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.