Are Ceramic Heaters Cheaters?

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The ceramic space heater I bought today should get the job done in my kitchen. The heaters I've used in there previously have all died for one reason or the other. I guess space heaters have designed obsolescence. The reason I bought this one is that it's like the ceramic heater my brother loaned me when the old one crapped out. $18 bucks. It gets the job done. It keeps my water pipes from freezing. What else matters?

It really makes me happy to have come to realize that I am is a miser. I've been a miser and a cheapskate all my life. It's just that I only found out about ten years ago. I guess it took that long for me to accept it as the way it is for me. I really don't care how that is, as long as I know. The fact that it's my nature to be a miser is the reason my marriages failed. If I'd known I was such a chintzy asshole, I could have looked for a woman who appreciated these traits.

To be fair, maybe they did. I've just admitted that I was not aware being a miser was what the enneagrams naymed as my chief feature. With my luck, my ex-wives understood my tendency toward avarice and expected me to follow through as if I understood myself. Too bad. Fortunately, I do know about it now, and I can make sure nobody else gets hurt except for me.

My mother was a sucker for the con artists who prey on old people in her last days. The media teaches that suckers can only be taken if they're greedy. Greed, however, is not limited to money. With old women it's more likely a hunger to be adored as they once were when impregnable. Greed is just another word for avarice. Greed is about wanting more than you need. The words even rhyme. '-)

Need and greed. One seems legitimate, and the other skanky. For me, learning the difference was a bit like having to learn the difference between love and lust. Not knowing brought me a lot of shame and embarrassment.

What I needed was some time alone in order to contemplate my life. It was at the point that I got most needy that my efforts to keep and even keel took on the appearance that I did what I did because I was greedy. Make no mistake. I am is that. but I am is also this, which is me. Tossed-word-salad. Ya gotta love it.

At no time that I am is aware of did I ever plan to end up a hermit. I just didn't get it. My inadvertent ignoring of my need to get off by myself in order to reflect on what's wot cost me plenty. It embarrasses me and causes me to feel deep shame that I could be so dumb. Why am I always the last to know?

Shame seems to be a state of being I attract to myself out of pure ignorance and stupidity. If life is a school of hard knocks, the hard knocks classes assigned to me were not electives. I don't actually think other humans have less to deal with than me. I certainly don't know whether that's the case or not.

If I were to assign myself an archetypal figure to explain my odd behaviorisms I think I could legitimately call myself a shaman. Granted, other systems of judgment than my own might call me a fraud, and if so, then I would agree with them.

My qualifications for calling myself a shaman is that I know through experience an awful lot about shame. I have experienced the depths of utter despair through my shameful behavior. Most of it for which I never got caught. Worse, I'm still not sure I feel all that ashamed even though I know perfectly well that I should.

I do know how to forgive myself. Some forgivenesses take longer than others. I do what I can. The biggest problem for me in that regard is my lack of some willingness to live up to another's rules of conscience that I have no avenue upon which to tread lightly. The other does not like to be disobeyed. No blame.

In the Wal-Mart today I was twice confronted by two women on their cell phones talking about their shopping to somebody in another location. Both of them were taking up the whole aisle with their bodies and their carts.

I softly uttered, "Excuse me... ?" to get the first one to make some room to let me by. She became briefly incensed, as if I were in her house because she thought she was over her cell phone. What's up with that? Sad question... eh?

The same thing happens when people are driving and talking over the cell phone or texting. They literally conclude they're in the same room having this face-to-face conversation... and not in a car going sixty-five miles an hour on a busy road.

When stuff like this happens in my presence I am is able to reach for some holy saying that is gonna help me keep my senses acute and my feet on the ground. The saying I find most useful these days is "The superior man lets many things change without being duped." It's a quote from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching.

There seem to have been long periods in my life in which I was not willing to let things change even though I wasn't duped. For some reason, in the past, I thought it was my job in life to keep people honest. In the endgame I eventually became aware that my job was to keep me honest. Everybody else was on their own.

It's not that I intend to cop a dismissive attitude toward other people's troubles, it's that I gotta interpret what they pass off to me as the God's own truth or they feel betrayed. As it turns out, my seeming dismissiveness is more to be blamed on my now outlawed cultural heritage.

The Civil Rights Acts of the early Sixties made criminals out of my people, and it made an unwilling outlaw out of me. It took decades for me to begin to get a grip on what made my parents and friends and neighbors a bunch of illiterate assholes just for being born and bred in an aristocracy. Apparently, some people just can't take a joke.

Like it or not, the joke is on me. I am is the butt of somebody else's joke, sight unseen. If it's taken into consideration that my parents moved around a lot when I was a small child, and having the Jim Crow way of seeing the world shoved up my ass at every turn, my entire existence became like a war of the Gods.

I didn't have any time to just be me. At some juncture that had to change. As far as I could determine I needed some stability in my life, and the only way I knew how to get it was to create it from wit and grit. So, that's what I did. There was and still is a price for such arrogance. Nobody knows.

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