Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. I can give you several other good reasons…
My days with Mrs. Uppington are numbered. Her owner is coming back quite soon, I think, just in time to make room for two more little puff balls I haven’t found names for yet. Yes, another lady is going away for a while and I seem to have become the dog(s) watcher. Also, Elizabeth has a friend who needs a place for her dog while her house is being finished. The White Lodge is going to the dogs today.
I like dogs. There was a time I wouldn’t have considered not having one. Before I do, though, I shall have to have a place out of the village. I’m certain I don’t want to have to tie it up, or put it on a lead every time it has to poo.
They all like to be out and about, out in the world. Even the breeds that were created solely for the purpose of companionship, the little puff balls, the “lap” dogs, the little pugs girls wear on their arms – even they answer the call when it comes and go running off into the woods.
I hear that call myself sometimes. But usually with me it involves an automobile. And I don’t come back with dead possums in my mouth. Well, not typically.
Hey, I started February weighing 205 pounds, which is the heaviest I’ve been since 1979. I’m at 175 now. Ten more to go. All I did was to eliminate possum from my diet. Yes, you too can lose weight the old-fashioned way: stop swallowing.
I don’t see the signs as much these days, on telephone poles: “I Lost X Amount. Ask Me How,” with a telephone number beneath, or “Work From Home. Find Out How.” You know in either case it’s a nutritional supplement marketing thing. They worked for about five minutes in 1981, made tons of money. Now it’s the same people who buy lottery tickets trying them.
I used to pray silently whenever I was at a store where the person in line ahead of me was buying numerous lottery tickets. That’s how I learned to pray again, by the way. Did I ever pray before? Yes, when I was a child. I had forgotten how. A man who is smarter than I am told me to do that, to pray whenever I’m given the opportunity, especially in situations when the cause of the opportunity would normally create annoyance. Another excellent opportunity of this sort is having a too-slow driver ahead of you on a narrow, winding road – something which we have in abundance here. Or, if you ever get stuck in a traffic jam, construction, accident, some such thing – that’s good too.
You can start by praying that God speed the person up. He’s not likely to do that for you, but hey, it’s a start. Communication has commenced. I was told to keep doing it. The strange this is, I used to be a rather impatient and irritable person in situations like those. I called people who buy lottery tickets “lotto losers” – in my mind.
Prayer becomes habitual, just as sin is habitual. Prayer opens the heart to Grace – habitually – and Grace is more powerful than sin. One finds that his sins are becoming less numerous. They may also become more troubling, those that remain, because they start putting up a fight. They feel threatened. This is why it’s very holy people who seem to be troubled most by demons.
Yes, and following that stream of thought I will add that in such cases it’s obviously more prayer and more Grace that a person needs, rather than less. Let’s say a fellow – a very religious fellow, perhaps a priest or an evangelist – becomes so troubled by this battle with sin that he ends up acting out on the dark thoughts which remain in his mind. Let’s assume this becomes publicly known. It happens often enough. Many people might then say, “This religion business must be phooey. Look at this guy, behaving so badly even though he is very religious. Why, it’s hypocrisy!” But that’s backwards thinking. That’s like thinking the way to win a battle is to withdraw your troops from the field, which is just silly. The answer isn’t less religion; it’s more.
I think that’s just so profoundly simple to understand. Am I crazy? Yes, but… you can bring me home to meet Mom.
Try try try to understand,
He’s a Magic Man, momma…
I was thinking of writing “You gotta have Heart” here, but I can already hear many of you saying, “Must we?” so I shall refrain.
Hypocrisy is more often accused than it is committed. Many people are truly penitent, and yet remain branded with the scarlet “H.” ‘Twas ever thus. The most grievous of sins, more damaging to the soul than even Murder, was Adultery, back in the day. Amongst the early Christians the Penance was often ex-communication for a certain period of time - a year, ten years, whatever. That meant the penitent was barred from participation in Communion, which was a horrible thing as far as those folks were concerned. Many believed it would be better to die. It was a stiff Penance in any case, the stiffest.
Gee, why is that? (That’s a rhetorical question. I’m about to answer it. I’m such a bloody know-it-all. However do you put up with me?)
Because… Adultery is a direct assault on the Family. We understand God as a family. We understand God’s relationship to the Church as that between a bride and a groom, and our individual relationship to God as that between a father and his children. Anthropologically-speaking, the family is the basic unit, or building block, of civilization. Metaphysically-speaking, the structure of family, or institution if you prefer, resembles God, or mirrors on Earth something that exists in Heaven – only in this case it’s so important, so basic, that it not only reflects or mimics a spiritual reality; it is the same spiritual reality existing simultaneously in both places.
Theologically-speaking… oh gee, I wonder where the dogs fit in? I like dogs. Did I mention? Many families have dogs. I’ve noticed that.
I may have covered the theology and called it metaphysics, but we can take it another few leagues down the rabbit hole and hypothesize that the family exists on a particular level. (Both “hypothesize” and “particular” are words with the emph-AH-sis on the second syll-AH-ble, McGee.) In other words, the structure we call family is rudimentary to the structure of matter itself.
Naw, probably not. It’s a thought. I’ll leave it to the dogs to go down rabbit holes.
You know, Mrs. Uppington’s breed was created to go down rabbit holes. She seems to nail her nose into the ground, and small as she is, she’s suddenly immovable. You’re walking along with her and – bang – dead stop: her nose is nailed into the ground. If she were to do that while running she might flip right over. It’s funny. Dogs will make you laugh.
Where was I? Oh, yes – saying goodbye. It’s been great fun chatting this morning. We’ll do it again soon.
Poor fellow couldn’t be made to understand that the updated version of Media Player or Roxio, or Nero would not copy a protected DVD any more than the old versions would. But he tried, till long past my bedtime he tried. I yawned quite a lot, declared that I was an early-to-bed-early-to-rise sorta fellow, but…
He’s from Ecuador I gather. My upstairs neighbor. Hey, it was company. That’s very rare. My son has returned to his mother’s. Life with Dad wasn’t all he expected, I suppose. He lost his computer privileges here, and I blocked SouthPark and Family Guy, the comedy channel, and everything else he felt like watching on TV once I got a gander at their content. I told him every title in my library is available to him to read. Like the Squabbler, he can use these tools to travel through time and space, to alter reality in an infinite number of ways, but he wasn’t buying it. Dad’s too strict.
Well, Dad is canceling his cable television subscription. The boys are the only ones to use it, when they are here, and if everything they wish to watch is inappropriate for them – heck, inappropriate for anybody – there really isn’t much point to keeping a TV at all.
Great movie: Excalibur.Remember it? Bloody long, and quite campy. Helen Mirren played Morgana. Nigel Terry was Arthur. And, with unforgettably over-the-top vigor, Nicol Williamson played Merlin. There was this scene where King Arthur’s son Mordred (by Morgana, the result of an enchantment), arrives at Camelot in full battle gear to meet his father for the first time & demand his legacy. When he declares he has come for “what is his,” Arthur offer him his love. Mordred says, “That’s the only thing of yours I don’t want.”
Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Clive Swift, and Gabriel Byrne rounded off that cast. That's Williamson, above. "A dream to some," he coos with extraordinary ham at one point, "A nightmare to others!"
I had the opportunity to explain my belief about alcoholism and alcoholism recovery rather recently to a person. I don’t believe that alcoholism is a disease. I believe it is a physical and spiritual illness, just exactly as the 1939 book Alcoholics Anonymous defines it.
The disease classification was a political decision, (just as was the declaration that homosexuality is not an illness). The American Medical Association and its psychiatric sister association are both political organizations. They have political agendas – mainly having to do with which avenues of research may receive funding from the federal government and which others may not. (I happen to believe that government has no business funding any scientific and/or medical research. But that’s another topic.)
When I arrived at the AA fellowship in March of 2001 the nice people there told me I wasn’t a bad person, I was a sick person. In other words, they lied. Years of meddlesome secular psychiatric rubbish and false teaching had utterly changed AA. (Of course, I wasn’t to know this at the time.) In reality, I was a sick person precisely because I was a bad person. My sin caused my illness. Alcoholism is an illness of body, mind, and soul which is caused by habitual sin.
As we already know, sin is the cause of all human difficulties.
Is it sometimes hereditary? Perhaps. It wasn’t in my case. But there’s an old adage which sums up the possibility of hereditary alcoholism rather precisely: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
In order for me to recover from alcoholism I had to become a good person. That’s precisely what the bally-hooed 12-Step program was designed to help a person do. It works every time it’s tried, but you have to ignore any and all information that does not come directly from the source textbook, Alcoholics Anonymous. There are hundreds of recovery methods that clearly do not work. To investigate them is a useless endeavor.
As if by nature – and you can see this occurring – people in general carry a burden of guilt in their hearts. Many of us can’t understand what it is precisely that we are feeling guilty about, and so we cast our lines out to fish for reasons as we try to relieve the guilt we feel. If it often seems that we don’t “belong here,” or if it seems at times that we’re strangers in the world – as in the 70’s all those “ancient astronaut” books like Chariots of the Gods were in their way expressing – we’re right. We don’t really belong here. We’re not truly of the world.
Birds are truly of the world. Dogs – like Mrs. Uppington, snoring behind me – are truly of the world. We are not. That which we call “Nature” is part of a world from which we are separated by a chasm which is impossible for us to cross. We can “see,” and we inhabit, only a shadow, or a reflection, of that reality, but we are cut off from it. We are cut off from it ancestrally by Original Sin. The explanation for this sense of alienation, this very real exile from reality, provided by the story of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis is sufficient. It is sufficient because it is entirely true.
Now, many of us are reacting to this quite natural sense of guilt and this in-born understanding that we are strangers here by seeking in whatever way we can to make amends and correct that situation. That’s good. As it happens, God has provided a way for us to do just that by taking human form in the Person of Christ and taking upon Himself the burden of all of which makes us feel so guilty.
But for many people their god is a pagan god, the god called “Earth;” they worship earth. Dirt, basically. They worship dirt. Hence, the global warming hoax. In its way it is just like the ice age hoax of the 70’s. I’m not one of those who believes that the global warming idea is a conspiracy, however. I never ascribe to such an unlikely cause as conspiracy what is so easily explained as ignorance.
Ignorance is forgivable. Heck, it’s what we do. It’s our “verb,” as a TV public service advertising campaign would have it.
We require Apocalypse; we long for it. Of course we do. Deep within each of us is a seed of that knowledge of The Garden, that ancestral memory of the home from which we have been exiled.
Home is where the heart is.
To many people that statement seems to mean that wherever their “heart” – that is, their affections – happen to be is their home. But that’s just dumb. It doesn’t mean that. It means that home is where you have left your heart. You don’t have one. It’s missing. You are the Tin Man. We are all the Tin Man, walking abroad in the Shadowland, in the desert, without our hearts. Where did we leave our hearts? – At home. That’s where the heart is.
Perhaps it’s on the kitchen table, right next to the invoices I had just printed out to take with me, and my MP3 player. There I was, without music or invoices, cleaning several offices last night, cursing my absent-mindedness. Oh when will I ever be able to leave the house just once? I’m constantly turning around and going back for that all-important thing I had been thinking to bring with me just seconds before I left. This is because I have a piece of wood between my ears instead of a brain.
The Hollow Hills from a distance, on top of the next ridge, highly saturated to better resemble what my eyes see. My little house is below. I traveled one hundred years into the future to get this one. I’m long dead, of course, and forgotten. Someone may come along and say, “People lived here once.”
“The world is open again,” said I to Elizabeth yesterday as I turned up into the road my boys used to call the Bumpy Road which runs parallel to the Valley Road on the other side of the valley. The signs reading “Seasonal” be damned, but bumpy it was, indeed, having not yet been graded. The snow, which had been allowed to rise to whatever level it would, unbothered by a plow, had left little canyons in the packed dirt road as it melted. If I were the size of an ant it would be as though a glacier had left behind a certain kind of landscape which other ants could later write about authoritatively.
The famous Catskill Mountains, which are quite nearby, home of a million old Jewish comedians, are really not mountains at all. The Catskill range is really a plateau which has been eroded over time. I read that somewhere and I said to myself, “I’ll buy that.” Why not? It doesn’t hurt anybody. It doesn’t increase anybody’s taxes or limit anybody’s constitutional rights.
Who can speak authoritatively about the world, about matter, about nature? Who can say this is this and that is that? The fellow who declared the world is flat and covered over with a dome of sky – that’s who. The world is a dream that is ever changing, a territory of shadows. We think we know this; we think we know that, the other ants and I. Rubbish.
But in this world of shadows we are real, and we are really the only thing that is real. No – not our bodies; they are shadows too – but that which seems to animate them, the consciousness “within” – that is real. The rules that govern it are real. The rules are literally written in stone: The Ten Commandments. There is a popular move afoot to officially change their title to The Ten Suggestions.
When you forget the world is a shadow, and you begin to think that things are real, that’s called materialism. It’s seeing half a world, living half a life, or being dead inside. When the body dies nothing remains. That’s the best definition of Hell I can think of on such a beautiful morning when thoughts of dark matters are in the distance.
Yet it’s still dark outside my window. The birds haven’t awakened the sun yet. Oh yes, I’m giving my bird feeder another try. The little blighters started coming around yesterday. I accidentally bought seed that’s way too big for my feeder, so I thought I might as well get another feeder. I’ll be a regular Papageno by August at this rate. I shall take some pictures.
The green mist is appearing in the tree branches. It is like a vapor. You may remember this scene in the snow, if you’ve been watching right along. I also snapped it two weeks ago - the same morning I got the deer. It was gray and brown primarily.
We don’t see with our eyes. We see with our minds. If you remove the eyes from a body what do you have? A camera, basically. Without the mind the eyes are like a camera taking pictures that will never be developed.
Waiting for Elizabeth to show up. I’m hoping Imeem comes back on line. I have a desktop full of images I’d like to dump on you, rejects from other posts.
Yes, I want to show you my rejects. Here's a road to Nowhere.
Listening to the Shangri-La’s “Past, Present, and Future,” one of the creepiest songs of all time ever.
“Would I like to take a walk along the beach with you?
-Of course,
-But don’t try to touch me,
-Don’t ever touch me,
Because that will never happen…
Again.”
So I just had to make a spooky girl CD. Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you... Both the Zombie’s version and Atlanta Rhythm Section’s, of course. And then there’s a bit of incidental music from the Lost Highwaysoundtrack that features the same theme, instrumentally.
Queen Bitch from the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic. I really like that movie. I like Wes Anderson in general. It’s bloody funny. The Royal Tenenbaums was a bit darker. People behaving badly. But my son and I crack ourselves up with the occasional non-sequitur quote from that movie: “Excuse me, did you just call me coal train?” It could also be Coltrane.
One day I was talking to my son about – something, I don’t recall what it was – and he shot me a sharp, disapproving look and said, “You’re going crazy with the smack talk!” I have no idea where that came from. Perhaps it’s a pop culture thing, a line from a movie I haven’t seen, like “Are we having fun yet?” I’m told that comes from a 90’s chick flick.
But no – The Life Aquatic is a genuinely funny movie with a very nice soundtrack. Maybe Project Playlist will offer a portion of it. I’ll check. I guess you’ll know whether or not my search was successful because – well – you’ll hear it, or not. Duh.
Ah yes, I found Seu Jorge’s version of Queen Bitch. Here’s a fellow who seems to specialize in doing acoustic versions of David Bowie songs in Portuguese. His performances are sprinkled throughout the movie, in which he also appears as a crew member on Bill Murray’s ship, The Belafonte. I suppose one of the things I like best about Wes Anderson movies is the way he creates a reality which isn’t quite… quite. It’s almost surrealism – not quite. It skims the surreal, occasionally dipping into it, but always with a sense of play.
Well gee, I’m waiting for a drop-dead cute 98 pound girl with a prehensile tail to show up and go to work with me. My life dips into the surreal; that’s why I write about it. I’m a nice kind of crazy, yes?
You know what? The girl in the Shangri-La’s song has got some serious sexual trauma going on. Their lyrical content in general – Leader of the Pack, Dum Dum Ditty – I mean, it’s awfully dark. I suppose you could say the Shangri-La’s are proto-Goth, whatever - if you wanted to dip into that sort of labeling.
Unique, in any case.
Well, Fibber and Molly will be along tonight. It’s a funny one. Heck, they’re all funny.
So, I guess you may glean from this rambling post that I do occasionally find a movie I like – or, one which was made in my own lifetime. I do like movies – lots of movies – that were made long before I was born, only a handful that were made since. They really do have to be rather peculiar. Their “message,” if they have one, doesn’t really matter. I could disagree or disapprove but be charmed by it nonetheless.
Often, people say to me “Have you seen this?” or “Have you seen that?” and I say thanks, but I don’t bother looking at their recommendations. Life is chock full to overflowing with life-enriching experiences. If I’ve heard only one piece by Mozart I’ve heard all that matters, a lifetime’s appreciation. We are geared for war, and we are geared for more, and more, and more. How much can a fellow squeeze into a single lifetime? I can’t hold any more; I’m full, thanks.
The way to freedom – and, listen carefully ‘cuz this will cost you money – the way to freedom is Downward Mobility. The way to freedom isn’t more, more, more; it’s less, less, less. Do you get me? Think about that today – while I’m off doing that thing I do with the White Tornado, The Amazing Monkey Girl, listening to my new spooky girl CD.
I’ll be back tonight. Well, actually I have a painting job tonight. But I’ll put the show up.
OK, Peter Lorre is standing before an NBC mic and Suspense! is a CBS program. And last week, Jim and Marion Jordan stood before a CBS mic and their program ran on NBC. That's weird.
Just humor me.
Tonight our program guest stars Peter Lorre. My Dad used to do a Peter Lorre impression. He'd say, "Stop eet! Stop eet! You're driving me sane!"
We just humored him.
Check out this picture. What a fine specimen of a man, eh? Dashing? You bet.
