A Dime Short Of C#

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That's just an expression to me. It may be more or less than one dime. The solfeggio C is pitched a little higher than Middle C. I was singing the vowels tonight and I kept coming back to this one note to sing little scales putting an "h" in from of each vowel in turn a-e-i-o-u, and I got curious about that tone, and so I switched on my digital piano (that I never have to tune), and discovered that C#6 was the closest to it, but the real tone was just a tad lower than a true C#.

Remember how I once told you about how Johnny's dogs were born next door, and when they were puppies and tried to follow me home I tried to shoosh them back home by waving my arms at them and stomping the ground at them to turn them around. But, they kept following me until I turned around and screamed at them in a single note, and they went back to Johnny's house lickety split. I hummed that tone until I got back to my house and could find it on my keyboard, and it was C#.

I'm wondering if I've been screaming at people in C# and it works the same way with humans as it does with doGs? It's not like my screaming startled my listeners and they run lak a dog through the everglades, but I may have correctly observed that they groaned and rolled their eyes as if to question my motives. Yet, things seem to smooth out considerably if I reframe to Bb minor and sing as if I'm tortured by love sickness.

It tickled me when I found out the note I naturally reach for without a tuning fork is C#. It might have tickled me more to suddenly be inspired to pick out the tune I'd been singing in the chord of C# Major without hesitation or missing a lick. It made me so smugly pleased with myself I immediately started playing the Major and minor scales all over following the Circle of Fifths.

That may seem silly to real musicians who have been playing the scales all their adult lives and much of their childhood. I only taught myself the scales from researching the internet for how to do it in the last couple of years. The most tedious part of it for me was learning which finger needed to go where to do it the right way. All of it and more is readily available for free on the internet.

I took piano lessons briefly in the third grade. I may have had something like they give kids drugs like Ritalin to slow them down. I could not sit at a piano long enough back then to conquer the scales. I must have copped an attitude about sticking with it years ago when I joined the high school band. Nothing would have helped me more musically later on than learning the scales way back then.

It's still a big thrill for me to sit down and play the scales. I hardly play anything else because I still haven't learned to play chords with both hands smoothly. I don't know whether I'm avoiding it for fear of failure or that I'm fairly satisfied knowing that the longer I play the scales the deeper they'll be embedded in my subconscious.

A long time ago, at least thirty years, because it happened before I married my second wife, we lived in Key West where we met, and I took music classes full time at the community college to get money to live on from the GI Bill.

I failed the music theory classes mostly because I didn't know the scales. If I had, I could have worked out the theory assignments, if nothing else by counting out the notes pretty much the same way a kid adds and subtracts numbers by counting their fingers. I didn't have a process I could rely on for learning music. I didn't know how to learn how to learn like I did with history and social studies. I even learned math better than music theory.

I knew it wasn't too late for learning the scales to help me. Doing it was fulfilling a life time dream, and sort of anticlimactic. Being able to walk over to my piano tonight and consciously work out an understanding about what made me curious was such a big deal to me, and then to immediately play all the notes in C# without hesitation was like a sweet topping on some birthday cake.

The opening part of this entry is an e-mail response I had with a musician friend. It's like knowing the scales with my fingers gives me the ability to talk music with people who are much more adept at playing music than me. It doesn't help me to play music at a high level of complexity with them immediately, but it does allow me to think that if I worked at it a while I might be able to fill in the blanks here and there.
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Late Figs

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There are two big, fat figs left on my fig tree. I've never had figs wait this long to ripen. One of them is just now turning a little bit brown. The trick is for me to let it ripen and grab it for myself before the birds or bugs get it for they hungry selves. No blame. It's a race against ti-me. The birds can always fly to another tree like my brother's fig tree next door.

The Mysterious Stranger, the story by Mark Twain, still haunts me. I figured out yesterday this story is metaphor for his remembering vision. I got my own. It's his description of what angels are like that fascinated me. He offers up a very good description of a docetic spirit such as was promulgated by groups of early Christians who were labeled the Gnostics.

The story describes what Twain thought angels are like. For one, they're not humans, because they are immortal. They're innocent of guilt and arrogance, and they don't know why humans judge events and things as right or wrong. Angels do not possess what Twain calls a Moral Sense (sic). He employs parables and metaphors through out the story to illustrate his point.

This story is not just Twain's remembering vision I find similar to mine. Especially how he describes war and more wars as the main feature of mankind. I saw stuff like that too. Moreover, it's how the angel he calls Satan took the boys he befriended on astral travel trips all over the world. I've been there and done that, but I haven't considered that there might have been an angel behind it.

This leads me to think of modeling or mimicry and imitation. Imitating humans can bring me the things of humans and their societies. Modeling angels and/or docetic spirits is more complex. Already learned things have to be tossed out and other rituals have to be mastered. All without the guidance of knowing right from wrong. What a drag, man.

I'm just channeling out of the Twain story. I wouldn't know the truth if it bit me on the ass. Honestly, I've never considered what the attributes of an angel might be. There was an argument on a discussion list by a Viet Nam veteran who seemed indignant about somebody claiming there were guardian angels for people in trouble. Where were they when he needed them. It reminded me of a poem I once wrote I entitled Where Is God When You Need Him.

Twain's conclusions might explain that. If angels aren't possessed of a Moral Sense because they're immortal, then it makes sense that they wouldn't feel obligated to humans to prevent their death or some other human catastrophe.

Modeling angels to be-co-me one with them seems impossible to do. They're angels. Most people confess to not being able to see them. Especially if they're all caught up in trying to save their souls or to become immortal along with having to bring home the bacon.

To me it has to happen on a random basis. Like meeting the Buddha on the road all accidental like after you've tried to be like him all your life, and he passes you by. Like the biblical character Saul who was on the road to Damascus and was blinded by the light.

Modeling angels is a matter of planned serendipity. Meeting up with them is hardly an event one arranges. Like death, it's always unexpected. In other ways it's like the lyrics in the pop song The Gambler describe. "You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run...".

The people I looked back at and wondered if they were angels have had similar "qualities". I hesitate to write that what I saw them as indicated something as substantial as "attributes". Maybe how Twain described angels fits those "people". It's that lack of a Moral Sense as a description that grabs me as being a simile for what I grokked from them.
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The Smug Satisfaction Of The Self-Righteous

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First a short, not too severe drought, and now unending rain for a week with floods galore. One thing is sure about the weather. Eventually it will change. As long as there are equinoxes and solstices it has no choice. Is the term "weather" a noun?

It really surprises me sometime that my personal conclusion that humans can only accuse other people of being what they think they would be like if they behaved like they interpret the other human to be acting. This woman on a discussion list I'm fixing to get kicked off of, who called her own self a "fat lady" (I have no idea if she sings), accused this guy of being "preachy" because he likes to explore at length as he writes. I kinda knew that it wouldn't be long before she started preaching to him and filling him up with unsolicited advice she herself never follows one day later.

I have an old friend who unmitigatedly advises people to follow the same diet that forces him to take purple pills to deal with the results of his own inflated opinion of the diet. Is he aware that he's doing this misdeed to the people he wants to respect his experience and wisdom. Not a bit of it. Nada. Zip shit. He just goes on advising people to act like he thinks he does, and attending funerals with the smug satisfaction of the self-righteous.

It's easy enough to make judgment of other people's opinions, and accuse them of being like I would be if I did that, but going through the motions of taking my own advice is hard work. The problem is that its difficult for me to monitor what I'm saying or writing while I'm "seeing" the content of what I say or write in the real time of when I'm composing it.

Ad libbing is a lot easier to do when I don't pay much attention to what I'm actually saying or writing. It's pretty well understood by me that I generally write to capture drifting thoughts with words for the specific purpose of being less clumsy in speech when I talk the talk. It's a hit or miss preoccupation. A crap shoot. Occasionally I'm right on when I utter my inane tossed word salad, and other times I'm not even in the ball park.

It was only when I figured out what the psychological concept of projection was that I was able to realize and predict other people's behavior by what they proclaimed about... anything. Any other person, animal of inanimate object will do for the purpose of accusing other humans of being like the accusers opine themselves to be like.

I don't know why that had to happen first. The process that determined that I would realize other people were betraying what they didn't know unconsciously about themselves by what they accused other people of being like. I do know it didn't take that much longer to figure out I was doing what I accused them of. Thereby betraying my own unconscious view of the sensory dimension.

To a large degree I've made myself aware that I'm just as vulnerable to other people's observations as they are to mine. It's not an easy thing to do. The hard part is realizing what I'm doing when I do it. If I can or do become aware I'm betraying myself with my judgments of the other, while I'm doing it or soon, real soon, after, then I can stop doing that, for a while, but soon enow I find myself doing it again. It can be very discouraging.

Recently I've become aware of a doctor with unusual ideas about what makes people sick, including rheumatoid arthritis, and he claims it's the excretions of bacteria in our gut lining that does it. A cure is effected by doing what it takes to kill the harmful ones and stimulate the growth of the good bacteria. He's a doctor, so the cure he recommends for RA people is a prescription drug. My doctors don't seem like they'd give me a prescription for a drug that might cure me. I'll ask anyway. Whatta they gonna do? Kill me faster than usual?

I was at the over-the-counter drugs shelves at the drug store and looking for a supplement of Acetyl L-Carnitine and Alpha lipoic acid mixed together because I am running out of what I have. I wasn't having any luck finding what I wanted among the numerous supplements the drug stores love to sell.

Maybe it was my taking so long that caused the big (I mean real big) middle-aged black man, sitting on the benches that the prescription fillers provide when their customers have to wait a while, good-naturedly asked me if I'd found what I was looking for. I just had found it, and showed it to him as a matter of friendliness and courtesy.

He asked me what I was taking this hard-to-pronounce supplement for? I told him it was for rheumatoid arthritis, and he sighed. "You don't need that", he said, "what you need is a teaspoon of wild honey and a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, and that will take care of your arthritis."

I repeated what he said to make sure I got it right, but I just said "vinegar" and honey. He leaned forward to correct me, and said, "No, not just vinegar, it's gotta be apple vinegar!" I thanked him and left to pick up the ingredients. He reminded me of Esther, one of the black women who helped my mother with the cooking and cleaning house. Anybody who reminds me of her gets my instant trust.

The concoction doesn't taste bad at all. The honey keeps it from tasting too much like medicine. What I'm wondering since I read about the excrement from gut bacteria is whether apple cider vinegar kills those bacteria in my gut. I know they're in there. Why else would I have RA? Time will tell if my impulse is once again correct. '-)
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Twain's Angel Named Satan

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It's unusual for me to read a book these days. I did yesterday, but the tale wasn't that long, and it could easily be called a short story. I don't really know what criteria is used to label it a short story or a novel. It was written by Mark Twain, but he died in 1910 before he could publish it. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

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

The chances are that I won't dig too deep into how the publishers decided on what to print as the compendium of the several versions that were available after his death. Apparently, there were at least three endings to choose from. Here is a link to the version I read. This site is pretty well laid out and its easy to click from chapter to chapter through it:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger/Chapter_1

The overly long post I wrote to one of the discussion groups I participate in was done in the throes of excitement I experienced as I easily read my way through the story. I stated excitedly in that post that there was a real possibility that I read this book or saw the Hollywood film when I was a kid that set me off exploring the internet to find out more about it.

The whole story intrigued me. The main character was an angel named Satan who claimed to be the nephew of the Biblical angel of the same name who had fallen from grace and was ejected from heaven. The most shocking part could have been that Satan, as mentor to the narrator, revealed to him almost the same vision word for word as my own "remembering vision" that happened sixty years after Twain's death.

I've read similar accounts of other writers visions in which they were shown a personal form of the history of Earth, but Twain's version was ghastly close to my own. Particular about how the vision was mostly about the history of war and bigger and better weapons over the centuries to the present time. The story line of our mutual vision is ongoing and will be until life can't hang out here anymore. The media news is always about the various wars going on all over the Earth simultaneously.

As I read the story at one sitting (it only took 4-5 hours) it became apparent that the roles of both mentor and apprentice could have been about me. In real life I've played both roles with aplomb. More similar to my own life story is that the various roles I identified with included the cowardly parts of the narrator.

Its easy for me to yield to the temptation that the last story Twain tried to tell before he died was so similar to my experience with Edgar Allan Poe's ghost that took me around the universe in a manner similar to that described in Twain's story. My opinion seems to be that this is a ancient theme with multiple variations, virtually "the old, old story" I heard so much about in Sunday School, and a hymn by the same name.

The weather is finally changing. It's rained all night and is forecast to rain at least through tonight too. The rain is the result of a cool front slowly passing our way, and bringing cooler temperatures and less humidity.

The "less humidity" is the comforting part of the forecast. It's supposed to cool off at night for better sleeping too. I couldn't take enough clothes off yesterday to cool down, and today my feet are cold. A new record for high temperatures was easily set this summer. "The end is near." '-)
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Calcified Bones And Aging Pine Bark

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"Your comment about "unconditional love" was instructive to me by reflection. The docetic spirit that hangs around with my me represents agape love because of my personal belief that love develops between entities of all sorts only because they are around each other a lot. For example, people who unexplainably "fall in love" with co-workers they don't even like, which always surprises me about how it makes eventual parting such sweet sorrow.  

Do you suppose the saying "Love thine enemy as yo'self" prevails when we hurl our subjective projections upon others in order to accuse them of being "the enemy"? Was Pogo right?"

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Pogo? Nobody is old enough to remember Pogo, are they?

If I respond to e-mail in the morning before I compose my almost daily blog entry, I sometime feel faintly compelled to continue the line of thought I wrote about in my earlier e-mail replies. On the contrary, if I compose a blog entry previous to writing e-mail responses my pen pals get an unsolicited dose of bloggery. It's impossible to keep the two activities separate. There is only one of me, and that's Me. Also. "Thou shalt have no other God before me."

My i/magi/nation runs wild on my me so-me-ti-me. The "natives" in my i'magi-nation get restless. Do you suppose one magi might be labeled a magician?

I have used my own reframed term "imaginator" occasionally when writing. I can't confidently claim to have invented or coined imaginator as a new word. I used it to indicate the mental facility employed by creative people for imagining abstracted constructions as opposed to defining an inherent ability (a inborn faculty) to process those abstracted images. In any case, I intended to indicate location, location, location.

If I want to abstract some images to facilitate the oratory that conveys my intent, I take those imaginary abstracted constructions to a specific place to let it be so. Then, I kick back in various ways to await the assigned genie's return to his coop/bottle/place with the requested material.

I like using i/magi/native or i/magi/nation instead of imaginator. Quite simply, the very idea of heaven as a nation of the magi just "sounds" right. It's more useful to me in face to face encounters when all the other aspects of my self-generated persona has been honed to a specific sharp edge.

It's also consistent with my experiences as a psychonaut and what the world looks like from that solipsistic stump-hole. Framed by the aging bark that's nearly always, like calcified bones, the last part of a clear-cut, yellow long leaf southern pine to go.

I lived near an old man who owned several thousand acres of primordial long leaf pine that was the only ones left by repute for far and wide. He had a sawmill he kept a black bear chained up to nearby the machinery, and five grown sons. I heard he died just after I joined the Navy.

This old man's youngest son was five or six years older than me. The only son that was anywhere near friendly to me, but that was probably due to age differences. I knew more about these men from occasional gossip than I ever witnessed. My only regret was that I never got to see that remaining virgin forest before they clear cut it while I was away in the military.

The old man was reputedly tough. Violently tough. He literally carried a big stick and would dare anybody to walk up to that chained up black bear and whack him like he did. It was told that his sons had to do that to prove their manhood. The youngest one, the only one I had a speaking relationship with, proved himself not able to do it, although he was the largest son by size. Eventually, and sadly to me, he died an alcoholic.

Not long before he died he saw me driving by the open shed he sat and drank likker straight from the gallon bottles he shared with his compadres and fellow drunks, and waved me in to talk. He was soused, and I didn't wanna do it, but the bonds were too strong for me to turn my back on him.

In hindsight, I sorta think he knew his time was getting near or nearer, and he wanted to clear some things up about his relationship with my father. They had gotten close briefly after the old man died. He was bitter about how my father, a teetotaler with an unmerciful attitude about taking a drink, had hurt him horribly by turning his back on him for being an alcoholic.

This wasn't the first time I'd taken shit from the people my opinionated father abused by his arrogant haughtiness. This guy hadn't even been one of his agriculture students. There were thousands of them, and more than I ever wanted to know about had a little something to tell me, as if my father's sins were visited upon me, and there won't no "as if" about it.

As far as I'm concerned I finally figured out why my father pissed so many people off with his idealism and arrogant demeanor. I questioned my father with the same fervid intensity I develop with complete strangers. I questioned him from the time I could talk until he couldn't make sense of the world anymore. He never knew why people reacted like they did to him. It hurt him that they felt hurt. Probably even moreso.

He grew up in the remnants of an aristocratic society that because of war became a failed political state. His grandfather fought in that war to preserve his plantation of several thousand acres of cleared cotton land, and two hundred or more slaves to make it profitable. They lost the war, but not the aristocratic arrogance that made them appear unconsciously to act dismissively toward underlings. Including their own children. How else were they to learn how they must act to carry the day,

The Jim Crow view of life made sure he was surround by this snobbish, aristocratic agrarian attitude. It was the status quo he had no reason or intention of abandoning. It was his way of life. Only the Civil Rights laws of the early sixties ever made him question the rightness of his cause, but by then it was too late for him to learn new tricks.

As far as what me and my siblings inherited from "the rightness of his cause", it might appear that my older sisters were able to cope more readily than me and my brothers. On that note, I'm four and a half years older than my younger brother, and eight years older than my youngest brother. My sense of it is that they literally found it easier to adapt to the new order, with our youngest brother finding it even easier just eight and four years younger. Neither my mother or my father ever got over it. Not so oddly, most of their caretakers in the latter days were older blacks. Everybody understood everything. Change was/is just as difficult for older blacks as it became for older whites, even though you might think blacks would do it better. We'll all die off, and it won't even matter soon enow.

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Mirrored Rabbit On The Wall...

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I bought a box of colors from Wal-Mart and used the masonite back of a mirror that had been broken and the shards removed. Thats where the "frame" came from. I just used the prepackaged colours right out of the box because I'd never painted before. I wasn't impressed at first because I'm not a schooled painter. I've never taken any art lessons. That's never stopped me before. I sorta trust that something interesting will come out of whatever I get fooled into doing. 

Sometime it takes a while for me to "see" that. It used to cause me a great deal of pain and regret that I could be taken in by charismatics so easily. I've been used by every pervert in the world to prove to me that I am is a fool. But, after the extreme emotional reactions finally calm down and I become inwardly still about being used like Pinocchio, I found that I could be-co-me with my former nemesis's intent, and re-invoke their oratorical skills for myself as if I were them instead of their victim. Some other people need less intimate mentors. 

Saturn conjunct a native's natal Sun creates the self-made man. The conjunction in my natal is wide-spread. A conjunction with the Sun and Moon are usually given ten degrees plus or minus to be labeled a conjunctive aspect. Saturn was in 22 degrees Aries in my natal chart, and the Sun was at zero degree, two minutes, thirty-seven seconds into Taurus. Eight degrees apart. 

That's why it sometimes takes a long time for the tricks of the trade to kick in when I me-me-click (mimic) my resolute predators. I complain about being the last to know so often. If I caught on quicker to what's wot, maybe I could avoid some of the charismatic tricksters that got their claws out for a tasty meal. But, the doubts and fears I endure for such long periods of ti-me cause some quick-studies to reconsider their hasty conclusions, and that makes me a little cocky I suppose, why would it not? I-am-is-me. 

More often than ever, I'm deeply intuiting upon the notion of being born in the Chinese Year of the Hare/Rabbit. Rabbits are prey for a lot of different predators. We taste just like chicken/dinosaurs. I don't stand and fight unless I literally can not possibly under any circumstances get the fuck outta Dodge. I won't defend others too readily either. "Run Forrest, RUN!". That movie really took me in. That's one of the movies that stimulated me along the path of rarely going to movies.

In the times of past,
when I was a boy,
I listened to every word,
and the meaning
of my prayers
was to wash away
the guilt and fears
of doing wrong.
I wasn't strong,
but I'd sing a song.

"What a friend we have..."

The fact that I have a tendency to deal with life's problems by leaving the scene (criminally inspired or no) has brought the damnation of seductive women everywhere on me. It's disgustingly true, but I've been known to leave female companions in the lurch if push comes to shove. I seem to attract the type of woman who "sees" their relationship with me as an avenue to attract other men in the presence of mine enemy. As usual, it took a long ti-me for me to "see" their "seeing", and I still hesitate and lose. It still gives me the blues... so I had to stop... and keep my stopping still.

It's not just women either. In the past, and probably looking forward into the future also, depending on me to be your buddy if you picked a fight with a bunch of ready-made, ass-kicking biker types is not going to improve your chances of getting outta wherever it is unscathed. There's a price to pay you probably won't like, and one that I will not be there to witness.

If I'm with you because you intuited that I was a fool you could use for your own kinky pleasures, I'll create such opportunities as described above to break the spell of your charm, and leave you to hang from your own petards without regret. Why would I not? I don't start fights or respond to such temptations unless there is a briar patch handy.

It may seem as if one of my natural born talents is to create psychological entanglements to serve that specified purpose. I'm too quick to hop on some passing band wagon, any passing bandwagon, and use whatever charismatic skills I've captured from my enablers to go along to get along until I'm outta sight, and mind.
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More Shadowy Mind Games

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In a way I sorta took a day off for the autumnal equinox. I went back to reading and writing all day. That's what I prefer to do. Since I can easily publish anything I like on the internet by my own hand, then, why would I not?

I'm constantly surprised by how people respond to my ability to remember what they write or tell me about themselves. Its no real effort for me because I remember patterns not content. If I remember the pattern, the content emerges automagically from the framework. In my fathers house are many mansions. It reminds me of a pop song from my youth, "I'm my own grandpa..."

The shadows on the wall I walk along as I attempt to reconstitute my constitution have been tricking me lately. The problem for me is that they are not tricking me at all, but rather amazing me that I've never recognized what I suddenly "saw" yesterday out walking.

Yesterday I saw two shadows, and my first impression was that the second shadow I saw was the reflected original shadow cast by the real sun in the real sky upon a real me and placing a real shadow on the concrete sidewalk I trod upon. Now I'm flipped out. I went back today and realize there were actually four shadows of myself in the vicinity, but I might have been wrong about there being a reflected shadow.

The fact that I saw these things that have had to have been there all along has caused me to think about how an artist might think I was stupid for not having seen this phenomena before. I realized that if it wasn't so hot and I wasn't so sweaty and if the passerbys wouldn't think I was crazy and called the cops on their smartphones... I probably could have drawn with a pencil a fair approximation of what is.

For artsy things I need a portal. An entry-way. Inspiration of some sort that I sort of think I have to generate on my own if it don't come natural. Which is my point. The shadows and lines I saw on the sidewalk and in the reflections of the display windows at the strip mall might have been natural. It might have come to me rather than being conjured by desire.
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My Almost First Time

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When I joined the Navy when I was eighteen years old I was technically a virgin. One of the reasons I joined the Navy was to rid myself of this albatross that was emotionally eating me alive. I knew better logically, but it seemed like everybody my age in the world was having rampant sex behind closed doors, and I was the only-est guy in the world who reached eighteen years of without getting it on. How could I have known otherwise? Young. Dumb. Fulla cum. Damn!

The first time I was presented with a real opportunity to be with a woman was a total disaster. It was a disaster for the same reason all my other serious attempts failed. I wasn't ignorant. I was not dumb. I was merely innocent of guilt. I hated that. It may have been the only ti-me in my life I could have claimed truly claim innocence, and it tormented me.

The event that never happened came about due to a fellow sailor I hardly knew. We were both in a holding pattern waiting for the electronic classes we were sent to after boot camp. The classes were organized in such a way that allowed for boot camp graduates to return to their family home for a couple of weeks. I didn't take that leave because I had joined the Navy to get away from "home".

The guy was a gawky, slender guy my own age, but he wasn't a virgin. When he asked me if I wanted to go "get some" I went bat-shit crazy with desire. One of the main reasons was that the girls he had lined up for us was sneaking out of a home for pregnant girls. That was pretty much proof positive they weren't virgins, so only one of us had to be shy on that account.

He had a car. I don't know where it came from. He might have been raised right there in San Diego for all I knew, but he had a car, and that's why this whole thing could happen. The girls were going to sneak out of the home and meet us at a corner not far away from the home.

He drove to the corner where we were supposed to meet them, and two young girls ran from behind some shrubbery real furtively and piled into the car giggling and laughing at the idea that they had snuck out and not gotten caught.

The girl who got into the back seat with me was pretty enough, and emitted that soft glow pregnant women get. She looked at me, seemed satisfied with what she saw, and then without another word she put her arms around my neck and started wildly kissing me. I didn't expect that, and her impulsive reaching sort of scared me a little.

She was a good kisser, and I was, after all, an eighteen year old kid, it didn't take long for me to be real interested. Clothes were removed, but I hesitated. She urged me to "Go ahead, it's okay. You have my permission. Git it on, big boy!" I still hesitated.

The young girl's pleas were distracting the action in the front seat. The guy turned in the seat to ask me what my problem was. Suddenly I found myself saying that I couldn't do it because she was pregnant, and I was afraid I might hurt her if I started poking around up in her belly.

He started to assure me that there wasn't gonna be a problem with that, just to go ahead and git thangs done. By the time I realized that my concerns were unfounded, and turned to "git it on", she had already become disgusted with my innocence and began screaming at the couple in the front seat about providing her with the village idiot.

I didn't wait for the rest of her tirade before I opened the car door jumped out to the street, and started running for my life. I was terrified that I had really been stupid. When I ran until I was out of breath, I thought about what they all had said, and how they had looked at me in disgust, and I started running again.

I didn't know where I was or how to get back to the base, but I finally took a street from which I could see San Diego bay, and the base was located at the north end of the bay. It was a long way from where I found myself, but the long walk finally calmed me down.

I was afraid this guy would tell the sailors back at the school and I'd have to put up with being ridiculed, but that didn't happen. The school started, he flunked out in a few weeks, and I never heard of him or saw him again. I guess I learned a little more about girls than I'd ever allowed. Never again would I think they were merely warm and fuzzy toys to play with. They were extremely capable of causing me real and lasting pain.
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Gnosing Around Like doGs Do

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The topic of yesterday's entry is important to me. My understanding of what gnosis is allows me to move on to another phase of mimicking Prince Chi. Realizing that gnosis is a process I use to acquire knowledge rather than gnosis being the knowledge I seek through it is a big step for me.

I've been out working in the woods again today. I know it's banal, but I'm beginning to see the forest through the trees. I don't know if I wanna write about what I'm doing. I don't know the nayme of the plants. Particularly some of the vines I run into. I can think of five or six different kinds of vines in the piney woods I'm working. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them are psychedelic like the Ayahuasca vines in the Amazon rain forest:

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

It seems too certain that some psychonaut has already checked this out and the community as a whole knows for sure one way or the other.

One of the problems I've had with the vines is that my feet sometimes gets tangled up in them and I fall down. I fell down hard today. About an hour ago. Falling down doesn't bode well for old people with osteopathy problems. Just last week I heard a TV doctor say that over 90% of the old people who fall down and break a hip die within a year or so.

I was late composing this entry yesterday afternoon, and then I went to bed early because of all the work and perspiring I did earlier in the day. Thus, I woke up very early this morning.

Went back to bed and woke up thinking about gnosis as a process. It's like gnosing around to catch the scent of the prey like a doG would do. '-)

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What Gnosis Is

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Don't think for a minute that I don't know I'm making more errors and typos as I get older. For me, that's no real excuse. I've been making mistakes and awkward errata from the git go.

I composed an e-mail post late last night after I'd been working in the woods. I was tired in addition to my normal carelessness. This morning when I re-read the post, even I didn't know what I intended to say. One of the other traits of my dotage is that I find it fairly easy to forgive myself.

Dismissive attitudes seems to be on my mind lately. I copped one this morning to induce a certain person to go ahead and be themselves already. They're gonna do it anyway eventually, and when they do, they'll get the sa-me result that made them run away just like the last ti-me they did it, again, and then they'll run away again to soothe their tripidations..., they'll just run away. No blame.

"Move along! Move along. Nothingness is all that's going on here. Nothing to gawk at. Nothing to squawk about. There ain't nobody hyah but us chickens..."

I wrote a bit about defining "gnosis" this morning that I liked. Nothing I could possibly write would be accurate for all ti-me. I talked about gnosis not as the source or experiential database of universal proportions, but as a process that makes that virtual cornucopia apperceivable. I use "apperceivable" to indicate an extension of perceivable because of the value-added condition of application. I just made that description up by apperception. I like it.

Apperception is a term I became aware of by reading and following up on an article about being an expert. An expert at anything. Damn! I'm shocked! I double-clicked on the link and the article is still available:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-expert-mind

Wonders never cease, but hardly anything ever written on the internet is ever gone for good. This specific article seems timeless, and really provided me with some wonderful insights.

To apperceive something there has to be an identifiable source. People who become experts create that source by installing in memory the appropriate databases to draw the specifications of the the topic or subject of expertise from.

The article linked above uses the process of what it takes to become an expert in the ancient game of chess as an example. The database needed to become a chess expert is to memorize the classic winning strategies of past grand masters for the last century or so. They say it takes about ten years of constant effort to became a true expert on anything.

The term "memory" fascinates me because I'm obsessed with the term "me". I get all goofy about the intricacies of it's implications. Any term in which the consecutive letters "m" and "e" appear, I'm gwine take it apart to "see" it's etymological bejinnings. First by hyphenating it's various parts, and then by how that sounds. Coincidentally, in my piggish rooting it out, smell is the last sense by which I-am-is gets to gnose it.

The process of gnosis is similar to any "exodus" strategy. The useful part of it seems associated with Maslow's "peak experience". The description of which he stole from Moses and his sojourn from Egypt to the heights of Mount Sinai. Of all the Commandments of Mosaic Law the one that has the most power with me states irrefutably, "Thou shalt have no other God before me."

The especiality of this phrase gets me going. Lak' I say-id earlier, I iz obsessed with the scope and reach of this statement. Mostly, because when push co-me-s to shove, I-am-is only gnose One me. It's myself in the first person singular (Adam, pre-Eve). Tossed word salad. Can't express a special part of myself without it. "How 'bout them Saints... eh?"

When an aspiring "expert" does what they need to do to acquire their own database of the classically recognized winning moves of chess for each piece on the 64 squares of the game board by memorizing them, they make these historical games and moves more-of-themselves. By rotely learning these winning moves they create a database they can app-ly. This is the tricky part for all systems of expertise in my opinion.

A chess neophyte has to be able not only to create a classical database as a value-added "more" to themselves (it's actually outside their physical body in what is called the human aura, where all the abstract constructions ex-is-t), they have to be able to consciously perceive it as an ongoing process in order to play chess at an expert level. That's sorta Step #1.

Step #2 is applying the knowledge of Step #1 to the ga-me sot before them in real-time. According to the article in Scientific American, lots of chess enthusiasts are able to create such a database. Relatively few of them can perceive it in their mind's eye in ongoing consciousness, and fewer still employ the tactics they "see" to reach for the right move in the ongoing game and apply it toward checkmate.

Gnosis is not like that for one simple reason. The experiential database already exists in each human aura. They can be brain-dead and it' still around. It's the accumulation of billions of lifetimes on the planet earth, and it's got the equivalent of a unlimited hard drive with more me-mores... ad infinitum. Selah '-)
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Dissing Dismissive Attitudes

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There is a feeling I've been curiously entertaining that has to do with the expression "dismissive attitude". I don't seem all that sure I know if and when I might display such a trait, but I sure have experienced it from others. Dismissive attitudes are not all bad nor intended to get some standardized reaction from those in the know.

I've never spent much or probably any time around aristocratic people. I don't know if they know what being born with royal blood actually means. It might not mean very much at all if you don't have the disposable cash to live on easy street. If you still have the old family silver you can be a blue-blood though.

It's a real medical condition brought about by consuming incremental amounts of the element silver, usually by making tea in silver teapots and drinking such tea out of silver tea cups. If you do that long enough, eventually your skin will take on a bluish colour. My ex-sister in law, the veterinarian, claims as many people do, that feeding her children colloid silver prevents a lot of bacteria problems and wards of the common cold.

As a trained actor (not a gifted actor, but a rather carelessly schooled one), if by some miracle I were allowed to audition for the role of an aristocratic person, I would probably attempt to display a dismissive attitude toward underlings.

There is a good chance I'd get the part. I have before. In fact, that's kinda how I was type-cast as a performer and thus discouraged from seeking a professional career. I got cast in authority roles like old country fathers and/or cops or heavies like Al Capone or even Hitler.

Learning that I was pretty much type-cast was a deep learning for me. It seems to have taken a special kind of person to get me to see and accept this very disturbing information. The Headmaster of the Drama and Speech school compassionately proved up to the job, but it took seven years off and on for him to do it.

When I finally did "get it", I immediately knew what that meant. It meant I wasn't gonna be able to make a living as a professional actor. I had no idea the world saw me in such a limited way. I usually got great reviews when I played those heavy roles, and only so-so reviews for my light-hearted roles.

I appeared to do best of all when there was just me on the stage. There was nobody else there for me to be dismissive toward and thus incur the wrath of an empathetic audience. In my own mind I'm a solo act because I don't have to be responsible for letting someone else's conscience be my guide but the audience. I don't mind taking my chances with them at all.

Watching that video of the experiment with how social class causes people to react sympathetically or not reminded me of how I eventually learned by my own bootstraps that most everybody I've ever encountered takes advantage if they can.

When I was a homeless bum, even other homeless bums acted dismissively toward me. I was always alone, so whatever reactions I might have to having my inferiority proven to me by the lowest of the low, I learned to live with it. I suspect that was the point of the "go ye therefore" instruction.

To speculate further, I was taught that the Southern states that became the Confederacy considered themselves to be an agrarian aristocratic society, and it was this aristocratic society that acted as a bond that made these states a confederacy.

Maybe the War Between The States pretty much happened for the same reasons the Mormons had such a catastrophic encounter with the federal government over multiple wives instead of slavery. Brigham Young and his crowd had the audacity to think they could make their own laws and sit in judgment of the population of Utah as they willed.

That's clearly the same reason there was a Civil War, and the same reason Texas is still a Republic. People want sayso over home and hearth, and they act willing to fight to the death to make it so. I probably hold an unpopular attitude in this regard, but I think these events were necessary for the good of the whole.

I hate being the victim, but I understand the need for the laws of eminent domain. At times the individual has to suffer for the public good. It can be abused. It IS abused. But, "If you wanna make an omelet you gotta crack some eggs." I honestly never dreamed a four-lane freeway would ever be built around the north side of Wilmington, N.C. Now that quaint, moderate-sized seaport can become another pot-holed New York City with rats the size of a donkey.
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The Very Sight Of Me

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A TV program influenced my thinking unexpectedly. The influence was due to a deliberate effort on the part of the experiment's creators to show through their designed scenario the way it is with humans when it comes to how they react to social class issues. The experimenters used an adult actress to play the role of a mother, and a little boy and girl that were both under six years old to play her children.

She parked an older model car that had dents in it and a hubcap missing in a metered parallel parking spot in a middle-class shopping area. She was loudly screaming at the kids when she parked the car. All three of them were dressed in shabby cloths.

She got out of the car and opened the passenger side door, and practically yanked the little boy and girl out of the car, and yelled at them, "If that's how you're gonna act, then you can just walk back home." Leaving the onlookers with dropped jaws, she left the children there on the street, got in the car and drove off. The store owners and the people near them on the street went nuts trying to help the kids.

In a little while she came back to get the kids and the people in the neighborhood got into her case and yelled and screamed about what a terrible mother she was and called the cops.

Later, same actors, same location, but in a snazzy looking expensive car and they wore expensive clothes. They performed the same act from the same script. But, when she left the children there this time, nobody tried to help them, and when she came back to pick them up, nobody said a word to her about her outrageous behavior.

The point of the experiment was to demonstrate that humans only react to the behavior of people they consider their social inferiors. When the skit was over I felt immediate compassion for rich kids. It is a familiar feeling.

I've known quite a few "trust fund kids" who acted truly different from po' people like me. I guess I'd always thought it was the disposable cash that made the difference, and it does, of course, but not for the reasons I'd though before.

This experiment also helped me to understand what I call the "go ye therefore" parable in the KJV of the Holy Bible. This parable was literally instructions for how to live my life for me. I went "therefore" for years and years. I've never really had any sane explanation as to why I chose that path as if it was the one with heart for me.

It's what a body can learn from truly being the low man on the totem pole that is the point of going out into the world empty-handed with no money and no extra clothes or a fixed idea of where you'll end up at. I've written a lot about how even migrant workers looked down on me as dirt beneath their feet. Nobody had any respect for what they read into the very sight of me.

When they saw me standing there beside the road with my dirty sleeping bag and piteous pack of seedy possessions, every impulse they'd ever had to be a preacher or minister or priest of the church came out in them. They weren't picking me up to give me a ride, but to minister to me and provide balm to my threadbare soul. In other words, to seduce me into having sex with them like all men of God are duty-bound to do.

Not all men matriculate into silverbacks. If it wasn't for prostitutes some men would never get the privilege of having sex with female even for recreational purposes, much less procreative purposes. A lotta men are not the real father of the children they're raising as if they were the real father. The invention of DNA tests to be used as a reliable identifier has shown this over and over again.

Who cares? My point is that the beta males who don't impregnate the majority of the females have gotta to something with their needy sex drives. Many of them, instead of using their desires to find mates for procreation use their desires to please each other. Why would they not? After all, not being a silverback IS chopped-liver.

Another activity non-silverbacks indulge in is becoming a shaman or medicine man. A sha-me-d man can be-co-me a shaman. Others can be-co-me me-dic-s. It's merely the difference between working mojos with either numbers or woids.

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A Rose Called Charley

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The David Letterman style of humor reminds me of Johnny Carson and Jack Benny. I thought they were the cat's meow. Sometime I only tune in for the opening dialog at the beginning of the show. There are a lotta reruns now. Obviously there's no blame in that. Dave is older and as rich as Midas and it would be silly to think he's not going to take a lotta vacations to enjoy his success. I'm a big fan, but I click around a lot about that time of night now.

Since the only television shows I receive at all with my middling, weather-dependent, over-the-air outside antenna reception, I don't have a large selection of programs to choose from if I wanna escape the reruns. Under ten. Even then, there is significant repetition of the same networks, and lots and lots of reruns.

Sometime I watch the Charlie Rose show if its interesting enough at the moment I tune in. I'm not too crazy over his interviews with politicians. He is, and has said so frequently, but I'm not. It doesn't intrigue me to watch and see if he can find the chink in their armor. It's not a spectator sport I get into.

In my opinion, Charlie Rose does a great job of interviewing writers and authors of all kinds. He's not too hot in my warped outlook with actors and directors and producers. When there are two or three people around his table I usually move on. There ain't no mystery why they're there. Its to promote their latest work. Charley seems to act like he's capitulated to their being there solely for the money. Subtlety don't appear to be Charlie's strong suite.

His guest tonight was a newspaper columnist and noted TV pundit that shows up on a lot of the Sunday morning news programs on various channels. He usually represents the conservative point of view. He appears on the PBS nightly news show on Friday with a liberal pundit for balance, and they kid around knowingly with the program's host.

They like to act like they're being genteel sophisticated, I keep getting the feeling they would rather be duking it out than smiling for the camera and uttering the independent . I don't believe that part of it, but they do balance the conservative/liberal outlook with the host's humorous interventions.

It wasn't the guest pundit that said something wise that caught my attention. As a matter of fact I had gone downstairs to get something from the kitchen, and heard Charlie Rose make this remark to summarize what his guest pundit stated. He said, as a recap of his guest's point of view:

"If I can frame the question I can determine the answer."

It's just my measly-assed opinion, but I think one or the other of the many variations upon this theme is some kind of universal law. It's the main principle of most vegetable oracles, and that might include mineral oracles like the one at Delphi too.

It's the heart and soul of my irreverent statement that just about any warm body will automagically become (be-co-me) an oracle to answer the question I've deliberately framed to conjure that specific result, and they do it with shock at first, but eventually there eyes become filled with wonderment and with great joy.

It seems to amaze people in general that they can reach for a source of very profound propensities in order to answer a question they don't think they could normally answer at all. My favorite name for that source is "the cornucopia".

Sometime I associate it with cosmic consciousness or the Akashic Records, and I can't really miss using any or all of that sources nay-me-s. It seems rude to explain myself when I assisting these warm bodies (meaning anybody can do it) to let go of who-they-think-they-are in order to access something they're terribly familiar with on a tremulous, fleeting basis.

A well-formed question can break through their defenses like cracking an egg on a rock. With a little luck and a lotta hutzpah they've done it before they can stop what they didn't know they could do. What is simple is easy.

That's about the best and only-est trick I really know how to do. People get pissed at me because I don't take advantage of the gratitude. They want me to do it. They're dying to be used by a shyster. What an adventure... eh?

I've played around the edges with using my rough-hewn, self-made, clumsily honed talent for manipulating the way some people view the world. I ain't a natural at it. I don't have the killer instinct to go for the throat, and in general, I am is not ambitious.

At one time I sorta thought I was or could be ambitious, but acting it out with some depth of sincerity gets in the way of me approaching life in the manner that make MY hair stand on end, and selfishly, I'm fairly apathetic about their need to be used callously.

To look at it from my point of view I have faith and act like betting on my one-trick pony is the very best, most useful act I can inflict upon the other. How can introducing to their own talent for grokking the source not provide them with the individuation they don't have a clue will truly satisfy them.

All seekers are looking for themselves. Most don't appear or seem to know that's what they're looking for. They state tersely they do, but if they did they wouldn't be looking, and they're looking. It might be a little safer if they wore the armor of the Knights Of The Round Table (Zodiac).

Searching for an identity that satisfies you can be a perilous task. Sometimes the threat can be from your own family. From your parents or your siblings or extended family. If you get murdered in America, it's probably gonna be family or a close friend that's gonna do you in. Don't you just hate that?

Disgustingly enough, there is a map for that. It's popularly called The Six O'clock News. It's a TV show that comes on right after the soap operas, and it's jazzed with pathos to engage compassion on the face of it, but it solicits the same murderous rage displayed in the great coliseums from ti-me immemorial.

A certain class of people are as addicted to the blood and guts fireworks of murder and mayhem of the nightly six o'clock. They are BIG fans. They're the same NASCAR fans who could care less who wins and loses as long as they're present and got bragging rights on personally witnessing somebody get fried in a fiery, long drawn out wreck of all wrecks.

All professional sports are predicated on humanity's love of a good killing either man or beast. Standup comedians make their living scaring the bejesus outta people with insights to the pathetic dilemmas and stress of how death is always unexpected.

Third-world countries seem to love animal fights that are illegal in the United States. Dog fights. Cock fights. Bear fights. Its gotta be "to the death" or what's the point? People love a good, ugly killing. The legality of it seems to be a mere technicality. It's said that the common society of man won't obey a law they find distasteful. Living in a country that has the highest percentage of their citizens doing hard time seems proof of that pudding.
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Nay-me-s That Precede "Pride"

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Maybe if I compose a blog entry before I go work in the woods I can make more sense, but I sorta doubt it. I've been accused of not making much sense in the best of situations as well as the worst, so I guess it really doesn't matter at all when or even if I write. It's a real good then, then, that I do it for-me.

If I had any sense I'd be alarmed that this summer's record-setting heat wave acts acts as proof positive that global warming is progressing along quite nicely. Nicely? It's progressing. That's all I need to know, but it's not a phenomena that fills my heart with overflowing love for God, the truth, and the American way.

America doesn't seem to have "a way" anymore, and maybe it never did. What I'm observing is that since Obama got elected I'm seeing lots of different races that emigrated from lots of different cultures are showing up acting important on TV now. It seems like black American actually can speak English the rest of the world can understand if they got a good enough reason to try.

That's a big deal and an indication of huge progress in the United States of America. I didn't understand this until I found myself telling a local Indian friend about what I thought his previously mentioned problem was. He has really developed as an entrepreneur, but he said that he still felt some discrimination from other entrepreneurs of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. "I hope my die he did."

"I hope my die he did." is a phrase only the Coharie and Lumber River Indians use. Well, maybe not "only". These local Indians use their own lingo as a form of tribal identity. They don't remember any of their original Indian language, so what they speak both to the world and to each other is a variation of English that identifies them to each other in the world outside or away from the coastal plains of North and South Carolina.

My friend confronted me instantly. What right have I to discriminate against him for the way he uses English? I tried to explain myself. I must have done pretty good, because once I pointed out that when the Latinos he rents trailers to talk among themselves in Spanish, and he speaks minimal Spanish, how can he know or not whether what they're saying in Spanish is a plot to murder him?

He slumped his shoulders with his elbows an his knees, and laid his face in his hands in total submission to his new understanding. "You're right. I try to treat them fairly, but sometimes I do think they're plotting against me." The word on the street is that the Latinos love him because he's honest and fair.

The fact that people speaking in a foreign tongue makes most people suspicious the speakers might be platting against them is an old, old story. But, it can be particularly damaging if their conversation is about money and profit, and making a deal with a mere handshake as he does.

That's why I suggested to my Indian friend that he stop using the language that identifies him as an Indian to other Indians when he's conducting business with businessmen of various races or from different cultures. Especially "damn Yankees" that move here from up North. '-)

It's possible for his prospective business partners to think he's trying to hide something by the way he talks about the deal they're engaged in making. In his mind he thinks he's just showing pride in being an Indian, but if their reason for coming together is not for planning a monthly PowWow, such pride could be missing the point.
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Double Trouble

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Writing at night makes saying what I see in the interim more difficult than it has to be. For one thing it becomes harder to get to sleep. Writing activates my brain and if I do it just before I go to bed it takes a while to reach the serenity it needs to let go of the world.

I don't think it was just the writing that kept me awake. The fact that I had been overcharged because the meter reader made a mistake was on my mind and my nerves. I've had trouble with the county water department people before. Dealing with them is like death and taxes. I can't win because they can't lose. They will just take my property and sell it on the courthouse steps.

After laying awake until around three in the morning I got up and took a Tylenol 3 pill hoping that it would relax me enough to fall asleep. It did help, but I tossed and turned until around eight o'clock this morning and decided to get up to see if I'd received any e-mail that would give me an excuse or subject to write about. No. Nobody loves me.

Not being married and living alone is not very appealing to many people. I've heard probably every reason in the world that some people offer as an excuse for remaining married. Even after they spend considerable amounts of time complaining about being in that predicament. I never get invited anywhere couples will predominate. No blame. People don't keep asking if I keep saying no.

It sorta amazes me that I'm still finding a ripe fig or two on my tree this late in the season. As I've mentioned before, a big flock of birds, probably starlings, descended upon the tree right when the fruit was getting ripe and they ate every fig except the immature ones. There were hardly any figs left for me to eat. I picked about ten figs yesterday and they were tasty. Some of them seemed to have developed a tougher skin than usual, but they were very sweet.

Maybe it's because there was no e-mail to provide an interesting topic to write about, I turned on the TV to catch the weather report. After that I clicked on the PBS station to see if there were any interesting travel programs on. A program about the National Parks was showing some old films about an expedition by some rich folk to a series of the Parks on the west coast. Yosemite National Park was featured.

The term "Yosemite" is familiar to me in another way besides being the place I jumped off a cliff to commit suicide after I had turned blue from a freak snow storm one summer. The second time I was in the Navy I was stationed on a destroyer tender named the U.S.S. Yosemite. In a way, I guess I committed a kind of suicide on that ship too.

The ship was the home of the Admiral who commanded the Atlantic fleet. Because of this it was renown for being very "spit and polish". It was a choice assignment for me because of the nuclear torpedoes and rocketry I'd been schooled for. That job revealed to me a side of myself that was never going to go away or be fairly accounted for. My kismet was revealed to me so irrefutably it changed how I viewed life on Earth.

The schooling had some bearing on why I re-enlisted four years after being honorably discharged from my first enlistment. Mostly, however, truth be known, I re-enlisted in the Navy to get out of my first marriage.

My barely considered ploy didn't work. Tough lady. Eventually I had to feign dissembly and run for my life. Now, if the lady is still alive, she detests the very mention of me with the same passion she pretended to love me. I haven't laid eyes on her for at least twenty years nor our daughter in ten. "What's love got to do with it?"

Love, as far as it goes with me, is all about being around people. I agree that "Absence makes the heart grow fonder.", but for me, there has to be a foundation of personal community for my absence from a person to create a lingering fondness. I've moved around too much for there to be much love in my life.

I don't mourn the death of many people, and don't expect to be mourned upon the occasion of my own death. Some people might celebrate joyously upon learning of my death, if they don't die themselves first. Some people who made life a little miserable for me have already died. I don't feel much of a victory.

This summer has pretty much proved to me that global warming is a fact. I don't much believe it's man-made. The Earth is too large for that. There are documentaries by these experts that explain how the ocean used to cover the place I live not that long ago, and they reference indiginous camp sites they've explored ten miles out on the Trans-Atlantic shelf.

The real problem with global warming as I've personally observed it is the absence of bees to pollinate plants. That's gonna be a real drag, man, but I'll probably croak via the aging process before it gets too devastating. Previously, I've never encountered the perculiarity of the honey bees' reaction to persistent hot weather.

The local weathermen say this is the hottest summer on record. It's been over 95° (35° C) more days than has ever been recorded ere now, and the seven-day forecast predicts at least seven more days of extreme temperatures to extend that record even more. I'm gone help by burning some more ground cover today. '-)
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All Beliefs Die Out Eventually

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Here it is at eight o'clock at night and I completely forgot about writing a blog entry. I've been out in the woods again today. I burned off more ground cover than I expected to. The humidity has dropped considerably, and the weather people expect it to stay relatively low for a couple more days. Perhaps I'll get the rest of what I wanna burn off done by then.

This is not gonna be a quick turnaround. The woods I'm working in were ravaged by two hurricanes one after the other during one season. Both times the eye of those hurricanes came right over my house. The first hurricane soaked the ground to the roots, and the second hurricane blew the trees over roots and all.

It was a pine forest full of mature trees. By the time the weather straightened out most of the yellow southern pine trees on my property were on the ground. Fortunately for me, an old friend of my family had a lumber crew operating nearby, and he paid me a thousand dollars to cut what lumber he could out of it.

He hauled at least $15,000 worth of timber away. It was painful to go from living in an idealistic setting that my friends sort of envied me for, to living in what looked like a combat zone in a war. The value of my property dropped way more than half it's former listing.

Ten years has passed since the two hurricanes struck. The ground cover still had most of the trash that was left over from all those trees going down. The land itself was torn all to pieces from the timber company's logging machines. I was so saddened by the whole deal I couldn't bear to mess with it.

Two years ago I tried to clean up some of it in order to see the family pond from my house. The pond is about a hundred yards west of my house and during the winter the sun sets over it. The work I did there hasn't paid off too well. Many of the young trees I left to mature died when I burned that section off. I'm trying to be more careful this time.

After I burn what I can off I plan to rake the rest of it up and plant some centipede grass over it and rake it again in hope the seed will take. In any case it'll take at least two years for the grass to start appearing. I planted the lawn around my house with centipede without knowing it took so long to mature, but when it did it looked real good.

It took me by surprise that there haven't been more copycat Koran burnings. Evangelicals can be fairly violent people. To me they qualify as the American equivalent of the Taliban, but most conservative types associated with most of the cultures I'm familiar with are like that. This will never change, but the evangelical movement is not really Christianity as it's been regarded in the past.

They may call their religion Christianity and they may continue to use the KJV as their guidebook, but it seems to go beyond the general categories of contemporary Protestantism and/or Catholicism or Mormonism or whatever old people are continuing until they die out.
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Hope, The Tool Of Capitalism

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It was cooler last night. Not cool enough to use more than a sheet as bed covers. Sometime I even had to remove the sheet, but it was a lot better than laying in my own sweat all night or almost worse, running the loud window air-conditioner. As I get older and my body doesn't adapt to it's surrounding like it used to, I almost wished I'd have thought about providing for myself in my old age mo' bettah. Almost....

I keep hearing myself say, "That was then, this is now." Is that the difference between "this" and "that"? I appear to be transiting to an attitude of not indulging either the past or the future so much any more, but only right now. It's not that much of a choice. If I let myself get drifty and not take care of the business of life that's sot before me it only gets more complicated and more dispiriting.

A friend or at least a frequent acquaintance appears to be letting whatever integrity he possessed float away from him. It's like he was floating on the ocean on a collection of individual floating devices that held him high out of the water, and one by one they have drifted away leaving his head barely above the surface.

My concern is that he only thinks he has hit bottom already. What good would it do to convince him that he hasn't yet? He has a job. A house to live it. An old Toyota truck to drive that he manages to keep running. It makes me feel a little bit like a monster to wish for him that he would go ahead and lose it all.

In my opinion he needs to be reduced to realizing that all he has ever had of value is wit and grit. Both are indispensable attributes that can themselves be lost, and if they are, then all hope is gone. Hope is a fickle bitch. Always has been. That's because hope is the only thing anybody got for sale. If you got something against selling hope life is gonna be hard on you like it is me.

Yesterday afternoon I went out into the woods again to see if the ground cover had dried out enough for me to start some more fires to burn it off. I lit some bunches of pine straw that would have normally burned brightly right away, and the flames fizzled out soon after.

After I did that a few times and got the same results I decided to wait until this afternoon. The humidity is forecast to be low for the next couple of days with a fairly soft breeze. Between these two elements creating better burning conditions I'll probably get what I want done.

What I'm attempting to do is remove the ground cover of mostly pine needles and deciduous leaves and briars so I can locate the trench line we buried the water pipe in a decade ago. I've raked some of it away enough to find the top of the trench we dug. The kerf of the trench was only 3-4 inches wide, but laying the pipe and refilling the trench in the sandy land left a mark.

The mark is that the fill dirt settled with the rain over the years and I can literally see the line of the trench, but in other places the color of the fill dirt is more clay-based than the light-colored sand that makes up the top soil. The land around here used to be on the bottom of the ocean. If the Earth keeps warming up it'll be under water again. It's only a 100 feet (30.5 M) above sea level presently.

It could be that this clearing out project may result in me planting some centipede grass seeds in the space I'm opening up in the woods. The reason I'm clearing it out is to be able to walk along the pipe trench in order to discover any leaks before they cost me too much money. If I'm gonna rake the ground cover off on both sides of the trench line, I might as well scatter some seeds and rake them in.

The only problem with centipede is that it takes about three years to mature. I probably won't live long enough to be rewarded with the fruit of my labor by just considering the law of averages. One good thing about that is that if I do croak I won't worry about it.

I'm still getting some rare figs. After the birds totally stripped all the fruit off my fig tree one morning the tree grew some more figs to replace them. I guess in a small way I've had two fruiting periods this year. Yesterday I picked around ten ripe figs. That's the most figs I've had to eat this year.
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The Water Of Life Ain't Cheap

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It rained a little last night. Not much, but enough to reassure me the fires I used to clear out the ground cover above my water pipe from the meter were completely out. I worked on cleaning out the underbrush for the last few days. I got chiggers in every skin crease on my body. The more underbrush I clear out, theoretically, the fewer red bugs there will be on me.

It's a long pipe I'm trying to relocate. My house is at least a hundred yards (91.44 M) from the paved dead-end road that gets me to my driveway. Both me and my youngest brother have county water meters for our domestic water side by side along side the paved road, The 6" County water main was installed on the other side of the road from us.

That meant the county contractor who was hired to install the meters had to bore a tunnel under the paved road in order to install the meters on our side of the road. He did a lousy job. He wasn't paid to think about where he installed the meters. He was paid per meter, and made a living by owning machinery that did the work.

His entrepreneurial rush to install as many meters per day as possible pushed him to put the meters where it was easy for him and not necessarily convenient for us. That shoddy attitude caused us to have to install a much longer pipe to our houses than were needed. I should have been there looking out for our interest. Now I regret my ignorant ways.

The meters were located on the other side of the drainage ditch on the side of the road we live on, but down toward the bottom of the creek that creates the family pond. Instead of locating the meters perpendicular from the paved road, the idiot put the meters where we were force to pipe the water at a long angle uphill to our houses.

A bad situation was made worse by our other brother hauling in some clay-based sand to force the drain water in the ditch to continue on down to where it runs into the family pond. The paved road has a big culvert under it allowing for the flow of the creek, and the roadbed was elevated by fill dirt.

The ditch that runs beside the pave road dropped in elevation when it nears the creek because the roadbed was raised. Water from the ditch was escaping into some already swampy land before it got close to the pond.

The dirt was brought in to force the water to continue along side the road to keep it out of some potential pasture land. Not much. An acre at best. What makes it so ironic is that my brothers who brought in that dirt to create pasture land, sold all the cows, and that acre went fallow.

The problem for me is that dirt he brought in for his reasons put our water meters into the ditch, and they are engulfed by weeds and briars. Mike, the youngish meter reader is scared to crawl through all those briars and tall weeds to read our water meters because of his admitted phobia of snakes. I saw his county truck parked by the meters and went there to talk with him.

That's how I found out his attitude toward reading my water meter and snakes, and it's probably why my water bill doubled on the last billing. Its also my motivation for clearing out the woods along where our water pipes were buried a decade or so ago. A small pine tree wrapped it's roots around my buried pipe and snapped it into, and that leak cost me $1500. That's three months of Social Security checks. I have to find that leak.

This is a situation in which my greatest fears become active, and sometimes rampant. It threatens my need to be alone in order to contemplate my own life. It makes me supremely aware of how close to being thrown out of house and home by the County government I can get if I let myself get too deep in debt.
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The Accidental Murder Of A Struggling Fig Tree

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It crossed my mind this morning that it's possible that I could forget how to write with pen and paper. Except for my old habit of filling in crossword puzzles with an ink pen or perhaps filling out some government form or writing my monthly checks to pay my bills, I write everything using a computer keyboard and use no ink at all. I guess that lowers my personal carbon foot print upon the world.

Being green, as in trying to be more aware of ecology is easy for me. That's all taken care of by poverty and greed. Misers don't have to remember to make a special effort to turn the lights off that aren't being used. Carelessly doing that would bring shame.

I do contribute directly to smoking up the environment by burning stuff. Yesterday I had raked some grass up from my lawn being mowed and sprinkled it over some weeds I wanted to kill and lit it. A medium-sized flame that didn't threaten to get out of control kept on burning after the primary target was consumed.

The fire didn't burn any further back into the woods than where the sunlight could reach during the day. The ground cover in the woods hadn't dried out from the last rain shower that happened a couple of days ago. The top layer of the ground cover further back in the woods looked fairly dry. Underneath the top layer it was still too damp without direct sunlight.

There wasn't any threat of the fire getting out of control. It was only burning back in the woods just so far at best, so I let the fire creep along the edge of the woods and out a little ways onto my lawn. It removed the debris that gathers there like lawn mower clippings and leaves the wind blows there.

It's the same mistake I've made a lot in my life. I thought things were cool with the fire. I had a garden hose laid out on the lawn nearby in case a sudden breeze popped up and drove the fire further back than expected. With the intent of not staying long I went into my house to check on some scallions and tomato stuff I had simmering.

When I came back outside a couple of minutes later the fire had acted just like I'd thought it would. It was still a controlled burn. What I didn't think of was the little fig bush that had struggled back to life for three summers without really putting up some healthy branches. It had three fine looking leaves on it, and I thought that with a little TLC it might eventually flourish. It burnt to a crisp because of my thoughtlessness.

If there ever was a ti-me in my life that I catered to the needs of other people it couldn't have lasted long. I don't mean to appear cold-hearted or mean spirited in regard to the other. That's why I went to acting school. When I am feeling indifferent it's hard to hide that from other people.

People in my immediate environment are just dead to me in regard to meaningful conversation. I got other fish to fry that takes all my attention. I foolishly expected people to understand I needed to turn inward when I was younger. Not as callously as then. I still turn inward to a calling as if anyone in my presence weren't there, but I try to act like I got some couth about it.

It's really no different than someone answering a cell phone while we're having an interesting conversation, and ignoring me completely to talk animatedly to some other person as if I didn't exist. They expect me to understand that it is nothing personal. Eventually, they hang up, then turn to me and say, "Now, what were we saying... ?"

Too bad there weren't any cell phones to blame it on when I used to run around the country talking to my angels in pretty much the same manner without a pretense that there was somebody actually there. When I committed myself to the insane asylum to find out what crazy is I met this young black dude who was picked up at the bus station for talking to a pack of cigarettes.

I met him in the reception building when they sorted out the incoming. It took about two weeks to get the paperwork done before they sent us out to the building that housed patients from the same counties together. The most interesting nuts I met was in the reception building.

This man told me that he was riding on the Greyhound bus from somewhere in New York on his way to Florida. The bus stopped for a break in a nearby town in North Carolina for fifteen minutes. He said he got off the bus to stretch his legs and smoke a cigarette.

When he passed a trash can outside the bus station, he said a voice told him to throw the pack of cigarettes into the trash can and stop smoking. Automatically, without really thinking about it, he did what he was told. When he looked around for the person who had told him to throw the cigarettes away there was nobody around.

He figured somebody had played a trick on him, and so he went over to the trash can to get his pack of cigarettes back. He said the pack of cigarettes must have dropped behind some other trash, and he was muttering and admonishing himself about what a fool he was for letting somebody trick him.

About that time a cop approached, and asked him what he was doing picking through the trash can. He confidently explained what happened and why he was looking for his cigarettes, and the cop arrested him for being nuts and took him to jail.

When he tried to explain what happened to the judge at his arraignment, the judge ordered a psychiatric exam, and they put him in the state hospital for that exam to happen. There weren't any psychiatrists there to interview him. I never had an interview with one there myself. It's just a place to lock people up and keep them off the street rather than sending them to prison. They're being closed now. No blame.

I don't know if he ever got to Florida. I could leave anytime I wanted because I had committed myself, and when I did leave after a month, he was still there. If he'd had a cell phone back then, he'd never been locked up.
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Perfidity

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It was cool when I got up this morning. I had gotten up to go pee twice a bit earlier. I always recognize a need to relieve myself between sleep cycles. Occasionally I am able to watch with some lucidity what happens toward the end of a regular sleep cycle.

It's during my observations I seem able to discern almost exactly when my sensory switches are turned on as I ease into a predominance of beta brainwaves. Up until then the painful urges of my bladder are mercifully turned off. So is conscious awareness, normally, and my abstract options in the deeper patterns are gone.

Gone away running
not to, but from
a life of computerized joy.
The life he is leading
is not even his own,
but the imaginary schemes
of a golden-haired boy...

My older sister, my youngest brother, and me all take after my mother in the way we look. All of us has a huge shock of strawberry blond hair when we were little kids. It turned to a sandy brown after puberty. I see pictures of kids with nearly white hair frequently, but the group pictures taken when I was in elementary school weren't among them. Me and my siblings stuck out like a sore thumb.

Our family moved to southeastern North Carolina when I was two years old from Mississippi almost a thousand miles away. We looked different and we talked different than the native Tar Heels. I have one of those group pictures a classmate gave me a few years ago, and when I looked at it for the first time in fifty years, it was that difference in appearance that caught my eye.

The coastal plains of the Carolinas are probably a good match up for many coastal areas all over the world. The water from the various rivers start way up in the high country and cut through the land below them like slicing pizza. The debris from the mountains is carried to the flat lands in torrents and floods and dribbles and is the very cause of the flat lands.

For all practical purposes what happens in the coastal plains also happens on the other side of the same mountains as the water swoozes down into the Mississippi delta land. It's like the delta of the Nile River, but on a small scale around here compared to that.

The point I'm trying to get to is that these rivers and swamps drained in the same general direction according to the lay of the land, but they created valleys that spread out into swamps and flatlands near sea or river level. The rivers and streams and swamps created horrible conditions for building roads across them.

Just like the hollows up in the mountains people got trapped on the ridges between the rivers and swamps because without roads and bridges there was only one way in, and only one way out. This seclusion, just like in the bayous around New Orleans, produces a lot of kissin' cousins and Waving Willies as well as some of the most exotically beautiful individuals of both genders there is anywhere.

The seclusion of the river ridges and islands made them easy to defend in the old days, and that's where escaped or persecuted anybody went to get away. It apparently didn't matter what race or culture you came from if you were seeking refuge. The bayous and swamps were the real melting pots of America and probably any other place where troubled people can hide.

The same situation can happen in any defensible geographic layout. Like the places out West where outlaws could gather and protect themselves against sheriff's posses and other pissed off authoritative people. I'm trying to remember the god-forsaken places where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out.

The demise of these places as hideouts from whatever authority/warlord/plantation owner ruled the day was caused by the inevitable building of roads to every nook and cranny on Earth. People like me could run and hide, of course, but we used the roads to do it in plain sight.

One of my biggest regrets is that I couldn't pull it off and bring a woman and kids. I couldn't do it with a family tagging along. I must have really, really liked to do it. I went without them. I stayed when they went. The life games that seem most important to me require solitude. I've tried to buck that trend, but eventually discovered the effort to act like I have some couth cost me more than giving in.

I simply can't live in the fear of embarrassing significant others by refusing to indulge my impulsive behavior. How could I possibly capture drifting thoughts with words if I was afraid that doing it might contaminate my family and friends.

Yesterday I used a strange word I wasn't all that familiar with. The term's root is 'perfidy'. I kept writing, but after a while my curiosity forced me to look it up in the Dictionary.app to find out what it meant and if I had used it correctly. As usual, I had, but therein lies the rub,

That term came to me from a very spurious source that possesses all sorts of intriguing data like "perfidious". It's like it floats up outta neverneverland, and I have to latch on to it and use it in real ti-me in the piece I'm writing or it's gone for another thousand lifetimes.

I'm fairly satisfied that my attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words operates out of the sa-me dynamic that causes my nightly dreams to disappear pretty soon after I wake up. Being receptive to and using the offerings of that nebulous source is what soothsaying is all about.

I practiced reaching for this source employing the ploy of reading palms almost daily for around twenty years, and then one day I stopped. I had milked that process dry. Holding hands with a goodly number of people each day for a long time is a form of intimacy I don't think many people enjoy.

I sense that the actual lesson for me in reading palms was to finally realize that in doing so, I was projecting my own idea of reality upon them. Granted, there may have been cases where the ideals I offered them was mo' bettah than whatever they had formerly acted like was true, but who am I?

It wasn't fair to either of us for me to use them that way. It's a crude way to practice denial by saying, "You're not me. We are not one and the sa-me." So, eventually, like with sexual relationships that can become explosive, I had to stop holding hands and let palmistry go. Seeing through other people's pretenses to themselves and saying so face-to-face can be exceedingly dangerous to one's health.
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Entropy

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The leak in my water system drives me crazy. I was able to blackmail my youngest brother into helping me try to locate the pipe we buried because we buried both pipes to both houses in the same ditch. That was a long time ago. Maybe ten years. The 18" (45.72 cm) deep ditch that runs just to my house from the paved road is at least one hundred and fifty yards (137 Meters) and then it continues on to his two houses.

The original ditch ran through the piney woods left after two hurricanes in a row tore down the original pine forest. Man, what a drag. I literally built my house in a handsome pine forest. Too bad it went away. The problem for me now is that the woods have overgrown the remnants of the ditch and covered it with pine needles and other debris, and we can't tell where the pipe is to check it for leaks.

We've had problems before. Our other brother ignorantly had some construction work done that ripped through the pipe where it goes under the road around the family pond, and my youngest brother marked it with a big rock when we repaired it that tiem. We used the stone he placed and the place where we fixed the break a year ago in the pipe where the tree roots broke it, in order to line up where the pipe had to be located on the other side of that road through the woods. We hope it's located where we placed the marking tape.

We tied bright pieces of florescent orange marking tape around the trees where we figured the pipe ditch pretty much has to be. Now I gotta clear out all the trees and bushes that have grown over where the ditch is or could be. Hopefully, with the brush out of the way, I can walk the ditch line and find the leak. This is a lotta work for an old man, but what else I got to do but fix the leak. If I don't fix it I'm just paying the county water department the money I need to live on.

This involves what the Enneagrams label my "chief feature", that is, in the larger sense, avarice. Greed. It's hard to figure in my case. I'm only greedy about having the minimum money or food I need to withdraw from society and contemplate my own life. Other than that I'm fairly generous. I get yelled at for giving stuff away if I don't use it anymore. It's my stuff. I'll do what I like with it. I like giving stuff away, but not if I need it to get away to think things over. What irritates me is giving stuff away and the recipients sell it for spending money instead of using it for what they claimed.

When it comes to that, however, as when a leaky pipe costs me that money I need to stay independent, I'm urged into action I might ignore otherwise. If I die from heat prostration in my attempt to dig this leak out, so be it. Okay, so I'm somewhat of a drama queen. Big deal! People respond as if it matters.

I did have to stop and come inside my house and turn on the air-conditioner to cool off. I'll take my second shower of the day soon, because attempting to locate that ditch line out in the woods with high humidity is a sweaty job. I'm eat up by red bugs (chiggers). I use Clorox bleach to kill them, but there are lots of them and chlorine bleach can't be all that good for my skin. They will be around until I quit going out in the woods.

The upside down tomatoes I planted, that survived the tragic fall they had when the handles to the plastic buckets I used broke, has started bearing tomatoes. Since I've stopped eating bread/gluten I can't make tomato sandwiches anymore, I resorted to eating them raw like I would an apple or a peach. Straight from the vine. It's the only vine-ripened tomatoes I've eaten in years that I know about. Tasty.

They are very tasty. Not that it matters that much, I'll be dead soon enow, but before that glorious event I wanted me some vine-ripened tomatoes. It might have been due to the variety I planted, but none of the tomatoes that got ripe were big enough for a one-slice tomato sandwich. If I'm around next summer I'll plant a different variety and see what they do.

Something happened that I didn't expect to happen. The fig tree/bush I bought at Lowe's a couple of years (maybe three years ago) that died and came back to life twice, finally put out some more leaves. Three to be exact. I guess the roots survived.

Last fall before it frosted, but after the three leaves it produced the spring before fell off, I covered the stem the leaves had shown up on with leaves and pine straw to help that little branch survive the winter. This last spring I removed the straw, and the stem had a couple of small green buds on it. I thought it would take off.

It did no such thing. I guess I shouldn't have uncovered the stem that had the buds on it, but let it find it's way through the pine straw as the weather warmed up. I think maybe uncovering it made it vulnerable to the intense sunlight of the lengthening spring days. I'll cover it again this year, because that seemed to help, but next spring it'll have to grow through the pine straw I cover it with or just fucking die. '-)
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Refrigeration, The Best Invention

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I wrote a paragraph the other day questioning the need for kosher food after refrigeration had been invented, and it led me to think of the role food played in the ancient days, and why much of the content of ancient writings was about food and food supplies.

It makes me wonder if the edifices that were created as temples were not to worship invisible gods, but to store food in the winter or it's environmental equivalents like dry seasons and natural disasters. The Pueblo Indians in the American West did the same thing. They didn't build their buildings to live in, but to store food in.

In my opinion, the basic reason for wars, especially now, is that there isn't enough food for  the villagers in the off seasons, and the young people were sent out a'viking not only to get food and trading supplies, but to acquire property and slaves.

"Heaven" was called the "land of milk and honey". That turned into political dogma, and then they started fighting wars in the name of gods and heroes. Food preservation, as the real reason for war was kept a secret in writing when that came along.

Modern civilizations in Europe, Asia, and the United States who have automobiles and trucks don't seem to remember how long it takes to walk even a short distance by foot with a load on your back. Fifteen miles a day is pushing it. Double that means you're too exhausted to fight when you get to the stated destination That's what happened to Custer on the Little Big Horn. Massacre.

Now, think about the expense of 150,000 armed dudes with logistical support being sent to a country 10,000 miles away, and then start second war simultaneously a hop, skip, and jump away with 100,000 more professional killers, and you're close to having a bankrupt America just to show Islam (who has already figured it out), that we can't be attacked without vengeance, and we're broke. Almost a failed state. Aiiiyyeeeeee!

I'm sorta not much in the mood for writing recently. My water pipe from the paved road to my house is leaking again. I found where it had washed out, and I tried to dig up the ground to where the leak is, but I got so hot and tired I had to stop until it cools down some. I might have to wait until early in the morning. Being old don't make this any easier.
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Self-Assembling, Robotic Solar Panels For America's Nobility

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It's odd dealing with people whose word means nothing to themselves or anybody else. Particularly if that person is me. But, it's something that happens and the results thereof gotta be dealt with as reasonably as possible or pretty soon there is nobody left to hoodwink. Even though I live alone I am is not alone in the world or upon the Earth, yet, but the situation requires caution. It's not easy to live a life of no blame.

One of the Scientism fanbois (who is a retired nobody like me) posted a link to a publisher's commercial site where one of his personal gods, the non-stepping Stephen Hawking, has published another gaudy science book. This one seems even more desperate than the last one if the title is any indication. He has decided there is no God. Hardly original, but since the whole idea is merely to make some money off his famous nayme. History shows that the more radically he rouses the rabble, the more money he'll put on his hip.

A lot more people probably know Stephen Hawking by sight, if not by name, than many common folk might figure. The image of him sitting askew in his special wheelchair with a crooked grin and thick glasses on his face gets flashed on the screen a lot in the last decade or so, because it's probably unusual that people in wheel chairs get to be as famous as he is. FDR, maybe, but he pretended he didn't need a wheelchair. I bought and read Hawking' previous book because I thought I owed it to myself to keep up a little on science, but no mas, and my decision doesn't have anything to do with Stephen Hawking or his new book. It's about my own sense of ti-me. I don't go to the movies anymore either.

Just now I had to pause in my writing for a few moments while I booted up the web browser and looked through yesterday's browsing History to help me remember Hawking' name, which I'm as familiar with as the palm of my own hand. This sort of forgetfulness is sort of typical for my age. It's worrisome, but not as worrisome as it might be because I can easily use my computer to help me find words and names and familiar expressions when I lose them on the tip of my tongue.

It's true that if I just relax and wait a few moments then the stuff I can't remember momentarily will eventually come to me, but with my computer sitting right in front of me it's too easy just to stop and look it up right away.

If I didn't have the computer to assist me, and I had to just sit here and suffer some horrible angst that I have Alzheimer's or dementia, that inevitable suffering might cause me to get depressed and to give up on living from sheer frustration. It's not like I haven't confronted this many times even as a boy, well, in this particular body, but home computers hadn't been invented for a good while yet.

The eventual, inevitable, penultimate, all-conquering depression hasn't happened yet (at least, I don't think it has), and it may never happen. Instead, I might get run over by a big truck or have an airplane fall out of the sky right on top of my house, and kill me faster than I can realize I'm dead. That might be a groovy way to croak. Unexpected, and over with before what happened can even be keened.

The publisher's publicity announcement for the new Stephen Hawking book is about all that's available on the internet presently. The content that is designed to attract Hawking' regular readers is only a fat paragraph long, and the same paragraph shows up as "news" on hundreds of blog sites, but the "news" is never really "news" anymore, is it?

My initial reaction to reading that redundant publisher's teaser was to agree with what I understood about it from so brief an introduction. They want you to buy the book, and they ain't giving the plot away so that you don't have to. I may have played around with the idea of minuscule black holes as a reaction to reading Hawking' last tome. I won't deny his influence upon my thinking in this arena. His arena. Not mine. I seemed to have equated my pearl-like original form to a teeny tiny black hole whose event horizon is so-me-ti-me mes taken for "the white light" of enlightenment fame. I might be wrong.

The publicity announcement mentions that Hawking may have concluded that no God is needed if the universe as we understand it self-assembles with natural tools like gravity. The expression "self-assembly" rightfully gets a lotta press in the last couple of decades. Go ahead. Google it up. "self-assembly". Read some of the text headers that show up with the links on the Results Page. Big buzz word for the new millennium.

That expression is used a lot especially, it seems, in nanotechnology where the entire point of some digital firmware designs can only be assembled by it happening automagically by self-assembling. Humans self-assemble from the initial conjunction of the sperm and the egg to the finished product at birth, when the umbilical cord is cut to make humans wireless automatons. '-)

In the last week the geniuses over at MIT announced that they have invented a self-assembling array of solar panels that imitate the behavior of chlorophyll in plants. The important part of that announcement is that they have a prototype that proves the concept is valid. Previous to this invention the most efficient solar panels converted maybe 26% of the available sunlight. This relatively clumsy prototype starts out at 40% efficiency, and it can be manufactured using the same process as it's predecessor on the same assembly lines.

I don't think I could write an adequate description of how how the self-assembly part of this new invention works, but if you're interested you can Google up "new MIT self-assembling solar panel", and read all about it. Practically all the resulting links will lead you back to the PopSci article that forwards you to a site that requires a paid subscription. Bummer. Capitalism is hard on the great unwashed.
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