Many people have some idea of chaos theory. Lots of movies and TV shows have mentioned it and various characters have expounded on it's implications, but I think that most people have a very slim idea of what it means. I will not try to explain it because it has many meanings and many implications. The one thing I want to try to make clear is that chaos is not anarchy, nor does it mean randomness. It has a mathematical basis just like pi and other very, very long numbers. In fact, let's discuss pi.

3.1415927...

It just keeps going, and going, and going. But, even though the numbers are the same size on the printed page or monitor display imagine that the big numbers, those close to, say, a million are brighter red in color and bigger in pixel size. Now pi looks different, doesn't it? Say that the number 3 at the begining is a foot tall, a third of a meter more or less. Now imagine that the 1 just to the right of the decimal is 1/10th the size of the 3. Ah! Now, of course, let the 4 after the 1 be 1/10th the size of the 1 and so forth. Now the number gives you an idea of what it is. It is a 3 mostly with a very slightly fuzzy edge. It's a bit more than another 3, but nowhere near a 4. You see it as if you had a bit of a film on your cornea making it different. That fuzz never gets clear, no matter how you shake your head or rub your eyelid it stays fuzzy. You can't tell where it begins and the rest of the numbers leave off and that is more or less what chaos does.

Just as a dollar represents a fraction of work so numbers represent a fraction of quantity and quantity is fuzzy. The edge of our solar system is fuzzy. We recently located a bit of stone and ice way out past Pluto spinning around the sun nevertheless and we named it. There are lots of things spinning around our sun and we may never name them all because our solar system is fuzzy. It has no real beginning nor end. Work has no beginning or end. I crawled around the rooftop trying to restore a tarp to prevent the celing from caving in and the ceiling then caved in. We put the tarp back up and added boards and staples and today I woke up to look up and see the plastic/insulation ceiling was wet, as was the insulation that the hired worker had added in the walls to replace the wet, spoiled insulation from our last leak. Next week we plan to remove the roof that leaks and replace it with a dormer that doesn't. But someday it too will leak and someday it too will have oxidized under the solar wind into a grey colored dust which will be pulled along the tectonic plate until it is ground under another plate and turned into magma. It never stops, but the edges are fuzzy. Thus we can say work, like all things is a fuzzy, chaotic thing.

All things are of the universe and the universe is fuzzy and chaotic. But it has an equation, just like pi equals the circumference divided by the diameter of a circle. But if we observe a circle from the side and it is a variable line segment and if we observe the variable line segment from a slightly different universal stance we see a point. A point that fluctuates in color and density, like a star seen through the air surrounding this constantly moving, crawling, melting and burning ball of dirt and water and complex organic molecules. Pile up a few billion of those molecules in the right stack and you get me, observing the universe through a fuzzy eye. So the equation of the universe may be a chaotic equation, like the one for the value of pi or the one for the value of me. Might even be quite short, like e=mcsquared.

The opposite of chaos is order, in most people's minds and order implies stability, or unchangability (stay=unchange) Since, however, the mass we are regarding is of the universe, we must understand that it, too, is chaotic and therefor constantly changing. Solar winds blast it, positrons and quarks fly thru it, knocking off odd bits of electrons and so forth. All of the things being knocked off are energy, which is vibration and that never changes in that it is always changing. So Einstein's fancy little equation assumes there is a constant weight to be measured or a constant mass to be measured or something is constant. But of course it is not. By changing my perspective I can turn a circle into a point that throbs and vibrates. So long as I and the circle are not one and the same I can measure it with time as a factor, so I can say that at a certain point in time the energy contained in a bit of mass is sooooo big that a city filled with little girls and boys dreaming happy thoughts about peach orchards can be brought into a screaming mass of electrons, ultraviolet and infrared radiation, and small chaotic bits of complex organic molecules.

So the universe is unknowable because it never stops. This must mean that the All is ignorant of the universe, but perhaps has an equation which enables it to catch small pictures of it from time to time. The trick, of course, is that we may not always be in that picture. Harry Truman was a nice enough guy, a father and husband who attended church and unlike the man he wanted to murder had not directly been responsible for many deaths. When he ordered the evaporation of that 3 year old Japanese girl who dreamed of peach blossoms and dolls that looked like Shirley Temple with slanted eyes he had never held that little girl on his lap and heard her sing that little song about peaches. Had he done so he might not have been able to vaporize her and her family. That is chaos. With his filmy eyes and certain perspective he was able to look at that girl and see instead happy Marines walking onto the beaches with no bullets firing at them and little American girls hugging their daddy. Harry liked little girls to hug their daddy and smile and play with their Shirley Temple dolls, except not of course those dolls with slanted eyes. The term "little girl" was slightly fuzzy to his vison of things and so out on the edge of things little girls had their skin burnt off and their brain boiled in a fraction of time which we could not easily measure.

Now in this uncertain future we look at those fuzzy events and see the little girls and boys on both sides of the big pond, so much alike and so different in outcomes. We see that there is no order to things, no true equations. Good and evil are chaotic terms and war is a fuzzy event. Good people don't torture young men and women, evil people kill innocent bystanders. Wars have a begining and end. We know this because we took history class and in history we learn that all of life can be measured as the spaces between wars, kings and asassination plots. But life is movement through time and time is the relationship between moving objects and objects are fuzzy bits of regions of probability collapse so by measuring time we collapse the probability to a single equation that's easy to understand and memorize and write down as the answer to question 5 on the first page of our history test. But by the time all that is done the event has moved on and the easy answer is always the wrong answer for this current moment in time. So it is that we learn that Japanese had tried more than once to surrender and cease fighting, but we rejected their appeals and vaporized their children and then we agreed to the terms of their surrender. We did all this both because they were evil and also because we wanted to see if the bombs worked. Oddly enough there were those experts who helped create the bombs who thought there was a slight chance that the equation which described the results carried with it a slightly chaotic quality which could be understood to mean the earth's athmosphere would catch fire and we would all of us be vaporized. Harry took the risk, but so did we all, even though the vast majority of us did not know we did. You can see here that the universe is chaotic, not ironic, because it did not vaporize the air and only a few thousand children had their lungs burnt to a cinder so they could not call out for those mothers whose ashes went whirling into the air to fall as slightly dirty rain on the lawns of California. Trickster was not involved, War was.

You wonder what would have happened if when a President is about to order the deaths of many thousands of people he had to sit quietly as they walked by him and as each small face looked up at him(or her) he was required to say, "Burn her (or him)" and the child would be led off to return to their homes and wait for the sound of the B-52 flying over their village. This is exactly what the despots of our unenlightened history used to love to do. Those evil geniuses like the Khan or Caligula or some random Incan king. They would sit and smile as the chests were ripped open and the small beating heart was fed to the Central Power That Is. What if Harry had to confirm the airstrike by eating the raw heart of a representative Japanese girl? You'd have to have some real balls to do that! I bet Georgey Boy is glad he doesn't have to face any of the families he's ordered vaporized. No little girls on his lap, his babies are drunk and happy and all-powerful, as daughters of absolute monarchs frequently are. At least for a few more years.

The difference between chaos and order is that chaos is the underlying theme of the universe and order is a construct of a limited intellect. Chaos is not cruel, nor random. It sits as the one consistancy in an inconsistant inconsistancy. Order is always inaccurate because it trims off the fuzz at the edges, so it is always not quite what it says it is. If the fuzz that is trimmed off is important, then you have less than what you need to understand. Imagine trimming the fuzz off a peach and then handing it to a person and asking them what they held. They might say it was a nectarine or even an apple. This is because that fuzz helps us understand the peachness of the peach. Those things on the edge of the equation, those little uninvolved details which hold the whole thing up are important to understanding. We want to kill men who want to kill us but they are trying to kill us because our bombs are dropping on their little girls and we want to kill them because their bombs kill our little girls. Back in the day, we used to trade children in order to avoid war. It was understood that war killed little girls and if we had a litle girl on our lap, calling us Uncle Harry we would be less likely to pick up the phone and say "Burn them all."

If George had to look at the little children whose parents were unable to feed them and know that it was his order that stopped the food from coming, or stopped the meds that kept Grandpa alive, would he be less likely to sign that paper or make that phone call? Or, like Caligula would he lean forward and grin and say "Grandpa won't be home when I let you go because he was old and sick and I want to give that money to my rich friends. Your Grandpa was just in the way, an incidental fuzz on the peach of my strategy."? I rather think he would lean in. I've watched him on TV as he leans in to explain to those otherwise stupid and drooling reporters that war is peace and love is indifference and death is life. Like some evangelical minister explaining that the poor will always be with us and anybody who thinks otherwise is unclean and should be burned alive. Or drowned. Sometimes we save money by pretending to build dikes around cities and a house filled with old people gets drowned in the storm. Oh, and so do the old folks. Grandpa won't be there when we get home, Shirley. He drowned while tied to his bed where we left him.

Suppose a country was created where the Supreme Authority, the One who wages war was forced to open the casket of every dead soldier and kiss them on their forehead goodbye? Each fallen warrior was sent to the earth with the blessing of those who ordered their death. The Secretary of War and Peace was filmed on live TV kissing each body goodbye, and then was sent back to their office to write up new plans for the next war. How solemn would War be, how so much pain for all those involved. Instead we see the happy grining face of a man with an IQ of a roadkill squirrel, insulated from all visions of death and violence, all voices of dissent, all concepts of the fuzzy nature of war. Instead he hears how there are good and evil men and he is good and so he can order the vaporization of the evil ones. All the while not understanding that evil is as evil does. If the Christ had taken up the sword and killed the soldier come for him, he would have become a soldier and a bringer of death. We would have lost a voice for peace. If a man who did not know much of the world save the region around the city in which he was born can see the nature of war and the nature of man, then why is it so important to have as our leader a man who thinks vaporizing children makes him a good man? How could we be so unseeing?

It all depends on where you stand and where you look. If a point in time can be understood to be a circle of time from a different viewpoint, then it can be understood that we cannot always see the end of a number or the edges of a world or the point of a sword. We should walk carefully and quietly and whenever possible we should allow small children a good night's sleep.

I may not know a lot of things about a lot of things, but one thing I'm pretty good on is recognizing patterns. Seems like most people ignore obvious patterns, preferring instead to pay attention to preconceived notions about the probable outcome. They also have bought into the crazy notion of probabilities. For instance you are always hearing someone say, "What's the chance of something like that happening?" when the event has already happened. Obviously the chances were 100% that it would happen. The whole freaking universe spent an infinite amount of time making it happen. Or it could not have happened. There are two possibilities for any event: 0% and 100%. If you want to get mathematical then call it 50/50. It either will or won't happen. Simple. All this crap about a 1 in 5 chance or a 1 in a million is just words flapping in the breeze. It either will happen or it won't. There are an infinite number of things that have to be in place for it to happen a certain way, but since that holds true for it not happening a certain way, given the nature of infinity, all you need to know is the pattern of the immediate universe and you can see which way it's headed. So you need to be able to understand patterns to see the way the universe is going.

And you need to understand that words are math based. The early Jews had this way of writing on multiple levels, assigning numbers to letters and making math problems out of paragraphs and the resulting equations created new words giving them new knowledge. Is that not a cool way to use your time as you sit in a stinking desert surrounded by herds of sheep and goats and sexy daughters climbing into your bed to give you that son you always wanted? Assuming it wasn't a drunk daddy climbing into the sexy daughter's bed and then later writing that it was the other way around. After all, given the number of patriarchs in the Old Testament, what's the chances one of them is a child molester who like math and writes in his journal? About 100%.

And then there's the Tetragrammaton. YHWH is the best they can offer as a name for the deity who gave them the okay to have sex with their daughters and slit their son's throats while planning to go into the next city and burn the buildings, kill the men and have sex with their sexy wives while selling their children into slavery. Sometimes when days were long you'd find sons selling younger sons into slavery. Nice group of folks, the early Jews. Funny thing, they thought so too. They wrote about it, bragged about it and spawned a couple thousand sects of variations on the theme. What's the chance two of those variants would still be around today feeding the same deity with that funny unpronounceable name? About 100%.

YHWH is the equation of introduction to the entity that they created to approve of their midnight drunken wanderings and subsequent burning, raping and looting. I just can't get over the similarities to Charlie Mansion and his crowd. I often wonder what's the chance Charlie got the equation right and opened up a channel to the One True God who then told him to burn, rape and kill and all the souls he took down would be his slaves in the afterlife. Because that's pretty much what both Osama and Billy Graham have said to their followers. Well, maybe Pat Robertson. I think Billy mostly said "Bring me gold". What's the chance of the Old Testament God coming back into full steam and giving us that old time religion all over again? yup. 100%

Now, when George said we were going into the old hometown, the Mideast, and kill, rape and torture he didn't say that exactly, but he certainly left it obvious. He covered it up with a shawl or decency, by American standards. Patriotism, pre-emptive self-defense, get them before they get us and all that. But essentially we are doing what the Old Testament said true believers should do. And in exchange you get to rape their women, take their gold.... after sending a cut of it to Pat Robertson.... and sell their children into slavery. We don't call it slavery now; we call it welfare or even workfare.

What about the sacrifices, the slitting of the boy's throats stuff? Possibly you don't get the Internet, newspapers or TV, but there's a fair amount of decapitation going on out there. There's also the simple expediency of dropping a 500-lb. bomb on a wedding party, knowing that there's a 50/50 chance somebody will lose their head in the explosion. And there will be lots of blood. So He is getting His blood sacrifices. Oddly enough, the Pres keeps using the term 'sacrifice' and nobody seems to notice that the Pres says we need more sacrifices, that we all have to sacrifice and in the End (of times) everything will be worth it. He says we need to sacrifice more because we have sacrificed so much already, we need bodies heaped on bodies. Gee, it's starting to sound like maybe YHWH is also the God of the Aztecs, ain't it? What's the chances a near-infinite deity could have landed in several points around the planet demanding human sacrifices and rewarding the faithful with lots of sexy boys and girls and gold? 100%

This is starting to read like a shampoo bottle.

Now, yesterday Morgan Freeman was being interviewed by Tavis Smiley and he mentioned a couple of things that struck me as odd, in that they rang true and corresponded to the patterns I have been seeing. So they must be true. People like me would pick up on this right away, but it's odd to hear an actor repeating it. He did couch it in vague terms, like a duck in a prayer shawl, but it still quacked. He alluded to the areas of the flood and their history in a magical context. For centuries New Orleans areas have been the sites of magical operations. Voodoo in de swamp, boss. Plenty bad jew-jew here.

Anybody with a history of magic will have tapped into the forces that like to swirl around the deltas of big rivers. It's a heck of a heap of power there. That fertile delta corresponds to the pubic region of the Body Magical. It's why the Egyptians did so well, like the Babylonians and many others. We like to hang out near Her crotch, except when we are told by the Father to go out and kill something. Most magic in Voodoo calls for complex symbolic gatherings, like Black Cat oil and Goofer dust. Black Cat oil is obviously part of the Bastet sect and I suggest that the term "Goofer dust" may be a twisted version of another Egyptian sect's magic, If we knew how to spell it we could plug it into our Jewish decoder ring and figure out which deity was involved. But I digress.

There was always magic in the delta and as such there was always a lot of ways to contact the Deity you wanted. The bad old gods liked blood, like YHWH loved that sweet smell of burning flesh. You knew he used to be a volcano god, didn't you? Fire and brimstone, screaming minions crying out loud and beating their breasts. So in deltas you either get to see a fertility god, a planting god, a water god or some other kind of fertile arena. Then you have the hurricanes and that's also a water god, like Neptune. Neptune features big on the New Orleans Mardi Gras. He floats on by throwing out fake gold and silver while the menions get drunk and have sex in dark alleys or cheap hotels. All of which has recently gotten flooded and knocked down by high winds.
What's the possibility that two or more deities could have a tiff in an area of strong magical power and the resulting fight would bring up incredible winds and fires and knocked down houses, floods and dying critters, including humans?

So the Pres calls for more sacrifice, doesn't care who goes down, who dies, who bleeds... as long as there is plenty of it. He says out loud we need more sacrifices and when the storm breaks over the heads of the children in New Orleans.... by the thousands they die. And the Pres gets to feed his God a rich full meal while knocking down and flooding certain locations of strong magical power. It's exactly what would happen if a group of people who were raised as demi-gods by their rich parents, learned about certain rituals while growing up and attending schools with neat clubs like the Skull and Crossbones, calling on the forces connected by blood sacrifice to attain great power and wealth, wanted to make that God even more powerful. They would call for more sacrifice, they would lie with every breath, they would arrange for real crappy responses to calamities to ensure lots of human sacrifices and they would appear to be acting on another set of rules. Why else would you put the roommate of an old friend with no experience in catastrophe management in charge of FEMA? To make sure people died. For years they have been avoiding making the city safe. They let the levees wear down, they have studies done to make sure they understood exactly how to make the city safe and then do the opposite. They repeatedly call out the name of their God while the blood flows and the children wail. More sacrifices. The WTC wasn't enough, apparently. It was sloppy and small. Besides, what's the chance that a fuel-filled jetliner would take out two of the biggest buildings in the world, killing everybody onboard and inside?

So what we have here, according to the patterns I see, is a two tiered (at least) event. On one level you have the sacrificing of animals, people and cities, and on another level you have forces resembling the Goddess engaged in combat with forces of the God and the near total destruction of a city, several cities, in fact, but the Big Easy is more important because it was the site of much involved with the Goddess.

Back in the day when Mom was big, in the Mideast which was called back then "the World", they had these places with big trees, priestess who gave out sex as therapy and magical ritual feeding the Great Mother. There was music in the air and good food and no real boundaries except to try not to hurt anyone. You got happy feet. YHWH got upset, because in part He had this Great Idea that He was the one true God (in spite of his lying) and so His wife should have sex with only Him. When he wasn't screwing his daughters and sons. So they fought. History has records of many of these fights. The Greeks were lousy with stories of Gods fighting their wives and lovers and Goddesses rewarding young men and women with great powers and great responsibilities. Maybe She told the God that He had to take responsibility for His actions and that's when the fight started. That's when He wiped out 99% of Her temples and trees and Her Ladies in Waiting. That's when we had to worship Him or get our town wiped out and our women raped and our children sold off to slavery. Like when our children are going to be paying off a multi-trillion dollar debt we incurred by dropping many, many bombs on another Goddess rich arena. Crushing debt was often the path to slavery. Here in America we called it indentured servitude. Now we call it Chapter 13 or deficit spending.

So all those sites had floodwaters poured over them and silt and sand and corpses floating past. And the Pres says to Michael Brown, "Yer doin' a great job, Brownie." A brownie is a treat you eat. Michael means, "Who is like God". And the sacrifice is something Michael did recently by taking the first bullet and leaving his well paid public position to take on another well paid situation equally beyond his pitiful abilities.

Oddly enough, "George" means "earthworker", or even "farmer". Go Figure.

During the celestial combat "Dick" Cheney, the two time failure in college and mastermind of the Cheney-Bush regime, was vacationing, coming out of his temple only long enough to run down to the flood and gaze at the bodies floating in the tainted waters of the delta. Curiously enough, Richard means: "brave power", derived from the Germanic elements ric "power, rule" and hard "brave, hardy".

So we have a President whose name means farmer or earthworker, a seedy mysterious Vice-President whose name means brave power and ya gotta wonder why nobody sees a pattern there..... all those calls for additional sacrifices, all those messy bodies in Baghdad and New Orleans.... all that pious posturing, that born-again attitude that screams for a face slap. No, I don't think they worship a dead radical rabbi. It's pretty obvious who and what they hold dear and it's an old time religion for sure.

There is a way, though. There's always a Way. Once you know the general name and situation around a God, you can counter Him. You don't do it with strength and destruction when the deity is a God of destruction and sacrifice. You do it with distraction. You crawl into their beds at night and seduce them and 'corrupt' their priests. You fuck em to death if you have to. Like Bill Clinton, whose name means: wil "will, desire" and helm "helmet, protection" and you could say there is an implication there that old William Clinton desires head. or protection. Maybe a nice textured latex condom.

The Free Love movement had a lot to do with the last big war we had as well as the plague of AIDS. Point-counter point, tit for tat. So calling on the Goddess works, but you need to be careful that the counter to your calling is not so obvious. All you need to do is Call on Her in Her three-faced mode. That's a good circle of power to tap into and it covers youngsters, whores and wives, and Death. She's the one we need to stop this killing, and She's the one who can do it. I figure there's a 100% chance it can be done this Way.

All the sounds in my life

I stand against the house on the kitchen porch, standing really still as before me finches, nuthatches, woodpeckers and hummingbirds buzz back and forth. Buzzing in my ears and a breeze on my cheek as the chickadees ignore me in their flight path, as if I were a statue and for the moment I am. The flitting and buzzing and the hum of the bees nearby occupy my ALL for a brief eternity. That's what an epiphany is: a brief eternity. What you bring back from the trip is more or less up to you.

And all this noise as I crunch across the sand in the kitchen on the floor near the boots and it crunches all over the damn floor. Why don't I stop getting distracted and vacuum the floor and damp mop it? oh sigh. The distant drone of commercial TVland like when I was sleeping on Mom and Dad's couch. Dad listening to another rerun of Leave it to Beaver and me listening to him breathe. No oxygen again, he says it makes him weak or sick or something. I think it's just him dying but it's not going to hurt him that much, I'm thinking, while he's just sleeping. The cucuclocks start going off one by one, you program the room that way so you can hear each one, but by now you don't hear them, they're just background noise, like your breathing.

The sound of water splashing often takes me back to when you tossed me into the Colorado to teach me to swim. You figuring that since I liked to walk along the water's edge I should swim. You were a great swimmer, you used to give me rides in the public pool down in Yuma. I loved those rides, because I couldn't float and this was the only way I could move fast in the water. Otherwise I'd spend so much energy trying to stay afloat that I'd give myself an asthma attack and start in sinking. I knew from cartoons that if you went under 3 times, you'd die. It was like a watery curse. I counted 2 many a time. As it turned out, Dad got in to hold me up and try to teach me how to do various strokes. Kinda nice, no doubt, but also kinda wasted time because all the strokes assumed you were floating, or capable of floating. I tried them all and it was like a thin, pinkish-white torpedo lurching thru the water as the power in the props gave out and it settles down to the ocean depths, an arch of frustration. I knew where I had to start out to try these strokes so that I wasn't so far under the water that I couldn't still reach up and grab the edge and pull myself up.
The sound of Dad in the water, laughing, Dad by the ocean, digging for clams, laughing.

Me on the phone telling you about all the birds, all the colors and sounds. Dad tells me again that he had brought home a roadrunner once and that was why he called his business "Roadrunner Land Surveying". I always thought it was because a roadrunner once killed a rattler that I was about to pet because I was 3 and it was wagging it's tail at me. The roadrunner rushed in like a whisper, grabbed the snake and beat it on a rock and then ran off why it. Mom came out in time to see the roadrunner but I'm not sure I could have made her understand what had just happened, so probably Dad's story is the right one. He liked mine, though, made him laugh.

I was standing in the living room, looking out across the lowlands, at all the trees gently swaying, the pines towering behind like green rocky mountains.... and being an artist, I began to pick out the patterns of color, denoting different stands of trees by species. They looked distantly like a latch-hook rug I'd seen once, maybe in my living room. That made me think of that living room and the parties I'd had when all my friends would come and have fun in my living room... and, of course I was still in a living room, if one included the trees, like my friends. Well, truth be told, I think of the trees as my friends, and now all my friends have children and their children and so forth and go forth.

So there's all these families out there, each doing their thing. There's a new kid, a weeping willow by the culvert, and he's getting big for his age. I kept trying to get one started on the other side nearest the house, but they never took. Probably the runoff from the road.

All those families just outside, each doing things and tossing off kids, all breathing in some way or another, and I hear sending out chemical patterns which could be communication. They were complex enough to carry as much information as a dolphin's sqeal. It could be a cacapohy of chemical, and maybe positional, communications, like the birds when the sun comes up. That's the best time of the day, when the dew is rising and the birds are just chattering away. But I digress.

It's the sight of all these faces, all these families, dependent upon one another for so much, and me, just over the rise, spreading my trash their direction. I have a leach field, which has got to gross.. or not. It may seem like a great vein of vitamen ore... vitamen O. Oh, I don't know.
But still, all those faces, like the faces of the people down in that city with bodies floating past and young men staying to save a pupy, sending his children ahead with his sweetheart.

Lately I have been finding myself introducing myself to various parts of my yard, carefully leaving behind evidence of my having been there in the form of breath, body heat, and vibration. If one was a true pagan working under the assuption of a Mother of Life, then I'm surrounded by siblings. There's a distinct possiblity of my proteins residing in the cells of those faces, like old photos of Belle Starr looking like my Dad in sepia skirts. "Yo, Bro! Nice, looking petals! Very nice." and so forth, and go forth.

So maybe waste going through the body of the Mother of Life Herself becomes Life for my brothers, sisters and others? Amazing, like shit flowing downhill will eventually become compost. Just don't eat the mushrooms. But there you see it, in both reality and symbol: Nawlins the great is dead. Anything coming after will be a pale, sickly, addled version of itelf. But the soil of the flesh of our mother is like the tides, ruled by the same forces and given to the same rages... things change, and they never can be what they were, but they will always be what they were, that's been done. Now we'll see if something can be done with the ripples.

Gee, if I hadn't been reading the Kyballion and watching the Pirates of the Caribbean, I woulda missed it. There's this scene where the gold coin of the Aztecs hits the water and a big "whooom" goes off, they show the wave going out thru the water and, apparently thru the air, it made me think of the 3 dimensional nature of the wave and the fact that I could Hear the wave, See the wave, in both waterous and airborne forms, but I could never see all the dimensions of the wave, because my Knowlege depends on my ability to Understand. Ya gotta think for knowlege to make sense. I guess that's why I keep thinking about it, and the idea that my grand dad Tate died from pneumonia he got after helping out in the flood of the Ohio.

And Dad gathering up the bodies in India, the boiled and torn bodies floating in the bay. And Nawlins got hit so hard all at once that there weren't even enough people to kill to satisfy the wind. So the Earth coughed up her dead again and now there newly dead are floating alongside the long dead, and just to show you that times have gotten worse, the long dead have nicer clothes! And a boat.

So my hands shake and I have to think but not think and not try to put myself in all those shoes, but...
looking out at all those families I wonder, I knew that when the flood came, the little valley would flood, but not my house. But all those familes would get drowned and uprooted. And they already have, all over the earth. It's call multi-dimensional transmigration and don't you worry about a thing! It's the natural Order of Things under the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Yup, the same Law which disproves evolution and by disproving evolution, things can only get worse from here and the dead shall walk again. Or just float by in a nice suit in a nice box. I am sure that in the long run it will be all sepia toned like an old photo of a family gathering. The last before the flood came or the turn of the century, or the turn of the screw...

There's a cricket in the basment, like a loudmouth Archie or not maybe he's saying something very significant, something in ascii and I've gone to gui. Gone to gooey. I get that when I wash too many dishes all at once. It's good to know when to stop.

(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.