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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://raineyp.blogspot.com

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

I'm occasionally writing a blog over at:

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

Most of the stuff I write is at:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Once more into the breech!"

It amuses me how open people are to setting themselves up for the kill. It's as if they have no idea they are projecting their idea of reality on to the world around them. Yes, I am aware that I have existed in that state for most of the years of my life, but now that I understand that basic principle and employ my understanding of to the efforts of the other it sometime embarrasses me that I could have been so naive. The trick is that if I were that naive then, how naive could I possibly be now. Perhaps everyone haven't had this experience. I can't possibly gnow that can I? I can only assume that the other perceives only their own idea of reality. I certainly can't take that for any sort of universal truth. Perhaps they are similar to me, and have no more volition in the process of making judgement than I do. Some may perceive how the world mirrors ourselves back to us and manipulate me own opinions back to me as their advantage, and I never catch on. Perhaps not. Whenever I use the other's words to provide them with their own idea of self that seems to be the end of their argument. On the other hand, perhaps they find me trivial and boring. Poor babies. They gnow not what they do.

The media information we're getting from the tsunami catastrophe about what the survivors believe caused the tsunamis seems interesting. The Muslim imams are telling them that it happened because Allah is pissed off about how they have been behaving, and the scientists are telling them that it happened because of earthquakes and plate movements. According to the reporters, some of the survivors seem to rest easier with the latter descriptions, but many of them actually believe the imams, and some appear to feel guilty about their neighbor's and kinsmen's deaths as if something they did were responsible for the tsunamis. This is the proper societal response in much of the world. This confrontation between the values of the East and West seems very much like a larger version of the Scopes trial on an international scale.

To accept the argument of Arthur Schopenhaer (who I've been a little fascinated with lately) where reason exists as the activity of the will substituting abstract thought for perceptual understanding, and performs these substitutions of their own volition in order to change the expected results presumed by nature, then in effect, this might amount to Western societies insisting that their reason for doing what they do conflicts with the Muslim societies reason for doing what they do, and it's the Scopes trial all over again. This time it's happening on an international scale. The "evolutionists" in this global trial are vastly outnumbered. The use of reason as the pivotal point of contention appears to exist as the same argument that has existed since civilization began. As far as I can see, the argument is between charisma and logic. Charisma usually wins in these arguments.
.

I woke up at 0430 this morning. I didn't intend to wake up so early, but my younger brother had asked me to eat breakfast with him and so I thought this would work out fine. We kind of settled on a time to get together. He told me he wasn't sleeping well, and usually was up by three in the mornings, and so he would be available any time after then. We arranged that when I got up at my usual time between six and seven, I would stop by his house and pick him up, and away we would go.

Since the restaurant doesn't open until 0530, I drove down to his house at 0545 to pick him up. Nobody was up at his house. I lightly tooted the horn and that brought no response, so I came back home. All of this is well and good, of course, I didn't wanna get out this early, but it'll work out fine in the long run. I'm supposed to meet him and my older sister today to go through mother's stuff and sort it out for the various family members.

I'm not crazy about doing this, but it's gotta be done. As soon as the legal questions are addressed the airport authority will bulldoze her house down, so we gotta get what we want out of it. When asked what I might want I told them that I wanted practical stuff, and if nobody else wanted it I would like to have her refrigerator. It's a full sized one with a freezer compartment probably as big as my small dorm-type refrigerator, and I'm looking forward to being able to buy frozen meat in larger packages that will be much less expensive for me. I asked if there was any money left over, and expected the answer I got. Not much.

I went to eat breakfast in my usual fashion this morning. I knew there would be people there that would offer condolences for my mother's death, and I wasn't sure how I might respond to them. As it turned out I sense that I seemed rather defiant about their efforts to console me, when there was nothing to console. This one guy I've eaten with in the past many times stopped by my table to offer his condolences, and when I remarked that I felt pleased to think my mother's spirit had made a clean getaway, he remarked that he was glad for my mother, but his heart went out to me. It seemed quite clear that like many people, he simply didn't gnow what to say and was going through the motions in some effort to be kind. I could have made it easier for him, but I sometime think I don't have those skills or if I do, I ignore them to satisfy some other urge. I gotta learn to lie in these situations, so that people can feel comfortable with their rituals. Aww... screw 'em. LOL

I don't gnow exactly how I SHOULD feel about my mother dying two days ago. I do gnow I don't look forward to her funeral tomorrow. I'm just glad it's tomorrow instead of today. I woke up feeling absolutely wonderful this morning. I still find it difficult to believe this spring-like weather we've had on the East Coast now for the last two weeks. It's supposed to get up into the seventies today, and it didn't get below sixty last night. Naturally, since it's officially the winter season now, this miracle will not last forever, but it's wonderful NOW.

Hillary wrote to tell me of experiencing a sort of new found freedom in her mother's death. I seem to be experiencing somewhat the same. My sleeping patterns have not changed. I feel good physically. After I had rested up from that long drive yesterday I felt good last night too. I gotta take a long shower and shave so I'll at least not stink around all these people who are coming in for the funeral. I've been told my mother's youngest sister is driving in with her daughter, but the rest of her family is either dead or never knew my mother because we moved a thousand miles away from where both of my parent's families grew up a long time ago. That's a two-way street. We never got to gnow them all that well for the same reason.

I had hoped this airport deal would be settled before my mother died. With my mother's death I will have to deal with the government as a more direct participant than previously. My sister's having my mother's power of attorney really made things easy for me. She and my younger brother have handled this deal without me having to be directly involved, but that power of attorney ended with my mother's death. Hopefully, their relationship with the lawyer they hired will keep the momentum going, and all I'll have to do is nod my head, agree with their strategies, and I won't have to make a public spectacle of myself to get it over with. Admittedly, I would like for it to be over. I seem quite sure I would have accepted their first offer just to be done with it, but since that offer has more than doubled since the process begun, and my sister and brother are asking at least ten times that much, if not more, then it's better for me to stay on the sidelines and let them do what they gotta do. They say we'll at least get the last good offer, so we have nothing to lose by going to jury trial. Maybe I can get away with going for another long drive.

I've always seemed to run away from hassles. Like with my mother's death, I ran away to be by myself, while my siblings gathered together to console each other. I owe it to myself to understand how I feel about it, because how I feel about it is what I gotta deal with.

Aaah... the sun is shining, it's unseasonably warm, and I'm hearing things about how the various groups are planning to feed the family with all sorts of good stuff to eat. My favorite memory of the Baptist Church as a child. Just imagining ten different styles of fried chicken and a multiplicity of different potato salads and green bean casseroles.... plus pecan pie up the yinyang. Whatta life!

Is it your doubt of your father's strength that which kept him from realizing his potential in the past, and even now? If you change your mind to a more productive attitude toward your present interests, and through your own hard work show your father how you have always wanted him to be, will your father then blossom and become what he wanted to be before you came along? Why have you been so cruel? '-)

You WILL become your father if you live long enough. The time to make your father into the kind of person you want to be-co-me then... is now.