Germania

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Practically all day long I've watched youtube videos on the origins of language. Today was my day for exploring a little more about the Viking world the Arabian ambassador guy describes in his journal, but I got side-tracked into figuring out what the Friesian languages are about.

What made me curious were several comments I read in my search that involved the Rus Vikings, and association with the Friesian language. I was clueless. Never heard of it. Friesian is considered the last precursor language to the English language. A web search led me to the Wikipedia articles on the various languages that are called Friesian in one area of Germany or Netherlands. They're based mostly on the German language.

The Friesian speaking people inhabit the coastal areas of Germany and the other European countries that were on the coast of the North Sea right across the English Channel from England. The Celts who were there when the Romans conquered England lost the war, and it is apparently recorded somewhere that the Romans killed all the Celts, man, woman, and child.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frisians.png

Then, because of some threat in other parts of the Roman Empire, the Romans pulled all their troops out of England and abandoned the field to the Friesian speaking countries close by. They, in turn, were routed by the Anglo-Saxons, who were later whipped up on by the Normans who were Norsemen who were Vikings... and the band plays on.

I have speculated before that the Roman Catholic priesthood was invited into Germany and Scandinavia because they had a written language and social organization skills. They had Latin, and once a tribe without a written language became aware of the advantages of it they were willing to negotiate. This invitation to govern was not so rare with groups who had no idea how to govern or organize their own protective forces.

When I was reading about the Rus and Vandals and other tribal movements they were described as having a ruddy complexion. I have a ruddy complexion. I only found out when I joined the Navy and they put Ruddy down as my complexion. I had an anthropology professor who accused me of being "one of those barbarians" because of the shape of my skull. This research was beginning to take on a "roots" prospective.

This is a link to the web site that I've been polluting my mind with:

http://www.friesian.com/germania.htm

Somewhere, either on this web site or at one of the linked site that appear there, a story about a Viking and his encounter with his son about his inheritance. The father gave his son a sword and a battle axe and told him that was his entire and only birthright.

He got no other property. He was told to use those weapons to provide himself with the wherewithal he personally found important. A license to kill? In effect, the son was sent "a'viking" in the hope of gaining enough loot and booty to return home and create his own kingdom. Centuries later, the sword was replaced with the word, and a new way of coping with the rancor of the world of nature was forever changed.

Another bit of information I was ignorant about was that the Rune symbols are not as ancient as I'd led myself to believe. According to what I read today they were the initial attempt of the Scandinavian and Germanic tribes to come up with their own written language.

The runes were generated only after the Northern tribes become aware there was such a thing as a written language. I'm not sure of the dates. It's my guess that the Runes were not satisfactory to them, and their Druid priests felt as though they had been betrayed by their followers by deserting them for Latin and the black-robed Catholic priests.

I'm speculating that the Druid leadership was insulted beyond measure, and withdrew from the north country en masse to prove to their former charges that they couldn't live without them. Paradoxically, they probably immigrated to the slums around Rome where they intermingled with the Jewish Christian refugees from Israel.

The Druidic priesthood had been in charge of all the Germanic and Scandinavian tribes. They had all the skills needed to adopt the Christian religion and organize the Church of Rome much better than the decimated Jews could.

For the sake of argument, I playfully claim that the Druids used the executive skills they still possessed to organize the Christian Jews refugees in the slums and catacombs of Rome into a secret society whose effort was to proclaim Jesus of Nazareth as the true Messiah.

In my highly questionable opinion I believe the embarrassed and shamed Druids, formerly of the Northern tribes were welcomed into the Jewish Christian community and incrementally took over the Church of Rome as their new religion, and by extension the Holy Roman Empire which was their old stomping grounds. YMMV '-)

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Miscellaneous Missives of Good Will

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It was a simple act, but I felt emotional while carrying it out. There has been a paper grocery bag laying around my house in which some of the things my ex-wife left here when she took our children and left me here alone. It wasn't much, but it was the only physical evidence I had left from that era of my life. Since I'll never see them or my grandchildren again it seem prudent to send it off and free myself of some blame.

There were three framed cross stitch pieces my wife had sewn while she was pregnant. They were left on the wall of my parent's house when she left for California, and some notes my kids sent to their grandparents they never saw again. Dead now. Two baby pictures and some kindergarten drawings and painting.

Once I took the cross stitch pieces out of their frame I was able to stuff all of it into one of those prepared envelopes at the post office, and after I printed the address of my oldest daughter in Washington state (the only address I've ever had of any of them). I paid the clerk's asking fee and off they went. It only took ten years to get around to doing it.

I'm trying to put my house in order so there won't be much for the ghouls to sort through after I croak has become a minor priority in my life. I cleaned out my attic a few months ago. It's completely bare. Probably about like my brain cavity.

Most of the stuff I have now are tools I'll probably never use again, but I just might need them if I don't die soon. That's my real question. What if I don't die anytime soon, but life just drags out for another ten, maybe twenty years. Taking pills is the most of my activity except for cooking and writing.

I do have a few other activities I indulge daily or should be according to me. I play the major and minor scales on my digital piano. Recently, instead of just following the Circle of Fifths in one direction I've taken to moving in the opposite direction also.

It's the same scales, but in a different order. After having learned and played these scales in just one direction, playing them in a different order causes me to hesitate. My efforts are becoming smoother incrementally and there are fewer hesitations in between the various keys.

Singing the vowels is something I've taken to doing every day now. I suspect that not talking because I live alone has a detrimental affect on my mental resources. By that I mean to indicate that the two .sig files I've been using for about a month now are essential to my overall understanding. Namely: Speech is mind. Mind is speech. And, In the bejinning wuz the woid.

Not speaking because there is nobody here to talk to could lead to me becoming not only a mute person, but not speaking could be the cause of dementia to some degree, if not Alzheimer's. Singing the vowels is an activity I really enjoy if I get into a flow. I can get to feeling really joyous when everything gets easy. What is easy is simple.

After I left the State Hospital in full awareness, finally, that I might be a bit depressed, but not insane, I realized in fact that I can personally change my mind and act completely differently than previously. One of the ways I have of changing my mind is to change my speech. Singing the vowels in order to find the pure note of each of them works just dandy.

Of all the vowels, singing "e" is the most tragedy-laden. The perfect example is singing the national anthem. It's difficult to get it right, and the easiest part to screw up on is "the land of the free". Getting a good, clean e-note when singing the "free" word can be tradigidous.

Who hasn't heard a series of people trying to sing the national anthem at sports events sound horrible. If they're gonna screw up, it's usually gonna be hitting the e-note while singing that one word, "free". If they can just get the free word out with some confidence and power, I can usually see the joy they made it in their faces.

It sure makes me feel good if I can get that high e-note with clarity. Even when I've been practicing daily I find it difficult to predict with any accuracy that I'll get there as if it was easy. Lately, however, I sense that I'm learning how to reach for it with more predictability.

Granted, I don't have a lot of confidence in this method yet. What it's about is learning to balance the sound from my vocal cords between where it goes up into my nasal cavities and out of my mouth. In the past, I think I made some big effort to keep from having a nasal sound to my voice because it's considered hoky.

If that's what happened it may have been a mistake. Sometime my voice breaks when I try to take the e-note from a low range to a higher range. It happens regularly. Infrequently, after I've warmed up, and I begin to get a clear e-note up and down the scale I'm singing, I notice that I'm aiming the sound and my breath up toward the nasal cavities.

Aiming my breath in this way is constantly hard for me to remember from one practice session to the next in regard to the e-note. the other vowels seem easier. I work to develop some power in presenting each vowel sound. To me, that means I can get pushy and keep a lucid tone issuing forth throughout the range.

Doing this is weird. There's no future in it. I hardly ever sing in front of other people. I sang a gospel hymn at the Solstice bonfire in front of my brother and his wife and a friend. It came out okay, and they seem impressed enough to applaud. In my opinion, singing and chanting help keep my mind about me.

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Dubious Insights

It unusual for it to snow six inches (15.24 cm) here on the coastal plains of the Carolinas. However much it has snowed in the past, it sure didn't seem to take this long for it to melt. Granted, most of the snow has fallen off the trees, but my lawn and most of my driveway still has abundant snow on it. It keeps hanging around. Maybe tomorrow the temperatures will get high enough to cause most of it to melt.

It was situations like this that reveal my lack of character in the way I conducted myself in my two marriages. I expected my ex-wives and children to cope with stuff like cold weather and snow in the same way I do, by just waiting for it to leave. More and more as I get older and reflect on my attitudes I realize that my way of perceiving the world is and never will be up to snuff for the marriage ga-me.

It worried me in my youth, and caused me to think I might be crazy. I went to extremes to find out that isn't really true. It's more like I'm autistic than insane. I played with the notion that I am is possessed by Asperger's Syndrome, but I took a test on the internet that claimed to distinguish whether this was true, and I didn't even come close to having that disorder. That figures. If it were true I'd play piano mo' bettah.

I composed a post to one of the e-mail discussion groups I'm subscribed to that says something I've wanted to say for a while. My writing it was not so much an act of daring do, but to clarify how I think about this topic. The quote is from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the so-called Gnostic Gospels. Here it is:

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3 Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

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

This saying reminds me of Bill Nye, the science guy trying to dumb down to what he appears to think children will find intriguing on TV, and by his idiotic behavior cause kids to wanna grow up to be just like him.  What child would wanna get into science as an adult if doing that caused them to become like that buffoon? It's about like some people here attempting to discover the "secrets" of a illiterate society from thousands of years ago via a modern education that dismisses the methods the ancients used to get there.

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I made the above comments because the academic approach some of the members of this group take toward a very unacademic, informal group of people who weren't satisfied with the status quo. That of being slaves to the Roman Empire.

According to Elaine Pagels, tenured professor at Princeton, and author of the seminal book entitled The Gnostic Gospels, three-quarters of the people who lived in that world were slaves, and that fact alone is why many of the ancients found the Messianic claims of Christianity attractive. Not only were they saved in spirit, but saved from physical slavery by the main careactor of the Jesus stories.

The Jesus stories, to me, currently, are the real beginning of the contemplation of cognition in the homo sapiens species. It was when these stories gotten put in written form that they could be discussed by groups that were illiterate. The people who were literate could read the stories to them, and as opposed to the oral tradition, the written stories were consistently the same.

The later efforts of the Roman Church were to make the stories absolutely and irrevocably the sa-me by killing those who didn't agree with them. The various "Inquisitions" serve as an example of that, and the Reformation happened to resolve the power play of the Catholics.

The main body of early Christians didn't appear to be buffaloed by the formalities of the ruling churches of the time. They were mostly slaves who viewed the Jesus stories as literal and real and by believing in the Jesus they took that way, they would be freed of slavery. Who wouldn't love the comfort of believing that?

I feel like a child in elementary school raising my hand to gain the recognition of the teacher crying out, "I know! I know the answer to that question." Modern educated people who can read the original writings for themselves in order to make up their own minds. That's who. Despite that, most don't. No blame.

The Doo Dah Racetrack

This cold weather has me stymied. It addles mah brain, and reduces my identity to that of an instinctual primate who never quite got abstract thought down pat. It makes me feel unhealthy and forces me to pretend I know just what to do about it. I don't. Hell is cold, not hot. Probably both.

The response I got from my brother when I called to say I ain't walking tonight was an unfeigned agreement. We didn't walk the night before either because the power was off and the path we usually take around the property had six inches of snow and slush that didn't glow in the dark so we could pass it by without getting our feet wet.

That's part of the deal of our walking out through the woods at night. We don't use flashlights, but let our eyes get used to whatever light may be available. When it's cloudy out and on the new moon things get touchy feely in a hurry. Our path is mostly a dirt road that we created ourselves. It's not like we're gonna get lost, and we're never far from the warmth or coolness of both our houses.

Well, maybe the warmth or coolness of his house. Mine is pretty much the ambient temperature 24/7. I do have a small ceramic space heater in my kitchen to keep my water pipes from freezing, and another space heater in my bedroom upstairs where I keep my computer.

I'm surprised that small a heater would keep my kitchen warm, but I'm grateful. The space heater I use here in room helps a little, but not much. I'm wearing ski clothes to stay warm otherwise. Except for the era of my two ex-marriages when the women insisted on modern conveniences, that's the way it's always been for me, and worse.

There were no modern conveniences for most of my youth. Sometime I wonder what it would have been like when I was a kid if real insulation had been invented. About the best anybody could do then was to make their house as wind-proof as possible. I really don't think they knew the principles involved with insulation. It took the invention of it itself to put the idea of it in their minds. I don't actually know if that's the case.

The first house my parents lived in either by renting or owning that had central air conditioning only happened after I left home to join the Navy. The Navy had it on their ships, but not in the barracks at the craft schools I attended. Certainly not in recruit camp buildings. Of course, the boot camp location was in San Diego, California, and most natives there have never seen a stove except for cooking (I don't know that either).

I spent time in two places that by location are warm all year long. I went to the Navy boot camp in San Diego, and to a torpedo school in Key West. I went back to Key West time and again for years, and then lived there full time for 3-4 years.

Both towns were basically "service towns" in the since that the military establishments in both were a huge part of the economy. Later, they both became winter resorts because of their location. The military had to leave or make way for the money people.

Presently I live outside a little town that is located on the "military highway" between two of the largest military bases in the world. The towns or small cities they're associated with are still considered "service towns", and their economy is heavily dependent on the federal money associated with the military.

Neither town seems likely to become resorts, and more military units seem to arrive monthly. They're less than a hundred miles (161.9 Km) apart, and if a nuclear device exploded in the little town I live in that is located in between them, the explosion would take both these fortresses out.

Don't think the citizens here haven't considered that possibility. They kept an eye out for them thar Communist Pinkos coming here to make it happen. The rustic people in this neck of the woods could serve as the stereotypes for lots of conservative Bible Belt mentalities. They're of a very conservative, God-fearing bent whether they're registered Democrats or Republicans.

In the past I didn't realize how much this political attitude was the status quo in this region and all over much of what was the Confederacy of States that rebelled against the Federal government. When I was a kid growing up both my parents considered themselves to be liberal and progressive and Democrat. That's not how they ended up because they were also Jim Crow to the bone.

My parent's racial prejudice was not so personal because it was the status quo of the area they grew up in. They grew up out in the boondocks northeast of Meridian, Mississippi just west of the Alabama state line. My father grew up a little deeper in the hinterlands of Meridian than my mother near some place called Collinsville.

When I first saw it I was really surprised that it was nothing more than a crossroad with a couple of stores and a few houses. By the time I first saw it none of my father's family lived nearby or even in the state of Mississippi.

They all had to leave to find work. Mississippi is still the poorest state in the mainland. The story goes that my father's sibling followed the lead of his oldest brother and went to work in the oil fields in Arkansas. Since his oldest and only brother was eighteen years older than him, he got stuck taking care of their parents.

My father told me his mother had been a school marm at some time before she became a baby factory and virtual slave of my illiterate grandfather. She was most valuable to him because she could read and write. They were both dead by the time I was 2-3 years old, so I can only write about what I was told. Dead men don't tell tales.

Not being raised around any of my kinsmen from either side of my family took its toll on me through shame. That's exactly how I became a shaman whether I liked it or not. There was nobody around to dispute or affirm any of my parents family tales. They took us back to Mississippi with them on summer vacations for about a week or less most summers, but brief meetings was about the most of it.

Between my father's and mother's siblings I supposedly have around eighteen aunts and uncles. I barely knew any of them face to face. Only through my parent's stories about their take on what family meant to them and how family ought to mean to me, but I didn't know their families. I have over a hundred first cousins I've never seen or heard from in my life nor they from me.

As my parent's stories began to unravel through time and space I didn't even have that as a form of identity. I grew up in five villages in two states where the villagers didn't know my parents very well and we were always strangers in their very strange land, and if it was them that it took to raise me, they did a piss-poor job of it. No blame. '-)

My entire life seems to be about finding an acceptable identity I can be satisfied with. When Mick Jagger sings of not finding no satisfaction, that's the satisfaction I know is missing with me. In my dotage I wonder if that's not the way it's supposed to be instead of being some sort of failure.

What is this lack of satisfaction humans suffer as if it were the root of all evil? I'm claiming this lack of satisfaction limbo is that root instead of money. Humans only need money to attempt to find satisfaction. Maybe that's why I've abandoned ambition as an answer to my prayers or as my prey. Well, at least for today. Manana is a completely different story.

The Blizzard Of 2010

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The Big snow came to the SE coastal plains of the Atlantic Ocean all day yesterday starting at 0100. It stopped the world here. We're never really prepared for snow storms. Most of the time the snow we do get is considered fun for the kids and a minor aggravation for the adults. It snowed 6"-8" here, but Boston may get 30" of snow (76.2 cm) by tonight. Down here in the flatlands of N.C. that much snow might kill half the population.

The power stayed on until I fixed coffee and oatmeal, and then it went off and didn't come back on until around midnight. The temperature got down to around 14° (-10° C) last night, and I was very concerned about my water pipes freezing. All the neighbor's lights came back on and our lights didn't.

Good thing I noticed and told my brother to call in again (he knows somebody at the power company). They came and got the limbs and trees off the power lines where they run through the woods that broke under the weight of the snow.

Its 10:30 a.m., and we're still below freezing, and aren't expected to get much warmer for the whole day. This is a bit unusual because sometime we don't get enough snow in winter for the kids to make snowmen. That's kind of a gage for whether its really snowed or not. Even with six inches of snow it melted on the asphalt highways by dark last night.

This storm is probably about the only event that could interrupt my affair with the internet. Not having access for 24 hours was a big change. It demonstrated how dependent I am on it for what goes on outside of my house. Since the power was off there wasn't any television either, so most of that time I just sat and looked out the window.

My brother's greenhouse that is about 150 feet (45.72 M) south of my house is heated by gas, so there wasn't much chance I'd freeze, but the exhaust from the gas burning made it hard to stay inside it and breathe in that stuff for long. The tomatoes I grew out of the bottom of the plastic containers got moved over there before first frost, and there is about 6-10 fine looking tomatoes to contrast with the white snow.

My brother and his brother-in-law made a new work table inside the greenhouse for his wife to work on. They mounted gro-lites above the table about 5-10 feet (1.5-3.5 M) from my tomato plants and they seem to be getting some benefit from the lights that they keep on all night to help her wheat grass grow.

I've learned more about growing tomatoes in the past summer than I've ever known before. For one thing, I found out that tomatoes are self pollenating and nothing needs to be done to the cuttings than just to stick them in fertile soil. I even did some cuttings after the first frost and put them in dirt in the greenhouse and they lived.

I've been introduced to a prescription salve called Silverdene. The Wikipedia link is entirely too long to include. It is a topical cream that might help the open lesion on my foot. I've used it for two days. It hurts for a good long time after I apply it. Something has to help this thing heal up. I gotta read up on this stuff to make sure I'm not killing myself.

The big deal about getting it to heal up is the drugs I take for the rheumatoid arthritis lowers my immune system rather drastically, and infections can go wild and literally kill a person if they're not controlled. It's my opinion the VA Hospital would like that so they would have one less patient. The medicos only work there for the money.

The power going out must have killed my microwave oven. It's not that old. I was just beginning to get the hang of it. Maybe when the weather warms up I can take out on to the outside deck where I can see what's wrong and hopefully fix it. These things aren't cheap. All my creditors want their money before the holidays and times are a little tough now. Even though I'm writing it for the world to see, it doesn't matter. Nobody knows. '-)

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What I Am Is Lets The World See As Me

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It's December the 25th in the Christian world, but probably just another day in the boondocks for most other people and places. Google has a Blog Search dealio that I have bookmarked. When I click on it, a summary of the day's blogs from all over the world pop up. It gives me a little better view of what's happening in the world other than the Six O'clock News.

This morning I saw a link and a header that caused me some curiosity. A famous man died and is to be cremated today with thousands of people in attendance. I have never heard of this man. I didn't know where the ceremony was taking place. I'm sure I could not pronounce his name without lots of practice.

http://www.asianetindia.com/news/karunakaran-cremated-today-thrissur_224591.html

I clicked the link because of my curiosity to find out what country in the world this event was taking place, and soon realized he was a grassroots hero in some part of India. Moreover, from the little I read, I realized that he was the kind of man my parents would have been proud of me for being, but nothing like that ever happened or ever will happen. They're dead, and I'm "coming in on a wing and a prayer."

Maybe I should be ashamed of not seeking fame and glory to please my parents or my lovers or my children. It's not that I don't feel shame for failing them or them failing me. The "holiday blues" have wreaked havoc on me for the last couple of days. I found myself wishing for the others who have played a significant role in my life that I had come through for them if for no other reason than for the sake of appearances.

I don't feel any reciprocity for the angst and regrets engendered by the time of the year. It's as if I never mattered to them when we were together. If anything, I sense they're pleased to have me out of their sight, and thus out of their minds for the rest of eternity. No blame.

My father never apologized for using me as his whipping boy, literally, during a period of time when his job and family were threatened by his lack of some statecraft appropriate for dealing with such matters. I was the obvious choice because I'm apparently touched by a bit of autism, and who else would you choose to take your frustrations out on but the dumb kid?

I don't know what sort of autism to call it, but I don't worry about hurting people's feelings too much. I never really learned to share when I was a child. I was an accomplished thief by the time I entered puberty, and didn't know and couldn't be convinced it was wrong for me to take what I felt was my share of life without regret.

Eventually, this caused me to seek a path that led to my not wanting things. I had to artificially institute attitudes that didn't allow taking what I wanted from the world because my doing that was an embarrassment to my caretakers. I wasn't trusted to be myself, so I had to learn to imitate people society approved of. Who else have you heard of that got kicked out of the Boy Scouts AND Alcoholics Anonymous?

It doesn't take much to remind people I'm just putting on an act about being humble. I went to acting school to learn to give them what they get, but behind what I let the world make up their mind about there is the same old me that might or might not give any quarter for what I consider to be over-strenuous efforts to push beyond my veil of forgiveness.

It works both ways. If I retreat back across it I forget how nice and polite the world expects me to be for their sake, and if they follow me into my domain they forget what they entered my rabbit hole for and who they "thought" they were that they might do such a stupid thing.

Nothing is going to happen except that I might not allow them to go back to being who-they-thought-they-were. What punishment could be worse? For the most part they have not stored their riches in heaven, and what they prized in their old life is no longer available for them to delude themselves with.

Whatta drag, man. Been there. Done that. How else could I have added this dynamic to felix the cat's bag of tricks? I am is did not intend it to be so. There was no grand plan. There couldn't have bien. I attempt solely to live within eternal change. To do that I gotta let a lotta things pass without being duped.

"... I'm leaving
on a freight train.
Don't know
when I'll be back again.
Oh, babe, I hate to go..."
~ AU

Those lyrics just come to me to signify a whoosh I voluntarily enter or I don't get to go at all. I have to throw everything that has meant anything to me in the past or the whoosh ain't there to decide about anymore. I am is truly sorry and apologetic if you were one of the girls I left behind.

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How Real Can Dreaming Be?

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Treating my dreamtime as if my computer didn't work out so hot last night, or rather this morning. I sorta didn't get much sleep for trying. When I finally did get to sleep, perchance to dream, the first dream I attempted to manipulate with a pretend mouse evaporated before my very "eyes". No biggie. I got the rest of my life to work this out.

The problem I have with the open lesions on my toes is in full heat presently. It's because of the RA. It's been going on for years and I thought it was athletes foot fungus. Well, it's not. Maybe it's psoriasis. The rheumatologists told me it comes with the arthritis along with other problems. Fairly similar to the side effects of having diabetes. Yet, I don't have any symptoms of diabetes.

Now, I've gotten the same redness showing up on my finger joints that are swollen. The redness hasn't broken out into open lesions as of yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. My family doctor at the Dogwood Clinic over at the Fayetteville VA Hospital prescribed a tub of triamcinolone acetonide cream to use with these lesions. Apparently it has 0.1% steroid of some kind in it. It sorta works.

For the first time I had to decline going out for a walk in the woods at night with my brother. The lesion on the second toe of my left foot is painful to the touch of my shoes, and walking just repeats that touch with each step. I've tried to ignore it and walk on, but that causes the lesion to worsen.

Last night when I was cleaning it to put a new bandage on it, the lesion reacted to the peroxide I sprayed on it, and bubbled up as I like for it to do. That way I know the oxygen indicated by the bubbly foam is killing any bacteria that might be present. I doubt that it help the lesion to heal, but at least it's getting disinfected. These lesions are not a pretty sight. There is nothing very pretty about the aging process. The same thing that keeps you alive reverses its role.

Sometime punctuation drives me nuts. Particularly with apostrophe s ('s). I'm fairly sure of my use of the apostrophe is fairly correct most of the time, but others not. I'm trying to be aware of it to see if I can develop a sense of when to do what, but I still wouldn't get too cocky about being wright. Right?

My friend Billy came by to bring a Christmas gift. A gallon of wine. Right brand, but wrong wine, so he fished out the receipt and told me to go change it if I didn't like it. Such impertinence. As usual, we sat around and talked for a couple of hours. I shamed him into not smoking in my closed room, but only after the first cigarette. I'm like a converted whore about cigarette smoke now.

Billy has been doing a lot more meditation, and I am is about the only-est person he can talk to comfortably about it. There is nothing special about me except that I am is the only other person he knows well that meditates. Since I kind of got him interested I guess I owe him that much.

We've had a conversation going for over twenty years now. A lot of it in the last decade or so has to do with the hypnosis sessions we do. We got into this habit when we worked and roomed together on a construction job down in Marietta, Georgia.

He was nervous about having to take a TIG welding test in order to keep his job. I suggested hypnosis. I guess he was desperate or thought his situation was a good enough excuse to try it, but he quickly agreed and we got down to it. He turned out to be somnambulistically inclined, and could reach the deepest states of hypnosis easily.

Due to his ability to achieve a deep state of somnambulism it was an easy task for me to teach him how to visualize abstract objects. It only took a couple of hours to get him to visualize two silver screens like the ones in movies theaters and get him to project a video-like scene of the best TIG welders he had ever witnessed welding in the right hand screen, and an image of himself in the other screen.

My instructions were for him to get the image of himself in the left screen to behave just like the expert in the right screen. Where upon I left him to this task while I counted aloud from one hundred backward to zero. I wanted him to use my voice as a connection between us, but to use all his other faculties to achieve the good end.

By the time I reached zero he had his answer to the TIG process that had always stumped him. When he was trying to get his body in the left screen to imitate the expert welder's bodily motions in the right screen he noticed the expert do something he had previously ignored in his own efforts to get the necessary perfect results.

Billy told me that he only noticed the expert doing what he did, that did the trick and corrected his welding. was because he had to get his image of himself in the left screen to repeat it. By trying to imitate the expert in every detail with his own body he saw/felt it.

The expert was moving the TIG cup by using his elbow instead of his wrist to roll the cup. We both knew his notice of that one motion was what his problem was. What tickled me was that it was the same reason I had problems back when I was welding pipe. The next day he passed the 100% x-ray test with flying colors.

Helping Billy to pass that welding test on his own merits was a crucial insight for me. The reason for my writing that is based on how I convinced Billy he could actually "see" the objects and behaviors I suggested hypnotically to him.

Our success was based on a day trip we made one weekend while we were working in Marietta to Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Billy had never seen a mountain in his life. It amazed me that a fifty-odd year old Native American Indian had never seen a mountain. When I suggested we go resolve that missing experience he was eager to go.

It was his brand new experience in seeing a real mountain with a national park on top of it that set the scene for our successful hypnosis session with the TIG welding deal. At the entrance to the National Park is a building used by the Army Corps of Engineers as their logo.

The buildings up on Lookout Mountain were the representation of that logo. Two square buildings connect at the top with an arched crossover to a low central building that formed the park entrance below it. Google "Army Corps of Engineers logo", and you can see it for yourself.

The way I got Billy to "see" the twin movies screens in his imagination was to get him to remember seeing those two buildings at the entrance of the National Park on top of Lookout Mountain. That was "real" for him. He had a vivid memory of everything associated with our trip to see his first real mountain.

Even in waking beta consciousness he can recall every aspect of that trip today. He doesn't have to be hypnotized for that. So, when he was in a deep, somnambulistic trance I asked him to pretend his favorite recliner he talks about favorably was sitting in the middle of the street facing those building.

The chair was real to him. He sat in it every day when he was at home. Asking him to pretentiously place in some weird place was not that odd in deep trance. I asked him to sit down in his favorite chair and remember those two buildings with the entrance to the park between them. That part was easy. These objects were like the back of his hand.

When he got comfortably ensconced in his favorite imaginary chair looking at one of has favored memories of a visit to these imagined buildings, the next thing was to ask him to place the movie screens on the two buildings. That was easy for him. What is easy is simple.

After he seemed comfortable sitting in his favorite chair looking at two sanctified holy building grow movie screens at his command, it wasn't really that hard to get him to realize the chair and the movie screens were not a natural part of a real scenario.

The next part was the poser. I asked him to remove himself and his chair and the two movies screens he had generated to fit on the two buildings into outer space, then I took away the chair and left him in the middle of nowhere looking at two movie screens that were only there because he imagined them to be... per my hypnotic suggestion. Then, I woke him up.

The next hypnosis session we did together I asked him if he could "see" the two movie screens in his imagination? To my delight, he seemed insulted for me to think that he couldn't. What did I take him for? A fool? Of course he saw the movie screens. He made them what they are today. '-)

The twin movie screens were a big deal. We didn't stop using them after he passed the welding test. We started putting his real heroes up on that right hand screen. Not the heroes he was supposed to have for the sake of pleasing others, but the real heroes he himself didn't actually know he was a secret admirer of.

There was Mister Peel, an old man in his neighborhood he grew up around. He had always admired the way he was and how compassionate and kind he was to even his debtors and the people who rented property from him. He owned several trailer parks.

Mister Peel died maybe ten years ago. Now, Billy owns all the trailer parks Mister Peel owned, and several more besides. Why would he not? When we put a video of what Billy admired about Mister Peel in the right movies screen and had Billy imitate what he saw in the left screen, when he perfected those moves, I had him leave the left screen and be-co-me Mister Peel in the right screen and they each became the other. No blame.

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"... Perchance To Dream."

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The idea of setting up a practice of attempting to control my dreamtime as if it were like a computer may not be as difficult to establish a practice for after all, but I'm not sure it will do any good. Something I found out last night was something I should have known. Opening a hole in the roof and flying away from my nightmares leaves me allone. That's nowheresville, man.

What I experienced last night attempting to initiate lucidity was very detached from the world of the senses. I found myself just a bit short of abstracting the abstract. In one of my other pursuits my intention has been to make myself intelligent about intelligence. I guess trying to employ a computer-like interface with my dreamtime (or The dreamtime) appears to be a bit like abstracting the abstract.

The only source I can reach for to associate my attempt to gain conscious control over going lucid in my own dreamtime provides me with what I experienced while smoking diviner's sage. My consciousness shrank to that of a newborn ensconced in a dim gray light that impressed me that it was like lamb's wool and swaddling clothes.

It was like that in a way, but last night I was very aware of having a physical body. I was consciously aware that it was from that body that I am is emerged and nobody but me knew it. The effect of smoking the diviner's sage was that I didn't know I had a body attached to the newborn consciousness I experienced nor a persona to go with it. In both cases, what consciousness there was, I was all by myself in that state without any other sort of communicant available to me for the sake of diversion.

By that I mean to say that there was nothing else to focus on beyond my immediate me. I-am-is was not "there" for me. Like I am was enveloped in the gray light that had ragged edges. Every crack or partition in it was a portal to somewhere, but the grayness didn't provide the incentive or curiosity to explore outside this particular box. In other words, I am is wasn't a part of me out there.

My lack of incentive or ambition in that state of being is like an old hat to me. It fits very comfortably even if some of the stitching around the brim is threadbare. Nobody knows. Probably not even myself from the perspective of the beta state of consciousness where words live.

It's definitely not the delta dream cycle state. In my experience, a predominance of delta brain waves does produce an effervescence I can use as a springboard to high times. I had an experience with a golden blob around the age of fourteen years old that literally became the platinum standard for what pure ecstasy is like.

What I'm trying to say about my dreamtime efforts last night is nebulous even unto me. Whatever I experienced, for better or worse is that I'm fairly sure that the dreamtime is not the portal that leads to what happened when I was a kid. I was very awake when that happened. I've sought to experience it again since then, but there has been hell to pay for my doing that. I can't really explain it, but I keep trying to find it again because it's all I can do.

I'll probably continue to find out what I can by taking this approach to the dreamtime. I find myself in the dreamtime while consciously aware frequently enow, but sometimes finding myself there all of a sudden can startle me so much I lose what I had of it. Granted, it's not as disappointing as having a sexual encounter in the dreamtime interrupted at the last second, but close.

Even if I am is able to acquire some insight about how to enter the dreamtime with a purposeful end in mind there is no guarantee it can be of any practical use beyond mere entertainment. That don't disturb me none. I'll take entertainment anywhere I can get it.

The choice I seem to have made in regard to finding a path that has heart for me seems fallible for just about everyone. I could be wrong. I suspect I based some strong decisions on my ability to amuse myself without having to pay some professional to do it for me.

It might be true that if a person can entertain their own person they don't actually need a lotta money to live a rewarding life. What if laughter really is the best medicine, and either you provide it for yo'self or be forced to look elsewhere at your own expense or die in agony?

If I could find a righteous portal in the dreamtime and the only way I can learn to use it is to dedicate my efforts at night to reach for it catch-as-catch-can despite being constantly brushed aside by the powers-that-be, I owe it to myself to keep on keeping on.

It not like I have to get to sleep at a certain time so I can get up early and go to work. I don't go to work except to keep physically fit. I don't really like to work with such selfish motives, but if I don't keep as physically fit as I need to be in order "to sleep, perchance to dream", the whole deal is a bust anyway. '-)

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The Ascendency Of The Long Nights

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The bonfire deal went well. I had raked the fallen leaves in an open spot to create a twelve foot circle to keep the fire from spreading, then I took wood from the brush heap and piled a fair amount of limbs on top of the pile of raked leaves to have a decent fire.

If I felt like I had satisfied the ritual with the small stack of wood I would burn that and stop, but if I wanted to keep the fire burning I could get more wood from the original pile and keep the fire going until that pile was gone.

My youngest brother and his wife, and my friend Rainey came over, and we lit the fire and kept it going until nearly all the wood in the first pile was gone, and then we started picking up other limbs and fallen branches. I guess we stood and sat around that fire for at least two hours. A pleasant time was had by all.

A bottle of vodka flavored with coconut was passed around at the time of the solstice. It happened at 6:38 p.m. EST. It's not like we drank like sailors on leave. A sip. A taste. A swig. It sure wasn't enough booze to cause this stuffy headache I'm coping with this morning. I felt the same way yesterday morning. It's like I have a cold or perhaps the flu, but the stuffy head is the only symptom of it.

My rheumatoid arthritis is acting up, and while the prescribed medicine I'm taking does help a lot, the knuckle of my index fingers on both hands are still painful. If I accidentally tap the knuckles against a hard surface it produces excruciating pain. I don't think I played the scales yesterday on my digital piano or took the walk with my brother last night because of the solstice celebration. I'll do those things today for sure.

It's been acting like winter for about a month now. It got cold and has stayed cold. It's gotta be encouraging to realize that the daylight will last a little longer each day for the next six months. I guess it's due to the fact that we started winter before the solstice that I have paid attention to how much further south the sun rises at this time of the year. It rises low and never gets close to the midheaven during the time of the long nights.

I'm still thinking about building a fractal TV antenna just to see how it works. Another reason I wanna do it is to get the idea of fractal geometry in my imagination mo' bettah. It's like the memristor that completes electric theory, both technologies had to wait for the invention of the computer to come along.

For Benoit Mandelbrot to come up with a formula that the rest of the world could check out to get the stamp of approval of the greater whole he needed the computer to do all the cumbersome iterations that takes too long for one man or even a fairly large group of men to do by hand.

When Chu did the mathematics to prove that the theory of electricity up until his time was not complete he didn't really expect anybody to create a physical prototype in order to patent it. Williams of HP Labs did. It seems apparent now that since the memristor behavior only happens on the nanometer level there, like with Mandelbrot, there was no way to prove it was real until the technology caught up enough to make it so.

My theory about initiating lucid dreaming by treating what I am consciously aware of as if operating my computer is not going to be that difficult to do. I figured my problem would be to remember to give it a whirl in real-time. It was not a problem this morning.

I lay in my bed early this morning needing to go to the bathroom to relieve myself, but not wanting to get out from under my warm bedcovers that includes an electric blanket. Finally I got up and made a mad dash to the bathroom to get my business done, and flew back to my bed.

The fact that I enjoy laying under the warm covers just for the luxury of it became apparent to me yesterday. I seem to delay going back to sleep for a while just for the sole purpose of enjoying my warm bed. It was during that period, just before I lost consciousness to sleep, that I remembered to find out if I could double-click on my dream objects to find out if I could initiate and notice any change. I could, but I didn't.

There is a good chance I will find it easy to remember to practice treating the dreamtime as it was a computer desktop and manipulate the dream sequence like surfing the internet. What I don't know yet is whether I can elicit a desired response deliberately. This could be a waste of time, but time is all I got.

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The Solstice Bonfire For 2010

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The brush pile I shaped to build a bonfire for the solstice is done. I sent an e-mail to a couple of people to ask them if they wanted to join me. Many people in the Bible Belt think celebrating the solstice is some sort of religious heresy, but then again, they don't know much about the roots of their religiosity, so I don't expect them to display any overt curiosity.

In a couple hours I'll go out into the edge of the woods maybe a hundred feet (30.48 M) from my rathole of a house and light my own damn fire. I feel old and decrepit today. Emotional. Holiday blues. My blues will automagically be resolve in a very short time. There is an astronomical reason for the peace and good will that arrives with the solstice, and then celebrated on the 25th. The body gnows.

The glass flute playing is going to take some time, and lot of practice to master. My arthritis is acting up on me and my hands are like clumsy paws. It may have something to do with the cold. I know the stories, but I don't quite believe them. I do know that if I wasn't taking the methotrexate I'd be in worse condition. The best

This morning I started to warm up to begin singing the vowels and instead began singing songs from memory right away. It was amazing to me how easily I fell into a groove that let me move quickly into any part of my range. It was a lotta fun. I started singing all the songs I ever actually learned the words to. Most of them from when I was a boy.

The songs I wrote in my late twenties and early thirties are not part of the repertoire from this early source. This is not a recent development. Even though I write songs and memorize other people's songs for the sake of performance, it's the songs of my childhood I reach for when I am is at the end of it's rope.

A couple of days ago I was singing the vowels and my voice opened up pretty good. I felt a tingling just below my solar plexus that felt to me like a very desirable state to sing from. It's showed up now and then for most of my adult life.

Regrettably, this "flow" is not there for me to reach for it and be able to depend on it being there for me as I will. In my opinion, the best I can do in regard to my voice is to keep my daily practice going and let my spirit choose the model for it as it wills. I don't really know how to do that with aplomb.

In the early hours this morning after I had to make a trip to the bathroom I lay in my bed and watched the hypnogogic images return to fascinate me as soon as I let go of the waking beta state. I guess I was pretty lucid for that situation and wanted to stay conscious long enough to enjoy feeling the warmth of my bed again.

As I lay there I wondered if I could treat my dreams in the same way I operate my computer. I started with an imaginary mouse and began clicking on the dream images to see what would happen. Not much at first. Then, I somehow remembered to double-click instead of just single clicking. Double-clicking did make a difference, but the results excited me so much I woke up.

Surfing the dreamtime as if it were the internet might really work. The most immediate problem might be to remember to do it while I'm dreaming. I am is theorizing that it might be easier for me personally to open the dreamtime portals with a simple mouse click rather that shouting "ABRACADABRA!" in my sleep.

I don't think I'll actually have to vocalize to initiate anything in the dream world. For all practical purposes the internet is like the dreamtime. I believe that if I could initiate a more active consciousness or lucidity by the intent I harbor with a pretend double mouse click it might engage my focus less alarmingly.

Candidly, I've never had much luck with the lucid dreaming bit. I mean, I've been lucid a lot in the dreamtime, but it comes and goes as it will. I've never been able to decide just for the hell of it that I am is gonna do some lucid dreaming tonight in order to solve a particular problem from the inside out.

The dream of being caught in an dungeon-like huge industrial complex was around again last night. I think my reaction to finding myself there once again was what caused me to reach for the computer mouse in that nightmare. The first thing I did, and the last thing I remember of that lucid state was me ordering up a sky blue hole in the ceiling and me flying through it. How's that for getting out of a mess?

I just got a phone call. I won't be alone on the solstice. Hurrah!

Ω❦

Glass Flutes and Fractals

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My Hall's glass flute arrived. My friend has a tuner program on his iPhone and the tuning of it is quite nearly perfect. As advertised. I'm pleased that I don't have to do one thing about the tuning. I can just pick it up and play it and it should do just fine. It won't be me out of tune, and even if for some reason I was there is nothing I can do about it. So, there! '-)

My brother and I were a little late going for our walk in the woods tonight. It is cold outside and not much wind so I didn't bundle up as much as usual. I've been wearing these cheap cloth gardening glove to give my hands some protection. They work pretty good after the first round or so. Not tonight. For some reason my hands got chilled in the gloves and they never warmed up.

I've had my head in youtube fractal videos again for much of the day. I will get burned out soon and have to stay away from fractals, but I am is hoping to build a fractal TV antenna just to see if it works as advertised. I finally understand how to start the process and make the first iteration. From there it should be fairly simple to do.

Maybe I'll have better luck making a fractal antenna than I did making a pvc pipe flute. It is a fairly sure thing that I'll make other attempt to make some flutes from pvc and other materials too. One of the problems I will have to overcome is drilling the holes in the pipe once I get all the measurements right.

Making crisp, clean holes in a flute is a big deal. Even my new glass flute has raised edges around the holes so that my finger tips will cover the hole easier. With the pvc flute the edges of the holes can't easily be raised, so they need to have nice clean edges in order for my fingers to seal of the hole to change notes. Maybe a new type of drill bit might help.

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Mandelbrot's Fractals For Life

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The so-called "crystal flute" I ordered hasn't come yet. I couldn't figure out from the no-reply e-mail I received acknowledging my order how it was to be shipped. I curbed my curiosity. I didn't wanna get to excited and over-anticipate it's arrival.

In the past I've ordered a few things over the internet with my debit card. It makes me nervous to put it's numbers out on the internet. I was hesitant to do it even when I did hit the Submit button to do the deed. It was done in a heartbeat.

The next morning I got another no-reply e-mail saying the flute I ordered was on the way. Even the second one didn't tell me how it was being shipped, but it did give me a tracking number that was linked to my account. UPS by ground. Scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.

Stress seems to be my normal reaction to waiting in dulled anticipation. I feel hampered in movement. My auto-immune diseases act up. Nothing goes right. I got busy and tried to make a PVC plastic flute I read about on the internet. It didn't work, and I'm disgusted, but I know why it didn't work. Maybe I'll do another, mo' bettah one.

I walked over to where my brother was working in the greenhouse building a worktable that was a more convenient level for his wife to work at. David, my brother's brother-in-law was helping him construct the table. David is in town to visit his younger brother who my sister-in-law ensconced in their first house to care for him.

He has RA like I do, but that's complicated by the development of fourth-stage throat cancer. He is very ill and sleeps a lot. He can barely speak, so he watches old military movies to reach for the kind of courage he needs to fight the good fight his older sister won't give up on. That's why David is out in the greenhouse. His presence and concern seem helpful, but he's edgy.

When I walked into the greenhouse to visit and get away from my own self-generated stress about something as simple as waiting for my new flute to arrive, I could tell my going over there was too trivial to be timely. I don't have to know why. I made my cheerful excuses and bolted for the cold misty rain outside to come home. Learning not to argue with myself about what is obvious is an ongoing lesson in life for me.

Sometime I like to aggravate myself by not easing the edge of my intemperance. The tracking number for my flute was present in the no-reply post that told me my flute had been shipped just before midnight. I could have satisfied my curiosity much sooner and gone on about my business unconcerned.

For me, purposefully not resolving issues with irrefutable solutions right away seems to be a way of life for me that hasn't really paid off. I've gotten in trouble in the past by not paying bills when they're due even when I have the money in the bank.

This attitude probably has something to do with being a hard-headed double Taurus. The astrology sign whose primal keyword is inertia. Bull-headed. Being a double Taurus by Sun and Moon is perhaps like the two-headed Roman god Janus. One of my bull's head (Sun) faces the incoming and the other of my bull's head (Moon) faces wot was (OMG! Did you SEE that?).

The power point of all four fixed signs is the fifteenth degree. It's in the middle of each of the signs Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius. If you know much about electric motors it is easy to see why it the center of the coiled magnets that pulses in phases to keep the armature turning, you can easily master the gist of fixed signs.

Benoit Mandelbrot's invention of fractal mathematics is being demonstrated in a documentary that is being run and rerun on PBS currently. I never change the channel. I've watched it three or four times at different times. I watched it pretty much in it's entirety this morning.

Too bad Benoit Mandelbrot didn't publish his book on fractal mathematics before I turned sour on math upon entry into high school. I might have grokked it. But, back then I didn't "see" any reason for advanced mathematics beyond triangulation. What was taught as mathematics in my prime did not describe what I witnessed in the world around me. I may have done much better if it had piqued my curiosity. Fractals do just that, and there is no end to it so far.

In my family it was unthinkable to not go to college. Until I came along that is. My behavior appears to have broken that rule. My older siblings both got Masters degrees, and my younger siblings, like me, never finished college. It's all Mandelbrot's fault for not publishing earlier. '-)

It seems impossible to me for any homo sapiens with an un-conflicted brain could not understand fractals. They're used by God to create the entire universe. What I mean is that if a really good documentary about how fractals work with lots of examples even illiterate people who can neither read nor write could understand the relationship.

I think it took home computers for the general public to keen what Mandelbrot accomplished. Mandelbrot himself admitted that he couldn't have formulated his work without a computer. No man could live long enough to do the iteration necessary to prove the math did what he said it did.

Quite naturally I tied this in to my remembering vision and how I-am-is arrived here on Earth with three attributes in it's kit bag. Curiosity, volition, and me-mores. I'm thinking that's all me and my fellow pearls needed to populate the planet and to call it "Earth".

It's done through iteration. "Inch by inch, it's a cinch!". It's done through repetition and redundancy. The same way fractal mathematics work. It just takes billions of years of iteration of the fractal principles to finally generate species homo sapiens.

Mandelbrot made it possible for the species homo sapiens to be-co-me conscious of how humans came to pass, and therefore to initiate the next stage of evolution. That one point seems to be the ring-pass-me-not for a suspicion to become reality. Consciousness.

Benoit Mandelbrot said regular mathematics is used to describe what we make outside the realm of nature. Fractal mathematics is for describing the nature of what we are and have been, henceforth, what we will be. That is, if we don't kill off our chances with what we made.

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Cold And Naked

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The snow is falling north of us up toward Virginia. Its not that far away. I look out the window and see a few stray flakes falling now and then. The weather person on a local TV station gave an interesting lecture along with slides to show why it would snow where it did and rain further south. We're further south. It's raining.

Its not a hard rain. Sleety. A drizzle of soft pellets that ain't snow and it ain't hell, but it could be if the Eskimos have been right all along. I seem to be developing a different attitude toward being cold most all day long. The only time I'm warm all over is either when I go for a fairly long ride in my car or pretend to shop in a heated store, and at night in my bed.

The coffee I drank after 11 o'clock last night kept me awake even after the late, late shows on TV were over. I became very aware of my feet. I have problems with them because of the rheumatoid arthritis. I have open lesions on the second toe of each foot, and the toenail on my left big toe is coming off. The weight of the covers on my toes was excruciating.

This problem had already been confronted and solved, but I had to disarrange my solution before I could change sheets. It was still warm then and the single sheet I used as cover in warm weather wasn't heavy enough to bother my toes.

My solution for having the covers too heavy on my feet and toes was to cut a piece of plywood wide enough to put across the foot end of my bed that raised the covers off my toes. This got a little complicated because the covers at the foot of my bed was about 10-12 inches (25.4-30.8 cm) above the top of the mattress.

To hold the covers in place I cut a wall stud to the width of the mattress and clamped the ends of the covers at the foot of my bed with a pair of commercial carpenter's clamps. Other than this rig looking very un-stylish, the only other problem was the clamps themselves sticking out from the bed with some fairly sharp edges. There has gotta be a better way.

At three o'clock in the morning I was still laying there in bed wide awake, and realizing part of the reason I was awake was that my feet hurt because of the covers. All I had to do was get out of bed and put my jury-rigged cover-lifting frame back in place and that problem would be solved.

Getting out of bed where its nice and warm and the room the bed is in was cold as a witch's tit no matter how inconveniently my feet hurt. Finally, my bladder demanded I get up and go to the bathroom, so I overcame my cowardice and got up to take care of both problems... and take something to help me sleep. Something borrowed. Something blue...

Setting the rig up again to raise the covers off my feet was merely a matter of doing it. Doing it nakid pushed me to do it as quickly as I could, but like I said, I got a different attitude toward getting cold now than I did just a few days ago.

According to some pundit I heard on TV, the body uses more calories to stay warm than it does to jog. It didn't hurt to have his punditry supported by a documentary I watched about the toilette of a hundred year old Japanese physician who got up every morning even in winter and wiped his naked body down with a wet towel, and then walked a few miles dressed only in enough clothes to be decent.

After I fixed the covers on my bed so they wouldn't weigh down on my feet I got back in my warm bed. The electric blanket had it all warm and toasty for me. The relief was palpable. Not only on my toes, but on my heels. The covers pressing down on the open sores on my toes had taken my attention away from the fact that they were pressing my heels down into the mattress with equal pressure.

It was easy to luxuriate in my warm bed now that the pressure on my feet was relieved. I had taken the sleeping aid while I was out and about and it was kicking in. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness to enter sleep was I wasn't rolling over to sleep on one side of my body or the other to keep my toes from sticking up. I guess that's why I've always gone to sleep on my side, and woke up flat on my back.

If I use the system of astrology to weigh this situation I gotta go directly to Pisces, the sign that rules the feet. Obviously astrology is a top down system because Pisces is the last sign. The sign of retribution. That Greek philosopher dude who was forced to drink hemlock is said to state that his death started from his feet up. Maybe he was a breech baby?

Pisces is significant in my natal chart because two major planets habituate the sign and they're only two celestial degrees apart. Being only two degrees apart gives them the aspect of conjunction. The planet Venus is in 24 degrees Pisces and the planet Jupiter is in 26 degrees Pisces.

Venus is in the best sign it can dwell in because it offers compassion to the sorrow of having to expiate the karma acquired in the eleven preceding signs of the zodiac. In astrology, a planet being in its best sign is called it's sign of exaltation. Venus is exalted in Pisces.

Jupiter was the co-ruler of Pisces until the planet Neptune was discovered after Galileo invented the telescope, and so Pisces is considered a powerful sign for Jupiter to occupy. Jupiter and Venus conjunct is considered the "luckiest" angular aspect in the system of astrology because they're both benefics.

One might think that having Venus and Jupiter conjoined in a compatible sign in a positive angular relationship in the Fifth house of romantic love would indicate great good fortune. However, in my natal chart there is a problem. This wonderful configuration is 180 degree opposed to the ruling planet of the sign Pisces, Neptune.

Neptune, in my natal chart, is in the opposite sign of romantic love. It's in the eleventh house in the sign Virgo. Trouble and toil in the house of friendship. It's pretty much the sa-me situation in which a prospective or actual lover telling you that they only wanna be "friends". What a drag, man. So, the only thing left to do is get drunk and dance nakid in the moonlight.

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Becoming Your Own Spirit

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It is not difficult to catch the PBS Frontline program of how Jesus became the Christ. They've had innumerable reruns of it at all times of the day and night. There is nothing much on network TV that interests me. I don't get cable out here in the country. I can't afford a satellite dish setup, and so, I am is stuck with over-the-air TV reception. If I watch television at all, it's usually on PBS, and not much of that.

It's interesting to me how the various academic pundits try to get at the truth of the roots of Christianity, and how they divide their efforts into two parts in order to conquer it. They appear to set forth Jesus as an ordinary religious seeker who left his parent's home for a decade or so, and came back ready to fight with them about what's wot in regard to God.

This is not that unusual a story. It's the story of Everyman's puberty, and how children attempt to gain their own individual identity in order to be able to stand as an equal (or better) before their parents and their ancestral gods. In my own opinion, not many people are able to handle the trials and tribulations that seems to be required for making such an almost impossible effort. People soon reach for the domestic life as their savior, and their own spirit has to take what leftovers their family life leaves over for it.

There are ways to pursue this goal after the thrill of pubescence recedes into the duties of adulthood and bringing home the bacon. Since their seeking is all over now in order to feed the brats who are obligated to hate them, this backsliding, in the past, could be addressed through submission to shamans. It only makes sense that previously sha-me-d persons who have mastered the hopelessness of shame, know how to teach a born loser to cope with the pain instituted by their own spirit.

It is very shameful to have to do what is required by one's own spirit to be-co-me with it. The shameful part has much to do with trying to keep your childhood caretakers happy enough to continue to feed you or at least not kill you or abandon you, because in more ways than one they are you and you are them, and each of you want the other to not be such a fucking hassle. No blame.

Becoming a shaman amounts to be-co-me-ing your own spirit. "Aye, and thar's the rub!" It's your own spirit that you have to appease, and not any other source of authority. Like Santa Claus, "It knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you're awake. It knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake."

This is a tough gig, man, since your own spirit is as invisible as any other spirit, it is tough to use as a model in order to imitate it. The first of The Ten Commandments becomes prime in this sojourn. "Thou shalt have no other God before me." In my opinion that "me" (quoted from the preceding quote) IS your own spirit.

If your own spirit is like Santa Claus and gnows when you've been naughty or nice, you can bet yo' ass it gnows when you've been worshiping other spirits as if they were God... to it's own detriment. Why on Earth would any reasonable person deliberately piss off their own spirit by knowingly chasing after somebody else's spirit in it's stead? Particularly dead people's spirits, how rude is that?

When there is nothing left to lose but your soul, and every gift your own spirit has provided you with to prepare a place for it has been bartered off, there is trouble in River City. Your sha-me-d soul is not what so-me spirit would wanna brag about to the other pearls in the neighborhood, so the desiccated you will probably be abandoned by your former own spirit because it has become ashamed of you. Why would it not? Dumb ass!

This description is a turning point for me. Defining my true goal as that of becoming one with my own individual spirit seems simpler, and more directly to the point of self-abnegation.

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A Little Day Music

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Buying presents for people is not my shtick. Besides, it's against my religion:

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

Docetic Christianity is the religion for misers like moi. That why I consider myself a Gnostic. It is because I am is gnosy. I am is always sticking his nose in other people's business. How can it not?

Buying presents for myself is another matter. As much as I detest using my debit card on the internet I couldn't refuse buying myself another flute. It's the flute of my dreams. How could I-am-is not? I've been living without a flute for several years now, and life is not as good without me having one within reach.

So how, you might ask, can this new flute you just ordered and paid for be described as "the flute of my dreams"? Because nothing moves. It only has a blow hole for the embouchure, and six holes for the fingers. It can't be tuned. Any sound that emerges from it happens because of the way it is played. It is made of glass.

http://hallflutes.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Product_Count=2&Screen=PROD&Product_Code=0204&Category_Code=A04

This is the company that makes the flutes from Pyrex glass. I didn't buy it from them because I bought it cheaper at a big online music company that might be able to protect my CC info mo' bettah. Besides, they had it in stock and they ship it free.

There is no telling how long it will take to get here. It won't be as long as it took me to decide to let go the cash for it. I'd like for it to get here tomorrow, but I suspect they are shipping it through the USPO, and that could take weeks.

I get a lot of attention when I play the flute. I had a wooden recorder I used to take around with me in my ruck sack. I wouldn't play it in front of people, but would get off to myself and that would sometime cause people to find me. That's much better for me in general because I am is a counter-puncher.

Having played several different sorts of wind instruments that only made sound when I blew into the end of it, began to wonder if getting a proper flute like they use in orchestras and marching band would suit me better. I resolved that curiosity by buying a used student's flute at a pawn shop.

It was everything I'd dreamed of. If I pressed down the pads on the right combinations of holes it made the sound I had already heard in my mind. I guess I sorta have perfect pitch. At least enough that instruments that are not in tune irritate me when other people are playing, but not much when its me playing.

Not liking to tune instruments has not served me well with the occasional musician I play with. My carelessness gets all over them. Some get mad enough at me they never willingly speak to again. That's why I need to play an instrument that don't need to be tuned or retuned every five minutes because of the humidity in the air.

My digital piano never needs tuning. No one has ever complained. Nobody has ever heard me play it. This Pyrex flute may be different. The information about it that came my way only says that it was engineered and an cast with exacting precision. The sounds that actually come out of it is probably a hit or miss deal.

If the flute I ordered comes from the factory with a good tone, me and the people who hear me play it will probably never question whether it's perfect in every possible way or not. If it even comes close to being somewhat in tune I'll be happy. I just like to have a wind instrument around.

The student flute I had was made by Yamaha. I say "had", but I still have parts of it laying around here and there. I messed up the pads when I tried to clean it up, and when I tried to replace them I lost a couple of the teeny tiny screws that held it together, and the new pads didn't fit, and I got discouraged and left it be.

If I could afford it, I'd buy another classical flute just to have it around. I'll probably be satisfied with this glass flute for the purposes I play a flute for. Every flute and piccolo these people make are less than $100. The average orchestral flute runs at least $4000. Beyond my present means.

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Memristors For The Great Unwashed

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In the past I've written about how much the memristor devices intrigue me. Once in a while I insert "memristor" into Google to see if there is anything going on over at Hewlett Packard Research Labs. It's pretty slow going, at least as far as interesting news articles are concerned.

In my new web search, however, there was this youtube video that the inventor of the first prototype at the HP Labs explains how it happened that he was able to invent a prototype based on Leon Chu's mathematical proof that memristors actually exist in nature.

What's weird about my watching this video is how easy it is to fool myself that I understand most of what the guy is explaining. In the comment section below the video there was another person who experienced the same thing. He somehow sensed that he grokked the principles that demand that memristor theory be taken into account.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

My background for understanding what the video explains is fairly amateurish, but typical. I first became familiar with the principles of electricity and electronics in the schools I had to attend in the Navy. The first schools I attended taught vacuum tube circuitry. Later on I was introduced to solid state devices.

To write that my background is amateurish, but typical for me is that I made really good grades on all this stuff in the classroom, but practically failed the laboratory part with it's hands-on emphasis. Mind games is what interests me about electronics and gadgets.

The mind game part was mostly about feedback devices like portable EEG machines that ran off 9-volt, snap-on batteries. I wanted to make my brain waves a conscious part of my considerations. I might have gotten a lot more useful information if I'd gotten some external guidance, but I like to play with my gadgets alone. According to the Enneagrams, my selfishness in this arena is the bane of my existence.

My job in the Navy was that of a Torpedoman. When I first got into this rate by accident it was mainly because I was the only seaman available who had good enough grades to get into the schools they wanted to send me to. It turned out that I'd already been to the same school and graduated third in my class.

I had a knack for this electronic stuff. I could see it all in my imagination as if my imagination itself worked the same way, but it didn't. Not really. Aye, and there's the rub. Something was missing in the way the Navy was teaching me electronics. I got kicked out of the school and that provided me with a chance to do what I joined the Navy for. To see the world.

It is just something that happens with me. If I feel/think that I'm being taught something that ain't quite right, I stop the process and pretend to go along to get along. I do just enough to get by until I sense that I'm getting the straight skinny from the right source. I got a virtual list.

That is what I think happened with my electronic education. They were leaving something out, but not only did the Navy not know it, but neither did anybody else straight out. At least, not until the memristor was proved mathematically by Leon Chu, and a prototype created by Williams and his group at HP Labs.

When I listened to this guy in the video explain what memristors were about and why they "remember" previous behavior I knew right away he was talking about what had previously been missing in my education. When he explained why he thought that memristors would replace all digital storage devices as a separate unit I got it. I've written about it without a good framework for explaining myself to a mindful audience.

Some events happen the way they do because I plan it that way while alone in my room. To me this can happen because of the weak power of memristorical events in the human brain. Remember my disclaimer at the top of the page. I'm not trying to tell the God's own truth here. I'm just juking around to see what happens.


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Are Human Beings Merely Whales That Grew Legs?

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The space heater I worked on yesterday worked all night long, and none of my water pipes froze in the coldest weather of the year, so far. I kept the space heater in my bedroom turned on all night too. That's the first time I've done that this year. The Canadian Express that is chilling every thing down to the bone makes people who live in moderate winter climates do more than they usually need to in their fear of the Eskimos being right about hell being cold instead of hot.

Even so, my brother and I went out last night for what's becoming a nightly ritual anyway. I had to stop earlier than usual because even with the weather being so cold I was perspiring. Not sweating like a dog. Dogs don't sweat. A lot of furry animals don't sweat. That's why human beings can chase them down and bonk them in the haid when they suffer heat prostration.

In my current opinion (it changes), learning that hominoids have the ability to run huge animals to death exists as the biggest incremental step in grasping how the dinosaurs and other large animals like the wooly mastodon disappeared. Human-like animals hunted them down by chasing them in packs and killed them.

It also explains why track and field are the basic human sports events. We can't run as fast as some animals, but we can last much longer. That's why the marathon winners are usually Africans. They can run at a racing speed even in the hottest part of the day in the hottest part of the season.

I've also become interested in a recognized biologist's claim that homo sapiens emerged directly from the oceans instead of descending from trees to the plains in order to chase the herd animals to death. What convinced me to explore this notion is how he pointed out that humans have subcutaneous fat just like the other ocean mammals like whales and walruses do.

One of the reasons subcutaneous fat interests me is because it goes away as humans go through the aging process. That's why their skin wrinkles. The natural collagen is gone. During my last visit to the VA Hospital arthritis clinic up in Durham, my rheumatologist-in-training with the Duke Hospital program told me the prednisone I am is taking also reduced the subcutaneous fat, along with other even more unpleasant side-effects that steroid drug produces.

The lack of subcutaneous fat in old people is why so many of them like to spend the winter in snow bird places like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and southern California. The subcutaneous fat keeps humans worm just like it does whales and seals and otters. If they lose it, they die. When humans lose it, they're already dying. Sometime slowly, sometimes not.

If the stem cell scientists wanna really help old people get even older, finding a way to restore a person's subcutaneous fat may be the secret. I don't know that, of course. While it seems to be true that plastic surgeons habitually now inject collagen they get from other parts of the body into heavily wrinkled place in an old woman's face, it's difficult to imagine they could do that over the whole human body. I think the stem cell approach might make that happen.

Just to speculate even more wildly than usual, I think that learning how to use the stem cell technology to restore youth to aging bodies may be the next phase of evolution itself. I really think that a lot of the people alive on Earth presently will be alive several hundred years from now, if, and only if, humans don't blow the Earth up in a nuclear holocaust before it can happen.

If rejuvenating old bodies and keeping them in fair health allowed them to carry on research that takes more than one four-score and seven years lifetime to complete, then more could happen exponentially than any other factor. Or not. '-)

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Elementary, My Dear

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It's been a very domestic day. Really cold weather is here. The space heater I use in my kitchen to keep my water pipes from freezing over has been on the fritz. I've been trying to get it to work or shopping for alternatives all day. I've thought I had it fixed twice, but no dice. This last fix seems to have the best chance.

These space heaters are not all that complicated. More complicated than I need them to be. The biggest problem I've had with them working has been with the tilt switch. They get stuck, and then nothing works. The manufacturers who make these cheap space heaters don't make it easy to get inside them to figure out the problem.

The tilt switches are interesting to me. I understood the theory of them before I ever saw one, and today I saw two of them for the first time. They were from two brands of heaters, but the tilt switch looked exactly alike. They're fairly simple, but they don't have any bearings to keep them from sticking.

My maintenance efforts basically consists of looking for something worn or broken, and shaking electrical contacts like the tilt switch to see if they're stuck. I did this twice and even though the heater would start up, it didn't operate for long before it shut down.

In my last effort, I saw some of the spring-shaped elements (that turn red hot when the heater is working) were jiggling around maybe a little more than some of the other elements of the same kind were.

I was about to give up with I realized the loose set of elements had jumped off the ceramic holder they needed to be attached to in order not to touch the other elements. I got some needle-nosed pliers and easily put the loose element back in the right place.

The last time I went downstairs to the kitchen the space heater was still buzzing away. Just now I finished a long conversation with a knowledgeable friend who pointed out that the elements that get red hot in order to produce heat are a bare electric circuit.

If the wires touch each they short out. Since they're designed to tolerate great heat they don't burn into, but shut the system down. I think I can figure it out before its all over. As long as my water pipes don't freeze I'll be happy.

Some people seem shocked that I seem to not care so much about anything more than mere survival. I'm a little shocked myself. I was out walking with my brother to get some exercise. We have a little circular route he likes to take to stay near to where his wife is.

The other night we were passing by when he thought of something he needed to do immediately, and so he invited me inside to wait until he'd taken care of business. His wife was curled up in a real cushy chair watching TV. She got up to say hello and she was only wearing pajamas.

That's how warm their house is in the winter. They even have a thermostat that keeps the temperature at a chosen level. That's not how it is at my house. I have to wear winter clothes inside my house just like I do outside my house. Nobody likes to visit me in cold weather.

I don't live this way to please anyone but myself, but some people act like the way I live is a vendetta against the choices they make. I have no idea why. We each make up our own minds about what we're willing to do to get what we think we need. I just seem to need less.

Ω

Frames For Figuring Form

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The term "framework" has been plaguing me lately. In a positive way. In the way I'm approaching this conundrum, my own rules of conscience act as a framework for finding a path with heart for myself. Ere now, I am has usually associated the term "conscience" with the adage, "Let your conscience be your guide."

In the last decade or so conscience has begun to represent more to me than a systematic way to con myself into acting out the careactoristics (sic) of a specified, given role in life. Thus, in a personal, unseen way, my con-science IS a science or at least I appear to go about working it in a methodical manner. It is not like I really have any choice but to con myself the best I can.

Life seems to force the issue of conning myself toward what I am chooses as the good end or being conned by others toward other options of their own choosing. That can be fun, but it took me forever, and still does, to accept the other's goals as what's best for me.

It became apparent to me that I needed a framework for perceiving the world that was different than what was provided for me by kith and kin. My plaint was not so much what was wrong with my heritage, I just didn't like the idea of being a copy cat person with nothing to call my own.

Finding a framework for viewing the world didn't come easy for me. I didn't know finding a framework was such a big deal. I couldn't let my conscience be my guide. I didn't know what my conscience was. I certainly didn't know creating a conscience to guide me was my own responsibility. I was as convinced then, as I am is now, that I am is always the last to know.

What I didn't know was that to be the last to know is actually a very good thing, at least for me, it is. That means that I hold off until the last second to make up my mind that such and such is so and so. That power of denial sometimes carries the day when sheer logic and the power of reason is too little too late.

It's not that I condemn logic and reason as much as I consider it the aftermath of a done deal. At the same time I'm writing this the TV is own telling the story of Billy Graham the evangelist. My mother and older sisters were in love with him, but that didn't make my father happy the least little bit.

On the other hand, there was not much my father could do to condemn Billy Graham as a speaker and/or an effective orator. That's how my father made his living, but in other words. I had a belligerent way of holding my own counsel about oratory, but I was exposed to the inner working of it by association.

The results Billy Graham (and the other evangelists who were popular in the era I grew up in) got that impressed me as a kid was how they made the young girls act all dopey and everything. How the young girls acted toward the evangelists of the time was not much different than the way they acted toward Elvis Presley and later, the Beatles. All of what made the young girls feel sexy was about oratory and how bejinnings begin with words.

Being the last to know probably hurt me more than anything when it came to realizing what the young girls were looking for in a boy. I figured it had to be about talking. I didn't know what to practice saying. It was after I received my remembering vision that I started studying the occult. I had not paid my attention to the occult before then. I discovered it was all about talking, and learning to say what people wanted to hear.

I was a homeless bum when I noticed several people in some of the hip communities like Boulder, Colorado had spread a blanket out on or beside a sidewalk and offered to read people's fortunes. Usually with Tarot cards. I wasn't familiar with the Tarot at the time. I saw that it was an opportunity to talk to people face to face. I wanted to provide myself with that opportunity at any price.

The opportunity I recognized when I watched the card readers run their card layouts and interpret what they purportedly "saw" to their customers. As a street person I was constantly on the look-out for opportunities to engage other people in conversation if I had some sense. I was already doing that at every opportunity, but the way I did it left a lot to be desired. I needed a gateway, a portal to a potential friendship with somebody I had something in common with.

At first, learning to read Tarot cards was a very undignified proposition for me. It was far too hokey and had a reputation for being a form of black magic. Black magic is fine for dilettantes with deep pockets, but for a street tramp it's much too dark. For better or worse the way I did it was the only way I knew how at the time. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the way I learned to read the Tarot cards, but for many people there would have to be a lot more learned before the true meaning of me-and-thee-ing can occur.

The easiest way for me to learn anything is to have a first-hand opportunity to watch and observe. Its a lot mo' better to have a mentor who will check up on me and criticize my technique, but if need be I am is a fair self-starter and it can make things happen from will-power alone. It's just a little rough around the edges, thats all. Grandma Moses instead of Rembrandt.

The Waite Tarot deck was a kind of blessing to me because it brought me to the attention of some people who could help me to get started learning astrology. In fact, I bartered my first lesson in astrology from a woman I read Tarot for.

This woman who helped me get the insight I needed to study astrology was a lesson unto me. She used me like a dog to her own advantage, but she didn't leave me out in the cold. She explained her way of the world to me by introducing me to her friends and customers and they would pay me to read their Tarot cards.

As time went by I began to understand that this woman's friends and customers were perfectly willing to give me money for lots more than reading their Tarot cards. Not only that, but this woman had competition in town for the same friends and customers that were perfectly willing to be very generous with me.

Previous to this sequence of events that opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing the world I had always thought that if the opportunity to be a sex toy for an older wealthy women I'd do it in a heart beat. I didn't do it. Instead I made the same mistake I'd made before and married a heart-breaker who was as poor as me, and still is.

So, I blew another chance to be a gigolo and bon vivant on a rich girl's dime in order to follow my own star to the hell of divorce and the hatred of more children. I kept faith with studying the occult. Although I stopped reading Tarot cards I took up reading palms instead, and mastered the I Ching after daily use for thirty years.

Now, I don't do any readings or make any charts or consult any oracles. I haven't read any palms, even for charity for years. I practice saying what I see in the immediacy of now via writing and playing the scales redundantly on my digital piano. I cook terrible food to eat, and it's not to torture myself either. I medicate myself to stop God from torturing me.

Being around people irritates me more than ever. They don't seem able to distinguish how they manage to torture themselves over events they have no control over or ever have the mental acuity to espy themselves as the root of their own evils.

Even if I have figured it out for myself I can't set myself up as a model for them to emulate my behavior. To suggest to anyone that they should follow my example is laughable. It's easy enough to perceive there is no reward for following my ideals for living the good life. Besides, I change my mind about what they are or ought to be faster than I can formulate a rule for how to go about it.

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Dragons Flying In Formation

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The picture at the top of the blog has such a unique meaning to me I use it as the background pic on my desktop. It startles me to encounter that image when the whole of my desktop is revealed. I've never used an image other than the default one that come with the Operating System.

These are the storms I think about when I think about dragons. These electrical storms are too organized toward a specific purpose to be thought of as random events. One of the most powerful storms I've encountered that have this shape and disposition was in the Florida Everglades.

I was driving back to Key West with my second wife through the sawgrass on both sides of State Highway 27 that runs from Gainesville to Homestead. There is a lotta open space on that route. Particularly after you pass the sugar cane fields around Lake Okeechobee:

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

The geographic location is flat and flatter. Most of the vegetation is sawgrass and sugar cane with an occasion islet of trees interspersed among the taller palmettos. This sort of visual freedom in a subtropical zone makes for the electrical storms that are also called tropical storms. The Orientals call them "dragons", and I've learned to call them that too.

My wife and I saw this storm coming at us across the sawgrass of the Everglades, and it was one of the most spectacular events of nature I've ever witnessed. In the picture above you can see the circle of clouds swirling around an open center, but what can't be seen is that those clouds in real time are swirling ferociously and lifting water out of the everglades like a vacuum cleaner.

Not only are those rings of clouds moving swiftly in a circle, but they are roiling as if there is an unseen torus moving across the water, and everything that can be seen is a reaction to that invisible torus doing what torus' do:

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

Admittedly, I haven't a leg to stand on when it comes to using an invisible torus as the ground of being of a specific form of a tropical storm, much less the dragon of Oriental literature and dancing. I might bet a small wager that I'm close to being right because of my history of having a reliable intuitive system. It ain't rare that I'm wrong either.

Storms shaped like this are somewhat common to sailors who spend a lotta time out on the oceans or large lakes. Sometime they'll drop funnels like tornadoes do and they're called water spouts. It's not unusual to see water spouts off the Florida Keys on occasion. Infrequently there might be three or four in the same area.

During my visit to Big Ben National Park in Texas I had two powerful experiences. One was that I left my body and went flying with a crow as it caught the uprising winds that strike the large hills that bend the Rio Grande River around them and serves as the namesake of the National Park.

The other experience was resting at the end of a fairly steep off-the-trail climb to a little nook away from the other tourists. It was in this nook that I had the encounter with the crow. On the other hand it was a great high place to see the surrounding country around sunset.

The sunset there had the effect of making the large, voluminous clouds appear purple, and from the vantage point of being on the top of the highest hills around, it was interesting to note that the bottom of these purple clouds was flat as a fly flitter, but the tops of the individual clouds rose in an anchor shape on end way up into the sky.

They were like huge water tankers carrying water from one place on Earth to another, and for some reason, it appeared to me to be deliberate. As if some sort of local intelligence inherent to each massive cloud was involved somehow in directing these water vapors to a specific targeted area.

Included in this dream sequence was the notion that what I was seeing floating along on a tiered, but flat invisible layer of air was the specific result of a single dragon that has sucked it up out of the Pacific Ocean and that the group of clouds I witnessed before me in that hill top were dragons flying in formation.

My memorized framework for providing order in nature comes from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Emperor's Yellow Book:

When all the lines are nines, it means:

There appears a flight of dragons with no heads.

Good fortune.

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