Gentleman

There was a time a young man was expected to be the soul of a gentleman, to use proper language and to dress for auspicious occasions, like attending the dinner table or going to the movies with his young lady. Attending the movies should locate him within a certain time-frame and this same young gentleman was expected to be equally entertaining to the young and old alike.

Though by this time the advent of television had already occurred, but his elders were still at home. One were equally required to sit parlor, as he would to master at least one musical instrument, barring debilitation. He might therefore be given to present as much presence on stage, as he would to entertain the company verbally, and sit formal parlor in the company of one’s elders.

One was expected to wax charming equally, with his elders and his young lady. In school, it was irrational to be charming before two generations removed, but this was the requirement and if there were a problem with this expectation, one was well advised to keep the problem to himself. Further, it was assumed when one was young, one suffered no health problems. He functioned.

There were other taboo’s in a young man’s life or by university days they began ferreting themselves out. One did not refuse a friend’s alcohol and the boldness of our boy in the back seat rendered him a hero in the eyes of the young man with the perpetual alcohol in hand. No matter what one’s reserve required of him, or what effects alcohol formulated of him in desperation.

Oh, never mind the life of being a professional guinea pig, while young professionals learned to ply their craft by practicing on the chronic patient with multiple disorders. A man can make up his mind alright, but the case in point stands as is. He assisted in generating pharmaceuticals and activating professionals, whose procedures and practices ought to be called by his name.

The gentleman parlor sitter participated in generating four generations of pharmaceuticals and procedures and practices of the new science of psychiatry, virtually unknown and unheard of before his time of squandering his lifetime developing practices brought into being. Pioneering was part of a family heritage and the man offered his own for the history books as well, gladly enough.

Hard to say how much of this is actual and how much delusional, but consider it all anyway. A lot of things can be accomplished with the force of one.

Dye

The dye is caste, and the results are as expected. All that transpired thereafter was preordained from before the foundations of the earth. There was a fellow who wanted a spiritual awakening, so he spent forty days and forty nights in the desert. There was another, who wanted similar results and he ingested a power plant. The results in both instances were as a matter of course.

Intelligence was apparently not one of the questions under consideration, though I don’t know, but there is a capacity for spiritual conceptualizing, which was a foregone conclusion. One must be able to consider abstractions, to get the job. Therefore, the callings were issued at their respective times. Now, various people were called for jobs at various times, not just a couple.

It’s only that I’m an avid student of these lives and not particularly one of others. For instance, it is curious to consider the choices made in King David’s life. Yet he was known as a man after our maker’s own heart. It is only that King David frequently reached out to his maker, and it is assumed that there were not so many others of King David’s time, who did equally so.

Besides, aren’t the characters in the Bible, put there in the first place, for us to relate to their circumstances? For starters, I can relate to Job, in that nothing ever seemed to work out right in my life, for a long time and seemingly for no good reason. Well, that’s changed, now that I’ve kept the faith and kept acting with righteousness. But I’m not certain anything I did, impacted it.

It’s clear that both men, who sought religious experience, ultimately found what they were looking for. I was one of them, and for years, I became filled with more than I could contain. Watch yourself and don’t draw conclusions based on information you don’t have. Those were years I was lost in things I could not understand, until I’ve defined my own capacities and limits.

You study one book and think you have all the answers to all the questions on all the exams, and I dare say it’s not so. I’ve been to places you never go and have accomplished things you can’t imagine. There is only one God, one faith, one baptism. I am faithful to the things my maker has required of me, whether any living, breathing human being thinks or believes so or he doesn’t.

Exchange

The concept of means of exchange has been re-initiated in America, much to the chagrin of many. FDR’s Great Society has been overturned by great numbers of hippies and flower children imposing on the system, with our desperate reaction to our psychedelia, in spite of the advantages it set up for psychology and psychiatry, because of the debilitating psychosis we were reduced to.

The ensuing psychosis, mental illness, disability – call it what you will, has been set forth in too great numbers of young people, by the end of the 1970s, at too great a price to government generosity, to do anything but shut down Federal Welfare altogether. The numbers didn’t fit, and even the great and powerful US of A has to make the numbers fit somehow. We’re talking millions of kids.

Psychosis was the prevailing reaction to ingesting all forms of psychedelia, in fact, it was an epidemic at Woodstock, Haight Ashbury, and all across the nation, in the early 1970s. It was a government cover up also. Attempt to keep the gasoline off the fire. People cast themselves on the country, and we’re talking about handling a major epidemic of mental illness in this country.

Like it or not, the country and the world function based on a means of exchange, and the free ride, paid for by a reasonable taxation of the workforce, has been too greatly imposed upon, and canceled as a method of exchange. Now it’s either Money, or Time Value of Money, in exchange for goods and services. The plan is to transition payment to Time Value of Money altogether.

With the Time Value of Money, Credit, there are four values in the equation. Present Value, Future Value, Payment and Percentage Rate. It’s next to impossible to keep track of all those variables in your thinking. The note holder wins, the payor looses. It’s that simple. If you break the values down to easy payments, you end up paying more than the actual value of what you’re buying.

If the only way you can possess comforts, is to pay less over a longer period of time, you’ve got to accept that you are over-paying for the item. The plan is to convert all payments to the Time Value of Money, in order to have a winner and loser in every transaction. This is the current plan for the Have Not’s to at least have temporary possession of goods and services. Nothing is free or fair in life.

Consent

There once was a time we shared much more, but we can just share space and time, while one does almost nothing else mutual whatever, and that’s still what’s called a relationship. I have offered that definition for her, and she is here to collect. That’s alright. She was once a hermit and I am a writer at the moment, doing my work as she rests. There’s virtue in that state of things.

Having done all to assert my wishes toward her, she asserts individual needs in return and I’ve no idea whether she’ll make a round trip or not. She’s been doing a lot of abrupt begging off and promises a lot of returns which do not transpire. I finally feel as though I’m only clutching, while the remarkable relationship of an entire lifetime, disintegrates before my disbelieving eyes.

After promising she would never leave me, that she would always be there for me, that she understood me best of anyone. She proceeded to issue a demand of me, of which I could not comply, and so has chosen to withdraw from me, to a mutual dining table of unilateral truce, I am not supposed to notice. She will take the substance of her meals with me, and fly, flyaway…

It’s a contest of wills. She demands, I refuse to comply. She puts too great a value on a substance, I am still not inclined to provide. She asks what is virtually impossible for me to supply. I’m really not inclined to make the virtually impossible a reality, whether those things are her wishes or not. As I have always been, so I am. In the face of anyone else’s wishes, mine override.

I am left alone to my keyboard once again, when she let on she would return smartly. The confrontation sealed the latest of occurrences. There is something she wants that she can’t have. No one puts that substance on demand in that way. I will not be required to proceed with any such thing. It’s a matter of whatever it’s a matter of. Once required, I will not be required thus again.

People will equivocate with me endlessly, but if the shoe were on the other foot, I’d be accused in a court of law. As it is, I’ll only be put off, while no one will ever really understand. My principles be damned along with me. I’ll be foot loose and fancy free before anyone knows what happened. Beware. No one requires what no one demands. It’s that simple. Not complex. Simple.

Conflict

There are conflicts in life, which seem as though they should not be, which leave pause to question why they exist in the first place. Conflict seems unnatural, while it is the most natural state of all affairs. Harmony and agreement are the most preferable states of being, while ironically being the least natural of all states of being. There are conflicts generating occasion for food or sex.

The anthropologist says the basic conflict in primitive societies are for either food or women. Those two commodities provided, an individual then has time for the higher pursuits, such as language and the other arts, that language itself, is one of the higher pursuits. Advancement in a culture is principally measured by whether there are histories or written language kept in that society.

One of the deficiencies of the Woodstock Generation, is the lack of a written history of what happened to us. Apparently, there was either little writing done about our times, or there was little circulation of writing done about our times. How this correlates with the usage of historically popular substances among us, I can only guess. Personally, I was unable to write for a very long time.

My thinking has been too confused to generate a written record of the baby boomers, until it is late in my life, as well as being late in my sobriety. Recreational chemicals confused me for a very long time. I’m still sorting that out. I didn’t have the ambition to set all this down, until the beginning of this project at the age of sixty. It has taken me six years since then, to arrive at this point.

The basic conflict with my generation has been with recreational chemicals. Drugs. This seems fitting enough to say it again. The conflict of the baby boomer generation, the Woodstock Generation, the hippies and the flower children, has been drugs. Our biggest contribution to our society, were it not for technology, would be with the development of pharmaceuticals, or other kinds of drugs.

The flower children were idealists and dreamers, who threw ourselves headlong into taking mind-altering chemicals, enthralled with the effects of being more or less out of our minds, as often as possible. The initial results were the onset of an epidemic of chronic mental disorders, and we found ourselves submitting to be test subjects to further chemical treatment for the mentally ill.

Baby boomers constituted at least two thirds of the popular vote at the end of the 1960s, which was the political entity pressuring Richard Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam in 1975. The flower children were at least one of that two thirds majority, who experienced a toxic psychosis from psychedelic drugs, the epidemic of Woodstock, Haight Ashbury and throughout the nation.

The toxic psychosis epidemic has calmed down. Many of the flower children lost their lives, either directly or indirectly from toxic psychosis and the ensuing chemical imbalance. The only reason more did not lose their lives was due to the development of advanced psycho-pharmaceuticals to stabilize patients, and development of outpatient solutions to get the hospitalized out again.

Society has a greater need for outpatient housing and treatment for the mentally ill. There are some halfway houses and foster care placements, as well as assisted living homes in the community, but the problem with them is with lack of funding. Probably the biggest disservice to the mentally ill, propounded by the media in our time, is to publicly accuse us of being violent and dangerous.

As with any minority, society sees our differences, rather than similarities, with mentally ill, and is therefore frightened and put on guard, because we’re different, rather than being similar to others in society. It must be human nature to interpret differences this way, because America was established to be the melting pot, but still has a lot of conflict among it’s differences, ever since inception.

What is desperately needed in our society, is to celebrate our differences.

Daisy Mae

There is a wide, stony creek winding its way through a sweet meadow, replete with lowing livestock, all of which is populating the backdrop of a fertile mind. Daisy Mae wandered the meadow with a forgotten feed bucket in hand, uncertain of her object in being where she was, as her mind was drifting with this idyllic Springtime. There must be some reason she was where she was.

Then there was Billy Ralph reposed at the bank of the creek, where there was more sound in the process of water seeking its own level, than there was anywhere in water’s absence. This sylvan scene would be uninterrupted, were it not for the mixture of genders as there happened to be and the time of year being as it was. It was Daisy Mae who was effected by the warmth of something or other.

Noticing the young man whiling away the morning, affected as he was in an idle fashion, she loosened her blouse provocatively and had no great inhibition in taking to the chill of the water. One may find it of interest that the two happened to be socially acquainted but not genetically related. Without dampening her clothing, she sauntered up to Billy Ralph and did her best to sound coy.

“Don’t you have anything better to do, Billy Ralph?”

“As if carrying that bucket around validates your inactivity, Daisy Mae.”

“I never heard such impudence out of someone so idle, Sir.”

“Whatever,” enjoined Billy Ralph.

Then he was lithely up from his repose, ankle deep in creek water and knee deep in passion, on his feet with her, in one certain motion. It was enough to sweep them both off their feet in a bold passion. It was Billy Ralph’s decisiveness carried the day at that juncture and Daisy Mae was reaping as she sewed, arriving as she did in a pair of shorts and loosened blouse the way she was.

That youth knew no bounds was evidenced, as the couple, who were otherwise acquainted as we’ve said, settled themselves into a repose of comfort on the banks of the sumptuous creek bed which was at hand. Happening to be a sylvan scene of no other population to concern themselves with, at that moment, the frank sentiments of the two youngsters was unabated until sometime thereafter.

The universal language of an exquisite silence they would practice alone together at this point, was punctuated only by an urgency of breath. The two of them found their provision for adorning themselves with the clothing of the times, to be absolutely and emphatically superfluous. Article after article of their provision was shed as useless, in moment squandered, at greatness of length.

Otherwise occupied as they found themselves to be, they began to realize they questioned themselves why it was they bothered with such contrived arrangements of clothing, to have to bother themselves with in the first place. It was a positively irrational state of mind, in the urgency of a most glad moment, to have occurred to them wildly sometime between the wanting and the having.

Believing

The things we think and believe about ourselves and our world, make a decided difference in our manner of addressing our world and all that is involved in living the life we live. If there is no or little importance involved in the things we do, then the consequences we incur in our wrong-doing are of no importance or significance, until they are too much the imposition.

I could think of all sorts of things to do to enjoy my animal nature. One law after another might be violated, but there are others who have similar thoughts and feelings to my own, who might suffer pain and discomfort, if I were to indulge in such practices. Causing pain and discomfort on others is contrary to my purpose, because I spiritually avoid inflicting pain on others.

If consequences are an imposition on us, then any behavior is ultimately acceptable in the meaninglessness, if we can only avert being caught. There would be no right or wrong, no good or evil, because it is all a matter of averting being caught in the first place. We might be above regulation, because no standard might be just, no arbiter of a value system validated.

This is criminal thinking, primed for long-term incarceration in the prison system. Any person who thinks this way is a candidate for big-time trouble with, not only the law enforcement authorities, but also with our maker in the first place. All of life rebels against such thinking and such people. This thinking is out of sync with all that is good and right and just in this world.

We think and believe in an auspicious existence and meaning to the things we do and say, for their own sake, not because it keeps us out of trouble or gets us something, but because it speaks highly of things all the way round. Our conception and birth were an auspiciousness, because that speaks well of our parents and of us. We avoid wrong-doing, because it’s offensive.

I believe in the one who formed me in my mother’s womb and my forming was not by chance or random happenstance, but by intention and design. I believe all those horrible things that happened to me in life, which should have killed me, did not succeed, by divine design and divine purpose. I believe my companion is chosen to be with me, by my maker’s initial choosing not by my own. I believe something out of all I do and say is by divine design and purpose.

There was a time I had to be strapped down, to keep me from destroying my own eyes at my own hand and there was a time I was struck mute by an illness of my post-psychedelic mind. Another time, my vision was confounded by all sorts of distortions of sight, nearly causing blindness and I have known a great cacophony of speech. I cannot resort to any expressions.

It was when the content of my reasoning and confusion of my perceptions were so greatly distorted by forces unknown and purposes beyond me, it was even in those considerations I was able to remain an honest and righteous man. I was granted these modest meditations of my heart to reason with. My existence has given some sense to the nonsense and some goodness in the evil. The only machination capable of accomplishing this end, is a faith in my maker.

Confinement

Institutional living is the up and coming thing. Millions are in prison for hire. Odd how state hospital is shunned by federal funding. Few are in group homes. Millions are housed in assisted living, nursing homes, the names for costly institutions. The sociologists are studying the human animal for responses to a regimen of the nature of institution that one is confined in, because the goal is institutional confinement from the cradle to the grave, unless you’re filthy rich.

There are those who structure their time, who ought to be permitted to do so, in order to maintain passivity. There are certain amenities some cannot do without, others value other things. For a tranquil society, one ought to have access to certain toys of maturity, given certain limitations, who will insist upon harboring certain nonstandard beliefs. Being able to speak and write one’s mind, is an important building block, to fashioning a tranquil society.

Along with an idea that humans have a need for open spaces on occasion, comes the idea that humans have a need for the company of plants and animals now and then, along with their customary walls. The possibility of the company of a significant other, ought to be a possibility among humans with cognition, which ought not be denied them. Humans have a need for attempts at relationships, both genders and private intimacies as well. Happy campers.

The idea of having a family nucleus, with any other arrangement being superimposed, has rendered society to an isolationist state which needs be remedied. Many meet their spouse in a bar, others in a church, but either one settles down to an isolationism which is a difficulty to remedy. At least with communal dining and a nucleus of an institution of maybe fifty to eighty in the one house, the nucleus makes for some sense of tribal belonging.

The tribal idea, or communal living, is that of mankind belonging to a tribe, needing to be unified, ever since the advent of the automobile and then the TV, which have developed a unit of separateness. It has forced the individual to accept a sense of being apart from the humanity around him, which has resulted in a depersonalizing of conscience, such that people are in need of belonging to something, yearning to belong to anything.

Humans have a basic need for a tribal, communal context, in our relating, on a day to day basis. In the towns and hamlets, in days of yore, everyone knew the butcher, the baker and the candle stick maker. Now, we are strangers. If we do not have a group to relate to, we cannot relate to the individual, and therefore we get monsters shooting up movie theaters and elementary schools, in desperation to revolt for a tribal sense.

Before the popularity of the car and the TV and now the cell phone, which is the latest barrier among us, when we once knew everyone among the manageable group. We beheld them, as they did us, being responsible for our individual behavior, from the time we were very small. Maybe the government working to reorder us into a tribal unit, functioning within units of a greater society, to standardize mass experience. Thank you, Henry Ford.

In assisted living, for example, the people are people, not strangers. The hair dresser/barber is Doris. The receptionist is Carol, the full timer in the dining room is Evelyn. I call the part timer, Mother Superior, when she’s not listening, because that’s her attitude. Belonging is important to all of us. We’re not machines, in spite of Henry. The biggest problem is a feeling of alienation, not from countries or nations, but from the guy in the next apartment.

The institutions we experience now, are on an experimental basis, developing protocol for future reference. They are the forerunners of the institutions to come, as our tribal setting congeals, in the not too distant future. Maybe they’ll come up with some new names for things and more subtle arrangements, than we have now, but the trend is for all of us, from birth to death, to have some sort of superimposed tribal environment.

The state hospital program was a good forerunner idea for me, because of the tribal village feeling, and the assisted living home are similar types of arrangements. If anyone comes into my house, I have the right to speak to him, because he came into my house. Like if a stranger came into our town or village, the resident has the right, yea the responsibility, to challenge them, to know their business is in our village.

The world, with all it’s machinations, police forces and etc, has lost that sense of community. If we are ever going to join the intergalactic community we aspire to, we are required by sense of decency, to terminate the military madness, going on among us. The solution to this state of murderous madness, be it by armies or by individuals, is to regroup into basic tribal units, and take responsibility for ourselves and for each other.

The dye was caste, and the results were as expected. All that transpired thereafter was preordained from before the foundations of the earth. There was a fellow who wanted a spiritual awakening, so he spent forty days and forty nights in the desert. There was another, who wanted similar results, and he ingested a power plant. The results were a matter of course.

Intelligence was apparently not one of the questions under consideration, though I don’t know, but there is a capacity for spiritual conceptualizing, which was a foregone conclusion. One must be able to consider abstractions, to get the job. Therefore, the callings were issued at their respective times. Now, various people were called for jobs at various times, not just a couple.

It’s only that I’m an avid student of these two lives, and not particularly one of others, in general. For instance, it is curious to consider the choices made in David’s life. Yet he was known as a man after our maker’s own heart. It is only that David frequently kept reaching out to his maker, and it is assumed that there were not so many others of David’s time, who did equally so.

Besides, aren’t the characters in the Bible, put there in the first place, for us to relate to their circumstances? For starters, I can relate to Job, in that nothing ever seemed to work out right in my life, for a long time and seemingly for no good reason. Well, that’s changed, now that I’ve kept the faith, and acted with righteousness. But I’m not certain anything I did, impacted it.

It’s clear that both men, who sought religious experience, ultimately found what they were looking for. I was one of them, and for years, I became filled with more than I could contain. Watch yourself, and don’t draw conclusions based on information you don’t have. Those were years I was lost in things I could not understand, until I defined my own capacity for my own limits.

You study one book, and think you have all the answers to all the questions on all the exams, and I dare say it’s not so. I’ve been to places you never go, and have accomplished things you can’t imagine. There is only one God, one faith, one baptism. I am faithful to the things my maker has required of me, whether any living, breathing human being thinks so or he doesn’t.

There has got to be a beginning place, where all things are one, in this seriously screwed up life of mine. The idea that I ingested that life altering chemical, and lived to tell the tale, is remarkable in itself. That it only simulates death, but does not bring it about, is an interesting concept to ponder for a moment or two. I wonder how to tell you about my experience with a falsified death?

For one thing, there’s more to tell you than I could ever remember, if I lived to be a lot more ripe an old age than I happen to be now, and I might succeed in making myself silly in the attempt. Having a myriad of experiences to recount, one after another, in a sort of tapestry, I succeeded in traversing the crack between the worlds, and that experience of itself is Almighty God.

The mountains themselves have more of a story to tell than I ever will, and are less inclined to make the attempt. I know I went up the mountain and back down again, but have no clear recollection of the series of events I can say I experienced, immediately, or subsequently thereafter. My memory is quite disjoint on the particulars of what happened after traversing between the worlds.

There was the concept of spectrum for me to consider, and I shudder to think I nearly burned the place down, toying with bits of fire, in some crazed ceremony. I ultimately claim the structure was spared destruction, and the people contained within, were none the worse for the wear of my madness. Experiments with the concept of spectrum were a success, and I took on enlightenment.

What’s more is, the one experience is not the slightest bit related to the other, and I only associate the two in coincidence, but only the one is contained within the lesson I addressed, in dead earnest. My mind’s eye could envision the consequence of a various spectrum, in all things more profoundly, and I was pressed to apply the image elsewhere, and found myself hard put.

This is a momentary part of an entirety of my experience with the power plant, and it embroils itself in the nonsensical quality of the greater part of it. It was sometime after I moved on from this nonsense, that I was taken from the confines of the infirmary of university, and was spirited off, on a magic carpet ride, down the mountain to another set of nonsensical stories to tell, there.