It Must Be the Vapors…

COLD

2010-01-02T19:03:00.005-06:00

Shivering is the low frequency end of what excruciating pain is the high frequency end.

Lower frequencies than that begin to sauté our butter melding with the wherever as frigid names crackle and flake away like melting ashes. If ever I pick up what remains of wherewithal again, it will not only have to be life threatening, it will have to get me closer to the equator, just so I retain some smidgen of choice in how I stroll and pedal my way to the inevitable compost pile of life’s omniped multicylcle.

Yeah, I don’t like cold. It’s never been a friend of mine. A carton of cigarettes a day are better for my lungs than 10 minutes of non-stop shivering. Not sure what the term for the respiratory equivalent to a heart attack would be, but I suffered one so arrhythmic the only way I survived the night was by passing out so I could breath in … over and over … until a guardian nerf eld discovered me turning blue in the morning in my hammock and fetched an asthema inhaler, melting the problem like butter. I'm still not back to my vigor before it happened three years ago.

Constant, excruciating pain is the white noise that is never gray, anywhere; each cell contributing the bayonetto (an extremely sharp bayonet, sharp even for a stiletto) extremes of its individual displeasure with the less than artichoke dipping temperature to which it is being so unjustly subjected making it move its own butter just to get warm, what a fucking wasteful indignity! My cells hate it when that happens and curse me long after they get their wind back and hit the showers. I am sort of obligated to go along to get along. I depend on a happy body. No body says, “Yo dood,” when me bod’s not with th’ haps.

What bothers me almost as much as this inability to adapt to natural temperature conditions in an otherwise pleasant environment is the findings that wild children (called feral only because of some inbred taboo against admitting we humans could be related to those over which we claim to hold mythically endowed stewardship, like the catholic church ~~seeks~~ sees after wayward little alter boys) have an almost infinite tolerance for temperature variation, implying that if my sensitivity to cold is not some genetic inheritance, civilization can make us incapable of returning to the wild in more ways than by our actions and our thoughts. Obviously we spoil easy … else we’d all still be laying back under the star lit skies out on the old homestead land instead of standing in long lines in neon lit concrete boxes of cities of a mythical homeland to see movies about laying back under the …

If only knowing that could make me warmer. Rub two thoughts together. Throw in some sapling theories for kindling. Watch out for sparks. Turn up the ignorant bliss to eleven … just a short blast from the furnace of insensitivity …

Oops, Mr. Buttersworth, cheap at twice the price, meet Aintyo Mimer, the original copier — snap — blowing by like the wind up toy skirts of — crackle — non-prophet hedges against — pop — faith in all-profit possibilities. Getting’ warmer. Pheuzzzzzzzzzzzz…

"DIRTY"

2010-01-01T13:13:00.007-06:00

… was one of those words that never entered his vocabulary for the same reason “fabulous”, “incredible” and “awesome” dropped out. Words that were, or had fashionably become, so ubiquitous as to cease modifying the nouns or verbs with which they were linked in any meaningful way, became mirrors of the speaker by their opaqueness.

“Dirty” was one of his first introductions to how a freeborn boy could be wrong around people who had traded their freedom to choose for lip service allegiance to pop righteousness. The poop in his pants, the soil on his knees and the words he heard daddy say couldn’t all be dirty. People that found dirt always smelled like soap. So how come mother called aunt Donna, who took more baths than anyone in the world, a dirty minded woman?

These questions and observations led him to see that using the word dirty was a kind of unconscious code with which the righteous could recognize each other as allies in finding wrong with actions outside what one must assume they consider their unnaturally sanitary soap box. It no longer mattered whether the modified noun was excrement, soil, reputation, sanitation, sex, ethics, money, job, habit, thought or language in comparison to how clearly it defined the accusing speakers, who were, ironically enough, always describing other than them selves. Imagine that.

His own meaning for “dirty” formulated when he began to feel dirty himself. Finding himself attending class with students who bragged on the obituaries of murdered residents of Carver Village and powerless to find anyone to believe it, or if they knew, to join him in opposing it, he dropped out of his new Mississippi high school and joined the Marines, both to get away and to learn to be more effective in opposing such lynchings. But he felt dirty, leaving such a mess.

Experience over four years of direct contact with and obedience to the military code of justice did nothing to expiate this stain of helpless cowardice he felt. Indeed, it only showed him the immensity of institutionalized enactment of the same kinds of atrocities against people of color in neighborhoods called nations. He talked to veterans returning from the Korean conflict who were just as shot loose from consensus reality as returnees from any of the admitted wars his country wages. If they were fit enough to retain in the service they were often recognizable by fresh material in the shape of rank chevrons removed from otherwise salty uniform sleeves. Chevrons awarded for ferocity in combat granted on the spot in the field. Chevrons taken away for inability to fold up their prize winning talents like the weapons they used by courts-marshal at home. He felt even more helpless to reconcile the increasing examples of other such duplicity dressed in the same flag. Dirty war is a term used by his country to describe resistance to its clean ones.

Over the fifty years since he left the service he tried joining only one more group he thought actually wanted to make the world better. When the company finally announced the product he’d helped engineer to fruition over nine years, he expected he’d begin work on a new project. Instead he was given the task of taking the material, design and performance capacity of his reliable new product to the point that it would break down as soon after warranty as possible to reduce the cost of making something for which the price remained the same, need expensive repairs earlier and increase product turnover. The duplicitous facade was everywhere.

He made a choice between wallowing in the dirty for dominating profit, like oil refinery towns love that smell of money in the air, or feeling the healthy remove from the trough of filthy lucre in the wilderness where the dirtiest he gets forking compost, cleaning chicken roosts and planting seeds feels like the epitome of clean. The word dirty never comes to mind.

LAST WEEK OF THE YEAR

2009-12-31T08:15:00.005-06:00

late rising at eight

to a morning dark as seven

guided by the light

like the chickens

who greet him

meet him at coop door

run between his feet

for feed mix in the yard

‘til chill chases him back to his pod,

his yellow and sunset orange submarine,

too toasty ‘til he acclimates

then not warm enough.

from the bridge above it all

he surveys her immediate position

along the never dry river of time

outside her surround-around port holes

blocked only to the south:

imac portal back

to the man-made world

saying news he fears to hear

paying dues left by his career

playing diversions still held dear

posting thoughts finally come clear

touching minds far and near

quality beyond the hit counter

variety of insight incited

tethers to the myth examined

patter on soft skin drum heads

looses rhythm in complexity

gains rain’s tapping attention

another frosty foray for feed

for the dry beneath the roost

to their cackle bitching delight

three more dashes during the day

through rain drops

to catch egg drops

beckoned by loud hen cops

today’s done deeds

entered as 169-171 in his egg book

times, dates and mom’s took

along with omelets eaten

friends who got treated

running cost of the feed

being happy where he is

friends know where to seek him

season of return

spontaneous reunion

catching up the years

yarns of daring do

sympathies of aging

venture wiser view

future all too new.

2009 in Review: END OF AN ERROR

2009-12-25T18:00:00.010-06:00

The sanity defined by civilization seemed to find ways to reinterpret my maybe musings about the human condition to be personal attacks in most imaginative ways throughout the year. I was all too often lured into personal responses, as if their demonizing party line stereotypes or quoting the bible represented willingness, much less the ability of the offended to carry on a rational discussion

Coupled with my having stumbled onto the 10^th Daughter of Memory writing exercise, the foregoing dilemma suggested I change the direction of this blog from philosophical ponderings about my observations of the living universe, so easily taken offense to by faith’s delicate certainties, to one of strictly fiction based on such observations. I am beginning to see the rationale for originating fables and fiction throughout the ages as a way to get a message across indirectly to those able to apply Mary’s Little Lamb’s problems to their own life, thereby avoiding the more direct identification with the real population referred to as mindless, faithful sheep.

•

For those more willing and able to discuss opposing views with the understanding that the essence of the duality is the win-win objective rather than a lose-lose contest of righteousness, I have moved my ponderings to a new blog available to all who find it in plain sight. You are welcome until offended — at which juncture I would hope you’d be so kind as to throw yourself out into the street. Watch out for cars … headed for the cliff.

I came across three new examples of folks who get the whole idea of a living universe: Sandy Krolic’s The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, Richard Grossinger’s, Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life and James Cameron’s Avatar. It is gratifying to find others describing the same ongoing event so well as to bridge the differences of viewpoint while enhancing the scope of all.

This year found me a keeper of chickens and an eater of their delicious free-range eggs to supplement my less than desirable progress in growing my food in the garden through Texas summers. This year was a disaster, with only Serrano peppers coming back after the drought — watering every day cannot beat 100°+ for several months — trees began shedding leaves in mid June!

Having a quasi roomie and companion for stimulating conversation through six months of the worst heat was a more than compensatory distraction from discomfort though it left me missing her quite more than I expected and a never before indulged chocolate addiction – acne at seventy-one?

The UN climate summit succeeded in only resolving that people in suits consider people otherwise dressed or from below the equator to be unworthy of protecting from the ecological disaster by supplying them money to achieve the same standard of living that is causing it in the first place. Rather than dragging people out of the rain forest and selling them an air conditioner we should be planting trees and naturally ventilating our houses in their shade with the fresh air they regenerate symbiotically. Don’tcha jus’ love politics?

As 9/11/01 fades, 12/21/12 looms … “ these are the times” … "this is a record of the times" … “we’re all going down” … “together.”

Stragedy plots a way to side step inevitability.

Only carbon based life could generate so much irony.

TOP OF THE SEASONING TO ALL

2009-12-24T19:43:00.001-06:00

ANOTHER "BLOG BUD" HITS IT OUT OF THE PARK

2009-12-18T19:39:00.004-06:00

JUST GO HERE.

ONE OF THOSE INTERESTING TIMES

2009-12-18T08:22:00.007-06:00

For no reason other than a comparison to my usually solitary musings to a generally indifferent population I find myself caught up in a maelstrom of social concerns. The first being an ongoing philosophical discussion with a friend that it seems has reached an impasse I am loath to let stand, thus the request of readers to register an opinion of the Marcus Arelius' Quotation two posts back. The second is Pisces Iscariot's pricise encapsulation of a giant portion of what my rants are directed at.

The third is Jeffscape's entry into the Tenth Daughter of Memory writing exercise both for its beauty and for a tangent too large for his comment box. It began there with …

I've always questioned red for love too. It's opposite is green, the ultimate feeling of being a ground for healthy growth, the realization of the possibilities of love. The red is the anger at finding oneself needing, thus expecting others to supply the water for the seed.

Love and happiness are the same thing to me. Happiness is as much the essence of our being as curiosity, arising from the core within each that connects all life despite our definitions. Love is a drawing the attention of our happiness to another that too shows the happiness of its own existence and therby expands ours. The dispair of the world, from broken hearts to wars, is essentially the chagrin at realizing how bereft of happiness we often feel upon discovery of how much we depend on our view of the world to supply and control it, like a painter expecting the canvas to put the right colors on the brush in just the right places and getting angry because it doesn't.

Pisces' piece exemplified civilization suddenly bereft of the props of the myth civilization weaves being thrown back to their atrophied personal responsibilities, just as heartbreak does every day to individuals. Life owes us nothing after giving us the happiness of existence, not even food. We have to love being alive to seek that which will sustain it. We breath involuntarily, but we have to do food. The rest of our doing is either the outpouring of our happiness or the searching for where we lost touch with it along the way.

"Man is riding a camel in search of a camel." - Nomad proverb?

•

Addendum: The previous post, "There Comes a Time …" has been deleted upon Lilwave's convincing me it was a "dumb post". She also made me pretty sure it was dumb of me to try to appeal to her in any manner. I apologize for washing dirty family laundry in the small public who might have gotten splashed. I'm sure you weren't as offended as Lilwave claims to be. Ah, well, I live and sometimes learn, apparently nothing on that little venture. I can't imagine anyone to pray to so, I guess I'll have to wait for things to change, as they always do.

MY THOUGHTS , EXACTLY!

2009-12-18T06:55:00.003-06:00

JUST GO HERE.

FEAR IN SHATTERED COLOR

2009-12-15T20:41:00.004-06:00

Maybe if dad hadn’t gotten laid off in October he might have gotten to open the usual present before bed time that always took the edge off the season long anticipation of the wonderful rewards for his good behavior Santa put under the tree while he slept through the night that felt like eternity.

Maybe if mother and dad hadn’t been such good hosts, they might have done their little helper chores sooner and been in bed sooner.

Maybe if children understood all the words grownups use to cover the holes in their fabrications they would be less skeptical of the words they did understand.

Maybe if a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass. He doesn’t so he does. Dad was, mother and dad didn’t, children don’t so they are and he couldn’t sleep for worrying that something besides the leering face in the glowing stars on his ceiling was afoot. By the time he got to the stairs he knew no one was afraid of being caught being naughty by Santa or his helpers. For each step crept his skepticism bloomed until he could see the whole lurid scene.

The implications were so vast he could only beat a hasty retreat back up the stairs before his discovery was discovered. In turning to go he snagged the garlands decorating the banister and loosed a hanging purple ball from the fir frond upon which it depended. Lunging for it he missed, deflecting it into the path of the paper loop chain, which caught its hook and stopped its surely shattering on the hardwood living room floor.

Maybe if the Christmas decoration had completed its journey on the winds of gravity his parents would have realized the jig was up and would have welcomed him into the fold of the first stage of adulthood like anyone who announces their discovery.

Maybe if the fear of being found out during the tedious chore of hauling the delicate pendulum of ball and chain back to safety hadn’t shocked him into a unique realm of realization for a five year old, he might have been one of those that spitefully announces his discovery to all those who are still fooled by the fable or still telling it.

Maybe if he’d blabbed his secret insight he’d have never learned to spot prevarication whenever it belies his own experience of nature or the body language of the teller of tales.

Maybe if science actually knew what it was talking about they could calculate that bumblebees can, in fact, fly. But they don’t so they can’t. The ball didn’t so he wasn’t, the fear did so he wasn’t, and he didn’t so he has never burdened anyone with his trust, belief, faith or himself with the bruises for which they’re always cruising. Maybe

IMAGING

2009-12-13T16:34:00.007-06:00

Ally

Arouse

Arena

Adventure

Absolution

Ablution

Being

Burgeon

Beat

Belly

Borne

Born

Curl

Comatose

Comfy

Cramp

Conscious

Curious

Density

Different

Dabble

Defend

Depend

Delicious

Easy

Edgy

Eager

Earthling

Evolving

Eternal

Essence

Forms

Frames

Future

Flames

Find

Favorite

Games

Goings

Gettings

It is not our task to have the right answer before we die,

It is our gratitude to find more profound questions

throughout our naturally curious lives

however long that gift

may survive our

impatience for

conclusions.

Grockings

Groupings

Graphings

Happy

Hum

Handle

Hit

Hurt

Hesitate

Ideas

Ideals

Imagination

Iconoclast

Isolation

Individual

Journey

Justice

Jury

Jail

Journal

Joy

Karma:

Knots

Keep

Keen

Knowledge

Kosher

Lecture

Learn

Love

Lure

Leap

Loose

Mother

Meaning

Micro

Macro

Memory

Momentum

Naïve

Note

New.

Nurse,

“Not

Now.”

Open

Opiate

Obviate

Oblivious

Organism

Operation

Poem

Ponder

Pleasure

Pressure

Palpate

Penetrate

Quaint

Qualms

Quantify

Quisling’s

Quality

Quest

Ribosomes

Remember,

Romantic

Roaming

Riddles

“Reality”

Scenario

Setting

Story

Saga

Spontaneity

Silenced

Civilization is a stragedy of erroneous eras

we’re all too willing to ignore

because it’s all we know

how to be

told to

Tradition

Test

Trait

Talley

Truth

Tell

Unique

Umbrage

Until

Understand

Universal

Unity

Variety

Verify

Very

Vaporous

Vortex

Veil

Wander

Wonder

Wisdom

Wax

Wizard

Wane

Xanthippe’s

Xeric

Xenobiotic

Xenia,

Xenopus

X'ed

Youth

Yawn

Yin

Yang

Yearn

Yoga

Zazen

Zero

Zocalo

Zeal

Zoetrope

Zoo

MEMAGRAM FOR CINNAMON

2009-12-11T17:04:00.006-06:00

So, here comes Cinnamon with an old meme for old me, so I'll reply with answers that haven't changed in the two years since I last got tagged with it.

1) I have not seen a doctor, nor needed to, since my hypochondriac, registered nurse wife went home to her mother thirty-seven years ago. Proper diet and homeopathy have succeeded where junk food and the AMA failed with regularity.

2) I have not owned or driven a car for thirty-three years, with two exceptions in emergency situations.

3) I have been celibate for the past twenty-two years in an ongoing experiment to learn if sex would arise without my initiation of the act, leaving me with the unavoidable impression that I am not sexually attractive or that I am attracted to women dedicated to the same experiment. Playing hard to get and succeeding too well.

4) I have lived nineteen months naked in a tipi in the wild, albeit owned lands.

5) I witnessed the night long labor of a friend’s natural childbirth resulting in a new life opening its eyes for the first time to see sun peek simultaneously over the horizon, followed momentarily by the shadow of a curious cow come to look in the window.

6) I have seen two different UFOs close enough to see silhouettes of beings inside moving across lighted panels and fell asleep watching a third dashing to and fro across distant mountains.

7) I survived being caught sailing from Pascagoula across the gulf to Tampa by a minor hurricane which, in the middle of pitch black chaos, caused me to leap to the conclusion that there might possibly be a god. When the thirty foot seas remained after the winds died to batter my boat like a pebble in a maraca, I let their namesake, Aeolus, have all the screaming insanity that emergency prolonged over two days can build with both blaspheming barrels.

There is an amazing corollary to the first three in the list above: with out a car, doctor or persuasive pursuit of wimmin I have lived quite luxuriously below the United States’ poverty level for twenty of the last thirty years. I have satisfied myself with the truth in the phrase, “The measure of a man’s true wealth is the things he can live without.” and the reality in the quote, “I can cover the earth in leather or wear my own shoes.”

I feel no obligation to pass this tag on, its having arrived here by accidental shenanigans and playful intrigue by an idle English idyller.

MESSAGE FROM THE FULCRUM

2009-12-05T14:22:00.004-06:00

Silence.

Knock!

Awakening

“Was that a sound?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dream is over

“Is something happening?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dualities resume

“There it is again!”

The duality of silence and sound are the clothing with which the mind adorns experience as its best gesture to suggest one’s ineffable insights into an existence too everywhere to be pointed at. At the balance point of each and of all, that which can be dressed in expression fitting the fashion must neglect the rest of the ongoing reality to tell a snap shot story of the enormous variety of dualities contained in any instant, inspirational glimpse of the eternal present. Seeing the dynamic of dualities as a dance or a war seems to depend on the centeredness of one’s fulcrum.

If the essence of the living universe were not the fulcrum about which constant change occurs, we could not be aware of our existence in it. Duality, simultaneously recognized difference, is the trigger to our awareness and the limit to the range of our ability to describe the truth at the fulcrum upon which the instant of the present balances. Like a tight rope walker stabilizes herself by spreading her apparent physical presence over imaginary ground on either side of the rope with a balance bar, our memories and expectations stabilize our awareness of the reality of the only time or place we or anything else ever has or will walk, now.

My version of the yin yang symbol for duality above demonstrates how the variations produced by the living universe mix into the definitive duality of two complimentary, opposite colors which, rather than obscuring the polarity, show the dynamic mix of two elements whose existence depends on each other in the often ignored threshold between them, now.

Though I used a tight rope, now and the line dividing the yin yang as examples of this universal threshold just now, a deeper examination is needed of the ramifications of ignoring such a critical transition by allowing the distraction of the more stark contrast of stereotypical extremes by indolent minds insistent on viewing the world in black and white righteousness. For the civilized mind such examination is possible only by withdrawal from all cultural influence, found most purposefully in deep meditation or prayer and inadvertently in epiphanies called anything from religious to psychedelic experiences of the true connectedness of the living universe. During any such personal insight into the eternity of the present, one’s purpose for being there dissolves in significance when one realizes that the resolution of all dualities is this source from which we attempt to single out, follow and favor any number of its myriad variations over the rest.

Lao Tsu speaks of the threshold not as something to be limited by or crossed, but as a path to be wandered as the way of everything, the path of unattached balance. Upon such a path, habitual temptations and aversions acquired and indulged, in excess of the necessities of a healthy life, may be seen as so much baggage and examined for their push/pull connectedness across the threshold of pernicious preferences frustrating the already well off, like trying to use a long balance pole while walking along the flat ground in a row of a cornfield.

This turned out to be a bigger chunk of the constant ramble unwinding from this view from the fulcrum than I intended. Maybe.

IT ALL A.D.D.S UP

2009-11-27T10:18:00.008-06:00

Marcel Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase

She awoke at day break

Fast of frying eggs and bacon strips

Off her PJs and jumps into the shower’s steaming stream

Lined by subjecting a block of sand to a wind tunnel

Vision kept George from taking the trouble

From her face when she thought he was lying

South of the equator, just East of the Glapagos

Ninja Turtles kept the kids out of her hair

Brush 97, brush 98, brush 99, brush 100

Times, if she’d told him once

Upon a time stories to tuck

And Little John were merry men

Can’t jump or tell the truth

Her kids found in stories she used to make up

On her face and sheath on her torso

By Rodin being born from the rock

Music coming from the kitchen

Reeking of delicious and so nutritious

From hens not stuffed in a box

Lunch for other women’s appitites

For adventurous exploits on the ocean

Of motel bedsheets

Of water washing away

Dreams of doubt in a blink of an

iPhone call from Timmy still in bed

Of roses when seen from the outside

The sun cleared the tree line

Of excuses from here to

“Hello, lazy bones. Come down to breakfast…

At …”

People said she looked like Audry Hepburn

The toast if she hadn’t ejected it.

“Good morning, dear.”

GRATITUDE REDUX

2009-11-26T08:23:00.001-06:00

Symbiosis — endless giving, endless receiving

Gratitude |ˈgratəˌt(y)oōd|
noun
the quality of being thankful; readiness to
show appreciation for and to return kindness

Contemplating the meaning of thankfulness on this best of all examples of the history twisting represented by the United States’ various symbolic holidays this morning, I am stretched between the extremes in meaning from the obese boy being glad the bag of ding dongs is close enough to reach without interrupting his computer game to the gratitude I feel for realizing that the entire world is colored, shaped, flavored, textured, perfumed and sound-tracked by whether I feel like I’m getting to enjoy my life or having to endure it; quite independent of preferences about the individual events occurring. Returning to this realization in the aftermath of several complete alterations of material possessions and life style due to fire, divorce and willful adventure always makes me glad I’m glad I’m glad … But then along with all my other neopagan ways, I’m a hedonist as well.

The second part of the definition above scuffs up a handle on gratitude upon which business has a death grip. It is no longer a kindness when exacting excessive profit from the evoked gratitude was the purpose of the act; it’s prostitution of our better, greater selves for the evanescent rush of winning in a society of lesser, more isolated selves. It’s where the cliché, “What have you done for me lately?” originated and is used in one form or another throughout civilization. It is a practice among chiefs of pacific island tribes to become rich enough to give unrepayable gifts to the other chiefs to hold them in thrall to their gratitude. Such an approach makes the giving of a gift only possible to those who truly do not expect one and impossible to give to one who does.

I am grateful for being able to back away from caring where those damned ding dongs are and perceive a movement toward a kinder, more symbiotic behavior among civilized people despite the atrocities committed everyday by people unloading the burden they believe their life to be upon the world they irresponsibly hold responsible.

CREATIVITY: THE COSMIC WHODUNIT

2009-11-25T10:31:00.006-06:00

The one thing common to all forms of creativity is the assumption of intention aforethought. From world creating gods to tide creating gravity, a purpose to manifestation of artifacts and effects is assigned as a tag with which to most expediently catalogue our ongoing experience of the present framed in concern for the cumulative sense of comfort about coming events. Believing that everything has a purpose is rarely tested beyond its ability to find a niche within one’s faith in a world and life as something being done by some super geek accomplishing a goal with us as the means.

The most rational among western civilization’s more curious minds are just lately beginning to question the demythologized, essential requirement of the concept of creativity: cause and effect — and how the admission of any form of simultaneity belies the necessity for assigning a direction to causality for change to occur. We impose restrictions on our possibilities of realization by our inability to describe our experience to ourselves in terms that can do no other than imprison our minds. Part of thinking outside the box is our willingness to understand our fluid, preverbal thoughts, unhampered by concern for whether or how they may be manifested, arising from the nowhere sea of the invisibly, infinitesimally small, instantaneous, spontaneous eternity of the present as they do.

The requirements of cause and effect take effect when preverbal inspiration sparks a desire to manifest itself in relation to a consensus reality, even if it is only an ironic smile crossing one’s face at realizing the twist such an admission may put on one’s own ongoing reality tunnel. Like those atomic physicists’ probes into the enigma of where, when and how who did what to whom in the otherworldly world of quarks, I have come to suspect there is an entire, underlying behavior pattern to my life which never consults consensus reality or my own reality tunnel as my body bops along relaying to me the world as it is and whether it cares to respond to any assumption of purpose that may evoke in me. This could mean that all I manifest, from language to action, is essentially a happening; an event my body was only too happy to be part of being. This way, the only doing involved would be to modify the synchronistic spontaneity of being in the moment to plan to serve some expectation, some purpose for mañana; just not now. It is very interesting that the finer science is able to slice time the less obvious the assumption of causality becomes.

It’s been a long, strange trip to get wherever it is I am, but now that I’m here I’m beginning to think nothing I could have done would have prevented arriving, no alternate reality tunnel could avoid including this empirical realization of the difference between being and doing. One of my dad’s aphorisms about the creativity of painting was to, “leave in the happy mistakes.” I’m beginning to wonder if my entire life isn’t just one big happy off-color daub of paint left on a world canvass painted by a soulless civilization with unlimited assumptions about correctness of its purpose.

All I know is that I can stand up from my seat in the shed with no purpose in mind, gaze around the garden, chicken coop, pond, compost pile, state of fall leaves in the yard and feel either an attraction to action or the consideration of procrastination in response to my avowed primary directive to maintain some sense of symbiotic benefit with my environment. I either go with it or sit back down. Most of the pleasure my life is to me is the realization that, while this environment of “my place” may not appear to be what it is if I hadn’t moved here, I have never actually “done” any of the changes; I just agreed with a good idea amidst whatever now simultaneously happened to be.

Without having been bombarded everyday of my life with culture’s idea that the world was created and is still controlled for the unquestionably holy purpose of having we humans to love and/or punish by the great transformer in the sky, I doubt it would ever have occurred to me. Without having to deal with a culture whose assumption of ownership and superior righteousness of purpose granted by their creator, my dedication to understanding it in a more profound way than can be expressed, and through such inadequate expressions as I may manifest perhaps resonate within still muddled minds, might not have needed to become an avowed a purpose for my life.

Maybe.

TOURIST PLANET

2009-11-23T06:26:00.006-06:00

Something cracked in my tidy little world view some decades ago when I saw a TV show about a member of the British nobility having his family board at a tavern in town on weekends so he could open his castle and charge gawkers enough to support his royal lifestyle on weekdays of the year round. In a way it was like finding that I was on the Truman Show, and I was Truman.

Supposing the nobility to be noble, above the petty groveling of the peasants at the hooves of their passing, is the very myth that perpetuates any awe in the breeding of subordinates, so necessary in supplying the abundant obedient servitude that lives demanding expedient convenience with their leisure require. Being an allegiance pledging fledgling to the nobility of “… in God we trust” without doubting the high minded patriotism of others for most of my early life, seeing this pitiful display of effete inbreeding solely dependent on inheritance of the noble acquisition of such high position turned out to be a major turning point in my life about assuming authority, that of others and for myself.

I was yet to question the nobility of the acquisitions themselves; it takes a long time to awaken to the complete delusion of wishful thinking. No, this post is about the inherently effete artificiality at the root of any form of tourism, from my example of Lord Cantdoit’s pawning acquisitions from ancestors’ exploits abroad in the name of the noble empire, to international corporations’ embodying the essence of pimps by marketing the value created by a home grown community business for the profit of slave wages by moving it to an area where labor is still recruited by beating the bushes in the wilderness.

It seems like in every instance when I see someone cede the noble integrity of a vital, independent self-reliance to borrow the money to afford others to promise them a guaranteed future, I see a reenactment of the noble savage tempted from his/her relatively symbiotic, hunter-gatherer coexistence with the environment to join culture’s exploitation of it and each other to advance status in a culture based on eminent domain granted by faith in an artificial authority. Newborns today don’t have to make the two hundred thousand year acculturation from emerging homo sapiens sapiens to the pop stars of today. Culture has devised a way to capture the emerging mind before it can figure anything out for itself and snap it up to date on the latest craze without it even suspecting there might be choices or that something might be missing among the plethora of transient facts they must engorge for regurgitation upon demand. Evolution is such that infants have always been equipped to deal with daily life in nature at any stage along the way; the cultural myth being so artificially, arbitrarily imposed on nature as it is, is never consistent enough to influence genetic memory.

The reason we never attack the source of our myriad problems is because it lies within the pointing finger. Governments and gods were invented as proxy straw men on whom to project the justification for our abdication of personal responsibility for our relationship to the nature of the world around us, preferring to amuse ourselves with the tricks we can make it do for us with this cattle prod, this dollar, this gun.

Vanishing Game was the best flint knapper still living. His work decorated display cases in museums and dens of eminent historians and amateur nativists around the world. He did it all, from finding the flint out in the lifeless wasteland reserved for his people, carefully pushing delicate slivers of geology away from the rest of the stone-cum-spearhead along its fault line as thousands of generations of accumulated hunter's skills became perfected in his strong hands, donning the war dress he inherited from his great grandfather and sitting by the Res Road on a blanket all day – not a deer in sight – just customers.

•

Taking where one is to be home

More dear than junkets to Rome

That leads one thinking what one sees

Are facts learned

Not faux culture one's fees

Paid acts earned.

IT'S ALL GEEK TO ME

2009-11-18T19:37:00.004-06:00

So, when did the revolution happen?

First time I saw a geek, he was behind chicken wire in a dirt pit ravenously devouring anything the paid audience in the tent would throw in there with him. He bit chickens’ heads off and let ‘em run around spurtin’ blood everywhere. For a child of my tender years, with few adult standards yet, that was ultra peachy keen, a level of amazement now known as awesome. Tin cans, light bulbs, baling wire, razor blades; you name it, he could have eaten it right down.

It was forty-three years later when my girlfriend pointed one out to me passing on the sidewalk outside the exotic restaurant I’d taken her to to set the scene to pop the question. I was gazing around looking for some subject for casual conversation from which to smoothly segue into my spiel about the fitness of our bodies, our lifestyles and our futures when along comes the perfect example of unfit for any of that, so I stretched, yawned and in my best version of surprise remarked, “Wow, look at that nerd.”

I never even got started into my spontaneously improvised synthesis of the moment and my eternally practiced lines. The look on her face was her best version of WTF, LOL, “That’s not a nerd, that’s a geek.”

I gotta say, she stopped me in my tracks. For some strange reason I knew, with that distinction, I’d never be fit for life with her or anyone until I understood the difference. I got up from the table, kissed her on the cheek, gave her my credit card and disappeared from the world that ever saw me before.

My research has revealed that like the entire history of oppressed genius going underground and reappearing in a more sophisticated guise for their original purpose as anything from illuminati to Bohemian Grove to the Church of the Subgenius, the geeks of my youth had formed a literal underground union through the web of tunnels connecting the increasing number of pits the carnivals were so kind to dig for them. They realized over the years of considering their common experience that they had all become quite intuitive about electromechanical things and chicken heads. They taught their children to stay away from the opposite sex and anyone who appeared to be someone “…who would pay money to watch you bite the head off a chicken”, to study everything they could find about the cutting edge of gadgetry under the anonymity of various guises from queer in the fifties, square in the sixties, dweeb in the first part of the seventies melding into nerd toward the eighties until they began the silent revolution surfacing once more as geeks, wearing their weird like the latest fashion.

All of a sudden, if you were watching for it, nerds came out of their cloisters on prom night and got laid by the same drunken cheerleader as the quarterback, while he was finding how much better Zelda4TX looked without her horn rimmed glasses, hackers became synonymous with Robin Hood, the world wide web spread faster than a billion spiders, a guy in Peoria could schlep down to his basement in his altogether, bomb an entire village on the other side of the world with a sophisticated computer game while the coffee perks and be done in time to drink it fresh with toasted bagels, the president tweets.

The other day, someone asked me what I thought it would be like if geeks ruled the world. I looked at him with the smile of sardonic irony I’ve practiced for those spontaneous moments when people appear to be talking in their sleep.

5 CHICKS & A TOMCAT

2009-11-15T11:00:00.008-06:00

I realized the hits I may invoke only after I finished typing the post title and am loath to change it just because it may disappoint the voyeur in us all. As my role model in reverse, Chance the Gardener (Chauncy Gardner {Peter Sellers}) likes to say, "I like to watch." These days it's these chicks.

Be that as it may I am hereby updating the breathless world on the news of the crew's cruise 'oer the land of the free and the home of a knave. Watching Priest's predatory instincts wax and wane with his feline curiosity is quite intriguing. He can sit obviously enamored amidst all five scratching, pecking and chatting about the smorgasbug offerings as sedately as I could hope for and I've watched him stalk low all the way across the yard as if they were his last chance to eat or maybe his long gone sister, Vera, prone to play like kids' cowboys and indians. No matter how many times I catch and scold him he manages to carry out his faux fear mongering as often as not — enough to evoke a squawk and a flutter, no more serious than their own pecking order arguments over food — and, having grown up with him every day of their life, they come right back to what was so playfully, rudely interrupted, while I still mother hen them two weeks into their free range adventures.

As the video demonstrates, if I can spot one I know within the hypoteneuse of a 6'x12' triangle where the others are.

I panicked when I touch the soft shelled egg in the nest until consulting goog ole goodle and found it to be common among hens' first eggs after moulting among on line eggery folk like me. Now I've made it more common, just because it calmed me down. Robin is the name of the hen I inherited in a mixup when my buddy, Chuck, retrieved his three chickens I baby sat over a week of his vacation. She was moulting because she is about eleven months older than her new coop mates. When the the mess her feathers were calmed down into smooth new plumage the turned out to have mousey brown feathers with pin stripes of their quills shining on her wings and back and her breast turned as red as a robin.

You may have noticed the markings on the radiant blond I've been calling Whynot, evolved from Wynona out of "Y" for the markings on her infant forhead, which have prompted me to now call her Dax, for the Star Trek symbiot and my buddy Babyldorkgalactinerd. The shot below is of Nameless One who watched me move that chair, my sieto, to get her food at every dawn of her life, so has stationed herself there and pooped in it to show her appreciation. I'm waiting for eggs.

If course, being the Simon Legree of all I feed and feed off of, I have devised a task for them to do when they're not busy laying those eggs they're always in process of making: I pile several shovels full of compost into the sifting screen and a token sprinkling of feed which they jump up to eat and remain to sift through the whole pile of juicy bugs therein, pooping all the while … the benefits of symbiosis never end. I like to win-win.

TAKE THIS APPLE, GOD WON'T MIND

2009-11-15T03:40:00.007-06:00

Lying comes natural to a culture believing truth can be told. The dishonesty lies in that leap of faith required by the myth, so ubiquitous it’s invisible, that somewhere there are right answers in the back of some book of life with the indisputable authority to declare all other versions wrong. How tedious; half the folks looking to be told what’s right, the other half claiming it’s their way or the highway. The third half are aware of this tautology, stepped out of it and are, therefore, unable to be lied to. Nor do they rely on being told the truth, knowing variations on the theme of a truth so vast it cannot be spoken enrich the beautiful complexity of what we can only live to behold a smidgen of.

Sure, we can get the names right for things and actions we’ve learned for the stuff and nonsense we’ve invented and what they make us do. All that is written down somewhere in dictionaries and patent offices, psychiatry and pharmaceutical labs, bibles and constitutions. While honest folk endeavor to get those names in the best order to accurately describe past events, present feelings and future intentions, it is just as easy to rearrange those names for different, undisclosed intentions for ears waiting to hear some version of, “…so help me God, (with your authority to make the gullible believe anything, oh mighty writer of the Book).” Courts are busy making judgments on the suspension of disbelief among believers by one person’s version of events being more persuasive than the other, neither of which even need be about the truth.

Considering the variation in reality tunnels among humans as important to the survival of our species as the diversity of species is to sustaining the healthy life of the planet, makes it easy to hear such various reports as purely informational data points balanced against one’s own experience in an evolving probability theory about life in the universe of an open mind.

There are no liars if one’s not looking to believe, there are just different versions of what people think is going on, none of whom I need to believe nor expect or want to believe me. If our realities resonate, great; if not, grater. One thing common among my friends; the only lies we call on each other are the hoods we’ve winked on ourselves. It’s what friends are for.

•

Addendum: I'm chagrinned by my omission of a primary inspiration for this post and the coiner of one of my favorite terms, "reality tunnels", Robert Anton Wilson, … yeah you, you old rabble rouser — who got around our tendency to seem to be or to actually be liars when claiming exclusive truth, by finishing every sentence with, "…maybe". Beautiful. Maybe.

BELONGING

2009-11-14T18:25:00.006-06:00

Lately I’m prone to be longing

To write of how belonging

Means I’m at home in my body

Wherever it happens to be.

It can’t have been long

Since I longed

To be needed

To feel such belonging;

To share myself undaunted,

‘Til what was wanted

Turned out never to be

Anything belonging to me.

Then I’d drool like those fool dogs

At the knell of school bells

Once the idea was seeded

That the only thing that I needed

To look like black ink’s in my logs.

The habit was strong

To sell my myself to belong

To the things I could own,

Just to belong with folks

What says they likes ‘em.

And then there are unexpected gifts;

Of unearned adulation or derisions

Offering bridges across their divisions

Or driving wedges by reading me wrong.

Belonging to me,

It has come to me

To not play that game

Of owning their name

By seeing their “Foe” is faux blame

For misery that needs my company.

Belonging to me, I can see

My wealth requires no ledger

For those belongings I haven’t,

The things I don’t own

Don’t require payments on a loan.

I belong in my body.

My body belongs in the body of Earth,

The Earth belongs in the Milky Way

The Milky Way belongs in the universe,

Not an owner in sight.

CAN’T GET PAST THE LOOKING GLASS

2009-11-13T15:03:00.007-06:00

Looking Through the Our Glass

Intending to ponder what now is

I wander in wonder of Priest’s prowess

As I sit in my seat in the shed

Shed of piles of past notes

On what “to know’ is

And shelves of books that I’ve read.

This chilly misty morning

Sparks the dog’s spirits to play

Tails up, standing stark still, until

A blink, a wink and they’re off again

One chasing the other behind the tree

The other chasing him out

Like fractals from the void of nowhere

Now here sheds snapshots like leaves

Falling on the mirror of my pond

Memory on the top

Expectation on the soaking bottom;

Joyful scene — seen future green

Violent encounter — dread future red

Informing the water with their flavor

Decaying into the past

Building the body of unborn future attitude

Gestating in that nowhere of here now

Born continuously

As the changing reflection

Of which side we think we’re on.

Like Stalagmites from drips from Stalagtites

Form pillars and puddles,

Experience builds rigid resolve

And fluid bodies of wisdom

Accumulated with age,

That product of time

Considered a crime

As are so many ways of counting:

Someone makes up a game

Then assigns blame

To ones remaining the same

Though gaining a name…

Priest won’t let me write

He wants affection

He didn’t plan it that way

Neither did I

But I kind of expected it.

•

Dedicated to my first literary hero, Lewis Carrol (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

STARRING: HERSELF

2009-11-12T08:30:00.009-06:00

Pilar had wanted to be in the movies ever since padre Ignacio had set up the projector in the community lodge. She was one of the few among her tribe who realized the story unreeling before them on the big white blanket was more wondrous than telling it with pictures that could move, stranger than the cloth covering all but the faces and hands of the people, odder than the sounds they made, or where they were, or what was going on. It wasn’t happening anywhere in time or space. Not on the wall. Not in anyone’s memory. It didn’t happen, it was done.

She remembered several years earlier when the huge boat without sails or oars came up the river with those wet crystals that shocked her fingers when she touched them and turned to water when she watched them. That happened; the only thing that happened at the movie was watching the movie that was done.

It was ninety-three years later, rolling tortillas in her booth at the reopened zocalo one morning, when she realized her dream had come true. The process of becoming one of those people who did their life was a long process of absorbing the changes that began with that movie about a world that didn’t happen, but was done with planning for a purpose.

When people dressed as those in the movie began to come up the river to clear the bank where they landed to build huge buildings with the great trees they felled, she watched her people fall for the ice machine over and over again — or disappear into the disappearing forest. When her clan ceased relocating, it became surrounded by other uprooted clans in an area dense enough to make the big buildings go around it.

Last year the people in the big buildings decided to celebrate the wonderful life they carved out of the wilderness by thanking her people with an urban renewal project that turned their east side village square and its neighborhood for several blocks into a stylized reproduction of the native village when she was thirty — a sort of ethnic cleansing. Many homes were purchased and converted into shops selling mass produced copies of clan items. She was paid a commission to sit in a booth in the zocalo rolling tortillas in addition to whatever she made selling them.

And there was the Director of Photography now. In his flip-flops, black socks and garters, Banana Republic shorts, Hawaiian shirt, gimme cap and shades-on-a-rope he was directing the rest of the cast into position around her. When Pilar stopped to watch as his children and wife gathered behind her and leaned their chins on her shoulders with big smiles on their faces, the DP said, “No, no. Keep on doing whatever was happening when we showed up. I want this to be a real documentary. Okay, everyone. Action.”

DETECTING THE INEVITABLE

2009-11-09T11:25:00.006-06:00

If there were ever an oxymoron that an entire civilization hasn’t caught on to yet, it is the idea of detecting the inevitable. I’m about to whup a whole sake cup o’zen on your ass here, so be warned. Detection is becoming aware of and possibly pointing out previously unnoticed things. The inevitable, the Tao, the way of all nature is not a thing. It is not a law of physics or biology; it not a beginning, middle or end; it is not a creator any more than the Earth’s oceans intentionally created biological life. I am given to understand that in the Hindu vocabulary, the closest word to mean thing is “event”, in keeping with this idea of a living universe.

The myriad variety of things to be detected and pointed at arise from the infinite process that indicates the universe is alive, and if so, conscious. As each being is conscious of the sensations of its constituent cells’ reaction to the environment in its location so is the universe aware of itself with the same curiosity with which we constituent beings quest, or not.

Becoming aware of the natural, inevitable source of the distractions, of which most are exclusively, distractedly aware, is not a process of detecting but rather a cessation of detecting, dissecting, naming, and explaining. No explanation can make someone see the depth of the flat autostreogram pattern and my humble attempts to elucidate the inevitable are infinitely more inadequate to save anyone the actual, personal experience of realizing with all one’s senses, life as it is beyond description.

Such awareness has shown me that each entity has a characteristic nature which, should they align it with the nature of the universe, the fears and regrets inevitable with attachment to particulars in the evanescent variety as it passes gives way to sharing the ride with all the things down the inevitable river or the stroll down the way of everything that runs along its banks. Western civilization is a mistaken attempt to build a damn out of attachment to the water.

PATENTLY COPYWRONG

2009-11-09T07:46:00.004-06:00

I just left a site with a giant copyright symbol and statement at the top of his side bar to return here with a clear explanation of why I see assuming the authority to control the interpretation of a voluntarily overt act second only to the usury such assumptions enable that riddles western civilization with the constant sense of oppression it exudes. Competition is beneficial only when it encourages everyone to expand their perspective and skills beyond the current edge with no energy devoted to retarding fellow vier’s possibilies; otherwise, such events are competitions in the most spiteful vanity.

When I first decided to sacrifice my graphic skills on the fires of the open market, I matted up the pages from several pads of watercolors, pastels and pen and sat on a blanket on the sidewalk along the “drag” with other art and craft vendors. Among the many things I learned by watching the faces of the people leafing through my work was how fraught with attachment to their reactions I was — to the point that the whenever I sat with pen, brush, chalk in hand after that venture, my mind leaped beyond any inspiration to faces in reaction to whatever it might have been. For me it was severe artist block. It was a full ten years before I was able to live by mypenchant and passion for art.

The one thing that has changed in the thirty odd years since that experience is my attitude toward the future of anything I might create once I offer it for public access. While it remains an inspiration or its incarnation in a drawing pad, note pad, voice recorder or computer program the work is mine; how could it be otherwise? But when I receive my commission from a client, sell my art to a customer or publish rants and ponders here, they are out of my hands and are free to be used for anything. To litigiously trace works into their future to ensure my desired interpretation is not only frustratingly futile, for an artist or author it is self-defeating.

My friend, Amber, began her own stained glass business making hanging creations she called Suncatchers. They are so beautiful that within a couple of years she began seeing “suncatchers” at trade shows underselling items so brazenly copied as to have the same names for the pieces. After much contemplation on the situation she realized the negativity and expense associated with legal action was much greater than any loss she might recover.

More importantly, she realized the value of any of her creations was in the quality she devoted to her own inspirations, a field in which she relished creating new pieces yet to be imitated by flatterers who not only demonstrated her ideas, but exposed the superior quality of her work as surely as an ad campaign.

In the case of the blogger who warns away plagiarists with a stay puff sized ©, I must assume he either wants to keep his ownership, income or integrity in tact although others’ misuse of his work can have no effect on the value of his intended meaning, while gratuitously drawing attention to the expressions he wanted out there in the first place.

THE “BANE” OF SELF-RELIANCE?

2009-11-08T09:13:00.006-06:00

A post over at Thoughtstreaming was in its usual process of describing what I must assume is the “opposition”, which any blog espousing a political ideology authored by names like Troutsky and Che Bob must, of necessity, have, when along comes this sentence, “Individual as opposed to collective rights and a fetishized discourse on the Founding Fathers and Christianity and self-reliance.” Something clicked into place in an ever present puzzle presented to me early on in my naïve delve into the political blog scene with a comment to this same blog and receiving a most hostile reception for suggesting that I got any value for my life from reading Ayn Rand, obviously one of their code words loaded with ammunition of instant opinions for the combat life seems to be for them.

For me the entirety of Ayn Rand’s works were another version of the theme that inspired Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, singing the beauty of the of human potential and railing against the enslavement of it. That she made super heroes of those who realized their potential by becoming the most ethical architect in all of literature in Fountainhead and were the rare few honest captains of industry in Atlas Shrugged, got her branded by socialists of Trout/Che’s brand as a champion of the real, living, union busting, greedy, Gordon Gecko CEOs who milk their country dry. That she learned her fierce self-reliance in escaping from the collective nightmare of her life in the worst incarnation of socialism to date that was the Soviet Union, only emphasized their reasons to oppose her. That Howard Roark and John Gault had stirling ethics with no room for usury, the bane of civilization against which they and all men rail, just doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a brand easy to singe into the hide of anyone who would rather make it on their own. Methinks they throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

In western society, human potential exists in various kinds and quantities, less by genetic inheritance than by early wiring by the highly variable environment into which an individual is born. The belief system of the parents is either the first oppression or the first inspiration a growing curiosity deals with. Socializing outside the family is the first challenge to the inspiration or light on the oppression in a life full of contradictions to every assumption we make. It is at this stage that all the advice points to making irretrievable conclusions about what is right as a keel to remain steady through whatever experience the future may hold. Some, myself included, were never so sure of the concept of righteousness as to adopt it in any form other than than their own autonomy. I remember instances of great passion in love and war in my life, but none were my attempts to convert another to my ideas as a matter of faith in their intrinsic righteousness – merely food for thought in varying potencies from out side the box.

Although I have mentioned it several times previously, the Hindu concept of Minahana and Mahayana is particularly relevant to this socialist/capitalist argument in that Minahana is the individual, “little boat”, which must be mastered before one is capable of taking an oar in the “big boat”, Mahayana. This has always meant to me the same sort of self-understsanding that must precede indoctrination into the requirements of any culture, whether it is the solitary vision quest of native American adolescents or the walkabout of Aborigine lads, without which their communities held them lacking the virtue of responsibility and unworthy of assuming a role of tribal responsibility. Had either culture met a Marx or a Trotsky they would have laughed at the folly of their rejection of self-reliance in favor of group righteousness.

One person’s passionate belief in their responsibility for the care, feeding and behavior of themselves is another person’s fetishized self-reliance. It seems to me that the socialist abhorrence of self reliance is its lack of needing the group they cannot imagine living without. There are no self-reliant mobs out to take over the government that they want control of, there are no anarchist clubs anywhere. The gun toting, John Birchers against whom they rail are not self-reliant — they want to control the same government the socialists do — smaller government just means they want the orders to come from their own living room.

Well, this is as clearly as I can state my thoughts regarding the methods of painting the opposition with such a broad brush it leaves no room for anyone to qualify as an ally.