Healers And Prophets`

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It's not so surprising that I got banned from the evolutionversuscreation discussion list after I unsubscribed. The coward who owns the group tried to feed me to his wolves. His bullying was a deliberate act of intentionality. It's gonna cost him. If you'll remember I've already predicted I wouldn't last long.

I sorta figured all along that MATT O. is lurking on another group I'm subscribed to because it's the only place he could have gotten my address to send me an offhand invitation to join the group plus the link to get there. Some people... eh?

He got nothing. I've played head games with nincompoops like this a thousand times. I knowingly only committed to what one precious member referred to as creationist "repartee". Why would I not treat his junkyard dogs like animals I know better by experience than to trust? Admittedly, being gullible can be a positive attribute that can lead a person into new adventures, but I'm not a masochist. I don't like being abused with aforethought.

Being gullible is not always an effort I'm openly conscious about. Sometimes I don't know, that I do know, even if I suspect I might know, something, at least, that I won't own up to. That's the conundrum of being born at sunset that puts my life goals in opposition to my mundane daily goals.

I even fool myself into thinking my personality is open house to anybody who takes the time to check it out. I want it to be. I desire to be as translucent as possible, but later, I sometimes discover my silly efforts to be open about my life is a lie.

The little sores inside my mouth, and on one particular spot on the left upper side of my tongue, indicates to me that I'm overdoing it with the nsaids (aspirin, ibuprofen, Naproxen). Any infection can become a serious problem while using prescription drugs as powerful as methotrexate and hydroxychloroquine.

Presently I'm dealing with it by swishing silver colloid water around in my mouth and spitting it out. It helps. At least temporarily. I can never be sure what causes this problem. It happens occasionally. It obviously has something to do with what I put in my body.

My hands hurt. That's where most of the pain I endure from rheumatoid arthritis shows up. Why would it not? I use my hands for everything. Especially typing on my computer keyboard and the keyboard of my digital piano. For the last couple of days I've encountered fairly serious pain just picking up stuff like coffee and kitchen pans. That's why I've been eating the nsaids.

After it stopped raining late yesterday I went for a walk down toward the river. My brother's dogs seemed very happy to see me out and about. They don't appear to go back in the woods without a human to go with them. This human likes having them along. There is nothing back there to worry about except snakes.

Black bears are native to these parts, but I've never actually encountered one when I'm out walking. I only worry about momma bears with cubs. Otherwise they skedaddle long before I see them. Having the dogs around does make me feel safer. They sort of clear the path through the woods before I get there.

The local people are fairly observant about trespassing on people's property. Our family property is isolated by the river and the various streams and flood plains that run through it. I've never met anybody on my walks in all these years. I suspect that's because they'd have to wade through the swamps or go around the end of the airport runway to get to it. Who wants that?

The more time passes and the more people huddle in their houses and in the small crossroad villages that infest the entire Atlantic coastal plains, it seems, the more hesitant they are to wander out into the woods and swamps. That's fine with me. Not many people keep gardens anymore, so they got no reason to be out on the land at all.

The nuclear plant disaster in Japan seems to be a bad omen for many people. I'm concerned myself. There is no real good way to protect oneself from radiation. Acting manly is a fail. I had to take classes about radiation when I went and took a pipewelding test at the nuclear plant in Southport.

I arranged to get laid off before I even finished the welding tests. The tests take weeks to complete. Just going to those classes on radiation was enough to scare me off. I took to reading palms as a diversion there in the test shop, and among the people who stood in line to get their palms read were two big shot supervisors.

It was a humorous situation to me. Generally, people don't think about construction workers as the sort of people who read palms. Many people don't have a clue about what kind of people read palms. Not even palm readers themselves. It's an interesting thing to do.

I knew before hand who these guys were, and that they had a lotta pull on the job site. They got customized readings for that reason, and they liked what I told them. Why would they not? I could see right through them. Pretty much like I do everyone else.

When I asked them to help me get a layoff in order to draw unemployment, they were joyous to get me gone from there. My esoteric talents scared the hell outta them. It's evident that I got a talent for that sort of thing, but I studied intensely and practiced for a long time previously. I don't do it anymore since I settled down. Healers and prophets can't heal and prophesy in their hometowns.

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An Inside Place To Be With A Friend Of Short Acquaintance

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It's raining, but since it's not so cold, and we do need the rain according to the TV weatherman, I am is not complaining. Any excuse to sit around in an inside place to be and amuse myself will do. My mathematical brother seems happy enough to stay inside also, we haven't done our walking routine for a couple of days now. Sunday and Monday nights were downright cold, but we only got a minimal frost on Monday night.

Since the forecast was for it to warm back up to some more comfortable degree, it only seemed logical to wait for that to happen. Now, it's supposed to rain all day and all night, so we'll probably miss out again tonight. Guess I'll have to get on my exercise machine and act like I'm rowing down the river for a while. That's probably a good thing. It forces me to use my upper torso more than just walking does.

The machine is called a Cardio Glide. I did lots of research on what might work best for me. Several reviews including Consumer Reports recommended it. Since Sears sold it under their own label it was fairly easy to find one to buy.

One of the reasons it was so highly recommended was it's durability. I'll testify to that. I've had it for probably ten years, and it's working without any apparent flaws to date. Not using it as much as I probably should have has helped, but it's well-made and very useful.

My newest gadget, the Bose noise-canceling headphones, are working out just fine too. The military helicopters have come around again, but not as regularly as they were for weeks on end. Maybe they sent them to Libya to kill people. Better them than me. When the helicopters have shown up the noise-canceling aspects of the headphones really make a difference.

For the last couple of days I've been using them to listen to the binaural beat generator for a while. This stuff works as advertised, and it's free. The free (as in beer) part of it is particularly satisfying. I paid extragant amounts of money to buy Hemi-Sync audio tapes from Monroe Institute, and the Hemi-Sync tapes never used Focus levels beyond 12. I felt cheated by them nickel and dime-ing me to death. I'd go back for more if I could afford it, but only because the I Ching thought it would be advantageous. I enjoy my disgusting habit of being a miser.

The services offered by the Monroe Institute are very good, and has proved worth it for me if for no other reason than to introduce me to another method for entering the deep other than finding the time to meditate for hours on end. I get the sa-me results without having to be so damn disciplined about it.

I've considered employing the Gnaural software program while using psychedelics of some one sort or the other, but I've reached an impasse with power for a while. Besides, I've done more than my share in the past. I always seem to overdo things like that. At least I've had enough sense not to get into the addictive stuff any more than experimentally.

My drug of choice now is cheap red wine. I wouldn't be cheap about it if I could afford the good stuff. Not that I really know what "the good stuff" is. My sister-in-law's brother and his wife do. They travel all over to exclusive wine tastings. He seems to enjoy my company enough to stop by with a bottle or so of some very tasty stuff.

He brought a bottle of pinot noir that made me hate the grocery store variety. Damned Scorpio, he probably did it to ruin my low-caste tastes. Still, he did it, so there is something to be respected about that. As much as I enjoy being filled to the brim with avarice, it's nice to have friends who ain't. Why they don't scream "Turn about is fair play!" and shun me is a mystery wrapped up in an enigma. Well, some actually do just that. No blame.

Currently, I am is enjoying exchanging posts with several people who seem interesting. One woman sent me a link to a brief synopsis of a writing she admires. It told of a fascinating experience the author had of taking a Bedouin from the sands of the Sahara desert to some place in Europe where they visited a waterfall.

When he was ready to leave the place they didn't wanna go. He asked why, and they told him they were waiting for the waterfall to stop. They couldn't believe there was that much fresh water in the world. They expected it to run out at any time, and they were waiting to see that happen. It made me wish I'd been there to witness that.

I've traveled considerably for a po' boy. I literally joined the Navy to "see the world". The notion of serving my country to be patriotic never crossed my mind. It's probably true that if I hadn't gone to the countries around the Pacific rim during my first enlistment in the Navy I might never have gotten there. Certainly not to Hawaii the six times I briefly passed through that paradise.

Being a bookworm as a kid didn't prepare me for Japan and the other Oriental places I visited aboard Navy ships. I'd seen pictures of venerable old men with their cute little goatees before I first visited. I was surprised, even sort of shocked, to actually see the first one face-to-face. He was scraping left-over food from our trash barrels and seemed very happy to get it. I had a lot to learn about real poverty.

It was only 10-12 years after the end of World War Two, and Japan was still recuperating from the total devastation the war brought right to their door. The people there had to make do as they could to merely survive back then. I assumed their recovery would be more or less permanent until the tsunami and the ongoing nuclear power plant problems.

If I wasn't so inured to personal heartbreak I might feel sorrier for them than I do. I still wish them hope. Granted, hope is the only product anyone has for sell, but it's also all I got to give, and I feel properly guilty about that too. Not so much that I'd sell all my worldly goods and send them the money, but at least I empathize with the horror they're enveloped by without experiencing fiendish delight.

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Bird Dung And Blueberry Bushes

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It's been a rotten day. Like an idiot I tried to wrap plastic around as much of my old fig tree as I could to save it's tender leaves from the predicted frost. The fig tree did fine. I fell off the ladder and lost my glasses to boot. What a drag, man.

I didn't break anything, but I probably received a slight concussion. It wasn't like I was trying to save a child or a beloved pet from a burning building. Even if the frost had killed my fig trees new leaves it would eventually recover. I feel like a fool.

I did manage to wrap my blueberry bushes up. Probably because I didn't have to climb up on a ladder to do it. They were blossoming, and I figure the blossoms are even more tender and vulnerable than the leaves, but so far, so good. I love fresh fruit right off the tree.

The blueberry bushes came up at the base of a young oak tree that divides my driveway as it loops around my house. The birds eat the blueberries growing at my kinfolk's houses and roosted in the young oak.

The way I figure it, they spent the night in the tree and defecated the seeds on the ground below, and... Voila! Blueberries up the yingyang. The blueberry bushes I transplanted from my parent's old house died. The birds doing what came naturally are better gardeners than I am is.

Subscribing to discussion groups are a lot of fun for me. I get to write to specific people rather than to the-world-at-large. That's what I do here, but I get a lot of the ideas I write about here from what I write for discussion groups.

The latest group I subscribed to is about science vs religion. I'm such a slut because I can go either way, and do just that. It might seem even more foolish for me to take sides in this most ancient of all debates than it was for me to be climbing ladders at my age.

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Will Frost Kill The Spring Crops?

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Waking up this morning was not a dreamy affair. I might have dreamed, but all I realized when I woke up was that I had a headache from drinking too much wine last night. It has everything to do with me listening to binaural beats. Doing that makes me emotionally sensitive. It's not liberating for winos like me to let themselves get too emotional.

A woman wrote that she liked getting to understand the "real person beyond the fantasies" when she read this blog. It's not unusual for some people to think that a "real person" writes this material. I be-co-me with the careactor who composes it, and once done, that persona drifts away. They consider themselves real people, and appear to want me to be one too, but for their own reasons, not mine. She seemed disappointed that I don't allow for my readers to make comments.

I guess if she kept a blog she might write for the very purpose of eliciting comments simply because she concluded it would be the most rewarding part of blogging for anybody. Seeking personal rewards is not why I do it. Allowing my readers to comment on stuff I invent in the specious present is more of an aggravation than something that "rewards" me.

The problem with a Comments section for me is that instead of writing creatively in the moment, and attempting to make sense of my drifting thoughts, I find myself addressing the comments people have about my apparently asinine conclusions. I don't consider people's reactions to what I make up as I go along germane to the purpose of doing what I do. I like that people actually read this blog, but I don't really understand why they do it.

In my opinion, people should make up their own stories about what matters to them rather than accept other people's opinions as representative of what is not there for them. That is, if they actually have their own opinions. It's not like I intentionally lie to describe what crosses my mind, it's just that it doesn't matter if what I write is considered the truth. Writing the truth is not itself my purpose for writing.

Truth is a passing fancy in the way I look at the world. I wish what is often called "the truth" were not some extemporaneous fantasy that becomes the law of the land. Who doesn't want what they publicly profess to believe as true to stay what they claim it is forever?

I just got back from having breakfast at the local diner. While there, I heard people talking about the weather. I live in a farming community where the farmers grow a lot of produce like bell peppers and cucumbers. They have a small window for selling the products they grow that is controlled by how the harvest season and the trucking industry comes down.

It starts in Florida and moves up the Atlantic coastal plains. To have any chance at all of making money they have to have some good luck with the weather. A late frost can bring catastrophe. They have to plant early enough to have ripe produce when the buyers pass through the area, but if they plant too early, frost can kill their plants and they lose their investment.

A general rule around here is to wait until after Easter to plant. Adventuresome capitalists don't do that. If they plant early, and their crops don't get killed by a late frost, then they can get the premium price for their product. The market moves north with the passing season, and the buyers and the truckers themselves make more money by not having to pay the extra costs of shipping from Florida to the big cities up in the northeast.

There is a forecast of frost in this area for tonight. That's why all the chatter at the diner was about the possibility of that happening, and what the farmers think they can do to prevent losing all the time and money they have already invested. Even the non-farmers are worried, because if the farmers lose because of frost, then the money they would make from a successful crop goes out the window.

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The Sbagen Binaural Beat Generator

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The fact that I'm smugly pleased with myself about how to use the sbagen beat generator has me bordering on some unbearable arrogance. Sure, I'm perfectly aware that my getting it to happen would be child's play for any self-respecting nerd, but I don't have much respect for the nerd in me for reasons I don't wanna get into presently.

The instructions seem fairly clear after the fact. They always do, don't they? I must have read them through at least five or six times just to get the nerve up to give it a go. Previously, I downloaded the Gnaural beat generator and used it right away. It has a user interface that makes that possible for amateurs like me. I like it too. I used it for the entire time I wrote yesterday's blog entry.

The problem for me with not being satisfied with the Gnaural were the comments and the brief biography of the sbagen beat generator creator. He is a real nerd, but also a psychonaut like me. He might not have coded the sbagen generator if not for that. His fairness and generosity toward the other beat generator coders impressed me. Especially his positive remarks about the Monroe Institute and Robert Monroe.

It was my serendipitous encounter with Robert Monroe's books on astral traveling that got me interested in binaural beats over twenty years ago. My own spontaneous out-of-body trips caused me to get interested in Robert Monroe's books. When I read in his books about the institute for exploring this phenomena I had to find a way to go there and check it out.

It wasn't an easy thing for me to do because his asking price wasn't cheap, but it wasn't impossible for me get the money together. After I went to Faber, Virginia and saw what it cost him to create the Monroe Institute I didn't think the price unreasonable either. The only way I got the money up was to save it out of my unemployment insurance check, which wasn't all that much at the time.

It took a long time after I attended the initial seminar to realize I'd gotten a lot more from attending and participating in it than I originally thought. I was heavy into the I Ching as an oracle at the time, and when I asked it if I should go back for more seminars the answer suggested that doing so would bring "supreme good fortune."

The aspect of the Sbagen download that kept me coming back to it and trying to get it to work for me is that it's not a set deal. It also has all the binaural beat Focus sets that the Monroe Institute wants big money to get to. The initial seminar only gets up to Focus 12, and that didn't get me where I wanted to go. The Sbagen download has up to Focus 26 and a way to mix and match other Focus's beyond that.

I still haven't learned how to use this program the way I'd like. I've just been reading the instructions again and learned a little more about it. I guess it'll be a trial and error thing for a while until I understand how to pull what I want from the program.

In the meantime I cranked up the Gnaural generator again to have something to divert me while I attempt to compose this blog entry. I started losing focus, and I had to stop writing and let it have it's way with me.

I don't know exactly where I went, but it was outta the world of abstract constructs and woids. When I returned to my computer I was too far outta whack to write, so since I found myself staring at iTunes and Vivaldi's Four Seasons, I booted that up and soon found myself emotionally distraught over the beauty of Vivaldi's stuff.

In the past I have confessed to not listening to recorded music any more than necessary because I like to reserve the pleasure of music to live performances. In this case, I turned to Vivaldi to bring myself back into the world of the senses from wherever the binaural beats of the Gnaural app took me moments ago.

Vivaldi's Four Seasons is about the only music I have on iTunes. It's actually there because I wanted to see if I could digitize it from the CD I bought for $1 at one of the big box stores that was trying to dump their classical music because it doesn't sell well to teenagers. I've lost the CD now, and I'm glad I recorded it on iTunes.

The seed sprouting I was doing for a while got lost in the shuffle when I began to understand what happens with autoimmune diseases. It's fairly simple to understand. The immune systems stops protecting the body from what attacks it, and it begins to attack the body itself. Slowly, I began to realize that I didn't wanna continue the kind of diet that strengthened my immune system, so I stopped sprouting and using them.

On the other hand, cooking brown rice from scratch takes longer than I like. I thought I'd try soaking it like I did when I was sprouting beans and lentils to see if that would reduce the cooking time. Every day for three days I drained the water from the brown rice and put new water in. I kind of hoped it would sprout, but it didn't.

It did swell up a little, and I decided to cook it to see how long it took for it to be ready. I boiled it for twenty minutes, and sure enough, it was ready to eat. That beats the heck out of the forty-five minutes it's been taking to cook straight from the box.

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Binaural Beats For The Great Unwashed

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Right this moment I have an audio software program playing binaural beats into my new Bose headphones at a beat of 4 hz. I have the volume turned down about as low as it gets on my iMac and minimized in order to see the TextEdit page I'm writing (righting) this blog entry on. Most of the time I find it extremely difficult to write creatively if any sort of aural activity is going on. Since the binaural beat is absolutely steady and doesn't change I'm hoping I'll be able to compose my usual untruths at the same time.

Another facet of this experiment is the noise-canceling aspect of the headphones. It digitally creates sound waves that offset specific external noises. I write specific ambient noises because the earphones have microphones to sense the external noise, and generates wave patterns that are transmitted inside the ear cups to cancel the external sounds.

It ain't perfect. I bought these cans (headphones) to help me deal with the very, very loud military helicopters that have decided to use the local airport next door to play war games. It would be preferable for the military to find another place to practice killing people, but the U.S. Army is the largest organization in the universe, and they don't appear to to care if they drive the citizens they're supposed to protect crazy.

Since I don't have any influence with the military (the CC is their bitch) I bought these expensive noise-canceling headphones as a defense gesture with the attitude that it's the best I can do and still live here in my own house.

The binaural beat is being generated by a free software program you can download from here:

http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/

The beat I'm listening to is the default beat that comes ready to play when I opened the software and hit the Start button. Purportedly, the beat generator program will play any binaural beat you decide to create after you learn to use the program. There are preset programs that can be downloaded ready to use with this specific software if you don't particularly wanna learn to program your own.

Presently, I don't even know how to use the presets and get them to work for me, but I eventually will. It all depends on whether I stay interested long enough to endure the learning curve. I have ordered a free DVD from this web site:

http://www.centerpointe.com/

The guy who runs this site creates binaural beats that he sells hope with. He was recommended as a righteous, sincere dude by Jim Peters who created another beat generator that can be found here:

http://uazu.net/sbagen/

The guy who is called "Jim Peters" has an interesting bio linked to this page. I've read during my research that the sbagen generator, which drew my original interest, is probably better technically than Gnaural, but it doesn't have a user interface that I could grok right away, and Gnaural does.

Binaural beats are not a new subject here. I've written a few entries in which mention them. Usually, I associate them with the videos found at YouTube by the hundreds. I like the YouTube videos, but they're somebody else's mess, and I'm sorta interested in creating my own, and have been since I attended the introductory seminar at Monroe Institute a couple of decades ago while Monroe himself was still living:

http://www.monroeinstitute.org/hemi-sync/

Oddly, I seem to have included more links in this one entry than I have in any other blog entry I've written in all these years. Maybe the binaural beat at 4 hz is causing me to be more patient than usual. I certainly hope so.

With Mercury in Aries in my natal chart I don't seem to be very patient. It doesn't help, of course, that Saturn is in it's fall in Aries in my natal. Patience seems to be assigned as an attribute of Saturn. For some reason, probably practical, I am pleased that Saturn is in it's Fall in my natal chart.

Being irresponsible has it's price, especially emotionally, but since I don't know any other way. I've learned to accept walking away from leading the ideal life of married with children. Not because I particularly wanted to, I adored my children and was satisfied with my wives, but I guess it was not meant to be for any of us.

In less than a month I'll be 72 years old, if I should live so long. It's a significant birthday for me. It's symbolic of spiritual puberty. The actual date of that event has already passed a while back. I never figured the exact date for lack of interest. Basically, it happens twelve years after the second Saturn Return, which happens in one's late Fifties.

Astrologically it represents the onset of spiritual power, in the same sense that physical puberty (that happens at around the age of twelve years old) is manifested in young kids. For a male that means that he can produce sperm and procreate children, and for women, they matriculate into becoming impregnable.

Entering the period of spiritual puberty theoretically means that I should experience what it's like to exercise spiritual power, and I'm as curious as all get out how that will manifest itself. Since I always seem to be the last to know I might not recognize it happening at all.

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Having Fun With Lucid Dreaming

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In my search for new discussion groups to participate with in the last couple of days I inevitably subscribed to what appears to be mainly an NLP group. I probably won't survive very long there. The moderators are very threatening and strongly suggest prospective members read their FAQ.

The FAQ is written for the most part in all capital letters. That should have told me all I needed to know. Maybe that's why they have nearly five thousand people subscribing to the group and very few posts proportionally. Many months they have less than fifty posts all month. I am just seeking a conversation, so I've unsubscribed already.

Getting re-acquainted with NLP may have been the reason I dreamed about being trapped in an odd situation again. This time I was out in the country in what looked like a one room country store that was being used for an NLP gathering. I was assigned a bunk bed inside the large room. I put my sleeping bag and back pack that I was using for a suitcase under the bunk, and went outside to socialize.

When I came back all my stuff had been moved and everybody who had originally been assigned a lodging there had been moved out in favor of another group. Nobody knew where my stuff was. I became incensed and started screaming bloody murder over the injustice of it all in a very loud voice. Several official suits tried to calm me down, but I was having none of it.

Then, the clapboard-sided country store turned into a modern brick facility with lots of light and open spaces. It had lounges with comfortable seating, and several pools with small waterfalls and split-level balconies. In the center of the layout was a glass-enclosed atrium with green plants that perfumed the air.

I moved around trying to find my way around inside the building. Even though the architecture was modern and clean, I suddenly realized I was in pretty much the same psychological situation as in former dreams when I had found myself trapped in murky industrial environments, but these were fancy digs instead.

There were lots of fashionably dressed people there, but no one would talk to me or answer my questions about what was going on. Eventually, I realized that I was dreaming, went totally lucid, and started having a really swell time. Upon going lucid, I didn't wanna leave or wake up from the dream. I started performing weird acts like deliberately diving head first from places where in real life I would have been killed by the heights alone, but I did it knowing that I couldn't be killed because I was dreaming.

I didn't have arthritis in this lucid dream, and I was doing extraordinary things with my body that I could do when I was youthful and maintained a daily hatha yoga practice. Ahhh... it felt great to be young again. I find it difficult to describe what behaviors I deliberately invoked, but eventually, of course, I inevitably woke up, and I was just another old man with bad hands. Still, it was wonderful while it lasted.

Later this morning I began to wonder if having these recurring nightmares and dreams was helpful to me in going lucid. I'm thinking that maybe the familiarity of being in a similar situation on different nights hasn't helped to recognize a little earlier each time that I'm dreaming, therefore enabling me to start controlling the dreamtime in my favor.

Yesterday afternoon I went for a long walk back toward the river again. My brother's dogs, all four of them, went with me. About ten minutes into the walk they jumped up a female deer, and they all took off lickety split after her, but surprisingly, they only chased her briefly for about a hundred yards, and gave it up. No hunting dogs they. Granted, they weren't hungry. They get fed regularly as pets everyday.

I stopped by the place where the two ditches run together to see if the re-channeling of the water coming from the pond below my house was doing. The water had reverted back to it's old course. I probably didn't understand the mechanics of the situation very well. I let it be, but I may mess around with it later. It's a nice little place to rest from walking and watch the water move.

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Fire, Then Rain. The Blessings Of Heaven

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My dreamtime this morning took me back to working in a harsh construction environment. My supervisor gave me some scrap metal I didn't want to carry home, but it wasn't prudent for me to tell him I didn't want his gift. He took a Sharpie pen and wrote his permission on it in order for me to get it past the guard shack. That one piece of metal turned into a heavy bundle of different pieces of metal, like it can in dreams, before I got home. In the dream I was supposed to go back to work the next day, which was a Sunday, but there were conflicting signals about that.

In this dream, however, after having earlier dreams turn into nightmares, I finally realized I was dreaming lucidly enough to get myself off the job site, and then to will myself to come home to my house. When I got home I deposited the scrap metal over by my trash pile and came inside. Since I was still lucid by this time in the dream, I lay down on the very bed where I currently lay dreaming, and willed myself into an out of body flight to the Moon, and sat up there gazing down on the earth for a while. I woke up.

Just after I sat down to write a moment ago I heard some animals mewling and whining and barking like they do when the sirens go off and hurt their ears. They sounded like they were all the way across the river and beyond the swamp and flood plains. I'm not sure they were dogs. The sounds were not happy, carefree warning sounds. My brother's dogs started baying in sympathy with whatever it was. I got the impression they were wailing because somebody or something valuable to them died.

Not so oddly, just as I heard these animals puling, I remembered that the fortune cookie message I got yesterday. It said that a big change was going to happen in my personal life. It made me think of my youngest brother who lives next door. He has been burning off the overgrown grass and brush down the hill next to the pond. He came over to ask me if he could borrow my garden hose to add to his hose in order to reach down to the area he wanted to burn off to control the fire. I put on my shoes and went to help him.

The nozzle on my hose is about worn out, and it absolutely refused to be taken off in favor of connecting my hose to his. We used WD-40 on it to try and remove it. Nothing worked. I suggested that if he wanted to burn the area off without the water hose, I'd go down and help him keep an eye on it, but he adamantly refused to consider setting the fire without a water hose available.

I knew from the tone of his voice that he would not change his mind, so I teased him a little about being overboard on the safety aspects of it. It might have been mo' better if I hadn't done that. But, I went further and reminded him that our family had been burning off land without hoses since our childhood, but that just made him even more angry, and he snapped off a comment about "I get to have my own way occasionally!", and stomped off.

In an effort to appease his anger, I switched the lengths of hoses around so that the stuck nozzle was at the end of the three pieces of hose I had, hooked it up to the faucet outside my house, and pulled the end with the nozzle on it down toward where he had been burning. The effort had made me pretty tired, he hadn't returned, and so I came back in the house to watch the six o'clock news. Pretty soon, I received an e-mail from him saying that he had lit the fire. I got up and went down to where he was tending the fire. After all, the land he was burning off was partly mine.

When I got outside I noticed that he had rerouted the hose I had dragged down toward the pond, and when I got to where he was he was in a better mood. He said that he had finally gotten the worn-out nozzle off that had been stuck. He figured the WD-40 we had sprayed on it earlier had a chance to work. The fire burned real well in most places, but with some islands of dry grass here and there.

I stayed down at the pond with him while the fire burned. By the time the humid night air started slowing the burn I was ready to put out the fire and go inside. I subtly started saying as much, and preparing to leave it go. He had used his tractor and disk on the land beside the road higher above the pond, so there wasn't much chance it would get out of control. I told him to let me know when he had enough and I would turn the water to the hose off at my house.

Some time went by, maybe an hour or so. I heard his tractor running, so I figured he had called it a night. When I didn't hear from him for about an hour I assumed he had forgotten to let me know to cut the water off. I went outside and called out to him a couple of time, but got no answer. He was close enough that he could have heard me yelling, so I went ahead and turned off the faucet the hose was attached to and came back upstairs.

The truth is that I was very tired. I had gotten up early, didn't get the nap I'd planned to make up for it, and was ready to go to bed. When I got up to go pee later, I found another e-mail from his iPhone that he was still down there, but it had arrived at my computer two hours earlier. I guess he had came by my house and turned the water back on while I was asleep.

The next morning after it got light enough to see what had happened with the burning, I walked down to the pond. It looked like he had gotten a clean burn on much of the area he had wanted to burn off. I was pleased for him and came back to the house to write yesterday's blog entry. He piddled around down there off and on all day. I went to check on his progress a couple of times, and found him using his tractor to re-pile the unburned heavy tree branches.

Just after dark last night I headed over to his house to see if he wanted to walk like we've begun doing for the last month or so. I saw his truck lights moving on the lane we both use as a driveway going toward his house. But, instead of going home he drove toward the area he'd been burning. I followed him down there on foot. He didn't see me as I approached.

When I arrived, he had a flashlight out checking the still smoldering pile of fallen tree branches he had raked up. There was a fairly strong wind blowing, and that was his concern. I stepped behind his truck where he couldn't see me, and when he came back and opened the truck door to drive back to his house I growled like an animal. It scared him, of course, and then when he realized it was me we had a good laugh.

Instead of driving his truck the three hundred yards or so to his house, he suggested we start walking from there in order for him to return to check on the fire again. As we walked I began asking him how his life was going. I asked about his wife's health and how they were getting along. He assured me that everything was great. He even volunteered that there had been an agreeable pick up in his internet business for a few weeks. I took his word for it and we finished our walk. The dogs howling the night before must have been about something else entirely.

The reason I'm up and writing at this ungodly hour is that the expected rain started pouring down. It is surely welcome. Not only to put out any remaining sparks from the brush burning, but to take the spring pollen out of the air, at least for a while. The yellow pollen that comes from the abundant pine trees in the area had coated my car and I had to use the window washer along with the windshield wipers to clear it off well enough to see. Since my sinuses have been killing me with all the pollen, I was glad to hear the rains come.

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Dreams With Real People In Them

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I sat with this older rich woman at breakfast yesterday. I had to if I wanted breakfast, there was no other booths open, and she permitted me to sit with her because she was obviously occupying a whole booth alone. She was having Belgian waffles and bacon, and so I decided to have pancakes and bacon. The pancakes were thick and tasteless. The bacon was particularly crunchy and well done the way I like it. That bacon is what showed up in my dream.

The other real object that showed up in that same dream was about the CBS news anchorwoman Katie Couric. She was a guest on the David Letterman Show last night just before I went to sleep. Later on, I dreamed that me and Katie Couric got married.

We held hands while we were in a line in front of a judge's bench for the Judge to marry us, and he asked me for picture ID. I joyously reached in my back pocket to get my billfold, and it was gone. Oh, the angst! It turned out that wasn't a problem, because Ms. Couric was so well known the Judge waived my lack of an ID off and took her word for it that I was who I claimed to be. With a nod of his head and a wink of his eye he grandly pronounced us man and wife.

Later, at some celebratory dinner for the bride and groom, I became aware that my head was laying on the corner of the table looking up at and toward her. In the dream, I was munching on crisp bacon. She saw me eating it, giggled, and pushed some more bacon toward me as if she was feeding a dog at the table. I sorta think I would have wagged my tail if I'd had one.

Oddly, in the dream, I was very happy to be married again. That's not what I regularly tell myself when I realize that I live alone, and have for nearly thirty years. I've been married twice ere now. Each of my marriages lasted for around 7-8 years, more or less. Construction work had me traveling quite a bit. Keeping jobs that required travel may have been more deliberate than I was aware of consciously.

The other day while I was eating breakfast at the same place as usual, and my other brother stopped by my booth to sit and chat with me for a while. I had seen him earlier when I first got there, but he was involved in a meeting with a table full of outdoor types talking about keeping the local rivers clean. He is considered a "river master" and a leading authority on the nearby rivers and streams. He invited me again to learn to paddle a kayak, and come get involved, but I'm not interested.

Since he was sitting there in front of me, and had used me to express what he's intrigued by, I decided to use him to explore something personal about myself. He hates it when I use him the same way he uses me, but since I let him go first, he pretty much has to put up with me. Learning this ploy was a major event in my study of the Book of Changes.

I talked about my drinking habits, and how getting drunk has caused me marital problems in the past. Events he knows about simply because that sort of thing gets around in families. I use booze, mostly cheap red burgundy, to put some distance between me and people I don't particularly like to be around, which includes most people. I use pot for that purpose even more than likker, but it's been a while. Recuperating from getting high on pot is usually less painful than booze.

Later last night or rather early this morning, I dreamed that my youngest brother next door has four brown dogs instead of three. I mentioned it to him in the dream, and he told me that he figured that someone had got tired of one of the puppies he gave them, and they gave it back to him. That seemed weird because it's been a few years since that happened.

The male (mostly Spitz) dog they call Chokolat sired nine puppies via this brown (mostly razor-back) bitch I call Mama Dog. She has a given name, but I never remember it. He gave all the puppies but for two chocolate colored puppies away. He naymed the two dogs after their father. The male he called Chocky, and the female he called Lottie. They all come to my house for a visit almost every day. Lottie came over yesterday around dusk and stayed longer than usual begging to be petted. Something is wrong.

This dream I woke up to may have something to do with that rich widow I had breakfast with. I only point out that she's rich because that's how I sort of keep her at bay. She seems to get ideas about us getting together, and all I have to do to back her off is say that I'm merely interested in getting her money. I think many of the old men that flirt with her really are after her money. She has a goodly number of children and loads of grandchildren, and that's too much baggage for me.

I realize this entry is full of mixed metaphors and partial stories that have no real goal. That's how it is with writing down dreams. Most of my dreams are so phantasmagoric that they make no sense, and logical descriptions come hard. The fact that this last series of dreams contained something from my real life is unusual. Creating graven images of something that's not real isn't easy, and it's certainly not something to be respected by others. '-)

It took a long time for me to understand that writing is in truth nothing more than creating engraved images. It's simple enough to point out that the written word is literally nothing more than symbols engraved on a surface. Usually paper, but they are also carved in stone. Words written on computers are like castles built on silicon (sand).

People worship paintings of objects and images and icons in the same way as they worship stories. Stories themselves have no substance. Told with some decent amount of skill, they change people by changing their minds. Mind is speech. Speech is mind.

They don't worship spirits. They worship that which represents spirits. Told, but unwritten stories have no specific form. They depend on the receptivity of the audience. Spirits have no form either, but yield to temptation.

There seems to be some sort of world-wide sadness now in evidence in the ambient surroundings I pay attention to. I read recently on the internet of some satellite that's used to measure magnetic resonance. The data the researchers get from this satellite claims that logistic spikes occur with big emotional events happen.

The entire world became focused on what would happen after the 9/11 attack. Another spike recently happened when the tsunami struck Japan, and continued with the news about the nuclear power problems. Some pundits suggests these emotional spikes confirm that we're all connected, even if we don't consciously know it. I know it in my own experience consciously, but I gave up on trying to convince others as a failed policy. Knowing we're all one doesn't help anything or change the world toward a better end.

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My Unending Search For Aural Sanity

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Sometime I figure that as long as I can make sense of my own behavior, it doesn't matter whether I can make sense of your perceived behavior or not. Particularly since all I can possibly ken of your behavior is my own idea of what's going on over there. This has been a persistent, redundant theme of mine for a long time now.

One of the instigating factors of my feeling good this morning surely has something to do with these probiotics I'm putting into my body. It hasn't always been that way. Initially, it was a painful experience. Not only that, but my feeling better about taking them might be associated with when I'm putting those capsules full of "good" bacteria in my body. Doing it early before I eat appears to have helped me adjust to what they're doing.

I get up several times each night, usually at the end of each sleep cycle to relieve my bladder. How else would I know if I've got to go? When it's cold outside, getting up from my warm bed to go take care of business is irritating. I hurry to get back under the warm covers as quickly as possible, and return to the dreamtime. It was 60° (15.55° C) at five o'clock this morning, and I was not in so much in a hurry to go back to bed at all. I stayed up to write.

Before I woke up I dreamed of living in some earlier period in history. I'm thinking maybe the late eighteen hundreds by the clothing and lack of technology. It was horse and buggy days. There was a ragtag group of men around me, and what looked like a plantation store of a not so well-to-do plantation. I might not have been the owner, but I was at least an overseer of some sort who told people what to do. They acted like what I said mattered.

We were approached by this city slicker who wanted to hang around. For what, was more difficult to discern. In the dream, I figured that if I knew his astrology sign I might garner more information without committing to a decision, and so I asked him for identification that had his birth date on it. I didn't want to have to employ the ubiquitous, "What's yo' sign?" giveaway.

The scrap of paper he handed me should have sent me straight into lucid dreaming. That was because it was printed by a computer, and that's how I became aware that in this dream sequence I was illiterate. I couldn't read. That was a new feeling, and I woke up soon afterward.

My new noise-canceling headphones work. One of the loud military helicopters approached the area, and as usual, I could hear it coming a fair distance away. Did I say these helicopters are loud? Very loud. I can turn my TV up all the way, and still not distinguish what the talking heads are talking about, because of the stultifying, uninspiring, deliberate sound they make.

I grabbed my new headphones from off the twenty penny nail I had pounded into a wall stud. They handily hang off to the right side of my computer monitor. There is a slide button that turns on the electronic circuit whose job it is to digitally match the ambient sound to offset it. The red LED light came on as it's supposed to, and I quickly adjusted the foam ear cups over my abused ear lobes.

It was a wonderful sensation, or rather, a wonderful lack of sensation. The sound wasn't exactly muffled, but deterred. It was obviated. It was cut out. It was interrupted. What I heard was a new experience I don't know how to describe yet. Hold yer horses, I eventually will.

The noise wasn't gone. I could still hear the helicopter's engine sounds despite my brand new noise-canceling Bose headphones. Airplanes in general have no mufflers [in this case, it is the military, and these war machines are designed to irritate the hell out of people), but the usual sound was interfered with by the electronic circuitry.

The web site I scanned to discover what I could understand about this digital circuitry plainly stated that they were designed to be worn by helicopter pilots to do exactly what they were doing. It was only later that passengers in jet liners realized the headphones worked for them in the same way. Bose, who makes expensive speaker systems, was the man who invented and patented these devices.

Obviously, my highest wish would be that I didn't need to wear devices like these inside my own house to protect me from the military that supposed to protect me and my neighbors from enemies. But, now our own military has taken over the government and do whatever they like without regard to the citizens they are supposed to serve. Now we serve them.

Obama's attack on Libya reveals the dictator-like attributes I have been writing about since I first noticed that he struts around in a manner very reminiscent of the Italian dictator Mussolini. Even though I voted for him, and probably would again instead of voting for that weirdo John McCain (who, in my personal opinion, is still Vietnam's masochistic bitch). Obama's eagerness to declare war on Libya and call it macaroni as the act of a world savior is not okay with me.

The problem with his doing that, as far as I am concerned, is that the security spinners make it appear that it was Obama's decision and not the military/industrial complex who actually calls the shots in the United States of America. I might feel better about it if he was just another nutcase filled to the brim with delusions of grandeur.

The PBS channel has been showing travel shows since I got up, fixed coffee and breakfast, and began writing this blog entry. Most of the time I've been composing the TV is muted, but when I reached a stopping point I turn on the sound and listened to Rick Steves describe Copenhagen and the Danes, and then Burt Wolfe show off the intricacies of Taiwan.

It never ceases to amaze me that these travel shows have introduced more information about the world via these videos than I ever was shown or learned in college, and geography was probably my favorite courses in my formal education. I might have taken the geography courses themselves merely in order to watch the films they presented in class.

Presently, I've seen all of Steve Ricks and Burt Wolfe's travel shows at least twenty times each. Minimum. How could I not? The University of North Carolina Educational TV airs them over and over again constantly. They almost take up as much air time as the dodo heads (feigning false, amateurish enthusiasm) who constantly and unendingly beg for donations.

The only other options as far as over-the-air television reception goes is insane, perverse sitcoms about emergency room traumas, police and lawyer shows about murder and mayhem, and the trials and tribulations of teenager puppy love, unfaithful marriage "partners", and the agonies of child bearing and raising kids. In my dotage, I've outgrown that ridiculous, mundane crap.

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Tasting Death Requires Abstract Thought

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This morning's weird dream.

It's like I got there in my own vehicle that maybe someone was driving for me. It looked like Kansas. Open country. Flat. Like on the Great Plains. I was told that I would be staying at a house about a hundred yards away. There was a path from the one place we arrived at to the other building. They were waiting for me when I approached the building and I entered a second floor entrance of a split-level dwelling.

Once I was warmly greeted and inside, I was pointed toward a vehicle that was parked there, and I took off my gloves and shoes and tossed them toward the underside of that vehicle. I was dreaming, right?They were immediately picked up by two playful dogs. I was worried they were gonna tear them into pieces by their antics. I was told not to worry.

The next activity I remember was cleaning and putting white shoe polish on the lady of the houses boots. Eventually I looked out of a window and saw the house I had arrived by car to. It was made of poured concrete about five stories high. Each floor had a balcony, and there were a group of people that I took for a family standing on the balcony of maybe the third floor with a couple of horses.

They kept their horses inside the house. I remember thinking that was rather odd, and began considering the logistics of how they removed the horse's shit out of their homes. The gray concrete buildings looked like they were designed and built very recently with a view toward basic survival in a mad, mad world.

Maybe I was thinking of how people had moved their entire lives inside away from the radiation into these filtered environments. Maybe because of the nuclear leaks and the radiation being talked about in the news from Japan. I found myself doing other menial task in the house I'd been sent to. It was like I had to earn my keep to be inside of one of these buildings. I didn't mind, and in fact, I felt grateful to be allowed inside.

Later, after I had woke up and had relieved my bladder I lay in bed thinking of how the people in the area around the troubled nuclear plant in Japan being told not the eat the vegetables or drink the milk grown in the surrounding neighborhood. Then, I realized there is a nuclear plant up at New Hill not far from here, and another one that I worked for a couple of weeks about 70 miles away down in Southport.

This radiation threat doesn't come from nuclear weapons like many people have feared. There doesn't have to be an explosion. All there has to be is a lack of water to cool the rods down, and everything around where this happens will be radiated, and no one will see it coming. Maybe I wasn't joking in the recent past when I've written that the end is near. Perhaps this is what the Gospel of Thomas means when it claims that the humans that follow the precepts of the Jesus stories won't taste death.

I'm pretty sure I understand why the GoT makes the statement about how some people won't taste death. That is a specific statement. Not "tasting death" calls for the reader to ponder the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of. I realized in within the last few days. It has to do with devolution. First one grows in consciousness from childhood to a certain point, and then they begin a process of throwing it all away.

Abstract knowledge leads to delusion in a way that is hard to believe. The reason it's hard to believe is that the brain-washing that causes a human to believe that the intense development of abstract constructions associated with a formal education is the path to glory, and in a lotta ways it is, but people don't naturally go senile or get Alzheimer's without a reason. Not tasting death happens when the identity gained through the delusion induced by abstract knowledge is eliminated such that they no longer know they have a "who" that is dying. '-)

This suggests that one's personal identity is a lost cause if it's based on an academic education. In other words, that of graven images. I am is not claiming this is the truth. Read my disclaimer at the top of the page. The topic of "graven images" is something I relate to the Ten Commandments. Specifically: Thou shalt not worship graven images.

The definition of what "graven images" are came to me slowly. Probably precipitated by a job I once had etching coated copper rollers that had film by a printed resistant by dipping them in vats of acid for specific times. The acid ate away the copper that wasn't coated by the resistant film that had the design on it, and left tiny holes in the copper rolls that picked up ink to be printed by design on paper in a process called rotogravure printing.

Rotogravure printing is what's used to print very fine print on various surfaces. Usually paper, but other surfaces like vellum and some types of plastic too. I'm no expert in the printing process. I just had a minimum wage job doing this for a while, and the term "gravure" associated with the printing process made the connection to graven images for me.

Admittedly, my casual research into what "graven images" consist of was pointed toward the Christian Bible which contain the Ten Commandments. I thought it ironic (at best) that the very device which contains the warning is a graven image itself through and through. The very people who are warned by their religious faith to not do that are doing that without realizing it.

Then, I began to realize that books of any kind or media of any kind fit the description of "graven images." This commandment appears to resolve to not using other people's written experiences as a guide for living. If true, and I don't know, it means that our academic education is designed only to make it's victims the same as indentured slaves to the military/industrial complex.

I realize this blog entry is not exactly organized for maximum effect. I'm just trying to get my thoughts down so that the possibility exists for me to write it more clearly down the road. That is, if there is a "down the road." Nearly every day I'm reminded that my forgetfulness is more in evidence than ever.

I like to tell myself that I'm forgetting stuff that doesn't matter to me anymore. Like the mathematical formulas I used to fit pipe back in the day, but it's more than that, and more about words and recent activities I fully intended to activate than I like to admit. More often now, I make extra trips to the grocery store to buy what I forgot to buy in earlier visits. The price of gas makes me worry about these mistakes more these days.

Okay, maybe these odd behaviors don't worry me so much. It's just that they ought to. Right? One thing is for sure, I'd probably be a lot more concerned if it wasn't for sitting in front of my computer a lot where I can use Google to find the very terms I forget momentarily during my "senior moments".

I'd probably worry a lot more about having these moments more frequently if I couldn't resolve them soon after they occur. It's easy to understand why older people who don't use computers to think with would worry themselves to distraction more than those who do use computers and have a connection to the internet.

One activity that doesn't appear to be hard struck is my love for expert level crossword puzzles. In the last couple of years since the New York Times changed puzzle editors I've started buying the puzzle books published by the Los Angeles Times Press. I really enjoy these puzzles better because of the editors they employ.

The clues provided in order to solve their puzzles makes me reach for the most vague use of most of the answers that I get amazed at how they come up with them. Hardly ever do I get through one of their Sunday-sized puzzles without having to look at the answers in the back of the books.

It's more than occasional, upon finally realizing the correct answer, that I hear myself muttering, "How the hell did they come up with that perspective?" It's utterly delightful to finish most of their puzzles without looking in the back, much less the whole thing.

I think about my crazy mother when I work crossword puzzles sometimes. I started solving them as a child to impress her. By puberty I was constantly pissing her off because I would pick up her half-finished puzzles and completing them before she could get back to them. If somebody did that to me currently, I might go into an uncontrollable rage.

Writing about my mother's influence in learning to solve crossword puzzles reminded me, that fairly recently, I had openly realized that I had read the King James Version of the Bible twice before I was twelve years old solely to impress her and make her love me more.

It was obvious to me that I was getting a lot less attention with the birth of my two younger brothers. I became obsessed she would desert me and keep them. All that laborious reading wasn't really for any other reason. After that, however, I started having my own visions, and there was no need to read about other people's visions.

Maybe that's why the I Ching states that "the superior man" contemplates his own life. I must have realized that on my own when I was just a little boy. This seems to be the time of life for realizing I had more sense than I gave myself credit for when I was quite young. Coming to believe that was possible took much, much longer.

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A Birthday Present For Me

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The simplest way for me to deal with the noise of the military helicopters that use the local airport to play war games was to buy a set of headphones that not only fit over my ears, but use an active noise canceling digital device to stop the madness. It would help if they were good at reproducing sound.

I did considerable research to figure out what I should buy and decided to go for the cheap pair of headphones to see if they would do the job for me. Unfortunately, my efforts to do that at NewEgg.com, where I've gotten reliable service previously, now has gotten so big and their order page so confusing and tedious that they literally wouldn't let me fill out the form and buy what I wanted. No more NewEgg.

When something like that happens (I spent two hours trying to get it to work), I take it as an omen to upscale my purchase, and decided to buy the expensive Bose headphones. To accomplish that I drove up to Raleigh and shopped at the Best Buy store. There has always been something suspicious about Best Buy to me. I've never gotten one rebate back from them that I applied for. I was basically just comparing prices anyway.

I went to the Apple Store in the same shopping mall to see if they had what I wanted in stock, and the price was the same, so I bought them there knowing they would handle my debit card without me having to worry about where the yellow went. (old Pepsodent toothpaste jingle '-))

On the way home from Raleigh I decided to try my new noise-canceling headphones out to see how much they reduced the sound associated with driving on the InterState. I was fairly impressed with the results. It wasn't like being inside an audiologist's chamber and perfectly quiet, but the road noise was substantially reduced. I put them on and took them off a number of times to be able to judge the difference they made.

The Moose Club is just up the road from my house. On Saturday night those twerps hold a dance and hire a band to play for them to get drunk and dance by. They're probably not twerps, just "good ol' boys" taking a break from the tedium of everyday life, but when they make a lot of noise doing so, they're twerps in my ignored opinion.

Last night was a good chance to see how affective these devices are. The bass down to the Moose Lodge was thumping it's way through my walls, and the bass drum was loud as usual. I put the headphones on, and they significantly reduced the noise, but did not eliminate it. Just to see what would happen I inserted foam earplugs in my ear and put the headphones on top of them. That did the trick.

This morning, it's a little chilly. Not bad, but enough so that it's more comfortable when I turn on my new ceramic room heater. The fan does make more noise than I like, but for $18 I deal with it. For the hell of it I put on the headphones to find out how much the fan noise would be lowered. A lot, but again, not completely.

I remembered the switch that turns on the electronic device that creates interfering sound waves inside the cups of the ear pieces and turned it on and off several times to find out how much good that does. Quite a bit. The difference between having it turned on and when it's turned off is significant.

$300 plus $23 tax is a lot of money to pay to have some peace inside my own house, but yelling at screaming at military helicopters and Moose Club members and my younger brother's tractor noises is not productive nor practical. It only reminds me of how little power I have to change what's wot. I've used the foam earplugs from time immemorial, but they only go so far in making the noise tolerable, and no mas.

This entire subject should be a non-issue. According to the audiologist at the VA hospital I'm legally deaf. Unfortunately, or maybe not, I bought and used a weirdo device called the Neurophone to learn to hear sound through my skin. My take is that it works in some mysterious way.

I never have complaints about turning my TV and audio products up enough to irritate people. I don't drive other people nuts asking them to repeat what they just said. None of the usual indicators imply that I'm in the least bit deaf. Only that audiologist at the VA. That might change in the future. The placebo effect might wear off and I'll have to admit I'm deaf, but if that happens I wouldn't need these sound canceling headphones would I? It's a crazy world I live in.

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Allone Again

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My life has changed rather drastically in the last week. Drastic may be a little strong for the decisions I've made, but they are big changes for me in the sense they make me more alone with myself and my weird opinions, and point to an even greater need for me to amuse myself without much external help. No blame.

The most "drastic" change I made in the past few weeks was to cancel my account with the latest company to buy out the previous company who served as my ISP and home phone commercial benefactor. As of March 15th I don't have a DSL account or a home phone account. The blinking LED lights of the modem went off just before dawn on the 16th, and our tawdry little affair was over.

I probably should have kept the home phone, but I decided to make a clean break. The DSL is not a problem because I'm connected through my brother's commercial account with a much faster download speed. I plan to get a smartphone of some sort or at least a regular cell phone due to the mobility it would give me.

The Assurance Company that "gave" me a free cell phone is a ripoff. I've never been able to make or receive a single telephone call on it, so I took out the battery to wait for them to decide to cancel my account. I'm disappointed that it didn't work, but "life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone."

The fact is that I didn't make a single long distance call on my old touch tone phone for the last three years, and no more than five long distance calls in the ten years before that. I'm not exactly the "great communicator." I had a job a long time ago in which I was on the telephone for a living for about three years, and it burned me out on communicating over that media.

When the internet and e-mail came along I subscribed to a series of e-mail discussion groups, and participated vigorously because it gave me a chance to write and become more skilled at saying what I see in that manner. That's the other "drastic" change I made yesterday, when I unsubscribed again from the one group I've been a vigorous, participating member of for the last four or five years.

The first time I subscribed to this group, and subsequently unsubbed from it after nearly four years, one of the moderators wrote to me and asked me to re-subscribe because the group activity appeared to be losing it's momentum, so I did, but I probably shouldn't have. Nobody could keep it going because e-mail as a means of communicating seems to be taking a nose-dive.

So, I don't get any e-mail anymore to inspire me to write "to" a specific person, but only to the-world-at-large via this and my other blogs. It's just you and me now, dear diary, and that's okay with me. According to my latest .sig file statement, "You are the only human being you gnow.", there is nobody but me out there anyway, and so why would I pretend to write "to" another person if "they" are merely my own idea of what's out there.

In one of the last posts I sent to the group I explained my opinion of "knowledge." One of the old members of the group I was just beginning to appreciate put a kink in my new .sig file to state, "You are the only person you grow." I thought that was clever, but that it missed the point of my intent in using "gnow" instead of "grow".

This is my own quote from an exchange about this on the group, "Growing knowledge is basically an ego trip in my jaundiced opinion. Acquiring it by gnosis is tantamount to the hero's journey. Growing is evolutionary. Gnowing is devolutionary. It's abandoning one's rules of conscience to get back to the garden again."

Granted, "growing" knowledge in the first part of one's life seems to be a useful and probably necessary thing to do. In the United States there is not much of a choice because a dependent is required to go to school by law. Getting passing grades during that period is sort of necessary so that you want get passing over and have to attend school with a younger group of students can be humiliating and dangerous to everybody.

My writing that "growing knowledge is basically an ego trip", in retrospect, might have hurt the guy's feeling that substituted "grow" for "gnow", but I didn't intend to do that. That happens infrequently. In the last few months somehow managed to hurt an old friend's feelings, and he stomped out of my house never to return again. Contrarily, that might turn out to be a good thing. Occasionally, I do the right thing without knowing what I'm doing.

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The Dreams Of Being Me Get Nasty

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I wrote a long entry yesterday, but didn't publish it. I was not in a very good mood because of stomach problems, and my writing showed it. I'm gonna edit it now to see if I can come up with something I'm willing to publish. As a matter of fact, I just did that and I'm okay with it now.

Nothing makes me feel more gullible and stupid than my dreams. I had a strange dream about being in bed with a rather large snake that scared the hell out of me, but then I dreamed of being cuckolded by my second wife and a man who pretended to be my friend. In the dream I was sitting outside in a car and watching these men cum and go in and out of our apartment to help themselves to my ex-wife's eager unfaithfulness.

I write "themselves" because he called in a neighbor to come help himself and they all seemed real cozy making a fool out of me when they thought I wasn't around. When I woke up I knew there was a certain amount of truth to the dream. I got shed of them all a while back. The wife left me nearly thirty years ago.

In my current opinion, I probably invited all this to happen because of my incessant need for self-importance. I ignorantly figure that what I've done with my life should matter. It doesn't. The embarrassing events that keep popping up in my dotage constantly and continuously reveal my total insignificance to myself and mankind, much less my family members.

The I Ching was the last of a series of oracles I studied and mastered to the degree necessary to work my mojo on other people without realizing that is what I was doing, and consequentually, realizing my mojo was working me. In some post or the other recently I wrote about using other people as oracles instead of the Yellow Book I learned from as my goto source.

I wrote about asking other people the well-formed questions I would normally address the book itself to receive an answer, and because the questions I ask were so pointed and designed so specifically for an oracle to respond correctly to, the person I asked the question of instead of the book had to become an oracle themselves in order to answer me.

Many, if not most people, don't have a clue they have this resource available to them, and when they watch themselves become something they never suspected they could, it makes them feel real special. Why would it not? The problem is that without a person who has mastered an oracle to ask them the right question, they can't go to the oracular mode and feel brilliant. They start hanging around people like me for that reason alone.

Making people feel smarter than they actually are is not a sensible way for me to win friends and influence people. It didn't start with my study of oracles, but back when I joined the Navy and had to take a battery of tests (like all recruits do), and the testers oohed and aahed over the results of those tests. I had the second highest scores overall and the only person who scored higher was a Duke graduate with a Masters degree in chemistry.

That's when I began to suspect my father had been lying to me about his opinion that I was too dumb to walk around without his personal guidance or to make a decision about anything I did without his approval. I had joined the Navy without his approval, and it was only because he couldn't force the Navy to suspend my application that I got to get away from his influence and find my own say so in the world external to my natal family.

I got treated special in the Navy because of those grades on those initial tests. My grades were usually the highest on any ship or station I was assigned to including those test scores of the officers who decided what and how I did things in the Navy.

The problem I have with communicating is that I have the ability to make people feel smarter than they themselves figure they are. The results of that is the same as when I ask them questions to elicit their inner oracle. They like very much feeling that they get from realizing they are capable of deep thought. It's having to hang around somebody like me to continue to feel that way that makes them get ugly.

It has taken most of my life to realize these people were playing me for a chump. I was a chump. I am a chump. I will die a chump. Not just a chump, but just about anybody's chump, with bells on. All for the purpose of feeling special and that my service to these humans is important to the evolution of mankind. Eventually, I realized I was mostly doing it for myself.

The proof of the pudding is that I live alone in a rathole of a house I built by myself and will never complete. I'll die in extreme pain and my body will rot and it won't be found until there is nothing left but bones, but until then, I'll describe it all in excruciating detail or at least think I did that without realizing that all I wrote was incomprehensible jibber jabber. What a drag, man.

These nightmares have gotta be caused by the probiotics I am is taking. They sort of do as they're advertised to do, but they make me feel like shit (pun intended), and I am becoming more and more aware that feeling like this and having these weird nightmares that indicate I a bigger fool than even I thought possible.

Worse, I am is a horrible, unfeeling person as a result of imbibing these "good" bacteria. It's not that I'm as mean as a snake, I just do dumb, meaninless things that hurt people's feelings. Treating people badly is about the only way I can rid myself of the people who only abide my nasty disposition in order to feel smarter than they really are.

I have an update about the probiotics. I stopped taking the recommended , high priced ones with nine strains, and take only the acidofelous Pearls I got off the shelf at Wal-Mart. The Pearls (brand name) still cause me some discomfort, but I can tell by the gurgling that they're working as advertised. If they stop I'll go back to the multi-strained pills.

http://www.pearlslife.com/Products/All-Products.aspx?filter=dt0

I gotta be projecting about my relationship with other people. Either that or attempt to realize I'm doing it in real ti-me. That's not so easy to do. It's me that can't keep up the pretense, not them, they can't even pretend they can sustain the attitude necessary to reach for their own star. All fall down.

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Burning The Past

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Ten o'clock in the morning, and the temperature is a muggy 58° (14.444° C), and so humid I can see the droplets of moisture in the air, even as blind as I am is. The sun is nowhere in sight, and according to the weather report, it probably won't be until tomorrow. As long as it's fairly warm, and it is fairly warm, I can dig it.

The probiotics I've been using for a couple of days now has not been a pleasant affair. I've had stomach aches and headaches galore. I've tried to ignore them in order to reach the good end (not knowing what that might be), but still, it's aggravating and highly uncomfortable. The headaches are the same as if I'd been constipated for a few days.

When I have been able to relieve myself it's like diarrhea, but the relief is helpful when it comes to pass (pun intended). I was afraid that the diarrhea could get out of control such that I'd get dehydrated, but that has proved to be a useless worry. Maybe it was just part of the way this stuff works. In any case, I am is feeling okay now, and the headache I woke up this morning seems to be going away.

Here I'm writing about my personal life as if this were a teenagers diary. Well, it sort of is a diary or a journal, as well as being my way to contemplate my own life on a daily basis. Things pop up here that I don't usually dwell on. It's just that I am doesn't lead a very exciting life these days, at least the sort of life that makes for exciting reading.

To me, I am is doing the world a favor by not writing in it's inimitable "tossed-word salad" fashion as it has for the last decade or so. I am is getting senile enough without deliberately doing it as controversy. It's a form that allows him to explore the world in an off-hand way, but its not all that pleasant for his readers. It might be even mo' bettah if he were to stop referencing himself as "I am is" to indicate his state of being in the first person singular, but One can't have everything and eat it too.

My brother came over last night and called out to me to ask if I wanted to go for our walk. He can't call me on the phone like he has in the past because I don't have a home phone number that works anymore. My account has been eliminated. As soon as I realized they had disconnected both my home phone and my DSL connection, I threw my old touch-tone phone in the trash, and then, last night, I used the trash (including my old phone) to start a fire to burn a brush heap.

Good riddance. It was very hard to keep clean. Not that I tried to keep it clean. Sometime I'd get so embarrassed that my non-visitors would realize how seedy I am can be, and I'd spray it with rubbing alcohol and wipe it down with a paper towel to get the worst of the gunk off of it. Now, I don't have to do that anymore, perhaps the angels won't be afraid to tread here anymore.

The dreamtime apparently doesn't like the probiotics either. I had horrible nightmares the first night such that I woke up practically screaming. Well, not last night. The first dream I woke up to was about a puzzle and a guy that seemed to need juggling skills as well as intellectual insight to even attempt to solve it. It's kind of vague now.

The puzzle pieces were like intricately shaped wooden tiles, but I couldn't discern what material they were made of. He was working inside of a picture frame setup that was around two by three feet in dimension. the puzzle pieces were maybe a half-inch in depth and didn't protrude beyond each other, so that the pieces he had already put in place were a flat surface. The puzzle part was all about shapes.

He worked at a frenzied pace as if he had no choice because the puzzle pieces were being thrust at him at breakneck speed, and that's where the need for him to also be a juggler came into play. Candidly, it was a fascinating process. He wanted me to learn how to do it, so that he could stop doing it. I woke up.

The second dream I woke up to involved a beautiful young woman that I never knew all that well. She was/is a married woman, and that's all it takes for me to not get too close or let my emotions run wild. She was always friendly with me with a ready smile, but she seemed to be friendly with most people.

Her smile had the same affect on me as maybe the Mona Lisa's smile does in the Louvre museum (never been there). We had no relationship in the dream other than the fact that she kept popping into view between scenarios. I don't remember much about the content of the dream itself anymore, except that it was not a terrifying nightmare, and I was happy about that.

Writing my new .sig file came as a delightful surprise to me. It's like an 800 page book in one sentence. As a poet I've constantly attempted to reduce all my drifting thoughts into as few words as possible, but for me this one statement was a tour de force. It states everything I know about projection and where it leads to. Oneself.

I wrote an e-mail post yesterday about using other people as oracles, and more specifically how that comes to pass. It was a clumsy, ill-worded attempt that could have and will be better done, but the fact that I got the rudiments down in some fashion was pleasing to me. I haven't gotten any response to it, and don't expect to. The people I addressed with the post had rather reach for ancient dead prophets for insight, and I have to be satisfied with that.

Describing the processes that brought my grasp of insight about the cornucopia I reach for in order to ken the physical world, is not something that came to me overnight, and I have suffered dearly for it. It has cost me everything that most people hold dear over a long period of time.

To recommend that others take up that cross seems tantamount to asking them to submit to heinous torture. Most of them don't have enough time left to undertake such a journey even if they knew how to do it. No blame.

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Individualism vs Tribalism

Another aspect of my earthly identity is now gone. The flashing lights on my DSL modem have ceased blinking. The dial-tone on my ancient touch-tone telephone is silent. I no longer have a telephone number that works, and the band plays on.

The loss of this form of identity is infinitesimal compared to the Japanese people I'm watching on TV. Lots of old people, in particular, lost everything near and dear to them. No reminders of the past to cling to in order to know who they are. Some of the ones that were interviewed lost their entire families, much less the photographs and mementos. All gone in minutes.

Normally I don't allow myself to get emotional over catastrophes, and I'm not really all that upset now. It doesn't do any good. When it's over, it's over. With tsunamis, however, the destruction seems so utterly complete. If you're on the ground and don't have time or refuse to believe the warnings quickly, you're dead. Ground up into little pieces by all that you once loved and thought protected you.

The probiotics I've been taking appear to have been the source of the complaints I've been writing about with my stomach. I kind of figured those bacteria I deliberately ingested were causing the discomfort, but it could have been something serious and life-threatening. For a couple of days I was constipated, and then on about the third day I started going to the bathroom, and didn't stop until I felt like there could be nothing left, and then I went some more.

My stomach doesn't hurt anymore. There's a whole lot of gurgling going on. Things are moving around. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. I had to get up last night to relieve my bladder many times last night because I had deliberately consumed lots of water. When I went back to bed it took a long time for me to fall back to sleep. I wanted to take one of the sleeping pills that I have left from an old prescription, but I hesitate to do that in the fear of getting addicted to the point of needing them to sleep.

Giving up my telephone number was more mentally troublesome than I expected. I sort of thought I was beyond that. As if my remembering vision was the only identity I need. My old telephone number was listed in the local directory in my "nom de plume" as felix. Quite regularly I got calls from Latinos who figured I was a Latino. They don't have the slightest respect for the Do Not Call registry, or apparently, for each other.

The other day I got a call from some white redneck who thought I was Spanish, he didn't speak Spanish, and when I told him my number was on the No Call list, he called me "Nigger!" and hung up. What a drag, man. Most everybody is prejudiced about somebody, but that's a hateful world that I've tried to confront in myself, and it's hard because a lotta people don't seem to even be trying. That doesn't bode well for the future of this country of immigrants. It's that identity thing again.

As I understand it, and I don't claim to know enough to even have a strong, irrefutable opinion, the whole rebellion in the mideast is that age-old conflict between warring tribes. In the flareup in Libya, for instance, the conflict appears to be more about Gaddafi's tribe against other regional tribes, than a country-wide referendum about freedom of speech and equality.

In Iraq alone, there are over 300 different tribes. All with their own customs and rules they seem very willing to fight to the death over, and it's been that way for thousands of years. The two different kinds of Islamic sects ought to be enough to fight over, but with three hundred different tribes (that have serious differences in their own point of view) it seems impossible that they will ever be able to form a nation-wide system that will let them live in some semblance of peace.

I was raised in the Jim Crow system in the Deep South. I tried to walk away from it and treat everybody as an equal, but there is something very deep and impenetrable that's hard to get shed of when push comes to shove. In the recent past I've had strangers walk up to me and inform me that I was one of them whether I liked it or not, so I should stop acting like a phony. I know my act is artificial at best, but I owe it to myself to keep trying to do right.

For this and other reasons I get the impression that lines are being drawn which might force the issue of having to choose one set of principles over another. I can't imagine joining forces with the conservative movements. I'm just not that afraid to try new ideas like they seem to be. I don't have to worry about it. Cowardice AND over-confidence makes humans do stupid things.

It's not always easy to find the middle way, but getting older makes it more convenient to get over. Many people appear to give way with older people because they seem so set in their ways. There is no fool like an old fool, and besides, since they will soon be dead of natural causes, it doesn't matter if they refuse to cater to the prevailing currents or not.

It is not cold outside, but it's cool and with a steady wind blowing it seems even cooler. It's the same every spring with me. I can't wait for it to get warm and stay warm, until it does. It's an old, old story. False spring. Tomorrow, the weathermen promise, it's gonna warm up to over 70 degrees, and I'm be able to lay naked on my new adjustable lawn chair.

I've been able to lay out a couple of times in the last week or so, but that chilly wind has blown for a couple of days now, and it hasn't been exactly comfortable. The ultraviolet light of the sun helps with my skin problems, besides helping me to relax and feel at ease with my psyche.

Long Distance Relatives

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Yesterday seems anticlimactic after realizing I had summarized my entire outlook on life with one well-formed statement. "You are the only human being you gnow." I figure that's true universally, but since I don't know anyone but my own idea of myself I have to keep the door open for others to see things differently.

It's cooler than it was when I first woke up. The weather forecast predicted it. A cool front dropped down over us and the wind changed direction from the southeast to the northwest. Not cold, but cooler. Yesterday it got up to 77° (25° C) with clear skies, and that was very comfortable. Because of the clear skies the temperature dropped quickly when the sun went down. The supper given for the visiting kinfolk was outside and I didn't stay long after eating.

Like a lot of people, I suppose, the tsunami that struck the Pacific Rim looked horrifying on TV. The newscasters talked about how Japan was probably the most prepared political entity on Earth for such an event, but I don't see how much could have helped deter the natural forces that struck the coastline.

The hurricanes that strike the southeastern United States are bad enough. Even the hurricane's worst damage is done by the surge that arrives with the eye of the storm, but it's constrained to a very specific area around the center of the storm whereas a tsunami strikes the coastal areas of any landmass it approaches. The rescue workers don't know where to begin. No blame.

It was warm enough yesterday to lay out half-naked in the sun. I was more than half-naked. I only wore my underpants in order to expose my body to the ultraviolet rays of the sun. I've read that exposure helps with the psoriasis that is part of the rheumatoid arthritis disease I suffer from. Maybe it does help. This morning the redness seems less pronounced.

The last time I shopped at Lowe's for plants I saw what looked like a well constructed sun-bathing chair that can be adjusted for different heights. Normally, it seems, these types of chairs have plastic webbing that eventually gets torn up for all kinds of reasons, but this one has metal slats that are welded into place.

It's not cheap. $100. That's a lot for what amounts to a glorified lawn chair. If I'm gonna be out there a lot to get the ultraviolet rays it will be worth it. I plan to put it out on the second-floor deck just outside this room. Nobody can see me out there in a state of dishabille unless they drive up directly to my house, but from there I see them coming and duck inside real quick.

It makes me sad that I may have to stop playing the scales on my digital piano. I've already had to give up on playing my guitar. Of course, I stopped playing my guitar several years ago in favor of the piano, but the idea that I can't play it because it's too painful is the point. As I get older there are lots of things I may not be able to do any more. It's when I can't take walks that might be worse. Currently that is not a problem.

I didn't do much walking yesterday. The supper my brother and his wife gave was unexpected, and it came up when I thought I'd get out and go. I admit to some curiosity about what this man would look like. He came from my mother's side of the family. I had only met his grandfather a couple of times over the years.

That's how it is with families that grow up in poor places like Mississippi. Everybody has to leave to make a living when they grow up. My mother and father came east to North Carolina because my father got a job offer to teach here along with other teachers with a degree in agriculture from all over the country when N.C. passed a law to have one in every high school.

His siblings got involved with the petroleum industry starting in Arkansas when my father was a little boy. His oldest brother was eighteen years older than him, and found jobs for the husbands of his sisters out there. They worked for Texaco, and eventually most of them moved to Texas to retire. I hardly knew any of them ever. Too far apart. Too little time.

My mother's brothers followed my grandfather into dirt work operating heavy machinery doing road-building. For that reason they went to New Mexico around Albuquerque. Eventually, many of them and their children returned to Mississippi. Like the boy visiting here currently. His grandfather, my uncle, returned to Hattiesburg and raised his family there. Interestingly, my mother's family, the Johnson's, will have their annual reunion here this summer.

My sisters and brothers have all been to the Johnson reunions down in Mississippi before. I've never attended one. I've avoided them to do my go-ye-therefore trip. A lot of them, as I understand it, are fundamentalist Christians, and do not approve of living like I have. I hope I don't have to sacrifice their children to appease the nature gods I also follow. That sort of thing don't seem to fly with the fundies. '-)

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You Are The Only Human Being You Know

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This morning, quite accidentally, I wrote a statement that encompasses everything I've been trying to say for years. It's my new .sig file. "You are the only human being you gnow."

I like .sig files. They draw a some criticism that I ignore, but I am is nothing if not redundant. I repeat something that impresses me over and over again until I "get it". It becomes a part of me and I am that. Granted, such silly dramatic statements are not going to make me immortal, but it makes my life interesting, and I like doing it.

A second cousin and his wife and child came here from Mississippi to get a restored title for a car that had been in a wreck. I only knew his grandfather briefly. He is staying in my brother's guest house until he gets the legal stuff done, and then he will return to Mississippi where he lives in Hattieburg.

My brother and his wife had a supper for them and invited me and our other brother and my older sister to come eat and meet the kinfolk. My oldest sister didn't come. She and her husband are older now. She's 80 years old. Maybe that's why they didn't come. Nobody cares much. She's such a drama queen and a fundamentalist Christian. She can make things very unpleasant. As if we don't know where she came from.

My second cousin has through-hiked the Appalachian Trail. When he found out I had hiked a couple of hundred miles of it we had something in common to talk about. He looks like his grandfather, my mother's baby brother. Especially his hair. Black, very thick, and it looks like a shoe brush laying on it's back. He said he let it grow out when he walked the AT and it got curly like an Afro. Nice kid.

My older sister, she's two years older than me, talked about a DNA test one of our family took. My sister has done genealogical research for a couple of decades now. The DNA test revealed a genetic line that provided information she had never had available before about our father's side of the family. The information goes back five hundred years more than she knew about. She hasn't had a chance to work out the details, and promises to tell the rest of us when she does. Naturally, there was a bastard involved.

I left right after we ate. I've been having some trouble with my stomach and my digestion tract. I'm going to bed early and see if sleep will help. It hasn't so far, but maybe that will change.

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The ACC Tournament Followed The Script

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The Apple Trackpad I bought has taken some time to learn to use. It's still more trouble than it's worth to use it to play MineSweeper. I'm still working on making it easy to play MineSweeper, but my whole point when playing that game is to beat my own fastest time. For that I use my Logitech Everywhere laser mouse. About every other need is now done on the Trackpad.

The trackpad is easier on my hands. The rheumatoid arthritis is taking its toll on my hands more than any other body part. A lot of the pain I experience there is my own damn fault. Yesterday when I was playing the scales on my digital piano I got really excited about how well it was going and banged my fingers against the keyboard to indicate my joy. I paid for it before I went to bed, and then all night long. Every bone in my hands ached actively even without moving them. The end is near.

Maybe it's not so odd that I chose the Spanish term "manos" for the middle nayme of my pseudonym. At the time it had more to do with my learning to read palms for a living. I never made much of a living reading palms. Back then, just getting some food to eat and an inside place to be outta the elements when the weather acted up was all I asked. Reading palms helped with that a lot.

Late this afternoon I walked back down to the intersection of ditches where I played around with a stick cutting a new passageway for the water that was dammed up with the dead leaves from last fall. I guess I wasn't surprised that the channel I dug was still open. I had thought that it would be wider or deeper, but it was about the same depth and width as when I left it. At least it hadn't clogged up again.

An hour or so ago I did a very stupid thing. Instead of spraying the silver colloids I made up into my nostrils, I picked up the wrong spray bottle and introduced 90% denatured alcohol up my right nare. It did not take forever for me to realize what I'd done and blow my nose like crazy. The mucous membranes in the nose and sinuses absorb whatever is introduced very swiftly. The medicos give vaccinations nasally because of this. I hope I didn't get enough in there to do any serious harm, but if I did, "Goodbye cruel world." '-)

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