Mobius' Trip

Mobius' Trip

I know there's an answer
I know there is a why.
Just out of my vision
corner of my eye

One day I will spot it
that fantastic clue
the truth of the ages
my quest will be through

But wouldn't it be funny
a real kick in the head
if my sought after answer
was another question instead?

Kudos for Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite authors. The following was lifted from today's The Writer's Digest, by Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion. His collection of short non-fiction, Just Before Dark, is
fantastic, and his other novels, including Woman Lit By Fireflies, Brown Dog, The Beast God Forgot To Invent, were introduced to me by my good friend Lee Meekombs a year or so ago and since I have read everything Harrison has written. He is a man's man, outdoorsman, hunter, yet a sensitive poet and his stories touch on the edge of darkness yet reflect a kind of hope that by reaching into that shade he may draw back light. In read searchers this morning without realizing it was by him, and felt this familiarity and a kind of longing that linked his reaching to mine and then only after reading the bio did I realize it was really Jim Harrison. The only problem with Jim is that his searches for what he was seeking led him into psychotherapy to which he refers from time to time, which to me is the evil of our times and of all times through what ever priest of bone rattler has has proffered disaster in the name of help.

Perhaps that is the reason Jim never emerged as the real spiritual being he
really is--let one in and he will, like a rapidly spreading cancer, first
destroy your hope and then your very spirit will turn inward---look at
Hemingway, et al. Don't get me started. I see a great spirit in Jim Harrison
that I am sure was suppressed by them. This is speculation, but like something
dead, I can smell it overpowering the desperately seeking spirit of this
man. I grieve over such great spirits never knowing Mr. Hubbard, my guide and mentor.

Searchers
by Jim Harrison
At dawn Warren is on my bed,
a ragged lump of fur listening
to the birds as if deciding whether or not
to catch one. He has an old man's
mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across
the yard
and he walks after it
thinking he might close the widening distance
just as when I followed a lovely woman
on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn't
equal her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes
moving into the distance, turning the final
corner, but when I turned the corner
she had disappeared and I looked up
into the trees thinking she might have climbed
one.
When I was young, a country girl would climb
a tree and throw apples
down at my upturned face.
Warren and I are both searchers. He's
looking for his dead sister Shirley, and I'm wondering
about my brother
John who left the earth
on this voyage all living creatures take.
Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant
insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds
and stars.

"Searchers" by Jim Harrison, from Saving Daylight. © Copper Canyon Press,
2006.

It's the birthday of Jim Harrison, born in Grayling, Michigan (1937). He had a
happy childhood in Michigan, growing up in a big family of people who liked to
read. But when he was seven years old, he was playing doctor with a friend and
she cut his face with a jagged piece of a glass beaker and he went blind in his
left eye. He said, "Ever since I was seven and had my eye put out, I'd turn for
solace to rivers, rain, trees, birds, lakes, animals."
Even though he liked to read as a kid, he wasn't particularly interested in writing, and in fact was
more interested in religion. He said, "I finally realized that writing, or
art as I'd just as soon call it, had absorbed the transference of all my
religious impulses at age sixteen. Up to sixteen I wanted to be a preacher, and
then one day I did a whirlwind: I jumped from Jesus to John Keats in three
days."
So he set out to be a poet. He went to school at Michigan State
University and married his high school sweetheart. And he got a master's degree,
even though he hated grad school, and published his first book of poetry, Plain
Song (1965), and got a job teaching in New York. But he didn't really care for
the East Coast or for teaching, so he moved back to Michigan and made $2.50 an
hour as a construction worker and wrote some more books of poetry — Walking
(1967) and Locations (1968). And he liked being back in Michigan. He said, "I
figured out that my main obsession is freedom, and if I didn't have the freedom
of close access to the natural world, I wasn't going to survive." And he said,
"If things are terrible beyond conception and I walk for 25 miles in the forest,
they tend to go away for a while. Whereas if I lived in Manhattan I couldn't
escape them."
Then, in 1970, he was hunting and he hurt his back so badly
that he had to stay in bed for months. His friend Thomas McGuane told him he
should try writing a novel, so he did, and it was Wolf: A False Memoir (1971).
It didn't do very well, and neither did his next couple of novels. Then he was
visiting the set of the movie The Missouri Breaks, because Tom McGuane had
written the screenplay, and he became friends with Jack Nicholson. Jack
Nicholson wanted Harrison to keep on writing, so he ended up lending him a chunk
of money to get through the project he had started. And that was Legends of the
Fall (1979),a collection of three novellas, and it sold well and got good
reviews and made Jim Harrison famous. He's continued to write novels and poetry,
most recently his novel The English Major (2008) and his poetry collection In
Search of Small Gods (2009), his 12th book of poetry, which came out earlier
this year.

--
L D SLEDGE
1516 COLONY COURT
PALM
HARBOR, FLORIDA 34683
www.spotofsledge.blogspot.com
standwithfist@gmail.com
"They made the world
round, so you could not see too far down the road."

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a
good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable
words."

Goethe

Healing Cancer

Mes Amis:

Regardless of the hype made by the Cancer Industry, composed of drug companies and the AMA, we are no closer today in finding a cure for cancer through conventional means than we were fifty years ago.  The statistics of "cures" are merely remissions based on five year, not complete cure, numbers. They are no really interested in finding a cure, but spend millions researching and earn billions in their horrendous treatments of chemotherapy and needless surgery.

Did you know that cancer, when found, has been growing in the host for many years? It is a very slow process. And it may take many many years to finally kill you.  But the treatments will. The merchants of medical chaos will rush you to chemo or radical vivisection as if this discovery was some overnight thing, when it has been resident in the host for perhaps decades, finally making an appearance, and there must be a quick fix---their quick fix is most often the cause of quick death. I would take a life of pain or whatever than the horrors generated in my body and mind from such as chemotherapy, or the lopping off of my breasts if I was a woman when that may not be necessary..

So how do you explain those cases when the cancer disappears without a trace without their chemo or radical chopping off of your parts?  They explain it by saying it was misdiagnosis.  Yet when it is found, they rush to cut or hit you with chemo, etc., which renders your life living hell.  A friend who recently died from ovarian cancer did chemo, and I swear chemo killed her, said that it felt like her body will filled with straws sucking her very life out.  It is so sad that people will listen to their doctors because "doctors know best," an amazing blind faith that has been instilled in us since birth. If you have a doctor friend who is honest enough to talk to you about their "art" of medicine, what you will be told will shock you to the core for they simply do not really have a clue beyond setting bones and the efficacy of aspirin, etc. Other than those, they will readily admit a placebo works about as well as most pharmaceuticals in curing something other than the effectiveness of psychotrophics which fix nothing but create addiction and more TV watching.

How about those amazing disappearances of even advanced cancer after a radical change of diet from animal to plant foods?  How about those cultures which have mostly plant foods in their diets which have almost no incidence of cancer?  How about the very low incidence of cancer in countries where they smoke like potbellied stoves, with low intake of animal (meat) protein and high plant foods?  Does that tell you anything? 

I was handed a revelatory and provocative DVD by Dr. James Keppler of Sacramento this week:  "Healing Cancer From Inside Out," by Mike Anderson with such research and medical authorities as T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D, (The China Study), and many others of high repute in the medical community who are not afraid to voice their opinion about what is happening in the Cancer Industry.  This DVD is two hours long; the first hour dealing with the so called cure by the medical research and treatment community (and drug apparatus) and the second dealing with what really can and does cure cancer dealing with diet primarily of plant origin. It discusses studies in just about every culture and country in the world, and primarily a huge study in China, which reveals unequivocally that diet is the source.  My old doctor who mama took us to in Shreveport, Dr. Tom Smith, always said "You Are What You Eat," and after sixty or seventy years that is becoming clearer in my mind what that old boy was saying. 

I would go even further and say "you are what you eat and what you surround yourself with (including who you surround yourself with)."  Ingesting that most wonderful ribeye or tbone, juicy, succulent, dripping with juices, filling the air with mouth watering smells, is the apex dining experience of most Americans experiences---given a baked potato flooded with butter, sour cream and chives and maybe bacon chips.  But that is the meal that kills. Not only choking your arteries with fat but loading your body with the poisons the stockpen owners injected the cattle with, and on top of that what they fed those animals which in turn is loaded with pesticides and herbicides, and you became, at the top of the food chain, the ultimate depository of all those wonderful man made carcinogins. What the hell can you expect will happen to you?  We are just to damn lazy to find out, and then go through life with increasing debilitation, accepting the stiffness, the moodiness, the depressions, personal awareness winking out like lights going out in a building, growing into regular and then finally accepted chronic lower energy and increased body pains. We accept this scenario as what normally happens when you pass forty.  No, this body is designed to last well over a hundred years at a ripping howling enduring asskicking screwing laughing day by day life until something external knocks off this meat body. We are committing hari kari with each mouthful of generated foods.  So eat organic, whatever you eat, and eat primarily plant based foods.

As to cancer, what is it?  We are literally swarming with cancer cells, waiting to be triggered into a life. You trigger it primarily by your diet, and in part by your associations and environment, but primarily what you put into your body as food. And when it is triggered, it grows slowly usually unless it is at the last stages---depending on where it is and in what organ it manifests itself.  If you are diagnosed, please do not listen to their idea of rushing into chemo, for that will kill you for sure, or surgery, depriving you of a part that may not have to be removed, for it has been there for a long time, usually, and if the part is removed, the cancer may come back somewhere else. Change your diet.  (And hey, remember the author who had cancer and decided he would just get away from everything and laugh a lot---and cured it through laughter....) After publishing this rant on my general email (standwithfist@gmail.com) I received a number of responses from friends who had either personally or had friends who changed diet and removed any vestige of cancer.

Have a great day. This is good news.  There is a way to beat it.

ldsledge

How to Remember a List of Ten Items

Have you ever gone to the store and couldn't remember some of the things you went to buy? Here is a simple way to remember ten items at a time. I learned this years ago and use it all of the time as a "to do" list, and don't have to write it down unless it exceeds ten items. There is a way to remember twenty items, but I am only going to show you ten, for you seldom have more than that do to.

The method is simply hooking the item to something easily remembered. This is probably the way those savants who can remember the names of an audience of a hundred people. They may be simply gifted, but this system is for the non gifted, like me. Here goes.

Hook the item to the following list of rhyming mental pictures.

One = Run. A group of runners in a marathon, each one carrying the item you want to remember.
Two = Zoo. An island in the zoo, across a fence from you, filled with monkeys playing with the item.
Three = Tree. A huge tree, with the item hanging from the branches, falling like fruit to the ground.
Four = Door. A big door with the items falling through, squeezing out of the door.
Five = Hive. A huge beehive, with bees carrying the objects away and bringing them in.
Six = Sticks. Piles of sticks with many of this item mixed in the sticks.
Seven = Heaven. The clouds parting and the item is falling through the clouds from a crack in the sky.
Eight = Gate. There is this big swinging garden gate, and this item is tumbling through.
Nine = Vine. The item growing on a huge vine like clusters of grapes.
Ten = Den. A bear's den, with bears sitting on, playing with the item.

You can use this list over and over. Each time you use a new set of items, it erases the old one and the new one is now in the hands of the runner or monkey, etc.

Have fun trying this out. I think you will never have to write out a list again.

The Great Pretender

The Great Pretender


Prefer I to press to these keys
To imbed on my own memory and cyber world
The imaginary cankers that I seem to cherish
And hold dear
When I know they are only phantoms of old dead dreams
Long drempt, long past in memory
Of lives lied in the dim half world of shadow
Somewhere back in the days of maybe regret and too little joy’
And now I know what is important,
For it is joy that I can make for myself
It is the day I can fill with laughter and crystal dreams of now
Of bells that ring like little birdsong
And fragrance on the breeze
And the tug of a fish on my line
The touch of her gentle fingers on my body
The breath of her on my ear
And there is more for I can look and see dimension
And form and the floor beneath my feet that stays
Level and firm so I don’t sink to my chin in doubt
Yes to know I know, to know I am me
To know I am pretending
A pretend that I am pretending
Oh what fun.
Fill my pretended lungs and let out a laugh
At how silly I am to try to not know
And to know that I am really having fun
Pretending to pretend,
always.
And forever
Amen

Michael Jackson's oil portrait "HomageKOPH/15)

Michael Jackson, the innovative musical genius of his generation, left a legacy that changed the face and pace of Rock music forever. He is gone, but his music and images live on. He is linked to Dick Zimmerman, masterpiece portrait artist, labeled by the public as “The Rembrandt of the 21st Century”.
Zimmerman started as a portrait painter, and because of his very realistic style, painting exactly what was on film, he moved into photography to enhance his reference photographs. He then studied photography and found he was fascinated by the medium, and was so successful that he got caught up in it for twenty two years and at that time gained his reputation known as the celebrity image maker. But he longed to return to painting, his first love.
Dick has been painting again for the last eighteen years and has just completed an oil painting, a tribute to Michael Jackson, entitled “HomageKOPH/15” using his reference photographs taken of Michael through the last fifteen years, which they had created together. During that period, he had the opportunity to do three photographic sessions with Michael: The Thriller Album cover, the exclusive wedding portraits of Lisa and Michael, and Steven Spielberg’s ET Narration cover. You can read the story of the creation of the Thriller album on our website, www.dickzimmerman.com.
Dick will be traveling to Los Angeles this week and will present the first copy to the Jackson family, and selected museums throughout the US. During that time there will be numerous interviews and TV appearances.
During and after the painting presentations and media blitz in Hollywood, the demand for his paintings will undoubtedly accelerate, so will his commission prices. Most likely 100% to 200%. Certainly there is an opportunity here if you were originally interested in a family portrait commission, to take advantage of the current commission prices.
Art like this is a double investment. It increases in actual value over time with the acceleration of the repute of the artist, but it is much more of a private investment, for it pays personal dividends in priceless pleasure every time you look at it.
Dick is no longer doing art festivals. He is dedicating his time exclusively to painting. His agent/representative, David Sledge, stands ready to answer any question you may have.

To wit: to woo.

To wit, to woo.

Well, how do you go about it? Do you have some great lines? "You got any Irish in you? How about, "Shall I call you or nudge you?" "Are you tired?" "What's your sign?" "Do you come here often?"

That is not going anywhere. Thus begins the mating ritual of the most ridiculous species on earth, the Homo Sapiens male. In our effort to woo, men forget one minor detail: women are human beings. They respond to genuine, sincere communication. Because the thought of this kind of interaction makes most men a little queasy, we sometimes look for a way to get things rolling. Palm reading is just this sort of invention. And I think it's on the same plane as astrology and reading knobs on your head, but it has advantages in the mating ritual.

In the course of discussing the lines of your respective hands, you may learn a few things about each other. You know that the line that runs across the upper area of your palm is the heart line. Maybe you can pick up on just how sensual she is by checking that out. Then there is the head line, the one in the middle. Is she smarter than you? Is that what you want? Then the long one on the bottom is the life line. Of course there are many interpretations of these lines.

The life line may be a little scary, if it has lots of breaks or if it is short. And the head line may go nowhere, or streak deeply across the palm. But then, if the heart line is deep and long, you may feel you have advance surveillance going on and have a bit of jump on the mystery awaiting in those eyes so close.

At the very least you'll get to hold a pretty woman's hand for a few minutes, and that is not a bad thing at all.