Author Archives: Jim

Saturday, July 18th, 2020 –

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Saturday, July 18th, 2020 —> +13˚C / +55˚F & Overcast @ 6:51 am in Atlantic Canada on what would have been my cousin, Gary’s, birthday – Also Cheryl W.’s birthday – 🙂 –

- Evelynn + Foating Building + Lamp-Post

– Evelynn, “Don’t look at me – I can’t levitate lamp-posts and Customs Houses-“

— Evelynn is Nikki’s latest builder-avatar – { she’s incredibly cute and when viewed in a ‘gaming’ monitor her red hair is amazing. Here she looks a bit anemic } – and she was on a mission – to see how many areas were having obvious problems right around here – since we managed to fix a major problem with the area where ‘Aerendel City’ will be.

— Almost all the areas connected to the City have gone wonky – land masses hav gone down, buildings stay where they used to be – And the weird thing is, if you walk { more like ‘Run’ } you builder-avatar one way, there is no problem at all, but if you run him or her another way – there are definite problems. – Jumping – ( Or flying ) from Aerendel City to ‘Highland Forest’ = no problem. – Running around on the ‘ground’ from Aerendel City – down through the Birken Hills, through Birkenport – across into Daelen, and up through ‘AerWest04’ & ‘AerWest02’ and into the Highland Forest —> Birkenport’s buildings, docks, —> everything – is a couple feet off the ground. Daelen’s about a meter higher than it was an hour ago, but ‘Evelynn’ assured us that she used her ‘cunning’ to climb on a rock and jump onto the higher ground at Daelen. The Border between AerWest04 & 02 was only half-unglued – but the hills between the City and the Forest had not only slid several yards { or meters } north – but dropped a couple yards { or meters } down, too.

— Remind me – we have to send the miners down to find a lot of missing rocks that we used to hide the weird looking 2 dimensional edges of the ‘river’ we turned up on an angle to simulate a waterfall.

— Earlier this week I was ‘swearing my fool head off’ – using words I managed never to resort to for something like thirty years — { shhh – don’t tell anybody how old I might be –  }  But lately I’m laughing. If I still have my sense of humor – hey, that’s a good thing – I remember reading Carlos Castenada – “Your sense of humor is the first thing to go -”  { Heavy sigh and smile at the sky – }

- Diane -

– My sister, Diane, year unknown, in mom’s kitchen during renovations… –

— Meanwhile – Along with all the catastrophes in the game world we’re building – I decided I probably needed to move things around in my ‘office’ here – I woke up from a dream and while I was half asleep, half awake I saw myself looking happier while working on stuff and writing my novels etc, if things in here were in a different configuration and I could actually get up and turn around without knocking anything over or stubbing my toe and needing to hop to the washroom to find the band-aids…

—- In the process of moving stuff out of the office and into the room we were getting ready to fill with a couple desks and printer stands – since Cathi has officially been told to go ahead and ‘create’ herself a home office since they don’t want all their people back in the building until the Covid-19 thing is enough of a nasty memory that they could safely move into ‘phase 3’ of their ‘recovery plan’… — um, while moving stuff around, feeling like my life was one of those silly little plastic puzzles where you have to slide the little square pieces around in a highly imaginative way to get it right? –  Duh — in the process of moving stuff around – I opened a couple boxes that were in the closet in here under other boxes — and found some interesting photographs I’d forgotten about, like this Polaroid of my sister Diane, probably from the late 60’s or early 70’s – when I was probably either still in the Navy or trying to eek out a living in Vermont…

— & – in the interest of not boring you to death, and maybe actually getting a few things done this morning – I should end here, and figure I got a fraction of the things said that I’ve wanted to say to my friends and family for the past couple weeks — and see if I can actually ‘budget’ my time instead of racing full out in seventeen directions at once. …

–— “Have a good life!” { still can’t believe in wishing anybody one good day at a time… }

~~~~~ Jim

My Father was a Monster – With a pretty good sense of Humour – I’m left with PTSD & a handful of happy memories.

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Tuesday, June 25th, 2019 – +21˚C / +70˚F – sunny & bright with a deep blue sky @ 11:11 am  –

— “Not a poem” from my friend, Douglas Jay Otterson in the Ithaca, New York area —>

“My Father Was a Monster”

 

1.
He was everyone’s friend at family gatherings
But two swigs later his eyes could turn glassy
his huge strong arms swung violently through the air.
And his roar was as bad as his bite.We never knew what to expect
He was everybody’s friend at home in the kitchen
singing “Daddy’s little Girl” with a big smile on his face
and one of my sisters on his knee.
One slam of his fist on the kitchen table
rattled all the silverware in the house.I don’t think he physically hurt
any one of his daughters
But the psychological terror was always
one or two seconds away.I might have been thirteen years old
when somebody gave me a lockable diary
for Christmas or my birthday.
I kept it in a bureau drawer
under folded tee shirts
But somehow he found it and picked the lock-
-Got drunk at a family picnic and
called me an asshole in front of everybody,
quoted two lines from one of a hundred pages
-somewhere in the middle of the book, middle of the page –
That kind of betrayal never goes away

I started writing in French. And in code.

2.

P.T.S.D.
I was not the only one-
I had friends who would never want to be there
when their fathers came home.
Our babysitter – whose father worked with mine
surprised us one night when dad was working nights
and her father on another shift had just come home.

She’d run out her back door and across three back yards
then down someone’s driveway, maybe another hundred yards
-across a main road and knocked our door.
She was trembling when she asked my mother
if she could hide out with us
until her father simmered down.

We didn’t ask why her father might have been crazy mad-
maybe even not mad at her.
We let her in. And I got sent upstairs to mind my own business.
And her mother called several hours later and said her father had passed out drunk
and it was safe to come home.

I was just beginning to realize when my father was drunk
and when he wasn’t
when he gave me a twenty dollar bill one night and told me to get
whatever I needed.
I bought a pair of shoes that fit me better than the ones I had.

The next day he asked me where the new shoes came from
I was confused, I said, “You gave me the money last night -”
How much? Twenty dollars.
“You took advantage of me, pal-” he began
and he went on a verbal warpath that evening-
demanded the seven dollars change I gave my mother
-terrorized every one of his five kids and his wife.

He raised his hand to strike one of us several times,
but never did – not that evening –
One sister went upstairs crying and he ran up after her
We were terrified
Every nerve on edge
we listened and were ready to jump
and try to subdue a monster bigger than all of us together
if it sounded like he was about to slap or punch a girl-
not even half his size
We heard him using his soft, friendly voice –
“I would never do anything to hurt you-”

He hit my mother twice.
Both times she packed us up and spirited us out of the house.
The first time she had my aunt pick us up and drive us to Vermont,
to her mother and father.
Where my grandfather groped all three of my sisters
and spouted the strictest, straight-arrow, black and white
moralistic b.s. I ever heard.

A couple details are scrambled lately
but I think my uncle came and got me and brought me back home
where we sat with my father and he looked broken and lost
my father looked broken and lost.
I thought he was genuinely remorseful. (I was fifteen or sixteen years old)
He promised to be a better person.
He promised all kinds of things.
My uncle drove me back to Vermont.
We packed up and came back home.

His best behavior lasted two weeks.

Another incident. I was already in Vermont
working at my grandparents Motel, Restaurant and gas station
Running the gas station pretty much by myself at the age of nineteen
for ten dollars a week. (and room and board?)
I don’t know what happened
But my mother and the other four kids showed up and dug in to stay
The younger kids were enrolled in local schools
My mother worked as a waitress and sometimes ‘hostess’
at the restaurant where I was designated emergency fill in dishwasher.

I don’t know – maybe it was a month later
my father found out where they were and came up, got a room in the motel
and threatened to charge mom with kidnapping.
The local Congregational Minister sat and talked with mom and dad
and in the end
Mom broke down and believed him
once again,
believed he could change
believed he could be better.

So they went back home
And I went with them,
thinking maybe he’d be more apt to keep his promises
now that I was six foot three and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds
I got a job pumping gas.
That lasted a couple months,
until I came down with hepatitis

My favorite uncle came to see me and his jaw dropped
he later said I looked three quarters dead.

I was slowly getting better.
The doctor said it might take a couple more months
my father, working his part time job,
delivering oil in an area close enough so he could stop home
to use the facilities, et cetera,
stopped home mid morning and roared
That if I was still there when he got home from work
he’d pitch me out in the middle of the road
He said he knew I got hepatitis
so I could avoid working
and paying him rent.

Ya know, I know-
A lot of kids had it worse
A lot of kids had broken bones and worse

But what convinced me that I had PTSD
was not just the nightmares.
{ or other weird dreams, like the time
I dreamed he came charging up the stairs
to beat the ‘living cement’ out of me – again –
and I jumped out of my body –
I probably really had an astral projection-
I leaped through the roof and out into a starry winter night,
bare trees, cold wind-
I turned around and saw through the walls and saw my bedroom
in bright sunlight
with the bed made
and nobody in it –
If this wasn’t enough to scare me –
I knew that I had not completed the task
that God or one of the ArchAngels had assigned me –
I hadn’t written my books
and I snapped right back into my body,
it was still night, and nobody had run up the stairs
in a bloodlust
to beat up anybody.

I was amazed at how miraculously relaxed I felt }

I had several dreams in which my father fell asleep or died
while driving a family car
and I tried to climb out of the back seat, over him –
to get into the driver’s seat
and steer us to safety.

Most nightmares had invisible demons coming after me.

but worse than nightmares –
whenever he threatened me – or my mother,
or seemed on the verge of losing control
I had immediate visualizations of anything within reach
that I could use as a weapon
and a felt myself summon the adrenaline I’d need
to smash his skull or drive a knife into his jugular vein,
give him a karate inspired knuckle punch to the adams apple –

I somehow never lost control –
well- one time
a dog followed one of the kids into the house
they were petting him.
My father picked the dog up and
violently
threw the dog down the stairs
didn’t break any bones
but it yelped and ran like crazy to get away –
And as my father started screaming
“Who the Christ Jesus let that dog into the house?”
I jumped out of my room
with blood in my eyes and
was half a heartbeat away
from pushing my father down the stairs
At the last moment
I turned and smashed a hole two feet in diameter
in the sheet rock wall at the top of the stairs.
He didn’t hear the crash
as he was roaring and stomping down the stairs.

The next morning
he discovered the hole in the wall –
Asked my mother about it
she told him he came home drunk and he did it.
He’d already kicked and punched through a couple other walls
he believed her. (I think she only lied in life or death situations.)

Years later, working at the post office
seeing supervisors and managers bullying
powerless employees,
vandalizing post office property and blaming custodians
they wanted to get rid of any way they could-
lying on official documents and when, in the grievance process
they were confronted with evidence that they’d lied, they’d reply
“Management has the right to make comments.”

At the post office-
I never came close to bashing any skulls in-
but I did have to walk away and calm my breath
several times

It took me two years of
delivering newspapers
of an unethical publisher
in New York State –
Out – driving throw-away junkers
on a two hundred and fifty mile loop through three counties
away from supervisors and managers
making peanuts, actually losing money
as they double charged everybody that worked for them
and claimed I owed for more papers they never issued to me-

it took me two years of fresh air and sunshine
and wind and rain and driving snow
before I could think about idiotic post office supervisors
without imagining me in a dark foggy alley with a metal baseball bat
watching them approach, half drunk and bragging about how they
got to the Puerto Rican guy they didn’t like,
and got the African American custodian to resign for health reasons
when I was no longer there to protect them –

I would have loved to see the look on their eyes
when the cop they called to press charges against me
for smashing windshields and slashing tires on post office delivery vehicles
when the officer was a friend of the family and laughed in their faces,
“I know that man – he’s working for a newspaper three hundred miles from here-
and has been for three years now.”
This was somebody who’d listened to me ‘belly aching’ about the nonsense
those supervisors were pulling against innocent employees
And he only half believed me, thought I was exaggerating.
Until they tried to frame me for something
some other stressed out postal worker
or random pissed off customer
or slithering supervisor committed.

It took me at least another decade and a lot of yoga
to calm myself down to where my first thought-
when faced with slimy evil manipulating son of a guns –
was not, “yeah, the world is full of idiots”
wasn’t even, “Let it go – somebody will get even with someone like that –
don’t go to jail because you let him get to you.”
but an actual – “Be patient, God isn’t finished with a lot of us yet.”
or, “There really are two kinds of people on this planet-
Angels in Training and Angels in Trouble. –
And a lot of us have one foot in each camp –
And some of us are centipedes.”

3.
Sixty something years into this life
and I need to work on my delivery.
I fought the anger down
I no longer jump at the sound of brakes
I no longer spend half my life expecting a sucker punch
from a huge right hand.

He was six feet, two or three
When I was more like five foot nine
He weighed around three hundred pounds
when I was more like ninety nine pounds with my ribs showing

He’d often drop or misplace a pen
and start an inquisition with a roar –
“Who stole my pen and what did you do with it?”

a teenaged zit was dinner table conversation –
“What the Christ ya got growing out of your head?”
-he’d ask with a leering grin.

We moved from a project duplex
with paper thin walls and neighbors so close
you could spit out a window and hit their outside walls
We moved to a ‘nicer neighborhood’
where we could hear the large man across the street
roar at his wife with ‘f’ words I never heard
in the old ‘not so nice’ neighborhood.

So I figured every one within three hundred yards, maybe more
could hear every tirade – would know we kids could drive a saint to swear
could hear that my mother belonged in a luney bin,
Could probably wonder what the hell it meant to be told,
“You sound like someone with a paper asshole.”

The really scary part was –
He could be warm and affectionate
and even make sense
So there were times when I doubted my own sanity
and thought I might have judged him wrong
judged our whole situation wrong.

But then my middle sister reminded me of the time
He knocked me down in the back yard, knelt on my arms,
removed my glasses and pummeled my head with both fists
screaming, “Give me a knife, I’m gonna kill him. Get me a knife!”

And we never knew what set him off.

If we didn’t have a clue about some evil deed he was accusing us of –
we’d often hear, “Don’t play Mickey the Boo with me, pal-”
and maybe need to duck or get smashed
-so who the hell was Mickey the Boo? None of us knew.

4.
The woman I love probably saved me from an early grave
in more ways than one.
At a critical time in ‘my life’
she fell in love with my voice and one poem I wrote.

I told her I’d drive five hundred miles for a hug
and turn around and drive right back if she took one look and went, “ugh-”

I drove more than twelve hours across New York State Highways,
crossed the bridge – went through customs
remembered what she said, answered all the questions
and appreciated the young customs guy’s smile as he welcomed me to Canada.

I called from a convenience store, apologized for taking, what?
-maybe five hours longer than I’d expected that drive would take me?
We met through a locked and chained door
in a semi-public place.
-On a scale of one to ten – I felt like a three
and the first glimpse of her I got
I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s at least an eleven -‘
But we hugged and talked and
she didn’t send me right back home.

Now- it’s seventeen years and a couple months later
And I believe we have the best relationship of any couple
I’ve ever known or heard of.
Nobody’s perfect, but maybe our neuroses mesh
without exploding
And there are times when she’s actually said
she wondered why I stuck around
through a couple odd stretches
that I guess she thinks
would have sent anybody else packing –
and – man – I think I wonder how she puts up
with my ‘quirks and idiosyncrasies’ and outright failures –
I think I wonder about that at least twice a week.

But I found something this morning
I thought we’d used up long ago and I felt good about that
I showed it to her and wondered if she’d found it a put it where I’d find it
And when I asked her if she’d known it was there
She nearly lost her temper and said
she didn’t need to face an inquisition while she
was getting ready for work

I was stunned.
I’m not my father.
Do I sound like him
without meaning to?

Good Grief?

 

— Douglas J Otterson – June 25, 2019 —

This Universe Has Many Levels.

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Sunday, December 16th, 2018 — +1˚C / +33˚F — ‘clear’ & hinting at evening @ 4:41 pm

= = = = =

Okay, you are most likely reading this in the Material Universe. Many of you believe that this is the only universe there is.  If you can’t handle me telling you that you’re wrong, ‘log out’ of here and go somewhere else now.

The material universe is the lowest of several universes that are right here, right now.

“Above” the material universe there is the ‘Astral’ Universe. The Astral Universe is where we go when we’re dreaming. { That’t the most simple explanation. You also contact the Astral Universe when you are visualizing/imagining things, people, events etc. — }

The Astral Universe is many times larger than the material universe. The size differential has been compared to a hot air balloon and the basket below the hot air balloon in which passengers ride. The Astral Universe is the balloon and the basket is the material universe. The Astral Universe has also been called the Emotional Universe. The Material Universe can be called the Physical Universe. If and when you’re in the Astral Universe, you may be able to touch things and believe they are physical because they will be at the same ‘density’ as you are.

There are sections of the Astral Universe that are dark – where things are not that easy to see – This has been called the ‘lower’ astral universe or lower astral plane. ‘Mischievous’ or even downright ‘mean’ and ‘destructive’ and/or ‘negative’ beings like hanging out in the lower astral universe. You could enjoy yourselves down there, and feel pretty safe, or you could believe you are stuck in what some people who have experienced the least friendly citizens of the lower Astral Universe have described as ‘Hell’.

There are also lighter and brighter sections of the Astral Universe where ‘nicer’ beings tend to hang out and spend their time enjoying ‘life’ and the company of not so mean, or nasty individuals who either spend most of their time there – often between ‘lives’ in the material universe – or pop in and out as they dream. Some people who have been to the higher/lighter sections of the Astral Universe believe they have been in ‘Heaven’ – but this is not the Ultimate perfectly Bliss-Filled area that all evolving beings believe is the end of their journey through life or many lives.

Beyond the Astral Universe there is the Causal Universe. Again, the Causal Universe is much bigger than the Astral Universe – the size differential is again comparable to the size of a hot air balloon and its basket with the Causal Universe being the balloon this time and the Astral Universe being the comparative size of the basket. Where the Astral Universe is the realm of emotions – the Causal Universe is the realm of the higher intellect.

Do not be confused and believe that by higher intellect I mean this is something you can achieve by attending a decent university and training your brain just right. The higher intellect functions on a level where anything you imagine, you can manifest – if you want a river in a parched desert land you can ‘dream one up’ and have it become reality. Beings that have evolved to the level where they can live in the Causal Universe can manifest just about anything they desire. If you can imagine that the material and astral universes are the grammar schools and middle schools in the wider universes of education, we have to learn a lot of lessons on self control and discover what is most important in our lives and go through a lot of testing before we can graduate to the Causal Universe. A few really angry citizens of the Causal Universe could turn the place into hell if they believe they can and should set anyone and anything on fire who looks at them wrong or says something they’re not ready to hear. “Abandon all self-righteous delusions that anger is a good thing” before you apply for an upgrade to the Causal realms.

There is something beyond the Causal Universe, but we can’t get there from here. And those who have been there and come back to tell us that, yes, there is something ‘out there’ can’t or won’t tell us exactly what that is.

= = = = =

And while I’m at it –

Love!

Let me throw a bit about ‘Chakras’ into this mix.

Your Sexual Center or Chakra has been called the ‘Lowest’ chakra in the human body. This is a bit tricky because sexual engery is actually finer and functions at a higher level than most average humans experience in their day to day existance. This might explain why sex drive is such a motivating force down here in the material universe.

If you identify yourself as a purely sexual being, and if your attraction to others remains on the sexual level, one ‘romp in the hay’ will satisfy your attraction and you’ll want to move on to other attractions / other experiences.

Next up is the physical chakra – If the attraction between two individuals is purely physical, a little bit of aging may modify that attraction to the point where one or both idividuals will lose interest in each other and go looking for a younger partner or partners.

The ‘lower’ intellectual center or chakra is next up. If two individuals are attracted by each other’s intellect all it might take to break up that attraction is one person changing their mind about something the other person believes is important.

The next higher center or chakra is the lower emotional center. If an attraction between two people is emotional – that relationship has a 50/50 percent chance to last – we’ve crossed the line into long lasting relationships here.

Above the lower emotional center is a higher emotional center or chakra.

Above the higher emotional center there is a higher intellectual center or chakra.

Somewhere above the lower emotional center peeople become much more ‘spiritual’ in their outlook and their goals and aspirations.

If an attraction between two individuals comes from this spiritual area that many humans attain, then their connection will blow any obstacles that might try to keep those two people apart – out of the way, out of the water – and basically – their combined energies will move Heaven and Earth to bring those two people together.

= = = = =

How do you know what level you’re on in relation to the chakras?

When you’re fully involved with your sexual center your drives are purely sexual.

When you’re fully involved with your physical center you tend to want to relax and go to sleep and stay there.

When you’re fully engaged with your lower intellectual center you want to learn about things.

When you’re fully engaged with your lower emotional center you may want to satisfy your desires, sometimes in confused manners like over-eating, seeking over-stimulation through drugs or serial romantic encounters – or, if you’re lucky, you may seek to please and be pleased by the one person you are most committed to.

When you’re fully engaged with your higher emotional center you are filled with a sense of love and compassion – you want to nurture others and make their lives more comfortable, happier, and ‘better’.

When you become fully engaged with your higher intellectual center you are driven to know what exactly ‘God’ is and what God is all about. You will also understand that to know more and more about the ‘Divine’ you will want to share what you’ve already learned about ‘God’ and the ‘higher laws of Creation’.

= = = = =

This is probably enough for one article here.

— Namaste —

~~~~~ Jim

 

 

 

 

— Yesterday —

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Thursday — September 22nd, 2016 — 13°C / 55°F — Dark Damp & Cooler in Atlantic Canada @9:23 pm —

— I have no idea why the latest WordPress UpDate decided this blog should default to an italics font— But I did manage to change it – The “Cambria” font looks fantastic in some blogs but not so hot in this one – hmmmm-?

Ganesh

Ganesh – He was here in one update, then disappeared, and now he’s back.

— Yesterday, All I wanted to do was sit down and work on the novel I’m writing. I’ve been ‘on a roll’ – This is something I began in 1987 – after discovering the world of doing things ‘on-line’. I was part of the SFRT  – Speculative Fiction Round Table  on GEnie – General Electric’s venture into moving to the next step toward what became the internet. General Electric want to make money from this venture. Using that ‘service’ cost something like six dollars an  hour after 6 pm and before 8 am on Weekdays. the prime time rate was more like eighteen dollars an hour. weekends and holidays were also six bucks an hour.

— Writers’ Workshops are a great place to get yourself inspired. What I liked was tapping into everybody else’s ideas. What excited and inspired them. Whether they were producing masterpieces or nothing at all. The obvious stuff didn’t matter. Nobody was going to listen to read part of a chapter or your latest poem, or whatever – and tell you exactly what you had to do to make a million dollars with your ‘masterpiece’. They may tell you that they hate the way anybody still writes anything that includes words that end in ‘ing’. They may tell you that what you’re doing sucks because it concentrates on one little area of life that they don’t want to bother with. They may try to tell you that nothing you ever do will be good enough, because somebody’s already told that to them, about whatever they were doing and in their hurt, they want to hurt others. But somewhere in the mix, between the nonsense and non sequiturs – something happens. In the world of imagination, someone lights a spark and someone else gives it a candle and maybe a third person moves that candle to somewhere that shows you something that you might never have thought about, or points your toward something in the realm of imagination and ideas that fires you up for weeks, even months at a time. Think about this – most people who have written a novel, or any other book, have spent at least a year working on that novel, ( or  whatever ) might have changed details that drove them to distraction five or six different ways, or more, and stuck with it, finished it, did some editing, rearranged some plot elements, believed in their story line and the finished product enough to bring it somebody who might read the first ten words and laugh in their face. They might send or bring their story to dozens of editors and publishers, received dozens of humiliating rejections, and then found somebody who took a chance – and then, not every book that is finished, gets edited and even published reaches more than a handful of readers. Somebody’s imagined ‘best seller’ might only sell to friends and relatives- or might be way ahead of its time and disappear into oblivion only to be ‘discovered’ decades later, maybe after the writer left this world – temporarily or permanently? Left and come back? Left voluntarily or left kicking and screaming – devastated by disease or fell asleep and never woke up again?

— Yeah, so the story I was writing in 1987 hit a brick wall, I didn’t know where to go with it. But I never gave up on it. Sometime in the middle of this August I found a file on a hard drive I haven’t visited in a while and thought, yeah – this story needs to be finished, but I’m not too crazy about this part, or that part or the way it started going off in that direction, or whatever – So I started re-writing from the beginning. I looked up a bunch of things, Word Processor on one screen, browser in another, looking up movies that were playing in various months during the time the story took place – what kind of cars were new that year? What colours did those cars come in? Did they have cup holders that year or did they come later?

— I was over 102,000 words into the re-write- on page 219 using a 14 point Cambria font. ( it just looked ‘right’ ) & like I said, all I wanted to do is move the story along some. — But — I never did get to that story yesterday.

— & Here’s a bit of yesterday’s time line.

— 7:30 am – Checked email, groaned a bit, shook  my head a couple times – followed one link and was just distracted enough so when I got up and left the ‘office’ to see and talk with the love of my life before she left for work, she was already gone. I poured a cup of coffee, made some toast, buttered and jellied it, ate it, went back into the office, sat down, listened to the morning news, which was coming to me through a CBC web site on a mac computer beside the one the bulk of my novel is growing in- /sitting on? The ads coming in to the browser froze that browser, I had to force quit out and start back up again. And then, just after 8:30, in the middle of an interview I was interested in –

— 8:33 am – lost power. no electricity came into the house to power the computer I need to be working if I’m going to write and/or continue writing that story. Now power to the television or radio either. Grrr

— 9:33 – ish am – I called Cathi on a cell phone to tell her we had no electricity. She hinted that she was having a weird day too. Mercury was still retrograding around, proud of itself. I tried resting, lying on the bed. That didn’t work. A while later I needed to get up and go into the washroom.

— 10:00 am -ish – power came back through our electricity lines when I was coming back into the bedroom from the washroom. It was time to feed the pets. and reset a couple clocks, like the one on the microwave, which needed to be set before I could ‘nuke’ a cup of lukewarm coffee. I restarted a couple computers, wanted to take some photos from a digital camera and work on them on the computer that is mostly email and photos, with a little bit of ‘lite’ blogging going on now and then. Then I walked around, let the dog back inside after he wanted to go out and bark at any dogs walking their humans up and down the road he can see from his dog ‘run’ – fenced off area. I think I ‘nuked’ myself some instant oatmeal, then ate it, probably drank some nuked/reheated coffee.

11:00 + something – When I sat down to seriously get with messing around with digital photographs, I discovered the browser was frozen. Then, not just the browser, but the whole computer was frozen. I sighed, pushed the button, turned it off, waited a minute or so and told it to ‘reboot’. The computer took longer than usual to come back to life.

—> 11:30 -ish, am. I discovered the computer did not boot from the large ( 1 terrabyte ) usual external hard drive, it booted from the smaller, interior drive. The external drive did not ‘show up’ on the desktop like it should have. This could either have been a weird part of a routine, it may have been slow to come up online – or it could have been a problem – the blackout might have killed it. So I tested it, moved it over to another computer, plugged it in, turned it on, nothing happened. I’ve had problems with externals drive that have gone to sleep before. When they go to sleep, especially in the past after upgrading the operating system or something like that- updates can be a problem. The trick when they happens is to move the firewire cable to its other ‘home’ connect it with the computer off, turn the external hard drive on, and immediately turn the computer on. When the computer finds the sleeping hard drive it magically wakes it up and everything is fine. It just wanted to see me act like I might scream and throw things or sit down and cry. Okay, tried everything. Nothing worked. It might work in a different enclosure. Maybe something went ‘kerfloowie’ in the enclosure. I plugged in another, similar enclosure that houses two older partitions with Mac OS X 10.4.12 (I think-) for starting up older computers that can’t handle any newer operating systems. Those partitions showed up, no problem, okay, so I opened up both enclosures and swapped the one that was giving me problems into the enclosure that worked fine with the older operating system hard drive w/ partitions. plugged it in, turned it on, turned on a computer, — twiddled my thumbs a bit, and nope- nothing shows up. check inside the ‘About This Mac’ routine, click ‘Get more info’ to check the system profiler select firewire and there’s the problem : “Unknown device” It’s either fried or its connection got scrambled. Okay, time to grit teeth – Back up the 1.5 terrabyte drive with the older system on it. Then erase that drive, make sure it gets the GUID schnarr so it can start a freakin stupid intel mac – install the stinkin operating system, then migrate the stuff that is a year old so none of the wedding photos from two of my cameras and one of Cathi’s, wedding videos from my flip cam and Cathi’s Nikon, And the wedding photos etc are something that takes eight hours to down load, and I don’t know how long it takes to work on them because I was halfway through that and had spent another eight hours doing that grrrrrr-

— Ack! I begin the automated backup the hard drive process, it gets about an hour into that and craps out, says “The file “Moe” is too long and contains characters that are not compatible with this computer-” um — “WHAAAAAAATTTTTT?” So I tried again, “This backup attempt of yours contains backed up and non backed up files- so you can’t back it up-” [ which is utter b.s. ] “WWWHHHHAAAAAAAATTTTTTT?” so I gotta go through the whole process of copying every file onto its nice warm and friendly backup home MANUALLY? one at a time?

—> Time Line for everything that followed:

—> 10:45 pm – Backing up everything manually is finally finished.

——> 10:46 pm Begin erasing, reformatting and installing Mac OS X 10.6 on larger of two partitions.

—> 11:00 (+ something) pm Connect to iMac with good stuff & same operating system – restart iMac holding down the correct key to put it into ‘Terminal Mode’ and select the right hard drive to copy from, begin the migration process:

—> 11:15 -ish pm, Begin!

—> 2:15 am —> “[estimated] 45 minutes remaining”

—> 2:30 am —> “2 hours, 35 minutes remaining”  { “AAAaaaaaaa!” }

—> 2:40 am —> “Transferring Applications Folder” —> No estimate of how long this might take —

—> 2:42 am —> “About 3 hours, 15 minutes remaining”

—> 2:45 am —> “About 54 Minutes remaining”

—> 2:50 am —> “… 45 minutes….”

—> 2:53 am —> “… 29 minutes …”

—>2:56 am —> ” … 38 Minutes… ”

—> 3:13 am —> ” … 4 minutes … ”

—> 3:17 am —> ” … Less than 1 Minute … ”

—> 3:18 am —> ” … less than 1 minute … ”

—> 3:19 am —> ” … l/t 1 minute … ”

—> 3:20 am —> ” … l/t 1 Minute …”

——> 3:21 am ——> “Click Here to Restart Computer ” —> Click!

—>3:25 am —> “Checking for New Software Udates…”

—> 3:41 am —> “Restart after updates…”  Click!

—> Daylight! —> “September 22nd, 2016 and you still have a pants load of snarr to do before you can think about getting back to the photos – and then maybe you’ll be able to get back to your novel — bwa hahahahahaha! I lied – ” -Alzo Spraque l’ordinatuer – And I’m so tired I don’t a chips if anything’s spelled right.

— “Sleep? What a concept -” — Gary [“Scarf”] Gray —

— I did get some sleep, stumbled around in a trance – sat down at the computer at 7:30 am and discovered that several things were still not right, it’s telling me to reinstall iTunes. It’s told me that ‘Google Chrome does not support this ancient piece of shit – wtf is the matter wit U? – U moron!” The version of iPhoto won’t work. I check for updates and hey, “We have another two hours worth of updates for you, kid!” My brain feels like crying at the thought of playing any silly computer games to pass the time while that computer is updating / getting its act back together.

—> um —? Noon-ish? —> updates worked, but now the iPhoto app is the ‘upgrade’ that makes you go through three extra steps to move what you could have moved with a mouse or track ball and an easy ‘drag and drop’ But W.T.F. – load photos from one camera anyway.

—> 3 pm —> “Oh hell with this, time to install the OS on the smaller, half a terrabyte partition.” Fire up the  install disk start up when I’m done, do not migrate anything right off, make sure it works first –

—> 4 pm —> So Speaketh  the Computer,  “Oops, no iPhoto – Oops iTunes is configured wrong, please re-install —> ooops, iTunes is configured wrong, please Re-Install! —> I SAID! iTunes is fupped up, reload the fupping thing! // to which I replied “I reinstalled the bloody thing 4 times, restarted the fupping computer 4 times and it’s still futched up? —> Moving right along —>

—> 4:30 pm —> Migrating “Renard The Third” and “Z-Schnarr The Second” —> ” … About 17 hours and 38 Minutes Remaining …”

—> 5:10 pm —> ” … 6 hours, 21 minutes remaining … ”

—> 8:10 pm —> 6 hours, 24 minutes remaining —> Walked the dog.

—> 8:45 pm –>- “4 hours 33 minutes remaining” Watched the Black List on PVR

—> 11:15 pm —> “49 minutes remaining”

 

—> 12:45 am Friday, 23 September, 2016 —> “Restart—”

—> 1:30 am —> updates loaded —> “Restart—>”

—> 1:35 am —> Updates didn’t do anything —> “Restart —>” —> “Oh, you wanted me to actually install those updates? well just who do you think you are to tell a computer what to do?”

—> 1:45 am —> Computer restarted. looks okay, good night.

—> 4:45 am —> visit washroom, check on computer. it’s still there- fire up iPhoto —> load 646 photos from camera (two years worth of saved photos on the SD card) –

—> 5:53 am —> check out iTunes. “iTunes is not configured correctly, please reinstall—>” Reinstalled four times? Nothing works. log out, relog into top User on this partition. Reload iTunes there? doesn’t work. Reload the workhorse user? click on iTunes, = “Oh, you wanted me to start up? Why didn’t you say so?”

—> 6:30 am —> Your system does not support Firefox, you can’t load it. WWHHAAAAAAAATTTT?

—> 6:35 move firefox from top user to workhorse –  it works – do search for older versions of firefox using safari – hey, only their latest piece of poo-poo won’t work with this vintage operating system The install OS DVD gave us a version that did work – stick your tongue -out at anybody who worships at the altar of planned obsolescence. Dance around and smile at nearby statue of Ganesh.

—> 7:30 am —> wake up Cathi, “What time do you want to get up for work?” — “But it’s Saturday!” — “No, it’s Friday—” Now that’s gotta be the worst ….”

—> 7:45 am -ish —> Cathi’s out the door. The dog wants to go outside. It’s raining. But he wants to go outside.

—>7:55 am —> The dog says “Boof!” half heartedly, but twice – I open the door. It’s pouring rain, I can’t see the dog anywhere, I call him. A big happy very wet black Lab comes bounding from where he was barking at some small animal way the heck in the back corner of his ‘run’ — I dry him off with an old towel, he is deliriously happy for the rub. And the attention. He gets a small treat.

—> 8:15 am —> I fire up a couple programs. Everything seems to be working fine. software update wants to load a security update and a couple other things. —>yeah, go ahead. It wants to restart —> “Knock yerself out-”

—> 8:45 —> updates loaded & installed, Computer Restarted, Fire up the Mail program. —> Mail wants to use your login keychain. —> What login keychain, there never has been a login keychain. —> Wong answer, Mail wants to use your login keychain, please enter your password now. —> drop dead, get outta here —> instead of disappearing in a cloud of acrid smoke, the mail program pops up and looks around bright eyed and bushy tailed and says, “What’s new?” —> so I load about a dozen email accounts. two of them don’t like their passwords. I go into the living room, tell the laptop it’s December 31st, 2037 @ 11:11 pm and send myself a message. The mail app has a nervous breakdown. The malware program says hey wait, I haven’t had an update in 20 something years! the laptop freezes. —> I push the button, kill the laptop, smile at our very handsome and newly clean dog, then start the computer back up. —> programs that I shut off before the laptop had it’s nervous breakdown pop back up and hog all the desktop RAM. —> I shut them down. —> The mail program springs back to life and sends email message from the year 2037 – after I had told the time and date app to set itself automatically, —just before the laptop’s nervous breakdown.

—> 10:00 am —> the cat goes crazy thinking I’ll never feed him again. —> you keep that up, maybe I won’t —> feed the pets, and not to each other, that would be too messy to clean up before Cathi gets home.

—> Noon-ish —> Okay, most of the important programs I’ve tested work fine. —> a couple of them have anxiety attacks on startup and tell me I need to enter their login keychain passwords. I tell them to eff off and they fall to their knees in tears, beg me for a password. I tell them to eff off again and the programs say, “Oh, you want me to startup? why didn’t you say so?”

—> DreamWeaver CS3 thinks all my html files are in Chinese characters. I will be damned before I’ll click on any of them to see what just might happen.

—> iPhoto the happy correct version is sleepy and complains that it doesn’t want to download no 646 photos, but it goes ahead and downloads them anyway and then smiles and says, “See? Ain’t I amazing?” and I say, stick around, I got another three or four hundred photos to upload from two other cameras, and then there’s the video – but flip-share should handle that-

—> the ftp program whines and complains and wants its login keychain password, but after half a dozen “Cancel” clicks it pops up, yawns and says, “Good morning, what can you do for me today?”

—> Firefox is working fine, thank you. Google Chrome is off in a corner abusing itself. Good, I don’t need no stupid Google Chrome.

—> it’s Friday, September 23rd, 2016 – Mercury stopped retrograding yesterday and is now dancing forward across the sky. Bruce Springsteen’s trying to catch up to me in the age department. But I’ve got two weeks more under my belt than he does, and I still like Born to Run and a couple radio stations are playing happy birfday mini concerts of his stuff and then saying it’s his birfday, so Appah Hoopey Bruce!

—> it’s 11°C / 51°F and “overcast” here in this delirious little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 1:35 pm and if they dropped the bomb on me right now I’d deflate their silly egoes and laugh them to death.

Another interpretation of Ganesh.

Here’s another view or interpretation of Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. My favourite Ganesh moment was when I was cleaning a haunted building, chanting to myself and realized Ganesh was dancing beside me. Apparently – He liked the chant -(It couldn’t have been my voice – nahhhhhh-)

—> And Ganesh is smiling at me from H.J. d’Aerendel’s last posting – Life is good. for at least the next thirty seconds or so —? Right?

— Schnarr! — 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

 

 

 

Fun With Geo-Magnetic Storms?

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Thursday – September 22, 2016 — 20°C / 67°F – & Kind of Grey & Cloudy 4:46 pm in Atlantic Canada —

‘Fun with geo-magnetic storms’ is something like ‘Fun with Mercury Retrograde’ – For the last four or five days people have been more ‘on edge’ than usual. Many people who are usually easy-going and friendly have been ready to ‘bite people’s heads off at the drop of a hat’ –  Last night I read something – on a facebook page no less – that may have shed some light on why people are walking around feeling like human time bombs. (Eek?)

Solar storms that kick huge magnetic  storms out into our cute little neighbourhood  in this material universe, have the ability to scramble human beings’ state of mind. According to ‘Starfire Tor’ – if you’re on facebook, go to her real page, not the ‘fan page’ – funny things happen along with these ‘storms’. Funny ‘sheesh’ not ‘Funny – that’s a good one’ or ‘LOL’ or “LMAO” or ‘rolling on the floor laughing’ – happy bursts of mirth?

Cosmic good guys and cosmic bad guys are apparently able to use solar mass ejections and solar magnetic anomalies which cause geo-magnetic misadventures – to try to ‘correct’ events that humans on the earth at this time may or may not deserve. If you can understand ‘Karma’ as ‘Your thoughts attract consequences’ or ‘good and bad deeds attract good and bad consequences’ / – If you kick the universe, you get kicked back. If you hug the universe, you get hugged in return. –

Look out, I’m about to open the door to parallel world theories and treat them as if they are true. Somebody told me that a big part of the reason that the US political scene is so squirrelly this year is the ‘fact’ that somebody else was supposed to be running for president of the U.S. of A. – but the ‘bad guys’  threw in a monkey wrench and hurled a nuclear bomb somewhere on earth and the Angelic good guys tried to fix that. But trying to fix things on that scale has unforeseen consequences. whoever the sane candidate for U.S. President was or is – He or she is not in the running – not in this parallel –

There may be zillions of possible parallel dimensions out there where you are living your life in your body with your dna – and maybe a few things are different there – Maybe Charlie Brown ran to the red haired girl and gave her a big hug and a kiss and she fell madly in love with him and the Peanuts comic strip was a colossal flop.

Somebody told us that there is a nearby parallel world where MK Ultra victim Sirhan Sirhan was nowhere near Bobby Kennedy in 1968. The guy in the security uniform did not step up behind Bobby and shoot him in the back of the head while glassy eyed, hypnotized, Sirhan Sirhan aimed a gun at nothing and pulled the trigger, giving the real assassin the distraction he needed to put that bullet in Bobby’s brain. In that world RFK was not assassinated, ran for President and was elected, reformed the Federal Reserve Banking system and avoided all kinds of ‘economic fit hits the shan’ nonsense that bankrupted thousands of honest Americans and put all kinds of ‘taxpayer dollars’ in the ‘beedy grastards’/ “Banksters” hands in this world. That parallel dimension is doing fine, thank you. The greedy idiots who are trying their damnedest to control everything in this messed up parallel dimension are out of luck there.

Why aren’t we there? Why aren’t we in any one of a gazillion parallel lives that may be a lot more fun than this one? You may have married the wrong person in that world. You may have married the right person and lost them to an insane accident. He or she may have stepped backward when the wedding photographer asked him or her to so and a space lab chose that micro milli second to fall out of the sky and landed on his or her head. (“ooops”?) – Your favourite, most reliable friend in this life may have had a weird vitamin deficiency over there and become a pathological liar, or been raped as a child and became a sociopath? The possibilities are supposed to be endless. Be careful what you wish for – you might get what you wanted, but jumping up and down in celebration, you may have slipped and hit your head, and developed total freaking amnesia – or stepped on a banana peel, landed wrong and become a paraplegic –

This is confusing. If we’re the ‘main’ Parallel Universe / Parallel Dimension and something horrifically bad happens – does a new Dimension suddenly burst into being and uncountable angelic beings ‘slide’ vast numbers of us from the bad place to the nearly identical – new ‘good place’- ? I began to write a story once, um, thirty years ago? – Something like that – A guy going through a divorce went to a party with his co-workers near the end of May – up here in the northern latitudes – A really cute cousin of a best friend at that party developed a wicked headache and needed a real aspirin when the only stuff they had at the house the party was at was either tylenol or advil, or that other non-aspirin snar. He said he had aspirin at his house and the cute woman said she needs it so bad she’s gotta go with him.

On the way – what should have been a five minute drive became a nightmare as a freak blizzard exploded and dumped six inches of intensely blowing snow in half an hour and showed no likelihood of letting up. The ‘hero’ gets the woman to his house and discovers that the front yard is under six to eight inches of intense snow storm and the back yard is idyllic, warm and sunny. He gives the woman the aspirin, before she even swallows it, she’s all better, they go out back, walk around the house and everything’s fine, but his car isn’t there, and the front door is locked, his key won’t fit. They walk around back and the door they left unlocked is still unlocked, they go inside. Halfway through the house the woman is again incapacitated by the wicked migraine. They can see his car, but they can’t get to it without spending over an hour shoveling. The phone line is dead, electric lines have blown down from utility poles and are sparking on the street. She passes out, he carries her to the bedroom closest to the back door and sits there, stays with her until he passes out, wakes up and the storm is over. She’s awake, but weak and just wants to rest.  He walks to the front of his house and there is no snow visible anywhere, but his car isn’t there either. – That’s as far as I got, what I had planned was – in the next few days they discover that many of the people they knew are not around and nobody else remembers them. It seems like all their most loving, forgiving, altruistic friends and acquaintances are still around, but the short-tempered, conniving, manipulating &/or power-hungry types are all gone.

In my plans for the end of the book, a Native American / First Nations medicine man tells them the wold split in two and ‘all the good ones are here and life is good – all the not so good ones are in the other place, and they are running out of food, they have no electricity or even water. Very bad storms have made it impossible for them to go anywhere and get what they need – they are in real trouble.’

So – that’s my weird take on parallel lives, time shifts and the “WTF is going on here?” weirdness of the past few days.

— If this makes sense to you, we may all be in trouble, or we may be about to step through a door that wasn’t there yesterday and discover paradise where we never thought to look for it, right under our noses.

 

~~~~~ Jim

Back to work on the game world.

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Monday,  July 11th, 2016.

Cute Ottarian Woman.

“Nikki”

One of Doug’s Builder characters had a problem and vanished. When he tried to re-roll her ( he thought she looked more like somebody – a real person – in his life than that actual person does ) He couldn’t get the new version of her right, so he changed the hair colour and messed with the racial morphing sliders and came up with  Nikki – a ‘terminally cute’ Ottarian ( Many Ottarians believe they descended from intelligent Otters. ) ( Others will give that theory ‘lip service’ and look at you like you have to be a moron to believe in such things. )

Close up screen shot of Nikki.

Close up screen shot of Nikki.

Here she is, looking a lot more innocent and sweet than she might really be – Ottarians ( in the game world ) are ‘young spirits’, a lot more intelligent than ‘wise’ very inquisitive – Parents seem to have as much fun as their children while they’re playing together – & They are communal, acquisitive – can’t understand the concept of ‘currency’ – they are fantastic swimmers who love to play in the water for hours – have large families and are Nurturing toward each other and children of all kinds.

— I was very impressed with Doug’s latest ‘creation’ – and spent too many hours trying to get the “speed trees” application to work for me. It crashed on take off too many times.

~~~~~ Jim

Monday, July 11th, 2016

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Monday, July 11th, 2016 — 12°C / 52°F – damp and grey outside @ 6:51 am in Atlantic Canada —

Paris from an interesting angle.

Not the colour sky I remember, but this is striking. [ copied & pasted from twitter ]

I haven’t been to Paris in this life time. Many of the photos I see of Paris have either a grey sky, or are shot at night to show off the lights – This shot is interesting.

 

— 24°C / 75°F with the sun still bright in the sky — a lot fewer clouds than this morning — @ 8:06pm —

— Walking the dog this evening. He was a lot more lively than he has been these last couple weeks. But we still had our “Flop & I ain’t goin nowhere!” moments.

Cathi and Jassper up the street.

Cathi and Jassper up the street.

This is Jassper, taking one of his breaks during our exercise walk. I had to come back home to check on something and this is what I saw on my way back to them. They hadn’t gotten far.

Cute little dog with his head through balcony uprights.

“Scamp” – This little guy is the same age as Jassper, and he barks his head off at Jassper whenever he sees him.

Scamp thought I looked like fun, as long as he didn’t have to protect his owner from big, scary looking Jassper. His owner yelled after him, “I keep telling you don’t go near the street!” So I patted his head a couple times and led him back to the small side porch here, where his ‘daddy’ was sitting, enjoying the warm, but not too hot – evening.

Dog sitting near the curb. Cathi trying to encourage him to get up and walk the rest of the way home.

On the way home.

This is Jassper’s idea of a fun walk lately, whether it’s the pain or fatigue, or just plain obstinacy – He plants his bum on the road, or in somebody’s lawn – and doesn’t move until he’s ready. Cathi tried to get a couple photos while he was rolling in someone’s grass with all four legs in the air, looking a lot like horses when they perform similar actions.

Looking toward Canada Street while the sun is thinking about setting.

This is looking down the street toward Canada Street – the kind of shot you take when you’re bored with trying to get the dog to move and think – “hmmm – that just might make an interesting photo —“

And, just to show you how much progress we make when we’re trying to encourage the dog not to stop and smell the roses – um, there aren’t any roses – we have no idea what he wants to stop and sniff at. :

Dog sitting in the road. Cathi giving up trying to motivate him.

This might be ten steps farther down the road on our way home than the previous ‘sit down’.

But – Today Jassper was more energetic than he has been lately. And if only one of us is out walking him, he’s a bear, and often – after we finally convince him to get up and move – he’ll take two steps and flop on the ground and look a combination of ‘tired’ and ‘defiant’.

That’s not our whole day, we sat and twiddled our thumbs waiting for somebody who said he was going to come look at the Jeep and probably buy it – but he never showed up. Maybe Cathi scared him away when she told him her spouse [ me ] thinks we should both be there when he comes.

— sigh? –,

~~~~~ Jim

#BlackLivesMatter

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Friday, July 8th, 2016 — 15°C / 59°F – Very Grey & Cloudy — ‘It’ rained earlier in Atlantic Canada @ 12:38 pm — It’s Alex’s Birthday 🙂 —

Very Young Smoke Tree Sapling.

Our happy little Smoke Tree – this morning at about 11:30 Atlantic Time.

If the above “Smoke Tree” sapling was the only ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ in our lives lately we’d probably be a lot more happier and a lot more relaxed.

— I made the mistake of listening to the news last night before I went to bed and tried to sleep.

— After 2 days of young black men being shot and killed by policemen in the country I was born in and grew up in [ one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – The other in Minnesota ( Just in case you’re reading this in some distant future or purposefully cut yourself off from ‘main stream media’ and never heard of this before right now this minute – ) ] A peaceful demonstration in Dallas, Texas was winding down and people were heading home when at least two ‘snipers’ opened fire and killed at least 5 policemen, wounded at least 6 others and also wounded a couple of civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. One shooter, ‘heavily armed with an assault-type rifle’ & barricaded on the second floor of a parking garage, shouted at police that the end was near and he wanted ‘to kill as many white people as he could, especially cops’. He also told them there were bombs planted all around the building he was in and all around Dallas. So the police tried to talk to him. I believe this ended when an ‘armed robot’ ‘neutralized’ the ‘target’.

— Before I saw video of apprehensive police trying to remain behind cover while they were peering into the parking garage, I saw a very amateur cell phone video of another shooter – this shooter was on the street, standing against a square pillar beneath an overhanging part of another building – at least I don’t think it was the parking garage – This guy knew what he was doing, I believe one commentator said he obviously had combat training. He sprayed a couple bursts of bullets around and then checked his back and looked around, and when he had the attention of several policemen, he began aiming more carefully. We have to take the photographer’s word for the rest of this paragraph – He did not get this on camera: One policeman came up behind the shooter, behind another pillar, moved to where he had a good shot and shot three times, hit the shooter once in the back. The unphased shooter turned and moved. I don’t know whether he feigned in one direction and moved in the other, but he got behind the officer on his blind side and shot him, then stood over the fallen policeman and shot him ‘3 or 4 times’ “Execution Style” And escaped around the corner. He was reportedly captured alive a little later.

— One of the demonstrators who was walking around in ‘camo’ shirt and pants (& I didn’t see his feet) and had what looked like an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, pointed straight down at the sidewalk – had his photo circulated by the Dallas Police as a ‘Person Of Interest’. He reportedly ‘turned himself in’ [ why does no one say, ‘He voluntarily went to the police station’? ] — & The last I heard about him was that he was not a suspect. He was probably a law-abiding citizen, exercising his rights to “Open Carry” – a relatively new law in Texas. I never heard the arguments for and/or against that law before it passed, I am still up here in Canada. – My best guess would be that the Texas Legislature came to the conclusion that law-abiding citizens with ‘Open Carry’ firearms permits would more likely discourage violent criminals from attacking somewhere or someone they most likely believed would be an easy target, someone who could not defend themselves with ‘deadly force’.

— People up here in Canada argue along the lines that they believe they are safer living in a country where it is not very easy for anyone to get a firearm – where almost nobody would be walking around armed and ready to shoot ‘at the drop of a hat’. One person commented, that the shooter who was on the sidewalk and ‘executed the police officer’ most likely was wearing really good body armor – “Yeah, wow, see? Everybody should have access to that kind of stuff – ”  implying, “Then nobody would ever be safe anywhere.”

— This morning I heard on a talk show that originated in Toronto, Ontario, Canada – That a lot of celebrity black people were posting and tweeting #BlackLivesMatter material, some of them short and quick, others longer and with obvious deep thought and level-headed feeling behind them. One commentator wondered why there weren’t a lot of white people talking, posting, tweeting and in other ways communicating that they agree with the idea that “Black Lives Matter”. Canada is not perfect, but it is quite a bit more open-minded about race relations, and doesn’t have the same level of deep undercurrents of white supremacy and racial hatred that I saw, heard and felt, even in New England, where I spent most of my life before I fell in love with a Canadian and moved up here.

— But let me go on record as a ‘white guy’ who believes that Black Lives Matter, as a matter of fact, I believe that All Lives Matter – And I thought that would include everybody – Red, Yellow, Black, Brown, and White humans –  And any grey or green or other colours of the rainbow any human like races we haven’t seen or known about officially and/or unofficially here on planet Earth. & I also firmly believe that non human lives matter too: plants, animals – anything else that might be alive whether we recognize their sentience or not. I might never be able to convince a cat to become a vegetarian, or prove to an alligator that it might be more fun to make friends with any animal (or human?) it sees as a potential lunch than eat it – but I’m serious. All lives matter. This opinion never makes me the most popular person in any group of friends, but I don’t run around screaming or pontificating that I believe that everybody and every thing has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I think I would like to wake up in a universe where everybody has just realized that life would be a lot better for everybody if we all realized that those who believe a different philosophy, are attracted to people and ideas and emotions that ‘we’ can’t understand, embrace or endorse, belong to a religion ‘we’ don’t follow, belong to a race ‘we’ do not belong to, live in a country whose politics seem to be opposite those of ‘our’ country’s — are not a threat to us. — Everybody out there has something to offer that you would probably value if you could see a little deeper beneath the surface of things.

— Right now I’m thinking that if some string pulling, manipulating, evil master mind wanted to create a race war, he [ most likely ‘he’ – or a group of nasty, like-minded ‘he’s ] is moving his plan along rather well this week. Ya think?

— “Love Anyway – “

~~~~~ Jim

Both Sides of the Rainbow

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Saturday, June 27th, 2015 -( 10°C / 50°F – Sunny & bright with last night’s rain drops evaporating from the fences in our little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 7:00 am )-

— Big news yesterday – The U.S Supreme Court’s decision made gay marriages legal all over the U.S.A.  It’s about time. -No, it’s way past time. Way past time that a critical mass of us saw past the brain-freezing labels and recognized the living, breathing, feeling, loving human beings that some people who want to maintain their delusional power over us have been doing their damnedest to convince us were God-hating monsters, or at the very least, mind numbing statistics.

— I believe I was about twenty one years old when one of my friends sat in my car as I was driving him somewhere and painfully unburdened himself of the fact that he’d realized he was gay. I went into shock. My first reaction was to wonder how the hell I would ever be able to relate to him again. Yup, the rock and roll soundtrack of my life and times was singing, “Oh, my mind keeps going through them changes-” and I spent two or three days with all sorts of thoughts and feelings spinning around and my whole world view went on a roller coaster ride. Then, somehow, I woke up one morning and realized that the universe was still an unimagineably beautiful place. Cool morning breezes could still raise my spirits without warning. My friend had not grown horns and a tail and begun spitting deadly acid or breathing fire on everything that mattered to me. He was still the same person I had grown to like, who could read something I wrote and tell me why it stunk, or just smile and say, “It’s times like this when I know why you’re my favourite writer-” and make me feel like my life actually meant something positive to this world. And basically, maybe most importantly, I knew who I was, and who I lusted after, I knew he wasn’t about to hit me on the head with something and rape me while I was helpless, and I knew I wasn’t going to catch his condition from him. The next time I saw him neither one of us had to spend more than the first minute or two worried that our friendship had imploded. He told me that he chose to ‘come out’ to me first, because he was pretty sure I wouldn’t snap into a psychotic frenzy and kick the living cement out of him or unleash my lightning wit and rip his struggling self-esteem to bits of smouldering cinders with a few deadly words. And he was just the first.

— When I was revamping the web site for friends in the Connecticut Green Party, one ‘heterosexual as all hell’ type activist invited members of a group called “Love makes a family” to one of the local meetings. A couple very normal looking- maybe more attractive than ‘average’- women with no obvious neurotic fear of admitting who they were told us they were lobbying to get the Connecticut Legislature to make it a law that gay and lesbian couples could adopt children, or ‘win’ the custody of children that were biologically theirs from a heterosexual marriage. The green party guy who had invited them to speak to us was a typically messed up victim of PTSD and the US Armed Services, and the VA hospital ‘system’, and his politics were left leaning and he was an outspoken activist for all kinds of human rights, and he was stunned almost speechless when, at the next local meeting, the executive board like members of the green party announced that they had decided that they didn’t want to be seen as hitching their wagon to such a possibly unpopular cause. He gasped, stared at the floor for the rest of the meeting and later looked at me and said, “Well- I actually thought that would be a no-brainer- Ya know – with everything this party stands for-?” and walked away shaking his head and talking to himself.

— And then, we’ll jump forward in time. I had a few health issues, my father, who’d been so healthy as a child that he thought we were faking it when we came down with the measles for crying out loud- who’d been suffering so badly with asthma that he probably developed as a fireman when he pulled dead kids out of burning buildings and dead workers out of toxic chemical pools at the local factory that made brake shoes and donated landfill that the town happily accepted and then bragged that they had the only ‘fire-proof’ streets they knew of- began going downhill faster and faster, his doctors couldn’t take him down off his steroids to give his body the break it needed, and after twenty years of this his heart started failing. He had two heart attacks in three years. The first one earned him a pace maker. The second one killed him. (No, he wasn’t gay, he admitted there was a time when he thought that I might be- which would have shocked the bleep out of me if he’d said anything at the time. He did joke every once in a while that, no, he didn’t want to have anything to do any ‘Homoes’ – and grinned, “Thursday is my day for guys-” ) But after his death, and a couple other shocking deaths. -And a couple of world-view rattling ‘events’ like the attack on the twin towers, which happened fifty miles from my parents’ home, and then the mounting evidence that ‘nine-eleven’ might not have been caused solely by jets flown by terrorists who probably could never have steered the damned jets that accurately at that speed – and then more news about the Oklahoma City, Murrah Federal Building, bombing, where a close family friend’s father’s job took him in and out of that building all day, most days and we held our breath as she kept trying to get through to anybody in Oklahoma City to find out if her father was still alive- or in the hospital with life threatening injuries, or what?- And we found out that -One- nurses in Oklahoma City had treated burn victims, -US Armed Services special forces guys- who had gone into the Murrah Building and removed remote control detonators that hadn’t gone off like they were supposed to, and a few of those did go off, in the soldiers’ hands- And -Two- the US Air Force did a lot of testing with Fertilizer bombs like the one that was supposed to have blown that building apart, and discovered that a fertilizer bomb in a truck out in front of a building could not possibly do the kind of damage that had we saw- And one guy said that Timothy McVeigh, the self-confessed bomber, might not actually have been executed to death. The guy said McVeigh was convinced that his ‘execution’ would be a show, that he’d be revived later and shipped off to somewhere where he would continue to work in covert operations with a real celebrity status and enjoy the hell out of the rest of his life free to blow things up and kill lots of people for fun and profit. — & I have a cousin who lives in Littleton, Colorado, whose two step daughters were high school aged and matched the names of two friends that one hysterical young woman in the first reports we got was screaming might be still inside the school and might be dead- she didn’t know. — We did get through to my cousin right away that day, we got the news almost as fast as they did out there. And the two step daughters went to the other high school in town. — And now there’s speculation that some potential mass killers are given psycho active drugs and deliberately manipulated into their rampages by ‘rogue elements’ connected with government security agencies that want total control over us, and have been working on it since they brought Nazi scientists and devious fascist puppet master types into this ‘great country of ours’ after we ‘won’ world war two. I can’t say that the last ‘scenario’ is as plausible as insiders bringing down the twin towers and blaming it on inept terrorists, and the buildings falling straight down in a manner that seemed impossible – And how about that other building? And where the hell is the evidence that they shipped out of town in a big hurry, and why did they do that, instead of standing there with the ‘smouldering’ gun type evidence? And I can believe that a truck full of fertilizer bombs couldn’t possibly blow the hell out of a building it was parked next to- And the point of this paragraph has nothing to do with equal marriage rights for all – I just want to let you know that the last twenty years rattled my soul with all the power of a psychic atomic bomb going off inside my head.

— But I found Love. Real Love. With a real live human woman, and went through all the hell of becoming a permanent resident and then citizen of Canada to be with her. Compared to the other doo doo I’d been through, the hoops I had to jump through and the -every time we turn around, they want more money, while they won’t let me work, in fact, if they catch me working- they’ll deport me- compared to the conspiracies bringing down buildings and getting draconian laws passed with my freedom loving countrymen not only surrendering their freedom and privacy, but accusing anybody who squawked, or complained that something was not quite above board with that- of being a bleep bleeped terrorist sympathiser – hey, the hoops I had to jump through to live in Canada were a piece of cake.

— But-! The wild and crazy love of my life needed a medical test that needed a trip to a special office in Toronto. And I went with her for moral support- While we were sitting together in the waiting room, waiting for her turn, we were approached by someone we thought had to be another patient, who looked like she could have been either homeless or one step away from something like that. She looked at us and asked, “Are you Christian?” -Trying not to wince, and having a ‘thing’ about telling the truth- I said, “Yes.” This woman nodded and said she was part of some church and she just wanted us to know that all good Christians should be worried that if ‘they’ made gay marriages legal, then the devil will win, we knew that- didn’t we? – But her church was having a campaign and wanted to invite as many good devil hating Christians to come to their meetings as they could – (and she didn’t say a word about trying to get us to voluntarily give up lots of whatever income we might have, but I could imagine that would happen if we’d ever been stupid enough to go to any of their meetings) and she smiled and told us, that (then U.S. President) George W Bush was going to save us, he was on ‘our side’, but they still need as many good Christians to come along and make our voices heard- and she kept smiling a very weird smile, and kept nodding her head, and I got the really creepy feeling that she might have been an actual marionette, with some even creepier ‘individual’ pulling her strings, and the animatronics guys had almost made her look perfectly human and perfectly reasonable.

——— And now, today, with lots of people around the world believing that the U.S. Supreme Court has just made a giant step forward toward world sanity- I can’t get the image of that poor woman out of my mind. Propaganda specialists had worked overtime to convince her that fire-breathing devils would jump up out of the ground and run around stabbing people with pitchforks if ‘the free world’ ever allowed gay marriages to become legal.

——— And that’s just one more weapon in ‘their’ divide and conquer bag of tricks.

— I remember hearing about the ‘Tribulations’ that evangelicals screamed were coming at us. There would be wars and rumors of wars. Best friends would be turning on each other. There’d be earthquakes and starvation and people dying of thirst everywhere. I just never thought that any U.S. Government agency, or its -plausible deniability- ‘rogue agents’ would be behind it.

— So- now what? A lot of good people are celebrating. They have a right to. They’ve always had that God-given right. Now their government agrees with that. But I’m wondering about the poor, manipulated, terrified people whose only ‘crime’ is that they believed what their preachers told them- Are these poor people sitting in a corner? Shaking in their boots? -Terrified, and ready to jump when the wrong person gets up with the wrong message and tries to move them to some kind of insane action?

— How many ‘other shoes are about to drop’?

— Sigh.

— Very soon after I came to Canada, originally as a visitor, my friends in the ‘states’ began telling me that I was in the right place, that things down there were getting crazier all the time. The last couple times we went down there on a visit, we could feel the tension mounting almost as soon as we crossed the border. We have spiritual friends who tell us they can’t watch television news any more if they want to hang onto any measure of peace of mind.

— And in other news, yesterday. They reported that ISIS (which began as a puppet group/spin-off of Al-Qaeda, which was created and guided by the US Central Intelligence Agency —) was probably behind three suicide bombing attacks on three continents. I later thought that maybe I’d missed something because two of those attacks took place in Africa. Maybe somebody blew something up in Asia? or Somewhere else?

——— But at least I can feel good for the people I know and care about who are waving rainbow flags and enjoying a bright moment right now.

———And I’m wondering just how big a stick Teddy Roosevelt would think I should carry around with me.

~~~~~ Jim

 

The University of Dreams

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Tuesday, June 23, 2015 -( 11°C / 52°F & ‘overcast’/ kind of grey outside – promising rain? @ 6:10 am in our little corner of this planet, in Atlantic Canada )-

"Alaskan Bush People"

Billy & Ami Brown -center- and family, are the ‘stars’ of a ‘reality’ teevee show on the Discovery Channel.

— I watched two episodes of ‘Alaskan Bush People / Off The Grid’ last night on the discovery channel and thought, “hey, they’re my kind of people.” The program ‘follows’ the family of Billy and Ami Brown, who live on a wilderness island in southern Alaska. The episodes I saw last night were probably from the first year, Matt, the oldest son, was 32 years old, the youngest daughter was twelve years old. In those two episodes they had just built a real house, and were moving into it. The mother, Ami, had contacted an Alaskan Matchmaker – The two oldest sons went out hunting for deer and three other children in their twenties, took a boat ride three hours each way to meet another family and barter for egg laying chickens. The son who calls himself ‘Bear’ met someone and went on the first date he’d ever been on after talking with the woman on the phone and admitting he could count the times he’d talked on a phone on one hand. He kind of freaked his date out by climbing a tree and inviting her to join him. The brother who shot the deer goes by the name of ‘Bam Bam’. Yes they’re ‘quirky’, but my sister, my mother and a couple nephews live in North Pole, Alaska, I spent three months up there, and the Brown family look like people who would fit right in up there. I thought they came across as genuine.

— Overnight, I dreamed I was attending classes in a school for adult writers, & another adult writer wanted to go and have coffee somewhere and talk about writing. I woke up wanting to jump right into writing before I lost details of the dream et cetera.

— This morning I went looking for information about the television program, discovered that law enforcement types are going after them for something. The photo above is from that article, which I found at { Link —> } http://www.rantlifestyle.com/2014/10/23/stars-of-alaskan-bush-people-back-on-grid-after-grand-jury-indictment/. There is a bit of name calling and posturing by people in a blog responding to the short article linked above. I’m reserving judgment, and will be trying to connect with the article’s author on twitter when I finish here.

~~~~~ Jim