| Mother Mary |
[Jun. 12th, 2009|11:46 am] |
I just wrote about how my mother helped me to do something I thought was important to my development, but what she helped me do must have been horrifying to my father, and sometimes I wonder if she helped me do what I felt needed to be done to spite him.
Committing myself to the State hospital was a dividing point in my life. I was still married to my first wife, and she apparently had no intention of letting go of me just so I could reap the wild wind. No blame. It was in the marital arena that conventionality and the weird fundamentalism she was brought up in that made our marriage uncomfortable for me. At least, that's what I thought back then. Back when I was young, dumb, and fulla cum. Why would I notice that most of the people who admired Errol Flynn's swashbuckling feats were other young men. Wives don't appear to admire swashbuckling adventurers so much, at least not if they're their husband. And neither young men or old men are suitable to me as a wife.
I'm fairly sure committing myself to the mental hospital was a cry for help, but it was the culmination of a much longer scream. There really were good reasons for questioning my own sanity. Chiefly, I suppose, because I experienced what some call Kundalini in my mid-twenties. It really changed the way I looked at life before I ever had a chance to know exactly who I am was. |
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| New Website |
[May. 16th, 2008|10:05 am] |
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http://applepandowdy.blogspot.com/
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This is the last entry I intend to post here for a while. I don't like having to jump through my ass or ask for help on how to find out if I have any readers. It's not that it matters so much that I have readers who come here, except that my imagination runs wild about what is or are not, and to prevent that, all I have to do is find out for sure. Google has got me in their pocket now. First it bought blogger.com on which I kept my first blog, and now it's bought Feedburner, a company that provides information on the what traffic a blog has. Thanks, LiveJournal, it's been fun.
The comments made by a bunch of students about which computer to buy to take to college was an interesting read this morning. I'm not in the market for a laptop, so I don't know exactly why I was attracted to reading the article or the comments afterward. A lot of these kids used MacBooks and thought they worked best because they worked... period..., and others seem to like having a combination of a laptop for classes, and a desktop or big monitor and regular keyboard back in their room.
I was surprised as how practical the students were about size and weight, and yes, power. Their comments about the need for power and why they felt they needed was only partially based on games. Above all, at least among the people who commented, they seemed so ultimately practical about choosing a computer to use at college. Personally, I think they ought to take that money and go blow it on a grand adventure, but nobody with any real sense listens to me.
My brother lives further back in the woods than me. He has one of those deals with the trash picker-uppers and a big plastic container with wheels on it. Every week he has to haul it out to the side of the paved road. To do that he has to pass by my house, and most of the time (if he ain't filled up) he stops by to see if I have any trash I want hauled off. Nice fellow, my baby brother.
This morning when he came by it wasn't business as usual. He drove up in one of those huge four-wheel pickups with four-doors and a short bed on the back of it. He had the trash container loaded up on it. It was a used truck that probably (I'm guessing) costs upward of 30-40 thousand dollars when it was new, but he got a deal from somebody he had done a favor for, and did them another favor by buying this dinosaur from them, or rather, his internet company paid for it as a company truck.
My brother is a fairly successful dude. The basis of his thriving business is a couple of books he and his wife wrote from scratch. They set up an internet site to sell the books, and ended up selling a lot of other stuff they didn't create, but make a respectable profit from selling and distributing. Like a lotta successful people they have disposable cash to play with, and to buy things like huge pickup trucks to haul their trash a couple of hundred yards to the roadside.
I sort of envy my brother and sister-in-law, but not necessarily for their success in business, but because they can enjoy the success of their business. That's the part that would drive me nuts. I've been a miser my entire life, but I've only known that I was a miser for maybe the last decade or so. I seem genuinely astonished that I could be the way I am for so long without realizing it's actually me that is that way.
Could anything be more exciting that to realize that you're exactly the kind of person that famous people find fascinating and write novels about. Who doesn't recognize Scrooge's famous cry, "Bah! Humbug!" The people who have known me for any length of time realize that I'm the real thing, and the proof of it is that they hate me just like they hate the character Scrooge, but I'm a real, living boy (albeit without a long nose), and no strings attached.
I've always like to test myself and put myself in harm's way to see if I might survive, and I'm 69 years old. I've actually survive half again longer than I ever expected to. Mostly because I'm a miser. I can't afford death. Death gets snooty when it comes around me. It wants me to beg for it's coup de grace. I whine and pule and claim that I don't even have the coin to pay Death to row me down the river Styx.
Limbo land. I live here in my self-generated limbo land. Nowheresville. I don't dare think it's good or bad. Exactly like Being-in-itself, it just is... |
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| What? The Internet's Down? OMG!! |
[May. 15th, 2008|11:56 am] |
What's wrong with this world? The crows are cawing in the yellow pines outside, but the internet don't work this morning. That doesn't happen very often. Nothing goes on around here in such a way as to prevent it from working. What the hell is going on? Is Bush making his final push to take over as dictator?
I woke up too nervous to sit here and listen to the drum machine in the background. Never the less, something good was going on in my dream time just before I woke up. I was watching myself play scales on the piano keyboard. When I deliberately brought it up again, it came. I lay there for a while pushing my fingers through the C Major scale, and then the C# Major scale, got altogether too excited, and got outta bed.
If this arthritis will hold off from crippling me just a little longer, I might be able to do all this in my mind's eye, even if I'm crippled and kept from doing it with my hands. Maybe that's the whole point of getting a body. Ya git a body to learn how to do things you don't need a body for except how to do "things" in the first place. It's like having training wheels in order to learn how to ride a bike by yourself. Once you know how to coordinate the pedaling and the steering, then all you gotta think about is somewhere you wanna go.
...
Where do you go
when there is nowhere to go,
and the place that you're at
is kinda blue,
and you've been everywhere
but the stars up above,
and you feel like
you've been up there
too.
I never see the lay of the land when I'm outta mah body. One time i was flying low over this lush, green, jungly place, and the pock-marked image of Noriego appeared translucently across the "sky" before me, and I "knew" that I was located over Panama. That's how silly things get sometime. I need a body with it's brain to figure things out as if I were embodied. If I'm outta body, then what's normally perceivable sensorially doesn't compute that way any more.
I think that's why I'm obsessed with writing. It's deliberate. I'm trying to "say" what I "see". Oh, I can say "something" deliberately, but I can't always say the something that actually sots itself before me grinning with a impudent dare.
That's what was going on when I saw the video of the Sea Folk with the yellow jackets playing. I "knew" the grin of the piano player. I once knew a man who looked like that. He graduated cum laude from a school in Missouri, and was at the head of his class in law school. What impressed me even more was that he taught himself to play classical guitar from reading a book.
People let go of their feigned appearances for all sorts of reasons. Some never come out to play at all, think what you like. I used to get my feelings hurt by people I thought would be okay to come out of myself and play with, but over time learned that was a mistake. I thought I had a friend in this guy whose mother used to make him come inside every day at four o'clock to practice his piano lessons. I thought that because he played the piano that he would naturally be a emotionally sensitive person like I think I am is. He hated playing the piano. He was being forced to do it. His mother, and her sister the piano teacher, thought that learning to play the piano might make him more emotionally responsive. It didn't.
I had the opportunity to meet with this person late in life. We hadn't seen or spoken with each other for nearly sixty years since we were boys together. He was sent to military school when he was sixteen years old, then went to the Navy academy, served six years in the military, and thereafter become a member of the military/industrial complex and a NeoCon. Why am I always the last to know?
The next to last time i saw him, he reminded me in so many words that he was "still the meanest little son-of-a-bitch" in the school group we had both belonged to. Just before he pridefully introduced me to his trophy wife who is probably twenty years younger than him.
How could I have not "seen" how he was, and thus his future? I was the new guy in town. I was desperate for a friend to play with. He was apparently so mean-spirited, nobody wanted to play with him. How was I supposed to know that? My family had just moved to this little town. We were a perfect match. He pretended to be my friend in order to cheat me out of all my marbles. I dumbed down to have a friend. I bet he is a great businessman.
Why not play with this? It suddenly crossed my mind that his family had moved to this little town after the Civil War during Reconstruction. They probably moved there to take advantage of the total failure of agrarian economic system due to having lost the war. No blame. Lots of carpet-baggers and bluebellies did that. I traveled to where there was economic opportunities all my adult life.
The local people in this small agricultural center probably knew his family came there to take advantage of them, but not anymore than Wal-Mart came here for the same reason. Who gets close to the Wal-Mart people who come and go through here. It's not like they're here to be good neighbors and find a house with a picket fence to settle down in.
I have stopped writing several times to see if the internet is back up. I don't remember it being off-line this long before. It was up just long enough to download my RSS feeds, but was gone again ere I could punch any of them up. At least from that I know the problem is not here on my end of the big show.
#094 RumbaFlamenco
This drumbeat moves fast and furious, and because "it" is actually just a ROM program on steroids made up of ones and twos, it does that over and over again, and will, until either I turn it off or the power fails for one reason or the other. Do we make machines to do what we can't... out of pure spite... or romanticism?
I'm a great romanticizer. Not only am I able to make mountains out of molehills with aplomb, but I can furnish those mountains with secret hideaways that makes all the girls and boys in my mind's eye crazy with lust and dissatisfaction. It's all about that species flaw Sartre wrote about. You know. The flaw of not being able to see our own possibilities in real-time? What other species flaw have I been writing about for the last year?
I romanticize the events in my life in a frenetic effort to grasp or grok my possibles in real-time. Why else would I concern myself with always being the last to know? Romanticizing my unworthy life into The Hero's Journey is a fairly futile effort for me to indulge. Getting to the grail castle and sucking up well enow for a chance to sit down in it's inner courtyard (together with my own self-generated, phantasmagoric images) under the bow tree (yew/you/world tree) is one thing, but getting back ho-me (whole me) with my as yet unseen gift (Something simply fantastic and utterly supercilious, of course, a somethingness that might wow the current warlords, and earn me seventeen virgins on Earth while I'm still alive [and still have a horn to blow]), all without revealing what I experienced in the kingdom to show modesty and respect, is yet another variety of tomatoes altogether. I described this dilemma exactly in 1972. I didn't have a reason to live after that.
Maybe I couldn't get on the internet this morning because I needed to write something I needed to hear. Synaesthesia? I don't know. I tortured myself for a while. Got up and looked in the stubs in my checkbook to see if I'd paid my bill. I had. I called my brother to see if he was online. Yes. Then, I realized I'd telephoned my brother over the same internet connection I wasn't supposed to be getting, and rebooted my computer, and as you can readily see, it worked. |
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| Seemingly Effortless |
[May. 14th, 2008|09:37 am] |
#092 Beguine
Wanna perform a simple, interesting online gimmick/test that might intrigue you or no? Follow the link below for as long as it interests you, and you may find yourself a little surprised at what you might not know about your eyes and your vision. You literally have holes and blind spots that you can witness for yourself.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html
I rushed over the introductory remarks, did the test according to what i thought I was supposed to do, but it didn't exactly come out like the post remarks stated, so i went back and read the instructions aloud in order to get it right. That worked well. Even I got it.
I have a huge blindspot in each eye that's apparently part of the design of seeing. I've known I'm going blind, but I didn't realize how much. Oh, what a thrill it is to be human and have to rely on a deteriorating body to tell me what's what. It seems I haven't been getting reliable information all along, even when my eyes were bright and saw the world perfectly.
This is just another warning to not get cocky and swear something is there that might not be, even though I've always "believed" that it was. I've seem to have had more than my share of the gift of over-exaggeration anyway. Why go just a little over-the-top when I can make an entire continental divide from a molehill?
This "blindspot" business must be why misdirection works so well. If anything critical has happened in your life such that you get hurt because of these blind spots, then you might question how perfectly you see without understanding it. For me, it's just the fact that as I've grown older and had more "accidents" that weren't really accidents as much as simply not seeing danger to avoid it, I think I naturally resort to strategies that reveal the danger to me "in other words". Everybody knows everything in other words. Okay, maybe some people don't.
I got curious about the people who operate this website because they keep mentioning members, contributing guest writers, etc, who are also familiar naymes on the Edge website.
http://www.edge.org/
Reading what this group of people appear to say about themselves has a tendency to cause me to believe they think they are actually evolved to another species beyond homo sapiens. The problem with me about that is they appear to get older just like me. Whatever they might have accomplished with their theoretical mind, they haven't achieved immortality, and that's the ring-pass-me-not for true evolution.
These steroids have allowed me to use my fingers somewhat adroitly again for a while. The deep pain is still there. Particularly around my forearms and shoulders. Especially when I suddenly reach for something. WHOA!
When I played the scales last night my fingers seemed to fly over the keyboard. Okay, fly over the keyboard like a clumsy third-grader, but compare with how deliberately I had to move in the last week to get less soaring results, they flew.
No matter how much better my hands, wrists, and fingers felt after taking these miracle drugs I've still only been attempting to teach myself to play the major and minor scales for a month or two. It's not like arthritis and carpel tunnel syndrome have interrupted a lifelong career as a concert pianist or even a hack playing for drinks at the corner bar.
Rick, a fellow traveler who lives out in San Francisco instead of Boston now, questioned what exactly is it that I'm attempting to learn by what I'm doing now. He stopped writing soon after that. He described how when he was in his formative years (mid-thirties now) he was forced to learn to play all the scales and arpeggios so well that his teachers could place a dime on the back of each hand, and if it fell off during the time he was playing these exercises, he had to start over again until he got it right. When I wrote back and told him that i envied him for that, he hasn't written again. I don't think I got it. Why am I always the last to gnow?
Since then, I've questioned myself why I'm so driven to learn to play these scales, and eventually, the arpeggios too. In fact, it's become somewhat of an obsession. I stopped all my other musical exercises I had taken up. Maybe that's why the arthritis has flared up again. It's my body demanding that I stop torturing it to make up for the sloth I exhibited in the past. |
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| Yesterday |
[May. 13th, 2008|09:45 am] |
7 Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
One of the most interesting e-mail discussion groups I've subscribed and participated in is centered about a specific writing in a group of old writings found buried in a large earthen container in Egypt that was supposedly buried to hide them from the Papists over 2000 years ago. The #7 saying written in this writing opens my entry today because I woke up early this morning thinking about a situation similar to what this saying is about.
It's my considered opinion that what I drempt of was what this saying about lions is about. It's not the truth. I don't know what the truth is nor rightly care. So, if you're reading this journal in hope of discovering the truth here, whatever you take with you when you move on is your own conclusion, and you're welcome to it.
I studied astrology in a deliberate way for over twenty years. I had a mentor of sorts when I first started out. She was there for me in a casual way at first because our real connection was that she was the goto person if you wanted me to read your Tarot cards. Other than my brief discussions with her I pretty much taught myself how to make charts on my own from buying and reading the books I read.
If I'm interested in a subject or topic of my own curiosity, then I'm pretty much of a self-starter. Nobody has to push me to study. Either my curiosity leads me to it or I'm gonna eventually let what the other recommends for me to study go the way of all earthly thangs. "Dust into dust... ", et cetera.
The Sign Leo never meant anything special to me. In my natal chart it wasn't emphasized. That means there were not any of the planets inhabiting that Sign nor were there any important points to be especially considered. Leo is one of the four fixed signs of astrology, and is probably most famous historically in that regard. Particularly in the Jesus stories repeated in what the Papists call the New Testament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse
In the last Book of Revelations Leo is represented as one of the four creatures surrounding the throne of God, written as the calf, the lion, the eagle, and the angel. All this could lead one to think of Leo as a very powerful force along with the other power/fixed signs of the Zodiac. Since the main components of my natal chart concern themselves with two of the other horsemen, Taurus (the calf/bull) and Scorpio (the scorpion/eagle), I paid a lot of attention to these power Signs.
The Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion group has been around for many years. I don't know how many. The old man who created, and therefore owned it, is considered to be dead. The moderators he used still run the group. I've participated on and off for maybe five years.
The group responds to one of the 114 sayings in the Gospel at a time. One of the moderators sends all the group members an e-mail with six different translations of the same saying by different scholars, and asked for comment. The discussion theoretically ensues about the "saying of the week", but in actuality goes all over the place according to the current interests.
Recently, a student at Virginia Tech went on a rampage and murdered over thirty other random students. What he did was all over the media for weeks. It was during this period that the introductory saying was the "saying of the week" for the group, and one of the members said the mass murderer at Virginia Tech was the perfect example of what #7 actually meant. The reason he did what he did was that the lion ate him and became man. That was the first time I realized what the saying meant.
I've been eaten by the lion a few times that didn't result in anybody getting murdered, but every other factor was in place except for the dead bodies. I killed my second marriage by allowing myself to be consumed by the lion. I almost completely lost my temper and hit my wife with my fist. She didn't die or even miss work the next day.
She went to work with a couple of shiners to show my hometown people what an asshole I am is, and the marriage fell apart, and I can't be friends with anybody who knew us as a couple, including the children we had together, so I might as well have murdered her because the result is about the same as if I had. If I had not studied astrology for all those years I might not have understood this ancient principle of cognition.
I understand this arthritis problem I'm having currently through astrology. It has to do with the planets Mars and Saturn inhabiting each other's rulership and bones. My hands, wrists, and shoulders are the main points of how this reaction is attacking my body. The steroids I took has helped, but I know from how I'm feeling presently that this is merely a temporary solution. It will return, and I'll be reduced to begging for relief.
There is not a question in my mind that I'll beg anybody or anything I even suspect will help relief my aching joints. I got no pride when it comes to pain. If it hurts, I cry like a baby. I've never seen where it's done me much good to suffer in silence. The people around me are altogether willing to ignore my problems if I do. Screw that!
At some point, somebody will get sick of my whining and knock me in the head to put me outta my misery, because I'm too cowardly to do it myself while I'm still able. |
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| Becoming Less Memorable |
[May. 12th, 2008|04:52 pm] |
It was a strange morning and I didn't get much done. My hands are feeling much better due to the steroids, but I've got a lotta energy and having it caught me off guard. I bought that converter box to get digital TV reception and I'm getting such lousy reception just the changes in the weather screw it up. This reminds me of all the problems I have with trying to get wireless reception from my brother's house 300 feet (91.44 M) away. It doesn't take much to lose the signal. Just like the Bluetooth keyboard before Apple fixed it.
So, I'm trying to spilt the antenna signal so I can get digital through the converter box, and the old analog signal straight-wired until the analog signals go away next year. The poor get poorer. This is not my area of expertise. I have to work at it until I get stumped, then stop for a while until I intuit another idea to work at that usually fails.
So, as an aside, I started cleaning up in my old bedroom some more. I'm putting in some more sub-flooring, but i have to move a bunch of stuff out of the way to get each 4 X 8 ' sheet of flooring in. The lumber is stored downstairs, and I have to pull it upstairs with my bad hands. That was no fun, but I'm only gonna move one piece today.
If I can get it situated it will show me how I have to lay out the other pieces of sub-flooring. That means I will be able to nail a couple of pieces down, and when I move stuff back on to the nailed down pieces I won't have to move the stuff so much any more. At some point I'll be able to move my bed back into that room, put up some shelving, and get most of the stuff piled on the floor up outta the way.
I'm eager to get my upstairs rooms straightened out. I haven't acted too eager, but mentally I wanna get back to where i can walk out on to my upstairs deck and look around just for a change of scenery. I'm up off the ground and feel safer. If the boogie man were to come after me, he'd have to climb the stairs and I'd at least see him coming.
There is something very arboreal about hanging out on that upper deck. Something deeply instinctual. It's not that I'm actually any safer up there than anywhere else if a homo sapien decided to stealthily attack me. It's not like orangoutangs don't have predators that outsmart them. I just like pretending I'm back in the old days when I lived in trees for many, many life times.
I don't know what people do who haven't had their remembering vision. Since there was a time I hadn't had mine, I have to assume that some people have and some people haven't had remembering visions. It's difficult to imagine someone having a remembering vision and forgetting about it, but I have had people tell me that after hearing my story they suddenly remembered what I was talking about in their own lives.
The first thing I did after it happened was to run to a place where i could get pencil and paper to write it down before I forgot it happened. I think I might have looked like that piano player that was all wigged out and flirting with ecstasy. I didn't care what anybody thought until i captured what happened with words. I went to an all night restaurant, begged a pencil from a waitress, and started writing what i remembered about what i experienced on napkins. I wrote furiously for about half an hour or so, and then stopped. What I experienced wasn't a dream. I realized it wasn't going away, and threw all the napkins away.
It's true. I never have "forgotten". It's not possible for me to remember it in consciousness all at once. I remember when something seemingly mundane event reminds me. I once posed a question to myself about how homo sapiens got all those brain receptors for all those different plants and stuff in their brain, and almost immediately i remembered being a grazing animal and eating ground plants with all sort of spores all over them. I could smell them. I knew the effect they would have on me if I ate them.
I remembered being a crow myself when I saw one playing with the wind currents down in Big Ben National Park. That's where i learned i could be-co-me with what amounted to one of my grandchildren. It was easy to leave my human body laying beside my second wife and become one with the crow and remember what it was like to soar with an updraft until I was just a speck from the ground.
Granted, i don't know how to show other people how to be-co-me. They have to realize there is only One me by themselves, and let themselves be enveloped within that One-ness. Once that happens they don't need a mentor. They remember. They re-me. They get a do-over. Temporarily. Long enow to gnow. To find the glow. To say hello to what once was possible for them then, and ken the manner by which what they are now are merely those ancient possibilities extended extemporaneously into the specious present. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 11th, 2008|11:30 am] |
It came down to searching through my dead mother's old prescriptions and coming up with some steroids to help my arthritis. They were old pills, but they seemed to help a lot. The severity of the pain has eased off. It's not gone, but the sharp edge is only nicking my throat a little each time it swings both ways.
I'm beginning to see where this piano thing could go. Rainey brought his guitar over last night and we played together for a while. We were able to find a meeting place by agreeing on the same chords and playing the twelve bar blues structure. l need to play the bass line over and over again to get it down pat, and he seemed to need a bass line to play against. We both needed some sort of mutual framework to know where to go next, so we both had a good time playing the stuff we both enjoyed without taking away from the other.
I got a chance to play a "walking" bass line that came to me last week after only sixty odd years of listening and playing tuba in the high school band. I knew it sounded about like the stuff I've heard before, but I wasn't sure it had the same number of measures as the original, before I "walked" it. When the counting was all done, it was right on the money. It's little incidents like this that allow me to take chances with more confidence. I only appear to be daring. With every chance I take there's a lotta homework in the background. I hate for people to hear me practice.
I got the impression from just the short amount of time we spent playing last night that eventually, Rainey or some other musician I play with (just in case this fool thinks he can learn to be-co-me without me), will be able to show me what they want me to play, in order to set them up to break out with they own stuff. I work with the idea that many people haven't gotten the cooperation they needed to play what they personally calculate and demand from the other, in order to lay the law down. I'm starting to think that my efforts to learn the major and minor scales has been done exclusively to accommodate the other, more so than for-myself. It's a designated energy of play in which I can kowtow to the other exclusively, slovenly, adoringly, and do what they need done, in order for them to see if what they've been dreaming of will work out right in mixed company.
I'm thinking this is more universal than me and Rainey and Ben. They give me what I need to be myself, how can I not acknowledge my debt by performing a chore I'm perfectly aware nobody else will. Most people don't have the understanding it takes to put they own shit on the back-burner. It's embarrassing that it's taken me so long, and that my ability to let people use me in this way without incurring debt is threatened by physical problems like arthritis and carpal tunnel.
It's not been an easy trick for me to learn. How can I deliberately betray the very principles I have been taught to hold in the highest regard, merely to allow some obsequious bystander to perform the same thoughtless act in the wink of an eye without the slightest concern? Is this the example I need to witness in order to take myself down a notch or two until the dealings done? I meet people all the time who can ignore every passion I've ever obsessed about. Why am I always the last to know/no?
Rainey has been telling me during our infrequent visits over the last little while that he's been playing this song he likes that's in a video on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZAZqSo2XlM
I brought it up last night and realized that he's told me about this before. He even had me search for this video before. I bookmarked it to my Favorites at my youtube account, but I hadn't realized that this tune/video was the same tune he had been talking about "getting down" with for some time now. He memorized it from playing along with the sea folk album. What an idiot I am is. It missed his point completely.
So, when the video was playing, he started playing on his guitar. He's always noodling around on his guitar. It took a while for me to realize he was playing along with the bass line on the video. So, I asked, "Duh... er.. ah... Damn... Rainey! You're playing the bass line that's on the video!"
"Yeah, the whole song is wrapped around the bass line. If you learn the bass line you've learned the whole song. It's in E, then A, and then B."
"Sevenths?
"Yeah, yeah... you can use sevenths...."
"Rainey will be able to show me what he wants me to play to set him up to break out with some stuff he hasn't gotten the cooperation he's needed to play what he thinks will lay the law down."
We all wanna know the right way to lay down the law, and have it work right the first time. but not everybody's daddy was a lawyer. Patience is required especially if all one can do is cut bait. The way that I was taught to "lay down the law" got criminalized in the early sixties and fishing instead became practically impossible.
My pappy went to extremes to pass on the old ways to me in my formative years. When I arrived at pubescence and rebelled against the established order in order to establish my own identity as a man, the entire political system of the United States decided they'd had about as much as they could stand of it too, and stood by my side to crush the old system my father thought was the cat's meow.
How could my poor old father have survived this I don't know. I was formidable enough of a challenge for my father's authority. I didn't need the government's help to make him feel like a total asshole for listening to his old father and respecting the old ways.
The old ways were not that old either. Most of the societal stuff I was taught about the culture I was raised in were only enforceable before women's suffrage laws took effect. The North was unable to enforce the terms of surrender after Reconstruction, and I was taught the loser's laws still prevailed. Just what the hell was I supposed to do? I was taught to fly in the face of the publicly acknowledged law of the larger political state, because it wasn't "our" unwritten law.
If I were to follow my people's ways, I would have to own my wives and children as if they were chattel. Giving women the vote before I was even born took the teeth outta any respect I "oughta" had for the old ways, and yet, because I was raised by demons dancing around this fiery cauldron, in my moments of doubt, I reached for those ways as if in my desperation they might provide solace, and they provoked heart-break instead.
I have a woman friend with a huge heart who spent years researching and assembling her entire genealogical heritage on both sides to leave as a heirloom for her adopted children. She has a Master's degree in Education and a room full of pulp fiction romance novel's she reads herself to sleep with every night. There is a secret grinning idiot in all of us that is gonna find a way. You can bet your life on it.
I got only the little bit of land my father gave me to build a house on, and never really wanted that. I should have. I didn't have the foresight. I couldn't see the future. I felt stupid and spent my life attempting to "see the future" and only realized after it was too late, that I had to create the future by learning that I'd always done created my own future, and this is it. What a drag, man. I "see" people creating their own future without their knowing that's what they're doing all the time. It's the story of Everyman.
The piano player in that music video has a recognizable expression on his face. He's deliberately being a blooming idiot just because he can. He ain't got no couth. He got no nevermind. Just look at him. He acts exactly like he don't give a shit what you think about the way he looks when he's in the groove he created for himself to crawl inside of. No blame.
Is there a deep craving inside each of us to be-co-me with whatever need be to feel what we only dream is possible? How much of our life gets wasted learning how to look a certain way to get a predictable result? Why do poor people dress up to look rich to approach God to learn modesty? Why do college professors wear buttoned up stiff collars with ties while they attempt to teach their paying students how to remove the yoke of ignorance from around their necks. |
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| The Sun, The Moon, And The Rising Sign |
[May. 10th, 2008|09:55 am] |
It amuses me that people in general seem to find the word "masturbation" unsettling. I can talk and write about murder, rape, and any other sort of mayhem and it causes less concern with people than the topic of masturbation. About the only comment I've had from my daughter about the content of my blog was about masturbation. She apparently doesn't like the idea that her friends might think her father would masturbate. That makes me wonder how her own children would fare if they were curious and asked her about it. I can hear her now telling them about how it would make them blind or crazy or both.
A friend the other night asked me " Where's this leading to?" when i asked this same question in real-time conversation. We've talked about every subject two people could talk about, but the idea of talking about masturbation is more repulsive to him than serial killers or genocide. I got the distinct impression that he thought I talked about masturbation as a come-on to having homosexual sex.
No, I would be much more direct than that. I haven't made a pass at anybody to have sex for any reason for years and years. I don't need to make a pass at myself to have permission to masturbate. As a matter of fact I have to force myself to think about doing it. Being so detached from any subject allows me to explore that subject to it's limits. I have definitely explored sex to my limits, but not music.
The azalea blossoms are about gone for the spring. There is a few stragglers on the multicolored bushes, but the red ones have been gone for over a week now. I guess the only concern I have for my plants now is to wait and see if I get any fruit from them this year. When the old fig tree sprouted leaves this year I was a little surprised to see some early fruit appear, but now they're all gone. Reading about how some stem cells can become anything they need to be, it made me wonder if that's what happened. They started out to be fruit, and then changed themselves into leaves or new branches. f
I went to the cafe to eat yesterday. A woman friend of my approached the booth where I sat to ask why she hasn't seen me lately. I told her about how between the gas prices and the food prices there at the cafe have risen I just haven't been able to afford it, so she tried to cheer me up by telling me about the new car she bought. I asked her if her boy friend had bought it for her, but he hadn't. He bought a new car the next day just to keep up with her. I was surprised when she told me that she had read in my blog about my troubles with arthritis. I didn't think she read my blog any more.
I'm pretty good with words. I oughta be. I've spent my life learning how they can be used to manipulate people's feelings. People come to me all the time to get their feeling manipulated. They get stuck in one mode or the other and don't know what to do to change with the changes. One of the ways I use words to change people's feeling is to indirectly attack their ennui with shame. No. Not my shame. I'm the sha-man, not the sha-me itself.
The reason people don't like to converse directly about masturbation is that they're ashamed they do it. I can talk about masturbation for hours on end without ever using the word itself. I don't care what has anybody stuck for whatever reason, they can't hang with it when I start pushing them around with their own shame. Then, I have to beg them to stick around long enow to plow the new ground.
If you've ever questioned whether you really understood what a shaman is, then all you have to do to reach clarification is to take the word apart with hyphens. You be looking for the root in order to stroke it for what it worth to conjure it into Being. Well, it is better in the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground... right? Things can't maintain themselves as a separate reality without establishing they own ground of being. No being? Then, nothingness.
I've written a lot about visualization. If I haven't, then I should have. Our ability to do that is what makes homo sapiens the ruler of the roost for the "time being." Visualization is the tool homo sapiens use to create their own separate reality. Presently, I attempt to use visualization to create an 88-key grand piano keyboard in my psyche to use as an input device to a world beyond words.
The fact that I created a typewriter keyboard in my psyche to create a world with words only has residual benefits to my current pursuit. Both keyboard pursuits are threatened by the problems I'm having with carpal tunnel and arthritis. I may have arranged the whole thing. My body may be legitimately telling me to stop, and to keep my stopping still.
It's very difficult for me to realize how stubborn I am, have been, and inevitably will be. I can't perceive myself that way except through my projection of myself on to the other. I really don't like doing that a lot. I'd rather pretend I'm looking deep inside for the real me. Nobody knows. I'll do what I like.
That's one of the problems my extreme stubbornness creates. I'm even more stubborn because nobody knows. Yet..., and yet again... everybody knows... and that makes us all dishonest, and gutless wonders.
I got an excuse. I'm the only person in the universe who understands the excuse I use to be stubborn. My natal astrology chart reveals that I was born a double-Taurus, both Sun and Moon. The waxing crescent was barely visible at the moment I drew my first breath. It was sprinkling rain. The blessings of heaven were compromised in that moment by the occupation of the eastern horizon in the Sign Scorpio.
The three main components in astrology are considered to be the Signs currently habituated by the Sun, the Moon, and the eastern horizon. In my natal chart they all occupy fixed Signs. Power signs. Two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The other two Signs that make up that foursome are only emphasized in my natal chart by their in-sign-if-i-can-ce.
#106 Rumba
Those other two signs are Leo and Aquarius. I state that they are insignificant in my natal because they're both unoccupied. Period. In my chart there is nothing there in those two Signs, and none of the air Signs in my natal are occupied by any planets or significant points of interest.
I'm definitely not an airhead. It doesn't matter. I got enough sense to bring in consultants. I'm surrounded by airheads. All of them wanna share, and if they don't, I just take what I need anyway. Why would I not? They're not labeled airheads for naught. That's the precise reason nobody knows. We're all airheads in some form of being.
One can't be too particular about whatever kind of being they can come up with. Being is hard to come by. It ain't something one should spend a lotta time culling through to pick out the cream of the crop. Grab what you can while the grabbing is good. I've watched fairly normal looking people get jiggy trying to catch worthless, plastic-bead-necklaces tossed from a float decorated by a DMT-crazed designer during Mardi Gras.
I've been told that a person has to grab for any sort of being they can compete for and be glad they got what they did. Plastic-bead-necklaces, particularly the ones that are liberally decorated with sparkling sequins, are mo' bettah than nothingness. But, you gotta be careful. Lotsa people like gewgaws that be willing to wring yo' neck to git 'em.
Being is created through a specific, self-generated visualization technique that's deliberately done without inspiration or just cause. |
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| An Unimaginable Future |
[May. 9th, 2008|02:36 pm] |
This is a sad morning. I woke up in a lotta arthritic pain, and remembered playing piano last night to Rainey's guitar, and i had to stop. I can see right now that I'm not going to be able to play the piano for very long at one time.
I tried a pain-killer prescribed by my dentist a while back. I hoped it would work to alleviate the pain, but it didn't do much. None of the OTC drugs work anymore, and just taking so many of them has me fuzzy-headed. My brother came by this morning wheeling his trash barrel out to the paved road and had some room for some of my trash. He's not in such a good mood either. He's afraid I'll become dependent on him, but he's the one with a pace-maker.
This is what I've been writing about. What if I live? What if my hands get worse and worse, and it gets to where I can't grip my eating utensils or lift stuff or wipe my own ass. The way things are going I won't be able to tie my own shoes or cinch up my belt because i can't make a fist without weeping, much less play through the pain to play the scales on my piano. What a drag man. I guess I'm gonna get stuck with meditation as about the only practice I'll be able to indulge.
It hurts to type, but not so bad that i can't make it happen. That might be because this new keyboard doesn't require much oomph to push the individual keys down. I can hover my fingers over the keyboard and aim them toward the right key, and the weight of my hand is enough to cause them to do right. I wonder how long that will last?
I only had two bamboo shoots come up this year, which is one better than I had last year. One of the shoots came up in plain sight beside the others, and i thought that's all that would come up, but then Ben noticed the other stalk of it coming up in the woods straight behind the others. I looked at it yesterday, and it's the largest one that has appeared. It's about 4 inches (10.16 cm) in diameter. That's more like what I've been expecting for giant bamboo. This variety grows up to 60 feet (18.28 M) high.
I'm gonna try to play the scales. I gotta do what I can. I've got too much time invested in establishing a daily habit of playing them to stop now. Besides, if my hands and wrists are in constant pain, what difference does it make if I do stuff that hurts them even more? I got a feeling this is forever. |
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| Is It Actually You That Talks To Yourself? |
[May. 8th, 2008|12:10 pm] |
008 8Beat
I spent some time just now reading the .pdf file that describes what's possible with the Yamaha DGX-620 Portable Grand digital piano I bought a while back. It has lots of features that can be manipulated in an orderly fashion if you know how.
http://music.yamaha.com/products/main.html?productId=1206
The fact that I could download a .pdf file with all the documentation digitized and available on my computer monitor that's on a table adjacent to the piano makes it easy to read the instructions for setting the instrument up while I'm doing it.
The 8Beat rhythm I'm writing by this morning is a simple drum beat played at a medium speed rate. The drum machine plays it over and over with computerized precision. It's practically inhuman in the way it just repeats the same beat over and over without any perceivable mistake. If the saying "To err is human" holds any truck at all, this drum machine proves it's not human at the rate of one beat per second. I can choose to make something of it or not. It has no options but to do what I command. I can change the rate to any of it's parameters just by pressing on a few buttons.
In today's read, I found out about some settings that require me to press certain piano keys while holding down a Function button. It's not any different than setting my computer keyboard keys as "hot keys" to institute chosen functions. In fact, this digital piano is nothing but a computer with a piano keyboard as an input device. An analog piano made with wood and an elaborate set of strings held taut by a cast-iron frame is a computer too. It carries out computations.
As an input device, the 88-key grand piano keyboard is a marvelous invention. It's the product of hundreds of years of trial and error. It's the keyboard that draws my interest, not what actually makes the sound indicated by the specific key on the keyboard. Hundreds, if not thousands of digitally samples sound can be entered in combinations with thousands of other synthesized noises so much that it might take an entire lifetime to study the possibilities. It's the keyboard itself that makes sense out of chaos.
I studied computer programming enough to get a simple generalized idea of what coders do to earn the results they get. They manipulate symbols that manipulate other symbols which makes other things do stuff. I do that with words. Not with the intellectual me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of the words, but with the sounds they make.
I imitate other people's voices, and behaviors, but mostly their voices. It's more discreet because permissive. That's about all I'm good for. Nobody knows I imitate them, because I become them to do it. How could they know I'm being them if they don't know themselves? They have no choice but to act as if what they perceive in-the-other when their current interests indicates me, is who-they-think-they-would-be, if and only if, they keened my reasons. They see themselves in me, and I see who-I-think-I-am-is when I be-hold them (by temporarily appearing to give them being). We imitate each other and create a groundless third-person as a metaphorical container that smells like primroses, and some say, never actually ever goes away for good.
I pretend to suspend my belief that's me over there. Possible? I don't know. I pretend to listen to the conversation the other is having with themselves using the other as a mirror (a "me" error; an error that makes me into a not-me [an eye-mage]). I watch and listen to them accuse the other of being like themselves (beholding). Then, I imitate them doing that, and accuse them of being what they accused the other of being by imitating their previous accusation in their own voice. Why would I not? How else can I subtly bring attention to what the other takes for granted? A man gotta do...
I seem convinced we should all take our own advice. It's us we're actually talking to no matter what sensorial object we use to project our idea of ourselves toward. If I were to tell you to take your own advice, I might run the risk of hurting your feelings and having you shut me down from ever asking a favor. Why else would I bother? The most politically useful stance I can assume toward your self-delusion is for me to become you, to say your own advice to you in your own voice. Why do you think I went to acting school? It was to learn how to be-co-me. I had to figure out there was only One me on my own. |
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| Grocery Shopping When I'm Hungry |
[May. 7th, 2008|11:44 am] |
I stayed up to see the election returns and got nothing. The polls closed so late last night I didn't expect to see anything definitive. Even this morning when I looked at the news sites there was nothing conclusive about what happened yesterday. The only thing I've heard is that Hillary cancelled all her appointments, and I'm not sure i heard that right. I'll probably wait until the evening news comes on to find out what I wanna know. When is Bill and Hillary gonna let it go so the big head of steam the Democrats got going into the main chance won't turn into vaporware? The fascists that are running the government now are not going to roll over and play dead. No blame. It wouldn't be any fun if they did.
I wrote recently that i didn't think that i could vote for a woman for President of the United States, but I didn't say I wouldn't vote for a woman for Governor or the Senate. That's just what I did too. The women I voted for on the State level both won going away too. I guess they convinced more people than I first thought.
What really amazed me about this runoff election was the low turnout figures. The last time I heard it was only 36% of the voters turned out to have their say. The constant hype there has been in the media about how many new voters are registering for the first time, I expected the percentage to be higher. Maybe twice that. I'm beginning to suspect the national media like network television is losing it's influence, it's their integrity that's the first virtue to fall. None of these news sources even pretend to offer a balanced non-partisan view.
I don't read the political news on the internet much because so much of it is obviously bigoted or prejudiced even more than the old school of journalism. Not that I'm looking. I don't know what any of this political jazz means anymore, if I ever did. My parents were die-hard liberals when I was a kid, and as my father got older, he grew oddly conservative and claimed he'd paid his political debts to the hand that fed him during the Great Depression. Then, I realized his youthful idealism basically had an old-fashion bent all along.
Maybe the changes he went through as he grew older made him reach back for values that had more meaning for him. He was raised so far away from the closest town it took at least two days to drive a mule and a wagon there and back to get store-bought supplies and/or to deal with the regional government services.
My father was the only person in his natal group who finished the seventh grade, and the first to finish high school, and the only one that even attended college, much less graduated and got a BS degree. He didn't get much encouragement from his family. When he finally did get his college degree at the age of thirty-three I was already born. I had two older sisters. I don't know why I didn't inherit more of his determination and ambition. Instead, I rebelled against it, and literally felt like a super hero merely to have survived.
About my only claim to fame was that I could withdraw into myself in order to perform some rituals that take extreme concentration. It wasn't like I aimed to be able to do that by some concerted effort. It was just there for me from early on. The real reason I turned inward was that my father was the determined, ambitious man I described above, and turning inward was the only way I knew to hold on to something for myself.
About all that means is that I became a bookworm at a very young age. I escaped being the new kid on the block into books. Mostly adventure novels that appealed to boys that age. The only difference between me and the other kids I was raised around was how much I read. I wish that I would have been obsessed by reading something sophisticated like Shakespeare or that classical literature would have elicited my curiosity. Not me, it was about going on adventures with Tom Sawyer and Robinson Carusoe and Treasure Island.
Somehow I connected my love for reading stories about going on adventures with a saying I favored in the King James Version of the Bible. The Bible had a lot of adventure stories in it. Jesus told his disciples to "Go ye therefore...", and I did. I think it would have worked out for the religious people who attempted to shape my understanding what the stories in the Bible meant better if I hadn't read all those other adventure stories. I reached different conclusions about what the stories were all about than many of my supposed mentors.
My escape into reading adventure stories to hold on to my own sense of self in the face of my father's ambitions for me, directly shaped the attitude I felt good with about how i wanted to live my life. In the same sense as the saying about the child being the father of the man, I wanted my life to be an adventure for as far back as I can consciously remember. I didn't appear to consider how the meaningful others in my life would think about it. I don't have to guess. They didn't like it at all. It's in this very arena that i figure I'm probably autistic in some way. There situations in which I don't consider other people's feelings, and worse, I don't realize I should at least have the decency to hide it for their sake. I agree. I certainly should have. There's remorse now, but it wasn't there when it should have been.
I haven't had a public job now for over five years. Except for going to the grocery store or the post office, I hardly go out anymore. I am out of sight and out of the other's mind. When I went to vote yesterday the woman who asked for my name and address called me by my youngest brother's name. We do look similar. She seemed astonished that he had an even older brother.
There is a connection between my not working and not going out in public much anymore. The values I needed in the working world in order to fully consider my ongoing situation seem extraneous now. I have less and less to intervene in the working world for. The things of that world have lost their value for me because of disuse. You know the old saying, "Use it or lose it." There is lots of activities related to employment and finances I used to engage in persistently and continuously over the years. Merely because I stay at home a lot, I don't encounter work related problems any more except through my memory of them. A lot of the stuff I previously kept on the front burner was remembered for job-related and/or social reasons. No mas.
I used to kowtow more than a little to influential people who might be useful to me one day. I never knew when I'd need an inside person to get my foot in the door. Particularly in my field of endeavor of industrial construction. Many of the jobs that were hiring non-union people got found out about by word-of-mouth. Some people wouldn't tell nobody but their travel mates about a time-job paying big money in some god-forsaken part of the country nobody in their right mind wanted to go. I'd go. I needed to stay friendly with people who might just help me get that high dollar job. High paying time jobs kept me from having to work more than six months a year for the biggest part of twenty five years.
When I retired I didn't need to be all that accommodating to all those people I didn't even know well. I didn't have to be nice or mean or agreeable or ready to bop them in the nose at the drop of a hat or any other way at all. We all knew why we acted like good buddies, it was the closest thing we had going to a union.
If I approach the guys now who know I've retired that are still working, they seem confused. They get a look on their face that seems to say, "Why are you being nice to me if you no longer have to? Are you some kind of a nut?" Some parts of becoming more reclusive is not voluntary. I'm just not in the daily, mundane flow of everyday affairs anymore, and that serves its own purpose. Not necessarily because I choose for it to be that way, but because there are higher, more noble reasons why such should be so. |
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| Deadly Intent |
[May. 6th, 2008|11:40 am] |
There is nothing negative to say about the weather this morning. It rained a little last night, but by dawn all the clouds were gone, the sky is blue, the temperature is already 60 degrees (15.55 C) at 0830 and rising, the birds are singing, my head is ringing... It's supposed to be a perfect Spring day.
The arthritis seems to be backing off a bit. The real problem area has been in the pinkie finger of my left hand. It gets intensely painful just laying there relaxed in my lap, and if I accidently bang it up against something hard it really, really hurts. I take this in stride because I don't have any choice. I really do think this is happening because it's part of an allergic reaction to some of the chemicals used to tan leather.
The location of the most severe pain is in the pinkie finger on my left hand. It has a history of such problems with difference causes as the root of it's painful outcry. I recently wrote about how my little finger and the ring finger beside it once went numb on me. I finally figured out why that happened and stopped doing what caused the problem. That's how I'm approaching this most recent onset of pain. It wasn't shy. It upsurged into consciousness with a flair. There was a specific moment when I felt my toes burning and I cried out in total disgust, "Oh shit!" I figure it's a reaction to a chemical allergy, but not with any real conviction.
The arthritis could be a reaction from my playing the scales on the piano repetitively for hours each day, and expecting that little finger to behave with as much strength, coordination, and facility as my other fingers. That's kind of unreasonable. I'm not a true, ambidextrous person. I have to deliberately reach to perform chores with my left hand. I taught myself to write with my left hand after I was an adult, and then to write with both hands simultaneously (on a real boring desk job), but if i don't practice calligraphy fairly often, writing with my left hand turns back into it's usual clumsy scrawl.
Typing is different, of course, I have to use both hands equally, but it doesn't take as much physical strength as much as physical coordination to punch out what I wanna see on my computer screen. The keys on my piano are designed to imitate the exact resistance one would encounter on the mechanical keys of an acoustic grand piano. They're weighted and balanced to emulate the real thing. The harder I punch them the louder the sound the instrument makes. It's quite amazing in this way. It takes significant effort to push these digital keyboard keys down as opposed to the comparatively minimal effort it takes to type.
I make mistakes on the piano keyboard the same way as when I'm touch typing. If my mind drifts and I lose the flow of what I'm attempting to express I have to use the delete button all too frequently. In both cases I'm merely attempting to say what I see. In both cases, if I stop to cull or make judgment of what appears in my mind's eye, it just goes away just like last nights dreams. I can no longer hold it in my mind's eye for the purpose of capturing it with words.
I used the expression "mind's eye" and say that I capture the drifting thoughts I serendipitously encounter there can be captured with words if I leave go judgment. It's a little different with sound. Sound (theoretically) doesn't appear in my mind's "eye". I literally hear the sounds I wish to capture with notes on the piano keyboard. I wish for my vision and auditory faculties to work together in mutual reception with some degree of exclusivity.
Can you imagine the dignity I have to concede to allow this to happen? Somebody or something important in my life is gonna feel neglected when I retreat into the magical lair that lies deep in the bowels of the earth, and I am no longer there for them to support their inane illusions. It's gotten to be more than a tiny bit embarrassing how little oomph I got left to emotionally invest in their self-inflicted suffering these days.
I do actually bear some responsibility for allowing some others to believe (of their own choosing, of course) that I can personally bestow immortality upon them if they play their cards right. It's a hideous leftover from my past when I was always a snake-in-the-grass and took great pride in my well-honed skills. I'm gonna return to conquering this pretend flaw first thing in the morning, but for now, the temptation to play God in order to anoint them to be what they already are can be hilariously entertaining. Sha-men use sha-me to scarify their patients into healing themselves, and thereby, into producing their best fruit on the new wood. M.D.'s use radiation and chemotherapy for the same purpose. I'd be the first to admit that the medicos got the scariest tools for pruning.
Between writing and practicing on the keyboard I'm using my individual fingers for a specifically chosen repetitive action from the time I wake up until I go to bed. The pinkie finger on my left hand has gotten the worst of it. It's had to really "man-up" to play the notes on the piano with enough strength to fit the sound it's soliciting to equal the other fingers, and it's protesting it's treatment as sheer abuse. No blame.
When I read palms I spend considerable time looking at the pinkie finger of the people I hold hands with. The little finger relates in astrology to the planet Mercury, and everybody knows what that means, right? It's an assigned construct. It means whatever I choose for it to mean. Like every other facet of ex-is-tense. Is-ness only has pre-sent (default), extemporaneous values, and these default values are lost for eternity when it be-co-me-s with the process of it's own historicization. It no longer IS it (the plenitude), but merely ex-is-ts for lack of it's own ground of being.
It's not enough to realize that the entirety of our surrounding environment becomes what it is to us because of the way we write it in stone. As a palm reader and fellow fruitloop, I have to realize the entirety of what I filter for in the world of my client depends on my decisions. I expect nothing less of myself. Besides, as an Aspie I was born well suited to the task. My gift nearly drove me crazy before I learned to divide and thus conquer it. Like dividing the year into seasons, the seasons into months, the months into days, the days into hours and seconds and the cracks in between this and that. I only own the specious present, and it doesn't belong to me.
My gift makes me appear autistic at times. Only lately have I been able to grok it lucidly enough to acknowledge it. It ain't like I haven't been willing to acknowledge what happens for me as a gift instead of a curse. I honestly didn't realize some people can't do what i can do. At least not without considerable, sometimes debilitating effort that only makes some people bitter in the long run. That's difficult to cope with when I don't have a clue why they're writhing in envy and jealousy. At least, that's why I personally wiggle and twist sometime.
The gift I"ve been imbued is that of being able to let go of the abstract world with such swiftness it creates a vacuum that demands attention for the duration of it's non-appearance. Fetching some specific treasures from the dragon's lair takes more focus and cunning than other. There, more mundane objects distractingly scream out "Pick me. Choose me." Some objects within that Cornucopia (plenitude) practically wag their long tails as if eager puppies wanting to be chosen at the dog pound.
I can't afford sentimentality when pearl-diving in shark-filled waters. When I do that in earnest, and successfully provide manifestation of the desired object in the sensory dimension, that ritual only seems unusual if you've never seen how it happens frame-by-frame. Each frame can be a separate reality so dazzling it appears impossible that it would need anything else to complete it. Each frame can ex-is as a being-in-itself, and it seems trivial to stop and play the edges, but in my way of seeing the world, that's what I gotta do to "make sense" (manifest in physical reality) of a former nothingness to conjure it into Being as well-formed somethingness.
Playing the edges, exploring the peripheries, finding the catbird's seat is the prerequisite for me to be able to connect two separate realities into at-one-ment. I know people who go straight for the jugular, but that technique isn't all that reliable for me. I get too blood thirsty to go for the kill and overstep my bounds. It's almost deliberate when I know I will survive, but my original intention frequently peters out when it come to the short hairs, and that can be embarrassing. Why bother? If even a remote chance of this severe humiliation occurring lurks in the shadows of her perfect smile, the Return can be a mofo.
Who doesn't do that? Apparently, lots of people. No blame. It takes two bowls. Even nothingness is filled to the brim with intent. |
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| Is Your Keyboard Filthier Than A Toilet? |
[May. 5th, 2008|09:53 am] |
I don't know where the intent of my piano keyboard has gone to. I seem to be wandering all over the place. What's happening here is starting to conform to all the stupid little habits that brought life as it's sot before me today into play. Even playing the major and minor scales is starting to go astray. I practice the individual keys that give me the most trouble separate from when I play all the major and minor scales at one sitting as I follow them around the Circle of Fifths.
The Circle of Fifths diagrams I first encountered and memorized goes in the opposite directions from the diagrams of the Circle of Fifths I've seen more recently. It certainly doesn't matter which direction I follow them around to me, because like in my sorry life I've always gone both ways. I seem determined to change directions about every day so I'll be able to use the Circle of Fifths in every way that's possible. Every music theory web site I go to has a section on the Circle of Fifths. All the authors have their own methods for using it for all sorts of reasons. They're usually good reasons, and when I first read them, I determine then and there that I gotta memorize and incorporate this sort of thought into my practice routine. That's probably not going to happen because of my introductory statement at the top of the page.
So, I do things like I did this morning. I didn't wanna start composing words right away. I know, I know, every writer I've read who has written about how they write strongly suggest writing first thing in the morning before anything else. I don't. I not a good writer or a successful writer. I am a writer because I write every day for hours. I invent more reasons for why I write than could ever be true.
Anything. I like describing anything with words. They don't always has to make sense in a way that's gonna bring me title and rank or money in the bank, I'm just a very curious fellow who seems convinced that the only true motivation for writing is for to reveal what's going on just beneath the surface of what i pretend to the world. To say what was just on the tip of my tongue.
The whole point of my interest in grokking the 88-key piano keyboard is to learn to sit before it like I do my computer keyboard and compose words, but with musical notes. I don't intend to learn to play what some other composer has composed. I intend to compose music in the moment I'm sitting before the piano keyboard just like I compose with words that I type. As you can tell by the clumsy results I get from composing with words, the chances are the music I compose with each sitting at the 88-key piano keyboard is not gonna the hounds of Nashville to come beating down my door to sign me up.
I recognize the truth in what I'm writing in real time, and by the time I start the next paragraph it's gone. It's not the truth anymore. It's history. Truth can only ring true for a miniscule moment, and aye, there's the rub. It's the same thing in singing or chanting or standing up on a stump or a stage and opening the floodgates of Pandora's Box. The snake doesn't die from it's own venom.
I can't compose stuff with words or music and worry about what people will do with it after it's no longer the truth. What you're reading or can ever read is not the truth I'm conjuring for this moment. By the ti-me it gets to you in any form except in the immediate moment of it's elicitation, your present mindset is being contaminated with your own idea of what I intended. Not the truth I exhilarate in as I sit here all quivery and in awe of my own wonderfulness. '-)
One of my favorite hymnals from childhood is the song whose lyrics suggest something approximate to, "You got to walk that lonesome valley. You gotta go there by yo'self. There ain't nobody hear can go there for you. You gotta go there by yourself."
This is what rings true for me while I'm composing, but even more so when I edit what I've written. I simply can't type fast enough to get what I'm copying down in it's original form. Besides, I'm getting off like crazy on just the flow, and I might not give too much of a shit if you have to struggle with what is no longer true anyway.
I'm really pleased to have realized how powerfully reading and semi-studying The Tibetan Book Of The Dead had on me all those years ago. I was very impressed even then when I first encountered it, but as I absorbed it and made it my own through contemplation it made it's way outta being booted up straight into RAM, and remained on the hard drive for occasional use when something reminded me of it, and then when I really got lost studying the Book Of Changes, I saved it on CD, and you know, I don't have a clue where that booger is presently, but wherever it is I have a lucid recall at my fingertips anytime I get froggy.
The other day when something I read brought out the fact that the title "Dalai Lama" is a Mongolian phrase, and I realized that the Mongolian hordes were still alive in Tibet I got excited. I read some I hadn't really realized. Tibetan Buddhism is based on visualization. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead might have been what opened my eyes to the notion of how visualization is used as a creative force. It's what I work with as I compose, and especially when I edit. I'm doing both at once.
The visualization practice I'm using is pretty much the same technique portrayed in NLP as "reframing". I'm changing my personal history with every composition. That simply means I'm un-writing stuff that once had value to me, but no mas. I don't particularly want to do this work simply because I'm lazy, but after spending all day trying to make something of the external world around me, it's just the most interesting, rewarding activity I could possibly engage in.
People irritate me when they try to make themselves interesting at my expense. It's a doubly damned effort from the gitgo. First and foremost, for them to draw the attention from others that i draw from others without effort, they would have to walk that lonesome valley by themselves. I can't do it for them. I'm perfectly willing, but it simply doesn't work that way.
I have to interpret your intent just like anyone else. Just like you misinterpret my intent. Nobody knows what you think. You're it. Get over it. If you bring about change in the way you look at the world in such a way that it makes life easier or harder for you, not one soul on Earth will know what to congratulate you or condemn you for. Nobody knows. If you're looking for help from the other, then not even you know/no. You'd better git crackin'. Nobody else can.
If you did actually make the decision to walk that lonesome valley by yourself, you would not have the time you presently devote to wishing somebody else would come along and do it for you. Besides, if you did do the right thing by yourself, you would be spending an awful lot of time explaining this to other people who want to make themselves interesting at your expense, but at least you wouldn't be bugging me to do something i can't, and wouldn't if I could. Perhaps you don't merit other people's attention because you don't even merit your own. No blame. |
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| The Worst Fate Of Man |
[May. 4th, 2008|12:04 pm] |
I watched Obama with Tim Russert today. It was the most attention I'd actually paid to what he has to say. In the end game, for me, he's just another idealist like Ralph Nader that's gonna get his feelings hurt. He'll probably go live alone in some backwoods part of the world and contemplate his navel. He seems to be the self-observant type who watches himself become what makes sense to him at the time. He would probably be the easiest one of the three candidates for me to see and listen to on the news each day. I'm thinking that maybe it might be interesting to observe with him and watch what occupying the most powerful political office that has ever existed will play with what he thinks of himself as idealist. We could all get to see what he's made of simultaneously.
That's what happened with Bush. I wasn't disappointed by his performance. I knew he was pretty much a fraternity boy and a buffoon right away. I think America got exactly what it deserved when they elected him twice. I think it's gonna take a bunch of immigrants to preserve the American dream. The natural-born citizens who have reaped it's rewards seem like the first ones to betray her principles anymore. The immigrants come here with the dream very much intact. If this country doesn't continue to be the melting pot of the world, then the American dream won't be worth a plugged nickel.
America needs this idealistic young man to fire up our deepest principles, but the notion that the same people who elected George Bush twice will vote to make him the President of the United States is about as absurd an idea as have ever come crossed the pike. The local evangelistos I hear talking it up around at the cafe, seem to have decided to bloc vote for Hillary. They think the NeoCons can win with John McCain against Hillary as a woman, than they can with Obama as a black man.
This is the most intriguing political predicament I can remember. It's so fascinating, I figure because I was raised in the South under the auspices of the Jim Crow culture. That was the status quo where I grew up in my formative years. That culture was disenfranchised as criminal, and made illegal by an act of Congress when I was 21 years old. Very, very inconvenient thing to happen to me after I was already shaped and my final neurons connected. I think many Southern males about this time was just getting used to women getting to vote and own property, and now this? OMG!
I never cared much for warmongers. I know it's just the way the world is, and philosophically, they have just as much right to be here as the more apathetic types like me, who just as soon not have the significant others in their lives blown to smithereens over whatever to prove some political point. I'm not complaining so much. I've left them alone and they've left me alone, and for the most part, the rumors of war have always remained rumors.
I don't like to think about what's gonna happen to Obama. He seems really sincere. I absolutely believe he follows a path with heart. But, these down and dirty politicians of all ilks are most likely gonna eat this ol' boy's lunch, that is, if they don't outright murder him for his troubles. He reminds me of a second wave. Martin Luther King as an Avatar. A tool. Probably a martyr.
I watch and have watched Hillary Clinton with the same interest I watch any person I know was born in Scorpio of any age or gender. That's all I know about Hillary Clinton. That's all I need to know about Hillary Clinton except for one not-so-small personal question. Has she matriculated into being an eagle or she still a snake-in-the-grass. I've studied the Sign of Scorpio more than any other because in my own natal astrology chart, Scorpio is my Ascending or Rising Sign, and the bane of my existence.
If I arrived at the conclusion that Hillary had ascended to the supreme wisdom and sagacity of an evolved Scorpio I would support her completely. It doesn't matter to me whether she thinks she's evolved or not. I'll be the judge of that. '-) One thing I have to give her credit for is dealing with Bill's infidelity. According to all the Scorpio women I've gotten friendly with and whose personalities I've dissected to the bone, her ability to live with her natural jealousy, and appear to put it behind her, probably indicates her loftiness about as much as any one situation could.
However, I don't think I could vote for a woman as the President of The United States. I might, but global warming seems like it's taking us in the opposite direction of Hell freezing over. One Margaret Thatcher in a lifetime is enough. Living in the same house with my mother as she got old and lost in senility, probably put me off on trusting women with authority like nothing else that has happened in my life. All her lies came apart at the seams. I only suspected she was a secretive person. When she forgot I was her son, she talked to me like a stranger about her lousy, no-good son (me), and I even got to ask questions that she gave me shockingly straight answers to. I don't believe in Santa Klaus, moms, or apple pie anymore. If I ever did.
The only problem with mothers is that they have never been little boys. ~AU
I really wish I preferred men as sexual partners. At being homosexual would be something definite. I'm a mentally tough guy. I could stand the heat. I even "came out" to my parents, but I could have just as easily done that just to hurt them. That's the kind of son-of-a-bitch I can be. I usually hurt people's feelings without even trying, but when i make up my mind I can be absolutely horrid. Both women and men call me Butch. It's not a compliment.
Some distraught people approach me like they're putting their life in my hands. I've covered up by acting tough and unfeeling for so long I guess it's believable that I would take advantage of that. It's not true 99% if the time. Only if I'm unjustifiably provoked. I'm just another old man with bad hands. It may not be that long before I'm unable to pull the trigger. I'm too cowardly any way. I've always been a runner. Even though I might live to fight another day, I probably won't. Successful misdirection is too great a reward in itself than to burn my bridges.
I'm pretty sure I could operate a successful business as a paid executioner. I'm not stating that I've be a successful hit man. I believe there are people who would pay me good money to murder them. I might have had offers, but since I deliberately and forcefully changed the subject, I guess I'll never know. It has to do with me acting tough to cover up some potentially embarrassing incidents that have literally made me less... ummm.. manly. I've written about this previously.
I seem a lot more detached than I really am, but for true, I really can and have been very devoid of feelings as to the fate of the other. I get scared of myself when that happened in the past, and I force myself to run for my life. In one sense it seems like I'm a coward because I retreat so off-handish-ly, but it's for fear of myself. I'm not afraid of exerting deadly power on my own behalf to save myself. A man gotta do. My real fear is that I'm afraid I wouldn't care one way or the other. So, I run to keep my life and my sanity.
I'm afraid of misanthropy. I'm afraid of hating every human being on Earth. I honestly can't think of a worse fate for a homo sapien. |
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| New Feedback Gizmo |
[May. 3rd, 2008|12:17 pm] |
I've been working on getting the new blog I set up to work with feedburner. Now there is a "Subscribe" button at the bottom of the page that when a reader clicks on it will be furnished with some options on how to be notified of a new entry. I don't know how well this works. I got so burned out trying to figure out what information they needed to make it work as advertised I've quit trying to sign up a couple of times before. After I get settle down a bit I'm gonna try to get all three blogs signed up with this so I can get a realistic view of what's cooking in the readership department.
I wanna explore how I can conduct my personal affairs in consideration of the fact that "Nobody knows.", i.e., I think there is a way to exploit human freedom in a very satisfying manner. I wanna explore exploiting. I get this image of a plant root searching for the easiest way to get to available nutrients and feeling it's way through the obstacles in it's way. What part of an individual plant keeps up with where all the feeder roots are going. Do vegetables have ___?
This all goes back to my remembering vision in which I somehow was able to "see" and "be" all my former earthly incarnations from the moment I arrived on Earth as a pearl-like entity and discovered I couldn't leave again. I've written about how I began to imitate or emulate the other pearl-like entities that got attracted here like I did, and they couldn't leave either. They were making themselves into various creatures of various and sundry forms in the hope that what they made themselves into would help them escape. When their new invention didn't serve the purpose they were created for, then the pearl-like entity would remove itself from that created object, and let it, say, hop off.
Once the pearl-like entity discovered it's current project would not attain the desired end and left it to it's own devices (well-formed or no), that was the end of the created object's evolution. Rabbits didn't evolve into kangaroos. Kangaroos were created anew by the pearl-like entities in the hope that bigger might be better. Not so.
Not only was I "shown" all the incarnations (rabbits, kangaroos, giant sequoia, homo sapiens, arthropods, reptiles) I'd made myself into and abandoned as food for thought, but I WAS those creatures because I made them out of myself using the available physical materials. I'm guessing billions of years even before I was able to make myself into a one-cell micro organism.
I'm trying to describe incrementalism. Best described by my sister-in-law in an old saying she got from her Granny who was said to have frequently chirped, "Just keep going, Honey chile, inch-by-inch it's a cinch."
I got to a point while reading Sartre's Being And Nothingness when I was relating what I thought his translator had him writing that I began to relate his intent to my current conclusions about my remembering vision. I enjoyed doing that, but it took an inordinate amount of time for me to read Sartre's book. When I got through reading it I realized that he was explaining how to read his book as the reader worked their way through it.
I was fascinated with Sartre's claim that homo sapiens cannot see their own possibles in real time, i.e., they can't "see" the future. What's possible for any one human IS his future, and not what's possible for other humans. This is where he brings the "for" word into play. With the poser being: Are you doing what you're doing FOR yourself or are you doing what you're doing FOR the other? For whom does the bell toll?
The intriguing thing for-me is how Sartre (and his translator) described convincingly how if a person was sitting alone in a room amusing theyself by their chosen preoccupation, and another person entered that room, the original occupant could no longer possess being-for-itself in order to accommodate the other's presence.
The question I'm most likely to entertain is whether homo sapiens have to respond to the other predictably. The other can enter the sa-me room I occupy alone, and I respond to that event as I will. Isn't responding or reacting to the other's presence my option and not theirs? Do I have to accommodate their presence AND their intent for entering the room I formerly occupied alone?
I really think my subjective response is more about their intent than their presence. I don't know if I have much of a choice about physically acknowledging their presence. That happens unconsciously. My conscious mind IS concerned with the other's intent. Maybe this is a two level deal that accords with the two types of consciousness' that possess humans. Non-thetically, everybody knows, but thetically, nobody knows.
Which brings me back around to the terms "theistic vs atheistic". Is this the same as thetic and non-thetic? Some things are created by gods, and others not? |
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| Sure As Tootin' |
[May. 2nd, 2008|11:45 am] |
It's not even strange anymore when I do some odd remedy for the arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome that seems to get worse each day. Now I'm eating and drinking gin-soaked raisins. That's supposed to help according to Ben and his homespun advice for home remedies. I eat raisins in my oatmeal each morning, but that hasn't had any affect at all that I can tell. I've never liked the taste of gin that much. Maybe that's why I allow it might work. Medicine is supposed to taste horrible... eh?
I've been intending to work upstairs in the room that I spent most of my time since i built this house. I used it for a bedroom and where I had my computer set up because it was the only room in the house that was heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Since Ben and I remodeled a lot of the house and added decks with a set of outside stairs linking them on the second floor and downstairs. I moved my computer down here, and moved my bedroom into what used to be an open-air second-floor balcony.
The paragraph above was hard to write. It's just redundant information I've written several times using different approaches. There is nothing exciting about it. It's like describing what happens when I walk out the paved road and get my mail. The mundane everyday tasks are the most difficult for me to describe.
Ben came over, and while he was here, he helped me move some shelving that had come apart on me. My previous attempt to move it out of the way so I could install the new sub-flooring I intend to put in my old bedroom. Now I'll be able to line it up the from the outside wall and go from there. I don't have as much room for as wide a set of stairs into the attic as I had hoped for. To do it the way I originally planned won't leave me enough room to put my bed in that room. I'm thinking that a way will open as I put down the flooring. There has got to be a unique way of making it work. I just don't know what it will be yet.
I didn't have any blueprints or drawing when I started building the house. I was still angry about my second wife accusing me of not satisfying her sexually, then divorcing me because I got mad and punched her in the eye. She ended up taking our children to California where I couldn't see them anymore. I figured it might be politically expedient to have I needed besides humans to beat on, so I started building this house. My brothers helped me cut the timber and take it to ol' man Joe's sawmill and bring it back to my lot. I bought a couple of cases of nails and started building a hooch just to have an inside place for my scattered junk to be.
I didn't have much stuff, so I didn't think about closet and storage space. I built a walk-in closet upstairs, but I just now tore it out because that's where I'm gonna put the stairs to my attic. I didn't design any closets at all downstairs. Unfortunately, the rooms are too small to add any closets unless I build another room on to the original house. I'd have to win the lottery for the money to make that happen. There's a really good chance it ain't gwine happen. So? I'm not immortal. It ain't like this place has to last forever.
Sartre wrote about a species flaw. It's only a flaw to me when I try to make something happen that requires me to be a prophet. He postured this flaw as the homo sapiens inability to perceive their own possibilities in real time. He makes a case for this proposal by placing whatever possibilities we may have in the same dimension consciousness upsurges into nothingness from, and claims that it's nothingness that keeps us from looking homeward for the inspiration of that what drove us to seek freedom through individuation.
The reason I'm writing about this has to do with something else I detected or invented as a way to cope with my not being able to see my own possibilities in the real time I enjoy, but restlessly. I'm thinking that we have to create possibilities for the future such that we can recognize our own handiwork when it arrives in real time. The fact that I'm attempting to put some stairs up to the attic of my house is the same as creating possibilities for the future that I'll recognize in the real time they arrive. If I don't create that future then death will speed up it's journey to come and get me and take me away.
I don't know if I'm writing this well. My intention was to speculate that if a homo sapien doesn't create a future for itself it starts dying. This might suggest why some cultures emphasize the importance of having a work ethic. Having goals allows us to pretend we have possibilities that we're actually working toward. Our possibilities ARE our future. The Protestants that raised me believed in what they called the Christian work ethic, but I rebelled against it and worked harder getting outta work than I ever did working.
It seems that it's getting more difficult for me to act like I got a future at the same time I'm realizing even more deeply the inevitability of death approaching. Are my plans to keep working on my house an act of futility designed to ward off death by staying busy? That seems cowardly, but very consistent with the way I've lived my life. |
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| The Pain Of Learning New Ways |
[May. 1st, 2008|08:35 am] |
This is one of those "write the damned blog" and get it over with mornings. The most exciting thing that happened yesterday was that my brother came over to visit. Not only has he had a bad case of flu that's had him cleaning out and purging his body with projective vomiting, everybody else in his family, including the grandkids and all the people at his office has got it too. I began to wonder if he came over to give this weird intestinal flu to me too, so maybe I wouldn't feel left out, but I got enough troubles, so I let that opportunity slide.
The worst spot for this latest bout of arthritis is my pinkie finger on my left hand. There was a time a few years ago this same finger and the ring finger next to it went numb and I couldn't feel either of them. I finally figured out what was causing this problem. I was commuting about 50 miles (80.46 Km) one way to work during the warm season. I propped my left elbow up on the window I had rolled down. I sort of "hooked" my elbow on the door frame opening for the window, with the window rolled down , on the rubber tubing that sealed off the window.
There are two points on my elbow that stick out . The main elbow joint and one right beside it toward the inside of my elbow toward my torso. There was a way that I could get the ridge of the rubber gaskets in between those two pointy parts of my elbow to keep my arm from sliding off into my lap. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that in between those two pointy protrusions is where the nerve that goes down to those two fingers is. Propping my elbow on the edge of the window caused the nerve to get squeezed and that was why why the two fingers went numb. I stopped doing that, and I didn't have any more problems with my fingers going numb.
I don't know which situation is better. For my fingers to go numb and thereby lose the sense of feeling in them or for those two fingers to be in constant pain. If I accidently bang that hand against an immovable force, the resulting pain can almost bring me to my knees. That's why typing and playing the scales on my piano keyboard is so tough these days. As you can see, I'm still typing. What you can't see any evidence of is that I'm still playing the scales too. I'm suffering for my art. Right?
I keep hoping this "attack" of arthritis is a temporary thing that's caused by some external force like the chemicals in the leather sandals I wore, but i haven't worn those sandals or any other leather thing for a while now, and the pain continues to make life a little miserable for me. I'm not worrying about the typing. I've been typing for fifty years. If I stop, it won't make that much difference. I've written more useless content than many secretaries have while typing it for a living.
It's getting the piano visualized in my psyche that's worrisome enough that I carry the pain hoping to make that happen. I can perceive the results my playing the major and minor scales are creating on occasion. My inner voice uses what it's gotten so far to talk to me briefly about what I'm doing and what other people are doing musically. It names notes and occasionally a chord. That's why I seem willing to endure some mild pain to make it happen. Once done, then if I can't play anymore physically, I'll be able to do it technically correct in my mind's eye like I do with my writing. |
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| What Can One Gain From Pain? |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|08:47 am] |
I think my physical body has taken a radical change toward irritating. Ibuprofen and Alleve ain't helping much with this arthritis pain I'm experiencing pretty much 24/7 now. It's more difficult to sleep through. It seems to have attacked my muscles now. That's a new development. This doesn't bode well. It's like my thinking has been recruited for other purposes than previously employed for.
When I move the wrong way the pain takes my full attention immediately, and whatever I was thinking about before that gets put on the back-burner, if it's enough even to rate that. I feel lucky it's not in my hips and legs like this yet. I don't know what this is going to mean for typing and playing the keyboards, much less wiping my own ass, eating, tying my shoestrings, brushing my teeth, and masturbating. What a drag, man. I always dreaded the idea of being in constant pain. Well, that's one more of life's little mysteries I don't have to wait to find out about any more.
The weather reporters said it was going to get chilly last night, and they were right. It's just now reaching for 50 degrees (10 C). There was no threat of frost or freezing, just cooler than what we've been having. We are well into the second month of Spring. The red blossoms of the early azaleas have come and gone, but the multi-coloured ones and the white azalea bushes are in full bloom now. Nobody except my visitors knows there are pretty flowers to look at here, but they're not missing anything. There's pretty flowers everywhere this time of the year.
My fig trees are doing quite well. My old tree is really coming alive. Even some of the branches I had considered dead and a lost cause have bright, green leaves on them. The one cutting I transplanted last winter that appears to have taken root has two leaves on it now, and there may be some other leaves, but I can't tell whether they're fig leaves or not yet. The ready-made fig bush I bought at Lowe's has really taken root. The leaves are a little too dark green, and the edges of them are burned, as if I might have fertilized the plant a little too zealously, but it's very healthy except to that. The blueberry bush is growing, but i think it's too late for it to fruit this year on the new growth. The new grape vine has these huge green leaves that make the native Fox grapes seem puny by comparison. I'm hoping they'll cross-pollenate, but I don't even know if that's possible.
Ben brought this young couple over to gather all the scrap metal I had in my yard. It wasn't that much, but the price of junk has risen so high it made it worth it for them to come and get it. I had an old cast iron bath tub that's been sitting around and being unsightly for a long time. They took a sledge hammer to it in order to break it up and make it easier to load. Ouch!
It probably won't be that long before people will be able to just come and take what they like, because I won't be able to stop them. This is the way my ex-wives and children wanted it to be for me. I'm glad to oblige. I'm sure I deserve all the misery life can heap upon me. I'm not as attached to pain as I suspect they'd like for me to be. I used all the tears I had left missing them after they abandoned me.
I'm not innocent, you know, I'm as guilty as sin when it comes to treating other people like they wanna be treated, but most people are so dumb they can't figure out how I get past their pretenses when nobody else does. They stand themselves dumbly before me, offer me their upturned palm, and beg me with their eyes to tell them what they refuse to see about themselves beyond the pale.
I tell them. What's it to me? I have no asking price. I don't charge admission to see the big show. They know full well I'm telling them straight to their face without ulterior motive. They don't have the ears they need to hear WHAT I'm saying means. They get so mad with me when they don't understand, even when I tell them straight up, that they wanna kill me. They also seem to know immediately, if they do that, they'll never know the truth behind the lies wot imprisons them, and so they regretfully leave me be.
Worse, I'm about as ignorant myself as any man as you might meet. My ability to ignore stuff that don't lead me to the desired result is where my true genius shines. Instead, I get accused of being retarded for the very attributes people claim to love me for. I ignore their cover ups, and encourage their true nature to stand forth in it's own radiance. I can't do that for them. I wouldn't I if I could. They wouldn't know WHAT to use their ability to desire things for or that it's not always for-the-other.
The powers that be appear to be on an irrefutable quest to take away what dignity I have left. All I can do is display some mindless bravado, grimace, and defiantly say, "Bring it, bitch!" with as much left-handed spin as I can muster. I ain't dead yet, but if I was, I wouldn't tell you. |
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| Sensibly Nonsensical |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|09:57 am] |
#085 BrazilianSamba
A couple of days ago Isabella wrote two phrases that caught me up in them, and haven't let go yet. The two phrases are: self-begotten, and only-begotten. I didn't realize she was writing about some God recognized by some Gnostic societies, I thought she was writing about something i understood about my own person, which is distinctly NOT a God. Well, i could be I suppose. To somebody who has other definitions of what a God IS.
#024 6/8ModernEP
My remembering vision was just that. I "re-membered" how I begot myself. I am is the begetter. It does that for me. i describe the "I am" and the "me" for "you". Ain't that just peachy? We beget phantasmagoric images for our own amusement. The foremost of these begetters some call the Kristos or Christ. It's begettings are very special, so it is written, but if you don't believe in graven images, you can just ask, and you'll be told exactly what you filter for, then sit upon the bust of Pallas above my chamber door and croak, "Nevermore!" forever. It's fine with me.
My "me" lacks nothing. I don't know how nothing got away, but since it's invisible to incarnates it doesn't really matter, now does it? Besides, "Thou shalt have no other God before "me"." Right?
This link will take you to a translation of The Sophia Of Jesus Christ:
http://www.kronosofia.dk/frames/side/biblioteket/gospels/thesophiaofjesuschrist/thesophiaofjesuschrist.html
If it doesn't (due to the length of the link), then you can just Google it up. There are lots of translations of this ancient document and you can just take your choice of which translation pleases you. The problems of transliteration seem so blown out of proportion it doesn't matter which translation you fuck your mind with.
I re-member-ed. It wasn't something i set out to do. I had never imagined such a thing possible. How could i possibly desire something that doesn't exist for me? Granted, I was doing what I was doing when it happened just to look busy for-the-other. There were four other people in the next room that was open to the room i was in by a room-wide Spanish arch way. There wasn't even a door to close. We could see each if we'd stopped ignoring each other's presence long enough to do that.
I was in that sort of other room in exhibiting some pretense to detachment. I was indeed detached from what they were there for, a sex orgy I wasn't a part of. Maybe that had something to do with what happened to me. Those four people only had one thing on their mind, and my presence in the house wasn't appropriate. I lived with the woman the three men intended to have sex with along with some other people. She and I never had sex together. We had tried, but it didn't work for us. We had both had sex with other people in the same room together at the same time, but between the two of us, nothingness. I didn't even get aroused watching her have sex with other men. Marion. She followed me around adoring me, but it wasn't sexual. I never understood this. I guess we both wanted to be each other's exclusive lover (both Taureans), and that was impossible because we were both passive temple whores. We were what we were for-the-other. Neither of us had any passion of our own to give, only to receive, and both of us as receivers drained the other completely dry.
When I had my remembering vision this woman of all women was in the next room preparing to drain three lusty young college students dry, and leave them laying around completely used up. She could have done that to a dozen men just as easily, and probably had. She was the most beautiful woman I had known, and was built for speed. Why that didn't work on me that way I'll probably never know.
I've written about this situation lots of times. Not about Marion being in the next room when it happened. I don't know whether her being there had any affect on what happened whatsoever. I haven't included her presence in my previous descriptions of the environment I had this vision in.
There was definitely a high degree of ongoing sexual tension in the house where this vision occurred. It was not me and Marion's sexual tension. My excuse for being there was to participate in getting high on pot. My relationship with Marion was such that I could have thrown a monkey wrench into the boy's plan to have a four-way with Marion. I was sort of blackmailing them into getting me high. I didn't actually have that kind of influence with Marion, but they didn't know that, and she went along with my plot just to please me. In fact, it was to Marion that I'd made the promise that as soon as they did get me high, I would leave them alone to do what they all wanted.
I had moved away from the group as soon as I took enough hits from the several joints that was going around to get what I came for, and I went through the Spanish arch from the front living room into what had been used as a dining room by the family who originally built the house. I intended to use my going into the separate room as a segue into leaving the house altogether.
The dining room area was only dimly lit from the lamps in the living room. There was a lighting device over the dining table, but it wasn't turned on. I was looking at a Moody Blues poster that had lyrics from some their hit songs pinned to the lime-green wall with thumb tacks. The pot was good and I was starting to get off. I remember moving closer to the poster in order to read the lyrics better, but discovered that wasn't the reason the words weren't making too much sense to me. My real attention was distracted by this other image.
The reason the other image distracted me was that in that image I was flying through space having the time of my life bouncing off one celestial orb to the next in absolutely straight lines. I was bouncing off the pretty balls. The joy of that was all consuming. Soon after I became aware of this other image (in which I was also a participant) going on in my aura, I became aware of it eventually being attracted to what eventually turned out to be the planet Earth. Obviously, I decided to check it out, and unfortunately have not been able to leave it since my initial arrival here.
What I remembered in my re-member-ing vision was everything that has happened to what came here initially since it did get here. That has everything to do with me being self-begotten. Isabella actually wrote about two elements: self-begotten and only-begotten. As in "only begotten son", etc..
It wasn't long after I got here and discovered I couldn't leave and resume my flight through the universe, that I became aware of other entities that had the same luminescent look about them as the way an oyster pearl looks like. We all looked like pearls. They were already here. i can only assume they got here the same way i did. I obviously don't know. We invented history, so before we got here there wasn't such a thing to inform me as to how they got here. I only KNOW about "me".
They were already making themselves into various objects. I "knew" why. They wanted to get outta here and start zooming through the universe again. At least, I did. I started imitating them by making myself into things. Things I hoped would get me outta here. When what i made myself into didn't accomplish what i intended, I did the same thing I saw the other pearls do. i abandoned my creations to their own recognizance in order to try again. That's what I remembered in my remembering vision. All the things/objects I made myself into. I don't think we literally intended to populate the Earth with our springs that wouldn't get us off, but it ended up that way. Eventually, since what we were doing didn't actually accomplish anything, we started staying inside our own creations just to have something else to do.
I know I filter for substantiation of this vision in everything I study any more. There's not a chance in Hell I possess the slightest objectivity in this matter. So what? I ain't dead yet. |
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| Root Notes And Rudiments |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|09:52 am] |
I went No Mail on the GoT again. I do understand it, but I don't like it. Many people who subscribe to e-mail discussion groups appear to think these groups are more intimate than they really are. They turn to them when they get in trouble with themselves for comfort, and it's not there for them. It's sad, but true. Especially on the internet. Nobody loves you when you're down and out.
That's one of the reasons I began writing a blog. I'm not writing TO anyone in specific most of the time. Sure, I know some of the people who read my blogs, but there is no pressure for them to do that. To the world it's just another internet address. If they wanna come here and read what I write they just do it. I don't know whether anybody is reading my blog unless they specifically mention it to me.
I don't read it myself after I edit it all I'm gonna and publish it here. Publishing it simply means I'm going public with what I have to say. It doesn't cost anybody anything to log in, and I'm not paid anything by anybody to provide content. Nowheresville.
The weather here is strange in the opposite way it was strange all last summer, fall, and winter. We've gone from experiencing the worst drought ever recorded here to being flooded. The fields are so drenched with all the rain we've had in the past mother that the farmer's tractors mire up in the mud. Of course, this is the best time of the year for the farmers to get rain. Too little or too much can be costly, but most farmers seem to favor having a little too much than too little.
It rained five inches last night after I went to bed. A heavy shower would come, then it would ease off for a while, and then another heavy shower would come, but it never stopped raining completely. If my plants don't produce fruit this summer I'll be shocked.
I've gotten fat again. That's probably because I don't care so much any more. I don't ever expect anybody ever again to fall in love with me because of my girlish figure. The weight gain might have something to do with the arthritis showing up again. It's worse than before. My wrists and shoulders hurt whether I move them or not. Great! Just great! As if I didn't have enough to whine about.
I had an aunt who had rheumatoid arthritis from the time she was a child. Eventually, the medicos removed all the knuckles in her hands because she was in such pain. She lived with the pain all her adult life. She had two children who didn't get arthritis that I know of. She lived for over ninety years. There's a good chance i will too. I should have been a good person so I would have died young. Too late for that now. If meanness is the criteria for living a long life, I'll probably live to be two hundred years old or better.
The web site I found to help me figure out chord progressions is sitting right there waiting for me to go to work. I click on the Bookmark, stare at it for a while, then move on. To do this the easiest way I'm gonna have to make some tree diagrams with all the progressions written out on a chart that's easy to see. That's the name of the web site. Chordmaps.com. What I have in mind for my keyboarding is very consistent with the stated goal of this publisher.
He started with what he calls A Simple Map. The basic form is composed of eight blocks of squares in two columns. The left side column has five squares one over the other. The right side column has three squares, also one over the other, but placed to fit in between the spaces of the five squares beside them. Arrows are drawn to show all the different directions the practicer from one square to the next. The form of this Simple Map pretty much stays the same, but the squares are filled up with the various chords based on the root notes of each key.
Describing something like this is the most challenging aspect of writing for me. The simplest activities are the most difficult to paint a picture with words for me. At one time I considered becoming a technical writer, but I doubt I would have the staying power to do much good at it. Particularly if I had to describe a process that had no personal interest for me.
The Simple Map is just that. If I could memorize just the chords for each key using these interconnected squares I could die happy, but of course, as indicated, it doesn't stop there. Take a look at this more complex map:
http://chordmaps.com/genmap.htm
I don't even know how to read some of the names of the chords represented on this larger, more complete map, but i like it. It shows pretty much all the ways a keyboarder could go when they are at one spot seeking to go amicably to another without just pissing the listener off completely.
Presently, this is about all I've got in mind for playing the piano. I just wanna mess around putting interesting sounds together around simple, well-known themes like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and other nursery rhymes and folk songs that people recognize easily enough. I don't have any original ideas about music that drive me to reinvent the wheel. I may be able to put some original twists on pretty standard stuff, and enough will be enow.
A real challenge for me would be to describe what is seen on the chart on the above linked page using a plain-spoken approach that might make the chart understandable to a complete stranger to music theory. This more complicated chart would have to be drawn up for each of the keys. I think they would, but at this point I don't know. I'm sticking with trying to memorize a few simple progressions. Why? I don't know that either. My obsessions are just not that obsessive. I get where I get to, and after that my interests just seem to peter out. No blame.
I've been using the rhythms of the drum machine on my keyboard as the tempo I use to run up and down the outside stairs that connects the decks Ben and I built a while back. I'm not actually running up and down the stairs, but moving at a goodly pace.
It doesn't take but three or four times of doing that to get the aerobic thing going. I'm sort of dancing to take it easy on my joints. I keep my knees bent. I try to move with a little spring in my step, yet do the heavy lifting it takes to move my fat ass up and down 16 steps. Pretty soon the blood is flowing through my veins and my recently examined heart is pounding away. It helps that I've stopped smoking tobacco, but things ain't as pristine as they could be. With any luck at all, they never will be. |
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