Ffolkes,
Halloween has always been my favorite, as far as any holiday can be said to be so, given my opinion of most of them as corporate/government  manipulations of the economy. However, Halloween has two things going for it that most holidays don’t…. One, it is patterned after real cultural celebrations from history, giving it the veneer of authenticity, and, two, it is the day before my birthday, which is the Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos in Mexico (And, if you don’t think THAT was a point of pride as a child, you don’t know jack….).

As a kid, this gave it the advantage over other holidays, hands down, and that preference has carried over through my adult years, for much the same reasons…. Costumes are fun, too, but, a bit undignified to fit in with my self-image as a curmudgeon; I haven’t indulged in a costume since my kids still were enthusiastic about holidays…. I just dress as always, and tell people I’m a serial killer…. they look just like everybody else….  🙂

This year, Halloween finds me up early, for unknown reasons. Actually, my recent schedule, of sleep, write, read, lather, rinse, repeat, etc. has been all over the map; probably has to do with the stress levels that go up and down, depending on how long I’ve been in the dark re: SS and their machinations and contortions. I’m hoping this early up means something in there is clamoring to get out, rather than waiting for me to persuasively seduce it onto the screen. We shall see shortly….

It could get ugly this morning, as I’ve no real material stashed, and I never know how Smart Bee will be about providing proper quotes in a timely manner…. it tends to listen to Murphy a lot when I’m not around. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m scaring myself, and I think I should go see how it is going to be…..

While I’m doing that, y’all can take a breather for a moment…..

There, feel better?…. Hmm… I don’t know about Smart Bee…. this is what I came up with right away….

“Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.” — Elbert Hubbard

Which isn’t bad, all things considered, but, it isn’t going to make much of a pearl. It’s too finished; there isn’t any more to be said on the subject…. Well, it’s not encouraging, but it was something, which is better than nothing, I suppose. I’ll just have to take my chances…. Since there seems to be no further excuse for heading on out, I’ll bid thee adieu, until the final lines, and wish you a pleasant dive today…. Shall we Pearl?…..
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And here, poor fool, with all my lore
I stand no wiser than before.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

“This instant is thine; the next is in the womb of futurity, and thou knowest not what it may bring forth; maturity of the unborn is in the keeping of the Law. Each future state is that thou has created in the present.” — Akhenaton? (c. B.C. 1375)

“The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.” — Joan Borysenko

Living life well is a subjective goal, and, as such, whether or not it we are successful in reaching the goal is purely a subjective judgment. This kind of judgment requires introspection, which makes it somewhat of a conundrum for many people, as their skills at that particular activity are severely limited from disuse. Very few people today spend much time in self-examination, from what I can see. If they did, they sure wouldn’t act the way the do, or dress the way they are, or carry on such a foolish, self-destructive course of living….

“The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. . . No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.” — Charles Mackay

Introspection, however, requires both honesty and ruthlessness, in being able to recognize those things within us that are not of value, and to remove them from our persona. As such, it is what most folks would term as “hard” or “difficult”, and they will avoid it at all cost, laziness being a rather common human trait. It is much simpler, and easier, to just take what all the powers that be, (otherwise known as either the beloved ruling class, or those most heinous of criminal manipulators, preachers/priests), are selling as moral standards, and use them, regardless of whether or not they are truly moral or not…. and I assure you, mostly, they are not….

“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

I often feel like Goethe, in what he stated above, as I believe myself to be one of the few who actually do use introspection on a regular basis. I believe this because, if other folks were using this process, the world would look a lot different. Women would feel safe walking the streets; old folks would feel cared for; gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals would not suffer discrimination for their orientation; racism would be dead, and religion would join mythology as a piece of mankind’s past, rather than its current status as our jailer/executioner…..

“Being good at being stupid doesn’t count.” — Smart Bee

All of these societal problems (bigotry, racism, discrimination, slavery, entitlement, misogyny, etc. )arise from the attitude of elitism held by those individuals among us who never look within, to see just how ugly their inner selves have become, from using the sick, twisted elitism as preached by the modern religious and political leaders. We, as a species, cannot afford to listen any more to the Judeo-Christian ethic as propounded by the beloved ruling class; this kind of entitlement and aggrandizement has led us to the very brink of extinction, as we continue to treat the planet as our toy, instead of as our home. We cannot keep pouring millions of tons of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere and expect nothing to happen, because what will happen is already happening…. our weather is changing, and not in a good way…. the planet is warming up, and when it is warm enough, the ice at the poles will melt, and everything on Earth will feel the effects….

“The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people: I was saved, they were damned … Our hymns were loaded with arrogance–self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come judgment day.” — Robert A. Heinlein

As Akhenaton pointed out over 3000 years ago, what we do in the present will determine how the future will be. What our species is doing now will guarantee that most of us won’t be around to see what happens in that future, because we will be dead within a hundred years, or less, if things don’t begin to change TODAY…. Since it is unlikely that will happen, well, we may as well take the advice given to many school children in the 50’s, in learning to deal with an atomic blast…. to wit: bend over and kiss your ass goodbye….  I hate to be so cynical, but, introspection requires honesty, so….

“You were s’posed to laugh!” — Zippy the Pinhead
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A Brave and Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

Maya Angelou
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“Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, utters another.” — Homer (c. 700 B.C.)

I’ve gotta say, I’m with Homer on this one…. In looking back over my lifetime, in fact, just about every time in that lifetime that I’ve been subjected to emotional pain has been the result of this very thing, i.e., dishonesty, or betrayal of trust. My most recent example of such treatment at the hands of others took place about two and a half years ago, when I received a double whammy, from my boss at work, and from the woman with whom I had been in a relationship for nine years. My boss, without ever once indicating in any way she was unhappy with my work, had me bureaucratically removed from my job as “unfit for duty” as a result of my back injury and pain. In the same week, the woman I lived with went from telling me she loved me on Tuesday, to asking me to not call her for a couple months on Thursday, as she wanted some “space”…. a euphemism for “goodbye forever”….. Both of them stuck a knife straight into my heart, metaphorically speaking, and I bled pretty profusely from that trusting organ….

Emotionally, I’m pretty much over these two incidents, though I’m still dealing with the physical reality of the first one, but, whenever I think about either one, there is still residual pain, and the tears still flow freely with the pain…. What helps is to realize that a) I’m better off being out of each situation, even if I don’t know why either one happened, other than by speculation, and b) they won’t be able to do it again, at least not from that quarter of the compass…. It also helps being the age I am, as I’ve now been through this kind of pain more than once, and I know that I am not alone with that experience, and I only have to remain alone if I wish…. There are other people out there in the world who are worthy of my trust; the trick is to learn somehow to recognize them, and to learn how to judge the strength of their commitment to honor, and truth. Like Tom Robbins said in “Skinny Legs and All”, the question that needs to be answered is, “How do you make love stay?”…..

The tricky part, it seems, is how to keep on trusting, when so often it leads to betrayal. Society teaches dishonesty and cheating as skills to use against each other; witness our entire political scene, and then tell me otherwise. But, learning to trust is essential to being trusted, so it becomes a balancing act, with one’s fear of being hurt on one side, and the need for human contact on the other.  Somewhere in the middle lies the answer, and that is when love can show its face, even if only for a time. One just has to learn patience, for the search for an honest man, or woman, has been going on for a very long time, and as far as I’ve seen and heard, there has not been a great deal of success at finding one….

“…and I get on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again.” — Pete Townshend
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Well, that certainly turned maudlin on me…. I could barely write my way out of that one. Ah well, at least, if nothing else, it is honest…. perhaps, some might say, shamefully so, but I gave that up years ago, so, hey…. In any case, it’s done, which is something, given how things have gone this morning. Not to complain, but it has been tough to grind this one out…. I did start a poem, but, only got two lines in before stalling; it’s just not ready yet. The first two lines are good, though, so I’ll stick with it….

Any who, I can’t think of how to cause any more damage than I already have, so I’m going to consign this one to the place where I can’t get it back, and publish it…. Don’t hate me for it, I beg you…. And, if so, well, sorry ’bout that, but, that’s the way it goes around here….  Y’all take care out there, and May the Metaphorse be with you…..

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Kowabunga!