REMEMBERING

What It's All About

Don't let nostalgia cause short term memory loss

•

Protecting
the
United States of America
from
ever
having
to
walk
anywhere.

IF CURSING MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER …

•

RIP Dennis Hopper

THE CAVE

It was inspired by the wisdom of the I Ching’s ability to phrase sixty-four examples of the natural curve of events throughout evolution in such open ended metaphors that any particular variation of daily vicissitudes brought to the collection as a meditation can find wise council by the chance of casting yarrows to choose which particular example to consult in each case. This symbolic tying of timeless wisdom to the immediacy of the moment serves to intensify greater consequences in a bigger picture than the meaner, more personal concerns brought to the ceremony for solution.

Prote noted that the written word was disappearing from public culture as the biggest show on earth made every expressible thought so realistic no one knew where or when they actually were in the reality of the natural universe. Only conscious purveyors of the spectacle’s endless memes used the written word to communicate preshat ideas for scripts, business agendae and subliminally recognizable symbols for ads. It became like a programming language that only geeks who loved to lie knew how to use even though everyone perpetuated its purpose by speaking. Government documents no longer required redacting no matter how damning the words. The Bible wasn’t read but from the pulpit. Like General Motors, Standard Oil and Goodyear bought up all the trolleys to kill competition for their industries, the spectacle bought up all the books as material to no longer be read but to be more artfully reified. Libraries became as abandoned as auto plants in Detroit eighty years after the trolleys were destroyed. Scripts for the spectacle became the only form of literature, like Latin for priests, lawyers and doctors. The last person outside the spectacle industry that still knew how to read succumbed to Shakespeare, Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski on audiobooks played on her maxi-pad before she died.

He knew that if people were ever to recover their direct contact with the living body of which they, in the reality of the nature of the living universe, are dependent symbiotic cells, it must occur as individual realizations rather than yet another following the latest leader or copying the guy next over as they learned to herd within the spectacle.

His idea began with noticing the variations of pitch in the speaking voice that could be generalized into categories of emotional states. He collected data on individual’s normal speaking voice to establish a baseline for the variations in vibration frequency recorded when stating various problems being posed and when speaking of the understanding gained by the consultation.

With much cross referencing and codification he managed to devise a large chamber, the interior walls of which were composed of areas of varying reflection and absorption of sound waves such that anyone, asking any question within the blackened cave it appeared to be, would hear an echo in their own voice replying with words they were genetically predisposed to interpret as “Follow your own light, just as you did when you first chose to follow another.”

A DIFFERENT DOING

Oh to lie back and let myself be amused by ideas and thoughts drifting by like the clouds forming, dissolving and passing overhead on a warm, sunny day. Ugh, to have those clouds obscured by dense, grey clouds of particulate results of petroleum combustion suggesting that the natural happenings of the clouds need something done about the blight in between.

We have a tremendous capacity to normalize change as part of the genetic sanity of adapting to the environment for survival. This capacity has evolved over millennia prior to the introduction of human innovation and has developed a healthy immune system with a broad range of tolerable climatic conditions. We cannot survive outside a range of temperature and humidity that desiccate, burn, freeze or drown us. We cannot survive instances when the dynamic forces of our living planet peak and locally release poisonous gases, molten lava, tsunamis and cause mountains to either collapse or rise to loose sudden havoc in the area.

We have learned to survive in increasingly vaster areas of our planet by means ranging from the evolutionary advantage gained by hairless apes being able to handle and eventually exploit fire to our thus encouraged curiosity creating prosthetics enabling survival anywhere.

So, yeah, humans are, by our evolved genetic memory and innovative curiosity, well able to deal with all but the most catastrophic natural conditions. Within the conditions of human civilization our genetic capacity to adapt is used against us by forces of authority threatening survival to manipulate behavior of the obedient. The warp that enables such exploitation is the simultaneous demonizing of the instinctual survivor we are at birth as the gremlin in culture’s machine, and praising and rewarding the conformity of our public image to artificial standards in an endless pursuit and maintenance of an approved reputation.

When one’s self esteem is dependent on one’s reputation, insanity occurs.

I finally grok that there are fellow humans out there who cannot be alone because they cease to exist without a reflection, so buried and hated who they actually are has become to the external suit of reputation they were taught and learned to prefer thinking of themselves as being.

In a civilization whose citizens vary from fully self-realized to externally controlled automatons we find the dysfunctional heart of the devolution machine lies in the codependence of the sheep and the shepherds. Like any dynamic, one cannot exist without the other. The shepherds’ concern for their reputation is so obsessive they seek competition, podiums and audiences to surpass mere approval on the way to supreme reverence, none of which can be done without dependent worshipers. The sheep’s concern for their reputation is so frightened that political correctness seems like a plateau below which they live in the abject servitude to the authority of the shepherds with “right away, what color and how high?” Even the flocks in which they gather to fend off deadly solitude, from social clubs to religions, armies and governments, take on the sheep-shepherd dynamic at all levels

As economics would have it, this dysfunctional clot in the stream of human evolution takes on the form of a pyramid from the top of which the bottom looks less considerable than ants. This is what the belief in human superiority over the rest of the body of the planet within which we are a dependent part creates out of every newborn, so well equipped to survive in nature but never ready to live on lies.

So, to the different doing I mentioned in the title: it is not an action per se, but more of a mental doing. It is a purposeful de-hypnotizing ourselves from the propaganda we’ve had lied to us from such a saturated cultural environment all our lives that we live in fear of nature as a threat, like cotton plantation owners feared their slaves. Should we be able to recover our appreciation of the intuitive observer we have always been, watching our hocking original thinking for the illusion of reputation, we might see our way clear to following a desire to become more symbiotic with a former threat in our personal lives by becoming self actualized rather than going along to get along waiting for the shepherd to steer us right.

The only humans who taught me well were living examples of being self actualized.

•

My fickle anarchism has now decided that separating serious debate about the fiction of the myth from the fiction about the truth of the effects of the myth were both about fiction and the separation was intellectual masturbation — thus this post and several others to come will be republishings from that shortlived diversion of my other blog, Dualitytilaud, the palindrome of duality and a key to unlocking one's too taut knots we're not taught to think beyond.

OUTSTANDING IN THE FIELD — LOST

The Pharmacist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing - Dali

Or

YOU CAN’T MOVE A SAILBOAT BY BLOWING FROM ON BOARD

We are born owning nothing but our body. We experience our body’s hunger reaching out and sensing an environment that may feed us. This appetite requires the body to get stuff, distinguish its benefit as food, and eat the good parts to quell its overwhelming motivation. In the process of searching for food an intellectual process, slightly more abstract than sensing the taste and satisfaction of hunger afforded by every bit of stuff come across and stuffed in the mouth, begins to develop. I call it curiosity, the mental companion to physical hunger and the assumer of total responsibility for the survival of any living being.

Curiosity involves recognizing other beings in the stuff and patterns amongst them, attributing a value system based on their value as food. One needs not put too much stuff in ones mouth before realizing that some of it not only tastes bad but objects to the point of trying to stuff oneself in their mouth! Curiosity is very useful for making these determinations ahead of their recurrence for those who survived the first time. “Everything that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Hunger reminds us we must interact with the world to exist. Curiosity is the means by which we sort our sensations of the environment and direct our responses to them. When hunger is satisfied curiosity continues to probe the environment in the play of happy solitude or with others of our kind. The combination of food and play so tests the capacities of beings, a periodic return to the dream world of metaphorically encoded clouds which, as our genetic memory of evolution, formed in the womb and daily thereafter birth serves as the universal formula into which the variables of current events may be plugged as a guide to natural solutions.

So much for our individual motivation and capacity to survive in nature.

Curiosity is intrigued by possibilities of the unknown and imagination is whistling in the dark to help it guess at the shapes by the echoes returned from the concert hall of nature. Bad guesses can survive only so long as the tune whistled keeps everybody dancing without regard to the nature they trample to dust. The culture evolved by western civilization is based on such a bad guess and stuck to the same tune for so long that, of all the beings on Earth upon finding themselves in an unfamiliar environment, only humans would look for work to make money to pay someone else to feed them and willingly pay the establisment’s usury fee on the privilege of being allowed to earn and buy the same things the rest eat raw directly from nature. The only idea offered to rectify the bad guess is warring over who gets to whistle their version of the same tune.

So much for the motivation of the marathon dance, the perpetuation of the whistler’s fee and the willing surrender of personal survival responsibility to culture’s daycare/nightbleed vampire farm.

It’s not rocket science. It’s a heavy metal lullabye.

WHERE ELSE COULD I BE?

The too sweet odor of rotting fruit littering the ground beneath the loquat and chinaberry trees is tempered by the just right piquancy of jasmine and honeysuckle blooms. As I turn the compost pile, the fecund excretion of its microbial denizens exudes earthy wafts promising well fed food in the garden and my bowl. The balm of the hen’s poop cushioned on the hay straw lining their coop mixes with the doughy aroma of their feed’s crumble chunks of meal soaked by last night’s sprinkles from the sky. Priest hops into my lap for another head scratching mutual affection session and once again I am amazed at how clean he smells as I rub my face in his long fur.

Grackles and jays squawk at the other end of the scale from the tiny turtledoves’ dulcet cooing, while the chickens run the gamut from gentle stuttered purring to ear splitting announcements of new oval ova arrivals. More mature, two legged or four wheeled arrivals are announced by the thirteen member canine choir’s cacophonic greeting at the gate across Fetchit Drive. The distant clanging of Johnny’s hammering heated iron in his blacksmith’s shop reverberates off the porch wall in competition with the merry gurgle of the fountain fresh pond water in its return cycle down the falls. Muffled now by spring foliage growth, but still too audible, tire treads and combustion cycles move noisy air down the hill from the too close highway. Brazen completely unmuffled roars that make seasoned veterans stop talking and cover their ears pass overhead whenever dragons approach or leave their international nest too close to our east.

Muscles cramp in my calves as I stretch awake in the silken lining of my Christmas gift sleeping bag after a nap demanded by the fatigue of trudging the several miles it takes to supplement my garden’s limited selection at the grocery store. I barely notice my failing hip joint in my normal perusal of my stomping ground as morning dew on long grass dampens shin hairs, zephyrs chill them and the sun heats and dries them in turn, each step of the way, but a shopping trip or climbing to the top of the stairway up the bank from the river reminds me of it all too well. My perception of the contrast in textures and times maximizes as I brush sand from the smooth skin of young Finn’s plump feet with the calloused gnarl of my desiccated, septuagenarian hands.

I can never distinguish imagination from reality in the ill defined realm allotted to the sense of taste both because it is so connected to the savory olfactory and because my prepared meals have been enjoyed from the first pangs of hunger, through the imagining what would be most beneficially pleasing, the smelling of each ingredient before and after its inclusion in the concoction, the determination of its readiness on to the actual eating of them. The cross over continues as I judge the efficacy of the meal’s benefits by the aroma of my farts, as sure an indicator as asparagus in urine.

Opening my eyes, the question is answered. My sixth sense, my mind, is functioning and well satisfied. Seeing is believing. I am here, now.

And now. Amazing.

More creative, for Amy. ;•D

THE PLOT (PROPHESY) THICKENS (SICKENS)

Somewhere between learning from experience that the government lies about cannabis and UFOs and witnessing multiple videos of the free fall speed collapse of the only three steel buildings to ever do so, all on the same day, I have been sure of the government’s duplicity and have theorized on a long range ultimate agenda hidden behind the distractions of its public corruption and ineptitude. I have read extensively into the same material Dan Brown has completely bastardized for his popular novels, Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States drew from and the dearly departed Robert Anton Wilson so deftly skewered with hilariously scrambled conspiracies in his Illuminatti Trilogy. I guess you could call me a conspiracy theorist. It’s okay, I don’t mind. I prefer not being so dependent I fear to doubt.

Such suspicions were rather idle speculation until I began questioning the ultimate reason mankind finds itself at the threshold of self-extermination through the insane intentional refusal to adapt to the nature of its place of birth. Daniel Quinn showed me the historical transition from hunter-gatherer to totalitarian agriculture as the turning point, but I still failed to grok a reason for it. I suppose I have my daughter to thank for discovering what I have come to propose is the justification that converted relatively symbiotic humans into the scourge of the Earth — the mythology of mankind’s inheritance of Earth’s stewardship from its creator as our special gift is the backbone belief of every monotheistic religion since it permitted man’s slaughter of great swaths of nature to establish his food supply in greedy exclusivity over sixteen thousand years ago. Concentration around the new food depots in cities further cut off man from his natural environment until we come to the war on everything period in which we now exist suspended by our own petard.

That seems to cover how mankind began operating as master of all it surveyed, and I can kind of see how believing man superior to his environment could surface as the genocidal behavior exhibited by small pockets and huge armies of terrorists against their fellow man, but I’d yet found no ingrained mythos in my admittedly shallow research into Xianity and its roots in mythology back to the forcing underground of Paganism.

And then one day on Facebook during heated comment banter with my old buddy Roger about the difference between racism and anti-Semitism someone comes up with,

I see the United States as being an Israelite nation. Being that the US is a ruminate of the Tribe of Manasseh. Both Ephraim (England) and Manasseh (the United States) were son's of Israels son Joseph. We are God's chosen people...however, we have been allowed to go our own way, until we are at the point of blowing ourselves off the planet...then ... and only then, will God intervene. That Is the only way man will learn that his way will not work, and thru that learn to accept God and his Word. So yes, we need to protect the country of Israel because the United States was born from her.

Who knew? Am I the only one who missed this detail? Ah those crazy myths. There’s a set for the masses surveyed and a set for the masters of all they survey. If that tidbit didn't match current events in the unreasonable leniency being shown the genocidal Israeli treatment of Palestinians I wouldn't have even noticed that quote, much less posted on it.

LIVE LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW

Alone on Preikestolen

Whenever someone advises me to, “live like there’s no tomorrow,” they might as well say, “Walk like you were born unable to fly.” Both are true, neither are choices; there IS no tomorrow and I CAN'T fly

Though we may speak of making big plans for future events, and as often as the idea may occur to us in different states of change during its development, the event itself is merely another such state happening in the same here and now from which the plan arose and within which memories will recall its having occurred. Experience can be had only here now. Time is an invention by which we speak of things not now, mañana, but we can only speak of and experience thinking about the concept in the eternal here and now.

We all live within a culture that practices the creation of artifacts representing our perceptions and conceptions of reality, and promptly forgets such symbols aren’t what they represent; worshipping golden idols. The only reality to such creations are the experiences of conception and manifestation on the part of the maker and of perception and belief by witnesses. It is fairly simple to perceive that a painting of a flower is not the flower in the vase sitting next to it, while it is literally impossible for believers to distinguish between religious dogma and wishful thinking — especially tenacious where scriptures are full of contradictions to one’s actual experience of the natural environment and prohibitions of one’s own natural behavior. It is as if culture pushes the idea that the more one must deny reality to live in accordance with the conceived artifacts, the purer the merit for reward in a fantasy afterlife. “If you want to get ahead, you gotta stick it out. My country, right or wrong.”

I fly with ease in my dreams. It is so enjoyable that I am a bit fearful of heights without a handhold when I’m awake. The concept of my flying is so temptingly real I can envision feeling that special organic intuition that signals my ability to levitate in my dreams, walking off into space to finally break through my own shreds of disbelief and fly away. I know the difference between reality and dream fantasy, I fell thirty feet from a trapeze when I was thirteen — straight down, no gliding. I am just as acutely aware of the difference between experiencing reality directly and experiencing the mere second hand information, at best, to be found in symbols created by other’s perceptions.

I have always walked like I couldn’t fly. I’m in the process of learning the benefits of living like there’s no tomorrow, in the here and now, and discovering the debilitation of living like there is some other when or where experience can be had by sacrificing awareness of being here now.

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Tangential to the forgoing essay is the matter of gaining enough life experience of the conflicts between one’s direct experience of nature and civilization’s antagonistic exploitation of it to begin questioning the authority under whose aegis one’s own nature is trained to obey and whose favor one’s reputation is designed to curry. Without such doubt in external authority’s righteousness in defining proprietary behavior, one must abandon any reliance on the intrinsic value of oneself to consider one’s own existence valid. Such people can never be alone because they cease to exist.

A real horror story would be to be unable to love myself unless I felt loved by another; as scary as meeting city folk who have never walked on the grass or were unaware Big Macs come from cows. Civilization breeds such zombies more or less successfully.

SOCIAL REVOLUTION OR INDIVIDUAL REVELATION?

This is a reply to Troutsky’s astonishing claim that the life of the Time Master in the previous post was easy, because living outside the artificial spectacle was LIVING IN A DREAM — that actually dealing symbiotically with nature is less realistic than the energy starved prosthetic culture we have isolating us from it.

I am beginning to notice a tendency of Socialists to deride back to nature commune examples of living by socialist ideals as dreamers copping out on the real work of the revolution to drive the big bad machine of central control. This is a reflection of the United States’ top down version of democracy’s tendency to, not only deride, but overthrow self determined democracy arising without its consent or aegis. The larger the government the more consideration of the quality of people’s lives is replaced with the quantity of the burgeoning economy’s usury of those individual lives — no matter who’s driving.

TIME MASTER

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

LITTLE THEFTS OF NOTHING OWNED

There’s a second part to the advice given young men contemplating marriage that is never given. Its omission could be responsible for the other half the divorces, the first half being the advice given prospective brides, but this is my experience, and I am male, born and trained.

Dads tell their sons, “Look at her mother. How would you like to grow old with that?” Despite its emphasis of a woman’s looks being a poor basis for projected lovability in a relationship, omitting it’s corollary can make it all the worse.

Prospective grooms should be told, “Look at her father, that’s who you’ll be expected to become.”

I was nothing like my father-in-law. We had nothing but loving his daughter in common. I never had a conversation with him that wasn’t in front of his TV. He’d come home from his welding job at the shipyard at four in the afternoon, unbutton the top couple of buttons on his pants, sink into his chair where he’d eat dinner on a TV tray and be trundled off to bed when his snoring sent his adoring wife onto action. At Christmas he gave all the men the same aftershave and the women the same cologne, every year. I’m still using the last of mine to clean my keyboad, vintage circa 1970. His slide show of a two week rent-a-trailer, touring vacation we shared consisted of nothing but crystal clear, sharp focus photos of all the historical plaques filling the frame — not one picture of the scenes commemorated.

None of that was me. I was an engineer who put 10-12 hours daily into my yuppie career with IBM going for the unlimited future. I played golf and sailed on weekends, neither of which she cared to share. She said I abandoned her

I married her to relieve the discomfort between us after we’d visit and endure her parent’s scorn at our unwed cohabitation. Ten years and two daughters later, she gave up trying to make me her father, took our girls home to him, sued for divorce claiming ridiculous exaggerations of how unlike him I was and won sole custody of the children. The marriage was to make her happy, I treated the divorce in kind and never contested any of it.

In my first test on what was to become my lifelong research into the ultimate duality of nature versus nurture I failed miserably. After repeated visits to see the girls resulted in the fireworks of her defensive isolation skirmishes, I realized they would always remember me as a disruption of their nest, so I backed off in the belief that relations could resume when they could write and read my letters. I never imagined, as she confessed many years later to me and the surviving daughter, that she would throw my mail in the trash, including a fairy tale I spent two years writing and illustrating.

When it seemed letters had not helped establish a better connection I consoled myself with the hopes that genetics would win out and her curiosity would exceed her mother’s old ex-wife’s tales — another case of naive wishful thinking.

When she did reach out to me it wasn’t out of curiosity — it was to express her regret that I couldn’t be at the afterlife party in heaven with the rest of the family because I couldn’t accept Jesus as my lord and savior! I realized how much she had irretrievably become her mother.

The other day I heard my self telling my friend Crystal’s grown son how small he was the last time I saw him and it took on the reverberations of echoing down a long hall built of the many other times I’d expressed my fondness for loved ones whose childhood was not my experience and my knees buckled.

The grief I’d stoically borne of years with only child support checks getting through uncensored, my daughter’s insistence to this day that I’d abandoned her, her refusal to invite me to visit her family, her eldest son’s graduation from high school came crashing down with all the weight of the cruelty manifested in the world by the unshakable belief in ownership — granted humans by the mythical creator of it all. What a crock of pain.

Roger says it all —
in civilization
"WHAT GOD WANTS, GOD GETS"

Ceci n'est pas une maison*

This is a PICTURE of Donna's home

The following paragraph is what I was typing when the ensuing paragraphs ensued, er, ah, events occurred (gotta keep the reality and its story distinguishable from one another or I’ll be back in the invisible prison).

Guy DeBord’s spectacle is what I call the tautology of the invisible prison. “When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle.”

Oh, the irony of it all. In the midst of discovering Guy DeBord, often referred to by Troutsky, and reading his Society of the Spectacle, the Dawgranch dawgs break my concentration with their raucous greeting at the gate of perhaps forty members of a TV entourage here to scope out an upcoming scene for an episode of Friday Night Lights in my neighbor’s uniquely styled home evolved as an outgrowth of her life in the bus she parked under a giant pecan eleven years ago.

Ack. The very tentacle of the spectacle has come to annex my everyday direct experience of nature here in my retreat from the grid to integrate it into the spectacle lived by the never-left-the-couch dolts plugged into “Reality TV” 24/7 even when they believe they are out in the “world” discussing the latest episode of Office at the office around the old water cooler bottled water machine.

And wouldn’t you know it, if I sign their disturbance agreement paper, my premeditated tolerance of whatever the hell they decide to do in the course of their production for the spectacle will earn me a hundred dollar share of the big bucks lavished on the preservation of the invisible prison. If they don’t run off or over the hens or tromp through my gardens it’ll be a breeze to do my share, with the first hand direct experience of witnessing the creation of the latest spectacle to be decoupaged onto the ever denser walls of the invisible prison thrown in as education. Yahoo.

*After Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" he lettered beneath a realistic painting of a pipe just to keep the invisible prison visible, and not a prison when one is conscious of tne myth.

NO REASON

In the eternity of the timeless instant there is no reason for me to do anything nor a me to do it. It is only when I wonder and stick my licked finger in the air that I recall the momentum of the river of events and am free to choose whether and to where I swim until I once again bake away such purpose on the eternal bank to observe the river of reason for no reason. This is my experience of meditative contemplation; to observe reality as it is prior to any memory of names assigned, priorities assumed or direction proposed.

Civilization is an endless ocean dedicated to eroding the shoreline both figuratively as regards loss of contact with our natural instincts and literally as regards the real rising seas as a result of generating enough energy to make and move our growing fleet of prosthetics, so that drowning is the only possibility of not swimming; as if life was an ride uphill on a bicycle which must be constantly pedaled to keep from falling over. The relatively leisurely pace of natural existence is energized by the dynamic of all life, finding and avoiding being food, becomes flooded with frantic distractions demanding arbitrary tricks to earn the right to sit down to dinner and deceptive dedication to serve the ravenous to stay off a rich predator’s menu. This is the reality of domesticated obedience to cultural education’s muting the instinct to intuit the eternity of the timeless instant or recognize the purposeless observer we were before school taught us to make our marks at the top of the heap.

I am learning to untie too taut knots we’re taught not to think beyond; where the loose strands of consciousness yet twine in the primal brine where nature swims in evolutionary metaphor unadorned by language, incapable of duality, yet to be born as premise, faith or fact. I may never go beyond desiring to share the adventure.

HERO

I guess this speech will knock anyone off the fence they ride hoping to rationalize remaining a convenient inhabitant of the invisible prison I speak of so often. I hereby commend to you another unique example of what I call heroes.

Hat Tip once again to Pisces Iscariot at Far Queue

GO ALL THE WAY HOME - DECRIMINALIZE

I have more than a passing concern for the hundreds of thousands of folks whose privacy is invaded every year by the very wrong-headed righteousness of victimless crime enforcement from whose oppressive threats their personal cannabis consumption served as an effective, though unnecessarily costly, stress relief — until caught.

As yet another example of the invisible prison made of the fucked up myth by which western civilization unconsciously behaves, I am witnessing the death bed scene of an atrocity against human intelligence born a couple of years before me. The half-assed measure of legalizing cannabis* stops at the invisible wall of civilized acceptability and is not allowed beyond; returned to nature as decriminalized; innocent as born.

It’s the economy, stupid. The only reason legalization of pot is gaining enough attention of the brain dead unconcerned is the hole our something-for-nothing economy has left in their ability to buy more stuff deep enough for them to even hear “cost of one billion dollars a year to incarcerate otherwise innocent potheads” and “income of three biliion dollars a year on sales and grower income taxes — in California alone” Pretty slick, I wonder if we can do that with winter rye?

Every time Obama reneges on promises he made to the “American People” he now claims it’s for the good of the “American Economy”. Rather than admit that the cost of the bureaucracy required to filter out unqualified medical problems is more than enough to pay for all care regardless of conditions, no insurance required, the idea of single payer was replaced with mandatory insurance for everyone. With regulations like that, who needs preexisting conditions to feel ill? For the first time in history I am required to pay for my existence whether I get sick or not!

The economy is the code word for the imbalance of least population with the most money, while true wealth remains in the hearts and minds of those most in touch with the natural curve of planetary life despite the piles of money attempting to legalize it.

*cannabis = Marijuana: a name invented by Harry J. Anslinger to target Mexicans — just like George W Bush, Inc. invented the name “Al Qaeda” to make separate terrorist causes appear to be a united front against which to declare his preemptive war.

PICKPOCKET

Never having been filthy rich, I was a fool to suppose I knew how the excessively wealthy regarded their excesses. How was I to know that beyond a certain point acquisitiveness saturates the very purpose of living, like alcohol saturates the cells of the liver, in an accumulating toxic cocktail of fear of inadequacy to both fulfill the promised expectations such wealth engenders in competitors, investors and sycophants and protect it from a public suspected of being as unscrupulously greedy as was required for such an accumulation.

I figured that since losing a fin out a wad of bills totaling around a hundred bucks was no big whoops to me, this guy would never miss a million out of his hundred billion. What I didn’t realize was that no one gave a shit about my measly fiver while his every penny had a hundred million dollars invested in a security system and a staff of bean counters, plus millions of anxious stockholders, tax collectors and relatives checking up on their share.

Little did I know how he shuddered off the ghostly chill of envy he experienced when he passed the homeless one-legged vet panhandling at the corner of his downtown Dallas branch office building this very morning. I should have known how mean great riches had made him when I saw him stumble over the man’s only foot in his attempt to ignore his existence and give him only a dirty look as its acknowledgement.

I realized at that moment how this mutated human being had built his ridiculous personal wealth by owning the mercenary corporations' looting public funds in payment for worse than inadequate support of the fodder being made of the nation’s poor in a war of yet more acquisition. The look in this man’s eyes was the look in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes upon discovering leeches on his body in African Queen and I knew — it wasn’t the leeches that wanted some of his financially spun cotton candy wealth he so much feared, it was the ironic leeches on his ability to achieve the happiness for which such acquisition was reputed among slobs like me to be the reward. He acknowledged with his resentment that I was happier than he.

My old gal, Mabe, slapped him back to reality with, “There he goes folks. The richest man in the world kicks a fellow human being like wasn’t one his own self, but I can see his shriveled dick right through that fine three piece, pin striped suit of emperor’s clothes.”

The crowd at the bus stop and for half a block around turned their focus on the kingpin. So discombobulated by interacting with the unvarnished truth available only outside his many sycophant filled ivory towers was he that he reached in his pocket for the bills he’d just withdrawn to pay the new girl to say she understands his torment convincingly enough to give him an erection and slammed them down in my hat.

“Dinner on me and Mabe! All month.”

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PICKLED BRAIN

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

—Volaire

Someone challenged my perception of the invisible prison within which western civilization lives by saying, “The whole thing is in your mind.”

I could only reply, "That’s the difference between you and me: it’s in my mind, so I can think about it while it is your mind and you can’t.”

Recipe for Pickled Brain — or — Thinking About What We Think With

Test for Ripeness:

1) Can answer all questions likely to be asked within 40 miles of home.

2) Hasn’t asked a question arising from curiosity for the last five years.

3) Takes authority to represent truth from pulpit, podium or plutocrat.

4) Never read a book voluntarily.

Preparation for Pickling:

1) Sever nerve paths capable of reporting unique experiences to conserve the energy normally required to ignore such messages for use in healing injuries caused by the same mistakes endlessly repeated.

2) Surround organ with an environment about which certainty is impenetrably dense.

3) Fill container with a fluid mixture of faith, trust, hope, belief and wishful thinking as a cushion against any latent instinctual resistance to the container.

4) Put on a shelf to ferment for the rest of life in isolation, within warehouses full of mindless millions pickling in their juices in the invisible prison.

Serving Instructions:

1) After aging long enough for all the heresy and doubt to be leeched, the once clear cushioning fluid will gel and turn as opaque as a proven fact. It is nowready to serve reliably.

2) Care must be taken to release the gas pressure of desiccated curiosity extracted in the fermentation process before handling individual brains.

3) Served individually they are digestible as paper pushers, bean counters, assembly lines and lifetime retail clerks. Not recommended for dealing with the vagaries of nature.

4) Served in mindless masses they delight the palate of the democratic process, tax base, demographic retail, preemptive war fodder, righteousness of the mostest and other forms of mob rule by deception of the willingly ignorant.

•

I always wondered how the active verb, “ignore,” lost all sense of personal responsibilitly when the adverb form “ignorant” was applied while “unaware” serves a more precise definition of the condition of not knowing. Ignorant always carries the major context of having willingly and knowingly ignored that of which they are ignorant and their situation is self induced.

•

A sure sign one is outside the invisible prison is inquiries begin searching for something truer than the answers that form the prison walls. Certainty is the border patrol around comfort zone zapping any illegal curiosity. Labels conclude the curiosity of the taught and are springboards into the unknown for those actually learning.

•

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

BETWEEN THE SHEETS

She found it while leafing through her leather bound edition of Leaves of Grass. It was a shade leaf of cannabis indicus the size of her palm. She’d placed it there at a different time in a different world.

Looking up from the page on her pagan promontory perch, the vast expanse of the sea to the western horizon became dearly desiccated by the visceral, visual recollection of overlooking a desert; so endlessly featureless from afar, so constantly alive wherever one looked down at one’s feet. A sort of reverse twist on “the grass is always greener.”

They were camping on the east rim anticipating a lunar eclipse soon after sundown, which announced its advance by gradually saturating the entire vista in the golden orange hues of grain, pebble, rock, boulder pixel remnant shards of this shedding mountain perch with the prism of the western atmosphere casting a glow around their elongating silhouette creeping eastward into the illuminated scene.

He passed her the freshly rolled joint she’d awaited since he’d proposed this entire weekend a month ago. She’d always been curious about the stuff but found no reason compelling enough to risk jail just for kicks. She found Zeke to be more than enough. She knew a lot of people who abandoned the club during music breaks to “get high” out back with the band while she stayed behind and worried for them. She knew Zeke went out with them most of the time, but she didn’t know him until the night he picked up her empty glass on his return, went to the bar and brought her a fresh one.

“Nothin’ like another cool one after goin’ out there with those folks and dryin’ your whistle,” he said, standing there watching the band get reorganized.

"I don’t go out there, but thanks for the drink anyway. I haven’t wet mine enough yet.” She immediately tried to inhale the variety of possible nuances those words conveyed and didn’t exhale until she realized none of them were wrong; she’d long admired him from afar and was loath to pass up a chance for friendlier proximity now.

When her kissed her at her doorstep and left she realized a friendlier approximation was far from adequate. The next time she saw him the mutual beam connecting them was visible to anyone who cared. Like love struck zombies they got their drinks, moved to the back and sat together at an empty table without looking at anything but each other.

Although she’d always taken rejection as “their loss”, she couldn’t help but clarify something that had bothered her for the two weeks since he’d walked her home. “You were welcome to stay the night, you know?’

“Yeah, I got it that might be the case, but I have to get an overt invitation to begin assuming anything. I am too familiar with the influence of alcohol to make me perceive everything going my way until my face hits the floor and the morning after trying to recall from whence come vague memories of something too intimate to be so forgotten.”

“I’ve never made the first move, men seem to begin the groping and I either grope back or back off. I was out of my element with you. Would you get me high far away from police so I can enjoy it?”

His face lit up. “Oh, wow! This is perfect. I am going to harvest the first buds of this year’s yield next month and was planning to take some to the wilderness to celebrate the lunar eclipse. Would you come with me?”

She watched him separate the glistening purple-green bundles from their stem and expertly gather them between the sheets of zig-zag paper into the perfect cylinder he licked, sealed and declared to be the lunar fatty. He lit her first toke with much pagan fanfare but said not a word thereafter, just watched.

Their slowblime lovemaking fell in pace with the nature of their surroundings as the sun disappeared leaving the glow of the roach the only light for light years until half the eastern horizon became engulfed in the maw of a gigantic moon reflecting the sun in silver light upon them snuggled between the sheets. As the fullness of the moon grew perfect the earth interrupted the sun with a shadow on a further desert as it began to eat the moon in turn. The wolves, who’d been harmonizing to the lunar tune as their pitch rose with it, slowly became a random cacophony as it disappeared and revealed stars once obscured by its brilliance. Their shared orgasm occurred at the peak of the howling at the dark of the moon in the middle of the milky way and they remained in afterglow until the moon and vulpine harmony returned in full.

She returned the leaf to its place between the sheets of onion skin vellum pages, closed the book, scrambled off her perch, grabbed her cane he'd carved for her from the stalk and made her way home to the ferryman’s house.