Chapter Eight: What goes on Behind Closed Doors

“There are things known,

and there are things unknown,

and between are the doors of perception.”

                                                                 __Aldous Huxley

There is, also, a great old country song revolving around how no one really  knows what goes on behind closed doors. Regardless of which quote fits the moment for the collective entities a great deal depends on no one looking through the sort of doors Huxley was talking about. For the CE's even more than a wandering lover keeping those doors of perception firmly closed is an absolute necessity for survival.

Why would that be so?  Why would reality dictate that the humans remain ignorant of the relationships between the CE's and themselves?  When the situation is examined in depth several very good reasons present which impact on both sides of the equation.

To open this chapter I'll ask you to contemplate that in objective fact the relationship between any given CE and the individual humans (who are component nodes hosting its' life-force) is a very straightforward exchange of value: the CE acquires sustenance from the individuals in the form of their loyalty, their compliance and enactment into physical reality the definition which is the foundation of any given CE, in exchange that CE provides to the individuals some component of the self definition which is absolutely critical for a human's psychological survival within a complex society. Quite an easily seen symbiosis. So simple and so easily seen as to be easily ignored.

However like most things that seem simple and straightforward when some minor degree of asymmetry or conflict created by that simplicity gets amplified by it's very ubiquitous nature then what is found is a complexity of daunting proportions.  Witness that all of life is crafted from just six self replicating di-nucleic acids arranged in various patterns of complexity.

It is in that complexity of minor conflicts between what defines and separates similar CE's one from another that the CE's compete for survival and dominance. It is in the foibles of the human personality … the ego and the insecurities, the arrogances and the fears… interacting with those differences where the CE's find the tools and the weapons of their struggle for survival. 

A CE is literally a social creature, and life as a purely social creature is rough.  The situation is complicated enough when only the respective CE's are aware of the full dynamic in play.  Let any significant percentage of the human nodes become fully aware and the individual psychologies would be influenced by that complexity.  The situation would almost instantly becomes quite untenable from the perspective of both players.

Since there will be several CE's defining any individual human any conflict or contradiction between those CE's (particularly if the node has fully internalized them) assures those contradictions are echoed into that individual's psychological structures. Should the node be aware it was the CE's that provided him not only the components of his self definition but equally the source of the conflicts that trouble him the conflict count would go up significantly, particularly as the factors of human physiological emotion enter the mix.

If there are too many contradictions to resolve the individual will suffer, as will the associated CE's.  How could it be otherwise?  From the fate of one the fate of the other is derived, as one fares so fares the other.  It is not such a stretch to understand that the ultimate well being of both sides of the symbiosis is quite dependent on minimizing the incompatibilities, and the first and simplest tactic to accomplish that end is for the nodes to remain ignorant of CE's in the first place.

  And yet, such a thought just introduces another layer of complication into these exploration. By the definition offered each CE would…  just as does it's humans hosts who set the original template of their lives… have the instinct for personal survival, not to mention an ego self, and self importance that mandates the desire to grow and become stronger. 

From the CE's perspective these things are a serious conundrum: those differences which create the dangerous conflicts within the common host are, to them, the very differences that define them as unique living creatures.

For a, any, CE to achieve a significant degree of security would demand that  any moral or ethical differences (at the host level)  between that CE and the foundation definitions of the other CE's present (within their common host) had been eliminated.  The net effect would be to effectively collapse the society of Collective Entities to its' most primal levels… a population diminished several orders of magnitude.  By example, ceReligion might survive, but ceProtestant and all of her daughters most certainly would not.

At the time of this writing it is a very open question just how much of this conundrum is actually acknowledged by the CE's.  Just how self aware are they?

 Judging by the behavior of social forces which show every evidence of defining a major CE they are just as resistant to entertaining such concepts as are the humans whereon their lives are hosted, and for reasons that would run closer to parallel than otherwise. It may well be the humans are not the only creatures hiding behind doors of perception kept most deliberately closed. 

If there is truth to such a thought then another set of concepts must be introduced into the relationship between the humans and the CE's, the recently technology-awakened societies:  what happens if the Collective Entities inherit any or all of the psychological deformities which plague the human hosts from whence they derive their template of existence? 

A terrifying possibility to be examined in the forthcoming chapter "Round, like a circle in a spiral…"

...to be continued...

Child's Play, or …

Social Recon Droid

…they can't see the forest for all the trees in the way. 

Take this for a fact: way more than half of what created the wide awake millennial snowflake mandatory head-case set degrading the American culture has to do with the play they knew growing up. Or, to be a bit more succinct, the lack of real play they suffered being as how their play was usurped and ruined by damaged adults taking part in the war Empire Academia's Kingdom of Psychology (EAKP, for brevity's sake) prosecutes against any element of humanity not addicted to their power play of pathos perpetuated.

An adult cannot play with a child. Not really. Play is the child interacting with other children at a child's level of understanding. Only the child knows, certainly intuitively but still an understanding, his exact position on the multiple curves of personal maturation involved with achieving a sane and stable adulthood, ergo only the child can accurately pick where and what and with whom to play. 

Any adult who attempts to "play" with a child brings an adult's level of understanding, and that understanding destroys the child's opportunity to test and integrate what has been learned to date. The more the adult attempts to interact at the perceptual level of the child the more false and ingenuous the adult appears to the child. 

A fact, long established: children will by instinct do a better job of observing the adult (as an example to model) than the adult is capable of doing where the child is concerned! The child always has and always will notice the falsehood, and the consequences are obvious, and inevitable. 

The child is left to conclude that the state of adulthood is undesirable, it is to be deceptive and disingenuous, parameters in direct contradiction of any and every ethical foundation offered by any of the world's cultures. Of even more damage potential the child is likely to conclude they themselves must be damaged and defective in some manner because they do not understand why the adults have brought a deformed demeanor to their play and assume, as an example seen, that they must attempt the same!!! 

Pathos perpetuated, much to the power and profit of EAKP's campaign to rule the world by forcibly exporting their lens of mandatory mental illness as the foundation state of the human condition. 

This one? This one is very actionable. Counterattack by acting politically to take the schools away from EAKP, teach skills not attitudes, and kick the kids out on the playground three times a day for a total of two hours a day. Observe from a distance for safety, but do not intervene in their play. That's theirs, and they desperately need it.

An Accidental God... or...

 Many a true word is spoken in jest.  I'm not normally one to pay much attention to cute little panels published on the internet, normally they share a lot in common, to much in common, with some carcass off-gassing the politically correct toxin that ended up killing the creature. But when one is walking along practicing modern mindfulness by being grateful for being up-wind of what is rotting on the downhill downwind side of the path?  When fate sees to it that right about then something hits ignition temperature and all that reeking methane becomes a fireball throwing a flaming face into the sky right through the hide of the steer who died a week ago?  Well, yes. That is something to take note of, file it under "omens I've witnessed" category and keep right on truckin'.  This little psuedo-meme landed in that category things tying up a huge loose end pointing out an obvious I'd overlooked.  

For some time now I've been preaching the idea that Empire Academia's Kingdom of Psychology (EAKP, for brevity's sake) is a major and quite covert force operating in the political affairs of mankind, a force playing both ends against the middle, a force which has an agenda of its' own in play.

It's obvious EAKP is moving into the social power vacuum that was created as the religions, Christianity in particular, began to lose their potency in the affairs of men. It is equally obvious that EAKP desires the immense social power Religion once commanded… the power to grant or withhold a universally recognized social certification of acceptably moral behavior. Watch the world with eyes that see it is quite plain the Empire does not desire to be the power behind this throne, or that throne, they want power over any and every throne.

Not hard to see, and not an acceptable solution in my book. Fools we'd be to trade Peter for Paul.  Paul never met Jesus, but he was steeped in the mechanisms of Roman civic and political organization, he was a tax collector the way I heard the story.  He'll stick to what he knows, just like EAKP's shrinks, whose forte is understanding mental illness, are showing every indication of trying to rule the world viewed through their original lens.

A serious allegation I'm quite willing to defend, and yet measured against my own standards as gm-ct a thought I've never quite signed off as complete. From time to time, in this scenario or some other,  when I've thrown that thought into service it still returned a bit of that… itch… that indicates an incomplete thought, a thought with one angle left open and weak.  As is usually the case when such itches show up the cause is something inside the self, some blind spot bias shadowing the needed line of thought.

Mea culpa, and on more than one front. You have to confess your mistakes if you're to claim your victories, and the hole I'd never filled involves how the general public could be duped into  allowing such a trade-Peter-for-Paul power play in the first place. That never made sense to me.  

To wit? If superstition is truly fading then why do they accept what Empire Academia  offers, which to an objective view displays all the same properties as the Religions? Particularly since it's not hard to see that accepting the Empire's claims is still an act of faith… there are ninety-nine people who believe in science for every person who actually understands any part of the science the others believe in. How does this work?  It's obviously working, but how?  

Religion bases its' authority on the concept of a, any, God or Deity, and in point of fact those entities are spectacularly absent everywhere but in the thoughts and judgment parameters of a believer.  Through EAKP's lens though this must translate somewhere close to believing the propensity for delusional thinking, magical thinking they call it, is very widespread.  

Eh, probably… but moot to the point because as the meme shows?  There is a force already up and running to take the place of the God(s) those joining the Empire had to reject in the process of rejecting the Religions the Empire competes with. 

Yup.  The issue of human beings needing to believe in something bigger than their own lives to avoid all those painful philosophical positive feedback loops of pure humanism was neatly resolved.     And it didn't take EAKP two shakes of a donkey's tail to realize that they had the inside track.  That's what the internet is for.  After all, The Internet as it is called did escape from Empire Turf back in the day, Empire Academia selling to the United States military to be specific.  EAKP was there then,  of course they were and that means they had a very good chance of understanding how to play it to their own advantage right from the get go.  Kind of resolves a couple of developmental chronology issues, you know?  Yup.  It fits.

And, on a slightly more sarcastic and maybe even comical note?  From that same little meme it is pretty obvious the new religions forming around the new God are already fragmenting into divisions, Protestant and Catholic as it might be called.  Only took a couple of decades where in Christianity it took over a thousand years.  The new God and affiliated Religion is obviously not nearly as stable as the one it proposes to replace.  How do I know this?  Because I was taught to pray (to that deity I DO NOT pray to) in the name of the Modem, the Router, and the Holy Packet… not the Holy Signal.

To those who are closing in on the causes…

I say to you as was said to the aerial warriors of yesteryear… God's Speed, and Good Hunting! I take to my keyboard with equal amounts of hope and fire in my heart to return to the subject of autism. 

 

I read a research paper today that adds solid information to a subject I spoke about in a previous post, "When Theories Collide," originally published eight years ago. In that post (moved to display just below this one) is contained the first whispers to reach my ears concerning the herbicide RoundUp and a correlation between its' usage and the incidence of autism in the population dwelling in, or fed by, the regions where the usage was heaviest. In that post I said "The only thing missing of course is the actual mechanism by which an herbicide used in commercial agriculture is driving a psychiatric disorder that is, for all intents and purposes, still a total mystery to science." 

 

That mystery is evaporating to reveal the full and ugly truth of this matter. The article (link below) builds a solid case of research based causal reasoning detailing the multiple paths by which the now all but ubiquitous compound glyphosate (active ingredient of the now defunct brand name RoundUp, but a compound still in heavy use world wide) attacks one of the most key chemical balances in all of nature, including of course the human condition. The paper does a fine job of detailing the multiple mechanisms by which the herbicide has caused the increases in the incidence of autism related disorders. 

 

Glyphosate is what is called a persistent chemical, it builds up in the ecosphere and is difficult to remove even with the best of intentions. If all of America's farmland were declared an EPA superfund site, money no object, it would still take decades to remediate this disaster. The research presented reveals glyphosate as the initiating villain of a sequential set of events running through both the microbiome of soil chemistry and the animal kingdoms, events that converge in the human food chain to initiate several different forms of multi-generational deformations in the production and utilization of the critical brain chemical Dopamine, deformations that echo down the entire chain of interlinked and interdependent chemistries which must be in proper balance to make full and functional sanity possible. 

 

My hope is that with the understandings achieved in the last eight years it might be possible to craft therapies to mitigate the harm done to a multitude of innocent lives. Perhaps, several lines look promising. 

 

Approaching this subject from the perspective of the fire in my heart which burns on behalf of the autistic boy who is my third roommate, the boy I've been mentoring for four years now watching him fight for his sanity and suffer the consequences of what that article speaks of? From that perspective this one is too big for any class action lawsuit. Simple money is petty well below even being considered. A campaign of retaliatory revenge comparable to The Wrath of God's war on the Nazi war criminals might be appropriate… and yet still futile. Those afflicted now and deep into our future would still be afflicted. It will have to be forgiven, it really cannot be avenged. 

 

But that said, it is bloody well time and high time to relentlessly pursue the ultimate origins of this problem… the unbridled arrogance of Empire Academia teaching their students to assume they are, by reason of their degrees, entitled to casually tinker with the foundation building blocks of nature! Money from some corporate donor/patron does not, and cannot, justify teaching that such extended and unrecoverable risks can ever be put under the command of corporate greed and rationalizations. 

 

It is time to rein them in hard, and arrange by public referendum federal legislation to assure that from here on, in the eyes of the highest law of the land, they will carry equal responsibility with the corporate entities who sponsor them for any and all consequences of what they taught inflicting harm on the human condition. Period, end of sentence. They have skated away from their share of the responsibility one time too often. 

To the article mentioned:

https://isom.ca/article/dopamine-excess-and-or-norepinephrine-and-epinephrine-deficiency-in-autistic-patients-due-to-prenatal-and-or-postnatal-deficiency-of-dopamine-beta-hydroxylase/

When Theories Collide...

==originally published 6/26/14===
*brought forward by new evidence/experience
pertinent to the subject involved...*

I may well be full on full bore crazy.  If I’m not then there’s some heavy, heavy things in play that will define the future of the human race for the foreseeable future.  Nope, no bullshit, the rosebushes are going to have to scrounge for dinner, I’m serious.  Please, please read what follows with an open mind, this thought needs to get out there.

The first of the two theories began a few years back believe it or not from talking with some ladies who shared a few things in common.  These women were all full mature, fifty plus, they were all mothers, and they were all veterans of, if not living in, lesbian relationships after having raised their children and buried the man of their life.  These were not aging porno stars, nor were they man haters, they were simply good women who towards the end of their lives shared their life with another woman of like kind.  They were interesting company, theirs’ an interesting perspective on the world.

Among the things I was allowed privy to at one point was a facet of their love lives they were discussing, a unique state of being they chose to call “the erotic core.”  All of the ladies were educated, several professional writers, and yet they still struggled to find words to describe what they seemed to agree was a common phenomenon in their lives related to, triggered by, and yet quite possibly transcending the sexual.  After listening for a while I volunteered that the closest thing I’d ever heard to what they were discussing were efforts by women to describe the mother-child bond of early infancy when the little one’s life was still totally interlinked with and supported by momma.  I put forth the theory ( full expecting to get some textual equivalent of that look that means “just how could you  possibly have a clue?”) that perhaps what they were experiencing was some psychic or spiritual mechanism of that bonding function reawakened by the tenderness they carried for their lover/companion expressed in the intense and yet essentially lust-less (from a social perspective, equally, from a reproductive perspective) sensuality they shared between them.  But I didn’t, what I got back was a fully considered “that almost makes sense.”

And it does almost make sense.  If there is one time that to evolution’s perspective it makes total sense for there to be a telepathic function it is between mother and child in the later stages of pregnancy and the early stages of infancy.  After all, the first thing the little one has to learn how to do is work one of the most complicated and subtle of things known to the human experience: his own brain.  It makes total sense for the mother to help with that process, to borrow a few terms from the digital world help with the formatting and configuration operations if you will, far to complex for direct perception by mother or child, but rewarded for both by that warm glow everyone with eyes and even half a heart can see. 

It would take years, decades, of work to put a body of scientific research under such a theory, but still it is a valid theory based in causal logic.  For the sake of this essay please hold that thought if you will in a buffer labeled “if this be true then the following is possible...” and consider what follows from the perspective that there is a telepathic function to the human condition, a critical function normally limited to the first few months of awareness that operates essentially at the firmware level many, many developmental levels below what would be called personality.

This theory-thought has been floating around in the back of me brain for several years now, not the sort of thing to demand a lot of attention, just leaving it active looking for evidence that might fit.  The other day something broke my horizon that pulled this theory back front and center with a bang.  Hopefully not a bang to be followed by a whimper.

Monsanto: the international monster corporation of the agro-chem world is the cornerstone of what yanked my attention back into this domain.  Monsanto markets the herbicide Roundup^® that is in ever heavier service in the agricultural industries trying to feed a seven billion plus and still growing world population.  Theirs’ is a noble work, needed, and yet not without heavy risk... anytime you start tinkering with mother nature the risks go up exponentially the deeper you get with your tinkering, and Monsanto is playing deep enough to be full on scary... it takes years, generations, sometimes centuries to have enough data to fully understand the full consequences of some things, but sometimes only a tenth of that time span for some error to have a catastrophic and permanent impact on the general reality.  Case in point?  The current problem with greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It took well over a century for that relationship to come clear. You get the picture.

In the last months data has been surfacing linking the usage density of Roundup^® with the incidence of children born impacted by and afflicted with what is called the Autistic spectrum of psychiatric anomalies and disorders in the regions involved with, or fed by, the areas where the usage was heaviest.  The numbers are solid, the linkage well on its’ way to being a proven thing.  The only thing missing of course is the actual mechanism by which an herbicide used in commercial agriculture is driving a psychiatric disorder that is, for all intents and purposes, still a total mystery to science.  Even the best of the head-shrinkers don’t know enough about the actual mechanisms of how the human brain really works to do more than guess and go look concerning what might be causing the shifts and skews observed in reality.  It’s far, far easier to determine what is happening than to get to a bottom line why it is happening, you know?

Among the multitude of things that appear in far larger numbers among the autistic than in the general population are what are called “the Indigo Children,” those individuals who are often heavily afflicted by the autism, and yet display abilities that really do defy full understanding in causal logic.  For all of human history there have been those few individuals whose abilities history has never been able to explain... Nostradamus,  Edgar Cayce and the like... where it was obvious they were tapped into, able to access, an information stream not available to others.  In short, the statistical anomalies that were (and are) the true psychics of the world.  Obviously these individuals are of human origin, and equally obvious is the fact that their abilities are a latent potential of the human genome.  In short, they were mutations that were fully functional, but didn’t breed true.

The thing about mutations is that the more of them that occur, particularly involved with some one specific function in life, the greater the chances that a few of them will breed true, or set an ascending recessive into their descendents (essentially the same thing, just delayed) to reappear in ever greater numbers as the generations go by particularly if they interbreed with others who equally carry the same recessive.

This is the point where the second theory came into being, the one I perceived as being on a full on and terrifying collision course with the first theory I proposed in the beginning.

It is becoming known that the mutagenic Roundup^® (yes, it is a mutagen, engineered to  genetically modify the weeds to be sterile... known fact) is the driving factor in the wholesale jump in the number of individuals born within the autistic spectrum.  It is equally known that Roundup^® is being sold in ever greater amounts exposing an ever larger percentage of the population.

Thirty, forty years ago the number of those considered “autistic” was 1 in approximately 2500 to 3000.  These days, even operating under the more limited definitions of yesteryear that number is approaching 1 in 500 or so.  A scary fast increase.  It is equally known that those called “the indigo children” who so often show abilities akin to the legends of the psychic are usually, not always but in say nine out of ten cases, also included among those within the autistic spectrum.  Considering the ever larger number of humans exposed the potential is obvious, terrifyingly obvious, if you are willing to look at the state of the human condition full on objectively.

I am going to take my chainsaw and go sit out on this limb and say that I’m coming to believe the actual mechanism of this jump in the number of autistic individuals is the result of a chemically (read Roundup^® and any others similar)  induced mutation in the genetics of those exposed that favors an increase in their psychic abilities, and that this increase is in fact the mechanism that produces the autistic spectrum by which they are first identified: the mutation prematurely increases, enhances and expands the range of their sensitivity to the point that the critical developmental brain formatting operation is compromised and contaminated by the noise of humanity originating from beyond momma!

The abilities of those so effected are both compromised and in some cases, in some ranges,  enhanced far beyond their fellows, their motive for resentment of those compromises directly proportionate to their ability to (re)engage with the humanity that would have thrust them into such a state of life unwilling. 

Boys and girls, guys and gals and Martians of all persuasions... if there be any truth at all to the collision of these two theories then the dice are rolling.  So many, so very many of the legends and myths and prophecies humanity has indulged in over the years make perfect sense to such a scenario, particularly if at any point some set of recessives surface in a fairly large number to the point the mutation begins to breed true!  Everything from the zombie apocalypse to the 2000 year old prophecies of John writing in the book of Revelation concerning the number of man... as  beast... come into clear and terrifying focus given such a scenario.

Heads up world!  I am so totally hoping I’m totally full of it...

The Elephant Unseen...

 This post is a comment on an article published by TheAtlantic The Problem Is Gun Culture, Not SCOTUS;

"To the town of Aqua Fria rode a stranger one fine day… Didn't talk to folks around him… Didn't have to much to say…"  Most definitely on my list of any era any genre  favorite music. Not to mention a totally fine way to open an essay on the subject of guns.  It is rare that I totally agree with something published by The Atlantic, but this is one of those times.  The author's (Tom Nichols) thesis sentence, with which I couldn't agree more, is found as paragraph four of the offering.

"The problem is not the Court’s decision. The problem is an adolescent, drama-laden gun culture, a romance with weapons that became extreme only in the past quarter century."

Beyond an absolute truth well spoke that sentence contains an assertion in its' closing words that implies Tom has noticed something that I have also noted.  In the last quarter century?  From the mid-90's till now? I agree, he's right, but why that period of time?  What happened in the mid-90's to start such a transformation?  What enabled it? It had to be something. What was it?

As a contra-social philosopher and GM-CT I have never investigated that obvious question as fully I should have. Mea culpa, my bad.  His assertion sparked a thought, the thought a question, and what was found looking for an answer to that question is a possible explanation for not only this conundrum but several others equally problematic that have radically escalated across the same period.

Are they related by something unrecognized?  Maybe.  This potential is in the realms of Social Psychology and I've never heard a whisper of it anywhere. Not to say it hasn't been noticed, or spoken of, just that I've never heard of such a thought being examined. It's new to me.  Gentle reader, allow me to share that thought with you.  Perhaps it might strike a chord in your contemplations as it has in mine.

Social evolution, cultural evolution, is absolutely horrible about conflating and equating things which really have little or nothing to do with each other in absolute fact.  These things are rarely seen at the surface of thought, they are often simply stored in the same register of thoughts as it were, and yet by that simple proximity across the run of history they can become very powerful influencers in shaping what will become an individual's deepest expectations.  Since expectations, particularly those never fully understood, have direct access to shape the structures of emotional responses the sum of such conflated expectations can easily be a totally concealed motive to empower any number of things into reality.

There is one HUGE point that broached the surface for most people in the mid-90's that I am certain was so heavily conflated with several other cultural elements as to become an almost a ubiquitous driver in the opening days of the new century (important point… the new century as accounted by the Gregorian calendar in current service). 

The subject of Tom's essay was the change in attitudes concerning weapons, guns in particular.  A fact of life: Fear, and the consequences of fear, are the constant companion of any weapon of any sort.  As my thoughts evolve I'm ever more convinced the now comical and seldom mentioned  Y2K thing… the fear of electricity going down, the fear of all the computers suddenly turning into economic assassins… was simply a thin veneer of irrational ridiculousity concealing a much deeper set of fears of such scale as to secretly echo decades into the future as motivation for a great many things.

How could a set of numbers rolling over on a calendar create an irrational fascination and romance with lethal weaponry?  How could that change mandate a desperate effort by half of society to reshape society into a totally ovine collectivist herd mentality and destroy the individual?  How could it demand a return to a feudalistic religious fundamentalism in the other half, the half most commonly in  love with the weapons? 

What has dawned on me is there is a point that when combined, emotionally conflated, with the totally public onset of not only a new century but a new millennia would be of sufficient power to set such a cycle in motion to become self sustaining beneath the surface of a society.

The United States of America evolved, and in large degree still is, a Christian society. In the structures of Christendom is the solid belief that at a time of his choosing known only to him Jesus will return to the mortal realms of Planet Earth.  A very, very powerful and very old belief. Judgment day, as it is known to the faithful.  Judgment day, to accompany what the prophet John detailed elegantly and gruesomely… and apparently ever more accurately…  in the book of Revelation. 

I know for a fact that for a great many Christians that series of prophesied events was firmly expected sometime immediately after the onset of the Gregorian new millennia (which was in close and convenient proximity to an astrological event of equally epic proportions… a grand conjunction of the planets marking a new age of the earth to the Pagan folk) and I equally know that regardless of the true depth and degree of faith, or secret lack thereof, from one perspective or the other there is no greater a terror for a Christian than the consequences of that day come to reality!

  Enough fear that a total fascination with guns makes sense in that environment.  Pick the fight, load the guns, shoot all the bullets.  Only the survivors will have to face judgment day, those who died in the fighting will have died before Jesus made it back, they'll have died without KNOWING and are therefore forgiven pursuant to Jesus' sacrifice… right.  No wonder Ragnarok looks better to a lot of them than what Armageddon implies.

Look at what is known to every shrink and every good parent, look at what happens when a deep expectation fails to materialize in reality! Fear. Secret fear, the authority (be it parental or societal) has failed its' charter and we do not know where we stand.  And a lot of very public resentment.  Said authority betrayed what our culture led us to believe was a promise. Time for a good temper tantrum and pout, if nothing else.

Folks, are we looking at a case of a self fulfilling prophecy?  To speculate further would be to further abuse your patience (thank you!), but think about it.  Looks to me like there is good potential for a solid and fully concealed connection between this thought and every major factor that is now dividing America. 

Pink Floyd: A Monolog

The music of Pink Floyd carries the disillusionment of a generation, the sadness and the secret hope. As that generation, my generation, passes into the portion of life where its numbers begin to dwindle, when the physician is called for more often than the vintner, when each winter is indeed a little colder, now is when the music of Pink Floyd is in fullest bouquet.

Intoxicated with the strength of youth we sipped a vintage forty years older than ourselves, and only now with the scars of age upon us can we fully appreciate why the melancholy sounds of Pink Floyd touched us as they did. For all the intervening years we have carried the warning Floyd wrapped in sound seductive, no matter how we might have publicly reviled the loathed and solemn wisdom therein.

For the most part we were the children of the wars, conceived by survivors honoring the ancient tradition of replacing a dead enemy with living children, baby boomers raised by rote in the shadow of our parents secret struggle to restore an innocence sacrificed in the cause of freedom. They, whose gallantry bought freedom for the world, they themselves were not to be free. I saw this in my father's face, in my mother's eyes, in the fear driven structures of their thoughts and beliefs. Long before Floyd put a voice and a tonality to my perception I knew. Death, frustrated by fortune or fate in his first attempt on my fathers life stalked him still, and this my father knew as well.

Perhaps he, a child of an older time when death knew fewer restrictions, perhaps he knew even before the kamikaze and submarines brought the point to acute focus. But we, we did not know. In the silence which surrounded such subjects we could only guess without knowledge. And so when we first heard Atom Heart Mother or Dark Side of the Moon there was a commonality between those exotic sounds and the feelings which seemed to somehow seep or flow or explode around our parents as they struggled to reconcile having survived that which claimed so very many others.

Pink Floyd is the music of the inevitable rendered into comfort rather than terror. It is the music of a final understanding to bridge the incarnations, a proceeding comprehension of life as a fleeting set of fantasies resolved to little more than tiny footnotes. It is a music which emulates the shift in perspective produced from introspection taken to the point of hallucination. Dime bag or Batman, Floyd is the anthem of realizing, soon enough or far too late, that we are  all as mortal as our parents.

Clean Feet are a good thing...

Or... all hail the Gods of Rotory abrasion! Mighty angle grinders and the magnificent little Dremel tool are the heroes of the day.  The villian?  A little widget of a piece of plastic in the shower faucet that had cracked.  The mercenary? One of those obnoxious spring clips Ford is infamous for putting on vacuum lines.  The operation?  Grind the ears off the clip until it is true round, nothing poking out, and then get the spring clip around the broken shaft to hold the crack closed and reinforce old plastic that is the part that actually turns the valve stem and then, delicately, so very delicately, clearance the inside diameter of the next plastic widget that holds the whole mess centered with the handle.  It was almost big enough, almost, I needed maybe 30, 35 thousandths to let everything turn like it should, I had about 120 thousandths of plastic to work with. Enough, just be careful...

Forty five minutes of gentle persuasion and YES, I now have clean feet! And... not only that, I just saved 40 bucks and week or ten days of having the vise grips hanging off the valve stem waiting for the widget to arrive as part of a kit full of other parts I don't need.  Victory is sweet.

The Romance of it all...

=== originally published June 2014 ===

hear what follows in an ever thickening brogue, the speaker a smaller man, gnarled and bent, calloused, gray and grizzled with piercing blue eyes and a salt air a’ the sea about him, a man who wandered the world under sail a century and more before any of us were born

Now, most folks say romance and they be thinkin’ of a man and a woman, some affair a’ the flesh becomin’ an affair a’ love, and aye, there be romance there, there is, the romance of that test and temperin’ a’ love what leaves two hearts honed a keen edge fit to set the future a fair green field with a crop on the land, and aye, there’s a romance there, there is. But there be romance in other things as well, for romance is life on the very edge a’ livin' when ye' can't help but know life is a worth the livin’... them times when livin’ on beyond is no sure thing... I’ve known a few of those times.  Times, times come and times go and these times, these doldrum times are so slow so give me no more rum, nay, give me back the witch, bring her to me as she was in the glory of her youth, show her to me as she were on that day when the sun beat brilliant on a blue green sea a’ runnin’ high and shadow of her sails painted the deck like veils floatin’ across your lovers back, bring her to me as she were that day when the sky behind was black as pitch and the wind, ah, the wind was nigh on a full gale thirty, forty knots just off the stern and she was a runnin’ down the wind a runnin’ from the devil's own storm a boilin’ up chasin’ from behind... I was there, I was and there were no man jack aboard didn’t know the Cap’n was a pushin her, pushin her so hard, to hard, heart breakin' hard, him a’ standin’ there like a statue by the mizzen mast with his hand on her, standin’ there a makin’ love with the witch while the white foam was a flyin’ over the bow... half the hour, an hour, hour after hour in the riggin’ standin’ ready and listenin’ to her cryin' with the strain, feelin’ her beat her breast again’ the sea and every time the sea give way feelin’ her shake until all aboard knew ‘twas nothin’ but the love between ‘em holdin’ her spar to mast, keel to rib... aye, and when the storm fell behind, fell and faded and the wind become a breeze it were the climax of her ecstasy we all felt in the riggin' when the Cap’n himself fell to his knees and leaned down to the very deck to kiss his witch... that were a day to remember I tell you, for that?  That were a day of romance it was, deep romance... there be so few of those days now.

I wish I'd painted this one, but I didn't... it belongs to some other artist far better than I to whom I offer my thanks for the beauty of his work... CDM

Every now and then my imagination just takes the bit in its’ teeth and runs with me.  I usually don’t contest it very much, unless I’m involved in something where I have to keep focus on the real.  Most of the time I just let it run and think around the outer edges even if I have no earthly idea what triggered the whole episode.  Today the word “romance” took center stage.  Why?  No clue, not really.  There’s the movie “Romancing the Stone” and there’s thousands of “romance” novels, and none of those have crossed my thought in a long, long time.  But for some reason it seemed a good word to wander in since somehow I don’t think very many people realize just what romance really is..