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… and your old men shall dream dreams …
.. and your old men shall dream dreams ….
~Joel
I haven’t been writing much lately. I go through long spells where I just dontwanna. Moreover, I don’t hafta. Writing is a hobby to me. I am a dilettante at it. I wouldn’t mind being a world class writer with millions of spendable dollars, and being feted and pampered on world-wide tours and receiving accolades for my brilliance, but I don’t wish to work for it. So, that pretty much leaves me with little coffee posts peppered with the occasional rant.
As many of you know, I have a muse that is cranky and old. She dresses in a long ago style of a professional woman who has never updated her wardrobe. She is all business, yet still manages to be a bit coquettish. She would be a successful businesswoman if she were real. She is brutally honest, yet supportive. She is my foil, and will tell me what my supporters won’t. She fits me like a well-worn shirt that your woman keeps trying to throw away, but you just like the way it feels.
Quite frequently in my dialogues with her, I discover myself. I often don’t know what I believe until I have to defend it on the written page.
In this month of softening sunrises as autumn once again reminds us that there is a cycle of life, I don’t want truth. So I haven’t been chatting with her all that much. I want to sit out in the sun and build power plants in my head, or deftly maneuver a mega-yacht into its berth, or masterfully start a heavy-laden freight train on a steep grade, or even rescue a distressed damsel or two. I don’t want the give and take of dialogue. The Donald means nothing to me. Hillary is just another hack. Obama is a petty tyrant. The press corps are just political activists wearing a mantle they did not earn nor deserve.
T
he world has passed me by, leaving me in its dust. Like and old dog on the porch, I hardly raise an eyelid at the passing rumble of cars as a new generation of wage slaves try to extract meaning out of it all. I am now an impediment to their ambitions, not a player.
And it suits me fine.
Good morning!
My center, the geographical center, and the center of the universe
Another red sky morning here in the geographical center of Texas. Sunrise was at seven according to the tic-tock, but now that I live by God’s time, sunrise is always at 6am, or the first hour as I call it. The recent rains have greened up the bermudagrass; it is a comfortable 69° and mildly humid outside, according to Mistress Cortana, my new overseer from the illuminatus at Redmond. She is beginning to rule more and more of my day as she relentlessly prowls my computer and internet activity. Nevertheless, she is only interested in me having a good customer experience with my masters at Microsoft. Or so she says.
The planters on the porch outside my window are plush with moisture, and my diseased potted tomato plant grows to the sky. It set new tomatoes, and I sprayed them with a fungicide just to see if that would work. I suspect however, that I will eventually dump the plant into the ever-growing burn pile for cremation when the fall rains arrive.
It has been an intriguing experiment, living by solar time. Mostly. As the equation of time advances and retreats during the year, the tick tock has the sun rising earlier and later than 6 am. I was getting up at 5:30 on the clock, but every day at 6:00 solar time. Now 6:00 solar time is almost 7:00. Have I confused you enough now?
Anyway … my mornings seem to be a bit more serene, and I don’t feel like I am wasting my life as much. The sun is always at the same place when I drink my coffee now. However, it drives the rest of the world crazy now that it worships the gods of standard time. I do nothing outside the home for the first three hours of the day. No daylight savings for me. Every day is daylight savings …
Made another dog run yesterday. The coordinator didn’t inform the man I was handing off to in time for him to schedule the trip, and so I ran my leg and his. It was pleasant for the most part, but really, at this time of life, I really don’t enjoy more than about an hour of driving. I have to learn to let other rise up to save the day. They managed without me before I joined with them. Still, I feel I reduce the world’s misery by an insignificant millimeter.
I am beyond skeptical of astrology, but sometimes I wonder if Mars is high in the sky with all the infighting going on between internet friends. Perhaps it is just the argumentative types who get into the scrapping in the first place. I am doing better at not jumping into the disagreements, but sometimes I will have three paragraphs of bile written before I remember that the new me is la-de-dah, and delete it.
Today is also preparation day, when we do all the daily chores that we can to make Shabbat a day where we don’t have many chores. I can tell when I go to turn the coffee maker on each morning. The slow cooker is sitting empty on the counter top, awaiting her filling it with the various goodies that go into the Shabbat meal. Soon the pleasant aromas will fill the house while we await the arrival of the Queen of Shabbat.
Shabbat Shalom!
No Ten Tuesday
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
~ Ernest Hemingway
That is another take on the famous quote by Gene Fowler. So this morning of nothing to do I sit at the keyboard and bleed on it. Literally, it seems. I tried peeling my thumb with the potato peeler, and can’t get the bleeding to end.
But fortunately, the only key that thumb is used on is the [space bar]. But I do need it for everything else I do, it seems.
It is humid, but much cooler this late August morning, and I can feel the weakening sun as it backlights the leaves on the acacia tree in yellows and green, and continues on to dapple patches of yellow on my little porch garden.
I wrote and wrote and wrote last week, then reached an impasse in the story that I cannot get around. Female competiveness. I know so little about the dynamics of that in the boy-meets-girl part of the story, but it is integral. The mavens say that when you reach a stalemate like that to not attempt to tell the reader what is going in in the characters mind, but to simply describe the action.
Nowhere does the difference in the wiring of men and women show as much as it does in the dialogue between them. I have caught out several women writers who were writing from a masculine viewpoint on this. Men do not often dialogue in their heads after they have decided on a course of action.
In this slightly pornographic tale, I need to get the woman from casual interest into a fully developed relationship overnight, and nothing seems to move the girls faster than to have some competition. Not so much that they say to hell with this, however.
I have a circle of wet, brown eyes watching me this morning. Snookums has been outside with them throwing the ball, but now that she is on the treadmill, she has temporarily lost her allure, and I alone am the one who still has possibilities at this precise moment in time. Dogs be fickle creatures.
And my pots outside are needing water. The sweet potato vines need three waterings a day now that they have matured. I think next year I’ll rig up an automatic watering system. I do have a hose reel on the porch that makes the chore simple. Just step out in a minimum of clothes, grab the sprinkler wand, and fill up five containers.
And all this has taken a cup of coffee, and I need yet another, so … good morning!
The death of a foolish poet, on the anniversary of his asininity.
The death of foolish
poet, on the anniversary of his asininity.
I watched as the last box went out the door. That was it. The final stake driven into in my humiliation, and perhaps the first step to my rebirth. It was most certainly a lesson in misplaced trust.
I never wanted to forget the injury, so I entered it on my calendar like an anniversary date. Forgive, yes, knowing me, I will. Forget? I don’t ever wish to, and again, knowing me, I would.
It is a battle scar, a reminder of a failed moment when a phoenix died in the ashes. It is also a reminder that trust needs be grounded in reality. It is a signpost: Do not go this way again. A warning: rhymes are for youth. A consolation for grief. I’m sorry for your loss. Here’s a hug for ya …
Dawn in Texas
Dawn arrives with a humid 78° this preparation day. It is felt that the day should be devoted to preparing for the Shabbat, so that one does not labor on that day. The sages are all over the map on what constitutes ‘labor’, with the most rigid believing that writing is labor, therefore not allowed. I belong to the only religion that has figured out how to work at resting.
Snooks hasn’t risen yet, but soon the house will be redolent with baking challah bread, and whatever she decides to prepare for this and tomorrow evenings meal. In our family, we make heavy use of the crock pot for Shabbat. It bothers us not one whit that some poor soul has to shovel coal into the fiery maw of a power plant maw so that we can rest by not turning a switch on or off.
Yeah, it can get very weird, and serves as a reminder of why human logic is a seriously flawed process. Even my atheists friends don’t escape this sort of weird logic of humans, and fail to see it in the so-called scientific method. All it takes to be a fool is one poorly understood element when coming to a conclusion. Seems like the enviro-scientists are the worst of the lot in believing that their science is settled. Even cosmologists don’t have the arrogance to make that claim, and it above all science really is fact driven, carefully denoting theory from fact.
But I don’t want to go into a full-blown rant with the eco-brownshirts today. This morning I just want to sip my coffee, put a few bits in my chronicles, put on my ugly shoes and water the plants, and sip some more coffee.
And how ‘bout them EPA polluters! In all their vast concerns with the environment, they release toxic sludge into the Colorado River. I hope the States do not listen to their mia culpa’s and sue the EPA out of business like the EPA carelessly does to business. It would be poetic justice. But … I rant at eco-brownshirts.
I am very pleased with my beginning container garden, though it hasn’t yielded the disease free environment plants that I had hoped. But there is always next year. Everything else goes into a billiard table flat expanse of ground cover that is mower friendly. Speaking of which, I need to repair one.
I am feeling good after my doctors visit yesterday. A1C came in at a bit under 6%, which while a tad high, but very low for me. And my loss of 20lbs is holding over the last six months.
And the day has moved into the second hour after sunrise, and I must be off.
Good morning!
50 Shades of MzMuse
I had settled in after fixing a huge country breakfast of eggs, sausage, biscuits and hash browns to write. I have had a tale on my mind for some time, but it does lay on the fringes of propriety, so I have been very discreet in the telling of it, so the tale just dried up. I do write for an audience, and many of my audience frankly do not appreciate frankness on some topics. Especially sex and submission.
So I hit the [Delete] key and sat back in my $49 Office Depot “Executive Chair” and watched the blinking curser for a bit. I almost missed her sitting up against the desk lap, knees drawn up to her chest and hands clasped around them. She seemed so … submissive, sitting in that huddled pose as she looked up at me like I might strike her if she said the wrong thing.
“Yeesh! Hard night at the rest home? The guilt caught up to you I see!”
“Yes sir.” She replied, not raising her eyes.
“I have been trying to write this vignette on submissive women for some time now, and it just isn’t working. You are just going to have to do better, and I know you can.” I said, sternly. I hate being a taskmaster, but I can and will be if necessary.
“I will sir!” she plead earnestly.
I continued. “I just can’t let this lapse go, however. Rules are rules, and you broke one. That calls for a severe punishment.”
“Oh sir! Please! Not the whip!” she begged.
“I am sorry, but you will just have to accept the punishment.” I could not waver on this.
“Yes sir!” she replied meekly.
“I want you to dress in tight lime green stretch pants and that pink Rayon™ blouse, and go lingerie shopping at Walmart. Pick out a thong, the flimsier the better, and pay for it with a check. Then return home and put it on. That is all you are allowed to wear in the house while I am gone.”
“Please sir! The whip! I much prefer the whip!” she cried.
“Enough!” I roared.
“Yes sir.”
Organic Living vs The Tick Tock Machine
Living by the tick tock machine.
For some unexplained reason, I wanted to spend one year living by the sunrise and sunset, and not be troubled by a digital or analogue display telling me what to do. I began a study in time, or horology as it is called by the experts. Man time as I like to call it.
Universal time is not synced to any sort of organic activity. It is all a part of the human brick making machinery. A sage once told me that God builds with stones, and man builds with bricks. Though masons have very unique skills that can be hard to master, at its foundation, bricks are a relatively easy medium to build with. Stack ‘em nice and pretty, and find something to keep them stuck together, be it mud and straw or lime and cement.
Today’s time is like that, and man has to keep tinkering with it to keep it sort of synced with solar time. Or God time as I like to call it. The ancients didn’t need to know about the precession of the earth orbit around the sun, nor the equation of time to explain why the sundial only tells the ‘correct’ time twice a year.
Ancient Hebrews divided the hours between sunrise and sunset into eight equal periods called hours, and the night into four equal periods called watches. The Romans had 12 equal periods from sunrise to sunset and three equal periods from sunset to sunrise that were also called hours and watches. This little discrepancy has confused Biblical Scholars greatly over the years, but that is another topic for another time. The net result on the average Roman or Jew in ancient Israel was nil. You rose at daybreak, and slept after twilight ended.
So back to the waking at dawn, and going to bed at the end of twilight. I had no comprehension how difficult that was going to be in this world where everyone else lived by the tick-tock machine. Special events at churches and synagogues, such as a Wednesday Bible study, start at 7:00 pm, whether it is light or dark outside.
Even my beloved Snookums is geared to the ticktocking. Brunch at 10 am. Dinner at 5 pm. TV at 8 o’clock. Bedtime at 10:30. Lights out at 11. And we don’t need no steeeeeking sun to tell us what to do.
*sigh!*
So quietly, I try to adjust my body to God’s time, yet pay some obeisance man’s time. It is sort of like trying to serve two masters. Still, it does seem to fit me a bit better now that I have started that primitive rhythm and do not depend on artificial suns to extend my evening hours. It will be an interesting experiment this winter, with the longer nights and shorter days.
So goes the days in the autumn of my years. Whether it be tempus fugit or time flies, the days pass, and I watch, sans a watch on my wrist.
Good morning!
Cooking a frog in August
Friday. Preparation day. The smell of challah wafts through the house, and the slow cooker is hot and full of mystery. Talk radio fills the silence, Kippur da Budgie has finished yet another moult and is fussing because I rearranged her cage. I do that ever so often just to give her something to be cranky over.
I am on hiatus from blogging on WordPress® and Blogster,® but I get the itchy finger. I so wish to do something other than sit at the PC all day. Well, really I don’t, but I would like to accomplish more worthy things and not fritter my life away playing.
I always wanted to be a railroader, but that never quite worked out for me. But with the miracle of modern day graphics and server sharing, I now belong to a rail sim. It is not a game, but a sim. It runs in real time over real rail routes, and requires much of the same skills in starting massive tonnages and keeping them under control. And there is a dispatcher raggin’ on your butt for over speeding and poor train handling skills. One route is from Bakersfield, California to Barstow, California. It is an eight-hour run both in real-time and virtual time. So I have had to limit myself to one full run a week.
But it did get me out of the blogosphere for a time. I like the social sites, but like real life, collectively they are a major ache in the tuchas and I need to get away from the infighting from time to time. Nothing is more inane than a blog war. Not that I am all that innocent. I have been known to woof up a fight from time to time myself.
Shabbat begins at sundown, and I am working at not laboring during that 24 hours. I don’t know what it is, but I can look at a chore all week long and ignore it, but tell me I can’t do that chore on one day out of the week, and it becomes the most important thing in my life on that day of rest.
And Sunday, I am running up to Waco, Texas to pick up Aggie, a two year old male heeler/border collie mix, and deliver her to another transporter in Round Rock, Texas. Aggie is going to a K9 trainer in San Antonio from a rescue up north. Apparently, he has mild behavior problems when cornered, but his foster said she had no problems with aggression from him.
So that will get me out of two days of chores. But sooner or later, I am going to have to rebuild the mower deck on one of the riding mowers and put up the awning over the front porch.
We are still without a congregation, and that troubles me a bit. I am not certain what I am going to do at this point. I can only be true to the light that I am given. Others may or may not be on the right path, but I am unable to sit in a congregation and be taught things that are completely at war with my understanding. So I keep my eyes and ears open. And I also have said enough on the topic.
And the summer slips into its last month, and I am well into Autumn. Life goes on. Evil continues in evil, and the righteous continue in righteousness. The spring rains have come and gone, the latter rains are yet to come. Mankind follows its new God of rationalism. Knowledge is considered as wisdom. The temperature rises one more degree in the proverbial kettle with the frog, and we happily bask in the warmth.
Ribbbbittttt!
Rusty runs off the rails …
The road not taken …
… And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. …
Robert Frost, the Road not Taken.
A reflective morning descended on me as I read and re-read this poem of Frosts. Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I usually don’t talk about the voices in my head. Bat-kol is the term for the types of voices I occasionally hear. They are often full of portent. Around 1999, I was startled by the clang of a metal door being slammed shut, and a male voice saying, “We will not pass this way again”.
Normally, when I get one of these bat-kols, it is a woman’s voice I hear. However, three times in my life it was a mans voice I heard. Frequently when that happens, it appears to signify an immediate event. Yet, this one appeared to be more of a bad omen than one denoting a specific event.
The years following that omen we had a number of startling earth events. Huge hurricanes, typhoons, tsunami’s, bitter freezes and such. Not that they are infrequent in terms of geologic time, and if that were all that it was, I would dismiss the weather driven events as better world reportage.
But coupled to those events is a more subtle worry. Nations are losing their anchors, again. Once again, civilization rises up against civilization. Corruption in our own (US) government at the highest levels is systemic and incurable. A new wave of Muslim aggression has arisen. It will only be quelled by a xenophobic reaction, and the vast majority of today’s effete non-Muslims have no stomach for the fight and prefer vapid platitudes to actually having to do something right. The jihadists got it right, and we deserve what we are going to receive from their hands.
The only bright spot in all this is that history shows that the effete academic intellectuals are the first ones to be decapitated after a revolution. Tyrants know who the confused troublemakers are. I wish I could live long enough to stand in the crowd and cheer Allah’s little executioners on with each swing of the axe. Nevertheless, I suspect that the proverbial frog in the slowly simmering pot, it is going to take a decade or better to slowly cook itself to death, and I doubt that I have that many miles left on life’s odometer. Pity.
Bring on the Ragnarok!
Another nun slaughtered for Allah!
A range by any other name is just a range …
A web friend posted this on her facebook page. Wow! Talk about nostalgia! I remember when a very wealthy woman in New Mexico bought one of these in the 50’s for her mansion’s kitchen. They assembled it in the freight house when it arrived, then six men lifted it onto the back of a small truck and took it to the house to install it. People drove miles just to see this miracle of modern cookery while it sat in the freight house.
It had two ovens, a broiler, a warming oven, six burners and a removable griddle that sat on two of the burners. The cook quickly learned all the quirks of it and began turning out meals for Hollywood glitterati and New York novelists.
Sometimes I did small chores around the house, painting and such. When I was there, she fed all the workmen lunch in a special dining room off to the side of the kitchen. Usually she made an appearance and thanked everyone for their efforts. She was much loved in the community, and now a hospital, a school, a highway and a hotel are named after her. But I’ll keep her name a secret.
Rusty's Armory 