Flying Wing for each other...

From the "Life at My House" series... No. 42

A magic man and a major muse

Went out to lunch one day

And over the tea and strumpets

One heard the other say

"Sweetheart we've a lot of power

In how these children think,

They who live within the walls

Their shamans twist and shrink

Until the little darlings crouch so low

In misery and drink

Crying for the faith they lost

Before they learned to think...

So lover shall we take a hand

In helping them to see

That all the things they're pining for

Are generally quite free?

Should we put it on the street

And dare the merchant man

To try and claim a copyright

On verse pen’d God’s own hand?"

*chuckle*  If I were to allow vanity more than 50 milliamp to work with I might come to the conclusion this poem was a tiny bit precognitive... and no, I'm not going to explain.

Concerning Steers, Queers, and the Catholic Clergy...

For more than a few years the debate has raged:  is it nature or nurture sets the most basic attitudes and orientations of humanity?  Is it genetics or upbringing that ultimately defines who we are, what we become?  I’ve never officially taken a side in the debate, I’m in the same position as the combat correspondent who gets close enough to the action to hear things flying by his head, but no, the pistol riding in my camera case is strictly for looters.  I’m just documenting the battle, not really taking part in it.  There was an interesting little firefight crossed my perception the other day, and it resulted in a small but potent tidbit of a thought I’d like to share with you.

IF (huge little word that one is!) there is some degree of validity to the nature side of the argument THEN there are some interesting commonalities created between rather unlikely components of society.  Consider what the three groups named in the title have in common.  What do the Steers (voluntarily childless hetero) and the Queers (homosexual) and the Catholic Clergy (celibate) all have in common?  They do indeed have something in common, as a matter of fact what they have in common is an error that could have destroyed an entire timeline, an error I first heard of concerning the awesome Ambassador Spock back in his youth when he served as science officer aboard a Federation starship.

Spock was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact from a time warp.  Well, to be more precise he was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact into its’ own time returning from such an adventure, there are always the legends concerning Leonardo DaVinci.  In the episode a twentieth century human ends up spending a few days aboard the twenty third century Enterprise.  He was a prime specimen of his vintage, he was the fighter pilot who had gotten entirely to good a look at the massive Enterprise fighting her way back into orbit from a dangerously low dip into the atmosphere, they had to beam him out of his cockpit or let him return to base and report what he’d seen.

Intelligent, well educated, physically and psychologically fit, orphan and unmarried, few  connections to his time beyond those he served with in a calling where it is known that sometimes someone doesn’t make it home and no one ever really knows what happened to them... if ever there was a candidate to make a successful jump three centuries into his future he would have been your man.  They almost made the mistake of taking him with them as they attempted what most would have called suicidal, a deliberate attempt to drive a starship though such a torture folded form of space as to emerge three centuries into the future.  But then Commander Spock realized their almost fatal error in time to avert it, he realized why he had to plot a trajectory where they could return the pilot to his own time a split second before he’d first laid eyes on them, closing the potential that could have resulted in there being no future of their own for the Enterprise to return to, leaving the great starship and her crew orphans of the universes.  Did you see the episode?  Have you figured out what the three groups have in common with that fine work of fiction from four decades ago?

Of course.  The issue at stake is in genetics, the unique pattern of DNA that results in more than any one individual human, it equally defines every potential human timeline that might ever come of that pattern blended with another equally unique pattern.

Steers, queers, and the Catholic clergy... what do they share in common?  What they share is that they are all voluntarily sterile, they choose not to reproduce.  With their choice they are essentially casting their vote in the nature/nurture debate.  If they believed that nature had any  major influence on what a person turns out to be they’d never choose sterility of their own volition, it would be counterproductive to their prime agendas.

All three of the groups in question are, in point of fact, genetic black holes consuming for all the eternities the patterns of those who comprise the groups.  Regardless of how you might feel about the relative ethical and moral status of these people the fact remains: they are each and every one of them the utter end and destruction of who can say how many possible futures based not on their actions but on the potential deeds of those who might have come into existence from their contribution to the human genome. 

Seriously.  She was a nun in the seventeen hundreds, a beautiful woman who retreated from the psycho-sexual-social manipulations of her world to hide her beauty beneath a habit in a cloistered convent.  But had she not retreated, had she stood up to her father and married the man of her choice from her loins would have come the line from whence came the man who touched the heart of Adolph Hitler’s grandmother in her youth before the bitterness and the cruelty became a matter of her habit.  How different might our world be?

Anyway, like I said in the beginning of this post, I’m just a combat correspondent and I think it is time for me to move.  I’ve got a serious hunch where I’m sitting on this issue is right about where a serious skirmish is likely to go down since there’s a counter attack due any old time now.  Frankly I really don’t want to be this close to the action when that goes down, once a bullet is in flight it doesn’t give a damn how many possible futures might be decided by where it happens to hit.

The Third Reality of Man Chapter Three: Tools, Bartered and Borrowed...

If you ask a stranger “who are you?” several times in a row you're likely to notice a strange pattern.  Try it sometime.  Ask someone “Who are you,” and take note of where they find their answers.  For example, who are you?

“I’m John Doe.”

“No, that’s just the name your parents hung on you.  Who are you?”

“I’m a design engineer for an aircraft company.”

“No, that’s how you earn your money.  Who are you?”

“I’m an American.”

“No, that’s the nation you live in.  Who are you?”

“I’m a Conservative Christian Republican!”

“Sorry, but those are all political groups supporting your vision of society.  Who are you?”

“I’m me!”

“Of course you are,  but who is that?”

The length of the list will vary, person to person, but the majority will offer quite a list before they’ll offer something defined from within their own self, something they created of their own thought.  If you watch their eyes you’ll likely see them get angrier with each repetition of the question, and a quick hot anger at that. 

What is provoking their anger?  The usual reason for anger of course, which is fear of one form or another.  They're  frightened of the nakedness you're compelling on them.  Their anger is in response to being stripped of the symbols they've always used to define their self  within the context of their society, and even more critically in the context of defining their self… to themselves.  As each component of their self definition shifts domains from being part of their self  to being part of their social environment they feel the foundations of their identity becoming weaker and more vulnerable, less complete, less secure... of course they’ll be angry. 

Consider the more subtle implications of what you’ve just seen.  You asking such a question is perhaps a bit rude, but still essentially harmless, and yet you frightened them.  In point of fact you are most likely totally powerless within their life, have no potential to do them any harm at all, and yet you still frightened them into anger, a deep anger.  Why?  What fear has such a secret grip on them?

What they fear is an entity who does have power in their life asking that question.  Consider what might happen if that entity not only asked that question but demanded a correct answer?  What if the consequence of a wrong answer meant being denied the right to continue to claim that part of their self identity? I'll assert to you that is exactly what they fear, even though they don't recognize their fear for what it is. 

I will assert to you that each and any element of society John or Jane Doe uses as any portion of their self definition is in fact a collective entity, a discrete and separate  entity whose life is hosted on a set of individuals defined by a common thought or activity, some common element of belief in their lives.  Should such an entity as that ask them a such question it could have impact on their life, for they are dependent on that collective for a portion of the definition used in the cause of self definition, the  critical ability to recognize the self from among the multitude in the perspectives mandated by abstract intelligence.

Each of the individuals included in such a group who incorporates some collective  definition (grammatically expressed as “we”)  as a part of their own self  definition  (grammatically expressed as “I”) is in fact a node within that collective entity participating in a symbiotic relationship where the collective provides a critical component of self definition to the individual, the individual in return providing  continuance and cohesion to the collective in the form of compliance and loyalty to the common definition in preference to the other collectives offering common value.  Just as the lives of the collective entities are hosted on many individuals any given individual will host several if not many such collective entities in their self definition, an interwoven structure of balance and compromise between the components defining the personalities of both individual and collective. 

To understand the human dynamic in full is to integrate an understanding of the structures and interactions of these collective entities in parallel with an understanding of the individuals, for while they are totally interlinked and interdependent they are in fact each a unique life form struggling for survival within their respective environments.

In that the collective entities are derived from, and composed of, individual humans many of their life functions are in fact analogous with each other, for both must meet the same three primal demands of life.  Since both are living entities both must procure sustenance, both must provide security, and both must arrange for procreation since both are mortal life forms that suffer attrition to biology.  There are many comparisons between the individual human and the collective entities created by the humans' answer to the challenges of hosting both imagination and an abstract intelligence.

In point of fact they are constantly trading with each other, borrowing or bartering to acquire the resources required for their respective survival.  Even a short contemplation of the thought will give a bewildering surplus of events to stand as examples.  In fact, even a short examination of the modern world can be confusing to the point of traumatic for the rate of exchange between the two life forms has been accelerating exponentially for approximately the last quarter of a century, which will be the focus in Chapter Four of this series, "Awakenings in Utero…"

…to be continued…

for convenience all essays in this series are collected on the page titled

"The Third Reality of Man"

On the Tour... like us?

The sixty four thousand millinea question might be "just how many branches of humanity have had reason to establish a tour, of one sort or another, to keep track of the children of colonists lost into the immensity of space?" 

All in the Family...

This post began as a comment I'd intended to offer to Anne of Carversville on her post "The Cult of True Womanhood and Female Cardinal Virtues" .  As it ran out though the thought got a bit to large for a comment block, and while inspired by her posts on feminism actually ranged a bit far to be an appropriate comment for that environment.  So I'll leave the full thought here where she or any others who might have an interest may read the thought in full. 

The majority of my focus in such matters is understanding the ongoing evolution and interactions  of the collective entities, those social forces so omnipresent that with the aid of modern communication technologies (serving as synaptic connection between the individuals who function as neural nodes of the collective mind) they have for all intents and purposes achieved the status of a self aware sentience in their own right. 

The 19th century writings and publications mentioned in Anne's posts would be among the first glimmerings of such consciousnesses awakening, a common thought distributed by technology to be hosted by many individuals as a portion of their self definition.  Such individuals loyalty to and dependence on the definition provided becomes the life force of the collective entity, and like all living things a collective entity must, first and foremost, assure its' own survival.  From that understanding it isn't so very hard to see how the irrational assertions printed to chastise any woman who ventured beyond the boundaries of the prescribed definition would be evidence of the collective entity using technology to defend its' host base from a competing collective. 

Of course ceReligion, the underlying authority cited in the  "Cult of True Womanhood" was undoubtedly the first and still among the most powerful of the social constructs to evolve into this new life form.  Among the collective entities ceReligion would have to qualify as Mother Eve, the original source setting the template for all who evolved from her lineage.  What Anne’s post brought to focus for me was the thought of parentage among the collectives, the linear descendents that in their maturity become allies, or competition, with the original collective for the same group of hosts.

The “Cult of True Womanhood” is an ideal example of such parentage. From the content of Anne’s post it would seem the same demographic of women who at one time were most likely to embrace the cult were in later generations the same women who would form the core of the Feminist movements. The transition from ceReligion's "Cult of True Womanhood" powered by the promise of heaven to ceFeminist's self willed existence powered by the thought of independence from any need for patriarchal justification makes an interesting case study.

At this point ceFeminism is a fully mature and powerful collective, many generations old and well defined.  Many women form a major portion of their self definition in structures defined as feminist thought.  For significant numbers of women what religion was feminism now is... the primary source of the vocabulary they use to define themselves to themselves.  How the women who host ceFeminism as their primary self definition fare as the collective continues to evolve will tell a great deal about the life cycle of a collective entity.  It will be interesting to see how ceFeminism responds when her daughters begin to challenge for primary control of the hosts.  It will be interesting to see if ceFeminism will follow the example set by her mother ceReligion and attempt to widen her definition to allow her to dominate rather than guide the lives of the men folk, as ceReligion did in the latter half of the twentieth century bartering her influence in the political arena as a means of shoring up a shrinking host base, or if ceFeminist will ally herself with the younger entities her life enabled and accept a position of lesser power but more stable tenure among the hosts.  It will tell a great deal about what kind of woman ceFeminist really is.

The Fashion of Freedom...

I'm currently doing something I very rarely do, to wit browsing the offerings on a fairly major fashion blog.  Fashion is something that is a non sequitur in my life, I'm about as far removed from that world as it's possible to be.  But fashion is a major power player in many people's lives, sets attitudes, defines directions, and as a philosopher I can't let the person I am limit the scope of my thought concerning the rest of the world. (ok, that one's a keeper, her eyes don't look like the others, and the hat is cool...kieiping a copy of a magazine cover… omg, is this stuff contagious?)

 

 

Anyhow, what I'm noticing most is a serious dichotomy between the primarily feminism inspired text and the commonalities in what seems to be reflected in the model's eyes, the message riding out to the world on their glance.  The feminist dialog is all about woman as a free creature, self willed, self reliant, responsible for her own actions and her own fate, and yet to my eyes the ladies in the pictures are usually projecting some mixture of a thought formed on a line running between the pathos of "help me, help me please, I'm being crushed by this endless meaningless charade"  and  the irresponsible arrogance of "I can do as I damn well please because you can't see me, I'm invisible, I'm safe, all you can see are my clothes." 

Seems like a pretty damn good jump between the two, the attitudes of feminism and the attitudes of fashion.  Yea, the kind of a jump even old Evil Knieval would have thought twice about.  Makes me wonder if fashion has become the foil of feminism, makes me wonder if the feminists of the world are totally exploiting fashion, and the women who are the slave victims of fashion, as the ultimate negative example of what feminism says a truly liberated woman is supposed to be all about.  I mean really, how can a woman feel herself a free and liberated creature if all society has to do to enslave her thought is have someone say "this is how you should look" and she is compelled by a lifetime of compliance into overhauling her wardrobe?  Hmmmm...

But then again, I don't suppose the jump between fashion and feminism is any more severe than the jump between the old male establishment's desire to marry a virgin so her ignorance will allow him to keep a veteran lady of the evening for his mistress.  Looks to me like the two contradictions run a very, very similar wave-form and polarity, all things allowed for.  People.  Give me a hatful of hot nitro glycerin, I know what to do with that.  But the contradictions society impresses on people are substantially less stable, and a whole lot trickier to work with. Oh, well.

Mitt Romney is who Dwight Eisenhower was worried about…

Social Recon Droid
by CDM.MMX

The first presidential debate of the 2012 election is in the history books.  I watched most of it, read all of it, and my conclusion?  Romney is the antithesis of what a genuine conservative is all about. 

Just for the record, I don't really subscribe to the established political stereotypes and so I call myself a pragmatic idealist.  In other words, do the most good you can with the resources you have to work with.  That's do the most good mind you, not do the most good for this group or that group, but just the most good across the board.  An attitude closer to good parenting than the conventional template of governing.  This usually puts me leaning a bit more towards the conservative side than the liberal, but not this year.  Romney doesn't represent what I call a conservative approach, I find him just an echo of the radical evil that exploited the internal naiveté of the conservative segment to attempt an economic rather than military coup on the United States of America.  The Republican's are not fielding a conservative candidate this year.  Their man is as radical as they come, in radical denial of reality if you want it defined.  In point of fact the actions and attitudes of President Obama come much, much closer to a genuine  conservative stance than any of the half formed, undefined pie in the sky emotional  euphemisms being offered by Romney. 

If I were an old school liberal I'd most likely be rather upset with President Obama, after all, all he is promising is that with forethought and diligence it is possible for America to pull itself out of the hole left in our history by an almost successful attempt to convert the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the global corporate establishment being used and misused as their  mercenary army.  He offers no miracle cures, no miracle programs, no glitz and glamour special effects on behalf of a few to blind the eyes of the many.  As a liberal President Obama is at best kind of mediocre.

But that is fine by me since I am not an old school great society liberal any more than I'm an obsolete soldier suffering the consequences of the victor's paranoia the world came to call the cold war. I find his pragmatic approach to restoring and maintaining the well being of the nation  quite in keeping with my own attitudes.  I think he's done a good job and see no reason at all to change managers at this point in time.  That is after all the job we hired him for, management. 

If I were being asked to elect a puppet king or an almost benign tyrant I'd vote for Romney, he'd be better suited to those jobs than would Obama, but thankfully those jobs aren't up for grabs, at least here in the United States.  I'm looking for a truly gifted manager, a finesse job blending fiscal wisdom and acute people savvy who can double in as an effective commander in chief.  That's the job of the President and there is no doubt in my mind President Obama is by far the better qualified.  He has my vote.  I'm willing to bet he'd get Ike's as well.  

Bad, worse, and despicable…

A kid shot himself in the head at our Junior High the other day.  Dead bang, took himself out ten minutes before the morning bell in a hallway in line of sight of the area where the cliques like to congregate.   Gave a lot of now very shocked kids their first real exposure to blood and violent death.  Movies just aren't the same.  My niece was around the corner from him at her locker, heard the gunshot but thought someone had popped a plastic bag in the cafeteria.  Maybe fifteen seconds later she turned the corner headed for class and got to good a look at the body, the spray and splatter on the wall.  Not something anyone needs, much less a fourteen year old kid.

Needless to say, she came home in a state of shock.  Her best buddy and I nursed her through the day as she rode across the waves of tears and horror as the shock wore off in stages.  The shock isn't fully gone, but it's fading, into the once every couple of days stage instead of once every couple of hours.  Tough kid, she's handling it very well.  She'll never forget what she saw, but I don't think it's going to be a lasting trauma, just a lasting sadness. 

That's the bad part.  A very bad thing, but still sooner or later almost everyone has to deal up close and personal with death.  It happens… a car crash, a shooting, a fight, sooner or later something shocking like that will happen and the living have to deal on the subject and then go back to living.  Like the saying goes, "they're history now."  The kids at that Jr. High are learning that lesson a lot sooner than they should have to. 

I'm going to keep a very close eye (and ear, and heart) on her for a while yet, but I'm not to worried.  Not for her.  But I am very worried for the kids who were not quite so close as to know the full and gory truth of the matter.  I'm worried for them because of what the damned grown-ups are doing.  That's the worse running into despicable part, the hip deep euphemistic hypocrisy flowing like a mud slide across the entire affair.  I watched the local evening news for a few minutes tonight, that was about all I could tolerate.  Watched the news media (damn them to perpetually inflamed hemorrhoids!) spinning plastic fantastic propaganda around the word-thought "school" to misdirect and overwrite genuine public concern, watched the sides getting picked out for the finger pointing political blame game, watched the kids who most desperately need the truth being shunted off to become victimized pawns as the surrogate psyches of the adults trying to white wash the facts into one form of political mileage or another (yea, three local stations, three networks, take your best guess as to which was playing which angle). 

Before all is said and done they'll probably do deep if not lethal damage to another fifty kids, and those kids will have to suffer a whole lot more than the kid whose unknown despair led him to end his own life.  At least he died quickly.  The others won't be so lucky, unless they take the same option he did.  And if they do?  There'll be no way to connect their deaths back to the initiating event, because after all, everyone did everything they could.  Yea, right.  They sure as hell did.  But it wasn't for the kids, that's for damn sure.

Sabotaged...

Yup, I was.  Blindsided. Teach me to make assumptions and not calibrate the instruments.  I do know better than that, at least in some environments.  The culprit shall remain unnamed until appropriate vengeance has been both executed and celebrated.  The point of the sabotage?  The *bleeeeepin* meat thermometer.  The confession?  The child (at breakfast) admitted one of her crew on a weekend sleepover stuck it into live flame to see how fast the needle would swing.  Several times, and it's mechanical.  At this point it's most likely about as linear as the bottom curve of a well shaped breast, and I ain't talking turkey.  Drat and phooey on it.  Down to the store where they sell such gizmos for another one.  I want some platinum dammit, a true RTD that checks it's own battery voltage and will read accurate to 1/100th of a degree, and that coarse only if they built a cheap circuit.  At this altitude water should boil at 211.85 or so, and I want a thermometer that will say so in so just so many numbers. 

Winners, Losers and Sphere of Empathy...

Sometimes it is the most obvious of things that escape being set into words.  But, sometimes even the most painfully obvious of things will trip, miss a turn, and you'll actually see what you've been looking at for literally years.  One of the things I've been overlooking tripped this weekend, I got a good look at it.  It's part of the human condition at such a low level, such a foundation factor in so many things I'll share it here, perhaps it will help someone else open an understanding of something they're looking at but having trouble seeing.

The title of this post is really kind of backwards, because the last term in the title needs a definition before this thought will make much sense, and that's the idea of the sphere of empathy.  The sphere of empathy, as I've come to call it, is a conceptual measurement from the realms of geometry applied to the emotional, a way to visualize and to a degree quantify and plot the emotional interactions between the various peoples of earth which might be summarized as "humanitarian."

Let me begin by asserting to you that "Humanitarian" is not really a mode of thought, not thought as a fully rational function, but is in point of fact a word describing an individual's spectrum of emotional response to the observed state of life of those who live within that individual's sphere of empathy.  Considered in this manner everyone is a humanitarian, everyone, where they differ is in the scope, the range within which they apply that word.  The most barbarian of them all, the most greedy, self serving, vile and vicious individual on the planet is still a humanitarian, and his definition of humanity, his sphere of empathy, consists of one individual… himself.  The rest of the world is outside his sphere of empathy.

On the other foot…

It's a very standard question I'm sure, standard world wide.  "What do you want for dinner?"  And of course worldwide the standard answer is usually "I don't have a clue, hadn't given it any thought."  Or words to that effect.  Until recently I'd always been the second voice.  Truth be told I was telling the truth, dinner was six or eight or twelve hours down the road, and between now and then there were dragons to deal with, of one sort or the other and shucks, I wasn't spending any thought on what I was going to eat for dinner, I was worried about not becoming dinner.  Food would be preferable to motor oil or ETBBA, but that was about as far as my thoughts went.  Generally by the time I made it to dinner I was really to tired to care.  But that was then, and this is now.  Now I'm the one asking, and compelled to a wry chuckle at myself (and others of my gender/role) for finding a bit of a "hmmmphhhh…" at the stock answer coming back at me.  Karma, particularly the instant variety, can be a bitch.  Oh well, food it is.

I'm now give or take two weeks into this "Mr. Mom" gig, and finding it an interesting comparison to the other things I've used to fill my days.  Name a trade and I've probably worked in that world for at least a few weeks, I used to change jobs every ninety days just to keep life interesting, back in the BC days when I was the only one I had to look out for, before the factory took me into isolation for a quarter of a century.  You can learn an awful lot bouncing crew to crew being strong back labor and a set of extra hands for the journeymen.  The gypsy days of my misspent and totally enjoyed youth when adventure was the unsung standard and boredom the enemy don't you know.  I'm coming to realize I covered a lot of turf in those days, I really did.   Only in my later years have I've realized just how much ground I did cover, and this Mr. Mom gig is tapping from virtually all of it.

Yea, the last bolt is tight (hopefully), there's oil in the pan, gas in the tank, all the odds and ends are clear of the rotating parts and someone says "contact!"  The starter kicks in, things start to turn.  A few seconds later there's a cough, things speed up, slow back down, two, then three coughs in a row, things are waking up… talk to me sweetheart, bring it to life… the guy on the throttle risks a bit of a pump shot, the guy under the hood brings the timing forward a bit to match… anyone who's ever brought one back up from a rebuild knows the scenario.  You don't want it to idle, you want it to roar, snap up to three grand or so and run in all those new parts before they have time to revolt and break.  You break 'em in like you want 'em to run.

That's about where I am with the Mr. Mom gig right now, except it's not new steel getting acquainted with old iron, it's a 14 year old child's old attitudes getting acquainted with new ways of doing things.  It's a rebuild on attitudes and expectations, attitudes on the world and attitudes about herself, her expectations about herself that I'm working on.  You look for different things, listen for different things when the job is turn a house into a home, turn a headstrong feral child in the general direction of a lady.   But hey, the idea is the same… bring it up quick, clean, don't let the old patterns linger on, seat it quick and solid.  Don't tell 'em, don't even show 'em, let 'em live the truth of the old saying "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." 

Tiss the Season...

Yup, it is.  The season of Podiatric Sex.  Yup, it's football time again.  Uooga booga.  Our gang gonna beat down your gang take all your food and females.  Drat.  Not that I mind the boys out knocking heads, what the whale, the young bucks do the same thing out in the woods.  You know, lock horns and wrestle so the does can decide who gets to father next year's fawn.  That's pretty stock stuff in nature.  But (you knew there was going to be a but…) what is not found in nature are the freaking fragging f*ing fans living on reflected glory, those identity challenged idiots flooding into town every other weekend or so hauling in mock malice and seasonally adjusted profits.  The  next four months are gonna suck… manic traffic, overcrowded everything, gas prices bouncing like bra-less whore on a trotting horse, drunk children of all ages howling at the midnight moon to show their politically prescribed loyalty to the tribe, the pack, the team.  What a needless nuisance.  Drat.  Double drat and damn.  It's football season again.

If I were as good as I'd like to be...



Whirl
by CDM.MMXII

 ...... I'd be able to animate the image, show the right leg flashing into the high kick that pulled back propels her into the pirouette, the shadows from the sailing veil setting curves across the soft flesh of gender, the ripple of dancer’s muscle as she bends from the waist through the second revolution, the plant and leap taking her out the right side of the frame.  But *sigh* I’m not that good yet, all I can do is imagine the power and grace of her motion, and maybe, just maybe, you can imagine it as well...

Once More into the breach...

I know, I know
by CDM.MMXII

A painting a bit off my usual styles (or attempts at style), but fairly pertinent to the news of the moment.  It fits.  I’ve taken on a final labor of love, playing Mr. Mom for my brother and niece, taking on keeping house and coaching homework and driving the taxi runs and... and... and you get the picture.  He’s a single parent running himself ragged trying to earn a living, someone needs to step in as backstop.  What the hell, it’s life where pretty much everything else has run down into shades of slow fade to black.  Truth be told it’s as much for me as for them.

Yea, I can do this.  I kept track of a fifteen, twenty million dollar chemical batch plant for a decade, worked warehouse and receiving and R&D and sundry such related things... how much harder can a kitchen be? (Any mom’s in the audience: keep yer mouth shut, please, I don’t want to know just how cold the water is, I’m already airborne and halfway to the drink...)  It’s still working time figured against batch scale to match load demand and all of it riding a (insert fifteen favorite obscene words) JIT inventory system... yea, I’ve been there before.  But I’d bet serious folding green dear old Mrs. Cleaver never used words like that to describe what she was doing.  I just wish Betty Crocker knew how to write a proper annotated SOP... translating is a, well, just say it bites fleas and barks at the moon.  Oh, well.

Today was the first day of school... dear God, do all those soccer moms actually have a driver’s license?  Judging by the chaos of freaking idiots around that Jr. High I’m not convinced they should be allowed on the road.  Ten minutes of wading the traffic and I was wishing I’d driven the big truck... heavier, more power, and sheet metal I don’t mind bending... I was ready to put some serious push on the pavement to make ‘em move.  Took thirty minutes to make six blocks, and that was just to get to where I could cut to the back streets and make some headway.  What a circus.  Thank goodness the kid will be riding the bus tomorrow.  He (the driver) gets paid to put up with the idiots.  I don’t.  But it does explain why they’re always advertising for drivers.

Of Pain and Painting...

Look Up Sweetheart, Look Up
by CDM.MMXII

Another reflex painting, just letting the feelings fall off my fingers and into the colors.  It is almost time to tell her story, such of it as I know.  Almost, but not quite yet. 

Suddenly numb, Uncomfortably numb...

I got my feet kicked out from under me yesterday, got totally blindsided by something I hadn’t even given a thought to.  I was packing up my big desk, emptying the drawers, clearing and cleaning getting ready to move the beast to its’ new home.  The job proceeded as such jobs usually do, the things used daily, a few of the ok, that’s where that went kind of finds, a yuk or two.  The usual. 

When the last drawer was empty I took a break, when I stepped back into the room afterwards something slammed into my mood like a two ton wrecking ball, left me spinning hard for the remainder of the night and into today.  Not down, not blah or blue or flat or angry, just numb.  It hit so hard I was totally numb so suddenly it was a bit frightening, really.  It took an effort that carried through the night into dreamstate, almost Escherville, to figure out what had happened.  I did it to myself, but I never saw it coming. 

Sometime this morning a question popped into my head... “How many convicts get released from prison, and then get a job where they get to take apart the prison they were incarcerated in?”  Not very many, that’s for damn sure.  But that’s what breaking down that desk was to my subconscious, it was taking apart where I’d been imprisoned for years.  I walked back into that room and got smacked by all the things I’d felt sitting in that corner, and all the things I knew I should have been feeling but couldn’t acknowledge, not then, not under the circumstances.  All the despair of watching my wife fade into bitter senility, all the anger, all the helplessness of being pinned in a corner to get beaten daily by her attitudes I’m now convinced were seeded on her by a pair feminazi lesbian grifters working her for money, pinned there to endure rather than break the promise I made with God for my witness.  Sorry bitches (NOT), I’m stronger than you gave me credit for. But then again, you really don’t know much about men.  All you know are the steers and queers.  I’m neither. You couldn’t make me help you validate all your hatred for anything male.  You wanted me to abandon her so you could add my story to your list of justifications for your way of life.  Didn’t happen.  Might have, you got close, but it didn’t.  God gave me a couple of genuine friends beyond the reach of your poison, you couldn’t quite turn my sentence into true solitary where you might have had a chance.  I owe the Almighty another effort on His behalf, because all things taken into consideration it’s beyond believing Alex and Leia and Ira and Irisha were a coincidence, finding them then and there is just to far beyond the laws of averages to be believed a chance encounter... examples of good women to set against the influence of bad women on my life.  No, that didn’t happen by chance.

 

Anyhow, I sat numb all night, started painting by force of habit, didn’t have a clue what I was trying to paint until it was finished.  It came out almost what I didn’t know I wanted to portray, almost, so I figured I might as well post it along with the story.  Last night wasn’t a very restful night’s sleep, but it was productive.  Now I know just how deep the damage goes, I’ve found the bottom.  It can be fixed.

Gonna be interesting to see what expression winds up on her face the next time I take a try at capturing an image of Malaguena.  Very interesting.

It isn't your time...



Until You See Her Hands
by
Cyranos DeMet

 


  Originally painted on a long lonely night many days ago, partially painted that is.  I refound the file cleaning up the hard drive ( I do a lot of digi-doodles that never amount to anything but wasted drive space, have to go through and cull them out from time to time), and with the theme for that great television show "Mash" hung in my head finished it this morning.  Have you ever heard the lyrics for that music?  If you have you'll fully understand the painting, and why it is titled as it is.  ( Suicide Is Painless, the theme to Mash... I recommend the Johnny Mandel version, it's on uTube, of course).

I'm not sure what happened to the image quality... it's lousy... someone/thing totally fubar'd the shading.  Oh, well.  What do you expect when the subject is suicide?

Sandhaisat...Prologue

All Rise...

"Has the jury reached a verdict?"

"We have, Your Honor."

"On the sole count of premeditated temporal murder in the first degree how find you?"

"We find the defendant guilty as charged."



Unneeded by CDM.MMXII

 Ok, I'm killing a lot of time.  Guilty as charged.  And you know what?  My conscience doesn't bother me at all.  It's my time dammit, what's left of it, and I'll do with it as I damn well please.  Thirty years of servitude, I figure if I've done the time I might as well do the crime.  So yea, I'm gonna kill a lot of time... painting, writing poetry, thinking up ways to do neat things like put a set of angel wings on a beautiful woman that not only work but look like they grew there, write on my stories, flirt with the pretty girls and in general enjoy whatever life might have to offer.  I've done my time, I've lived with the betrayals and the heartbreaks, the mockery of morality from the smug and the perverted, the usury and deceptions of the damned by any decent deity corporate establishment, the lies and hypocrisy of those who claim to speak for God himself.  I'll let someone else fuck the whole lot of 'em, I won't, I have no sins on my soul to deserve the likes of them.

It's my time now, and I don't give a damn what they say.

30 Doodle Street...



"Evita" by CDM.MMXII

 This is one of those posts that has nothing to do with anything, and everything.  A ramble.  The picture just sort of happened because a random grab into the music library brought up the soundtrack, the story, of Evita Peron and somehow that's what the story put into an image.  Sort of a surrealistic running out into psychedelic commentary and condemnation of materialism and ambition.   The panel is all colors, the figure more black than white and devoid of detail, just like the hearts of those for whom materialism has displaced humanity.  Boy howdy, like I'm the first to make that observation.

When I was young I was poor, much like Evita.  I always felt myself an outcast, lower class, isolated and alienated.  But I chose a different path than she,  I'm a lot closer to Che than Evita.  I survived, grew up, freed myself from the cult that had inflicted the misery, freed myself from the chains and contradictions, found my way back to a God of my own understanding, built my life literally from the shirt on my back and very little else.  I didn't do badly by myself, not really. 

But now none of that matters.  I'm drowning in crap, things, posssesions, and I feel more destitute than I did when I literally stole my dinner at times.  Things have never really held that much power in my soul, not really.  I'm fond of my stereo, but that's for the sake of the music and the emotions stored therein.  I like a good sipping whiskey at times, I can delight in a beautiful woman without her ever knowing I even noticed her.  The fact of the matter is I feel homeless these days, more homeless than the year I lived out of my field jacket.  The material never held much sway in me, any one place just a different place than the last one, no real biggy.  Home has always been a place in someone's heart, and I feel homeless.  It totally sucks.  Poor Evita.  I wonder if she felt like she had a home.

If you can't say something nice...

Paint a picture instead.

This one was inspired by a line in a song:

...from the wells of disapointment
where the women kneel to pray
for grace of God in desert here
and desert far away...

from "Democracy" by Leonard Cohen

I've had that song, mostly that line, stuck in my head for several days now.  It's becoming annoying.  I'd say I don't know why, but that would be a lie.  I know damn good and well why. 

Prisoner of Choice

The prisoner is not the one who chose, the prisoner is the one

whose every chance for choice

was set null  and void by the consequences of the first choice.

Corners...



Now You Know
by CDM.MMXII



There’s an old saying that relates to foresight in action... it goes “don’t paint yourself into a corner.”  Right.  You’re painting the floor, don’t paint yourself into a corner (where you’ll be trapped by your own wet paint).  Hmmm... that’s most generally good advice, and of course the idea of leaving yourself a route back out applies to a great deal more than the fairly rare case of actually painting the floor.

These days I’m thinking that is exactly what my culture has done though, I’m thinking we’ve allowed ourselves to be painted into a corner of our own making.  All of the liberations and libations, all of the profitable passions and ultimately pornographic compassion, all of the psychobabble bullshit addressing all of the politically correct angst and anxiety of the steers and queers and identity challenged alternate lifestyles trying to justify the sterility they’ve created?  I’m thinking those are nothing more than the wet paint locking several generations of American’s into a corner, where they must either wait for the paint to dry (aka, waste off a generation or two into the grave from old age, and neglect to put their story in the history books),  or walk out leaving tracks to advertise just how not bright we really were back in the day.

Stranger in my dreams...

To Cross a Desert of Dreams
by
Cyranos DeMet

She's starting to show up on a real regular basis, and that's beginning to bother me.  She's waiting for me somewhere, I'm sure of that.  But where?  At times I think she won't find me this side of mortality, and that is... unsettling.  She never feels threatening, not at all, in fact several times she's shown up to give warning of a threat, the kind of threats I used to face in Escherville.  But she's not a citizen of that place, I'm sure of that.  She's silent, smiles, feels warm and strong and benign, a friend.  Maybe somenight she'll tell me her name.  That would be nice, to know her name...

Giving it all away...

Yea, why not.  Might as well post them all.  I've given away everything else in my life, might as well give these away as well.  They'll have a better chance of being appreciated than most of what I've given away.

Spotlights and Spheres of Empathy...

There are a lot of ways a man can get his heart broke.  The most common of course is when he falls in love, overcommits the situation and ends up crying in his beer thinking he's hurt a lot worse than he really is.  That may be the most common, but that isn't always the most painful.  Sometimes you'll be walking along and have a perfect stranger catch you blindside with something that hurts like hell, although from a distance, and your choices are endure or diminish your own humanity to disable the hurt's ability to reach you. 

It happens to me more often than I like to admit, happened just last night.  No, it wasn't a beautiful woman wishing she could be seen for more than her beauty.  It was exactly the opposite, and worse, it was a homely woman wishing she could be seen for herself, wishing the spotlight wouldn't find her because of how she looked.  Kind of an occupational hazard for those who have an open heart, an open sphere of empathy.  Sometimes you really, really wish you didn't have to image all the data you recieve.

Bar-chord Lives, or something like that....

Just because I painted it doesn't mean I have a clue what it's about.... really.  Take your own best guess.

House of Cards...

There are times life feels so very much like a house of cards, each card leaning against the other in off-square corners, layer after layer stacked up on the feeble walls of belief or hope or assumption.  Trying to believe the best about people leaves faith a rather fragile construction when you get right down to it.  Let hope bring an error into a wall and the entire creation can collapse.  No earth shaking revelation, that, pretty much everyone has seen that one way or another.  Just one of those unhappier facts of life.

Even knowing it could happen it still happened to me just the other day.  I tried to believe the best, and got shown the worst.  My mistake.  This isn’t the first time I’ve had a bent card, a deformed and badly weakened card get way to deep in the pile, this isn’t the first time I’ve watched a house of cards fall.  Nope, not at all.  But this time it’s more than just fallen walls easily restored with a stronger straighter card in place of the weak one.  When things fell apart to some innocent error or random accident it isn’t so hard to forgive and forget.  But such wasn’t the case this time, there was no accident or error, no puff of breeze, no bump to the table.  I watched it shaping up, watched it forming, hoped I was wrong and had my hope betrayed.  What could have been noble proved out as deliberate and premeditated malice with greed for a motive.  If it had only been greed for money it would have been bad enough, but no, the truth goes far deeper than that.  I said I got shown the worst, and I wasn’t joking.  What the falling cards revealed was a lustful greed for power, a cold greed black and evil as any vampire villain from fiction exploiting the living to linger in the shadows of anti-life, the kind of evil that requires a continuous stream of victims.  What I saw was truly the ugliest side of what passes for humanity.     

Which brings me to the point of this post.  Exposure to that kind of evil is like exposure to a great many other toxins, the toxin will often linger in concealed forms to poison later times and places and peoples.  Such evil leaves anger and bitterness and vanity in its’ victims, the toxins of the soul that create the very weaknesses that open the way for evil to jump from life to life like a contagious disease.  Those contagions are the deepest damage done by even a brief encounter with genuine evil, the contagions left behind what must be guarded against most closely after exposure to such a carrier.  Failing to guard yourself against what the evil left behind is to invite the evil to make you its’ new host.  Such a carrier is what the falling house of cards revealed to me, I’m having to keep a very close watch indeed on the state of my soul, the state of my inner defenses.  The degree of evil I encountered demands acute vigilance to limit the damage done to no more than the superficial things of money and a fallen house of cards once built on the hopes of what might have been. 

Oh, well.  Since the house has fallen might as well play some poker.  Folks, the game is seven card stud with nothing wild being as how the jokers just burned themselves.