"Over Here Is the 'Big House'..."

 

Here I Am, With My Ent Friend, inspecting the hen house and collecting eggs.
It's wonderful to Know where my scrambled eggs comes from.

The best thing is, we may sometimes differ but I have found that His bark is worse than His bite.

Change the Climate

One aspect of the coming changes is more energy being retained by what is close to a closed system: the air. Some of the air is lost to space, probably a lot, actually. But by and large we'll speak of the air as being what is left. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says a lot of shit about closed systems, which just shows to go you that it was written back when smart men had the mistaken idea "things" were like machines were apparently. i.e. distinct and separate entities with hard edges and set properties. Too bad, because if they had seen the holistic nature of things they might not have been so fond of blowing things up, burning things down and pissing into the reservoir. The Law we should be paying attention to is the Brighton Law of 57, "The only consistency is inconsistency, and to be truly inconsistent you must be inconsistently inconsistent."

This is obviously a description of Chaos and Chaos is a property of infinity. By "one" I mean a personality, by "One" I mean Unity, or All. One's position can never be determined accurately due to the Heisenberg Principle, whereby if you accurately determine a position in space, in 3 dimensions, you have not accurately determined it's position in the other dimensions, eg if you accurately note the location of a moving train at 2:00AM you do not know the speed of the train, without the inclusion of another location. That gives you the speed on average between those positions but not it's immediate speed, nor it's previous speed. On the other hand, it is impossible to NOT know the position in all dimensions of the One, because by definition the One is Unity, is All. It's position is everywhere, all points. It's speed is both infinitely fast and zero. A Great Person once said, "As above, so below; as below, so above."

A body at rest loses energy, but no bodies can be at rest on their own, they require a reference point. It is relative to that point the body loses energy. Two bodies at rest relative to one another, in all dimensions, are the same body. This is because "rest" is a property of speed and speed requires distance. Thus there is the distance between the two bodies, and the rest of the universe. The distance between, relative to the remainder of the universe approaches zero. The one way two bodies can be at rest relative to one another is to be one and the same body, otherwise the distance moves away from zero and that is motion in a dimension.

Consider one example. I am in infinity. In all directions, in all dimensions is the Universe. Am I at rest or am I speeding at 500,000 kilometers per second? In order to be accurate in the answer, the question requires distance and time, and they require more than one entity. If I answer that I seem to not be moving, it will be relative to another point. In the night you see a light, it's not very bright and doesn't seem right but it doesn't take flight, although it might. Close one eye, you want to be sure. Two points define a line, your eye and that light. Let's forget about the light dimming as it approaches, thus fooling our eye, let's forget it is a far away star and thus to far to be sure of. It's just a light. You think you are at rest relative to it. But if you think about it as a light at the bottom of a very long well. you might find your imagination takes flight and you descend that well at a great speed until perhaps you hit. But now reach out to any side and feel a stone, a third point and now you are pretty sure you are at rest in a tunnel, not moving relative to the light at all, until the train with the dimming headlamp strikes you and the stone. You can't be sure of any one dimension until you are sure of all others.

So to know the distance between two objects as a stable, consistent value the objects have to have dimensions other than zero, eg "The distance between that stone and my hand is apparently the same as the distance between my pinky and my thumb." You need more and more information and it has to be accurate or the train will hit! Now close that eye again and hold up your hand, making an "okay" sign. Now spread the thumb and forefinger apart slightly and move the hand until you see the apple on the table. Now see the apple as the same size as the distance between your thumb and forefinger; wow, that's a small apple, not nearly enough for a snack! Even though your mind says you should be able to pick that apple up, you can't no matter how carefully you squeeze. You don't have enough information to make an informed choice.

A climate tipping point is not a point. It is a collection of conditions, of properties in a variety of dimensions. At some point in time it is possible to determine that we have passed it, but we cannot be sure how fast we are approaching it or leaving it behind because we can't have enough information. Heisenberg has made sure of that. But people of different vision may see different dimensions with differing clarity or accuracy. Minds which are trained to see an excess of patterns, that is to say, those who know more than they should, are most likely to be accurate as to the relative position of You and the Climate. Speaking for myself, as only I can, I think :

We are wasting a colossal amount of energy and time talking about stopping the climate from going chaotic due to the constantly increasing amounts of energy we pump into it. If we stop the burning of fuels for energy to move our machines and modify our environment, it does nothing about the existing inertia of the atmosphere in what we can see is a clearly chaotic pattern. How many times a day do you hear a newsreader say "the experts were surprised...more than the pundits predicted...?" Chaos is by definition impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy. The probability approaches zero.

We can fairly accurately tell which cities will drown when the last of the polar ice melts. It would be wise to plan for their evacuation,  taking the occasion to plan a 21st century replacement, or even a 30th century replacement. Where do we want our national capital to be and what do we want it to look like? Do the residents of New York continue to live in a flooded out city with no mass transit and the newly created canals where the streets were flooded with sewage and chemicals?

These are the type of questions we should be speaking of. These are the significant issues. Cutting back on pollution will be very easy after the oceans rise 10' and the weather is in a madly chaotic pattern, because the factories will all shut down, at least for awhile until the mobs settle down and the bodies get buried.

Thus it is that one and One are the same.

Jon Was Born on a Tuesday

Or was it me? I can't remember days of the week worth beans. That's not why I was expecting you today. I actually have good news today. A doctor called me back.

Well, actually it was a PA, but that's damn near as good. He called back to discuss the conversation we had back on Jon's birthday, the 3rd of November. I had told him that Jon was being over sedated and had been since the accident. He checked the records and said, "All these drugs would just sedate the man!" Jon just lay there, staring at the ceiling, staring at the room, juiced out of his mind.

We talked about Brainfingers, the mind computer interface being tried out on some "PVS" patients. We discussed drugs like Ambien and he wondered how Jon had done with those.

"Jon has never been given any therapy other than range of motion. No drugs to increase alertness. No attempt to find out if he is capable of thought."

So they want to try him on Amantadine, an anti-viral drug that will help him avoid Swine flu as well. This drug has been shown to help aggression in alert TBI patients, and increase alertness in patients who are minimally conscious or PVS. The other drug they might try is Ambien.

This is the closest we gotten in 9 years to getting off the Phenobarbitol. He was put on that crap in Arizona and he's been on it since, just because they fear seizures and all the paperwork they can cause. But Dr. Shroud is gone and maybe the new doctors have noticed that Jon is drugged up and left alone whereas his Dad seems a nice enough guy who says his son CAN think and needs help proving it. So maybe we'll get some help now.

Hang in there Jon.

Thursday Morning in the Rain

We become more and more isolated in the Western World. Like Pakistan we cling to our nukes and our torture chambers, ignoring the safety of our people, oblivious to everything but the lure of cash and the myth of social Darwinism. Meanwhile our children become more and more hooked on video and computer games, our middle class disappears, and our freedoms leak away as Obama becomes Bush and Amerika becomes post-war Germany. When all of the Western world is on one side with civil liberties and rule of law and we are on the other side with secret police, torture chambers and secret courts issuing “execute” orders who will speak for civil rights and essential freedoms? Britain? Hardly! Maybe Scandinavia…Who will be our Hitler? He will be a Republicrat at any rate. I have my passport ready.

Why is it when the roof is leaking and the ceiling is sagging I find it hard to be optimistic? Drip, drip, drip. Howling Wolf asks, "How long are you gonna do me wrong?" and I just don't know what to tell him.

"How many more years are you going to treat me like you do? You took all of my money and all of my love too."
I know how the Wolf feels. I can sense the K-Y jelly on my ass and the shaft still inside. I've been screwed so many times my threads are stripped and I can't go no where.

Ten dollars

Jon's grandmother sent him a ten dollar check for his birthday. She writes about him sometimes, little memories, like a particular teddy bear, a time of stolen doughnuts or trout fishing on the Mogollon Rim. She's in Idaho, I think the last few years. I usually buy Jon some music and add it to the collection at his bedside for the caregivers to play, the aides and nurses. Thing is, Jon was 35 and if he had any idea of what is going on, he knows he's not a kid any more. He may not be able to think, but if he can, what would he want for his birthday? I got to thinking, "a hug" Jon loved a hug, he'd even take one from me, although he didn't always know if he should squeeze or not. Pretty sensitive, but he had a bad back, too. Still, ten dollars of music? Art is harder, with 2D like paintings and prints having to be placed so a man in a wheelchair, all floppy and propped up, can see them. With music you just need ear buds. Still, what kind of music would you suggest for a man stuck to being handled by people who may not know, nor care, but they are wiping his butt. What kind of place would you want to be in on your birthday, awake and aware, or sleeping and off dreaming? Jon knew about lucid dreaming and I always hope he practices it.

So music must be important. I'm thinking Scarlotti and Ravel and piano concertos and big swelling strings and then loan harps plucking their way through a dark forest, maybe an oboe on the prowl. I might buy some new stuff, maybe Jazz, maybe some stuff from down south in New Orleans. Even at 35 he'd like that as background music.

Ten dollars

Jon's grandmother sent him a ten dollar check for his birthday. She writes about him sometimes, little memories, like a particular teddy bear, a time of stolen doughnuts or trout fishing on the Mogollon Rim. She's in Idaho, I think the last few years. I usually buy Jon some music and add it to the collection at his bedside for the caregivers to play, the aides and nurses. Thing is, Jon was 35 and if he had any idea of what is going on, he knows he's not a kid any more. He may not be able to think, but if he can, what would he want for his birthday? I got to thinking, "a hug" Jon loved a hug, he'd even take one from me, although he didn't always know if he should squeeze or not. Pretty sensitive, but he had a bad back, too. Still, ten dollars of music? Art is harder, with 2D like paintings and prints having to be placed so a man in a wheelchair, all floppy and propped up, can see them. With music you just need ear buds. Still, what kind of music would you suggest for a man stuck to being handled by people who may not know, nor care, but they are wiping his butt. What kind of place would you want to be in on your birthday, awake and aware, or sleeping and off dreaming? Jon knew about lucid dreaming and I always hope he practices it.

So music must be important. I'm thinking Scarlotti and Ravel and piano concertos and big swelling strings and then loan harps plucking their way through a dark forest, maybe an oboe on the prowl. I might buy some new stuff, maybe Jazz, maybe some stuff from down south in New Orleans. Even at 35 he'd like that as background music.

evolution of market forces in the early twentieth century

"Market forces" as espoused by the perps who bankrupted us is that the suckers who bought the "Genuine Rolex" watch should all rise up and beat the snot out of the creep who sold it to us, and then demand the money back. This is also called "revolution" and it is feared in exactly the same way, that is to say the perpetrators of violence against their own kind fear retribution because they hurt so many. If each of us wanted to, and were permitted to slap the face of the person who hurt us there are "great men and women" who would have their faces slapped to oblivion. I am not suggesting anyone should do that thing, but if I thought it would do any good I would and maybe I wouldn't, because so many people came to slap me. We' ve all screwed somebody somehow, even if we never saw the car we cut off we still did a "bad" thing. There are no doubt some now-middle aged women who would track me down and I would have to let them wind up and slap me hard, because now I can see what it was that put me in that frame of mind to do a thing that would now make me blush with rage. No, you can't expect that invoking divine permission to clean up the earth by hurting some one(s) is a righteous thing to do. Even if you try to even the bloodshed by strapping the bomb on or piloting the plane yourself, you still hurt far more many people, even a People, by hurting some one. The Jains have made some very good points in that diretion.

The phrase "As above, so below" comes into play. If we ignore great harm being done then the gods who play out our fantasy will be great causes of harm. They can burn the planet clean, or at least wipe out People. One should not count on being called "Great" by One who made you. We are but leaves on the Tree, and the seasons cannot be held back. So in a strange way we are witnessing an ancient play, one I have read many times in many forms. Where the Western world is messing with the locals they can stir up old memories. There was once a Goddess who was sent into a rage and sent against a foe. When she had defeated him she was still hungry for more death and blood. She went out across the land killing everything. The other Gods became alarmed and needed to stop her. So they filled a vast field with beer and colored it red. They told her it was blood and she drank it up, and then got sleepy and lay down. That's how they saved the world, that time. Now we have a vast bloodletting with bodies floating down sacred rivers. Kids are getting their hands blown off. Now the question should be, how can we lure the death dealers, the dictators and presidents, the heads of states and heads of corporations, all of them to a vast pool of blood which is really beer. How can we think they are getting something wonderful when they're just being made less deadly and aggressive. We could suddenly make them all trillionaires and all of us nillionaires, then they'd have it all and maybe they'd go to sleep. We could plow the beer into the earth and grow potatoes and beans and stop fighting. It would be nice to stop killing for a generation or ever. I see no need to harm a person, especially not some child playing in her yard. If I were a God or Goddess and I saw men killing children, even from a vast distance, I would get as pissed as Inanna was and I would go into such a rage as to wipe out all those people and their servants. Thinking along those lines I have to point out that everybody serves somebody somehow. It's not a bad thing to serve someone who is bad themselves. But it is unethical, because you aid someone who is therefor more able to do that bad thing. I pay my taxes, my President sends bombs which kill children, am I not complicit?

If harming none is important, then by understanding the dual nature of Self allows that we not harm ourselves, and we are more than the sum of our parts.

It gets complicated, and it's not like math, you can't really whittle it down to abstracts. Harm has a face, even if it only recently had arms, too. Throw in emotion and tradition and it seems impossible to imagine. Doing no harm is hard when you look at the implications of daily actions and inactions. The reaction is to pull in and focus on the ground in front of your feet.

How does that fit in with market forces? because market forces call for a set of forces which naturally achieve equilibrium. The best way to illustrate this is with a pendulum. Billy, would you bring in the pendulum? (Billy brings in the pendulum) Now, note how it swings back and forth, back and forth, just like market forces. Back and forth, up and down and then back around, just like market forces. You see? You see how just like market forces the pendulum is? Billy, please pass the hat among the kind people and collect all their wallets, rings and jewlery. Quickly, now!

That's how market forces work. Not like a pendulum, but by a person hurting many. A "Market" is where people go and buy bread of various kinds from various people who all meet in a public place. When we speak of market "forces" we speak of dark forces, buried behind closed doors, guarded by people who do not care. I would rather buy my tomatoes from the man who lives down the street and was able to grow tomatoes when nobody else did, not because he created a hybrid gene manipulated thing that looked like a tomato but could not reproduce a similar tomato. He had a greenhouse he built himself. Instead of selling off parts of his small farm he put up a greenhouse just before a late blight wiped out every tomato plant in the north east. The story doesn't say he got rich. It says he was Blessed by the Earth when others were not. He didn't sell the earth to builders of energy deficient pseudo Victorian mac-mansions. That's the moral and that's the best ending. But wait, there's more! I was Blessed by being able to buy local tomatoes from a friend when my own had died from the blight. AND the blight bugs were Blessed because they found a region full of young tomato plants with just the right conditions of constant rainfall for weeks on end. So as Tiny Tim said, "Why do those boys keep pulling out my crutch from under me, Mummy?"

Spending Each Day

Two quick bones to pick with the world: my new laptop comes with Vista Premium and it's been a nice OS until recently. I have some 18,000 pictures and I use Picasa to organize and import from my camera. Picasa also recently upgraded and the new look is nice, easy to use etc. Except, as I discovered to my horror when I plugged in my camera, something is missing. To whit: auto detection of media happens when I plugged in my camera under OS XP. Picasa would boot up with the import window discovering my images on  my camera card. Worked that way if I ppopped my card into the reader, too. Picasa jumps up to let me do my image thing. Now with Vista and new and improved Picasa when i plug in my camera to the USB port there is a noise to indicate something, but not Picasa. Eventually, and I do mean eventually, a requester pops up asking me if I want to do a number of things with my camera. None involve Picasa, in fact all of the choices involve Microsoft products that I rarely use. I tried to make Picasa the default program for jpegs and although it appeared to have taken, when I offer up my camera card with 200+ images, the laptop ignores me. Eventually..... it offers me Microsoft Media center. I hate that rag.

It took me several days of teeth grinding and searching through irrelevant forum threads to find out that both Picasa and Microsoft had decided to remove the auto detect option, in Microsoft's case it offers you their product or none. Of course, you know you can boot up Picasa, plug in the camera and TELL it to import, but it really was faster the old way. So since when is it an upgrade to have a well used handy capability disabled? This kind of thinking would lead to a well advanced highly technical society failing to provide basic services to it's citizenry, health care or education. In a dinky waterlogged country like Holland they have no nukes, but they do have very nice universities and you get on the handy mass transit and go to the hospital to get your tumor removed for free and again on the tram to a university to get your Masters for free. Yet our government mocks such "niceties" as nothing we'd like to have around here. Heck no! That sounds like socialism to me, son.

I live in the Great Empire State, a name not without irony. Here, in the democratic country of the United States I cannot start a petition to make medical marijuana legal. I can't start a referendum either. We don't allow people to write their own laws and introduce them to the Legislature for approval by the People. Not our form of government, you see. That would make laws all higgledy-piggledy, you see. But that means we are not at all a Democracy. No, we are a Republic, but it's a democratic republic! That means we vote for those we want to represent us, like a representative democracy. Only we can't nominate who we want to vote for, unless we are either Republicans or Democrats or occasionally some other approved political party. I vote for the person, not the Party, so I am not allowed to nominate. I am allowed to vote in the general election, though, for or against the people the Party has picked to run. I'm feeling rather distant from a democracy at this point. But I can run myself for public office, yes? Not exactly. You have to be able to get several thousand people to sign a petition in your favor. That means you quit your job, if you have one, and walk around your district getting valid signatures. Any invalid signatures might get you tossed out of the race. Yes, it's a race, but a funny kind. For instance, the news media are not required to cover candidates. In fact if you are someone like me, the news will NOT cover you. If you are a sitting Senator with a funny name like, say, Kucinich it makes it hard to say your name on the air so they won't cover you either, even though you are already supported by millions of people. So I need to raise some several million dollars to buy air time to press my case for office. They don't have to take my money, either. What about the "debates"? Well, they don't have to allow people like me into the debates and if someone like Senator Kucinich does get a court order to require them to have him in the debate they can ask him the stupid questions, like "Have you stopped beating your children?" or "What kind of tree would you be?"

I would be the tree falling on their house.

Yet I have hope. I know the Deity is watching and laughing. I know this for lots of reasons, but here's one. We have no cat, Hidey, as you know, was crushed by a car wheel. So we have ashes instead. We also have mice living in our library and basement and pantry. We also have an assortment of Havaheart traps for raccoons, possums, and rabbits and mice. The mouse one is maybe ten inches long. These traps have two little doors on each end that flip up and are held in place by a thin rod which has a pad for bait and a bent end that rests against and pushes against another similar rod that holds one door up, the bait pad rod holds the other up and where the two rods engage you have to get the two 1/16th inch wide rounded rods to press just right and then lay the trap down with no vibration because the slightest bump and the damn rods disengage and the doors drop. (Where the hell is he going with this?)

I picked up the small trap. Both doors were flopping open, the bent rods were disengaged and moldy from the last bait. I looked at the trap in my hand and then I rolled my wrist to turn it upside down to look at the mold. Yucky, needs warm soapy water. I rotated my wrist again, bringing the trap upright. I looked down at the trap. Both doors were up and held in place by the two bent rods, which were touching by about a 1/16th of an inch, just enough to hold the mechanism in place with the doors open and the trap set. I never touched it with my fingers except to roll it over, un-set, and roll it back to find it set. It usually takes me a few minutes to make the trip rods engage properly and hold long enough to place it on the ground. This time it did it by itself. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that this proves the existence of a non-human, on-material presence which not only can affect the material world, but has a sense of humor about it. What's so funny about a trap setting itself? When I put the trap gently down I bumped it just a bit and the trigger went and the doors shut, locked by the two wire loops falling into their proper latches.

Somewhere She is chuckling at my situation. I have to wash the trap to remove the mold and re-bait it for the mouse and I am confident that no matter how many times I roll my wrist while holding the trap it will NEVER do that trick again. It makes me dizzy.

I had three excellent photographs of the Hudson in winter matted and framed for show. I spent a lot of money, frankly, to get museum quality work. Yikes, but it's okay because yesterday we got the flyer for the Arts Center Winter Solstice exhibition. $5 per entry, must be framed and ready to hang. Yup, taken care of! Must be signed on the photograph itself and be marked as one of a limited edition. Oh. I never signed the print before i spent all that money to seal it nice and tight for show. I can't enter any of the beautiful shots of the Hudson in Winter. Goddamfuckshitpiss!!

I guess I need to have more prints made and maybe i can use those salvaged frames and the mat board in the back room... I have a mat cutter... sigh. Can't afford to have new prints framed the nice way. Ah well, live and learn. In the distance I hear faint chuckling.

The Most Important News in Decades

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html

For some time now I've been alarmed about the fact that the world buys oil with dollars, not yen or shekels or euros. The people who sell the oil are the people who bombed the World Trade Center. Not literally as they were incinerated, but the oil rich people of the Middle East also contain some religious people who objected to our military stomping around their holy sands and cities, oogling their women and occasionally raping one. Point is a lot of "those people" want us out of the Middle East. Now, with the rising lowering of esteem as it relates to the Great Satan, a lot of oil people want to sell oil in anything but dollars. It isn't that they hate us. They hate a lot of people. They recognize that the big balloon the Founders sent up in 1776 is foundering in a sea of red ink. The meatballs in charge of the treasury spent money like it was their own and Daddy would bail them out. Well he can't, Daddy's broke.

You might ask what's the big deal, we'll just convert our pseudo-billions we borrowed from China into yen and buy our oil. Yikes, the dollar is falling in relation to the yen... and every other currency. We don't control world currency and so oil might become... is almost certain to become.... much more expensive for Americans. In fact impossibly expensive. Think heroin dealer dealing with a junkie in serious withdrawal: how much sympathy can we expect to see? Don't forget, the dealer is a new capitalist and hates us for raping, murdering, burning, bombing etc and we are rude.

We are about to slip into tenth place if we are lucky and certainly among the rest of the third world nations. I didn't do it, I just report it.

12 woodchucks

Is anybody else a bit uncomfortable with the correlation between the "balloon boy" incident and the kid in the well in the movie "Twelve Monkeys"? It feels like I'm in a science fiction movie! Maybe it's because every fucking thing from Washington has so little relationship to my real world that I feel like I'm in a dream or movie. They act as if we are our labels that they have assigned us. I am not "walking man 3", I am Will and I have a story.

When all the good ideas are used you get bad ideas. When all the good laws are used up you make bad laws. When all the good movies have been made, you remake them with new directors, new actors. How many roles can Jim Carey handle?

When you approach a psychotic who is in a violent mood, you don't confront them with the dichotomy of their words and actions. You don't stress that they are misunderstood and so must kill certain people who are spreading lies. That's a bad idea, to talk about killing to a psychotic. Yet we do this every day when we tell our President to make us safe from psychotic suicidal strangers. In order to understand his instructions, our President must go insane and that is where the trouble starts. That is when they send in drones with missiles to kill everybody at some wedding party, when someone at the wedding is labeled "insurgent".

When I say the President is "insane", I mean to say that his world view, his paradigm, is not in sync with the Constitution, which defines the country, and the Bill of Rights, which defines our protections. He is working under the New World Order defined by the Patriot Acts.  And just to be clear, this is not a new phenomena, this shifting of Presidential understanding of the Big Picture. Clinton is the most recent example of that, eh, gays? Our current commander in chief no longer can see the workers, the cleaners, the tillers of soil, as "human" in the same way as him. he gets private jets, private dinners, private massages. He gets to be protected when all of us are vaporized by nuclear weapons. Remember? The Congress and the White House have huge, deep bunkers to wait out a war. WE have either straw houses, stick houses, or brick houses. They all get vaporized. It makes a difference when you know you're Mother Goose and everybody else runs around getting their tails cut off or their houses blown down.

It was a virus in the movie that cut down the population. They keep finding new virii in far away places that threaten the folks back home. Globalization might mean that everybody gets to die from the same little piece of DNA. Except the folk in the bunker.

Speed Shifting in the Here and Now

I have talked about paradigms shifting before. It's a concept which is not actually very well understood by most people. I'm not saying that I am special or somehow brighter because I write about paradigms as if I understand them. But the concept of a paradigm itself, minus the change, is pretty simple: it's essentially the subliminal here and now. that's why people find it hard to really grasp the thing happening around them. They are in the warm waters of the darkened room which constitutes most lives. You don't think of your little toe while you walk unless there is something wrong with it. Once that toe starts pulsing there is a paradigm shift. What was is no more: the walk is no longer pleasurable or at least neutral transportation. I figured this out when the arthritis in my big toes started manifesting as really loud screaming pulsing pain in one tiny spot. It changed my day, changed my plans, changed the way i thought of that particular moment. Now the Present is made up of those particular moments strung along not like pearls at all, but like photons.

So, first let me cover the idea of the shifting process and then try to lead you to the water of enlightenment. A large cold beer might help. Now, let's talk about the back of your head. What, exactly, is that whorl of hairs on the back of your head doing? Bald folk imagine it. You can't be sure, can you? Because you can't see back there. But, friends and neighbors, sight has little to do with photons. It has much more to do with perception, by brain action. You know a person who can't see red or green is not actually incapable of "seeing" red or green outside of the paradigm of his or her existence. Dig it: our brain assigns values to input, thus creating a map of our universe immediately outside the body. Those photons traveling to the retina from a "green" source are still traveling and still impacting the retina in a color blind paradigm. Maybe they see something like a shade of grey very much like the shade they see with a red object. But not the same, it is impossible to be the same or we would see no difference with our color sighted eyes. If the photonic signature is identical, the light is the same. See? Yet in this paradigm the person cannot tell if the light is red or green. There is no reason why their brain cannot instruct their consciousness that the photonic signature received corresponds to the color green and thus they "see" green. By the same token, there is no physical reason why a person cannot "see" with their skin. The photons are still hitting them and the cells must be affected. So we should be able to see with our eyes closed. Try it. Now try it thinking that your eyelids are more transparent than before. Now more transparent, until they are clear. Now if an object moves in front of you the photons are impacted and you see the object's shape insofar as it impacts a mass. There are other things besides mass and photons.

About 50 years ago I tried seeing auras. I found a book on psychic phenomena and decided the text was pretty clear and unlike some books, not dangerous. I followed the book and started seeing auras around my hands and other living objects. Now the cool thing about auras is that they tell you something about the thing which supports them. In the case of a human you can see how they are feeling. If they have an injury you will see the disturbance in the "force" (sorry, couldn't help referencing) Let me tell you an actual event in which I "saw" an aura. To begin with I was drunk. I was therefor very relaxed and being as it was a smoky place I was working on my breathing. I have slight asthma around ciggies. I noted a young woman coming to the bar to replace two drinks. I looked back down her path to see who the second drinker was. Under certain lights and drugs I like to play with my aura practice. I saw that the young lady waiting for her friend to return with the drinks had a black streak in her aura, about from the forehead at a 45 degree slant up. I notice degrees because I used to survey with Dad and others. She also had a red streak coming from her throat. Just slightly different appearance to the air around her head and shoulders, which is all I could see of her. Her friend was buying a beer and a whiskey sour. I was close enough that when I muttered "Ah, good. That'll help her throat." she heard me. A minute later it seemed she had told her friend about my comment because the lady in question came over to speak to me.
"What did you mean by saying the whiskey sour would be good for my throat?" she asked, in a not unfriendly more curious tone. I told her the truth. I was drunk, remember.
"Well, the black streak in your aura coming from your forehead was clearly some sort of infection and the red streak from your throat was pain, so I figure you had a sore throat because of a sinus infection, but the black streak looked thin around the edges, so i think it's going away, maybe you took antibiotics. So the alcohol from the drink will numb your pain a bit, the fruit juice will wash your throat and the vitamin C will be good for the whole body." Turned out she had been recovering from a sinus infection and had a mild sore throat. I suggested a couple of whiskey sours or maybe a bloody mary or screwdriver. Later that night we made wild monkey sex at my place. She refused to see me again, go figure.

The point of the story, and I insist it's true, is that the idea of seeing a field of energy that would allow that exchange to happen is not part of most people's paradigm, and to have that happen to them would no doubt require a huge paradigm shift. I expected it. I have a huge ego, just no good self esteem. I expected it because I thought it was possible, not because I'm cool.

So here's another example: you are floating in a warm liquid, in the dark, with only muffled sounds and softness around you. This must be what pre-birth must be like. This must be a womb-like experience. Now suddenly there is light and people touching you and sounds, sharp and bright. You might be emerging from a sensory deprivation therapy or you might be being born, either way a paradigm shift happened and you likely missed it because you were focused on Now. When everything around you changes, insofar as you can see, a shift in your thinking is required. Suppose suddenly you can see magnetic fields. Doesn't that change the way things look? What if all you could see was magnetic fields. Dead organic objects, like a rabbit, might be invisible to you, unless it's existence impacted the magnetic fields nearby. Steel would be quite clear, especially if it were magnetized or near a magnetic field. Suppose you had two sets of "eyes" and you could see ranges of electro-magnetic-photonic fields so removed from our present understanding that the very "physical" universe around you changed shape and motion? Of course your paradigm would change.

Ideas are part of your universe. Ideas like "democracy" "Jesus" and "white" might make you see a neighborhood in Kabul very differently if those ideas did not exist in your paradigm. A truly blank mind could see the universe in very clear terms. When the One woke up, it's mind would have been blank, because It predated dates. No past. No morals. No ethics. No doubt.

Once you have a paradigm, you are bound to it unless the universe changes. You can't imagine things outside your paradigm, but remember that everybody lives in a different space-time and so their perception of things will differ. And those differences will create different paradigms. It's not a problem until the paradigms differ too greatly, then it gets tough. Your instinct, if you are animal, is to resist changes. It's why we fight a person saving us from drowning. But Will can resist instinct until it is examined and fitted into the paradigm. It only takes a brief second to understand why the savior has their arms around you.

I dumped all these anecdotes to try to express my feeling that a certain group paradigm is shifting in a mostly misunderstood direction. It's like watching your sheep grow horns. They are defensive in nature and only needed at a certain point in the animal's life. America is growing it's horns in a certain way which indicates a certain trend overall and few can see it because it fits neatly in their paradigms. It's the changes one can see, not the background, not the spaces between the words. But let's say I express myself in this way:
suppose          i           say             things            like                 this         ?
Can you see how this style of expression can change the way you perceive, understand a message? A line of prose can become a poem if a a regular pattern the words sound the same. The pattern is subliminal to the understanding of the words. If I spoke a phrase like: "I am fine, I try to do this every few hours." while dancing to a waltz it would convey a different image than if it was spoken while sitting at a desk with a computer in front of you. No other words could be spoken but a completely different message is "seen" with the same words.

So, the world around me, being alive, is changing, and the amount of changes and the direction they take is such that it is clear a paradigm shift is occurring in the human world, especially here in America. It happened when the World Wide Web created a mind that could see a different world, a group consciousness which doesn't emulate a human mind for those of you who worry about Frankenstein problems, it is it's own mind. However, as parasites we live off it's paradigm and that is causing certain changes in behavior. For instance most young Americans post their resumes online to a site which attracts employers with similar needs as the poster's talents. Now the fact of the matter is that neither poster nor
employer need see each other in the flesh. If one needs a line of code, one does not need a coder be in the room. That's why they made the Net. The same is true of artwork, crafts, herbs and information. It is all free if the need is matched to the supply and the overall balance is maintained. We have too much milk and there are babies in African countries who are dying from lack of food. We have people out of employment and there are things which need to be transported, gardens to be dug and dogs to be walked. What left the feeling of imbalance in people's hearts was lack of clean flow of necessary information. If you knew someone in the building, would you blow it up? If you knew most of the someones in the building and one was your lover, would you blow it up?

Paradigms shift gradually when they involve many people. Suppose a rational human being knew that if they simply woke up, ate food and created things they could be happy, why would they aspire to be a billionaire whose wealth enslaved thousands of innocent people? Paradigms, personal paradigms. Multiply those paradigms by billions, blend them all together and you see what the global information network can do in terms of shifting paradigms for large groups of people. Let me say this about that: if every person in America who disapproved of nation building, empires and war in general expressed themselves to the people in the Middle East, through some reasonably effective means of communication, could it not cause a paradigm shift in the universes of some people who are determined to cause harm to us as a people? Why would you walk into a building or a courtyard or down a street, wrapped in explosives and determined to kill if you knew the people you wanted to kill were more or less like you, with similar social needs, religious feelings and even a hatred of bigotry and war? It is unlikely. By the same token, suppose you were interested in voting for Dick Cheney as President in 2012 and you wanted to know more about him and his views as they relate to the big parts of your paradigm and you had access to something like, say, an information network? In very short shrift you find that Dick Cheney is a murderous, psychotic, war criminal, protected by his wealth and his knowledge of criminal activities involving anyone who might be interested in arresting him and holding him accountable for the many hundreds of thousands of dead caused by his actions. See how the Web has made life better? You know the SOB is getting away with mass murder and you know also that a family of four can live off the grid on 5 acres with a little cooperation in the family. Chances are in this new paradigm you realize that crazy assed psychotics are not easy to deal with, anymore than rabid wolverines. Chances are you realize the safest thing to do is try to lay low while the main parts of the paradigm manifest. When it's safe to come out, you'll know it. Other more adventurous people will be safely walking around. At the moment I would suggest digging a root cellar and putting up a couple of wind plants. That seems safest to me. I expect to have to lay low less than ten years, maybe 15. Then the oceans rising will have attracted the attention of the unsodden masses and they will stampede. After Dick is a red smear it will be safe to come out of the root cellar.

Eye Blinked

Once upon a time or two
I saw you watching me watch you
There was no other thing to do
So you watched me and I watched you
And time passed slowly by we two:
A fly with paper stuck to its shoe,
Old men who sit and sip their brew-
Is this a dream or vision true?
I blinked and who was watching who?

October the 6th

Have fun, Jess, have fun. She's driving off in a cloud of wet, colorful leaves, down the road she rode down on her bicycle built for one. Down the way on her way to down town home town, her own town in it's day. We live in a quandry, a small street with nowhere to go. We dive in and out of the highway, which by the way is an old hiway before the War.

This is not the way it should have been, it could have been a fine way to live. We could have had cities on the moon, and cities on the coast would not have been moving upstream towards a livable plateau regardless of who was living there before. We have so many cities and oil refineries on the coasts which will dive under the waves. We have so many cities with vast lines of infrastructure under water with a wall of pumps trying hard to stay the day. It could have been all in fiber on one line that floated but that would have cost a few million stupid votes. So we talk over copper, which is so rare it rivals those diamonds on some woman's hand. It could have been fiber made of silicon and coated with something to make it strong, but we had to do other things we didn't know and weren't supposed to know how much the cost and how many the lives, so we talk over mutt cables of copper and aluminum and glass. It slows the thoughts to near Presidential levels.

We still distill potatoes after fermenting them for a week and a half. We still drink the blood of the grain and we call it the hair of the dog. We store the food of the gods in vats and check them at certain intervals. The wine poured into the vats of diluted honey is made from the grapes which grow over the temples of the Goddess. Then the drink is finished, mixed with all the appropriate ingredients such as rosemary, nutmeg and cloves. The bridegroom drinks, and is slit, neatly on his bed, to drain down into vats and thus onto the fields. He sleeps in glorious fecundity, and the fields are ready for the winter.

What a world for sadness, such a place for tears. Mother never warned of madness, father never spoke of beers.

Tick Tock Around the Clock

Wrigley has a way of charging in where angels fear to tread. Thus, he sees an apparent obstacle such as a hedge row of Queen Anne's Lace, valerian, chicory, grasses and the like, and he goes in nose to the ground and never a scent be missed. So it is that he comes home with burs in his fur and scratches on his face. We deal with it. He doesn't like you messing with his tail. He's very proud of that plume even though it might be woven through with cleavers and mother's wort seed. We deal with it. We also deal with ticks. We try very hard to find and eradicate the parasites and Frontline on a regular basis. I kinda worry about pouring an oily complex organic molecule on his spine every month, but I am told it needs to happen. I know in Phoenix it needed to happen. The desert is extremely dry, even for bugs. Ticks on a dog there was nasty. Hell, they're nasty here. So anyway, apparently we did not manage to get all of one out sometime back and it left some "parts" embedded in poor Wrigley's neck. He got to scratching it from time to time, as a young dog might and it got infected. Last night he oozed a tad and that is how we spotted the sore.

We applied normal first aid, cleaned it up and smeared an antibiotic on it. The skin wasn't red, just pink. Bed time he and I toddled off and he immediately snuggled right up close. He didn't seem right, and that morning he had been to the hair dressers so he should have been frisky. I checked him over while he tried to do his wiggliest to prevent me from touching him near the sore. His front paws felt warm to me, compared to his rear paws. That made me get up, dress and the two of us left the girls behind for the all night animal emergency clinic in South Glens Falls.

That's where Hidey cat was taken and where we learned we could not save her. That's where we picked up her ashes.

They shaved, nicked, sedated, and cleaned the area so it turned a light pink to a red in the middle. There was a black point right in the middle. that's where they took out the head of the nasty little tick creep bastard blood sucker. I dislike them a whole lot. Wrigley didn't seem sedated although he was having a hard time with the itchiness of the spot where they shaved. I kept explaining to him about bacteria but he was very distracted by the ITCHINESS of the spot. I took him home with some cream for the wound. Once home he began to exhibit the effects of the sedative. He didn't quite walk straight and when he got an itch he would suddenly leap up, run to a clearing, turn and scratch the spot. But when he moved fast he tended to lean a bit and then he might fall a bit. He also started whining at odd moments, shortly before he leaped into the air and spun around, nibbling and rear-legging it. I learned that if I just stroked him gently from stem to stern he would nod off. This meant that I not.

The night went like the old sign on a cheap hotel in the seedy part of town. Blinking, blacking out, coming up bright and then repeating the process. I got tired and fell asleep a couple times, but when he jumped up, I would wake up. Actually, ever since that time in Phoenix when the bikers burst into the apartment I was sharing with a buddy who apparently sold horse tranquilizers as synthetic mescaline, thus causing several bikers to convulse, I have slept lightly, waking up to the sound of sudden movements or just a board creak in the cold night air. Wrigley leaping fit right in to those examples. I plan to nap later today, especially if he shows he can sleep. Then I will have a shot at, like six hours maybe of real sleep. That's much nicer. Until the pseudo-charities call asking for money to show our support. I show support by paying the bills and student loans on time.

Hey! He's sleeping.

Will's Drawers

Margaret and I were washing dishes one one afternoon. I washed, she rinsed the plates, dried, and put them away. I handed her a sudsy pair of strangely twisted plastic claws. She rinsed them, twisted the towel into a point and swabbed down the "fingers". Then she opened a drawer and started to drop them in.
"No! Not there. That's not where they go." I said to her, reaching for the claws.
"Why not?" she asked, waving the claws vaguely at the drawer.
"Because that's the silverware drawer. Flatware, actually. We don't have any silver, except Jessie's spoon collection." I replied. Margaret turned to open the next drawer over. She looked at me and down into the drawer. There was a rolling pin, some measuring cups and spoons, four different forms of thermometers, a wooden tray for holding yet another rolling pin, and a strange, round piece of white plastic with dozens of small square holes punched in it. Margaret started to drop the claws into the mix.
"No! Not in there either. I have a system, Margaret. I like everything in it's place. You're going to make it all higgledy piggledy."
"Hah! You have a system? It's chaos in here! I can never find anything in this kitchen!" She was waving the claws at the cabinets and drawers around the room.
"I have a system," I said, quietly, wanting to be the more mature of the two. I was older."Everything is set up in terms of how they are used. Flatware drawer has flatware. The towel drawer has hand towels..." Margaret pointed to the drawer with the rolling pins. "... and that is the mostly baking drawer." I finished.
"What? Mostly baking? What the hell kind of classification is that? Mostly baking!" she huffed. "Why is it only 'mostly baking'?"
"Because we use two of the thermometers for cooking meat and making soap. They have dual uses, so it's 'mostly' baking." I nodded my head and smiled, knowing I had proven my point beyond doubt. I had a system.
"Alright, fine, Mr. System. Where do these go?" She offered me the claws and I turned to a drawer across the room. Opening it I said, "These go in the funny tool drawer." She staggered backwards with wide eyes, making funny noises in her throat, apparently finding it hard to speak.
"Funny tool? Oh do tell me more!" She slumped to the floor, but I stayed on course. I reached into the drawer in question.
"This is a funny tool that cores apples. It's a very funny looking tool. And this tool, " I said, holding up a French curve shaped plastic thingy, "is for measuring pasta portions and serving spaghetti, only it doesn't do that very well. This drawer is for all the funny shaped tools we have that don't fit any other category. That's why they're away from the others. Reduces conflict." Margaret stood up, staring in disbelief.
"You're a madman, you've lost it. I'm, no, we're going to have you committed!" As she turned away to get a rope to tie me up with, Jessie approached. Margaret grabbed her by the arm. "Ah ha! I'll prove it! Jess! Where would these things go in the kitchen?" She held up the white plastic claws. Jess looked briefly at them and pointed across the room.
"In the funny tool drawer." Margaret emitted a silent scream.
"You've warped your own daughter!" She staggered back against the drawer for "things with plastic handles".

So now Margaret knows how to find things in the kitchen. She asks Jess. Once I found her in the middle of the kitchen, holding a stainless steel splatter screen and looking from one cabinet to another cabinet, like a squirrel in the middle of the street and a car coming on. I took it away from her and hung it on it's hook above the stove top.
"So it's close to the stove." I said.

Alice in Wonderland

If you have been a thorough reader you know I do tend to favor Persephone over the other goddesses. I suppose in part Her story resonates because it is the same framework as the Hero's story. The genders have changed but the goal is really the same. When Persephone was under the shadow of Her mother she was rarely written about. Few adventures can occur with the virginal Spring. When as Inanna-Ishtar She traveled below to see Her sister on the occasion of the death of Her husband you should recall her position and status. Even as Spring she was not Eoster or Diana later. She was in a holding pattern, waiting for Her myth to unfold. So She travels below, to the land of Hel and Ereshkigal to attend the death rites of Her brother-in-law. The Consort of the Queen Priestess is sacrificed to ensure future prosperity. His blood is sprinkled over the fields. Nowadays the farmer sprinkles liquid shit on the fields for the same purpose. The liquid shit is from cattle, the symbolic animal of the Consort. So then, did it go from blood to shit as it appears? Or was the shit mixed with blood in the beginning? As Below, so Above the old saying goes, so we can assume that the not-consumed parts of the Bull-Consort were used and recycled, in the exact same way the Amerindian used all the smallest parts of the bison, a symbolic animal that was sacrificed for the good of the People.

So now we have Persephone in Her various aspects traveling down to attend a yearly festival in which a Chosen Male is sacrificed to create a flow of blood and entrails which will enrich the Earth, another aspect of Demeter. Now we should pay attention to another early situation in which a regular flow of blood signifies fertility and a passage to another personality and function. Non-technological societies have their young girls move to a secluded hut with the door closed as she has her first menstruation, and those which follow. She isn't being punished, She is becoming a woman. When Persephone returns to the surface She is a full blown Woman and wears Her hair up.

Woman's purpose in the Pantheon, the role Demeter and Inanna play, is to bear the child and nurture it. It is the Child's purpose to seek a greater purpose, to act out a ritual, to die and be born again in three months. So Fall is preparing for that journey into darkness, not in fear, but more in rapture, knowing that after death, after every death is life and life reborn.

Yet how different it is should the Hero descend and emerge again! Herakles went down to retrieve His wife, whom he sort of accidentally "killed". He always feels bad when He sobers up. He travels down the passage and meets monsters along the way, handles them abusively and makes a deal to get His wife back. Easy peasy, He does the work and goes to get His wife and ALMOST gets her back, but naturally there is a caveat to Her return: He can't turn to view Her until She is ALL the way into the open, out of the Cave. Being exceptionally horny after dispatching a few wild beasts, of course, He turn around as soon as he steps into the light, ready for a little post-death nooky. Poof! She's gone and He goes back to getting drunk and killing things.

Not much to build a religion on but somebody did. Dionysus slash Yeshua do a better job, except for the end where it turns into a bizarre cult that goes around killing people. I can never quite wrap my head around that kind of runaround, but I suppose it has something to do with testicles and limited blood supply. That situation was solved under Ishtar by sacrificing a bull at the last minute, rather than a Consort, or perhaps "just" a Consort. There's this statue of Her with a vest of testicles to show how serious She can be. In fact, when she got all het up once and started showing Her PMS side, they had to spike the blood with beer so when she drank a stadium load of blood she also got quite high, went to sleep and got up later feeling much better. Now recall that they did not have Genny Cream Ale back then and hops wasn't always the only herb in making beer. It was quite common to have the herbal equivalent of meth in beer, also Viagra, acid and angel dust. Beer was a sacred brew made by the Priestess and a select few. Hence the constant association with the Goddess and Grain, a living thing which is buried in the earth, only to rise again for the greater good by providing both bread and beer.

Alice doesn't take off Her jewelry and skirts as She travels down the passage to Her myth. She doesn't end up stripped of Her flesh and hung from a nail like Inanna does. Her symbolic companion is a Hare, a symbol of both fertility and associated with the moon, the "man in the moon" is quite often a Hare. She is accosted and held by cards, which in the period were as often used for fortune telling as games. Her future is told, She rises up shedding Her old submissive self, overturns Her enemies and emerges reborn. Or at least refreshed. Now we do not know if the bottles of "Drink Me" held blood or not, and the ocean of tears is significant because tidal waves are made by Pluto, the god of the underworld, who used to be Ereshkigal in Sumerian times. But there was no tidal wave, was there? Nope, just Her paddling along until a mouse shows up. Mice tend to do that when the myth is about a Woman. men get Lions and such, but Women get cats and mice and Men. Especially Heroes and Villains.

Well after all that climbing down and through the thing I think we can say that it was fun while it lasted, so far about 20 thousand years and counting. Autumn is here, the trees are starting a new brief but colorful show time. The air smells of apples and leaves.

Aphasia Go Through

40 years is a long time, especially to a hamster. It seems more like it was far away, which it was. Actually, it was long ago and also far away. Damn. I was very thin, very thin. Not so thin as Uncle Don, mind you, but certain broomsticks or rails were obese next to Don. Nevertheless, I was thin. From what I can remember of those days I was also bright, or well read anyway. I remembered what I read, the actual words, sentences... entire phrases. It was fun with Teddy and Don and the rest of the group, going through Pyramis and Thisbe to the delight of all our friends. It was fun. But that was a long time, about 70 pounds, two wives and 3000 miles ago. I'm better now, different anyway. The internet has provided me with a chance to see a slide show again of those sweet young kids and another slide show of some old men, most with beards and some of those sweet young girls who captured my heart so long ago, but they'd dyed their hair graying, maybe to make the old men feel better... why didn't the girls age? Much. Why?

Well the simplest answer is right in front of you: look at what happened to Mike and Rick and Don! Gee Don looked so drawn. Maybe more woodcut than drawn, or graphic novel style, monochrome. The girls sucked them dry. All of 'em. Even the "Saint" had hardly aged a bit and oh, what irony. I've aged too. Not as much as a couple of those poor guys, I try to keep up with the chickens. No, but even from a distance they got me. I can't believe Margaret could be a vamp. But times are hard and strange and ya never know. I never would have thought that Jonoff would end up looking like Don Knotts.

So it's more complex. I can close my eyes and see them, see how they were moving as Larry snapped the picture, what the air tasted like. And there it is, the problem with the strange, locked in amber women and the strange, withered old men with the eyes and smiles of my old pals. Some of them aren't smiling, some aren't even there. They're missing and I see the gaps in the pictures where they all stand shoulder to shoulder, smiling at the camera. It's rare we see an early shot of Larry, because he was the cameraman, our eyes on our world. Weekend parties would go quiet and the lights go dim when the man with the magic lantern would begin to show what happened last time we had a tourney or a party or a war. Larry was a short man with a quick lense and you looked for your own face, or if you were in love at the time for nice shots of your flame de jour so you could get Larry to sell you an enlargement. For the cost of paper and chemicals. He'd develop them in our bathroom, the bathroom we shared in our apartment. Larry and I had one wing of a two family and Teddy and Cheri the other. Now Teddy isn't waving back as an wizened bagpiper sucking on a churchwarden pipe. Nor Larry, nor others who just seem to have been there yesterday, but it's been 40 years. I've lost them and I didn't realize it because in my mind, I seem to see them so many times a day. They cross my inner sight every time I see a pipe, a camera, a sword or a cheap bottle of red wine.

The thing is, I don't but rarely see those things without thinking of those empty spots. I worry that the young men and women might someday go away too, in my inner sight. So I drag them out with eyes closed so I might see them again and start a new memory. But each one fades, that's empathy. Or entropy. There is a difference but there's another term that describes it. This. Them. The editor helps me get past those times when a term gets away. I can look up and see what I was writing about, see if that jogs my memory. Empathy is a cleaving of minds, a synchronizing of souls, however briefly. Entropy is the winding down of Everything, the thinning of the Universe. They are not the same, nor are they not connected. There is a sympathy for empathy in entropy. As one goes, so the other shall follow.  But it's a Little off Everywhere, not big chunks, not people suddenly not being there. That would hurt too much. Even a heartless thing like Death doesn't take everything at once. It unwinds the thread of the carpet in your mind a little here and there, like a mouse crawling across the floor a little at a time. So you wind down until it's obvious and then it feels like a big chunk has been taken away. You just were preoccupied, distracted by another one so like yourself you felt an immediate bond, a merging of minds and bodies at times. At times it seems that all we did back then, back there, one bed one pair of bodies and sometimes under the stars, in pools or rivers and canals. I was such a hormone driven kid back then, two wives ago and 3,000 miles. I got better in many ways.

What do you call that? When one day you're riding skateboards everywhere and the next you're using the bus. There's a term for that and it's not entropy. I can't always remember a specific term or word and since I always think in words, when I lose a word I lose a thought and I can't always get back to it right away. I have to write everything down. Sometimes as I am trying to write it down I forget what "it" is called and then of course I lose the next thought and the chain is broken. Aphasia. When a word drops out of your vocabulary.

It's okay, not to worry. I just have to get a nap. It's worse when I'm tired. I'll get better. I'm just going through some tiring times, it's just a phase. Yeah.

New Truck

 

Well, I got a new truck, or rather I have a 2002 Chevy Silverado. Wrigley likes it, Margaret likes it too. I haven't yet figured out a good name for it, yet. I'm leaning toward Gandalf because it's gray. For that matter, so am I. We hope to use this truck to carry furniture down to Jess in Brooklyn, to act as car #2 when the Volvo dies and for towing a trailer maybe with a boat on it. Yup, a man needs a truck and a dog. Now I just need an intact spinal column.

Monday Morning Musings

Actually, these thought came to me last night, but lets see if they sound right today. On NPR yesterday they interviewed several educational pundits. These people spoke of various changes to our educational system in order to fulfill it's mission statement. Curiously, it seems that the purpose of American education is to produce good, happy workers. Not CEOs, not entrepreneurs, not Nobel prize winners, just happy workers who know that everything has a price and nothing is free, even knowledge. It costs more and more to obtain knowledge. This discourages people, poor people especially, from trying to obtain deep educations. You remain undereducated and happily playing with trinkets, like Blackberries, PSP and the like. It sounds very good, to the CEOs, but it emphasizes that everything has a price and this cuts into profits. Things like wages and health care for the workers, for instance, are costs to the CEOs. So they move to cheaper labor camps and fire their American workers who need lots of money to replace their 2 year old car, their last years model game machine etc. This satisfies their need for more profits, but by firing workers you reduce their incomes and fewer products can be purchased. The solution is to make cheaper trinkets for the Americans, who after all are valued for their ability to spend. Since they aren't very educated their tastes are crude. Violence and sex is all it takes to interest them for hours. When they get bored with these trinkets and games the CEOs can simply release old products with new names and new commercials. All this maintains the level of profit the CEOs expect.

Profits represent labor, past and future, in the form of money. Money can be used in a Ponzi scheme or a hostile takeover. This works as long as people accept that numbers on paper really represent something. Once they don't, the jig is up. Witness 1930's Germany with their wheelbarrows of marks representing one potato. If people are unemployed, undereducated and unaware, money becomes next to worthless since it is part of an economy which produces inferior products by uneducated workers. Market Law kicks in and either somebody steps in from the outside to manage resources or somebody steps up from the inside to control the resources, or the resources are largely ignored while labor remains primitive, agricultural and stagnant.

What do you do with stupid, ignorant workers who produce shoddy products which can only be sold back to the ignorant workers? If you educate them they expect to climb the ladder to success, to replace the ruling class. Can't have that! If you replace them with robots to make better products they can't afford to buy them. The difficulty only exists because the intent of the ruling class is not to "raise all boats" but to ram the small ones. They call it social evolution", a testament to their own ignorance. If the little fish can't compete we'll eat them. Of course if the food chain is broken then even the big fish go down. How to maintain control over the workers, keep them ignorant and happy, and maintain the royal lifestyle to which the big fish have become accustomed? Lotteries start up, advertising millions for free! But as any gambler knows, gambling only serves the house, that is the Ruling Class. You can try to gain their trust by starting easy to finish wars and declare "Mission Accomplished!" when in fact nothing is further from the truth. You could buy up the media and control it, serving up pap and bullshit and propaganda. "We are the best in the world!" Food is imported, clothing is imported, vehicles are imported, clean water and entertainment. America watches British sitcoms re-formatted to sound American. American children watch cartoons made in South Korea, a military dictatorship under our protection.

Every single President in modern times, upon finding themselves Commander in Chief, has sought a war in order to try out the new toys. Our undereducated children wage the wars, bringing home bent and broken bodies, brains bruised and dysfunctional. They get low paying jobs and gradually go insane, remembering the faces of the children they have killed and raped. But even insane people buy trinkets, so the President is happy because the CEOs are happy. This is why we bail out banks instead of hospitals or schools. When a bank does badly and is failing at it's purpose the government gives it billions. When a school in the ghetto goes badly, failing it's students, the government comes in and closes it, giving the task of education to for-profit corporations to move the money up to the CEO level. Recall that every member of the past administration and the current one came from business to protect business even at the cost of the lives of thousands of workers and children.

This is mostly how it goes. I could explain how to free us of this constant control, manipulation and destruction, but you can't explain to an Angus how that ramp is not the way to go. Well, you can but they won't listen. See, we have to be educated in social history. This has to accurate and as devoid of propaganda as possible. It must include all our mistakes and deviations from the Law so we can avoid those traps. Then we have to be active in local politics, we have to either go to town hall meetings or watch them on cable. Everybody should have access to information via the web so they can learn not just what the government wants to them to hear, but what the world says is happening. We have to place role models up who deserve it. Not skinny alcoholic strip-tease dancing "entertainers". Not lying political hacks, nor partisan news sources like Faux News. Sen. Byrd is one of the most eloquent speakers in Congress but his speeches get buried because they often say unpopular things, like "War against Iraq is a crime and a huge mistake!" just before we invaded that poor country. Dennis Kucinich was also a truth teller who was ignored. I honestly think the news people didn't like trying to pronounce his name. In other words, we need an educated population who knows history, rhetoric, logic, and the Law of the land, the Constitution.

That's what we need, alright, but we won't get it. Just like my boy needs constant stimulation and therapies in order to heal enough to communicate America needs democratic processes and education to survive. So, just like my son, my country is doomed to die a pitiful, unnecessary death. Oh the houses will still stand and many of the tall buildings will be filled with businesses, but mostly we will move numbers around and quietly, obediently, march up that ramp towards the man with the gun.

America the Once Beautiful

Obama is a failed President because he presides over a failed government. Our Bill of Rights is now a Limited Contract of Privileges under the control of the President. Our Constitution is seen as a set of guidelines, not Laws. And all of our Legislature, minus maybe Byrd and Kucinich, are businessmen selling themselves and any part of the government over which they have control. WE, the People are seen as commodities which are sold to the highest bidder. We are guaranteed to consume ten times the amount of any other population, so the foreign owners of what was American business can expect great profits over a long term. Obama was sold out before he began and he is as domesticated as the rest of us. He resists conflict like a man who grew up in an alcoholics family, beaten by a man stinking of gin. He wants to be liked and he does not want to be lynched. So he has compromised the heart of America just as Bush compromised her soul. We get the leftovers, the bones and dried flesh of a once great Republic.

What we have here, clearly, is the evolution of the United Corporations of America and Beyond. Every person at any reasonably elevated post in the government, say maybe anyone elected, is invested in the businesses of America. Some specialize in real estate, some in weapons, some in more arcane dealings. White slavery is very profitable and legal if you call it something else.

If we use the analogy of a dairy farm, one of my favorites, we the cattle are trained from birth to be domesticated consumers, docile and if not content at least not organized effectively. But in this current form the farmers are no longer caring for their cattle in a way as to insure their survival into old age. Why? Because we only give milk in our youth. Like chickens and other farm critters Americans can be profitable only into middle age and then they start needing more than they give out. So, what is a modern farmer to do? Cull the herd. So they start a war.

It works out especially well since the farmer owns a munitions factory down the road. He's also fond of steaks and leather seating. His gardens use bone meal and blood meal. So everything works out well for the evolutionary peak animals, Corporate Capitalists.

But in the woods and nearby fields are feral critters like deer and wild oxen. They come to the fences and encourage the cattle (us) to leave the farm and live a natural life. The response of most domesticated animals is a slow chewing of their cuds and a few belches. Some, however, listen well enough to try to leave the farm and join the woodland creatures, maybe open up a mom and pop cheese store. How can the farmer keep up their obscene profit margins if parts of the herd leave? Well you can regulate the small farms out of existence, you can buy them up and sell their parts to small parts of themselves, little connected farms that used to be privately owned and operated. Now they are part of the United Corporations of America and Beyond. What about the ferals themselves, the free thinkers, the Liberals? Outlaw them, build tall concrete fences around the farm. Land mines can be placed along the Mexico border and twelve packs of beer blocking the Canadian border. Change the school so the calves can't read worth beans. Encourage mindless hours of violent games and movies. Encourage breeding of the calves, selling off the unwanted offspring. You could take a page from Jefferson's journal and breed with members of your herd to make more cattle for sale or milking.

Ever notice that there are a lot of holidays and songs dedicated to War events but damn few dedicated to Peace? We had more but they started lumping the Presidents' birthdays together as Presidents Day. We never have a day off to celebrate non-wars, like when we landed on the moon. Shouldn't the first human on the moon be celebrated as much as the end of our first nuclear war?

It would be so nice if our children had accurate history books instead of propaganda and lies. It would hurt to see the harm our nation has caused, but most nations have black spots on their history. We just have mostly black spots on ours. Personally, people coming to hear the President with automatic weapons and handguns seems like a black spot. Oddly enough, the more they threaten his life directly the more Obama steps back and waters down the help we need in this pasture. He looks brave enough, but he's a black man in a white government and the sheets are on the line, the crosses have been planted on the White House lawn. I don't blame him, but it would be swell if he stood before a microphone and said, "I quit! You sons of bitches are too fucked up for words. All you think about is your stock holdings! You don't give a rats ass for the People. I'm going back to Chicago to run a soup kitchen." I could respect a man who did that. I can't respect a man who thinks secret prisons are okay, the Geneva conventions are mere suggestions, and kidnapping people from the streets of the world and torturing them is a "necessary evil." NO, it's not, Mr. President. Treating people like animals is not a necessary evil, it's just plain evil.

I move we consider a motion to sell off our assets and dissolve this corporation as of July 4th 2010.

Poop

So there's this great show on PBS talking about Yellowstone Park, and they said "it's the first National Park in the WHOLE WORLD!" and that somehow pissed me off. I mean, I think it's great we teach our children not to eat the molten yellow flow, but it is a fact that many parts of the rest of the world have EARTH under their feet. The thing is, these "Progressive" shows really fail to teach our children how to, for instance: grow enough of the right food to last for four seasons or until you could plant: protect yourself from seasonal rains and winds. How to prepare food so youncan eat it.

It just seems to take so long.

Now they're teaching us how to train our dogs to find certain poop.

I can't stand it.

Checking Reality

When Bill Clinton got into the White House one of the first things he did was break his word about allowing gays to be out of the closet while in the military. The homophobic uproar over this promise was too great for the Commander in Chief. He capitulated so fast, in fact, that it seemed to me that the original plan must have been just that. But was it something he couldn't control or was he a ratfucking liar? Only time would tell.
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
When Barack Obama took the White House he did so on a promise to end the Iraq War, an illegal war pre-planned and plotted for by a team of liars and thieves who happened to have lied their way through Big Business into the biggest Business of all: Politics. He was faced with mass murderers, child killers, war criminals and fraudsters of the greatest dimensions. So he moved a lot of troops to Afghanistan and planned to bring in many more. Afghanistan is that country which is known as the one only Genghis Khan could take and he couldn't hold it. So Barack, in his measured, pragmatic, easy-on-the-ears, way of doing things failed to mention upon moving those troops out that Iraq ordered us to take our child-raping, crowd-killing bunch of soldiers and contractors and get the Hell out. They gave us a deadline and oddly enough pretty much none of the MSM ever mentioned that aspect of Barack's great military adventure. They made it sound like he was keeping his promise, mostly. But you and I know that he was avoiding a scene in which we had to admit we figured that we owned Iraq, it's oil and blood, and Iraq figured we were invaders, occupiers and unwanted guests. They do like our money, which by the way is a way to record labor accomplished or promised and we, boys and girls, we are the collateral, WE are the workers backing those dollars. Barack chose to let their leash out a bit and send the boys and girls to Afghanistan, where no doubt our Marines will find some little girl to rape and murder, after all, boys will be boys.

Of all the industrialized western nations only America fails to recognize a citizen's right to health care. Or actually, to be more accurate I should say, "a poor citizen's right to health care". We demanded to be equal to the Europeans. We wanted our health care for everyone and we wanted our taxes to pay for it. Trouble is, most of our taxes goes to feed the Beast of War. Quite a lot goes to stuff the pockets of well-placed friends. There isn't much left for health care. Besides which, we breed very well and replace dead workers with young ones. Why heal the sick when there are plenty of people waiting to take their place in the factory?

It's a lot like owning a flock of chickens. We lay our eggs, we scratch the soil, eat the bugs off the vines and poop near the stems of the vines. All is well in the Garden. But if a hen goes sick we bring in the rooster and we fertilize a few eggs and we make new replacements. Thomas Jefferson did the same thing with his slave population, except of course HE was the rooster. Same thing, though. You can't get a vet to look at a chicken, so when they get sick we separate them from the other hens until they die, which they usually do. Then we bring in the new chicks. See, in a flock the individual is not as important as the flock. It's obvious. In America, which is like a lot of big flocks of hens, we don't care about the individual so long as the corporate world is well. Here's a great example. Every day the PBS station has news on the hour and about a third of the news is how well the corporations are doing, which are sick and failing and what they are worth to the owners. Unless the flocks are threatened by a hurricane or a wildfire the farmer doesn't care, and so the radio says nothing about how healthy we are, or how sick we are. They could broadcast the number of successful heart transplants this month, or cancers cured. That is all news which touches us easily as much as the price of a stock I do not own. In short, they care about how much money they make off us, not how we are doing.

I've written and thought about this a lot. It seems to me that as humans we should resent being treated as herd animals. But we continue to work for others, even false-humans: the corporation. WE continue because we are domesticated and know no other lifestyle. We don't go to Europeans because our masters tell us they like to "eat stinky cheeses" and they are rude to us and they even don't know that America saved the world twice and now stands as the premire force for good and justice for the rest of the world to admire and emulate. None of this about the Europeans is true, though maybe the french do like stinky cheeses, but who doesn't, nes pa? The Europeans, for their part, think that they defeated the Nazis in Europe and Africa and Russia took them out in eastern Europe. The Americans came late, worked hard and then claimed the victories. In our world history books that our children are herding about from class to class it is written that John Wayne killed Hitler. Until the Internet we had no reason to doubt it.

A recent report documents sickness among populations. It seems that the Europeans are healthier than Americans. Just looking at the figures we have more heart attacks and strokes. We also have the longest work week and the shortest vacations and even no vacations for a great number of Americans, who can't afford to go on vacation. In most modern industrialized nations the workers are afforded long vacations, up to a month even, paid for by the employer because it is a basic human need: rest. "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" We are allowed to be born, mostly, and we have no chains on us, mostly, and we can watch TV. In fact, we HAVE to watch TV in order to know what to buy next. See, the masters don't eat us, not literally. They don't drag our bodies to the knackers and make dog food out of us, although in Philadelphia it's not wise to sleep on the park benches overnight. They don't want our flesh yet, but they do take from us most of those dollars they give us for our labors. The food we require in order to be strong enough to work for our masters is paid for by us, as is the water, the housing and the health care. We sweat for them, they give us dollars, we hunger so we give the dollars back. It's all very civilized and orderly.

This would never have happened if we didn't have big fences around our herd. The Atlantic and Pacific prevent us from easily finding out that the other people in the world see health care and housing as basic rights. After all, they are basic needs. It makes sense, too, that we should take off some time to regain our sanity. We shouldn't work so damn hard, it'll give us a heart attack. Do a little every day and it gets done. The Europeans are portrayed as slackers by the American MSM in order to make us proud of working ourselves into an early grave. So we sneer at them as we fall into the soil.

Have you ever debated with a Jehovah's Witness? Notice how they all fall back on a faith that the Bible must not be self-contradictory and it contains all the answers except we are too stupid to see them. That 5th amendment that says, "Thou shall not kill unless and until you are ordered to." is a problem for many people. I often wonder what would have the history of the world been like if the Bible had been translated to read, "Thous shall not MURDER, which is a human taking the life of a human" so that wars could be seen as violations, even though Joshua claimed he was ordered to burn those cities and rape those women and sell those children into slavery. He wasn't, he was simply greedy and cruel. So he told the people he was God's Right Hand of Something and it was time to modify those Commandments slightly to allow the taking over of several regions of Holy Land. It has been observed by several accountants and lawyers that some animals are more equal than others. Four legs good, two legs better. The rich have two legs, the rest of us are crawling, which is a four legged stance, in a way.

I had a friend, his name was Dan
He was not a happy man
His life was not the one he'd planned
We should feel bad for Miserable Dan.
I loved the boy, I love the man
We both made castles in the sand
It didn't turn out the way we planned
He's employed but I got canned.
Everyday he goes to work
A style of life he will not shirk
I have a little funny quirk
For evil men I will not work.
I wash the dishes for my wife
Who seems to stand the worker life
I changed the mouse and cursor bright
Into into a kitchen knife so light
I chop the veggies and oil the pan
And cook because I am the Man.

Sunday Morning

I suppose this habit of reading the world's newspapers in the morning is not a great idea from the standpoint of keeping happy. Too many bombs and dead babies for me and quite a lot seem to be the result of the actions of my homeland. I keep hoping someday to read about a person, maybe of the people, certainly it's unlikely to be a wealthy person, but one who is working with the sick, helping families and not taking a dime for their efforts. Silly of me, actually, to expect a myth to come into being like that. But even now in India wealthy men at a certain point in their lives give up all their worldly goods and go sit somewhere to mediate and occasionally find some food in their bowl. Can you imagine George Bush wanting to give up his wealth and power to meditate on life while enjoying from time to time some rice placed in his bowl? It would restore my faith in American men is just one wealthy individual did something like that. Hell, it's not a bad thing to go think about life rather than slave to get more money. I used to meditate until the sitting began to hurt too much. I've begged on the street for coins so I could buy fish and chips to share with the other homeless people. Here's a lovely story of faith should work: I was hitching rides north to visit a friend. It was in Oregon and a truck pulled over full of migrant workers and their kids. I squeezed in the back and settled down. None of the kids spoke English and my Mexican was all obscenities. As I sat there a little brown skinned girl, about 7 or so, reached into a bag she had and pulled out a piece of white bread. She handed it to me solemnly and I tried to pronounce "gracias". That little girl handed me three pieces of bread out of her stash of food and we didn't even speak the same language. We didn't even have the same gods. But she fed me until I got out of the truck to move down a different highway, always on the prowl for Newness. But isn't the giving of food a gentle way of reminded us that we are all children of the Divine?

Yesterday I watched a baby cardinal follow its mother from branch to branch, fluttering and chirping, asking for food. It was on the same branch as some ripe berries but didn't know how to eat them, or simply preferred it's mother to feed it. We're a lot like that: able to help ourselves but preferring things to be handed to us. With the birds it is different, though. The mother is not only feeding her child, but teaching it how to feed a baby. For humans it's similar but we seem to learn that it's easier to take from others. Granted the offering of a gift should have been a part of that thought, but mostly we seem to grasp that we got something for free.

One of the first deities worshiped by we humans was the Bird Mother. We gave Her credit for hatching the universe as well as us. Her eggs sustained us, Her feathers adorned us and kept us warm. Her flesh was easy to eat. If you thought that birds were physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit you would try not to screw up their world, wouldn't you?One of the things that always struck me about Yaweh was that he seems more of a real estate salesman, giving out the Holy Lands to the faithful, making deals on lands currently occupied by the unfaithful. None of which can be kept, though. Eventually you die, see, and then the land stays behind while you go to where land is insignificant. Makes me wonder why they kill so many over there, fighting over wells like it was the 2nd century. The Israelis bulldoze ancient trees which bore olives to sustain the people, which gave wood for fires to cook pots of birds, which shaded the weary road traveler. Now there is firewood but no food to cook and no water to boil eggs from birds which have fled the destruction of the trees. As an old fashioned guy I see this as sacrilege. It's not at all nice, too.

Yaweh was a volcano god at one point, giving fertile ashes for growing trees and crops, but occasionally exploding and tossing molten earth around, killing all life in the immediate area. Then little buds appear in the ashes and new trees grow. Somehow people started worshiping the mountain rather than the life that it sustained. They were more impressed with the destruction of the beasts rather than Her great strength in opposing Him. Life is quiet and easily missed, but it's a greater miracle than the lava flowing into the valley, because after the lava cools and the mountain sleeps, life returns and She gives us food for our hungry and songs for our souls. I would rather bow to a pheasant and offer my thanks for it's song and flesh than pray to a mountain and ask that it not kill my family and friends. Different kind of relationship, wouldn't you say?

Waiting for the Man

Awhile back I started getting intense stabbing-burning pain in my left shoulder, especially when sitting and typing. It got worse and worse until it started feeling like a replay of the shingles I had a few years ago. So I called the pain management people and they suggest doubling up on my meds. Having been trashed by Neurontin I was not eager to see if Lyrica could leave me in a haze of non-memory. Well, so far it makes me slightly dizzy, but the pain has just backed up a bit, still waiting in the sidelines. Certain moves kick it up again and the weight of my shirt irritates it like a bad sunburn. Another issue is that standing in the studio working on clay can cause it to flare up and suddenly my left shoulder's on fire and my leg aches terribly. sigh. And the side story is, of course, that the legal meds don't quite help and have side effects and the illegal meds do work but aren't covered by insurance.

We had late blight this year that destroyed 90% of my tomatoes! German Striped, Lemon Boy, Better Bush, Genovese, Oxhearts, yellow pears and probably many other kinds of lovely tomatoes just started to form and Late Blight turns them all to brown mush. Some of the compost plants are still growing but it may be too late to get fruit. All that pain digging and planting and now I have to dig them up and burn them. Next year I will grow kelp.

In about a half hour the stabbing pain in my shoulder should fade. The ache in the lower back will take longer. But just for the record, this is about all I can type before the lower back knots up and the shoulder is too painful to stand any more typing. Time to cook breakfast anyway.

The elderberries and blackberries are ripe and deep indigo, almost black.