half a bag of mojo

2011-12-28T09:38:00.000-05:00

I have a complex relationship with anger, and one that seems difficult for others to comprehend: I see anger as a force for good, in myself and occasionally in others. Many people see anger as the force that makes them do stupid and occasionally evil shit. For me, anger is largely where courage comes from.

I am incredibly angry at my government for what it has done to this young man. At the precise time in his life that he is asking himself who he is, (and getting answers that likely scare him) our government makes him an accessory to murder.

unfuckingtitled

2011-12-26T03:40:00.000-05:00

My first lucid memory is being told by a doctor that I probably wouldn't live to be 20.
He thought he was doing good, telling it to me straight (at the wise age of 8)
I have been waiting to die ever since.
It leads to much melodrama,
and sadness,
and acute not-giving-a-shit.

I don't know why I'm NOT dead,
but I'm not.
And I have no idea how I feel about that.
I have been convinced of my imminent death many times
four entubations, two respirators, a heart attack
and about a thousand asthma crises later
Still dying, never dead.

Have a nice christmas, world.

So he is dead.

2011-05-02T02:25:00.000-04:00

Osama binLadin was killed in a firefight last night.

Before you rejoice, consider this: Early reports have him participating in the firefight, and that is one of the qualifications for Islamic Martyrdom. Did we kill a bad guy, or create a transcendent being? Our gloating, rejoicing and celebration further his cause. Almost nothing good ever comes from killing people. I am sure we tried to capture him, and I am sad that we failed. A public trial would probably have been better.

I am glad he is dead, but I hope we have not created and enshrined a new hero.

Djinn

2011-03-15T11:23:00.000-04:00

My familiar is a cat,
an old black cat
sharpens her claws on the couch-arm

My old black cat,
the Cross-eyed cat
jumps on my chest and rumbles

The Cross-eyed Cat,
a Halloween cat
arches her back and blinks

Both paws up,
claws at the ready
she combs my beard when I hold her

Tokyo

2011-03-15T05:03:00.000-04:00

I always wanted to go to Japan
It is the martial artist in me

The wind is blowing towards Tokyo
and it is carrying death with it.

Is it Godzilla?

Dust, dust, all is dust.
floating on the air
picked up in dust-devils
and thrown carelessly into the wind

The wind that is blowing towards Tokyo

Fukushima is the cost of technology
And it will happen again.
And we will let it.

Bastet's spell

2011-03-13T11:40:00.000-04:00

Bastet cast the spell, the spell I can never learn
She took her rage and contained it
focused it
and in so doing gave the blame
the hurt
the fear
the worry
the helplessness
to a small magic-marker picture
of a cute little princess
She then ripped it into small squares
and as she did, she became calmer
and began to let it go.

is it on?

2011-03-11T04:02:00.000-05:00

Yeah, unfortunately, it is on.

-=lizard looks at Bill, Bill looks at lizard=-

Go with the flow, or slay the dragon?

Screw This.

2011-03-11T01:34:00.000-05:00

Red cool-aid or blue Kool-Aid, it's still fucking Kool-Aid. Does it matter if it was Ayn Rand or Karl Marx who stirred it last?

the letter

2011-02-23T23:50:00.002-05:00

She is there,upstairs, probably asleep, crowded close to a chocolate retriever.
We are in the same house, yet I miss her terribly.
He is upstairs, with the dwarf hamsters. Damn, I wish he were awake
There is a happy black cat expressing it's joy by standing on my chest
And I am trying to write a letter. It is the most disturbing thing I have ever done
it shakes the pillars of my very existence
and I'd almost rather die than write it.

ethereal imp

2011-02-18T15:01:00.000-05:00

There was an imp, a three-foot tall harbinger of things unusual, sitting on my chest on the hospital bed. He was heavy, and I couldn't breathe.

"I know something you don't know" the Imp said in a teasing, whiny way.
I couldn't get enough breath to ask what it was. That didn't stop the little bastard telling me. tho.

"This is how you are going to die, big guy. Flat on your back and gasping for breath, looking up at blank ceiling, or the faux-nice some nurses have. not now, not tonight, but unless you manage to get yourself shot while arguing, or run over by a bus, this is it, this pathetic fate awaits you. Have a nice day" it said, then fucked off to wherever hallucinations go when I am not around to notice them.

a bad case of the 'scareds'

2011-01-17T15:54:00.000-05:00

I saw it, in the flash of the moment
Truth and fact melting together seamlessly
I saw it, as it really is, clearly.
I averted my eyes as quickly as I could
Then, I ran home and hid under the covers
and aggressively forgot it all

and woke up, clueless

and everything was all right again

-=foggy moments=-

2011-01-17T10:55:00.000-05:00

I get lost in here, sometimes.
Drifting,
blissfully disconnected.

looney bin fun

2010-06-18T20:56:00.000-04:00

So, I was sitting in my livingroom, talking to my son, about what, i do not remember. Suddenly, I was siezed by chest pain, wrist pain, sweating, and incoherent thinking. A few hours before, I had a moment when I could not figure out how to start the car, and I couldnt putt he steps together to sweep the living room floor.

I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that I was having another heart attack, or perhaps a stroke. Fairly quickly, my thought process cleared, but the pain remained quite severe, and I sent my son for help. Some very calm neighbors called an ambulance, and I went to the hospital.

They found absolutely nothing physically wrong. So i asked for a referral to a psychologist or psychiatrist, thinking that it was a problem with my mind, or perhaps my penchant for self-medication was messing me up. (Just OTC stuff, no narcotics or street drugs) I was told that I could not have one, they could not refer me to a shrink of any discription, I had to go thru "Crisis", which is apparently the ONLY way to get an immediate referral to mental health professionals, and the only way to do that was to let them send me to a mental hospital for "observation". I was scared shitless, still fairly convinced that I was dying, so I agreed, under the condition that I was NOT agreeing to be committed, and that I could leave whenever I wanted. that assurance being given, I agreed, albeit with a slight bit of angst.

While there, I slowly lost my conviction that I was dying. I arrived at Acadia on thursday night, and did not see an actual doctor until Tuesday afternoon.

While there, we had "group meeting" every morning, at which we were asked probing, consistently pointless questions, and were told what to expect for that day. Monday morning, I was told I would be seeing a doctor that day. This was very relieving to hear, as it was the whole reason I had agreed to go.

A lesser reason was to cease taking my OTC meds under controlled circumstances. There were no negative effect from not taking them, except that the pain I was taking them to treat came back like a freight train. Oddly, this lack of significant effects from cessation has not reassured anybody that my taking them was essentially benign, proving their objections had no basis in reason or reality, just in fear of the unknown, I have chosen to respect their emotional hesitance and not restarted the OTC med regimen despite the nearly crippling pain. I have been told that I do not really respect the emotions of oters, so this is an experiment in that direction. No idea how long I can put up with it, but I am trying.

Anyway, on Monday morning I was told, by a creature named Wayne, that I would see a doctor that day.

Several hours later, Wayne informed me tht he had decided I didnt need to actually see a doctor, I could just see him, a Nurse Practitioner. I refused. I was not there to see a nurse, but to see a psychiatrist, and wasn't really willing to compromise on that point, as I had already come this far. When I told him i considered what he had told me that morning a lie, he changed his story. It wasn't really HIM that decided I could skip the doctor, it was both him and the Doctor together. When I told him that really didn't much matter to my conclusion that he had lied to me, and now he had lied twice, he changed his story yet again, saying that the DOCTOR had decided he was too busy and had asked Wayne to divide up the case load and had put me on Waynes list. With the lie count now up to three, I gave up on Wayne, told him I would wait as long as necessary, ande had a snack to calm down.

Are you out there, Wayne? I am searching for your e-mail address because I have not yet told you how I felt at your deception while I was at what I considered a vulnerable point,. I will find it.

The next morning, during "group", Wayne made the mistake of asking us all if we had any issues that needed to be dealt with. So I told him. He had lied to me, in front of everybody in the "group" and lost all credibility, and as I had been told by a mutual friend that he was a good guy who actually cared, I would give him the chance to regain it by admitting error and apologizing in the same forum he had lied to me in. He couldn't do it, or wouldn't do it, and told me that it was an inappropriate forum in which to address the issue, and that i should stop talking in front of the other patients about it.

He refused to speak to me for the remainder of the day, but I did get to see the doctor. With a referral in hand, I asked to be discharged, and since I was there voluntarily, they of course said yes, and i left.

In order to get a referral to a psychologist, I had to sign myself in to a nuthouse (Acadia hospital in Bangor), and now I have to put up with all the stares and worried looks and stigma that comes with it. I had to stay there for almost a week. All this just to get an appointment.

The actual appointment will not be for six weeks to three months.

Result of the stay: a somewhat plausible explanation of what happened to me: PTSD sufferers frequently suffer flashbacks, or are force3d to relive their traumatic experience3s, in real time, again and again. The Doc thinks i was reliving my first heart attack. As this is a mental disorder, there is no way to conclusively prove this.

At no time was I ever a danger to myself or anybody else. My son performed admirable in what he thought (as did I) was a major crisis, and my neighbors did me the great favor of comforting me while I was waiting for the ambulance, as well as calling the ambulance and looking after the Kid till Deb came home.

I cannot in good conscience tell anybody else who thinks they need psychological help trust Acadia hospital, seek other alternatives first. And under no circumstances believe what they tell you in a looney bin, they have no respect for your feelings and expectations at all, they think you are crazy, stupid, and must be calmed down, even if it means lying their asses off to you. maintain your goals, insist on being treated honestly and forthrightly and realize you are still human, regardless of how they treat you.

Penis Joke

2010-06-14T01:25:00.001-04:00

I have a friend who wants to go to special forces training because it will turn him into a finely crafted weapon of survival and destruction. I informed him that a weapon is a tool. If he wants to have real power, the thing to be is the hand that wields the tool. He thought it was a penis joke and didn't listen. Now he is completely screwed. So i guess he was right, it WAS a penis joke.

Answers to questions I have recently been asked,

2010-06-03T14:15:00.002-04:00

1) are you insane

Probably. What you have to understand is that from INSIDE insane, things look pretty much normal.

Technically, the answer has to be "yes". I suffer from PTSD, i suspect i suffer from a lot of other things, too, but because of the way I am, objective answers are quite difficult to obtain. In a pinch, go with "yes", treat my words as coming from a crazy person and dismiss their significance. I dare you.

2) does the answer to the previous question automatically make everything you say dismissable and valueless?

Only when I am wearing a clown nose.

2010-06-03T11:42:00.002-04:00

Are you out there, reading this? Because if you are, know this: I am willing to talk about it. I am also willing to promise that as far as it is in my power to do so, I will prevent harm from happening to you as a result of simply talking about it, whatever it is. a different perspective might help.

bottle of pills

2010-04-30T15:32:00.002-04:00

There is a prescription bottle
on the shelf
Untouched for years
that represents freedom.

It's contents remain untouched,
for to use it is to lose it
and it is my silent support
and the greatest comfort I have.

It is insurance in pill form.

I have watched slow-motion death
crush families into despair and ruin,
anihiliate hard-won futures
as if they were tissue-thin dreams,
burned by the bedsides of the dying.

While there may be no good way to go
there is certainly a bad way,
slowly consuming every resource
as death is staved off,
minute by minute
while the handholding relations
wish the end would just come, and free them all,
and then hate themselves for wanting it.

There is no dignity in rotting,
no nobility in feebleness,
and little success in hope.

There is no peace in desperation,
just denial.

I will stand proudly and walk through the door
rather than cringe away in fear.

-----------------
No, I am not suicidal and no intervention is necessary.
it's just a poem

Honest Opinion

2010-04-16T09:31:00.002-04:00

So there I was, just sort of hanging out, engaging in some minor substance abuse, writing some nice purple invective against some internet stupidity or other, when a person I respect (and love, but the respect is more important in this case) asks me for......an Honest Opinion.

I have lost friends this way. Frequently. When, many years ago, a friend asked me for an Honest Opinion about his new girlfriend, and after receiving it went immediately to fetch his assault rifle (I shit you not, this actually happened), I instituted a new policy: If you ask me for an Honest Opinion that I think you may not like when you hear it, I will say "ask me again, and I'll answer, but you should be warned, I am actually going to give you what you asked for."

People, as a rule, don't want your opinion, and when they ask for an honest opinion specifically, they are actually saying "I think you might disagree with me, here, so I am warning you I am sensitive on this topic". They are telling you to be honest because they really want you to AGREE with them. They are telling you how important it is to them. They are telling you, basically, "I want you to give me an honest opinion if you agree with me, and if you don't, I want you to lie"

Screw that. You ask me for an honest opinion, you will get exactly that.

On to the opinion.

"Do you think I am stupid because I am a Christian"?

Fuck.

The honest answer is "yup". It isn't "Yes", because "Yes" is a correct term, carrying none of the derision I want to pack into the affirmation. What I want to say is "Of course I think your Christianity is stupid. You stopped believing in the tooth fairy and Santa Clause, right? Well, if I was a 30-year-old who still believed in the literal existence of a fairy that rewarded you for losing teeth by putting currency under your pillow, you would think THAT was stupid, right? You think the Scientologists are morons because they believed in Xenu the Cosmic Overlord who stashes souls in Volcanoes, right?" but I actually respect this person, so even tho it would be the honest thing to do, I DON'T say any of that. I say "Yup" because "Yes" is a respectful answer to a stupid question.

And i still feel like a liar, because I didn't manage to convey what I actually felt, my Honest Opinion.

I believe in reason, and it is a sad fact that if you START from reason, you can't get to any of the major religions. You can get to a nebulous spirituality, but probably not much further. If you start from religion, you can still accept Reason, but you have to hold reason subordinate to your religion, because any application of reason to religious doctrine or dogma will end with said dogma or doctrine decimated. In other words, reason kills faith. As it should.

To hold as truth or fact things that reason dictates are neither is to willfully place reason in a subordinate position. And that is, almost by definition, stupid. So, yeah, I think Christians (and Jews, Muslims, Etc) are stupid, in that they are holding to beliefs that cannot be. And believing in Christ just as hard as you can (which is the suggested antidote to this terrible 'reason' stuff) isn't going to help at all. It didn't work with Santa, after all, did it?

So my Honest Opinion insults the intelligence of somebody i respect. It is what it is.

If I didn't respect this person, I'd probably just shrug and say "Nah, to each his own" or some other equivocation.

I find it distinctly odd that my respect for this person is going to make me tell him I think he is stupid.

living an intellectually honest existence blows sometimes.

PTSD really blows

2010-04-06T04:37:00.002-04:00

I guess I am slowly learning to accept my diagnosis. Lately I have memories (I will not relate the substance because that will trigger the memory) that cannot be turned off. I have to see it, all of it, over again. feel what I felt, see what I saw, hear what I heard. Normal memories are fragile, can be interrupted by anything, a stubbed toe, a mosquito bite, a wandering thought, a small noise. THESE memories are a revery, unstoppable Imax relivings of experiences in minute emotional detail. Every feeling, every icky sensation, every horrifying microsecond. once it starts it goes until it is finished, and it goes until I feel every little detail of the things i thought I had forgotten years ago, thought I had boxed up, thrown out and gotten over.

it really sucks. But PTSD pretty much fits.

Why isn't Dick in Jail?

2010-02-16T10:29:00.002-05:00

Richard J Cheney admitted committing a serious felony. On T.V.

Torture is unlawful. This is fact. Causing torture is also unlawful. This is also a fact.

Waterboarding is torture. This too is a factual statement. The United States Government has tried, convicted and executed people for waterboarding, as torture. Waterboarding was called, for years, the Water Torture.

Cheney admitted instigating torture, thus, he has admitted to committing a crime.

Mr Holder? What the fuck are you waiting for?

Swallowing

2010-02-16T09:11:00.002-05:00

Science now knows that when pregnant women orally ingest the ejaculate of the father of the child she bears, she has a SIGNIFICANTLY reduced chance of developing preeclampsia. Further research has also found that the regular ingestion of the ejaculate of her partner can help a woman become pregnant in the first place. It introduces the partners proteins into her system as a whole, and gradually acclimates her system to the presence of his proteins, so that she is far less likely to have an immune response when the fertilized egg attempts to implant, increasing the chance of successful pregnancy.

Of course, I didn't fucking KNOW THIS ten years ago, or my wife's pregnancy would have been MUCH more fun for me. (She didn't actually have preecampsia, so the effect on her would have been minimal, but trying to prevent it would have been a blast. Health first!) :-)

Pantomime Horses, I shit you not.

2010-02-16T01:06:00.002-05:00

I download a lot of japanese porn, mostly because the idea of beauty in Japan is apparently much different than in American porn. There is very little silicon breastage, Almost no Anorexically thin chicks (who arouse in me nothing more than the desire to buy them a good date at an all-you-can-eat pancake house) and quite a bit of defiled innocence and purity, and that happens to be my thing. But I erase 9 out of 10 of the things I download, mostly because I don't read or speak Japanese, and in addition to the aesthetically pleasing aspect of Japanese porn, there is a LOT of serious weirdness. Tentacles, a penchant for VERY young looking actresses (and if I can't TELL they are over 18, I don't feel comfortable watching it or having it on my hard drive) and a rather odd costume thing. And, apparently, a real liking of sex with pantomime horses. Or, rather, very well-endowed men in HORSE COSTUMES. The first time, I laughed my ass off. It was hilarious. Around the 8th such film, I got to wondering if there was some wierd cultural thing of which I was unaware. Pantomime Horses.

Squick

2010-02-16T01:01:00.002-05:00

I was asked to define the term "Squick".

Squick is the sound you make, and the feeling you have when, in the middle, you realize that somebody has spliced Golden Showers into your perfectly good BDSM download. Curiously, I am told it is the same thing you feel when somebody has spliced Twinkie porn into your perfectly good Golden Showers porn. Or when you realize that somebody has put Missionary Vanilla in the middle of your download of the Ozzie and Harriet Show.

The Brits are getting it right. Us? not so much.

2010-02-10T18:28:00.002-05:00

The British High Court came to the conclusion that "United States" authorities had violated the Convention Against Torture treaty that was signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by congress.

This treaty states that whenever credible reports of torture are made, they must be investigated, first in the jurisdiction in which the torture was alleged to have taken place.

The treaty also directs third party countries to investigate and bring charges if the power accused refuses to investigate on its own.

Obama has no choice now but to investigate if he wishes to conform to the law. If he fails to do so, he is an accomplice after the fact.

2010-02-10T02:28:00.003-05:00

Back from Florida. The drive was awesome. I raced up the east coast to avoid the "snowpocalypse" blizzard that slammed the megalopolis from New York to Richmond. Made the entire 1400 miles from Orlando to Vassalboro in about 30 hours.

I meditate while driving. The tunes are cranked, and I drive like a fucking crazy man, so my mind is almost constantly engaged in trying to look for cops, maximize the speed, looking for road signs. the whole front part of my brain is involved, psyched, grooving, moving. The back part, Mystic Half, is free to dream.

And dream he does.

The car is nice, a 1999 Saturn wagon, but it is white, not my favorite color. Named her Amalthea (from the glowing silver chick that the Last Unicorn turned into when she was hiding from the Bull) We got along well, immediately. I wasn't even off Disney property before she managed to become an extension of me, and I forgot completely about the physical part of driving. The rest of the ride was just sweet. Two three-hour naps in the back (she isn't quite long enough for me to fit into comfortably, but nonstop speedfreaking the miles takes a toll, and sleep was, for a change, easy)

And mystic half dreamed of plots, and characters, and possible narratives. I made progress on what I have tentatively called "Spinners" but the block is not yet broken. I have characters, names, places, maps, everything but a story. But the drive got me a bit closer to that.

More later.

Off to Florida

2010-01-31T22:49:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow I fly to Florida, pick up a car, and drive it back to Maine. This should resolve some of our mobility problems, but it is only a temporary quick fix. Poverty really sucks.

I think I am going to start writing in this blog again, because I am in the midst of the worst bit of piece-specific writer's block I have ever experienced, and blogging seems to help.

I have the universe, I have the characters, I have the theme, I know what I want to say, and I have done an enormous amount of work on this one 'project'. what I DON'T have is a story.

It has been a while

2009-07-11T11:22:00.002-04:00

It has been a bit more than a year, I think, since I last wrote to this blog. I still get hits, but now very few.

I am going to try to get back to this blog, health permitting, and pending agreement with my ethereal Muse (who is a rank lazy BITCH)and pursuant to gently pressure from my tangible muse (Thanks, Lady Dusk).

I have been writing a lot, most of it is either garbage (which I don't share because it is... well..... garbage) and a lot more is background work (lists of Neofelid names, governmental structures in the 14 worlds, Variken team names, etc, which is basically self-generated reference material, sort of an encyclopedia of the 14 worlds. I am saving most of this work, but I do the majority of it away from the computer, so it is actually ink (graphite, dye, crayon) on paper (menus, the backs of prescription forms, napkins, etc)

I have a moral question, and I really want answers.

2008-10-15T10:03:00.002-04:00

Okay, here is the situation. I am asleep in the daytime (as usual) and my doorbell rings. It is, say, noonish. It is a sunday. At my door is a twentysomething woman and her son, who is about 8. They are well dressed, and holding copies of some colorful christian religious propaganda. I am grumpy and annoyed. If the woman had been alone, I would have either slammed the door, or given her one of a number of verbally abusive but clever lines that I keep in the back of my head for such intrusions, but the kid's presence alters the tableau a bit.

What I want to do is ignore the woman completely, kneel down, and say to the child, in a very pleasant voice "Hi. The only difference between Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny is that your mommy thinks one of them is real." and then stand up, and smile, and hold out my hand for the mother to shake.

Am I justified in doing that?

The Dragon's Sway

2008-09-16T23:48:00.000-04:00

Chasing the dragon
whisps of smoke,
dense, fragrant,
slowly rising
curling
blurring the spaces
between me
and the fire I am taming.

She rides the crest of the wave
floating, radiant and alluring
her black hair's curls adrift
like the Dragon's breath
playing soft about her shoulders.
Her almost-smile,
Her closing almond eyes,
Her softly swaying hips,
spellbind me
as I watch the Dragon
seduce her
and She moves in the slow cadence
of it's beating wings.

The Dragon floats between us
tendrils in a mist of mingling spirit
and entwines us
a welcome third
a presence, a binding,
and the black whisps of the Dragon's breath
holds us together
and we are overtaken, we three,
into one.

Tentacle Hentai

2008-09-15T08:02:00.000-04:00

Okay, I admit that I am not a normal person, in many ways, one of them sexually. I learned about sex from Gor novels, incredibly poorly informed back-of-the-bus talk and an unbelievably kinky first girlfriend. I can understand, appreciate and practice deviance of many types (a subdivision of BDSM that will remain mercifully unspecified being my personal favorite). My motto is "If sex is a physical thing, you are doing it wrong". I own handcuffs and whips and -=CENSORED=- -=CENSORED=- and a really nice set of -=CENSORED=-s.

All that being said, WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE TENTACLES?????????????????

I watched Urutsukidoji (legend of the overfiend) which was, I believe, the first appearance of the marauding penis-tentacle-beasts. I thought to myself "That's original, really kinky, and a bit much". That was some twenty years ago, or thereabouts.

There are now HUNDREDS of japanese cartoons featuring these bizarre and quite disturbing critters, molesting their ways through hordes of biologically impossible japanese superheroines (who, as a seeming rite of passage into superheroism, must be sexually assaulted by somebody or, more often, some thing. With tentacles where penises should be)

There is even a LIVE-ACTION version, with real, human actresses, and marauding tentacle-penis beasts. Really badly designed marauding tentacle-penis beasts. I mean, they look like something out of an x-rated version of Dr. Who, circa the 1970's. I watched these as comedies (cough cough). All three of them.

What disturbs me most is the possible effect these tremendously violent, bizarre and sick depictions of the sex act will have on an entire generation of young japanese boys (the obvious target demographic). Literally ALL sex acts depicted are violent and nonconsentual.

I am comfortable with my own sexuality, but even as bizarre and troubling as my sexual education was, I was never really exposed to the wholesale degradation of women until I was an adult, had already learned the important difference between fantasy and reality, and had, in real life, respectful and very fulfilling relationships with women. I can hardly imagine how hard it would have been to deal with my own sexuality if it had been formed by japanese cartoons.

I am a devoted liberal, and a free-speech fanatic absolutist.

Tentacles make that somewhat more difficult to justify.

Healing

2008-08-11T11:04:00.001-04:00

So, night before last, I had a good night. I got a lot of writing done, I was in relatively little pain, my chest didn't feel tight for the first time since the heart attack, things were good.

So last night, as I started to realize the implications of my impending good health, I had a meltdown.

Fear and I don't have a complex relationship. In fact, we have a fairly simple one. Fear hangs out, a small kitten mewling at me from behind the door, and I ignore it (and occasionally trip over it as I am ignoring it, but I ignore that too). Now, unfortunately this kitten can occasionally (like, once or twice a decade) inflate itself into a giant, angry lion capable of ripping my fucking head right off, eating and digesting it, with a cheshire-cat grin before crapping it out onto my lifeless corpse and then turning back into a kitten, peeing on the remaining mess, and skittering off.

That happened last night.

You take the good with the bad.

I have been, while recuperating from my near-death heart experience, missing enormous chunks of my son's life.

My son really likes me, he likes doing things with me, he likes hanging out with me. He likes doing the things I like doing, and he likes doing them with me. He likes almost everything about me.

Last night, for the first time since he discovered talking, I realized how important I was to him, and it knocked me on my ass. While I have been bitching and moaning about how fucking sick I am and how lousy I feel, he has been relentlessly growing, learning and imitating ME.

I have never been as responsible for something, not even me myself, as I am for him, and last night, I broke. The whole thing. Tears, feelings of complete helplessness before overwhelming responsibility, feelings of complete incompetence.

99.999% of the time, I DEFINE arrogance. Look it up in the dictionary and my sneering face should be staring back at you. I LIKE it that way. I am the smartest person I know. I present, as well as I am able, the image of somebody who, in time of need, could easily kick YOUR ass, rip your heart out of your chest with my bare hands and eat a big chunk of it, cholesterol be damned. I take a perverse pride in having almost no formal education at all, yet still knowing more about any subject I care to than the experts, and making them KNOW it with ease in the first thirty seconds of our meeting. I LIKE it that way, even tho it is almost all a cleverly constructed exaggeration.

Ending up quivering on the bed, crying, hugging a pillow and wishing for nothing more than a big-ass hug from somebody who can make it all better is humiliating to the extreme.

And, as it happens, quite necessary. Writing it down and publishing it where it can be read by close friends and complete strangers alike is humbling, to put it mildly, but also quite necessary.

Hey, world. I am mortal, small, insignificant and terrified. Like everybody else.

And, as it happens, healing. Slowly, perversely and painfully, but healing indeed.

I suppose, in a wierd and weird way both, last night was a good night too.

Anthrax

2008-08-10T14:32:00.002-04:00

First, let me be very clear, I am not a lawyer.

This is not a place where I like to play out my morbid and obsessive infatuation with politics.

I have been, for the last three days, posting and absorbing responses about the current anthrax investigation, and my posts have generated a bit of e-mail and some nice hits to this blog, as well as some uncomfortable questions that I have refused to answer in other places and have promised to answer here. This is the post I promised.

I am interested in the subject because a friend of mine was tangentially involved in one of the attacks, like literally hundreds of thousands of other people in Washington D.C., Newsrooms in many locations in Florida, and New York and many other places. (no, his name was not in the news and is not important to this discussion)

I am not a doctor, and have no personal knowledge of the case outside what is available publicly. And no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, believe in Elvis sightings, Astrology or God.

I also don't believe everything the government tells me about anything.

ANY examination of the publicly available evidence adds up to one thing: "Trust us, Ivins did it, because we said he did it, now go away, nothing to see here." on the Government's side, and literally thousands of well-reasoned questions that have no answers on the other side.

I have only one thing to contribute from personal experience with drugs and the people who do drugs, stretching back for my entire life: It is incredibly easy to self-medicate yourself to death and never actually commit suicide. It is the sudden end of careless or irrational or uneducated self-medicating, and it happens all the fucking time, and it is only through fairly relentless self-control and relentless self-education that people who explore self-medication DON'T end up killing themselves. It is dangerous buisiness and it is fatal a lot of the time.

A bottle of good vodka and ten tylenol can be a ticket to bye-bye very very easily. If you have a dead guy, a bottle to vodka and a bottle of tylenol #3 and no note, there is no way you can call that suicide without knowing a WHOLE lot more, like when the script was written, how much he had been taking regularly and the condition of his liver. You can die from as little as a gram of tylenol (That is between 2 and 6 pills) if you are on a good bender, and that is WITHOUT a compromised liver. Throw in a few cough pills and BANG, you can check out. That is one fifth of Stolie and a SMALL handfull (not even a recreational dose of codeine) of the big bad 3, and it is liver necrosis within twenty hours, sometimes a LOT less.

These are things drug counselors know, and a few of the better cops that work with chronic users, and any good e/r doctor knows, but you will not find in a PDR. You WILL find people in detox with tracks up their arms who will tell you just how easy it is to lose control of a very small habit and end up cold and dusky blue.

So if the government is telling you that a suspect who drinks and has had the FBI breathing down his back for more than 2 years checked out with an overdose of TYLENOL and by the way, there is no autopsy, and did we tell you he was the mastermind behind the most sophisticated bioweapon attack in history that we want you to accept the suicide as proof of guilt about, you aught to be very very skeptical.

Our government lies to us about almost everything, we are believing this exactly why?

Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a shrink, just a guy with a LOT of real world self-induced biochemistry knowledge, a high IQ and a good self-education.

Now, back to socially meaningless ramblings, demented poetry and bad fiction.

2008-08-10T05:11:00.002-04:00

Since the heart attack, everything has been so dark for me, for so long. I had a good night tonight, and it has been long time since I could last say that.

Why I have a cat

2008-08-10T05:08:00.001-04:00

I am pounding it out on the keyboard, actually sweating (slightly, or it would be actual work) as I type, my protagonist is about to break through into the hollow cavern in the asteroid that holds the-

a pink tongue licks my nose

It is connected to a small black thing, somewhere between being a kitten and being a cat.

She climbs up between me and the edge of my desk, and her little black head slightly obscures the lower left of my screen as a series of "k" stutter across the screen.

I tell her that I am an artist, a picaso (hey, I'm alone in my office at 3AM writing sci-fi, delusions of grandeur are a morale boost) interrupted in mid-stroke.

She purrs silently, and licks my nose again.

I tell her that if Tolkein had had an annoying small black cat, Pippin's name would have been pippppppppppppppppp and then where would the world be? before I remember that Tolkein probably had a manual typewriter that would have turned me into finger-sore goo in about 20 seconds.

She is unimpressed by either my delusions of competence or my wonderful memory.

But she watches me type, and licks my nose a few more times, and curls up next to the keyboard and falls asleep, still purring silently.

Teaser #1, unnamed fantasy novel

2008-07-30T16:00:00.005-04:00

In the cave mouth, six Laborers stood by the carts of broken stone as three uniformed Plainsmen sifted through the contents. Three uniformed Laborers stood, halbards with their butts resting lightly on the ground, in close proximity to the Plainsmen, clearly bodyguards.

The Laborer mineworkers were uniformly pale-skinned, dark-haired males, all at least seven feet tall, with long, heavily muscled limbs, streaked orange with freckles in a tiger-striped pattern. Two carried enormous pickaxes, another a large sledgehammer weighing some 40 pounds.

The Laborer bodyguards were more varied, but were of a slimmer, shorter stock of Laborer, tho they all still stood towering over the Plainsmen in stature. All three were female, and two wore carved emerald cabochons on her cuffs, each denoting the Plainsman for whom she worked. The larger of them, pale and red-haired, also carried a bone knife around her neck on a braided orange strand, indicating that she was a Freeman. The device on the emerald cabochon she wore was of a knight, rampant dexter, the sigil of Magister John Grange.

The bearer of the second emerald cabochon was deeply tanned, also with red hair, and her cabachon was of a lion's head, roaring sinister, the mark of Masterminer Jemsen Rialdonado.

The third uniformed Laborer was the smallest, barely 6 feet in height. Her skin was black, as was her hair, and her eyes were wide-set and almond shaped. She wore a black cabochon carved with the head of a bull over two crossed wands. The black stone was diamond, and it was the sign of Technical Oracle Amar Arrad.From her position between the Plainsman and the Laborers, facing the Laborers, and her body language, holding her halberd close to her, it's butt against her boot, proclaimed her the senior Laborer present.

The three Plainsmen stood over the cart of broken stone, two of them stooping, rummaging through the cart, examining bits of stone. The third stood, eyes closed, concentrating.

In thickly accented True Speech, he muttered "There is only one of value, toward the bottom. It is shaped rather like an - yes, Grange, that is it". He had not opened his eyes as he directed the men to the flake of stone.

Grange looked closely at the wide, thin flake of stone. He turned it in his hands, and held it up to the sunlight. "I see nothing of interest. Are you serious in your offer?"

"Certainly" replied Arrad, reaching for the stone. Grange handed it to him, frowning. "Nothing but rock" he muttered, looking at Rialdonado, who shrugged.

Arrad gave the stone to his bodyguard without examining it.

"Give me some room" he commanded, and the other Plainsman and all the Laborers moved back from him. The bodyguard with the stone walked to the group of hulking Laborers, while the other two uniformed Laborers moved into the mouth of the mine, slightly worried expressions on their faces.

Arrad began to mumble incoherent sounds and pivot very slowly on his left foot. It took him almost a minute to make a complete circle and start a second.

None of the Laborers present had seen a Technical Oracle work, and all watched. The tall, muscular mineworkers tried to watch surrupticiously, and the bodyguards stared intently, except Arrad's, who looked bored.

Arrad finally spoke. "You have a tunnel stretching due south at a depth of about 35 feet, yes?"

Rialdonado muttered "yes, but"

"Drain it, and continue at a thirty degree angle down. In 19 feet, you will break into a cavern. Drain that and simply chip the gems off the walls. It is nearly identical to the cavern above it and to the west, but richer."

"What is it, Arrad?" Grange asked.

"The rock? It contains the remains of a large Zintora shell"

Grange and Rialdonado first frowned, then guffawed loudly. "You must be drunk, man! We are three hundred miles away from the nearest salt water. And how would a zintora get 120 feet down my mine and buried in layer rock?"

"Rheeanza" Arrad said, holding his hand out to his bodyguard. Rheeanza handed it over. Arrad passed his hand over the surface of the stone, and handed it to Grange.

One side of it was now polished. Clearly, light against a dark background, was a spiral shell, about two inches long.

Rialdonado examined it without touching it. "It's a sculpture, it is made of rock, not shell" he said.

Grange closed his eyes and muttered a single sylable. He grinned. "Youv'e been had, Arrad. That was never alive. Now, why somebody would sculpt a shell into a piece of layer rock and hide it down my mine, I cannot fathom, but it is the only answer. But thanks for the scry, that would have cost me 100 ducats." He clearly meant it as scorn, and it was only politeness and a touch of fear that kept him from ending his statement with "Sucker!"

"You have what you wanted, I have what I wanted." Arrad said, and took back the stone. He motioned to his bodyguard, and they walked back up the access road toward their horses. Rheeanza walked two steps behind him, her halberd across one shoulder.

Grange looked at Rialdonado and said "get me more of those stones. I hate mysteries."

The Masterminer growled at his laborers "Start draining the Southmine. But two of you go to where you found that rock and fine me more just like it."

After walking around a bend in the access road, Rheeanza quickened her pace, and drew from beneath her uniform a wood-hilted bone-bladed dagger and lodged it in her belt sash.

"Interesting dilemma" she said in her native language Mitger. "Do we believe that a mad wizard created a sculpture of a shell in the middle of a bed of layer rock and then buried it, leaving no traces of excavation?"

Arrad laughed. "We let the facts guide us to a conclusion without resort to speculation. This is clearly a stone depiction of a shell, exact in every detail except that it is made of the wrong material.

I have attempted to lay a dwimmer on it, but failed, which means according to our current understanding, it can never have lived. Yet, I know it's age to be perhaps a million years, the same age as the rock matrix in which we found it. We have a thing that cannot be, yet is."

"Clearly our current understanding is flawed"

"Clearly"

They walked in silence, and upon reaching their horses tethering bar, mounted and rode silently.

"Well?" Arrad asked, eventually.

Rheeanza said "Clearly there was life before magic, and that life was made of stone. When Magic first came into the world, the stone creatures must have died off, for some reason. We all know that dwimmers can be laid on anything that was once alive, but we must amend that idea to exclude stone life."

"I don't like it" Arrad said. "I think something turned this shell to stone. I think it was alive, it lived and died in a world where their was no magic. I think that is much more likely that a living being made of stone."

"I disagree. I think a world without magic a far more unlikely answer than a living thing made of stone."

My Muse

2008-07-27T10:17:00.002-04:00

My muse, or rather, one of them (the one that lives in the aether, not the one that lives in Chicago (see Lady Dusk)) kicked me in the nuts last night.

I was innocently lying there moaning from the exertion of chasing goats, dogs and a VERY reluctant cow. It seems I and my family have been declared the neighborhood go-to guys for dealing with animals that have escaped their pens and gone running off. I have a talent with dogs, so I can understand that part of it, but goats????? COWS?????

I did learn one very important lesson - Martial Arts do NOT work against cows.

Anyway, back to my muse. She told me that I can't just write a science-fiction novel, mostly because it is too much work and not enough creativity. I must also write the fantasy novel that has been banging around in my head for two years. At the same time!

the main characters of both ganged up on me in a dream about something to do with getting on a bus and driving to london. The details are unimportant (and, in fact, inexplicable) but I am committed to writing two novels at the same time, something I have never done. Both to be posted as they go, online. Yay.

Morphine dreams

2008-07-25T14:22:00.000-04:00

Heavy eyes closed on a dark room
pungent fragrance, pine and ceder,
smokey sultry woman there.

slow, deep caress,
warm soft skin slides warm soft skin
not doing, just being.
undulating, watching black dragon smoke

under black silk
constant slight movement
subtle teasing,
slow, smooth passion
building slowly
always just an inch
away

black cat sleeping
stretch to reach,
arch of pleasure,
yawns, sighs, sleeps.

smoke twirls and flows
waves and swirls of gray
attention wanders
slides away

heavy eyes open shyly
and closing, and again
black cat whispers silence
dragon smoke swirls

bodies join softly
under black silk
smoke entwines
black cat sighs.

Bad Ferret Nightmares, and an answer for Spiritwrack

2008-07-21T10:52:00.002-04:00

Back in mists of prehistory, (call it 1986 or thereabout)my second novel was eaten by a ferret. A drunk ferret. Owned by one Vince, about whom the less said, the better.

This particularly obnoxious creature had a habit of dangling himself into large beer mugs and drinking. A lot. And then, probably because the little bastard was overfed and overloved, he would find the most inappropriate place possible to relieve himself.

He crapped on a videocassette of Fire and Ice, which was a perfectly appropriate editorial comment on the movie, but cost us about $20.

He ate a hole in a leather chair and used it as a toilet until the smell became too much even for him.

He thought my friend Jamie's air mattress was a chew-toy.

And he LOVED computer disks. I had been writing this epic for almost 8 months (this is back when I still suffered from the delusion that somebody would one day READ the stuff I write) and the fucking vermin ATE the thing. 8 months of work. chewed to death by a ferret.

If I had had backups, it wouldn't have mattered. But this was 198fucking6, and backups were things 'the man' did, we freewheeling longhair counterculture types would NEVER do something so lawful......

I had a dream last night. The Ferret had eaten the Declaration of Independence and I was eating scones.

Because of this meaningful, if somewhat obvious, prompt from my usually-more-subtle subconscious, I will indeed be posting my novel online, somehow, as I am writing it.
I am, at the moment, trying to figure out how to organize this. Expect more within a few days.

Accident

2008-07-16T18:28:00.001-04:00

I pull into traffic
and glance into the mirror
my entire life is following me
in a little blue car

As if coordinated
planned
the SUV strikes the little blue car
just as I look in the mirror to check on them
and my entire life shudders, groans,
and stands still for a moment
in the rearview mirror

Freeze-frame
time stops
and I spend an eternity
with my terror
and my first thought is
this is backwards. I was supposed to be following her

But she was following me
it made sense,
I knew the road and I needed gas
so I led.
It should have been me
that took the hit.

Thirty feet separate me from my family
and I run it after haphazardly parking
I am looking down
because I don't want to see
until I am there

step
faster, run faster, fat pig
step
my pants are falling off
and I slow down to hike them up
and and I hate myself for it.
step
please let them be alive
step
my fault, my fault, should have waited
step
I look up and see her, she is alive
step
can't see him, shit!
my son!
step
if I hadn't been frustrated,
step
and just wanting to get home
step
I would have waited, looked
step
but no, arrogant jackass has to do it HIS way
step
where is my son?
step
I see him in the back seat
step
he looks fine
step

I reach the little blue car
my hands on the twisted, bent metal
look into her eyes
and then down
her entire body
no blood.
In the back seat
seatbelt fastened
my son, stunned but unhurt.

I breathe

2008-07-07T19:54:00.003-04:00

I have to either post on this damned blog or give it up.

I am writing about 5000 words of fiction (hard science fiction) per day, and about 350 of them are worth saving. Which is slow going. Not to mention that I have rewritten the entire concept 4 times so far.

My netfriend Spiritwrack (yes, somebody hasnt had a life since first edition D&D) wants me to post, perhaps here, perhaps on it's own blog, my progress on the new novel. Anybody else want to see the unseemly and unimaginably ugly process of a novel getting written?

George Carlin

2008-06-23T10:30:00.002-04:00

George Carlin died last night. Shit piss cunt fuck cocksucker motherfucker tits. Fart, turd and twat.

George convinced me long ago that there are no bad words, and that language is important. He was an amazing person, the funniest man in the world (in my opinion, of course) and I will miss him.

Damn, I'm old. I was listening to Carlin records when I was 10 (I had to sneak them from my mother's room and listen with the sound wayyyyyyyy down)

It disgusts me that in all the obits I have read (5 of them) they had to highlight not his humor, but his drug use. So he did drugs, big deal. He made people laugh. What is more important, one person's sobriety or ten thousand people laughing their asses off?

Well, the hippie-dippie weatherman is gone now, and it sucks.

Go with Joe, George. Joe bless you.

Happy Restoring Habeas Corpus Day!

2008-06-12T20:26:00.001-04:00

Today's supreme court decision is the beginning of the end of the tyranny!

torture

2008-05-17T19:54:00.001-04:00

Does torture work?

Depends on how you define your terms, especially "work".

If what you want is to extract information from a person, and you torture them to acquire it, then no, it doesn't work. You get everything you want to hear, a bunch of stuff he thought you might want to hear, and a bunch of random guesses thinking the pain might be stopped long enough for his made-up story to be checked out. So, no, the information you get from torturing somebody is crap, and interrogators know it.

On the other hand, if you use torture as it was originally intended, it works wonderfully. It inspires terror and obedience in a population, makes them pliable and cooperative to know that if they are picked up for whatever crime they will be tortured until they confess to anything the interrogators.

In short, as an interrogation device, torture is a failure. But at inspiring a population to helplessness and stark terror, it's just ducky.

But that would mean that we are inspiring terror. Wouldn't that make us...........?

PTSD? Bad Taste Disorder? Annoying Bastard Syndrome?

2008-05-07T16:10:00.000-04:00

I am treading on dangerous ground.

Can it be that my heart attack has driven me completely mad?

I am risking my marriage, I know it. And I am losing the respect of my son.....

Because I have chosen to begin downloading and watching every Doctor Who episode in existence.

What madness is this, gripping my mind?

FORCING ME, as tho completely against my will, enthralling me....

At night, I dream of explicit liasons between Sarah Jane Smith and ..... but some things are better left untyped.

I must have a scarf... or an opera cape or a recorder or some such....

HELP ME BEFORE I .....um...... WATCH AGAIN!

Thanks Meri

2008-05-01T23:23:00.002-04:00

I downloaded "earth after people" that Meri recommended in the comments, and it is VERY educational, in that I thought traces of human habitation would be nearly permanent. Nope. 50 years and almost all of it is gone, 100 years and without serious excavating, there would be no trace. I think that rocks. In many ways we are a plague on the planet, but at least it is temporary.

Finally Writing Again!

2008-04-27T12:22:00.002-04:00

I started plotting a new SF novel and it feels marvelous and painful, much like the day after a good workout, only the thing that hurts is the imagination, having been exercised after long neglect.

I am thinking of this as my fourth unpublished novel, because I am coming to grips with the idea that after 25 years of trying, I am just doing this because I enjoy it, not for any reward external to me. Maybe Corvus will read them one day, and that will be good enough.

Favorite Cartoon quotes 3 and 4

2008-04-22T08:43:00.001-04:00

"I have achieved maximum suckage" - Psycrow, Earthworm Jim

"You worms are all alike" - Mrs. Bletherige, Earthworm Jim

Favorite cartoon quotes, #2

2008-04-20T09:43:00.002-04:00

The wages of sin are death, but the hours are good - Psycrow, Earthworm Jim

Favorite Cartoon Quotes, #1

2008-04-18T16:32:00.002-04:00

Release the Mind Control Squid! - Brother Blood, Teen Titans

Gallipoli is the reason Britain managed to survive WW2

2008-04-17T23:15:00.000-04:00

Gallipoli is a massive battle of the first world war that the British and the Anzac (Australia and New Zealand Allied Command) forces lost, in a fiasco, (that lasted more than seven months and massive casualties on both sides) that was planned by Winston Churchill (young, clean and sober) who blamed himself for each and every Allied death on the Turkish Gallipoli beaches.

Older, stone drunk and miserable, he guided England through the terrors of WW2 and the London bombings. His overwhelming guilt kept him vigilant (even when so drunk he could barely navigate. Elanor Roosevelt called him "That drunken shriveled little dwarf" and claimed he was, while a guest in the White house, was so drunk he groped serving girls and tried to light a soggy cigar in the bathtub). Even his stellar performance in WW2 did not allow him to forgive himself for the guilt of his obvious incompetence 27 years earlier.

Guilt is a crappy means to run ones moral compass, and a horrible criteria with which to qualify one for excellence. But it works.

The Frucks are here!

2008-04-16T07:32:00.001-04:00

Spring has finally arrived, and the frucks are outside frucking up a storm every day at and after dusk.

A Fruck is a frog that sounds exactly like a duck. We have a small soggy spot (the technical term is "wetland" or "mosquito breeding sanctuary") in our back yard that is home to about a million species-confused small amphibians sending out duck-like mating calls. At times, it is so loud that it wakes me up, but I really don't mind, because it means WINTER IS FINALLY OVER!!!!!!!!!

I am feeling much better.

Sunglasses?

2008-04-15T08:45:00.000-04:00

Okay, I admit it, I am a scandal fan. I love it when high-power politicians are revealed for the hypocrites they are. I think, really, that once a person is elected to any political office, they should be stripped of any privacy rights whatsoever until they are no longer in office.

But finding Dali-esque naked chicks in the Vice President's sunglasses is just....... I thought I had too much free time. Damn.

clusterhead

2008-04-12T15:39:00.001-04:00

A net-friend, a fellow sufferer of cluster headaches, asked me to write a description of the kind of headaches I used to suffer through during the 4 year period of my life that I danced regularly with chronic cluster headaches.

First, headache is the wrong word. I have suffered from greenstick fractures, broken bones, arthritic joints and some incredibly severe self-inflicted pain (I had a weird childhood) and nothing even approached the pain of cluster headaches.

I have had migraines, I lost a testicle due to lack of circulation after a botched hernia repair (it hurt like getting kicked in the nuts, except the pain lasted about 3 weeks) and they werent even close to the pain of a cluster headache.

I recently had a heart attack, and some very scary chest pain. It was far more frightening than any but my first few clusters, because I was convinced I was dying, but the pain didn't approach clusterhead pain.

All right, get ready to use your imagination, hardcore. A cluster headache has the same quality of pain as the first quarter-second of the most severe stubbed toe you have ever felt, and it is located behind your left eye, pushing outward. The pain does not diminish to a throbbing chronic pain, it stays sharp, as tho somebody were trying to push a burning bowling ball out through your eye socket, and they KEEP PUSHING. It is acute pain. it is severe acute pain, and It STAYS severe acute pain.

And it lasts about 2 hours.

And then, it turns off like somebody throwing a switch. Remember that, it becomes very important.

Because in about fifteen minutes or so, somebody will flip the goddamn switch again. Or not.

They hit in clusters, hence the name, so there are fifteen or twenty of these lovely 2-hour (approx) headaches yet to come, before the cluster ends. IF the cluster ends. Can't go out, can't make plans, can't do anything. I was extremely lucky (from a familial perspective) because almost all (maybe 85 %) of my headaches happened late at night, so my wife and son did not have to witness it, altho my screams would occasionally wake them.

During the daytime, I pretended to be healthy and whole (because I was. Cluster headaches do no damage, they just hurt) but for two years, I vacillated between incredible pain, and the fear of the imminent return of incredible pain, and those are the only two states in which I existed.

They were so bad that at one point, in the middle of a cluster, I think I had a psychotic break, and convinced myself that I wasn't "really" in pain. I was certain that I could cure it by convincing myself it was fake. No, it does not sound rational, but I wasn't, really. Which is what disturbs me the most about them, I was in too much pain and too much fear to think clearly.

I haven't had one since 2005.

I doubt I will survive if they return.

Untitled

2008-03-30T08:22:00.000-04:00

There was once a fire in my heart
'till I pissed on it,
stirred the ashes
and buried the remains
and I still remember it's presence
and have felt it's absence every second since.

Once, I worked with the shadows
and molded forces in the aether
calling forth beauty and knowledge
and frolicking gently with the creatures that live in it
but I forgot how
I slammed the door
wedged it shut
and painted the black cross on it
and expired waiting for the cart

Once I danced before the castle
'neath a blood-red sunset
on the hillside near it's cold dead walls
but there, now, only the zombies dwell
and I dropped my gate-key long ago
thinking I'd never want it again.

Once I told myself that I wanted no regrets
never revisiting a decision
or reliving a choice
but somewhere regret has creeped into me,
and I wish I had done other things

John, have you taken your meds today?

2008-03-22T10:27:00.001-04:00

As therapy (to get my brain working after the heart attack) I designed a blowgun that can propel a toothpick through a half-inch of plywood, and an aluminum nail through 1/8" of plate steel (provided it is both sharpened and lubricated). Now, I have no idea what an asthmatic would do with a blowgun like that, but it was a hell of a lot of fun figuring out the aerodynamic qualities of a film-cone dart. I even figured out a way to make the darts spin as they leave the blowgun, improving accuracy (out to about 25 yards.)

Hmm. I have an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic for a next-door neighbor who regularly annoys me and scares my kid. I bet I could tranq him up by dipping the darts in.... no, wait, that would be mean. Nevermind.

Health Update -

2008-03-21T11:59:00.001-04:00

Whine, moan, complain. More hospital, more pain, more bullshit.

Spent last monday night in the E/R with crippling chest pain. I had a lot of that before the heart attack, and it was all written off as non-cardiac pain. Then I had a heart attack. Now, I have chest pain, and they are calling it non-cardiac pain again. I wonder why I am not completely reassured? Probably just hypochondria. I mean, all that chest pain before the heart attack was obviously non-cardiac, of course the chest pain I suffer AFTER the heart attack is just bound to be non-cardiac too. It is so obvious.

Anyway, that is why there have been so few entries into this blog. It is kinda hard to write and clutch my chest at the same time. But, since the doctors are so sure it is non-cardiac mystery pain, i am sure it will go away soon.

Pointless Introspection

2008-03-16T08:17:00.001-04:00

I try to never meet and associate with people in groups larger than about 4 (and even that is three too many for me unless they are friends, in which case the number is unimportant, as long as they all know each-other), because it is my experience that people have strong reactions to me, positive or negative, and I'd rather handle that in low numbers.
I have sometimes thought that my trouble with people is that they are prone to misunderstand me, either my words, or my appearance or my general intent, whatever.
I am now convinced that I was entirely wrong about that.
The problem is that I make myself TOO well understood. And when people understand me, bad things happen.
People fill in what they don't know with what they want. If they like you, they generally assume you agree with them. And people general encourage this by keeping their opinions to themselves, or asserting those opinions softly and quietly, just to assure they do not offend.
I never learned to do that. If you ask me what I think, I tell you, without the probing many engage in, to pre-vet the reactions to their opinions. I assume a person who asks my opinion actually wants it, and that is a mistake. When people ask for opinions, they are generally looking for reinforcement of their own opinion. After they know me for a few minutes, either they hate me, or that expectation changes. People who know me don't ask unless they want an answer.
It sounds arrogant, but it isn't. It is reality.
It is why my employment record is so sporadic. I do not know HOW to kiss ass (or flirt, or smalltalk). And it is not a good quality, it is a horrific curse. If I could do it, by this time in my life, I would be in a position in which I no longer need to. I am not in that position. I need to, and I can't.

The Elephants Foot

2008-03-12T17:37:00.003-04:00

Every once in a while, idly sitting in front of the computer, refreshing my political blogs every thirty seconds or so waiting for a congressman to get caught blowing a donkey or abusing infants, I will stare at a blank google screen and think to myself "what do I want to know more about" and I will search my mind for fragments of something that once caught my interest but had gone unresearched. I have rarely regretted idle curiosity as much as I did the day I remembered something I had seen on PBS ages ago, maybe in the late 80's.
"Elephants Foot" I typed. and some nasty-assed truth got vomited onto my computer by the internet.
Ask a bizarre question, get a bizarre answer.
My History teacher, Bill Forstchen, had taken a class of kids to the Soviet Union. I had been expelled the year before, but most of my friends were on that trip. Chernobyl blew up while they were there. None of them (as far as I know) were effected, as they didnt go to the Ukraine or Kiev. It was national news that affected me personally (via my friends) so I payed casual attention. So, when, years later, I saw that a documentary was scheduled about it, I watched.
The entire premise of the documentary was calming. There were scientists working in the same building as the reactor that exploded, and a thousand people worked every day in the three other reactors in the same complex. It MUST have been a minor accident that had been resolved, except for this particular area in one building, to have all those people working there. Some scientists had located most of the nuclear fuel, absorbed into melted sand (dropped by helocopters in the first days of the crisis) and formed a glass mass which had dripped through cracks in the concrete containment and pooled and cooled in the rooms underneath the reactor. The Scientists dubbed the mass, when they found it, "the elephant's foot" for it's shape.
I (mistakenly) downloaded a film called "The Battle of Chernobyl" and watched it.
There are some things it is better not to know.
If you are really into being VERY depressed about something over which you have no control, watch this film.

More than 500,000 people got doses of radiation that would, in the west, be considered hazardous. And these are only the workers that were used (mostly red army, but also miners and steelworkers were drafted) to clean it up. No study has been done of "civilians" evacuated from the area that may number from 10,000 (the residents of Pripyat, the employee's town and Chernobyl itself and the surrounding countryside) to several million (the Soviet government, usually drowned in red tape and paperwork, kept very spotty records about this event)
About 500 helicopter pilots were redirected from Afghanistan (where they were fighting a war with Osama Bin Laden, among others) to Chernobyl, and ALL of them died. Gorbachev blames Chernobyl for the Soviet's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also credits Chernobyl for the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, holding the position that because of Chernobyl, the Soviet Union had neither the money nor the manpower to keep up with the West. He is probably right.

Here is the real information, tho. They were very close to a meltdown to groundwater, which would have caused an explosion powerful enough to vaporize the three other reactors on the site, which would have combined to form the largest "dirty bomb" imaginable, which would have rendered the Ukraine and Belorussia uninhabitable for 250,000 years. They averted it by tunneling under the reactor and laying a 30-foot thick concrete disk under it, at the cost of hundreds of lives, and the health of thousands more.
The government allowed the Mayday celebrations in Kiev to go forward, despite knowing that radioactive dust was settling on all the participants, turning Kiev into a place that had radiation levels so high that in the west, people wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near without protective clothing.
It is stunning what damage a government can do to it's people just by being in stubborn denial for a few days.

"it"

2008-03-05T15:11:00.001-05:00

Until my thirties, I wondered when "it" would happen
and I lived in almost constant terror of "it".
The fear ruled everything.
"Don't go outside! the pollen will bring "it" on"
"Don't run to hard, you know 'it' is waiting"

My breath would catch
and the rattling sound in my lungs
taunted me mercilessly
with the specter of "it".

"It". The Last Attack,
The Big One.
Death. By asphyxiation.
The picture was clear, and constant.
Gasping, the breath would not come,
I would watch as the skin under my fingernails
turns from pink to dusky blue
and all would fade
as my brain starved for oxygen
and my system shut down.

In my thirties I had come to terms with it
thinking maybe what I had always been certain of,
could be avoided.
Maybe I would die,
and, for the first time, I thought,
maybe I wouldn't.

Then I had a heart attack, and the old terror is back.
A single twinge of pain in the chest,
and I am staring, again, at "it"
and the only thing I can think to tell myself
is that this "it" is much quicker than the old "it".
Small consolation.

Another medical update

2008-02-28T08:02:00.002-05:00

I caught some sort of digestive system plague, and the last week or so has been miserable.

It used to be that these illnesses would effect me more (because of my existing lung problems) than the general population, but this is ridiculous. I get a sniffle, a cough or a stomach ache and I am down for days, trying not to moan so loudly I disturb the kid.

I am in a fairly dark place, mood-wise. Eating is no longer pleasurable, nor is sleeping. In fact, since the heart attack, I have felt almost nothing but nerve-munching, upset-making, oh-god-I'm-gonna-die fear.

cheers.

medical update

2008-02-22T08:31:00.001-05:00

So, a walk outside of less than 100 yards almost does me in.

I HATE appearing weak. I don't mind actually being weak, as long as it doesn't show. That's probably vanity or ego or whatever twisted thing I use to judge my own self-worth. I am used to appearing strong, even if it is a sham (which, if we are talking physical strength, it has been for quite some time). I don't even mind appearing fat or slovenly, as long as I still look like a moving train when I walk and a cross between a Vulcan computer and an axe murderer when I talk.

No longer. I walk with a cane and there is, at least to me, a noticeable weakening of my voice, frequent straining for breath, and occasional mental disorientation. Okay, so in times of need, I look like a moving train with a cane, but it actually takes an effort. Yesterday I walked over to a neighbors house only two doors away, and had an asthma attack, moderate chest pain (about 2 points above the constant background pain) and had to take a nap.

And just because it pissed me off, I woke up and found a very good excuse to do it again. Same result, altho while at the neighbors house, I held up my side of a detailed philosophical conversation.

This is going to be a long, nasty road to get even close to the sickly bastard I was before the heart attack. And the pain is getting really old really quick.

Here comes the depression. Hooray.

I'll get throough it, but shit, it is harder, by far, than I thought it would be.

Lizard

An Explanation of the 180 I.Q. thing.

2008-02-20T13:41:00.002-05:00

I am not really THAT smart.

I have taken 35 IQ tests, only six of which were administered by professionals. On those six tests, I scored the following:

Unmeasurable (max 200)
185
130
130
126
112

On the other tests, the average is about 150.

IQ tests absolutely nothing but the ability to take IQ tests well. That's all. If it actually tested anything useful or functional, MENSA members would be running the world instead of being a collection of socially malfunctioning malcontented underachievers who think they SHOULD be running the world.

I use the number 180 because it is a nice, round figure, it is pleasantly high, and it is on the license plate of a total ubergeek in the movie "sneakers".

I am smarter than the average bear, no more. I suck at math, I have no memory for dates, names, times, schedules. Without my wife, I would never even know what day of the week it is. This was true even when I was a full-time computer repair person who HAD to know these things.

Nope, it is a joke. My intelligence comes mostly in the usage (preferably savage, vicious, unrelenting) logic in argument, conversation, and writing (not the kind of writing I put in my blog).

Diogenes is easily as smart as I am, and CrowBear is going to be an amalgam of my intelligence, which lies in communication, and his mother's intelligence, which lies in organization, keeping track of diverse detail, and dogged devotion to task. Step aside, world, here he comes.

If he decides to be a happy bum, I will be content. If he decides to accomplish something, I will watch with profound admiration. If he decides to pursue his potential to it's fullest, I will be jealous and mooch off him for the rest of my life.

Whatever shall I do? I am just wracked with indicision!

2008-02-20T07:42:00.001-05:00

For the last fifteen years, my most serious medical problem has been my massive high blood pressure.

It's gone.

Apparently, whatever happened with my heart attack has completely eliminated my hypertension.

Which leads me to a question I have, at the moment, no answer for :-) . The Docs have been telling me that I need to become less angry, less tense, less vehement, less stentorian, less ME. THAT was what was causing my hypertension, my type-A temperament (even tho I live a very nearly stress-free lifestyle, worry very little, and am a complete slob) and I MUST change it, or it will kill me. Oh, and lose some weight.

None of them said "perhaps a heart attack might be a good idea, too" but that is what seems to have done the trick.

Now, losing the weight was annoying (throwing up for six hours at a time three or four days a week sucks, but THAT is gone, too) but maybe that was all I needed to do, that and my heart readjusting. My cholesterol is fine (my triglycerides suck, and I am not sure what that means, and neither are the doctors)

So I need to decide whether to change who I am, trusting that they were right all along and this is just a freak reaction, and if I stay my arrogant, sure-of-myself condescending, snippy, angry self, it'll just start killing me again, of do I say FUCK 'EM in a loud, angry, self-righteous, arrogant, I-know-more-than-them voice, and continue merrily on being the smartest guy in the room, a semiprofessional asshole, a 180 I.Q. annoying bastard?

Heh heh heh. I wonder which I will pick? Don't you?

Gonna keep losing weight, tho. Bring on the salad!

Lizard

rage Rage RAGE fucking RAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2008-02-19T16:07:00.004-05:00

God, I am tired of idiots.

"Drugs bad!" she said, then she stopped thinking.

Really? Drugs keep me alive. Albuterol, Salmeterol, Prednisone, Penicilin, Cipro. All of the above have saved my life, and will again, I have no doubt.

Also in the catagory of "saved my life", altho less directly, are Fentanyl, Morphine, Oxycodone. They also almost ruined it once. Most scalpels are also swords, in broad analogous terms.

Nicotine almost killed me.

So did (does?) caffeine.

Marijuana has improved bits of my life greatly, and made a few bits a bit worse.

Alcohol annoys me, and I don't use it more than about 2 beers a year.

Drugs bad? Without them, I would be long dead.

"That's not what I meant. Those are LEGAL drugs!"

With the exception of LSD, Cocaine and Heroin, ALL drugs are legal under some circumstances. Broaden your spectrum to the entire world, and only heroin is universally illegal, as far as I know.

So the illegality of a drug makes it bad? and the legality of it makes it good? Nicotine GOOD? God, I am tired of idiots.

What makes a drug valuable is it's usefulness.

"But a DOCTOR should decide that!"

Why? Because they have better judgment? Ever actually TALKED in real-life terms with multiple doctors? The ratio of morons-to-geniuses is the same as among normal folks. There are doctors who wont provide pain medication under any circumstances, even to dying people, because of the threat of addiction. DYING PEOPLE. Here is a clue, moron: If they are dead, withdrawl is no longer really a problem, neither is addiction.

What does a doctor know about your spirit?

"Spirit is not the proper realm for drugs. How can drugs help your SPIRIT?"

Aside from every society in history except the Eskimos (because their native land contained no spiritually active plants, and they were largely carnivores anyway) and every non-monotheist religion on the face of the earth, I guess nobody believes that drugs can help your spirit. Oh, wait, the catholics and most christians consider wine a sacrament. Okay, make that ALMOST every non-mono.... wait, jews do too, don't they? And the muslims? Well, depending on sect, they smoke marijuana and nicotine, and make an almost sacred ritual out of coffee. I guess we are left with just the Eskimos, the baptists (New Wine devotees) and YOU (and every other moron without the sense to think for themselves or the wit to do research)

But you , YOU, who first taught me about thinking about spirit, buy the white anglo-saxon protestant line uncritically, just because you knew a few people who were scarred by drugs, people who would have likely have found a way to fuck themselves up anyway. Shit, woman, you are married to one of those people, and he hasn't done drugs in years, and he is one of the most twisted, dishonest people it has been my sad experience to meet. Drugs didn't do shit to him, and you have already acknowledged it in conversations that hadn't pushed your goddamn buttons.. mommy, daddy and the church are responsible for that mess.

Prozac, Celexa, the list of drugs for depression, an essentially spiritual condition, is now massive. Go to a doctor, tell them you are depressed, and wham-bang, they will write you a spiritual prescription before you can finish the sentence.

Why should I let a doctor, from ANOTHER RELIGION or none, make judgments on what I use for a sacrament, what I USE FOR MY SPIRIT?

"Well, drug ABUSE is bad!"

Define abuse. Taking a drug for pleasure? Do ya drink tea or coffee, woman? Dont bother answering, I lived with you, remember?

"The DOCTOR should say how you take them, and anything else is abuse!" Yeah, just give your decision-making process to a complete stranger who may or may not have your best interests at heart.

Listen up, woman: I walk my own path, and I always have. Get in my way at your own peril.

And YES, you childless judgmental idiot, when my son asks, WHENEVER he asks, I will ANSWER honestly. I will not HIDE what I do to satisfy your narrow morality under ANY circumstances. If he wants to walk my path, I will not refuse, I will ENCOURAGE, provided he is OF AGE, provided he is mature enough, provided he is, to MY satisfaction, ready.

What buisness do you, who opted out of motherhood specifically because you thought you would be bad at it, (a decision I respect, by the way) have passing judgment on what goes on in my relationship with my son?

I know my son. Don't get in his way, either. The only weapon he knows is unconditional kindness, but he is 7, that will surely change. And he is smarter than I am, by a long way.

Come debate me here. You have the address, but you don't have either the backbone or the skill. And you happen to be wrong, and you KNOW it.

Come on, make your point, change my mind.

I am waiting, and I guarantee an answer to anything you post. Come on.

Lizard

The Damned Phone

2008-02-19T08:35:00.001-05:00

I think it is because of the bizarre way I look at the world: I find the telephone among the worst of evils of the modern world when I must use it for voice communications, and among the most important, vital, and utterly beautiful creations (which, I am convinced, will be the tool that will finally give us universal literacy, suffrage, and even intellectual freedom) when I connect it to my computer.

There are exactly two people I am comfortable talking to by phone. My friend Diogenes, and a woman I have known my entire adult life in Florida whom I will pseudonym Sophia (wisdom).

Diogenes and I have a mutual agreement about language: Say it, mean it, explain it clearly or shut the fuck up. Neither of us is likely to misunderstand the other, we both speak in a very similar manner. He is a bit younger than I, and I was (I think) instrumental in teaching him the finer points of savage intellectual debate. The chances of us hurting one another's tender feelings on the phone is zero, mostly because emotional misunderstandings simply cannot occur when you have spent years arguing in the same style. (as an aside, one of my proudest moments was when he smoked me in an argument so completely that I was forced to admit that I was arguing based on an egotistical desire not to be wrong rather than an intellectual desire to be right. It was at that moment that I first realized the real value of losing an argument: Once you lose, and accept the correctness of the opponent's position, you are NO LONGER WRONG, and if there is one thing worse than being wrong, it is STAYING that way. Yes, Diogenes, photons are massless particles)

Sophia I have known nearly forever, and she is a bit older than I, and was instrumental in forming the way I communicate, much in the same way I was to Diogenes. In other words, all the miscommunications that are going to happen have already happened, we both realize the limitations of language, and we simply talk.

Everybody else (and I mean EVERYBODY else, my wife of 20 years included) causes me varying amounts of extreme discomfort to communicate with on the phone.

Serious discomfort. Sweating, trembling limbs, stammering, mental distraction and occasional terror. Phobia stuff, irrational reactions to normal events.

I feel like I am speaking to dead people. I feel like I have absolutely no grasp of the emotional content of any conversation, because I can't SEE it. Offense, confusion, misunderstanding, aggressiveness, anger, happiness, sudden understanding, distraction, even a need to cut the conversation short to go to the bathroom is all stuff I SEE on peoples faces and read from their body language, and I am really good at it. But NONE of that input is available on the phone, and I hate it. Talking to corpses that don't know they are dead.

So, to everybody out there I simply won't talk to on the phone for longer than about 30 seconds, you now know why. To those who are offended by that, I do apologize. This means YOU, wife of Diogenes, for whom, (because of the risk of offending) I will not choose a pseudonym.

With he two exceptions above, I worry about offending nearly everybody. Now, most people, even tho I worry about offending them, I simply don't care. The worry is ethereal and abstract. But for others, those people who have a VERY high emotional content in their conversation, the risk of offense is so great that the normal phone-terror turns to ... well.... outright fear. It amounts to this: the easier you are to offend in person, the harder a time I will have talking to you on the phone.

One (yet another) of the pieces of my personality that are whimpy beyond imagining. It's okay, I make up for it in other ways.

Writing blog posts is probably something that I shouldnt be doing within days of a heart attack

2008-02-17T01:46:00.004-05:00

I was quite gone, there, for a few days. I scared the crap out of a few of you who read this stuff, and for that, I apologise. Grindelwald, you can stop refreshing the blog every fifteen seconds, I am okay and getting some of my brain function back.

I am healing. The scars where I tried to rip my heart out are scabbed over (I am just lucky I had trimmed my nails to practice guitar the day before, or I might have actually been able to get down to the gristle before they whacked me with the morphine bye-bye juice) and have been keeping busy making homemade blowgun ammo. (no, it isn't craziness, it is simply a task that is physically undemanding and mentally challenging, which is exactly what I need to get my brain up and running again.)

To everybody who thinks my internal-conflict shamanic self-explanation for the heart attack is wrong, pointless or a kind of denial, I thank you for your concern, but I deal with things better in my own paradigm than in yours, and when i get stressed (and this really does qualify) I kind of forget that I have to translate Shaman-lizard into Human for some of you to understand.

I wrote a LOT of stuff in that first post-attack ramble that I did not intend to spill out onto the internet, and i am glad of my choice to make this a strictly pseudonymous place, but it is oddly comforting to know that there is a concrete record of my own twisted response to this mess that I can always refrence, and more importantly, can never again hide from.

Sunlight, even pseudonymous sunlight (Partly cloudy?) is the best disinfectant

Lizard

Requiem

2008-02-16T18:10:00.003-05:00

"I want a dog. I've always had a dog".

So had I, as a kid, but I went to a petless private school, had two consecutive petless girlfriends, and I am allergic to anything that has skin.

When we lived in Portland, we had cats. Seven of them. They made life barely tolerable there, and I very conciously chose the allergens over the sterility of city life and stocked up on Benadryl. But we were on the third floor, so a dog was pretty much out of the question (TSG had Wilbur, the dumbest dog on the planet, when my wife and I were colllecting waifs to populate our early abodes. I will write later about how one black lab puppy managed to fit into an apartment containing 7 cats, 3 snakes, 4 permanent adults and up to 12 temporary waif-ish hackysacker couch potatoes. look for it later under the title "The Dreaded Butt Attack"

When our landlord sold our building, our menagerie (minus waifs, unfortunately. I liked the waifs) moved to seven acres in Bath, so, "I want a dog" Bastet said. Bastet wants a dog.

I dont want to contribute to the total suffering on the planet, so I will NOT get a purebreed. So we called the pound, and they asked Bastet what kind of dog she wanted, and she said "Big". And they said to her "we have JUST the dog for you!"

My friend, who I will refer to as Diogenes (yeah, motherfucker, you lucked out. I was tempted to pseudonym you Grasshopper, Gumshoe or Mr. Burton just to retaliate against you for not slavishly reading my every blog post, but my recent tryst with terminality has left me feeling generous)

/*begin freeflowing blogangst what the hell do I call people? I am demanding pseudonimity, but what if I piss off somebody by pseudonyming them myself, poorly? to quote a good movie, "Somtimes, ya just gotta say "what the fuck" end freeflowing blogangst*/

went to the pound to pick up the dog.

I have no idea why he went instead of me, it was too long ago, but anyway, Diogenes went to pick up our new dog,

Diogenes is a martial artist. A VERY good one, too. He moves with grace and determination, and he has excellent balance, better than mine when I was at my best. He is a pretty big guy, and very well trained. Black belt. Grappling instructor. Ninpo Taijutsu. The first thing that our new dog did was knock Diogenes on his ass. I wasn't there, but I got the idea that the dog REALLY wanted to be adopted, and was rather aggressive in agreeing to accompany Diogenes to our house.

Now, in his defense, it was winter, and slippery, and the dog was FUCKING ENORMOUS. 170 pounds enormous. Blocking Out The Sun enormous. he was big. Really really big.

His name was Ben, and he was a problem. His left hip had been crushed somehow, either through abuse or neglect or accident, and had never been correctly set. He was in constant pain in stormy weather, he was affectionate and deleriously happy to be alive at all other times.

He looked like a cross between a German Shepard and a Great Dane. I am 5'8" tall and he could lick my chin with just a little hop up.

We had him about three years. Huge dogs, regardless of their worth and value as living beings, don't live long, and I did not know that at the time.

He was scared of children (there was possible abuse in his past, and he reacted badly to being startled), so whenever we went out, he was muzzled. But his big lips stuck out of the muzzle far enough to carry around a deflated football, which he carried everywhere.

He loved to go walking on the Kennebec river and bark at the water. I could always tell he wanted to jump in the water, but he was terrified to. Our other dog, Gamma, used to swim around frequently, and Ben would watch her jealously. We always tried to get him to swim, he was always too scared.

One day, he found it. The Swimming Stick. I threw it into the river, and he wanted that stick so badly, he jumped in after it, Gamma gleefully yipping at his tail. Ben got the stick, and swam back. His self-pride in his achievement was clear, obvious. He strutted. Ben had conquered the water.

He died a few months later. I miss him.

The Paintbrush

2008-02-14T16:59:00.000-05:00

The Paintbrush

"Baby" I said,
"The blood ain't mine"
but the scarlet terror leaking from me
deafened her to my words
because it was already in her eyes
and she watched me die
helping the nurses
with their red-paint cleaning chores.

"Baby, it ain't blood anymore"
but I was already dead
and the pump that shot the crimson at them
was just useless plumbing

"Look!" I shouted,
my right hand gouging the flesh of my chest
"I don't need it!"
and the red food coloring that was decorating the innards
of the former me
dripped down

I couldnt get it out, that damn pump,
and I cried in desperation
as I peeled the skin off my chest
and they hit me with 20 mgs of morphine
and the sticky red stuff poured out, into my eyes
staining my tears red
and making my beard into
a grotesque
dripping
paintbrush
held by no visible hand
painting nothing

Sometimes, you just need to let crisis roll over you and on past

2008-02-14T03:15:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, you just need to let crisis roll over you and on past, and watch it's wake rebound and ripple.

I am finding it nearly impossible to be the person I was about three weeks ago.

The Attack was a symptom of a rather nasty war inside me, being fought over primarily moral issues. Somebody won, somebody lost, and I am now a different person.

I feel far too pationately in two mutually contradictory ideas, both of which I believe, all the time.

There was something just beyond my understanding, but just barely, and, in terms of paradigm, I flipped. I had been wanting to flip for a long time. I had spent eons contemplating the fucking hanged man. I didn't really expect a heart attack, but I knew it was going to be a crisis.

It is, I hope, the price I paid for learning something I needed to learn, somatacising my goal and kicking it's ass (or not, twitch, twitch), classical animist or tribal or shamanic way to learn and heal. Symbolic sense, unnervingly valid.

It is very hard to explain to others why I believe what I believe, but it seems that one of the things I just smacked with is that I need to try.

I am finding it very hard to be the person I was three weeks ago. But, in that I wasn't really very fond of him anyway, it is getting on my nerves much less than I thought it would.

Self-therapy by blog. God, I am so screwed. My brain hasn't turned back on, at least not fully, but I do seem to be waxing a bit poetic.

Contemplate Benedict of Amber, and Faramir, and Arthur. Those are the metaphors my brain wants to think in at the moment, and that makes it a bit difficult on a hard-sci wannabee like me.

When most geeks in my generation had their religious formation moment, it was in either Star Wars for morality, or Star Trek for worship of science. Mine was Conan the Barbarian. Go figure.

I had a fucking heart attack. I just CANNOT get my mind around that.

In January and early February

2008-02-12T09:17:00.001-05:00

Instead of actually blogging, I was engaging in several mystical rituals involving teacher-student relationships.

Also, I composed (but did not mail) a letter to my father (one of exactly three that I have sent him in 40 years) and attempted to compose a letter to my evil stepmother (who refuses to allow my wife and son into her home because of some imagined slight that happened more than 30 years ag0. I'd tell you what that slight was, but I have no fucking clue). I have been trying to figure out a way that can accomplish the goal of getting my father completely and totally out of my life in all respects, yet keeps him in the life of my son, who loves him dearly, and keeps my halfsister (I HATE that I have to refer to her as half anything) in my life, because I seem to dearly love her (which is odd, because we hardly know one-another). My father is not a bad man, but he made some simply awful decisions in his life, and seeks continually to judge, (in a snide, parental-concern sort of judgementality) mine.

And I did several things which I will not detail here that may have been of questionable value, considering what happened later. Suffice it to say that I was engaged in trying to radically reshape my life and attitude toward life, using shamanic means (incorrectly, as it turns out. I wanted it done quickly, and shamanism is both gradual and subtle, so I was fucked from the start, to misquote 'The Commitments"

I could not be the parent I wanted to be. It was not typical father-failure stuff. I was there, physically, still married contentedly to Bastet, his Mom. I am not emotionally distant, I can hug and tickle and engage in physical affection kids need. The problems were in other areas.I didn't really care why that was the case, I just wanted to fix it. If I wanted my son to be a motivated, smart, passionate, reliable, creative and rebellious young boy, I would have to be all those things in order to be an example, and I tried harder than I have ever tried anything in my life before to do just that. And I could not do it.

Parts of it were simple, I guess. smart, passionate, those things I find come quite easily to me. I frequently have to dumb myself down, and ratchet back the burning fire of my enthusiasm, in order to be taken seriously or understood. It isn't even a challenge to pass those on. Creativity was pretty simple, too, tho since I don't understand my own creative process, I just sit around and create with him, it seems to work fine.

But reliability and motivation I just could not do. God damn, didn't I try, tho. Schedules, both internal and external, dates, places I needed to be, events in which I would participate and contribute in some way, Karate, the importance of promises and simple words.

(as an aside, CrowBear couldnt have cared less. As long as I was there to tickle, rub his back, sing King Henry at least occasionally, and shut the fuck up while he played computer games, he was happy. None of this is about HIM, it is all (of course) about me.)

It started when he quit karate. And then I had to quit, for different reasons. Every single failure on my part, failure to do the dishes or to work with him on writing, or even things as simple as singing to him when he wanted, every scheduled item uncompleted, every event unattended stuck a knife in my gut.

Stuck a knife in my gut. I have a strange literalness in my metaphors. Starting in November 07, I started vomiting, for hours at a time, three or four days a week (Bastet says more). I lost a lot of weight, but things were getting progressively uglier here, as I got sicker and sicker and no idea why. (the metaphor not having occurred to me yet).

I started looking at all the things together. I have three students (four if you are broadminded, five if you are REALLY broadminded). On in particular, is a complete failure on my part, another is now a bitter enemy, and another who never should have even BEEN a student. Failure, failure, failure. One success, and one agreement to stuff the teacher/student thing and just hang out. If looked at realistically, this is my life's work: Out of five, that's three failures, one success and one agreement to desist.

And my kid.

And my Dad.

It was a cycle, a really bad one. My father treats my son in such a way that, as he is a child, he sees nothing but love and affection. When he is old enough to understand what is actually happening as my father showers him with affection (but never allows him over for the night or even to visit for lunch), he will understand both shame and hate. My father, on some level, knows this. He also knows he will be dead when the transition hits and will never have to do any of the explaining about why he was such a cowardly bastard. Leaving me with the entire pool of pigshit to drag my kid through when he is old enough to understand the stench.

I can't teach my kid the things I need to teach him, because I was never taught them. My students are mostly the same way as I, (except Valkyrie, who, I suspect, has enough reliability and motivation for several army units) and as such, their students are likely to be the same.

And I can't stop it. I can't fundamentally change these things about myself, altho they may be the most important things I can conceivably change. More failure.

The vomiting continued until early last week. It had been building in strength and intensity for three months.

I was constantly looking for a way to solve the dilemmas, and could not.

My brain stopped working, or, rather, it had stopped working well. I have an I.Q. of over 180, and I rely on it like most people rely on breathing. It failed. My mind came to the conclusion that there was no way to solve my existential dilemmas under any circumstance, including flight or suicide.

So, a few days ago, I had a heart attack.

I lived.

Now what?

Closets and Caves

2007-12-29T13:13:00.000-05:00

So there I was, minding my own business, reading my political blogs and not expecting anything particularly interesting because Bhutto's assassination has used up all the news oxygen, when I read this:

A Rudy Giuliani campaign booster is standing by his comments that the U.S. needs to defeat "the Muslims" - or "chase them back to their caves."

And this:

John Deady, co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy group, told The Guardian of London, "We need to...keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them."

Asked if he was referring to all Muslims, Deady said he was.

"I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims," he told the TPM Election Central Web site.

"When I say get rid of them, I wasn't necessarily referring to genocide," he said.

In the last thirty years, there have been a lot of closets left empty, because the country has become liberal and open-minded enough that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people could find acceptance and be (largely) left alone.

Can we maybe fill those closets with these fucking conservative republican bigoted pinheads, and nail the closets shut? I thought we were well past the era when it was acceptable for people to spew vile shit like that in public. I couldnt care less if they want to sit in their darkened cross-filled abodes and rant and rave like rabid dogs, (freedom of speech and all) but when this stuff is spewed forth in a political campaign, the response should be derision, laughter, and rejection. I am not talking about laws here, I am talking about what OUR response should be. The LISTENERS.

Our 200+ year long national conversation about freedom of speech has almost always focussed on the speaker and her/his rights. The listeners to speech have no rights except the right to not listen, to change the channel, turn down the volume or walk away. But don't the listeners have an obligation? Especially if those listeners are journalists, there is an obligation (in my opinion) to point out the vileness, repeat it, satirize it, shout it from the fucking rooftops, "Did you hear what this guy said?"

For years the press has refused to call Bush a liar, even when it was obvious and incontrovertible that he was, in fact, lying. Now Rudy, who wants to run the whole country the way he ran New York -=twitch, shudder=- has hired a guy who wants to "get rid of" the Muslims, and is anybody shouting about it? Anybody but me and a few DFH bloggers? Not that I can see. And as of this morning, this dangerous microcephalic moron STILL WORKS for Rudy.

I am a bit of an amateur historian, concentrating on the consequences of the fall of the roman empire. How does this relate to anything? After Rome collapsed, the Catholic Church basically burned every bit advanced scientific knowledge they had gathered, plunging most of the west into what we now call the Dark Ages. But they couldn't get everything, because Spain was ruled by - you guessed it - the Muslims. If it were not for those Muslims and their innate love of knowledge and reason, we would not have the works of the ancient Greeks. You know, unimportant shit like Logic, Reason, Coherent argument, Medicine, Astronomy. Aristotle, Plato, et al. The folks who pretty much invented western thought. When the Muslims conquered someplace, they didn't BURN books, (like we ignorant, unwashed and illiterate white Europeans did) they COPIED them. Translated them. Distributed them. Taught from them. Saved them.

Islam today is not what it once was, and a small (but very very loud) minority of Muslims have abandoned reason, logic and science for fanaticism and self-immolation. Much like Europe did under Catholic domination.

We don't need to fight Islam, we need to fight stupidity, ignorance and generalized race-hatred. Stuff them in the closets and see how THEY fucking like it.

If I had the time, I suppose I could have found a better way of saying this, but I am too angry, too upset, and too scared to really pay attention to literary merit. The idea that one of the Rethuglican candidates might win the next election (and the more chaotic the world gets, the more likely that is) leaves me with a fervent desire to move to Greenland.

Family Holidays

2007-12-26T12:19:00.000-05:00

They sit together,
mother, father, son and daughter
enjoying each-other's company
a bond of love
apparant and tangible.
They like each-other,
as well as loving.

It is a thing I have no memory of,
and do not understand.
but I know that once I did,
because seeing it in others
clenches my teeth to breaking,
and lights me with hate and anger
that I can barely stand.

What I remember is an absent father.
And a mother and daughter
eager to find any excuse to banish me to my room
so that they would not need to deal with me
while they sat together
mother and daughter,
enjoying each-others company
while I cried, alone and confused.

At Christmas, they made an effort,
and usually let me stay for an hour or so
but it was forced, uncomfortable,
and when she had had enough,
my mother would create the opportunity
to send me away
crying.

And hating.
A fury so strong and loud within me
that it bursts forward and engulfs me
if I am not very careful.
It sits inside me,
scheming, planning revenge
on people I don't even know anymore.

And now I am the father
and I am not absent.
and I like my wife, and I like my son,
and of course, I love them both
and there are no people I would rather spend my time with.
I have broken the line of anger and hate
I will not pass it to my child,
as I believe it was passed to me
as it was passed to my mother from hers.

Later there were beatings, whippings.
humiliations unending, isolation and total control,
and all of that is forgiven, all is past.

In a strange way, this means I must keep it.
I refuse justify the harm done to me
by passing it on to my child
and forgiving my mother by it's inevitability.

Even if it kills me, it is mine
and I will never pass it to anyboy else.

But I know that once, we were happy together.
I don't remember it, I was too young,
but I know it was there
because it's ending maimed me
apparantly for life.

I cannot celebrate holidays,
no matter how hard I try
because the hate and rage are too close to the surface,
too near to my mind, my tongue and my temper,
too raw, too real
because it was just yesterday,
even tho I can't remember it.
The hate and rage have never forgotten it.

Patriotism, and two movie reviews

2007-12-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

This is hard for a good bleeding heart liberal to say, but I am a patriot. Not a pinhead-patriot like the jingoist flag-waving conservative christian dipshits that have rallied around America's Stupidest President, but a Patriot more along the lines of Earl Warren (Chief Justice of the supreme court in the 60's and before) who understood that his DUTY as a powerful American was not to lie subservient to the past, but to see the shortcomings of our country and try to address them.

We are not perfect. We engaged in genocide against the natives, war crimes against the Vietnamese and the Iraqis (and probably the germans (dresden) and the japanese (too many to name, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki cover it) and mass oppression against the Africans, Chinese and others that we brought here to build our country, willingly or otherwise.

How can a patriot say such things? Because they are true, and to refuse to say them is, well, intentional idiocy. MY Patriotism is not mutually exclusive with honesty.

What am I a patriot about? The rule of law, political, religious and expressive freedom, and a free press. We have none of these things, but we are closer to them than any other country. But we ceaselessly try to be as close to those ideals as we can.

I saw two movies recently that really exemplify what I mean when I say Patriotism. they are:
"Swades", and "Chak De India". Obviously, they are not American movies.

"Swades" (rooughly translated as "homeland") is the story of an American resident Indian engineer who works for Nasa. He retuns home to bring the woman who raised him (nanny, foster-mother) to the U.S. so that she can have a comfortable old age. In the course of his travels, he falls in love with India, and the small villiage in which she lives, and, of course, a woman. This film is about the beauty and majesty of India, but it is also relentlessy critical of Indian culture, especially the caste system. Mohan (the engineer) confronts the villiage elders with their own hypocracy in several well-written and superbly acted dialogues and monologues. I will not go further into detail because I hope I can convince somebody to watch the thing.

Also in Swades is a musical scene (this is a Bolleywood movie, there is ALWAYS a musical scene) that is very descriptive of the Animist philosophy, and is very beautiful.

Shah Rukh Khan stars, and I can give no higher praise than this: he emotes so well that I ocassionally let the subtitles flow by just to watch the performance, not really caring about the words. 'course, I downloaded the movie, so I can watch it several times. My son CrowBear asks for me to play the songs repeatedly.

The second movie, also starring Shah Ruhk Khan, is "Chak De India" ("Come On India") and is a -- wait for it-- Women's Field Hockey movie. It is a fairly standard sports flick, with training montages and motivational songs (really good ones. Bolleywood kicks everybodies ass at musical scores). This is a lighter, less meaningful movie than Swades, but it is great fun, where Swades is sometimes brooding. It has a men-versus-women riot in a MacDonalds that is quite enjoyable, and a lot of the Field Hockey action is well planned and VERY well filmed. This movie is also very critical of Indian mores and culture, in the way women are treated, and in the way India is fragmented into many different and frequently fractious states. The girls (I was never able to really tell how old these women were, and the film itself refers to them as both girls and women) are presented as strong, independent and intelligent, and some are presented as noble, some as manipulative, some as jealous, some as megalomaniacal, but all of them real characters.
Khan is generous with screen time, surprising in a bolleywood megastar.

Both of these films are works (in 'swades' case, masterworks) of patriotism in the sense that I use it: these films are, in the course of loving India, trying to fix it.

I wish these were American films, because they express a sentiment I find very lacking in our cinema.

I have had a long obsession with Bolleywood films, but these are the first two I am not embarassed to like.

So I'm Evil. Whoop-de-fucking-do

2007-12-15T23:38:00.000-05:00

I got expelled from another pagan forum.

Seems they don't much want to defend beliefs that are different from theirs, and animism is too anarchic.

The issue at hand: a small piece of verbiage spewed out of the vile, drug-addicted, incredibly brilliant mystical comedian named Aelister Crowley. You wont hear him described this way by anybody else who knows about him, I am distinctly alone in my belief that he acted as a comedian all his mystical life (mystical slapstick combined with literary brilliance, acerbic wit and an ability to produce bullshit on demand and in quantity that dwarfs anybody in history with the posible exception of L. Ron Hubbard. I refer anybody with questions to The Book Of Thoth, the most incomprehensible mystical guidebook ever written)

The verbiage: "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of the Law, love is the law, love under will"

Many Wiccans and many other pagans have adopted a creed which truncates Crowley's statement and ads a perfectly rediculous caveat "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" and in the course of modifying it, made it into vacuous bullshit.

"An it harm none?" So, like, you can't hurt anybody. Hurting people is against the rules. Right? So people who adhere to this credo are pacifists, that would, under no circumstances, harm another? Well, no, not really. The VAST majority of the pagan community who pay homage to the drivel will tell you that harming is fine in self-defense and in due defense of another. So "An it harm none" is conditional. And kinda vague. Can I harm animals? Is that against the rules? Simply to ask the question is offensive to some. "NO!" they say, usually in leather shoes. Some talk about how it is ok to kill animals to survive, in a hunter-prey sense, and some of the animist traditions revere this (Not mine, I am an anti-hunting wuss)

With so many exceptions, I cannot swear by the damn thing, and that seems to mean much to some people, who seem to be as willing to make their own exceptions as often as they like. There is just this overwhelming fear in some circles (the more dangerous ones, the more fringe ones where I hang out and chat about mysticism and hallucinogens, ritual sex in mysticism) that unless this one principle is genuflected at, the fringe will lose the suppo0rt of the orthdox wierdos (my special term for the people who follow paganism in a much more subdued, conformist way than does the fringe)

I can't say that harming another is against my rules if it isn't. If there is a judgement call to be made, it is subjective, and thus not really subject to oaths like that. If the oath allows the oathtaker to bend the rules, IT ISN'T A VALID OATH, as nothing is actually being promised.

I am almost always then offered an out by whatever group is desiring this autodafe, "But this is a technical objection, right? You don't object to the principle"

Yes, I do. I object to you telling me what to do, and I object to bastardizing one of the most significant (in my opinion) moral statement about people who choose a path of their own design, people he called Magickians (looks aweful, no? He was attempting a designation that would differentiate between stage magic and what he was attempting to do) in order to do it.

Crowley's words are brilliant in choice and composition, and they are ion a kind of code that he used. I do not have the time here to go into the specifics, but this is MY take on the Law of Thelema:

" 'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law" -Crowley
This is his fundamental state of being. If you choose to walk a path of your own design, YOU ARE COMPLETELY RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING YOU DO. You can't claim society made you do it, you can't blame it on a god you probably don't believe in, nor can you blame it on your upbringing (all of which said NOT to tread your own path), all you can say if things don't work out right is "oops, my bad" and deal with the consequences. It is the ultimate statement of libertarianism, in large part because it is a philosophy that is completely devoid of inherent good and evil, and the lies of other men, it is a simple statement about the practitioner and nothing more. I imagine asking Crowley if I 'should' do something. the questions would, I imagine, go a bit like this:

AC - Do you wanna?
Lizard- well, yeah
AC - will you sleep well after you do this?
Lizard - Sure
AC - Go for it.

But AC would have had the same conversation with somebody talking about involuntarily sodomizing (raping) a student of theirs during a magical ritual. He was only talking to me about trying to get laid doing Tarot readings.

The idea that a philosophy could embrace such darkness with equal ease as my more mundane moral question disgusts some. But AC wasnt talking about wether something was right or wrong, he was making a statement: "The Choice Is Yours", and stands behind the philosophy whatever that choice is.

I am not a fan of interpersonal violence, I am much better with words than I am with my jump-spinning round kick. But it is my choice, and will always be, and I am comfortable with Crowley's statement as a statement of how the world works. It says nothing about morals, nor does it try, and the spin put on those words by the pagan community in general and wiccans in particular is offensive and ill-considered.

When I say these things, I get expelled, or asked ot be less aggressive in discussions, or told that discussions like this are really outside the yadda-yadda-yadda. And some tell me I am evil, dark, sick or insane. Which I kinda like.

Fuck 'em.

Animism

2007-12-08T11:50:00.001-05:00

For me, animism is largely a deeply emotional response to the natural.

It is the feeling of a cool breeze, and feeling in it's touch on the skin the caress of a caring, loving, powerful goodness.

It is the feeling of the sun touching me gently with the warmth that gives the world life, and feeling touched with meaning, unfathomable and delicately beautiful

It is the warm feeling of my cat snuggled against me, taking my pain away, and a wonder that surpasses expression that the world would be made, at random, to allow such a thing.

It is the feeling of these things, and of that more that i can never quite say. As feelings. Not science, not belief, just input. It is how the world feels to me.

I don't, and never have, interpreted the world through these feelings, and so they have never really translated as a formal religion that would be easily recognizable as such. But I feel these things as certainly as I feel gravity.

It is the dichotomy that keeps me as sane as I am, which might not be saying much, but I cultivate this dichotomy, and NEVER try to resolve it. There should be a word for a dichotomy that is a coveted thing, but I havent seen one.

How do YOU think?

2007-11-26T12:48:00.000-05:00

I think in words, and with a few exceptions, I always have. Thoughts come to me in complete sentences, usually grammatically correct. Interestingly, I don't think in letters, or in the sound of the words subvocalized. I think in meanings, but those meanings are always in a grammatical or descriptive structure.

I think that because of this, I find it extremely difficult to visualize static images. All of my thoughts move. The view is always different at the end of the thought than it was at the first.

Bastet thinks in pictures. Haven't asked if they move or not. Honey? Keeping up with my blog? DO the pictures you think in always move?

I learn best by listening to the spoken word explaining something. I learned to be a DM by listening to Forstchen or CrimeBoss run games.

I can remember most important conversations I have had verbatim. I am sure Bastet and Yhazmina would both fervently disagree (and both have, loudly and mock-violently. ) I can also remember the repetitions of "I didn't SAY that!". I think most people remember what they MEANT, not what they said. And because most people don't think in words, they often do not realize that the two are not identical. I am not saying, by the way, that my recollection is always right.

So, I know people who think in words and in pictures. I am quite sure my dog thinks in odors. Anybody think in sounds? Is that even possible?

Do people born blind think in terms of a spatial perception that I can't imagine because I can see? Or is it sort of like my thinking in words but not in sounds, they think in shape and structure but not in pictures?

Thinking about thinking, preparing for my yearly solstice trip.

Under the effect of psychedelics, I experience the effects as a conversation with dark, foggy pictures accompanying. I hear the sounds, and feel the emotions, all expressed to my mind in words, paragraphs and connecting plot-lines or developments. Wierd, huh?

What the hell am I?

2007-11-25T23:00:00.000-05:00

My friend Grindelwald asks a question in the prior post that I will answer (or attempt to) here. To repeat the question:

Okay, Lizard, I don't get you. Clearly you are not anti religious, because more than half of your posts are about religion, in a sense. Obviously Christianity has annoyed you, so it is a good guess that you aren't one.

So, what are you?

I know you wargame, I know you do drugs, I know you can play Russian WW2 combat strategy better than anybody I have ever met(digitally), and I know you know a lot about the bible and the occult. What does all that add up to?

There is no formal name for what i believe. I have tried several times over the past few years, and have come up with: Rational Animism, Animism, Anarchist Animism, Gnostic Animism, Gnostic Shamanism, Tribal Mysticism, Mystic Animism, Chaos Animism, Chaotic Gnosticism, Rational Mysticism.

(The reason for the chaos theme is that I have a working theory that attributes much of what I consider my mysticism is to a chaos-theory interpretation of the sufficient complexity that gives rise to intelligence. I am fairly convinced that sentient identity some sort of emergent phenominon of the neural net, and by wierd permutations in chaos mathematics, we share things in common that can be changed, with the results also in common. It is kinda complicated)

I like Rational Mysticism most, but most people who groove on rationality consider it an oxymoron (I obviously disagree), and most people who are into mysticism misunderstand it's usage.

I think there is enough evidence of mind-to-mind communication that it cannot be ruled out, and must be considered and studied.

I believe that science does not understand intelligence at all well. I think that there is considerably more going on in the universe than science can yet see. I believe that if we survive long enough as a species, science will see most of what is, but never all.

I read Tarot cards. I started it to try to get laid, and I kept it up because it worked, (for doing readings, not getting laid, altho it is how I met my wife) much to my shock and surprise. I do not use the cards to tell the future, I use them to explore different vantage points on the question, using the symbolism of the cards, and project several possible ways of handling said question.

Because it worked, and because I am a rationalist, I refuse to believe that it has anything to do with the 78 pieced of cardboard, and had to have something to do with my perception of the question when exposed to the symbols. I am sure some would argue that it didn't work, that it simply seemed that way. That depends on what you think "worked" means. Since I was not 'reading the future', I told nobody what would happen. But suddenly, because I had these cards in front of me, I could see their question clearly, and suggest things they, almost ALL of them, found useful.

I also felt something happen, as soon as I started to really examine what I was doing (It is very hard to overstate how shaken I was at the results I was getting) and I started noticing differences. My breath came slower and deeper, my eyes never quite focused sharply, my heartbeat slowed and I lost track of time.

The act of performing a tarot reading was putting me into an altered state of consciousness.

I have digressed, in a desire for clarity, but to answer the question: I am a mystic, because I use altered states of consciousness to investigate both the world within me and outside me. I am rational because I acknowledge that i can't prove any of it, and therefor, it may not be true or real in any objective sense. I am sure that I am exploring myself. When I think I am exploring or effecting the space outside my head, I might be completely and totally wrong, and deluding myself at every point.

Why explore if it might all be delusion?
Because it is truly an unknown, and I want to find out.
And it can be fun.

I will go into why Animist is appropriate in another post.

Good enough, Grin?

I FUCKING hate christmas

2007-11-25T12:14:00.000-05:00

Let me be very clear: I hate Christmas. I hate everything about it. I hate Santa, I DESPISE the Little Baby Jesus, I can't stand either giving or receiving gifts, I hate the music, I hate the sentiment and I hate the day.

Santa is nothing more than a shill for the moneysucking merchant pinheads pushing bullshit toys and a spirit of unmitigated greed.

Santa is a lie, generally the first significant lie we tell our children. "Oh, it is such an innocent lie" they say. "Oh, it does no harm! The kids LOVE it" Yeah, bullshit on both counts. Let's teach the kids that in order to instill the happy-happy-joy-joy ethos of peace-on-earth-goodwill-to-men, we have to invent an obese asshole with terrible taste in clothes. Yeah! Let's teach our kids that in order to teach them generosity, we have to first lie to them, then we have to accompany it with greed.

"Oh, but Christmas is about the message of Jesus" they tell me. Yeah, lets teach our kids that ending your career executed by the powers that be and failing in your mission is a good thing. Lets tell them that a quisling, a cringing, whining, other-cheek-turning passive dipshit is actually GOD. Lets tell them that if you get invaded, oppressed and nearly genocided out of existence, you should pay your fucking taxes to your fucking oppressor, because Rendering Unto Ceaser is a good thing, even if Ceaser is offing your people like they were ants at a picnic.

Lets keep telling our kids that if Grandma gives them a pair of mittens 9 sizes too small, they have to smile, and LIE, and thank her with sentiments they almost certainly do not feel. Let's perpetuate the culture of lies that communal crap-giving furthers. Lets insist we buy gifts for people we can't stand, because it's Christmas.

I do not give gifts for christmas, nor do I want to receive any.

Fuck Christmas.

Finally, some GOOD news

2007-11-19T18:30:00.000-05:00

My back, which has been causing massive amounts of pain for 15 years now STARTS the day almost painless. As I stress it, it gets achey, and I still can't do much, but this weekend I did housework at a consistent (tho slow) pace. That might not sound like much, but it is better than I have done for ages. It has been feeling so painless lately that I have finally canceled my one remaining narcotic scrip. I havent been taking them anyway, but the scrip was always there is a way of getting through the pain, thinking if it gets too bad, I can always fill that scrip.

Thinking about going back to karate soon, and fully participating. That might be a bit soon and a bit overambitious, but I am still just thinking about it.

Bitch Bitch Bitch (political post)

2007-11-19T15:09:00.000-05:00

It isn't a word I use a lot, except when my hand is firmly intertwined in Bastet's.... well, never mind that. I don't use it as a descriptive term, nor do I use it as an insult unles it is appropriate, and then, almost universally to describe a male behaving in a petulant, jeuvanile manner. (ex. "Stop being a little bitch about it"!)

When used as an insulting comment about a woman, it usually means one thing: Agressive Woman Who Won't Change Her Mind When She's Told. In that I absolutely love intelligent aggressive women who are not intimidated by me, I hardly consider that a slur.

I know women who bear the title proudly, who court the word and use it as a badge of pride.

If Hillary Clinton wants to get elected president of the united states, she CANNOT run from that word, or that concept, she has to OWN it. She has to smile to herself, and to everybody else, be proud every time an insecure male idiot refers to it, or a jealous woman spits it at her.

Because she is a bitch, by the definition I am using, and I think it is a pretty accurate one, close to what people really mean when they use it.

Hillary DOESN'T know her place, and she shouldnt. She is, at the moment, engaged in the process of MAKING her place. And she had better own the word that best describes her.

Where, oh where, has my week gone?

2007-11-17T10:01:00.000-05:00

Sooooooo, it turns out that I am missing 7 days from my life, five in one chunk, and two in another. Here is what happened:

I went to the E/R and got medication that lowered my blood pressure. And I don't remember the next 5 days. I only understood this last night, when I took my family out to dinner and we talked. Turns out I was a complete (tho nonviolent) asshole. "Grumpy" is the word my very pleasant and nonjudgemental wife used, which, coming from her, is a very severe statement.

I realized this was happening almost immediately (from my perspective, anyway) and wanted to go off the med the next day, but since I was scared to death of ... well... death, I kept taking it. From my perspective, I kept taking it for two days, but from the perspective of everybody else, it took me 7 days. I then called the Doc and asked if it was dangerous to stop taking the med suddenly, and they said I needed to keep taking it and the "side effects" would eventually subside. Now, judging from the number of pills that are left, I stopped taking the med about two days before I 'woke up'. After talking with the doctor, I took another dose, and lost the next two days.

While I was out, I drove, talked with people (including my oldest and dearest friend, on the phone, for a few HOURS) and nobody but my wife noticed that anything was wrong.

I have stopped taking that med. This condition is terrifying and very hard to deal with.

Under normal circumstances I am a VERY controlled person. It does not always seem that way because I am vehement and loud, but it is true. Even in the height of anger or depression, I always know what I am doing. To spend LARGE chunks of life out of control is horrifying, like living in a nightmare.

Headlines I'd like to see

2007-11-10T08:21:00.000-05:00

Dick Cheney sodomized with a rusty wire whisk by angry waterboarded ex-detainees

Micheal Mukasey reveals garden-gnome ancestry 'no, I didn't do it on purpose!' mother retorts, 'I was just plantin' potatos and 'ee snuck up on me. And he didn't have a condom'

Secret Origin of Humanity revealed! Aliens return to earth to harvest republican conservative brains. Xenospokesman Louboo Smarmeling tells us that "It is a culinary miracle! When we first terraformed your puny little planet, we were thinking 'apetizer', but when we came back to see if you were ready yet, we were surprised! You humans, especially you conservative republicans, have the best tasting brains of any known world, and we have sampled many"

I promise, this is the last time I will moan whine and complain

2007-11-09T12:47:00.000-05:00

and if you believe that, I have a really cool commercial property for sale, runs from new jersey to new york.....

Since a few weeks ago, I have gone from elated to miserable, from very very sick, to amazingly healthy, from very encouraged about my future, to checking out prices at crematoriums. Life is giving me some choices (which is rare in and of itself) and some of those choices aren't all that bad, given certain assumptions.

The Numbers:
Best case: I can live a normal life, die of old age. 2% probability, and 'old age' is defined as 70.
Worst case: My brain explodes before I am finished writing this. .003% probability. (Okay, I made that one up. :-)

If I do Nothing: in three years, I have an 89% chance of still being alive
In 5 years I have a 70% chance of being alive, but with a 30% chance of suffering a debilitating stroke.
in 11 years, when my son turns 18, there is only a 22% chance that I will be a normal, functioning 55-year-old man. There is a foggy probability melange that mixes death, severe disability and systemic organ failure that is so dismal it doesn't bear repeating here, not if I actually want to function for the rest of this day. Let me put it another way: 20 years of uncontrolled stage 3 hypertension is pretty much a death sentence. Melodramatic? yes, it is. but the numbers don't lie, and they lay out a neat probability line for how my health future looks.

I realize I am obsessed with this, probably obsessed with it beyond all proportion. It is almost impossible to work out proportionality when, on one side of the ledger is EVERYTHING and on the other side is.... well..... everything.

This is mortality, closing in. I have expected it for years, but I am now FEELING the crush of it. My nemesis has a new name (hypertension) which replaces my former nemesis (asthma), which was far more annoying, but a tad less deadly. Of course, the asthma isn't gone, it's just getting it's clock ceaned by the sheer brutality of death from uncontrolled hypertension. Blindness, diabetes, heart and kidney failure. Slowly.

The doctors I have spoken to are split evenly (2 against 2) that my hypertension is a lifestyle problem, or an endocrine problem.

I hope the two on the lifestyle side of the argument are wrong, but I suspect they are not. I am beginning to believe I need to fundamentally change who I am to beat this.

And fundamental personal change is a mystical thing.

Historically, I adapt quickly and well, but this bump in the road is rather large. We will see. Less optimism than in my last posts, but the despair I felt after my last e/r visit (which I have not yet written about, the despair was THAT bad) is receeding.

My Wierd Eye Appointment

2007-10-30T22:27:00.000-04:00

Since I am now well into my 40's and am starting to hold books a bit further away from my head to read, I went to have an eye appointment.

The Doc's assistant thought I looked unwell, and insisted on taking my blood pressure. It was 255 over 150. Then she LITERALLY left the room at a dead run. Less than six seconds later, the eye doctor came in and told me to go to the E/R, where I spent the rest of the morning getting stuck with 9 needles (6 to get the IV, 3 for shots before they could get the IV in. It took 2 hours. I went through three electronic blood pressure machines in the E/R. None of them were calibrated to read a BP that high. They went through two nurses to get one with the hand strength to pump up the manual cuff)

Oddly enough, one of the drugs they pumped me with ACTUALLY WORKED. When I left my BP was 110 / 63. It is the 43rd different blood pressure med I have tried.

I was told in the E/R about a year ago that if I could not control my blood pressure, I would have a stroke within 5 years. I looked up the stats and he was right, the chances are in the high 70% range of a stroke, with a 50 % chance of that stroke being fatal or debilitating.

I have not been comfortable for a single moment since getting this sentence. I have confronted major familial demons and stirred shit up that I thought long over, simply because I might not have time to do it later. I have given up Karate because I am not fit enough, even moderate exercise can cause a major blood pressure spike, and that may mean stroke. I made one exception to this, going to the first saturday class taught be one of my former students (former only in that he now outranks me, and I have been learning from him rather than the other way around for years now)

Since that day, literally everything I do is weighed against the possiblity of a stroke. "Is this worth my life?" has been a frequent thought.

Today was a bright glimmer of hope. The stuff they used WORKED. And it seemed to work very quickly. I have a script for it, and on thursday I pick up a home monitor and see if it will keep working.

I might be around for a bit longer than I have been thinking.

It feels pretty good.

with dreams like this, would YOU sleep?

2007-10-25T13:12:00.000-04:00

I was watching Condi testify after not getting enough sleep, when I slipped into a dream.

In my dream, Sheldon Whitehouse (who, in my dream, was wearing some sort of weird dolphin costume) asked Condi Rice (who was, rather predictably, covered with blood. Naked. There are times when a good imagination is a curse) the following question:

"Madam Secretary, I am going to ask you to define torture for the record. I am going to ask you this for one reason: Within the next ten years, I expect there to be war crimes trials, and I expect to be called as a witness. At those trials, I expect to be asked what I knew about the torturing of prisoners, and when I knew it. And I am going to tell them the truth, that I tried everything I could think of to make sure that if we were torturing, we stopped, and the people who engatged in it were brought to justice. I am, in foresight, building the record that will be evidence in those trials. With that in mind, Madam Secretary, I would like you to tell me what the administration's definition of "torture" is."

Of course, the Whitehouse-Dolphin wasn't there, Condi wasn't naked and nobody asked that, but it was a nice dream.

YES I will write about ANYTHING to beat writer's block.

Block Blown!

2007-10-25T11:55:00.000-04:00

Damn, that almost resembled a poem! I'm baaaaaaaaaack (maybe)

untitled

2007-10-25T10:56:00.000-04:00

there is a moment when pain becomes something else.

Take my word for it,
you never want to go there,
and it certainly isn't worth the trip

But it is sweet.
Sweet pain.

it is after the anger,
after the bargaining has been rebuffed,
after the begging stops,
and the pleading goes unheard,

there is a moment, fleeting,
just a gesture away from the place
where pain and death become a united force

------------------------------------------------------

I approach the point of ice-white sharpness
where pain and ecstasy merge
into a convulsion of sensory overload

and I am in another place.

Pain is a door, and the Mystic Half of me pushes me through.

This isn't shamanspace, this is something else
like being too stoned to follow the lyrics
or too drowsy to catch the meaning in a phrase
or too drunk to walk the line
all at once

There's shitloads of noise
and almost no signal
but when the PainGod talks
I listen up.

I can't put the message in the poem
if words could say it,
there would be no need for all that damned pain.

But it is there, and it is dark,
cold and deep.

pain is pure.

oneline poem #7

2007-10-25T01:21:00.000-04:00

If you wait long enough, the doomsayers will, eventually just by chance, be right.

The Alien Abduction Center

2007-10-24T18:19:00.000-04:00

There is an area in the brain that knows about alien abductions.

That is just.... deeply bizarre. Not as bizarre as quantum mechanics, but freakin' close.

The reason I think there is an 'alien abduction' spot in the brain is because i don't believe in alien abductions.

If you read the vast amount of alien abduction literature, one thing becomes very clear, that a lot of people are hallucinating the same things. It is also fairly clear that many of these similar hallucinations happened without the knowledge of previous experiences. In other words, in a lot (but still a small minority) of cases, the people experiencing these hallucinations could'nt just be copying what others say.

Like the near death experiences, and conversion experiences, and the alcoholic's 'moment of clarity', the alien abduction experience is a shared experience, and I suspect that there is a spot in the brain which, when stimulated, gives us this experience.

DMT and Salvinorin A both tweak this area (or maybe a receptor system, I don't know) as they both generate the alien-being visions (Salvia's are a bit more horrifyingly strange while DMT's are more godlike and emotive, at least for me).

Why would there be an 'alien being' centre in the brain? Of what possible use is it, evolutionarily speaking? Or is it's presence a by-product of intelligence itself?

These are the things that keep me awake nights.

I probably have pnumonia again, sorry for the infrequent posts.

Maintenance Robot

2007-10-16T04:21:00.000-04:00

I stayed awake for more than 150 hours straight.

My wife was having a hysterectomy, I was on prednisone and having severe asthma attacks every few hours. My wife's care at the hospital was atrocious, and I had to stay awake and monitor what was going on. I am not a doctor, but I know a lot about medicine from research. She was panicking, and she needed me there.

When she got back from the hospital, I must have decided at some unconscious level that she was going to be fine, and I collapsed, having almost 4 hours of the most vivid hallucinations of my life, in the complete absence of any exogenous psychedelics.

After that, I must have simply lost the conscious part of my mind, because I was out for three days. During those three days, I was apparently fully functional, if a bit cranky and whiney. I drove my family a hundred miles, I cleaned the entire apartment, had phone conversations, cooked, bathed, walked the dog, everything. Apparently if you take away the part of me that has the ego, the rest can still function pretty well.

I call him my Maintenance Robot.

Over the next year or so, both the asthma and the cluster headaches got worse, and the two drugs that I was taking as treatment (prednisone and fentanyl) caused Maintenance Robot to come out a lot. He displayed interesting behaviors (putting pizza in the silverware drawer, repotting plants). As soon as I could drop the prednisone, he went away.

I sleep better knowing he is inside me, and will keep me going if I am gone, for whatever reason.

The Block

2007-10-11T20:38:00.000-04:00

it's like a fingernails on a chalkboard
or maybe constipation
Writer's Block
constantly reaching, grasping, clenching.....
nothing.

There it is! An idea!
and I reach out to it
and it recedes,
and I GRAB it, and it becomes the ghost of an idea
and slips away through my grasping fingers
as it races away back into the dark space that birthed it.

It is in my peripheral vision
an idea, a character, a plot
but when I turn to see it head-on
it turns sideways and disappears,
having no depth,
just a lovely misty outline
and again, I grasp nothing
and in a few seconds, even the memory is gone

AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHH!

2007-10-06T08:54:00.000-04:00

Writer's Block Sucks.

Hopefully this is just a short burst of writer's block, but who knows.

On the theory that it is better to write pointless drivel than nothing, will now write about writer's block.

Hmm.

Writer's Block Sucks.

SCREW DESPAIR!

2007-09-27T20:56:00.000-04:00

Dear Cruel World,

Enough of this depression shit.

this is WAR!

Nature wants me dead,
but I will fight it
and love it unconditionally
because it keeps alive all that I love
even while trying to kill me.

Bring it on, I say!
I have been fighting and winning for 43 years
and I will go on for another 43.
DAMN YOU, LIFE!
YOU WILL NOT BREAK ME!

I have a mind that works wonderfully
and enough high-quality pharmaceuticals
to keep me going indefinitely,
and I can still breathe, albeit badly.

My wife and son love me
and need me in spite of my cost
and I can still make a difference.
I have words, and I use them well.
As a sword, my words can cut with the best
and they can heal, console, and teach
and if my body fails, my mind can still find purpose.

and even momentary weakness and self-pity
WILL NOT END ME!

I will fight, and on my own terms, I will win.
When my ending time comes,
I will not die of hemmorage
or of asphyxia
I will die by my own hand
on my own terms
proudly and happily.

Unless, of course, I get hit by a bus,
or some other unstoppable unavoidable calamity
but that will still be a win
for I will have escaped the slow agony that nature holds in store for me
and should there be a part of me that lives after death
I will hunt down that spirit that has tormented me throughout my life
and kick it in the nuts, laughing.

If there is a supernatural entity responsible for my life
be warned:
I am NOT amused by the trials you have presented me
and I am going to kick your ass for it.

I will awake in the morning.
I will see my son off to school
and my wife off to work
and in the alone time that follows
I will stay alive
just to spite life
just to spit in it's eye
just because I am too stubborn
too willful
too nasty
too evil
too ME
to let this shit kill me.

Adversity, go fuck yourself.

I AM LIZARD, I LIVE!

[insert annoyed primal scream here]

lizard

Despair

2007-09-27T20:18:00.001-04:00

Can I stop now?
Every day it is a struggle to breathe
a struggle to move
a pain to stand,
it even hurts to lie down
and it is becoming harder and harder to simply be.

I am half a man, or perhaps less
in a world of athletes I can barely crawl.
I am less than everybody I know
less even than I permit myself to acknowledge
and I don't want to be

If I were not the person I am
I would have given up long ago
and realised that there is nothing here for me.
nothing.

I am a weight on everybody I love
a constant drain on resources
a neverending vacuum
that eats money, love, patience and sympathy
and spits out nothing but pain, obligation and loss.

Can I stop now?

Can I just cease to be?
slide away into the darkness
that has been eating me alive
since the spark of life came into me?

Can I not wake up tomorrow?
Can life just be finished with me?
They will cry, yes,
but their tears will soon dry
and in my place there will be an empty bed
but the bills will be paid
and another will soon fill the miniscule gap I leave behind.

If I keep on, my fate is pretty much certain
I will die gasping for breath
turning blue slowly
Or I will die when my blood vessels explodes from the pressure
and blood leaks into my brain, leaving me paralysed
or retarded and drooling.

I am damaged beyond repair
and I am so fucking tired.

But I can't do it. I can't stop. I don't know how.
I fight, always, every minute.
But today, I don't know why.

Today was a very very very bad day.

Lizard

Harvest Night

2007-09-24T11:14:00.001-04:00

Harvest Night

Black silk-clad, barefoot
Steel knife, sharpened carefully
blessed by the water from the stream
that flows through and under the sacred patch

In the center, the canvas spread
will hold the bodies I sacrifice
in the name of medicine
green medicine, good medicine
Gifts of life, freedom from pain,
communion with the green.

No moon, utter darkness but for the low, dancing yellow
of the lantern flame
making the shadows of the tall plants dance wildly
as the gentle night breeze blows the flame
For this sacrifice is forbidden
and darkness is the domain of this green teacher.
For now.

Bless, cut, give thanks.
Bless the blade, wipe it clean on the black silk of my garment
place the green lady on the canvas, bless and thank, move on
kneeling, from tough stem to tough stem
Bless, cut, give thanks.
Bless the blade, stack, move forward.

I bind the bodies in bailing rope and canvas
For they are made of her, too.
Her perfume is overwhelming
The green goddess' musk
covers me
and I lay a moment beside her,
under the stars
in her place of birth, life and death.
and I feel her spirit commingle with the pines
and the goldenrod, and the coyote heard faintly and far off

Winter is coming,
and through it, the tendrils of her smoke
will carry my prayers and thanks
to those stars, the coyote and the pines
and each breath will be dedicated to the prospect
that in all things, The Green holds an answer
and I hope that I may continue to have a hand
in speaking her truth..
My poem is but a poor repayment of her sacrifice.

The Gun

2007-09-23T14:02:00.000-04:00

The gun chafed.

It chafed my armpit when I wore it
it chafed my soul when it lived in the glove compartment
it chafed me raw with every alarm call
It was there for a reason.

I did not tell anybody about it
not the guards I supervised
not my wife
not my friends.
My boss mentioned it just once, after handing it to me.
"Can you use one of these?"
I gulped. "Yeah".
"Take it on the alarm calls. Here's the permit"
and I looked down at what had to be a forged permit.
We were both clear on what was not said
and that it would never BE said.

I knew he was telling me that the new job wasn't as safe as the old one
and to get certified to carry was long and cumbersome
and knowing him, probably expensive
so screw the state and it's requirements
but he wasn't going to leave his employees naked.

He knew I had the I.Q. to know it without being told
and that was the only reason he gave the top job to a dirty fucking hippie

It lay on the office table next to the keybox
as I wondered.
For six hours.
Then, the first alarm call.
A bank.

It went into the keybox
and into the patrol vehicle
and it began to chafe.

I did not hand it off to the next shift,
The boss said "keep it. Graveyard shift only"
and never mentioned it again until I left his employ.
I hid it in the safe to which only my boss and I had keys.

God, how it chafed.
an insectoid irritant in the back of my mind
constantly buzzing about my conciousness
it's inherent danger omnipresent.

Two years later, my successor on the graveyard shift
got a call, midshift.
One of his sons, 7 years old
had shot and killed another of his sons
with one of his guns.
Accidentally.

I do not know where MY gun went, after I left,
and I hope I never find out.
It could have been, but probably was not
the gun that chafed me so badly
that killed his boy
The gun that I never used
nor even contemplated using.

Science and....

2007-09-19T19:11:00.000-04:00

Yeah, okay, I call myself a mystic and a shaman (depending on the audience and subject), so a staunch defense of science might not be what you are expecting, but here it is nonetheless: Science, as a philosophy, is always almost right. The set of rules ("scientific method") and the application of reason to obsevation to produce theories, continual refinement of theory to observed phenominon, will always give you an answer that is as close to 'right' as it is possible to get. Generalizations based on an ignorance of the philosophy of science are almost always wrong.

Since the quantum mechanical discoveries in physics, (I hear the scientific absolutists groan) science has been unable to make fundamental claims about how the universe works without caveats. "It works one way if you are talking about really big things, and it works another way with regard to really small things."

I understand what the fundamental contradictions in quantum mechanics are as well as a mathematically illiterate writer can (which is not, very), and I find sufficient non-understanding to allow for many philosophies. Every time I look to science to relieve me of the burden of mysticism, it fails. It cannot succeed, because in order to say what is not, science must be able to say all of what is, and that, science has never been able to do, even in theory, much less in practise.

There is a state of being that was first explained to me by a marionet/pupetteer at a carnival at which I was making a living as a tarot reader. He called it Bilocation when he was sober, and he called it Possessing the Puppet when he was in an altered state (he was very fond of hard cider). He said that in his late teens he had had one episode with a marionette in which he had felt his conciousness shift, and his perception of the room (that he could not actually see from his position above the stage) was from the point of view of the marionette, and he had the sensation of his movements while controlling the puppet as if the puppet had muscles instead of strings. He said the experience only occupied perhaps 30 seconds of time, but he had spent the next 30 years chasing that one state again, acheiving it many times. He clearly viewed this as a mystical/religious experience, but was acutely embarassed by the fact he knew it was all his own psyche, no magic involved. He had, in the best tradition of scientists everywhere, conducted an experiment when 'in' the state. He had looked at the audience from the perspective of the puppet, and fixed it in his mind, and coming out of the state, looked at the audience. They were not the same. He was not "actually" seeing, getting information, through the eyes of the puppet. He really felt he was going crazy then, because the experience was too vivid, to real-seeming to be anything other than real. He doubted himself, and the value of the gift he had discovered, because it wasn't "real".

THere is a state of being in the practise of most traditional animist shaman, the 'journey'. (christians will recognize the state as the state in which John the Evangelist enacts the book of Revelations). Astral Projection may be the same state, and it may be different, I don't know. It sounds similar.

These states are psychological, sure. They are not "real" in the sense science requires, because there can be no external verification of a completely internal process.

Are they useful? Obviously I think so, or I wouldnt be paying this kind of attention to them. It is the question of HOW they are useful, and there, I must say that I am still working on an answer.

I am a mystic because I have experiences that require me to ask questions that science has not meaningfully addressed, and probably cannot meaningfully address, because of the nature of the experiences (occurring entirely within my own mind, but possessing a claim to reality as strong as does the consensus reality. That is, in the words of science, I experience voluntary hallucinations which I claim have significance to rival or exceed 'reality' yet are obviously different and subjective.

Nature Sucks

2007-09-13T19:28:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I feel like I am not human.

Planet Earth is the home of humans, the place where they evolved, the place in the universe most able to support life.

Not mine.

I fight constantly against nature. Nature tried to kill me just after I was born, and has been trying ever since to finish the job. I require massive medical intervention just to keep my system from rejecting the very things that keep most of you alive. I can't breath the air, drink the water or eat the bountiful offerings nature provides without requiring some sort of medicine to stave off anaphylaxis (death by allergic reaction). I am allergic to pollen, animal dander, car exhaust, wood smoke, more than 50 industrial and agricultural chemicals, sulfides, sulfates. The only major allergen that I am not effected by is peanuts.

Planet Earth hates my guts and has been trying to kill me for 43 years.

Suck it, Earth. I am still here.

Sorry folks, bad day all around.

Poetry collection

2007-09-10T08:47:00.000-04:00

I am putting together a collection of poems, consisting mainly of the poems that have appeared in this blog. The collection (still under developement) will live at

http://mysticblindfold.blogspot.com/

ANY critique, criticism or even nasty comments are very welcome.

A Proud Moment

2007-09-08T12:47:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it is very good to be me. Today, I went to a karate class taught by one of my students. I call him MY student, but in actuality he is a student in my dojo, but I have always felt that I was one of the factors that motivated him, and he is now an excellent martial artist, teaching his own class, and I am absurdly proud of him.

These emotions tend to sneak up on me. I have no real right to be proud of him, my contribution to his life has been mostly very small, yet still, going to his first class and seeing him teach it with confidence, mingling my own teaching techniques with those probably of his own creation, made me quite happy.