Maybe I've found a way to get into my old blogs, but in case this only works once, you can go to where I regularly post these days at:

http://felixperegrino.com/

The Death Dreamer

There are times when I'd rather write stuff about thoughts that drift through my mind than to act responsibly and fulfill my social obligations or do the mountain of chores around my house that I can get by without doing because I don't appear to be deeply impressed by social obligations.

One of the chores that I'm putting off in order to mindlessly ramble through the other non-sense I haven't manifested yet is to finish the wall I'm putting up in my house. As a structural object it's very close to being what it needs to be in order to perform the designed function as a "wall". The biggest part of that function is to insulate my bathroom from the "new room" so that I can heat and cool the new room with the same machines I use to heat and cool my bedroom.

To insulate my bathroom from it's present state of construction will take a lot more money than I have to spend on it. I sorta have to do one project at a time to incrementally reach the good end, whatever that is. Basically, that end is to completely isolate each room in the house so that any one of them can be heated or cooled as appropriate to my ongoing temperament.

One of the most practical projects I've undertaken was to put an insulated wall around that portion of my house on the first story that I use as a kitchen. The reason it was practical is that it protects my water pipes from busting from freezing temperatures during the winter. All my plumbing is either in that space or the one above it, the bathroom.

Placing the bathroom above the kitchen was a dumb idea, and if and when I get the wherewithal I'll change it. I don't know how yet, but if and when I get the money (and I ain't croaked yet) it's gonna happen. It's inevitable that I'll die pretty soon after the county approves my construction practices and gives me a permit to have the electricity permanently installed. Right now, I can't imagine that happening, and soon enow, I might not be able to imagine it due to senility.

Selah

Life can be rude and quite tragic.
I am is that tragedy's dream.
It's home is a hollowed out mountain,
and it's life is short mountain stream
A poem tells it's tradigitous story.
it's words are a barbershop song
they are sung by a fretful perceiver
masquerading as Death all along.

fmp, 1/18/12

Modesty As An Art

☯ In my youth I read somewhere that one of the Hindu chants (I'm guessing, maybe it's Hindu) is a universal sort of mantrum to sing. It goes somewhat like "Om ne padme om." I sing it over and over with as many variations as I think of in the moment. Sometimes I actually go into a deep trance that can be quite wonderful in feeling, but it doesn't matter. I go there in the same way if use the Protestant hymn, The Lord's Prayer, just as handily. It really comes down to making a joyful noise before the Lord. If I can develop a flow, I can't not get joyful. Alexander Pope purportedly wrote, "Modesty is the art of power." I keep remembering this saying because I find it useful for dealing both with the external world of the senses, and internal world of nonsense. One is plural and the other is not. That's counter-intuitive isn't it? It's usually the other way around. One mostly means non-plural. The Other is legend. The external world is perceived by the senses. There are five of them plus a lick and a promise some call "the sixth sense". Inside, however, everything is nothing but the idea that it's something, or, in the specious present, no thing at all. Inside somethingness there is only no-thing-ness. Sartre wrote about nothingness as if he were redundantly chirping the same rationalizations many people already understand in other words. The end game for me of reading Sartre was discovering that I only seem to understand Sartre while in the act of reading the translated English version of Being and Nothingness. When I get through reading, usually reading aloud, I don't understand what I just finished reading. I read out loud to make sure I am not senselessly skim reading. Reading Sartre is a game I play with myself. It needs no meaning other than what arises in the moment... and then POOF!... it's gone. The back cover of the paperback book, amazingly, is still intact. Owning a hardback edition would be a joy. Maybe what I need is one of those text tablets the big bookstores are selling. They might be just the ticket for reading in bed. Especially if they don't need to have a reading light on, and a time for the device to go to sleep if I do. Like, if it falls out of my hands and don't move for a while it turns itself off. Reading aloud helps me relax some nights and gets me good and sleepy. It doesn't seem to matter what the content is. The complicated style of Sartre really requires focus to grasp on my best days. When I read just prior to sleep, however, attempting to cope with complex ideas to ward off the temptation to sleep means sleep usually wins. I started reading late at night to discover if falling to sleep from reading Sartre would help me to grok his philosophy. If it happened that way I can't remember what happened consciously. That's the whole point of "going to sleep". I lose consciousness. I don't necessarily lose consciousness as much I lose my awareness of it as a faculty. During one period of my life I attempted to stay conscious during an entire ninety minute sleep cycle, and emerge at the end of the cycle full conscious of what transpired at every level of the sleep pattern. There is a difference between losing consciousness and becoming unaware of consciousness. Being unaware of consciousness seems to be the default state. Currently, I'm astounded by Sartre's notion that consciousness only "is". It doesn't do "is not" in the same way personal maids don't do windows. It's the reasoning behind his claims about consciousness that causes me pause. I can only assume I grasp his reasoning correctly. I seem cowed to always be taking chances that what I think is true in my interpretation of his meaning when I write it here on the internet where any competent person can easily prove I'm a fool and an idiot to have my own take on Sartre's work. Read the disclaimer at the top of the page. My personal take on his intent is only true for me. Albeit that my rude interpretations may be composed more of my own approximations than Sartre's. He's dead. Maybe we'll talk about it when I join him. The reason consciousness only is and doesn't do "ex-is", is that consciousness doesn't require a ground of being for doing it's is-ness trip. Humans do. Probably all forms of life does. If being is the great primordial soup, then individuating out of the primal soup into individuality requires ex-is-ing (existing). To ex-is by maintaining your identity as an individual requires a ground-for-being. It is a compound form with a dual nature. I am is IT, and IT is me. The third element is unspeakable. '-)

I Use Labels Too Carelessly

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I'm writing my regular blog at felixperegrino.com now, but I composed this post to an e-mail discussion group about food, and I liked it enough to wanna save it to look at occasionally, so I'm putting it here for safekeeping. 


Hi David, 

I'm not wealthy enough to be that picky. Some people got phobias about metals. Not me. I was raised outta cast-iron pots and drank raw milk and spring water out of galvanized pails. Even now, infrequently, I use silver and copper colloids internally. I normally take dietary supplements with other metals in them every day, that is, if I'm holding. 

I do got phobias about plastics. How could a non-nerd like me possibly discern what's "food-grade" about plastic containers or no? I don't trust labels. Why would I? I wield them too carelessly myself. I ain't no walking encyclopedia about the chemical makeup of most ceramic glazes either. Moreover, all kinds of wooden utensils retain weird residuals that might be the death of me. 

In the past, as a homeless bum who might not have eaten for a week nor had a safe place to sleep for longer, upon encounter, I got less and less picky about what's wot with each passing moment. I don't even wanna remember what I et then nor the despicable acts I may have performed as I lay dying. '-)



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Changes

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I'm changing to my own website:


http://felixperegrino.com

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Around The Mulberry Bush

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It's hot outside, but not too humid even though it's somewhat cloudy. I've been laying on the second-floor deck on the chaise lounge and watching the wind sway the pine tops. It amazes me still that I can now see the pine needles on the trees a long way off, and that the blue of the sky and the green of the leaves is really blue and green. 

My new plastic lenses are uncontaminated by the nicotine brown that stained my cataracts. If you have ever noticed the brown stains on people's fingers that smoke cigarettes, then you've seen the color I had to see the world through before the eye surgery. 

At the time I didn't know any difference. The cataracts grew and got stained with brown slowly and incrementally. I didn't actually know it was there until it was gone. I knew it was gone immediately after my right eye was operated on. Maybe not immediately after the surgery, but the next day after they took the plastic cover and bandages off the next morning. That is when I knew I had been seeing a brown-tinted world. I had a clear lens in my right eye and a brown one in my left eye. 

Three weeks later the ophthalmologists removed the cataract in my left eye and replaced it with an intraocular lens like they had installed in my right eye. Except that this time, the world wasn't so clear when they took the patch off the next day after the surgery. They operated early one Friday morning. Then, took the patch off the next morning, and the world was grayed out in my left eye. It took two days before I began to think the surgery might work out right. 

Now, it's a couple of weeks later. As far as the seeing part of it is concerned the completed surgical procedure on both eyes has worked well. Like I mentioned above, I can see individual pine needles at the top of the pine trees a hundred yards (91.4 M) away. I just don't know why anymore. Being possessed by really good vision without eyeglasses doesn't make sense like it once did. 

It doesn't make sense in the sense of sensuality. Having pretty good vision didn't make my libido return in full force. Looking at fertile young women doesn't arouse me anymore than watching turtles sit unmoving on a log down by the pond. They're still there looking sexy to potent young men, but all I see is where that's gonna lead to... babies... and hard times ahead. Fools! We're all fools...

People were telling me that my eyeballs looked swollen right after the procedures were done, and as time passed they commented on how they seemed not as big. Not as swollen. But, nobody has yet told me my eyes look about normal again. They don't feel normal. There is a new normal that is not normal to me yet. 

There is a circle of physical sensitivity around each of my eyeballs maybe a half inch wide. The feeling follows around the edge of the socket holes in my skull. It's no hinderance. It doesn't appear to interfere with my seeing stuff. It doesn't hurt or make me happy either. It's just there, and it worries me a little that I don't know what's going on. 

I may have options at this juncture about whether to reconnect objects that made sense with my old way of seeing to my new way of seeing. It's becoming more apparent that my recall is not as sharp as it used to be. It's very reassuring to have a web connection and a search engine to remember content I used to depend on in order to make a living. 

Why would I wanna remember the details and formulas of how to fit steam pipe when I haven't done it for nearly twenty-five years, and not very likely to ever do it again. What I can do, however, is to remember little parts of it and use that in a search engine to find the whole thing. Once it's sitting there in front of me I can remember what the formulas are for. 

Yet, it's a little like being able to see well again. What I abandoned as not useful in the past doesn't become useful again just because it's clearly available for the old reasons. I still don't fit or weld pipe anymore, even if I might do it better than ever because I can see how once again. 

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The Zen Of Spicy Food

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Humans eat spicy foods for other than the nutritional value it sometimes includes. They eat it for how it helps the immune system fight against bacteria that kills people. It doesn't matter whether chile peppers, garlic, onions, and leeks has any nutritional value as long as the chemicals in them destroy unfriendly gut bacteria, and promote the growth of friendly gut bacteria that manufactures all the vitamins the body needs to prevail over nature. 

My personal and contaminated research into the notion that the human immune system is composed in it's entirety by their gut bacteria doesn't appear to be going away. Contrarily, I continue to be moved by information from all the cooking shows on TV instead of relying on the medicos who are using placebo-like suggestion to get me to believe I'll be just another victim of the worst case scenario. 

This line of thought started when I heard what amounts to a rumor that in some parts of Italy the food they cook is the medicine they take on a daily basis. They eat foods that depress the unfriendly gut bacteria, and have heaping helpings of food and drink that promotes the growth of friendly gut bacteria. 

Yesterday I found myself watching a program about chili peppers, and how the cultures that eat them have a lot fewer health problems than cultures who avoid them. The capsaicin in chili peppers gets rid of the bad gut bacteria in the same way onions and garlics and leeks do. Besides, the foodies talked about how peoples who eat peppers can turn the pain associated with the hotness of peppers into pleasure (sometime with a sexual bent), and instead of feeling pain when they eat peppers they feel pleasure. 

This is not exactly new thought. Before refrigeration made food preservation handier, a lot of the ways people preserved foods was with products that kept the unfriendly bacteria away from the food they tried to keep from rottening during the off seasons. Like preserving olives in olive oil. Eventually the olive oil will oxidate and spoil the broth, but it keeps food alive for months until it does. 

I'm not much of an expert on preserving food, so the ways the old people did it. Even my parent's generation practiced these methods. Most of the homes in the neighborhoods I grew up in had smoke houses for salt curing ham and bacon. My mother "put up" half gallon jars of vegetable soup mix for the winter for years even after she got her first refrigerator. Canned foods became prevalent and were the basic products for separate grocery stores. 

Having a "strong constitution" in the past meant that a person's gut bacteria was in balance and they didn't get sick every time other people did because of something they all et. The idea is that friendly gut bacteria destroy unfriendly bacteria, but sometimes it's the gut environment itself that makes the difference in whether the friendly bacteria can win this war of the gods. 

Salt preserves meat because unfriendly gut bacteria can't survive in a salt-laden environment. They gotta have oxygen to breed successfully, and that's why antioxidants are supposed to be good for you. It's also why smoke is used to cure meat. Smoke protects by killing off the oxygen in the curing process. 

This is a priori speculation at it's worst. '-) Read my disclaimer at the top. I'm not trying to tell the truth here, but rather, I'm writing to see what comes out when I entertain certain ideas. 

Yesterday, after I watched the TV show on chili peppers, I went and bought some peppers and used an onion and some garlic and a can of pinto beans and made me a killer of a supper. There was so much anti-unfriendly gut bacteria stuff in the meal I made, that the crown of my head was still singing when I woke up this morning. 

I only ate a small bowl of it. This morning I turned the stove back on and put some frozen breasts of chicken into this spicy goop, and I'm going to eat some of it for breakfast soon. Right after I drink some kefir that contains trillions of friendly bacteria to help fight the good fight. 

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