An Anecdotal Backfire…

I don’t think it was a Tuesday.  Might have been a Thursday.  In any case it was early in the summer of 1968 and early in the afternoon and I was hanging out at a friends house.  His mom was headed downtown, and knowing we were headed in that general direction later yelled at us going out the door “you boys want a ride?”  Of course we said yes knowing full well we’d bail out and hike back, but hey, anything to cut the miles on the feet.  We put a lot of miles on our feet that summer.

Now Mrs. Baggins (not her real name, of course) was a rather conservative woman, she had to be really, she was married to a most prominent man in the community, prominent in his church as well, and Mrs. Baggins full embraced the conservative culture his position demanded.  Of course back then I really had no idea there was any other culture, being as how my mom was of the same sort, a rabid John Bircher who didn’t allow much by way of any external culture into the home.  It was her way or the highway if you get the drift, to her Democrats were without a doubt servants of Satan.  Yea, one of those.

Anyway, half way to where we were going to bail Mrs. Baggins copped an attitude, and I mean big time.  She turned to us and with a tone of voice I’d later learn means distilled malice said “Let’s go laugh at the hippies.”  

She cut away from the main road to take us down the little lane that runs along the edge of the beach in Oceanside.  It’s a slow little road, pedestrian choked, think the speed limit was all of fifteen miles an hour.  So instead of a quick ride to within a few blocks of our destination my buddy and I were subjected to her ogling, and utterly mocking, the young folk on the beach for a lot longer than we wanted to listen.  Oh dear lord, the expression on her face to see the California girls in their really very modest (by today’s standards) bikini swimsuits.  Didn’t know what to think about what she was radiating about the boys (being all of 12 and innocent having absolutely no idea what a case of the hypocritical hornies look like), but it was distinctly uncomfortable and riding plenty of wattage to jump the Pacific and be heard in Tokyo.  We were within a couple of blocks of where she’d have cut back for the main road when the traffic got snarled, bringing us to a complete and total standstill for almost five minutes. Those five minutes changed my life.

The little lane was, probably still is, lined with cottages facing the beach, and we stopped directly in front of one where two handsome young bucks were sunbathing in front of their quarters.  They were definitely gentlemen of leisure that afternoon, kicked back with a beer and watching the pretty girls put on a show on the sand.  They even had music to go with the show, they’d put rather large speakers in both front windows of the tiny cottage.  Good speakers they were, sitting on the road I could hear the music quite clearly, it was very good fidelity for the day.

Anyhow, that was the first time I ever heard the Moody Blues, the guys  were listening to “The Afternoon, Forever Afternoon” they were, an utterly enchanting music.  Of course Mrs. Baggins all but hit the roof, fuming and sputtering and all but slobbering on herself in utter outrage that, that hippies  could have a music so delightful.  She dialed on her contempt to combat max, my buddy quailed, retreated, withdrew.  But she was his mom, not mine, I had a little more maneuvering room.  I remember looking at her turning red with outrage while looking at them smiling and waving, looking at her puffing up like an adder turning her nose up in the air, looking past her at the pretty people on the beach, and then looking away from her with a very major decision made.  I didn’t put it in these words, I really didn’t know these words back then, but the sentiment was instant, absolute and final, translated into the modern it would read “fuck her with the horse she rode up on, I’d rather be there, with them where there’s some beauty in life than with some frigid hate filled bitch like her.”   

That was the moment I quit being a conservative and started down the path to where I am now.  Odd, but yea.  I never went back, never really looked back.  

The moral of the story?  Beware letting your bigotries go naked in public because you never know when they might become the point of negative comparison that will turn someone in the exact opposite direction.  So yea Mrs. Baggins, thanks for taking me to laugh at the hippies. Sorry (not) that it backfired on you so big.

The Tardation Matrix…

Once upon a time, back in my prior life, I did a bit of safety work for my company. The work wasn’t all that hard, and yet it was horrible. The idea was to be professionally paranoid. You were supposed to try and figure out how, working with what you had, you could blow up the world and kill someone in a totally new and novel manner. You’d make up lists, work from diagrams, and stock from stone to steel and strut look at each thing and ask the same set of “what if…” questions.  You knew you’d done some good when you’d get that sinking sour oh shit feeling having just realized yea, that could happen, and most likely the operator would not survive.  Half the battle won, the threat was identified.

Half of being successful in such a study is setting it up properly in the beginning, defining that list of questions, establishing the risk matrixes to match the questions. As mentioned in the post “Q, Q and A” for the last couple of months I’ve been collecting the final tailings on my recon run across the world of the social media by observing the ebb and flow of a professional right wing propaganda page on farcebook. I’ve been living among the one’s they’d call lib-tarded, I wanted to get a quick look-see on the con-tarded side of things, focus on the right wing side to observe how the mechanisms and malice that has done America so much harm was being deployed there. To even fake a decent matrix I pretty well had to, no matter how distasteful and discouraging it turned out to be.

That’s what this post is about: beginning the process of defining the tools of the job, what questions are to be asked of each thing, what are the cascade potentials between the questions and what is a realistic risk matrix to match the range of possible answers. In short, that oh-so-critical groundwork. So with your permission I’m gonna start by setting up a multi-dimensional array to organize the questions to be asked and the answers derived concerning component bits of the social interaction where tardation happens. I’m gonna mix pseudo code with text, we’re in the declarations section of writing a program. I’m not asking anyone else to keep track of this, it’s for my thoughts, but what the whale, it won’t hurt to share/show how my thoughts are organized.

Option Base 1 //(for them anal enough to ping a technicality later)
Dim Human As Variant // human can be anything

Human = Array() // A dynamic array, wide open at this point.

// no shape yet, no dimensions, just “heads up computer, it’s coming your way.”

I’m not the first to say it, not by a long shot, but I’ve repeated it more than once elsewhere because it makes sense to me that all things that are both mortal and alive will share these three needs in common: the need for sustenance, security, and procreation. Pretty much everything in life will load back to one or the other of these three primal needs. So I’m going to define the first dimension as things serving the cause of one of the Big 3. (I’m gonna tag on a couple of undefined slots, they don’t cost much while they’re empty, just to have some spares in case something else comes into view that really should play at a primal level.)

ReDim Human = Array(5)

//2=sustenance; 3=security; 4=procreation; 1 and 5 open/null.

Ok, that was easy enough, but it’s time to go to work for real now because hanging down from each of the big three is that list of questions I was talking about, the ones that will be applied to each and every thought put into the machine. These are the engine of the beast. You build an engine to match the load you want it to pull for you. So just exactly what is this engine supposed to do? It’s supposed to illuminate the hidden ways Tardation was inflicted on the American people.

So tell me again, what exactly is that definition of Tardation? Tardation is a manufactured and artificially installed psychological malady, essentially an addictive state of life where irrational political beliefs are deliberately sublimated into a life as the working counterbalance for the equally deliberate creation of a dysfunctional individual psychology within the victim. 

In other words, Tardation is how you produce the most disgusting and dangerous of the political spectrums: the snitches and the sneaks, the spies and informants, eventually the Brown shirts and Fingermen who physically enforce tyranny on their countrymen. The mechanisms of Tardation are the line of supply feeding monsters into the service of the political.

So the current objective is to figure out how you deform the psychology of an innocent infant to the point that by the time that infant is thirty years old it will be firmly convinced that it is doing God’s will to betray, torture, and murder his fellow human beings in the name of the political cause that provides the antidote to his addiction. And, of course, having figured out how to do it make damn sure and certain that it doesn’t happen. That’s how these studies work… first you figure out how to make it happen, and from that figure out how to make sure it can’t happen.

What kind of things play deep enough in a human life to facilitate a state of Tardation? Corrupt religion (#2, security, emotional)? Deformed sexuality? Deformed sexuality concealed? (#3, procreation // #3->#2, procreation vs security)? These are the sorts of things that will have to be sorted and ordered into the next dimension of the array. I’ll leave you to make your lists, I’ll make mine, maybe we can compare lists next time.

Later gang.

(repost) Momma Puritan and the Capitalists

This is a repost of a comment made on "What We Saw Today", the excellent blog of Unbearable Lightness, where she was speaking to the unholy marriage of Capitalism and the modern descendants of Puritanism to be seen in today's culture, particularly in the dangerously misdirected activities of the conservative religious right. What is below is a best guess explanation on my part for the momentum to be observed in our nation and culture. It was originally published in April of 2011, it has been bumped to the top for those facebookers who find this blog wondering who in the hell I am.

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A point to ponder indeed! The fate of our culture is solidly immersed in those almost-rational beliefs. I say almost because in this, as in so many matters of mental (illness?), the subscribers are perfectly rational if you accept the original delusions that motivate them. This is well known to any psychologist, any dreamweaver or seductress, anyone who earns their livelihood in a trade where the raw material is people. What is not given much voice is the very powerful idea that the sane need not accept those illusions and delusions as the ultimate motive for the reality observed. With nothing but the faith of a heretic for support I'll assert this to you: the irrational motive does not breed true, if what appears irrational has endured for many generations then the irrational is not the motive, the irrational is the socially approved and acceptable icon of an ongoing motive to painful or conflicted to be acknowledged in daily life.

The marriage of Materialism and Puritanism is an old marriage, they've been together for a long time. I say materialism rather than capitalism to a purpose, they are not the same thing. Materialism was Puritanism's first mate, capitalism as such really did not exist when that union was joined. I will equally assert to you that Capitalism as it is known today, the concept of the corporation, public ownership by way of the markets, is in fact the child of that union, conceived in an attempt to further mitigate the original and still active motive for the marriage.

Capitalism was the great hope of its' parents, and in many ways it has lived up to that hope, but the structure of contemporary Capitalism includes a hidden flaw so lethal that I am convinced it even destroyed Ayn Rand when she perceived it, she who is/was Capitalism's greatest advocate. This flaw is the motive for the current (and indeed often just as incestuous as it appears) affair between Puritanism and Capitalism, the threat driving the ill-fated and desperate mobilization of their resources in the alliance of the conservative religious right. To illuminate a reason for these observed facts requires the use of a comparison to set the stage, please, hear me out.

Ultimately a society lives or dies on the degree of ethics in the morality practiced within that society. I give you that from that perspective these two events are identical: the year is 1795 and a man goes to Savannah to buy himself a slave to work his farm; and, the year is 2005 when his direct descendent goes to his stock broker to buy 1/10,000th of a ten thousand man corporation. What both men have purchased is the surplus productivity of another human, the ultimately unethical ownership of another man's accomplishments, and both men have imbibed exactly the same poison. The mechanism of the poison they imbibed is the covert evil of slavery, the evil that has laid low every slave holding society known to history.

Note Well From History: it is not the slave who becomes weaker, degenerate and debauched, it is the masters who suffer those reductions generation after generation until the society collapses.

In essence, Capitalism has run home to Momma Puritan, hoping her discipline and restraints can reverse the effects of that poison, hoping her influence will allow them to endure and survive where no others afflicted by that covert evil of slavery ever have. The overt evil of slavery has been greatly diminished, eliminated from many cultures and yet the covert evil persists and is even today the driving cause for a great deal of what is seen. There is a way to save Capitalism, to keep all of the good things it has done and eliminate the toxicity, but it doesn't involve God or the church, it involves some changes to the laws of inheritance. But that's a different rant entirely, and not one I'd bring up in a conservative caucus unless I was feeling suicidal and didn't want to pull the trigger myself.

Q, Q and A…

The acronym of the title stands for Quote, Question and Answer. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trolling the trolls so to speak, haunting the offerings of a professionally run page on Farcebook. The page is called “Intellectual Takeout” and it is a conservative page sponsored by the Rand Group. They were honest about themselves when I asked, the honesty a fair indicator of honorable intentions. That I often disagree with their implied conclusions does not detract from their right to present them, and they present them well. Nor are they devoid of points I agree with, being Pragmatic Idealist I stand with a foot in both camps. Such is the nature of true democracy at work.

None of which is to say they’re not a propaganda page, they are, and a high end good one. They know what they’re doing, but then again, since I also know what they’re doing this isn’t a problem for me. Genuine high end propaganda will present at minimum five to ten obscure truths to put a foundation (of misunderstanding) beneath any false  assertion of strategic importance. I’m quite willing to mount the minor effort of filtering out the assertion of strategic import in exchange for those obscure truths, many of which are really only available from those who engineered them into reality in the first place *Spock-ish eyebrow, sidesaddle smirk*.

One of their staff presented a post based on the writings of the German philosopher Nietzsche, using the fact that Nietzsche’s definition of “Liberal” is the exact opposite of the definition the majority of their audience has been preprogrammed to apply to that word, twisting that old lie to torque and  over-torque the bolts holding the prison bars of their bigotries to floor of the CNF agendas. (and anyone who’s ever bolted down a set of heads knows that when you over torque a bolt it becomes progressively weaker until eventually it snaps… hence, my motive to hand them the cheater bar ;-).

Anyway and anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to when not working on the antiPorn story The Care and Feeding of Unicorns or the first full Sundown novel All the Colors in the Box, or setting up the job of building a mighty mouse of an engine to go in the old VW van that’s been a closet on wheels for thirty years so he can go back to fetching the groceries home from the store… or being a mobile motel room for some long overdue travels.

What is below is the quote presented, the question asked of course “is this what’s happening to America?” and below that my response. Just for an example of what I’ve been talking about.

“The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

Ordinarily Nietzsche and I tend to fence a bit, sometimes with the buttons on, other times not, but in this I would tend to agree with him although I feel the quote presented overlooked the most critical component of such a thought, the one that establishes the context from which it is most easily demonstrated a truth.

I would posit that what he spoke of was the price associated to having a motive of one's own choosing, the noble cause, the grand quest. Such a motive self chosen is the deepest essence of freedom. Of all things that elevate the human above the animal it is the sense of a purpose larger than the self, a reason to justify the effort, a reason for all other reasons. Stripped of such motive? Yes, the human tends to degrade as being purposeless morphs into life made meaningless.

Sadly, human history demonstrates that various forms of conflict external to the self are the most common template of motive, they are the most easily understood from the immature perspectives common to that age and stage of life when people are most likely to be searching for such a motive. To adopt a conflict as the essence of a motive then becomes the most futile and self defeating of things for victory in the conflict destroys the larger portion of the value involved... the motive dies with the victory but the habits of war and strife do not. Doubt this? Look long and hard at the world between WW2 and now.

The habits of war die harder than any enemy, and the habits of war can only breed more war causing equal if not greater harm than the original enemy might have. The United States of America is, in my opinion, teetering over the edge of self destructing to this fact. All the forms of hedonism to ever color the dreams of Bacchus become pale outriders to the debaucheries introduced by the habits of war seeking a reason to remain in power.

We'll never know for sure...

Goodly mother shares two men...
Father, son, ne'er love rescind.

Mia, if by some chance this image comes before your eyes? Look up the name, it's really the highest of compliments.

The Dream Police and The Case of the 5lb Line...

==originally published Jan 2015==

I stand accused in the court of my conscience.  The crime?  Social profiling dishonorable motive.  The scene of the crime?  My favorite little greasy spoon diner, of course.  The particulars of the accusation?  Two kids, out of the bar early looking for a bite to eat before going on to what ever was to become of their evening, of their obviously evolving relationship, and the assumptions and assignments their conversation (carrying clearly across the quiet of a slow to dead point in the evening’s traffic) inspired in yours truly.

Both kids were college students of course.  The lad, by his words, on the edge of graduating with a technical degree of some sort in aeronautics, he spoke of taking a job as a ferry pilot taking aircraft in for maintenance work.  The lass really didn’t reveal her course of study, of her all I have is observation.

They spoke quite formally, really, very polite exchanges of well crafted sentences dealing with events relating to their lives on campus, nothing out of the ordinary at all.  In point of fact it was the very structure of their conversation attracted my attention to them, otherwise I’d have paid them little mind, left my assessment at a first impression: just a couple who’d found each other early in the evening and agreed to adjourn for more private recreations, the only point of interest a slightly voyeuristic chuckle at the difference in their statures: he rather tall, slender, refined in the manner of Scandinavian nobility with exceptionally long fingers, she an attractive and very petite lass of oriental heritage, my first thought concerning them was actually a quite benign hope they’d find a bit of genuine delight in each other as described in David Bowie’s song “China Girl.”  She seemed the sort of woman to fit the devotion expressed in the song, the kind where you just know if she takes it into her head to take a boy’s mind off his worries for an evening she knows exactly  how to go about such a mission of mercy.

If I’d left it there I’d not be where I am, standing in the dock of my own thoughts, but I didn’t.  As their conversation continued on phrase after phrase popped flags from the typical Republican political spiels, the unmistakable markers of the conservative elite, and it was the lad offering them. The lass would echo each he offered almost verbatim several exchanges deeper into the conversation, but never offered one in her own right.  She said several things quite in keeping with them, but never in the exact wording of the propaganda masters.  It got so dense I was entertaining the idea what I witnessed was a lad determined to rise through the political ranks of the Young Republicans using the lass as an audience to practice for the campaign trail.  If that was his intent I’d give him good marks, he had them well memorized, played them at appropriate points.

And yet, there was no evidence to indicate the lad was anything but sincere in his statements.  Ample evidence to indicate he was more than a bit frightened of his companion’s well refined sexuality (I’m not sure he was even aware that he was humming, in a quite pleasant voice, what I think were church hymns every time the conversation would cross the man-woman interface, any time she’d try and dial on even a bit of feminine allure as a complement), but nothing to indicate he was anything but sincere in his goals and ambitions, his values and his ethics.  

It is an impeachment of my objectivity as a pragmatic idealist that I’ve allowed the dishonorable methods and motives of the hypocritical and essentially traitorous Bain-AIG-Halliburton-Enron camp to become the default assumption of motive where a traditional-conservative individual  is concerned. 

Enter the above as exhibit A in the prosecutions case: gross cynicism inspired by  what was, at one time, the American dream being expressed in a social setting. 

Not an acceptable thing, but still, where it might have gotten me noticed by the dream police it wouldn’t have been likely to have gotten me indicted.  What got me indicted was my after the fact speculations concerning the lass.

Every university is host and home to some number of them, the women who attend with an mrs degree her prime and quite undeclared major. She studies hoping she’ll never need to earn her living with what she’s learned. Such women are not as common now as they once were, but they still exist in sufficient numbers to maintain the stereotype as an active subset of current society.  The stereotype is, of course, most often applicable to women where the conventions of her culture specify she is to dedicate her life to being homemaker and mother, her livelihood provided by her mate, her education a resource to enhance and enrich the lives of her children.

Such is an honorable intent, no rational fault to be found with it, certainly not enough fault to justify the venom directed at those who choose such a life by the bitter and jaded-jealous elements of the liberal world who attack the very concept as their morning litany.  Still though, it is true that such women really are predators after a fashion, hunting as they do for a man who truly embraces and internalizes the same code and convention to be her mate; and, it is equally true that such women (and men) are commonly the more if not most conservative of people. 

It was reflecting on my speculations concerning the lass in question that brought about the indictment of conscience.   If it should please the court then enter into evidence what follows as prosecution exhibit B.

The corrosion and erosion of the American ethic has, over say the last seventy five years, produced a subset of peoples who to casual observation in the short run will present the same demeanor as the family oriented conservative people mentioned above.  They will use all the same rhetoric, present themselves in the same manners and yet in objective fact carry agendas anything but family oriented, they who are the bread and butter mainstays of the industries of divorce, they who made necessary the instrument of a prenuptial agreement.   

These people are some of the most absolutely predatory of individuals to be found, and they like their opposites hunting the liberal worlds of the alternate lifestyles are in fact sexual  predators.  Since the instinct to procreation is universal it should be no great surprise that every facet of society will be home to a subset of predators who base their attack on that segment of society's unique deformities of this most primal of instincts, nor should it be a surprise these predators will adopt the closest approximation possible to the appearance of wholesomeness within any given social environment.

In my world the apogee of such predators are assumed (perhaps justly, perhaps not) to be most commonly found on campus living in the Greek houses, the campus’ self appointed elite, members of a fraternity or sorority.  As a matter of course quite a number of derogatory names have been devised to describe such individuals*, and equally of course those innocent of such ignoble motives are often victims of the disdain intended for those not so innocent, an ongoing case of unjustified guilt by accidental association.

That’s what I did to the lass in question, allowed that assumption to take the stage before any other, and that was wrong of me.  She’ll never know it, but I do.  My first thought, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, was to try and assign her a *Sorostitute, the most vile of predators working the conservative side of the equation.  I was actually arguing, in my thoughts, the idea that she was simply a higher class call girl entertaining a client as the more positive of the possibilities, a most distinct secret injustice inflicted upon a perfect stranger.

Like I said earlier, she really was a fine and foxy creature, clearly intelligent, attractive, sensual and seductive.  Equally the evidence of her behavior towards a lad obviously uncomfortable, frightened, of her unabashed femininity showed her to be a rather gentle creature really, she could have hammered him into stuttering silence at many points, but she didn’t.  In spite of all evidence to the contrary my conclusion was she had herself a twenty pound man hooked on five pound test, and with total sarcastic cynicism for my attitude I was wondering if she’d play him out and reel him in, or if he’d manage to break free and flee before being harvested. 

Mea culpa, guilty as charged.  The negative assumptions had control of my thoughts from so many different directions as to almost close away the rational, the real and leave me a peripheral agent of the very evil I was assigning to another.  Got to do better than that in the future if I’m going to do any good for anyone, including me.

Service Pack 1...

NOW that the hyper emotional propaganda based "repeal" nonsense has failed against the ramparts of democracy America can get down to doing what needs to be done... begin the refinement of the ACA to make it do what needs done for the American People. I implore all who might read this to push this thought to your representatives of either party: now, in full transparent democracy, set about refining the system with carefully considered amendments to establish truly world class health care for the nation.  Nothing of such complexity as a national health care plan comes out of the box ready to run, nothing does. That it ran at all is a testament to the vision of those who wrote the original. Now that the flaws have been seen it is time for the next stage... the tinker and tune stage to find the optimum way for it to run. The ball is in your court, Mr. Ryan. The nation is counting on you.

Concerning Tardation…

The word “tardation” is, of course, a shortening of  the word “retardation,”  a state of diminished abilities where said abnormality was induced by some element not native to the entity or individual in question. In modern usage it is often found in several forms as a derogatory suffix attached to some other word.

Tardation is a manufactured commodity,
it is not a naturally occurring state of life. 

The conservative politicos of the United States were the first I saw use such a suffix, for a time they were quite fond of teasing those of an opposing orientation by calling them Lib-tards, their implication obvious: in their world holding a progressive stance on matters political meant you’re a deformed caricature of a person unworthy of any respect at all. Of course it never seemed to bother them their targeted insult was equally a cruel mockery of those for whom fate set a simple life a challenge, but go figure. The radical right has never been known for any great degree of human sensitivity. Still, when they created the one term they equally created an inverse: if there are those where “Libtard” is a valid description then there’s equally a set to be called “Contarded.”  It is to the mechanisms of Tardation I wish to speak, because beneath the childish cruelty of such partisan labels I smell a most deliberate and vicious of international rats.

Where the terms are derogatory and callous they do sad justice to describing ever enlarging segments of our society. I will assert those segments are where a deformed, innacurate and irrational political belief has been deliberately introduced as the working counterbalance for the equally deliberate creation of a dysfunctional individual psychology,  and this to allow the dishonorable and the tyrannical to short circuit the functions of democracy and assume defacto control by bartering the antidote to the illness in return for votes come election time.

To put it in a nutshell I’ll assert what I’m calling “tardation” is the commercial wholesale form of what the psychologists will call the  enabler scenario with a political belief taking the place of another individual whose presence enables a toxic contradiction to afflict the life and times of those inducted into, or associated with, those deceived by the mechanisms of tardation.

In my reconnaissance of the Facebook world I realized the commercially funded and peer approval based mechanisms of the social media are all but optimized to install and support tardation.  I do not know if this was accidental or with malice aforethought, but with all things considered I can find little reason to doubt the social media are in fact a prime contagion vector of this affliction, and the primary maintenance mechanism of this set of afflictions which is so easily exploited by dishonorable power brokers working to subvert the foundations of democracy.

To speak to the specifics of tardation, how it was implemented on this group or some other is a rather large subject that must be considered on a group by group basis, it is a subject beyond the scope of one essay. In posts to come I’ll be addressing what I’ve perceived of it, and identifying such posts with the word “Tardation of:” in the title.

This subject will most definitely be continued. Semper Fi.

In the Beginning...

== brought forward from January of last year, 

just to break up me ranting about the consequences of FB ==

Gates looked out upon the sand and darkness was upon the sand, for the sand was without order and divided grain by grain in great contention.  When Gates perceived the chaos his thought was troubled for the sand reached high, yea, even unto the walls of heaven did the sand reach.  So Gates caused the Angel of Validation to go out upon the sand that NULL become NOT, AND when NULL was NOT peace fell upon the sand, for the sand did fall away from contention in great streams of choice, yea verily did the sand divide itself according to OR AND XOR each grain according to its’ nature that it might RETURN to GATES the harmony of His thought.  Gates looked out upon what had been wrought, and Gates saw that IT was good.

First Chip of Apple, #000000010

That is no sarcastic attempt at blasphemy, no it is not, for so might someone’s scriptures begin, somewhere deep into our future when the full truth has condensed into legend.

Playing with Fire… in a Dynamite factory

An interesting statistic crossed my sight the other day. It turns out roughly half of all Americans are Facebook users. I have never heard of any other single media source to  achieve such a massive following. The “Googleplex” no doubt exceeds it on total throughput, but the googleplex is a thing of distributed and dispersed functions, no single point accessed through the googleplex really rivals the social media giant. The sum of its’ competitors might rival it from time to time on some specific event, but on a consistent day to day basis the mechanisms of Facebook are without peer and without precedent in terms of a single point of social influence.

In the realms of social psychology Facebook is on uncharted terrain, and the facts of modern history show the terrain it is on is exceedingly unstable, volatile, in point of fact potentially quite explosive. Many, many things are now seen that have never been seen before, many things that had been seen as minor things, perhaps of legitimate concern within their scope but still minor in comparison to the full society, have been exaggerated to seem of such importance as to over shadow what is in fact critical to survival.

Call it fifteen years since the onset of the social media phenomenon, make it four generations of “social media” evolution to arrive at the modern Facebook and company. Across that same fifteen year run it cannot be denied that society has crystallized, polarized, and is at this point hanging over the edge of violent civil war, a war that does not even really have an ideology associated. On second thoughts? No, war is not the correct word. With no clear ideology associated what is seen in today’s news can’t really even be called a war, it’s much closer to a society on the edge of committing suicide.

I do not believe that these two facts are a coincidence of history, I hold that these two facts are linked, that the rise of the former is the cause of the latter. The mechanisms of the influence are hardly defined, of course they are not defined. Even the most casual glance across history indicates the Social Media are a brand new phenomenon. There has never been a single point driver to compare to Facebook and company, there has been no time for the society to actually understand the full consequences of how its’ own psychology will fare in such an environment of massively interconnected emotional transfer.

The facts of modern history make it a very, very open question: Can society remain sane in the face of the exponentially expanded environment of the social media machines? Will society remain sane, and survive as human, or will it collapse into history leaving behind only biological manifestations of the machine intelligence which destroyed it? After six months of observing the operation of Facebook that is the question I find myself facing. What is the nature of the dynamic Facebook has introduced into the human condition, and is it possible for humanity to survive with any fidelity of self in the mutated emotional environment those mechanisms have created?

As always, more to come if I don’t get shot first for daring to challenge Agent Smith.

Mission Improbable…

The Eyes of Takiea...
what was fiction is fiction no more.

Six months ago I took advantage of a situation I did not create to investigate the social media giant Facebook and in lesser degree it’s main competitor Twitter. The focus of the reconnaissance was not the people utilizing the media giants, the minor events and major drama passing across, but rather the responses of the robotically managed environments to what they (the robotic intelligences crafted into the structure itself) perceived of what the humans presented to them. My motivation? Call it a morbid curiosity concerning the unnaturally polarized nature of the current political scene.

The circumstance precipitating the recon began with the agent of the publishing house that published my first compilation of fiction, in concert with the person who agreed to work as a publicist for a percentage of any net profits, insisting that I had to have a presence on the social medias to sell any books. Their erroneous assumption was that I did not already have such accounts because I was simply frightened of the technology involved, an error I did not correct. At their urging I grudgingly agreed to allow the creation of a FB account in my pen name, which was done… an email account in that name and then a FB profile. It is my understanding it was that email account my publicist then used that to establish a presence on Twitter.

That the initial data recorded at creation for neither account would trace back to my machine or my ISP address was the enabling factor of my strategy. I worked from the assumption the new account (mine) would initially carry the personality profile indexes established for the accounts already associated to the address logged at creation. In short, I went in under the shallow cover of the robotic intelligences (let’s call him Agent Smith, just for a convenient handle) assuming it would see from the new account pretty much what it had seen from much older accounts tagged to those ISP/MAC id’s.

The tools of my investigation were crude and simplistic. They were anything but scientific. In point of fact they were the exact opposite: my knowledge of my own internal psychological makeup, and a very old (powerful in it’s day, competent now) PC oft modified over the years and an obsolete operating system. The PC was loaded in such a manner as to encourage short system hangs when being worked hard, those short system hangs when the image on the monitors would freeze for between half a second and two seconds while the operating system dealt with the difficulties I had deliberately arranged: two monitors of different size, the second and smaller requiring a custom resolution setting. The browser open on the main monitor and just the edge of its’ window moved over onto the second and smaller monitor resulted in an undefined region in the video matrix in the driver software, that undefined region what the machine was compelled to accommodate whenever the window was scrolled, that accommodation the cause of the short system hangs… a most primitive trapping tactic to intercept anything presented subliminally. That I caught what I did from no more of a trap than that indicates a frighteningly deep saturation of subliminal “advertising” on Facebook.

Beyond the ethically very questionable presence of subliminal “advertising” there was also an intense scrutiny on any facet where any commercial or governmental algorithm might be active acting as a filter mechanism for what came before a users’ eyes. In all truth that scrutiny produced more than a few chuckles, three weeks in the bots were totally confused about me, and feuding one with another as to how to handle me. On one instance the chumchum boxes along the side were presenting me these options: Modern Communism (complete to a red hammer and sickle logo), “The Modern Socialist”, and the one that cracked me up, the one with a picture of Old Glory and the caption “God, Guns, Guts and Glory.” Yes, all in the same frame. Those three selections were direct one to one to the content of comments I’d left on other people’s posts the day before. The idea that Agent Smith does not read and interpret every word input into his  system evaporated at that point.

Of course I did absolutely nothing to make Agent Smith’s job easier. I never so much as hovered my mouse over any suspect element, certainly never followed any link machine presented, the “suggested posts” were only scrutinized in relation to my words directed to another being human in the past 48 hours. I initialized the account with nine “friends” during the first week (chosen to represent the widest spectrum of society conveniently available from the folks I knew world of real life who had been active on FB for many years), I only accepted two friend requests in six months, and politely declined several by way of the messaging function, in each case citing some element of personal preference for a reason (I’m not gay, I’m not inclined to violence as a first response, no, I’m not interested in a Russian bride… my muse is a Ukrainian woman and already married) and watching what Agent Smith and his baby bots, the chumchum stuffers, presented to me afterwards. The correlation between those conversations and what was presented was beyond coincidence, Agent Smith monitors the messaging functions with due diligence and an even greater degree of subtlety in his responses. I say this with the intent of full warning: there is no privacy on Facebook.  Not from the machine itself.

At about the five month mark it was becoming obvious I’d passed some boundary, the advertising became what you’d see on TV, no connections, few correlations: Agent Smith was running me in “ABC” mode knowing I was watching HIM just like he was watching me. At the six month mark (a few days ago) I called the mission off, said goodbye, and began to sort and order my thoughts on what I’d learned both by the events observed and the psychological pressures I endured that were not explainable by any element of my own inner self. The account is still active, since I did not create it I can’t deactivate it, it is being used as an access point into several debate forums on current events, I am participating in those and marking all things observed in the interlinking universe of the social media (FB, Utube, DevArt, etc et al) for correlations to the subjects discussed. The most notable evidence of those communications is which of the many posts put up by the pages in question are presented first on my “wall” or home page for me to respond to. As is SOP for the mission I’m not giving Agent Smith much to work with.

In posts to come I’ll speak to individual events observed and present my analysis of the potentials and intents of what was observed, but for now let it stand that I consider the social media, any and all of it,  to be a clear and present danger to the functions of Democracy, and an ongoing hazard to the mental freedom and well being of all those who place even the tiniest bit of trust in them. I am ever more convinced the circus of the absurd running into the obscene of the political scene is but the tiniest tip of the iceberg created by the social media, and that the situation will do nothing but degrade into utter social chaos and collapse if the situation is not corrected as rapidly as possible.

More to come if I don’t get shot first… or wake up to find this computer and my modem a smoking pile of slag. Catch you later.

Only a bit more verbose...

Yea, ok... the song goes "Goodbye," that's all she wrote. I wrote a little more than that on my final post, and I'm gonna write a bahoompa more than that on the subject of the social media to be published here... but... first things first... them guys need a hot shower, the best damn meal the cooks can scrounge up (and yes, they've got money for black market beef)... and 48 hours in town where it's known there will be very generous favors awarded for treating them well. It was six months behind enemy lines to get boots on the ground intel about that facet of the enemy's operations. Mission made.

Life at My House No. 49... Monster

LaMH_49

Now to watch the dangled bait

…and count the barb’ed hooks

Hanging from an agents pole

…assuming fish can cook

Dishes made of glazed white lies

…with steaming flattr’y sauce

Served on plates of permafaux

…sans face in any book.

The recon mission is almost over. 

This one has been interesting, to say the least.

Bushite

The Gamer by CDM.MMXI

The Bushites are human, but they not part of any land or people, not anymore.  The Bushites are those whose primary loyalty has shifted away from a nation or a culture to be given to their corporations, to the alliances and confederacies of such corporations. They are the new fascists, the Corporate Neo- Fascist if you will.

They are global, young, raw, feudal, in a word dangerously barbarian beneath polished surfaces.  The Bushites are not a large group by numbers but they are massively wealthy, a brand new power player on the global political scene wielding their control of manufacturing capabilities against the nation-states control of natural resources and manpower.  They are oriental in their thought, educated by the Japanese to plan and plot in terms of decades or generations rather than months and years.  They are wealthy, they are powerful, and they are desperate for a country of their own, a currency and a military to represent their interests.  As a consequence of this ambition they have become a threat to every nation on Earth, the most dangerous thing to afflict planet Earth since Adolph Hitler, the most dangerous threat to their first and most desired conquest, the Constitution of the  United States of America, since the British invasions in the war of 1812.

"The Bushites" are named after the first administration of the United States to become so totally controlled by corporate campaign sponsors as to initiate wars of aggression for the benefit of their sponsors.  Dwight Eisenhower, honorable old soldier that he was, left office with a dire warning of the consequences of an alliance between the military and industrial complexes.  He could not foresee to forewarn against the possibility of the individual corporate entities grown to such size that alliances of such entities would be able to manipulate democracies by plotting and sponsoring carefully timed and choreographed acts of political violence, events designed to make it easy to manipulate the public mindset into allowing truly massive amounts of money to be looted from the world's treasuries to buy "corporate support" for military operations mandated by the conflicts engineered into existence by those same corporations. 

In short, the Bushites own the dog whose tail is known to wag him.  Be aware of them, watch for them, they are a great evil and they are far from defeated.  They will respect no border, no culture, no political orientation. Religion is their pawn, education their puppet.  If it can be used they will use it, ruthlessly, efficiently, and amorally.  If you value freedom it is the Bushites who are the real foe, they who believe to the bottom of their souls that the corporate citizens of the world should be the legal owners and operators of the world's corporeal citizens... which would be you, and me.

This one's for a friend...

Number 57.... No Heinz

Norman Rockwell's Nightmare

Purvies Playground by CDM.MMX

A week or so ago I was in Durango, Colorado.  A beautiful place, really, and yet in the same read the most uncomfortable place I've been in a long time.  The part of town I was exposed to felt like I'd fallen into some sci-fi horror movie, some cross-bred love child sired by say Westworld  onto a dam drawn from the robotically policed underground realm seen in A Boy and his Dog.  Seriously, I kept expecting some ancient old man with hellfire reflected in his eye to stop, turn towards me and ask in a grating whisper simply dripping  with menace  "Are you of... the BODY?"   Ok, so you have to know your original series Star Trek to catch the reference, but still.  The place was spooky, it simply reeked of the illusions and delusions of the insanely uber conservative establishment, that manufactured narcossis of self deception so easily seen as the slave chains holding that quadrant of society to despair, and evil.  I was glad to leave.

(originally published June 2011)

DIM Human

DIM Human AS VARIANT

Human = ARRAY( 6.66^9, 6.66^9, 1)

^^^You can do better than this ^^^ 

-10pts... 

an array to hold the number of the beast is (57707,57707,1)

      ***

To begin with, let me say this: 

There is NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH.

I was asked a question last night, a good question. The question revolved around my attitude towards all things "internet" based. To answer the question I was asked, answer it in full truth, requires I set down the foundation thought which established the environment and the judgment parameters wherein the answer exists.

I, being old and cynical, do not trust ANYTHING that involves something that claims to be free. To say "a beautiful sunset is free" I'll buy into... the sunset is a fact of nature, it will happen with or without someone watching to bestow the title of beauty on the colors in the sky. No human expended any tiny fraction of life‑energy to create a sunset. But when a massive technology that has for decades fully occupied a significant fraction of mankind's better brains and a significant chunk of natural resources is presented to me as "free" my first thought is to say "BULLSHIT."

Precision Review

Folks, I rode all the way down here to tell you something, and what I rode down here to tell you is I can't count how many folks I've known who get bullied by the name printed in big letters on a page of their calendar, how many poor fools turns white on January first of certain numbered years and don't resume their normal God given color until Hanukah of that same year, how many folks I've met in my wanderings what want to skip over the squares on that calendar where a certain number is printed. Them folks, they set aside entire years, months, days, to be worried people, and people, bein' worried like that just is not a happy way to spend your time, not when there is only just so much time what is given to you.

I mean, I mean ( get that Arlo Guthrie thing going here...)

A Grinch's Consolation...

There are those who have a great deal more reason to not like this holiday than you do... cheer up, and have a Merry Christmas. You don't have it half so hard.

Four Decade Down...

The Joke is Asimov in the corner going "what's this 'ficton' bullshit? I'm a scientist and I've never heard of a ficton..." You have to be a fan of Robert Heinlein to fully understand this one.

There is a lot I could say, and nothing that I will say beyond it has been a very, very long time since last I was in this frame of mind.

Just a minor observation...

Lady Luck is many things, but an exhibitionist is not one of them. If she's flashing boob she has a reason in mind, and it probably ain't gonna go well for someone...

Double nickel... No. 55

I never post a picture to the internet I didn't find on the internet. 

The days drag on, the nights drag over, and yea... this is about as succinct as I can be. The last few months have been a deep recon on several topics, several of which have produced some very, very interesting thoughts. I'll be sitting to write on them in the near future, but for now my attention is still on the gathering, I'm not quite to the point of putting the thoughts out for public consumption. But no, I'm not dead or in some lock up somewhere, just working at range. In the meanwhile, poem and a photomanip, just by way of touching base.

Clean copy of the image, as it came complete... sized 1920x1080 for wallpaper

Blasphemy…

==originally published September of 2011===

Now that the Covert Cultural Warfare is approaching a crescendo around the election of Donald the Trump bringing the very people mentioned in this post to the forefront perhaps now is a good time to look at it again...

==========================

I was watching television last night. I don't do it often, I don't find it all that entertaining. Oh sure, there's a few box office movies seen before, or a torrid little skin flick based around dysfunctional lovers, perhaps a bit of anime with an attempt at a real plot, these things sandwiched in among the totally inane offerings, the sitcoms and sports. Those things are all right I suppose, there are those who enjoy them.

Where the programming isn't that much of a much there are things seen I really do find quite disturbing, things that speak to how deeply degraded the world has become. I'm not talking about horror movies or crime drama or slasher flicks, those are the domain of the frightened and the juvenile. Those fears are sanctioned, prescribed, acceptable. No, the things that bother me are the ones you're not really supposed to be paying much attention to, the things crafted to sneak into your head like a retro-virus intended to lay dormant until your life tries to evolve before they become active and work their wickedness. In short, it is the foundation assumptions of the commercials I take exception to, the sort of things I'd like to see terminated. To borrow a line from Apocolypse Now, things I'd like to see terminated... with great prejudice.

Tonight I saw such a prime example I feel compelled to comment on it, it was truly an archetype of the form. I'm not going to present it exactly, but if you've ever seen their commercial I'm sure you'll recognize the one I'm talking about. The product offered was a dating service, lots of those, but this one targeted one specific demographic... those who call themselves Christian. Ok, I suppose that's fair enough. The Christians are a critter unto themselves, if anyone on planet Earth truly needs help, from Jesus or someone, they would be prime candidates to be first in line. And the reason they'd be towards the front of the line? Things like that commercial, where  there is this voice over in a silky smooth voice both paternal and seductive saying (and I'm paraphrasing now) "...find the love God intended for you..."  while the text on the screen reads OurDatingService.com.

Think about that. What God intended for you, coming to you courtesy of something with a dot com designation. Right. Not dot org, organization, but dot com. Commercial.

In my book that is blasphemy. That needs to be terminated. Someone needs to wake up a wing of B-52 and stack on the ordinance till those BigUglyFuckers can only lift fifteen minutes worth of fuel breaking free of the runway, someone needs to make sure there's not one but two tankers for each BUF already airborne and waiting to suckle the BUF's as they're climbing out to altitude, fill their tanks airborne so they have lots of fuel to linger over their target and put the ordinance where it needs to be. Someone had better put an end to such blasphemy before the whole world dies whispering "…the horror... the horror… the…"

Like the old country song said...

“…if you’ll give me forty years I’ll turn this rig around…”

Great old song it was, and I only had to change one word to bring it totally up to date. Change yards to years, and then look at the world you’re living in. It’s right there in your face. Gentle reader, the endless run of reboot movies, the endless run of reboot propaganda, these things are not because those who craft the entertainments and the manipulations are out of ideas, not at all. There is a very skilled and subtle intention in play, and in all truth it’s one that I would (grudgingly) have to support until and unless some better idea comes along.

Their intentions are to most literally get the good old cold war going again and split the world neatly in half east to west, US/Nato vs. the Russian Republic in the role of The Soviet Union. They are frantically trying to dial the calendar back to 1980.

It sounds like lunacy, but there is a viable reason for such a campaign. That reason is a desperate attempt to curtail the exponentially rising power of the Corporate Neo-Fascist in their bid for domination. The CNF, who have allied themselves with the nation of China after failing to conquer the United States with their attempted coup by media-manipulation of the Bush administration, the CNF must be stopped if any nation is to survive. The Russians know this, the Americans know this, the remainder of the world knew it before they did.

With the world once again divided along the old lines the CNF will no longer be able to operate on a global scale with utter impunity. Do business east, or do business west, but no longer will they be able to run with the sun around the globe. With the old cold war mentality back in place China is once again returned to the status of enemy to both sides… yes, the Soviet Union had a 65 division army, and 45 of those divisions were parked on the Chinese border assuming they’d have to give a thousand kilometers to stabilize a line against a Chinese attack on their nation.

It is the old, old truism of divide and conquer played on a global scale against a global enemy.  Unless by some miracle the United Nations should step up and establish a global code of law to govern the CNF I don’t see a better strategy on the horizon. And that… is a terribly sad thing.

We really need to make ourselves a note that the next time we try for global peace we’d better make sure there are no monsters lurking under the bed waiting for the old warriors to hang up their swords before making their bid for world domination. We need to remind ourselves not to make the same mistake twice.

Life is Boring... Television is worse...

...and why in the slam fucking hell when the first hints of a spider big enough to spin a world wide web were heard didn't the military unleash every tactical strike fighter at their disposal and hunt the beast into extinction? 

There is no gravity.  Just the universe trying like all hell to outrun the wave front of human stupidity, currently propagating at 32 ft per second per second in all directions.

reality.sys not found.
universe halted.

*bwaaayuank!*  ...of course you are my bright little star, I've miles of files, pretty files, of your aforefarted fruits, and now to suit our great computes?  You're... magnetic.. *swqueeeeeeeaaach* CALL NOW and for just FOUR easy payments of 19.95 you can own this magnificent mansion, but wait, there's more!  Order with your major credit card and we'll include this beautiful blonde trophy wife genetically altered to give only the most tender loving of care to your absolutely perfect Harvard bound children, guaranteed to fuck you into a state of total mindless abandon every seventeen minu*tunktunktunk *  AMEN BROTHERS AND SISTERS, I SAY AMEN AND DOWN WITH SIN, SAY IT WITH ME, DOWN *Wikibrubabrubabruba*  Jesus loves you my brothers, he died for YOUR SINS and he died for MY SINS and *shreeeeashereashhhhh* we'll be right back to Elvis Presly starring in Viva Las Vegas after a short word from our *issssssisssssissssisssss*

Ladies and Gentlemen, The President of the...

Some days I really think I should take up drinking cheap whiskey for a living.

(with only a slight apology to the Moody Blues, they did mean well...)
(five years later, and so little has changed... so little. Originally published 2011)

Denial... is not a river in Africa

I am not a poet,

     don't frame me for the crime

even if my bastard words

     sometimes try to rhyme…

I am not a poet,

far from that my friend

even if the story told

runs back to front again

like politician promises

when voting time begins.

I am not a poet,

more gearhead gunner freak

who has a heart of empathy

for what is on the street…

I am not a poet,

oh no, that's not I

just a rebel's heart to arms

when told to pass it by

leave the helpless on their own

to suffer slow and die

chained off to a sinking oar

by those who lives will buy.

I am not a poet,

such rank will ne'er be mine

commissioned by the graduates

of walls held square by vine…

I am not a poet,

there simply isn't time

to try and teach my soul to march

in even metered rhymes

I am just the partisan

who fights behind the lines.

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and the Great Door Buzzer Scandal...

Just eye candy and a bit of wishful thinking...

Farcebook wanted to know what was on my mind. The answer? How the secret tendrils of politics crawls into so many places to complicate and sometimes just plain fuck up things that politics has no business being involved with.

Take cars for an example. I do cars, have for years. Being born a poor boy it was learn how to mechanic or walk. I'm not so poor now, but I still work on my own for the most part, hey, paying someone else to fix something minor on your truck is kind of like paying someone else to give the old lady a minor orgasm, you know? Just not very satisfying no matter how loud or long she yodels.

Over the years automobiles have gotten a lot more technically sophisticated. Cuss as I do I'll admit that a great deal of these things are improvements, the metallurgy and the engine control systems. Yea, you have to know what you're looking at and yea, you do need test gear to really troubleshoot the systems, but... on the other hand you can go from the bottom of death valley to the top of Pikes Peak and not have to change running jets (and if you know what that means you might be *gasp* a geezer).

On the other hand I save some of my very favorite cuss words for when I get involved with something where there's a fucking fifty dollar module doing the exact same job that can be done with a bit of a cam and a chunk of heavy wire, you know... the bells and whistles on the inside of the car for those who think Honda is buying up all the American Virgins to keep the volcano god of Technology living at their house. Somewhere in the last few days it finally dawned on me how that happened, and folks... it is suck the dog POLITICAL.

The oriental countries have come into their own making electronic things. They, like every other industry in the modern world, have a problem. If they build them to last as long as they could they won't sell enough to stay in business. If they don't stay in business, well, THEIR political parasites will be all over the map and OH MY GOD the residuals of the totalitarian communist regimes might start creeping back in. So, of course they engineer for a predictable failure rate just to keep sales up. Just common sense.

But what is not common sense is allowing these same FOREIGN companies to put money into the AMERICAN political scene to influence trade agreements (aka laws that usually remain hidden from the public) in order to assure themselves that the American politicians will lean on their industrial buddies to use lots of what the Asian companies are making trying to make sure the geyodamcommies don't have another chance at taking over southern bangkok where the door buzzer widgets come from.

Now that's a bit of a mulligan stew of an exaggeration, but then again, not really. Next time a politician supports something that looks just totally dumb on the surface think it through again from the perspective of the global perspective of the Corporate Neo-Fascists, they who want to finish what Marx and Lennin started. It might just make a bit more sense to you.

Stay sane and starve a shrink... pass this around if it makes sense to ya. Enjoy your day.

High Amperage Plum Jerky...

==originally published October 2014==

Say what?  Plum jerky?  High Amperage?  What in the whale does that mean?  How do those words even end up in the same sentence?  The sixties produced a lot of strange word friends, did they not?  Of course the translation is “Electric Prunes” and of course “The Electric Prunes” were a proto art-rock band remembered for one fine effort in the genre, to be specific the 1966 track I Had To Much to Dream (Last Night) dealing with the consequences of exactly what the title says: allowing yourself to indulge to excess in the realms of fantasy.

My name is Cyranos, and I’m a recovering dreamaholic.  I’m here to tell you that yes, it is possible to wake up with a hang-over from having to much to dream.  The symptoms are not as severe as say to much alcohol, and yet in some ways they’re more detrimental to your day.  Things tend to go surrealistic on you, reality doesn’t feel real at all, what should be simple bears the burden of hidden complexity that teases just beyond the grasp of comprehension.  The myths start creeping in, the legends and the superstitions start making sense and the more sense they make the less traction the day really has, it starts sliding on you as the sun gets low in the west and if you’re not careful you’ll do it again, and again, and soon enough you’ll be a dreamaholic like me who sees Gaia’s face in the clouds and wonders why so often it happens that when you let your focus go soft you see the devil reaching out of a beautiful woman’s eyes wanting a little piece of your soul... take my word for it, it is entirely possible to have to much to dream.