POSTS BY SLEDGE

2012-01-20T07:18:00.001-08:00

Threescore and ten plus years on this planet, watching with dismay of the man’s plunging like Lemmings over the cliff, I have some thoughts to share.

Man is a silly, random, childish, beautiful brute. He is a pure, spiritual being, burdened by baggage of pain and misdirection accumulated over his existence which is eternity, making him reactive and stupid. He does stupid things constantly. Witness the worn stones and dreams of past civilizations, tilted askew in the sands and mud now long abandoned.

Having once attempted a run at politics I learned that politicians must please everyone which is impossible. Attempting this makes him a liar. Then lies become commonplace, and attempting the tricky balance of staying afloat in a sea of pleasing all leads to not really knowing or caring what it true. You have to have a phenomenal memory to be a politician. You have to say one thing in the morning to one group something different to another group in the evening. You learn to talk slick and really never commit, sounding like you are committing while saying with heart what you think they want to hear.

We are witnessing, in January 2012, the pre-selection of a Republican candidate that can beat the democratic president Obama this year. The candidates, in trying to each be positioned for nomination by crushing each other, are providing fodder for Obama in the big final race to come. In my life I have watched this happen several times, but never has so much depended on what happens in 2012.

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter who is elected, for I feel they are all puppets, with strings pulled by the same banker puppeteers. Their masters have pulled down each country under their control until finally they have the big one, the United States, postured to crumble in a few years, having taken over the money, the media, food, energy, shelter and transportation. Their objective is unthinkable. The existing puppets in congress and the high seat have closed their eyes and are diving over the cliff toward oblivion in every policy embraced---bankrupting this great experiment with unimagined velocity. Whether a Republican president can or will do different is questionable. Each will blame the preceding contingent. The previous boy president followed his daddy’s will who was following in turn his orders.

Do you think any of the viable lying candidates will make a difference? Only Ron Paul could. But he would have to get Congress to act to implement his plan, and each of them has sold his or her soul to get and stay in office. I love Ron Paul. He is incredibly honest and my dream president. But “they” will not let this happen. Only a miracle can keep Obama, the most arrogant and flagrantly incompetent president ever, from being re-elected because he has the blacks, Hispanics, democrats, and the media, and many just who love the way he reads a monitor. They do not wish to lose their something for nothing life. Who can blame them? Please, whoever is listening, tell me I am wrong.

hitchhiking

2012-01-11T05:53:00.000-08:00

Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac of today, January 13, 2012, had the following little poem that made me remember my hitchhiking days. When I was growing up in the country in Northwest Louisiana, about 50 miles south of Shreveport (close to Texas border) we either caught a Trailways bus or “caught a ride,” (hitchhiked.). The bus only came through once a day and went to Shreveport or somewhere southeast, so if you wanted to go somewhere you hitchhiked.

There was no danger. There were many on the road with their thumbs hiked in the air wanting a ride. I had many experiences, some great, some terrifying. Like the time my buddy Kenneth Brumley and I caught a ride with a couple of drunks. It was a two door car, and we were sitting in the back and couldn’t get out. He was all over the road and in the ditches driving 100 mph, sometimes sailing in the air, leaving the highway on the crest of a hill like you see in the movies, to crash down with a great bounce after a brief flight. Finally he stopped for gas, and both he and his passenger went into the station. Kenneth and I crawled out of the window and hid until they left. We had been taken many miles out of our way and were relieved just to be alive.

There were queers who reached out and touched my leg and I demanded to be let out then and there---wherever I was, even on a lonely stretch of road. Once a guy showed me a huge roll of hundred dollar bills while driving, then showed me a pistol to prove he was loaded but would blow anybody away that wanted his money. Most of the time it was a nice guy or couple. Caught rides on the back of pickups, or cattle trucks with plenty residue from their erstwhile bovine passengers on the bed of the truck and you took your chances on trying to find a place to sit, and more often than not, black people would be willing to help, needing help themselves most of the time.

We never thought much about hitchhiking. I would catch rides from my little town to Highway 80, which ran north and south from Shreveport all the way to New Orleans, through Baton Rouge, a distance of nearly 300 miles. I did this many times, without a single problem in the fifties.

I was a kid, still a teenager, and until I got a car this was my way of going places by myself. By the way, there were no speed limits on those two lane roads, and driving eighty and ninety was not unusual. No seat belts either or air conditioning. Probably no higher accident rate then than now. Mellow memories. I had a sense of freedom that I had forgotten. Of course, the couple hitchhiking in the poem that follows didn’t involve much freedom for them—it was a different kind of freedom. Then was Janis Joplin’s Me’n Bobby Magee a kind of freedom?. That kind of freedom feels quite wonderful as a memory.LDS

HITCHHIKERS
by Charles Simic
After a Walker Evans photograph from the thirties

Hard times brought them out early
On this dreary stretch of road
Carrying a suitcase and a bedroll
With a frying pan tied to it,
The kind you use over a campfire
When a moss-covered log is your pillow.

He's hopeful and she's ashamed
To be asking a stranger to take them
Away from here in a cloud of flying
Gravel and dust, past leafless trees
With their snarled and pointy little twigs.
A man and a woman catching a ride
To where water tastes like cherry wine.

She'll work as a maid or a waitress,
He'll pump gas or rob banks.
They'll buy a car as big as a hearse
To make their fast getaway,
Not forgetting to stop for you, mister,
If you are down on your luck yourself.

America, Its Strength Is Its Weakness

2011-12-18T04:51:00.001-08:00

The weakness of our country, which at one time was its strength, was flinging open our doors to everyone. “Give me your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” are the shining words at the foot of the lady whose torch held aloft is still a beacon for all to come and share the bounty of our land of plenty.
The diversity of all the lands coming to our shores enriched our culture and our economy. It is the answer to anyone wishing to be free and being a part of the great mixture of peoples we call America. But there is a downside.
“The reason a democracy or any wide-open group caves in lies in its extending its privileges of membership to those who seek to destroy it.”
“The idiocy of doing so is plain. When a person announces he is no longer a part of the group, he has rejected the group. He has also rejected its codes and rules. Of course he has also rejected the protection to which he was entitled as a group member.”
HCO Policy Letter, 17 March 65, Issue IV, HCO Div 1, Justice. Organizational Suppressive Acts. L Ron Hubbard.
I think this is the paradox of any experiment in democracy, an attempt to let the people govern themselves. We hold the door wide for anyone to enter and allow them the vote, the give-away programs, education, health, with no input. Yet tax the productive. What is the answer?

What Now America?

2011-08-31T06:24:00.000-07:00

We Americans are feeling the wrenching disorientation wrought of change. Change is upon us. At the age of 77, born at the end of the depression, having lived through three wars, I have been fortunate to have had the best that America had to offer in this great experiment in democracy.

The white man, through being much more vigorous and aggressive because of having his blood origin in the cold climes of northern Europe, dominated the planet for generations. His blood has thinned and he, like the Romans before him, has weakened morally and spiritually. He now hasn’t the will to maintain dominance. Rome was sacked because Rome simply had rotted from within and their indolent senate died in their seats. Greece and Rome lasted hundreds of years. The great civilizations of the east in China, simply continued, ponderous with people, and are becoming the survivors because of sheer dominance in numbers.

We have come to this teetering point less than 300 years since our valiant overthrow of the yoke of English tyranny. Those men who signed the Declaration of Independence risked everything. Without the intercession of the French we would have lost, and they were involved to weaken England, their dire enemy. Immediately thereafter they had their own revolution which changed everything there.

We are in a crisis we cannot conceive as real, for we are living in a surreal world of false economy, having elected enemies of our own basic philosophy as leaders. It seems that we are just holding our collective breaths, for that last precious bit of air, before we all drown. We are like bewildered children---lost---without direction, trying to find a real voice, a real leader who can fight through the tangled thicket of laws and political commitment to the light of day, who has the moral strength to confront and win back our self respect and future that seems to be dissolving before our very eyes. He or she is there, somewhere.

Is this really happening? It is like dream, a creepy dream. We see all the assorted pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and separately they don't make sense--the trillions, the bail outs, the corrupt cronies, George Soros et al, immigration, Muslim incursion, the "the where the hell did he come from President," and they are not so ignorable, but ignored like a very unpleasant smell. Put them together and it all comes crystal clear. There is a reeking stench that violates all sense of goodness and propriety. It was all planned. In politics, like Wall Street, it is all planned. Nothing is coincidental.

We are beset in every direction because of a sold out leadership—puppets of those who would have America become at one with the rest of the world—under their control. A planned invasion of Mexicans from the south, illegally crossing our borders, taking jobs of working Americans for pennies a day, getting governmental benefits paid by taxes of working Americans, reproducing children who under the law of “jus soli" are American citizens, all to become voters who will support a regime willing to bankrupt our country to support them for their votes. Minorities within who do the same. A rabid, alien, Muslim culture integrating itself within with a declared intention to destroy America. A Muslim president, mysteriously placed into office out of nowhere (now clearly a pawn of people like George Soros---whose record of destroying nations is clear) whose skin color and professed philosophy galvanizes and coalesces all those who want something for nothing into a tighter voting block than ever; whose philosophy of tax the rich (productive) and give to the non productive fits the very scheme that has destroyed Greece, Rome and every other strong civilization.

Destroy the US from within by bankruptcy, and thus goes the rest of the planet into turmoil. America has become the planetary power, and though it is clear there has been anything but peace during her reign (wars are created by those who benefit and those controlling the money benefit—the bankers primarily) she has held out her hand of freedom for those who wish to come and play by our rules until the Mexican invasion.

Who will win? What will become of America? Will America, Canada and Mexico become one? Europe will dissolve into one and Asia into one, creating three great interplanetary powers, all led by someone. Some hidden leader, (tyrant of incredible power) or maybe not so hidden. There is no place to hide even now. Google has a picture of your house, a whole profile on everyone on the planet. You can be located by satellite at any time. Implanted chips will be the final end of man’s independence, will and freedom.

He tried, but is now an anemic, frail mockery of our forefathers and their will for a free America. How can we keep our integrity, our personal freedom, our ability to choose direction and life? It has disappeared during my short span on this small, but beautiful, planet. History shows great societies have always greedily destroyed themselves by the immorality of the dominant species. Over and over. The mysterious standing stones in the deserts and jungles profess to his huge ability to create, and his ability to destroy, and to his inevitable demise.

I am a dedicated Scientologist. I know we are spiritual beings, having meat bodies with limited lives we use for transport and communication. We are basically good, beautiful, immortal, creative beings. But we are stupid. We were put here because we were geniuses (stupid ones), miscreants, psychopaths, artists, and political dissidents. We didn’t fit and had to be disposed of. Dropped here, given amnesia implants (we really can remember but it is too painful to remember), and we spend our days trying to figure out what the hell is going on---developing philosophies, religions, to explain it. Never one that really explains, just requires leaps of faith.

We have tools to recover our basic abilities, our basic happiness, without any need for “faith in” or belief beyond knowing this is the way once it becomes clear. It became clear to me instantly once I saw the truth of it. Some take longer. No matter, the truth is there to be had by anyone, anywhere, of any faith, color, or religious conviction.

Thus we are attacked by those who wish to keep mankind in the dark, unenlightened as to man’s own spiritual power and ability. We are growing and have a huge hill to climb against those who wish to destroy us and control minds through drugs, fear or political estrangement. (Psychiatrists and drug companies—financed by those who eventually benefit from mental enslavement.) Those with low confront of evil will snort and say this is rubbish. Believe me, there is evil, and it is not “the devil.” There are a fraction (2%) of the population who are so terrified of others, who have learned how to look and act like others and have disappeared in the fabric of society, they will destroy everything around them. They are hard to spot, but everything around them is in a turmoil. Those they influence look crazy. They are usually the last ones you will spot. They are cowards, who use your power, for they have none. They are thus dangerous. We elect them to office, chairmen of boards, or they sit by the fire knitting while their family is in chaos. You need to learn to spot them. We have the means to do this.

We can win, but we must stand tall and do more than sit on our asses knowing we are the only way out of this prison planet. I solicit, and even dare, any man or woman who professes to be searching for answers to honestly take a look. Open your mind and see. Go to the source. There is much disinformation abroad. See for yourself. Think for yourself. You can help save us all by first finding the road out. It is this one. I know of no other on this planet.

Me and Ray Bradbury

2011-08-22T05:01:00.000-07:00

I attended a talk by Ray Bradbury at LSU in the late nineties. Knowing he would be swamped afterwards, I ran backstage before anyone got to him and had some pictures made with him, including this one.

His family moved to Hollywood when he was around ten years old, and he started selling postcards and maps to homes of the stars. He spotted W.C. Fields standing on the corner waiting for a ride, so he asked him for his autograph. Fields scratched his name on the little piece of paper, held it for a moment before giving it to Bradbury, then scowled over his cigar and said, “There you go, you little sonofabitch.” From the way he described it, I know he thinks about it often. It’s like a stuck picture that he muses over—for it is funny as hell to me. His telling of it leaves me with a picture of an irascible old sonofabitch himself who somehow became a star and gave Bradbury an indelible impression of this as a highlight event.

I have used this as an example in giving talks on Affinity, Reality and Communication, and how we must take responsibility for our communication because of the everlasting results of what we say and do.

The following is today’s offering by The Writer’s Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, of The Prairie Home Companion.

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury (books by this author), born in Waukegan, Illinois (1920). He's the author of many books of science fiction, including The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). One of his ancestors, Mary Bradbury, was burned as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, and he said he got from her his anxiety about fearmongering and thought control. He said, "Science fiction is a wonderful hammer; I intend to use it when and if necessary, to bark a few shins or knock a few heads, in order to make people leave people alone." He told Paris Review, "I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past — a combination of both." He didn't go to college, because the family couldn't afford it, but he did go to libraries ... at least three times a week for 10 years. He wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library.

As a boy, he read Edgar Allan Poe and The Wizard of Oz. And when he was 12, a traveling carnival came to town, and he met a magician named Mr. Electrico, who believed young Ray was the reincarnation of a friend who had died in his arms in World War I. Later, at the show, Mr. Electrico touched people in the front row with his electrically charged sword, making their hair stand on end. "When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, 'Live forever.' And I decided to."

Sick and Dying "R" US

2011-08-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

My Dear Friends:

Dr. Tom Smith, one of those old time "real" healers, was our family doctor. He was always saying "you are what you eat." He went no further than that, but would have if we would have asked him what he meant. This was in the fifties, before GMO and adulteration of our food supply by pesticides, herbicides, growth enzymes in our meats, etc.

I called this blog "sick and dying R US," because that is what we Americans are.

I decided to learn about enzymes today, and watched this clear explanation of enzymes and how absolutely essential that we know about them and how they affect health.

In a nutshell, enzymes are chemical elements in foods that make what we eat useable by the body. They also can be used to make foods, such as cheese, wines, beers, and even to process such as curing leather and are the catalysts that nature supplies to transform substances into useable substances.

They are vital to every aspect of health, and account for ability to ward off heart attacks, cancer, ulcers, immunity problems, and most diseases and body problems. By the time a person reaches 70, the body produces 1/3 of the necessary enzymes needed to properly use foods we eat--add this to the additives for storage, color and increased production and we have a problem. Orange juice, with the container saying pure juice, not from concentrate. This juice has been stored in huge containers, with all oxygen removed, with fructose and sugar added. Each 8 oz glass contains the equivalent of 8 teaspoons of sugar. More than a coke. You are in trouble if you think you are helping the health of your kids by giving them other than fresh squeezed orange juice. These food additives for shelf life, taste and color account for the obesity in the US. Go to a cafeteria, Chinese all you can eat, Walmart, or wherever, and try not to ignore the disgusting Americans who can barely move, who simply know no better.

I went to Europe with my son Tom in 2003---I was shocked at the difference between the bodies of the Europeans and Americans--The Italians and French were trim, graceful and athletic compared to the wallowing obesity of most American tourists. Some English and German were also fat, but nothing like Americans.

At my age, I am concerned about feeling good, feeling energetic and pain free. I assure you the mid seventies have pain, stiffness, and digestive and other problems unless there is exercise and proper food.

Where do you get enzymes? Raw vegetables. Juice them, just eat them, or cop out and buy supplements. I am going to start using my juicer. It is a little more complex doing this, and cleaning it after, but I am going to keep it out on my counter and use it to make a two day supply. I want to feel good, still be hard and stay hard, in every way. Crawling out of bed in pain every morning before I walk the stiffness in my back off only gets worse with time, and I can imagine how it must be for those fatties who look like they have live animals in their clothes as they walk, and struggle to get up from sitting positions. It is enzymes, fructose, exercise (don't need much) and additives.

Watch these videos (the first one and the one on orange juice) and get smart.

I have to thank Mercola for keeping us informed. Why don't they have a required course in school beginning in lower grades with this subject, making it simple, with videos like this. The problem with most of these "instructional" courses, are they are too complex, giving misunderstoods, not going basic enough. This could easily handle America's stupidity.

LD

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/08/21/enzymes-special-report.aspx?e_cid=20110821_SNL_Art_1

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/08/16/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-artificially-flavored-to-taste-like-oranges.aspx?e_cid=20110821_SNL_MV_1

Memories of 9/11 by an American

2011-08-18T07:56:00.000-07:00

Memories of 9/11 by an American

I was at home, staying away from the office, getting needed time and space to work on an upcoming jury trial, when my wife came into my office saying “the world trade center has been attacked.”

I had to shake the woolies out of my head and shift gears, for I was deep in the facts of the case, and had no clue what she was talking about. I carried my materials with me and sat down in my LazyBoy in front of the TV in the bedroom. One of the twin towers was smoking about two thirds of the way up, and the announcer frantically chattered about a plane running into the building.

I thought it was novel that an airliner had gone off course and hit the building. My legal mind immediately thought of the damage lawsuits of the people on the plane and those injured in the building---and the claim the building owner had against the airline.

There was lots of talk, but no knowledge of anything about what really happened. I continued concentrating on my case, interrupted from time to time by the announcer giving updates, with the picture of the buildings continued on the screen. At the time, there were no available photos of the plane approaching and striking the building. That came later.

Then another plane hit the other building. That got my attention, and I am sure it was then that those who should know about such things sat up in red alert. This was no accident!

I had most of my attention from then on riveted on the TV, watching the two fantastic buildings with ugly smoking wounds in their sides, trying to visualize what was happening there. This was not commonplace news!

There before my eyes, building number one seemed to shrink downward for a moment, then, in seconds, it simply folded in on itself and collapsed in a smoking heap. I felt something hit me in my gut. I couldn’t breathe for a moment. It was a physical shock within me. I had no idea what had happened, except that thousands were dying, all at once, and there was a simultaneous cry of the dying in that instant that hit me like a blow. It hit me spiritually, but it felt like a physical thing.

We are all connected whether we know it or not; our de-evolution makes us think we are lonely islands, but beneath we are joined. Not since Nagasaki or Hiroshima have so many humans lost their lives all at once. I felt an immense rush of surprise, fear then sadness coming from that crashing building. One person dying is one thing. Thousands dying at the same instant, not having a clue what is happening, is another. It was a cry of despair that could and should have been heard around the world.

Later, after the second building fell, when I felt the same thing, I realized what it was. I recalled Obi-Wan-Kinobe in the Star Wars movie, when the peaceful planet Alderaan was totally destroyed by the Death Star. He doubled over in intense pain, sensing the death of millions all at once---saying there was a disturbance in the force, instantly knowing that the planet was no more and all the beings on it were dead.

If I had not been totally convinced of the fact that there is a connexity in the brotherhood of man, of man the spirit, then this was ultimate proof. Many others felt it too, and had no name for it, and it generated fear and anger rather than understanding of the nature of the loss. It generated anger in me too, a gripping futile anguish of the descent of man into an abyss of despair.

Then there was a coalescing of the human spirit like I have never seen in my lifetime. Americans came together as one. Flags sprang up everywhere. There were marches. TV spectaculars with celebrities singing patriotic songs. I remember a stage filled with celebrities singing America The Beautiful, with Willie Nelson right in the front with his laconic nasal twang---and I could see America shining through, rising from the ashes, being one. I actually cried, and cry again in the memory of that coming together, which we should and can do even now.

We are approaching the anniversary of that horror. Again we should stand tall, we should come together and link our living spirits with a dedication to be one as Americans and know who and what we are. We are free yet. We can pull ourselves out of the despair that was born of this event. We sensed vulnerability for the first time as a nation. For at no time since the revolution have we had incursion on our shores of a foreign power, and in this case a totally foreign philosophy.

Once again I want to feel that surge of pride and power that I felt ten years ago when we came together and sang America The Beautiful. And this time I feel we can, and should, on the brink of a chance to change back to American values that we have lost during these past ten years, bow our necks and say “enough.” I am an American.

When I was in high school I had an after dinner speech that I won first prize two years in a row in speech tournaments called “I am Proud To Be An American.” I spoke with six different dialects and impersonated six singers---Vaughn Monroe, Billy Ekstine, The Ink Spots, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine. I told how precious being an American was through the voices of those new immigrants. That was a time when being an American was a given. It was expected. We were all thoroughbred Americans in 1952. Over the past fifty years we have become something else, something that welfare and political expediency and political correctness have eroded our ability to speak, our pride and our patriotism. We must now rise again and hold our heads up as Americans with a grim determination not to lose our precious gift of freedom.

The polling booth is our weapon. Lock and load: Ready, aim, vote!

As an author I write about winners, American winners. Two stand tall, get in your face, make it go right, kickass American winners are Jack Chandler, of Dawn’s Revenge, and Riggs McCall, in Command Influence, heroes in two of my novels which will be available immediately in my website http://ldsledge.com. Read two chapters from each book free now. Plan to buy and read these books. They will make you proud you are an American.

It's All About Winning

2011-08-15T19:43:00.000-07:00

It’s All About Winning

Ed Connelly lurched and stumbled along the marble hallway, grimacing at the effort of walking and holding the heavy books in his twisted and gnarled hands. He fell into a chair in my freshman law school class, his tongue between his lips, fumbled with his notebook and finally got it opened, then gripping a ballpoint pen in his fist made big jagged marks on the page for his notes. The whole class watched his struggles.

He looked up, his eyes shining at his recent victory at being able to make it from the parking lot, up the stairs, and down the long hall to the classroom. He was positively merry! My heart melted.

Ed was born with severe cerebral palsy, as bad a case as I have seen and still be independently mobile. You couldn’t watch him eat. Every move he made was headed in the wrong direction until he forced his rebellious body to somehow finally get the spoon somewhere near his mouth, or to stop one foot from ramming into the other as he fought his way along.

He smiled and laughed in a choking sort of way when he was not trying to rein his willful body into behaving. He barreled along life using what he had to work with, and made it very well.

He finished law school and set up his own private practice in 1960, and the last time I saw him was in the late eighties. He was still practicing, and seemed as happy as anybody else. Ed is a prince among men.

It’s all about winning.

Jim Girard, a fraternity brother, and one the most handsome men I have ever seen, had no use of his legs. They were literally rags. His upper body was Herculean, and he could walk on his hands faster than I could run. He overcame, married, has children and is and doing well.

Stephen F Hawkin, total body paralysis; President John F. Kennedy excruciating pain every day; Franklin D Roosevelt, crippled; Michael J Fox, Lou Gerig’s disease; Christopher Reeve, quadriplegic. None gave up. How many more could I list?

It’s all about winning.

William Ernest Henley was in the hospital for over a year in horrendous agony, having his leg removed from tuberculosis of the bone. He suffered all of his life in grievous pain, yet he wrote Invictus while he was in the hospital:

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

What is the difference between these men and others?

They deal with it. They ride over it. They know they are not their bodies and that they are spiritual beings. They have something to do and a reason to do it and will not let anything stand in their way.

There is a winner in each of us.

It’s all about winning. It is not about not losing. There is a huge difference.

Jack Chandler, in Dawn’s Revenge; Riggs McCall, in Command Influence; and Nimrod Woodbine, in Nimrod’s Peril, are faced with challenges that would cow most men. But they are winners and refuse to give up, realizing that win or lose, the only way out is the way through. To read about these three winners, check in at my website http://www.ldsledge.com, and read two free chapters each, and enjoy my site.

BOTTOM OF THE NINTH

2011-06-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

Bottom of the Ninth

Sure I struck out

More times than I hit

Some would say I was Minor league

Some say I shoulda played in the Majors

A bit light and short to get it over the fence

With the ninety mile pitchers

That would jar your spine if you could hit it

And I was fast, and I had a bitchin' slider

They just couldn’t see

Sometimes I wonder if this very game will ever end

And if the players are real

Early in the game I was confused

If I wanted to pitch or catch or play second base

Indecision benched me at times

But I played on, and now the bases are loaded

The game is tied and the pitch is three to two

They are all looking at me

My arm is hurting and I know I haven’t played

As good as I could have played this game

Always doubted if I was good enough, I was good enough

Been a pretty long game, with a middlin' record

In June 2011, I have played seventy six seasons this time around

And I have begun thinking of the next game

And how I won’t screw it up next time.

Quotes: Martha Graham and Pablo Picasso

2011-06-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader:

Here are two quotes from two of the most creative people of our time, Martha Graham, dancer, and Pablo Picasso, artist. I am not so vain as to place myself in the company of these two giants, but I want to add my own, "A Song of You."

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others"

— Martha Graham

“Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.”

Pablo Picasso

Spanish Artist and Painter, 1881-1973

A song of you

A light that is not a light but a torch that burns forever with a brightness that illuminates all.

A song that is not a song but contains all the music that there ever was or will be.

A power that is not a power, but a potential of unparalleled exquisiteness.

A promise that is not a promise but a future certain waiting to unfold in the fullness of time.

A joy that fills every corner of the universe with incomparable beauty and exhilaration of life.

A knowing that is a knowing of all, past and future, and certainty beyond certainty.

A truth that envelopes the allness of all, that reaches beyond the beyond unto infinity.

This is a song of you, all of this and more, a thing of infinite beauty.

By L D Sledge, written May 17, 2007, upon hearing L. Ron Hubbard's lecture Decision: Cause and Effect, 20 May 1952, from Route To Infinity series, transcript pages 52-53.

The Seed That's In Me

2011-04-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnbMYzdjuBs&feature=related

The Seed That’s In Me

There is a seed

Within my breast

That cries for water

To be blest

A secret seed

Whose flower has blown

A blossom whose time

Has come and gone

And left behind

A seed forlorn

Awaiting now

To be reborn

I feel it’s heartbeat

Deep within me

Pulsing strong

To start, begin me

How I yearn

To let it grow

Burst it’s shell

And let it flow

Heed it’s need

A constant yearning

To sing its song

Set a burning

When I let it loose

And its gone a winging

Is that all there is

Or a new song singing?

There is a seed

A burning ember

In you and me

Something remembered

Of who we are

A thing unflowered

A majestic being

A thing of power

Robert E Lee and Hugh Hefner on the same page?

2011-04-09T06:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes reading The Writer’s Almanac strikes a poignant or odd lack of alignment to me as did today’s vignette on Lee’s Surrender and Hugh Hefner’s birthday which were juxtaposed side by side. The two men simply didn’t fit on the same page.

Robert E Lee, reserved, stiff and formal, long suffering, was the antithesis of Hugh Hefner, who, for whatever reason, felt he had to loosen some of the screws so tightly jamming the minds of our social structure shut on the issue of sex.

Having hit my virile and hormonal teens in the fifties when the closest look at the female naked form was in the lingerie section of Sears and Roebuck catalog, seeing Marilyn’s boozums and other parts so openly displayed was a shock to me. But I have always felt that things were too tightly wound, having grown up in the oh so frustrating fifties trembling on the lip of the door flung wide open. I knew that once the straps were loosened something new would happen. Elvis’s gyrations offended the Baptists and white anglosaxon protestant mores, and tight lipped narrow eyed closed mindedness. Any images or motion that would serve to stir the reproductive juices had to be squashed. Then “boom” everybody was doing it but me. I was born too soon.

I wonder at the virtue of anticipation, if there is such a thing.. When I learned recently that teenagers in high school were having sex so freely, I was floored. We didn’t. A girl who had opened herself to the thing I wanted so badly but was afraid to try had to be somehow ruined once she had submitted. When I learned she had “done it,” she became a thing of wonder and fear for I hadn’t a clue. Smooching in the car was all there was, though the girl was pleading for something more and I did nothing, terrified at the thing before me I had unleashed. Wow did I miss out. Looking back I cringe at the opportunities lost. If I had had just a little courage and hudspah with my particular libido I would have drowned in excess, or maybe on the other hand, having established my position in the balance of things just normalized and no longer have hung up in mystery and become its willing slave which did eventually happen.

Maybe there was something good in that. When it all happened in the seventies and suddenly doors and legs and arms were flung open wide I was already married with children and felt that somehow life had passed me in its very unfair fashion, leaving me ignorant and unused. Why couldn’t I have learned about this earlier and not have wasted my life so nervous and agitated about it?

It has taken me all these years to finally control the compulsion that I think was created by those early years of self imposed frustration. Whew! I didn’t think I would live long enough to wrest free of the cloying interference with my life. Hugh banged opened the doors that were locked, barred, bolted shut on old Gen’l Lee and me---too late for Bobby and Me. At least I finally reached a point of control, more than a standoff or a draw, with my nemesis, the old 2D monkey on my back. Thank God for small (or amazing) wonders. It is sweet to be free of it—I won. Knowing what I know of Bobby Lee, I think he went to his grave gnawing on it.

Here’s the article.

On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War.

They met at a private residence in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. General Grant was reported to have begun the conversation by saying: "I met you once before, General Lee, while we were serving in Mexico... I have always remembered your appearance, and I think I should have recognized you anywhere."

To which Lee is said to have replied, "Yes. I know I met you on that occasion, and I have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked, but I have never been able to recall a single feature."

They talked over terms for an end of the war. Lee asked Grant to commit the terms to paper, which Grant handwrote on the spot. Lee accepted them on the spot. They shook hands. Before Lee rode off to inform his men, the two generals raised their hats to each other in salute.

The site is now a National Historic Park.

It's the birthday of Hugh Hefner, born in Chicago, Illinois (1926). He is the founder, editor-in-chief, and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy magazine.

He was brought up by strict Methodist parents. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he majored in psychology, where he reviewed Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male for a student publication. He wrote: "Dr. Kinsey's book disturbs me ... our hypocrisy on matters of sex have led to incalculable frustration, delinquency, and unhappiness."

He was writing promotional copy for Esquire magazine when he got the idea for a new magazine that would be similar but more daring. He said: "What I was trying to create, quite simply, was a lifestyle magazine for single guys. There had never been anything like that before."

He financed the project with $600 of his own money and several thousand dollars from friends, including $1,000 from his mother. He produced the first issue out of his kitchen in Hyde Park, Chicago. It featured a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe, which Hefner bought from a calendar company for $200. The magazine reached the newsstands in December of 1953 and quickly sold out all of its copies.

He said, "Playboy was part of trying to make the case for a more liberal attitude ... suggesting that there was more than one moral purpose for human sexuality."

Heart attacks and hot water

2011-04-05T15:59:00.001-07:00

This is a very good article. Not only about the warm water after your meal, but aboutHeart Attacks. The Chinese and Japanese drink hot tea with their meals, not cold water.
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For those who like to drink cold water, this article is applicable to you. It is very Harmful to have Cold Drink/Water during a meal because cold water will solidify the oily stuff you just consumed. It will slow down digestion. Once this sludge reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than solid food. It will line the intestine. Very soon, this will turn into fat and lead to cancer. It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.

French fries and Burgers are the biggest enemy of heart health. A coke after that gives more power to this demon. Avoid them for your Heart's Health.

Common Symptoms Of Heart Attack...
A serious note about heart attacks - You should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting . Be aware of intense pain in the jaw.

You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nausea andintense sweating are also common symptoms. 60% of people who have a heart attack while asleep do not wake up. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let's be careful and be aware. The more we know, the better chance we could survive.

A cardiologist says if everyone who reads this message sends it to 10 people, we'll save at least one life. Send to a friend. It could save a life. So please be a true friend and send this article to all you care about.

I JUST DID

Take charge of your health

2011-02-27T05:29:00.000-08:00

I just bought and read "Over the Counter Natural Cures," Take charge of your health in 30 days with 10 lifesaving supplements for under $10.) By Shane Ellison. This is an easy to read and apply book that describes most of our problems and how they can be solved by supplements that are so cheap they are almost free. I have done a kind of summary which follows. But you should buy this book from Amazon, or wherever, and apply it if you value your health and life. Life is no good if you hurt, feel sick or just can't get up and get it done.

Summary:

Sleep and rest: Spring Valley Valerian Root Extract—Walmart $4.17
Cholesterol: Lewis Labs. Folic Acid—or Nutritional Brewers Yeast, $7-$20 Whole Foods
Beat Illness: Soloray Garlic---or garlic raw.
Obesity, Diabetes: Spring Valley cinnamon Walmart – Reduces appetite
Prostate: Puritan’s Pride Saw Palmetto (I got 3 for 1) Great source.
Detox-Life Extension: Rite Aid—Milk Thistle. (A must)
Blood Pressure-cardiovascular: GNC Hawthorne
Vision: Jarrow Formulas Carotenall—Vitamin Shoppe.
Cancer (to avoid and cure) Jarrow Formula turmeric-circumin 95

Avoid cancer by: (1) Avoid inflammation causing foods. Eat omega 3 and Omega 6 foods in balance. (2) Avoid sugar and alcohol (3) Get sunshine (4) Fresh Vegetables every day. (5) Exercise

Rules: read the ingredients in every food.
Avoid food from boxes and cans.
Eat more good fat, not less.
If it tastes sweet, spit it out.
Totally avoid aspartame .
Splenda (sucralose) originated as an insecticide, 600 X sweeter than sugar. Contains a nasty form of chlorine. Maltitol raises insulin and blood sugar.
High Fructose Corn syrup (HFCS) Made in lab. Spikes blood sugar and insulin, causing to overeat and causes wrinkles and aging process.
Safe sweeteners are agave and Stevia. (Watch out only get Sweet Leaf---the others contain maltitol!!)

MSG—monosodium glutamate. It seems to be in every food you buy. Sold as a flavor enhancer. Created in alab to convert healthy rats into diabetic rats to learn more about diabetes. Once consumed, MSG sets into motion a ravenous chemical cascade that begins with spiked blood sugar and insulin and ends with feel-good molecules known as endorphins. The brain then demands more and more overeating.

MSG--This white, crystalline amino acid is made in the lab and added to canned or packaged foods to “enhance flavor.” It only enhances overeating. Check for the aliases in the ingredients---hydrolyzed vegetable protein, hydrolyzed protein, hydrolyzed plant protein, plant protein extract, sodium caseinate, calcium caseinate, yeast extract, textured protein, autolyzed yeast and hydrolyzed oat flour. MSG under in disguise under other names.

My favorite authors

2011-02-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

Mes Amis

I love to share authors. Here is a list of my favorites, along with suggestions from others some of whom I haven't read. The order given doesn't necessarily mean order of preference, as they are written from random memory.

Historical and historical fiction:
Will Durant, my absolute favorite historian. His 100 page, Lessons Of History, an awesome little book, and of course his XI volume Story of Civilization, Story of Philosophy, and numerous other historical stories of famous lives.

Bernard Cornwell. Learned about him from reader Tom Cummings. The Grail quest in Sharpe series, Starbuck Chronicals. All about English history in the 17th century, Recent finished The Archer.

Recently read the whole collection of Martin Cruz Smith--mostly set in Moscow after the wall fell and there is a new Russia run by the Mafia. Senior investigator Arkeny Renkov is an out of favor investigator always in trouble with the bureaucrats, and he always seem to prevail but it is a cliff hanger. My friend Mark Gould calls it "turgid," and I guess it is. My favorite is Rose, set in the coal country in Northern England, Stallion Gate--making of the A bomb including all of the main figures...but there are other great ones: Gorky Park, Stalin's Ghost, Three Stations---there are others, and I recommend them all.

Mary Stewart. Her king Author series, The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last enchantement.

Jack Whyte: Series on Author is fantastic. Start reading the Skystone. It is all about the Camoloud Chronicles, in 400 AD the Legions left the British Isles, leaving the Romans who had lived there for centuries, and their confrontation of invasion from all directions. Bloody times, but beautiful real history woven with the Authorian legend---unexpected stuff, for Merlin was actually a Roman Soldier. And the sword was made of a meteor.

Wilber Smith. His stories of Africa are fabulous. Follow from the beginning when the Boers and English settled Africa through to present time. Men of Men, The Burning Shore, they are all delicious. Read them all. Oh yes, there are his mystical histories of Egypt in the Seventh Scroll, River God, Warlock.

Michener. A treasure. The Covenant, another great story of Africa. Caravans, the Source, my three favorites.

Charles Frazier. cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, set in post civil war. I underline his great phrases and descriptions, noting the page number on the back cover, so I can go back and have a little word snack. I do this with all great writings.

Jeff Sharra---you gotta read his historical fiction on the Revolution, the Civil War, the First and Second World war. He puts you in the head of generals and privates alike, and you learn politics as well as how it was in the trenches. Wonderful stuff.

Bill Bryson. Please read A Walk In the Woods. He and a friend treck the appalacian trail. Funny. A short History of Nearly Everything---I learned more about esoteric and arcane stuff than I could imagine reading this very funny writer talking about serious tech stuff like relativity, etc. Others are The Lost continent, Mother tongue, I'm A Stranger Here myself. Many others. Funny bright writer.

Stephen Ambrose: Undaunted Courage about Lewis and Clark, Jefferson and the opening of the west. Band of Brothers, To America. Wonderful reading.

Alfred Silver. Canadian writer. I stumbled on him buying Red River Story, thinking it was about the US Red River, but there is another Northern Red River, a story of settling the Hudson bay area by the Irish and French. He also wrote Where the Ghost Horse Runs, Lord of the Plains, Arcadia, Colony and Keepers of the Dawn.I read these like a starved man--a harsh time lived by tough harsh men and women in a freezing world -- enough romance to sustain any reader, and enough action to hold any man.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

JRR Tolkein. Perhaps my favorite writer of all genres. You know about him and the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I think I read them all three of four times through before the movies came out. You just get into his world of wonder and become it.

Robert Jordan. So prolific. Wheel of Time, progress through hismany sequels.
Roger Zelazny. The Nine Princes of Amber.
Raymond Feist. Rift war seies. The Magician, Krondor. I read this guy dry.
Orson Scott Card, the Ender and Maker series.
Anne McCaffrey. Pern Novels

Terry Pratchett. Fancy. Discworld series. Funny fantasy. Where's my Cow, the Wyrd Sisters, The Color of Magic. One of his books started with: "In the beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded." That is also my idea of the Big Bang silliness.

Neil Gaiman. I just got through Smoke and Mirrors, Stardust, (movie) Fragile things and am reading Good Omens where he collaborated with Terry Pratchett. He wrote the screenplay for Beowulf, American Hero. A real trip, this guy.

Tom Robbins. I put him into the fantasy category, because I can't categorize him anywhere else. I love his stuff. Totally random but makes wonderful sense all together. Jitterbug Perfume, my favorite, the story of a 1000 year old man. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (movie), Still Life with Woodpecker, Another Roadside Attraction. The others that followed weren't quite as good.

Larry McMurty Omigod I could not believe the extent of this guy's work known for Lonesome Dove, the Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment. I love his westerns---the Berryberry series of a wealthy aristocratic family on a several year jaunt into the american west in early 1800's, with their fine wine, servants and silver and outrageous standards---Sin Killer, Sorrow's River, The wandering Hill, The folly and the glory. Amazing prolific writer. I just finished Telegraph Days---hilarious story of an "Organized Woman," in the 1800's in the west during the days of Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, etc. He said that General Sherman, who paid a visit to the town and met her, said "an organized woman is a fright to the mind." Meaning, a woman who knew her own mind and was independent and did what she wantd.

Jim Harrison. Legends of the fall, the Beast God Forgot to Invent, True North, A Woman Lit by Fireflies, get his book of short stories, Just Before Dark. Tough, intellectual, sensitive, funny and a wordsmith who holds you page by page. A gourmet hunter fisherman with his main subjects always right there to discuss, women, love, sex, food, hunting. Oh yes Brown Dog can't be missed.

Gregory MaGuire. Wicked--life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Ursula LeGuin. Earthsea Trilogy
Agathy Christie--anything by her--specially the Hercule Poirot series.

Louis Lamour. I read every one of his books, the hayburner westerns as well as other real classics--The Walking Drum, 1700's adventures of a son's quest to rescue his father from Arab Kidnappers . Sitka, about Alaska. The Sackett series start with a man in Ireland falsely charged with a crime and he makes his way to America. The Hanuted Mesa is a great one also.

James Lee Burke. Great Detective stories set in Southern Louisiana and New Orleans. Tough ex alcoholic Dave Robichaux lives in a fishing camp near New Iberia with his wife and daughter, works for sheriff's office, ex N.O. Cop. Get his stuff, haunting, wonderful images and thrill packed pages--Neon Rain, Cadillac Jukebox, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.

CS Forester, Hornblower series.

Carl Hiassen. Set in Florida. Totally wild stories about wild people. Hilarious characters. Natuyre Girl, Skinny Dip, Lucky You, Hoot, Native Tongue. Always involve some stupid badass guy getting what he deserves.

James Patterson. Great mysteries. When the Wind Blows, books with nursery rhyme titles.
Bruce Wiseman---Mind Games. Bruce putme onto reading Sol Stein's Stein on Writing, the best book on writing I have read.
Jack Vance.

Eric Van Lustbader, the Ninja, White Ninja, The Bourne Legacy. Gutsy, great writing.
Ludlum. Bourne Series, Matarese Circle. Recently Lustbader took the Bourne series to a new level.
Michael Chrichton. Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timieline, Prey,, Eaters of the Dead, the Thirteenth Warrior.

John Le Carre--Spy who came in frm the cold, the Night Manager, Constant Gardner.
Clive Cussler, Dirk Pitt series. Watch this one though, his name may appear on the cover, but another name in small print appears below his, who really wrote new stuff out there. I have been disappointed in these subliminal authors sliding in below the radar under his name. Clive is great though.

I have run out of authors as I sit here putting this together, but there are many others that I discover and read until I have "read him or her up." You can't miss reading these. I will supplement as I discover others.

Poem to my dear friend Renee' Duke

2011-01-04T10:17:00.001-08:00

Goodbye Hello Renee’

I am blessed to know thee,

Oh blythe spirit.

Thou hath spread thy wings

and flown again.

And circling will find another

place to light and sing thy song

so we may again take joy in hearing,

and learning that which thou may teach

through thy eternal wisdom and fire

that resides within thee.

I for one will miss thy smile and the light

in thine eyes, and the flowers that bloom

around thy feet as thou passeth by.

I will miss the birds that sing around thee all the while.

I know thee now and forever,

My dear friend Renee’.

Return soon and again bless us with thy smile.

L D Sledge

January 4, 2011

Yeats' Angst

2010-12-20T05:02:00.000-08:00

W. B. Yeats is my favorite poet. His poetry touches the mystical and dreamworlds that I sense as well, and here, in today's The Writer's Almanac, is the explanation for his inner pain that gave birth to some of his best work. I feel this, knowing this about him. Find someone you love desperately, and she is there, just out of reach. The emptiness borne of her withdraw in this case gave birth to these famous, poignant, unforgettable lines. Here's the article:

It's the birthday of the woman who inspired this verse by W.B. Yeats: "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, / Enwrought with golden and silver light, / The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / Of night and light and the half light, / I would spread the cloths under your feet: / But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

That's Maud Gonne whom W.B. Yeats (books by this author) was addressing; she was born in Surrey, England, on this day in 1865, just six months after Yeats was born in Dublin. They first met when they were each 25 years old. Yeats later referred to the day he met her as "when the troubling of my life began."

She was an Irish revolutionary, independent-minded, graceful, and reared in affluence. She was tall, red-headed, and exquisitely beautiful. In his Memoirs, Yeats wrote: "I had never thought to see in a living woman such great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race." She wore long black dresses and she kept singing birds as pets.

He asked her to marry him over and over again. She refused, over and over again. She once told him: "You would not be happy with me. ... You make beautifully poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry."

In a letter to him in 1911, she wrote, "Our children were your poems of which I was the father sowing the unrest & storm which made them possible & you the mother who brought them forth in suffering & in the highest beauty."

Yeats wrote about her:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Gift from my student

2010-12-17T08:34:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I picked up my 11 year old student, Allen C., and drove him to the Community Learning Center where we do our tutoring. I teach him reading and grammar. He is around the 3rd or 4th grade level, but very willing. He lives in a small apartment house with his 8 member family.

I brought him a little box of magic tricks and a cool 300 piece jigsaw picture puzzle. He likes those.

When he got in the car he handed me a little flashlight, about 2 inches long, with a keychain. You push a button and a bright little light comes out. He had three of these little plastic alien creatures also. He said he bought them at school that day. He was really proud of the little aliens. He said he bought the light for me. I know he didn't have any money. I didn't expect anything from him, and he was so proud to hand it to me, noting specifically it said "Dad." I didn't and still don't know what to think about that, but maybe I have become a father figure for him.

We had out tutoring lesson and then I showed him how to do some of the magic tricks. When he started to get out of the car, he stood by the door and then handed me the little plastic alien guy and said, "here you go.." I tell you I could not have been prouder of a new car than having this kid, with no money, give me one of his prize possessions. Wow!!

on punctuation

2010-11-30T09:14:00.000-08:00

I love words, how words are arranged and lay on the page for my tasting and frolic among them. I am reading "Rose" by Martin Cruz Smith, who is a wordsmith as good as Tolkein or Peter S Beagle, and that is going some. Those little marks between the words are fun too. Read "Eats, shoots and Leaves," or put another way, Eats shoots, and leaves."

Here's a fun little poem I stole from The Writer's Digest, and am sharing with you.

On Punctuation

by Elizabeth Austen

not for me the dogma of the period

preaching order and a sure conclusion

and no not for me the prissy

formality or tight-lipped fence

of the colon and as for the semi-

colon call it what it is

a period slumming

with the commas

a poser at the bar

feigning liberation with one hand

tightening the leash with the other

oh give me the headlong run-on

fragment dangling its feet

over the edge give me the sly

comma with its come-hither

wave teasing all the characters

on either side give me ellipses

not just a gang of periods

a trail of possibilities

or give me the sweet interrupting dash

the running leaping joining dash all the voices

gleeing out over one another

oh if I must

punctuate

give me the YIPPEE

of the exclamation point

give me give me the curling

cupping curve mounting the period

with voluptuous uncertainty

"On Punctuation" by Elizabeth Austen, from The Girl Who Goes Alone. © Floating Bridge Press, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

Gumbo recipe

2010-11-26T13:14:00.001-08:00

Chicken, Smoked Sausage and Okra Gumbo

Ingredients:

One large fryer

Three Yellow Onions

One bunch of green onions

One bell pepper

Three ribs of celery

Three cloves of garlic

½ teaspoons of parsley flakes

Two lbs of smoked sausage

Two lbs of fresh okra (or three bags of frozen okra) (cut up preferably)

To taste:

Cayenne pepper

Black pepper

Seasoned salt

Garlic powder

Onion powder

· Cut up the fryer and take the skin off. Wash the chicken and pat until only damp. Liberally put on the cayenne and black pepper with the seasoned salt, garlic and onion powder. Rub it in good.

· Put a couple of tablespoons of oil in a skillet and brown the chicken on all sides. Set the chicken aside.

· Using the same skillet or pot where you browned the chicken, make a roux. (pronounced “Roo, as in too.” (ask anybody from South Louisiana how to cook something and they will say “First you make a roux.”)

Heat half cup of oil with half cup of flour (preferably in a cast iron skillet) until it is deep golden brown. You will have to stir it steadily to keep it from caking up or burning.

· Cut up your vegetables and sautee’ them in the roux (may have to add a bit of oil) until they are softened. (They say melt the onions.) for two or three minutes. I usually take longer until they are no longer crisp.

· Add the sausage to the roux and veggies and heat for another five minutes or so. (In my last batch I only had a pound of sausage, but I could have used some more.)

· Add a can of tomatoes.

· I have a huge cast iron pot. I transfer the roux, veggies and sausage to the pot. (Try not to use an aluminum pot unless absolutely necessary.)

· Add 3 quarts of water, and then add the chicken.

· Bring to a boil and then set to simmer.

· Put some oil in a skillet and dump the okra in, and cook it until all the slime is gone. Try to cook until it is almost dry if you can without burning. You need to constantly turn it to get most of the liquid out. Some people object to the slimy effect if you put it in the gumbo without cooking it like this first.

· Dump the okra in the pot.

· Add seasonings of garlic powder, onion powder, seasoned salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper and about 1 ½ teaspoons of parsley flakes. I add a bay leaf or two.

· Simmer for a couple of hours. Some cook for less time. I like to cook it down a bit until it is soupy and thickened a bit and the chicken and sausage is well done. The chicken will usually shred and be scattered throughout. I sometimes take the chicken out half way through and remove the bones. This will give a good distribution of chicken.

· Taste as you go, keep an eye on the gumbo as it cooks and see if it needs salt or whatever. I like it hot and add Cajun seasoning like Tony’s or some other that gives a little heat and flavor.

· Serve over rice. I usually top it off with a bit of Tabasco or hot sauce to make damn sure it is hot enough for me.

· Gumbo can be frozen, and it tastes even better after kind of marrying up with itself for a time in the fridge.

For ambrosia: Cut up oranges, pineapple, granny smith apples, grapefruit, banana, walnuts, sliced almonds and pecans, tiny marshmallows, cherries, blueberries, and any fruit I can think of. It is a kind of fruit gumbo. Then mix in a bit of sour cream and a lots of sweetened shredded coconut. Mix it all up and it is good to go. Lasts a while in the fridge. Great for a snack. Leave out the marshmallows and put unsweetened coconut if you are feeling virtuous.

2010-11-26T09:02:00.000-08:00

On holidays

It’s Friday after Thanksgiving

The world has pressed the pause button

Things are in neutral, except for frenzied shopping in the malls

A palpable calmness is in the air

Life takes time to breathe

It is easy to begin, again.

2010-11-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

It’s easy to begin, again.

There’s no yesterday

Nothing remains.

Except the insubstantial stuff

of memory

that I allow to claim part of my day.

Which is just dumb.

So I begin again every moment

to live, again, and again,

A new chance every moment.

Now, and forever.

Amen

Teaching Angelo

2010-10-08T06:06:00.000-07:00

I have learned the reason that teachers teach.

For the past month or so I have been tutoring at the Clearwater Learning Center. One of my students is Angelo, a bright, cute seven year old Mexican boy. His mama is a single parent, can barely speak English, and he is raised in a home where only Spanish is spoken. She immigrated a few years ago, bought a tiny trailer in a trailer park with money she made cleaning houses and restaurants and has a powerful intention that her children (she has a three year old daughter) get an education and learn English. She is a proud American.

This was complicated by the fact that the school insisted on putting him on Ritalin because he was dispersed and didn’t concentrate!! The child is seven, energetic, bright, curious, and didn’t really have a clue about what was going on in school. Small wonder he was “distracted.” I could rage at this lack of humanity dished out in the robotic school system.

I have been trying to teach Angelo how the short “a” is used. Bat, Rat, Cat, Mat, Sat, etc. I finally, after two lessons got him to actually read these words out loud, but he would read down the line and get to Fat and say, “Sim,” or “Nin,” or something like that and he just didn’t get it. The “at” at the end of Fat, didn’t register as sounding like the others preceding, and he would look at me with those big brown eyes and not know. The lessons would be an hour or sometimes hour and a half two times a week on Mondays and Fridays after his regular school.

I would help him with his homework which was totally ridiculous. Totally out-gradient stuff that meant nothing. He would be given stuff to do and turn it in and never be told if it was right or wrong, for it wasn’t graded by the teacher or returned to him to know what he had done. And some of the questions baffled me. This is the modern school system. No wonder we will be a third world country soon!! And here was a child who was desperately trying to keep up and learn and having started out behind would stay behind unless he had some means, like a tutor like me, who could help him at least move in the stream and not drown in the eddies and log jams of misunderstood words and out gradient stupidities.

I had no idea how his mother Claudia got way across town to the CLC for Angelo’s tutoring, but I learned they had to take a bus and transfer once and walk a distance to get there. So I picked them up a week ago and brought them to my house and Claudia cleaned my house while I tutored Angelo in a long two hour session. She charged me $15 an hour for four hours and her work was fast and totally beautiful. Angelo and I had several breaks so he could look around, play and get exterior. At the end we got through the homework as usual, but still there was a blankness in his eyes when we went through the many words, examples, puzzles, etc., on the “short a.”

So last Monday, October 4, 2010, rather than make them go to so much trouble of bussing to the center, I tutored him at his home. It is a tiny trailer in a mobile home park. She was so proud of it. She said, smiling big: “I pay $5,000 for eet fi year ago.” The trailer had one bedroom, kitchen and little dining room, small room on the side with a sofa, and a screened porch. They are Catholic, and I am invited to his first communion soon. Pictures of the Holy Mother, Jesus, are on the walls and fridge along with little magnetic plastic capital and lower case letters stuck on the fridge door. We sat at the little dining table and went to work.

I first got him through his homework, and then tackled the short a. We went through the usual routine, and though he is energetic he was patient, and still baffled at what I was trying to get across. Now this is the fifth or maybe sixth session. I took the plastic letters down from the fridge and put down “bat,” then “cat.” He got kind of still watching me, and then I had him do “Fat,” all of a sudden his little hands got busy putting together all of the words, even making up three letter words with vowels we hadn’t even used. He was totally blown away to spell “Poo,” which always fascinates seven year olds. So now Pee and Poo were words he could spell in plastic. I felt a rising joy in me as he put word combinations down, and I knew he had it. He had the short a and evidently knew what we had been trying to do!!

I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced, outside of being an auditor and watching the amazing change in your preclear take place right before your eyes, but seeing Angelo cognite on the short a and spelling three letter words, now more and more I know, was nothing short of one of those soaring moments you will never forget that changes you too.

So if you want to have this, to know what I know, I guarantee there are hundreds of thousands of children out there that you can change by simply spending some time like I am with tools which the CLC has, and get after it. Sharon and Holly are angels in my opinion. They run the CLC and have an amazing amount of tools that can be used at every level of learning needs there and they will provide them and help you with the next step.

I also have been tutoring an 11 and 13 year old brother and sister team in grammar. We are on adverbs. There is a grammar kit that makes it simple and gradiently fun and they get it. I had to learn it myself!!

So give of yourself and teach a kid. You never know where it will lead. Like a pebble dropped into a pool the ripples of your action radiate out in every direction and every dimension and touch places you could never guess. All because you dropped a pebble. I love this little kid, and we have bonded. There is a depth of gratitude from Claudia that is almost audible.

I have changed for though I am only dealing with Angelo here, and the others later, even just having one under my wing is enough to know I am making a difference somehow. Angelo will be a man one day and he could even be President of the United States, and he will make a difference. All because I took some time. You can too. If you want to feel like a million, take some time. Reach out and touch someone and see how it feels if for no other reason than to feel like a king. You know you are changing the future when you help a child.

Pay It Forward

2010-09-19T06:43:00.001-07:00

Do you think that you are alone? Do you think that you do not make a difference? Do you feel that your actions are lost in the labyrinth of time and you are only a grain of sand on an infinite beach? You are part of the whole, take you away and the whole is not complete. Without you the fabric of reality could collapse.

What you do makes a difference, and every act or omission is like a pebble dropped into a still pool—the ripples move out in an infinity of directions, touching shores that you could never imagine, and every little thing, regardless of how insignificant you may consider it to be, affects others, as other acts affect you, directly or indirectly.

Smile at someone on a busy street, and that person then knows he or she is acknowledged for his or her existence, then that person feels better and smiles at another. Ripple effect. Did you see the little you tube video of the Russian subway filled with frowning, unhappy people, and the man began to laugh? People at first thought he was crazy, then the person in the seat next was caught up in the laughing---then soon the whole car was filled with rollicking laughter, people smiling at one another, slapping each other on the back, awakened to the fact that they were really one-they were brothers and sisters and a group.

He then gets off at the next stop, gets onto another sad, apathetic car, and does it again, and again. Can you do that just once, can you spare a smile?

I have been trying to say this, and did try to say it in my little quote I have in my emails ("This moment in eternity is as important as any other moment, past or future. What will you do with it.") But I didn't say it as clearly as this little two minute video says it.

http://www.butterflyeffectbook.com/miami

There is a new phrase in the English language abourning, "Pay It Forward." Here is what Wikipedia says about it:

“The expression "pay it forward" is used to describe the concept of asking that a good turn be repaid by having it done to others instead. In contract law, typically there are two parties but there is the concept of third party beneficiaries. Pay it forward merely applies this contract law concept so that third party beneficiary be a stranger to the creditor (or obligee). More specifically, the creditor (obligee) offers the debtor (obligor) the option of "paying" the debt forward by lending it to athird person instead of paying it back to the original creditor. Debt and payments can be monetary or by good deeds. In sociology, this concept is called "generalized reciprocity" or "generalized exchange". A related transaction, which starts with a gift instead of a loan, is alternative giving.”

In other words, do whatever good you do without expectation of return, but collect the debt as paid in full by having the debtor do something good for another.

I think if we live our lives with a "pay it forward" state of mind, we as a group, and we are a group whether we realize it and act like it or not, and what we do to and for each other impoverishes or enriches in proportion. Watch this video, and live today with this in mind.

L D Sledge

A Fisherman Changes His Mind

2010-09-17T04:24:00.001-07:00

A Fisherman Changes His Mind

By L D Sledge

September 17, 2010

In my youth the still deep waters

Of a bay, a lake a creek

Tugged me to explore, to wonder and thrill at what

monstrous creatures lurked below the sunken logs

and deep, dark holes

yearning to see the sudden dip of the end of my pole

feel the tug on my line as I fought to bring him up and

see him, feel his living flipping slippiness in my hands,

my trophy my joy at having won not my dinner but

something more visceral and ancient in my blood.

Now that I am longer in the tooth I pass those placid ponds,

Or that shining bay and think of those old ones

Those who have seen days like mine,

Who have passed the days of fight

Whom I now salute as I pass and smile

And wish them well in declining years

Who deserve to lay low and sleep safe in their warm deep

And dream of beautiful fish

As I dream of girls beyond my reach.

A Woodcutter Changes His Mind

by David Budbill

When I was young, I cut the bigger, older trees for firewood, the ones
with heart rot, dead and broken branches, the crippled and deformed

ones, because, I reasoned, they were going to fall soon anyway, and
therefore, I should give the younger trees more light and room to grow.

Now I'm older and I cut the younger, strong and sturdy, solid
and beautiful trees, and I let the older ones have a few more years

of light and water and leaf in the forest they have known so long.
Soon enough they will be prostrate on the ground.

"The Woodcutter Changes His Mind" by David Budbill, from While We've Still Got Feet: New Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 2005. Reprinted without permission.

(I am a subscriber and admirer of The Writer's Almanac, by Garrison Keillor of The Prairie Home Companion. I receive the Almanac daily, which contains a poem and a bio of some artists or celebrated historical character. This morning, September 17, 2010, I felt a resonance with the poem about the woodcutter, for I once was a hunter and zealous fisherman, and I no longer hunt for I see no sense in killing any creature that contains life unless it is contra-survival such as flies or roaches or termites or rats, and have lost the burning desire to catch the biggest catfish or bass in the lake. So I wrote my poem about the fisherman changing his mind.

The image of the fish is by James Christenson, fantasy artist.

Guggenheim and art

2010-08-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

In 2003 my son Tom and I went on a 3 week trip to France and Italy. I wanted to go to Italy to see the art, and there was plenty of it. After two weeks I stopped turning around to see another statue, though they were fantastic. We took an overnight train from Paris to Venice, and on a shuttle I met a lady who was the manager of the Guggenheim museum. She invited me to the museum, with perhaps a coffee or a glass of wine. She was attractive but I was married and thought this would only be an adventure in art. So Tom and I visited the museum, which backed on one of the large canals.

What impressed me was that Peggy Guggenheim had to be blinded by the personalities of the artists she took to her bosom, (and from what I see she held a number rather close to it), for the art at that museum consisted of smudges of paint on a canvas. There were a few pieces that had some aesthetic appeal, and I like modern art, but I remember one huge canvas with a small black brush mark in the upper left corner with a huge price tag. The only one that made sense to me was this picture I took of the horse and rider which was outside on the deck by the canal. I saw a copy of it in the Getty museum in LA as well. Not sure what it says, but art is of the soul, not of this earth, and needs no definition for it stands alone. I kinda understand this rider's problem, but art is to be felt, not understood. Right? I think it is funny, and compared to the other totally ridiculous stuff I saw in that museum is really not bad.

What started this was the article in this morning's (August 26, 2010) Writer's Almanac which follows:

It's the birthday of memoirist and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, (books by this author) born in New York City (1898). Her father died on the Titanic shipwreck, and at the age of 14 she inherited nearly half a million dollars.

She moved to Europe to live a Bohemian lifestyle. She had an affair with Samuel Beckett, as well as several other artists.

Back in her native New York City, she opened a gallery called "Art of this Century" on West 57th Street. She became the patron of an unknown abstract painter by the name of Jackson Pollock, supporting him so he could be a full-time artist, and she held a one-man show for him at her gallery, one of his first. Soon he was famous.

She wrote some memoirs about her affairs with the rich and famous and artistic, including Out of This Century (1946) and Confessions of an Art Addict (1960).

Responsibilities of Patriotic Americans

2010-08-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

My Dear Friends:

I am forwarding this*, not because I am forwarding negative things, but as a note of pride as an American and perhaps with a view that we can make a change in the way things are happening and even in how we think about today's confusions.

A giant of a man, Patrick Valtin, (www.M2-tec.com) is my partner in co-writing The Business Owner's HIRING BIBLE, a manual to help small business people walk through the minefield that exists today in negligent hiring, discrimination lawsuits, etc. The judgments against business are incredible and shocking. We are writing this book, followed by seminars and consultation in this area, to help the floundering and even baffled businessmen and women through the maze of potential liability by hiring the wrong person, and helping them hire the top players. My partner is one of the top business consultants in all of Europe.

He tells me that while he was growing up in Belgium, America was considered an honest country that stood tall in integrity and ethics. It was the promised land. He says the viewpoint is now different, in doubt, and there is deep suspicion of what we are really about after all.

I almost weep when I think of how those who first saw the noble lady standing in the harbor and they knew of these words:

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

So how do we handle and live with those "yearning to breathe free" from the south of here, who evidently are a different class and viewpoint of need than those who first kissed the earth at Ellis Island years ago, and came here through open door that still exists?

We are confused, hurt, and angered at those who do not respect the concept and reality that is the home of the free and the brave yet violate the law to come here and enjoy the fruits of our toil and soil. We own this place. So how do we, as a nation of freedom loving men and women, cope and deal with this?

My partner says Americans love freedom (which we take for granted) and that is one thing we will not give up. We just assume our freedom is free. Europeans and other cultures do not have such. We just don't appreciate it for we have never been without it in our memory. When he told me that Americans love freedom, I was surprised for that was a “given” in my mind, not a gift but some kind of free license. Hey, it exists here but nowhere else!!!

The wrong thing to do is to do nothing. If you are sailing on the ocean and you are not steering your boat, you will crash on the rocks or someone else will steer for you and you better like the direction he is taking you. Don't just squat on the deck and bitch. Join a group that you know is enlightened who can direct, as a group with an enlightened and intelligent leader and leadership, to a true patriotic goal of restoration of respect and constitutional order. Not a teaparty of cussin' wild gun toters (I am a gun toter and proud of it) going in all directions at once. I want to hook up but don't know what to hook up with.

I am investigating Dr. Richard Davis, MD (www.PatriotStorm.com( (www.SUEtheFED.com). The stats are remarkable and the purpose good. I only know that I must do something, and not sit on my behind and groan when I get such things as I am forwarding here. I have vowed not to forward such if there is nothing that can be done, when forwarding only causes us more grief.

I don't have stats or time or wherewithal to start my own, so I am looking for the star to hook my wagon to, and then rally others to ride the wagon. Maybe Davis is the answer. It is to be seen. Meanwhile I am sure there are others, but his seems pretty cool. I will report. There is a meeting on September 7 in Tampa. I will give more details when I get them.

Consider this as a positive, not a negative forward, for I want you to look at what you can do. The Mexican exodus is only a symptom of a much greater problem, and the source of the bleeding must be found and not just bandaided, but fixed for good, not replacing one batch of SOBS for another batch of SOBS.

Let us not flush ourselves down the drain by inactivity, by apathy, by undefined anger and wasted energy by striking out in the wrong direction. Get a direction and move on it, put some money and energy to it, and then ride.

If you have any creative ideas, share, and I will disseminate. I am tired of getting this kind of forward without answer. I get this all the time from my friends who should know better. If you have a bellyache, don't tell me about it. I have a bellyache of my own. Fix yourself or shut up. But stop whining by forwarding things that have nothing but frustrating bitching, true or not. Be positive, where are you on the tone scale by sending this without a positive answer to it? Think about it.

You will hear more about this, count on it. Meantime, wake up, take responsibility, do something!!

Much love to all of you

L D Sledge

*Pictures of those who first came to Ellis Island and then pictures of Mexicans degrading America and our Flag.

The Truth About the McDonaald's Coffee Burn Case

2010-06-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Friends, as a courtroom trial lawyer for 43 years, juries became less and less friendly as the insurance companies propaganda became more and more effective. For example the celebrated lie promulgated by Travelers (I think it was). They said they had to settle a case for a huge amount for a man who tried to cut his hedge with a lawnmower and injured himself. This was all over the news. This and other constant bombardment by PR smeared lawyers and lawsuits with propaganda constantly. I felt like I was in a war, for I had to confront juries with their arms folded with that look on faces that said, "come on scumbag, lets hear what lies you are going to tell us."

This culminated in the McDonald's case, which I have cited below from Wikipedia. There is a part of a trial called "voir dire," in French meaning to see and to hear, wherein the lawyer asks prospective jurors in the "selection" process, how they feel about things.

"Who has heard of the McDonald's coffee burn case?" Every hand went in the air. "Mr. Smith, what do you think about that?" Mr. Smith would say it was outrageous. So would Mr. Jones, Mrs. Thibodaux, and Mrs. Boudreaux. I would have to take another tack, and ask them if they could erase that case from the book I was going to read from and start with a clean white bright page with nothing written on it, no McDonald's case in the pages, and consider it free and clear of any other case? Some would say yes, and some say no. I would strike the no's, and there was always some vigilante who said yes and as a sleeper he would be negatively influential.

So the McDonald's case was murder for me as a trial lawyer for the remaining years I was in the business as a courtroom plaintiff lawyer. Here is what really happened, as per Wikipedia. (BTW, the anatomical part that was scalded was a very personal part to Mrs. Liebeck, rendering it scarred and traumatically affected for her love life.)

Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants also known as the "McDonald's coffee case," is a 1994 product liability lawsuit that became a flashpoint in the debate in the U.S. over tort reform after a jury awarded $2.86 million to a woman who scalded herself with hot coffee she purchased from fast food restaurant McDonald's. The trial judge reduced the total award to $640,000, and the parties settled for a confidential amount before an appeal was decided. The case entered popular lore as an example of frivolous litigation; ABC News called the case “the poster child of excessive lawsuits.

Liebeck's attorneys argued that McDonald's coffee was "defective", claiming that it was too hot and more likely to cause serious injury than coffee served at any other place. Moreover, McDonald's had refused several prior opportunities to settle for less than the $640,000 ultimately awarded. Reformers defend the popular understanding of the case as materially accurate, note that the vast majority of judges who consider similar cases dismiss them before they get to a jury,and argue that McDonald's refusal to offer more than a nuisance settlement reflects the meritless nature of the suit rather than any wrongdoing

Lawsuit

Facts

On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered a 49¢ cup of coffee from the drive-through window of a local McDonald's restaurant. Liebeck was in the passenger's seat of her Ford Probe, and her grandson Chris parked the car so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap. Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin as she sat in the puddle of hot liquid for over 90 seconds, scalding her thighs, buttocks, and groin. Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (nearly 20% of her body weight), reducing her down to 83 pounds. Two years of medical treatment followed.

Settlement offers

Liebeck sought to settle with McDonald's for US $20,000 to cover her medical costs, which were $11,000, but the company offered only $800. When McDonald's refused to raise its offer, Liebeck retained Texas attorney Reed Morgan. Morgan filed suit in a New Mexico District Court accusing McDonald's of "gross negligence" for selling coffee that was "unreasonably dangerous" and "defectively manufactured". McDonald's refused Morgan's offer to settle for $90,000 Morgan offered to settle for $300,000, and a mediator suggested $225,000 just before trial, but McDonald's refused these final pre-trial attempts to settle.

Trial

The trial took place from August 8–17, 1994, before Judge Robert H. Scott.[13] During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds. Liebeck's attorney argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. Liebeck's lawyers presented the jury with evidence that 180 °F (82 °C) coffee like that McDonald’s served may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about 12 to 15 seconds. Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. (A British court later rejected this argument as scientifically false. Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns. McDonald's claimed that the reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that those who purchased the coffee typically were commuters who wanted to drive a distance with the coffee; the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip. However, this claim contradicts the company's own research that showed customers actually intend to consume the coffee while driving to their destination.

Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.[4] McDonald's quality control manager, Christopher Appleton, testified that this number of injuries was insufficient to cause the company to evaluate its practices. He argued that all foods hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constituted a burn hazard, and that restaurants had more pressing dangers to warn about. The plaintiffs argued that Appleton conceded that McDonald's coffee would burn the mouth and throat if consumed when served.[16]

Verdict

A twelve-person jury reached its verdict on August 18, 1994. Applying the principles of comparative negligence, the jury found that McDonald's was 80% responsible for the incident and Liebeck was 20% at fault. Though there was a warning on the coffee cup, the jury decided that the warning was neither large enough nor sufficient. They awarded Liebeck US$200,000 in compensatory damages, which was then reduced by 20% to $160,000. In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jurors apparently arrived at this figure from Morgan's suggestion to penalize McDonald's for one or two days' worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day. The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald's and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount less than $600,000.

Who is Really Responsible for the Oil Spill

2010-06-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

I must put in a word about the BP oil spill.

Who is responsible?

We are.

We Americans insist on gas guzzling vehicles, air conditioning always set on freezing, appliances that gobble energy, and a lifestyle that Julius Caesar or the Pharoahs would have thought to be paradise. This lifestyle requires more gas, which demands more oil, which pushes exploration into new and untested areas. If it can happen, it will happen. And it happened, finally. Inevitable.

In June, 1967 an almost identical incident occurred in the gulf at 200 feet of water when the IXTOC (spelling), a Mexican well blew out with 30,000 barrels of oil a day spilling into the Gulf.

Watch this youtube interesting newscast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo

It took six or eight months to finally shut it down with about the same amount of oil now gushing into my beautiful Gulf of Mexico at the hand of British Petroleum. They tried everything that BP has tried, and not worked, except BP has 5000 feet of water. Finally the pressure in the Mexican well was reduced by offset drilling. I think they drilled two wells into the same shaft or something and reduced the pressure enough to cap it. I am not sure if BP has the technology to do that at a mile down.

In other words, the greed of oil companies push beyond their ability to repair at the expense of the environment. They had no way of knowing how to fix this if it should happen, and it happened. It is like walking too close to the edge and falling with no safety harness. It is just going to happen. That is the way things work on this planet and in this universe. If it can happen, it will happen.

This time it has the potential of destroying the fishing, shrimping, crabbing, oyster fishing, sporting, and the beautiful pristine estuaries of my wonderful old fishing grounds in the marshes and coastline of Louisiana. There are things that can be done to repair, such as using friendly oil loving microbes by people like my friend Mark Gould, which would eat the oil and leave no harmful residue. But do you think they will buy it? Lets see what will happen.

The point of this writing is to put responsibility where it should be. We, the energy sucking Americans, let the dogs out, and the dogs here are companies like BP, who with bravado ventured out beyond reason at our expense---not their expense mind you---for they have money beyond counting. And they could give a damn less about what happens.

And who really owns BP? It is rumored that the Rothchilds, those who make and break presidents and control the lives of everyone in the Western world and possibly elsewhere. Do you think they give a damn about Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama or Florida? Don’t be silly.

Don’t be too hard on BP because of its vile stupidity. Had we insisted on alternative sources or energy, rather than let the Rothchilds and Rockefellers and their ilk run our lives, this would not have happened. If we weren’t so damn selfish and self-centered, we would have never allowed the oil people to control our economy. Hey, we like it as long as it is going well, don’t we, except for the prices which we bitch about.

I think we got what we all kind of expected would happen sooner or later. But as humans, and that is not saying much, we cannot take the blame or handle responsibility, so lets kill BP and the politicians, etc.

There I’ve said it and I am glad. Humans, please get it right for once.

psychiatry is an ass

2010-06-07T07:26:00.000-07:00

"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, "the law is an ass---an idiot." (Charles Dickens-Oliver Twist)

In the case I am about to cite, and quote verbatim from headlines of the June 5, 2010 issue of the St Petersburg Times, the law is an ass or worse. My experience with psychiatrists in forty three years of practicing law taught me they are just the opposite of the Hippocratic oath they took: "first do no harm." I was no "sit in the office and notarize papers or talk to high falutin' corporate clients". I was in the trenches, representing people in court, going to their homes and work sites, helping those who couldn't help themselves. So I have seen life and the law from the bottom up.

I asked "what is man?" After ruminating on this a bit, "Dr." Curtis Steele, a Baton Rouge shrink, said "an isolated and random occurrence in a chaotic universe." In other words, an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters would eventually type the U S Constitution. An accident. Here goes the article. Decide for yourself who is the ass.

STATE PAID REKERS DOUBLE
The state used him to defend its ban on gay adoptions, despite attorney's objections.

TALLAHASSEE: Disgraced psychologist George Rekers was labeled a "right-wing, religious-based" expert witness and rejected for months by state attorneys defending Florida's gay adoption ban.
But when they couldn't find anyone else to replace him on the witness stand, Attorney General Bill McCollum overuled his trial attorneys, quickly hired Rekers, and paid him his agreed upon contract with no questions asked, according to documents released this week by McCollum's office.
Rekers, a psychiatry professor at the University of South Carolina has been stripped of his credibility after reports surfaced that he hired a male escort from rentboy.com to give him nude "sexual" massages and accompany him on a recent European vacation.
The adoption ban has been ruled unconstitutional and the state is appealing. The state paid Rekers more than $120,000 to testify on the "negative effects" of gay parenting. (comment: go figure)
Rekers' fee was almost a third of what the state has spent on the gay adoption ban lawsuit to date--$383,000. Half the cost has gone to attorney's fees; the rest to general expenses, including $120,000 to Rekers.
Meanwhile, records obtained by St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald show that despite repeated objections from the Department of Children and Families, the attorney general agreed to advance Rekers $60,900 to get him to take the case and another $59,700 a year later as the case dragged on.
The payments included $9,000 for 30 hours of searching journal articles and books, $27,000 to "read the relevant publications since Sept 2004 and evaluate and critique the "methodological quality". A year later he charged nearly 30 hours for reading the same materials again.
McCollum said he wouldn't hire Rekers again knowing what he knows today, but he defends the expense. "The only problem we had was the expert, and the amount of money, and the credibility of the expert" Bob Butterworth, the then Secretary of the agency said.
McCollum's staff asked for the first check to be expedited because they feared losing him before their deadline to submit the expert witness list.
Rekers asked for the money up front so that his fees would not be contested, as had happened in previous cases in which he testified. McCollum said he was aware that Rekers was not considered as credible in Arkansas as he had been in a previous case in which he was used in Florida, "but he was qualified. There was never any dispute over his qualifications."
Hannah, the Attorney General handling the case, acknowledged they hired Rekers to bolster their case."If you haven't hired the experts to help you win the case, then you're bot doing the job. You can't sit and rationalize over the expert or later even over his personal life," she said.

I have seen some really insane things happen in court, but this takes the cake.

I had a childlike faith that the law would always be based on reason and the truth would eventually be revealed. It was the catalyst of two opposing elements, forming during and as a result of the conflict, the truth. Not!

The American legal court system works well enough, in spite of the fact that the courts accept experts to give opinions to bolster the position of one side or the other, and the only expertise accepted by the courts in the area of mental problems are the psychiatrists who haven't a clue. All experts are paid for their opinions. The court or jury will buy one over the other, based on varied criteria---from personality to the number of degrees and certificates held to the amount of statistics that can be rattled off convincingly. Many times it was a race between the other lawyer and I to get to a particular expert because he was good. He usually managed to rationalize my position over the other side. Many are what may be referred to as whores. Some are honest, and credible. But if you want to win your case, do you really want to know the implicit truth? That is why they say lawyers all go to hell. I didn't play that game during the last twenty five years of my practice. And there are some good lawyers who won't play that game either. The idea is to seek them out if you wish. Most people want a junk yard dog when it comes to taking a case to court. And the lawyer makes the moral decisions on how to prosecute the case.

Rekers is a good representative of and just a speck in the mass of nastiness that is psychiatry. But he will survive, believe it or not, and continue to keep his license and continue to "do harm" wherever he goes.

Sushi

2010-04-12T06:24:00.001-07:00

Sushi
By L D Sledge

Sushi made of little fishes.
Eat ‘em raw on little dishes.
How they make that funny rice,
stuck together neat and nice.
Wrap around that eel so tasty.
Eat it all so none is wasty.
OO wowie, that stuff is hot,
what you call it, wasabi what?
When it hit you, it start biting,
make you feel like kung fu fighting.
Little leaves of pinky ginger
send me off on fishy bender.
Wash it down with vase of saki.
Hit me like a puck of hockey!
Full of fishes, fried they not.
Rice and ginger, wasabi hot.
Can’t believe how much I ate.
Started early ended late.
Oh my God look at that bill!
Was it worth it for the thrill?
Help me get up from this chair.
Carry me out to cool night air.
I’ll be back tomorrow night.
I don’t care if wrong or right.
Little fishes every day,
make me troubles go away.

IS THIS OUR MANIFEST DESTINY?

2010-03-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

Struggling in the Straight Jacket

Are we in extremis, the final struggle to keep life in our amazing Republic, attended to by the high socialist priests-executioners giving the final rites to a dying dream?

Two hundred thirty four years ago, in 1777, brave patriots wintered in Valley Forge in one of the worst winters in history without blankets, shoes, or food, then marched through the snow unshod and freezing to fight for the freedom we have had until recently. We broke free of the yoke of tyranny through their sacrifices and the courage of those few men who dared and risked their lives and fortunes to rebel. And they won.

Their faith in the basic goodness of man grew and lived on through that dream and built the greatest nation on earth in two hundred short years.

This country was built on the ideal that man should and could be free to pursue liberty and happiness. This was the great experiment in hope that the ideal would flourish, prosper, and live on. We stepped forward in an unrelenting cadence of confidence and optimism through the years, as if it would last forever. We conquered those faraway blue mountains, reached the sea, expanded north and south without any thought other than being the best was our manifest destiny. We knew we could reach as far as we could see and dream. And we did, for we were individuals with integrity and the idea of no limitation.

I know of no other country which has survived this long with such far reaching aspirations intact. We have spent two hundred years in a wild howling charge over the ramparts of this idea that nothing is impossible as individuals, for no real creation has ever been achieved by a bunch of people. It has always been individual genius that pushed the crowd out of their comfortable little boxes and over the edge into betterment.

So where are we now? What has happened to us to punish our individuality by tax and rewarding the crowd which produces nothing with our energies and productivity? We are following the down spiral of the economic history of every great civilization. Is this the manifest destiny of man on this planet? Is this the eventual destiny of America? Are we to become one governmental entity of peoples north and south, giving our energies to support those who have no energy? Is this right?

Is this the idea of the greater good? Smother the productive to give to those who do nothing but consume? Give power of decision and choice to a government of self seekers who run it with robotic bureaucrats and give the profits to cronies? Is this the greatest good for the greatest number?
Now we are really no longer a Republic, handing such massive control over to the burgeoning, pregnant, fat and useless bureaucracy of political patronage and political payback for votes and favors. Who really controls this country now? It isn’t run for, by and of the people any more.

Witnessing the recent larceny and theft of the rights of the majority of Americans, even while the huge majority was screaming “no” they stole a huge sector of American rights away, without due process of law unless you call the recent congressional convoluted legislative trick process of law.

We have stopped being the steely eyed individual, gazing across the blue mountains to a future lying beyond, knowing that we can go just as far as we want. Now we are wary of saying what we think, doing what we want, for there are laws that wall us away from that freedom, and taxes that kill our incentives. We have found the enemy and they are us, my friends. We are totally responsible for the condition we are in.

So where do we go from here? Nothing? Lie back and be comfortable, the government will take care of us? Is this our ultimate manifest destiny? Seems so.

What can you do about it? The worst thing you can do is do nothing. Start a movement in the area where you live. If you love your country and remember how good it was before we drifted into this dead welfare zone, then get with some friends and start something. Everything big started small. Do not tolerate rabble rousers or hate mongers. Qualify your people as Patriots only, those who are not afraid to stand and be counted. Not a Tea Party necessarily, but a small group growing to a large group, grow to town meetings, then county then state and do something!!!

Get yourself a constitution and rules to follow, with goals and purposes and policies to follow. Get paid members who will work. Be vocal. Follow your own goals and be true to them. Read the Bill of Rights and the constitution of this country and make sure you understand it and stick with it. You will get results. The dark side cannot win if you shine the light of the U S Constitution in their eyes.

I BEEN THINKING

2010-02-26T19:26:00.001-08:00

I been thinking.

Like my old buddy and law school roommate Martin Smith would say: “It’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.” I reckon that’s about right.

After another decade of marriage, and then a year or so after the divorce from Amelia—--I am gradually, and resistingly, receding into the life of a single man living alone. Tonight I came home after being with my buddies at the Artist In Action meeting in Clearwater with all the ruckous from “Fourth Friday on Cleveland Street", and things were just where I had left them. It was quiet; so quiet that I could almost hear it. And I felt like somebody was here, in the other room, and I was not alone. That is probably so, but I kept expecting in some part of my mind to have her, or someone, call my name or say something and appear through the door.

So when one finally terminates a relationship that almost was, there is a vacuum, and not so much guilt for not having done enough, or having done too much, but there is a feeling that maybe I could have made the difference if I had just known how. After four trips down the aisle, I think I know how to handle that now, but do I? I was selfish every time. I have enough tech under my belt not to let it run out and dry up and die on the vine for lack of putting 1000% into it with the fertilizer that makes such grow and bloom.

I guess that some things are unworkable when the music just never harmonized enough to make both want to dance together regardless of how much they want to or try. Two good people on the edge of the abyss of lonliness—wanting more--. We are no longer “us” except as friends, and good friends. Damn. Oh well, it’s done now, and it just hit me as I came home tonight that it is a done deal, and there is no looking or going back.

I have been working with a lady named Ingrid who is helping me with ethics, finding my purpose in life. Mr. Hubbard says that one knows one’s purpose in life by the time he is two years old. I had forgotten mine.

I began to look, and after going down a bunch of dead ends, saw(in my mind) a painting I did while I was in college. I took up oil painting—never took any lessons—just played with it and should have never gone to law school but should have pursued art for I was good and could have made a great and fulfilling career painting. Instead I had to go to law school for that was the thing and was commercially feasible—so I was told---and that was true---I was damn good, but always unhappy.

As I meandered trying to find that concept, that thought, that bright spot in the far corner of my past that was covered by so much debris, I suddenly turned a mental corner and there it was. It was a painting of two old men, Mexicans I guess, sitting against a dark umber wall, with hats down over eyes as in siesta, with guitar by one, and the light was just right. It was mostly black and umbers and whites. Boom, I realized what a major thing I had done when I painted it---it was perfect---. I had let myself go while painting it with no worry of the outcome, and something happened. She asked me about it, what was special about it, and it hit me!!! I had put myself into it!

This is a thing that I had abandoned on my way down that winding trail to here and now. I had failed to put me into what I was doing, and had become random, bored, just playing, not serious, not real, having spent forty three years as a lawyer doing something off my purpose line, and had never had fulfillment in achievement, regardless of how much money I had made or cases I had won. I remember settling the biggest case ever, quite a few million dollars with a fee of more than a million. My staff was ecstatic. I was bored. It was kind of "so what"? It was more money than I had ever dreamed of having. I had never put myself into it or whatever I was doing. I had left behind the thing I loved most—painting—like abandoning my one true love to marry a rich widow I didn’t really care for that much.

So now, I will put myself fully into anything and everything I do without reservation. If I am headed through the door, I am going through that door. Like Amanda Ambrose once said in a song, “If you don’t like me walking on you, well get up offa the floor.”

The discovery of this within me came at the right time. I can devote my time to production. I am co-writing a manual with the genius and most remarkable man I know, Patrick Valtin, and that is going to contain “me” for I will put me into it—and it will be amazing.

It has been a long time since I have written a personal blog, and coming home to this empty house required that I document this moment in time for things will not be always so desolate, unless I want it. It is damn fine to be in charge again. It is not so lonely with me here as my best friend.

Mobius' Trip

2010-01-06T13:06:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-11T04:06:00.000-08:00

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. Â© 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 â€” 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

2009-10-28T03:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-05T09:21:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-07-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-07-21T04:13:00.000-07:00

July 21, the birthday of Earnest Hemingway. I grew up with Hemingway being the literary giant of the age. "The Old Man And The Sea" was serialized in Life Magazine in the Fifties. I read it wondering at the futility of effort and life that exuded from the story, hoping for something more. An old fisherman caught this huge fish that pulled him for days until it surrendered and he brought it in after nearly killing himself to prove to the villagers that he was really worthwhile as a man. But when he got in the predators had eaten it. The reason I put the image in this of the "flowers in the dark" as I call them, is that Hemingway was a man with flowers in his heart but darkness in his soul.

Then he did lots of things he should not have, as most of us have, and had no tool to deal with it or cleanse himself of his overts and withholds as we call them, and suffered. The suffering from such by a sensitive soul is to bring self inflicted justice in such extreme measure upon ones self that it seems inexplicable that one could have so much bad luck. He made the mistake of seeking help from psychiatry, and shock treament. They put electrodes on both temporals and send huge jolts of electricity through to "cure" one. They have no clue as to what this is supposed to do, but it subdues the patient, giving him more problems than he had before. I have seen this happen over and over, and then the patient turns to drugs to ease the new pain overlaid on the old, and dies while still living. Hemingway took a shotgun and blew his brains out for he found he could no longer write or create----it stripped him of his creativity and thus his very life.

I know of a few who do not look for love. Some are able to sublimate the need for a partner with whom to laugh and create and satisfy needs with activity of some sort. I am one who needs both, needing a sexual partner and someone with whom I can create joy and life. I happen to love the grace and wonder of a beautiful woman. I recently fell obsessively into the abyss over an exotic Italian woman who couldn't make up her mind. She had me, lock stock and barrel. Her reach and withdraw was maddening. Maybe something like that happened to Hemingway. He was married a number of times, and loved the ladies, and when you play that game you expose yourself to the vicissitudes and wild random variables of the game, and can become a babbling idiot over a woman. I know it can drive one over the edge, but I fortunately had my tools of Scientology to save me. Poor bastard didn't have anything but psychiatry, the very essence of evil, which crushed him in its tentacles and destroyed the essence of his life.

There's a legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to create a six-word story, and he said, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Inspired by this, an online magazine invited readers to submit their own six-word memoirs, a collection of which was published by Harper Collins in 2008 as Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Six-word memoirs include: "All I ever wanted was more" and "Moments of transcendence, intervals of yearning" and "They called. I answered. Wrong number." (The above paragraph was stolen from today's The Writer's Almanac,by Garrison Keillor.

Seems both presidential candidates in the 2008 election said that his "For Whom The Bells Toll," was their favorite book. A wounded man in the Spanish Civil war heroically holds off the enemy while his comrades escape. I can see McCain holding this book to his breast, but the idea of Hussein Barak Obama having any courage or bravery as a mantra is a mockery.

I read somewhere that someone asked Hemingway about rewriting a story, saying, "I hear that you had to revise it fifteen times, why did it take so many times?" Hemingway replied, "to get the words right." Writing is rewriting. Write the story fast, et it out of you, put it on the paper, don't give a damn about grammar or anything, just get it out. Then go back and fix it. He was a master of minimalism. I wonder, with the writer and reader climate of today, if he would be recognized as the great icon he became or have been swallowed up in the stampede of writers trying to get attention---and if the women editors and publishers would have approved of his extreme maleness. I wonder. Seems the male icon is vanishing. At a writers conference, a woman editor/agent brayed to the audience, "The Day of the Male is dead, thank God." Appears she was close to right. Look what we got for a President.

Quote by Martha Graham

2009-07-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

I am not a great fan of dance, but I have been to the ballet and I have seen some strange things done on stage called dance. But when I saw the Martha Graham dancers performing at the Louisiana State University theater back in the seventies, I was impressed. This was truly dance as it could be, for it wasn't just a bunch of jumping around emoting---it was exquisite, fluid human motion, expressive and so unique that it left an indelible impression of aesthetics on me.

My good friend Eugenio Castillio, of Mexico City, a great artist and performer in his own right (I never saw him dance and would probably ask him not to try when I was looking) sent me this quote by Martha Graham.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.”

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly; to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU. Keep the channel open…”

“No artist is pleased… There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Reaching for ourselves, sometimes finding.

2009-07-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

Man reaches for beauty, and in touching knows, but only has a hint of what is there that is his to have. We know there is something there, something so valuable and so powerful that we try to express it in mere words, usually called poetry, or song, or images, to say to ourselves and others what we feel, and always come short for there is no way in this mortal form that we can fully have it or say it for in its raw form would be too beautiful to hold.

I truly believe we had it once, as we had other universes, and I don't mean other worlds or other places somewhere among the stars of this one---I mean universes that were universes of song, of aesthetics, and it is that toward which we long. We sometimes touch chords that resonate through barriers around us we have self created uusually to protect ourselves from the backlash of our own transgressions---so we have gone deaf and dumb to the music that surrounds us. Even the chimp in the image knows something.

The following poem was "lifted" from Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Poems like this touch the longing in me for that which I feel I lost somewhere along the way.

Black Islands
by Martin Espada
for Darío

At Isla Negra,
between Neruda's tomb
and the anchor in the garden,
a man with stonecutter's hands
lifted up his boy of five
so the boy's eyes could search mine.
The boy's eyes were black olives.
Son, the father said, this is a poet,
like Pablo Neruda.
The boy's eyes were black glass.
My son is called Darío,
for the poet of Nicaragua,
the father said.
The boy's eyes were black stones.
The boy said nothing,
searching my face for poetry,
searching my eyes for his own eyes.
The boy's eyes were black islands.

"Black Islands" by Martín Espada, from The Republic of Poetry. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Reprinted without permission

It's the birthday of poet and politician Pablo Neruda, born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, in Parral, Chile (1904). As a boy, he read all the time and wrote poetry. Even though his father disapproved of his writing, he kept doing it, and he was encouraged by the poet Gabriela Mistral, who lived in his town and later became the first Chilean to win a Nobel Prize. In 1923, when the boy was 19, he sold all his possessions in order to publish his first book, Crepusculario (Twilight), and he published it under the name Pablo Neruda so his father wouldn't be upset. In 1924, he published Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, known in English as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which was incredibly successful.

The following is a Poem Of You I wrote after reading L. Ron Hubbard's little Essay "You."

A jewel that is not a jewel, but is worth more than all the jewels in the universe.
A light that is not a light but a torch that burns forever witha brightness that illuminates all.
A song that is not a song but contains all the music that is or ever will be.
A power that is not a power but a potential of uniminaginable exquisiteness.
A promise that is not a promise but a future certain waiting to unfold in the fullness of time.
A knowing that is a knowing of all, past and future,and a certainty beyond all certainty.
A truth that envelopes the allness of all, that reaches beyond the beyond, untroubled and waiting for the defoliating of the dreams of pain and storm.
This is song of you, all this and more, a thing of infinite beauty.
May 2007

The Declaration of Independence, my version

2009-07-05T06:59:00.001-07:00

There comes a time when you have just had too much, and too much is way far more than enough, and you reach the point when you simply can’t stand yourself any longer for putting up with it. You don’t file for divorce, you just walk. If you gotta fight, you fight your way clear. There is no back door. The only way out is through the front door right in the face of it. If you stand in the way, I am going to walk all over you for if you won’t work with me, and respect me for who I am, I sure don’t owe you a thing. Get out of my way. I am coming through.

A man or woman doesn’t belong to another man or women. Man is an immortal spirit with the right to fight his way free, and if he fails to be constantly vigilant to anything that may deprive him of this precious and God given right and to be always ready and willing to kick the behind of that which stands in his way of this freedom, he will always be enslaved. This holds true whether the suppressor is a man, a group of men, an army, or just an idea within himself that holds him back from being the power that he is. You are not my master. I am going to show you that without any equivocation.

You say you are my friend. You have used my good will and my willingness to share the many things for which I have worked so hard. You constantly refuse to grant me the beingness that is guaranteed by the clear universal imperative to all men. You think you are wiser because you are older and bigger than I, that you have the right not only to rule but to control every aspect of my life through force. You are wrong. I am hereby telling you that I am going to fight you and I am willing to die rather than continue a charade of pretended loyalty to one who thinks of me as a vassal and nothing but a material possession.

I have asked you many times to realize that I am not your possession; to honor me. You do not own me. I am not your suckling babe. I do not need you. You need me. You are too stupid to see that. Yet you continue to trample. I will no longer petition your good faith for you have none. You give me no choice, for your continued harm and threats to me and mine prove that you have lost your humanity. You are only a cowardly bully and I have outgrown you not only in physical prowess but most significant of all in my inner will to kick the hell out of you to make you understand not only to back off but to get out of my house. You are a very unwelcomed guest who has fouled my nest.

While I don’t need to give you a formal declaration of independence, I am doing so just because I am a nice guy. I am giving you this notice for you might wake up from your stupor and realize that I am armed and can and will stomp your royal behind into the ancient muck of ideas you think of as justice. I dare you to cross this line I am drawing in the sand of time. It will set us so far apart in the future that you will lose sight of me as I sail to freedom, while you sour in the arrogance of your ruinous and no longer workable ways. I will soar in the joy of the new light of knowing, in the unfettered manifest destiny that stands before me with my new life that you have given me, thanks to your abysmal lack of common sense.

Get ready, I am about to introduce you to a new reality.

Random Acts of Senseless Cruelty

2009-07-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Random Acts of Senseless Cruelty
Reading Jim Harrison’s novelette, Wolf, later made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, I recognized a trait the character had that I somehow outgrew. He called it “random acts of senseless cruelty.” This struck me with a bit of déjà vu.
The character, Swanson, is camping and hunting in the woods of Northern Michigan trying to stay sober, for he had to put fifty miles between himself and whiskey to try to dry out. As he tramped through the woods, slept amid clouds of mosquitoes, stood naked in the plumes of smoke from a boiling campfire, swam in the chilled waters of Lake Michigan, he pondered over his life and the incidents came to life on the page as little vignettes of adventures and misadventures, usually involving women, sex, and liquor, and more sex and women and liquor, meanwhile wondering what the hell it was all about.
He would wade sloughs and icy rushing creeks, push through brambles and briars, fight his way through clouds of stinging insects, all the while reminiscing about his misspent life. You may think this is a terrible book to read, but Harrison’s prose is wonderful and you get caught up in where he is going and where he has been. I have read everything I can get my hands on. His Legends Of The Fall was also made into a screenplay and was a bit different from his other introspective novels. Just Before Dark is a batch of nonfiction short essays about his experience in hunting, women, drinking gourmet cooking, literature, and another adventure in reading. A wonderful story, A Woman Lit By Fireflies ,about a upper middle class woman tired of living with a man who evidently was a good lover to her, but was totally involved in his business and who never thought of anything but the market, and on trips only listened to stock market news and never involved her in anything though she wanted to listen to classical music sometimes. He was oblivious to any of her needs, and had lived on her money until he became independent of her. On the return trip from visiting their daughter, they stopped at a visitors station and she simply walked out the back door and into a cornfield and kept walking. She spent the night at the edge of the field in a kind of nature made cave of leaves, and while she walked the rows and built her fire and boiled water from a creek in a small can, she thought of her past. All of his stories are filled with flashbacks. During the night she woke completely covered with fireflies, like a living lamp of flickering incandescence. The next day she walked back and divorced her husband. A story worth reading for it leaves traces in your heart of an odd dissonance, a victory but a sad one. I usually don’t go for things like that, but it really left an impression.
Ok, about senseless cruelty. Swanson shot a turtle on a log with his high powered rifle, rendering it to shattered pieces of shell and flesh. He shot into a swarm of bees on the side of a tree. I remember, as a kid, hunting, shooting into a squirrel’s nest, shooting birds nests and little birds like sparrows, beautiful blue jays, rabbits, squirrels, catching bullfrogs and later cutting their legs off for dinner while they were still alive. I never thought of their pain, and how the suffered.
My final hunting trip was thirty years ago when I went squirrel hunting with my cousin David Sledge and his father. I had a shot gun and wanted to see if I could still kill my limit, eight, of squirrels by “still hunting.” That is by being very still and slipping up on them. I killed eight, stuffed them into the big game pocket on the back of my hunting jacket, and when I returned to the camp I dumped them out on the ground and was totally shocked. There lay eight tiny creatures, curled in on themselves, little clawed paws in prayer like position, more like tiny dead kittens than anything else. I felt a horror at what I had done.
At least I was left with fishing. Then I learned that fish had nerves in their mouths. I had been told they had no nerves in their mouths and you could catch them and not hurt them. I saw a demonstration of a lady putting something on their mouths and then released them back to the brook. The fish went into horrible spasms trying to rub it off of their lips in the gravel and dirt beneath the water. Now that screwed me out of my fishing. I have been informed by my old buddies that I am really a pussy for allowing this kind of thinking. I can’t help it.
I have realized that all creatures are entitled to life, even the tiniest little crawly thing unless he biting or infecting me in some way. I cannot understand how such minute creatures I sometimes see crossing my desk can possess this precious thing called life, but they do, and what part do they play, and why are they here? Well, if I don’t have the answer to these things I surely can’t presume to have a right to smush them. My friends simply slam something down on them never thinking about it. I hate houseflies, roaches, mosquitoes, gnats, ticks, no-seeums, horseflies, and will kill them in a heartbeat, but most of those little fellers aren’t harming me, even spiders, and I let them go. I think spiders are pretty cool.
So there is the evolution of a man up from one kind of barbarian to another, perhaps more noble, maybe just silly, but that is the way it is.If anybody wants to take me on about it I am willing to stand my ground and kick his ass for I feel life is inviolate and precious, though I don’t understand it and how it works, but I know I am creating mine in some way that I hope someday I will understand better. Alvin Rubin, my freshman law school property professor, told of the pilgrim who finally made it up the mountain to ask the wise hermit who lived up there “what is life,” and the hermit said “It is a cream soda and a matzo ball.” Oh well, that makes sense when you think about it, I guess.
So there is no telling where a stray idea, like “random acts of senseless cruelty”, can lead. It led me to this point, at which I am going to stop writing.

My First Kiss

2009-06-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

It is June 17, 2009. About this time of year in 1950, I was fifteen years old, and in love with Sylvia, whose family came over from Yazoo City, Mississippi, to visit relatives in my little country town of Castor, Louisiana, during each summer. I was euphorically in love with her. She filled my eyes. In those days there was no such thing as having sex, and the most one could hope for was maybe holding hands and acting stupid trying to impress the girl with inanities that were usually blurted out and immediately regretted for being totally non sequitor and out of place. Here is a little poem, sort of, I wrote a while back about our kiss on that star flung spring night.

First Kiss

The July moon dappled the old
porch and steps with silver
through the sycamore leaves,
painting the yard pewter
with deep moon-shadows.
Embraced in the warmth of the evening
and the heat of each other
we sat nervously in the swing on the high old porch,
talking about whatever fifteen year olds in 1950 talked about.
Trying to say the right thing.
Groping for words to amuse and touch.
Afraid, hearts thudding at the
closeness of the other
The mystery of what was happening, drawing
together and pushing apart in uncertainty.
Then, a sudden stillness.
A mutual decision to stop the parrying
Our faces drew close
Our lips touched.
There was cold fire and I spun out into the
Summer night with Orion and Pleiades
We were too young, too afraid to think of more
than what our lips were about.
We kissed and kissed with the hunger only lips
can know, being lips, until our lips were bruised
wanting more but kissing was all there was.

He who owns your food owns you

2009-06-09T04:38:00.000-07:00

He who owns your food owns you.

Assuming that there are sheperds out there watching over us, they are asleep or we have given over our lives to the wolves. While we were sleeping Montsanto has bought you, your food, your body, and all the seeds that may be grown to feed you and your family. These seeds are genetically altered to resist pests and weeds. They are specialized. Just a few years ago there were hundreds, maybe thousands of varieties of potatoes, corn, even apples, but now they are reduced to a specialized few, and in the corn and grain business, they are owned lock, stock and barrel by Montsanto. Take out these limited varieties of food, and there is no food.

Watch this: http://www.hulu.com/watch/67878/the-future-of-food

Farmers who lived on their land, grew grain, wheat, rapeseed, other vital crops, had an unwritten law that one farmer didn't do anything on his land that harmed another. The very first case we learned in property law was Fletcher v. Rylands, where a farmer diverted water flowing over his land onto his neighbor's property. Fletcher won, for one can't do anything on his property that will injure his neighbor. Simply the Golden Rule put into law. This has been followed until now. The powerful Montsanto raises its horrible head.

Montanto has genetically altered seed. These seed were carried in a truck along a road boarded by an old time farmer of grain. The seed falls out of the truck along the way, mixing with the crop of the farmer. The farmer's crop is now mixed with the creation of Montsanto. Montsanto sues, saying the crop of the farmer now is owned by Montsanto, for he is using genes created by Montsanto, now locked into the farmers crop, and the genes of Montsanto are patented and everything that has that gene is owned by Montsanto. Montsanto won. The farmer of fifty years is bankrupt.

Carry this a bit further. You eat the grain, the grain becomes integrated into your system. Montsanto can, eventually, carrying this into the extreme---own you. If Montanto has its way, it will. Up until this time, there was a basically sacred rule that one cannot patent and own a living organism. But Montsanto, through legal maneuvering, managed to get through the Supreme court of the US a little ruling dealing with having exclusive right to a genome or gene of a created organism that ate oil spills, but that then grew into a larger monster for the law expanded into allowing anything containing the created gene to belong to the patent holder, Montsanto, Dupont, etc. Now every ear of corn is literally owned by Montsanto.

Now to Armegeddon. Suppose, as in the potato famine in Ireland, there comes a blight or totally immune insect or disease, that takes out the now genetically altered corn crop which has become so specialized that there is only one kind of corn? The law I live by is "If It Can Happen, It Will Happen." Creating crops resistant to pests and unwanted weeds seem smart, but the human consuming these foodstuffs are now consuming an alien food that can, and will, eventually alter the human being who evolved by eating natural foods, now foods altered to resist insects, which genes are different from the genes eaten by man's ancestors. So with the worst possible scenario, we could be exposing ourselves to famine and mutation of the species.

Then, the old fear I learned in economics in college that was generated by Malthus, that population would outstrip food supply, will come to pass. If it can, it will. So man is truly fouling his nest in as many ways as he can imagine, and soon will realize his ultimate nightmare come true, for he has been working hard at it for a while. If he doesn't bring the roof down economically, through physical nuclear destruction, he will do it by the substance he consumes for his very life.

I feel we, as Scientologists, have the only way out, and I am not considering it through what one may believe or what one may achieve through prayer though I feel prayer is important, but what one does to clear himself of those things that make him do what he is doing to himself is vital. The only technology existant is that of Dianetics and Scientology to solve and the only possible hope mankind has to save himself. We are nose diving into a horror for the basically good beings in this universe that we can only imagine. First of all, buy Dianetics and read it. It is in every bookstore. It will give you the truth, the real idea of what you are up against, and it gives the answer.

So the only way to tell one of a problem he has is to propose an answer. If you just give him a problem, you are not a good person. If you awaken him to a problem that is jeopardizing his life, and give him an answer, you are a hero. I am giving you this gift.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/67878/the-future-of-food

Poetry

2009-06-07T04:23:00.000-07:00

Poetry

All of us have a bit of Poet in us. I have written things, never thinking of myself as a poet, just a scrivener writing scattered shots about things I have to say or words that seem to burst into my subconsciousnes and beat at my bay doors for release. I am not a poet, just a writer who occasonally gives birth to something akin to poetry. I am still not sure what poetry is for it seems to take many forms and I have never studied it at all.. I was accidentally awarded the first place prize in the International Contest for Poets for Human Rights last year. Must have been the only entrant. No, there were hundreds.

Poet In Prison

I am a child of the universe.
I am a song, a poem, a living thing
I care not what you do to me.
for I am a forever spirit.
You cannot contain a song
A Poem
A spirit
With your Bars
With your Fears
With your threats of reprisal for reaching and touching.
I will always be here singing,
writing my poems
when your bars are rust
when your fears are memories
when your threats are but echoes
of bad dreams long forgotten.
My song will still ring among the stars.
November 7, 2008

I re-discovered Billy Collins, American Poet Laureate. He makes it look so easy. I find it so much more satisfying to read a poem than hearing it read. There must be a better way to read poems than those I have heard or read myself.
I have listened to poets read their stuff, and stuff of others, and wondered how a poem should be read to get across the spirit living within that sparse distillate of language that says so much. Tasting a poem a la carte, licking it directly from the page, actually gives me more sustenance than hearing it read. Those words lying quietly on the page seem to take hold of my mind as I am feasting on the entirety of the way it looks, naked and wanton there, offering all of itself to me, not giving itself in small verbal bits and bytes across the space between the reader and me. I think the way words lie on the page have a magic that the spoken word lacks, regardless of the way the meaning touches me.
I am a fan of Billy Collins, American poet laureate, as well as W.B. Yeats and his mystical “Lake of Inisfree,” and numerous others---there are poets everywhere—peering out through the foliage of their hiding places---many not wanting to be known. I could never get into Keats. Too much is enough. Poetry flows and works its way through the cracks of cathedrals, prisons and outhouses, Grand Ole Opry, kindergarten and in the mist that rises in the woods just before dawn. It is a touch of soul that can be savored in a moment, for the poetry I love is not epical, but in little mind candy packages, easily unwrapped and quietly sucked for a quick trip into that place you go when you can forget where you are.
I was raised in the country in N. Louisiana, white anglo saxon protestant country. It was a place where there was no music, except the current pop and hillbilly music of the late forties and fifties (I graduated high school in 1953) and there was very little “culture”, or “refinement.” My mama read poetry. I never realized how it touched her or appreciated her for that until recently. I should have. She was a very unhappy being, alone, though she was married to my father and later to another man. She would sit in a darkened room, with barely enough light to see, and read poetry. I have two of her collections. I never appreciated her for that. She killed herself in 1997. There was depth there, too much depth for her to swim. It took me a long time to appreciate poetry. And I do, but find myself in abyss of mystery unless the poetry is clear and not too oblique, like the real world poems of my good friend Stazja McFaydden.

I chanced upon the following piece on how to read a poem out loud, and since have been able to convey the content of poetry when I read it. As a result, I have been asked to read to groups. I simply read slowly, articulating all of the words according to their rank of importance as I see it, and make sure by looking up at the listeners to make sure they are getting it, and they do. It isn't the reading, it is the listening and duplicating that you are about.

But with all that said, here is a little piece by Billy Collins, on how to read a poem out loud.

"No doubt, most of the readers will be students with little or no experience in reading poetry out loud, especially to such a large group. And we know that a poem will live or die depending on how it is read. What follows, then, are a few pointers about the oral recitation of poetry. The readers, by the way, should not read cold; they should be given their poem a few days in advance so they will have time to practice, maybe in the presence of a teacher. In addition to exposing students to the sounds of contemporary poetry, Poetry 180 can also serve as a way to improve students' abilities to communicate publicly. Here are a few basic tips:
1. Read the poem slowly. Most adolescents speak rapidly, and a nervous reader will tend to do the same in order to get the reading over with. Reading a poem slowly is the best way to ensure that the poem will be read clearly and understood by its listeners. Learning to read a poem slowly will not just make the poem easier to hear; it will underscore the importance in poetry of each and every word. A poem cannot be read too slowly, and a good way for a reader to set an easy pace is to pause for a few seconds between the title and the poem's first line.
2. Read in a normal, relaxed tone of voice. It is not necessary to give any of these poems a dramatic reading as if from a stage. The poems selected are mostly written in a natural, colloquial style and should be read that way. Let the words of the poem do the work. Just speak clearly and slowly.
3. Obviously, poems come in lines, but pausing at the end of every line will create a choppy effect and interrupt the flow of the poem's sense. Readers should pause only where there is punctuation, just as you would when reading prose, only more slowly.
4. Use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words and hard-to-pronounce words. To read with conviction, a reader needs to know at least the dictionary sense of every word. In some cases, a reader might want to write out a word phonetically as a reminder of how it should sound. It should be emphasized that learning to read a poem out loud is a way of coming to a full understanding of that poem."

Nonetheless, I always return to Yeats, whose "Innisfree," "When I am Old," "Wandering Angeus," really penetrate this thick covering of my being and go right in, carrying a mystic message that tells me there is a world beyond mortal sight, something better and wonderful that maybe I can reach "when feeling out of sight for ends of being and ideal grace". We all came from that magic universe once upon a time, and that is why we strive to the stars or to the places and spaces that mimic to some faint degree that which once was that we know was who we were before we spiralled down into this dismal place we now are. But we do have poets, and poetry, and song----.

The Cloths Of Heaven (Yeats)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Dick Zimmerman, Rembrandt of our time

2009-06-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

How wonderful to have a compelling talent that has been touched by Angels. Such is the talent of Dick Zimmerman, ww.dickzimmerman.com, my old friend of twenty years, who has been known as the celebrity photographer of our time, now turned to his old love of painting.

Dick is a true genius, who, as you can see in this portrait of a beautiful young girl, can capture on canvas a spiritual instant. Like the Mona Lisa, the subject's personality, a moving flicker of light, the best of the person, the inner self, caught forever through the eye and brush of this amazing artist. I am in awe. Go to his website and watch the video, see the many portraits, read his intriguing inside stories about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Salvador Dali, Michael Jackson, Tom Selleck.

I am writing his bio, and there is a plethora of material on this unusual and gracious man, for his photographic career carried him into places and lives of people the entrance into which are forbidden to the normal human being. Such are the ways of genius---somehow their talent, when blended with boundless energy, a sense of purpose, an ethical foundation and that something else that seems inherent in this rare combination of beingness, opens doors into a labryinth of wonders that we the comparatively mundane never dream of knowing or seeing.

I intend to help him become who and what he deserves, to be recognized as the Rembrandt of the century, the Da Vinci of our time. He will come to the home of the subject, set up the whole scene, and then use his skills toned over three decades as a celebrity photographer to capture images on his digital cameras, and then return to his studio to paint them on canvas. That is where he is able to transform technical skills in photography with traditional portraiture, and while that is not unique as a method of reproducing images on canvas, his eye and talent of putting it all together to draw out the thetan, the spiritual beingness of the subject is what makes him the unique artist he is. I want to help this man.

We are taking commissions now. Usually, after a sitting, the portrait is complete and shipped within sixteen weeks.

Dick usually works from nine at night until four in the morning Working at night leaves him undisturbed and free to become his art and meld with his subjects to produce that certain thing that only he can do for his subjects. I consider this a privilege to work with Dick. Smoking cigars, sitting out on the windy porch of his sixth story condo overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, talking about art, our Church, our goals and aspirations, planning the future, is a real joy.

Call me if you want to schedule a sitting for a portrait. 727 667 1191. The fee depends on the size of the canvas and the number of faces. I find it interesting that he will only paint a face that is of normal size or larger on a canvas. He says he doesn't paint shrunken heads, so if there is a large group, as in some of the paintings, the canvas has to be large enough to accommodate each head being normal size.

It is a great day in Clearwater.

Technicalia, I am getting dizzy

2009-05-25T04:58:00.000-07:00

Lately I have either signs of dimentia or confusion from the dizzying changes in technicalia. Seems every day there is some new online social club you can join-Plaxo, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Twitter lets you put in 140 characters as a message to an expanding list of "followers" you generate to read that brief concept. And reading them is like trying to decipher a foreign tongue. But there are many interesting things to chase down and surf from those little snippets of data--they refer you to exotic or previously unknown sites full of intereseting data that may or maYy not have practical purpose. I find myself wasting time. However, ifyou have half million followers, as some actually have, you can promote something to that group reading your little pieces of data, and my friend Laura Sherman who has "Your Chess Coach", teaching kids and adults to play (she is a master herself) has reached and developed a chess public through Twitter. It has practical uses. But how do you keep up?

Talking to a buddy yesterday in the Qual section of the Flag AO, who queried why kids go around texting, buried in their cell phones. I ventured that they were wanting to be acknowledged, wanting to be assured that they exist in this rapidly moving world where people are piling up one on top of the other and individuality is dying in a grossly accelerated homogenization of the species. They are crying out to be acknowledged for themselves and not being able to "be" they are "doing." Inasmuch as the elements of life are "be" "do" and "have"they can't achieve the be. You have to decide what to be so you can be that and then do the things that that beingness is so you then can have the things that the beingness wants and achieves through doingness to get it. But to do that, you have to back in, learning what you want to Have first, to find what you need to do to be that. So these kids are craving beingness, but seem to be sucked up in a technical spiral like my character in my novel Nimrod's Peril---the N'aa'maan, who lives for information, data, thinking of it is food, rather than developing spiritually he just gets more data, not knowing that knowledge is not data, but certainty. Seeking certainty, these kids are texting texting texting. Doing, doing doing.

Angel on a Harley

2009-05-12T19:06:00.001-07:00

How do you forget when you have been within someone's universe and you wanted to stay, but then it is gone? How do you stop wanting to reach and find that being and hold for as long as you can? Do you ever stop the longing, the intense aesthetic dream that may not have ever been, but you know it was real--real enough to create angst from its absence? She is gone,but you know you will see her again someday, and maybe even make it become real, as impossible as it may seem, but you know it may leave you bereft again for it still may be as tentative as the angel she seemed to be. This thing called love. This intensity of admiration. This obsession. This phantom of delight. This poem is dedicated to her, wherever she is, if she is real. Was she real? Or was our joining an ephemirality only, as tenuous as the fog that permeated my being that day, or was it months, years?

Angel on a Harley

Her eyes told me that there was a world beyond mortal sight.
Then I saw the shimmering moonlight that was her hair,
All a tumble
With waterfalls and birdsong
that I could hear across the rift of our universes.
Her gossamer blue wings iridesced in and out of my vision.
And there was a hint of lilac
And something else
Undefinable, like the smell of wonder.

She revved her Harley, just feet away from my open window at the stop light.
She looked into my mind and smiled a smile that sucked me right out of my
Head and smacked me against the wall that separated our worlds.
She laughed.
The very air became her joyful laughter,
Blessed
As in kissed
Made love to
She let me in and I soared
United
For that sparking instant
In a joining I had always known was possible.
I knew then that a moment could be a lifetime
And it might be enough,
But it was not enough,
Just to know.

The light changed.
She fled away.
Weaving through traffic.
I couldn’t catch her.
The last I saw was her red taillight dropping over the other side
Of the overpass a quarter mile ahead.
I was bereft.
I am still trying to catch my breath.
After seeing an angel on US 19.
I wonder if I was dreaming.
I want to go to heaven if that is where she is.
Or get a fast Harley and catch her..

Facebook, what is it really?

2009-05-08T07:32:00.000-07:00

As Alice's White Queen said, "I am trying to believe three impossible things before breakfast."

It is getting curiouser and curiouser.

I have asked about Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and the other seemingly innocuous social type internet programs---and who is really behind them, what do they have to gain, do they harvest information about the members, is it all legit? I sniffed a sinister origin, and have asked many friends what they think and nobody seems to worry or even wonder about what comes their way on the net when asked to join or have been to confirm that Joe Blow wants to be a friend. Who can resist being a friend? Watch this little video below and if true will answer this question. What the hell, I am sure "they" have a dossier on me and have had one for a long time for I have been a rather mellow dissident and always have been a relatively harmless question-asker who nobody really should worry about.

Here’s a relevant video. I haven’t Snoped it yet, but I don’t always trust Snopes. This video answers my paranoia.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/603.html

With satellites that can track your every move, read the time on your wristwatch from miles above the earth, with tv cameras on street corners in major cities, with social security numbers, economic stress, environmental threats and terrorists, the coming identity card and even chip implants to assure you of your security and well being, we are already in a kind of cyber prison with invisible but impenetrable walls. We can run but we cannot hide any more.

But we must remind ourselves that we are immortal, eternal spiritual beings temporarily housed and even warehoused in this transportation and communication system of flesh that we are being more and more convinced is ourselves. This is a lie. We have been and are being implanted by electronic and ideas jammed in our heads through all the media and TV every day that we are weak and nothing, and have to worry about all this, but now our big brother is going to take care of us. where is this going? I think you thinkers know. Nowhere good. So rather than leave you with this doom message, which I have sworn never to do, I want you to know there is a way. Know thyself for who and what you are. Never think you are what they say you are or have become. You are your best friend. You are more powerful and good and greater than anyone every allowed you to think you are, and you, with your friends, can come together and defeat this oncoming blight by simply knowing who you are and your power is without limitation. "They" are cowards, hiding behind lies and terrified of you. Don't be fooled. Together, believing in ourselves and not in the lies that they want us to believe, we can kick their ass.

Lovingly

LDSledge
Maverick

Voodoo Man

2009-04-19T11:44:00.001-07:00

I haven't written anything for a while, so last night I decided I would write a little flash type fiction as fast as I could type, and I type very fast. I wrote this little story in around thirty minutes. I is a true story.

Voodoo Man

Our cook, Alonia, was a huge woman, weighing in at close to 300. She worked steady from seven in the morning until three and cooked everything “down.” What I mean by down is all meat was cooked in a gravy, and vegetables boiled right down to the bottom of the pot, but she was honest and faithful. And superstitious.
She wore a bandanna around her big round head and her eyes were bulging saucers, looking not unlike Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind. I swear she must have copied the stereotype, she even looked and dressed like her, but in the forties all southern black domestics looked and dressed much the same as they did in the Civil War. Things and attitudes in the South had not changed much in the seventy five years since the war between the states was over.
I was ten years old in 1945 when Daddy came in and told Alonia that an old man by the name of Lazarus was in town and had been arrested as he got off the bus. I thought Hazel was going to faint when she heard the name.
“Mr. Laurie, you don’t mean Lazarus?”
“Little man, real dark complected, wears a black hat and got real black looking eyes.”
“Ooooweeee, she wheezed, looking all around. “That;’s the voodoo man--he real bad.”
Alonia lived in a little cabin in the pasture down below our house. She became very agitated.
“I ain’t goin’ to stay in that house tonight by myself,” she moaned.
“Don’t you worry, I am going down town to see what is going on.”
Daddy and I drove the half mile to our little village of Castor, Louisiana and arrived to see a scene like I had never seen before. We didn’t have any law in our little town, but there was the sheriff from Arcadia was standing by the bus with a long stick in his hand. A little black man was sitting on the ground with an open gash in his head that was gushing blood. There was blood all over his clothes and the ground around him.
An old suitcase stood open by the bus. It was brimming over with money. There were ones, fives, tens and twenty dollar bills, and a bunch of silver dimes and quarters.
There must have been two dozen people standing around, watching. I remember the scene, still frozen in time. This seemingly harmless old black man, sitting on the hard dirt under the shade of a big sycamore tree right at the low board porch of Tooke’s cafe, butcher shop and grocery. The deputy was a large white man with a star on his chest He held a three foot stick, which I assumed he had used to hit the old man in the head blood pouring out of the coal black curls on his head.
Daddy was Mayor. He spoke to the sheriff.
The deputy pointed at the suit case. “Sonofabitch been stealing from people think he is some kind of hoodoo man. There must be five thousand dollars in there,”
Our little town, with its four stores, two gas stations, cafe, barbershop, depot and post office had a railroad track running through the center had never had any crime that would require the sheriff to come to town. Being Saturday, the town was filled with people who came in on wagons filled with cotton to be ginned pulled by mules, old trucks, even an A-Model Ford or two was putt putting down the one street. A crowd had gathered, about half white and half black onlookers. The blacks were cowed back, some holding their hands over their mouths, eyes wide in fear, looking at the little man sitting on the ground. He looked harmless enough, but he was enough to terrify Alonia.
“What you gonna do with him?” Daddy asked.
“Gonna take him in. We been keepin’ track of him. Heard he was headed for Castor to do more of his mischief. Need to get somebody to stich him up first.”
About that time, my granddaddy, who was a dentist, walked up. He had a little case and he bent over the little man and dabbed the blood away from the cut on his head and, poured some alcohol straight in the cut. The little man let out a holler as the alcohol scalded through the bloody mass.
“Hold still,” Grandaddy said, pinching the edges of the cut between his thumb and forefinger and began sewing the hole closed. Then he rinsed it again with alcohol and stood up.
“There, that should do it till you get him to Arcadia,: he said, wiping the blood from his hands with a cloth he had taken from the bag.
The sheriff stood the little man on his feet and put cuffs on him, then tucked him in the back seat of the sheriff’s car. He then closed thesuitcase and put it in the trunk.
He drove away and the crowd commenced to talk excitedly. I heard one of the black people say “that’s a hoodoo man. He can put the mojo on you.”
“Steal you soul,” one said, “make a walkin’ dead man outta you. I seen it happen. He one bad man.”
“Creep around at night, steal souls,” another said.
One bug eyed woman, wearing a red bandanna and carrying a walking stick said, “You can buy a spell from him and put the gris-gris on somebody. He burn candles an’ make spells. They work. I seen it happen.”
She went on, herself supposed to be a hoodoo woman who could do spells herself, “you listen tonight at nidnight, and see if a rooster don’t crow and a mockinbird don’t sing, and see if somebody don’t die hereabouts. He done took another one.”
A tall black man wearing overalls with no shirt under the galluses said, “He got all that money from the devil. He sold them souls to the devil. That Satan money we just seen.”
Daddy shook his head and smiled at me. I was wide eyed myself, listening to all this talk from this group of terrified men and women. The white people listened, though they avowed they didn’t believe in that, they were listening, very quietly.
Daddy moved back toward the car and we went home. He told Alonia what had happened.
“Wooie, Mr. Laurie, I am so glad that man is gone from here. Wherever he goes somebody dies, and he always has lots of money. Said he steals souls and sells them to the devil.”
I looked at daddy. He shook his head, and said” son don’t worry about that, ain’t nothing gonna happen.”
That night, a rooster crowed at midnight and a mockingbird sang in the plum orchard below the house. I slept upstairs with the windows open and I remember it was a full moon and that rooster crowed. And also, a dog howled. My skin crawled.
The next day I heard that Miz Skinner, the old maid that lived by herself in the big old house by the railroad, had died during the night.

Storm On The Gulf

2009-04-14T05:57:00.000-07:00

Morning Storm On The Gulf
Omigod, this is one of those glorious spring days here on the gulf in Palm Harbor, eight miles from Clearwater. It is 6:30 a.m., and a storm hits with wind whipping the palms and big oaks, lightning and sky splitting thunder. It’s dark and threatening out there. My windows are open so I can feel the damp wind and occasionally a cold drop blown through the screen. The world smells rich and loamy, and the morning full of energy with the incessant rolling thunder, rain beating the roof, slashing of the limbs on the big oaks in their frenzied dance, and flicker of light through the dark jungle of my back yard from the lightning far above. The sky darkens and there is a riot of motion and sound everywhere, crashing fronds and frantic trees doing their prayer dance to the great storm god as the torrents pour from the heavens amid a shrieking climax of thunder and lightning. My backyard rain forest of palms, ferns, white bird palms, drink the warm downpour in a joyful feast of life as the storm peaks in an exultant climax with a huge drumroll in the sky, and I can feel the storm dissipating and moving inland, carrying with it the greatest orchestra of all in a traveling show that leaves a quietening here, distant thunder, the limbs and fronds now slowing to small dances in the zephyrs and my world and yard are sated and smiling a thank you for today’s blessing. Now there is only a steady gentle rain soothing my garden, me, my world in a post climatic peace. The world has made love.

Responsibility

2009-03-25T19:14:00.001-07:00

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory
were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or
of thine own were: any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind, and
therefore never send to know for whom the bells
tolls; it tolls for thee."
John Donne
Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions, no. 17
(Meditation)
1624 (published)

I was a courtroom lawyer for forty three years. I told my juries that what they did that day in their verdict would create many effects unknown to them. It was like dropping a pebble in a pool, and the ripples spread out to touch every inch of the pool’s edges. You never know what effect your act or omission today has on someone far away, even unknown. My words spoken long ago have come back to me in the mouths of strangers, most of whom have reported having been happily changed, bemused or even enlightened. I never heard of those bad things I may have done or said, and what changes they evoked. I am sure they are there, in abundance.

Responsibility in its broadest definition doesn’t mean blame; it contains an essence that elevates one who is responsible to a state far above that of the human, but including human. It means one who is willing and able to be at cause over every phase of his life, the lives of others, and all things sentient and non sentient in the universe. A fully responsible man would literally be a God.

Life is tough. Man is ill equipped physically and mentally to handle things that come his way on a regular basis. Growing up in a world that believes in force as its means of survival seems to require that one use force, when understanding would resolve any conflict. Man wants to be happy, and feels he must fight to survive, and meaning well sometimes steps on others toes in the process, bumps them in the crowd, says and does stupid hurtful things to his friends, spouse, children. These insults affect the lives of those who received them, and they repeat them, like echoes.

I was a Boy Scout and active in the Scouts with my sons. Their Pledge is one of taking responsibility for self and others. It means more than just being helpful. It means giving service and exchange in abundance, giving more value than one receives. This oath and the definition of responsibility represents the spiritual ideal of mankind: Love of one another.

It is so easy to communicate through a smile, a nod, a friendly acknowledgement. Most people have never been acknowledged for who they are or what they do. It is so easy to say, “Hey, you are looking terrific today.” Find something you truly admire about that kid, man, lady, nearby while you stand in line at the market or bank and sincerely tell him or her about it. There is always something. Emerson said, “Every man is in some way superior to me, and in that I can learn from him.” One thing you can get from that guy in line is a smile, for he is burdened, you can count on it. You can move him out of it for just a moment, and that may be enough to get him through the day. You get it back double over.

I noticed that when most clients brought their kids in, they didn’t introduce them. Kids are adults that have not achieved full growth, and probably have never been acknowledged as a person. I would squat by the kid, offer my hand (not some shallow high five) but a real handshake as I looked him right in the eye, being really sincere, and said, “I’m L.D., what’s your name?” He would tell me. I would say that I was glad to meet him, and really meant it. You could tell he knew it, for he would brighten up. In a short time he would be hanging on my leg or wanting to sit in my lap or tell me something important about his day. I would let him and listen. Usually the parents were amazed that their kid had opened up like that to a stranger—and to a lawyer at that! That kid would go away realizing he was worthy.

I am responsible for you, though I don’t know you. You are part of the fabric of my universe, and when I see you we will know one another, for we are somehow kindred spirits. And if you just cut a few of the little threads holding yourself, you will know and show that you love me and I love you. That is the way things should be. That is responsibility.

“Don’t send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Random

2009-03-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

This is a randomized blog, written on the 24th of March 09.

I googled myself and found the following article that I had written in the mid eighties. I was asked by OSA to go to a convention in San Francisco onTorts and Religion. There had been a rash of lawsuits against churches and the convention was packed with religious representatives of every description: Moonies, Hare Krishnas, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Scientologists, Buddhists, etc. The cult of psychiatry was there represented by "Dr." Jolly West, of University of Southern Cal., who was reputed to have killed the university's pet elephant by drugging it with too much LSD. Tim McNamara, an old frat bro (TEKE) from LSU was there representing the Catholic Church from Lafayette, Louisiana. That was a period when the very first lawsuits were developing against priests for sexual abuse, and suits against evangelists for hustling too much money from converts. One church had all of its churches and branches closed in the northeast from a judgment of millions, saying the convert was brainwished and should not have donated that money.

I wrote a piece and sent it to many ministers, warning them of what was coming.

http://www.helium.com/items/989269-torts-religion-and-the-menace-of-psychiatry

I learned that many ministers, to be ordained, must take a course psychology, and in some cases had to be psychoanalyzed. Now this is such an extraordinary thing. Psychiatry does not believe in God or the spirit of man. On top of that, if a penitent confesses suicidal intent, then the priest or confessor much refer them to a psych or if not, his church can be suit if suicide does result for not sending the person to a psych. So what is a religion purporting to represent God doing referring its parishioners to a cult/business---for it is not medicine and cannot rank out there with medical doctors---in the first place. What is it doing consorting with these cretins in requiring their sanction in order to be men and women of god?

Here's some information that may be useful:

FIRST
Emergency

The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find Yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile network and there is an Emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to Establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly, this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

SECOND
Have you locked your keys in the car?

Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys In the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot >From your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other 'remote' for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

Editor's Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a cell phone!'

THIRD
Hidden Battery Power

Imagine your cell battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370#. Your cell phone will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your cell phone next time.

FOURTH
How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?

To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following Digits on your phone: *#06#. A 15-digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.

If your phone gets stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

And Finally.

FIFTH
Free Directory Service for Cells

Cell phone companies are charging us $1.00 to $1.75 or more for 411 information calls when they don't have to. Most of us do not carry a telephone directory in our vehicle, which makes this situation even more of a problem. When you need to use the 411 information option, simply dial: (800)FREE411, or (800)

"Making love to a woman--an activity full of delights, but none of them predictable and the best of them capable of inflicting grievous injury on a man.

Right there in front of my nose

2009-03-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

In my quest for defining and locating the Supreme Being, I knew it was not an entity cast in the beingness of man. It is the allness of all. So what does that mean? Just what it says, it is everything everywhere.. And I am in the center of it all. This beingness is not just connected, it IS everything. The very molecules of air that circulate around and in my body, in this pen I grasp, and in the nupernova in a nebula that I have never heard of trillions of light years away. All. Unimaginably, all.

Sitting in my car with the seat kicked back, ready to nap (poco reposa in Italian) with the windows open, the cool breezes from the gulf ruffling the scruffs of hair I have managed to grow on the circumference of my head, I looked into the tangled bare limbs of the tree above, and realized that they were perfect. The bark on the tree was perfection, then it dawned on me that everything was perfection, in perfect coordination and balance with everything else.

I tried to conceive of what kind of mind that could create that leaf dancing in the breeze above my head. This is beyond belief, but it was made, it was not just grown out of some sea of ammonia. Perhaps it all evolved through some implacable force that ruled out the inferior and allowed only the winning superior to survive and reproduce, constantly squeezing out the losers, now we have the winners today but tomorrow they may be squashed in the remorseless advance of evolution toward a better leaf, tree, squirrel. But it was made ultimately by intelligence and not by accident. That would be all too improbable.

So I decided to mock up a prayer:

Oh thou great intelligence, now that I know you are there and where you are, I ask of you, what may I brace myself against to hold the line? It is so like lifting myself by my bootstraps. I know that I am responsible, ultimately, for all. And in seeking more responsibility, I am forever pushing to remove the stain within that flaws me. I now know that it is simply ethics, but how do I change me? How may I atone for my excesses and for my omissions, for my failure to act when I should have acted, for the gnawing in my loins and struggles within that must be quietened to fit this society of man, so I may do no harm, and serve others.

I am about to go to sleep, and now, after knowing you, I rest, in your arms. I am safe. I know you are only good, and will do no harm. You are my best friend. I am a mirror of you, under the mask I wear that reflects the conflict I lived before I knew that we are one.

Daybreak

2009-03-17T04:44:00.000-07:00

It is still dark, though it is seven A.M. There is a vague hint that morning is imminent, the light is changing, the leaves of my oak are particularizing, coming out of hiding in the night, awakening, changing from an umber mass to individuate themselves in the graying light.

I welcome the new challenge of the day. I have plans but have kept from myself what will really happen, so I can have mystery and game. I will rise and stretch, exercise, coffee, break the fast and then get on my motorcycle and attend to things on my list.

What is next? What joy will I feast on in the coming hours? It is up to me.

Recovering Romantic-seasons of love

2009-03-06T04:23:00.000-08:00

Recovering romantic from an ill fated love affair. When I first saw her on her motorcycle, with long black hair flying, I was smitten. I lost myself in that image of wild beauty. I wrote this poem, later played piano and sang it.

Her eyes told me that there was a world beyond mortal sight
Then I saw the shimmering moonlight that was her hair, all a tumble
with waterfalls and birdsong
that I could hear across the rift of our universes.
Her gossamer blue wings irridesced in and out of my vision
and there was a hint of lilac
and something else
the scent of wonder.

She revved her Harley, just feet away from my open window
at the stop light.
She looked into my mind and smiled a smile that
sucked me right out of my head and smacked me against the wall that
separated our worlds.
She laughed.
The very air became her joyful laughter,, blessed
as in kissed
made love to
She let me in and I soared
United
For that sparking instant
in a joining I had always known was possible.
and it might be enough,
but it was not enough, just to know.

The light changed
She fled away
weaving through traffic
I couoldn't catch her
The last I saw was the red taillight dropping
on the other side of the overpass a quarter mile ahead
I was bereft
I am still trying to catchy my breath
after seeing an angel on US 19
I wonder if I was dreaming
I want to go to heaven if that is where she is
Or get a fast Harley and catch her.
--------------
Soon after, I met her, for real, and we talked. I was in love. Euphorically, floatingly in love with this beautiful being. She was Italian, mysterious, alive, hot, reaching. I fell on my head.

Without going through details, months passed of reaching and withdrawing, and now it is over, and I am still connected for I have tasted her universe. That is what communication does, reaches and enters other universes and draws them near, and if you are brave, you enter and can lose yourself in the labryinth of baffling mazes. Love is the melding of universes in a sweeping joinder. I wanted this joinder completely, but she held back, and the more I reached, the further she retreated. Only when I withdrew did she reach, but tentatively and without commitment. The game became pain, then loss and blame. It is over and the scent of wonder still remains, with angst, in my bones.

I was reading a poem this morning, which jumpstarted this little piece, from my wonderful friend, Shirley Windward, who at 90 is still writing, still loving and being. I so wish to deserve the love that she reflects giving someone in this somewhat erotic piece:

Maelstrom Encounter
"---you leap into the navel of his belly
whee the hair grows perfect, evenly arranged like an oriental fan
and trace that fan along the rib of sliding sweet skin, moist with itself
and with your own sleek lips
touch that generous nipple with your
tongue, pressong to ecstacy
in the throat hollow, and up the ridge
of his chin, and then plunge, the arrival,
the attck on his round, red,
barely waiting, ah----beloved lips."

Thank God I have known such touching by a loving woman, but have never been able to deserve keeping her. I learned why, just yesterday, because I was never true. I had never committed myself totally to a women out of fear of losing myself from betrayal or just not being honest, having a back door, keeping that door open for the perfect one that may come along or as an escape route. I opened myself once and stayed married almost twenty years but lost her because I was selfish and lack of my integrity--I didn't screw around, I was just not thinking as I am now and wish I had then the wisdom I now have learned through painful necessity.

When I realized what a worm I have been all my years, I knew I had to change for my viewpoint has proven to be the roadmap to the perfect storm of misery which I have known so much during my life. One knows so little about love; there is no roadmap to the perfect relationship. Relying on emotion as the main criterion is the road to hell. I know.

One is either cause or effect, or somewhere between, and when it comes to love, sex, one wants to be effect and simply opens the door to all that comes through that door to smack him right where he lives. I feel wounded and wonder if I will heal right now because I relied on emotion, but it was a welcomed euphoria I haven't had in a long time, and a feeling of connection I don't remember having this lifetime. I wonder if I can stop loving her. It is an aesthetic undefinable tie that has a beauty that I wish I could control, but it has a tentative hold on me with no future. I still don't understand it but I do know that again I did not take responsibility for myself, and for her, and managed to wreck it again. There will be a next time, and this time I will dedicate myself so fully, regardless of the consequences. I think integrity is the ability to commit oneself fully to another, a job, an effort, without reservation, with the willingness to have whatever comes from the result, hell or high water, and then can look back and say "I did my best." I screwed this one up and though it had problems of age difference, cultural and language differences, if I had this integrity, I could have made it go right. I will never go at anything that I undertake half assed again. I did it with my law practice, always wanting out from the beginning, but in spite of that I was successful for forty three years as an asskicking courtroom lawyer. Maybe that is where I got that attitude. Regardless of its source, I am the one responsible.. It is time that I grow up and become responsible. I devoutly will keep this promise to myself. I will be true to myself and to my mate, my work and life from this point forward. I will be awake every moment from here on to choose the route that serves the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics and elements in the world, and not just for my selfish self. I want balance,and I will have it. Nothing else will serve. I promise you, my friends, and myself. This is a defining moment.

Then there is my poet friend, Dean Blehert, whose words "We have drawn apart to play catch," once blew me in the weeds with that concept. He has millions of poems. I think he must write dozens every day about everything. He is funny as hell, making points without being serious. His recent publication, Deanotations, Volume I, are poems written beginning in August 1984. Such as

Fame has not changed me
though I daily bask in the applause
of future readers.

The suicidal cavalry officer fed his horse
beans, then locked himself in the stable
with the horse running.

No wind
A tree talks very slow.

The clouds have vanished
and the sunlight is getting
all over everything.

Snap goes the shoelace. The short part
hangs from my hand, lookikng apologetic.

He compared her to a flute:
"I fingered all her stops."
My first date was like that:
Whenever I touched an opening,
she said "stop."

There comes a time in a man's life
when he has to choose. I can't decide
if this is that time or not.

-------------------------
Ignore the craziness of the day just for a while. Sit quietly for three minutes and look at the quietness that surrounds you, reach into their simplicities and be that, find a momentary peace for the noise is only in you. Love yourself, for you are your best friend.

I love you
Can you love yourself as much as I love you?

Choose

2009-02-22T05:02:00.000-08:00

I don't know who wrote the following piece, but it contains such a basic-basic rule of life that I must pass it on in this Blog. I forward upbeat, positive, fun and funny things on my email lists every day, choosing not to send anything that may upset or create any more problems than we have already, and my readers thank me regularly for making their day better with these little winks of light that make them feel better or laugh. We have a choice with everything we do. This morning I got an email from Jo Ganz saying she sent it to a friend who reads this every morning when she wakes up and it helps guide her day. I hope you find it equally useable. I do.

LET IT REALLY SINK IN - THEN CHOOSE .

John is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, 'If I were any better, I would be twins!'
He was a natural motivator.
If an employee was having a bad day, John was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up and asked him, 'I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?'

He replied, 'Each morning I wake up and say to myself, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or ... you can choose to be in a bad mood I choose to be in a good mood.'

Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or...I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it.

Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or... I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive sid e of life.

'Yeah, right, it's not that easy,' I protested.

'Yes, it is,' he said. 'Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people affect your mood.

You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It's your choice how you live your life.'

I reflected on what he said. Soon hereafter, I left the communications tower industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.

Several years later, I heard that he was involved in a serious accident, falling some 60 feet from a communications tower.

After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, he was released from the hospital with rods placed in his back.

I saw him about six months after the accident.

When I asked him how he was, he replied, 'If I were any better, I'd be twins...Wanna see my scars?'

I declined to see his wounds, but I did ask him what had gone through his mind as the accident took place.

'The first thing that went through my mind was the well-being of my soon-to-be born daughter,' he replied. 'Then, as I lay on the ground, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or...I could choose to die. I chose to live.'

'Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness?' I asked

He continued, '..the paramedics were great.

They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the ER and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read 'he's a dead man'. I knew I needed to take action.

'What did you do?' I asked.

'Well, there was a nurse shouting questions at me,' said John. 'She asked if I was allergic to anything 'Yes', I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, 'Gravity'!

Over their laughter, I told them, 'I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.'

He lived, thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude... I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully.
Attitude, after all, is everything.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.' After all today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well armed lamb."
Benjamin Franklin.

2009-02-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

Mes Amis

This is part of a Rant du Jour written in 2006.

I’m totally absorbed in reading a series of books by Jeff Shaara about the Mexican and Civil War. Gone For Soldiers, is about the Mexican war and chronicles, almost in novel form, the roles of Captain Robert E. Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Jackson, General Winfield Scott, and the importance to the US of that war, which established boundaries of the US in the years just before the Civil War. Then there is a follow up book, Gods and Generals about, the early years of the war, followed by Killer Angels, about Gettysburg, written by Michael Shaara, Jeff’s father. Quite wonderful reading.

The Civil War so far overshadowed the Mexican conflict that it seems to have faded in history as not important, but it was very important, and shows how stupid our Presidents can be. Seems that Santa Anna was imprisoned after he decimated us at the Alamo, and then President Polk sent him back to Mexico with the promise that he would rally the Government and effect a peace agreement between the US and Mexico. Instead, he rallied an army to fight the US, and we had to go in and lost many men in a bloody fight. It seems all the Generals were prima donnas, except for Scott, known as old “fuss and feathers,” who didn’t care for politics or politicians, and they all were vying for fame that would catapult them into the presidency, and Polk wanted to do anything to embarrass them to keep them from getting any recognition. I am almost done with this first book, having already read Gods and Generals, and can’t put it down.

Speaking of Generals, I recently found this website, PlanetDVDNow.com, which sends you DVD’s for the cost of shipping. They have just about everything you want, and I ordered quite a few, one of which was about George Washington’s life, because I knew so little about him. Seems as if he was a very stiff and upwardly mobile character---much like the aloof appearing, snobbish portraits of him. He was born in the Virginia patrician culture but was not rich, and wanted to be. He was a soldier for a time, making numerous errors, and was not promoted as he felt he should have been, so he resigned and returned to his family properties as a farmer. He married a rich widow, and worked her thousands of acres and slaves as a country nobleman. Then he risked it all when he accepted the post as General in the Revolution. If we had lost he would have lost all of his lands and probably been executed, and many heroes of the revolution returned to civilian life broke and died in poverty. It was a big chance, and only because of his cold steadfastness as a commander did he keep the starving and pitiful Continental Army under control. The Cont. Congress wouldn’t appropriate money for clothes and shoes and food, and he had to live off the land but he refused to pillage his own people. So therein lies much of the nobility and heroism he demonstrated and his men followed him. Most were volunteers and there were many desertions. It was a ragged bunch but he made it happen, and at the end he could have made himself king, but he preferred to return to farming after his presidency.

George Washington was born in Virginia (1732). He started out his career as a successful land surveyor and farmer, and he spent much of the rest of his life trying to get back to that. He was reluctant to advocate for armed rebellion against the British, but he eventually saw that it was inevitable. He served as commander in chief of the revolutionary armies, and after the new U.S. Constitution was ratified he was the clear choice for newly created office of the president. No other candidates were even considered. Washington was elected unanimously. He was the first elected president in world history.
Washington was in an awkward position as the first president because he knew that he was helping to invent the presidency by everything he did in the office. He wrote, "I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent."
When a Senate committee came up with an official title for him, "His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same," George Washington insisted on being called "Mr. President" instead.
Washington did believe in a certain amount of formality. He always wore a sword in public, and he never spoke casually to anyone at public events, including close friends. He didn't even shake hands; he just gave a formal bow. And he rode around New York City in a luxurious cream and gold carriage with silver-plated decorations and Washington's coat of arms on the doors, pulled by a matched set of six white horses with leopard-skin saddle blankets. When people criticized him for having such a fancy vehicle, Washington replied that it had been a gift to his wife.

So, he deserved the kingly appointments for having saved the nation. In politics, it’s a virtue to not be outspoken, to be able to hold in your thoughts and not reveal them for you will inevitably bump someone who holds a different view and therein lies trouble. I have only, and actually quite late, learned this and I still am not smart in this as I am unfortunately like an open book. For that reason, I realized politics is not my thing very soon in 1971 when I ran for City Council in Baton Rouge. I nearly won. Scared me. I just wanted to make a good showing so I could run for legislature later, then finally go to Congress. That was my ultimate goal, but seeing that a politician soon has to be able to talk out of both sides of his mouth, and still keep from offending, he will soon forget which is right from wrong---using situational ethics and nowadays sooner or later be accused of something he didn’t do, or busted for some infraction he did do accidentally, and always in the big fishbowl. Ugh! Either one must be superficial and shallow or be very well founded and at peace with himself so that he can float on the tide and still keep his own self respect. I was neither.
Responsibility: The following poem by John Donne ends with the little line—“never send to know for whom the bell toll; it tolls for thee. So what does that mean? Every act or inaction impacts someone or something else, in greater or lesser measure, which then ripples through the universe. Like a pebble dropped in a pool, the ripples flow out in all directions, touching places you never suspected. So everything you do has an effect on something else, and you are responsible for everything that may happen far away, even though you may never know it. I have had people come to me and repeat something I said to them a half century ago, and I couldn’t remember having said it, but they did, and it had an impact. I have said some very dumb things, and done some dumb things, and it always comes back in some way. So when I was disbarred, regardless of how much I can point fingers at those who did it, and regardless of whether nobody was hurt, complained, or even affected that I knew of, I caused it. It wouldn’t have happened had I not caused it in some way. I cannot send to find for whom the bells toll, for they toll for me.

No man is an island by John Donne

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

My friend and poet Dean Blehert, www.blehert.com, is an amazing poet.
I have a huge collection of his little musings, most of which are just two or three liners. I randomly clicked among those I have saved and out popped Feline Haiku, “The food in my bowl is old.”

Feline
The food in my bowl Is old, and more to the point Contains no tuna.
So you want to play. Will I claw at dancing string? Your ankle's closer.
There's no dignity In being sick - which is why I don't tell you where.
Seeking solitude I am locked in the closet. For once I need you.
Tiny can, dumped in Plastic bowl.
Presentation, One star; service: none. Am I in your way?You seem to have it backwards: This pillow's taken. Your mouth is moving; Up and down, emitting noise.
I've lost interest. The dog wags his tail, Seeking approval. See mine?Different message.
My brain: walnut-sized.Yours: largest among primates.Yet, who leaves for work?
Most problems can beIgnored. The more difficultOnes can be slept through.
My affection isconditional. Don't stand up, It's your lap I love.
Cats can't steal the breath Of children. But if my tail's Pulled again, I'll learn.
I don't mind being Teased, any more than you mind A skin graft or two.
So you call this thing Your "cat carrier." I call These my "blades of death."
Toy mice, dancing yarn Meowing sounds. I'm convinced: You're an idiot. Anonymous

Somehow, after reading of tuna, I thought of a poem of my own, published in www.SpillwaReview.com, among other poems I wrote in the cuisine poetry section.

Sushi

Sushi made of little fishes
eat’em raw on little dishes
how they make that funny rice
stuck together neat and nice
wrap around that eel so tasty
eat it all so none is wasty
Ooh Ooh wowie, that stuff ishot.
what you call it, wasabi what?
When it hit you, it start biting
Make you feel like Kung Fu Fighting!
Little leaves of pinky ginger
send me off on fishy bender
wash it down with vase of saki
hits me like a puck of hockey
Can’t believe how much I ate
started early ended late
Oh my god look at that bill
was it worth it for the thrill?
Full of fishes fried they not
rice and ginger wasabi hot
Help me get up from this chair
Carry me out to cool night air
I’ll be back tomorrow night
I don’t care if wrong or right
Little fishes every day
Make me troubles go away

LDS

While I am on the cuisine poetry, here’s another that was
Published in Spillway Review:

A Canticle to peanut butter

Yo! Thou creamy
Yo! Thou Crunchy
Lord of snackies
Lion of lunchies

Steadfast friend
when fridge is bare
Ever ready
Every there

Gob a glob on
sliced delicious
nibble public
or surreptitious

Soar on wings
of jelly highs
A malgam pure
of honeyed sighs

Nanners, Crackers
white or wheat
smear some on
this gummy treat

By star by sun
by hunters moon
viands por dios
lick the spoon

Before I die
I’ll say a prayer
that peanut butter
is Heaven’s fare
===============
So this comes to you from the land of sunshine, on the west coast of Florida, where we have a bluebird day at sixty five degrees and dancing palms trees. I received an email today from a pretty lady I met on the Freewinds at the art convention a month ago from Moscow, Russia. They are under the snow. Elena, I am sorry, but our snow comes every fifty years here, if then, and only in little flakes that dissolve on our warm windshields.

Education doesn't fill an empty bucket, it starts a fire. W.B. Yeats.

L D Sledge
February 22, 2009

Political comment.

2009-02-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

Mes Amis:

"I can keep my money, my freedom and my guns, and you can keep the "change." I saw this as a big sign on the back of a car. There are more signs of unrest in America than I have seen in my 73 years on this planet this round. Are we in fact doomed as a Republic? What happened to our sense of duty? Our willingness to fight. "The price of freedom is constant alertness and the willingness to fight back." (L. Ron Hubbard.)

Now we have illegal aliens on social security without contributing a penny, a medical program that can exclude people from advanced age of getting expensive treatment such as chemo because the determination of societal worth vis a vis expense, removal of habeas corpus-the fundamental right of the citizenry, Homeland security-an act that in order to keep security limits movement and freedom, pending required national id card, bills to regulate my right to keep and bear my hunting rifle and shotgun, CEO's who get millions in severance from companies they managed to bankrupt and then get paid out of the public fisc, billions of dollars in new bills to adjust the economy, much of which is just pork, and the list goes on and on.

So is there some pattern behind this? Who is really running things? The gnomes of Zurich? I think there is nothing done now, or anytime in the past, of significant change that wasn't engineered to empower individuals in charge who don't give a damn about the people. In a little book by Will Durant, he said that there is a higher concentration of wealth in a smaller percentage of the population now than there was in imperial Rome. Every great civilization seems to have gone through such an evolution, then crumbled because of corruption at the top.

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. -- Ayn Rand (1905-1982) Author

I am convinced all of this chaos was manufactured for the benefit of a dominating international group who have run things for a long time, but now are just making larger, bolder steps in creating larger chaos to distract us from the truth, to set themselves up as ultimate rulers with infinite power over our lives and minds. They are emboldened by our apathy. And of course they are hidden in the woof and warp of business and political fabric, saying that one visible group or the other is cause. Obama, Bush, papa Bush, Clinton, Reagan, little Jimmy, and all of them were pawns. Cannon fodder. This "bailout" insanity simply pushes us toward the brink of what probably will be the biggest economic collapse imaginable, and we are sheep for shearing but are doing nothing for we are polarized and mesmerized by the rhetoric of this one so improbable a president who is driving us at breakneck speed toward the brink.

My ultra conservative friends have poo pooed my observations along this line. I was on a radio program with Jim Engster on public radio before the invasion of Iraq, and demanded to know about those Weapons of Mass Destruction, where were they, what was the justification of invasion, and even defended France's refusal to join the war. I was told by several to get hell out of the US and move to France. My questions of the motivation of this, the Homeland Security Act, and on and on, have been kicked in the teeth because I have been some kind of weirdo who dares question the wisdom of our great "leadership." I sent a letter to Clinton when he endorsed the "don't tell" concept in the army in protecting military homosexuals, saying his administration would probably go down as one of the worst in history. Well? I was told that the gov. would probably be investigating me and I should be very afraid. What the hell is this attitude? I have the right to question those things that impact my life!! Not that that issue impacted my life, but it was such a departure from my concept of the order of things that I had to say something.

It is this apathy that has put us in this precarious position of pending tyranny and hidden Marxism that can actually be fascism for we will be run by the wealthy who run the government as always. If we continue on this path, we can have a Gulag world with Orwell's "1984" just coming a few decades late, camps for dissidents and political mavericks. I will surely be a candidate to disappear for I have made myself a critic of the power, unwisely for I really created a problem for myself as an outspoken lawyer. So I speak from experience. I have seen, as Ann Rand said, those guys deal in favors with no production. And they live very very well. You penalize production and reward non production and you get non production. Where are we in this truthful statement? Bankrupt.

So this said, take a look at where you are in your sense of responsibility. I feel a rebellion in the air, for what it is worth because "they" have means of putting one down, but if the public makes a huge spontaneous move, it can happen. The only problem about revolution is the new group then suddenly changes and becomes the old in short time. Welcome to planet earth.

Durant says that regardless of how powerful the centralized government becomes, sooner or later it is toppled. With existing technology of sniffing out dissidents and rebels, this may take a while to overturn. What you see in Science Fiction movies are simply the future, and implanted chips are the future---to read not just your health but your location and even emotions and thoughts. This is not far away. So enjoy what freedom you have now, and be ready for anything.

I usually am upbeat, write about joy and happiness and the infinite capabilities of man and his works of beauty and worth. I am just fed up with the apathy of our public, for all art and beauty seem to disappear under the shadow of tyranny, and if we don't wake up and do something, like electing responsible men and women, taking part in community, state and national affairs in some way, then soon you will be willingly stretching your hands so they can place the manacles of command on your soul.

Bird and I

2009-02-17T19:29:00.000-08:00

It was in late October, 1979, an Indian Summer Sunday afternoon in Baton Rouge, La. I was in the back yard cutting a sheet of plywood with a skillsaw on two sawhorses, talking to Bob Godwin, my law clerk and his buddy who had dropped by. The trees above were loaded with those migratory blackbirds that blacken the skies and fill the trees with their clatter and squawks. The noise above was so loud we had to almost yell to hear each other.

A bird flew down from the tree, skidded on the sawdust on the plywood, looked up at me and squawked. He walked to my finger, pecked on it and then began rubbing its beak in a caressing motion on tthe top of my hand. He then stepped up onto my hand, then my forearm and fluttered to my right shoulder and began pulling gently on my beard and nuzzling in my ear, while making little cooing and gravelly sounds that was like purring. At one time, the din from the tree had grown to a roar, and the bird looked up and let out a mighty squawk toward the tree. The noise instantly stopped. Not a peep from the tree. Silence.

Bob said, "That bird knows you!!" I whispered for him to get my eight year old daughter Shannon to bring the camera quick. Before they could get back with the camera the bird flew back into the tree. We were disappointed and began chattering about it.

The bird flew back down onto the plywood! He flew back to my shoulder and continued talking to me, and I knew he was trying to tell me something. Shannon brought some bread crumbs. He ate them, and I had a worm bed behind the garage I kept for fishing and I held up a long wiggling nightcrawler at the time this picture was made and he swallowed it right down.

This went on for twenty or more minutes. Fortunately there was one piece of film left on that roll. He then flew back down to the plywood, looked up at me, squawked (which was goodbye I am sure) and then flew back into the big Oak above. The entire flock lifted like a black cloud and flew away. I was in a mild euphoric shock from the experience. It was one of the sweetest things I have ever exerienced.

I have always believed that flocks of birds had a leader, and now I am totally convinced. It may be a man or woman in bird form just messing around, or whatever, but it is surely a spiritual being like us in that bird body. This event showed me that for sure.

The beginning

There is no end
Just beginnings
and games in progress
What's the score?

There are no losses
Just experience
and points on the graph
What's the trend?

2009-02-15T20:58:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Dominguez was a legendary procurer of cases. Somehow in the mixed tangle of relationships I got to know him and we became friends. He was a Damon Runyon character, one of those tough guys who came up in the rough part of New Orleans, and at the age of sixty he was just as mean and tough as he ever had been. Jimmy was scary mean. What I am trying to say is that he would scare you with his voice, his demeanor and his eyes, even though he was only five feet five.

Jimmy had been a motorcycle cop for twenty or more years, and then retired as chief of detectives of Baton Rouge. He then became an “investigator,” really a procurer of cases, for the legendary tort lawyer Al Brumfield in Baton Rouge. Brumfield was a wealthy plaintiff attorney back in the sixties and seventies until he was murdered in his home one night by burglars. It was rumored by Jimmy that he was killed by a family member, but Jimmy was also a little crazy and paranoid. I know from rumor, and from what he told me himself, that he had killed at least three men---in the line of duty or otherwise.

Let me describe him when I knew him in the late sixties, seventies and early eighties. Two hundred pounds, five feet five, his bald head had a deep creased indention running front to back, and he packed a .45 automatic on his hip under his leisure suit jacket. He wore an old lime green and a light blue leisure suit long after they went out of style. A thick gold chain around his neck, big gold rings on nearly all of his fingers and long fingernails that weren’t always the cleanest looking. His face was oddly kind of small, taking up less room on the front of his rather fat head than it should have, jowls, and his small hard eyes were set close on his nose.

When Jimmy laughed, it was a heh heh with his thin lips pooched out showing his teeth which were in need of maintenance. He was a scary looking man, especially when he laughed. I had a skinny somewhat proper secretary, about forty five or fifty whom he called whistle britches for she wore corduroy pants often and as you know when you walk fast with those pants they rub together and make a sissing sound. He would come into the office wearing his felt hat he pulled down over his eyes, and his dark aviator type glasses, and look right at her crotch and lick his lips. She would make a whimpering little noise and run into the back of the office, and he would laugh his heh heh laugh.

Jimmy brought me some dog cases, meaning some that were worthless or difficult at best. He brought his good cases somewhere else. For some reason, the country people, the Cajuns of South West Louisiana and the rednecks of Mississippi thought he was brilliant, some thought he was a lawyer, and they all thought he was a messenger from the God who lived in the city who could deliver them wealth from their offshore case or car wreck. He would hear of a serious accident somewhere, and he knew someone in the area. Next thing he was in this person’s house, drinking their coffee, charming their socks off, then signing them to a contingency fee contract. Brumfield would settle the case and keep the money his account for a long time “in the client’s best interest,” and finally release it to the client when the client began to worry him about it.
There is something to this, for I once had a million dollar judgment in a case against the highway department and my clients had no money left in less than a year.

Jimmy introduced me to the prison population at Angola, where I immediately had a hundred clients. In those days the vehicles and tractors were insured by Fireman’s Fund, and prisoners were always getting seriously injured on them. Once a hootenanny, which is a barred cage on wheels used to transport prisoners to the canefields, loaded to overflowing with prisoners locked inside, was being pulled at a high rate of speed by a guard down a gravel road, and things got out of control and the hootenanny flipped upside down in a deep pond. Nobody died, but there were injuries and many nearly drowned—you can imagine the terror. I settled those cases after a while.

Another case involved a black boy, less than thirty, along with a trustee and four other prisoners all of whom were in for murder, were loading a pickup with bales of hay. When the truck was loaded, the trustee and two murderers got in the cab, two murderers sat on the tail gate, holding onto the support chains, and there was no place for my client to sit. He didn’t want to sit with the murderers---as his crimes were petty theft and some burglaries during which he always got caught red-handed. So he clambered on top of the great stack of bales and tried to hold on as the trustee careened down the gravel road at a high speed—--making a curve during which maneuver the top bales and my client separated from the truck and continued in the original direction---all terminating in a canefield with my client’s severely broken leg. My little New Orleanean client had spent his life in one jail or another, actually getting rehabbed more in prison than at home—for his mama would lock him in the attic while he was home to keep him out of trouble.

Once he got out of jail, still in his cast, and wanted to borrow some money. The problem about plaintiff lawyers is that their clients are nearly always indigent and broke. I gave him a check for $100 because he had no shoes and needed a shirt. My office was on Plank Road at the time, sometimes in the late sixties, and about two hours passed when he came back, crying, begging me to fix the check. He had clumsily tried to alter the check to make it $100,000, and was turned away from the bank. I should have kept the check as a souvenir.

Jimmy’s prize prison procurer of clients was named Paul. All the prisoners I represented were in Camp A, the murderers, rapists, big time crime guys who had been injured. This guy was thin with dark almond complexion and oddly colored blue eyes. He had cut a man up into little pieces and put the dismembered parts into a big suitcase. He ran his drugs, whores, extortion and contraband like the Godfather of the prison. Nobody messed with Paul. He never made parole and died up there in that hell hole, but given that he was insane, he surely didn’t belong in society. Insane doesn’t mean slobbering crazy---it means constant intention to harm in order to protect oneself for they are in frenzied concealed terror. They are completely devoid of feeling and have no sense of responsibility---that is why they can kill or harm without remorse. Jimmy was just like him in a way. This was in the late sixties and seventies before I learned to detect and stay away from anti-social personalities. It was scary, but exciting.

One of Jimmy’s techniques of control was blame and put you on the defense. His voice and demeanor was a weapon. He growled, even gurgled, turning his lips up in a snarl, while almost getting in your face when he felt he was losing control. I was terrified of him at first until I realized I could play his game. His favorite starting point was a growl: “Why didn’t you return my fugging phone call?” He probably never called at all. Finally I would just tell him he is a lying sack of shit he never called. He would laugh and all would be right.

Once a good friend was sitting across my desk from me in the corner of my then small office on Perkins Road when Jimmy burst in, wearing his hat pulled down over his eyes, sunglasses, lime green leisure suit, growling, “why don’t you return my damn phone calls?”

The door opened in a way that Jimmy couldn’t see my friend. But my friend could see him. My friend knew I kept a gun in the top drawer of my desk. I growled back: “You lyin’ SOB, you ain’t called me!”

“You, you,” Jimmy said, pulling his coat back as if reaching for his gun. I slammed the drawer of my desk open and reached inside and my friend hit the floor. Jimmy saw him for the first time and we both began laughing and my friend looked up wide eyed, still expecting lead to fly. My friend and I still laugh about that scene as he got to meet the legendary Jimmy Dominguez.

Jimmy had lots of ups and downs—his wife Sadie died. I think, in spite of his tendency to wander and I was amazed that some women really found him irresistible---and I still wonder at seeing a fine young babe wrapped around a tattooed, unwashed, hairy beast and thank the gods that women are truly blind. If they weren’t, I would have been devoid of love life and so I just was thankful for the blind ones who stumbled by me.

Anyway, Jimmy finally had a stroke of sorts that deprived him of his weapon, his voice. He could only growl and gurgle. He had set up the “Big D Bail Bonding Service,” bailing criminals out of jail, and was having problems with his partner. He and his wife sat across from my desk explaining the problem, and Jimmy’s eyes would bug out as he tried to talk, but could only burble and growl, his face turning red and redder as that animal inside tried to get out. She would lean away from him and reach out and touch him to cool him down, yet as if she had to keep a little distance at times like these for he just might explode and she would be hit by shrapnel. Still attempting to talk he would growl, almost slobber and finally resolve into a little bugeyed squeak. I thought he was going to have cardiac arrest right before my eyes, all the while thinking “he’s getting what he deserves.”

Finally Jimmy went to whatever reward awaited him, and I stood between his daughter and his wife at the coffin, looking down at what was left of Jimmy. We said nothing for a while, then his wife said under her breath, “There lies one no-good rotten sonofabitch.”

After a couple of heartbeats, his daughter said, “Yeah. Daddy was a no good rotten sonofabitch.”

I thought this was a fitting farewell for a man whose life consisted mainly of terror, extortion and threats. Maybe he wasn’t all bad. I was able to ride over and above the thing he was, being an observer and not a participant in his game. I am sure he never knew a moment’s peace, and was as miserable a human as I have ever known, concealed by his demeanor of bluff that he may have been willing and able to deliver. Had I not known him so well, I would have thought he was just another Mafioso, for he looked and acted the part---and claimed he was the confidant of Carlos Marcello and his gang---he may have been. All I know is that my gut went into a clinch when he showed up, and only relaxed when he was gone.

This little spinning forgotten cinder out on the far reaches of an insignificant galaxy, is peopled with angels, demons, geniuses, miscreants, idiots, all miracles in their own way. If you hang around long enough and mix it up with the tenants of this planet, you will run into the Jimmys, or Swaggarts (I represented Jimmy Swaggart for seven years) all trying to survive in their own way, which is interesting for they cannot, being immortal spiritual beings, but survive. People like Jimmy D. try to survive by keeping others down, and people like Jimmy S. try to survive by putting fear into others in another way for another reason in the name of salvation. And I sometimes almost weep seeing their struggles and pain trying to overcome problems they create for themselves. I wonder where Jimmy is today. If one believes in Karma he may be one of the dogs he kicked, working his way back up the gene pool. On the other hand he may be singing with the angels, laughing at the effects he created on me. Knowing him was, looking back, a treat, for he was the last of a breed. The way things are going, fifty years from now his kind will be on forced medication, unless he is a psychiatrist, which would fit his mind-set, and he would be dispensing the pills or administering the shock treatment.

The Least Tern and Sabine Indians

2009-02-14T21:05:00.000-08:00

Forty three years of law practice yielded up to this seeker of sensation and spice many weird and off the radar experiences.

I represented many of the Sabine Indian people who live in the marsh on the edge of the gulf south of Houma, Louisiana. They speak a dialect of Cajun French which is a dialect of Parisian French. They primarily fish, trawl and trap for a living, with a diet of fish, crab and oyster and occasional coon, possum, squirril or rabbit. Many times I sat at a table totally overflowing with great boiled crabs and shrimp, getting it on me all the way to my elbows. Delicious. South of Houma, head toward Montegut (monteegue) and then head south again to Pont Au Chein (meaning fork of the oak tree---that is what the locals say it means--not dog=chein.) Beyond that you drive south again down among the bayous. Soon you will come to what appears to be the end of everything, a marsh as far as the eye can see in every direction, with brown marsh grass waving in the wind like an endless wheat field shot through with saltwater canals. Then you reach a thread of high ground with oak trees on each side bordered closely by encroaching marsh with houses in varied condition, some on stilts, on each side of the road bordered by a canal on one side. When I first visited there in the early seventies, there was land around these home and cattle. The last time I went water and marsh came right up to the back of many houses, and after Katrina and Rita I have no idea if the whole area is washed away.

Proceed a mile or so down that road and you arrive at the end of the world, for you can go no farther---it is just marsh and gulf south of there. My clients and friends lived on that little peninsula of dry ground. The people are of the Chittamacha (spelling) tribe, who subsisted over the centuries just as they do today, building boats, living off the land, with an idea the land is theirs. They are looked down upon by the Cajuns, who consider them "Sabs," lesser breeds, and so they stay isolated and marry among their culture, which is unique asmuch as the Cajun life is unique just north of there.

I spent quite a few pages in my novel, Dawn's Revenge, telling about this area and the people for my protagonist, Jack Chandler, escaped the clutches of a vengeful sheriff by hiding out there among his friends. Once I was sitting on the dock by the canal in front of my friend's home, smoking, drinking beer with my friends after a fishing trip, when an old man, in his late eighties, came paddling up in a pirogue (a shallow, very narrow, flat bottomed boat about eight feet long) from the south. He had a home on a little high ground a couple of miles south which had become surrounded by water and now he would come to visit his family and friends by boat. He was wizened, toothless and gnarled as an old root. He didn't speak any english. I gave him a beer and a cigarette, and we squatted on that dock for an hour, smoking, with him smiling at me, his clear, sparkling eyes watching with humor everything around him.

They are very friendly if they take you in, otherwise they are aloof and suspicious. I was one of their own. They would open the door, grab me by the arm, sit me in the swing, bring me a cup of scalding sweet hot coffee and talk in their heavy accented patois, and I would feel so warm and welcomed. I handled lots of their cases almost exclusively as their lawyer until a lawyer in New Orleans married into a family in the community and then only a few of my oldest friends kept me on. It was a rich and enriching experience for they always had some claim for an offshore accident, hurt on a rig, shrimp boat, etc. Steady clients and good money, and good fun.

They felt they had free run of the whole of their territory on the islands around, the many strips of beaches reaching into the gulf and on the canals. Then environmentalists came in and began cutting off areas that one couldn't trespass where a threatened specie may be nesting, such as the Least Term. The Least Tern is a kind of small seagull that lays eggs in the sand and has been declared threatened. They posted signs and warnings not to cross in this area of the beach, which before had been part of a means of ingress and egress to the beaches beyond where my friends would go and picnic and fish.

My friend and her family continue their usual pattern of crossing that area, and evidently drove straight through the posted area where these little birds lay their eggs, and sure enough there was one of the few agents there who arrested the driver and charged with a hefty fine. My friends swore there was no sign or warning, and that if there were warnings they were posted after she crossed through. She was adamant and angry, being a bit hot under the collar naturally. Now Linda was not a Sabine,but a Cajun lady who married to the community and she and Dave had three kids and lived out there in the worst of conditions but seemed to be consummately happy. I took the case at her insistence, because you just have to do so when you have good friends needing help.

I went to New Orleans to the hearing, and all of these game wardens were there, and they said the passed through the warnings and posted signs all around, nearly hitting one. She said they were lying and were just trying to discriminate against Indians. Well, they broke out a little video and it seems the agent was really on the ball for there she was, blasting right through the area, nearly hitting a sign that said no trespassing, squashing many little eggs in the process. the video showed broken eggs in that tiny nest in the sand with her tire tracks all over it. She stayed angry at me as if I was in collusion with the law even though she could see herself sitting high in that pickup talking away to her kids as she ripped right through the area. Of course there was no fee and even with the visual proof, she stayed mad at me for a year or so as if I had done something wrong. Then we were dear friends again. I understood the phenomena.

I have many stories about these great people and unusual cases.

If you ain't livin', you are dyin."
(Shankshaw Redemption.)

On anatomy and staring

2009-02-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

It’s February 13, 2009, the day before Valentine’s day, and the weather is just perfect in Palm Harbor. The morning is one of those cool mornings with fresh air from the bay and the Gulf. Pinellas County is an appendix shaped peninsula on the West coast of yet another big Peninsula, the state itself, with Tampa Bay on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. The only time of year that is hell, and it is purely hell, is in the summer. But being from Baton Rouge, which is in a topographical room without windows, and there is no air circulation and hotter, I can appreciate a place that has breezes year round that modifies the swelter. And the fishing is great. In three minutes I drive down Edgewater drive with vistas of the gulf and sand Key a few miles away. Kind of paradise here.

I have a collection of Mankind magazines, and little books published by Mankind, about the way we lived, the daily life of the periods. I just finished reading about the Victorian era which was struggling for existence as I grew up. Girls in this country still wouldn’t reach. It was if they were forbidden to reach. Men do the reaching. Man feels threatened a little when a woman reaches, and that comes from these mores’. It must have been a crazy time. John Ruskin, writer, never consummated his marriage because he had an idyllic idea of womankind borne of the poetry and dreams of the period of romanticism, and when he was confronted with a woman’s anatomy he freaked. She married an artist who came to paint her portrait who evidently did appreciate her anatomy.

In my bio I put “looking for signs of life.” Included in this category of livingness are ladies whom I really have been drawn to had life---and more than a guttering candle or glow, but spark that may even shock me it touched without permission. So here’s a poem to amorosity.

When I think of her anatomy
She’s got things I wish to see
And I have heard the best things in life are free
But it did cost me it really cost me,
Beyond measure

And rising tide within said pay
You’ll drown in your juices if you wait another day
Roll the dice and then pray
To see and know what beneath lay
Those treasures

So rolled the dice on the bedding table
To view the sights beneath the sable
True, there were wonders and I think her name was Mabel
And I looked with all that I was able
At my leisure

So now that I am long in tooth
Looking back I know the truth
I looked and saw and can say sooth
And I guess that I’ll admit I am uncouth
But that was pleasure.

-----------------------------------------------

My second wife Glenda (the good witch) criticized me for staring at things. She said “you look at things like you are in awe of them,” like I was wrong and it embarrassed her. Per haps it is wrong in this culture to look at things with deep interest. I do find myself staring at things because I find things fascinating, and upon ruminating on what I do, as I am given to do at all times, I realized that I am really trying to get it, to absorb that which is around me into myself so I can fully understand it all. Then I realized, after learning the basics of things, for there are basics and everything has an anatomy which can be broken down into smaller elements and parts, that there are “parts or components” of understanding. These are Affinity, Reality and Communication, each of which can be broken down into even smaller parts, so if there is any kind of upset or problem, it is always a break in one of these Affinity, Reality of Communication---or all of them. It is a triangle, with the C on the top. If you expand any one of the angles, all the rest come up. So always communicate if you are in doubt of anything, and it will bring up the reality (agreement) and then affinity. I learned this studying L. Ron Hubbard’s works. It has made my life much easier and gives me tools to handle any situation witih people.

So I wrote a little thing on Staring

What I see
You may wonder why I seem to stare
Yes, that may be the word---stare
I seek the fullness of the world
That is the reason I am here
To feel, encircle, taste, enter
And know the heart and mind and soul of allo.
I sense its edges, its depth
Its essence, its life and proportion
Its roundness, its angularity
Its allness and how it fits with the whole
I only wish I could flow within
The cambium, the sap, the upward
reaching juices of this big elm
and know its heat, its cool certainty,
feeling the birth of its twigs and leaves
and how it praises the day
with uplifted branches
for each ray connecting its life
to the sun that is in itself connected
to the wholeness of the universe
all of which I am somehow holding in place.
I came here to know
As payment for past deeds,
Now in a meat body,
Trying to retrieve something lost
Trying to find the path to the way
Back home
Back to myself.

Reach out. Touch someone. Be.
Have a fabulous, unserious day.

Waiting for the Tide, Who Am I, Remembering a Dream

2009-02-10T19:58:00.000-08:00

(Picture by James Christensen)

I am a fan of James Christensen's fantasy art. Here's a sample of his art that I named "Waiting For The Tide," to accompany the poem I wrote in May 2006.

Give me the Sea
By L D Sledge

Oh set me afloat
in me friggin boat
upon the foamin' brine
I'm a mean old coot
and I don't give a hoot
about your bleedin' lubber's whine

I'll take me tea
Myself and me
and what I say is true
I'll sail away
One fine day
onto the salty blue.

Meanwhile I'll wait
in this landed state
to take me for a ride
I really hate
this landlubber fate
I pray for an early tide.

When I die
I pray that I
will swim with Davy Jones
In the deep
Is the place to keep
me remainin' mortal bones

Soon far out upon the sea
all that you will see of me
will be tiny speck of sail
Than I'll be home
The world to roam
with the porpoise and the whale.

So kiss it while you may me lass
the time is now and soon will pass
I feel me tide a risin'
A mariner man will come and go
and dock his dingy with the flow
As soon you will be a realizin'

I may be old
but I've been told
I've wood a plenty for the fire
We've got time
For a lovely rhyme
I promise to inspire.

So pipe me aboard and you'll be surprised
We'll still be a sailin' even when the wind dies
I'll leave you a smilin' when me anchor is raised
Trim me sails and swab me deck
Fix me jib so I'll leave here correct
I'll monkey up the gallant and sing your praise

Soon I'll be gone with the swellin' sea
But you haven't seen the last of me
This voyage has just begun
In the topsail I'll be singin'
In the wind I'll be a wingin'
Look for me beyond the sun.

===============
As a kid in my little remote country town of Castor, in the northwest quarter of Louisiana, I dreamed of being a sailor for some reason. I would fantasize standing on the rolling deck with the wind whipping in my hair (I had hair then) and the salt spray soaking my shirt, or skinnying up to the tops in the crows nest, wheeling side to side in the swells and rock of the ship. What dreams we had as kids.

Here's a couple of old poems:

Who Am I?

I have pulled the oars as a galley slave
I have ridden camels across the waste on the silk road
I have ruled empires as Sheik and Pharaoh
I have marched with Hannibal across the Alps
I have bored skulls in china, as physician to release the evil spirits
I have sung the songs that swayed empires, as solomon, Hing Tsue, and Ragga
I have slogged through swams in search of baubles on Arctuous
I have dealt and died a million deaths
from sword, disease and famine
I have won, lost, laughed cried
and taunted my enemes, boredom and death.
Look into my eyes
You will see eternity.

----------------

(I had a dream of dancing with a lady who must have been ninety or more)

Remembering a dream:

I danced with her last night
Her skin was smooth
drawn over hands
with blue veins
Pretty hands
Now Old
Still feeling
Still reaching
Still dancing
Her eyes were blue
I knew she has grandchildren
who adore her
and her body was solid and firm
from workout and dance
Life was in her
Like slow fire
It burned
and will burn on and on.

I didn't mean for this blog to be a poetry blog, but I have written hundreds of poems I am finding in the looseleaf binders that contain those half million words of shortstories, essays and poems, and will share some on these blogs.