Monday, January 11th, 2016.  -( Over-Dosing on Reality in Atlantic Canada )-

We are happy to discover that Mister DiCaprio seems to be legitimately concerned with social issues and Civil Rights and Equality and stuff like that.

— Friday night I sat down and started writing – finishing up a section of a Novel I’m at least ambiguous about – I’m in a bit of a quandary over whether it generates enough light & understanding without following the usual formula – The likeable character with his or her butt in a bear trap & you’re supposed to keep the readers in suspense until the end when the character either escapes alive or doesn’t. There are already enough things over-stimulating our adrenal glands with hard pounding fast action. Can I hold anybody’s attention with a story that does not want to blow anybody’s nervous system all the hell? Anyway – I just about passed out at the keyboard around 7:30 am – Saturday morning – and plodded into the other room, climbed into bed and did not immediately fall into a deep and peaceful sleep. We got up around 1 pm and had several things we had to do – drive to a supermarket and buy stuff we’d almost run out of and stuff like that.

— When we got home we had more stuff we had to do, attack some wood and cut it up for the wood stove so we could save the roughly four times the cost of burning wood if we heat using the over priced utilities here. And I think we discovered that the television series Manhattan, with excellent acting and writing and plot twists and all that. Cathi also wanted to listen to podcasts we subscribe to, several people talking about their predictions for what might hit the fan this year. It looks like Elitists are plotting to try to destroy the economies of most ‘Western’ Nations so they can manipulate more and more people into voluntarily surrendering more and more of their rights and freedoms – But anway, Cathi conked out and I sat there and watched all ten episodes of season two of Manhattan and thought those actors, producers, directors – all of them – deserved accolades and all kinds of prizes. But then again it was after 7:30 in the morning before I conked out and again, I didn’t get the deep revitalizing sleep I needed –

— Sunday we didn’t have as much we had to do and that’s a good thing – we kind of took it slow and I did get a little bit of rest, but one of the times I woke up from a short nap I was too busy thinking about where my story line was going, and needed to go work on that, and had some pleasant diversions from friends on the internet and I felt pretty good about things, I started working on one of my web pages that needed help and a lot of things went off the rails with that, browsers crashed, updated web pages refused to display their new content correctly- stuff that said it was uploaded and working on the web loaded out of order on the pages I was working on. That was weird. I had to go in and make sure my browsers knew not to load anything from their memory cache, the refresh/reload buttons were supposed to take care of that, but with Mercury Retrograde – and whatever else was going on in the world wide web – that just wasn’t happening. I think it was after six a.m. on Monday morning when I reached a point where I thought it wasn’t 1,000% perfect, but it was a lot better and if I didn’t quit there, I’d pass out on the keyboard and wake up to find several pages of weird random letters appeared and kept on printing themselves ad nauseum. – depending on where my forehead or other body parts hit the keyboard when I passed out – 😉

— This morning – Monday mornings we put out the garbage and recycling, and Cathi has to get up and out to work, has to leave here between 7:30 and 7:45 to avoid getting stuck behind school busses and get herself to work on time. I start the van every morning so it isn’t freezing when she has to rush out of here, and if the windows were coated with a lot of frost, we – or she – or I have to scrape windows so she can see where she’s going and get there in one piece – alive and on time. We did get her out of here –  It was actually something like 8˚C / 48˚F – well above freezing, but it was raining and thick patches of ice between here and where she works would be dangerously slippery, so she left as early as she could. And then I made the mistake of sitting down at the computers and checking the pages I’d fixed over night. They still weren’t acting right. The dog and the cat came around to let me know it was time to feed them, then came around again to let me know they needed to go outside if I didn’t want to have to clean up messes on the floors in here and stuff, and I think I decided I needed a break whether web pages were more than 90% fixed or not –

— Again, I didn’t get deep and peaceful sleep, but it was deeper and closer to peaceful than it had been all weekend.

— The dog woke me up around 7:30 p.m. Cathi had come home, done a few things, taken a nap and was busy with her stuff on her laptop and the nightly television shows that help her unwind.

— I felt weird – like I could force myself to wake up completely if my life depended on it. I kind of stumbled around in a near trance and did manage to do stuff – get the firewood ready and check the things that needed to be checked and yup- the animals were okay, Cathi was okay – There was rain water on the floor in the basement where the strangely warm weather had given us wetness instead of a lot of white mess – but things did not feel right. It almost felt like I woke up in a parallel world where things weren’t quite the way they were in my familiar world. It felt like one wall was maybe half an inch closer to than it should have been, so the door couldn’t quite open all the way when I had to get past it to get down in the basement to check on puddles and important stuff like that.

— & Listening to news about David Bowie’s death seemed a bit strange too. All the teevee news stations were giving that ‘story’ a lot more time than I expected, interviewing Canadian Astronauts and half the musicians in Canada – and it felt like they were canonizing Bowie with praise and distinctions I thought John Lennon or Paul McCartney or one of the original Rolling Stones would get – I was thinking that David Bowie, with his “Chameleon” redefinitions of himself every year or two was given credit for starting cultural trends that I was pretty sure he picked up on and personified, became a leader of a ‘movement’ that had started without him – He might have given MTV Holy Hell for not broadcasting music and videos by ‘Other than White’ musicians and groups way back in the beginning – but he did not stick his neck out and threaten the ‘Establishment’ and ‘The way it’s always been & we like it that way’ the way John Lennon did – Bowie might have made it more socially acceptable to act and wear stuff that bent the weird old rules of gender classification and did things that, for instance, gave Boy George the confidence to be himself when he broke into world wide acclaim – But there will probably never be any Conspiracy Reasearchers delving into the possibility that he was killed by somebody who had been targeted, trained, conditioned and activated in a ‘Manchurian Candidate/ MK-Ultra’ type program to go out and assasinate him.

— I took a nice long soak in a hot bathtub, almost fell asleep there, realized the water had cooled considerably, got up, drained the tub, turned on the shower and warmed myself back up- dried myself off, stumbled around a lot less trance-like, found “Cat People / putting out fires” on You tube and suffered through idiotic YouTube commercials before I could blast it almost loud enough to disturb the neighbours – If this was summer time and any windows were open, that might have been a concern – but – Yeah – I could shed a few tears and feel like DB had given me, and the greater world around us – a lot to celebrate and a lot to think about while he’d been with us.

— But I still feel a bit strange. I woke up in a ‘place’ that felt like an alternative dimension this evening, and now David Bowie gets to wake up in a really altered dimension – hope it’s a much higher world he’s graduated to –

— Thoughtfully yours –,

~~~~~ Jim