Waking with the birds is good. I knew that it would never become hum-drum living here. My goal, years ago. I did have one. North and West were good directions; South and East were bad. Highway signs. Still, it was good to come home, even though school loomed like a cloud of black poison gas. And there you were thinking I must have loved school, but no. It was for social reasons I despised it - having to be with other children. I was different. It's the same today, except that we are no longer children. Now we live our lives in a perpetual vacuum without sincerity. Du hast mich. But I don't mind. Dad was a schoolteacher. We traveled all summer. We camped. We went North, we went West. The corn was low. When we returned at the end of the summer, too soon, the song only just beginning to sing, we went East, we went South. The corn was high. Many years passed when I wished to be here. More correctly, I wished to be anywhere other than where I was. The Exile began many years ago. Home is now in the seventh dimension. But it's good to wake up with the birds after dreaming of spies, interrogations, a hip replacement done with a hand-held power drill, other things.

At first there were leaves, very dense and green, impossibly large. I had been here before. These were words. The leaves were words. But what I had wanted was the simplicity of the desert. I got the rain forest. There is a book made of such leaves around here, behind one of my doors. Blank pages grow with green leaves until words are overcoming you. It is a frightening book. My mother tells the story of how I held my hands over my ears and shouted Too many words! because suddenly I could read, and every sign in the world was now shouting. It hurt me. I learned to read one day from a Cutty Sark billboard. Those were the first words I read. Oh - it was too simple; letters make sounds in combination. There are only 24 of them, and only 40 combinations. The words made the voices come. Large letters shouted from everywhere I looked. You can't get away, you know. Hike out into the woods, climb mountains, and there it will be: the discarded voice shouting Pepsi.

Enough of morose reflection.

That fellow's name with the beard and the too-low trousers is Scroobius Pip, by the way. My son found it. They send each other these things without tags or descriptions, titles or explanations. It's a whole world of This is cool and Check this out without discrimination. The English Squabbler, indeed. When I say Hey Thou Shalt Not say Ho... Make some noise.

Kill me.

There was a lot of talk this weekend about self-actualization. I don't know what that means exactly, but according to my relatives' husbands I am a self-actualized man. I think it means awake, alive. Fellow was talking about the feminization of society. I think: Safety Last. Who cares if the kids are being turned into worms? Well, I guess I do. There's a tourist brochure for that area telling us to Do The Corkscrew. That means they would like us to tour the many wineries in that area. Coming down the winding mountain road many signs shouted at me. This winery here, that winery there, and then a sign shouting DWI - Don't Do It! Are we insane or just comically stupid? We are at war with ourselves within, divided. Law enforcement is dedicated to penalizing us for doing exactly what we are encouraged to do. The TV tells us to screw our kids' babysitter, but when we do we end up in jail. The culture is a blind, stupid blob of shapeless matter, and the government is a bloated whore. She floats above us like an airship of nude, obscene and monstrous blubber with a million tits for the mindless to suckle. Saying the obvious makes me self-actualized.

My father, though. I enjoyed his company too. Nothing has really changed. He still drives North and West. He still camps. He could write his book: My Life Of Camping. He was looking at maps when I left; trying to get somewhere mentally before making the jump. A man makes a decision. That is well and good. But a decision without taking action on it is an empty thing. It is so empty that it creates a vacuum, like a black hole in space only in the mind. The vacuum begins to pull in all of a man's character, until he has nothing left of it. And then he will be able to look at our culture without being sick because his mind is gone; he is dead in his mind. My father is alive in his mind. Still going North and West. He's still going, still thinking, still doing, still waking up with the birds. Such a down-pat conclusion? No - not from me, never! There are no perfect circles. There are no corskscrews. No book, no leaves, no desert.

OK. Good morning!

I like wood. Wood is good. The Squabbler got to come out in conversation a few times this past weekend. My Dad - you may remember him, you who have been reading for a while - he was there with his little house on wheels. Leaving a place is like stretching a long rubber band. About ten miles out it snaps at last and I'm off. Saw an airshow with biplanes. Drove around with my cousin's widow one day. Nice girl.

Ate a lot.

Well, I told them how it happened that in 2001 I lost my mind, and it was replaced with this piece of wood. The wood tells me things. They liked that very much. One fellow in particular wanted to talk, and listen. So we did.

A bear rifled through the garbage of about six houses up the road. I like bears. And bunnies.

I have nothing of interest to write tonight. I'm sorry. It's warming up - the brain, I mean. Or the mind. On holiday.

Reading a Graham Greene novel. Listening to some Gothic liturgical music in the bath. Burning nag champa. We'll see what dreams may come for tomorrow - maybe a spark will alight upon dry grass. I missed you all. You know that already because you know how I love you.

Thanks for the suggestions on music hosts. I'll try that one Sherry's got. And Bella's. Tomorrow, though.

An Open Question: Are any of you able to embed full songs from Imeem or any other provider?

Silence here, for now. I am sorry. I'm going away, my lovelies. Or - more correctly my creator (with the small letter 'c') is going away for the weekend, and taking the Squabbler with him. I had hoped to give you Saturday night party people a little something to hang your ears on.

Business as usual - or, almost as usual (without music if need be) - will resume here late Monday or early Tuesday of next week.

Animal Crossing.

I have a game that followed me, or somehow managed to come with me, surviving from my childhood. It is a number of wood blocks about 2 cubic inches each with holes drilled through them, but not straight through them, at rounded 90 degree angles to allow a marble to pass through. One builds a tower with them with the holes lined up so that dropping a marble in one of the top blocks results in the marble evacuating through one of the bottom blocks. There are also open tracks to link several block towers together, and "blank" blocks which are solid - no holes, - and shims to create a little extra gravity wherever necessary to keep the marbles moving inexorably downward. How I still possess this game, but not a single picture of myself at the age I first played it, nor my stuffed puppy, Jingles, whom I sorely miss, nor any other 40 year-old artifact that may prove I actually experienced a childhood, is a mystery. Life is overflowing with mystery.

Well, I could purchase the same game brand new, or newly-made, from a company named Creative Playthings. Apart from being a bit cleaner and less worn, the new game (or toy, really) that I purchased would be exactly like the old one in every way. Not so with any video game made for the Nintendo Game Cube game system which has been phased out, or abandoned, by the company that makes it in favor of promoting their newer game systems. Animal Crossing is a Nintendo Game Cube game in which the player is the only human being living in a virtual village inhabited by demons - friendly talking animals of the pokemon/digimon hybrid variety that are not really animals at all.

I love Animal Crossing. My character's name is Nemo.

Like my wood block toy, Animal Crossing really isn't a game because there's no competitive aspect to it, really. One doesn't win anything by playing. It seems to be designed for new readers, young children, as an educational tool, but a few years ago, when I was first introduced to it, the game was the rage among teenagers who were probably looking for something innocent yet engaging. That pretty much describes the "E for Everyone" - rated 'reality' game the object of which is to live day by day in a little house in a little village surrounded by friendly 'persons' with whom you interact. There is a store, a post office. There is money, the basic unit being not a dollar but a 'bell.' You may earn bells to buy the things you want, need, and desire in a variety of ways. The store pays 'top bell' for any fish you may catch with your fishing rod, bugs you may collect with your net, or things you may dig up with your shovel. There are ways to upgrade to having a golden shovel. Bags of money - bells - may sometimes be shaken out of the trees, or dug up out of the ground. Everybody has a job for you to do, if you ask them. Your neighbors pay you in gifts, for the most part, when you do them favors.

I described this game to somebody who told me she didn't think it was very realistic - money dropping out of trees or dug up at random out of the ground, and what-not. She was wrong. Or - let me revise that: She was right, insofar as her perception of life does not allow those things to occur. Mine does. The proof of that is demonstrated around me right now. I own a computer, a couple of cars, food in my cupboard, and so forth, all of which was paid for with money I've earned in exactly the same way one earns money in Animal Crossing.

Every morning I wake up and venture out into a world populated by friendly persons, armed with my golden shovel, my fishing rod, my butterfly net, and shake money out of trees - though perhaps not literally. What I mean by that is I might as well be shaking it out of trees, or digging it up out of the ground, for how easily it comes and how abundant it is. I've told you this before: Wealth is infinite in supply. Wealth can never run out. Wealth is not a "pie" with a limited number of slices that may be removed from it. If my neighbor has more it does not affect in any way the amount I may make if I choose to do whatever is necessary to make it. And making money is one of the easiest things a person can do.

Well, let me explain this. First of all, in the course of my day I meet no one who is unfriendly. I come across a few here and there who may be in a bad mood, but when I smile and say hello to every single face I meet, without exception, I am saluted in return in much the same way. That is the level at which I know most people. I live in a small town. That doesn't matter. I frequently visit cities - like New York - and do the exact same thing. You may say I know people only superficially on that level, and you may be right, but that's the money level - right there.

I engage my neighbors in conversation. Our words of love - and it is love because we are wishing each other well - do one of two things: either they fly away like birds, or they turn into money and fly into my pocket. Either way, it is good. The birds are very pretty to look at, and the money is better than any amount I've ever made working at a job for a wage.

You see, my neighbors ask me to do jobs for them, and I accept those jobs because I love them and I need to make money. The money that I make is merely a form of polite communication between my neighbors and me. Now, part of doing this is advertising. I advertise my services in a number of local newspapers. But that's just a slightly more advanced way of talking to my neighbors, a way of talking to more of them at once than I could do just by walking around town with my golden shovel.

Hey, I know a person who lived all his life down in New York, just like I did. He's very depressed and frightened most of the time. He tells me New York is a terrible place full of mean people - and that's why he moved up here to the frontier. But he doesn't seem to get along very well with the people up here, either. He's an attorney. He earns whatever he earns - it's not my business what that may be - but he is always worried he is going to lose whatever he has. Alarm systems ring his house around; his doors are always locked. He drives a car that has airbags at every possible angle of accident. He is one of those who is almost always in a bad mood when I say hello. But, especially in the morning, I can usually get a smile out of him.

We lived in the exact same place - New York City - for many years. We live in the exact same place now. But, we live in entirely different universes. He inhabits a world full of mean, angry, suspicious people. I inhabit a world full of friendly ones who are always giving me pretty birds and money. They are the same people.

Every now and then I have problems. We all do. My name is John the Squabbler and my problem is me.

Here's a re-post from January. TR was the sole commenter then. I guess it had not yet occured to me to reply to comments. I had no idea I would get any.

Boy, this is some cheesy writing. I need to put a warning sign on the door of this blog.

Coffee is waiting to be poured in the kitchen. The kitchen by itself is large enough to be sufficient to all my living needs, and it is a distance from bedroom. Awakening slowly, I wonder if I should walk there or take the bus. Although not many in number of rooms, each room in this space is larger than some houses I've occupied. This had been the public portion of a large Italianate farmhouse. The house next door had been the carriage house at one time, and the new public school buildings - (mere warehouses; how can learning happen there?) - now occupy what had been the large farm which stretched across the valley from Mt. Vision to the Susquehanna River. This house offers the advantage of being in both rural country and village. The view out the front windows is of a village street with neighbors, lawns, and other windows. The view out of the back windows is of a river valley under hills without interruption by any structure other than God had put there, owing to the fact that it is the property of a neighbor of mine who has gobs of money and buys up land chiefly in order to preserve its natural qualities.

Jolly good.

Preservation of open spaces would be a good idea if only there were more people like my neighbor who were willing to accept the responsibility of preserving them. Usually, preservation of open spaces has something to do with allowing perfectly good commercial property to fall into "public" hands. By public read government, and by government read nothing whatsoever in the real interest of the public.

One day I hope to be as wealthy as my neighbor, or at least wealthy enough to do as she does and purchase land to be preserved for perpetuity without letting it fall into the government's hands.

Having said that, there is something even better to my eye than a wide open, undeveloped space, and that is a wide open space which is developed beautifully. I would have no problem with development if development were beautiful. Nearby is a region known as the Adirondack mountains. Dreadful place. You have to walk in quite a ways before you can see mountain scenery completely unscarred by the addition of a homestead, and yet most of the region is undeveloped and the state has taken pains to ensure it remains that way. The problem is that what little development exists is new, and usually prefabricated, and manufactured for economic expediency rather than beauty. So the vistas there are actually of less value than a fully developed, bustling, and architecturally interesting city's would be.

Nothing improves a beautiful natural landscape more than a beautiful building does. I live in a pretty village. Most of it was developed at the turn of the last Century in Victorian styles which, though confusing and eclectic, and sometimes discordant if taken together on a view of the whole street, were intended to enrich the lives of their inhabitants in an aesthetic manner lost to our current mass awareness. If people were more heroic then than they are now; more God-centered than they are now; more courageous than they are now; more independent, more characteristically American in the way of placing higher value on liberty than on life itself, than they are now, it is at least partly because they lived in beautiful buildings. We were citizens then. Now we are consumers.

Some would blame capitalism, but they are like those who would serve the evil wizards and Orcs, and yucky things dreamt of by Tolkien in the new world order they espouse. Take away capitalism and you take away that same vanishing liberty which allows me to say these things about buildings and people, and land. No, I believe that in our rush to advance and to improve, and to create wealth, (for the source of wealth is infinite, and all wealth is from God), we have allowed the aesthetic eye of our mass consciousness to grow dim. Many of us can no longer discern beauty from ugliness.

In "Days of Old" we were enslaved by Feudal lords and kings, and the like. Amazing things of beauty were dreamt of and then built at the cost of many lives sometimes - perhaps because with our wills enslaved our minds aspired to a greater freedom than the mere liberty of movement and tremendous material prosperity could have given us. But now that we have at last achieved the latter we seem to have misplaced the former, and it just so happens that liberty depends upon beauty if it is going to survive.

Beauty connects us to God, and without God there is no liberty. Without the aesthetic principle there can be no courage, no freedom of thought, no aspiration to anything except the accumulation of disintegrating material things. This is precisely why things don't seem to last as long as they used to, and don't seem to be as well made as they used to be. Their value is valueless.

Lord, it's a bloody long way to the coffee in this place.