I've Got A Few

☭
For so-me it's the only way to fly. I nearly died of shame in Reno, Nevada once, among other places I also went to die of something, about nothing at all. God knows what. What died there in Reno was my first marriage. 

I was sad to death during that ti-me. The weird thing was what made my me sad. It wasn't about the woman or child nor what I'd dreamed sadness was about or for. Especially the for word. As in Being-for-myself vs Being-for-the-other. What is life for?

Who am I doing physical life again for? I wuz tricked. I could have sworn I'd figured it out and matriculated on to other dimensions or planes of ex-is-tense, but ti-me and again I wake up here with a familiar yearning for nicotine, caffeine, and an overwhelming curiosity about and need for something warm and moist. Moist? Moist? Spirits gnow nothing of elements like water. Moist almost always means I've co-me-d again with the senses. What a drag, man. 

In Reno I wept for the person my parents and caretakers attempted to make me into for their sake. It was the self-same person my first wife married too. I am had good reason for experiencing sadness. A significant other in these people's lives died because of them, for them, and it won't no pretty picture.

They all felt cheated. Why would they not? It took a long time for them to get around to saying so. They had only been able to say it to who they'd wanted me to be. He died. That boy. He won't there for them no more. It's a cold day in hell. Talk to the hand. 

I came here to die from the second wife. I knew the score even though I pretended to hide it from myself. Gnowing that I already know is the bane of my existence. I am is so hard to lie to. It jumps through all kinds of hoops to indicate otherwise. Finally, however, every day, the chickens co-me ho-me to roost.
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Wasted Days

☪
I guess I spent quality time with my youngest brother and his twin grandsons. They up for the weekend to give their parents a break, and then my brother brought them over here to give his wife a break. She's had problems with high blood pressure since they got back from India. Stress, I reckon, jet lag and all that jazz. I guess they figure because I'm family I oughta be ecstatic to see their wunderkin, but I had to put my writing off for four or five hours and everything else I had planned for the afternoon, so not really. What they consider a waste of time is life-giving to me.

I've been having to take several naps a day because of the self-injected prescription drugs I'm putting into my body. That's a big change from my earlier life when it was difficult for me to nap at all during the day time. I have another appointment on March 8th, and I'm preying for something less fatiguing.
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Oh, The Joy!

❦
It's feeling like I'm doing something for myself that matters about this crazy vegetarian diet I've followed since the first of December last year. My only verboten is eating meat. Anything else goes. That's a lotta wiggle room.

I just fixed lunch by going over to my brother's greenhouse and harvesting some wheatgrass, and kale and cabbage leafs. I brought them back to my masticating juicer and rinsed them pretty good in my new favorite stainless steel bowl. I love stainless steel. I used to love welding stainless steel pipes. They melt like butter. Lovely TIG welding.

When I the above ingredients ready to be juiced I prepared three apples by washing them and then cutting them up with my new apple corer and slicer. It has a hole for the core of the apples and five blades to segment the apple into six neat pieces that fit handily into the juicer in one fell swoop. Then, I took a vegetable brush and cleaned a nice fat carrot to top the whole thing off.

I had three kinds of apples to juice with the wheatgrass and vegetables. The Granny Smith is a great apple for juicing because it's very firm and has a lotta juice in it, but the Red Delicious apples my sister-in-law left here for me to use while they went to India has taught me a thing or two.

It's the way the juicer removes the juice from the pulp of the stuff I put in it that gave me the idea. The Red Delicious (or other soft eating apples) don't go through the juicer like the harder Granny Smith apples. They seem to crumble inside the juicer, if "crumble" evokes the image I'm attempt to draw with words.

The end result is that the softer apples make a sort of foamy juice rather than the clear, cider-like apple juice like you might find for sale on the roadside in season. Between the two types of apples and the other ingredients it looks like and has the physical consistency of a smoothie. I doubt if I've drank as many as 4-5 smoothies in my life ere now, but the concoction I put together is very good. Especially good compared to pure wheatgrass juice. I may find even tastier combinations as I go along.

Constitutionally, I'm as regular as I've been... maybe forever. That's a big deal with the methotrexate I just took an hour or so ago. The side effect is some fairly severe nausea that forces me to only eat what I can keep down. Very unpleasant experience, but I experience a lotta pain in my joints if I don't take my medicine.

I'm not so willing to face the prospect of taking some sort of powerful drugs to deal with some very specific pain for the rest of my life. I will do it. My tolerance for pain has always been high because of the way I've lived my life, but these days that same high tolerance is like the ol' grey mare. She ain't what she used to be.

Maybe this vegetarian diet will help. Maybe it won't. But, I gotta do something that suggests there is a less painful way to conduct my affairs. What if I live to be as old as my father was when he died totally free of pain? That would be eighteen more years of progressively worse pain. Oh, the joy... eh?
♠

Grandparents I Never Knew Well

☀
In a documentary I watched last night, Yo Yo Ma's father reputedly stated that it takes three generations of concerned parents in order to produce a musical genius in the family tree. In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching it is written, "... three days before, three days after." How revealing could it be for some scholarly sort of person to research to find out if for three generations after the musical genius evolved, the genie upped and left that lucky family.

This causes me to think of my grandfather. My father's father. He died when I was around two years old and he was 74. My father was his youngest child by a long shot. I don't know the truth because they never talked about it around me, but my uncle, the oldest child, eighteen years older than my father, may have been more of a father figure to my father than their real father. My great-grandfather, however, was a little more known, but he died a broken man not long after he returned from the final battles at Petersburg, Virginia at the end of the Civil War.

One thing is for sure. My immediate ancestors weren't trying to produce a musical genius like with the Yo Yo Ma family. With my question being: What was their focus, if any at all? I came along at the end of an era. Everything my ancestors tried to build up got torn down by acts of nature or of God. Depending on what a person buys hope with.

My father seems to have exaggerated the importance of his forefathers. My older sister and my youngest brother, both Aquarians, dispelled by their research the grandness of the "old home place" and the general store and cotton gin my grandfather supposed operated. My sister got caught up in the genealogy bug, and my brother has a penchant for collecting family photographs. Between them, a different image than the one my father painted came to light.

My great-grandfather did serve in the Civil War, but as a private, not an officer. Not even a Sergeant. He was a magistrate and county registrar, not an Alabama Supreme Court Judge as had been whispered. He apparently did own a two-thousand acre cotton plantation and a couple of hundred slaves. I don't know what it might mean if I knew or had known the facts.

My father may not have made these claims himself as I remember, but he didn't really go to the trouble to correct our (my) impressions. Almost the entire time he stayed up here in North Carolina where he only intended to stay temporarily until the Great Depression ended. He openly meant to go back to Mississippi and take over the family farm his parents had managed to hold on to, and said so on many occasions.

It never happened. In the end it couldn't happen. His father died, and that left everything in his mother's name. She secretly instructed my father's siblings to sell the farm to anybody but my father. She didn't want him to come back to Mississippi once he ever got out of what must have been for her a living hell. He was her baby boy and she protected him even against his wishes. Too bad she died before I knew her.

I don't know the truth. I don't even remember what she looked like. I was still a baby when she died. The whole Civil War/Reconstruction/Boll weevil/ Great Depression sequence appeared to have caused her to lose faith in Mississippi ever becoming a good place to raise a family. What she did broke my father's heart, but it probably best for his family. I saw what happened. I was born there. The place is sadly jinxed and a hard row to hoe.
♒

Fishing Boats And Genealogy

☯
I worked on some fishing boats. Shrimp boats mostly, but some charter boats, and I was in the Navy for six years, and most of that time was stationed on a ship. I was raised within fifty miles of the ocean and closer. It's not like I particularly like boats and water, they're just a part of my life that I haven't rejected yet. I haven't spent any time on the ocean for years now. I guess that part of my life is over.

Lots of the various parts of my life are over. Marriage. Wives. Children. All gone. No blame. I was never a very competent lover, father, or husband. Things just never went easy. I liked being with those people. I even liked being married. Most of the problems I had with it was about money. I have never been very ambitious about money. Damned shame too.

About the only other activity associated with working to get money that fired me up was when I learned to weld pipes. Welding is actually the only-est trade I ever mastered, but once I did I moved on. In my opinion, anybody who masters anything can master about anything else if there's time.

What I started to write about was how little all that means to me now. I'm a little surprised that all my old war stories have taken their place in the past, and I don't write about them as much as I did earlier. I thought my stories were the basis of my individuality, but I was wrong. When I finally realized what the true basis of my individuality rested upon, my adventure stories paled by comparison.

Another part of my life was more subtle in the way it occupied the time it did in my contemplation of my life. I've spent about three or maybe four hours today watch the black history genealogy shows today. I'm not black, and never have been that I know of, but my ancestors owned black slaves, and fought in the Civil War to keep them. I came along about the time that particular era in history would come to a turnaround.

I watched these shows even though it was my ancestors who were the villains. At least I was able to hear the stories from the other side of the tale. I know a lot more about the Reconstruction period that took place after the war. There were handed-down family stories about what happened then.

I wish I have the curiosity and dedication to learn as much as possible about my family's genealogy. I know myself pretty well, though, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to try any harder to find out about it in the future than I've tried in the past. It might be interesting, but the history I'm actually interested in goes back for billions of years, and it was revealed to me already. Reaching for what I find there is all I have ti-me for any more.
☸

The Amulet Charms Of The Root Doctor

♜
For some reason it seems sad around here. It probably has to do with the dis-glorification of my not-so-illustrious ancestors, and how little I know about them in order to come to their defense. I'm watching a TV documentary featuring this Harvard professor named Gates who does ancestry research.

He apparently has two programs that PBS simultaneously runs one after the other continuously (like all the other programs PBS runs and reruns redundantly). One of the two programs features the use of DNA research of a person's ancestry, and the other seems aimed at the recovery of the information of direct historical significance through available public records and private documents like personal letters.

The DNA research done by this professor (who graciously reveals that his own research about himself shows that he's at least half-white) also features other races besides blacks. People like the noted actress Meryl Streep. But, the research for his other TV program is done by rambling through old court house and census records by professional, academically trained researchers, is all about black history. The reactions of the famous and noteworthy blacks he does this research for are basis of his TV program. They seem genuinely moved and sometime emotionally shocked by what his research reveals about their ancestors.

These black stars like Morgan Freeman and Tina Turner seem to wonder why they never knew these things about their family background. It's not so strange to me. I don't know those kinds of things about my own familial ancestors. I speculate not many people do. It seems to take a special kind of drive or interest plus a gritty determination to wade through all the documentation to do the roots search. If Doctor Gates chose me as a subject for his program and showed me the literal documents or verified photos he comes up with for his featured clients, I'd be just as fascinated as the recipients of his research appear to be.

That's not gonna happen. The research Gates does to make the point of his TV show is that practically all the research on the black people on his show go back to slavery, and my ancestors were the slave-holders, and some right prideful sons of bitches at that. We lost the war. Only the victors hold war crime trials.

The show I saw this morning happened because I turned the TV on to catch the weather while I reviewed the contents of my e-mail Inbox. There was no content in my Inbox except for this crazy guy who tries to make silk purses out of sow's ears. The other crazy people who insists their designs of silk purses are mo' bettah than his apparently haven't been let out of their cages yet.

So, instead of answering non-existent e-mail I started watching this genealogy program and witnessing my ancestors being demonized (probably rightfully so in the moral sense of other cultures/victims). One of this guy's points was a major part of the slavery his ancestors experienced was that it forced them to move around from owner to owner with no official recognition of their personal relationships, and they had no sense of history or permanence.

Watching his program caused me to realize I was sort of in the same predicament when it came to feeling as though I didn't have my own place in the world. My natal family moved incessantly when I was a kid. So was the boll weevil. All God's chilluns got shoes, and those shoes were made for walking, but for walking while looking for a ho-me. Forty acres and a mule could give a man roots.

One of the guys they researched resulted in an apparently little known or publicized, but recorded for all time facts. Practically all the Native American Indian tribes kept slaves. Black slaves. Black slaves that didn't get freed by the Emancipation Act because it didn't apply to Indian tribes protected by treaty and reservations. They still don't.

Chickasaw Indians owned this guy's black ancestors as slaves and they kept them as slaves on into the twentieth century because they had sovereignty to do it. Just like they have the sovereignty to open and run gambling casinos.

This makes sense to me in an odd sort of way. Slavery during this period of time was legal over most of the entire face of the Earth, and not just with my agrarian, Jim Crow ancestors. Slavery is still legal or at least tolerated in many places in the world or so I understand. I ain't researching that to find out. My individual understanding or opinionated conclusions about large social movements is minuscule at best, and I am is apparently intends to keep it that way.

I'm merely wondering if the War Between The States was a world-wide effort to stem the tide of slavery everywhere. Like, for example, as a procedural step of evolution in general. Maybe like what happened that brought about apartheid and eventual freedom in South Africa in a way. People have to refuse to be slaves or it just goes on and on.

It doesn't seem to stop on it's own. That's practically stating a claim that slavery is a spiritual entity with it's own docetic hierarchy. I had to stop myself from using my Southern upbringing to enslave my ex-wives and children. The marriage contract itself practically guaranteed my eventual behavior as my parent's child. I can't be in a marital relationship without that person ruling the roost.

The fact that what I was raised as a child to become such an adult is an abomination and an insult to God as exemplified by this rude saying in the Gospel of Thomas:

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

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

It was having to abandon the persona my parents would be pleased to claim that drove me to commit myself to the insane asylum to find out for myself if I was crazy or not. To be the docetic Christ's disciple that inveigled it's way into my body and my life I had to form my own persona around that wot hated it's mother and father. In effect, I had to crucify the person their parental decisions were designed to shape me into, which was definitely not my own idea of myself. I'm pissed off at God for forcing me to decide for-myself instead of Him..
♛

Alfalfa Sandwiches And Cheap Mountain Burgundy

♝
Incredible! The temperature reached normal for this time of the year for the second time this winter. I even have the outside door open. It's 61° (16.111 C) and so sunny it's actually bright outside. This doesn't bode well for the phenomenologists who claim the Earth is getting warmer because of carbonized heat.

It doesn't matter if the glaciers disappear and the dinosaurs die. They didn't have houses and air conditioning. Humans do. It doesn't matter if the other animals die off. We have each other. Homo sapiens always turn to cannibalism when the going gets rough. Just like the other species. How does getting a good education stop the great unwashed from eating you when they get hungry and roam the Earth looking for tender meat to eat?

Sprouts apparently don't grow so fast when the ambient temps are not amenable to the process. I only heat the one bedroom that has my computer in it in my house, and don't heat that room after I go to bed. Since I've gathered the jars and the screen lids and a fairly large sampling of sprouting seeds, I gotta do it to see if I can get it to happen for me like it happens for the people with the youtube videos.

As a beginner and newbie at sprouting, I've proceeded to line up about 6 wide-mouth quart jars that have a couple of tablespoons of seeds in each of them. I soaked them all overnight, poured that soaking water out, rinsed them thoroughly with fresh water, and then drained them to sit and germinate in a sunny window.

The lentil seeds I set to sprouting about a week ago are not really developing as fast as I've been led to believe they would be. I've been particularly influence by the youtube videos that demonstrated what needs to happen to grow sprouts. There were a number of videos taken of how the sprouting happens in slow motion.

The video on sprouting lentils I watched showed that dumping the sprouts with the hulls sticking out like little wings into a bowl of tepid water, and the hulls would separate and float to the top where they could easily be removed. I put them in the water, but the hulls stuck to the sprouts. I drained them again, put them back in the screen covered quart jar, and hope they'll grow some more and I can get them hulls off more easily.

I bought a ready-made container of alfalfa sprouts at the grocery store basically to see as a model for what the seeds I'm trying to sprout should look like when enough is enow. When I removed the plastic top and grabbed some of the sprouts to taste them, they filled the container up more solidly than I thought they would. I expected them to be more flimsy.

The only way I could think of to eat these alfalfa sprouts was to make a sandwich with whole grain bread. I swabbed some mayonnaise on the bread, placed a neat pile of sprouts on the bread and took a bite. They tasted real good. I was a little surprised as how crisp they were for chewing. They didn't break down with a couple of chews, but I had to chew them like real food to make them palatable enough swallow.

Later, as I returned my focus to how the sprouts were faring in my belly, I realized that the one sprout sandwich gave me a pleasant feeling of being full that lasted a couple of hours. That's very satisfying to me. I got lousy eating habits. I just shovel whatever food I got into my belly until it feel stuffed, and stop. Not having to eat so much to get that feeling works for me.
♛

The Sign Taurus And Magnesium

⁂
The places on my fingers where I cut the tip of the thumb and index finger on my right hand has about healed up. There is still a small scab on the thumb, but it isn't bothering me much now. Now, if the hangnail on the same hand will heal up I'll be a happier man. Playing the piano and hitting that sore spot on the keys can be very painful.

Since I write about my daily life here I can't not write about the pain I experience 7/24 now. It's certainly a consideration in writing. Rheumatoid arthritis is a mofo. My future doesn't look bright. The medicine I've been transferred to might be doing something to the disease, but it's doing absolutely nothing for the symptoms of the disease.

The diet I've been following is doing zip-shit for me too. If it was helping I wouldn't be hurting so persistently. There'd be a break once in a while. The pain-killers might actually kill the pain for a change.

There has to be something positive to write about. That positive is magnesium and what it's doing for the constipation I experience as a side-effect of the prescription drugs I'm taking by the handful. To be fair, most of the "pills" I take are vitamin and mineral supplements.

Magnesium is the main ingredient in Milk Of Magnesia. That's why it is a positive for me. Too much or too little magnesium in my body has negative results. I'm trying to balance it out so that being full of shit doesn't make me crazy. Why am I always the last to know?

The first magnesium supplement pills I bought worked as well as I could have hoped for as far as regulating my bowel movements. I followed the dosage advice that I should take about as much magnesium by milligram as how much calcium I take.

I've been prescribed 600 mg of calcium twice a day. I get them from the VA Hospital when I order them over the internet. That's the biggest improvement for dealing with a government bureaucracy that has come down the pike ever since I've been using their services. Getting my prescriptions filled online saves everybody a lotta trouble.

That's 1200 mg of calcium I take a day for all the osteo-whatever problems I've been diagnosed with. According to the formula I decided arbitrarily to follow in dosing myself with a magnesium supplement it means I should take 1200 mg of magnesium. I haven't been taking that much magnesium. I hadn't done the numbers until now.

Even at the dosage I've been taking I haven't experienced diarrhea, but I've been what felt like close a couple of times. I must be dosing at about the right level and that's very promising. I've experienced specifically defined events where being full of shit (constipated) brought misfortune in it's train. A couple of times, extreme misfortune.

I honestly believe I developed the arthritis and bone problems they say I have because of my diet and toilet issues. That's not to say that I don't have a genetic propensity for it to happen.

To be or not to be constipated, for me, that's frequently been the question. I haven't always lived a lifestyle that made a designated toilet available to me or the privacy to use it when I needed it to be there.

Another positive result from using the magnesium oxide supplement pills has to do with leg cramps at night. I've just this moment decided that arthritis is a type of bone cramp. That might seem nutty until I think about how porous bones can be, and porous bones can have cramps just like muscles can.

Remember my disclaimer. I'm not trying to tell the truth here. I'm exploring all sorts of possibilities. Members of species homo sapiens has to search for possibilities that only could be so because of the species flaw that prevents them from realizing their own possibilities in real time.

The contemplation of my life is about these not so obvious possibilities. It's why I have to be alone with myself so often. Maybe I created a species flaw for homo sapiens in order to paradoxically force them into accepting a true need for living a life of no blame.
※

Knowing What I Am Is Gnows

❝
Maybe what I'm attempting to write about is the lack of satisfaction gained from studying to learn something I already gnow. I don't always know what I gnow. I gnow what I need to know only when I gnow it. The best way to describe it is to take into consideration the dynamic involved with how the various quotes and sayings that come to mind and mean certain things only upon certain situations specific to the quoted words or sayings.

It's sort of like the History button on my web browser. I don't have to consciously keep up with where I've surfed to previously. The browser is programmed to remember and I don't need to. All I need to remember is that if for some reason or the other I wanna return to a web site I visited earlier, I can activate the History folder and double-click the previous locations into being for any reason that enchants me.

Some homo sapiens can invoke the attributes of all the living beings they were previous to the animal they've made themself into presently. Any and all of the previous incarnations they've made themselves into before. The others that don't do it can't do it because they've never remembered being those other entities.

This can happen very quickly. That's why the digital revolution is making this possible for more humans than ever before. Operating computers can assist a human into realizing that processes that ordinarily take a long time to do by hand can be done in a relatively short period of time digitally.

I was watching a Nova program in which this scientist was working the gene pool mojo that's possible because all the genes have been recorded now. She talked about how to find out what the genetic differences between a human and a chimpanzee could take months to scan and record all the genomes involved to find out just a couple of years ago, but the same work could be done by the supercomputer she worked with in one afternoon.

What I'm trying to explain is that if a person was to get into a bar fight and was outnumbered 10-1 by a room full of oversized goons, this would be a really good time to recall having been a gorilla with all it's primitive strength in order to fight the good fight.

I'm claiming that just about any member of the homo sapiens species could do that. I only claiming that it possible, but in order for a human in a bar fight with a bunch of goons to reclaim the strength it had back when it was a gorilla, and realize consciously thats where it's strength to fight the goons came from, it would have to get the picture that was going on with the same approximate speed of a supercomputer.

For an ordinary human to re-cog-nize it's strength was recalled from when it had previously incarnated as a gorilla for a few million years it would have to "see" that extemporaneous image not as stored abstract constructs but as a gorilla would "see" the need for it to act as if it were being attacked by ten other gorillas, and that would be the basis for even a gorilla to have that kind of strength.

That sort of inspiration doesn't last long. It only "appears" in a form that be recognized by a homo sapiens who has a faster brain than a supercomputer. But, for the normal homo sapiens to look for something it's been taught to ignore, they would have to accept things can happen at that speed first, and only then could they anticipate the possibility that it could happen through them.

I really do have an end in mind as I search for the words and metaphors I need to describe something I came into by stealth. I'm seriously considering buying 8 gigabytes of DRAM to add to the 4 gigabytes this iMac came with. It will hold 16 gigabytes of DRAM.

Having 12 gigabytes of DRAM installed will allow this computer to run about as fast as it's capable of running. I wanna learn to "see" fast enough to anticipate what happens next in order for me to believe what happens at least that fast in the dreamtime. I already know I'm not looking for these events to use words and abstract constructions to invoke behavior that transpired previous to the invention of words by homo sapiens.

This is totally involved with what I'm claiming is a species flaw. The inability of a human being to realize it's own possibles in real time. I suspect this flaw or defect can be undone by refusing to be limited to the beauty of abstract constructs. The experience of gnosis brings this result within reach, but with the example of the digital age, gnosis may not be necessary. That's a good thang. '-)
❞

How Can One Learn What They Already Gnow?

仝
It's my intention to write about the possibility that what humans attempt to teach other humans about is exactly what they wanna know about themselves, but how can that be? How can we use the other to teach ourselves what we already know, but can't use that gnosis for-ourselves, as if profound self-understanding?

Could it be possible that what we project of ourselves upon the other is simultaneously a rejection of the claim that what we project is us instead of them. Projection/rejection?

Do these two terms represent a polarity? Is projection/rejection different ends of the sa-me spectrum. I su-spect so. I've never seen the term anti-jection used to oppose pro-jection. Besides, what does that have to do with ectoplasm? pro-ject; re-ject; spect-rum; su-spect; ecto-anything. Ecto?

From the Mac OS dictionary.app:

ecto-
combining form
outer; external; on the outside (used commonly in scientific terms) : ectoderm | ectoparasite.
ORIGIN from Greek ektos ‘outside.’

Odd. The first thing that came to mind as I wrote and cut and pasted above was the term "inject". Would inject mean to turn something external into something internal? How about interject? The "j" seems extraneous. Jecto? No, jecto seems to be a jet engine in Spanish.

Confused already? That's what I do sometime to get my current insight over the hump with some injection or glimmer of hope that evokes a new interest. Sometime I'm able to go from the ridiculous to the sublime in one fell swoop by unbecoming (un-be-co-me-ing) rituals of great antiquity.

Ben came over and interrupted my writing, but I continued the rap I never got to write down because of his demand for attention. I did take the time to show him the youtube video of the Ukrainian woman sand painting, and it affected him in just the manner I thought it would. He's already figuring how he's gonna do it himself. No blame.

I only appear to have one basic ongoing project presently. My aim is to continuously reach for my inner voice as my goto place of reference. It's a tedious quest. That world is there for me as I need it and never any other time. That dictates my behavior to some degree. If it is there for-me, then it's the cat's meow, and if it isn't there for-me I have to accept that I bought into some red herring that taking me further and further away from my home on the range.

The claim I act like is so, about blaming my daily failures on not having much of a future left, because of my age, is one of those false trails. It's like a path with no heart. Which is why the whole point of my current endeavors is to reach for what I need in the specious present from my ongoing relationship with an ancient past mostly in which there were no words.

Homo sapiens apparently don't remember the time before they began speaking. I watched it time and again doing hypnosis and helping some subject to relive their birthing experience. I used a hypnotic patter to help them regress back to being a baby again.

Part of the deal with that would be to stop at some recognizable point along the way like a birthday party and have them relive significant occasions to prepare for the end game. A lotta that has to do with helping them realize they're in a deep hypnotic state.

When I might have the subject recall various significant events like remembering the presents they received at their sixth birthday party, they automagically realize that they couldn't recall these events without being in a hypnotic trance.

They have to realize they can't enter a subjective hypnotic state and maintain a conscious presence that would ask the questions they need to answer to find out where they're at with how real it can be to them to re-experience something they thought was dead and gone.

That's the basic reason the species flaw dictates that they can't know their own possibilities in real time. Mostly. That would require not a dual awareness of being in a hypnotic trance and simultaneously ex-is in an awareness of what questions need to be asked in order for them to recall a ti-me (tie-to-me) when the memores they acquired wasn't stored in abstract constructions accessed through woids.

That said, that's exactly what needed to be there and was there for me to experience my remembering vision. Enlightenment of this order is what can happen when and if a dual state of being can be cognated simultaneously.

Specifically, in this case, the facticity of entering a hypnotic state of being, and another state of being that is able to critic the behavior of the other simultaneous state of being. This dual state of duality is needed to fetch a third state of being that contains the first two simultaneous states of being.

The secret of this to me seems to be consistent with a recent realization is that to recognize the two separate realities of being in a hypnotic, receptive state of being simultaneously with another state of being which can objectively observe the behavior of it's doppelganger state of being produces the third state of being extemporaneously.

I hope you're keeping up, because I've already gone further with this than I thought I could. The third state of being can be self-generated to fulfill the role played by the entity of the third state or it can be another homo sapien who consciously interjects themselves as a role player. A hypnotist willing to play God for the other's sake will do quite nicely.

What's in a nayme? What's in a not me? Does playing God for the other do something to the me that stops it from going ho-me again? Playing God for-the-other is about as unselfish as it gets. As most martyrs could attest and often have in their suicide notes they didn't know would turn out to be just that. "I have a dream... I have been to the promised land...".

Martin Luther King, Jr. was such a martyr in my own time. Rosa Parks was not a martyr because she didn't sacrifice her life for the cause. Just like a woman, however, she started that mess that ended well for some, and not for others.
々

Wizardry

仝
As I watched this youtube video I became an instant convert to the type of sand-painting as it appears in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

Here's another, and this guy is said to be the source from which the performer in the first video got the idea of doing it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCEB4v3o-50

Watching the young woman create the images she brought forth made me think of all the sand paintings I've read about an seen in respect to Navajo and Tibetan sand paintings.

The info I have been exposed to about sand painting is that it's extemporaneously done in the full realization that what's being created will be swept away soon enow either deliberately by the artist or by the erosion of ti-me.

David sent me this link. He is one of the few master painters I know personally, and he was the first one I thought about when I realized what was going on. Freaking Capricorns are always trying to write they stuff in stone, when they should have been writing it in sand all along.

When I write that I don't they should stop doing the stuff they're doing, but rather doing sand-painting to access their own ideas about whats in there that they might wanna paint. I think it might just be a great way for any artistic type person to meditate. It's the only way David would meditate for any reason, and if he knew I thought it was a good idea (even though he did because he sent it to me) he'd never do it out of pure spite. Now, he can't do it. I've ruined his day. '-)

Yeah, I know I'm projecting and that I oughta take my own advice. I've already begun figuring out how to build the "light box" she's using to amaze me with. I have lots of large glass panes that could be used for this purpose. If I were a decent friend at all I'd build one for every artist friend I have and take it to their house. Especially musicians.

The way the linked artists swept away each scenario they spun into being even before they reached a defined end point was the most interesting aspect of this medium for me. Isn't that how life itself is? It also resolves the paradox of daily living by wiping away the past as it creates it.

Writing stuff in the same style as sand painting is what I attempt to do here in a vague way. I'm not trying to tell the truth or to say that any particular reference I use to imply a shadowy point is the God's own truth. I turn around and contradict myself as soon as I realize I've tried to work that mojo. Denial is the most powerful force I am is aware of, but I have to work it or it leaves no trace or clue that it's pulling strings behind the curtain. If I stop denying unity I lose consciousness and am no longer awake!

々

Already Wishing For Spring

仝

I've taken to sleeping more in the last week or so. Part of it has to do with the prescription drugs I'm using. Sometime sleeping is all there seems left to do to while the ti-me away. It's mostly because of the current weather in my opinion, but above all it's for all the reasons winter has always been winter. I've never liked cold weather. As I've aged I like it even less. It reminds me of my upcoming death, and I don't have a clue what to think about that nearing eventuality.

Winter is the reason why Florida and points south are as popular with the old people as they are. I appear to have made a decision to spend the winters of my youth in Florida rather than the last winters of my dotage. Several times in the past I've gone to Florida specifically to miss one wintery forecast that I wanted to avoid at all costs . It didn't work for me though. When I did that it got cold in Florida too. There is no worse place to be than Florida when it gets cold there too.

There was lots of talk about a decade ago. The changing of the millennium was the talk of the town. Some prophesied the end of the world in 2001. Writing the expression "2010" just now made me think of those times in the 90's when there was some concern that the world was gonna end, and if not then, it would end in 2012 by the ancient Mayan calendar, so the talk has returned. I might not still be here when that rolls around, but I don't believe the world will end or that humans can predict such a thing.

All throughout my life there have been various self-styled prophets who have made claims that the world would end on various occasions. Obviously it has not. I don't know why it hasn't. I have concluded there are two distinctly possible ways it will happen. Either by astroids hitting the Earth or by nuclear holocaust.

There is a scene in my mind's eye from my childhood that I re-member when I think about the success of homo sapiens here on this particular planet at this particular phase of life. In my imagination I "see" my siblings and myself in the back yard of this one house we lived in, just before we moved to this town because of my father's job.

It was/is a house we called "the yellow house" because that's what color it was painted. It was one of the more modern houses we lived in during the time I was a kid. The specific images living in that house conjures, however, are of my family (minus my father) in the back yard of the yellow house washing the family's clothes. We used very primitive tools for washing clothes that seem old as the hills by today's standards.

We had a large cast iron pot we built an open fire around to heat the water. We used a cast iron pump with a thick leather valve to pump water out of the ground for drinking and washing both our clothes and our bodies. Since I was the oldest boy a lot of this physical work was done by me. At that age I didn't think of what I did as work. I was a real gullible child who could easily believe what I was doing was 'for the family'.

There had to be water to cut the yellow lye soap into small pieces to clean the clothes, and there had to be more water pumped and heated to rinse the clothes. All of the pumping and poking and stirring the clothes in the water and on scrub boards. After that, the water had to be changed to rinse the soapy clothes out. It was a lotta work for a family of seven to have clean clothes to wear to school.

My father's clothes all had to be ironed. Like the white shirts he wore a tie with. He was usually one of the only male teachers at the schools he taught at. He was visibly relieved to come home and remove the starched shirt with the stiff neck he'd worn all day.

When I watch the documentaries on TV about primitive cultures all over the world still washing clothes by hand I truly feel for them. By the time we moved to this town where most of my family still lives the automatic clothes washing machines had been invented and between those machines and the electric refrigerators a lot of the work had been reduced to a fairly easy routine.

The arrival of my puberty turned my parents into slave-drivers for the same family chores I'd gladly done before. I don't remember there being any sort of ulterior motive to ruin my parent's lives. One day I was a happy kid doing my share of the chores around the family home, and the next day they were all a bunch of inconsiderate assholes for making me do all that work. Just that fast. Boom!

The house I live in now is practically a mansion compared to the houses I grew up in, and yet it's still called a rathole by my visitors. They don't appear to have a clue what their ancestors went through before it came to this. I bet the people in Haiti would be pleased as punch to live in a rat hole house like mine.

I got running water, inside plumbing, a clothes washing machine AND a dryer, an electric stove, and a refrigerator to keep food from rotting. A bed to sleep in, and a rather nice down comforter that keeps me warm on cold nights like we're having now. We never seemed to have enough covers to keep me warm in the winter when I was a kid.

Although some people think I live like a bum in this still incomplete edifice I call home, all I have to do to let them slide is remember how it was back in the "good ol' days", and I can forgive all the remarks about how slovenly I live in the present. I keep my body washed and warm, that's as far as I'm willing to go to please haughty people who never been a whole day in their life without food or shelter.

Even the primitive way I lived as a child can't compare to how I lived on the road as a bum, but I feel guilty if I find myself owning more than my natal family had when I was a child. Nobody should have to live like I did as a homeless bum. I don't know many people who have. I have to let a lotta things pass without being duped. "Be passerby."

The sprouting I've been trying to bring into my diet is a slow process. I've had some lentils in the jar to let them sprout for a week now, and they're just beginning to emerge a little. The stainless steel screen lids I paid altogether too much for don't fit the regular quart jars I have. They're designed for wide-mouth jars. I still don't have any wide-mouth jars. Maybe I'll be able to get a routine going when I do get those jars that will cause this sprouting business to prove it's worth to me.

⸭

Polarized Dual Fates

※

Its discouraging to see the weather report and the temperature for the next seven days is not going even up to 50° F (10° C) during the daytime. What a drag, man. It's been that way for a couple of weeks now. Sure, I knew it's winter, but the average temperature for this time of the year around this part of the country is over 50°. We usually get a little break from the cold weather for at least one or two days a week. Not with this purported Earth temperature rising. I've looked forward to that.

I went for a longer walk than usual this morning. Believe it or not I did it for my feet's sake. My feet are getting to be a problem like my hands are. Troublesome. I have to walk a ways before they loosen up and start to feel normal. Of course, normal is not what it used to be, and never has been.

I pulled the band-aids off my fingers where I cut them on the mandoline slicer. The cuts seem healed enough now that I don't need to cover them up any more. those fingers really feel strange when I type or play my piano. The band-aids kept me from feeling the keys on both keyboards. It's just too bad my hands are dying and becoming useless.

Having to deal with the pain in my hands makes me wonder about how my not being able to use them so proficiently as in the past will affect the eye/hand coordination in my brain. Maybe that will be the first place the senility shows up. I probably shouldn't have paid so much attention to the articles the neurologists wrote about the results of people having their brains damaged by accidents and such.

Rainey came by for a visit last night. That man has a lot on his plate these days. His ex-wife and the mother of his children died suddenly from a blood vessel popping in her brain. It was totally unexpected and unprepared for. His ex-wife was her mother's only child. It's probably a good thing she and her husband are rich since they don't have any other children to look out for them in their dotage. She's bringing law suit after law suit his way.

I kind of know how that feels. I have three children, but they don't even know me that well. Surely not well enough to empathize with the problems of old age. I oughta done mo' bettah at being married with children that I did. No blame. My natal astrology chart suggested it would happen this way.

I was a little surprised that Rainey didn't understand my rap about projection the way I thought he would. I guess it's difficult for anyone to understand why I'm not so invested in "truth" the way others are, and the way I was until a decade or so ago. I stopped trying to tell the truth when I changed the settings here to not allow comments on what I write. As Rainey pointed out, what I'm doing here is a monologue, not a two-way conversation.

Maybe what he don't take into consideration about my outlook on projection is that I don't believe anybody is what they project on other people. What a person accuses other people of being like is themselves, but they themselves aren't themselves either. They aren't what they label themselves to be any more than anybody else they label is. People aren't abstract constructs even if they "think" they are.

I don't know if I wanna write about this too much. I have a tendency to be-co-me what I write about for a while. By thought alone I've made myself into all possible things, but as a homo sapiens I'm also possessed by the same innate flaw other homo sapiens are conflicted by, the fact that none of us can realize our own subjective possibilities in real ti-me.

I may have begun formulating this notion when I became aware of the cognitive principle of projection. That happened during another vision I had around the same time as when I experienced my remembering vision. Projection, however, wasn't an invention of mine like the species flaw is. I write "is" because I don't know of any body else making this particular claim, and I'm a fool to claim it myself.

That means I have to defend that claim, and I don't particularly wanna. Whenever I use the term "defend" these days I seem to immediately reference the Jung quote about what religion is:

"Religion is a defense against the experience of God." ~ C. G. Jung

http://www.minnesotareads.com/2009/04/the-power-of-myth/

What really catches my attention in this quote is how Jung states "defense against". That phrasing pushes me toward considering any thoughts I express defensively indicates what "God" is to me. It doesn't specify any particular form or fashion "God" has to fulfill in order for me to defend against it. It seems like to me it's pointing out that whatever I defend myself again is what I'm acting like God is by that criteria.

So, how or why am I defending a claim I invented as if it is of God to me, but not so much necessarily to anyone else? Or, within their ability to comprehend if they're infatuated with so-me conventional point of view? Why are they disabled by their relationship with the species flaw anymore than I am is?

It's useless or futile for me to attempt to explain this species flaw or even to defend it's facticity against people whose only unconscious purpose for living is procreation pure and simple. Some people try to make life better for their spawn as if it's what's good for the rest of the homo sapiens also, and they'll kill you if you don't agree with them.

I don't know if I really believe evolution leads anywhere. Sure, the process is ongoing. It probably should mean that because it ex-is-ts then it does have some noble cause, but I suspect evolution happens because of the nature of the beast, and will go on and on until the beast evolution produces implodes in upon itself leaving only the void, and nothing around anymore to make something of it.

※

The Breath Of Life

✜

The most haunting aspect of being possessed by rheumatoid arthritis is the potential loss of the skillful use of my thumbs. James Whitmore played a role in a prison movie of which it was stated of his character in regard to his upcoming parole, "In here he serves a useful purpose, but out there he'll be just another old man with bad hands."

I didn't know at the time I saw the movie that I would become "just another old man with bad hands." I am that now. Having a pretty good idea of what's coming down the pike doesn't make it any easier to deal with scenes in the nature shows on TV that keep pointing to the real difference between men and monkeys is man's opposable thumbs. Twice in the last couple of days I've found myself changing channels rather than be reminded that not being able to grip the simplest things like tools to cook with is a severe disadvantage in pretending to be a cock of the walk.

I really anticipated Saturday arriving so I could take a dose of methotrexate to help me manage the pain in my wrists and hands. It's not like I have to use my hands to encounter the pain. They hurt all the time now day and night. I took the pills around lunch yesterday and they're not helping that much. Somehow I knew they wouldn't.

Practicing the scales on my digital piano has become a hit or miss event when it comes to daily practice. Sometime using my hands to do that seems to loosen them up and they feel better for a while. I don't think using my hands even though it can be painful is going to affect the eventually outcome.

I have other problems with my fingers presently that has nothing to do with arthritis. I was using my mandolin slicer to slice some onions to go in this weird dish I was attempting to prepare. I got down close to the nub of the onions I was holding with my fingers, and instead of reaching for the little plastic doodad that's designed to hold the last of what's being sliced, I went one stroke too many and sliced off a hunk of skin on the thumb and forefinger of my right hand.

These kinds of cuts take forever to heal even in normal times, but this prescription drugs I'm taking lowers my immune system such that it take even longer than normal to heal. Never have I become more tersely aware that the skin covering of living things is a separate organ all by itself.

My skin is an organ just like my heart or liver or kidneys or my eyes. I can look at my skin. I have to use a mirror, and because I'm fairly blind I can't see the details like I used to. My skin as an indicator of my general health ain't looking that good. It's probably an indicator of what my internal organs look like too.

Maybe it's because I sit down a lot that sitting down to meditation is not as meaningful for me as it was in the past. Since I use breathing as a focus for my meditation practice it's my breath that tells me the most effective way of meditation for me currently.

My breath is telling me that my walking meditation is more effective than sitting, but recently I'm realizing that I get a lot out of just standing erect and paying attention to my breath in that posture is working well for me too. I've worked up a routine for my breathing while I bend at the waist in a circle. I self-observe while doing this and watch how bending in different directions impinges on my breath.

It usually takes a while to bend backwards from standing erect. I figure that's due to the fact that sitting forces me to bend forward for long periods of time when I'm at my computer. Bending backwards stretches my stomach muscles that habitually stay tense when I'm sitting.

Bending backwards to stretch my stomach and frontal torso muscles almost always requires me to let go mentally of whatever I've been concentrating on previously. I have to sort of feel my way through the backwards stretch and consciously let go of tight spots. Most of the time I do this stretch it's the muscles in the lowest part of my stomach that take the longest to unwind.

The muscles there in the lowest part of my stomach seem directly associated with the perineum. When I can relax one area or the other, the other area appears to let go also. I practice a visualization technique to get this to happen... hmm... artificially.

For me there is a holy spot in the area of my perineum. Sometime it lights up all of it's own accord without any notice it's gonna happen. This is the most delightful way for it to notify me consciously that my root chakra is alive and kicking. The other was is for me to trick it into radiating enough energy for me to locate that holy spot specifically.

I approach this through observing my breath. The most ticklish part of this routine or ritual is where I observe my breath from. In this particular exercise I'm using visualization to place my attention in the area I remember the holy place from the last time I was consciously there.

The perineum is what I was taught to call "the taint". It ain't this and it ain't that... it's neither... it's the taint. In my male body the perineum and potentially the real holy spot is somewhere at the root of the stalk of my penis and in front of my rectum.

My point is that each time I attempt to engage this holy spot I have to imagine it first to bring the focus of my attention to the general area I logically discern it to be. Then, I have to move the focus of my attention to that imagined place, and direct my breathing from there.

I have to locate the real holy spot each time I attempt to meditate from the holy spot by imagining its there first, then directing my breathing from the spot I imagine, and it's from my simultaneous observation of my breath and feeling for the holy spot that I can make the final adjustment to connect my breath and the holy spot.

Why? Because once I make that connection then it's plain to "see" that the decision to initiate each breath I take is decided by wot's happening within the holy spot. That's the real reason it's recognized as the holy of holies is that the breath of life resides there.

Once I "feel" my way to the real holy spot from imagining it to be there a real physical sensation emerges that's easy to consciously return to for a while. I don't know because I've never studied meditation in any formal way, but I sorta think that's the determining factor of how often one would meditate. When the physical sensation that emerges from being tricked into revealing itself begins to wane and it take more time to locate it easily, then it's time to refocus by meditating in the normal manner.

I'm apparently unable to discern what another's normal way of meditating is. Even if they explain it to me. I still hear what I think they're saying, when they explain it to me, and can only make judgment of my own behavior in them. That's cool, but whatta I need them for if I can only "see" me?

✙

Snow And Broke Cameras

♏

We got about 4-5 inches of snow. Light, fluffy snow that began melting at the crack of down. It didn't stick to the roads so much. When I finally went out for a drive to see how the local neighborhoods looked dressed in white it was still fairly pristine, but by the time I got home again the melting had intruded in the innocence the original snowfall inspired.

It was snowing before I went to bed so I knew the ground would be covered when I got up to look. When I opened the outside door on the second floor that leads out on to a small deck designed to accommodate the outside stairs the first thing I noticed was how the snow had accumulated so neatly on top of the rail banisters. I could immediately see how much snow had accumulated by the sharp delineation of the puffy snow on top of the six-inch planks that capped the deck rails.

For once I was moved to get out my camera and take some pictures. I replaced the batteries with some fresh charged ones and started snapping away. I walked out in the snow-covered yard and took some pictures of the house. I went outside from the first floor just so the outside stairs wouldn't have any boot prints on the fresh snow.

I don't know how to get the camera to work right. It's got lots of buttons, but they're all gobbledegook to me. I'm exactly the kind of un-nerdy bumbler who just wants things to work without me having to figure out how to get them to do what they can do. I don't need so much choice. Not about cameras. I'm the person point and shoot was made for.

I did get the camera to act like it does when it does take pictures that are automatically focused. It's really a wizard at doing that. I've proved to myself by jiggling the camera all around while snapping off shots that I can't for all practical purposes take a bad photograph technically. That's when things are going right.

When I downloaded the uncertain photos into my computer the processing program asked if I wanted to delete the photos from my camera, and I clicked "Yes". That didn't work out too good. There were no picture data in the download, so I got nothing.

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

I wrote about buying this camera back when I bought it. I remember writing at the time it was an expensive frolic. Taking photographs has never rung my bell. It's like some weird process of trying to capture time that doesn't appeal to me, yet, other processes about time do capture my fancy.

The stainless steel screened wide-mouth jar lids I ordered through Amazon got here today. I intend to use them for growing sprouts. It caught me off-guard when I realized the jars I'm currently using aren't wide-mouth jars.

I guess I have a choice. I can either cut the screens down to the regular quart jars I have or try to find some wide-mouth jars to use with the lids I got. Finding wide-mouth jars might prove difficult. It's the wrong season of the year for the stores to have canning supplies in stock.

My sprout growing venture seems awkward. It's not falling into place the way I like for my projects to happen. I've germinated some black beans and they didn't look right, so I put them in a planting tray with an inch of top soil. They grew like crazy after they got started good, but they're the green leaf that grows after the black beans germinated, not sprouts.

The oily, hulled sunflower see I soaked to sprout didn't look much like the sprouts I've seen around. I've since discovered that I need to use unhulled sunflower seeds for sprouting. If they're hulled they need to be put in a tray with potting soil. So, I put the hulled seeds I've been trying to sprout in a tray and after one night they already look like they're growing.

♍

Sprouting, Sprouting, O'er The Ocean Blue

♉

My memories are stored in my emotions. That's why I had to fight to the death to keep my emotions for my own person. However much emotional (e-mo-shun-all) energy (the more of me than you can see) gets dulled or squashed in me is how much memory I lose in that process.

I had to fight to keep from being manipulated through my emotions by charismatics, and at the sa-me ti-me I had hold on to what they used to use me as if were everything the zombies are not. Zombies aren't brain-dead, they're emotionally dead, and can never rise to the occasion where empathy can make thangs right.

Writing about emotions is not the sa-me as responding or not emotionally. I use writing to explore drifting thoughts to see what I can mine from them. First, I have to capture those drifting thoughts with words. Once that happens I can contemplate their deeper me-and-thee-ing-s (meanings). It's a dangerous task. The fact that there has to be both a me and a thee to have meaning is somewhat of a paradox, and aggravating.

I have other aggravations presently. Trying to type with band-aids on my thumb and index finger on my right hand, On the very tips of them where I strike the keys on the keyboard. I cut the tips of those fingers while slicing up some potatoes on my fairly new mandolin(e) slicer. I thought I was being fairly cautious. Not cautious enough.

The first time I became aware of mandolin or mandoline slicers was just before I bought this one. At first I thought the term "mandolin" was a brand name or a play on the musical instrument. It was only when I did a web search that I discovered the term mandolin indicates a type of slicer that a lot of manufacturers use. Here's a link that shows a bunch of different brands of mandoline slicers:

http://www.creativecookware.com/stainless_mandolins.htm?gclid=CJKM7JLb6p8CFc8N5QodVkdCeA

It was definitely my own stupidity that I sliced off a quarter inch bit of skin on my index finger and simultaneously sliced a half inch hunk of skin part-way off my thumb. I didn't use the included implement to hold the last part of a medium sized onion to slice that had gone to sprout. What a dumb-ass I can be at times.

Cooking is not my forte. No matter what my friends and neighbors try to teach me about it I mess it up. Mostly, I don't do what they tell me often. I intend to, but in the heat of the kitchen I lose my mind and end up with the same ol'/same ol' barely edible... hmmm... food. It keeps me alive, and not very alive at that. I blame all my illnesses on my lousy diet.

I just got an unexpected call from my youngest brother. He and his wife are back from India, and very nearly home from the Raleigh/Durham airport. He told me they would be gone for two weeks, and it's only been a week and a half. I'm very happy they made it back from India. I probably won't hear about it for a couple of days. He said they were totally exhausted, and were going straight to bed. No blame.

The greenhouse my brother built for his wife has been there for a few years. I'm not sure how long it's been there, but it's not been used as much as was sorta planned in the beginning. I looked out for the plants while they were gone, and tried to make sure the heater was fired up on the nights the temperature got ten degrees below freezing.

The last couple of nights it got that cold I went over and lit the stove, but the next morning the fire was out. The first night I figure the stove had a thermostat and had turned itself off when the sun came out and heated the greenhouse in the morning light. Last night I lit the pilot light and turned the volume knob up a bit, and the flame lit, but didn't seem strong.

The fire was out when I checked it this morning, so I looked to see if there was natural gas in the tank outside. Out! I called the gas company, and they told me my brother's account was on a "will call" basis, so they would come out today and fill it up. I'm glad my brother is back. I don't like messing with other people's business affairs. It wasn't a big deal. Both of us went to school with the guy who owns the gas company.

The sun flower seeds I'm sprouting are slowly coming out into sprouts. It took lots longer than I thought. It takes some planning to make the sprouting thing happen. It's not complicated from what I've been reading online and from watching the Youtube videos on sprouting.

The seeds have to be soaked for a while to get them started to germinating, and then they have to be rinsed with fresh water a couple of times a day until they're fully sprouted. I have no idea how long that takes. The real problem is that various seeds take different lengths of time to become the edible product that I can store in the refrigerator once they mature.

I don't know what the final product looks like because I've never done this myself before. From what I've read so far the different plant seeds take different amounts of time to become what you eat. I germinated some black beans I bought at the grocery store.

They didn't bust out into sprouts fast enough to please me, so I put them in a tray of potting soil just like I do the wheatberries, and they've grown into small plants that are tasty. Yesterday I used my scissors to harvest them and I included a loose handful of them in my wheatgrass juicing. They added a bolder taste to the usually sweet grass.

I was at the grocery store again yesterday and bought a small bag of lentil seeds to germinate into sprouts. I don't particularly like lentil beans themselves, but the sprouts are reputed to taste pretty good. I got some of them soaking since last night to see if they'll sprout.

I ordered ten quart jar lids and a sample pack of a variety of sprouting seeds from Amazon that have stainless steel screens instead of the normal sealing lids to do sprouts in. The lid only cost $1.30 a piece, but the shipping costs was even more that the cost of the lids. The seed sampler costs $34 and had separate shipping costs.

Between the lids that come from one company partnering with Amazon, and the seeds that come from a different Amazon partner the whole deal cost over $60. That's ridiculous. The lids are a one-time deal (as of yet), but the seeds are possibly a constant reorder and the shipping costs for seeds are over the top for me. There are at least ten different kinds of seeds, however, and I should be able to tell from this sample kit what sprouts might appeal to me.

I checked my marking post to see when I quit eating meat. It was the first day of December of 2008. A little over two months. I'm doing this diet to see if it might help with the arthritis, but it might be a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. If nothing else, I've learned a lot about magnesium.

♋

The Winter That Snowed Washington

☫

The wind started howling early this morning and woke me up. I finally went back to sleep, but the wind was still blowing strong when I got up, and has blown hard all day long without a break. It's pretty cool too, but none of that compares to what's happening up in the mountains and in Virginia and the Northeast beyond Washington, D.C., I feel their pain.

Year after year I seem more sure that if there is a hell, that hell is cold, not hot. Living in a hell where it would be equivalent to the 95 degree/95% humidity summers we have here on the coastal plains might be just about as punishing. I came close to dying from getting caught in a freak snow storm once, and it made a distinct impression on me.

The deepest impression might have been the ecstagony of getting warm again. That episode surely contributed to the rheumatoid arthritis that plagues me now. It's the only pain I've experienced that approaches the agony I experienced in that bath house shower.

I had turned blue from the cold up on top of what was supposed to be a scenic view of Yosemite Valley. When I got to the bath house that was open and was warm inside and had hot water in the showers I couldn't stand the touch of warm water.

I kept turning the adjustment knob on the shower to a cooler setting and sticking my hand or my blue feet under the stream of water to see if I could get under it and warm my body up, but before I could get under it I had cut all the hot water off.

The bath house was at about the same elevation as the Park Lodge I found out the next morning, but that elevation was at least 8-9000 feet high, and the cold water in the shower was very cold, yet I could barely stand putting a foot, then a calf, and then my knee under the shower until I could stand under the shower stream.

I don't know why I didn't scream at the pain I was experiencing. Sometime I've thought that it might have been because there was no one around to hear me. That seems sort of stupid now, but I was so totally focused on surviving the pain I didn't need to scream. It might have been the straw on the camel's back that would cause me to collapse in shock.

It took me all night to gradually turn the hot water valve on. I think I wept, but I don't know how I would have any tears left to cry. Just before I jumped off the mountain to what I fully expected to be my death I sat in the snow and wept profoundly at the the irrefutable approach of death.

My life didn't pass before me in those dark moments. I felt a deep and abiding sense of failure. Not the failure I felt in Reno, Nevada after I'd left my first wife and our child. The failure I wept for there beside the Truckee River was the failure of my parent's child's endeavors.

I was inside the closing year of my first Saturn Return, and I was sad to death that I had failed them. They never got over it nor forgave me. No blame. That's what happens when some homo sapiens turn thirty. I didn't last long living in Reno. About four months altogether. Another woman ran me outta town when I didn't measure up.

It was on my return trip back toward North Carolina from Reno that I was convinced by my friend Jerry who now lived in Montgomery, Alabama convinced me that I oughta at least commit myself to an asylum and see if they could help me outta my complete funk. I guess I hit the bottom in Reno. I was convinced I had become someone not worth loving.

Reno - 1969

Weep and moan, weep and moan,
and cry to one's own pity.
To live this life 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.

Laugh and cry, laugh and cry,
sometimes I'm in the middle.
The crux of feeling lie in between,
and I end up second fiddle.

The sounds of being second
sounded resoundly in my mind,
and the flaw of my competing
was not common in me or kind.

Sing and shout, sing and shout,
in the rhyme of speculation
I see myself a crazy man,
and swoon in adulation.

Playing tunes of yesteryear,
reciting psalms of tribulation
I sing the songs of childhood
and prey for restoration.

fmp
Edited today.

☪

The Lousy Fate Of Eating My Own Cooking

☀

I was drinking cheap burgundy with a friend the other night and found myself using the term "going autistic" as a way of saying how it is to go into a musical flow. I mean to use the term in a very positive manner. Without the intent of being derogative, but falling into a musical flow is a bit short of using abstract constructs as a manner of making music. The way I intend to use this expression is to equate it with gnosis. The player reaches for the Akashic records to find a tune that pleases them.

There is a syndrome that acts as the passageway to get there that must be observed for me to find my way to it. there are features I have to recognize and give due credit to in order for everything to fall into place for the music to happen.

Getting drunk on burgundy is never good for me the next day. It never has been, but with these powerful prescription drugs I'm swallowing by the handful its quite a bit worse. When I'm inebriated I act like it doesn't matter if I die from it or not, but the next morning is a nightmare. I went to bed for two days to get over it.

My piano scale practice has suffered from the pain I'm experiencing. Both from the ineffectiveness of the self-injected vaccine Humira and that weekend hangover. I don't know exactly what the cause of the problem I have with my finger tips, but I have the middle finger and thumb on my right hand that has an open wound that won't heal.

The lesions are located at the front edge of the cuticle. The medicine I'm taking lowers my immune system, and little nicks and scratches take forever to heal. Weeks for a simple scratch I get from working out in the yard. If I accidentally bump either of these sore spots the pain is excruciating for longer than it seems like it normally takes me to cope.

Still, and again, I don't think I'm much worse off than other people my age. I have my ailments, and all ailments can be a hassle, but I've been around, I know other people who have it much worse than me. The fact that I'm getting around on my own two feet and taking care of my own business is actually pretty good. I've always been somewhat of a whiner anyway, so the whining I'm doing now is nothing unusual. It doesn't help me with having something interesting to write about.

The weather has become a more critical concern since my youngest brother and his wife went to India and left me to feed their dogs and take care of their greenhouse. It's not a tough assignment. The dogs think they own my house too, so we're friendly and I couldn't let them go hungry for any reason.

The only thing I have to do at the greenhouse is to water the plants and make sure the stove is turned on if the temperatures drop into the low twenties (-5 C) or so. Above that it doesn't freeze inside the greenhouse. There must be a thermostat connected with the stove, but I haven't located it. I don't have the documentation that came with it. After my other brother's hired hand showed me how to light the pilot light I haven't had any problems

I've been pretty consistent in preparing and drinking the wheatgrass juice everyday. I couldn't do it when I had the hangover. God! I was ill. It would have been just fine if I'd died Saturday morning. I still get a little nauseated while I'm preparing the wheatgrass juice. The book my sister-in-law gave me to read about this says that a soul has to adjust to imbibing it at first, but I'm don't seem to be adjusting all that well.

Magnesium seems to be the whole point of drinking wheatgrass juice. That and trace minerals. Having remembered what my father told me about why some of his cows went down from a lack of magnesium in the grass they ate really brought the possibility of me suffering a magnesium deficiency loomed in front of me for contemplation.

I still haven't eaten any meat since I went vegetarian. I think it's a couple of months now. I wrote down the date next to the date I stopped smoking tobacco on a post downstairs. I'll have to check it out to see how I'm doing. I knew I was a lousy cook even when I was eating meat, but now my amateurish efforts to feed myself are worse than ever.

I fixed some crap last night that not only tasted horrible, but it burned hell outta my tongue to boot. I sliced up a couple of fresh potatoes with my mandolin slicer (what a whiz-bang wonderful tool that is) and was gonna just fry some hash browns with lots of salt and pepper. I flavored them with some cheap curry powder. It didn't work, so I added some spicy Mexican tomato stuff that had plenty of hot peppers. Ugh...

I need to win the lottery so I can hire a cook. That's all. I've already traveled the world as much as my curiosity has demanded. I'd just like to enjoy my last refuge of pleasure with some dignity. That's the problem with cooking for myself. It's just not dignified to have to eat that crap.

☼

Aye, And There's The Rub

凹

My brother called me from New Delhi, India yesterday using Skype, and he sounded better from half-way around the world than next door. Absolutely amazing. I'm sort of regret we didn't switch over to a video call to see how clear that might be. Some spam saying I had a Windows virus showed up on my desktop when we hung up. Damn, I'm glad I dumped Windows.

I've talked to a lady in Australia over Skype a few times a few years ago and it was not nearly as clear as this conversation from about the same distance away as India. I don't know why or care. If this is an indication of how communications with the rest of the world will improve in the future I don't know what that means. Six billion people each with their own iPad? Whaaaaa?

It's in the news this morning that Google is working on a technology that will translate one language to another in real time. As I understand it, if this technology comes to fruition then anybody speaking any of the major language groups will be able to communicate with anybody speaking another language, and will hear the other in their own language.

I've been suspicious of the carrying on involved with the Thomas group for the last year or so. I've always been felix in the group and never written under another name, but that doesn't seem to be true for some other members and particularly the moderators.

I use the term "moderators" today instead of "moderator" because apparently one of the moderators who supposedly left the group didn't leave at all, but began writing under a new identity. That's fine with me, but I dislike the subterfuge when it happens at that level. I don't have any say so about what transpires in this group, but I'm happy there's more than one moderator, which seems to make the group into a dictatorship of some sort, and puts all the responsibility on the lady taking the hit.

I had unsubscribed from the group a while back, but was asked to rejoin the group by a moderator who herself apparently left the group, but with the secrecy and underhandedness practiced inside this group it's very difficult to tell if she actually left the group or is still there under some other handle.

I held off taking the methotrexate my regular VA doctor prescribed for me when I was not enchanted with the super-expensive miracle drug. It simply did not work to alleviate the pain I experience with the rheumatoid arthritis. I have been in such pain that it's difficult to hold the toilet paper to wipe my butt.

Finally, when it got so bad I could barely climb up and down my stairs I reach for the methotrexate and took six pills of it which was the initial amount my first rheumatologist prescribed for me. It's helped a lot. It's another month before I have another appointment with the specialists up at the Durham VA. It doesn't do any good to attempt to communicate with them. The doctor doesn't answer my e-mails I sent to the address he provided me with, and the nurses lie to cover for the doctor. No blame, they get their government check whether they respond to me or not.

I may be dealing with another level of denial that I'll never recuperate from this disease. It threatens not to kill me, but to make living unbearable. If I live as long as my father I'll have eighteen years of degeneration before I croak, and be senile either. Great! Just great! All I can hope for is to get a horrible disease that will kill me. '-)

函

As If I Hadn't Noticed

𠚐

Recently, when I wrote about how I was raised to adulthood in the style of the Southern aristocracy, I commented that all I had to do to continue to live in that fashion would be to move to some part of the world where what I was taught to think was the proper way to be still was that way and it still is. If I was young and in my prime I could still move to a place like that, but now in my dotage I'd have to have a huge windfall to change my place of residence. Mostly due to the nature of my healthcare.

I am no longer an adventurer who stands up and walks out the door with nothing to sustain me but wit and grit. My body won't tolerate it anymore, and it punishes any idea that I get about moving it to a less comfortable place to be with pain. If I don't do what my body dictates, it hurts until I take steps to change it's attitude. The king is dead.

An academic video I found in Google Video about consciousness featured a talk by this science guy about birds. He seemed concerned about the very point of the song birds singing their songs. Why does the song bird sing? Basically, this expert submitted, it was through singing that the male song bird demonstrated for the female his fitness to be the male progenitor of her eggs.

It was pointed out by this fellow, who had literally spent his adult life studying why song birds sing (why would he not?) that the physical condition of a specific singer bird could be detected by analyzing it's song. How long it could sing at what velocity, for instance, would indicate the kind of stamina it would be transferring to their potential off-spring. It seemed to matter if the male invented some of it's song. That would display it had creative genes to offer the female. Why would I disagree, it worked for me even though I was faking.

Maybe I heard this sentence in a song, "Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone." When I submitted myself to having a vasectomy performed upon me, it was sorta like the same reason I committed myself to the insane asylum. I wanted to know by experience what kind of results I'd get for myself rather than having to depend on my interpretation of somebody else's opinion.

No sane reason was necessary. I just wanted to know. I expected the people who claimed to love me to understand that I didn't need their blessing. For someone to suggest that I might wanna wait until my next life or the one after that to give it a whirl was an indicator of real insanity for me. This is it for me. This life is all I have in the specious present, and if there's anything I need a physical body to accomplish to do, then I gotta do what I can now.

Getting old and developing rheumatoid arthritis is not the result of how moral or immoral my outlook is or has been. It doesn't have anything to do with whether I pushed the envelope by my odd commitments. It might have something to do with how many times I've slept without cover on the bare ground, but I doubt it. Illness is a limit imposed from the inside. As opposed to having a car wreck which imposes limits from the outside.

I've written my thoughts since I was a little boy. Up until I got online during my fifties I wrote most of my thoughts in poetry, and I did my best to come as close to revealing what they really were without actually doing it. That was the fun of it for me. Little did I know that there was no way in hell I could ever reveal the intent of my thoughts no matter if I tried to, instead of tried not to.

When I went online and subscribed to a series of e-mail discussion groups to find out about weird, esoteric interests of mine, little did I know that it would reveal a desire to out my ideas and tell on myself whatever the come. That's how I find out my occult studies had been for. They were done in the service of Me.

Like a car wreck might impose physical limits upon the body from the outside and diseases like arthritis impose limits from the inside, there is one part of the life on Earth that neither touches, and that's me. That it is the untouchable and my only identity can be very difficult to keep in mind.

The me is like a drone note on the sitar. The expert player attempts to divert the listener's attention away from the drone note by all the fantastic runs of notes and rhythms he uses to do it. Its like a contest between your will to not lose your conscious awareness of the drone note and his will to trick you into forgetting it.

Jazz does pretty much the sa-me trip. They start out playing a nursery rhyme most people remember from childhood, and then twist it around to lead you to musical landscapes you've never dreamed of. So-me-ti-me, and the living is easy... '-)

I spent thirty-six hours in bed since Friday. Saturday morning I woke up in deep pain and on top of that I had a hangover from too much wine Friday night. I went back to bed. Got up long enough to feed my brother's dogs and water the plants in the greenhouse, took a sleeping pill, and went back to bed. Finally, I woke up feeling human.

The pain from the arthritis has come back full force. The Humira is useless. I tried it for a month and ended up not able to wipe my own ass, and so I took some methotrexate to try to ease the pain. It's helped, but not that much.

My friend David visited me recently and told me reading my blog was all about sickness and death. As if I hadn't noticed.

𠚐

Salt Blocks And Cows

𠀴

My father was a cattleman. He liked having cows around. Dairy cows to provide the family with milk and butter when me and my siblings were kids, and then beef cows after my younger brothers reached high school age. What he really liked was breeding animals for a specific end. He won national contests for his brood herd producing the fastest growing calves by a certain age. It was something he enjoyed getting recognition for. Maybe that's where I got the notion that it's who a person wants to impress that rules their public outlook.

One of the ideas I've been tossing around lately probably came from conversations my father and I had about cows getting sick and laying down on him. That was a crucial point of husbandry that used to break his heart. He told me several times that when a sick cow lays down, she won't ever get up again. She's dying.

He explained what he thought happened according to his experience and his education. The cows died because of a lack of magnesium in the foods they ate. He said the natural presence of magnesium had been depleted by the couple of hundred years the land had been farmed.

With no magnesium left in the soil to be used by the grass the cows ate, they had to be given a supplemental source of magnesium. That was done by setting out a hard block of salt that had the required magnesium in it for the cows to lick and get the trace minerals the tired soil didn't provide anymore.

The magnesium pills I bought at the drug store were manufactured from sea water down in South Carolina. I had no idea about the connection between magnesium and the ocean. Then, when I was researching magnesium as a food supplement I run into this article in Wikipedia:

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

This article agrees with the advertisements by Ancient Minerals that gets their pure product from buried ancient seabeds that have deposits of magnesium chloride hundreds of feet thick.

http://www.ancient-minerals.com/magnesium-chloride.html

Then, there is this video on youtube that although dubbed in English provides some interesting information about magnesium deficiencies similar to what happened to my father's cows that happen to people (particularly in ancient Italy) when the magnesium in the soil is all farmed out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaIaVroZJEk

This is beginning to look like what happened to me. The stuff I've been reading and researching has led me to thinking that maybe what happens to my father's farm animals has happened to me. This leads me to think about the wheatgrass I'm growing. Is the commercial potting soil we're using to grow the wheatgrass got the required magnesium for the wheatberries to convert and include it in the wheatgrass juice I'm consuming.

There are organic fertilizers that are recommended for germinating and growing wheatgrass that come from seaweed. Kelp specifically. They come from the same sources that the magnesium pills come from. I'll bet thats the deal. The point of the wheatgrass and the kelp fertilizer recommended for growing it is about getting the necessary amount of magnesium in the human diet.

This is a little weird to consider. People and animals all over the earth are dying from magnesium deficiencies, and there are layer upon layer of pure magnesium chloride in these ancient buried seabeds, the very best type for health care there is, hundreds of feet thick and real cheap to get to the market place.

Frankly, this seems a little too good to be true, but who knows. It's cheap enough for a miser like me to give it a shot and eat a bunch of magnesium oxide and magnesium chloride I've already bought and started chasing them down with the resveratrol in the cheap burgundy to boot.

两

Curses!! Foiled Again!

It's kismet that I live alone. It would be God's own punishment for some unlucky soul to be forced to live with me. They'd have a better life living on death row waiting for their court-set date to be murdered by the State.

At least that way my potential companions would know a definitive end would come that they couldn't possibly find out by living with me. I can't imagine the people I've duped and been duped by would ever believe the end of our quaint, inimitable escapades might have an irrefutable expiration date. A drop-dead date when the entire folder of memories of ever having encountered each other would be deleted without leaving a trace.

People pop into my life unsolicited, I shouldn't have to beg them to leave. It makes me feel powerless to be forced to hurt the one I love, and with good cause. People don't behave the way they do for my reasons, and I can't make them into what they're not. Its a drag, man, to lead people into thinking I can only to find out I've lied to both of us. That means I have to be especially cautious on a continuous basis in order to live a life of no blame. "I've seen the promised land!" I'm convinced I must live a life of no blame to git there.

"I got shoes.
You got shoes.
All god's chillun
got shoes.
When we git to heaven
we gone put on our shoes,
and dance all over God's heaven."

Old Spiritual Hymn, AU

Living alone is the only-est way I gnow to give myself half a chance to live a life of now blame. By not having witnesses to how I conduct my daily affairs then I don't have to spend all my time in a defensive mode to make sure what happens is not my fault. Nobody knows. I am is the only-est One hyah who gnows when I've laid an aigg. it's a no blame way to be who-I-think-I-am-is. Selah.

I've read in a couple of places that nobody really knows the original meaning of "selah". The most popular guess seems to be that it's a primitive form of musical notation because most of the biblical writings were written in a poetic style in order to more easily me-more-ize them. Once the particular writings or orations are committed to that part of us where the more of me than we can see actuates randomly and upon request, all that needs to be known is how to rub the lamp or screech "OPEN SESAME!" authoritatively.

The situation here got more neighborly yesterday than usual. My friend David came by for one of his rare visits. We've known each other too long. He finally got a girlfriend he's happy with and that's sorta what needs to be there for us to get along. If he's not happy with a lady friend I seem to have to listen to a bunch of shit I don't wanna hear.

It really looks swell for him now. They've been together for around five years he tells me, and he seem arrogantly positive about their future together. Good to see. Good to hear. Best of all are his new paintings. I'm suspicious my old friend has mastered his painting talent. Good thing too. He ain't no spring chicken even if he is ten years younger than me.

There is a regular name for what I'm trying to describe about where David is at with himself and his art. To me he's found his own identity as a human being. David is an enlightened human being and it happened while I was angry with him and hadn't seen him much since he fortunately got dumped by the sadistic bitch I probably need myself to learn to love pain.

He really thought he loved her and being around him while he found out different was not hunky dory. It's this new love of his life that brought his enlightenment around. She's an artist too, and apparently provides the spiritual support he needs to create. Here is a link to David's paintings:

http://www.myspace.com/bluefoolart

David is the Blue Fool like I am is felix. He found atonement in his own way by his own bootstraps and it shows. I've always wanted a famous artist as a personal friend. For bragging rights around the camp fire if for no other reason. He could at least get rich too. He's very generous to his favorites. Somebody has got to do it. I haven't won the lottery yet. Ain't that a sorry contribution to the cause? A stack of losing lottery tickets and scraps of unpublished poetry that ain't been blowed away by the wind yet.

Outwardliness As A Virtue

✖

A strange feeling is in the air. My neighbors have gone to India on a good will tour sponsored by Rotary International in the name of doing what can be done to stamp out polio for good. The neighbors in question happen to be my youngest brother and his wife.

My brother told me that there are only a couple of places in the world where polio still exists and the place in India they're going to help give nasal vaccinations to the children in that area is one of the last. I don't remember where he said the other area was.

It amazes me that the World Health Organization can make the claim that only two places in the world still have active polio cases there. The US government can't find Bin Laden, but WHO claims to know where invisible diseases are located.

I sure don't know the facts about polio, and despite my sarcasm, WHO just might know. I continuously admit I don't know what truth is except in the specious present. By the ti-me I write it down it's no longer what it was that made it "the truth".

I just watched a 2008 Harvard graduation speech by a J.K. Rowling. She wrote the Harry Potter books. The speech got listed by the TEDtalks people despite the fact that it wasn't the regular TEDtalks format:

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

This woman seems very sincere and gave a powerful speech that revealed the depths she can reach for to create her novels. I've never read any of them. I have seen parts and pieces of a couple of the movies they were made into after they came out on TV. She looks a lot like the American actress Meryl Streep, but with a British accent.

The curiosity that drove me to watch the speech she gave was because she is a writer. She went to college to learn to be a writer. Part of what she talked about in regard to writing was how she had a struggle with her parents to be an English major instead of studying something more practical like accounting. Neither of her parents went to college.

Part of me watched being fully aware she was rich as Midas, and through her creativity earned every cent of it. No blame. She also stated that anybody was voluntarily poor is a fool, and I agreed with her there. I am is.

I really, really don't get off on regular television. They got nothing to surprise me with anymore. I've lived too long to be easily tricked, but if I watch at all, and I do watch some television about everyday, I'll usually watch some documentary on PBS, the old people's station.

The North Carolina stations are all the same stuff. What PBS stations in other places show on the air I don't know. Here, they've begun using one of their channels and call it "the Explorer Channel". There are a lotta travel shows that show tours of places all over the world. There are lots of cooking shows about different cultures. I like this agenda, but they have lots of reruns and then reruns on top of reruns.

It's interesting to me that I've visited quite a few of the locations the videos are about. There are lots of places I haven't been, and that just makes it more interesting. There are four or five companies that make these travel shows. Each with their own host. Rick Steves seems very popular. I like his shows too. He doesn't get bogged down but skips through the tulips and roses and marmalade too.

I like some of the photography shows that go on location because they seem to specialize in the flora and fauna from an artistic perspective. That's never come easy for me, but when it's pointed out in specific photographs accompanied by a little explanatory palaver even I get the point of what they're seeing.

The best thing about this new Explorer Channel is that they show these documentaries when the umpteenth version of the local news is on. They're showing the migration of the Monarch butterflies when the cop and lawyer and doctor shows are on the network channels. Even reruns of some of the travel shows and nature shows are more interesting than sitcoms and survivor shows to me, but your milage may vary.

✂