Wasting My Life By Judging The Dead

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A few minutes ago I found myself responding to my favorite victim of the last decade or so, that he had "wasted his life judging the dead. " Then I attached this quote from the Gospel of Thomas:

52 His disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel, and they all spoke of you."

He said to them, "You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence, and have spoken of the dead."

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

Granted, I projected my idea of myself upon this undeserving target, but he's very strong and coated with teflon so I don't feel so mean spirited. Why else would I use him as a mirror to find out about my own wasted life. I've told him several times previously that he's wasted his life. This time I provided a reason he has wasted his life.

It's helpful to me to find out what I think I've wasted my life for. Hmm... there's the "for" word again. "... what I've wasted my life 'for'". I became addicted to mentally attaching a special significance to the 'for' word back when I was reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness a year or two ago. Hyphenated terms like "being-for-myself" and "being-for-the-other."

It doesn't surprise me much that I seem convinced that judging the dead past is pretty much a waste of ti-me. If I created a rule of conscience at all about that conviction it exists as a guideline to remind me to let 'judging the dead past' go, and move on if I find myself dwelling there. Copping to this attitude is based on the ancient adage, "If you snooze, you lose".

In regard to my ongoing world view for the past few decades, my most reliable subjective observations seem to have been gained by contemplating my own life in light of what I accuse others of being. It's my opinion that I can only accuse them of being me. Poor child-like innocents who are too busy judging me as themselves to remain completely free of blame.

I've slowly become more and more aware that my current behavior depends on letting my conscience be my guide. That's not news. My ongoing behavior from any time in the past has depended on the rules of conscience I haphazardly, unknowingly adopted, and did so first without a clue of the long range implications.

It seems like I have invariably adopted the metaphor of a pig nosing around for food to eat to represent the process of gnosis in my personal needs. Specifically the kind of pig the farmers in France use to locate truffles. I don't know why. I've never eaten real truffles to know what they are or taste like as a singularity.

I constantly "nose around" in my subconscious seeking ancient rules of conscience that no longer get me where I wanna go and rudely eliminate them. Rudely, you say? Yes, I can express my natural talent for being rude and as crude as I like with myself. Why would I not? Nobody knows.


The possibility that I did and still do generate an abstract traffic light (a rule of conscience) for keeping my nose to the grassroots in order to track down the drumbeat I unconsciously follow just makes good sense to me. I got rules of conscience for being the kind of person other people want of me and for-themselves that constantly need culling. Sometime I enjoy it. Sometime I don't.

The entirety of my database mining is based on finding and supporting my own experiences instead of somebody else's experience that I ripped off (interpreted) from a media event (graven images). I use the expression "graven images" beyond the idea of statues and pictures to include engraving agreed upon symbols on various materials like parchment, papyrus, and paper. You know, the stuff the papacy stores in the bowels of the Vatican. '-)

Books in general are based on the writer/creator's experience in the best of all worlds. Their stories may be wonderful and inspiring, but they're not my stories nor my interpretation of the mysteries of life. It's contemplating my own experiences that occur because of my own outlook that gets me where I wanna go. YMMV

I didn't just tell my outraged mirror that he has wasted his life judging dead people's unknowable behaviors, but that he was stupid for doing it. Again with the "for" word. I gotta figure why I'm using the term "for" so much for. Don't I? Shit happens. Things change. No blame.

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Living A Life Of No Blame

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The ability to create metaphors continuously in the specious present is a goal I didn't really know I had previously proposed to myself as a way to walk through the world bearing no blame. I must have been gifted to conduct this quest because I'm just plain-assed nosy. My maternal grandmother (the only grandmother I actually knew) constantly complained upon our visits to her house that I was 'a nosy kid', and implied that the world might be better off if somebody shot me with shit and then killed me for stinking. As a result she is still in purgatory waiting for me to forgive her. '-)

I may not be joking. One day a few years ago I was asked to use hypnosis to help this artist-in-residence woman to re-experience the moment of birth in which inhaled her first breath. She was a pretty young woman, and I was in the mood (being a hypnotist is booring, being hypnotized can be exciting), and so, with my brother and his wife there to protect her if I got demonic, we proceeded to have a unproductive hypnosis session.

It was unproductive in the sense that she never got to re-experience her own birth. No blame. It was her first hypnotic trance experience. With some excitable people it takes them a while to trust that they'll be okay if they let themselves relax their guard enough to reach the somnambulistic trance state in which the birthing can be evoked.

It took me decades to consciously relax enough to realize I had shot past the somnambulistic trance state looking for something more than it actually was. Typical for somebody born with the planet Mercury located in the constellation Aries. Even unconflicted configurations that involve the astrology sign Aries frequently have to tone down their expectations to keep from reaching further for some result they lust for.

The aforementioned "artist-in-residence" was born when the Sun was in the constellation Aries. I could have guided her where she needed to go in order to get what she thought she wanted, but it might take months of weekly sessions that neither of us were interested in pursuing. But, she did get deep enough in trance to leap out on her own to escape what she didn't really want in the first place.

She interrupted me during my futile patter to say that she was experiencing being in an old colonial period style farm house. I asked her to describe what she "saw" there. She was quiet for a while, then she stated that she was in the attic of the house and there was an old woman there who said she had a message for me.

Huh? Talk about yer unexpected surprises! Damn! I got real interested, real fast. "Tell me." After three decades of hypnotizing people I've come to understand that the trance works better if I give my subjects lots of wiggle room. It seems to help if I keep things simple and leave them a lot of open-ended short phrases to encourage them to fill in the blanks like I was the dummy and they have to explain things in detail so I can "get it"

She said the old woman explained to her that she was in some sort of holding pattern she had been in since she had croaked, and it was because of the way she had treated me as a child. Evidently she need me to forgive her for her misdeeds. She had spanked me a few times during my parents visits to her house during the summers over the years.

Mostly for being nosy. Once for me and one of my female cousins playing "I'll show you mine, if you'll show me yours", and she caught us visually exploring each others nakid bodies, but before we got to the touchy-feely part. We were around five years old. She tanned our naked little butts with no quarter, and raged around a houseful of reunionees with a vengeance.

That may have been the incident in question. I asked the artist-in-residence to ask the old woman in her vision to provide specific information so that I might be able to find a ritual to use to forgive her, but she had faded because the artist-in-residence broke the trance to go pee.

In contemplating my own life it's become fairly apparent to me that I may have more than my share of curiosity than your average bear, but I don't currently thing that's the fundamental problem with living a life of no blame. That fundamental problem could be that I am is a little to courageous when it comes to pursuing what's curious to me. Too much bravado. Altogether too willing to put everything that means anything to anybody "on the line" by my impulsive responses to wot's sot before me.

I don't have a clue how to forgive my grandmother for her supposed sins against my nature. Whatever she did she wasn't responsible for curbing my immense curiosity. It's still ready to range forth further than it ever needs too. I don't try to keep it restrained so much as to dismiss the results it obtains by going batshit crazy.

My enjoyment of going "batshit crazy" itself has much to do with remaining the fool I've always sort of enjoyed being. Not everybody I've met has the talent and desire to go over the top with simple pleasure as I am is can. My eternal question appears to be: Why would I not?

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Crab Buckets

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What a weird morning. I sent out a post with my latest picture attached it entitled I Ain't Dead Yet to some older e-mail addresses I didn't know were active or not. Apparently they were still working, because I'm getting responses. It seems they're not dead yet either.

Maybe that's nice. I've been wondering about whether life can be "nice". It's always one thing or the other coming up or going down. Shit happens, Things change. Personally, it's how to control my reactions to what change offers up that is the deal about my so-called decisions. It's the only personal thing that matters in the sensory dimension.

Everything around me just happens of it's own accord without any input from me unless I just go batshit crazy. If it wasn't for my me I'd be a pill-popping drunk... oh, wait.... I am IS a pill-popping drunk. All legitimate as death can be, but no joy in Muddville. The pills I pop ain't euphoric. On the contrary they can be distressingly bland. I so-me-ti-me remind myself not to recommend my odd lifestyle to anyone else but masochists.

I know this weird guy who goes around telling people they're crazy to eat anything else but his greasy meat and potatoes 'soul food' diet. Never mind that he pops purple pills by the handful or would if he could afford them, do what he says do or you'll regret it like he does. I reckon misery does love company.

It was a great relief to me to change the settings on this blog to disallow comments on what I write. I've explained myself a couple of time and put my disclaimer up in the Header. Recently I added a quaint comment to the header that popped up in my writings one day. I gotta remember to look at it again when I publish this entry. It's very clever, but I would say that, wouldn't I?

Now, I've gone one step further and removed the link to my blogs in my signature file that's attached to each e-mail post I Send. All my .sig file says now is felix with a small "f" to indicate that I do actually give a fuck about the way the world goes, but not overly. It's that reactive mind all over again.

Some people seem convinced L. Ron Hubbard identified and labeled the way humans react to the stimuli of the world around them, but English-speaking nutcases have been addressing the reactive mind for as long as English was able to climb out of the crab bucket.

Have you ever literally seen crabs try to get out of the bucket they're placed in when they're caught by fishermen in order to take them to the fish market and sell for fun and profit? They climb all over each other's backs trying to get up to the lip of the bucket to afford a mad dash for the seawater again.

They're like the Jews in Krakow rebelling against being herded into a ghetto by the Nazis until they were shipped off to the gas chambers. They realized they were going to be murdered whether they fought back or not, so they tried to get out of the crab bucket, and just like the crabs on the crab boat, they all died anyway. Life is cheap. No blame.

I added a couple of paragraphs below after I published because I like the way I worded it and I wanna save it for posterity:

From a detached point of view it's easy to understand why you sought the protection of the state from the outside world. I sought to protect the outside world from me. When I was in the admissions center there were these two worried, worried men who followed me around the institutional walls in the large passageways we were permitted to freely walk. One walked in front of me looking back frequently as if to make sure I didn't turn off. If I stopped and squatted against the wall, they stopped too, and nervously squatted against the wall looking, looking, watching me like a hawk. If I stood up and walked in the opposite direction they changed to the opposite one looking back and the other trailing cautiously.

One day I tricked them and turn into a side hall way and waited until they scurried in behind me and I caught one of them by the arm and demanded to know why? They told me I was the only person there including the nurses and attendants they could trust not to hurt them. Stuff like that weirds me out sometime when I think about it. I have been accused of not having a conscience. I have admitted openly that I strive mightily to eliminate the rules of conscience I created to be-co-me my parent's child. Reading The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain made me wonder if I've accomplished my goal with flying colors.

I was accused of writing about myself a lot by some lout who tersely pushes the idea, herself, that she oughta know better. I just shined her on. What could I say so that she'd understand, that I use myself as an example, to keep from accusing other people of being me.

Bringing my projected idea of myself back ho-me where it be-longs is the entire point of even noticing that who I use as a mirror to do that. Longing (yearning) to be is what half of life is all about. It's mucho difficile to do that when I've be-co-me-d over into somebody else's Me, but not who they are in the first person singular.

Does that make sense? I am is writing about the sa-me crap I always get back to. Why would I not? The unity of life on Earth, and maybe the several universes, all depends on me. That's why the particular one of the Ten Commandments of Moses states explicitly, "Thou shall not worship any other God but me.", as if worshiping any other God was actually possible if there ain't but One me.

Homo sapiens, for the most part, it seems, don't appear to ken the notion that what they call themselves in the first person singular is a much bigger deal than they are personally. What they're labeling "me" as their own identity is anything but personal, and yet it is.

Life is what it ain't, and it ain't what it is. It seems to be extremely disparaging that there ain't but One me, because each of us cling to our own abstract opinion that the me we inimitably indicate as being individual to our persona is a joke we each play on ourselves for false pride. I reckon if I wanted to spend eternity going around bursting that bubble I could. But, when bursting bubbles ain't no fun no more, ti-me stops flying. Who wants that? Hell, that's how I alit here upon Earth in the bejinning.

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Olive Oil And Snakes

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It's so humid this morning I have to run the A/C to keep from sweating in 75° (24° C) weather. Now, I'm having wear warm clothes to stay warm. I think what I need for both spring, summer, and autumn is a dehumidifier more than a heater or A/C most of the ti-me.

Relief is on the way for a couple of days with dryer weather on the way, but the sun won't be able to burn off the overcast, gloomy clouds until later this afternoon. For some reason I'm figuring that a dehumidifier might use less electricity than an air-conditioner and maybe run quieter too, but I don't know that. I'll have to research that topic a little.

It's an odd thing, but maybe part of the health problems I have is due to me being overly cautious about using fats and oils. Maybe I painted them all with a broad brush just to avoid using the ones that are said to be bad for humans. I have been reading about that over the last year or so, and the problem with avoiding most fats and oils is that humans need oils.

The deal about olive oil has always evaded me because my ancestors didn't immigrate to the U.S. from the areas in Europe where olive oil is a native product. We used peanut oil or lard from pig-killings to cook with. The Southern traditional diet has been proven to be a lousy diet lately.

I suspect that had a lot to do with people abandoning their gardening in favor of buying their food at grocery stores. Please don't misunderstand me, the Southern diet is still a lousy diet and it always has been, but that was probably offset by the fresh garden vegetables that ripened on the plant for immediate consumption.

I may have realized I wasn't getting enough oil in my diet by reading about how good fish oil is for humans. My reading somehow segued to olive oil and then to the general consensus that canola oil (Canadian oil) could easily replace olive oil if there weren't any olive oil in your kitchen. Huh?

This bit of information sent me searching on the internet to see if that was true, and many people seemed to agree. Certainly not the olive oil producers who adamantly disagreed. Dietetically, though, they seem to be equivalents. This pleases me.

The whole controversy of the quality of olive oils and the arguments about virgin and extra-virgin olive oils, and whether the majority of the olive oil was a Mafia rip-off is totally avoided. Why would I wanna feel cheated by gang wars over the quality of the food being imported into the U.S.? Other vegetable oils are also good for humans, but they're more expensive than canola oils, and not quite as healthy to boot.

Anyway, I've been using a lot more canola oil (and olive oil too if I have it) even in the oatmeal I prepare most mornings. When I fry foods in canola oil I don't try to skim the extra grease off foods like hash brown potatoes and the one-pot vegetable stews I atrociously put together.

My efforts to get the good oils my body needs into my daily intake matters, and I think its made a big difference with the aches and pains that come with rheumatoid arthritis. I'm feeling much better lately.

I still use the fish oil, but I'm using a concentrated form of soft-gels that have more of what really matters about fish oil once a day instead of four of the un-condensed variety. I have 14 bottles of either prescription drugs or supplements I take every day. Part of it may be sheer hysteria, but on the other hand, not many of the supplements do any harm like the prescription drugs do.

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Black Gumbo Dirt

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It's hateful for me to not allow people to think they're gonna get over on me by trying to deal with them gently. Many times when they try to corner me or have me up a tree they're already in a jam with some desperate situation in life. It bothers me to have to get crude in order to break through their worried minds, but, a man gotta do.

I stayed with my mother for two and a half years after my father died. I had already been living in their house in order to help her with my father's dying for two weeks. By the time I ran for my life by going to hike on the Appalachian Trail I could have easily murdered her in cold blood. They weren't my parents anymore or anybody I ever knew in our entire ti-me together.

Dying due to the aging process is not easy to watch. My parents were the most educated people in either of their families by a long shot. My father was the only child among his siblings that completed the seventh grade. He had to go live in a boarding house a long way from his parent's home for the opportunity to finish enough school to get into college. He was thirty-three before he finished.

My mother didn't finish college until she was forty-eight years old. She kept going back and going back to summer school classes. If I had gone straight through four years of college after I graduated from high school I would have finished college before she did.

They were not the people we buried side by side in the City Cemetery. They had become total strangers from who I had be led to believe they were by the time they died. Why would they not? Much of the remembering that went on in their dotage was a complete surprise to them as they forgot who they had made themselves into for the sake of appearances.

One incident from each parent was enough memory of their aging process. The delighted look on my father's face in his mid-eighties when he suddenly re-experienced his fifth birthday party. He had received a little rubber ball and some Jacks to play that game. He still had the ball and a couple of the Jacks in a collection box. My mother remembered how much she loved her first husband who was a serious alcoholic when I stayed with her during those two and a half years.

It seems difficult for me to remember the ground down in the river flood plain around here is called gumbo soil, but it's not like the black gumbo soil in Texas. Here it's black and mucky alright, but it has a lot of sand in it. It's all over the swamps around here. The area has lots of sandy land that when it was cleared to grow crops the sand eroded down the the flood plains of the local rivers and then mixes with the muck it finds there. It is not a rich organic soil that's good for growing a garden, but it grows ferns of all kinds real well.

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Late Fall Tomatoes

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One of the upside down tomato plants I set up has 26 golf ball sized tomatoes on it. I thought the plants would be dead by now. Before the first frost I hope to put them in my brother's greenhouse next door to see if they will survive the winter and keep producing. That would be a neat trick.

The fact that I planted two different varieties of tomatoes and only got a fair number of fruit the size of a golf ball (instead of the huge slicing sized tomatoes I yearned for) from both varieties is just weird. Not only did I plant two varieties of tomatoes, but I planted one plant the old-fashioned way in a large pot right side up, and two plants emerging from the bottom of two five-gallon plastic buckets.

My initial effort was a feeble attempt to have some vine-ripened tomatoes to eat myself, instead of the commercial tomatoes grown for shelf life that are sold at the franchise grocery stores. This was not my first effort to grow tomatoes since I've lived at this location.

A few years ago I really worked hard to prepare a small garden plot for the sole purpose of growing big, fat one-slice tomatoes to make tomato sandwiches with. My memory of how easy it seemed for my parents to grow garden vegetables apparently convinced me it was a piece of cake if I prepared the ground first.

I dug a ditch by hand about two feet (61 cm) deep by two feet wide for about eight feet (2.43 M) and filled it about half way up with cow manure, then I topped it off with commercial bags of topsoil. On top of that I placed the black plastic stuff that keeps the weeds from growing. When I got ready to plant I punched holes in the black plastic cover, and set out the commercially grown tomato plants in the dirt beneath it.

I even had a passel of 1/2 inch stainless steel poles I'd been given as a gift to tie the plants up to keep them off the ground. The plants grew prolifically, produced hundreds of blossoms, then fruit, all of which developed mosaic "end rot" disease... and the whole deal was a bust. That broke my heart for growing tomatoes for years.

The idea of growing tomatoes in pots I could keep up on the second floor outside deck came from my sister-in-law giving me an ornamental cabbage plant one fall as a gift. She thought some living green color around the drab room I spend most of my time in would be cheerful.

Cabbage is one of the commercial produce vegetables the local farmers grow in this area. I don't know much about it. My parents didn't ever grow cabbage except in their gardens. I did know they were set out in the fall and were able to survive all but the most severe hard frosts. We have moderate winters here, and severe hard frosts can be few and far in between.

The ornamental cabbage and kale plants they sell at Lowe's are attractive because they have a interesting layout of their leaves, and the fact that the leaves have curly edges draws my attention when I pass near them. I took it upon myself to see how long I could keep them alive by taking them inside when the hard frosts arrived. Otherwise I watered them and left them outside come what may.

The kale plants (I had two varieties) lived well into the winter season. At some point I took them over to my brother's greenhouse, and while there they went to seed, and died as expected. Not the ornamental cabbage. It sat over in a corner and got watered when all the other plants in the greenhouse were watered.

When the warm weather of spring outran the frost I brought the ornamental cabbage plant back over to my house to sit up on the second floor deck where the rabbits wouldn't get at them. It was that one advantage that probably inspired me to try to grow some tomato plants in pots in the same area to keep them away from small animals and worms and other pests who attack plants from the ground up.

The ornamental cabbage plant is still alive. In fact, it's thriving. Little cabbage plants started growing out of the side of the cabbage stalk which has "eyes" that sprout. The sprouted plants growing out of the original cabbage stalk do not have the original ornamental look to them. They look more like regular cabbage plants.

That's what I'm using them for. I snap off one of the sprouts and either either eat them raw or boil the chopped plant up with country ham fatback, salt, and pepper. Recently, I've been adding turmeric spice to explore what it's exact taste is. I grew up eating boiled cabbage with fatback, and that allows me to detect the exact taste of the turmeric as a standalone.

One day has passed since I recited one of my own poems to my high school classmates. I didn't just spill out the words rotely, but performed the poem as a one-act play. It was selfish of me, I suppose. I was the only-est one with anything to say when the class president asked if anybody had any comments to share.

I'm happy they liked my performance. I can still see some of their old faces plastered with awed smiles today. They really like me. They've liked me all along. I only needed to give them the chance to find out for themselves when they couldn't help from showing it. I suspect my nervy arrogance will open the door for others to act out and reveal themselves. It's about ti-me. '-)

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Home Towns And Prophecy

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My high school class reunion happened today. We had lunch at some pizza joint that has a meeting room. It seems a little cheap, but this town is barely more than a village. The most exciting thing to do here is go to the Wal-Mart shopping center. There ain't a lot of eating places to choose from to meet around here. After our meal, our high school star football player offered to have a cookout at his home at our next meeting.

Going to this reunion allowed me to do something I've always wanted to do. I got a chance to recite one of my own poems I wrote a long time ago to these people I was young with. Many of them know I've been a homeless bum with a reputation for not being ambitious. My recitation came off pretty well. I only forgot my lines once, but I picked them up again after only a slight delay,

The delay was probably a good thing. They were upset that my flow was momentarily interrupted because it was going so well. The women begged me to finish the poem if I could, and the men actually remained quiet until I finished. It's unusual that the men didn't stop me because of the attention I got from the ladies.

There is a saying in the Gospel of Thomas that somewhat challenged me to find out if my classmates would allow me to speak my piece:

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

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

The trick is that they didn't realize or understand that I was prophesying or healing them by enchantment. Who knows? I might be deluding myself and calling it macaroni. I've done this for a long ti-me and I'm perfectly aware of whether my rhetoric is having the desired affect or not.

It's not any different than a stand-up comedian knowing whether he has lost his audience or whether his performance "killed." I sorta think I got over despite saying #31. The reason why is that I am is actually as much of a stranger to them as they are to me.

We were children and young adults together. Few of us, if any, knew at that age what would become of us as adults. Very few of us, from all visible indicators, knew ourselves through our own experiences until we actually did become adults.

I didn't really understand what I hoped to accomplish by reciting my poem until I got home a while ago. I'm pretty sure I wanted my classmates to think of me as my own person instead of being the son of one of their favorite teachers, my father. Maybe they'll think of me more as a poet than a supplementary extension of their mentor.

Maybe reciting that poem with my usual success here in what passes for my home town can mean that I don't have to stay here anymore. '-)

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The Ancient Ways

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The Canadian geese are back. Flying between ponds and honking away. They certainly don't appear to be going extinct. I think maybe the flocks are getting bigger. Fine with me. I never craved cooked goose as a food or as a predicament. It tastes like fish smells, but fish taste much better to me.

The best tasting fish I think I've ever eaten was some smoked salmon a coworker had flown in from a small fish smoking industry in the coastal area of New England he had lived at for a number of years in the past. The salmon were wrapped in foil and placed in Styrofoam containers straight out of the smoking units, and they were still warm when they arrived by jet and special delivery at the Fort Bragg work site we were at.

I remember physically picking up chunks of the salmon that was juicy and I could literally chew the meat with my tongue it was so tender. I remember the feel of it in my mouth better than the actual flavor of the fish. It was so good I forced myself to be careful not to not grab more than a politically expedient share. I felt sure this one event might not be repeated, and it hasn't. Not to worry, there was plenty for everybody in the office with some left over for visitors.

Remembering how good that fish made me wish I had gotten the address of that place where they smoke the fresh-caught salmon. Who knows? I might have a windfall of some kind and place an order over the phone. My disappointment that I didn't ask for the address didn't last long. I soon realized that I could probably find the place myself with a search engine and Google Maps. I reckon I at least owe it to my taste buds to spend a little time looking them up and finding out their asking price.

There is a family pond just down the hill from my house that's stocked with a variety of fish. I hardly ever fish there. It was built by my father and two younger brothers while I was away in the Navy. In fact my father and mother bought this farm while I was gone. They had 15 acres they had bought when I was around thirteen years old. When I returned from the Navy they owned nearly two hundred acres.

In a way, this fairly recent matriculation of my parents into being property owners was something I had to deal with. They owned no real estate at all until they bought that first fifteen acres. We always rented previous to that first piece of land. My father was around fifty years old then. I arrogantly thought we must be rich just because our family owned a house and some farm land for a change. It went to my head and I got called down more than once for acting out with false pride.

When I got out of the Navy and my parents owned both the fifteen acre farm and a 160 acre farm I didn't know how to contain myself, and so I hitch-hiked around the country a few times until I could calm down. To suggest that I get extremely excited about having to deal with unplanned event when I was young is not an exaggeration. It takes even less inspiring spontaneous events to get the same result even now. Experience doesn't seem to promote a more dismissive attitude.

For a long time I didn't have the words to express my fits of ecstasy and despair. I certainly didn't like the descriptors coined by the psychiatric or psychology domains. They made me feel hopeless and quite possibly insane, and they still do. If I use medical terms to describe my mood swings my listeners have a tendency to avoid me. If I describe the same events using astrology, only a few listeners will fade away. If I describe the same set of circumstances using the lingo of the I Ching, the sa-me crowd usually leans forward in anticipation.

The most promising aspects of my quest for individuation was learning new ways of describing why and/or why I might wander off the beaten track to indulge my voracious curiosity. The facts surrounding my penchant for homeless wandering are that my spiritual quests (questionings) led me into psychedelic drugs like LSD, and later on, studying the occult languages for diverse ways to describe how my extreme reactions to life's constant surprises. This unorthodox behavior proved to be a more natural way for me to express the deep emotional responses that a sudden vacuum of uncertainty might evoke from my person.

Part of the difficulties I experienced while trying to express myself in a way that satisfied both myself and others simultaneously, was that I had no passion for disciplining my mind. On the contrary, I like being undisciplined very much. I like not knowing what to expect from the way I interact with the world as I understand it.

The best lingo I found for dealing with me and with the world external to my nay-me-d personality was the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes (I Ching). Unlike astrology and psychology it used the labels of the forces of nature to make useful metaphors that keep the inner and outer world from blaming me for what goes on around me. It teaches it's adherents to live a life of no blame.

I got blamed for things a lot when I was young. Shit happens. Things change. I found that attitude hard to live with. I needed my own way. I needed my own way so desperately I cruelly abandoned loved ones. I still do. Nothing has changed much except that I can explain myself with descriptions even people who live by instinct can easily comprehend.

It's with the tool of writing that I explore outside the my current limits. I write to individuals as if myself and I write to unknown crowds of people as I were all of them united, and nobody needs to know why or how but me. They can't. They can not know why or how because impossible. This state of impossibility doesn't exist as it does because I have anything to do with it. I can't know why or how anybody else does what they do by the same reasoning.

The thing about getting older that's scary to just about every older person I've talked with is the notion of losing their mind from senility or Alzheimer's dis-ease. It is not only dreaded by aging people themselves, but the younger people around them that are obligated in one way or the other to take care of them.

A friend came over while I'm writing this blog entry to seek relief from the insanity of his mother losing control and lapsing into paranoia about her food and drinking water being poisoned. He had to take her to one of the regional hospitals and stay up there for a couple of days. She's not any better, and if she follows the path my mother did, it will only get worse.

In a way, it can't be that bad yet, she still recognizes him as her only son. The real problem for my friend is that his mother was the only support his senile father has had. He hasn't been left alone for a couple of years now, and his wife is apparently close to being institutionalize herself.

It's probably even more tedious for me because there ain't nobody here but me. I can't explain what that's a pattern I'm used to. I have the address of one child in Washington state, and I don't know where the other ones or their mothers live. There is a reason for that. They don't want me to know where they live. They only want to know if I'm dead yet. I guess I begged with my horrid behavior to be regarded in this despicable manner. No blame.

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A Visit From An Old Friend

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It's been a slow sort of day. I don't remember much of it. I don't think I've left the house. I cooked a one-pot meal that I'm dreading to eat for the next few days. Jesus, I could die of my own cooking. I gotta become a nicer person or at least pretend to be until i can get up with somebody who can cook. Jesus F. Christos!

I spent much of the afternoon and early evening with my friend Billy who is an American Indian... sort of. He is actually a mulatto of some sort like everybody else around here. He claims to be a Indian, and he actually is, and yet he's not. He don't know any Indian gods. His own parents worshiped some Palestinian god of dubious ex-is-tense. Gods being what God's are, what possible difference could it make?

He's wealthy. If we hadn't been friends for over twenty years he probably wouldn't talk to me. He'd like for me to forget I'm poor so he wouldn't feel as though he's stooping in order to be my friend. I'm thinking I'm doing him a favor even though he betrayed the cause. It's all I'm giving up, and so he has to take it or do without. I'm not the sort of person you wanna do without. Guaranteed!

I'm aware that might seem arrogant, but there is a reason staying friendly with me, once gained, and that's because I'll tell you what I think because I'm true to myself, not you. That's what I hope for from people. I'm not seeking the truth as much as I am knowing how you feel. Then, I can make adjustments to a world beyond words.

Not for a minute do I think my friends know the real truth about the condition of the world I live in. Why would I obligate them in such a manner? It's perfectly and consciously aware to me that we each see what we take for granted. Why would we not?

Billy has lived the sort of life that is as opposite to my own of anybody I'm consciously aware of. One of my proudest moments was when he came and asked me if I would fit pipe for him down near Atlanta, Georgia. One weekend while we were working there we took off and went to Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain.

It was the first mountain he had actually ever seen in his life, much less drove to the top of and looked down on the Tennessee River. Vicariously, I enjoyed his initial excitement as if it were my own. Previous to this occasion it was difficult for me to think that somebody had never seen a mountain in their entire life.

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Ti-me For A Change In Me

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The doctors seem to have hit upon the right combination of prescription drugs to keep the arthritis pain at bay long enough for me to comfortably play the scales on my digital piano again. The longevity thing is popping in once in a while to allow me to feel like missing a few days hasn't kept my unconscious mind from processing the benefits. One benefit is that the longer I work at this, then the more lightly I stroke the keys, and that takes less physical energy and sounds better.

The fact that I taught myself the major and minor scales and kept practicing until I memorized them makes me pleased with myself. Its not so much that I wanna be able to play a lot of music on the piano, but rather that I did something I knew would be good for me in lots of different ways. I sing more accurately now. At least I think I do. YMMV

I keep considering what I need to do about learning to play up and down the keyboard more playing triad chords as they appear in the Circle of Fifths. Since I don't have a piano teacher I have to take the attitude of "steady as she goes" in the sense of feeling my way through playing the piano.

For instance, tonight after I finished playing the scales I tried to play the major scale triads around the Circle of Fifths, and I soon got confused about which chord came next. I could write this down on paper and just follow the instructions on the keyboard, but somehow I think I have to do it by memory. Maybe tomorrow I'll remember a few more chords than I did tonight.

The water colors and acrylic paints I bought aren't getting used as much as I'd hoped when I bought them. I bought some terra cotta flower pots to have something round to paint on, and discovered I need to buy some white gesso to coat the pots with so they wouldn't absorb so much paint that the colors looked flat and weird.

I couldn't think of anything in particular I wanted to paint on the flower pots, so I painted a zodiac of all the astrology signs. I didn't think it through and I got the spacing wrong. I started over by painting over the symbols with the gesso, and taking a compass to figure out the twelve spaces I needed for the symbols to come out evenly spaced.

The point of buying these pots was just to have something to use the colors to see what they looked like. I used the various paint brushes I bought at the same time for the same reason. Just to get some familiarity with how the brushes move. I'm not mixing any colors, just using what comes straight out of the tube.

Primal colors are fine with me. It's not like I know them by name even. If I can just paint anything on those pots and learn what the names of the colors I'm using that might be progress of some sort. I'm beginning to "see" the future a little better, and it's not hunky dory.

The more I think about the three puberties that are associated in astrology beginning with the first pubescent period at the age of twelve that involves the ability to physical procreate children, and the second one at the age of forty-two that concerns mental creativity, and the third one at the age of 71 that evokes spiritual creativity, the more I look for signs of what spiritual creativity is about.

When I moved from the physical stage into the mental stage of life at the age of twenty-nine and a half into the mental third of life I eventually stopped looking for physical solutions to my problems, and took up figuring mental ways of accomplishing the same end. I was literally thirty years old when I started studying astrology and the various vegetable oracles such as the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching.

How was I to know I was preparing for the second puberty at the age of forty-two. That's exactly when my second wife loaded our children in the new car I'd bought with her and went to live near her mother and siblings in California. By then, however, I had a clear mental picture of why it had to be that way, but the emotion of breaking up was horrid.

Presently, I'm right at the age when the third puberty arrives astrologically, and my previous experience has informed me that anything goes when it's time for major changes to matriculate. Changes as drastic as losing my second family. For all I know it could be sickness or death. I don't know what to expect. Oddly enow, I'm sorta okay with that.

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This Damn Battery Charger, I Oughta...

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The battery charger stopped working that's pretty much mandatory for keeping a BlueTooth keyboard and TrackPad operating, plus the Anywhere Mouse I keep running. I still use it and will until I get proficient enough on the new TrackPad to not keep fresh batteries in the extra mouse too. That's six AA rechargeable batteries I'm discharging 24/7.

The charger going kaput surprised me. There is not much about it to go wrong. The diodes could burn out I suppose. It has two LED's. One is to show the power is working, and a red one that flashes on and off when it's charging used batteries. When I took all the batteries out of the holding racks the red charging light stayed on. I decided to just unplug the power cord and wait ten seconds, and sure enough, the red light went out.

The batteries in the Anywhere mouse were fine, so I put four rechargeable batteries in the holding racks, the red light came on again, and so I waited for about an hour to see if the batteries would charge up. When I took the batteries out of the charger and put them in the TrackPad the BlueTooth page notified me that they had 99% charge. Wow! In an hour.

The charger must not have been working all that good for a while. I thought I may have to buy a new one. The miser in me is what drove me to look harder for a solution. I'm addicted to it provoking me this way. I don't think there is a way for me to get out of being a Scrooge when being one delights me.

The morning flew by, and now it's already after three o'clock in the afternoon. I wrote something all morning, but it took me so long to edit what I did write that it got tiring. I like to edit and try to get all the words I type just like I like them. It challenges my brain. News reports I've seen lately emphasize how the human brain uses most of the body's energy. Editing may use more than any of my physical activities.

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On Keeping A Long White Beard

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The branch of a state-wide department store had a big sale, and I decided to splurge and buy a herringbone sports coat to wear at formal occasions like funerals. The price was right. 60% off. I saved a $100, and got a neat looking coat that will show I at least tried to dress up a little. A friend of mine had such a coat and it seemed to serve him well for all occasions.

What really impressed me about how people seemed to accept a nice looking sport coat and slacks instead of a matched suit of clothes was that his coat was a little big on him. He seemed to be able to move around in it comfortably. I bought a corduroy sport coat out in Seattle, Washington to wear at my daughter's second wedding, and it fit so snugly that I haven't worn it much since. The herringbone jacket is a little too big for me.

I'm getting older all the time, and the world reminds me of it. I had an RSS feed for the Obituary column in the local paper, and nearly half the people that showed up on it were younger than me. That began to get on my nerves, so I deleted the feed. I'm better off not knowing about every soul in this county and the adjoining counties that croaks in the prime of their life.

The next high school class reunion is next Monday. That's how weird the people I went to school with are. They hold it on a Monday. The people who are still employed will have to make special arrangements. Too bad. Maybe, if we're lucky, that will mean at least half the class won't be there. I may not be there either, but that's the real reason I bought the coat.

My beard is now longer than it's ever been before. It is a few inches lower than my shoulders. I started it as a goatee, but got tired of keeping it trimmed, so I let the whole thing go. Now it looks really weird because my beard is long and the sides of my face has much shorter hair. If I had any couth whatsoever I'd at least try to trim it a little to make it neater. I'm not.

My long white beard freaks little children out when I go shopping at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter. They get these winsome looks on their faces. I know why. I could be Santa Claus, and they don't know whether I know whether they've been naughty or nice.

They gimme that half-smile when they notice me, as if I might actually recognize them I just happen to have a nice beard, and surprise them with an early gift because Santa Claus loves all the children and knows each of them by name. Right?

Sometime I wink at them or stick my tongue out at them when their mothers ain't looking, and they all draw back from staring at me in shock and awe, and some of them start crying.

Hey! I didn't invent Santa Claus. I'm innocent, I tell you. I don't stop and torment them or pester them anymore than anybody else. All this happens in a moment when we're passing each other in the aisles. Oddly enow, it happens with so-me grown-ups too. The Santa Claus thing. I've grown awfully suspicious that some adults still believe in Santa Claus even if they're unconscious of it.

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Used and Abused

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For some reason, a long time ago I took the advice of some Shakespeare character "not to lend nor a borrower be". I may not have the quote worded exactly right. I don't like loaning money. I've only done it once or twice since I got out of the Navy several decades ago, and I don't borrow money from friends.

It's not that I won't step up if a person is short a dollar or two because they figured wrong or literally forgot their wallet at a restaurant or in the check-out line at the grocery store, but to loan someone money out of my meager Social Security check to help them live a lifestyle that's grander than my bare survival gets tedious, and I get testy.

When I realize they're borrowing money from me to keep their reputation up with people who virtually live in expensive mansions with all the expensive modern conveniences, and eat out in restaurants several times a week, and I live in a unfinished rathole of a building with a minimum of conveniences and eat my own lousy cooking. I feel used and abused.

Recently I've written a bit about how homo sapiens seem especially gifted at data mining the various databases they encounter. Some deliberately encountered by design and other by random chance and serendipity. The focus of my curiosity in regard to data mining is the database source.

Various experts are considered experts usually because the database they mine for pertinent information is a database of previous experts experiences they establish as a source by their own efforts. Like people who wanna become chess grandmasters might memorize all the classical strategies of past chess grandmasters and even specific winning games from the last one hundred years.

Such a man-made database of other people's experiences not yet their own requires expertise merely to establish it in a knowable place (a rememberable location) and a way of retrieving it such that it solves problems through diagnosis.

This approach seems to work okay for many people, but I go about it in a little different way, but only because I use a different non-made experiential database as a source for retrieving ideas and using them as my own.

There is a fine word it took me a while to completely understand. Well, enough to use it confidently as I please, because I can delineate what it means very well to a rude critic. That term is "apperceive". It's easy to grasp the meaning of it. When humans perceive information from the sensory dimension it is stored away as memory.

Memory is an odd word to me. If I hyphenate the initial "me" it resolves to me-mory. If I change the "y" to an "e" it takes the form of me-more. Reverse it and it's more-me. I add an "of" to possess it, and its more-of-me. My memory is the more of me than you can see. Your memory is the "more" of you that makes "you" what you are to both of us. '-)

It's the "more" of you, that I can't perceive with my five senses. If you try to describe verbally what the more of you is, that I can't perceive with my sensory modalities, all I will hear is what I would be saying if I spoke the sa-me words.

Socially, in order to feign real verbal intercourse, I am forced by my lack of objective information concerning the more of you, except my subjective interpretation, to invent my own idea of what you describe. Eventually I have to assu-me what you're describing is what I see in my own "more" of me for the purpose of me-and-thee-ing (meaning).

Once sensory data about ongoing events are engulfed into one's memory banks, retrieving this non-sensory data for use in the sensory world is a ritual labeled by the auld people as a/perception. Sort of like negating sexuality by placing an "a" in front of sexual to spell asexual. I don't know why the second "p" is added.

Apperception is used to describe retrieving stored information from whatever source it comes from. But, it's more than just randomly retrieving experiential data. An example from chess mastery works for me.

Not only does a chess student have to memorize all the classical games for the last hundred years, but he has to be able to retrieve specific and pertinent data that associates to the game predicament he finds himself, but he has to learn to use it to win chess games strategically, and still have the animal instincts to go for the throat of his opponent when they bare it.

"Opportune moments in love and war, once lost, can seldom be regained."

~ Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States of America

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More Hours Wasted Listening To Binaural Beats

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The actual entry is further down. Using Blogger.com provides me with the opportunity to edit innumerable times. It doesn't seem to matter how much later I decide to change things around. Presently, I'm not interjecting in this space to change the original entry below, but to add something that I wanna preserve for posterity.

It's not unusual for me to return to edit stuff after I've thought about it for a while. I've been writing on the internet for 15-18 years now. Nothing I've ever written has been deleted. I figure the content that's entered now will be consider part of the pioneering days of the internet, and will be kept in server farms forever around the globe. In a way, my writing about anything I like to in the early days (relatively) of the WWW actually makes me an immortal, or at least until some nuclear armageddon clear-cuts the Earth, and breaks it up into a zillion astroids.

The binaural beat compositions I'm watching on youtube and listening to through stereo earphones still intrigues me. The last one made patterns of sine waves from an oscilloscope. It made me wonder how many people who watched this video knows what an oscilloscope is or what it's used for.

The creators of the video don't hide the graph lines of the oscilloscope screen, and those translucent pipped lines gives a nice perspective for how the sine waves swirls dancingly to the music they produce. This happens on a new web site where another of the binaural beats artists displays their wares via youtube. They call themselves Kymotropic Inventions. The dictionary.app on my iMac don't have a clue what "Kymotropic" means. They overlay blues songs on top of the sine wave patterns. Eerie sounds not usually heard in nature, but pleasant.

The interesting thing for me is that I can write with this stuff playing through my earphones, but I can't write if the television is on or I have a visitor. That benefit alone pleases me because many times there are ambient noises that cause the same stultifying reaction when I'm trying write. Like Marine helicopters hovering above the runway not far away, and Mexican music from the rental trailer over across the paved road playing loudly to address the migrant workers apparent homesickness.

Another habit I have that makes time fly, and also causes me to think that it's a meditation enabler is a Hearts card game from a collection of card games I bought at the Apple Store. I liked the MS Hearts game very much, so when I switched back to Macs after a long siesta I had to search for a Hearts game for Apples operating system.

I liked the Hearts game that came on the CD, and a couple of the other card games that came with it, and I played the default Hearts game fairly contentedly for maybe a couple of years. It seemed a little too predictable as far as outcomes were concerned, but I wasn't unhappy with my purchase,

One day I saw an option I hadn't seen before. If it'd been a snake... and all that jazz... so, quite naturally, as curious as ever, I clicked on it, and a dialog box popped up and asked if I'd like to move to a more difficult lever of their regular Hearts game, and I clicked on the Yes button.

They weren't joking around about it being more difficult. I lost 90% of the games I played for the longest ti-me, and had to completely reframe my Hearts playing strategy. Even after a year or so of playing at this more difficult level I have only managed to win at or below 50% of the Hearts games I play.

The other computerized "players" all read cards. That's the way I got it figured. I'm the only real player, and I'm the odd man out with this game. I don't know what cards they have, and they all know what cards I have. It's a tedious position to find myself, yet I am is intrigued. If my mind drifts, it brings catastrophic results immediately and I get the Queen of Spades and all of the cards in the Hearts suite except for one.

The result of having to pay strict attention to the game at all times is what I have to do with mindful meditation. After a while I go into the state of being where I lose track of ti-me, and forget about all my troubles and woes for a while, just like happens when I sit in the cafe booths for breakfast and stay for several cups of coffee while I work crossword puzzles. Time flies because I'm having fun.

The binaural beats at this new web site are very interesting, but they don't feature the solfeggio notes I can sing with and hear the external input into my ears that cause my voice to warble to include a binaural beat of it's own.

I've listened to the four videos these people have generated, and now I'm gonna go to my own youtube account and start the thirteen binaural beat videos I have on a playlist that will play each them in sequence without me having to boot up each one separately.

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The Elimination of Pain Via Crossword Puzzles

The brief interview I saw on TV has precipitated an interest in how pain can be tolerated mo' bettah in the presence of either a loved one or a picture of them. This is very interesting to me because it provides a portal to finally understanding the incentives for sadomasochism like nothing before. If this new theory is correct, maybe really love is why a historical Jesus offered himself up to voluntarily die on the cross to serve as an example of to what degree love can serve humans, but not so much other living creatures. Here is a link to watch it:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/16/earlyshow/saturday/main6964376.shtml

The most interesting intuition I've entertained since this is about what a parent will suffer for their children. Death. That's what. I'm considering the day to day stuff like going without food to make sure their children get enough to survive. Lifting up automobiles their kid is trapped under. Standing in queue for hours for the Gestapo to shoot you in the head at the edge of a huge common grave. Maybe the long lines gave them a chance to socialize a little with the people they were going to be buried forever with.

Contrarily, unrequited love can produce pain so powerful they'll murder their own siblings in the insane notion they're preventing them from experiencing the same degree of pain they're suffering. They can't stand the pain without love and so they go postal. There are two cases of this being discussed on the six o'clock presently. Both cases are about women killing their own children or step-children.

Is the absence of pain in a loving relationship the only proof positive the expressed love between two people is real? Does the presence of pain prove love is false and "not there" for the sufferer? Are auto-immune diseases due to a lack of love, and offer verity to the lyrics:

"You bettah let someone love you, before it's too late." ~ Desperado

The Remoteness Of Remote Viewing

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The mini-crisis I generated over my water bill actually provided relief in a way. Inadvertently, I found out how the system works by being wrong. I had the idea that the minimum payment each month included a certain number of gallons that was the limit before additional charges were added to the minimum payment. That's where I went awry.

There ain't no minimum allotted gallonage. Each customer pays the minimum payment plus the cost of however many gallons of water they used. That way they don't have to read the meters every month. It doesn't matter when they read the meters, because when they do read the meters, the fare goes back to the last reading even if it was done six months ago.

Many incidents, in the past, where I get really jacked out of shape over what usually proves to be an over reaction, the only real result of it is that I embarrass myself. Sometime a lot of embarrassment. Other times not so much. Candidly, it's a lousy learning system, but it works for me.

The expression I use a lot that goes, "Why am I always the last to know?" is frequently more than just a whimsical attempt at lame humor. It's like asking a question of the I Ching, but with the whole world as my oracle.

I guess I could climb to the top of a hill and scream out for God to hear my pleas, but it's flat as a flitter around here. The only-est way to climb up high anywhere around here is either is go to the top of the county water towers or the fire towers, which nostalgically, aren't used anymore. Satellites with heat detectors.

So, without leaving my room I spread my chosen questions of the source through the people who read my posts around the universe at large, and then the universe responds by choosing the me-singer (messenger) whose song evokes my me-sayer (messiah), and I-am-is me becomes indirectly so informed.

As you can see, I haven't completely abandoned using tossed word salad to get around the formality of well-formed speech. I write like that just to discover if there is anyone out there who can make sense of it. I-am-is sez wot it sees with accommodated ease. It sure ain't up to me.

I reach for this source that won't abandon me when the graven images of life does. If it wasn't for Google I'd be lost for words based on my formal education more often that it might appear that I do. It's an awkward phase of life I find myself in.

A newborn arrives in the initial physical phase of life. After around twelve years it matriculates into being able to reproduce life sexually. Eventually, after the first Saturn Return, it entered the mental phase of life, and twelve years later, just like with the physical phase, at the age of forty two years old, approximately, it matriculates to mental puberty and the power to create mental children (ideas).

When the same person reaches the age when the second Saturn Return happens in their late fifties they enter the spiritual phase of life, and twelve years later, at the age of around seventy-two they matriculate into create at the spiritual level, and I'm right around that age now.

The orbit of Saturn upon which these figures are cast is twenty-nine and a half years. That's why the second Return happens near the age of fifty-nine, and adding twelve to that leans toward the age of seventy-one and I'm seventy-one and a half. Stuff is happening such that I think I'm consciously aware of it a little bit, but it's nothing to speak of.

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Mark Twain and the Dragon

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I'm still stuck in Twain's deliberate description of an angel's attributes. Specifically that this angel (The Mysterious Stranger itself) through Mark Twains own composition of the story's content states that angels aren't condemned to polarized reactions by the human's Moral Sense. I'm not sure the angels dialog said this exactly, but I got the impression it stated docetic creatures like itself did not possess and wasn't possessed by a conscience because immortal.

The idea I got from the story was that angels are immortal and don't taste death, and that's why they don't understand why humans fear death. Maybe I'm reading that part wrong. I got more and more excited as the story went along because it appeared to follow pretty much the sa-me format as my remembering vision.

By the time i got through reading all eleven chapters of The Mysterious Stranger I was fairly convinced that this story was Clemens' metaphorical account of his own remembering vision. Reading it revealed what I consider to be a common format to this particular variety of visions. I'll probably be on the lookout for other examples in other writer's stories.

Twain's account and my account could either be used as the source code for the script of the blockbuster movie 2001 Space Odyssey. You might make a good argument that I unconsciously imitated a sequence of scenes I mimicked from that movie, but can you just as easily claim that the movie wasn't based on Twain's work copy-righted sixty years earlier?

Either way, experiencing this type of vision leads to an alternate source of information to data mine using curiosity explore the cornucopia I became aware of in vision.

There seems to be some residual effects of me getting angry over my water bill. I have mentioned that I was wrong and the Public Works department was right. They have a web site with their policy spelled out, and I didn't know it existed.

I could have saved myself a lot of stress and possible embarrassment if I'd known the web site was there and I'd checked it out before I opened my grouchy mouth. Fortunately I knew I was over the top in my efforts to get treated fair, and asked my youngest brother to negotiate for me due to his lack of emotional investment in the outcome. He did a good job and resolved the matter. I still have some calming down to do to get over being foolish.

If I check it out with some objectivity I can see that I'm acting out in a defensive way, and it probably has to do with the aging process. I appear to be attacking other people's defenses to see if they are more prepared for death than me. There is a Gospel of Thomas saying about preparing oneself by practicing thrusting one's sword into the walls of ones house in order to train to kill the strong man. The paragraph below is an example of how I do it. Your milage may vary.

"Why aren't you able to write in the vernacular of an established group of variegated curiosity seekers about their non-academic concerns? I do. How can such an uppity Pharisee/priest/confessor such as yo'self graciously take his minion's confessions if they think their spiritual mentor don't have the ears to hear their plebeian concerns, but gladly accepts the widow's mite to gild the lilies with monkey shit coffee?"

This paragraph is a projection of my own idea of myself, but only partly so. It's a combination of what i perceive of myself in a specific person that I've felt was strong enough for me to use as a mirror, but I may have gone too far and caused a reaction I didn't really intend. It might be prudent for me to instigate some behind the scenes damage control.

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Angels Can't Taste Death

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If, as Ariana Huffington, who was born in Greece and purportedly wrote a well-accepted book on the Greek Gods stated, in a PBS documentary earlier today, that modern and ancient Greeks all think they made their Greek gods in their own image to be able to see themselves in abstract construction as they secretly are for real. Obversely, she concluded that western Europe and America think of the Greek gods as if they created the ancient Greek civilization sort of like Jehovah did in the Genesis myth. 

I idiosyncratically agree that the Greek societies and cultures created the Greek gods in their own image. How else could they have arisen from the vapor of the bottomless pit known as 'the abyss' than as ideated thought creatures. As of yet, there are still no space elevators, and teleporting humans hasn't gotten off the chopping block either. I concur that Western civilization probably doesn't exactly see that ploy in the sa-me light. Whatever that is. It's kind of like the story of the Emperor's new clothes. The devout dress their gods in the attributes they collectively give them. Yadda... But, another strategy for apperceiving from that ancient database is to postulate that the Greek gods were forced to mimic man in order to remain gods that humans can see themselves in or they're useless and abandoned. So be it. No blame. 

Presently, as of now, I don't think homo sapiens can imitate immortal entities because homo sapiens create the world around them employing the polarized spectrum referred to as "duality". Human beings can't even conceive of imitating or mimicking any thing or event without the perspective of both ends of that polarized perspective.

Without polar opposites to use to gain perspective humans can't put the "me' behind them me-ekly in order to grok (deeply intuit the presence of) immortal entities. Moreover, if immortal creatures are not aware of duality they can't ideate perspective worlds nor understand the prayers of humans. Immortals are immortal because they can't taste death. 

I've written about "the price" from many approaches. As many as I can discover portals for. I seem less quick presently to condemn myself for the foibles of ritual and the tied-to-a-railroad-track results thereof. I use "speech" so-me-ti-me that I-am-is ain't prepared to defend, and it can be worrisome and scary, but a man gotta do... How could He not?

This post is just a hash. I wrote parts of it two or three days ago. It doesn't matter. It can only get more slacker as ti-me goes by. I didn't post yesterday because I kept putting it off, and then I had a friend call me who seriously needed to take a drink or two to settle down, and naturally I drank a bit with him.

I got home around midnight, and felt lucky to not get pulled over by the cops and tested for being drunk. I wouldn't have passed with flying colors, but I didn't realize that until I woke up in the early morning hours with a hangover beginning. It was then that i realized I drank more than I'd figured.

That was a stupid thing for me to do. I was around twelve miles from home. I did take evasive action in the form of a back country road that put me around five miles further to drive, but it's so desolate in the early morning hours it would be a waste of time for the cops to set up a road block for one car per hour or less.

The road is named after a bridge that crosses the creek/river that runs through my families property for several hundred yards. I wrote "creek/river" because normally its a pleasant little creek unless there is a lotta rain, then it become a river, but not necessarily a raging river because of being located in the coastal plains.

Coastal plains are generally a flat terrain anywhere they happen all over the world. Holland for example. Not only is it flat there, but they put up dams and pump the seawater from behind them to farm the exposed land. East Texas along the Gulf of Mexico is as flat a fly flitter for several miles inland in some places. If you drive from Houston to Corpus Christi the territory looks a lot like it does here on the Carolina's coastal plains. Even how the pine forests have been clear-cut in most places.

Water in the hinterlands gets corralled into swift-running channels by the mountains and then the foothills. By the time the water reaches the flatlands it spreads out and incrementally creates a wider floodplain on each side of the rivers and streams. It does the same thing in the Great Plains west of the Mississippi River. There, the flat floodplains are called the Mississippi Delta lands. There's deep, very rich loamy soil there that grows cotton like all git out.

When it gets to the coastal plains and spreads out into the broader flood plains, it begins to run deeper because of the lack of hills and bluffs to compress it into rapids and without rock layers close to the surface the water digs down as deep as it likes.

In the area my house is located it's normal to drill household water wells down 400 feet (122 M) into the relatively soft soils without hitting any rocks. That's probably where the expression, "Still waters run deep." comes from.

The coastal plains here in the Carolinas were the home of General Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox in the Revolutionary War. When there is a drought or dry condition it's easy to get around without bogging down in the swamp mire, but if it's wet you really gotta know your way around or you won't be able to run from the bears when you up to your waist in muck. The Swamp Fox knew which path had heart. He took it and helped win our independence from the European royalty.

Contrarily, there were lots of Tories here because they came here as aristocrats or with the hope of becoming aristocrats with vast grants of land acreage to back it up. In my opinion, this Southern agrarian aristocracy was the root cause of the Civil War. I observed the regal dismissiveness of the Southern aristocracy last night in full-blown denial. Presently, it's real difficult to self-observe such behavior in my own personality. I do what I can.

Many of the European immigrants arriving through the Northeastern port cities felt lucky to have escaped the European royals and religious tyrants, and could not tolerate the growth of an aristocracy getting a foothold in America and rule over them again as if pawns. Why would they not go brother against brother to make sure that didn't happen?

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Wot I'll Fight To The Death For

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It's true that I am is the only-est One who can grok it, because everyone else has to interpret my behavior as if they were doing what they "think" I am is doing, but for their own reasons. I've been in a rage for the last couple of days about how I'm getting innocently screwed by the county water people. No, it's not personal, just a bookkeeping error of $15, but if it's left uncorrected it invokes the old joke about "a billion here, and a billion there soon builds up to be a chunk of real money.

This incident set off my deepest fears, and what I'll fight to the death over. Now, this is really an admittance that I've wasted my life and don't have a good sense of humor. What I was/am totally incensed about would be so petty to the average person, "I can't get no respect!"

True, the overcharge is only $15 more than I usually pay. It might not show up for another six months. Why am I fighting city hall over such trivial amounts of money. Candidly, it's about principle. The only principle/s I have. Without it I'm a worm rather than a homo sapiens.

Last night after I had gone to bed and lay there not sleeping because I'm so deeply angry I finally figured out a sane way to go about resolving this issue. I needed a printout of my payment schedule in order to show that I have a legitimate complaint. It's probably a sure thing I can make sense even to the people who just shined me on as if I don't matter.

I still couldn't go to sleep because I was wound so tight, so I took another pill and it worked. This morning I casually went out for breakfast and sat with my brother and an old high school friend. My brother left for work, and my friend and I sat for another hour as he explained to me how thrilled he was with the books he has been reading lately.

Then, I was very pleased with myself for letting him talk uninterrupted until he left, and then I drove the short distance down to the Public Works office, calmly and purposefully walked in the door. I had to wait until the clerk finished with the customer in front of me, then I asked the same woman who dissed me last Friday if she would print me out a copy of the last twelve months of my payments that are drafted on my checking account.

She knew who I was from our former encounter, but she was very professional and printed me out what I'd requested with only a minimal delay, and I walked out. This may read as a very mundane event, and it was because I made it happen that way by controlling my temper.

I didn't look at the printout but briefly on my way home. After I got home I still didn't look at it much. Just enough to see that my assessment of the situation from last Friday was correct, and so to give myself some time to calm down even more I decided to take a ride in order to change the scenery in which I exhibited my extreme angst.

I rode over to Fayetteville where I decided to go by the Community College to see if I could catch my friend in between the chemistry classes he teaches to see if he had time for lunch. It turned out that he was between classes, and we had some lunch and chatted for a while until he had to return.

Riding around with no real destination works wonders for me as far as relaxing is concerned. I was/am still angry, but at one point I caught a drifting thought I became determined to capture with words, and I had to pull over to the side of the road in order to write it down.

"I'm the kind of person who gets jacked up so tightly, that I have to spend inordinate amounts of otherwise useful time calming myself down to keep from doing something stupid."

When I wrote "spend inordinate amounts of time", it's not so much of a joke. It could take a few days or a few months or a few years once I get good and mad. Madman.

Some say the nomad is mad,
but the don't understand,
that the nomad must travel
at the madman's command...

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Libraries As Portals To The Dreamtime

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One of the up sides of being a bum who hitch-hiked around North America during the warm months was that I treated myself to being a bum in Key West, Florida during the cold months.

The whole island back then was like an inside place to be except for the mosquitoes. I slept at night and mostly in the day time right out in the open unless I got invited to sleep inside someone's house.

A lot of bums from all over competed for the resources for staying alive in the warm southern climes in Florida, Texas, and California mostly. Key West may be the choice of the lot, but the hardest to survive in. Any place has a limit by nature to how many people can sponge off a particular neighborhood.

Key West is now one of the most expensive places to live in America. There is a really good reason. There are thirty odd bridges along U.S. Route 1, and keeping the scum and the great unwashed at bay is easy. Two sheriff's cars parked in a vee on one of the bridges and two deputies with riot guns could hold off an invading army. A bank robber there has a armed gauntlet for an escape route. Aiiiyyyeeeee!

Being a bum meant that I had as much time (then as I do now in "my retirement") to do whatever I please without cumbersome appointments. With no real inside place to get the public's eyeballs off my physical person, sometimes the best I could hope to relax and enter my private dominion was to find an empty seat in some public library.

Any place where I could park my body in a soft upholstered chair with an open book in my lap and drift away into the dreamtime until the bespectacled librarian's assistant would slyly poke me rudely back into the library's universally known musty smell. "You can't sleep here, Sir!", they'd cackle.

"Learning to ask people what they think instead of correcting them and telling them what to think seems more progressive. It's pretty much the point of learning to use oracles in order to be-co-me One."

I wrote the quoted paragraph above an hour or so ago as an e-mail response. I like how-formed the whole paragraph turned out. Especially the second sentence. I didn't know during the ti-me I used and studied the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching that I studied oracles in order to become One. Or, an oracle either.

Even after I was informed in a dream to stop using the I Ching I didn't understand that I had to stop using the book as my oracular source and start using people instead. It was a big move. It frightened me for months. Eventually I discovered that people LOVE to be used as oracles. None of them ever knew they were so smart.

A couple of hours ago I walked out into the woods where I've been cleaning up the ground cover and fallen tree residue. I felt moved to clear the area above where the pipes I buried to move county water from their meter up to my house. It's been a long time since my youngest brother and I buried those pipes to our houses.

His house is a hundred yards deeper into the woods than mine. We buried our individual pipes in the same trench until we got to my house, and he split off from there and buried the rest of the pipe to his house. Once I cleared enough of the ground cover and bushes away I found the trench by how the filler dirt has settled in.

There aren't any leaks. The county water department has billing mistakes they refuse to admit are incorrect. I think that may be because they don't know how to go into the database program and make the necessary corrections. They're dismissing me as a doddering old man who is merely confused. So far, it's working for them. I may arrange a surprise by going over their heads to the county commissioners. Even that may not resolve my problem. A lotta these county government people are kin or at least seem to be.

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They Prey By Faith Allone

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Several times in the last couple of days I've found myself stuttering to get words out. 'That' doesn't bode well. 'This' doesn't bode well either. What a drag, man, presently, neither this and that look bright in the future. Let's face it. When neither 'this' nor 'that' is where it's at, then life itself seems contraindicated and Death can extemporaneously rule the roost.

"Contraindicated" is a little out of metre for writing poetry in prose, but I just love to say the word, and writing it is just as much fun. Okay, not as much fun as hyperfluidity, but right up there with perfidy. I've been called a wordsmith lots of times because I like to bend words around to express a personal point of view, as if to suggest my way of saying things is special, and it is, but the clumsily disguised point I reach for is the same old/same old.

Sometime I think the thoughts of genius. I like it when that happens, but I don't think for a minute that I got dibs on tuning in. I think everybody with a undamaged human brain tunes in. It's communicating what humans find there in their personal cornucopia that spoils the broth. A lotta people can't say what they see to other people, while others can't see what they say. Both prey by faith allone.

For me it's always taken more than faith. There has to be something honestly intriguing for me to have faith in the specific bird-in-hand. A somethingness upon which I can hang my hat, as it were. Merely using my head as a hatrack is just not enough.

In my opinion and subjective experience my "brain" is not merely inside my skull, but is located all over my body. My "mind" extends even beyond my skin and is the antenna of my holistic networking system. I-am-is operates a huge database server farm, and all that we are or can be is forever etched in blood and stone.

I may ken more than the average person about transistors. They came along at a critical learning time in my life. I studied electronics in the Navy before solid state transistors became all the rage. The theory class study and the lab work was all about vacuum tubes.

Electronic theory didn't change all that much with the advent of transistors, because transistors performed the same task in electronics as the vacuum tube did. Solid state transistors are just so much more stable and they last practically forever unless lightning strikes.

The first transistor I held in my hand was made of silicon and the piece that I held in my hand was about the size of a silver dollar, and the most amazing thing was that there were the equivalent of two hundred radios etched into that rock. At last count Intel had reduced the size of transistors such that they have fit a billion of them on a postage stamp size stone.

Soon enough, in my ignorant opinion, they will keep reducing the size of transistors enough that one day they will realize they don't actually need them, and never have. That can't happen soon enough for me. I might have to roll over to applaud in my grave if they don't hurry up.

Oddly enow, I'm not kidding. I suspect "things" are in play such that all this tech stuff exists in nature and finding out how it works will solve a lot of problems like global warming and oil shortages. I don't know what they'll call it. It may have something to do with memristors, and the fourth law of electricity they represent.

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The Cute-It-Ain't Quaintness Of Mental Armor

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It's almost nine o'clock in the morning and the temperature is forty eight degrees (8.889° C). It's the second really cool morning after the record-setting heat of last summer. In a month or so I'll wish it were as warm as forty eight degrees, but presently it's like the dead of winter to me. I put on long pants and imitation sheep's wool boots to stay warm.

Two or three nights ago I was preying for the temperature to drop below 70° and the humidity in the air to dry out enough for me to stop sweating and fall off to sleep comfortably. It reminds me of the group of Haitians that worked at the same job site as me. They showed up for work in sweaters and coats when the morning temperature was 72° in south Florida.

The ambient temperatures in Haiti don't rise and fall that much throughout the year. The Haitian's bodies don't have to adjust to big jumps or falls in the average temperature there. I don't know the actual figures in Haiti, but in the Amazon River basin in Brazil along the Equator, the temperature varies only +/- 2° around the 90° mark, 365 days a year. Thus, the temperature there doesn't get higher than 92° nor lower than 88°

It almost seems quaint now to remember how I loved taking Geography courses to claim the money I got to live on from the GI Bill. I had to be a full-time student to get the money, so I filled up my schedule with lots of courses that weren't required for a degree, but resonated with my innate curiosity.

The quaint aspect of it is that what I liked about the Geography courses is they showed a lot of films about exotic places they also lectured about. That was a sort of unique opportunity at the time. First to have the time to do it provided by the GI Bill, and to have the film technology around needed to see the film.

It was film on a reel. I'm trying to describe what might be called the "old days" to a younger crowd, but my point is that I'm not recalling the old days for nostalgic purposes, but to describe how I had to pay to go to an institution to view these types of images rather than Googling them up at my leisure on YouTube.

I have seen many more videos somewhere on the World Wide Web than I ever saw in a formal educational institute. With the near truth being that I've probably viewed more videos in the last six months via the internet than I ever saw in any of the schools I attended.

The big deal about that is that I saw them by indulging whimsy at full face value. Who hasn't spent hours following one link after the other to satisfy some inelegant urge operating under a pseudonym just as mysterious as their own fake handle?

Maybe a lot of people haven't. How would I know? I bought my first computer in 1988, and didn't get an internet account until around four years later. I was really ready to sign up when some local investors set up an ISP with a local telephone number. I've said all along that I was the thirtieth person to sign up, but I could have made all that up.

I do remember that what I bought into wasn't all worked out yet. The internet browser hadn't been invented yet, and the initial "stacks" we used to log on were primitive and the connections were totally unreliable. I don't recall the name of those "stacks", but it was a semi-standard protocol that thirteen year olds could delete a connection just for fun and games.

The one thing Microsoft did back then that still impresses me was to build a reliable stack of protocols for staying connected to the internet. Before Windows 95, staying connected was a crapshoot even if you were a natural born nerd who sorta knew what you were doing.

Windows is an okay operating system unless you log on to the internet. Being online with Windows, for me, caused me to feel as though I was spending more time trying to keep my rig secure than I was doing what I got on the internet for. I switched back to Mac, and haven't had to deal with that crap again. Ever. Not once since '03.

It gets real interesting to speculate on how ordinary people expressing their curiosity by following interesting links on the internet to some satisfactory conclusion.

I seem to have been a religious nut most of my life, and finding out why I've been a religious nut might have been impossible if I hadn't been able to view all the documents from all over the world from the same seat I'm seated presently.

Sorry I write such long sentences. It ain't like I'm writing the All American Novel. I'm tracing links in my own memory banks in pretty much the same way I go from web site to web site following the links the web sites I visit provide me with. That's another way of saying I try to capture drifting thoughts.

Following the links in my own private world as if it were literally the internet is something I've been training myself to do for forty years before the internet was invented. It's exactly the behavior required to do occult readings. That's what I had to learn to do to read palms, in the past.

I followed the anchors I've abstractly established by redundancy and repetition, and then say-id what I "saw" there to the person I held hands with. By following the anchors I previously created I produced a murky version of a Google Results page as my rap that considered magic and populism to make the trailer park queens as openly giddy as school girls.

I was a smelly bum back then. What kind of clients did ya expect me to have? The Queen of England? '-)

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Mister Benson And The Skill Center

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The sunlight out on my deck is now welcome. It's cool. The ambient temperature is 61° (16.1° C) and the humidity is low for around here. Sitting out in the sun to get vitamin D the old-fashioned way is very comfortable and relaxing. I began reflecting upon having made a living as a journeyman pipewelder, and then realized that's what I could write about today instead of just watching my drifting thoughts evaporate to become a part of the wispy clouds overhead.

Welding was perfect for me as a solitary thinker. It's the only craft I've ever mastered besides oracles. It didn't last that long. I didn't fall into it until I was thirty-five years old and in dire straits. I had walked away from a perfectly good wife and a perfectly acceptable corporate job to "tune in, turn on, and drop out". I don't write as much about that era of my life. Just the results of my walking away.

The guy's name who taught the government sponsored welding class was Benson. Mister Benson to me. I never attempted to get personal with him. I needed to learn how to weld for good reasons. I had married again. My family of another perfectly good wife and child lived in a slum house, and our Volkswagen needed a new engine. I walked a couple of miles each way to the Skill Center.

There were 15-20 guys in the class to start out with. The numbers varied, usually downward, as the months passed. I was thirty-five years old and most of them were in their late teens and early twenties. We got along fine and most of us smoked pot together on the breaks. They didn't exactly know what to do with a skilled labor wannabe who wrote and recited poetry... and was literally the best welder in the class.

I was the best welder in the class because I practiced a lot while the young guys were strutting for each other attempting to pass for being a good catch for the ladies. Mister Benson made me the student foreman because I was such a hard worker and set an example of what it took to do right. Same as when I was in boot camp in the Navy. Start out with a bang! In welding class, however, I couldn't afford to go out with a whimper.

It's not unusual for what the outside world sees me as, to not be exactly true. I was born at sunset, and the sun in my natal chart was in opposition to the astrology sign on the eastern horizon which represents the personality the outside world "sees me as".

What does this have to do with the welding classes? Practically everything metaphorically. It only appeared to Mister Benson and my class mates that I was seriously practicing to become a competent welder by burning rod after rod while most of the other students were goofing around. Like I mentioned above, being a role model wasn't my real motivation.

What my real motivation was turned out to be molten metal. An honest to God intimate relationship with fiery red molten metal. It burned so bright special lens were needed to look at it, much less to learn how to push it around like it was 'mah bitch. '-)

Hey! It's not like I ain't got colloquial with you before, dear reader.

That's why welding and pushing that little point of molten metal around is so intimate. 99% of the ti-me, there wasn't nobody there to witness this goings-on but us chickens, as it were. I could cuss all I wanted to while my welding shield was down, and there won't nobody there to tell me "No!".

Throughout my entire welding career, if that what it was, the people who had a right to by corporate authority always (to a man) told me to take my time and do it right the first time or they'd fire me. Doing any other kind of work previous to welding pipe, the same Type-A's nearly all told me to hurry up or they'd fire me. Slowing down and doing it right was right up my alley. I felt like a boll weevil who had finally found a ho-me.

Later, my supervisors would try to get me to stop working so hard, and they too misunderstood my intentions. They took my daily goals as my motivating force, when por mio, it was my life goals that caused me to work right on through the breaks.

If there was enough work to go around and I could, my supervisors would have to shut off my welding machine or come tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go home. I'm a'telling you straight up, I used to get real joyous while I was hidden behind my welding shield. It was like I could "see" the entire universe within that glowing metal.

"... but, he grew old
this knight so bold,
and around
his heart
a shadow,
grew as he found
no spot of ground
by the name of
El Dorado!

~EAP
(The misquotes and lousy punctuation? Mine)

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It's The Weather, Stupid!

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It's too fast, man. We had record high temperatures for the longest time ever this past summer. I don't remember how many consecutive days it was over 90° (32.2° C), but it was week upon week. The last week has been cooler, but before that it was over 95° (35° C) and 95% humidity. It barely got down to 70° (21.1° C) at night and I had to sleep and perspire at the same time. It's in the fifties (10+° C) now, and I'm freezing. There was no transition between really, really hot, and a merely cool autumn day. Damn!

The few people I've talked to face to face around here are ready, really ready, for some cool weather. It ain't like I don't appreciate that it's finally here. I got convinced this last record-breaking summer that global warming is a real threat to my personal existence. My sympathy and compassion ain't got no long tail. I don't care about what happens to people all over the world, just within shouting distance of my house.

That's what watching the six o'clock news on TV has done to me over the years. They've shown so much death and violence from all over the world on such a constant basis that I've become apathetic and somewhat sarcastic about all these tragedies all the time. It makes me think of two of the sayings from the Gnostic library in the Gospel of Thomas:

6 His disciples asked him and said to him, "Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?"
Jesus said, "Don't lie, and don't do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed."

And:

14 Jesus said to them, "If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.
When you go into any region and walk about in the countryside, when people take you in, eat what they serve you and heal the sick among them.
After all, what goes into your mouth will not defile you; rather, it's what comes out of your mouth that will defile you."

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

Its the line about giving to charity that surprises me. That's why the Gnostic library found in Egypt in 1945 is so interesting. It's written in Egyptian Coptic (the language of the Pharaohs) and predates the stuff the Catholics changed to suit their dogmatic purposes.

"and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits."

The Protestant and Evangelical churches in the Bible Belt are practically based on what they call "Christian charity", but in the original versions of what was to become what is called The Bible, Jesus stated that doing it will harm your spirits. Who needs that? Adopting such an attitude fits in perfectly with me being a miser. '-)

This Dutch guy I exchange e-mail with occasionally wrote me again today in order to provide me with a link to the English version of their discussion of the Gospel of Thomas. I seem sure he won't really mind if I share it with you.

http://gospelofthomas.org

Not many, if any of the people I associate with are interested in this kind of thing. I don't find any blame in that. I'm not interested in a lot of the topics they obsess over, but I hang around with the kind of people that ain't got no couth anyway. Most of them had it beaten out of them as kids. "Spare the rod, spoil the child."

Monday is the day I take the methotrexate to combat the aches and pains of rheumatoid arthritis. I'm not looking for to the side-effect of nausea that's gonna be evident for a couple of days. I'm taking a solution of honey and apple cider vinegar daily on the advice of a passing stranger. Oddly, that's why I think it might help. It makes me burp a little like antacids do.

The sun is supposed to come out eventually. It's brightness replacing all the misty grayness has gotta help my emotional stability. The weather ain't done nothing but piss me off lately. Grouchy old man...
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