2007 IN REVIEW – POLITICIZATION OF A PONDERER

In January my home here at the Dawg Ranch was flooded to two feet deeper than the surface of the pond, yet the fish all remained. A week later a rare snowfall blanketed the land and froze that pond to an ice rink surface for toads.

February welcomed this still snazzy iMac to be my broader window on the world outside my Dawg Ranch digs with its inclusion of iChat video as a way to see my friends during our conversations, although its log in process is has been dysfunctional for the past eight months.

In March I discovered Cornel West’s dynamic vision of socialism and his optimism for grass roots democracy among the disenfranchised youth of the US. The toads taught me how close to the cycles of the moon their behavior is timed. Continued rains threaten to create a rain forest amid the rolling hills of Tejas.

April fooled me by showing me the satiric ditties of Roy Zimmerman while taking away the life of my favorite role model of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Troutsky gave me the Thinking Blogger Award which I dutifully passed on to three, Pisces Iscariot, Bobby Lightfoot and Mr. Daymon at 22 Over 7, out of the five that fell to my lot. I have since discovered Karoline in the Morning and so have only one more to name.

Amidst a rare sunny day in late May and a gathering of friends, I began getting e-mails expressing a born-again evangelistic zeal in my formerly rational 40+ daughter to save me from hell by accepting Jesus as my savior. Encouraging this post,

Our debate of late
Has centered the tongs on the truth
The essence in that block of ice
Is directly between
So it can be seen
Jesus wants us to let God in.
Buddha wants us to let God out.

The dynamo
Behind the spark of life
As we reward our selves
With the karma laden canvas
We paint with our lives
Of what we think we see —
And of who we think it is
That sees it.

One thing
Endlessly dissectible
Eternally one
No matter what is done.

She has yet to acknowledge the poem or desist with passing ammunition to onward Christian soldiers.

Much to my surprise, my search for confederates in remote viewing research among my blog buds of yet curious minds got the treatment of a fart in church judging by the lack of response to the June post.

I declared July 20th the 176th day of rain in 2007 in exasperation of having too much water ruin my spring garden and retreated to the cyber world of Uru.

In August I found John Pilger to be a great reminder of the purpose and possibilities of journalism in an interview on Democracy Now. A week or so later Amy Goodman interviewed Naomi Klein about her book on the Shock Doctrine.

In September I tried a second blog, Canary in a Cave, in an idealistic, hardly realistic attempt to separate politics from nature, which didn’t last a whole month due to the political nature of mankind’s approach to nature of any kind.

October saw an expansion of a mutual exploration of truth evoked and encouraged by Red Dirt Girl and this quote from Joyce Carol Oates,

"The experience is there, the reality is there,
but how to get at it?
Everything I type turns into a lie
simply because
it is not the truth."

In November I discovered the political compass and have gotten pretty excited about its possibility of waking up an all too complacent US citizenry to the disparity between their best interests and the government agenda demonstrated on the political map by plots of presidential candidates in complete opposition to the fourteen readers who voluntarily contributed their coordinates to the data.

My conversion to a bona fide political animal was completed in December as I decided to vote in the 2008 election for Dennis Kucinich. I doubt I will vote for any other candidate if he isn’t on the ballot in November.

Overall I fondly remember making great new friends amongst my blog buds as we all rued the further continuous sinking of the US into global fascism. The unique capabilities of the interweb to generate lateral communications between individuals who formerly depended on vertical top-down government representation through the news media is slowly being realized to have the power to neutralize governments’ practice of settling their arguments using their misrepresented citizenry as canon fodder to out shout one another.

I wish you all peace, love and happiness in a more alert new year.

THE HIGH COST OF WORKING

The best teachers I’ve had in my life are those who planted seeds viable enough to sprout nourishment in the most fertile occasions for life lessons. The idea that the big lesson must be one of self discovery, no matter how interesting and fact filled the lecture, is a carry over from days when 95% of the population lived lives of physical activity using skills acquired by apprenticing to a working mentor so that the lessons all made immediate sense through living examples, from carpentry to stalking game. Classrooms and teachers can only offer the experience of proving that one remembers the facts of the lecture with little assurance that relevance to ones life is grasped until well after graduation. The next best thing to apprenticeship is having a teacher who employs knowledge of the subject in daily life as a primary livelihood and is, therefore, also a mentor in the classroom.

The best art I have ever seen has enhanced the way I am able to look at everything from from that moment on, or bugged me until it did so further on down the track of time. One piece that bugged me for most of my life until the cosmic humor of the scene, adequately depicted by unexceptional oil painting technique, finally broke through my chronic perturbation. Although it may have been obvious to the entire rest of the world already, I enjoyed realizing for myself that humorous beauty of dogs playing poker was the high irony of dog’s inability to hide their emotions well enough to ever be able to bluff … a prerequisite to poker is lying!

Not that it is art work, but there is something that has bugged me like the poker playing pooches. With the obvious savings gained by not needing to supply office and parking space, insurance or food for employees who could work just as efficiently from computer at home as they ever did in their cubicle, in addition to the good sense to eliminate commuter traffic wherever possible — with all that, why have corporations not jumped on that bandwagon to the bottom line and stockholder profit? I think I have finally caught on to them and it is just as insidious as the rest of the ruinous practices of capitalistic excess: corporations’ greatest enemy are individuals who think for and are useful to themselves which, allowing them to work from home at their own pace, will allow them to discover in the much more encouraging, entrepreneurial setting. The mass hypnosis will break down if the mini patriotism of corporate loyalty to product necessity is seen for the propaganda it is when viewed from the fractalized perspective of the individual. If the savings do not balance out the loss of profitable loyalty they must be pretty worried about their secret.

INSIDE THE ACTORS' STUDIO MEME

Perhaps the first time I heard the term, meme, was on the old TV show. Inside the Actor's Studio, when during his interview of actors, James Lipton would work in the following questions, the answers to which always seemed to exaggerate the spread between genuine candor and maintaining the hyped image. I like meme's despite their me-me-me aspect, or, if you're like me in valuing the uniqueness of the individual over willingness to conform to external authority, because of the work meme's do to help one find ones forsaken self under the mindless conformity demanded by western culture taken on faith and fear of punishment.

1. What is your favorite word?

Threshold

2. What is your least favorite word?

Can’t

3. What turns you on?

uniqueness

4. What turns you off?

conformity

5. What sound or noise do you love?

wind in the trees

6. What sound or noise do you hate?

the whine in my brain around circuitry

7. What is your favorite curse word?

motherfucker

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

anthropology

9. What profession would you not like to do?

run the lives of others (would like not to be done by anyone!)

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

If you must bring up this mythical terminology: this IS Heaven being made to seem to be Hell by people running around worrying about just such mythical improbabilities as their main concern as if life were one big report card from the big Santa in the sky that pre-adolescent mankind still believes in.



I realized that although it was at least twenty years ago that I used to watch this TV show, or any other for that matter, Google's spell check still doesn't recognize the word, meme.

MARKERS

Today the South Pole begins to point away from the sun and gradually hide itself in the shade of the girth of the Earth. This is my 200th post since June 14, 2006. In precisely five years the Mayan calendar will mark 13 Baktuns (13.0.0.0.0.0.0) or 5,125 years since the sun last crossed the galactic equator and will do so again from the other side of the galaxy. At the rate I am posting I will have added 666 more posts to this blog by December 21, 2012. If the predictions based on the Mayan calendar come to pass, I will have some very interesting events about which to opine and by which I may be prevented posting ever again. This possibility of leaving the living has always existed and I have made my peace with the reaper long ago.

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I just watched a movie I would have avoided except for the name, Stranger than Fiction. It featured Will Farrel as, Harold Crick, a man who began hearing the narration of his life as being written by Emma Thompson’s character, an author who kills all her heroes. In this case, her hero finds her just as she clears her writer’s block on how to kill him and, although only hand written on legal paper, she has finished the book and his life. She gives him the whole manuscript and he reads it in one sitting on the bus. When he returns it to her he is resigned to his fate, its being such a perfect ending to a masterpiece. As Crick goes about his morning routine getting ready for work, the author is typing up the ending. Upshot is that he lives after being hit by his regular bus when he saves a boy on a bike from being run over. The author explains to Dustin Hoffman that she never minded killing her heroes because everyone dies, but she’d faltered with Harold because none of her characters had ever known they were to die and nor would they have bravely carried on with their lives. He was the kind of person she would never want to die.

As contrived as this plot was it scored big points in the loss of fear of death department with me. Don Juan told Castaneda that a warrior must live prepared to live forever or die at every and any moment. Fear of death so lowers our energy level that we attract those elements that would exploit it. Hypochondria and Xenophobia are extreme cases of a plethora of other fearfully self-fulfilling restrictions to realizing love, happiness and an open mind, within us all the while.

It is fear of the unknown that formulates religions as community fairy tale tellers to buffer against the finality of death. “Don’t worry your little head about it, if you behave yourself according to god’s will you will be playing a harp in heaven, singing a sutra in nirvana, winning wars in valhalla … yaddada, yaddada, yaddada. You won’t miss a thing, you’ll be looking down at life from a more understanding remove. If you sin, you are gonna roast in hell, ride the wheel of life forever, be reincarnated as a coward…unless, of course, you want to contribute to the church.”

There are many perversions of those supposedly comforting promises, both in the curbing of free thought by theocratic dictates and in realizing one could bribe ones way through a life of sin, if one were rich enough, which seems to be a mutually self-fulfilling requirement of its own.

The excuse I hear most from those nearing their life expectancy goes something like, “I just want to see the grandchildren grow up,” as if nothing had been missed up to then. With the world being in the diseased condition we have wrought upon it, a wish to witness the life they’ll suffer from it is a most macabre case of group hypnosis and hysterical historic denial.

There are deathbed confessions of top secrects by operatives who swapped their fear of the repercussions for violating their sworn silence for the fear of having no virtue to report to St. Peter, having feared the government more than god while healthy, but for exactly the same reason.

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The notion that there exists a date upon which all life as we know it will cease to exist for every living creature puts a giant twist in an already shakey path mankind finds itself trodding. Whether it is the Mayan prophesy seeming to coincide with global extremities exacerbated by human treatment of our space ship as an unlimited resource, unsustainable depletion of biodiversity, stoppable explosion of population, the rise of one world corporate fascism, 6,000,000,000 people dependent on finite fossil fuels or not, if it makes folks reexamine their lifestyle in light of these things, it serves its purpose well. Will there be a race among individuals to accumulate the most of everything or will the proximity to finality finally show any justification for such self-aggrandizement to be as blatantly self-deluding to all who deny it as it has for many all along?

OHHHH, THE TIDE IS TURNING

I am not sure what turned the tide, but at the last minute, the United States agreed to join the consensus of emission reduction of 20-40% by 2020 at the Bali Environmental Summit. Still not enough but a step in the right direction. Attendees credit the delegate from Papua, New Guinea's saying to the US, "If you are not going to lead, get out of our way." It is the best environmental news since the Cayahooga River burned itself out.

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For one of the best uses of metaphor I've come across in a long while in a very modern fairy tale check out Parlor Radicals by Adam Engel over at Tomas Paine's Journal.

GLOBAL WARMING, MOBILE SWARMING

I think I have a way to settle the ambivalence of the three big auto using countries, the Axles of Evil you might say, US, Canada & Japan, to go forward with ecologically necessary measures to avert the threat of global warming!

Forget global warming. Let’s appeal to their good old bible thumpin’ fear of hell, since that is what seems to break out wherever industrial civilization touches the planet. From the dragon’s breath torches of petroleum cracking towers and billions of auto farts 24/7/365/100+ to a population gorging itself on increasing artificially abundant food whose burgeoning numbers are forbidden by celibates to use or even know about artificial birth control, we have enough absolute, evident concerns resulting from the same causes as are affecting global warming.

We are poisoning our selves by poisoning what we breath and eat and drink! I read of a theory that the Roman empire declined because of pewter dinnerware making them too ill to summon the will to kill for the thrill at the top of the hill. Our fatal favor of fossil fuel will take more than our empire with it. The global warming aspect of earth’s latest health report has been most in the news because, of all the disastrous results of our planetary abuse, it is the most arguable, least evident to people within the propaganda spin zone. Please go here to see what you might do about turning the Axles of Evil around.

I have got to point you to this superb discussion about why we have got to rein in our consumption without even mentioning global warming.



And if that doesn’t help, I have a backup plan. I have come to the point in my life where my concern about being misrepresented by people doing bad things has caused me to threaten hell with a freezing over. I am going to support Dennis Kucinich for president and, here’s the ice nine clincher, vote for the first time in my life on my 70th birthday for him in November 2008. The situation is dire enough and he decidedly addresses the situation at its roots enough to get me involved.

This brings me to a bone I have to pick with the whole process of the run up to party conventions having such an emphasis on electability that effectiveness in representing the concerns of the people gets discussed less than their sex life or their hair cut. Frankly, I would like to see the two most laughed at candidates from both parties run on a third party ticket, if Ron Paul would consider being Kucinich’s VP. They are not laughable, they are being laughed at by their competition as an attempt at sneering condescension to their honest, vulnerable naiveté in the lying, promise-’em-anything shark pool, rather than even discuss the important points they both bring up. If the White House needs scouring, those two would be like anti-bacteria on grout to route 'em out.

I have not studied Dennis Kucinich on purpose as yet, but from the information that comes to me unbidden, he’s that dynamite reputed to come in small packages. We shall see. I hope you sign that petition to let the Bali Environmental Summit know that Bush does not represent you.

There are new data points on the political map, click on the sidebar to see. I appeal to everyone to check this out. It is a unique way to demonstrate the misrepresentation of the people by the political agenda, it doesn’t matter whether you are a US citizen, please send me your political compass points for a more representative plot. If anyone wants to help get their readers to contribute, feel free to copy the map from the sidebar and make it a link to this post.

I have also considered a kind of double blind test designed to cancel the personality of the hopefuls wherein a series of pertinent questions, not requiring speechifying hyperbole, is presented to all the presidential candidates. Then list each question with each of the candidates answers next to anonymous check boxes to be chosen, one per question, by the survey taker. Individuals could find the best candidate for them and two totals can be taken for the overall survey: the overall winner by individual voter’s total results and the winner by tallying all the check boxes of all the voters. The great advantage would be having the winner on record for what was promised. If anyone who thinks this is a good idea and has the clout to get it out to the powers that be, feel free. I think it would be an excellent way to actually vote on more than two candidates, no electoral college to manipulate.

I must be as naive as Dennis.

BABY FACED BULLIES & THE DIVIDER

I have read more political literature since I began this blog a year and a half ago than I had over the entire span of my existence ‘til then. Although there has been practically no change in my political inclinations, I have acquired a vocabulary to better describe what I've always intuited, but never discussed with anyone. Howard Zinn has reified my worst suspicion — that politicians are to the people they claim to represent as the farmer is to his dairy cows; keep ‘em just contented enough to give maximum milk and if they don’t produce milk, send ‘em to the stockyards or slaughterhouse. This cross purpose system of governance has claimed itself to be the first and therefore ultimate form of democracy, as witnessed by the US overthrowing of home grown democracies elsewhere with financial and military assistance to local, puppet dictators across the globe. To see such top-down-democracy as anything more sophisticated than legalized mob rule is delusional. To see the US brand of democracy as representative of even the “majority” of the people in the face of daily examples of the two year long, billion dollar campaign season, the principles-for-auction house the corporate lobbyists have made of the Hauls of Congress, and two rigged elections is manic euphoria.



The myth of “US American exceptionality” explains why the people can so readily condone and even support the US’s treatment of people in other countries in ways that, despite our comatose conscience and jellyfish vertebrae in reining in Dribbleya, would get us all out in the streets in revolt should soldiers treat US that way. From the stifling occupation of Germany after W.W.I by allied troops making Hitler look like a benevolent, heroic savior from oppression to his people, to our blatant genocide of Iraquis at the rate of nine innocent civilians deaths for each terrorist killed making suicide look like an honorable death for a benevolent, heroic savior from oppression to his people we see examples of our exceptional inability to walk in the shoes or sandals of the people ruled by our government’s enemies. No more our enemy than we are theirs.



I am continually amazed by posts decrying the evils of the incorporation of the US from the viewpoint of a victim being helplessly drawn into the greedy jaws of the ravenous beast. Just because the supreme court has incomprehensibly granted personhood to corporations is no excuse for individuals to anthropomorphize them further as ogres doling out necessities of life at too dear a price. The mainstream isn’t a vacuum except to the brain dead dust fearing life without the trappings of the rich and famous for the appearance of living. Corporations have gotten control of the people like pushers control junkies and it's up to the junkies to go cold turkey because the AMA is a corporation too. They'll sell you something else just a debilitating.




Speaking of the AMA, it comes to mind that there is no profession, with the possible exception of science, that still uses Latin who aren’t hiding skullduggery for the same reason top secret exists for national security, people would riot if their betrayal for personal profit of the scheming exceptions were known any more blatantly than the everyday news.

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I just read that the ABA has awarded Alberto Gonzales their Lawyer of the Year award — ‘nuff said.


WHEW! I knew I had read something positive to end this rant with —— the tiny town of Potrero has rebuked the incursion of a Blackwater training facility into its environment. A town full of terrorists just east of San Diago??? Not.

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If that didn't make you feel better, go here.

THE 8 MEME

Souls in Limbo —— Iturraldi

I found this meme at Deep Thinker and thought it would be enlightening to do:
Name 8 things that…

…I am passionate about:
•Finding themes to variations in nature
•Playing variations to songs on my flute
•Creating lyric metaphors about man in nature
•Becoming conscious of the symbiosis with nature that sustains me
•Reducing my footprint on the earth by getting off the grid
•Raising my own food
•Watching animals play
•Being a loving friend to all who care

…I often say
when alone (95% of the time)…
•c'mere kitty
•chuckle, chuckle
•wow
when with people…
•I don't know
•I love you
•says who?
•no thanks
•wanna hit?

…that changed my life forever
•Moving from Tampa, Florida to Pascagoula, Mississppi at 13
•Joining the marines to get out of Mississippi
•Reading Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
•Outgrowing a 9 year IBM corporate mentality
•Living in a tipi
•Knowing Raja Rao
•Loving Mary Gardner
•Reading Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

…to do before I die
•Fly, like in my dreams
•Understand that western civilization is not devolution
•Feel love for everything
•Live a thousand years or say goodbye now
•Witness the soul plane become manifest in daily life
•Leave no footprint
•Exemplify my evolving wisdom
•Talk to a dolphin

…musical that I can listen to over and over
from my iTunes playcount for recent music—
• David Gilmore's On an Island
• Easy Star All-Stars' Dub Side of the Moon
• Deep Forest's Boheme
• Mickey Hart's At the Edge
• Baca Beyond's The Meeting Pool
• Pink Floyd's The Wall
• Barbara K's Ready
• Leonard Cohen's anything at all

…that attract me to other people
• Egoless candor
• Original thinking
• Adventurous eyes
• Genuine listening
• Deft demeanor
• Wise behavior
• Radiant wellbeing
• Heretical humor

…I learned in the last year
• A summer garden can get too much rain, even in Texas
• To raise chickens for eggs
• To use arugula in killer guacamole
• To make hummus and tabouli from scratch.
• Many genuine friends through blogging
• Too much about politics for comfort
• The actual divide between politics and people's best interests as demonstrated by the Political Compass
• To love my neighbor despite rancor in the past

There are quite a few among my links whose answers I would be interested in seeing, but don't care for assigning chores to unwilling friends so I shant tag anyone, in hopes it will be picked up voluntarily.

GO SHOPPING!!!

Leslie has a great post on Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping, and a little plug for Democracy Now where Amy Goodman interviewed him about his campaign to ostensibly shame people into stopping shopping in the shopping malls and chain coffee houses across the country. Except for the immediate disruption to the engineered flow of cash extraction from addicted consumers he poses with his red robed Stop Shopping Gospel Choir dancing and singing in the aisles, he will not make the market back down or the addicts withdraw. In the long run he will have been a draw to the Great American Thingathon he protests as hardened shoppers rush to see and take him under their wing as harmless, quaint entertainment just as the hippies in Austin, perhaps the rest of the country, adopted Merle Haggard’s C&W put down of war protesters, Okie From Muskogee, as one of their favorite ways to mock the mock of their larger-than-that selves.

Since 9/11 I have become more aware of the whole consumer mentality that has possessed the American psyche. I have long known about manufacturer's schemes of planned obsolescence and breakdown-the-day-after-warranty-expiration in order to keep customers paying repeatedly for shoddy products, but I hadn't quite comprehended how successfully these ploys went unconsciously obeyed by such a large portion of the sheeple. I have George Bush to thank for the wake-up on that. When he shouted into the silent shock and awe echo of a nation on 9/12/01, “Go shopping!!!,” he mouthed the words dictated by the neocon puppet masters with their fingers on the pulse of the country, the GNP, the trough from which they swill.

The upper class buy multiple houses to contain their superfluous acquisitions of status and wasteful affordability. The middle class rents space in acres of above the surface land fill cubicles to store and lock the knockoffs that didn’t make them as happy as the rich must be. The lower class keeps their car in the drive way so their garage can become a repository for their disappointing discount center bargains, like addicts' empty plastic needles. Even the impoverished flock to flea markets and yard sales as the excesses trickle down in Reagan’s dream economy coming true.

The removal of the middle class to further rarify and separate the, elite, clandestine, upper-class from the working poor lower class is well underway thanks to US capitalist greed having bought up patents and scientific technology to keep quality at minimum acceptability for maximum price while the rest of the world forged ahead in both quality and affordability. To a good bean counter it only makes sense to abandon the old inefficient and overpriced ways that would have to be retooled and retrained to pay for better quality and price available elsewhere as if the US were a failed business whose treasurer reinvested in another start up nation whose profits can only go up in this gamble of lives for the profits of the rich.

As much as oil being our source of energy is the source of many of our problems personally, culturally and globally, our dependence on world cluttering stuff to make life easier, happier, more fulfilling is not only futile and harmful to the planet we abuse, it is perpetual denial of the true source of happiness within each of us, most clearly recognized when we are of use to ourselves.

SOOTHING THE SAVAGE BREAST

Paco de Lucia

So long as mankind loves music there is hope.

WHAT LOVE HATH WROUGHT

Photo nicked from Melissa at Empress of Dirt

Memes. Tags. The games bloggers play to exercise their writing skills and frankly display their lifetime accumulation of intimate oddities has been around since the interweb got bulkier than gossamer.

This particular tag came to me from Red Dirt Girl in a convoluted game of using my name nicked from Minx to admonish her for failing her duty to pass on her Amazing Blogger Award to seven others as part of earning it. So she promptly hit my pseudonym with the tag with no idea of who I was or how amazing the blog of Ike Onoclast might be. I complied with her demands in the comment section of her post about the award just for the fun of it which only piqued her penchant for intrigue. She showed up in the comments on the Why post below sussing me out and demanding seven real amazing facts about myself. I actually had typed out the list below before realizing that she had given me no award and that to do so after the fact wouldn’t be the same, which is fine with me. I’m just having fun and I get the sneaking suspicion she is too. With no further ado

1) I have not seen a doctor, nor needed to, since my hypochondriac, registered nurse wife went home to her mother thirty-five years ago. Proper diet and homeopathy have succeeded where junk food and the AMA failed with regularity.

2) I have not owned or driven a car for thirty-one years, with two exceptions in emergency situations.

3) I have been celibate for the past twenty years in an ongoing experiment to learn if sex would arise without my initiation of the act, leaving me with the unavoidable impression that I am not sexually attractive or that I am attracted to women dedicated to the same experiment. Playing hard to get and succeeding too well.

4) I have lived nineteen months naked in a tipi in the wild, albeit owned lands.

5) I witnessed the night long labor of a friend’s natural childbirth resulting in a new life opening its eyes for the first time to see sun peek simultaneously over the horizon, followed momentarily by the shadow of a curious cow come to look in the window.

6) I have seen two different UFOs close enough to see silhouettes of beings inside moving across lighted panels and fell asleep watching a third dashing to and fro across distant mountains.

7) I survived being caught sailing from Pascagoula across the gulf to Tampa by a minor hurricane which, in the middle of pitch black chaos, caused me to leap to the conclusion that there might possibly be a god. When the thirty foot seas remained after the winds died to batter my boat like a pebble in a maraca I let its namesake, Aeolus, have all the screaming insanity that emergency prolonged over two days can build with both blaspheming barrels.

There is an amazing corollary to the first three in the list above: with out a car, doctor or persuasive pursuit of wimmin I have lived quite luxuriously below the United States’ poverty level for twenty of the last thirty years. I have satisfied myself with the truth in the phrase, “The measure of a man’s true wealth is the things he can live without.” and the reality in the quote, “I can cover the earth in leather or wear my own shoes.”

I feel no obligation to pass this tag on, its having arrived here by accidental shenanigans and playful intrigue with a long stemmed sweetheart.

WHY?

“Why do I exist?,” I asked the universe.
“Don’t ask me,” the universe replied.

“Why do I exist?,” I asked Mother Earth.
“Don’t ask me,” she answered.

“Why do I exist?,” I asked a tree.
“Don’t ask me,” whispered the oak.

“Why do I exist?,” I asked my cat.
“To taste the universe. Why do you ask?,” she purred, her cheek nuzzling mine.

The tiger must hunt
The eagle must fly
Man must ask, why, why, why.

The tiger must eat
The eagle must land
Man must say, I understand.
——Kurt Vonnegut

“Do I exist to understand?,” I asked my self.
“To taste the universe, the meal with infinite courses, each garnished with our own evolving theories like a trail of crumbs, lest we lose our appetite for awe and revelation, embalm our understandings, atrophied into petrified conclusions and relinquish thinking to external authority for protection from the fear of not knowing,” I laboriously concocted my reply.

“I exist to taste?”
“Yeah, a universal taste bud, they come in all sizes from sub atomic to super galactic. Nature evolves by consuming itself. Just as we represent the alchemists stone when the atomic elements in the food we eat transmute into the elements we are and the elements we feed back to nature, our experience of our existence formulates our growing wisdom about life and our thoughts feed new ideas to the evolving universe whether we articulate them to one another or not.”

Cool, I can live with that. The why, the purpose, the intention all begin with the inquirer and need never enter into the travels of curiosity with its journal of imagination into the ways of nature. Penetration of the myth of civilization is what requires an endless tracing of whys because there is always an initial intender in this crude digital mock of the natural world it intends to pave over.

Whenever I attempt to differentiate between nature and artifice, there’s always someone who mentions that it’s all nature. Who am I to argue, I know nothing. It may be a very small nit I pick here, but I find it to be the thread of faith leading to the corner of a mythical rug under which all the natural results of the constantly antagonistic attitude of western civilization have been swept with undeserved authority and establishment by rigorous miseducation and enforcement.

Yes, it is natural to make mistakes. It is natural to benefit from all experience. It is natural to mimic the examples of the natural world in as wide a variety of ways as those who would express themselves. Tribal life of early man was often an expression of a group’s respect for a local plant or animal with which they identify themselves as an unspoken surname. It is a natural mistake to not consume what one kills. Early man thought of it as the ending of the spiritual existence of the plant or animal to fell a tree or a deer and not build a shelter, make clothing nor have a meal of what they killed.

Somewhere along the line the taboo on ignoring man’s intimate connection to the life of the planet was circumvented by the arrogance of assuming ownership rights over everything requiring the first artifice; the invention of a supreme being to grant such rights and duties to conquer the nature to which man had been held in thrall by Pan, that raunchy old, fun loving devil.