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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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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
