called Christian religions, like the Protestant one I was raised to believe would save me from the darkness, only "think" Christmas and Christ belongs to them. If they wanna be different from the Catholics they're gonna need a different world savior to worship. I'm thinking, maybe Martin Luther King, Jr. or Johnny Cash. They're both dead now, and it seems to be very important that world saviors be quite dead. Regicide requires it.

I watched a segment of one of the network morning shows earlier today and heard Garrison Keller state that one of the more important things to remember about writing is to never listen to the opinions of your readers. He actually said this about the listeners of his radio show Prairie Home Companion. I'm a big fan, so obviously he shouldn't listen to me, but since I've got no advice for him anyway, if we chance should meet in some dark alley, we would get along just fine.

It was a turning point for me when I changed the settings here to prevent people offering Comments. I realized that when I permitted my readers to make comments about what I'd written, I wasn't writing what I wanted to write about, but what they wanted me to write about. What a drag, man. I came close to losing a couple of old friends by changing the settings, but it turned out alright. They stopped reading my blog looking for a spot they could comment upon and just read the crap I like to write about... or not.

Upon making that decision I discovered that what I was trying to do by keeping this blog was to capture drifting thoughts with words. I couldn't do that and address my reader's comments. It is a matter of focus. Granted, when I read my reader's comments I had to interpret them first to mean what I would have meant if I'd written the sa-me thing.

I've been writing on one or the other of the several blogs I've keep over the last decade or so without a real purpose except to "see" what I'd say. That's why when I did the old switcheroo to saying what I "see" it was a big change for me as far as writing goes, but it's the exact sa-me way I read-ed palms (The -ed is to indicate that I don't read palms much any more).

The fact that I don't see many people face-to-face probably has something to do with it, but more to bear on not doing it is the fact that I realized I was projecting my idea of their reality upon them, and that wasn't fair. It was as interesting as all get out, but it wasn't just. I couldn't justify that behavior to me.

Part of why I realized I was projecting came to me by reading an old book. Purportedly much older than the biblical writings by several thousand years. It was said to be the oldest Chinese novel written strictly to be a story. It's entitled The Golden Lotus. I picked it out of the stacks of the university library and sat there and read it in one sitting. Hours.

I've written about this before. The first wife of the main careactor asked a Buddhist monk to help her. He did, but exacted the price of being given her oldest son to train as a monk. As her son approached the ti-me when she would have to give him over she went to see the lama to beg him to release her from her promise.

As she went to where he lived she accidentally saw that this monk was a Buddha. He was sitting in a meditative state directing a constant stream of the spirits of the dead to their new reincarnated lives. She went ho-me and got her son and brought him to the monk.

This is about what I was doing when I read palms. Most of the palms I read were done in private settings, but there were ti-me-s when I read the palms of people who had stood in a line to wait their turn.

I did this two years in a row for my older sister's fund-raising event at the local high school. They put up a small tent with a table and two chairs for me to practice my arcane art inside. My sister sat at a table outside the tent and took the money the fair attendants paid for me to read their palm.

There was always 10-30 people waiting in line to have their palms read for a couple of dollars. All of which went to charity. I literally assigned those people their life's work because they believed I could do it. I've had people hunt me down to tell me that what I predicted came true.

This was a big ego trip for me for a while, but not after I realized the truth of what was happening. There was hell to pay for me doing that, even innocently, even on purpose. I had to stop for my own sake.

That's why I don't allow comments here. I'm just writing what crosses my mind when I sit down to it. What I write is not directed at any particular person. I don't have a clue who reads what I write. More critically, most of the ti-me, I don't have a clue about the source of the stream of drifting thoughts I kowtow to comes from. There may be several streams of consciousness I follow, but I believe this:

"You cannot save him whom you follow." AU

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Kona Coffee

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My youngest brother has always been a photography enthusiast. He's studied it and used it and put it in the pan. He collects family pictures and puts them in CDs and gives them to relatives as gifts. My older sister plays around with genealogy, so they're quite a pair. Aquarians, the both of them. I don't remember having seen the photo he digitized. When he sent me a copy of it a couple of days ago I had to look twice to recognize the background.

The torpedo tubes behind me in this photograph were used in World War Two. I was transferred to this ship called the USS Twining for my first assignment in the Navy. It was only after a year in the deck force scraping rust, painting, and mopping decks that I got into the ship's Torpedo crew. I was the only one with high enough scores to attend the school. It was the best piece of luck I'd had since I joined the Navy.

The only work I had to do on the ship after I became a torpedoman was to mop the small deck around the torpedo tubes, and polish the brass. There were three of us to do that. After I got in the torpedo gang I didn't really do that much work, but I stood a lotta bridge watches out at sea, and drank a ton of premium kona coffee.

I was amazed to find out later that the Navy only bought the highest grade of coffee grown. Growing up in my parents home drinking coffee was verboten. I might have had fewer than five cups of coffee in my life until I joined the Navy, but I got addicted to the very best coffee there was/is, but no mas. The Folger's Black Silk coffee I buy is pretty good for the price though.

My daughter sent one of those family Christmas cards that has all three of them in pictures. It's a little sad for me to get these things in the mail knowing I'll never spend any time with my grandchildren. I was angry when my second wife took our children and headed to California with them, but since I saw them in Seattle I realize I got used and abused by somebody who claimed to love me, but didn't know what I think love is. No blame.

This new prescription drug has a powerful affect on me. I can feel it roaming around doing what it does. It reminds me that the "rheuma" part of rheumatoid means "to move" or "roam". The disease moves, the drug chases it. My body is their playground.

My hands and fingers still work okay. By that I mean that they still do what I tell them when I write or play the scales on my digital piano, but they feel weak. That may have something to do with the swelling in my fingers going down somewhat. That may be the "miracle" part of this medicine.

It amazes me that I'm taking shots that cost $1000 each every two weeks. Well, I've given myself one so far. The next one is due on New Year's Day. That's three times plus as much as I get from Social Security each month. What a life... eh?

♡

Man, The Most Efficient Killing Machine Ever

♥

My brother found this picture of me from when I was in the Navy. I'm standing next to my battle station on the torpedo deck.

I almost forgot to write an entry today. It's not that I've been particularly busy or even had a lot on my mind. I think it's the natural peace and good will that comes with the three days of the winter solstice.

Many, if not most religions try to claim this peaceful feeling as a result of their world saviors and Gods, but I don't need any other reason than watching the days get shorter each day for the last six months. That serves as a subtle, yet ominous warning that gets more unconsciously worrisome as the nights get longer.

Then, usually on December 21st each year in the northern hemisphere it stops doing that. After a couple of short days and long nights more... the next night is shorter and the cycle renews itself. The holiday blues are over whether you like it or not. That really is something to celebrate. On Christmas and New Year's Eve both!

If studying astrology fairly actively for around twenty years didn't serve any other useful purpose than to make me aware of the equinoxes and the solstices it's been worth it to take the ridicule from the nerds. The nerds never did actually cause me much pause in this regard. Particularly when I got smart and started reading palms. I have literally read more than one rocket scientist's palm more than one ti-me. They co-me back.

I think some people make themselves so special through their work and education that people soon forget they're still human. In my not so respectable opinion it's difficult, if not impossible, to forget you're human if you offer me your hand in order for me to read the lines on your palm.

That's part of the deal. I know what to say while you're holding hands with me to make you sexually aroused to so-me degree. Even rocket scientists get sexually aroused when they're being treated as a warm-blooded animal. That's why people go to church. At least the further south ya go. They wanna get juiced up for Jesus. LOL

Homo sapiens in general will pay good money to watch animals including and especially human animals fight to the death. Either that or as close as legally possible. This murderous blood lust always simmers just below the surface of civilizations. People still pay good money to watch gladiators fight on the sports arenas and they flock to the NasCar race tracks to watch the blood fly. No blame.

Human beings are not only animals, but the most successful killing machines ever self-generated. I read an internet article recently about research that revealed that a large majority of the general populace would murder somebody if they were legally absolved of it. Ruwanda and other wars of genocide pretty much proves that point.

There is something stupidly dangerous about raising your kids to think it's wrong to kill when just believing that could get them killed by people who know how the world is and just do it. Observing the Ten Commandments in the wrong place can be a death warrant.

The Omega juicer I bought does a good job of squeezing the juice out of the apples, carrots, leafy lettuce, and wheatgrass I shove in it. This morning I harvested some of the wheatgrass me and my sister-in-law grew, and I was a little surprised at how much juice came out of the little bit of grass I put in it.

The juice I'm making seems to be making a different in the constipation problems I've had due to the prescription drugs I'm taking for rheumatoid arthritis. The fact that things have been coming out well is probably due to my not eating meat as much as juicing. I seem even more convinced the crisis I had that brought the RA diagnosis was brought on by the low carb diet I went on for a couple of years.

When I win the lottery I'm going to buy me a house near a reputable farmers market that has a spacious kitchen in it, and a fiber optic line straight into my house with all the entertainment stuff all hooked up to it. Preparing my raw foods and writing is about all I got time for any more.

On the 26th I'm gonna break my raw diet to eat my older sister's shrimp curry. I'm sure she would understand if I just said "No.", but I'm not sure I would understand, because I'm just trying to see what kind of diet will serve me best, not get all militant and prudish.

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"Three Days Before, And For Three Days After"

♚

There is not much e-mail traffic for the last couple of days. I don't know how much the winter storms in the Midwest and the Atlantic coastal areas have to do with it. The area I live in appears to be protected from some of these winter storms by it's proximity to the ocean.

The center of the storm that followed along the leading edge of a cold front drew moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and as it moved north along the front edge of the cold front it snowed. But, that all happened west of here in the piedmont and mountain areas of North Carolina.

That interaction between the approaching (or descending) Montreal Express pulled in warm air from the Atlantic Ocean that also fed the precipitation, but that warm ocean air sweeping across the coastal plains kept it warm enough to prevent any accumulation of snow here. It was for sure a dank, howling wind cold. Just above freezing with a gale wind whistling through the pines, but when the front passed and the sunshine returned the roads were all clear and the crisp air practically sparkles with light.

My bossy sister-in-law decided it was time to harvest the first wheatgrass we planted. There were two trays that were mature enough to start snipping the tops off to put in my new juicer. She brought one over here for me to partake of, and took the other one to her house to put through her own juicer.

I was in the middle of fixing up some brown rice to get something in my belly when she brought the wheatgrass. It's not exactly the health food kind of brown rice, but a microwavable steamer bag of instant rice. I mix it with some white spaghetti sauce and plenty of salt and pepper and eat it like I'm dining out at the Savoy.

My sister-in-law hung around for a bit urging me to put some of the first wheatgrass in my juicer to celebrate the winter solstice, but I already had the rice going, so I put it off until today. The solstice season last three days. "Three days before. Three days after." Such is the cycle of life. "We three kings of orient are..."

Every year for so-me ti-me now I've kept my antenna out for the presence of a palpable feeling of joy that arrive with the victory of the light (the Sun) over darkness (the Moon/reflected light) during the three days immediately following the winter solstice. If such is so it's probably too subjective to get a general consensus about. I doubt if it could be quantitatively measured for atta boys.

I still feel a little guilty because I didn't juice the wheatgrass to share the feeling of horticultural success with my partner in this endeavor. What I feel guilty about is that I juiced up a couple of carrots and an apple for sweetness later after the rice settled in. I had already cleaned the juicer before I realized I could have done the wheatgrass instead.

Even now I'm putting it off for some reason. I think it's because I'm playing around with using the carrot pulp from last night as a poultice for where I bit the inside of my upper lip. It's physically intriguing in a way. Sorta like dipping snuff, but without the health problems.

I'm holding a generous pinch of the carrot pulp between my teeth and lips. That pushes the spot where I accidentally bit my lip away from my teeth and prevents their constant rubbing together and further irritating it. The psychological comfort is similar to me to the carrot pulp acting as a cud.

It gives me something to do with my mouth like chewing gum does. Sitting here writing I'm constantly in and out of a state of intense focus. Particularly if I'm editing what I've hurriedly written to capture a drifting thought with words. I really have to initiate volition without thinking about it or the thought drifts out of context with my efforts.

When I drift back to beta consciousness and be-co-me aware of the sensory dimension again, it's humorous to realize I have a cud of carrot pulp in my mouth, and it was there the whole time my attention inhabited another world.

♛

Oracles Are Tools To Ask Yourself What Nobody Does

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My Solstice bond fire was just two weeks worth of packaging trash. Now, what was, is burnt to a crisp in tearful salutations and grateful acknowledgement for my now ancient life to the forever young sky gods. Smog is ambrosia to these cloud-chasers. May they bless me with a new young body (your's will do... Bitch! Assume...) soon!

Richard Wilhelm, a German and contemporary of Jung, translated one of the five books of Classical Chinese culture called The Book of Changes, it's present Communist masters not withstanding. There's a story of how Wilhelm proceeded. He learned to speak Chinese and went to China to consult with a leading Master of the I Ching in order to get a practical interpretation of it. He would go to China, consult with the I Ching master, then go back to Germany and transliterate the various Chinese symbols and ideograms into the German language. At some point he would go back to China to consult with the I Ching master again to see if he had gotten it right, then go back to Germany and work on it some more. One of his consultants was C.G. Jung who wrote a detailed Forward to his German translation. Cary Baynes translated it from German to English under Wilhelm's guidance, and it was given to me as a seduction device back when that mattered to fools. 

I don't know if what I've written is true to Wilhelm's intent or Baynes servitude or no. There's another translation by a formal Sinologist named James Legge that makes no practical sense to your run-of-the-mill curiosity at all. There has to be so-me me-and-thee-ing (meaning) for the ordinarily curious person to follow. We're not all pedantic as Jack Kilmon.

I may be, and so-me others (who know who they are) really, truly are. but despite that, percentage-wise, very few can be, and it's all their fault. How can you show off to people who think going along to get along is enough to pass as an ongoing passerby that may not go for your spiel? Each one of us may be special, but it's up to each one of us to know in our hearts that we're the actual children or so-me living God. Get real. Who can talk you into that? You're it, chile! You'll believe your own rhetoric even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket. No blame.

Really. I know we're all fools and we take chances that can nail us to the cross, but it's not really intentionally meant to incite murder and mayhem... right? It's just an intellectual ga-me so-me of us play that allows us to think we're a cut above the rest or, as so-me might say (if paid in gold coin), "You get it! I approve of your homogenized behavior! Be of good spirits in your advanced wordiness! Atta boy...Atta boy... ATTA BOY!!!

I started writing this as an e-mail response, but it kind of got out of hand for what I originally intended as a backhand play at support. Nobody should have to deal with a bunch of shit i made up just to be ridiculously sarcastic in order to get in the back door I created just in case, right? Or, should they? If such a portal exists, by hook or by crook, who am I to decide to keep my stopping still?

The wheatgrass project is happening in a slower time frame than either my partner-in-crime had figured. It's going, and what's growing is really pretty, but it's not growing fast enough for us to get what we thought we might need to make it a mainstay of our diet. We gotta germinate a lotta seed to have enough for that. Once we get ahead of our daily needs we can have a better idea of how to plan on how much to plant for enough to be enow.

I got an idea for planting that is easy enough to check out. I'm thinking of putting the soaked wheat berries in smaller containers, each about enough for one juicing session. I gotta go get another bag of potting soil and some containers to find out if this is a viable theory, but since it will happen in a fairly spacious green house there's no reason not to try a lot of different approaches. I'd really like to arrange things so that it could be a daily habit. That's been impossible before because I moved around so much, but it's perfect for right damned now.
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Air-Conditioning And The Death Of A Nation

❝

My first night of sleep after shooting myself up with the new "miracle" prescription medicine for my rheumatoid arthritis at least feels like no real harm has been done. The real test for me is whether it will provide relief for the entire two weeks that pass between shots. I avoided shooting up for my whole life and now that fear has past. In a way I don't have much of a choice, but my body doesn't matter so much anymore as long as it lets me do what I wanna do without the interference of unrelenting pain.

The stiffness in my fingers seems to have back off a little. They were hurting a little yesterday, but when I went downstairs I saw that I had forgotten to take my nightly medicine along with the 600 mg of ibuprofen the night before. I took it immediately and soon some of the pain had dissipated. I took some more ibuprofen last night, and the stiffness in my fingers might have lessened because of that.

My younger brother (as opposed to my youngest brother) decided to buy our parent's house from the government to condemned it to build an extension to the runway again for $1 and the promise to move it or tear it down.

He slowly supported it and jacked it up to put on steel beams in order to move it to some land he had bought on the other side of my house. It was a little further down the dead-end road on the other side of the pond, and now it's on the other side of my house closer toward town.

The house is still on the rig my brother custom-built to haul it over there on. It's not a small house. It started out as a two-bedroom frame house the family who owned the land earlier built, but my mother and father added a large dining and living room, a large den/family room, with a basement and a two-car garage, and bricked it all up.

Moving that mess (including the garage) was a major task. He finally got it over to it's new location a week or so ago. Yesterday was scheduled to set it down on a temporary footing in order to build a new foundation under it. They tried, I suppose. I heard diesel motors roaring as they moved it in place, but the weather was just lousy for being outside for any reason.

The major snow storm that's moving up the east coast passed through here yesterday, but it didn't snow here because we're located south and east of where the cold front met the tropical storm. Our proximity to the Atlantic Ocean moderates some of these winter storms, and getting snow here can be scarce as hen's teeth. The coastal plains are a great place to live, and that's why most of the population lives close to the ocean.

Air-conditioning will spell the end of our paradise. Too many people are finding out that southerners are just people like anybody from anywhere on Earth, and that's a damned shame. True, the summer heat and humidity can get tough here, but modern weather reporting indicates constantly that the heat and humidity can be just as bad or worse further north.

A temperature of 95° (35° C) and a humidity of 95% works the same drudgery on most animals, especially delicate homo sapiens, no matter where it occurs, but moderate winters and air-conditioning is gonna be the death of easy country living with some privacy still available within a decade. With the population spiraling outta control so enough there will be no place to move to that's mo' bettah.

I don't see this other brother very often. We each have our own ways and those ways are different. True, we have the same parents, but all of our parent's children are really different in our own way. Some people have said that of the three boys my youngest brother is more intellectually inclined, our middle brother is more physically inclined, and it's said that I am is more spiritually and philosophically inclined.

None of use actually argue with that, but both my brothers and my older sisters got more to show for how they've adapted to life here on Earth. We have such varied interests we don't really compete with each other. Me and my brothers live within three hundred yards of each other now, and our sisters live within sixty miles.

We used to be scattered all over the world. It never seemed all that strange that we would be in consideration of how many times our family moved when we were kids. More and more often I realize how being around lots of different kinds of people and cultures helped us to go to different places without being intimidated.

Our youngest brother is 63 and my oldest sister is 79. We seem to be pulling together now as we get older and older. Our parents had a long life. My father was 88 years old when he died and my mother was 93. We could potentially live longer than they did. Which leads to my most pressing question now, what if I live... and keep on living... constantly losing what makes life worth living as I go along... it could get to be a drag... and I won't even know it. I probably won't even know when I get dead.

❞

Delivery Trucks Galore

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Two potential problems were resolved this afternoon in about an hour. The first one happened when I walked in my front door and there was a package from FedEx sitting on my CardioGlider exercise machine seat. I thought for a moment that it was the Omega Juicer I had ordered, but on closer inspection it turned out to be the arthritis medicine that I had refused to take.

They sent it to me again and still didn't renew my old prescriptions. This time, however, I was ready to give it a shot. Mostly because my regular doctor at the Fayetteville VA Hospital pretty much called me an idiot for not taking it in the first place. The main reason I didn't take it was because I had some lesions in my mouth that I didn't know where they came from, and the warnings on the medicine said don't take it if those indicators were present.

As I wrote a couple of days ago I found out for myself why I was having those problems. It was due to the dentures I wear and I was having a reaction the metal that held the dentures together. Titanium metal I think. I stopped using the denture piece, and that helped, but I think it was the wheatgrass poultice I used that cleared them up.

When opened the box and saw what it was I used the self-injectors and shot myself up within thirty minutes of its arrival. It was easy peasy and I don't have to take any more medicine for another two weeks. I don't feel any response to the medicine yet.

Within the hour my juicer arrived. I was really happy for it to show up. The service was terrific for UPS Ground. My sister-in-law brought it from their office when the UPS guy came by and I wasn't home. He delivers all my brother's business packages and they knew who I was from that and delivered it to them to bring to me. It happens in small towns. I should have had it send there in the first place.

The juicer is great. I didn't have anything to juice when it got here, but later I went to the grocery store and bought some apples, carrots, and leafy lettuce to give it a whirl. I procrastinated for a while before I made my first carrot juice.

My sister-in-law got me to use her manual juice a few days ago, and so I was familiar with the principles of how these masticating juicers work. The only real difference between her's and mine is the electric motor. The parts in her juicer is nearly all metal, but mine uses a lotta plastic. It's a special plastic though thats harder than many metals, and is easier to clean.

The wheatgrass we planted is coming along slower than what we expected. It's doing fine, but maturing slow. That may have a lot to do with it being so cloudy and overcast for the last two weeks. Once we get the growth cycle figured out we'll be able to use as much as we want. I've planned all along though to juice a variety of fruits and vegetables. It's been over a week now since I've eaten any meat.

I've been warned several times that I need to clean the juicer after each time I use it. It's not that difficult to clean. The engineering has been worked out on these types of juicers. It comes apart with the twist of a couple of locking knobs and cleaning it is just a matter of running it under some hot water. I'll probably wash all the parts in soapy water when I wash my dishes.

I drank the juice of four small to medium carrots about an hour ago, and one of the first results I've noticed is how it clears my sinuses. I first noticed this effect after eating the rye grass I've harvested the last couple of morning. My sister-in-law has told that this diet has a tendency to clear up the internal mucus in the sinuses and the G.I. tract. It's sure done that.

I would have gotten on this diet a long time ago if I would have known how it would clear my sinuses. Other than when i stopped smoking tobacco a couple of years ago, this has been the best thing that's happened to my meditation practice in decades. Breathing is a big part of my practice, and certainly the most important part of it.

My family doctor over at Fayetteville VA has ordered a bone density test that I have an appointment for on the 29th, and the only other appointment I have for anything is next April. I do have an invitation to eat my older sister's curried shrimp the day after Christmas, and vegetarian diet or not, I won't miss that. She's a gourmet cook for sure.
☄

The Real Second Coming

✞

Sometimes it not what I write about that counts, but what I don't write about that matters. I was invited to attend a musical gathering last night, and at the last moment I decided to ride over there with Ben to see what was going on. The event took place in a museum in a room they apparently used for meetings of the various types that museums might gather together for.

A museum appeared to be an apt place for these musicians to get together for what actually amounted to a hoe down, but it wasn't necessarily a joyous occasion, and before it was over I embarrassed myself by trying to play guitar with this group, and stomped out to save face. It was almost as cold outside as it was inside the air-conditioned museum.

Twice in the last couple of days I've been treated like a senile old fool. One of those times was in the checkout line of the grocery store when this young woman thought I was confused about how to punch in my debit card numbers, so she practically yanked my card out of my hand, spun the input device around, only to watch it perform the action I had already entered.

Some of this behavior probably has to do with letting my beard and hair grow out. It's a real mess, but it's even messier if I try to keep it neat and trimmed as it grows out. My plan of action is to just let it grow helter skelter until it's long enough to comb.

My beard usually looks fairly decent at the length it is now, but only when it's warm. In cool weather, such as it is now, the clothes I wear to keep warm pushes my beard out and away from my neck, and it always looks as if I wasn't performing my toilette and brush it out to look at least the best it can at this point.

What I'm saying is that if I get treated like a senile old fool, at least part of the reason I get this response is that I look that way, and there is no reason why anybody could be expected to read between the lines. I.E., no blame.

The winter solstice is only a few days away. Less than a week. It happens on the east coast just after noon at 12:06 p.m. next Monday. Over the last decade or so, but not every year, a few friends have gathered to burn a bon fire and maybe perform the ritual toast to the dead past and to the coming new year.

If I remember to do it on time it shouldn't be that difficult to throw together some dead limbs from the woods around my house and build a fire. This year it should be cool enough to appreciate the warmth, and the time of day is accommodating.

It makes me happy that I studied astrology for a long time every solstice and equinox that passes. Otherwise, I might not pay attention to these old rituals so intimately associated with my ancestors. That's what it is to me. A form of ancestor worship. Yet, I don't know much about them. I'm interested in genealogy, but in a casual sort of way. I have an older sister who got all fired up about it, but she doesn't share much of what she's learned without me having to ask.

Besides, I look at ancestry in a different way that what some people I've encountered treats it. Ancestry for me has taken a different turn, because all my ancestors are actually me. Maybe I think that because of a popular song from my youth entitled, "I'm My Own Grandpa". I was endowed by vision how that can be so around forty years ago, but only realized the implications of that visionary experience within the past decade or so.

Every so often in the recent past I have pondered upon the possibilities of what might have happened if I hadn't lived long enough to realize what my remembering vision signified in a philosophical sense. It began to come together for me when I randomly decided to purchase a book called The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels:

http://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Gospels-Elaine-Pagels/dp/0679724532

It was by reading this book that I became aware that what I had experienced in my remembering vision was the same thing the ancient early Christians called "gnosis". By reading Pagels descriptions of what gnosis, and thus "Gnostics" were about I knew that I had experienced this same sort of event.

I read this book before there was an internet in my life, but when I finally did get online I ran across some articles on Pagels and Gnostics, and soon found out there was a couple of e-mail discussion groups available to pique my already established interest.

One of the e-mail discussion groups was a formal, academic inquiry, but there was/is another group devoted to a more informal study of the Gnostic Gospels, and concentrated on a specific gospel called The Gospel of Thomas. Not only am I not interested in an academic approach to something I personally experienced, but I'm sorta contemptuous of the whole idea of attempting to dissect a subjective experience by academic methods. It's like trying to take an objective stance toward a non-experience.

I rejected my early religious training at puberty. I railed against it. I ridiculed it. I stood up in front of dozens of witnesses and cursed their God to hell and back. If it's actually possible to determine, I'd say I went way over the top with my quest to cut myself loose from being condemned to a childish outlook.

Eventually, upon a specific occasion, I realized I had to find a way to look at my early training in a more positive light, because it would become my only anchor if I do live long enough to experience my second childhood. The "specific occasion" I mention above was the result of watching both my father and my mother enter and attempt to endure their own second childhood.

By specific I mean to indicate that they experienced the same events growing down as the did growing up. I watched my father's face when he remembered the birthday gifts he received at his fifth birthday party. A little rubber ball and some jacks to play with. This eighty-five year old man evaporated within the explosive joy of a five year Jesus boy old right before my eyes. That's the real second coming.

✟

Rebel With A Cause

The statement or adage or quote or wherever it came from, is true in my experience. I was warned about it by my father when he got to be about my age. "Bored people are boring." My old school pal was bored, so she called me last night and yapped away until I thought my ear would drop off. If I tried to say something to be a part of the conversation she would literally tell me to shut up and let her talk. I took about as much as I wanted to and hung up.

Granted, journalistic writing is not much different than what that woman was doing last night, but reading this blog is voluntary, and if the reader has had enough of my redundant, repetitive crap, they can just click their way outta here. they don't have to read my crap. I don't know who reads what here, and I don't know how much they read before they hang it up. No more than they want to I hope.

There is one thing that people have to do for themselves and thats entertainment. They have to discover for themselves what amuses them and provide themselves with the opportunity to indulge whatever that is. That's what this bored woman wanted from me. She wanted to use me to amuse herself, and she didn't give a damn whether I was mutually amused or not. There ain't no accounting for taste.

This morning I deliberately opted for walking pretty much the same route I took yesterday. On my way out of the house I stopped and picked the bottom leaf off the ornamental kale plant I keep here at my house for eating it raw, then I went over to the field with the rye grass on it and picked some of it to chew as I walked.

Today I knew I was chewing a cud of grass and it was deliberately done. It made me feel ancient. I knew I was doing the same thing millions of homo sapiens have done before me when I picked and chewed on the grass blades. I doubt if my ancestors had fields of cover crops to select from. Cover crops are a fairly recent agricultural development.

The State of North Carolina hired him and hundreds of other agriculture majors from all over the country to move here and teach the scientific principles of farming. There may have been some sort of country-wide movement that instigated the State to do this thing, but it wasn't long after our family moved here that it also started paving many of the farm-to-market country roads in the eastern part of the state where all the old plantations were.

Now it's hard to find a dirt road to remember the "good ol' days" by. Not that anybody cares about not having to navigate the pitfalls of dirt roads. There was only one paved road in the entire eastern part of the State when we first moved here. It was a federal government road between two large military installations or even it wouldn't have been paved.

My maternal grandfather was a section boss for the State of Mississippi that was in charge of road maintenance for the dirt roads. My uncles all worked for him growing up, and when the state finally got around to using mechanized equipment they learned how to run bulldozers and motor-driven scrapers, and they did it all over the country for the rest of their lives.

My paternal grandfather was a blacksmith and owned a cotton gin. Neither of my grandparents could read or write. My father and mother were the only members of both families who graduated from high school and got a college degree out of twenty aunts and uncles. I could read and write better than they could by the time I was 8-9 years old, but so could their own children. Mandatory schooling changed everything.

I have practically no experience being illiterate. I was precocious and reading a little by the time I was five years old. I probably didn't have much choice with both my parents teaching school. My older sisters made sure of that. I was the baby boy for four and a half years before my younger brothers showed up, and they used me to imitate our parents, who they wanted to be like when they grew up.

They did grow up and become teachers, and they did it for the rest of their lives. Both of them are now retired high school teachers. My younger brothers and I resented them and we deliberately didn't finish college to keep from doing it.

Chewing My Cud

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It's been an interesting day in some ways, and sad beyond tears in others. The wheatgrass we planted in trays is really bursting forth in some serious plant splendor. I waited to go to the greenhouse to check the progress of them today. I went for a walk back to the rye field and gathered several handfuls of the fresh grass and chewed it up as I walked. It seemed strangely peaceful to be chewing my cud. I've never done that before.

I walked for maybe a mile or so in the woods behind our houses and felt very meditative as I wandered back to visit the greenhouse . My sister-in-law was there cleaning out a place to put a set of outdoor table and chairs inside the greenhouse. I helped her load some of their stuff they had stored inside on to the pickup truck.

The first two trays of wheatgrass I helped plant is starting to look like real grass now. The last day or two the wheat berries had these white stringy things emerging out of themselves, but now they are turning green and really bulking up. We now have six trays in process and two more trays with the one inch of top soil ready for the next batch of wheat berries that have already soaked for one day.

We tentatively have a process in mind for how we're gonna have a continuous supply of wheatgrass to work the mojo with this raw food diet. It's a fairly easy plan to follow. It starts with soaking the fresh organic wheat berries my sister-in-law conveniently ordered.

One half of a quart canning jar is half filled from the supply of wheat berries, and then filled to the top with water. When the water is absorbed into the dry wheat berries they swell up to just about to the top of the quart jar.

That's enough to cover two of the plastic trays we're using. We put an inch of potting soil from a big bag and then spread the soaked wheat berries over the top of the soil so that the wheat berries are touching each other, but not overlapping. then we sprinkle some water over everything and cover them up for two days. to let them germinate. Then, we wait for nature to take it's course.

The plan seems to be to figure out how often we have to prepare more trays of germinated wheat berries to keep from running out of fresh wheatgrass. Neither one of us appear to be all that sure. The trick, as far as I'm concerned is to have more than enough rather than too little.

I sort of forgot when I ordered my juicer online that it's the Christmas shopping season. I have no idea about how long it will take before it shows up. I'm eager to get it and to start messing around making the various recipes of raw foods to make juice with. It's not a problem since my sister-in-law owns her own juicer and we can use that with no problems.

The sad thing today was that I got a call from a woman I went to high school with and even dated a couple of times. She was just too frenetic and bossy for me, and I had to cut her loose in a dramatic enough way to get her to accept that we'd never be a couple. Fortunately, she was able to find some guy she claims is perfect for her and she was married to him quickly before he caught on.

She told me right away that she didn't have a soul she could call and talk to any more, and demanded that I listen to her whine about her health problems. I was polite altogether too long. Well, not really, but like I said, she's bossy and inconsiderate, and not just with me. That's why she has no one to call.

I had to just tell her I wasn't gonna listen to her and hang up during her protests. I feel extremely fortunate she didn't call back and demand that I listen to her some more. I don't exactly hate being impolite. If she had ignored my obvious dislike of hearing her whine I might enjoy being brutal to her again, but, she didn't call back.

I don't believe she called me to torment me, she just doesn't care one whit if she did torment me, her need to jabber at me was more important to her than how I liked dealing with it. The worse I treat this woman the more she likes the rejection. Unfortunately, I'm just not a sadist. I've tried, but it don't get me off.

My encounters with this woman in the last ten years is proof positive for me that how one treats old people when they're young, is how young people will them them when they're old. Her father was a successful businessman who could afford to provide her with a fairly privileged lifestyle until he died. She was snooty and condescending to one and all, and then she lost everything, and thought that was the reason people avoided her. It wasn't. It was and still is her mouth. Yeah, I know I'm projecting, except that I never had nothing to lose.

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A Smidgen More Say So, If You Please...

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The fact of the matter is, as far as my new diet is concerned, that it's interesting to struggle to follow it. This morning on my way downstairs to brew my morning coffee I stopped by my ornamental kale plant, picked off the bottom leaf and began chewing it and masticating it and getting all the live juices I could manage.

Just now I returned from a walk out to the field where a farmer, perhaps my younger brother, planted about 10-15 acres of winter wheat or rye as a cover crop. On my way over to that field I saw that my sister-in-law was not home, so I wouldn't have her juicer available until she gets home. I couldn't know when that would be, but I wanted some more live juices.

The grass hadn't grown much since I picked enough Saturday afternoon to squeeze about two ounces of wheatgrass I shared with my sister-in-law. Well, it's her juicer, and we're kind of in this diet together. It's convenient for both of us. My brother is taking medicine that's about the pacemaker he received, and his doctor don't want him rocking the boat with some weirdo new-age diet. No blame.

When I got out to the field the grass was dotted with the remnants of the rain showers we've have on and off for a couple of days. I reached down and started pulling the grass blades off until I got a hand full and crammed into my mouth and began chewing. It tasted delicious. It tastes about how fresh mowed grass smells.

There was something very settling about going out in the morning and eating grass like a cow or other ruminant might. Perhaps thats why in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching it is written, "Care of the cow brings supreme good fortune."

It's pleasing to discover that following this diet has already cleared my sinuses to a large degree. This may have something to do with me just chewing my cud of fresh grass. The chewing motion may exercise the sinus areas around my mouth, loosen the phlegm, and cause it to move it on down the line.

The juicer I ordered may not get here in as reasonable an amount of time as I originally figured. I conveniently forgot that it's the Christmas shopping season. With any luck at all I'll get it before Christmas, but I don't have my hopes up. I sure thought about it this morning when I was chewing up that fresh grass with my front teeth. Getting the juice from the grass is the whole point, and that masticating juicer will do all the work for me. It's not hell getting old, just inconvenient.

Every time I think about cooking something nowadays I think about the fact that cooking food kills all the enzymes in the food. It's almost like I'm wasting time and money trying to get blood out of a turnip (but not if you have a good juicer).

I'm not getting enough bulk eating the raw vegetables, so I'm eating some cooked brown rice to simulate my old diet and satisfy the usual cravings for a full belly. My belly is big right now, but that's not the problem with not getting satisfaction from the wheatgrass diet. It's my stomach being bigger than it needs to be for the relatively small amount of product I'm putting in it.

I've just been over to the greenhouse to talk to my sister-in-law who I saw working over there. We're really trying to pump ourselves up to do this diet right. We both have plenty of personal motivation. She has high blood pressure and mild diabetes. She really has to be careful with her diet every day.

During out pep rally we finally realized one situation has to be there for us to discover for ourselves whether this diet will satisfy our health needs. We need to have a plentiful supply of wheatgrass to juice up and drink. That's what we need to make any sort of judgment at all.

Right now we have six flats of wheatgrass in varying stages of growth, and a quart jar of fresh wheat berries soaking to germinate. She has grown two flats recently and put them out on the sunny side of her house. Because of this recent experience she has a better idea of how much wheatgrass it will take for two of us to make all the juice we feel like drinking.

The seminal book for this wheatgrass diet (The Wheatgrass Book by Ann Wigmore) states that if a dieter is trying to correct some health problem they might need to drink as much as six ounces of juice or more a day.

I don't have a clue how much live wheatgrass it will take to get that much wheatgrass juice for two people, but it's probably gonna be more than I've figured so far. I like doing this. It seems to give me a feeling of having a little more control over how I look at the future.
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Another Rainy Day That Brings Clarity

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Yesterday was a sort of test for me with this new diet. The wheatgrass we planted has at least a few days before it's ready to be harvested and I didn't have any to eat. So, I started eating my potted plants. There! I've done it now! I've gone loopy. The end is near!

The end probably is near. I can't understand why living just to take medicine to live is any life at all. That's about all I do anymore. I get up and take my medicine, and then wait until sunset to take more medicine. I worry about whether I did take my medicine or not. I'd rather die horribly than to merely survive.

I'm not really worried about dying. I've done it before. I don't even worry about the pain of death. I've experienced horrible pain before. It's just that I have other fish to fry than to sit around waiting to take medicine for something I caused myself by my own neglect.

The potted plants I ate were ornamental kale and cabbage. I just bought the two plants I gathered the bottom leaves from. I have another ornamental kale plant I've had a few weeks. It's become a giant. I keep picking one leaf at a time from the bottom of it and eating it raw since before my sister-in-law influenced me to start using wheatgrass.

I only started thinking about using a juicer since she showed me how. It's because I've gotten so snaggle-toothed over the years that I haven't thought too much about eating raw food. I don't have any upper molars left in my mouth, and only three molars on the bottom. One of those seems like it's ready to die on me too. What a drag, man.

The absence of teeth to chew with hasn't been a source of worry for me. The way my mouth looks has crossed my mind. I've still got all my front teeth. One of the large ones right in front is chipped. It got cracked by one of Jerry Lee Lewis's body guards in a fight I didn't start, and took forty years to finally break off.

The dentist showed me he could fix it, and he did. The repair job keeps breaking. Each time he fixes it he takes a little more of the original tooth away. I stopped getting it done. That's what I'll eventually do with the medicine.

At least, that's the plan. There ain't no accounting for how I'll react to the pain. It can get to be too much, but I'm the only person on Earth who can know what I'm experiencing. If I explain what's going on the other has to interpret what I say or write, and try to understand by their own relationship with what pain they have experienced. They'll hear me say what they think they have experienced. Not.

I'm still taking the methotrexate, but I only have a two week supply. The doctor at the VA Hospital in Durham still hasn't renewed my old prescriptions. I won't use the new stuff he prescribed. I don't know for sure what a Mexican Standoff is, but I think we're sorta having one. Funny thing is, he's of Chinese descent and I'm about as WASPy as it gets. Thank God we're both Americans.

I think I'm already getting some good results from the diet. I was warned about what's happening. My sister-in-law said that I might start divesting myself of lots of mucus. The way it's showing up is in my sinuses. I can really tell it's working when I go to bed at night and when I wake up and when I meditate. I can breath. My sinuses do appear to be clearing up. Oh, joy! ....Really!

Those aforementioned times is when I have to turn my attention to my stuffed sinuses, and that's the problem. They're the very times I do not need to have stuffed up sinuses. I have to do something out of the ordinary to clear them up so I can go to sleep and when I sit to practice meditation. I have to clear them first, and that part of it has put me off from doing it at times.

Literally, when my breathing is right, I can go places. By that I mean that if I can control my breathing I can leave my body and go astral traveling, and if my sinuses are stopped up I can't be bothered. At the moment I can abandon my body to do that, my body goes through the same transition it does when I get there in a sensory deprivation float tank, and all the lactic acid in my muscles is instantly converted to something less demanding of my attention.

It really seemed like when I got my priorities straight I started having problems with my health, so I might as well say that my health problems caused me to get my priorities straight. That seems rather odd doesn't it. Now I'm hoping that with my priorities straight I can address my health problems.

I read in Ann Bigmore's book called The Wheatgrass Book that her hair turned back to it's natural color. I don't particularly want that to happen. I've let my beard and hair grow for a couple of months now, and I'm beginning to like how it looks.

The computer I bought has a built-in camera and I finally learned how to take pictures of myself. It's quite simple. It even does movies. That makes it simple to make podcasts if I wanna. What I didn't expect was for the mail program to take one of those pics I took and insert it into my e-mails without telling me it was doing it. It was unexpected, and yet I don't know if I want to change it.
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Commitment?

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I jumped off the fence today and bought myself an electric masticating juicer. I ordered from the company that makes these gadgets, and it should be here in a few days by UPS ground. Buying this juicer at this time of the year when most all my domestic bills and taxes come due made me real nervous. I keep thinking I probably should have bought the manual hand-turn juicer and paid a lot less.

My buying this juicer is a commitment for me. I could have continued to use my sister-in-law's manual juicer when and if she was at home, at least until I gave myself more time to try this wheatgrass diet for long enough to be sure I might feel strong about it, but this is not about something borrowed, something blue. This is about the food I eat everyday.

I decided I needed to own my own juicer to be able to use it whenever or however I wanted to. I needed to have my own say so about wot's what when it comes to something to eat. I needed my own juicer that I keep at my house to do with as I pleased. After I became certain about that, then for me it was just a matter of whether I wanted a manual juicer or an electrically-driven one.

I questioned my sister-in-law about her manual juicer to find out how strongly she felt about it being a manual juicer as opposed to having one that was driven by an electric motor. She grinned at me and told me she could get along just fine with an electric juicer. She had the juicer she had because it had been given to her as a gift from my brother.

In my web search to find out more about what kind of juicer I might wanna buy one of the articles provided a link to a youtube video. When the linked video was over it displayed links to other videos about juicers, i watched a few that way, and then decided to do a youtube search to see how many of them were available. Hundreds! Maybe thousands! I must have viewed about 20-30 youtube videos about the various types and brands of juicers to get a good idea of what kind of juicer to buy.

The biggest problem that the various types of juicers seem to encounter is how much oxidation of whatever fruits and vegetables being juiced the machines themselves cause. I've never studied much about wheatgrass juicing and the problems to avoid before. The documentation I've used suggests that oxidation is not a good thing if you're going after the freshest, most beneficial juice. The authors I read pretty much all agreed that the longer you take from harvesting the wheatgrass to when you process it through the juicer, the less of the good stuff you'll get.

Apparently the enzymes start dying pretty quick after the plant is harvested, and they're dying mostly because of oxidation. You can see the result of oxidation when you bite into an apple and it immediately starts turning brown. From what I've read and listened to, that's why wheatgrass has to be juiced and consumed in a short time.

It seems like oxidation has a lot to do with the type of juicer one chooses to buy. There are two basic types, and they're used generally for different purposes. Centrifugal juicers are fast and easy to use, but they generate heat (which kills enzymes) and there high speed motors areates the plant material while its chopping it up with titanium blades.

Slinging fruits and vegetables around at 10,000 rpms to separate the chlorophyl from the cellulose whips up the extracted juice, and produces a froth. The froth is the result of mixing air with the wheatgrass juice and thus initiates oxidation which also kills the enzymes.

Centrifugal juicers sling the juice out of the blade chopped plants you feed into it. It's not the best design for wheatgrass and leafy vegetable like kale, collards and cabbage. They require a different mechanical design that don't whip up a froth and don't generate heat during the juicing process. The juicer that seems to work best for the wheatgrass and leafy vegetables perform a sort of cold press methodology by using a rotating graduated screw design that turns slows and masticates the plant material through compacting pressure. That's the kind I bought.

I actually bought some enzyme pills in the past. I must have unconsciously realized I needed something to help break down the junk food I kept cramming into my digestive system. After I started taking them I got some strange impressions from some critical article on the internet, and I sorta backed off of using those pills.

The problem I had was that I had no way of knowing what's wot with the dosages. I couldn't find any information that made me trust my health to it. I guess that's why the information I read about drinking wheatgrass juice made sense to me. Supposedly a natural sensitivity to when enough is enow becomes apparent as the diet self-regulates it's needs and the amount of juice needed to get the job done.

I guess I'm still not totally sure this diet will work out for me. How could I know after only a week? I worry about the money I spent on the juicer because things are getting a little tight financially, but I think I'll save enough money on food to justify my investment. Have I ever mentioned that I'm a miser?

When I was driving to mail my car insurance I saw a field of green grass that looked like somebody had planted a cover crop. Acres and acres of it. Since we've only gotten started planting wheat grass and it's gonna be a week or more before it grows enough to harvest I figured I'd get my scissors and a plastic bag and go out and harvest some of this cover crop grass.

I don't know whether the grass is wheat grass or rye grass. Its usually rye grass in this neck of the woods. The grass was just a couple of inches high, so it took a while to gather enough to get enough to make a couple ounces of grass juice, I got tired of messing with it, and I didn't exactly have permission from the proprietor to harvest, so I stopped before I got as much as I intended and went to share my booty with the juicer owner. We each got about a jigger of juice by the time all of it was consumed.

I had to make sure my sister-in-law was gonna be home before I harvested the grass in order to be sure I could get it into the juicer in fifteen minutes of cutting it. That's why I figured it would be the smartest thing to do to buy my own juicer. If I run into some living green stuff I wanna make juice out of I won't have to wait.

The colonoscopy that was performed on me a few months ago really helped me to know where I'm at with that. The fact that my next appointment to get another one is nineteen years from the last one was a pretty good sign I may not die from a pain in the ass. My heart has been checked out pretty good too. That leads me to believe that it's my diet that's causing me the arthritis and bone problems.

I don't know if I'll follow the living plants or raw food diet exclusively. It might come to that, but I think the problems I'm having has to do with not getting the enzymes I need to digest the food I eat, in the the food I eat.

So far as I can reason it out, what really needs to happen is for me to use wheatgrass juice to get what I need, particularly living enzymes, to digest whatever else I put in my body without taking the enzymes from other parts of my body to digest the new stuff.

There are other things at play, of course, things I may or may not know about this way of life yet, but the way I figure it, I got nothing but this one body to lose presently, and that's gonna happen no matter what I do. They'll make more. Some won't be ready. I'll trick 'em out of their new body, and things will keep on keeping on.

Tonight will be the coldest night of the year in this area. It's supposed to get a few degrees below the freezing mark here in the coastal plains, but not too much further inland up toward the capitol it's supposed to be a hard killing frost. We've been lucky that hasn't happened yet.

The grass around my house is still green, but the new fig tree I planted finally lost the two leaves it kept alive this past summer. The original branches that came with the plant died last winter, and I didn't think the plant would put up another leafing stem. It actually put up two stems. One of them died, and the remaining one settled down for the summer with just those two really healthy leaves.

The two leaves gave me a little hope that the fig plant will take root where I planted it and eventually thrive. I pretended all last summer that those two leaves were all the root system needed to acclimate to the soil I planted it in and establish at least stronger root ball.

My old fig tree has that kind of established system. I've found one inch thick roots from it twenty feet from the mother plant itself. For the last two seasons I've pruned back branches as thick as my leg and it's come back stronger each spring.

This tree came from a cutting that's said to have been in my father's side of the family for generations. Makes sense to me. Three of my four siblings have their own fig tree. It's a common brown fig variety. It could have come from anywhere. I kind of act like it's a member of the family. It'll be here long after I'm dead and gone, but it won't have my own family for a family. They live in another part of the world.
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Grazing

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For the first time I actually remember I drank a couple of ounces of wheatgrass juice within fifteen minutes of cutting it. I shouldn't have been surprised. I didn't exactly know with aforethought what it would taste like. But, after I'd swished it around in my mouth for a while and then swallowed, I realized it tastes just like... grass.

I like the hype I'm reading about employing a wheatgrass diet. I like the description of chlorophyl as liquid sunshine. Most of all, however, what I like about this deal is that I can easily grow this stuff all year long and have green food that I know where it comes from.

My sister-in-law is my partner in crime with this diet. She actually found out about it from her father who just hours before his death, when she asked him if there was anything she could get him, he said he wished he had some wheatgrass to drink. I think she is treating that incident as a sort of his last advice to her.

We planted a couple of trays of wheatgrass berries she had been soaking for a day or so. She showed me how to put about an inch of soil in the bottom of the tray and then cover it with the soaked wheatgrass berries. Then, we cover the trays up. They're supposed to be covered for three days, then uncovered to the light for a week before you can start harvesting.

It's been two and a half days, so I've been eager to see how the berries are developing. I walked over to my brothers house and asked if it was time to uncover the trays yet. Me and my brother sat and talked for a while. He seemed happy I was getting interested in participating in this diet.

One of the parts of the process that concerned me was the cost of a juicer. The ones I've seen on the internet are not cheap. I could buy a nice computer or a new digital TV for $700. While I was over at their house I asked what kind of juicer they had. They got a nice cash flow situation going much, much better than me. I figured she had the expensive kind.

I was delighted to be informed that the juicer my brother had found for her was operated manually, and she told me it could be had for about $100. Whew! I can live with that. Then, she offered to cut some of the wheatgrass she had growing outside on the sunny side of her house, and show me how the juicer worked, and feed me my first jigger of juice.

She got a stainless steel bowl she used to put the wheatgrass in and some scissors, and we went outside to where she had it growing. I was surprised to see it because it looked just like the grass the commercial grass grower scoop off the top of the ground to plant on new lawns.

That's when I realized it was in that form because she had grown the grass in a shallow tray with one inch of topsoil in it, so when the wheatgrass took root and she removed it from the tray to lay on top of the ground by her house, it had to look like that.

For some reason I had thought that she would use all the grass that grew in a tray of fresh wheatgrass for each juicing, but I was wrong. She cut the fresh wheat grass close to the ground to juice it, and then let it grow back out to have the regrowth to cut again. This is looking easier to do as we go along.

The most convenient aspect of this for doing this is they have a fairly large greenhouse that's located almost exactly halfway between my house and their house. The wheat grass can be started in the trays and then laid out on the ground inside the green house where it can grow at a maximum rate until it peters out, and then the sod pad can be rooted up and replaced with a newly grown tray full.

This juicing diet is a blessing for a snaggletoothed old man who never took much care of his teeth anyway. Particularly when I realized the problems I've been have with my mouth has to do with the partial denture I use because I ain't got no upper chewing teeth left. The partial is held together with titanium, and that titanium has rubbed my tongue raw where I use it to keep pushing the partial plate into place.

I'm very happy to have figured that out. It's been very uncomfortable and inconvenient to have to cater to what I eat. Spicy food and alcohol burn like crazy. I think if I quit using the denture for a while it ought to heal up. If it doesn't, then I got other troubles. What a drag, man.
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