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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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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
