Almost Ishtar at the Gate

I've been reading a great deal lately about places around the Mideast but about maybe 5,000 years ago. It's just amazing what things seem never to have changed. Like all this killing being done over there, like fireworks of body parts: BOOM! BOOM! It just amazes me. So, of course, this is in preparation for sculpting and displaying several representations of the same (more or less)personage. This Spring stuff a-coming, with robins and rabbits, colored eggs and such, this Easter, what does it mean?



I'm always saying things about the Great Round and All, but I also ask myself, "What faith only gives meaning and not a way?"



In a non-literate society someone trying to say, "the Way" or "Great Round" as opposed to round... well, there had to be a way to express that, otherwise those concepts could only exist inside One Person, You. So I reject that, it's silly and there was, therefor, a way if you didn't have the technology to express capital letters(runes, ideographs). There is a way to express oneself in large letters. I feel, for instance, that my Dad walked hard on the earth, but not mean like. I see him in capital letters. The top of a column, post, is a capital. Top of the Totem pole is a real capper. But top of a list... not so important.



For instance, today they announced a recent report on the numbers of billionaires in the world, what a great surge of numbers there were. They listed by country the numbers and named the interesting, like J.K.Rowling of Harry Potter, Inc. And I thought no great disdain for these people, per se, except that in this fairly cut and dried syllogism whereby there is a limited amount amount of wealth at any one time, because wealth is labor deferred or material goods and, let's face it, this is a material and finite world...for all that wealth to appear in the hands of those 600+ billionaires, there must be a corresponding number of those left with nothing, and I thought what a grand idea it would be if just once, I heard a list of the recently destitute, along with names, quips and history.



But it will never happen, not on that station, because those supporting the station want to hear about people like them, or better so that they have a guiding star to be guided by and we are starting to be guided by a star, that Star, Our Star and non-others, Ishtar!! Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, What about when spring comes and the Daughter of the Earth comes up in a mirrored journey to the one that got Her down in Hell (eventually to become Queen of the Underworld, Goddess of the Afterlife), so when she gets back, Her Boyfriend and maybe Son, is sitting on Her Chair, eating Her Grapes and pinching the serving girls' behinds! She goes ballistic, of course She does. Bottom line he gets to spend time Down Under and She is Queen of the Earth and the Underworld, Goddess of Passion and War.



And that is about the pose I am working on right now with my Ishtar for the Museum.



Goddess of Passion. It's funny, but when I think about the archetypes in our culture lately it seems that those who represent the Passions are either dying young, or becoming perverted, unethical parasites with slow faces and piggy eyes. I think of the guys and gals up Top of the Heap, the ones who should be most connected to the One slightly Higher than the Heap, the All, or as we say in Babylon and Sumeria, Ishtar. They should be passionate, but when I think of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and the rest, I see piggy eyes, a monotone delivery that reminds me of either a psychotic, or an autistic, but no real passion. I did see piggy delight when Cheney was talking about shooting his best friend in the face and no son of a bitch could do a damn thing about it.



But the kids out on the street blowing themselves up, the Locals, as we like to say when we aren't describing them as something much less nice, well they are showing some passion. And a real sense of what comes next, after. Otherwise, seriously, why else would You do it? You would have to believe in it so strong that you felt like exploding, as Life around you explodes. That's passion, and blood. Rivers of blood flowing down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, just like the old days when Ishtar was pissed. Her tongue is hanging out, stained red with blood. Her mace and dagger are streaming blood. Her Eyes are wild and open, Her Stare can kill you. Her best pets are Scorpions, which sometimes ride on Her Shoulders. Really bad-assed, pissed off Personage. Just like Down Under when she first went down to attend the funeral of Her Brother in Law. Her Sister, some say, freaked out... maybe it was something She said, the Way She Said It? Anyway it went bad, that was a long time ago, but both times it would take something special to set Her Off. Like rivers of blood into Her sacred Waters. Maybe it's time to check on things Upstairs.



The Way Up is just as hard, in some Ways, as the Way Down, and when the front down comes crashing down and there are all those Billionaires, all even in a list updated yearly....I'm thinking it could be interesting for those on that list.



It's odd how those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. Odd because if it's not a metaphor and we're talking about anybody who maintains themselves by using a sword, well, that's not many and not very interesting. Some kind of statistical quirk that accountants and tax collectors talk about over beers at the local pub. If it's about something more general and archetypal, then we should be able to apply it to lots of situations, even at random. Those who live by farming shall die by farming. Great, that works especially well in a pesticide rich environment, and a warning to us all to stay out of the fields.



Those who live by lying through their teeth and sending hundreds and thousands of trained murderers to go kill anybody, anywhere in the world who does not agree substantially with that single man's world view shall die, in their sleep next to their mistress with a monstrous estate that will keep legions of lawyers happy for years to come. Or shall die when legions of trained murderers come and kill anyone who does not, at least, substantially agree to another man's world view. In the past there were women who di this sort of thing, but it should be noted that they always had to be able to convince men to go forth and murder.



Ishtar had helpers, too.



There are these great stories I've read in preparing for this sculpture. Some of them indicated the great risks there are in waking up a Female to a mess in their Home. Especially Goddesses.

powered by performancing firefox

well I just don't know

Let's see... the words are being printed okay on the screen... This is my first try with this new way of uploading blog stuff without going thru a lot of nonsense. BUt nevertheless, this is an effort to forget about what was just done to me, make no bones about it! That is, my personal space was violated, and I volunteered. Lots of needles, not much discomfort, and now, in a week, I do it again to the other side. Then the third week they come in and do something to the nerves. I thing they bring in a binding arbitration or something. But I'm doing good on the Ishtar sculpture, given that just recently "we" decided to bring up the "Crazy ex-Wife Goddess" to the discussion and now I'm trying to figure out how to threaten with sword and torch and still cover one's breasts, because this is, after all, the 21st century and we don't yet have nipples. No problem, I have hair, and maybe even a scorpion to bring in to cover them nipples. Well this hurts, so lets see if I can actually post this.

powered by performancing firefox

It's pretty cold out, we got some snow yesterday that covered the tracks of the squirrels and birds but left the paths out to the hen house. My back is somewhat dull with pain and there's a periodic flash of deep pain on one side. Not a lot, but then the pills have kicked in by now. Starting March 1st they are going to try to "put the nerves to sleep" with high frequency waves. If it works I might have a 50% reduction in pain and regain some mobility in time to work on the two remaining sculptures for the National Museum of Dance.

The exhibit is supposed to last about a year and will feature various goddesses, mostly from the Greek era, with a small temple set up in a garden like setting. That's the impression I get anyway. I haven't seen any plans yet. I let them hang onto "Dancer", which they want to use as Demeter. It seems funny that they liked that one for Demeter as it's a bit chubby and oriental looking, but then the religions came from the east and body types were different then. Then they want Artemis, which is very pleasant but in need of a solid base so she doesn't fall back. During the firing it sagged a tad bit and now leans back too far. I planned a marble, stone or cement base for her. The Persephone they chose is the older one, just a bust really, but it's shown before and I like her a lot. Now I have to do Aphrodite in a taller size, like 24"-30" and Ishtar at about 18". It's curious how the mingling of forms creates an athmosphere. Combining Greek and earlier goddesses in one spot has interesting implications. If we use Aphrodite and Ishtar as examples of passionate goddesses we get one idea, but if we use Ishtar along with Persephone we get a rebirth concept and draw attention to her role as protector of childbirth. I like the idea that they have a religion whereby the passion that leads to childbirth is handled by one deity. She encourages love, sex and children. Nice Lady.

I have an idea for Aphrodite. Since I tend to appreciate the earlier forms I plan to use the moment she arises from the sea, supported by dolphins and maybe even covered by seaweed, at least the "special parts". The woman in charge of the exhibit is excited about it all, and that sure is nice. Aphrodite was identified as giving passion a singular role in life. It is passion that causes love. It is passion that leads to war. So Aphrodite has an affair with the god of war, Ares. Her husband is the god of blacksmithing and relates to Ptah and other male creator gods. They don't create the universe, as that was done already, but they create things like armor, jewelry, magic weapons. Aphrodite get a girdle that makes her look so good nobody can resist her. Odd, when you think about it, that a husband would make his wife irresistible to other men. But then Hephaestus was not your average god-husband. So she's on her seashell, supported by dolphins, partly nude yet not so much sexy as pure.

Ishtar was also called Inanna and I plan to make Her in the motif of the older forms, the stylized cylinder-like body but with suggestions of breasts and pubic triange, just enough to be "real" but still stylized enough to not be offensive to sensitive viewers. The real older form with Her spread-legged and obscene wouldn't go over too well. Ishtar-Inanna was the goddess who went down to Hell to visit Her sister Ereshkigal and pay respects to Her dead husband. There is some suggestion that Ereshkigal and Inanna as aspects of the same goddess, but that goes without saying. All deities are linked at some level. I like the Inanna version of the Persephone myth, the idea that She goes down of Her own free will and comes back more powerful. Much better than rape and abduction, even if it was by a powerful God like Hades. That version reminds us that Death comes for us all, but the earlier version reminds us that we sometimes have to sacrifice ourselves to ourselves in order to rise above and become stronger, to gain our destiny. We die and are reborn, the earlier version of the Jesus myth, even earlier than Isis and Osiris.

The thing you should get from all this imagery is that idea of the Great Circle, that death is not an end to life, merely a point on the Circle. We become greater by leaving it all behind. Inanna-Ishtar gives up Her jewelry, Her body and Her life and comes back strong enough to cast down her lover-husband who has usurped Her place. Much different take on things from the Persephone myth. Non-linear religions give us hope and despair. We will return in some form, but we will have to die again and suffer through life. Christians and other Yahwehists have a linear view where you die, are judged and then you hang out for eternity praising your Father. Not much point to that one, I think. The idea of returning to life and becoming one with other forms seems not only more interesting, but reasonable. How can an infinite universe just end and follow up with a nonsensical past life of continuous ego-stroking? Makes no sense at all. I don't even like the idea.

So you hope to see your loved ones again, know you will be in love again, in life again and will come to understand more and more about all those forms which are part of the universe. The other way gives you the position of sychophant for eternity! Yikes. Sounds exactly like what a man would invent, especially a man with doubts about his manliness.

An interesting aside is how various publications deal with the birth of Aphrodite. In some she is made of sea foam caused by the casting of Uranus's penis into the ocean. In others they deal with the penis by saying it had a vast ejaculation at the end, something which does sometimes happen to men when dying, and Aphrodite was formed of the froth. So in that one you see that they understood the fact that semen causes birth! Interestingly enough there are some creation myths where the male creator god masturbates the universe into existence, solving the problem of why a male god might not have a female goddess around to use that heavenly penis. Still, the idea of the universe being created by a hairy-palmed deity thinking about Sonia Bragga is disturbing. Gives you an idea of what kind of folks were telling tales back then. NOt much different from Fox News.

This morning the radio voice said that they normally only refer to medical doctors as "doctor" on air, except in some cases as when a reporter might refer to "Doctor Condeleeza Rice". That got me thinking, of course, about the concept of that woman as a doctor. I understand that she did not attend a medical school and is only a doctor by virtue, if you can call it that, of her PhD. BUt still, consider her for a moment holding some helpless preemie in her hands and she is deciding if it's cost effective to let the brat live or not... But I suppose I might be misreading that smirk she gets whenever she talks about women and children being killed by American weapons. She may simply be licking off some stray Thai sauce or something. She might be quite tender-hearted for the right price.

The thing is, as a second rate character in a soap opera, Condie does fine. But as Secretary of State she represents me and everybody else in my family and neighborhood. So, doncha think that when she has her face on the Web in short video clips for CNN and YouTube, and she's telling outrageous lies about how many innocent people are beling slaughtered because of this business deal, this slam-dunk, that went so horribly bad... that the people whose families were under those bombs or hit by those bullets... they might be really, really mad? I know that George thinks all "those people" are ignernt and backard, but actually pretty much all civilization started around there and has never left, except to evolve into a cesspool of dog eat dog, eye for an eye violence, a huge self destruction while they work out their history. Many of those people are skilled at building things, wiring things, mixing things. It's so simple a child could do it. As we learned from Timmy McVeigh you can drive right up to the target and be miles away when it triggers, letting you time it just right for maximum carnage. We do it all the time, you and I. In our name, every day, bombs are exploding people into pieces, bullets are slamming into children, and minds are being made up. It'll be centuries before all the vengence killings will be worked out. We'll be dying violently for centuries. And Condi got a super-tanker named after her. Oil tanker, that is, Texas T, black gold, just like Condee.

So whenever you think about the future, be sure to factor in the potential of daily bombings in some American city. It is much easier to successfully attack a super-power if you are willing to blow yourself up along with the victims. Suppose our military had as an active part of training the idea of strapping on a vest of C4 and walking up to a check point around rush hour? How many American kids would sign up to blow themselves up for their country? It takes real hair to do that. It does, however, violate the one commandment that I, as a pagan, choose to follow: Harm None. So, for me, a suicide vest may not be cowardly and misrepresented, but it is not to be done in the name of the Deity. You blow yourself up because you want to kill people you do not know. That just doesn't work for me. Then you have the other crime in war: distance killing. Firing a missle, dropping a bomb, shooting a bullet, all remove you for the immediate ramification s of your deed. You don't even get to run over and eat a slice out of the heart of your victim. Where's the fun in that? But then, maybe we just don't want to know what Halliburton serves up as Field Ready Meat Product. Bottom line is I think if you are willing to kill someone you don't know, you should be close enough to introduce yourself and acknowlege them as a person. Then you can blow the back of their head out, splattering blood all over the wall of the mosque. And be sure to smile for the camera, because in a few hours every computer in the Mideast could be displaying an all American Boy desecrating a holy site with muslim blood. Yup, that memory will take a while to fade, doncha think? I'm thinking that all those various videos, real and faked, that portray American national policy towards others, especially those of other faiths, are going to keep hatred of you and me and our families high for a number of decades. And the American Government is attempting to control the content of the Web, not surprising except for the complete lack of understanding of the form of creature that is the Web.

They didn't understand the Mideast, either. Not even Condee with her PhD understood how long tribes have been killing one another there, in vast numbers. It all depends on how pissed they are. See, when we want to kill in vast numbers we leave the country. We kill elsewhere. Those loonies kill at the neighborhood market! No, it was a bad idea to send thousands of ignernt, semi-well armed yet poorly trained and armored kids to another, very hot, very violent part of the world to compete with a culture that embraces death and yearns for it. Evangelicals talk a good heaven, but they love their HD wide-screen LCD TV. Bad idea.

I like Dick Cheney likes those field rations, with lots of gravy. But I digress.

It's a fine February morning in a place where everything has icing on it. Bright white icing. It's a place of bright contrasts, especially at night. But I'm talking about now and here and it's all a little too bright and white for me.The sun on your back is like a distant bonfire, as well it should. But the trees are broken, the terrible elms that I was going to take down later this year, now they're all broken and I feel sorry for them... but in the spring somebody with a chain saw is going to have to cut them down. They'll grow back as a shrub for awhile.

But these extremes, these whites and darks and swollen birds all puffed and jumpy on the branches. This is like a charcoal drawing, and those things tend towards extremes. That always gets me thinking about the Tree, the One we wern't supposed to get to. Even the Gnostics had that Tree. The First Mother, the one even a Bonobo ape orphan will snuggle against, is the Tree. It starts out as One and then branches out into many. Sometimes that's a good idea, sometimes, it's not. But the Tree of Life splits into two, and then again, and again. Until we show up and name It. Sounds silly, I know, but in the end we have the Tree as a Past and as a Future. And sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's not.

Infinity looked at me and said, "That's what it's all about, this and that, dog and cat. That's what it looks like, more or less. That's my name, you can't help but spread it around." So I looked and found that it was true, every Thing was connected to at least one other Thing, if you looked deep down inside, it would keep being connected. If you looked out in any direction, it was always the same, Something was connected to Something else. That's binary code, Male and Female. Adam and Lilith, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark. Something like that. So naturally you think of the Tree.

We'll get back to Infinity later. There's all these birds flying around, taking up seeds. Some are dancing on the ice, eyeballing some chick. It looks festive, but it looks serious, like rice farmers before a storm. But it's still Binary, the seed and the bird, both symbols that go back as far back as we have symbols. We must have watched them a very long time, and talked about them a lot as well. I've always said, watch what you do, but do it. That's a lot like those birds. Very little gets them to forget their task, right up to when a big Dodge pickup roars by and they split to the shrubbery. Man, do you think they have a collective memory of some carnivore the size of that bearing down on them, like a whale sucking up krill?

So if the Mother Bird Goddess is one of the earliest, she'd be the one most dispersed. I've always warned people about feeding the gods but now they've gone and gotten Yahweh into a blood diet so I thought, why not bring up his Grandmother and have Her set Him straight? Why not make a temple to the Goddess in Her bird form that would look to the passing Dodge like a huge bird feeder aviary, gazebo or something that covered most of an acre? I have that much land here. There's even a spring and a cavern, although nobody has gone in, it's kinda shallow and wet, but then I've dated gals who in the end were shallow and wet.

You start with a few columns and apiaries that had vines that wound around trees forming atriums lined with flowers. Here and there you'd have shrines to the various forms of the Goddess in this area, the local stories. Like a Woodcock shrine, or a Hawk shrine, all connected with small areas protected from the rain and snow. Nice, eh? That's what they were like. That's why you read about the sacred column or pillars that get knocked down and broken in the Old Testament. He's got a lot of explaining there. I'm thinking they don't call Him a Volcano God for nothing. But She would fold Her arms and go on receiving His attention or not. That would piss Him off and the next thing you know we're in Iraq with a moron in charge surrounded by psychotic evangelicals.

You wonder why I'd risk calling in a Goddess with a full tilt local Shrine? It's that or nothing, I read the papers as well as the scrolls and testaments. Everybody says it's ugly when Mom and Dad fight. But I have to say that there's always Grandmother, and She kicks butt. So maybe you go neolithic, counting that by now she's not only spread all over the world, since She started near Babylon, she's just around the corner! Yeah, and the great thing is that by being a custodian of the shrine, me, my wife and cats and maybe a crippled son, we would pay no taxes except maybe a few gallons of our great wines. Or pies, something they'd like. They being the new local reps of the regional militia. I figure by the time we pay off the wars in the Middle East the You Ess of Hay will be broke, dead broke and with a very bad credit to boot. Well, people still gotta eat, and we have a lot of people, so you want to learn how to garden, how to grow organic, because by not almost every item of food gets pulled off the shelves to feed the starving army, or because of E Coli contamination. Could be bad.

But it could also be good. Suppose Grandma comes in with Her Broom of Might and stops the fight, ends the killing and requires Mom and Dad to go somewhere for a few millenium and screw or something? No talking, more Creation.

That might be nice. It'd be Persephone and the ice and snow would melt, most of Florida would go under and the Polar bears would have to go to Canada, which would work well for all those Natives would got given most of that tundra and permafrost as a sop to their national pride. Anyway, the grapes would grow great, so wines would be good, and a few more houses would be fenced and covered with passive defenses, mostly to ward off gangs of orphans or insurance salesmen.

There's this branch from an elderberry that was crushed by the falling elm tree, and as it sticks it's body out into the light, it branches out in two, as if reaching up to a divine figure, and on each branch there sits a chickadee, all puffed up against the cold.

You may notice that I changed the appearance of this blog recently. I'm working on it, trying to make it more useful and attractive. I started it, in part, to vent my emotions because of Jon's situation, but he's been really stable lately and I have not, so I guess I'll work on the externals of the blog a bit while I work on the writing.

I'm going to be making a fairly classical version of Aphrodite in terracotta for the National Museum of Dance. In order to do this in a manner that I am comfortable with I am studying the construction and set up of shrines. I like to consider the kind of environment a given statue might be destined for. Some shrines are created for an object and some form over time and have objects added later. Let's look at an example. In Goddess worship we look for spots where there is a liminal activity, like a spring, a cave, volcano, etc. Say I find a small opening under a huge tree from which water is streaming out. This is inner energy coming out to light. This liminal place is thereby holy. I might offer a coin, tossed back into the depths. I might sit and listen quietly to the sound of water bubbling up. I think about Persephone, I might think about the World Tree, maybe I'll consider the elements involved here and light a stick of incense. Through the years I continue to visit the site and offer coins, incense and meditations. I might whisper to the Goddess, I might sleep and have dreams. Eventually I might bring others here. It becomes a shrine.

As time goes by I might build a small altar and put various symbols of the Goddess such as statues, bowls etc. There is a spot where people nap to have dreams or visions. A young woman comes to stay there from time to time, taking care of the shrine and keeping it clean. We build a roof over the spot where the offerings are made. The shrine becomes a temple. Maybe the dreams are consistantly true visions or maybe people come and are cured of diseases or psychological problems and more people come. Maybe people who are especially touched build small dwellings nearby. It becomes a temple-town with many shrines, many statues and offerings.

The Aphrodite I am working on is made for that level of shrine. It will be about 2 feet tall and so far at least, will have Her on a shell, holding a dove in one hand and with Cupid or Eros nearby. Notice that Eros counts for physical love and is a lesser figure in the shrine. This is because physical love is but a small part of the Goddess's domain. Love of family, love of country, of ideals... all these are loves, even love of self. Aphrodite deals with love.

She is related to Astarte, Freya, Marilyn and other Goddesses of love. She has a husband who loves Her, lovers who love Her, followers who love Her, and animals who love Her. Oddly enough, these animals are not always what you would expect. For instance, the dove is certainly one we would expect, being beautiful, soft and shy. But the pig is another animal associated with her, as is the dolphin. Both are good mothers and have other aspects which relate to important aspects of the Goddess. Meditation on these aspects, the love of a mother for her child, the love of a woman for her husband or mate, all can reveal truths about ourselves. Aphrodite is not faithful to her husband, but she is faithful to her Nature.

They want me to springboard off Isadore Duncan for the model so I have Googled a number of pictures and stare at them for long periods of meditation. The robes will be clinging so I can emphasize the body while covering it. I will likely have a breast exposed but plan to cover another with a hand. I want to show both the erotic aspects as well as the modest aspects of love. I may support the shell on two dolphins to show Her connection with the sea, as She was born of the sea.

Interesting note on Her birth. Some books say She was born of the sea foam created when a God's penis was tossed into the sea. Interesting, but some stories say the blood whipped up the foam, whereas others say it was an ejaculation after the castration that created white foam. Thus sperm entering the sea (which is ever the Goddess) gave birth to the Goddess of Love. Leave it to your imagination, was it sperm causing birth, or blood? Some writers have a problem delivering to their readers the image of a sea frothing with cum producing a beautiful nude Goddess. Too erotic? But it's the Goddess of Love, fer crying out loud. Christians should not try to write about Gods and Goddesses. They get nervous, especially when too many symbols start sounding like their own tales of Jesus and the rest of the Jewish gods. Like Osiris and Isis establishing the basis for the Jesus death and rebirth. Or Odin hanging from a tree being offered by himself to himself to bring a revelation to the people. Too close for comfort.

When I start mushing clay around I will try to post a picture of the work. The exhibition is supposed to be up for a year and I hope to make some commissions from all this, or at least get my name in the paper. Time to light some incense down by the spring. Goddess Bless, as they say in the temple town.

I've been trying to relax, looking out at the birds and the lowlands, but there are so many downed trees and broken trees in my field of vision. Maybe it's a bad idea to drink coffee first thing in the morning, like a jolt of speed. Then you plug into the box and find out how many people died while you were sleeping, and not just the ones who died when the house fell on them, or the ones who were trying to run somewhere to get away from the killing. No, I mean the ones who are over there looking at their neighborhood, just like mine. The trees that are down, when you look close, were dropped by shells fired somewhere nearby. The marks on their road were put there by tanks. If I look out at my yard and see tanks rolling by, firing at people running away and smashing down my trees. Maybe even someone I know is just under those fallen trees, one of the ones trying to run away. It makes my stomach feel funny.

See, I have a brother in law in a hospital, with stitches that go all over and deep, holding him together in a way that makes even the hardest surgeon pray a bit. That's beside the point, who they are doesn't matter. I can say I know so many people near to death, not quite there and having completely different prognosis that it makes a wonderful circle that is archetypal and easily transportable. Then I think of any other place in the world and drop that circle over it. I think of Rotterdam, which was leveled nicely at it's center and has a lot of people who remember the bombs. My brother in law comes from Hungary and has a good handle on things like tanks in the streets. I suppose having a neighbor who seems just the type to rally a crowd with a pitchfork and torch doesn't help me feel comfy. All neighborhoods are the same at their core, and Kore is an aspect of Persephone, who in any of the myths still went thru a lot of changes thru no fault of Her own. Anything can happen.

I wanted to saw those trees down, myself. I figured they would get real tall and die and collapse on the house, so that was a good reason to want to shave the elm goddess. Still, now I have to have someone cut up and stack the limbs and trunks and then cut down the 20' tall stumps. I suppose it would be real hard to get this done if there were snipers looking to shoot people who looked like they were making things easy for tanks to get through. That would put a dent in my yard work. Of course in a lot of places where there are snipers they don't have big yards like mine, or if they have property this big they have all of it under production, unless of course somebody puts a mine field in it, or a road for tanks with mines on it and people who seem to live in the trees beyond and who shoot people who try to clean up the yard, especially if they have never seen me or my family at Sunday, Friday, or Saturday worship.

What if some thugs with rifles, fully automatic rifles, came one night and informed us that some people would be living in my garage from now on and we were not to walk within a few yards of the place, as the dogs might not like it? Well, maybe I digress, but still. I was preparing to wash the dishes and started thinking about the view, my studio. What if they took it away? They can do that, they wrote and published papers that say they can do that. And they got a blathering idiot to sign his mark on the papers, so of course, that makes it better. But they can take anything they want, anytime they want and that makes me want to work faster, before it happens. Of course we can never say "It can't happen here." because it did, many times, and it was always unpleasant. We think that of course Syria would never have the balls to attack the big, bad, nuclear United States, especially if the head of the military were a drooling incoherent moron, but, I say to you, brothers and sisters, can you honestly say that no Syrian would have the balls to walk up to you and pump a magazine into you before you could squint at their name tag or ID card? Oh, I have to say I do indeed think that almost anybody you can see has the capacity to do just that. This is why a neighborhood is nice, you look out for one another. We bomb entire neighbor hoods out of existence in, oh so many places around the world.

What if some remnant of some neighborhood somewhere decided to even the score on your neighborhood? Oh sure, their government wouldn't have the guts, although oddly enough even the so-called "towel heads" are doing a good job of killing many of our trained troops every day. Man, anybody who wants to kill an American can somehow make it to Iraq, and they could just walk up to a patrol or a dance and do them all in. You might even get to go back home and brag about it. Sometimes they make videos of them doing it, along with instructions on how to do it yourself! Yes, and there are a LOT of neighborhoods where bombs or bullets with little American flags fell, sometimes passing through the skull of a little girl who was running to get her only soccer ball. Cheesy story, yet true. I bet her uncle would love to get some of those videos, or fully automatic rifles. He might be willing to wait until his travel papers come in and he can take it home to roost. There are hundreds of thousands of dead people with friends and relations with little American flags on them. Sometimes we don't let the families take the bodies in, we shoot at suspected looters.

Now I look past the broken elms to the road and I see a patch of white. It's Jess, with her head smashed in from a mortar round and her white pants getting all muddy as they roll by. Even when they pass it's too dangerous to do anything but hide in the bathroom and steal a look when things get quiet. Years from now I'll see the crows sitting on the broken ends of the elms, laughing, laughing, laughing.

But it's just a patch of snow beat down by the passing cars. The crows are sitting on the broken stumps of the elms and they are laughing.

Tomorrow the woodchuck tries to predict the end of winter. I have a hunch he's not going to want to climb out of it's warm bed just to see if the shadow is there. I know I won't feel like it. Even inside this computer room it's pretty darn cold. I have moved my email and various other accounts to this machine, which was a gift from Larry and runs XP, as opposed to the old thing which runs ME and frequently has to be rebooted several times just to get up and running. I backed up a lot of graphics to a portable hard drive and then spent a lot of time trying to convince Picassa that it should import these pics to this new machine. Now I just have to go thru about 4000 images and somehow find catagories for them to make them more useful. I really enjoy Picassa, it makes posting images to my blog easy as pie and organizing even massive amounts of images becomes pretty easy. I really would like to publish my better images, I think some of what I've done is worthy of public notice. Besides, Larry gave me the camera and in his name I would like to use it well.

Speaking of public notice, I am working on a project for the National Museum of Dance here in Saratoga. It's an exhibit springboarding from Isadore Duncan's dances and set in a Greek temple or shrine. I'm using three existing pieces of mine: Persephone, Artemis, Dancer (playing the role of Demeter) and a new piece I haven't created yet, Aphrodite. I'd have like to have been able to design the thing myself, but they already have designers, I just have to supply some of the art. It's very exciting in part because the exhibit is scheduled to be up for a year! Now if it generates a commission or two that would be swell. I have a number of pics of Isadore dancing and will use that energy to come up with a good design. The lady running the show obviously has strong feelings toward Duncan and the various Goddesses she portrayed. Those feelings are not always in synch with mine, as she seems to be working off the later, classical period and I tend to pull the stories back to their origin points. Thus, she talks of the rape and abduction of Persephone and I lean toward her incarnation as Inanna, who went down on her own to visit her sister.

My brother in law has had open heart surgery to repair a bad valve and two arteries. He's going thru the climb upwards back to the light, seeing insects on the walls and having odd fixations and dreams. Poor Sis doesn't know what to make of it, but she is really scared. He just retired, doesn't like to eat right and like Dad, seemed to think he could dog it out by being tough. Well, he is tough and that will help him, but it is the love of his wife that will give him the kind of strength he needs. Sis does love her man and she will fight tooth and nail to keep him alive. I wonder if she can see the common thread here between the classical Persephone and her own experience? In this case the sexes are reversed and the abduction was done by a heart attack, so the abductor is the victim himself... but we still have the image of going down, down, to the dark unknown and then rising to a new life, changed inside and out.

This month they want to stick more chemicals into my spinal fluid to try to undo some pain. The first time I tried epidurals it did nothing, but they want to try different chemicals. I have an appointment with the pain management people on the 23rd, and the orthopedic on the 27th. I hope something happens. I had to move Artemis down the stairs to take it to the lady from the museum so the designers could see what we have and I discovered that I could barely lift it, much less walk it down the stairs. I used lots of padding and a dolly finally. But I built that piece and I used to be able to move her around fairly easily. My weakness annoys me a lot. Today I am suffering a lot from the lifting. My back is like a sheet of steel and feels like I'm in a collossal vise. So I am cutting this entry short. It's really tough typing...

Jon is still Jon but I hope to go back down and try to move some papers around to get him on a list to move him to the Saratoga area. Since they no longer bother with stimulation therapy... since they have given up on him... I can get as good a care up here as down there. Turn him, clean him, talk to him. I can do the rest.

Talk to ya later. There's more going on.

It's been awhile since I got online and longer since I last posted. I've been distracted somewhat by my back pain, which has gotten significantly worse. Sitting is pretty rough on me but I can't exactly type on my back. Another thing that I simply must work on is this machine. It is running WinME, which you might know is an antique, no longer supported and buggier than Win3.1. So even as I type, when I look up I notice that my last several words haven't quite made it to the screen. I pause, wait and watch as the screen sits, blank. Then suddenly the cursor blinks and the words start appearing. It's like that time is 1967 when I smoked opium with Ma Armstrong, the Buddhist witch. All my words of the poem I wrote didn't appear on the paper until after I wrote them and stopped to watch them appear. They trailed behind the actual writing by a few seconds. Ma saw that too, so it was a group hallucination. This problem is not, however, caused by good drugs but rather by a bad operating system.

Jon just got through with a stint in the Kingston hospital for throwing up blood and running a fever. They figure it was a feeding tube problem and did nothing to change it, just waited for the blood to stop and then sent him back. They don't do surgery on vegetables so it will happen again, every time the tube gets jiggled by maybe turning him roughly or just tangling up the tubes. He'll toss up the blood and then breathe it back in and then run a fever as his body tries to deal with it. One of these days the fever will run to pneumonia and then maybe Jon will get the break he needs: Death.

You might flinch when reading that, but it's the truth. The current system does not deal with people like Jon very well. He will never write a book, flip a burger, or vote, so why fix him? He is money down the tube, as it were, and there are lots of sick folks they can fix, so why waste time on him? I suppose one could argue that a life is a life and the Good Book tells us to help the helpless, but in the real world of North Korean bombs and sickly Arabs with a penchant for self destruction one more locked in mind is just too much to worry about. The nurse I spoke with hadn't even looked in Jon's eyes and was surprised to hear that he was not staring at the ceiling or moving his eyes back and forth like a robot. He was tracking me and following me with his eyes as I talked to him. They have stopped all therapies with Jon, the ones that would help. He's waiting for Godot right now, or waiting for the head of Che to be transplanted onto his shoulders. Maybe we could make him like Zaphod with two heads. Nah, better to leave him in bed like a bucket of flesh where we pour in brown feeding sludge and pills and water and dump it out now and then when it stinks.

That sounded bitter. I'm sorry.

Jon tracks and emotes like a man would if he were trapped in his form and half the people didn't know his name and nobody plays his music for him and nobody looks him in the eyes and talks as if he could hear. But that's not enough to get him Ritalin or Ambien or Brainfingers devices that would enable him to move a computer cursor. That's for folks who live 2 hours from the researcher. Apparently here in America we have a 2 hour rule on health care. If you can get within 2 hours of us we will try to give you a voice, but if you live in the only hospital that will accept you and it happens to be in the middle of East Bumfuck NY you are out of luck, son, and sorry to see it happen to a nice guy. He never got a break. I knew from his natal chart that he was due for some serious stuff but it always seemed to me that all them grand trines and such gave him the power to resist. Indeed it did work out that way but the results were less wonderful than I thought. He resists dying with a strength that is staggering to see, but he will not heal any faster and he can't move a damn thing to prove that he's "in there".

Mean time I sit here with increasingly painful jolts down my leg, trying to document some of this, trying to interest anybody else in his situation. It's like shouting down a wishing well because you ran out of pennies. Still, if I throw myself down the well and gather up all the coins, for $2100 I can buy a device that straps onto Jon's forehead and perhaps allows him to control a computer, if he's having a good day. At the same time Jess is fighting for her scholastic career as the Dutch screwed up her records and gave her a few undeserved F grades. They had refused to teach in English, telling her that some classes were self explanatory, which they weren't, and then told her not to bother with one class as it dealt with Dutch building codes. They then failed her for not coming, rather than assign her a class in English from which she could emerge with a grade that more accurately indicates her real skill level. We're working on that too.

So I have two kids trying to tell the world that they are smart and alert and can do the work. They are being held back by people who don't care and have forms to fill out. I write and talk to blank walls and throw myself down wishing wells but to no avail. It's time to have my eyes examined and nothing got accomplished today except the Moron in the White House has expressed his deep concern that North Korea wishes to have a nuclear deterent against an invasion by the United States. Not a very successful day but if we are very lucky some nurse is sitting with Jon watching his eyes, some clerk is looking over Jess's test scores and some diplomat somewhere is sipping whiskey with another diplomat and talking about the weather.

I have to stop talking now and take more drugs and strap an electrode set to my back to block the pain signals to my brain. Later I'm strapping the set to my brain to block the frustration signals to my mouth. Maybe I'll burn some clay today and see if I have a product to sell. I have started making lidded pots and serving dishes but I need to be able to shovel wood for several hours without screaming in pain. On the other hand maybe that will become a type of firing, like raku, except instead of the pots being subjected to stress the sculptor is. Interesting marketing concept. I wonder what Jon would say about it?

I tried to talk on the air today thru the local PBS radio. I wanted to talk about the ethics involved in having an adult child who was diagnosed as PVS. They had this medical ethics person talking, generally about problems experienced by children and their parents when it came to making decisions in medical situations. See, our story is more rare. As father of the man I have very few rights. Obviously if we had a paper saying that in the event he was unable to make choices, I had the right to make them for him. Now one of the cases they talked about was a very bright child of 16 refusing to have chemo for his cancer, which would certainly kill him. The therapy he wanted to take was herbal and the doctors described it as "spice therapy" and therefor useless. The judge came up with a fair compromise but it merely confirmed the obvious: that we have no choices, we only have defaults, and in today's world, in America, New York, the default is the State. But I digress somewhat.. he said..
They put me on and told me I had a minute or two so I was able to set up the situation, how as father I was told by all the doctors that when decisions were being made for Jon, no matter what I wanted in the end they could get 3 doctors to sign off on what they wanted and that would be that. In point of fact, that's how they presented me with Jon's DNR. I didn't get that far before they cut me off, but they asked me to stay on so the guy could talk to me after. I gave him more details and he grew increasingly uneasy with the problems I had faced. He was of the very strong position that everything that had happened to Jon, or for him, was not legal., that as the closest competent relative I had the final say in all things, even to removing the feeding tube, ala Schiavo.

Funny thing about the concept of telling someone to starve my son to death, it opens the door (again) on the subject of The Good Death. In the Abrahamic (?) faiths we start off with a father killing his son and it goes right thru the two Testaments. In each case it is presented as a Holy Act and one which advances the soul of the Father toward a higher state, or at least he is never brought up on charges. I keep recalling the news story of the guy driving down a highway with a knife to the throat of his son, saying that his son was possessed and to save his soul he had to cut off the head. I forget if he even cut the kid's throat before they stopped him. But still, the original story was not overly interesting to me except for it's Biblical overtones, I would like someone to tell me how the boy is today? If the cops had been of the same faith as that man, they would have held the kid down, and after freeing his soul, they would bury the body with honors, calling it a Good Death. Same thing happens when some kid in Iraq steps through the wrong gate and gets shipped home under a flag. It's a good death.

If Jon is dying as I write this does it prove that Irony is the name of the currently dominent god?

If so, He is a Trickster. I learned, or was told, that they had stopped Coma Stim therapy for Jon. So he gets to either lie in his bed looking up at the ceiling, or sit in his wheelchair near the nurse station, sometimes with a TV on, sometimes just in the quiet dark.

I was told, it was suggested, that I grind up some Ambien I acquire from the web and stuff it into Jon's feeding tube. It has been found to help some patients, to 'wake them up'. The thing is, first, that as I have found, there is little chance that I would be able to mess with his stuff before some aide walked by. I figure it would take me the better part of the day to fiddle with any of his plastic tubular crap, it just freaks me out. My philosophy with drugs, too, has always been to be extremely careful about what you take, where you get it. That is, after those years of psychedelic majesty. After my first marriage, my loss of son, my loss of sanity and health. Took me quite a while to recover from having to ship Jon off to live with his mother at age 3-4. It ate at me for years. When Jon came back home he was such a great kid, a bit wild, but still with some work... Then he left yet again, this time to a mother who was breaking apart. She gave up trying to have a social life and having a wild violent kid around, so Jon was once again shipped off. This was pretty bad, with the drugs and such. By the time he asked to return to his mother, and she was ready to try again, I think I had lost him in some deep down part. I had never been able to save him. I couldn't even protect him from himself.

Now some man, who means well, is talking to me on the phone suggesting I administer a drug that was designed for something else, but seemed to help people with limited neurological abilities, or even 'locked in' types. But I have to order the pills from the web, then ferry them down 100 miles in powder form in some kind of bottle, I suppose, and somehow get it into Jon's feeding tube in hopes it isn't amphetamine instead. Although, that might be something to try. Personally, if I was going to try something this bizare I would most likely slip a bit of blotter acid under his tongue. I used to say I'd like to go tripping on acid so at least there would be colors at the end. It's not so funny a concept nowadays, but a nagging kind of buzz in my ear, my inner ear. "Slip the kid something! If it worked, you'd help him. If it doesn't, who could see a difference? He's a potato!" Yup, sits in front of the TV all day, never goes out. Of course, having sepsis and such a few times, maybe that's a wise move. It certainly is easier on the facility.

So, I think Jon will have to do without me helping out in either a pharmachemical or psychedelic family. Not yet, certainly. I will however strongly suggest to pretty much everybody in the food chain that something needs to be done with Jon, something that involves him getting decent care in a safe place by good people and close enough that when I find myself in a wheel chair, I can still get over to see him and nudge him. Dang.

I have enough unfired pieces, masks and sculptures, to do in a couple firings requiring 6-8 hours and then a week or so to recover enough to walk without a cane. But still, I can administer to myself drugs of choice, trying not to mix my Foster's too much with the ones my doctor gives me. I have an interesting balancing act here, trying to walk between ethics and morality, pain and joy. It's a classic shamanic location. I should build a nice sculpture of Janus, or maybe even Odin. He was a serious shaman, hanging from a tree, sacrificed himself to himself and coming back with visions. I suppose if I keep this religious theme to my work somebody is going to think I'm obsessed, but that's better than being posessed. I need to switch to a Greco-Roman style kiln so I can fire in a few hours what takes me maybe 6 in a pit. That's the original style I planned to build but I played with downdrafts to learn clay and now I want to build kilns to learn that technology, and to create some beauty. They have to be of a type which will go up fast and then fire fast and break back down to be able to size the kiln to the load. I need a lot of bricks.

...Now this paragraph is several days later and the new meds have managed to beat down a lot of the side effects of the neurontin. That stuff is very nasty. It got rid of the pain down the legs but screwed up my memory and them messed with my hands and even apparently gave me a few panic attacks and serious disorientation. Sheesh. Now I'm trying Cymbalta and Lyrica. Just freaking amazing what you do to avoid disabling pain. The crazy thing is that, if you think about it, all pain is is a signal to the brain that some nerves are being pinched. Why do they have to natter on about it. My spinal nerves are being pinched by crushed vertebrae and bone spurs. No kidding. Hell, I was there when I fell! I know all about them crushed bones. Why can't you simply put up a "message received" notice and get on with it. What the heck does my body expect me to do? Re-inflate the bones? Seems silly, sort of an organic spam. And of course as always I think about Jon. There in his bed, maybe feeling all kinds of biological spam from his body, so much that he can't even move his eyebrows. That's gotta be very distracting and disturbing. That's exactly why I think he drifts in and out of reality, why his eyes won't focus or even fix on my face. He knows I'm out there, but he's just too busy trying to shut all those nerve signals up.

Ever read the Amber books? The ones about moving through shadows? I am convinced that people like Jon move through shadows and drift in now and again to collect their mail. I sure hope so. If I had 6 years to just be in a bed and think, and have all these nerves screaming at me all the time I think I could work up a good fantasy, one so real that coming back to a broken body would be not a good thing. So that's what I think he is doing most of the time. He's out there dancing with a nice looking girl under the moonlight. If the Diety has any sense of balance and justice, my boy is dancing somewhere with the girl of his dreams. When the body fails, the mind moves on. Sounds about right to me.

Take care of yourself, wear your seat belts and when lifting heavy objects use your knees. The rest of the time try to work up a pleasant fantasy involving music, moonlight and somebody you care about.

Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi have written a book called "Revolutionary Economy", which deals in part with the idea that our economy as normally viewed is changing, broken and in need of an enema. The old systems no longer work very well, in much the same way that our weather prediction techniques are based on old records and the way things work in climate change means the old records are out the door, honey. So the old ways we measure economy and economic health are no longer working because the economy has shifted. I've talked about value added and money as labor deferred or referred. This is part of the same thing. Funny thing is that old Alvin used as his first example the OS called Linux. He also included Gates and Microsoft as the 'old school'. See, Linux was built for free by a single man, someone who saw a way to improve things and who was such a part of the 'new economic paradigm' that he did not think to patent and conserve his new OS, nor to market it with press releases, ads and interviews. He placed it on the web with instructions on how to use it. Then around the world people came who looked at the new OS and found ways they too could improve it. The source code was right there. So now we see Linux being used by entire countries, or at least their governments.

The way this works is that everybody needs a good stable OS that can do certain things. I needed an OS that could handle graphics, as in CADD, and some for games or playing around with my digital photos. Turns out Linux handles graphics very nicely. Let's say I needed a CADD prog and couldn't find one I could afford. I might find one in a book but then I have to get the code, compile and test it, and then use it. This slows me down a bit, but let's say I know a coder who loves to play around with code. They just can't get enough of it. Maybe they drink too much coffee or something. Anyway I give the code to them and when they fix it up for me I use it to design a new addition for their house. Saves them lots of money on drafting fees and I got a free CADD prog that does everything I like, and if I want to change something I can post the source code on the web and people can fiddle around until it works even better. Now this economic scenerio does not show up in any of the government's economic records because it was all done for free. In fact, if the government found out about it they would want the two of us to pay taxes on what the government says is the value of the transactions. So we make sure they never find out. Now we have a hidden economy which has the potential to shore up or even completely support an otherwise broken economic paradigm: fierce capitalism.

Capitalism works on the principle of taking more out of a system than you put into it. The excess, the cream on the top that you as capitalist take off is value added by the workers in the form of paid labor. See, if you used slaves to get work done you could charge a hell of a lot less for your goods and undercut your competitors but the government won't let you. Now as the production leaves the country and we are left with telemarketers and car parks the economy looks increasingly empty, yet people still get by. They eat, so they obtain food. In some cases they can grow food, especially if they doubt the quality of the food they would have to buy. IN most cases they buy, but let's say they buy from a local store. The local store knows them, so they can have a credit line. Maybe they can make nice herbal soaps and the store will barter for flour and sugar. People in the country and suburbs could live a long time like this. In the city you have trouble growing food, or making soaps. Well, actually the soap is not a real problem, but the chickens might be... except that my daughter in Brooklyn says there are chickens all over the place, but they are illegal and often used for cock fights. But this economy is also off the books. People in the city barter what they have for things they need. This is the true economy except in the old economic paradigm money counts as goods and labor and as the amount of money in an economy migrates increasingly to the top it appears as if there is no labor happening, no visual economy. Bill Gates cannot possibly be seen to have worked as much as three billion people, yet his bank account says he did, since money is a record of labor accomplished. But money has become a commodity itself divorced from production. That means that for some time the very rich get by trading money back and forth without any of them actually producing anything. They forgot why we trade. We trade to eat. We trade an hour's work for a loaf of bread. We trade the chickens we work for to the man who wants to eat the chicken and he gives us a new hot water tank for our bathroom. He had several he didn't need, and he needs to knnow that his food is fresh, untainted and clean.

The old reactionary economy works after the fact. You get paid after you work. With barter you get paid as you barter and the work can be accomplished when the people need it. Work deferred is money, and in this exchange the chit is memory, not paper or metal. You can't tax that which you cannot find. But governments need money to work and in the current American model it gets it's deferred labor by extortion. If you do not turn over 1/3 of your wealth to the government you will be attacked by the government and harmed in some way. So you pay your taxes. In exchange you get promises that this is the only way, or at least the best way to handle things like life and death. So a third of your life is spent being a slave to a system you may or may not benefit from. Oh, they say we are protected by the government from harm, but look how many people get raped, murdered and in the case of the WTC, blown up and burned alive. How safe are we? What about the schools? We pay for them and we find that as the economy has been changing our schools still teach in much the same way they did 150 years ago, except now we teach even less towards the future as adults and more and more teach to get high marks in an SAT exam. We do not teach people how to use ebay, paypal, google and so forth, yet those systems are clearly the new economy, or at least systems like that wherein people can post online what they need and how much they can trade or pay for it and people around the world can respond. As long as a means is found of collecting the material being traded people get by. If the economy is evolving into something that does not easily work with fierce capitalism and we are not teaching those skills to our children with our schools then how will they learn? By using the new economy! Face it, ebay and paypal are pretty darn easy to understand. You don't need a double entry spread sheeted accountant to understand that the old do-dah you have and don't want just flew out the door to some guy in Detroit and in exchange for which you have a certain credit noted on paypal.

If schools continue to promote such activities as football and basketball as part of the educational system, based on principles laid out in the 1800's, we can expect taxes to go up and quality of education to go down. Why? Because in fierce capitalism the price of commodities always goes up with demand. That means that a good football team, being in demand, will cost more and more as schools feel the need for stadiums, lights, sound systems and nice uniforms, nice chering squad, high profile coaches.... not one iota of which goes towards the stated product of that school: education to prepare a young person for the economy they will be participating in. Notice how more and more jobs require college degrees? And not just degrees, but Master's and even PhD's! For instance, I only have a high school education, but all my life I have studied art and art history, yet I am not permitted to teach those subjects at any level of our educational system because I have no college degree. It's against the law, not just a pattern set up by social needs. We need teachers. We need eager teachers with lots of experience and good communication skills. You'd think if education was important people like me would have a way to give their skilled labor to society and teach. But in fierce capitalism I have not 'paid my dues'. I did not buy a college degree and so I cannot give away my knowlege in such a way as to benefit the people who want it, ie with credit towards that college degree we all need to get a job. Isn't that odd?

Yet for all that I can set up a web site with lessons in sculpture and lectures and videos and even links to PDF files to take the place of books. I could do all that and have a better art history class, for instance, than the most expensive school there is. The people who learned from me would have not one credit to their name based on their educational experience with my web site. Our educational system does not credit knowlege, it only acknowleges credit. Let's say there is a man out there who can understand the way a star works. He can work out in his head equations which connect gravity, magnetism and electricity. Now he wants to tell the world because with this knowlege one could create cold fusion and each home could have a small fusion generator which would free new homes from the electrical grid, which is anyway failing from overuse. But this guy can barely speak, he's in a wheelchair and he's dying of a congenital fault in his personal system. What a loss for the world if he dies before he can communicate his information. The thing is, the people with the talking computers need money and he doesn't have much. He was a math teacher before being striken by this disease, he had little money to save from his meager salary. He needs a complex set of machines and computers to give the world this information and he can't do it under fierce capitalism because the people who have the goods want credit, not a stake in the future of the world. But let's say a geek in Iowa happens to be working on a wheelchair with a computer embedded and a speaking system based on puffing into a plastic straw. He's like that Finn who invented Linux. This guy lives in the country and wants to get his house off the grid, but doesn't want to have to cobb some parts for wind plants or biodiesel generators. He decides he wants fusion. Before the web these two guys would never meet but since the web they are seconds apart. The government wants a piece of the action. They want the cripple to pay sales tax on the chair based on their estimate of it's value and they won't even let the other guy hook up the cold fusion generator because he lives inside the Town of Wilton and the Town Engineer demands a stamped set of plans with references to the building codes and various state and local restrictions. The old government prevents transactions which benefit the individual (and the general public as well), not because there is a problem of public safety, but because it has gotten into the habit of only saying YES to something if it first gets it's cut. I know a church which was not allowed to move into their new building because it was made from a geodesic dome and the town engineer did not know how to read the stress load printout on a geodesic shape. It wasn't a safety issue, it was an issue of ignorance holding power over the needs of the people. Our current government, as exemplified by George W. Bush, is completely ignorant of the direction the world economy is going, and since we are a part of that economy we will have to figure out a way to work around the government until such time as that government simply fails to get in the way by virtue of it's being irrelevant.

It's been 6 days now since my sweety-pie flew off to Ireland to have a little time off with her sister. One of those things that just flies up and you have to grab them. The day they took off was the day that they were working on that 'huge' and dangerous plot to blow up airplanes. I have to be cynical about that one, the most damage it seems to have done is lose Margaret's luggage for a few days and confuse the take off schedule. The more I hear about it, in fact, the more I wonder if there was anything more to it that a group of stupid kids talking about what they'd like to do, not unlike a group of stupid kids watching an early Meg Ryan flick (from before her lips got weird) and suggesting how they'd like to tie her up and have their way with her. I suppose they'd be guilty of conspiracy or something, but in fact they never were going to hunt her down. So we have at least 24 people in custody and so far no trace of explosives or material for explosives. In America we'd find explosives even if we had to sell the bags of ammonium nitrate to the conspirators ourselves, like we did in upstate NY.

That's part of the problem with the world, they haven't picked up on how to nail these bad guys. Just join the group, get them all worked up, introduce them to an FBI secret agent, sell them weapons, arrange for a meeting and then arrest them. Why, if we did this more often we'd have all the bad guys and all the potential bad guys in jail before you knew it! We'd need to turn the prison system inside out, though, with all the bad guys outside the prisons and all the good guys (ourselves) inside. There just isn't enough room to build the number of prisons you'd need to house them all. Heck, if we really got hard about busting everybody who breaks a law or who talks or thinks about breaking a law we'd need to take over part of Canada.

Which brings me to my interest in taking over part of Canada. All those bad guys who come over from Canada and infiltrate our country are getting away with serious crimes, like coming into the country. We need to be sure of our borders. So we need to set aside a security zone across our northern border to protect the American way of life. I figure about 10 miles should do it. JUst draw a parallel line 10 miles inside of Canada from sea to shining sea and we occupy that strip pf land, booby trap it, put in a few million land mines, guard dogs and so forth and then we can be pretty sure that theose soft Canadians won't be letting bad guys into America. Same goes for Mexico. Everybody knows that the Mexicans are still steaming about our little annexation of that stinking desert we now call Arizona, New Mexico and the rest of the south west territory. We know they are sending swarms of illegals into this country to try to take back the land we appropriated by becoming citizens and voting it away! So we move in the troops, maybe even accept squads of good old boys with pick up trucks, binoculars and shotguns, and send them all to a point about 10 miles over the line. Just until we get a handle on this.

The Brits must have done something right because Margaret is feeling perfectly safe traveling to Ireland and not worried at all about the IRA blowing up a bus station or something. The Brits occupied Ireland for hundreds of years, but this was before all the sophisticated weaponry we have now, like unmanned drone planes and smart bombs. But it worked and now the Irish consider themselves to be good solid business partners and solid citizens of the Empire. If only the Iraqis could be so reasonable we could all be very rich men. Not the grunts on the street who make the goods, but the people who put up the cash. That's how fierce capitalism works. You buy the army, you use the army, you disband the army. Everybody borrows to buy the Humvees and plasma screens and everybody is happy.

Margaret's happy eating sausages and drinking ale at the local pub. She said that Ireland is beautiful, filled with nice houses and castles and so forth. She's gonna bring me back a little jar of Irish dirt, which I might just add a bit to my garden, just to see how me taters grow next year. Actually, if you think about it, if everybody had a pint of ale and a sausage for lunch the world would be a better place. The Muslims don't eat sausage because it contains pig. That seems a bit odd to me, how the Muslims and the Jews don't eat pigs, but the Christians do. Why one sect would eat an animal and not another is so very odd. Why would you create an animal that is perfectly edible and then tell your human creations not to eat them? Makes no sense to me, but then I don't understand why you'd let cattle wander around just because you think some of them might be God incarnate or at least one of your relatives. I'd eat a relative. I'd cheerfully nibble on one of my cousins if I was really hungry and I'd appreciate it if they would consider doing the same for me, at least if they're still as cute as they were last time I was in Kentucky. But I suppose the guys who live out in the desert and whose cousins wear those sacks over their heads don't feel the same way as I do about familial cusine. And isn't it strange how the Irish look at a sack of potatoes and get all drooly in the mouth? Sure and it can't be the shape, or the color or smell, because it's just a sack of potatoes. But you take them taters and you peel them nice, get them all steaming hot and then smear butter all over them and it's a wonderful thing to be puttin in yer mouth, doncha know! And I feel the same way about my cousins. Under the right set of circumstances I think I could do it.

Now the Brits feel the same way I do, I'm sure. They don't go on about it, but you look at the Royal Family and tell me that breeding close to the line hasn't produced a fine crop of men and women. Look at old Charles there with them wind powered ears of his and that big sh*t eating grin and tell me that they haven't been crossing the line from time to time. That's how all those Royal Familes in Europe got that way, by refusing sausages, eating potatoes and smearing butter all over their cousins. The problem, as I see it, in the Muslim world is that they're still fighting over wells and goats and they should be fighting over stock options and commodities. I say plug the wells, bring in bottled water and plasma screen teevees and everybody would be too busy watching reruns of Bay Watch to worry about the goats. Peace in our time. With all those huge freakin' familes... Osama is like 56 of 75 kids or something... you almost have to be involved with your cousin if you're involved with anybody. But according to Genesis (the book, not the band) we all started from Cain fooling around with his sisters or possibly their goats. In the former we'd expect offspring of either extreme intelligence or extreme skill with a banjo. In the latter we'd get mutant STDs. After whacking his brother old Cain took off and created Babylon or something like that. Couldn't have done it with his mother. I don't think Eve would have stood for it, not after being burned on that whole Tree of Knowlege thing. So it had to be his sisters or possibly his nieces. Now, Able is out of the picture and we assume that most of the kids would have stayed close to home, but a few must have wandered. Maybe there was some debate over finding Able whacked in the field. Maybe some of the kids thought it kind of sexy whacking your brother and they took off after Cain to create a new place to live. But you'd have to be into incest or something to pull it off, unless we could do it with goats and not end up with satyrs. Unless... maybe we ended up with satyrs and that's why those guys in the desert never have pictures taken with their shoes off! In fact, waving your shoe at someone, or even touching someone's shoes is considered in really bad taste. That's why they objected to having the Marines knock father Iraqi to the ground and put their boot on his head. It was just the boot that was the problem as it reminded them about the occasional cloven foot they get from their ancient connection to a goat in Babylon. Wow. This could explain so much.

But if only they could have grown taters in the Mideast instead of relying on goats so much. It would have changed world history. Think about it... 5,000 years ago someone stole someone's goat and we are still arguing about it today. Still getting all steamed up over a well, too. Now if we had taters instead we might still be arguing over the well, but after a couple pints of ale and a shot or two of Tullymore Dew we'd be singing and laughing and making passes at our cousin and the world would be a better place for it. I love Bible stories, they give me hope for the world. That is, except for the one where everybody dies and burns and then only the Jews are left. That one bothers me a bit. But if we all of us descend from Adam and Eve and they were Jewish, then we all of us are Jewish and maybe there's hope for me yet. I missed my bar mitzvah and a few other rituals, but still I have hope. I'll talk to my rabbi about it as soon as I know who he or she is.

I can't wait for Margaret to come home and see what I've done with the house while she was eatin' taters and taking pictures of pubs and castles. I'm painting the bedroom, cleaning the floors and fixing up the paths in the yard between and around the flower beds. I guess in the long run I follow the path of Able rather than Cain. Oh sure Able never lasted long but he apparently appreciated a nice garden and kept a few goats. I tried the goats but they never shut up so I stuck with chickens. Cain, it seems, built houses and opened up a law firm, even arguing his case before the Supreme Court. There were only 3 people on the Supreme Court in those days, but it still was a great day for old Cain. It wasn't his fault, he came from a broken marriage and his childhood was marred by his father's drunken tirades against the Grandfather, Yaweh. Adam would brew up some vodka from the taters and grains they grew and then start in bugging Eve about how she'd let herself go so bad since leaving the Garden. She put on weight after the first dozen or so kids, she became surly and disrespectful and constantly accused Adam of still having feelings for his first wife, Lilith. Small wonder Cain lashed out and ran away.

I'm thinking of a pale green for the bedroom. Margaret likes a nice green these days, having gotten tired of yellow. If I could get the entire bedroom painted and ready for her when she got back I bet she'd be so happy she'd allow me to paint the kitchen when we redo it. I'd like to try some very discrete wallpaper in the kitchen, something with flowers or grapes but very discrete. Maybe I could try a band of wallpaper along the wall just above the counters. I saw that once so it looked like the kitchen was in a garden and it kinda opened up the room. I'd like to be cooking in a garden, it'd be cool. I can add pots of herbs and there ya go, a garden kitchen. That would be nice.

Well, I suppose talking is not walking and I have to walk upstairs to start sanding the walls and planning my next move. So much to do, so little time. Four more days until my sweety-pie comes home! I think I've done pretty good so far, keeping pretty sane, keeping busy. Didn't buy any goats.... I got that going for me.

Meditating on the teaching of Abraham.

My friend likes to watch soap operas and if I drop by during their play I have to immediately can it until a commercial comes on. That's not easy for me, because I do seem to like to chatter on. At least a "hello" anyway. But once the commercial starts we get into the various characters and what they used to be like. I often comment on the dresses and odd hairstyles, comparing them with Kabuki costumes. I'm not always sure if she knows what I mean by that. So it's like that, like an old lady's knitting circle and one of them had come back from holiday and the others had to get her caught up on the latest. I can't remember the names and circles of incest and desires that she always explains for me but I appreciate the effort. She's a good friend.

From time to time one of these characters has an accident or is shot or somehow or another they get hurt, badly, and there they are in the hospital with the white gowns and tubes and machines wheezing. Sometimes it's a coma, sometimes amnesia will result, or they simply wake up one day. Often in that time where one of them is still with tubes and white gowns my friend will get agitated and exclaim that should she ever be in that condition, I should somehow take her out, "like that woman boxer in that movie, the one with Clint Eastwood, when he injected that stuff into her tubes. You should just take me out so I won't be trapped in that wheelchair." And then she remembers my son and starts to change the subject, but then it's out there and I have to respond. "No, I don't think so. I don't think I could do it. Not that I don't think it should be done, but if I don't have the hair to do it for my son, I don't think I could do it for you. I'm sorry." This puts a damper for awhile on the soaps.

Yet Abraham had no second thoughts, according to the various accounts. He was ready, even eager, to slash his son's throat. And all because a voice spoke to him. I don't know, maybe it's just the way I relate to authority, but if I had a voice telling me to slit my son's throat, I would have to ask for a second opinion. Now we have three large religions based on the life story of a man who was ready and willing and eager to slit his son because a voice told him to. At the moment several of the subdivisions of these three sects of the One True Faith are shooting, bombing, slashing, hacking, gassing and pretty much a whole slew of crap towards other people who claim the same heritage, and it is exactly because they claim the same God they are being targeted. And they have no second thoughts about it. Wow. To be that focussed and sure must be like being on a good quality speed rush in the middle of a guitar riff that howls to the heavens. I bet our President feels that way every time he orders another bombing. Awesome.

Suppose they did come to me with a form to sign and with that signing I would say that I at least, had no problem with them adding a considerable amount of barbiturates to his nightly tube feeding? What if, like the President, I was to be elevated to some near-godly status, being enabled to write off a human life with no consequences? Could I ever breathe again? Suppose I signed and some day they gave me a small cardboard package of my son's ashes to scatter, would I have the balls to scatter them around my house, or would I rush down to Arizona and dump them in the Grand Canyon? Yet Abraham might have burned the remains of his son and scattered the ashes around his house, no sweat. Because a voice told him to do it. He just had a gut feeling this was the one true voice, the one to listen to, not unlike the one that told George to set in motion a slow, grinding, mangling machine of crunching buildings and exploding land mines, sucking in everything in front of it and pushing out destroyed lives from the rear, this War on Terror he wants so much.

I often wonder how many times God has swooped low down and demanded a man show his faith by slashing his own child's throat. Seems to me that would take balls of steel. The slashing, not the asking, although maybe the asking too. Let's face it, if anybody I know was spoken to and told to slash their child open, there would be a very awkward moment. Yet for God, it can't be a very awkward moment because He can swoop, trickle, sparkle or otherwise manifest Himself in some other woman and make a new son. So offing one son isn't that big a deal. God doesn't get divine erectile dysfunction. But the first guy to write down this story, or maybe even to hear it... that must have been interesting. It's 3AM and you are dragging your drunk friend home. You get thru the front door, down into the living room, dump him on the couch and you turn to go but he grabs your arm and pulls you back. "Listen," he says,"I want to tell you something." You turn and try to pry him loose, but he's got a good grip. So you listen. "There was this voice, a voice like you never heard before. It just came out of nowhere. It was all around me. And it spoke, it told me..... it said.... it wanted me to take my son Jon, my oldest boy, and take him outside to that old stone altar we have from Grand Dad's days and lay him out and take that big butcher knife of mine... I didn't want to do it, but I was afraid. I was more afraid of that voice than anything I ever knew. I just took that boy, and I laid him out, and I took the knife. I took the knife and swung it up and came down with it... and just an inch from his throat my arm froze. I couldn't bring it down and I was so afraid I had failed that I wet myself. I stood there pissing myself and the voice spoke again, and it said "Good boy." I was glad. I was so glad that I had done okay that I never thought about what I would have done if that voice hadn't come back and stopped me. What I would have said to my wife, to the neighbors. To the Rabbi..."

We have three vast bodies of mankind slashing at the throats of each other. and what will we do if there is no voice? What if no Hand of God reaches down to stop the murder? So strange. For that matter, what if the Voice comes back and it's speaking Cantonese? Wouldn't that be embarrassing?

Still, the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. You know the quality of a faith by the stories that the followers follow, the ones they talk a lot about. Oddly enough all three of these faiths seem to talk a lot about torture, death, wars, incest and pretty much all those things we would do without the influence of religion to make it easier to slash one's neighbor.

I just finished reading a book entitled "Towing Jehovah", about just that; a dead God being towed to the arctic for final resting. It was full of religious and anti-religious musings, stuff about the Pope, angels, sailors and so forth. Pretty good read, all in all. For a pagan it was absorbing as it described the corpse and the way the death affected the various people. Of course we had the traditional sex scenes and the Jew dealing with his faith vesus the priest dealing with his. Odd how they all miss the point I would have taken up: a two mile God is not terribly large compared to the universe. In fact, a two mile long God is really very tiny compared to even the moon. I find it hard to get all religious about a 2 mile long corpse, but I liked the book.

It's June, cold and damp. Welcome to upstate New York.

I planted a lot of things in the garden that should have sprouted and given me lots of happy summertime food, but since it's decided to rain for several months non-stop with cold and damp intruding everywhere some of those seeds haven't sprouted. If we ever see the sun again I plan to plant snow peas. They are the only veggie named appropriately for this neck of the woods.

I've been in the studio working on a set of figures modeled after various religious figures, but as females. I have had a Jesus-as-woman for some time now but never went beyond it. I have this idea of Vishnu as woman and am working on it, but I keep getting distracted by the idea of portraying Shiva instead, especially as the world seems to worship destruction more than anything else, at least the politicians and leaders do. But as Hinduism tends to have male and female roles weaving in and out of the myths, so Shiva and Vishnu are part and parcel of the same thing. Nothing is ever destroyed, it just becomes something different. Those demons that Shiva blasted must become compost. What of the fruit of the tree planted in their blood? In "Towing..." they have plants growing incredibly huge using plasma and skin from the body of God. Have we not all grown so big from the same mix? Are we not bigger than the single celled living things from which all life came? God is not dead, He's just gone all composty.

Well, it's cold and damp and I have little to say today. My son is still PVS, my car is still slightly defective, my body still decays down the spine.....we all need sunshine. Frankenveh must sometime rise and speak: "Let there be warmth!" and there was August.

A week in the Netherlands was not quite enough time to see what I wanted to see. We arrived in Rotterdam and our daughter showed us some things about the trams and the little cute cars and we ate at a Mexican place with all the menus in Dutch. One thing that comes to mind when thinking of Rotterdam is the way people get around on trams so much when they aren't using bikes. Every ten minutes a little yellow train pulls up and you hop on, just like in Meet Me In St. Louis. Somehow we got into a two meal pattern with a nice coffee and fruit kind of breakfast followed by running around the trams, boats and trains to get to a quiet place like Keukenhof to look at all the flowers in the world. Miles and miles of stripes of reds and yellows and blues and off in the distance, in the middle of the field would be a small schooner. Seems that instead of dirt roads going around a person's farm you had canals with all kinds of boats in them for moving from the little canals to the big canals until eventually, I guess, you're in the ocean.

The people all spoke American pretty well, at least enough to tell us we were on the wrong train, although that was after we missed our flight home. None of the trains had much graffiti on them and none of them had any inside the trains. The trams were the same way. I saw a lot of tags on the overpasses in the highways.... and I was almost surprised to see they had highways at all. Somehow I would expect bigger ships or something on bigger canals. These canals went everywhere and had smallish roadways either right next to them or with a grassy area between. This grassy area was often punctuated with statuary, even a Rodin or two just hanging out next to the canal. No graffiti on the statues either. The one thing that really grabs you after awhile in Rotterdam is the number of bikes. Not fancy new 12 speed bikes but old 1960's one speed fits all and no hand brakes kind of bike. Miles of bikes in parking lots. Miles of bikes along the road, chained to posts and signs. A lot of the bikes have busted wheels and rust on them, abandoned long ago by an owner who figures $30 a bike beats fixing a busted wheel. People steal parts off abandoned bikes, like pedals and sometimes wheels.

The museums were astounding, not just because they had so much fine art, but that there were so many of them around. In Albany, a much bigger city, you get one museum and sometimes on loan a Van Gogh. In Amsterdam you get an entire museum dedicated to that guy alone! Then one block over is one filled with Rembrandt and his peers, another dedicated to items like furniture and so forth. Just amazing amounts of art. The buildings everywhere have a sculpted face over every single window. The doorways are carved with vines and animals and faces, and the doors themselves often have stained glass or Art Deco moulding. I took over 1500 pictures in 5 days. I took shots of ducks, trees, buildings and building parts... just couldn't stop snapping pics. Then we got home, eventually, and I went up to the studio. Passing my flower beds I knew my efforts were just begining re the landscaping. At Keukenhof I saw what real masters can do with flowers. I want to advance at least to journeyman status. I need hundreds more bulbs.

In my studio at last I swept, vaccumed, stuffed, stacked and wiped until I have a space where work can really get cracking. Poor Persephone looks a bit upset being shoved off to one side, but until I can fire her I have to move her out of the way. Now I have to decide if I want to work on Buddha or Krishna. I'm also toying with Sudra. She would be ideal for the times. When they released her to fight the enemies of the gods they got more than they bargained for, just like we got more than we bargained for when we allowed the ultra-right wing bastards to take over the country. Death and chaos follow fools. Time to get to work, to allow this trip to flow thru my arms to my fingers and into the clay. Who will emerge from the mud is anybody's guess. Kind of exciting.

We plan to travel to Holland in a couple or three weeks to visit Jess. She's attending school there for a semester and we figure we can use the old credit cards and get us a visit, my first to Europe. I wonder if my biography will note this trip as significant or miss it entirely. If you think about it, every moment of time we spend in this existence has the potential to be the last. Each breath could contain that virus that takes us out, each sniff of a flower could be as a gunshot to the heart. So every journey could be the first step in your new life or that final trip from which we never return. I suppose it should make one think about what all we've done, but in my case it makes me want to wash the windows and get rid of all them dust bunnies under the couch and chairs. Forget about under the bed! That's no man's land.

Lately there's been a few shows which mention comas and PVS and such like. I suppose because in part there are a lot of people coming back from Iraq with blows to the head from IED's tossing their (un)armored humvees into the air. So talk shows occasionally mention it, although they don't actually bring in a TBI survivor to try to explain what's up. I think it would be interesting if Dena could bring in her husband and have him suddenly decide to stand up and pee on the floor. It's one thing to have him do it at home, but on Letterman? Nah, better to talk about them, around them and thru them. But there's more of them every day.

We're talking about life insurance now, trying to figure out how to put enough on me to help pay the bills, especially Jess's school loans. Being disabled and over 56 I'm not sure anyone would be willing to sell me insurance but it would be nice to have her able to pay everything off instead of spending so many years working and working and not being able to save anything. Of course, she's used to having very little money to work with so she'll be alright no matter what we do. I have a lot of faith in her. I had a fair amount of faith in Jon, except his inability to see the logic in wearing a seat belt bothered me a lot. I also worried about him always looking for Ms. Right in local bars and concerts. My experience has been that you tend to find fun girls and sometimes interesting girls, but maybe not so many stable girls and in Jon's case I would have to vote for stable, given how unstable his mother was.

If we go to Holland and something happens to us, or to me, what happens to Jon? NObody would be able to take up the slack, although Margaret will most likely try to do something for him. I know that visiting him would be way hard on her, maybe too much to handle. But on the other hand, I have no indication that anything like that will happen. Normally you don't get too many clues about life's little surprises, but stuff like that comes thru. The big things come thru. But still you wonder. With no father coming in to inspect his feet and hands and breath, his wounds and tubes and scars, who will love him like I do? Who will cry when he's sick, or go to some second hand clothing store to find an amusing shirt for him to wear, hoping that he will understand the joke? That would suck. So I suppose I'll have to stick around and be the guy who gets to deal with all this until the Goddess takes him back. Next time I bet he wears his damn seat belt! Assuming he goes to a place where they have cars anyway...

I'm tired and I hurt. I have flowers to plant, trees to trim and things to sculpt. I can't rest yet, I can't 'retire' until some of these things get done. I bet I have a dozen sculptures banging around in my head now, some decades old. The series of God as Woman isn't very far. I'm working on Krishna now, the sketches anyway. Likewise a few sketches of Buddha as woman are coming along. I think I'll use the Crucified Woman as Jesus since there isn't any good description of Yaweh, except maybe a burning bush. That would make an interesting sculpture insofar as womanly attributes are concerned, but not really my genre or taste. Maybe things would go better with a Fosters. Kill the pain, rest the mind, get on with it. Well, I suppose that these blogs may get shorter if sitting is the only way to write them... the lower back seems to feel that spasms are a happy celebration of Spring, whereas I see them as my alternating days of pain and glory. The days I rake are glorious, and the next two days are sleeping, resting and choking down more pain meds. Kinda slows one down, but the clay is thawed so it's time to work. I really want to try this year to switch the noborigama to propane and to build a smaller updraft kiln to fire Persephone. Two projects, three if you count the roof on the sauna. So we'll see what I have to say about this in the coming Winter.

At the moment we're surrounded by critters. What we fail to recognize is that we are always surrounded by and inhabited on and in, critters. That's the natural state. So I laid out piles of critter goodies, like sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, grains and nuts, hoping that the chipmunk would take to the piles rather than strip the birdfeeder of it's goodies. But since the piles were added now I have a squirrel chomping away on the porch while the chippy lays into the bird food, probably watching his/her ass vis-a-vis that great grey thing over there chomping away. That's the way of things. Then, as I walk thru the house I see the birdfeeders on the south side simply dripping with birds and I don't feel so bad. There's a couple of chickadees who insist on hanging by the back porch, but they ought to ignore the chippy and the squirrel and go south where the other birds are. Their karma or something I guess.

But some of the birds on the ground are robins, and they are mostly carnivores, so some of that hopping and pecking is probably taking some life. Some early worm or early bug, maybe one been laying around in a frozen daze just woke up and took a hop... and before you know it the bird is a little more energetic, bravo, Bug. There are daffodils just now sprouting up, down by the stream. The reeds are so thick there that you almost miss them when they open up, probably a couple of weeks from now. And the reeds are useless for seeds for the birds, and useless for the human walking thru them, both for seeds and a thatched roof. Nope, the stuff is too old and dry, like a spinster aunt living in the back cottage, forgotten almost but still occasionally recognized for what it is. We forget that all those 'things' had a history, a past and some kind of future. Well, not really forget per se, but we certainly focus on other stuff somehow. Like I lose track of the fact that some of the stuff I throw out or drop without thinking about it will feed a critter that night, maybe warm up the cockles of some foreign heart. There is no waste in Mother Land. Just maybe in the Father Land. Certainly some waste there. I have these rodents living in my house and I hear them scratching in the walls and ceiling like some Poesque background music, except my sweety-pie hears them too. Now, I hate to put up traps, but I have found that there is no reasoning with these people. They will, of course, come into my house and take what I have around that they need. To them I am perhaps a noisy meat mountain. Just like I am learning to think of them as eating machines with runaway batteries, and they poop, too. The poop is bad enough, but the piss is real bad. I've rid myself of several beasts that did that sort of stuff in my living space. I understand they can't help Doing It, but they can be warned, maybe post humously, to stay out of the big meat mountain thingy's stuff. If it smells like Human, walk away. It works for awhile but since I'm not allowed to surround the house with signs written in rodent, sometimes I have to use brute force. it's something we humans are very good at.