I hope so, cuz I’m done with that for now. I am duty-bound to complete this Pearl, so, I have no other choice, according to my own adopted beliefs, than to get on it. How I mean to rescue this intro from the doldrums of real-time BS is unclear just yet, but, no worries, something should occur to me momentarily, as the back burners have been cooking that stew all morning; it may not be delicious, but it will be thoroughly cooked….

Picking a small, yellow flower from a bush, Mirandella absently placed it in her hair, wandering slowly through the forest’s shadow-dappled path, thinking of the night’s dream, which had awakened her, breathless, only to send her flying out of the castle, into the forest, to escape the power of the dream, and how it had made her feel. Her heart, now beating its normal slow, strong rhythm, filled again at the memory of that vision in the night, while she pondered its meaning, so unclear, yet so compelling…. At a sound to her left, she turned…..

What should we add now, eh? Should the noise interrupting Mirandella’s disturbed thoughts be a friend, a lover, a monster? A frog? Or, the Doctor? Any of those might work…. Ah, hell, it’s probably too late, anyway…. I’m already off in another direction in my head, so, we’ll leave Mirandella to her own fate, while we go see what we can find over in this corner of my mind…. In looking again at that first sentence, I might just send this one off to the committee who decides on the yearly Bulwer-Lytton Literary Contest, to see who can write the WORST opening line for a book or story…. It might just have a chance….

Oooh! What’s this? Why, look! It’s a pearl! Pretty shiny, too…. Here, I’ll show it to you….

Especially since it used up enough room to call this a legal document…. We’ll take the next available exit to the pearl beds, and consider ourselves lucky, on a day when I don’t have a lot of chutzpah…. Hang on for moment, ffolkes, it could get bumpy….

Shall we Pearl?

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” — Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

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It’s tough on a day like today, when vertigo, tardive dyskinesia, and pain are competing for attention all at once; it’s a tough battle, which nobody wins, least of all, me…. But, that’s neither here nor there; it just is. It has complicated this process, however, as I’m having a tough time figuring out what would be fun…. You see, right now, nothing much I can think of fits that description, at least, not for me…. But, I  know…. I’ll retreat into the past, with a bit of indulgence for my hebephrenic urges…. If the word is unfamiliar, well, look it up, and you’ll understand…. I hope. If not, well, look at it again, then it will hit you….

The summer of 1967, for me, was one of budding independence. I left my parents home to go stay at my sister’s house, in the Los Angeles suburbs, where I got a summer job, driving an ice cream truck. I grew my first whiskers, in the only place I could, my chin, a nice little fuzzy rug I called a goatee, and, with my surfer-boy’s haircut, I looked much like a current TV character, Maynard G. Krebs, from the show you will see today…. Maynard was a beatnik, the precursor and role model for all future hippies, and I loved that summer, if for no other reason than acquiring the nickname of “Maynard” to all the young ladies on my ice cream route…. SIGH…. good memories… Enjoy, ffolkes, these two characters, Dobie, and Maynard, formed a large part of the cultural influence which molded my own persona….. Deep stuff for a fluff TV show, eh?….

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In the past month or so, certainly in the past year, we have heard of some sort of terrorist event, whether a suicide bomb, mass shooting, abduction, plot of genocidal poisoning, threats of harm to both innocents and those in the public eye, or computer hacking, taking place in all of the listed countries. I am sure, there are, no doubt, others we either did not hear of, or I missed in my recollection, as these are all the ones I remember from the mainstream news…. Head over to one of the alternative news sites, and there are even more examples of the insanity of hatred and violence taking place in the world today….

In the last three years, I’ve ranted about various aspects of this issue, identifying the part played by government pundits, as identified above so arrogantly by Herr Goerring…..

I have witnessed this for all of my life. I grew up in hope, of a world where what I believed to be the American Dream not only had a chance of becoming reality, but, could be achieved by virtuous intent, and right action. Little did I know the “Dream” was merely a public relations term, used as a sop to those who want to believe it is possible, when, in reality, it has had no real chance of existence since soon after the ink dried on the US Constitution…. The powerful people behind the political scenes, the bankers, and oligarchs who have always influenced the rest of society to their own ends, began immediately to usurp the democratic process, right from the start, culminating in the Federal Court decision in the mid-nineteenth century which laid the legal basis for defining corporations as “people” according to the law, giving them rights even flesh and blood people do not possess…

Funny thing about people, though. When they do figure out what is going on, they have a tendency to act, and quickly, without apparent thought, though it may have been present during the stimulation toward action…. What’s more, the people who oppress others never seem to realize that all creatures have a limit to what they will endure without resistance; those who endure the most will act the quickest, and the most violently, to remove the source of that which has given them reason to remember their own honor…. I’m not the first to say this, by the way; other patriots before me saw what is happening, and were in a position to voice their opinions for posterity, to wit:

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those of us who profess to favor freedom yet depreciate agitation are men who want the crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…This struggle may be a moral one or a physical one, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will. Show me the exact amount of wrong and injustices that are visited upon a person and I will show you the exact amount of words endured by these people. These wrongs and injustices may be fought with words or with blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.” — Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), Letter to Gerrit Smith [March 30, 1849]

I’ve been, essentially, a historian for most of my life, patiently observing the antics of my fellow humans, as we all make our way through this confusing universe, while also reading, a lot, of how previous versions of our culture, and those of the entire world, have had their records passed to us, to aid us in our journey, by giving us the details of what has gone before, in all of its glorious, yet venal reality….

I’ve seen how mankind has evolved, both physically, mentally, and culturally, throughout the millennia for which we have written records, as well as the records of those who have investigated the universe, and our world, regarding the nature of things in the time before our species reached the point of self-awareness, sufficiently to have created a means of passing information from one generation to the next.

The most generous comment I can think to make regarding today’s culture, and the danger of extinction to which we have allowed ourselves to be led, is a line from a song of my youth, by a musical group who were the very incarnation of the cultural mood of that time, the Grateful Dead… In one of the iconic statements of the period of history in this country which, to those with the wit to see, heralded the state of the world today, they sang, aptly enough, in slightly off-key four-part harmony:

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I’ve felt so much….. everything, I must let some of it out…. I am still unsure how this turned out; having just allowed it to leak from the vein I opened, it’s still pretty raw…. In the future, you may see a different, improved version; for now, this will do, as it let off a bunch of pressure, at least for the moment…. I hope you enjoy it…

I cannot say for certain what parameters were used to pick out this pearl; I forgot to check beforehand, and, Smart Bee jumped out with them so quickly, I didn’t have time to write it down…. I don’t believe, after looking it over, there will be any problem, anyway; this one pretty much speaks for itself, though one must, I think, be able to be fairly subtle to find the way to the correct conclusion…. That’s not a problem, either, because, we all know these pearls are designed, and constructed with that very ambivalence in mind, such that any conclusion you come to can be the right one…. This one definitely makes that grade…. They’re all so short, this won’t take long, unless you go off on a side trip, into each one’s implications ….

“Time is breath – try to understand this.” — Gurdjieff

“Few people have the imagination for reality.” — Goethe

“The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring.” — Thoreau

“Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.” — Lily Tomlin

“Hope is very dangerous….” — Servalan

“Never hold a grudge.” — Noah Moore, (1994-2011)

“A mind content both crown and kingdom is.” — Greene

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It may just be me, but, from what I can tell, this process seems to be working fairly well…. Of course, that is probably wishful thinking on my part, but, hey, nothing new there, right? Right. On that note, and in appreciation for your kind attention once more, I will take my leave. See y’all tomorrow, ffolkes, if the men in the white coats, with the leather restraints, have been successfully beaten back…. Ta, then….