Heal Thyself?

☥
Deciding to forego eating meat has never been easy for me, but I gotta do it to see if it will help offset this arthritis. Apparently the rheumatologist at the Durham VA Hospital is gonna punish me for my refusal to commit suicide for his amusement, so I gotta do what I can to be a physician to myself where that's possible. My diet is definite one of those areas. To a large part it's that way because I live alone and nobody can know what I'm eating a majority of the time but me.

I made a mistake when I replaced the regular batteries in my mouse and keyboard with rechargeable cells. It was absent-mindedness on my part I guess. After I had changed out the batteries, for some dumb reason I put the regular batteries into the charging station as if they were rechargeable. It wasn't until I needed to change the batteries again that I realized my mistake.

That's why I went by the Wal-Mart yesterday. To pick up some rechargeable batteries. But, as I habitually do, I decided to look through the grocery section to see if they had anything to eat that might appeal to me. I picked up two containers of frozen chipped beef gravy before I remembered I'd decided to not eat meat. It took a moment for me to sigh in regret, and put them back in the shiny, refrigerated display case.

It's not easy being green. Most of the fruits and vegetables on sale were picked early for shelf life and they taste like cardboard, either that or they're just altogether tasteless and physically hard and tough. Maybe sawdust would be a better descriptor.

My sister-in-law has offered to share her wheat grass with me. Her spacious greenhouse is located between their house and mine, and just in case my brother and his wife thought I might hesitate to use any available space in their greenhouse, they told me to my face it would be just fine. I got no excuse not to do something greenish.

The ornamental kale plant I bought and repotted is really thriving. Maybe nature is trying to tell me that I oughta keep my gardening efforts out of the actual soil around my house. The plants I keep in pots seem to do okay, but if I take them out of the pots and put them into the ground they turn brown and die.

Some of the asparagus I planted lived despite my leaving it to root little pig or die. I know it's time to dig the crowns up, separate them into new plugs and replant them as a new crop. I suppose if I had a motorized soil digger-upper I could make that happen. I ain't much into using a shovel manually. In that sense I'm just another old man with bad hands.

What I would like mo' bettah is to live near a reliable farmer's market. I think the closest one is the Farmer's Market at the State Capital up in Raleigh. That's 70 miles (112.65 km) one way. That's not practical either by time or money.

New Orleans had the most plentiful Farmer's Market I've seen in the U.S.. Whether there's anything left of it after the hurricane is a mystery to me. It was located on the Mississippi River on Bay Street in the French Quarter which is one of the higher places in New Orleans. It didn't get flooded like the other parts of the city did.

Many a time I've thought of buying an apartment within walking distance of such a market. Not in New Orleans. What? You think I'm crazy too. New Orleans used to be like a prison that you might only want to visit for the very dearest of friends. It's not a place to become a permanent resident of in my opinion. I've lived there temporarily several times. No mas.

Any of those places in the South that are warm in the winter are collecting points for there being trouble in River City. Many of the cities in southern Florida, California, and Texas are that way. I've been to all of them. Worked in most of them.

Been a homeless bum in all of them. Yet, I was never one of the people you had to be careful with because ending up with yo' stuff would be burden to me. My being that way never had (and still don't have) nothing to do with you. You neither earned or deserved to be left to your own devices by me. It just is the way it is.

It's delightful to me to realize that the #5 saying in the Gospel of Thomas describes the concept of projection. I seem fairly sure that the concept of projection is what Christianity brought to the table to resolve the mysteries wrought by the double-bind of paradox. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, but you gotta do something or anything can happen.

What else is there to do but something. Can one actually call not doing nothing to be a doing at all? Something or nothing? That is the question. What do you do when there is nothing to do, and the world is sitting heavy on you, and the pressure comes down with the force of despair, and the will that you won't kinda stuns?

What do you see when there is no thing to see, and the thangs that you do see are not true, and you look deep inside for the child who has died, and the place it occupied is gone too?

Where do you go when there is no "where" to go, and the place that you're at is kinda blue, and you've been every "where" but the stars up above, and you feel like you've been up there too?

Oh, Lord of mah haid, take my senses away. Take me away from this world of desire. Because_ the feelings I got from frustration and fear_ take me away from loving my Self.
☀

Everything Is Nothing But

♌
I woke up thinking the ego is the personality. People on ego trips defend their personality against the events of their encounter with God, whatever they view God as. I don't have a clue whether this means anything valuable to me or not. I woke up, and there it was. Now I'm writing about it to see what co-me-s.

Something happened today I've been looking for at least ten years. Why am I always the last to know? I've figured that projection has to be a part of Christianity, but I haven't been able to recognize it except for the Golden Rule. The saying from the Gospel of Thomas describes it tersely:

5 Jesus said, "Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.

For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. [And there is nothing buried that will not be raised."]

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

All anybody can know that appears in the front of their face is who or what they think they would be themselves if they conducted themselves in the same way the attribute to the other. They perceive what they "think" is out there.

What they've hidden from themselves about themselves is most easily recogitated in the objects of the external world. We are reborn in the other, but not as them.
♆

Let It Be

♁
I've been trying to write the statement below for a long time:

"When I was a homeless bum who read palms to beg a meal, people used me to heal themselves because of what they made me into in order to do it."

Letting myself be 'co-me-d' is not the easiest state state of receptivity to deflate to. I have to give the persona I created to please my parents away, in order to be still let other people make me into whatever they need in the immediacy of now or there ain't no me-and-thee-ing to make meaning of. Any attempt on my part to maintain some wistful personality I treasure interferes with the other person feeling emotionally met. 

To enter this state of repose is the epi-to-me of abandonment. Absolutely in real ti-me putting who-I-think-I-am-is on the back burner in total deference to the other. Whatever they got on their mind at the ti-me is gonna be the enactment of the first of their three wishes. The result can be measured immediately, and only immediately. If you've truly gotten beyond your natal persona you can watch the following events happen in the face of the other:

2 Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]"

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

Travel broadens. That's why I speculate that the GoT was a cheat list of topics some nomadic storyteller put together to remind themselves of which sayings they could develop to tell the best stories to get the most people to reach into their stash and put coins in the plate/hat/turban. Protestant preachers still do it today. It's common practice for them to spell out the specific Bible verse they plan to use. It's the entire point of the Protestant movement. Tell the stories, pass the plate, and always leave town before you count the take.

They're telling these say-me Jesus stories today as were told when these Gnostic sayings were put together. It's a story of hope. Always a viable topic. Hope is the only product anybody on Earth got for sale. That's what the GoT is about. It says, "You wanna learn how to peddle hope? Take this Jesus story-telling show on the road. Soon enow, you'll drop the local dialect and eventually speak as if you were the person you speak of, but in the first person." 

It"s by letting other people make me into what they need for me to be that I can be most useful. I can't possibly know how steep the learning curve is for others because I have to interpret what they say when and if they tell me how it is for them, but for me, it's been a hard row to hoe. Why am I always the last to know?

An example of what I intend to convey happened when I went on my first sojourn after getting out of the Navy. I had a similar adventure when I ran away from home when I was fifteen, but that was probably meant to be a failed effort for some other lessons I was being taught.

I don't remember where I was or when or the set or setting. What I remember was standing on the side of the road going through the motions of trying to hitch a ride. I was in a state of chronic fatigue from which I could enter a state of revery in which I wondered why the cars passing me by on the road two thousand miles away from my parent's home didn't do the Christian thing and stop and help me like the Good Samaritans I thought they oughta be. Hell, some of them even had license signs that read God Is My Co-pilot!

I think that was the first time I consciously realized that nobody knew who I thought I was nor give a shit who my parents were. That's how deluded I was at that time, I thought being my parent's child should mean something to the world at large. Later, with the passage of ti-me and some thoughtful reflection, I realized they probably saw just another confused looking bum on the side of the road.

A lot more time would pass and a lot more reflection would be considered before I would capitulate to the simple facticity that nothing I ever thought I was or could be meant anything to anybody but me. At first, I was sad as if dying. But then, I eventually realized that won't all they wuz to it.

Later, one fine autumn afternoon, as an afterthought, almost on the edge of losing the image, there also appeared to exist the glimmer of a possibility that not only did I live in a state of not knowing, but that nobody else knows what they can't know either. Damn! That's as good a reason for living as any.
♘

Neither Wealthy Or Healthy? No Matter. All Fall Down

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This morning I was told again that I'd regret not taking this guy's advice to pay attention to what he thinks is important rather than listen to my own inner voice. I'm not gonna, and he'll lose faith in me again. He always loses faith in me. It's rather predictable.

I don't know whether to feel emotionally wounded that I wasn't emotionally met or no. Air signs. Whatta ya gonna do? It's always a snowball in hell with their dry wit. Do they All wanna be John Wayne/Clint Eastwood hero types or die trying?

I was fairly true to my new decision to attempt to follow a vegetarian diet yesterday at the Thanksgiving feast. At least I didn't eat any of the dishes that obviously had meat in them. The problem with me following a vegetarian diet is that I do most of my own cooking, but I don't like taking all day to do it. It's my own impatience that causes me to eat pre-processed foods.

What I'm eating in the place of meat isn't much better than what I was eating. Cole slaw and prepared salads I get at the deli section. Still, I owe it to myself to try. I figure I might do better eating less food altogether, meat or no meat. I've read a bit and seen some programs on television about people adopting minimum diets. Rats live longer when put on a minimum diet, why not humans?

To my surprise I still occasionally find myself contemplating a remark I heard on Hardball, a TV show. The host made the remark in response to one of his guest pundits. I don't recall that remark. It was the afterthought that impressed me. He said, "Oh, you mean the guy in high school who everybody liked because he argued with and made fun of the teachers." One of the responses I've had with my reflection was a negative remark my brother-in-law made in regard to me. He quipped, "I'm just glad I didn't have many people in my classes like you."

I've been thinking about these remarks. I know I was that guy in high school. Both my parents were school teacher both at school and even when we were at home, and smart alecky remarks was the only way I knew to defend myself against their attempts to institutionalize my outlook on life. But now, I'm thinking of my behavior more as if it was just another device I used to get attention. I don't think I realized in high school that my classmates liked me for it, but now I do. With the question being: Do I have to wax negative to get the same positive response?

I called the VA Hospital at Durham today to see if I could get them to refill my old prescriptions. I was all hyped up to argue with them, but the person I talked to was calm and obviously more lucid about what was going on then me. I don't work there. I haven't checked to see if it's happened yet over the internet, but I believe this woman I talked to will see to it reliably. She didn't take no guff from me, and I doubt if she'll take no guff from the doctors either.

Today was my lucky day with the Fayetteville VA Hospital too. I got through to the appointment center and made an appointment to see my regular doctor. They had sent out a letter demanding that the veterans not come to the hospital to make appointments to reduce the chance of getting or passing on swine flu.

The problem with that is that they didn't answer my calls or hung up before I could leave a message. Bureaucracy. It's everywhere. I hate it that everybody is gonna be on the government dole, I'll be even less special if that's possible. Anyway, after waiting on hold for an hour or more an operator came online and it took about two minutes to complete the deal. The 6th of December. That's fairly quick for any hospital.

Who doesn't hate being put on hold for an hour. I do, but I sorta understand the part about keeping people outta the hospital, and not just because of the swine flu. A lot of veterans appear to use the VA as a social center where they can meet up with their old buddies. The halls and waiting rooms seem full of people who aren't their for medical attention, and the threat of contagious diseases is real.

I may be wrong, but the service there seems better since Obama got elected, and that's not the only place things have gotten better. The blacks seem a lot friendlier because they feel more equal. The election seemed to prove that they too can grow up to be President of the United States. I really hadn't thought of this aspect of true equality.

What's really surprising to me about the apparently new attitude among blacks is how they have begun to initiate the normal social greeting we have in passing. I mean by that, that they say "Hello, how are you today?" first, and with a sincere smile to go along with it. It's no longer my soul responsibility to be friendly or not on my say so. I feel weird speaking back to them. I literally feel grateful they have acted so graciously that when I return their greeting it's almost like I'm gushing. How shameless of me.
〶

Does Nay-me-ing Thangs Change Human Nature

☟
Thanksgiving is not that great a time for me. My oldest sister's crowd are a bunch of religious fanatics that attempt to use the occasion to proselytize their fundamentalist religion. It's not the same since our parents died. I hate being rude to members of my own family, but I don't hold no truck with religious bullies trying to shove their version of God up my ass, kin or no kin.

I'll be going down to Wilmington to stop by the gathering for a while well after the loud praying is over, then I'll eat whatever I can, but no meat. I'm gonna go without meat for a while to see if that helps the arthritis. After I've made my perfunctory appearance, I'll drive down to the ocean and visit my old haunts to remember my childhood visits there.

Wilmington was a fairly sleepy mid-sized town that observed the blue laws until Interstate 40 was completed. Now it's beginning to seem like the towns and cities at the other end of it in California. The beaches are much better for swimming on the Atlantic end of the road. At least I think so. YMMV.

California does have the advantage of having mountains near the Pacific coast, the scenery is much more spectacular, but the water drops off too fast for the beaches to be good for swimming. Twenty yards offshore and the water gets deep real fast. Not so here. The coastal plains are as flat as a fly flitter for a hundred miles inland, and the Transatlantic shelf reaches another hundred miles or so from the shallow, wide beaches eastward.

Wilmington is not located on the ocean itself, but lies inland about ten miles or so as the crow flies. It's located on the first bluffs above the Cape Fear River. It's a port city, but the ship channels have to be dredged regularly for the ocean vessels to get all the way to Wilmington.

Global warming and the rising of the ocean waters is not regarded as too much of a threat here. Why should it be? It hasn't been that long geologically since my house 60 miles inland would have been on the beach itself, and the remnants of Indian villages have been found on the TransAtlantic shelf ten miles out from the present coastline under 50-100 feet of water.

Humans survived all those tidal comings and goings just dandy. If people want something to worry about that just might destroy life on Earth, at least all the mammals, they should look to the heavens and those persnickety astroids that nay-me-ing them doesn't stop their courses.

The Indians didn't build permanent dwellings or ken the concept of private property. They didn't lose anything when the oceans warmed and flooded their usual campgrounds in the winter. The water's edge was where they found it, not where it was "supposed to be".

It amazes me to reflect on what the Europeans brought to America. Especially in regard to the concept of private property. My ancestors were definitely convinced about that. Accumulating property seems to have been in their blood. The family stories go back as far as can be traced about generation after generation of men who followed the agrarian trip to becoming aristocrats. Not me, but both my younger brothers follow the tradition, and they haven't done too bad at it.

The current economic depression will end all that. The United States is going out of business. All their properties have been sold to the highest bidders, and the new owners are absentee landlords. I'm kinda glad all this waited until I got old to transpire, or should I say... expire?

I went to the gathering and got back an hour or so ago. Interestingly enough the religious nuts weren't there. Their mother, my oldest sister, was fairly gracious this time, and in fact, we had a couple of laughs together. There has been some tension between a niece and myself for a couple of years, and that even seem to resolve itself to some degree. I've never favored family gatherings too much, but this one turned out okay.

I like to practice singing the bel canto warm up exercises I learned while taking some private voice lessons. The one that appears to get me where I wanna go by doing this involves singing the scales and placing an "H" before each vowel to do it. Hay, hee, high, ho, who? For some reason this helps me to sing the pure vowel sounds the quickest. Every time I do it I have to find that pure sound again. If I practice every day for a couple of weeks it gets to where I can pretty much find the pure sound fairly immediately, but if I miss one day of practice it takes longer to get to the pure sound.

Singing these scales while I'm driving for at least an hour means I'll probably sound smooth and polished when I arrive at where I'm headed. This might appear a little false and egoistic to some, but I live alone and hardly ever talk because there's no one around to talk to. Like anything else humans have to learn to do talking has to be done on a fairly regular basis or I forget how to do it for a little while in the beginning.

The interesting thing about my singing today on the drive down to Wilmington is that intoning the vowels really calmed me down. Particularly when I practiced singing in the lower ranges and the frequency of my vocal cords fluttering gets so slow the vibrations have a massaging effect. It seems like I forget this soon after I finish doing it every time, because each time I do practice singing I remember how relaxed and comfortable with myself. There are many times in my life I could have helped myself by singing to relax if I could just remember to do that.

I had a problem when I was taking those private voice lessons that my teacher didn't recognize in order to correct my misconstruing what the vocal cords looked like. He certainly knew something was wrong, but he didn't know what in order to tell me what to do. I don't blame him for not realizing I thought the pluralized term "cords" meant several. In fact I thought the vocal cords were like a set of pan pipes, and learning to sing meant learning to send my breath into a different "pipe" for each note. I still don't have a clue where I got that image.

Later on I got to see what the vocal cords looked like from a plastic model my theater voice teacher showed me. Her name was Helen Steer, and I'm still grateful to that woman. She intuited almost exactly what my problem was. She ushered me into the room where the plastic model of the throat was, picked it up and sat it on one of those oak classroom tables. She told me to sit down in front of the plastic model and took it apart one piece at a time, and took an extraordinarily long time to explain everything there was to know about the human vocal cords and how they worked.

It was only after this woman helped me that I remembered what my private voice teacher was trying to get me to do, and I began doing it, but alone, and five to ten years later. On my way down to Wilmington today I got to a place with my voice that he had described to me many times. I really wanted for him to hear that I finally grokked what he so sincerely tried to teach me.
✄

O'er The Ramparts We Watched

⚑
The "Magic Mouse" sold by Apple is different. The entire top of the mouse has sensors that can tell whether the user is left or right clicking even though there is only one button. Since I've changed from using my right hand to work the mouse, all I had to do to go left-handed was to check the button in the Preference page.

This morning I ran across a review on the Magic Mouse and while reading it I realized I hadn't been using the two-finger swipe that causes the browser to go Back to the last web site or Forward to the next site. To move Back to the last web page I was on, all I have to do is swipe two fingers to the left across the top surface of the Magic Mouse. To move Forward I swipe to the right.

The Forward swipe only works if I've already been to the site I wanna move forward to. Otherwise, how would it know where to go without an address to reference. In iPhoto, however, all my pictures can be accessed by two-finger swiping in any direction including up and down. What I'd really like with this new mouse now is a way to double-click with one click. There is probably a key I can press down on to have that happen, but I haven't run across it yet.

Fortunately, I have a Logitech Anywhere Mouse I bought just before the iMac, and it double-clicks just fine. It ought to. I paid enough for it. I've been having trouble with my old mice, including an old MS roller mouse that came in real handy when I'd worn my index finger out by two decades of daily left-clicking.

Switching to my left hand to operate the mouse has taken a while to adjust to and I'm still in transition. The most noticeable improvement shows up when I institute the redo of the last play in hearts by mashing the Command key plus the Z key. I've watched myself reach for the Command key with my right hand whereas when I'm using my right hand to operate the mouse I reach for the Command key with my left hand.

I've practiced using my left hand instead of my right hand for a long time. Especially when I'm writing with a pen. Yet, I don't consider myself ambidextrous because my natural impulse is to reach with my right hand first. Maybe that will change if I use the mouse left-handed long enow.

When the local people find out I've been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis they've offered a lot of advice. Yesterday my youngest brother told me that he was chatting it up with a black woman he's known a long time while she was at work at Lowe's, and she started talking about her arthritis as if proprietorial. My brother said she had changed to a vegetarian diet and the pain went away.

Oddly enough, I had been reflecting on this very thing. A lotta strings had to be put together for me to take this woman's second-hand advice (via my brother) seriously. The main facet was my memory of an article I read about some research about the long term affect of a vegetarian diet. and what it concluded was that it lowered the immune system.

Lowering my immune system is what the rheumatologist prescribed me the drugs I take along with reducing the inflammation associated with arthritis. So, I stopped eating meat as of lunch yesterday.

Another little factoid that led me in this direction was the advertising squib I saw on the outside of a carton of yogurt that stated 95% of what makes up the human immune system is located along the gastro-intestinal tract. I'd never heard of such a thing, but it makes sense that would be where one's immune system is located.

I figure this dis-comfort/dis-ease is related directly to my diet. Of course, all my ideas in this direction is speculation, but it's all any physician has to make their diagnosis too. It's my body my bad eating habits shows up in, and I am is the only-est one who gnows what I-am-is put in it. Sadly, a bunch of crap just to shut down the warning system.

Going on that Atkins-like, low carbohydrates diet is probably responsible for the arthritic crisis that literally took me down. I recognize that arthritis runs in my family. My Aunt Elizabeth came down with it after having her second child in a debilitating way that ended up with all the joints in her hands being removed before she entered old age.

This stuff may be directly related to diet in the same way that Rickets got related to a lack of vitamin D and calcium, and the lack of vitamin C with scurvy, and the lack of vitamin A with night blindness. In any of these cases the problem was solved by getting those vitamins in the victims bodies.

I had a number of problems I didn't recognize at the time that were related to the low-carb diet I enjoined rigorously. To keep myself from reaching for carbohydrate-loaded foods I reached for meat instead. As far as losing weight was concerned that did the trick.

I ate a lot of canned and processed meats like tuna, smoked oysters, vienna sausages, and the cellophane-wrapped sandwich meats. All loaded to the gills with preservatives to give them shelf life. At times I ate canned veggies to fool myself into thinking that would offset the affect of all that meat. I'm beginning to think the carbohydrates are not as damaging to my body as the meats.

Previously, I've written that my mother was not a very good cook. Well, she actually wasn't a good cook. She was a good provider though, because she was in charge of the large family garden, and she saw to it that the milk from the cows and the eggs from the chickens made it on to her table. The real culprit was the tradition of Southern cooking. Soul food will kill your body so that all you got left is your soul. Have you noticed the warped bodies of older Southerners both black and white? Arrrrrgh!

Driving that big rig and eating in truck stops made me write mean things about how being a truck driver is bad for your health. If you sit near the door the truckers use to enter the truck stop from the parking area you'll see some more warped bodies (not all Southerners by a long shot).

The fact that I'm desperate to find anything to get outta taking these very serious prescription drugs is no needle-in-the-haystack facticity that I'm trying to hide. What if I should live to be a hundred? I'm not worried about dying. I'm worried about NOT dying.

My family on both sides are long livers. Especially my mother's side of the family. If it is true that how long one will live can be indicated by the length of life of yo' mother's mother, then I'm screwed, blued, and tattooed. My mother's mother lived to be 98 years old. If I live that long, that's 28 more years. Jeez! Talk about paying for my sins! My bodies revenge for the abuse I've inflicted on it (in many more ways than my diet), is to not die so I'll exist only to experience a maximal amount of pain? Whatta drag, man.
⚐

Split Personalities

⚇
I went to bed early last night, so naturally, I got up early this morning. Since I've not got some scheduled event to attend to like going to a job or carrying out some plan I have for the day I lay in bed for a good long time before I actually got up. What I was thinking about was how many people I know that are Aquarians, and how many of them are bookkeepers or accountants. Practically all of them are.

Aquarians don't always do what they do under the title of accountant or bookkeeper, but they seem to be happiest when they're doing that kind of work. Bean counters. They hold people to account by literally counting all the beans and in a lotta cases, it often appears, are called into some court of one fashion or the other to settle the case by an accurate count of what belongs to whom.

My youngest brother and my older sister are Aquarians, and probably have been the models I reference most often when I think about the attributes of this astrology sign. They're only mildly curious I use them this way. My sister is a retired school teacher. She can't stop working though. She keeps books for our youngest brother part-time.

Both of my ex-wives fathers were Aquarians. They didn't live long after their daughters got up with me. Neither of them were all that old when they died. I never met my second wife's father. He was the head auditor for the Sherwin-Williams paint company. Not only was he an accountant, but the accountant to whom all the other accountants made their accounts to.

Somehow I think being brought up or reared by an accountant caused their daughters to seek out the furtherest person they could find in the world from being an accountant. Me. Maybe for the sake of balance in their own perspective. Maybe as a way of taking account of themselves. It's said that many women end up with a man that reminds them of their fathers, and that's why they didn't end up with me.

That all seems so far away from me now, and why would it not? I haven't seen my first wife for what seems like decades, and I've only seen my second wife once in the last thirty years. I was married to each of them around seven years, and presently I'm seventy years old.

That means that for the most part, I've lived as a single person for fifty-six years, not counting living with my parents for the first eighteen years of my life. How odd that I would be taking account of the span of my life. I'm not much of a bookkeeper at all, and the sign Aquarius is unoccupied in my natal chart.

I feel old this morning. I seem to be losing interest in the few topics or subjects that have attracted my attention in the past. I checked and read the e-mail in my Inbox before I began writing. There was only two posts.

One of the e-mail post was from this know-it-all woman who disagrees with everybody in the world about everything, and the other post was a long lecture from this guy who is trying to create his own church so he can be it's bishop. I don't know why he wants to do that. The only thing I can think of relates to Castenada's statements about self-importance.

I stop writing this morning after the paragraph above. I started straightening up some things to account for my computer set-up, and the next thing I knew I was redecorating my entire upstairs. There was a rat's nest of wires beneath the computer table I bought at Wal-Mart.

I didn't have a clue about why they were there. After I took everything apart and put it back together again I discovered that half the wires in that tangled mess really didn't have to be there. It was a real fire hazard in some ways, but some of the wires were TV cables that connected to my outside antenna.

Sometime in the past I ended up with two sets of amplified rabbit ears antennas. The reason I had two was that the first one didn't work as well as I wanted and I bought another brand to see if it would get better reception. The grace period for taking it back to the store passed before I realized the lousy reception I got was due to a loose connection.

For some reason I decided to hook these two sets of rabbit ears in tandem and play around with moving them in different parts of the room to see if that would get more stations clearer. If figured that if it worked I was truly a genius. It didn't.

The outside antenna I comshawed from my parent's home after it was bought by the airport authority worked better. Particularly after I bought a cheap in-line signal amplifier. When the reception is good, the picture on the digital TV I bought is outstanding.

I never expected television to have this clear a picture. I bought the least expensive model TV and the picture is amazing. Granted, I don't get that many stations, but each of the stations I do get has a couple of other digital channels. All of the network channels have a separate weather channel. It's different to be able to watch the weather reports 24/7.

I've about given up on trying to pick up more over-the-air stations because even if I do they'll still be the same old over-the-air stations I got previous to the digital changeover. The most exciting thing that's happened on PBS lately is their explorer channel. If they're gonna show nothing but reruns, then travel shows and Ken Burns patriotic shows are mo' better than 50 year old British comedy shows who actors are all dead of old age.

Television was intriguing to me as a young person. I still didn't watch it much because I was always on the move. Most of the content is mindless repetition. What I found interesting was the technology. I didn't really understand how radio worked until television came along, and I had more training in electronics than many people because of the schools the Navy sent me to.

I didn't grog the notion of waves being sent through the air. A couple of years ago when I was complaining to a friend that I didn't understand how wireless routers worked, he smiled and asked me if I hadn't been born with one physical connection, and then they snipped that into, and that I myself have been wireless since my first moments on Earth? How could I claim not to understand wirelessness and sending invisible signals through the air?
Gotta stop. Nova's got a show on Dreams I gotta watch. It's all about paralysis, and the fact that dreams are not about one's psychology. I've suspected, but never committed to it. Dreams happen in non-REM sleep.
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The Navy Gets The Gravy

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While asking myself how many times I've worked myself into a lather by thinking I've discovered a brilliant approach to solving all my current health problems, I got distracted by a more practical solution which I hadn't put two and two together with yet.

Two trains of thought have provided cause for me to think I may be on to something that might work for the betterment of my well-being. Recently, I've been lead to believe the arthritis problems I've been diagnosed with are due to my own immune system turning against me. Not that it's personal, but one of the reasons why arthritis and other related dis-eases pop up inconveniently. The prescription drugs I take are partially designed to weaken my immune system to reverse it's unhelpful behavior.

The other way of thinking about my life that I've encountered recently is some double-blind research into vegetarianism, the results of which indicated that a strict vegetarian diet lowers the immune system. Supposedly, having a hyped up immune system is the source of my health problems. Could eating vegetarian eliminate my need for drugs to lower my immune system? Nothing ventured... ?

Another thing is that I went on this Atkins-like diet that made eating a lot of meat a good thing, and then another report that stated that eating a lot of processed meat like sausages and tuna and wieners, and junk food in general causes a lot of problems if that's most of your diet. Like my stupid diet.

Eating right can be a big deal for people who prefer to live alone if they're not cautious about doing right by themselves. Sometimes I think it's because eating together is one of the more enjoyable parts of being with someone. I'm not particularly happy to be living alone, it's just that it ain't worth it to the other to have to live with my crude domestic ways.

Between being an out and out homeless bum for many years, and working industrial construction jobs (that almost always happened in remote areas because of the pollution of what we built caused), the opportunity to sit down with people I loved to enjoy a home-cooked meal has been a rare event in my life since my childhood days when we ate what we grew in our family garden.

Probably the best eating I ever consistently did was when I was in the Navy. It's a little sad to say that I hadn't realized what a mediocre cook my mother was until I joined the Navy. She was an okay cook and we never went too hungry. She was born in 1911, so the Great Depression was in full swing all during her twenties.

I don't think any other kind of experience can provide the same affect on a people than depression and famine. My parents reacted like the other people who endured the Depression. They couldn't let it go. They seemed obsessed by teaching their children what they needed to know to survive such a time. The economic stability of the country is threatened again. Many of the pundits who usually take a sunny view of current conditions aren't smiling anymore.

It didn't help that I was a natural born miser when my parents taught me to do everything for myself and not depend on nobody. I certainly didn't know that avarice is my chief feature, and that being greedy was emphasized in the enneagram system for thinking about things.

Learning a goodly number of oracular systems designed for figuring what's wot has it's advantages, but seeing through the masquerades can be dispiriting too. I had studied or familiarized myself with the major occult systems like astrology, the Tarot, palm reading, and more profoundly the classical system of the Book of Changes (I Ching).

None of this system play revealed the Enneagram's method of showing this greed thing to me in a way I could understand it. I'm a bum. A wino. I got no respect for what matters to a lotta people. I constantly give everything I acquire away to keep from being it's janitor. How can I possibly consider myself a greedy, miserly person? Aye, and there's the rub, but it's a killer.

I will fight to the death to keep what I need to get away from everybody to contemplate my own life. There's a real good chance I would allow my most devoted friends to die if their sacrifice was needed to go my own way. By betraying them I betray myself, and thus, I'm victimized by my own victims. What a drag, man. You might not believe how many people have claimed to want to be just like me when they grow up. "Me? You gotta be kidding."
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The Gods Of Our Fathers

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I started this entry with something I wrote about somewhere else, and I didn't make my point in the earlier writing as clearly as I wanted, but rather than to try to right my wrong there, I decided to extend the point here to see if it has legs and can go bipedal.

I don't know what you read into what I wrote about rules of conscience. My point is about becoming consciously aware of and learning to know what one's own rules of conscience are. Since humans can only perceive what they generate and project from their own set and setting, nobody else but the inwardly turned seeker can know what they decided to adopt as a rule in the past. Even then it's a crapshoot.

The difficulty for many curious people, as I see it, is discovering for sure what their own personal rules of conscience are in the first place. You know, the "let your conscience be your guide" conscience. It's the difficulty of letting that specific conscience we've been advised forever and a day to let it guide us when we're confronted with a dilemma, is the one I'm writing about. You've heard of it?

This ancient adage directly challenges the rules of conscience we each adopt in order to direct us in our mimicry of what we desire to become like. Those rules of conscience we adopt early on, even in the cradle, become the drummer we march to instead of yielding to our true inner nature, whatever that may be, if any.

The personality we compose by imitating people who have a personality we are attracted to, comes together over time because we have to remember in real time to perform an action differently than we've been doing it, in order to do it more like the person whose personality traits we admire. In my opinion, that's why we adopt certain rules of behavior to remind us that we're trying to change horses in midstream.

It's been a long time since I actively studied neurolinguistic programming. Neurolinguistic programming or generative linguistics or any of the other sciences of cognition that study this sort of thing, but as far as I can tell it resolves to modeling or mimicry or imitation (the highest form of flattery).

Some think that a child learning it's native language is the epitome of modeling the other. Even before children enter a formal education program and well before they can read or write their native language, they can correct the usage of the language if its used erroneously. They don't know the formal rules of the language yet, but they comprehend the mistakes in rhythm when it isn't used correctly. All to no good end if they wanna be like a docetic Christos. Conversion means abandonment of all you thought you knew.

Conversion literally transforms the rules of conscience we adopt to become like others, this startling and unpredictable experience automatically removes the problem of mistakenly expecting other people to obey the rules of conscience we individually adopted instead of obeying their own conscience.

Quite naturally, our selfish motives becomes problematic if we demand that the other obey our rules, especially if they don't know what rules we adopted. More especially if we ourselves don't know what our own rules of conscience are either, and haven't a clue why we're pissed off at them, and for disobedience of all things.

I've written a lot about how to discover what your own rules of conscience are. They're what you expect the other to obey. They're what makes you accuse the other of acting like you wouldn't for their reasons. Thats the "ears to hear" thats brought up in conversations about Christianity and the Jesus stories.

Its the same principle as the one about removing the splinter from your own eye before you remove the mote from another's eye. We accuse others of breaking our own rules of conscience, and those accusations are how you find out what your own rules of conscience are. Having "the ears to hear" or "the eyes to see" means that we explore our accusations specifically for learning about what we expect of ourselves through others.
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The Sins Of The Father

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Another nothingness day. I've barely moved. The only time I've even been outside was to climb up and down my outside stairs to get some aerobic exercise and get the blood moving in all parts of my body. Probably more to do deep breathing to prepare for practicing meditation. I've been erratic about that and all my other long-term habits recently.

My meditation practice is so old with me. I don't even know how to talk about it so much. All I can really say is that I do it for-myself, but doing it also seems to be good for-the-other because it makes me calmer and more patient with them and myself.

I almost hate what I've done. I fully intended to do something that would b e indicative of who-I-think-I-am-is so that I could act in conformity with my true nature. For a long ti-me I didn't understand what my personal quest was about.

Enjoining my quest was never a choice for me. Eventually, however, when the tie-to-me (ti-me, time) was threatened with such overwhelming, persistent constancy, and I knew there was nothing I could do that would cause these threats and temptations to abate.

I had to give in to the notion that I could only defend myself against my encounter with what God is to me by giving myself up to being that opposed me at the sa-me ti-me I-am-is accepted it as the other side of me. The lost sheep the other ninety-nine was left unguarded for. I-am-is a story, and the ex-toll-er (ogre) who once exacted payment to cross the bridge, is-me. I-am-is-that-which-is-wholy-me.

The term "individuation" has been a part of my vocabulary for a long time. I know it means the same thing as the concept of enlightenment from reading about it over the years. The term "enlightenment" for me, though, seems associated with some impossible dream that can only rarely be accomplished. I don't think I ever bought into that notion completely, and not at all now.

If individuals were in outright control of discovering this for themselves they would mess it up. Yet, because they have such a deep powerful desire for be-co-me-ing without knowing how to make it happen, then they flounder and flop around as it that's gonna get them back to the garden. Fortunately, it's not up to the individual to lift itself to heaven by it's own bootstraps ("You can't git to heaven on roller-skates...), and that wot can don't care whether you recognize wot it's done for-you or not. That's why you gotta recognize when and if it happens, and it's up to you to recognize that what did happen has me-and-thee-ing (meaning), and if you poo poo it and shine it on, it's gonna break your heart into itty-bitty-pieces. '-)

It was only when I begin to grok that this entire conversation is about identification of my own true being that I realized that, I too, can use the gifts of my enlightenment with impunity. Why impunity? It's because that what makes me an individual can't be comprehended sensorily in order to set the concept of it into law. I am is the only one who gnows my me.

That's me alright. How many do you know? Nobody much knows their own me, and it might take a jury of my own peers to coordinate a perspective by which a law against me being myself could be enacted into a no-no (double negative, which is required for "seeing" positive hallucinations) and what else is God (good) but that?

It's a paradox and a double or triple bind all at the sa-me ti-me. One can't make a law against it without (at the sa-me ti-me), making the same law work for-it. I.E., you can't have One without the Other unless you negate both, and then you're back to one or the other again to satisfy "either or" logic.
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My Mother's Nayme Was Mary

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I don't like drunks when I'm sober, and I don't like being drunk around sober people. The fact that my mother's first husband and father of my oldest sister was an out-and-out alcoholic has been a bane to my own separate existence, but only indirectly. It was sort of like, you know, if my mother loved drunks, and I needed my mother's love, then the only practical solution for me was to be-co-me a wino. It ain't easy being red... er... burgundy.

The side-effect of me finding out my mother had been married before she married my father was the kind of explosive incident that metaphors and sayings get written about. Too much information. I took it to mean that my mother's honor had been despoiled, and if my weakling of a father wouldn't extinguish the culprit, then I would.

At fifteen years old I created a ruckus as an excuse to run away from home, and I hitch-hiked to Mississippi to murder my mother's fucker. I never have truly known I can't do stuff like that if I make up my mind, but in this case it seemed like life itself took over to show me I can't keep a grudge that long. By the time I got emotionally involved with what can happen on a long hitch-hiking trip, I forgot what I was going to Mississippi for.

I did get to Mississippi eventually. It took a few days. What happened next to cause me to forget I had originally started my journey with ill intent, was that as I went along the thousand miles to grandmother's house, just walking and singing at times to get me past the graveyards at night, I realized that I was on a real adventure just like the adventures I read about in books.

Realizing I was on an adventure in my own right was much more interesting than seeking unasked-for-revenge for my highly emotional mother's Southern Belle honor. Being out on the road catch as catch can allowed me to realize that it won't me that married a drunk, it was my super-moralistic mother that found out that likker is quicker, and had to pay for her pomposity for the rest of her life. I was having more fun looking out for myself as a stranger in a strange land than embracing some dated code of chivalry.

I did meet my mother's first husband. He was staying at his parent's house where he grew up as my mother's family's next-door-neighbor. My destination in Mississippi when I ran away from home was my maternal grandparent's home, and there he was next door.

He wasn't worth killing. I didn't feel arrogant about his sad condition. There wasn't much left of him. The drinking had wasted him away to a shriveled up gnome of a man who spend much of his time playing with the neighborhood kids as if a child himself. He somehow knew I was his first wife's son and approached me. He offered me a nickel to buy some candy. I just walked away from him. I couldn't be angry at him, much less act murderously toward him.

I stayed with my mother for a couple of years after my father died. Her doctor said she couldn't live alone. I was indebted in some ways, but eventually I had to move back to my own house to save my own sanity. I hated that I couldn't save her from old age and death. I could only save myself.

My mother was a tough cookie, and not that great of a cook. Her first husband was the boy next door who married her because he got her drunk and then pregnant, but then took off for parts unknown, leaving her in a small southern community in the deepest part of the Deep South as a divorced woman with child. Some people she grew up with shunned her and called her spawn a bastard. Hard row to hoe. My father showed up as her white knight, and earned her undying gratitude.

After my father died my mother sort of lost what mental organization she had. It was like she held herself together to take care of him as he aged and died. He made her promise. There were times after he died that she didn't know who I was, and there were times when I became someone to her that she once knew. All her secrets were told to some imaginary participant (that she made me into), in order for it to be alright for her to confide

5 Jesus said, "Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. [And there is nothing buried that will not be raised."]

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm.

Two of the people my mother took me for in her dotage was my own father and her first husband. It seemed irrefutably clear that she still loved the drunk. After my father finally died and left her free to get up with him at last, her true secret love had been dead for years. I felt like a monster when I finally got her to realize she was too late. Her weeping for her loss was so heart-felt I cried myself.

I don't think my mother approved of my drinking habits when she realized my bouts with booze were more frequent than I made out. I drink when I find myself in situations of my own making that I got into even though I knew better. I have allowed myself to get up with people who should have known better than to think they could convert me into what they thought they needed from the person I allowed them to think I was. Sometime I fool myself instead of them, and there's hell to pay.

I got habits only men who are reputedly weak have, but I do what I do knowing that I ain't attached to the results. For a while I thought my drinking habits were controlled by who I stopped drinking for. Then, I realized these same people liked me better when I was drunk than they did when I was sober. That was a sobering discovery.

Recently, like in the last couple of weeks, I realized why I get the kind of attention I do from certain people, and more mysteriously why they like me for being a natural. I casually enact behavioral careactoristics they find highly amusing. It was revealed to me by a comment I heard a news pundit say on a Sunday morning broadcast. "Oh, he's the kind of guy everybody likes because he calls out the classroom teacher with embarrassing questions."

The crazy part comes into play because I don't appear to care how the teachers reacted to my impatience. It's hard to boss somebody around who might strap on a vest that comes with a cell phone. This is something very specific to my relationship with teachers of various types.

I grew up in a household where both parents taught school and usually brought their work home with them. For eighteen years I heard all their complaints about how certain students would get their goat by the way they acted in class. and heard the baffled, summarizing comment, "... and they got away with it too. The whole class just cackled."

How could I not know exactly what to say to the teachers of the world if I wanted there to be a disruption that would end up with me getting some positive attention that caused my classmates to think I was pretty cool? On the other hand, wouldn't that commit me to exposing myself to classroom environments if that was a major way I entertained myself? I've met a couple of people who changed their careers in order to get the attention they need from classroom hijinks. Can you imagine that?
♏

Moving The Home Place

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I didn't really get up so early this morning as much as it took forever for me to get to sleep last night. I've had a lot on my mind. Worse, it's the same thing I've had on my mind for a week or so now. What's gonna happen when I run out of the medicine. The doctor at the VA still hasn't renewed my old prescriptions as promised.

Last night part of what was on my mind was that my parent's old house was sitting in the middle of the paved road at the end of my driveway. My younger brother (who turns 66 years old at the end of November) has been trying to get the brick house up on a wheeled foundation in order to move it up the dead end road it has been at for at least sixty years to a lot on the other side of my house on toward town, but on the same side of the road it's always been.

My brother stopped by yesterday afternoon to tell me they were going to cut off my power to my house around nine o'clock this morning in order to move the house under the power lines. I decided to leave town earlier than that and drive over to Fayetteville, have a leisurely breakfast at the Shoney's breakfast buffet off I-95, then go to Best Buy to see if they had the computer cables I needed to hook up my 20" Mac monitor to my iMac. I'm going to keep the monitor and sell the Mac Mini, but it may be a while.

I found the $29 four inch cable I'll need. It's another way for Apple to nickel and dime it's fanatic fan base to death, but I decided not to buy it yet. I found out that besides the Display Port to DVI cable I have to buy another DVI to DVI cable that's another $16 or so. The idea of shopping for cables was just to waste some time until my brother got the house moved onto it's new location. Not to go broke from impulse buying in the interim.

When I returned home, the house was still in the middle of the paved road, but it was set up to cross the ditch into what just days aga was a perfectly respectable hay field. Both my brothers were standing on the road watching and yelling to people who weren't listening to them. Since I couldn't get past the house to get home, I parked side the road and got out to join them.

My brother has been trying to get this house moved since just after my mother died. It was a lot of work, and a tax on anybody's logistical talents. Lots of things had to be done at a specific stage of the process to get the 7000 square foot brick house up on the custom built trailers. I wouldn't have done it, but I don't have nostalgic feelings for the house like my younger brothers do.

I had joined the Navy and was halfway around the world when my parents bought the house and the farm that went with it. My youngest brother was only ten years old when they moved to the new place from the little farm they had when I went through high school. Both my brothers and my father put a lotta work into making the farm profitable while I rambled around the brothels of the Pacific Rim.

My younger brother and I aren't close. We're brothers and all that jazz, and both of us get along pretty good with the baby brother, but we don't think alike. He's recognized around town as a person who spends a lot of time outdoors in both work and play, and by the same people I'm thought to be more of an inside, studious sort of person. He learns by doing, and I learn by reflection and contemplation of my navel.

Well, so to speak. Our baby brother is the intellectual among the three male siblings. Our older sisters both got Master's Degrees and are smarter in a very practical way. They both stayed married to their first husbands, and me and my brothers have all been divorced at least once. I've never divorced nobody, but both of my ex-wives divorced me. No blame. I'm a lousy husband and father, and not a very respectable human being in general.

There seems to be some sort of family consensus that between me and my two brothers the youngest one represents the intellectual facet, my younger brother represents the physical aspect, and I'm said to represent the spiritual side of things, and I sort of agree with that. I think we've all suffered for our learnings. For each of us there's been a price to pay. I got the best end of the stick though. I get to act like I'm crazy, and get away with it.

I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't become obsessed with using the I Ching as an oracle and a wisdom book. I didn't have a clue what an oracle was until after I experienced my remembering vision. It was after then that I started studying the occult.
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A Tinker's Damn

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Usually, when I open the word editor to begin composing a blog entry I have something more or less on mind to begin with, but not always. This is one of those days that nothing halfway important is on my mind. The weather outside is... dank. It's neither rainy or foggy or cold or hot, it's just somewhere in between all the above that I call dank, but that may not be the dictionary meanding of the woid.

I spend too much time thinking about prescription drugs. I'd like to call them medicines, but I don't always think about them that way. I go to the VA Hospital to see the doctors there, but I don't always think about them that way either. Presently, I don't think too much of prescription drugs or doctors or the VA Hospital either.

Well, that's not exactly true. I do think about them a lot. When I write that "I don't think too much of them", I guess it would be more lucid to say I don't get much reward or hope BY thinking about them. I feel a little guilty about using the services of the VA Hospital because even I got shot at, I never got shot. Many of the veterans I sit with in the waiting room have. I'm not worthy.

The problem with that is that I have lived a sorry life, and the six years I spent serving our country never meant that much to me because at least I served, and many people not only didn't serve, but they went out of there way to avoid it. I don't give a tinker's damn whether they did or didn't, they're the ones who have to live with that.

There are people who I call "professional veterans" who wear parts of their combat uniforms as if a badge of courage when it appears to me that they're actually wearing them as an excuse to live like they would have lived if they hadn't used their military service as an excuse to not conform. Why would they not? "Its okay for me to hurt people because I was in the war and saw things that would horrify you." Yadda...

The new Mac operating system Snow Leopard makes the Unicode Characters even more available. I'm not exactly sure of what the symbol above means, but to me it symbolizes a singular experience I had once, but where it happened might be iffy. What happened was that the first crescent of the waxing Moon rose outta the east with the planet Venus conjoined. 

The Crescent Moon was closing in on Venus such that it "looked like" Venus was inside the crescent of the Moon momentarily, and that's impossible. Venus can't eclipse the Moon. Only the Sun can eclipse the Moon by dent of the Earth coming between the Moon and the Sun.

 Ahhhhh... that's how the term "dent" is used or more specifically, "by dent of". A crescent Moon (the Moon is the fastest moving heavenly orb we perceive from the surface of the Earth. It moves one celestial degree in two Earth hours.

The aforementioned phenomena happens by the Moon closing in on what appears to be a stationary Venus (the brightest object in the sky other than the Sun), and the non-collision appears to make a dent in the hollow of the crescent Moon. That is, until the unlit part of the Moon completely covers Venus from Earth's perspective.

There are all sorts of metaphorical stories about this event. I don't know how often it happens locally. Like the solar eclipses, it happens somewhere from some vantage point on the Earth's surface.

I think I saw it way before I studied astrology on my way down to Key West, Florida in my second hitch in the Navy while a paid passenger on a Greyhound Bus. The Navy sent me to a rocket school at the old Navy Station in downtown Key West. I was truly shocked there was any place like that in the United States that I could get in a car and drive too.

Seeing Venus appear to be inside the circle of the crescent Moon seemed even at the time to be some sort of privilege to me. I've only seen it once. I'm not exactly a star gazer. Astrology to me is an abstract system for thinking about things that I memorized for keeping it around all the time. I had no idea other people can't do that. I still don't. I think it's because they don't have the right inspiration to make the effort. They do other things with their memories as useful or more than what I've done.
♠

More Lessons In Pain

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The walking meditation I've employed during my mostly lackadaisical exercise routine on the wide sidewalk in front of the strip mall shops has become more complex in the last few months. It takes a few months and sometime more to give added value to an established habit. The new part to this walking meditation is consciously letting my belly flop to inhale.

The fact that I gotta perform this behavior consciously or it doesn't happen is the rub. Voice teachers often indoctrinate their students with the notion of "belly breathing". The idea is that instead of chest breathing (which is a lotta un-necessary work) that to sing with a lotta control you have to bring that control into play from the lower part of your stomach.

Somebody taught me a way to make myself aware of when I was belly breathing is to lay down flat on my back to practice, and then place a small object like a small stone or one of the larger coins like a quarter just below my belly button. The goal of doing it this was is not to breath correctly so much as to use your breathing to raise and lower the small weight on your belly.

When I'm sitting or standing erect I consciously let my belly sag in order to create a vacuum in my solar plexus the "pulls" my inhale of air into my lungs rather than "sucking" the air into my chest.

I've been practicing this during my walks. As long as I pay strict attention to consciously letting my belly drop to pull the air into my lungs I can do the counting I employ while inhaling when I place my left foot down, and exhaling when I put my right foot down, yet taking two steps between each endeavor.

Doing this is more difficult for me than rubbing my belly at the same ti-me I'm patting myself on the head with the other hand. If a shopper walks out of one of the stores unexpectedly there is a good chance that I'll lose my count and forget to let my belly pooch to inhale, or I'll discover that I'm inhaling on the downbeat of my left leg instead of my right or all of the above simultaneously.

Infrequently I lose count because I suddenly become aware of another person on the sidewalk that definitely ain't no shopper going about they business. Many times I'm not walking along the storefronts because I'm shopping either. There are several walking wounded who hang out where people are every time I go there, but who am I? Am I walking there because I'm wounded.

Nobody I know of knows I'm not just an old man walking to get some exercise. This is the same dynamic I described earlier where I practice reciting a specific poem I composed for a very specific reason, and the criteria for me realizing I had accomplished my goal of internalizing the intent of the poem was to know it so perfectly that I could recite it all the way to the end in a casual conversational tone before any of my listeners realized I was reciting a poem.

I'm walking the walk AND talking the talk in at-one-ment, and nobody knows but me. It's not that huge of an accomplishment. It's not like what I'm practicing is hidden or a secret. I have to ignore the other people around me to keep my count and belly-flopping in synch with my cadence. When I'm doing that I'm too busy to give the other something to goof on like I normally do. I be-co-me invisible in plain sight. That's an old road trick I learned I couldn't live without.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail is a great place to practice this trick. Hiking 10-15 miles a day up and down some steep climbs and descents on rocky paths naturally pulls all the breathing techniques above into the way you have to act to get over the sheer physicality of it. There is an element of real danger hiking the trail that's not there on the sidewalks of a strip mall in a sleepy Southern village too, that can amp up the already good results obtained locally.

I've had a few friends over the years that got into long distance bicycle riding. They talk a lot about breathing and how it follows a certain pattern depending on the terrain they encountered. I've tried to ride bicycles for exercise purposes myself. I liked it okay. Especially when I'd get a second wind. I didn't like having to share the road with other vehicles. I hated getting flat tires ten miles from home even worse.

The rheumatologist at the VA Hospital in Durham still hasn't renewed my old prescriptions. Anything could have gone wrong. I suspect I'll be taught a lesson in pain. In the last couple of days since I was informed by the nurse in the arthritis clinic there that the doctor agreed to renew them. I've realized I'm pretty much at their mercy, but I still have to be true to my own vision while I'm letting them think they're getting over.
♂

I'm A Big Fan Of Willie Nelson

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I'm now watching Willie Nelson on TV. The man is my hero. He's my hero because he plays a nylon string guitar, and that old man can play the hell outta that guitar. One of the more interesting things for me about this program is how the pianist is featured occasionally, and my recent efforts to play the piano has me astounded by how a professional can make it seem easy.

Willie's stage is filled with really accomplished professional musicians. That's more interesting to me because I've seen three groups on PBS today where the star was surrounded by very competent, highly polished professionals on every instrument, and these people were having fun showing off for each other. I'm a big fan of these and any other talented and dedicated musicians who take their music to the limit.

At times I think I must be satisfied enough with my own playing to be able recognize real talent. I'm absolutely sure that's why I've been playing the scales on the piano. It's basically just to get a better sense of the instrument for myself. When I was a sad and lonely kid in the Navy I took great solace in going to piano bars in San Diego to listen to solo piano players putting on their show. Listening to a good jazz pianist made me feel emotionally met.

I think I'm right about what playing the scales on the piano will lead to. I don't practice playing any particular song much, but what I do play, I can play in any key. I know exactly why that's a big deal to me. It's because it don't mean nothing to a real musician. By that I mean that a person that's really dedicated to playing music at the professional level has to be able to do that, and much more than I'll get around to.

The first instrument I owned was a brass cornet my parents bought for me when I was twelve years old. I begged for it with complete abandon. I've always been a beggar. There have been many, many times I've been completely ashamed of myself, and I don't always get what I want by the doing of it.

It seems like it's been my real life's work to get mo' bettah at mendicating. That's the most amazing thing I can observe about myself. That is, that practically every skill I've ever took the time to get good at, had as it's ground of being a desperate need to get over.

I designed a poem to get me where I wanted to be attitude-wise. I was satisfied with the verses I come up with to enchant my own self into be-co-me-ing whatever I wanted to be with only a few seconds notice that I was on next.

I don't know if I deliberately set about to get the results I finally obtained by the doing of it. How could I? I didn't know what I wanted. I only knew what i lusted for in my heart, and I made that up, usually, in the heat of the moment on an as-needed basis.

Toward the end of it, however, I knew what I was doing, and I learned more and more how to go about it as I went along. My purpose became clear after years of trying to make it happen without gnowing what it was that I was actually reaching for.

To me it was simple. I wanted to recite this poem I wrote all the way through it without my audience realized I was reciting a poem. It is a fairly short poem. Most of my poems are only a few verses long. I take a lotta pride in saying what I see with as few words as possible. I'm a miser with woids (woes-to-the-id, words). I'm a miser about a lotta things.

I think it may have something to do with the Sun in my natal chart residing in 0°02" Taurus in the Sixth house, the home of Virgo. According to the Enneagrams my chief feature is Avarice. Greed. The bane of my existence. I guess I'm somewhat of a closet miser, because it takes certain conditions for it to emerge from behind closed doors.

I'm only seriously stingy and miserly about what I physically need to get away by myself to contemplate my life. If giving is better than receiving, then it's lost on me if what I'm expected to give means I can't isolate myself from the world often enough. Other than that you can just take what you need as long as you don't mess with my bottom-line stash.

That's threatened presently, and as I get older it might get worse, and then critical, and then deadly, to myself that is. I don't think it's all that particular to me by any means. It happens with a lot of old men who have taken a lotta pride in their independence. C'est la morte.

I can't say exactly how long it took me to be able to recite that poem to a group of total strangers without them realizing I was saying poetry until I got all the way through it to the end. That was the criteria I created for myself as the proviso for proving to myself my familiarity with the poem had made me contemptuous of it's intent. Only then did it take a life of it's own in my psyche to do what I designed it to do without supervision.
※

Descending From Aquatic Apes

♖
The health problem I am is experiencing appears due, according to the info on the internet I've lightly skimmed over, is that my immune system has turned on me, and while simultaneously protecting me from being infected, is also attacking me. My immune system is too strong for my own good.

All the medicine I'm taking is designed to lower my immune system. Why am I always the last to know? Maybe, because I either don't know how to listen to my inner guidance in this regard, or I am is ignoring it. I gotta stop this ignorant shit on my part, and keep my stopping still.

I read part of another article today about calcium and vitamin D tablets. This time they're supposed to prevent most cancers. The way this research is coming down, many of the problems of mankind seem due to a lack of non-dairy calcium and sunshine. Is this to sell over-the-counter skin protection for a huge profit? Skin cancer for the doctors to make non-risk money on?

The skin is an organ just as much as the heart and intestines are organs or the liver and kidneys are organs. I wonder how much this lack of calcium and vitamin D has to do with losing the subcutaneous fat layer under the skin as I get older? Does this have anything to do with my skin not being able to make vitamin D from direct exposure to sunlight?

Does it have anything to do with homo sapiens evolving from the ocean where subcutaneous fat is the law of living in and around water?

http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html

I've watched this video several times. I don't believe it or not believe it, it's just very interesting to me. It's interesting because my remembering vision should show me whether I evolved from aquatic apes. I'm suspicious that's why I find this theory so fascinating.

I've claimed and still claim I had the remembering vision I've written about for forty years. The information I get from attuning my inquiries toward my me-more-s of what was revealed to me about myself in that vision is only available to me in real ti-me (the tie-to-me), and is hardly ever there for me for the asking.

It's there for me when it's needed, and that need appears to conjure from my extended experiential database as the situation demands it. How can one give meaning to some event that's only a flash in the pan of the specious present?

Whether I evolved as an aquatic-based ape or from chimpanzees could be directly revealed from what happened during that vision. How to re-experience that specific part of what has happened since who-I-think-I-am-is arrived on Earth as a seed pearl that carries a pouch with curiosity, volition, and memory as the tools with which all nay-me-d object are enchanted into being.

I have more trouble with imitating people than I should have. I don't really have to do it. I almost never imitate famous people who a lotta people might recognize in my performance, and toss money and room keys at my feet... dammit! No, the troubles I bring on myself is when I imitate the person who is face-to-face with that which is me, and I-am-is the only One it gnows. I be-co they -me.

Doing that is great fun if you have a little me-and streak in you. Having a Scorpio Ascendent is tantamount to a ticket-to-ride. Be-co-ing with the other's me requires One devalue it's own worth in order to let go of theyself to go over there. You can't be doing no co-me-ing if you don't become selfless first. Can you dig it?

People who place great value on the very idea of themselves such that they can't walk away from their image of themselves, and trust it to fend for itself in their absence, ain't gwine be "doing" no be-co-me-ing. Self-deprecation is more challenging than many find comfortable.

Maybe like with hero wine (heroin) the habit of leaving oneself behind to be with the other's me is empowering beyond the belief system that's been holding them back. It gets easier when it happens outta the blue enough times. Spontaneous out-of-body events begin to become commonplace, and sometimes that's enough to test one's tie-to-me by opting for more and more incredible odds.

Trusting that the tie-to-me will not break and leave one stranded with no way ho-me seems to require leaving one's body unattended enough times for the eventual familiarity of finding oneself "out there" breeds contempt for the trumped up fears that keeps each eternally wandering seed pearl close to the false home promised by it's own graven images.

The more I contemplate my life and abstractly associate what I think has happened to the oracle of my natal chart, the more my dreaming leads me to the me-and-ing of the placement of the planet Mercury in six degrees Aries. I don't have much choice but to "boldly go where no man has gone before", and finding myself out-on-a-limb has been the status quo that has at ti-me-s left me sick to me heart.

Weep and moan,
and weep and moan,
and cry loudly in self pity.
To live this life in such a way
is just a little shitty.
It clings like putty
to the soul,
and pules for understanding,
but no one hears
with glued-up ears
the pleas of silent ranting.

There is nothing I'd like more than to pretend I am not responsible for making the decisions that brought me (and a goodly number of significant others) more pain than had to be borne. Who am I? What right do I have to pretend I didn't know what I was doing until it was all over but the shouting.

I'm not innocent, but candidly, thirty years later, I'm not too eager to feel all that guilty either. I've had a life to live without them in the here and now. I still have plenty of time to remember that they left me here to die alone. Not the other way around. Why not romanticize and cling to the saying "If you love them, let them go." It's debilitating to sever the ties-that-bind in favor of the tie-to-me, but Mercury in Aries exacts a brave heart whether the native likes it or not.
♘

Firewire and the VA Hospital

⸖
I do things on impulse that freaks me out at times. While I was in Durham yesterday I decided to go by the Apple store and see if they had a cable that had Firewire 800 on one end, and Firewire 400 on the other. I bought it and brought it home, but the 400 end was the mini version and I needed the standard size male plug. Do you think I can find the receipt to take this $30 POS back and get the right one? Of course not. Maybe the receipt will show up or I'll run into a Firewire peripheral that requires the mini plug. This iMac only has a Firewire 800 connecting socket, so I'll probably need it for something.

I know I'm taking my life in my own hands by refusing to use this medicine the VA rheumatologist prescribed me. I checked my prescriptions at the VA site just now, and no refills have been entered. I got some weird ideas about how this situation transpired.

Weird especially to me, because nobody else is involved either consciously or unconsciously with what's coming down. Besides, they couldn't even know my intentions in this regard if I wrote it down real good. They'd still only ken what they read into what I write.

That's the scary part of this endeavor. I'm really in it allone. I have to respond to the impulses I receive from my own experiential database as if it, my experiential database, was revealed to me to be used in exclusivity. It's depending on me to gnow whether or not the info I am is acting upon is truly from that source.

This is being asked of a person with a whole lot of tragedy present in his life because of making bad calls about sometime even trivial easy decisions. Nobody is perfect. It seems trite for me to write that I have to be true to my Self when I ain't always sure what I take that Self to be ain't some toad-licking other self without the capital "S".

Some of the entries logged in my experiential database are about critters my me made itself into in order to mimick something like a Siberian Tiger, because my me was impressed that being anything as ferocious as a bad-assed giant tiger would maximize it's ability to cope with it's own predators. Man, I don't wanna never be none of those things again. "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"

Possessing being as a homo sapiens is the cat's meow, man, even in the worst of ti-me-s. Being human means you get to exercise a unique species trait called be-co-me-ing. The Jesus stories has Christ extend a similar invitation. "Be with me." Come join with me. Leave yo' me, Bitch, and git over hyah. My me is the only me their is. You just been selfish and not willing to share yo' me-ness (meanness, me-and-thee-ness, where there are two or more of us-ness).

Apparently it's just the hardest damned thang in the world to do. To abandon yo' joke of a persona, charge it to the ground and let the rain settle it, leave it where its standing as if your didn't really have to be there for it to carry on, and be with me. Thou shalt have no other God before... me.

There is only One me, you gnow, and each of us has the audacity to behave as if IT wuz us. You know you're deal with blasphemy, right? That's never good. Even though, as it states in The Gospel of Thomas that one can be forgiven for blaspheming the father, and one can be forgiven for blaspheming the son, but the soul that blasphemes the spirit won't be forgiven in either this life or the next.

Damn, man, that's a huge dilemma. How in hell can I possibly know whether or not I've ALREADY blasphemed the spirit, and been condemned in some unspeakable way, ALREADY, and even though the father and the son has or may have already forgiven my me, I-am-is appears to hold no truck with infinite compassion for my purported insulting the One and only me. I mean, I know, but I don't gnow. Right?

Probably the one good thing about all this is that other people CAN'T gnow that I don't know nor care one whit in the right-damn-now of the deal. Like me, they can only see, what they'd be like if they were like they what they read into my purported behavior. I am is an island unto itself. It ain't me. It is what it is, and it definitely is what it is, but it's being this or that ain't up or down to me. I-am-is, in the act of denying it is me, is all there IS to It. IT is me.

"It's me, it's me, it's me, oh Lord,
standing in the need of prayer.
It's not mah momma nor my pappa,
but it's me, oh Lord,
standing in the need of prayer."

Old Spiritual Hymn ~ AU
仝

Some Events Are Not A Walk In The Park

☀
This has been a day I'll probably regret for the rest of my life. Literally. I returned the prescribed medicine to the VA and told them I wasn't taking it. The nurse asked me why, and I told him that I knew it would kill me, and knowing that it would kill me is tantamount to committing suicide, and I refused to do that.

He called the doctor right in front of me, told him that I brought the medicine back and refused to take it, and was requesting that the doctor renew my old prescriptions that he hadn't renewed at my last visit. According to what I witnessed, the doctor told him that he would do that. He hung up, and said that everything would be fine. The doctor would renew my old prescriptions of methotrexate and hydroxychloroquine, and see me at my next appointment next April.

The VA nurse told me to take the medicine I returned to the pharmacy, and wait for a while for the doctor to renew my prescriptions. I took the medicine to the pharmacy, took a number to take to the interviewers who check everything out while the prescription is being made up. The interviewer was rude, of course, and demanded to know why I was bringing it back. I half-way explained, and asked her if any of my prescriptions had been renewed today. Not yet.

I waited a couple of hours by walking around in the hospital halls, then went back to ask the nurse if he was certain the doctor had agreed to renew my old prescriptions. He told me he was sure, and to go back and check again. He wouldn't give me no phone number to check with him from home, and that's when I got suspicious something might be amiss.

The one good thing about it was that when I went back to the pharmacy and took another number that meant I'd have to wait another hour before I could talk to an interviewer, then when I did, she said that no renewal prescriptions had been entered into the computer system, but she could give me a two-week emergency supply until something happened. The proviso for that was that I'd have to wait and get it in person, which meant another hour, but this shit was adding up.

It did take another hour for my name to come up on the ready list, and when I waited another thirty minutes or so to get to the prescription window itself to get my drugs, I asked the guy behind the window if any new refills for today had arrived, and he looked at his computer monitor and said one word, "No."

So, I drove the hundred miles back home. About an hour ago I checked my prescriptions on the VA web site and no refills had been entered. I doubt that they will be. My experience tells me they are going to "teach me a lesson" and force me to go without any medicine for four months. I already know that's gonna be a real drag, man, a real, perhaps painfully, paralyzing drag.
☂

The Death Of A Flute

♡
Last night was a humdinger. The remnants of hurricane Ida arrived about dark, and it's supposed to rain all day steady, and at least part of tomorrow. The road maintenance crews have prepared for flooding. The weather forecasters expected heavy rains that dropped out of the sky faster than the ground can absorb it. It doesn't appear to have rained that hard, but steady on. It's set in. Thankfully, the winds calmed down a lot before the center of the tropical storm got to here.

Tuesday is the day I take the methotrexate. I can't predict how my body will react to it from week to week. Sometime it causes a considerable amount of nausea to the point of projective vomiting, and other times it's just an uneasy feeling that I cope with fairly well.

The rheumatologist has prescribed a medicine with the brand-name Humira. It's distributed in self-injecting units that I'm expected to shoot myself up with them once every two weeks. The side-effects of this drug can lead to death because it lowers my immune system. It particularly warns not to start it when there are existing infections and/or fevers.

I received the medicine via FedEx yesterday. I've been thinking about it pretty much since it arrived and I put it in the refrigerator. A friend with a lotta medical training offered to observe when I give myself the first injection for the purpose of support, but his plate is full with his own concerns just now. I'll probably do it in the next couple of hours.

I woke up with a dull headache that I associated with a hint of constipation, but that never transpired because I was able to perform my toilette without problems. Twice. Now the headaches going away, and I can assess my general health to figure if I have any reasons not to start the injections today. My body seems to know what's coming, and it don't seem to like it one bit.

It's been preparing itself for death, but me and the VA doctors keep interfering. Our efforts obviously won't keep me alive forever, but the drugs I've been taking ere now have made life more painless. I'm reminded of what it was like previous to starting the methotrexate on occasion when the edema and swelling return occasionally.

I don't really have much choice about using the adalimumab (Humira), because the doctor didn't renew my prescriptions for methotrexate or hydroxychloroquine. He did prescribe 5 mg tablets of prednisone a day for a couple of weeks to help me over the hump of changing strategies.

On the other hand he could have just forgotten to renew them. I won't see him again for four months, so I won't know until then. He hasn't answered my e-mail to clarify. It's difficult for me to think that when he was ordering the Humira and the prednisone that he would have overlooked refilling the other medicines.

I've had strong feelings about trying to find a way to keep writing and to keep playing the scales on my digital piano each day as long as I can. How long I can literally depends on the effectiveness of these drugs. I had to stop doing one or the other for what seems like a long time. Finally, with the drugs I was able to do it fairly pain-free again.

The pain became an obstacle that I wanted to overcome for the sake of keeping these habits up. I'm trying to be straight with myself about where I'm at with writing. At times I feel like I've gotten as much out of it as I can. Being honest with myself about why I'm playing the scales on the piano seems more difficult.

For some reason I convinced myself when I was hitch-hiking around the country and playing for donations with my old beat-up guitar, that if I could just learn and practice the scales on any instrument at all that it would allow me to offer a little more variety in the songs I wrote. If I don't continue to play the scales after I finally taught myself to play them from the instructions I studied on the internet, then I'll never know whether I was right about my theory or not.

I reckon it's been maybe a year or so since I understood the sequence of piano keys I had to depress in order to play all the major and minor keys, but even less time since I've figured out which fingers to use to play each key correctly. It's getting a little easier since I do it for an hour or more each day, but I still make a lotta mistakes.

Playing the scales at this late date doesn't really lead anywhere, but it does inform me about how much good it is doing to follow through with my promise to myself to do it persistently. I seem content to be able to play simple songs like nursery rhymes that I've always played in C Major on the white keys, now that I can extemporaneously play the same simple songs from memory in any key that crosses my mind.

If I keep at it, however, I think I may start reaching for a little complexity, you know, sort of like what people brag about in the various wines they get good at recognizing. I might be able to start playing with a little flair like I could do with a classical flute, and that's the deal about learning and practicing the scales regularly. I really need to find a way to afford a new flute.

If I could teach myself to play the scales on a classical flute I might be willing to play it with other people at a level of understanding that might cause them to welcome me to sit in with them. I'd be able to play in any key they wanted to, and they wouldn't have to limit themselves to my ignorance.

With a flute, a single-note instrument seemingly designed for people with Mercury in Aries, I can scat all over the place and make interesting things happen that other people can jam to. That might be a nice thing to be able to do to amuse myself in the place I'm carted off to die at.

It took forever for me to get up the nerve to buy a classical flute and teach myself how to form my lips to get it to toot. I've played around with wooden recorders that could stay in tune, and others that didn't. The Yamaha student flute I bought at the pawn shop was the cheapest band instrument type of flute that company made.

This silver-plated student's flute was old already, and the pads were worn, but the notes it sounded were pretty close to perfect pitch. They sounded the same each time I covered the right combination of holes, and it was something I got to where I could depend on being there for me. When I reached for them in my mind, my fingers and lips could make the precise sound I expected to hear, and not cause me no hesitation.

Much of the silver plating was already worn off the flute where it got held by whoever owned it before me. In the nooks and crannies behind the intricate mechanisms that operated the hole pad there was still some of the silver plating, but it was tarnished and cruddy in such a way that I figured it could stand a cleaning with some tarnish remover.

It was my clumsy efforts to make it look, and perhaps sound a little better, that brought the Yamaha student flute to it's final end. I got some silver polish on the pads that caused them to swell up and not fit over the holes right, and then, when I took the flute apart to see if I could fix that, and lost one really tiny and important screw, I was never able to get it to work again. Parts of it are all over my house in some box or the other. What a drag, man.
♥

All The Needles

Oops! I forgot to post yesterday, and it's nearly eleven p.m. tonight. What a drag, man. Things have happened that have distracted me from my habits. The new medicine came by FedEx today, and I wasn't expecting it. I didn't know how they would get it here, because it has to remain refrigerated or it goes bad. It was packed in a high quality styrofoam box with frozen packets placed strategically to keep it cool enough enroute.

It's really here now, and I've got to deal with it. It's not really a decision of mine to decide whether to use this medicine or not, but I have read the list of dangerous side effects that plainly state that my immune system could be made so vulnerable that a simple infection could lead to death. That's about as serious as side effects get.

Using this drug by it's patent name of Humira and it's genetic name "adalimumab" can really, really help with the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis or kill you. I can't not take the risk for more reasons than one. Since I couldn't ignore "the diagnosis" and the follow-up that confirmed it for the medicos that specialize in reading these particular kinds of signs.

When I was informed (and it seemed done as a duty or legal obligation pushed by the insurance companies) I was told I had a couple of different types of arthritis, and some sort of osteoporosis I don't recall the particular type of. Psoriasis? They said I had a kind of arthritis that evinced a symptom like psoriasis. Makes sense. It showed up in my feet, but I thought it was a fungus, but anti-fungus cream didn't cure it.

On the other hand, my concerted effort to deal with what I didn't understand by making it turn out to be a fungus infection brought me into a conscious awareness and a cure for every fungi infection of any type in my entire body.

What I couldn't cure by my own research and my own prescriptions was the weird lesions that popped up periodically on my feet, and those symptoms that antifungals couldn't cure was the external symptoms of psoriasis arthritis. At least, now I know why I couldn't heal myself, and it may have something to do with my ruddy complexion. All these symptom by diagnosis are considered mild, but mild for me is wide-eyed, jazz hands freakout!

I'm not going mildly into this good night. Philosophically, I can work up a powerful rhetorical tonic and affirmation as modest as with the absolute best of them, but my body couldn't give a fuck about being philosophical when it comes to pain.

I think the way I have romanticized the hard times even I admit were tough have created an immune system of such aggressive power, that when it isn't needed or called for it turns against me. That's what the deal is here from everything considered. It's been stated outright in the documentation of the medicines that have been prescribed to me, that the specific characteristics these drugs attack are an over-amped immune system.

What was designed by nature to save me from the inner and outer confrontations with that which preys, is turned upon itself. The drugs attack my immune system to keep it from killing me chink by chunk of who-I-think-I-am-is. In other words, if I somehow develop just about any sort of infection with my immune system so repressed it could kill me before any defensive measures could be mounted. Well, as long as it's quick and I'm not super aware of all the needles.