The Piano's Second Chance With Me

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How stupid of me not to think to learn to play the melody of The Ashokan Farewell with my left hand, in order to figure out which notes in the left hand melody might support The Ashokan Farewell melody I simultaneously play (or aim to) with my right hand.

I've never understood how I have to use both hands simultaneously to play the guitar or the classical flute and get along fine with a little practice, but not the piano. I've not had a strategy or abstract approach to playing this instrument. The possible combinations of keys and notes seemed endless. I didn't get it.

Using the piano to impress potential friends and lovers became one more activity I wanted to perform with aplomb, but never even got close to what most first-year students play at their first recital playing the piano. I knew it had something to do with me not knowing how to play the major and minor scales on an 88-key piano. I just didn't know what learning to play the scales would do to resolve my piano issues.

When I did figure it out I realized that the reason I needed to know how to play the various scales on the piano was the same reason I needed to know how to play the same scales on any musical instrument I picked up to play. What playing the same scales on the various instruments I've played by heart would do for me was to teach me about the particular instrument I picked up to play.

I bought the 88-key digital piano in order to teach myself to play the scales from the resources I found online. Where I found the patience to hang in there and teach myself to play the scales proficiently still surprises me.

I not only had to memorize where the various keys that played the specific note, but I had to learn how it related to any specific key it was a part of, and I had to learn from what I read online which finger to use to play each note in each scale.

It seems like I started this project 2-3 years ago. Time really does fly when I am is having fun. The technical problems of which notes to play in each key, and which finger to use to strike them is not so problematic for me anymore. Sitting down each day to practice is somewhat of a problem, but when I finally sit down to it I get happy I did.

Practicing the scales on a daily basis now for at least a couple of years are beginning to pay off for me. I can't rightly say that I'm ripping through them with aplomb, but I seem to be able to play through the Circle of Fifths arrangement of the scales without getting too lost such that I can't find my way back on track fairly quick.

Sometime I push to go faster than usual. I can speed up a little bit for a little while, but then I find myself falling back into my acquired pace and feeling easier about it. It's apparent to me that I'll get faster and more sure of myself as time goes by.

The realization that by learning to play the melody I want to play with both hands first may just provide me with an approach to using both hands to play the piano that I've needed. It's true that practicing the scales has taken away the intimidation that's held sway over me when I've been asked to play songs in some weird minor key I've never heard of.

The feat of being able to transpose from any one key to any other key has seemed impossible for me. Not being able to do that is the excuse I've used, in the past, to avoid playing with other musicians. It's not their fault. If I keep on keeping on this fear and intimidation might disappear.

Of course, by that time I'll probably be so old and forgetful it won't be much different than the the way it's always been. Presently, that inevitable, fatal prospect doesn't matter to me so much. I'm very aware of how silly it may seem to some people, but the depth of my musical understanding is one of the attributes of having had a series of human bodies that I can take with me to my next one.

The musical understanding I've gained or not may not be very much during this lifetime compared to a Mozart, but it's more than what I had when I bartered for this particular body when it was fourteen years old. Poor boy. He felt so shamed by what happened he wanted to die. Good thing I am was out and about co-me-ing here and there that fateful day.

Good bodies can be hard to come by in pretty much the same way used cars can be full of unknown and unknowable surprises. Having any body for any amount of time in any condition is mo' bettah than having no body at all, and yet, not having a body with which the grand quest can be made has its positive quirks that can lead to remorse if I am is suddenly drafted into duty.

I hate for other people to witness me practicing anything. I don't be bringing nothing out into the public eye unless what it is can be done competently enough to attract attention without creating a demand for more. I like being able to turn it on and/or turn it off like a flashlight when I think it'll do the most good.

Even though I've been learning and practicing the major and minor scales for a couple of years or more, only one person has accidentally heard me practicing because I didn't hear them drive up. Sometime I think it's deliberate that I never really get good enough at anything to make a living on prime time. Occasionally I've made a pittance. Welding was the only craft I ever mastered, and I welded with the best there was at the time. Otherwise I'm just storing up treasures in heaven so they'll be there the next ti-me around. '-)
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The Ghoulish Babbling Of The Undead

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Hypnosis has been a topic of interest to me ever since I can remember. It was just one more subject I read about when reading was about the only real friend I had as a young boy. My family moved around a lot.

Granted, my curiosity about hypnosis in general eventually revealed that what interested me wasn't always called hypnosis per se. Storyline references to hypnosis was part and parcel of all the other stuff I learned via my obsession for reading everything available in the villages we lived in order to keep from seeing the truth of our desperate situation. I read a lot of adventure books about knights from the round table going on quests to find the Grail. Very cool. I liked reading about native american shamans and medicine men and their apprentices going on long-suffering spirit quests in the remote outback away from their tribes by their lonesome to find their spirit animal. I believed that stuff too, man, I was all up into it.

I loved reading stories about brave-hearted men conquering nature. I don't admit it to many people, but I read the biographies of many of the science heros along with the arctic explorers too. I thought taking on the whole world to prove your manhood was really something at a young age. When I started taking formal classes in hypnosis in my early twenties it was easy for me to come up with something to say to the people I put into trance to prove to them that they were indeed hypnotized was to talk to them about vision quests right there in their own imagination.

The state of hypnosis can seem intransigent at times, and redundant and repetitious in form. The more firmly a suggestion is implanted in the subject's imagination by repeating the instructions in a variety of different ways, the more likely the desired results from the trance will transpire.

Sometime the limitations of hypnosis depends on the talents and patience of the hypnotist, and sometime the limitations are imposed by the hypnotic subject's lack of imagination or by a distractive set and settings beyond anybody's control.

A lot of the hypnosis I've done with people has been to change the way they think about stuff that end up as a neurosis like being afraid to cross bridges or other superstitions that make them feel silly. They know they're being silly, but sometimes even the thought of ignoring their superstitions makes them sore afraid.

People record their daily experiences in memory via their favorite of the five senses. The most common of the five senses people store their memories in is the sense of feel. Kinesthetics. They will tell you that by stating, "I know how you feel." If they're more attuned to storing their memories through the sense of sight they'll say, "I see what you mean."

It's commonplace for any one person to have a favorite modality for storing the events of their lives like the sense of hearing. The biblical stories have Jesus warning people that they need to have the ears to hear him. The other four modes are also recording everything all the time also, but the favorite sensory mode is the most common tool people use to recall the incidents of their past with.

The trick to using hypnosis to help people get over their neuroses and superstitions is to train them to use one of the other senses that was also alive and kicking in the same moment of the same event. The other sensory modes besides the favorite one are still alive in the moment, and they can be brought into conscious play with pointed effort. It's like they've been simmering on the back burner waiting for their time to shine.

To change a hypnosis subject's personal history to something a little tamer all I have to do is to have the subject to re-member a specific incident using one of the other sensory modes instead of their favorite mode for re-mem-ber-ing that event. It requires effort from them to bring about, and it's at this juncture that a mentor or a sitter can remind them from the outside to bring the new sensory mode you wanna conjure the specific incident by instead of doing it the same way expecting different results.

If you normally recall an incident using familiar visual images, then switching over to aural images or to what you smelled during the incident instead of what you saw. You might have to practice making it happen until it becomes the new habit. Pretty much the same way one practices a musical instrument until they become competent.

If you can institute that change from one to another in sensory modalities you become a different person to the world around you, because you now have a different history to draw from without actually changing anything about what really happened. 

What I've described is what can happen if a person's favorite way of remembering special events in their lives is swapped to one of the other senses to remember the event by. The ideal progression would be to enhance all the senses and the part they played in registering the former incident.

At some time in the past I seem possessed by the notion that I could learn what I needed to know to become the best that I can be without anybody trying to get me to do what needs to be done their way. For some reason I convinced myself that religious instruction should be free, and that was just stupid.

I paid to go to college or at least somebody did. It really wasn't much back in the day to attend the State supported colleges. I didn't even think of it as paying for knowledge. Apparently I got what whoever paid, paid for. Not much. The first hypnosis school I attended was the first school I almost paid for myself. I spent more of my own money going to hypnosis and NLP seminars than the various sponsors spent on my elongated college career.

I sure have been a sorry, selfish soul. I got no couth. I got no never mind. I acted like the world owed me a living, and so far, while I can't say it's done me proud, it's at least kept me alive and my senses about me. The one thing I might change about having lived the way I've lived is to have been kinder. In a lot of cases I honestly thought I was kind, but nobody saw it that way in real time but for me.
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Food Supplements de Jour

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The daily tasks I set for myself includes writing an entry to this blog and playing the scales on my digital piano. Neither are that difficult for me to do. I've never experienced writer's block, and the scales have long been memorized. It's just a matter of sitting down to one or the other of the keyboards and going clickety clack with my arthritic old fingers.

Earlier tonight I thought of a topic I thought I could get into easily and maybe write something I didn't know I knew. When that happens I have a little Aha! moment, which is always a little thrilling, but it usually doesn't last long, and I move on. I was only distracted for a moment, but that's all it took for the idea I had to evaporate. Occasionally an idea that gets gone comes back when I begin writing, but not very often.

The mild days and cool nights continue. It's very comfortable especially at night. It won't be long before I'm sitting here with a fan on and sweating profusely, and it'll stay that way until early the next morning. I had an air conditioner that I used during the hottest part of the day, and then when i went to bed to at least cool the room down until I can go to sleep.

Getting up several times during the night to relieve myself seems to be part of the way things are in my dotage. It used to irritate me, but then I realized that my irritation was basically a habit I formed back when I had to get up and go to work. Back then, getting up frequently during the night would mess with my sleep schedule and I'd be tired the next day. Mostly from worrying about not getting back to sleep right away.

It doesn't make any difference whether I go back to sleep right away these days. I have no reason at all to get up at any particular time of the day or night. My next appointment for when I'm supposed to keep a defined appointment is sometime in August. I even encourage getting up frequently during the night by drinking some water to make sure my gun is loaded.

I'm taking these dietary supplements like capsules of milk thistle that's supposed to help detox my liver. Most of the other supplements I take are also supposed to help cleanse the toxicity from my liver to some degree, and chelate the heavy metals out of my body. I think drinking a lot of water and urinating frequently helps with that.

There is a real good chance I'm carrying a number of heavy metals in my body from when worked in construction as a welder. I literally breathed the smoke that arose from my deliberately fusing various metals together. One of the most dangerous was welding galvanized steel. It has a lot of zinc that went up in smoke when it gets welded.

Welders got sick from welding galvanized metal as a matter of course. The old hands would advise the new guys to drink some milk when that happened or take some Tums. Doing that did help some, but the Tums and Rolaids both have a lotta magnesium in them, which is a metal itself. I don't weld anymore, and I don't take Tums or Rolaids very often, but I do take a couple of magnesium oxide supplement pills every day.

These supplements I'm taking are also supposed to actually supplement my regular intake of vitamins and minerals. According to the documentation I've been reading for the last year or so there are only about four supplements older people need more so than the younger crowd. My friend Rainey sent me a link to this doctor's blog who seems favorable to using food supplements on a regular basis for older people.

The vitamins and minerals he recommends are about the same as the ones I find on the research hospital sites like the Pauling Institute at the University of Oregon. I read a lot at the Mayo Clinic site and the Menninger clinic to see what they have to say about using any one supplement. I'm especially curious about the dosages they recommend if any.

All these sources have gone nuts over people taking a lot more vitamin D than has been recommended by the Health Department in the last year or so. Some long-term studies that were concluded about three years ago are just now being compiled and studied, and the results show that instead of taking the RDA of 400 mg, that adults should be taking 3000 mg, and get out in the sun regularly in order for the sunlight to produce it in the skin.

The most recent supplement I've been taking has convinced me to stop taking the prescription drugs for rheumatoid arthritis until I know what's going on. That supplement is alpha lipoic acid. I started with that, but as I read more the information revealed that it worked even better when combined with Acetyl L-Carnitine, and now I'm taking these combination horse pills that have both.

Oddly, they're supposed to be taken on an empty stomach, and if you've eaten in the last couple of hours they don't work as advertised. I'm having to think about this. This stuff ain't real expensive, but it ain't cheap either. It would be silly, and offensive to my miserly nature to waste my money not taking them on an empty stomach.

I've started taking this stuff called NAC (N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine) that both the legitimate and quacks are avid about people taking. The aspect of using it that many people like is how it helps to cure hangovers. It's used intravenously to treat overdoses of Tylenol3 and other hero-wine alternatives I don't remember the street names of. It also helps people with diabetes, and reinvigorates antioxidants like vitamin C and E that have lost their antioxidant affect. It tastes horrible, but it's real medicine.
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The Old Grey Mare

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It's lovely weather outside my door. Out on the deck on the second floor. The sun is shining brightly, and yet there is a cool northern breeze such that if I stand or lay out in the sun and get overly warm, then when I step into the shadows I can cool off quick. It won't be long before the temperature gets up to 95° Fahrenheit and the humidity gets up to 95% it won't make the slightest difference if I step into the shade or not.

An old man's shins are good indicators of the state of his health. At least my shins and feet, my lower extremities, perfectly reflect the condition my condition is in. For sure, my shins are where the side-effects of methotrexate display the fact that this powerful drug is taking an active part in my physical system. Sores and scabs. Not a sexy sight. There's hardly any part of my body that radiates sexuality currently. I could care less. I've always been a bit more of a voyeur than a participant.

My shins and feet felt cold when I got up this morning. I opened the outside door to the second floor deck to let the morning sun inside to warm up the house a little. By nine o'clock or so the floor when the sunshine shone was warm to the the touch of my old feet. The warmth felt wonderful, so I scooted my computer chair around so that the sun light coming through the doorway was directly on my knees, shins, and feet. Ahhhh....

It wasn't enough. It felt good where the sunshine hit the front part, but my calves and the back of my knees were still cool in the shadow. I got my air mattress from my camping gear, and a foam yoga mat and put them down on the deck in the sunshine. Then, I got my old blanket and all the pillows off my bed and arrange all this stuff to allow me to sunbath from head to toe in comfort.

I know exactly how long to stay in the sun before I get burned. Why would I not? I've gotten completely tan every summer when it was possible forever. In the deep south, and probably a lot of other places too, before the invention of home air-conditioning, taking off all the clothes you could was the only solution for cooling down other than jumping in the creek.

The way I know how to get out of the sun is a burning sensation that's like a pre-burn to actually getting red. This pre-burn tells me when enough is enow. Like, get out of the sun, right now. There are some families whose skin is so white they can't stay out in the direct sun for more than a few moments before it's too late. I'm not that white. I'm red. A real "redskin".

It showed up on my military ID card in the little box labeled "Complexion". Ruddy. That's what the Navy classified my color as. Ruddy. Red. Not white, not brown, not black, not yellow, but red. When I get a tan, my skin turns purplish first, and then a beautiful golden color that i used to get a lot of compliments for.

Not any more. Getting compliments for the golden tone of my tanned skin. I get compliments instead on how the skin on my head hasn't wrinkled. That's totally genetic. Both my mother and my father got those same kinds of compliments about the smoothness of the skin on their face. My mother was fair-skinned. The ruddiness came from my father's side.

My father's siblings were some strange looking people. Some of them seemed short and a tendency to be dumpy, and some of them, including my father's only brother and the oldest child, were tall and rangy. The kind who could eat all they wanted and would never get fat.

I got some of the height, but I gain weight real easy. I'm about twenty pounds heavier than what I weighed when I joined the Navy, but my waistline makes it look like more. I do care about that a bit. Some of my concern is cosmetic, but mostly it has to do with having comfortable clothes to wear, and the sheer discomfort of the fat getting in my way like when I'm tying my shoes.

I'd really like to go back out on the deck and lay in the sun some more. If cold weather shows up in my arthritis, laying in the sun has the opposite affect. It will take a few more days of sunning before I can stay out any appreciable amount of time. In a couple of weeks I ought to be able to lay out for an hour at a time. Maybe more.

Even today I had to be really careful not to drift off to sleep during the time I was stretched out in the sun almost nakid. The relief from the arthritis is so lovely I could just drown in it. My skin is making so much vitamin D I can practically envision it happening in my mind's eye. This is why old people move to Florida. To be able to stay out in the sunshine all year long.
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A Decision That Rules Out Choice

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Walking is an activity I don't have any problem getting into. The walking I do is not very strenuous. I aim for distance and repetition more than cardiopulmonary exercise. It hasn't been that long ago that I read something about how humans hunted that impressed me. The article stated that the humans biggest advantage in hunting other animals is that they did it in packs, and they depended on outlasting their prey more than physically overpowering them.

Hunting that way explains why people who go on safaris in Africa hire "beaters" who round up the animals and drive them toward the hunter who doesn't really hunt at all. The beaters do the hunting. The safari person is just there to make the kill. They pay the beaters. Everybody is happy. No blame.

I've never been much of a hunter. My father was and provided me with every opportunity I might have needed to get fired up about it. I just don't get a kick out of killing things. I've killed and eaten enough animals growing up to know. As soon as I joined the Navy and got out on my own I never hunted again.

I'm pretty much the same way about fishing. I know enough about fishing to be able to do it to survive. I've worked on charter boats and shrimp boats as hired help. I didn't care much for it. I did it, like I did truck driving in my early sixties, because I had the idea it might be something I could like doing to make some money. It was all dirty, greasy work, and the absentee bosses were all assholes.

It might have helped if I had understood about investing money. I don't understand it even now that I'm vaguely aware that it's going on. It's only since I've been reading on the technical news sites that I became aware of people who made piles of money creating dot.com companies, selling them to larger companies like MicroSoft, and spending the rest of their lives taking care of their millions by investing in up and coming dot.com companies as a way of making money with money.

I can't think of anything I'd rather do less of than developing a grub stake to bilk people out of their hard-earned money, although it's quite obvious that somebody is gonna. That's what the great unwashed are for. They're what they are to be taken advantage of by people they grow to admire.

I've spent my entire life learning how to take advantage of the people who have been taught from the cradle to the grave that it's better to give than receive. I do understand the dynamics of how that happens probably as well as anybody, and better than most. I just don't do it. I don't follow through. When and if I get enough money to survive for a while I stop trying to get more.

There is a specific stopping place when enough is enow. All I need is enough money to go off and be by myself for a good long time, and I could care less what people think I'm leaving their employ for. I just stop showing up because I'm unavailable to even defend my decision. There has always been a real good chance that if I wanna come back and take up where I left off, it can happen without much inconvenience to all parties concerned.

It took me an incredible amount of time to understand about investing money. It's still not interesting to me. I have one long-term friend who is really good at it. He has talked to me about it from his first success to his latest victory. Another guy I've known even longer spends incredible amounts of money on various "projects" and never makes any money at all.

As much as I like to talk to my friends and acquaintances, and as much as they feel like they have to fight to get a word in edge-wise, I usually end up listening to them more than they listen to me. Much of what I talk about is a set-up to get them to talk about what matters to them. Most of the people I spend time around are not as gifted for expressing their thoughts and feelings as I am is, but they wanna be.

I know how to help other people speak their minds. I'm self-taught in a lotta ways, but I've paid good money to go to schools and seminars to refine my basic talent. I know that most people can get everywhere they wanna go with themselves if they just talk about it enough.

If I can get somebody to defend something they do it's like getting my foot in the door. There is a reason for me pissing people off and forcing them to feel like there is something about what they truly believe in that's worth fighting about.

People in general might be surprised to understand that many people don't realize they are emotionally invested in what they truly believe. They don't realize that having something worth dying for is having something worth living for. It doesn't really matter what that is.

I wrote a post today in which I told this guy that he had wasted his entire life by doing something his people were mighty proud of him for. This might seem odd that I'd cop this attitude at first glance. I had my reason for telling him that, again, because I've told him something similar ere now. Here's why:

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

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

The above is one of the 114 sayings of the Gospel of Thomas. One of the manuscripts written in Egyptian Coptic and found in some ceramic jars out in the desert in 1945. The post I wrote to the guy to tell him he had wasted his life was a response to a post he'd written me in an e-mail discussion group on the topic of the Gospel of Thomas.

He fancies himself a competent translator of the ancient languages involved in these writings, and when we were discussing this same saying, he changed the word "hate" to something softer and more gentle. Something more in line with the comments in the King James Version of the Bible that states that children should love and respect their parents. That's why he has wasted his life.

He wasted his life because he became what his parents wanted for him instead of discovering and implementing his own way of living his life as an individuated, awakened person. A lot of people do that. Many more than don't. There is not a single, solitary thing I wanna do about it. It's a decision people have to make for themselves, and if they don't, they'll never understand why they should have. No blame.
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Getting Specific

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It's ridiculous to think I might have bought an $800 digital piano a couple of years ago just to use the drum machine that came with it. Its not true, of course, I bought it because it had 88 weighted and balanced keys like classical grand pianos do. Maybe a little of both. I wanted a digital piano with 88 keys and a drum machine. The fact that it came with 100 + other synthesized instrument patches is nice for varieties sake. It came in handy to play the drum machine in order to drown out the ambient sounds in the neighborhood that seem to be getting on my nerves today.

Percussion is the one area in music I never spend much time at. Playing the guitar had a percussion aspect to it in the sense that I kept time with it to sing. A few years ago I bought a djembe drum and played it for a while. I was getting fairly comfortable with several rudimentary rhythms when I started having trouble with the arthritis. I played a little recently because the prednisone steroids I was taking had my hands feeling okay.

The fact is that I never had no instruction in percussion. I didn't know how to practice to get better. I didn't know the rudiments. If I have learned anything else about life it's that to get what I wanted out of some endeavor, I had to know what the rules were so that I could break them.

I'm currently learning a song written by Jay Ungar called Ashokan Farewell. It's a song a lot of people heard because it was theme song for a popular TV documentary about the Civil War. Like others I thought the song was written during the Civil War, but it was written in 1982. The way people heard it played on TV created the rules for how they will accept it being played forever.

That's what I'm trying to do right now. I'm learning to play the song on my digital piano in the very same mode that made it popular with so many people. If I ever get that done I can start taking liberties and jazz it up a little bit to make it my own, but first I gotta acknowledge in public that originally it was somebody else's.

I can already play the song the way Jay Ungar wrote and performed it. But only one note at a time on the piano. I'm using a YouTube video of a violinist playing it because he does it right. He's accompanied by a guitar player. They keep it simple. I can play along with the video and not make too many mistakes.

Yesterday I found a Youtube video with somebody playing the song on the piano. By watching this guy play Ashokan Farewell I got some good ideas about how to accompany the single note melody I already play with my right hand. It's pretty simple in concept. He plays chords from bottom to top one note at a time at the same time he plays the melody. I should be able to teach myself to do that in about ten years.

The fact that I'll never be asked to play the piano in Carnegie Hall is one I accepted in childhood. I didn't have any ambitions other than to learn to play the scales when I bought this piano. I probably won't do anything with it other than to keep a promise to myself.

In the past, whenever I felt like I needed to have more of a technical background to grow in playing music I would use my not knowing how to play the major and minor scales as my excuse for not progressing. I didn't know exactly why I thought that.

Now that I've taught myself to play the scales from looking up how to do it on the internet I do understand why I thought playing the scales would help me perform better. Playing the scales teaches me about the piano as an instrument. Why am I always the last to know?

If I had learned how to play the scales on the guitar or any other instrument I fooled around with, it would have enabled me to be a much better musician and instrumentalist. That's what I needed to learn to play the scales for. To learn as much as I could about each instrument.

I didn't own a classical flute until I was at least fifty years old. I bought the first one I owned at a pawn shop even though I'd never played one before. I'd owned a few wooden recorders over time, and taught myself to play folk melodies and some nursery rhyme songs. I thought I might like to have a more precise instrument that I blew across the mouthpiece rather than into it.

That's the instrument I should have taken some lessons for. If I had done nothing more than learn to play the scales until I could comfortably play in any key upon demand I think I could have made a living as a musician. The flute I bought at the pawn shop died. I don't have a flute any more. That's kind of sad, but I doubt I'll ever own another one.
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Medicine Man

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Not only did I NOT get much done today, I never really intended to from the get go. I've been feeling my body all day to see if the pain comes back due to my stopping the prescription drugs. Well, not all of them. I still take the hydroxychloroquine sulfate once a day. I still take lots of pills though.

Many of the pills/capsules are supplements. I've been a supplement freak for a long ti-me. Presently, I'm taking 400 mg of alpha lipoic acid. 600 mg of Acetyl L-Carnitine, One gram of calcium. 500 mg of magnesium oxide. A gram of Milk Thistle in a capsule. One selenium 250 mcg tablet. Usually at least one or two 600 mg caplets of ibuprofen.

I take two humongus horse pills of fish oil every day, if I remember. An assortment of vitamins including one mg of B-12 that's way over the top. I've been taking the sublingual 500 mcg tabs and went crazy with my last replenishing purchase and bought 2500 mcg tabs instead. They are the sublingual type though. Sorta sweet tasting.

There are days when I feel like my only real reason for living is to take pills. The most recent prescribed drugs were very powerful, and lowered my immune system to ridiculous depths that exposed me to runaway infections that would literally eat me alive. I don't know if I can do any better at dealing with rheumatoid arthritis than the trained professionals can, but at least I can choose not to murder myself to deal with the pain.

I'm not hard and fast with such an attitude. I know when to cave to pain. I know about when I'll cave to pain. Your milage may vary. I'm acquainted with some ideas about whether human beings can remember actual pain or just the situation or the set and setting in which pain occurred. I don't think I remember pain. Well, until it returns for real, and then, in that moment, I realize we have more than a nodding acquaintance.

Call me crazy... again... but, I'm thinking about a life of acceptance rather than fighting a fight I can't win using the U.S. medical system. They admit they don't have a cure. I don't either. My lower legs broke out in sores that didn't heal until I stopped taking the prescribed drugs that was basically prescribed for dealing with pain.

I've been lying about the pain to the doctors without a real good reason except that I've been taught to give them a number that will result in me getting a prescription somebody else wanted for recreational purposes. I know enough now about the disease I'm dealing with to realize that catering to that kind of friendship costs more than it's worth. At this juncture it's being truthful with myself that counts.

Some of these supplements, in particular one I didn't mention, N-Acetyl Cysteine, are written about to be good for the eyesight as a mentionable side-effect. Its supposedly good for a lotta other things like schizophrenia and/or mental states that have a lot of mood swing to them. Manic-depressives. Bipolar.

It also gets used intravenously to help people poisoned by Tylenol-3. There's more. It's supposed to be one of the only across-the-counter products that actually help deal with hangovers.

There's a lotta hype associated with biased sites that offer up the drugs they review for sale, but some of it comes from respectable sources like research university hospitals. True, they cop to the same crap about such OTC products not having enough blind tests for across-the-board approval by the FDA, but they sorta mention that some of the claims seem not to be exactly fraudulent.

Perhaps they intend to condemn it by faint praise, but when they suggest combining it with the Alpha Lipoic Acid and Acetyl L-Carnitine it sure seems like they really like this stuff. It's probably too easy to manufacture to go to the trouble of seeking FDA approval.

Milkweed Thistle? It's been used for liver problems for thousands of years. I ran a web search on it. Even modern medicine men believe it still helps as an aid for detoxing the liver. Who couldn't do with a little liver detoxification in these days of processed foods?

All the prescribed drugs I took for RA worked through the liver, and most of their side-effects are related somehow to the liver in a not-good way. It's just not a good business to destroy one's liver in order not to destroy one's bone joints.

Granted, it's not a wonderful either/or situation, but destroy my liver to avoid horrible, devastating pain? Maybe I'll go senile soon and won't remember why I'm pissed off the best the medicos can do is to risk killing me in order to save me. I know. I know. I'm running as fast as I can.
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Simultaneously Is And Ain't

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Changing my gmail password has been both a blessing and a curse. I bought a password program that has a password generator and it encrypts the passwords it creates. I thought changing the gmail password would be relatively straightforward proposition, and it was after I jumped through a few hoops.

The problem I encountered after I changed the password was that it had to be changed in the Mac Mail.app in two places, and I didn't know about but one of them. What made it more difficult than usual was that I couldn't open the Mail Preferences page to search for the second location that, in all actuality, I didn't know I needed to know where that was yet.

I was prepared to reinstall the Operating System to correct the problem. A problem I only had in the Mail program and not the whole operating system. I knew how it got corrupted. I tried to transfer the settings from my 32-bit computer to the new 64-bit computer. It was carelessness. I did know better than to force the issue, but I guess I got impatient and didn't measure twice before I cut once.

The reason I was willing to go to all the trouble of reinstalling the Operating System was that if I did it, that would straighten out the mess I made of exporting the settings from my old computer to my new one. Even if it did correct my original mistake, reinstalling would mean I would have to redo all the network settings and set up new mail accounts. So, before I actually did it, I tried to find the solution again.

I downloaded a shareware program called Pacifist that was designed to retrieve Apple's software from the Installation DVD and reinstall it on my hard drive without deleting all my files and settings, and forcing me to set up the Operating System from scratch, and then downloading all the software updates from the time I bought the computer.

Either this software utility program didn't do right or I didn't understand how to get it to do right. There was a dialog box on the splash page for e-mailing the author of the software. I decided to send him an e-mail and ask for help. I conveniently forgot that in order to do that my Mail program had to work.

I unthinkingly clicked on the button to send this guy an e-mail, and was shocked when a new Reply page popped up ready to go. That wouldn't have happened if the Mail code was corrupted. I immediately clicked to see if the Preferences page would open now, and it immediately did just that. Hurrah!

Whatever the problem was, and I sorta think I finally figured it out, being able to search through the Mail.app Preferences page was key to me finding the problem. From there I was able to finally find the second location on the Advanced page where I had to change my gmail password, and suddenly I didn't have any more problems with my Mail program.

The mail,app grayed out and wouldn't do anything. All the troubleshooting I did indicated that nothing was wrong. The Pacifist software had a feature that checked the files on my hard drive against the files on the Installation DVD, and they were exactly the same. They were not corrupted. I repaired the Permissions twice and Verified the boot-up drive. Nothing wrong.

After I was able to get to the Preferences folder and started clicking around in the SMTP server setting I saw a dialog box that allowed all the server settings to be edited. Part of those settings was a password dialogue with asterisks hiding the password, but I knew my old password had seven digits in it, and the new one had ten. I typed the new one in, fired up the Connectivity Doctor, and it was butter, man, all butter.

"I love it when a good plan comes together." ~ The A-Team
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Shocking Slippery Slopes

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Oh, it's lovely here today. All clouded over and sprinkling rain persistently. "Set in for the day." is an old expression that has a positive ring to it. Implying that you're not really gonna be outside much today, or as it's said in the construction industry, "Rain out! Let's go find a bar and git drunk like sailors."

Two hundred men suddenly free to enjoy the unexpected. Sometime a thousand men in a fairly small town. Husbands, lock yo' wimmin in the house. One of my favorite places to have worked myself out of a job was Galveston, Texas. Galveston is the port city of Houston and a port of call for ships from all over the world. Going out on the town there can be an international experience.

Practically every seafaring country in the world has a specific bar they go to when they're in Galveston. Well, every country that has cargo and tanker ships sailing 'round the world. I don't really know how many bars in Galveston are set up to service foreign sailors, but dozens at least, and more than enough to make a night of it for a goodly number of nights in row.

I had joined my youngest brother and his helper in Galveston after I got run off from a job in the Cajun Riviera over in Louisiana. It was the first job I had after my second wife and our children abandon me for being an asshole. I decided to make a serious effort to become a real drunk and throw my life away. That's never worked for me, but it did get me fired.

Coming into work drunk was the excuse the Cajun clique that ran the job used to run me off. In truth, nepotism was at play, and they had some Cajun brother-in-law or cousin they wanted to be hired in my place, and I was in Louisiana.

Cajuns can be tight-knit and Catholic and a fun group to party with, but a Protestant working the petroleum industry construction in Louisiana is about like not being a cowboy in Texas and trying to keep a job there when family needs a job. They got shed of me for to hire they kinfolk. No blame. I knew that coming in.

Nepotism was not the reason me and my brother and Duke, his helper lost our jobs in Galveston. It was fundamentally the reason we got laid off sooner than expected. We just happened to be working in Texas when the oil industry itself went into a tailspin. Overnight there wasn't any money being spent on new construction in Texas, and even the native Texans couldn't find a job without being the friend of a friend.

Duke, my brother's helper was a young kid from around here. My brother got him hired on as a helper on a refinery job he was working in Utah. They traveled together out west for a while until I joined them in Galveston. The three of us hung around together after work, and over the next few months we toured the foreign bars around town.

Eventually, we began hanging out in this one fancy bar and grill that attracted a odd, but lively crowd of bar hoppers mostly from nearby Houston. They had a great buffet that offered seafood cooked in a variety of ways, and the food changed several times a night.

It was owned by an older homosexual who seemed fatally attracted to Duke. He constantly sent over drinks for the three of us in his attempt to seduce Duke. My brother and I lucky enough to drank free because we sat with Duke. It got to where we wouldn't go in there without him.

We should have left Galveston as soon as we got laid off. When we got there there were lots of construction jobs open. Particularly for pipefitters and pipewelders. You could literally quit one job and walk to the next job on the road and get hired the same day. We didn't realize at first how large the slowdown was, and that Texas had overnight become the worst state in the country to get a job. We hung out camping at a state park at the beach for a couple of weeks, and then we had to tuck our tails and slink outta there broke.
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So-me Bitching Beaches

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"Life's a bitch, and then you die"? I haven't been familiar with that aphorism for long. I've never really understood it. Life has been a bitch at times, but other times not. Por mio, it depends on where I'm at with myself at any particular time, and where I'm at in the world specifically. Location. Location. Location.

Doing the same thing the same way in a lotta different places was a lesson unto me. Repetition and redundancy is a hard and fast rule/tool with me. Maybe that's because my astrological natal chart shows that both the Sun and the Moon were in Taurus at the moment of my birth. Fifteen degrees apart. It was during the first crescent of the New Moon when a small sliver of the Moon looks a lot like a bowl.

Some pundits claim that a native's potential enlightenment is revealed by how much light the Moon reflects in the natal chart . They say the configuration between the Sun and the Moon is all any competent astrologer really needs to know to deduce any sort of information about the subject needed to set the hook. In the same way some palmists only read their subject's thumb.

Too much information is worse than hardly anything to go on at all. That's why it's not all that tough to deal with not remembering stuff that doesn't need to be in my life any more. Forgetting stuff is a way of realizing that whatever it was couldn't have been all that important anyway.

I probably learned more about what needs to be learned by becoming a pipewelder than anything else I did in my life. It's said that you can only learn to weld by doing it. Again and again and again. Then, you get a job doing it, and do it all day for a living, and after a few years you might be able to say you've mastered welding.

You can study engineering and metallurgy in the classroom, and that's a fine way to make a living, but even engineers can only learn to weld by burning a bunch of welding rods.

Welding was the first thing I ever actually mastered. I didn't get started until I was in my mid-thirties, and I didn't master the trade until I was in my early forties. "Better late than never." I didn't do it long after that. It wasn't as much fun when I started needing reading glasses.

Making a living as an industrial pipewelder is a personal example of doing the same thing in a lotta different places, and why my moving from location to location to keep a job was such an important part of the process of mastery in my opinion.

I'm convinced that mastering anything helps a person to master anything else if they got the time and opportunity. The length of time it took for me to master pipewelding was what impressed me most of all. I learned to be patient with myself.

In ways it was a big ego trip to be able to weld with such skill that even though every inch of the welds made were 100% x-rayed to find flaws, there hardly ever was a time when a flaw was found. That wasn't just me either. Pipewelders get tested first to get the job, then their work is tested to be able to keep the job.

That's why it's such an ego trip for them. If for whatever reason you lose your confidence in your skills, that hesitation is enough to cause you to lose your job. It's like being a boxer and losing a fight. It takes a lot to work your way back into it, and some never do. There seem to be a lot of trades where craftsmen can lose their edge, and have to do something else for a living.

In my case, it was my eyesight that caused me pause. I was thirty five when I stumbled my way into a government skill center down in Mississippi where I ran outta luck with a young wife and our child. Our car broke down and we had very little money, and things were looking real dim.

The government paid me to go to welding school, and I took to it like a hog to a mud puddle. I didn't have any skills and only a couple of years of college seemed like more of an impediment than a boon. It didn't take me long to realize that if I learned to weld I'd had a fairly sure way of making a living for my new family.

Learning to weld did exactly that, but since I only got started very near the time many people start to need reading glasses my time was limited and I didn't take that into consideration until it was a done deal. Once I failed my first welding test because I needed the glasses I refused to get, it was all over but the shouting.

That probably happens a lot with double Taurus's. It took me a long time to realize what I'd previously been calling "being practical" was really being stubborn. That's why my refusal to admit I couldn't see as well as I thought I did got the best of me.

It wasn't just failing the welding test that got my goat. It was my slow, obtuse refusal to accept the truth that my failing eyesight was just another indication that I was getting older in more ways than one. People who liked me and considered themselves a friend were telling me things for my own good, and I'd not only deny it, but rebuke them for suggesting I had weaknesses.

I switched over to pipefitting for a living. My confidence that I could pass the very difficult welding tests was shot to hell. How was I gonna make a living? It wasn't long after that I lost my family too. No blame.

I kept messing around getting jobs where I could as a pipefitter. It was tough. I didn't like pipefitting like I did welding, and that had a lot to do with me barely scraping by. I'm still barely scraping by. I don't know any other way that I like to express myself than being a poor it.
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The Way Of All Good And Bad Thangs

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The reunion of my high school class happened the day after Easter on the 5th, and I thought it was today. I wrote to the class secretary to find out what time today, and that's the only way I knew that I'd missed it. It probably happened because I'm losing my memory.

For some reason that doesn't bother me so much. A lot of my memories are not all that wonderful anyway. I've only been to two reunions in the last fifty odd years. The first one I got drunk and made a complete fool of myself. I didn't intend for something like that to happen, but apparently I was supposed to feel stupid about it for a long time.

The other reunion I attended was about six months ago and I deliberately toned my behavior down to compensate for my former mistake. Not much went on anyway. There was no organized method of getting news at that meeting. I only talked to the people at the same table I sat at, and only one class member sat in the group.

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

Reading on a bit about Walpurgisnacht revealed a statement about one celebration in Sweden in which the witches of winter were burned atop a special hill or mountain. May Day probably serves the same purpose to farmers in the northern climes as Easter does around here. It's a sort of drop dead date for planting gardens and crops so they won't get killed by a late frost.

This piqued my interest in how witches are associated with winter. They appear to specifically arrive along with the winter solstice. Is that when they mythically ride in like plagues on their brooms to indicate that the Black Plague descended upon Europe like a bird flu pandemic... instead of from land-locked black rats?

Were such "witches" symbolically burned at the stake, when Mai arrives, in order to prevent a late killing frost? Like dragons arrive with the spring equinox and are mythically associated with electric storms that spit lightning to burn homes and winds to blow down the farm crops? Do you supposed this is associated with old age and un-im-preg-na-ble women, and/or why they're sometime called "prigs"?

I wouldn't dare cop such an attitude around either of my ex-wives, but it doesn't matter that we were married, because I can't really say that around women of any kind. Does it matter that I have to stay away from people who take insult about my ability or desire to reach for any connections associated with my attempt to use words to capture drifting thoughts?

No. I can't afford to allow other people to decide whether what I choose to say is proper or improper any more than I can take the time to deliberate in real time whether what I write down in such an attempt is true or false. That's the exact reason I changed the settings on this blog to not allow Comments. This is a speculative process, not an attempt to be truthful.

This blog is also a continuation of my palm reading interests. Palm reading is one of the most fascinating activities I ever indulged. I did it practically every chance I got for around twenty years. No quarter. "Aye, and thar's the rub...". It took that long for me to realize that every word I said was a projection or accusation that was all about who-I-think-I-am-is.

I didn't learn about projection from studying it in a psychology class. I learned about it from taking religious sacraments and having it shoved up my ass from making rude assumptions. Other people are not like what I read in their palms. They're certainly not what I think I would be if I acted like I presume they do.

Granted, employing the dynamic of projection would make me what I accuse them of being like, but even that's not true. Not only is the other not what I would be like if I behaved as I propose they behave, but neither am I. I am is not what it ideates itself as being. I am is only me, and not any of it's delusions.

I read palms for such a long time because I could re-discover use palm-reading to find out how I used the rules of conscience I adopted in order to remember to mimic the behaviors of people I wanted to be like. That's how I incrementally developed the various personalities I am uses to get what it thinks I am needs from the world around Me.

There is only One me, and each personality assumes that the One me is actually IT. How does I am deliberately pervert and distort the One Me into six billion personas? In this sense, the persona is basically a mouthpiece for a particular worldview.

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

In my highly questionable opinion it's because each I am can only create personas by mimicry and imitation. The ability to do that doesn't last forever. Upon the symbolic event of one's second Saturn Return, the process reverses and the incremental process is reversed and all that has been done to be-co-me so-me-thing we're not that I am thinks into being is just as studiously undone. No blame.
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Otherly Utterings

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Back in the fall I bought potted plants called ornamental kale and ornamental cabbage from Lowe's. The plants grew ferociously during the winter. I only had to take them inside a few of the coldest nights. Along toward spring they started blossoming and now they're starting to bear seed.

I've never paid much attention to how these plants go to seed before. I've seen it happen in the gardens my parental family had when I was a kid, but it wasn't as noticeable as having them close at hand out on my deck and in the green house. I kept the ornamental cabbage plant in the green house part of the time because I was too lazy to move it back over here.

The fact that these plants put out seed pods surprised me. One of the kale plants was purple all through it's growing season, and the seed pods from it are purple too. I plan to watch the process all the way through, and harvest some of the seeds for to plant this fall. Presently, only the pods themselves seem to have emerged. I see a couple of what probably is seeds by the nodes that are showing up on the outside of them.

I sprouted some of the oily sunflower seeds I bought to feed the birds when it gets icy in the winter. Sunflower seeds need to be hulled before they're sprouted for food, but these were bird food and the hull is still on them. I threw some out near my compost pile for the birds, but apparently they went down into some cracks and the birds missed them. Now, I got sunflower plants growing like crazy out there. I might plant some more just to see if they'll mature. I don't know why they wouldn't.

The sunflower seeds I soaked to germinate them sprouted okay, but the black hulls were difficult to remove, so I used the same containers and potting soil we use to grow wheatgrass for juicing to put the germinated sunflower seeds in to see if they'd take root. They did, and I used scissors to snip off the green sprouts once they had developed two leaves. According to an article I read on it, if the sunflower sprouts are left to grow more than two leaves they begin to taste bitter. I let some of them go, and sure enough they did taste more bitter. They don't taste all that good to me when they ideally have two leaves.

I was watching a travel show hosted by this interesting Scottish guy who travels all over the northern tip of Canada and Alaska this morning. As travel shows go it was an interesting one because it wasn't about the dead stuff left laying around by dead creatures, including humans. I don't appear to be all that nostalgic about the early remains of civilizations and traditions like they celebrate in Europe.

Oddly, or maybe not, the thing about the show that interested me was when the guy got to the end of his journey in Vancouver, Canada. He ended it at a place called Friendly Bay. As he was walking along the Pacific Coast beach at Friendly bay I saw a bunch of seaweed laying abundantly on the shoreline.

I need an abundant supply of seaweed and kelp to make fertilizer out of. Some of you may recall that I made a trip to the Atlantic Ocean beaches near the house to see if I could find some seaweed, and got nothing. There has to be a big offshore storm for it to wash ashore.

When I saw the seaweed on the Pacific Coast up at Vancouver in that TV documentary, it reminded me of having lived, or rather home-ported, in San Diego, California for four years during my first hitch in the US Navy. When I went to the beaches there they always seemed littered with seaweed. Even to the point of it being somewhat of a nuisance.

I grew up mostly on the coastal plains of North Carolina. We never lived more than 50-60 miles from the ocean, and went there for one reason or the other year around. I've been to most every kind of beach in the continental U.S. on both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. Even Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. They're very different places with very different conditions that are natural to both coasts.

The Pacific Ocean drops off like a rock. Many of the beaches in California can be over a thousand feet deep just a couple of hundred meters off-shore, but the beaches I grew up loving near here might extend out for miles and miles before the depth of the water gets to be a hundred feet deep because of the Transatlantic Shelf that reaches out to the Gulf Stream.

Seaweed must like deep water, but that's not the only reason it piles up on the west coast, and needs a big storm to wash it ashore on the east coast. The other big reason is the existence of the Westerlies. The Westerlies are the wind currents that extend from the west coast to the east coast. Like when you watch the weather reports. The weather systems that affect the eastern U.S. always get here from somewhere out west. That's because of the Earth's rotation that causes the wind to blow like that in the northern hemisphere.

The Westerlies blow the storms ashore on the Pacific Coast, and with the exception of the hurricanes, they blow the storms eastwardly out into the Atlantic Ocean. Thats why there is a constant supply of seaweed on the Pacific coast, and only an intermittent supply of seaweed on the Atlantic Coast. When I win the lottery, I'm moving.
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Is The Tea Party's Final Solution Genocide?

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I went to a funeral last night. My older sister's adopted daughter's second husband died of cirrhosis of the liver in his mid-thirties. I went to support my sister. The rest of them were pretty much strangers to me. He was a drunk and a crack-head and not very lovable as far as I was concerned. He probably robbed most of the people's homes who went to his funeral. My guess is that the other guests were there to support his parents and siblings, and they needed it. Their world is now a safer place.

My sister and her husband couldn't have children because my sister had scarlet fever when we were children, and antibiotics like penicillin hadn't shown up yet in the rural village we lived in then. Her getting scarlet fever was a memorable event. I was six years old and in the first grade of school. The doctors quarantined our home and we couldn't leave the house for what seemed like forever to a kid, but it was only a couple of weeks.

She had repercussions from this disease her whole life. It making her sterile was just one of the symptoms. I don't know much about it. Who wants to talk about that to a blabbermouth like me. I have the deserved reputation of not being able to keep a secret. I don't wanna know any more of their stupid secrets than I can get out of. I know more about people than they know themselves, and I wanna hear the lies they tell themselves to cover up their self-ignorance?

Well, not so much my sister. I actually love her and our siblings. She's the perfect example of what love actually is to me. It's familiarity and has nothing to do with sex. While it may be true in one way that familiarity breeds contempt, it also breeds love as I understand love. I love people I've known for a long time, not because of any particular attributes associated with romantic love or sex. Sexual behavior is something more primeval and different than "love" to me.

Knowing anybody at all a long time requires me to forgive their dumb mistakes to continue to be around them. Just as they have to forgive my dumb mistakes or leave me be. It's not unusual for me to be in love with people I work with everyday for a few weeks. I suffer a little whenever I leave their presence. I mourn because I feel a real loss of some kind. The longer we're around each other the more I miss them. Much of my poetry describes the kind of love that seems too mundane to have invested emotionally in. There have been times I have felt deep shame that I could fall in love so casually over an encounter that was never meant to last long. It seems intentional that I chose to live life as a shamed man (shaman).

The pain of separation I felt from enduring both my divorces nearly killed me. I tried several times to murder myself, but I wasn't very successful or I may have been too much of a coward to actually do what it took to finalize the event. My ex-wives have grown to wish my efforts had killed me. My children probably even more so, but they never knew me well enough to hate the guy who tried to kill himself. They only hate their mother's idea of the guy who deserted them or got deserted by their mother. It's a complicated world. The children it takes a whole village to raise, leave those villages unprepared for life as their parents know it. Shit happens. Things change.

Since the advent of the television media in the Fifties and Sixties, entire villages have retreated from listening to the radio on the front porches and stoops next to the sidewalks, to the sofas and LazyBoy chairs inside of their houses. to where the village's children can't reach out to them without interrupting their favorite sitcom.

Wealthy soccer moms with their SUVs and strict schedules for extra curricular activities not withstanding. They're gonna just hate it when the Tea Party fanatics turn their precious soccer fields into the killing fields on Rush Limbaugh's rabble-rousing orders. Sig heil!! Bitch!

I'm only partially kidding. Genocide can get started with just the sort of dissatisfaction the great unwashed seem to feel these days. There was a documentary on PBS last night about the psychology behind how something like Ruwanda could happen. They had interviews with both the killers and the lucky survivors.

The conclusions from these interviews appeared to be that the conditions for genocide to occur is not enough. It takes the order of a strong man to get it started, but once started, the strong man can't make it stop. Even killing the strong man doesn't stop it once it gets started. Apparently, it becomes an act of nature until it's finally over.

I figure that's what happened to the little people in Ireland. The little people were probably just a race of people like the Bantu pygmies of Africa, the Ainu of Japan, and the Negritos of the Philippines. They were different because they were so small in stature, and eventually gained the reputation of developing magical powers to compensate. They probably accepted this magical attribute without resistance, because it gave them a sense of power over the larger races they wouldn't have without it.

Feigning they had magical powers when they didn't probably got them wiped out genocidally for their troubles. They could ran, but they couldn't hide forever, because their difference in size gave them away. They had to expose themselves to get something to eat. There are only so many places to hide for a long time on an island.

It was chilling to hear one of the Rwandan killers being interview for the documentary relate how they would wake up in the morning, and when the drums started beating, they would go out looking for the tribe members they were killing. They would hunt for them out in the jungles every day for months on end without really understanding why they were doing it. They had no mercy except for offering a quick death over a slow one.

To me, that's what the Tea Party people could become, because it's all about racial prejudice, not the government. I hope I'm wrong, but who knows? I'm human. I'm as gullible as it gets. I could get caught up in such a mob action like anybody else. I might not realize in real time what was going on because I'm always the last to know.
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Bamboo For The Masses

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The time of the year has come for new bamboo shoots to emerge from the root mass and grow forty feet tall. I've found three spouting out of the ground so far. There might be more, but they're hard to find in among the dead leaves and limbs on the forest floor. I'll know in a week or so. There may not be any more than three come up. That's the same number of bamboo plants I had come up last year.

Frankly, I don't know what the deal is with how bamboo propagates. When I first talked about planting them in the corner of my yard, my younger brother became truly concerned and swore that if I planted them they would take over all my property and my house. They haven't.

In fact, it took about five years for the first couple of bamboo shoots to grow at all, and in the last five years only about twenty altogether have appeared, and most of those died of their own accord or got killed by a fire forest fire I deliberately set to burn off the underbrush each winter.

It was just a small burn-off fire whose flames hardly ever reached a height of six inches, and it didn't kill much of the underbrush it was started for in order to open up the woods a little and kill off the ticks and redbugs so I could take a stroll there without getting eat up. It killed the bamboo though. Including the largest stalk yet. About 4-6 inches in diameter.

My red azalea bushes are blazing with new blossoms. The bushes were some commercial plants I put out over ten years ago. They've been very productive from the getgo. In a long row on the western side of the lawn around my house I planted some other azalea bushes that took a long time to start putting out blossoms.

This row of azaleas are mostly a pink and white variegated color and don't blossom until a couple of weeks later than the original plants with the red blossoms show up. at the northern end of that row are some miniature azalea plants that have pure white blossoms.

All the plants in that row were "rescued" from a commercial planting venture on my younger brother's property several hundred yards away that he rented out to the grower. They were potted and set under the pine trees on that property to shade them from too much sun when they're small cuttings.

The whole lot of them were killed back by a late hard frost such that they didn't have any commercial value. I asked the grower if I could have a few of them to see if they might come back over time. He told me I could have any or all of them. He was quite disgusted over his financial loss. No blame.

I took about 30-40 of them out of the pots and buried them in a row along the edge of my lawn and forgot about them for the most part. They didn't exactly die, but they didn't grow, and they only put out a few blossom over the next five years or so.

It was during the winter when a lot of the underbrush in the woods beyond the edge of my lawn had shed their leaves that I began to notice new shoots coming out of the ground of those frost-killed plants, and it was those new growth shoots that eventually began putting out blossoms. None of the original branches ever did much. Now, those plants are five foot tall bushes and seem to have more blossoms every year.

My old fig tree has completely leaved out and even has small berries growing. I've seen these early fruit happen before. It's exciting to see them and imagine having fresh figs earlier than usual. But these early fruits hardly ever mature. They turn pale green and fall off. That's when the real fruit begin to appear that will get ripe and BE delicious. '-)

The commercially grown fig bush I planted about three or maybe four seasons ago is still trying to grow up and be a real little boy. It's only been putting out a couple of leaves each summer, and then the small shoots it puts up that never get over a foot tall, have died back each winter. Then, in the spring, the plant would have to grow a new shoot even to grow leaves on.

This past fall I decided to cover the one puny little live branch the root system sent up as a token effort to reproduce itself with a pile of dead leaves to protect it from the winter frosts. The idea was that if I could at least keep that one little limb alive over the winter it wouldn't have to regrow the branch before it started growing leaves.

My ploy worked, at least to some degree. A week or so ago I raked the dead leaves away to find out if the little branch had survived the winter, and saw two tiny little green buds toward the top of the plant. It was alive. If it could get those two little buds to grow from early on in the season it might be able to grow some more branches with even more leaves, and more leaves might help the root mass grow big enough to support a strong, mature, blossoming fruit tree.

I've been checking to see if those little green buds would grow. They haven't really developed much, but now there is a third tiny green bud at the node below the other buds. I'm cautiously delighted.
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Hovering Between Old And New

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A friend told me about a health food cooperative down in Wilmington that she said had a large variety of sprouting seeds. I have a goodly number of seeds in my storage bin, but what I needed was an excuse to get outta town. So, I drove down to Wilmington to find this unheard of health food store.

I took the "old road" (U.S.421), the ancient road from the mountains to the coast that InterState 40 replaced. It crosses the "new bridge" that replaced the aging old bridge, and the only one that crossed the Cape Fear River at Wilmington. The new bridge is further south than the old bridge (now completely refurbished with a second bridge and four lanes), and becomes Oleander Drive on the Wilmington side of the Cape Fear River. Oleander Drive slowly replaced Market Street as the main thoroughfare that runs from historical downtown Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach.

U.S. 421 was extended from the entrance to the old bridge and stays on the other side of the Cape Fear River from historic downtown Wilmington. Using the new extension you will see the Wilmington waterfront, and it passes the entrance to the World War Two battleship, the USS North Carolina, until it reaches the new bridge. When you cross the new bridge it misses downtown Wilmington. If you keep going straight at the bottom of the bridge, it runs into Oleander Drive and the old shopping centers, and Oleander Drive continues toward Wrightsville Beach where it eventually turns in Military Cutoff Road where all the new shopping centers are, and then becomes old U.S. 17, which was replaced by InterState 95.

If you turn to the right at the foot of the new bridge it melds into old U.S. 421 which is the old road to Carolina Beach, then Kure Beach, and ends at one of the North Carolina State Aquariums. Nearby, just before you get to the Aquarium, you can take the State ferry over to Southport, a unique port entry town that received lots of immigrants and settlers from European ships that never got recorded because the United States wasn't the United States yet.

I wanted to avoid all that because the food cooperative was about half a mile west of where Oleander Drive turns into Military Cutoff Road, so I took the new, uncompleted InterState 140 cutoff that runs around the north part of Wilmington through a bunch of swamps. I thought it might put me closer to where I intended to go, but in the end game, it didn't. I know that now, but there's another way I have yet to use yet. Next time.

The reason taking I-140 from U.S. 421 instead of driving straight down Oleander Drive is that it doesn't bring me much closer to my intended goal is that it conjoins U.S. 17 lots further north than I figured. I should have turned south on I-40 over to Market Street and taken the old way toward Wrightsville Beach, and that would lead me to Military Cutoff Road just before it turns into Oleander Drive.

At that crossroad, where Market Street crosses Military Cutoff Road, is the relatively new shopping center where Lovey's Health Food Store is located. I've shopped there once before, but I didn't stop when I drove past it, because I wanted to check out the food cooperative I was told about to see what they offered as far as sprouting seeds are concerned. I finally found it, and it didn't have the variety of sprouting seeds I was told of. They did have the NAC (N-Acetyl-Cysteine) I wanted besides the seeds, and they had it on sale, so I bought two bottles of 30 caps each. Expensive crap. I gotta buy a health food store after I will the lottery. '-)

Then, I drove back to Lovey's, where I bought a bottle of 60 caps of NAC. They gave me a Senior Citizens Discount and a fancy cloth shopping bag for buying there, and then took the new way (I-40) back here to ho-me. I ended up not buying any seeds at all. I have an appointment I'm dreading at the VA Hospital in Durham, and they have three Whole Food Stores in that area where I can get all the sprouting seeds I want at a little better price, and get travel pay for my troubles.

The one geographical fact I learned about by going a different way yesterday was where Wilmington went to. Northeast. That's were the businesses migrated to. Since the federal government completed InterState 40 down to Wilmington from Raleigh it's become a thriving metropolis compared to being probably the oldest town in North Carolina.

Up until that happened it was a wonderful old town with some of the oldest houses in the state. It's been preserved pretty good and is getting mo' bettah/worse in that regard. If you've ever been entangled with the preservation types you'll realize they're a bunch of pedantic assholes nobody wants to be around, but they do... good things... maybe. I'd burn it to the ground and start over myself.

I've often thought that if I came into some sort of windfall and had the money I would buy a house in historical downtown Wilmington, but living in Key West, Florida for seven years has changed my mind about wanting to live in Wilmington or other Southern port towns like Charleston and Savannah. I really find the kind of people who work the preservation gig to be despicable, snotty prigs with no creative talents to speak of. Who wants that? Especially war re-enactment people. When I'm around them I wanna scream, "Get over it! Jesus Fucking Christ! What kind of animals celebrate war?"
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Getting On Regular

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I'm up early this morning. That's because I went to bed early last night. I lay in my bed waiting for the morning light to shine through the window on the south side of my bedroom to tell me that the day has started for the working folk. Many mornings I lie there for a while and listen to the morning traffic noises to begin. I was too antsy to do that this morning. When I did finally get up the clock on my computer said it was earlier than I thought. Four a.m.

The only thing on the television was the all-night news shows that I like. They run on for hours reviewing the past weeks news. They have the new presenters giving it their best in the hope that they'll get on regular. I used to go through that feeling a lot working in construction. Many "road whores" that work the industrial construction circuit will say they like being on the road, but given the chance to "get on regular" a great majority of them would probably say "Yes."

It's really quiet at this time of the morning. I should have been getting up this time of the day to write. There is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't. I don't have any appointments for anything until the nineteenth when I have to go face the rheumatologist and decide whether to tell him I'm not taking his drugs. My high school class is having a reunion on the seventeenth at a pizza joint. These people got real class. I like it okay. At least they have a salad bar and non-meat spaghetti sauce.

Starting a vegetarian diet is not such an odd move for me. It started out with me thinking that the Atkin's low carb diet might be responsible for the onset of my arthritis. For a fairly long time I didn't eat much else but meat, and when I read that older people lose some of their digestive juices as they age, I figured that it was the load I put on my digestive system that caused my body to revolt. I didn't plan to go on a vegetarian diet. My intent was simply to cut back on or eliminate meat for my GI tract's sake. After a few weeks of that, the change was such an improvement I decided to go all the way with it.

I stopped eating meat on December 1, 2009. It's been colorful. My sister-in-law got me interested in the wheatgrass diet about the same time as I decided go meatless, and that has been a real influence. I bought a real expensive juicer in order to give it a whirl. Then, I had to use it or feel stupid. Using it has been a lesson unto me.

Take pineapples for instance. I used to buy cans of sliced pineapple basically to drink the juice in the can. I didn't really know that until I bought a fresh pineapple at the grocery store, brought it home, sliced it up, and fed it to my masticating juicer without peeling it. My juicer did the same thing with it that it does with the wheat grass and celery and carrots. It smashed the fresh juice out of it and vomited out the peeling as pulp that will become compost. Very tasty.

The sprouting of seeds I've been doing has been enlightening. I got all worked up about getting the wide-mouth jars and the stainless steel screens I use to germinate and sprout them. I located several fairly local places where I can find good seeds. My first efforts were actually the most successful sprouting I've done. The surprising part of it is how little it takes for one person.

I thought at first that I'd have to start a new jar of sprouts maybe every day, but it didn't take too long before I had more sprouts than I could eat before they got too old. My stomach has a time with digesting raw food. It can only process about a cup or two a day, and those two cups of sprouts plus the wheatgrass smoothies I make are as much food as it takes for me to have more than I need to stay healthy.

Raw foods may make as much trouble for my digestive system as meat. It takes a lotta gall to break those vegetables down to being useful. That's part of the reason I bought a masticating juicer instead of a centrifugal one. I don't have any upper molars left to chew food with without my partial dentures. The dentures I have don't fit now, if they ever did, and the side affects of the methotrexate causes sores in my mouth and especially my tongue, and it can be very irritating to wear the dentures. I manage to chew some with my front teeth, but it becomes very obvious that's not what they were designed to do.

The prednisone series is finished a couple of days ago, and I'm finally becoming sane again. I've had people tell me they hate using steroids because they get bold and say stuff they wouldn't usually say. That's the exact reason I like it. Sure, I get a lotta accusations of being crazy, but that's normal for me. I found out a lotta hidden stuff that's useful I wouldn't have found out otherwise.
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A Day To Forget

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Nothing happened today. It might as well not have come and gone. It's eleven o'clock at night and I feel the same grogginess I felt when I first woke up. I think it was a cool day compared to the high eighties and nineties that the temperatures have unexpectedly climbed to yesterday and the day before.

Now I remember. I spent the day researching this new supplement I've started using, and then segued to a complimentary supplement I've since gone to the store and purchased and added to the row of bottles of supplements I've been strung out on in one way or the other for a long time.

This ridiculously inane behavior obviously hasn't helped that much. I got all the diseases my natal astrology chart said I'd have thirty years ago. I didn't believe it then, but I have no choice now. It's my Saturn in the sixth house of health. My conflicted Saturn is associated with bones. Man, have I got troubles with mah bones.

Not much interested in writing tonight. Maybe later.
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Well! It's Not So Weird To Me!

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I serendipitously stumbled upon a documentary about Gautama and the classical story of how he sought for, attained his enlightenment, and subsequently be-ca-me the Buddha. I would have planned to watch it if I'd been aware it was coming up, but I'm glad I fell into it anyway. I'd never seen a polished video on the topic of his life before. I'd only read about it in books.

There was a scene in the Gautama documentary about his life I wasn't aware of despite the fairly extensive reading and studying I'd done on his purported biography previously. He had returned from his initial travels to visit his wife who had recently delivered their new baby. Quite naturally, his wife wanted him to hold the newborn. He knew that if he took that baby in his arms that would be the end of his spiritual quest. He refused to hold the child and returned to his goal of acquiring enlightenment for good. 

Gautama and I were the same age of life when that happened. We were both approaching the first Saturn Return. It was during the last part of that 29 1/2 years cycle when we were both presented with our first child. This final phase of Saturn's orbit before it returns to the same place it was at first breath is represented by the last sign Pisces.

In astrology, Pisces is the sign of completion, and it represents the time of any cycle where the loose ends of the endeavor has to be cleaned up. Like getting a house ready for sale to fetch the highest price possible. In my natal astrology chart I have Venus and Jupiter conjoined in the last decan of Pisces, and my progressed Sun was passing by that specific configuration about the time my own first child was born. I too, ran for my spiritual life.

That is not the behavior of a person who has accepted the fate dictated by their family or tribe, in my ignominious and disgraceful opinion, but the deportment of a person who is chosen from childhood by mysterious forces to be tempted by that fate again and again whether they like it or not. Kismet.

Unlike Gautama, I tempted my fate once again. I married again and had two children with that woman, and instead of leaving them, pretty much forced them to leave me by another unforeseen explosion of physical violence. The first divorce almost destroyed my parent's child. I tried, but wasn't allowed to commit suicide. I meant for the second marriage to work and did a lotta stuff I wouldn't have done to keep it alive. It didn't matter.

For all kinds of reasons I never tried marriage again. Granted, I was tempted once by a real beauty, but the only way I can control my horrible temper is to live completely alone. At least, that's what I tell myself. I can't say I like living alone very much. I hate being an untouchable, because I do love touching and being touched very, very much. At least, I did once love it. No mas. The thrill is gone. Taking a good shit is more important in my dotage.

Being individuated is a piss-poor substitute for possessing relational exclusivity with a person who loves you back. Apparently loving me back can make a potential mate into a punching bag. Who wants that? Not me. I don't want it for them. I've lived alone since the end of my second marriage except for one brief encounter with a woman who sorta did wanna be a punching bag, sexually, and she was aggressively proactive in provoking my anger for her own ends. I ran for my life. I returned to here. It's to die for.

It's tradition for the farmers in this area of the coastal plains to not plant their produce crops until after Easter because of the chance of a late killing frost. It usually works out for them, but it hasn't always. They put a lotta money into plants and fertilizer and other overhead costs besides labor. Many of them borrow against a successful produce season. A killing frost can put them out of business and their families out on the street, so they're particular about planting too early.

They get the highest prices if they're the first-est with the most-est when it come to making money growing produce like bell peppers and squash and cucumbers. There is a window of opportunity as the Spring weather moves up from Florida.

Florida's produce ripens the earliest, but as sooner as the buyers and the truckers can buy produce closer to the NorthEastern markets like from D.C. north up to Boston, they stop paying the big money to the Florida crowd and move on up the Atlantic seaboard with the season to here, and then when the produce starts ripening in Virginia and Maryland, that's even closer and less expensive to haul to market than here, and the window of opportunity is gone.

What's I'm saying is that since Easter has come and gone, there's a pretty good chance we might not have a late killing frost, and my fig trees might have another bumper crop like they did last spring. To me, there's nothing quite so delicious as fresh, tree-ripened figs.

I'm especially happy about my new fig tree that I've been trying to keep alive for at least three years now. Each winter the live branches that barely stuck out of the ground died back, and each spring they had to grow up from the roots at square one. This past late fall I decided to rake a bunch of leaves over the top of the one branch that made up through the ground and lived through the summer to see if that would help it survive without having to start again from the root.

I uncovered it a week ago to see how it had done, and sure enough, there were a couple of tiny green buds on the tip of last summer's growth. With this commercial cutting sprouting out above ground from the first day of spring there's a chance it might grow enough to make it through next winter, and then live longer than me. The buds have gotten a little greener, but I'm afraid to trust my luck until they become green leaves. It's the best this plant has done so far, and I'm real happy about that.
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Computer Day

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It's been a strangely satisfying day. I had computer troubles. I was doing some housecleaning on my hard drive and inadvertently deleted all my e-mall accounts. I had to start again from square one and set up e-mail accounts for both gmail and my ISP. I finally got my gmail account sending me my e-mail again, but I got the wrong port number in my ISP account, and I'm too sick of messing with it to do a look-up to fix it.

When Apple decided to go 64-bit I was tickled to death. I been wanting me one of them thar devils for a long time. The problem was that my Mac Mini only had a 32-bit Intel chip, and nothing was gonna change that. I knew if I wanted to get hold of a 64-bit Snow Leopard Operating System I was gonna have to buy a new computer. After much agonizing to satify my miserliness I bought a new iMac with Snow Leopard installed.

Apple has a real good set-up to migrate your settings and other data from an older Mac to a newer one, and maybe vice-versa. My youngest brother, the Mac power user, reminded me of this, but I had already beat him to the punch by figuring out how to do it myself. It wasn't difficult to locate the software that made it happen. It's labeled Computer-to-Computer Migration Program or something equally as obvious.

I should have thought about what might happen if I migrated all my old settings to the new machine. I didn't. I migrated them anyway. My doing that was a rather inconvenient mistake I'm still paying for. The data and setting were from a 32-bit Operating System to a 64-bit Operating System. Too late now to do anything but reinstall from the DVD, and that would be a really big hassle because it would put everything back to a default setting for everything.

It took hours to get my rig back to acting like anything normal, but I removed a lot of old stuff that got migrated that ain't nothing but baggage. I downloaded new 64-bit upgrades for some critical software like the Onyx software program I use to do a lot of maintenance work. The software for my Logitech Anywhere mouse had been upgraded to 64-bit, and that allowed me to remove all the old Logitech stuff that showed up before I installed the upgrade.

That was particularly pleasurable for me to do. I located and deleted every Logitech file I had on my computer. There were eleven of them scattered about in different folders for various reasons. I didn't know which ones were needed to let my use the Anywhere mouse. So, I reacted in a truly classical pattern. I deleted them all and let God sort it out. '-)

Now, I know the only Logitech software I have on my computer is the right stuff for what I need Logitech for. It's a great mouse. I use it instead of the Magic Mouse that came with the iMac. The upgrade to 64-bit really helps an already excellent product.

I read some new today that saddened me in one way, and made me feel a little smug in another. Intel announced that they won't be putting no USB3 in their chipset that controls the motherboards that run Intel CPUs until possibly 2012. It was predicted this would happen in the last quarter of 2010. Nada. Ain't gwine happen.

Why does that matter? Why does that make a tinker's damn? Because I bought a new computer I couldn't afford because I somehow felt that the promise for ubiquitous USB3 by the end of 2010 was vaporware. You see, I had made a promise to myself that I wasn't gonna buy until Apple came out with USB3 and SATA3. But then, I somehow figured it was gonna be a long wait for reasons I didn't specifically understand.

I might have to wait a couple of years to get a new computer that had USB3 or SATA3, and right now they had a 64-bit operating system I'd been dying to get my hands on since the early 90's. Well, not dying for necessarily, but the idea that I might die while I was waiting for an indeterminate drop dead date to get a few features of unproven worth was ridiculous.

What my new iMac does have that makes up for it is room for 16 gigabytes of DRAM3. I've been waiting to see what the iPad was all about, and the fact that it's not a phone is a deal-breaker for me. What that means is that I can go ahead and invest the money I've been saving for months to buy 8 more gigabytes of DRAM to go with the 4 Gigabyte the iMac came with.

That will make 12 gigabytes of DRAM with a 3.06 gigabyte Intel CPU. I never had a computer with more than 512 Megabytes until last year when I upgraded to two gigabytes on my Mac Mini. That's all it would take on the Mini's 32-bit system and 32-bit Intel CPU. When I get that extra DRAM, then I can start saving to buy a voice recognition program that requires lots of DRAM. Yeah... right.

Well, I might need it. Rheumatoid arthritis is notorious for what it does to peoples ability to use their hands. I can get ready for that before it happens. As long as I can talk I can still communicate with a sensible voice recognition program. That is, if I still can remember my name by then. Shit happens. Thangs change.
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How To Get Yo'self A Fine Obsession

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There is one particularly useful attribute of the prednisone prescriptions my rheumatologist provides me with occasionally when the pain gets particularly rough that's both a blessing and a curse. It was during this last non-refillable series of steroids that my friend Rainey turned me on to the song written by Jay Ungar entitled Ashokan Farewell. I was really "roided" out the first time I played the video, and my mind was totally impressionable in a way I hadn't recognized yet.

I've written about the high I available with this old stand-by drug a goodly number of times. A lot of it has to do with the relief I get from the pain. If my readers know what to look for they can easily tell through my writing when I'm working through a prescription series. It makes me boldly go where this man has never been before.

The thing about this situation with the drug is that I got obsessed with Ashokan Farewell, and I think it can happen again. What I'm trying to say that if I wanna deliberately get obsessed with a topic I can do it by redundancy and repetition while I'm doing the prednisone.

For example, Rainey sent me a link to a youtube video in why Jay Ungar explains how he came to write the song, and then he plays it through once on his fiddle. I recognized it immediately as the theme song for Ken Burns TV documentary on the Civil War. I get really excited by the fact that I recognized it, and immediately start looking for other videos featuring a great number of musicians playing that song. There must be hundreds of them.

I found one particular video in which the violinist sticks to the original tune in tone and character the composer created, and began trying to play along with it on my digital piano to deeply learn this, by now, absolutely emotionally touching song. This is a link to the video I'm using:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFXbK9aZzXk&playnext_from=TL&videos=PuL_muCirRw

to learn the song.

At first I couldn't remember it long enough to move three feet away to my piano to play it, then over the next few days I remembered more and more so that now I can play the main them of the song without having to play the video to remember it.

I remember writing Rainey an e-mail about my excitement over learning it, and I impulsively used the Subject: box to state that this song was really a farewell to the Old South because I tied it emotionally to the fact that I'd first heard the song as the theme song for Ken Burns Civil War documentary.

Last night I was playing the video and playing my digital piano to imitate it. I really wanna stay loyal to the way the composer wrote it, and not turn it into some emotional hokum that suits my needs more than it does this guy Jay Ungar. After going through the video a couple of times to try to get it right I went to bed.

I dreamed about this song all night long. It was there every time I woke up at the end of a sleep cycle. I woke up this morning hearing this song, and that's when I finally got it. I can use this song as a vehicle to get over the fact that my entire life has been dominated by my trying to adopt to the fact that the Civil Rights movement ended the way I was raised to kowtow to the Jim Crow cultural attitude.

I've been using my participation in the Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion group as a way of addressing the religion I was raised to in the same manner. I really hated those hypocrites until I grew up and became pretty much the same sort of hypocrite I accused my religious and social mentor of being. Nobody wants that.

I want to be free of that sort of prejudice, and I have the strength and courage to do it, and I have. I have friends who are still stuck there and worship the Limbaugh/Beck crowd. They're welcome to it. Just don't bring it to my house. Go burn your crosses and play your superiority games and leave me to my own delusions. '-)
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