Another Cold Night In The Wino's Hooch

From the Gospel of Thomas and the Gnostic Library found buried in Egypt.
-
84. Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"
-

I think this directly relates to what i call my remembering vision, and subsequently all the things I made myself into before I brought this me into being. The way the above saying relates to what I've experienced is about what I "saw" in my vision. What I saw was myself as pearl-like creature that was attracted to Earth by it's rich colors. Like one of those strange cuttlefish that uses it's ability to produce neon-like color configurations to conjure food into it's jaws. I was attracted to Earth.

The most significant problem with my attraction and fascination with the things of the world was that I couldn't go back out into the open space of the universe to continue my unending sojourn. I was trapped here, and from that point where I understood this, about all I could do was to hang out and wait for the arrival of my man Friday to help me while away my non-isness until this planet blew up or otherwise lost it's hold of gravity over Me.

I don't know where this pearl-like entity came from. That wasn't a part of the deal. The only purpose for it in the first place was only revealed by what happened after it arrived, and I'm totally speculating on that assertion.

There were other pearl-like creatures were already here when I arrived. They were making themselves into things they reckoned would get them back into the unfathomable space of the universe. They made themselves into things employing their urge to life. This is full-blown monte urge. Not the demi-urge. I'd have to reach for the Genesis myth to describe that, but that was a long, long time away from my first arrival.

When I write that these pearl-like entities were "making themselves into things", I'm attempting describe a process that would later be recognized as evolution. They made themselves into thing by imitating what the others were doing. They were keeping up with the Jones right away. This IS the urge I referred to earlier. It seems so strange to describe something as odd as creating through mimicry. In my opinion and remembering vision (which nobody saw but me) that how we did it.

We? Yes. I joined the party and started imitating what the other pearls were doing. It was the only game in town. It's not like we even knew what we were doing. To do that requires another abstract sort of consciousness that was billions of Earth years away. I can tell what that other required consciousness is. It's not a secret. It's only hidden by paradox and misdirection. This other consciousness is what springs from what other people see when they LOOK at us. We create their expectation via the same old tricks that got us to the big game. We creatively imitated what they expected of us into being-for-the-other.

The pearl-like creature I arrived here as was already a being-for-itself. Desire. The urge to life. That's what got jiggy with the evolution thing. Evolution is not created to please the being-for-itself. The being-for-itself is what works the urge to life to create bodies for life to live in during their stay on Earth. It's sorta like an oyster that builds it's own home and soothes it's sandy irritability by coating it with spit.

As a for-itself I found myself totally ignoring those creatures I made myself into that didn't get the job done. They didn't ever have the ability to launch me back into space. So, I abandoned them to their hopping around, and got to work on the next best thing. Mimicking my fellow pearls.

To relate this back to the opening saying, I'm writing about how the experiences I had making myself into things through imitation was recorded in what some call the egg-like human aura. I say pearl-like, but I ain't picky. Every microbe or animal or plant I used the urge to life to create seems to have been recorded in the pearl's aura no matter what it made itself into.

This record of what I'd made myself into through me-me-cry (yes, there are two me's now) is what was revealed to me in my remembering vision. I don't see human auras. I don't even see mine in real time, but it was revealed to me in a weird vision, and sorting it out has preoccupied me obsessively for most of my adult life. Why would it not?

Death

I feel a little better today, but I'm not looking forward to cleaning my bathroom. I puked all over it. At least I got to the commode before I shit all over it. The nausea I get from this methotrexate is debilitating. The last two days have been horrible. I lost track of time for a good while. Nobody knows. This a terrible way to live, and it would be a lousy way to die, but what way to die isn't? My situation reminded me of that Ice Man they found frozen up in the Alps. He was wounded and climbed up there to die. He probably didn't even know where he was going. Death would have been a relief two nights ago.

I read this morning that some proof has been offered that Alzheimer's and dementia are caused by diabetes. The pundits are calling dementia the diabetes of the brain. I found that intriguing. My brother's wife found out in the last year of so that she has to deal with her blood sugar. I don't know whether she is pre-diabetic or full-blown diabetic. My brother started taking blood tests just to share her troubles or at least to understand as much as he could what she's going through. I walked over to talk to him about what he has experienced.

What it really came down to for him is that he uses the blood tests as feedback to try to "feel" when his blood sugar may be high, and act accordingly. Since he's not diabetic, just going for a walk can lower his blood sugar down to acceptable levels. This seems like it might be a good idea for me too. If diabetes is responsible for dementia, then it might be a good thing for me to learn to "sense" when my blood sugar is high or low by how I physically feel.

That made me think of my wine drinking. It may be that I use wine to keep my blood sugar balanced since I stopped using refined sugar and many of the precursors like breads and starches. Taking blood samples to see where I'm at daily for a while might provide me with a more accurate reading than just guessing. If nothing else, I could use the test to tell when I oughta get some exercise. It's not like I don't have time to do this, staying alive these days seems like a full-time job.

Hippie Dippie Highwayman

I got an account at flickerR.com. I created the account when i first bought my digital camera. There is no pictures much on that site except for my daughter's wedding in Seattle. Well, not in Seattle, but across the bay or sound west of Seattle. I basically took a bunch of pictures for her keepsakes. The camera takes really good pictures of whatever it's pointed at when it's button is pushes.

It doesn't matter what pushes it's buttons. The button could be pushed by scraping up against a tree, and it would still take a near-perfect picture of wherever it was pointed at the time. It's not hard for me to be very detached about operating this machine. It doesn't require anything from me except fresh batteries, and a penchant for pushing buttons.

Of all the accusations that's been aimed at describing just what sort of person I am is, the most frequent and enduring is in the form of a question delivered by a twisted, scrunched up face that spouts "You really like to push people's buttons don't you?" The answer to that question (that's not really a question at all) is "YES!" Most definitely yes, but with a broad exception to the rule.

It's not pushing buttons that's so attractive to me, but finding the buttons in the first place. That's the real adventure for me. Pushing people's buttons seems frivolous and mundane if I do it more than once or twice to twist the knife. Like door bell buttons. Once or twice is good enow. Even if someone's home it's obvious in just a minute or two that they don't wanna be disturbed. Pushing it one more time and then running can be fun too.

I think learning to push people's buttons is like a smoke grenade for me. It provides me with a cover so I can disappear from controversy. The most powerful thing that ever happened to me was being a bum on the road for months and even a year or two at a time. I usually didn't have any money or even a change of clothes. It became a game for me. A quest. A quest caused by a quest-ion.

Living like a bum only happened off and on and all total maybe seven or eight years altogether. In about three months I'll turn seventy years old. If I round off all the time I stayed out on the road as a homeless bum, that would leave sixty-two years I wasn't a bum.

Those sixty-two other years when I wasn't a bum won't no bed of roses. I didn't like public work or private work either. I tried my best not to work more than six months a year, and I can prove it by the ridiculously small amount of my Social Security check. I don't mind working if that's what's called for. I was raised to work. My father used to brag that if he taught his boys nothing else, he would have taught them how to work. He did that, and it was what I rebelled again to reach my own conclusions.

My question for me at the time was "How do I figure life out if I make myself an indentured servant to another man?" Everything learned of practical use to me happened when I was living as a stranger in a strange land. I didn't have to defend my family's reputation by acting like I had some sense. I was forced to act like I had more sense than I actually had because that's what my family expected of me. We were educated, and we were smart, and we were progressive, and I had to act that way or suffer the pangs of hell. I was a product of a family nobody would think was dumb.

Nobody expects a bum that stands begging beside the road to be anything more than that. I could ask anybody anything without worrying whether they though I came from a dumb family or not. They expected me to be dumb. Why would a beggar not be dumb. He's a beggar for God's sake! If he had any sense he'd have job and be making somebody some money. He probably can't keep a job because he's too stupid. Why would I not feel ecstatic? Everybody I met who thought I was dumb said the sa-me thing. Why waste my ti-me learning to be the sa-me thing they were? I wanted to know what was different.

There is another way that being a bum and close to it practically all my life. Movies. I went into a movie rental store with a friend of mine so she could rent a movie. She instructed me to walk around the store and see if I could find a movie I hadn't watched. My search soon became a seeking to find a movie I had seen. I hadn't seen any of them, and probably won't. Music? I own one CD. No records. No tapes of any kind or size. I like real people doing real things in real time.

That's why e-mail and the internet caught me off-guard. I'm communicating with real people about things that are real to them in real time, but I don't know what they look like; I don't know what they smell like; I don't know what they sound like; I don't know what they feel like; and not knowing what they smell like might be a true blessing. What's this world co-me-ing to?

Bad Faith

I've been trying to get a better handle on what Sartre means by his introduction of the concept of "bad faith". Sometimes I get insight about what Sartre declares in his book Being And Nothingness by reading what other people write about their own thoughts of Sartre's notion of bad faith. He devotes and entire chapter to bad faith, and I've read it carefully. There were many times (practically on every page of a 800 page book) I went back to the beginning of the chapter and re-read the whole thing up to the point where I got stuck. It took months for me to wade through it in order to prepare myself to understand his point. Reading around, bad faith may in essence BE his only point, but it's a good one, that is, if I catch his drift.

Recently, I've been reading about how he thinks homo sapiens have two consciousness'. When I'm reading along I understand why he writes what he does, but when I leave off from the state I enter to read him, I don't carry the immediacy of my understanding with me. I find it almost impossible to reflect on the meaning (me-and-thee-ing) of what I just read. If you're interested, here's the link to Bad Faith in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_(existentialism)

What I read seems connected to the two kinds of consciousness he says humans have. The "bad faith" happens because of the polarity and concerns of the two consciousness'. It happens because human beings have no choice about freedom. They're free whether they like it or not. That's one side of the argument. One of the two consciousness' acts like this is so.

The other consciousness doesn't wanna take on the responsibility of human freedom. Human beings can't make some Earthly object God to get out of the need to take responsibility for their being the way they are, and declare themselves twice-born and "saved" by the shirking of this innate responsibility of freedom.

Shirking one's responsibility to their own inherent freedom to choose to do anything and everything a slightly different way exhibits bad faith with the other dimension of consciousness because it's not acting from one's own authenticity. s

The Voice That Became God

I've only "heard" voices that I knew were "that" kind of voice twice. I've written many times about these two occasions. It wasn't "voices". There was only one voice each time. The first time i "heard" it, it said "Stop using the I Ching." The second time I "heard" this voice it told me to "Stop eating bananas." Both times I was doing what it told me to stop doing to excess.

In regard to using the I Ching I was totally obsessed. I sometime consulted the oracle to find out if I should make a telephone call or watch the news on TV. I was outta control. I knew what the voice meant when it told me to stop consulting the Yellow Book.

I never thought about the color "yellow" being prominent in both occasions. Bananas are yellow. It was easy for an obsessive personality like mine to get hooked on anything. Much less banana sandwiches. I would buy a small stalk of bananas, a loaf of white sandwich bread, a jar of Duke's mayonnaise, and a gallon of cheap burgundy, and I was good with the food thing for a week. I wouldn't eat anything else but banana sandwiches for a month or more. It was too easy. i guess that was a little excessive, and called for divine intervention.

Stopping, and then keeping my stopping still was fairly easy with the bananas. I may have been getting a little tired of banana sandwiches without being told to. Stopping my use of the I Ching as an oracle and book of wisdom was one of the most difficult habits I've ever had to break in my life.

I'm writing about "voices" because I read an article that included Jung's views on what a vocation is. Whenever I've heard or read the term "vocation" I usually think about a job or career. Certainly no more than that. I didn't associate it with voices at all until i read the Jung opinion and researched the root words for vocal.

I didn't realize that vocation started with the first three letters of vocal. I didn't associate what I'd heard spelled out as "a calling" as indicating a person responding to a voice they heard in their own subjective world. I figured a person who heard voices were probably just as crazy as me.

I'm not really all that crazy. Just daring. I'm the kind of person who will take a dare. I'll put my life on the line. It's a wonder I haven't lost it. The reason is that I am ready to explain why I took the dare before I take it. That's not as daring as it might seem to those who find it impossible to defend their own experience with God.

My Fair Lady

It's been a couple of weeks since I stopped consuming dairy products. At least the products I know contain dairy. The problems I've had defecating have gone away for the time being. I don't know if this is just a temporary lull or something i can depend on. I think that when I found out that dairy was okay on the low-carb Atkins-type diet I was following, I guess I went a little crazy, and indeed, overboard with the dairy thing. Especially cheese. Oops, I just realized when I wrote about cheese, that I am eating cheese crackers. Damn! I love those little crackers. This may not be that much of a problem as long as i don't overdo it.

In an odd sort of way I'm trying to reduce my diet to it's most simple elements of what i need physically, not psychologically. I seem convinced that what I need psychologically is getting the best of me. I weigh 250 pounds. That's at least fifty more pounds than I weighed when I got outta high school with a 32 inch (81 cm) waist. I'm down to two pair of pants I can get into, and my belt is in it's last notch, and too tight. What a drag, man.

The side-effect of nausea that comes with the territory of this prescription drug methotrexate has a lot to do with what tastes "acceptable" to me. Last night I ate an avocado with some mayonnaise, salt, and pepper, and could barely get it down my gullet. Lots of foods are affecting me this way. To the point, practically, that if I ate only what i could reasonably stomach I'd starve to death. If I'm gonna starve to death, then there's no sense in taking this medicine that makes me feel like I'm dying.

More and more, as time goes by, I'm impressed that people do what they do to impress a certain person or clique or crowd or group or class of society. I deliberately accuse some people of behaving this way in the e-mail discussion groups I participate in, and their response to such an accusation seems excessive at times. They don't wanna be accused of such a thing. They don't seem to wanna be so obvious.

What I'm writing about is like being in a room full of lusty young men who are chatting away about guy things, and a beautiful, impregnable woman enters that room. Procreation with all it's rituals comes into play, and all's fair in love and war. I made myself sensitive to this sort of interchanges between people when they're responding or reacting primarily to instinct.

I think this is one of the primary reasons I can't be married or even live with a woman for very long, in the past. I've written "in the past", because I've been fairly abstinent for the last thirty years. By having a vasectomy done around 1980, I have effectively been neutered, and I'm not moved by these dynamics except out of habit, and that habit has been culled out over time. I get to watch other people react to primary instinctual behavior who might swear it was not their motivation. Yes, it is.

When I was reading again in Sartre's Being and Nothingness he said that "desire" was the foundation of the for-itself, and when desire no longer operated as an incentive, then the for-itself was non-existent. I haven't mulled this tidbit around enough to get a sense of whether it's true for me or no, but it's beginning to look like it just might be so.

I eat different foods in runs. Recently, it's been frying up pork sausage, then frying some eggs in the grease it leaves in the skillet. Very tasty. I've been making a sausage and egg sandwich using sourdough bread slathered with copious amounts of Duke's mayonnaise, and that's all. Salt and pepper, maybe, and I'm good to go. It goes really well with cheap red burgundy.

My Non-existent Nerdiness

I've spent more time reading about solid state drives than I ought to. I read another long review about how this engineer tests the various brands to get the numbers on their performance. He seemed really frustrated. I didn't have to guess that. He wrote it several times himself. The real problem for him, as he seemed to explain it, was the big difference the hardware controllers the contemporary SSDs use. The old default hardware controller that most of the cheaper SSDs use today is much slower, but that is the only real difference in any of the SSDs made by any manufacturer.

I didn't learn much today by reading that long, technical article that I didn't already know from reading other long, technical articles. The flash memory manufacturers who have been around for a while are starting to come out with their own consumer renditions of SSDs with speedy new controllers that really up the ante for the small foundries. Intel/Micron, San Disk, and Samsung, etal., have recently introduced consumer and enterprise level SSDs that have garnered rave reviews for their speed and low usage of power.

When Intel gets into some product line, it's my impression that they have worked out all the kinks, and already figured it's gonna dominate the market or they're not interested. The SSDs they have recently offered to the retail marketers like newegg.com appear to be the cream of the current crop. They want a bunch of money for their new gadget. That's gonna change. It already has. The cheapest Intel SSD they had for sell on newegg a month ago was $600. I just checked it again this morning, and the price was $400. That's a lot more reasonable. Since they use the same SATA cable arrangements as the traditional SATA hard drive, they can be moved to another computer simply.

San Disk just came out with new SSDs that are faster even than Intel's SSDs, and according to what I'm reading online, they're considerably cheaper. I haven't run into much more information on them, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled. The race is on to get a lead share of this new storage device established, and the price is coming down. Computing is gonna get a lot faster in the year to come.

The big deal about SSDs is speed and low power usage. Traditional hard drives magnetically put the information on spinning platters. Moving parts that wear out. Moving parts that use a considerable amount of electricity to keep rotating. Both the spinning and the electricity it uses produces heat inside the computer case. The SSDs do that too, but at maybe an order of magnitude less.

This is the biggest problem laptops and small computers like my Mac Mini have. Traditional hard drives drain the batteries of the laptops more than any other feature, and they are usually the first part of any computer to fail. The SSDs don't have any moving parts and use a minimal of electricity to do what they do, and last a lot longer.

What I wanna do is put an Intel SSD in my Mac Mini. True they last a long longer and they're more reliable in some ways, but the big deal for me would be speed. The cheapest Intel SSD (now $400) would operate in my Mac Mini faster than the fastest rotating hard drive at any price on the market, and I can't put a fast hard drive in my Mac Mini anyway. The power supply isn't powerful enough, and it would get too hot inside that small case.

The Mac Mini uses a laptop hard drive that's very slow. The biggest bottleneck on the computer except for the onboard Intel graphics system is the slow response time of the hard drive. Much of the graphics slowness is due to the slow hard drive. I'd be killing two birds with one stone.

Solid state electronics came along after I studied electronic in the Navy. I studied and learned about vacuum tube circuits. The arrival of solid state transistors had a huge impact on the technical world, and particularly me. I knew just enough about how the technical world was changing into digital components to share the excitement in some small way. The consumer world was bombarded with how reliable they were compared to tubes, and no better example of that that the Sony Walkman portable radios no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Those were some pretty amazing pre-iPod times.

The traditional 5400 rpm laptop hard drive is practically the only analog part on my little computer. It's the only part of any computer that wears out because of it's moving parts. I really believe if I replace the hard drive in my Mac Mini that it will last much longer than I do, and it will continue to be all the computer I need unless I get antsy. The entire electronic make-up of it would be solid state and practically indestructible with reasonable treatment.

I'm looking forward the the next Apple OS called Snow Leopard. It's gonna be totally 64-bit throughout, including all the system drivers. It'll probably be out before summer, and if I got any money by then I'll probably buy a new computer to go with the OS so there won't be any hardware conflicts. I'm definitely interested in waiting to buy another computer until USB3 is default outta the box. That's gonna change everything, including how SSDs are connected externally.