Heebie Jeebies

I don't know whether it's me or the world, but I'm not in much of a communicating mood during the last week or so. The medicine I'm taking probably has a lot to do with it. Maybe I'll come up with something soon.

A New Blog

I've been waiting for the MacWorld Expo to happen to see what Apple would offer an upgrade to. The keynote speech is apparently where all the important news is given out at these shindigs. Most of the Mac pundits wrote that nothing much was expected this year. The biggest deal about the whole thing was that Steve Jobs wasn't there, and it's the last year Apple will display at it's oldest trade show. It seems like Apple has outgrown the need for this magazine's trade show support. Tech companies in general seem to be pulling away from this type of venue.

I was hoping Apple would update the Mac Mini. I didn't think I would buy a new one, but I wanted to see if I'd be tempted. I am in the mood for a new computer, but I have some features that are not yet in the consumer market to be in a new machine by default. Namely, a Solid State Drive and USB3. The hype was flowing for thinking Apple would come out with a new Mac Mini, but they didn't do it. They only upgraded their top of the line notebook they call the MacBook Pro.

One interesting note was that they did offer an SSD as an option with a larger storage capacity. the USB3 upgrade is too new. I didn't expect it to come out on anything Mac. As a matter of fact, another big trade show going on now, the CES, will have the first official demonstration of USB3 this week sometime.

USB3 is ten times as fast as USB2. It will have to be to accommodate the speed of the up and coming SSDs, but it will allow comparatively unlimited uploads and downloads from external peripheral gadgets like high speed cameras. I'm not thinking straight about this now, but several of the elements of computing can be taken out of the case that contributes to the heating and the need for a lot of noisy fans. Setting them up outside the main CPU case where they won't need fans to cool them will make computing a much quieter affair. Quieter still because the SSDs that will replace the traditional hard drives have no moving parts and are for all practical purposes silent. The pundits claim this is revolutionary technology as opposed to evolutionary technology. It's not just the next logical step, but sorta like a jump to warp speed.

I set up a new blog at:

http://wordsaladexpress.wordpress.com/

I'll probably be using both sites for a while to see if I like the new one. Presently, I only wrote a short note there to get things going.

The New President As A Potential Dictator

It appears to me as if I have seen so much of the way the world is that it's hard to catch me off guard. I don't know if that's a blessing or a curse. I would have been bored to tears to have lived like I live now ten years ago. I really am beginning to see that people see me as an old man no matter how I feel inside. They treat me like an old man who might need some consideration where strength and agility is concerned.

Many people are merely dismissive. They haven't got any use for me. I haven't been treated as a sex object for a very long time. Some young people of both genders push there way right past me knowing full well they won't have to suffer by their doing of it. No blame. I suspect most people when they get old will be treated just like they treated old people when they were younger. In that sense I think I'll do alright. I took the learning to treat my elders with respect fairly seriously.

I read an e-mail this morning that mentioned Neo-Nazis and responded to that poster in a way intended to suggest that Neo-Nazism is a waste of time. I don't know if I made my thoughts clear on the subject. Mainly because my thoughts are not clear on the subject. Nazism is a form of Fascist (as I understand it), and people who kowtow to this form of government seem attracted to and feel the need to be ruled by a strong man. Like a king or a dictator.

I've never lived under that sort of governance. I don't know what it's like. I felt like George Bush wanted me to learn what it was like from him and Cheney. They're still in charge. I probably won't believe that they still don't have something up their sleeves until the actual switchover on the 20th of this month.

Candidly, although I voted for him and wish him the best, Obama, and the fanaticism he appears to attract from very large groups of people may accomplish with ease what Bush and Cheney could only ineptly prey for. I've never witnessed this many people of all ages and genders get this worked up over one man. Should I live so long... life is about to get very interesting in America. Don't ask me how?

I've written my opinion about that before. Up until the election a couple of years ago I was beginning to feel isolated in my belief that Bush and Cheney intended to dismiss the Congress and the court system and rule the United States by Divine Right or some crazy shit like that. I wasn't worried as much about the political end of this upheaval as much as the religious right feeling and acting like they had a mandate to make their brand of Christianity the State Religion. Who wants that?

I don't think the current economic crisis is an accident. Not any more than I believe 9/11 was not part of the same central plan of a really ambitious bunch of people of a global hue. I guess I'm bordering on conspiracy theories when I write stuff like this. That has always seemed a little silly to me. Not that some people might plot a grand scheme to take over something or the other. That reads like the status quo. Why would they not? There are probably thousands of sinister groups doing that this very moment.

That's why I figure Fascism and Nazism will soon be a thing of the past. the technology won't allow it. The reason I write that makes sense to me for one basic reason I concurrently disclaim as the truth. New technology constantly supersedes older technology. The people who create the evolutionary technology that replaces yesterday's newspaper get old with the technology they created, and new technology created by younger technicians will replace what worked last year. Nobody can be in charge long before a new generation makes what gave the older group their power, obsolete.

Trying to stop it from happening would be sorta like the several biblical stories when the oldest male child of every family of a chosen tribe was to be murdered. Done to keep the new generation from eventually replacing them and the ideas they'd grown comfortable with. As if they really believed they were immortal.

The neglected fourteen year olds of the world will always overthrow the status quo simply because they can. Why would they not? In a lot of cases, it's their only chance to feel important, and they work at it harder than those smug souls who took the money and traditions their parents provided and let life run away from them. No blame. Shit happens. Things change.

Root Doctors And Chicken Blood

This new medicine I was prescribed makes me emotionally sensitive. Practically all of the events I normally get worked up about get more heightened responses. I stopped smoking in October of 2007, and after the initial withdrawals calmed down I was able to cope with my urge for a cigarette pretty good most of the time. Now, this methotrexate seems to amplify the nicotine urges I'm usually able to toss off with aplomb, and are once again a conscious struggle.

Much of what happened to me in my life happened spontaneously, randomly, and serendipitously because I threw my body away for the good of the game. What happened to my body when I was young wasn't even considered a threat unless I found myself in actual dire straits. I finally figured out that a situation some called "dire straits" didn't mean that situation was "dire straits" to me.

Chronic fatigue and debilitating hunger were the real catalysts for my odd esoteric experiences when I was out in some wild place alone. Hardly ever did power express itself to me with other people around, until the true sacraments trickled down to the little people. No blame. f

It almost had the feeling that the participates had to recognize themselves as the only key needed to go through the invisible gate. The most intriguing out of body experiences for me were the spontaneous ones that came outta nowhere and swooped me off to a place I wouldn't have known how to pray for. 

I've grown fond of using the pray/prey conundrum. Occasionally, just changing either word to the other puts an odd or unusual slant of the topic I'm writing about as if I've entered some eerie dimension so far out of my normal range and scope, that I wouldn't have known how or what to pray for by meager description. I like to use "prey" and "pray" interchangeably just to grok the possibles. It helps me with stalking wild mushrooms.

Stalking is like seeking prey as if you're fervently praying not to make a mistake and missing the kill. Being extra quiet and diligent because you're hungry, and a missed kill will sap up even more of your waning energy. Using an attitude of devout prayer to stalk your prey so intensely and pointedly that the prey itself dictates your entire behavior, and once done, the notion that you're both the hunter and the hunted is foregone.

As a homeless wanderer I lived in a constant state of shock, for the most part, and even if I always had some sort of home I could possibly go to as refuge, I wouldn't let myself do that for the unmitigated sha-me of it. I needed the shame. I sought it out among strangers who would never know my nayme or kith or kin. I was the only one like me they would ever gnow. 

Being a prodigal son is the spirit quest of a shaman. Shamed shamen are people who move through the roar of the misery of people who have behaved shamelessly, and woefully regret it. Some people can't live with the shame of some act or deed they have knowingly done, and their miserable relatives will jump through hoops to pay you to get them to stop doing that for as long as it takes to keep their stopping still.

Living as a bum serves as the ultimate education for understanding the deepest depths of despair. Nobody nose yo' nayme. "Hey... you... come over here! Now!"  Being nosed out when you're trying to be invisible is humiliating. There is no where to go your detractors don't know more about than you ever will. A hell-bent mob or gang learns to smell out what's wot about a homeless bum. Bums are usually smelly because it reinforces the fact that they're not acting poor for the sake of unearned alms. It is the odor that makes a man a real bum, and authenticates them as okay to patronize with a pittance of trickle down.

A blood sacrifice can be necessary for especially shameless people of the icky sort. Hot blood from a recently hand-wrung, decapitated chicken dripping all over the naked body of the miscreant, while laying on the cold bare ground. It has to happen while the dying chicken is still flopping wildly in it's death throes. This must take place at dawn in some trumped-up holy place in freezing temperatures. It has helped many a soul return from the fiery depths of hell, and to wear their previous lack of dignity proudly as if a crown.

You know how it is with mojos, ya pick the one you hope will represent the bottom of the barrel to the perspective client and take your best shot. One of the worst things a practitioner can do is underestimate the competition. After all, licensed medicos get to legally use radiation, chemotherapy, SHOCK TREATMENT, huge scary hypodermic needles, etc, and all you got is wit and grit. The AMA don't take kindly to any sort of competition for THEIR money. 

Since I think Eden is a place inside our hollow Sun where the corona dances wild with angels and flaming swords (solar eruptions) to keep out impure thoughts, my sopho-moronic thoughts about the Genesis myth probably wouldn't be that useful to you. 

Me Sages And Me Singers... Galore!

I seem more and more detached from trying to stay fit and healthy. I sit here in the mornings at my computer and compose messages. I don't always know to whom, No need. I can't afford the ruckus. I need my emotional energy for the composition itself.

The editing it takes to make sense to the other of my me-and-thee-ing is tedious these days when things go amiss. It is very time consuming. My touch typing somehow gets a mind of it's own, and when I go to correct what it drifted off to, I find that I am so pleased with what slyly snuck in so much, that I'm reduced to trying to patch fairly appealing, but mixed metaphors so far-fetched from each other (tossed word-salad... galore!), that what actually gets published here on my blog is a crapshoot. That's another reason I changed the settings to: No Comments. I don't wanna read no stinking comments about what I'm already sick-to-death-of via my incessant and unending editing.

"Familiarity breeds contempt." ~AU

I have usually edited what I originally wrote with such due haste and so many times, that I can't stand off and perceive the actual message as not-me anymore. I transmit clones of my abstract "self" over the cables and networks and transmission towers to all parts of the world? What I post on the internet IS my personality's spoor, and "I ain't nothing but a hound dog" tracking my own Sent to the hard drives and storage farms of the universe. Whenever I leave my body to check it out these days, I never know whose computer or server I'll find my soul digitized on. '-)

I truly enjoy creating messages for the sages. In my silliness, I think: me-ssage; me-sage; Me Sage and it's me-singers (messengers). There's no question that I-am-is IS at least a me-singer. I'll give it that. Big of me... eh?

All this to say I like capturing drifting thoughts with words. Not proving they're true or false. I've been conjuring for a way to get outta any responsibility for my mutterings for some time now, and I-am-is just might be on to so-me-thing. Selah

Obsession

Being obsessed is a regular situation in my life. I've had a virtual run of "magnificent obsessions" one after the other since childhood. I'm constantly confused over whether my obsessions are self-generated or introduced from an external source. Maybe both at the sa-me ti-me. It causes me to write in tossed-word-salad terms with a lotta hyphenating going on. Sometime I like to use three periods in a row ... as if to say "blah, blah, blah" or "et cetera and so on..."

To be obsessed in the way I am is using the term seems necessary for most people to make themselves into an expert of about any kind. One of the most notable examples is an American medical doctor. I'm not a doctor, so I'm guessing that the med students who aspire to be-co-me a licensed member of the AMA have to be obsessive about their entire approach to life if they wanna get through the process. Other kinds of obsessions like for gambling or overeating can have less positive results.

Sometime I think that if I don't have some interest or project to obsess about I am is not so happy. To counter that I have learned to obsess on doing nothing. I have a lotta ways of doing that. Most conspicuously has to be meditating, but any activity I can obsess on will do. Like writing. When I fall into a flow of creating and editing, a process I call composing, as if poetry, but not... the world goes away... and I-am-is at one with me.

One of the more interesting side-effects of meditating for me is how I count my inhales and exhales as I use breathing as a focus point to enter never-never land. Well? It is Peter Pan-like. I fall into the void pretty much like falling off my bed when I am is dreaming either by day or by night. I don't usually ride a horse and scream "The British are 'coming..." at the top of my lungs or hang lanterns in church steeples, but the breathe is an important part of my meditation practice.

I've used various lengths of counting my breaths to bring myself into focus with nothingness. I have a much deeper understanding of nothingness now. It's the result of my denying the otherwise undefined elements of the cosmic soup of the plenitude.

The assertive plaint of "You are not me" creates the nothingness I am uses to provide a ground for upsurging into being. Once done, and the very denial of all that I am is not, surrounds me and provides me with a ground-of-being, the question becomes: How do I consciously reclaim the possibles I left behind in the fullness of the Id?

Confused yet? Why would you not be? I'm still working this out, and this is the best I've been able to come up with. There is always tomorrow for as long as there is one, and then...

For Either Love Or Money

Happy New Year!

I found myself weeping with joy this morning as I watched a PBS program called From The Top At Carnegie Hall. I've seen it several times before. They bring three musical prodigies to Carnegie Hall to perform, but they provide a lot of background content that allows the audience to see that they're real kids too. These prodigies don't know they can't do what they wanna. They're practically unstoppable. The music just BURST outta them, and they laugh... oh, how they laugh. It's so moving for me to witness, even over television, human beings truly enjoying what they do.

I've never understood why classical music didn't happen for me. By that I mean that I did know what I couldn't do, and had no adult supervision to talk me out of this ridiculous notion. I would have needed a lot of personal attention to accomplish what I saw those kids doing this morning, but the ones who succeed seemed to attract the attention they needed to progress without the total enthusiasm of their caretakers to any extreme degree.

One of my big problems in getting the attention I needed to overcome my lack of confidence that I could do what I wanted to musically is that I'm hard-headed and stubborn. I don't take instruction well. Probably because I like to argue more than just about any other system of expertise, and I'm not too good at arguing either.

That's where I really screwed up. As a part of his agriculture classes my father was the Adviser to the Future Farmers of America organization. This national group sponsored a variety of contests for students, and my father took these contests very seriously. The two contests my father seemed to like best was debating and parliamentary procedure. Robert's Rules, and all that jazz. My father's students consistently won the State level contests and went to the national finals for one or the other topics nearly every year.

The long time Governor of North Carolina, Jim Hunt, was a national public speaking and debate champion of the FFA contests. He was a sort of prodigy too. I had one of the finest teachers of arguing around as my own father, and I stubbornly refused to take his instruction. I had to have my own identity or nothing at all. That's about how it's turned out too. I have my own identity, and nothing much more than that.

My younger brothers did as my father asked, but it didn't appear to influence their decision to choose a public life or run for political office. Sometime I think my rebellion against my father's ways influenced my younger brothers in a negative way, and I feel a little ashamed of any responsibility I bear if such was so. It was so difficult for me to understand that what I did had any influence over anybody.

I understand a little better now. I influence the people I do, in the way that I do, for the same reasons other people influence me. They don't have to know they're serving as a model of behavior for me. They don't have a clue for the most part, that they have been "the wind beneath my wings."

People have approached me to express gratitude for what they claim to have learned from me, and I don't even remember them as an individual, much less that they have been using me as a model for for their own behavior. It's not unusual for me to treat these sorts of encounters with suspicion at first. Since I don't remember them, I figure they're just saying that to flatter me and soften me up for either love or money. It works for them too.

Not only am I naturally suspicious, what with having Scorpio as my Ascendent sign in my natal astrology chart, but I have studied for decades how to hone my suspicions into a system for treating life with great and abiding caution. How else could I aspire to live a life of no blame?

Living a life of no blame isn't my idea. I copped it from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. In the middle section of the Yellow Book published by the Princeton University Press there's a sort of tuitional guide of how to approach and use the I Ching both as an oracle, and as a book of wisdom.

It's in that section of the Yellow Book that it's written that the purpose of the I Ching is to aid in helping it's adherents to become aware of how one needs to be extremely cautious about placing blame on the other instead of where it truly belongs, upon oneself. To live a life of no blame requires me to stop blaming others. I have to help other people stop blaming me for their troubles by not blaming them for mine.