A Little Gardening Music

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"Taking the risk of being labeled a fool by someone like Renfro is more fun than it needs to be. Baiting him to accuse me of being himself is rudimentary in learning to be a fisher of men. Jack is the same way. Despite their intellectuosity they still reach for the tribal things to feel secure about what they ignore."

I wrote this in response to being written about by the fool who projects his foolishness on me. I like the way the last line in the paragraph turned out. He apparently doesn't have a clue the implications of what he does by accusing me of being like he is. He's the biggest sucker in the group aside from me. My tasseled crown is safe.

Today the temperatures are supposed to get balmy. Up into the mid-70s (22-26° C) in the daytime, but dropping down into the 50's at night so that I can still use light covers to stay warm. Perfect spring weather. My youngest brother drove over with the disk on his tractor and plowed me a couple of rows for a garden.

I'll probably get out there today and rake the grass and as many of the roots up as I can so the centipede won't re-root itself. Fortunately I've got a couple of days left on Prednisone so that my hands can grasp the rake handle without excessive pain.

The effect of the prednisone/steroids on my joints, especially as associated with my wrists and hands, astounds me. When my hands and my wrists are swollen up I give the appearance that accords with the line from the prison movie The Shankshaw Redemption, "Out there in the real world, he's just another old man with bad hands."

If I accidentally bang my hand against something as inanimate as furniture the pain incurred can be debilitating for a moment. I have to stop whatever I'm doing to acknowledge it. Grabbing a rake and working furiously without thinking much about it is not possible.

After a week of taking 20 mg of prednisone the swelling is almost completely gone, and my hands and wrists work just like they always have. I figure that's the clue I need to research if I'm gonna find a comfortable way to live with RA (rheumatoid arthritis). I need to find out about how my own body produces the steroid equivalent and if it can be pumped up through whatever means available. If I figure that out I really will have a chance to become rich and famous because nobody else has discovered it that I'm aware of.

It wouldn't surprise me that if somebody did find a way to make having the disease that method would disappear into the woodworks because RA and Diabetes are the medicos guarantee of a generous income. If a person lives long enough they're probably gonna get one or the other or both. If you get an autoimmune disease you're most likely gonna seek help. It's not pleasant in the least.

I'm getting to the point where I might emulate Coretta King and go to the quacks in Mexico. I like to think I'm smarter than that, but that's never really gotten me anywhere before when I've thought that I was smarter than that. If I actually have behaved in a smarter than usual manner I forget about it right away because nature gives up. If I could keep the swelling down there wouldn't be any pain. None.

As an effort to keep from going to Mexico where they have no prescription laws, I'm using a new supplement I read positive things about in the flashy ad sites and the more respected medical sites associated with university research hospitals alike. It's called Alpha Lipoic Acid. The overdose levels are at least a couple of magnitudes higher than what I'm taking, and the documentation states that a subscriber urinates out what it don't use if they don't get nutty and shove it into their body by the truckload

There is one aspect of this chemical/drug/whatever that appeals to me. It has the reputation of removing heavy metals from the body safely. I bought some Boron and other unknowable stuff to help me with that, but what I'm reading states that taking alpha lipoic acid does it in association with other stuff it straightens out, so I've stopped the Boron. I'm putting my heavy metals removal into this one basket.

I'm not taking the last prescription medicine called leflunomide. It's just not people friendly. Two days after I started it I started defecating blood. Nobody wants that. If the pain and swelling gets to be too much I might start taking it again anyway, but the side effects are horrible. Even worse than the pain of the RA. If it won't cure me, and it won't (there is NO known cure), then I'm not going to introduce additional suffering and body part disintegration as an experiment. I'm not letting no doctor decide I should commit suicide to keep from experiencing pain and death. There ain't a pill for that yet either.
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The Pot Of Gold At The Beginning Of A Rainbow

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The outside door located about four feet to my left is wide open. The Sun shows up through the scattered clouds frequently. The temperature is not balmy, but its headed that way and predicted to be that way tomorrow and the foreseeable future. Green stuff and blossoms are all over the place. I guess Spring has sprung. Ole!

As regular as clockwork I am is predictably surprised by the arrival of spring each year. It seems like I oughta realize it's gonna happen, and I do. I guess its the fact that once the red bud maples start showing up in the edges of the swamps we're surrounded by here on the coastal plain, the urge can only be stymied, not stopped. When its Spring, its spring over the entire Northern Hemisphere. It makes homo sapiens seem so puny at the same time they think they're basically invincible.

When back to back hurricanes came through here some years ago I lived in a pine forest of fairly large trees, and I was the envy of many an apartment dweller. The first hurricane tore down a few trees, but more pointedly, the rain associated with it soaked the ground so thoroughly that when the second hurricane came through two weeks later with even more rain and even stronger winds I didn't live in a pine forest any more. It was very sad.

There were maybe twenty pine trees left out of the thousands that came down. Many of them just broke in half. That let more direct wind on the inner part of the pines that were sorta protected by the pine trees next to the open fields and highways. I guess they weren't used to swaying back and forth as readily, and many of them broke off half-way up at about thirty feet high. My idealic homestead suddenly looked like a war zone.

Ten years or so later the trees that survived the assault of the dragons have somehow managed to survive. Every one of them are now standalones the birds use check out what's going on in the neighborhood. Particularly hawks and crows. The hawks appear to use the tall trees for preying on their prey below them. The crows seem to use them for gatherings. Noisy beasts.

Beasts? Beasts, you say? Crows are beasts? How rude! Hey, I don't make the rules. Wherever a cacophony of crappy, disturbing noise happens, you got a gathering of beasts. Need I remind you that all the birds are all that remains of the dinosaurs? Beasts! Shall we talk about noisy motorcycles and the ... ummm... people... who ride them. Noise = beastliness.

Noise that makes music, on the contrary, is associated with truly wonderful attributes. Angels and heavenly choirs. But, that can be offset by pipe organs. The noisiest noise that ever wuz. I might deliberately set about to get myself sent to hell, if the option was a heaven that played pipe organ music constantly, or maybe at all.

Occasionally I reflect on how death would have treated me if I hadn't lived long enough to understand the hypocrisy I felt my childhood mentors displayed. How was I as a child supposed to understand that adults don't grasp the fact that they'll displaying hypocritical behavior patterns that innocent minds are confused by.

Old age progresses like Spring does. Once the signs start showing up, the arrow of time won't turn back and propel one toward youth again. That's why hope sells. After a certain age all hope gets impossible expensive, and never gets the results one pays for.

I don't know what happened in Coretta King's situation. The news got out that she was pretty sick. I kept seeing and hearing little bits of news over time that things weren't going well. I don't know why I paid particular attention to her case. Probably because of the fame of her husband.

The next thing that caught my attention was the news that she had gone to Mexico to a quack , and then she died. She had been in her last throes for a long time before she went to Mexico. No blame for their trying a last ditch effort. The end was inevitable. The medicos were made into ghouls, but she and her relatives were chasing rainbows with money. Mythically, isn't that supposed to work the other way around?
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Shopping With Google Maps

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I used the excuse of needing another crossword puzzle book to go to Fayetteville today. I had to go to three different book stores to find the ones I like from the Los Angeles Times. The editors there are very clever. Their puzzle clues are not like getting the right answers right on a game show or on a classroom test. They use a lotta puns that are often impossible to guess.

When I go to Fayetteville these days my visits are redundant and routine. I go to the same places about every time I go over there. I acquired this routine from when I worked nearby at Fort Bragg. Back then I had a little money to spend and would wander through some of the stores looking for stuff I could later pretend I didn't want and give away as gifts.

The health food store I discovered is one of the new stops on my circuit through Fayetteville. It's actually been there all the time I thought there was one one half-way decent health food store in town. I found out it was there through Google Maps. I don't know why I haven't used it to find shops before. I used it as, well, a map to find the routes to place.

I was looking for a place called The Whole Food Store up in the Research Triangle area around the capitol. It turned out they have stores in Raleigh, Durham, and Cary. Fortunately, Google Maps also listed several other stores in the area that carried health foods and those other stores made me realize I could do generic searches for types of stores. This feature has been available for a while. Why am I always the last to know?

When I decided to drive down to Wilmington to look for seaweed on the beach I decided to use the same search technique to find health food stores there, and there were five of them when I only thought there was one or maybe two. My sister-in-law found another one, the best one yet, a health food cooperative to add to that shopping list.

I really am way behind in the digital world. The iPhone has been on the market for some time now. I might could afford the iPhone, but I can't afford the AT&T service. Both my friend Rainey and my brother have an iPhone, and they're constantly showing off the little programs they download they find fascinating. No blame. It really makes them happy.

The method I described above using Google Maps I did here at home and then went to where the maps indicated, but they would have gone to the towns first, and then did the research from maybe a cafe there. and then used the GPS devices on their iPhones to show them exactly how to get where they wanted to go in real time.

I'm in no hurry to get a smart phone. I don't question that I'll eventually get one. Apple is coming out with their new iPad tablet computer that I'm led to believe is simply a bigger iPhone. I have refused to read the previews on it. It might be vaporware like so much other stuff I got excited about that never made it through to the prototype, much less actually end up in the store for sale.

Google now has its own smart phones they're calling Android. The reviews I've skimmed over suggest they're not that far technically behind the iPhone. I find myself wishing they would offer some competition and bring the prices of phone service down to a more reasonable level. But, they're just another huge corporation trying to fill their stockholders pockets, so I'm not holding my breath. I'm thinking it may be as much as a year or more before a smart phone get stuck in my greasy palms.
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Behind The Woodpile Darkly

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There is one possible facticity concerning women that neither gender have any long lasting control over. The "nigger behind the woodpile" element (of any race or complexion) waiting mind-to-mind with the woman of the house to detect the exact moment her husband goes to sleep in order for her to sneak out of the house and and get it up with the demands of the species. It's not personal choice. Cultural vows and promises don't mean shit to the species goals. Who would understand this call of the wild better than you?

Presently, there is a relatively simple way of knowing if your children are really your children. But, would you ask the parents of your assumed grandchildren to undergo a DNA swab merely as a point of personal curiosity after the barn door was carelessly left open, and your favorite riding horse had bolted?

Such makes me wonder how many female homo sapiens have been brutally murdered for responding to this call of the wild who have had neither conscious control or volition to resist fulfilling this compulsion to act in accord with the demands of nature?

How strange it is to watch a nature show that displays natives of paradise walking the coastal places with a tote bag in which they stash seaweed. Kelp, and other healthy foods. Foods that also make great organic fertilizer because they usually contain all the trace minerals needed to maintain viable physical bodies.

Once I was able to envision how seaweed can absorb practically any mineral or vitamin source it needs from the salty, mineral filled oceans it lives in, it was easy to understand why consuming it would be a healthy thing to do. Why am I always the last to know?

I was thoroughly informed by my cattle-breeding father about why he put out salt blocks for the cows to lick in order to get the trace minerals they weren't getting from the grass they ate that grew in mineral starved pasture lands. If they didn't get what they needed from the grass, they had to get it other places. There are such places as salt licks that animals find to supplement what they're not getting in plants.

That's the deal with using dried, ground-up, as-is seaweed as an organic fertilizer. Candidly, I prefer bat shit myself, but all the deposits of guano have mostly been depleted, and there ain't no more continents waiting to be divested of their bat shit for the highest dollar.

There are dead seas full of trace elements found buried all over the world. They get found by various exploratory ways that are usually designed to find something else. Some of them have mineral deposits that settled at the bottom of oceans hundreds of feet thick and they're mined commercially.

The fact that these same minerals and salts that are needed by plants and thus animals are in one place in such abundance, and leached out of the soil where plants grow so thoroughly is a mystery to me. Here is a link to a industry web site that informs about magnesium and how Martin Mariette mines it and changes the chemical makeup of the raw products to come up with magnesium oxide:

http://www.magnesiaspecialties.com/students.htm

If this prednisone can (and has) reduced the swelling in the joints of my body, and the problematic side-effects that come with this prescribed steroid is that if I use it too much my own body will stop producing it's own steroids to reduce the swelling on it's own, then the only thing I can do and gotta do if I can is get my natural steroid producers to do what needs to be done.

I gotta get some expert advice on where and how the body produces it's own steroids that are like the ones prednisone uses. Maybe there is some way I can increase the output of my natural body chemistry to offset the inflammation the lack of whatever it is missing currently.
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The Me That Is Not Actually... Me

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I don't know if I'm just written out or that I've written off as much of the world as I care to. More and more I appear to realize that I got nothing to say to people who don't wanna hear it. I haven't said or written anything in weeks that my correspondents don't already know more than I do about it. My cup runneth over.

There was another case of me being the last to know last night. My friend came by and we were talking about old time music. He plays guitar, mandolin, and fiddle among other instruments. He was playing my digital piano as we talked, and suddenly asked me, as if outta the blue, "Do you know the Ashokan Farewell?", and he started picking it out in a simple chord style on the piano. It was the fiddle song in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary and other Ken Burns videos on the National Parks. I recognized it immediately.

When my eyes lit up for recognizing it and I told him "Yeah, I know that song.", he asked me if I had seen the video of it on YouTube. Huh? "Yeah, the guy who wrote it has a video on Youtube." WTF? The guy who wrote that song is alive? He said, "Go to YouTube Search and type in Jay Ungar." I did. Here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx6dxrhqPZY

I seem to be calming down a little from doing the prednisone series. I've had lots of warnings about how tight my writing became in the last week or so. The only way I know that the steroids have me wacked out and over the top with some trivial subject is the fact that I'm there when I open the bottle and take out the proper dosage and throw it back with some kind of liquid to wash the tablets down.

The one thing about taking prescribed steroids is that there are perfectly good examples from what's shown on TV about the affects of un-prescribed steroids. The drugs I take for the painful swelling associated with rheumatoid arthritis is not the same kind that weightlifters employ.

The "roid-rage" can be very similar if what I'm experiencing can be compared to the antics of the professional athletes who appear to be even better or more proficient liars than I am is. I've never used any of those kind of steroids for any reason, but I might use them if I could afford it.

Especially human growth hormone. From what I've gleaned from some very shallow reading HGT doesn't share all the negative side-effects of the anabolic steroids or even prednisone. Just like steroids allow athletes to build strong muscles, human growth hormone can make the primary organs of the body strong too. Like the heart muscles, and even the lungs and kidneys.

Using these products in order to extend one's life and good health is an entire industry now. That's what I meant when I stated that I couldn't afford the growth hormone and the snazzily custom-built steroids. I can afford to sign up with the clinics who supervise this sort of stuff, and I might not get involved without a competent, experienced medico to rule the roost I just might go to.

A friend explained what the problem can be, more than likely will be, if a person uses steroids regularly. Your body stops producing it's own steroids when you use the artificial ones, then you gotta have the external steroids to survive the pain of not producing them naturally. The results are shown on the 6 O'clock almost daily. Nobody wants that. I don't. But, I might play around the edges of it because I'm like adventure, and I'm a dedicated psychonaut. Who knows?

The importance of writing my way through everything that happens in my life, much less when I'm walking the wire with steroids, is how I describe what happens to me IS what happens to me in a very direct link. I deliberately employ a technique called Reframing that I learned from my studies and the seminars I attended to grok neurolinguistic programming (NLP). Reframing amounts to changing one's personal history.

I've written about it before and I've written about how I use this blog to explore drifting thoughts so that if they interest me and they allow me to think I can use them to reframe some aspect of my personal history, then I capture them with words and put them to work for me.

Most of the reframing I do presently has to do with simply abandoning the rules of conscience I don't employ anymore to get what I already had and cannot lose no matter what. It's just part of the deal I've learn to recognize rather than something I have to invent or create to have it available on an as needed basis.

There is a lotta that. Most of it. The huge majority of abstract reckonings that got me what I thought I needed in the past that no longer make any sense to maintain. The remembering vision bestowed an experiential database of experience that goes back to the time of my original arrival on this specific planet, and all the creatures and entities I am has made itself into since. Big database. Billions of lifetimes as both this and that from which to draw upon. "Aye, and there's the rub."

I experienced the remembering vision forty years ago during the wrap-up of my first Saturn Return. It took thirty years for me to get my head wrapped around what really happened, and to realize it had happened to others who spent their lifetime writing about it as I have.

In the last decade or so since I realized that my quaint experience was a classical event that's pretty well known if you've had the experience yourself, but theres a ring-pass-me-not involved with recapitulating such an event from one's past that, in my case, got me over the hump with understand not only what happened, but why.

Then, it didn't really matter anymore. The implications are that nothing special need be done but to remember that I remembered, and then chop wood and haul water until due revelation moves things along. Writing is one fine way to chop wood. What I do to haul water is even easier.
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The Dark Earth

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You said you won't buy it (the red book), because you've lived it? 

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Yeah. Apparently the Red Book is Jung's own description of the process he used to get where he wanted to be with himself in his quest for subjective identity. Lead into gold. Gnosis. Knowledge of his own Being as that. In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching it is written that "The superior man contemplates his own life." As in the bird-in-hand of a living spirit instead of stultifying vague promises of translucent castles-in-the-air.

Aye, and there's the rub. What to pray for? What to prey for? Some pundits of questionable virtue state (arrogantly, as if irrefutable) that "Everybody gotta have a goal; an aim; a line of demarcation that's the standard of measurement by which one knows where they're at with what they're attempting to accomplish by hook or by crook." 

I've read of the Akashic Records since an early teenager. I got the false impression that they were some supreme record of everything that was, is, and ever will be. That first impression may not have been totally false. The problem was that my visions of what it possibly could be were too grandiose. A lotta the shit I get sha-me-d by, has been way the hell over the top. I like delusions of grandeur. I get properly disgusted with myself for allowing such to be so. They're like old friends I used to know well in the sweet bye-and-bye, and here they are sot before me for an encore. Huzzah!

Contemplating Jung's life could be sorta like, you know, in a way, like contemplating my own life or maybe, reflecting upon the similarities of our individual quests to data-mine any equivalencies I might prop myself up with by name-dropping and for shits and grins, but not really. Since all external objects are merely my own idea of what's out there that makes everything out there me, and not only SHALL I not worship another, the facticities of my own wool-gathering promise me I CAN'T worship another, if if I wanted to blaspheme the spirit as suicide-by-god. 

Your enlightenment is not up to me. I don't believe in you or find myself emotionally invested in your unique salvation. In my experience, either a person has learned to be-co-me by their own hand or they are:

... only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

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The Holy Longing

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

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

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

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

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

Goethe

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Evil Spirits

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For some reason I didn't get to sleep last night. I hardly ever experience insomnia. I took a couple of pain killers my doctor prescribed and it hasn't helped much at all. I did get all fired up watching the healthcare bill get enacted into law. I was very pleased with the result. I had to find a site that carried it on the internet. None of the TV channels I receive over-the-air carried it. Poverty can be inconvenient.

I talked to this woman at the grocery store about how she felt about the healthcare bill passing. I was feeling extraordinarily well due to the Prednisone steroids the doctor ordered, so when we discovered we both favored it we had a neat group of mini conversations about how it's passage strengthens Obama's Presidential standing, and maybe he can confront the immigration situation soon, and get that off the back burner too. We might disagree a little there.

One of the possible scenarios I found myself describing to this utter stranger (with a perky "roid-like" happiness) was that now that the healthcare bill has passed people might be able to approach each other in public feeling easier that the other isn't gonna hit them up for a donation to pay for their mother's heart operation.

Oh my God! I can't believe how insincere that might have sounded. I will say just about anything for the possibility of watching the other's response to what I know they wanna hear when I'm taking steroids to relieve the stress of arthritis. As a matter of fact I took today's dosage less than an hour ago. Wiggle room, please. I don't know what the truth is even when I'm rudely sober.

I wanna say my reaction to Prednisone is similar to diet pills, but it's not really. I just talk too much when I used to use amphetamines to study in college. The effect of the steroids is that I appear to be able to adroitly reach for the exact comment I know a specific person is dying to hear someone say, and then objectively watch myself disgustingly say it.

The lights go on... they're pleased as punch... and then they wonder why I might say something so disturbingly intimate that their own significant other has never been able to say in passing, especially in an aisle at the SuperCenter. Of course I don't mean it. I just somehow know it's somehow related to who-they-think-they-could-be if only their best qualities and attributes were recognized by... well... anybody.

The autistic disconnect with other people's feelings and concerns be-co-me-s translucently clear even to me in real time when I'm flying on these prescribed drugs, that will eventually kill me (even before the disease they are created to treat does). I'm addressing emotions other people aren't consciously aware they can experience without having their soft eyes conjured by charisma.

I was having breakfast with my youngest brother who was already eating when I walked into the diner we frequent. It's difficult at times to have a conversation with him because of his iPhone. If it's active or he decides to use it for whatever reason crosses his mind he does it instantly as if I'm supposed to understand why I'm been dismissed as if not there. It's the calls that are important and not me. I had to accept I'm not important to experience gnosis. Understanding my brother is a cakewalk.

Today he got the call from his wife who had taken her brother to the doctor's office to find out about an infection in his throat. She told my brother that her brother was told that the "infection" was 4th stage throat cancer. I knew why.

He also has rheumatoid arthritis that has been diagnosed since he was in his mid-thirties. He is only in his early fifties now. I knew why his infection has turned cancerous. He's been self-injecting Humira. The same drug I refused to continue to take recently. I didn't know until yesterday he was on it. It's definitely not to die for, in my opinion, but shit happens, and things change also when you're NOT having fun.

My brother is gonna lose his wife again while she cares for the perishing in her family. She has death-watched a goodly number of her kin. It's practically a duty she accepts with practiced aplomb. Librans. Damn! Her careacting is so cut-and-dried as she accepts the burden.

A friend advised me to "be careful with them thar drugs them high-falluting doctors give you." Poor innocent. Little does he know what dying people will do when they're dealing with an incurable, progressive disease. He'll only know when he get there himself. It's quirky to deal with the fact that you're not gonna get better when life/death catches up with a body. The best the doctors can do is try to slow the deterioration down without killing you first.

I'm taking three medicines now for the condition my condition is in. All of them were designed for something besides RA. They're prescribed for their anti-inflammatory characteristics. All of them have potential side-effects that are lethal. Yet, they're the best hope the victim has for living independently for some unknowable length of ti-me. The drug I started just today is called Arava Tablets (chemically, leflunomide).

Sure, it's frightening to read the documentation on the internet straight from the pharmaceutical company that manufactures it. Contrarily, it's just as frightening not to. I didn't want it to come to this, but it was unrealistic to think it wouldn't. If I live long enough I'll end up like my aunt. A zombie without any bone joints left. No reason to live, yet won't die, and horribly unable to kill yourself.

My last doctor's appointment was on the 8th of March. Three weeks ago. The dilemma I experienced about my reactions to the Humira, and subsequently starting the methotrexate again, but without the hydroxychloroquine had me dragging ass and in a lotta pain. Oddly, the documentation on the Arava Tablets explained why I was experiencing such discomfort. Chemical buildup in my joints of the evil spirits. '-)

The pain and discomfort was something I just had to endure until my appointment at the VA Hospital came around. It's gotten to where I don't really think about the physical terror as pain as in previous, similar circumstances like when I had a herniated disc operation. My ability to abstract thought gets real slack, and I'm operating mentally on a supremely primitive level of ex-is-tense.

I kind of like it in the way it lets me explore the wormholes the sacraments led me to occasionally. Abstract constructions get in the way for the most part in that place where I feel wrapped in swaddling clothes and experience no separation from acute is-ness. It might be nice to have a control that could occasionally say, "I'm here.", but if not, I won't even gnow they're not there.
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A Cold, Cruel World Warms Up

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I wrote a few paragraphs in a post to a discussion group earlier and I've got my mind on that, so I'm gonna paste it here, and then write a little more if it comes to me.

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In my own opinion about the term "care" I usually use it in association with "acting" to replace the mis-spelt term "character". My reasoning is weird to so-me perhaps. My major in college was Drama & Speech. I had too many people coming up to me during my late teens and twenties say-ing thangs like, "Boy, you just don't know how to act around decent people, do you?"

I still don't. It's too cut and dried for me. Hypocrisy is what turned me against my early religious training. The people who were telling me that what they were teaching me about Jesus was supposed to help me develop character traits that would serve me well as an adult. They didn't conduct themselves according to the tenets they supposed they were teaching. The dish ran away with the spoon.

What I heard them saying that was actually useful to me was that if a person acted like they "cared" about the misfortunes of the other, then they had character. If they acted like they didn't care about the other's misfortunes, then they had no character. I call it careacting. In either case, it's acting. Why would I need to study anything else than how to fake it until I can make it?
☀

Well, I was gonna do that, and then I started inserting all these characters and symbols at the top and bottom of the entry, and the various Sun symbols at the beginning and end of the quote, and life got complicated.

Two more hours until the Spring Solstice. I'm accepting Rainey's invitation to come over to his house to celebrate it with a small bonfire and maybe listen to the music of the hillbilly band he's pitting against each other for him to play against.

I ain't possessed by the desire to perform publicly again, so I won't be joining them. My musical ambitions seem satisfied by redundantly playing the scales on my digital piano. Not so much to understand my own way with music, but to grok what other people "think" they're doing when they play old-time and other music. I seem more attracted to nursery rhymes that can be extended into facelessness.

I'm really pleased with the way my seed sprouting project is going for-me. I got about three quarts of alfalfa and clover sprouts, and the very idea of what I'm putting in my old body is exciting for me because I know how those seeds got turned into wholesome food. Presently, I'm sprouting some alfalfa and radish seeds I started a day and a half ago.

My sister-in-law and next-door neighbor got me started in juicing wheatgrass which I greatly appreciate, and so to sort of pay her back I gave her a couple of wide-mouthed quart jars that has stainless steel lids that are needed to grow sprouts.

I didn't realize she didn't have any seeds to use, and/or that she felt a little clumsy and queasy about how to get started, because it's sorta like germinating the wheatgrass we grow. Her hesitation was pretty much the same way I felt about getting started growing wheatgrass. I just needed somebody to show me how and get me started.

So, I took care of that yesterday and gave her a starter package of mixed seeds I had, inspired her to put two tablespoons of seeds in the jars I gave her, had her fill the jars about halfway full to cover the seeds good, and to let them soak overnight before she drained them. All she had to do then was to wet them with more water a couple of times a day and drain them again, until they started looking like the commercial sprouts what she bought at the store.

I think this will take with her because she's a real gardener. You oughta see her yard. Like my father was, she's a Libra, and the way she keeps her wits about her is through orderliness. My brother, the Aquarius, is happy beyond measure with her Draconian ways (her Chinese astrology sign is The Dragon and my brother's is The Pig. Fortunately, mine is The Rabbit). I'm just glad we get along okay despite my gentle ways.

All living creatures have to worry about the way dragons inform the world of their ex-is-tense. Dragons represent electrical storms and lightning is how they spit fire. Their winds, as exemplified by both tornados and hurricanes, like the fairy tale about the Three Pigs is like a wolf that will blow yo' house down, and if that don't work, the dragon will indiscriminately burn it to the ground with a bolt of lightning. Aiiiiyyyeeee!
☉

To Jamie Herlihy

♈
The few people who ken my ex-is-tense in this of all worlds know I'm retired and so assume I am must need something to do and offer to fill up all the ti-me it had intended toward writing with all the noise they wanna get rid of in their non-specific, non-idealized worlds. I blame my rudeness on being old. They expect that. It's the excuse they'll use when, if ever, they enter their own dotage.

It seems as if (after all this time of heartily avoiding it) I have be-co-me-d with a community of family and friends. People know where to find me. It's both a blessing and a curse. It's come to the point of me having to deal with what I say again tomorrow, whereas when I kept moving on my road-to-nowhere, I didn't have to act like it might matter tomorrow, and you gnow, it still don't. I am is still living a lie.

My friends and family seem ready enough to change they own damned ways enough (a little bit) for me to act like I got a right to be here with my own peculiar estimation of reasonable behavior. I esteem stuff with the best of 'em, if I say so myself. I did. I did say so my own damned Self.

It sticks with me. I've read lots of translations and versions of the story of what happened in the arena around Gautama when he finally gave it up and sat down beneath the Bo Tree. He Adam-antly refused to move until he was allowed to jump the broom with true enlightenment of the Buddha-hood.

I don't know if this one significant gesture is included in every version of the Bo Tree myth or no, but when I am became aware of the significance of this incident in it's own way, it became the central tenet of what lets the horse out of the barn through a carelessly unguarded gate.

At one significant point in the tale, all these abstract evil spirits that had gathered to stop Gautama from realizing his own individuality (or die from trying) and cause his effort to implode through sha-me. The way these wildly aberrant creatures are described indicates powerfully that they felt pretty sure of themselves. Why would they not be? Only one of ten billion zillion seekers ever got over on them to be-co-me that.

There's a great word for describing this malevolent amalgam of deviant dweebs that hovers around like ghouls in all beings of denial. In the Bhagavad Gita, the seeker Arjuna perceives them as kinsmen, and he has to kill his own kinsmen including his parents to become awakened. Fortunately for him, Krishna offers to drive his chariot for him while he kills them all with his mighty bow and straight arrows. Aaaiiiiyyeeeee!!

This gang of interfering interlopers are even closer to us, by proxy, than our kinsmen. "They" are us, and of "us", it is me. I am is the culprit and initiating instigator of all the foregoing action. Man is God's critic. This sitting has to be done literally when the seeker can't walk away from it anymore. Bottom of the barrel. Dry well.

These spirits force the situation, and it can only be dealt with and by one's first person singular in the here and now or the first person singular dies and has to get another body. In any case that's still me, even though there ain't but One of them at finger-pointing ti-me to reach for it's own ground of Being and save the day.

It's me acting as that One who has to do the equivalent signature gesture exposed by the story of Gautama under the Bo Tree in my opinion. When he is confronted by the ghouls and evil spirits of his own past, he merely pointed to the ground beside his crossed legs under the hood of the universal snake Ka and the shimmering branches of the ethereal Bo Tree, and stated, "I have a right to be here."

Much classier than having to murder all your kinsmen in a self-imposed, self-conflicting all-out war of retribution or walking all the way to Canaan living on magical mushrooms and illusory grasshoppers. Granted, it takes something to be able to hold your own ground in the face of such terror. It's never over, the only change is in me ("Thou shalt have no other). I am seems to be faced with embarrassing scenes from it's past on a daily, so-me-ti-me hourly continuum.

Consciousness always makes the tie-to-me (time) happen right-damned-now. It classically erupts into being when I am is hot on the heels of a bugbear that traditionally emerges from the shadows as I bend my will to enter the wormhole of the "eye of the needle".

All Fall Down.
☯

Rocks, But No Kelp

♠
My bed looked mighty good to me very early last night. On impulse, and for other reasons I ain't ready to write about yet, I took off and drive 100 miles down to the NC Aquarium and the beaches there about to look to see in I could find some seaweed to use for fertilizer for sprouting seeds. I didn't find any. On the way back I remembered that seaweed usually only gets washed ashore after a big storm, and don't last long laying around on the shore.

I stopped a couple of times before I got to Fort Fisher and the Aquarium. Once at Snow's Cut at the entrance to Carolina Beach. It's a canal that was dug to bring the ocean closer to Wilmington. Otherwise, the boats and yachts have to go all the way to Southport or Fort Caswell like the big ships do. One can see the ocean from the top of the arched bridge that goes over it, so I thought maybe some seaweed would have washed ashore through the current passing through the canal at high tide. Wrong.

Fort Fisher, the old Confederate fort I used to go hunting for cannonballs and musket bullets at that place with a childhood friend who lived nearby, has been restored to some degree. The State hauled in a bunch of large granite boulders to keep the ocean back from where they built a visitor's center. I figured some seaweed might have been trapped by the tides in those boulders. Wrong again.

Bad day for decision making. There is public parking between the visitor's center and the rock jetty, and I pulled up and parked my car. There weren't many people at the beach this time of the year, but this spot is at the very end of U.S.Highway 421, and the practical ocean-front end of Interstate 40 (There is a ferry close by that goes over to Southport), and the Center is open year-round, so there are always a few people around.

Right in front of me on the rocks was a young teenager hopping from boulder to boulder, rock to rock, and doing it easily with the grace and energy of a young person. For a moment there I forgot that I was not young, and decided to hop and skip over the rocks myself, just like I'd done in the past when I was a kid. I fell. Twice before I got back to my car. Dumb.

I only got scraped up a bit and a few bruises, but it could easily have been much worse. It's easy to break bones when you're old. I'll be 71 years old in a month and two days, and got diagnosed with every bone disease known to mankind a year ago, including osteoporosis which thins the bones and makes them more easily broken. I was lucky this time.

Since I was in the Wilmington area I decided to go to Paula's Health Hut, a health food store that's been around a long time. I walked through it to see what they had to sell these days. Less than ever. I figured the reason it was low in stock was the other health food store over in one of the newish suburban shopping centers toward the new part of town that resulted from the completion of Interstate 40.

I was right. The new health food store even has a couple or three buffet tables that served all sorts of delicacies and salads. They had expanded to include the stores on each side of it. Exactly the opposite behavior or Paula's Health Hut. People are so fickle. So am I. I didn't buy anything though. I was already getting tired from running around in the big city traffic.

I decided to drive to one more beach that might have some seaweed washed up on the shore because of it's unique location as the entrance to the sound that is located behind Wrightsville Beach., the real playground of my youth. The place where all the bikini-clad teen-aged girls like to go to sunbath. Since the season won't start for a couple of months there were work crews on the beach I hoped to find seaweed sucking sand out of the yacht basin entrance, so that didn't go well either. "There was no joy in Muddville...", so I headed for ho-me.
☯

Pain Killers vs Pain Relievers

❧
When I kept my last appointment with the rheumatologist he prescribed me a new medicine to replace the self-injection type that didn't work out so good, but he also prescribed me an old medicine, prednisone, for which I was and am grateful. It reduces the perpetual pain of my joints to barely noticeable.

In his office at the VA Hospital in Durham he gave me the choice of going to the pharmacy directly and wait for the prescriptions to be filled or to have the pharmacy to mail them to me as usual. I arrogantly chose the latter to delay the goodness for a while, and possibly appreciate it more when I did get it. It made sense to me that it would get here before the weekend, but it did not.

The prednisone arrived yesterday afternoon about 4:30 p.m., and by five o'clock I'd made sure four of the 5 mg tablets were in my belly dissolving away and causing me to feel fairly human again by the time I went to bed. Of all the drugs I've take, legal or otherwise, prednisone, some kind of steroid, has offered me the most joy.

Joy? Yeah. It's the starting point which the relief begins that causes me to choose "joy" as a descriptor. I've been going downhill for around four months as fair as the pain in my body has been concerned. Up until last night, and especially for the last week or so, I've been experiencing a pain in both my big toes, and I know from the descriptions I'm only familiar with via reading that it's gout. This doesn't bode well.

Fortunately, this morning, after a pretty restful sleep, a lot of the pain I've been experiencing is fading. I can actually close my still swollen fingers into sort of a fist, the gout in my feet has dissipated. The constant pain in my neck and shoulders has taken a hiatus to some degree, and I'll take four more pills today and then tomorrow and the next day, and then reduce to three tablets a day,

Unfortunately, the same medicine that offers me this relief is also killing me. With steroids, there is a lotta relief, but with the absolute knowledge that I can only use it for just so long, then I have to stop using it for an infuriatingly long time before I can employ a new series of it, and when that happens, all the not-so-wonderful stuff returns full force if not worse. What a drag man.

If dying from what steroids do to one's body wasn't such a horror show, and I could get an endless supply of prednisone I'd keep taking it until I croaked. By the time I'm driven to the level of desperation, however, I'll probably be so crippled I won't be able to open the bottle by myself and put the pills in my body. I'll probably die from starvation.

I played the scales on my digital piano twice last night intentionally, just because I could do it more comfortably. The scales are about all I play on the piano or practically all the music I play any more. Sometimes I play rhythm guitar as background for Rainey to play his mandolin and violin, but that's gotten to be a fairly rare event.

I taught myself to play the scales from the teaching material I found on the internet. It took what seemed like forever to learn to play the scales with the correct fingering, and after about a year of that I began to concentrate of speeding things up. I'm still not playing the scales very fast, and my medical condition can be troublesome for me to hit the right note physically every time, but I'm very pleased I learned to do it before the eternal adema and stiffness because a 7/24 fact of life for me. Well, except when I got some prednisone, like now.... YIPPEE!!!!
❦

Is Modesty The Art Of Power?

䷎
When I kept my last appointment with the rheumatologist he prescribed me a new medicine to replace the self-injection type that didn't work out so good, but he also prescribed me an old medicine, prednisone, for which I was and am grateful. It reduces the perpetual pain of my joints to barely noticeable.

In his office at the VA Hospital in Durham he gave me the choice of going to the pharmacy directly and wait for the prescriptions to be filled or to have the pharmacy to mail them to me as usual. I arrogantly chose the latter to delay the goodness for a while, and possibly appreciate it more when I did get it. It made sense to me that it would get here before the weekend, but it did not.

The prednisone arrived yesterday afternoon about 4:30 p.m., and by five o'clock I'd made sure four of the 5 mg tablets were in my belly dissolving away and causing me to feel fairly human again by the time I went to bed. Of all the drugs I've take, legal or otherwise, prednisone, some kind of steroid, has offered me the most joy.

Joy? Yeah. It's the starting point which the relief begins that causes me to choose "joy" as a descriptor. I've been going downhill for around four months as fair as the pain in my body has been concerned. Up until last night, and especially for the last week or so, I've been experiencing a pain in both my big toes, and I know from the descriptions I'm only familiar with via reading that it's gout. This doesn't bode well.

Fortunately, this morning, after a pretty restful sleep, a lot of the pain I've been experiencing is fading. I can actually close my still swollen fingers into sort of a fist, the gout in my feet has dissipated. The constant pain in my neck and shoulders has taken a hiatus to some degree, and I'll take four more pills today and then tomorrow and the next day, and then reduce to three tablets a day,

Unfortunately, the same medicine that offers me this relief is also killing me. With steroids, there is a lotta relief, but with the absolute knowledge that I can only use it for just so long, then I have to stop using it for an infuriatingly long time before I can employ a new series of it, and when that happens, all the not-so-wonderful stuff returns full force if not worse. What a drag man.

If dying from what steroids do to one's body wasn't such a horror show, and I could get an endless supply of prednisone I'd keep taking it until I croaked. By the time I'm driven to the level of desperation, however, I'll probably be so crippled I won't be able to open the bottle by myself and put the pills in my body. I'll probably die from starvation.

I played the scales on my digital piano twice last night intentionally, just because I could do it more comfortably. The scales are about all I play on the piano or practically all the music I play any more. Sometimes I play rhythm guitar as background for Rainey to play his mandolin and violin, but that's gotten to be a fairly rare event.

I taught myself to play the scales from the teaching material I found on the internet. It took what seemed like forever to learn to play the scales with the correct fingering, and after about a year of that I began to concentrate of speeding things up. I'm still not playing the scales very fast, and my medical condition can be troublesome for me to hit the right note physically every time, but I'm very pleased I learned to do it before the eternal adema and stiffness because a 7/24 fact of life for me. Well, except when I got some prednisone, like now.... YIPPEE!!!!
䷢

Fresh Beets And Smartphones

䷡
Fresh beets? I bought fresh beets to make juice to go with my fresh wheatgrass juice? I've never tasted fresh beets that I know of. Now I'm gonna put the beet and its leafy top into my emasticating juicer to soften the medicine-y taste and feel of the wheatgrass juice? Damn, I've gotten adventurous in my dotage. I finally figured out that what I've been calling "tossed word salad" in the way I write is called a "mashup" online.

My old friend Billy came by for a long visit yesterday afternoon. It's been a few months since I've seen him. He has investments with my younger brother and they see each other frequently. When they have a tiff, as entrepreneurs will, he seems to get mad at me too. Never the less, he did come by yesterday for a few hours and we took up right where we left off.

Rainey stopped by toward the end of Billy's visit and stayed after Billy left until about nine. He and Billy get along just fine. He brought Billy up to date by showing him how his iPhone works, and Billy seemed genuinely intrigued by it. He only has a regular cell phone. I bet he gets an iPhone soon. My youngest brother has an iPhone. He's been a Mac fanboi since the mid-1980's and is an early adapter about gadgets in general. My brother may be a bigger iPhone nut than Rainey is. It's too bad I can't afford one.

The news reports about the new iPad tablet computer Apple is supposed to be coming out with next month is interesting. I follow it as closely as the angst of my poverty will allow. In the last couple of days Apple has announced how much it will cost and what sort of AT&T contracts or not a potential owner will have to come up with to play the new tablet computer game. The iPad will arrive with two types. One will have a wi-fi radio and no 3G, and another that has both. To get the 3G you have to buy it factory installed. It will connect to the internet through wi-fi or 3G if you buy the 3G configured model. I might get one without the 3G eventually. It's just money.. They'll make more.

The way I use the internet the wi-fi connection might work for me. Presently, the way I use the internet is to read the news and participate in e-mail discussion groups. All I need is the internet to do that. Not a telephone. Skype. Women liked my phone voice and call me on the job just to get off, and I couldn't hang up on them without them calling my boss and raising hell and wanting my job. I hardly ever use a telephone.

I haven't made a long-distance call in years. Obviously, I don't use a cell phone. I've never owned one. It's just too expensive to pay for calls I may never make. The idea of using a smartphone to connect to the internet might win me over eventually or the telcos may halt residential wired phone and DSL service for a total nation-wide wireless internet/phone system like WiMax. My age is showing. The first question I ask my friends who do use smartphones is: Where are you at? Where are you calling from?

Google's Android phone operating system is said to be really ramping up to compete with the iPhone. Almost daily some new feature or revision comes out. Apple never will compete on price with the Android smartphones, in my opinion, but I'm very pleased with Apple's 64-bit Snow Leopard operating system. I've dreamed of owning a 64-bit system since the late '80's back in the last century and former millennium.

I haven't bought the extra DRAM memory cards that will give me up to 16 gigs of random access memory yet, but I'm planning to eventually. My iMac came with 4 gigs (2 X 2 gig cards) of DRAM in four slots, which is triple the ram I've ever had. I'm figuring a way to afford two 4 gig cards ($350) that will give me 12 gigs of ram. Literally impossible with 32-bit systems just a year ago.

The digerati pundits seem to have agreed that the desktop computer will be passe for individual consumers in the next very few years and everybody will switch to smartphones like the iPhone and Google's Android. Apple and Google have seemed friendly in the past, but the smart phone seems to be pulling them apart. A knock-down dragout fight would be excellent for the consumer. "Hit 'em again, hit 'em again... harder, harder..." '-)
䷢

The Second Degree Of Intent

䷀
You have to be what the other "thinks" you are or you don't exist to them as an individual. Whatta drag, man. Pretending to be what the other expects as a price for their consideration is hard on the soul. I'd just soon not, thank you very much. There's nothing like a good ol' fashioned heartache to change my mind about sharing.

Being taught to share as a child could meand that sharing is a unnatural cultural proclivity that is also hard on the soul/sole. It certainly cannot be done with the innocence of a child, because a child doesn't want to share, and in general, is ready to fight about it in a New York minute.

There has to be something a body don't have to share with anybody at all for either love or money or life just ain't worth living. This somethingness required may be nothing at all. This nothingness appears to be what must be denied as something or it's like blaspheming the docetic spirit which IS the soul.

Making something into nothing is a little different than making nothing outta something, but both efforts are mutually concerned with the extemporaneous creation of a ground or not for Being. It is what it ain't, and it ain't what it is... simultaneously.

To find so-me-thing within a pearl's son (person's) individual control requires an atoned One to take on as much as they throw away all at the sa-me ti-me.

That's tossed word salad at my very best. Serendipitously writing down "pearl's son" as a misnomer for person is a thrill that's illogical as hell, but expresses a certain sort of truth momentarily as if it really could matter within the correct framework.

I write about experiencing in my remembering vision having the appearance of an oyster pearl because the soft luminescence of a pearl is the closest physical object in appearance to a no-thing the pearl actually is because in truth, it has no substance. It just looks sort of like a pearl, but it has attributes of curiosity, volition, and memory.

It uses these attributes to use matter as building blocks to imitate the world it finds around it. What it makes itself into via imitation and me-mi-cry could easily be nay-me-d as it's son. It (the pearl) reproduces itself as so-me-thing its not really, but irreducibly IS. The son or image it creates as it's representative in the sensory dimension can only ex-IS-t via the denial of itself as it's father as God. That's probably sacrilege AND blasphemy in so-me scenarios, but they can only kill the son and not the father.
䷁

Its Just The Way Life Is For Me Now

䷁
This raw food diet may be the cause of some of the lesions I'm experiencing. I first thought it was a reaction to the prescription medicine I've been taking because it was changed recently, but that was about the same time I changed my diet. The wheatgrass juice I'm drinking is some very powerful stuff. I think I gotta learn more about what is called "pulsing" with raw foods. It's an on-again, off-again approach that allows the body to adjust to the huge change in diet.

I continue to read about the raw food diet to glean what I can from other people's experience with it. As you can easily imagine there's lots of testimonials online. From what I've read so far I'm not doing too badly. I was just reading about how eating cooked foods can ease some of the symptoms of de-toxi-fication.

Another way of dealing with the fact that I'm always eating or preparing something to eat can be alleviated by adding some oils to my diet. Even some animal fat occasionally in the seasoning can help slow the digestion process down with interfering with the overall purpose of following a raw diet. I only promised myself I wouldn't eat meat as a guiding principle for detoxification purposes.

When I get clear enough to observe consciously how eating various meat product affect me in real time, then, and only then do I figure I can make a reasonable judgment about what is, and what ain't, good for what ails me.

Eating raw foods like wheatgrass (juice) and various sorts of sprouts provides me with plenty of protein and probably most everything else I need nutritionally. That leaves the question of supplements open for me to explore. By supplements I concern myself with vitamins and trace minerals for the most part. I study about how to get them into my body most efficiently or in some cases, how to get them into my body at all.

Apparently some minerals don't get absorbed by the digestive system. They have to be modified to allow them to be absorbed indirectly by being bundle with other stuff. Magnesium, for example, comes in many forms in some over-the-counter offerings.

The first kind I bought was at a pharmacy I used. They had a bottle of 250 magnesium oxide tablets. The label was a little confusing. It proclaims that each tablet has 420 mg of magnesium oxide, and just below that claim was another that said each tablet has 253 mg of magnesium. The odd 167 mg must be the oxide part.

Later, I bought a commercial preparation of magnesium chloride called SLOW-MAG that also has two different statements about how much magnesium is in each tablet. On the splash page it says there is 64 mg of Elemental Magnesium in each pill, and on the ingredients list it states that each tablet has 128 mg of magnesium. It also has 212 mg of calcium.

Calcium is the main reason I'm taking a magnesium supplement. At least it started out that way. A highly touted research effort came to fruition last year after studying the data of the research program involving vitamin D, and especially the way it interacts with calcium in the body. In the last year this research has had lots of publicity about how vitamin D is needed to get calcium delivered to the right places for the right purposes.

Other research has shown that magnesium is also a required part of the distribution of calcium, and probably iodine is involved in an optimal calcium distribution system, and otherwise you might get gout. You don't want gout.

Once I began noticing the various kinds of magnesium preparations I also ran across a bottle of 250 tablets of magnesium with chelated zinc. It was only $5 so I bought some of that too. I've sort of set it aside as a goto if I run out of the other stuff. That's highly unlikely. I probably won't buy any more of the magnesium chloride either because I'm getting the desired results with magnesium oxide.

There is a desired result for doing oral doses of magnesium other than helping the calcium tablets prescribed by the VA Hospital that I take daily along with the 1 gram of folic acid prescribed to offset the way the methotrexate uses the existent folic acid in my body. The easiest way to describe the aforementioned "desired result" is to mention that magnesium is used in the brand name Milk of Magnesia.

I've had lots of problems with constipation associated with methotrexate. Very painful problems at times. These relatively inexpensive magnesium oxide tablets are a trusty, sane way to kill three birds with one stone. I can turn into a virtual monster when I'm full of shit.

I've truly worked at listening to people when they informally or casually tell me I'm full of shit, and immediate begin to reflect on whether they're possibly right. Having the correct balance of magnesium in my body at the time literally makes it possible for me to go do my toilette thang and not be full of shit anymore.

In the past, a relatively long time ago, I became involved one day with the most powerful sacrament known to man. When this sacrament began to have it's way with me and during the rush to judgment that always follows, I concluded that I had returned to the depths of the depression I've abided, in the past, and acted upon an impulse to turn myself into the State insane asylum for the good of the world.

I hitch-hiked toward that place and had caught a ride in a big semi truck, and I was a bout a mile or two from the road that turns up that way, when I suddenly felt a deep, sacramentally influenced urge to shit. I practically screamed at the truck driver to pull over and let me out or I might inadvertently shit all over his truck. He was immediately cooperative.

I jumped out of the truck running for some bushes and simultaneously taking my britches off at the sa-me ti-me. I barely missed the pants around my ankles when I grunted out a painfully thick turd at least a yard long. It took a while for me to find some leaves to wipe my butt, but suddenly I realized that I was totally sane again. Well, you gnow. Sane for me is simply remembering how to survive in a brutally cruel, alien environment.

It might have taken an incident this dramatic for me to realize that when I get constipated I'm liable to act a little crazy, and that's the only real reason I am is acting oddly. If it happens as result of being ill and/or from taking pain-killers like when I hurt my back, then I am is sick and as crazy as a fucking loon, but with no blame attached to my temporary lunacy.
䷩

Red Bud Maples On The Edge Of The Swamp

❧
Not knowing the truth of a situation is a constant state for me. I have to go off alone and think things through before I can let what passes for the truth for many people... go. It seems I am forever dumping baggage and blowing bubbles. Like doing the maintenance work on my computer system and running all the checks and balances through their paces to make sure they're still working.

It doesn't take much input to stimulate me into diverting my attention to keep the bad guys at bay. I don't want them to cross the street to say "Hello". I don't wanna go to some defensive stance in the middle of just being out for a walk. I disengage from the world of the senses, and the other assumes I must be out for lunch.

The red bud maples are working their magic over in the edge of the swamp. Since the only place to live on the coastal plains are the ridges that are higher than the swamps, swamps are always right around the corner, and red bud maples are one of the dominant species that grows on the peripheries of the swamps.

As the precursors of the arrival of Spring they sort of forecast what kind of summer it's gonna be. Usually due to how late the last killing frost descends on us in the form of a Montreal Express. It's warmish now. It hasn't been for the last six weeks. If the blossoms on the fruit trees emerge and then a killing frost puts and end to the process, it means you gonna hafta buy your fruits and vegetables at the grocery store at a higher price to pay for the shipping. Bummer.

Not me though. I've been so successful at growing sprouts it's hard for me to live with me. I found myself wishing today that my parents had known about sprouting seeds and eating the results to keep the family healthy. Since we kept cows we always had meat and dairy product year around, and since we kept a large garden and preserved food by canning we had really good soup and bread, but no living vegetables much.

The good thing about me being successful in growing sprouts is that it's hard to go wrong. If you use the right procedure and have live seeds that will sprout it's a cinch. I like to experiment with this process, and I don't have to leave my house to do it.

I've read a little about germinating flax seed, and most of the authors I've read suggested that one should not expect much success. I'm having a little success with germinating flax seed, but I don't know what the end game will be.

It's this business of hulls that have me confounded presently. I first ran into it when I germinated some black beans I got off the shelf at Wal-Mart. When they germinate they split into by the white sprouting leg . the two black halves of the seed is where the energy for the plant is stored, but they taste bad. What happens next is that two green leaves and a growing tip emerge. Those first two leaves are the best food you can get out of this legume. They can be put in a salad or a juicer and you get the good stuff. Like the first trimester of human growth. Uncommitted stem cells galore are abundant.

I'm an old man and it doesn't take much to amuse me. I use the top of my washing machine as a counter top because it's there. Yesterday I was cleaning up around the kitchen after I had transferred my sprouts from the wide-mouth jars into plastic baggies before I stashed them in the refrigerator.

A couple of alfalfa sprouts had fallen by the wayside, and just to indulge my miserliness I pick them up and ate them. The sprouts were less than an inch long, and growing. They were alive. Perfect little plants in every way including what would become the root. From the seed I germinated the plant only has one mission, to produce more seeds. Everything that plant has to offer to grow is there for the taking. Good stuff.
❦

Seaweeds And Sprouting

♛
Yesterday my youngest brother and I rode together to Fayetteville for different reasons, but we got done what needed to be done in good humor. He had to drive over the company headquarters of a company he has spent the last few years working for to pick up some video he will turn into a safety film the Army Corps of Engineers has begun requiring of it's contractors. I went along to check out a health food store I didn't know existed until the last couple of days.

The health food store is called The Apple Crate. They carried the sprouting seeds I needed. A fairly large bag of them only cost $8. That's the most reasonable price I've encountered. Radish seeds. They're really tasty. I make myself a sandwich with alfalfa and radish sprouts with some mayonnaise and eat it up.

Later, I juiced up some wheatgrass along with a couple of apples and three medium-sized carrot and took my time drinking it. The wheatgrass juice is so powerful the taste and my light revulsion of it makes it an ordeal. That's what the apples and carrots are for. To lighten the load of the wheatgrass juice.

I read another article on health this morning about some doctor who claims to cure people with raw food diets. This article led me to a youtube video of an interview he gave about his medical doctrine for diagnosis. I'm not as impressed with him as he seems to be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r106Iqh3OD8&feature=related

I went over to Rainey's house for a while last night. He had stopped and bought some fast food at Hardee's and I brought some alfalfas sprouts and bread. We played some music together. He wanted me to check out this guitar he has for sale. It's a nice guitar. I forgot the brand name. Rainey played his mandolin. I don't know exactly how long he's been concentrating on mandolin, maybe a couple of years. He's getting mo' bettah, but he's a great guitar player.

I'm not a great guitar player, but now I know how I could be if I was interested and thought I'd live long enough. I feel like I'm getting to the place where the scales I play on my digital piano each day is really paying off for me. I'm the only one who knows that.

Playing the scales teaches me about the instrument itself. I could do the same thing by playing the scales on the guitar or even the fiddle. We both played the fiddle a little bit last night. It's kinda challenging. Rainey taught me the chord structure of one of the Old Time Music songs he plays with his followers at their regular Wednesday meetings.

One of the items I bought at the terrific new (to me) health food store was some kelp granules. I'm interested in finding out for myself if a teaspoon of kelp added to the alfalfa seeds in their initial soak to get them to germinate will provide the micronutrients the seeds need to make themselves into the best little sprouts possible.

I prepared two wide-mouth Kerr canning jars by placing two tablespoons of alfalfa seed in each jar. In one of the jars I added the kelp granules, and the other jar got none. I added the water to soak them, and then tomorrow morning I'll drain the water out of them to let them germinate.

I looked at the jar with the kelp in it a few minutes ago. The kelp was dry when I put it in, but now it's been saturated with water and it looks fairly slimy in there. I don't expect that to be a problem because it will probably find it's way out of the jar when I dump the soaking water out to let the germination process begin.

The kelp might need to stay with the seeds as long as possible in order for the germinating seeds to absorb the sought-for micronutrients. That's why I started the other jar with no kelp in it at the same time. That's the only way I think I might be able to tell if the kelp makes a difference. What with the two jars being side-by-side. Even with that I might not be able to see a difference even if there is one. I'll wait.
♌

A Sprouting Seed Store

♠
The trip to the VA Hospital in Durham was turned into an exploration of some health food type places. I was looking for some seed to sprout. The first place I went to was named Trader Joe's. It turned out to be a grocery store for singles, couples, and small families. It had a lotta knick knacks and a fairly large selection of wines, but it didn't have what I was looking for. It'd be great to have a store like that here, but they probably wouldn't be able to take that much business away from Wal-Mart Supercenter. Too many families around here trying to save a buck to indulge in the kind of niceties Trader Joe's carry.

Next two places were both Whole Food Stores. One was a few miles down the road from Trader Joe's in Raleigh, and the second was in Durham about two miles from the VA Hospital. This store did have some sprouting seeds. They were high priced to me, but another shopper said the prices there was lower than most similar stores.

The Whole Food Stores are apparently a big nation-wide franchise and been around for a while. They don't do small towns so I've only read some mentions about them online. They're not really a health food store either, but an even higher toned grocery store than Trader Joe's. I don't think they attract a lotta family business either, but they're not so expensive that just about anybody could buy a little something they couldn't get anywhere else.

If the seeds I bought will germinate and grow into sprouts I'll have bought enough to last me for months for less than $30. It makes me somehow feel secure that I have a couple of months food supply in the house. That is if I do what it takes to grow them regularly enough to have some ready to eat constantly.

The proviso about about "if the seeds will germinate" has become real to me in a short amount of time. Currently I'm trying to sprout some flax seeds along with some sesame seeds that don't seem to be sprouting. I put them in a jar and soaked them for at least twelve hours, and then rinsed and wetted them at least twice a day for three days, and they ain't doing squat.

Simultaneously I soaked some more alfalfa and radish seeds that are sprouting away, But, the hulled pumpkin seeds haven't germinated at all. This sprouting business all seems to depend on the quality of the seeds you use to do it.

After I'd soaked all these seeds and waited for something to happen, with some success and some not, I read flax seed don't sprout, and the sesame seeds have to have the hulls removed to sprout, and the sunflower seed also need to be without hulls to sprout, but not to plant for greens. It might have helped if I had read about what to expect first, before I soaked the seed, but it didn't cost me much to find out the hard way.

I bought two pounds of mung bean seeds in the Raleigh store. It's at least 20-30 miles closer than the Durham store. I've read just enough about sprouting mung beans for it to get me cautious, and read some more before I try sprouting them. I think what I read said that mung beans need to be sprouted in the dark or they get bitter.

The Asian cooks use mung bean sprouts a lot. They're very crunchy, but the reason they're so popular for sprouting is that they have lots of vitamins and minerals and especially trace minerals. That's a little boggling to my mind because they're practically translucent. They're supposed to be loaded with dietary fiber, but I can see through them. Where's the beef?

I've read about juices like wheatgrass juice and carrot juice and apple juice also have more dietary fiber in the juice than other sources like bran flakes. I would have guessed that the "fiber" would be in the pulp I throw away for composting. I guess I have to learn to rethink the properties of dietary fiber.

The documentation that came with my juicer stated that it would grind coffee beans. I've put off giving it a whirl until a couple of days ago. The machine did a great job until I overfed it, and it came to a grinding stop (pun intended). Tonight I was more careful as I poured the beans into the juice, and it ground up the rest of the bean bag, but I don't think I'll be grinding my own coffee beans very often. Too tedious, and the results aren't that much better.

I've been waiting for this appointment to get my medications straightened out. It's been a real drag for four months. I was obsessed about how I was going to address this situation not only with the doctor, but with the staff that humiliated me with apathy. I went through every scenario I could think of to get it right every day and every night. That's just how it goes with me. I'd rather get obsessed than have sex.

In the end, as I entered the hospital to keep my appointment I decided to forget all the stuff I'd planned and just go with the gut reaction that grabbed me in real time. The first person I had to confront was the nurse who shined me on and out and out lied about how he would contact the doctor for me about changing my prescriptions. I didn't volunteer one word of information that wasn't required by his job. He didn't say anything about our last encounter either.

When I saw the doctor I told him as truthfully as I could what happened and how I'd written him two e-mails to the address he provided me with, and that he hadn't answered them. I told him about how the medicine he prescribed didn't address the pain symptoms and caused sores to appear on my body.

He seemed genuinely sorry he hadn't been on top of it, admitted he hates e-mail, and insisted on giving me the number to his cell phone along with instructions to call him personally instead of going through the hospital. He took me off the old medication and started me on one that will probably be the death of me too, but at least I can call him to say goodbye just before I croak.

I had these sorts of problems with my regular doctor at the Fayetteville VA Hospital. She was new to the system just like this guy. Since she's been on the job for a couple of years now she has turned out to be a really swell doctor. I hope the Rheumatologist-in-training will be too. I have him for four years, so I'm not giving him a choice.
☯

A Day Of Loud Marine Helicopters

❧
The Sunday morning news shows are all gone for today. I stayed in bed as long as I could. It's not a pain free day. I got up to urinate several or three times. Cold. Mid-twenties. There is a documentary on PBS about the Buffalo River National Park in Arkansas. Been there. Would go again.

This is the place I went to find a cave to meditate in several years ago. I didn't find one, and got lost instead. It wasn't that I was exactly lost because I was within sight of the river. I just didn't know how to get away from it into civilization. It wasn't a happy place for me.

I had hitch-hiked west on InterState 40 to just past Little Rock to Conway, Arkansas and took the highway from there to Greenbriar, then Clinton, through Marshall, Arkansas. The Buffalo River was next, but the ride I had was with this middle-aged married woman who said she only lived about two miles up the river, and I could hike to the river from her house.

She took a lonely dirt road that went to the river and let me out, and told me she would be back in about an hour to see if I was okay. She wanted to mess around, but I wasn't okay with that. I was out in the middle of nowhere in Dogpatch and I didn't think she would come back alone.

I decided to go upstream a little ways to a place where I could watch to see if she came back, but mostly to stay out of sight until I felt secure. I was there looking for a cave, not to have an affair.

The river was nice. There was a sandbar/beach there where I'd been let out. The road that crossed the Buffalo River had a place where canoes could be rented to float the River. I think it's the only National Park based a river. Google Maps will take you to where I was if you type buffalo+river+national+park&fb into the search box.

There was no trail along the river where I was. The river was in the canyon that it carved for itself . The sides of the canyon was steep, but covered with primeval forest the loggers couldn't reach. Good thing the government was called in to protect it or it'd be gone probably by now. It was rough walking, and it took me a long time to get to where a small stream entered the river, and there was a dirt road that followed the stream up the hill.

The place where the stream entered the river was one of the most unique natural sights I've visited. It was very beautiful. I stayed there several hours. Only one vehicle came down the road. I hid until it was gone.

After I'd had my bait of nature, it happens, I started walking uphill on the gravel road that followed the small stream down to the Buffalo River. That gravel road had some interesting features along the way. There was a series of small waterfalls where the stream dropped incrementally from the plateau into the Buffalo River Canyon. There were a couple of homestead ruins where only the chimneys and stone footings still stood. To me it seemed obvious that the stonework was sturdy, but home-made. They made up with mass what lacked in engineering. I got the distinct impression the cabins were originally built and occupied by homesteaders or pioneers, and then later bought out by the government to make the National Park.

There was only the gravel road to suggest there was a fruitful route to civilization. It only went in one direction, and that direction was all uphill. I was physically tired to death by now. I had been on the road for four or five days previous to getting lost at the river. I had to keep going to see if I could find a road or highway someone lived on so that I could figure out how to get back to the small town of Marshall.

Eventually I came to a paved road and hitched a ride into town. I found a Laundromat and washed my clothes. I still hadn't gotten any sleep, but I got back on the highway to Little Rock, and didn't stop to rest until I found a convenient clump of bushes to hide behind inside the bypass around Memphis, Tennessee.

That's one way of being that always returned instinctually to me. How to hide in plain sight. I'd be hiking through some well-lit avenue in some of the largest cities in the United States, when suddenly I'd spot some unique out of the way nook I could drop out of sight into, and be quickly be covered by a darkness many people would dare not enter.

When I realized I could live like that it was almost impossible to not just give it up and go do it. I knew where to go that I wouldn't be followed. I hardly ever was by man or beast. That's not to say there ain't some real crazies out there that can be unknowingly provoked into doing a body harm, but that's easily avoided by the self-acknowledgement that I am is also that. When I admit their terror in my heart they gotta leave me be. No one person taught me that. I wouldn't know who to send a person to for them to learn how to be unfollowed.
❦

Un-ta-me-d

❧
It's a terrible burden to be born a provocateur unasked. It's certainly not what my childhood caregivers intended for me or for whoever possessed this body before I got it. He told me he was a virgin and I believed him. But, that's how it goes when you're a passerby. "Beggars can't be choosers."

I learned a lotta stuff about human desire in my youth when I lusted after having sex with as many other humans as possible. It's a yearning that virtually groaned for me to go out cruising for action. A bottomless pit sort of yearning that "pules for it's own pity". I can almost remember physically what that used to be like. I knew where to go and how to get what I wanted when I got there. I never asked for permission. Who?

The going to get there was exciting beyond words, but anticlimactic, because when I got there and instituted the rituals of conjuring, over time, I began to realize my rituals were unusually like the "fishing for men" rituals that I was taught to employ as a boy in Sunday School, that likeness is stunning.

As far as I was concerned while I was growing up I knew my fate in life from an early age. Becoming an expert fisher of men was what I took to have been promised by the Southern Baptist/Bible Belt/Jim Crow world that raised me. There was even a specific song we sung repetitively, hypnotically, over and over again, "I will make you fishers of men, if you'll only follow me. Hallelujah, what a savior. I'm from sin set, you're from sin set, we're all from sin set free."

Having been raised from childhood to believe "following me" was the only way to fly, I went outta my way to find out who this mysterious "me" was that I should follow. Perhaps that is my most powerful delusion. Practicing the religion of Christianity meant an apprenticeship for be-co-me-ing a "fisher of men." No holds barred. No stone unturned. Fisherman of men or bust! I honestly can't think of a more rewarding way to conduct my affairs.

Learning to become a fisher of men set the stage for my penchant for being a pesky provocateur. Yin and yang. The Creative/Provocateur vs The Receptive/Fisher King. The Sun and the Moon. Beach taffy. Polarities and worm holes spiraling out of the center of the obverse image of a black hole and into the pearly gates of the white light.

It must be strange for a Jew to live in Oklahoma so far away from his tribal ho-me land. Oklahoma? I don't know why I write that because I'm not a member of any Jewish tribe. I sorta belong to a tribe, but it's not necessarily based on blood, but it might be. Not that I know of. It's just that so-me people tell me I'm one of them. Either by slight of mouth or straight to my face. I seem to know what they're implying. In a lotta ways it has to do with discrete mannerisms such that "it takes one to know one."

There are Indians who live in these parts that know they're blood kin, but they can't get recognized as a tribe. They think they're a tribe, but it's easy to understand why so-me consider that wishful thinking. The coastal plains of the South Atlantic states, and the states around the Gulf of Mexico are full of swamps like the "reed sea" Moses used as an escape route to the promised land. 

Here, using a similar tactic during the Revolutionary War, Gen. Francis Marion of South Carolina, the Swamp Fox, used the "reed seas" (cane breaks) of the coastal plains as escape routes after he made sneak attacks on the British troops, and it wuz the sa-me lak wot happened in the Battle of New Orleans. 

The problem with these swamp fox-like Indians being recognized as a unified, blood-kin tribe is that lots of folks who hid in the swamps from Jim Crow and other wild beasts were not noble savages or savages at all, but run-away slaves, and po' white trash. They just gotta get over it, but it's hard when they all worship Jesus instead of their native Gods. They don't remember them.

Did you know that all the major Indian tribes in the United States kept black slaves that they bought and sold just like the Europeans did? That's what was promulgated by some black Harvard professor named Gates. The DNA tests done on the present relatives of the black slaves revealed very little American Indian blood in the black Americans, yet a large majority of blacks think they do have some Indian blood.

The Mormons claimed that the Indians in the Western Hemisphere were the lost Jewish tribes and they were visited by none less than Jesus himself, yet the DNA tests reveal that the Amerinds were from Asia instead, with no apparent genes from the MidEast races at all. The Mormons don't appear to acknowledge the DNA results. It don't fit with their dogma.

When the DNA tests became admissible evidence in a court of law that facticity put a mojo on the religions of the world in a very powerful way. I don't claim to know the truth about the future results of DNA testing, but it's gonna mess with a lotta people's claims to fame.

A lot of energy and emotional investment goes into controlling blood lines. It's fairly understandable that this is prevalent throughout nature with pretty much all forms of life. But, the real problem with enforcing this are the baby factories themselves. Women.

Women, as biological units, are gonna have the children of the most powerful man available no matter who or what their culture tells them they have to choose. I'm suggesting this is the default attitude of females in general. Where this dynamic can happen, it's gonna happen. Selah.
❦

It's A Little Bit Warmer Now

☯
The truth of how sprouts are taking over my diet seems a little too good to be true. I guess I'll find out as I go along. Today they've taken over my life. Just about every activity I've enjoined today has something to do with sprouting. I've got six different types of seeds either germinating or soaking to start the germination process.

The last batch of seeds I set to soaking happened because I suddenly realized that an empty mesh bag that some small limes came in from the grocery store, was just the perfect sized bag I could use to soak some hulled sunflower seeds in. It's the same kind of synthetic material that bags of oranges usually come in, but the mesh in the lime bag is small enough so that sunflower seeds won't fall out, but sesame seeds would. I put about a cup or so of sunflower seeds in that polyester bag, and now they're soaking in a dishpan of clean water overnight.

Using a cloth bag to germinate seeds in is another method for sprouting. The online articles about sprouting I've been reading states that using cloth bags instead of widemouth jars with screens is not unusual. The process needed for sprouting is still the same. Many sprouters who write about it seem to prefer using bags instead of jars, but the bags they recommend to do this with are very expensive for a fixed income person like me. $14 plus shipping for a quart-sized drawstring bag riles up the miser in me.

If this bag the limes came in works okay, I can buy more bags of limes for much less than I can buy one hemp cloth bag. The most popular sprouting bags are made of woven hemp cloth that's manufactured in China. The Chinese also use bamboo baskets for sprouting seeds. In a new age sort of way I can see where this would have a nostalgic appeal to a lotta people. Especially people who grow medical marijuana, but muslin cloth or cheese cloth bags work just as good or better.

All the containers are designed for conveniently wetting the seeds several times each day. The wide-mouth quart jars I use have stainless steel screen lids. After I put the seeds in them and cover the seeds with water to let them soak, I just pour off the excess water and lean them at an angle. I don't have to remove the screens again until the sprouts are grown. After they're initially soaked to start the germinating process, I gotta wet the seeds a couple of times a day, and then drain the excess water off through the screens.

I've read some comments about it being the size of the seeds being sprouted that decides whether to use a cloth bag or a screened jar. One article suggested using the same screening that can be bought at a hardware store. The writer said they preferred the plastic screen material because it comes in different gauges and is cheap enough to throw away if they get clogged or don't work as expected. .

Interestingly enough, most of the articles on sprouting are not about sprouting seeds for food, but growing marijuana. The process is exactly the same. They don't stop with sprouts though, but have instructions on how to grow the plants all the way through to harvesting the buds. Unfortunately that's illegal here. It's not worth the risk of getting caught growing pot.

I'll soak the sunflower seeds until tomorrow, and after that I'll take the bag of sunflower seeds out of the soaking water and hang them up to germinate inside a black trash bag to keep them out of the light for a few days. Then, all I have to do is put them under the faucet for a couple seconds to re-wet them a couple of times or so a day, hang them back up, and wait for them to push the hulls open and start sprouting.

Presently, I have some hulled sunflower seeds growing in one inch of potting soil over in the greenhouse. They grew real nice into two-leaved salad plants. Any more growth beyond two leaves and the sprouts get bitter. They have a strong taste anyway. I can either use them for a salad with the other sprouts or for sandwiches. I haven't tried them in an omelette yet. I have made an omelette with mung bean sprouts I bought at the grocery store.

In a way, changing my diet like this is sheer entertainment where none was before. It's a point of focus on something besides just making sure I take my medicine each day. That's no reason to live at all. I have lots to do each day with my writing and playing the scales on the piano, but growing the food I eat is a very interesting project.
☸

The Ups And Downs Of Hope

❍

Ibis

What never was is now.
But, back then, it was a rainbow
that stood between
God's promise and
Armageddon.
Both the cruel acts of nature
and the dispassion of kismet
happen together at times.
The changes are constantly
moving from what was
to how now brown cow.
What was important then,
when whippoorwills called,
and evening is nigh,
is now just so so.
Whatta ya expect
the effect might be
if all inspiration to create
speciously failed
to bait one's breath?

fmp, Thursday, March 4, 2010

It's always about hope isn't it. There's not any difference in the persuasion needed for proselytizing religion or selling AmWay products or running for political office. Professional educators make their living educating people to think that paying for even more education that will answer all their predatory prayers of learning to sell hope. Hope is the only product on Earth anybody got for sale. 

All professionals like doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs sell hope or various products that promise hope. A surgeon sells his potential patients on taking his surgery with the idea that the procedure will give the person hope of getting healed or at least relieved of pain. It seems ghoulishly like the old highwaymen demands, "Your money or your life." 

In the cowboy movies of the Forties and Fifties, irately selling the hope of living in a decent community allowed street-wise rabble rousers to form a mob in small towns to break the unsuspecting lonesome drifter outta jail and hang him from the highest tree. Subsequently, the preacher/priests would come along and sell the guilt-ridden former rioters/townspeople the hope that for a generous donation to the building fund, God will forgive them for murder in the first degree. As if God has greasy palms too. 

Story-tellers from ancient times have employed cleverness and powerful conversion techniques to obtain the same results Sheherazade did by the enticing way she told The Thousand And One Tales of Arabian Nights. She saved her own life by telling interesting stories that so intrigued her would-be murderer King, that he eventually married her instead.

I am presently looking for hope in a series of internet searches. Some of the links I check out seem to have the info I need until I read a little further past the introductory paragraphs, and then the trail turns cold. I'm reading about sprouting seeds and legumes and whatever else will sprout cheaply for the greatest benefit. I reading to find out about using kelp for fertilizer.

The seeds that I bought and sprouted and eaten have provided me with some experience to base my reading on presently. I was real pleased with the alfalfa and radish sprouts I grew. They looked a lot like the alfalfa sprouts I bought at the store. That's kind of my criteria for judging how well the seeds I sprouted did. Mine tasted crunchier because they were obviously fresher, and I'm prejudiced. '-)

They're simple enough to prepare to eat. I just put some mayonnaise on whole wheat bread, stick a glob of sprouts on the bread and eat it just like I would a tomato sandwich. The radish sprouts tasted just a little spicy and were very crunchy, yet sweet.

I tried sprouting some wheatberries, but they didn't do like I expected. The broccoli seeds barely sprouted at all. Most of them appeared to be dead seed. Like two-thirds of them didn't do anything at all. Some of the red clover seed did better, but there were still lots of hard seed that didn't sprout. This may have a lot to do with the ambient temperature where I had the sprouting jars. I read today I shouldn't have had them in direct sunlight either. That's why I'm reading. To find these things out.

The sesame seeds I bought in the Mexican food section at Wal-Mart may sprout or not. Lentil and black bean and sunflower seeds have hulls on them that have to be dealt with. I sort of figured a way of getting the hulls off by degree, however, the reading material I'm currently plowing through has given me some hints about other ways of de-hulling that might work. It also said that some seeds like sesame can't sit around long after they germinate or they get bitter tasting.

It seems like I'm getting agreeably obsessed with knowing where the food I eat comes from. The food I buy at the grocery store comes from all over the world. It's picked green and sprayed with chemicals and gasified and radiated with weird x-rays to give it shelf life. It's a real mess, and I have begun to think the food I eat is more responsible for my health problems than getting old is. I haven't a clue about what excuse young people use for their health problems

My lack of knowledge about sprouting seeds probably has a lot to do with my brown thumb. It may have a lot to do with my not having much success with growing stuff from seeds. I never sprouted nothing, and didn't realize I was supposed to. One thing is for sure, I'm gonna have lots of sunflowers around my place this summer. The hulled sunflower seeds I germinated and put on top of some potting soil is growing like crazy.

Somebody wrote a short e-mail about us being the aliens we keep expecting from outer space. Each of us arrived from outer space just in ti-me. Each and everybody is always us. We are everything any of us can tolerantly imagine.
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