Myself As An Example Of What Not To Be

I've used browsing the news sites on the internet as an excuse to get outta writing something this morning as long as I could stand it. I don't have "writer's block". I never have. That's probably because I don't try to tell the truth or deliberately lie. I ought to. It's the thing to do I suppose, but since I project my idea of what the world is like upon other people, as long as there are people, then I've got something to write about.

My youngest brother, who is also my next door neighbor who lives even further back in the woods than me, came over to see what the hell I was doing over here banging around with a hammer. It's hardly unusual for either of us to be curious about the other's projects. Sometime we can be useful as an extra pair of hands.

I explained how I was erecting the two double-paned sliding doors to see if they would shield me from all the noise I get from the shopping center a couple of miles away as the crow flies. Like me he seemed a little nebulous, but agreed that if something could be done, then it should be done. Nobody is making any noise just to piss me off, it's a serious matter of where I located my house.

When I first started my house the airport was just starting to grow and expand. They got money from the FAA, they had to spend it or lose it. My family's farm just got in the way. There was no shopping center to draw traffic and make the noise that's completely unreasonable. Since I don't rule the world (Dammit!!), it's me that's gotta make the adjustments.

He acted like the reason he came over here was to find out what I was doing, but I suspect the real reason was to tell me that he had talked it over with his wife, and they had decided to go on a two-week trip to India under the auspices of the international branch of the Rotary Club.

Both of my younger brothers belong to the Rotary Club. They're both businessmen. Businessmen find it useful to network. Rotary, I suppose, is a good enough way to do it. Particularly if it provides an opportunity to traipse around India under favorable conditions for a while. My ex-wife should have married one of them, and probably would have if it hadn't been for me. Life is complicated.

The strange thing is (or at least to me it is strange) that as we get some age on us, the more they remind me of my father. They didn't rebel against our parents the way I did. They swear they learned better than to do that from witnessing the murderous relationship my father and I had as I became a teenager and attempted mightily to discover my true identity apart from the authority of our parents. They might also swear that the only real thing they learned from their oldest brother was what not to do. No blame.

As I sat and listened to my brother enthuse over him and his wife's upcoming trip to India I saw him as my father saying the same thing he said just before he and my mother made a belated "grand tour" of Europe, Russia before it's fall, and Australia and New Zealand. The only grand tours I made was in the Navy, paid for by the government, and as a penniless bum.

All my siblings might be considered well-to-do except me. My children hate me for it. Sometime I hate me for it too, and then hate myself FOR them in addition to my self-hatred, and my ex-wive's hatred for me too. Well, they would hate me for being what it is that I am and am not if they knew me well enough to aim their dislike of me. I guess I'm lucky they don't know me that well. They left me, not the other way around.

Sometime I think I must represent what every member of my various families hate about themselves. It's like I am is the scapegoat for all the ills of their subjective worlds. My ex-wife's mother was said to have told my children at every opportunity how much she hated me, and that she hated me even before we ever met.

I've wondered about this situation a lot. Maybe people love to hate me because I'm so talented for carrying the weight of their dislike of themselves. I should deny it and let them find another home for it, but I'm pretty strong, and somebody gotta do it, and I've dumped enough of my own self-hatred to understand what it's like to be free of hatred, so why would I not be there for them in their hour of need?

Time's A'wasting!

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Thank God it's Sunday. Last night was another noisy night. With the Moose hall a quarter mile down the road Saturday nights are never quiet. Besides that, the next door neighbor (around 500 meters away) must have had visitors today. Visitors with loud children and guns they kept shooting. The world is moving in on me. I better win the lottery soon so I can find a quieter place to live or I'm gonna go broke from wearing ear plugs.

I may be in a situation where I'm a'fixin' to go completely deaf. There are a lot of old sayings about how things look brightest just before the fall. It seems almost a shame to actually say it, but the way the ambient noise around my house has been driving me batty, I might actually like it. At least for a little while.

It's not the noise around me that's driving me nuts, but rather, my reaction to the noise around me that's driving me gaga. Lots of sounds that never made no difference to me just a short time back now drive me to distraction. I'm supposed to be in charge of what I let drive me to distraction. At least that's the plan. The world can do whatever it likes, but how I react to what the world does is up to me.

When I first started building my house I didn't have any sort of a plan, much less a set of blueprints. I imitated. I mimicked. I did what I am has always done. It gathered a bunch of building materials, bought some nails, and started putting things together catch as catch can.

As a result, it's not very well designed (I'd mimicked workmen, not architects), and since nothing measurable is standard by any means, every rework I perform is tailor-made to fit existing situations of some part of the house. My clumsy adaptions to it's haphazardness only makes it more… errr… hap-hazardous.

I waxed a little romantic at first by deciding I wanted a quarter of the second story of the loosely proposed house-to-be to be a balcony. A balcony that adjoined my bathroom (foolishly located on the second floor) so that I could walk outside from taking a shower and let the breeze on the balcony dry me off au natural. I wasted my youth when I was young.

Furthermore, without the slightest reflection about whether making it so was a well-thought out strategy, I decided to put an aluminum-framed sliding glass doors leading from my bathroom onto my romantic balcony. Big, heavy sliding doors, even when they're constructed from aluminum can be a real hassle to open and close over time. I began to dread using the unromantic energy it took to open and close that sliding door.

This entire arrangement was a bad idea, and when I remodeled the house specifically because of this romantic, but stupid balcony I put a roof over it and and enclosed the whole area which gave me a highly needed extra room, but now put the sliding glass doors inside my house.

A couple of days ago I took the double-paned sliding glass door outside of my house to the second-floor deck just outside my computer station. This is where the noise I complain about drives me craziest. I leaned the glass doors on their sides up against the deck railing, and then tied them down with some telephone wire to keep the wind from blowing them over.

This afternoon the notion popped in my head to take those double-paned doors and set them upright side-by-side against the rail to find out if they would block off some of the noise. I figured if the air space between the double panes insulate again changes in temperature it might do the same thing to insulate sound.

I may be deluding myself because I want this to work, but I sorta think it does work. Perhaps noticeably. As if maybe it takes the edge of the children screeching in play. the results I'm getting or pretending to get is encouraging.

The world is not going to change the way it is to suit my needs in this case. It's my problem. I'm the one who built my house unintentionally as an echo chamber that picks up noises from miles away. As if living next to the local airport were not enough.

If I came into some sort of windfall that provided me with the option of remaining here and going to considerable expense to sound-proof my house to more tolerable levels or moving to another location. I'm pretty sure I would move.

Hopefully the windfall would be large enough to allow me to be picky about choosing a new location. I don't think it's the nearness of the airport that bothers me here. With my imaginary deep pockets I could construct the necessary baffles to shunt the ambient sounds away from my comfort zone.

The main reason I would move is the unalterable fact that the airport authority has carte blanc through an act of eminent domain to take whatever I contracted for any reason they please. I hate being at their mercy. It's fighting city hall all over again. The individuals on the airport authority board may change, but not the type of people who like airplanes.

I've contemplated the dynamics of this situation many times before. Ideally, the only real solution is the modern day version of a teepee called a motor home. Just unhook the faucets and the toilet utilities, crank up the finely-tuned diesel engine, and drag ass.

Once, back when I made as much take home money in a week as I do a month now, I even went so far as to purchase a used motor home to fix up just to see if I might like it. It didn't happen. I got ripped off in that deal by some people who were supposed to be my friends. I didn't even realize it until after they both died.

It's unusual for me to know somebody fairly well who goes and dies on me. I've always figured that's because I moved around so much I didn't get a chance to make many people's acquaintance for very long. Both of those men were from up North and were truly what's called around hyah "Damn Yankees", because they came to visit and stayed.

Not so unusual was the fact that they both seemed troubled by what must have happened before they came here. By that I mean that they brought their troubles they had at home down here even though they sort of claimed moving here made them scot-free. It didn't.

I am is not a good janitor of it's own stuff. It doesn't have enough ambition. If something is good enough to get by until tomorrow, why bother with making it better than it has to be today. Shit happens. Things change. Death is always unexpected.

I am seems totally unreasonable in this regard. Things, objects de art, seem trivial to it that don't to me, and thats not a recent development.

To I-am-is it seems like all it asks is just to have a body that works pretty good for as long as it does, and a chance to play the game of life for as long as the body keeps going. There will always be more bodies to wear out. Bodies are like money. They'll make more.

I was impressed by the sight of the hiding place the Army found Saddam Hussein on television. It reminded me of how I live here and have always lived except during the sixteen years I was married. I was lousy at being married. Why am I always the last to know?

The only practical difference between his hootch and mine is that I don't have a rabbit hole to hide in if the invaders come looking for me. He had all those palaces as Iraq's dictator, but all he needed for himself was a place to stay out of the weather and a few pots and pans to cook with. I find myself wondering if he had a refrigerator. Oh well, he don't need one now.
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Pollyanna And Her Sisters

The property I currently own is my place in the world to be allone. Metaphorically, it's the temple in which I-am-is represents the capitalists the Christos tossed out in order to take over the whole religious operation itself. The I am is wot it yam, but only when it eats it's spinach. A spiritual lurker waiting in the shadows?

Will the real Gretchen please stand up? The real Gretchen died of natural causes, I suppose (if you consider a wooden stake through her heart a natural way to die, but it's natural if that's the only way she can die). Her death left a daughter named Gretchen who didn't deserve to be the real Gretchen's naymesake, and Pollyanna, the middle daughter, who did. It's about "Look who won in the end!"

This never bode well for me, and I didn't even know it was that strong a hate game until the very end. Even then it was years before my daughter told me that the real Gretchen who died reminded her every time she passed her deathbed how much the real Gretchen hated me. If she only knew.

The real Gretchen hated me the first time over the phone. She already hated me before we spoke on the phone, but afterward she knew it, and she hated me before we met face-to-face, and that eventual encounter only made her hate me worse. She meant to get her daughter back from me, and each daughter her daughter had made her want her daughter back even more.

I married the middle daughter who wanted the real Gretchen to love her more than her sister named Gretchen. She tried to out-Gretchen her sister by be-co-me-ing her mother instead of her self. She won, but by becoming the real Gretchen by proxy she gainsaid her sister and adopted her mother's hatred for me.

In a lotta ways I'm glad I'm not involved in this Medusian struggle any more, but it seems like my own children have inadvertently pulled me back into it despite the apparent fact that they'd rather not. I'd rather they not too.

I foresee a knockdown dragon fight between two sisters. One is slick and supremely detached and the other plain vicious and an emotional cyclone. I'm glad I live several states away from both of them. I wouldn't wanna be the duty-bound older brother either.

It would be nice if it didn't happen around my children, but I got no say so and haven't had for three decades. For understandable reasons or no that woman took our children and jumped and run. I hate it for all of us.

 
Just call me nuts. This is the first time I've attempted to post a photo of any sort using the Blog This! feature of Blogger.com. If it works I'll probably post more.

I like the colors in this shot. I swapped my heritage of some antique glass with my older sister to get that peach colored chair with the embossing. It's old and the upholstery is worn out. Sorta like me. '-)

Flu City

I heard on the local news that a new strain of flu has been going around in the area. That must be what happened. I'm feeling much better today. What worried me was that the medicine I've been prescribed to my rheumatoid arthritis definitively lowers one's immune system. I'm pretty sure I had a close brush with death, and I may not be out of the woods yet.

The doctor at the Durham VA gave me a phone number and direct instructions to call him if I had an problems. Monday, I called and left a message to get him to call me back. I was pretty sure he would if he found out that I had called. He has called me before just after my appointment with him to see if I was taking the medicine, so I knew he wasn't averse to talking with me. I also figured it'd be a cold day in hell if he actually got my the message. That's why using the VA can be a death trap. The employees got a solid government check coming in and do what they want no matter what the doctors say.

The doctors don't make much money. They're all immigrants who take the government jobs to get cranked with their own practice in the US, so they're not gonna be there long, so the employees go along only as much as they need to until they're gone. The patients get caught in the middle of this dilemma and end up dead... and good riddance... their troubles don't stop the government checks from rolling in. Total apathy. Nobody knows or cares. No blame. The nurses appear to have the universal attitude most medicos do, "It's yo' money or yo' life."

I actually heard one of the nurses over at the Fayetteville VA state that if the veterans can't afford "a real doctor", then they deserve what they get (or don't get). This might be better than some other cultures, but I think mostly because the US is a melting pot, and prejudice is prejudice no matter where you are in the world.

I'm feeling a little sorry for myself that my house ain't properly heated. I wear the same clothes I wear to stay warm outside as I do in my house. I woke up to less than twenty degrees (-6.66 C) in my living room where my computer is, and it's only warmed up to 5-10 degrees now as it nears noon. I visited my brother next door to check with him about glucose testers he's been using lately, and he got outta bed after working most of the night, and answered the door with only his breeches on. He can walk around in his house nakid and still keep warm. I guess I was a little envious, and disappointed I've chosen to live like I live. But, only in the winter when it gets really cold like now. Being deathly ill doesn't help my attitude.

I sense that I'm getting a better grip on what Sartre writes about the homo sapien being possessed by two consciousness'. It comes down to people not recognizing the person the other thinks we are. We appear to be blind to it by convincing ourselves that everybody sees us as we think we are, that we are translucent to the other as we see ourselves. It's not true, of course, because we all project our own idea of self onto the other, and so we see the other as what we would be if we acted like them. They see us in the sa-me way.

Understanding this concept down to the bone seems necessary for me. It may be something I already know and write about, but since some doubt seems to hang around, I keep reflecting on it to see what comes up.

New Blog Site

There are some settings I don't know how to change to get Feedburner to work on this site, so I'm changing over to a new one where is does work. At the bottom of the page of Apple Pan Dowdy there's a dialog you can use to do an RSS subscription to let you know there's a new entry. Here's the new site"

http://applepandowdy.blogspot.com/

Allone

I get disgusted with myself sometime because I seem so selfish. I've spent so much time alone there is not a lot about my life that I shared with many people. They just weren't there the same time I was.

There has been a stream of people through my life at different times. I was married with children for all too brief a spell. We were together when we were together and that was a long time ago. I seem to meet people explosively and part from them explosively. After we're not together anymore, we're practically never together again.

I hitch-hiked around North America for 7-8 years off and on. Sometime for weeks or months and sometime years at a time. Hardly ever stopping and never for long. Three days before. Three days after. I worked around the country as a pipewelder and pipefitter for twenty old years.

I was attracted to working what's called "time jobs". Lots of overtime money. Twelve or more hours a day, seven days a week. Shutdowns. I worked on a lot of chemical plants. Petroleum plants. Pulp mill plants. Mostly new work. I didn't like going to those places after they operated for a while. I was only there to make money.

I didn't travel with groups. It would probably have been better if I had, but I didn't do this kind of work because it was my only option. It was just a way to make enough money to not have to work for a while. Construction trash. A bunch of drunks, ex-cons, and ne'er-do-wells. Irish travelers. Because I didn't travel with a group I was usually one of the first ones to leave after we'd worked ourselves out of a job. We did work. We had some pride. No union. Just wit, grit, and the ability to pass a 6G test standing on our heads.

Pipewelding for a living depends on that one thing. You have to pass a welding test on every job you go on. Even if its with the same company. There are usually so few people who can pass those welding tests, that if you can, you don't have to kiss nobody's ass. It's a two-edged sword though. If you fail a welding test it's hard on yo' nerves. Not nearly as hard as the iron worker has it if he fails his test of courage. Now, that there is a hard row to hoe. One misstep and... splat!

The money boys need your skills to build those industrial sites so the investors can make a profit on their money. If they piss too many of the skilled craftsmen off the job shuts down, and they gone be hell to pay for the sycophants wearing them ice cream clothes. I stumbled into welding by accident, but it sho' wuz a lesson unto me.

The point I make about working construction is that I wasn't around the same people very often. As a single-handed welder I might work four or five jobs a year in completely different parts of the country without running into the same people more than once or twice coincidentally. When I claim that nobody knows, I'm more often right than wrong. I have literally lived my life like a stranger in a strange land, but it wasn't necessarily my own decision a lot of the time.

I'm perfectly aware that it's my ability, even my strong desire to be alone that makes me seem curious to a lot of people. People don't seem to understand why I don't appear to need them like they seem to need other people. I don't know why they feel incomplete. I studied acting for years. It was my major in college. There might be times I act like I need people if that suits my purposes. That seems to be what people expect. It's when I walk away from them without what they consider the proper rituals and ceremonies that they become suspicious I might not be as needy as them.

It's not really to get away from people that i withdraw. I like people just fine. I withdraw to attend to stuff I can't attend to if I allow people's neediness to distract me. They can't know when they're screwing it up for me when they insist I calm their deep fears and breath occasionally. The fact that i scare the hell outta myself every once in a while by feigning death. It's not my intention to feign death, it's just that to get when I intend I really can't pay that much attention to decorum for the sake of the other.

Have you ever noticed when you suddenly realized that you've been fascinated by some spectacular sight the likes of which you've never perceived in yo' life, and when you do, you have to take a huge breath because while in your state of awe you forgot to breathe? I take this to extremes at times. I think I get more fascinated by the ways of the world than some others, and that seems to worry them to no good end. Sometime, I do know you're 'coming and I do bake a cake. Well... sorta.

I kind of think what I do is pretty mundane stuff. Especially in the very recent past during the time I read Sartre. One type of consciousness is the mundane kind that's merely awareness such that each species has adopted or adapted for their own specific needs. The other type of consciousness is special to homo sapiens. Sartre (at least his English translation) states that is type of consciousness is a thetic or theoretical sort of abstracted consciousness. The trick about having two types of consciousness is that you can't have one without the other, and it's a mighty temptation for homo sapiens to think they can, and desire it mightily. Might make right! Right?

I don't withdraw into myself to pursue altered states of theoretical consciousness. Some people might. How the hell would I know? How can I project my intuitions into theories? I can project my theoretical imaginings upon the other in order to see a mirror image of what I theorize about my own possibles, but i can't follow them back into the inner recesses of the rabbit holes via intuition? It takes a theoretical consciousness to do that, but nobody has to retreat into themselves to discover those mysteries.

I pursue altered states as a method of withdrawal from the temptations of the sensory domain. It's not easy to get started. One has to abandon their rules of conscience to even have a chance. For many, if not most people, They adopt their rules of conscience to get ahead, that's why it seems so odd to discover they already have a head, and there is no need to seek one. "Just leave them alone, and they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them."

I used the rules of conscience I adopted to shape my life to be-co-me with a former state of being. I was literally attempting to become something I am is not. I am is what it is, but it's not what it is not, too. It's okay to knot be what I am is sometime. As a matter of fact, I am not what I am is quite often, and I'm getting to like it more and more. Granted, being what I am is not seems a little scary at times, but I am is because it thinks, and thinking is a circle game, created for it's earthly aims. I am is me, and that's All there is to IT. '-)