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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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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
