I changed the "You have new mail" boing sound to another sound a while back to something that sounds like a submarine sound. For a few months, upon hearing the new sound unexpectedly, it startled me, and made me wonder how it is that I can get in such ruts or patterns when all it takes is double-clicking a check box to change it.
So, I changed it again, and a couple of days later, again, and the new "You've got new mail." boing is horribly dissonant and distracting. It scrapes long fingernails across a real slate chalk board. Aiyyeeeee! Boom! I changed it just now to a more non-descript boing that actually SOUNDS like a boing. Maybe I need a Chinese gong. No! A real one, that has a USB rig that causes a real gong hammer to bop the gong when I get new mail.
Maybe I could find a gong for announcing new mail that reverberates precisely at the same idealistic rate as my alpha brainwaves, and another for delta that works off a random generator designed to keep me from preparing a counter-move to defend myself "against" the reality of my experience with that which is God to me. "A man's gotta do... "
I'm getting all giddy now about the possibility that I might be able to get set up with another rig that will allow me to run the new Snow Leopard OS Apple is supposed to introduce in September. My funds for doing this is extremely limited, and anything I end up doing will put me in some sort of jeopardy financially.
One thing is for sure. Whatever I do, it won't be an impulsive move. Maybe a foolish move, but not an unconsidered one. I've had a secret yearning to own and operate a 64-bit computing device since the early 90s of the last century of the last millennium. Somebody had a production 64-bit chip and operating system and the price of it and the unavailability of software drivers and applications put it out of range for a middle-aged man already in his early fifties.
I was in my early fifties when i bought my first home computer. I used a borrowed TS-80 up until then. I was amazed at the speed the TS-80 computed my instructions. The TS-80 was not exactly a speed demon as computers went in those day, and not even a blip these days. Witnessing something happen that fast changed my whole mental world. I began to think for the first time, "Hmmm... if that computer can perform that calculation so fast I can't even recognize the details of the transaction, and my brain is supposed to make this TS-80's speed compare to a child's toy, then maybe the shit I've seen crossing my mind's eye could really have substance. It could be... true... and not a flash-in-the-pan fool's gold, but the real thoughts of genius I always suspected they were.
I figure if that 4-bit TS-80 could change my expectations so radically that I could consider cosmic consciousness because of the speed of that primitive rig, then sitting down to a full-blown 64-bit computer with a full-blown 64-bit operating system with more DRAM available than data on the SSD, and that's the computer I'm using every day to surf the web and do e-mail with, the very speed of it is going to rock my world, and make even more amazing mental configurations believable than ever before.
Now, Apple seems to have put it together part and parcel at an affordable price and has the hutzpah to pull it off. I can't imagine this feat not galling Microsoft and Bill Gates as much as anything has. He's worked at it harder and was first-est with the most-est, and nobody cared. I almost feel sorry for him. Poor little billionaire. My heart goes out to him.
Windows has always copy-catted Apple. No blame. Microsoft has no class. Why would they not imitate someone who does? I personally do it all the time. I don't know anybody who don't. In this particular situation, however, it's Apple that's copy-catting Windows in the 64-bit OS realm, and they're gonna make it happen simply because they got class, and that's gotta hurt. Particularly that ogre Ballmer. It wouldn't surprise me if Jobs showed compassion and didn't yuk it up. That's what being classy IS. '-)
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Home Gardening
57) Jesus said, "The Kingdom of the Father is like a man who had
[good] seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the
good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he
said to them, 'I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up
the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.' For on the day
of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will
be pulled up and burned."
http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/other/gospel.thomas
............................
This idiotic notion persisted until recently. It's a very sad story. The farmers in this area would have found this method of farming believable. It became life-threatening for my father to go to the old farmers who worked this land around here by the ways of their fathers. Almanacs at best.
Really. Usually read by the wife of the leading farmer in the neighborhood who had to do it because nobody else much could read. Book-larning was considered a hoity toity affectation only practiced by itinerant, barely educated lawyers, and nomadic, fiery-eyed evangelical preachers like Billy Graham who threatened them with God Almighty if they didn't dig a little deeper.
They were intractably resolved to planting and reaping and sowing when the leading citizen did it. They had crazy rules about even listening to the local radio, and like today, thought their kids would be despoiled by the media and the silly radio programs like Fibber McGee and Molly.
That's why North Carolina had to enact a law to hire agriculture teachers for every high school in the state. They literally had to pass laws to force these local yokels to send their children to school, and to hire people to enforce that law. Most of this legislative activity happened toward the end of the Great Depression, but it picked up where it left off after World War Two.
It liked to have killed my father on a personal, subjective level however, that is, to be hired to change the status quo which he felt in his heart to be the most idealistic way to live he'd ever encountered when we first moved here from Mississippi. Literally, by the time he retired from teaching and advising farmer's sons to get educated for themselves, and to learn to farm using the latest scientific techniques researched at the State universities, the farming industry was taken over my big money, and the local family farms that were the basis of my father's idealistic pronouncements about heaven on Earth, were for the most part, gone.
I've worked crosswords since I was a young boy. Even after I started buying spiral-bound notebooks of fifty or so Sunday-sized NYT puzzles I didn't realize that I was going to the Games section of Barnes and Nobles to pick and choose them.
I only realized that when they moved the location of the puzzle books inside the nearest store, and when I asked a clerk where they were, she looked quizzically at me for a moment and said, "Oh, you mean the Games section. We moved that to the other side of the center aisle."
I was miffed to realize my self-taught sacred rituals were rated commercially as "games". I wandered around for hours in shock. I knew exactly who I was unconsciously looking for to sooth my frazzled nerves. In situations like these, I always made passes at girls who wore glasses.
Okay, so they just bitches to help me through the night, but there's a certain type, you know, that will listen to me lie about anything as long as I tell them, "I love you." My anima isn't jealous. She doesn't wear glasses or even get old. She forces me to witness nubile young girls turn into wobbly old hags, and then asks me, "Whatta ya think of me now... wise guy?"
[good] seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the
good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he
said to them, 'I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up
the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.' For on the day
of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will
be pulled up and burned."
http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/other/gospel.thomas
............................
This idiotic notion persisted until recently. It's a very sad story. The farmers in this area would have found this method of farming believable. It became life-threatening for my father to go to the old farmers who worked this land around here by the ways of their fathers. Almanacs at best.
Really. Usually read by the wife of the leading farmer in the neighborhood who had to do it because nobody else much could read. Book-larning was considered a hoity toity affectation only practiced by itinerant, barely educated lawyers, and nomadic, fiery-eyed evangelical preachers like Billy Graham who threatened them with God Almighty if they didn't dig a little deeper.
They were intractably resolved to planting and reaping and sowing when the leading citizen did it. They had crazy rules about even listening to the local radio, and like today, thought their kids would be despoiled by the media and the silly radio programs like Fibber McGee and Molly.
That's why North Carolina had to enact a law to hire agriculture teachers for every high school in the state. They literally had to pass laws to force these local yokels to send their children to school, and to hire people to enforce that law. Most of this legislative activity happened toward the end of the Great Depression, but it picked up where it left off after World War Two.
It liked to have killed my father on a personal, subjective level however, that is, to be hired to change the status quo which he felt in his heart to be the most idealistic way to live he'd ever encountered when we first moved here from Mississippi. Literally, by the time he retired from teaching and advising farmer's sons to get educated for themselves, and to learn to farm using the latest scientific techniques researched at the State universities, the farming industry was taken over my big money, and the local family farms that were the basis of my father's idealistic pronouncements about heaven on Earth, were for the most part, gone.
I've worked crosswords since I was a young boy. Even after I started buying spiral-bound notebooks of fifty or so Sunday-sized NYT puzzles I didn't realize that I was going to the Games section of Barnes and Nobles to pick and choose them.
I only realized that when they moved the location of the puzzle books inside the nearest store, and when I asked a clerk where they were, she looked quizzically at me for a moment and said, "Oh, you mean the Games section. We moved that to the other side of the center aisle."
I was miffed to realize my self-taught sacred rituals were rated commercially as "games". I wandered around for hours in shock. I knew exactly who I was unconsciously looking for to sooth my frazzled nerves. In situations like these, I always made passes at girls who wore glasses.
Okay, so they just bitches to help me through the night, but there's a certain type, you know, that will listen to me lie about anything as long as I tell them, "I love you." My anima isn't jealous. She doesn't wear glasses or even get old. She forces me to witness nubile young girls turn into wobbly old hags, and then asks me, "Whatta ya think of me now... wise guy?"
Monday, July 27, 2009
Felix's Tobacco Stick Restaurant
The Civil Rights laws passed in the early 60s was enacted after I reached adulthood, but I could have avoided the personal aftermath by becoming a Muslim in Turkey. This startling revelation struck me yesterday, and I almost dismissed it's significance by shining it on. I had a choice back then I completely ignored.
While that doesn't surprise me, it's certainly a little depressing. I don't have that choice now because I'm an old man with deep habits. I ain't got the time left it would require to abandon my world-weary ways. I wouldn't do it anyway. The Muslims are as weird to me in theory as the people I'm stuck here with now. Everything I know about the Muslim faith has been gained through the public media. In truth, I know less about that religion in general than practically any other religion. I'm still not curious and that's a little odd to me.
I started using Splenda, the sugar substitute several years ago. I read about the research on it before it was introduced to the consumer market. I was waiting for it to show up in the grocery store. Now, Splenda has a new product I'm trying out. They somehow managed to put one gram of dietary fiber in each individual Splenda packet. I'm down with that. I've had trouble being constipated due to the prescription medicines I'm putting inside my body, and I've been led to believe that getting enough dietary fiber in my diet is the way to manage that.
I've been eating hot oatmeal in the mornings for that very purpose, and before I started with the prescription drugs it appeared to do what needs to be done to keep my toilette happening on a regular basis. But, with the introduction of the drugs into my system, everything changed, and I had some real problems with constipation. The only relief I've gotten happened when my first rheumatologist doubled the amount of my calcium/vitamin D prescription. That made things much better, and then I received the colonoscopy procedure. The result of that was another appointment to get another colonoscopy, but in June, 2019. Big relief.
So, the last couple of mornings I fixed my coffee and oatmeal and sweetened them with a mixture of a one packet serving of Splenda with the dietary fiber, and one packet of something else I'm giving a whirl, stevia, a natural sweetener I've heard my vegetarian friends rattle on about (I'm not like that. We're just friends. I don't even know why.), and by count, I consumed 8-10 grams of dietary fiber.
Since I've been to the bathroom several times this morning, I think it may be safe to assume that consuming lots of dietary fiber is an effective antidote to constipation. I think that's good news. I suspect I don't actually need all that much calcium, and I'm careful about getting enough vitamin D all the time, so I'm gonna cut back the doubled calcium to my original prescription, and I might be able to cut back on the oatmeal too, especially since I'm basically eating it for the sake of the dietary fiber.
I don't know if the article I read about how tomatoes, and especially foods that contain "cooked down" tomatoes, like what Italian cooking is famous for, is based on fact (I haven't seen much more about it), but I'm acting like it does. What I read into that information was that tomatoes have this chemical that stops the bad kind of cholesterol from coagulating in the blood stream, and it's the tomatoes that keep the Mediterraneans from having the heart diseases more commonly found in the Western cultures as much or more than the resveratrol in their famous red wines.
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-resveratrol13-2009jul13,0,53028.story
I read about Italians cooking like food was medicine for what ails them. I like the idea. I ain't being stupid about this. I can read the statistics of the Italian's health and longevity as well as any competent person, I just like the idea of cooking and preparing food (since I gotta have it) as if I were my own physician attempting to maintain my health or heal what ails me.
In that vein/vain, I chopped up some raw white onions and put them in my skillet with a dollop of canola oil to let them simmer and cook down. I added some commercially prepared flakes of roasted garlic, and lemon-flavored pepper, and a sprinkle of Parmesan/Garlic popcorn seasoning salt (not much, I'm cutting back on salt to lose weight), and then I realized I didn't have any meat for flavoring. I was wrong, and that's what tickled me.
Two days ago I was in the Wal-Mart SuperCenter shopping around for groceries, and I looked up, and here come this beautiful woman down the aisle toward me, and ignoring me as if I didn't exist as she always has. I've seen and admired her particular sort of elegant beauty on several wonderful occasions. She works for Wal-Mart, and gives the appearance of being on their management team. She may run the whole store.
The cat gets my tongue and I've never spoken a mumbling word to her. She has this silver gray hair she keeps long and usually in something that used to be called a "french twist" bun. I love older women who let their hair turn gray and keep it long. It adds so much to their character, and at this stage of my life, careactor matters. I don't know why. I'm prejudiced about it too. Particularly toward tall, beautiful, elegant women who have been beautiful and have been told of it constantly over a long lifetime. I had to say something...
I knew how to posture myself to stop her in her tracks and stare at me, so I did that, and then I watched to witness what I would say to her in order to get her attention and still show respect for her position in life. Bacon bits. Suddenly, I'm excusing myself to this woman, and telling her I'm confused, because I don't know the truth of whether I'm stopping her from her appointed duties because I'm fascinated by her beauty or whether I'm stopping her to ask where the bacon bits (like what goes in salads usually) are located in the store?
First, she did acknowledge I'd just told her I thought she was beautiful. She did it almost as a duty, as an obligation she had decided to artificially cater to in order to be politically expedient, and a barely recognizable twinkle on a personal level as if my remarks precipitated an overworked inside joke I didn't share in. Then, she walked me to the aisle entrance where the bacon bits were located, stood there until I found them, and strode officially away.
The bacon bits are processed by Hormel and were real bacon. When I remembered that I bought them as if I were going to use them in a salad, I didn't have any other salad ingredients to put the bacon bits together with, so I dumped half of them into the onior/garlic rue I was cooking up, then remembered I had a cup of cold dark-roasted Black Silk coffee left over in the pot one day old, and so I poured that in the mix also, and let all of it boil down to a pasty thickness before I added the Mexican tomato chunks, and waited for the flavors to get up next to each other.
Damn! That be some tasty shit, man, I'm good. I oughta open my own restaurant, but candidly, I'd just as soon win the lottery and let somebody else's fingers do the walking.
While that doesn't surprise me, it's certainly a little depressing. I don't have that choice now because I'm an old man with deep habits. I ain't got the time left it would require to abandon my world-weary ways. I wouldn't do it anyway. The Muslims are as weird to me in theory as the people I'm stuck here with now. Everything I know about the Muslim faith has been gained through the public media. In truth, I know less about that religion in general than practically any other religion. I'm still not curious and that's a little odd to me.
I started using Splenda, the sugar substitute several years ago. I read about the research on it before it was introduced to the consumer market. I was waiting for it to show up in the grocery store. Now, Splenda has a new product I'm trying out. They somehow managed to put one gram of dietary fiber in each individual Splenda packet. I'm down with that. I've had trouble being constipated due to the prescription medicines I'm putting inside my body, and I've been led to believe that getting enough dietary fiber in my diet is the way to manage that.
I've been eating hot oatmeal in the mornings for that very purpose, and before I started with the prescription drugs it appeared to do what needs to be done to keep my toilette happening on a regular basis. But, with the introduction of the drugs into my system, everything changed, and I had some real problems with constipation. The only relief I've gotten happened when my first rheumatologist doubled the amount of my calcium/vitamin D prescription. That made things much better, and then I received the colonoscopy procedure. The result of that was another appointment to get another colonoscopy, but in June, 2019. Big relief.
So, the last couple of mornings I fixed my coffee and oatmeal and sweetened them with a mixture of a one packet serving of Splenda with the dietary fiber, and one packet of something else I'm giving a whirl, stevia, a natural sweetener I've heard my vegetarian friends rattle on about (I'm not like that. We're just friends. I don't even know why.), and by count, I consumed 8-10 grams of dietary fiber.
Since I've been to the bathroom several times this morning, I think it may be safe to assume that consuming lots of dietary fiber is an effective antidote to constipation. I think that's good news. I suspect I don't actually need all that much calcium, and I'm careful about getting enough vitamin D all the time, so I'm gonna cut back the doubled calcium to my original prescription, and I might be able to cut back on the oatmeal too, especially since I'm basically eating it for the sake of the dietary fiber.
I don't know if the article I read about how tomatoes, and especially foods that contain "cooked down" tomatoes, like what Italian cooking is famous for, is based on fact (I haven't seen much more about it), but I'm acting like it does. What I read into that information was that tomatoes have this chemical that stops the bad kind of cholesterol from coagulating in the blood stream, and it's the tomatoes that keep the Mediterraneans from having the heart diseases more commonly found in the Western cultures as much or more than the resveratrol in their famous red wines.
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-resveratrol13-2009jul13,0,53028.story
I read about Italians cooking like food was medicine for what ails them. I like the idea. I ain't being stupid about this. I can read the statistics of the Italian's health and longevity as well as any competent person, I just like the idea of cooking and preparing food (since I gotta have it) as if I were my own physician attempting to maintain my health or heal what ails me.
In that vein/vain, I chopped up some raw white onions and put them in my skillet with a dollop of canola oil to let them simmer and cook down. I added some commercially prepared flakes of roasted garlic, and lemon-flavored pepper, and a sprinkle of Parmesan/Garlic popcorn seasoning salt (not much, I'm cutting back on salt to lose weight), and then I realized I didn't have any meat for flavoring. I was wrong, and that's what tickled me.
Two days ago I was in the Wal-Mart SuperCenter shopping around for groceries, and I looked up, and here come this beautiful woman down the aisle toward me, and ignoring me as if I didn't exist as she always has. I've seen and admired her particular sort of elegant beauty on several wonderful occasions. She works for Wal-Mart, and gives the appearance of being on their management team. She may run the whole store.
The cat gets my tongue and I've never spoken a mumbling word to her. She has this silver gray hair she keeps long and usually in something that used to be called a "french twist" bun. I love older women who let their hair turn gray and keep it long. It adds so much to their character, and at this stage of my life, careactor matters. I don't know why. I'm prejudiced about it too. Particularly toward tall, beautiful, elegant women who have been beautiful and have been told of it constantly over a long lifetime. I had to say something...
I knew how to posture myself to stop her in her tracks and stare at me, so I did that, and then I watched to witness what I would say to her in order to get her attention and still show respect for her position in life. Bacon bits. Suddenly, I'm excusing myself to this woman, and telling her I'm confused, because I don't know the truth of whether I'm stopping her from her appointed duties because I'm fascinated by her beauty or whether I'm stopping her to ask where the bacon bits (like what goes in salads usually) are located in the store?
First, she did acknowledge I'd just told her I thought she was beautiful. She did it almost as a duty, as an obligation she had decided to artificially cater to in order to be politically expedient, and a barely recognizable twinkle on a personal level as if my remarks precipitated an overworked inside joke I didn't share in. Then, she walked me to the aisle entrance where the bacon bits were located, stood there until I found them, and strode officially away.
The bacon bits are processed by Hormel and were real bacon. When I remembered that I bought them as if I were going to use them in a salad, I didn't have any other salad ingredients to put the bacon bits together with, so I dumped half of them into the onior/garlic rue I was cooking up, then remembered I had a cup of cold dark-roasted Black Silk coffee left over in the pot one day old, and so I poured that in the mix also, and let all of it boil down to a pasty thickness before I added the Mexican tomato chunks, and waited for the flavors to get up next to each other.
Damn! That be some tasty shit, man, I'm good. I oughta open my own restaurant, but candidly, I'd just as soon win the lottery and let somebody else's fingers do the walking.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Roids
I didn't have a clue what I was gonna write about this Sunday morning until I wrote the quoted material below. In my opinion these statements are a direct result of taking a prescription steroid called Prednisone ordered by my rheumatologist at the VA Hospital to bring the swelling in my joints down to a more comfortable level of largeness.
I think the way these steroids (along with two other prescription drugs designed to reduce inflammation that also have potentially despicable side-effects as well) are producing pretty much the same affect on me as they do on professional wrestlers, but they're not the kind of steroids (that I'm aware of) that pump me up and give me bulging muscles. Damn, man, whatta drag.
I suspect the real difference between the professional wrestler's reaction to the steroids he takes to bulk up and be a big, strong, mean-spirited mofo, and my reaction to these prescription drugs, is that I took Tim Leary's advice in my late twenties, and "Tuned in, Turned on, and dropped out..." I.E., as a psychonaut, I can direct the energy of these prescription drugs effects the same way I eventually learned to direct the energy of an altered state while using LSD-25 for an unreasonably lengthy period of ti-me.
I've resumed meditating for hours at a time in the last couple of months. That probably has something to do with the legal drugs I'm required by the arthritis clinic to put in my body on a regular basis. I'm not agin it. Frankly, I'd rather croak than deal with the pain not putting these high potency prescription drugs in my old body. A lot of the base reason for so much meditating, however, is about how I didn't recognize until it came to a crisis that I had developed a couple of serious, uncurable diseases. That alone has had a humbling effect on me, which the steroids have delightfully ignored! LOL
"It embarrasses me to weigh into this, but what you're describing seems more like an off-on button to me than something I have to create in order to stand "on the forged foundation created within." (Sigh... how sweet... how romantic...)
Maybe it's a gender thing for mommies, especially when they get around to using their special church lady "building blocks" to keep their snotty children busy while they sneak into the kitchen to take a snort to help them ignore their feral screaming.
Some days I get ecstatically giddy that I am a man. Women don't get to wax all noble nearly as much when they're being the hausfrau tyrant bitches they have to be to keep their sniveling bastard children from pissing me off so that I don't beat them all senseless just to get a little cardio-vascular thang going for my daily constitutional.
I gotta start smoking a pipe so that I can use the stem of it to point to the contentions of my dissatisfaction and expect real results from the odas. Seriously, If I were young again, I'd become a Muslim convert, move to a place where I could legally have oodles of legal wives I could keep in a barn like chattel or cattle. Now... that... might be worth keeping a job for.
I have to forgive myself for not doing it earlier in this lifetime, but how was I to know there is a heaven on Earth when the behaviors I'm punished for here are rewarded elsewhere, and not only rewarded, but expected or the male has to pay for their chattel's crimes yo'self."
Between the way I was raised Jim Crow and getting disenfranchised by a series of Civil Rights laws in the early Sixties, and my social customs (for good or ill) being criminalized, and Women's Lib turning what's left of that into some sort of reprehensible pig, I picked a weird body to reincarnate into.
All of a sudden, when I wrote those quoted paragraphs above and hit the Send button to commit myself to exploring these hovering unconscious, sometime spiteful thoughts, I realized that this entire situation is the way it is because of where I live.
The customs my people imbued me with to the bone is only legally challenged in the United States where religious freedom is a farce. Okay, it's pretty much a farce everywhere else if it is here, so if being somewhere else gets the monkey off my back, why am I living here in the Bible Belt taking abuse and shining it on like I'm helpless to do anything about it?
I'll probably just stay here and accept that I'm a coward. I don't really want a bevy of wives I can treat anyway at all, much less as chattel. That defeats the whole purpose of making a literal profession out of shirking responsibility at every turn of the screw. When I was a kid I hated having to stop having fun at some kid's paradise in order to return home before dark to feed the livestock. Being married was the same way to me.
Maybe if I won the lottery ten out of every twenty draws and became an instant zillionaire, and I could hire people to run my human ranches where I kept all my cuties. Naaa... having a lotta money would make me a janitor to my possessions even more than I am now.
I'm sure as hell ain't gwine change religions and have to learn a whole new dogma at my age. It's not that I'm so unwilling. I know a lotta dogma I won't raised to give credence to. Entire systems of thought me-more-ized and stashed away as my treasures in heaven.
These days, the doing of this learning seems awfully redundant. The place I seem to be stashing my little precious tidbits appears to be the exact sa-me place I'm getting them from. So, why am I fetching them to the sensory dimension and strutting around like a peacock for? Just to show off? Hell, that's more than possible. '-)
I may have been driving myself crazy trying to control something that's impossible for any individual to fully control. The important point for me recently is just that. To realize it's not a subjective problem I can address by shape shifting.
My youngest brother was gracious enough to look through the Apple Support system and found a poster with a problem similar to mine. He couldn't find a way to make the fonts and formatting he set on his own machine stay that way once he posted to the internet.
The responses he got from the pundits were only to remind him that his intention can be conflicted by about anybody else's intention, even if they don't know that what they've innocently intended in their own behalf reframed the original writer's choice of font and formatting. several respondents pointed out that the various operating systems and their various versions and iterations don't use the same font libraries and collections, and the offending OS just picks the closest one to it.
I still think that could be resolved by a WYSIWYG text editor and mail program designed for the Mac. Even the Apple administrators on the Support site seemed dismayed because other than Mac, third-party e-mail applications are folding because they can't compete with the inevitable Apple juggernaut that seems to enjoy cavorting with dinosaurs.
Things seem to be going Apple's way since they found a way to deal amicably with legacy software and moved on with the development of the World Wide Web, but they don't give the appearance that they're all that ready to challenge Microsoft on the enterprise front. I'm glad. I hope Macs lose favor and have even less of a percentage of the enterprise market. It discourages opportunists who prefer the scattergun philosophy.
I think the way these steroids (along with two other prescription drugs designed to reduce inflammation that also have potentially despicable side-effects as well) are producing pretty much the same affect on me as they do on professional wrestlers, but they're not the kind of steroids (that I'm aware of) that pump me up and give me bulging muscles. Damn, man, whatta drag.
I suspect the real difference between the professional wrestler's reaction to the steroids he takes to bulk up and be a big, strong, mean-spirited mofo, and my reaction to these prescription drugs, is that I took Tim Leary's advice in my late twenties, and "Tuned in, Turned on, and dropped out..." I.E., as a psychonaut, I can direct the energy of these prescription drugs effects the same way I eventually learned to direct the energy of an altered state while using LSD-25 for an unreasonably lengthy period of ti-me.
I've resumed meditating for hours at a time in the last couple of months. That probably has something to do with the legal drugs I'm required by the arthritis clinic to put in my body on a regular basis. I'm not agin it. Frankly, I'd rather croak than deal with the pain not putting these high potency prescription drugs in my old body. A lot of the base reason for so much meditating, however, is about how I didn't recognize until it came to a crisis that I had developed a couple of serious, uncurable diseases. That alone has had a humbling effect on me, which the steroids have delightfully ignored! LOL
"It embarrasses me to weigh into this, but what you're describing seems more like an off-on button to me than something I have to create in order to stand "on the forged foundation created within." (Sigh... how sweet... how romantic...)
Maybe it's a gender thing for mommies, especially when they get around to using their special church lady "building blocks" to keep their snotty children busy while they sneak into the kitchen to take a snort to help them ignore their feral screaming.
Some days I get ecstatically giddy that I am a man. Women don't get to wax all noble nearly as much when they're being the hausfrau tyrant bitches they have to be to keep their sniveling bastard children from pissing me off so that I don't beat them all senseless just to get a little cardio-vascular thang going for my daily constitutional.
I gotta start smoking a pipe so that I can use the stem of it to point to the contentions of my dissatisfaction and expect real results from the odas. Seriously, If I were young again, I'd become a Muslim convert, move to a place where I could legally have oodles of legal wives I could keep in a barn like chattel or cattle. Now... that... might be worth keeping a job for.
I have to forgive myself for not doing it earlier in this lifetime, but how was I to know there is a heaven on Earth when the behaviors I'm punished for here are rewarded elsewhere, and not only rewarded, but expected or the male has to pay for their chattel's crimes yo'self."
Between the way I was raised Jim Crow and getting disenfranchised by a series of Civil Rights laws in the early Sixties, and my social customs (for good or ill) being criminalized, and Women's Lib turning what's left of that into some sort of reprehensible pig, I picked a weird body to reincarnate into.
All of a sudden, when I wrote those quoted paragraphs above and hit the Send button to commit myself to exploring these hovering unconscious, sometime spiteful thoughts, I realized that this entire situation is the way it is because of where I live.
The customs my people imbued me with to the bone is only legally challenged in the United States where religious freedom is a farce. Okay, it's pretty much a farce everywhere else if it is here, so if being somewhere else gets the monkey off my back, why am I living here in the Bible Belt taking abuse and shining it on like I'm helpless to do anything about it?
I'll probably just stay here and accept that I'm a coward. I don't really want a bevy of wives I can treat anyway at all, much less as chattel. That defeats the whole purpose of making a literal profession out of shirking responsibility at every turn of the screw. When I was a kid I hated having to stop having fun at some kid's paradise in order to return home before dark to feed the livestock. Being married was the same way to me.
Maybe if I won the lottery ten out of every twenty draws and became an instant zillionaire, and I could hire people to run my human ranches where I kept all my cuties. Naaa... having a lotta money would make me a janitor to my possessions even more than I am now.
I'm sure as hell ain't gwine change religions and have to learn a whole new dogma at my age. It's not that I'm so unwilling. I know a lotta dogma I won't raised to give credence to. Entire systems of thought me-more-ized and stashed away as my treasures in heaven.
These days, the doing of this learning seems awfully redundant. The place I seem to be stashing my little precious tidbits appears to be the exact sa-me place I'm getting them from. So, why am I fetching them to the sensory dimension and strutting around like a peacock for? Just to show off? Hell, that's more than possible. '-)
I may have been driving myself crazy trying to control something that's impossible for any individual to fully control. The important point for me recently is just that. To realize it's not a subjective problem I can address by shape shifting.
My youngest brother was gracious enough to look through the Apple Support system and found a poster with a problem similar to mine. He couldn't find a way to make the fonts and formatting he set on his own machine stay that way once he posted to the internet.
The responses he got from the pundits were only to remind him that his intention can be conflicted by about anybody else's intention, even if they don't know that what they've innocently intended in their own behalf reframed the original writer's choice of font and formatting. several respondents pointed out that the various operating systems and their various versions and iterations don't use the same font libraries and collections, and the offending OS just picks the closest one to it.
I still think that could be resolved by a WYSIWYG text editor and mail program designed for the Mac. Even the Apple administrators on the Support site seemed dismayed because other than Mac, third-party e-mail applications are folding because they can't compete with the inevitable Apple juggernaut that seems to enjoy cavorting with dinosaurs.
Things seem to be going Apple's way since they found a way to deal amicably with legacy software and moved on with the development of the World Wide Web, but they don't give the appearance that they're all that ready to challenge Microsoft on the enterprise front. I'm glad. I hope Macs lose favor and have even less of a percentage of the enterprise market. It discourages opportunists who prefer the scattergun philosophy.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Working Fo' The Debil, Fo' Mah Pay
I'm still fascinated by some ideas I got from watching a TEDtalk on happiness. Gibson spoke of two people they had on file in their research department from their participation in some previous projects. One of these two people had won the lottery for millions of dollars, and the other person had been in a car wreck and become paralyzed from his neck down. The orator spoke of how after just four months both people had adjusted to their new situation enough to resume their search for the bright side of their experiences. They made lemonade. The speaker seemed convinced it's what we all do as homo sapiens. Eventually, however, we are not gonna get over what happens to us, and are gonna die like a dog in a ditch. So?
"Self-conversation is held in contempt by some pundits, but I strongly disagree with them, and would be glad to take a walk on the wild side with my detractors to see who comes back from what's out there.
Nothing is out there, either usually or generally, but you and I, and the fence post. Ever."
This is just crazy. I wrote the first paragraph to set up the quote I wrote somewhere else this morning, in order to put it here to continue to explore the "Ever." bit. I've spent so much time alone for my whole life. I'm alone now. I haven't been in the physical, face-to-face presence of another human being for a couple of days now since my next door neighbor and sister-in-law stopped by with her grandson and asked me to keep an eye on things while she went to Wilmington to be with her daughter while she took an operation involving gender problems.
More than I really wanted to know, but since I've vaguely known her daughter from a previous marriage just about all her life, I had to act concerned, when I was only resorting to cultural patterns we both had ingrained in us since childhood. This is the kind of decision-making that's sometime offered to us in a way that seems to force it upon us despite the form used to make it look like an opportunity-for-life.
It's difficult to pin down, but I'm almost giddy from the results I'm getting from the prescribed medicine I'm taking. I'm pretty sure it's the prednisone steroids the rheumatologist ordered for me after consulting right there in front of me with his supervisor. "They" decided to "bring me down off the prednisone" by giving me more than I've ever had before, and for three whole months duration.
The amount of prednisone I'm taking by doctor's order is nowhere near too much according to what I've read on the internet. They started me out on 20 milligrams a day for seven days, etc., and it can easily go up to 200 milligrams a couple of times a day, but since it lowers the immune system it's still dangerous because it makes the consumer of it vulnerable to other diseases.
The swelling in my wrists and hands has gone down dramatically. I may be as giddy about that pertinent facticity as my being on legal steroids is giddy-ish. Now that they've shrunk in size I realize how swollen they've been for a long time. I just ignored it like any other abnormality, and pretended to be Teflon Man. There was a crisis point that lead to the obvious diagnosis of arthritis that I didnt "see" myself until they proved it to with rituals designed for just that. I was on the inside of what they saw that convinced them my joints weren't supposed to be that... hmmm... large. Now that much has been previously, but tactfully mentioned for a good long time now. The fact that I have large joints is not a new conversation bit.
The fact that my large joints were not large naturally is somewhat of a surprise, but not really, arthritis, specifically rheumatoid arthritis runs in my mother's side of the family. Physically, I look more like them than my father's siblings and their genetically depleted families. Really. My younger brother has a son, who went for the ROTC college deal with the Marines, and he's it for my father's side of the family on all sides since the Civil War.
In a way though, these people, including myself, have always been bon vivants, and that kind of blood line has never been properly recorded. Nobody knows. It only takes an afternoon nap by poppa, and a visit by momma to the woodpile, ooooooh-la-la, and "... life goes on, even after the thrill of living is gone."
I'm really whipping it up playing the piano scales now. By that, I mean that along with the swelling in my hands and wrists going down I can play the scales and mess around with the blues with no pain for a satisfying period of time. I'm making hay while the sun shines. I've been through this routine before. When the prednisone wears off I won't be able to rip through nothing on the piano, and be lucky to hunt and peck these blog entries on this computer keyboard. But, until then I'm cutting the fool 'til I drop from exhaustion.
"Self-conversation is held in contempt by some pundits, but I strongly disagree with them, and would be glad to take a walk on the wild side with my detractors to see who comes back from what's out there.
Nothing is out there, either usually or generally, but you and I, and the fence post. Ever."
This is just crazy. I wrote the first paragraph to set up the quote I wrote somewhere else this morning, in order to put it here to continue to explore the "Ever." bit. I've spent so much time alone for my whole life. I'm alone now. I haven't been in the physical, face-to-face presence of another human being for a couple of days now since my next door neighbor and sister-in-law stopped by with her grandson and asked me to keep an eye on things while she went to Wilmington to be with her daughter while she took an operation involving gender problems.
More than I really wanted to know, but since I've vaguely known her daughter from a previous marriage just about all her life, I had to act concerned, when I was only resorting to cultural patterns we both had ingrained in us since childhood. This is the kind of decision-making that's sometime offered to us in a way that seems to force it upon us despite the form used to make it look like an opportunity-for-life.
It's difficult to pin down, but I'm almost giddy from the results I'm getting from the prescribed medicine I'm taking. I'm pretty sure it's the prednisone steroids the rheumatologist ordered for me after consulting right there in front of me with his supervisor. "They" decided to "bring me down off the prednisone" by giving me more than I've ever had before, and for three whole months duration.
The amount of prednisone I'm taking by doctor's order is nowhere near too much according to what I've read on the internet. They started me out on 20 milligrams a day for seven days, etc., and it can easily go up to 200 milligrams a couple of times a day, but since it lowers the immune system it's still dangerous because it makes the consumer of it vulnerable to other diseases.
The swelling in my wrists and hands has gone down dramatically. I may be as giddy about that pertinent facticity as my being on legal steroids is giddy-ish. Now that they've shrunk in size I realize how swollen they've been for a long time. I just ignored it like any other abnormality, and pretended to be Teflon Man. There was a crisis point that lead to the obvious diagnosis of arthritis that I didnt "see" myself until they proved it to with rituals designed for just that. I was on the inside of what they saw that convinced them my joints weren't supposed to be that... hmmm... large. Now that much has been previously, but tactfully mentioned for a good long time now. The fact that I have large joints is not a new conversation bit.
The fact that my large joints were not large naturally is somewhat of a surprise, but not really, arthritis, specifically rheumatoid arthritis runs in my mother's side of the family. Physically, I look more like them than my father's siblings and their genetically depleted families. Really. My younger brother has a son, who went for the ROTC college deal with the Marines, and he's it for my father's side of the family on all sides since the Civil War.
In a way though, these people, including myself, have always been bon vivants, and that kind of blood line has never been properly recorded. Nobody knows. It only takes an afternoon nap by poppa, and a visit by momma to the woodpile, ooooooh-la-la, and "... life goes on, even after the thrill of living is gone."
I'm really whipping it up playing the piano scales now. By that, I mean that along with the swelling in my hands and wrists going down I can play the scales and mess around with the blues with no pain for a satisfying period of time. I'm making hay while the sun shines. I've been through this routine before. When the prednisone wears off I won't be able to rip through nothing on the piano, and be lucky to hunt and peck these blog entries on this computer keyboard. But, until then I'm cutting the fool 'til I drop from exhaustion.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Old Dog/New Tricks
I'm gonna pay for my arrogance. I have in the past. No reason to think that won't continue ad infinitum. The next few paragraphs are something I wrote earlier today. I messed around with it and edited it from a million different angles. I seem momentarily convinced it's about the funniest stuff I got in me. It might help to understand I'm being sarcastic and that I wrote this to somebody I admire. Otherwise, it might not be so funny at all. No blame.
***
Resolve. Yes. What the hell has that got to do with "terms" and "Yeshua"? I'm stating that my trumped up accusations about you carrying on like a Sunday School teacher seems to rattle your cage. I don't know why. You don't understand memory. Not one in ten thousand do. I don't have to know why you have no control over your reactive mind, even in a conventional sense, in order push your iconic Norman Rockwell-designed default buttons. God, you're soooo translucent. Have you no pride? You know a mystery... Mister Flattop... my ass! Tars! Feathers! Git outta town!
Now, I'm seriously joking. Perhaps if you were to study Scientology and get them to help you resolve your extreme, discombobulating REACTIONS to the discomforting memores of your pasty-faced, pimpled youth, you might become "clear" enow to resolve your own issues, and stop wasting the entire world's precious... and soon to be yore, and no more... ti-me.
***
My world is getting a little crazy because of vitamin D. Not only am I taking four prescribed calcium tablets with 400mg of vitamin D in each one, occasionally I take one 2000 milligram tablet by my own leave for the sheer shock value of it. I read an article by a reputable doctor who suggested it. He's probably a little crazy about vitamin D too. Most Sun worshipers are.
I'm sitting here on the second floor inside my house where I put my computer desk when I moved my computer back upstairs after remodeling a bit. It's located in the southeastern corner of the upstairs rooms. There is a set of two outside decks on the eastern side of my house. One 10' X 10' preserved wood deck for the downstairs that leads to my front door, and another one on the second floor with a set of outside stairs (16 of them) that connects the two decks. The upstairs deck leads to another outside door that's located directly to the left of where I'm sitting. When I get up in the morning and open this door beside my computer rig, the rising sun shines directly on my mostly nakid, wrinkled old body and bathes it in light. Nature's way of getting even more vitamin D inside my skin.
I've mentioned that I subscribed to an AppleScript mailing list. It's fairly active. There's a steady stream of posts that don't get off-topic much at all. Apparently there is a cadre of old scripters who have been active on the list for a long time. There names seem to be familiar to the old Apple fanboi base, and they're kinda worshiped in a groupie sort of way for their technical prowess. There doesn't appear to be a stuck-up bone of contention amongst them.
That's about as different as it can possibly be on the other active e-mail discussion list I like to pretend at. It seems like just about everybody deliberately lies about stuff that shouldn't even be aired in decent people's company, and then initiates ad hominem attacks against all dissenters. Not me, though, exactly the opposite, I only feign attack, and then mock the indignant defenses my accusers find crumbling about them in tattered ruins. '-)
I'm not only nutty about vitamin D this morning, but I did something radical I might have ought to have done a long time ago, but that's not unusual at all for a double-Taurus-both-Sun-and-Moon. Taurus rules inertia. They can keep their stopping still beyond most people's call of duty. I.E., I changed the font style and the size in this text editor for the first time since I brought the computer back to my house.
I can be such a stubborn fool. I don't know how I've survived without getting shot with shit and then killed for stinking. For all practical purposes I haven't really survived anyway. The personalities I created to serve me in the various adventures I've enjoined, in the past, got out-and-out murdered by the very people they were designed to please. What a drag, man, "nobody loves you when you're down and out.", but there's a lesson.
A body gotta get skilled at dissembling and taking on the persona of a handicapped person or be a natural at portraying bums and down and out individuals or you might believe your own act, and go down in flames. I mean, that's WHY I took acting lessons for years off and on. YMMV, but I'm proselytizing that it shouldn't have. I'm telling ya, you can know too much about how to act around homo sapiens in the wild. Get professional help. At least consider going to acting school. LOL
The size of this font is making my eyes roll in confusion. I changed from a teeny tiny 10-point font to a bold 14-point font, and my eyes, habituated for years to the old default font, got the can't-help-its and acting jive-assed and jitterbuggy.
I'm so new to AppleScript I still find myself fascinated by all the cracks I find in the sidewalk. I don't have a clue where my intrique will lead to. There is lots of stuff about AppleScript that came with the Operating System that I haven't looked at. Just now I opened up some ready-made scripts with the heading "URLs". One of them was a script for opening CNN inside a browser, so I double-clicked on it to see what would happen. Exactly what it was supposed to do. A browser page with CNN headlines staring me in the face. Quick. Uncomplicated. Worth a shortcut on the desktop for sure. I've been doing things the hard way.
***
Resolve. Yes. What the hell has that got to do with "terms" and "Yeshua"? I'm stating that my trumped up accusations about you carrying on like a Sunday School teacher seems to rattle your cage. I don't know why. You don't understand memory. Not one in ten thousand do. I don't have to know why you have no control over your reactive mind, even in a conventional sense, in order push your iconic Norman Rockwell-designed default buttons. God, you're soooo translucent. Have you no pride? You know a mystery... Mister Flattop... my ass! Tars! Feathers! Git outta town!
Now, I'm seriously joking. Perhaps if you were to study Scientology and get them to help you resolve your extreme, discombobulating REACTIONS to the discomforting memores of your pasty-faced, pimpled youth, you might become "clear" enow to resolve your own issues, and stop wasting the entire world's precious... and soon to be yore, and no more... ti-me.
***
My world is getting a little crazy because of vitamin D. Not only am I taking four prescribed calcium tablets with 400mg of vitamin D in each one, occasionally I take one 2000 milligram tablet by my own leave for the sheer shock value of it. I read an article by a reputable doctor who suggested it. He's probably a little crazy about vitamin D too. Most Sun worshipers are.
I'm sitting here on the second floor inside my house where I put my computer desk when I moved my computer back upstairs after remodeling a bit. It's located in the southeastern corner of the upstairs rooms. There is a set of two outside decks on the eastern side of my house. One 10' X 10' preserved wood deck for the downstairs that leads to my front door, and another one on the second floor with a set of outside stairs (16 of them) that connects the two decks. The upstairs deck leads to another outside door that's located directly to the left of where I'm sitting. When I get up in the morning and open this door beside my computer rig, the rising sun shines directly on my mostly nakid, wrinkled old body and bathes it in light. Nature's way of getting even more vitamin D inside my skin.
I've mentioned that I subscribed to an AppleScript mailing list. It's fairly active. There's a steady stream of posts that don't get off-topic much at all. Apparently there is a cadre of old scripters who have been active on the list for a long time. There names seem to be familiar to the old Apple fanboi base, and they're kinda worshiped in a groupie sort of way for their technical prowess. There doesn't appear to be a stuck-up bone of contention amongst them.
That's about as different as it can possibly be on the other active e-mail discussion list I like to pretend at. It seems like just about everybody deliberately lies about stuff that shouldn't even be aired in decent people's company, and then initiates ad hominem attacks against all dissenters. Not me, though, exactly the opposite, I only feign attack, and then mock the indignant defenses my accusers find crumbling about them in tattered ruins. '-)
I'm not only nutty about vitamin D this morning, but I did something radical I might have ought to have done a long time ago, but that's not unusual at all for a double-Taurus-both-Sun-and-Moon. Taurus rules inertia. They can keep their stopping still beyond most people's call of duty. I.E., I changed the font style and the size in this text editor for the first time since I brought the computer back to my house.
I can be such a stubborn fool. I don't know how I've survived without getting shot with shit and then killed for stinking. For all practical purposes I haven't really survived anyway. The personalities I created to serve me in the various adventures I've enjoined, in the past, got out-and-out murdered by the very people they were designed to please. What a drag, man, "nobody loves you when you're down and out.", but there's a lesson.
A body gotta get skilled at dissembling and taking on the persona of a handicapped person or be a natural at portraying bums and down and out individuals or you might believe your own act, and go down in flames. I mean, that's WHY I took acting lessons for years off and on. YMMV, but I'm proselytizing that it shouldn't have. I'm telling ya, you can know too much about how to act around homo sapiens in the wild. Get professional help. At least consider going to acting school. LOL
The size of this font is making my eyes roll in confusion. I changed from a teeny tiny 10-point font to a bold 14-point font, and my eyes, habituated for years to the old default font, got the can't-help-its and acting jive-assed and jitterbuggy.
I'm so new to AppleScript I still find myself fascinated by all the cracks I find in the sidewalk. I don't have a clue where my intrique will lead to. There is lots of stuff about AppleScript that came with the Operating System that I haven't looked at. Just now I opened up some ready-made scripts with the heading "URLs". One of them was a script for opening CNN inside a browser, so I double-clicked on it to see what would happen. Exactly what it was supposed to do. A browser page with CNN headlines staring me in the face. Quick. Uncomplicated. Worth a shortcut on the desktop for sure. I've been doing things the hard way.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
My Figs Are Ripe
Up until this woman named Isabella got on her high horse about paradox. I only thought I knew what the term meant until she nailed me to the cross for the way I carelessly used it. Then, I had to get serious about how I might more thoughtfully approach the word, if ever, if I was going to use it at all again.
That's not how I came to my subjective understanding of projection that this same woman disagrees with vehemently. She's almost polite about it. After all, she is a self-professed Libra, but she must have grown up around seaports.
She's apparently used to not having her academic references go unchallenged by nincompoops like me, and there's no blame for her not wanting to deal with that, but I like her feedback, so I ruffle her feathers occasionally to discover exactly how she will attempt to put me in my place. I've never met her in person. You know how it is online. The face-to-face truth might be she ain't a she at all.
As usual, I had a vision about what projection is, and returned from that rather spectacular vision (aroused, roiling, white light event horizons and all) muttering, "Everything is nothing but the idea that it's something, and it could be anything at all." The fact that I got back with it in any coherent fashion at all was a miracle. I wrote it down, of course, but like with my remembering vision there was no need. How could I forget?
This vision happened in the same window of ti-me as my remembering vision, but in a different location in the same town during a different season of the year. Both visions, however, happened within a hundred yards of the Tar River upstream from the Pamlico Sound that's contained for the most part by the eastern-most ribbons of the outer banks near Manteo. Take a look:
http://www.pamlico.com/
This quaint (to me) statement I found myself uttering and sputtering to get it out into the sensory dimension as if by will power alone was to haunt me for decades, and still seems perched proverbially above my "chamber door" and croaking, when asked if will ever leave and begone from me, "Nevermore!"
I don't actually know if that statement is the real God's own truth or even a false god's truth, but as I reflected on it's possible me-and-thee-ing (meaning) for three decades it became some sort of truth for me. but with my creative beret in hand.
I just now returned from a visit to my fig tree. I took a step ladder out there to reach the juicy, sun-drenched ones on top. I wait all year long, and worry myself sick over potential late frosts in the Spring for this fig fruiting season to come into being. I have to compete with the birds and June bugs to get a share of them, and that's why I haven't eaten anything else today but tree-ripened figs. There's not a chance in hell I'll get sick from over-indulging because they get gone too fast.
That's not how I came to my subjective understanding of projection that this same woman disagrees with vehemently. She's almost polite about it. After all, she is a self-professed Libra, but she must have grown up around seaports.
She's apparently used to not having her academic references go unchallenged by nincompoops like me, and there's no blame for her not wanting to deal with that, but I like her feedback, so I ruffle her feathers occasionally to discover exactly how she will attempt to put me in my place. I've never met her in person. You know how it is online. The face-to-face truth might be she ain't a she at all.
As usual, I had a vision about what projection is, and returned from that rather spectacular vision (aroused, roiling, white light event horizons and all) muttering, "Everything is nothing but the idea that it's something, and it could be anything at all." The fact that I got back with it in any coherent fashion at all was a miracle. I wrote it down, of course, but like with my remembering vision there was no need. How could I forget?
This vision happened in the same window of ti-me as my remembering vision, but in a different location in the same town during a different season of the year. Both visions, however, happened within a hundred yards of the Tar River upstream from the Pamlico Sound that's contained for the most part by the eastern-most ribbons of the outer banks near Manteo. Take a look:
http://www.pamlico.com/
This quaint (to me) statement I found myself uttering and sputtering to get it out into the sensory dimension as if by will power alone was to haunt me for decades, and still seems perched proverbially above my "chamber door" and croaking, when asked if will ever leave and begone from me, "Nevermore!"
I don't actually know if that statement is the real God's own truth or even a false god's truth, but as I reflected on it's possible me-and-thee-ing (meaning) for three decades it became some sort of truth for me. but with my creative beret in hand.
I just now returned from a visit to my fig tree. I took a step ladder out there to reach the juicy, sun-drenched ones on top. I wait all year long, and worry myself sick over potential late frosts in the Spring for this fig fruiting season to come into being. I have to compete with the birds and June bugs to get a share of them, and that's why I haven't eaten anything else today but tree-ripened figs. There's not a chance in hell I'll get sick from over-indulging because they get gone too fast.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Slow Day At Flat Rock
"I'm not invested in why you have to make these particular rules of conscience sacred or any others. Where do you hope putting them on a pedestal will get you? Who do you want to impress that you're some special kind of person because you force yourself to kowtow to this cult-like mentality?"
I wrote the paragraph above in an e-mail response to a discussion group. Sometime the entire entry here comes from what starts out to be a reply to an e-mail group, but it never gets posted there. The people I find myself responding to don't even know I've written back.
It's not happening that way on the new e-mail discussion list I subscribed to. I haven't posted anything there. It's a group run by Apple supporting AppleScript, a scripting language for automating repetitive tasks on the applications that run on the Apple Operating System.
I get these posts from the group just like any other mailing list, and I read them through to see if they have any scripts I might find useful. If so, then I copy and paste them into the Script Editor that comes included with the Apple operating system to see if they'll compile and run. Most of them don't.
The software targets AppleScripts are designed to reach for are mostly different on each computer, because different users name the same sort of file or folder what they want to for personal reasons. AppleScript needs the exact name and the exact address for most scripts to work right.
AppleScript is supposed to work pretty good with PhotoShop, but you gotta have a copy of PhotoShop on your computer to have a target address for one of the scripts that show up in the discussion group posts to have a chance of the posted script working. I don't got PhotoShop installed or most of the other ridiculously expensive software that works well with Apple.
There are plenty of other applications that come free on a new Apple that AppleScript can be very useful with. Today I saved a script that fetched my IP numbers. It compiled and ran on my computer just like it showed up in the e-mail post. The script even drew up a small dialogue window that offered to retrieve either the internal IP number or the external IP number for the internet. I've never really needed to know those IP numbers, but if I ever do, I got a ready-made script to jump up and get them for me at the click of my mouse.
I seem fascinated a little by the idea of learning to cope with a system for thinking about things that don't hold no truck with careless syntax. What I've been reading about AppleScript is that it's one of the easier scripting languages to learn. I may be filtering for what I wanna see, but the writing style of the list members seems mighty neat and tidy. That's the idea of me studying and learning as much as I do. I think the side-effect of having to pay so much attention to syntax that It will help me to write better.
I wrote the paragraph above in an e-mail response to a discussion group. Sometime the entire entry here comes from what starts out to be a reply to an e-mail group, but it never gets posted there. The people I find myself responding to don't even know I've written back.
It's not happening that way on the new e-mail discussion list I subscribed to. I haven't posted anything there. It's a group run by Apple supporting AppleScript, a scripting language for automating repetitive tasks on the applications that run on the Apple Operating System.
I get these posts from the group just like any other mailing list, and I read them through to see if they have any scripts I might find useful. If so, then I copy and paste them into the Script Editor that comes included with the Apple operating system to see if they'll compile and run. Most of them don't.
The software targets AppleScripts are designed to reach for are mostly different on each computer, because different users name the same sort of file or folder what they want to for personal reasons. AppleScript needs the exact name and the exact address for most scripts to work right.
AppleScript is supposed to work pretty good with PhotoShop, but you gotta have a copy of PhotoShop on your computer to have a target address for one of the scripts that show up in the discussion group posts to have a chance of the posted script working. I don't got PhotoShop installed or most of the other ridiculously expensive software that works well with Apple.
There are plenty of other applications that come free on a new Apple that AppleScript can be very useful with. Today I saved a script that fetched my IP numbers. It compiled and ran on my computer just like it showed up in the e-mail post. The script even drew up a small dialogue window that offered to retrieve either the internal IP number or the external IP number for the internet. I've never really needed to know those IP numbers, but if I ever do, I got a ready-made script to jump up and get them for me at the click of my mouse.
I seem fascinated a little by the idea of learning to cope with a system for thinking about things that don't hold no truck with careless syntax. What I've been reading about AppleScript is that it's one of the easier scripting languages to learn. I may be filtering for what I wanna see, but the writing style of the list members seems mighty neat and tidy. That's the idea of me studying and learning as much as I do. I think the side-effect of having to pay so much attention to syntax that It will help me to write better.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
I Need A Vegetarian Dog
I this strange sound relationship with my brother's dogs who live next door without realize they don't own me. They get so jealous they can't bark as good as me. I practice the ol' bel canto exercises, and it drives them nuts. I get tired of them hanging around? I scream at them in C#-6, and they run for their lives. They have since they were puppies.
The only way they can tell they don't own me is that I don't feed them much at all. The left-over grease in my frying pan, maybe, when I'm switching food groups like from fish to chicken. Not often, once every couple of weeks at best. They're not my dogs. Occasionally, I'll give the stuff from my refrigerator that's getting too old to know whether it's too old or not.
It's too bad they won't eat old vegetables. I throw a lot of unused vegetables away. Many times simply because I have to buy in family-sized packaging and I live by myself. Left-overs are left-overs. I think people who live alone try to justify spending their money on more than they need by boring themselves to death with eating the same thing over and over again before it spoils. When I win the lottery I'm moving to some place with a lot of restaurants. What a drag, man.
The figs are beginning to ripen. I went out and found four or five that had turned brown and were drooping on their stems. That's the best way for me to tell they're ripe. The color can fool me. It's only when the fig gets ripe enough for the weight of the developing sugars to make the stem sag a big that I know if I pick it, it's gonna be naturally sweet and tasty. There was never even a threat of frost much this year, and they grew big and fat from non-resistance I guess. One of the other ways to tell if they're ripe is that the outer skin tends to split open when they just perfect, but that's when the birds and the bugs know they're ripe too. The interesting thing about that this year is that the figs got bigger than usual without the outer skin splitting. Big, fat, and juicy.
There was a family doctor who practiced medicine here all during the time I was growing up. He was considered to be eccentric for several reasons, but being a Seventh Day Adventist in a small town full of moderate Protestants and the fact that he planted fruit trees all over his yard at his downtown residence was curious, but the fact that he claimed just about all his patients had malaria topped the list. Of course, none of these odd differences from the norm were all that drastic. The coastal plains are full of swamps and mosquitoes, and he may have been more right than wrong.
I think I'm remembering that old man not only because of the joy of eating tree ripened fruit for a change, but because last week I got prescribed a new medicine for the rheumatoid arthritis that was developed to combat malaria. My new rheumatologist explained this briefly to me, and reminded me that the methotrexate medicine I'm also taking was developed for a certain type of cancer. Both of these designer drugs were "designed" for other symptoms of other human conditions, but the side-effect of seriously reducing inflammation made them useful for combatting RA. It's worrisome that it's also making me notice a new feeling in my kidneys.
I asked a friend who knows a lot about pharmaceuticals what the side-effects of the new drug are, and he said he wasn't familiar with it. Then, he started breaking down the chemical meaning of the name of the drug, while knowing it was used to treat malaria, and the last part of the name is "quine". Of course, quinine. My father used to take quinine from having visited that odd doctor. What goes around comes around. Maybe this doctor knew that quinine reduced inflammation, and prescribed it for any ailment that benefitted from that side-effect. Whatever he did seem to work. He had a lotta patients. He proselytized eating fresh fruits to anybody who would listen, and demonstrated it at his own house.
The only way they can tell they don't own me is that I don't feed them much at all. The left-over grease in my frying pan, maybe, when I'm switching food groups like from fish to chicken. Not often, once every couple of weeks at best. They're not my dogs. Occasionally, I'll give the stuff from my refrigerator that's getting too old to know whether it's too old or not.
It's too bad they won't eat old vegetables. I throw a lot of unused vegetables away. Many times simply because I have to buy in family-sized packaging and I live by myself. Left-overs are left-overs. I think people who live alone try to justify spending their money on more than they need by boring themselves to death with eating the same thing over and over again before it spoils. When I win the lottery I'm moving to some place with a lot of restaurants. What a drag, man.
The figs are beginning to ripen. I went out and found four or five that had turned brown and were drooping on their stems. That's the best way for me to tell they're ripe. The color can fool me. It's only when the fig gets ripe enough for the weight of the developing sugars to make the stem sag a big that I know if I pick it, it's gonna be naturally sweet and tasty. There was never even a threat of frost much this year, and they grew big and fat from non-resistance I guess. One of the other ways to tell if they're ripe is that the outer skin tends to split open when they just perfect, but that's when the birds and the bugs know they're ripe too. The interesting thing about that this year is that the figs got bigger than usual without the outer skin splitting. Big, fat, and juicy.
There was a family doctor who practiced medicine here all during the time I was growing up. He was considered to be eccentric for several reasons, but being a Seventh Day Adventist in a small town full of moderate Protestants and the fact that he planted fruit trees all over his yard at his downtown residence was curious, but the fact that he claimed just about all his patients had malaria topped the list. Of course, none of these odd differences from the norm were all that drastic. The coastal plains are full of swamps and mosquitoes, and he may have been more right than wrong.
I think I'm remembering that old man not only because of the joy of eating tree ripened fruit for a change, but because last week I got prescribed a new medicine for the rheumatoid arthritis that was developed to combat malaria. My new rheumatologist explained this briefly to me, and reminded me that the methotrexate medicine I'm also taking was developed for a certain type of cancer. Both of these designer drugs were "designed" for other symptoms of other human conditions, but the side-effect of seriously reducing inflammation made them useful for combatting RA. It's worrisome that it's also making me notice a new feeling in my kidneys.
I asked a friend who knows a lot about pharmaceuticals what the side-effects of the new drug are, and he said he wasn't familiar with it. Then, he started breaking down the chemical meaning of the name of the drug, while knowing it was used to treat malaria, and the last part of the name is "quine". Of course, quinine. My father used to take quinine from having visited that odd doctor. What goes around comes around. Maybe this doctor knew that quinine reduced inflammation, and prescribed it for any ailment that benefitted from that side-effect. Whatever he did seem to work. He had a lotta patients. He proselytized eating fresh fruits to anybody who would listen, and demonstrated it at his own house.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Sign In First, Then We'll Talk
_
"Thank you for the shuffle."
What? Over so soon? I didn't even get to tell you what I bought my second wife with over thirty years ago today. Hmm... it was today... right? It sure as hell wasn't with visions of sugarplums like the first one. Nor the hundreds of others beneficently allowed to envision a dream nobody but a desperate fool like me would support on the sly before either one of them, and none after.
My me-more slouch bag I used on the road seems to have more capacity for other's thoughts for supposing they're this or that instead of the end product of their own rules of conscience.
"Plop! Plop! Fizz! Fizz! Oh, what a relief it is." ~ AlkaSeltzer
_
I love making tossed-word salad. The reason I'm so amused is how I'm somehow able to imagine people trying to figure out what the hell I'm trying to say, even though it's as plain as day to me. Well, it is when I'm writing it, but when I go back to edit for typos and missing words and phrases it brings me back down to earth pretty fast. Like a lotta people I think a lot faster than I type. As I get older I also appear to delude myself into thinking I've already written my thoughts down that contrarily never see the light of my computer screen. Damn, I wanted to write "the light of day."
Aside from the physical condition my condition is in, my mental and spiritual outlook seem so much more like they always have been recently. They seem to be-co-me more of themselves as I deliberately rely on them to guide me toward more formidable non-strategies. In other words, more complex intricacies to leave the other holding the bag with.
I seem to have hooked up with my understanding that my ever-intriguing "remembering vision" is what some early Christians of the Docetic persuasion called "gnosis". To me, as a universal sort of quest various homo sapiens individuals undertake, by any other nayme, it's the sa-me deal all over the earth and probably the universe from ti-me im-me-more-I-am-able. Like the quest the apprentices of the American Indian shamans would make. Or, the identical quest made by the shaman apprentices of the Australian aborigines.
I wasn't raised to be any of those "noble savages", but to be a savage of my own making through religious conversion at the age of nine years old. One of the more delightful aspects of submitting my errant will to a revealed source is how those who conjure to apperceive from man-made systems of expertise appear bound to their borrowed devices by piously offering hope for sale in the awkward guise of feigned wisdom.
It has only been since I subscribed to the Gospel of Thomas discussion group and started writing there that I connected my remembering vision with the concept of gnosis. I have to write or I don't know what I got on my mind. I was writing about all the other miraculous events that have serendipitously popped up in my life. Trying to milk them through writing to find some significance in what happened.
Writing about my remembering vision seems to ask a lot from some potential readers. I think it's probably more believable that I deliberately jumped off a 800 foot cliff to avoid freezing to death, and survived without a scratch, than to believe I actually had a "vision" that filled in all the blanks I didn't even know were there. The odd thing is that I received the remembering vision AFTER I had committed myself to the State Mental Hospital, because I ALREADY thought I must be profoundly insane. Granted. I didn't do it for the good of society, but selfishly, and only for me. Nobody in there believed my act. They warned me I wouldn't be there long. I was glad to hear that. Why else would I have done what I did?
Maybe choosing a pseudonym like "felix" with the impression it was a Latin word that meant happy and prosperous had to go awry when the people on the construction sites I played tough guy at started associating it with Felix The Cat. I was annoyed at first. I thought the Latin definition was sorta noble and uplifting. It was never to be. My natural curiosity forced the issue and made 'felix' a cat with a bag of tricks the prevailing and ubiquitous goto. Why would it not? My legal name means "the supplanter". So, nothing much changed but my futile, life-long ambition to invisibility.
I received the vision after I'd given up and accepted life without the slightest justification for being. When I stopped insisting on so-me deep need for me-and-thee-ing (meaning). Being me is just fine without you. Carry on. See you around chump. That makes so-me dreadfully nervous I fear. So does the fear of dying. Everybody down deep gnows The Terror is waiting for your body to croak, and then it's gonna swallow who-you-think-you-are into it's whale-like belly to join all the other lost souls. Aiiiiiyyyyyeeeeeee!
I find myself changing from writing here on my blog entry and responding to posts on the Thomas e-mail discussion group. Sometimes I like what I've written on one venue and include it on the other. I recently subscribed to Apple's AppleScript e-mail discussion list, and I'll probably write one thing to the other doing that too. I don't mind changing horses in mid-stream one bit. It makes for great tossed-word salad. I'm the only one who ever knows what I mean anyway. Why not mix metaphors until I go stark raving mad. '-)
"Thank you for the shuffle."
What? Over so soon? I didn't even get to tell you what I bought my second wife with over thirty years ago today. Hmm... it was today... right? It sure as hell wasn't with visions of sugarplums like the first one. Nor the hundreds of others beneficently allowed to envision a dream nobody but a desperate fool like me would support on the sly before either one of them, and none after.
My me-more slouch bag I used on the road seems to have more capacity for other's thoughts for supposing they're this or that instead of the end product of their own rules of conscience.
"Plop! Plop! Fizz! Fizz! Oh, what a relief it is." ~ AlkaSeltzer
_
I love making tossed-word salad. The reason I'm so amused is how I'm somehow able to imagine people trying to figure out what the hell I'm trying to say, even though it's as plain as day to me. Well, it is when I'm writing it, but when I go back to edit for typos and missing words and phrases it brings me back down to earth pretty fast. Like a lotta people I think a lot faster than I type. As I get older I also appear to delude myself into thinking I've already written my thoughts down that contrarily never see the light of my computer screen. Damn, I wanted to write "the light of day."
Aside from the physical condition my condition is in, my mental and spiritual outlook seem so much more like they always have been recently. They seem to be-co-me more of themselves as I deliberately rely on them to guide me toward more formidable non-strategies. In other words, more complex intricacies to leave the other holding the bag with.
I seem to have hooked up with my understanding that my ever-intriguing "remembering vision" is what some early Christians of the Docetic persuasion called "gnosis". To me, as a universal sort of quest various homo sapiens individuals undertake, by any other nayme, it's the sa-me deal all over the earth and probably the universe from ti-me im-me-more-I-am-able. Like the quest the apprentices of the American Indian shamans would make. Or, the identical quest made by the shaman apprentices of the Australian aborigines.
I wasn't raised to be any of those "noble savages", but to be a savage of my own making through religious conversion at the age of nine years old. One of the more delightful aspects of submitting my errant will to a revealed source is how those who conjure to apperceive from man-made systems of expertise appear bound to their borrowed devices by piously offering hope for sale in the awkward guise of feigned wisdom.
It has only been since I subscribed to the Gospel of Thomas discussion group and started writing there that I connected my remembering vision with the concept of gnosis. I have to write or I don't know what I got on my mind. I was writing about all the other miraculous events that have serendipitously popped up in my life. Trying to milk them through writing to find some significance in what happened.
Writing about my remembering vision seems to ask a lot from some potential readers. I think it's probably more believable that I deliberately jumped off a 800 foot cliff to avoid freezing to death, and survived without a scratch, than to believe I actually had a "vision" that filled in all the blanks I didn't even know were there. The odd thing is that I received the remembering vision AFTER I had committed myself to the State Mental Hospital, because I ALREADY thought I must be profoundly insane. Granted. I didn't do it for the good of society, but selfishly, and only for me. Nobody in there believed my act. They warned me I wouldn't be there long. I was glad to hear that. Why else would I have done what I did?
Maybe choosing a pseudonym like "felix" with the impression it was a Latin word that meant happy and prosperous had to go awry when the people on the construction sites I played tough guy at started associating it with Felix The Cat. I was annoyed at first. I thought the Latin definition was sorta noble and uplifting. It was never to be. My natural curiosity forced the issue and made 'felix' a cat with a bag of tricks the prevailing and ubiquitous goto. Why would it not? My legal name means "the supplanter". So, nothing much changed but my futile, life-long ambition to invisibility.
I received the vision after I'd given up and accepted life without the slightest justification for being. When I stopped insisting on so-me deep need for me-and-thee-ing (meaning). Being me is just fine without you. Carry on. See you around chump. That makes so-me dreadfully nervous I fear. So does the fear of dying. Everybody down deep gnows The Terror is waiting for your body to croak, and then it's gonna swallow who-you-think-you-are into it's whale-like belly to join all the other lost souls. Aiiiiiyyyyyeeeeeee!
I find myself changing from writing here on my blog entry and responding to posts on the Thomas e-mail discussion group. Sometimes I like what I've written on one venue and include it on the other. I recently subscribed to Apple's AppleScript e-mail discussion list, and I'll probably write one thing to the other doing that too. I don't mind changing horses in mid-stream one bit. It makes for great tossed-word salad. I'm the only one who ever knows what I mean anyway. Why not mix metaphors until I go stark raving mad. '-)
Sunday, July 19, 2009
A Saucy Laid-Back Sunday
It's been a warm day, but the humidity hasn't been so bad. I went over to the strip mall to walk on the wide sidewalks in front of the stores. As usual I employed a counting system to focus my breath on what I was doing. For the last week or so I've been practicing letting my belly drop to create a vacuum in my solar practice in order to pull the air in my lungs through relaxing rather than sucking the air in through sucking. I guess i walked about a mile or so practicing letting my belly drop, and it's getting easier and requires less attention for it to happen.
I'm taking a considerable amount of exercise these days besides walking at the mall. I bought a rowing type exercise machine called a Cardio-Glider that works the whole body. I try to get on it and do at least one repetition for each birthday, so I end up doing seventy repetitions on it most days. My hands and wrists are feeling so much better from the methotrexate and maybe some relief from the new prescription my new rheumatologist at the VA in Durham wrote me. I'm taking two a day. He stated that this new medicine works over the long haul. He also ordered me a bunch of prednisone that I'll be taking until my next scheduled appointment. That in addition to the prednisone my regular doctor had prescribed me. I'm not sure they see what the other has prescribed. I may attempt to get my regular care clinic changed to the Durham VA so they'll at least be on the same computer system.
My youngest brother came over and without trying made me feel kind of stupid. He came over out of the goodness of his heart to share the good fortune he figured out in getting his over-the-air TV antenna setup to
work better and bring in more stations. I was polite, but didn't believe anything he had done would help be get better reception. He talked about hooking up a signal amplifier to the input cable from his outside antenna so
enthusiastically, I finally said, "Well, I have a signal amplifier I bought, but it don't work nearly as well as what you're describing, tale a look at my setup and see if you can improve my reception."
We had been sitting outside on my second-floor deck at the top of outside stairs having this conversation, so it only took a minute for him to walk inside, take a look at the amplifier in question, and ask, "Why isn't it hooked up?"
"Whaaaaa..."
"Yeah, don't you think it might work a little better if you actually hooked the signal amplifier to the input cable from the outside antenna, and then hook it up to your new TV set?", he said as he laughed in ridicule at my lack of technical competency.
"Here, do it this way, dummy..." and he proceed to show me how to get 36 stations instead of 5. I asked him if he had any coffee at his house? He said, "Yes, why?" "So you can go the hell home to your sweet, loving wife, and leave me alone to my disgraceful humiliation... and 30 additional TV stations... that's why. Thanks, Bro!
☆☆☆☆☆
I didn't really feel all that humiliated. I had tried to hook the amplifier up before. Why else would I buy it? It worked at first when I was using the converter box with the old outside antenna I got from my parents house before the airport authority forced it's being moved. The antenna has a rotating device, but it's so old the insulation on the wires had rotted off. It may still work. All it would cost me would be some flat four-wire cable to check it out. Manana. In any case, the only over-the-air stations I'm gonna get are the four commercial networks and PBS, I'm getting them pretty good now on one or the other of the new stations, why bother?
I'm taking a considerable amount of exercise these days besides walking at the mall. I bought a rowing type exercise machine called a Cardio-Glider that works the whole body. I try to get on it and do at least one repetition for each birthday, so I end up doing seventy repetitions on it most days. My hands and wrists are feeling so much better from the methotrexate and maybe some relief from the new prescription my new rheumatologist at the VA in Durham wrote me. I'm taking two a day. He stated that this new medicine works over the long haul. He also ordered me a bunch of prednisone that I'll be taking until my next scheduled appointment. That in addition to the prednisone my regular doctor had prescribed me. I'm not sure they see what the other has prescribed. I may attempt to get my regular care clinic changed to the Durham VA so they'll at least be on the same computer system.
My youngest brother came over and without trying made me feel kind of stupid. He came over out of the goodness of his heart to share the good fortune he figured out in getting his over-the-air TV antenna setup to
work better and bring in more stations. I was polite, but didn't believe anything he had done would help be get better reception. He talked about hooking up a signal amplifier to the input cable from his outside antenna so
enthusiastically, I finally said, "Well, I have a signal amplifier I bought, but it don't work nearly as well as what you're describing, tale a look at my setup and see if you can improve my reception."
We had been sitting outside on my second-floor deck at the top of outside stairs having this conversation, so it only took a minute for him to walk inside, take a look at the amplifier in question, and ask, "Why isn't it hooked up?"
"Whaaaaa..."
"Yeah, don't you think it might work a little better if you actually hooked the signal amplifier to the input cable from the outside antenna, and then hook it up to your new TV set?", he said as he laughed in ridicule at my lack of technical competency.
"Here, do it this way, dummy..." and he proceed to show me how to get 36 stations instead of 5. I asked him if he had any coffee at his house? He said, "Yes, why?" "So you can go the hell home to your sweet, loving wife, and leave me alone to my disgraceful humiliation... and 30 additional TV stations... that's why. Thanks, Bro!
☆☆☆☆☆
I didn't really feel all that humiliated. I had tried to hook the amplifier up before. Why else would I buy it? It worked at first when I was using the converter box with the old outside antenna I got from my parents house before the airport authority forced it's being moved. The antenna has a rotating device, but it's so old the insulation on the wires had rotted off. It may still work. All it would cost me would be some flat four-wire cable to check it out. Manana. In any case, the only over-the-air stations I'm gonna get are the four commercial networks and PBS, I'm getting them pretty good now on one or the other of the new stations, why bother?
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Syntax
One of the side-effects of trying to learn how to use AppleScript is that I compile and run code I find on the internet just to see if it will compile, as is, and if it does, I can't resist clicking on the Run button just to see what happens, if anything. Yesterday, after I started reading this (long, but free .pdf) about AppleScript, I opened up the AppleScript Editor that's part of the operating system in order to see if the scripts the .pdf article provided actually worked on my machine. Most of them don't. The objects of the ready-made scripts are generalized, and I have to find the correct path on my specific machine for those scripts to compile and then Run.
This seems to be my stumbling block currently. There are scripts designed specifically to provide the names of these paths in the correct syntax. If I can get a grip on these types of scripts that provide me with the correct information that HAS to be syntactically correct to get the desired results from more complex scripts that actually perform a real-time service, then I might think this is gonna work out for me. I'm easy. I'll be happy if learning what the term "syntax" actually means.
I've tried to work a couple of programming tutorials before. Back when I was using a Windows box. I worked myself into a fervor about the possibility that i could download the stuff I needed to learn PERL. I couldn't figure out how to call up and connect the compiler to the tutorial in order to practice. Learning AppleScript won't have that sort of problem because it's a system-based doodad that's all set up and ready to rock and roll. I worked the entry chapter of a commercial tutorial designed by Apple. They offered the first chapter as a come-on to get people to pay for the rest of the online book. The top retail price is only $44. I'm not trying to get outta paying their asking price. It's reasonable. I just wanna make sure I'm pumped enough about learning it to spring for the whole fee.
It may be a trick specifically designed to delude liberal arts majors into thinking they could actually learn a language that uses numbers and other weird symbols as it's mainstay, but I debugged and solved what turned out to be two simple errors that at first I couldn't get to compile because of syntactical errors, and then when the script I used from the tutorial finally compiled, it still wouldn't do anything when I clicked on the Run button. This is usually all it would take for me to give up and say... well, you know... and go back to playing Hearts and Sudoku.
Amazingly, I persevered. I finally messed around enough that I actually got both scripts to Compile and Run. Granted, these were the examples in the first chapter of the book. Even I could see they were fairly easy to resolve, but the fact that I hung in there and overcome my developing apathy was/is encouraging.
I think I have to live by myself because nobody can bear to see themselves in me through the inevitable projection process that can't not happen. I let a lotta events happen that many people profess to stop from happening simply because I am is curious. Curiosity is part of the original package that came with the pearl. So is volition or will power. But, the most intriguing topic I'm presently attempting to definitively grok is that part of the original package that came with the pearl is memory. Curiosity, volition, and... memory.
I keep visualizing pea pods or folding leather purses as containers. More recently, however, I see this "pouch", this container, as an aura that seems external, but is merely the event horizon of what's possible by attrition when me-me-cry is the whole of the creative force, and thus no more than a second-hand Rose who can't be-co-me with what it makes itself into through imitation.
I sort of think that I want to learn some sort of programming language because of the strict syntax. I know. I KNOW.. that's just crazy talk. I've been a math phobe all my life, and suddenly I'm reaching for logic as a goto device? There's something more to this than what is readily apparent to a casual observer.
The Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Emperor's Yellow Book played a big role in how I came to see the world in my latter days. I studied and used it almost daily for over thirty years. One morning I woke up from dreaming early and heard a voice telling me in no uncertain, but pleasant terms, "Stop using the I Ching." Less and less do I rue that day.
This seems to be my stumbling block currently. There are scripts designed specifically to provide the names of these paths in the correct syntax. If I can get a grip on these types of scripts that provide me with the correct information that HAS to be syntactically correct to get the desired results from more complex scripts that actually perform a real-time service, then I might think this is gonna work out for me. I'm easy. I'll be happy if learning what the term "syntax" actually means.
I've tried to work a couple of programming tutorials before. Back when I was using a Windows box. I worked myself into a fervor about the possibility that i could download the stuff I needed to learn PERL. I couldn't figure out how to call up and connect the compiler to the tutorial in order to practice. Learning AppleScript won't have that sort of problem because it's a system-based doodad that's all set up and ready to rock and roll. I worked the entry chapter of a commercial tutorial designed by Apple. They offered the first chapter as a come-on to get people to pay for the rest of the online book. The top retail price is only $44. I'm not trying to get outta paying their asking price. It's reasonable. I just wanna make sure I'm pumped enough about learning it to spring for the whole fee.
It may be a trick specifically designed to delude liberal arts majors into thinking they could actually learn a language that uses numbers and other weird symbols as it's mainstay, but I debugged and solved what turned out to be two simple errors that at first I couldn't get to compile because of syntactical errors, and then when the script I used from the tutorial finally compiled, it still wouldn't do anything when I clicked on the Run button. This is usually all it would take for me to give up and say... well, you know... and go back to playing Hearts and Sudoku.
Amazingly, I persevered. I finally messed around enough that I actually got both scripts to Compile and Run. Granted, these were the examples in the first chapter of the book. Even I could see they were fairly easy to resolve, but the fact that I hung in there and overcome my developing apathy was/is encouraging.
I think I have to live by myself because nobody can bear to see themselves in me through the inevitable projection process that can't not happen. I let a lotta events happen that many people profess to stop from happening simply because I am is curious. Curiosity is part of the original package that came with the pearl. So is volition or will power. But, the most intriguing topic I'm presently attempting to definitively grok is that part of the original package that came with the pearl is memory. Curiosity, volition, and... memory.
I keep visualizing pea pods or folding leather purses as containers. More recently, however, I see this "pouch", this container, as an aura that seems external, but is merely the event horizon of what's possible by attrition when me-me-cry is the whole of the creative force, and thus no more than a second-hand Rose who can't be-co-me with what it makes itself into through imitation.
I sort of think that I want to learn some sort of programming language because of the strict syntax. I know. I KNOW.. that's just crazy talk. I've been a math phobe all my life, and suddenly I'm reaching for logic as a goto device? There's something more to this than what is readily apparent to a casual observer.
The Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Emperor's Yellow Book played a big role in how I came to see the world in my latter days. I studied and used it almost daily for over thirty years. One morning I woke up from dreaming early and heard a voice telling me in no uncertain, but pleasant terms, "Stop using the I Ching." Less and less do I rue that day.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Compensation For Believing The Big Lie
I'm biased. I can't consciously remember taking a vow of poverty. Being poor just seemed part of the challenge I innocently accepted even before puberty. Of course, I didn't realize I had accepted this challenge until after it had cost me all domestic integrity and the support of the cultural systems I had accepted as status quo. But, I wasn't the one who criminalized the culture that shaped my childhood by an act of law, and so the challenge was accepted under protest. Mine. Aaaaiiiiiyeee!
I was forced by external circumstances to hate my parents and it had nothing to do with religion. They represented what the law of the land required of me as a citizen by enacting laws against the Jim Crow system my parents not only lived by, but taught me how to live by those unwritten laws until after I left their household by joining the Navy.
The Navy sent me to San Diego, California to go to boot camp there. It was like Dorothy finding out she wasn't in Kansas anymore. Being in the state of California in the late 1950s of the last decade of the last century of the last millennium, was no support to my deeply ingrained prejudiced ways at all.
Besides that, I was surrounded by teen-aged boys (for the most part) from all over the United States and it's Territories. The great majority of these young men had been taught from childhood that people from the deep South were ignorant hillbillies who, for largest part, could be ignored or kicked aside. Soon enow, within three weeks, with my childhood training of how to put people in their place and keep them there, I was promoted to be in charge of all of them, so it was very difficult for me to totally abandon the old ways. Why would I?
By unknowingly accepting the challenge of hypocrisy that was flung in my face before I even grew pubic hairs, I was personally confronted with the prospect of surviving on my own wit and grit as the only way to cope with my unending struggle to cope with The Terror. Some people, because or their own experience, understand just how much energy and attention it takes to remember to stay focused on the main chance (even though you might not rightly and lucidly gnow what that IS on a moment-to-moment basis). I couldn't bear to abandon marriage, but I couldn't have a marriage without working to get the money to maintain it. To live this way meant I had to abandon my spirit quest to man up to the responsibilities a domestic lifestyle required.
Finally, after I just gave up any attempt at leading a domestic lifestyle, and have lived alone in abstinence for several decades now. Granted, learning how to make time fly has been a great boon to my ex-is-tense type lifestyle. Abandoning my IS-ness to be-co-me a hue man (a color commentator) or a woe-to-man is a trial by fire. If it was easy, all the angles (angels) would
be doing it.
I seem to be having trouble with the spacing of my word processor. It even happens when I switch over to typing directly on this web site. Sorry if I'm not my usual meticulous editing self.
I was forced by external circumstances to hate my parents and it had nothing to do with religion. They represented what the law of the land required of me as a citizen by enacting laws against the Jim Crow system my parents not only lived by, but taught me how to live by those unwritten laws until after I left their household by joining the Navy.
The Navy sent me to San Diego, California to go to boot camp there. It was like Dorothy finding out she wasn't in Kansas anymore. Being in the state of California in the late 1950s of the last decade of the last century of the last millennium, was no support to my deeply ingrained prejudiced ways at all.
Besides that, I was surrounded by teen-aged boys (for the most part) from all over the United States and it's Territories. The great majority of these young men had been taught from childhood that people from the deep South were ignorant hillbillies who, for largest part, could be ignored or kicked aside. Soon enow, within three weeks, with my childhood training of how to put people in their place and keep them there, I was promoted to be in charge of all of them, so it was very difficult for me to totally abandon the old ways. Why would I?
By unknowingly accepting the challenge of hypocrisy that was flung in my face before I even grew pubic hairs, I was personally confronted with the prospect of surviving on my own wit and grit as the only way to cope with my unending struggle to cope with The Terror. Some people, because or their own experience, understand just how much energy and attention it takes to remember to stay focused on the main chance (even though you might not rightly and lucidly gnow what that IS on a moment-to-moment basis). I couldn't bear to abandon marriage, but I couldn't have a marriage without working to get the money to maintain it. To live this way meant I had to abandon my spirit quest to man up to the responsibilities a domestic lifestyle required.
Finally, after I just gave up any attempt at leading a domestic lifestyle, and have lived alone in abstinence for several decades now. Granted, learning how to make time fly has been a great boon to my ex-is-tense type lifestyle. Abandoning my IS-ness to be-co-me a hue man (a color commentator) or a woe-to-man is a trial by fire. If it was easy, all the angles (angels) would
be doing it.
I seem to be having trouble with the spacing of my word processor. It even happens when I switch over to typing directly on this web site. Sorry if I'm not my usual meticulous editing self.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Ain't Gwine Worry 'Bout War No More
Oh, what a thrill it is to read the side-effects of the prescription drugs I'm taking to deal with rheumatoid arthritis. Neither one of them were specifically designed for arthritis. The methotrexate was created to combat cancer, and the hydroxychloroquine was designed to deal with malaria. I was also given a new prescription for steroids to reduce the inflammation even more. They must figure I'm close to self-emulation or whatever it's called when people suddenly burn completely up without harming the chair they sit in when it happens. Admittedly, that would sure resolve any burial expenses. Even the bones burn up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine
The big deal is that all these drugs offer an anti-inflammation effect. RA makes me hot stuff, in a way, but that don't translate into being sexy. The most worrisome side-effect of this new drug is how it affects the eyes. Like I'm not blind enough already. I already have cataracts in both eyes. The one in my right eye is operable and I have papers to go to an optometrist presently about that.
My new rheumatologist told me yesterday he would be making appointments for me to get my eyes checked regularly because of the medicine. Now, I'm wondering whether the side-effects of the new medicine might affect me getting the cataracts removed. If I get blind as a bat from the medicine, what possible difference could it make if I have cataract covering my eyes?
I also got stuck in the arm to test me to see if I've ever been exposed to tuberculosis and small pox. I gotta drive over to the VA in Fayetteville to have a nurse look at that and sign a paper they gave me. Dealing with my health problems is about all I do anymore but write, meditate, use my cardio-glide machine, and walk. What if I live to be a hundred? What a drag, man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine
The big deal is that all these drugs offer an anti-inflammation effect. RA makes me hot stuff, in a way, but that don't translate into being sexy. The most worrisome side-effect of this new drug is how it affects the eyes. Like I'm not blind enough already. I already have cataracts in both eyes. The one in my right eye is operable and I have papers to go to an optometrist presently about that.
My new rheumatologist told me yesterday he would be making appointments for me to get my eyes checked regularly because of the medicine. Now, I'm wondering whether the side-effects of the new medicine might affect me getting the cataracts removed. If I get blind as a bat from the medicine, what possible difference could it make if I have cataract covering my eyes?
I also got stuck in the arm to test me to see if I've ever been exposed to tuberculosis and small pox. I gotta drive over to the VA in Fayetteville to have a nurse look at that and sign a paper they gave me. Dealing with my health problems is about all I do anymore but write, meditate, use my cardio-glide machine, and walk. What if I live to be a hundred? What a drag, man.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Trailer Hitches, And Other Hot Hardware
The remembering vision I saw of me coming to Earth from outer space as an entity that looked like an oyster pearl, but wasn't, has begun to signify to me that what life essentially and seminally IS, finds planets it can inhabit and evolves to what we ex-is-t as from soup to nuts.
I'm speculating with abandon, that the energy or force that propelled this pearl to the planet some of us call Earth came from the holocaust of the last planet we inhabited, and overcrowded, and blew to smithereens, because we hadn't resolved the problem of having to start all over again on another inhabitable planet from the level of the pearl again.
In my re-me-ing vision, and by my inadequate Earthly calculations, it took billions of Earth years just to evolve my pearl into a one-celled animal. That sped things up by orders of magnitude, but by the time we evolved into animals who could send space probes with advanced life on them to inhabitable planets, then we'll have to depend on nuclear holocaust to make life into a solar sail to take life there, again as a bunch of seed pearls that eat up the planet before they can evolve to homo sapiens.
"We" are the intelligent aliens we expect to invade Earth eventually as prophesied by Hollywood. Each of us arrived here as "pearls" and evolved over billions of years into what we appear to be now. In my opinion, that's a real problem for life. That is, supposing that "life" is what's here, that ain't on dead planets like the Moon or Mars. All of it. Water, air, but not necessarily earth or fire.
I believe there is an Atlantis type place in the universe where life has been able to go there already evolved as humans when they arrived. Instead of having to start from scratch in such primitive forms as pearls. But, according to my latest idiocy, about all they might accomplish before entropy in this closed system took over would be to make a few pyramid doodads to show that "Kilroy wuz hyah."
I wrote another poem in response to this guy that only subscribed to the Thomas list fairly recently. At least, he's only been posting under his current handle recently. I seem absolutely sure he's mo' bettah at using other people's experiences as if they were his own than me. He appears to assume he knows what other people mean by what they write better than they do themselves. Why would he betray himself in this manner?
HUM JOBS
Squirrelly, "squirely",
pudding and pie.
We only kiss girls
to make them cry,
and weep and moan,
and pule unending,
but without
the boilerplate
po'lite befriending.
For to gnow
is to be known
without further
introduction,
and to hope
without "knowing"
for some chrome
removing
suction.
Every thang is bassackwards
when it co-me-s to the end,
and sometime or the other
(my fair weather friend),
what seems to be ain't,
and what ain't is what wuz,
and what makes a soul faint
is what makes they taint
buzz...
© Today, 2009
I'm speculating with abandon, that the energy or force that propelled this pearl to the planet some of us call Earth came from the holocaust of the last planet we inhabited, and overcrowded, and blew to smithereens, because we hadn't resolved the problem of having to start all over again on another inhabitable planet from the level of the pearl again.
In my re-me-ing vision, and by my inadequate Earthly calculations, it took billions of Earth years just to evolve my pearl into a one-celled animal. That sped things up by orders of magnitude, but by the time we evolved into animals who could send space probes with advanced life on them to inhabitable planets, then we'll have to depend on nuclear holocaust to make life into a solar sail to take life there, again as a bunch of seed pearls that eat up the planet before they can evolve to homo sapiens.
"We" are the intelligent aliens we expect to invade Earth eventually as prophesied by Hollywood. Each of us arrived here as "pearls" and evolved over billions of years into what we appear to be now. In my opinion, that's a real problem for life. That is, supposing that "life" is what's here, that ain't on dead planets like the Moon or Mars. All of it. Water, air, but not necessarily earth or fire.
I believe there is an Atlantis type place in the universe where life has been able to go there already evolved as humans when they arrived. Instead of having to start from scratch in such primitive forms as pearls. But, according to my latest idiocy, about all they might accomplish before entropy in this closed system took over would be to make a few pyramid doodads to show that "Kilroy wuz hyah."
I wrote another poem in response to this guy that only subscribed to the Thomas list fairly recently. At least, he's only been posting under his current handle recently. I seem absolutely sure he's mo' bettah at using other people's experiences as if they were his own than me. He appears to assume he knows what other people mean by what they write better than they do themselves. Why would he betray himself in this manner?
HUM JOBS
Squirrelly, "squirely",
pudding and pie.
We only kiss girls
to make them cry,
and weep and moan,
and pule unending,
but without
the boilerplate
po'lite befriending.
For to gnow
is to be known
without further
introduction,
and to hope
without "knowing"
for some chrome
removing
suction.
Every thang is bassackwards
when it co-me-s to the end,
and sometime or the other
(my fair weather friend),
what seems to be ain't,
and what ain't is what wuz,
and what makes a soul faint
is what makes they taint
buzz...
© Today, 2009
Was It Memorex Or Blogger?
Something was wrong and I couldn't publish here for technical reasons for a couple of tries. It might have been my setup, and the glitch probably was something wrong at my end of the spectrum. This morning I had to restart my DSL modem, and now everything seems hunky dory. Yesterday I had to keep an appointment at the Durham VA Hospital. Pretty good day. I met my new rheumatologist.
My first rheumatologist at the Durham VA graduated from his Duke residency last month. He told me he is moving to Fayetteville, so I might see him again at the VA Hospital there occasionally. My "family" doctor (oddly, she's referred to as my family doctor by the specialists, but there is only me to attend as 'my family') is located at the Fayetteville VA.
The new doctor is only a little younger. He told me his last nayme is the same as a province in China, so it ain't rocket science for me to figure it out he's of Chinese descent, but his first name is Tony. He speaks better English than me, like English is his first language. He's tall for a Chinese person, and of course, as you would expect from a person serving a residency at Duke, a person with mental gifts he don't have to brag about for me to easily observe his integrity, especially when he summed up his assessment of my case to his supervisor right in front of me. She seemed to find my obvious confusion caused by their medical palaver amusing. She winked at me, and told me HE would explain what they said. She seems very clever. Good for me! I think I got some more good help.
I wrote what's written below on Sunday, but couldn't publish it. I'm too lazy to re-edit to make things fit.
I seem to be less confrontational since the colonoscopy procedure was performed on me. It could be that I wasn't full of shit for about a week. Part of it had to be that I was rendered unconscious by drugs during the procedure, and seeing how easy and pleasantly it could be done somehow proved to me that I'm not God. I couldn't have felt more helpless and out of control of my own life than to submit voluntarily to be anesthetized to the point of unconsciousness.
Particularly by a group of evangelicals who seemed to want to proselytize or pray over me while I'm out like a light. I honestly don't know why each and every one of the surgery team I talked to face to face brought up their religious faith in one way or the other. The surgeon himself assured me (NOT!) that he thought his religious faith did more for people than his surgical skills. To give him credit, he did say that he felt like he had saved a lot of people a lot of agony by removing potentially fatal polyps in the colon that could (and if they lived long enough, they would) turn cancerous. I trusted the sincerity I sensed in his voice as he said that.
I also trusted the easy familiarity he exhibited with his surgical team in the OR. Everybody there obviously respected him from the time he walked in, and they were really friendly toward him even though differential to his leadership role. The nurse or anesthesiologist that knocked me out before I knew it, looked like the actress who played the mother on the TV show, Little House On The Prairie. A no-nonsense sort of person whose eyes sparkled anyway.
I was unconscious until I was back in the recovery room where my brother who drove me over there was waiting when I woke up. On the way home he told me that the doctor said that he had removed one polyp, and my brother implied that the cameras revealed no other problems. He might try to protect me if there was anything else, and not tell me if they found out they were too late and sent me home to die.
I was told during the pre-opt interview by Nurse Cratchett that they would send me a very detailed letter that would give me the complete rundown on what the cameras revealed. She even seemed proud of just how thorough the upcoming report will be. I ain't gwine let my guard down until that letter gets here. They could have found anything in there. I was unconscious, and my brother is overly-kind, how would I know?
I did get a CT scan my doctor ordered at the same time I was there for the pre-opt interviews. I got a letter showing there was nothing unusual going on and no sinus problems were revealed.
My regular doctor over at Fayetteville also gave me a printout of my latest blood work up to bring home with me. It wasn't as easy for me to interpret, but I got some help from a friend who knows the whole deal. Besides, my blood tests and especially the blood pressure tests seem to elicit positive comments from the technicians, and they tell me about it.
One x-ray technician commented on how much metal she finds in veterans x-rays, when she didn't find any in me. I never got wounded, only shot at. I honestly don't feel envious of the boys who did. I actually joined the Navy to see the world. Getting all shot up or killed just because I was curious about sex as a kid was not why I did my patriotic duty, but I did my patriotic duty anyway. Now, I'm happy I did.
To this day I can't think of one good reason why anybody would try to kill me, but now I know homo sapiens don't need one. People like to kill people. They're just wanna do it without payback. Some of the genocide stories I've been exposed to in some one way or the other have affected me more than others. The one in Rwanda has horrified me the most. Just being the member of a certain tribe could get you hacked to death for no other reason than that. That's cold.
I'm headed back to Durham tomorrow to meet my new Duke Med resident at the VA Hospital who will most likely be my rheumatologist for the next three years until their class graduates. My first rheumatologist graduated June 28th. I'm hoping they'll speak good English, but however that works out they'll be supervised by an actual rheumatologist who might even have a little Southern drawl by now. It's a pretty good deal for me, as far as I'm concerned. I get to have two doctors, who, because one of them is learning, will talk about my situation a lot.
My first rheumatologist at the Durham VA graduated from his Duke residency last month. He told me he is moving to Fayetteville, so I might see him again at the VA Hospital there occasionally. My "family" doctor (oddly, she's referred to as my family doctor by the specialists, but there is only me to attend as 'my family') is located at the Fayetteville VA.
The new doctor is only a little younger. He told me his last nayme is the same as a province in China, so it ain't rocket science for me to figure it out he's of Chinese descent, but his first name is Tony. He speaks better English than me, like English is his first language. He's tall for a Chinese person, and of course, as you would expect from a person serving a residency at Duke, a person with mental gifts he don't have to brag about for me to easily observe his integrity, especially when he summed up his assessment of my case to his supervisor right in front of me. She seemed to find my obvious confusion caused by their medical palaver amusing. She winked at me, and told me HE would explain what they said. She seems very clever. Good for me! I think I got some more good help.
I wrote what's written below on Sunday, but couldn't publish it. I'm too lazy to re-edit to make things fit.
I seem to be less confrontational since the colonoscopy procedure was performed on me. It could be that I wasn't full of shit for about a week. Part of it had to be that I was rendered unconscious by drugs during the procedure, and seeing how easy and pleasantly it could be done somehow proved to me that I'm not God. I couldn't have felt more helpless and out of control of my own life than to submit voluntarily to be anesthetized to the point of unconsciousness.
Particularly by a group of evangelicals who seemed to want to proselytize or pray over me while I'm out like a light. I honestly don't know why each and every one of the surgery team I talked to face to face brought up their religious faith in one way or the other. The surgeon himself assured me (NOT!) that he thought his religious faith did more for people than his surgical skills. To give him credit, he did say that he felt like he had saved a lot of people a lot of agony by removing potentially fatal polyps in the colon that could (and if they lived long enough, they would) turn cancerous. I trusted the sincerity I sensed in his voice as he said that.
I also trusted the easy familiarity he exhibited with his surgical team in the OR. Everybody there obviously respected him from the time he walked in, and they were really friendly toward him even though differential to his leadership role. The nurse or anesthesiologist that knocked me out before I knew it, looked like the actress who played the mother on the TV show, Little House On The Prairie. A no-nonsense sort of person whose eyes sparkled anyway.
I was unconscious until I was back in the recovery room where my brother who drove me over there was waiting when I woke up. On the way home he told me that the doctor said that he had removed one polyp, and my brother implied that the cameras revealed no other problems. He might try to protect me if there was anything else, and not tell me if they found out they were too late and sent me home to die.
I was told during the pre-opt interview by Nurse Cratchett that they would send me a very detailed letter that would give me the complete rundown on what the cameras revealed. She even seemed proud of just how thorough the upcoming report will be. I ain't gwine let my guard down until that letter gets here. They could have found anything in there. I was unconscious, and my brother is overly-kind, how would I know?
I did get a CT scan my doctor ordered at the same time I was there for the pre-opt interviews. I got a letter showing there was nothing unusual going on and no sinus problems were revealed.
My regular doctor over at Fayetteville also gave me a printout of my latest blood work up to bring home with me. It wasn't as easy for me to interpret, but I got some help from a friend who knows the whole deal. Besides, my blood tests and especially the blood pressure tests seem to elicit positive comments from the technicians, and they tell me about it.
One x-ray technician commented on how much metal she finds in veterans x-rays, when she didn't find any in me. I never got wounded, only shot at. I honestly don't feel envious of the boys who did. I actually joined the Navy to see the world. Getting all shot up or killed just because I was curious about sex as a kid was not why I did my patriotic duty, but I did my patriotic duty anyway. Now, I'm happy I did.
To this day I can't think of one good reason why anybody would try to kill me, but now I know homo sapiens don't need one. People like to kill people. They're just wanna do it without payback. Some of the genocide stories I've been exposed to in some one way or the other have affected me more than others. The one in Rwanda has horrified me the most. Just being the member of a certain tribe could get you hacked to death for no other reason than that. That's cold.
I'm headed back to Durham tomorrow to meet my new Duke Med resident at the VA Hospital who will most likely be my rheumatologist for the next three years until their class graduates. My first rheumatologist graduated June 28th. I'm hoping they'll speak good English, but however that works out they'll be supervised by an actual rheumatologist who might even have a little Southern drawl by now. It's a pretty good deal for me, as far as I'm concerned. I get to have two doctors, who, because one of them is learning, will talk about my situation a lot.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
By Any Other Nayme
I seem to be less confrontational since the colonoscopy procedure was performed on me. It could be that I wasn't full of shit for about a week. Part of it had to be that I was rendered unconscious by drugs during the procedure, and seeing how easy and pleasantly it could be done somehow proved to me that I'm not God. I couldn't have felt more helpless and out of control of my own life than to submit voluntarily to be anesthetized to the point of unconsciousness.
Particularly by a group of evangelicals who seemed to want to proselytize or pray over me while I'm out like a light. I honestly don't know why each and every one of the surgery team I talked to face to face brought up their religious faith in one way or the other. The surgeon himself assured me (NOT!) that he thought his religious faith did more for people than his surgical skills. To give him credit, he did say that he felt like he had saved a lot of people a lot of agony by removing potentially fatal polyps in the colon that could (and if they lived long enough, they would) turn cancerous. I trusted the sincerity I sensed in his voice as he said that.
I also trusted the easy familiarity he exhibited with his surgical team in the OR. Everybody there obviously respected him from the time he walked in, and they were really friendly toward him even though differential to his leadership role. The nurse or anesthesiologist that knocked me out before I knew it, looked like the actress who played the mother on the TV show, Little House On The Prairie. A no-nonsense sort of person whose eyes sparkled anyway.
I was unconscious until I was back in the recovery room where my brother who drove me over there was waiting when I woke up. On the way home he told me that the doctor said that he had removed one polyp, and my brother implied that the cameras revealed no other problems. He might try to protect me if there was anything else, and not tell me if they found out they were too late and sent me home to die.
I was told during the pre-opt interview by Nurse Cratchett that they would send me a very detailed letter that would give me the complete rundown on what the cameras revealed. She even seemed proud of just how thorough the upcoming report will be. I ain't gwine let my guard down until that letter gets here. They could have found anything in there. I was unconscious, and my brother is overly-kind, how would I know?
I did get a CT scan my doctor ordered at the same time I was there for the pre-opt interviews. I got a letter showing there was nothing unusual going on and no sinus problems were revealed.
My regular doctor over at Fayetteville also gave me a printout of my latest blood work up to bring home with me. It wasn't as easy for me to interpret, but I got some help from a friend who knows the whole deal. Besides, my blood tests and especially the blood pressure tests seem to elicit positive comments from the technicians, and they tell me about it.
One x-ray technician commented on how much metal she finds in veterans x-rays, when she didn't find any in me. I never got wounded, only shot at. I honestly don't feel envious of the boys who did. I actually joined the Navy to see the world. Getting all shot up or killed just because I was curious about sex as a kid was not why I did my patriotic duty, but I did my patriotic duty anyway. Now, I'm happy I did.
To this day I can't think of one good reason why anybody would try to kill me, but now I know homo sapiens don't need one. People like to kill people. They're just wanna do it without payback. Some of the genocide stories I've been exposed to in some one way or the other have affected me more than others. The one in Rwanda has horrified me the most. Just being the member of a certain tribe could get you hacked to death for no other reason than that. That's cold.
I'm headed back to Durham tomorrow to meet my new Duke Med resident at the VA Hospital who will most likely be my rheumatologist for the next three years until their class graduates. My first rheumatologist graduated June 28th. I'm hoping they'll speak good English, but however that works out they'll be supervised by an actual rheumatologist who might even have a little Southern drawl by now. It's a pretty good deal for me, as far as I'm concerned. I get to have two doctors, who, because one of them is learning, will talk about my situation a lot.
Particularly by a group of evangelicals who seemed to want to proselytize or pray over me while I'm out like a light. I honestly don't know why each and every one of the surgery team I talked to face to face brought up their religious faith in one way or the other. The surgeon himself assured me (NOT!) that he thought his religious faith did more for people than his surgical skills. To give him credit, he did say that he felt like he had saved a lot of people a lot of agony by removing potentially fatal polyps in the colon that could (and if they lived long enough, they would) turn cancerous. I trusted the sincerity I sensed in his voice as he said that.
I also trusted the easy familiarity he exhibited with his surgical team in the OR. Everybody there obviously respected him from the time he walked in, and they were really friendly toward him even though differential to his leadership role. The nurse or anesthesiologist that knocked me out before I knew it, looked like the actress who played the mother on the TV show, Little House On The Prairie. A no-nonsense sort of person whose eyes sparkled anyway.
I was unconscious until I was back in the recovery room where my brother who drove me over there was waiting when I woke up. On the way home he told me that the doctor said that he had removed one polyp, and my brother implied that the cameras revealed no other problems. He might try to protect me if there was anything else, and not tell me if they found out they were too late and sent me home to die.
I was told during the pre-opt interview by Nurse Cratchett that they would send me a very detailed letter that would give me the complete rundown on what the cameras revealed. She even seemed proud of just how thorough the upcoming report will be. I ain't gwine let my guard down until that letter gets here. They could have found anything in there. I was unconscious, and my brother is overly-kind, how would I know?
I did get a CT scan my doctor ordered at the same time I was there for the pre-opt interviews. I got a letter showing there was nothing unusual going on and no sinus problems were revealed.
My regular doctor over at Fayetteville also gave me a printout of my latest blood work up to bring home with me. It wasn't as easy for me to interpret, but I got some help from a friend who knows the whole deal. Besides, my blood tests and especially the blood pressure tests seem to elicit positive comments from the technicians, and they tell me about it.
One x-ray technician commented on how much metal she finds in veterans x-rays, when she didn't find any in me. I never got wounded, only shot at. I honestly don't feel envious of the boys who did. I actually joined the Navy to see the world. Getting all shot up or killed just because I was curious about sex as a kid was not why I did my patriotic duty, but I did my patriotic duty anyway. Now, I'm happy I did.
To this day I can't think of one good reason why anybody would try to kill me, but now I know homo sapiens don't need one. People like to kill people. They're just wanna do it without payback. Some of the genocide stories I've been exposed to in some one way or the other have affected me more than others. The one in Rwanda has horrified me the most. Just being the member of a certain tribe could get you hacked to death for no other reason than that. That's cold.
I'm headed back to Durham tomorrow to meet my new Duke Med resident at the VA Hospital who will most likely be my rheumatologist for the next three years until their class graduates. My first rheumatologist graduated June 28th. I'm hoping they'll speak good English, but however that works out they'll be supervised by an actual rheumatologist who might even have a little Southern drawl by now. It's a pretty good deal for me, as far as I'm concerned. I get to have two doctors, who, because one of them is learning, will talk about my situation a lot.
Friday, July 10, 2009
TGIF
It might seem like I've become a shill for TED.com and their TEDtalk videos, but I am is a big fan, and if I like to watch people talk about their deepest interests and what it means to them, then... so what? If I wanted to know what you think about my opinions I would activate the Comments setting. Not gonna happen. Screw you. Get your own blog so you too can be lord and master over something for a while. Books rot, but the stuff that gets published on the World Wide Web, particularly in the early days, will be around on some media format until the end of ti-me. Immortality at last!
Oh, about the last TEDtalk that gave me a few goosebumps:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Ken Robinson is a master of oratory. By watching this video of him speaking before an audience of his peers it was easy to see that he had those people in the palm of his hand, and most of the audience were people who were to or already had their turn on the podium. He enchanted the enchanters. Enchanting me over the internet was no chore at all. I've always been a fool for charismatic speakers. I probably should have been pickier previous to my first Saturn Return, but it all straightened out after I began learning to be charismatic my own damned self.
I'm still imitating what I see of myself in people like Ken Robinson and certain other of the TEDtalk speakers. The TEDtalks are only my most recent fascination with watching videos of experts talking about what they've become experts at. Google Video has thousands of lectures by the world's most imminent teachers in their fields that only the elite class and their minions can afford to dance wildly with.
The elitist education curtain has fallen along with the Berlin Wall and conventional warfare. Nobody can hide behind arcane secrets anymore as a defense against nuclear holocaust. Tanks and bombs can't defeat an enemy who can't be distinguished from the populace. In the melting pot of the United States that could be anybody. Who among us newly equaled will decide to "Kill 'em all, and let God sort it out!"... first?
I probably filtered for what I wanted to hear Robinson say, but what I did hear him say seemed very similar to what I've written about myself in some wistful, melancholy way. I don't know who couldn't be impressed by the type of people who invent things. I don't mean a social class of people, because inventors are prone to come from all over the social map.
By writing about inventors I'm including all the creative arts where sometime the least expected people come up with unthought of ways of resolving common problems. They fly by the seat of they britches. They reach back and pull it outta they ass. That can be educated out of people. I found out about it by being raised by educators who took their work home with them. I had to run for my life. It's hard to allow that not many people do. Having my own life at other's expense ain't nothing to brag about, but rather, a crying damn shame.
"She walks these hills
in a long, black veil,
and she visits my grave
when the cold
night wind wails.
Nobody knows,
and nobody sees,
and, nobody knows,
but me. "
Oh, about the last TEDtalk that gave me a few goosebumps:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Ken Robinson is a master of oratory. By watching this video of him speaking before an audience of his peers it was easy to see that he had those people in the palm of his hand, and most of the audience were people who were to or already had their turn on the podium. He enchanted the enchanters. Enchanting me over the internet was no chore at all. I've always been a fool for charismatic speakers. I probably should have been pickier previous to my first Saturn Return, but it all straightened out after I began learning to be charismatic my own damned self.
I'm still imitating what I see of myself in people like Ken Robinson and certain other of the TEDtalk speakers. The TEDtalks are only my most recent fascination with watching videos of experts talking about what they've become experts at. Google Video has thousands of lectures by the world's most imminent teachers in their fields that only the elite class and their minions can afford to dance wildly with.
The elitist education curtain has fallen along with the Berlin Wall and conventional warfare. Nobody can hide behind arcane secrets anymore as a defense against nuclear holocaust. Tanks and bombs can't defeat an enemy who can't be distinguished from the populace. In the melting pot of the United States that could be anybody. Who among us newly equaled will decide to "Kill 'em all, and let God sort it out!"... first?
I probably filtered for what I wanted to hear Robinson say, but what I did hear him say seemed very similar to what I've written about myself in some wistful, melancholy way. I don't know who couldn't be impressed by the type of people who invent things. I don't mean a social class of people, because inventors are prone to come from all over the social map.
By writing about inventors I'm including all the creative arts where sometime the least expected people come up with unthought of ways of resolving common problems. They fly by the seat of they britches. They reach back and pull it outta they ass. That can be educated out of people. I found out about it by being raised by educators who took their work home with them. I had to run for my life. It's hard to allow that not many people do. Having my own life at other's expense ain't nothing to brag about, but rather, a crying damn shame.
"She walks these hills
in a long, black veil,
and she visits my grave
when the cold
night wind wails.
Nobody knows,
and nobody sees,
and, nobody knows,
but me. "
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Technically Speaking...
I don't know exactly why I started doing this tutorial on AppleScript, but I've wanted to do something along these lines for as long as I've had a computer. I found out about this tutorial reading one of the social sites like Engadget or Digg, and decided to check it out. Now, I'm sorta glad I did. It's probably gonna be as close as I get to doing some programming-like stuff. I've already learned a little bit more about how to get this computer to do what I want it to the way I want it to do it. Here is the link in the rare event you're interested:
http://www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/firsttutorial/index.html
Now that I've worked half of the beginners lessons I'm beginning to see what an advantage learning how to use AppleScript can be. Particularly if you've as pedantic as I am. I actually have no idea how pedantic I am is, but I do get upset if everything don't line up the way I want it to. Particularly in the Mac Mail program. I like it a lot. I just don't know how to get the results I want. Presently, from what I've seen happen with AppleScript so far, the picayune stuff I want to happen shouldn't be a problem.
One of the ways I've realized I'm a little picky is the way I handled cleaning up my hard drive on my first computer. It was a Mac Classic, and had what was considered at the time a huge hard drive. Forty whole megabytes. That's right. Not forty gigabytes, but forty MEGABYTES. People didn't have a clue the way things were gonna get bloated fast.
The Mac Classic was one of the first home computers that came from the manufacturer with a hard drive. Any hard drive. Needless to say. Forty megabytes of storage got smaller and smaller as time went by. I had to remove stuff from my hard drive and put it on floppy discs in order to make room on the hard drive. It wasn't rocket science, but a little tedious, and I just loved it. I guess I'll never really understand it well enough to describe (I got other fish to fry). but love solving those kinds of problems.
Now, I don't have any problems with storage. It's just me. I don't keep recorded music on my computer legal or otherwise. I like live music. I like listening to real people. If I can't afford it, it just gets better when I can. Listening to recorded music takes the joy out of being there for me.
My Mac Mini came with an eighty gig hard drive. I have less than thirty gigs of data on it. I have an external hard drive that has three hundred gigs on it. I use it as my main drive because it's a 7200 rpm and the one that came with the Mac Mini is a laptop drive that only turns at 4200 rpms. The external drive is much faster. I'm gonna partition it and use half of it as a Time Machine drive, but I've been too lazy to do that yet. I save everything all at once with SuperDuper.
I'm still excited about the 64-bit OS Apple is coming out with this fall. I might splurge for a Mac Pro, but more than likely I'll cave for something cheaper. Computing is a'fixing to get a lot faster. Orders of magnitude better I'm betting. The real deal with a new 64-bit OS is how much DRAM it can accommodate. From what I'm reading about what's possible by cranking the OS up to 64-bits, I won't be able to afford how much DRAM it will use. The real limit will be determined by how many memory slots come on the motherboard.
The last announcement I remember seeing about how many gigabytes of DRAM on a memory card was made by Samsung for the 32 gigabyte memory card. That one card would hold all the data on my hard drive, and my hard drive has a lotta stuff on it that don't need to be there.
My interest in this stuff is just crazy. I'm not unhappy with my Mac Mini. Especially since I maxxed out the DRAM at two whole gigabytes way back a month or so ago. Every aspect of using this computer is dramatically mo' bettah with the memory upgrade, and now I'm looking forward to having more DRAM on a 64-bit operating system than there is data on the hard drive. For all practical purposes, the kind of computing I do won't get much faster. When the hardware is so much faster than the necessary software there is no practical need for it.
I'm excited about the news this morning that Google has openly admitted they're creating an operating system specifically for being online. I agree they've found a chink in Microsoft's armor by focusing on an operating system designed to be online as effectively as possible. Microsoft was already an internet dinosaur when they took so long to steal their own browser.
It's my sense of things that Google has a great idea... again. For me, there was a huge divide created by the invention of the World Wide Web. I was online when it came online, but not by much. I had owned my own computer for five or six years before we got an ISP here that provided me and my youngest brother with a local phone number. That was huge. HUGE!! He makes a living now with a couple of online companies that's somehow surviving the economic meltdown. Not me though. I took some unconscious vow of poverty.
http://www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/firsttutorial/index.html
Now that I've worked half of the beginners lessons I'm beginning to see what an advantage learning how to use AppleScript can be. Particularly if you've as pedantic as I am. I actually have no idea how pedantic I am is, but I do get upset if everything don't line up the way I want it to. Particularly in the Mac Mail program. I like it a lot. I just don't know how to get the results I want. Presently, from what I've seen happen with AppleScript so far, the picayune stuff I want to happen shouldn't be a problem.
One of the ways I've realized I'm a little picky is the way I handled cleaning up my hard drive on my first computer. It was a Mac Classic, and had what was considered at the time a huge hard drive. Forty whole megabytes. That's right. Not forty gigabytes, but forty MEGABYTES. People didn't have a clue the way things were gonna get bloated fast.
The Mac Classic was one of the first home computers that came from the manufacturer with a hard drive. Any hard drive. Needless to say. Forty megabytes of storage got smaller and smaller as time went by. I had to remove stuff from my hard drive and put it on floppy discs in order to make room on the hard drive. It wasn't rocket science, but a little tedious, and I just loved it. I guess I'll never really understand it well enough to describe (I got other fish to fry). but love solving those kinds of problems.
Now, I don't have any problems with storage. It's just me. I don't keep recorded music on my computer legal or otherwise. I like live music. I like listening to real people. If I can't afford it, it just gets better when I can. Listening to recorded music takes the joy out of being there for me.
My Mac Mini came with an eighty gig hard drive. I have less than thirty gigs of data on it. I have an external hard drive that has three hundred gigs on it. I use it as my main drive because it's a 7200 rpm and the one that came with the Mac Mini is a laptop drive that only turns at 4200 rpms. The external drive is much faster. I'm gonna partition it and use half of it as a Time Machine drive, but I've been too lazy to do that yet. I save everything all at once with SuperDuper.
I'm still excited about the 64-bit OS Apple is coming out with this fall. I might splurge for a Mac Pro, but more than likely I'll cave for something cheaper. Computing is a'fixing to get a lot faster. Orders of magnitude better I'm betting. The real deal with a new 64-bit OS is how much DRAM it can accommodate. From what I'm reading about what's possible by cranking the OS up to 64-bits, I won't be able to afford how much DRAM it will use. The real limit will be determined by how many memory slots come on the motherboard.
The last announcement I remember seeing about how many gigabytes of DRAM on a memory card was made by Samsung for the 32 gigabyte memory card. That one card would hold all the data on my hard drive, and my hard drive has a lotta stuff on it that don't need to be there.
My interest in this stuff is just crazy. I'm not unhappy with my Mac Mini. Especially since I maxxed out the DRAM at two whole gigabytes way back a month or so ago. Every aspect of using this computer is dramatically mo' bettah with the memory upgrade, and now I'm looking forward to having more DRAM on a 64-bit operating system than there is data on the hard drive. For all practical purposes, the kind of computing I do won't get much faster. When the hardware is so much faster than the necessary software there is no practical need for it.
I'm excited about the news this morning that Google has openly admitted they're creating an operating system specifically for being online. I agree they've found a chink in Microsoft's armor by focusing on an operating system designed to be online as effectively as possible. Microsoft was already an internet dinosaur when they took so long to steal their own browser.
It's my sense of things that Google has a great idea... again. For me, there was a huge divide created by the invention of the World Wide Web. I was online when it came online, but not by much. I had owned my own computer for five or six years before we got an ISP here that provided me and my youngest brother with a local phone number. That was huge. HUGE!! He makes a living now with a couple of online companies that's somehow surviving the economic meltdown. Not me though. I took some unconscious vow of poverty.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Fat Bellies and Walking
I may be quite deluded about what gnosis is, but to me it's about projection. It only took eight hits of purple haze simultaneously to understand the psychological concept of perceiving our own idea of self in other people or things. In other words, we don't see what is there as much as we see what we conceptualize as "being there" for us. I really can't think of anything else a person would have to know in order to rule their own universe than to understand projection.
I'm gonna go over to the Wal-Mart strip mall pretty soon to walk. The side walks are nice and wide and easy to manipulate without stumbling or causing myself problems. I usually do a walking meditation even though my primary purpose if to get some exercise. I use a fairly complicated counting system to keep my focus on my breathing. It's somewhat equivalent to rubbing your belly and patting yourself on the head at the same time. The tediousness of keeping the count automagically keeps me focused.
Recently, in the last couple of walks as a matter of fact, I've been practicing a new sort of breathing during my walking meditations. I draw the air in my inhales by dropping my belly to create a vacuum with my sagging guts on my solar plexus. That action is what sucks the air into my lungs. The only muscles I use is when I squeeze the air out of my lungs when I exhale.
This is not so easy to do when I'm sitting down to meditate. Particularly because I got a bit of a fat belly, and when I let it droop to suck air into my lungs by it's sagging, my belly stops drooping when it hits my lap. When I'm walking, my fat belly doesn't get in the way. It's not easy to breath this way. It's counter intuitive and I have to think it through as I do it. Toward the end of my walk, though, it's easier.
It's my opinion that doing the breath exercises and meditating is a big deal, but nobody listens to me when I recommend it. I don't really blame them when I look in the mirror. Why would they wanna do something that might cause them to end up looking like me?
I'm gonna go over to the Wal-Mart strip mall pretty soon to walk. The side walks are nice and wide and easy to manipulate without stumbling or causing myself problems. I usually do a walking meditation even though my primary purpose if to get some exercise. I use a fairly complicated counting system to keep my focus on my breathing. It's somewhat equivalent to rubbing your belly and patting yourself on the head at the same time. The tediousness of keeping the count automagically keeps me focused.
Recently, in the last couple of walks as a matter of fact, I've been practicing a new sort of breathing during my walking meditations. I draw the air in my inhales by dropping my belly to create a vacuum with my sagging guts on my solar plexus. That action is what sucks the air into my lungs. The only muscles I use is when I squeeze the air out of my lungs when I exhale.
This is not so easy to do when I'm sitting down to meditate. Particularly because I got a bit of a fat belly, and when I let it droop to suck air into my lungs by it's sagging, my belly stops drooping when it hits my lap. When I'm walking, my fat belly doesn't get in the way. It's not easy to breath this way. It's counter intuitive and I have to think it through as I do it. Toward the end of my walk, though, it's easier.
It's my opinion that doing the breath exercises and meditating is a big deal, but nobody listens to me when I recommend it. I don't really blame them when I look in the mirror. Why would they wanna do something that might cause them to end up looking like me?
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The Ten Most Likely Way Life On Earth Will Die
I just watched a scary video on ten ways life on Earth can cease to exist. You can watch it too:
http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_petranek_counts_down_to_armageddon.html
I don't know why you would watch this video. I'm kind of sorry I did. But, everything the man talks about is nothing new. Most of it has appeared in the media for years and years. Life is very fragile. Shit happens. Thangs change.
The stuff this guy talks about, like Earth getting hit by an astroid or the development of new disease strains like the black plague are events the individual doesn't have much if any control over. If any one person survived such a cataclysmic event it would be sheer, random chance. It might not be worth it if you did survive. What for? Who is gonna manufacture the hope humans need to carry on?
It is because of my remembering vision that I don't feel ultimately threatened with extinction. The inner-most essential part of me was revealed to have co-me to this planet from outer space. Once here, it met other pearl-like creatures that also came here from outer space.
Those singularities will only get flung back into space if an astroid smashes the Earth to smithereens. It can create life such as us Earth creatures anywhere it finds a place it can imitate what it finds there, and adopt it's creations to evolve eventually into something like homo sapiens if it has time before an astroid destroys the new place too.
Life as we know it can't survive but for so long before it becomes a victim of random chance, but that which creates life as we know it always survives. I'm fascinated by the notion of some little things called neutrinos that I heard about when I was fairly young. The described characteristic that fascinated me about what I heard about neutrinos is that they get flung out into space from solar flares, and the big deal is, that they go right clear through Earth and everything on it.
The "spark of life" that I'm calling a pearl because it looked like an oyster pearl when I "saw" it seems like it got to Earth sort of like a neutrino is said to get here, but it's not a neutrino and it didn't go through the Earth as if it wasn't here. For all I know there could be countless billions of pearl-like creatures isolated on planets like Mars that can't evolve life forms there because the cosmic soup ain't right for doing it there.
The memory part of that pearl is the memory of what amount of consciousness has been developed anytime the pearl has found an atmosphere in which it can evolve into it's predictable life forms. It's this memore that fascinates me the most, and why would it not? Every macro- or micro- form of life including bacteria and germs or otherwise enemies of life are life themselves. I don't think it matters which prevails.
http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_petranek_counts_down_to_armageddon.html
I don't know why you would watch this video. I'm kind of sorry I did. But, everything the man talks about is nothing new. Most of it has appeared in the media for years and years. Life is very fragile. Shit happens. Thangs change.
The stuff this guy talks about, like Earth getting hit by an astroid or the development of new disease strains like the black plague are events the individual doesn't have much if any control over. If any one person survived such a cataclysmic event it would be sheer, random chance. It might not be worth it if you did survive. What for? Who is gonna manufacture the hope humans need to carry on?
It is because of my remembering vision that I don't feel ultimately threatened with extinction. The inner-most essential part of me was revealed to have co-me to this planet from outer space. Once here, it met other pearl-like creatures that also came here from outer space.
Those singularities will only get flung back into space if an astroid smashes the Earth to smithereens. It can create life such as us Earth creatures anywhere it finds a place it can imitate what it finds there, and adopt it's creations to evolve eventually into something like homo sapiens if it has time before an astroid destroys the new place too.
Life as we know it can't survive but for so long before it becomes a victim of random chance, but that which creates life as we know it always survives. I'm fascinated by the notion of some little things called neutrinos that I heard about when I was fairly young. The described characteristic that fascinated me about what I heard about neutrinos is that they get flung out into space from solar flares, and the big deal is, that they go right clear through Earth and everything on it.
The "spark of life" that I'm calling a pearl because it looked like an oyster pearl when I "saw" it seems like it got to Earth sort of like a neutrino is said to get here, but it's not a neutrino and it didn't go through the Earth as if it wasn't here. For all I know there could be countless billions of pearl-like creatures isolated on planets like Mars that can't evolve life forms there because the cosmic soup ain't right for doing it there.
The memory part of that pearl is the memory of what amount of consciousness has been developed anytime the pearl has found an atmosphere in which it can evolve into it's predictable life forms. It's this memore that fascinates me the most, and why would it not? Every macro- or micro- form of life including bacteria and germs or otherwise enemies of life are life themselves. I don't think it matters which prevails.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Another Day, Another Dollar
I drove over to Fayetteville today. I used going to the VA to see if I could get the travel money they owe me, but I went mostly just to get outta town for a while. There was a fine mist in the air the whole time I was gone. It never did rain, but the mist was continuous for hours. There was something very eerie about that mist. I slowed down to the speed limit because i thought it might make the road slick.
I looked for an TV signal amplifier while I was over in Fayetteville. They have a lot more stores over there. Everywhere I went they were out of stock on just about anything to do with over-the-air digital antennas. I get lousy reception here. I'm half-way between the State capitol and Wilmington, and when the weather is the slightest bit off I can't get a strong signal from either. The only way I can get a better signal is to buy a signal amplifier. I have one now, but it's not up to the task. I'll probably just wait for a while and see if there is a better solution.
I looked for an TV signal amplifier while I was over in Fayetteville. They have a lot more stores over there. Everywhere I went they were out of stock on just about anything to do with over-the-air digital antennas. I get lousy reception here. I'm half-way between the State capitol and Wilmington, and when the weather is the slightest bit off I can't get a strong signal from either. The only way I can get a better signal is to buy a signal amplifier. I have one now, but it's not up to the task. I'll probably just wait for a while and see if there is a better solution.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Bits And Pieces
The weather has been a little sporadic today. All the way from bright sunlight to sudden showers with huge, plopping raindrops. The showers have arrived in stealth mode for the most part. They announce themselves to me by the drumming sound they make on the preserved wood deck just beyond the opened outside door. The wind didn't pick up and there was no lightening to announce it's coming like it usually is in summer. Just "plop, plop... fizz, fizz... Oh, whatta relief it is!" You know about Alka-Selzer rains... right?
It's not often that I realize in real time that I've been writing about arriving on Earth as an alien for several decades, and yet I don't actually view myself as an alien in essence, but a living docetic spirit that can't figure out how to be wholy human in every way. Especially to die as humans do forever, and thus move it on down the line.
This theme of doceticism is not my idea or creation, but a theme of description that highly amuses me to work my way with it. It fits right in with my Kundalini rap of my twenties. The only difference I can find is culture and lingo. The content is essentially the same if the roots of metaphor are uncovered. Presently, I'm writing as though homo sapiens have a species flaw, and concluding that other cultures have called this species flaw other naymes including "the original sin." YMMV
This species-wide flaw causes humans and other species to imitate the possibilities of the other in their own best interest as "monkey see/monkey do" studies indicate, because they can't realize and initiate their own individuated possibilities in real time for-the-other. Compassion is distinctly human, but not all humans act compassionately even part of the time.
Why would they bother? They were created by aliens. They are the aliens themselves at heart. Rather, in essence, they are the aliens who created what eventually evolved into homo sapiens presently. It's the alien part of us that came to Earth without much option that is the mustard seed of all life on Earth.
That's not exactly honest or true for me to write that. My remembering vision was for all practical purposes about just me. At least, every aspect of it was about what had happened to me individually since I arrived here from outer space billions of years ago. It's only in this way that what I experienced was cosmic consciousness. It was not in any way all-knowing about the rest of existence.
What the other pearls who arrived here like I did experienced, I can't vouch for, but we all imitated each other in such detail that the only real differences between us soon after we got here (a million years here, a million years there) seemed bound to what part of the swarm we incrementally spooned with. Some cracks in ti-me produced pintos; other cracks in time made camels.
Systems of expertise are not the equivalent of gnosis. Yet, it appears to take two to tango in this regard. In a system of expertise the database used to apperceive a correct diagnosis or a winning move is memorized and used to calculate predictable results.
With gnosis, the database is provided by revelation and can't be earned by merit. It can't be prayed or preyed for, but is irrefutably given whether wanted or not. If you don't wanna abandon yo' parent's ways to accept it by your own hand, then it's given the hard way. Gnosis ain't always a blessing, and who-you-think-you-are dies like a dog in a ditch anyway.
For me a real problem happened early on when I took to the notion that the people around me oughta hafta obey the rules of conscience I chose for myself to be-co-me king of the world. Most didn't/don't like it or find much value in the experience, No more than I would like it if they expected me to obey the rules of conscience designed to get them what they wanted, even if turn-about is fair play.
I can't be sure that other people get mad when other people ignore the rules of conscience they're bound to by affirmation, because I have to interpret their behavior by my own world view like everybody else, but they act like they do when I treat them like I would myself.
It's not often that I realize in real time that I've been writing about arriving on Earth as an alien for several decades, and yet I don't actually view myself as an alien in essence, but a living docetic spirit that can't figure out how to be wholy human in every way. Especially to die as humans do forever, and thus move it on down the line.
This theme of doceticism is not my idea or creation, but a theme of description that highly amuses me to work my way with it. It fits right in with my Kundalini rap of my twenties. The only difference I can find is culture and lingo. The content is essentially the same if the roots of metaphor are uncovered. Presently, I'm writing as though homo sapiens have a species flaw, and concluding that other cultures have called this species flaw other naymes including "the original sin." YMMV
This species-wide flaw causes humans and other species to imitate the possibilities of the other in their own best interest as "monkey see/monkey do" studies indicate, because they can't realize and initiate their own individuated possibilities in real time for-the-other. Compassion is distinctly human, but not all humans act compassionately even part of the time.
Why would they bother? They were created by aliens. They are the aliens themselves at heart. Rather, in essence, they are the aliens who created what eventually evolved into homo sapiens presently. It's the alien part of us that came to Earth without much option that is the mustard seed of all life on Earth.
That's not exactly honest or true for me to write that. My remembering vision was for all practical purposes about just me. At least, every aspect of it was about what had happened to me individually since I arrived here from outer space billions of years ago. It's only in this way that what I experienced was cosmic consciousness. It was not in any way all-knowing about the rest of existence.
What the other pearls who arrived here like I did experienced, I can't vouch for, but we all imitated each other in such detail that the only real differences between us soon after we got here (a million years here, a million years there) seemed bound to what part of the swarm we incrementally spooned with. Some cracks in ti-me produced pintos; other cracks in time made camels.
Systems of expertise are not the equivalent of gnosis. Yet, it appears to take two to tango in this regard. In a system of expertise the database used to apperceive a correct diagnosis or a winning move is memorized and used to calculate predictable results.
With gnosis, the database is provided by revelation and can't be earned by merit. It can't be prayed or preyed for, but is irrefutably given whether wanted or not. If you don't wanna abandon yo' parent's ways to accept it by your own hand, then it's given the hard way. Gnosis ain't always a blessing, and who-you-think-you-are dies like a dog in a ditch anyway.
For me a real problem happened early on when I took to the notion that the people around me oughta hafta obey the rules of conscience I chose for myself to be-co-me king of the world. Most didn't/don't like it or find much value in the experience, No more than I would like it if they expected me to obey the rules of conscience designed to get them what they wanted, even if turn-about is fair play.
I can't be sure that other people get mad when other people ignore the rules of conscience they're bound to by affirmation, because I have to interpret their behavior by my own world view like everybody else, but they act like they do when I treat them like I would myself.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Keeping My Stopping Still
The fireworks are exploding in full force now. I can hear them in all directions. My brother next door was down by the pond setting firecrackers off for his twin grandsons. I seem satisfied to sit here and reminisce. I don't have to see the real thing to imagine people's reactions.
I've been spending more time meditating and practicing the breathing techniques I've used since the Sixties. I smoked cigarettes for all but the three years I stopped sometime in the past, and the year and a half I've stopped this time. Not smoking seems to have opened up a more subtle pathway for breathing or it could be that I've redeveloped feelings in that part of my nasal passages recently.
I found a new focus point for getting my breathing to take the right shape as I first attempt to direct it to the right area just inside my nostrils. I imagine seaweeds flowing in the current around coral reefs, but the hairs just inside my nares are what really flows back and forth as I breath in and out.
It's important for me to establish an awareness of the quality or characteristics of the air just inside of my nostrils. Doing that forces me to breath from the right place. I can concentrate on feeling a specific spot in my perineum and the same thing will happen.
When I get it right I feel the desired feedback at the same time from both areas, and that eventually leads me to my brow chakra and then my crown chakra, and when the sensations from all the chakras gets coordinated some very powerful things can happen.
The only real and sort of permanent problem I have with this breathing technique is that I have a deviated septum so that the air passage I need for this technique is usually stuffed up a bit, and it can take forever to get it clear enough to not have to think about it for a while.
Sometimes when I get it clear enough then I don't have any more trouble in a session, but usually it will get clogged again, and I have to stop and clear it out again with several variations of blowing my nose. This particular type of blockage doesn't interfere with my regular breathing much at all. Just when I'm meditating.
I wanna explore again what happens when I stop my breath and my heart from beating. I got a feeling I'll just lose consciousness and start breathing automatically after I'm out, but it may be more complicated than that. A couple of days ago I got my breathing stopped for a while. It was fairly familiar territory. Everything seems to have to be just right though, to be able to stop my breath and my heart from beating. I'll find out in the near future.
I've been spending more time meditating and practicing the breathing techniques I've used since the Sixties. I smoked cigarettes for all but the three years I stopped sometime in the past, and the year and a half I've stopped this time. Not smoking seems to have opened up a more subtle pathway for breathing or it could be that I've redeveloped feelings in that part of my nasal passages recently.
I found a new focus point for getting my breathing to take the right shape as I first attempt to direct it to the right area just inside my nostrils. I imagine seaweeds flowing in the current around coral reefs, but the hairs just inside my nares are what really flows back and forth as I breath in and out.
It's important for me to establish an awareness of the quality or characteristics of the air just inside of my nostrils. Doing that forces me to breath from the right place. I can concentrate on feeling a specific spot in my perineum and the same thing will happen.
When I get it right I feel the desired feedback at the same time from both areas, and that eventually leads me to my brow chakra and then my crown chakra, and when the sensations from all the chakras gets coordinated some very powerful things can happen.
The only real and sort of permanent problem I have with this breathing technique is that I have a deviated septum so that the air passage I need for this technique is usually stuffed up a bit, and it can take forever to get it clear enough to not have to think about it for a while.
Sometimes when I get it clear enough then I don't have any more trouble in a session, but usually it will get clogged again, and I have to stop and clear it out again with several variations of blowing my nose. This particular type of blockage doesn't interfere with my regular breathing much at all. Just when I'm meditating.
I wanna explore again what happens when I stop my breath and my heart from beating. I got a feeling I'll just lose consciousness and start breathing automatically after I'm out, but it may be more complicated than that. A couple of days ago I got my breathing stopped for a while. It was fairly familiar territory. Everything seems to have to be just right though, to be able to stop my breath and my heart from beating. I'll find out in the near future.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Costumed Grown-ups Acting Like Children
I don't know how unique being raised the way I was in on comparison to how other people were raised in the United States. It was certainly dominated by agriculture. Both in the fact that my father was a high school agriculture teacher, and it was in this capacity that he was the adviser to the Future Farmers of America club in all the little villages and towns on the North Carolina coastal plains we moved to. We move here when I was twelve years old, and our family has remained here since then for the most part. The unique thing about being raised here in this area is that the main cash crop grown in this area was/is tobacco. Lots of it.
One of the most exciting things about moving here was that it was almost big enough to be considered a town instead of a village, but only because it is the county seat of the largest county in the state land-wise. Population-wise, it's not a metropolis. The State capitol is about sixty miles away, and it has grown into a metropolitan area along with the towns surrounding it into The Research Triangle. The big deal about that to a twelve year me was that they had a Boy Scout troop here, and I had heard all about the Boy Scouts well before we moved here.
Joining the Boy Scouts led to an annual collection drive to get money for the Scouts to visit and tour Washington, D.C., our nation's capitol. In the fall, when the tobacco farmers brought their crop to market the scouts were allowed to approach them after their tobacco had been weighed in the woven wooden baskets that are ubiquitous all over tobacco-growing country. Usually it was just a couple of bundles from hundreds of bundles, and it was an act of generosity by the farmers and the buyers. Mostly the buyers. The farmers didn't lose anything because their product had already been weighed and they'd get the money for the full weight.
Going to Washington, D.C. when I was twelve years old was a watermark in my young life because of what I saw there besides the contents of all the museums (which was very exciting, particularly the Smithsonian weapons collection of swords and pistols). I saw snow completely covering the ground for the first time in my life. There might have been as much as three inches of it. There wasn't even any grass sticking up through it in many places. Real snow. The kind you could ride a sled on. I'd never seen a sled before, much less watch some local DC kids sliding down the small hills around the motel there. We don't even have hills here, but there are hills not far from here, like up in the State capitol.
The other thing I saw in DC for the first time when I was twelve years old was Catholic nuns. I'd seen them occasionally in the movies, but not in person, and they were the strangest creatures I'd ever seen. I couldn't figure out why they had to wear costumes like they were in a play or something. As if they weren't actual human beings. The stories among us kids, only one or two of whom had ever seen a nun before, grew to fantastic lengths of fancy.
We also saw some Jewish men who wore those big black hats and had weird-looking haircuts that looked very strange. The closest thing to that us boys from the backwoods had going for us was wearing Bass Weejuns penny loafers, so we'd all look cool. That was nothing compared to what these people. They looked more like grown-ups at a masquerade than us kids trying to seem different did. Of course, I was just as shocked when I passed through Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and many people out there actually wore cowboy hats and boots as if life really was a movie.
Seeing that some people do things differently than how I was raised to behave was a huge lesson I'd be learning for the rest of my life. I didn't realize how much difference it made to my personality to have done a lot of traveling when I was a kid. I was born in Mississippi, as were my two older sisters and my parents. My younger brothers were born here.
Our whole family would pack up in the summer and travel a thousand miles each way to and from Mississippi to visit our closest relatives at mostly my mother's mother's house. Hardly anybody I ever went to school with here growing up ever traveled to the state capitol sixty miles away. Then, three months after I graduated from high school I joined the Navy and they sent me to California for boot camp. Traveling defined my life and my personality. I never expected to be in any one place long enough to have to apologize for being different.
One of the most exciting things about moving here was that it was almost big enough to be considered a town instead of a village, but only because it is the county seat of the largest county in the state land-wise. Population-wise, it's not a metropolis. The State capitol is about sixty miles away, and it has grown into a metropolitan area along with the towns surrounding it into The Research Triangle. The big deal about that to a twelve year me was that they had a Boy Scout troop here, and I had heard all about the Boy Scouts well before we moved here.
Joining the Boy Scouts led to an annual collection drive to get money for the Scouts to visit and tour Washington, D.C., our nation's capitol. In the fall, when the tobacco farmers brought their crop to market the scouts were allowed to approach them after their tobacco had been weighed in the woven wooden baskets that are ubiquitous all over tobacco-growing country. Usually it was just a couple of bundles from hundreds of bundles, and it was an act of generosity by the farmers and the buyers. Mostly the buyers. The farmers didn't lose anything because their product had already been weighed and they'd get the money for the full weight.
Going to Washington, D.C. when I was twelve years old was a watermark in my young life because of what I saw there besides the contents of all the museums (which was very exciting, particularly the Smithsonian weapons collection of swords and pistols). I saw snow completely covering the ground for the first time in my life. There might have been as much as three inches of it. There wasn't even any grass sticking up through it in many places. Real snow. The kind you could ride a sled on. I'd never seen a sled before, much less watch some local DC kids sliding down the small hills around the motel there. We don't even have hills here, but there are hills not far from here, like up in the State capitol.
The other thing I saw in DC for the first time when I was twelve years old was Catholic nuns. I'd seen them occasionally in the movies, but not in person, and they were the strangest creatures I'd ever seen. I couldn't figure out why they had to wear costumes like they were in a play or something. As if they weren't actual human beings. The stories among us kids, only one or two of whom had ever seen a nun before, grew to fantastic lengths of fancy.
We also saw some Jewish men who wore those big black hats and had weird-looking haircuts that looked very strange. The closest thing to that us boys from the backwoods had going for us was wearing Bass Weejuns penny loafers, so we'd all look cool. That was nothing compared to what these people. They looked more like grown-ups at a masquerade than us kids trying to seem different did. Of course, I was just as shocked when I passed through Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and many people out there actually wore cowboy hats and boots as if life really was a movie.
Seeing that some people do things differently than how I was raised to behave was a huge lesson I'd be learning for the rest of my life. I didn't realize how much difference it made to my personality to have done a lot of traveling when I was a kid. I was born in Mississippi, as were my two older sisters and my parents. My younger brothers were born here.
Our whole family would pack up in the summer and travel a thousand miles each way to and from Mississippi to visit our closest relatives at mostly my mother's mother's house. Hardly anybody I ever went to school with here growing up ever traveled to the state capitol sixty miles away. Then, three months after I graduated from high school I joined the Navy and they sent me to California for boot camp. Traveling defined my life and my personality. I never expected to be in any one place long enough to have to apologize for being different.
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