It Must Be the Vapors…

CREATIVITY: THE COSMIC WHODUNIT

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:31:00 +0000

The one thing common to all forms of creativity is the assumption of intention aforethought. From world creating gods to tide creating gravity, a purpose to manifestation of artifacts and effects is assigned as a tag with which to most expediently catalogue our ongoing experience of the present framed in concern for the cumulative sense of comfort about coming events. Believing that everything has a purpose is rarely tested beyond its ability to find a niche within one’s faith in a world and life as something being done by some super geek accomplishing a goal with us as the means.

The most rational among western civilization’s more curious minds are just lately beginning to question the demythologized, essential requirement of the concept of creativity: cause and effect — and how the admission of any form of simultaneity belies the necessity for assigning a direction to causality for change to occur. We impose restrictions on our possibilities of realization by our inability to describe our experience to ourselves in terms that can do no other than imprison our minds. Part of thinking outside the box is our willingness to understand our fluid, preverbal thoughts, unhampered by concern for whether or how they may be manifested, arising from the nowhere sea of the invisibly, infinitesimally small, instantaneous, spontaneous eternity of the present as they do.

The requirements of cause and effect take effect when preverbal inspiration sparks a desire to manifest itself in relation to a consensus reality, even if it is only an ironic smile crossing one’s face at realizing the twist such an admission may put on one’s own ongoing reality tunnel. Like those atomic physicists’ probes into the enigma of where, when and how who did what to whom in the otherworldly world of quarks, I have come to suspect there is an entire, underlying behavior pattern to my life which never consults consensus reality or my own reality tunnel as my body bops along relaying to me the world as it is and whether it cares to respond to any assumption of purpose that may evoke in me. This could mean that all I manifest, from language to action, is essentially a happening; an event my body was only too happy to be part of being. This way, the only doing involved would be to modify the synchronistic spontaneity of being in the moment to plan to serve some expectation, some purpose for mañana; just not now. It is very interesting that the finer science is able to slice time the less obvious the assumption of causality becomes.

It’s been a long, strange trip to get wherever it is I am, but now that I’m here I’m beginning to think nothing I could have done would have prevented arriving, no alternate reality tunnel could avoid including this empirical realization of the difference between being and doing. One of my dad’s aphorisms about the creativity of painting was to, “leave in the happy mistakes.” I’m beginning to wonder if my entire life isn’t just one big happy off-color daub of paint left on a world canvass painted by a soulless civilization with unlimited assumptions about correctness of its purpose.

All I know is that I can stand up from my seat in the shed with no purpose in mind, gaze around the garden, chicken coop, pond, compost pile, state of fall leaves in the yard and feel either an attraction to action or the consideration of procrastination in response to my avowed primary directive to maintain some sense of symbiotic benefit with my environment. I either go with it or sit back down. Most of the pleasure my life is to me is the realization that, while this environment of “my place” may not appear to be what it is if I hadn’t moved here, I have never actually “done” any of the changes; I just agreed with a good idea amidst whatever now simultaneously happened to be.

Without having been bombarded everyday of my life with culture’s idea that the world was created and is still controlled for the unquestionably holy purpose of having we humans to love and/or punish by the great transformer in the sky, I doubt it would ever have occurred to me. Without having to deal with a culture whose assumption of ownership and superior righteousness of purpose granted by their creator, my dedication to understanding it in a more profound way than can be expressed, and through such inadequate expressions as I may manifest perhaps resonate within still muddled minds, might not have needed to become an avowed a purpose for my life.

Maybe.

TOURIST PLANET

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:26:00 +0000

Something cracked in my tidy little world view some decades ago when I saw a TV show about a member of the British nobility having his family board at a tavern in town on weekends so he could open his castle and charge gawkers enough to support his royal lifestyle on weekdays of the year round. In a way it was like finding that I was on the Truman Show, and I was Truman.

Supposing the nobility to be noble, above the petty groveling of the peasants at the hooves of their passing, is the very myth that perpetuates any awe in the breeding of subordinates, so necessary in supplying the abundant obedient servitude that lives demanding expedient convenience with their leisure require. Being an allegiance pledging fledgling to the nobility of “… in God we trust” without doubting the high minded patriotism of others for most of my early life, seeing this pitiful display of effete inbreeding solely dependent on inheritance of the noble acquisition of such high position turned out to be a major turning point in my life about assuming authority, that of others and for myself.

I was yet to question the nobility of the acquisitions themselves; it takes a long time to awaken to the complete delusion of wishful thinking. No, this post is about the inherently effete artificiality at the root of any form of tourism, from my example of Lord Cantdoit’s pawning acquisitions from ancestors’ exploits abroad in the name of the noble empire, to international corporations’ embodying the essence of pimps by marketing the value created by a home grown community business for the profit of slave wages by moving it to an area where labor is still recruited by beating the bushes in the wilderness.

It seems like in every instance when I see someone cede the noble integrity of a vital, independent self-reliance to borrow the money to afford others to promise them a guaranteed future, I see a reenactment of the noble savage tempted from his/her relatively symbiotic, hunter-gatherer coexistence with the environment to join culture’s exploitation of it and each other to advance status in a culture based on eminent domain granted by faith in an artificial authority. Newborns today don’t have to make the two hundred thousand year acculturation from emerging homo sapiens sapiens to the pop stars of today. Culture has devised a way to capture the emerging mind before it can figure anything out for itself and snap it up to date on the latest craze without it even suspecting there might be choices or that something might be missing among the plethora of transient facts they must engorge for regurgitation upon demand. Evolution is such that infants have always been equipped to deal with daily life in nature at any stage along the way; the cultural myth being so artificially, arbitrarily imposed on nature as it is, is never consistent enough to influence genetic memory.

The reason we never attack the source of our myriad problems is because it lies within the pointing finger. Governments and gods were invented as proxy straw men on whom to project the justification for our abdication of personal responsibility for our relationship to the nature of the world around us, preferring to amuse ourselves with the tricks we can make it do for us with this cattle prod, this dollar, this gun.

Vanishing Game was the best flint knapper still living. His work decorated display cases in museums and dens of eminent historians and amateur nativists around the world. He did it all, from finding the flint out in the lifeless wasteland reserved for his people, carefully pushing delicate slivers of geology away from the rest of the stone-cum-spearhead along its fault line as thousands of generations of accumulated hunter's skills became perfected in his strong hands, donning the war dress he inherited from his great grandfather and sitting by the Res Road on a blanket all day – not a deer in sight – just customers.

•

Taking where one is to be home

More dear than junkets to Rome

That leads one thinking what one sees

Are facts learned

Not faux culture one's fees

Paid acts earned.

IT'S ALL GEEK TO ME

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:37:00 +0000

So, when did the revolution happen?

First time I saw a geek, he was behind chicken wire in a dirt pit ravenously devouring anything the paid audience in the tent would throw in there with him. He bit chickens’ heads off and let ‘em run around spurtin’ blood everywhere. For a child of my tender years, with few adult standards yet, that was ultra peachy keen, a level of amazement now known as awesome. Tin cans, light bulbs, baling wire, razor blades; you name it, he could have eaten it right down.

It was forty-three years later when my girlfriend pointed one out to me passing on the sidewalk outside the exotic restaurant I’d taken her to to set the scene to pop the question. I was gazing around looking for some subject for casual conversation from which to smoothly segue into my spiel about the fitness of our bodies, our lifestyles and our futures when along comes the perfect example of unfit for any of that, so I stretched, yawned and in my best version of surprise remarked, “Wow, look at that nerd.”

I never even got started into my spontaneously improvised synthesis of the moment and my eternally practiced lines. The look on her face was her best version of WTF, LOL, “That’s not a nerd, that’s a geek.”

I gotta say, she stopped me in my tracks. For some strange reason I knew, with that distinction, I’d never be fit for life with her or anyone until I understood the difference. I got up from the table, kissed her on the cheek, gave her my credit card and disappeared from the world that ever saw me before.

My research has revealed that like the entire history of oppressed genius going underground and reappearing in a more sophisticated guise for their original purpose as anything from illuminati to Bohemian Grove to the Church of the Subgenius, the geeks of my youth had formed a literal underground union through the web of tunnels connecting the increasing number of pits the carnivals were so kind to dig for them. They realized over the years of considering their common experience that they had all become quite intuitive about electromechanical things and chicken heads. They taught their children to stay away from the opposite sex and anyone who appeared to be someone “…who would pay money to watch you bite the head off a chicken”, to study everything they could find about the cutting edge of gadgetry under the anonymity of various guises from queer in the fifties, square in the sixties, dweeb in the first part of the seventies melding into nerd toward the eighties until they began the silent revolution surfacing once more as geeks, wearing their weird like the latest fashion.

All of a sudden, if you were watching for it, nerds came out of their cloisters on prom night and got laid by the same drunken cheerleader as the quarterback, while he was finding how much better Zelda4TX looked without her horn rimmed glasses, hackers became synonymous with Robin Hood, the world wide web spread faster than a billion spiders, a guy in Peoria could schlep down to his basement in his altogether, bomb an entire village on the other side of the world with a sophisticated computer game while the coffee perks and be done in time to drink it fresh with toasted bagels, the president tweets.

The other day, someone asked me what I thought it would be like if geeks ruled the world. I looked at him with the smile of sardonic irony I’ve practiced for those spontaneous moments when people appear to be talking in their sleep.

5 CHICKS & A TOMCAT

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:00:00 +0000

I realized the hits I may invoke only after I finished typing the post title and am loath to change it just because it may disappoint the voyeur in us all. As my role model in reverse, Chance the Gardener (Chauncy Gardner {Peter Sellers}) likes to say, "I like to watch." These days it's these chicks.

Be that as it may I am hereby updating the breathless world on the news of the crew's cruise 'oer the land of the free and the home of a knave. Watching Priest's predatory instincts wax and wane with his feline curiosity is quite intriguing. He can sit obviously enamored amidst all five scratching, pecking and chatting about the smorgasbug offerings as sedately as I could hope for and I've watched him stalk low all the way across the yard as if they were his last chance to eat or maybe his long gone sister, Vera, prone to play like kids' cowboys and indians. No matter how many times I catch and scold him he manages to carry out his faux fear mongering as often as not — enough to evoke a squawk and a flutter, no more serious than their own pecking order arguments over food — and, having grown up with him every day of their life, they come right back to what was so playfully, rudely interrupted, while I still mother hen them two weeks into their free range adventures.

As the video demonstrates, if I can spot one I know within the hypoteneuse of a 6'x12' triangle where the others are.

I panicked when I touch the soft shelled egg in the nest until consulting goog ole goodle and found it to be common among hens' first eggs after moulting among on line eggery folk like me. Now I've made it more common, just because it calmed me down. Robin is the name of the hen I inherited in a mixup when my buddy, Chuck, retrieved his three chickens I baby sat over a week of his vacation. She was moulting because she is about eleven months older than her new coop mates. When the the mess her feathers were calmed down into smooth new plumage the turned out to have mousey brown feathers with pin stripes of their quills shining on her wings and back and her breast turned as red as a robin.

You may have noticed the markings on the radiant blond I've been calling Whynot, evolved from Wynona out of "Y" for the markings on her infant forhead, which have prompted me to now call her Dax, for the Star Trek symbiot and my buddy Babyldorkgalactinerd. The shot below is of Nameless One who watched me move that chair, my sieto, to get her food at every dawn of her life, so has stationed herself there and pooped in it to show her appreciation. I'm waiting for eggs.

If course, being the Simon Legree of all I feed and feed off of, I have devised a task for them to do when they're not busy laying those eggs they're always in process of making: I pile several shovels full of compost into the sifting screen and a token sprinkling of feed which they jump up to eat and remain to sift through the whole pile of juicy bugs therein, pooping all the while … the benefits of symbiosis never end. I like to win-win.

TAKE THIS APPLE, GOD WON'T MIND

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:40:00 +0000

Lying comes natural to a culture believing truth can be told. The dishonesty lies in that leap of faith required by the myth, so ubiquitous it’s invisible, that somewhere there are right answers in the back of some book of life with the indisputable authority to declare all other versions wrong. How tedious; half the folks looking to be told what’s right, the other half claiming it’s their way or the highway. The third half are aware of this tautology, stepped out of it and are, therefore, unable to be lied to. Nor do they rely on being told the truth, knowing variations on the theme of a truth so vast it cannot be spoken enrich the beautiful complexity of what we can only live to behold a smidgen of.

Sure, we can get the names right for things and actions we’ve learned for the stuff and nonsense we’ve invented and what they make us do. All that is written down somewhere in dictionaries and patent offices, psychiatry and pharmaceutical labs, bibles and constitutions. While honest folk endeavor to get those names in the best order to accurately describe past events, present feelings and future intentions, it is just as easy to rearrange those names for different, undisclosed intentions for ears waiting to hear some version of, “…so help me God, (with your authority to make the gullible believe anything, oh mighty writer of the Book).” Courts are busy making judgments on the suspension of disbelief among believers by one person’s version of events being more persuasive than the other, neither of which even need be about the truth.

Considering the variation in reality tunnels among humans as important to the survival of our species as the diversity of species is to sustaining the healthy life of the planet, makes it easy to hear such various reports as purely informational data points balanced against one’s own experience in an evolving probability theory about life in the universe of an open mind.

There are no liars if one’s not looking to believe, there are just different versions of what people think is going on, none of whom I need to believe nor expect or want to believe me. If our realities resonate, great; if not, grater. One thing common among my friends; the only lies we call on each other are the hoods we’ve winked on ourselves. It’s what friends are for.

•

Addendum: I'm chagrinned by my omission of a primary inspiration for this post and the coiner of one of my favorite terms, "reality tunnels", Robert Anton Wilson, … yeah you, you old rabble rouser — who got around our tendency to seem to be or to actually be liars when claiming exclusive truth, by finishing every sentence with, "…maybe". Beautiful. Maybe.

BELONGING

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:25:00 +0000

Lately I’m prone to be longing

To write of how belonging

Means I’m at home in my body

Wherever it happens to be.

It can’t have been long

Since I longed

To be needed

To feel such belonging;

To share myself undaunted,

‘Til what was wanted

Turned out never to be

Anything belonging to me.

Then I’d drool like those fool dogs

At the knell of school bells

Once the idea was seeded

That the only thing that I needed

To look like black ink’s in my logs.

The habit was strong

To sell my myself to belong

To the things I could own,

Just to belong with folks

What says they likes ‘em.

And then there are unexpected gifts;

Of unearned adulation or derisions

Offering bridges across their divisions

Or driving wedges by reading me wrong.

Belonging to me,

It has come to me

To not play that game

Of owning their name

By seeing their “Foe” is faux blame

For misery that needs my company.

Belonging to me, I can see

My wealth requires no ledger

For those belongings I haven’t,

The things I don’t own

Don’t require payments on a loan.

I belong in my body.

My body belongs in the body of Earth,

The Earth belongs in the Milky Way

The Milky Way belongs in the universe,

Not an owner in sight.

CAN’T GET PAST THE LOOKING GLASS

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:03:00 +0000

Looking Through the Our Glass

Intending to ponder what now is

I wander in wonder of Priest’s prowess

As I sit in my seat in the shed

Shed of piles of past notes

On what “to know’ is

And shelves of books that I’ve read.

This chilly misty morning

Sparks the dog’s spirits to play

Tails up, standing stark still, until

A blink, a wink and they’re off again

One chasing the other behind the tree

The other chasing him out

Like fractals from the void of nowhere

Now here sheds snapshots like leaves

Falling on the mirror of my pond

Memory on the top

Expectation on the soaking bottom;

Joyful scene — seen future green

Violent encounter — dread future red

Informing the water with their flavor

Decaying into the past

Building the body of unborn future attitude

Gestating in that nowhere of here now

Born continuously

As the changing reflection

Of which side we think we’re on.

Like Stalagmites from drips from Stalagtites

Form pillars and puddles,

Experience builds rigid resolve

And fluid bodies of wisdom

Accumulated with age,

That product of time

Considered a crime

As are so many ways of counting:

Someone makes up a game

Then assigns blame

To ones remaining the same

Though gaining a name…

Priest won’t let me write

He wants affection

He didn’t plan it that way

Neither did I

But I kind of expected it.

•

Dedicated to my first literary hero, Lewis Carrol (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

STARRING: HERSELF

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:30:00 +0000

Pilar had wanted to be in the movies ever since padre Ignacio had set up the projector in the community lodge. She was one of the few among her tribe who realized the story unreeling before them on the big white blanket was more wondrous than telling it with pictures that could move, stranger than the cloth covering all but the faces and hands of the people, odder than the sounds they made, or where they were, or what was going on. It wasn’t happening anywhere in time or space. Not on the wall. Not in anyone’s memory. It didn’t happen, it was done.

She remembered several years earlier when the huge boat without sails or oars came up the river with those wet crystals that shocked her fingers when she touched them and turned to water when she watched them. That happened; the only thing that happened at the movie was watching the movie that was done.

It was ninety-three years later, rolling tortillas in her booth at the reopened zocalo one morning, when she realized her dream had come true. The process of becoming one of those people who did their life was a long process of absorbing the changes that began with that movie about a world that didn’t happen, but was done with planning for a purpose.

When people dressed as those in the movie began to come up the river to clear the bank where they landed to build huge buildings with the great trees they felled, she watched her people fall for the ice machine over and over again — or disappear into the disappearing forest. When her clan ceased relocating, it became surrounded by other uprooted clans in an area dense enough to make the big buildings go around it.

Last year the people in the big buildings decided to celebrate the wonderful life they carved out of the wilderness by thanking her people with an urban renewal project that turned their east side village square and its neighborhood for several blocks into a stylized reproduction of the native village when she was thirty — a sort of ethnic cleansing. Many homes were purchased and converted into shops selling mass produced copies of clan items. She was paid a commission to sit in a booth in the zocalo rolling tortillas in addition to whatever she made selling them.

And there was the Director of Photography now. In his flip-flops, black socks and garters, Banana Republic shorts, Hawaiian shirt, gimme cap and shades-on-a-rope he was directing the rest of the cast into position around her. When Pilar stopped to watch as his children and wife gathered behind her and leaned their chins on her shoulders with big smiles on their faces, the DP said, “No, no. Keep on doing whatever was happening when we showed up. I want this to be a real documentary. Okay, everyone. Action.”

DETECTING THE INEVITABLE

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:25:00 +0000

If there were ever an oxymoron that an entire civilization hasn’t caught on to yet, it is the idea of detecting the inevitable. I’m about to whup a whole sake cup o’zen on your ass here, so be warned. Detection is becoming aware of and possibly pointing out previously unnoticed things. The inevitable, the Tao, the way of all nature is not a thing. It is not a law of physics or biology; it not a beginning, middle or end; it is not a creator any more than the Earth’s oceans intentionally created biological life. I am given to understand that in the Hindu vocabulary, the closest word to mean thing is “event”, in keeping with this idea of a living universe.

The myriad variety of things to be detected and pointed at arise from the infinite process that indicates the universe is alive, and if so, conscious. As each being is conscious of the sensations of its constituent cells’ reaction to the environment in its location so is the universe aware of itself with the same curiosity with which we constituent beings quest, or not.

Becoming aware of the natural, inevitable source of the distractions, of which most are exclusively, distractedly aware, is not a process of detecting but rather a cessation of detecting, dissecting, naming, and explaining. No explanation can make someone see the depth of the flat autostreogram pattern and my humble attempts to elucidate the inevitable are infinitely more inadequate to save anyone the actual, personal experience of realizing with all one’s senses, life as it is beyond description.

Such awareness has shown me that each entity has a characteristic nature which, should they align it with the nature of the universe, the fears and regrets inevitable with attachment to particulars in the evanescent variety as it passes gives way to sharing the ride with all the things down the inevitable river or the stroll down the way of everything that runs along its banks. Western civilization is a mistaken attempt to build a damn out of attachment to the water.

PATENTLY COPYWRONG

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:46:00 +0000

I just left a site with a giant copyright symbol and statement at the top of his side bar to return here with a clear explanation of why I see assuming the authority to control the interpretation of a voluntarily overt act second only to the usury such assumptions enable that riddles western civilization with the constant sense of oppression it exudes. Competition is beneficial only when it encourages everyone to expand their perspective and skills beyond the current edge with no energy devoted to retarding fellow vier’s possibilies; otherwise, such events are competitions in the most spiteful vanity.

When I first decided to sacrifice my graphic skills on the fires of the open market, I matted up the pages from several pads of watercolors, pastels and pen and sat on a blanket on the sidewalk along the “drag” with other art and craft vendors. Among the many things I learned by watching the faces of the people leafing through my work was how fraught with attachment to their reactions I was — to the point that the whenever I sat with pen, brush, chalk in hand after that venture, my mind leaped beyond any inspiration to faces in reaction to whatever it might have been. For me it was severe artist block. It was a full ten years before I was able to live by mypenchant and passion for art.

The one thing that has changed in the thirty odd years since that experience is my attitude toward the future of anything I might create once I offer it for public access. While it remains an inspiration or its incarnation in a drawing pad, note pad, voice recorder or computer program the work is mine; how could it be otherwise? But when I receive my commission from a client, sell my art to a customer or publish rants and ponders here, they are out of my hands and are free to be used for anything. To litigiously trace works into their future to ensure my desired interpretation is not only frustratingly futile, for an artist or author it is self-defeating.

My friend, Amber, began her own stained glass business making hanging creations she called Suncatchers. They are so beautiful that within a couple of years she began seeing “suncatchers” at trade shows underselling items so brazenly copied as to have the same names for the pieces. After much contemplation on the situation she realized the negativity and expense associated with legal action was much greater than any loss she might recover.

More importantly, she realized the value of any of her creations was in the quality she devoted to her own inspirations, a field in which she relished creating new pieces yet to be imitated by flatterers who not only demonstrated her ideas, but exposed the superior quality of her work as surely as an ad campaign.

In the case of the blogger who warns away plagiarists with a stay puff sized ©, I must assume he either wants to keep his ownership, income or integrity in tact although others’ misuse of his work can have no effect on the value of his intended meaning, while gratuitously drawing attention to the expressions he wanted out there in the first place.

Methinks © protests too much.

THE “BANE” OF SELF-RELIANCE?

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:13:00 +0000

A post over at Thoughtstreaming was in its usual process of describing what I must assume is the “opposition”, which any blog espousing a political ideology authored by names like Troutsky and Che Bob must, of necessity, have, when along comes this sentence, “Individual as opposed to collective rights and a fetishized discourse on the Founding Fathers and Christianity and self-reliance.” Something clicked into place in an ever present puzzle presented to me early on in my naïve delve into the political blog scene with a comment to this same blog and receiving a most hostile reception for suggesting that I got any value for my life from reading Ayn Rand, obviously one of their code words loaded with ammunition of instant opinions for the combat life seems to be for them.

For me the entirety of Ayn Rand’s works were another version of the theme that inspired Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, singing the beauty of the of human potential and railing against the enslavement of it. That she made super heroes of those who realized their potential by becoming the most ethical architect in all of literature in Fountainhead and were the rare few honest captains of industry in Atlas Shrugged, got her branded by socialists of Trout/Che’s brand as a champion of the real, living, union busting, greedy, Gordon Gecko CEOs who milk their country dry. That she learned her fierce self-reliance in escaping from the collective nightmare of her life in the worst incarnation of socialism to date that was the Soviet Union, only emphasized their reasons to oppose her. That Howard Roark and John Gault had stirling ethics with no room for usury, the bane of civilization against which they and all men rail, just doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a brand easy to singe into the hide of anyone who would rather make it on their own. Methinks they throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

In western society, human potential exists in various kinds and quantities, less by genetic inheritance than by early wiring by the highly variable environment into which an individual is born. The belief system of the parents is either the first oppression or the first inspiration a growing curiosity deals with. Socializing outside the family is the first challenge to the inspiration or light on the oppression in a life full of contradictions to every assumption we make. It is at this stage that all the advice points to making irretrievable conclusions about what is right as a keel to remain steady through whatever experience the future may hold. Some, myself included, were never so sure of the concept of righteousness as to adopt it in any form other than than their own autonomy. I remember instances of great passion in love and war in my life, but none were my attempts to convert another to my ideas as a matter of faith in their intrinsic righteousness – merely food for thought in varying potencies from out side the box.

Although I have mentioned it several times previously, the Hindu concept of Minahana and Mahayana is particularly relevant to this socialist/capitalist argument in that Minahana is the individual, “little boat”, which must be mastered before one is capable of taking an oar in the “big boat”, Mahayana. This has always meant to me the same sort of self-understsanding that must precede indoctrination into the requirements of any culture, whether it is the solitary vision quest of native American adolescents or the walkabout of Aborigine lads, without which their communities held them lacking the virtue of responsibility and unworthy of assuming a role of tribal responsibility. Had either culture met a Marx or a Trotsky they would have laughed at the folly of their rejection of self-reliance in favor of group righteousness.

One person’s passionate belief in their responsibility for the care, feeding and behavior of themselves is another person’s fetishized self-reliance. It seems to me that the socialist abhorrence of self reliance is its lack of needing the group they cannot imagine living without. There are no self-reliant mobs out to take over the government that they want control of, there are no anarchist clubs anywhere. The gun toting, John Birchers against whom they rail are not self-reliant — they want to control the same government the socialists do — smaller government just means they want the orders to come from their own living room.

Well, this is as clearly as I can state my thoughts regarding the methods of painting the opposition with such a broad brush it leaves no room for anyone to qualify as an ally.

…AND THERE'S ALL THE PEOPLE

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:01:00 +0000

This is the church

And this is the steeple

Open the doors

And there’s all the people …

… who keep making more people for the church down the road, and the one further down the road of years until that road runs into the road of inevitability coming the other way like the meeting of the Union and Central Pacific completing the first transcontinental railroad, except in this case all the people keep on growing like a pileup of cars in this train wreck of a world plan to just keep on feeding the result of careless breeding with the pope on the sidelines cheer leading, his “abstinence only” yells they aren’t heeding as minorities feel needing to catch up by speeding the irresistible seeding.

We have a Pope-ulation problem!

Overpopulation - John Pitre

GRADUATION DAY

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:36:00 +0000

Yesterday afternoon found me with unusual optimism for the future of my class of '09 debutantes when I opened the coop door and tore down the mesh barrier to their just walking out. It took no time at all for them to escape their seven month home schooling and test their training on the real world. I am quite gratified that, with only one warnining, Priest was satisfied to observe them rather than attempt to eat the chicks he watched grow more constantly than I.

They have yet to encounter the dags, which were in Donna's house for the three hours they were out before returning to roost at their usual shade of evening, but seeing them keeping to the the 12' x 8' area of proximity to one another within which they spent their previous life even while they roamed all over the garden area, I imagine they will hold their own en masse.

The setting sun catches their exotic feather colors and patterns to perfection, if only my camera did.

•

I swear, I must be psychic. Watching this a couple of times after I slapped it together by equating giving the chicks the right to roam the same ground I do with Democracy, loving Leonard Chohen's song by that name and quickly publishing it I noticed the music sounds just like a bunch of chickens to me. Then again, maybe I'm not psychic at all, merely psychotic.

RIP VAN YODOOD

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:15:00 +0000

Xiao Mao & Priest
By Babyldorkgalactinerd

I woke up this morning to the long hairs on Priest’s twitching ears brushing my nose as they searched for the source of a sound outside. Snuggled together in the chilly morning air, I’d been dreaming of the dissolution of the sharp edged contrast of one color dye or paint being swirled into a container of another color until only the third is purely evident. I never know what he is dreaming.

The stirring without began stirring within and we both headed outdoors to relieve ourselves and join the beginning of false dawn a good hour and a half before direct sunlight. The bang of the screen door set the hens to crying out their excited anticipation of fresh food. Along the path by the pond the sound of a hundred frantic little suppings came from the fish for the same reason. It is good to be king when your subjects are happy.

The three free ranging matron hens are in the shed picking up spillage from the feed bin as I dip out the daily portion for my younger coop bound girls. Soon I will let them free range too and the feed bin will empty much more slowly. I know they can’t possibly be hungry when they go into their greeting ritual of fluttering up to get the feed out of the can before I spread it for them because the older hens eat out of the areas last occupied by the rolling coop for weeks after I’ve moved it. Then comes a beautiful lawn of grass from the mix of rain with scratched in poop and seeds even they didn’t eat. It’s all good, nothing wasted. No eggs this early. They wait for the sun to get in the mood.

Although they cannot make sucking noises in pond water or cackle from their coop I am no less aware that my sprouting winter garden needs water despite the recent rains. Drought conditions aren’t relieved by sudden floods near so well as by steady drizzles delivering the same amount of moisture. How ‘bout that — my first farming aphorism. The remaining survivors from summer, three Serrano peppers and three okra, two artichokes and an asparagus bed are making up for lost time as I soak their roots with the hose on full shower into the hay around their feet. A mist setting is gentle enough to feed the sprouting cilantro, arugula, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower without beating them down into the well-composted soil.

After turning the compost pile vigorously enough to shed my hoody, Priest and I settle in our sieto to greet the great golden bringer of life from our merry go round seat in the shed. Refractions and reflections of the solar radiance spark on and off with the breeze on shuddering leaves’ fresh droplets and the inexorable change in the attitude of the light itself. Thousands of birds leave their roosts; criss-crossing overhead to inspect fields from on high where dwell billions of bugs and seeds that threaten to overgrow all the rest of us ground bound critters, swoop down upon the juiciest terrain and eat as many as they can. Good birds.

When the brilliance of the day enters the shed at a particular angle, like a preprogrammed robot I stir from my cerebrations, meditations and mid-morning snoozes to return to the shade of the porch and my electronically bewebbed portal to the wide world of western civilization. I consider it the ultimate reality show based on the outlandish question, “How do humans behave when born within a culture saturated in the certainty of human superiority entitled to ownership of the rest of the world; and each other if the price is right?”

In my most anthropomorphically cynical moods my browser news sites serve as an early warning system hot wired to the political scene for hints of when the baling wire that holds together this country’s faith in liars snaps in time to man the compound gun towers against the suddenly starving hoards pouring out of suddenly empty cities roaming the countryside in search of food. On the other stroke of the pendulum, during my most sanguine moods “Ted’s Tubes” allow me to sample individual’s various freely offered reality tunnels and to leave examples of my own observations, ideas and experiences as a measure of connecting, spreading and evolving like mycelium in preparation for the next time the conditions are right for the dirty hippies who groked flower power to come back out of the woodwork and rise to the fore once more to lead humanity back to the garden before the oil runs out.

So I click on Democracy Now! and there’s Amy and Juan at their table on their normal set, but they’re both clad in shades of violet. The first picture of the current events is of peasants in Venezuela wearing either traditional clothing or red tee shirts for Hugo Chavez; seemed pretty normal. Then came a scene from the US congress. It hit me with something as hard to get my head around as seeing a UFO.

Everyone was wearing either red or blue, though it was often hard to tell from all the logo patches covering every inch of their clothing … and the hats most seem to be wearing. There was nothing extraordinary going on; which only compounded my astonishment. I might have accepted a special occasion our elected servants may have drummed up, but there they were carrying on business as usual. WTF!

The area of their left breasts seemed reserved for rows of what resembled battle ribbons. Except for the hints of the background color of their clothing being limited to red or blue, there were no signs of uniforms or rank; there hadn’t been a military coup. Then a close up of a representative sleeping during the argument against a bill he introduced outlawing the use of poor people for fuel showed his colorful shoulder and sleeves festooned by the logos of Shell, Exxon, BP, et al, wrapped around him by his crossed arms.

The speaker, wearing blue covered in logos from the green revolution industry, was not opposing the bill because he wanted to legalize the recent popularity of spontaneous human combustion engines since that high speed camera learned the secret on film. No, he was opposed to the oil industry’s constant attempt to eliminate competition through legal channels behind the cloak of humanitarian concern for the lack of concern for the poor, rather than spend the money to buy them on the open market like everyone else, the free enterprise way. Ah, yes, it was a marathon competition of whose ethics could get under the Limbaugh stick. I checked the URL to see of I’d gotten the Onion site by mistake.

No, still Amy and Juan, in violet. I started frantically clicking around the news sites to finally realize that everyone out there was wearing either red or blue, with or without logos attached, or what I would call “civilian” clothes as seen on everyone last time I ventured into town. People in violet voluntarily wore fabric whose red and blue components came from the color of each thread woven, or dyed in various sized checks, polka-dots and mezzotint, but no logos patches. They seemed to be obeying an ethic lost on the reds and the blues.

I was well aware that someone out in Delaware could be doing something I never heard of and it had been a long time since I’d been to town; in fact, I relish signs of my being out of the loop of societal gossip, but this was stupefying. What could be happening? The habit my curiosity has acquired along with this portal is the Wikipedia button on it. I typed in red and blue clothing, and eventually ran down the history which had been going on so long that it was unremarkable on the street while I began doubting my sanity over what I was experiencing.

It seems Steven Colbert logged an entry into Wikipedia facetiously explaining the non existent Law of Transparency requiring anyone publically espousing their ideology as being good for anyone else to don red if it fell into the category of, “every man for himself in the human race to the top of the free-for-all enterprise heap” and blue if it was, “an even playing field, even if holes must be dug for the tall people to stand in so we all see eye to eye.” And that such espousers declare the sources of their income in logos of the companies who write the checks attached to the exterior of their clothing like thousands of other sponsored event participants.

Apparently a junior congressman from Delusiana, came across the entry and, recognizing Steven’s name from his far right wing TV show knew his fellow ideologue couldn’t be wrong, went out and bought a red suit and plastered logos of every backer from AIG to Tom’s Hardware on it, and wore to his first session of congress. As they say, the rest is history.

Like the Austin hippies turned the song, Oakie from Muskogee, around on the redneck mentality that liked “kickin’ hippies’ asses and raisin’ hell” and made it their back-in-your-face anthem, the fun being made of such a naïve clown on the floor got spun into the idea that the expiation of the guilt laid on them by government ethics watchdogs for gorging at the lobbyist's bribe banquets was at hand, if they could just bite the bullet, man up, own up and brag about their sleazy betrayal of the public trust — and dare their constituents to name a better price if they didn't like it. The violet was a voluntary choice made by the extremely interested but strictly nonpartisan investigative news programs which was only right in such a transparent, arrogantly honest society …

HEALTH: Mental Concrete part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:03:00 +0000

Beginning with the dictionary definition as a starting point…

Health: n, the state of being free from illness or injury.

… which apparently the medical/insurance industry’s indebted toadies, squirming under the contradictory desires to serve their masters while milking the fools who naively vote their servants into the public trough, would rather see as a point of departure, busier than all the all the airfields, harbors, train and bus stations in the world combined, the way all sides obfuscate the very simple humanitarian question of, “who is responsible for health in the land of the free.”

I’ve been pretty good about keeping the actual machinations of politics out of my rants about the deeper problem of how individuals can be so eager to be served and so loath to actually be of service that we leave the care and maintenance of our most personal responsibilities and mutually beneficial welfare of our neighbors to mercenaries from afar and bitch about paying them. Oh, Yodood, you’re so extreme! Okay, I admit it. We aren’t that irresponsibly dependent or stingily selfish by our nature, but we certainly let the government convince us it’s the right way to live.

Dropping out of the grasp of western culture’s mythology has been more than a physical shedding of its stuff and the 24/7 pursuit thereof, more than discovering a more timeless, naturally spontaneous lifestyle, more than learning that what I have always called my “will” has been obeying the prime directives of my cell’s collective consciousness as they manipulate a natural path through the artificial hoops and cul de sacs of civilization. For me it has also been a growing extension of the realization that, at the age of thirty-four, I had never fed my body or considered its nutrition to be more than satisfying my taste buds.

I’ve gotten to know my body pretty well over the years since feeding myself became my most primal responsibility as a being who desires to remain alive and able to follow the interests of my curiosity. A large part of the nature I am learning to observe, if not all, is the machinations of perception flavoring every experience with memories of other instances in an ongoing internal dialogue ready to report who, where and when I am; a practice so well instilled by public education and four years of marines. Beneath that dialogue are the the tangs of taste buds and the pangs of pained cells signaling more than need of habitual soothing; they’re hints at a remedy to be applied. All metabolisms are different, there are no panaceas to replace familiarity with the territory to which we all have as intimate an access as we wish. All too many leave such care and feeding to people in white aprons behind masks and fast serve counters of pharmacists and fry cooks.

When my wife, a hypochondriac registered nurse, took her sanitized world elsewhere, I was faced with an empty plate and no thermometer. Over the past thirty-six years I have learned to feed myself the foods my body tells me it needs to remain healthy without the crutch of the “health care industry.” Mid-2004, I went beyond feeding myself to growing the food to complete the life cycle of symbiotic responsibility as my waste feeds my food through composting.

My interest in Buddhism led me to the eastern philosophy of health and its profound sanity in considering prevention of disease far more fundamental than the forensic pathology of the west, that sends you home until you’re are sick enough to treat or afraid enough to gouge. The chi or kundalini system of the body, through which an immaterial regulatory energy flows, maintains its healthy balance just as the more material nervous system maintains its communications. Until the East met the West it did not know the intrusion of surgery. Acupuncture, Tai Chi and massage all treat the chakras and their networking as indispensible to health but are in turn treated by the AMA as fundamentalist Christians do other gods; as pseudoscience. In eastern health traditions doctors were forbade charging fees for their gift of compassionate understanding of the health of the body, but their willingness to share it made them the most revered and wealthy in their communities from the donations by the grateful.

I am not saying that because I haven’t seen a doctor in almost four decades I think everyone should boycott them. I just think it is worth considering retaking personal responsibility for our health far beyond taking antacid tabs while waiting in an exhaust choked waiting line at one of the millions of fast-food industry anuses that keep this great fat country going — coughing to hell. It is the same responsibility one must assume for daily behavior should one forego the ritualized accident, home, theft, health insurance guaranteeing that: no matter how irresponsibly we behave in the present (the only place we ever are), if we pay someone enough money in the past, our future recovery or death will make someone undeservedly rich off our carelessness — and perhaps our health will be covered — just like Zantacs at Jack in the Box. Taking drugs to ward off the results of ignorance is not the kind of prevention I’m talking about. Focus in the present needs or can benefit from no other insurance.

I realize there are wide variations in individual beings' ability to survive life on earth to the extent that, save the compassion of loved ones and/or the Hippocratic oath, they would live a life of pain or die. The whole while mankind has been building and clunking into the walls of western civilization, it has evolved a sense of empathy for fellow, clueless victims of the unfathomably ridiculous myth that nature is to be conquered, driven from the wilderness and sold on the block. It is what civilized people do to themselves, as they train their offspring out of their natural curiosity into a life of labor maintaining the walls, and force on others, as they replace natives’ jungle encampments with malls and move them to the brand new slums at the fringes of the brand new city. We are sicker from the system’s poisons and machines to isolate us from it than nature has ever made us.

As my body ages and my daily routine becomes more meditative than spontaneous I feel the feebles creep into my balance, strength, hearing and sight and I think to perhaps not throw away the mailer from Medicare next time. I pay for it. Or so it says on my annual statements from Social Security. They tell me I could opt out; and I would but for the idea that my unused portion goes to benefit the common medical access; the kindest gesture I’ve found in government anywhere. That we limit such efficient altruistic concerns to the aged while the general population pumps enough money into private industry’s pre-existing bean counters to pay for free, unqualified health care for everyone within our borders several times over is hand in glove with legislation protecting the polluting industries that cause ill health to begin with.

But the western health industry isn’t too much into prevention when the wreck, the war, the expedience is so much more profitable.

MOON … OON … ON … N

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:32:00 +0000

The full Moon dawns on the break of night

Solar reflection, Brian’s selection

The theme for All Hallows Eve.

Her full moon dawns on my line of sight

Solar reflection’s reflection’s detection

From my pond she doth retrieve.

I see it in the water of my eyes

In the mirror on the wall

Out the window to it all

In her rippled rings of water

In the pond

On her moon

On the Moon

In rings of water drops

In the sky

Sol still

Reverberating

His gong

Long gone

Not yet.

•

This is my submission to this installment of 10^th Daughter of Memory, though the post just before this is the result of getting so reflective about the Moon’s dawning I followed curiosity way off the theme. Boy oh boy, without reflection detection we’d need television.

THE LOG OF THE GOOD SHIP, CURIOSITY

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:35:00 +0000

She shoves off from the safe harbor of Certainty, enticed by the perfumed air blowing in on the breeze from the Sea of Everything Else to explore its many secret charms her crew intuits inland while absently gazing out windows whenever inside. They are all avid volunteers whose focus long ago dissolved the slats of the bamboo curtains while reaching for the larger picture so far beyond the glass barrier. They sail in defiance of threats like, “there be dragons,” from frightened keepers of the faith in the prophecy that, if order could possibly be indisputably established anywhere, the wilderness outside won’t really matter and will go away.

She needs no recruiting posters. In the beginning so many felt wanted by the vast unknown the founding elders realized they must act to prevent an ldeaspora‘s dissolution of all they were trying to nail down. They relocated the population further inland to a territory they dubbed the United States of Absolutica, away from the temptation of doubt lapping at the entire fractalized coastline, not just their original landing site, Curiosity’s point of departure from Certainty. In recent generations Curiosity’s fleet has begun sailing other ships out of other ports; the happy ship, the Wrong, sails out of the well defended port of Fort Righteousness; the super streamlined yet slow boat, Our Desire, out of Sinisabad; the weird ship, the Anomaly, out of Normalcy; the intuitive ship, Yearning out of Comfort Corners; Question out of Patanser; Beginning out of Land’s End … you get the idea.

Moving to the heartland of the new homeland, clearing the area of wild ideas and building the great isolating wall of definition worked very well during the lifetimes of those who’d remained involved in the passionate debates about the righteousness of every rule laid into the wall and who’d invested energy in the labor of leaving it alone once put in place. It wasn’t too many generations along when the sacred wall, referred to by all as the DICTATIONARY, began revealing leaks spied by inattentive students’ wandering attention during the endlessly boring process of doubt erasure their public schools were.

The process of patching the DICTATIONARY with a new rule for every inventive infraction became a distraction from considering the impossibility of enforcing them, much less the loss to the vitality of the community of its most creative criminals by diagramming their sentences to jail. The prophecy became as threadbare as the emperor’s new clothes when the more imaginative among them recognized the similarity of their culture to the process by which innovative farmers surrounded each budding pumpkin blossom with a mold of the head of the head founding elder to harvest a lucrative commodity just in time to save everyone from the mess of having to carve them themselves and the shame of probably getting them wrong at Halloween.

The experience of being surrounded by so many mirrors reflecting one’s proper image packed so close together, sealed within the fortress walls as they were, stirred the embryo of an irritation within even the most indoctrinated among the orthodox.

Tentative attempts to escape constant reminders of such mindless conformity with forays into the wilderness were always accompanied by a gigantic vacuum/snail device that extruded an asphalt trail wherever it went to transform the land wherever it stopped by sucking it up into the mold of a road crossing with options at each corner from an approved list of necessities including bank, gas station, fast food, car wash, bar, car dealership, church, parking lot and personal technology retailer as a support for the relatively isolated, practically identical rows of individual sets of walls of personal fortress sprawl they named homes.

These adventuresome heretics were slowly granted permission to decorate their indistinguishable homes, built on the design principles of exactitude laid down so long ago, with the blasphemy of modifiers. A dab of green letters and numbers spelling the name and registration of the homeowners on the mailbox in front of one of the standard black and/or white houses was open defiance of tradition. The first person to hang an adjective on the wall in their nouning room caused a stir of controversy throughout the colony.

These outlying boxes remained connected to the fort within fortified capsules whizzing these rebels back and forth along the slime trail or virtually through the series of Ted Tubes from their homes to the trough that sustains them from within the bowels of the fort, the fountain of truth, the reward of a promise, permission to exist. Being natural entities these strangers to a stranger land gradually enacted an innate curiosity as unconsciously as the depth to which their education had buried it, but just as surely — as if "curiosity" or "why" were actual words, much less symbols for concepts they recognized and could discuss.

Ayn ran away from her stifling nest within the ironic curtain because there were no words to express to her parents’ and teachers’ satisfaction the questions she couldn’t ask about a world greater than the DICTATIONARY could behold much less cared to contain. As chance or the salt air would have it, her parents’ home was in the closest proximity to the coast of any of the fort’s outposts so that her flight away from the prosthetics and the walls and the asphalt through this garden of unexplainable phenomena was the first time any of her people had breathed unconditioned air or witnessed the environment without glass protection for three hundred generations … and it led her to a beach.

Ever since stifled reports of her survival in the wilderness without definitions began leaking into the fort, wakened curiosities have leaked out and trickled down to the coast to build this outlaw community of sea farers sailing the Sea of Everything Else and re-porting their ships to share novel words about novel experiences of larger samples of the infinitely big picture of the universe.

She’s sailing under the full moon tonight. Come on along for the endlessly interesting voyage of the good ship Curiosity. Your life will be its logbook, its entries, your direct experience; no hearsay. You won’t need words until you choose to re port.

ANONYMOUS: Mental Concrete Pt. 2

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:03:00 +0000

The most beneficial effect I can see the internet having on the civilization it is saturating is the growing realization that truth needs no authority. The first installment of this series, Mental Concrete, dealt with the strategic misuse of stereotypes as demon paint to rally opposition to straw men as sole bearers of a particular all-consuming characteristic that the propagandist opposes that, in reality, is found in everyone to some degree. This time I want to home in on the mentally lazy habit of needing footnotes and degree initials to recognize obvious truth or of being persuaded by them to swallow propaganda.

My strongest experiential connections to other humans (beyond realizing that we are all made of the same cosmic stuff in extremely complex variations as cells in the tissue of the living body of earth) are our love of music, the occasional display of our deep-seated instinct to know right and wrong in the unrehearsed spontaneity of the moment it is required, and the rarer examples of our ability to capture and communicate that instinctual sense alive with a series of symbols as abstract as words or paint. The truth shines through the page whether it is a venerable old acolyte’s hand drawn parchment by candlelight in a musty cloister or the soiled brown paper bag the MD 20/20 came in scrawled by the shaky claw of a junkie by barrel firelight in an alley or the canvas of a saintly artist deliriously daubing every photon of light striking his dilated pupils from that starry night sky. Hell, I’ve been inspired by things I misread – and was no less inspired for finding my mistake. That’s what this post is about. The authority required to be genuinely inspired!

We seem to be so conditioned by our education to respect authority that we are paralyzed without its approval of our behavior and beliefs, religious or not. The internet is instant access to virtually anything anyone has ever wanted the world to see, and much of what they didn’t, for an entire spectrum of reasons. It is possible with very little effort to assemble every word, song or videotape relative to any subject, except those redacted by the government’s black ops authority over anything too amazing for the common man they swore to serve.

With such a plethora of information one may surmise the popularity and profundity of any subject by the quantity and range of the variety of views from every reality tunnel and camera ever applied, with scattered attempts to establish “facts” about the subject denoted by the particular acronymic symbol following the names of that particular specialty of authorityhood who’s word dare not be questioned. A comparison of the great, unwashed, unlettered, anonymous’ synthesis against the officially accepted facts always yields interesting, often intriguing insight into the agenda of such official versions; especially when the difference is great.

The idea of authority in both audacity of assumption and specter of surveillance makes of any system based on it fraught with little Caesars polishing their act, to expand their sphere of influence among the lowly gullible, and their apples for those whose rules school those fools who would achieve their stool with lickspittle obedience. Some shit.

It seems to me that western civilization is brewing a situation where the authority resides in a collective tower of mental masturbation at some floor or other. Authority requires levels; what else is left to achieve when you know it all? Outside that tower is the chaos of independent reality tunnels based on the individual life experiences of people who don’t assume they know anything about how or why civilization exists, much less perpetuates the establishment of edifices and new rules. Nor do they care except when intruded upon in their daily, relatively symbiotic lives in local nature, so far as authority permits.

It appears axiomatic that the strength of influence one assumes for one’s authority will proportionally disable the possibility of experiencing life as it actually is. Authority distorts perception whether the observed even knows authority is there or not. When authority asserts itself, the subject must as well, whether it wants to or not.

Authority is officially recognized and rewarded for accomplishments in furthering religious, political and scientific snow jobs that keep the people praying, obeying and paying. The most ubiquitous source of recognized authority is the initial “$”; able to buy the obedience of political whores betraying their constituents, the forked tongues of Madison Avenue snake oil salesmen on infotainment mainstream media and the guns of mercenary mobs to force fear on the unpersuadable priceless that remain. This collection of stereotypes I just used is marbleized throughout civilization; no one is absolutely evil or without a price.

Ah, well, they litter the internet, those authorities. I try to stay away from them, but I guess it doesn’t even pay to talk to it without “doing” something that qualifies, much less question it any more – to its face that is. I guess I’m as guilty of stereotyping as anyone; I question all authority but that which I perceive self-evidently shining through another’s unqualified behavior like truth on a page. Is it me, or does that sort of authority seem to be most likely found in people who prefer remaining anonymous?

LATEST COOP POOP SCOOP

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:32:00 +0000

Dateline: Dawgranch, somewhere along Fetchit Drive this month, six former debutants came out once more in the technicolor parade of Aurucana testimonies to a new level of maturity in pastel shades from lilac to sage. In just the short span of three weeks they have hit the three eggs a day pace of maternal extrusion. I have notified the egg eaters who have taken an interest in their development that they are welcome to help themselves up to the last three eggs in the collection basket. And we’re off …

With any intention there comes analysis of progress according to even the most nebulous of plans; if that intent is of an ex-engineer who enjoyed analyzing data in matrices for patterns, like myself, you employ something similar to the nearly completed first page of egg size and color per hen plus her choice of time and nest for her latest issue.

Humorous anecdotes along the way are referenced by

the asterisks on the first month’s egg chart above.

* Positive identification of the hen and the time: I looked in just as Shiva shuddered her egg out and I heard it hit the box floor. I left her in her post laying trance. When I came back thirty minutes later I learned hers was the second in that nest and there was already a third egg warmer than hers, but I couldn't be surer who laid the second one, I was looking right in her glazed eyes at the time..

** Positive identification of the time: I heard someone call my name several times in a beckoning falsetto. I looked out along Fetchit Drive, got into a brief conversation with Hank of the Hennery and then checked the egg nests since I was out in the sprinkle anyway. There was this egg as fresh as they come — has one learned to cackle my name?

Ongoing research into improved mobility seems headed for the time when I begin letting them free range. With the roost and nesting boxes the only functioning part of the rig, there’s little reason to move the whole thing to greener pastures. Another case of perceived necessity being obviated by inevitability.

•

Addendum: As a sign of the individual shifts to more home based food sources I offer this example in obtaining 100 pounds each of layer mash crumbles and hen scratch a month and a half ago for $25 compared to the $40.50 I paid yesterday for the same thing. The real question here is, is this representative of individuals changing their food source or my local feed store predicting a trend and heading it off like any greedy capitalist would with their 62% increase of the cost gouging those with the intent of going independent of chicken factories? My guess is: the probabilities are against my better wishes.

MENTAL CONCRETE

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:18:00 +0000

Frustrating encounters with certain blog buds and commenters recently have brought Jung’s and Campbell’s role of symbology controlling the way we think into sharp focus for me. It seems that no matter how sublime, ethereal, abstract, profound, enlightening an insight may be, the conveyance of the exquisite point of light into this realm of push and shove demand for clean edged certainty, assured by dictionary and blueprints, condenses, compacts all possibility of expressing any thought from outside it into the sharpest relief with the pressure between the press plate and the paper leaving black ink letters in rows as its symbolic proxy. Only the finest poets can build such structures with just the right crack left in to allow enlightenment to shine in —— “that’s how the light get in”.

In conversation, body language does a lot to fractalize the edges of the spoken word to meld the context from which the thoughts arose if they are vivid enough, imbued with the speaker’s spirit, to suspend the hearer’s belief in his own set of definitions long enough to go along to the end. Body language, if the eyes are ignored, can reinforce the tendency of a partisan audience to personify positive and negative abstraction into concrete allies and foes with a certitude only the eyes betray. Some can even lie with their eyes, but only by believing their own lies.

We could light the world forever if we could tap, cross the internet, the energy frittered away in frustrated miscommunications due to the use of abstractions as absolutes such as stereotypes taken as complete descriptions of single entities on the part of the speaker, or when the listener cherry picks the dictionary definition of certain word to refute the entire contextual meaning expressed.

In the first instance the abstract characterization of stereotypes is wasted on those who think in the black and white absolutes of righteousness. If such a thinking process were to hear the term, Jim Bob Lunchpail, they would picture a laborer eating lunch on the jobsite watching the propaganda of the opposing party on TV and swallowing it all, hook line, sinker, sandwich and bullshit; a real living entity; whole herds of such entities; hell, there’s so many we gotta organize against ‘em! That may be what the speaker intended, if he wanted to rouse the Jim Bob’s on his side to go out and get the others in some fashion.

But, as likely as not, they meant to describe just such black and white, with us or against us, lack of curiosity as characterizing lazy thinking wherever, in whatever proportion of whomever, it occurs. This phenomenon is exemplified by such thinking being unable to recognize satire’s mockery of such concretized stereotypes to realize that Colbert Nation is not a right wing utopia, or that Sarah Silverman doesn’t necessarily have a 48” TV as described in her video a few posts back, or that Glen Beck and Bill O'Reily aren't really news reporters, but Bullmoose bullshit dispensers who authored best sellers because right wingnuts bought bulk to get their books on the list; they don't even care if they're read, just so the mindless interpret sales as representing authority.

Sometimes the reaction of such thinking becomes stretched beyond permissible limits such that it snaps back with, “Arguing what truth means is irrelevant. Look up trust in the dictionary. Problem solved." in a comment earlier. To which I answered, with this "this is this and that is that" refusal to understand the context in which a word is used as an indication of what is meant, there's probably very little poetic license with which you won't argue, because that's not how the dictionary dictates it to mean. Pretty sad. Problem perpetuated.

No one IS Jim Bob Lunchpail or his idol, Colonel Bullmoose but they seem like real people to the degree one fits the description themselves. You get the idea. Or not.

SARCASTIC BOMBASTIC DRASTIC PLASTIC

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:20:00 +0000

Click on picture to learn what you are seeing

AND THEN THINK LONG AND HARD ABOUT IT NEXT TIME YOU ARE TEMPTED TO BUY OR THROW AWAY ANYTHING PLASTIC!!!!!

While the manipulators debate global warming this unquestionable indication of an unsustainable lifestyle is shoved to the sidelines. We must stop the distraction from life's priorities by big money's quick fix profits exploiting the necessary green revolution

DAY AT THE BEACH

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:22:00 +0000

They finally had a whole day together. She’d been planning it for what seemed like a month. Now it was happening. She’d emptied and defrosted the refrigerator last night so that it could air out all day today while they were gone. She’d made an entry on her iPhone list of “things to do on the way back” in the order each place would be passed driving home along the coast road tonight. The list was stored under “lists” for Saturday, August 9^th on her iCal. Life had never rewarded her for her ability to organize it so well as it had since she got her iPhone.

The loud rip of a zipper tore through his dreamless kitten fur slumber brought back the sound of her voice describing what today would be like as he drifted off into the soma afterglow of their love making last night. After slipping his legs into shorts, his feet into sandals and his torso into a tee and sipping some ganjava into himself on his way to the car he picked up his surfboard, sketch pad and easel. He was toking a pinner as she emerged from the house with enough travel gear and beach equipment for a week on the Cote D’Azure.

An hour later, after frustrating logistical debates with the logic of a hybrid car too small to carry anything more than two people no matter how small its carbon foot print may be, they were on the road headed south with the rising sun hitting him twice behind his shades as it separated from its mirror. His surfboard, rather than being the first item to be left behind, saved the day, so to speak. They’d strapped her several travel bags to it making containment splints of her beach umbrella and his easel, all of which they’d tied to the top via rope through the open windows. They’d have to climb through the window if they went so far they’d have to stop before they got to whatever place it was she’d promised would spontaneously catch her fancy on the way.

As wonderfully romantic as her plan to find the perfect, secluded beach from a car traveling on a heavily trafficked road seemed, they settled for the place she couldn’t hold it any longer. When she returned from the bushes all the gear was gone and a furrow led away from the car and over the dunes toward the beach. She grabbed her giant woven beach hat and matching bag from the car and topped the dune to see their stretcher still loaded with the body of baggage but Tim was nowhere in sight. Making her way to the gear in her matching beach shoes in sand that would be tough going even in bare feet, she heard his whoop from a hundred yards out to sea as he surfaced at the same time as a dolphin beside him.

She loved him so much more than she ever could have loved, wanted to love Job. As great as Job was at whatever he was doing or how much alike they were, both qualities made their relationship impossible. They never saw each other; being so dedicated to their careers that her birth control pills were almost superfluous. They both had offices at home, for pity’s sake. It seemed like Tim was always there for her when she needed him.

As he looked up from a gingerly examination of the carcass of a Portugueses Man of War he’d found washed up to the line of sea weed left by the last high tide on his stroll back to Priscilla and the bundle he spied her busy unwrapping and reconstructing into their awning, barbecue pit, entertainment center with boom box and TV.

It was so much easier to love her than it had been loving Ursula. They’d loved each other so completely they became one person, never apart. It was wonderful at first. They couldn’t believe how lucky they were among all the dysfunctional couples they knew. They knew each other so well one could remind the other of intentions postponed or call bullshit on a recollection of a shared experience. No matter how spontaneous they both were about their approach to life, they found their tendency to treat each other’s work on themselves as if it were their own psyche which aroused twinges of resentment that, over time, built a wall behind which they hid thoughts from each other. Although the thoughts were suppressed, they recognized the hiding. They lost their sense of humor and it devastated them both. It seemed like Priscilla was open and eager to share her enthusiasm about her multi varied life to his complete delight during their rare times open in her schedule.

While Tim made several gesture drawings of the beach scenes, Priscilla busied herself preparing tasty tid-bits, which she popped into his mouth upon their reaching perfection. When she got to tossing caviar to the sea gulls halfway though the second bottle of wine, he got out his pastels to catch the feel of the rare scene of her spontaneity in wasting a hundred dollars worth of sturgeon eggs just for fun and the frantic, raucous excitement of the screeching gulls. His gift of groking auras enabled him to lightly brush the heavy, rough paper with lavender chalk around her outstretched body conveying the inebriated elevation of her perceptions and green in the air around the gulls that spoke of the loud cacophony of their cries. It was alive and was to hang in their living room for many years.

In the shade of the awning they made love, the strength of his contentment was a steady stage upon which she danced to her heart’s content. After sharing a few puffs on his post coital doobie she twittered all her friends and he slept the sleep of the gods for an hour or so. He woke with sand stinging his skin and before averting his eyes to open them he knew they’d see surf.

As puny as the surf is on the eastern shore there are occasions of a sea breeze steady enough strong enough to stack up water high enough that he could climb on for a ride long enough to satisfy his longing for Hawaii. He was ecstatic to find that the southerly winds were running the waves about forty-five degrees to the shore line so if he kept sliding out to sea on one he could ride it almost a quarter of a mile while Priscilla ran through the glass thin edge of the same wave as it washed ashore video taping his delirious antics upon the rock steady board.

After three such magic carpet rides she begged him to stop because the light was getting too dim. Her list remained stored on her iPhone while Tim drove past all her scheduled stops on their way home to the tune of her exhausted snoring. He was used to it, she was always exhausted by the time she gave it up to Morpheus. He loved it. It reminded him of what a live wire he’d gotten hold of. She dreamt of an endless summer of him on the board and her running the whole way beside him. She really enjoyed her work, but she cherished these times with Tim in between yesterday and tomorrow. He was always there, seemingly waiting for her, though he’d never call her late.

SYMBOLS FOR CYMBALS

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:51:00 +0000

Tap, tap

Gentle rain on my tin porch roof

Thunder growling across the darkling sky

Lightening flashes crashing ears that hear

Whether it’s the weather beating their drums

Or the magic of sticks chopping motion making

An unidentified drummer’s flying discs beat air.

A pair of such metallic shapes kissing

Mouth to mouth resuscitate a memory

Of smoky soft shoe shuffling coolness

At that jazzy scale and tempo

Or boiling blood heated by the tingling

Of the many minute minglings

On the dancing gypsy’s wooden ring

Or at their greatest size

Slammed by hand to yell war

In crowded theaters of Astroturf

Suffering from its celebration

By big brass bands, marching as if to.

If you like your wave lengths long

Change the symbol for the cymbal to the gong

Roger Waters aims at the heart of the sun

Another sweaty J. Arthur Rank wank onset

Suggesting curiosities about inscrutability

Of exotic eastern uses for the high hat —

Cooking pad thai in it one way, it’s a wok

The other, on coolies smackin’ track,

It was hat, imagine that.

Brushes aren’t the only metal

That makes the cymbals sing

When his sword strikes orc shield

Gandalf is the lord of the reverberating ring.

Should that shield be slung,

A horizontal Frisbee guillotine’ll

Cut a headless swath among

Who failed to identify those flying objects

Fantastic millennia before they came in peace.

Upturned to the gentle rain, it is a bath for birds

A respite from foraging furrows in the field

Plowed parallel by such discs strung on a shaft

To raise food to fry in a wok

To eat from a bowl

With chop sticks.

Tap, tap.

FEED THE WORLD, GET ALL THE PUSSY!

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:57:00 +0000

NO OTHER GODS

noreply@blogger.com (Yodood) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:06:00 +0000

They came with their book and their fire sticks that could strike beings dead from many strides away for food or disobeying the rules they read from the book. The shock and awe that struck beings wherever such magic arrogance intruded its violent version of Gaia into their lives left them fearfully supposing secrets of her great spirit had been confided to these pale possessive people. As the trauma healed, the survivors among my people either became emulators of Gaia’s enforcers by pretending they too owned the part of her body wherever they lived or they moved further from such a dangerous rupture in the rapture of their symbiotic relationship as integral parts of that body.

Easter Island

Within the first new generation a few of those who remained in awe of and proximity to the strangers found one of the books they carried and quoted from as proof of their authority, and began to decipher the markings in it. They learned something more amazing than these visitors’ ability to uncover some of the infinite complexity of Gaia’s body; something more atrocious than how, instead of further revering the whole life of which she has offered them mere hints, they indifferently turn right around and begin using them against her as if only her matter matters and she didn’t exist.

Tipi, Turtle Island

The book turned out to be a fable by the protagonist and His holy ghost writer about the six thousand year history since His creation of Gaia, and the firmament in which she whirls, especially for a pair of little living action figures of Himself to whom He bequeathed it all as stewards of their playground, so long as they never became curious about the endless supply of food that was growing all around them in the garden or the infinite variety of fellow creatures by which they were surrounded. Apparently the creator left His inheritors unable to heed His only prohibition, this one commandment against becoming aware of their connection to their food and endless fun naming everything they saw. The first time they met up with another of the creator’s special creations, the shape shifting avatar of His antithesis, in the form that day of a serpent bearing the answers in the back of the book they couldn’t resist peeking. His wrath has been unbound ever since.

Talk about getting your insurance dropped for the pre-existing condition of having once inhaled in Los Angeles the day before the doctor finally decides to tell you you have a rare disease that can only be cured with an infusion of a billion dollars as empirical proof that there’s no loving creator that gives a shit about anyone —— much less one who thinks we’re all that special; except maybe as the afterbirth of impudent curiosity upon which to further avenge the sin of man’s original awakening. That's small potatoes. These early interpreters learned that the entire six thousand years, ever since that first question, has been saturated with examples of the creator causing disease, destroying entire cities with fire and drowning all life on earth but one mating pair of a trillion species on a boat he told a man to make for his family only. He even tried issuing ten more commandments, just to have more to punish them for violating. Talk about yer exploitive indifference of the elite.

Palenque, Mexico

They found the entire book to be filled with a history of a jealous creator exacting punishment against the punching bags He keeps within arms reach by occasional appeals to their egos promising for their faith rewards of a condo made of clouds and harp playing neighbors — no virgins to deflower, it’s not like that —after he finally grinds them to cringing meal; that they are His special, His most beloved creation and that what was for their own good somehow hurt Him worse than it did them. Ever hear that one before?

When that gospel of fear wore as threadbare as the NSA’s claim their secrets are for national security, some two thousand years ago, the creator wrote a whole new sequel, supposedly non-fiction this time, in which He created an extra super special action figure of Himself who He supernaturally snuck into the human dimension through a virgin wormhole to go out among the not all that special action figures to preach a gospel of love and perform miracles of sharing and acts of compassion right up in the grill of that ageless serpent the creator set out so long ago.

Machu Pichu, Peru

After reaping the karma that kind of peaceful action gets at protest rallies until this day, the creator's latest, greatest got himsaelf crucified, for which He also holds us all guilty, the fable became what is to still too recent a history to deny — The only historical record relative to the the second book’s protagonist's actually existing is the 500 year history of politics over its even being written and the formation of an establishment to enforce its letter: —— a yawning void admittedly filled by religious ad men devotedly putting together the greatest’s hits and pieces from undisclosed sources to smooth transitions between often contradictory essays by his fans and disciples in a brochure targeted at the compassionate guilt market which miraculously seems to appear wherever their search for unwashed heathens to convert chooses to be guided by the hand of the creator. Imagine that!

After due contemplation weighing their own ancestral tradition of Gaia being a consciousness of whose body my people found themselves to obviously be a part, balanced against this cruel myth from which these pale players take the part of their creator when reenacting His good god/bad god routine every day everywhere whether their symbol is a cross or a dollar sign, my people decided that those who could stomach rubbing elbows with the intruders would live amongst them as an exeample of respect for Gaia, just as they always had and still remain undetected as someone needing conversion. It was easy, their lifestyle was too gentle to be noticed by these warriors. The rest would retreat from owned lands to live in full relationship to mother, Gaia. This decision was based on the idea that these pale people are no more than another kind of human being whose ancestors thought survival training must include the nature of Gaia a danger to be conquered rather than revered and respected as fellow elements of her body, as we always have.

Ankor Wat, Cambodia

Now my people are many more, and paler than the old ones of whom I tell today. Our plan is slowly working. For the past six hundred years or so most of our people have gone deeper into the wilderness wherever those symbols start making speeches while the more curious of us integrate invisibly into the wound their culture makes, living as we always have amongst them.

Igloo, Frozen Turtle Island

Over this time we have found an interesting connection to a possible reason for their antagonism toward nature and their penchant for making permanent, dead things out of great portions of Gaia’s living tissue. Believing nature was the enemy who must be outsmarted with clever devices would come much more readily to a portion of humanity trying to survive a sunless ice age for many generations than to the rest basking on tropical shores eating the fruits of the Garden of Eden, living in temporary homes in respectful recognition of Gaia’s hurricanes, eruptions and heavy seas. Not long after they invented totalitarian agriculture, their suddenly exploding population had expanded out of the cold and was building high-rise hotels like walls around every shoreline as a private beach. Oh, yeah.

New York, Turtle Island ($64)

As the invader’s progeny of today notice the color of the people they bother to notice at all seeming to be getting darker, we notice the skin of all the people headed for caramellow as our number grows less from babies than from we who get it and become my people as surely as I have. It is never too late to become indigenous in the community of the mind.

We are where we are naturally, so all we need do is be natural where we are by not acting as if we could possibly own wherever that is — it’s all Gaia admiring herself through myriad eyes seeing their various versions like a good yawn and stretch feels to my body.

Have a good day and love your mother.

•

Addendum: As an unsolicited testimony to the effectiveness of the subliminal influence my people may exert upon the collective consciousness that is Gaia, I swear I did not know until just now, 7:53 PM, that today is Columbus Day. I felt a small sense of anxious urgency to finishing it, but that is pretty common when a post is bound to gore a few oxen.