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Sleep didn't come easy last night, and for the most part, not at all. It's been that way for a couple of nights now. I need to be cautious about what I write. I have some pain pills I can take to help me sleep, but I'm afraid I'm already dependent on such artifices too much. I am trying to ward off a deeper dependency. Yet, my abstract world revolves around getting quality sleep. Whose doesn't?
The live water kefir granules coming to me from Texas has me a little worried that they may get exposed to too much heat and die before I get them in the mail. I'm depending on the wisdom of the lady who is generous enough to send them to me as a gift to take what precautions are possible. My benefactress said that the USPO in her home town told her that Priority mail don't stop on weekends, so she sent them out on Friday.
My worry is that the package will be left in my Rural Free Delivery box out on the paved road, and that in this heat it will be like an oven in there. Otherwise, the probiotics reputedly survive to temperatures up to at least 104° (40° C), and I think they will have a real shot at surviving. I lie. '-)
Despite it being Sunday, I'll probably go check to see if they arrived. I feel a little silly taking the risk of being seen by neighbors checking my mail several times on Sunday, but whatta I got to lose? My local reputation is stained by some rustic grapevine immorality already. I live near a small town. It's residents gossip incessantly without keening the term "incessantly." Why would they not?
It's still dry here. Scattered showers all around, mostly west of here, but no cigar. I hate it for the farmers, but even then, the farmers around here aren't family farmers like they were when I was a kid. The belated arrival of huge expensive farm tractors changed all that.
The local farmers would bet their farm, literally, to buy a huge new diesel tractor to keep up with their neighbors, and promptly go broke trying to pay for it. But, it's a little difficult to feel sorry for corporate farmers. They're too diversified to put all their eggs in one basket. No blame. Business is business, right? For some reason I feel sorry for the dying corn stalks.
Maybe that's why I'm not an entrepreneur like my siblings. I may have been some traditional, idealistic role model for my two younger brothers when they were children, but that didn't seem to last beyond puberty for them. The grief I caused my straight-laced parents as first a young, then not-so-young person was a strong contributing factor to their abandoning any desire to be-co-me like their oldest brother.
My younger brothers personally witnessed how my parents wept for me. They were still living at home with my parents for 5-10 years after I ran away from home by joining the Navy. That's how I saw it. I couldn't wait to go out and make my own mistakes and pay for them. They didn't spare the rod, and the physical pain from my father's sadistic punishment made triviality of many of life's recognized problems before I fledged from the nesting tree.
Many of the people with whom I have shared insights with, in the past, found my willingness to suffer an exaggeration at first meeting. I literally have scars all over my body from "running lak a dawg thru the Everglades" of desperation. Learning to weld and stay out of the way of the fire speckled my upper thighs with "buckshot" burns that riddled my thick cotton denim work pants with a scattergun pattern of randomness.
This Spring, since I've been laying out in the sun to get some old-fashioned vitamin D, and as mundanely watched my skin changed color toward purple to ecru, through almost daily exposure to my naked skin (in most places), the round scars I got from a string of industrial construction jobs as a single-handed pipewelder really stand out.
Several of the larger burn scars might be a half-inch wide (2.5 mm). It's not like the entire surface of the skin on the top front of my thighs are completely covered with smaller scars, but they're noticeable, and especially to me. At the time of my life that I acquired these scars I was desperately trying to save the integrity of a family I once had, and I was happy to do it.
My sacrifice didn't work. It could not have worked in the best of all worlds. My ex-wives were complicit. They both knew very well they were marrying a retarded idiot, but they insisted upon doing it anyway. I think it wasn't their fault nor mine. They wanted to watch me deliberately abandon hope for the sheer thrill of not knowing.
It's not like I can't not do it. Maybe for a while. When I was younger and more daringly foolish. That's how I know I have options. I seem to be able to not do it more frequently now. I can, and often do, blame my not abandoning my integrity for the sake of a cheap thrill on any excuse handy.
Old age, sickness, poverty, transmogrifying shame of the vomiting kind, a dismissive, snotty disdain... any trick carved into stone or no works for me when I am is backed into some proverbial corner. I'll lie, cheat, and steal to slip away or arrogantly provoke the wrath of Hell to get thrown into the briar patch... to be all one. To reclaim my inherent integration. The best way to be all one is to not get scattered.
If there is one specific human attribute I get desperate to depend on in dire straits it's my integrity. It's ironically laughable to dare to think I own such a tool. To say it out loud as if I mean it is utter blasphemy of the spirit and the unforgivable sin. It's in this vein that I am is a hardened sinner... inured to the eternal damnation in all it's fiery glory. Huzzah!
When I write "I too have sinned", my statement is a confession of fact. I am has sinned against God. Again and again. As I understand it, this dynamic is similar to the adage in classical musical composition about the composer having to learn the classical rules involved in composing, but only well enough to find out how to break them.
My attitude may seem translucently unoriginal. I got nothing to hide. It's not my fault nobody can see how experienced I am is at breaking it's own rules of conscience (God). Well, maybe some can, but that's not up to me to try and comprehend other people's subjective rules of conscience. It's not breaking their rules of conscience that's gonna provide a breakthrough with my own pretend group of fanatical devotees.
Saying what I see when I speak my mind about this topic has been the bane of my ex-is-tense or at least one of the several banes of my existence. I define a "bane" as a self-imposed burden. Banes are useful tools if you can bear the shame of faking it until you can make it. Banes are the secret, mystical tools of shamed men (Shamen).
Currently, and I suspect for a long time of ignoring a capital use for it, I employ writing down drifting thoughts based upon the notion (no-shun) that speech is mind and mind is speech.
It wasn't me that generated that dualistic expression I now use for a .sig file. I seem acutely disappointed that originality ain't that precious to me literarily. Utility and subjective reasoning is important to me. Maybe it's a double-Taurus thing. My natal Taurean Moon "leads" my Taurus Sun by 16°.
I was born when the first sliver of a crescent moon appeared after the first New Moon in Taurus during the Year Of The Rabbit. Mythically it is said by some that the amount of consciousness an individual human possesses is revealed by casting a natal chart to discover the amount of reflected light bounced back upon Earth in the course of each lunar month.
I guess being born at the first crescent light of the New Moon is better than being born in the darkness of the exact New Moon. Unless more is less, and crowns nothingness as Cock Of The Walk. It doesn't seem to work that way, in a practical sense, nor is such, an accepted given. It's sorta like I was only permitted a small peek of consciousness to apperceive the greater known world.
Even that much exposure to the light makes me withdraw like a tortoise within my shell and screech, "Katy, bar the door...". Then, that pretense elicits another of my more critical and debilitating banes. I got no "Katy" to yell to for a long time now. I am is it. That's all there is too me.
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