Shrimpi Gets Technical About iPhone 4

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The new iPhone 4 is fully on the market now. If I timed it right I could probably go to any Apple Store or AT&T or Best Buy and not even have to stand in line to buy one. I haven't read many of the articles about the new iPhone previous to now. Most were openly speculative about what the new features would be.

Now that the various pundits have gotten their hands on the retail product and used it according to their own needs some serious reviews are appearing online. I have especially waited for this one:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review

The guy who owns this site is my favorite technical writer about the new stuff that hits the consumer market. He explains the stuff I need to understand to even think about whatever it is. His articles on SSDs (solid state storage devices) were considered seminal all over the internet. He's still the go-to source for what's going on in that brave new world of flash memory.

The article I linked above is rather long, but it's very thorough. All the testing and research they're famous for comes across with easy-to-read charts and technical details that satisfy my need to know without having to go to engineering school just to come away with the rudimentary understanding I use to intuit most answers I need.

It really boosted my confidence when Ben chided me for saying that I didn't really understand wireless networking. He casually pointed out that I have been wireless since they cut the umbilical cord between me and my mother's womb seven decades ago. At some level I just gotta understand everything there is to know about wireless networking even if I don't consciously know that I know.

That particular event worked on me. It didn't go away even after Ben made sense to me about it in real time. His metaphor popped into my mind about every time I got ready to admit that I was the last person in the world to understand wireless networking. I con't pretend that's true anymore. If I'm stymied about something in the wireless arena, it's because I'm lazy and filled to the brim with sloth. No blame. It's easy to be me if I kick back.

I got that article link bookmarked so that I can read a while and rest a while. I can tell from the drop-down index that it's gonna take a while to get through the whole thing. The titles in the index, however, indicate that most of the questions about iPhone 4 I've entertained will be answered. It even addresses how much it will probably cost to use it.

That's critical for me with my fixed income. My DSL account is helping me decide by raising the price I'm paying for this now ancient technology to just less than $70 a month base rate. An early general comment in the Anandtech article suggested having an iPhone would cost $200 up front and a little over $100 a month in data fees.

If the truth were looked at with an unjaundiced eye, using the iPhone would cost me $30 more than I'm paying now, but I'm suspecting the DSL people are gonna rape me for whatever they can get because they deliberately invested in this out-of-date technology for the sole purpose of milking the die-hards like me dry.

The attraction for me, and a lot of other even more active people is the mobility of being able to be online from anywhere without having to find some permanent connection to use when I'm not at home. I wouldn't have to be at home to do the little bit I do on the internet now. I still use e-mail to communicate more than any other feature, and I read all the news I can tolerate over the internet. Using the internet less now makes mobility even more desirable.

Capturing drifting thoughts with words has always been my primary way of reaching out to the external environment and thus other people. It's the only way I know to be receptive to what other people are into without projecting what I'd be doing in their stead.

I'm probably the only-est person in the world that knows my prose is merely an extension of my poetry or that the drifting thoughts I am apperceives as an amusing diversion do not originate from my own abstract constructions. You're reading my abstract constructions, and reading into them what you think you'd have meant. All the best with that... eh? '-)
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Sleazy Hot Weather And Cool Fronts

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Man! I sure would like to have me one of them thar iPhone 4 gadgets. I'm seeing people with them all around me, and they are all terribly impressed with the results they're getting. To me the most impressive feature of them is the GPS, and I don't even need an iPhone for that.

The way the people around me are using them is to stay more in touch with their own world from anywhere in the world. I've taught myself to ask, "Where are you?" right away in order to imagine I'm there with them. One friend calls me while he is going to and from the Old Time Music Festivals he makes a big deal out of. I think he likes to let me know that technically, I'm behind the curve with gadgets.

If that's what he actually thinks he's doing by calling me while he's on the road he's doing it right. He gets his point across that I'm not hip enough to jump ship with my dial-up mentality just by making much ado about nothing while he's clattering along in his old Toyota truck a hundred miles from home.

I'm not anxious to buy any smartphone presently. I might if I had a windfall. I can't even say I'm waiting for a better deal, because there are already better deals with Google's Droid phones. They're playing catchup, but the price is more reasonable.

The iTunes feature of the iPhone don't hold no truck with me. I'm burned out on recorded music. Truth be, I don't actually go out of my way to hear live music. My friends come over and play one or the other of the instruments I have laying around the house, and I enjoy that a lot.

I hardly ever join in and play with them anymore. I've constrained myself to playing the digital piano, and I'm too inept at that to fiddle around. I'm not playing the scales every day like I once did. I tell myself that all I wanted to do in that endeavor was to prove to myself I COULD learn to play the major and minor chords following the Circle of Fifths.

The idea behind me teaching myself to play those scales from the tutorial materials on the internet was that if I was able to learn how to do it with the right fingering, and practiced playing them every day for a long enough time, I would intuit the particulars of where I wanted to go next with it.

That might have just happened if I weren't so distracted by my health problems. I got a bad attitude due to something I did intuit the other day. I've written about it before. The images were about how I have become certain that my bone problems have been around since I got this particular body. The spirit I traded for it with must have know I was buying into a lemon, but he might have been in for a surprise about his end of the bargain when the dealing was done too.

The Channel Five weather site has a time-released version of what the satellite images report that shows 8 hour snapshots of what the weather looks like from outer space. They have radio buttons for regional and national satellite images on the same page. I've checked in to look for any progress in the cool front predicted to engulf us by sometime tonight two or three times this afternoon.

It's been really, really hot around here. Blessed relief is coming for about four days. Yahoo!! High temperatures in the mid-eighties (29,444 Celsius) and much lower humidity. It's too risky to exercise even a little when the high temperatures get over a 100° F (37.778 C) and the humidity is 90% +. I'm looking forward to taking some longer walks to get the kinks out.
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Solar Sails And Exoplanets

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This first paragraph got added on to what appears below. That'a because I just wrote a paragraph that took an inordinate amount of ti-me to craft, but the result shows that my attempts at prose are just a carry-over from my poetry and it's great fun to make do:

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It's just my highly disregardable opinion, but try as I might, all the gods I manufacture by abstract construction seem altogether human. They're just like I think I might be in my more transcendent, more-of-me expansions of spirit. Yet, those sheer, scintillating mo-me-nts of ecstasy have never been enough to stultify my acute fear of a meaningless (me-and-thee-ing-less) death, alone without a god of my own making. '-)

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It's gonna get above 100° Fahrenheit today and the humidity is already over 90%. It's been that way for nearly two weeks. Old people and babies die if they're not cared for in this kind of weather. I almost died once from heat prostration. I passed out unconscious and was laying out in the Sun when they found me. It took a couple of days to recouperate, but I was in my early teens then. It didn't hurt when I passed out, but I had a terrible head ache for a week.

Around here it's called getting the monkey on your back. Once it happens the rumors are that it makes a body more susceptible to heat stroke for the rest of their lives. I don't actually believe that. Most of the farm boys who worked in tobacco here in the Southeastern U.S. have had heat strokes because it's not recognizable at first, but there are signs that it's coming on. Ignore them at your peril.

I've thought several times it would be a good way to commit suicide. As I've mentioned often enough, I've considered suicide every day of my life since I was nineteen years old. That adds up to fifty years of thinking about killing myself. I ain't dead yet, but it's coming. Employing heat prostration to kill oneself wouldn't even be recognized as self-murder by an older person. "Another one bites the dust."

Just about every time I see the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on TV it looks red, and I think about it being the blood of the earth. Maybe that's what happened when we occupied Mars and the planet that used to roam the orbit where there are only astroids left from when we blew it up. We used each of those planets blood up and killed it.

Why would we not? Life is a parasite that eats planets. Once life uses up what nutrition a planet offers life, it's time to move on and find another planet to sponge off of. We seem to be spilling more and more of the planet Earth's blood at a more rapid pace now. It probably won't be long before we blow it up so that life (everything here that's not on Mars) can make itself into a solar sail and drift until we find another exoplanet to do our feeding frenzy upon so that life can evolve into homo sapiens again.

The one thing that I don't have a smart-ass answer to in this regard is that in my remembering vision I arrived as a pearl-like radiant point of light after life was already established here on Earth. I joined a group of existing pearls, and I've never felt sure we all came from the sa-me source.

My personal believe, currently, is that we ca-me from all over the universe or perhaps even universes, and are each eternal. We may inhabit other worlds that don't harbor life as we know it. That's the one thing I feel pretty sure about. Us pearls gotta evolve into homo sapiens or life's equivalent of what homo sapiens represent in the here and now or we can't contemplate the future or the past, but we got forever to bring that about. I think we gotta be able to do that to get beyond life as we presently know it.
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Limbaugh's Marriage An Abdication To Sarah Palin?

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Any extinct culture's sayings might survive the test of time even though the culture don't, because their sayings are either universal memes or they're not. A culture's memes (in the form of their proverbs and sayings) doesn't have to be universal or even true. They work because they're intoned by a master orators, and with the lack of a current magnetic lead speaker, the sayings are impotent. 

The master orator some people appear to extol the praises of is not Jesus or Mohammed or Gautama the Buddha, but Rush Limbaugh. Was his recent marriage an abdication of the throne to Sarah Palin? I don't understand the attraction. Granted, I might be looking at it from an arrogant, bigoted perspective, and not trying to be level-headed at all. I have a choice. Why would I not? 

A blasphemous thought occurred that maybe with all Palin's kids and her husband Joseph, she's actually the Holy Mother and a Tea Bagger to boot. This can't have a good end. It's the classical War Of The Gods, and nobody is gonna win or... for the most part... survive. They're not supposed to. This planet's problem with becoming Utopia is that it has too many people to carry on it's back. Palin will solve that problem. The great unwashed, like those wolves in her back yard in Alaska, gotta go. No blame. 

Watching documentaries on PBS and perhaps the History Channel seems natural for older folk like me. I can only write about PBS because cable don't reach this far out, and I can't afford the satellite dish thingie. It doesn't seem to matter much. There is so many reruns I can start talking about something I saw recently about wild animals, and many of the older folk sitting around me will nod and say "Amen!" to that.

Now, with the big oil spill threatening all the areas the conservationists have held up as a model for the universe, it's not so much fun to watch the documentaries about the coral reefs off Florida being put off-limits to bottom trawlers like shrimp fishermen to save what's left of the reefs. The oil will kill all the reefs and all the life that depend on them. Kaput! It's over. What a drag, man.

This is not news to me. I worked in Southern Louisiana helping build an oil separator plant not two hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico. The oil being pumped up through the oil rigs out in the Gulf got pumped from there to one of these separator plants where the oil was semi-refined into three grades with gasoline being the lightest.

This place was a few miles west of Holly Beach, Louisiana. It was a beach town nicknamed The Cajun Riviera because so many Cajun people had summer cottages there. I was told that at one time that Holly Beach was THE place to be to party on the weekends for the Cajuns from all over southern Louisiana.

I believed that part. There was a crossroads in the middle of a huge bird refuge between Holly Beach and Lake Charles, Louisiana where the party life continued. Man, those Cajuns have a good time what am!

They have a good time inland at that crossroads because of what happened at Holly Beach. It was a collecting point for all the trash and spilled oil from the thousands of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. The Cajun Riviera became a dump. I guess the rest of the beaches around the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and most of the resort areas along the southeastern Atlantic coast is or will be joining Holly Beach in their depraved shame.

I not only worked construction in southern Louisiana, but I worked on a few shrimp boats there too. A lot of the shrimpers there had shallow-draft wooden boats they inherited from their families. They've been shrimping the shallow waters just off the coast for decades. Once upon a time they used wooden sailboats to drag for shrimp. It's hard work and easy occupation to poor mouth. Now they got nothing but family pride, but about what? Is the Cajun culture a failed political state. In the last couple of years Cajun power has had a hard blow to what was left of their tenuous culture.

Candidly, their situation isn't any different than what happens when natural disasters strike anywhere in the world. They gotta move to a happening place. The people there won't like it, and it might be unpleasant to have to change they ways. But, "... life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone."
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Time After Ti-me

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I've been reading again. This time about arthritis. I used to consider myself somewhat of a bookworm until I went online back in the early nineties. I approach learning differently now. A web search for a topic I'm curious about can be very specific to my subjective inspiration. I don't have to wade through lots of non-related material to get straight to the point. That is, if I know the point.

One of my first reactions to being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and several other bone-related diseases was a clear, distinct image of my mother's sister whose entire life and those of her family was permeated by her "disease", rheumatoid arthritis. The last time I saw her she was over ninety years old, and totally out of it. Her empty eyes neither happy or sad. I didn't think she even knew who we were or cared.

My aunt being that way in her old age probably didn't have that much to do with her arthritis as it did just with getting old. I watched my own mother and father go through the same forgetting, and when I think about it, devaluing what ain't real anymore is just a necessary step along the way. Seeing myself like that from my current perspective is not pleasant.

One of the things I read about arthritis is that about 70% of adults suffer from it to some degree most of their lives. That's what having my condition diagnosed as something recognizable like RA helped me to understand that I've probably had it all my life. It's probably a genetic condition based on inheritance. In a word, it's fairly natural to have arthritic aches and pains when you get old. At 71 years of age, I'm old.

Being seventy-one years old is like not having much to look forward to but more of the same. Astrologically, however, being 71 is one year short of being 72, and that's a big deal spiritually. It's associated with the number twelve, and the initial arrival of puberty that happens around the age of twelve years old.

The ti-me counter here is Saturn, and the fact that it takes Saturn 29 1/2 years to orbit the Sun. When it does that, astrologically, it's called the first Saturn Return, and the end of youth. Saturn immediately begins it's second orbit (based on the native's moment of birth). Twelve years later the native enters a second puberty usually referred to as the mid-life crisis. Men get sports cars and women get plastic surgery.

I endured my second Saturn Return when I was 59 1/2 years old. Sometime between now and the time I'm 72 years old I will enter my third puberty. I'm not sure what it's called, but it's probably not involved with the same features as what happened in my mid-life crisis at 42 years old. I'm not guessing about what happened then. It wasn't pretty.

I've heard it said (or made it up) that reaching that third puberty is a fairly joyous occasion spiritually, but physically it might not be so hot. Like the first puberty has to do with developing the power to make babies, the second puberty has to do with the freedom to walk away from those responsibilities, and the third puberty has to do with attaining spiritual power. Probably at the expense of the body.

Believe it or not I was a shy lad, and I only kissed the Blarney Stone just after my second Saturn Return. It was then that I experienced my remembering vision, and trying to understand in retrospect what happened took up the rest of my life until recently.

I was alone with it after it happened. It was probably the most astounding thing that had ever happened in my life. It put me in the position of believing it happened and trying to figure out what it meant for me, or forgetting it and trying to be the kind of person I was meant to be. A dad, for one thing. I've father three legitimate kids, but I've never been much of a dad. I honestly don't think I was permitted.

One of the reasons I had to figure out what having the remembering vision was all about was that I couldn't let it mean nothing. I just couldn't. I couldn't act like it never happened, because if I did I would have lost my soul. I don't actually know what that means, but I'm convinced it would have happened. I would have forgotten my identity. I would have lost my chance at individuation if I would have shined my vision on.

The fact that my natal chart sets me up with all the tools I need to figure it out makes me even more damned if I let it go. I didn't let it go. I let a lotta other stuff go that damaged all concerned. I can't afford to care. Besides, they're of the blood. They'll make do. Just like me. Either that or they won't. At least two of them have their own babies now.

Setting up my DSL connection to wireless allowed me to move my iMac to any room in the house. Today I moved it downstairs. It's cooler down here and there's a big overhead fan that has kept me fairly cool although the outside ambient temperature is in the mid-nineties with humidity in the eighties.

Not that I get company much anymore, but when I do it seems like they like to visit me mo' bettah if I'm downstairs instead of upstairs. Upstairs I receive visitors in my bedroom, and that appears to make them more uncomfortable than need be. The overhead fan does a good job. I haven't turned the A/C on all day.
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My Beastliness Tamed By Music

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Waking up was a lousy event this morning. I hurt all over and was in a bad mood too. It took a while, but I got over it. What got me over it was a weeping spell I got into from watching this woman play the fiddle on TEDtalks.

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

This woman is a total musician. She sings. She plays the fiddle and dances a jig simultaneously. She plays the piano to accompany her fiddle-playing husband, and she's interesting to look at while she's doing it.

I was so pleased by her accomplishments I began weeping, and that emotional release turned the way I was feeling when I woke up into a mo' bettah attitude. Then, when I was watching another TEDtalk video, the speaker whipped out an Einstein quote that really hit the spot with me:

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

The quote from Einstein is:

"Not everything that can be counted counts; not everything that counts can be counted."

I decided to enter that into Google and see what other people had to say about Einstein's quote. There were lots of hits. Some people wrote their entire blog entry on this one Einstein quote. I think they all meant well, but some people just can't write down what they think in a coherent manner even though it's obvious they're fairly intelligent, and I got the sense that they really understood what Einstein intended.

I compare writing to what Rembrant wrote about drawing. He said something equivalent to, " The only real way to learn to draw is to pick up a pencil and push it around on a piece of paper every time you get the chance. That's the approach I take toward writing, except that now I go clickety-clack on my computer keyboard.

One of the unknowingly smart things I did in high school was to defy my father and insist on taking a class in typing. I only took one year of typing. It was very embarrassing in a way because I never got very fast. I think about the fastest I was able to get in that class was 55 words per minute. I made a lot of mistakes or I'd have done better.

I never owned a typewriter until I was in my forties. In fact, until I built this house I live in. I didn't have anywhere to keep a machine, and I sure as hell didn't have room for it while I was moving around so much. I did use a typewriter when I had that job with RCA, but I didn't have to compose too many letters with it. I typed mostly business reports which were about numbers, and the hunt and peck method worked okay for that.

Getting online with the internet and participating in e-mail discussion lists was the activity that forced me to get better at typing. I didn't start writing blogs for nearly ten years after that. Since what I wrote on the e-mail discussion groups was mostly my opinions about the topics and subjects the members of these groups confronted, that made a natural transition toward writing prose.

Before that I kept daily journals or diaries in spiral-bound notebooks, and burned them every ten years or so. I didn't get all that pleased with the way I wrote out things cursively, so most of the serious (to me) stuff I tried to express was done in the poetic form, and that was basically to keep what I wrote about a secret.

I kept things secret because what I considered for contemplation was a bunch of stuff many people thought was just nuts, and they still do. Too bad, but the people who usually think that way don't write anything more than letters to their kinfolk or love letters to their amours, and nothing at all about their opinions or what they think about life.

To me, that's a big mistake. It means they don't even try to be honest with themselves about how they think and feel. That leaves them to quote other people's ideas and thoughts instead of their own. They don't contemplate their own lives, but those of other people.

The thing about that is that they don't generally realize that they don't even write about what they contemplate about other people's lives, but rather the projections they have about who they would be if they were not who they are. To me that's rather sad, but none of my business.
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Sometimes I'm Up, Sometimes I'm Down

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I took a painkiller and ended up taking an eight hour nap. I guess I needed it after my trip to the capitol. At first, when I woke up this afternoon, I thought I had slept all night and all day, but then I remembered going for breakfast earlier. I must have laid down for a nap after I got home from eating scrambled eggs and grits at the restaurant I've started eating at.

These prescription medicines I take for the rheumatoid arthritis are very powerful. I take a prescription dose of ibuprofen, and if I don't my joints can get very painful. It's probably the drug's anti-inflammatory behavior that helps the most. I'm damned if I do, and I'm damned if I don't take these pills.

If I don't take the ibuprofen I can barely stand up, and even when I do it can be very painful. My feet can be so swollen and inflamed from gout I can barely make it down the stairs in the mornings to brew coffee. This can be very emotional to deal with too. It was painful in my youth to learn to use my limbs, and it's painful in my dotage to learn that I won't have the power to stand on my own two feet forever. What a drag, man.

When I do take the ibuprofen it's a lot better. It's still a bit awkward moving around sometime, but there is not so much pain when even a little bit of the inflammation is reduced. Still again, it's that much better when I get a prescription for a few weeks of prednisone. All the pain goes away and I get real cocky like I was prize fighter again.

The problem I got is just that simple. With anti-inflammation drugs I can get around in a fairly adequate way, and without them life gets really tough. Some anti-inflammatory drugs work better than others, but there is also a heavier price to pay. Presently, I'm totally consumed with how I feel physically, and whether I can plan ahead for activities that require some dexterity or not.

That's my life these days. I don't think it would make much difference if I was a billionaire. There is not much anybody can do for me that being able to find good help would solve. Sure, it might be nice to have some things done for me. Like somebody to reach for things that hurt too much to do, but if I had somebody to do things for me I'd go downhill faster from self-indulgence.

I came into a couple of xanax pills. A half of one of them really helps me to sleep a solid 8-10 hours. That seems to help a lot. The inflammation in my bones itself contributes to tiring me out. An old friend of mine seems to have returned. Chronic fatigue. It always seemed to make hallucinate back when I was a bum. Maybe I'll start seeing some strange shit now. That might be a welcomed distraction.
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Visiting The New Museum

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The trip to the new section of the N. C. Museum of Art was a little disappointing. The lighting was bad as far as I was concerned. It may not have mattered if I'd never seen the art before, but I been visiting these paintings and sculptures since I was a little boy, and I noticed.

I noticed, for instance, in the one Thomas Cole painting the museum has owned for a long time (as long as I remember) has a splash of red I could spot all the way across the old gallery. No more. I had to get within one foot of the painting and search for it. The Brown painting of the shoe shine boys was flat and dull and looked more like a magazine cover illustration than a master work. What a drag, man.

After I left the museum I drove over to this huge shopping center to go for a long walk inside the air-conditioned buildings. I must have walked for a couple of miles. The shopping center has two stories, and lots of stairs to go up and down. Very good place for getting some aerobic exercise.

They have an Apple store at this shopping center. I stopped in to see if they had any software I might want to buy. I didn't expect to find anything because I've looked before. What surprised me was how many people were there. Later, I realized that Apple started selling the new iPhones today.

When I thought of that I realized there probably wasn't that many people after all. If I'd wanted to I might have been able to pick one up just because I just happened to walk into the store. I might get an iPhone before long. I'm still mulling it over.

I gotta get a better idea of the costs I may be signing up for. Since I don't use a phone very much I may be able to get on the internet through wifi and not have to use the 3G cell phone minutes as much. I could have used the GPS all day long and felt much more confident that I wouldn't get lost. The GPS feature is probably the most useful part of having a smartphone.
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The Randomness Of Serendipity

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Somehow, even while I was writing yesterday about deep meditation, that my realization about the incremental restriction of oxygen necessary to get me there, made me aware that I was eating meat in the here and now that would sabotage any effort I might make to get there today, even if I decided to practice doing it all morning.

Specifically, I was eating meat that would take my digestive system at least a couple of days to process, and if I eat any more meat before then it'll be even longer. Yesterday, for some reason, I recalled that I was doing a lot of fasting back during the time period I had this astounding, heart-stopping experience of pure bliss.

It happened during my first marriage when I wore a three-piece suit for RCA. I worked an office job and was on the telephone from morning until night. I know that was the situation my situation was in because of where it happened. It happened in one of the upstairs bedrooms at the townhouse apartments we lived at in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I also opened things up in that apartment by taking LSD for the first time there. A lot of "firsts" in my life happened there. It's where I made the decision to "tune in, turn on, and drop out". I left my three-pieced suits there when I ran away from what I knew as home.

My entire life up until that juncture was chaotic and fast-paced by changes. My father, who told me many a story of how he grew up in pretty much the same hearth and home until he married my mother in his early thirties, uprooted his own family time and time again as if that rooted-ness was responsible for this careactor within himself that he called, "Poor Bill".

"Yeah, none of those people I grew up with would believe what happened to Poor Bill. They didn't think I'd make it. But, I did. I did better than all of them put together. Poor Bill, my ass."

Maybe I took my unconscious vow of poverty from my father's attitude of "I'll show 'em!" I guess I decided I'd show 'em too, but what I'd show 'em was that I could do without. I could deliberately be poor and have a more interesting life than they could buy with false ambition.

That hasn't worked out that well. I don't meet too many people who envy me for what I haven't accomplished. Most seem to think they would be a little crazy to have approached life as I have. Not only do they not appear to be jealous of my non-accomplishments, but dismissive of my absurd rationalizations to the contrary. No blame.

I can't live the way I wanna live unless I live alone. Some of the mental states I lust for require uninterrupted processes/rituals that are hard enough to get to from square one initially, much less continuously from the sadness of failure. For that reason I am not particularly fond of visitors.

Some visitors visit because they got nothing going on for themselves at their own home. Everybody is not as trained to amuse themselves as they need to be in order to live alone. They know how to entertain other people just fine, but not themselves. That means they depend on other people being around them to fill the gaps. Group-think. They have picnics, preachings, concerts, art galleries, and wine tastings. Why would they not?

The effort it takes to remain conscious at certain levels of focus is an iffy thang. I've practiced the art of reducing my oxygen intake for years. Practically every night as portal to losing consciousness in order to fully enter the sleep cycles. It's literally, if not virtually impossible to do it laying down. Staying conscious, that is. Once I get oxygen deprived enough to conjure the desired state, I go to sleep.

A body gotta have every advantage it can provide for the experience to be successful. Not having to be concerned with the digestive process because you ate some really spicy pesto is just one of them. Being full of shit because you're constipated is another. Being in a room where you can't ignore somebody else's noise is no good, because it takes at least some focus to ignore it.

Getting into a float tank is an excellent way to get to this place, but it's not a done deal simply to get in there, because that doesn't always guarantee the desired result even though the physical conditions may be optimized. In the end game, however, using a float tank as the only method you got to get there can be cumbersome because float tanks are immobile for the most part.

Since I can't get to this highly desirable state of being in the prone position, because I inevitably go to sleep, and thus lose consciousness, I gotta find an upright position that will give me another shot at consciously experiencing this state of being. Hopefully, to enter it and be able to stay in it for successive times in order to learn to get there without a ritual.

The reason I need to be conscious in this state is to induce repetition and redundancy. I always seem to need a certain degree of rote-ness to get what I need to carry on alone. I don't know whether it's just me or Memorex. I may have set this need up foolishly, but I gotta practice until I find my own needs satisfied or I can't tender an IPO to let the public take their chances with my inventions.

This is probably some freak I need to let go of. Before I stopped consulting the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching I asked it a lot about getting another float tank. The materials I need to build another, mo' bettah sensory deprivation tank, that were missing the first time around, back before the internet evolved, are all over the place, and cheaper. The Emperor's Yellow Book said "No."

Getting that response from the I Ching about building another float tank was a little sad for me. I don't remember whether I asked it if I should avoid using sensory deprivation to help me learn to move, of my own volition, to this state of being I find useful.

One of the most amazing things to do in my dotage is to sit back and contemplate how I ever did something like build my own float tank. I built the bulk of it on the front porch of a beach cottage I rented to stay in while I was working at the duPont plant in construction for Daniels. Then, had to move it here to my house over a hundred miles north.

Getting it here was only a part of the logistical problems I had with this thing. Once I got it here I had to cut a hole in the side of my house to get it inside... and then I usually start thinking about how I ever got this house built to put it in. I might remember hammering every nail, but I don't know how I thought about doing it. It's like my life. No blueprints.
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Low Oxygen Intake And The Color Purple

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Coming to understand that the main point of a meditation practice is to lower the oxygen content of one's breathing has revealed a couple of more ideas about why a meditator goes about reducing the body's diet in such away as to not take more oxygen to run the body than is necessary.

As I've explained about my going vegetarian, well, up to the last couple of days when I've eaten two steak sandwiches), the only reason for my doing that had to do with how difficult it is for me to digest meat. If I'm trying to lower the intake of oxygen by practicing certain meditation techniques, the fact that my GI tract is working all it's muscles and acids trying to break down the meat I put in it, that's gonna screw with me trying to lowing the oxygen.

This lowering of the oxygen intake also jives with what happens in a sensory deprivation or float tank. Floating in warm salt water that's three or four times as salty as the open ocean facilitates the body needing less oxygen. Nothing I've ever done has been more relaxing than spending a few hours in a float tank.

A day or two ago I wrote about how I've only been to the desired state of being via meditation just once in around fifty years of meditating on and off. I've been there a goodly number of times while in the float tank I once built. Now that I really need it to help with the arthritis I don't have a float tank anymore.

That's not to say, however, that every time I crawled naked into my float tank I ascended into this exalted state of being. I felt lucky if it did happen, but I couldn't prophesy which time I got into my float tank it would happen. It's a little like what the Tibetan monk stated about how death is always unexpected.

Something has to be abandoned wholly and abruptly to "wake up" in the desired state. That's why "falling" into this state of being is likened unto death. It's the Jesus child you were taught in your youth that you always should have been that's gotta be forsaken. It's not that easy to betray what you've grown to love for old time's sake.

There is the question of who's memories will you use to meet the future? Your naive, supposed-to-be life is the result of the rules of conscience you employed to create an identity for yourself or accept the identity imposed upon you by your family or tribe.

Having one's own identity seems to be the only thing that really matters to a homo sapiens creature. Having an irrefutable identity is truly to die for. It's so fragile, though, that one small whack up side the head in a bar brawl, and it's Irene Goodnight to one's personality. It's called getting some sense knocked into you. Back in the tribal days, aye, and even today in tribal areas, to not belong to an identity group is to risk lifelong slavery as a wannabe.
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A Genuine French Omelette

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One of the reasons the practice of meditation made such an impression on me was the accidental results I got from reading the instructions in a book. What was more startling at the moment was that what happened that afternoon happened the first time I tried to do it. It was the breathing technique that was different from what I'd already tried before. Those previous efforts too came from reading the instructions in a book. The crossroads and rural villages in the Bible Belt didn't have many meditation teachers around.

By following the instructions I read in this book I "fell" into a deep, meditative state of being in which, for as long as I remained there, I found that I didn't have to breathe, and I could stop my heart from beating as long as it pleased me. I did stop it from beating an impossibly long time, but eventually I felt like I should be reasonable and start it up again. I've never gotten back to this garden again by my own volition.

I've been to similar gardens using different methods of approach. Unsurprisingly, I never got back to each of those similar states of being either. Most mystical events only happen once in my life. Yesterday, however, I heard this comment about how certain animals bring about hibernation. They slowly restrict the intake of oxygen to induce it, but they have a skin flap they close to do it. Homo sapiens don't have such a flap, but they don't need it. I've contemplated the notion of hibernation and it's possible relation to the various meditation states frequently since the heart-stopping event I describe above.

During that singular experience I was fully aware of what my opportunities were in the real time that rare state of being allowed. By that I mean that when I got into this state of being I serendipitously discovered that I could slow my breathing down to the point of actually stopping it. I decided to see if my heart would stop beating. I'd never been in a place like that where I could do that before, but the very first time included my awareness of being able to do that. I wouldn't bet the farm on it, but I almost knew the results I'd get if I did it.

After hearing that comment about how certain animals induce hibernation by deliberately slowing down their breathing to restrict their oxygen intake, I suddenly remembered the point of breathing a specific way to slow my intake of oxygen down. through that original, but specific breathing method. I've been playing with it off and on ever since. Basically, it's an exercise in visualization and focus. I've tried to explain it before using the holiest spot in the body as an example. I've never felt as though I ever got my point across. It's too far-fetched and intimate for many people.

The fact that I concluded that I brought my rheumatoid arthritis into such a drastic state as to have it cripple me by eating a bunch of pre-processed meat doing the Atkins diet has had me thinking about what role that played before refrigeration came into being.

Preserving meats to last through the winter, in the past, was a tedious process that mostly employed using lots of salt, pepper, and smoke houses. When I was a kid a lotta people had smoke houses in their back yard. Smoked bacon and fatback that was used to flavor vegetables made life easier for everybody. It was even easier if you had a profession like doctoring, lawyering, or fixing teeth for which people would trade or barter their work for the product of your smoke house.

In other words, if pre-processed meats are unhealthy for a body, then everybody who couldn't kill an animal every three or four days for fresh meat was living on a diet that eventually killed them. Refrigeration was definitely one of the reasons human being are living longer,

Waxing nostalgic is not one of my better talents because I don't care to do it so much. I feel contempt for nostalgic people, and when I rule the world, they all going to the gulag where they can do things the old fashion way until they drop dead from sheer exhaustion. '-)

I'm hardly eating anything at all. With the side-effect of the methotrexate I don't even like looking at food. I ate little meat, then bought a steak and cooked it, and then threw it away for to my brother's dogs to eat. They gulp it down like it was cheap hamburger. Dogs gulp everything down.

I was really disappointed to find out that bacon is considered pre-processed meat. It obviously makes sense that it is when I think about how it's processed or was processed back in the day. Who doesn't like bacon?

One thing that did catch my attention today was a cooking show that promised as soon as I tuned into it to show the viewers how to cook a genuine, Julia Child's french omelette. It's so simple even a simpleton can do it. The most interesting thing was the chef's statement that a "genuine french omelette" shouldn't have any burned or brown spots on it.

This was something I noticed the other day when I went to this new restaurant where I got a great veggie omelette. The next day I went back to the same place and ordered a Western omelette, and it did have those burned spots, and that queered the deal for me.

Other than not burning them, the most useful tip I may have gotten from this foodie show was the omelette skillet. Yeah, they got skillets made just to cook omelettes in. The real difference seems to be in the thickness of the metal of the skillet. They have to hold enough heat to cook the omelette after you put all the ingredients together.

It's essentially scrambled eggs with a sprinkling of your favorite cheese, a green spice or two, and then it is rolled up in the pan, the lid is put on, and the stove turned off. Its the residual heat in the thick-metalled skillet that finished the job without burnt spots.
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Implements And Devices

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The methotrexate ritual can be a hard row to hoe. There is lots of different side effect, most of which can't be seen, but the one reliable reaction to taking my weekly dosage is nausea. Physical nausea. Mental nausea. The very thought of eating some foods that I eat regularly make me wanna retch. Retching is always consciously reachable for a couple of days after I put that stuff into my GI tract. It's chemotherapy plain and simple.

I ask myself all the time why I do this to myself. Is being alive worth it?Probably not. But, that's nothing new. I've asked myself that question everyday at some one ti-me or the other for the last fifty years, and I ain't dead yet. If thinking about suicide invites it, then why am I always the last to know?

It's represented in the comic strips as a simple and plain-spoken, "Oh....". Many other forms of the media go ahead and add the other word, "Oh... Shit!" To me it begins with a sinking sensation in the physical area of my heart, a heaviness I can only watch in sheer dread. "The jig is up, man, all hope is lost."

Older generations that were still alive when I begin to become aware that there were other people in the world than my family members. I was instinctually aware of them, but their otherness didn't make any sense to me for a long time. Longer than average I think. But, whatta I know?

It seems obsessive the way I react to chance and to change. Sometime I put off making critical decisions until the last possible moment, and then of course, sometime I wait too long and queer the whole deal with my outrageous inertia. It's not nice watching people who have let me think for them implode and renege on their investment. Everything I denied myself to give them gone walking away.

It's not like I am is not there watching the whole thing as if from afar. It be-co-me-s with a distant witness that's in a resting state, and they watch without comment or summarization. Recaps are extraneous. Putting on a different head to say the sa-me thang seems irksome. Irritating. Extraneous to the extreme.

"Ain't nobody knows
the troubles I've seen.
There ain't nobody that
knows my sorrow.
Nobody knows the troubles I've seen... Glory!
Hallelujah."

Finding out for sure that I was born in Taurus instead of Aries was a big deal for me because previously I hadn't known it could be figured so close. When I found out it could be figured to the minute, to the second, I figured I better learn how to do that myself. That's what it turned out to be alright. A system for figuring things.

I needed a system for figuring things desperately. Furthermore, I needed a system for figuring things that nobody could gainsay. I hate for people to go around confusing the issues I'm interested in with facts. I needed something nobody else had, and when, after years of study and practice, it became more and more apparent that I had chosen a path with heart.

You can't argue astrology with me, and I'm not gonna argue astrology with you. If you know enough about astrology in a technical way to argue with me about some point I inculcate from the seat of my pants, I'll concede your point immediately and move on. Whatta ya gonna do? It's a system for figuring things, not God's gift to mankind. Granted, being dismissive toward people who worship graven images ain't a vote-getter.

Once I had generated my own thousand natal charts I set about using this system for figuring things on a real time basis. Not by making thousand of my natal charts for the ingrates, but by holding hands with them unimpeded by implements and devices. I.E., graven images.

For me, the whole point of my learning how to make astrology charts for other people was to get to interpret those charts for my friends. I never made no natal chart for money. That wasn't the point. Okay, when I was learning to make astrology charts I didn't really know what the point was. I figured that if I learned this system for figuring things... I'd figure it out. Later. When some joker was getting ready to expose me as a fraud. Then, I'd figure it out, and that's what happened. Why am I always... ?

The reason for learning astrology is to learn to interpret what they mean to the chart's owner, the native. The native inhabitant of those nether regions from whence came they help. Natives of such and such. Natives of so and so. Native to a certain cultural naiveté. With a certain bent, with their own sense of identity, probably by tribe rather than by individuation.

The reason for learning astrology is to read the signs of some other's situation as if it were familiar to you as the lines in the palms of their hands. That's what palmistry is about. Reading the native's natal imprints from the lines in the palms of their hands, and then speculating what that leads them inevitably to.

Your normal, average, run-of-the-mill homo sapiens hasn't got a clue about what their future holds for them. Neither does the remaining elite, if such is so. People can't perceive their own subjective possibilities for the future in the specious present or eternal now! That makes them vulnerable to whatever co-me-s along, and they just hate it. No blame.

The problem with learning to read people's palms is that by doing it, the palmist is generating his own future via the prognostications he heaps on his hand-lers. This amounts to prophesying one's own fate. Is that a path with heart?
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The Proper Balance Of Magnesium, Calcium, and Vitamin D

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The fact that I've been torturing myself seems self evident through the last few days. I've been holding back on the nsaids and pain-killers and only taking one or two a day. The nsaid (ibuprofen) prescribed allows for three 600 mg caplets a day. I've been trying to get by on one. The hydrocodone also prescribes three a day, and I've been taking one or two tops.

These pills help reduce inflammation, and I've really needed for that to happen because inflammation is what causes ninety percent of the pain I experience. The last day or so I've been taking the prescribed amount of ibuprofen, and that's helped a lot. I'm still holding back on the hydrocodone (Tylenol3), but I'm getting a different attitude on that medication too.

One of the proven supplements I'm sold on forever now is magnesium oxide pills. They helped me to have regular bowel movements when the prescription drugs kept me constipated. I don't even like me when I'm full of shit. I wish I had known about the connection between calcium, vitamin D, and magnesium a long time ago. I've only known that calcium requires vitamin D to work for a couple of years.

I didn't realize I needed magnesium to stay regular rather than to reach for Milk of Magnesium when I got constipated. The story goes that human adults need about as much magnesium as they do calcium for things to work out in the bone department. That amounts to around 500 mg of each minimum a day. Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, for all practical purposes, you can't overdose on. Some people take more than 6000 mg of vitamin D a day.

This time of the year what with the angle of the Sun my skin should be making lots of vitamin D even when I sit here typing. The sun shines through the second-floor outside door directly on to the skin on the left side of my body. Since it's still having to penetrate the vapors of the morning to get to me, it's not as likely to cause me to get a sunburn, but it don't make as much vitamin D either. That's why I take a 3000 mg supplement pill every day. Well, most days. I get slack occasionally. Taking all these supplements are like closing the barn door after the horses have run off.

The wireless router I now use to connect to the internet seems to work pretty good. I should be able to move my iMac to any location in the house or even outside and still pick up a signal. I haven't tried any other place than where I've kept my computer for the last couple of years. It upsets me that lightning took out my ethernet socket. It makes the resale of my iMac less tenable, but as long as the wireless connection works the computer will do what it oughta.

I went back to the restaurant where the grandmother cooks such great omelettes. The first one I ordered was the veggie omelette, and it was delicious, then a couple of mornings ago I ordered the Western Omelette, and while tasty, it was just too much with the meat it included.

I've decided to eat some meat. I suspect I need the protein. From everything I've read and studied, about the only meat I really need is fresh red beef. Any processed meat of any kind is just not right. It has to be unprocessed including freezing, and not much of it. The only-est way I know how to make certain of that is to buy myself a small filet mignon once a week at the grocery store and cook it myself.

I haven't done that in a long time. I barely remember charcoaling steaks on the patio when I was married, and I've never charcoaled no steaks during my single years. I left my parent's house to join the Navy when I was eighteen, got married to my first wife a year or so after I got out of the Navy. I don't remember grilling steaks outside during that whole marriage. We ate out a lot. Mostly steaks.

I left that marriage in my late twenties, bummed around for a few years, then married my second wife when I was in my mid-thirties and didn't cook no steaks outside except for once or twice, and I've lived alone since that marriage broke up in my early forties, and I ain't cooked no steaks since I've lived in this house going on thirty years.

The truth may turn out to be that I've only cooked steaks outside on a grill maybe ten or fewer times in my whole life. That may negate my chances of being selected as the suburbanite of the year. I think I may have done it more often at other people's houses than at my house.

The odd thing about that is that this last year-plus run is the longest I've observe a pure vegetarian diet when I made all the decisions about going vegan. I've stayed with vegans and had them for friends pretty much all my adult life, but to impose it upon myself is a rarity.
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Duckbill Soup

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The weather seems atypical, but I know from the past that it's not really. We almost entered a pretty good drought when suddenly the bottom fell out and it rained for what seemed like forty days and forty nights. It didn't really, it just seemed that way. Despite the early fears of crop failure the corn is as high as an elephant's eye. In fact, we just had a shower that cooled the surface of things, but the sun is so hot it evaporates right in front of my eyes. The long hot, steamy days of summer are already here.

It's a good thing I'm not spending much money on food these days. I'm gwine need it to pay my electric bill for running my air conditioner. I'm ever so pleased it does run. I thought for a long while it was broke. I play games with it trying to save money, but also in order to see how well my body can adapt to the heat. I woke up in excruciating pain. I took a 600 mg capsule of ibuprofen on an empty stomach to see if that would help. I was kind of shocked that it really did.

I went back to bed after I took the ibuprofen, and when I woke up again I felt much better. Almost normal, whatever that means. Then, I took the other medicine and supplements I cram into my body, and included a pain-killer to boot. I've felt fairly decent ever since.

The Thomas e-mail discussion group seems to have gone kaput for sure this time. Nobody seems to wanna discuss anything anymore. It's hard to keep a discussion group going without any discussion. The fact that the group is based on discussing the merits or not of 114 saying means that we're gonna run outta things to say about those saying in a couple of years.

Some of us have been participating in some way or the other for 7-8 years. The veteran members don't write about the saying much any more, and barely tolerate any stray newbies that may pop in on the scene to play the innocent. Burnout? One member suggested the quest wasn't over until the seeker forgot what they were looking for, and who it was that originally wanted to know. That description makes good sense to me.
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Going Wireless

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I've been offline due to a lightning strike that killed my ethernet port. I had to get a wireless router to connect to my DSL modem and pick up the internet wirelessly. My youngest brother was a life saver by helping me to get back online. He has a couple of business networks he has to keep going all the time. I still don't understand how he got it to work. The password I put on the new router would take 7 supercomputers twenty years to figure it out. My brother laughed at me, but I got it all written down off the computer.

I know it's not logical, but I almost believe my downloads are faster wirelessly than with the DSL modem speeds I had. It's been an interesting event, but I don't do anything anymore that requires that much speed. I don't download any music or videos, I just stream them from Youtube and TEDtalks and that works for me.

My bookmarks list grows smaller and smaller. Maybe I've lost interest in a lot of subjects I once found interesting, but the fewer bookmarks are really all about my learning more about how to use a search engine like Google to find the information I want without messing around. These search engines are indexed so profoundly it only takes a few critical terms for them to put what you need right in yo' face straight away.

I wrote about how I have made a habit of hyphenating words that include the term "me" in them. I've been thinking about sa-me for a while now. My last tinkering had me write it like this: say-me. So-me-ti-me I write about two mes'. The little one utters things out loud. It "says" thangs.
It's that "me" that has to be abandoned in favor of the big me, and that ain't easily done. Especially when you're attracted to sayings as a whole.

I like systemized gatherings of sayings like in Bartlett's Quotations, and in the Sutras and the holy books of many cultures. I like to compare the various sayings from different cultures and see what I can find in common between them. I don't have a captivating excuse for liking sayings and adages and metaphors and parables, I just do.

Maybe it's to distract myself with. Maybe that's why I like sayings and me-tap-hors. Reciting my poetry and making up stories involving familiar rhymes and children's songs has gotten me a lot of attention when my real situation was very depressing.

That hasn't happened for a long time because I live in what mostly passes as a hometown for me. It's not my hometown or even my home state, but it's where my natal family settled down, and because of that I can't be either a healer or a prophet here anymore than my siblings can. But, all we have to do is leave. Then, shit happens, and thangs change.
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An Unexpectedly Delicious Omelette

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It was in the mid-nineties with high humidity yesterday afternoon, and this afternoon is prophesied to be more of the same. That is not as threatening as it could be because I accidentally found out my air-conditioner DOES work. I just have to be selective about when and how long I use it in order to keep the electric bill down to something reasonable.

I went downstairs to the nice soft adjustable chair I got as my part of my mother's estate. As usual, when it comes to dealing with my siblings, money-wise, I was left sucking hind tit, but I got some practical stuff I needed like a fairly modern refrigerator, a better clothes washing machine, and this chair. The nicest feature of this chair, to me, is that the adjustments are done with an electric motor system. It moves from where it tilts forward to help old people stand up to being almost as flat as a bed.

That's what happened to me yesterday afternoon. I like to use this chair to practice meditating because I can adjust the tilting mechanism to any height that feels comfortable on any certain day. That's why rheumatoid arthritis is called that. It moves. Somedays it kills me here, and other days it'll kill me there, and so-me sad day it kills me everywhere all at once. Whatta drag, man.

When I write about meditating I try to remember to write about practicing meditation. It's not any different than practicing any skill. LIke playing a musical instrument. What I mean to say is that I don't actually meditate when I'm practicing. Any more than I would go to Carnegie Hall to practice playing the piano for a church choir.

I don't know about you, but I can't stand for other people to see me practicing anything. If the other becomes aware I'm displaying some skill I've been working on for a while, I don't want anybody to hear a damn musical thing I play in public that ain't at least practiced, and perfected would be even mo' bettah!

Even as modest as I try to be sometime, I'd be bragging if I claimed that I had reached some perfected state of being while practicing meditation, but the times I may have come close happened when I was all alone because I don't want nobody to watch me do anything I haven't perfected to the best of my talent. If I'm cutting the fool in public it's because I've practiced endlessly at deliberately appearing to be a fool in public. But, obviously, I would say that, won't I?

I had taken a pain-killer about an hour before I went downstairs to get into the chair I use for practicing. I'm persnickety about how often I use these pills. My prescription allows for three a day, but I like playing the edges even with stuff that won't designed in the first place to cure what ails me. Pain ain't what ails me. It's what causes the pain to work it's way into my conscious awareness thats wot ails me.

The pain-killers are just not that strong. I have to take two of them at the same time to get a buzz, but just one of them usually does the trick for me if I need some relief just long enough to get over the hump meditating and getting my breath right.

Getting my breath right is everything to how I practice meditating. I breathe much differently since I stopped smoking cigarettes, but I may have gotten better results with my breathing when I smoked. Keeping my stopping still with my ancient tobacco habit is edgy in a way I hope to get used to, but it really has messed with my breath in regard to practicing meditation.

Yesterday afternoon, after I'd wiggled around and got myself seated solidly, I went into my counting routine and watched my breath while I accommodated the noises from my ambient surroundings. I've done this most days for nearly fifty years. It's not like I don't notice even the most minute changes.

I must have sit there and counted my breaths and inhaled the world around me for nearly a half hour, and I knew I wasn't getting anywhere I was preying for. So, I grabbed the control box for tilting the chair, and it electrically moved my feet higher and my back lower until I was laid out about flat, in a crumbly sort of way.

It was around sunset when I sat to practice meditation, and it was three o'clock in the morning when I realized I had not only napped, but went into deep sleeping patterns for about 6-8 hours. It was a good sleep. It didn't hurt as much when I stood up. I'll take small blessing wherever I can.

Since it's Saturday morning I took my daily medicines, and my weekly dose of methotrexate. Candidly, between you and I, it's not exactly an gaily anticipated event. The side-affect of nausea hardly ever makes anybody happy. This is an oral form of chemotherapy any way you go about describing it. Some people lose their hair.

I'm already bald and snaggled-toothed, so I guess I'll lose some other attribute of sexual attractiveness, as if it could get worse. Being feeble is bad enough when you're the only one who knows, but having one's feebleness displayed as if a call for help, can be embarrassing beyond description.

This restaurant chain called Shoney's has a all-you-can-eat breakfast bar that I habitually stop for if I'm around one of their franchises. Several of these restaurants have disappeared. There is one over at Fayetteville at the junction of Hwy 87 and I-95 I have gone to over the years when it's convenient. I used Google Maps and found they have another Shoney's further north on I-95 where it crosses U.S. 70.

I went there where it was as described above, but I never went in the doors of the place. I had already eaten. I ate very well, thank you very much. As it turned out, right here in river city.

Most of the medicines, and even the supplements I gobble by the handful, says on the labels that they should be taken with meals in order to spread the strong effect all over the stomach. I know what happens if I don't. It burns like I'm getting an ulcer.

I took my morning medicine just before I drove toward that Shoney's I'd discovered with Google Maps about forty miles away. I soon realized that if I waited until I got there to eat something my stomach would be on fire. There was only one restaurant I knew of in the area I thought about all this. Sometimes somebody ran it. Sometimes not. I went there.

To my surprise there was barely a parking spot left open. The restaurant build ain't that big. I didn't think I'd get a seat. Fortunately, they had tables with umbrellas outside in front, and they served me there. I decided to try an omelette. Omelettes tell me everything there is to know about a breakfast cook. Like club sandwiches tell me all I need to know about a short order cook.

The omelette was absolutely delicious. Better than any omelette I'd eaten in this town, and maybe the whole state. I spewed compliments to the waitress, and asked her who the cook was. She just beamed, and proudly told me the cook was her grand-mother. I never saw what the woman looks like, but I think I'm in love.
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A Chemical Transformation

❧
My meditation practice is getting cranked up again. I meditate at least once a day, but sometimes I employ a walking meditation I find very useful if I do it for a while before I sit down to it. The problem for me in going for a walk is that I see every thing that happens along the way as a good topic to write about. That's cumbersome if I'm attempting to meditate.

There is a state of being I've been to before both by a sitting meditation and after being in my sensory deprivation chamber for about an hour, in which after a big chemical changeover I relax to the point that my heart stops beating and my breathing stops breathing.

This has only happened 2-3 times in my entire life, and each time it transpired I seemed to stumble into that state of being serendipitously without expecting it to happen. I.E., I've never deliberately set about inducing that state of my own volition and have it actually happen as a result of my trying.

It's like I can't really want it to happen for there to be a real chance that it will happen even unexpectedly. My plan is just to practice meditating a little more than usual and hope for the best. I have a reason for wanting to get to this place, and that reason is the chemical change my body goes through just before I find myself able to keep my stopping still.

Getting where I wanna go might be a whole lot easier with a sensory deprivation chamber. I built one for myself that worked for a couple of years, and then my inept planning eventually cause the whole deal to turn sour. The last time I saw it in one piece my friend took a chainsaw to it and since it was made of wood primarily, it didn't last long.

Having that float tank go south on me after all the work and planning it took to put something together was one of my failed projects that really bummed me out. The other was failing as a semi-truck driver after I got free training to learn how. The float tank was real good for me as long as it lasted, but the truck driving turned out to be an occupation I learned to hate.

Despite the fact that I had originally thought truck driving would be a natural way to travel and make a living simultaneously, I was really glad when it was over. There's a real good chance I may have not-so-unconsciously sabotaged my developing career. They were some nasty suckers when I walked out on them too. No blame. I had deluded myself once again.

Since I no longer have a float tank, and a commercial one costs nearly ten thousand dollars up, I guess I'm gonna hafta practice meditating and hope for the best. The idea of coaxing that chemical change to happen in my body when I let go of all my cares and woes is that there's a possibility that could have a positive affect on the auto-immune diseases that are presently at war with my skeletal system. It's worth a shot. '-)
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The Digital Age Is Aging

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Apple came out with the new iphone, but that just pissed me off. Like Jobs said, "Not everybody will be able to afford one of these.", and I one of those. I might could afford the machine itself, but the AT&T charges is just more than I can bear presently. I've been reading that the data charges are better for the regular user, and the heavy downloader will have to bear the brunt of their excessiveness. Until I can get a more practical sense of what the real charges are I gotta let having a smartphone slide.

I've never owned a cell phone. I've only attempted to use somebody else's to make call a couple of times. I don't really need a mobile device as badly as people who are on the move do, because I stay at home mostly now. There is hardly a place in North America that evokes my curiosity anymore. I been everywhere two or three times over.

I went on the road to follow the "go-ye-therefore" mystical path, and in that sense it was the people that I met on the road who helped me change and find my own identity, but the traveling itself was about seeing the geography of various places. There is not many national parks in the continental U.S. that I haven't been driven through riding shotgun with some stranger that picked me up hitch-hiking just to have somebody to talk to. Somebody to turn to when the beauty of nature becomes so over-whelming that they are forced to say, "Damn, would ya' look at that!"

I don't know how I got here from writing about the new iPhone. It might be hard for me to write about something I've never used, but I have traveled a lot on my own, and that traveling brought me to the point or juncture at which I lost my desire to go look at something I've already seen several times over.

From what my friends have shown me about the iPhone I sure could have used one back in the days I was forced to use a folding map or an atlas to figure out where I was. The GPS that comes on the iPhone really keeps the user informed not only about where they are, but about options and possibilities that a paper map could render.

PBS has a channel they use to show a lot of travel guide videos. Occasionally, I might randomly tune in to one of the Rick Steves videos, and I enjoyed watching his shows. I still do, but they most show at least four or five a day on this new channel, and they get repeated a lot. Rick Steves' videos seem to be mostly about Europe, and I'm beginning to lose what little interest I harbored by the emphasis on ancient architecture.

The surprising thing about this fairly recent development is that architecture usually interests me more than shows about historical figures. There is one series of videos about deserts and the plant and animal life that I still enjoy watching. After having been raised in the coastal plains of North Carolina where it can sometime resemble being in a tropical rainforest, the differentness of deserts evoke what seems like unending curiosity. Okay, mild curiosity, but at least curiosity of some sort.

I am not totally jaded and world-weary. I'd still travel if I could afford it. My health and sheer agedness prevents me going on the bum just to have something to do. I was out lying in the sun this morning. I use my old air mattress, plus a foam yoga pad with a blanket over them to lay down on. I use the pillows off my bed, and then put a towel on top of them for the perspiration from getting toasty. I do it for the vitamin B my skin develops. The only problem I have is laying down and getting up, and I need any props I can get my hands on to do it.

That's why I couldn't realistically go out bumming around again. I'm too crippled up to sleep on the ground. It would take all the joy I get out of finding some hidden place to lay my head. I think my way of going about that and the simple pleasure I used to get out of secreting myself in plain sight came from being born just after sunset.

That delineation put my natal sun in close conjunction to the seventh house or Descendent. One hundred and eighty degrees away from the eastern horizon and the Ascendent. One's life goals are represented by the location of the sun at the moment of birth, but their daily, mundane goals are related the the sign intersecting the easternmost point that happens at sunrise.

Being born at or near sunset puts one's life goals and daily goals at polar opposition. The opposite ends of the same spectrum are posited one against the other for the sake of argument. If this, then that. I used to walk through some town and needed to sleep, and one minute you'd see me, and the next moment you wouldn't.

When I was bumming around hitch-hiking I was constantly on the look-out for a private place to be. Since I was a stranger that was always in strange places I never knew where or when those places might be, but it got to where I could sense them in passing, and immediately duck into those places and be both out of sight and out of mind.

As soon as I removed myself from public view I would stay just out of sight for a few minutes and watch to see if anybody saw me head for cover. Sometime I'd spot a good place, and then walk on for a short distance before I would double back from my disappearing point. I proved to myself that old adage was reliable. I could depend on it. I bet my life on it again and again. Now that I can't do that anymore I really miss it as just a fun game.
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The Ache That Breaks

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This may be the affect of being born just after sunset into the twilight zone, but I don't necessarily sing because I feel good. I sing in order to feel good. Sometime it works and I get to feeling pretty good, and sometimes no matter how long I work at it I never really get over the hump into sheer ecstasy.

I've just now been sing for about an hour. I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for a long time and only stopped about three years ago. I'm still coughing up phlegm from "the good ol' days", but it's fairly clear fluid as opposed to dark brown. I've been taking a nutritional supplement called NAC for a while now, and it's supposed to help clear my lungs.

So, when I sang just now I would practice singing the vowels with an "h" in front of them to open things up. This takes a while. I like singing the vowels with the h in front. Hay, hay, hay, hay.... hee, hee, hee, hee.... high, high, high, high... ho, ho, ho, ho.... who, who, who, hue, you are blue...

After I warm up a bit and cough enough phlegm out of my lungs and sinuses I start singing nursery rhymes and patriotic songs I learned as a child. I don't sing the words, of course, because I'm singing vowels. By this time I'm singing God Bless America as if I'm laughing. The laughing makes me yawn, but I'm not really laughing. I'm deliberately stringing together the hee-hee-hees, and the ha-hah-hahs to the tune of the song.

Nobody hears this madness. They're usually too far away, and today, there was a huge farm machine spraying fertilizer on some rye grass cover crops a few hundred yards away, and I could hardly hear myself sing.

I've planned for a long time to practice this fake laughing often enough to make it seem natural, and just start cackling at the least excuse to do so just to find out how the people I'd be around might respond. If I practiced a hour or two daily I might could go to the Wal-Mart some Saturday and start laughing and see how many people I could trick into laughing at my laughter. You know: A man gotta do...

Whatever I thought I was doing by stopping the medication was a dumb idea. I did learn a lot from doing it, but my elbow joints are raising hell with me. I'm probably gonna take some of the prescription medicine I rejected a while back to see if that might help.

A correspondent who also has RA wrote that when he took this medicine he got some permanent nerve damage from his use of it. He told me that as a warning. I don't think it matters as much as it did if the medicine killed the nerves to stop the pain. I keep wondering if it will also kill the nerves in my brain. Well, why the hell not?

After all, the singing I'm doing these days, and for perhaps longer than I've realized, is basically a controlled scream. It seems to help. I'm beginning to get some ideas I can try to turn the pain into sexual pleasure, and I'm practicing them if I remember to while I'm singing, but it's not even making my mildly excited so far. What else I got to do but try?

Controlled utterances are an interesting habit to indulge. Apparently a lot of people do it and call it chanting as a religious practice. I've done it in the past when I used the sacraments to go beyond the care acting I was taught to observe as a child. There is a lotta control that goes a long way when the walls start melting, and for me it was singing that helped me to remember myself when the praying mantis' working the control panels ignored my presence.

If I live long enough this rheumatoid arthritis will probably impede my ability to move my limbs freely and as I will. If it gets to the point I can't sing or speak, however, I will probably die of heart-ache.
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A Maddening Loss Of Face

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It embarrasses me and I feel a little ashamed about my nightmares of getting lost and unable to find my way out of these huge industrial complexes that I used to help build for a living. I had started outside of this large assembly building when I saw the large sliding doors close, and I knew immediately that I was in another of those disheartening situations.

I finally found my way outside of the building and then I couldn't find my car. The various parking lots were at least a mile apart. and I walked and walked in complete desperation. Several times I realized in real time that I was dreaming, and I even asked myself, "You're dreaming. You can fly when you're dreaming. Just will yourself up into the air and escape. I didn't do it.

At some point during the sad dream, this young guy drove up behind me in what looked like a golf cart, and as I turned and recognized him as somebody I knew, I asked, "Will you help me find my car?" He smiled, and said, "Sure, hop in." We drove and drove from parking lot to parking lot, but never found my parked car. Eventually, he was in the back seat of the cart with some honey, and I was driving relentlessly looking for "my car", but I didn't know what my car looked like.

I know. I know. I just wrote about this young nurse-type woman coming up to me yesterday and asking me, "Sir, do you need some help?" The probably unconscious motivation the young woman had probably came to her from the dreamtime. My dreamtime. Life is really strange.

Part of my attitude both yesterday and before came from the realization that I was going to have to start taking the methotrexate again. I'm not going to describe what's happening to the bones around my hands, wrists. and elbows, but I've already started missing days of playing the scales on my digital piano. I wrote blog entries for the days I didn't post, but I didn't publish them online.

I kinda feel like a prisoner in my own house. My sister-in-law has a younger brother who also has RA and was injecting himself with Humira, the prescription drug I refused to take. He got a cyst in his throat that got infected, and since the Humira drastically lowers the immune system's ability to fight off infections, he already had fourth stage throat cancer by the time he went to the doctor with it.

He needed some help, so she moved him into their old house next door with the expectation that I would help take care of him, because after all, here I am right next door, why would I not be happy to pitch in and help. Her oldest brother tried to trick me into doing what he didn't wanna do. I got angry and took steps.

It's not like these people have any respect for me or my family, and my own situation. The brothers have always been dismissive and snotty, and now I'm supposed to be grateful to help him die easier. They shoulda took notice of my past. I can be deliberately and infuriatingly unkind. Like the gods act toward me.

The ocean has become a plastic soup. Nothing can live in it any more and it's only getting worse. Like the deserted Mayan villages with all their magnificent ruins, Earth will soon look like Mars. We've shit in our own backyard and then our neighbors. The scientists are already looking for another planet for life to live on, but the chances are no matter how young you are, you will probably die within moments of when I do. Sayanara, mofo! It's time to go build another nest. LOL
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Otherwise

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Another milestone happened yesterday. I took my shoes off to go walking on the sidewalk in front of the stores at the strip mall because the gout in my feet has been acting up and it is uncomfortable to walk with my shoes on. From behind me I heard a voice that i knew was addressed to me say, "Sir... sir, are you okay? Do you need any help?"

I turned to face my rescuer and it was a young woman who might have been a nursing student or even a nurse. She was looking at me investigatively, and asked again, "Do you know where you are? Do you need some help?" I must have looked at her for a moment like she was crazy, but then I realized she thought that because I wasn't wearing shoes out in public that something must be wrong.

My explanation about the gout hurting my feet didn't quite satisfy her, so I nervously asked, "Have you ever had arthritic problems?" That seem to do the trick. She backed off and answered "No, and I hope I never do.", to which I answered, "Me too. I hope you never do.", and she and her friend entered the nearest store. I suppose I should have been grateful for her asking. Some old people do get lost and need help.

This must be some routine they teach people in medical training. I was over at the VA Hospital to get some blood work done before I kept a doctor's appointment, and unfortunately for me the blood lab was training some students to take blood. This young woman was going through the motions of sticking me several times, but finally the regular nurse had to take over.

She stepped back an pick up her pad and looked at me like I was dead and asked, "What's your social, sir" I told her the last four numbers of my SS number which all any of the people at the VA ever ask, but that wasn't good enough for this harridan.

She looked at me weird and stated authoritatively, "No, I need to know your entire social security number." So, although I knew she was testing me per her classroom training to see if I'd lost my memory yet, I answered her correctly, and she giggled in delight to have displayed her training. Everybody there thought she was being rude, but that went right over her head.

Another milestone or benchmark I remember well happened at a franchise hamburger place. I waited in line for the cute teenager to get to me, and when it was my turn she looked up blankly at me and asked, "Do you get the senior citizen discount sir?" She didn't smile or lead me to believe she had any sort of emotional exchange with me. She was all business, I knew my days of flirting my way through life was over. I was in my early fifties thinking I looked thirty-five. Why am I always the last to know.

I had to give up on my ideas about seeing if I could help my situation by using supplements to offset any dietary misconceptions I'd acted under. I started taking the methotrexate again this morning. It was a very sad event for me and I got fairly depressed. I had to sing for over an hour to get back into a mood to cope with my situation.

Entering my dotage has been a rather rude affair. I don't like having to give up habits that have served me positively for a long time. Cigarette smoking was one of the hardest. Sex has been on the way out for a couple of decades. Its not easy to get people who find me sexually uninteresting to go out of their way to do little things for me they otherwise wouldn't do. It's alway otherwise now. What a drag, man.
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A Conversation With God

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Last night went a lot better. Thanks to the relief that the prednisone gave me, along with a couple of other prescription drugs I entered a deep sleep with some comical dreams that seemed too good to be true. I don't know if I decided to ignore that the entertainment was too good to be true in order for me to go lucid and take control of those dreams or not, I certainly knew I was dreaming in real time, but these dreams were so much more pleasant than the dreams I've been having in the recent past I was happy to leave them as they were.

Part of why I feel better today is that I expected to. I knew what prednisone can do for the deep aching in my bones and joints. If I take enough of it all the pain will go away and I'll turn into an obnoxious cock-of-the-walk that reveals my true colours. Note that I didn't write true colors. For the most part I know how to spell. I've won spelling bees before. Granted, I may not be the best there is at spelling words, but I always know if I'm deliberately misspelling a woid.

I don't wanna trust feeling better today. It won't last but until I run outta prednisone, and I don't have that much stashed away. The high I get from prednisone is probably as good as I'll feel for the rest of my life. I doubt that I'll even look much like a human being when my ti-me comes. I can't imagine anybody not taking it personal when their body starts malfunctioning.

Especially beautiful women who have depended on their attractiveness to get what they could from life. I think it may be better toward the end to have not been so beautiful and to have so much to lose when you begin to look like shit warmed over.

Having not been a woman in this particular lifetime takes away from my being so certain I understand what women go through during an entire life cycle, much less the various parts and phases of their overall life. It may be easier for them to learn to express their emotional and nurturing parts by playing with dolls and pretending to be a mother while they're still a child. I never hung around long enough to find out.

For me life was a quest. A quest as in the first five letters in the term "question". I told myself I was trying to answer the great questions of life when I didn't know what the great questions of life actually were. So, quite naturally, I made them up. The great questions of life I've tried to answer are the questions I made up myself. Is that... right?

A few years ago I studied up on how smoking the leaves of a plant informally called The Diviner's Sage might affect me. By the time I decided to do this the internet and the Erowid.com site had come into being, and all I had to do to familiarize myself with what might happen if I imbibed this stuff using the standard procedures employed by the old sages.

At Erowid.com a curiosity seeker can read about practically every sacrament known to man and written or talked about. Erowid has a section in their descriptions of such plants and chemicals in which people who use these sacraments can write comments about what they experienced during their reaction to putting the sacraments into their body.

By researching this web site and many others I prepared myself as much as possible to get the most positive experience I could from using this ancient ritual to reach beyond the sensory realm of ex-is-tense. I learned to do this the hard way.

The first drug I ever sought out to experience was LSD. I was around twenty-five years old when I heard on a radio program that some seminary students had taken this new drug, and each of them claimed to have had an audience and conversation with God.

I'd been jumping through my ass since I was a child to have that brief conversation with God, and all I had to do was to put some chemical in my body? I was astounded beyond words. I made up my mind on the spot. I didn't know how, but I was going to get some of this drug and put it in my body, and I didn't care if it killed me. Well, I ain't dead yet.

This mention of how I was attracted to getting some acid (LSD-25) in order to "tune in, turn on, and drop out" is what associated to what I did to prepare myself to smoke Diviner's Sage. I had been a psychonaut for twenty years and had used every psychedelic I'd had an opportunity to, including many of Shulgin's designer drugs up to the time I became aware of salvia divinorum. No designer drug that! Dimitri either!

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

A lotta people have a lotta different experiences smoking the Sage. I've read about a lot of their experiences on the internet. If there is any one classical experience the accumulated database of writings describe I had a very revealing trip. That may have a lot to do with having done a lot of the sacraments previously, and having gained a deep understanding of what can go wrong if you let the right thing happen when you know you ought not to.

One of the recommendations of the writers who related their experience with the Sage is that you need a sitter when you do it the first few times. You don't know how you will react. Different strokes for different folks.

I had a friend who agreed to sit with me if I would return the favor his time around. His being there turned out to be a critical part of the entire experience. I have no idea if my sitting with him returned the favor. He's like what he accuses other people of being like, he doesn't talk. He doesn't know how to share. No older sisters. '-)

I learned more about death from smoking the salvia divinorum than any of my other psychedelic experiences. It turned out to be my conversation with God.
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Chronic This, Chronic That

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Thursday is the day I was born. Thor's Day. I have read that Thor was a Celtic god who was bad about tossing thunderbolts around. Same as some Hindu gods. What a thunderbolt represents by metaphor or parable is not exactly clear to me. I named the pony my father bought me to plow with Thunderbolt. I read a lot of adventure stories as a kid. Maybe I read about Thor and decided to call the pony that name. He wasn't much like a thunderbolt, however, he had asthma and didn't have much endurance.

My father was a horse trader of a sort. I guess he got that from his father who was a blacksmith and there were lots of animals around all the time. I guess my father knew something about blacksmithing simply because he was around it much of his early life, but he was the baby of the family, and his father was nearly sixty when my father was born. I doubt if his father had the strength it takes to do blacksmith work.

Daddy (I called him Daddy) talked to me a lot about getting attached to animals as pets. He didn't think it was a good idea. He didn't allow pets in the house. Ever. It was like a mortal sin. His reasoning was simple. Don't get so attached to an animal that you refuse a profitable price for it if it comes up for sale. That may have a lot to do with me not keeping pets.

Apparently I don't keep anything around that I might get emotionally attached to. That's not accepted as a very attraction trait nor attitude toward life by lots and lots of people. They all think I oughta know better, but what they don't understand is that I do know better. I know better, but that doesn't get the response I'm fishing for by acting like I don't know better. Life just doesn't always have to make sense to me. It can be a little or even a lot crazy, and that's cool, man.

Last night was really rough. I couldn't find a position to sleep in that I didn't wake up in excruciating pain. It's not that I'm not used to excruciating pain, it's just irritating when it interferes with my sleep cycles. I've written previously about chronic fatigue, and how when it's combined with hunger it can lead to explorations of the dreamtime that never get righted again.

The chronic fatigue I'm experiencing from having my sleep cycles messed about with is probably different in the sense that it's not combined with hunger. Perhaps a bit because I'm not eating meat. I probably ought to be eating meat to get the protein I need to keep my muscles. I mean keep my muscles at all. I didn't get much sleep because the pain was not cooperating, but tossing and turning at least activated some muscle.

I finally gave it up and decided to call my rheumatologist to start taking the medicine again. He didn't answer or offer an opportunity to leave a message. The only option was to call Duke Hospital Emergency which essentially means "Don't Call." This has everything to do with the VA Hospital service. They're there to help you die sooner than later.

Since I couldn't get hold of the doctor I decided to take 10 mg of prednisone to help with the pain. After only a couple of hours it's been a big help. I read up a little more about prednisone, and it obviously ain't a good thing to abuse, but when I feel like my body is going into shock from the pain and I'm depressed and thinking suicide, then bending the rules a little won't matter much one way or the other.
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