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. 

The Third Reality of Man Chapter Two: "Me, We, and Thee"

It is a fact of life the human has the same requirements for survival as do all life forms:  the need for sustenance, for security, for procreation.  For the animals these needs are quite straightforward, the literal things directly associated. For the animals instinct and environment govern the competition to fill those needs, but such is not the case for the humans. 

Human intelligence has set perception and imagination as new players alongside instinct and environment in the competitions for survival.  For all that it is an obvious observation it still needs made: because his environment includes abstract imaginings communicated the life of a human is at least one order of magnitude more complex than any of the other creatures sharing the planet with him. 

Further, the human capacity for abstract thought communicated enables a single human to form alliances with multiple collectives beyond those defined by nature, alliances beyond the troop or pride as would be seen in the other animals.  The human will form alliances with several unique arrangements of differing individuals according to a common thought or imagining, specialized structures evolved to enhance the cooperative efforts aiding the cause of survival.

I will assert to you these groupings, whose sum is known as society, provide to their members aid in more than survival within the physical reality, they also serve as the foundation for survival in the inner reality created of abstractions and imaginings in ways not yet fully understood. 

Among the deepest and most profoundly life altering consequences intelligence burdened on the human is the ability to perceive the common physical reality from a perspective other than first person singular.  To perceive reality from a perspective removed from the self opens to human perception a vision very likely unique to the human: the possibility to see your own self among the multitude as others might see you and be compelled to ask the most uniquely human question there is: who is that?   

Consider that question if you will.  When the question is set in the first person it instantly takes the more familiar form of Who am I ? 

But how to answer that question?  It is not such a simple problem, and nature provides no clues. Perhaps there are other creatures who also ask that question, but that possibility remains undefined for lack of communication between the species. To the best of my knowledge only the human must define for himself an identity unique enough to recognize self  from other  within the internal reality expanded into the third person perspectives made possible by intelligent imagination.  The question of self recognition, self identification is as unique a marker of humanity as exists, separating the human from the other creatures sharing the planet with us. 

I will assert the challenge of building an identity robust enough to be recognizable from any perspective available to the abstract inner reality is the single most powerful force empowering evolution in shaping both society and the inner structure of the individuals who are the component elements of those societies.

Even the most casual glance across human history shows the impact of the ongoing quest to satisfy the question of self identity. From within the perspective of this question the dividers of race and culture, nationality and religion, the various social classes within the larger definitions are revealed as little more than constructs in the cause of facilitating an acceptable answer, for it is from these artificial divisions the majority will derive the symbol set used in the cause of self definition.  

Such symbol sets are the one critical function nature does not, and cannot, provide to any species ascending from instinct into abstract intelligence.  Within the animal kingdom there is no demand for such, only the presence of imagination empowered by abstract intelligence creates need for such symbolisms in the struggle for survival.  Where nature is concerned the humans are very much on their own in answering the question they quite literally invented.

It should be no surprise that when faced with this new challenge the humans returned to their first source of strength.  The humans ascended to dominance on the strength of cooperation within and between the various collectives enabled by symbolic communication, it is to those same collectives the humans turned to meet this new challenge threatening their mental rather than physical survival.  They did as they had done before, and in so doing opened the way for evolution to resume its’ work.

With what has gone before set as both foundation and anchor it is time to move beyond observations distilled from history and deal with humanities current state of affairs.  Just how has mankind fared in his quest to live in the divided reality of abstract imagination?  What tools, what tactics have been employed?  And most critical of all, what are the long term consequences for the human race of such tools and tactics considered in the context of evolution’s efforts?   Such thoughts are next on the agenda in Chapter Three, “Tools bartered and borrowed...”