All dressed in red
Sunday Scribblings offers ‘Tribe’.
wilting fleur-de-les
red painted faces howling
Niners over Saints
It’s not all wine and roses
Three Word Wednesday offers ‘Brutal, Sullen, Trust’.
trust the inner eye
treat sullen glances firmly
true love is brutal
The Bell Curve
Sunday Scribblings offers ‘Normal’.
“Normally, I’d be upset”
naked before God,
not the most comfortable feeling
late at night
during lunch
whilst making love
being normal, a normal human
lustful for all things under heaven
vain
angry
sloth – a word fallen from favor but quite… tasty
no person, being alone, can honestly say
I am not normal
a universe of selfish impulses
contained by epidermis
constrained by morals
restrained by normal
we yearn to be alike
the same
identical
no different from anyone else we meet during daily intercourse
learned behavior
no, stop, don’t
you can’t do that
all of us want to be normal
lost and found
Three words are all it takes to find yourself. You are here. I was there. I want to go here. Then there. You are here. Where is here? Is it there? Where are the words between there and here? If I start there and am now here, how did I get from there to here. Where is here? Why should it matter if here is here and there is there. What if here is not where you want to be? What if you are here means you should have been there? How do you get from here that should have been there and move to there which will be you are here once you actually get there?
You are here.
Every moment of your life, you are here.
You will never get to there.
Today is my 48th birthday
Call me
hearing ringtones
in my sleep
pop and hip-hop
calling sheep
texting friends
made online
we’d see the zoo
if we only had time
put down the phone
and look around
all the people
on the ground
they feel so strong
using thumbs
frantic feeds
damn they dumb
reading news
four g fast
inky fingers
lost to the past
nothing’s real
if it ain’t online
meet for dinner
if we only had time
put down the phone
and look around
all the people
on the ground
they feel so strong
using thumbs
frantic feeds
damn they dumb
what you mean
can’t upload
hold my calls
I’m about to explode
had enough
cannot connect
paid ninety bucks
last I checked
the more I pay
the less I get
too many plans
deeper in debt
hate my phone
it really sucks
maybe that one
is worth the bucks
yo
I got it
yah
I saw it
whatever
I read it
so
I don’t have time to read a hundred texts an hour
of course I love you
what
gotta go
call you later
yo
I got it
yah
I saw it
whatever
I read it
so
the projections don’t match the geopolitical realities of international relationships vis-à-vis currency manipulations, debt yields and commodity shortages. There is no way the suits will go for a half-assed presentation based on government stats and phoney bank ledgers. Buy low, sell high.
works
put down the phone
and look around
all the people
on the ground
they feel so strong
using thumbs
frantic feeds
damn they dumb
Is is time to go?
When the fire burns out, how do we change? I find myself without time to write: without the desire to share my thoughts with the world. The fire that raged for several years has now gone cold.
I have not gone cold. My personal life is very hot.
The fires raging in the countries speaking Arabic are not spontaneous combustion but the result of the entire span of human conflict. Madison reflects the falling standards of a people long accustomed to being on top. Every century, every dynasty brings changes. Fire destroys and renews.
In Florida, spring fires are the essential element to protecting the very essence of life. Without fire, the rains don’t fall. Without rain, the aquifers dry up.
The Ogallala Aquifer is the result of millennium of fire across vast prairies. Then came the Dust Bowl.
Fire is more than simply a chemical reaction of oxygen and carbon. Fire is Life. More than water, more than food, without fire human beings would not have conquered the natural world.
Perhaps it is time for me to go. Five years ago a fire was reignited in my soul. I chose to change.
The world changed too.
Farewell my friends. The fire is calling me away.
Truth Is Freedom.
a word out of time
Evening in Egypt
the revolution
by people of the Pharaoh
will be televised
after twitter and facebook
are severed by government
A month of sundays
This week’s prompt from One Single Impression is ‘Carnival’.
“The Zodiac collides with FaceBook”
in a month of sundays
the snow accumulates
floods wash away promises
leaders rise and flee
seasons end and prayers go unheeded
payday comes in
fees go out
blame is the Carnival of our lives
guilt sambas through the endless
relentless
negative
bombastic
rhetoric
we all loath
yet lap up with zeal
###########################
I want to start by wishing all my friends best wishes and health for 2011. I have taken a break these past four weeks to center myself and make many difficult decisions. However, before getting into the recent past, I wanted to share with you something fascinating. Yesterday I went to our local library and picked up a copy of Smithsonian magazine from Sept. 2010. Within the pages I discovered this article: Patience Worth: Author From the Great Beyond . There is another source here from Wikipedia: Patience Worth was allegedly a spirit contacted by Pearl Lenore Curran (February 15, 1883–1937).
What I found though was buried deep in the article towards the end in four short paragraphs. Bold text mine.
“No sooner had she appeared than an uproar ensued in the press, as a variety of experts—philosophers, psychiatrists, neurologists, historians, semanticists and literati—began weighing in from around the nation, Canada and Britain. Psychoanalyst Wilfrid Lay, writing in the literary journal The Bookman, insisted that Patience’s writing was merely “the automatic activities of [Pearl’s] Unconscious.” Writer Mary Austin in the Unpartizan Review attributed Patience to “an excessive discharge of phosphorus” in Pearl’s brain. Other observers explained the phenomenon as the result of inherited “nerve cells” or a “talent that has been transmitted over the heads of [Pearl’s] ancestors to her.”
Pearl steadfastly refused to cooperate with the psychologists who wanted to study her, but that didn’t stop Charles Cory, chairman of the philosophy department at Washington University, who’d been present at several Patience Worth sessions, from claiming to have solved the mystery. In a long article in the Psychological Review in 1919, Cory argued that the case could be explained by multiple personality. Though Cory was confounded by Pearl’s ability to remain herself while Patience dictated to her—multiples usually inhabit only one personality at a time—he concluded that while Pearl went about her housework during the day, her “other self” composed her novels and poems.”
“James Hervey Hyslop, head of the ASPR from 1905 until his death in 1920, was typical. After earning a PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, Hyslop had joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1889 as a professor of logic and ethics, but by the early 1900s he had given up his post to devote himself to psychical research. He claimed that he could determine the authenticity of spirit communication through a system of “cross references,” whereby several mediums who were unknown to each other would receive related messages from a spirit. As soon as he heard about Patience Worth, he wrote to the Currans, urging them to submit to his cross-reference test. They refused. Anger at their rejection may have been behind the attack he launched in the April 1916 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. The case of Patience Worth was “a fraud and a delusion,” he wrote. “Notoriety and making a fortune were the primary influences acting on the parties concerned.”
A decade later, Hyslop’s judgment was emphatically contradicted by his successor at the ASPR, Walter Franklin Prince. A one-time Episcopal and Methodist minister and amateur magician who had a PhD in psychology from Yale, Prince had grown up with a passion for puzzles. He became fascinated by abnormal psychology after he and his wife adopted a girl diagnosed with multiple personalities. This led to an interest in the psychology of mediums. Some of Prince’s research was published in the Journal of the ASPR, and soon Prince became the society’s chief investigating officer, working with Harry Houdini to expose fake mediums, who “came to fear him like the plague,” according to a friend.”
I had no idea multiple personalities were acknowledged so far back in psychology which begs the question how has the current style of mental therapy and treatment become so hostile towards multiples? I have yet to meet a single person in the mental health field who is willing to talk to me about our lives. The contrast in eras is so striking.
I began a new job this year after burning out in my previous occupation. The economic downturn has been difficult on many sectors of business. I am very hopeful my new position will last at least as long as I wish to continue working. It is a complete opposite; mentally taxing and physically restful versus physically taxing and mentally boring. I am working much longer, driving much further but am also much, much happier. Sometimes quitting and moving on is necessary even when doing so creates a different set of obstacles. I have received unconditional support from home and abroad for my change of employment and am looking forward to each new challenge.
lay down past failures
enter the hall of mirrors
own your distortions
seared meat on a stick
tacky detritus coats midway
festive illusions
thrillriders screaming
staccato barkers weave dreams
nebulous shadows
dark steps to sideshows
raucous safe entertainment
mutants titillate
clutch giant pink pandas
fall back to reality
swig sugary dregs
Stop touching me!
This week’s prompt at One Single Impression is ‘Stillness’.
backed in a corner
nothing protects from crisis
freeze reality
The long walk up [the hill, not a flat]
We humans try to find patterns in everything. If basic math doesn’t work, move on to algebra. Still too chaotic? Then calculus. Or fractals. Or N-space. Finally quantum physics. Yet chaos and entropy are still firmly in control of our lives. The chaos is a creative force and the entropy a destructive force. The yin and yang of the universe. Nothing we write, we ponder is original. Besides the DNA we obey, the cultural imprint is deeply embedded in all our reflexive responses.
This week’s prompt at Magpie Tales is:
‘We are both the Id and the Empty Well’
Carefully bundled, hat, green with a yellow pom-pom, boots, black, coat blue, navy verging on ultramarine, scarf, hand-knitted, opened this very morning, rainbow of varied yarn, all from the markdown bin, mittens, too young still for gloves, yellow to match the pom-pom flopping with every labored step up the slick slope, a choice to make, middle or top, one safe, the other thrilling, tracing the footsteps of relatives now content to sip cider and gossip in front of the snapping pine, warmed by memories, tales shared, given to each generation in turn, the spell of the hill, and a red sled, and carefully bundled, she went all the way to the top… and slid home.
Such a tricky word
This week for One Single Impression the prompt is ‘Free(dom)’. Since the word is part of my blog title, you’d think I’d have strong feelings about Free(dom).
“Never enough”
Free of obligations
Freedom to live alone
Free of responsibility
Freedom to stay out late
Free of worries
Freedom to have fun
Free of family
Freedom to enjoy life
Free of common sense
Freedom to die young
Free of empathy
Freedom to slaughter millions
Free of understanding
Freedom to destroy planet through greed
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We humans try to find patterns in everything. If basic math doesn’t work, move on to algebra. Still too chaotic? Then calculus. Or fractals. Or N-space. Finally quantum physics. Yet chaos and entropy are still firmly in control of our lives. The chaos is a creative force and the entropy a destructive force. The yin and yang of the universe. Nothing we write, we ponder is original. Besides the DNA we obey, the cultural imprint is deeply embedded in all our reflexive responses.
‘We are both the Id and the Empty Well.’
Thank you Sandra for your friendship.
Sharp divides
This week for One Single Impression the prompt is ‘Meld’.
fish long to fly free
many birds swim to survive
humans envy both
Osprey seeking meal
capturing spirit
rite older than memory
chip replaces brush
Beaver Moon
Beaver Moon Set, 7am, 11/22/2010
slap tails freezing pond
quaking aspens yellow leaves
full moon beavers dance
Blessing~ 1991-2008
