Anagama Will

Another Winter Solstice

2011-12-23T08:54:00.000-05:00

Climate change? The yard is brown and soggy without a speck of snow or ice. Mums are trying to bloom again and the forsythia has a single yellow bloom on it. I need to collect dry wood and put it into the woodshed for the bonfires, otherwise it seems the various Holy Days are marked with a week or so of rain and you can't hardly get a match to light. I suppose this is why the Catholics got into lighting candles inside... it's the same phenom.

Since we started asking our homeowners insurance to pay for the ceiling falling down it has rained almost continuously and not a drop seems to be leaking inside. Go figure. That seems to prove the "ice dam theory" as why it leaked so much last winter. The new year will see so many changes and maybe we'll get a new roof. Maybe it will be dry enough to grow tomatoes and beans. Maybe I'll get my sciatic nerve burned in half again and suffer a little bit less. That would be swell.

Analogous to What?

2011-09-15T13:32:00.000-04:00

The trouble with analogies is that they are at least one step away from the Truth of things. The longest journey begins with but a single step, and so you can go a long way away from the Truth of things just by committing to an analogy. For instance: on a stormy afternoon a rumble of thunder passes by and we are told "That's Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp fighting it out at the O-K Corral!" and yet our father told us that it was but the rumble of ionized air when a lightning flash passed through the atmosphere! This could create a crisis of faith between a boy and his father and that would be very sad. If the boy is George Bush, well it could be disastrous. But it doesn't really matter who the boy is, there was trouble which could be avoided if George had just been struck by lightning.

The picture to the left here is another case in point. The image shows a shrine to a local fertility god framed by two sacred trees which have the attributes of the primal male and female. During a drought the local tribal women paint the figure in red mixture made from goats blood and milk. They festoon the trees with garlands made from their hair and offer cups of beer on the ground before the shrine. Since they can't make beer during a drought they have the responsibility of always saving aside a jar or two of beer. In good times they will rotate out the cups of beer to insure quality of offering. They drink the "exhausted" beer themselves. During a drought they may not be able to offer as many cups of beer, but still, they can count on a few cups of beer for the family until the rains come back. If they run out of beer and the rains still have not come back they will chop down the sacred trees and burn the figure in a huge bonfire. They dance and toss wood into the fire as long as they can. When they have exhausted themselves they collapse on the earth. Then the rains come, filling up everyone's jars, the local streams run again, and the night air is filled with the sounds of animals again. In gratitude they take the last log from the fire and fashion a figure from it. They prop it up at the site of the last shrine and plant two seedlings of their sacred trees.

That's not a shrine to any thing, it's a piece of driftwood, flotsam pulled out of the Hudson and propped up against a couple of trees. But the story told more and conveyed more than just the collection of the words and that influenced how one might view that picture, even after reading this.

Now suppose it happened that you felt very strongly that your life had been blessed by Life, the land, water, sky and spirit of the place has sustained you through many hard seasons. There's a place you like to go to, a stream of water flowing past an enormous cedar tree. The roots of this tree embrace the earth, covered deeply with moss, a spring trickling out from below, through the moss covered roots and down to the fast flowing stream. It has a quiet and a calmness which is Great. You take some clay from the stream and you start forming the clay into a figure that gives you the same feeling somehow. A round bellied female form whose arms extend out and up to embrace the sky while Her feet arm firmly in the Earth below. You put it nestled against the mossy hollow there. When you go there you can close your eyes and still see the green and the rich brown while the stream still tumbles and the spring sparkle... in that time without time you feel not apart from the All, but truly a Part of it. That is one step closer to the Truth of all things.

Others took to resting by the stream and one puts a large rope around the trunk of the tree, to see how big it is around. He leaves the rope. In time people have meditated on the Rope in that Holy area, the shrine of our lady of clay, and perhaps they have collected many truths about the story of our lady. Let us say that in that far away time I come to the shrine and park my bike against the gate post, walk up the trail and down the path. I kneel in the moss as had thousands through the years, a pair of round depressions in the moss from all those knees. As I start to meditate on the figure of clay I notice a small depression, like a belly button. I lean in carefully to see it better. It's a fingerprint! I note one or two others here and there. I sit back and think about it, all the various stories of whose finger and when? My time is up, I leave the shrine confused and somehow distant from my Goddess. Many days later in the city I take my recently acquired AK-47 and my improvised suicide vest and stride toward my assigned target, finally feeling as if I know where I am in the scheme of things.

Clearly it's best not to examine the symbols very closely, nor the figures of clay sitting in the Holy of Holies. Leave the spirit where it belongs, deep in that mossy hole you call a heart while the spring of Life still trickles from your breast.

Spring into Summer

2011-06-22T13:25:00.000-04:00

Ain't Misbehaving, neither me nor Louie. It's a drab and dreary day, typical for the time of year. You have two types of weather, too hot and too damp. It's as if a sauna had escaped and was roaming the hills. But that's life and that's the way it goes. Could be worse, could be a skeeter dodging drops and looking in vein for an arm.

I haven't seen Jon in many weeks thanks to the old back and this transitional weather. It takes a couple days to uncontract my muscles and get limber enough to chance a 100 mile drive. Then it rains again. But the beans need it. We have a nice garden started here, beans and taters, tomatoes and peppers. It is an exercise in control and chaos. I build the tepees and plant the beans and then see how many sprout. This year all my pole beans were raptured up apparently. I planted them twice to make sure and now I know Kentucky Wonders are either good Christian beans or the moles like them.

We have a new puppy, a 2 year old named Buddha whom we call Buddy. Like Wrigley he is a half Corgi but this half is a Pembroke Corgi which comes with no tail. The other half is Beagle so he has the nose and the body. He's more stubborn than Wrigley was, he is willing to stand for several minutes leaning into the leash in an effort to go THAT way instead of the way I want to go. I have proven more stubborn by leaning the other way for several minutes and then I simply sit down and wait. I guess waiting for Jon to get a break has honed my patience. I should wind up a bunch of rings and make more chain mail. I still haven't finished Jess' shirt.

There is something going on in Washington and I doubt it means Good Times for one and all. I suspect it has to do with our 14 trillion dollar debt and our inability to raise enough taxes to pay the interest on it. Japan gets Washington state, Oregon goes to India and California goes to China. Debt settled and we can go on from there, borrowing from the Chinese to pay for our 4-5 wars.

What does the Creator think about all these bodies? It must be like seeing your blackboard being erased by the chalk. Is it possible for the Creator to become afraid of his creations? Sure, says so in the Bible. He was afraid we'd get not only as smart but as immortal as He and the angels. So he killed the Tree. Now when people die, they are Dead. Or that's the way it is for Yahwist people. Pagans like me keep coming around. Not sure which idea I like best, but the idea of having billions of "first kisses" is a Hell of a great idea! Looking at my son being born, and my daughter being born... and my beautiful wife on our wedding day... to be able to do all that again certainly is a great reason to go through the process. I think Yahweh hasn't been the same since he got his divorce. he needs to get out and meet some nice divinities of the female persuasion. Do a world of good!

Equinox -Spring 2011

2011-03-20T08:29:00.000-04:00

It should be remembered that the All, in it's infinite purity, hasn't a quirk to hang a personality on, nor a flaw which offers a lesson, yet it does; that lack of flaws must be balanced by an infinity of flaws in a infinite field. Thus all those flaws concentrate upon finite Things, if it is a flawed Thing, or a psychosis if it is of the Mind. It requires no trick of the imagination to determine that Infinity must be balanced and if it is, then does not Evil equal Good? In a Way, yes, in the Way that the sun is halfway through it's Path from Solstice to Solstice. It happens, every time it is time to and it doesn't last long, not really, it just feels that way when it's happening to you. So one should remember that Evil is no Quirk of the Infinite One, it is a Quirk of something further down the way to Nothing. Humanity in the form of one person can be “quirky” enough to be called evil, but not Evil itself.

Like the equinox, evil happens in an instant and the echoes of that happening, the reverberating memory pains upon receiving this evil, are what seem to never end. Now an eclipse can last for several minutes, and you might not think of it as an instant of time, yet how does the Moon feels about that brief encounter with a shadow? Hardly a blink. It happens, then it's gone. But it has an impact. People have died, by hand or by happenstance, people have looked up to see death. Thousands have washed up onshore, crushed and rent by some insane hatred of order and balance. They will mine for flesh amid the rubble and drowned debris for weeks and months, but the cities and towns of Japan that have been so torn asunder and drowned are now being irradiated by the unwillingness of humans to face reality for years and years. Is that evil? All those deaths and all that destruction seem to point to a malice behind it all. So we could call it Evil and give it a pitchfork or lightning bolt, or we could even imagine that the Universe itself is inherently Evil to turn a blind eye on those people now gone forever, with grieving loved ones left behind. Some are able to make the kindly Grandfather in the Clouds an occasional wife beater and child molester, but all of that is trying to hang a personality on that which can have none. The quake, the wave, the burning debris floating on the ocean all leave you feeling weak and sick to your stomach. You feel like tearing your hair and screaming. You close your eyes and try to find a quiet center, someplace where it makes sense.

Where is the balance point at the Equinox, the point at which the egg can stand on it's head? Both science and Belief tells us that the point is within our heart, in the way we see ourselves and our place in it all. It is the point where change can happen. When you find that balancing egg in your heart and know the moment is passing, which side will the egg topple to, guided by gravity and what's inside? You can't know, because there are an infinite number of rays streaming from that point, pointing to where the egg will fall. The further from that point the more room there is for more rays, and more ways to fall. This is where personality comes in and takes a stand. This is where you know where you are going from this moment on. We cannot face the next wave of evil while we refuse to move from the last. We should not want to be part of the next pile of debris, so it's good to think and act and to think about higher ground. In acting, you become a creator, you create a future for yourself. You move, and all things which move are alive. So be alive in your new world, your new creation. At the equinox point you may fall, but you have a chance to determine the direction. If I say you will fall in the direction at which you are looking, remember that in science we know that some basic elements of the universe are determined by the thoughts and actions of the observer. Thus, as your personality perceives the Universe rushing up at it, it knows which way to go, guided by what's inside it.

So at this time of year take your philosophy out and set it on the table standing on it's end. Decide which way it will fall and be ready when it does.

Looking At It

2011-02-11T09:35:00.000-05:00

With Wrigley dead there is very little to smile about. I can understand why the Universe would want to hurt me, I'm an asshole sometimes, a real arrogant twerp. So it would make sense to hit my head while bitching about losing a flashlight as if someone else moved the thing, which by the way would be in my coat pocket. So that makes a certain sense. But here's the Thing: what possible Universe would prefer it if the most perfect, intelligent, frisky and kind animal in the world, ever, were to be dead. I repeat the word because a sentient creature will recoil from the illogical and this makes no sense.

Now there are these religions I have read about which imply the Creator is a Cosmic Micro-Manager and can take full responsibility for unkind deaths, wars, virii and SDS as well as Saint Somebody and Doctor Izzo. I can, to a degree see logic in that, but it produces such a Psychotic Creator, such a murderous mind that I cannot associate that with Creation at all. From there I have to go to a Mother-like Creator, because only a female can extract life from Her own body. Only a Female Entity can give birth. As Below, So Above. This makes sense to me, and Mothers raise kids differently, and Grandmothers more so. As you go from the One to the Family to the Tribe you still get more progress from Mothers than from Fathers, especially Psychotic Father in Heaven raining down fire and lava and burning napalm. I'm even willing to extend the metaphor to include mercy killing of mal-formed kittens. But you should not enjoy and anticipate it.

Then there are religions which are much more self-in-All oriented. Life and Universe are co-equal. The Universe can in fact rain down fire and burning napalm on children and mothers. It can even produce the elements of a body to supply a home for Life, but only Life will make that a Home.

It is within the soul of man to confuse one for the other. It is within the mind of man to have the curiosity to constantly test the truth of both. But here there can be no mistake: my friend Wrigley is dead and I have to take home his ashes. There is an expression: all is ashes. This carries with it the image of a burned dwelling, Life has fled. There are but shattered walls and blackness under the gray. But I have images, too, of a tiny pine tree growing from a half-melted stump, aglow with moss and tiny flowers, all eating away at the air, the dew, the stump. What is left behind becomes part of the Universe and what leaves returns to Life.

A religion is not a faith. I have no religion but I have a faith. I believe in myself first of all, from this island of being I can sense both seen and unseen, tasted and untasted. My mind can feel other mind. That which is felt is also feeling, that which is alive is also changing, we change ourselves just by breathing in a particular piece of air. If you hold your breath just in time to avoid that virus which would have killed you, is this not a miracle? Yet no one is applauding, no one noticed.

Two people noticed when Wrigley was hit. Each had a truck and although Wrigley loved trucks and loved new people, he was under my truck and would not let the other man near him. So I picked him up and I put him in the truck, our truck HIS truck and I drove him to a place I thought might just have to kill him, like Hidey the cat was killed. But he was sleepy and in pain and I stroked his head and like I tell my son every time I see him, "You're a good boy. I am so proud of you. I love you so much." But I will not know in a sure way if he heard me because Wrigley was always pretty quiet in the truck. He liked to sleep while I drove.

I'm Being Watched

2011-02-01T07:01:00.000-05:00

I have evidence that I am being read. They never leave their name and they don't always write in American, but they seem to enjoy reading what I have written. Interesting. Just in time for my acquiring fans my knuckles are getting bigger, the finger tips are pointing the wrong directions and my toes hurt. The edges are fraying. I always feel that my pains are from my son, in order to bear his pains. That would be about right, his hands are curled and useless and my fingers are throbbing. His feet have dropped and my toes can't stand pressure. IN a perfect world a son would inherit what his father left behind. In my world the father fades and curls like an Autumn leaf in a fire, burning in the passion a father feels for an injured child. My words are also my children, and they can't leave this page any more than Jon can walk away from the Center. But it's nice to know somebody has come visiting and left a kind word. Now if Jon fares as well, he will smile and focus his eyes on something nice.

Amazing

2011-01-26T10:56:00.000-05:00

I am really surprised to find someone who is incapable of wrapping their heads around the concept of the universality of soul, I would find it unnerving to think that we are all of us divided by our souls rather than joined to Soul. Curiously though I am able to begin to pin down when that idea took hold, that we are all "Us" and the rest are "Them". The walls that some have built are as formidable as the ones which encircled Berlin and now Gaza. And perhaps for the same reasons. If a portion of the Humanity believes that the Many are, in fact, at the Essence One, and a portion believe that the concept of individual Souls created by the One is Truth, is there an equation to find a Law to encompass both Truths?

Clearly, the answer is Yes. but a lot will not like it, they can't wrap their heads around the idea. I believe that Adam and Eve suffered from this when they ate of the Tree of Knowledge and discovered a lot all at once. They were in shock, as I have been from time to time at an "AH" moment. So the tendency is to take it slow and await for a little aha moment. I favor sudden smart blows to the mind. Like a mace. The mace is short and to the point and it means what it says. So is an enlightenment, but lately we are bombarded throughout our daily lives with other people telling us what to think, how we think and why we all want to get laid. Or sometimes NOT get laid. But to take it slow can just prolong and delay the inevitable shift in thinking.

Imagine the Milky Way Galaxy with the center mass and the streaming arms. They cluster around a central arm and the whole pattern is repeated down until the Solar System with it's streaming planets, comets and meteors. It's what they call fractal. Now imagine that each bit of each bite is a personality or epiphany of that fractal pearl. That's Us and the other bites are Them. And that's the Truth. However, that set of bites, their Truths and their planet, are all bits of the Galaxy, the Milky Way, named after a very old story of a Cow who licked the icy brine to create Gods. Someone kicked the bucket. That Cow, those briny Gods and Goddesses all are part of a Pantheon of a Society filled with Functionalities and Celebrities and Administrations and Corporations and All of those are Persons under the Law, which we assert, Rules All.

I actually do not enjoy working in a union shop because I am forced to send part of my check to administer the rest of the money they take. I prefer to work alone, mostly, alone. So I understand the allure of thinking ones soul was unique and alone from all the Other souls, yet we have to admit that Soul and soul do look a lot alike. Something there...It's as if one were a pattern for the other. Like a fractal looks like the Milky Way, or the black spots on a cow in a field wanting to get milked.

I make no apologies for having borrowed from several sources to construct what I feel helps the whole AHA moment work. For example: you can only see a certain range of light waves and only feel a few more. It's not nearly enough to cover the full spectrum, so how reasonable is it to say you "see" something? Yet we do, and we mostly know what Others mean when they say they See something too. You can wear goggles to see into the infra-red ranges and see things you never saw before. In that universe things can blend together if their heat ranges are the same, if they have empathy for one another you might say. Like a warm sheet and a warm body, they can be said to have blended in a way, into a red-yellow spot. That would be a true vision and would convey a Truth. When we shake hands, or kiss, or slap, or strangle we merge in some level and become one form, maybe several levels. If I had a person whose goggles had been strapped on for some time they would no doubt be having interesting thoughts. Suppose we upped the ante and tossed in ultra-violet? merge the two visions and what would we see then when two people or more touched?

Naturally if someone had never heard of nor seen infrared goggles they could not be faulted for not being able to wrap their minds around the idea that at various levels we are all linked as a common Being, the One, and yet we are also capable of, as this Infinite Being Knows, Being in a very small bite of the Cosmic Muffin. The difficulty is when people cannot find it in their hearts to admit they cannot see into the infrared and insist that heat does not "radiate" and there are no fields of amorphous blobs in amazing colors which not only surround us, but which link us to every other living thing, although it would include a lot of what we might call "inanimate" but which a Shinto believer would suggest it had a Soul. Big stones in the sun, for instance would certainly blend into a person's field when near. What does this mean, what lesson does it contain? Don't try to touch a big hot rock.

And beyond the Milky Way are other galaxies which do what they do so well, they spin like Dervishes around one another, getting dizzy and losing themselves in the Dance. I too am lost in a dance, in a trance, seeing things which others do not, and don't we All?

On the loss of Memory

2011-01-21T15:55:00.001-05:00

Virtually everyone knows about the loss of short term memory. They heard about it when they started smoking weed and when they did other less civilized ways of dealing with short term sexual tension. But then there's Age and it brings with you short term memory loss and immediate memory loss and brief totally fictional memory, i.e.implanted memory... so many ways to lose your way. But, there is a way of memory that you might call the Way of Mid-Term memory loss.

We all know how the next breed of humans are not prime material to face a world of competition. But we don't breed humans for the most part, only for sport and never for politics. The thing is you can't judge a buck by his cover.

When a blacksmith has in their hand a piece of work so fine, so just no better, they, in the end, are holding iron, metal of some antiquity and a Master of working iron is standing on the shoulders of those who worked bronze. There are books with detailed instructions on the theory and execution of a carburetor producing a dose of gasoline fumes and oxygen in a compressed cylinder while being struck with a spark in the midst. This can move people to want more power over their lives. They may want to move without horses!

There was a time when men of some experience would hang out a shingle of wood with a sign showing what they thought they knew. For many real and political reasons the Blacksmith would be found at the edge of town, mostly near a bridge if they had one. A Smith would hang out a sign of an anvil and if another Smith should come around, the newcomer would no doubt have a reason to doubt the first Smith's territory and skill, so he would dispute the first and a competition would occur, a great occasion for folks of all ages. The Smiths would go thru all the usual blacksmith accomplishments and move into the more esoteric, producing more and more complex pieces of work, lances that never dulled and puzzles for the little ones. People would bring in things to repair and sharpen and the meet would go on for hours, perhaps but at some point one Smith would concede defeat and the folk would go home and no doubt the Smiths would go sauna or drink and chat about what was going on here and around here, down that road from which had come the new Blacksmith. Perhaps here he planned to make a stand, to teach the skills of iron, bronze and copper. A Smith could locate ore, smelt and refine the ore using local clays, stone, wood and fire brought from the Smith in a little bowl.

Once smelted, the iron, bronze or copper could be shaped by Master Smiths into any shape you could imagine, and any device you could imagine they could build. There were lone Masters who lived apart and repaired odd things and made one-off devices or jewelry. They were harder to find and were almost always very old by the time you did in fact find them and present them with your great-grandfathers mantle clock which no longer chimes or runs. But they took great care handling the clock and looking inside like a sloth counting ants on a hive.

Boots were repaired by elves behind closed doors. Everyone knew that. I, myself, have had a pair of excellent leather boots repaired, re-soled by a tiny little man with a thousand nails in his mouth and he Knew what to do. A few days later, a new pair of wonderful, excellent-fitting boots would appear on his counter and you would leave a small offering of odd metal chips for the Master to take home. This was a time when the coins were worth their weight in whatever.

So that was the Smith. There was also the Rag Man. He usually had a wooden cart filled with things and a pile of this and that. He did also have a pile of rags which his wife might turn into quality quilts for sale later, or she might repair certain gowns. But things got repaired and delivered and sometimes message, too, if the wagon went a certain way. It was a kind of Facebook, an early Facebook. Now, all Farmers need Smiths sooner or later, just as Astarte needed Vulcan. The Smith and Farmer both needed big families to run the shops and barns and such. In some towns a certain Master might work in fine metals or in glass, and they might catch the attention of locals as having Special skills

Gardener was a Son of Farmer, and he worked very hard or sometimes She worked very hard at growing herbs and spices and oils, infusions, rubs, and decompression techniques for the overworked. She lived on the outskirts of Town, which is where two roads came to-gather. And roads were named from roods, or reeds, which is what the Sumerians used as a unit of measurement of distance, ala along a road. Where is your Smith today?

Most of our society will argue away the Smiths and the tinsmith and the Herbalist or Hedge-witch or all those mid range Masters who would hang out a shingle so people knew who to go to if something needed help.

Now, hold onto this thought: You don't know any tailors, so you cannot clothe yourself. You do not know a Blacksmith, so you cannot have tools made to work your trade. You cannot heal when you need it, and when things go wrong, as they often do, you only "know" the Yellow Pages. As we got rid of all the Masters who were not familiar enough to ply their trades locally, we could do with some one with a big dog to watch over our sacks of wheat and rye and taters and onions etc what makes up a society. We have no muzzled or not monster to slow down the would-be sackers of humanity.

Mercury was a Messenger, trusty-worthy or not, He was it for getting the word out. There were people hanging out around banks and barbers to take the occasional message for the occasional chip of copper, a common metal. These might be Mercury! But he got the job done and he did not form gangs with inappropriate tattoos on their necks and faces. They did not go cutting off peoples heads. Among themselves they told tall tales about their messages and their travels and they argued about which was the greatest, fastest, most cool messenger of all times. Now nobody needs someone to take a message without stopping, just get it to this person and there's a piece of silver for you if you get it there by the tenth bell. Without all these half-starved kids running all over town with notes they could not read we would not now have the hydrogen bomb!

Suppose every small hydro-dam generator looked like an ancient crumbled mill? would that satisfy the People? Think of it... you are riding down Main Street in a two pony cart and your driver gave the Boy to run ahead and tell Granny you were coming! O! What a lovely day- 2025 AD! If we wanted it to be...But we probably won't want all that humming so close to our bedrooms, so I guess not. Frankenstein did it, the Doctor, not the monster. But not new York City, for all it's watery options.

Who needs a tinker when all we have is un-repairable? Who needs a Rat-Boy or a Messenger, or a Flower-Girl, a basket-weaver, a Miller? When our Apple juice and Chicken jerky dog treats comes from China dare we ask where our eggs and flour have come from? Who maintains the quality? We have been told there isn't any money for all of that, just enough money to hire enough Thugs to collect the taxes. Not enough to heal the sick or educate the illiterate, just enough for Power to apply to the masses. and In the process the Smiths have vanished, the Barber is gone and there are no Potters or Bone-Setters either. We are on our own.

You can design a house in your head, or maybe a room, but you cannot think of what the house down the road has to do with the house you want to live in. But is it upstream or down, does it shade your land or not, and in a pinch does the person living there like you enough to give you shelter if you Needed it?

Do you know who in the neighborhood knows CPR, to put a modern spin on things? Do we even know the occupations of our neighbors' neighbor? Not much of a neighborhood, but a start. Who knows how to make bricks? who knows how to make glass? who knows how to grow food?, who knows how to drill wells? But we can go to the moon...or can we? The Saturn V booster is the greatest strongest machine we ever built and yet the last one is rotting on the ground because we don't do that any more. We don't build hydrogen blimps anymore either. We don't bend wood into a circle so we can roll our asses across the ground instead of walking!

The loss of a key element can set a society back generations. The less we know, the less we can go.

Studio Views

2011-01-17T08:30:00.000-05:00

In the winter when the snow is about two feet thick and it's almost into the negative temps, I often stop off at the studio, after closing the hen house, and fire up the propane heater so the room gets more tolerable. You can't work frozen clay and glue does not flow at 2 F, but pencils work and I can rearrange sculptures and look at things a new way. Before it got very cold I was able to tear apart pine cones and glue the shingles on my bird houses. Hope to sell some in the spring. The other things, the nearly abstracted objects and rearranged stuff, I try to see old things as new. So I get some roots and objects and stack them up and stir them up and stare at them awhile until I have a neat little vision of what might be.

The Green man face is mounted onto a honeysuckle clump and pine cones are stuffed here and there to produce an amalgam of images, flowing into one another and writhing in your mind. I doubt I will show this one. Years ago I obtained part of a hat form and it sits in the studio waiting. I took "The Nurse" mask and mounted it on the form to see if it might be good for posing masks for studio pics. Now I am looking at and wondering about what this means. In anthropology they tend to declare objects are religious artifacts if they don't know what it means. So if my sculptures are religious, in what way? So I study my own work to see if I can figure out what kind of societal purpose they might have had if I had found them in a ruin. Funny way to look at one's own work, but it makes things old somewhat new again.

Sticks and stones and white tail bones, antlers, branches and string. What can we do with this old leather shoe and what will the spring time bring?

Once You Know

2011-01-14T15:20:00.000-05:00

Once you know, once it really sinks in, you don't move for a moment, and then you just straighten up. You want to face this head on. Cats can both hold objects with their paws, but they can also sell them on eBay! This is what Wrigley had been trying to say.

Suppose, and this is just "suppose', there were ways for thinking entities somewhere "else" to affect things here? Suppose limes were just lemons who in another dimension were not yet ripe? Suppose except for avocados NO fruit got green when ripe? Oh yeah, I know what you are thinking, sure and what about beans? But beans are always and forever Veggies, or vegetables, because they are all kinds of colors anyway. I myself grow purple green beans... or red streaked white beans. never could get lima beans to grow much. Too much rain I suspect, at the wrong time. But I digress.

Obviously if invisible beings permeated the atmosphere we'd feel them if we couldn't see them. And yet we do feel something in the air, something cold coming down from the north... and when Uncle Heath dies in January from the Grippe, does anyone not think it was bad spirits which took him? Unless, of course, you have enough money to have professional Undertakers to relieve you of that Burden which Fate has cast aside... like his jacket and his wallet and his, oh yeah- his body. But say it ain't as bad as those Indians who burn their loved ones on the banks of a sacred river and then cast the ashes into the waters! Better to contaminate the Los Angel's water shed and leave the Ganges for the downstream rice farmers. But we still shit off our skin cells after death and so our bladders, and so our brains, no doubt, but I swear by Erda before me I will go out as befits a Great Ape, noisily; thus making damn sure I attract the attention of a Chaos god...no...no, that's in that computer game I play. No Chaos Gods here. Everything makes some kind of sense, unless you get distracted, and then none of it makes sense. Life is like talking to Abbot and Costello and You are on second base.

A Question of Morals

2010-12-24T09:24:00.000-05:00

Recently I found myself being "friends" in Facebook with people who, like myself, are caring for a person with TBI. Brain injuries can unite some very disparate peoples, as in this case. But the real world is a funny place. I enjoy learning basic skills, like surviving in the woods, building fires, making knives etc, so when I encountered this family and their friends I was pretty pleased. They hunted with black powder guns, hand ground the meat and made sausages and smoked meat... pretty cool stuff. Then the "xmas" holidays came in and things changed. Yesterday morning one of the members of the extended family decided to post a comment which ran something like this: "All morals come from God (YHWH) and if you don't believe in God and Jesus you can't have any morals." It's hard to sit still for this so I wrote a quick, polite response wherein I declared that I am not a Christian but that I thought I was a moral person; I don't lie, cheat, steal, hurt people, I honor my parents, I am a devoted friend and I am also a devout pagan. So this gentleman replied with essentially this: "If you don't believe in God you cannot have any morals because all morals come from Him." Well I am also something of a logician and I find it hard to listen to bigotry, illogical arguments, circular thinking and lies. I happen to have a pretty good grasp of where YHWHism comes from and it's history, which is not very moral by our current standards. Read the text! We have lies, murders, rapes, incest... all of this by the good guys! The bad guys seem to be getting killed off not because of their actions, but their very existence. People were slaughtered simply because all their lives they lived in a land that the YHWHists desired. So they took the land, killed the men, raped the women and sold the children into slavery for the sin of existing. This is an example of "morals" in the YHWH world. Again, read the text.

Now, the person who insulted several billion people with his simplistic world view must have a set of values which comprise his moral dimension. Probably things like murder, rape, stealing, lying are all included, but if you asked him about the lands the YHWHists stole violently with many innocent deaths he will say that the Lord gave the land to the Jews and that's the final word on that. Apparently their deity is outside of the moral universe, and by "trickle down" the followers are also de-facto moral people no matter what they do, so long as it does not involve worshiping other deities. I follow a different path, ergo I am immoral no matter what I do. It's a curiously circular form of thinking and it allows someone who is not a very nice person, like Dick Cheney, to get away with mass murder simply by praying in a Christian church. Amazing.

But what about the billions of people who live away from the Middle East and never heard of the Jews, never heard of Yeshua and yet conduct themselves in a moral environment with respect for the rights of others and a respect for the life of the land? They apparently are in a no-win situation. They cannot be moral because they never read the Bible and never were dunked or something by a priest. Back in AZ I had a similar situation wherein a Christian was lecturing me on my paganism and how I was doomed to Hell. I suggested that a person could live a moral life, a good life, without ever hearing of the Ten Commandments. Alas, he could not hear of this. A Pagan was by definition an immoral and bad person. Around this time was the Jim Jones incident and being a bug, I mentioned the Bibles old Jim Jones read from while he pouring poison into the kool-aid. Not a great idea. Jones was an evil man ruled by Satan, but of course it was years before they figured this out, prior to that he was a holy man preaching the Lord's words. Then he killed everybody. My point was that I did not kill people, did not steal from people, did not lie to people and so I had a shot at being "moral". Nope, not so, impossible. Nobody who follows the Goddess can be seen as moral, and no matter what I did or said I would always be a lost soul, an immoral man and doomed to Hell because I did not worship the Jewish god YHWH. This sort of thing always puts a bug up my ass.

My pagan faith has one commandment and there is no direct punishment for failing to obey that commandment. It is, "If it harms none, do what you will." Pretty basic foundation for a decent set of morals, I think. So I can study the Bible, I can study the Koran, I can study Wicca, and so forth, so long as I am harming no one. I cannot steal because it harms, I cannot murder for the same reason. I cannot go to war, I am faithful to my wife and my family. But I do so out of a sense of responsibility to myself because you cannot be loved if you do not love others. I want people in my family to be able to love me, so I follow the Pagan Way and try to harm nobody in the process. Now if we study the history of Judaism, Christianity and other related faiths we see a disturbing pattern of violating all the commandments when it suits them. Christians dropped the nuclear bombs that decimated two entire cities filled with old people, men, women, children, pets and even Allied POWs! We knew all those people were there, the POWs were less than a half mile from the target zone. Apparently we wanted to be sure to vaporize them. Well, we did, and to this day we refuse to offer any assistance to those people suffering from radiation induced abnormalities, birth defects and cancers. We do nothing to help the sick, nothing to help the broken children. This from a Christian nation which even now is fighting, trying to get the Bible into all the classrooms. No Pagan could vaporize and irradiate a city, it is such a crime against Nature that no one who believes in Life could handle the guilt. But Christians not only can handle it, they worked to make sure it could happen again. We now own enough nuclear death to kill every major city on Earth, all built and designed by Christians. Prove me wrong.

This man who has judged me as immoral and inferior goes out to kill deer and other forms of life. He never considers the soul of the animal, as would a pagan. He never prays forgiveness to the animal he is about to kill, and he will pray to his God for allowing his bullet or arrow to find it's mark. No thanks to the unlucky deer. This seems twisted to me, but his God is a micro-manager who inserts His way into every detail of life, except sometimes. Like when a crazy man rapes and murders a little girl, apparently YHWH is not there to help her. He certainly would not be there to help a Pagan girl. In Iraq a number of Christian Marines raped and murdered a 14 year old Muslim girl and then murdered her family. Then they burned down the house to destroy the bodies and went back to play pool and prepare for the next day of occupation and slaughter of civilians. I find this hard to understand, but it seems it is okay to do this to a non-Christian because their souls are lost anyway. Like Joshua entering those cities to rape and murder, with a holy Get Out of Hell Free card.

I encourage every Pagan to read the Bible, as many translations as you can. Read the Koran translations, too, because fundamentalist Muslims are as bad as Christians in twisting a tale of Peace into a tale of Slaughter. It's important to understand the kind of thinking that goes into these faiths because many people are stuck in them, trying to be good people but having to reconcile the various stories with the various Commandments. How does one wage war if Thou Shall Not Kill? I suppose you could use paintballs, but they don't. They seem to like real weapons better. In comparative religion we find many stories of one faith fighting another. Muslims today are killing Muslims over a political dispute almost 1000 years old. Jews are still killing cities filled with Palestinians and occupying their lands, bulldozing down the ancient olive groves and poisoning the wells. We have not gotten very far following YHWH and His derivatives. Pagans seem to be doing a bit better, being more than willing to adopt science as a means of further understanding the Deity, our Goddess. Ecological movements are based firmly in the Pagan principles of harming none, taking care of the Earth. The name of this planet is derived from one of the names of the Goddess, Urda. Our days are named after Pagan gods and goddesses. Our months are named after Pagan deities and Roman dictators. Our life is rich in Pagan traditions because in part the YHWHists stole even those and twisted them to connect with the YHWH faith. Easter comes to mind, as does Christmas, both Pagan holy days twisted into YHWH's holy days, but the spring Goddess was so important to the masses that they kept Her name for that Holy Day. I'm thinking hypocrisy here.

I guess if that Christian would consider reading this I would like him to come away with the idea that all faiths have hypocrites and power mongers and politics can soil any garment. A moral person is not moral out of fear, but out of love for their fellow humans and the life that surrounds us. This does not require ell fires or homicidal Deities tossing fire and brimstone. What Yeshua was teaching, apparently, and what got him in hot water with the Priests, was incredibly similar to what the Pagan faiths convey: "Harm none." He did not think that giving offerings were enough, that helping humanity was more important, and that cut into the Temple's wealth, so he had to go. It was not Pagans who turned him in and demanded he be killed, it was YHWHists. The Romans killed him because his followers were promoting him as their King, and their Emperor did not allow that, so the leader of the cult had to be removed for treason. Simple politics, nothing to do with religion.

So, looking back on things, I have to say that regardless of how effective I am at it, I strive to be a moral person. I try not to be too judgmental and I try to be more helpful. This is not good enough for my judging friends in the YHWH camp. But it seems to be good enough for my Lady of Life and since She gave birth to the Lord of Light I suppose it's good enough for me. Like the YHWH and Yeshua cults, the followers don't always get it right, or maybe they get it too Right and their minds explode. One thing I do know for sure is that unlike Her consort and son, YHWH, the Goddess will accept each and every one of us upon our deaths. She will hold us and love us and return us to life in due Time and that is something that works for me.

Waking the Witch

2010-12-22T13:03:00.000-05:00

I had a dream the other night, when everything stood still. I thought I heard King Arthur, a-comin' down the hill. A buckwheat cake was in his mouth and a tear was in his eye, but his true nature became clear when the babies came to cry. Their hungers was aflame with need, their arms were whisper thin, I thought I saw King Arthur, not once but thrice again.

People understand, but animals believe. There was no way to stop the wren from shitting on my sleeve. A buckwheat cake was in his mouth or so the label said, but what was running thru his veins was nowhere near true red.

He compulsively wipes his hands across his beard, wiping away this feeling he had, this thin skin of hydrocarbons. It's just another skin, one of many. He sniffs it anyway, hands it to his Dog and He sniffs it and falls asleep, farting without sound. The Dog can do with yoga what other men talk about online.

Hudson River Valley-Winter

2010-12-22T11:10:00.000-05:00

This morning we missed the bus for work and I had to drive down to Albany. Margaret made it to work and Wrigley and I met a nice man and his dog in Washington Park. It was cold and both dogs seemed determined to smell each other for many more minutes than my poor fingers could stand. We bid a "Happy Holidays" to one another and Wrigley and I trotted back to the car. I decided to take the old River Road, Rte 4 because after a really cold night you sometimes see some fantastic ice below Schuylerville. Sure enough, when we got to the gate to the Saratoga Battle Grounds we started seeing geese flying in and out of the river. I parked the car and trekked in to the riverside. Thousands of Canadian Geese were sitting, standing and flying on the river. It was a study in grey scale. I took about 50 photos of the geese and the river and turned back to the car where Wrigley no doubt napped. As I crunched through the flooded field I started noting the patterns in the layers of ice. Then I saw this scene and snapped it. I am reminded of a frozen rice paddy somewhere south of Kyoto.

Quoting Will

2010-12-06T09:16:00.000-05:00

I am finding lately that more than ads for Russian porn sites I am also getting legit comments from people wanting to "back link" or otherwise share my blog. I have no problem with that, in fact I tried to put up a note to that effect. As far as I am concerned my thoughts are free. One problem has been that they leave their notes with no way to contact them, they sign "Anonymous" and that limits me to 6 billion other people. So if you leave such a note, you find my thoughts interesting enough to share, then by all means drop me an email or something.

I am thinking about suing for my son's body. No, he's not dead but he's not officially alive either. They have moved his prognosis into "permanent vegetative state". I would like to point out that the AMA says this is a non-starter. There is nowhere to go from that point except to wait for death. That will not do, not for my boy! I insist they declare what they intend to do if my son continues to live but not respond to them. He responds to me, slight movements, slight expressions, a small smile. I'll take it. I think he's in there, floating in a white fog and occasionally floating by the windows of his soul and spotting old Dad sitting there holding his hand. What else can I do?

I am thinking about suing for my son's body to be returned to a hospital nearby so I can begin the wake. Oh, the heart beats and the lungs work and he is said to be in pain once in awhile, but they give him Oxycontin to ease his pain. Yet, how can a vegetable feel anything? The fact is they give him pain to lessen his suffering, and how can a vegetable suffer? They're trying to have it both ways and that won't do. If he is suffering, then he is self aware, yes? If he is self aware he is not a vegetable, no? So a non-vegetable gets therapy and the non-vegetable may take up time and resources that are wearing thin these days in NY. So they want it both ways. they want him dead and alive. Dead, he causes no trouble. Alive, he counts as a warm body for reimbursement by Medicare. If I take him away they get less money. So I am thinking about suing for my son's body. What else can I do?

Shipwreck

2010-12-04T07:53:00.000-05:00

As the rest of the ship broke apart
   and the other victims sank
      --out of sight--
The Lady drifted
    for awhile
          at that level
                 Looking up.
Her gown fluttered about her
showing nothing
             anymore
Then, as by some
                unseen signal
She sank
and became
food for thought.

New Bricks Arriving, Old Friend Leaving

2010-11-08T06:11:00.002-05:00

Thanks to an old pal who is leaving fascist America for the Netherlands, I just acquired enough insulating fire brick to add to my collection of hard bricks and finish my wish list for my new kiln. Not only that, but Mike sold me a complete burner set up for propane firings with cutoff valves equipped with temperature sensors ($10!!) This completes the first phase. Now I build a nice 6' tall, single arch kiln/oven which can be fired with either wood or propane and used as either a big bread oven using wood for fuel or a nice sculpture kiln using the gas. Wow! I can now also convert the big noborigama kiln to use either gas or wood or both. Amazing. All I need now is a slab roller to go along with the pug mill Mike sold me. I can process my old clays, roll them into slabs and cut the slabs into tiles, plates, saucers, bowls etc and bisque them in the electric and fire them in the new kiln. Probably can't get started exactly until the spring...unless the winter is relatively easy on me. I might be able to build the base from cinder blocks. yay!

Dear Mr. Murdoch

2010-10-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

Dear Mr. Murdoch,

I noticed today an article in which it was stated that every Republican potential candidate for President in 2012 is employed by you. Congratulations on your finalizing the takeover of American government. Now that you own Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House you can complete the conversion from a "democratic" republic to a true fascist state. I have to assume you will then announce that America's debts are not the debts of New America, or whatever you plan to call it. I expect you will retain the name to help the people adjust. Anyway, that seems logical. The Chinese will object, as will India and Japan, and for obvious reasons Great Britain will not. If you want my take on it I would suggest that China might be willing to have California and Hawaii in order to wash the slate clean for them. Maybe Japan should get Hawaii, that would be so ironic. 8-)
I am not writing this to sing your praises and make suggestions, actually. I am asking you if you expect the "wrong thinkers" will be allowed to leave the country or if you plan mass executions. The reason I ask is that my family and I will likely fall into one of the categories flagged for removal. I am 60 years old, disabled with a back condition so I require a lot of medication. I also have never voted Republican, and although I only occasionally voted Democrat I am sure the Tea Partiers would consider me a liberal. Personally I consider myself to be a financial conservative and a social liberal. So it seems logical that my family would be sent to the camps. That being the case I would like to have a chance at political asylum in a European country like Holland or Sweden. I doubt very much European countries will welcome a flood of refugees so I would like to start the process now. If you would indicate how scapegoated minorities will be treated in the New America it would save you and yours a great deal of effort and money by allowing people like me to leave before things get hot around here.
Traditionally a new fascist government cements it's power over the population by creating a mass sin for all to share. Germany used the Death Camps. With all the people having supported the camps by supporting the fascists they would obviously share the blame and the effort to ensure they won the war. I expect you are too savvy to have an actual war per se since your background is more along the lines of a financial manipulator. This would save the damage to real property and livestock. So a propaganda war and a redistribution of the wealth is the likeliest path. The war to be won, then, would be a paper war to see which corporation ends up on top. I would not forget the religious element here. The neo-Muslims continue to be a violent component in the Mideast and like you the leaders are eager to expand their sphere of influence. A treaty of some kind is the most probable tack to take with them, probably offering them most of the Mideast save Israel. That done it would be simple to sign a fuel and resource agreement with the Saudi family and others.
I'm thinking it's a done deal since there is no force nor government capable of stopping you, with the possible exception of the Neo-Muslims and as noted above they can be bought. So the most important thing for me is an indication about the deposition of the scapegoats to allow me to start applying for refugee status or arranging for some kind of safety net for my family. I'd very much appreciate it. I realize there is no Earthly reason for you to reply since I'm a nobody, but I am hoping your sense of humor might be a factor and my plight amuse you. In that case we might work an arrangement. I hope so.

Sincerely,
Will Shirley
poet, philosopher and artist

Lately

2010-09-30T18:42:00.000-04:00

I am something of a news junkie, or rather I am a seeker of truth. There you go, in the 21st century we'll be able to read news stories as they happen everywhere in the world! So I do. And I find that the world I thought I lived in, the world of America the democratic republic with the mandate to rule the world, is even more disgusting. Our boys in green are collecting souvenirs in Afghanistan. Do you know where that is or anything about it's history? Let me briefly clue you in on a good thing to know: barbarians are not at the gate, they are in your mind. So we have our boys in green collecting fingers for necklaces (like in the movies) and skulls, maybe to make a goblet out of (like in the movies). I suppose we needn't become alarmed until they start peeling the tattoos off the dead for lampshades, I guess. We're still better than somebody in the past. What about Genghis Khan? Well, what about him? Wasn't he a barbarian who cut off heads and took body parts as trophies? Yup. Where did he do all that? Mongolia and places west during his takeover of much of the known world. OH, and Afghanistan. He didn't last very long there, nobody does.

The poppy crop is down, the CIA will be very disappointed. There goes their Xmas bonuses. It wasn't because we burned the crops, oh no. Mother Nature brought over a fungus which killed half the plants. We were trying to save the crop so the government would have a nice source of income. Lord knows they can't export rocks. OH wait! They can. We now have a great reason for our boys in green to be killing and collecting: mineral wealth. We just read a decades old report from the Russians, who also failed to conquer Afghanistan by force of arms. Seems Afghanistan is lousy with mineral wealth of the particular type of mineral wealth which makes computers possible. So we ain't never going to go away. That means in the future there will be a small market in body parts collected by Americans as they won the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.Like how in America 2075 poor folks have to sell kidneys in order to get served at Health Care Inc. It's a small but important part of our future economy.

The My Lai massacre led to the failing of the American delusion that we were the "good guys". We have never been the good guys so long as our cars drive across the graves of the natives who we massacred for over 300 years to take and hold their dirt and the stuff underneath it. Of course they never had ownership of that dirt, it was sort of a caretaker position. Now we own the damn Earth and we will drill and burn and excavate until the last useful rock is melted, smelted and purified into liquid Plutonium for our furnaces. But if there are enough of the Aghan version of My Lai around, enough necklaces of fingers, ears, skulls, rape stories told over at Joe's Bar after a few beers, maybe people will see that supporting the "bad guys" makes us bad guys. Makes us targets for the real "good guys", the ones avenging dead sisters, dead sons, dead parents. We have been hit a bit, but the blood still flows so we can expect another, soon. Unless...

Unless somewhere there is in America a "lawyer" who actually believes in the Rule of Law and he arrests the previous administration and issues a warrant for this administration for crimes against humanity and war crimes, we have no way out but to tear their houses down and send them all to the World Court. Then we will be the "good guys" and we can hold our heads up in international waters.

Do the world a huge favor and if a buddy, a brother or a sister tells you that they have a necklace of fingers, go to the police, the FBI, and the press and see to it that others know about it. If we actually act like people with ethics and morals perhaps the next sky scrapers to fall will do so to build a multi-cultural center where people can learn about people in other lands, with other religions and the same love and respect for human life.

Colors

2010-09-12T07:59:00.000-04:00

If you look at the house we seem surrounded by a golden cloud. It's the Jewel weed, mostly. That's about chest high and somewhat golden orange with spots and speckles. It trembles with the beating wings of the hummingbird checking out each bloom. Sometimes the shaking of the flowers causes the seed pods to pop, reminding me of the other name for the Jewel weed: "Touch-me-not".Great fun to watch them curl and scatter their seeds. Mixed in with the Jewel weed is Goldenrod and there are many kinds. Some have a huge single clump of bright golden fluff while other weeds have multiple heads, smaller but more exciting. They look like golden fireworks. Down the way we have many sunflowers, giant grey striped sunflowers and dozens of Jerusalem artichokes. I have actually pulled a few and examined the little tubers, like water chestnuts. They seem like the kind of food a wild man must eat, like Solomon's seal and bolete mushrooms. A lot of the yard is edible.

The flowers that I bought and are hanging from the front of the house are dead and dried, whereas the colorful weeds and volunteers are big and beautiful. The golden cloud around the house continues to the rear and is mixed in with the pinks and lavenders. This time of year we have one or two bright fuchsia roses growing next to the funny Turtleheads, whose pouty mouths grump in four directions. They are as much fun as snapdragons, which oddly enough don't like to grow here. Too many competitors I guess. There are maybe a half dozen lilacs of various shades growing flowerless in the late summer morning. Each year I am surprised by the increasing size and volume of flowers on the lilacs. Another shock is the wandering and misnamed Obedience Plant. Half the one bed is covered in pink flowers and spiky leaves. I have long since forgotten where I first planted them. They struggle with an un-named weed whose nasty stickers are a handful all the way onto the roots. It has small flowers which are not pretty enough to forgive the pricks over but whose roots apparently have wandered all over the beds. I pull them up by the handfuls and they come back nastier. I suppose I should boil and eat them just to scare them away but we can't be sure if they are poisonous or not. It's a desperate plan developed from an observation that certain weeds become less intrusive once I realize a use for them. The valerian root is great for back pain, so now they grow in more attractive groupings where the wonderful scent of the pinkish flowers can startle and delight the walker by.

An odd yellow surprise are the number of squash plants which not only volunteered to grow this year, but who volunteered to grow in funny places, like out by the well head, near the garden path, and of course where the old compost heap used to be. I expected either tomatoes or squash and got them both. the pumpkins gave us two fruit, both big enough to carve or small enough to eat. The blue Hubbard squash was planted from a packet of seeds last year and has come back to haunt me this year. It overran the path to the hammock and wandered over the obedience plants, mixing it up with the evil prick weed. yet all the plants manage to get along better than the residents of New York City do when politics are in the air. Two avocado trees from the compost have sprouted and are about a foot and a half. that's still a far cry from the ten foot tree we grew last year. I had it in a pot and eventually the head was so tall I had to move it to the deck, where the cold autumn air finally got to it. Let's see how the twins do this winter.

The Goldfinches have found the Jerusalem artichokes and are picking away at the flowers. They leap from choke to sunflower to chicory, looking for all the world like animated sunflowers. Over their shoulders is the more thorough hummingbird buzzing from the hibiscus to the Jewel weed, one flower at a time. After putting up the hummingbird feeder I am startled to find a little hummer poised in the air about two feet from my face, examining my features and perhaps evaluating my intent. She buzzes off, satisfied that the feeder is safe enough and later she comes by to see if it is, and it is safe and tasty. But as she sips a male comes by, chipping and buzzing, slamming her in the air and chasing her off. Then the male goes over to the hibiscus plant to sip and watch the feeder. I'm not sure why he doesn't just feed at the feeder or share the hibiscus, but that's hummers for you, too busy to think.

Decomposing America

2010-08-08T08:08:00.000-04:00

I've been having a "debate" with a right wing nut over in social group land. He claims to be a millionaire businessman but Margaret thinks he's a poser. Nevertheless it has been interesting seeing just how angry and pissed off he is. He sees the changes coming up in our economy as being a direct threat to his way of life. He's in construction but he thinks the new economy will not help him out much. The "New Economy?" you ask? Yes, the old one was getting frayed around the edges so we got a new one coming in. The essence of it is that the corporations running the government have been devouring one another for some time now and we are reaching a tipping point. The Fascist Regime which is America is part of an older template for human social interaction based primarily on relative wealth. Read: class war. The money has been trickling up to such an extent that businesses have been happily sending factories east to make even more profits. A problem with this short sightedness is that the unemployed buy very few things, no matter how "affordable" they are. But the reason for this older form of economy is the transformation of labor into money. The flaw lies in the nature of money and it's perversion by our society.

Money is a tally device, a means by which labor completed or promised is kept track of by counters of metal or paper strips. The coins are fair for metalworking and the colored strips of paper make lousy toilet paper but good eyeglass wipes. If a person should work for ten hours they get a counter marking their rate of pay and hours worked. it is possible then to transfer this counter to another person in exchange for their labor. This is a sort of Ponzi scheme where everything works until the papers fail to deliver. For instance, say a ditch digger works ten hours and gets a paper saying ten hours @ $10/hr equals $100. In point of fact the dollars have very little intrinsic value but they represent ten hours labor @ $10/hr. If that $100 is given to a doctor, say, one might find that it covers one hour of labor, not ten. So, although the numerical markings on the paper have not changed the value of the paper has. Furthermore it is possible for someone to get their paws on a pile of paper when they have done nothing to earn it. It might be a promise or it might be theft. Let's say I find a wallet with $1000 in it and I keep the papers for myself. Aside from the question of right or wrong there is the displacement of labor contained in this act. I can now hire ten men to dig ten hours at $10.hr and get my basement fixed. Nevertheless it can be argued that there is an imbalance which will have to be reckoned with eventually.

In our society here in America, we can also write our own script through checks and money orders. We can write contracts for millions of hours of labor with no coins or paper passing hands. In short, currency has little or no value except to tally labor completed and/or promised. In recent years more and more of the tally markers are numbers on a computer screen. Eventually it would be possible to remove money from the system and replace it with a tally board of relative labor values and time spent in labor activities. Labor is not passive, it changes things. An hour with a doctor might result in a headache being cured or it might be a tumor detected and saving a person's life. Money takes on a local value determined by the value of that person's skill set. It is further modified by the immediate need for that skill set. When a pipe is not leaking a plumber's time is not so valuable.

Money was invented by the rich and powerful to hold sway over the poor. It tips the scales in society. If a person were to accumulate a considerable amount of money they would hold sway over those with none in a time of universal need. In a drought the money could be used to hire diggers to make a canal from a river to the farmlands. But nothing stops the diggers from digging before any money passes hands. The money is not even the motivation for digging, the water is. In a moneyless society the ditch would still get dug and all would benefit, but in a monied society if enough money is not present the ditch does not get dug and the farms suffer. An example is in Haiti where a lady owned several mango trees but hadn't enough water to grow more. The river was a few yards away and she needed a ditch. Arrangements were made for the ditch to be dug but because this was in a money environment it took many weeks of negotiating over who would get how many paper tokens in exchange for the use of the land and the transportation of the water for irrigation. It might be noted that the ditch can serve more than one farm. In a moneyless society it would quickly be determined that the ditch had value and workers would dig the ditch to increase the mango yield, serving many people in need.

I have had people question my contention that money per se has no real value and actually slows down an economy which is dependent on it. Prior to the invention of money work was accomplished by people in exchange for the common good. Like rice farmers working together for the common harvest things got done. We have used money for so long we have forgotten how to make things happen without it. I suggested recently that we have thousands of empty houses in America and thousands of homeless people. In a moneyless society it is obviously for the greater good to get those people into those houses. I am told that people who get houses "for free" will not appreciate the houses and will trash them. The bigotry revealed in this statement is really pretty obvious: the poor are slobs. The benefit to society should be obvious as well. People in houses get sick less often than people who live on park benches. There is no good reason for keeping the homeless as homeless, anymore than it is reasonable to keep people from working. Our bridges and roads are unsafe, we haven't enough light rail lines and virtually no way to move people around large cities without polluting the environment. All of these issues can be solved by people working together for the common good, and this labor pool would need to live in houses. The solution should be clear.

We would be surprised if firemen came to our burning home and declared their rates for saving the house, yet that is exactly how it worked a few years ago. Public financing of fire protection became a group effort because of the group impact of fires. Nobody goes to a fire with their hand out. Things change and we should be open to the passing of outmoded ways of getting things done. If we made food, housing and health care basic human rights afforded to all we could eliminate money, which would eliminate economic classes. People would work one on one with a fair exchange of goods and services being set up by the parties directly involved. One more item to scratch off the list of governmental functions.

My Nation, My Loss

2010-06-15T12:20:00.003-04:00

Yeah, it's time for a serious one. Maybe it was last night's migraine that is still throbbing in the background of my head, but a few thoughts and words keep bouncing around ahead of the throb. Here's an image I cannot shake: Glenn Beck on the cover of some magazine in a Nazi uniform, grinning like a shit eating skunk. Not a piece of fiction, dear reader, Google up the image if you like. But, see, when Prince Henry dressed like an SS officer he looked like an officer, which he is. Beck looked like Mussolini, which he isn't supposed to be. For the terribly young, again, Google it.

Why is this important? Cut to a sound bite, Donald Rumsfeld, the Murderer of Iraq: "A treaty is just words on paper. That's all, words on paper." And he of course meant the same for all legal documents including the Constitution, all words on paper. Like the Bible for what that's worth. Like the oath of office Bush took: words on paper, signifying nothing. Now pan back to look at the administrations say all the way to Nixon. Look at the NAMES. Curious, when you consider how many people live in America, that so few have worked so long to run this country into the ground and the monies into their bank accounts. The same damn names over and over, a good old boy network that includes the 'right" kind of woman. Think Condi down on her knees doing Georgy Boy while he works on a puzzle.

Slip of the brain, sorry. So, no conspiracy, no plots written in blood by the night light. Actually these kind of people like rituals where somebody gets bloody, somebody gets off and nobody talks. So aside from that, let's get down to generalities. In a math problem the limits are known and finite. It is impossible to lie about one plus one equals two. You can jimmy up a form of math where analogies are made and substitutions are made, but still within that system the parameters have been spelled out and the rules are well known. One such form of math deals with chaos, the ruling deity of the Western world. You can use it's rules and parameters to follow a flock of birds for some distance before new data has to be added so they don't fly off. You can "see" how people will walk around a mall or in a stadium how the seats will fill up. Most of the time if you have enough variables spelled out you get pretty close. But chaos math still has rules and parameters, edges a little fuzzy but we have a handle on what the fuzz looks like up close.

Now take Don Rumsfeld and his words on paper. Let's ask Don to predict the flight path of a set number of particles being acted upon by Mars gravity and a forward uniform acceleration... ah! Now Don has folded his paper and snapped the pencil in half. He picks up his blackberry and calls up an engineer he owns and gives him the question. He hands the blackberry in and goes and buys another. See, math is just words and numbers on paper and Don has no time for that. he buys knowledge and owns people to remember for him. The one who knew about the Constitution fell down a mine shaft and exploded. But he never read Mein Kampf either, more words on paper. He is, however, living the books he never read, minus the death camps. Ours are much smaller so as not to attract a lot of attention.

Beck in a suit, Don with a blackberry and Bush with his girlfriend and millions of dollars. Toss in Rush and the rest of the wealthy assholes who think laws are for suckers and ethics get you killed, as if Hitler had a shred of ethics in his soul. In business, according to American standard fierce capitalism, it is a dog eat dog world. It is also a dog blackmail, murder, torture, slander world. Now in the theory set forth by Benito Mussolini, (by the way, Don, Benito actually wrote whole books of words on paper.) a fascist state is the result of a corrupted republic and republics are always going to corrupt because you put a small number of the wealthy elite in charge of all the money and power. He personally felt that this dog eat dog mechanism was part of a perfect state of eternal warfare wherein the best rose to the top. Social Darwinism is rampant in the writings(?!) of the right wing in America. They bought into the concept without understanding, I hope, who promulgated the concept. Now, a fascist state should more properly be called a corporate state and fascism is actually corporatism because the biggest corporations run the government for their own advantage while waging constant wars to keep up their bottom line. Nothing is so wasteful as a war. It uses up materials and people so fast that the factories and maternity wards can barely keep up with it. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy used slave labor from the countries they ate up. America uses Americans as slaves with the illusion that they have choices, when in fact none of the possible choices amount to a rats spitball. How many channels of pure crap do Americans have to choose from and yet how many corporations control the news sources for these American consumer-bots? Damn fucking few, and there is a reason for that and it is found in chaos theory.

A corporation is words on paper that a certain number of people or other corporations must agree with. Too few units and the thing is unable to protect itself from larger, nastier entities. Too big and it takes a government to support the appetite of the Beast. A country is words on paper tied to a physical location in which the document itself defines who shall be included. Note that it is identical to a corporation except for one small point: land. Multinational corporations are not like countries because they are oblivious to geography except as it relates to commodities and resources. They don't care if their actions destroy a country and send it's people into exile. they don't care because nowhere in the Corpora does it state that they care, so they don't. In the Constitution, dear reader, there is no mention of caring for people, not people caring for people. There are mentions of the government having responsibilities, duties and powers, but nothing about giving a damn about the old, the sick, the homeless. So they don't.

They are the people who run the corporation that is America, a huge, multinational corporation whose main product is death. It runs on human souls and bodies and has been in charge of my country for about 40 years that I know of. The ultra rich in America are not always the ones with the most dollars. In times of war, constant, never-ending war the real wealthy invest in things like gold, slaves, countries. Nothing has changed in 8,000 years except the words on the paper and they signify nothing.

The only thing that never changes, according to Fred Brighton, PhD, poet, philosopher and author of "It Takes A Real Prick to Screw America", is inconsistency. And per his Theory of 1957: "The only true consistency is inconsistency, and the only true inconsistency is inconsistent inconsistency." So you may go for 200 years thinking you lived in a democracy or a democratic republic, only to wake up in a failed empire collapsing into a fascist state, or Uber-Corporation. But in one or two years it might suddenly shift into a simple society of farmers and hunters linked by fiber and separated by miles of dangerous, toxic wastelands. It's all good! Nobody gets to live forever, no matter what words there are on paper. Cheney is kidding himself that bathing in babies blood while fucking your daughter will make you immortal.

Gulf Coast Fairwell

2010-06-03T09:09:00.004-04:00

Now that the SC has declared corporations to be People, BP can run for President, buy the election, and proclaim the Gulf of Mexico disaster to be a minor, cyclical aberration that had nothing to to do with oil drilling. That would all be legal in the world of modern America.

Lately they have been playing clips of the Twin Towers burning and collapsing. Watching the second Tower come down I was reminded of a collapsing empire, how it teeters and rebounds, slips, and burns, until finally it's obvious to everyone what is happening and it collapses the last few feet. The Empire has collapsed into it's component parts. Then everybody around is breathing unhealthy air, contaminated water and debris falling, floating and blocking all the unlucky survivors. You don't want to be too close to the center of either the Empire or the Tower.

This oil will reach the Stream and poison beaches along the Atlantic seaboard. As it slowly kills off the fish population and the bottom feeders we can expect major changes to the chemistry of the sea water. Look at pictures of "dead zones". Now, here's the thing: unless this has a cooling impact on the waters we will continue to see the ice caps melt. Should they do so as the temperature rises we can expect more active, destructive hurricanes-born in the Gulf. So we have chemical stews of poisonous brews being tossed up above the flood lines by massive CAT 5 storms hitting a beach which is several hundred feet higher anyway because the oceans are rising! Got that? Whew. The oceans become lifeless here and there, especially in the Gulf, where we used to get a lot of our fish from, since the Atlantic fish are being fished out. They also get higher all over as the ice caps melt and the Greenland icecap especially melts. Now, as I said before, unless something happens to slow the melt... and that is a done deal by now, way too much inertia behind the warming... the storms continue to get larger and faster, influenced by our constant adding to the oceans chemicals which kill off our food supply. If we dumped this crap on our soils we would have to import all our food from China.

The good news is that with decreased salinity and increased petrochemicals the Gulf Stream may not stay on course. If it does not flow north, past Iceland and down past Britain, and back around to Florida or Cuba. That's part of the reason that hurricanes spin like that. And as the air mass expands due to heating, it doesn't gain mass, it gains volume, which allows for a bigger storm ceiling, and that changes weather patterns. I am hoping their various computer simulations included such a possibility. The Stream changing course, I mean. Although that might make Paris more like Montreal or Seattle. Alas for Boston! The City That never Sleeps will finally lay down and close her eyes, perhaps for good.

Filth, death, and poison, flavored with lies and stupidity all coming towards Washington is nothing new, but this time it's not a Party, it's a multinational corporation. In other words just a guy, a person like you or me... according to the Supreme Court.

Far away, Long Ago

2010-05-12T09:31:00.004-04:00

Sometimes I get a whiff of a bit of moisture mixed with the pines and I feel the asphalt beneath my feet again, a long time ago. Once upon a time in Oregon, on a road in the evening, with the surface of the road warm and soothing, a young man walked with pack and stick and a growing awareness from the many scaly encounters his feet were having that his mocs had big holes in them, the snakes on the highway were hard to see in the growing darkness, and there was a real horrible possibility that he'd be walking in the dark, stepping on snakes for many a mile. It was an Oregon wetland and I was pretty sure most of the snakes were harmless, but a single hiss would do it: I would jump up in the air and land squishily on a gopher snake and he'd scream and bite me and I'd jump again, landing on some other snake and pretty soon I would look like a golf ball in a field of mousetraps.

A station wagon pulled up and the door to an old Plymouth wagon was the pearly gates and Golden Gate all in one. I climbed in and promptly shook my boots out to make sure I had no passengers and to check on the size of the damage. I had two good sized holes in each moccasin. It could have been worse, though, because I had traded an old harmonica to a kid for a nice calf hide. I just cut off a portion with my knife and placed it into a moccasin over the hole. When i was done I could get several more miles out of those guys! Good job! Now I looked at the guy driving the wagon.

He was scruffy, I guess, but I was worse off. He was also sucking on a bottle in a brown paper bag and holding the steering wheel with his left index finger while his elbow rested on the old girl's elbow rest. Not a bad deal, maybe a buzz, certainly further down the road, and best of al no snakes. I remember looking around back to make sure he wasn't transporting snakes to some zoo in Seattle. He wasn't. It had been raining off and on for an hour or so and my fake fur jacket smelled like a wet dog.

So when Wrigley and I went out back to open up the hen house and check for evidence of woodchucks or foxes messing around, as I walked up the path I was wearing my big green boots because it had been raining off and on and by now Wrigley smelled like a wet dog, which is of course what he was. But it takes you back. It takes me back anyway.

Fish and chips, good fish and chips in a newspaper cone with vinegar and salt on the chips and fish does it for me. I'm on Haight Street, that great street and it's 1967. I fear I was dressed in a green satin dressing gown sheered short and hemmed by my own fingers. It was a bit of splendor to make up for the sandals, tee shirt and jeans. Like the beads, except the beads on the street often moved from neck to neck, like puppies. But the small portion of fish and chips at the Shamrock cost a mere 30 cents and the large portion only 60 cents. That was not too hard to panhandle. A large portion had 2-3 chunks of fish and a LOT of chips, we'd be able to feed a multitude with a couple large portions. Everybody shared. Couples with babies were not unknown, but not often seen during the day. They tended to have crash pads and the ladies were often at home tending to the baby. Sometimes several couples would occupy a flat and there would be dogs and kids and a lot of confusion. They were always melting pots with all the races represented and some in between.

Going over to a place with a friend for some reason dealing with drugs and music... As we approach the front porch my friend turns to me and says, "Now, don't stare. Doug and Ada are nudists.." and the door opened. She was remarkably beautiful, with a full round moon-like face surrounded by a cascade of midnight hair and a Bode body, all pale and rounded. I could not stare. I looked beyond her to see the old man sitting on the couch, rolling a joint. I was real happy and it must have shown, because now that Goddess of the moment was in the kitchen wearing an apron and washing the sink full of dishes. Still, she had twin moons and I could glance as we chatted. Later, carrying an amp and being fairly high, I walked back to my friends house where, conceivably we would smoke a little more while trying out the amp. My friend turned to me and raised an eyebrow. "How'd I do?" I asked him. He looked away for a moment, thinking in silence. "Well, it's hard, ya know?" he said. We walked in silence back to his crash. It was hard.

The Old Hippie's Groovy Blog: You Think?

2010-04-24T13:04:00.000-04:00

The Old Hippie's Groovy Blog: You Think?

They Didn't Let Me Post This

2010-03-06T07:43:00.001-05:00

...all the forums have limits on the babble they can post and I babbled on too long, so I am posting it here:

A "country" is a concept, an agreement between individuals. Our nation was formed via a Constitution and Bill of Rights. Through the years we have amended our nation and our rights by making agreements with the world, for instance on how we will conduct ourselves in war. None of the agreements and contracts have any meaning if we show the world that we have no respect for written agreements, for treaties or promises. By killing civilians in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations like Gitmo and simply ignoring those deaths as somehow unimportant we show the world that the United States is untrustworthy and dangerous. The more we kill the more dangerous we show ourselves to be. We even poison fish supplies by dumping garbage and chemicals into the waters off Somalia and Peru. In short, in spite of our past actions where we "saved the world" we are killing it now. As my father used to say, "That dog won't hunt."
The world will someday stop us, it will have to in order to save itself. I would hope we could somehow do it ourselves, thus saving millions of lives, but we will have to turn off the TV and march in the cold, being chased by security forces and maybe even jailed. The question is, do we believe in anything anymore enough to risk our peace if not our lives?

Life Is Like A Two-Way Street

2010-03-03T09:20:00.002-05:00

So much of life is binary, two-fold, two-

faced, too much. It seems that the initial

response to life, the immediate response, is

pure bi-polar good-bad, instantly. A bit of

tissue moves away from a bright light, or

towards it. This is my response: that it can

be a gray zone when no immediate response is

possible. Say you are interested in speaking

with someone and you are in a dark room,

possibly even outside in a new moon

situation, but you are walking about in the

dark while looking for someone and you bump

into someone. You may startle back and then

exhale to exclaim, "Whoosh! Oh, Jack! I was

looking for you!" To which Jack might say,

"In the dark, Jill?" But it doesn't matter,

Jill was looking for Jack and found Jack, so

that was "good", right? Well, yes, in the

short term, but in the immediate term, the

moment of contact, Jill stepped back and

inhaled sharply, before recognizing Jack's

leather jacket and exhaling like a hoot owl.

The owl was a symbol of wisdom, knowledge,

by virtue of an association with a version

of the Goddess.

Jill had a response that was from a

different part of her brain than the one

that "knew" Jack's leather jacket. In fact,

in a dark room it only knew "me" and "not

me- dangerous". This binary knowledge of

life is cellular. It comes from our spine

and the base of our brain; it comes from our

nerves in our fingers. Both Jill and Jack

and ourselves are a vast condominium complex

of cells and cell families. Just like any

small town most cells know or are aware of

the cells around the neighborhood. They are

much more aware of their families, the cells

they most have physical contact with. Some

cells just bounce around in fluids, like

"white bloods" and "the reds", who sometimes

get into altercations with other cells,

especially those from outside the

neighborhood, like rose thorns. There are

times when cells will die in the attempt to

kill other cells from outside the 'hood.

So it might be noted that racism is at it's

roots a cellular artifact. It should be

understood as that and treated as that. A

viral infection, such as re-writing history

can change an aversion to an insane hatred,

leading to a violent confrontation, death

and corruption. Corruption of the core

systems of the body will kill it, make it

incapable of going along with the everyday

needs of life. Cells die all the time. They

get replaced, until someday they don't. Then

some move on to other lifestyles. Compost.

Other compilations of living organisms may

recycle most of what is left. This is also

how cultures takes up the remains of other

cultures. They take up the knowledge, the

rituals, and the history of other cultures.

Suppose Jack had ingested a slice of rye

bread which had been made from flour

containing generous amounts of a fungal

infection called ergot that likes to grow on

certain cells. This bread now is being

digested in Jack's stomach and the

ergot amine poisoning has him seeing

everything in bright red flames and Jill's

eyes are burning coals while her hands are

those of a demonic banshee. So, naturally

when Jack said, "In the Dark, Jill?" he

meant the Dark Side, ie, Hell. So when she

reached for his face Jack did what any other

all American boy holding a bucket of water

would do: he beaned Jill on the head,

causing her to fall and twist her ankle.

Finding Jack in the dark like that was

really "bad" for Jill, and "bad" for Jack,

who continued on his psychedelic rampage for

another 12 hours and finally is arrested for

attacking a lamp post with a baseball bat,

and resisting arrest, assaulting an officer,

profanity and attempted sexual assault. Jack

had a real bad time after that.

Good - Bad? Who is to say? That's why they

call them "cell phones" so there is better

communication between the cells, and this

sort of thing doesn't happen. Jill could

have called someone, maybe Peter, and asked

where Jack was, whereupon Peter would

clumsily explain that they had gotten some

"bad bread, man" and everybody was freaking

out! She might have then tried to find a

safe place to sit it out, maybe called

someone else to meet her with a flashlight

somewhere.

Timing is critical, timing and experience.

If Jill had not wasted time hanging around

the 'hood with Jack and had got to night

school, or maybe taken classes in aikido or

intervention techniques, she could have

handled the encounter with a host of

variations.Alas for Jill, so many of them

would have gotten her hurt and Jack freaked

out, but at least two variations would have

had them making crazy monkey love under a

full moon, so that would be good.

Fancy Title

2010-02-04T09:50:00.001-05:00

I keep going on about surfaces, titles, names. Names are such a bad idea. Add verbs and pronouns and adjectives and soon everything is covered in names like paper mache covers a cheap lamp. You can't see the thing itself, the absence of the rest of the universe. The reason for this is simple and basic. You can't speak of anything until you can agree on what a thing is. Cast about in your mind for a familiar thing, maybe a monitor. This thing is called a monitor although other things are, too. This is a different monitor, it occupies a certain space and is differentiated from that other space by a surface, which restricts other things from interacting much with the rest of the universe, although some do send out photons, packets of electromagnetic radiation which will display a picture if displayed in a certain matrix. It's all very complicated and electronic. Except it isn't in far more ways you might imagine. First and foremost let's try an exercise in logic: see that monitor there? Yup, you point to it, right there. So I pick up the monitor and remove it from your sight. Now I ask, Right there? and you look confused and turn your head. There! you point at the monitor. There, right there! Well, I say, the last time you seemed pretty sure of yourself. You pointed over there and said Right There. Now you point over here and say Right There! Which is it? Well, it's not the space I was pointing at, it was that monitor in your hands is what I meant. Now I look confused. I'm not holding hardly anything! I have pretty much nothing at all in my hands. And it is the Truth in more ways than you can imagine. Mostly what is in the vicinity of the ends of my arms is differing frequencies of electromagnetic energy, and nothing else. Now you want to try to touch it. Your finger stops moving forward and you say, There! Right There! but I am setting the monitor down on the table and although your finger continues to rigidly follow the monitor in its path, by the time I have stopped moving you have sketched out a wobbly line. Now I have to wonder what kind of thing you are describing. It seems pretty big because everywhere you point you seem to find it lurking. Everywhere I look I see varying frequencies and packets of frequencies and no end in sight. It looks like this monitor is either everywhere at once or nowhere at once, like a paddle ball dancing about the end of a band and occasionally slapping into the paddle of my consciousness. But not a thing, not a where, but a process. A corporation of packets of frequencies changes relationships with the rest of the universe in a coherent or mathematically consistent ratio of parts. And there you have it. It's too hard to say that in a conversation, so we slap paper mache all over the place until everything Every Thing has been plastered down with names and names of names.

I've always enjoyed paper mache. I always thought it neat to be able to make little heads over a light bulb and then sew clothes for the heads to make puppets. I'd put together plays, with special effects for a smoking dragon and even performed in libraries for kids. Great fun. But the dragon was not a dragon and the smoke was a toasted Cavendish. Still the kids liked it and some young ones were even a little afraid of the dragon. They were afraid to touch him. They'd seen the smoke and heard the words and even though the knight had slain the dragon, apparently "slain" did not mean killed, because here he was, still smoking, potentially at least.

I'm not sure that kid was so wrong to fear a dragon. They have been known to terrorize a community, which does entail eating some of them. So people have been taken into the belly of a dragon, what an experience. Dragons, like snakes, could eat a person slowly from the feet up, or perhaps head first to quickly quiet the prey. Lots of things can creep up on you, lots of ways to die. Yet here we are, tickling the tonsils of a dragon and still wagging our feet at the sky. There is no sulphur to a dragon, contrary to popular fiction. The flames come from methane belches, followed quickly by the clicking together of steel and flint in the dragons teeth. This is one reason they come into human territories, to acquire the steel. The flint they can dig up themselves. It must have been an early, stone age dragon who discovered it could light beleches in the same way a human learned to light farts.

But the picture of early dragons roasting men for dinner does create a lasting image on the collective consciousness of homo erectus. It would collect on the DNA. DNA has that double helix thing, which is interesting in the fact that dragons fly up and descend in a tight spiral, creating a double helix flight path, also the spiral is the path a human takes being swallowed whole by a dragon. It was said that a knight going out to fight a particularrly nasty dragon would eat sausage and cabbage the night before so that if taken by surprise the knight could let loose a huge fart at the wrong time for the dragon and thus blow it's head off, killing both the dragon and the knight. This was the first suicide attack on another species. Since then we've gotten into doing it to other humans. Not the fart, so much, although we do produce a hell of a lot of methane, but the blowing up onesself for ones something or another, usually something invisible.

The funny thing is, all that blowing up stuff is pointless from the viewpoint that there isn't a lot of stuff to blow up, per se. Most of what gets blown up is empty space and packets of frequencies, except, of course, it ain't. IT's not a thing, though, it's things. many things, none with names, none with subjects or predicates, no verbs to offend. These things are called Dark Matter and they are dark because they just don't give a rats ass about the rest of the universe, which is not even nearly as much as the dark matter is. Most of the universe doesn't give a rats ass if everything blows up. It's happened before and will happen again, like a little red rubber ball on the end of a band, smacking some Great Paddle in the Nothing and impacting mostly nothing, but still, the back and forth goes on, sometimes you get a hit, sometimes you are hit. Nothing to get excited about, it's just an exchange of frequencies, some math to balance the Ledger and then you find that dark matter Caused an effect in the rest of the universe, just by being. This darkness is always opposed, but never overcome, because we are in and out of it, like water and oil, spinning in Nothing, forming a Great Yin Yang.

Sometimes the back of a mask is well made, smooth and polished by the foreheads of many actors. Sometimes the back of the mask is crude, chiseled out quickly to produce something for a tourist, or maybe a yearly ceremony, after which the mask is discarded, or sold to tourists. The special masks are painted with blood, smeared with spit, polished with the hair of the creator. Feathers may adorn it, down from a chick, and white dung used to paint the lines. This special mask is never seen, but is buried high in the hills in a very special place, sometimes with a child, sacrifised to be a servant to the God who will wear this mask. The child is always a female. They adorn her face with special signs, drape an expensive shawl over her, give her drugged drinks and then escort her up the hills to the very special place. By the time she gets there she is so stoned she thinks she is a goddess going to marry a god. They take her to the cave and she leans in to see the Special mask worn only by a god and seen only by one other person. Then they hit her very hard in the back of the skull and place her in the cave, seal it up and never return.

what i said

2010-01-18T08:35:00.001-05:00

Ya know, voting in the Nazi Party would send a message to those bad old Democrats! If we wrote in Charlie Manson for President that would sure show them. After all, this IS all about "sending messages" rather than running the country, right? yeah! Vote in a communist to send a message to the right wingnuts and vote in a Nazi to show them lefties. Don't worry about actually solving the vital social issues of the day, or the decade, just send messages and pout when things go against you. What the heck has happened to American intellect?? Can you people look past your petty party loyalties for a second and SEE the world for a change? WE are bombing Muslim babies and their relatives are trying to bomb OUR babies. Nobody is talking, nobody is listening. Does you religion require madness? Are you obligated to kill all non-believers? Then move to Australia or some other place besides America. Let's live up to our propaganda and CARE about life and CARE about people.

Haiti - Lake Katrine

2010-01-16T09:17:00.001-05:00

Today is Saturday, Saturn's the Male epiphany associated with Harvest. The farmers used to have a bash on Saturn's day and bring out the sour mash. I am more sour than usual, in large part because of the realization and full understanding the implications of so many heads being hit by so much violence in Haiti right now. If any father can relate to the face of the man holding his surely wounded, possibly dead child, it is I. Yet some might say the child died in the arms of someone who cared, and that is true and that matters. It instinctively punches into the gut, deeply next to the still-beating heart. Thank the One they died so loved.

The camera pans. GoogleEarth zooms down to Lake Katrine, to a bed near a window where a 35 year old man stares or sleeps. He's my boy, my child and for so many seemingly lame reasons, it is rare I can hold his hand. He's 100 miles away, being otherwise “cared” for, but in the end they don't care. IN point of fact a tiny piece of a percentage of the money being sent to help that other father and his poor, wandering neighbors, is all that prevents my boy from being closer to me when he dies. See, it is a fact that the general pool of brain injured people die after about 15-20 years. The ones who got deeply hurt, who almost never wake up, they tend to die easier and last fewer years. So it is not with a conspiracy I fear for my boy, it is time, and time is hard to avoid.

Jon could have been a father, should have been, would have been a good one, maybe if we didn't fight about how he was raised. I tend to interfere and that isn't something I'd want to hang on to. I might get a TV star to raise awareness of Jon and have his sperm extracted to give us a child to carry on his name. Oh, that would have ratings and hate mail. But I would much rather Jon hand over his own child, made by him, than some quasi-verse where we can skip past Jon to his child's life. There are so many reasons I could give for Jon being nearby, healthy or not, conscious or not. Jon may be the only man never to tell me to shut up, to let me prattle on about politics or faith. But I know I do not know he hears me, it is a matter of faith.

I do know that my body finds it hard to bear the pain and the liminal points, the edges and joints, are thinning a bit. In fact several are starting to go away, making it harder to take a 2 hour drive to be with my son so I can chat with him, possibly, almost certainly stimulating a few new cells to procreate, my boy trying to get control of his lungs and mouth so he can at long last ask me to change the channel or just shut up for a change. Failing that everyday stimulation from someone who loves him, my boy will most certainly die before I do. It is not hard to imagine him doing it alone, in a white bed, by a window, but not being able to look out at the sky. I can't even hang a poster from the ceiling for him to stare at, because, of course, the nurses and staff could not do what they have to do to keep his body clean and free from infection. An infection run wild, anti-biotic resistant, will eventually give him a pneumonia from which he will not recover. They will probably give me his ashes, or I may have to chase them down.

So it is I observe a Haitian man frantically staring all around at the bodies, trying to find his child, and fearing that he will find his child.

The Unionization of Mother Earth

2010-01-12T14:56:00.000-05:00

Now, for a moment, I want you to see things through different eyes. I want you to see things filtered by some category or another and I want you to lose yourself in that perception. I am used to disappointments. Here's the thing: I am here digesting the contents of an imported beer, contemplating the idea of getting up and brewing up a 5 gallon batch of brown ale. I'd use the water from our well, our new, deep well. So the beer would be digesting malts and such using local water and local minerals. It would have a certain dialect. That beer would sit in my basement for a week or three, and then I'd be drinking it, rather than one imported from England. I like England. But I digest.

Over there, sitting on the couch which was made in Denmark in the 70's, eating her crunchy sandwich and thinking about school, is my sister-in-law. She's digesting food made somewhere between 100 and 3,000 miles away and shipped through an armada of vessels allowing us to have lettuce in our sandwich.

Outside I can see a little red squirrel eating the last of a corn cob. His stomach can handle what the stomachs of the jays could not. Actually, his intestine is processing the cob through the actions of some little critters about a cell wide, or if you get technical you'd have to admit that even at that scale there is a lot of sub-contracting going on, so they are about two cells wide. They are unions of specialists, each able to do a limited set of actions on something pressing against them, like a slurry of cob, seed, dirt and maybe suet. Like an assembly line the stuff that passes is added to or subtracted from, and the final product becomes food for the next down the line. The sunflowers that the squirrel favors are flavored with poop from the squirrel that favored them. Neat. But I digest.

Now see me at my table, my sister-in-law on the couch, the red squirrel on the tip of the elderberry shrub, just those three entities. Ah! Now see, in a simultaneous shift, just the intestines with the sub-contractors and digesters all working in such a way as to create heat, housing, employment, raw materials and social intercourse. Ah! It's slimy, I suppose, but still those wriggling tubes of shit and workers are analogous to a string of small towns and strip malls alongside a freeway or local highway. The people aren't the same color, but hey, what the hell? See those struggling worker unions, those hardhats and picket lines. That's our body, but that's our body expanded to relate to everything else. That's our local environment imprinted on our own DNA from drinking the water, eating the eggs and walking the walk. We aren't what we eat so much as we are what eats us, as well as how we handle the changes.

So now, looking at those twisting colonies of entities you should be able to notice the patterns of correspondence re the squirrel, the two humans AND as we refocus our eyes to acknowledge the earth beneath the squirrel is teeming with those unions, the couch has billions of entities working in and out of tandem, just getting by. My skin, my hair, my dog, all teem with workers changing one environment into another. We're getting beyond surfaces here. We're seeing our reflection on every facet of our environment. When the sun shines we are blinded by our presence. Except it is also the presence of the red squirrel, The earth itself and all the faces turned to behold that which holds us. It's fascinating.

I saw a red squirrel with a corn cob in it's mouth, chasing another red squirrel who had none, no doubt proving Darwin was squirrely. Who was directing the fight, the flight, the request and refusal? Who was it, the two sacks of little bitty workers hungry for more stuff to process, or the little squirrel brains which handled the chattering and scratching? Was it deeper than that? Do molecules crave carbon and oxygen? Do they whore themselves if needed for a nice oxygen fix? The earth, the Earth, Urda, all consume mountains of us all, taking us all in and changing us into nice oaks and poplars. That “sack” of critters is my Mom, I'll have you know! She's everything a boy could need, and more. She's everywhere, she will never stand you up. She might let you die. In fact, she most certainly will.

I could never eat a corn cob, neither could my sister-in-law. Our guts would not stand for it, the unions would go on strike. If you want to eat a corn cob, wait a bit and eat a squirrel, it's the same thing. It will taste like chicken. But I digest.

What would a sustainable life feel like? What if the critters eating that beer knew that in about 30 years the whole neighborhood would go to shit? Would they be long dead, or reincarnated into some other living entity? Would they just move into the Earth and start digesting there? Eventually the region would start to show promise as more minerals and critters died and were reborn. One day some being would harvest the wild fruit and make a fine beer or wine and have a moment when they realized how every living thing was related directly and indirectly to a common source of life and sustenance. Our old pall David Korten failed to name Her, but She has so many names...

Surfaces pt 2

2010-01-06T09:46:00.001-05:00

It is possible to confuse the surface of a thing for the thing itself. When we do that we misunderstand everything about it. It is possible to confuse the mechanics of a thing for the thing itself. When we do that we forget about it's past, fail to see it's now, and cannot imagine it's destiny. We lose time. When we are lost in the girders of a bridge, looking at the columns, the asphalt and cables, we may forget and call this thing a "bridge" with all the things associated. We may believe a thing is it's purpose. A bridge is to move cars and people and products across the waters, when in fact this bridge, at this time was built for beauty, and love. So now we have a quandary, because our vision has deluded us into believing this thing is dead, it is steel and tar and paint. We fail to see the columns under the sand, or the rusted piles of iron it is becoming and will become. We don't see the pigeon shit or the hawks or the suicides. It is easier to filter all that out and become deluded into thinking a bridge is a bridge.

But what if it falls down? Then it isn't a bridge any more? But the rust is still there, the steel, the paint, all there. Pigeon shit may wash off, but it stays long enough to argue the case for the bridge. Then it flows downstream and the bridge rusts, the steel breaks down and the sands take up the color of the old bridge. Something was missing after the bridge came down, something left. Maybe the bridge had a soul, and maybe few could see the soul of the bridge in the steel cables and asphalt drives.

Now somebody took a picture of that bridge in an early morning fog and developed it in platinum and they hung it in a great gallery. It hangs there today. People who look at it can smell the fog, hear the birds and the rumble of the trucks. They sense the soul of that bridge. So that's where the soul went? Were the Plains Indians right to worry about the camera? Some young lover wrote a passionate poem, an epic tome poem comparing their love to that bridge, that wonderful bridge! And reading that poem you get a sense of the soul of that bridge, because it was built for love and for beauty. So there's more soul for you, we're getting closer.

Behind all surfaces, inside all mechanics, there are bits and pieces of a greater soul, enhancing and embracing the delusion of surface while providing the reason for life, for slogging through the physical strain of holding up a body, a form. Yet all is vibration, all is movement, all matter mere properties. So the mass is brass because you've got your head up your ass.

You can't go on forever, you know, pretending you don't understand the eleven dimensions and the folly of picking and choosing a few for particular attention, that's just squinting. Babies play peek-a-boo because it's fun. Mommies play it because it's fun and the baby laughs so sweetly. Neither is fooled by surfaces, no baby ever thought the mother was gone. The confusion comes when the laughter stops. A woman sobbing with her hands over her face, weeping over the covered up face of her baby, this too is confusion. This is a delusion of surfaces that can cause collapse. The knees get weak, the thighs tremble and the stomach sucks in a deep sob and there is a collapse, the bridge between two souls seems gone. This is confusion over surfaces.

When the last photo of the last bridge left behind by the last two people is dust, all of that, all of them, will be as the paint and shit that flowed downstream and stuck to the shore. Still there, just not so easy to see anymore, like a mother with her hands over her face, it's hard to see. And yet, it is because we are small and the rest is so big that we focus on parts and surfaces. But behind the fingers, behind the tears streaming down the face, is Mother and Children should know that. The covered up baby, the cold slab of meat and bone, this is not all there is to a baby and the soul has floated downstream to stick to another shore, but never gone. Even scientists agree things cannot be destroyed, only changed, and change is life, life is change.

What happens to the salt you put in the stew? It's in the flavor, in the smell. It's everywhere there is stew.

We aren't the meat, we're the salt of the earth.

Babylon

2010-01-03T08:49:00.001-05:00

When once the fleeting moment leaves
The sacred widow dons black and grieves
The desert children weep and plead
For someone to supply their need
But none will hear and done's the deed.
The circle's closed, the candle snuffed
The shaman asks, "Was it enough?"
The holy rivers flow dark with mud
The streets of Babylon are thick with blood,
Imams and pastors locked in hate
While angels sleep before the gate
And orphans slink into the night
To dance beneath a moon so white
And owls and jackals post the guard
Beneath a sky so brightly starred.
- Aries

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

2009-12-29T15:15:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-16T10:22:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-08T17:16:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-03T07:15:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-13T17:40:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-13T17:37:00.001-05:00

evolution of market forces in the early twentieth century

2009-11-12T10:11:00.000-05:00

"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

2009-10-22T10:50:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-18T07:41:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-15T22:06:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-15T20:27:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-08T09:43:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-07T16:30:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-02T09:15:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-28T16:57:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-24T09:13:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-16T10:34:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-05T08:21:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-31T09:35:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-29T09:09:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-19T17:43:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-17T15:16:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-16T08:36:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-13T06:29:00.001-04:00

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.

"The Rant" by Tom Degan: The GOP's Little Image Problem

2009-08-07T17:27:00.000-04:00

"The Rant" by Tom Degan: The GOP's Little Image Problem

People need to read this blog in order to see that sanity is not lost.

In Memorium: Hidey Cat

2009-08-05T06:08:00.002-04:00

I got frustrated opening doors for her, but it was a bit of a game and I really didn't mind, Hidey. Some time ago some slob of a civil servant gave Ernst Road the same speed limit as State Route 50. Posted at 45 MPH, our little tree lined, winding road has become hazardous for those who live here. In spite of warning her about the people flying along at 50-60 MPH Hidey liked to improve her hunting skills behind the dumpster across the street. Lots of mice over there, as well as her friend, Linus. Hidey was a purr machine and a real lady. She had a delicate grace and a sense of humor. Born in NYC, she came to our home via Jess, who wanted more for Hidey than being trapped all day in an apartment. Hidey became an excellent hunter and often stayed out late looking for critters to bother and sometimes eat. In recent weeks she had gotten to know Wrigley better, even touched noses a couple of times. She was settling down to be a country cat.

The problem with cars, aside from everything, is that when you drive along at ten over the speed limit you don't look down or up, you just fly along oblivious to the fact that there are hundreds of pounds of steel and plastic carrying you over other animal's paths and trails. Many critters can't comprehend this, can't SEE the car coming. I don't know who hit Hidey or if they like cats or dogs, but they don't realize the pain our family is suffering now. Another love is lost from life.

Hidey, come back if you get the chance. I hope your new kittenhood is in the country and filled with growing catnip and lazy mice. We miss you, I miss you. Wrigley would if he thought about it. Peace unto you, my furry friend, may Goddess Bless.

Poem- Beta version

2009-07-21T09:39:00.001-04:00

Wrigledy Piggledy Pooh
Went off to buy a shoe
A leather sandal or sneaker- phew
Simply would not ever do
For Wrigledy Piggledy Figgledy Pooh.

Deepest Darkest Africa

2009-07-11T09:36:00.001-04:00

At the moment our President is speaking in Ghana to their parliament. I gotta tell ya, it is SO great having a President who speaks as if he could write his own scripts. Someone who can use big words and little words, someone who seems to understand the big words. Now if he actually can do much of what he speaks about, it would be swell.

There is a scene in a Richard Pryor bit I think about somehow when watching the Pres. A shrink is giving Richard a word association test. "Black-white," and then it goes into "spear-chucker, jungle bunny, jiggaboo, and finally, of course, nigger. Pryor has become increasingly angry and wild eyed, "cracker, whitey, honky, and then finally DEAD honky! I like to imagine Barak staring down some southern legislator, saying "DEAD honky" and having the Cheney Assasination Squad haul him away. sigh. we can only hope.

African Americans forget what we are pretty sure is the store of our race. The human race, ya know, because science tells us that DNA refutes the concept of race divisions. We ALL come from Africa. We walked out of Kenya and headed out to bleach our skin, to grow smaller, taller, whiter, and then return to make slaves of our cousins. And of course, it's a good idea to recall that black Africans sometimes sold their kin to the white Africans from America and Europe. Nothing is ever split into a clean 50-50 like black and white, good and evil. Is it more evil to bring a black child to Mississippi as a slave or to kidnap them and turn them into soldiers in Africa? Hard to say. I'd give them both an A+ for evil.

CNN is broadcasting a story about a group of black kids paying $1950 to a PA country club to use the pool. All them little jungle bunnies just splashing away in the same water as white folk use! Yikes, there's neeegrows in the water! Well they returned the money after throwing the darkies out and fully expected everybody to go away happy. This is a good example of just how freaking stupid bigots are. Oddly enough the black children were not happy. We have a nice clip of one young American weeping in the year 2009 because white country club owners didn't want black children in their pool. I guess a black President didn't miraculously turn idiots into citizens. Ah well. Funny thing, the next story line was Spike Lee making the same observation. I kind of wonder if They let a black man into the WH just to keep the neegrows happy. Well, as a fellow African American, although a pale version, I resent bigotry wherever it may be and whoever gets hurt should have a loud voice so we all can see what is happening.

Now we are back in white America, talking about paying down debts and interest rates. Not crying black children, we talked about them for a minute or two, now let's talk about credit cards. Wouldn't it be interesting to have a prolonged discusion about how we relate to one another? Like a few hours, maybe. Well, the next black President can handle that in the year 2090.

Fred Brighton-57

2009-06-23T10:50:00.001-04:00

"The only true consistency is inconsistency, and true inconsistency is inconsistently inconsistent."

Brighton's Theory of '57 shook the philosophical world, and they all went down to the local pub to have a few pints of brown ale and to discuss the implications of the young philosopher's new work.

"So, in other words, the Universe could be just cooking along, doing it's thing, and then POOF it all changes, with no obvious connection between one Universe and the Next. That moment before, that last moment of the Old Order, that might have been a minute ago. But up on the top shelf of your bookcase there is a mote of dust where before there was none.

"And the names of the Demons of the Gate are Belief and Perception, And Belief wields a mighty staff to block the passage of unbelievers, Whereas Perception swings the Green Jade Sword, which alone can cut through all blocks to Knowledge and so to Wisdom."

The cat climbs onto the top of the outdoor sink and then leaps to grab the lip of the sill of the bathroom window. Then she scrambles and cries and scratches at the siding with her hind legs. Someone opens the screen and pulls the cat through, and then replaces the screen.
"Where you been, cat?"
"Me? Out."
Tch tch tch. "That's what you told me last night." The light goes out, the door closes. Now muffled:
"I'm beginning to think you ain't gonna pay back that money. I'm beginning to wonder about this friend of yours, what's his name?"
"Burt?"
"Yeah, Burt. I think I should meet this guy. Soon. Like this afternoon. Now what?"
"...me out! Now!"
"Alright, alright. Here's the kitchen door. Now go find that Burt meatball and get MY dough!"
The cat runs to the birding station and waits to see if a bird is going to land there. She waits a minute, then two. Her tail twitches, just the tip, from side to side. Suddenly she whirls and runs to the shady side of the house, to the outdoor sink. She jump to the small screen covering the bathroom window and starts to loudly proclaim,
"You'll get your goddam money when and if you learn not to replace the fuggin' window screen! Now get in here, NOW!"

Daddy's Day

2009-06-21T09:28:00.001-04:00

I found myself calculating the difference in time to California and heading for the phone as I saw it was Father's Day. No, it's too early to call Dad. Lessee, earth to the One is about a lifetime away. It's Sunday today... oh, so listen...can you hear the sunshine hitting the air and shifting the layers? It hits the leaves and pushes their fluids around, changing sugars and such. The trees wave their branches about in the breeze to expose all the surfaces to the sunshine. In that way our Father shines upon us from all directions, giving us heat and moving our fluids around.

What? Father? Will usually waxes poetic about Mom, especially on Holy Days. But remember, the Tree has two sides and we are reminded to honor the Father and the Mother. Yesterday was Solstice, today is Sunday and it's Father's Day. I'd like to go sit with Dad in the back yard while the birds are singing and calling to one another. He loved their singing and he loved to watch them fly. I know that when he watched them fly, he was flying too. I've been with Dad in the air, I know how he loves those lazy eights and looping turns. We'd go flying nearly straight up in that Cesna 175 until it'd pause, we'd be weightless, and then we drop, loop and turn until any normal man would have passed out or thrown up. I always got to the brink of passing out but held on because sometimes, on a crazy whim, Dad would hand the controls over to me and say, "Here, Stud, take over."

My razor is dull, I can't finish my shaving. It's a disposable but I use it for about a year before tossing. It must be about a year. It's always strange going to buy a bag of cheap razors with a couple day old beard, maybe half shaven. I feel like I need someone to help count out my change. "Here we go, Billy. How many pennies do we have?"

Dad used to hunch his back and roll his shoulders. I never thought much about it until recently, when I roll my shoulders, trying to relieve the stinging, burning fibromyalgia pain. I get up and walk around, angry and impatient, waiting for the damn pills to kick in. I sit down, continue typing, mis-spelling and rolling my shoulders. Dang, it hurts. Dad used to snap at me when I bothered him for something or another. Like starting the lawn mower or finding where I'd misplaced his hammer. I always thought he was mean. Now I'm mean. But it's just because my pills haven't kicked in. Dad didn't have pills to kick in. The best he had was beer and a shot. Yeah, I've tried that but the next day it's worse. I think if I had to live like that I would have to be grumpy the second or third time a kid asked me to get up and do something.

"Here, Stud, take over"

No can do, Dad, you're the man, I'm just a close second. I can fly a Cesna for a few minutes once you get us up into the air, but I'm no mean eagle. I happen to know my Father can really fly. I know he trusts me to carry on down here until I get my wings and can join him in a dizzy, crazy , lazy eight way up where the Sun shines in all directions, warming us and keeping us smiling.

I love you Dad, call me sometime when you get a chance.

Delayed Responses

2009-06-19T19:48:00.001-04:00

I was mincing some dill and sage to put in the dumplings when, as usual, I thought of Dad's dumplings. His mother had taught him how to make cut dumplings and for years our family enjoyed the chicken and dumplings he made. Several years ago he and mom came up for a visit and I made chicken and dumplings for them. Mom said she "liked" them but Dad was vocal in his criticism. "Your Grandmother knew how to make good dumplings. These are drop dumplings! It's not the same, Bill, just not the same. I don't know if I can eat these."
Well, he did eat them and I bet he sort of "liked" them, but every time I make dumplings I think about Dad's cut dumplings. It's like making a pie crust, you need a sizable clear space to roll out the dough, then you have to cut them and set them aside to toughen up. They are great, but my drop dumplings are fine too, especially with fresh dill and sage in them. But I have decided, and you can hold me to this, that the next time I make dumplings, just for Dad I will roll and cut them. I bet Margaret will like them so much she won't let me make the drop kind anymore. That would make Dad chuckle, wherever he is now. I bet Grandma is cooking for him and I bet she's trying new things he won't approve of. Dad needs to loosen up, especially now that he's dead.

Wet Thursday

2009-05-28T09:10:00.001-04:00

My room is a dull collection of surfaces and muted colors, except where the novels under the side lamp are illuminated, and even they are mostly black and red. Reminds me of a kids joke. But outside the world is green. It starts where a bottle of ginger ale is sitting on a TV table in front of the couch. Green, but just at the top where the window light hits it, like a key lime pie green. At the window the plants are all translucent green, shades of glowing green. It flows out onto the world forming great shapes of green. The world is textures of green, all glowing and growing and shedding light. If I was 17 again I'd think I'd gotten some fine acid somewhere. It used to be like that, everything led to acid. They told us that acid rots your brain, like a battery left open on a tossing ship. The idea did more to intrigue acid users into doing yet more of the toxic brew than any fear to them about their minds. See, this is how the train moved for those young idiot savants of the sixties:

Acid causes changes in consciousness which is predicated upon one's personal paradigm of the universe and one's place in it. Fearful people generally took acid to find peace, but peace comes from within and all they found were scary bright lights and sounds they couldn't understand. Your friend or guide was supposed to interpret those inputs for you. Reference peyote rituals and coming of age rituals. Science, in the form of physics, specifically quantum physics, tells us that the immediate universe is a product of perception, relative to one's place and time, one's paradigm. Example: delusional people believe things are a certain way, based solely on their brain's chemistry and their perceptions of the immediate universe. There are no hard edges in nature, so we are all of us to some degree, delusional, otherwise we are enlightened. Acid tells us that there are no hard edges in the universe, according to any number of paradigms, therefor it is likely that we are all of us some degree of the universe, and therefor some degree of ourselves, a self referencing existence. The conclusion reached is that you don't need acid to become delusional, nor enlightened, you simply need to change your paradigm.

Thus, you are what you eat, what you shit, what you till, what you plant, what you admire, what you pluck, what you kill and what you bury. You are what you believe you are, and you might believe you are alone, and then you are.

There is a difference between delusional and illusional. It is important to remember that.

When one is tripping on acid there is often the sense of rapid motion when others might perceive none at all. It's also possible to have that sense of rapid forward motion at the same time those around us are perceived as standing stock still, sometimes combined with a sense of going in all directions at once. The “others” who are standing stock still may in fact be moving, so that one's perception of them increasingly diverges from what they themselves might perceive, and any of the other “others”. The resulting paradigm can be confusion during communication. Nobody makes much sense on acid to others, but often it can feel amazingly sensible. During these times it was always good to have a friend there to tell you how sensible it was not to act too swiftly on one's new awareness, due to the fact that one's chemistry had changed, and it might change again. You could sense this, even if you couldn't absorb it all, like an enormous cake with just the right icing. It would still be your downfall to try to eat it all. At these times it was always good for someone to tell you that, indeed, you had eaten it all, and then show you an empty plate.

You can spend a lot of time trying to see through closed eyes. There are those who would tell you to open them, and those who would tell you to keep trying. Only you can tell if you can see through closed lids, or what you can see. It stands to reason you can see your body, or some version of it. The trick is seeing past your body to some other version of it. Now understand that the stand of trees outside, so vivid in their greenery, are in turn receiving photons bounced off your body, vibrations coming from your body, so that they are perceiving a paradigm as well, and it differs radically from yours. Their perceptions, we are told, must including their roots and leaves, as our hair and skin and nails can be perceived by us. So their perception of self and the immediate universe will include the taste to the soil, the sound of movement, the whisper of air, the smell of everything, and who knows, maybe some electrical-magnetic perceptions we cannot image, not having those organs. So we are living in their universe, and they in ours

If a giant oak or a trembling bristle-cone be enlightened, I assume they would have some perception of me, for I have faith I am of this universe too. Faith is important when creating universes out of paradigms, for faith comes from within. The universe stands without, in all Her trembling new-greenness.

A Pair of Faces Beats an Ace in the Hole

2009-05-27T18:04:00.001-04:00

For some time now I have been talking about the fact that every innocent life taken by American forces is connected to hundreds of family members, thousands of neighbors and friends. Let's face it, the way Americans kill these days if one little girl is blown apart or crushed you can bet a lot of other playmates and friends were taken out, maybe even a mother and father. I've written about how the disaster that put my son in a coma took me down into many a pit of dispair. When Jon was a slab of meat in Arizona and I was a father taken to the ER because I collapsed, hell for the last decade it's been tough on a lot of people, and I suggest often that we should TRY to understand the implications of your own actions, especially your proxy actions by the government forces and hired mercenaries, well it all comes back to bite you on your butt. Or smash your son's head through glass and steel, leaving you with a piece of silent meat that could look like you son, or daughter. I can't imagine Jess left with two steel claws because some young American man dropped a bomb too fast or in a wind, maybe. But now, believe it, there are thousands of young men and women eager to blow themselves up with any one of us if some person tells them to do so, the right person.

Last night on PBS they showed us the faces of thouse kids and explored their world. Well, son, it was as bad as I feared and the facts pretty clear, we are paying to maim thousands of children and we will be asked to pay a huge additional fee, the indifference fee. It's well and good to say the appropriate slogans and lyrics, but seriously, try to think of thins a moment. Every day hundreds of children in America are wounded and killed by their parents, and the President will NEVER say a thing about it. If that does not offend him, or her, then where is the goodness is the American soul that is worth sending our children off to die and kill defending it? I don't see it. What I did see was the face of a 15 year old kid eager to not only kill a stranger, but die in the process. Our goverment would add this point start going on with numbers, e.g. "it only took 19 to destroy a Great American Ediface, now imagine thousands of GeeHawdes strapped with Nuclear fuel rods living next to YOU!" or some such thing, but seriously, you probably have within ten miles of you some young American boy saying something like, "They're all the same, we outa just NOOK them all!"

It's not a fucking reality show, son. It's what my son looked like, and his friends in the ward multiplied by thousands, but no that kid will never set foot in my son's ward and see the tubes and the curled hands of a victim of violent impact to the head, like from a 15 year old kid blowing himself up. He might say that "...we wear helmets, they're pretty good.." and I would have to say, "He was wearing a damn VW van, you idiot."

And what I could say to that 15 year old, if allowed and if he could understand my words or facial tics, is that the problem with this whole thing is that people are asserting that killing children is okay and children are saying it's okay to kill the rest of them. Nothing ever works out quite like you think. Sometimes you end up spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair, unable to move, with tubes invading your throat and shit drying in your bed sores. You never know what can happen, especially if your actions are based on what some person says you should do rather than you first do no harm. You prefer to act on someone's command, like a slave or a dog, like Wrigley. Then you blow up, or maybe partly blow up. Then we all mostly die. I don't know, it sounds like something somebody from a Hollywood movie would do.

24

2009-05-27T15:52:00.001-04:00

So far, in the last 24 hours my friend Sharon has been suffering through numerous tests to find out why her extremities tingle and burn and her hands are icy cold. She hurts, has no energy and looks like she's in her 70's. Sharon is in her 70's but always has looked 60 something because she takes very good care of herself. Next, I fought off a nice migraine at about 3AM, no doubt caused by too many beers, cheese products and a few chocolate cookies in the ice cream for desert. So there i was, choking down Midrin caps, trying to remember what time it was, not wake up Margaret until I was dead sure it was a migraine... because BIG migraines lay me out on the floor, usually near the toilet so I can puke from time to time. Let's see, what next after the migraine? Oh yeah, because the meds make me very sleepy we woke up late and I had to drive Margaret to work in Albany, 50 miles south. Then I had to walk Wrigley because he was so good in the car for an hour long commute. That was fun except it was wet and cold. Then I slept, upon getting home, that is. I slept until 2PM, woke up, remembered Sharon, then thought about what I might do to help. Nothing, actually. I decided to see if I could bake a nice rhubarb pie for her. So the first thing is to clean up the counter of last nights dishes and dog/cat food cans. We save the pull top tabs for kidney patients. Somebody donates 57 cents per pound. Margaret like the idea but freaks out when I pull off the tabs because the metal is sharp and you have to wiggle it back and forth to snap it. "Nonsense, I say, I'm careful with sharp objects!" Unless I am drowsy from the meds and lack of sleep. Then I drag a sharp edge of tin over my thumb and slice deeply into the knuckle. Yeah. Okay, I did not bleed into the dough or the fruit and we have lots of bandaids because I'm always saying things like "I'm careful..." when the world, nay the universe, knows I am clumsy as hell, that's why I never play video games. Drip, drip, drip... leaving a trail of blood everywhere I go, trying to tear the damn bandaid open. Why should you need a combination of three hands to get to a bandaid for your dangling thumb? It's a good product, waterproof and seals the edges together nicely. I finished the pie crust in my usual incompetent manner. Grandma Shirley was great with pies, Dad was great with pies, I USED to be great with pies. Why can't I make a simple lattice top pie anymore? Dang. The good news is my back meds help with finger pain.

Let's see now, steel pin in my left index finger, slice across the right thumb knuckle, arthritis in my fingers and toes and neck and back... migraines... I think that's about it. Yeah, I'm doing great, one body part at a time. If I burn that pie I will begin to think that I'm really losing it, not just misplaced it. sigh.

I have no idea what to fix for dinner. Everything needs knives and other sharp things, as well as fire and hot metal. I wonder if I could boil whole potatoes? Sure, let's try boiling water! The really bad part about all this is yet to come, when Margaret notices the bandaid or the bloody kleenexes and unwashed dishes. Now she gets to say "I told you to be careful!" and it's not fair. She ALWAYS tells me to be careful and I always hurt myself. It's sort of the way I work. Oh yeah the cuts are getting deeper lately but that's just because I'm not careful. Dang, maybe she's right. But how the hell do you make a pie without cutting yourself? I bet Grandma's hands had lots of scars. I do know they were soft, unlike mine.

I think the bleeding has stopped. The timer's gone off. The pie is done. Looks good, except the lattice work is very chaotic, more like a black widow's web, still, it ain't store bought. I think I'll go sharpen my axe and take on that big tree out back.

What Ever Happened to the White Hats?

2009-05-23T08:11:00.001-04:00

Going through the Guardian movie reviews I noted a certain ambivalence in the subjects. Most seem dark and depressed, even the children's movies like Prince Caspian had a lot of death. Now Terry Gilliam has a movie out starring a dead guy and his three substitutes. Wow. Should have started with Johnny Depp, he never dies. But there aren't any heroes like we had when the Lone Ranger was about. Some time around Batman, the movie, the world got a little darker. Might have been when the US of A started bombing villages to save Democracy. Or maybe it was when they killed Jack Kennedy. Dirty Harry never wore a white hat, although Clint did on occasion. My Dad wore a White hat, a Stetson, which is currently sitting on my armoire in the bedroom. I tried it on but it felt huge and tall and tight. Guess I'm no hero. Maybe I should use the hat to check on that aspect of suitors for Jess's hand in marriage. Try on the hat and see how it fits. Jess could probably fit the hat but she wouldn't try it on because it wouldn't suit her style.

Can a black man in a white hat be a hero in a bigotted country? Somehow I think not. Between the tap dancing and singing our President doesn't have time to do right. So we continue to drop bombs on children and call them collaterol damage, a term I have not heard from the White House since the Viet Nam genocide. Makes you wonder.

On the one hand we have the previous crowd of heroes still, but they are old, aged, tired and discouraged. Not that term. Cronkite still writes and speaks out for democracy for America, but the media will not cover anybody who acts like things are not well in America, the best of the best bar none, except immigrants. I would lke a political party in which the Jimmy Carters and Walter Cronkites spoke to the values we were taught about as kids in school. Those values which have been shelved for many years but still sound pretty good. You know, the kind wherein kids in high school are eager to join Peace Corps for a couple years before college rather than look for a snazzy college to get a good wage degree from. Nobody wants to be a hero if they have to live in squallor and drink heavily or eat messy hot dogs for lunch. But the subtlety of this is so fine and clever. Note that since the early days of film the "bad guy" had wealth and a great home and a great looking bimbette. The hero lived in a house with a broken stair, cracked coffee cups and no girl friend at all unless you count the great gal he never kisses. Now we have guys who live in garbage cans as heroes. Not much to impress the children, eh? Small wonder they grow up wanting to be Wall Street speculators.

We can't just start making phony films showing rich powerful good guys because A) it's too soon and B) power and riches corrupt goodness, note the Pope. Batman is a fantasy, remember, who rarely gets laid. So somehow we need to show that even though you don't get rich, you can be happy with yourself and your kids won't think you're a loser if you fight the "Good Fight". You might even get laid. Robin Hood was a good guy who even started out rich but gave it up to fight the Bad Guy.

In India, in the good old days, maybe not so much nowadays, you would live hard until middle age and then, even if rich and powerful, you gave it all up and went to meditate by a stream clothed in a wrap and owning only a beggers bowl. You looked for peace and understanding, not wealth and power. That's India though and we think of them as "seriously messed up with funny accents". But it would be nice if somebody like Gates gave ALL ther money away in order to meditate on Life. It would be even better if the ex-Presidents all went from the White House to work in a soup kitchen. Until then I guess we'll have to make do with ancient mythology as a guide to ethical behavior and the value of a simple life.

Ah! Such Music

2009-05-21T15:54:00.000-04:00

Wrigley likes to sit in chairs, also garden wagons, cars and wheelbarrels. But when there's nothing exciting to do, like when I'm gardening, he likes to climb into a nice chair in the shade and listen to the birds singing. Sometimes he turns his head to catch a nice warbler's tune or sometimes he closes his eyes to a mockingbird's solo. I like a dog who appreciates music..

Thoughts on a Spring Morning

2009-05-10T09:01:00.002-04:00

Here's some thoughts I would like to share regarding the effect of absolute power corrupting the Dems. First, the assumption that "parties" exist as unique entities. I've been watching these entities for close to 40+ years now and all this talk of left, right, center-left etc is absurd as the talk of conservative democrat, liberal republicrat. There is a group of people who trade jobs off and on and tell us all where to send the money and what we will go to prison for. It's called the Political Party. It's made of people who have no skills other than speech, and they aren't very good at that, but they found a job wherein they get paid for speaking and signing their names. They run the country at one level while the Dictator d'jour runs it at another level. You cannot corrupt corruption except by cleansing it, and nobody is talking about cleansing our Party, just exchanging personalities. Obama keeps many of the previous dictator's ideals and people because he also belongs to the Party. He isn't corrupted, he's never been clean. He gets paid for talking and signing his name. He gives our money away and sends people to other countries to kill and destroy and mostly to move money around. War is a fantastic money laundering scheme combined with a great video game experience for those who never went to war.
   As I read about our country from foreign news sources, mostly online because they make it very very hard to find out what non-Americans are doing and thinking, I find that American people are the most lied to people in the western world, lied to by it's government. Nothing is the way our "news" says it is, and for good reason. The news business should have been a news service, a right for all the people to know the truth, because the truth will set them free. But that's like asking a dairy farmer to take down his fences and let his cattle roam the fields and woods. News sources in America serve to 1. spread the official lies 2. keep the herd afraid of Others 3. keep the herd afraid of the herd and 4. keep the herd humming. It is an arm of the government and so is part of the party.
   The Body Politic in this county is not merely corrupted, but like a person with brain cancer is failing faster than can be controlled. Witness the fine quality of "leaders" we get these days. No, 200+ years is a long time to last for a badly organized ponzi scheme tied to an 18th century philosophical essay. At this point the land mass is domesticated enough to support several efficient governments or one large terribly inefficient government. Contrary to national paradigm, we have little control over our governmental form. Notice that it never varies? That's because the same forces act on it from within. The tribolite wants to eat tribolite food even after the ocean has shifted away. So it dies or grows lungs and feet. The US needs to be less United and more States. Let Texas split, according to the Law of the Land. Let the West Coast split off according to their inclinations. Let the NE states handle their regional problems with a regional government, maybe a democracy. The US will become a federation of regions, hopefully with no standing armies. Less money to run, less need for armies, more money for schools and hospitals. Big cities like NYC should become City-States and run themselves or decay into a big museum. Let Europe try to tell the world what to do, or China, or Nobody. I like the last choice.
   Asking if absolute power corrupts assumes absolute power is absolute. It's like asking if an unmovable object can be moved by an unyielding force. No, but it can be destroyed. Absolute power destroys the existing political system in exactly the same way a needle full of pure heroin killed Janis Joplin. She was trying to get clean, like Obama, but she couldn't resist using the needle "just a little bit". Obama wants to play toy soldier too, but in Afghanistan, where his "advisers" (read yes men) tell him he can win, which would be the first time in history. America is in hospice, it's best just to organize a committee to figure out how to parse out the parts.

Change We Can Believe In

2009-04-18T20:45:00.001-04:00

Well, besides the new dog and the new fridge, I also have a new laptop to play with. I just downloaded Scribefire and added it to Firefox. The new laptop is running Vista Premium and it's a pleasant surprise. Go figure. Now I can take my computer with me when I travel taking pictures and use the card reader to transfer the images into Picasa. Anything doesn't look good enough, I just take up the camera and take another shot. Marvelous technology!

The cat is climbing up the screen door again. She has learned after awhile I will get pissed enough to open the door and let her in again. Then she will check the food bowl for fresh wet food and if it's not just right (full) she will go yowl at the kitchen door until I get pissed and go toss her out. A few minutes later she will notice that she's out in the cold and will run around to the front screen door etc etc. Why can't she be more like Wrigley? sigh

Hmmm. This chair/laptop combination is starting to hurt a lot. Seems the angle of the dangle is all wrong, my spine is tingling, my legs are numb and the upper body is knotted up big time. So, bye.

Musings on a Sunny Monday

2009-03-24T09:03:00.001-04:00

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031217/its-not-just-rush

After reading the above piece I found that I was feeling dizzy and vague and I realized what it was: shock. I've seen clips of these people off and on and they never were as venomous, hate-filled and dangerous as the material in Heath's blog shows. I would have thought that the calls from these writers and radio show hosts to go out and murder and torture "libs" was breaking some kind of law. Even with the 1st Amendment there is still the legal concept that you cannot use free speech to incite murder or riots. We've arrested Muslims all over America for spouting such hate. But when a fat, cigar-smoking manly American says the same thing, he gets a pass. In fact, he gets a bonus, fan clubs, merchandising and millions of dollars.

“I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress. “ says Sean Hannity and yet in spite of all the laws to protect people from violence he doesn't get a slap on the hand.

There is a layer of very dangerous people in America, people who have decided the Law is for the weak and the important thing is that America and the world be formed into a reflection of their own prejudices, hatreds and fears. Violence is their first resort, and like an Anti-Christ their leader is the opposite of all the values expressed by their supposed spiritual focus. He's rich, ignorant, hate-filled, violent and shallow. He protects himself while putting others in harm's way. He approves of mass murder, calling it "war" and thinks dead children are "regrettable". He doesn't care about life, he holds nothing truly sacred and his primary personality trait is egoism.

Amazingly, when you look at it, the official American religion is Anti-Christianity. Follow the money, connect the dots. How do Americans view care for the sick and elderly? What's the first thing that gets gutted from a state budget in economic down times? Besides funding for education, it's the hospitals and nursing homes that get their funds slashed. Here in NY we have a blind, unshaven, cross-eyed, dark skinned man for a Governor and when businesses are leaving because of high taxes and ignorant workers he slashes funding for education and health care and raises taxes on businesses. If you could form an analogy of this on an individual basis it's roughly like applying leeches to a diabetic with a high fever.

So instead of healing the sick, we cause sickness: selling contaminated peanuts, meat, salads, water supplies etc. instead of lifting their minds we force feed statistics in over-crowded crumbling schools. We send billions of tons of toxic chemicals into the air, water and earth all over the Earth, killing and maiming thousands, perhaps millions. We haul our garbage to sites off of foreign shores, killing the fisheries and starving villages. We do all this in the open, with various excuses, but with no sign that we plan to stop the killing any time soon. It would not be "cost effective" and would cut into our bottom line.

Christians worship a man who preached love and tolerance and American Anti-Christians follow men who bugger little boys while smoking crack and embezzling church money. They sing in huge crystal domes about crossing the Jordon River when most have never left their home state and couldn't find the Jordon River on a map. They send billions of bullets and bombs to the Holy land to kill people and soak the sands with blood.Some even claim to be doing this in the Name of Christ!

Well, I could go on, but sometimes something I read just sets off a fuse. If we can arrest and imprison people for preaching violence against America, why confine the law to just Muslims? Why not arrest Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter and the rest of the neo-cons? They preach insurrection, armed conflict and assassination. Aren't those crimes? They appear to be when a blind Muslim cleric says the exact same things. Right wing nuts blow up churches, post hate filled letters online, and promote the overthrow of the American government. I'd say those are crimes, and big ones at that. Yet rather than sitting in jail these people are actually becoming wealthy as American Anti-Christians send in their tithes. This is the same layer of society who financed Hitlers rise to power prior to WW2. Right wing fanatics, Republican, (anti-)Christian, upper class along with their followers. We were and are a gnat's ass away from becoming a brown shirted bunch of goose-steppers, with even more blood on our hands. Yet if I wrote a letter suggesting people track down Rush, tear his fingernails off and burn him alive nailed to a cross, they would track me down and arrest me. Rightly so.

Any exception to a rule invalidates that rule.

A new rule may be devised which includes the exception.

Continuing the process eventually creates a rule which is the direct opposite of the original rule.

This pendulum swing of rules and exceptions is the roadmap of civilization.

The Mongols considered their sweep across Europe as bringing the light of civilization to a barbaric land of savages. American anti-Christians considered their slaughter of thousands of natives as bringing the light of civilization to a land of ignorant savages. They nevertheless used the natives form of government as a model for the new Republic of America.

Many native tribes own and operate casinos where they encourage non-natives to gamble away their earnings, smoke contaminated tobacco and drink expensive alcoholic beverages, thus getting retribution for things like the Trail of Tears.

Twaddle, Twit and Twoh
Went out to see a show.

Said Twaddle to Twit,
"But where shall we sit?"

Said Twit to Twoh,
"We have to know!"

Said Twoh to Twaddle,
"We'll have to do battle!"

To battle they did go
And ended Twaddle, Twit, and Twoh.

New Dog on the Block

2009-02-28T10:06:00.003-05:00

For several years I've wanted to have a dog around. I haven't really had a dog since I was a kid. Jon brought Wishes along with him for awhile, but like all the other dogs I've had as an adult, Wishes was not interested in anything I had to say, like "STOP" or "STAY" or "Don't dig up my flowers!" So I wanted a young dog who would obey and who would like to hang with me as I stumble around the house and yard. It would be good to have a dog who would travel well as I take my picture taking excursions around the county.

So, as I was getting the car out of the shop I saw that John Peoples, my mechanic, had a picture of a Corgi dog on his counter and a "free dog" sign. Seems his daughter had a sweet dog who needed more attention and more exercise. He needed a man to hang with who would play with him, drive him around and walk him up and down the street. Like me. So I agreed to take him on for a trial. Wrigley came home with me. The next day I began to feel queasy and I had some burping issues. The dog was great and I took anti-acids. After a few days of getting worse I realized that in spite of getting a flu shot, I had the flu. I had the serious shits and was very barfish. The dog curled up in bed with me and looked sorry for me, licking my hand. This went on for a few days until Margaret started getting queasy and burpish. There followed a very bad scene with her sick, as a dog, cramps and body aches and me with body aches and indigestion walking the new dog. It's been a couple weeks now and we have stopped having the flu at last and Wrigley is getting the kind of attention he needed.

Yesterday as we drove to the bus stop for Margaret we were flying down the interstate when the cars in front of me started braking and swerving. I had nowhere to swerve, however, being graced with a car on either side matching my speed. So I had a couple of seconds to see the head and most of it's body of a deer pop up from under the rear of the car ahead of us! With a whoomp and thud we went over it. By the time we got to the bus stop you could smell burning meat and hair from the engine compartment. As we stopped we could see steam coming from the hood and when I got out it was clear the radiator was losing every drop of fluid, which I needed to keep Wrigley from.

So we towed the car to John People's garage and he got to play with his grand-dog Wrigley. The radiator was split on the bottom with chunks of Bambi shoved inside. I called Enterprise and rented a small car for about a week and John told me that he'd have to hold off fixing it until the insurance adjuster could take a look at it. Funny thing, if the radiator repairs cost enough it might actually total the car! It's a 1998 Volvo after all. So we have a new dog, will have a new radiator and I think I need to buy a truck, like a Toyota Tacoma, so we have a spare car and one where muddy dog feet won't be a problem. The black leather in the Volvo has suffered from Wrigley's claws.

Finally, Izzybag Productions is steaming ahead working on my web site. I'm extremely interested in how they get my stuff up, the other sites they've done were so sweet and clean with great little features and class. My photos should be just great and hopefully somebody will buy either my sculptures or the images. We need to pay down Jess's debt. Her school loans are huge and it looks like employment might take awhile. So, look at www.picasaweb.google.com/fredbrighton for my web albums and cruise over to www.willshirley.com to see the startup of the new site. Someday when I'm famous you can say you saw it all in the beginning. woo-hoo! Life hurts, but it still is sweet like honey. Wrigley says "woof".

Wintertime Blues

2009-01-31T07:11:00.001-05:00

Got up this morning with a sad sinking feeling
There was a big bubble of water dripping from the ceiling
The ice dams on the roof were as big as glacier
I didn't tell my sweety, didn't want to face her
So I got me a coffee and I straightened my head
When the sun comes up and my tummy is fed
I'll find me a ladder and my little nice ax
Climb up on the roof and give it some whacks
Pour on the rock salt and lots of cuss words
Like "son of a bitch" and "you little frost turds"
But sooner or later they tell me that Spring
Will melt all the ice that Winter can bring
With buckets of ice melt and posts holding up
The living room ceiling and rum in my cup.

Maybe It's the Weather

2009-01-22T12:39:00.001-05:00

Awhile back I had an experience where my entire consciousness could be focused on a single spot. Specifically, it was my finger, my left index finger. It was pretty exciting and I have pics I've considered uploading to my web albums except at long last I do have some shame. That finger was fat. And it hurt like Hell, or along the lines of what I think Hell is like. Certainly a lot of nerve pain because that's the hardest for this society to deal with. Nerve pain gets confused with perception of self, maybe because the Self is in part the system of nerves along which the signals pass. So a lot of nerve pain means a lot less You. There's just not a lot of room for You there.

I bring this up as an example of the difference between the body and the mind. When my finger was swollen with infection and the data along the nerve pathways indicated a full blown melt-down of the fatty tissue around my index finger, I was beside myself with pain. It was as close as I could get to leaving the pain behind: just jump to the side of it. So we had a duality going, me and that pain. Most of the planets in the immediate view from Earth are "involved", as they say, with another planet or star. Partners seem relatively common. Just look at Luna and Earth, they've been going steady since Luna was torn from Earth's side by a passing high velocity mass, possibly Venus. That had to hurt.

This finger of mine, this semi-me, doesn't act like the rest of the fingers. When I ask, the rest of the fingers bow their heads, but not that one. NO, it just nods, as if acknowledging a comrade. So it's just not the same as the rest of them. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable asking it to scratch my back. But still, I know it's mine and I do want to be fair. So I ask it to do things, but not things that involve bending. Because of that steel screw thing.

And Earth must feel much the same about Luna as I feel about that finger. You wouldn't ask Luna have have "tides" because, let's face it, if Luna has water, She's hiding it pretty good. It's like She never grew up, never wept and held a young one in Her Hands. Never had an atmosphere. So you're not looking for rainbows here or pretty sunrises. You love Her just the way She is. Well, maybe "love" is a strong word. "Tolerate" is good, plenty good. I mean, Hell, what are you going to do? It's not up to me, I'd be able to handle either way. But it seem to me that a finger of mine ought to be able to at least bend enough to allow me to flip someone the bird without making it into a peace sign. That's all I'm asking.

When I Was Small

2009-01-21T13:22:00.002-05:00

When I was small, as I recall, I felt like a variation of Gulliver, somehow perfect in intelligence and reasoning but held back by size and strength because all the Rest of Them were bigger and pretty much stronger. I'm not particularly strong even now. There's a lot of times when the subject comes up, usually involving the chickens, and it isn't so much the immediate effort, because quite often that feels like good exercise, but the anticipation of the pain that comes later, after pleasure. It always hurts later. That would be an interesting thing to replace "In God We Trust", because quite frankly in God I do not trust, I've read both books and seen the movies. NO, thank you mam, In God "we" do not trust. But I respect and admire His Mother and She seems very "OK" with this situation, this "growing up" crap I seem to be doomed to plow through.

See, God used to beat me up at the bus stop and take my lunch money. As a result I grew up slower and my spinal column was not as dense as it might. So, now that I am not small, I am nevertheless less dense than average and tend to get blown about in the Winds and end up stuck in trees, tattered and torn, or made into nests of strange birds. I always seem to be doing things for birds.

Let me tell you something: some of those doves are getting too fat to fly. They've eaten up all the white millet and sunflower hearts and never with having to do more than sit and have it rain down on your head. Honey, of course they're over weight. If the finches are the penguins of the air, then geese are the elephant seals. It's not that they can't fly, they do that extremely well, but you'd never guess it by watching them on the ground. Even Canadian Geese waddle. And doves rock around as if they never saw a Chaplin movie they didn't like. Or the early Keystone Cops. Actually I saw a person walking exactly like a Keystone Cop, but it had more to do with her hip alignment than a silent movie addiction. Unless... she were a gigantic pigeon wearing the winter coat of a human being.

Wow. That's as bad as magpies. Next they'll be stealing our identities, let alone our nests. I get the feeling that juncos would never steal another bird's nest. They might sub-let it if the lease was fair and the neighborhood good for children. You can't be too careful these days, but of course all that will change with Obama in the White House. You just have to believe that the wave of "HOPE" that swept out of Washington yesterday around noon meant something. Anybody with a fully intact cerebrum had to have felt the wave that went through the Earth yesterday, like the feeling a neighborhood has when the police arrest a fourtyish white male in a late model Chevy van who is identified by seven children as the man who tried to pull them into his van on various Saturday afternoons. Except our perps are apparently, so far at least, getting away scot free. We shall see, ya never know and so forth.

So I walked around, I drove around. When I drove around I made engine sounds and gear shifting noises, like I did when I was small. It made driving around somehow more fun. I do a great brake sound. And I took pictures. In my mind's eye I look over pictures of another age. I faced my size and asthma with determination, I loved the earth, the soil. I tried to share my happiness with others. I felt then like I feel now, full of promise and mountains to climb over. I remember when I was small I didn't just want to go to Mars, I wanted to build a ship to fly to Mars. I wanted to push the boundaries of the universe. I wanted infinity to MEAN something. I had no great problem being small, I used it to climb like a monkey and fit into small places. And now I'm Big and I look at some of the things that lasted and some of the things that didn't and I still manage to have this funny giddy feeling that Things might be getting better, fairly soon.

As Long as Water Flows, Grass Grows

2009-01-21T12:41:00.001-05:00

A philosopher once said that reality is it's own reflection. We talk of reflecting on one's life when older, we say a deed reflects well on a person's character. This concept of passive reflection is also held in the Hermetic saying "As above, so below. As Below, so Above." The first condition of Earth was water below and sky above, one reflecting the other. An early symbol of the Divine Feminine holds a mirror in Her hand. Another early form of the Goddess was the Gorgon Medusa who could not be slain because her gaze would freeze you into stone. By using a mirror you could approach Her and slay Her. By seeing Her reflection rather than her Person you could slay Her. By reflecting on himself a man was able to remove the head of the Goddess. Shamans the world over have as part of their essential set of amulets small mirrors.

Sometimes people wonder why I reflect on problems of divinity when I refer to this blog in terms of caregiving, parenting and art. But in order to care, to give care, it's a good idea to understand what you are caring for. What you care about is also important. So when I talk about Jon and his state of mind, or lack of mind, I have to understand what exactly is "mind" and why does it matter. (Did you know 'matter' and 'mater' are related terms, one referring to the stuff of the universe and one referring to the divine feminine, She who is the stuff of the universe?)

If my son is dead and the flesh that moves and excretes, coughs and falls is not human but mere flesh. After eight years all the flesh has been recycled and made new. Jon is mostly feeding formula from a tube now. No more steaks and enchiladas, no more beer or water. This mass in the bed that looks almost like my son but nothing like my son might be nothing of interest to me or it might be the screaming mind of my lost and lonely child, trapped in a form that does not obey him. Would you want to know the truth, would you try to find out where your boy went? So I reflect on consciousness.

Those people who drive their cars by the house, or walk their dogs past our mailbox, or fly overhead in planes, have no bearing on my son. They never knew him, never met him, don't care about him. I'm the last of the care givers. His mother is slightly insane, trapped in her own fantasy in the nursing home that cares for her. His friends, if friends they ever were, have never come to see him, have stopped sending the odd emails, no longer have his address. They don't care. So I am left with the task of caring and it's important to me that I do it right, so I need to understand what I am caring about and why.

If woman gives form and man gives the spark, what is that form and what was that spark? Did Nancy supply the body into which I placed a soul? Did we make a mix 50/50 of body and soul? Did I have anything to do with it at all, is the scientific myth of DNA a fantasy of modern science? What is human, what does it mean to be aware, and is there a difference between self aware and conscious? Nothing is given here in America 2009, no deep debates about the nature of consciousness. We're busy supporting mass death and destruction, far too busy to wonder at the lives we snuff out.

Why divinity and why write about it? Why not? I couldn't give a rats ass about the self-destructive twits on the news. They leave nothing behind but images that fade away. Why try to understand consciousness when so many people waste it? Look at Gaza, look at Mumbai, look at Hiroshima. But to be distracted by imperfections in a mirror will make it difficult to see the reflection. To pick at your sores will make it harder to heal. So I wonder at the grace of two invisible gases combining to form water which runs downhill to fill an ocean and provide the stuff of life for a lifetime of living.

Every day I wake to pain and wait for it to fade. Every day I take science in one hand, water in the other and combine them in order to move this flesh around without only seeing the imperfections, the nerves that startle, the muscles that twitch, the bones that fade away. Every day when I take the pills that fade the pain away I think on Jon, reflecting on our similarities, our bad backs, our need to understand and I wonder if he wakes up to pain every day, because he can't take the pills and sit and wait. They don't think he can feel anything, so they won't help him out of that pain. They don't think the trache hurts him when he coughs. So they leave it in to save them the trouble of making him move enough to not have fluids build up in his lungs.

Dad died in his sleep, Mom died in hers. Suppose for a moment that your child was sleeping and dying and it was taking years to finish the dream, would you wonder and worry? Would you shake you fist at the sky and scream WHY WHY WHY?

I'm pretty self absorbed, what with this constant pain and all. I think a lot about the various body parts rubbing and pinching and screaming. It's hard not to, the screaming is pretty loud. But maybe because my Mom was sensitive to the suffering of others and maybe because my father would splint the wing of a broken dove I find it hard, even in the middle of waiting for the pills, not to wonder at what kind of morning my son gets, what kind of things happen to him down deep inside. I read the papers online about the Gazan children dying in their beds and think of my son dying in his bed. The Gazan children are dying because we sent rockets to Israel. My son has no therapy because the money went to build rockets to kill Gazan children.

I'm not sure I want Jon to wake up to this world. I'm not sure I don't want to crawl into my bed and pull the covers over my head. Like the snow covering the earth outside my window. But spring always comes, the Goddess emerges to greet Her Mother and the world knows new life. Kicking and screaming we come out of the womb and silent and faded we return. You can't stop living and you can't stop Life, so you might as well reflect on what it means and why you are involved.

Progressive Rambles on a real Cold Day

2009-01-15T13:06:00.002-05:00

Still working on developing some definitions for some terms so that communication can begin. It's so easy to make mistakes when the meanings are vague. But let's make given the alphabet and language, that'll save time, in a manner of speaking.

It's actually easier to just design some terms which perhaps sound in the direction of a previous term, but in this case I'm looking for a good definition for that One that was before the Duality. I mean, it's picky of me at this level to get picky over the concept that that which is before cannot be taking from that which came before it. Spoils the concept of time. Time being a concept from the perspective of the corporal observer. "You gotta start somewhere." So let's compromise with "the Deity". The purpose from our perspective is one of definition and surface understanding. "What are we talking about here?" The Deity Before the Duality would be what? Not like what, but what? Infinite, functionally infinite. This is before abstraction, which requires something to abstract from. If a miss is as good as a mile, then we miss solid understanding of any term by a mile. "Goes without saying."

The Deity is the Deity, nothing else. But is It anything more? No, can't be more than infinite. That would imply a duality exists, and we are before that. Ah, there we have it. The "before", which is also "without" also imply a duality. Wow, that was fast. It was fast because it was before Time, time requiring two. At least two and in a crowded summer room it seems that anything over two gets damn close to Infinity. But I digress.

I, for one, like to imagine in an empathetic field. When I turn that sunny beam to the Deity I am shocked to find myself I find looking back at me, as if from a long, long tunnel. That makes perfect sense. We all see ourselves as somehow related to the Deity, and since we are temporal our looks had to come from somewhere upstream, ultimately with the Deity. And we'd be terribly wrong. We came from the Duality that self created from the existence of both the Deity and Trickster. Without Trickster there could be no Universe, no us to wonder at the attributes of the Deity, the One. But there you are and there I am, so let's make given the Trickster, the element of "What...?" that comes of consciousness. Once you have infinite qualities you have consciousness, because consciousness is clearly part of an infinite set, like the Universe. More complicated than any computer for sure, and connected in an infinite set of ways. Has to be conscious to ask "What...?"

What's it like to be the One, the Deity? Well, it isn't like anything. It's a lot like Nothing, a dead ringer for Nothing, in fact, except for the perception of Self, the consciousness thing. Self perception is not only required of consciousness, but is the leading factor in acquiring consciousness. Now imagine Trickster spinning in a circle, staring back at you all the time. That's consciousness.

In time it would get boring, self fulfilling and self defeating. You can find in Life an imprint of that first boring look. You look for something interesting. There must be an Other. One way to get an Other is to see your Self through an Other's eyes. That's called Empathy, and Empathy is considered to be a feminine quality, as it receives, transforms, and delivers forth some Thing new. In time you'd have infinity filled with infinity and, being so full of it self it would give birth to it self in all it's wonderful details.

IN the beginning you liked bright colors and shining things. You like to bang things together, unless it was too loud. Everything that didn't make you cry made you laugh. You were that close to being bipolar. Later that day you liked to move, to run every where as fast as you could. When you hit things you liked them to break. Then you had children, things like you only smaller and they did things that you remembered and things that you did not. Sometimes they did things you did not like, even when you remembered doing them yourself at that time. They became more like you in power and will, and then they went away. So you did it again, bringing forth life after life, until you were exhausted and you rested. While you rested Things multiplied and grew in power and will, and some left and some stayed. Later that night you awoke feeling rested and thirsty for something. In the vision of the Night Well that reflects your own face back to you, there is the Moon, coldly reflecting the warmth of the Sun back at you.

To be the Deity, for an instance of Infinity, would have to Be like drowning in a lily white sea, with nothing to see and nothing else to be. Until with inward eye the Deity perceives Itself and asks aloud, "Me?"

The echo of that silent "Me?" put waves of ripples across that ivory sea. Each wave a criss to cross itself in Infinity. Thus, you see, both you and me. Say it loud and say it proud "I am!" but not too loud, you wouldn't want to attract a crowd.

On a Bright January Afternoon

2009-01-14T14:01:00.001-05:00

Let me, for a moment, examine something and in that examination maybe I will shed some light on something. Don't be confused by surfaces, surface meaning. What I want to bring a light to deals with fundamental Principles. So, let's start with One. The number one or the One, it's all one. The point is, we have a point. It's just to the left there, after t. and again.

You quickly learn and then understand that a point is pointless. A point has no point for the simple fact that it is one. And you come back around to what's the point? So let me explain. Then I'll come back around to an example. Any question, or fact, or explanation has either a background field, a given, some kind of basis for understanding. Even if you are talking to yourself there is more than one self involved. There's always a question and an answer. Ah! Look back over that last statement and you see the conjunction? That indicates a two parter. Now we're up to two. Now we have a point, and a direction. That's sometimes called a vector, but I digress.

A question is an absence of information, a negative form. Our consciousness, for instance ( this is that example I promised) is attracted to a question, clearly, because it forms the basis for our existence. "Who am I?" and you can take the "who" and replace it with a lot of various questions that may or may not make sense, but they would all be questions. And my point is that there is no point in a question. There is a modified point, a point with a figure above it, a kind of sickle or circle that isn't finished and then suddenly goes down to approach the point, but ends before it can. We empathize with that figure above the point and we are attracted to it's story. So we are attracted from our core to questions.

The thing is, a question pre-supposes the existence of an answer, it cannot exist without that supposition. The answer doesn't have to make sense in any particular sense, the point of a question is called an answer. It's also called a duality. Or gender. Lots of masks for lots of tasks.

Now, from a point to the point. You have a Duality there, an absence and a form. Minus and Plus. Female and Male. Before that Duality there was a One. Now put all that together and you have a triangle. Pour white sand onto a flat surface and you will have a solid triangle. Mold and shape with hands, sweat, blood and time and you have a pyramid, four sided in three dimensions based on a triangle coming from a point.

There are more stones at the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza than at the top. If you had the same number of stones at the top as on the bottom you would have a stack, and it would fall. So, a pyramid brings stability, and for thousands of years Egypt built pyramids and variations of pyramids and stacks of stones until Egypt as a fantastic Empire was no more, and the dust that chokes the visitor from afar is both the dust of the pyramids and the dust of their builders. It's all the same dust to the visitor from afar. And since the builders of the last pyramids breathed the dust of the builders of the first pyramids, it's all a great big dust recycling plant, anyway. A big Circle of Dirt.

The First Woman and the First Man drew circles in the dirt. They drew them for hours, over and over, making mounds surrounded by ditches. Like the nests of the shore birds they built their mounds and their ditches and they laid their futures in the center of the mounds and gave to them their heat. And the circles within the Circle broke open into two parts. One was two, and two were one. They were Eve and Adam. They were children to the One.

Eve was smaller than Adam, but Adam felt empty without Eve. When she was bleeding on the Moon he stayed away out of fear and ignorance and emptiness and longing. When they were as one they were close to the One, and when Eve bore a child they were united as one, a family, a solid, multidimensional configuration. It felt right.

Eve talked to the snake and became wise. Adam talked to his snake and became empty, so he went to Eve and she made him feel full. Then she did it again, got big and cranky, and bore a child, yet another boy. Another mouth to feed. Adam became distant and sullen. The children quarreled. The Serpent sprouted wings and headed west. Eve put on weight.

And that was thousands, tens of thousands of years ago! So nothing's really changed. One becomes Two, who become Three, and it get's finer and more dispersed until One is more like Nothing and the skies are crowded with Stars.

Now the birds are feeding on the seed of thistles outside my window. Some of the worthy birds will live to see Spring. Some of the worthy seeds will be shat upon the earth and give birth to thousands more. It just keeps going around and around. Not a perfect circle, sometimes a question mark, but even if it's an uneven point, it's about all I can handle at this point.

MIddle East Madness

2009-01-05T16:12:00.002-05:00

As I read through the various articles in the various papers and online feeds I am struck by the curious fact that like so many wars recently the lines between the "terrorists" and the "forces of good" get blurry and strange. Like when America decided that pulling out fingernails was good for democracy or that bombing a people who might at some time in the future think about hurting America is good for our security. But I like to pare things down to a few basic, easy to confirm facts, just to get some semi-clear answers.

Hamas was elected to rule over Gaza by the people in Gaza, a classic democratic event for which we spend millions trying to encourage. Oh, not being ruled by Hamas, but being ruled by somebody you voted for in a fair election, unlike the election in 2000 in America when the outcome was illegally decided by 7 Republican justices. But certain states declared that we needed a do-over because Hamas was unsuitable to Israel and America. I have a problem with any country announcing to another that it's leaders are not suitable and must be removed immediately. It just doesn't sound very... well, fair.

Hamas cannot "rule" a region which is a functioning concentration camp any more than the British prisoners of the Japanese could rule their camp. Gaza functions as a concentration camp. It has the concrete walls, the razor wire, the armed guards at the entrances and the tunnels out to allow for an influx of medicine and food and weapons. There used to be a standard that prisoners have a right to attack their guards and try to escape. It was considered a human right. So the people under Hamas have been firing little rockets into Israel, injuring people and killing some too. Maybe a couple dozen. Certainly 5 that we know of in this last round of attacks.

In response the Israeli military closed the entrances, bombed the tunnels and proceeded to rain down bombs and missiles upon the people of Gaza. So far we have at least 500 dead Palestinians, including women, children, oldsters and pets. So according to the Israeli government a Palestinian is 1/100th of an Israeli. They claim the right to defend themselves, which nobody can argue about. The problem I'm having with this means of protection is that considering the culture in the Mideast, one of revenge killing, honor killing and religious killing, it seems obvious that the best way to keep the killing going is to have a serious imbalance in the scoreboard. In other words, if Israeli forces were to respond to the dozens of little rockets raining down on fields, roads and houses by shooting equivalent rockets into Gaza I would see that as a not-unreasonable tit-for-tat. You still get dead babies that way and that seems to be what everybody in the Mideast wants, so we're golden. But 2 ton bombs do not equate to an Estes model rocket with a stick of dynamite duct taped to it. Collapsing entire buildings down around it's inhabitants to kill one man is not fair and balanced. What it is, is genocide, a war crime. It's a slow genocide, like the one America waged on it's Native populations, but nevertheless, genocide.

Look at what the Israelis are saying: we're going to continue bombing until we defeat Hamas and make it so Israeli families can feel safe. Say, if you want to make Israelis safe maybe blowing up neighbors is not the way to do it. The survivors are going to very inclined to make Israeli families suffer. If you want to be safe, don't kill anyone, don't threaten anyone, don't invade their land and occupy it.

Then you have Hamas shooting little rockets over Israeli skies, mostly to no harm, but from time to time they hit a person or a house. Like I said before, the scorecard shows that little rockets versus big bombs gives the bombers a 100 to one edge. So shooting rockets is not an attempt to destroy Israel. It has no chance of destroying Israel, not even if they shoot millions of them. No, they are trying to get the Israelis to do things so horrible and deadly that the world will get so mad they will say "We don't give a damn about Hitler and what he did to the Jews, the Jews have to stop this genocide!" And in theory this is what Israel is doing... except for a minor problem. The Western world, especially America, doesn't like the Palestinians. There are no famous Palestinian entertainers in America, no famous physicists or doctors, no cute Palestinian children on television shows. But there are Jewish examples of funny, smart and tender people in American culture. Besides which, the Israelis are using American tools and bombs to kill the Palestinians. We can't protest too loudly that the Israelis are using the weapons we sold them for exactly the kind of uses they are designed for. We'd look like hypocrites. Again.

So from a market standpoint this is a win-win for American military suppliers. By keeping the Mideast unstable we also keep gas prices at a rich level. Plenty of profits in war, we all know that. If ever there was a moral aspect to American policies we could argue that supplying the means to conduct a genocide is a violation of our moral principles. But our "moral principles" went the way of habeas corpus and truth in advertising. So aside from so-called "International Laws" and "U.N. Charter" there is no good reason for the American government to stop or slow down the genocide of the Palestinians. They won't just fold up and take their punishment, they won't embrace their Jewish landlords and they refuse to ignore the deaths of their families. They demand vengeance or at least justice. They won't pool their money and donate to the American political system. So they're just not trying.

I had a boss once who called me into his office to stare at me for a minute or too and then declare "Bill, you're just not trying." This was because after rupturing my disc, breaking my back on the job because I obeyed orders from my supervisor I continued to come to work, eating codeine 4's and Flexeril so I could walk and sit without screaming in pain. I tried to use the calculator but my mind was fuzzy and confused and distracted by the shooting pains down my legs. So my boss reminded me that I just wasn't trying. And I wanted to climb up onto the hillside with a high powered rifle and shoot my supervisors as they emerged at the end of the work day. Instead I walked away and did not come back. But I had a place to go, I went home. The Palestinians can't go home because Israel is there now and is raining bombs down upon the Palestinian people in revenge for dozens of toy rockets raining down on the Israelis.

I think perhaps it's time to agree that the Middle east is not conducive to human life. Something in the hot sun, the white sands, something makes people go crazy and want to kill children. Read the Various Holy Books to come out of the Middle East and you will find lots of instructions on killing women and children, raping them, burning them, dismembering them. It's not a happy place, it's the sort of place Charles Manson would like to live. So I suggest we shut it down, make it a psychic brown field and don't allow anybody to live there. Surround the area with mazes that always lead back out. Prohibit airplane flights over it. Pave the region. Paint it orange with a black skull and crossed bones on it.

Let's start a religion where killing babies is never permitted, and define a baby as a person who has been born, not just conceived. If we could recall that we are all of us children of the Deity and as such we are all of us brothers and sisters, or sisters and brothers and it is a bad thing to kill your siblings, a terrible thing. My sisters gave me grief lots of times and we fought like pigs, but never to the death. Never did I drop a 2 ton bomb on their part of the house, because that would be insane. But the Prime Minister of Israel is killing his brothers and sisters for threatening to kill other siblings. Where's Mom when you need her? Melting the ice caps, that's where! She will take care of this whole thing sooner or later. We'll be so distracted by the loss of billions of people we might forget to kill the surviving children for being part of a different religion. We might even drop the whole "Kill a *fill in the blank* for Christ" concept.

Mom!! He's touching me! He won't stop touching me!

Drop a cluster bomb on his bedroom and shoot him as he runs out! Handle it yourself.

New Year Murmerings

2009-01-02T10:33:00.003-05:00

It took a couple of hours to start the car today thanks to the deep freeze of an upstate New York winter. Here it is January 2009 and I'm still not living in a city on Mars. Little Billy Shirley would be so disappointed. But on the brighter side I never expected to live this long, either, so I got that going for me. It's hard for me and the car getting started in the cold mornings. My fibromyalgia doesn't seem to like it either, my arms feel like somebody held them behind me all night and squeezed the biceps. Kinda sucks. One of the chickens looks like she's on her last legs, too. They get sick sometimes in the winter and sometimes they get over it and sometimes not. Big Red stayed in her nest for weeks, hardly moving and looking bad. A couple of times I had to poke her to see if she was alive. But she got over it and survived until summer and then dropped dead.

The charger was on the battery for about two hours, grinding away. Then I sat and pumped the gas, begged and pleaded and then Freya suddenly started. We still don't seem to have much in the way of a heater though and that's a problem, but since she's due for the shop to check the "check engine" light issue we should be able to deal with it. My mechanic is in a bad way, he tried to start a motorcycle business just before the recession got real shitty and lost his shirt. So now I'm letting him fix those annoying little things like red warning lights and no rear wiper.

The little birds are all puffed up and round, like they all turned into chickadees. Even the blue jays have breasts today. They are diving and landing, knocking each other off the perches on the feeders. The way they dive off the branches on the chestnut reminds me of cliff divers on a tropical island. Except for the icicles and piles of snow, the technique is similar. Instead of pearls they end up with a sunflower seed.

Back in Phoenix, where it is warm in the winter, when the car didn't start I would call up Larry and he'd come over with his tools and make it work. Never failed to start my cars and explain exactly why I screwed up. This morning I asked Larry for a manifestation or something and then the car started. I'm pretty sure it was just a coincidence because Larry would have explained why the car didn't start and how to prevent this problem. Nobody told me nothing this morning so I guess I am on my own.

A friend is asking me to pick a camera out for her. She likes my photos and wants to own a digital. I'm temped to give her my old one, the one Larry gave me when I wanted to work in digital, but it's an antique with a memory card they don't even make anymore. The real problem is that my friend doesn't own a computer and doesn't want one. When means she'll have to view her pictures at the drug store when she prints them. I told her this and she didn't mind, just so she gets nice prints. I like being known for having knowledge. It's not like I'm another Larry but there are a couple of things I know well. If somebody wanted to use a kiln or build one I could help. I've taught Jess how to brew and a few other things like that, so I am something of a teacher, not as far up the ladder as Larry got, but not bad.

We're putting together our family tree here, using MyHeritage.com and their Family Tree Builder. It's great stuff, you can have pictures, sound clips, all kinds of information about the members of your tree. Then you publish the thing at their web site and anybody who happens to be connected can find the rest of the information, like some long lost cousin might discover that there are several William Shirleys and by comparing some details they can link to our tree and the thing gets bigger. My great grandfather was a William and he moved from Tennessee to Erie New York where he was a peace officer and an herbalist. They called him Doc Shirley and his obit described him as a big man. So I can really relate since I too an into herbs and my pappy was a big man. I'd be a big man, the doctors say, except something went wrong as a baby and although my spinal parts are for a man over six feet tall, like Pappy, I am only 5'-10" minus two inches for shrinking bones and ending up at 5'-8". But Doc Shirley had kids and if they ever build a family tree online they would discover ours and the thing would grow. Eventually, if everybody with family tree knowledge did this eventually we'd have this single huge family tree online for everybody to see that they are related to everybody else.

We are a huge family with all kinds of skin tone, height, occupations and interests. Things don't always go well in families and people sometimes drop out, but unless they die in a lonely grave in the desert they continue on with their lives somewhere. Their children may come to wonder about their great-great grandparents and do a search online, and when they do they will discover that we've been growing a nice one. I just wish Mom could see it, she loved to talk about family members, ancient uncles and cousins and what they did when. My grandfather Tate saved people from a flood, going out to collect them from their houses in a rowboat. He got a cold, it turned into pneumonia and he died. The stories mom told about her brothers were delightful and protected under the 5th amendment.

--- How time flies. I started this a couple days ago and now Margaret has added numerous names to our family tree and one chicken has passed on. Poor Tweedle Dum died, most likely of old age. She is survived by her sister, Tweedle Dee and her friends and room mates, Audrey Beardsly, Sharon and Biddie. Instead of flowers please treat birds kindly.

A Trip to Xmas Town

2008-12-22T16:33:00.001-05:00

There is a kind of melancholy to the sight of a late afternoon vista of broken trees, brush and snow, lots of snow piled on everything. Like that good Russian doctor I heave a heavy sigh and turn away from the window. My toes get cold just looking at it. And yet, I still find myself strapping on the old snowshoes and stomping out to maybe check the suet feeders, or the water in the hen house. I hate the idea of those birds having no water on a day like today. It's so cold the crystal in the air have hit and mixed to form froth and tinkly lights against the flat white of snow. Maybe the tinkly lights are a bit more than my frontal lobe can take. That's why I have no problem with a grey overcast day. That's a simple color palette I can handle. But when the clouds part and the western sun peeks through, shining across the jet black asphalt, the ivory banks, then tumbling down to the stream at the culvert. You keep the colors simple and you have so many options.

Imagine, if you will, a spot of burnt umber, about an inch across. You can lift your head, incline your eyes and see that spot, right over there. It is something you might not have noticed, but the angle of the sun made all the other branches and leaves go a different color. It reminds one of a large fig or something, just balancing on the twig. But then you see it, the bright orange beak. It's a female cardinal. She turns and looks at you even though you think the room you're in is sufficiently dark to hide you, the bird looks at you. Stop breathing, don't move, just stare back.

You blink.

She's gone.

Now imagine that everything you see is a part of a 360 degree mural, roof and floor. It is of a scene from within or just below a huge thunderhead cloud, dark and flashing. Below you is about 4 thousand feet of open air, mostly, and then part of Northumberland fine dairy district, notably the fields apparently beneath your feet. It's hard, isn't it? Not to try to grab a piece of that cloud to avoid falling down to the fields? Just don't move until you understand something about your world. First, it's all around you, not just surrounding you across the landscape, but ALL around you. Secondly, it's massive, without apparent end. Are you breathing out? Are you breathing in? Then you're alive and you are in the proximity of a fine thunderstorm.

Those fields, that grass, those cattle, need this rain. It sustains them. But you are there, above the fields, between them and the storm. You look up, go ahead, don't be afraid, it's far away. You look up, and the clouds are stamped into valleys like the creases in a geniuses brain. You feel like a bacteria inside a Titan's head, and that's why you can't quite take it all in. If it breaks open and feeds and waters those fields, the cattle will thrive, the men tending them will thrive. The soil will be invigorated by the manure. All will be great. Except you will be in between the storm and the cattle, not a happy place to be, maybe.

Do you resent the rain, the lightning, the winds? You wish they'd go somewhere else? yeah, maybe a little, but most likely you were too excited about the coming storm and the tinkly feeling along your spine just before the flash hits. It's a risk you are willing to take. You move along, or it moves around you. Still the earth below, still the storm above.

You must by now be getting apprehensive about the whole thing, about what's keeping you up, when will the rain hit, what are you wearing? The tension is electric. But if you squint your eyes, if you look at it just right you can see that everything you see is formed of tiny, teeny, points of some color or brightness, like an old fashioned television set. But it's more like the way a clump of pampas grass sways, each seed carried along by the plume at the top of the stalk, but each seed looking toward a separate destiny. Each beam of light came from a different place to be bounced, just so, into your eye. Why, in a way the whole damn scene is a cluster of lights in the back of your eye, the impression transmitted to your frontal lobe or eastern seaboard, whatever controls vision. The whole spherical ALL is pointed directly at You, each point or beam of light represents the tip of a thousand light year spear of changing, sparkling, tinkly, light.

You're famous! Or at least the center of attention.

And in your darkening room, with the branches filling up with trembling cardinals and juncos, the tree losing it's tint and going over to the shades, the feeling has not changed. It's still the beginning of the Light, the Lengthening of Days. It may feel cold from time to time, but the days are getting longer and things will someday stir in the soil. It has to make you happy to hear the sound of the rumbling Wheel, toiling over the cold, white fields.

I watch Her, She watches me.
Eye see Her, She seizes me.
That's the Way
the Wagon rolls.

Waiting

2008-12-18T17:14:00.001-05:00

There's an old Chinese blessing that goes, "Grandfather dies, Father dies, Son dies." This is a blessing that provides that all men should live to be a grandfather, that no father should die before his son. It means a lot to me, especially since Dad died. See Mom with her arms around her Man. He's a happy man, he knows he has a wonderful wife who loves him and will always be there for him. Then there's Cher, my sister and she's behind Mom, smiling and hanging on.

Cher is with Mom tonight and she has been for a few days. Mom's dying. Cher is sitting nearby, sewing a dress and watching TV. When Mom wakes up sometimes she asks for ice and Cher gives her some crushed ice. Mom says a few words and goes back to sleep. Her lungs are like old lace and the ice tires her out.

Dad died from, in good measure, drug addiction. He smoked tobacco most of his life and it ate up his lungs until in the end he couldn't get out of his wheel chair. Mom smoked right alongside of Dad, like she always did things: right alongside Dad. Now she's waiting to see him again. He's out there, I bet, but he was an atheist and I bet he's holding back, a little ashamed that he was SO sure there was nothing after death. Who knows, maybe he took that "til death do us part." thing as gospel. But he was wrong and Mom expects him to be there. So, if you're reading this, Dad, you better get your butt in gear and sit tight until Mom makes her move.

Somewhere there are those who were before us and they wait for our return. A world without Mom will be a world without real smiles, a world with muted music and fewer rainbows. But it all fades, doesn't it? This is not our destiny, this is more like a game of hide and go seek. Now the sun is setting and our Mother calls us in to the warm house. We can always play again, She says, and they go through that door to the light beyond. It is warm and all their friends are there, all their relatives. Everybody's glad to see them. Dad reaches out for Mom and guides her to her seat. He's in his white shirt, white Stetson and bolo tie. He's wearing his boots and his belt with the big silver buckle. Mom looks around at all her family and can't stop smiling. Dad can't keep his hands off her. It's better than their wedding party because they know that their love will last forever. It already has.

I am not yet ready to cross the threshold, but I can look through the windows. As they serve the meal and pour the beers and wines Dad reaches over and taps her on her shoulder. Mom looks at him with bright eyes. He leans in and kisses her and whispers something that nobody else can hear. The music starts and he escorts her to the floor. It's a slow dance and they have forever.

The door closes quietly and I turn into the night and walk my slow way home. The snow sparkles behind me.

2008-12-18T12:11:00.000-05:00

This is a picture very similar to what I looked like when Dr. Radcliffe had the various appliances in my mouth so he could perform his happy little root canal. Note this is a simulation, not the real thing. As I explained, I left the camera in the car.

My First Root Canal

2008-12-18T12:09:00.000-05:00

Okay, I didn't take my camera into the dentists office, so later on I arranged a little post-production work. Again, I was working alone and it was a couple hours after the dental work and my face was still numb, but all in all I think I did alright. Now squint your eyes a bit and imagine this nice clean doctor's office in Lake George. There's a big white chair with various things attached to it and a bright light hanging over it. I'm sitting down with my mouth open, a bit scared but not peeing my pants scared. Just nervous, after all, this was my first time getting a root canal. I wasn't even fully informed what the heck a root canal was exactly until a week ago on my first visit to the dentist in Saratoga who was going to be working on my new molar/bridge complex, later. Apparently he didn't like to do the actual root canal so he was sending me to a specialist. So here I am in the chair, the light shining down on me and my mouth open. (see picture above)

I don't mind dentists all that much. They by and large have hurt me much less than other people, like managers, supervisors, friends-of-friends and ex-wives. What I do mind, however, is sitting in a big white chair with a bright white light shining down on me and a pile of strange metal appliances in the tray in front of me thinking about having this drill burrowing down into my root canal, taking out nerves and such and leaving a nice hole for a metal post to be inserted so they can build me a new molar top to which they can attach a new bridge. See, when you say it that way you can see why my eyes are wide and slightly bulging. This line of thought invariably ends with the Novocaine wearing off about halfway through the nerves in my tooth. Then I scream and arch my back, hurting more vertebrae and driving the drill bit into my jaw. The doctor stands on my chest to wrench it out, and as he does there is a snap and the drill bit breaks in half. This requires hours of post root canal surgery to remove the drill bit. During the surgery the anesthetic wears off and I wake up to the exciting feeling of my face spread open to the world and several doctors trying to close it up before I waken fully.

I've read about such things. Waiting for the emails to come down I read the Lancet condensed version and there are times when things go wrong with drugs and the people who inject them.

Dr. Radcliffe is a tall, white haired gentleman with a quiet, grandfatherly demeanor. I tell him about my dreams and fears and most especially that I generally take a shitload of drugs for back pain and so Novocaine sometimes doesn't cut the mustard. He should use a lot and move fast. He is smiling and looking at x-rays and murmering in what I take to be a studious, positive manner. Then he turns with a hypo in his hand and smiles down at me.
"Oh, don't worry. We haven't lost a patient yet." Then he shoves a new appliance in my mouth, a spreader that attaches to another device that seems to be a tiny shower curtain. It circles my mouth, preventing me from seeing down my own throat or something. Part of the structure seems to clip onto my crumbled molar so that it's like a funnel with my tooth at the bottom and plastic shower curtain all around. Did you get that? Now the good doctor begins sticking my jaw with needles from the inside out. I taste something... odd, slightly unpleasant, like lighter fluid. Now it's gone. Apparently the good doctor has shot my lower left jaw with enough Novocaine to drop a bull elephant. I have trouble focussing my left eye. Actually I generally have trouble focussing my left eye, it's the combination of Cymbalta and Lyrica that dry my mouth and eyes and leaves me a bit blurry.

Now I'm hearing the drill(s). Unlike some people I do not mind the sound of a high pitched drill in my mouth. That means the work has started and someday it will be done and I can go home. Dr. Radcliffe seems to be scraping and drilling, grinding and scraping for several minutes. Still numb. In fact I can imagine that saying the word "numb" would take a lot of effort. Probably come out as "nuff-buh". Have you ever seen those African ladies who put the big things in their mouth to make their lips stretch out like a dinner plate? Well, Dr. Radcliffe seems to have acquired one (not the African ladies, the mouth thingy) and he was trying it out on me. The shower curtain thing is stuck over my lower lip which is stuck on my front teeth. I'm guessing this from impressions of pressure on my mouth parts. They're all numb so it's a guess that I'm biting my lip, hard. (Later I find this is not exactly the case, so don't worry about it)

Dr. Radcliffe pulls back, does a final rinse and suction and then takes out the spring steel appliances. He jams a piece of cardboard with a wire attached to it into my mouth and then he grabs my finger and places it in my mouth, holding down the cardboard. The assistant lays a lead apron over my chest and abdomen and they both leave the room. There's a faint "beep" and they come back in, but not to let me go. They both stare at a computer screen on the wall . Dr. R doesn't sound all that happy when he turns around. "Well, looks like we're not quite done after all." and he starts popping those spring steel expanders and little shower curtains into the mouth. He drills some more, grinds a bit, scrapes a bit more. I'm starting to fantasize about the nerves coming back to life. I can sort of feel the scraper somewhere in there. I don't want to panic, but I can feel the panic. My toes are curling and spasming in my boots. Then he's done and it's over. No pain.

He fills the hole with something. I can tell it's a plastic plaster something that quickly becomes hard enough to withstand a curious tongue and most likely soft food. He probably buried a GPS locator as part of the Homeland Security End of Term Project. Even now Google Earth has a label over me: "Voted For Obama" or something. It's all done in a blur and then I'm out at the counter making sure about my co-pay. On the way home a buy a Fosters green label and when I can feel the side of my tongue, some hours later, I pop the top and slurp it down. Keep the nice cold beer over on the right side, please, and no drooling.

Circular Logic

2008-12-11T14:17:00.001-05:00

It's raining somewhere but around here it's snow. What a strange form of water snow is, I just love the way it tries to find a different path for every flake. For days you smell it coming, like the rains in an Arizona desert. I feel it deep in my bones and I'm walking like a sidekick or comic relief. "Hyar I come, Missus, hyar I come, hee hee hee."

There are so many cardinals outside in the bushes and chestnut that it looks like a Technicolor version of The Birds. There's a half dozen males, so bright and black and red like a Russian workers poster. Two dainty females argue over the wooden feeder, ignoring the other empty feeders. The goldfinches don't seem to care about anything but what is in the sock. Looking at the bright red males suddenly diving down into the lowlands I find myself thinking of kids diving off a low cliff into a pond.

Outside the colors are stuck in a small range of shades: tan, white, red, black,green-grey, and gray. The whole world could be described in those few colors. Even the birds, even the birds have abandoned color...except the jays. Bright blue and bold, diving after the seeds on the ground and tossing piles off from the feeders to the snowy ground below. The red squirrel is burning so many calories running around after sunflowers.
In the middle of it I see Biddie, the silly Rhode Island Red who just has to believe that anything near my house must be better. But if she keeps it up I have to go out and take her home before her feathers freeze. I put up strips of plastic hanging from the top of the hen house door, the chicken door. It's like they have over the doors to freezers and beverage center refrigerators. I just have to teach the girls they can part the strips and walk into the house. Funny, they'll climb into a potting shed or peck a piece of glass but walk through some strips of plastic? That takes some working up to accomplish. They stall at the ramp to the door and start mumbling and groaning. Soon one takes a peck at one of the strips. They she dives in through the opening. Several others follow, but some hang back, waiting, no doubt, for some kind of signal from the first hen that all is okay.

If snow were time,
If time were snow,
Then we'd watch it pile up
Outside our windows
Building up on the arms of the chairs
And making it difficult to walk up stairs,
Time from the past just piling like dust
and we go on piling it up
For we must.
If you stop you get buried
If you run you get wet
If you die on the way there
You might get there yet.
All those years you might have wasted
Are like glaciers in the heights
Growing larger yet by inches
In the water known as ice.

It's a little like being placed in the middle of your parents' bed and then undressed and covered with a knitted shawl your grandmother wore. You would like to watch it all happen but the shawl, for all it's delicacy, is warm and soft and it seems right to sleep.

Night of the Living Hens

2008-12-08T11:36:00.003-05:00

This is a true story, based on facts, more or less, as I remember them. The only witnesses aren't going to correct me because they all have something to hide. I went looking for some tools in the garage, which is where I usually start looking for things. In spite of the fact that the garage is filled to the rafters with tools of all kinds I couldn't find the precise tools I wanted, but as I poked around I noticed a couple of old windows had fallen over in the attached potting shed from where they were blocking the door to the garden. The door and the surrounding door frame were mostly not finished and anything smaller than a pony could get through, but we aren't zoned for ponies and it's never been an issue.

So I had stacked some old windows, glass doors and boxes against the hole and then leaned another door against the whole thing. In spite of all my efforts the wind constantly blew through and knocked things around. Unless, of course, tiny ponies had wandered in during their migration to the south, but that is, I think we can all agree, unlikely. I straightened things out and was turning to go when I heard a faint "cluck". I looked around for the source and discovered Biddie in the corner, trapped by a pile of wire shelving. She was very contrite and concerned but I reassured her and got her out of the mess and tossed her out of the near-pony sized hole in my door barricade. She wasn't happy about this and paced around, swearing the way chickens do. I'm used to this. I get this a lot while gathering eggs so I just went on straightening pots and piles of pots. Suddenly, where the fiberglass roof meets the plywood floor a hen head popped up through what had at first seems to be a patch of rain darkened plywood. Seems it was more than dark, it was decayed. I yelled at her about coming into the shed but she was determined. She squeezed herself through the hole, widening it as she went. Then she hopped to the top of a stack of window frames, swearing and shaking her fist at me. She insisted that "free range" meant she could go any damn where she wanted on the property. Well, that was not the agreement and "free range" simply means they aren't charged for rent. I explained this to her as I escorted her through the hole I had tossed her before. I heard a noise behind me and there was another hen head popping through the hole in the floor. The hens liked to go under the shed to escape the summer sun and to dirt bathe in the unfrozen sand in the winter. I quickly popped a pot into the hole, driving the hen backwards. She began to say the most outrageous things about my parents and relationships while she struggled to get past the pot!

In the end I won and she was expelled, but immediately went to another rain rotted spot in the floor and forced herself through the tattered wood. I used a large pot this time but it went through all the way, making a hole big enough for a couple of chickens or one tiny pony. I found a big basket with tools in it and shoved it over the hole. Then I poked around with my fingers and found several other places where the floor had rotted out. I'm not a very good carpenter. When I made this shed I had a pretty good idea but somehow when it was done the fiberglass panels were not exactly overhanging the floor. They more or less pointed at the floor and when it rained the floor got wet. I had thought the plywood was pressure treated but after nearly 15 years I suppose it was too much even for pressure treated. Well, by now I had a bad case of "Bop-a-Hen" going with heads popping up all over the place. It took me several minutes of shoving baskets and bits of plywood before I felt the floor was fairly secure.

Another task for me to take up in the spring: rebuild the potting shed to be hen and rain proof. As I turned I noticed that the window on the east wall was only mostly done and there was a 4" gap along one side. It's one of those "measure twice, cut once" things I've read about. I'm more of a "slap it together and see what doesn't fall down" kind of builder. I took up a long thin piece of wood and looked around for a hammer and a nail. I'm not sure why I kept hammers and nails in a potting shed but there they were. So I tapped the nail into a random spot on the stick and started to nail it against the slot. Abruptly and rather like Night of the Living Hens Biddie leaped up and attached herself to the frame of the window while she tried to stick her head through the slot next to the window. I beat her back with the stick and was able to hammer it down to block the opening. Now all the hens were hammering with their wings against the blocked doorway and from under the floor. It was a feathered, clucking nightmare with me in the middle.

The blockages seem to be holding and I haven't spotted a hen in the potting shed or the garage lately, except... this morning I noticed a feather on the floor between the garage and the potting shed. It might have blown in, I suppose. It might be left over from my battle with the hens. It might have fallen out of my hat, which sports several nice feathers in the sweat band. But the hens are curiously quiet these days and they pace around the hen yard looking uninterested. So I think they're up to something. There seems to be more sand around the potting shed and the hens are looking dustier than normal. They also put a sign up over the big hen house that says "Stalag 13" and another one outside the potting shed that says "Free range means freedom!". I never should have shown them "Chicken Run" last summer.

Painful Reality

2008-11-26T08:57:00.003-05:00

Yup, today is one of those days. Wet, cold and damp. Did I mention cold? Not very, actually but cold enough to make a thin film of ice on pavement. I almost lost it taking Margaret to the bus stop.
Going around the curve on Gailor Road I noted the fresh tire tracks heading for the rail and the evidence that somebody had recently done some work on the rails. This was as I was fish tailing around the corner. I seem to be able to steer fairly well in cases like this so you'd think it wouldn't make me as tense as I was. Trouble with getting tense is the muscles tighten up, your bones rub and your nerves get somewhat inflamed. Which is a fancy way of saying it hurts to get tense.

What I have at the top of my hip bone is a dense area of burning, stabbing pain that likes to occasionally feint going down the leg, but it never goes past the knee. Still it stabs and pokes and otherwise refuses to let me think of anything much but the specific region of pain. Right THERE!

I used to know this kid named Bob Mehan. We were maybe 12 or so, maybe younger, but Bobby was bigger than me, as was everybody else in the class. Trouble was Bobby was the biggest and I was the smallest so it was apparently his right to punish me for my size. He did this by greeting me every day with a pinch of the earlobe. He'd squeeze my earlobe until I writhed on the sidewalk begging him to let go. My father told me to hit him and he'd never bother me again. Dad was wrong. Bobby didn't get mad or anything, you don't get mad at a gnat buzzing by. He just squeezed harder and twisted. Now come back with me to today. Maybe Bobby died in Viet Nam, or a car crash, or maybe his soul is still hovering around me but now he's doing the same service to my lower back, just above the hip. He grabs that nerve and pinches and twists and I grit my teeth and beg him to stop.

I'm not whining, Dad. I'm just trying to explain to people who say things like "Oh, my back hurts too when it gets cold." because what I get is a bigger thing than "hurting". It's more like having a quarter of my body go over to the enemy and turning to assault the loyalists. Like a bayonet, maybe? A sucker punch that remains for several seconds?

Bottom line is it really sometimes sucks that the handful of pain meds I take don't do enough to allow me to function on a day to day basis. I still have to clean the kitchen and make sure the house is set up for having guests for a few days. I have to shop for food and put it away. That means Jess's vegetarian fare and healthy snacks for Jackie, whose heart condition has put her on a strict diet. I look forward to doing all this while gritting my teeth and watching the clocks to see how close I can get to the six hour mark and a new batch of pain meds. If you start taking them too close together you just get addicted and they stop working. That's how I got the thrill of withdrawal from codeine. Boy that was a lot of fun. But I'm not whining, Dad, I'm just telling it like it is.

It is very painful to be vertical on a cold damp day in upstate New York.

I still don't have a kitten to play with either. That bothers me. What kind of a house is catless? Why is there no cat food in the cabinet or catnip in the jar? A cat would curl in my lap and purr and the soft purr would slowly melt away the tension and reduce the spasms. The pills would kick in and I would be able to gently put the cat down on the bed and go finish my chores. That's the great thing about cats, they can cure you of melancholy or pain in just a few soft purrs. I know where the animal shelter is but it's a half hour of driving on slick pavement just to get a new companion. Is it worth it? What if their selection isn't the right selection? Well, Willie, you never know til you know. I should choke down some pills a few hours early and go rescue a cat. Yup, that's just what I ought to do.

I'm starting to get it!

2008-11-14T17:22:00.001-05:00

more animals

Now if I can figure out how to do this sort of code cut and paste thing with my original stuff. This was just a test.

2008-11-08T08:21:00.000-05:00

Jess is certainly the greatest daughter I could have imagined. Well, maybe she doesn't have super powers nor can she operate on spinal columns, but she is a great little artist and a sweetheart besides. I'm very proud of her but as I look at my sweety-pie Margaret I recognize that the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. Still I will take credit for thrusting art books into her hands when she was an infant and I did advise her on the evils of men early on, giving her that cynical "show me" attitude which has spared her the worst of the creepy boys. Hopefully somebody will show up someday with a good attitude and good library. The books are important, in much the same way in the sixties I always checked out new friends' record collections. Jess's generation rips their "record" collection onto their MP3 players or hard drives and expect for the people (like Jess) who appreciate vinyl there aren't many ways to look into a person's soul except their books. Maybe their DVD's but that too is becoming tiny and digital.

Well, now the world has changed and Jess may be traveling in search of employment but we have to give Barack a few months to get things going here. Meanwhile she can spend Euros as easily as dollars and one must work to eat. It seems silly that someone as bright and as talented as Jess might have to cross an ocean for opportunnity but that is how much of America got filled up. Yes, we used to have opportunities but even a new President can't help a country as screwed up as George has left this one, not in a short time frame. He's gonna need at least two terms to filter out the legal crap Wall Street has nested itself within. Imagine the ticker tape parades with convoluted ticker tape faling from above to trickle down on us all. Yeah, maybe a few years in Europe will give Jess enough experience to come back home with more open doors to the world of design. Assuming America ever pulls out of the muck in time we should be able to see our girl fully employed, making the world a better place to live in. Now if she would just design a kitchen Margaret and I could agree on.

She's a babe, she's single but she doesn't take crap from bozo men-boys so don't apply unless you have an impressive porfolio of thoughts and dreams. It would help if you were employed, too. We have these student loans yet to deal with...

Baby Mok

2008-11-01T11:08:00.001-04:00

I wasn't sure when to write about Mok. She was my best friend for some time and her passing was a huge dark cloud over our summer. When she came to us there was a great deal of emotion around it all. Margaret's sister was dying in the hospital and her cats were left alone in the apartment for weeks with just the occasional visitor to feed and water them. Eventually Bernice died and we had to deal with the cats. Two came home with Margaret after lots of clawing, hissing and running around. They were pretty wild. "Flufinella" and "Satanspawn" lived in a kennel for awhile in our back room as we tried to get them to relax around us. Fluffinella showed promise although she tended to lay on top of Satanspawn and dominate her. Then Fluffinella started pissing on the couch and crapping in the hallway. She showed no interest in the sandbox, which explained a lot about Bernice's apartment. Finally I decided to find a no-kill shelter for the two cats: one that couldn't be touched and one that couldn't be trained. Funny thing about a bad economy, shelters fill up with unwanted cats and we couldn't unload them. Meanwhile Fluffinella betrayed her cute name by clawing my arms as I tried to remove her from the kennel. Satanspawn just vanished into the nether reaches of the house. I decided Fluffy needed a new home, like any shelter that would take her, so she went away and my arms healed.

Eventually we got Satanspawn to reappear and take food. Jess decided that her name needed a change. She selected "Mok" from some association we never got clear. Mok began to pace around the house, slinking away from the people and hissing if approached. I tried wet food, dry food, catnip and so forth and eventually you could almost touch her as she ate. We lived in the same house like room mates with different schedules.

I've always felt cats could be approached on their terms and I began discussing life and the related concerns, like weather, food, and noises in the house. It was very similar to having a fight with my wife when she refused to talk to me but would allow me to hang around. Except wives don't get off on catnip. Mok and I started a relationship based mostly on herb and food. Margaret found that Mok would chase things like feathers on a string but she wouldn't release them, preferring to try to eat them. I don't know how long it took to have a good relationship with Mok, but we tried bribery mostly. I changed the timbre of my voice and eventually I could pet her if I was slow and gentle. She grew to like the attention. She learned I could be trained and she would tell me when the food dish was empty, or the wet food was dry or the water dish had dust in it. She had some siamese in her and her talking was very active. I could tell when she needed catnip as she would announce, "Meee yowah-owah yowser mowser meeyow meeyow...." and it was catnip time. She'd walk into the house, look down the hall for Margaret and ask "Hello Mahrgret?" very plainly. I'd tell her it wasn't time for the bus yet and Mok would walk into the bedroom, mumbling to herself.

We fixed a blanket at the end of the bed for Mok to sleep on and she seemed to enjoy bedtime best, almost as good as catnip. We found a cat bed at a local discount store and set it at the end of the bed. Mok was so happy that she had her own bed! She'd come and take naps in it during the day. Eventually she'd start out the night by pacing around the house telling us it was getting late. She'd stand at the doorway to the computer room and lecture Margaret about sitting too long. Then she'd find me and let me know how late it was getting. If I was smart enough to listen we'd go collect Margaret and go to bed. Mok would start out just within reach of our hands, getting stroked and whispered to, then climb into her bed and sleep. I found a tiny teddy bear in the basement among Jess's stuff and introduced it to Mok, telling her every child needs a teddy bear. She would touch noses with the bear upon climbing into bed and then curl up next to it. She was very proud of that bear, that she had gotten a personal toy just for Mok. We found a squishy turtle and a string she liked and they became bedroom toys. Mok began sleeping between Margaret and me, stealing warmth and snuggling happily with her best friends.

During the day Mok was interested in hunting outside by the bird feeders, or down in the lowlands, leaving mouse parts in the path for me to relocate. She was good at it, I saw her haul off a good sized rat! She'd practice hunting with Margaret, using feathers on strings as targets. Margaret was better at it than me, giving a good flick just at the right time. Mok spent many hours chasing that feather. Outside in the winter Mok would hide near the feeders, black on white but patient. In the summer she'd hide under a leaf. Eventually neighbor cats would start invading her turf, drawn by the many catnip plants in the garden plots. Fights would break out and as Mok was tough but small she'd often end up hiding on the roof or stuck in the chestnut tree. She started hunting across the street to avoid fights. I warned her about the cars but like all cats she thought she was fast enough to get by.

One weekend Jess was up for a visit and Mok did not come in after dark. We all called her but couldn't get her to come in. Mok could be stubborn, but she always came in before bedtime so she could snuggle with us in bed before snuggling with her teddy bear. The next morning I went out early to call her again. I found her stretched out on a bit of wading pond in the front yard. Someone had brought her home. Later I discovered it was our nighbor, Cathy who had found her body in the street, dead from a blow to the side of the head, a victim of her blackness and the cars which went by too fast to stop in time.

We buried Mok by Furlinghetti and Starr, not far from Fred's grave and we marked it with a stone. She was buried with some food for her journey, a big bag of catnip and of course her little teddy bear. We tucked her in her personal bed and covered her with one of my soft shirts so she won't be cold down there. I knew that sometimes I could be lonely when Margaret was at work but Mok would come and play and talk to me. Now it's just the loneliness keeping me company.

In this time of wars and elections we can miss the important things in life, like sitting in a comfortable chair stroking a furry friend, listening to the warm purr and chatting about life. Mok was one of the best friends I've had in life and I will miss her terribly.

Hibernation

2008-10-31T09:33:00.002-04:00

I'm beginning to understand the bears, and not just their fondness for berries and honey. I mean the drive to find a warm, soft bed and just sleep it off, the whole summer thing. We had them haul away a ten yard dumpster this week, filled with broken windows, stained rugs and boxes filled with packing peanuts. We kept hauling things out of the garage, the basement and yard until I was sure there was nothing left. Then I'd spot an old window with a cracked pane leaning against the "potting shed". We left behind the larger pieces of iron and aluminum for the kid across the street. He has an old truck he uses to haul scrap away to sell to the guy in town. He'll end up rich someday with a fleet of old trucks, all running on LP gas or something.

I wonder if a hangnail can be fatal? I'm stuck typing with three fingers since my left pointer got that steel pin awhile back and now one of the three has a wicked hangnail, forcing me into a two finger mode. That takes longer and makes me work more. This is supposed to be more fun and have less pain, but then at least I'm not bleeding. I've been trying to take pics in the early morning to catch some nice lighting, what with all the poplars having a few boughs left of those golden leaves I like so much. The oaks are playing around with some subtle shades of bronze. The camera doesn't seem to catch the more subtle tones but sometimes it works. I also got some shots around the altar, showing off the new ent-tree.

Two to three hours after taking my morning meds I find that the combination of several cups of coffee and several pills makes me very drowsy, but I will try to upload one picture before I take a wee nap.

Gloomy Tuesday

2008-10-28T17:04:00.002-04:00

Tuesday is originally the day sacred to Tyr, the god of the sky and today is dominated by the sky, with its big grey presence and its never ending dreary rain! Everything is soggy and I find myself checking the thermostat to see if it's too cold to do some clay work. I don't need to check it, if I have a question about the air then it's not a good time to try artwork. Back awhile I would have had my camera out, trying to capture the subtle shades of grey in a cloud or the textures of a rain dampened lawn. I don't do that very much now but I tend to think that what I've done stands on its own, needing no sequel or follow-up. Besides I'm not sure that the screen captures the details an eye can take in. Maybe that's ego, maybe it's being lazy but I'd rather try to stay warm and find some distraction. Food is good.

I started simmering a bit of game hen about 4 PM and it's pretty much ready to work over now. With a bit of celery and tater and maybe something in the allium family... ya never know how far this could go. A lot depends on my spinal issues, if there's a lot of details and staying in one spot I might just pass, so the fibromyalgia doesn't get pissy. Amazing that perception of reality could shift so. I started out thinking I was fine and even after the various accidents I felt pretty good, occasionally twinges of pain but nothing too bad, until that winter and then the cold taught me that my body was not my slave and that I could be very unhappy inside my skin. Nonsense.

That I would have to stop pounding hot iron, or oak stakes, or axing some tree or carrying a bucket of clay from the local stream just never occurred to me. I figured I'd skate along fairly unchanged. Boy, that was just what it was: naive. Your consciousness is framed by your body, by what's in your gut and what's in your groin and what's going on inside your head. So when your spine is making all kinds of body parts hurt you had better believe that YOU are going to change and in a deep way. I always thought I existed and more or less created my universe through perception, but consider that with chronic pain you have to ask, "Who would wish this on themselves?".

It's not that it defines you, but, for instance tonight, when the therapies and nerve blocks and cutting and so on don't do crap because it's cold and rainy and you hurt, what are you to make of your hold on reality? Why would any consciousness want to roil in this kind of surface? It staggers the imagination. On the other hand, if the Universe were relatively young, maybe this slapping around is thought to be "fun" by the slapper. Nah, I think it's just the way things work out. My parts move better in warm weather but my brain works fine regardless, so here I live and look forward to my snowshoes.

I'll drag this old hulk around like Captain Ahab, who killed Moby Dick and dragged his stinking carcass across the ocean to the nearest harbor to brag about the hunt and the end of the great white whale. Nobody will know the final part of my story either, because like Ahab the final words are written after the means to transmit them are cut off. You could type all day on an excellent blog, only to have it wiped out with a bit of lightning on a nearby tree. That's why we save when we can and send when we must.

Approaching All-Saints Day and Night

2008-10-24T13:51:00.002-04:00

Well, as I was saying a moment ago to my pal: there's a season for everything, and if the roots are not severed the garden will prosper in the spring. I hold on to hope like that, that the next idiot in the White House is more like Chance than Crazy-Ass Mc-Cain. Doesn't anybody read the Bible for its rich library of knowledge of human nature? The guys on TV local late at night cable station 2.3 may be nuts, but they got a thing going on "It's a little bit strange lately.." Every since they brought back moon dust people have started getting just all messed up and plain stupid.

It's so bad I'm tempted to throw the stalks and read the hexagrams in the long form just to try to find some order in the chaos. Like to like, they say, and you can read into things how you like, but I like the way the Book of Changes says it.

I have to wonder what it is that we are approaching, dark in the night, when we approach adulthood. I have to wonder why I went through all those years of just hanging on if I'm the only one who remembers it all? I suppose my adventures on the road, homeless, penniless and without any obvious worthwhile skills, don't merit much attention, being as how little I did that changed the world. But still, hearing these dire predictions and wondering what will happen to those poor people who invested in the stock market puts one at odds with ones own emotions . I don't own stock, not even indirectly as far as I know. So the DOW means little to me. I'm sorry it's failing, but unlike a fawn, a DOW is a construct and they can be de-constructed easily enough.

The thing is that even the sympathy you feel for the millionaires is tempered by the lack of zeros in our own little nest egg. Certainly, as my retirement rests with the Nation, if it fails, so do I. That would be awkward but at that point your pensions is the least of your worries especially if your potatoes didn't do so hot that summer, or your beans or onions. Doesn't take much to screw around with your balances internally and externally. There you are: suddenly "different", like maybe poorly dressed begging for quarters for hot coffee. It has happened to Kings and none of us are kings, but we sometimes act like we think we are. Imagine a whole layer of society which never had to beg for food in its collective consciousness. Never had to beg for pity, empathy or water. Those people could never "get it" about being that hungry, that pared down to a fine point.

Whether it's the people who dropped the napalm or the people who remember the night the napalm was dropped, there is a lack of understanding. No sane person puts itself in risk, yet begging for food admits a weakness so profound that there is no doubt that one is helpless before any display of force or indifference. One of the strangest ironies in this current War is that the technologies which went into producing these Smart Bombs could be used in such a way as to profoundly enhance the lives of the people who suffer under their usage. I expect that the many thousands or millions who were only partly affected by our shock and awe tactics, would make every attempt to acquire those support technologies and use them to make the rest of us suffer. They might even figure out a way to make it pay. They might even become our sub-contractors in future wars and wait for a good time to do something nasty to us. I don't know, but I hear people do get off on "an eye for an eye". It sounds like voodoo to me though.

Falling into winter

2008-10-01T09:57:00.001-04:00

Today I start walking in water. Yup, it's an exercise. The water is in a pool and a treadmill is in the water and the idea is that since I need to lose weight and my spine is compressing as a result if I walk in water I weigh about 1/4 normal. This allows me to burn some calories, tighten my gut and butt and feel more positive about things. It's pretty cool: the new medical center is only about 3 miles away and they do acupuncture and various other kinds of things, most of which the insurance covers. My fibromyalgia must feel threatened by all this because my hands and arms have been aching rather a lot and combined with my back pain I'm not a happy camper. I am getting used to hurting all the time, now I have to get so used to it that I just ignore it. At the moment it still pisses me off that I feel like an old man at 58.

The arm pain is fairly new. It's like somebody has hold of my forearm and is squeezing it down really tight. The hands feel like I've been blacksmithing all day, which is ridiculous. Hell, there's moss growing on my anvil and a tiny poplar tree in the Hardee hole. NO, there's no excuse for it. Could be bursitis or something, too, but I hate to think I'm developing yet another "itis" that represents by pain. It does help a bit to breathe, prana breathing is good for that. It is hard to walk around and do things like wash dishes while doing that deep, careful breathing, especially when listening to CNN makes me yell obscene remarks every few minutes. I should learn more self control.

On the political side the empire continues its tumble down into fascism. If President Palin decides to require school prayer and asserts that we, as a nation, must prepare for the End Times I suppose that will be the final death knell of this country. I wish I could believe that the elections will be fair and honest this time, but the last two certainly formed a pattern and it is a well known truth that once absolute power is given to a deranged individual they are loathe to give it up. I wonder how Cheney will insert his ugly head into the new administration. Maybe Secretary of Finance, he'd like that.

Finally, I'd like to introduce you all to Brewster. He's an odd bird with many cute mannerisms, like fluffing up like a fighting cock and jumping the hens. So far no crowing, so he may live, but if he bothers the hens or makes them set on their eggs all day we may have to have a talk. I already have two offers to take him. He does have pretty green feathers in his tail. I don't know, you decide if he's worth the feed. I have to go out into the never-ending rain and open the hen houses. I really need to clean the floor of the little house, it's got a strong ammonia odor, but the damn rain won't stop! I hate raking and shoveling wet chicken poop. Well maybe tomorrow we'll see the sun. Meanwhile, enjoy Brewster's first official portrait.

BIrdhouses

2008-09-19T16:35:00.002-04:00

One of the pieces I fired recently was a birdhouse shaped like a smurf house. The roof was sculpted like a thatched cottage and the door was very organic and had a little lip of a thing above the opening. I guesstimated the size of the door with my thumb and then built a base designed to fit over most pointy posts. Finally I put a hole in the base so you could secure it.

I've had it stuck on a post out in the back garden on the path to the studio. I was seeing how the mounting worked and getting an idea of how it would be to have that house there. This afternoon I noticed that as I passed the birdhouse on my way back to my kitchen a chickadee flew to the birdhouse door. It landed on the sill, looked around and inside and then popped in. It turned around and popped its head out. Seemed to be pretty satisfied with the place. So, I'm feeling positive about that particular design and that particular house. I think I have to get beefier on the stake holding it up. If we got a wet winter it might drop the house. I also have to waterproof it with beeswax.

A quote from Dick Cheney

2008-09-15T17:21:00.002-04:00

I got this from a site just now. It's a quote from our VP about the powers of the President that needs to get tossed around the internet. It's from the Iran-Contra hearings, so younger voters may not recall the name Oliver North but the SOB is still working in the White House. This quote explains why the assholes in the White House keep telling us that the President is above the law and he can pass on that "get out of jail free" card to anybody he so chooses. Here's the quote:
"To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law."

Now tell me again how this country is a democracy when the President, the chief representative of the Constitutional authority granted by the People, can freely break every law on the books, international treaties, state's laws and Federal?? Who the hell told Cheney that our country is a free for all? Somebody who has a faster trigger finger needs to go hunting with that man. Because he ain't letting go of unlimited power without a fight, you know that!

"Duty bound to exceed the law..." Then why do we bother with laws and the Constitution if one man can overthrow all restraints and restrictions and kill, rape, torture, whatever he feels covers the situation? Hell if the Pres can do all that why was getting a blow job worthy of impeachment? Even if we pretend they tried to impeach Clinton for lying about the blow job under oath, the Vice President himself says that every now and then the President is duty bound to exceed the law. Which effectively says that there is NO LAW IN AMERICA save the whims of the President.

I say fuck them all, fuck them all to Hell! 100,000+ dead innocent people, tens of thousands injured, maimed, raped, and driven from their homes because President Bush and his other head are duty bound to exceed the law. I always was taught they were duty bound to obey and protect the law. Stupid me.