The Blog Resurrected

Contrary to popular belief, I do live.  I've been devoting a lot of time to my new radio show; if you haven't checked it out, please do.  It's all about capital-T "Truth," in politics, advertising, media and also covers lots of psychology/sociology issues and news items, as well as many comedic breaks.  You can call in/chat in on LIVE shows!  Show has been picked up already by iHeartRadio and I've only been doing it for a few months!  Check this jank!  http://www.facebook.com/TruthOnTapShow

I expect some blog posts again soon as I do have a fifth book due for release on 4-14-14 (Vol. 1 of the People Phenomenal series: Flight Fortemente).  Thanks for checking everything out!

The Temptation of the Public Poetry Reading, Issue 2: In the Truth of Lacking Intelligence

You can be an optimist or a pessimist, or somewhere in-between, but no matter where your mark is on that scale, you should have no opinions on math.  And who should?

Mathematically, your experiences in this world can be summed up as everything you've gone through as calculated by your mind.  Your experiences are not everything you've gone through, of course, except as calculated by your mind.  A person who may be called disconnected from reality is, of course, having a reality of his own, marked not by level of accuracy regarding what's really happening--marked only by how he perceives it, and how much of it he perceives, and how long he can remember any of it.  Without memory, there can be nothing drawn from an experience except for the immediate emotions or other thoughts it gives birth to, and without memory, the traceability of that path disappears, and therefore, can never be proven to have existed until science can record the path.  Don't hold your breath for that one.

To that end of having experienced, we are only limited by intelligence once health and normal cognitive abilities are accounted for, those being the engine of experience.  Intelligence is our legend for the map of experience, isn't it?  How can we know what we are experiencing without it?  And a lack of intelligence, which every human alive today lives with, is a measure of our ability to understand a given experience, or ascribe any value to it or even more importantly, to draw anything valuable from it.

Since we are all lacking some intelligence, leaving us all somewhere between knowing nothing and knowing it all, then we are all immeasurably limited until we find our what the end of intelligence is, and in my own humble wager, intelligence is not limited--it's a perpetual compounder, if nothing else.

Imagine if you did know it all; would you even know what to do with that?  Is it fair to even argue that knowing it all would necessarily include having the knowledge of how best to use the information you have to further (what?  Your life?  Humanity?  Science?) something or someone?

The truth in realizing that you lack intelligence is a promotion of yourself.  I'll say it aloud.  You are promoting the accuracy of your understanding of your importance and of your value to this world when you realize that, compared to all knowledge, you can't possibly have even scratched into a millionth of a millionth of one percent of it all.  This world is temporary, just as you are; your importance to it is no more measurable than is the measure of your importance to the ground compared to the train's importance to the ground that you are riding on.

By recognizing the truth of lacking intelligence, you decisively are placed into a category made by nothing more than circumstance that insists upon your expendability.  The Earth and her people can afford to lose you.  The skies stay blue even in your absence, until She, the Mother, is devoured by a dying sun and the mathematical certainty that she will be consumed by a black hole long after she has lost her ability to sustain life of any type.  And just as traffic will still move long after you're gone, the Universe will still thump long after She's gone.

The implicit idea is not that having total intelligence would make you indispensable--nothing would still rely on you for its survival; having total intelligence would make you indestructible, except by your own choosing, and anything in existence that might choose to destroy itself or allow itself to be destroyed when it doesn't have to must be lacking intelligence.  Assuming choice is never removed, total intelligence is not possible as long as choice is possible, and who among us would give up choice to have total intelligence?  Who would walk into the cell of knowledge and slam the door behind him, knowing that that would be the last decision he ever made, just to roll around in the mind of all information and it's applicability?

People will not tolerate you enjoying your life, so you'll have to do it alone

There are only a couple of things I really dislike.  One is constant negativity, and the other is hypocrisy.

The negativity isn't something I always hated.  I didn't even isolate it from everyday, normal conversation until a few years back.  I just incorporated it within life as a part of life.  Once I separated it in my mind, I realized that I didn't have to tolerate it.  The negativity was coming from people.  All I had to do was either get those people out of my life, or insist on the old maxim, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."  Easier said than done; I know.  I worked with a guy who was always negative, so I couldn't just cast him out of my social circles.  And I didn't want to say old maxims to him; sounds bossy and judgmental.  Instead, after he would say something, I would always say some variation of, "Oh, I don't know.  When it comes to negative stuff, I just don't get involved."  He finally got the message, and because he didn't know how not to be negative, he stayed quiet a lot, which was ok with me.

It was ok with me because I had decided to have no more negativity in my life.

On my mom's 70th birthday, about 4 years ago, my youngest sister, Kelley, was visiting and she and I made a little pact while standing around outside.  Something got us talking about negative people, and particularly, critics.  We both believed that you shouldn't criticize anybody until your got your own back yard perfect, unless they asked for your honest opinion.  We both knew that some people love to stew in negativity; that steamy, acidic broth from which all of their thoughts and actions emanate, seen usually in the form of their criticism of you or other people, or places/things.  Always putting something, person, or place down.  Always, always complaining.  Just unhappiness, paraded.  We knew everybody had days like this; Hell, even weeks like this, or occasionally, an entirely bad month.  But those folks are easy to separate from those who live in the steamy broth, the acidic, corrosive poison that moves them from thought to thought, and therefore, from action to action, which usually materializes as criticism.

We made that pact.  We decided to work hard, really hard if necessary, to get negative people not only out of our social and co-worker circles but even family members.  Even siblings, parents, whomever; if they were negative, and always prone to criticize you or others, or tell you how to live (implying how you're living wrong), off they go.  Out of the circles.  You launch them over the fence of your everyday yard.  You are free to warn them; give them a month.  Tell them, "In 30 days from now, I'm going to stop hanging around or talking to anybody who I see as negative.  Not because I'm judging them or any other reason except that it brings me down, and this life is hard enough.  I don't want help to feel bad.  I don't need bricks tossed into my leaky lifeboat.  I can't handle it, and even if I could, I'm going to choose not to, because nowhere have I read that I'm not entitled to take a good, hard, fair shot at happiness.  If I'm going to take that shot--to make a real effort toward it--I have to get the negative people out of my daily communications.  There is no other way."

While hypocrisy and negativity are not necessarily related, I think they do hang out a lot together.  A hypocrite must necessarily be telling others how to live to be a hypocrite; he must also not be living by his own advice/demands.  The ultimate, near-combo mixture for me that just drives me berzerk is a hypocrite being a hypocrite while criticizing me.  A christian, for example, telling me I won't make it to heaven, when I personally know that he breaks 5 of the sacred 10 commandments weekly but believes he's forgiven if he says sorry every Sunday.  I have many, many more examples that do not involve religion, and I'm not here to pick on religion, but it is the first example that popped into my head.

While I may occasionally contradict myself, I'm ok with that.  My life path is clear to me now, at almost 41-years old.  I know a lot of people that live off of government checks when they could be working, yet they criticize others for not working.  I know plenty of people who have diets or lifestyles that are very unhealthy, yet they criticize others for eating too much or smoking cigarettes.  That's not contradiction, because they would have to believe in (and would thereby live) a healthy lifestyle in order to be contradicting themselves while criticizing the choices of others.  I contradict myself occasionally with philosophies.  Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes," in Song to Myself.

I don't know about being large or even containing multitudes, but I'm not bothered by when I contradict myself.  I see it as almost unavoidable if you think a lot.

My girlfriend, Tanya, has a very positive outlook on life, in general.  I'm super lucky for that, because I promised myself before I started dating that I could not be in a relationship with anybody who was consistently negative.  And that now goes for my friends, too.

So this blog post is one that I made mostly to help me crystallize this particular series of beliefs that absolutely must define how I deal with others.  I'll probably refer people to it. It's very confrontational in my view to just come out and tell somebody, "You're too negative.  I'm going to avoid you from now on," yet I've had to do it, and I'll have to do it again.  If I seem to have disappeared from your life, and you happen to stumble across this, you may get a clue into what I was thinking when I removed myself from your daily life.  To sum up, this life is a bitch, no matter which way you slice it.  There's a few good things, and a shitload of bad things.  I choose to focus on the good things.  My choice may be good or bad, but it is my choice and one that I adhere to with maximum dedication.  I would advise this to anybody, this choice to not hang around/be around negative folks and hypocrites.  But yet I don't, because advising anything sounds... pushy.  There is one other context I need to put this in, though; I genuinely believe that if you don't live by this model or some variation of it, you cannot have a decent shot at real happiness.  I'm giving myself, and the people around me, the best chance possible to have happiness.

Another degrading comment from my ex-Monster in Law

I can't be sure it was from my ex. ass-in-law, especially considering the name is bart_BOY_1 but I have to go from experience.

Let me take you back.

It's July 4th, 2001.  We're gathering to watch fireworks on a lake.  In comes the ass-in-law; hyper, just smoked a big, fat joint, and she's all in my daughter's face.  100mph, this nutcase goes.  My daughter can't stand her personality; she's almost in tears as her grandma hits her with 10,000 Amps of stimulus per second in her stoned rampage.

And that was a mellow evening.

Since then, she and her daughter, my ex, have gone on a concentrated mission to separate me from my daughter, and have been fairly successful.  After I found out my ex was cheating with gawd knows how many men, I immediately filed for divorce.  I had sole custody of my daughter but with her polished court appearance at the final divorce (mostly lies; even got caught in a lie where the judge said, "What?"), she got custody back.  Some lawyers tell me it was because I was leaving the state and was honest about that (she since left and moved to another state with my daugher); others tell me it was because I lacked a vagina.  I took it to the state supreme court (I will not capitalize it) and lost again.

There was a sneakiness that pervaded my ex-ass and ex-ass-in-law's behavior; it was always in their M.O.  "Don't tell Curt," (my ex father-in-law) was something I heard every day.  It was always about hiding and lying with her and her two kids.  She also tried to get me to lie and not tell a clinic that was giving my daughter checkups for free that I had gotten a job and could afford medical care/food so I could keep getting benefits. She flat out told me, "Lie to them.  Don't tell them you have a job."  I refused.  This VA boy wasn't playing that scam game up in VT.

So tell me something.

If your husband and daughter (AND her current husband, the 4th or 5th, I've lost count) all three lived off of a check from the government, and you and your son were potheads, would you be able to easily launch attacks upon others?  Is it jealousy?  Is it just diminished brain capacity? 

It always gives me a chuckle.  But I'll probably write a lot more about them now; the government funded, pothead family. Next time, I'll leak some names.  Come poke at a sleeping dog, well...

The Temptation of the Public Poetry Reading, Issue 1: Who You Are

An old friend of mine once introduced me to the idea of going to an open session for poetry reading.  I'm not a huge fan of the rhymy stuff; I can write it all day, but to have to rhyme is to have to be confined.  So I prefer the prose.  I've never been to one; I may never go to one, but the thought that I might like to read aloud at one gives me a small thrill.  With that sentiment, I start the series of writings that I would actually be willing to read aloud.  To qualify, in my mind, they must be ones that I could read with at least bouts of incredibly emotional emphasis--they must be moving, by my reckoning (and, I hope, they are moving by yours).  So, tonight, I begin.

I don't know exactly who you are, but I know it must be enough.  It can't be any other way.

Who you are--who I am--is defined by what we have been.  And what we have been has been a result of our choices, our genetic bridles,  our interpretation of the world's acts upon us, and the actual acts of the world upon us.

As a kid, I was a natural at baseball, but I lost the love too early.  I was passionately and fanatically in love with football, but I started the effort too late.  My spirit, both the built and the inherent, was the spirit and remains the spirit of William Wallace--of an unquenchable thirst to see the abused vindicated and the abusers punished.  A close friend told me a few years ago that I have a problem with forgiveness.  He's right, and part of what I have trouble forgiving is my past, and I would have that trouble regardless of what my past was.

You are who you are.  You love what you love.  The story that creates the you of right this moment is a story that, fast-forwarded, would look like popcorn in a machine, going from seed to popped, or unpopped and remaining seed, bouncing all around in the machine by various forces that, alone, are specific and detailed but together are fully unpredictable, yet when you look at all the popcorn in the machine after the popping is done, the popcorn and the remaining kernels that are unpopped fell in exactly one way.  One, single, defined way.  That became the you of right now.

I accept the me.  I look at my life, right now, and I see the fluffy popcorn in its cubic arrangement.  I see every kernel that didn't pop and lay dormant, I see every unique shape and position of each piece, and I am not allowed to go into the popcorn and swoosh it about, for it is in the past and that's that.  Time travel wouldn't help, because if I swished it all about, then the present me would have no idea what he had interfered with and resurfaced.

Nobody would argue that you can change this or that starting in this present moment, and, indeed, the world would have it no other way.  Anything being shaped is constantly in a process of leaving its old state.  Nobody would argue that accepting your present state is more peaceful and much easier than fighting it.  And in truth, why would you fight it?  Change all you want starting now, but until starting, you can change nothing, so why not accept your present state?  All that has made you is in the past.

You are, right now, exactly what you absolutely must be.  In the future, go ahead, become anew, but what you are right this moment is and forever will be enough for you, because you have no choice in the matter.  All the toil and panic you can muster will not change it.  Would you dare go as far as to accept it and even celebrate it?  I would.  I celebrate who I am right now because the past will never be re-written.  I am a leaf, half-grown from a tree that will die.  I am information that will pass leisurely into and through your eye.  From your moment of birth, you are falling toward your death, and I'm falling with you, and we will both be entirely satisfied with that, in one way or another.

Into the 59th hour of sleeplessness and other things I wish were fiction

It's entirely true that as I write this, I'm now past 58 hours of sleeplessness.

Being an experimenter, I wanted to see what I could do in this state, yet I don't even know what to test out.  Thinking in preparation or any type of project is hard.  It's exactly like looking into your mind for answers your know are there and they've locked themselves away down in a locked part of your subconscious.  The conscious mind itself is devoid of activity, mostly.  I'm only relatively aware of my immediate surroundings.

None of us are strangers to fatigue--the monopoly on insomnia is not mine--yet this is a level that I have only passed maybe 10 or 15 times before.

Typically, as is the case tonight, the force that keeps me awake is physical pain with some arthritis problems that I have in my spine.  What happens isn't all about pain, though.  For some reason, as my lady would testify, once I've gone 36 hours awake, I often get very nervous about sleeping until after 48 have passed, and then I can (or have to) crash.  It's this odd feeling, like since I'm so exhausted from having been awake for 36 or more hours, I fear I'll sleep so hard I'll die.

Ever heard of anything like that?

Well, might as well try a few experiments here or descriptions.

I'll start with one truth here; the importance of any opinion piece--of any blog, really--is immediately diminished after only being awake for just 24 hours.  One begins to wonder, "Why bother?"  While I can easily wonder that while fresh, I can quickly answer, "Because I like it.  I like to share the experiences of life and get feedback and maybe help to spread understanding in my own little way, through my own little insights; one more flavor of chips in the vending machine, Kevin's mind tries to be."  That's generally the feeling, but right now, it's like I can't even understand what a blog is.  I wonder if I ever really did.

The TV is on; I usually watch stuff on NetFlix because I can get my WWII stuff and science stuff through that, and it's a really cheap subscription of around eight bucks per month through the Wii, added to our meager satellite plan.  I hear and see it, but it's harder to understand not only what I'm looking at, but to figure out what I think I'm looking at while also taking in the auditory information simultaneously.  I find myself watching this Hitler underground caves/roadways special and although the story is well-told and quite factual, I often forget what the documentary is about.  Is it about bread lines?  Wait, that was more of a Russian thing.  Oh, it was his bunker; no, shit, this is about his larger underground factory, transport and hangar systems.  Ok, got it.  Now they are talking about gas penetrating into the shutters  yet before that, they said why it wouldn't work, and I can't remember why that was.  And this was literally stated to me 20 or 30 seconds ago.  Every frame is starting to look the same; rocks, caves, underground with modern-day scientists/flashback to WWII, sometime in early 1945 before they surrendered, those clips mostly come from.  The narrator, who speaks perfect English with only the very slightest English accent, seems to be saying nothing.  I catch words.  "Rejected, empty, nothing, shelters, air raids, humidity, authorities."  In a sentence, this documentary, which I would normally rate about an 8 or high 7 on my need-to-know scale as it applies to my interest in that part of history, isn't making sense, and won't be remembered by me, I suspect.

As I sit here typing, I'm making more mistakes than usual.  My fingers are moving slowly, compared to my normal medium speed.  I often don't look when I'm typing, right now, with my head laying back on my recliner as I type.  To look, as I am again now, makes my neck feel like it's trying to support a pallet of cinder blocks   The typing mistakes, normally limited to one word I have to fix in a paragaph, are popping up every 3rd or 4th word on average.  I'm losing my ability to think and execute the motor functions of the type required to type.

There is a general fuzziness to all I see and hear, like it's not really happening here, but in a recording from a week or two ago.

I'm disturbed more by sensory issues.  While the normal moderate to severe pains of my conditions rule the largest block of my perceptions, still, it is not them that make my skin crawl right now.  It is other things.  It is the feeling of my socks on my skin--I don't like it, they feel like sandpaper and they are actually very nice, padded, Carhart socks, not a month old.  When I put my right hand on my mouse pad, I can feel a cool dampness from where I have sweat on it, and I can't stand it.  I have to get up now.  It has been about twenty minutes, I think, since I started this post.  Time--the accurate perception of time... that's the first thing to go after even 24 hours.  At this point, I nearly have no concept of it.  I just guessed that I had written about six paragraphs, with lots of pauses and mistakes.  (I just counted; it was technically eleven paragraphs, and that tells me a lot).

I'm taking a break now; just for one moment.

While on a break, I tried to remember what the date was and couldn't.  I guess the 21st, and that was only one day off, and that's actually not bad for me.  I also realized on my five minute break that I was writing this whole piece more for me.  It's a reference piece--not just to show my difference in thinking and writing performance but so that I can look at areas of the novels that I have written and possibly recognize when I was writing tired, for better or worse.

If I honestly try to compare this state of mind, right now, to my state of mind when I've had rest and a coffee, I can actually do that pretty well, at least I think.  I realize how broken (I just had to think for at least 15 seconds to decide on the word "broken") my thoughts and the resulting writing is between the two states of alertness.  Not just from paragraph to paragraph (if you asked me to summarize, right now, what I had said in my first few paragraphs, I have no idea and I'm not cheating--I think I introduced the challenge of the fatigue as I saw it and how it would affect my writing, but I don't remember.  I literally cannot remember what I wrote 20 or 30 mins ago in this very post) but from word to word and sentence to sentence.  A regular question that rises in my mind as I write all this tonight is, "Where are you coming from with this sentence from the last, and where are you going to go?"  I have yet to answer it, except on the break, when I sat in a dark room with no stimulus other than cold (an enclosed back porch).

I know I should write more--I know that this could become valuable to me, this knowledge of how the sleepless Kev has written--yet it holds dramatically little importance in my mind.  I need to get the socks off, and stop thinking for a while.  Maybe I'll write another post hours from now.  I know I should.  I know, deep down, there is value in it, however trivial.  But right now, the dominating thought of this state of mind is the constant thought that I don't care.  So, until later.  (I will spell correct; there are many to be done, which is not at all normal for me--I will not move paragraphs around, restructure, or correct for dashes, hyphens, or other silly stuff).

If you bothered reading through this, I hope you don't feel your time was wasted.

Tonight, I May Tell You a Lie

While the true date was January 31st, 2013, I entered a time warp.  And everything I'm about to write must, therefore, be a lie.

I was instantly in WWII, leading a group of four other commandos, like myself.  Our objective was a simple reconnaissance mission, and although we had to leave it earlier than we would have liked to, we did accomplish the mission.

That was secondary to the action, though.

It was 11:00 p.m., and as I rode my super-stealth scooter, muffled and quiet by its inferior engine size, I was late, but had already communicated with the four commandos I would end up leading, even though we all went into the mission as equals.  They forgave me early.  As I sat in a mess hall, before the mission, I had a feeling--a gut feeling, which I always listened to but didn't on this night--that the enemy would spot our transport vehicles and be on our tails soon after we entered their territory.  I kept this feeling in as I rode toward our rendezvous point, where they in a car and I on my scooter turned our motors off and began our deliberate, camouflaged, quiet march directly past enemy guard shacks, as we had before, and into the heart of enemy-held ground.

You never really get used to the nervous feeling of going past those shacks--it's not that you fear they will do anything, per se--you fear that they will notify some larger force that then really has a chance to take out your squad.  That was the real fear.

On this night, that's exactly what happened--that fear had been realized.  A bigger force had been notified, and was hot on our trail.

But we wouldn't know it until the search lights boomed on, shining through the windows of the building we were in.

But well before that, at 11:20 or so, we confidently entered the building, snapping our reconnaissance photos and recording sensitive audio signals.  We ran ultra-high technology tests to see if a certain type of enemy was present--an enemy that had proven extremely elusive in prior missions.  While we were satisfied that we had captured more than enough information to call the mission accomplished, for the operational part, anyway, we weren't satisfied with the amount of data and wanted to stay longer.

That's when one of the commandos, whom I'll call the Scot, said, "Lights."  We immediately dimmed our own sources of lights and stepped into a hallway, out of the range of the lights, between doors and windows, just barely.  Being the oldest among us at 40, I did feel a responsibility and thereby did start advising on what to do.  "Keep perfectly quiet," I said.  "Your camera is still emitting light," said another commando, who I'll call the Black Irish.  I said to her, "Just leave it on but drop it into my bag."  I didn't want her to accidentally snap a photo, setting off a flash, if she tried to turn it off and made a mistake, and the search lights lit up the whole of the building as the patrol moved around it, lighting it from both sides.  They were 15 feet from us at their closest point.

Three lady commandos and two men, we were.  The ladies all seemed very calm, and so did the Scot.  It was me who was the most energized--I suspect because I felt that for our survival, I must come up with the right plan, but I was not the leader.  We were just a group; just a team.  After the lights turned off and the patrol seemed to move away, I knew better--I had seen the tactic used before.  I said, "They're pretending to be gone, to see if we'll come pouring out.  We have to stay here, dead quiet, with no lights, for a while."  They agreed.

As we sat and whispered incredibly quietly, I could not help but tell them what was on my mind.  "I knew it!" I said with as much of an exclamation as you can have in the softest whisper.  "When I was there tonight, in the mess hall, my gut told me that a patrol would come, and would know we were somewhere near.  And I didn't listen to it, and it's always right--I knew it!  I will never ignore that instinct again."

We sat there, silent, in the dark, listening to our own hearts beat in our ears, wishing it wasn't happening so we could hear the outside better.

"Here's what we can do," I suggested.  The Scot and I knew the area already, whereas the Black Irish, Daughter of Elder, and the third woman whom I'll call the Silent Thinker, had seen the area few times before.  "If we go out the way we came in, taking the lane out to the main road, we can just do our normal routine of pretending to be civilians since I still believe the patrol is waiting out there, by the main road we followed in.  Or, we can go out the back way, loop wide around the building, and move through a patch of trees to the beach, which is neutral territory, and then we can re-join the main road some distance up the beach and certainly pass as civilians.  The problem is that if we go and loop around, there is terrible barbed wire that will probably cut us up a little."

Daughter of Elder asked, "What does your gut tell you now?"  She caught me off-guard with the question... I had not yet considered my gut feeling.  I had only just begun weighing the two options.  After a moment, though, that feeling crystallized to some degree and emerged.  "To be honest, my gut says we should loop around and go for the beach."  "If they find us, though, just leaving down the main lane out to the main road, won't we just as easily pass as civilians?  We should hardly be arrested," she said.  "Probably, but civilians on enemy ground are far more suspect than civilians on neutral ground."

We all agreed to go for the beach.  The weightiest factor was probably that my gut feeling had already proven perfectly sharp that night.

I said, "Follow me; we're going to move slow."  I believed that the enemy patrol may still be as close as 20 or 30 feet away, and now we were walking only with small patches of light that the gibbous moon leaked through some of the broken windows, into the hallway that led to our exit--every step on broken plaster or wood fragments worried us... every creak and groan and crack sound was certain to be the one that would give us away.

We moved slowly and deliberately to the exit, looping long around as planned, and then looked as best we could down the lane to see if the patrol was still there.  We could see none, yet we knew that the beach would be the safest bet, even though we would have to pass more guard shacks to get there.  After a brief discussion of options, it was a unanimous vote to continue on the path to the beach.

The guard houses we had to pass were ones we had never even reconned before.  We didn't know if they would have dogs, or if they had automatic trip wire that would illuminate an area where it was activated.  As we moved down a small road toward the beach, between two guard shacks, I stopped them just before we got to the shacks.  My gut was speaking again.  "I have a feeling this area may be rigged with alerts, so I think we should run these last 30 yards to the beach."  There wasn't agreement, but no disagreement.  We ran for it.  The moment we started, I could feel my legs vibrating and going numb as the pain of my conditions shot through my low back and up my right knee.  The truth is that I had been ordered not to run, at all, but if they had known that, I would have been pushing papers in some supply depot somewhere if the word got out... but it went off without a hitch; there were no alerts, no dogs, and no guards saw us.  We were out of harms way for the moment, but deep down, we knew we would face the patrol eventually.  Lady of Elder was attacked by the rare creature on the beach known as the Dock of Prey, but she quickly neutralized it and shook off her pain.  While my own pain was still growing by the second, I masked it with occasional stops in our walk to shift the weight in my body away from the most painful areas.

We came up with a new story since we couldn't use our original cover story due to the area we would be emerging from when the patrol found us.  We batted the details back and forth--discussed what curve balls the patrol might throw our way in any line of questioning.  We molded a plan, whispering as we walked.

After the tension of the previous hour, which included our penetration of enemy lines, strategic reconnaissance  and impromptu escape, I noticed a thing that we had all been ignoring.  "Don't forget to stop and smell the flowers," I said.

The moonlight, so bright then, was just dimmer than a setting sun, casting a wide, white path of ripples on the bay.

We did stop, and look, and admire.  We all know from previous experience that it was these moments that life was made of--these moments, of seeing beauty at a time when the odds wouldn't even have you alive--these moments were the fruit of defying the odds.  The moonlight, on the small waves, was vibrating like a thousand glowing violins moving to the same conductor.  Even in the cold breeze, it was a remarkable and spell-casting sight.  We were stunned by the beauty of the moment in every way.  And then, as commandos do, we marched on to face our fate.

Not two minutes into our walk as civilians down the main road, the patrol spotted and stopped us.  As I saw it approach, I think we all considered finding cover, but I said, "Be calm, and just act normal.  You are entirely within your right to be here right now; you are just civilians, and you know our story."

The pulled near, and questioned us briefly.  We stuck to our story, and while they didn't seem satisfied with it, they didn't have enough reason to waste more time interrogating us.  As we continued on down the road, we told quiet jokes among ourselves, mostly about how ineffective the patrol had been in not finding us, and then in letting us slip right through their hands in plain sight.  It's hard not to joke about it--it's entirely unbelievable.  But it happened.

Those four commandos went on their way in their vehicle and I went mine after some chat about the war and other odds and ends.  While I don't believe in destiny or predetermined futures, I couldn't help but find the strangest irony in this night.  As I rode my super-stealth scooter back down the road to return to my base, I remembered thinking back to when I said, "Don't forget to stop and smell the flowers..." That sentence reverberated in my head, mesmerizing me even as I rode down the road, thinking back to saying it while seeing the moonlight.  "Smell the flowers..." and it was in that instant that I ran over an already dead skunk in the road, which made my scooter smell just like him, even after extensive washing.

Was it a balance?  Was it required that if one got to smell roses one night, he would have to smell a skunk on the same night?  Is the price for moments of beauty simply moments of ugliness?  I don't know, but it seemed like more than chance was at work that night for the five of us.  There seemed to be an unplanned perfection in it.  Those are the nights people remember for a lifetime, where the full range of the senses is employed, the full range of emotions crosses through the heart and mind, and the full meaning of the utter simplicity in existence gongs like a church bell in the highest tower... that night was a symphony of flawless effort and perfect balance that I was happy to have conducted, for a little while, back in WWII.

Let's Give Reality a Little Bath, Eh?

Nobody is coming to take your guns.  The moon landing was real.  9-11 wasn't an inside job, nor was Sandy Hook.

I studied psychology, but I'm not a PhD., so I have no professional reputation to protect, meaning I can be real, which means I'm here to set some of the paranoid or otherwise incorrect folks straight because this is getting a tad bothersome.  Let's cut the shit, huh?

Nobody at work is planning your demise; people are consumed with their own lives.  If you refuse to learn enough about your constitution to know how well it protects you from your government, fuck you.  I and others are tired of explaining it.  Small people dislike other people for the simple infraction of not thinking exactly like the small person thinks.  How much were you worried about Y2K and Dec. 21st, 2012?  Was it worth it?  

The government isn't building FEMA camps to lock you up so they can take over.  The Anunaki are not returning (but aliens are real, and it's time to get real about it--whether they've visited here is still up for debate, but some awful respectable eye witnesses have seen much...).  We will be permanently established on the moon and Mars before 2050.  We'll be on other moons by 2100, and on our way out of the solar system by 2150.  That's a good thing, because giant asteroids are real.

There is not a small group of secret society people running the world.  The world is run by demand, trust, religion, and raw military strength.  No white person alive ever owned a slave in America, and no black person alive ever served as one.  While America is and always will be a great center of possibilities, the dollar has taken her over.  With religion dwindling here and the power of money growing, it's time for people to make sure they have a personal constitution of goodness within them and that they are teaching it to their kids; a constitution that is loss-of-faith-proof and corruption-proof.

There is no grand evil going on in Washington.  Our government is an assembly of people we grew up beside, not machines.  They are your neighbors.  While they are highly susceptible to influence, there are still plenty strong enough not to sell out your clean air for a pair of tickets to a basketball game.  Think about this; every 2-4 years of your life, the American government has changed.  Has your view of them changed every 2-4 years?

Before you post anything online, would you please have the common courtesy to Google it and make sure it doesn't pop up on one of the scam sites?  Spreading false fear is worse than generating real fear, and I hope a day comes when people are accountable for it legally.  Neither the Chupacabra, nor Bigfoot, are real.  The jury is still out on sea monsters.  I before E except after C?  Bullshit.

Your company can't make money by paying everybody a million zillion bucks a year.  If you feel like you are getting screwed, go start your own company and hire some people and pay them what you wanted; tell us how that works out.  Dr. Phil is a prick.  Dr. Drew isn't.  999 out of every 1,000 things you are scared will happen won't.  And stop fucking with skaters/cyclists/scooter and motorcycle riders/pedestrians.  Somebody is gonna pull out a gun and cap your ass.  Keep playin.'

Learn to park in a single parking space.  Learn to stay to the right if people are trying to go faster than you.  If somebody stays in the left lane on an empty road, zip around to the right, pass them, cut them off and ride the brakes for a while.  The message will get through.  You can always try high beams first.  If you are a tailgater, I hope you choke on cut bait.  If somebody is tailgating you, go slower, and slower, and sloooowwwwweeerrrrrr until they give you a car length or two.  People will learn.  

You are no more or less important or meaningful than anybody else.  Anybody.

Hanging around negative people and harboring negative thoughts will guarantee that you do not attain happiness.  Either let them go, or let happiness go; it's a simple choice.

If you play your music so loud in your car that I have to cover my ears, you are probably a tiny-pricked teen male, insecure in every way, and I hope you shit your bed every night for the rest of your life.  The world you are on?  That's a shared deal.  Somebody's gonna snap on you one day, and your life will never be the same.  Turn the shit down or get some headphones if your mark of success is the implosion of your own eardrums.

Your religion is not one bit more legitimate than any other religion out there that can't be proven as fact.  Don't try to sell me anything you can't show me.  Seriously.  I will embarrass you.

Women can do anything men can.

Global warming is increasing because of mankind's behavior.  Do us a favor; if you're going to believe in any conspiracy, please, please, please don't let it be global warming.  If it turns out to be a giant hoax, I'll let you ridicule me and throw fruits at me in a public square for the rest of my life, but at the very least, entertain it as a possibility, and live as such.  There are 1,000 easier ways industry could have created spoof needs.  They could have run with West Nile virus protection or the skin cancer rates that are shooting through the roof.  They could be opening entire malls dedicated to personal self-defense or water treatment.  This is real.  It is measurable.  Carbon emissions have never been as high as they are today--nowhere even close!  

You'll never be perfect.  You'll never be happy if you keep comparing your life to the illusions people are showing you about their lives.  Assume you'll never win the lottery, and if you're blowing the grocery money on it, you deserve whatever happens.  Take a damned statistics class.

Just because you see somebody standing, walking, or smiling, doesn't mean they're ok.  There are a million very real problems or conditions they could be suffering with.  If you get nothing else from this blog post, please take away this fact--you do not know what any other human being is going through at any time, regardless of what his or her face may say.

Class dismissed.  Read chapter four of "I Actually Fucking Started Thinking."  There will be a quiz.