This is something I started writing awhile back and I figured I'd post it and see how it reads...
05/27/2007

I'm looking out the window at one of my neighbors, an army reservist who did some ungodly amount of time in Afganistan and Iraq and came back with one arm intact. The guy used to tinker a lot, work around the house, now they don't have much hope for his rehab because he just wanders off and putters, one handed, around his property.

The other day I saw him dragging in long branches from the ice storm and piling them into brush piles, maybe for the rabbits to play in or something. This day was different, he looked different. Then I spotted what he'd added to his arm, the stump of which now sported a small electric hedge saw and he was using a battery pack to power it as he sliced through the brambles and branches until he reached the larger branches, whole trunks of elm toppled by the weight of tons of ice last winter. Most were at least 6 inches across. Sorry, neighbor, time to call in the big boys.

Then he walked back to his big white truck and fiddled around in the back. He turned around and was now sporting a small 2 cycle chain saw, about 14 inches. Sorry, trees. He's back! And in a few minutes he had chopped and sawn his way around the debris pile, making order out of chaos. I could see how he had pilled up kindling against the winter, how fence posts and garden posts were stacked up to dry, and the brambly stuff was piled up for the rabbits. When he needed to switch to a different tool he would walk back to the truck until he eventually had finished the job. The chipper attachment bothered me, but he must have been wearing ear plugs because he never blinked or flinched, not even with the big stuff.

Now I'm afraid to talk to him when I see him in town. He wears his army issue arm in town and I find myself staring at it. My wife thinks I'm being rude and my attempts to explain don't sound very reasonable. I did try this morning to talk to him, but he just wanted to talk about solar rechargable oil-cooled tools and appliances. He went on about all the panels he had around his property, all wired into a box in his house, in his garage, even down by his fish pond, for the extension trimmer he built. He showed it to me. Don't get me wrong, I like ingenuity and stick-to-it-ness, but he began to sound like a salesman.

That's when I thought about my other neighbors, what a great bunch of guys and gals they all are, mostly. But also somewhat easily influenced, especially with tools and toys. I know soon one of them will slip up and have their arm replaced with a 4 cycle Stihl/Lumber-King Sawmill all powered by methane, also locally produced. Propane heating grills and flame throwers for weed control while making a great burger! I can almost smell the smoke.

This could be such a bad summer, and it's already just begining.

Imagine, if you will, a little bit of sculpted jelly. Shape it as you will, name it if you want. Now drop that figure into a vessel of clear material so that the first rests about half way from the bottom. Now consider if you will what we have here. The figure, if cognizant of anything other than itself, nevertheless cannot see the material in which it is suspended. So it appears to float, at least to itself, because we can see the vessel. But the vessel might very well be aware of itself and the things around it, and if so, what would be it's view of the universe. And so on to the air around the vessel and the very blood in my veins. But if any of it makes sense, then it all makes sense, but it all depends on your senses. As you walk through the crowded air you touch so many very aware beings about which, no doubt, you are mostly ignorant. Except, maybe when you get a virus or infection. Maybe a tumor.

So this little figure of a being is swishing it's arms and looking around, and maybe has a sense of some 'other' out past space. Eventually it becomes pretty darn sure we are watching, maybe some thought comes to it, some sense of presence.

It turns slowly around, twisting and flailing away, but of course the invisible material matches it's temperature and bends no light, so... No matter how hard it moves, we are always there, watching, for as long as it can remember.

And now what does the invisible material think of all this? Has it been supporting the carved figure, invisibly, all along until suddenly there we all are, and only a few of us know most of the whole reality. Or at least the limited number of relationships I've willing to consider. Just a handful of gods and only one mortal. But if you recognize symbolically that the invisible supporting material is Feminine and the vessel itself becomes the Grail. It's amazing. But I digress. The gods, though, watching all the time just doesn't sound like me for very long, so you know I will have to touch or tap the vessel to see what happens. Tapping the vessel would have a bucket load of symbolic significance as well. The list goes on and on. Small wonder some folks freak when they start laying it all out. That is, the matter of relationships both known and unknown, the awareness or not of the so-called individuals, for at some point, just like tapping the vessel, I would be compelled to mention how much water I have in me, how much in the air around me. What if you suspend yourself in warm pools and think of cold pools, or little figures in panic, running endlessly through the very material which suspends and defines it. Even the vessel must be changing if entropy makes any sense. And change is life, so there you go!

So I will leave you with the thought of you considering a being suspended by an invisible, loving, and protecting existence, in a clear vessel, and the reflection of yourself on it's surface, oddly not distorted at all.

There's a song in Johnny Cash's "Cash" album called 'Sam Hall'. It's based on an old old song about a man going to be hung for a terrible murder. One of the lines Johnny sings sounds exactly like Dad when he was singing similar songs to us, often following us around the house singing loudly, making up lyrics and generally acting like a drunk at a wedding reception. Man, I sure miss those concerts now. "My name it is Sam Hall, Sam Hall. My name it is Sam Hall, it is Sam Hall. MY name it is Sam Hall and I hate you one and all. I hate you one and all, damn yer eyes!" Seems curious, doesn't it? Yet Daddy didn't hate anybody, unless you count bigots and fools. Still, he didn't take crap from anybody either. "Well, the sheriff he came too, he came too. The sheriff he came too, he came too. Well, the sheriff he came too and he said, Sam how are you? Well, Sheriff how are you, damn yer eyes!" Dad spent time in prison, hard time, and he came out sounding like he had actually tried to get some good out of it, some kind of better attitude.

I see old men from time to time who look just like Dad. They're big in the gut, white haired and deliberate in their actions. They act like men going somewhere, taking no grief from anybody until they finally drop dead either lifting something too heavy or just pass out in their naps, leaving behind sons and wives but not too many close friends. They were just too ornery. Lately I seem to see them more and more, in stores and at gas stations. I think maybe they were there all the time, but now that I see them in my bathroom mirror I see them more on the street.

Dad went tiger hunting once, in India. It was during the war, WW2, and Dad was stationed in Calcutta or some big city like that. He and his buddy had been refining work on their still that Dad had designed. They decided it would be great fun to take a tiger skin home so they took a jeep and a couple of machine guns and went into the jungle looking for big cats. They were not brave men, just stupid according to Dad and they had a hard time finding tracks. I bet Dad thought that since he was a Kentucky born tough guy he'd be able to track a tiger through the jungle but they never found any tracks. Dad said they sobered up after a few hours and as they were getting into the jeep to drive back to the base they noticed a huge tiger who'd been standing a few feet away quietly watching them look for tracks. They jumped into the jeep and high tailed it home without firing a shot. He seemed a bit embarrassed by that admission years later and being Dad did not pump up the story with any crap about shooting the cat and leaving the skin or anything. He sadly admitted that sober and tired their only thought was to get away from the beast before he stopped being amused at their antics.

Dad bought a baby once. He was in the market place and a woman was trying to sell him stuff he didn't want. He got tired of it all and held out some coins and offered to buy the woman's baby. "Oh, no, Sahib! NO!" she said. He added a couple of coins to the handful and she suddenly thrust the baby at him, grabbed the coins and scampered into the crowd. Seems the baby was a girl and not very valuable to a poor family. Dad kept the baby in the barracks and the men took care of her for a few days and then they took her to an orphanage nearby. She would be about 60 years old now and probably never knew that for a few days she was an American.

Dad claimed to never get lost, being a surveyor and all. One time we were at friends having a barbecue and the parents were drinking hard, as they did back then. After midnight Dad and Mom got us in the car and Dad insisted on driving home. Mom never won that kind of argument so she would say, "Just don't kill us, Bill." Dad drove off into the night. Several times Mom asked him where we were going and he always insisted that he knew perfectly well where we were and to leave him alone. Suddenly he stopped the car. The headlights seemed to shine off into space. He got out of the car and walked ahead a few feet and stopped. Mom got out and joined him. It seems that the dirt road we were on that wound round the mountain just ended. There was nothing ahead but stars. Dad said, "Well, the last time I was on this road it went somewhere!" He insisted on driving down the mountainside because there was no turnaround and we had to back down the road until we got to the main road and Dad was able to get us pointed in the right direction. For years Dad insisted that somebody had changed the road. I'm not sure they hadn't.

I've seen a fair amount of men that reminded me of Dad but none of them had the same quality of stories that Dad had. He was a rare man and it hurts my heart when I spot some old coot at the gas station filling up his truck's tank, glaring at the credit card reader through his reading glasses. I bet he has some stories to tell if you asked him, but I bet he never hunted tigers in the jungles of India.

Somehow today I started thinking about Good and Evil. I'm not sure I can recall why, but I think it had to do with this story about a Holocaust denier vs a Holocaust historian. The thought was, that the denier was evil because they asserted something that was wrong, that they asserted that the Holocaust had not occured, whereas the historian was good for the inverse reason. Anyway during the debate they talked about the need to always remember so that such a thing never occurs again. To which I said (to the radio) that we should therefore have a series of memorials and holidays to never forget the genocide which helped birth this nation. We had a stated purpose of killing every man, woman and child who opposed our dominance, who asserted that we had to right to build upon and farm their ancestral lands. They were evil and so we had no need to remember their genocide. Even if the few survivors might like to have us remember our crimes, they are descended from evil and therfore are tainted. At least that's the way it reads in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, I began to think about how people who are the rankest evil never think of themselves as such, never get up and say "I'm doing something evil today, I am a bad person." Even if they know everyone around might think so, they still rape, murder, burn, eat and so forth in the full faith that what they do supports some form of Order. We did all that and are doing all that today even as we speak. Little nameless 14 year old girls are being raped and murdered in Iraq, in our name. That has to be evil. And so good would be to oppose that evil, and opposed we are. They destroyed two, maybe eight buildings and somewhat over 3000 people to oppose our position that we are supreme leaders of the world, in part because the Soviets are bankrupt in too many ways. That's a bit problematic when one looks at our history and national bank accounts. But I digress.

I decided, finally, that Good was that which supported life. Thus, Hitler was acting in Evil when he ordered the Holocaust because it destroyed life. In fact lots of life. Our bombing of Dresden and Bagdad and Hiroshima and Nagasaki was evil, too, for that same reason. There is quite a bit of both evil and good in the universe. For instance most of my cells are taking in energy, growing and splitting and otherwise contributing to life. So my body is good. I drink beer and sometimes smoke, so I am evil as that hurts life. I fathered two children, so I am good, as that promoted life. I grow gardens, so I am good. I digest, so I am evil. I walk on the earth, so I am evil. I expell carbon dioxide, so I am good. I expell carbon dioxide, so I am evil.

Get my drift? It's not as easy as it seems. Calling something Evil or Good based on finite things not capable of shades of value, just doesn't effectively cover the issue.

It's not a word game or a logic puzzle. It effects whether someone lives or dies, and the manner of both. If we agree there is both evil and good in all things then we can agree not to destroy life in the name of protecting life. It doesn't balence out, it's just evil. There is no greater good than good itself, and somehow machine gunning down a small town of old men just isn't part of any greater good, it's just lacking in all elements of good.

The Catholic church got all upset about a chocolate Jesus but chocolate promotes life and so is good, at least more good than priests raping little boys, which is not a creative act. To be part of some evil is not to be evil itself. Thus, all Americans need not apologize for the genocide of the Natives, but should never forget, so that it might never happen again. The thing to never forget is not the dates and times and numbers of dead, but that it was promoted as a greater good that merely looked like evil because there were dead bodies involved and burning homes. But loss of life and deliberate taking of life must be evil and there can be no greater good when death is involved.

4/17/2007
The day after the greatest destruction in our schools since forever... or so they say. Again you get sucked into the problems of Good and Evil, and again I find I can see how a mind can find Good in recklessly killing random and selected people where they can not prepare, nor defend, a reckless but not brave act, and in the minds of many people, a sane mind, a good boy.

The radio show host asks how do you find any sense to this? Those who can trully see sense are busy preparing to beat his score and the ones who have no idea are like lambs in the pasture, cows in the field, bottles on a fence. We are busy doing what we see as important, like raising things to eat and piling up rocks. Eventually we learn to ride and we use that skill to ride over and hit someone from above. Took awhile, but some sick bastard figured that out. 32 dead. more or less. Yet the President is horrified! and oddly enough, up til now, for all the hundreds of thousands of people who died with bullets and shrapnel, and concusive force, walls of houses and so forth...I would expect by simple arithmatic that the President should by now be so horrified that he would be unable to move a finger, because every time he sneezes, six people die. When he scratches his leg, a dozen die. He should be frozen with guilt and fear, but he's not. He's detached and aloof and able to see the greater good. Just like Jim Jones and Adolf, and the rest of them various tribal leaders. They only see the greater good, which is, mostly, what the voices inside them say is right and good. Sometimes they get touched in special ways and then a whole city might burn. Meanwhile some of us have learned to chew a cud while others have slipped off and gotten small.

Suppose you had a rich idiot, a drunken slob of a born again, back-sliding bully of a twerp and his father got elected governor. Suppose for the most part you could control this jerk and get him to use his father's money and power to set you both up, all of you up in a real nice sweet situation. The great thing is, nobody can get hurt, except the poor slobs at the end of the food chain, but hey, that's mother nature, right?

Actually it is Mother Nature, but so is the entire circle within a circle so that eventually the poor slobs are doing fine and the twerp and friends, such as they are, are nailed down to a sad fate as an aside in history: At this point the influence of America on the world stage effectively ceased to be... it's citizens were far too busy "following the money" and finding out how a nation as huge and wealthy as the United States could be penniless, in fact owing trillions of dollars to the new superpowers, China and India.

So what comes around goes around and so forth, like the flu, like a pandemic, like a fad.

I suppose it might be like being a jellyfish and getting caught up in a wave where some guy is breaking a world record. Maybe you know that overhead some guy is ding something great, or maybe you don't, but meanwhile you are swimming the swim of your life trying not to end up on the sand way up there where the water hardly ever goes. You're too busy to see the fine details, to pain attention to the form of the wave. Too bad, because it's lovely. It's good. But it might take a jellyfish to it's death. Thing is, the surfer most likely never at any time during their record breaking experience included the desire to screw up that damn little jellyfish. So nobody set anybody up, they just got there.

But somebody got there with guns and extra ammo, a plan, and a final, totally controlled finish. Where could he have learned such an admiration for the thought and action of killing as many people as you can, people you don't know, or who you do... but people who cannot stop your destruction. Like you were a god, or a hero. It's just a shift in perspective and an abandonment of some basic cultural and biological rules. Like killing babies, or screaming students in their classroom.

I'm having a hard time telling the difference between his bullets killing the innocent and our bullets killing the innocent. The blood is always the same color.

I'm supposed to start working on Aphrodite soon, as in yesterday, but somehow the thought of working at Skidmore again has me apprehensive and nervous. Maybe if Regis hadn't set me up right next to his wheel, in front of all those students I could handle it but I am quite shaky and disturbed. I think it's the studio, but it could be fears about the exhibit itself. Yesterday I called them to let them know I was starting the work and they told me I might not have to do it, that there may not be room for any more work. It's strange, because Aphrodite was the first goddess piece they said they wanted, and they got all excited about it. Now they may not need her. I have to get Ishtar to the studio somehow and get her fired. That has me nervous too. What if the arms break, or the sword snaps off? The firing itself I'm not too worried about if they start slow and 'soak' the kiln for a couple of hours at low heat. It might very well be the fact of working in front of people, even if those people have more than enough to do than watch what I'm doing. It is, after all, the end of the school year.

Yet my hands are shaky, I have butterflies in the stomach and can't think very straight. There's a lot of issues: the students bump things, steal things, make noise. I like some classical music going on in the background but otherwise quiet time. Can I focus in a public setting? What if the thing fails near the beginning? I'm used to having a shit fit, tossing the clay in the bucket and then pouting in my chair slugging down a Fosters while I contemplate what went wrong. Can't do that at Skidmore for sure. Then there's Regis. What if he treats me like a student again and lectures me on my choices? I keep remembering him slashing my Osiris because he insisted I had made a mistake on the arms. He doesn't understand my reasoning, why I change scale and realism, how one thing slides into another. He likes consistency because he's a potter. Alice is one of the few sculptors who work at the studio from time to time and all her work is classical, perfect and clear. My is more disturbing and at times slightly nightmarish. Regis might not 'get it' and then we'd have to waste time and emotion talking about it.

I'm likely being paranoid. They may all be so busy they'll ignore me, but it still feels like trying to work in a subway. The problem, of course, is that my kiln is not ready to use and trying to move Aphrodite in my car to Skidmore for a firing would be inviting disaster. What to do? I suppose I should 'suck it up' and just go start the damn thing, even though the museum won't use it, somebody may buy it and some gallery may show it. Still I will miss my music and wingback chair and the occasional Fosters.

Maybe I can look for tires for the car today and start later at Skidmore. Maybe if Margaret comes to check things out, like tomorrow or Sunday... maybe then I'd feel less threatened. Oh well.

It might be that I am backing off my meds and I have been using them long enough that I have a slight case of withdrawal. That sounds very feasible. Jumpy, twitchy and nervous. Yup. That could be withdrawal. Crap. Grab some clay and work it out. I should build a mask expressing my disappointment over the exhibit. Go buy a beer. Something.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Homeless days

Years ago I was homeless. Like my father before me, I left school for the road, at least for a few months. The following year I did it again for much longer. I remember looking at the trains going by and recalling that Dad refused to teach me how to jump cars, something he knew about from when he worked on the Illinois Central. But I wanted to be a hobo.



I realized that few people really understand the hobo life because it's been outlawed for some time now. That's so curious, it's like a man sawing off his feet so they won't hurt. A hoe-boy is a man who will, among other things, hire out to mindlessly walk in line with others of his ilk, hoeing away in a cotton field, or tomato patch. If he had his own hoe, useful for many things, he could put in gardens for people who had houses but no time.



But the hobo did the same thing that tractors and tillers do now. So the hobo is not wanted, needed or desired. They are the homeless now and possibly crazy or violent or both. So from time to time the streets of NYC suddenly are cleansed of wandering workers and unskilled laborers waving hoes.



There were people who traveled the roads, even going into subdivisions to sharpen lawnmowers, kitchen knives and scissors. I remember, in the 60's how the last of them to drive slowly by seemed tired and quiet. Usually they chattered away about the weather and local dogs. Then they went away, maybe to end up drunks in some inner city park. Or CEO's of some multi-national investing slush fund. Never know, they survived on sharpening knives and putting in tomato patches, harvesting cabbages, knocking down bee hives. Lots of stuff got done when we allowed people to travel freely and work as they felt the need.



My son was trying to do that, but everything costs so much and the trains aren't the same. He's kind of been taken out of the picture now, too. Become a welfare case, taking from the public offering, so long as that service can be maintained. We may decide that sick people are a drag on the system, making us weak and subject to terrorism. So the government may use it's power to turn certain people secretly into non-citizens and by storing them in secret prisons overseas, can eliminate the problem of homelessness and abject poverty. Also this surplus we have of unskilled and skilled laborers who happen to need a lot of money to live on because everything costs so darn much, especially when you consider what the Chinese are paying their workers to make it all. Lots of cash up front. Fortunately the black market can keep our economy from collapsing, until, like in Afghanistan the black market is the bulk of the economy. Then national priorities change and that's when I worry about my son, because he isn't worth much to certain business types.



See, now if I had been taught how to jump on slow moving train cars, I could have been a hobo and taught my son how to be a hobo so he wouldn't have been in that VW van that morning and in a wheelchair today. It's Dad's fault, then, that he was worried if he taught me, I'd do it and get myself killed, or in a wheelchair the rest of my life. He shoulda handled it like he did everything else, hang the consequences, let's have fun!



I would have made a great hobo, although I think I would have liked to model it after the earlier hobos, with the hoe and bag hanging down filled with a shirt, socks and a harmonica... maybe some kerchiefs in red checkers. Cool.

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Last Days of Winter

Well, how about that? Just a couple more days until Spring, the season of Persephone, and we got an extra 10" of snow just for sport. She doesn't like to wake up early and sometimes tosses extra blankets on just before she finally rises and faces the sun. I made coffee.



There's a new gallery in town down in Ballston Spa, called the Strolling Village Artisans. I checked it out, and it's very nice. They have the crafted jewelry and ceramic pots and some fine art. I left my card and told the guy working on the store next door that I was a sculptor looking for space to display. The next day the owner called. She was a gal who had done some teaching at the art center downtown about the same time I did, so she knew my name. I told her what I had fired, what I was planning and she was very excited at the idea of displaying Goddess related material in a shrine context. So she is interested in my building a number of small shrines with figures, lamps, bowls etc during the month of October. The other nice thing is that when I told her about my big wood-fired kiln she was very excited about getting a chance to use it with me, something I've wanted for awhile and now with my back in such better shape I think I can fix up the propane burner for the first 16 hours and then start stoking with wood for the next 6 or so. That would make a very nice high temperature firing. So life is good. Skidmore College professor Brodie, my old mentor and pal says I can use the studio there and the kilns, since I was an alumni. You can't beat that with a stick.Praise be to Persephone! Say Hooplah!



The last session on my back Thursday burned my sciatic nerve so I can't get the shooting pains down that leg... if I don't break anything else. I am 99% pain free for the first time in many years, and it might last a year or six months, plenty of time to get my exhibitions and gallery work done. I'm working on getting Jon's paperwork sent up to Saratoga as well, but we have to wait for somebody to die or something so a bed gets empty. But if he were within 8 miles and I had somebody helping with the kilns and I didn't feel the need for pain meds every few hours I can get a lot done.



Wednesday I was working on my Ishtar sculpture with there was a crash and I was down on the floor with a 4x4 and a 4" lolly column across my back. The support for the ceiling had slipped loose. We were supporting the place where we removed a wall until this spring when we can get up there and stretch 1x12 joists across the living room and properly support the ceiling. As of now there is a strange truss-like thing a friend suggested and which I had no trust in but was outvoted, mostly because it was cheaper. But it allowed the ceiling to sag 3" in the middle and all the sheetrock cracked. Now we do it my way. In the meantime I'm on the floor surrounded by a broken lamp globe and the couch has caught the beam and pole before it broke my spine! Was I saved by Ishtar, or was I attacked by Yahweh? Either or, I guess, but all I got was a long bruise and some tightness in the hips. Amazing.



So with thousands of troops going back to kill thousands of men, women and children, and the Goddess of Spring arising, what spiritual images can we expect? Well, for one thing Ishtar is both the Goddess of life but the Goddess of war. Like Shakti, she holds weapons aloft, tongue hanging out stained with blood, she dances on the earth and destroys those who would defy her. As she emerges from the earth she finds her lover-son Tammuz has usurped her and is sitting on the throne of power. She beats the crap out of him and sends him to hell to hang on the peg like her while she stomps around setting things straight. Can we hope that the Pres and his men will be kicked out of the seats of power and forced to face their crimes? Will we return to growing and nurturing and back away from blood-letting? It would bring about a balance and we need that. The thing is, once you evoke a Goddess with blood and violence it is often hard to calm her down. So my task this spring will be to monitor her actions and try to placate her with offerings and prayers. I need to acknowledge her pain and anger but redirect them towards the disarray created by the jerks in power. For instance, New Orleans and the gulf coast is trashed, people are begging for homes and food and jobs. There's a good place to start.



So make them gardens, plant them seeds. Think happy lamb thoughts and put out suet for the birds. Maybe we can make it through to the other side.



Speaking of which, Jess graduates soon and then my sweet baby girl gets to show the world how talented she is. Let's hope the world can see the advantages she offers. Because we gonna owe a pile of dough...Maybe she can design a gallery and then somehow get her dad into it. That would be fantastic. Ya listening, Persephone? Ishtar? Mama? Did you know "Mama" is an ancient name for the Goddess? She's here, she's there, she's everywhere, so beware.... Don't forget to get your Mama some flowers when she returns to the surface. She likes flowers.

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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.

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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.

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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.