(Entropy): It is impossible to obtain a process that, operating in cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work.

This is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I put it up there so I could get into a very curious bit of 'logical thinking' I have stumbled upon. Quite some time ago I got into the habit of reading online news from around the planet, just to get a broad perspective. Well I looked at an Islamic site to see what they were saying about the world and there was this article which 'proved' that evolution was impossible by using established science. The concept was that scientific Law discredited the 'theory' of evolution. They were crowing about how ignorant we were regarding our own science and in their statements was the one that went something like "The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics clearly states that chaos comes from order, whereas evolutionary theory states that life came from chaos and then became ordered." Brilliant. Like many ignorant people they take a concept from one branch of science and try to apply it to another. This is why people cannot figure out so many things about physics when they move from Newtonian physics to Relativity physics. Different set of rules.

Now, in my opinion evolution never said anything about order/disorder/chaos. What I understand evolution to present is that living things change, usually from environmental changes, and when those changes promote survival and cause changes in the DNA, those new changes may be passed on to their offspring. Thus it is entirely possible for a complex living organism to simplify itself under the correct environmental changes. For instance, if we declare a human being to be a complex living organism, then we can see that when society collapses, as in New Orleans after the hurricane, many people began to act more like cro-magnon man, swinging clubs, snorting after rotted food and raping various women. Or even if you look at death you see that the symbiotic relationship between the various living components of the human break down into their basic parts and crawl off into the soil to do their thing as bacteria and raw chemicals. That is very much like entropy, and entropy is part of the 2nd Law, so people get the idea that living things are primarily governed by the Laws of Thermodynamics.

It's so disturbing to see such 3rd century thinking in an otherwise 21st century culture. But then these are people who believe that when a woman is raped she has committed sex outside of marriage, which is adultry and is punished by stoning to death. These are the people who show mercy towards the rapee by forcing her to marry her rapist. So it's disturbing but not unexpected.

Last weekend I was at a birthday party for a friend's little girl. Her uncle was there, an old friend I used to visit with and play Runequest with. Somehow we got to talking about Islamist extremists and I brought up this crazy idea they were promoting that the 2nd Law cancelled out evolution. The man sat there with a thoughtful look and said, "That makes sense to me. Things go from order to chaos, entropy.... and evolution states that simple forms of life become complex forms and that's the opposite or entropy... so yeah I can see that." This is a man with a 21st century job programming shows for the Fox station in town.

Okay, what happens when you mix chemistry with biology, or biology with nuclear physics, or apples and oranges? It all depends. If you are talking about fruit, then apples and oranges and even tomatoes can be grouped together. They have similar properties. So do the berries from a Dolls-eye plant, but if you say "Fruit are healthy for you to eat every day," and you include Dolls-eyes as fruit.... which they certainly are.... you will die a painful death. So it's important to remember context. It is possible to use chaos theory to describe the movements of people in a crowd.... for certain things, but if you think that you can deal with your neighbor by using chaos theory, you will get nowhere!

In one context I am sitting here typing with my fingers making communication with somebody else. In another context there is a complex set of energies interacting in a chaotic manner according to the laws of relativity. If I stand on a moving train car and project something out ahead of me, it's speed is that of the train plus however much speed I put on it, allowing for air resistance, gravity, and other forces acting on it. But if the thing I project is a beam of light, it's speed is constant, right? Wrong. I once answered a question in science class correctly and got it marked wrong. The question was "What is the speed of light?" and I answered, "It depends." During the argument I showed the teacher that the speed of light is usually stated as 186,000 mps in a vacuum, but it varies as it is modified by it's environment, such as moving through a piece of glass or a mile of sea water. I failed the test, but I feel I made the point. It all depends on the environment.

If you wanted to prove that I was touching a brick wall you could argue that since I was leaning at a 45 degree angle against the wall, I must be touching it. But to PROVE it you would have to define what you meant by 'touching', what you meant by 'wall' and what you meant by 'me'. Seriously, I am a set of energy fields with no real boundries, and so is the wall. In theory I should be able to pass through the wall. In fact there are those who would argue that this question cannot be answered if by touching you mean coming in contact with the wall, since the wall is mostly a vacuum holding energy fields and I might merge slightly with the general region which we refer to as 'wall' and never would a single electron of mine smash into a single electron of the wall. There are others who might say that my perception of the wall and my perception of my body is what prevents me from passing through the wall. It's all relative.

So here's a guy with a reasonably good education who thinks that evolution is proven false by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and creationism must be taught alongside evolution in a science class to which the future movers and shakers of this country will attend. He stopped talking to me when I disagreed with him on these points. He considers me to be an ignorant person who can't think clearly... so sad, such a waste.

There are a lot of ways to phrase various Laws of physics and biology and even the term 'Law' changes depending on it's context. Since we cannot 'prove' anything beyond our own mind, we really can't prove evolution or the General Relativity Theory. But I am not an one celled living organism floating in a primordial ooze, and the nuclear weapon which vaporized Nagasaki worked just fine. I just can't wrap my head around why people want to be so pig headedly stupid and cherry-pick their terms in what they claim is a logical process establishing a point they already believed. They don't test their theory or try to understand an opposing one. They tell you to shut up and return to watching baseball on Fox.

I know I shouldn't expect people to want to debate rather than argue, but I know a doctor, a devout Muslim, and he delights in debating and testing ideas. He says it is part of his culture. After all, didn't Arabs give the world zero and algebra? They are deep thinkers. What about Osama? "He's an idiot defaming the name of Islam in order to reach out and grab power for himself!" Sounds logical to me. Our beloved Bush is an idiot defaming the name of Jesus in order to grab power for himself...

Evolution also has the concept that when a living organism cannot change in the face of a changing environment that organism will most likely die. Trouble is that in the case of the aforementioned Osama and Bush, they will take many thousands of people with them. That's evolution though, and as Rumsfeld would say if he understood enough about the subject to make a comment, "Evolution is messy business and sometimes innocent people get hurt."

There's a jar hanging from a towel rack in my kitchen. It's one of those ball jars, not one of those bell jars, like in Edward Gorey's books... the little tailed lizard-thing stuffed and mounted under a bell jar. So, with a nylon stocking stretched over the top and held with a rubber band, there's this ball jar hanging around the kitchen. It's got a bunch of slightly wilted wild carrot leaves and a very nice caterpiller. We've been watching this caterpiller eat leaves and poop. That's all it's been doing. I hung it from the towel rack so it wouldn't get jostled by me washing dishes.

Well now it's not even doing that. It's getting shorter and much, much slower. It's becoming something extremely different, in all the various categories you'd want to bring up. At first you get the idea that it's just sitting there, but if you sit there with it, thinking about the wilted leaves and the poop below, why you'd have to start thinking about Life, the Universe and maybe why the Buddah is like a bag of poop. Or you might start writing Zen poetry like some kind of crazy enlightened Ferlinghetti... be it as it may, it would be a very busy or un-busy time for a soul to be swimming in. So think about this short, green guy hanging on to what he knows, thinking about how if you could just Think about Yourself a different Way, you could Transform Yourself, without losing Your Self.

The thing that's important to recall is that We know it to be True, because it's happening in a ball jar hanging from my towel rack. I have seen it happen before. The Old Man doesn't wake up and a beautiful butterfly remains. A beautiful winged version of itself will rise up, embrace the suns rays and fly away, to some other transformation.

My quiet, powerful sisiter in law is , or may have been, rising from a form to another as we speak. She, too, grew slower and shorter. I think she grew more thoughtful, but unable to speak her growing thoughts. Like that caterpiller, I could not understand what she felt inside, but I know it changed her because I have seen it before. The Old Man doesn't wake up and they close His House. But somewhere there is a new shape flying. We may not even be able to see it's colors or form with our unchanged eyes, but if our hearts are changed by that other transformation, then we can imagine.

In my universe change means Life and Life without Change is something more like poop. It wilts the leaves.

When I first came to this area from the desert, it was in early Autumn, a time of year sacred to the sense of plenty. There were plenty of colors and everything smelled of change. It was somehow very envigorating to see those leaves, and yet had I visited in January I'm not sure that it would have been envigorating per se, but certainly exciting. But never sad, never regretful per se. There is always the "what-ifs" like a game I played when I was 3 or 4. I played it rather a lot and it started to piss off my sisters, because whatever they answered I would produce another question of "What would you do if...?" Now think about an infinite brother and sister going at it over an infinite time and you get a sense of the energies and potential for envigorating a region of Change can be. If Change becomes a Transformation, then a more beautiful, more transcendent Presence is Understood, is Perceived. In a stable infinte universe all elements, all presences, must be equally perceived. But stability is an anathma to Life, so in a Living Infinite Universe there must be Transformation as well as Change. So the butterfly at first may be thinking mostly about controlling those huge freaking wings, especially in a wind.

We go from creating great art and great literature, to being transformed into a flippant thing thinking always about itself. So there is a form of balence made manifest. And a certain kind of energy is seen descending. Or perceived as descending. Like those penny whistles you pulled the rod and the tone went down and in cartoons they used this noise to indicate something descending. There is a parallel Tone going up and if you think about how your heart skips a beat when you watch a butterfly poised for its first flight... how it was so beautiful flitting away to the next leaf, that energy you felt envigorating you was creative energy being released.

I mean, it's hard to think of those flight maneuvers being somehow coded into the wingstems so it could continue to write Beat poetry....undisturbed by flying. What would be the Point to that? All that Change without Transformation somehow envigorates you in a different Way.

And some thought has to be given to the Shell that the Butterfly leaves Behind. It, too, is beautiful and fragile and eventually changes into the Earth. We all of us change into the earth. In the mean time I suppose I will flit from leaf to leaf and try to control those wings of thought that propell me forward, to use a metaphor.

Sometimes the flitting is imposed on from outside, like those settlers in Gaza. Or like a colony of MRSA, passed on from patient to nurse to patient to doctor, to lots of folks. It reminds me of a film I saw in first grade about how cold germs passed from football to people as white X's. Still, those MRSA colonies are made of living things who have gone through all kinds of near extinctions by the best antibiotics we could devise. A thousand plagues were rained down from above and below at these guys and still they raise their kids and still they grow and have a dream, maybe several. They are survivors, yet they are moved from patient to nurse to patient without a way of remaining somewhere, of finding a home. They know the universe is after them because they have their History, and every generation is given this knowlege, how to survive, how to grow, and maybe even how to die.

We spend a lot of time sometimes on imposing changes instead of understanding transformation. I suspect that may be why there are so many ways we have devised to deal with the shells we leave behind.

Well, it's been an interesting couple of weeks. My sister in law died last Friday after struggling with the damage that smoking can do. She was in about the same shape as Dad: trashed heart, broken lungs, mind starting to drift away... Nice lady, but she never tried to save her own life by not smoking. dad had it thrust on him when they opened his chest and rebuilt his heart a couple of times. My sister in law kept smoking while she was dragging a tank of oxygen around. Her son in law helped out by giving her ciggies. Now he's yelling about sueing the hospital and I find it hard to believe he's concerned about his mother in law so much as how much money the lawyer says he'll get. He has no concept that bankrupting a good hospital might be bad for the community. Sometimes I think he had planned this all along, feeding her habit and getting things set up for a lawsuit when she passed. Obviously I don't think highly about the guy. He likes to come up for holidays and smoke dope in the bathroom with the shower goins. Then after they leave I have to wash all the towels and scrub the walls so we don't smell like a 1967 VW van.

I was reading some stuff that John Edwards put up in his effort to run for President next times. It's so sad. All the old lines, all the old slogans... "we can do it"..." now more than ever..." all bullshit. He doesn't have a thought about changing the system, he just wants to be head of it. Maybe that's what's wrong with American politics. People can become head of something and have power and wealth. Maybe if it cost money to remain in power, like you had to pay 80% of your net worth to the Treasury Department, live in the poorest neighborhoods and your kids had to serve in the military... maybe then the only people who would run for the White House would be those people who really want to make positive changes for the poorest of us all.

Well sometime in the next few hours they will lower the casket into the earth and return the mortal remains to the Immortal Earth. Since her illness was caused by chemicals in the brain it would seem to me that she is now sane, or as sane as a mind can get. Curious concept, sanity. Few would argue that the BTK slayer was insane because he caused so many deaths, yet our Secretary of War is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and few would call him insane. People will pray over the casket today and speak of God and rewards and so forth, yet in the long run maybe the idea of a reward for having lived any kind of a life misses the point of mortality. Maybe mortality is a reward for the hardship of being immortal, like a dip in a cool pond during a heat wave, especially if the heat wave never stops. It's easy to be smart and creative if you are immortal and omnipotent. Struggling with a body and a finite length of time and still managing to be smart, talented or just mostly sane takes a lot out of you. Obviously that jerk in Kansas didn't have what it took and that jerk in Washington doesn't have what it took. Yet my poor sister-in-law managed, even with mental illness tugging at her mind day and night, to be mostly sane, mostly caring, even motherly. Trapped in a ghetto most of her life with few ways out, she raised a daughter who became a mother. She had her pride and a certain dignity by meeting life's hardships with her head held high. When her heart finally stopped and her tattered lungs stopped working she could say she had done it all, pretty much. Her sisters have cried for her, her daughter and grand daughter will miss her terribly. I will remember her smiles and her little voice, always thankful for a kindness and always thinking of ways to be kind to others. She gave bad gifts with an open heart and appreciated any kind of gift or act of kindness in return. The last time I saw her she was in bed with a little smile on her face, waving goodbye to me, her teddy bear nearby. I'm gonna miss her, but not the confusion and turmoil she brought with her. Family memories, old wounds, old times.... she brought them with her for the holidays, along with her daughter and her son-in-law. Still, those problems were minor and soon forgotten. In their place we have the photos of her holding the baby, smiling at the hope of the next generation. There's a whole lot of folks out there who have given the world far less of themselves and with less goodwill.
When it happens to me it will be easier on those I leave behind, I hope. No caskets, no flowers or deadlines to meet. Hand out the parts, let the blind see, let those who need kidneys or marrow, or whatever I'm done with and haven't trashed take what they need and burn the rest. Scatter the ashes or work into a nice ash glaze and put me on a pot and then on holidays you can stick some flowers in that pot and tell me how good I look. Why not? If I was a pothead when I lived, let me be a pot in death. Wouldn't it be interesting if the person seeing with my corneas someday saw the person who is seeing with Larry's corneas? Would we recognize one another? "Something in the eyes..."

Be good to yourself while you yet live
Give of yourself while you can yet give
Life is a song with chorus and rhyme
We sing to the stars in 8 bar time
And once we are done we pour us a beer
Chug it on down and "Another round over here!"
No hangover, no headache, no embarassing gaffes
Just a beer over here and a belly of laughs

Bob's stuck 

Neighbor Bob is moving dirt. Out in the darkness, except for a couple of shoplights, Bob is moving dirt with a front end loader that he bought pretty much for this exact usage. So there's Bob out moving dirt from a huge pile of dirt that overlaps my property line to the space just under his new porch on his new house. Bob's old house burnt up. Or burnt down. It's gone now, just some debris buried in a hole in the yard. I made the call to 911 when I saw brown smoke pouring out of the attic. Too early for a dinner barbecue and too brown for anything I'd like to eat. In the end they saved mostly nothing, just some photos and a few paperback books. Not the ones I loaned them, ironically enough, just some old books that had been in the right place at the right time.

Above the fridge there was a cabinet and nothing was burned in there. Next to that cabinet was another cabinet and in that cabinet was a box of saran wrap. Next to the box were a few plastic bowls. The bowls were melted into one big glob dripping down the cabinet and onto the burnt floor. The box of saran wrap was slightly soiled. Oddly enough, Bob saved from the fire a few books and box of slightly soiled plastic wrap. This is a lesson in karma.

Upstairs, in the living room that Bob had created from a space above what had been a two car garage, a space that became a lovely carpetted room with a big TV and a big leather couch, a kitten was sleeping in a box in a corner. The upstairs didn't burn, but the smoke from the kitchen below and the dining room below and the box of saran wrap wafted up into the living room and into the lungs of the kitten sleeping and the kitten never woke up. Bob's wife cried when they brought out the box with the kitten in it. She and the children all cried when the towel was pulled away and the kitten was in the box, not sleeping but just as still.

I buried the kitten out back near the other small graves from previous kittens and previous dogs and maybe a goldfish or something like that. I did a ritual and said some words and let the kids say goodbye to a kitten they never got to know very well.

This was a year ago.

Bob is moving dirt around his great new house, his neo-Victorian house with it's movie theatre in the basement and the 20' tall ceiling in the dining nook and the master bedroom on the first floor instead of the second floor in the neat tower with three big windows because Bob's wife has bad knees and can't climb stairs very well. Bob's house has radiant heat in the floor and R-52 walls made of concrete-asphalt shingles that can't burn. It has a computer in the wall to control the hot water that runs thru the maze of tubing under the floor. It has an oak door to the back yard that is twice as carved and twice as expensive as the front door I have on my house. It has a bar/dancefloor in the basement, and a gym/bedroom next to that. It has a secret room that doesn't have a door because they have to wait for the inspectors to get through with their inspections.

But it doesn't have a kitten sleeping in a box near the bedrooms.

They did try, but the kitten ran out into the street and got hit by a car, so they decided not to have another kitten for awhile. Instead, they have a wrap-around porch, fiber optic cables in the walls, three bathrooms, five bedrooms, a formal dining room, a family room, a dining nook and at the moment a couple of big piles of dirt from digging the basement out. Bob set the project back a bit when he buried the steam shovel in the slurry he created when he struck water digging the hole for the basement. But it made a good picture.

I think when the dirt is all spread out and the border plants have grown and the grass has set in and the hydrangea is back to it's old self, that Bob is going to get a kitten and make a box near the bed where he and his wife sleep. Bob likes kittens and cats and enjoys it when mine come to visit, when he has stopped digging and moving dirt. My cats seemed to enjoy his company, too. Oona rarely came over, but Ghetti did quite often and watched Bob work on his cars.

Now Oona and Ghetti are sleeping the Long Sleep out back where I buried them, with rituals, tears and grey skies. Something about kitten and cats just makes a guy feel like it's a home. I've always had one around even when I was longing for a dog that didn't dig up my flowers. Maybe the followers of Bast have been reborn here in Wilton and are conducting their rituals and burying their dead just like before, except they don't remember being in Egypt.

There's so much I don't remember. There's so much I have forgotten. I can't remember the name of that kitten that died in the smoke filled room next door. That troubles me a bit, that I would bury a cat with such dignity and ceremony and then forget it's name. I suppose a name is just a label that falls off in the wash water like the mayo jar I clean before tossing in the recycling barrel. Was it Hellman's, or the generic brand? I suppose as long as we feel satisfied with the end result, it's all the same.

Bob has stopped digging in the dirt and the lights are out. It's time for me to go to bed and dream of kittens.

the old man 

Sunday morning we got a call from my sister. Daddy didn't wake up. Mom woke up and dad was cold, passed in his sleep next to his sweetheart, a quiet, reasonable way to go. Not really in character if you think about it. Now we have to reorganize and figure out how to make sure mom has a place to live and enough money to feed herself and such. Odd that in a Superpower nation a middle class woman has to count her pennies.

Daddy was a pilot and he flew into the storms, face first and joyous. He flew by the seat of his pants, by instruments, by guess and by golly. His middle name was Byrd and he flew like one whenever he got the chance. He took my friends up in a Cessna and tried to make them pass out, doing loop-de-loops and lazy eights. He flew into thunderheads, drunk and crazy, slamming into the side of the mountain, breaking the plane and his nose and sobering him up but not enough to stop him from trying it again. Even after his vision left him, even after his hands started shaking and his breath came in a tube, he wanted to fly.
"Bill, I honestly think, no, I KNOW it that if you could just guide me to the seat and get me onboard, I could fly again. See, when you fly in those storms you can't see anything anyway. I was flying by 'feel' most of the time and I can still FEEL, even if I can't see!"
He told me time after time how he just needed a chance to sweet-talk a pilot into letting him try those controls one more time.... He could have done it, too. He might not have landed well, but I know he could fly blind if we just had given him the chance.

Daddy had great eyes before. He could spot a hawk up in a tree a zillion feet away. He'd home in with the transit and let me watch the redtail swoop down and take a jackrabbit. Some summer nights dad would get out the transit and we'd look at the moon, and at Mars. I think I saw the rings of Saturn once, but that's not probable. With dad, it was possible. In the last couple of years I was always finding great books on planes and think how dad would like to look at this one... only dad couldn't see anymore.

Now dad can see as far as he wants. He can see those rings of Saturn, he can see the sparkling ice on Titan. Dad knows now what he argued and debated about all those years. He was a devout atheist with nothing but disdain for religions. I suppose my pagan faith disturbed him. He was used to argueing about Jesus, but he didn't know enough about Isis to form a good arguement. You could see he was disappointed in me, but still he figured I'd come around. We'll have to talk about it when I see him next.

Dad's physical form is in a morgue now, waiting to go to a hospital where medical students can cut him open, marvel at the shape of his lungs and heart and wonder how a man so torn up and rebuilt could have lasted 83 years! He lasted because he was solid steel and full of piss and vinegar. Dad flew like an eagle and walked the earth like a proud stallion. He was weak at times and had his flaws, many bad times, but he lived them all and took the hits.

I'm proud to be his son.

I've always wanted to build a camera obscura in my house. That's a system of mirrors, lenses and prisms that allow you to see around your house, like the various doors. You move this dial and there is a scene projected on a white plate that shows who's knocking.

Now if you think of these images being projected as light being shunted along, then when you pass a picture through a lens to make it smaller and brighter you also make it hotter. That is, if light passing through the lens works like when you focus the sun onto a piece of paper. Should, maybe, get hotter. Perspective is a way whereby a vision gets smaller, too. But it places more and more into your field of view and so each piece has to be smaller to fit. be funny if all things kept their size but had to overlap or something. But if you focus an image of a tree and make that image get smaller and smaller until it's a single white dot, doesn't it set the paper on fire? So you could say that at it's most focussed form, an image is energy. Which is what everything is, anyway. At least according to physics.

So if the image of everything is energy and the everything being imaged is energy, why do we think of everything as every 'thing'? Why don't we see it as a wildly varied pattern of energies interacting? Seems more useful somehow. You see that every thing is everything, like the printed flowers on a cloth are both flowers and part of the cloth, the image being the flower and the cloth being the substance by which the flower is made manifest. I wonder what bit of the universe is being focussed in order to form this image I see of myself?

Now, since infinite is another word for universe, and infinitely large is the same as infinitely small, we can see the analogy of an image being focussed forming this cone with the thing at one end, the image at the other and the energy between the two. But it's relative, isn't it? That thing at the end of the cone, that bit of light which burns, could be a massive object infinitely far away from the observer and that big thing at the other end could appear big simply because it is near that which perceives. Thus do optical illusions work on the mind. So in one half of reality I am an almost infinite thought thinking of that which is so small as to be a point of light and heat, or in the other universe that point is actually infinte in nature and referencing back to me via the energy between.

And that energy between forms the basis of a relationship, creating a single Thing from all the inbetweens. You name the relationship and create the universe. Trouble, I think, starts when the universe created relates back to you, making you part of it's infinity. Like being swept along in a rip tide.

I suppose that's what happens to god who get worshipped to death. But if they had a camera obscura in the infinte, they would see it coming and be able to duck and dodge. Maybe that's why we don't seem to have any more talking, burning bushes except for the occasional daliance with peyote or bad rye bread. Our Diety saw a bad time coming and ducked out. It might have been the Reformation, or maybe the Catholic church. Being All-Knowing still doesn't require All-Acting. The Diety could suddenly, instantly, see the Inquisition ahead and be so damn shocked It didn't say another Word for a whole millenium.

And if your camera obscura was turned on you, so you saw you looking at you, would you have some doubts as the nature of the image? Could it be some confusion would result as to who was watching whom? You question with your mind when you're human, but if you're All-Knowing there would be no pretending because you couldn't fool yourself. Such a pity. No wonder the pagan goddesses and gods tend to be less than All-Knowing. They have more fun. If you held a piece of paper about halfway between the Object and the Point, would the Image be Person, or Deity? And if the Object were All, then all the lenses and prisms would be philosophies and religions, and the Point, that Where-Not-Where that so many Zen folk crave for. It's gonna be really hot, though, in some form. You'd burn like a torch as you approached. And the Observer would See it all.

Each time the light passes through a lens or off a mirror or deflected by a prism, it loses energy, until finally it hits the white plate and you could close your eyes and leave your hand on that plate and never feel the image. The only way you'd know it was there would be to open your eyes and look.

The other day I walked into my favorite pub to 'quench my thirst', as the old folks might say. Anyway, I was sipping on my first Fosters of the day when I noticed this guy at the end of the bar. Now, aside from the fact that he obviously sleeps under bushes and fishes for lettuce from behind the Price Chopper, he's a goofy looking guy. His beard looks like a rastafarian nightmare, all blondish-grey and frizzed out. He looks harmless, though, so I smile and he smiles and I sip.
Fosters is my favorite beer right now. I know that some people say it tastes likes dingo's piss, I dare them to produce an Australian beer that doesn't! But it's my favorite and so I was focussing on sipping when suddenly I get this... armpit smell. You know, when you grab the wrong tee shirt from the pile, the old shirt? Well, I look up, expecting it to be the reincarnation of Dirty Ray from my Caroline Street days, but it's that goofy looking guy. So I smiled at him, trying all the while to not look like I was smiling AT him.
He scooted onto the stool next to mine and cozied up to his beer. It was like two Irish guys who knew each other, but for some reason hadn't spoken to each other for twenty years. I sipped and he sipped. Then, being the loudmouth that I am, I broke the ice.
"How's it going?" I asked
"Sucks great green greasy eggs, if you ask ME, which you do all the time!" and he sipped.
Wow. So I asked him, "What do you mean, all the time?"
"I mean every freaking time, all the time, it's 'God this and God that'! That's what I mean!" and he snorted a bit and sipped some more and then turned to me.
" It's not a great time being God, ya know? NO, of course you don't. Nobody can know what it's like but ME! That's being 'Godlike' or something. It's not bad enough watching you drinking your dingo's piss over there, but I get to BE you drinking that dingo's piss over there, as well as being the dingo's piss itself! That's called being omnipresent or something. It sucks. And omnipotent! All powerful!? To what avail? Of course I win every debate or arguement with any lesser being, I'm omnipotent! There's no contest. I have no idea... well yes I do, but for the sake of argument let's say I have no idea where those people get the idea it's some kind of WAR going on between one of my flawed creations, his minions and ME? Give me a break. Anything I can create I can uncreate. That's called being ALL-POWERFUL!" He stopped to take a pull on his beer, wipe the foam into his beard, and I took the opportunity to signal for another. My back was starting to spasm, but the entertainment was first rate.
I prodded him with a gesture. Continue...
"You know that passage in the Bible about me knowing the hairs on your head? It's absolutely true! I know every dinky little secret of every dinky little detail of everything in the infinite number of infinite universes! And those damn physicists keep finding MORE!. Do you really think any sane being could stay sane for long knowing the number of pubic hairs on Michael Jackson's crotch? This is not a good thing, this being 'all-knowing' Any sane being would want to find a place where there is not so much 'all-knowing' and get there fast!"
"So, you come to 'The PartingGlass'? You stop being the All-Father and go get drunk?" I asked.
"Have you seen the TV about Sudan? Have you read about the latest sex-crazed priest and the way the Vatican handled it? Wouldn't you want to get drunk?" He finished his beer and started fishing through his raggy pants and coat pockets. Then he stopped and looked up at me.
"Uh, I don't suppose you'd..." he said, and nodded at his empty glass.
I shook my head and dug through my pockets for another $5 and said, "Yeah, sure. Hey, another beer over here for my friend."
"I KNEW you'd say that! I KNEW you'd buy me another beer! That's called 'being all-knowing'! and where's the fun in that? It's no damn good bumming a beer from someone if you always know which schmuck will actually BUY you one! No damn fun at all! But, the other thing is, being all-knowing means you know when to stop. Thank's anyway, son. I better be off. Take care. Oh, I don't have to tell you that!" and he walked away, out the door and down the street, I presume. I didn't follow him. I didn't want God to think I was one of those guys who hits on old men in bars. But then, he wouldn't think that. He'd know what I was doing. He's all-knowing. But he's hard to figure out.What the heck did He mean by that? This calls for another Fosters. Yup.

I'm reading some comments in the NYTimes about stem cell research and I notice that for the most part the writers are trying to be coherent and not very rude. There is a theme among those people who dislike stem cell research when it involves the use of unwanted fertilized eggs. They state that these objects are distinct human beings with rights of protection. Briefly getting into the idea that if life was so important to them they should also be mentioning the thousands of people we are slaughtering every week around the world in our so-called war on terror, I'd like to discuss a couple of other points.

I believe that these folks are basing their views on a religious viewpoint, or a philosophy which is is spiritual in nature. And speaking of nature, how does Nature view eggs and sperm? Well, women regularly dispose of unwanted eggs without any guilt over the loss of potential human life. Men dispose of unwanted sperm on a fairly regular basis as well. These cells make no effort to protect themselves. Nature has provided no basis for a stay of execution, She simply takes them back into the matrix of life and recycles the elements. If we say that Nature is the mechanism by which God makes His will manifest, then we can say that God apparently does not consider these objects to be potential humans because since humans are the highest order of life on this planet and His beloved creations He would logically do everything possible to protect them. Unless we're looking at a huge number of martyrs for some unknown cause, they are just cells being flushed or wiped off or out.

When a woman has a miscarriage a human life is destroyed. If we value human life so much, why isn't more being done to rescue these humans and bring them to term. I mean, after all, we can take a person who has been breathing water in a swimming pool for 15 minutes and restore them to life. Granted, it's a limited life based in a wheelchair and maintained by a staff of nurses and doctors, but life nevertheless. So why don't doctors try to place a miscarried child in some kind of life-support system? Because it's not really a human yet. It's a part of the mother that never grew away. It's sad, sure, but not the same as a premature child being kept alive in an incubator. And we know this because otherwise we would arrest the mother for some form of manslaughter like we arrest the people who inadvertedly cause the death of an adult human.

So Nature and/or God do not consider these cells to be humans.

It's not a good idea to second guess Nature and/or God.

The argument that these potential humans deserve the same respect as Einstein or Jefferson is moot, because obviously by discarding an unwanted fertilized egg we are also possibly protecting the world from another Stalin or Nixon. So potential worthiness is not a good point. The naysayers use the argument that the potential good of stem cell research is at least marred by the real destruction of these potential humans. But we are daily killing real humans for a potential goal of creating democracy and this is considered to be clear, reasonable and logical. If human life is so sacred(to use a religious term) that we must never take it, then clearly the Department of Defense(War) is a desecration of our government, since it's sole purpose is the destruction of human life which is perceived as potentially harming others.

Since we are a part of nature every action we take is therefore natural. Children around the world play war games, sometimes with real guns, and this is natural. Male cats march into a den and slaughter the kittens of another tom and this is natural, just as American soildiers march into another country and slaughter thousands of children who might grow up otherwise to be anti-American. Killing unwanted, potentially dangerous humans at any age is something we pay our soldiers to do on a regular basis. It is ironic, if not hypocritical to say that we are a culture of life, unless we mean the destruction of life or unless we mean certain select versions of life. At that point we are simply playing games with word definitions.

The Nazis experimentations on Jewish prisoners is often brought up to counter the argument that we can learn much from these slaughtered cell clusters, but they fail to bring up the fact that Americans took the documents regarding those experiments on Jewish prisoners and used them to learn better ways of killing people. We directly benefitted from that slaughter. Not to mention that we encouraged it by doing nothing to stop it until we were good and ready and the Nazi war machine was effectively weakened by the other armies of the world. So, like most everything in this ultra-right wing administration facts are pruned and picked to provide the best view of their side of the debate. When facts don't exist they make them up. They repeat them often enough that a good number of people eventually believe them to be true. The media, with their addiction to short sound bites and video clips, continue the pruning job until everybody can say they heard it on the news or read it in the paper. At least those who can still read, unlike our beloved leader. He has short pithy statements read to him by his beloved mammy. The curious thing is how many of the administration seem actually proud of the fact that our President is an illiterate.

I wonder why they find it so important to eliminate all hope for the sick and the poor? I suppose that so long as there is hope there can be a seed of resistance. Though they say they want to preserve life what they actually mean is that they want to preserve ignorance, since only an ignorant people can be fooled into thinking that imprisonment is freedom and death is life.

Isn't it ironic that it was the Goddess of Life who gave us all these extra cells because they contained the means by which we could cure all those terrible diseases and deformities which afflict us? I have heard that everything we need was given to us in the begining by the Creator.

Maybe there is an emerging business in providing tiny high-cost funerals for all those unwanted cells. Maybe there is a PAC feeding millions of dollars to the right-wing fanatics who have usurped our semi-democratic processes, and this PAC wants to start promoting the idea that we should collect all our unused sperm and eggs and bury them in hallowed ground with many of the same rites and accessories as we now use for fully formed humans. Like the Egyptians we should be saving our fingernails and the hair falling out of our heads. Vacuum up the skin cells from our sheets because they could be used to clone our duplicates. "Love me, love my clone."

The chant that all life is sacred is misunderstood by many liberals. They complain that the right wing is waging war while claiming that they respect life. The right wingers don't respect life insofar as they think killing is bad. No, they think killing is great! Life is sacred in that the taking of life pleases the deity they worship. They document it in their Holy Bible, they parade it on the streets of America, celebrating various wars and assasinations. They buy millions of toy guns from their Communist Chinese pals and teach our children that war is fun. They consign tens of thousands of Americans to lives of starvation and dispair and early deaths. They fabricate great gasoline gulping vehicles just so a single person driving to the mall can not only pollute the air, earth and waters of this planet, but provide financial support to the very terrorists we trained, released and now hunt.

Life is sacred, yes, but only in the taking of it. That's what they mean.

America owes more and more of it's culture to the Aztec and Nazis and less and less to the revolutionaries that fought and died to create it.

However, this process is very common in human history and in the long run it works out. Very much like the process in the human body where parts come and go and eventually the body dies, but Life itself moves on. Countries come and countries go and history may record the militant facist country of America which attempted to take over the planet and was destroyed by it's greed and incompetance, but left the world many scientific and artistic wonders.

So last night I went out back to collect the eggs from the henhouse. Me, my little basket and the flashlight. It was cold and damp of course, because I needed to mow the lawn and do garden work, so naturally the Trickster thought it would be funny for me to hurt a lot, I guess. Or maybe the plants needed watering. Never assume you can ever assume.

I had a chat with the girls, reassuring them and explaining why I hadn't been able to fix their house much even though I had promised last week to clean out the crap and build new roosts. Big Red wasn't sure, but she told the others to "wait and see" and for that I thanked her. I stepped out to the gate and paused. A couple of days ago I might have had a black and white friend waiting for me. Furlinghetti likes to follow me around and see what I'm doing and I always collect the eggs late, just before bedtime and so when I have my basket and flashlight in hand she knows it's almost time to go to bed. So she waits for me by the gate and follows me inside. The last couple of days, though, she has been too sick and waits for me in her basket by the bedroom door. But not this night.

Tonight if she waits somewhere it is somewhere far away and right nearby. Maybe Teddy is stroking her, or maybe she is stroking Teddy, I don't know, but I know that I paused and felt a tightening of my throat, stopping me from saying, "Time to go in, Furball, let's go."

She was in her box the other day, looking pretty bad. She barely had the strength to lift her head when I approached. Her eyes were 'wrong', not her eyes at all. I noticed that she didn't seem to be forcussing on me. Her tumors had started breaking through her skin and one had gotten infected. She was hot with fever. I spoke to her, telling her that I was willing to take her to the vet and there she would get a shot and go to sleep and never wake up. I asked her if this is what she wanted. She seemed to focus on my face and then she folded her paws and laid her chin down, closing her eyes for a minute, as if taking a nap. Then she lifted her head and stared at me, calmly. I took this to mean she wanted to sleep and I knew that with the probable pain from the sores and the fever that there was only one way to get a good sleep anymore.

She didn't protest when I lifted her and placed her on her feet, but she sagged down immediately. No chance for her to rise up and go listen to the birds. No chance to sleep between us on the big bed. No chance to chase a chipmunk out of the herb garden.... she was done with all that. There was only one thing she wanted now, and that was a good sleep.

On the way to the vets I told her that Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose and that she was going to do pretty much the same thing. No comment from Furball. No protests over the box or the ride. I signed the papers and opened the box and stroked her dry hot fur. I touched her head softly and told her goodbye.

I'm so damn tired of saying goodbye to friends.

No one is left to chat with during the day, to listen to me, to play with me. My sweetheart has a job 50 miles away and I wait for her at the bus stop like a kid waiting for desert. But she's heard all my jokes and needs to think about what needs to be done the next day, maybe even tonight by laptop linked to the office. My stories of woodchucks, herbs and new birds at the feeder are interesting, but not that important, not really. She listens as best she can while she writes down notes for tomorrow.

Furlinghetti never worried about tomorrow and she always listened to my jokes, laughing rarely, but still purring when I stroked her head and chuckled to myself. She liked to be on her back and watch the world go by upside down. She would turn over on her back with her toes curled up tight as if someone should tickle that tummy. She was the only cat I ever knew... and I have known hundreds.... that liked me to make raspberries on that exposed tummy. Such a funny beast.

So once again I got to be the Angel of Death and it never fails to hurt my head, but I suppose that being the one to decide is a duty and a hard one, but one that should be taken by someone who cares. And I do care for my friends, even the furry ones.

Now we have ten chickens, some with names, and one cat: Starr. Starr is a serious cat and stays inside most of the time. She is almost as old as Oona was when we put her down because of cancer. A serious calico of advancing years, Starr likes to sleep, eat and occasionally step out onto the porch before running back in if a car drives by. She seems a bit subdued now with no friends around but me. I hang out with her, I listen to her stories and I try to be a good companion, but I'm just not the same as Furball was. I don't understand the point of view.

I like to think of Furlinghetti, Oona and even old fRed cat sitting on a distant hillside with Grand dad Riley and Teddy, watching a celestrial sunset and talking philosophy. Furball will feel right at home with Teddy. He was a cat lover and even had show cats, siamese mostly.

I'm looking forward to being able to join in those talks, it's so rare I can ramble on about my funny ideas, except for here and for you. And I look forward to tickling that tummy and watching her toes curl with pleasure.

Such a good friend. Such a hole in my life.

See ya later, Furball.

Liminal points. These points of transition, one form to another, are both consequences of Life, and yet not truly a Part of life, because they stop where they are. And stopping is to resist Change, and Change is Life, so liminal points are not part of life, but cause life, or otherwise support it. They are the gate thru which the spirit passes. Shamans either form part of the gate, or support the gates, or sometimes are, themselves, the gate. I suppose Mothers must be thought of as Gates. I found myself within Peggy Jo Shirley and then I was not and sometime fairly soon, as Time is thought of, I will be Not. Not of this Form. But I digress.

The Points themselves are analogus to vertices of a Sigil, thus a Great Pattern is formed. This is pretty much Western Tradition, but even the East Coast is Western, as far as the East is concerned.

But to be part of a Transition is not necessarily to be a "Vertex of Fate" (tada) Sometimes you just stumble into it. So it is that I meditate on Furlinghetti the Cat. As we speak, she could be doing her Transition out of this interactive version of Life. That is to say, her cancer is starting to rip her body into smaller, non-interactive bits. She has found a spot she likes in the garden I have made of my back yard where she feels protected, yet able to at least hear the rest of Life going on around her. I have decided that since her sores are causing her problems and there isn't really anything we can do about the sores, because her immune system is pretty shot by now... well, it seems that once again I get to play Undertaker. I have this vision of the Spirit Furlinghetti, as I experienced it being whipped out to sea by a sudden tide and all I can see of Furlingehtti is her hands outstretched, but I cannot reach or pull or something and then there is nothing but the flotsom on the beach. In this case I have a furry body to bury.

But Liminal points are by definition not part of the consequences. Or at least not nccessarily. Because unless Furball comes back for a visit, I will never feel close to her again, nt really, so in part my Self is being impacted, but not my Soul. Maybe it's a kind of a split, which can be recognized as a Liminal point. And everything past the One is bifurcating, so Everything is a Liminal Point. Maybe that efines a multidimensional circle or something, some crazy Sigil that I can't yet read. I just know it sucks to pay someone to kill my cat because I think the dying thing is gone on long enough.

Suppose, for instance, that a Soul is traveling along and happens to take a hairpin turn and slide ever so briefly into a Space wherein I dwell, like a bacteria on a lamp post on a tight curve at night. Now I see the face of the driver of the carriage but what happens if I intervene and try to stop the Coach? The mission has been altered, the King never makes it to the Coast to seek freedom somewhere beyond? Catch my drift? Maybe not, sometimes my references are too obscure and layered. The point though, is that what would have changed is someone had intervened on behalf of, say, Jesus? Or even Charles Darwin? People would have changed, Things would have changed and Change is Life, so Life would have gone on.... But it would be different.

But just because I see a 'cat' does not mean that some Great Soul has not banged into the Lampost of my Life. No, in fact it makes a lot of sense. Seems to me that I have met a lot of Great Souls in my Time and you gotta figure that like certain intersections like Time Square just get a lot more action, certain kinds of people meet a lot of Great Souls, yet never seem to be able to hang on very long, like they are just passing thru and they leave you with an autograph, or a bit of leather... We save these these things, we incorporate them into our myths and our Story, and sometimes we stick them in lockboxes and others have to figure them out. But it seems right to me that if you get stuck on the idea that because you perceive yourself as merely part of the change and not part of the consequences, you can get sloppy on your participation. So a ritual provides you with the way of dispensing with all those various energies, "good" and "bad" and then you can move on or not, to your next interaction with Life. And it tightens up the whole design. Shamans are nothin of not folks who tighten up in a clinch. Like when a good old friend is dying and there's not a damn thing you can do to stop it. Stopping is a denial of Life, because Life is Change and so, therefor, must be Death. That's why the other Face of Persephone is the Crone, and no one can stop the Crone from coming in and doing what She Has to Do. Think about it. All those Fairy Godmothers jumping in and barging in to the King and Queen's chambers or spiriting away a child who Changes Everthing. It's just that Furlinghetti is getting close to the point when she will stop changing me.

No stops to scratch her tummy, no suddenly having to stop reading to allow her to talk to me face to face.... a lot of things will be left behind. Yet to hate change is to hate life and that's not such a great idea. Seems to me that hate in general is not such a great idea, and self-hate is gotta be even nastier. So you do what you have to do and deal with the consequences, knowing all the while that the consequences are not what defines You.

Dang. I liked it better when a sunny day was just a sunny day and not a day dry enough to dig a couple of graves.

Now think about some poor slob doing the same thing for his kids while our representatives talk of and balence consequences. If it hurts me so much to think about my poor cat dying, it must be amazingly hard on the rest of the world responding to what people are doing who apparently have every ability to point to me and my family and claim that we gave them a mandate to do this. But then I suppose that all change is part of Life and all that, and then it must be noted that we all have a right to find our spot to die in and maybe Furlinghetti has picked hers. I hate to think of dragging her off in a box to have some guy knock her out. Eventually she'll be where she was going to be anyway, but her last rememberence of me would be of stuffing her into a box and then pulling her out into the hands of a nice stranger.... I just find that hard to reach. I suppose maybe it's up to her.

Sometimes it seems like I'm living in some kind of isolation ward with this computer my only outlet to the world. I have friends around the planet, few of which I have actually met but nevertheless I consider them all friends. The people who live in the houses nearby all have their schedules and patterns and it hardly ever seems the right time to pay visits. This is the curious reality of a wired-in, chronically ill house-husband. People don't like to ask you how you are when they know the answer is "in pain" and they don't like to ask about the family when all too often it includes the latest nightmare involving my son. So then the talk might pass to the television programs so many people like to watch, but somehow it seems that watching people conive and lie their way to big cash prizes, or eat worms and set themselves on fire, or the terribly funny sit-coms which involve married couples insulting each other non-stop, mostly about their intelligence or sexual prowess just doesn't have much to interest me. I've become a stick in the mud, a wet blanket, an outsider. So outside is in when you're talking about the internet universe. For instance if my back is acting up and I can't sleep I know someone in Pakistan is wide awake, or an Australian artist might want to chat about wood firing kilns. This tends to make me think of the monitor as the window to my neighborhood.

Ye Gods, my father's face stares at me from the mirror.

But I can hear my mother's voice when I sigh and remark that the birds seem to be having so much fun chasing the butterflies.

We are products of our own imagination.

The thing that pisses me off most about this back crap, aside from the constant pain and isolation, is that I would really like to build a stone wall, or do some more blacksmithing, or even slide into my chainmail and helm one more time and show those young sword and shield twerps what a real mace man can do. Seems kinda early to shift gears down to the "old guy" mode when I have so many great ideas that require something more of an intact spine. I keep fantasizing about a powered exoskeleton like Iron Man wore. What a great idea!

My sister keeps sending me articles about the artificial disc that has been approved by the FDA but there are some caveats about that. First off, of course, is that like the epidurals that did me no good, there is always a slim chance that something would go terribly wrong and then Dad and me would be able to have wheelchair races around the nursing home. Then there is the idea that the FDA also approved those drugs that made deformed babies and stopped the hearts of those guys looking for relief from arthritis. FDA approval to me merely means that some back room deals were cut and money was passed to a secret bank account, but then, I am very cynical.

Then I look at Furlinghetti, the little black and white cat who's body has gone over to the enemy and is even now growing new tumors on her belly. She's out back watching birds, chasing chipmunks and by and large just being a cat. So I ought to be able to do my art, weed my flower beds and by and large just be me. It has been said by many a person that I like to hear my own voice. That is to say I talk too much. Perhaps my dirth of local friends has more to do with my prattling on about politics, medical blunders or even just herb gardening. Curious that a great mind as myself would have a better chance at gaining new buddies by shutting the hell up from time to time, but it's an idea with merit. Maybe not everyone wants to hear about how the Koreans modified their tunnel kilns about the same time the Norse were exploring the Silk Road and wouldn't it be interesting if the kind of wooden framed houses the Finns built were not merely similar to the Japanese homes, but copies of them? I can't for the life of me figure out why someone would not want to know all about my time spent in a redwood stump while panhandling around the Bay area. Hell, it was fascinating the first dozen or so times I told the story! Short term memory loss has ramifications I never thought of, or if I did I quickly forgot.

So it's not so much of a whine, I hope, when I remark on my worldwide network of faceless friends. It's something that brings me hope and I often think the world would be so much better if it was a Law that people should go to other countries and share meals as often as their work schedule permits. It used to be a Code that if you broke bread with someone, or shared salt even with them that you could not harm them. What a great idea! I say let's start a mission to bus Americans to Sudan laden with baskets of 12 grain bread and bottles of vitamin enriched spring water. Then, when the people can get off their cots and pull on their tattered clothes they could come to America and parse themselves off to local familes and share their crusts of bread, toasted grubs and rusty cans of water from a local runoff. Maybe we'd be less inclined to call them gooks and shoot their babies. Maybe having been homeless and starving myself once or twice gives me a bit more insight into how hungry people live. So when the neighbor boy says we should nuke a country because They aren't like Us I say he should go live with Them for awhile and see how he likes having one hour of electricity every other day and no clean water, thanks to American bombs. But I digress.

The thing is that I think this internet thing, should it catch on, could be our window into the minds of Them and a window for Them to see Us as we really are. My mother was no Mrs. Cleaver, she worked hard every day of her life, in ofices and even on the factory floor. And we all know how unlike Dad was to Ward Cleaver. Goddess, I hope I was never like the Beaver! Instead of financing football stadiums we should finance entire family exchanges, spending a month each in twelve different countries as part of our one year hitch in the service of the world. How could we nuke a city where there is this great little market that sells silk cloth for pennies or has a cabaret where the dancers leap from table to table and the beer is warm but delicious? I think it would work too well and that's why they charge so much for passports. The Powers that Be don't want Us to get to know Them. We might find we like each other.

I wonder what kind of music Mozart would have made if he had had access to a sampler and a synthesizer? Or if he had heard Dave Brubeck or B. B. King? What a concept. We need time travel, too. I want to escort JC himself to the prayer services that our beloved Bush attends and explain what the man has been doing in the name of Christian conservatism.

Actually, that would be too rough on JC, he was always a sensitive boy. Better to bring Moses along. Now, he would kick ass!

Well, this is about as long as the old back will let me sit, so I guess it's back to the kitchen to add the mushrooms and carrots to the veggie stew. I'll end this thing with a bit I sent to an overseas friend I encountered trying to get some help on my sad little Amiga. The man not only helped out, but we chatted over several emails and became something like friends. He was remarking that he wished he was more creative, as in the way I do sculpture and such. I told him:

"Try to think of yourself as if you were your own father. Ask yourself what you would want that child to be, to do, to feel about himself. Then make the effort to give yourself permission to try. Those outside influences are invaders! You, as your own father, should stand in the way and protect yourself as your child. You block those influences while the child within you finds out what gives you the most joy. Then follow that joy. Personally, I love art. I always have. My father used to tear down my watercolors from the wall declaring that they were dreams in the clouds and I should get real and learn a trade. Funny thing.... now Dad is 84 and sickly and he told me a couple of years ago that when he was my age he wanted to be an artist, but he didn't think he was good enough because he looked at the museums and then at his poor work and decided to do something that he could earn a living at. So for 60 some odd years he was a miserable worker, drinking late at night and generally not a very happy man. He wanted to spare me the disappointment of trying to be a Picasso and failing. But I wanted to be a William Shirley and I couldn't fail at that, so after all this time I am making art and yeah, I don't sell anything to speak of, but my house is filled with things that could not exist if it hadn't been for my two hands. So I suggest that if you have something you enjoy doing, even if it doesn't meet the standards of the masters, do it. Just do what you love and don't worry about how good it is. It'll be good enough for your grandchildren or maybe some archeologist a few hundred years down the pike. Make yourself smile."

Not perhaps too insightful, but honest at any rate.

I saw the Shrub on TV the other night and I was struck by something I thought I would share. It was a sense that the only thing worse than being in a country ruled over by George Bush would be to BE George Bush ruling over a country. Look at the man... he can barely speak, he stammers, stutters, reverses track... he's scared shitless. He has never been successful, has he? In school he was less than average. In college he was a doper, a loser who was kept out of jail because of his father's millions. They bought him a state and he screwed that up massively and then they bought him the White House and he's screwing up there too, even to the point of going to war in two or three countries while we go through a time where the value of the dollar is sinking, where the people are out of jobs, the trade balences are all against us... this is a terrible mess for a kid from Texas who can't tie his own shoelaces. If it wasn't for his little toy mammy bedding him and stroking his forehead I bet he'd be screaming to be allowed to call king's ex and go home.

So he wanted to rule over most of the planet, to have people jump to their feet when he walked into the room. He wanted to be equal to the world's leaders. But he's a chump from texas and he knows it. He got passing grades by paying people to take his tests. He joined the National Guard to avoid risking his ass in Viet Nam and that's on the record. He snorted enough coke to float a steam ship and is still from time to time doing a few lines. He and Tony Blair like to get buzzed and call press conferences. But when the haze lifts and he is standing in a room filled with people hired by friends of his fathers to applaud whenever he completes an entire sentence on his own, he knows the truth. He is in WAY over his head and tens of thousands of people are dying because of things he has said but didn't actually know what they meant. Or at least what would happen if you actually DID that. He bubbles and babbles and Condi strokes his head and calls him her mean Daddy Warbucks, and that helps. But in the end he Knows that he is a moron doing work that should be done by people who understand reality, something he has never had to do. He may even want to do a good job, but he can't. He's too damn stupid and too fond of the coke and some under the sheets action. He's never been very smart and now every time he mutters a threat against some jerk because he dresses better than George, some Marine slaps on some greasepaint and marches off to slit some throats.

George is running scared. I suspect they will have to find him a couple of whores and some more good coke or crack just to keep him from running through the streets of Washington screaming, "I am a loser, I've always been a loser and you all KNOW IT!!!"

George is running scared. He always thought somebody would fix it so he didn't look like a moron, but he never realized that even though the sign says "The buck stops here" it really means "the BLAME stops here". History books... real history books, written years after he's dead.... will say that George Bush screwed up the world in much the same way he screwed up everything he ever touched. All his chickens come home to roost in full view of the world and he can't stop the world from printing all his mistakes. He can control the American press fairly well, but not the world, and not the physical facts. Corpses are corpses, no matter what you call them, and hundreds of thousands of dead people are camped outside his window staring in. It scares him badly and you see it in his eyes. That's why he never is allowed to speak to people who might not already think he's a genius. If somebody asks him about the blood and the bodies and the screaming babies, he wouldn't be able to pick his teeth with a stiletto and murmer, like Rummy, "That's democracy for ya..." He'd start screaming, "It wasn't me!! I just said it'd be nice if Iraq was another state like New Jersey....!"

I don't think he sees any way out of the next four years except to do a bunch of stuff, no matter how stupid, and get out with his multi-million dollar a year pension, free room, board, and all the dope he can take and hope for the best. In the long run it won't affect him. The wealthy people own "money" not dollars or yen or euros. They live in condoes around the world and drive fast cars, all the stuff he loves to do. But in the end he knows someone will write about his reign objectively and then History will know that George was a moron, the worse President we ever had and he screwed up the world so badly that hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were lost and entire countries toppled, leaving their citizens penniless, homeless and angry. And outside the US many people figured "an eye for an eye...." and began to make plans to come to America and get a job selling fuel oil and fertilizer....

This week I turned 55. I sent an appeal to the Social Security people about my denial of benefits. They seem to think that a man who can't sit for very long, or stand for very long, or who has only done drafting all his adult life, can somehow be retrained and start a whole new career without sitting around in a drugged up haze. These are the same people who thought Sadam had huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. I'm not too worried that they won't eventually see the way of things and since I did pay into an account that included disability insurance I'm not too weirded out by the idea of taking money for doing nothing. I did something for years: worked in pain. I've gotten to a point where I really don't want to do that any more. The pills may be screwing up my liver as my enzyme numbers are sky high and we are trying to find the culprit. Need to achieve a balence, ya know?
Well, a strange thing happened to me the other day. I was suddenly granted a glimpse of the emotions of finding out you will be living alone for the rest of your life. I'm serious. I was meditating on things in the afternoon, as I do sometimes when I've been good and have time to sit, or actually pace since I don't sit much. I suddenly felt this wave of emotion as I thought about making sure I ate that lunch, and took my pills. I thought about making sure I cleaned the floor sometime soon before the dust Freddies got too big. Then I realized that someday either my sweetheart or myself would be older and being in that room thinking the same thoughts. Maybe this was a gestalt experience with a future self, but the sheer lonliness of it all hit me. I can't be sure of it but it felt very real. I sat for awhile and considered it. How my darlin girl would feel one Saturday morning puttering around, picking up my stuff and putting them into boxes. She has done that sort of thing with her mother and with Larry, but I know that where my things are concerned it would hurt her even more, and I was wondering what I could do so that the pain was less. Could I leave a note somewhere I figured she'd find it? Could something I say make her smile and remember me fondly? Or would anything just break her down?
Then I wondered about me walking around packing up her things. Being a shaman has some advantages in that talking to the dead is not that hard and getting answers is not unknown. But still, talking to the dead of the ones you loved that much.... that can be painful too. Then I considered my old heart, starting to get all out of whack with too many of this and that floating around in the blood. Would Her being gone take me out too, or would I just pad around the yard and house feeling empty and alone? Terribly sad thoughts and yet needed to be felt, because these things happen. Popes die, freinds die and the love of your life sometimes dies. I know people going through all that and it hurts, because even a hug won't stop the pain. You hang on to the pain because it's all you have left of them.
So there you are, in your familiar house surrounded by familiar things, and everything is different. Like the color green has been snatched from your universe, everything is different. The other day a very good friend of ours casually told us that she had had a "non-fatal heart failure". We were stunned. I have been trying to think of what I can say in a letter or a phone call that would tell this girl how much her friendship and even love, has meant to us and to me especially. I knew her since before I met my sweetheart and she was always good with a smile or a hug, always there when I was really beat up. Her husband and I had many a great adventure and many a long laugh. They both mean a great deal to me and our close friends: Larry started coming to Thanksgiving and going to our friend's house just like family. Just like we are family. So how do I deal with the idea that this young, smart and gentle lady might leave her husband and sweet daughters and travel on that dark journey? How do I think about that funny guy sitting in a bedroom one night holding her gown and sobbing? I guess you don't think about it that much. You think about holding him closer and telling him that she's just around the corner and hope that it helps.
I hope if the time comes he will do the same for me. In the meantime we take our meds, write our letters and wonder why all the death lately? Why the sudden upswing of awareness of these mortal thoughts when over in Africa there are thousands doing it every day? Maybe a door of perception has opened up or a window anyway. Maybe I caught a whiff of the pain around the world and I just happened to in the right frame of mind to realize what it was. I do know I plan to hug a lot more and sit a lot less.

I had a friend once who said she was a witch. She was real proud of that, that connection to a greater source. She also thought that canaries escaped their cages and somehow found their way to her back yard where she had seed out for them. I tried to tell her that goldfinches weren't canaries, they were wild birds that went to anybody's yard where there was seed, including mine. She didn't hear me. She also was convinced that Death was the Enemy and Life was all about defeating Death. The term "witch" has it's origins in "wise one" and the concept is that like many folks in meditative and magickal paths a person should try to shed delusions and confusions and find a Truth at least once in their life. One of the Truths I believe in is that Death is a short step from one form to another and that like the very fabric of Existence itself, Life is eternal. Only the forms change.

Today I said goodbye to an old friend who by now is making that short step to another form. Oona was a gentle lady who wanted only to be stroked and listened to. She would follow me about waiting for the chance to stick her head under my hand, even if I was napping on the couch or working on something in the house. Lately Oona has been sharing her form with a growth, a kind of cancer, and that cancer was slowly taking away her ability to enjoy life. She was able to eat a few teaspoons of milk and then sometimes would throw it up. Not a very lady-like way to go about the day. She also was getting confused and would forget which food dish was hers, or even what room she was in, and she would call out for someone to come and help her out.

So today I helped her Out.

It's a funny thing that people can read about all kinds of things like tsunamis and torture chambers in Syria run by the CIA but when a little furry friend seems to be stumbling in the Way of Things, we cry.

I was a little nervous this morning about my choice to let some technician stick a needle in Oona and pump her full of drugs. I always think of Janis when the subject comes up. She probably had a moment or two when she realized that this particular high was not going to end.

Years ago I was swimming in a canal in Yuma while my babysitter was away in the bushes making out with her boyfriend. She had given me a floatation vest but didn't take the time to tie it on me before she trotted off with her little friend. So as I paddled around the canal I somehow paddled out of the vest. Contrary to what some people may think it does not require only a relaxed mind to float in water; it requires a certain ratio of fat to muscle and I had the wrong numbers for floating. I sank like a rock to the bottom of the canal. At five years of age or so I knew enough to kick when I hit, to try for the surface. Maybe that's an instinct. I also had seen in cartoons that, like baseball, in drowning it's three strikes and you're out. I hit the surface lightly, not even enough to get out a yelp and then dropped again to the sandy floor of the canal. That was two. I had one more chance for life. I had my eyes open by then and could see the rocks on the surface and the sparkling ripples on the surface of the water as I once more kicked to the sunlight, but once again my body had other ideas, and I found myself going down for the third time, just like in the cartoons, with my arms outstretched upwards. I recall thinking that I was supposed to see my life flashing before me but maybe at that age there wasn't a lot to see and I just relaxed and figured, "Well, this is it." Then my fingers touched the vest floating on the surface and I kicked up in a frantic last ditch effort. I caught the vest and hugged it to me, coughing and gasping for air. I managed to paddle slowly to the edge of the canal, a muddy little canal used for irrigating the cantalope fields. As I struggled to pull myself up onto the mud my hand slapped down on a little insect known as a mud dauber because they pick up bits of mud and sculp nests for their eggs on the sides of things, like garages and bridges. They also have the ability to sting several times without dying, unlike a honeybee. So I got hit several times on the palm and would have let go of the beast, but that would have meant slipping back into the water and another round of drowning. I think I either crushed it or it slipped away, saving it's own life. I don't really know for sure, but I lay there coughing up dirty water and wheezing and crying in pain. My babysitter heard me and came and got me. She knew things had gone badly awry and took me home, leaving me there alone while she took off with her boyfriend. When mom got home she found me with a swollen hand, a bad cough and a blackened, burnt back from the hot Arizona noonday sun, the same sun that sparkled so pretty on those dirty waters. My back bled and peeled for some time and they couldn't even smear Noxema on it for a few days until some skin grew back. The babysitter was never re-hired and I doubt she got paid, although I don't recall being able to tell anyone about the boyfriend. I figured that out years later when I thought about the event. Dad was upset with my version of the story because he was one of those folks who thought that all you had to do was relax and you floated. "Everybody floats in water!" he would say when he tossed me into the public pool to teach me how to swim. Eventually I learned how to swim underwater and got good at it, so that worked out. I still float about twelve inches under the surface, in spite of a much greater proportion of fat on my frame, thanks to years of beers.

My early experiences with death very many and all included this feeling that "Well, this is it..." My bouts of pneumonia, complete with feverish hallucinations of monsters sitting on the bedside watching me; my falls off rocky mountains, tall trees and the occasional light pole. I came to accept that death was just around the corner and so far it wasn't so bad, certainly not "the Enemy". It was almost an old friend who always seemed to have to leave the party early. but always with a promise of a return. I couldn't quite understand my father crying when he got the telegram about Grandma Shirley passing away with a heart failure. I got a better taste of it when Teddy took the turn and my wife of the time told me to "get over it." When I had decided to take a turn off a cliff on my motorcycle and join Tedddy one morning he stopped by to give me a heads-up about timing. "You have things to do. It's not your time." Granddad Shirley passed away in the Vets Hospital about two weeks after he asked mom and dad not to put him there because it's where old soldiers go to die. When I saw him years later on the other side he was sitting on a tall hillside watching the storms over the mountains across the valley. I asked him how he was doing and he smiled that slow Tennessee smile and told me, "Well, Billy, it's not too bad. See those clouds over there? Real pretty." Teddy said much the same thing. "It's interesting."

When old Fred Brighton lost all her teeth and was wasted away to a bag of fur and bones and infections were eating up her jaw I knew I had to help her make that last step. To say I cried like a baby was not quite true. A baby cries because something is all wrong and it's the worse pain they have ever felt. I cried because it was all right and it was a familiar pain, one you get to feel too many times. I buried her in the garden in the sun, along with a tee shirt for a pillow and some catnip to make the journey colorful.

I told Oona on my word of honor that I would make her a crypt inside my altar under the apple and cherry group that shades my Goddesses. Like an Egyptian princess she would become some part of a great holy thing and would listen to my prayers and receive my offerings. I told her I will make a nice statues of a Cat in Glory, with her feet all close together like she could sit on a quarter. Like angels on the head of a pin she will sit on my altar to my Lady of Life and Death and in the sun the goldfinches will come and fight over thistle seed. If a canary should break loose from it's cage I hope it will find it's way to Oona's statue and sing it's little heart out for my old friend to hear.

As I handed Oona to the girl at the vet's I started to cry like I had hoped I wouldn't, but wished I would. If I hadn't cried it would have meant I was not being compassionate, just dumping off an old cat who had outlived her time. But like a man I cried, like a baby I cried, like a friend who is saying goodbye I cried and when the poor girl offered me some tissues I said, "It doesn't make it better..." but I knew it was right. It was time.

I know Teddy will show her around, Fred will find her some nice catnip and Granddad will be happy to sit by her and stroke her soft fur while they watch the storm clouds that create the rainbows on the other side of the valley. See ya later, Oona.

I've been reading the Book of Exodus, trying to understand a god whose name is stated as being "Jealous". It seems to me that if you know the name of something, according to the principles of western magick, you can control that thing. The God of the Hebrews, Christians and Muslims certainly needs controlling. He's asking for more and more blood sacrifices these days.

For years I have said that if any man were to exhibit the traits of the God in the Bible they would be considered psychotic. It seems to me that the description of the life of Moses is a prime example of a psychotic in control of a group of people, not unlike Charlie Manson, except Charlie only killed one man and sent his followers to kill for him. Like Yahew, Charlie is a jealous god and punishment for worshipping others is death.

So there in Exodus are all these nit-picking rules for everthing from cutting your hair to what food you can eat and how to prepare it. It's as detailed as a government manual and as vague in a way so a psychotic manager can turn it to justify anything they want to do. Go and read Exodus and Deuteronomy and see if all the rules and regulations don't seem a tad over zealous. The origins of Jealous, the name of the God of the Hebrews, is in fact zealous.
Here's a description of the BTK killer, recently captured and currently being held by the Kansas City police:

Two neighbors said that he was particularly hard on a woman dying of cancer, an arthritis sufferer. He repeatedly wrote her warnings and costly citations for not keeping her lawn properly cut.

"He knew my mother couldn't get around, and he would come down the street and measure her grass, and if it was a little bit over he'd write her a warning or a citation," said Joshua Thomas, who moved into the house after his mother died.

Neighbors' Perspective

"What little power he had, he abused. He was a very petty man," Reno, another neighbor, said. "It's kind of curious that dogs that were in back yards suddenly came loose when he was around, and then there he was to write the ticket."

Margaret Farmer said her daughter's garage burned down a few years ago, and within a day Rader was demanding she pay to have the debris hauled off. "I don't know anyone on the street that didn't despise him," she said. "He acted like his word was the only law. Everyone else was supposed to do exactly as he said and when he said."

Now, in the real world a person who was so zealous, so jealous, so controlling, was a dangerous man. After Moses snuck up on the Egyptian man who was beating his Hebrew slave/employee and murdered him, he hid in the sand/desert because the Hebrews were so frightened of him that they drove him away. He was a dangerous man. He didn't try to negotiate with the Egyptian, preferring to beat him to death. When he set out to rule over the Hebrews he made a deal with God. God would manipulate the heart of the Pharoh and Moses would lie to the Hebrews and eventually Moses was in control. Once he was in control he took them into the desert, isolating them from anyone else and making up rules to further isolate them. This is what that freak who captured Elizabeth Smart did. He, too, was a dangerous controlling religious zealot.

Now we have three cultures based on the rantings of a dangerous, controlling, jealous religious fanatic. And the convergence of those cultures is the Middle East, where babies scream near the bodies of their blood splattered mothers. Like Moses before them, our leaders speak religion while they gather up gold and power over others. Osama is precisely like Moses. The BTK killer would be right at home in the Old Testament.

So the Name of that God means "Jealous", a not-very nice emotion when found in a human and since we are all of us supposedly made in His image, we have a predisposition to be like Him: jealous, zealous and dangerous.

I wonder if perhaps all that crap about detroying all the temples to the Mother of Life might not be a family squabble, a manifestation of the jealousy He felt when His wife was offered devotion from others. She had communal sex, Her priestesses were encouraged to offer themselves to men who came to the temple, freely and without holds. He got jealous and He saw wasted opportunities there for money making, something He seemed very obsessed with. All those golden decorations described in the Old Testament and She just screwed anyone for free! Small wonder He turned to killing, to moving people to travel the desert killing and destroying. He was having a little shit-fit that has lasted all these thousands of years. Now we have a born-again Christian President who is following in His footsteps. Bush even has been described as "annointed by God to lead the people"... into where? why, the Holy Land, of course. Into Bagdad and the other holy cities of old. Still jealous after all these years, oh, still crazy after all these years.

Curious to note that when the Italian reporter was freed by others, she was attacked by American forces and only the self-sacrifice of her liberator prevented her death. Another curious irony in the ever-ending story of a Jealous God and a Zealous little man.... dangerous and nit-picking, controlling and not well liked, but too dangerous to oppose. I wonder if we dug up the Rose Garden if we would find a collection of skulls dating back over 200 years?

Today I'd like to try to speak about empathy. I got denied disability recently and in the letter it was stated that my claim was based on my assertion that I had had a bad disc and had surgery and it got better. Well, this was a piece of a fraction of what I had put in my application. This was when, 15 years ago, I had blown out a disc and had the pieces removed. For about a year I was relatively pain free. Then the pain began to return and now, 15 years later, I have two herniated discs, two compressed discs, severe arthritis and apparently either fibromyalgia or maybe a return of the shingles. Not really my call to make, the doctors haven't really decided why this pain down my left side and arm is so intense at times. But I was refused disability. I know eventually they will give it to me because in fact I cannot be retrained because I cannot remember things anymore, nor can I sit for more that a few minutes at a time and I hurt all the time. But I digress.
My thought was that some person reading my application and those of my doctors, came away with this tiny fraction of information, missing the doctor's reporting that there was no chance I could work again because it's a degenerative condition and that's what degenerative conditions do: they get worse. I was wondering why they didn't "get it" and I had this flash of a chimpanzee I saw in a PBS show. She had been caring for her child and the child died. She carried that dead piece of flesh around for a couple of days and then took it out into the jungle and came back sometime later a changed and angry chimp. I felt for that chimp as I don't feel for our President, who cheerfully orders the deaths of thousands of babies a day. That's called empathy, because I have held my son inmy arms, knowing that he is very slowly dying. The average life span of a person in his state is about 4-7 years, so he's on the downhill slide to death. The nurses with children, who have nursed them to health, relate to me and my pain better than one of my doctors who admittedly is concerned over the fact that he is leaving his practice to move to a northern lake town to "shoot snowmobilers". ha ha.
This doctor wrote in his last report on me that I was "an enigma" to him. He couldn't figure it out why, when the MRIs on me didn't really show that much pressure on the nerves, why I told him I hurt that much. He didn't understand, apparently, that everybody is different. Everybody has a different chemical mix inside them. I seem to have more of a substance that pain doctors call "substance P" (no kidding) which allows for the transmission of pain to the brain. He didn't test for this, nor has any doctor. It may be an expensive test that the insurance companies won't pay for, but anyway it would just tell them that I hurt all the time. Bottom line, he couldn't relate to my pain. He interrupted me when I tried to tell him how I felt. He started up his dictaphone in the middle of my saying goodbye to him, dismissing me without even a hand wave. He did not have an ounce of empathy with me.
I have a friend, really a friend of my sweety-pie's, who studies gnosis and such things and is trying very hard, as all good gnostics do, to eliminate all empathy and other human bindings from her psyche. I doubt she would see it this way, but I know a bit about gnostics and gnosism, and they want to leave this frame of mind and achieve enlightenment. So they say things like "Why do you think you have chosen to be sick?" Now this, on one level, is a very good question, because on one level we have chosen to be sick. We created this universe and sat down in it, specifically to feel sickness and pain and all those parts of an infinite existence. But on this level, the level below the clouds, we didn't choose a blown disc, a life of pain meds and limping. We just hurt and want it to stop. This very fine and hard working lady has never had a child and will never be likely to have one. So when we talk about my feelings about my son she tries very hard to understand what I am going through, but like that distracted doctor she just can't bring in empathy. She can't understand and so we don't connect. We agree silently to disagree.
In gestaltism a person tries the opposite of gnosism.INstead of trying to leave this body and these human frames and concerns, a gestaltic (?) tries to connect with others. They try to blend with others to form a new mind formed of all those people around them. The idea is that a body thus formed is greater than the sum of the parts. You quantum-up to a higher level, working your way towards the All. It's not a better technique than any other, just a different technique. you might say it's using empathy to achieve enlightenment.
My primary care doctor listens intently to what you say. He holds your hands and looks at your face and only when you are done speaking does he speak. He chooses to have empathy for his patients, whom I am sure he thinks of as friends. So he is pretty good at diagnosing my problems. He understands that I sometimes hurt where my son hurts before I even hear that my son has a new injury. He says he sees no reason why a parent would not be that close to a child. he says that doctors know very little of the "why" of the body, only a bit of "what". He gestalts rather than gnows.
There is an experiment wherein they attach electrodes to a chimp and let it do things, like picking up a peanut. They record the brain patterns of this effort. Then they have the chimp look at a peanut without being able to reach it and the same patterns occur in the brain, even though the arm is not moving. Then one day a doctor reached over and picked up the peanut and the chimp showed the same brain patterns as when the chimp was reaching out to take the peanut. He empathized with the doctor. He related to that white clothed arm with the pale hairless hands. He gestalted.
Maybe when we try to see if chimps and apes can speak or otherwise communicate, we are actually forming a gestalt with the beast, causing them (and us) to achieve more than we could before. Maybe both the researcher and the ape achieve a higher consciousness by empathizing with one another.
When we send out boys and girls to kill other boys and girls we try to turn them into killing machines. Lean, mean, killing machines is what the TI says and he means it. if they were boys and girls it would be harder to kill. We send out robotic planes to drop bombs, piloted by video game experts. They see the dots on the screen and zap them, getting higher marks and going to the next level, when their planes can carry nuclear bombs and zap entire cities. But the science of war has advanced to a point whereby we no longer try to push our boys and girls out into the killing fields armed with a stick or a sword to thrust that thing into the guts of another frightened boy or girl. It doesn't work as well as it used to. I think maybe it doesn't because we know more about those other boys and girls. We know about where on the globe they live. We know a bit about their religion, thier lifestyle. We might even have heard their prayers on a PBS special on religion. So we empathize with them. You can't kill a person with whom you fel connected, any more than you can cut off your own arm unless you somehow first disconnect with it, like that man trapped under the boulder who knew that his arm would be the death of him if he did not sever the link at the elbow.
I am told that eventually I will be in front of a judge armed with a lawyer and then I will likely get my disability. I wil look that man or woman in the eyes and explain about my pain and my son and his pain, and they will empathize. They will be asked how can I work, how can I continue to connect with the other workers when I feel so disconnected from them? My life is one of pain and joy. Pain when I awaken, joy when I no longer feel my body. The life of a worker is one of disconnect. They become grades. "I'm a 27, you're a 12. I know more than you and make more money. I am somehow slightly better than you." You probably see their children as diferent from your own, if you have children. This disconnect works for certain kinds of jobs. It does not work for seed planters. Rice farmers sing in the mud, thrusting rice plants into the earth like a cock into a vagina, creating new life. They become a single entity creating life. Office workers shuffle paper, move spots on a screen. Until their office is hit by a suicide bomber they relate to their grades and their desks. Then, screaming in unison, they run to the exits, freed of their grades and running towards life. They empathize with those left behind and struggle to run back and save them, even those whose grade levels are so much higher than their own. A manager comforts a mail clerk and they are one in pain.
Empathy allows us to achieve a higher consciousness. I have a name. If I name my chicken it becomes that much harder to kill them and if I am not a chicken killer, then I am forced by my connection to that hen to apologize for taking their egg. I explain to them why the egg won't hatch, why it becomes a health problem if allowed to rot. People think it's funny and strange that I talk to my hens, talk to my garden and the trees in my yard, but I try to empathize with my world, to achieve a higher consciousness through empathy with the life around me. It's a Way, maybe not your Way, but I have had a break of light through the clouds from time to time and miraculously the pain in my back was lessened.