Singing In Cadence With The Mule I Plowed

❧I haven't had any of the overt occult experiences for a long time It's a fact for me that I live in the immediate present pretty much all the time now. Either I'm awake to the natural world around me or I'm off into the wild blue yonder. Singing is a way in which I can do both.

My first real singing started when I was a boy off plowing a mule in the back forty, and staring at a mule's ass and winking pee-hole for hours on end was not enough amusement for a twelve year old boy. I started singing the songs I had learned and memorized at church and at school to amuse myself. I could get to singing and the world would go away.

One time my father came to get me because it was pouring down rain, and I didn't have enough sense to get out of it because I was too busy making a joyful noise. What amazed my father is that the mule didn't bolt toward the barn, although it was thundering and lightning to beat the band. 

It's not just linguistics nor the words one chooses, but speaking those words and phrases that make homo sapiens so versatile. I live alone and don't talk much. I write a lot of words, but I don't speak them because there is nobody here to say anything too. To keep my brain working with words I have to find an excuse to say them, so I sing to my neighbors and my brother's dogs. They go into shock when they realize I'm doing much more than barking.

I don't think I could be comfortable living in a place where I couldn't make as much noise singing as I want to, at least at times screaming bloody murder for no good reason at all. That's why people who talk a lot are liable to say stuff that comes from some source that not always accountable for. Many, the great majority, perhaps, of people in general are quite satisfied to sing in the choir. Well, bless their hearts. '-)

I started writing this as a response to Jerry, and I did send out the first paragraph as that. This has been a long cumbersome day with all the aches and pains that never go away now. I more or less cope the best I can with what I got, and that has to be good enow.

I walked around my house barefooted on the grass for a goodly number of rounds. First I walked in one direction and then the other. My feet are et up with the gout now, and walking around with shoes on, even my wonderful new Crocs, gets tedious. Feeling the uneven clumps of grass beneath my feet was as about as close as I'll ever get to a foot massage these days. It was very enjoyable while it lasted.

My upside down tomatoes are not growing so rapidly. I have another plant of the same variety planted in a right-side up planter and it's doing great. I put a little more Miracle Gro in the upside down bucket and hope that will help. I might just keep adding fertilizer until it burns the edges of the leaves. The right-side up plant got burned right away because the potting soil I put it in was really rich in nutrients before I transplanted. When it got past that initial burning, however, the plant really took off.

Growing food in pots up on the second-floor of my outside deck seems to be my kind of farming or gardening. I have a lot more control over it because I pass my plants every time I go up and down the stairs. I don't have to worry about varmints like rabbits either. I have lots of rabbits around my house, and I like seeing them hop around on my lawn, but I don't like them eating my green plants. This tactic I'm adopting may resolve my biggest dislikes about growing stuff.
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The Dictates Of Silence

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I didn't really wanna get out of this town when I was a teen ager growing up as much as I wanted to get away the people who knew me and my family and rat me out. I wanted to start making decisions about my own life instead of having them made for me by others no matter how well-intentioned. I wanted to make my own mistakes and respond to what I knew for certain was my fault.

I abhor having fault assigned to me as if I have no say so about the reasoning behind my purportedly outrageous behavior. I had no intention what so ever of "going along to get along" unless there was a distinct and lucid reason for me to do so. I go along to get along a lot. It's practically impossible to replace that dynamic with another when the situation that harbors it dictates the "silence of the lambs".

If there was a real problem with me taking charge of my life by making as many decisions as I could about what to do, it wasn't a problem of me attempting to avoid mistakes pedantically. Sometimes the way I interpreted given situations worked out gloriously for me, and sometime there was a deeper hell to pay than I originally knew existed.

I knew about the possibilities I'd make foolish mistakes instinctively, but those instincts were fairly honed for a boy my age due to our family moving around so much that I ended up being not particularly close friends with anybody before we'd move on.

I got duped a lot by my need to find friends that were trustworthy. I remember when my family moved to this bigger little village/town in order for my oldest sister to be able to finish a twelve year academic program I was 7-8 years old. I entered the second grade at this new school. My confidence knew no bounds.

I was used to being around schools. Both my parents were school teachers, although my mother stayed at home until I was in the seventh grade. My father taught at every school I attended from first grade all the way through high school except for the sixth grade.

He was always within reach. I might see him through the windows of my classrooms as much as a couple of times a day. He was there for me. I took advantage of it without realizing it until now. My relationship with my classmates seemed contaminated by being a prominent teacher's son.

I'm perfectly aware I used the term "contaminated" instead of a softer term like "influenced". The situation became burdensome when my age group started their pubescent rebellion against authority. School teachers are very much authority figures for teen agers. Sometime my classmates expressed their rebellion against authority by deliberately making a fool out of me to get at my father.

I was a teen ager, but I was still a kid, and I was the new kid on the block who was desperate for friends in this new town my family moved to, and I was suckered into doing things that had much deeper consequences than being tricked by snipe hunts.

I seemed particularly vulnerable to the smartest guy in the room rather than the sports heros. From sixth grade on it was a cute, baby-faced midget with a smile that melted the motherly type girl's hearts. He was like their doll babies. Cuddlesome because he was smaller than average all the way through school. He had piles of curly hair.

I didn't particularly wanna be like him, but I did want the admiration he appeared to draw from the girls I was becoming acutely aware of. I didn't know him or even about his personality so well because we were not in the same home room during the day.

That changed a bit in high school because we began to have a few classes together. What I didn't know that might have been extremely helpful was that he was homosexual and I didn't know what that was yet. That had social implications I wasn't aware of because of my ignorance of what made homosexuals homosexual.

My ignorance was costly, both to me and my parents. What happened was insufferably shameful. I thought that only women displayed the fury of hell for being scorned. Why am I always the last to know?

This guy and his compatriots, another homosexual and his sister attempted to manipulate me into a situation in which I could be accused of rape. That part of it worked like a charm. I surely was accused, and brought indignantly in front of a panel or jury of all the authorities in my life including my father. Only the truth of my innocence bore me through this without total humiliation, but it changed my concept of how innocence would always work for me. They defrocked me of my innocence forever.

There was another participant in this situation that I hadn't really thought about as a possible sexual participant. That was the principle of the school who claimed during this kangaroo court that he had been the assistant warden of some state prison before he turned to education, and that during his time as a prison warden he never saw even a murderer on death row as hardened in their intent as me, this fourteen year old farm boy.

This was part of the reason I was able to get this body in exchange for my old one. Being accused of being a sociopath and pariah at the age of fourteen when I didn't have a clue I was being framed until the gathering of that panel of humiliation was enough to make him wanna throw himself off a bridge. Of course, finding a bridge to do that in the flat coastal plains was pretty much at lost odds anyway.

When it was over my father never wanted to speak of it again. But, years later I did, because I still didn't understand what happened. He allowed that it happened because of an argument between him and this principle, and this principle, who it was suggested was having sex with these half-way openly gay kid arranged the whole deal to humiliate my father.

The principle later got run outta town for a variety of crimes, but that was no compensation for my shame. It might have, however, initiated my life as a shamed man (shaman). That specific incidence of shame was bad, man, real bad, but it was only a preview of the coming attractions. '-)
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Homeboy Ramblings

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It's been a weird day. I must have been having fun because time flew by as if the shadow of somebody I used to know. I went to the greasy spoon to eat breakfast, and I had no longer sat down and ordered coffee than my youngest brother showed up with a smile. He was eating from the blue plate special buffet line and had his one meat and two vegetable standard fare meal.

I call this place a "greasy spoon" not because it ain't a perfectly respectable popular establishment, but because they don't exactly be hiring no gourmet cooks for fifty cents over minimum wage. They always have some sort of greens for the lunch crowd, and my brother needs vitamin K like is in greens and especially collards. I called their menu the old school lunch room diet.

I don't mean to be disrespectful of no school lunch diets either. I personally witnessed what having cheap school lunches did for lots of children. The post-Reconstruction Era lasted a long time in the rural recesses of the coastal plains.

That's because there wasn't any north-south highways in the coastal plains. It's the same way all up and down the Atlantic seaboard from about New Jersey on down to Florida. The old superhighway U.S. 1 that ran north and south from Bangor. Maine to Key West, Florida was considered the western edge of the coastal plains from one end to the other.

InterState 95 acts as that boundary now. Both those roads follow along the ocean-side edge of the piedmont where the foothills of the Appalachian range forced the rivers to contain themselves within the low hills that rise up out of the coastal plains. The rivers could have bridges built across them fairly economically, and that's why there won't no north/south roads built along the coastal plains for a long time.

The people who lived in the coastal plains were pent up along the sand ridges that rose above the huge swamps there. During dry seasons some of the smaller creeks and rivers could be crossed pretty easy. But, if there was a lotta rain further inland the swamps and deltas would fill up with mud.

To travel with the water in the swamps high, a body would have to follow the sandy ridges northwestward until the river cut a channel through a bluff where a bridge could be built to get to their neighbors house on the other side of the river maybe a mile away as the crow flies. These ridges served somewhat in the same way as mountain hollows in West Virginia.

Modern construction equipment and better engineering designs eventually overcame the obstacles of not being able to travel north and south in the coastal plains. That let a lot of through traffic through the little villages and crossroad towns that weren't really set up to receive them and make a buck as they passed through.

That's what brought my mother and father from Mississippi for. The State of North Carolina recognized a need for some help to be brought into the whole state. To their credit the people of North Carolina grabbed their own bootstraps and started changing their own world. It was a hard row to hoe.

The people who farmed the sandy ridges that penetrated through the swamps where the water draining from the mountains gathered before it found its way to the sea were stuck in the same way the people who lived back in the bayous of Louisiana were stuck in their superstitious ways.

They farmed in the same manner they had before the Civil War. They imitated the farming practices of the largest local absentee land owners, and planted and harvested their crops by their time tables. The rebellious ones might consult a farmer's almanac if the knew how to read.

My parents got hired with a whole bunch of other teachers from all over the United States. It was toward the end of the Great Depression, but before the beginning of World War Two. The State passed a law that required an agriculture teacher and a home economics teacher to be hired for every high school in the state.

These educated people were not received well by the backwood populations who not only were independent despite all their faults, but they had pride in their stubborn ways. They still are, but the outside world has changed them. I'm part of that outside world to them even though my family has been here for nearly 70 years. My two younger brothers who were born in North Carolina adapted to the way things are here because they never knew any difference.

I've worked or traveled extensively throughout the coastal plains of the Southeastern U.S. since I was a boy.The states along the Gulf of Mexico from upper panhandle of Florida around to Texas doesn't have a deep coastal plains, but from Galveston Island on down into Mexico the coastal plains can run a hundred miles inland.

The bridge building problem has been persistent all the way around. They had to build highways further inland in order to find high enough bluff and a narrow river crossing to economically build bridges. Until that happened after World War Two there were a lotta isolated places with inbreeding galore. All that is changed now. It doesn't matter whether it's for the better or for the worse.

I worked one summer at a place called Holly's Beach on the Gulf coast of Louisiana. It happened during a sad time in my life. I guess I was trying to drink myself to death, but I'm just not that kind of drunk. Holly's Beach had an long-time sobriquet among native Louisiana cajuns as "The Cajun Riviera".

Before the advent of off-shore drilling it must have been a beautiful place and probably earned the right of being a favorite place for the large population of cajuns to get together. When I was there in the late Seventies the beach was already littered with all the crap that came off those drilling rigs offshore. With this BP spill, the rest of the Gulf Coast and probably all the Caribbean resort islands will be like that too. I guess it's just the way life is. It's also the way death is.
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Oh, It's Thursday, For Christ's Sake, WTF?

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Astrology is just a big memory association peg board of broad reach and endless possibilities. I started studying it after I had learned to do tarot layouts in my early thirties. I wanted to read tarot as a way to pick up some spending money while I was on the road. It didn't take long to realize that the whole tarot gig was just an ancient framework for finding something interesting to say.

I used the Waite deck because that's what somebody gave me as a harmless gift. Then, I learned that all the occult sciences derived from astrology, and that astrology was the mother of all thought systems in every culture in the world. To me it was the most elaborate system for finding something appropriate to say when I read tarot cards, but when I learned the dynamics of giving reading through channeling I switched from Tarot card to palm reading.  

The amazing thing about studying astrology is that I learned it by myself. I had some encouragement from a few people who knew more about it than me for a while. Basically, however, I learned from books. They didn't have an internet of search engines back then. My learning astrology as a self-taught person got weird. It has everything to do with having the Sun-Saturn conjunction and Mercury in Aries. 

That's why Saturn in 22° Aries represents the self-made man when it's at a far conjunction with the Sun in 0°, 2" Taurus. My point is that I seemed obsessed by the idea of being able to find interesting things to say to anybody about anything if I had a modicum of information about their native leanings. 

Blackness in the South is matriarchal. You can't be an observer of human nature and not notice that. Practically all the black athletes who are celebrating at the end of a successful game call out "We're #1!" and "Thaz fo' my momma!" They play the dirty dozen by declaring the most disgusting "yo momma" jokes, but you better not. You would see it patriarchally and perhaps, with less compassion and understand of the role of momma.

Matriarchal or not, the blacks in the South have a lot in common with the whites and Indians of the South in music. We all got sung to sleep as children to the same lullabies. We all know the ol' timey hymnals and spirituals that were taught in grade school. A lot of counter-indicative things were going on in the Jim Crow culture I was raised to consider the status quo, but I think the music we all practiced give us a certain identity.

I don't claim that what I've observed is true or whether I've started filtering for it, but black people seem a lot friendlier since Obama got elected. I've had black women go outta their way to speak to me just to say hello in passing. The black men a little less so, but I found that if I went outta my way to give them the first nod they picked up on it and spoke back to me in kind. This is very pleasing to me.

On the other hand, when I go to be polite to white people, the men seem eager to be friendly, but the white women for the most part ignore my innocent greetings. They've traded places. It used to be that white women were at least polite and responsive, and the black women were more sulky and reticent. My, my... how the world has changed.

It amazes me that I first remember, then forget what chanting does for me. Chanting has totally become the bel canto voice exercises I learned taking private voice lessons. They're very specific, but loosely organized. I just add and "h" in front of each vowel so that I'm singing "Hay, hee, high, ho, who." I sing whatever songs I remember and replace the words with each of the vowel sounds.

For instance, to sing Jingle Bells I'll sing it maybe five times using the same vowel all the way through the ditty. "Hay, hay, hay... hay hay hay... hay Hay hay hay hay..." Then, "hee, hee, hee... hee, hee, hee... hee, Hee, hee, hee, hee..." After a while when I get a fairly pure vowel sound going I'll lapse into using these sounds to imitate laughing. It's really hard not to do. When that happens, I begin yawning with each new intake of air. Yawning is a classical way of relaxing the body, and proving that laughter is the best medicine.

I don't have to be happy to use this method to relax. It's an excellent preparation for meditation. Once I get warmed up and hitting on all my laughing cylinders I can get a roomful of people laughing with me contagiously without even being amused. Well, at first, but when they get to laughing it makes me happy too.
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Saccharine Tastes

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

I've been using this supplement because of what I read on the internet somewhere. I'm taking several other supplements too. The Singularity guy ain't got much on me. I have two prescribed supplements by my rheumatologist to offset the side-effects of the chemicals he's murdering me with. I'm kinda trying to stop him by rebelling in small ways. It's a strategy I studied in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes. Sometimes I recognize where my strategies come from. Sometime I don't.

The documentation on this chemical "talks" to me in a favorable way. It might be killing me without my knowing just how. The paper trail of this supplement is inviting to me. The Wikipedia article is fairly conservative in the problems it can address.

One of the most interesting things this chemical/drug/supplement/whatever addresses has to do with sugar regulation. My blood work doesn't indicate that I have any outstanding indicators for diabetes, Diabetes doesn't seem to run in my family like arthritis does.

The dosage I'm taking is what's in the bottles I bought at the health food store. 600 milligrams per dose. I got two brands. One comes in capsules and the other caplets. This stuff has a uniquely unpleasant taste. I wash it down as fast as I can.

Its supposed to make schizophrenics and bipolar people more stable. Maybe that's why I've been able to discern a really saccharine sweetness to my coffee that pushes me to believe what I'm being made conscious of is that I'm using too much sugar for the balance factor.

Just now I finished my first of usually two cups of coffee I brew for myself each morning. I put one packet of Splenda (w/dietary fiber), and one level tablespoon (?) of refined white sugar into it. When I brought it back upstairs to where I have my computer, as I drank it, I noticed that overly sweet taste and it made me wonder if the NAC supplement was causing this saccharine taste.

When I went back downstairs to make some oatmeal and get a refill, I decided not to add any Splenda nor sugar to see how that affected this "sweet" taste. It was not there. I tasted for it several times and it didn't show up. The interesting thing to me, however, was that the taste of black coffee didn't make me yearn for the missing sweetness.

This might give me a ring-pass-me-not for while I've gone over the hump with sweet stuff. It might allow me to gnow when enough is enow in real time when I can actually do something about it. I just ate some Oreo Fun Sticks I bought due to TV advertisements. That sickly sweet taste I described earlier still lingers on my tongue. I wonder if NAC makes the taste buds more sensitive to overdoses of sugar?
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A Motherless Child

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This the second night mare I can remember where I was doomed and left alone because I diddn't have the proper clothes to wear in order to go to work. this morning my mother drove off and left me to die alone because my not having the right clothes to wear kept her from doing what she needed to do. Oh, it was a dark time. It's like I came here by mistake and nobody knows who I am is. Nobody knows me. They have to do what they gotta do and hurry on by.

It's because I am not born of woman. This body is, and that why the mother of this body left and felt no remorse. I am is not the child she gave birth too.

I had the same problem in the Navy. I didn't have clean uniforms to wear on liberty. I spent my small pittance of chasing sex and drinking. The uniforms were usually white, and the sailors had to pass inspection before they would be allowed to leave the ship for rest and recreation. Many was the ti-me I waited for a couple of weeks to get off the ship, and they wouldn't let me go because of my improperly kept clothing. What is it with me and clothes?

This is not a very good morning for me. I'm in a lotta pain. I've tried to sleep to ignore it. I've slept for 18 of the last 24 hours, although technically I wasn't actually asleep all that time. I'd wake up and it's be raining hard. It's probably rained 20 inches over the last three or four days. Dark and dank.

It's late afternoon now. I meditated for a while. It really seemed to help. The biggest problem I have now is that I ate some meat and it made me sick to my stomach. That was the real reason I sat to meditation. It's hard for me to believe that little bit of meat made me feel so lousy. A quarter of an ounce at best. Wow!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sometimes_I_Feel_Like_a_Motherless_Child
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No-tes

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It amazes me to see and hear experienced musicians playing the piano with such flexibility and skill. They're so accomplished in their technique it causes me to feel clumsy. It hasn't really gotten any better since I've learned to play the Major and minor scales on my digital piano. It helps me to appreciate their craft, and usually, like with others I've heard, it makes me wish I had started sooner.

I've known about how learning and playing the scales daily helps a person play any instrument better for a long time, but I never acted like it was so until recently. I play several instruments of various kinds by memory or by heart, but I'm not an expert on playing any of them in the classical sense. I can, however, play simple tunes on them in such a way as to arouse the same emotions in a listener as more accomplished musicians, but that gift is not always on call like it is for a trained professional.

As with all the instruments I've encountered in the past, the more I attempt to play any particular instrument, the better I understand how difficult it is for the musicians I witness performing to do what they do if I do it too. It doesn't matter that I'm a rank amateur who shouldn't be mentioned in the same room with the masters. I don't have to know what they know to more deeply empathize with what they're doing. Fortunately, neither does anyone else.

I didn't last long studying the piano in the third grade with Richard's aunt whose brother was a famous writer. Mercury in Aries. My mind wouldn't accept instruction from her. It had it's own goals for the time, and it had more to do with learning how to communicate face to face with other people than it did through a musical instrument.

In the sixth grade I wheedled my parents into buying me a cornet. I wanted a trumpet, but the cornet costs less, and we were poor, and I was lucky to get that. My father was right. It was a waste of his precious money. We were living pretty much hand-to-mouth as a family, and so my cornet cost everybody in the family what it took to purchase the trumpet.

The big problem for me was reading sheet music. It's like I refused to do it. I could listen to the person next to me play what we were supposed to be playing, and play the same thing, with feeling, from heart. Why would I bother to read music if I could easily imitate someone who could? It's been that way for three billion years since I first arrived on Earth as a mustard seed.

I brought my music with me. I am IS my music, and my music is me. What more is there to deny? What more is there to say "No!" to. What more is their to know? How else do we grow than through what we gnow?

My main musical instrument is voice. I had always rather have sang than to express myself musically any other way using any other implement. The fact that music can only be sung using the vowels completely intrigued me the first time I be-co-me-d with it.

Sometime I think the rain taught me to sing. It's raining now. Really raining. Maybe two inches of rain in this one passing shower. It's dark outside the wide-open door to my second-floor deck. It's thundering and lightning and I hear a church bell ringing through the cacophony of noise. It made me wonder if the church steeple had been struck by a bolt of lightning?

It rang twice at seven minutes past eleven o'clock in the morning, and stopped, and has since then kept it's stopping still. But the rain hasn't stopped nor barely slowed down. A week ago the weathermen were worried about a big drought that would dominate their fanciful descriptions of what happens 7/24 and reduce it to the same ol'/same ol'.

I stood up and walked over to look out the door at the galvanized pail my neighbors bought me as a gift. It has at least six inches of water in it. That means it's rained a couple of inches or more in the last twenty minutes. It's still pouring down. It's like the expression I heard as a child. It's "set in", this rain has. It's set in for the day.

The fact that only the vowels can be "sung" and not the consonants in a very powerful tidbit of info about singing and music. I guess my finally realizing this true thing had a more powerful impact on me than maybe for many others.

My unfortunate musical mentors had been trying to get me to understand this for a long time. Several of them literally got so frustrated they yelled and screamed at me because otherwise I had a good voice. There was just one thing wrong. They didn't know how I envisioned the "vocal cords" in my mind's eye. I was trying to get something that wasn't there to do what they told me.

I kind of think this was their fault, yet at the same time I realize their coming to know that might require more interest and dedication to their job than they were willing to give. I didn't exactly show up on their doorstep with letters of recommendation. I straggled in like something the cat laid at their feet.

The speech coach's name who did realize I had a problem in visualization is Helen Steers. My affection for her knows no bounds. I even know my affection for her was/is genuine appreciation for her taking the time to get me over the hump with my difficulty.

One day she told me to come to her office after class. Her doing that wasn't so unusual. She was on the faculty of the Drama and Speech Department and I was a Drama and Speech Major, and many of the professors were like that toward their department major students.

I followed her around the corner to her office and started to sit down next to her desk, but she stopped me and told me to follow her into an inner office that she used for storing her teaching supplies. I'd never been invited into her inner sanctum before, so I was avidly looking around and taking it all in.

She approached a plastic model of the human head and told me to watch her take it apart. It didn't take long to get to the throat of the model, and all the parts of the throat, including the "vocal cords". Without saying a word she disassembled the various parts of the plastic model's vocal cords, lifted each part to show it to me, laid it down, and then took out the next part to hold it up significantly, then she put it back together, and told me it was my turn, and left the room to sit at her desk.

I've always had a good mechanical touch. I disassembled and reassembled the plastic model several times, and kept doing it until she said she had another class to go teach. We never discussed what happened for me in her office, but it was noticeable to me that she called on me to read from scripts in front of her classes more frequently. We both knew what I got from it.

After she helped me to understand my misperception about how the vocal cords worked and what they looked like it was everything I needed to know to remember what my earlier voice teacher had been attempting to teach me. I perform some of the exercises they taught me even now. I still don't blame them for not getting to the root of my problem. I kind of think it's because they were musicians who matriculated to teaching their craft, and Doctor Steers was a speech therapist.

Sometime I write about a certain kind of person I encounter seemingly serendipitously throughout my life. Back when I was a homeless bum on the road doing my go-ye-therefore- spirit quest I would meet this sort of person when I was truly at my wit's end with chronic fatigue and hunger. I would go days and weeks with out food or sleep. Then, one of these people would show up and prop me up for a couple of days until they thrust me once more into the breech. God hates a vacuum.
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Reap The Wild Wind

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It's not very pleasant for other people to push me hard enough to see how cold I am can be. That's the reason they're dealing with wot's sot before them, and I am is dealing with wot's sot before me. "Thou shalt have no other... "

It's not like I care if any one person dies. We all die and are born again without end. It's always "Once more into the breech..." forever and ever. Screeching bloody murder or no. I'm just not all that emotionally invested in what I'm helpless to change. Charge it to the ground and let the rain settle it. I know perfectly well I can't save him whom I follow. "It's just a fact, Jack!"

That's why I don't tolerate people well who wanna follow using me as their mirror. Why would they play Second-Hand Rose? Why would I not just backhand them into senselessness, if it doesn't make any difference whether I do or not? It didn't.

I can't give them wot I am imbues of it's own making. In this case, I am is not me. The me requires no making. It just is. In this case I am is me. Both cases are always true or not. It doesn't make any difference, because 'you' can't have One without the Other. 'You' are not me. Ever. 'You' can't be-co-me with anything. Only I am is can. Whatta drag, man.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/

This link leads to a story of how life can be for Aspies. You know, people who behave as if they're possessed by a specific syndrome some guy nay-me-d Asperger (1906-1980) foretold. He pro-spected it, and found gold in his a' priori speculation. If so-me people are not that way, then they can use this way to display their wares as if they did. "Any ol' port in a storm."

If you were to look it up on Google you'd find that the behaviors Asperger defined was basically concerned with a limited number of people who functioned at extremely high levels of focus in such a way that made time fly when they were having fun. After a while, the only way they could have fun was to make ti-me fly. No blame.

One of the problems that Aspies are supposed to have according to Asperger's description is evinced as a difficulty in communicating with other people. They don't seem to know that it's okay to treat other people objectively. Apparently, they can't discern in real time that the other people is a separate entity than themselves. They can't anticipate the intent of the other as if it were not their own intent too.

In my opinion, that's the polar opposite saying "You are not me." I am is me, but 'you're not. The attitude of the other people not being who 'you' are is necessary to remain conscious of the reality in which intent actually matters. It is by denying that 'you' are me that I am can provide itself with a ground-of-being that allows me to participate in a world in which 'you' are not me.

In some world in which you can actually be you, and not part and parcel of what I normally observe as just little ol' me, I can practically guarantee 'you' will not enjoy being treated by my me as just another of it's spawn. If your you ain't got legs, why would my me not persistently slap you silly to keep you in line with all the other children who live in her shoe? She's got so many children, she do not know wot to do!

Does that mean that 'you' have to find your own ground-of-being in order to maintain consciousness in the world in which I am has already established for itself that you are not me? Do 'you' have to deny my me as any other ol' 'you' in order to be persistently conscious of equal footings of subjective denial?

What's fair about me denying who- you-think-you-are in order to individuate as my Self to force your 'you' to reach for what it takes for-you-to-join-me on an equal footing? Shouldn't you make some effort to matriculate to your own ground-of-being without me always having to host your monkey on my back during my magic carpet ride?

Denial is the sa-me as abandonment of the ego. According to the latest cognitive studies in their most believable journals, 'they' say that we all astral travel if we're not focused on "doing" something. I've written about this dozens of times. Astral travel is the same facticity as day-dreaming. If your 'you' daydreams, it astral travels.

The reason I know this about myself is due to speculating on what can happen using the contents of my remembering vision as my source for forecasting. I don't knead double-blind tests to bolt the barn if the gates left open. It's just what people born when the planet Mercury occupied the astrological sign Aries.

This mention of astrology is what brings me full circle to the link I posted about Aspies. They don't appear to readily recognize the run-of-the-mill signals humans pass between each other during face-to-face attempts to communicate little more than the time of the day or a mutual comment about the weather. That's because they astral travel more readily and more frequently than your average bear in Jellybean Park.

Astrology is a map for that, but there are other oracles like the Book of Changes for learning to recognize the social signals homo sapiens pass between each other as a form of communicating amicably. Learning to use oracle to pick up where others left off is not the hardest thing to do. The hardest thing is not to do it and keep on keeping on.

Getting diagnosed as an Aspie might be a real step up for me. I studied all kinds of systems to assist me in being able to stand under the wisdom of the wise domes. The occult systems helped a lot. Eventually. The mother of all the occult systems is astrology. It practically takes an Aspie or a person like me to be able to reach deep enough into this ancient art for it to finally make sense in the sensory realm. Astrology is not about objects in the sky, it's about people.

It's about learning how to give people the wiggle room they need to be their most admirable self. For that to happen one must be able to recognize that they're not you. They ex-is-t because they provided themselves with their own ground-of-being just like you have, and if they're not, if they're hitching a ride on yo' star ya' gotta toss them off as ballast if they won't "see" the light.

According to this research about why humans are smarter than chimpanzees, and the testing and retesting of what humans do when they're not performing accepted rituals that won't start a fight, they're doing what only humans can do, and that's leaving their bodies in the meantime, and going for a spin around the universe looking for the possibilities you once had that somehow got lost along the way.

In other words, we're all always on some spirit quest when we not taking care of monkey business. One of the most comedic scenarios I've ever witnessed was about hordes of cartoonish careactors popping in and out of ex-is tense, and laughing uproariously about what was going on 'back there'.
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Twenty-Seven Years

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It's a fact for me now. I have finally accepted that I've been plagued with rheumatoid arthritis since childhood. I just didn't know all my aches and pains came from the same source, literally, until that diagnosis. It has only been a couple of years ago I was officially diagnosed as being possessed by a "mild rheumatoid arthritis". I was confused, at the time, because the painful symptoms I experienced during that singular period were more than I've ever had to endure previously.

In my very unreliable opinion, the extreme pain I was experiencing during the time that brought me to be diagnosed as having RA, was caused by two simultaneous events. I went on the Atkins-type low carbohydrate diet and ate a lot of processed meats that were very hard to digest, and that became the physical basis for the stress I was feeling. About the same time, mentally, in addition to the physical stress, the advent of visiting my ex-wife and children for the first time in twenty-seven years brought on the full-bore attack of arthritis to the fore.

In between the stress of trying to digest all that processed meat and the stress associated with being in the presence of my ex-wife and children, I feel like I had an attack of some kind that brought around the old Johnson family disease of "bone trouble." I don't know whether I will be able to recuperate from it to live a mildly pain-free ex-is-tense or no.

The facticity of arthritis having been a part of my life maybe forever means that I essentially know how to deal with it, and that I'm the only person/pearl on Earth that gnows what it's all about to me. Everybody else has to project their own ideas of themselves upon me as if I were them, and I am is not.

It's not like I know what I am is doing about making the pain go away. Truth being, he is doing everything it can to make it worse. It's about like my going to the drug store last night just before they closed to get something for my stuffy breathing. Shut down. My sinuses were so stopped up I had to breathe through my mouth. It was definitely something I et.

I bought some NiQuil cold medicine because it gets me a little high and I sleep good. By the time I got home with it though, my sinuses had quit acting up and I was breathing through my nose fairly easily. I took a couple of swigs of the NyQuil anyway just to help me sleep mo' bettah.

That's the short version of how this arthritis has acted up in my life. It comes and goes like the stuffy sinus attacks I have that keep me from breathing well. Sometime, if I leave it alone and get busy doing something that entertains me it will go away. At least for the period of relief in which "time flies". Other times the unpleasantness is such that I can't escape to writing in order to ignore it. Bummer.

Prednisone fascinates me. This is a very powerful sacrament that helps me die simultaneously with the relief it offers from mah bones. I've read a little about it online, but not too much. That seems like "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Prednisone is a steroid, but not the same sort of steroid weight lifters use to give them strength and big muscles.

Rainey has attempted to explain the difference to me several times, but I don't have the medical lingo down enough to grok what he's straightforwardly telling me. I kind of get it. He's getting better at explaining himself to non-nerds, but they gotta meet him half-way. I'm rowing as fast as I can.

This somehow relates to the saying, "The only problem with mothers is that they nave never been little boys." Rainy has never been a non-nerd. Aspies like him require patience. I got it in spades, but only because I've never not been a non-nerd.

I'm real interested in the topics and subjects that nerds become obsessed by. I know all about obsession and being obsessed. Just not about numbers. I think numbers are wonderful symbols for the people they introduce the unknowable world to, but I'm glad it ain't me that does it that way.

I like words, but I may be able to explain why if I re-spell the term word with an "i" to the future. Woid. Words are a woe to the id. Women are a woe to the ego as in woe-men. Words and men are woe-to-men. I gotta put a whoa on that thar. Maybe instead of say woe-to-men, I might oughta write, whoa-men. Women say whoa to men or rightfully scream "RAPE!"

Who has say so when it comes to saying "Whoa!" Whoa to this. Whoa to that. I am gnows tens ways to skin a cat (felix). Felix The Cat, that is. "Whenever he gets into a fix, he reaches into his bag of tricks. Felix, the cat... "

The not-felix didn't know how to say, "Whoa!" Much less do it. Mercury in Aries, you gnow? The planet Mercury is closest in to the Sun (God), and what could be a more appropriate location for gnowing the mind of God than right next to it? In classical astrology and in numerous oracle systems whose rudiments are based on the vegetable kingdom (the Christian Garden of Eden), the planet Mercury represents the human mind. It's placement in the natal chart is critical in many ways.

Mercury has the fastest orbit of all the planets, and to have it in Aries can be both a blessing and a curse. The Greek God associated with Mercury is Ares or Mars, the war god. There is nothing quite like having your mind ruled by the war god. At one time I told some crazy whoaman, "If you wanna know what to expect from me, you need to study up on Ares."

It's not so much that I will declare war on yo' ass, but that I'm always alert for an excuse TO declare war on yo' ass. War gods can be hard to get along with. War gods just love war. They'll take either side's argument just to be in the middle of the battle. But, unlike the humans they slay wholesale as just 'something to do', they can get wounded or die knowing full well the ambrosia brought lovingly by it's mother will restore them to full power.
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Only By An Act Of Law

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Yesterday I wrote about walking barefoot on concrete sidewalks. The little town I attended the second through the fifth grade of school at had a few sidewalks going through the downtown area and through the ritzy plantation house parts. This was about the age when I began to be able to wander off by myself to find playmates at random without my parents and my two older sisters smothering me with their infuriating, arm-snatching, tattle-telling bossiness. If it turns out I hate women, they're why.

I called this enhanced crossroads a town because it was a bigger village than the village my family moved there from. Even the village we moved to from this village I'm fixing to describe was actually bigger than this village, but still not quite a real town. That's this place I live in now. It's really considered a "town" only because it's the county seat of the largest county in the state, but it's not an actual town population-wise, only by importance because it has a shabby courthouse in the middle of "town".

Maybe it really is a town. It has lots of sidewalks. Even on the other side of the tracks. But, it's not progressive unless it's forced to be by an act of law. Nevertheless, it has a lot of sidewalks I've walked on barefooted. It the sidewalks on the village before this town I live in now that I really was allowed for the first time to be footloose and fancy free for longer periods of time than ever before.

I was angry for a long time about being jerked around from jerkwater village to jerkwater towns back to jerkwater villages again growing up, but on the flip side of the coin, when I turn within to contemplate my life, having it segmented into so many different towns and houses makes it easier to view it frame-by-frame.

The second town our family moved to, got moved to because it had four years of high school, and the village before that only had eleven grades of school in total. To enter a four-year state college in North Carolina back then, a student had to graduate from a twelve grade school. We moved to this next village just so my oldest sister could satisfy that requirement and enter college.

It was integrated like a progressive spot on the road oughta be. This small-town wannabe place was located at a crossroad on that same concrete "military road". N. C. State Highway 24 and U.S. Highway 258. This hyah one-horse town was itself in the middle of nowhere, and surrounded by huge swamps and long-leaf pine forests. It's a lot more important now. They got a by-pass around town and two stop-lights.

I reckon my parents decided it was okay for me to just wander around anywhere I wanted to go in that place. The aforementioned sidewalks basically followed the two roads that made up the crossroads, and were situated like a cross right through the center of town. It's not like a person could get lost if they found the sidewalk. They were maybe a half-mile long out from the center of town in four directions.

Besides not being likely to get lost, it was the sort of place where what any kid around was looked after by all the adults in town including black and white and indian kids. For some reason it was considered duty for all the adults to raise all the children, and some of them would spank you if you didn't do right too. Race and class probably did have some privileges, but for the most part not. "Spare the rod, spoil the child." This was the last town I ever lived in that followed that credo. Now, people seem to be looking for somebody to sue for interfering in their family business.

Maybe the children of the world have always been abused as if nobody cared, but not where I was raised or maybe my attitude is just another example of how gullible I am can be, and always, always... the last to know.
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The End Is Near

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For once, at least, it's a cloudy, rainy day I'm glad came around. We were headed for a drought unless it rained soon, and so it did. The grass on my lawn had turned brown, and maybe that had something to do with what I wrote about the world running out of food yesterday. Even if the people had planted a garden it would die without water, and all their waiting for spring to come with it's promise of green vegetables would be to no avail.

I see a lot of travel videos on PBS. There is nothing else much on over-the-air television to watch but the phony sitcoms about doctors, lawyers, policemen, and false reality shows where they have more backup than performers.

I enjoy watching some of the documentaries. I'm tired of watching nature show about the struggles of animals to stay alive in a shrinking world. A lot of these shows are so old all the animals featured in them died long ago. There is nothing to save anymore. Soon, the drone aircraft will be used to kill the ones that are left just for target-practice. Man's inhumanity is not only directed toward man.

Apparently there are lots of people in northern Europe who still live out of their gardens. They don't have electricity or clothes-washing machines. So, they don't spend a lot of time attempting to look glamorous when they're barely surviving. I have a washing machine and a dryer, yet I don't try too hard to look glamorous either.

I've been letting my hair grow out just to see what how it might have changed over the last ten years of keeping it cut off in a buzz cut. I was planning on growing it out for a year or so to where I could bind it back in a pony-tail, but it got too hot and having all that hair on my head threatened my life with heat prostration. The fact that I'm an old man made it even more of a problem. My ancient air-conditioner died, and so the only way I can cool down is by running an electric fan, and by cutting my hair off again.

I like it short like this. Buzz cuts are me. I don't have to wear a hat just to keep my hair looking half-way neat. I can ride around with the windows in my car rolled down. The A/C in my car don't work too well either. I'm a little upset by that because it's the first car I've had in decades that had an air-conditioner that worked right. Not being able to use my hands because of the arthritis is not only klutzy, but inconvenient as all get out.

I didn't cut my beard off. It's gotten pretty long. About 8-10" long now, and scruffy looking. I haven't trimmed it or tried very hard to keep it looking neat. Even if I did, the worn-out clothes I wear to allow for my belly to get bigger or smaller would give me away. What's the point of having a neatly trimmed beard if the rest of me looks like a snaggletoothed bum.

My feet hurt so I just drove over to the strip mall to walk on the wide sidewalk outside the stores. My feet are so swollen it was uncomfortable to wear my new Crocs or even the larger sized pair David bought me to help me learn to love Crocs. When I got to the mall I decided to just go barefooted. I'm real pleased I did.

Walking barefooted on the concrete sidewalk brought back a lotta memories of my childhood. My feets remembered and started talking the same old stuff they did when I was a kid. In the villages and small towns I was brought up in everybody including most adults went barefooted in the summer.

I remembered walking around the first village my family moved to when I was two years old from Mississippi. They had a few sidewalks, but the main feature was the concrete highway that ran from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. It was called the military road because that was the only reason it was there. The federal government still didn't pave roads in the South due to Reconstruction unless it involved the military. World War Two changed that somewhat.

State Road 24 was the only paved road in the coastal plains and the farm folk truly used to goggle at the chance to drive their iron-rimmed mule-drawn wagons down it to hear the crushing of the sand on the concrete under those metal rims. My family rented half a house on the north end of this village where the farm traffic from that direction would bring their goods to town to sell them.

I used to sit on the front porch of this house (which still stands) and listen to the noise of the mules hoofs clomping and the silicon crunching, and the sounds of the farm children screaming from the wagons. Everybody went everywhere when the farmers came to town unless they came alone. That usually meant they were there on business. The bootlegging business. Lots of swamps to hide stuff in.

I'll probably go back and walk on those sidewalks barefooted again. It's a lot mo' bettah than wearing shoes on my swollen feet.
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Eating To Get Skinny

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Everybody had a garden when I was a kid. They had to have something to eat. There weren't many grocery stores for people to buy food at. The stores that were around were like the convenience stores today, but they had no electricity or refrigeration. There was no electricity or refrigeration in people's homes either. Home canning and smoke houses were the only way to preserve food longer than it naturally take to spoil. That's a little worrisome these days. People in general don't have a clue how to garden, and if they do they don't know how to preserve the food in order for them to have something to eat during the winter.

That's a big deal, you know, having something to eat in the winter. In my opinion it's not going to be there soon. There's not much food in the spring either. It takes a long time for vegetables to grow and produce the garden crops we take for granted. Even then, humans have to compete with the other animals. They gotta have food too. If you think rabbits are not gonna eat your garden to keep you from starving you're just wrong.

True, if there isn't any vegetables to eat, then people will kill the animals to feed their families, and so there won't be any animals to kill and eat either. After a while enough people will die off and the chance of getting some food to eat will be better, but people don't die so easy, and the ones that don't will still be out looking for food to feed the ones who can't go out looking.

I'm writing this because of a trip to the grocery store yesterday. The prices have gone way up, and the quality of the groceries have gone way down. Typical. You're paying more for less. You've been doing that for a long time. Longer than since electricity and refrigeration came along. Why? Because the nutrients in the soil the food grows in has been used up. That's probably what happened to Rome. People have been growing food around the Italian peninsula for thousands of years.

One of the minerals that has been used up on lots of farms is magnesium. Animals don't need lots of magnesium as a percentage of what they eat, but if they don't get what they need they die. Life ain't worth living without magnesium. The paradox is that there is an overabundance of magnesium on earth. The oceans are full of it. There are dead seas deep in the earth that are practically all magnesium and it's hauled out by the truck load.

The problem is that when the land where magnesium is not plentiful is farmed, what little it possesses naturally to support the plants that are grown on it year after year gets used up by those plants, and eventually there is no magnesium in the plants that grow there by the time they are put in the pot for cooking.

My father raised cows both for food and pleasure. Sometimes one of his cows would lay down and die for no apparent reason at all. He knew what caused it. A lack of magnesium in their diet. He just could predict it when the cows were in the pasture grazing. He put out salt blocks that had the magnesium the cows weren't getting in the grasses they were eating. Once a cow laid down from magnesium deficiency it was too late. They never got up again. It happened to young cows as well as old ones.

That's the reason so many people are fat today. They're eating plenty of food, but the food they eat don't have the nutrients they need to live well-rounded lives, and so they just eat some more, and keep on eating. Why would they not? They're starving for something like magnesium. None of the cows my father lost to magnesium deficiency were skinny cows.

Just because the nutritional numbers on the side of a box claims that this sort of food has this amount of nutrition in it doesn't mean it's there. If it was grown in a field that's been farmed for a thousand years in a row, probably not. Even if it's never been farmed at all the field may not have the needed nutrients. You gotta buy supplements. You gotta know to buy supplements. It doesn't do any good to inform people who are happy not knowing. They pay the asking price? Then, it oughta be there.

This makes me think of how just a hundred years ago the life expectancy of human adults was around thirty to fifty years old. The fact that food couldn't be stored very well over the winter meant that lots of people were not going to get the nutrition they needed to live long, happy lives during half the year. I can't imagine that not adding up over the years.

Pellagra is a disease that runs rampant all over the world. It was especially prevalent in the Old South or the southeastern United States. For the longest time people didn't know what caused it. It will definitely kill you, and it will make you look like a horrible monster before it does. There were kids who came to school hungry all the time when I was that age. The school lunch program came into being here with the same wave of concern that made North Carolina hire agriculture teachers from all over the United States to have one in every high school.

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

You can read about pellagra on Wikipedia. I thought I knew what caused it by remembering what I heard about why my school mates got it. I was wrong. I thought it was from a main diet of bleached wheat flour. It's not. Its corn poisoning. Corn is poisonous. Amazing! I never heard of it. The Wikipedia article explains it.

The native indians of the Americas knew it was poisonous and off-set it by treating it with lime before they ate it. Now, due to the work of this one American doctor who used prisoners to experiment with it was discovered that it could be cured with niacin or vitamin B3. This reads a lot like how the sailor's disease called "scurvy" was cured by eating fruits that have a lotta vitamin C or "night blindness" is cured by vitamin A.

In my opinion, the biggest reason people are getting older and older is because of better nutrition and refrigeration and transportation. They get nutritious food all year long. At least, they get food that has at least some nutrition in it all year long whether there is enough of the right kind to keep the process going more consistently.

I stopped taking most of the arthritis medicine. I'm taking just one kind now that was not made for arthritis, but rather for malaria. Quinine? Remember quinine that was the first drug used for malaria. We had a local doctor who treated everybody as if they had malaria. People thought he was a quack because of it, but he was thought of as weird anyway because he was a Seven Day Adventist who grew fruit trees and gardens in his front yard. In those days of calculated country cooking nobody believed his philosophy of nutrition. They do now.

The reason I'm taking a malaria drug is that it reduces inflammation as well as about anything except steroids. It was reducing inflammation in all that quack doctor's patients too. Inflammation is one of the biggest reasons any disease hurts, and so his acting like everybody had malaria was one of the ways he was able to help so many people.

These people included my father who was a regular patient until he became financially secure. Then, of course, he was too hoity toity for quacks. He only lived to be 88 years old. Of course, the quack eventually got old and died too. His house was sold and all the fruit trees were removed. They both did okay.

Both of these men came here from some place else to challenge the status quo here that was very primitive. There were and are still reasons why it became that way. The Reconstruction period and the Civil War being mostly to blame. The coastal plains all up and down the Atlantic seaboard always had problems economically because of their location.

It's the same deal in coastal areas that are separated by big rivers and accompanying swamps the world over. Here, for instance, roads couldn't be built across these rivers and swamps until the technology came along to make it possible. The rivers here run in a southeasterly direction, and so the only roads in the coastal plains ran the same way. For all practical purposes there were no north and south roads. Just east and west ones.

The roads would start in the piedmont and run down the ridges between the rivers and swamps, and you had to come back out the same way. You couldn't travel any long distances on these roads although they might be hundreds of miles long. You used them to go into the towns along the road, and maybe even to the ocean, but you had to come back out along the same road. There were towns ten miles apart as the crow flies, but because there was no bridges the residents of these towns might have to travel a hundred miles to get up to a place they could cross the river.
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The Forsaken

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I've moved into a different phase of seeing what happens if I stop killing myself with prescription drugs like methotrexate and Humira. It's not my joints that are bothering me so much presently as the long bones in my forearms and the gout in my feet. It's not so much a dull ache either, but a sharper pain that's very specific, localized, and ongoing. Ouch!

I ignore all this and move around like I wanna. It's deliberately done with some false vainglorious aplomb. Well, what passes for aplomb at my age and condition. I don't exactly strut when I go for a walk along the sidewalks of the Wal-Mart strip mall, but I try to walk with some dignity and a touch of military bearing. No sense in inviting trouble if there's no need. Trouble will come in it's own time.

It's like I'm sobering up from all the prescription drugs I've been taking. The only way I know how to deal with stuff like this is to go back to the roots of when I first might have noticed the symptoms. When I contemplate my life with some specific clues I'm filtering for, it's like working a difficult crossword puzzle.

What I'm realizing via my meditations is that I've been dealing with arthritis for years and probably decades before it was diagnosed as such. The point of my searching for these early indications appear to be that I'm realizing that I handled this on my own without knowing it was a recognizable disease.

I'm not sure if being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (and several other bone diseases) has made much difference after the fact, except that it makes getting pain pills easier. My doctors don't think I'm faking when I say I need something. RA is an incurable progressive disease. I accept that my symptoms ain't gwine get no better. They could get a lot worse, and probably will because I'm getting older along with having these progressive diseases making me feel less manly.

One of the habits I've been able to keep going is practicing the scales on my digital piano. It's not an activity that many people with crippling arthritis do. I make myself do it. I'm the only-est one who can. Playing the scales by following the Circle of Fifths was a lot easier to do when I was actively taking prednisone steroids, that is, until the prescription runs out.

After a few days of using this miracle drug I feel practically cured, but it's a false healing. When the prednisone runs out and the pain monkey gets on my back again it's like I never used the drug in the first place. Physically, anyway. Mentally, I'm always grateful to know some drug or the other will offer relief.

The prednisone vacation is very nice. It's about the only pain-killer I use that truly gets the job done, and makes me feel delusionally high and mighty without merit simultaneously. I'm very familiar with delusions of grandeur. I personally think working through them is the cat's meow. It's something a person does for-themselves. Prednisone pushes me into a bold arrogance I usually won't let myself get to without extreme trepidation. Of course there's a price to pay, but I'm willing.
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Learning Math To Have Friends

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Okay then, or rather, "How now brown cow? I feel like I'm living in a leper colony rather than living over here in the woods by myself. Too much traffic for that. It was too good to be true. I don't own the world. Otherwise, if I did, I'd either move to a quieter place or demand that my neighbors (including the airport) leave well enough alone by returning to it's previous condition.

I probably wouldn't be nice about it either. I wouldn't have to be if I owned the world. If they found out I wanted them gone it would be prudent to up and find theyselves some other place to be in order to have their lives spared. I'm not the person the world wants to be owned by. Given unlimited power I might make Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein seem like playful children by comparison.

I think the thoughts of genius so-me-ti-me, and not only the good genies either. The evil genies are just as likely or even more prone to show up in my version of wot's what, and I've seen all their wares to boot. That's what happens when you sit down under the Bo Tree while chronically fatigued. It doesn't seem to matter where the Bo Tree is or even if there are no trees around at all. Chronic fatigue is the deciding factor.

At least, as they say, this/that IS my story, and I am is sticking to it. Why would it not? The world becomes it's own thoughts to please it. But, when the flash and dash of breaking through becomes just so much so and so, it can't get back to the Garden again. Damned sha-me. You know?

One of the Jesus stories, if not all of them, is really about something or the other making itself in it's own image. Who or what is deciding which, if any, of these eye mages represents it's best interest seems to be an enigma within a paradox or vice versa. Maybe neither.

In either or both cases it relates to the monkey-see/monkey-do dynamic. The current end product of evolution to the last man-jack uses imitation and mimicry as it's only mode of creativity. That's a long earth-time period from when the leading edge of evolution were monkeys. Monkeys might imitate each other in some solitary venture, but monkeys don't know how to prop up each other's egos for a joint venture in real time.

Atta boys!, are the only real difference between men and monkeys. Homo sapiens can subjugate their own need for self-importance to support larger and larger groups. The hierarchy of which doesn't have to emerge from their personal experience, but can be uttered by a printed notice on the occasional fence post:

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The person we acknowledge as King will pass through this region around the noon hour. Be prepared to fall on your faces in homage of his superiority or we will take your resistance or slightest hesitation as a death wish we will be happy to accommodate. ~ Selah

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If I were to read a sign like this while strolling the countryside I'm pretty sure I'd fall to my knees immediately upon espying a crowned figure followed by a entourage of meanies. Granted, what with my arthritis and all, it might hurt a lot, and OMG, the sha-me of it. But, "the superior man lets many things pass without being duped."

To assure myself I am on topic still I scrolled to the top of the page and re-read what I wrote at the bejinning. I was right. I don't have a clue why I just wrote what I wrote, and it doesn't appear to connect to what I started out to write in any practical way at all.

The documentaries that get rerun a lot on PBS can mesmerize me. Presently I'm watching a series of programs about the spark of life that distinguishes modern man from his most recent incarnations the monkeys.

Just above, I wrote that the act of handing out "atta boys" is what the real difference is between men and monkeys. I probably derived this from watching Alan Alda moderating these types of science shows. He's a better Bill Nye, true, but he is a trained, professional actor, and if he couldn't perform this moderator role well it would only mean that he's a lousy actor.

Bill Nye, as a professional scientist, might not be so lucky. He seems to seek safety in teaching science as if he were talking down to children. The guys on NOVA do the same thing. As if learning math and science is only for the privileged few rather than a topic a typical adult might find interesting if they weren't condescended to.

I refused to learn to live life by the numbers. There is not a chance in hell I'd put myself in the position of insisting on prospective friends and acquaintances learning advanced math theories before I would treat them as an equal.

That's kind of what happened with my love affair with astrology and the other occult systems that depend upon it for augury. Not many people speak that lingo., and what with their preachers telling them its a sin to even hear it mentioned, speaking it is too big a hump to overcome even for the good it can do.
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Am I Dumb Enough To Need A Smartphone?

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Yesterday was not all that strange or different for me than usual. The weather is unseasonably cool. There's a crisp edge to the breezy north wind. It's not cold, but a light jacket feels nice. That makes it just right for taking a long walk without getting too hot.

If there was anything different yesterday it was the anticipation of seeing an old friend again I hadn't seen in person for a while. She used to have a job here as an artist-in-residence for a couple of years. She became friends with my brother and his wife and that's how I got to know her. She was driving down with her second husband to spend a few days away from their hectic city lives. Their progress along the I-95 corridor driving down from the District of Columbia to North Carolina was not unknown. Cell phones are ubiquitous now aren't they?

Previous to the constant info bombardment cell phones provide, our visitors probably wouldn't be heard from after they left home unless they stopped somewhere along the way and used a wired phone to call, but not anymore. Yesterday was a series of hourly phone calls and text messages from wherever they were. I received more telephone calls yesterday than for a long time.

That seems a little complicated, but it required nothing from me other than to sit here and amuse myself reading and writing, and let nature take it's course. The visitors were actually staying with my brother next door and his wife, and I was only involved because they wanted to meet one of my friends who depended on me to tell him when they showed up.

They finally got here and my friend showed up here at my house about the same time. We had a cup of fresh coffee I'd made, and went over to my brother's house to meet and greet the out-of-staters. It was an artsy craftsy sort of gathering of some talented folks.

Our old friend used to be the artist-in-residence here a decade or so ago, and was married to a poet back then. Later, she divorced him and has since married a graphics designer for a few years now. I'd never met him in person until last night. My friend they wanted to meet is a fine musician and my sister-in-law is a trained painter. We all felt easy with each other pretty quick.

I really have fallen behind technically by never having owned a cell phone. It still doesn't matter to me that much. What made me wonder if I might ought to check it out was the development of the new smartphones like the iPhone and the new Android devices. Being able to get online with them and use them as desktop replacements makes buying one for myself almost inevitable.

I would have bought one already if I could afford two telco accounts. Just having this one DSL account is pushing my budgetary envelope. Having an expensive iPhone data account in addition to the DSL account is financially prohibitive. I'd literally have to get a job and go to work to get a smartphone I wouldn't use any more often than I don't use the home phone I have now.

I must have a phobia about using phones. I haven't made a long-distance call in years. I don't have enough excuses to get out of the house now. Of course, my acquaintances who do have smartphones tell me it gives them more freedom to get out because they take they smartphones with them everywhere they go. That's one of the excuses I use to leave the house. To get away from the phone. Double bind. Damned if I do. Damned if I don't. All fall down. '-)
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Autism And Me

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Since I first posted the entry below I took a self-administered test to check out my tendency for "high-functioning autism" or Asperger's Syndrome by taking this test at a Wired Magazine site:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

I didn't even come close to having the score that would indicate I'm autistic, high functioning or not. I had a score of 23 and the lowest score needed for Asperger's was 34. Average score was 16.4. I still display a low-grade dose of the behaviors Aspies apparently kowtow to, but maybe my symptoms are not all that extreme. Mostly I guess I'm looking excuses to use to forgive my own shamelessly arrogant behavior. Maybe the real difference is how deliberately I engage my shamelessness.

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Autism is a familiar word, although sometimes I forget it and it gets left on the tip of my tongue and messes with the taste of my cheap red wine. Cheap red wine is about all I can drink without my autism showing up, because I don't naturally know how to read people's feelings and emotions. I do know how to read people's feelings and emotions artificially through the esoteric systems I've mastered. Perusing this preview/trailer of a movie that will be shown on PBS served as an epiphany that helped get me over the hump:

http://www.horseboymovie.com/Film.php

It was the fact that the parents of this autistic boy took him to a shaman in Mongolia who was himself autistic that laid out the problems I've had with people all my life. It's the reason I studied so many esoteric systems and read so many palms and made so many natal charts by hand for years. I had to find an artificial way to grok other people's feelings, and I'm always the last to know.

My inability to "read" other people's responses to me is also the reason I declined an invitation to accompany an old friend to hear his favorite old-time music band play last night about an hour away in Wilmington. I didn't wanna take a chance of inadvertently insulting his friends he told me would be there. I wouldn't even realize I'd done it until the shunning started. Then my friend would be stuck with a social leper the rest of the night instead of enjoying the night out with fond acquaintances.

The only dependable way I have of man-handling my detachment is to take the advice I offer other people. It might be better if I knew to do this in the real time of me offering my ridiculous advice to the other. I do pay attention sometime.

On unpredictable, but pleasingly auspicious occasions I do remember to remember that I just might be ignoring the other's feeling more often than in the past, and attempt to change horses in mid-stream. I wouldn't bet the farm on my doing that, however, because sometimes it's the most sagacious ignorance I get possessed by.

Sometime I ignore the practicality of going along to get along in most social situations as if my fits of extreme objectivity belonged to somebody else instead of me. I've made myself a bright guy in some cases simply because I'm more desperate than other people to get it right the first time.

The social amenities not only don't come easy to me. It's impossible for me to play them like a natural. I've studied a lotta systems because learning is easy, but application of the principles of the systems I've mastered is where the going gets tough with me. It casts shadows over every decision I make in regard to other people.

One of the most hurtful aspects of this situation is how it affects people who might innocently take a liking to me. It doesn't happen much, and I'm usually okay about it when it does, but I have to look out for the people who like me.

Defending other people's right to be friendly with me can be a burden I often shuffle the coils of impulsively. Until the other has time to grasp the reality of my non-attachment, they have nary a clue about how I am is can get cold as ice faster than it can warm up to them.

I have forever used other people to mirror me to myself fairly disdainfully, as if how they felt about it meant little or nothing to me. It's embarrassing. I am is a sha-me-d man. A shadow of a man. No real man at all, but a pretender to the throne. The docetic spirit I attempt to commune with is me. It gnows, that fucker! I am has to settle for mere knowledge. Who wants that disparity hanging over one's Damocles-like haid?

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

If I hang out in the non-attached state of being that allows me to reach for a broader and more profound source for my nomadic juggernauts. then that state of being has to dismiss the mundane judgment of the Earth without amenities.

I'm trying to describe a balance point as a state of being that, in a way, is like Damocles sitting under the sword more so than the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse. Like Damocles, once I discovered the sword hanging over my head by a horse's hair, I'd jump and run skeered outta mah wits.

The Wikipedia article is probably the first time I've actually read the story of Damocles and the double-edged sword. The myth that existed in my memory of Damocles and the sword was that the sword was suspended above his prostrated body getting closer and closer to cutting his throat with each pendulum swing. Maybe there is more than one version.

Alexander Pope wrote one particular sentence that impresses me, and I don't know a whole lot about Alexander Pope but that one remark. Who cares? The remark was something similar to: Modesty is the art of power. Incrementally I've concluded Pope was saying that the only way to manage power is by comporting oneself modestly. Is this pretty much the same as what Shakespeare wrote quoted in the same Wikipedia article, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"?

In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching the virtue of Modesty is the subject of an entire Hexagram, and it has no negative lines attached to it's judgments and omens. It's the only Hexagram like that in the entire book. A comment of explanation states that the I Ching only teaches caution. The sort of caution required for living a life of no blame.

This morning, however, I'm currently impressed with the metaphor about the sword hanging over a power-hungry neophyte. It's like the Youth scampering along the edge of the abyss with only his doG as a companion in the Fool card of the Waite deck.

Reading palms was sort of like sitting under a double-edged sword for me. Hell, I was just playing around with the idea of something to do to attract a little money of my own say so while I hitch-hiked around the country while it was warm. I did it on the lam for a long time. I was only trying to run away from myself, not nothing illegal, but that's another story.

The big deal with reading palms is finding something to say to the person you're holding hands with. That's the only-est reason the great majority of them hold hands with an out-and-out bum for. For the bum to say something they could make a mountain from a molehill with. For that to-happen-for-them, ya gotta have something to say. It really doesn't matter what.

The reason it doesn't matter what I said to them is the same deal with poetry and painting and music and every other art I'm currently aware of. The perceiver of art perceives what they think is sot before them. What the artist intends by their effort to express wot's what to them doesn't matter to nobody but the spooks up in the corners of the gallery, and in the minds and hearts of their wannabes.
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☯ By The Sa-me Token

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The sun has finally moved itself around to where it is shining on my nakid old body right now through the doorway out to my second-floor deck. In other words, my skin is making vitamin D while I'm sitting here typing my blog. I've already taken a 3000 mg tablet of vitamin D, and now I'm getting it straight from the source. I've taken maybe ten other supplements and prescribed drug in addition.

I've stopped taking two other prescription drugs I felt were hurting me without helping me. I told my rheumatologist at the VA Hospital, and he was not a happy camper. I've refrained from telling him that if I wanted a friend I'd buy a dog. I insist on him remaining a stranger. Not taking the drugs he uses to experiment on me with is a sure route to success in this regard.

However, I am taking one of his prescribed drugs. I know that it helps me without too terrible side-effects, because I stopped taking it for a while to take the last poison he assigned me, and when I started taking it again it helped. I had a weird node on my wrist that disappeared when I began taking hydroxychloroquine.

Mo' bettah, I discovered yesterday that I was only taking one pill of hydroxychloroquine a day when I'm supposed to be taking two. I didn't write that not taking these prescription drugs didn't result in pain. I'm concerned deeply by the pain that occupies my conscious mind constantly, although if I get excited by something that distracts me I am able to ignore the pain while I'm focused on what makes ti-me fly.

Briefly. In snatches. A moment or two now and then. The same activities that have made time fly for me all along. They still work even with RA toiling away at making my life more miserable physically. I've grown rather apathetic about the whole pain deal. I don't have to be emotionally involved, and so, for the most part, I just let it be. Nobody knows. Literally.

I studied acting formally for around four years in college. I've done some low-grade professional acting. By a huge majority I got good reviews rather that awful ones. I know exactly how to get inside this pain and put on a really believable display of morbidity.

But still, despite my formally trained talents for taking on the face value of another's conscious being, nobody knows. They can only know what they think they would be feeling, if they felt and acted like they think I do. Their ignorance (root: to ignore) is not personal. I am is as deprived of knowing their pain as they are mine, and by the sa-me token.

I am is perfectly aware that it's adding the "is" to I am. I am is gnows it's not the personality nor does it possess the reach to attach to subjective feelings of another. It doesn't gnow itself as an other. I am (in the metaphysical/spiritual sense) simply... is. It is me. How many do you know?
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Grumpy, Picky, Old Bachelor Food

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Time has gone crazy in world. I thought at first it was the springing forth of Daylight Savings Time that was throwing me off kilter a bit, but other things have come into play since my entire life is now governed by pills. Mostly over-the-counter supplements I probably don't actually need, but I buy them and take them in the hope they act like placebos and give me a break, real or not.

The reason the pills I take are interfering in my normal outlook toward time is that they have to be taken just so. The Acetyl L-Carnitine and the Alpha Lipoic Acid need to be taken on an empty stomach for them to have a change of acting in the way they're supposed to in order to boost their naturally lagging amounts due to the aging process.

I do understand what's going on intellectually, but it's still just odd to me the way it works. The reason these supplements have to be taken on an empty stomach has to do with the fact that both of them are found in practically every cell in the human body. At least, that's what I'm reading into the health sites I visit to inquire about them.

Since these chemicals (or whatever) are manufacture by our bodies for their own use the digestive tract just treats the supplemental chemical like any other food it's trying to digest. It doesn't separate the supplements out to supplement the stuff every cell in our body needs. Taking the capsule at least two hours after eating means the digestive system will accept the supplements to supplement the existing supply in each cell.

What this means is that I can't just snack any old time I want to in order for this supplement to supplement. Presently, I take two capsules when I first get up in the morning even before I brew up my coffee. Then I take my time drinking my coffee and lay out all the other prescription drugs and vitamins that require me to take them with food.

It usually takes about an hour to go through the e-mail (if any) and read all my usual news sites, and then I go downstairs and fix something to eat, usually oatmeal, and take all the other pills with my second cup of coffee. It's not that big a deal, it has messed with my lackadaisical way of doing what I like when I like to.

I was getting a bad attitude toward sprouting seeds. I must have gotten hold of some old seeds that wouldn't sprout. My last two batches have turned out well, and that eased my concern somewhat. It's not that these over-priced organic seeds cost me an arm and a leg, and threaten to put me in the poor house if they don't do what they're supposed to.

If I got one good jar of sprouts out of every two jars I attempt to germinate it still wouldn't be that expensive. Its just that I take it personal when they don't do right. It's really crazy to allow myself to go there, because the process is so simple that nobody at all could get it wrong.

There's only three things to do. Cover the bottom of a wide-mouthed canning jar with seeds. Put enough water in the jar to cover the seeds completely. Let them sit overnight. Pour off the water, then set the jar of soaked seed upside-down at an angle so any excess water can drain off through the stainless steel screened lid, and let the wet seeds do what they're gonna do.

They need to be wetted and drained a couple of times a day, but the world ain't gwine end if you forget a few hours. Like I said, it's way too simple to mess up the process, but success does depend almost entirely on the quality of the seeds.

The real problem I have with a failed crop has to do with me having a regular supply of sprouts to eat on a regular basis. The recommended amount to eat to get all the vitamins and trace minerals needed to stay healthy is about two cups a day. That is, if you don't eat anything else. I do. I eat just about anything else but meat.

I'm surprised and yet I'm not about how easy it was to stop eating meat. I stopped on December 1st of last year except for four jumbo curried shrimp at my sister's house. I guess I might have expected not eating meat would be sorta like stopping smoking tobacco, and the consequences would be hard to deal with.

It hasn't been that much of a struggle to stop and stay stopped, but it's tedious to put together a meal when meat has been ninety percent of what I've been reaching for to stave off the hunger pangs. I never have been that inventive a cook, but now I'm having to make do without the main ingredient. I'm doing okay. I may have gained weight instead of lost any.
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Group Showers

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Experiencing gnosis does not always augur a fortunate outcome. It depends most times on how well it's handled. For the event of gnosis to come out well there usually must need be a mentor of some definite skill level who can teach the newborn of the second birth how to live a life of no blame.

There are those who experience gnosis, and then, there are those that follow them who haven't/didn't experienced but who find life easier if they stay close enow to the enlightened One's... hmm... light. In my biased opinion, it's always the organization of followers who haven't experienced gnosis that eventually conjures the fate of their leader who has. They either successful at forming a breakaway tribe or die trying.

Gnosis is a term associated with the early Christians. The term is similar to the Asian term "enlightenment" or the western term "Individuation". The people who organized around a gnostic in the areas around the Mediterranean Sea might have done so in a manner similar to the way the regular tribal members relate to a shaman or medicine man is in the American Indian tribes.

The Druids of northern Europe were organized in pretty much the same way. Although, those ways are not well known. There's only a smattering of written records usually by third parties. What I've read indicates the priest class didn't always live with the tribal members, but moved from group to group administering activities like legal matters and healing, and indoctrinating children at certain ages. 

The person who experiences gnosis is not necessarily a leader, but more like specialists who devoted their lives to tribal affairs. They're depicted as living out on the periphery of the tribe, and didn't take a direct part in tribal affairs. 

The meaning of the written gospels in relation to followers may be like what was written in the National Geographic about the Gospel of Judas. The written stuff was the remnants of what the person who had experienced gnosis had written themselves or had been related to scribes by professional memorizers. 

Even now there are people are born with photographic memories. Many were autistic people who had to be taken care of in the best of times. Even midgets were treated as "special" at times like oracles or soothsayers. Remote viewers who predicted the enemy was near and were proved wrong didn't fare well. If they were proved right, They were sometimes made rulers. 

A better example of what kind of people gnostics are can be found in group homes, but they used to be placed in lunatic houses or just murdered for their own good by their parents. Dung heaps. Hell. Crazy mothers who go on slashing sprees because the lunatics were still their babies. Children who aren't raised right, like who never get toilet trained or taught common self discipline have to root little pig or die. Institutionalized. Autistic or Down's Syndrome children who never learn or can learn to fend for themselves are still "sent away" for the good of all. 

Prodigies of all sorts become throwaways when they're not so cute or amazing when they get older and still have to be fed and their diapers changed. Then they join the ranks of the old and feeble. All these people are sent to another line when they get off the train. They don't even get the chance to be slave labor before they're sent to take a group shower. 

A friend came to see me again today. We've been friends for a long time. I knew all his children before they entered first grade, and tomorrow his youngest child is graduating from college. I felt very honored that he chose me to exhibit his pride in his children to. He's come all the way from being an out and out drunk to raising his kids right and owning several businesses. Too bad I couldn't keep up.
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The Silence Of The Cows

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It's misty this morning. Not misty enough to call the ambient atmosphere foggy. It's not foggy. Just a bunch of low-hanging clouds. It smothers a lot of the human noise, but the cooing of the mourning doves and the lonesome sound of some new cows being put in an old pasture. They don't realize they have about 600 acres they can freely roam around in until they're gathered up and taken to the slaughter house to be sold for a profit.

Cows don't have a language per se. I've just been around them since I was born. I've spent more time on earth with certain cows growing up than I have human beings. I had to kill them and cut them up for food for our family to eat. It's what farm boys do. I know exactly where food comes from.

I booted up my digital piano and found a rhythm on it's drum machine to play in the background so that the "silence of the cows" next door won't tear my heart out. What? I got a heart?

Apparently I have a pretty good heart. Well, as opposed to having abused bones. I don't have diabetes. I'll probably get it if I live long enough. People do, you know? Neither of my parents had much trouble with diabetes. It was said that my father had some low-grade diabetes associated with getting old.

He was in his mid-eighties when this mild diabetes showed up. It was managed with pills. He got a pace-maker about this time too. I think there was a connection between the two ailments. Once the medicos start messing around trying to fix one thing it pisses off another part of you. It's not like this process is incited on purpose. But, when it begins you might as well abandon hope. My father eventually did. I was so pleased for him. It gave me hope that if I live long enough, I'll have the good sense to abandon hope also.

On the other hand, if I hadn't abandoned hope already, how would I be able to recognize that's what my father achieved? I'll tell you how. I watched him incrementally let go of the pride his main obsession in his adult life provoked in him. He was obsessed by selectively breeding beef cows. We had dairy cows when us kids were small, but after I left home he and my younger brothers started raising black angus cows. He mixed them with Holsteins to get longer bodies and bigger frames.

The result was his brood cow herd. In his dotage, I watched him as he sat in the den he added on to the existing house on the property he bought after I left home, and observe his herd through the open sliding glass doors that looked out on the barn and pastures he created outta some cut-over timber land he bought for next to nothing.

My father made sure I knew what I was missing out on when I abandoned my heritage for the life of a nomadic adventurer. My mother absolutely disapproved of the decisions I made that seemed so careless. My decisions were anything but careless, but she never believed me. No blame. She couldn't see what I saw because she loved her mother more than me. My mother wasn't a saint, she was a glorified baby-factory that didn't even carry that facet of life through to completion. She had fewer than half the babies her own mother had. Her death mask was The Scream.

My parents served as progressive examples for the same sort of people here on the rural back roads of the Carolina coastal plains that they come from back in Mississippi where they grew up. They couldn't have done that if they'd stayed in Mississippi. My mother could have never graduated from college, even at the late age of 48 years old, if they'd never left Mississippi.

31 Jesus said, "No prophet is welcome on his home turf; doctors don't cure those who know them."

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

Truer words have never been uttered. Not only can a person not be "all that they can be" unless they travel and live away from where people know them and their family, but because they aren't "all that they can be", then they can't be healers or prophets anywhere at all, and then they have to repeat the lesson again and again until they learn to shape-shift.

I wrote about my feet and ankles hurting me pretty bad yesterday morning, and I went walking because I didn't know what else to do but reach for the pill bottle. I wasn't that sure I would cause myself more pain by pushing against what already existed abundantly. This morning my feet felt pretty good. At least a lot less painful than the morning before.

I don't really believe I'm smarter than the disease that has caused me great discomfort, to say the least, but I do believe I'm smarter than to shovel really powerful drugs that all have warning labels that indicate death as a side-effect into my body as a reaction to pain.

I've done pain, man, I've walked through the gates of hell, and now that hell is striking back I'm gonna my defense over to some college boy? Possibly. I'm sure as hell not gonna burn no bridges. Now that I more completely understand the medicos options we might be able to work something out. If I don't get to play God, then I won't allow them to either.

The trick is though, that the drugs they use supposedly to help me, can also disarm my ability to use my subjective insight to protect myself against their objective experimentations that use my body as a playing field. This basically comes down to me living alone and having my own say so above and beyond their control.

They can prescribe all the drugs they want to, but if they can't control the environment in which I ignore their wishes, then I can flush them down the toilet and they can't know whether what they have prescribed has the effect they're looking for or not.

I don't know what I'm doing in regard to medication. At this point I don't care. If I know by personal experience that the sores in my mouth are a side-effect of some medicine the rheumatologists have prescribed and I want them have a chance to heal, then I gotta stop taking whats causing the problem.

My doctors ignore my complaints about these irritating sores I get on my tongue and gums, and prescribe drugs that lower my immune system to the point it can't fight off these mouth sores. If the mouth sores get infected and become cancerous, then what's the good of healing Peter if it kills Paul.

Basically, I want these professional medicine men to help me where they can help me and leave what they can't help alone. It's really up to me to decide that, and if they decide I can't have any say so and still be their patient, then I gotta find another way. They can only go the Doctor Mengele route if I encourage them. It's just crazy to expect them not to envision me as little more than another warm body.

It's like with my brother's dogs next door. They come over here and climb up the stairs and scratch on the door for me to come and pet them. I could see this as our being friends or I could recognize that they're just coming over here to find out if I'm dead yet so they can eat my rottening body. '-)
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