It's shocking to me that Martin Luther King was assassinated forty years ago. My history is as tied up with his even though he was murdered as expected all those years ago. It was a sad day for me, even though I am a product of the culture he threw away his life to defy. I don't think it matters much which side you're on when you witness the life and times of a true martyr. I say "witnessed", but I never met the man or saw much reason to curse him. The die was cast. For what it was worth, I seemed more or less untouched the heat of the battle, and went my own way. The rumors of war remained rumors.
Even after all those years I still see myself as a moderate protestant. I use lower case letters to signify that although I was raised under the auspices of the Bible Belt Protestants, but in my puberty I began to see the hypocrisy within their religious dogma, and confronted God to show me my own path with heart, and let the rising tide of Fundamentalism eat away it's moderate, free-choice roots in the righteous cause of Fascism, but I retained the right to protest the right of any other person to impose their religious views on me, even if I had to hide it to survive at times.
The Navy was already desegregated to a large extent when I joined in 1957, and soon I found myself eating at the same table, and sleeping in the same crew's quarters with blacks, asians, latinos, and most testily, them weird-talking Bluebellies from the Devil's own lair. In four brief years the cultural lies of racial superiority ingrained during my formative years suffered a blow from which they would never completely recover.
I would never waste my time to claim I'm not racially prejudiced. Jim Crow ruled the roost for my entire childhood in the Bible Belt and the Deep South. I can't trade the childhood I actually experienced away for another more politically correct one. Philosophically, I completely agree with the tenets of equality before the same law, and act accordingly no matter what.
It's not for the people who are different from me in some way that I constrain myself to some rustic form of politeness and questionable good will. Like many religious minorities, I grin and bear it if I must. Why would I not? It's not for-the-other I deliberately exhibit as broad a sense of fair play as possible. To what people as will graciously allow it. I do it to follow (as best I know how) the tenets of the Golden Rule, and how it works to embrace human freedom in practice. I show people how I wanna be treated as pedantically as needed, so they don't have to guess about what it might take to make me slobber with gratitude when they save me from myself just before hell freezes over.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
My rural delivery mailbox had one letter in it when I went to the cafe this morning. It was a brief note from the VA Hospital stating that all my tests turned out okay. I got nothing going on that has negative indicators. I guess I'm fairly pleased about that. They're not even interested in giving me cholesterol reducing pills. It's about 150. You see, that's what I'm talking about. Who's worried about dying? What if I should live?
I'm thinking more and more about being possessed of symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome. I subscribed to an e-mail discussion group today. I'm hoping to get a little feedback from the horse's mouth. I wrote an introductory post, but no replies or any other posts from that group have arrived.
This has a lot to do the intent of my statement when I write about not having no couth or no nevermind. That means I can be rather plain-spoken without regard to the other's feelings, and not intentionally. Some people appear to think that I don't take their views into consideration when I act out in the way I do sometime. In many cases it's true. I don't mean anything derogatory by pretending disdain as I do, it's just difficult for me to realize that other people don't have the good sense I do. '-)
I don't know why I felt so pressed to have the condition of my heart checked out. I thought it was probably okay, but I've been known to cry wolf and think I'm just pretending. My invisible, docetic friend sets me up with double entendres that can have a cruel human side to them.
The fact that I smoked cigarettes for around forty years and didn't have any detrimental indicators in my heart show up is amazing even to me. I don't have to know where I am to be there.
I'm thinking more and more about being possessed of symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome. I subscribed to an e-mail discussion group today. I'm hoping to get a little feedback from the horse's mouth. I wrote an introductory post, but no replies or any other posts from that group have arrived.
This has a lot to do the intent of my statement when I write about not having no couth or no nevermind. That means I can be rather plain-spoken without regard to the other's feelings, and not intentionally. Some people appear to think that I don't take their views into consideration when I act out in the way I do sometime. In many cases it's true. I don't mean anything derogatory by pretending disdain as I do, it's just difficult for me to realize that other people don't have the good sense I do. '-)
I don't know why I felt so pressed to have the condition of my heart checked out. I thought it was probably okay, but I've been known to cry wolf and think I'm just pretending. My invisible, docetic friend sets me up with double entendres that can have a cruel human side to them.
The fact that I smoked cigarettes for around forty years and didn't have any detrimental indicators in my heart show up is amazing even to me. I don't have to know where I am to be there.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
I feel sensitive and vulnerable now. The dreaded ordeal is over and it wasn't dreadful at all. There was only one scary moment, and it happened a week before my hospital appointment. I was worried there might be a mix-up about my appointment, and I called to check it out. I joked around with the lady on the other end of the phone, and she suddenly adopted some officious Nurse attitude and told me not to come over there for my appointment and mess with them. I instantly changed my entire disposition and became as non-offensive as possible.
I remember several single mothers who went back to school to become nurses simply because nursing paid good money. If they were doing it out of compassion for their fellow man I wasn't aware of it. They had mouths to feed.
I took up pipewelding because it paid good money. I know the feeling. I didn't weld pipe to put money in the investor's pockets who were financing the work I made money doing. If they got too demanding and demanded more of me than I was willing to give, I'd get the red ass, pack up my tools, and hit the ground running. Same way with demanding too much of nurses. It's just a job. No blame.
It's simple enough to alter my behavior if I understand what's being asked of me. All I'm really altering is my reaction to provocations I don't yet understand. The woman on the telephone I talked to about my appointments helped me to remember I'm nobody special to these people. I know better than to get critical with people who don't have enough time for me and my bag of tricks in the first place.
I can't claim to know an awful lot about medical institutions. Particularly as a patient. I've only been a patient a couple of times. When I was, they fixed what ailed me, and I didn't have to go back for the same ailment over and over. The incident that scared me about hospitals happened with my father when he was in his mid-eighties. He had some sort of problem that caused the visiting home nurse to have him checked in the hospital. When I heard about it I went to visit him. He was alone and in a very sulky mood. There was no blame in that. He was trussed up on a strait jacket.
He had been yanking the IVs out of his arms, and running up and down the halls like a happy child naked as a jaybird, and after three or four times of chasing him down they put the strait jacket on him and wouldn't take it off unless I was willing to check him out of the hospital or hire a non-relative guard to stay in his room with him. I wouldn't do that. This senile old man didn't even know it was his son that he looked at so balefully. I might have helped my father, but not this feral beast. I only knew him as my father, and he wasn't that person any more.
When the nurse tersely described his behavior I had no doubt it was true. I knew his ways and other men who had similar ways. One of them in the state hospital where I committed myself for a month to find out for myself if I was insane. I was there long enough for my purposes. I learned to recognize insanity from the inside out.
I witnessed the attendants put other giggly little men who behaved a lot like my father into strait jackets. The attendants never came close to doing something like that to me. One of the jobs my father had as a college student was working as an attendant at the state hospital in Mississippi. He told me horror stories. I wanted to know if they were true. I got lied to a lot. I needed to know something was true. It wasn't.
My father was the baby of his family. He wasn't supposed to show up. His oldest brother was eighteen years older than him. His parents both died in their seventies before my father was thirty-five years old. He didn't take it well. I oughta know. I'm the person he talked to about it when we worked out in the fields alone together. He told me about things that were none of my business. They were a burden. I was just a kid.
My father was a sociable man. He liked people and he liked to be around somebody all the time. It was only in his dotage that he appeared to spend more time alone. Often enough, he seemed bitter because he's given so much to other people and they had forgotten him when he got old and was lonely. I don't think anybody could have provided surcease for the lonesomeness my father felt. I could probably count the number of times he put his arm around me and hugged me on one hand. My mother even less. They stiffened up if I tried. You get what you give.
I remember several single mothers who went back to school to become nurses simply because nursing paid good money. If they were doing it out of compassion for their fellow man I wasn't aware of it. They had mouths to feed.
I took up pipewelding because it paid good money. I know the feeling. I didn't weld pipe to put money in the investor's pockets who were financing the work I made money doing. If they got too demanding and demanded more of me than I was willing to give, I'd get the red ass, pack up my tools, and hit the ground running. Same way with demanding too much of nurses. It's just a job. No blame.
It's simple enough to alter my behavior if I understand what's being asked of me. All I'm really altering is my reaction to provocations I don't yet understand. The woman on the telephone I talked to about my appointments helped me to remember I'm nobody special to these people. I know better than to get critical with people who don't have enough time for me and my bag of tricks in the first place.
I can't claim to know an awful lot about medical institutions. Particularly as a patient. I've only been a patient a couple of times. When I was, they fixed what ailed me, and I didn't have to go back for the same ailment over and over. The incident that scared me about hospitals happened with my father when he was in his mid-eighties. He had some sort of problem that caused the visiting home nurse to have him checked in the hospital. When I heard about it I went to visit him. He was alone and in a very sulky mood. There was no blame in that. He was trussed up on a strait jacket.
He had been yanking the IVs out of his arms, and running up and down the halls like a happy child naked as a jaybird, and after three or four times of chasing him down they put the strait jacket on him and wouldn't take it off unless I was willing to check him out of the hospital or hire a non-relative guard to stay in his room with him. I wouldn't do that. This senile old man didn't even know it was his son that he looked at so balefully. I might have helped my father, but not this feral beast. I only knew him as my father, and he wasn't that person any more.
When the nurse tersely described his behavior I had no doubt it was true. I knew his ways and other men who had similar ways. One of them in the state hospital where I committed myself for a month to find out for myself if I was insane. I was there long enough for my purposes. I learned to recognize insanity from the inside out.
I witnessed the attendants put other giggly little men who behaved a lot like my father into strait jackets. The attendants never came close to doing something like that to me. One of the jobs my father had as a college student was working as an attendant at the state hospital in Mississippi. He told me horror stories. I wanted to know if they were true. I got lied to a lot. I needed to know something was true. It wasn't.
My father was the baby of his family. He wasn't supposed to show up. His oldest brother was eighteen years older than him. His parents both died in their seventies before my father was thirty-five years old. He didn't take it well. I oughta know. I'm the person he talked to about it when we worked out in the fields alone together. He told me about things that were none of my business. They were a burden. I was just a kid.
My father was a sociable man. He liked people and he liked to be around somebody all the time. It was only in his dotage that he appeared to spend more time alone. Often enough, he seemed bitter because he's given so much to other people and they had forgotten him when he got old and was lonely. I don't think anybody could have provided surcease for the lonesomeness my father felt. I could probably count the number of times he put his arm around me and hugged me on one hand. My mother even less. They stiffened up if I tried. You get what you give.
Monday, March 31, 2008
I've spent a good deal of the day getting ready to go over to the VA Hospital tomorrow bright and early. I got some gas. I didn't get much for $20. Having an internet connection is becoming more and more essential now to stay interactively connected to the outside world.
The way gasoline keeps going up, the outside world will be the next town over. We're being forced to returned to the grassroots level of dealing with people in the flesh. I don't care. I did my traveling when I was young, dumb, and full of cum. The Boomers who waited until they retired to travel can use the brochures they pored over and dreamed by to light up the fireplace to get ready to cook supper.
I can't imagine having to commute like I used to in order to work. My fuel bill would take away the only good reason to drive long distances to work. A good many local people drive 50-100 miles one way to work each day. They have to. There are not that many jobs around this rural county. I suspect there is going to be a lot of cheap, educated help going around begging for anything they can get soon.
I'm sort of resigned to the thought of finding out what sort of condition my ticker is in tomorrow. I'm a little nervous about the possible results. I smoked tobacco and other green things for most of my adult life. How much damage that's done to my heart is anybody's guess. Maybe not so shaky a guess after they run me through the chute tomorrow. That's about what the nurse on the phone described when I asked her what to expect.
My formative years were saturated with farm animals and taking care of them. As a result of that I sorta know what behavior to avoid if I wanna shuffle through this event as a typical everyday experience rather than an trying ordeal.
I guess it might seem odd to some people that I write about human freedom and of my intimate knowledge of how institutions work. I don't personally grok why this would be difficult to understand, but it's my gig and not theirs. It seems clear to me that many people don't seem to understand that, in America at least, they've been in and out of institutions since they were children.
Schools are institutions. One attends schools to get institutionalized. When it's looked at this way, my knowledge of institutions is not that profound. I know people who have been so institutionalized they can't live outside of them. They get jobs there and spend the rest of their lives institutionalizing others as if their righteous duty to God and man.
The way gasoline keeps going up, the outside world will be the next town over. We're being forced to returned to the grassroots level of dealing with people in the flesh. I don't care. I did my traveling when I was young, dumb, and full of cum. The Boomers who waited until they retired to travel can use the brochures they pored over and dreamed by to light up the fireplace to get ready to cook supper.
I can't imagine having to commute like I used to in order to work. My fuel bill would take away the only good reason to drive long distances to work. A good many local people drive 50-100 miles one way to work each day. They have to. There are not that many jobs around this rural county. I suspect there is going to be a lot of cheap, educated help going around begging for anything they can get soon.
I'm sort of resigned to the thought of finding out what sort of condition my ticker is in tomorrow. I'm a little nervous about the possible results. I smoked tobacco and other green things for most of my adult life. How much damage that's done to my heart is anybody's guess. Maybe not so shaky a guess after they run me through the chute tomorrow. That's about what the nurse on the phone described when I asked her what to expect.
My formative years were saturated with farm animals and taking care of them. As a result of that I sorta know what behavior to avoid if I wanna shuffle through this event as a typical everyday experience rather than an trying ordeal.
I guess it might seem odd to some people that I write about human freedom and of my intimate knowledge of how institutions work. I don't personally grok why this would be difficult to understand, but it's my gig and not theirs. It seems clear to me that many people don't seem to understand that, in America at least, they've been in and out of institutions since they were children.
Schools are institutions. One attends schools to get institutionalized. When it's looked at this way, my knowledge of institutions is not that profound. I know people who have been so institutionalized they can't live outside of them. They get jobs there and spend the rest of their lives institutionalizing others as if their righteous duty to God and man.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
I can't get over how much more convenient it is to have this pint-sized Bluetooth keyboard working like a charm now. It's just so much smaller and seems so much more ergonomic because of how I can move it out of my way with such ease, and use the desktop it usually occupies as a desk top. Since it's wireless I can just pick it up like an empty coffee cup and place it in any ol' empty spot around me without the usual cable hassle.
I got this one little ditty I play with my left hand that seems to move through the twelve bar blues pattern so close to being right I can't hardly stand it. I haven't got it down pat well enough to count it out without losing the sequence, but that's a little frightening because it means that if it don't count out right I've formed a habit with the wrong turnaround. This is a huge dilemma for me. I've reached the place with me and learning how to play new musical instruments that I realize that if I form the wrong habit it's almost impossible for me to correct it. It might look like I've successfully overcome the faulty pattern, but when I get pushed I reach for it all over again as if all that practice didn't mean a damned thing.
That is sort of the same place I am with playing the major and minor scales religiously every day. I can't ignore going through a particular scale for a particular key and coming out at either end of it on the wrong finger. I can't afford to forgive myself and act like I'll straighten it out later, because I probably won't. I'll have habituated myself to an unbreakable pattern because I didn't stop and correct my fingering mistakes as I progressed into the correct habits.
I really wanna push on through and get to the good stuff. I'm starting to taste it. I'm playing a twelve bar sequence of chords that I've memorized in Bb Major, and I'm working on memorizing another twelve bar chord progression in F Major. I'll just know when I get to where I'm aiming with this blues thing. The twelve bar blues progress into several of the more popular music styles including jazz and rock and roll. That's sort of why I have chosen to concentrate on getting the blues rudiments down pat before I explore other directions.
I'm fairly pleased at the progress I'm making with memorizing and playing the major and minor scales daily. I'm not that bright and shiny at it. Yesterday I put off playing the scales until the last few minutes before I went to bed. I kinda of get the feeling the non-thetic part of me likes to be a naughty boy and not submit to my Teutonic disciple. Fortunately for my self-pride the brat comes around and goes along to get along. Even it can't get over how keeping a long string of daily practice sessions really makes what seemed hard at first appear to be incrementally easier.
I'm starting to recognize the related patterns the various scales demand for everything to come out right at the end. I get intuitive flashes sometime when I recognize similarities in the patterns that somehow seem like they should have been apparent much earlier. Particularly in the interrelationships between the black and white keys. I won't try to describe what I observe. I don't seem able to hold the images that arrive in those brief flashes long enow to do them justice.
Even if I were able to do that at this juncture it wouldn't reveal anything new about the way things are. The design of the keyboard itself continues to amaze me. It amazes me, if for no other reason, than how it accommodates the ten fingers of the human hand. Nothing I do on a piano keyboard I will be able to accomplish for the rest of my life will ever challenge the status quo of piano keyboards as they exist presently.
I think I'm sort of a minimalist musically. I seem to adopt the philosophy that less is more when it comes to reaching out to an audience. Even if that audience is an audience of one, and that one listener is oneself. A couple or three notes placed together at the right time and place, and offered up on a tempo that befits the occasion is all that needs to change the lion into a state of tempered outlook.
I think that's why I got the response I did from playing the classical flute out here in the country where houses tend to be much further apart than in the suburbs and downtown. A simple nursery rhyme song can captivate a listener from a long ways away. That seems to work better in a rustic climate. Being surrounded by the objects of nature invites a more placid tweaking. It's not like I'm playing to scare away hungry grizzly bears.
Maybe I'm trying to charm Death so that It allows me to keep this body a while longer. After all, if it comes when my numbers up, there won't be nothing to make music with when dust returns to dust. I don't really believe that. I already get images that are more tempting than the ones I encounter in beta consciousness.
If you've never studied what goes on when you go to sleep I'd highly recommend you go to the trouble to Google it up. Currently, and for a fairly long while, EEG machines have been able to successfully distinguish four basic brainwave patterns. These four brainwave patterns sort of rule the hour each in their own time. Their time is when there are more of them present than there are of the others.
EEG machines can easily detect which of the four basic brain-wave patterns are stronger than the others at any particular time. When a person goes to sleep at night, the four phases of the sleep cycle are associated with the display of a predominance of one or the other of the four types of brain wave patterns.
This how they can wire you up to various feedback machines in the several sleep laboratories around the country, and tell exact which phase of sleep you're in at any time. Some of the most interesting scenarios described in the sleep literature happens when the laboratory technicians wake people up during various stages of the sleep cycle and point blank ask them what they were experiencing just before they woke them up.
The most intriguing comments these people offered were the descriptions they offered upon being awakened at the deepest level of the sleep cycle. This is the phase where the slowest brain waves are stronger than the other three brain wave types. These lowest frequency brain waves are called labeled delta waves. The comments the people woken up in the delta phase of the sleep cycle often speak of feeling like they were having a very significant dialogue with themselves about how life was going for them in the beta world recently, and surrounded by yellowish gold aura and atmosphere.
Some traditions suggest that if a person could let their body proceed to go to sleep and go through the entire sleep cycle without losing consciousness, what they would learn from that seemingly impossible journey would allow them to rule the world as if it were spinning like a toy in the palm of their hand.
This is a neat trick if you can pull it off. After a lifetime of taking a shot at it on a fairly regular basis, I can't rightly say I've being completely successful, but I can't honestly say I haven't either. Spotty, cum and go events like this, usually turn out to be a crap shoot with me. A lot like vaporware. YMMV. What happens if you do remain consciously aware for the entire sleep cycle seems self-explanatory if it happens, and nowheresville if you don't. You ain't nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.
I got this one little ditty I play with my left hand that seems to move through the twelve bar blues pattern so close to being right I can't hardly stand it. I haven't got it down pat well enough to count it out without losing the sequence, but that's a little frightening because it means that if it don't count out right I've formed a habit with the wrong turnaround. This is a huge dilemma for me. I've reached the place with me and learning how to play new musical instruments that I realize that if I form the wrong habit it's almost impossible for me to correct it. It might look like I've successfully overcome the faulty pattern, but when I get pushed I reach for it all over again as if all that practice didn't mean a damned thing.
That is sort of the same place I am with playing the major and minor scales religiously every day. I can't ignore going through a particular scale for a particular key and coming out at either end of it on the wrong finger. I can't afford to forgive myself and act like I'll straighten it out later, because I probably won't. I'll have habituated myself to an unbreakable pattern because I didn't stop and correct my fingering mistakes as I progressed into the correct habits.
I really wanna push on through and get to the good stuff. I'm starting to taste it. I'm playing a twelve bar sequence of chords that I've memorized in Bb Major, and I'm working on memorizing another twelve bar chord progression in F Major. I'll just know when I get to where I'm aiming with this blues thing. The twelve bar blues progress into several of the more popular music styles including jazz and rock and roll. That's sort of why I have chosen to concentrate on getting the blues rudiments down pat before I explore other directions.
I'm fairly pleased at the progress I'm making with memorizing and playing the major and minor scales daily. I'm not that bright and shiny at it. Yesterday I put off playing the scales until the last few minutes before I went to bed. I kinda of get the feeling the non-thetic part of me likes to be a naughty boy and not submit to my Teutonic disciple. Fortunately for my self-pride the brat comes around and goes along to get along. Even it can't get over how keeping a long string of daily practice sessions really makes what seemed hard at first appear to be incrementally easier.
I'm starting to recognize the related patterns the various scales demand for everything to come out right at the end. I get intuitive flashes sometime when I recognize similarities in the patterns that somehow seem like they should have been apparent much earlier. Particularly in the interrelationships between the black and white keys. I won't try to describe what I observe. I don't seem able to hold the images that arrive in those brief flashes long enow to do them justice.
Even if I were able to do that at this juncture it wouldn't reveal anything new about the way things are. The design of the keyboard itself continues to amaze me. It amazes me, if for no other reason, than how it accommodates the ten fingers of the human hand. Nothing I do on a piano keyboard I will be able to accomplish for the rest of my life will ever challenge the status quo of piano keyboards as they exist presently.
I think I'm sort of a minimalist musically. I seem to adopt the philosophy that less is more when it comes to reaching out to an audience. Even if that audience is an audience of one, and that one listener is oneself. A couple or three notes placed together at the right time and place, and offered up on a tempo that befits the occasion is all that needs to change the lion into a state of tempered outlook.
I think that's why I got the response I did from playing the classical flute out here in the country where houses tend to be much further apart than in the suburbs and downtown. A simple nursery rhyme song can captivate a listener from a long ways away. That seems to work better in a rustic climate. Being surrounded by the objects of nature invites a more placid tweaking. It's not like I'm playing to scare away hungry grizzly bears.
Maybe I'm trying to charm Death so that It allows me to keep this body a while longer. After all, if it comes when my numbers up, there won't be nothing to make music with when dust returns to dust. I don't really believe that. I already get images that are more tempting than the ones I encounter in beta consciousness.
If you've never studied what goes on when you go to sleep I'd highly recommend you go to the trouble to Google it up. Currently, and for a fairly long while, EEG machines have been able to successfully distinguish four basic brainwave patterns. These four brainwave patterns sort of rule the hour each in their own time. Their time is when there are more of them present than there are of the others.
EEG machines can easily detect which of the four basic brain-wave patterns are stronger than the others at any particular time. When a person goes to sleep at night, the four phases of the sleep cycle are associated with the display of a predominance of one or the other of the four types of brain wave patterns.
This how they can wire you up to various feedback machines in the several sleep laboratories around the country, and tell exact which phase of sleep you're in at any time. Some of the most interesting scenarios described in the sleep literature happens when the laboratory technicians wake people up during various stages of the sleep cycle and point blank ask them what they were experiencing just before they woke them up.
The most intriguing comments these people offered were the descriptions they offered upon being awakened at the deepest level of the sleep cycle. This is the phase where the slowest brain waves are stronger than the other three brain wave types. These lowest frequency brain waves are called labeled delta waves. The comments the people woken up in the delta phase of the sleep cycle often speak of feeling like they were having a very significant dialogue with themselves about how life was going for them in the beta world recently, and surrounded by yellowish gold aura and atmosphere.
Some traditions suggest that if a person could let their body proceed to go to sleep and go through the entire sleep cycle without losing consciousness, what they would learn from that seemingly impossible journey would allow them to rule the world as if it were spinning like a toy in the palm of their hand.
This is a neat trick if you can pull it off. After a lifetime of taking a shot at it on a fairly regular basis, I can't rightly say I've being completely successful, but I can't honestly say I haven't either. Spotty, cum and go events like this, usually turn out to be a crap shoot with me. A lot like vaporware. YMMV. What happens if you do remain consciously aware for the entire sleep cycle seems self-explanatory if it happens, and nowheresville if you don't. You ain't nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.