Arty History
All those years of Art History classes and it takes a travel show about Germany for the lightbulb to come on that the big famous religous paintings from way back when were just early forms of advertising and political lobbying because the church had all the money and were the patrons of the arts of their day.. Had? Has! Funny, I don’t see the church spending too much money on art these days.
The host made a comment about how the church goers would have to look at the horrific images of hell and what happens to sinners to scare them onto the straight and narrow.
It occurs to me that this was like insurance for the church because they knew people wouldn’t be paying attention to what was being said so it had to be laid out graphically in front of them. I don’t mean the illuminations that were there for the illiterate masses to learn the stories…I mean the epic paintings of blood and gore and destruction. The pop-up ads of their day.
Or perhaps Pop-Culture is more what i was trying to say.

Streetlight Update

I have the little book to keep track in.

The first was tonight (I should put the 2 from the other day in) at 7pm the light over the mac machine in front of me went out.

Revisiting the Romans

As I re-read last nights posts this morning I feel the need to clarify one of them a bit. The Holy Roman Empire one.

I have not made a 180. I still think we’re fucked up in the New World and there are still lessons we need to learn from the Old World.

Jesus, it’s analogous to the whole thing with me and my dad with the united states being the obnoxious teenager all full of testosterone.

But through conflict comes change.
It is not man’s destiny to remain in the darkened cave staring at strange images on the wall mistaking them for reality. Nay, man has always believed his destiny is to be an explorer. To walk out of the cave and bathe in the light. And yeah some may go blind and some may get sunburned but mans destiny is to keep walking out into the light.

300 years ago the New world was the light and man flocked to it. To Philadelphia and the rest of Pennsylvania for religious freedom, to New York for who knows why people ever went there and the rest of the people who came here all over the place…
(history class …philosophy class…hell, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any class…)

So I’m not saying we are right or we know best and the rest of the world needs to follow along behind us. And I’m not saying we’re gonna burn like Rome or whatever really happened there and there will be some great end to America.
Maybe it’s not even up to us to figure out what the world needs to be moving towards.
But it is our job at this point in history to poke. To push the edge of the envelope. To bring the worlds needs and issues front and center. Even if the issue is needing to move the world beyond the era of the neighborhood bully.
“Well that’s stupid.” I say to myself. We are playing the bully and we got punched in the nose. So we became a bigger bully.

Hey, I’m not saying I know what I’m talking about. I’m just looking for the world to be a better place than it is.

wow!
I just realized I wrote a whole post essentially saying change is inevitable.
What the hell?
And it didn’t even feel like putting on a pair of shoes 3 sizes too small.
Boy, I musta really been wasted that night!

I make streetlights go out.

I don’t know why.
I just do.
When I walk under them they go out. Not all the time, but often enough that I notice and when I mention it to other people they notice. For example, tonight I walked 2 blocks to the store and on the way home, not one but two lights went out as I walked past.
Usually they are regular streetlamps. Tonight one was on the side of a church and one on the side of an elementary school. Both are always on from dusk til dawn.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s something like me needing the energy so somehow I’m sucking the light’s power.
Or I was just thinking somehow there is some energy field around me that simply disrupts the lights energy flow long enough that it goes out and has to reset it’s self.
I don’t know.
Could be one of them.
Could be something else.
Could be nothing.
But it just seems to happen way too much for it to be mere coincidence.

Maybe I should turn it into a science research project and keep a little notebook with me and write down when it happens. Track things like my mood and how I’m feeling physically at the time.

Funny that I never thought of this before.
Although this is the first time I have ever written down anything about it happening.
It’s happened as long as I can remember.

Ok that’s what I’m going to do…I’m going to keep track in a notebook. Why not? Could be fun. I feel like a little kid just thinking about it. My family used to always parrot me from when I was a little kid because I said, “Interesting……..like science!” in that slow kidlike drawl.

The Holy Roman Empire
The West Wing just made me realize that we are right.
We Americans.
It is our time in history to push the change.
Pass or fail…it is our time and we have to do this.
Yes, we may be the Holy Roman Empire of our era.
But we are what we are. And we need to do this.
The world needs to change.
And if bush needs to play the violin while this point in history burns than so be it. But I think we all admit the point that something has to change. This boredom…this self serving bullshit reality we have created. The Roman Empire and their Coliseums and their Gladiators and their wars. It had to end, didn’t it?
And then what became of Rome? Now it’s where the pope sits.
From the heart of war and debauchery in the world to the heart of religion.
Interesting.
Funny that we are the nation founded on religious freedom…the idea of whatever you are is ok here.
Too bad that has turned into the national religion of the dollar.

Evil Revisited
I’m angry that there are evil people in the world…and that somehow they think it’s ok to be evil. Forget eternal damnation or any of that shit…
I just don’t get it. How can anyone for whatever reason…especially stupid shit like money or power or fear do things they know are wrong. How do the cigarette companies do it? Or wait, there’s the problem…the depersonalization of calling it the cigarette companies…how can the people that work there…the ones that make the decisions…the people who think the company that makes something that kills people is more important that the people killed by what the company makes…those are the ones I don’t understand.
I guess it works at every level…when I worked at the sculpture factory and a table base would get a leg broken off somewhere in production process someone would usually just elmers glue it back on and say, “It ain’t goin in my house.” Like that somehow makes it ok. And that’s the problem I have with most of the people I have ever met. We all have the same fucked up attitude where we don’t really care if it isn’t happening to us. Like everything else is television or something. It doesn’t matter if it’s not happening to me.

Well we’re wrong. It does matter.

This began as a conversation about computer problems…

J: i have no idea
J: sounds weird
Mo: i'm beyound clueless
Mo: bc
J: A.D. Who's he?
Mo: after dinner?
……….
J: devil woman
Mo: he heee hee hee he
J: hey speaking of devil woman...
Mo: yes
J: wots yer church called?
Mo: ??
Mo: B… unitarian univeralist fellowship
J: uh...so yer a uniterian?
Mo: rite
J: what's the unity part?
Mo: which means nothing really
J: so not like christaina type thing?
J: uh...christian
Mo: I think it means we all believe whatever we want together
Mo: no not that
J: so no jesus in your dealie?
Mo: no
Mo: well, he's there
J: prophet type dude
Mo: with all the other dudes and chicks
J: like in islam...jesus is just one of the dudes.
Mo: ya just a dude w/ an interesting take on shit
J: do you have a book?
J: like a unitarian handbook or something.
Mo: it the "its all good" church
J: wow
Mo: hmmm. i mite have a brochure
J: can I have your permission now to post this conversation (edited with the names changed to protect the damned) on the blog...it seems to fit so well.
J: 'it's all good' there are more people in the world who say that?
J: that's what inspired the whole thing...R and I talk often of feeling lost.
Mo: Long before he became a minister, D was a folksinger,
multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and interpreter of traditional music.
D plays several instruments and has shared the stage and recorded
with musicians from around the country. This year at the Goods and Services Auction, 10 members banded together to purchase a concert which will be presented at the Fellowship on Saturday, January 24 at 7:30 p.m. There is no charge for the concert and everyone is welcome.
Wanna go? I was thinkin of goin'...

Sure post whateveru want. I have no shame.

Mo: J: 'it's all good' there are more people in the world who say that?
This happens to be a really popular phrase in case u didn't know
J: yeah, I know
Mo: I saw it on a bumper sticker for sale last summer
J: but not too many people really live it
J: you should read "Ishmael" by danial quinn...it makes me wonder...
Mo: i think it's people trying to convince themselves 'its all good' cuz they really don't believe to begin with
J: what's there to think is good?
Mo: anyway, that concert is at my fellowship sat. night and I was thinkin of goin'. Our minister is a folksinger and I have only heard him do one song once
J: We're the holy roman empire...our best hope is the world waits until after we're dead to collapse
J: I'll go if I don't end up too scared to burn in jew hell for it
Mo: ur funny
J: wasn't tryin ta be.
Mo: your name is already emblazened on the jew hell list , not to worry
J: y?
J: and I don't think jews have a hell. At this point I'm just hoping for something after...
J: not hell-like of course.
J: a do-over would be nice
Mo: who knows, i'm sure u've done somethin to qualify u...i was at a synagouge (?) a couple months back and the book we were reading saing one of the 2027 rules is anyone w/ "night emissions" is damned by god
J: 2027 rules?
Mo: yea, like one of the books was all these rules..?
Mo: I'll have to ask A
Mo: he'll remember
J: yeah...there's this thing in the bible about some dude pulling out, “he spilt his seed on the ground” so the whole masturbation thing is now seen as a sin. 1+1=apples
Mo: it was in hebrew but had the english translation

Lovely

First we had Mad Cow (I'd be pissed to if you fed me my parents to fatten me up to grind me into hamburger) and now we have Bird Flu
What was that scientific community joke about the planet shaking us humans off like a bad cold?
Funny how much we've helped it along in the past hundred years or so...

I wonder if either superbowl teams coaching staff has someone playing the game over and over on nfl playstation x cube computer game to see if there are any tendencies or anything else they can use in the game.

Speaking of Pronunciation

Dennis Kucinich Homepage

Between growing up in Ohio and remembering his name as someone cool back then and reading this, especially his 10 points I think I have found my candidate. I'll have to read a little on Dean too I suppose. And then I'll look at some of the other parties...but this time I think it's important to vote that conniving little bastard out of office unlike last time when I actually voted my liberal viewpoint voting for ralph nader.

…
Or maybe my (biological) sister is right and, although I have only done six months to a year at most jobs, there need not be a thing. Maybe I just like trying all these different things out. Maybe I needed all the experiences of a dozen different careers and meeting all the different people that came along with walking the different walks of life…What if that all brought me here and this is really the thing.
Or at least becomes one of those things like property that provides a (perpetual) paycheck to help fund the exploration of all the different things.
You are right though…if that’s what I’m gonna do I should at least do the thing as a hobby along the way because it’s something I like to do. But we’ve made it such a HUGE thing…

The Thing

What about the possibility that for me that the thing is to write about doing the thing and that the thing that we thought was my thing is just a hobby or perhaps through writing about doing the thing I will discover that it truly is my thing and it’s the only thing for me to do or perhaps even that it’s not my thing at all but for whatever reason I feel I need to do this thing to get to that thing so I’m just gonna put it all into this thing for the time being and when I get to that thing I get to that thing.
Or not.

Correct Pronnunciation

ok Rej…So now we know.

Somewhere along the line several years ago I said something to you that hurt you about how you pronounced something. And you said something to me several years ago about my pronunciation that stuck me in a similar manner.

So because of these original inflictions we have spent probably the last ten years or more having a bummer between us that we have poked eachother with over and over again.
I could tell you that, although you adamantly say cyclamen like bicycle that everyone else I have ever heard say it from Paul James to the people at the nursery to the kid at home despot pronounce it cyclamen like I’m feeling sick today (sicklamin). And you could tell me that I was incorrectly remembering how my grandmother who was married to an Italian man that liked to cook (Probably with his shirt off) pronounced Acine Di Pepe and laugh and make me feel like I must be stupid as a rock for possibly thinking that could be how it’s pronounced.
But is that really the point?

First of all, lets get over it.
I think we both might after last nights owning up of the reasons. Dude, I correct the fucking television when it mispronounces something. Sometimes I may be wrong but more often than that I’m not and to not do it would go against my nature and I bet yours as well. So lets just stop taking it personally.
I mean shit dude…You have to realize that after 16 years or whatever that I love you more than any other person on this planet. You have expanded my definition of ‘Best Friend.’
There is no-one that has been a stronger voice in my head over these years. Yes, I used to have conversations with you in my head and when I’d talk to you it would come out as ridiculous angry drivel but think about it there Yin…of all the voices in my life, yours is the one I spend the most time talking to inside. I use your moral compass to help guide me. I think to myself, “How would Renée do this?”
It’s nice to know that when I wake up scared and crying in the middle of the night because I can feel death and the unknown (probably nothing) waiting out there for me that there is someone in the world I can talk to to help me try to figure out how to deal with it and go on and not just paint over it like most people seem to do…like I have done…like I can’t seem to do anymore.
It’s nice to know that there is someone out there in my world who understands that ALL these things are related and that we struggle with them every day.
Someone else who sees the problem of the infinite line and how it relates to ‘nothing’ and how scary that is.
String Theory.
I refuse to let myself imagine even for a second the possibility of my life without you around. I think I’d be WAY more boring…either that or way more nuts but not in the good ways.
Although in this time where I am struggling with the ongoing loss of my father and everything I am learning a lot about life and family I still believe to a huge extent the line from Illusions about how we are not always born into our true family. If family has something to do with a mental connection, you are definitely mine. Not only being there as someone to talk to about things…but being there as a (fill in fancy word here for, ‘the person standing next to me at the precipice of the abyss’) going through a lot of the same things at the same time. Nobody in my biological family is my age like you are, maybe that has something to do with it, or maybe it’s the two know-it-alls thing. Whatever. There is a huge part of me that truly believes you are my sister more than the one in California I share the genetic structures and patterns with. I don’t remember if you ever read the books after Illusions but when I put myself in that dream world that stretches across lifetimes it’s you I’m standing there surrounded by cats talking about the nature of being with.
To put it more in your terms…if all that weird shit about the universe and karma and reincarnation and stuff is right I think somewhere along the line the ladel that created your soul or brain or consciousness and the one that created me were dipped out of the same kettle of cosmic soup.

So to return to the original point here for a moment…

I would like to apologize for all the stupid things I have ever or will ever say to you. I’m sorry I pick on you. I’m sorry I pick on me. I’m not really sorry I’m the type of person that picks though. Gadfly. I’m human. You’re human. We do human things. The things that we usually say, “Oh those stupid humans.” And we hate ourselves and loathe each other and everyone else for doing or saying or thinking. We all struggle. And sometimes we give voice to those struggles at the wrong time or in the wrong manner. It’s part of the struggle and the learning process. Life. It just kinda happens. Neet! Thank you for playing.

um...no. It doesn't mean I threw.
:-(

Emailin With J & R

J began with---

The show I was watching is over…I shut the tv. About
to walk away from the
computer too. Will the miracles
never cease?


R Responded---

Doesn't that feel great?! I just couldn't get over how
good it felt to turn the tv off without checking what
was on every other channel first. Empowered.

what a great weekend. didn't do much. cooked & ate,
watched football, slept. did some garden planning with
my mother. Can't wait til tomorrow, we're going to
have a lot of fun.

so... i couldn't tell from the blog...did your
discertation on "no time like the present" actually
mean that you threw? it sounded like it, but i'm not
sure. you know, that discertation by the way could
become a mantra. SO TRUE. no past, no future, Just
Now!
wow.

i'm at work, and all i can think about is all of the
other productive things I could be doing if i didn't
have to be here.

Perspective

It hit me like a ton of bricks.
Perspective…it’s what we lack.
I’m watching a tv show about the beginning of ,”Welcome Back Kotter” and one of them says something about a producer being there for the entire 30 year history of television. And that’s the thing. The people who were making television for you and I as a kid knew the entire history of the media. But more importantly, they grew up in a world not only that didn’t have television, but it was wrought with poverty and world war.
The people making tv now are our age or younger, c’mon you and D have worked in that industry now. We grew up in the weirdo 70’s. No wonder everything is becoming so fucked up! Think of the extremes that created, the people freaked out by the 70’s who became republicans or those who embraced it and turned into the rest of the world.

There was a larger personal point here that was what originally made me jump out of bed and run down to the computer…but as the original premise points out…the tv is on so my brain cells are being annihilated as I type and I’m having trouble recalling the personal point having gotten lost in the high falootin esoteric crap point and completely forget that I originally jumped up because I figured out one of those little things that was going to make my life better if I can only remember it or write it down.
I’m pretty sure this wasn’t it…but we can correlate all this perspective stuff back to Brugge and Eddie to broaden the point beyond the box.

AHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The larger personal point!
What if (in light of my time traveler) You and I and all the rest of the lost flock have stepped outside of time. Stepped outside of the perspective of 2004. Waiting for the world to catch up to us. Waiting for our calling to come get us so we won’t have wasted the lives we’ve stepped into.

Small sidenote to the first game...Although the Football was good...The best part was having one cat asleep on my lap and the other curled up unside my flannel shirt for most of the game.

I can’t believe Football season is almost over. It amazes me how quickly the weeks in the fall seem to go. From the boredom and anticipation of the pre-season to hey there are only two weeks left seems to happen without warning. College Football held little interest for me this year as my team had one of the worst years ever. It amazes me looking at the numbers of guys from the past few Penn State teams that are playing in the NFL that the Lions haven’t been doing better than they have. When guys who barely make the starting lineup and aren’t even the really big names on the teams become NFL starters and guys whose names you hear for making plays often…How did they not win more in college? Could what ‘they’ say be true?
The years we’re in the hunt with an x-0 record I tend to devote my entire Saturday to college football knowing what’s going on with the top 25 and watching the key games. Those are the years I watch all the bowl games. This year the only bowl I watched was the Hawaii bowl because my girlfriend was in the stadium.
Sunday however…My team is still in the hunt at this point. Very exciting. I have watched all the games. I usually watch as much NFL as I can. It’s like watching chess. No, I don’t sit and watch chess…but add in a little head bashing and I’m in! The chess match is between the head coaches. All the preparation and the play calling…but ahhhh the head bashing! Ahhh communism.
There is nothing like the emotion of a tight game. Especially when your heart belongs to one of the teams. The adrenaline. But unlike my co-commentator I also love watching the 70-0 thrashing especially when it’s my team doing the thrashing. And super especially when it’s PSU and Joepa put the scrubs in for the entire second half and the score continues to be run up so furiously he even plays the kids who are still a couple of years away from being backups and even the ones who never thought they would see actual game time. Games like that, and all games for that matter, it’s just the beauty of the game it’s self. The crisp pass, a sweet run, the crushing blow of one of those kids who never sees the grass on gameday so all the years of stored up football are released on that one play in that one hit. You’re a girl…what do you care about the score anyway? Guys in tight pants are still guys in tight pants whether it’s 70-0 in the third quarter or 23-23 at the two minute warning.
And todays games begin. Soon I will know if I will be excited with anticipation for another week or if my evening will be ruined and I will be without focus in my life until Spring Training begins in a couple of months.
But why? Why am I so emotionally invested in this game? Is it just good advertising on the part of the NFL? Am I that much of a sucker for a good sales pitch? Is it the head bashing? Nah, I don’t like boxing and I think the fighting part of hockey is stupid.
I guess it’s just a combination of the elements.
I think other sports lack the chess match element. I can’t think of any that share it to the same degree…where you line up the pieces on the board before every play. Perhaps that accounts for the popularity of football, it appeals to all different intellectual levels. There is no need to understand the esoteric aspects of the game to enjoy a good afternoon of helmet crunching fun. But that’s probably what manages to hold my interest rather than having it be a passing entertainment fad.
you only need look as far as yesterday afternoon and Mike Martz’s decision to take that game into overtime in stead of trying to win it outright in regulation. The controversy made it entertaining. The situation made it entertaining. The second guessing makes it entertaining.

There is no time like the present.

My entire life I looked at this one way. A saying meaning something like the similar cliché…why put off til tomorrow what you can do today.
I just said it to myself sitting on the couch thinking about when in my life I am going to throw pots again. No better time than now.
But then suddenly I took the statement totally out of the context of my own personal demons and looked at it as a statement in it’s own right.
Not that I want to be deep or anything…but it sorta works along with the impossibility of time travel argument I made earlier…There is no time BUT the present!
The past is a memory and the future is a concept.
But the now is here.
My time traveler stepped outside of time and waited for it to move ahead so it seemed as if he traveled forward in time.
There is nothing but now.

Sorta makes me wonder who made these things up. Were people saying the same things we consider cliché a hundred years ago? Three hundred? Eight? Were they saying, “There’s no time like the present.” In Brugge in 800ad?

If the 20 year fashion repetition factor has always been in play does that mean the Brugge people were wearing bellbottoms that year as well? (We’ve seen them in the 60’s 80’s and 00’s (what did they decide we are supposed to call this period in history? Speaking of which…I’m excited to see what the roaring 20’s will be like this time around).

Innocence Lost

I believe this supposed innocence of American television is a carryover from the 50’s when a married couple couldn’t be in the same bed and the 60’s or 70’s when they had to have one foot on the floor type thing. So that’s why the word Fuck was just approved here and who knows maybe we’ll see a nipple or a penis and not just sippowitz’s ass being the American version of risqué tv. The point we seem to have missed is that back then we weren’t seeing murder death kills on tv with the same descriptive slow-motion multi-angle photography that we have now so you see actual real simulated brain matter spew onto the face of the person holding the gun in the front seat. Personally I’d rather see a penis.

The Story of the Microwave Oven

Here’s just a little example of what we don’t know.
Where did the microwave oven come from.
It came from The United States Army.
“How did that happen?” You ask.
Somewhere in Alaska there were a bunch of soldiers freezing their asses of but they figured out they could warm up if they stood in front of the big round thing on top of their truck. I think they were working the early warning radar system looking for Russian nuclear missiles or something. The technology was all new so nobody had any idea why it happened , all the guys knew was that it was warm standing in front of the microwave dish just like standing in front of a fireplace and in the middle of winter in the middle of Alaska standing in front of a fireplace sounded like a good idea.
So in front of the fireplace…uh…microwave dish they stood.
The problem with the idea is one we all know now because the technology those men stumbled upon has become commonplace in our modern society.
Yup…They were cooking themselves from the inside out.
They’re all dead now…they died horrific deaths but that’s ok because I can make a tv dinner in 3 minutes and who really has time to cook anyway?
Similar story to the people who discovered x-rays. There’s a reason the person who takes the x-ray goes in the other room behind a lead wall. The people who first made x-ray machines had no idea so they used it like it was a home movie camera. They all died very quickly. Disintegrated.

Say what you will about the x-ray…and they were inventors striving for something…
But is microwave popcorn really a noble enough discovery to have accidentally died for?

Thanks R, now I have my work cut out for me for the weekend whilst you’re away.
I didn’t realize my speed and topical randomosity was throwing a monkey wrench in the works.
Now that I have your responses to work with I will spend the weekend working with them on an individual basis.

To begin with…I didn't realize the glow fish and fish tomato were actual things, tomacco being simpsons reality, not this one so please disregard my initial comment (posted in R’s eyes the second she posted the whole thing…freaky).
I did not need to know that scientists have fucked with the DNA of every tomato I eat. They spliced in fish DNA so the tomato won’t rot before it gets to the store. Holy fuck, are you kidding me? That’s as bad as eating cow face in a mcdonalds burger! SHIT! What is wrong with us! No wonder people go off in the mountains with guns and live off the land, “Live the life” as a friend of mine whose kids have chosen to do so put it to me once.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

I know you will be looking for more explanation than that.

So this is something I wrote recently in my journal.
How tv Fucked me

I think growing up watching so much television may have tainted my point of view. Somehow I think I confused my life with television and the do-over I was expecting was like reruns or something. But the underlying flaw is that it isn’t real. Willing suspension of disbelief they call it. That thing that allows you to be scared when something scarey happens in a movie or cry at the sappy scene. It’s like that’s my life. I couldn’t put aside my disbelief that this life I am living is real. That once I got to the point where I was old enough to have lost my father before reconciling our relationship and felt all the pain and remorse that would bring…I think I actually believed it was then I would get the do-over. Then is now. I see no do over. No matter how hard I think about what my life was like when I was a 5 year old kid…and I can think it pretty damn hard…I can close my eyes and see the sidewalk outside my house under my feet and feel the hot summer sun as I walk through the muggy Cleveland air of my childhood. If I try hard enough I can even smell it. It almost feels like I pass through it for a brief second. Like it’s really hanging out there waiting for me (like my father and grandmothers altzheimers is in this reality) if I could only grasp it as it passes by. But alas, there’s that willing suspension of disbelief practice working against me…because no matter how hard I try to hold on when I open my eyes I’m still middle aged and my father is still wearing diapers.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

2:00 in the afternoon and I jump out of bed to run down and turn on the computer to check the blog. I treat this addiction like it’s a job. Like somehow this will help me escape from the life I’m here to report.

Peco Part Two

Well…I’m sure we ALL knew this was going to happen….about an hour and a half after the power came back on the electric company called me because I called and said the power was out.
“Thanks” I said, “But the power came back on an hour and a half ago.”
“Yes sir, but we have no phone number for this address.”
The aforementioned computer outage reporting system has you put in your 10 digit phone # and it gives you the first 4 numbers of your address. Well it had the wrong address and I couldn’t figure out why until the woman on the phone said the whole address to me…it’s R’s address. How weird! She lived with me for about a year when I first bought the place but everything has always been in my name here. Without getting into all that with her I worked very hard to get her to disregard the number she was calling me on from their caller id and put my home phone number into their system.
One thing I have definitely learned in my life is that phone calls like that go much better when you are in a good mood because that comes across in your voice. I was happy, I could hear she was happy so we all got everything we wanted except me not wanting to be bothered talking to a human being I don’t know on the phone but at least I was doing it with the lights on.
I have been everything from the happy jolly person to the irate lunatic on the phone screaming for the supervisor and who do I have to sue to get this shit taken care of damn fuck hell and other bad words too! And when I’m nice I get what I want if not more usually and when I’m mean I just get screwed. I see a larger life lesson in there somewhere.

Todays example from Guardian...

An unnatural disaster
· Global warming to kill off 1m species
· Scientists shocked by results of study
· 1 in 10 life forms doomed by 2050
Comment: We still have time to act
Special report: conservation

1 out of every 10 species on the planet dead in 45 years.
A. as a grown up I don't think I believe this stuff the way I did as a young kid.
2. they say it like it's nothing...tra la la lets have another cow face sandwich at McDeadYummyStuff

I think it's kindof funny (it the that's not really funny it's more fucked up realm of subliminal messagery) that spell checkers want you to capitalize the letters tv.

Thoughts From a Power Outage

Well….this is a very strange blog. It has the oddest of beginnings and who knows where it shal go. Ultimately it has a time limit but it could end at any moment.
I am currently blogging by candle light.
The power on my street went out a little while ago so rather than sit here in the dark I lit some candles and fired up the laptop. It says I have 3 hours and 18 minutes of battery life remaining. Unfortunately I must now waste some of that while I go downstairs to check on the loud crash I just heard…was probably a cat and some pottery.
Wow, that couldn’t have worked out better for the cat…a lot of noise and a rather large piece of glass falling several feet onto a countertop crowded with pottery and glassware and other dirty dishware that happened to land on a plastic sandwich box full of used coffee grounds which apparently cushioned the fall so nothing got broken at all and the only things that got knocked around in the whole deal were made of plastic or metal and almost everything was empty so a couple of paper towels full of coffee from the kitchen floor and it was all over. Gave the cat a little love because he only does bad things to get attention and I have been on the computer and ignoring him all day.

So the power went out. I go online with my laptop to get the phone number for the electric company. I call on my cell phone because all of the phones in the house are cordless and none of them work when the power is out. Good thing R called earlier today and made me realize the cell was dead so it was on the charger for a couple of hours. So I call, I push the buttons and they have the wrong address listed. So I have to go find a flashlight to find an old bill (no easy task since my new filing system is to throw bills out when I pay them that way if I find a bill in the house I know I have to pay it still) and call again (By this time I have the key sequence memorized to get me to where I can put in the account number) put in the appropriate numbers and the machine tells me my address…Woo Hoo Success! So I press 1 for yes and they say my outage has been reported. They then ask if I want a phone call when the power is restored.
Me, “Hello?”
Peco, “This is Peco, your power is back on.”
Me, “Uh…yeah…hang on lemmie turn down the stereo.”
…
Me, “Hello?”
Peco, “This is Peco, your power is back on.”
Me, “Um…yeah, the lights are on and the stereo was just blaring.”
Peco, “Yes sir. Just wanted to let you know you can turn the lights and the stereo back on now sir.”

Ok…so it wasn’t as funny as I thought it should have been.
And the clock radio just came back on next to me. I guess it’s over.
I’ll give it a few minutes to see if it holds…it flickered a few times on the way out.
Definitely gotta get the laptop back on charge in case it happens again later.

This is not my idea of moving towards a utopian society people

KENNEWICK, Wash. (AP) -- Forced to clean up an increasing number of jugs and bags of human waste along highways, the Adams County Waste Reduction & Recycling office took out a full-page newspaper advertisement to combat the problem.
The ad features a photo of a plastic milk jug filled with urine, and the message, "Okay, One last time: This is not a urinal."
From March 4 to Nov. 27, 2002, one Adams County highway cleanup crew picked up 2,666 jugs of urine and 67 bags with human excrement in them.
The problem isn't limited to Adams County.
Megan Warfield, litter program coordinator for the state Department of Ecology, had posters similar to the newspaper ad printed and made them available for any county that wanted them. About a dozen counties have ordered copies to deal with the problem, she said.
"All of the cleanup crews encounter it. It's pretty much the same around the state," she said. "Ironically, they're mostly found on interchanges near rest areas. Why can't they stop there?"
Ninety-nine percent of urine is sterile, but could be dangerous if it contains hepatitis or blood, she said.
Warfield said human waste falls under a newly created category that the Legislature created last spring: potentially dangerous litter.
Human waste, dirty diapers, cigarettes, cigars, tobacco or other items that can start a fire, and hypodermic needles or medical instruments designed to cut or pierce, fall into that category.
The fine is $1,025 for anyone caught dumping such waste, but the new penalty doesn't seem to be easing the problem.
Karen Cagle, who supervises highway cleanup crews in Eastern Washington, had never heard of urine jugs when she started her job in 1989.
Now the numbers grow each year.
"Several years ago, we started finding them and didn't know what to do with them and left them. But you can't leave it there or the freeways would be (flooded)," she said. "It's incredible what's out there. Where is it going to stop?"
Gary Lembacher, who oversees the litter program in Eastern Washington, said he does not let the kids on his work crews pick the bottles up.
"I just don't trust any liquids," he said. "You don't know if it's pesticide or if there's something used in methamphetamine."
Taxpayer money not only pays for highway cleanup, but also pays for the state Department of Transportation to dispose of the human waste at the landfills.
"I don't know what the answer is," he said. "People are getting more out of control."

A or B

Is the world the matrix?
Why is everything always A or B?
Flip a coin to make your choice.
It’s a great idea or it sucks.
Prince or Pauper?
Black or white?
Either this way or that.
Sometimes you feel like a nut sometimes you don’t.
I’m feeling rather like a grapefruit myself.
Speaking of grapefruit, does this make sense without the chicken analogy?
No, not which came first…the machines not knowing what things tasted like so that’s why so many things taste like chicken.

It makes me feel like sometime I’ll blink and when my eyes re-open the entire universe will be completely different. Like I’ll slip into one of those alternate string theory realities and everything will be different and I’ll never be able to get back like a shattered mirror.

The cheese is smart.
She just tried to trick me because I was ignoring her.
Sh sent me an email telling me to call.
I didn't so she sent another one a little while later with this title, "Blog"
with the same message in it in case I didn't read the first one and I'd jump
all over one called Blog.
Good thinking.
Too bad I slept through the whole thing or it woulda been really funny!

Time Travel According to J

Time travelers can only move forwards in time.
Because they are not moving forward in time…rather they are moving outside of time as time passes and when they move back in they are in the future.
The past has already happened therefore you can’t move into it.

Works within the realm of relativity as the atomic clock shows that time slows down at the speed of light is approached. If you go fast time slows down therefore time for those not moving fast seems to those moving to have moved into the future. The atomic clocks on the space shuttle prove it because the one that went fast for a while was behind the one that stayed here. You need to go much faster and for a longer period of time for it to make sense but if you could lets say go almost the speed of light which is where time supposedly stops, so fast that one minute for you is like a thousand years. For you it seems like you moved a thousand years into the future in that one minute and to the world you go to it would seem like you came from 1000 years in the past.

Me and Jake are watching Planet of the Apes.

What is "My Calling?"
What is "Your Calling?"

As A River Runs Through it is on


Can it really be that simple?

SpiderMonkey DeathCar Donkey Donkey!!!!!!

As a follow-up to my last post…I just heard on NPR oddly enough a headline (because that’s all my public radio provides me with from the NPR news desk and that’s about all I can handle…see previous post’s comment about I don’t watch that show) that India and Pakistan suddenly announced that they are having peace talks and everyone is open on the subject of the disputed region of Kashmir and how one of the outgoing presidents wants his legacy to be one of peace. I bet that’s the one they tried to kill they other day. They. You know….They.

The London News Review

This is from there from January 2 nd.
It’s very interesting the things we don’t know about as Americans. Or perhaps just me since I don’t watch that show.
Anyway…off to the quote:

“On Sunday, a convoy Musharraf was travelling in passed over a bridge that blew up a few seconds later. The President's life was only saved by an electronic jamming device installed in his car.
Of course, the nightmare scenario in Pakistan is that fundamentalist elements take control of the country’s nukes (by, for instance, assassinating the President) and Delhi is more or less erased from the map by the day’s end.
The US State Department and the elite Washington press corps were deeply worried about the risk of a coup in a nuclear-armed country, as was made clear by the following exchange, two days after the event:

'Question: Pardon me if we discussed this yesterday, but I don't think we did, the assassination attempt on President Musharraf and your reaction to it?'
'State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher: No, we really didn't.'
'Question: All right. I didn't think we did.'
'Boucher: Let me get you something on that.'

The State Department later put out a statement thanking Musharraf for his support in the 'Global War on Terror' and expressing relief at the fact that nobody was hurt. “

This is lovely. What a lovely thought.
Society has found new ways to scare the shit out of people. The American government is using things like this to ratchet us up like they did during the cold war so we’ll be behind them when they blow up another country for their oil. And apparently we don’t care as long as the price of gas stays low enough for us to feed our SUV’s.
I saw a picture online of a highway banner about the H2 that said something like, “Real Soldiers are dying in their Hummers So that you can play in yours” Also said something about 2 soldiers a day are dying (the 2 in the H2 or something). The point was it’s just a chevy tahoe with a different body but it only gets like 5 miles per gallon. Are you fucking kidding me? That’s insane! Does no one remember 1974? It’s when the big chevys and fords and dodges gave way to the Honda civic because of lines at the gas station and the price jumping from the 25cents a gallon it had been for a long time to a dollar before dropping back down but never to 25 cents again. And as Americans, unless we travel abroad (and I mean as close as Canada) we never even know how much more the rest of the world pays for gasoline compared to us. A few years ago I was driving to Canada regularly and I always made sure I got gas before I crossed the border because in New York gas was about a buck and a half a gallon and once you cross into Canada it was a little over two dollars a liter which (For those of us Americans who said “No Way!” to the metric system when the rest of the world said ok (talk about standing outside the car having a sandwich!)) worked out to….uh…like $7 a gallon maybe? And last year in Holland and Belgium although we really had to look hard to find a gas station (Yay Europe!) it was like 5 or 6 bucks a gallon (Sorry, Euros). I once heard our government subsidizes the price of gas for us or something. “We’ll sell you fast airplanes and lots of bullets for them if you sell us cheap gas for our SUV’s”???
But this rant was supposed to be about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and how someone is going to kill some dude and blow up India or is it Pakistan…I did poorly in geography…hey, I’m American…Europe didn’t really exist until November 2002 in my reality!

There are few things in the world that bring as much momentary pleasure as a pizza.

3:45 1/5/4
Just a sidebar note about my life...
Just now enjoying the tactile sensation of petting the cat (The Dude) I had the strongest urge to throw pots I have had in a very very long time.
I could feel the wet clay slipping through my fingers.
Do u still have that movie of me throwing pots and H at the same time?

Gadfly
Perhaps you should have included have included the definition of gadfly for all of our reader.
I do not agree though that isn’t the purpose. Socrates refered to himself as a gadfly. He was put to death (“In the immprtal last words of Socrates…I drank what?” Val Kilmer in Real Genius) for it. He questioned. Like a fly buzzing around your head he questioned. He was persistent.
His deal was to prove to those who thought they knew things that they did not. To try to get the people of his time to get to the point where I believe I (we?) am at now…where I realize my own insignificance in the greater scheme of things and now I need to find some other purpose for my life to fill the lack of purpose.
This is what religion used to do. This is what you blew away with your tarot card statement.
I guess I hadn’t realized it was all just debate to you. I thought you really put some weight into what you seemed to believe as far as the nature of the universe.
Of course in my youthful manner I believed your words to be absolute.
I saw no room for doubt or the changing of minds or anything outside the realm of your essentially telling me you believed in nothing./ Which is pretty much where I’m at now in my life. I believe that life happened. That this Illusion is reality. And that someday it will all end for me.

Infinity and Nothing are two concepts I think we has human beings have a hard time grasping.
I m Having a hard time with the idea of my own mortality…poof I’m gone and history doesn’t notice. Not written history…I guess I mean time. Time doesn’t notice I’m here and it won’t notice I’m gone (Good thing I don’t believe in time as a concept in and of it’s self).
R recently said to me that it’s the people in our lives that we touch that matter. That she couldn’t imagine how different her life would be without me. Aside from being one of the coolest things anyone had ever said to me…400 years from now so what! We owe history nothing. All we have is the very moment we are existing in right now.
We owe history nothing.

supposebly?
R not Cheese says, "It didn't bodder me. Bodder. b-o-d-d-e-r (she spelled it out)." in perfect joey tribiani.

Capitalism

Capitalism is the machine to which I refer.
But as the ussr was never really a communist society (I believe it is the israeli kibutzes that are the only true functioning examples of communism on earth) I'd bet if I did some research about the ideals on which capitalism is founded we're really not following the original intent either.

I want the Star Trek reality where we are truly communist...meaning everyone working towards the common good not some socialist dictator making people dissapear if you say anything subversive. I mean the true utopian society.

Somehow we decided that money is the most important thing in the world. More important than family or health or life or progress. Money money money money.
I would say it's more important than sex but you're the one who took me to a place where money can buy sex so that one's out.

I think capitalism is stuff like supply and demand and work hard to get ahead.
But what it is in reality...at least the outer reality of 2004...it's the stuff about the jeans and the joneses and the cars.

R is a gadfly

Socrates incarnate.

I’m Angry at plastic!

Any of us who have seen the movie The Graduate will remember the scene where some old fucker spills on a young Dustin Hoffman his philosophy of life summed up in one word…”Plastics.”
The way of the future.
And now I begin to wonder.
We as an American society embrace the ‘Bigger, Better, Faster, More’ mentality with glee charging up that hill to keep up with the Jones’s. We rarely stop to consider the consequences or the future really. Only later do we discover that blah blah blah was bad for us and is killing people. Recent examples would be things as simple as putting plastic over something before putting it in the microwave…well now 30 years after the fucking things become commonplace they (the mysterious all knowing ‘they’) figure out and tell us (us being those who are not they) that somehow the microwaves which we really don’t fucking understand worth a lick but woo hoo we can cook a steak in 30 seconds…can’t wait til they figure out why cooking with microwaves is killing us or poisoning the atmosphere or something…that those microwaves are doing something to the plastic and it’s bombarding our food with little toxic particles.
I’m angry that we do things that are bad for us.
Things that “Take days off your life”
If my life is all I have and all I ever have who the fuck are you corporate America to steal days from me?
And who the fuck am I to do the things that will take days off the end.
And what doesn’t any of it matter if a garbage truck can come by and crush you to death in your car and nothing you ever did like that matters.
What does it really matter how many packs of cigarettes a day you smoke or how many times a week you go to the gym if you happen to have bought a ticket on one of those planes that hit the twin towers? Or if you worked there and got to work early that morning?

But we were talking about things like plastic. How about Aluminum? We drink billions of sodas in it and wrap food in it. I was in college when I figured out tomatoe sauce made aluminum foil disintegrate when I found big holes in the foil over a dish of lasagna…ate it all anyway. Most of my pots and pans are aluminum and some are so old you can see gouges in the bottom of the pot where thousands of cans of soup and spaghettios were stirred in them. And now with my fathers Altzheimers we come to find out that the one (and only I believe) thing all patients with altzheimers have in common is that they find aluminum in their brains.
Aluminum in their brains!

Do I even need to discuss Aspartame? Used to be called Nutra-Sweet but then they figured out that it was causing all kinds of brain problems from migraines to tumors (the brain cancer rate in the US went up like 9000% in the first 10 years of Nutrasweet hitting the market). You can’t buy NutraSweet anymore. But that same shit with it’s technical name is still in everything.
Hello…it’s BAD! Stop making it. Don’t change the name. Fucking stop making it.

I live right near an abandoned Asbestos factory. Next to that there is a mountain of Asbestos. I mean it. The government decided they couldn’t move it so they put dirt on top and grew grass and trees on top of that. Don’t mind the razor wire fence around it…isn’t it a pretty little mountain on the edge of town. What’s that? It’s leaking into the stream that feeds the river where one of the largest cities in America gets half of it’s drinking water from? Oh. Ok. Lets build a weird little concrete wall type thing next to the creek to see if we can keep the asbestos out of the water. Hmmm….I wonder if they test my little towns water supply for Asbestos…we use wellwater so I’m sure something is leeching into it. Lovely.

They test shit on mice and then say it’s ok for us. What the fuck? How do they know what 30 years of an artificial sweetener will do to our bodies? Or that hair color she is putting on her head every month.
The worst part is…if they tell us it’s bad 9 out of 10 people will 9 out of 10 times choose to do the thing that is bad for us anyway. No wonder the government doesn’t fucking care about us. We don’t seem to care about ourselves or eachother.

So last night R says to me on the phone that I have gone to a weird place with this and I'm not going to like her answers.
I would say that I went where I went (where we are) because I needed to hear her answers.
I want to hear her opinions.
That is the point to debate. Not to always agree or say what the other person wants to hear. But rather to open up the possibility of other ideas.
I've done enough mental masturbating on this and now I need to have some actual brain sex.

How could I expect any less when posing the questions to the person who shook my world to it's foundation and blew away all the naieve mystery in my life with one sentence?
It was several years ago. We were discussing the reading of tarot cards which R has always done and at least acted like there was something to it…
One sentence…from R…
“You don’t think I actually believe any of this do you?”

one of those rare moments you can hear a pin drop inside my generally cluttered mind.
“?” was all I could manage to think.

So now these years later I’m sitting here having recently realized the probability of the finality of mortality and how I’ve wasted most of my life waiting for things…some of which have arrived, some are yet to come and some were just pipe dreams and silly childish wishes.
There is an emptiness…a void inside me where the ‘faith’ used to be.
This is why we read. This is why we talk.
And you think I don’t want to hear what you have to say?

Feed The Machine

First Question:
Will there come a day when science/medicine/some-other-voodoo will find a cure for death?

SubQuestion A:
will you get to choose at what age your mortality begins...at what age aging stops for you.
SubQuestion B:
What will happen to birth at that point? Will it be outlawed?

Who am I and why am I here.
No...but seriously.
I know...random accident...billions of sperm...billions of years of creation and evolution...2 horney people.
But what else?

Is there a 'Meaning of Life'?

I thought the H stood for 'Hell'?
But what do I know...I'm a Jew.
Oh, right....so was christ.

Funny....I just realized a week or so ago that christmas was just a mass for christ which is why yins all go to mass on x-mas (which is how I usually write it because I can't speel so of course I never noticed)

So let us begin with a statement of purpose

I'm J-Bird and she's The Cheese.
We like to think ourselves smart.
We like to think ourselves evolved.
We gragimated kollege together.
Sorta....although I'm older it took me longer so she managed to be done first.
Anyway...we like to get together and discuss the nature of the world and I recently rediscovered blogging so we can now share our views of the world with the world.

So not much of a purpose as of yet. I tend to get lost in tangent land. The cheese is the rock who brings me back to....uh....what were we talking about?

Yes...and won't all the jesus people be surprised when they get here :)

And so it begins!

Woo Hoo