Since I bought these two antique computers, I ended up with a big box full of plastic styrofoam peanuts. A big collection of different shapes, too. So I was looking and thinking that I would have, as a child, seen an entirely different thing. I would have seen all the cool shapes and colors...mostly pastels, but cool shapes. Then I decided that as a kid I would have wanted to build things with them. I vaguely remembered that I loved to build things.

So I took a big pile of these things onto a TV tray and tried to stack them into a "shape". They were too short to their length for making walls except as stones. But I found that as I stacked them.....I had worried about static electricity... but they were so light, they couldn't hold a wall, they brokae up at maybe three levels. Try as I might, I found that a random pile of layers and directions was the only way you could stack them. And no matter how hard you tried to make something "Pleasing to the eye" it always ended up looking like various sizes of piles of shit.

And oddly enough, one may well be able to argue that, in life, no matter how hard you try, you end up with what appears to be various sizes of piles of shit. It's all a matter of perception. To an organic gardener, piles of shit are great! I, myself, have gone to great lengths to attend to great piles of shit. That's how my garden started. I suppose my marriage to my sweety-pie can be said to be based on that stuff. But isn't shit just composted stuff by an organic-walking-around-something-or-another? Yes, I say, eventually, with plate tectonics, we shall all be compost, and that to any other might be called shit. It's my life and i can see tomato beds if I want. Not quite the lemons=lemonade thing.... squishing lemons is a mess. Gardens are less messy.

But ya know, there was SOMETHING in that scene where the guy says 'This means something!'. Things just don't weigh down on styrofoam pellets and figure eights and tubes.... nah, they just "move aside" and the whole thing collapses. But then, their individual natures are not compromised. They cannot become an army of styrofoam. They'd just drift off. It's hard to tear them up individually, being closed cell foam, so all you can do is try to "stack them" and watch it collapse into a sea of beadies. Maybe in the end we can live as diffused bits in a digital sea of beadies. "Bee" Dee"...Buddha Dharma. See, ya don't need acid for that sort of thing. There's all kinds of connections. You just have to be perceptive and try to "Listen". Not act...not cut off the head of your neighbor with a machete.... No, that's what we call "Over the top" in technical terms.

And in the end, we have the whole relationship thing going, the "father" and the "son" thing..... When Jon was born I did his natal chart and I thought that this was the chart of someone incredibly near the liminal point. Everything was in his last house, his 12th house, except for one aspect in his 4th and one in his 8th. "Death and regeneration" and "Family".... and the 12th house is "Karma"....really an inaccurate term, but close. Closer to "Dharma", I think. So Jon is much, much further along than I. I mean, I have had a "Near-death" or two, but never as deep as this, never as long. Man, I don't envy the crawl back.

But at the same time, as "Father" I have to insist. As I insisted he walk before, and not put EVERYTHING into his mouth. There were lots of impositions based strictly on this "father" thing. And to be frank, I did not have a good role model. A violent alcoholic is just not the right role model. So I used Grand-dad and bits of this guy and that, people I admired, dad when he was sober. That's probably the way most fathers do it. But now, with my own father so close, I feel, to stepping over that I have to think about how it will impact Jon if I don't make it to see him recover. Odd concept, but a practical one.

So the image is Hansel and Gretal leaving trails of breadcrumbs to find their way home. The birds eat the breadcrumbs and they get lost. But why leave that element in the story? The part that failed... it didn't add to the drama of the story, and so I think it has to do with the nature of the crumbs. What did they leave behind? Was it really bread, or could you leave any number of things behind... like a record, like a picture. My goodness, if that was all you could do for your child was to leave behind something to connect them to a Greater-self.... why would you not?

Ah, the noon whistle. The False-alarm to let us know that "All is well".... unless someone attacks at noon, and then all the alarms will be ignored. Fortunately, no one but us know that we are vulnerable by our dogma and rituals.

I guess that's why I like being shamanic. The idea that each trip is just another trip and each fall is just an upside down smile... well, it just helps me thru the day. Each up is a merino sheep being found after 6 years of hiding, having accumulated some Xnumber of pounds of wool... the poor thing looked like a popcorn machine gone mad..... this crazy sheep, waving at the cameras, mouthing "Hey, you crazy bastards! I finally did it, I Malcolm Daley, turned myself into a sheep and am now IMMORTAL!!!" But nobody could read sheep lips, so the poor crazy genius was sheered, crated and shipped to Australia, 12,000 miles from his lab and the formula which will bring back his humanity....

Time for lunch. Where I will turn some organic life-form into compost, including myself. BUT I will also grow great freakin pocorn!