Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Murmurations
Thursday, September 15, 2011
The Eagle and the Mole, Elinor Wylie
Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.
The huddled warmth of crowds
Begets and fosters hate;
He keeps above the clouds
His cliff inviolate.
When flocks are folded warm,
And herds to shelter run,
He sails above the storm,
He stares into the sun.
If in the eagle's track
Your sinews cannot leap,
Avoid the lathered pack,
Turn from the steaming sheep.
If you would keep your soul
From spotted sight or sound,
Live like the velvet mole:
Go burrow underground.
And there hold intercourse
With roots of trees and stones,
With rivers at their source,
And disembodied bones.
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.
The huddled warmth of crowds
Begets and fosters hate;
He keeps above the clouds
His cliff inviolate.
When flocks are folded warm,
And herds to shelter run,
He sails above the storm,
He stares into the sun.
If in the eagle's track
Your sinews cannot leap,
Avoid the lathered pack,
Turn from the steaming sheep.
If you would keep your soul
From spotted sight or sound,
Live like the velvet mole:
Go burrow underground.
And there hold intercourse
With roots of trees and stones,
With rivers at their source,
And disembodied bones.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Musicogenics
Once I finally learned about musicogenic seizure activity, the veil that had been draped over these ultra-mysterious and spine-tingling spells of mine was torn open so that, once again, science could explain the heretofore inexplicable activity that had made me feel so unique. How humbling.
They began when I was in my early twenties and, so far as I can recall, they did not initially get triggered by chord combinations that my once half brother and I referred to colloquially as swamp chords; E and A minor, principally. But at some point these events, that I refer to as "spells", began occurring only during those specific haunting chord combinations on a flat top acoustic guitar, or "box" as we used to call it.
Now, about those spells. Words. I need words. "Haunting" is one. "Familiar" is another. "Intimate", yet another. "Reversion" to a time and place specific, where darkness and stomachy pleasure inbred passionately, creating a paradoxical amalgam of simultaneous pleasure and internal discomfort. The same place. The same time. Always the same. The spells takes root in the gut and distribute upwards into the backboned spineworks and brainplex. I am consumed with the time and place. I am taken back, as if into a vague and recurring dream that I only experience when I'm awake and tending to the chord combinations that alarm the sleeping stage and cause velvet curtains to unbunch and shed sensory images from a well-rehearsed play, directed by some ancient hand. The pleasure is both intense and exhausting. Butterflys with sharp glassy wings and needle junkie proboscuses fly round and round my the inner sanctum of my gut, while I sit catatonic and perfectly captivated until it all passes, and my serial recovery from the experience begins once again. It will be thirty minutes or so until the residue is completely withdrawn into the inner dark stars from which the spell was born. The enigmatic play that is directed from entirely within by neurological circuitry has now suffered a scientific label and mystery surrounding it has been attenuated for the most part. This is the history of all myth and mystery.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
The Most Beautiful Poem Ever Written
Original version of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1819
By John Keats
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beauty - a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said -
'I love thee true'.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
By John Keats
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beauty - a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said -
'I love thee true'.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Sunday, July 31, 2011
My Tiger Swallowtail
I sidled quietly down to your garden this morning, my love, dragging the bare toes of the opposite foot across the Bermuda lawn after each step, creating a single lane of dark green disruption in the pastel blanket of dew deposit that lay there, and observed my first Tiger Swallowtail anxiously attempting to rouse your huge sunflower stalks from sleep by tickling their darkened centerpieces with its capricious and curious proboscis and little threadpiece legs. How gregarious yet utterly quiet she was.
At this acute point in the arc of our shared lives, I urge you, my wife, to harvest from between these few lines our secrets points of light, and ring from that bounty all of the glory that underlies our antics. I truly love thee.
At this acute point in the arc of our shared lives, I urge you, my wife, to harvest from between these few lines our secrets points of light, and ring from that bounty all of the glory that underlies our antics. I truly love thee.
My Personal Disc
If there was any lingering chance of me ever getting elected to any public office, my truthful account of the experience that follows will seal its tomb permanently.
The year was 1980. Amy and I were en route to her parent's home in the East Brainerd suburb of Chattanooga. It was late. Dark out. We were seated in my little truck travelling on Shallowford Road. There is a point where Shallowford Road intersects with another road that was cordoned by a four way stop. As I approached that intersection, I immediately noticed two things: first, I noticed the illuminated "tower" behind the house up ahead to our left; and then I noticed the tractor-trailer truck sitting idle at the four way stop, facing us. The tower, as I'll explain, was probably twenty to thirty feet above the house to our left. I remarked, "what kind of tower is that behind Debbie Lackey's house?" I knew that the house was inhabited by Miss Lackey and her family because my buddy, Neil, had told me so, because he used to date her.
When I employed the word, "tower", it sprang from my brain's apparent attempt to reconcile how two horizontal white lights, approximately ten to fifteen feet apart, could be aloft without being supported by a structure of some kind. So, my cognition immediately defaulted to the practical. I assumed that someone in that family had constructed a citizens' band or radio tower of some kind in the back yard of the house and had fitted it with two lights which projected from the house directly across the highway at approximately thirty to sixty feet above the ground. The lights were perfectly stationary, and there was no noise. Not even the hum of a bulb.
In hindsight, I now realize over thirty years later, that my "tower" was being witnessed by at least three people: me, Amy, and the truckdriver who idled at the stop. I remember stopping in the road, windows down, summertime, and gawking at the lights, until I finally realized that there was no tower supporting them. Through the darkness, I could make out the absence of any structural device beneath the lights, which looked like two automobile headlights, shining straight and horizontal, yet separated a distance from each other that would defy the width of our standard highway lane.
As we looked on, a dozen or more new multicolored lights began illuminating in succession around the periphery of the object. "Oh shit!" was the only sound I heard from within the dead silence as my girl, mouth agape, realized what we were experiencing.
After the multi-colored lights had completed their successive illumination around the object, it revealed to us a perfectly circular "disc shaped" object. I estimated at that time and now over thirty years hence that the object was from thirty to fifty feet in diameter. The disc then began to move. It moved very slowly and in absolute silence in the direction that the two beams of light had been directed. Toward that trajectory, it crossed above the highway, some ten feet ahead of us and some fifty to sixty feet above us. We stretched to watch it crossed above, and then noted that the disc stopped as soon as it completed crossing above Shallowford Road. Those times that I've related this to others I've always maintained that I could have hit the disc with a baseball or a rock. I cannot attest to this, though. But, the point is made. It was that close.
As we tried to examine the underbelly of the disc, it again stared to move; this time, travelling in the direction that we had come. So, I turned the truck around in the middle of the two lane, divided road, and noticed that the tractor trailer that had been stationary, was idling up and moving as well.
Once we were headed in the opposite direction, we followed the disc, which was maintaining a constant speed and hovering some ten feet or so above the tree line that ran adjacent to Shallowford Road. We followed the disc for about fifteen seconds, when, with speed that rivaled the speed of light, it jettisoned into the universe. Silence was perfectly preserved.
I have now ended my silence about a fact that occurred remarkably close to the sensory perceptions of at least three human beings in the summer of 1980 on Shallowford Road -- a suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was late. And dark out.
The year was 1980. Amy and I were en route to her parent's home in the East Brainerd suburb of Chattanooga. It was late. Dark out. We were seated in my little truck travelling on Shallowford Road. There is a point where Shallowford Road intersects with another road that was cordoned by a four way stop. As I approached that intersection, I immediately noticed two things: first, I noticed the illuminated "tower" behind the house up ahead to our left; and then I noticed the tractor-trailer truck sitting idle at the four way stop, facing us. The tower, as I'll explain, was probably twenty to thirty feet above the house to our left. I remarked, "what kind of tower is that behind Debbie Lackey's house?" I knew that the house was inhabited by Miss Lackey and her family because my buddy, Neil, had told me so, because he used to date her.
When I employed the word, "tower", it sprang from my brain's apparent attempt to reconcile how two horizontal white lights, approximately ten to fifteen feet apart, could be aloft without being supported by a structure of some kind. So, my cognition immediately defaulted to the practical. I assumed that someone in that family had constructed a citizens' band or radio tower of some kind in the back yard of the house and had fitted it with two lights which projected from the house directly across the highway at approximately thirty to sixty feet above the ground. The lights were perfectly stationary, and there was no noise. Not even the hum of a bulb.
In hindsight, I now realize over thirty years later, that my "tower" was being witnessed by at least three people: me, Amy, and the truckdriver who idled at the stop. I remember stopping in the road, windows down, summertime, and gawking at the lights, until I finally realized that there was no tower supporting them. Through the darkness, I could make out the absence of any structural device beneath the lights, which looked like two automobile headlights, shining straight and horizontal, yet separated a distance from each other that would defy the width of our standard highway lane.
As we looked on, a dozen or more new multicolored lights began illuminating in succession around the periphery of the object. "Oh shit!" was the only sound I heard from within the dead silence as my girl, mouth agape, realized what we were experiencing.
After the multi-colored lights had completed their successive illumination around the object, it revealed to us a perfectly circular "disc shaped" object. I estimated at that time and now over thirty years hence that the object was from thirty to fifty feet in diameter. The disc then began to move. It moved very slowly and in absolute silence in the direction that the two beams of light had been directed. Toward that trajectory, it crossed above the highway, some ten feet ahead of us and some fifty to sixty feet above us. We stretched to watch it crossed above, and then noted that the disc stopped as soon as it completed crossing above Shallowford Road. Those times that I've related this to others I've always maintained that I could have hit the disc with a baseball or a rock. I cannot attest to this, though. But, the point is made. It was that close.
As we tried to examine the underbelly of the disc, it again stared to move; this time, travelling in the direction that we had come. So, I turned the truck around in the middle of the two lane, divided road, and noticed that the tractor trailer that had been stationary, was idling up and moving as well.
Once we were headed in the opposite direction, we followed the disc, which was maintaining a constant speed and hovering some ten feet or so above the tree line that ran adjacent to Shallowford Road. We followed the disc for about fifteen seconds, when, with speed that rivaled the speed of light, it jettisoned into the universe. Silence was perfectly preserved.
I have now ended my silence about a fact that occurred remarkably close to the sensory perceptions of at least three human beings in the summer of 1980 on Shallowford Road -- a suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was late. And dark out.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Some of My Favorite Quotes
"The first casualty of mediocrity is loneliness." PGSW
"Marriage is the best teacher of ambivalence." PW
"The past is a bucket of ashes." Carl Sandburg. (This is actually the title of a poem).
"A primrose by the river's bend, a yellow primrose was to him." Upton Sinclair, from Oil!
"He lives in perpetual fear. He's always on the edge of ferment, of tears, of hysteria. And he knows he's caught. The actual business of living has made him afraid." Excerpt from, Will the Real Mr. Sellers Please Stand Up. (1969).
"Baseball have a way of takin' care of itself." Ralph Garr, former Atlanta Braves player.
"You can never completely hate someone until you first hate yourself." PGSW
No more speed, I'm almost there." Golden Earring, Radar Love
"The better part of valor is discretion." Shakesphere
"A drowning man takes down those nearest." Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
"Give me a child for the first seven years and I'll give you the man." Jesuit Maxim, author disputed
"People tend to get on with their lives no matter what." Paul Kligerman, the Up film series (from 56 Up)
"Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." Noah Cross, Chinatown.
"If I killed myself it would be a hate crime." Paul Whetstone
"The rims of wounds have wounds as well." Lucio Brock-Brodio, from her poem, Noctuary.
"God sometimes you just don't come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?" Tori Amos, God
"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one." Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now.
"Elementary school teachers have a well-preserved and dirty little secret: some children are just no god damned good." Paul Whetstone
"When a man is finally boxed and he has no choice, he begins to decorate his box." John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday.
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability." Ron White
"Water finds its own level" Repeated by Curtis Caughorn
"You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast." John Steinbeck, East of Eden
"The future's not what it used to be, Mr. Angel." Robert DeNiro to Mickey Rourke in Angelheart.
"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs." Frederick Douglass, Former Slave and Abolitionist, Lecturer and Author (1817 - 1895)
"When people change direction it is a rare one who does not spend the first half of his journey looking back over his shoulder." John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday.
"It's better to have twelve people judge you than to have six people carry you." Anonymous
"Why do born-again people so often make you wish that they'd never been born the first time?" Katherine Whitehorn.
"To a hammer everything else is a nail." Anonymous
"Learn to be what you are, and resign with a good grace all that you are not." Henri Amiel
"In America you can never get too fat or too stupid." Paul Whetstone
"Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." Ambrose Bierce
"Don't sing for me. Dance for me." Anonymous
"[I]n the nature of reason and common justice they deserved an interval of loafing." Jack London, Call of the Wild
"Ethical Man: A Christian holding four aces." Samuel Langhorn Clemens
"Indeed, I tremble for my country when I think that God is just." Thomas Jefferson
"A ship in the harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." John A. Shedd
"The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If you don't bring Paris with you, you won't find it there." John M. Shanahan
"Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that the horses may not be stolen." Henry Louis Mencken
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." Henry David Thoreau
"I don't know how to make love, but I do know how to fuck." Paul Whetstone
"Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend." Josh Billings
"How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound." Joseph Joubert
"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." Jonathan Swift -- This is not truly a "favorite" quote. In fact, I can readily envision the mission-minded faithful drawing upon this quotation in order to further their aims: "there's 'not enough [religion] to make us love one another'" because the whole world must first convert to [fill in the blanks], or "there's 'not enough [religion] to make us love one another'" because prayer should be part of the public curricula. In hindsight it would have been much simpler, and less taxing textually, to have simply omitted the quote from this list. It must be the first half of it that lured so comfortably in.
"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine" and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." Jean Jacques Rousseau.
"From very early, the oxygen of the criminal's life is to seek excitement by doing the forbidden." Stanton Samenow, Ph.D.
"I believe that the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder." Werner Herzog
"It is not enough to succeed. Othes must fail." Gore Vidal.
"The value that is eventually placed upon our lives by the authors of our histories will be measured, not by the quantity of the so-called friends we made along the way, but rather upon the quality of the scalps we harvested from our enemies." Paul Whetstone
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez faire captialism than Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt . . . and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." Gore Vidal
"And hence my rage since I have grasped in the broadest possible sense what 'wretched' means: the depreciation of my good name, my character and my aims. . . ." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The most useless thing I can envision is the importance that humans place on their so-called feelings." Paul Whetstone
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson
"We are meaning-seeking creatures who invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting that give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value." Karen Armstrong
"Tradition soon becomes obligation." Paul Whetstone
"From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs." Karl Marx
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Carl Sagan
"Private property turns you in to a son of a bitch." Paul Whetstone
"A prison, even though entirely surrounded by walls, is a splendidly illuminated theater of history." Milan Kundera
"Aim straight ahead to those you love." Jean-Luc Godard
"Ideally, if you must marry, find an only-child with dead parents." Paul Whetstone
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." Ojibwe saying.
"Humans invent the observable in order to attempt to explain the unobserveable." Unknown
"Plum her depths. Widen her shores." Paul Whetstone
"Marriage is the best teacher of ambivalence." PW
"The past is a bucket of ashes." Carl Sandburg. (This is actually the title of a poem).
"A primrose by the river's bend, a yellow primrose was to him." Upton Sinclair, from Oil!
"He lives in perpetual fear. He's always on the edge of ferment, of tears, of hysteria. And he knows he's caught. The actual business of living has made him afraid." Excerpt from, Will the Real Mr. Sellers Please Stand Up. (1969).
"Baseball have a way of takin' care of itself." Ralph Garr, former Atlanta Braves player.
"You can never completely hate someone until you first hate yourself." PGSW
No more speed, I'm almost there." Golden Earring, Radar Love
"The better part of valor is discretion." Shakesphere
"A drowning man takes down those nearest." Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
"Give me a child for the first seven years and I'll give you the man." Jesuit Maxim, author disputed
"People tend to get on with their lives no matter what." Paul Kligerman, the Up film series (from 56 Up)
"Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." Noah Cross, Chinatown.
"If I killed myself it would be a hate crime." Paul Whetstone
"The rims of wounds have wounds as well." Lucio Brock-Brodio, from her poem, Noctuary.
"God sometimes you just don't come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?" Tori Amos, God
"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one." Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now.
"Elementary school teachers have a well-preserved and dirty little secret: some children are just no god damned good." Paul Whetstone
"When a man is finally boxed and he has no choice, he begins to decorate his box." John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday.
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability." Ron White
"Water finds its own level" Repeated by Curtis Caughorn
"You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast." John Steinbeck, East of Eden
"The future's not what it used to be, Mr. Angel." Robert DeNiro to Mickey Rourke in Angelheart.
"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs." Frederick Douglass, Former Slave and Abolitionist, Lecturer and Author (1817 - 1895)
"When people change direction it is a rare one who does not spend the first half of his journey looking back over his shoulder." John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday.
"It's better to have twelve people judge you than to have six people carry you." Anonymous
"Why do born-again people so often make you wish that they'd never been born the first time?" Katherine Whitehorn.
"To a hammer everything else is a nail." Anonymous
"Learn to be what you are, and resign with a good grace all that you are not." Henri Amiel
"In America you can never get too fat or too stupid." Paul Whetstone
"Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." Ambrose Bierce
"Don't sing for me. Dance for me." Anonymous
"[I]n the nature of reason and common justice they deserved an interval of loafing." Jack London, Call of the Wild
"Ethical Man: A Christian holding four aces." Samuel Langhorn Clemens
"Indeed, I tremble for my country when I think that God is just." Thomas Jefferson
"A ship in the harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." John A. Shedd
"The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If you don't bring Paris with you, you won't find it there." John M. Shanahan
"Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that the horses may not be stolen." Henry Louis Mencken
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." Henry David Thoreau
"I don't know how to make love, but I do know how to fuck." Paul Whetstone
"Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend." Josh Billings
"How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound." Joseph Joubert
"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." Jonathan Swift -- This is not truly a "favorite" quote. In fact, I can readily envision the mission-minded faithful drawing upon this quotation in order to further their aims: "there's 'not enough [religion] to make us love one another'" because the whole world must first convert to [fill in the blanks], or "there's 'not enough [religion] to make us love one another'" because prayer should be part of the public curricula. In hindsight it would have been much simpler, and less taxing textually, to have simply omitted the quote from this list. It must be the first half of it that lured so comfortably in.
"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine" and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." Jean Jacques Rousseau.
"From very early, the oxygen of the criminal's life is to seek excitement by doing the forbidden." Stanton Samenow, Ph.D.
"I believe that the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder." Werner Herzog
"It is not enough to succeed. Othes must fail." Gore Vidal.
"The value that is eventually placed upon our lives by the authors of our histories will be measured, not by the quantity of the so-called friends we made along the way, but rather upon the quality of the scalps we harvested from our enemies." Paul Whetstone
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez faire captialism than Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt . . . and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." Gore Vidal
"And hence my rage since I have grasped in the broadest possible sense what 'wretched' means: the depreciation of my good name, my character and my aims. . . ." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The most useless thing I can envision is the importance that humans place on their so-called feelings." Paul Whetstone
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson
"We are meaning-seeking creatures who invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting that give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value." Karen Armstrong
"Tradition soon becomes obligation." Paul Whetstone
"From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs." Karl Marx
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Carl Sagan
"Private property turns you in to a son of a bitch." Paul Whetstone
"A prison, even though entirely surrounded by walls, is a splendidly illuminated theater of history." Milan Kundera
"Aim straight ahead to those you love." Jean-Luc Godard
"Ideally, if you must marry, find an only-child with dead parents." Paul Whetstone
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." Ojibwe saying.
"Humans invent the observable in order to attempt to explain the unobserveable." Unknown
"Plum her depths. Widen her shores." Paul Whetstone
Saturday, July 16, 2011
A.A., N.A., and Recovery
I've been attending A.A. and N.A. "meetings", on and off, since early 1994. My recovery record is admirable: Sober from March 18, 1994 to CIRCA Summer of 1999, and then from December 20, 2002 until the present day. I was "out there" as recovery groups collectively describe it, for approximately three years during my only relapse. At one meeting, after I returned to the "program", as it's called, I was referred to as a "scout", because I had returned to alcohol and drugs in an ostensible act of curiosity about the legitimacy of my own addiction. I wanted to be sure that I was really an alcoholic, so I ventured out again into the depths of the "disease" and learned very, very quickly that my little problem, as my mother discounts it so well with good intentions, was yearning to be relased all over again in order to inflict new damage. The result: I fell back into the misery of addiction and alcoholism headfirst, landing on a concrete pad that disbursed my hard and soft tissue all over the figurative walk of what little seemed to remain of my life. Fast forward to December 20, 2002 -- Bean Station, Tennessee -- A.A. Meeting in a smokey little front room in a tiny rented white house on Broadway -- Bobby K and his wife, Barbara, running the show -- I wandered in, already in the throes of an emotional collaspse, and spilled the contents of my relapse onto the long table around which others sat in stunned silence, until "Donna" sympathetically utttered the term, "poor guy" and I broke down and undertook my second beginner's white chip, reycycling all my rightfully-earned momentos, that marked over five years of sobriety, into a little brown basket, and started over. This time around, I don't rely upon any kind of etherial "higher power" to keep me sober. That backfired during phase one of my efforts. Instead, I take 100% responsibility for my recovery. I don't look skyward for help, I only look in the mirror, and most importantly, at what lies directly in front of me. I allow no opporutnity to the abstract messengers that live within our minds to have me believe that a god is directing my movement. It was god, you see, whom I entrusted with my recovery the first round, and I distinctly remember thinking that "he" answered a prayer for me (delusional thinking in hindsight) by giving me the green light to end my day with a harmless glass of wine. Today, I know better, even though I concede that "he" didn't hold me down and pour the mauve liquid down my throat. Today, I'm sober, meaning I'm not even high on the lies espoused by the architects of religion and dogma. A.A. and N.A. are not critical to my sobriety, but they have their pro rata utility, because I find that I tend to fall back into healthy rhythms if I appear at a meeting from time to time, introduce myself as "Paul, a recovering alcoholic [or] addict", and affirm my account of alcoholism, addiction, and the recovery that I maintain in increments, colloquially referred to as "one day at a time."
Recovery requires a deep cleaning of the vessel. A "searching a fearless moral inventory" to be precise. It, too, compels the occupant of the vessel to make amends to those he has harmed. These important requisites allow the vessel to better weather the impending storm that awaits new entrants into sober life.
Recovery requires a deep cleaning of the vessel. A "searching a fearless moral inventory" to be precise. It, too, compels the occupant of the vessel to make amends to those he has harmed. These important requisites allow the vessel to better weather the impending storm that awaits new entrants into sober life.
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Great cover of Walking on the Moon, by one of my favorite bands, the Police. This is a great song about falling in love.
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NPR did a piece called "This I Believe" a few years back. Listeners were invited to recite their core beliefs about anything...
