The Beat Goes On

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Sleeping inside my breezy house is not the same as sleeping outdoors. Not quite. I oughta know. I've been out there a lot in my life. Not recently. It's literally been ten years. I was 61 years old when I made my last sojourn by hitch-hiking down to Key West, and then out to Los Angeles and back to the coastal plains of the Carolinas. I slept outside on the ground every night for three weeks.

I enjoyed hitch-hiking and being on the open road again, in the way stuff like that comes down. I knew the whole time I was out there doing it again after a couple of decades of trying again to be civilized, that this trip was the last hurrah for me. I wouldn't do it again voluntarily. The reasons I did it in the first place no longer existed. There was nothing left to run away from except myself, and I'm fairly placid these days.

Why would I not be unmoved? I don't lead an exciting lifestyle any more except the one I create for myself through writing. I do have an electric blanket I use to keep the bed warm, but I forgot to turn it up before my brother and I went for our night time walk out in the woods. When we got back I was perspiring from the exercise, but chilled to the bone.

After I went to bed and realized I had forgotten to turn the heat up in the electric blanket I could feel how cold my thighs were. The subcutaneous fat felt like dead meat. Like a lump of fatback just retrieved from the refrigerator. It took at least an hour for me to get warm all over, but then I had to turn the thermostat on the blanket back down to the minimum setting. What a life... eh?

It was my brother's idea to go walking at night. He asked me if I wanted to walk with him. He likes to take the lead and he always walks a couple of steps ahead of me. That's the same behavior my ex-wife like to exhibit when we went walking, but she was a brazen woman determined to show her own mother she was nobody's fool. She could never walk side-by-side, much less two steps behind. I should have married a more flexible person.

The big snow storm put a halt to our night-walking for four nights. Neither of us is young. He's around 64 years old. I think both of us think we're going along for the other's sake. He had heart palpitations and they put a machine in his chest and told him he needs to exercise and eat a lotta vitamin K. His wife can't walk with him like she used to because she has a bad foot. Maybe it's that.

I have a bad foot too. It has to do with the side affects of rheumatoid arthritis. Open lesions on my big and second toes on my left foot. This has been popping up for years. For a long time I thought it was athletes foot. But, putting fungus medicine on it didn't work. I may have found a salve called Silverdene that does the job.

When I looked Silverdene up on the internet the drug site stated that when it is applied it shouldn't be covered with bandages. That may have been the reason my toes got so inflamed in the last couple of months. I've tried for years to treat this problem, but nothing worked.

The arthritis medicine lowers my immune system, so I've been afraid the lesions might become infected and untreatable at some point, so I put Band-Aids with antibacterial salve, and that didn't do any good. In fact, the lesions got more irritated. Maybe the Silverdene with do the job. It's supposed to kill bacteria and fungus.

All I know is that Silverdene is very painful to use. That's better than having my foot amputated. Many of the prescribed or not medicines I'm using these last days have a dark side. The advertisements on TV that address the side-effects of these wonder drugs are proof of that.

When I watch one of those pharmaceutical company commercials it is impossible not to notice that whatever claims they're making about how much better you might feel if you use their products, they make equal or better claims that it may kill you. As if that didn't really matter, honestly, because you're gonna croak from something eventually.

I'm really glad I live inside myself in a house with few mirrors. I walked up to the checkout counter yesterday and got in line behind an older woman. From the rear she looked like any other worn out soul with frizzy hair and a half-hearted attempt at putting on her face.

When it came her turn to check out she turned to face the cashier and I realized I knew her from when we were young together. She didn't glance my way or recognize me, and I decided that if she didn't, then I wouldn't either. She paid for her stuff and walked away not knowing I wasn't dead yet. So did I.

There was more to it than that. I have seen her since we were teenagers together. She had been married with children and living in Florida and the whole deal blew up in her face. I spent part of an afternoon with her listening to her tale of woe. She messed around and got caught. More than once.

I knew her father and mother and his brother and wife. All of them lived together in the same house. They may have been twins who married twins. I never heard nothing said in a negative way about their arrangement at the church our families attended together. They were regarded as such righteous church members that nothing untoward could have possibly occurred. I still believe it.

On the afternoon I listened to her sad story she invited me to come inside the family home and say hello to her people. That was fine with me. I'd known all of them on and off for a long time, but not intimately. After we all made our re-acquaintances, I made my expected excuses and prepared to go home.

The father pulled me to one side and semi-whispered, "Son, you may have gotten to first-base, but you oughta think about whether it's wise to go to second, she's changed." I nodded to him. He nodded back, and smiled sympathetically.

That was enough for me. I never looked back. When I got off by myself and put two and two together it all added up to a hard row to hoe. She was a weeper. Weepers really get on my nerves. They intend to. It gets them what they want. Punishment for their sins. Women are crazy.

Some women appear to take their attitude toward me from my stern exterior. They take it from their impressions that I'm just the sort of old-country disciplinarian they need to expiate their purposeful wrong doing. Some attempt to get me to hit them by attacking me either verbally and sometime physically. Others, like this one, reach for the same results by weeping.

The problem for me and for them is that I'm not what they try to make me into for their sake. Bluntly, I am is not a sadist. If I were, then things might work out between us. I'd enjoy doing to them what they think they deserve, and they'd feel mo' bettah about having suffered, and we could both go on with our lives.

A very kind woman called my bluff, and caused me to understand that roughing up women don't do shit for me. She did it in such a loving way that it makes me wanna honor her privacy and not even write about what happened.

When I joined the Navy censorship was rampant in the United States, and when my ship pulled into Formosa all those banned books were for sale in English. The American author's books getting banned made them more famous than they deserved as writers. They wrote some bland stuff compared to the English and French writers, including Comte de Sade.

When I read de Sade I was in my late teens and early twenties. Some of it disgusted me and some of it excited me. In any case it was not the sort of literature I'd have found laying around in the church pews in the villages and towns I grew up in.

I made room in my life for sadomasochism just in case I ran across it in real life with real people. During that phase of my life I was pretty much open to any sexual experience or experiment. There were some openly sadomasochistic events along the way, but I never initiated them.

I was invited to participate because of my fierce looks. I was a loner. I felt like I had to look fierce to ward off dangerous predators. I was never asked to take the masochist's role in these affairs, so I had nothing to lose.

It might have helped me understand how it is with me if I had noticed that I never really got very excited about whipping up on somebody to get them off. I just did it because that's what I thought they wanted or what they needed to get where they wanted to go.

Eventually I began to understand that my taking a belt to them to "help" them get off was not all they wanted. They wanted me to be passionate about it and not giggle at them. To me their prostrations were ridiculous, and impossibly funny. They were not amused.

Pain is something I learned from very early on to abide. To survive was my only goal. I was beaten early and often at my parent's house until I got big enough to fight back. When that happened I ran away from home. There came a point where if my father attempted to punish me via physical beatings that I would kill him to stop him.

My running away, even unsuccessfully, seemed to do the trick. I ratted him out to my grandparents who seemed to respect him for saving their daughter from a fate worse than death. They had no sympathy for me and my sad story at all, but they did tell him that I'd told them about all the beatings.

When I got back home the beatings were supposed to be behind me. But, they took another form. He had my classmates in his agriculture classes punish me by running me down a belt line of thirty teenagers five times in a row. He lost me then, and he was never the father for me he saw himself as after that.

We would have both been better off if he hadn't stopped me from leaving for good when I was fifteen years old. Both of us would have suffered much less pain. We fought continuously until he was too old to tango. When he lost his fighting spirit to old age I lost my best sparring partner.

When he died at the age of eighty-eight he was surrounded by a loving family. It's what he lived for, and what I rebelled against much, much longer than my pubescent years. I guess by dying alone like a dog in a ditch I will have earned my just rewards.

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Tell The Stories, Pass The Plate

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In reflection it seems a little unpatriotic of me to admire something a real meanie like Saddam Hussein, the now-dead Iraqi dictator, purportedly said. I can't quote what he actually said or verify it. As I vaguely recollect it was along the lines of "Winning or losing a war is not so important. For me, to merely survive is to be victorious."

I like the spirit behind such a statement, but sometime it contradicts my desire to live a life of no blame. But, in all truth, it's almost the sa-me. Surviving at all appears to require a strategy that alleviates the burden of being of such blame that you get hung by the neck until dead.

"Dang me! Dang me!
They oughta take a rope
and hang me!
Hang me from
the highest treeeeeee...
Oh, woman would you weeeeep fo' me?

~ Roger Miller (Extra "eees" mine)

Like Saddam Hussein, one day I won't survive whatever comes along. But, as long as I do survive, even though I-am-is don't got no say so no more, my body will still fight to it's last breath to stay alive. Having your neck broke with a hangman's noose seems like a humane method for murder by the state, but the grisly details that lead to the last moment are remanded to a goon.

I was trying to get high one time down in the sub-tropics, and ate a lily trumpet flower growing right on the streets down there, that was reputed to put one in a state that simulated death. Some said that eating it raw didn't actually kill most people, but sometime it did.

Getting tricked into eating that flower was a sort of manhood test in that social arena. The toxicity of it tested the eater's ability to handle the unexpected psychological reactions the chemicals in the flower evoked. If the eaters reaction to the hypnogogic images caused by the chemicals in such a way that they had a heart attack and died from that, the lily eater failed the test.

I survived. I don't know how. At some point my breathing system went into some sort of paralysis and I passed out. I didn't really react like I was dying as much as the last thought I had was that I couldn't catch my breath. When I regained consciousness I was lying in an alley.

I didn't remember anything that had transpired after I thought I was asphyxiated or remember immediately that I had eaten this weird flower on a dare. In fact, I was as clear-headed and in the present as well as I had been in months. I can't claim anything about that experience except that I survived.

Any memory of what happened in the interim might have been lost before I got up and walked out of that alley into the bright tropical sunshine. I nearly had this sort of memory loss in an escapade I survived in Yosemite National Park. The real miracle of that event was that I was able to keep some of it in long-term memory.

Homo sapiens seem to re-enter the instinctive state when they're in dire straits. It's a place where all of an entity's ability to focus their attention is brought to bear on the living moment in order to keep living. Speculative theories about the unborn future or undead past are tossed out of what's wot like so much baggage.

In a perilous situation like I faced from eating that flower while in a subtropical paradise, to attempting to leap to my death because I was freezing in a freak snow storm, I had no future then. All my past was dead of it's meaning nor did it's absence serve as a savior. All I had of life in the moment before I jumped was a final moment of decision. Simultaneously, I was so completely ignorant of deciding to jump, I never knew it until I launched my half-frozen body into the air.

In the moment I jumped off that 800 foot (244 M) cliff, and gravity caught me in its grasp and pulled me earthward, I knew that immediate moment of life was all the life I'd ever had all along. I can only describe it as a world beyond words.

I've escorted people to this state of being a goodly number of times via hypnosis. Not so much in a clinical manner or for clinical purposes, but more or less for entertainment or because I thought it might provide insight to the subject about what can have being beyond the language box.

Hypnotizing people and inducing them to voluntarily remember being born and taking their first breath can or maybe should only be done in the mood of curiosity and entertainment. To take such a process as a controlled blind study is ridiculous. It depends on the subject and the hypnotist and they're all individually different without choice.

It's an easy gig for me to do this with people I'm already friendly with. I don't have to teach them to trust me. They already do or we probably wouldn't be close acquaintances. This is not much of an interesting thing for me to do as a hypnotist. The subject in a deep trance is having all the fun. For my part it takes lots of patience due to the need for repetition and redundancy.

A lot of what happens in my hypnotic affairs is proving to the subject that they're really and actually in a deep hypnotic trance. Even in my own experience with being in trance it's really difficult to realize it's true. It took a fairly long time for me to realize that I learned how to hypnotize people in my own hypnotic state.

For some reason this doubt that the trance is real is a common occurrence in most subjects. It could happen in the trances I conduct simply because I was trained to repetitively assure my subjects that they really were in trance.

There is a typical reaction to me proving to them in some way that they're in trance that satisfies the reason I was taught to assure them they're in trance rather frequently. That omen arrives in the form of a sigh of relief.

There are times during a hypnotic session that I can detect a subject's hesitation to "go" where I'm suggesting they "go". It's not out-right resistance, but more like a reaction to their being confused. In my opinion, hypnotic subjects really, really wanna do what you ask them to do if it don't cross the line with their ethics or morals. For them to hesitate in confusion about whether to implement my suggestions could be unpleasant. Nobody wants that.

If the session is about reliving one's birth experience I have to get the subject to do a lotta things they know perfectly well they can't do in normal waking consciousness. Otherwise, why would they need to reach for a hypnotic state to get there? That's how I deal with the aforementioned hesitant moments. I reassure them they can do as I suggest because they're in a hypnotic state. Now, git it on. Time's a'wasting! '-)

It's my suspicion that the reason I don't do hypnosis with people very often these days is that I don't have to go there to get people to accept my suggestions or even for them to know they can reach somnambulism in the blink of an eye. Tell the stories, pass the plate.

The place I am is really attempting to get my friends to go to via hypnosis happens before they ever get too close to their actual birth experience. It happens when they regress back through their adult life back into their childhood, and then to the real promised land.

The real promised land (or so I say, but I would, wouldn't I) is the state of being humans occupy and verify before they learn to talk. This information is readily available by a rudimentary reading of practically any professional interested in child psychology, but to a hypnotist it can be a real challenge.

The reason the state of being humans occupy previous to learning speech is that in trance they ARE that speechless tottler, and they can't talk or understand hypnotic suggestions very well. As a matter of fact the hypnotist is treading into the arena of the famous "terrible twos", and any suggestion, legitimate or not, might swiftly be met with a resounding "No!"

There is a way around this and for me it has to be done in advance with the cooperation of the adult before the regression ever begins. It does appear to require a deep, somnambulistic state to institute, but I'm not all that sure about that.

What has to happen is that an invisible adult witness has to be created. Pretty much in the same way a stage hypnotist might convince some rube that when they wake up they will uncontrollably cluck like a chicken when they hear the word "You". I get them to do this in a conversational mode in which I explain exactly why this needs to be in place before we begin the regression.

It's probably unfair of me to not be all that concerned that the people I do this with actually re-experience drawing their first breath. What I want for them is to re-experience the world they lived in before they became dependent on speech to get what they want from the world around them.

I dawdle. I linger there with them. I pounce upon any trace of memores that I can get them caught up in. I want them to be there as long as it's comfortable. Above all, I'm gonna strongly suggest to them they're going to remember everything, but that it will be through the witness we set up early. The witness is instructed to remember what the speechless newborn can't put in words. That way I don't put words in it's witness's mouth.

Some of the people I've done hypnosis with have re-experienced their own birthing process and returned to the never-never-land they hailed from. I ask them lots of questions and tell them lots of times in many different ways how they're gonna remember every aspect of their personal sojourn.

I set up post hypnotic suggestions designed to cause their memores to cough up the goods when they return to waking consciousness, and repeat the suggestion many times before I tell them to co-me ho-me. Most re-me their memores magnificently. '-)

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Kaa

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The woman in the video at the web site linked below, provoked a stronger emotional reaction from me than I experienced yesterday, when I watched all those videos on the origins of language, combined. I stumbled across her video randomly, but got caught up in it pretty much right away, and couldn't turn away. It became personal and compelling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAmzeW0fPs&feature=channel

Her name is Temple Grandin and she has a PhD in some kind of animal science. I found myself reaching to remember that throughout her lecture to reassure myself that despite appearances, she got through to somebody. She made enough sense to somebody to grant her a Doctor of Philosophy degree in something.

A PhD in anything would have assured me she was on the level in some way or the other. The advanced degree somehow kept me remembering she actually could straighten up and fly right if push came to shove, and that's why I let my me be her for a while.

Otherwise, her unusual way of dressing herself and her blatant, pushy attitude would have had me changing channels in a New York minute. Contrarily, by the end of the video her fancy cowgirl outfit made perfectly good sense.

http://www.templegrandin.com/

My use of the statement above, namely, "I let my me be her for a while." is the second time I've used it today. It's what I am is trying to say when it uses the hyphenated expression "be-co-me". I have no idea why it has segued to the third person to employ that descriptor, but sometimes that's best in order to have a second, totally biased opinion. '-)

One or more of the reasons "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" is that the old tricks the old dog learned, in the past, are still perplexing to it. The old tricks sometime appear to be merely seeds of their true utilitarian behavior. Old tricks can get so subtly drawn they're not perceivable as trickery by the new tricky-dick whippersnappers who continue to hold the opinion that time and tricks stand still.

One of my old tricks that gives the appearance of being self-regenerating to adapt to the law of change is that you're not me. No matter how many stupid ideas I get about how I'd run the world if I were a rich man... London Bridge AND Humpty Dumpty gotta fall down. My me does too.

A thousand times ten thousand, thousandth times, ad infinitum, and all that jazz. I-am-is suffers the death of ten thousand cuts and scurrilous ego abuse until there is no thing left to live for. Kaa-plunck!... and then what I am was becomes what it is, but it's only a part of the universal serpent with no id to cause woe to.

Such a world without woids is misrepresented as utopia when it really means woe-to-the-id. Woe is not utopian by nature. First, ya gotta have an id to cause woe to. Then, you gotta dream up the kind of woe that might shatter your ego in order for your id to have the fortitude to claim it as your own woid. Is that what it takes to be taken for your word?

If you're not a self-starter or have a clue that you even got a personal self (a soul?), then you obviously cannot institute a condition of woe to your newly found, so-called "id", and suffer for Christ, even if you manage to bring it own home to Jesus (or your own top shelf menagerie of gods) with a fabulous show-and-tell display of unhinged charisma. Just tell the stories, then pass the plate.

I seem convinced that if a soul needs to be dependent on an external savior or a knight in golden armor to run their ego-driven defense system while they're negotiating for less pain, then they might be shit out of luck with finding the word. Without the woid, there is no bejinning... or jinn.

There is no doubt in my mind, currently, that my I am and my me are prejudiced toward their own survival as the true goal of my intent or at least biased toward what they are programmed to execute without my nosy acts of resistance, "Damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead... Run over this jerk and complete the mission. Kill the buddha!"

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Germania

❧

Practically all day long I've watched youtube videos on the origins of language. Today was my day for exploring a little more about the Viking world the Arabian ambassador guy describes in his journal, but I got side-tracked into figuring out what the Friesian languages are about.

What made me curious were several comments I read in my search that involved the Rus Vikings, and association with the Friesian language. I was clueless. Never heard of it. Friesian is considered the last precursor language to the English language. A web search led me to the Wikipedia articles on the various languages that are called Friesian in one area of Germany or Netherlands. They're based mostly on the German language.

The Friesian speaking people inhabit the coastal areas of Germany and the other European countries that were on the coast of the North Sea right across the English Channel from England. The Celts who were there when the Romans conquered England lost the war, and it is apparently recorded somewhere that the Romans killed all the Celts, man, woman, and child.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frisians.png

Then, because of some threat in other parts of the Roman Empire, the Romans pulled all their troops out of England and abandoned the field to the Friesian speaking countries close by. They, in turn, were routed by the Anglo-Saxons, who were later whipped up on by the Normans who were Norsemen who were Vikings... and the band plays on.

I have speculated before that the Roman Catholic priesthood was invited into Germany and Scandinavia because they had a written language and social organization skills. They had Latin, and once a tribe without a written language became aware of the advantages of it they were willing to negotiate. This invitation to govern was not so rare with groups who had no idea how to govern or organize their own protective forces.

When I was reading about the Rus and Vandals and other tribal movements they were described as having a ruddy complexion. I have a ruddy complexion. I only found out when I joined the Navy and they put Ruddy down as my complexion. I had an anthropology professor who accused me of being "one of those barbarians" because of the shape of my skull. This research was beginning to take on a "roots" prospective.

This is a link to the web site that I've been polluting my mind with:

http://www.friesian.com/germania.htm

Somewhere, either on this web site or at one of the linked site that appear there, a story about a Viking and his encounter with his son about his inheritance. The father gave his son a sword and a battle axe and told him that was his entire and only birthright.

He got no other property. He was told to use those weapons to provide himself with the wherewithal he personally found important. A license to kill? In effect, the son was sent "a'viking" in the hope of gaining enough loot and booty to return home and create his own kingdom. Centuries later, the sword was replaced with the word, and a new way of coping with the rancor of the world of nature was forever changed.

Another bit of information I was ignorant about was that the Rune symbols are not as ancient as I'd led myself to believe. According to what I read today they were the initial attempt of the Scandinavian and Germanic tribes to come up with their own written language.

The runes were generated only after the Northern tribes become aware there was such a thing as a written language. I'm not sure of the dates. It's my guess that the Runes were not satisfactory to them, and their Druid priests felt as though they had been betrayed by their followers by deserting them for Latin and the black-robed Catholic priests.

I'm speculating that the Druid leadership was insulted beyond measure, and withdrew from the north country en masse to prove to their former charges that they couldn't live without them. Paradoxically, they probably immigrated to the slums around Rome where they intermingled with the Jewish Christian refugees from Israel.

The Druidic priesthood had been in charge of all the Germanic and Scandinavian tribes. They had all the skills needed to adopt the Christian religion and organize the Church of Rome much better than the decimated Jews could.

For the sake of argument, I playfully claim that the Druids used the executive skills they still possessed to organize the Christian Jews refugees in the slums and catacombs of Rome into a secret society whose effort was to proclaim Jesus of Nazareth as the true Messiah.

In my highly questionable opinion I believe the embarrassed and shamed Druids, formerly of the Northern tribes were welcomed into the Jewish Christian community and incrementally took over the Church of Rome as their new religion, and by extension the Holy Roman Empire which was their old stomping grounds. YMMV '-)

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Miscellaneous Missives of Good Will

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It was a simple act, but I felt emotional while carrying it out. There has been a paper grocery bag laying around my house in which some of the things my ex-wife left here when she took our children and left me here alone. It wasn't much, but it was the only physical evidence I had left from that era of my life. Since I'll never see them or my grandchildren again it seem prudent to send it off and free myself of some blame.

There were three framed cross stitch pieces my wife had sewn while she was pregnant. They were left on the wall of my parent's house when she left for California, and some notes my kids sent to their grandparents they never saw again. Dead now. Two baby pictures and some kindergarten drawings and painting.

Once I took the cross stitch pieces out of their frame I was able to stuff all of it into one of those prepared envelopes at the post office, and after I printed the address of my oldest daughter in Washington state (the only address I've ever had of any of them). I paid the clerk's asking fee and off they went. It only took ten years to get around to doing it.

I'm trying to put my house in order so there won't be much for the ghouls to sort through after I croak has become a minor priority in my life. I cleaned out my attic a few months ago. It's completely bare. Probably about like my brain cavity.

Most of the stuff I have now are tools I'll probably never use again, but I just might need them if I don't die soon. That's my real question. What if I don't die anytime soon, but life just drags out for another ten, maybe twenty years. Taking pills is the most of my activity except for cooking and writing.

I do have a few other activities I indulge daily or should be according to me. I play the major and minor scales on my digital piano. Recently, instead of just following the Circle of Fifths in one direction I've taken to moving in the opposite direction also.

It's the same scales, but in a different order. After having learned and played these scales in just one direction, playing them in a different order causes me to hesitate. My efforts are becoming smoother incrementally and there are fewer hesitations in between the various keys.

Singing the vowels is something I've taken to doing every day now. I suspect that not talking because I live alone has a detrimental affect on my mental resources. By that I mean to indicate that the two .sig files I've been using for about a month now are essential to my overall understanding. Namely: Speech is mind. Mind is speech. And, In the bejinning wuz the woid.

Not speaking because there is nobody here to talk to could lead to me becoming not only a mute person, but not speaking could be the cause of dementia to some degree, if not Alzheimer's. Singing the vowels is an activity I really enjoy if I get into a flow. I can get to feeling really joyous when everything gets easy. What is easy is simple.

After I left the State Hospital in full awareness, finally, that I might be a bit depressed, but not insane, I realized in fact that I can personally change my mind and act completely differently than previously. One of the ways I have of changing my mind is to change my speech. Singing the vowels in order to find the pure note of each of them works just dandy.

Of all the vowels, singing "e" is the most tragedy-laden. The perfect example is singing the national anthem. It's difficult to get it right, and the easiest part to screw up on is "the land of the free". Getting a good, clean e-note when singing the "free" word can be tradigidous.

Who hasn't heard a series of people trying to sing the national anthem at sports events sound horrible. If they're gonna screw up, it's usually gonna be hitting the e-note while singing that one word, "free". If they can just get the free word out with some confidence and power, I can usually see the joy they made it in their faces.

It sure makes me feel good if I can get that high e-note with clarity. Even when I've been practicing daily I find it difficult to predict with any accuracy that I'll get there as if it was easy. Lately, however, I sense that I'm learning how to reach for it with more predictability.

Granted, I don't have a lot of confidence in this method yet. What it's about is learning to balance the sound from my vocal cords between where it goes up into my nasal cavities and out of my mouth. In the past, I think I made some big effort to keep from having a nasal sound to my voice because it's considered hoky.

If that's what happened it may have been a mistake. Sometime my voice breaks when I try to take the e-note from a low range to a higher range. It happens regularly. Infrequently, after I've warmed up, and I begin to get a clear e-note up and down the scale I'm singing, I notice that I'm aiming the sound and my breath up toward the nasal cavities.

Aiming my breath in this way is constantly hard for me to remember from one practice session to the next in regard to the e-note. the other vowels seem easier. I work to develop some power in presenting each vowel sound. To me, that means I can get pushy and keep a lucid tone issuing forth throughout the range.

Doing this is weird. There's no future in it. I hardly ever sing in front of other people. I sang a gospel hymn at the Solstice bonfire in front of my brother and his wife and a friend. It came out okay, and they seem impressed enough to applaud. In my opinion, singing and chanting help keep my mind about me.

❦

Dubious Insights

It unusual for it to snow six inches (15.24 cm) here on the coastal plains of the Carolinas. However much it has snowed in the past, it sure didn't seem to take this long for it to melt. Granted, most of the snow has fallen off the trees, but my lawn and most of my driveway still has abundant snow on it. It keeps hanging around. Maybe tomorrow the temperatures will get high enough to cause most of it to melt.

It was situations like this that reveal my lack of character in the way I conducted myself in my two marriages. I expected my ex-wives and children to cope with stuff like cold weather and snow in the same way I do, by just waiting for it to leave. More and more as I get older and reflect on my attitudes I realize that my way of perceiving the world is and never will be up to snuff for the marriage ga-me.

It worried me in my youth, and caused me to think I might be crazy. I went to extremes to find out that isn't really true. It's more like I'm autistic than insane. I played with the notion that I am is possessed by Asperger's Syndrome, but I took a test on the internet that claimed to distinguish whether this was true, and I didn't even come close to having that disorder. That figures. If it were true I'd play piano mo' bettah.

I composed a post to one of the e-mail discussion groups I'm subscribed to that says something I've wanted to say for a while. My writing it was not so much an act of daring do, but to clarify how I think about this topic. The quote is from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the so-called Gnostic Gospels. Here it is:

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3 Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

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

This saying reminds me of Bill Nye, the science guy trying to dumb down to what he appears to think children will find intriguing on TV, and by his idiotic behavior cause kids to wanna grow up to be just like him.  What child would wanna get into science as an adult if doing that caused them to become like that buffoon? It's about like some people here attempting to discover the "secrets" of a illiterate society from thousands of years ago via a modern education that dismisses the methods the ancients used to get there.

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I made the above comments because the academic approach some of the members of this group take toward a very unacademic, informal group of people who weren't satisfied with the status quo. That of being slaves to the Roman Empire.

According to Elaine Pagels, tenured professor at Princeton, and author of the seminal book entitled The Gnostic Gospels, three-quarters of the people who lived in that world were slaves, and that fact alone is why many of the ancients found the Messianic claims of Christianity attractive. Not only were they saved in spirit, but saved from physical slavery by the main careactor of the Jesus stories.

The Jesus stories, to me, currently, are the real beginning of the contemplation of cognition in the homo sapiens species. It was when these stories gotten put in written form that they could be discussed by groups that were illiterate. The people who were literate could read the stories to them, and as opposed to the oral tradition, the written stories were consistently the same.

The later efforts of the Roman Church were to make the stories absolutely and irrevocably the sa-me by killing those who didn't agree with them. The various "Inquisitions" serve as an example of that, and the Reformation happened to resolve the power play of the Catholics.

The main body of early Christians didn't appear to be buffaloed by the formalities of the ruling churches of the time. They were mostly slaves who viewed the Jesus stories as literal and real and by believing in the Jesus they took that way, they would be freed of slavery. Who wouldn't love the comfort of believing that?

I feel like a child in elementary school raising my hand to gain the recognition of the teacher crying out, "I know! I know the answer to that question." Modern educated people who can read the original writings for themselves in order to make up their own minds. That's who. Despite that, most don't. No blame.

The Doo Dah Racetrack

This cold weather has me stymied. It addles mah brain, and reduces my identity to that of an instinctual primate who never quite got abstract thought down pat. It makes me feel unhealthy and forces me to pretend I know just what to do about it. I don't. Hell is cold, not hot. Probably both.

The response I got from my brother when I called to say I ain't walking tonight was an unfeigned agreement. We didn't walk the night before either because the power was off and the path we usually take around the property had six inches of snow and slush that didn't glow in the dark so we could pass it by without getting our feet wet.

That's part of the deal of our walking out through the woods at night. We don't use flashlights, but let our eyes get used to whatever light may be available. When it's cloudy out and on the new moon things get touchy feely in a hurry. Our path is mostly a dirt road that we created ourselves. It's not like we're gonna get lost, and we're never far from the warmth or coolness of both our houses.

Well, maybe the warmth or coolness of his house. Mine is pretty much the ambient temperature 24/7. I do have a small ceramic space heater in my kitchen to keep my water pipes from freezing, and another space heater in my bedroom upstairs where I keep my computer.

I'm surprised that small a heater would keep my kitchen warm, but I'm grateful. The space heater I use here in room helps a little, but not much. I'm wearing ski clothes to stay warm otherwise. Except for the era of my two ex-marriages when the women insisted on modern conveniences, that's the way it's always been for me, and worse.

There were no modern conveniences for most of my youth. Sometime I wonder what it would have been like when I was a kid if real insulation had been invented. About the best anybody could do then was to make their house as wind-proof as possible. I really don't think they knew the principles involved with insulation. It took the invention of it itself to put the idea of it in their minds. I don't actually know if that's the case.

The first house my parents lived in either by renting or owning that had central air conditioning only happened after I left home to join the Navy. The Navy had it on their ships, but not in the barracks at the craft schools I attended. Certainly not in recruit camp buildings. Of course, the boot camp location was in San Diego, California, and most natives there have never seen a stove except for cooking (I don't know that either).

I spent time in two places that by location are warm all year long. I went to the Navy boot camp in San Diego, and to a torpedo school in Key West. I went back to Key West time and again for years, and then lived there full time for 3-4 years.

Both towns were basically "service towns" in the since that the military establishments in both were a huge part of the economy. Later, they both became winter resorts because of their location. The military had to leave or make way for the money people.

Presently I live outside a little town that is located on the "military highway" between two of the largest military bases in the world. The towns or small cities they're associated with are still considered "service towns", and their economy is heavily dependent on the federal money associated with the military.

Neither town seems likely to become resorts, and more military units seem to arrive monthly. They're less than a hundred miles (161.9 Km) apart, and if a nuclear device exploded in the little town I live in that is located in between them, the explosion would take both these fortresses out.

Don't think the citizens here haven't considered that possibility. They kept an eye out for them thar Communist Pinkos coming here to make it happen. The rustic people in this neck of the woods could serve as the stereotypes for lots of conservative Bible Belt mentalities. They're of a very conservative, God-fearing bent whether they're registered Democrats or Republicans.

In the past I didn't realize how much this political attitude was the status quo in this region and all over much of what was the Confederacy of States that rebelled against the Federal government. When I was a kid growing up both my parents considered themselves to be liberal and progressive and Democrat. That's not how they ended up because they were also Jim Crow to the bone.

My parent's racial prejudice was not so personal because it was the status quo of the area they grew up in. They grew up out in the boondocks northeast of Meridian, Mississippi just west of the Alabama state line. My father grew up a little deeper in the hinterlands of Meridian than my mother near some place called Collinsville.

When I first saw it I was really surprised that it was nothing more than a crossroad with a couple of stores and a few houses. By the time I first saw it none of my father's family lived nearby or even in the state of Mississippi.

They all had to leave to find work. Mississippi is still the poorest state in the mainland. The story goes that my father's sibling followed the lead of his oldest brother and went to work in the oil fields in Arkansas. Since his oldest and only brother was eighteen years older than him, he got stuck taking care of their parents.

My father told me his mother had been a school marm at some time before she became a baby factory and virtual slave of my illiterate grandfather. She was most valuable to him because she could read and write. They were both dead by the time I was 2-3 years old, so I can only write about what I was told. Dead men don't tell tales.

Not being raised around any of my kinsmen from either side of my family took its toll on me through shame. That's exactly how I became a shaman whether I liked it or not. There was nobody around to dispute or affirm any of my parents family tales. They took us back to Mississippi with them on summer vacations for about a week or less most summers, but brief meetings was about the most of it.

Between my father's and mother's siblings I supposedly have around eighteen aunts and uncles. I barely knew any of them face to face. Only through my parent's stories about their take on what family meant to them and how family ought to mean to me, but I didn't know their families. I have over a hundred first cousins I've never seen or heard from in my life nor they from me.

As my parent's stories began to unravel through time and space I didn't even have that as a form of identity. I grew up in five villages in two states where the villagers didn't know my parents very well and we were always strangers in their very strange land, and if it was them that it took to raise me, they did a piss-poor job of it. No blame. '-)

My entire life seems to be about finding an acceptable identity I can be satisfied with. When Mick Jagger sings of not finding no satisfaction, that's the satisfaction I know is missing with me. In my dotage I wonder if that's not the way it's supposed to be instead of being some sort of failure.

What is this lack of satisfaction humans suffer as if it were the root of all evil? I'm claiming this lack of satisfaction limbo is that root instead of money. Humans only need money to attempt to find satisfaction. Maybe that's why I've abandoned ambition as an answer to my prayers or as my prey. Well, at least for today. Manana is a completely different story.