More often than we might suspect things are not exactly what they seem. Some people like to promote the idea that certain experiences change their lives in such a way that they lose their inhibitions about the way they address the world, and through these experiences they are able to be more honest and sincere both with themselves and the world around them. They seem to go to great lengths to promote their new courage and enter into the malstrom of life with renewed hope and energy, and can sometime take on challenges they would not have dared to before their unsubstantiated claim to personal liberation.

For many, these claims may become a sort of self-evident truth and they begin to take risks they previously would not take. Some seem to retire into seclusion in order that they may savor their newly gained confidence until it blooms into a source of great joy and ecstasy to be shared only with their loved ones. Still others like to go public and use these experiences as a form of self promotion to feature themselves as the mediums of God-like virtues and the dispensers of unconditional love. Many of the televangelists seem to take this route. They seem to favor saying they have a personal relationship with God, by any other nayme, and start deciding what sort of behavior their followers must conform to in order to attain to the same level of sanctity they claim to possess, because they had certain experiences rarely suffered even by the wise. With enough publicity, often with pictures of angels fluttering around their umbrellas of superiority, their original experiences become less of a feature of God's blessings than of their own need for self importance.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the influence of the human's will to live. On a discussion list I was subscribed to recently there was one fellow who claimed that the entire purpose of religion was to destroy one's will to live, in order to attain resurrection and trancendence into the higher realms of understanding. Every post to this list garnered a response from this fellow that the pleasures of this life were filthy and degrading. He was attacked by practically all the positive thinking members of the group, including myself, and in effect was told that God wanted us to be happy and enjoy what we could of this life because sooner than we might realize we would die and the chance would be gone forever. He was unrelenting in his assessment of our foulness and degradation, and insisted that our will to live was the culprit who would prevent us from attaining transcendence.

It took a while for me to contemplate his contentiousness and allow that he might be right. I am beginning to agree with him to some degree. I have often wondered what the religious leaders have meant when they refer to some odd notion they call the original sin, and have begun to consider whether or not the will to live is that which they speak of. The rare few who have experienced a near death experience write about the glorious experiences they had when they relinquished their will to live and accepted death as the consequence of their doing so. Yet, when they didn't die, they seem to take their not dying as a mandate to save the world, and thus redevelop the will to live with an even greater vigor than ever before to carry out their mission. World saviors do seem an odd lot, but they can be very entertaining.

I had a somewhat revealing dream this morning. I found myself out on a construction job. I was there as the friend of a friend who had borrowed some equipment from me to get the job going. The equipment was a small front-end loader and a load of bricks. There were a lot of people around the job site, but not many of them were working. They were using my material to build what was being built. I hung around the edges of the job trying to make myself useful, but there was nothing much for me to do. It seemed like I was just in the way of all the other people who were trying to find something to do. I approached my friend to ask him what was going on and he told me that if I didn't like what was going on, then I could just go. So naturally, I decided to take my stuff and go home, but instead I woke up. The whole dream felt like a child's game.

After I woke up and started thinking about the dream I decided to act like all the characters in the dream were different aspects of my own person. This has not been pleasant. The whole dream made me feel stupid. I began to wonder if the people I'm involved with in my life were just like the characters in my dream. Were they using my stuff just to look busy like they were trying to build something with my stuff, and then acting like my being in their life was an inconvenience to their pretentions?

Most of the experiences I've had in my life that seemed to have given me the direction my life has taken are made of of experiences I had when I was alone and without human witnesses to verify anything happened at all. They are indeed, all in my own mind. Yet, I describe these experiences like they are what make me important as a human, and yet, nobody gnows but me. I hallucinate these experiences have value because of what I have read or heard other people describe about their experiences in life, but maybe what they think is important and what I think is important is not really all that important at all. With the question being, is there anything important about life at all?

I have sat around for the last two and a half years doing nothing since I started drawing my Social Security check. A year ago I went with my friend Billy down to Georgia and worked as a pipefitter for about two weeks. Made some good money, but I was waiting the whole time we were there for them to discover that I didn't really know what the hell I was doing. When we got fired for them catching Billy smoking in an unauthorized area I was quite relieved. The only other time I have been active during this "retirement" period was when the North Carolina Revenue Department audited my state taxes for the years 1997-98 and I couldn't find my W-2 form for 1998 and had to jump through my ass to get a copy to prove the company I worked for had indeed paid my taxes. In the end, after driving myself a little more insane, it turned out that they owed me a bigger refund than they had sent me back then. In this particular case, driving myself crazy over nothing at all proved profitable. If driving myself crazy over nothing had been constantly profitable I should be as rich as Midas.

There are other people who have become a part of my life recently, mostly people on the internet through e-mail. I have some local friends that I see occasionally. They come to my house and we drink a little wine together and talk about what happens in our lives and about what we think is important in our world, but it is not earth-shaking stuff, only events that happen to just about everybody. I find it difficult to understand why they consider the events in their lives important. It's all about their love affairs which are not going anywhere, their struggles with money (mostly the lack of it.), and their health.

I am at least ten years older than any of these people. When I think about what they struggle with, I realize that I have not struggled with these things in a long time, because I decided to leave these so-called struggles behind as an effort in futility. Nothing really needs to be done about these daily affairs. They just come and go life friends I used to gnow, and the outcomes always seem to take care of themselves no matter what my friends do or don't do about them. Just like me. Are my friends just characters in my dream? If I wake up, will they disappear from the face of the earth?

I just remembered something else that happened in my dream this morning. The people on that job that was using my stuff were building square columns out of the bricks my friend had borrowed. I kept tearing the facades of the brick columns down. Nobody even noticed. They just kept busy building new ones. It was almost as if they were using borrowed stuff to make things that didn't matter to them, the only thing that mattered was that they kept busy. The thing that frustrated me and made me tear down their work was they ignored a nagging need of my own. I felt like I should be busy too, as if the only reason I was there was to provide them with the materials and machinery necessary for them to act busy and accomplish something that was important to them, and my need to act busy just got in their way.

You know... I have been thinking about our conversationabout the possible state of Ben's health. I told you how his expression of appreciation of my visiting him at the corralseems sincere, but a little out of the ordinary.

I had another friend who lived in Clinton for a good while. His name was Noel Carter. He was from Kentucky too. He was a drunk too. For about ten years I used to go over to his machine shop to visit and drink a little with him. When he
reached a certain state of inebriation he would get very adventurous intellectually. This seemed very similar to how
booze can help a person break through their social inhibitions and flirt with the girls and get out on the dance floor and cut a rug. Except with Noel it seem to give him the ability to cut through the inhibitions that stoppedhim from displaying his intellectual reach.

Noel had incredible intellectual powers. Of course, he had to have a few drinks before he would let anyone see that. He had been in the Air Force and his job there was the repair and upkeep of C-140 aircraft. It didn't take him long to
become the crew chief on a specific airplane, and his knowledge of these airplanes was phenomenal. I have sit with
him for hours and listened to his descriptions of the various systems involved in the operation of this aircraft.

In the same way, he described how various types of jet engines worked, and what needed to be there for them to work properly. While this topic is not as interesting to me as many others, his unique "country boy" was of using a great number of fascinating metaphors and analogies to get me to visualize what he was describing. These metaphors came straight from his childhood in Kentucky, and over the years and the bottles of Black Jack we consumed together I felt as though I could wander through Kentucky almost as a native
son.

The people from this section of the country have a unique way of expressing themselves. It took me a while to absorb and understand the small but distinct ways of using common phrases that sometime meant the very opposite of what might normally be taken by their usage.

Noel died when he was 52 years old. In the last two years before he died I didn't see him as often as I had in the
past. I had started working a mechanical engineering job over at Fort Bragg, and between the commute and the time I
had to spend on the job I only got to see him on weekends occasionally. I could see that things had changed with him,
and he was taking even less care of his health. He entered a kind of lethargy that left him disinterested in many of the
things he had formerly taken an interest in. He didn't take in work to make money with any real effort any more, and he had taken to eating mostly beans that he cooked on his wood stove and occasionally eating wieners. I started buying some food like beef stew and taking it over to him to try to encourage him to eat.

He was always a small, skinny man. He had very small, delicate bones. He got even skinnier, even though I didn't
think that was possible, and yet he developed a little bloaty looking pooch to his stomach. One of the last times I went over to his shop to visit, he had a large cyst that appeared on his face, and he had stopped bathing and changing clothes. He looked awful, but when I drove up to the door of his shop where he was working on a lawn mower he
looked up and offered his old grin to welcome me.

One day I was sitting at the counter of the restaurant where we had met. He had quit coming there, so I was a little
surprised when he walked up behind me and tapped me on the opposite shoulder and laughed a little when I looked the wrong way. Then, he got very serious and asked me if I would do him a favor. I told him I would, and asked him what the favor was. He wanted to know if I would take him to the VA hospital at Fayetteville. I said that of course I would, and asked him what was wrong. His eyes got a little teary whenhe told me something was terribly wrong in his belly. I expressed my sorrow at his discomfort, and asked him when he wanted me to take him to Fayetteville. I think this was on a Friday. He told me that he needed to go on Monday. I agreedto take him anytime he felt the need.

On Sunday afternoon I stopped by his shop to coordinate our getting together to make the trip. The door to his shop was open as usual, but when I went inside to talk to him he wasn't there. Instead, there was another skinny fellow who told me that he was Noel's cousin, and that Noel's mother had come down from Kentucky to take him home. Apparently he had called her since I had seen him, and she recognized he was in trouble and had come to get him.

His cousin told me that Noel was over at the motel room his mother had rented, and told me that Noel may like it if I
went over to visit him before he left. I didn't do that. I knew Noel would not like for me to see him in that condition. I never saw him again. Turned out he had developed colon cancer and had waited too long for them to do anything but
cut it all out and send him home to die.

As I thought it over I realized that Noel had told me in his own way that he knew something was wrong and said goodbye to me. I sort of got that same feeling from Ben the last time I saw him. These ol' boys from Kentucky have their own way.

Quite often I find myself somewhat amazed at how people take that which they have been trained to think they're like as the gospel truth. I wrote my opinion on why I think the Jewish tribes have suffered persecution throughout their existence on a discussion group I subscribe to, and got a response from a woman to claims to be Jewish stating that I was descriminatory for even having an opinion of their history. I suppose if I had offered an opinion about why the native American Indians lost their land and territories the Indians in the group would have written that my assessment of why they suffered that loss would have written in to say that I descriminated against them. Some people... eh?

The real problem with these types of things has to do with the world getting smaller and the tribal unity of all peoples who attempt to segregate themselves from the rest of the world are losing their hold on their children who had rather join the world community than kowtow to their ancient customs. Purists always lose their battles to keep things pure. I doubt very seriously if there ever has been a pure race. In fact, it simply doesn't work out because even if the purists got their way the bloodlines would dissipate because of inbreeding and they would end up a bunch of idiots who could not even defend themselves against attack.

A friend mentioned in an e-mail that there was going to be a TV program on the true nature of the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene as represented in the art of Leonardo Da Vinci. I decided to watch it in order to knowingly participate in the discussion that might follow. I was only vaguely aware of the Da Vinci information. I didn't know that he was supposed to be part of a secret society that were given secret information about what happened to Mary after Jesus's death. I wasn't too impressed with this part of the program.

What I did find interesting was the fact that so many scholars considered Mary Magdalene the Grail vessel herself. That her relationship with him was due to the fact that she was considered the vessel that received Jesus's blood. By blood, they were talking about bloodline, and that Mary Magdalene was the mother of his children. The program used Da Vinci's painting of the last supper as support for their theory. In the painting, which supposedly contained representative information of the secrets that Da Vinci was given by the secret cabal, the program promulgated the notion that the person sitting to the right of Jesus was not the disciple John, but was indeed a woman who was Mary Magdalene. I found myself agreeing that the image to the right of Jesus in the painting sure looked more like a woman than a man. Particularyly when the other images in the painting that were supposed to be men did look like men except for this one figure. An interview with a so-called Da Vinci art expert pointed out how the figure purported to be Mary Magdalene was leaning to the right in the painting, and that her leaning to the right and Jesus's image turned to the left formed a V(Vee) which an ancient symbol for the human female. It also represents a container or vessel, and when put together seems to infer that the Holy Grail was Mary herself, instead of being a drinking cup.

The entire time I was watching this program I was remembering a documentary about the Popel in which it was stated that John Paul did not pray to either God or Jesus, but to Mary as Jesus's mother. This suggest to me that the highly touted virgin birth did not concern itself with the birth of the physical Jesus, but of the docetic spirit that was born unto the personality Jesus, and may represent the continued worship of the old female Goddesses, which was being suppressed in the Jewish tribes at the time Jesus was around.

This female Goddess adoration is much older than the Jewish concept of Jehovah, and was predominant throughout the Mid-East and the Greek states well before the Judaic tribes were formed. This seems to substaniate to some degree that Christianity did not spring from the Jews and the Mosaic Law traditions, but from the old Greek oral tradition of a female God.

In my dreams I have a seemingly female companion. She is always there as a witness. I haven't been able to look at her directly, as yet, and identify her. I thought for a long time that she was my second wife because she has dark hair. I taught my ex-wife how to astral travel and we did a lot of work together in that regard. But, now I'm not so sure. Yesterday morning as I was waking up I found myself calling her Linda. I don't know whether or not that was a fluke, and it may end up being a distraction. It is, however, the first time I am conscious of that I have had any clue as to her identity. Maybe she is my anima, but I find that a little confusing because there is another woman in my dream life that is a fair-haired beauty that shows up now and then.

I have been involved recently in a drawn out discussion about description, and the various languages and lingos humans use to say what they perceive. My most recent conclusion, that the various descriptive efforts we make to communicate the ineffable fall short of actually getting the satisfaction we require from such efforts, is truly an exercise in futility. Yet, I continue to make such efforts despite myself. I wonder how surprised I'll be if it ever happens?