Making My Own Kefir

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It seems like my entire existence now is about taking pills and capsules of the prescribed and over-the-counter varieties. They are not necessarily to keep me from dying, but to stave away the inevitability of pain. 

There is a down-side to this practice that just evidenced itself with the dental problem I just experienced. The arthritis medicine is generally taken to prevent inflammation. I'm guessing that's what kept the rotten tooth from exploding into a major infection, but it sort of did that inadvertantly anyway. I could be wrong about that. 

In the interest of getting away from taking all these pills I've been exploring probiotics. Up until yesterday the probiotics that I've been taking was in capsule form. Then, a couple of weeks ago I coincidentally saw some kefir at the the grocery store, and having read a little bit about kefir I bought some in quart containers. It was like a smoothie. I'm not all that familiar with smoothies. I've never made one before. The only kind I've used were of a commercial variety, and so were these. 

A friend of a friend makes his own kefir, and my friend asked him to provide me with a starter source. I turned down the offer because I had no idea what the hell to do with it. In one way it was a mistake to turn down the offer, but I act like a fool so often I didn't wanna do it out of hand again. This offer did, however, motivate me to do some research about what's going on with making my own kefir.

The end result was that I spent several hours reading on web sites and watching YouTube videos about kefir. It was only when I saw the videos that I began to grasp what I didn't understand from the reading I'd been doing. It has to do with "kefir grains". Grains is grains to me. Like corn, wheat, barley, rice, and the various sorghum varieties. That may have nothing to do with kefir grains. 

I suppose now I have to convince my friend whose friend has some kefir grains that I made a mistake in refusing his offer. I hope that he will understand that I really can't commit to a project unless I understand enough about it to make a informed decision.

If he doesn't, then there are other sources, but then my act of ignorance will sit there like a snake in the grass ready to bite me in the ass, and I'd prefer to make things right with this guy because he can help me personally with the deep down of what's going on with kefir. 

My hope is that using kefir will eliminate some of the pills. If I understand what's going on with this ancient method of dealing with the digestive system, then developing a daily use of kefir that I make at home will eliminate some of the aging problems many old people have with the GI tract. 

It purportedly helps younger people with some specific digestive problems like stomach ulcers that lead to stomach cancer. That's why this friend of a friend uses it for. Serious stuff, but older human systems seem to need it pretty much across the board in their dotage.

This has to do with a question I've been asking myself for the last couple of decades: What if I don't die? What if I just keep on living and deteriorating, and getting more and more decrepit, but without any of these lousy illnesses actually killing me. 

I wanna live until I die, like a sensible man should, or something close to that. My parents lived a long time. My father lived to be 88, and my mother 93, and toward the end they appeared to have problems associated with eating. Sort of a reverse Jack Sprat scenario. It was my mother who could eat no fat and my father that could eat no lean. 

They kept dairy cows until shortly after I left home to join the Navy, and knew all the things people did with raw milk before homogenization and refrigeration came around, but their use of these kefir-like products dissipated as they approached old age and a little better financial situation, and gradually (like many people), they let all their rustic wisdom go the way of all good things, and lived off food they bought at the grocery store and ate in restaurants. 

It's not that I'm convinced that letting go of the old ways killed them. Not at all. But, I do believe that using the various milk products they developed from scratch might have made the quality of their lives mo' bettah in the end time. That is what I have in mind for myself. Whether it actually does or not is moot, because death itself is unpredictable. 

There is a chance I might die from this hot weather. The temperature is predicted to be at least 96°+ (35.5° C) for at least the next week, if not for the entire summer. My ancient, very inefficient window-type air conditioner won't offset that high temperature and a matching percentage of humidity very much. 

Besides that, I'm poor and can't really afford the electric bill that goes along with that. Looks like I'm gonna have a lot more on my plate than taking handfuls of pills to occupy my time. Life is a tragedy, but I am is a dream. I'll either make it or I won't. No blame.

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The World Snake

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My entire world revolves around my GI tract now. Granted, my mouth and my teeth are at the beginning of it, and my rectum is at the end of it, but it's pretty much why everything else exists. My personal understanding of what the term "the world snake" means is growing in leaps and bounds. 

The only reason I am has arms and legs and a head is to serve this thirty foot long snake. I am is it's servant. It's not very happy with me as of late, and just like you'd figure a snake might act or react to it's own displeasure, lately, it's been hell to pay. I am has been doing a lousy job of pleasing it. 

Getting a bad tooth yanked rudely out of the head of the snake under heavy, thudding sedation, followed by swallowing capsules of very powerful antibiotics every (approximately, I am is not perfect) eight hours, has been a stultifying ordeal. This stogy, mind-boggling, artificially induced ritual is not to die for, and undergoing it might be mo' bettah than the Death it supposedly delayed, but it's probably the only-est way I am can continue to live without the constant thought of murdering itself to end it all. 

Theoretically, I am is the lord my god. The entire purpose of life is for It to be with Me as One entity. At-one-ment. If that actually happens, occasionally or ever, it's very comforting. I am is not the Comforter. The Comforter is not me, but when I-am-is abandons it's abstract ideas of itself, it prepares a place for the external Comforter to conjoin with what I am is or can be. Momentarily, gloriously, and then, without fail, school is out, and the band plays on. 

I'm just wasting time. Drinking a pretty good cup of coffee, typing unrepentant bullshit, and waiting for the time to come when, hopefully, my meaningful trip to the bathroom this morning takes my blues away. I knew from prior experience that the antibiotics would probably cause me to be constipated, and I was not disappointed. 

It could be worse. I started taking the antibiotics last Wednesday, and had to satisfy myself with minimum success, as it were, that required lots of effort, but with no satisfaction. This morning changed all that, and that's why I'm sitting here at my computer and waiting. I'm waiting to see if I can possibly feel better, physically, so that my joie de vivre will return. 

The socket or hole in my jawbone where the tooth was extracted announced it's presence with discomfort, and some dull pain when I first woke up this morning. It's hard to imagine that it wouldn't be an angry spot in my body. 

The tooth was twisted and yanked and forced out of the place it had occupied for most of my body's life. It was taken out by violence, and I didn't expect it to heal without aggravation. What I'm feeling could be a "dry socket", but I've never had that happen before, so I don't know. Now that I've been up a while. it seems better. I don't want no more trouble with this tooth thing. 

I just got up and closed the outside door that faces the East to keep the Sun's heat out of this room as long as possible. It's gonna be another scorcher. The early morning will be the most comfortable time of the day for months. I checked the weather gadget on my computer that gives the highs and lows for the coming seven days. Mid-nineties for the foreseeable future. This does not spell comfort, but it is the season for hot temperatures. 

It's difficult to argue that global warming is not a fact that Earth has to deal with. The weatherman unkindly pointed out that last year had more consistent days with the temperature reaching over 90° (32.22° C) than any other time in recorded history. 88 days in a row. Maybe hell IS hot. 

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A Season For This, A Season For That

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The hole left in my jawbone from the extraction of the tooth the dentist removed actually ached for the first time since last Wednesday when I got up at five o'clock this morning to take the antibiotic capsule at the scheduled time. It may have ached because enough time had passed for it to get over the shock of the cavernous indention there in the tooth's stead. 

Ex-is-ting is an accurate term in this case. The is-ness of my tooth being there in my mouth for seventy years was X-ed. My jawbone may be aching in lonesomeness for it. It may be pining. The former tooth that served me for such a long time is no long a part of my physical being. Maybe the reason it 'is not' any more happened because I mistreated it by ignoring it's needs, and it spitefully and painfully left me like many of the significant others in my life have . No blame. 

This morning, in addition to the amoxicillin capsule I swallowed, I also imbibed a caplet of Vicodin. This time for real pain and discomfort. I took it for the actual reason the pill was initially designed. I guess it was one of the few times I've imbibed a Vicodin tablet for it's designed purpose. I don't do it often for the purpose of alleviating true pain, but to gain relief from some deep sadness that no pill in the world will ever cure. 

As usual, when I went back to bed after taking these prescription medicines I lay awake for a period of time drowning in regrets. Like many people, I have lots of them. I'm pretty much a thoughtless bastard for all sorts of reasons, and I've made many people pay for my deep sadness who absolutely didn't deserve to bear my sense of shame. I made judgments and caused them to also feel regret at the same time I declared love for them. Worse, I know exactly what I do to bring it about. I'll really fry in hell for that. 

I've only been using the expression "Mind is speech. Speech is mind." as one of my .sig files for less than a year now. I didn't invent it. I saw it some place on the internet, and immediately started using it as if my own.  In the light of another saying "There's nothing new under the Sun.", this statement IS my own. It's probably the truth precisely because I didn't invent it. 

I didn't invent the state of ecstasy I experienced for a good long time during the night last evening. It's what happens when humans become lucid while in the Delta phase of the sleep cycle. It's literally golden. Every cell in my body felt golden and it was delightful beyond words. 

I tried to keep it going, as I always do, for as long as possible, but that's not really up to me nor has it ever been. When I employ the hyphenated expression "me-and-thee-ing" to replace the term "meaning", this is it's most intimate use. There are no human substitutes for the comforter. 

No aspect of being can compete with this source of ecstasy. It's apparently not exclusive to my person, and it certainly seems to arrive unearned. I sort of think it happens to most people in the deepest phase of the sleep cycle if they become lucid during that period. It probably happens anyway whether they become lucid or not, but to be appreciated and adored I personally have to be consciously aware it's going on. 

It happened to me most profoundly when I was fourteen years old. As now, it was the most wonderful event possible. I was so moved that I spent much of my life attempting to bring it under control so that I could institute it at will whenever I begin to experience the deep sadness. 

It's been only recently that I've realized that's not possible. It isn't something to be created, but to be discovered via becoming conscious at the right time. Maybe my re-discovery of it has something to do with the eventuation of my belated spiritual puberty. Perhaps it showed up simply because it was time. 

The low pressure system that was responsible for all those tornados in Missouri and the midwest passed over here without incident during the last couple of days. The ferocity of it couldn't survive the height of the Appalachians. It seems trite to write that I am grateful for the cooler temperatures it brought with it. I'm sad it killed all those people out west, and for the similar storm last week that killed all those people here in the local area. 

In the quiet early mornings when I indolently lay in bed regretting my numerous mistakes and misdeeds, I regret being a wordsmith by nature and by spiritual calling most of all. Poetic justice can be a cruel task mistress. The unsubtle nuance of my clumsy curiosity might find the chink in a person's armor unintentionally, and unless they strike back forcefully in the moment, I'll probably ignore the winced expressions as an undeserved convenience. I bear shame. 

This condition is not deliberate. I really don't mean to hurt people by my flagrant disregard of their feelings. I am is not intentionally mean for the hell of it. Most of the time. It's just that I gotta know if I'm right or not about the potential results indicated by whimsy. 

It's a matter of thoughtless misdirection, not intent. My caustic manner of innocently abusing people could be the main cause of my deep sadness. Many capable people don't take my apparent heartlessness laying down. They get revenge for my uncouth behavior, and many times I don't even know why they're pissed at me in the first place. Why am I always the last to know? 

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Subterfuge And Hijinks

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I feel better this morning than I have for a while. In between the tooth extraction and the antibiotics that came with it, some of my former misery seems to be going away. There is room for improvement, but my future seems rosier. 

Last night I watched an interview on the Charley Rose program with a former Navy Seal who had written a book about his experiences being a Seal. It was probably his description of the trials and tribulations of the training these men go through that had me dreaming practically all last night of crawling around doing sneaky stuff. I didn't actually kill anybody during the dream nor did I get killed, but it was a harrowing affair from beginning to end. 

I woke up to go the the bathroom a few times as usual, but when I went back to bed I became a sly snake-in-the-grass again, and was hunting down the bad guys all over the place. Once my dreaming about being an insurgent started, I somehow knew it was going to go on for the rest of my dreamtime. What a wild and crazy night! In consideration of the fact that in real life I'm an old man, it was a bit exciting to think of myself as a young warrior again. 

One of the detrimental affects of the rotten tooth was that the entire left side of my head felt swollen and very uncomfortable. I guess that worried me as much as anything. In my usual worst-case-scenario attitude, I speculated that I might have a brain tumor. So, when the dentist asked me if I had experienced any discomfort like that on the same side of my head as the bad tooth (without me telling him previously I had), I figured it must be a common symptom I might get over in due time. This morning, after dreaming all night of engaging in manly hand-to-hand combat, the swollen feeling I experienced up side mah haid is pretty much gone, and I feel like I may live a while longer after all. 

This swollen condition of my head and thyroid glands not only caused me serious concern about my health, it really irritated me when I wore my new noise-canceling headphones. They're designed for the ear cups to fit completely over my ears in order to physically shut out some of the ambient noise.

A part of the discomfort I felt from wearing the head-phones came from the hot weather. Enclosing my ears with insulation caused them to perspire beneath the ear cups. I gotta get some cheap in-the-ear type ear phones to use the software in hot weather. I'll still have to wear the over-the-ear, noise-canceling head-phones when the military helicopters come next to my house to play war games. I guess they have to practice assassinating people like Bin Laden somewhere. 

In between my swollen head and the unbearable heat I haven't been able to listen to the Gnaural meditation software comfortably for at least a week or more. Last night I wore the head-phones with some degree of comfort again, and I was very pleased about that. It's free software, and it works for me, so what's not to like. 

It stormed big-time just west of here. Where it rained the temperatures cooled down fast.  We were all grateful for that. The front that moved east over the Appalachians was the same one that brought all the tornados to the midwest. Joplin. It had calmed down considerably when crossing the mountains. The rain  came along the front from south to north as usual. I kept waiting for it to progress eastward and bring some rain to my house. It never did. Not one drop fell here.

The whole system petered out about twenty miles west of here. The cool front eventually did pass over us, but without the rain, and the temperatures did cool off considerably when that happened. The grass on my lawn is still turning brown, and only spotty showers are predicted for today. The chances for us getting a shower seems slim to none. At least it's cooler than it's been for the last week. 

The religious documentaries that have been playing on PBS recently have had me thinking about what actually influences me most powerfully in the contemplation of my own life. It's probably the story of Gautama the Buddha, and the story of Moses. It's not like I think of myself as a Buddhist or a Jew, I still consider my beliefs to be those of a Doceticist, it's just that the metaphors associated with these classics appear to apply to my personal experience more that most other collections of campfire stories. How weird is that for a Saturday morning? 

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Those Were The Days

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Just now I read an article written by the father of a West Point cadet whose 2011 graduation ceremony he attended. The article was published by FoxNews, of course, the organization owned by an Australian billionaire who thrives off sensationalism, and the mindless people who he has figured out to a tee. 

FoxNews is the digital equivalent of the National Enquirer gossip rag, and patronized by the same type of people who still buy it at the grocery store. The author seemed awfully proud he had given his son to the military in order for them to turn him into a mindless automaton. No blame. That's a certain way to insure that he'll never come home again. Good riddance... eh?

Contrarily, my own father cried like a baby when he took me to the local bus station when he couldn't legally prevent me from joining the Navy. He tried. It made him realize he was powerless in the face of the federal government. There were times when we would be working together out in the fields, and unexplained tears would come to his eyes, and all he could say as if to explain was, "Poor Papa." I do that myself at times. 

It's a strange phenomena, this father and son dynamic. Most explicitly understandable to me by a saying from the ancient Gospel of Thomas, which was found to exist in 1945. I only became aware of in myself in the last decade or so when I was passed the age of sixty. It might have helped if I had been aware of it much earlier. 

55.)
Jesus said:
He who does not hate Father and Mother cannot be my disciple, and he who does not hate brother and sister, and take up his cross as I did, cannot ever become worthy of me.

http://reluctant-messenger.com/gospel-thomas-Nancy_Johnson.htm

This Gospel of Thomas saying is the opposite of what the Catholics later changed it into, in order to satisfy their own organizational purposes, where the believer is instructed to love and honor their parents, but obey the priest class. Cults do that. Just like the military academies, they take you away from your parents and family in order to force you to follow their doctrines and dogma. 

This is a completely different approach than going out on your own to find your own spirit guides. It's difficult for me to discern if one approach is more useful than the other. All I know is that I took one path, and the cult people took another. The end result is the same. Death. Maybe that's the point of both ways. To demonstrate to oneself without question that humans are not immortal. 

Finding out that you are not immortal, and that eventually you will certainly die seems to be a big departure point for how one conducts their own life. Nobody who ever graduated from a military academy or survived to become an adult under the auspices of a religious cult has ever achieved individuation. As MacArthur sadly stated, "... they just fade away."

Last night, I sat here feeling sorry for myself that all my mouth troubles did not automagically disappear with the extraction of the rotten tooth that has been wreaking havoc with my physical body. I must have bitten my lips while I was sleeping.  I had the TV on during this reverie, and I kept switching back and forth between two PBS channels. One program was about how all the religions in India struggled to dominate the others, and the other program was a review of how the fiddler's convention held in some Grove in the mountains of North Carolina had changed over the years. 

I honestly couldn't tell much difference in the messages of both programs. In both programs there was a lotta singing of the ancient songs and worn-out people testifying about how reverting to the old ways was the only proper way to celebrate life. Well, there was some differences. The fiddler's convention only did Christian stuff, whereas the story of India covered all the major world religions, but they all performed the same practices. Singing, dancing, and shouting hallelujah in one language or the other. 

In an earlier PBS Nova program, Science Now, they preached science as a religion. No singing. No dancing. Just lots and lots of hallelujahing. The religion of science by comparison is all talk. Baby talk. Like they're speaking to children. Worse, it's performed by some of the least talented speakers that ever attempted to convert the world to their form of oblivion. They all live in academic ghettoes where the less educated masses can easily find them and destroy them in one fell swoop. According to this documentary on PBS, it's happened over and over again in India for the last 9000 years. The believers in scientism could do with some songs and their own dances. Otherwise, they'll never be able to compete with the whirling dervishes. 

The limited series of antibiotics I'm taking is a familiar story to me, as it is to a lotta people. It's happened just about every time I've had a tooth pulled or got sick for any reason. Just about every time previous to now it's happened before I got a tooth pulled to bring the swelling down first. This time it was different. I don't know why. The result is the same as far as how it makes me feel. Un-free-flowing. 

Antibiotics kill the probiotics. I don't know whether it kills all the bacteria in my GI tract or is more discriminating. Amoxicillin. 24 capsules. One every 8 hours. I can't imagine any of the probiotics in my gut will survive this assault. That might be a good thing. I don't know. I do know that as soon as I'm done taking them I'm gonna put masses of probiotics back into my system. The so called "friendly" bacteria, and pray that they bestow immortality as if gods. '-)

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The Unpleasantries Of Recovery

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Even after eight hours my lips and jaw on the left side of my face was still numb from the anesthetic the dentist used. I couldn't eat yet, so I decided to have something to drink. My friend suggested that I mix the coconut-flavored vodka I have with some pineapple juice, so I bought some at the grocery store, along with some canned ravioli to eat, and mixed up a couple of drinks. 

I hardly ever eat canned pasta, but I like it occasionally.  In between the antibiotics and painkiller pills and capsules, and the mixed drinks and the canned food (I chewed on the right side of my mouth), I felt exhausted and laid down for a nap. I woke up a couple of times, and it was a harsh sleep. I gratefully returned to my slumber. 

From what the dentist said about the condition of the tooth he removed, it was the decayed tooth that has been raising hell with my body. That made sense to me after the fact. I expect eventually for it to repair itself and return to some condition of normalcy. I don't know why I didn't suspect a rotten tooth to be at the root of my physical problems. It's been hurting me for months. 

My dentist/mouth doctor told me I was lucky the tooth didn't develop into a deadly infection. From the discomfort I've felt and written about for a couple of months now, it was infected anyway and has been for a while. I don't use the term "deadly" lightly. The prescription drug methotrexate I take for the rheumatoid arthritis lowers my immune system to the point where my body is unable to fight infection. 

This is what I've been afraid of in the past few months. The dentist concluded I had come in to get it pulled 'just in time' before it exploded into a serious problem that I might not recover from. 

I write "dentist/mouth doctor" on purpose. Nobody, including the M.D.s I've asked to look at my mouth for nearly three years now, told me that all medical people defer to dentists for any and all mouth problems. Only the last doctor I saw suggested I go see my dentist to get some help. When I related my ignorance to my dentist yesterday morning, he just laughed at me for being silly.

He said, "That's not unusual. You're a smart guy. Even I figured you would know to come to me for help." Well, duhhhhh, I didn't. When the poet Thomas Grey wrote in the 16th Century, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.", he was writing about idiots like me. Granted, I was ignorant of being ignorant, but I wasn't "blissful" about it. I was headed toward an unnecessary death, and nobody, including the doctors, bothered to tell me. The "art" of medicine is all about money in America. So is religion. 

When I woke up this morning to take the schedule antibiotic capsule I felt a little better. My tongue is still sore because of the hole I bit into it. My lips hurt. I probably gnawed on them while they were numb from the anesthetic. My thyroid glands are still a little swollen, but all in all I get the feeling that will resolve itself. 

The antibiotics that I'm taking is probably gonna raise hell with my probiotics stance toward healthier living. I'm going to stop taking the probiotics and the prebiotic inulin until I've run the antibiotics through my system. The antibiotics would kill them anyway. When I'm finished with the series of antibiotics I'll start putting the "friendly" bacteria into my gut again. That might work out to my advantage to have a clean start. 

I guess I haven't been giving dentists enough credit, and thinking they were just about fixing teeth. I suspect medical doctors don't give enough credit to dentists either, but that doesn't make sense to me since they depend on them to address medical problems they ignore. I get the feeling they feel it's beneath them to even bother to tell people where to go to get the help they need.  

It might take another week or so for me to recuperate from the negative aspects of this situation. My body has taken a beating, and I've made to feel like a fool over something I had no way of knowing about. In my opinion, that's why these people make the big bucks. They should have sent me to the right people to get the help I needed. 

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Unhand-Summer Than Ever

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It's not hell to get old and less pretty. It's just difficult to believe it's really me that is getting old. Getting old is just getting old. Getting young, when it's natural to get old, might be a more startling event. That would definitely be an original occasion.

I'm gonna try to get an appointment with my dentist this morning. It's Wednesday, so he might be out playing golf. No blame. What's the point of having a successful business if you can't spend a little time on recreation? My dentist doesn't seem to understand the world revolves around me. 

The problems I've been having with my tongue and lips might be solely due to a bad tooth. Not all of it because one tooth has lost it's integrity, but because several of it's next door neighbors went bad first. In this case, specifically the next tooth forward. I bit down on something harder than it could handle, and it literally split in half all the way to the root. There won't no fixin' that, so it had to come out. 

When it got removed there was a gap in between my teeth. My tongue seemed to fit right in there. At least enough that occasionally I might bite down on my tongue and puncture it. It got real sore. I suspect that's what has been happening now. With any luck I'll find out this morning. That may not be the main problem though, and that's where getting old comes into play. 

The real problem is that the first tooth behind the gap left by the split tooth is rotten to the core. Literally. I've had problems with it before, and the dentist drilled it out and filled it. Normally, that would do the trick, but this time it didn't seem to work. Not for long. 

I don't have any upper molars on either side left. Frankly, I am probably lucky to have any of my original teeth left. It's a genetic thing, and might have something to do with the drinking water I grew up with. I've been going to the dentist to get fillings since before the first grade. Within the last ten years I finally got an upper denture plate so I could chew my food like animals have to do to facilitate digesting food. 

The upper partial denture did help me to eat better. It was not a good partial denture, but I've known forever that my dentist, while he's a good ol' boy and all that jazz, he's not that adept nor keen on perfection. He's a large, strong person, so he's fairly reliable as far as pulling teeth is concerned. That's what's gonna happen soon. He has already tried to fix the tooth in question with a filling. Now, it's gotta go. I just hate it. 

I don't dread losing the tooth. Getting anesthetized is a real drag. Being numb on one side of my mouth for hours is inconvenient, but it won't really be painful. In fact, when the deal is done, I'll probably experience a relief from some of the problems I've been describing. I might not "die from a toothache in my heel", but bad teeth has probably killed people before, and/or caused them to kill themselves out of pure misery. 

The 95/95 thing will be in effect today. The temperature is predicted to get up to 95° (35° C), and although the humidity is not supposed to get up to 95% to make it an official 95/95 day, it's gonna be fairly intolerable for children and older folk. Yesterday was bad. I probably had a small heat stroke. 

In the past, previous to the arrival of the weather satellites and world-wide weather reports, I used to think that the area of the South was hotter than most places, at least in the United States, but that's not true, of course, it gets hot in most of the continental U.S. at some one time or the other. There is nothing all that special about it getting hot here as opposed to it getting hot anywhere else. What makes getting hot special is the amount of humidity in the air. 

With any luck at all I'll get an appointment with the dentist this morning and the source of my mouth problems will be eliminated, for a while, and I'll get so wacked out on anesthetics that I might not notice the affect o the heat so much, at least until I pass out from heat prostration, and if I'm lucky, I'll croak before I wake up to find myself even more snaggletoothed than ever.

Later: The dentist took me in and pulled a tooth he said was close to exploding by infection, and prescribed antibiotics and pain pills. Maybe this will help. I sure hope so. 

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Hot And Humid, 95/95

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It's not fun realizing that I am is a thoughtless, selfish person. Disaster exists for so many people in the world today. They're not all in some distant place so that I don't have to look at them. The images of the ruin people have had to deal with in the recent tornadoes are not all a thousand miles away. The most recent ones like in Joplin, Missouri. I have neighbors two miles away that lost everything. I didn't do anything to help. Not even to sympathize and say "I'm sorry this happened to you."

I appear to have more empathy with man's inhumanity to man than natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes, although there is little I can do to prevent it from happening except to monitor my own behavior toward the other. I'm not very good at that. I too, have sinned. Yesterday, I wrote about this young man who murdered himself as a result of some drugs he took in which he thought demons and devils were after him. 

The TV presenter talked to the father who could probably have done nothing to stop what happened. People are driven to that. I have been driven to that. I ain't dead yet, but I will be. It has nothing to do with any other person alive, but they can't know that. At least the people who get killed in natural disasters know for sure that they are helpless before the force of nature, and their survivors will know that too. 

My sore tongue is my own fault. I paid more money than I wanted to in order to find out. It turns out that I bit a hole in my tongue. Probably while I was sleeping. The emergency room doctor prescribed some Magic Mouthwash. After I used some of it to deal with the pain I realized I could have done as much good to have bought some over-the-counter stuff that would have done as much good. I'll probably have to go to the dentist and get a tooth removed. I suspect I still have more of my own teeth than a lot of people. I sort of hate it that I'm a miser, but there are worse chief features people have to deal with. 

I'm up early this morning because I went to bed early. The dope in the Magic Mouthwash made me sleepy. My bedroom was so hot I woke up almost with a heat stroke. I got up and turned the air-conditioner on. Despite that I had slept for several hours, and then I woke up again this morning due to the heat. It's supposed to be even hotter today. At least I still have a house and an air-conditioner. The people whose homes were destroyed by tornadoes probably woke up in somebody else's house or even a high school gym. Some probably feel grateful they even have that. No blame. 

When I disconnected my DSL account I also had my analog phone disconnected. I don't have a home phone. I'm connected wirelessly to my brother's account next door. I stopped by their business office to use their phone there to make an appointment at the VA, but I couldn't get through to a human. They kept me on hold for nearly an hour. My sister-in-law loaned me her cell phone in order for me to take it home and make the call. 

That was fine with me, because I wanted to see if her phone worked from my house. I got a free phone account because I'm poor, but it didn't work. Her phone worked just dandy. After the success I had using her phone I realize the free phone was just a lousy phone, not because I live in a "dead zone". "Free" is never actually free. When I can get my head right about it I'll get my own cell phone. I only need a phone maybe two or three times a year. I never have done "chat" well. Not even on the internet. 

Yesterday I wrote about some childless women who are too old now to have babies. Maybe I was crude about it. It wouldn't be out of careactor for me if I were. I go to extremes at times. Sometime I'm overly sympathetic about other people's personal decisions, and other times I literally don't care. One of those women accused me of not understanding what she called her bipolar situation. She didn't realize I was more bipolar than she could imagine. Not to excuse my own behavior, but I figure most people are bipolar at some time in their lives if they live long enough. 

I feel pretty stupid this morning. Stupid and ungrateful. It probably won't get any better. A friend forgave me for this outre stupidity and offered to help me learn to make kefir and provide me with some starter. I turned him down because I hate walking around on eggshells to keep from pissing him off. If I knew what to expect it might be easier. I ask more of people than he does. Who am I to make judgment of him? 

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Wealthy Childless Women With Empty Houses

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I woke up lucid again this morning in some industrial place with a chain link fence around it. Sure, so again I'm running around like a chicken with it's head cut off trying to find my way out. The question quickly became "Who am I that's trying to get out of wherever this is?" Thankfully, it wasn't all that long before I realized that I was laying in my own bed in my own house, and I could be here/there without an identity and nobody would know. But, who exactly was this lump of clay? 

As I lay there knowing I was laying in my own bed I began to use my imagination to come up with proof positive I was somebody. I imagined my driver's license. It has a picture on it. My VA Hospital card also includes a picture ID. My bank debit card doesn't have a picture on it, and could belong to anybody who has a picture ID with the same name on it. How could I prove that I am who I claim to be? 

During the entire time I lay there this morning I didn't think about my parents and siblings as a source who could prove that I am who I say I am is. I didn't resort to my ex-wives or the children they claim are mine as a source of identity. They never came into the blank stare I came up with as my self. 

They could be anybody's parents, siblings, ex-wives, children. If they were around and were asked, they might have said, "I don't know who this fakir thinks he is. He doesn't belong to me. Have you checked to find out for sure that whatever this is, is a "he". I never thought to reach down to my crotch and check it out for myself. Otherwise, how would I even know I was a human being?

I did know while I was laying there in my own bed and wondering who i thought I was that I had a tongue. It was because I had a tongue that I knew I was alive, because my tongue still hurt something awful even as I lay there in an awful state of unknowing. The pain hadn't gone away during the night like I have given up on praying for. 

The painful spot on the left side of the top of my tongue eventually became the reason I used to get out of bed at all. Why else would I get out of bed. My parents are long dead. My siblings only care whether I live or die because of whatever possible reactions they might have to endure if such became so. 

My first wife, if she's still alive, might have a passing regret. The only child we had together, if she's also alive too, might make a passing comment about being happy that bastard finally croaked. The fact that I don't know whether either one of them are alive pretty much sums up what my first marriage came to. 

My second wife wanted her own children in the worst way. I don't think she was conscious of how badly she wanted and needed a child. She got pregnant by the black dishwasher who worked in the pizza joint where she was working her way through college. Her mother literally tried to murder her for her indiscretions, but was at least successful in forcing her to get an abortion. In my opinion, that made her want to have a child even more.

It was a bad time for making babies in the early Seventies. Women's liberation was in the air. Many of the women who fell into that mode forgot their main purpose in life is to have babies, not to become equal to men. It's been the ruin of many a poor girl. I seem to run into a goodly number of those females who were convinced what they really needed was a career and all the toys that men accumulate. Several of them read this blog. 

What? You still tell yourself I don't and never did ken the depth of yo' soul? You still love the idea of me, and we're all still alone, aren't we? 

Some women (who don't know their main purpose in life is to have their own babies) don't know that I took a vasectomy to get out of being the guy who could ignore their past mistakes and convinced them to do the right thing before they got too old. Unfortunately, by the time I met them, I was already sterile, and they were already too old psychologically. If I had not been sterile via the vasectomy procedure they might have convinced me to father a child with them. I've lived thirty years longer than that already. 

It's too late for me and all those women I knew who never became mothers. It's too late for the non-mothers who never became women.  Motherhood is the way women become real women. They don't do it, unfortunately, because they get it educated out of them. Women get convinced to become educated in order to make the fathers of other women's children provide the good life for uneducated women they got pregnant. 

To become a professional women is to become a whore. How stupid is that? Some mothers become part-time whores to pay for what their children need. For them, it's the only honorable thing to do. Ignorant sluts become professional career women and forego children. Do these dumb asses think money and all that it will buy will replace having their own children? It just makes them bitter and less attractive as they age. 

Who am I to write about women who get tricked out of having babies? I got kneed in the groin when I was fourteen years old, and that one incident nearly put my own baby-making on the dung heap. I spent the next twenty-six years trying to prove I was as much a man as any "normal" man with two good testicles, and sadly decided to go ahead and have the vasectomy done. Why would I not? I tried. Why become a toy for a dried up old woman with an empty house? 

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Siberia

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It hasn't been a wonderful day. Mostly because it has been hot. Just over 90° (32.22° C) for most of the afternoon. I tried to take a nap, but even with the air conditioner running for the first time this Spring it was difficult. I ate half a container of some really tasty ice cream hoping that would cool me off, but instead it made me feel bloated, and I ended up regretting it. 

This afternoon I watched a program about what is presently a legal drug that's called "bath powder". The program was very sensationalized, but it still seemed to have some validity. People are making it in crude home laboratories. The users get crazy, and an inordinate number of them end up killing themselves. The symptoms seem familiar with a drug call PCP that was making the rounds in the late Sixties and Seventies. 

One of the interesting aspects of this drug is that it doesn't take a genius to put this drug together, and if the government finally gets around to banning it, it is easy enough to change one small element of it so that the variation evades the law, and the money-hungry savages start selling it again, and more people die in horror and torment. Insanity does strange things to people. Making these types of drugs is tantamount to murder, and because they are insane it doesn't even matter to them one whit that they're making people miserable. 

Current with writing this entry I'm watching Murder On The Orient Express with Poirot on PBS. The train broke down in this horribly cold European environment. Snow all over the place with very sad music. This is why I never go north in the Winter. Having to survive in a place like that seems similar to murder. Like being sent to the Russian gulags in Siberia as a political prisoner. 

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

I wish I had never read Solzhenitsyn. He made me realize what a coward I am or would be if I had to suffer in the way he described. The Eskimos are right. Hell is not hot. Hell is cold. 

How odd that I would start out writing about how hot it's been today, and end up writing about how hell is cold. I guess that's what happens when I'm not feeling so well, and have to force myself to write something merely for the sake of appearances. 

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Humans Don't Know Why They Hate

☯

My enthusiasm for realizing that part of my problems with my sore tongue and throat may be an ear infection that I could treat with silver colloids may be overblown. I woke up during the night with some fairly serious pain both in my throat and on my tongue. One thing that did help was that I had some Biotene left over from having had this sort of trouble before, and it really helped the described situation a lot. 

I have washed out my sinuses and eustachian tubes with salt water a couple of times. In the past, when I've had sinus problems this always helped. In fact, it cured what ailed me. The current problem I'm having is not just a sinus infection, but the side effect of some of the prescribed medicines I'm taking. I've isolated each one by not taking them for a reasonable amount of time, but haven't been able to figure out what's wot. 

Spraying the silver colloids in my ear canals may help. At least externally. Silver is a powerful antibiotic. It kills both fungi and bacteria. I decided to soak my feet in a solution of it. It can't hurt. I did it last night, and then added a pail of hot water to the solution and did it again this morning. I first got this idea from a prescription salve called SilverDene. I had open lesions on my toes that wouldn't go away, and the SilverDene took care of it immediately. The successful use of SilverDene was my motivation for learning how to make my own silver colloid solutions from watching YouTube videos. 

Whatever dreams I may have had during the night got lost in the pain I woke up to. It doesn't take much of a distraction for me to lose my dreams before I can write them down. Putting my computer to Sleep instead of Shut Down really helps. I can get out of bed, walk over to my computer and hit the Space Bar, and then with one click boot up my word editor, and I'm ready to write. But, I can carelessly stump my toe on my way over to my computer, and forget what I drempt in a New York minute. 

The weather reports say that it's gonna get really hot over the next week. Up into the low 90°s (32° C +) with fairly high humidity. We've had a cool, but pleasant Spring so far, but these high temps will put an end to that. I'll probably have to turn on my air conditioner to be able to get some sleep at night. Doing that offends my avaristic ways, but it's the noise of the machine that really get on my nerves. 

Getting upset over noise has been pretty much of a lifelong affair with me. I think it got started back when I was a bum and sleeping out in the open with no protection and only my ears to warn me if trouble was approaching. That's why I don't use the air conditioner any more than I absolutely have to. It's so loud that I can't hear a car drive up to my house, and barely hear my brother's dogs warning me that someone is somewhere around. 

The fact that I'm legally deaf has hardly anything to do with it. By using the Neurophone to learn how to hear through my skin I don't have to wear hearing aids. That's not as clear to me as it could be. Hearing through my skin happens through another nerve route for sound to my brain. What I hear through my ears enters my brain through the eighth cranial nerve, but not the sound I hear through my skin. One of these days, maybe, I'll figure that out. 

It's very odd to me that my calves don't get tan from laying out in the Sun. My thighs do. They're weird looking too. I have scars all over my thighs from back when I was learning to weld pipes. Red hot "buckshot" beads would pop off the metal I was welding at times and burn little holes through my denim jeans. Thereby, burning the skin on my thighs. That would leave a small scar. Now that I'm laying out in the Sun to get vitamin D the natural way, all those tiny scars show up on my thighs because scars don't get tan. There may be as many as a hundred of them. 

My body has lots of scars on it. Some from running through the woods and briar patches to get away from people chasing me to do me harm back when I was a bum. Some people wanna hurt you if you're different from them. Sometimes the difference is not so clear, but their intent to hurt me was unmistakeable. Since I was usually a stranger in a strange land, there was no place to hide except where those people were afraid to follow me to. 

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And, The Crowd Went Wild!

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There was no reason for me not waking up and feeling like an idiot. There was some sort of residential fire in this apartment located on the side of a steep hill, and I was driving a fire truck to find a location near the fire. When I drove the truck down a steep incline that ended in this guy's driveway, it was no where near the apartment on fire. I couldn't turn around and go back up the embankment, and I couldn't back up the way I'd come. I was stuck and the original fire in the apartment was still apparently blazing. 

The guy who owned the apartment I drove the fire truck down to was shaving, and acting like I wasn't in his apartment running around like a chicken with it's head cut off. I was in an extremely embarrassing situation, and nobody cared. It's as if I were the only one there. Later, when I walked back up the hill to survey the situation, there was a convenient road that lead right to the fire, and other firemen had put it out. Nobody said anything to me. 

I've never had anything to do with fire trucks. I was trained in boot camp in the Navy about how to work fire hoses on ships. Other than that the only thing I remember other than seeing fire trucks race up and down the road with their sirens screaming, was playing with a toy truck on the front porch of a house we rented in this small village. The primitive volunteer fire truck was being driven around the only block in town with excited firemen clanging the truck's warning bell and turning the handle of the mechanical siren to announce the end of World War Two. The crowd went wild! 

What I wrote yesterday about dancing and getting attention for myself was interesting to me. I never have understood that aspect of my life too well. Maybe I can gain some understanding writing about this approach. In the past, I've written about how I admired charismatics and how they could get people to forget their normal precautions and do extraordinary things they normally didn't think they could or would do. I wanted to be just like them.

When this would happen, in the past, I found myself just as flabbergasted that it happened because of me as the people who found it happening to them. I don't think I'm really that great a dancer or even a singer. Of course, I like to think I'm pretty good, but I've never considered that strongly that my way of doing these activities was that much different than the way other people did the same thing. The only real difference was probably my enthusiasm. It's not enthusiasm so much for what other people do, but for what I do. It works in such a way that it's a self-contained drive that forces me to exhibit it in just the way I move, but not necessarily at my own volition. 

It can happen when I'm sitting still. I don't have to be moving at all for this energy to affect other people's behavior. In fact, I've always moved slower than most people. When I played sports I was usually the slowest runner doing practice laps. When I boxed I was never known for my footwork. I'd move out to the center of the ring and wait for my opponent to come get knocked out. I was known for having fast hands, not feet. 

Odd, how it co-me-s back to my hands, and now, in my dotage, my hands are the most debilitated of all my arthritic joints. Yet, the very few people I'm around physically still seem poised on waiting for me to do or say something that will motivate them to do extraordinary things. I could be fooling myself about this, however, it's not all that unusual for me to think nothing in this regard has changed. It probably hasn't. 

I don't know what to do in the interim between the times this happens, but when it's ti-me for me to do my stuff it always seems to work, and people still get mad at me for creating a sense of urgency when it is not apparent to them that such an urge is required. They seem to get mad at me because they can't stop themselves. It's not my fault. I'm innocent, I tell you, like a newborn baby without no bad habits. 

Making people get goosey is not much to brag about. For some, it's downright irritating. For others, they take to it like a child who gets picked up and swung around or thrown up into the air by an adult. "Do it again, Daddy, do it again!"

The low pressure air system that's moved in right over our heads is nothing new. It holds the traffic sounds from the State Road a couple of miles away down close to earth as if the cars and trucks were just outside my door. The loudspeakers on the church on that same busy road playing the sounds of a bell announcing that it's eight o'clock, is loud and kind of obnoxious. Sometimes they play pop music over that same system. Assholes. 

If it was autumn the smoke coming out of the chimney of the tenant houses on the back side of the open fields would only rise just so high, and then form a layer that would hover at the same elevation the low pressure system would hold the smoke down to. Many of the old shotgun-style tenant and mill houses are gone now, and the wood stoves and fireplaces that produced the smoke are gone too. 

The do-gooders were ashamed to allow that some people worked as laborers and heated their homes with fire wood. Now, instead, they're concerned with everybody's carbon footprint. Some people just can't be satisfied that there will soon be so many humans trying to have a place of their own to do as they will, that only a nuclear holocaust will resolve the problems of all the kazillions of spirits throughout the universe wanna have their own human body. Like angels dancing on the head of a pin. 

It's a matter of memory. Humans forget the dead past. They don't recall that there is more of their me than they can sensorily perceive. The fact that there has been millions of efforts to create worlds and space ports like Earth previous to now, and each time they get over-crowded and we end up destroying them to make each of our tribes victorious. The mushroom shaped clouds and the rocket ships they think is needed to find another place like Earth to settle is already here. The end is near. Selah

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The Dogs Know First

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I just had a big thrill. I discovered that something is looking out for me. I've written of how I've been having problems with the noise-canceling headphones fitting over my entire ear, and when it's warm, it gets damp in the ear cups of the earphones. I worried about fungi developing inside the cup of my ear phones yesterday. Recently, I became aware that the silver colloids I make kill fungi, so I lightly sprayed the inside of the cups with silver colloids. It's a can't lose situation.

That's not the good part though. It wasn't until today that I thought about spraying a mist of silver colloids inside my outer ear canals. The reason I thought about doing that was a news item about the problems people have with "swimmer's ear". In the swampy coastal plains the very humid air is enough to cause the fungus that develops with swimmer's ear to grow uncomfortable. It was only after I sprayed the silver colloid solution into my ear canals, and only after a wad of earwax etcera fell out of my right ear, that I realized part of the pain I've been having with my throat has been that the left side of head and my eustachian tube hurt like crazy.

It was only then that I realized the sequence of events that stimulated me to do the right thing was no coincidence. As soon as I sprayed the silver colloid solution into my left ear it felt better. Much better. The fungi there immediately stopped attacking the inside of my ear canal, and started defending it's very existence. Whoopeee! It can't win. I cured all the fungus problems I had with my feet with silver as an antibiotic.

I literally thought the sore place on the left side of my tongue was spreading to the entire left side of my punkin' haid. I felt doomed. As good as dead. The next stop was for it to get inside my brain. Dead man walking. I'm a very excitable person when it comes to diagnosing my own death. Every day of my life it's just around the corner. Whatta wimp!

All I was aware of at first when I became lucid was my doing Tai Chi. I don't know how to do it. I just always wanted to learn. But, here I was in my dream doing it with grace and style. Then, I realized I was mimicking this Asian woman in front of me that I didn't know personally. I guess I became aware enough during my dream to realize I could finally learn how to do it by watching YouTube videos if I still wanted to practice it.

The next thing i knew was that I had some electronic equipment that I was going to use for something. I didn't know exactly what. Before I could put the equipment together to do with it whatever I was gonna do, these two young men pushed me aside, and started taking it apart and deciding it should go this way or that way, and I was confused and kind of mad that I had forgotten what I first had the stuff for. Eventually, I realized who these guys were, and they were with a beautiful young woman who some called "the swamp woman". 

I had a frustrating time with these people. I had been running around all over the country on my vision quest alone for years. Nobody knew my real name. I was just this guy. Then, all sorts of visionary things happened due to my using a lotta psychedelics, including my remembering vision, and all of a sudden this group of people formed around me.

Instead of being a faceless bum, I became an odd sort of leader with several hundred followers who claimed I was the returned Christ even though I had openly renounced Christianity for myself. I didn't have a clue about their motivation or why they figured they needed a leader, but it was during the time of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. They all would have sex with me at the snap of my finger, so I didn't really question why they thought I was special. 

This dream last night went on and on. Before I woke up I knew a lot more about what happened back in those days. One of the things I never understood happened this one time when I was going to leave that town for a while. These people were starting to do things they thought would please me, and they were doing it in my name, and some of it was very illegal and I'd have to be responsible for it. The problem was that I didn't know what they had done until after it happened. I decided the best thing for me to do was get the fuck out of Dodge. 

When I mentioned that I was gonna leave, they wanted me to decide who would be the leader of the group while I was gone. I didn't care by this time, so I arbitrarily chose this one guy that I liked okay. I thought he would enjoy the attention, but it was apparently the wrong choice, and the right choice guy got mad at me such that I never saw him alive again. 

It's very sad to remember people like what got dead before their time after I wasn't around any more. I didn't know many of these people but for a year or so. Why some of them survived to get old and why others didn't has always been a mystery to me. During that period I couldn't stay in one place very long. 

It was after that era that I returned to Key West for the winter, as I had been doing for several winters, but this time I met the woman who was to become my second wife, and I never had any followers after that. When I met her I stopped writing the poetry that gathered people to me. Now, she's gone, and our children with her. For the last thirty years or so I've lived alone as a social pariah among the decent people of the world, and that's just the way it is. Back to basics. 

My brother's female dog apparently slept on the second floor deck outside my bedroom last night. She kept barking at something off and on during the night. When I woke up this morning and started to write my dreams down, she scratched on the door and whimpered a little to get me to open the door. I let her in for a minute, and she seem overjoyed to see me. 

I think she can smell me dying. I smell like I'm dying to myself. This woman I got to know over the internet recently wrote an unoriginal e-mail to tell me I'm an idiot, also told me that cancer doesn't hurt until toward the end. In that case, the end is near. The soreness on my tongue seems to get better, until I wake up during the night, and discover to my extreme displeasure that it's not better. C'est la morte! 

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The Promise

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I don't have a clue why I'm so adverse to using pain-killers to deal with what is merely pain without a need to recompense. One of the mundane reasons has to be that there is no euphoria involved unless I overdo it and take two for one. If the saying "All is fair in love and war." is valid, then why do I have to declare war on the side effects of what has been designed to save me?

It's almost got to the point where it is redundant, even to me, to refer back once more to the period in my life when I wandered aimlessly around North America as a beggar and a bum. I didn't really know at the time I was doing it that my experience then would serve as a primary example and/or metaphor for how I might interpret life ever after that. 

Candidly, even though it makes me look like a know-it-all jerk, I actually did know that what I experienced on the road would become the default go to if and when I ever did settle down. The most impressive thing about seeking my individual identity was that for the entire escapade that it was my individual identity that was conducting the quest. 

My spirit quest didn't happen in one linear sequence. It happened for 7-8 years, but over about a thirty year period. It was an on-again, off-again situation. Part of it happened before my first Saturn Return, and the rest of it happened afterward. My last round trip hitch-hiking out to California and back was a celebration of all the times I had done it before during my second Saturn Return. 

There was one particular sojourn of about a year and a half in which I hitch-hiked coast-to-coast ten times in a row. It was during that sequence of events that I got caught in a freak snow storm in Yosemite National Park and jumped off a cliff higher than Yosemite Falls, and didn't get a scratch on me. 

There is one constant question that haunts me about my various adventures: Why am I always the last to know? 

It takes years and decades for me to contemplate the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of wot happened. Everything that happens to me is nuanced to hell. If I contemplated other men's lives the way I do my own I'd have rows of PHDs to my credit. For contemplating my own life, however, I never get nothing. Nobody knows what I'm doing when I do what I do. Even if I do it right to their face and explain myself in polished phrases. 

It's not their fault. There has to be a "me" in order to me-and-thee, many don't seem likely to do what it takes to contemplate their own life because it takes a carrot on a stick to go for it. There is no reward for holding your life in the palm of your hand to watch it spinning. Nobody knows. Nobody gets no 'Attaboys!' when you finally conclude, "Egad! I think I've got it!"

The very gall of paper chasers, and to what end? Those paper chasers who take it upon themselves to reward others with pieces of paper don't contemplate your life. Somebody has to contemplate you life. 

If you don't contemplate your own life, and the people you chase paper for don't contemplate your life, then you are uncontemplated. An uncontemplated life is no life at all. 

I experience a deep unwillingness to exert effort to understand in real time that what I perceive, what I CAN perceive, in the world about me is merely what I make it into for the sake of appearances. My unwillingness appears to be there because I wanna blame somebody else for me being a fool. 

If I wanna live a life of no blame, even if I am is always the last to know, then I have to realize I made the world, as I understand it, into my own image. I just hate that! The reason I hate it is that I know it's gotta go, and it's only me that can act as executioner. 

I can't serve two masters. I can't serve an idol of myself (no matter how much extraordinary skill and insight went into the creation of it). Simultaneously, the image I made of myself can't institute a ground for being that doesn't depend on negation. Without a ground FOR being, then it's back to the cosmic soup (and nowheresville) as far as individuation is concerned. 

Oh well, the Gnaural meditation sequence is about over. Gotta go...

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