❧
It's been said that my mother wasn't an especially good cook. I've said it myself. The one thing my parents did know about was fresh cow milk, and what to do with before a reliable source of refrigeration came along. I used to milk those Jersey cows. They were famous for the amount of butterfat in their milk. Nothing we did back in my early years had anything to do with pasteurizing cow milk. As the milk got older they did different things to it to keep it useful and not dangerous.
About the only thing I had to do with this process other than milk the cows was to help churn butter. Many an hour has been spent plunging the paddle up and down, up and down. It's the rhythm of life. Like what is indicated by the ringing of a village bell. If it rings at the right time, then everything is cool. But, if that bell rings at some unannounced time, it's "Katy, bar the door!"
When I worked up in Columbus, Nebraska helping to build a corn processing plant I became familiar with tornado sirens. Columbus is located on the northeast side of the Platte River. The locals that worked on the same jobsite had a saying or some sort of belief that the river protected Columbus from tornados.
Maybe so. I only lived and worked there in "tornado alley" for three months, and we worked lots of overtime. The sirens were a fixture. What the locals told me on the job was all I ever got to know about that town. Many times after we got off working twelve hour shifts, we'd stop by the designated road whore construction worker bar.
A smart family man might stop there for a quick one and get on home to momma and the kids. People like that come and go in industrial construction crew. A great majority of them have been divorced, and many of them have divorced several times. It's an addiction. Living among strangers who don't know your history can be told anything, even the truth, and they don't have much choice but to take you at your word.
Living that way usually means that the traveler (who is addicted to creating their own personality as they go along don't hold no truck with the God's own truth). The truth is what's useful or not. Granted, the same information that wasn't available to the strangers I lied to, is quite available over the internet. It doesn't matter. I just hafta be mo' cautious about how I arrange data and facts to come up with believable figures. If you don't understand, just leave a comment. '-)
A first and only event did happen in Columbus, Nebraska. I went to a comedy club. Why would I not? I was working and making good money. Even a dedicated miser can afford a night on the town occasionally. If I enjoyed myself at all at that comedy club, I enjoyed myself too much. I guess I laughed so hard I got embarrassed. The comedians got mad at me. My truly hysterical responses drew more attention than their jokes.
The same thing has happened to me at clubs where I used to go to dance. I got more attention from my dancing than the band did from their playing. They hated me. Some of them I knew personally. As a result of my fancy footwork, in modern-day terms, they de-friended me.
No blame. Why would they not? Their best was not enough. People with a natural gift for rabble rousing are as rare as hen's teeth. That's why when they come along and the people start feeling it, their natural response is the proof of the pudding, the crowd goes wild!
Some bitter, spiteful people do their dead-level best to rid the world of people like me. They know what I'm like at first sight, and start plotting and getting the tar hot and the down mattresses out of the attic. They wanna shame me before my sheer presence reveals their mundane inauthenticity. The well has run dry. I just run away and hide. I am is hiding now. I'm hoarding my poetry.
❦
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Monday, October 12, 2009
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?
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?
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Time's A'wasting!
➾
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.
➽
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.
➽
Sunday, October 04, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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. '-)
Thursday, February 05, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
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/
http://applepandowdy.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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. '-)
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. '-)
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Pale Horse
I used to be a dancing fool, and then I got mixed up with the wrong people. I married a woman who was raised by Fundamentalists who thought dancing was a sin, and that got in my way for a while. Before her, I literally didn't realize their were heathen like that. They were against everything I ever wanted to explore. Then, I "tuned in, turned on, and dropped out", and dancing found it's way back into my life, and all was love and kisses for a while, until I rode tha pale horse one time too many and it taught me I better find a path with heart if I wanted what i came for before the chance was gone.
The only thing I seem to have really practiced in this body since I've had it has been to find out all the possible ways to abandon it at the first appearance of the light. Sure, I've remembered what's what after I had to let it go temporarily while i was bartering for this particular body, but it's easy to get distracted with illusion and all the fascinating mannerisms that intrigue the other into offering enticements to stick around.
Pale horse? I guess it might be easy for some to guess I've been reading about the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I never have studied the mythology behind this too much. I'm thinking maybe I will. I know I'm intrigued by the very notion of reading about "a pale horse" ridden by a pale green rider the colour of death. Mostly as a descriptor. If I haven't been intrigued to the point of even a low-level research into the possible me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of "a pale horse" with a "pale-as-death rider", then if I use these terms as descriptors because they fascinated me without going to the trouble to find out why, then there is a good chance most of my readers won't go to that trouble either, so that's why I'd better do it, just in case they get a hair up their ass, and do look it up..
Besides, there are those other colored horses that can also be a source of intrigue. The "black horse". The "red horse" (anybody with a right hemisphere just knows this has got to get Martian), and the "white horse". You have studied The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, have you not? Same symbols. Same colours. Sa-me me-and-thee-ing. It's the story of Everyman all over again, about the Hero Of A Thousand Faces. That's all anybody really kneads to gnow whether they know it or not.
I like to sit here and make up a bunch of lies to amuse myself. Time flies. There's nothing else to do. I've never denied myself too many opportunities no matter what it cost me. It's cost me plenty. But still, I realize that if I don't get up and move my body occasionally it will cause me more problems than I really wanna deal with because eventually it'll force me back to begging. "There's no fool like an old fool."
That's why I'm enjoying the drum machine on my digital keyboard. Presently, I've got #018 16BeatUpTempo kicking it out over and over and over again. I just love that about digital computations. It's been playing in the background for at least two hours without the slightest variation. Two hours that I don't even remember because everything was sonically the sa-me. Why would I? The tie-to-me (time) went flying, leaving the body here to create non-sense to cover it's tracks.
Dancing to the rhythms provided by the drum machine brings me back down to Earth. It provides me with some aerobic exercise. It changes my mind to include my physical body and all it's aches and pains. I don't have to stay here. But, when I'm there, I get lonely for it. I may have to get another body soon. The nostalgia I've developed for this one is a great weakness I intend to over-co-me. Soon.
The only thing I seem to have really practiced in this body since I've had it has been to find out all the possible ways to abandon it at the first appearance of the light. Sure, I've remembered what's what after I had to let it go temporarily while i was bartering for this particular body, but it's easy to get distracted with illusion and all the fascinating mannerisms that intrigue the other into offering enticements to stick around.
Pale horse? I guess it might be easy for some to guess I've been reading about the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I never have studied the mythology behind this too much. I'm thinking maybe I will. I know I'm intrigued by the very notion of reading about "a pale horse" ridden by a pale green rider the colour of death. Mostly as a descriptor. If I haven't been intrigued to the point of even a low-level research into the possible me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of "a pale horse" with a "pale-as-death rider", then if I use these terms as descriptors because they fascinated me without going to the trouble to find out why, then there is a good chance most of my readers won't go to that trouble either, so that's why I'd better do it, just in case they get a hair up their ass, and do look it up..
Besides, there are those other colored horses that can also be a source of intrigue. The "black horse". The "red horse" (anybody with a right hemisphere just knows this has got to get Martian), and the "white horse". You have studied The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, have you not? Same symbols. Same colours. Sa-me me-and-thee-ing. It's the story of Everyman all over again, about the Hero Of A Thousand Faces. That's all anybody really kneads to gnow whether they know it or not.
I like to sit here and make up a bunch of lies to amuse myself. Time flies. There's nothing else to do. I've never denied myself too many opportunities no matter what it cost me. It's cost me plenty. But still, I realize that if I don't get up and move my body occasionally it will cause me more problems than I really wanna deal with because eventually it'll force me back to begging. "There's no fool like an old fool."
That's why I'm enjoying the drum machine on my digital keyboard. Presently, I've got #018 16BeatUpTempo kicking it out over and over and over again. I just love that about digital computations. It's been playing in the background for at least two hours without the slightest variation. Two hours that I don't even remember because everything was sonically the sa-me. Why would I? The tie-to-me (time) went flying, leaving the body here to create non-sense to cover it's tracks.
Dancing to the rhythms provided by the drum machine brings me back down to Earth. It provides me with some aerobic exercise. It changes my mind to include my physical body and all it's aches and pains. I don't have to stay here. But, when I'm there, I get lonely for it. I may have to get another body soon. The nostalgia I've developed for this one is a great weakness I intend to over-co-me. Soon.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Either On Earth Or In Heaven
Some people take it that I'm addressing them personally because that's what they need from me. Why else would they read my shit? It's not true, and they don't care anyway. Why would they bother? I don't know what the truth is. I don't rightly care. To me it's a subjective affair at best, and only disturbing to think otherwise. I don't need/knead yo' blessing or consider your disdain a curse.
#020 JazzRock
Have you ever notice that about yo'self? That you feel misunderstood, and yet at the same time you of all people specifically know everything there is to know. If you know everything there is to know, then one of the things you must know is that everybody knows everything just like you, and for that reason alone, it's not possible that you could be misunderstood. Maybe the only problem you actually have is that there is nothing for a problem solver like you to figure out. It's all kismet, man, fatalism rules!
What's understood on the "everybody knows" level is not transposable to the "nobody knows" level of understanding. A chess grandmaster can't automagically scrub up, man the scalpels and do brain surgery as if it were just a chess game. Contrarily, the brain surgeon might get emasculated big time in a Washington Square chess match for $10 a throw. Expertise don't change it's stripes or spots for love nor money.
Practically every wisdom book ever taken seriously for any enduring amount of time at all speaks of unity of some described sort being the goal of all endeavors. Sartre writes about homo sapiens being possessed of two types of consciousness', the thetic and non-thetic. Whether that's the same as saying theistic and atheistic is a moot point for some.
The ancient Coptic translations of the Gospel of Thomas persistently states that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven a person must "make the two into One". Atonement seems to mean a lot in many different disciplines. I've studied a lotta mostly unapproved systems for bringing unity about, but I don't think the main chance is about systems of expertise.
Homo sapiens became masters of the known world a long time before they invented writing and the more abstract systems of dividing and conquering. Why does that have to be an ongoing process? Why can't the rich just get rich and stay that way? Why doesn't money make people as happy as they dream it will?
I don't hear too many people saying that power would make them happy, so what's the difference in thinking that money will make you happy. Money makes you powerful. Power makes you happy because it brings you money? Money and power are possible. At least for a while. For some, the only goal worth pursuing is immortality. You can be forgiven for desiring money or power. Everybody understands why you might want that, but not immortality?
44 Jesus said, "Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven, either on earth or in heaven."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
#020 JazzRock
Have you ever notice that about yo'self? That you feel misunderstood, and yet at the same time you of all people specifically know everything there is to know. If you know everything there is to know, then one of the things you must know is that everybody knows everything just like you, and for that reason alone, it's not possible that you could be misunderstood. Maybe the only problem you actually have is that there is nothing for a problem solver like you to figure out. It's all kismet, man, fatalism rules!
What's understood on the "everybody knows" level is not transposable to the "nobody knows" level of understanding. A chess grandmaster can't automagically scrub up, man the scalpels and do brain surgery as if it were just a chess game. Contrarily, the brain surgeon might get emasculated big time in a Washington Square chess match for $10 a throw. Expertise don't change it's stripes or spots for love nor money.
Practically every wisdom book ever taken seriously for any enduring amount of time at all speaks of unity of some described sort being the goal of all endeavors. Sartre writes about homo sapiens being possessed of two types of consciousness', the thetic and non-thetic. Whether that's the same as saying theistic and atheistic is a moot point for some.
The ancient Coptic translations of the Gospel of Thomas persistently states that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven a person must "make the two into One". Atonement seems to mean a lot in many different disciplines. I've studied a lotta mostly unapproved systems for bringing unity about, but I don't think the main chance is about systems of expertise.
Homo sapiens became masters of the known world a long time before they invented writing and the more abstract systems of dividing and conquering. Why does that have to be an ongoing process? Why can't the rich just get rich and stay that way? Why doesn't money make people as happy as they dream it will?
I don't hear too many people saying that power would make them happy, so what's the difference in thinking that money will make you happy. Money makes you powerful. Power makes you happy because it brings you money? Money and power are possible. At least for a while. For some, the only goal worth pursuing is immortality. You can be forgiven for desiring money or power. Everybody understands why you might want that, but not immortality?
44 Jesus said, "Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven, either on earth or in heaven."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
Friday, May 09, 2008
Quietly Not There
Despite all my whining this morning i got everything I usually do done. Maybe even more than usual. I played all my scales and boogie woogie exercises. I spent four or five hours with visitors. I tried mightily not to whine to them, and was only partially successful. I sort of have something to live for now. At least for the next year. I wanna see what happens after I have played the scales every day for a year.
The big deal about his is that I have to do it long enough to get bored. That's a very critical stage in the learning process I favor. I am thoroughly convinced that bored people are boring. Hardly anything frightens me more than the idea that I'm boring. I'll go to any lengths to keep that from happening. That's my true motivation for practically any project I undertake.
Many of the projects that attract me are those in which there is a period in the process in which the biggest problem is becoming bored with the material, and stopping because it's so hard to carry on. If I don't carry on though, if I do reach a point where I break out, if I haven't practiced long enough, then I don't have enough material to use when I do break out to do something interesting to keep from getting bored.
Yesterday when Rainey and I played together for a brief time, I played triads in the key of C Major. I could have done the same thing I did yesterday five years ago or better. I don't know why I didn't at least play a little bit of the boogie woogie I've been practicing. Probably because even though I have practiced it some, it still sounds very amateurish.
I've said that one of the reasons I wanted to learn and practice the major and minor scales is so that I could transpose songs to any other key and be able to play competently. I don't know if that's what I'm actually attempting to do. I don't think I'm preparing myself to play with other people. I think I'm doing this to satisfy some personal urge or whim. That's why I don't care if it appears that I'm making progress or not. I'm not doing what I'm doing for-the-other, but for-myself.
The big deal about his is that I have to do it long enough to get bored. That's a very critical stage in the learning process I favor. I am thoroughly convinced that bored people are boring. Hardly anything frightens me more than the idea that I'm boring. I'll go to any lengths to keep that from happening. That's my true motivation for practically any project I undertake.
Many of the projects that attract me are those in which there is a period in the process in which the biggest problem is becoming bored with the material, and stopping because it's so hard to carry on. If I don't carry on though, if I do reach a point where I break out, if I haven't practiced long enough, then I don't have enough material to use when I do break out to do something interesting to keep from getting bored.
Yesterday when Rainey and I played together for a brief time, I played triads in the key of C Major. I could have done the same thing I did yesterday five years ago or better. I don't know why I didn't at least play a little bit of the boogie woogie I've been practicing. Probably because even though I have practiced it some, it still sounds very amateurish.
I've said that one of the reasons I wanted to learn and practice the major and minor scales is so that I could transpose songs to any other key and be able to play competently. I don't know if that's what I'm actually attempting to do. I don't think I'm preparing myself to play with other people. I think I'm doing this to satisfy some personal urge or whim. That's why I don't care if it appears that I'm making progress or not. I'm not doing what I'm doing for-the-other, but for-myself.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Cowboy Singin' At The Break Of Day
When Ben came over this morning I told him about getting the converter box coupons and buying the converter box. He wanted to see what it looked like right away. He saw the weak signals i was getting with my old antenna. I had another antenna i got from my parent's old house when they went to tear it down. It is a much bigger antenna, and it still had the brackets on it from before. We mounted that old antenna on the edge of the upstairs deck and played around with it to see if we could get a stronger signal. We actually did.
I'm not getting all the stations I got with an over-the-air analog signal, but the ones I do get are very clear and the sound is clean as a whistle. I was eager to get this coupon and converter box because it would be a cheap way for me to find out how many digital stations I could pick up here at my house. That's the only way I could assure myself that if I bought one of the new wide-screen LCD television sets that I would receive enough stations to make it worth my while. I think the answer is yes.
I don't know the digital TV lingo very well. I've only read about it. I've seen the demos at the big box stores. There is a large Sony TV set up at Sam's Club over in the regional town nearby. I feel like an Okie walking around in New York City when I see it. It's the most realistic images I've ever seen. I have thought it was possible to send pictures of that resolution and detail over the air. $6000. I won't be buying one of those sets. Not without winning the lottery.
The thing of it is that the picture I'm getting on my old style TV set is a much better picture that what I was getting just yesterday. The situation is a lot like my DSL connection. I have the cheapest and therefore the slowest DSL account my ISP offered. It's still more than i can really afford. If I paid $5 more a month I could upgrade to twice the download speed. I'm not gonna do it. Compared to dial-up, the speed improvement of even the slowest DSL account is easy to live with.
I probably won't ever have the highest quality electronic gadgets in my house because I'm poor as a church mouse, I got a couple of other gadgets that cost me plenty considering my budget, but I use both of them much more often than I watch television. My two keyboards. The one I use to compose words is obviously my favorite way to waste time. The other one I'm just getting around to learning how to use. I don't seem much in a hurry to do that. I know that it will come in time, but not of my own choosing.
Some of the scales of the major and minor keys are becoming very familiar to me. Familiar by touch and some even by sight. I'm not sure how to describe what I'm writing about. Intellectually, I know which piano key to press down on in the correct sequence, and I know which fingers to use to do that. Accomplishing that in a smooth, rhythmic fashion is another story.
What I mean about some of the scales of some of the twelve keys becoming more familiar to me is that I anticipate what the next note will be and where it's located, and I'm not having to figure it out rotely so much. The sooner I recognize which note I should play next and why, the more confidently I can attack each note and thus the entire scale. Like D Major. My fingers seemed so clumsy when I first started playing D Major I thought I'd never get through it easily without making one mistake after the other. So, I practice playing D Major apart from when I played all the scales, and I practiced with separate hands sometime for an hour before I played D Major with both hands.
Now, when I'm playing through the major and minor scales by following the Circle of Fifths and I get around to D Major, it's like I can relax and cruise through this one. I don't have to be so careful about making a mistake. I don't make so many mistakes in choosing the wrong piano key. The biggest problem I'm having playing the scales is using the wrong finger, even if it's the right note in the sequence.
As far as the notes are concerned, I know when i've made a mistake from the sound. Somehow, I can take that into account, anticipate the approaching problem area as I play, and eventually reach for the correct note. How I react to striking the wrong piano key and hearing the wrong sound in the wrong place, has progressed from immediately getting confused, losing my place in the sequence, and having to start from the beginning of the scale again to figure out how to get past that mistake.
The most common way I realize I have drifted off from using the correct finger to play the correct note is when I play the scale from the low register to the highest register and back down again, and reach the root note with some other finger than the one I started the scale with. There may be a couple of exceptions, but generally that's a no/no. I'm supposed to end back up on the root note with the same finger I started out with or I've done something wrong. I may have played all the right notes in the scale, but used the wrong finger to do it with. That's my most common mistake playing these scales.
I don't think it's gonna be that long before I start using my friend Rick's technique for playing the scales. It's not actually his technique. It the technique one of his teachers used, and the way he tells of it seems to indicate the practice to him was loathsome. His teacher would put a dime on the back of each of his hands while he played the scales, and if one of the dimes fell off or he made a mistake, he had to start all over from the beginning.
I've tried to do that. Well, at least with a dime on one hand. It's not easy for me to do. I find myself really having to reach for the piano key with just the finger I use to press it down. The most difficult part of this so far is to not use my hand to reach for the note, just my finger, or the dime falls off. I can see where practicing to use my fingers independently like could be useful in all sorts of endeavors. Like playing with my fingers individually on my djembe drum. Presently, I don't have that much control over my fingers to play the drum that way, but I can see where I might one day.
I'm not getting all the stations I got with an over-the-air analog signal, but the ones I do get are very clear and the sound is clean as a whistle. I was eager to get this coupon and converter box because it would be a cheap way for me to find out how many digital stations I could pick up here at my house. That's the only way I could assure myself that if I bought one of the new wide-screen LCD television sets that I would receive enough stations to make it worth my while. I think the answer is yes.
I don't know the digital TV lingo very well. I've only read about it. I've seen the demos at the big box stores. There is a large Sony TV set up at Sam's Club over in the regional town nearby. I feel like an Okie walking around in New York City when I see it. It's the most realistic images I've ever seen. I have thought it was possible to send pictures of that resolution and detail over the air. $6000. I won't be buying one of those sets. Not without winning the lottery.
The thing of it is that the picture I'm getting on my old style TV set is a much better picture that what I was getting just yesterday. The situation is a lot like my DSL connection. I have the cheapest and therefore the slowest DSL account my ISP offered. It's still more than i can really afford. If I paid $5 more a month I could upgrade to twice the download speed. I'm not gonna do it. Compared to dial-up, the speed improvement of even the slowest DSL account is easy to live with.
I probably won't ever have the highest quality electronic gadgets in my house because I'm poor as a church mouse, I got a couple of other gadgets that cost me plenty considering my budget, but I use both of them much more often than I watch television. My two keyboards. The one I use to compose words is obviously my favorite way to waste time. The other one I'm just getting around to learning how to use. I don't seem much in a hurry to do that. I know that it will come in time, but not of my own choosing.
Some of the scales of the major and minor keys are becoming very familiar to me. Familiar by touch and some even by sight. I'm not sure how to describe what I'm writing about. Intellectually, I know which piano key to press down on in the correct sequence, and I know which fingers to use to do that. Accomplishing that in a smooth, rhythmic fashion is another story.
What I mean about some of the scales of some of the twelve keys becoming more familiar to me is that I anticipate what the next note will be and where it's located, and I'm not having to figure it out rotely so much. The sooner I recognize which note I should play next and why, the more confidently I can attack each note and thus the entire scale. Like D Major. My fingers seemed so clumsy when I first started playing D Major I thought I'd never get through it easily without making one mistake after the other. So, I practice playing D Major apart from when I played all the scales, and I practiced with separate hands sometime for an hour before I played D Major with both hands.
Now, when I'm playing through the major and minor scales by following the Circle of Fifths and I get around to D Major, it's like I can relax and cruise through this one. I don't have to be so careful about making a mistake. I don't make so many mistakes in choosing the wrong piano key. The biggest problem I'm having playing the scales is using the wrong finger, even if it's the right note in the sequence.
As far as the notes are concerned, I know when i've made a mistake from the sound. Somehow, I can take that into account, anticipate the approaching problem area as I play, and eventually reach for the correct note. How I react to striking the wrong piano key and hearing the wrong sound in the wrong place, has progressed from immediately getting confused, losing my place in the sequence, and having to start from the beginning of the scale again to figure out how to get past that mistake.
The most common way I realize I have drifted off from using the correct finger to play the correct note is when I play the scale from the low register to the highest register and back down again, and reach the root note with some other finger than the one I started the scale with. There may be a couple of exceptions, but generally that's a no/no. I'm supposed to end back up on the root note with the same finger I started out with or I've done something wrong. I may have played all the right notes in the scale, but used the wrong finger to do it with. That's my most common mistake playing these scales.
I don't think it's gonna be that long before I start using my friend Rick's technique for playing the scales. It's not actually his technique. It the technique one of his teachers used, and the way he tells of it seems to indicate the practice to him was loathsome. His teacher would put a dime on the back of each of his hands while he played the scales, and if one of the dimes fell off or he made a mistake, he had to start all over from the beginning.
I've tried to do that. Well, at least with a dime on one hand. It's not easy for me to do. I find myself really having to reach for the piano key with just the finger I use to press it down. The most difficult part of this so far is to not use my hand to reach for the note, just my finger, or the dime falls off. I can see where practicing to use my fingers independently like could be useful in all sorts of endeavors. Like playing with my fingers individually on my djembe drum. Presently, I don't have that much control over my fingers to play the drum that way, but I can see where I might one day.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
This Worrisome land
It's been a strange day. I almost forgot to vote. I was very surprised that there was no line. Either when i got to the polls or by the time I left. I went to vote when i did because I got the digital converter box coupons by snail mail today. Radio Shack was the only place in town that carried them that had any in stock. They were $10 more than I expected. In the end I had to pay $24 above and beyond the $40 coupon. I figured that was a cheap enough price to pay to find out how well I can receive over-the-air digital signals. Now, after all this time of being curious, I have a pretty good idea. Lousy. I get lousy over-the-air digital signals here. Just as i figured. This does not bode well for my TV watching after they cut off the analog broadcast signal next February. The poor get poorer.
I did get a couple of stations pretty good, and when the signal was strong it was very good. I guess I am more impressed by the sound than the picture. The sound is either on or off, and it's pretty quiet about it either way. Very seldom is the analog audio signal quiet. Even on the best of days there seems to be some static in the audio. I may be able to rig up a better antenna setup and improve what I'm getting. I don't watch a lot of TV, but sometimes it's a good distraction from the rut I'm usually in.
I really am interested in the results of the elections today. I don't think the results will prove to be that dynamic. I don't think either candidate will leave the race when the dealings done. When i turned the news on a while back, the first thing the announcers said was that the polls were still open and they didn't have any results yet. They implied that tuning in around eight o'clock tonight might prove more fruitful. It'll probably be over by nine o'clock.
One incident happened at the polls while I was there. A bent over, shriveled up old black man came in just behind me. I had to wait for the only person in line in front of me to get their business straight. I heard the old man explain that he couldn't read or write and that he had never voted before.
By the time they arranged for someone to read the list of candidates to him and helped him make his mark on the ballot, I has messed my ballot up by marking two candidates when i was only allowed to vote for one. The person helping the old man with his ballot was the person who had to approve of me getting another ballot, so i stood there listening while she helped him.
He only wanted to vote for Obama and a woman for the governor's office, and a woman for the Senator seat. After he had made his mark for those three offices he didn't vote anymore. The woman read him the candidates for some other offices too, but after each one he would tell her, "No ma'am. I don't know nothing about what those people are running for. I just wanted to vote my first time in my whole life, for a black man."
I did get a couple of stations pretty good, and when the signal was strong it was very good. I guess I am more impressed by the sound than the picture. The sound is either on or off, and it's pretty quiet about it either way. Very seldom is the analog audio signal quiet. Even on the best of days there seems to be some static in the audio. I may be able to rig up a better antenna setup and improve what I'm getting. I don't watch a lot of TV, but sometimes it's a good distraction from the rut I'm usually in.
I really am interested in the results of the elections today. I don't think the results will prove to be that dynamic. I don't think either candidate will leave the race when the dealings done. When i turned the news on a while back, the first thing the announcers said was that the polls were still open and they didn't have any results yet. They implied that tuning in around eight o'clock tonight might prove more fruitful. It'll probably be over by nine o'clock.
One incident happened at the polls while I was there. A bent over, shriveled up old black man came in just behind me. I had to wait for the only person in line in front of me to get their business straight. I heard the old man explain that he couldn't read or write and that he had never voted before.
By the time they arranged for someone to read the list of candidates to him and helped him make his mark on the ballot, I has messed my ballot up by marking two candidates when i was only allowed to vote for one. The person helping the old man with his ballot was the person who had to approve of me getting another ballot, so i stood there listening while she helped him.
He only wanted to vote for Obama and a woman for the governor's office, and a woman for the Senator seat. After he had made his mark for those three offices he didn't vote anymore. The woman read him the candidates for some other offices too, but after each one he would tell her, "No ma'am. I don't know nothing about what those people are running for. I just wanted to vote my first time in my whole life, for a black man."
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Hopelessness Rules!
I worked all fall and part of the winter clearing the underbrush out that grew up after those two hurricanes come through here within a matter of weeks. The first one softened things up by soaking the ground down to the bottom of the tap roots, and the second hurricane come along and ripped and tore all the trees up. It looked like a war zone for years.
Before the hurricanes my house was surrounded by thirty year old Southern yellow pines that rose a good sixty feet (18.25 M) into the blue sky and most of those pines were over a foot in diameter at their base. They provided a canopy that kept the underbrush to a minimum. I could see down the slope to the farm pond my father and brothers created by damming up a small creek. It was a very attractive sight. On the other side of the pond is the cow barn and a couple hundred acres of pasture that runs all the way down to the flood plains of the river.
After the hurricanes removed 90% of that canopy by force, mother nature started growing all kinds of plants where the sun could now shine in. In a year I couldn't see the pond any more because the rapidly growing underbrush became a visual barrier between the pond and me. I was very sad about my quaint little hootch in the pines having the romantic background ripped away. Without the trees my formerly quaint hootch looked more like the rathole it actually is, and I seem more like a penniless recluse than an old beatnik/hippie who has seen a thing or two. Who hasn't?
At least I'm a penniless recluse who still has his health. The arthritis I whine about is about the only physical problems I'm possessed by in any persistent manner. At the age of sixty-nine an increasing number of my high school classmates have had serious problems and some have died. Oddly, not a great number. Most of the ones I know about that got killed by accidents or got sick and died were considered well off, and on the whole, fairly decent, respectable people. The men were thought of as good fathers to their children. Not like me. They died anyway. What's the point of being good or bad if you're gonna die anyway?
Why life? Why death? No, really? What's the point? Even if you get to be a rock and roll star and live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory or drag it out in some loquacious, hardscrabble misery for as long as you possibly can... what's the point of life at all?
Maybe what I'm really asking is: What's the point of consciousness? What is the point of being consciously aware of the futility of life if you're just gonna die anyway. What is there to be gained by that? If the facticity of being consciously aware of life and death made any difference to anybody about anything, then that might mean there is such a thing as hope.
That is absolutely not true. Believing in hopelessness instead of hope is our only salvation. Hope is the only product anybody got for sale for any reason. Repent! Stop buying into hope. It's a shell game. First you see it, then you don't. Losing hope is the only thing in life that really hurts. Just say no! Hopelessness rules!! '-)
Before the hurricanes my house was surrounded by thirty year old Southern yellow pines that rose a good sixty feet (18.25 M) into the blue sky and most of those pines were over a foot in diameter at their base. They provided a canopy that kept the underbrush to a minimum. I could see down the slope to the farm pond my father and brothers created by damming up a small creek. It was a very attractive sight. On the other side of the pond is the cow barn and a couple hundred acres of pasture that runs all the way down to the flood plains of the river.
After the hurricanes removed 90% of that canopy by force, mother nature started growing all kinds of plants where the sun could now shine in. In a year I couldn't see the pond any more because the rapidly growing underbrush became a visual barrier between the pond and me. I was very sad about my quaint little hootch in the pines having the romantic background ripped away. Without the trees my formerly quaint hootch looked more like the rathole it actually is, and I seem more like a penniless recluse than an old beatnik/hippie who has seen a thing or two. Who hasn't?
At least I'm a penniless recluse who still has his health. The arthritis I whine about is about the only physical problems I'm possessed by in any persistent manner. At the age of sixty-nine an increasing number of my high school classmates have had serious problems and some have died. Oddly, not a great number. Most of the ones I know about that got killed by accidents or got sick and died were considered well off, and on the whole, fairly decent, respectable people. The men were thought of as good fathers to their children. Not like me. They died anyway. What's the point of being good or bad if you're gonna die anyway?
Why life? Why death? No, really? What's the point? Even if you get to be a rock and roll star and live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory or drag it out in some loquacious, hardscrabble misery for as long as you possibly can... what's the point of life at all?
Maybe what I'm really asking is: What's the point of consciousness? What is the point of being consciously aware of the futility of life if you're just gonna die anyway. What is there to be gained by that? If the facticity of being consciously aware of life and death made any difference to anybody about anything, then that might mean there is such a thing as hope.
That is absolutely not true. Believing in hopelessness instead of hope is our only salvation. Hope is the only product anybody got for sale for any reason. Repent! Stop buying into hope. It's a shell game. First you see it, then you don't. Losing hope is the only thing in life that really hurts. Just say no! Hopelessness rules!! '-)
The Art Of Mimicry
I've been a little bit lost about what I want to practice playing on the piano next. Tonight, I may have found the direction I have been looking for. This digital keyboard has lots of voices and rhythms and tempos and such to fiddle around with. Tonight I stumbled across a combination of settings that seemed very useful for what I wanna do on the keyboard other than play scales. I want to combine several practices to include with playing the scales around the Circle of Fifths.
This electronic keyboard plays the style i want it to play using the specific type of piano I want it to use. All I have to do is punch some buttons and it starts playing the options I select. When I punch the button for the keyboard to play the boogie woogie as accompaniment, it splits the keyboard so that the boogie woogie is played the left hand bass line below the note F5, and above that point the keyboard stays in the grand piano mode.
What I discovered was that i could play chords with my right hand to the preset boogie woogie bass line, and make it sound pretty good. The digital keyboard plays the boogie woogie as accompaniment in the root key over and over again, until I choose to play the IV chord and subsequently the V chord to eventually start the turnaround. I only have to strike one note to choose the key I want it to play in, and the digital programming plays the rest of the notes of the boogie woogie automatically. So, just by choosing one note at a time I can have the keyboard play the boogie woogie accompaniment for any of the twelve bar blues chords in any of the twelve keys.
I have no idea if this description makes sense. It's probably flat-out wrong. I haven't written about playing the keyboard long enough to polish the stone. What I'm attempting to describe is how the keyboard plays the boogie woogie as accompaniment for any key below F4 according to which note i strike on the keyboard. What this means to me is that i can use this preset programming to follow the Circle of Fifths in order to practice playing the boogie woogie in all twelve keys.
That may be all I have time to do. I think I have a pretty good ear for music, but I ain't a quick study who can sit down at a keyboard for the first time and play anything they want in about twenty minutes. It's taking forever for me to get as far as I have. If I can play the boogie woogie by memory using both hands in all twelve keys six months after I started practicing I'll be happy. Accomplishing that might lead me into jazz and rock and roll. i don't ask much of myself. Of course, if I didn't have carpal tunnel and arthritis in both hands and wrists it might go a little faster.
I'm playing through the pain as if a professional athlete. I don't know why. Maybe just because I can. Today it seems to have helped to play even though it got really painful at times. Maybe I just want this to happen so bad I can't let a little something like bone-rattling pain stop me at this juncture. Nobody knows. I'm doing this where nobody can hear me, so when i write "nobody knows", they literally don't know because they're not here to witness if I'm playing or not. I'm writing about it here, but you have to take my word that I'm doing what I claim to.
When I was on the road by myself with no resources and no place to stop and lay down behind closed doors, I had to push through any symptoms of illness. I couldn't afford to get sick, and so I didn't. I don't wait for tragedy to strike before i write it off either. Well, maybe once or twice, but not usually. I write a lot. I can't prove it does anything for me.
One of the facets of the enneagrams I found convenient was how it explained to me in a very convincing manner is that the way I have lived my life is exactly how a person of my nature has to be. Many of the mundane problems I've had with significant others is how I have to be alone a lot. Studying the enneagrams helped me to understand why I needed so much time alone with myself. I hadn't realized what a big deal it is for me to have that privacy. Literally to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind of any other homo sapien.
It's my need to be allone that has been the most difficult part to explain to concerned others. Until the last decade or so I didn't realize the depth of my need for alone time. To explain why I need it satisfactorily, I'd have to understand completely, and I never will. Why should I attempt to explain myself through and through? With no room for error. I don't understand even a little bit why I aspire to some purportedly exotic states beyond the sensory pale. The mental and physical requirements of the subjective experience forces me to abandon every emotional obstacle that holds me back from letting myself be drawn into those mysterious states of the lightness of being. Those states of being me.
The idiosyncratic whims of a silly old man? Maybe. Why the hell not? Who cares? Everybody including me "sees" what they think is out there, and that's what they act like is so. Everybody knows at some level life is merely a contrived lie designed to placate our deliberate ignoring. Designed to placate their fear of the Terror. It's absurd to be afraid of what one is not nor could be. I can't imitate what the other doesn't mirror back to me for reflection. Nobody knows that's possible, but he ain't telling. If only Nobody was a real boy, he could be a Somebody instead.
This electronic keyboard plays the style i want it to play using the specific type of piano I want it to use. All I have to do is punch some buttons and it starts playing the options I select. When I punch the button for the keyboard to play the boogie woogie as accompaniment, it splits the keyboard so that the boogie woogie is played the left hand bass line below the note F5, and above that point the keyboard stays in the grand piano mode.
What I discovered was that i could play chords with my right hand to the preset boogie woogie bass line, and make it sound pretty good. The digital keyboard plays the boogie woogie as accompaniment in the root key over and over again, until I choose to play the IV chord and subsequently the V chord to eventually start the turnaround. I only have to strike one note to choose the key I want it to play in, and the digital programming plays the rest of the notes of the boogie woogie automatically. So, just by choosing one note at a time I can have the keyboard play the boogie woogie accompaniment for any of the twelve bar blues chords in any of the twelve keys.
I have no idea if this description makes sense. It's probably flat-out wrong. I haven't written about playing the keyboard long enough to polish the stone. What I'm attempting to describe is how the keyboard plays the boogie woogie as accompaniment for any key below F4 according to which note i strike on the keyboard. What this means to me is that i can use this preset programming to follow the Circle of Fifths in order to practice playing the boogie woogie in all twelve keys.
That may be all I have time to do. I think I have a pretty good ear for music, but I ain't a quick study who can sit down at a keyboard for the first time and play anything they want in about twenty minutes. It's taking forever for me to get as far as I have. If I can play the boogie woogie by memory using both hands in all twelve keys six months after I started practicing I'll be happy. Accomplishing that might lead me into jazz and rock and roll. i don't ask much of myself. Of course, if I didn't have carpal tunnel and arthritis in both hands and wrists it might go a little faster.
I'm playing through the pain as if a professional athlete. I don't know why. Maybe just because I can. Today it seems to have helped to play even though it got really painful at times. Maybe I just want this to happen so bad I can't let a little something like bone-rattling pain stop me at this juncture. Nobody knows. I'm doing this where nobody can hear me, so when i write "nobody knows", they literally don't know because they're not here to witness if I'm playing or not. I'm writing about it here, but you have to take my word that I'm doing what I claim to.
When I was on the road by myself with no resources and no place to stop and lay down behind closed doors, I had to push through any symptoms of illness. I couldn't afford to get sick, and so I didn't. I don't wait for tragedy to strike before i write it off either. Well, maybe once or twice, but not usually. I write a lot. I can't prove it does anything for me.
One of the facets of the enneagrams I found convenient was how it explained to me in a very convincing manner is that the way I have lived my life is exactly how a person of my nature has to be. Many of the mundane problems I've had with significant others is how I have to be alone a lot. Studying the enneagrams helped me to understand why I needed so much time alone with myself. I hadn't realized what a big deal it is for me to have that privacy. Literally to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind of any other homo sapien.
It's my need to be allone that has been the most difficult part to explain to concerned others. Until the last decade or so I didn't realize the depth of my need for alone time. To explain why I need it satisfactorily, I'd have to understand completely, and I never will. Why should I attempt to explain myself through and through? With no room for error. I don't understand even a little bit why I aspire to some purportedly exotic states beyond the sensory pale. The mental and physical requirements of the subjective experience forces me to abandon every emotional obstacle that holds me back from letting myself be drawn into those mysterious states of the lightness of being. Those states of being me.
The idiosyncratic whims of a silly old man? Maybe. Why the hell not? Who cares? Everybody including me "sees" what they think is out there, and that's what they act like is so. Everybody knows at some level life is merely a contrived lie designed to placate our deliberate ignoring. Designed to placate their fear of the Terror. It's absurd to be afraid of what one is not nor could be. I can't imitate what the other doesn't mirror back to me for reflection. Nobody knows that's possible, but he ain't telling. If only Nobody was a real boy, he could be a Somebody instead.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Memsistors AndThe Revival Of Analog
Sometime it doesn't do me any good to try to bull my way into making something happen. I don't know if I have much choice. It's part of the operating system or BIOS. There are certain conditions or situations where what comes natural to me ain't good enow for what's happening in the present tense.
That reminds me of the recent news of HP Labs coming up with a working prototype of a memsistor. First the Berkley professor Chua did the mathematics in 1971, then the Williams team manifested Chua's possibilities in 2008.
The memsistor is considered to be the missing link of electronics theory. I don't know what all that might mean, but then again, none of these guys know yet either. It's gonna be fun reading about how they will react when the light bulb turns on. What we all seem to agree on is that this is some awesome shit. Technology imitates life. If memsistors were missing in electronic theory, then their psychic equivalent was missing in human theory.
When the physicists figure out how the memsistors will change electronics the behaviorists will figure out how they will empower humans. This has everything to do with visualization in my world. If there has been a missing link to the mechanizations that have unfolded so far, then rethinking them in light of the memsistor should prove astonishing. Your milage may vary.
Just like the discovery of the missing link in electronic theory is gonna change everything analog and digital, and not necessarily for the better, then the possibles that appear in human consciousness because of the changes the memsistor's arrival makes, then the possibilities for humans will be discovered also.
I was born into a house that had no electricity. Power generating plants were slow to reach the rural areas. Even when we did move into a house that had electricity, the only thing it was used for was to power a light bulb and maybe a radio. None of the modern conveniences that we have now was available back then.
There is one vivid moment I remember to this day. I was playing on a bare wooden floor in the living room of a house we rented from a Ms. Pollock. On my left was an open fireplace which had live embers glowing even though it was not cold. Lined up along the edge of the burning coals were a series of cast iron appliances that my mother was using to iron my father's white shirts he wore with a tie each day at work. The fire was to heat the ironing devices. The radio was on and playing the same song over and over throughout the afternoon. The room was fairly dark even though there was a light bulb dangling from the ceiling with a dim bulb barely lighting the room.
My mother was crying while she mindlessly ironed my father's dress shirts and listened intently to the radio. It was worrisome to see my mother cry. I didn't see any reason for it. So, that's why I asked her why she was crying.
"Do you hear that music, boy?" she answered back.
"Yes, Momma. Is that why you're crying?"
"That was his favorite song."
"Whose favorite song, Momma?
She sniffled, and didn't answer right away.
"President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He died today. He was one of the greatest men who ever lived. That was his favorite song. Home On The Range."
My mother always addressed FDR using his full name. I guess it was her idea of showing respect. The Great Depression made a deep impression on both she and my father. They both experienced it living in Mississippi, which was already the poorest state in the union even before the Depression struck. Roosevelt's efforts to give people jobs by creating them through the government saved them from what to them was a fate worse than death.
I remember our family getting it's first electric refrigerator, and cooking stove, and clothes washing machine. i remember the back-breaking work these appliances replaced. It was a relatively long time before they begin wiring the whole house for electricity and every room had it's own receptacles and outlets. It was sort of a miracle that the whole family was proud of. We didn't have to work so hard to look respectable.
Looking respectable wasn't so easy when I was a kid, but it was even more difficult earlier before modern transportation brought factory-made products more often to the country stores. The local stores that sold ready made products were always operated by strangers. Many of them from the North. Carpet-baggers. Jewish families. They were desperately needed.
The local people literally didn't know what to do about stuff made cheap in factories. They made their own cloth and other materials through blood, sweat, and tears. Each item was sacred. Every scrap of cloth was used and reused until they literally couldn't be repaired. They saved every bottle and glass like they were precious treasures. Broken family heirlooms were kept anyway.
My mother made our clothes from the cloth sacks flour and chicken feed came in. She was so proud she could provide her children with good clothes. Her children did not go through the great depression. The comments we got from our school mates about how tacky the clothes she made for us looked must have hurt her terribly. Life was cruel to my mother. I don't know many mothers life is not cruel to.
It took forever to change the people who survived the two great wars and the great depression into being a throwaway society. The fact that they fought this change tooth and nail was one of life's greatest mysteries for me until I was called to provide in the same way they did. I failed. Miserably.
I guess this description of how long it can take for even educated people to adopt new technology is kind of lame. Many of the people my own age are totally intimidated by the thought of learning to use a computer. A lot of them much smarter than me. It's gonna get even more confusing for everybody, much less the ones who couldn't adopt to the digital revolution. The memsistor is gonna change both the digital and analog worlds. Especially when it's realized that the earlier technology was not as good as it could have been if the early adaptors had known about this missing element. It's gonna make humans different too. This is the discovery needed to for humans to really become cyborgs.
That reminds me of the recent news of HP Labs coming up with a working prototype of a memsistor. First the Berkley professor Chua did the mathematics in 1971, then the Williams team manifested Chua's possibilities in 2008.
The memsistor is considered to be the missing link of electronics theory. I don't know what all that might mean, but then again, none of these guys know yet either. It's gonna be fun reading about how they will react when the light bulb turns on. What we all seem to agree on is that this is some awesome shit. Technology imitates life. If memsistors were missing in electronic theory, then their psychic equivalent was missing in human theory.
When the physicists figure out how the memsistors will change electronics the behaviorists will figure out how they will empower humans. This has everything to do with visualization in my world. If there has been a missing link to the mechanizations that have unfolded so far, then rethinking them in light of the memsistor should prove astonishing. Your milage may vary.
Just like the discovery of the missing link in electronic theory is gonna change everything analog and digital, and not necessarily for the better, then the possibles that appear in human consciousness because of the changes the memsistor's arrival makes, then the possibilities for humans will be discovered also.
I was born into a house that had no electricity. Power generating plants were slow to reach the rural areas. Even when we did move into a house that had electricity, the only thing it was used for was to power a light bulb and maybe a radio. None of the modern conveniences that we have now was available back then.
There is one vivid moment I remember to this day. I was playing on a bare wooden floor in the living room of a house we rented from a Ms. Pollock. On my left was an open fireplace which had live embers glowing even though it was not cold. Lined up along the edge of the burning coals were a series of cast iron appliances that my mother was using to iron my father's white shirts he wore with a tie each day at work. The fire was to heat the ironing devices. The radio was on and playing the same song over and over throughout the afternoon. The room was fairly dark even though there was a light bulb dangling from the ceiling with a dim bulb barely lighting the room.
My mother was crying while she mindlessly ironed my father's dress shirts and listened intently to the radio. It was worrisome to see my mother cry. I didn't see any reason for it. So, that's why I asked her why she was crying.
"Do you hear that music, boy?" she answered back.
"Yes, Momma. Is that why you're crying?"
"That was his favorite song."
"Whose favorite song, Momma?
She sniffled, and didn't answer right away.
"President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He died today. He was one of the greatest men who ever lived. That was his favorite song. Home On The Range."
My mother always addressed FDR using his full name. I guess it was her idea of showing respect. The Great Depression made a deep impression on both she and my father. They both experienced it living in Mississippi, which was already the poorest state in the union even before the Depression struck. Roosevelt's efforts to give people jobs by creating them through the government saved them from what to them was a fate worse than death.
I remember our family getting it's first electric refrigerator, and cooking stove, and clothes washing machine. i remember the back-breaking work these appliances replaced. It was a relatively long time before they begin wiring the whole house for electricity and every room had it's own receptacles and outlets. It was sort of a miracle that the whole family was proud of. We didn't have to work so hard to look respectable.
Looking respectable wasn't so easy when I was a kid, but it was even more difficult earlier before modern transportation brought factory-made products more often to the country stores. The local stores that sold ready made products were always operated by strangers. Many of them from the North. Carpet-baggers. Jewish families. They were desperately needed.
The local people literally didn't know what to do about stuff made cheap in factories. They made their own cloth and other materials through blood, sweat, and tears. Each item was sacred. Every scrap of cloth was used and reused until they literally couldn't be repaired. They saved every bottle and glass like they were precious treasures. Broken family heirlooms were kept anyway.
My mother made our clothes from the cloth sacks flour and chicken feed came in. She was so proud she could provide her children with good clothes. Her children did not go through the great depression. The comments we got from our school mates about how tacky the clothes she made for us looked must have hurt her terribly. Life was cruel to my mother. I don't know many mothers life is not cruel to.
It took forever to change the people who survived the two great wars and the great depression into being a throwaway society. The fact that they fought this change tooth and nail was one of life's greatest mysteries for me until I was called to provide in the same way they did. I failed. Miserably.
I guess this description of how long it can take for even educated people to adopt new technology is kind of lame. Many of the people my own age are totally intimidated by the thought of learning to use a computer. A lot of them much smarter than me. It's gonna get even more confusing for everybody, much less the ones who couldn't adopt to the digital revolution. The memsistor is gonna change both the digital and analog worlds. Especially when it's realized that the earlier technology was not as good as it could have been if the early adaptors had known about this missing element. It's gonna make humans different too. This is the discovery needed to for humans to really become cyborgs.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Memsistors And The End Of Human Beings
I had a visitor who was only here as part of his agenda. It actually had nothing to do with me except as I fulfilled the role he assigned me in his duty to his world. He has only assigned just enough time in his schedule for me to play this role he had already written all the dialogue for, and when I attempted to insert my own agenda for my own reasons, he lit out like a jumping jack for parts unknown. I'm nothing if not accommodating. Wham! Bam! Thank kew, Ma'am!
I had intended to tell him about this news article I read to see what he might think of it, but as I mentioned above, he didn't wanna hear it. No blame. So, I'll just write out what I meant to use him to explore. It's not much. Just a news article about the invention of a new type of computer memory that's gonna be mo' bettah, and faster than all the rest. But, of course, there is more to it, but I might have misinterpreted.
Here's a link to one of the articles that came speculating to the forefront this morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/technology/01chip.html?em&ex=1209787200&en=c4345e5bcda95925&ei=5087%0A
There are some sites with detailed prophecies of why this new invention is such a big deal. This invention will not lose it's contents when the computer is shut down. That's a big deal for the computer to have "Instant On" capabilities. There's more. This type of memory will remember what's been put in it. It retains a certain kind of imprint or trace for what has been stored in it.
That's the part of what this invention is about. The pundits speculate that it's ability to retain a certain degree of history of it's own use that can provide computers to have more human-like abilities. This is the invention that supposedly the robotics crowd has been waiting to come into being to be able to create robots that think for themselves. Yippee?
We may have to become cyborgs to survive. Maybe we already are cyborgs of a type that can only realize itself for what it is at a certain point of evolution. We are certainly making ourselves into the future tense. We are making more of ourselves all the time. Humans are each the result of their own begottenness. Self-begotten. Only begotten. The child is the father of the man. The man is the only begotten son of the child.
Here is a link to a discussion of this new invention called a "memristor" where nerds are discussing the future possibilities implied by it. They're talking Nobel Prize on the same day it's publicly announced.
>>Of course you can still use it to store digital data, but the real fun will come when you interconnect these things to emulate the analog behavior of the brain. This is where the claim of pattern recognition and facial recognition come in. They're not actually talking about software there but the actual analog capabilities of circuitry built with memristors.<<
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/211228&from=rss
When Isabella wrote about "self-begotten/only begotten" she was referencing some early Gnostic literature in which a certain type of god was self-begotten. I Googled these terms up, and the results page had many links to the Gnostic sites where their use of these expressions are spelled out. But, my original inspirations upon becoming aware of just the words themselves threw me right back into my remembering vision which was itself my subjective history of what sorts of traces of what my memory banks had previously employed. That's what makes me think that we're probably self-generating cyborgs from the git go.
Looking at this sperm and an egg thing from a cyborg point of view, we make ourselves from the point of conception into a computerized zombie to the point of ridiculousness and absurdity. Homo sapiens are just a flash in the pan to life in general, but are the results of a long incubation. An incubation of what? What's the end game for what life has evolved to in the relatively short period of time it's supposedly occupied the joint? Procreant to procreant to procreant? That's what it's all about? Is that all there is?
I read Robert Monroe's books about astral travel. In these books he described what he "saw" while he was out of his body. He described one "heaven" he passed by on his way to other places that was for creatures who thought having sex was to closest thing to heaven they ever understood. He described this place as literally crawling with naked people all wiggling around to have sex surrounded by sex for eternity.
The reason I was attracted to reading Robert Monroe's books was because of my own unsolicited ventures with astral travel. I've somehow been popping in and out of my body or somebody else's body for as long as I can remember. That's apparently about all the essence of me does. It moves.
I paid Bob Monroe's asking price for attending the introductory seminar at his school called Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. I read the books, then I wanted to see the movie. Mostly, I wanted to meet this man whose writings had a big influence on me. I had already traveled out of my body a lot, but not of my own volition. I wanted to go through his program to see if that was possible for me. All I really found out was that it was impossible for me not to travel outside of my body if I wanted to have my own space port. That's about all the human body is to me anymore. A place to rest up in between spirit quests.
I had several conversations with Robert Monroe when he came over to where current class was in session. I asked him a few questions and the other people in the group asked him more. He was so familiar with the questions people asked him that he would start out his answer with the page number of the book that aroused their suspicions. I didn't remember to ask him the one question I really wanted to know the answer to: Was that sex heaven he wrote about a metaphor for Earth.
I had intended to tell him about this news article I read to see what he might think of it, but as I mentioned above, he didn't wanna hear it. No blame. So, I'll just write out what I meant to use him to explore. It's not much. Just a news article about the invention of a new type of computer memory that's gonna be mo' bettah, and faster than all the rest. But, of course, there is more to it, but I might have misinterpreted.
Here's a link to one of the articles that came speculating to the forefront this morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/technology/01chip.html?em&ex=1209787200&en=c4345e5bcda95925&ei=5087%0A
There are some sites with detailed prophecies of why this new invention is such a big deal. This invention will not lose it's contents when the computer is shut down. That's a big deal for the computer to have "Instant On" capabilities. There's more. This type of memory will remember what's been put in it. It retains a certain kind of imprint or trace for what has been stored in it.
That's the part of what this invention is about. The pundits speculate that it's ability to retain a certain degree of history of it's own use that can provide computers to have more human-like abilities. This is the invention that supposedly the robotics crowd has been waiting to come into being to be able to create robots that think for themselves. Yippee?
We may have to become cyborgs to survive. Maybe we already are cyborgs of a type that can only realize itself for what it is at a certain point of evolution. We are certainly making ourselves into the future tense. We are making more of ourselves all the time. Humans are each the result of their own begottenness. Self-begotten. Only begotten. The child is the father of the man. The man is the only begotten son of the child.
Here is a link to a discussion of this new invention called a "memristor" where nerds are discussing the future possibilities implied by it. They're talking Nobel Prize on the same day it's publicly announced.
>>Of course you can still use it to store digital data, but the real fun will come when you interconnect these things to emulate the analog behavior of the brain. This is where the claim of pattern recognition and facial recognition come in. They're not actually talking about software there but the actual analog capabilities of circuitry built with memristors.<<
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/211228&from=rss
When Isabella wrote about "self-begotten/only begotten" she was referencing some early Gnostic literature in which a certain type of god was self-begotten. I Googled these terms up, and the results page had many links to the Gnostic sites where their use of these expressions are spelled out. But, my original inspirations upon becoming aware of just the words themselves threw me right back into my remembering vision which was itself my subjective history of what sorts of traces of what my memory banks had previously employed. That's what makes me think that we're probably self-generating cyborgs from the git go.
Looking at this sperm and an egg thing from a cyborg point of view, we make ourselves from the point of conception into a computerized zombie to the point of ridiculousness and absurdity. Homo sapiens are just a flash in the pan to life in general, but are the results of a long incubation. An incubation of what? What's the end game for what life has evolved to in the relatively short period of time it's supposedly occupied the joint? Procreant to procreant to procreant? That's what it's all about? Is that all there is?
I read Robert Monroe's books about astral travel. In these books he described what he "saw" while he was out of his body. He described one "heaven" he passed by on his way to other places that was for creatures who thought having sex was to closest thing to heaven they ever understood. He described this place as literally crawling with naked people all wiggling around to have sex surrounded by sex for eternity.
The reason I was attracted to reading Robert Monroe's books was because of my own unsolicited ventures with astral travel. I've somehow been popping in and out of my body or somebody else's body for as long as I can remember. That's apparently about all the essence of me does. It moves.
I paid Bob Monroe's asking price for attending the introductory seminar at his school called Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. I read the books, then I wanted to see the movie. Mostly, I wanted to meet this man whose writings had a big influence on me. I had already traveled out of my body a lot, but not of my own volition. I wanted to go through his program to see if that was possible for me. All I really found out was that it was impossible for me not to travel outside of my body if I wanted to have my own space port. That's about all the human body is to me anymore. A place to rest up in between spirit quests.
I had several conversations with Robert Monroe when he came over to where current class was in session. I asked him a few questions and the other people in the group asked him more. He was so familiar with the questions people asked him that he would start out his answer with the page number of the book that aroused their suspicions. I didn't remember to ask him the one question I really wanted to know the answer to: Was that sex heaven he wrote about a metaphor for Earth.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Accustomed To Her Face
I'm doing some strange stuff now trying to familiarize myself with the 88 key piano keyboard. Nothing that a third-grader wouldn't do better. I feel like i oughta get bolder. I'm playing the major and minor scales every day and understand why I'm doing it, but it gets a little staid, and so I'm working on learning chord progressions. I'm using the material I found at:
http://chordmaps.com/part10.htm
There is a chart about three quarters of the way down the page I've found useful when it's used for making a chart map. I've been learning several songs written in Bb major, so I made up a chart for the chord progression in Bb. I play triads with my left hand in the designated sequence, and doodle around in the same scale as the chord I'm playing with my left hand. I have to look at the map to see what chord to play with my left hand, but that gives me wiggle room to experiment with my right hand. I think I'm actually fiddling around with modes.
I've read a lot of articles on modes recently. At first I was intimidated, but theoretically modes are quite simple to understand. The hardest part for me is getting used to all those weird mode names. Eventually, should I live so long with out going totally senile, those mode titles will become so familiar to me I'll become contemptuous of them.
The way the site owner at chartmaps.com has things laid out it should be simple enough to write some songs that sound pretty good just using his formula for chord progressions. I might end up writing some songs just to remember the sequence of his map for chord progressions.
I like well-formed patterns to practice that are instructive. Etudes. Little songs designed just to teach certain techniques that can become standard fare. That's the way I like to break the rules. To learn them so completely that i get bored with them and start making mistakes that sound good.
I'm not worried much about getting stuck in some prescribed routine for that very reason. I learn prescribed routines for the sole purpose of becoming bored with them. If my audience doesn't know the prescribed routine as well as I do, then how will they be able to discern the cleverness of how I deliberately incorporate mistakes and make them interesting.
I like to use nursery rhymes and other stuff that a lot of people get taught as children. With my flute I would try to play simple songs that most people are fairly familiar with like Hickory, Dickory, Dock, the mice ran up the clock..". I would play the song several times until my listeners would remember it well, and then I would start making mistakes in such a way as to beg their forgiveness.
They generally forgive me at first, but then I make more mistakes, and after a while it starts to appear as if I'm deliberately making mistakes to irritate them, and just about the time they're ready to despoil me, I play the original tune again, and they know they've been duped for the simple pleasure it gives me to see their self-begotten faces. That's the only face I'm ever gonna talk to like they're grownups.
http://chordmaps.com/part10.htm
There is a chart about three quarters of the way down the page I've found useful when it's used for making a chart map. I've been learning several songs written in Bb major, so I made up a chart for the chord progression in Bb. I play triads with my left hand in the designated sequence, and doodle around in the same scale as the chord I'm playing with my left hand. I have to look at the map to see what chord to play with my left hand, but that gives me wiggle room to experiment with my right hand. I think I'm actually fiddling around with modes.
I've read a lot of articles on modes recently. At first I was intimidated, but theoretically modes are quite simple to understand. The hardest part for me is getting used to all those weird mode names. Eventually, should I live so long with out going totally senile, those mode titles will become so familiar to me I'll become contemptuous of them.
The way the site owner at chartmaps.com has things laid out it should be simple enough to write some songs that sound pretty good just using his formula for chord progressions. I might end up writing some songs just to remember the sequence of his map for chord progressions.
I like well-formed patterns to practice that are instructive. Etudes. Little songs designed just to teach certain techniques that can become standard fare. That's the way I like to break the rules. To learn them so completely that i get bored with them and start making mistakes that sound good.
I'm not worried much about getting stuck in some prescribed routine for that very reason. I learn prescribed routines for the sole purpose of becoming bored with them. If my audience doesn't know the prescribed routine as well as I do, then how will they be able to discern the cleverness of how I deliberately incorporate mistakes and make them interesting.
I like to use nursery rhymes and other stuff that a lot of people get taught as children. With my flute I would try to play simple songs that most people are fairly familiar with like Hickory, Dickory, Dock, the mice ran up the clock..". I would play the song several times until my listeners would remember it well, and then I would start making mistakes in such a way as to beg their forgiveness.
They generally forgive me at first, but then I make more mistakes, and after a while it starts to appear as if I'm deliberately making mistakes to irritate them, and just about the time they're ready to despoil me, I play the original tune again, and they know they've been duped for the simple pleasure it gives me to see their self-begotten faces. That's the only face I'm ever gonna talk to like they're grownups.