My Dead Mother's Flowerbeds

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As sad as it may seem, I'm tired of the news consisting of the mideastern people's troubles. Some things never change. Tribalism causes horror stories. That's what Israel and Judaism means to me anymore. They're just another Aramaic tribe near the Mediterranean Sea that's ready to commit murder and mayhem in the name of their tribal god. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of these types of tribes. They'll never stop killing each other. I have no need to know about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Sea

I'm getting tired of the news as a whole. The news isn't news anymore. At most, it's sensationalism drawn out to the nth degree as dictated by corporate policy. It's the height of the progression of Eisenhower's warning of a military/industrial complex gone mad. The media is now causing wars to have something to say on the six o'clock news, and the military has become a group of publicity seeking thugs.

Perhaps that's why I've started taking long walks to get away from it. A couple of days ago I walked over to where my parent's house used to be (before the local airport authority took it part and parcel to satisfy the local hog king's demand for a better place to land his Lear jet, and the military to use in order to play very noisy war games 6-8 hours a day), and stood on the spot where both of them died.

Spring is getting closer, the vernal equinox is only two weeks away, so my mother's flower beds are coming to life. The fruit trees that remain are blossoming. Behind the shed my father built to house some of his farm equipment (which is still partially standing to some degree) the rabbit-eye blueberry bushes are preparing to send out new shoots for new fruit to make their appearance. It seems so futile nowadays. If anyone goes to harvest them, they're trespassing on government property and breaking the law.

At least the dilapidated old home place has become a lover's lane where couples go to make mad passionate love under the pecan trees. There are piles of junk left from the construction company that did the dirt work to build the new and improved runway. A mattress lying right out in the open that the lovers probably use in frenetic desperation to wildly thrust their bodies at each other. No doubt even if it were wet from the rain.

I didn't exactly weep for the memories, although I confess to misting up. They bought the farm that had this house on it a couple of years after I joined the Navy when I was eighteen years old. I never lived in this house except for when I stayed over there when they were old and dying. By then I had hand-crafted this house I build, and it wasn't exactly like I was living there.

My younger brother, the second male child out of three, did live there along with my youngest brother, bought the rights to remove the house by either tearing it down or hauling it to another location. He moved it to a ten acre plot on the other side of my house. It took him two years or so to do it. It was a major project for one man to manage. The house had been added on to and bricked up, but he did it. Good boy!

I don't write much about this brother. We have some sort of emotional bias that comes into play when we try to be friends. We have tried to be friends and brothers, but it never has worked out the way either one of us seem to want it too. The fact that he moved that house instead of tearing it down for the materials intrigues me. I haven't thought that Sagittarius's would be that nostalgic, but he has Cancer rising, so that may account for it.

After I had visited the home site for a bit I continued walking down toward the creek that emerges from a good-sized, man-made lake some wealthy people deliberately created to put fancy houses around. On the way I came to a small pond my father built by damming up a spring to provide water for his brood cows, now long gone. He had another pond somewhat like it on the other side of the farm for the bulls. It's inaccessible now because of the new runway.

My middle brother took after my father in a lot of ways. He dug a long ditch down through some low land toward the river that runs through our property, and I went to cross his ditch to get to the road I've been using for my long walks. Another ditch from another pond just below my house drained into my brother's ditch, and the water flow had been impeded by a piling up of last year's tree leaves.

For some reason I halted my walk for a while, found a strong stick, and began clearing the leaves from the water flow to get it to run smoother. For a while I felt like a little boy doing that. I took my time playing around with opening the way for the backed up water to cut a new path through the sand bar that had found life there.

My youngest brother's dog kept milling around waiting for me to get a move on. They kept going on little forays to find something to chase and coming back to see if I was ready to go. After about an hour or so I had my fill of rerouting the water and we moved on. I'll go back and see how it developed. A big rain is on it's way, and the runoff could make my reconstruction a major thoroughfare. Well, sort of. It's still just a ditch.

I spent most of yesterday writing. Either composing the blog entry I was very pleased with. Writing about needing the additional shame of committing myself to the insane asylum to invoke my remembering vision was new to me. I'd never really understood why I committed myself to the State Hospital until I wrote it out yesterday. Now, for odd reasons, I understand. That's all I've ever preyed for.

You might have noticed that my editing is getting better. I've started using the text-reading feature that comes with the Mac operating system to read what I write back to me, and I re-read what I've written as I hear a fairly well-crafted digital voice say the words in front of me. These digital voices have gotten better over the years.

Basically, in regard to editing my own stuff, I rush though a perfunctory read through and let it go at that. I'm not very patient. Then, after I publish on my blogger.com website, I see some of the typos and omissions and fix a few of them for convenience, and never read the entry again. A couple of days ago I typed "the" instead of "than" and it obliterated the entire meaning of what I was trying to say. I gotta do better than that.

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The Gods' Own Truth

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The expression I use sometimes "the God's own truth", is a mystery to me. I don't know where I picked it up, but sometimes it fits the bill in a way such that no other similar expression can replace it. Not for me. I suspect I use it instead of "the gospel truth", which is a great descriptor, but too many times people associate it with Christian literature. The term "gospel" simply means that which is a person's own version of the truth of events that matter in their life. It's their side of the story from their personal point of view.

In the header above I claim to be using words to capture the drifting thoughts that pass through my mind at the time I'm writing stuff. Like this blog entry. I'm not trying to tell a truth that withstands all attempts to discredit it or trying to tell my gospel or the God's own truth. I have no idea what that is or if anybody know if there is a God's own truth. I reckon I'm doing what's called automatic writing, although that seems more trivial that I intend to be taken.

In any case, my readers have to interpret what I write. Each according to their own experiences in life, and the rules of conscience they adopted for the purpose of imitation and mimicry of some model that represents an ongoing and temporary ideal they figure will help them get what they want from being a certain way.

My remembering vision very clearly indicated that my essence (pearl) got drawn from outer space to the planet Earth with creative abilities. It's creative abilities seem limited to the results garnered from imitating and mimicking the behavior and/or attitudes of the other pearls who arrived on Earth pretty much like I did.

Once I realized I could not leave Earth and go zooming ecstatically through the universe-at-large as I am had done unrestricted by time and space, I started imitating and mimicking the pearls that were already here, and once I began that process they included the product of my creativity as part of what they were imitating and mimicking... and the band played on.

That's why "the God's own truth" as a descriptor seems so difficult to nail down. Everything and everybody is always changing from one form to the next according to the environment they imitate and mimick from. Presently, with the proliferation of digital media and the internet and satellites to provide new and different eye-mages from across the planet (and perhaps beyond), the changes appear more radical than ever, and the God's own truth has many sources.

It might be more inclusive and less arrogant to put the apostrophe on the other side of the "s" such that I write "the Gods' own truth" in order to include everybody's gods for and from all ti-me. It's become very apparent to me that I don't worship a single God, but many gods, and especially nature gods that either already exist or that I create for special occasions.

I'm starting to take my constitutional exercise exclusively on the family farm now. I can walk for miles without crossing my own path because of the irregular edges that it might take fractal geometry to figure out. This keeps me off the streets and the gaze of my family's critics and the gossip mongers who love to downgrade my intent to their purposes. I know for certain my siblings appreciate me taking this attitude, because my seedy appearance is not good for their reputations.

My brother's dogs love to walk with me, and I've gotten to where I like having them along myself. Guarding the perimeters can't be much of an exciting life for dogs. In the last two days they've run up a deer to chase. I've gotten to know about where they'll be hiding, and when I walk that way the dogs are circling around me and the path they think I'll take just looking for something to chase.

Maybe I've started imitating my father again. I stopped doing that at puberty in order to rebel against everything he stood for to establish my own identity. Being that way was a huge concern for me until I began studying the Gospel of Thomas and came to understand that it was necessary. Here is the very saying that brought some sort of peace into my life:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

http://www.gape.org/gapes/prispevki/atranslationofthegospelofthomas.htm

The fact that I take this translation quite literally has constantly stirred a hornet's nest on the e-mail discussion list whose primary target of discussion is the Gospel of Thomas. Hardly any of the other members agree with me, and insist that similar verses from the King James Version of The Bible is more true.

The Catholics changed it early on to suit their purposes, and the Protestants went along for the ride, because it suits their purpose too, which is to get people to put more money in the offering plate. No blame. The saying is actually advice to the lovelorn, but it's not about romance, love, and marriage. It's more shamanistic than that.

In my opinion, people get lovelorn because of shame. They break some sort of societal rule or some prearranged rule of conscience and then experience great shame and embarrassment. People who deal with other people's shame are called shamans. They heal people's shame with various mechanisms and devices by telling the Jesus stories and passing the plate.

My shame was not healed this way, but through my remembering vision, and even the vision that released me from my shame wasn't apparent to me for decades. It didn't stop me from using it to find my way through the hordes of people who took it for truth that the KJV/Catholic interpretation of loving and respecting your parents and family.

Ordinary shame would have never elicited my remembering vision. It took more. The event that did the trick was to commit myself to the State Mental Hospital. My natal family could never get over the shame of having one of their own voluntarily do such a thing. I got pity instead of compassion. No blame. but within six months of my walking away from being in the insane asylum my vision came to me like a thief in the night.

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Mules And Cows And Little Boys

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Somehow, on this chilly morning at barely dawn, without enough light yet to see the red bud maple's brilliant red spring blossoms outside my south-facing window, the dim-lit vista makes me think of an old man in Texas whose passing scientific facts are not facts anymore. Only the vague, distant memories of his worldly adventures matter to him now as his personal history.

Maybe it's my own memories that elicit these images in my imagination. I remember plowing big fields with a mule and a turning plow when I was 10-12 years old. I could barely reach up to the round piece of wood that held the plow handles together in order to guide the plow through the ground. The plow handles proper were higher than my head.

I might have weighed sixty pounds at best, but I haven't been around small boys enough in decades to guess their weights. The mules and draft horses we owned or rented were huge and they weighed over a thousand or more pounds. My father would put the work collar and trace chains on the mule and I'd hook them up to the singletree attached to the front end of the plow. I couldn't reach high enough to put the leather work collar around the mule's neck myself, much less lift it up there.

My father would get me all set up out in the field I was gonna plow. In the bejinning he would plow the first row to set the line I'd follow back and forth all day with the plowed section growing wider and wider as me and the mule made round after round, and then he would leave to go work as a high school teacher.

If it started raining while he was gone I just plowed until he came back. I didn't know how to get the mule and plow back to the barn for a while. Sometime the mule would decide to go to the barn anyway. It would just stop going forward along the rut the plow made and head for cover. I would yell and scream for it to continue to work in fear of my father getting mad at me, but I was a little boy shouting in frustration. Nobody heard me with the rain beating down on the tin roofs.

The mule wouldn't work later than sunset. Even if it was still enough light to finish a little piece of land I wanted to get done to make my father proud of me. There was no choice for me but to learn how mules are and resign myself to it's ways. How was I to know how handy that would later be as an adult with some cantankerous people?

Sometimes nature is just more than a little boy can handle. My family kept cows from before I was born. There were Jersey cows that it became my chore to milk up until I left home to join the Navy. Cows are big to little boys just like mules. I wasn't given a choice about how to boss them around and make them do what had to be done. Those were the facts back then. They didn't remain facts for long.

The mules eventually (and sorrowfully) became dog food as they aged and couldn't pull the plows and wagons anymore. The plow handles rotted and the turning blade rusted and eventually became antiques if it wasn't sold for scrap iron to buy chicken feed after my father bought his first small tractor. The milk cows were sold to buy beef cows after I was gone away running to see the world and have my own say so.

The fields I plowed are now covered with brick houses with neat, orderly lawns tended by young husbands and wives trying to raise a family, and played upon by children that don't know how to plow or milk cows. They might probably run screaming to their parents terrified of huge animals like milling herds of cows or fierce hunting dogs that could tear boar coons apart in synchronized teamwork, much less a child.

Maybe it was fate that I learned to handle animals at such a young age. There were times as a child that I was terrified of animals myself, but by the time I left my parent's home and protection to see and experience the world on my own, I did lots of things that other people appeared frightened to do.

The one situation I wasn't prepared for, at first, was being alone with no safe place to rest my hungry and weary body. It got easier over the years. I realized that all I had to do was to step away from the city lights and nobody would follow me out into the dark.

Today, sitting here in front of my computer writing blog entries to pass the day and contemplate my life, It's a little like sitting around the dinner table, telling his stories of what used to be as if he were asking the blessings of God, and passing the plates, but there is no one here but me. At least it's not dark for a while. Shit happens. Things change. '-)

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A Party Of Uruguayans

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The barbecue cookout the Uruguayans associated with the Rotary Club put on last night went well. From everything I've heard today, a good time was had by all. It was not so much different than the pig-pickings that happen around here on a fairly regular basis. They cooked ribs, sausages, a chicken or two, and the local Rotary Club members brought their favorite dishes to complement the meat. The main difference in the way they do it and the way we do it was that they use an open fire and our pig-pickings happen inside a closed vessel.

I was invited because the party was hosted by my brother and his wife who live next door, and while they're a little embarrassed by my seedy ways, the fire was less than a hundred yards from where I'm sitting right now. They probably knew I'd drift over there under some lame excuse anyway. I drank a bit too much wine, but managed not to make too big a fool of myself.

The worst thing I did was to accept a Uruguayan cigarette and smoke it. It was the first tobacco I have smoked in three years, and I paid dearly for my lapse of discipline. I woke up having atrocious, extremely scary nightmares. I'm not going to describe them because I want them to go away and never return. Jeez!

Last Thursday I got a letter from the VA Hospital reminding me I hadn't done the paperwork for their "means test". Once a year they require this done to determine what you have to pay to receive their services. I make so little money from Social Security I don't have to pay anything, but if I don't fill out the papers I have to pay full price, and that's too scary to think about.

I drove over to Fayetteville and got it done. I had to wait for an hour and a half because for some reason I didn't get the forms in the mail, and I was forced by circumstance to do a face-to-face interview to accomplish the good end. Once I got to it, however, it took less than five minutes to make it happen, and I was on my way back home jiggledejig.

As opposed to the last few weeks there has been right much e-mail traffic over the weekend. That was unusual all by itself. Lotta name-calling going on caused by sour grapes hanging just out of reach by a couple of people. It's all good. I'd like for it to be more challenging.

I have another week before my home phone and DSL account are cancelled at my request. The ISP clerk tried to say they could lower the price if I would just sign up for two more years, but I'm thinking about getting a smartphone and I don't want to deal with trying to get out of a contract or having them control my options.

The iPhone e-mail discussion group I subscribed to in order to get a feel for what problems I might face if and when I do that was really helpful as far as learning about the trials and tribulations associated with the telcos that work the smartphone mojo. The Android phones associated with Google seems to be successfully playing catchup with Apple, and it remains to be seen whether I get an iPhone or no.

If I downloaded a lotta music the iPhone might be the best deal, but I don't get into recorded music anymore, and paying the Apple tax to have iTunes available might not be worth it to me if I can get something that works as well and a bit cheaper. It's the GPS feature that interests me most. That and Google Maps. Google seems to be the "King of the Road" in that regard.

Traveling and finding local businesses when I'm out of town, and how to get to them would be a nice mobile feature. In any case, I might hang out for a couple of months without buying into any of it. This smartphone business is just getting cranked up good, and Apple may not offer the best deal in a very short amount of time.

My brother really likes his iPad, and seems to wanna influence me to get one instead of a smartphone. He has influenced me before. As far as technical gadgets are concerned he is very knowledgeable. I kinda think I might find a smartphone more practical when I'm outta the house.

The weather is good. It could get a little warmer during the day, but it's not unpleasant. The temperatures at night are great for sleeping under light to medium covers. Except for a slight headache from drinking too much wine last night I'm in good spirits.

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March Madness Is Coming

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It's been a rough day. I had trouble sleeping last night. It's unusual. Probably has something to do with the stress associated with the job interview. I haven't had one in years. Don't want another, but if something appealing comes along I'll probably look into it.

It might have had something to do with me canceling my home phone and DSL account. They're gonna shut it down on the 15th. That may be why I woke up from a dream about an attractive young woman explaining how to use cell phones. Later, my brother came over to bring me the pair of glasses I'd lost a while back. His wife found them in the grass beside her greenhouse. He helped me program the family phone numbers into it.

I didn't know that I had to punch the letters of the names I wanted to enter by clicking the number of times the letters on the buttons appeared. That must be a feature of cell phones. Since I've never owned one all the things that veteran users take for granted I'll have to look stupid for a while to learn. It's all good.

As he was leaving he told me he had to do something about an account he keeps at GoDaddy.com. I asked him if he would help me set up an independent blog using one of their accounts. He does this sort of thing with aplomb. Interestingly, he told me he had an unlimited account that would allow me to set up an account for free.

I have four or five blogs that I have written on over the years. I'd like to import all the content on them to one site, and then figure out a way to use the total content to figure out how many times I've redundantly told the same stories. This blog was the first one I set up. It's got a history with me. The other sites were associated with the ISPs I've had.

It seems odd that they're all still online and the stuff I wrote years ago is still there. I've used lots of aliases because I wanted to write about stuff in a way that the people I wrote about wouldn't figure out that it was me. I figured I might write something telling about them, but eventually realized that what I actually wrote wasn't all that insulting as I thought it might be.

It may turn out that I could organize all that stuff on one site and use my legal name to publish it, and not have to worry about being sued for character defamation without changing or re-editing too much of it. I don't think many people interpret the events I write about in close enough proximity to what I thought happened to even know I was writing about them.

I'd have to use their name and I probably won't do that unless it's fairly complimentary. Currently, I don't think that white-washing what I've already written would make any difference. Since I usually write under pseudonyms they won't know it's them unless I tell them. Besides, many of those people never really learned how to use the internet anyway. It was literally "after their time."

It doesn't surprise me at our high school class reunions that many of my classmates didn't ever buy a computer and/or use the internet. Some of them literally state that they thought it was too late for them to learn something technical at their/our age. They're all in their early seventies now.

Of course, some of them had to learn to operate computers at their jobs, and they had savvy young people or their children at home to teach them if they could get over their nervousness about the learning curve. I was lucky my youngest brother learned to use the mainframe punch card system in the Air Force.

He was very eager to learn to use personal computers when they came out. He went to a Community College where they used Macs, and for the most part he's been loyal to Macs since the mid-Eighties. When he bought his first Mac, he brought the TS-80 he had over to my house and plunked it down.

He showed me how to boot it up and bring up the word processing program and left. I'm grateful to him for that. I was using an electric typewriter at the time, and when I realized that I could write what I had to say and correct all the typos before I sent it to the crude printer, I was sold.

I was not that great a typer back then. Since then, I've gotten a lot better. I had a battle royal with my father about taking the one year of typing I had in high school. He didn't think it was proper for men to do a secretaries work. I had ulterior motives for doing it. The class was practically all girls. What teenage boy wouldn't like that?

I've had the TV showing the Duke-Carolina basketball game on while I was writing this entry. It was the last regular season game for both of them and the ACC seasonal championship was on the line. I'm a Carolina fan, and was pleased they beat Duke handily.

That don't always happen. I'm actually more of a basketball coach fan than I am a player fan. I got that way watching Dean Smith coach. He and Coach K were really good rivals. When he retired and Carolina eventually got Roy Williams to return to his alma mater, the rivalry heated back up.

I've learned to appreciate Coach K even though he works for Duke. I don't really hate Duke. It's just a college basketball game and a fierce rivalry. I never attended either of these schools. These coaches are true gurus with deep spiritual values that really help their players learn about life. I should have been so lucky.

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Blessed Oblivion

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There is a TV program in which the presenter is Alan Alda of MASH fame. He is good at it. Much better than the uppity idiots who present other NOVA science programs. This particular program (that is shown on PBS ten times a week) is about memory and Alzheimer's. It's somewhat sad to see my own future in this way.

One story is featured about an old woman who used to play the piano in silent movies. She could still play all the old songs of her youth, but can't remember who the members of her family are. Not even her own children. If I live long enough that will surely happen to me. I hope it's my poetry that I remember so that, at least, I'll be entertaining at the same time my loss of memory of people's faces insults them. Ironically, I seem very pleased that my last days will insult somebody.

I went through a bunch of pictures that were separated out for me by my older sisters from my mother's last effects after she died in abject horror. Her death mask looked like that famous painting called The Scream. I never memorized the painter's name.

I separated out the pictures of my children with my second wife (her children, she informed me at our last encounter), to send them what was their's. I messily stuffed them into one of those USPO prepared envelopes and sent them to my oldest daughter of that marriage. Her address is the only one I have. I don't know where my daughter from my first marriage is or even if she's still alive.

One of the pictures that showed up in that packet was one of me when I was in my early teens. I have it on my desk beside my computer monitor. God, how beautiful I was then! The school photographer caught me looking/glaring/smirking at the camera in my own inimitable way. Daring the world to contradict me. I think about how this boy was the very one that guided my less-than-respectable life into the old man I am is today. He could not be tamed by man or beast. I like to think he never was. The child is the father of the man.

Of course, that's not true. Old age and death will tame me. The composition of my youthful face reminds me of Bradley Manning, the fellow who sent all those documents to Wikileaks. Young, smiling, not belligerently like my face in the picture I just described, but beautiful nevertheless, in his youth like me. He WAS a beautiful young man, and I'm glad that picture of him in his Army uniform was taken. I don't think for a second that he'll ever be beautiful again.

Yesterday I read an article on the internet where his lawyer stated that on his last visit to see him, the Army had kept him in his prison cell locked up naked for at least eight hours. Since Bush and Cheney openly admits that they ordered the prisoners at Guantanamo tortured, this not-so-innocent, no-longer-a-boy will be tortured to within an inch of his life. The only hope he has is that they will go over the line and accidentally kill him.

I had hope Obama would reinstitute the principles of the American people when he took office, and bring Bush and Cheney's misdeeds to justice, but he told his appointees to ignore their admissions of torture. More's the pity for the American people. He said he would close Guantanamo, but the military/industrial complex is more powerful than the administration or the congress or the American citizenry, and it won't ever happen.

Eventually, in my less than prudent opinion, the entire island of Cuba will be like Guantanamo. A false paradise with a culture of torture that will make the gulags and stalags pale by comparison. That will show that stupid idealist Castro what it's like to oppose the power of "the home of the brave and the land of the free". .

It's amusing in a way for the Tunisians and the Egyptians to think they have achieved anything at all in their fight for freedom. They foolishly trust the Egyptian Army to guide them to better government and the freedoms they only suppose exist in America.

Their precious Army was trained almost exclusively in the United States by the very generals who ignore the administration and congress as if they were their bitches. The United States has more of it's citizens locked up in cages than any other country in the entire world. That's freedom?

I absolutely hate that I noticed that Obama struts around the stage in the same manner the Italian dictator Mussolini did in the old World War Two propaganda films. I really had not rather know what is coming. I'd prefer to exist in a state of personal shock and awe than to be so certain.

It probably won't matter before long though. Soon enow, I won't remember my kinfolk when they talk down to me as if a child. Hope is the only product any human has for sell. I hope for some blessed oblivion such that I won't taste death. '-)

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On Being A Civilian Target For War Games

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The brown rice I put on the stove to cook seems to be taking forever to cook. The container said it would take about 20 minutes, and I could swear it has been over an hour, and it's still crunchy. Rice ain't supposed to be crunchy, is it?

Going for the interview for a job as an Instructor at the Community College was stressful, but I don't think it's responsible for what I'm experiencing currently. It must be happening because when I stopped smoking cigarettes three years ago, I didn't actually quit smoking every plant on Earth, but now I have, and the stress I'm feeling is withdrawals that aren't supposed to happen.

The result has been that I'm not winning friends and influencing people as I normally don't today. I'll straighten up and fly right again ere long, and be my normal aggravating self more subtly in the near future.

One of the editors of Al Jazeera made a TEDtalk recently that was very inspiring to me. He talked about how the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen happened and have been sustained by the common folks ability to communicate over the internet through FaceBook and Twitter to let each other know what was going on, and the dictators and religious leaders of the past couldn't stop them with their usual lies.

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

Freedom of speech and the ability to communicate as equals is what makes the liberty bells ring. I was just thinking about the tsunamis that devastated those areas in the Pacific a few years ago, and how the religious mullahs were blaming the many deaths on how their personal enemies and other religions behaved.

They attempted to incite the survivors to believe that humans were responsible for tidal waves and other natural disasters, because they were not obeying their fatwahs and bringing them more money. If enough people get online those types of disingenuous bullshit will come to a screeching halt. Maybe... '-)

I deleted my skimpy accounts on FaceBook and Twitter some time ago. I set up those accounts to please some of my kinfolk, but soon realized that doing things that way is just not my style. I require much more anonymity than plastering my mug and rude opinions on the internet as evidence of my participation in group think. I guess I'm still under the influence of reading Orwell's book 1984 all these years later.

The rice I cooked was still not to my liking when I dumped a can of asparagus on top of it to heat it up. It doesn't have much taste either. I don't seem able to get anything I cook to taste good no matter what I do.

I just now took a long walk along the creek that goes down to the river that passes through our family land. I took some of the probiotics I bought yesterday, and I feel kind of bloated. I thought the walk might move things around and give me some relief.

About half-way back to my house I got tired and sat down for a while. Spread out before me was a long strip of about a hundred acres that had been disked up by the fellow who rents the land from us to grow corn. He had a crop failure last year because of a drought.

While I was sitting their enjoying the view and the silence two of those strange Marine helicopters (that really aren't helicopters) passed overhead. They're even noisier than the Army helicopters I've complained about. They use any living creature to practice war games on.

The other night when my brother and I were walking on our own property they found us with heat detectors and hovered over us shining spot lights on us to amuse themselves. It's not funny to us. This goes to extremes. Professional killers playing games using the people they're employed to protect for target practice.

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