SPRING CLEANING — LOOSE ENDS

MISTER AVERAGE
He was born February 17, 1928
He died October 19, 2006 at 7:46 in the morning
By dying at 78.6 years of age he was average for the first time in his life.
He delayed by one second the moment his nation bore its first 300,000,000 people. That was nineteen years ago. Today his great-great-granddaughter became the 600,000,000 person living in the United States. She expects to live 106.2 years …
if she is the new average.

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BALI HI

I am a mask carved from brown and cream marbled candlenut wood by a very happy person, Gai Tsu, who would have carved me when he did without the dollars he was paid for doing so. I will hang in the new apartment of Marjory Daw on a wall that allows me to look out upon the red brick, treelined street a floor below. Marjory will receive me as a house warming present from her friend, Thad, who loved Bali more than anywhere he’d never been and bought carvings like me on any occasion he deemed an excuse to support Bali and the art depicting the celebration of life he believed her culture to be devoted to. Marjory had only heard of Bali from Thad and from a record her Nana loved to play with a song, “Bali Hi,” on it, to which they’d danced a kind of slow hula with their arms stretched upward in breezy waving motions. Because there had been a wooden carving of Buddha on one book shelf or another the whole while she was growing up, beatific smile etched between chubby cheeks, robed arms stretched up to the sky, big belly shiney from her testing the unfailing truth that she could not help but laugh if she rubbed it, for the longest time she thought the song was about Buddha and his high belly.

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VIVE LE DIFFERENCE

We all see different things with different eyes for different reasons. It is our only commonality. Eradicate those differences and nature will eradicate humanity, the whole cannot balance on one point. We are born to different parents (genetic predisposition) in different places (cultural biases) in different times (temporal pressures) and spend the rest of our lives, unless completely hypnotized by our cultural myths, seeking love and belonging in reenactment of the genetic inclination to find security in numbers against a common predator. Modern man, having preemptively extinguished all possible species of predator, has only to flock for protection against predation by other flocks and lying scoundrels hiding within the swollen ranks of their own. The USA was founded upon such scoundrelous lies when it declared that it “hold(s) these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal ...” and then proceeded to fill its prisons with, make war upon, and train their equally created children to not become exceptions to the rule, disbelievers in the lie. All governments need prisons, killing and education to maintain public allegiance to their brand of lie. I happened to have spent my life seeking love and belonging in the USA. I found the love and belonging - it is the government that doesn’t belong here!

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"And let this always weigh down your feet like lead, to make you move as slowly as a weary man, to refrain from yes or no when you do not see ... because hasty opinion too often points the wrong way and then affection for one's own opinion binds up the intellect."
—Dante

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DOLDRUMS

Doldrums are those windless areas that appear to sailors in their treks across ocean expanses for which their purpose must await nature's way going theirs once again. In the course of simplifying my life there occur such purposeless moments. They are not the result of stopping to meditate. They are realized to have occurred in any describable way only when returning to a consciousness of objective reality, you know, the one we all walk around in while seeking agreement with our version of. They are what seem to be the same as and probably the original incentive for the development of the practice of any kind of meditation. The closest approach I can get to expressing the state would be that it is undifferentiated, the essence of all variations appears and the modern brain’s pigeon hole comparison mechanism free wheels silently without input to sort. I have at various times been reminded of such states by witnessing or hearing of autism and alzheimers and post traumatic shock cases, where the subject is lost to the world insisted on by the sane. The reason such states are sought after by meditators is for a direct connection to their nature without the mental machinery enumerating the variations of which the maelstrom of catagories comes available.

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CREATIVITY USED AGAINST ITSELF

Every battle won by Save Our Springs to prevent developers from destroying the local environment ended up being a bullet on a realestate brochure.
The quality of life in exchange for the quantity of toys.
The machine being sold at announcement will run forever, assuming it has passed product testing, compared to several years down the line when the beancounters have shortened the life of every part to barely beyond warranty. When you make millions of anything, it only makes sense.

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." —Leo Tolstoy

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STRENGTH IN VARIETY

The variation of nature’s manifestations from the evanescent to the unavoidable is an indication of the health such flexibility lends to its endurance through an unmeasurable period of constant change.
My body doesn’t need me to tell it what to do for proper operation within my skin and anything I intend to do outside my body I must include my body’s active complicity. I serve as the perfect government of the cells of my body. I must trust my cells, my citizens, to go about their various functions in such a way that the general health of my life is well and their are no internal conflicts that could spread disease. When there comes along something I must deal with using my hands I consult, brief and use my hand cells for the purpose with no need to consult the entire body.
If it is not too much of a stretch to consider humanity's body to have individual humans as its cells and small tribes of individual cells as molecules and particular functional parts of the body, finger, biscep, liver, plumber, carpenter, farmer and that drummer that keeps the beat … I would like to propose that nature is the perfect model for proper regulation of human affairs in the analogue of the natural curve as opposed to the digitized calclulus of civilization (upper, middle and lower class; the caste system; slavery) which never takes small enough, close enough asymptotic approximations to human nature for the fit to be fair for all.