His Wife Died Unexpectedly

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The wife of a man I graduated from high school with died suddenly from cancer a week after she had been diagnosed. The doctors had said she had a year or more, but it didn't happen. A bit of a shock for my classmate I suppose. I say "suppose" because I don't know this fellow well as an adult. We only saw each other occasionally in passing.

I didn't know him that well back in high school either. We had a confrontation at the bottom of a stairwell one day. I might have said something that offended him. He turned suddenly and shoved me back against the stairs, and invited me to get up and fight. I could tell by the strength with which he shoved me that wasn't a good idea.

It was a turning point in a way. I thought about whether my refusal to fight that day was an indication that I was a coward for years after that. The incident turned out the way other incidences would in which I'd rather retreat to fight another day. After all, I was born in the Chinese Year of the Hare. Sometimes it's insightful to act like a rabbit would.

The bull is another animal that's prominent in my natal chart. I was born with the Sun and Moon both in the sign Taurus. The other member of the big three in astrology, the Ascendent or Rising sign has two animals that oppose each other. The eagle and the snake-in-the-grass. I can be-co-me with any of these animals with power. Either that or slither or hop into the briar patch until the future looks brighter or just fly away... "Oh Glory, I'll fly away...".

One of the biggest surprises to me about my true nature is that I am is an intellectual. Sure, it's a little arrogant of me to state that, but I got pronounced to be such by a nineteen year college sophomore, and who would know better than a know-it-all like that. I mentally decided that it was a stupid idea to get up off those stairs and fight a losing battle. That trait would plague me and reward me for the rest of my life. I'm a decider when it comes to me being myself, and that affects everybody around me.

The man whose wife died was portrayed as having led a completely different life than I have in his wife's obituary. I didn't have a clue he was a Mason who was politically active. His wife was the County Registrar. As far as I knew he was just a truck driver for a local meat packing plant. When he retired from that he started driving trucks for Wal-Mart. Steady, secure work. He's still stronger and more respectable than me.

The funeral was tonight and the burial is a private service tomorrow. I read where there is a reception after the funeral tonight, and so I'm gonna go to that, but I didn't wanna go at all. There is nothing personal about it being this man's wife, I just don't like going to local funerals.

The problem is that I usually see neighbors who expect me to remember their names, and sometimes it's embarrassing when I obviously don't. Maybe that's why I now keep a white beard that reaches half-way down my chest so they won't expect much, and find the idea of me being senile quite believable.

Luckily, nothing like that happened. I went in the back door where the people were leaving, went inside and my friend was ten feet away. I walked ahead of everybody in line and walked toward him with my hand out. He grabbed it. We smiled at each other, and I was outta there.
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On Reflection Of Direction

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The work week has returned, and the world has cranked back up to noisy. I hear the street sounds of people going to work and about their business. That hasn't been so over the weekend. This past weekend there wasn't even any noise from the Moose Club building about a quarter of a mile away. They always make noise on Saturday night. Maybe they couldn't get a garage band to mutilate country and rock and roll music well into the early morning hours.

I'm getting better about not letting ambient noises irritate me. Previously, when some local noise got on my nerves I'd cuss and raise hell that the actual perpetrator couldn't possibly hear, and drive myself crazy mumbling about deep caves where I could get away from the racket.

A friend told me about going out to Kansas with a friend from there, and when they stopped along the road way out in the country, it was so quiet they could hear their own hearts beating away in their chests. I've never had that experience when I was passing through Kansas, but I've dreamed of it since hearing that story anyway.

It's possibly true that I've never spent much time stopped in Kansas. I've always been a passerby. I've never met and formed friendships with anybody from Kansas except this one dude I was in the Navy with who was from a place called Garden City.

Decades later, after I got out of the Navy, and he had made a career of it, I met him briefly in Reno, Nevada. I was working as a bellboy in a hotel/casino and literally checked him and his family into a room. He wanted to get together later for a drink and talk about the good ol' days. I agreed to do that, but I didn't show up.

It embarrassed me that he had gone on to Officers School and was a Lieutenant Commander, and I went on to become a divorced bum. Besides that shamed attitude, Reno is where I ended up after leaving my first wife in the middle of the night with a three-month old child only a month or so ago. I certainly didn't wanna explain that to a dyed-in-the-wool nerd who had succeeded where I had failed.

I met this guy in the Navy when he was transferred aboard the ship I was on. We were both Torpedomen and worked for the same Chief Petty Officer. Our inept differences were epitomized when he started dating the Chief's daughter. I didn't know until we run into each other in Reno that he had married her.

There was no blame in that. He was a goody-two-shoes store clerk from Kansas who followed the letter of the law (always a bright idea when you're in the military), and I was a rebellious farm boy from the Bible Belt down South.

A good part of my joining the Navy in 1957 was to get away from the cultural turmoil in the South that precipitated the new Civil Rights Laws. As far as I'm concerned it was a smart decision. By the time I got out of the Navy it was all over but the shouting. I had avoid a fight that wasn't my fight. As far as I was concerned that was settled by the Civil War one hundred years before.

The destroyer ship we served together on made a couple of trips to the Orient and around the Pacific Rim. The real difference between our outlooks on life appeared even when we went on liberty in Japan. He took all the tours to the Emperor's Palace and Museums, and I went to the bars and whore houses to put notches on my gun. It seemed as natural as could be that we each went our own way.

It seems odd now that I think about what I did to invoke the guarantee on my iMac to get the Ethernet socket repaired. I guess it got struck by lightning and traveled through the telephone line and through the DSL modem to my computer. I don't know that for sure. As my youngest brother pointed out, if that was the case then it should have taken out the modem.

It was because the DSL modem still worked that I was able to buy a cheap wireless router and get online through wi-fi. What seems odd to me was that since I got back online with no problems wirelessly, that I actually went through the guarantee process with the Apple Store in Raliegh to get the Ethernet socket fixed.

Granted, the fact that I spent at least $40 in gas making two different round trips to the capital city and about eight hours of time getting my computer fixed to show room condition is about my chief feature of avarice. I'm a miser, and not a very bright one to look back at some of the absolutely stupid things I've done ere now.

The only-est reason I went to all that trouble was to keep my youngest brother from being totally convinced that I've abandoned reason. Without his influence I would have took the hit and moved on. When I have computer problems I can't fix myself he is my goto guy, and occasionally I am that for him. I try not to bug him about these kinds of things. I have other friends with other talents. Each of them have a different mindset than the other.

I take pride in going along to get along with clever friends so that they'll help me when I'm trying to get out of spending any more money than I have to because I'm a talented, but natural miser. I've ruined my credit rating twice because I couldn't stand to write the checks to pay my credit card bills on time even though I had the necessary funds in my checking account to do the deed. That's not ego-boosting.

I wouldn't dream of asking anyone to help me manage my money. That's not the problem. I'd rather die first. I ask the people I try to stay on friendly terms with to help me resolve my problems without spending any money. "It's the economy, stupid!" In the last decade or so I've realized more profoundly that I'm quite obsessive about money, yet in a peculiar way for a particular reason, and there's the rub.

My obsession is about having enough money tucked away somewhere that I can use to get off by myself in order to contemplate my own subjective life. Any more than that I'll easily and lovingly give away. The lethargic manner in which I live my life prevents me from having very much money to give away lovingly.

The term "niggardly" gets bandied about on my behalf. This only happens because I've been living in one place too long. I get in trouble with myself when the will that I won't do things gets too much air time. This is exampled by a willful stubbornness not to exhibit some behaviors that make life easier like paying my bills on time when I have the money in the bank to do it with.

What do you do
when there is
nothing to do,
and the world
is sitting heavy
on you,
and the pressure
comes down with
the grief of despair
when the will
that I won't
kind of stuns.

I've stoically watched marriages and women I loved and who willingly bore children for me walk away due to the same, unadulterated, unyielding stubbornness I sadly watch myself exhibit. For me to reflect on the fact that the real reason I might have acted this way was because I was a cheap miser is a dreadfully hard row to hoe.

I don't have much choice about trying to get objective about my ruinous past. It's been nearly thirty years since my last marriage blew up in my face. It was obvious that I didn't learn anything about how to be a good husband and father from my first failed marriage.

A failed marriage can be easily compared to a failed political state with the same shame and hardship that arrives with the dissolution of both. It's almost like I had to have two marriages to break down any morality or ethics that might have been left in me from my Jim Crow upbringing.

This was hard to justify after doing whatever I felt compelled to do in the process of trying to impregnate every female in the world, and to prove to myself irrefutably that I was as potent a male as any even though medical evidence proves I'm not.

After the accident there was never a chance that I could become a real little boy instead of a wooden puppet. That turned out to be even less true than I might have ever allowed myself to imagine. There's a huge difference that makes no difference to nobody but me, because nobody knows.

Even harder for me to admit is that I don't know other people's motives in the same way that others can't possibly know about me and mine. I don't do what I do for other people's reasons, and they don't do what they do because of mine. It's been easy to espy that I don't do what I do for anybody else's reasons but my own, but not so easy to realize that turn-about is fair play.

Why wouldn't other people do what they do for my reasons? They're perfectly good reasons. I've really thought things through. If the other would just accept my reasons as "for the best", then I'd never have to deal with their infernal questions about why what I've thought good for me didn't deliver the goods for them. Jeez! Some people... eh?

That's why I removed the Comments feature. I do not want to hear my readers second-guess what only amounts to speculation on my part. I don't present what I write as the God's own truth, and I don't intend to defend my clumsy soothsaying as if truth-telling was intended.
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The Seat Of My Pants

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Sunday, another non-event day in my weekly calendar. It's not even my fault. To working people it's their last chance to get some quality rest time. To their families it's the only quality time they can have with their parents. Bachelors, either young or old have to fend for themselves. No blame either way as you like it.

I started drawing a Social Security check as soon as possible at the age of 62. I mean, exactly on my birth date. I made one visit to the District SS offices in Fayetteville and got interviewed by a black dude who had the same last name as me (my legal name). I guess that was enough for a comfortable rapport to break out and make the interview pleasant.

Interviewing people all day long is what this government agent did for his entire working career. I asked him. Why would I not? We were instant temporary friends. I needed to know. He needed to be asked something personal to make the transition to personal. A fifteen minute interview turned into a thirty minute conversation. No, I don't remember his wife and kid's names.

At the conclusion of my first and only interview with the Social Security administrative staff ended with startling success ("This is it? Are you sure there is nothing else to do or to sign or to make the next appointment? This is it?"), and the deal was done. I've never had to go back. The government has never skipped a check. What's not to like?

That one fact, that I've never had to go back for another interview, took some getting used to. My former dealings with the government that I can write about always included multiple interviews and filling out forms with people who absolutely knew I was lying about my employment situation, but they kept showing me how to get around that.

Hell, I'm no church lady. I too have sinned. I was grateful for their wink-of-the-eye help. Drawing unemployment is par for the course if you work the industrial construction trades. I know the gig.

Some years I would draw unemployment checks three or four months a working year. Mostly because I was unavoidably out of work. When the big construction companies need you to help them make money they can be easy to get along with. When they no longer need you they are heartless. Everybody knows.

They stopped building nuclear power plants during the time I was involved with the industry. I happened to get in a few years after the transcontinental pipeline from Alaska was constructed. There was a glut of skilled labor after that ended, and so by the time Texas and the off-shore industry in the Gulf of Mexico cranked up the workers from Alaska had drifted off, and they needed fresh meat.

I have friends who would feel shame to get on the dole (unemployment), but I paid in when I worked, and my former employer paid in when they laid me off. It was a pre-figured situation for all the participants. No harm, no foul is my excuse. I do what I need to do to get by, and as per usual, little more than that.

Not all my misspent youth was honorable, perhaps, in some people's eyes, but at least I was fairly legal. The pompous friends I mentioned before wouldn't take help because of their arrogant pride, but for their patriotism and publicly displayed domestic troubles, they were constantly broke and in debt, and I wasn't. I never had much, but enough to make do.

Making do is what my chief feature as discerned by the Enneagrams. Making do in this case is called avarice or greed. That's what this system for thinking about things say I have to resolve. That's a hundred and eighty out from what I previously thought. It still astounds me that I've talked myself into believing this accusation.

The problem for me is that this chief feature provided by a study of the enneagrams describes a familiar pattern I have indulged over the years a little too convincingly. The bottom line of this behavior is that I don't experience reality in real time. For some reason I gotta get off by myself to mull it over. This is very inconvenient and rude.

In my own opinion beyond what I've convinced myself is true about what the enneagrams say is how I see this attribute astrologically. It's an attribute associated with the water sign Pisces. I read about this trait in Pisces and started watching. At the time I had a close Piscean friend. For my observational purposes it worked out real good that we hung out together along with other friends.

When Eddy first went inside of place where there were people gathered, the first thing he did was to locate all the exits in the joint. After I had observed this behavior for a while I accused him of doing that to see how he defended his behavior, or contrarily, just shined me on as if I were ridiculous. He defended.

He rationalized that he could only take so much external input before he had to remove himself from the situation until he had abstracted the sensory data and organized it in a way that allowed him to feel safe. If he couldn't do that, then he not only would not go back in the building, but would leave the premises.

Eddy actually thought I was the real extremist, because I might not only leave the premises, but the entire state or region of the country. If I was peeved enough I might leave the country. Admittedly, that's taking it a little further than Eddy might. I haven't heard from him for decades, though, and the last time I did hear of him he himself had left the country.

For a long time I thought that the reason I always looked for exits when I enter an enclosed space was because so many people have tried to kill me for the sake of the world. A couple of times when I was out hitch-hiking to nowhere I was picked up by men who drove instead to a remote spot off the highway, and then with a cocked gun explained to me with tears in their eyes why God was making them kill me.

I can safely say that these events were as ramped up and full of death as jumping off that cliff in Yosemite was. I guess I was more impressed that I lived to write about it than what happened such that nothing fatal did. I didn't even get shot. In both cases they took me back to the highway and left me be. I've never been sure they were real humans, but were testing me like the good ones that turned bad.

In both cases I told them that the reason for their anger was that they didn't go off and mull things over when they got pent up. They did like they did with me. They were really, really pent up when they saw me as a victim standing conveniently beside the road. If I hadn't seen people like that when I committed myself to the insane asylum I'm sure I would have got dead. My own fear of my reflection of what I saw of myself in them would have cost me my life.
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Keeping My Own Counsel

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It's Saturday night again, and I'm alone in my rathole of a house again, and the problem is that I don't really mind if such is so. There is nothing on TV that interests me. Especially on Saturday night. So, I'm writing just to amuse myself because it just always does if I can get on a roll.

There is a program on PBS about these guys trying to locate the remote Buddhist meditation caves. I've seen it a couple of times already. The facet of this adventure that interests me now is that the meditation caves look like the Pueblo Indian ruins out in Arizona in the Four Corners section.

I accepted wot wuz sot before me as far as the American history is concerned ere now, but the resemblance of the meditation caves in the Americas and Asia intrigues me. In consideration of the fact that the DNA people tested the people in both places and they are of the same blood might have something to do with the similarity of their architecture.

The Mormons appear to be intrigued with knowing who your ancestors are. It's usually the Orientals that are recognized for ancestor worship, but the Mormons might have them beat. They told the Indian tribes of the Western Hemisphere they were the lost tribes of Israel. The problem of that is that the DNA tests show the Indians are descendants of Asians.

I doubt if that makes the slightest bit of difference to the Mormons, and it might not make that much of a difference to the people they lied to. Moreover, the Mormons might not have been intentionally lying to the Indians of the Western Hemisphere.

The DNA tests simply weren't available to their prophet, and the fact that he would have needed them to be so certain doesn't say much for his prophecy. I suspect nobody cares. They'll invent some more lies to show they know they were wrong all along, or not.

Religions like the Mormons and the other major religions aren't much comfort to me. I'm just not much of a groupie, and the religions are basically support groups in the same manner as Alcoholics Anonymous or the other Twelve Step groups. I seem to fare better by living alone and keeping my own counsel.

My new prescriptions arrived in the mail today. The only real new one is to inhibit stomach acid. I'm supposed to take one a day. I got a new supply of prednisone, and a new schedule for taking it. I'm supposed to take 2.5 mg twice a day until my next appointment in November. I'm not unfamiliar with this dosage.

Once before they started me out taking 20 mg a day for five days and reduced the dosage over a period of time until I was taking 5 mg a day for about a month. It seemed to work real well. The doctor that prescribed it stated that low dosage had practically no side effects, but according to him, "It really makes life easier for the old folk." I can't argue with that. It's about time someone made some concessions to my age. '-)

I certainly have made concessions to my age. One of those concessions is that I have a different attitude about the future than when I was younger. Reading about famous people dying that are ten years younger than me startles me when nobody laments that they died young. That literally staggers me to know my death is expected nonchalantly as if I were just another passenger on the river Styx. I am is. No blame.

My perspective of time has really been altered from when I was young, dumb, and full of cum. Occasionally I realize in the moment that when I write about stuff that happened forty years ago it doesn't mean much to me because I have experienced fully how time flies when I'm having fun.

That's practically the only way I know I'm having fun is to recognize that I didn't even notice the sun went down until it would get so dark I couldn't continue to do what made time fly. I've used writing to make time fly since I could first write. I wasn't any kind of prodigy either. It took me just as long to learn to write as any of my classmates.

The real difference seemed to be that I started writing poetry and stories fairly early. Nothing genius. Just "roses are red" kind of poems. The difference was that I did it. I did it a lot. I enjoyed making up stories that I could reduce to a short poem. I didn't write anything I liked until my late twenties and early thirties, and nothing I've written so far is gonna make it to the Hall of Fame.

One of the features that comes up a lot on the travel shows I watch on PBS is about stone. Europe is all about stone buildings that were finally built to replace wooden ones that kept burning up... errr... down. Every time I've paused between paragraphs or to reflect a little deeper on what I'm trying to write, I'm looking at the television and seeing tomb stones. Rows and rows of tombstones.

The Europeans seem to glorify death in the way they seem so willing to go to war. That's not to justify the way the United States uses war to invoke terror. There ain't no terrorists more terrifying than GI Joe. In these travel shows they spend a lotta time showing the monuments to their war heroes. So did the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas. They seemed to love carving rocks and stone.

What does that say about human beings and their love of trying to make at least something permanent. They literally try to do that by writing stuff in stone. It works for a while. Usually longer than the sculptor will. I'm thinking of all the petrography they find on the rocks of remote locations.

A lot of that so-called "art work" was there when the next scripter/sculptor came along to add their two-cents worth. The newbie had to know that most of the pictographs he saw on those walls was done by humans who had been dead a long time, and that he would be dead ere long himself.

With my question being, did he leave his mark for much the same reason as the comic strip character whose wrote graffiti that stated, "Kilroy wuz here." That's the last thing I wanna do. That's why I use a nom de plume, and have since I was thirty years old. I became my own ghost writer.
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Masochistically Eating My Own Cooking

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Nobody ever tried to teach me how to cook, so I got nobody to blame my lousy cooking on but me. On the positive side, nobody has to eat my cooking but for me. I have invited people to share my table with me who adamantly refused to take the risk. If I am is a sadomasochist at all, it's expressed by my having to eat my own cooking.

Socially, my sadomasochism is also a flop. The reason it's a flop is that I don't actually need a partner because I play both roles. Being a success to me means that I have captured an appreciative audience, but without their actually knowing I'm their source of entertainment. My continuing to be that sort of source depends on their not knowing.

I've had tons of people try to comfort me when I get down on myself for losing. The loss is even worse because if I'm even half-way correct in my estimations, nobody knows. I can usually get by if a smattering of people here and there in my audience gets suspicious that the audience is mine without their knowing it.

To avoid an argument I might just concede that I've known that homo sapiens are supreme in the animal kingdom because they're the best me-mickers for a very long ti-me. Humans can imitate other creature's behavior mo' bettah than any other creature on the face of the planet. For me to be the best I can be I practice mimicking something pretty much all the ti-me.

If humans learn everything they know by mimicking some other creature who already knows how to do it, and all knowledge of craft and conceit is acquired by imitation and mimicry, then why study anything else than how to use your main chance in a more subtle and refined way? I did. My major in college was Drama and Speech. I formally studied how to convince other people I was somebody else. I didn't make A+'s. Can you spell t-y-p-e-c-a-s-t?

Cooking for myself is living proof that I'm not as the best that I can be, and I've been around some pretty fair cooks who I could have be-co-me-d in order to stuff my own face with something tasty. I can smell the canned food I got on the stove cooking downstairs, and I already know I'm gonna use a lotta strong soy sauce to cover up the taste of what I smell up here on the second floor, to get whats on the stove down there down my gullet.

Just like I committed myself to the insane asylum to find out what crazy really is, I worked in a lotta kitchens and served as a waiter to learn what that world is all about. That's why I can legitimately say that I've been around some great chefs. At least long enow to watch what they do. If I'm such a wonderful imitator why am I feeding myself this awful gruel?

Part of the reason I thought it was worthwhile to work in classy restaurants was to feel comfortable in an otherwise intimidating situation. Maybe I didn't learn to be an adequate cook from my experiences, but I did learn a lot about restaurants and the kind of people who work there, and the kind of people who patronize classy restaurants.

It took a while, but soon enough I began to understand that the people who work in classy restaurants are not necessarily classy themselves. They're working a service trade. They don't even think thats classy. Generally, in my unworthy opinion, they are people who were born to serve, and to get any satisfaction from life they gotta find a spot they can do it in plain sight.

Working a restaurant mojo is all about presentation from the top up OR the top down. Even the dishwasher is expected to act like they got some couth. If the whole deal is about presentation, then you gotta have some role players, and role players with any salt and pepper in their blood gotta be good actors. They gotta be convincing when they obsequiously fawn at their customers attempt to act classy.

That's the other side of the aisle. The patrons and matrons who need a classy restaurant to display the fact that they are a class act. The dynamic is not only about chic places, but about the trailer park queens who dress up to go to the Wal-Mart SuperCenter. It's the same deal. I never had to work at Wal-Mart to find out how it's customers are. Doing that might be equivalent to committing myself to the insane asylum, but not working in restaurants.

I've run outta steam on this subject. I know that for this entry to be balanced and well-rounded I should get into a fair discussion of why people go to classy restaurants. They are part of the reason I waited on them. Being typecast I had another angle for being there in the first place. It wasn't to learn to be-co-me the classy person who dresses up to eat out, I just wanted to find out if I could pass myself off as one of them if push come to shove. I can, but it hasn't.

Push hasn't come to shove, that is, I've never had any problems eating in classy restaurants because I can't afford to pay their asking price. Therefore, I don't have to concern myself with passing myself off as a classy person like the people who can afford the classy prices. This is one of the greatest pleasures of being a poor hermit. I can't afford to do things I don't wanna do.

The TV is on and a nature show is on PBS. A pack of wolves are stalking buffalo calves and the mothers are trying to protect them. The wolves stampede the buffalo. This works because furry animals don't have much stamina. In this case, the wolves got the advantage because they stampeded the much larger horned animal, and the stress of running out of control meant that eventually they were exhausted and had to wait for the wolves to kill them to eat. No blame.

I've read several articles now about why humans have prevailed in the animal kingdom. It's because they have tremendous endurance. They have tremendous endurance because they perspire. They sweat. They can hunt like wolves in packs and chase freaked out mastadons until drop dead from exhaustion and heat prostration. Do the math. They got fur coats and they don't sweat.

There may be a subliminal reason why humans get crazy about running. The long distance runners get a lotta respect in the human community. A lot of it has to do with marathon runners being universally youthful and trim and they wear skimpy clothing. Not like the basketball players who wear girlish culottes instead. Their game depends a lot on endurance, and they dress in layers of clothes?

Realizing this phenomena about humans and their ability capture wild horses by just running them down until they have to give it up makes looking at nature shows much more interesting. It also piques my interest in the argument about humans evolving out of the ocean without having ever climbed trees like the monkey types did. Monkeys don't have subcutaneous layers of fat like humans and walruses do. Aquaman rules!

During the time I been writing this entry I've had a kind of pot-luck soup cooking downstairs. I almost didn't check it to see if it was burning yet. I do that sometime when I write. The world, including whats in my kitchen cooking goes away. I'd bet that cookware makers sell more pots and pans to old people to burn up than newly weds.

I was right about what I wrote above. A bowl of it needs about half a bottle of soy sauce to even make it have ANY taste. I'm pretty sure I took an unconscioius vow of poverty, and I have to allow that because I'm actually poor. But, being poor is no excuse for screwing up perfectly good food to punish my uncouth taste buds. There IS blame. Unfortunately, it's mine.
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Interpreting The Words Of The Dead

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To find the words to write stuff willy-nilly just to find out what the story is with certain obsessions can be tedious. My lifelong problem in realizing these words has been that I don't have a continuous conscious awareness of what I'm trying to write about in my subjective perceptual realm, and so it's a little uncomfortable to open the barn door, and let my rustic rhetoric out into a cruel world of sophisticated critics.

The descriptors I need to say what I see have never come to me easily. The subject I'm currently writing about is the term "all knowing father", such as is used in the ancient Christian dialog at times to indicate God in it's fatherly role. The meaning of this term is hotly debated, and has been argued frequently on the gnostic gospels discussion list I participate in. Fortunately, not many of the group's members agree with my perspective. Each individual member has got their own row to hoe, and that's what attracts me to them.

The veteran members of this group almost always have their own take on what this specific expression and other boiler plate expressions indicate at the rudimentary level. Like me, they hardly ever change their minds about how they think about the topics we discuss. I do change my mind or pretend to, but it may be hard to detect. It can flippantly change to fit the current conversation when the pedantic shadow boxing gets amusing.

Within the month of August this year I've associated "the all knowing father" expression with two terms from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. Those terms are "the great man" and "the Superior man". I'm exploring through my writing what this means to me. I don't know why. I am is already convinced they mean the sa-me thing.

What I'm ignorantly claiming all these terms and expressions mean (me-and-) is a source of abstract constructions that some people call the Cornucopia or the Akashic Records, and in the early Christian writings is often referred to as "the kingdom of God" as if to say "heaven."

Heav'n, Heav'n

I got a robe, you got a robe,
All God's children got a robe.
When I get to Heav'n gonna put in my robe,
Gonna shout all over God's Heav'n, Heav'n, Heav'n
Everybody talkin' æbout Heav'n ain't going there,
Heav'n, Heav'n, Heav'n.
Gonna shout all over God's Heav'n.

I got shoes, you got shoes,
All God's children got shoes.
When I get to Heav'n gonna put in my shoes,
Gonna walk all over God's Heav'n, Heav'n, Heav'n
Everybody talkin' æbout Heav'n ain't going there,
Heav'n, Heav'n, Heav'n.
Gonna shout all over God's Heav'n.

I got a harp, you got a harp,
All God's children got a harp.
When I get to Heav'n gonna play on my harp,
Gonna play all over God's Heav'n, Heav'n, Heav'n
Everybody talkin' æbout Heav'n ain't going there,
Heav'n, Heav'n, Heav'n.
Gonna shout all over God's Heav'n.

Old Spiritual

http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/Freedom/protest.cfm

To me, all these description are referring to what I experienced in my remembering vision. It's a huge database of personal experiences that make me a universal creature, but says nothing about cosmic consciousness for the whole of the various universes. As my friends would disgustingly point out with exaggerated derision; it's all about me.

It is. I hope my die it is. At least in the big picture. There ain't but One Me, and each of us think we're It. That which IS me, is all of it. More is also less.
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The All-Knowing Wisdom Of The Unknowable

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The great man, the superior man, the all-knowing father all mean the sa-me thing to me now. They're all just other names for the Akashic Records. Surrendering oneself to it's influence in real time equates to the state of cosmic consciousness.

To me it goes back to when I went out-of-body to experience that level of understanding working consciously in a couple of college girls, and when I returned to my body sitting over on a sofa in the same room I became aware of being back in my body uttering, "Every thing is no thing, but the idea that it's some thing, and it could be anything at all."

That statement to me indicates a state of cosmic consciousness without the names to distinguish one thing from another. My experiences in this realm seem a little different than what I've read and heard other people say about their own experience.

These other sojourners appear to experience some entity that talks to them and tells them wise things, whereas the entities in my cosmic experiences don't even know I'm there, and if they do, they're not aware I have an ego that could stand a little support.

I don't really hold whatever it is that moves around in my being doing what it wants to do without askance responsible for our lack of some thrilling sort of communications. I make up stories for it just dandy. It doesn't even know what I'm doing, and in the end game, I don't either. I want it to be special for me or at least to give me something that will allow me to appear special myself to others. Big deal. It doesn't even notice.

The real trick that brings fortuitous results happens when I stop fooling myself and stop with the lies I make up about what it's real purpose for being with and within me is all about. It's when I abandon the bullshit and start imitating and mimicking it's behavior when it deigns to be present that I think I'm exhibiting right action.

Thats a little hard to describe, and it makes me feel as foolish as all get out, but when I give up on trying to get this docetic spirit to act like the savior I was taught to believe it is that I feel like I'm doing the right thing for myself.

What I'm writing about is behaving toward this docetic spirit with the same adoring attitude that I might display toward any hero that I wanted to act like. Sports heroes for instance. If I wanted to be a better golfer (or a golfer at all), I'd imitate Sam Snead or Jack Nicholas or Tiger Woods.

It's not easy to let go of what stops me from observing this entity while it's doing what it does. Much less to watch what it's doing in order to attempt to act like that myself. It's not always there when I set about to do that. I don't have the slightest control over it's comings and goings.

Many times, even when I've let go of the abstract constructions I view the world with, and I'm aware of it moving through my body doing whatever it likes, I can't be-co-me with it in order to get a sense of why it's doing what it's doing, and without knowing it's purpose I got nothing but shadows dancing in the dark.

My conscious realization that these symbols I've been taught to respect and have learned through my subjective experiences are symbolic of the sa-me entity seems to be a big deal. It's all happened in the last couple of weeks. I may be wrong, but it seems to have been precipitated by the suffering I experienced when I stopped taking the arthritis medicine.

It appears to have been when I started the pain medicine again because I couldn't stand it, in tripped these unifying thoughts that always seem to lead toward another phase of atonement. It's kind of lonesome to be alone with this, but nobody knows, and that can't be changed on my dime.
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The Upside-down World Of Tomatoes

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Two medium-sized ripe red tomatoes hang from my hanging tomato plants under the edge of my outside stairs. It's kind of a wonder that they ever produced ripe fruit what with the troubles they had. I heard about growing tomatoes out of the bottom of their containers from a friend, and then saw an advertisement and a review about how they did real good that way.

I bought two five-gallon plastic buckets, cut a golf-ball size hole in the bottom of them, and gently worked the leafy section of the tomato plants through the holes. Then, I stuffed some coffee filters around the stalks of the plants to hold the dirt in the buckets and to allow the stalk to grow bigger. With the plants in place I filled the buckets with top soil and hung them from the railing around the deck on the second floor.

The tomato plants took hold and started growing from the bottom of the buckets, and then they turned upward toward the sun. I thought things were doing okay until the weight of the dirt pulled the steel handle out of the sides of the plastic bucket and they fell down on the deck.

One of the plants survived the fall, and that's the plant with the two ripe tomatoes on it now, but the other plant got lopped off by the edge of the plastic bucket where it was turning up to find the sun, and it died after I changed things around so the weight of the bucket and plants were supported by some two by fours.

There is a chance I might be able to grow tomatoes this coming winter in my brother's greenhouse next door. I like the idea of doing it, but the tomatoes I've gotten from my efforts this summer forces me to realize I wan't be able to grow enough tomatoes to feed me all winter. Maybe I'm not doing it right. At least I know not to depend on the handles that come on those plastic bucket.

I'm thinking of trying to use burlap bags filled with dirt to do this upside down business. It keeps the plants off the ground where they seem more prone to disease and creepy crawly things. It's no big deal. If they grow then I'll have some vine-ripened tomatoes, and if it don't I'll just go to the grocery store and buy the tomatoes they grow for shelf life. Yuk!

There was a news story on TV that interested me this morning. It was about how blind people can learn to see through their tongue. This reminded me of researching and reading a lot of material about what's called a Neurophone that purported to teach people to hear through their skin, so I foolishly paid $700 to get them to send a Neurophone to my house.

All this stuff was invented by a fifteen year old boy genius who put this electronic device together to talk to dolphins. It was sponsored by DARPA, of course, and so it had to be involved with better methods of killing people. That's all DARPA does. The idea was to load dolphins up with explosives and send them out to sink enemy ships. They trained the dolphins down in the Florida Keys, and the place is still active. You can play with the dolphins when they not being trained to kill things.

The same system that teaches one to hear through their skin reputedly would allow a blind person to "see" through the skin on their finger tips. It hadn't been worked out back when I was involved in it, but it doesn't surprise me that it would come to this. The reason one could use their finger tips is because there is some many nerve endings in the fingers that have a direct connection to the brain. The skin is probably the most complicated, complex organ the body has.

We finally got a couple of cooler days. It's still getting up into the low 90's (32°-37° Celsius) for the next week or so, but when it's over a hundred degrees and the humidity is also in the nineties, old people and children can die from heat prostration without moving a muscle. I'm hoping the worst of the summer heat is about over.
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Sometime A Mojo Will Actually Work

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I got up from writing my blog entry yesterday and left pretty soon after that to drive up to Durham to keep my appointment at the arthritis clinic at the VA Hospital. I was anticipating an ill-tempered visit with this Nazi doctor they assigned me. I've been mentally cussing him for four months and working it up in my mind to force the issue of me getting my case assigned to another doctor.

During my drive up there I began singing to warm my voice up. I hadn't used my voice much because I live alone, and I didn't want no cracks in my voice as I waxed emotional to make it easy to enter my Prince Chi dissembly mode when I got there. It's so much easier to make it believable as I've grown older. Muttering, cranky old men are like the squeaking wheel that gets the grease.

As I drove north along I-40 with the cruise control set barely below the legal speed limit, I began trying to process 4 months of frustration and get it behind me, now, so that when the process started I could respond with an empty mind poised to engulf wot wuz sot before it completely. I practiced awareness of my ambient surroundings so that I would BE unconcerned when I got there.

Since I had left early from home to give myself plenty of time to get there I arrived in Durham two hours before my appointment time. I had lived in Durham for a short time while my first wife worked on getting her dietitian certification from Duke. I lived at 808 Onslow Street. Odd that I remember that. It was the first apartment I'd ever rented in my short life at 22 years old.

The Whole Foods Store in Durham was easy to get to in order to waste a little time, yet located where I could easily get back on the Freeway to go to the VA. My visit there yesterday was less enthusiastic than my previous visits. I found that store in the first place because they had sprouting seeds and I was into growing sprouts then. I'm sorta not anymore.

It was easy to find a parking place at the small shopping center. I parked the car and decided to go for a walk to stretch my legs before I went inside the famous, fancy grocery store. I walked one block east on Perry Street and found myself across the street from some large industrial buildings I think are associated with Duke University.

The street I was on had lots of restaurants and cafes that seemed very student oriented. The main campus is near by. There was a steady stream of the young beautiful college students each attempting to show their particular version of individuality as if they are grownups. I felt older than ever, but at the same time, invigorated by a contact high from being among them. I walked for a few blocks, then turned around and returned to Perry Street.

As I mentioned earlier, the Whole Foods Store don't hold as much truck with me since I've returned to a more convenient diet. I browsed through it knowing I wasn't gonna buy anything. Then, when I was done acting like an muddle-headed automaton, I got in my car and drove over to the valet parking at the VA Hospital, and went inside.

I hadn't wasted enough time. I was still an hour early. Fortunately, being early got me in a short line to check in at the main reception desk. I don't have to really do it that way. I can go directly to the clinic to check in, but I was in a suspicious mode because of my mindset, and I wanted to leave a digital trail that I was there in plenty of time to keep my appointment.

After I checked in at the main desk, I went to the cafeteria to see if they had anything interesting to eat. I had taken my methotrexate earlier that morning before I left home, and for a day or so after I take methotrexate I can only eat what will stay down. It's notorious side-effect of debilitating nausea makes eating an iffy business. Sometimes I can eat about anything, and other times I won't be able to keep what I normally eat down.

I checked into the clinic about 45 minutes early and meditated myself into a pretty relaxed state for about a half hour. My appointment time came and went without me getting any attention, so I got up and started wandering around inside the waiting room and out into the hall. For some reason this usually makes the staff nervous. Not yesterday. So I went directly to the desk and asked why I was being ignored. That worked.

Within minutes the nurse came out and called me into his office to do the pre-visit interview and check my blood pressure and weigh me like I was a cow going to slaughter, then I was instructed to go back to the waiting room and the doctor would come and get me. I seemed to settle down then a little, because this is the regular process about every visit.

Not long after I sat down I heard my name being called by a soft, feminine voice. Oh no! This ain't supposed to be happening. It's supposed to be the tinkling, smart-alecky voice of my nemesis Doctor Tony Ning. Not a pleasant woman's voice at all. I looked up, and there was a very attractive Oriental woman wearing a doctor's white coat. She smiled at me and asked, "Are you felix?"

When I answered in the affirmative, she said, "I'll be your doctor today, follow me." Surprised, I did exactly what she said. It was as if I were in a wonderful dream. My prayers were answered. God is good. I didn't have to deal with the doctor I didn't like, at least for today.

Trying to sound humorous I asked her as we walked down the long hall to the doctor's offices, "Where's Doctor Ning? Did they fire him?" She laughed and explained that his schedule had been changed to another time of the day because of his lectures. My mojo had worked. He got promoted to his own level of incompetence.

My new doctor seemed to want to show me right away that she was in charge, and she did pretty good. After she had asked me a few questions and checked me out for swollen joints and listened to my heart, she went out and got her supervisor. This pleasant, grizzled old man, on the other hand, knew damn well he was in charge, and from my first glance at him I did too. We started negotiating and he agreed to keep me on the same medicine that worked for me, and then he added a little surprise with a twinkle in his eye. "Do you get along okay with prednisone?"

I tried not to look too excited, but I don't think I fooled him at all. Prednisone might be my drug of choice for dealing with RA. He said, "I'm thinking of a very low, daily dose of about 5 mg. This seems to work real well with older folks, and that low of a level doesn't have many noticeable side-effects. If you don't get along with it you can just stop."

The young woman doctor agreed with her supervisor, of course, and they decided to prescribe me 2.5 mg pills twice a day until my next appointment. All the animosity I had been feeling and preparing to fight to remedy for months melted away by the time the valet service brought my car around for the long drive home.
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Gastric Juices And Lying Doctors

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Two events happen today that I'm not fond of. One has already happened. I took my weekly dosage of ten methotrexate pills early this morning, and later today at 2 o'clock I have an appointment with the rheumatologist who prescribes those pills and others to me. We don't get along well. He lies to me straight to my face. How can I trust a doctor who knowingly lies to me without any shame whatsoever?

The only decision that makes any sense statecraft-wise is to keep my mouth shut, take what drugs I think will help, and ignore the other stuff this Doctor Mengele dishes out to kill me and save the government some money. Knowing what other people are thinking even when they don't is a burden I didn't start out to take on.

This will be the third round trip in the last week I've taken to the Triangle area today. The other two trips were associated with getting my computer fixed before the warranty runs out. I could have gotten the whole thing done with one trip if I planned it out, but I don't exactly mind getting outta town occasionally. Back in the day, I did a lotta traveling, and even short trips like these remind me of all the weird, enlightening events that can happen to a stranger in a strange land.

It's been exactly a week since I impulsively bought the Apple TrackPad to replace my perfectly satisfactory Logitech Anywhere Mouse. I've already mentioned how I found out that I was wrong about the strength that it took to get this contraption to left- and right-click. I discovered in the Preferences panel that there is an option I could check to get it to do as expected, and that changed everything. "When all else fails, read the instructions."

The truth is that now it's so sensitive to my touch that I seem to be able to get it to work by barely touching it, and if one of my other fingers touches the pad unintentionally, or even comes close to touching it, something other than the desired reaction results.

It's a time thing. After a while my body will master this device, and then I won't be able to live without it. You know, like my old IBM Selectric Typewriter. I wonder what ever happened to that thing? Maybe it ended up in the same metal scrap heap my first automobile did. The Nash Ambassador, with seats that folded back into a bed. What a trial owning that car was. ! I can't say it was exactly a lemon because it was used when I got it, but Nash went outta business not long after that.

Keeping an appointment at the VA Hospital in Durham takes me all day long. I got up fairly early this morning. Mostly because I went to bed early last night. Sunday nights are notoriously bad TV viewing without cable or a Dish hookup.

If you miss an appointment with the VA they can kick you out of the regular clinics, so I'm extremely attentive to making sure that doesn't happen. Then, if they terminate your participation in a clinic the only medical attention you can get is emergency services, and that's not good.

I guess I'll leave pretty soon and stop somewhere along the way and buy some breakfast/brunch. I've already eaten some oatmeal to have something in my stomach for taking the medicine. If I take it on an empty stomach it can be really painful.

I'm always on the lookout for a clean greasy spoon with a good Western omelette or a decent club sandwich on the regular menu. Both seem to be disappearing from the cafes of America, or at least, the club sandwich is. It's a crying shame, man. What's this world coming to when you can't buy a triple-decker club sandwich?
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The Safari Reader Feature

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There is a new feature in the Apple browser called Safari that I have to remember to use. When I do remember to employ it I find myself foolishly gratified. It's kind of dopey when I feel this way. Grateful is not one of my more polished attributes.

The feature is simply called Reader. It does one thing pleasingly well. It converts an article I'm interested in reading on an internet site, so that it automagically removes all the extraneous stuff like advertisements of all kind, and enlarges the type on a pleasant neutral background, and lets me focus on entertaining myself without distraction.

There is one aspect to this feature I'm not sure of. If an article spreads out over several pages the Reader anticipates the need to click "Next Page", and downloads all the article in the background so that reading the article is one smooth production from start to finish. I haven't tested this theory much. It doesn't appear to work on some sites, but seems to work seamlessly on others. I may be hallucinating that part of it.

I don't know if the iPad browser has this feature for reading books. If it does, then it's almost unfair to all the other tablet computers that are trying to get into the digital book market. I haven't tried this out on free book sites that carry all those Public Domain masterpieces.

Now I have. I stopped writing to see if it works. It does. Beautifully. It even allowed me to copy this paragraph from the Reader program itself:

"Sartre was the chief proponent of French existentialism, a philosophic school--influenced by Soeren Kierkegaard and German philosophy--that developed around the close of the World War II. Existentialism stressed the primacy of the thinking person and of concrete individual experience as the source of knowledge; this philosophy also emphasized the anguish and solitude inherent in the making of choices."

http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/sartrebio.html

Naturally, from finding out it worked as above, I had to try it out on Wikipedia. The Reader feature removed every extraneous sections like all the Wikipedia self promotion and presented the article on Sartre in its entirety without any distracting gobble de gook.

I get distracted fairly easily if I don't have a solid purpose in mind. The paragraph on Sartre above has that one sentence that caught my attention, "Existentialism stressed the primacy of the thinking person and of concrete individual experience as the source of knowledge".

I've never quite gotten a handle of what is meant by the term "existentialism". I do know that once I was able to get into reading Being and Nothingness that even though it was a translated work that Sartre was writing his tour de force just for me.

It took me months of reading each night before I went to sleep. The experience was like no other reading experience I've had. It was like I was receiving instruction on how to interpret his me-and-thee-ing (meaning) as I skimmed through each chapter.

I'd have to go back and read it again, and sometimes again several more times after that. I think I must have read each chapter ten times or more before I got to the end of the book. I felt like I understood a bit during the process of reading each night, but each morning it was if I didn't understand any of it. Any understanding happened in an immediacy the immediately seemed to evaporate.

I've finally stopped going back and reading Being and Nothingness to see if there is anything more I can glean from my additional efforts. It's like the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching for me now, ten years after I was told in a dream to stop using it. I sometime use quotes from both books, but I don't use them as an oracle any more. I be-co-me with them to act as and channel as the oracle myself. I ate the whole thing.

Capturing drifting thoughts with words has not been easy for me. I have to do it about every day for several hours to stay in practice, and even then it's not always there for me whether I want it to be or not. It has been dangerous to both my health and my wealth or lack thereof since puberty.

I got this body from it's original owner when it was fourteen years old. Right away, as it new owner I began retreating to a hermetic lifestyle the previously occupied body did not understand. To be what I am is threatened it's ground-for-being. Candidly, that can be tough because the brains of this body belonged to another with a selfish purpose, and had a tendency to treat me as if I am is were just a rebound lover who will soon discard it as if use-less. No blame. I guess I do have a history.

Time, the tie-to-me, is not so flexible as cultural demands need for it to be, in my case, and it took decades for me to reclaim what I'd gained ere transitioning to a fresh young body. This kid had fourteen years to create a set of rules of conscience before I could even begin a rescue effort to abandon them wholesale. The fool had been brain-washed into think he was duty-bound as a Christian to let his conscience be his guide. Socked in, man, what a drag.

Some friendly people are possessed by their definitions of what friends like me should act like. I can be a great disappointment to them. I couldn't even do that for my parents or ex-wives or their children. They appear to forget how I can be. They try mightily to get me to meet them halfway to allow for my possible ignorance. I don't even pretend to go there anymore. It's useless. Too many fixed signs in my natal, and/or too few in their's.

I could almost swear they want me to dumb down to what they can reach for inside their subjective tribal box, and yet, hold me up as their model for how to get outta there simultaneously. I don't seem able to explain why that ain't up to me, but that it is only up to them.

I can't assuage their self-inflicted pain due to the very fact that I have no say so in the matter. Meaning (me-and-thee-ing) only goes so far when soliciting the favors of the Comforter.
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TrackPads And Spelunking

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In the end game, I'm resorting to learning to use this new TrackPad by playing computer games with it just like I did when I first learned how to use a mouse. It's much more sensitive than I first thought. At times I barely touch the surface of the TrackPad and it performs some unexpected task before I can stop it.

I have a MineSweeper game that was designed for the Mac to imitate the original game that comes with Windows. It took a couple of days trying to figure out how to flag a cube with the TrackPad I suspected of having a mine under it, but when I did figure it out it only took a light touch for the warning flag icon to pop up.

Since it's a timed game, and I know what sort of time using a regular mouse takes, I can tell how quickly I'm learning to use the TrackPad. It's getting mo' better. Much better than the first couple of days. It might take a month or so to really get using it without having to think about what I gotta do differently to make it work right. I might not go back to my $75 laser mouse.

The most consistent problem I'm having is when I try to highlight something to either copy or delete it. It's a two-finger maneuver that's a lot like the move used to right-click. I guess I'm having some trouble getting the right-click move to work the first time too.

I seem convinced it's not abstract thought that will finally do the job, but my instinctual mechanisms that will figure this out for me. If that happens I may not know consciously exactly how I do it, and that will have to be okay by me or I'm likely to get unnecessarily confused.

This seems to be a lot like reaching for "the great man" or "the Superior man" as it is used in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. It took forty years for me to understand these metaphors through my own being/persona. The abstract thought part the I-am-is initiates through denial of the me.

Stumbling across a Wikipedia article on karst land formations set me right back on looking for a cave, but this time I was more sensible in my search. I asked for links to caves for meditation. The Results page produced lots of places with caves for meditating, plus, practically the entire history of meditating in caves, and a lotta shit about hermits too. It was like finding gold in a murky swamp.

The connect between karst formations and caves is that the karst formations are where limestone and dolomite happen in nature. Caves are found in these areas because rainwater and acid create the caves and caverns because its soft stuff that goes into solution in plain water. Other types of rock and minerals are much tougher to penetrate, so they don't find many caves in quartz formations.

The Google Results page had a lot of links to caves where famous gurus meditated. Some of them had a lotta pictures of what the caves actually looked like. Many of them were not caves in the manner many think about caves, but a lot of them looked like the Pueblo indian ruins in Mesa Verde, Arizona. I bet that's what those buildings were for too.

Many Navajos and other pueblo indians still live in the eight-sided huts they've lived in as long as any of them can remember. The name of them escape me presently. Hogans? There are huge Indian artifacts at Chaco National Park and other places where it is said that the Indians didn't live in these buildings, they were used for ceremonial purposes.

The pictures I saw of the types of places the famous gurus of Asia used for meditating looks just like the places that can be found at this link:

http://www.traditionsofthesun.org/

This is not like a big deal unless you've followed these sorts of things for fifty or sixty years, then it all adds up. That's what having a universal database like the internet available that allows people to discover that an activity performed in separate countries or continents are doing the same thing and calling it something different.

Another point of sameness seems to be the remoteness of the locations of these edifices. I didn't think this up, but watched a documentary on cave paintings. These researchers pointed out the same thing I saw in the pictures of the meditation caves. Many of them are located under a ledge of rocks and then walls are erected around them to provide privacy .

The cave paintings were found in the same types of locations. There are cave paintings in real caves, but most of them are under rock ledges just like humans and other animals have sought refuge from the elements since the bejinning of ti-me. However, they are all remote and a long way from where tribes of people could locate near water and food.
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The Great Man vs The Superior Man

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This is another one of my blog entries where I wrote something I liked in an e-mail discussion group and wanted to follow through. I write entirely too much as it is in these groups:

"No, I'm not "doing the iching" as an oracle anymore. I still quote it occasionally like quoting the GoT. Especially if I sense that the sayings from each indicate the sa-me universal condition. I use people as my oracular source now, as instructed by yet another vision in the dreamtime. Unsurprisingly, once done, people just love be-co-me-ing an oracle. How else could they know such a thing is possible? How else could I gnow such a thing is possible?"

I'm quoting myself here and I don't know the proper way to punctuate to indicate that or if I even need to. I just wanted to take what I wrote a little while ago as a beginning point in order to find out what else I might write in regard to how I get people to become oracles for me.

My nemesis challenged me to defend my admitted use of trickery to get a new young body from a suicidal teenager because my current body was extremely old and approaching death. The kid (who I am is legally right damned now) was approaching death. It wasn't a harsh takeover deal. It was something that worked out for both of us, but in the superfluidity of the eternal now. Instantaneity.

Irrevocable shit happens in real ti-me within the event horizon of the specious present, and there ain't no redos. Really! Even light ain't fast enough to escape the angels with the flaming swords at the ring-pass-me-not of their guardian domain. Probably defies the arrow of time or some shit like that.

I've written about how I went to my first hypnosis school at night when I was around twenty-four years old, and how I've since attended several other schools and many short seminars on the art of suggestion. I'm a bigger student of it than a practitioner, but I don't have to be stultifyingly slow with the use of suggestion, just bold.

I taught myself not to presume people can't or won't do what I ask of them while they're in a deep trance. Ethics is naturally a part of hypnosis because most subjects are willing to do what the hypnotist asks them to do. Some are even eager to do stuff they wouldn't ordinarily do because they got the perfect excuse if accused of misconduct, "I wuz hypnotized." That's even mo' better and more believable to the church ladies in the juror's box than, "I wuz drunk!" Thin ice.

My point is that if I ask the right question of a person in the right situation they don't have to be in a hypnotic trance to become an oracle for me. I emphasize the "for me". People of either gender will become an oracle and talk about stuff in detail that both of us know they previously knew nothing about, and yet, they're undeniably doing it in front of witnesses.

I ask them to answer some impossible question that neither one of us knows for sure they can't answer. I can't afford to assume they can't do it or my doubt will contaminate the possible result. I can't always maintain that degree of objectivity, and if I can't it's a bust. Instantaneously.

That puts a lot of responsibility on the composition of the proposed question. If I can contain my doubt and fulfill my part of the deal, then the question I present has to come outta the blue quickly enow to misdirect any questioning of my motives and nip their doubt in the bud. It's just human nature for suspicion to arise, so the machinations I employ to divert them requires their ongoing cooperation to see where this thing can go.

The most critical part of this ritualistic mojo is that it has to happen in a cauldron of unquestionability. Whatever in hell that may mean. To me it means that both of us have to enter a consciously generated state of innocence for the floodgates of the great man.

"The great man" or in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching, the Superior man, took decades for me to figure out. If I had ignored my remembering vision as a fluke of nature I still wouldn't know what these terms are symbolic of, because without my unwavering believe in what I experienced in my remembering vision, I would never have studied any of the occult devices. I just wasn't that kind of person. I don't do tattoos no matter who does.

My remembering vision was a visitation with "the great man". I probably don't have a clue about what the Chinese sages who created the I Ching or Book of Changes meant by their use of "the great man", but since the last couple of days I think I do. I'm guessing. I'm not proposing my definition is correct or truthful. I can't swear that's it's anything to write ho-me about. But, currently, in the present moment, "the great man" is the more of me than you or anyone else can "see".

The 'Superior man" is all my memories, especially the ones created previous to this particular life-time. My re-membering vision revealed consciously to my current persona this universal more-ness. My own Akashic Records of what eternity has been like for this I am is. I am is me, you know, in all ways it has been and will be. Well, maybe. My remembering vision didn't reach into the future. I seem pretty sure from reading and talking to other people that their remembering visions were more inclusive and more far-reaching than my own.

The great man is that "man" which is greater than just me. The Superior man is that man who reaches beyond this one lifetime or this one planet, but in all ways is and will be. It's like an experiential database that's not always online, but I am is gnows it's there anyway.

I think I'm trying to get around to writing that "the great man" is individual cosmic consciousness. Realizing in real time "how great thou art" is tantamount to the religious experience of gnosis or enlightenment. It's the superior database of one's total life experiences as opposed to the inferior database of an individual lifetime. It's bigger than. It's greater than. It's superior to by volume and weight. From infinitesimally small to the infinity of open space. It's the more of me than I am is can "see".

If I'm actually weird in any way at all it's that using words to capture drifting thoughts is one of the most exciting activities I can imagine. I'll get over it or maybe not. It's lasted forever so far.
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My Second Day With The Magic TrackPad

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This is the second day I've used the Magic TrackPad to replace my mouse. I wasn't exactly happy yesterday. I understood why I wasn't happy and it was legitimate I suppose due to the fact that it was the first day. I'm a little happier with it today.

I may get happier still. I've had some things happen by accident that have very good implications for what can happen in the future. The starting point for my new appreciation started from when I opened the Preference file and researched the "Tap to click" feature. Then, it wasn't so hard to get a sure response when I tried to left click.

Once I checked the "Tap to click" option my ability to double-click and right click improved. Highlighting a word or phrase is still a problem sometime, but all in all the touch technology is starting to look real handy as a way to manipulate info on my monitor.

It really irritates me to have to learn a whole new way of doing things. Especially in this case when I have a working mouse a few inches away that I know exactly what to do to get what I want from it. I complained yesterday about how difficult it is to get the Magic TrackPad to click. The rubber pads on the bottom of it are also switches. The entire pad has to be pushed down forcefully to get these switches to work.

That's not what's going on with the "Tap to click" feature in the Preferences file. I may be mistaken, but I think that activates the touch units on the top of the pad. When I get it right all it takes is a light touch to get the device to click or double-click. Other times it's not easy. It seems obvious that eventually I'll learn what it takes to get it right without hesitation sooner or later, and the whole input dealio will become thoughtless.

Another aspect of this new gadget is that it doesn't matter which fingers one uses to get it to work. They don't even have to be fingers from the same hand. Just now I was having a little problem getting it to right-click in order to use the spell-checker. The way I solved it was to reach over and put my index finger on my left hand on the pad and touch it with the index finger of my right hand and it worked real well.

It's a flat plane. There's nothing to reach around or grip. That's real different. I've used both hands in turn with mechanical or laser mouses, but that was tricky to do sometime. They gotta be moved to work. Not the TrackPad. I will probably end up placing it more toward the middle above my keyboard so I can reach it easily with both hands.
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My New Magic Trackpad

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My brother next door bought an iPad. The largest capacity one, of course, that's the way he is. Why mess about with something that just gets you by. I was surprised he could use my wireless router to hook up to both of his networks and use them just like they were sitting in front of him from my house. I had no idea that could happen from an iPad. He's extremely pleased with it. No blame.

I bought into the Trackpad myself. It was certainly an impulse buy. I picked up my iMac from the Genius Bar at the Apple Store, took it out to where my car was parked and locked it up in the trunk so that I could walk around a bit inside the air-conditioned shopping mall.

The Apple Store had run out of Trackpads when I first brought my computer in to get the Ethernet circuit board replaced. While I was walking around the mall, I impulsively decided to go back to the Apple Store to see if they had received a new shipment of them, and sure enough they had them in stock again.

It's gonna take some getting used to. The one aspect of the Magic Trackpad I don't like is the same thing I didn't like about the Magic Mouse. It's too difficult to mash down on the surface to get them to click. Double-clicking should be easy with two successive taps, but I need a small hammer to get it to click at all. Maybe it'll get easier over time.

The odd thing to me is that I used my arthritic hands as an excuse to buy the Magic Trackpad because I thought it would be easier to use than a regular mouse, but it's not, so I'm using both. I downloaded a software program that would allow me to use two mouses for input. I don't even remember the name of it. It got transferred over to my new computer when I transferred the old stuff from my Mac Mini to my new iMac. It works.

I'm seriously pleased to get my iMac back from the shop. Finding out from the technician at the Apple Store that the reason it was so slow in booting up was a relief to me. It also prepared me to have even slower boot-up times if I add more memory. I can add up to 12 gigabytes more than the 4 gigabytes the computer came with.

I probably won't add any more memory. The 4 gigabytes it came with is twice as much DRAM as I've ever had on any of my previous computers, and I have less stuff on the hard drive than I've ever had. I got the first video card I've ever had with the iMac. I thought it would help if I decided to play more complex games over the internet. It's not fast enough though. The extra DRAM could be a big help, but this slow video card won't process fast enough.

The three trips I've made to the State Capital during the last two weeks have caused me to feel my age. The arthritis is actually a little better. I'm not having near the aches and pain I had during the time I decided to stop taking the prescription medicines one at a time to find out which one was causing my lips and tongue to swell. I can't say I'm really sure if I found out which one. It could be any of them.

What I noticed that has plagued me a bit and that I attribute to getting older is apathy about what happens in the future. No matter what does happen, my ability to wait for things to get better if I'm just patient enough ain't gwine happen. It's like with RA. It's a progressive disease that there is no known cure for. I can't just take to my bed for a couple of weeks, eat right, and heal. The healing part is real iffy.

Another thing that causes me to dismiss the future as bright is watching and witnessing the activities and behaviors associated with procreation. Since I can't procreate because of the vasectomy I took all those years ago my attitude toward those activities and behaviors has become complacent to say the least. Cynical at best.

Women who can't have babies anymore probably understand this angle better than me, but not much. The first temptation of recreational sex is partially driven by social needs. The second temptation, that of biologically creating a child seems more species driven and instinctual.

It's the instinctual part of the mating deal that leaves me with a loss I can't logically explain. When a fertile, impregnable young woman appears on the scene, even though I can't get her pregnant even if we have sex together, my old habits cause to check her out anyway, then I notice myself doing it, and wonder why those kinds of habits are still around.

The most intriguing thing about this is that people who are obeying their instincts don't consciously know it's the cause of the behavior. The older they get, the less they indulge, but they still don't know they're doing it because of instinctual impulses. That is how they get manipulated by people who do realize they're behaving the way they do illogically. That makes them vulnerable just like it made me vulnerable, back in the day, but it doesn't make me wanna take advantage of them. I guess I'm too soft. That's apathy.
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Computer Got Broke

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I wrote this yesterday, but the old browser on my bother's ancient computer wouldn't let me publish anything but the title.

My computer is in the shop getting fixed. The Ethernet socket went south. I took it to the Apple store Thursday. They confirmed that it was still under warranty, and it's a good thing too, because they have to replace the motherboard in order to repair the Ethernet socket. They said it usually takes about five days, and they'll call me when it's ready.

I thought I'd have to go the entire five days without going online, but my brother got worried when I didn't answer his e-mails and set me up with one of his older computers. It was the latest thing when it was new, but even my old Intel Mac Mini was much swifter. I'll be glad to get my iMac back and in working order.

The woman working the Genius Bar at the Apple Store told me something she didn't intend to. The store was jammed and they were late with nearly every appointment. She wasn't in a joking mood. She confirmed that the Ethernet socket was indeed broke, and asked me if anything else was wrong.

I told her there was nothing else I knew of, and that I was happy with the computer except for how long it took to boot up. I asked her if she knew of a fix. She said the problem was how much DRAM the computer had installed. Every time it's booted up it performs a memory test, and with four gigabytes of memory it takes a while. I asked her if it had more memory it would take even longer. Yep.

The newer iMacs can accept sixteen gigabytes of memory. That was one of the main selling points. That, plus the fact that they used desktop CPUs and 7200 rpm hard drives. The iMacs previous to the October '09 models used laptop parts. I have intended to buy some more memory just to see what an additional four gigabytes would do to the performance. I don't think it would do much but make my boot time longer.

Apple has just come out with a new series of iMacs that have faster CPU chips still, and a few parts have been upgraded, but as I suspected, they didn't have USB3 or eSATA sockets. Back when I bought the iMac I bought I had thought about waiting for the next upgrade, but now I'm glad I didn't because they're stalling with the faster peripheral inputs probably for another year.

The Operating System on this computer is old, and my brother forget the password he needed to download upgrades. The web browser is so old many of the web sites won't let me in. I can get into my gmail account, but the Inbox makes a mess of the posts and it's hard to unscramble them to answer one by one. I'll really be glad to get my modern, up-to-date computer back home.

Monday

I got a call early this morning that my computer was fixed and I could come get it. I was headed to Raleigh in less that five minutes. When I got to the Apple Store, they showed me that it worked and the repair was complete. Before I left the shopping center I decided to go back to the Apple Store to see if they had received any of the Trackpads, and they did! I will take a while for me to catch the hang of how to use it, but the reviews I read says it doesn't take too long.
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Denizen: Only Partially Privileged

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Denizens of the ocean? I just heard that expression on TV and they were talking about how glaciers finally fall into the ocean and join "the denizens of the ocean". Denizens?

denizen |ˈdenəzən|
noun formal or humorous
an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place : denizens of field and forest.
• Brit., historical a foreigner allowed certain rights in the adopted country.

It seems like from the Dictionary on my iMac that the "z" got put into the term because it has to do with citizen. Denization is the process by which a foreigner becomes a naturalized citizen.

Here is a description from the Thesaurus: denizen
noun
formal the denizens of Grant's Hollow were a quirky lot: inhabitant, resident, townsman, townswoman, native, local; occupier, occupant, dweller; archaic burgher.

The term "denizen" gets rare usage these days because of the various countries developing complex naturalization systems. It gets used a lot just to describe an eccentric person who came from some other culture. Back when I used to travel alone all over North America I was nearly always considered a denizen. Sometime I was even asked, "Where you a denizen of... boy?"

I was called a "boy" just about everywhere I went. I was a bum. Politically, I was considered a failed state. White trash. A nigger. But, niggers held a higher social class than me, as did all the Latino laborers. Being a failed state deserves no respect. The strangers in the strange lands I visited has no way of knowing how far I fell to be-co-me a bum. All they knew was what they saw sot before them right then and there.

At best, I might be considered a denizen and allowed certain privileges of their community as long as I didn't get out of line. The hard part was that any citizen of the place I found myself had say so over whether I was measuring up to their interpretation of the local moral values.

I had to learn to survive in these situations. Many, if not most of my defense tactics when faced with confrontation would be simply to disappear into the woodworks and let my antagonist find their own way back home without me. Other times that simply didn't work. I was on their turf, and they knew most of the hiding places where I could be out of sight and therefore out of mind.

My living this way for nearly a decade caused me to pay close attention when I read what Carl Jung wrote about religion:

"Religion is a defense against the experience of God." ~ C. G. Jung

The reason I paid so much attention to this quote is that, to me, it points to the only way I know of finding out what my real religion is. It's by reflecting on what I defended myself against out there on the road where I lived hand-to-mouth without pretenses.

Sometime it absolutely astounds me for other people to even consider that I would follow their rules of conscience as if they were my own rules of conscience. They want me to let their conscience be my guide. It's not that I wouldn't pretend, at least, to do that if I could.

Unfortunately, when they tell me to or indicate that I somehow should follow their rules of conscience, I only hear them saying what I might say if I were them, and doing what I do for their reasons instead of my own.

In consideration of the futility of that, I seem to have spent most of my adult life trying to uncover and dispense with my own rules of conscience as burdensome baggage. If I pull this off, will I then have any reason at all to continue trying to be a real little boy instead of a wooden doll?

I seem to be associating my earthly plight with Pinocchio more and more these days. As I am is the docetic spirit who, despite all my efforts, cannot become a human being. Oh, well....
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Being Ridiculously Normal For A Whole Day

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Time and money. That's what I did today. I wasted both, and irritated myself all the way home from Raleigh as punishment. Okay, so I have a way of taking it easy on myself when I act impulsively, because I'm perfectly aware I made the rules I followed that caused me to play the fool. That ain't always been as clear as a bell to me.

There were no good reasons for me to go to Raleigh. I could have gone anywhere to satisfy the need I had to get outta town for a while. When I found my way on the way to Raleigh, I didn't stop myself from heading in that direction. I went directly to the Crabtree Valley Mall to the Apple Store.

I figured I might buy me one of those new Magic Trackpads I've been reading so much about. They didn't have any in stock. Sold out. That's just as well. It would have been an impulse buy. I'm fairly happy with the Everywhere mouse Logitech sells. It actually cost a little more than the touch mouse Apple sells. I have to switch hands often because of the swelling in my wrists.

The touchy Magic Mouse that came with my iMac is not what they hyped it up to be. There are some good things about it that I liked, but it was the styling that blew it for me. It was too law to the ground to get a good grip on it and get stuff done. It was/is hard to click and, thus the Logitech mouse.

The reviews on the new Magic Trackpad are pretty good. Some of the reviews have called it the mouse killer. Once you get on track you'll never go back. That's probably true. The top of the Magic Mouse has touch control, and that part of it I liked. Sometime Apple goes over the top with it's famous styling and forgets the functionality.

Since I was at the Apple Store I checked with the attractive woman who showed me around the iPad. I've found out that's the best way to get somebody to wait on me there. Just start doodling around on one of the displays and they show up fairly soon. I don't want an iPad. I'm more in the market for an iPhone, and I can't afford either yet.

I asked her about the broken Ethernet socket on my iMac, and her response was to make me an appointment with the Genius Bar to have it fixed. She said they'd fix it with some confidence, but I'll believe it when I get it back and it works. She assured me that the one year guarantee would pay for everything. That's another doubt I have that I'll be happy to have erased. I'll have to make another round-trip to Raleigh on Thursday. I don't mind going, but I'm a miser. I hate to pay for the gas.
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A Mother Goose Moment

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It's not encouraging to read and watch the violence in Mexico on TV. The drug cartels seem to kill and plunder at will and the government appears helpless to stop them. Mexico is like a failed political state turning to anarchy as usual. I used to like to go there to visit. Now, violent warlords tell everybody what to do unopposed by the frightened politicians who have to look out for themselves personally in order to survive.

It seems possible that anarchy could happen here in the United States if the politicians on all levels can't find enough money in their budgets to pay the police force instead of laying them off. They don't hire new cops anymore.

Attrition has already diminished their numbers such that I can drive around in my car without seeing a cop for the whole time I'm out and about. The cops I do see appear busy and not interested in stopping anybody for misdemeanors. I still fasten my seatbelt out of my residual fear. It's probably just the calm before the storm. "Once a cop, always a cop."

Once upon a time I convinced my youthful self that the same people who become cops can as easily become robbers. Indeed they have if you watch the 6 o'clock news. It must be a terrible temptation to cross the line. If the State can't afford to pay them to be cops they might decide to become robbers. That doesn't bode well if a state of anarchy emerges.

I've heard that the civilian police forces are paramilitary outfits that can be as gung ho in their disciplinary outlook as their military cousins. The same dictums in the military that states that a busy warrior is a happy warrior implies that an employed cop is a happy cop. In my dotage I like happy cops mo' bettah.

Only a few years ago I remember complaining about how many cops there are here in this county. I compared the present number of people in the county employed by the justice departments to how few there were here when I was a boy growing up. It's a thousand percent growth rate.

It seems silly that I'm now concerned with there not being enough tax money to keep them happily employed. I don't think it would be too big a shock to my system if half the police forces were put outta work. I grew up with not many cops around. But, for people even ten years younger than me it could be a rude awakening. Boys will be boys. Aye, and thar's the rub...

Fewer cops mean that if I don't have a wreck I could drive until I'm ninety years old without getting a ticket. It'll be the cops with the most seniority who will survive a big layoff, and they'll be veterans at turning a blind eye to my age-related driving mistakes. Hell, that's practically a new reason for living.

My entire life seems to have been dedicated to getting by with offbeat behaviors that I ought not to perform if I had been nurturing a political career. I definitely have skeletons in my closet, galore! With my question to my self being: How could I have so easily settled for cheap thrills? It's like I never had no sense of class or culture. Everybody seems to be acutely aware of this in real time about me except por mio. Why am I always the last to know?

I'd like to be joking, but I'm not. My brother's four year old grandsons were brought over for a visit as they usually are when they're visiting their grandparents next door. The last time they were here one of them looked me sincerely in the face and asked me, "Uncle felix, why do you keep such a messy house?" I knew exactly which adults prompted his up-until-now-innocent curiosity.

I feel shame to be such an embarrassment to my own kinfolk. I even moved a couple of pieces of furniture upstairs in order to feel less contemptible in their jaundiced view of the world. That's exactly what people in general hate about me not cleaning up around myself properly. Even though I feel shame, I don't feel no blame. I know what I'm here for, and neatness just don't count in that penultimate pursuit.

I've lived such a self-deprived lifestyle that I feel lucky to have a private place to store my ratty belongings and get inside out of the weather. As sorry a life as I've lived it's more than I deserve, and yet the world wants to nag me to keep it looking tidy for their sake? What a downer to exist as depraved nemesis to my own families and their snooty friends and children. If they'll just wait until next year, I'm gonna change my inbred ways for damn sure.
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Does Hollywood Dictate U.S. War Policy?

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I suspect that if you're an "American" you're usually considered Christian by pretty much the rest of the world. That probably includes both Hemispheres. Even if you personally consider yourself to be an atheist by religion or not, if you're in uniform and killing their kith and kin, nobody cares. Do you think it matters why you individually think you have a right to be in another person's country, to the native inhabitants of that country?

Invading their country is a good enough reason for the warlords in Afghanistan to viciously murder you for just being in their backyard and inside their houses. Why would they not blindly kill you no matter what you think your reasons are, in order to put you out of their own misery? 

The American troops dress like the Stormtroopers that come out of the Star Wars movies, only to be outfoxed and killed by a succession of bearded young men who wear unarmored dresses. They were whipped in Vietnam by smooth-faced young men who wore pajamas. How stupid has America become? Why is our war policy dictated by Hollywood? 

I wrote the above paragraphs in response to an e-mail discussion group post that encouraged it, but they never got the above response. I made up something a little more mild-mannered to keep them from realizing I'm Superman in disguise. '-)

War has dominated the headlines of my entire life. I was born just two years before the Second World War started. I was six years old when it finished. Then came the Korean Conflict, Vietnam, Grenada, Honduras and a few other Island Nations, then Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure I've left some wars or rumors of war out. I'm old. I'm tired of war and killing. What happened to the comic strips?

There is something else about war that dominates my thinking. I've written extensively about my remembering vision in which I experienced through vision every aspect of my life since I arrived on Earth as a sort of seed pearl. Every part of that vision became about war after I had finally made myself into a homo sapiens.

It seemed really to be about weapons from sticks and stones to arrows and spears, then gunpowder was invented and all the weapons that followed that. In vision, I watched battle after battle with succeeding weapons and war after war. I watched myself get killed hundreds and thousands of times in wars, but that wasn't any shock at all after having lived as the entire spectrum of being the prey of my predators, and then the killer of my prey.

Life is about death, and that's all there is to it beyond abstract constructions to staunch the bleeding. War is civilization. Civilized people make war to kill off the young men who compete with their fathers for the right to perform the rituals of fatherhood. Young men go to war to kill off the old men of the culture they're fighting to stop them from sending their young men to war to kill them off.

War is a knee jerk reaction to sexual opportunity and thus procreation. Such that women are merely war booty, and gaudy cheer leaders who keep screaming "FIGHT! FIGHT for me! Show me you care! Die for me!..."

Fight him for me.
Take him on like a man,
and show the world
why I chose him
as your foe.
Why would I not
make sure that you win
If I'm chosen as
yo' sacrosanct whore.

Then, you can
stand before God
as some glorified clod
who will father the child
of our dreams,
who will conquer the world
with it's necklace of pearls
and make a queen-mother
outta me.

AAAAiiiiiyeeeeeee!!
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The Ocean Is The End Of The Road

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E-mail has really slowed down in the discussion groups I participate in. Maybe it's because people prefer texting. I don't see any difference between texting and chat rooms except that not as many people swarm together simultaneously. I don't do either. Chat rooms never took my fancy and texting seems more like something the younger crowd does to flirt and carry on like the baby factories they are. It's expensive from what I hear.

I may become somewhat of a drunk again. The hard stuff seems to help with the arthritis. Why not booze it up if it helps stave of the poison I'm taking the medicos call "medicine". Booze doesn't really help with the pain, but it does seem to distract from my focus on my medical condition. i spend just about my entire day doing something that serves my illness, and a drink or two of vodka lets me consider other things.

It doesn't matter what other things I consider either. I went over to my brother's house late yesterday afternoon to return something of his I had borrowed and though he was not home yet, his wife was and she had visitors. Her twin grandsons are still here, and a woman named Beth was up visiting from Wilmington.

She's the friend of a friend of my brothers who has left her car filled with her stuff parked over in the corner of his yard. She intended to buy a house in Wilmington and make a new home there, but so far only has rented a small apartment until she finds an area of Wilmington she thinks would be nice to live in.

It might be difficult for me to make a decision about which section of Wilmington I'd choose to buy a house make a home of. It's grown so much since the government finished InterState-40 to the north side of town. It still has a small town atmosphere to some degree, but the big money in moving in and there are huge shopping centers popping up all over the place.

The Cape Fear River is the immovable object that controls how the city/town grows. The government is finally building a huge bypass around the northern part of the city. It's taking a long time because there are so many swamps to pass through. That's the same problem all of the coastal towns have along the coastal plains. The water that drains from the Appalachian mountains has gotta go somewhere before it gets to the ocean, and when it gets to the flatlands the rivers get shallow and the water spills out over the river banks into the delta regions.

It's an engineering problem that has been faced before all along the Atlantic coast, but the place I've seen it most frequently was when they attempted to run I-65 above Mobile, Alabama. They dug deep through the mucky part of the swamps there to put a long bridge over the Mobile River, and just before they turned the traffic into it the whole deal slid at least ten feet south, and they had to tear it all down and start again. It took years longer than expected.

The construction around Wilmington seems to be about done, and they have traffic on it, and it seems to be holding up real good. Now they have to cross the Cape Fear River, which should be that big a deal, but after they get across the river they run into more swamps that are bigger and probably deeper. If I were wealthy I'd buy all the land I could where the bridge ends on the southwest side of the Cape Fear. Most of it is already owned by Dupont, so even if I were rich now it would probably be too late.

The town I live in is about half-way between Raleigh and Wilmington, and I'm quite satisfied with my location. I can go to either city in an hour. The woman I was talking with at my brother's house stated that the reason she chose Wilmington to move to from Cincinnati, Ohio, was that it has lots of cultural activities. There are gonna be lots more in the near future. Roads mean everything to new growth.
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