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.

How Jiggly Is Jiggy?

I've got a regional weather radar report bookmarked so that I can watch a worrisome line of storms approaching from the west. When I go to the Weather page on WRAL.com they offer live reports from either satellite or radar images. I usually elect to see time-lapsed eight hour sequences of the radar images of the storms. For some reason I haven't thought of bookmarking the regional radar page. It's where I usually end up at. Clicking on the Bookmark brings up the latest sequence of images. The weather systems move across the screen like a download progress bar.

I like to think of electrical storms as dragons. That's what the Asians call electrical storms. I was in Formosa and witnessed a long line of people doing a dragon dance. It seemed to go on for miles. The sheer numbers of people stunned me. I didn't realize when I was there what the dragon represented. If I'd known I could have understood what they were doing better. I was raised in hurricane country. On the coastal plains we sometime have electric storms in the winter.

I empathize with the Asians with their Dragon dances and what they represent. I can't bluff my was through my fear of lightning. I be unabashedly looking for shelter when the sky goes BOOM! Monsoon. Tropical storms. Rainy season. Hurricanes. All dragons. They spew forth fire (lightning) destroy the crops (wind and hail), and blow you house of cards to hell and back. The Wicked Dragon Of The North. Witches. Covens. Liquids swirling around in the pot as the witches (hurricanes) dance naked and howl like Banshees. All this stuff waddles like a duck, and it quacks.

One of the more interesting facets of the manner in which scientists look with askance at the so-called heathen ways ("lightning is how they smirk, and then give hurricane names as if they were living entities with their own ground of being. I'm enjoying sitting here writing on and off with all the doors and windows open so I can hear the wind and feel the pressure changes as the dragons swoop and swirl.

The squall line split and went around us. It didn't happen all of a sudden. i could tell as much as a half hour ago on the web site radar screen it was breaking up. I should be happy. There's been lots of tornados and considerable damage. The early news reports showed the latest tornado results. Another hour and the rough part that's risky will be past here.

I sure am enjoying the digitally perfect drumbeat the drum machine on my digital keyboard is playing in the background. I've never owned anything like this gadget. I admit the sound isn't exactly like it would be if I were in the same space as a real live drummer, but it's very good. The quality of it caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting the drumbeats to sound so real.

I can listen to these drumbeats when listening to songs with people displaying their personalities drive me nuts. By that I mean that I get distracted by the emotion I sense in their voices and instrumentals. I got other fish to fry. I can't write with recorded music playing, but I seem to be able to move right along with just a drumbeat playing.

Just now, the last drumbeat the machine was playing finally got on my nerves, and I reached over and pushed a button that made the next drumbeat on the list start playing immediately. The fact that there is no lapse in one drumbeat to the next amazes me, but that's digital. All or nothing. The drumbeat I punched up changed just enough to keep my interest going. I must have gotten up three or four times and boogied my ass off until I had to stop. I shoulda had one of these machines a long time ago. Getting my heart rate pumped up by dancing is more interesting than mere exercising.

I became intrigued when my brother brought his twin grandsons around. They can walk, but not talk yet. Younger than two years I think. I watched them walk. They stutter stepped like old men do, or rather, old men stutter step like toddlers do. One on the way up, and the other one the way out.

Ka, And The Phony Noise-makers

It's the pad on the heel of my palm opposite my thumb on my left hand that's killing me or maybe it's the other way around. I feel a deep stinging, burning sensation that's different than the dull aching bone-weary pain of the carpal tunnel syndrome mofo. I just went upstairs to take some horse-pills of ibuprofen to soothe the savage beast. I'm just getting to the point when I'm getting the boogie woogie down pat with my left hand, and then the joint of my pinky finger starts raising hell, and I have to take a break. After I get it down right I won't be pounding so hard.

It's difficult to tell how much the arthritis is responsible or the carpal tunnel is responsible or whether my constant pounding away at the keyboard is responsible, but most likely it's all three. I don't care. It'll just have to hurt. I think it will back off on it's own ere long, but if it don't, maybe I can turn the pain into pleasure and find something new and different to get excited about. It's been a while. Decades.

The last year in my so-called "sexy sixties" better pick it up if that description is gonna hold no truck with me. I used to have a few perversions I could count on to get me excited, but like all the other wages of sin I paid my pound of flesh for, they went the way of all good things. I don't like doing stuff that hurts. I really worked at it. I had expert mentors, but I was never able to get over the hump with pain. Now, there is nothing left. Pain was my last best hope to experience some sort of physical pleasure. Instead of making me squeal with delight, It's probably gonna be just more of the same.

I did take the left hand work I've been doing another step in the same direction. I'm working at playing the boogie woogie bass run with each hand in turn, and using the other hand to chord the root and the minor seventh. A couple of sources of info I have got me to thinking of labeling the chord structure with the numbers of the scales of each key. In particular when I transpose the boogie woogie and seventh chord to the next key in the circle of fifths.

A friend who visits fairly regular gets angry with me because of the way I approach music. Particularly since I purchased this new keyboard. He hates I practice exercises rather than just get drunk and make merry. He doesn't play music. He don't have a clue what I'm attempting to accomplish by what I'm doing. It's easy enough to forgive him for being irritated and confused. I don't rightly know what I'm doing either. And yet, I do.

I know how to get into a flow and take everybody with me. I know a lotta different ways to accomplish that. I know what it takes for me to get there so the other will follow. I reckon I stumbled into that accidently when I was a kid. What I stumbled into was a deep curiosity about how i could be duped by charismatic people. It's not an intellectual process.

The ritual is what it's not. At first, it had to be intellectually comprehended so my body could be trained to respond to certain moods and feelings in order to enhance them through repetition and redundancy. I had to know in my own person what it took me individually to get into flow. Flow ain't no stranger to nobody. The thing I had to realize was that in a crowd there are as many rituals of flow being followed as there are people. The idea is to get them all synched up (entrained) to the same folkways in the immediacy of now.

In the way I learned it, there has to be a constant to rally around. It can be anything. Fingers tapping on a table. Keys being rattled in one's pocket. Just so it's about the same frequency and at the same beat longer than any of the other ambient sounds. People gonna try to break the monotony to keep from being enslaved to it, but people are basically joiners. You can't let them break your stride. Just keep on keeping on. As if you have a right to be there doing exactly what you're doing without their permission. Soon enow, when they can't fight you, they'll join you, then they'll all j'in in. Why would they not?

We all do it pretty at every chance we get. Birds do it and fly. Bees do it and die. Queens do it and sigh, but I don't do it, and I'll tell you why. I promised my mother that I'd be true. But, I'll tell you what I will do. I'll stay still and let you do it, as long as I don't move, that ain't cheating.

There is a part of the classical story about what happened when Gautama sat under the Bo Tree and received enlightenment that keeps popping back up in my mind. It may be a triviality that could easily be ignored as unimportant to the overall purpose of the metaphor.

I only know this story in a general way. I've never studied it or tried to memorize it. to me it's just an amusing story that a lotta people treasure for their own reasons. I never actually studied Buddhism with the idea of becoming a Buddhist. Why swap dogmas when one is as good as the other? I was a book worm for a long time. I read several versions of the classical Buddha-under-the-Bo Tree-accounts. My version might be all wet. It's just what I remember from a long time ago.

I guess the moment this event that fascinated me happened might have been some sort of test or trial to see if it would get Gautama to abandon his effort to achieve enlightenment and to get up and walk away like practically everyone else who had tried it.

The part I really feel uncertain about involves the world serpent named Ka. The Protestant faith I was exposed to and pretty much believed in as a child never said nothing about not "world serpent". Sure, the snake in the Garden of Eden that tempted Eve, but nothing like what was described as being their for Gautama with those riotous crowds of phantasmagoric spirits showed up and tried to scare the hell outta him. I've seen them suckers. They scary. Real scary. 'Nuff said?

I suspect most people have encountered something somewhere that scared the Bejesus outta them. I sure have. I've sought it out to see what I'd do. It was Gautama's response to the arrival and fierce appearance of these weird goblins that fascinates me. I've felt like I understood why he did what he did a bunch of different times, but ere long, I find myself wondering about it again, and worry about if I truly got his point. Instead of getting up like I probably would have and running all out and at any cost for my life, he merely pointed to the ground as if to say, "I have a right to be here."

What does that mean? Every version I've encountered has been translated in the same way. None of them ever said he actually said anything. They all say he pointed to the ground "as if to say" he had a right to sit under that Bo Tree and seek enlightenment. Why would that answer satisfy those horrific, scary apparitions?

I could be wrong. Somebody might point that out to me in no uncertain terms (or would if I allowed Comments) I got it all wrong. But, I distinctly remember it being said that the world serpent Ka arose behind Gautama and spread his hood over Gautama as if to shield him from the rear. He got his back.

So what made those phantasmagoric creature go back to where they came from? From Gautama insisting he had a right to be there, or that huge damn snake rising up behind him and scaring them off. Sometime I like to think that even Gautama might settle for thinking it was him and his calm gesturing that made those demons go away, when it was actually some force behind him he didn't see, that tacitly did the trick.

Reframing The Stone

Why gainsay the abysmal stench of my downscale mechanisms? I bear no shame. The balmy ocean breeze wafts past my flared nostrils bearing the sulfurous odour of decaying kelp. It's piled up in wiggly rows along the white beach and marks the highest tide from the last tropical storm that passed by wailing. Until the seaweed lies there in the unrelenting sun covered with black flies and fiddler crabs and rots completely, the picture postcard beaches will smell like rotten eggs, and thereby taint paradise.

Atlantic City, 1971

Sores on lips that run from the brain
that comes from the sky in the form of rain
to start the weeds a'growing.
Bed-a-bye treetops the cradle rocks on.
The children stop talking to ice-cream cones
for the kettle of onions that boiling.
Other times than this are drearier than
the day before the new house burned.
Fortune never deals the players fair.
Yet, the changes are constant,
and drifting thoughts don't apply.

@July, 1971
Edited 4/24/08
_

Surrounded By Oceans

It's amazing to me what playing the scales everyday has wrought. I don't exactly know how to describe what I'm experiencing. I tried to explain yesterday by saying that my fingers seem to be getting to the place where they know where to go better than my head does. I'm still dealing with bottlenecks, but the bottlenecks I'm attempting to open up are now what would be real progress not that long ago. In some manner I'm beginning to get out of my own way.

Today I started playing the chorale part of Beethoven's Ninth. I forget what it's called. It's the part everybody knows and sings to or hums. It's Germany's freaking national anthem. A lovely tune. It evolved from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, as a lot of classical songs did. I was playing single notes with my left hand. I played the same tune graduating one half-step at a time and played it in all twelve major keys without many serious mistakes. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I expect from playing these scales daily. I expect to be able to play anything I can play by memory in any key major or minor without exception and no dilly-dallying around.

I'm working with my left hand a lot these days when I'm not playing the scales. Playing the scales doesn't take near as long as they did, so I'm trying to get that boogie woogie thing going with my left hand. I'm using the Circle of Fifths to play the same boogie woogie in all twelve keys and playing the root and minor seventh to accompany with my right hand. It's a slow process.

Another thing is going on as a result of playing the scales. Today when I drove to the Post Office to mail the ISP monthly payment I walked around for about a mile to get some exercise, then I went back to my car, but I didn't crank it up and leave right away, I like to sit in my car and work crossword puzzles in the big parking lots and watch people as they come and go.

When i do that I usually listen to a classical music station that actually plays a lot of music and keeps the chatter down. Oddly enow, they call themselves The Classical Music Station. A perculiar thing happened. At the end of a song they were playing the announcer re-stated the title and composer again, and told what key it was written in, and when he did that I perked up. I knew the key of E Flat Minor. I play it every day.

Then, he announce the next piece he was going to play and told that it was written in A Flat Major. This time i "saw" the entire scale as I practice it on the keyboard. I'm beginning to visualize the 88-key keyboard layout. This was a very exciting moment for me. I don't know if I'll continue to spend all that much time on the piano as my main instrument. If I can complete my visualization of it so that I can use the piano keyboard for reference when I play other instruments, it will have served it's purpose.

I can't foresee how this development will affect how I'll approach playing music in the future. I've only guessed how learning to play the scales and playing them daily will change what I think is possible for me. For one thing I'm beginning to realize it's impossible for me to not have perfect pitch. I don't know how to explain that statement. I write it because of how I play by memory.

I hear what I play before I play it, I've always heard the music in my imagination. I just didn't know where the sounds I hear are on the keyboard. Now, I'm beginning to know where the notes are I've always heard in my psyche. Not just thetically either, but intuitively. i don't know where that's going, but it's okay with me. When I started playing that Beethoven melody in every key, at the end of playing in each key I didn't have to reflect on what the next key was. My fingers automatically went there, and I knew it was right. I looked it up afterward. My fingers were right every single time. I'm already hard to live with, this might make me impossible to be in the same room with.

I'm not joking about being hard to be around. I've had three people tell me so recently. they claim I don't care how I act around them or how I treat them. They say there is nothing they can do about the way I treat them, because I'm the only person they know of that they can talk openly with about what matters to them. if that's true, then it's a one-way deal.

I can get the same response outta anybody I want to. But, I don't. I get the response I get from my friends, and they're about the only people I bother with in person. I'm as stuck with them as they are with me. The world is changing really, really fast now. Does China really only have twelve days of coal left to power their industry? The food shortage deal is on the national news now. Things are gonna get exciting. world wide, and it might be sooner than we think.

The Roll Of The Dice

I've had a good day playing the scales. It's like my fingers are beginning to recognize where they need to go next before I do. I'm hardly doing anything else each day musically but to practice what's difficult for me separate from when i go through the whole kit and caboodle in the evening.

Tonight I stopped working my way through the Circle of Fifths, and played the key of F Major repetitively. First the left hand separately and then the right. When I was more satisfied with the results, I played F Major with both hands until it seemed to flow more smoothly. I'm beginning to get a little bit of intuitive flash about where this is headed. I'm gonna loan my body out and let unembodied spirits use it to play my piano in order to remember the old days through me. Man, they gonna owe me big time when I croak.

There were certain moments back when I traveled a lot with a guitar and a sleeping bag. Those were the luxury items I got to take with me sometime. I'm considered a fair singer, but even I know I was not an accomplished instrumentalist. It did cross my mind occasionally that it would help my repertoire considerably if I could intersperse some solo instrumental licks in between the verses of the songs I wrote to sing. About the best I ever got out of myself, in that regard, was that I could play a few bass runs with my thumb while I strummed chords with the other fingers.

A man who picked me up hitch-hiking on the way from Portland to Pendleton, Oregon asked me to take a drink with him, and then after we did that, he asked me to sing and play the guitar I had with me for him. The whiskey put me in a pretty good mood, and so I sang a couple of the songs I'd written. After a few more slugs off that pint bottle he had hauled out, he began to sing with me. I switched over to singing some familiar songs I thought he might know the words to, and by the time we got to Pendleton we were pretty good friends.

Just before we got there he asked me if I wanted a job singing in a bar where he knew the owner. He kinda laid it out for me so I could make up my mind. The man brought a band in for the week-end, but Sundays through Wednesday he hired a solo act to try to entice his rush hour customers to stay for one more drink before they drove home for the night.

The man paid me $35 a night, all the beer I could drink, and whatever tips I could hustle from the customers. I'd been on the road for months living catch as catch can, and this offer was a windfall for me. My original patron who got me the job in the first place insisted on paying for me a room at an old downtown hotel for a week. I was in hog heaven. The owner liked the way I made money for him, and began slipping me a twenty dollar bill on the side a couple a times a night.

This turned out to be a real opportunity for me to make a name for myself as a singer/songwriter in that part of the country. A couple of guys who were agents came in the bar, heard me sing, made me an offer I couldn't refuse. To cut to the chase, I blew it. Maybe because it seemed too good to be true.

I got mixed up with a waitress who worked at the coffee shop of the old downtown hotel. It turned out that she had just been released from prison for cutting up her old boyfriend. When she started obsessing on my whereabouts every moment I wasn't in her sight, I knew I had to run for my life.

That's happened a lot with me. I must have a blind spot. It may be that I'm the male counterpart to this type of woman, and they keep thinking they've met their soul mate. I don't particular like that part of me some women find interesting. How could I possibly love it in them?

On the other hand, in my natal astrology chart, in the Seventh house of partners, where the Moon resides exalted in Taurus, and conjoined within the same degree with the planet Uranus, all the interpretation books I ever studied claimed a person with this configuration in their nativity would be attracted to unusual, eccentric partners who would act more as a nurturer than a lover to me.

What a drag, man. I'm don't believe I"m that kind of person. The oracle might be right. It might be what I actually need. I just can't stand the manner in which I have to conduct myself to satisfy their need in that way. I'd rather do without.

The Totalitarianism Of The Written Word

Burning off the underbrush yesterday was a real chore. I've done nothing but sit around today. I may turn on my drum machine and dance to 085 BrazilianSamba for a while just to get my blood moving throughout my body. I like the cowbells.

I don't know what's going on with my musical pursuits. I was doing a lot of ear-training exercises, but not recently. I play the major and minor scales along with some blues chords and the related pentatonic scales. As usual, I pretend I know all there is to know about what I should do next. That's what some people do.

I'm still thinking about Walt Whitman being convinced his book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, would stop slavery and prevent the Civil War in one fell swoop. In my opinion, Whitman had to cop to that arrogance or he could not have written what he did. That's how poets earn their reputations for being a little wacko. They have to make grand assumptions in order to make the quantum leaps they do to describe other dimensions.

People who are able to focus a little beyond the pale of human reason usually have to pay the piper in odd, sometime unexpected ways. There is a book around I've been exposed to called The Urantia Book:

http://www.urantia.org/

I just realized I could Google the particulars about this book up. I didn't know there was a fancy web site now where you can send your cards and letters, but I should have. Fine. You can read all about it. I'm still gonna use my memory of what it's about to make the point I attempt to, even though by using the link above, you can easily prove how slack my long term memory system can be at times. I don't actually care. I don't wanna hear it. That's why I changed the Comments setting to Off.

I was informed that this book was produced by automatic writing. I suspect that's a little bit of what I do here, but I don't seem so other worldly in my daily quests. My muses are as apt to cuss like a sailor as they are to wheedle and croon. They appear to enjoy shocking my readers with off-the-wall word-salad that makes me seem like a fool to some. Why would I not agree?

The Urantia Book itself is the proof this sort of channeling can be done. I just don't know how useful it is to people who appear to have their own way of seeing the world. I like it that the author (or authors?) did what they did, and I'm prone to think each seeker should do their own automatic writing for what it can reveal to them about themselves.

I discover relationships between lots of discreet memories of distinct events I'm somewhat convinced may have actually happened as I write everyday, but without rhyme or reason. I don't have to know where I'm at to be there. How else could I control my creativity except by yielding to temptation?

A fellow named Larry provided me with a definition for existentialism that has proved very useful. Particularly because previous to Larry's description I didn't really have one I could live with. He stated that an existentialist was a person who was fully in control of their creativity. I don't know what percentage of the world's population would agree with Larry, but he makes sense to me.

What seems to have helped me express my self in writing in the way that most satisfies me is my decision to abandon any judgments I might make about the truth or falsity of what flows out of my fingers on to my computer screen. This was an easy decision to to make, because I don't know what the truth is. I don't write to discover the truth. I write to find out for myself what the world has to say. Right damned now! Let the dead past bury it's dead.

Burning The Woods Down

Driving back home from having breakfast to the cafe I had to stop twice to write something down on paper. A drifting thought, if you will. What I wrote on the top margin of a flyer for the Farmer's Home Furniture Store was: 1)The non-thetic mind is what learns things. The thetic mind is what teaches it. 2) The non-thetic mind is docetic. It can't become human, because to become human is to err. Non-thetic consciousness simply can't make errors, because it doesn't make judgments. Judgment is required for errors to possess being.

I'm not sure what this meant to me at the time. I got home, and before I got settled in to write about it Ben showed up with enough garden hose to reach back in the woods where I wanted to burn the piles of brush I cut down to allow me to see the pond from my house.

He was in a helpful mood and I could readily see that he had brought that hose over here in order to help me burn the brush piles, so we got started around 2 o'clock and burned those brush piles off and also about a quarter of an acre of undergrowth besides that. We sort of bit off more than we could chew on purpose. The fire really cleaned the woods up between here and the pond.

I don't know how many of the rare wild orchids I burnt up in the fire. They'll either find their way back or they won't. There's plenty of them on my brother's property next door. He told me just a couple of days ago they were blooming. I'm pretty sure the fire will bring them back stronger. Like pruning fruit trees does.

The longleaf pines this area is famous for require forest fires occasionally to survive. Not having forest fires where people have settled is as responsible for some localized species going extinct as anything else. Like the extinction of the white pine forests up around the Great Lakes and up through Canada. Talk about your raping the land. That's as cruel as it gets.

I'm too tired to write anymore. Tending that fire wore me out.

Medusa

I've always had a problem with weeping. Just now I was watching a video in which a man was playing a digital keyboard and singing this old familiar song. I knew the video wasn't actually about him. He was sort of a straight man for this sexy, red-haired young woman standing at a microphone with a fiddle and a bow. This scenario would never have worked with an older woman or a male fiddler. Not for a man. I don't know what might work for women viewers.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/117

She's waiting. She bows an accompanying note or two. Then, she starts playing... and stops. She's waiting again, and this goes on for most of the video. I'm watching the progress bar that indicates how far along the video is, and it's getting toward the end, and this prick-teaser ain't doing shit. Why am I watching this stupid video?

Then, when the video is almost over, she starts playing. She's a pretty good fiddler, but so what? Red-headed sexpots by the score are trying to make it big in show business on a continuous basis, what's the big deal about this one?

Then, she starts doing a freaking highland fling of some kind, and at the same time she was playing this pretty good fiddle tune. She was really cutting a rug and sawing the hell outta that fiddle. Wow!

Then, the crowd erupts into sheer pandaemonium, the fat guy accompanying her on the keyboard got up filled to the brim with sheer exuberant adoration... gave her a big hug... and the video was over! Whaaa....?

So, what does this description have to do with my opening sentence about weeping? It was the fact that I got so worked up about what I expected to happen in the video, that when it did happen, I suddenly felt so emotionally overwhelmed that I started weeping with joy, and couldn't shut it down for about 10-15 minutes.

This episode happened here at my house where I'm alone. I understood everything all along the way. I was happy even though I was perfectly aware my uninvited session of puling would be followed by some Humpty Dumpty-like fall. All Fall Down.

I once had a girl friend who asked me if I wanted to watch her have a sexual climax while she was taking a bath. How could I possibly say no? All I had to do was watch. I didn't have to do anything to her to help or hinder. I was actually in love with her rather than being lust for her, and aye, that was the rub (no pun intended).

She didn't rub herself either. She'd been taught that was nasty. Crazy Capricorn bitch couldn't break her parent's rules, so she made up some new ones. No blame. What happened was that she skootched her bottom down toward the end of the tub by lifting her legs back she could thrust her vagina under the rushing flow of warm water coming out of the faucet, and the warm water provided the friction she needed without touching herself.

I didn't really pay a lot of attention to that end of things. I wanted to see her face when she reached a climax. I agreed with her parents. There is some nasty shit going on down in them nether parts. Some good. Some bad. Sometime both at once.

This woman was a fine specimen of womanhood. She was 46 years old at the time. Sixteen years younger than me. She didn't have the body of a teenager, but she was pretty close. She hadn't had any children. I lived with her day and night for about six weeks. I knew her diet. It wouldn't be worth it to me, but she was near the end of that rodeo. Newer, more devastating tactics would be required.

What I'm saying is that she was a beautiful woman for her age. I wouldn't say the age part her that to her face, I don't care what sort of lack of character that indicates. Hell still hath no fury like a woman scorned, and this woman seemed like she eagerly looked for a reason to cut you.

I saw her face when she climaxed. She was of Greek descent, and I saw Medusa there in her face when she cum hard. In that moment I understood everything she had deliberately hidden from me with her female wiles. None of her feminine mystique (my-stick?) survived her fall from grace. I saw the darkness and ran for my life.

It took a while. It's not unusual for me to meet my match in a woman. It's not my option. Ever. I work hard to make it so. Selah.

What's What?

I've kept a blog online for as long as the archives on this blog shows. This was my first blog site. I've written lots more on the other sites I've kept. Especially for the last couple of years with the LiveJournal blog (see Links, lower right side). I write a lot of personal stuff that allows my readers to think they know a lot about me, but nobody knows. A person who has been reading my blogs might think they know me pretty good, but all they actually know is what they read into what I write.

I've tried real hard to be what the other required. Especially before I realized that's not possible. Something about me is all things to all people. True, it's my eye-mage they use for a mirror, But, it's their conclusion, and it all relates to who they would be if they were what they think I am is.

I know this now, and this no-ing could serve as the excuse I need to crawl back into the woodworks of ho-me (whole or holy me). I haven't figured out how to equate the terms "know" and "no" in order to make clear my intent. To know something requires one to no it, to deny it's ex-is-tense. That's the state-of-being from which the negating takes place. A state-of-being external to is-ness. Ex-is-ness. Consciousness can't upsurge into Is-ness because is-ness is where consciousness upsurges from. Consciousness upsurges from wholeness. From that which is complete. Where no thing is lacking. There's plenty of nothing to go around. Eat, drink, and be merry!

For a thing to be a thing instead of a no thing, that is, for an object to possess being outside of is-ness, independent of it's source, then it must have it's own ground of being. Consciousness does not. It's doesn't have a leg to stand on. Consciousness exists when on it's upsurged vision quest/sojourn, but it's only a temporary state of affairs. Which begs this question or two to be answered: What gains consciousness and what loses consciousness. There is no sense in asking "who" gains or loses consciousness. Who only ex-is-es when it's outside the plenitude. There is no individuality inside the plenitude (being-in-itself) In is-ness, so who isn't and can't be a something inside of nothingness. Who acts like the persona, but can't BE what it seems. Who doesn't do is-ness. What does. What be-co-me-s with consciousness as a convenience, and still ex-is-ts once who dissipates into nothingness. So, what's what?

I worked on a boogie woogie rhythm with my left hand tonight after I got through playing the scales. I turned on the metronome and counted out the twelve bar blues I've been wanting to learn to play. The digital metronome has a chime sound at every fourth beat, and once I figured out how to listen for that chime ringing I was able to stay on count, and it worked out pretty good. The exciting thing about it for me is that I was able to do the turnaround in the right place more frequently. Before tonight, I had been trying to cram the turnaround into the twelfth measure, when it actually starts in the eleventh measure.

I don't know much about the history of the blues, and I don't particularly care if I don't. All I know is that I have had a time trying to play the blues on my guitar. Damned shame too. I needed material like crazy. Back when I was traveling around and playing for whatever I could pass the hat for, I didn't realize the blues have a fairly standard form like the twelve bar blues chords. Nobody ever told me. I didn't know to ask. I suspect I somehow thought that people were born knowing how to play the blues. They might be born to have the blues, but it takes a little more than that to learn to play an instrument well enough to get anybody to abide you while you practice. Even when I found out more about the particulars of how the blues are played, it hasn't come easy to me.

I seem to take too strict a point of view about learning the particulars about playing the blues. I have to know what's right before I start taking liberties. That's what I believe my problem has been. I took liberties with the little bit about the blues I did know or thought I knew, and it threw everything outta whack. I tried to fake it until I could make it, and it didn't work worth a damn.

This time I'm gone get it right. I finally know what's right, more or less, and I'm pretty sure if I can get to the place where I can play what I think is the right way to play the blues. That's right, I wrote "what I think is the right way", I deliberately did not state that I wanted to play what I felt was the right way to play the blues. That's the kind of blues I wanna play, and if there ain't no sech thang, dahlink, there sho' nuff will be soon.

The scales are coming along real good from my point of view. I'm still fairly clumsy when I play them. I'm not unhappy about being so inept at this stage. I enjoy being dogged about trying to play each and every scale effortlessly. That could take years, if it ever happens at all.

Right now I can't play the keyboard anywhere near as well as I played the guitar, and I wasn't that instrumentally great at playing the guitar. Mostly I strummed chords to accompany me singing the songs I wrote. If I keep on keeping on I think I'll get to the point where I can perform my old songs and accompany myself on the piano. I'm trying to go a little further than that though. I'm trying to learn a bit more about music theory and maybe gussy them up with some low-down blues.

I didn't really compose any songs. I figured out some chords to go with the poems I wrote. The poems are supposed to be performed, and making them into songs made it easier to get them heard. It's odd how people will accept the same words as lyrics that they won't accept as a poem. It surprised me how many people memorized my poems as lyrics. It didn't necessarily make me feel special. The same people memorized lots of poems in the form of lyrics.

There are other circumstances in which other people don't recognize I'm reciting poetry and pretending I'm doing something else. I used my poetry as an enchantment when I read palms and tarot cards. Those people had their own idea of what I was supposed to be doing, and couldn't be convinced of anything else. That's what human freedom is all about. Nobody knows.

I probably got too much out of it when I read palms. I hardly ever read palms for money. I read palms for entertainment. Mine, preferably, and the person I was holding hands with if possible. I found reading palms to be one of the most revealing ways possible to observe the other, and also observing myself observing others.

There was always a third person plural in the present tense of my palm-reading. That's what performing is all about to me. There is another me watching me read palms. A witness that is also me. I spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to get this silent witness to use me to have it's say. The problem with that is I am also it and it's like I'm trying to get myself to do something that part of me is aloof from.

You came my way
and thought you'd go,
but I saw your mind,
and knew you'd know
if I told you
the very truth
about myself
which is aloof
from worldly things.

I am a light
from very far
that shines
with all the beauty
which we worship
in a star,
and is in day
the very night
the shadow
of a very bright
daydream.

I'm here
to show you
through the night,
and take you to
another light
that shines alone
throughout the years
to give you hope
instead of fears
of dying.

When I quit
you'll want to die.
You'll bow yo' head
and wonder why
you spent yo' time
to sit and sigh
while I was here
to satisfy
yo' need
for crying.

July, 1973
Edited 4/14/08

Several people have accused me of having to be insane in order to write this poem. They wanted to know who gave me permission to write as if I had the right to make stuff like that up merely to amuse myself. Well, nobody much, and I did. Larry said that an existentialist is a person who controls their own creativity. It just doesn't make sense to me not to. I don't necessarily believe it makes a damn one way or the other if a person controls their own creativity. How else can one approach the notion of allowing their creativity to control them? You can't have One without the Other.

Other people are going to make what I write into their own idea of what they see on their computer monitor. They can only understand what they would have meant to say if they wrote the same exact words they claim I wrote, but for their own reasons instead of mine. Nobody knows. Not you. Not me. Not nobody. How can me-and-thee-ing (meaning) actually occur in real time outside of some imagined idea of ourselves as the other?

Heal Thyself

I seem convinced I have an allergic reaction to the chemicals used for tanning leather, and some food allergies too, that I have never considered to be allergic reactions before. I bought some leather sandals that were made in China last year. I really liked them. They were probably the best made sandals I've ever owned, and i was looking forward to wearing them again this summer. That's not gonna happen. I just took those sandals out to my trash burning pile, and they're going up in smoke. They may or may not be responsible for the lesions I have on my feet. But, the descriptions I've read suggest they are the problem.

Last Spring I had the same problem break out on my second toe on both feet. There was a little of it on my big toe also. When the same thing happened this Spring and when I heard some people whining about their allergic reaction to pollens, I suddenly realized that might be what was going on with my toes. It still might be somewhat responsible, but I kept searching for more specific symptoms that described what I was experiencing, and the leather chemical reaction popped up when I searched for "allergies + feet". I stopped wearing the sandals immediately, and now the lesions on my toes seem to be healing, and the redness on my big toes is gone.

It's weird to think I might have serendipitously run across the real source of these lesions. They didn't respond to any of the external salves and treatments I used. They didn't heal up all summer. I'm thinking it was only because I stopped wearing the sandals when it got cold that the lesions healed up. I think this reaction happened to me internally too. My kidneys started getting a little sore around the same time my toes broke out, and that soreness is pretty much gone away too. I'm still gonna be careful about my diet. I may be allergic to wheat glutin too. Rainey's gonna tell me "I told you so." I oughta listen to that man more often.

The game of Sudoku amazes me. It lets a liberal arts major like me think in some simplistic way about numbers without using those numbers as mere symbol. Using numbers has always been more like work than play to me. I've done it when I had to. More than once I've made a living manipulating numbers in a very strict-time manner. Sudoku is just a game.

The reason I'm carrying on about Sudoku is that I just paid $20 for the license to legally install a stand alone software program that does nothing but generate some practically infinite number of Easy, Medium, and Hard Sudoku.

I had my own way with online Sudoku sites and the Flash games that abound around the internet. Those sorts of places seem to come and go, most of them never really get too hard to solve. But, I generally like to play the game, and had my eye out for a greater challenge. When I saw a review of this Sudoku game called Latin Squares, and it had a Demo for downloading so I could look it over.

I did download the Demo and really liked the way the game is laid out. It's a little gaudy and is way over the top with the neon colors, but it works in a very simple manner like no other Sudoku game before.

If you are familiar with the Sudoku classical layout it's four squares filled nine smaller squares that altogether make up one big square that is the classical Sudoku game board form. Each of the four sections of the big square has nine smaller squares inside each the quarter sections. Three squares across and three squares downward and one square in the middle to make nine. So, you end up with nine numbers inside each of the nine squares in each of the four quarters of the big square Sudoku game board. Right?

The game starts out with a limited group of random numbers placed in each of the nine squares spread across all four sub-squares of the big square. Each of the four sub-squares have nine cubes inside it, and only the numbers one through nine are possible in each of the four squares. The goal is to have all thirty-six of the smaller squares contain one of the nine numbers so that there can only one of each of the nine numbers in any of the smaller squares in all four quarters either vertically or horizontally. To win you have to figure out which numbers go where. The game gets exponentially more difficult when fewer original numbers are given.

What makes the Latin Squares game so easy to play that I'm willing to forgive all the gaudy, jukebox-like flashing lights and being forced to respond to more Yes/No dialog boxes than I like, is the simple way I can point and click the numbers on and off with one mouse click. Other Sudoku games are much more complicated to get such a simple thing done.

No quick decisions are necessary in Sudoku. There is usually a timer in the computer versions of the game. Playing Sudoku is slower moving and more contemplative than action games. Each move has to work out with every other square in the thirty-six square game board or it's just no-bones-about-it wrong. Inside each of the nine squares are a second set of nine marker numbers lined up inside each square in the same way the larger squares are in the four large squares.

If I play Sudoku on paper I like to have a professional grade gum eraser to use because i make so many mistakes the nub of an eraser on a No. 2 pencil ain't gwine cut it.

On the computer an eraser is not needed. I can't see the small numbers inside the squares unless I highlight them with the cursor. If I left-click on one of the small numbers it immediately becomes a big number that represents the larger square. If I right-click on one of the smaller number it remains the same size, but it remains highlighted to remind me that specific number of the nine possible numbers has a better chance than the others of being THE number.

Winning a difficult Sudoku game is all it takes to make me feel like Einstein. It must be my genes and the luck of the draw. Some people spend millions and never get the thrill I get from an odd computer game. Granted, it's a cheap thrill, but for only $20 I can make them cheap thrills add up fast.

What's so cool about this game and the reason I paid their asking price is the intelligent way the developer/s allows the player to review their options, and execute their decisions without a hassle, and then undo it easily if their original decision doesn't work out.

Wasting what little life I have left away playing computer games is insignificant compared to the time I waste away capturing drifting thoughts by writing them down in words. It's pretty obvious I don't always choose the precise term to fit in the precise place it needs to be, but it's ever so much fun when I consider that many people don't even have my very limited options.

I've done some reading in the past. I appear to get more out of discovering the world through the auspices of my own docetic spirit than wading through other people's baggage or even my own. After I publish my blog each day, I never read what I wrote in the archives. It's too embarrassing.

Some smart aleck once told me I was a specious sort of person, and the expression on his face when he said that made it seem like I was being accused of not measuring up to his expectations. I looked up the term "specious" in an old unabridged dictionary I had laying around, and it's definition of specious confirmed for all time that I wasn't receiving a compliment by this fellow.

It was the next definition underneath specious that drew my attention. That entry was entitled "specious present". Even the old dictionary called it an archaic expression. Usually employed by philosophers to indicate the eternal now. That didn't compute at first. Respectable philosophers associating the term specious with the eternal now? Sure enough, reading the rest of the entry confirmed I'd read it right. How could that be?

The answer was revealed in the next description. Certain philosophers concluded that the present must be treated as if it's ongoing value is somewhat specious. Specious in the sense of being plausible, but not convincing. If any possibility arrives from the future that is so convincing you follow it into the past, you've abandoned the immediacy of now.

Contrarily, it concluded, if you get enticed by the possibilities of the future before they reveal their true nature in the cauldron of the present, you're counting yo' chickens before they hatch.

"Do this, don't do that, can't you read the signs?"
_

To reach enlightenment via meditation is to amicably attain an inspired state of hopelessness and feel satisfied in that enough is enow.

It a hopeless cause to argue the positive aspect of hopelessness. In meditation, it is hope that diverts one's attention to industry and away from the nothingness of nevermind. Hope is about stuff that matters. Matter is wot covers you up six-foot under when you croak. Who needs things to matter? Nincompoops?

One cannot aspire to the state of ecstagony using hope as a vehicle. That's the polar opposite of what one does when they practice mediating nothingness with the hope of individuation. One can't hope and stay in the specious present at the same time. That's why once the immediacy of Now! is attained unheroically, one must abandon hope. Don't you read the signs. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

Which begs this question: How can one cling to somethingness when nothingness is all that's left when the chance is gone? It's not like nothingness stops consciousness from claiming Is-ness as it's ground-of-being... is it? Are consciousness and somethingness the same sheepish concept in wolf's clothing? There's nothing to either one of them. Consciousness don't seem able to ex-is without constantly inculcating denial.


The Great Pretender

Ooh Ooh yes I'm the great pretender (ooh ooh)
Just laughing and gay like a clown (ooh ooh)
I seem to be what I'm not (you see)
I'm wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you're still around

~ The Drifters

http://www.links2love.com/love_lyrics_134.htm
_

It's shocking to me that Martin Luther King was assassinated forty years ago. My history is as tied up with his even though he was murdered as expected all those years ago. It was a sad day for me, even though I am a product of the culture he threw away his life to defy. I don't think it matters much which side you're on when you witness the life and times of a true martyr. I say "witnessed", but I never met the man or saw much reason to curse him. The die was cast. For what it was worth, I seemed more or less untouched the heat of the battle, and went my own way. The rumors of war remained rumors.

Even after all those years I still see myself as a moderate protestant. I use lower case letters to signify that although I was raised under the auspices of the Bible Belt Protestants, but in my puberty I began to see the hypocrisy within their religious dogma, and confronted God to show me my own path with heart, and let the rising tide of Fundamentalism eat away it's moderate, free-choice roots in the righteous cause of Fascism, but I retained the right to protest the right of any other person to impose their religious views on me, even if I had to hide it to survive at times.

The Navy was already desegregated to a large extent when I joined in 1957, and soon I found myself eating at the same table, and sleeping in the same crew's quarters with blacks, asians, latinos, and most testily, them weird-talking Bluebellies from the Devil's own lair. In four brief years the cultural lies of racial superiority ingrained during my formative years suffered a blow from which they would never completely recover.

I would never waste my time to claim I'm not racially prejudiced. Jim Crow ruled the roost for my entire childhood in the Bible Belt and the Deep South. I can't trade the childhood I actually experienced away for another more politically correct one. Philosophically, I completely agree with the tenets of equality before the same law, and act accordingly no matter what.

It's not for the people who are different from me in some way that I constrain myself to some rustic form of politeness and questionable good will. Like many religious minorities, I grin and bear it if I must. Why would I not? It's not for-the-other I deliberately exhibit as broad a sense of fair play as possible. To what people as will graciously allow it. I do it to follow (as best I know how) the tenets of the Golden Rule, and how it works to embrace human freedom in practice. I show people how I wanna be treated as pedantically as needed, so they don't have to guess about what it might take to make me slobber with gratitude when they save me from myself just before hell freezes over.

My rural delivery mailbox had one letter in it when I went to the cafe this morning. It was a brief note from the VA Hospital stating that all my tests turned out okay. I got nothing going on that has negative indicators. I guess I'm fairly pleased about that. They're not even interested in giving me cholesterol reducing pills. It's about 150. You see, that's what I'm talking about. Who's worried about dying? What if I should live?

I'm thinking more and more about being possessed of symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome. I subscribed to an e-mail discussion group today. I'm hoping to get a little feedback from the horse's mouth. I wrote an introductory post, but no replies or any other posts from that group have arrived.

This has a lot to do the intent of my statement when I write about not having no couth or no nevermind. That means I can be rather plain-spoken without regard to the other's feelings, and not intentionally. Some people appear to think that I don't take their views into consideration when I act out in the way I do sometime. In many cases it's true. I don't mean anything derogatory by pretending disdain as I do, it's just difficult for me to realize that other people don't have the good sense I do. '-)

I don't know why I felt so pressed to have the condition of my heart checked out. I thought it was probably okay, but I've been known to cry wolf and think I'm just pretending. My invisible, docetic friend sets me up with double entendres that can have a cruel human side to them.

The fact that I smoked cigarettes for around forty years and didn't have any detrimental indicators in my heart show up is amazing even to me. I don't have to know where I am to be there.

I feel sensitive and vulnerable now. The dreaded ordeal is over and it wasn't dreadful at all. There was only one scary moment, and it happened a week before my hospital appointment. I was worried there might be a mix-up about my appointment, and I called to check it out. I joked around with the lady on the other end of the phone, and she suddenly adopted some officious Nurse attitude and told me not to come over there for my appointment and mess with them. I instantly changed my entire disposition and became as non-offensive as possible.

I remember several single mothers who went back to school to become nurses simply because nursing paid good money. If they were doing it out of compassion for their fellow man I wasn't aware of it. They had mouths to feed.

I took up pipewelding because it paid good money. I know the feeling. I didn't weld pipe to put money in the investor's pockets who were financing the work I made money doing. If they got too demanding and demanded more of me than I was willing to give, I'd get the red ass, pack up my tools, and hit the ground running. Same way with demanding too much of nurses. It's just a job. No blame.

It's simple enough to alter my behavior if I understand what's being asked of me. All I'm really altering is my reaction to provocations I don't yet understand. The woman on the telephone I talked to about my appointments helped me to remember I'm nobody special to these people. I know better than to get critical with people who don't have enough time for me and my bag of tricks in the first place.

I can't claim to know an awful lot about medical institutions. Particularly as a patient. I've only been a patient a couple of times. When I was, they fixed what ailed me, and I didn't have to go back for the same ailment over and over. The incident that scared me about hospitals happened with my father when he was in his mid-eighties. He had some sort of problem that caused the visiting home nurse to have him checked in the hospital. When I heard about it I went to visit him. He was alone and in a very sulky mood. There was no blame in that. He was trussed up on a strait jacket.

He had been yanking the IVs out of his arms, and running up and down the halls like a happy child naked as a jaybird, and after three or four times of chasing him down they put the strait jacket on him and wouldn't take it off unless I was willing to check him out of the hospital or hire a non-relative guard to stay in his room with him. I wouldn't do that. This senile old man didn't even know it was his son that he looked at so balefully. I might have helped my father, but not this feral beast. I only knew him as my father, and he wasn't that person any more.

When the nurse tersely described his behavior I had no doubt it was true. I knew his ways and other men who had similar ways. One of them in the state hospital where I committed myself for a month to find out for myself if I was insane. I was there long enough for my purposes. I learned to recognize insanity from the inside out.

I witnessed the attendants put other giggly little men who behaved a lot like my father into strait jackets. The attendants never came close to doing something like that to me. One of the jobs my father had as a college student was working as an attendant at the state hospital in Mississippi. He told me horror stories. I wanted to know if they were true. I got lied to a lot. I needed to know something was true. It wasn't.

My father was the baby of his family. He wasn't supposed to show up. His oldest brother was eighteen years older than him. His parents both died in their seventies before my father was thirty-five years old. He didn't take it well. I oughta know. I'm the person he talked to about it when we worked out in the fields alone together. He told me about things that were none of my business. They were a burden. I was just a kid.

My father was a sociable man. He liked people and he liked to be around somebody all the time. It was only in his dotage that he appeared to spend more time alone. Often enough, he seemed bitter because he's given so much to other people and they had forgotten him when he got old and was lonely. I don't think anybody could have provided surcease for the lonesomeness my father felt. I could probably count the number of times he put his arm around me and hugged me on one hand. My mother even less. They stiffened up if I tried. You get what you give.

I've spent a good deal of the day getting ready to go over to the VA Hospital tomorrow bright and early. I got some gas. I didn't get much for $20. Having an internet connection is becoming more and more essential now to stay interactively connected to the outside world.

The way gasoline keeps going up, the outside world will be the next town over. We're being forced to returned to the grassroots level of dealing with people in the flesh. I don't care. I did my traveling when I was young, dumb, and full of cum. The Boomers who waited until they retired to travel can use the brochures they pored over and dreamed by to light up the fireplace to get ready to cook supper.

I can't imagine having to commute like I used to in order to work. My fuel bill would take away the only good reason to drive long distances to work. A good many local people drive 50-100 miles one way to work each day. They have to. There are not that many jobs around this rural county. I suspect there is going to be a lot of cheap, educated help going around begging for anything they can get soon.

I'm sort of resigned to the thought of finding out what sort of condition my ticker is in tomorrow. I'm a little nervous about the possible results. I smoked tobacco and other green things for most of my adult life. How much damage that's done to my heart is anybody's guess. Maybe not so shaky a guess after they run me through the chute tomorrow. That's about what the nurse on the phone described when I asked her what to expect.

My formative years were saturated with farm animals and taking care of them. As a result of that I sorta know what behavior to avoid if I wanna shuffle through this event as a typical everyday experience rather than an trying ordeal.

I guess it might seem odd to some people that I write about human freedom and of my intimate knowledge of how institutions work. I don't personally grok why this would be difficult to understand, but it's my gig and not theirs. It seems clear to me that many people don't seem to understand that, in America at least, they've been in and out of institutions since they were children.

Schools are institutions. One attends schools to get institutionalized. When it's looked at this way, my knowledge of institutions is not that profound. I know people who have been so institutionalized they can't live outside of them. They get jobs there and spend the rest of their lives institutionalizing others as if their righteous duty to God and man.