I've been taking some pictures of his little Buddha statue next door at my brother's house. It seems like a fun thing to do during various times of the year.

My new interest in photography seems a little forced. I reasoned that I owed it to myself to give it a whirl. I might appear to be obsessed with my house, and I am I suppose, because I take a lot of photographs of it. The ones I'm taking now has to do with the recent renovations to this house. It's mostly noteworthy because I began building this house over twenty years ago. I have lived in it during the entire construction of it, however slow that might be. This renovative work is the first real effort I've made in a long time. I seemed perfectly willing to let it rot down around me. Im not sure I feel any differently now.

This house is about all I've ever created to represent me when I'm gone. It will exist as my only remains as long as it remains. Frequently, I entertain the concern that this house will serve as my crematorium. Not intentionally, but because I'm getting older, and displaying the forgetfulness of the elderly. To what degree, I have no way of knowing. Everything I do makes sense to me most of the time. It's a little difficult to justify complete confidence in my competence with my collection of burnt pans and boilers laying around. Forgetting I've got stuff cooking on the stove is not an infrequent event. Each time it happens I renew my vows, but then it happens again, and I find myself sighing in comic relief.

This picture just stood out among most of the pictures I took around this time. The browns and reds in a warm light stand out against the gray of the windows. The window behind the chair used to have leaks all around it, and the window on the right just wasn't there. This is my sitting area. It looks much neater than it used to. Look at the same chairs in a pic just below.

I finally arranged my photo albums so I could post a specific picture. It all has to do with my ignorance of the iPhoto program on the Mac.

This photo shows the new decks we built on the east side of the house. The remodeling work on the southwest corner of the house can be seen. That's my friend Ben up on the second floor deck.

I cannot for the life of me get my library of photos to come up among the selections I can choose from on my browser. I get the same titles whether I've deleted them from the iPhoto program or not. This is messing with my mind. This is definitely not one of the plans that have come together for me. Most all of my photos are labeled with the numbers the program assigned them when I downloaded them from my camera to my computer. It's laborious just to hunt through them and find the ones I wanna write about. I end up just picking any photo that shows up when I click on something. Whatta drag...

I'm having problems uploading pics. It's gotta be my ignorance of how to catalog my photographs on my computer. Anyway, this is one of the shots of my house at some stage of development. There is more done than this picture shows. Maybe I can figure out how to get my logistics correct somewhere down the road.

These three girls taught me a lesson I'd been learning all day. Today was the first time i've taken my new camera out in public where there were a lot of people around. The occasion was a local barbeque cookoff. The building behind the girls is the county courthouse. I saw two of the girls standing near a temporary stage the sponsors had erected in their dance leotards. I asked them if I could take some pictures of them. They giggled and started posing right away. Then the girl in the center approached and asked if she could be in the pictures. Just to see what would happen I began to ask them to move this way or that, and they seemed to have a really good time posing for a perfect stranger. This was a real informative day. I'm beginning to understand why some people are so attracted to photography.

This is a shot I took from the north end of the family pond just west of my house. I take a lotta pictures of this pond. The surface of the water is always changing and there are a few stumps sticking up out of the water here and there that make for a good focus point. I took this shot from the paved road. The land behind the pond goes on for a mile or so and joins my younger brother's property. If you could follow to the right of the picture you would see how the land gradually slopes down to the river where we own both sides of it for a while. Most of the land along the river is swampy and floods every time it comes a good rain. It's just beautiful to me down there in the swamp. I'll go down there and take some pictures as soon as the bugs go away. We had a couple of hurricanes through here a few years ago, one following the other. The eye of both storms passed right through here and tore a lot of the trees in the swamp down.

The pond is there because my father and two younger brothers built the dam for it while I was away in the Navy. My father bought this property during that same period. I was raised across town on a much smaller farm. He sold the place I was raised to buy more land here. I was a little disappoint they sold my home place, but it was only a place we lived for 4-5 years so I wasn't that attached to it. I don't possess the sentimentality for this farm my younger brothers have. It's home to them from an early age. I am attached to my house. It's made of cypress trees I cut down in the swamp and hauled to the sawmill.

This is a picture of the drum I play each day. I might miss playing a day occasionally, but I'm real committed to playing it regularly. The blue chair came from my mother's house after she died. It was a gift to her from her children. It has motors in it to either use it as a LazyBoy type of recliner, but the real feature is that it will tilt forward to assist older people get out of the chair. This feature makes it possible to adjust it to a comfortable seat to play my drum.

The other articles in the picture won't be seen in this particular arrangement again, because while remodeling my house things got moved around. A lotta stuff finally got thrown away during this transition, and will never be seen again.

This is a test run to see what the page looks like with a photograph on it. If this works and it looks right, then I'll be posting a picture and writing comments about the picture. This shot is of the remodeling I'm doing on my house. This shows the lastest work I've done on it. Maybe this will work for me or it won't.

I switched over to the new Blogger format. That should renew this old account and get things started. I guess I'll have to get with Rainey to figure out how to post photographs here. My plan is to post one photograph and write about the content of the photo.

I don't know whether this blog is still working for me. I haven't posted for a long time. This message is just to see if it still works. I wanna put some pictures up.

I sorta intended to put some photos on this blog, but my interest in photography seems to be lagging. My brother loaned me his old camera for me to figure out whether or not I wanna buy one for myself. It keeps shutting itself down after each picture I take, even with new batteries. That's discouraging, but it shouldn't intervene if I really wanted to take photos. I have a difficult time trying to figure out why I'm taking pictures of stuff. Meanwhile, you can see some excellent pictures at my friend Rainey's blog at:

http://raineyp.blogspot.com

It's about time to write another entry to keep this blog current. I've been writing on livejournal, but now I have use of a digital camera, and I may want to put some of the pictures I take here. Of course, I have to figure out how to do that first.

I'm occasionally writing a blog over at:

http://home.earthlink.net/~fe1ix/

Most of the stuff I write is at:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/fe1ix/

I keep these older blogs up just so I can download copies if I ever take the notion. I enjoy the livejournal format for blogging much better because it comes with it's own comment section and allows me to edit blog entries after I've published better. Any comments that show up on the livejournal blog sends me an e-mail with several options in how I can treat the comment section.

The summer heat has backed off for a week or so. I haven't really been suffering from it all that much because I stay in the air conditioning that's at least moderately comfortable. It does lock me in to being inside though. If I go outside for over 15-20 minutes I start perspiring like crazy, and it takes at least a half hour to cool down again once I go inside.

The activity that has suffered most as a result of the heat has been my drumming. It's hard to get up the energy to deal with the heat and the physical exertion of playing the drum. The more I practice the less energy it takes to do the same thing. Ben and I played for about an hour this morning and I could tell I hadn't played as much since it got real hot. Ben has been practicing by himself a lot recently, and he sounds a lot more confident in his abilities. Exploring the drum has been one of the more rewarding things I've done in a long time.

It's about time for me to write something else on this blog site to keep it active. I'm writing regularly on:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/fe1ix/

I'm understanding more about my life and how it's been affected by my being a miser. I expected to get old and die, but I didn't really think about myself as a miser. Recently I wrote that I divorced my first wife over a chair she bought. Now I've figured out that I divorced my second wife over a car. She went out and bought the damn thing without telling me anything about it first.

Of course, if she had told me about it I would have been a total asshole and made her feel like shit. The more I uncover about my real motives the worse i feel about treating other people as if they should act like me. Of course they shouldn't act like me. Acting like a miser can be an unpleasant experience. No need for that.

It literally took five minutes from the time I clicked on the Blogger link for this new entry page to show up on my screen so I could start writing this blog entry. This should change tomorrow. "Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow. Tomorrow's just a day away. " At least, Sprint promised they'd install their fastest iteration of DSL tomorrow. I'm afraid to get my hopes up. There will probably be a freak snow storm that prevents them from doing it for another month.

Anyway, I'm writing my regular blog at LiveJournal now:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/fe1ix/

I will probably drop my Earthlink account after I get hooked up wirelessly to my brother's DSL account next door and use one of his e-mail accounts to get my mail. That will kill my ability to keep the Earthlink blog. I'll probably keep this blog up to keep it active until I decide whether or not I want to copy the entries to my hard drive. I've written a lot of stuff on this blog and I may want to use it to put together a book of some kind. First though, I have to copy the entries to the Earthlink blog. As soon as I cancel that account I won't be able to get there anymore.

Considering my history I doubt that will ever happen. I hardly ever read one of these entries again after I have published it, so the idea of editing a bunch of stuff from my past doesn't seem to inspire me to action. I basically write to put my past into some sort of order to give my gestalt a bit of integrity. I certainly understand that my description of some past event changes each time I write about it. That's not important, what does seem important though, is that I can reach for a version of reality that seems plausible for the present situation. Truth being a very relative state of affairs.

I've been putting off my dental problems. I never did have good teeth. I was getting fillings in the first grade. It never really got any better. I could have probably taken better care of my teeth and gone to the dentist more often, but more often than not the money had to go someplace else. I've still got all of my front teeth, but like an old horse, all the grinders in back are either missing or near gone. I gotta get some partials so I can eat better, but I keep putting it off. I have practically stopped smiling and showing my teeth. Opting for a closed-mouth grin instead. I see a lot of old people doing that. Losing my teeth don't seem so critical in the face of death. I'm not growing old gracefully, I'm just growing old. I haven't had many health problems, and I don't have many now. A touch of arthritis occasionally. Nothing persistent. My parents and their parents all lived long lives. I may live a long time too. On the other hand I could get shot before nightfall or hit by lightning or killed by a meteorite. I think the jealous husband deal is out the window though.

I feel a little lethargic and uninspired today. I got two more pieces of furniture to retrieve from my mother's house. I kind of dread going over there and getting them. We're supposed to get everything out of her house next Sunday. With the stuff already gone from the attic and upstairs bedroom, and everything in the cellar cleared out, it should be easy enough to finish it. There is a finality to it that seems to have some nostalgic emotion to it. We put mother in her grave and cleaned her house out and distributed her stuff among us. The airport authority will soon come in and bulldoze the house my mother and father lived and died in level to the ground, and then move the ground it sat on to a different place. Them ol' boys needed a taxi-way for their little airplanes they fly on Sundays to get away from it all. My mother and father's house was in their way. They got no mufflers on them Harley's up in the sky. They just make circles around town so everybody can see and hear them. Noisy crowd... that. Bragging rights...

I find my need to stop making claims to exist as a real impediment to writing prose. Back when I only wrote poetry I could disguise the claims I made in such a way as to conceal it to some degree. I wrote a long post on a shaman's group in which I discussed how moving around and dealing with strangers alone had caused me to let go of a lot of the stuff that seemed reliable when I was younger. When people live in a community and play the role assigned by that community it seems difficult for them to find out who they really are. They have to be who the other takes them for. I suspect some people think that putting a bunch of etheogens in their bodies so that their normal way of doing gets suspended, think they are dealing with a new reality, but then they go back to doing what they were doing previously, as if what they "learned" from etheogenic products never happened. They show up for work on time and nobody gnows anything happened to them at all. They have to do that. They're paid good money to be who they were hired to be. No real risk at all was taken. Fly them to La Paz without any money or identification and they would be totally lost and reduced to childishness. No blame. Being reduced to childishness might be one of the best things that could happen to them.

Children seem to get educated to learn to get ahead. For some, the head they get is the only one they will ever have until they face old age and death. Old age and death doesn't seem to have much respect for their education or where they think it's gotten them. It might seem difficult to put on the act you got paid for pretending to, when cancer is eating your belly up full time. Such reduces one to childishness in a very convincing way. Better not wait for that. The time to run away from home is now. Nobody gnows what all you've done when you down and out. Nobody cares. They got their own row to hoe. The hopeless have a hard time selling hope to other hopeless people. That can be a useful thing to understand. Hope is the only thing for sell in the world.

How oddly this week has passed by. I've had lots of visitors and been around my natal family more than usual. Mother's death so soon after the holidays has brought us together again just after we were glad for everyone to be home again. We have been dividing mother's household goods. We have to get them out of the house before they bulldoze it. They've already bought the house through eminent domain, and there's a deadline for getting what we want out of THEIR house. My siblings and I are being ever so kind to each other. All of us vowing that we won't fight over the inheritance, but forces are shaping up that indicate such might not be so. I've said earlier that I wouldn't fight over these things, but I was wrong. I will fight for my rightful share, and if I get anything out of it, I won't give it to the poor either. Well, except for myself, of course. I am is poor.

I'm actually not truly poor. I do own a little property, but my financial resources are such that paying taxes on it requires living evenly more frugally than if I didn't have it. Things may get a little better, but I'll still have to budget with a meticulousness and devotion that doesn't come natural to me. Actually, maybe it's really elegance that I'm a little short on instead. Like any other problem I encounter, I romanticize my low-ball existence into an adventure I'm eager to engage in. Why would I not?

I'm getting flack from several sources about my use of projection as a writing tool. One of these sources are inside my family. Maybe there are two of them or maybe really just one acting for the another's concerns, yet feigning that concern as their own invention. All of these people are females. My writing seems to elicit concern from the court ladies. I can't help from being somewhat alarmed because they have always come through for me in the past. Maybe because they feel so protective toward me, they feel priviledged to empower themselves to critic my descriptions. No blame.

I do appear to stand before some portal presently. I am is abandoning indulgences from the past with little regard. It seems more serious than it has in the recent past, and it's behavior suggest a change of heart. I feel patient about letting it unfold itself to me, but not so eager to encounter the source of these changes that I feel a need to openly embrace what might get sot before me. My mood reminds me of the ambiance the croaking of Poe's raven conjures in me.

"Once more into the breech!"