I got plenty of help making a fool of myself today at the reunion luncheon. The class president and the secretary both gave a little speech and I was the only person either one of them called by name. They each had a little story of what I did or said previous to the luncheon. I was set up to say something stupid to get attention. I said something equivalent to the notion that the only reason I came to the luncheon was to find out who had died since the last reunion, and then promised all the remaining high school class members that i was going to live longer than any of them. They tittered nervously. I guess I wasn't supposed to say something like that, but me an the one person I said it for might have been the only ones who noticed.
Several times I turned my head only to find some one staring at me with a pleasant look on their face. They seemed genuinely amused by my histrionics. Somehow I got the impression that the reason I was getting positive feedback from my classmates was because of the changes I've gone through in my life quest. Getting feedback on my own relationship with myself from this group that thought they knew me during my pubescent years seems fairly important to me. It might be hateful to say, but seeing that they got old too is rewarding.
There was this one woman I talked to for longer than I'd ever talked to her in my life. We had this fifteen minute conversation about her and how she had met her husband in college and knew right away she could build the kind of life she wanted with him. Her story was plausible, but not truly convincing.
I asked her what her astrology sign was, and she hedged of course to show that she was an educated church-going woman who never believed in the occult. But, when she told me she was an Aries and hinted that she was a conservative Republican I couldn't stop myself from encouraging her to tell me more, and then more.
The fact that she seemed so willing to tell me her life story proved to me once again that I was still living in a bubble of piteous lies I told myself to justify my teen-aged angst. I thought she was a different kind of person altogether, and was reticent to tell me what she was really like. I was totally wrong. This woman was sure of her own place in the world. Why am I always the last to know?
Another female classmate who was the class beauty queen was very friendly and came up to speak to me several times, and then sought me out before she left to say goodbye. She seemed happier than the last time I saw her. She told me about how she had maybe six grandchildren and her current husband has nine, in Scotland of all places, and she's having the time of her life commuting to Scotland and back and being a grandmother. Whatta woman. She was more convincing than ever before.
I got another perspective of this guy who became a veterinarian. The last reunion he talked to me (at me) for a good long time. He seemed to be trying to convince me of the positive influence my father had on him when we were in high school together. This is an old, old story with me. There must have been ten people say something to me to honor my father through me. It took a long time for me to let them do that and feel good about it.
I hadn't been able to understand the nature of the veterinarian for years during and after high school. It seems painful for him to seek my company out at these affairs. It's as though he has to express his gratitude for the interest my father took him, and he seems to be telling me I should have treated my father with the respect he had offered.
Today, however, something happened that brought some clarity into the nature of his character. The class president called on him to offer a prayer before we ate lunch, and the manner in which he was called upon for saying the blessing and his choice of rhetoric for saying the enchantment told me everything I needed to know to let him be.
This other guy that brought his memory of my father into the conversation I went outta my way to start with him, but he regretted it as soon as he realized the slight of tongue that betrayed his secret admiration.
He had been the star sportsman in our class. He was a really fast runner, and he could knock a baseball over the fence with some predictable regularity. He got scholarship offers in two sports. Just to make conversation I asked him if he had continue to teach school after he stopped coaching.
He did keep teaching, he said, and when I asked him what he majored in during his college career he told me he had majored in biology. I was a little surprised. I never realized he was a nerd.
He leaned back in his seat real confident-like, and said that my father had been the strongest influence on his choice of a major for college. Then, he realized what he said and corrected himself to say the biology teacher, a Mister Parsons, was his strongest influence.
For some reason, I suspect that his little slip-up was the first time he was consciously aware of how powerfully my father influenced him despite his refusal to take his classes in high school. He told some people he didn't take agriculture, even though he lived on a farm, because he didn't wanna end up being a hick.
Sometime I think people treat me as if I were my father instead of me being myself. I don't think they know it. Maybe it's not true. But, they talk about their relationship with my father as if I'm supposed to understand their need for me to play that role FOR them. It's not possible. My father was an honorable man. I can't even act that way, much less BE that way.
I think my talking about dead classmates was supposed to prove to them that I'm not my father. He was a Libra. He would never have been so crude or rude. I think they forgave me immediately because for some reason they need me to be my father for them. They also eat in blue plate special restaurants that serve heated can food like the school lunch programs to remind them of neverneverland. Life in a small town is just weird.
The one thing that pleases me at these sort of functions is that my mother didn't graduate from college and get her "A" teaching certificate until she was 48 years old, which was after I got out of high school. If she had taught at the same school I attended like my father did, then these reunions would require me to play the roles of both my father and mother simultaneously. As talented as I am is, it's not worthy.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Woodworking
It seems silly to say how much I'm anticipating how the repairs to these two stringed instruments are going to work out. The repairs to the mandolin didn't amount to much more than cleaning up the old glue spots, and then re-gluing them and then using wood clamps to hold it correctly aligned until the glue sets.
Like the guitar, the mandolin is not a high dollar item to begin with. I don't remember my motivation for buying it, but I don't think it had anything to do with bluegrass or old-time music. At the time that I bought it I doubt if I'd ever seen that many people play a mandolin close up.
Thangs have changed in that regard. My friend Rainey started playing a mandolin when a friend of his insisted he borrow his mandolin to see if Rainey might enjoy playing it. He did, and I sort of gained an interest by osmosis. I didn't think my interest was so great I'd buy another mandolin, but finding the one I forgot opens the door for me to at least explore playing it.
The guitar interests me because I played it like it was for a good long time. As a matter of fact, when I thought about the guitar I had in the attic I truly thought it was a different guitar. An acoustic jazz guitar that had an accident.
The jazz guitar had other qualities than being broke that made me unenthusiastic about hauling it out and repairing it. It was a heavy, cumbersome guitar that didn't have much reach to it. The fret board was bowed so much that there was no practical way to straighten out again.
I can't say I was delighted when I opened the case and saw which guitar it was. I am glad it wasn't the klutzy old jazz guitar. I'm pretty sure that if it had been I would have just put it on my trash pile and burnt it with a little prayer about ashes to ashes and all good thangs must come to an end.
There is some things I do get delighted about, and that's lighting up stuff I don't want around me any more rather than giving it away or taking it to the trash dump. Some things, when I'm done with them, I don't want nobody else to have them and possibly go through the same disappointment I did. I burn them figuratively at the stake.
I burn old clothes that I've worn because I don't want nobody else to wear them. Sometime even if they're brand-new and I get a bad feeling. I wish I could say that I'm a careful shopper and look for clothes with a little class at a good price, but according to how many clothes I don't wear but once or twice before I burn them to a crisp, I suspect most of my shopping is thoughtless impulse buying, and it's my shame about indulging in that kind of stupidity that causes me to burn the evidence.
When I win the lottery I'm gonna have all my shoes tailor-made just to see what that might feel like. I do know how store-bought shoes feel. No two pair are alike even if I buy the same brand. I suspect this might be true for other people too. Maybe even people who only buy tailor-made shoes. Part of that probably has to do with how my feet themselves change from time to time.
I have a bunch of carving tools I've never used much. I don't have much of a knack for sharpening them. That seems to be a craft all by itself. I first became aware of that while I was in the Navy. There I became aware of seaman's knives. The kind that have marlin spikes on them for dealing with ropes and knots. Some of the guys could sharpen them keen enough to shave the hair off their arms, and others, like me, were lucky to get them sharp enough to cut butter.
Often enough these days I am getting the feeling that I've lost years of my life exploring and participating what goes on with the internet. I knew when I started writing on my blogs that might cause me to lose interest in the e-mail discussion groups I participated in for around fifteen years. What I found out doing that, however, is that what I really enjoy doing is trying to capture drifting thoughts with words. I like wool-gathering to get the raw materials I need to weave my tunic of one-thread.
Like the guitar, the mandolin is not a high dollar item to begin with. I don't remember my motivation for buying it, but I don't think it had anything to do with bluegrass or old-time music. At the time that I bought it I doubt if I'd ever seen that many people play a mandolin close up.
Thangs have changed in that regard. My friend Rainey started playing a mandolin when a friend of his insisted he borrow his mandolin to see if Rainey might enjoy playing it. He did, and I sort of gained an interest by osmosis. I didn't think my interest was so great I'd buy another mandolin, but finding the one I forgot opens the door for me to at least explore playing it.
The guitar interests me because I played it like it was for a good long time. As a matter of fact, when I thought about the guitar I had in the attic I truly thought it was a different guitar. An acoustic jazz guitar that had an accident.
The jazz guitar had other qualities than being broke that made me unenthusiastic about hauling it out and repairing it. It was a heavy, cumbersome guitar that didn't have much reach to it. The fret board was bowed so much that there was no practical way to straighten out again.
I can't say I was delighted when I opened the case and saw which guitar it was. I am glad it wasn't the klutzy old jazz guitar. I'm pretty sure that if it had been I would have just put it on my trash pile and burnt it with a little prayer about ashes to ashes and all good thangs must come to an end.
There is some things I do get delighted about, and that's lighting up stuff I don't want around me any more rather than giving it away or taking it to the trash dump. Some things, when I'm done with them, I don't want nobody else to have them and possibly go through the same disappointment I did. I burn them figuratively at the stake.
I burn old clothes that I've worn because I don't want nobody else to wear them. Sometime even if they're brand-new and I get a bad feeling. I wish I could say that I'm a careful shopper and look for clothes with a little class at a good price, but according to how many clothes I don't wear but once or twice before I burn them to a crisp, I suspect most of my shopping is thoughtless impulse buying, and it's my shame about indulging in that kind of stupidity that causes me to burn the evidence.
When I win the lottery I'm gonna have all my shoes tailor-made just to see what that might feel like. I do know how store-bought shoes feel. No two pair are alike even if I buy the same brand. I suspect this might be true for other people too. Maybe even people who only buy tailor-made shoes. Part of that probably has to do with how my feet themselves change from time to time.
I have a bunch of carving tools I've never used much. I don't have much of a knack for sharpening them. That seems to be a craft all by itself. I first became aware of that while I was in the Navy. There I became aware of seaman's knives. The kind that have marlin spikes on them for dealing with ropes and knots. Some of the guys could sharpen them keen enough to shave the hair off their arms, and others, like me, were lucky to get them sharp enough to cut butter.
Often enough these days I am getting the feeling that I've lost years of my life exploring and participating what goes on with the internet. I knew when I started writing on my blogs that might cause me to lose interest in the e-mail discussion groups I participated in for around fifteen years. What I found out doing that, however, is that what I really enjoy doing is trying to capture drifting thoughts with words. I like wool-gathering to get the raw materials I need to weave my tunic of one-thread.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Old Title/Same Tune
New blog. I couldn't let the title of my old e-mail discussion group go after all these years, so I created this blog as it's namesake. I've been thinking about deleting the Yahoo group for a while now. I found out pretty fast that I'm not the sort of person who can manage an e-mail discussion group. I don't know why. Most of the time I'm too inside of that dynamic to fathom why because I can't observe me as a stranger while I'm busy being the observer. Tunnel vision.
That's not really a joke. I get so single-minded about some stuff that the world literally goes away. Worse, or maybe better, I have pretty much rearranged my life to let it be so.
Maybe that's why I became fascinated with Jean Paul Sartre's book Being and Nothingness. He wrote about topics and subjects that drew my attention before I read him in a powerful way. The way I read his material indicated that being and nothingness were intimately related in a way I deeply understood. I'm relatively sure I projected my opinion upon what he was writing, but on the other hand, it kept seeming that he meant to write the same stuff I was projecting upon the stuff he wrote. By the time I finished reading the entire 800 pages of his translated work I actually had the gall to conclude that I understood what both of us meant.
The odd part of it is that I still do think I understand what Sartre intended to communicate, and it wasn't exactly about philosophy. Wittgenstein might agree. I've never read that much of Wittgenstein and probably won't. I've read various pundit's comments and reviews of his stuff, and concluded that he was right to say there's no such thing as philosophy. I keep returning to solipsism. I don't like to. I keep getting the feeling from people that they think it's a copout, and that's bad.
I don't think it's bad. To me that's just the nature of the abstract worlds we all create as a way of feeling important. A way of giving ourselves false hope that what we put our faith in will save us from the terror. The horrible thing is that we know deep down through repetitive, redundant eternal experience that our defense against the terror won't succeed. Paradoxically, and simultaneously, it's not even supposed to.
Any extemporaneous attitude I conjure as a coping device that carries a torch for some imagined salvation, appears simultaneously to push my perpetual lust for safety from the terror even further away. That's what solipsism means to me. The strategies I employ as a defense against the terror points to the futility of using nothingness as the ground for being. If I stop denying that the perceived world is not me, I lose consciousness and fall back into the cosmic soup.
Cosmic soup? Not exactly. There is another metaphor I use as a descriptor for non-being. It's probably the result of being raised in the Bible Belt. It's the metaphor of an innocent babe in swaddling clothes. It's not really a place as much as a state of being. It's not a conscious state of being, because anything I could say about it is not of the experience itself, but a retrospective consideration. What I experience in real time as that innocent child-like entity wrapped in a grey softness that's sort of like lamb's wool. That's the "swaddling clothes" reference. That's being inside the terror and not seeing it as such.
It's when I'm not inside the terror that it scares me deeply and persistently. No rest for the weary. Whatever it is that I am be-leaves itself acorn to oak to be when it's not inside the cosmic soup, that IS the terror.
I'm really trying to describe something here, but I'm not real happy that I'm portraying the thing-in-itself as an essence that can't be contaminated by exposure to the assumptions upon it's careactor, but it don't consciously know that except by abstracting the apparent reasons of their presupposed model of behavior without possessing any reasons of their own.
The hypothetical "reason" I can't describe what I want to is that any description I offer is unnecessary for anyone soul that has consciously been aware of themselves as that innocence (inner sense). It's too unadorned to offer a construction of something that only is what it is when there is nothing else to turn it into as a source for re-member-ing. It's a meme. A me-me. A doppelganger and it's shadowy friend. It's a temporary product of me and thee. When two or more of us are together and we're me-and-thee-ing like crazy.
That's why the Gospel of Thomas saying indicates by it's brevity the humorous wisdom of "Be passerby." In another wisdom book by the Chinese culture, "The superior man lets many things pass without being duped." This is the condition of the innocent child in swaddling clothes inside the terror. It holds on to no thing. It's in between cumming and going. It only has me-mores to re-me with. The me-mores are the "swaddling clothes" and require a living body to twist and weave them into a one-thread shroud that's a metaphor inside a metaphor.
Or maybe not. How the hell would I know? I do like the last paragraph though. I never have understood why such pride is taken in weaving a one-thread garment, but it's held in high regard in several cultures. What it actually means could be subjective and whatever the individual shape-shifter insists upon. Sometime I appear to be convinced I am is evolved itself from one of ten billion zillion pearl-like creatures that roam the universe and perpetually make ourselves into things outta whatever we find about us at any one ti-me or the other.
I don't think the pearls roam the universe as if vagabonds out looking for a good time. I think they're all running helter skelter from a terror they can only cope with from the inside out, and when they're on the inside they forget the terror is waiting for them to re-me.
That's not really a joke. I get so single-minded about some stuff that the world literally goes away. Worse, or maybe better, I have pretty much rearranged my life to let it be so.
Maybe that's why I became fascinated with Jean Paul Sartre's book Being and Nothingness. He wrote about topics and subjects that drew my attention before I read him in a powerful way. The way I read his material indicated that being and nothingness were intimately related in a way I deeply understood. I'm relatively sure I projected my opinion upon what he was writing, but on the other hand, it kept seeming that he meant to write the same stuff I was projecting upon the stuff he wrote. By the time I finished reading the entire 800 pages of his translated work I actually had the gall to conclude that I understood what both of us meant.
The odd part of it is that I still do think I understand what Sartre intended to communicate, and it wasn't exactly about philosophy. Wittgenstein might agree. I've never read that much of Wittgenstein and probably won't. I've read various pundit's comments and reviews of his stuff, and concluded that he was right to say there's no such thing as philosophy. I keep returning to solipsism. I don't like to. I keep getting the feeling from people that they think it's a copout, and that's bad.
I don't think it's bad. To me that's just the nature of the abstract worlds we all create as a way of feeling important. A way of giving ourselves false hope that what we put our faith in will save us from the terror. The horrible thing is that we know deep down through repetitive, redundant eternal experience that our defense against the terror won't succeed. Paradoxically, and simultaneously, it's not even supposed to.
Any extemporaneous attitude I conjure as a coping device that carries a torch for some imagined salvation, appears simultaneously to push my perpetual lust for safety from the terror even further away. That's what solipsism means to me. The strategies I employ as a defense against the terror points to the futility of using nothingness as the ground for being. If I stop denying that the perceived world is not me, I lose consciousness and fall back into the cosmic soup.
Cosmic soup? Not exactly. There is another metaphor I use as a descriptor for non-being. It's probably the result of being raised in the Bible Belt. It's the metaphor of an innocent babe in swaddling clothes. It's not really a place as much as a state of being. It's not a conscious state of being, because anything I could say about it is not of the experience itself, but a retrospective consideration. What I experience in real time as that innocent child-like entity wrapped in a grey softness that's sort of like lamb's wool. That's the "swaddling clothes" reference. That's being inside the terror and not seeing it as such.
It's when I'm not inside the terror that it scares me deeply and persistently. No rest for the weary. Whatever it is that I am be-leaves itself acorn to oak to be when it's not inside the cosmic soup, that IS the terror.
I'm really trying to describe something here, but I'm not real happy that I'm portraying the thing-in-itself as an essence that can't be contaminated by exposure to the assumptions upon it's careactor, but it don't consciously know that except by abstracting the apparent reasons of their presupposed model of behavior without possessing any reasons of their own.
The hypothetical "reason" I can't describe what I want to is that any description I offer is unnecessary for anyone soul that has consciously been aware of themselves as that innocence (inner sense). It's too unadorned to offer a construction of something that only is what it is when there is nothing else to turn it into as a source for re-member-ing. It's a meme. A me-me. A doppelganger and it's shadowy friend. It's a temporary product of me and thee. When two or more of us are together and we're me-and-thee-ing like crazy.
That's why the Gospel of Thomas saying indicates by it's brevity the humorous wisdom of "Be passerby." In another wisdom book by the Chinese culture, "The superior man lets many things pass without being duped." This is the condition of the innocent child in swaddling clothes inside the terror. It holds on to no thing. It's in between cumming and going. It only has me-mores to re-me with. The me-mores are the "swaddling clothes" and require a living body to twist and weave them into a one-thread shroud that's a metaphor inside a metaphor.
Or maybe not. How the hell would I know? I do like the last paragraph though. I never have understood why such pride is taken in weaving a one-thread garment, but it's held in high regard in several cultures. What it actually means could be subjective and whatever the individual shape-shifter insists upon. Sometime I appear to be convinced I am is evolved itself from one of ten billion zillion pearl-like creatures that roam the universe and perpetually make ourselves into things outta whatever we find about us at any one ti-me or the other.
I don't think the pearls roam the universe as if vagabonds out looking for a good time. I think they're all running helter skelter from a terror they can only cope with from the inside out, and when they're on the inside they forget the terror is waiting for them to re-me.
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