Thursday, November 20, 2003

It amazes me to continuously find out how little it takes to push me right on into ecstasy, and how ecstasy can appear debilitating. My old '87 S-10 Blazer has been giving me trouble for years. I spent a lot of money putting two rebuilt engines into it. But, no matter what I did it always came back to the same problems. Today I realize that I probably spent that money in vain, because it wasn't the engine block that was giving me the trouble. Yesterday my mechanic found the problem. One small passageway in the injector block was blocked up with carbon. That passageway needed to be open so that it could pull a vacuum on another part that is directly connected to the operation of the car's computer, and that wasn't happening. They had to pull the injector block out of the car twice, and only when they did it the second time and used a titanium drill to ream out the carbon build up would the car run correctly. This same plugged hole in the injector block had ruined two new engines because they never checked it when they bolted it on the new engines. Bah... Humbug!

Anyway, now my Blazer runs pretty good. I took it out for a long trial run and it thrilled me to the core. Now I can use some of the money I was saving for another vehicle to work on my house a little. It's about time.

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

I had a kind of exotic dream this morning. I found myself traveling in an Asian country. I was being treated with a greater degree of respect than I expected. I was told that it was because of the woman I was traveling with. She was a sometime friend of mine that I have known for a long time. Her ex-husband used to be the band director in high school. We have attempted to have some sort of relationship before, but that didn't seem to work out too well because she is a very busy woman, and I needed more time than she allowed.

In my dream, it wasn't so much the relationship between me and this woman that brought the respect, it was because I was with a woman of my own kind, and didn't chase after the Asian women there in their own country. This seemed to mean a lot to them. The atmosphere in much of Asia has apparently changed a lot since I visited there while I was in the Navy back in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Then, there was a lot of abject poverty that was still prevalent due to what happened around the time of World War 2. The people of Japan and Taiwan were so desperate they would sell you their daughters for enough money for their families to subsist on. I found the stories I had read about how female children were considered of less value than male children to be generally true, and selling them to the highest bidder was not considered a bad thing to do there. Maybe with the economic changes that have raised the level of income and the women's movements have changed that for the better.

Many of my current dreams seem to feature women. While napping around lunch time yesterday I dreamed of this one woman that has a lot of familiarity for me in my dreamtime. She was sitting and talking to me about a subject I don't remember much about. One thing that impressed me was that she had a male companion that never spoke or interrupted her. There was something about the sight of him that suggested a Greek god of some kind. I only remember seeing him from the waist up. He was bare-chested, and his musclar development seemed a little too perfect. He wasn't built like a body-builder, but was very lean and rangy looking, and he appeared to be physically adept in a way that caught my attention. He had a very stream-lined, sleek look to him, and yet seemed completely content with himself.

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

I rarely dream of my dead father. Last night I saw him again. It was just a brief encounter. I walked through the old house we lived in from the time I was about thirteen until I left to join the Navy at eighteen. I opened the backdoor and there he was sitting by the steps. He looked up and asked me, "Are you looking for me?" I answered, "Not really." He was just sitting there and I run into him not expecting to see him there.

That old house, like many of the houses we lived in during my childhood is gone now. Others are still around. The places we lived helps me to remember much of my childhood because I associate what happened there. I believe that if I had been raised in the same house all of my life I would have forgotten many incidences of my youth. I know people whose entire existence occurred in the same place, and they don't seem to remember as much as I do about their lives.

It's the same with moving around. Last night I watched a movie about some murders that happened on a Navajo Indian reservation. The scenery was magnificent. I have been through many of the same locations many times when I was hitch-hiking. That country is so different from how it is here on the east coast. There is so little fresh water there, and what little there is attracts the people who live there. There is vast areas of uninhabited land. The color of the land is brown, for the most part, and one can be alone very easily. The movie reminded me of being there all those years ago.

Sometime I eat breakfast with a relatively new friend whose name is Roy. One of the interesting things about Roy is that we are the same age. We graduated from high school in the same year. When we were children I didn't know Roy and Roy didn't know me. We lived in the same town, but we belonged to two completely different cultures. Roy is black. He was such a good football player he was offered a scholarship to go play
at Ohio State University by the famous coach Woody Hayes. I played football. I never heard of him back in those days.

Shit happens, things change. We have spent hours in the last year talking about what has happened since. We knew a different world. It's gone now. Let the dead past bury it's dead.

Monday, November 17, 2003

I seem sure that the subject I write about will be disturbing to some. That said, I wonder if humans have ever practiced killing the young of a woman whose husband or mate has been killed or defeated. The Alpha male of a lion's pride seem to do this with impunity. I watched a nature show on PBS last night about walruses and sea lions last night. The mature bulls seem to kill the young just crawling across them on there way to the ocean after the breeding season. When the time comes for the herd to leave to go to new feeding grounds after the mating season, they leave the newborns on the beach to fend for themselves. They have to learn to avoid the waiting sharks and teach themselves to survive without the accompaniment of the mature members of the herd. They are not taught to hunt for food nor are they protected in any way when they first enter the ocean. Over 50% of them die before they learn how to survive. Humans seem to place too much value on life.

Sunday, November 16, 2003

I don't remember too much about the dreams I woke up to this morning. I only remember that they had something to do with cutting across lines of flux to produce electricity. The way I have conducted my whole life involves this. The way I rebelled against my early caregivers onward was like cutting across the conventional way of doing things was like those acts of defiance produced sparks, for sure. I had something goingt they were attempting to get me to ignore and forgetand that was what conjured those defiant acts. I realize now, well, since the last couple of days when I learned how my will to act out of my own volition, was the real aim of their efforts. They gave me "will power". Lots of it. They just didn't appreciate that I used that will power to resist them.

Funny thing that. For all these years I didn't really grok what the human will was when the other talked about it. Not clearly like I do now. What's more amazing is to understand that the will is not natural. It had to be developed little by little. In that case, my mother and father really did good by me. Perhaps too good. I have used my will to defy the world.

Once, when driving down to the Florida Keys, I picked up a hitch-hiker. He was really whacked out. Not exactly scary, but he had figgity little habits that were a little different. He talked about a different kind of crazy shit than I talked about when I was in the same condition he was in. I told him about my philosopy of life. After a while, he looked at me, composed in what I suppose was his most serious composure, and told me, "Man... you are taking on the whole damn world. You will never win!" I told him I didn't expect to win. The only important thing for me was to fight the good fight.

I stopped going to my friend Sebron's restaurant in the afternoons to have lunch and do my crossword puzzles for a couple of years. The I Ching had told me not to go there because of the crowd that ate there, and I was following the advice of the I Ching religiously then. They were not my friends. I gnew exactly what it was talking about. The crowd that came in there were just a bunch of local businessmen. My father had gone there and sat with them. He told me that most of the business that happened around town happened at their coffee gatherings. I never sat with them. I only went there in the afternoons after the lunch crowd had gone, sat by myself and worked my puzzles. I could tell they would have liked for me to join them and be part of the ol' gang, but that had never been my style.

Then, a couple of months ago Sebron mentioned to my younger brother that he had not seen me for a while, and I decided to stop by just to assure him that my not going had nothing to do with him personally. It actually did have something to do with him, but it wasn't the way he thought. The reason I didn't go there had more to do with the music he plays there. He tunes into one of the "Oldies but Goldies" stations that only played music from our youth. It drives me crazy to listen to that stuff. I didn't even like "beach music" back then. Why would I want to listen to what I didn't like then repetitiously for the next forty years. He seems stuck in that mode. Like he stopped living after he was twenty-five years old, and never learned anything or even found life interesting after then. There are a lot of people around town like that. They just extended their mental retardation to where it didn't show up until after high school and sometime college. They stopped growing then. It's so sad it embarrasses me to be around them. I worry that I will make smart-assed remarks that will hurt their feelings. It doesn't do any good to do that. It's not like they don't have the mental capacity to grow, it's just that they stopped using their mental capacity to grow after a certain age.

The other dream that I remember partially has to do with that music. A phrase from that era was part of one of my dreams. I think it has to do with a female entitiy that is omnipresent in my dream life. The phrase runs close to this, "If you don't know me by now. You will never never ever know me. You will never never ever know me..." I woke up with that tune repeating itself over and over. I know her.