Great Aunt "Jimmie", my Grandfather's sister, with Mildred and Edward...posing with the tractor that Monroe built from plans that were published in Popular Mechanics......

Coalescence of Internalization and Subjectivism

THINKING CHILDREN'S COLORING BOOK

A Page for the 'Thinking Children's Coloring Book' that I designed while visiting a friend in Holland....in my mid 20's......The 'Plan' was to 'market' the Book with a box of drawing pencils....for those who have some needs for self-expression, without actually creating anything other than 'choosing colors' and 'drawing within the lines'.......Most of these drawings were lost, when they were stored in my garage, which leaked during a heavy rainstorm.....Even this one has some damage.....

Quick and Unedited Response to The Repetitions of Hopeful Optimism

Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking,
Comes  the ever repeating notes
Of the neverending songs.

Each time the  song is sung,
Each time the Heart is won,
Each time the Tale is spun.

If Today is Yesterday's Dream 
That we've forgotten to forget,
Then, Tomorrow is Now.  

Repression is the delusion of the fury,
The arm around a neck and down an arm,
Cramped breeches and moist panties.

Oh, Daddy, thanks for the chocolates and flowers. 
We were just listening to Mozart
And discussing Plausible Deniability.  

On Re-Reading R.D.'s KNOTS .............

They are playing a game.
They are playing at not playing a game.
If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. 
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

JILL I'm upset you are upset 
JACK I'm not upset 
JILL I'm upset that you're not upset that I'm upset that you're upset. 
JACK I'm upset that you're upset that I'm not upset that you're upset that I'm upset, when I'm not.

JILL You put me in the wrong 
JACK I am not putting you in the wrong 
JILL You put me in the wrong for thinking you put me in the wrong.

JACK Forgive me 
JILL No 
JACK I'll never forgive you for not forgiving me

There must be something the matter with him
        because he would not be acting as he does
                unless there was.
        therefore he is acting as he is
        because there is something the matter with him.

 

He does not think there is anything the matter with him
because
        one of the things that is
        the matter with him
        is that he does not think that there is anything
        the matter with him
therefore
        we have to help him realize that,
        the fact that he does not think there is anything
        the matter with him
        is one of the things that is
        the matter with him.
there must be sometime wrong with him 
because he thinks
there must be something the matter with us 
for trying to help him see
that there must be something the matter with him
to think that there is something the matter with us
for trying to help him see that
we are trying to help him
to see that
we are not persecuting him 
by helping him
to see we are not persecuting him
by helping him
to see that
he is refusing to see
that there is something the matter with him
for not seeing there is something the matter with him
for not being grateful to us
for at least trying to help him
to see that there is something the matter with him
for not seeing that there must be something the matter with him
for not seeing that there is something the matter with him 
for not seeing that there is something the matter with him

for not being grateful
that we never tried to make him feel grateful

RE-FOCUSING

when overwhelmed by loud noises or several people talking at once.....I discovered, long ago, that the best thing for me to do...is re-focus...replacing the stimuli to one sense to that of another.......especially on nearby sharply defined objects, which seems to muffle the edges of my diminishing constraints. Yellow, with green, is especially effective....... I think this is one reason that I became a photographer.....to re-focus on still, visual stimuli rather than endure cacophony.....

Reflections on The Intellectualization of Emotions.......

More, later---on the intellectualization of emotion, and  plausible denial;   to determine if the emotional/intellectual system is functioning properly, and, if not, to comprehend, if not to explain,  the faulty performance of conscious thought,  by examining potential sources of conflict and the way conflict becomes manifest in a reasoning system.  At unconscious systems level, the localization of functions in particular parts of the cortex and the connections among the subsystems which support their interactions in performing higher level functions like those involved in language processing or the labelling of  output expressions-both visually and verbally and gesturally, (breath)---cannot be mapped (yet) or comprehended with clarity, thus the confusion.  The desire to mold the abstract of a both orderly and chaotic environment in that part of the brain that we call the mind-- that which is made even more  inchoate by all the influences of electrical fields, the thoughts of conscious things and the unconscious activities of all things that exist in this manifestation of matter in the universe can, only in the mind of a normally deluded human being, create the visions of unthinking people who are content enough to function with the doors to perception and consciousness closed absolutely and locked  even at the genetic level from their progeny.  And those who pose to grasp the handles of these doors, pose a threat not only to their gene base but to their own mental stability.  Isn't this difficult to talk about, express, or comprehend with any clarity?  I see a light in a distant window, high in that building that stretches beyond the clouds into infinity.  I'm looking for a ladder... extendable enough to place my vision directly into the window, although there are countless other windows beyond my grasp.   So where is this going?   I think I know.  Where do you think?  The suspenseful and thrilling conclusion is to be seen next Saturday morning after the 8th episode of Flash Gordon,  after yet another dozen Sally Cruickshank animated features and a brief national geographic program about the cannibalization of missionaries by amazon natives. 

OUT WITH THE STALE AIR, IN WITH THE FRESH.......

8 years ago, I posted some words about letting go of non-mutually-beneficial relationships.....Not so easy, as people..myself included... tend to perpetuate predictably co-dependent scenarios.....Yesterday i made a few difficult decisions and unfriended some "friends" that, over years to decades,increasingly offered practically nothing and that i had become indifferent toward or that had defined the parameters of 'relationships' by limits, restraints, apathetic indifference or inexpressiveness.......What's the point? Many of my friends from youth are dead....I don't want zombies to replace them........communicative vitality...well...yes!

THE WAY IN, WITHOUT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE WAY "OUT"

'The Way In" is through the pre-frontal arrangement of neurological structures that determine how sensory input will be processed; what attributes will be given to the input to integrate new sensory data with constructs that have already been hard-wired through bias, preconception, prejudice or unthinkingness; our expectations of reward, or punishment...which both expands or limits our more intimate expression of what most believe is the 'same', or should be, for all humans.....Art may arrest the courage of eccentric viewing of the ordinary....or, for some, this is what it looks like....'out there'.... This is what I see......I can only imagine what others see, if i had any interest in that......I'd rather 'see' what others express creatively, for that is both the co-joined twins of Truth & Deception and the real futility of fashionable dreaming and stylistic conformity.......Or, without verbosity, a picture, instead.....

AGING BEAUTY IS AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY......

Pretty Boy, Joe D., Warhol Superstar.....'then' and 'now'.....The 'Moral'?   One lives in the moment....then, adapts for the 'next' moment......  Of course, for many Hollywoodians and Socialites....with a spare hundred grand, they can hang on their Youths like moths on broken light bulbs...... 

Culinary Sophisticates May Shake Their Index FIngers....but....Sorry, Alton! .

 I actually love to munch on these little frozen, breaded coconut shrimp.....dressed-up with a fancy Thai hot and sweet dipping sauce.....so there!    

PUIRT A BEUL, OR

Last Night I Dreamt of Bunnie......

Then, reaching out to touch her.....her image, from my memory......vanished...and I awakened.....feeling the loss......

STATISTICAL REASSURANCES

WITH ALL OUR SOUGHT AFTER DISTRACTIONS.....ARE WE CREATING A SCHIZOAFFECTIVE WORLD?

watching a few minutes of Ms. Woodward's Academy Award winning performance in Three Faces Of Eve, early this morning.........I thought of how amazing it is that we are integrated into identifiable singularities, distinct from one another, yet....under stress..... fall asunder, to maintain stasis in the electrical storms that fill our craniums.....a minute causality may create an extreme effect even/only by qualitative theoretical assumptions.....an electron, traveling a copper wire, or even migrating to another 'shell', may induce a change in the Universe......

The Amino Acids.....LIVE!

All that's left of my old 'Veristes' is a half century old photo......the 1300 pages of 'material' has vanished from its Server, in the Glut Of Zen coursing toward the Oblivion of Mindless Interaction........ I hold the 'SmartPhone' responsible! Or was it just the shallow waves of FB, Twitter....and all the other short-attention shenanigans of grey-matter convolutions....folds, mirroring the neurological sameness of ubiquitous mediocrity? Even the occult flaming squid and even....gasp!.....The Subgenius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N-0E8ZVNDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbHjybg50BU

Follow the crumbs

I've spent enough time in my Dark Labyrinth.........and have heard from pink-faced Hittite griffins that watch from behind dark clouds, that I need a little honey with the whey in my golden bowl.......where are those bread crumbs that I left along the way, Petronius? I'm hungry for some sweet nectar and a cake of manna, be it bdellium....be it but the whooshing of butterfly wings......

.

Totally exhausted from trying to comprehend my emotional condition and move to a more transcendental plane of thought and feelings, I've been trying to develop a Optical Qualified New Input Mail Language through solution-uncovering button modifying initialism, transparently, when i discovered Pre-Binary Yttrium-Oriented Interface Services....Wow, was i surprised, especially when i realized that the Y-value Common Zero-Input Object Storage co-efficient had been incorrect, all along! So, when I consulted with the "i" Interactive Virtual eXchangable Header Overlay Service, i was instructed to replace the Balanced Common Hierarchical Logic Service Router with a Virtual eXtended Interchange Enhanced Telecommunications Sequence.....how delightfully simple and logical! Now my life will be a breeze, for this was the cause of all my anxiety and despair! And I avoided the intellectualization of my neurosis by quickly and diligently digging for the correct analysis and solution.......Life is so much simpler now and the view from my padded cell is quite spectacular......

THE NICHE OF AMBIGUITY

A non-existent, unless imagined, single sostenuto thought, amorphously indicative, posturing in dissidently divergent emotional context......

THE IMPACT OF 1967

21, and living in Nashville, Tennessee....attending a relatively conservative University......and not identifying very much with the Brooks Bros.-wearing, fashionable Hoot-Nannyiers....especially after meeting Allen and Stokeley, during IMPACT...my 'senior year'....Everything went 'South'.....literally.....I had moved 'off campus' to engage in Leftist activities that would, by 1967, lead to my being 'punished' for 'making trouble'.....My Mother, after asking me why I did not attend 'Graduation Ceremonies' or have any 'recognition' in the Senior Yearbook, was both shocked and annoyed that I had refused 'the Diploma' and had refused to 'take' the Comprehensive Examination in English OR to complete some 'required' coursework in 'Art'...."What a waste of money!", she said.....then.....'Get into the car!!....we're driving to Nashville!"... We drove, with Mother getting yet another speeding ticket, to Kirland Hall, where Mother confronted Alexander Heard, the University's Chancellor.....Then, off to the head of the English Dept....then, to my 'Faculty Advisor'......Arrangements were made, on the spot, for me to take the 'Comprehensive' alone, in Dr. Rupert Palmer's office, while my Mother, seated in the Hallway outside, blocked my egress.......Hours later, I turned in my 'deliberatly' convoluted 'Proof' that I 'should, indeed be granted a B.A. in English, specializing in 17th Century Metaphysical Poetry, with a Minor in 'Fine Arts'/Psychology/Philosophy'......As Punishment for being a pain in Vanderbilt's butt, I was sent 'my' diploma a year later...so dated....'Big Deal!" I thought.....what am I going to do with This, anyway! Then, 'we' were expected to sit in rows, taking notes of whatever our 'profs' were rattling on about.....NOT to hang out with liberal, Commie, Black, Jew Poets, making 'trouble' for the Nashville Police.....I thought THAT was what 'College' was FOR!......Sorry, Alexander, but did you think I really gave a sh#t? If GInsberg had looked like Daniel Radcliffe, in Kill My Darlings, I'd have gotten into a lot more Trouble!

STUCK IN ONE OF THOSE ABSTRACT PLACES

Anoushka Shankar-indian Raga jog amazing performance

The Undiscovered Brando....

'almost' two pages from Marlon Brando's copy of "The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society" ....about the comprehension and subsequent understanding of unconscious processes that battle for dominance and survival within the constructs that form and perseverate within our brains and manifest in our beliefs and actions; and, admonishments about dwelling in pop mediocrity rather than intellectually beyond the mass norms of 'acceptable' dogmatic thinking.....

I think Brando was aware of the naive complicity that can bring about what seems to 'be'.....that can place a fool like our president, on his throne and elect an adulatory congress of self-serving howler monkeys to low 'high' places.......as though they had the capacity to do our thinking for us......

THE STRUGGLE TOWARD CONSCIOUSNESS

125 Drafts....to work, toward 'completion'.....This morning, working on a dozen of these writing/imaging Projects....I fell into slumber, from not having slept the night 'away'......During this brief tourney between awakening consciousness and slumberland 'dreaming' .....it 'seemed', to the 'always awake' part of my brain, that the 'always asleep' part was trying to erase the prestidigitations of Art, and replace these remunerations for creative Thought...with more mundane considerations.......In the Dream, within a dream, contained by the 'freezing' of my body's involvement with sleep-walking and semi-conscious scribbling, by the light of a 2 1/2 watt yellowish light, coming through the galley windows of a childhood metal ship's portholes.....enough interplay between light and shadow passed through my thin upper eyelids to initiate a sequence of 'dream images' and faint, but 'present' motion......Then, within the dream that was being 'disassembled and obliterated', arose another dream, that....awakening with startled apprehension, tearing off the cloak of repressive chemistry that the New Brain casts about the old, reactive gizzard of the 'Old Brain'....I emerged from the imagined respite of Slumberland, with a clear and highly-detailed story, complete with pictures and sounds, but lacking dialogue.....but, as I reached for a pen and a notepad to scribble the shorthand trail of crumbs...back to the 'Story', now retreating to the dark, unconscious inner sanctum of electrically-charged tissues, wrapped in that bony cage.....It was gone! Nowhere to be 'seen'......I am determined to 'get There', nevertheless.....Already, even awake, under the influence of Java, bits and pieces are coalescing....Then, I will manifest all of 'this/that with the glue of creative imagining....The agents of repression and sublimation will, I'm certain, demand that I immolate the product of such expression....paper in fire...or just in frustrating 'crumbling'....tossed to the trash can......

JAFF'S PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY.......

almost a half century have passed.......

from Jaff's Series of 'portraits of friends'....from memory..... This 'portrait of me' from a distant memory, as we have not actually 'seen' one another...in the flesh...in decades, now...

https://jsarchivegallery.blogspot.com/2020/06/portraits-of-my-friends-from-memory.html?fbclid=IwAR3enBCC8vv89Edqwe9y9-c5VQYcCsmAXxOSmCxRKX8B_QP2dFL6UnBpcZQ

Jacob Tremblay Does His Best Seth Rogen and Arnold Schwarzenegger Impres...

THE BEATLES! THE BEATLES!....ENOUGH OF THIS!

A track listing for a compilation CD that I worked for hours to assemble....well, not really....Miqel's the 'man'...psych-out, acid-heads and space-freaks.......They don't even play this stuff on Art School radio stations!.... I was temporarily 'relieved of my position' as a 'disk jockey' at WRVU, in Nashville, for subjecting students to 'way too alternative' music......'Give them what they want!', I was ordered by the station manager..... "How about......I get the 2 am time slot?....a different audience, perhaps?"....

On reading a Post by Tom Harper......

Even less distanced from the repressive 1950's....I was dumped into the 'hands' of the 'Fugitives" and "Agrarians", Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Aden and John Crowe Ransom.....and some now forgotten academic scholars and poets.......in 1963, of course, I thought 'What do 'they' know!....they're 'school teachers, aren't they? Isn't Faulkner the 'one'?" I never met James Dickey, until he visited Rupert Palmer, my English Dept. 'Advisor', as I sat in 'Dr." Palmer's office, being upbraided for being 'too cryptic....with too little respect for the 'writing of the past'.....Dickey dropped in with some advice: "Go for the Money!".......I thought, then, that I should have gone for the degree in Evolutional Biology and Genetics.....but the typewriter was far more appealing than the slide rule and monocular microscope, then......Hmmm, maybe I should have gone to 'ART SCHOOL'...This 'Place' wasn't MY idea, to begin with....but Mother's......It was 'this' or "Riley Munday"....shutter....In the 'long run', I'll admit, Palmer's History Of the English Language and The Morphology of Phonemes....may have 'paid off'.....I can 'write'....in my own style...with my own idiosyncratic utilization of 'Language'....as Doug Marcaida would say: "It Will cut!"....look!....there's two amoebi now!, but even after 'twenty years of schooling', I'm not certain of the plural spelling. 

CHAZ CARTIER

From a dozen years ago.......from a note to a friend, whom, at that time, I knew as "Chaz" and with whom i've shared many 'dialogues', although we have never met in the "real world", but only within the contexts of Myspace and Facebook: Re: mental illness as the burdensome lagniappe of Creativity...the compartmentalization, then unravelling, of associative collusions within the mass of cortical tissues......:.....It is not so much that eccentricity is incomprehensible, for i don't seek to discover the periapsis of intellect or the common, intersections that we share......somewhere between 24 and 42, so to speak, wherein the trajectory of random thoughts collide in expressions that are both recognized as "real",yet, at the same instant, are transient and unknowable........i keep, at my bedside, 7 boxes, varying in both size and design, materials of construction and contents.......At one point in time....well, actually not a POINT, but a span of time........there were fewer containers for the stuff, less stuff and a more random assembly......to find an item, i had to open all the boxes and search the multi-leveled vaults of treasures, many that i had forgotten were there and could no longer remember their origins.........Now......i can see a box and, because of my 'organization' have a relatively accurate idea of the 'types' of things therein.........an economy of placement now constructed, my prior randomness gave way to 'you can find it if you concentrate' .......Many of the "things" in the boxes represent entire constructs or clues to memory and insight.......some are purely nostalgic......One could say that this whole procedure is just a form of OCD to fill the dots between the mind's clicking in time......but the process inhibits dissociative thinking, for me, and ties me into the more rigid relativity of the rest of the world........eccentric? i suppose so........ but then, i make no claims to normalcy, and find it rather pathetic and dull, don't you? On the other hand, however, i have seen Madness, both intellectually and emotionally........and my advice is: "don't get lost" The vast space with which we have little familiarity is far greater than the known universe.......the world is full of "code".....the world, perhaps....IS just "code".........the "cheat-codes" are just delusionary devices to corral the Incomprehensible into a text of believability.......So....I've found that Art is the best excuse for living.......writing it, drawing it, dancing it....whatever........then observing this output, thinking "ha ha....it is what it is". Now, there are a dozen 'boxes' of inter-related conceptualizations, taking form as 'things.......a box of nail clippers, of bracelets, of old photographs, of clippings from books and magazines.....of refrigerator magnets bearing 'words' that can be assembled and reassembled.......as Fancy would have It...... then, this assemblage of words will be enveloped in stacks and stacks of paper, bearing other assemblages of language as 'brushstrokes'......

Will.They.Ever.Know.Best?

If only fathers knew best and their offspring actually comprehended the wisdom that fathers should convey to them........if only we were all raised with love, compassion, forgiveness and understanding, the Consciousness of Humanity would evolve......It all begins in infancy, is congealed in childhood, is fixed in adolescence and unyielding in adulthood.....

Excitation with Mollifying Emoluments

First, 

a second dessert! : lemon-scented "eggs" iced cream with powdered Schaffenberger cocoa and a plasticy blob of Robert Rothschild raspberry chocolate sauce, unheated.......   Then, a few

Chili-hot small dish samplers for a late luncheon......another tribute to Parts Unknown.......especially hot........particularily the braised collard greens with chili flakes, hot garlic, tomatoes cooked in sriracha chili sauce, tortilla pasta rice with chili oil and tamarind paste, black beans in walnut oil, yard scallions....marinated in rice vinegar, and fava beans Hannibal Lecter, with grated aged parmesan cheese...with a solacing side dish of green dragon-enhanced Bhindi Masala with ground mace and star anise and black salt.......For 'dessert', a sponge cake soaked with mango iced cream, refrozen, then sliced and served with whipped cream, flavored with raspberry and apricot liquors.......This dessert....a tribute to my friend Hill Irving....I miss our many conversations about cooking, Films and really alternative music, which spanned almost a half century.........We once had a telephone dinner party, wherein we cooked then ate foods.......hundreds of miles apart, watching Babette's Feast and commenting on the "Spread" and Repression.......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBG4mRIg-9M

still going through thousands of old 'family' photos......This photo, of a line of competitive ocean swimmers has a 'note' on its reverse.....I have no idea of who any of the swimmers or the photographer...obviously some family member.....or who wrote the 'note' on its back.....Nevertheless, the photo is a 'wide group shot' cropped and edited from a 62.5mm contact photo.......

Dining, Alone....as usual

no thank you....I can make a better lunch, without leaving home, driving in traffic, waiting in line at that trendy 'brunch' place......before my friends were served, I cranked out some white cornmeal and yellow grits-covered spicy chicken tenderloins with a 'snaking' of green curry sauce, French-herbed fingerling potatoes with fresh rosemary and cabbage/carrot coleslaw, quick-marinated in rice vinegar, some corn relish that I made a few days ago and a glass of spicy chai tea........and, no cacophony, no steel eating tools, no morning elevator pop muzak or ubiquitous 'live trio', playing 80's greatest hits........and no 'getting dressed'! My absence gives everyone 'someone to talk about' over coffee and beignets.....

Moving to The Capitol.......After avoiding The Draft

more old photos.....It took only a couple of days, visiting Atlanta, to make the decision to move here in 1968.....quickly meeting Mother David and the Underground Artist Culture.....It 'took' another month or so to confront the 'Reality" that Atlanta was STILL in the middle of The Deep South, as we 'freaks' were beset by men in uniforms, carrying batons, cuffs and guns.....So, how have 'things' changed? Fewer protests......more militarized 'law enforcement'......and, which may be a 'boon'......everyone has a camera......EVERYONE! But, I'm not 'cocky' about that.......Photoshopping can make just about everything just as Big Brother would have you see it....can't it? Don't believe 'it' just because there's a 'picture' on the WEB....Nevertheless.....this photo is real.....shot on film, processed without 'changes' and published in The Great Speckled Bird.......the hippies' source of Leftist News in the later 1960's.......and, to think, I was...just half a decade later......modeling double-knit bell bottom trousers with nik-nik shirts! Shake 'it' up.......Fortunately, that was short-lived!! I gave away my red, yellow and green bells, Ritz Cracker sleeveless sweater and Sgt. Pepper shirt, went Nik-Nik and dropped out of the Full Catastrophe, as Zorba would have called it........following the 'Program': 1)play 2)protest 3)march 4)party 5)obsess on 'catching up' with those who Worked 6)work and acquire 7)play 8)reflect .....Full Circle......then....reflect on all of it to figure out what it was/is all about.....right, Alfie?

http://www.thestripproject.com/category/community/history/page/4/

Send in The Clowns.......The cops won't shoot 'em......

Watching the DirecTV 'News Quadriplex' early this morning.....with its 4 screens full of violent, shouting and sign-waving men, women and children, emboldened behind the anonymity of Coro-19 masks......i thought of 'Thoth's Buddhist activism from a few years ago......'Between Social Wars'.....His words may be incomprehensible, but his message is clear......Today, his audience would ALL have their phones in 'record' mode, however......before moving on to the next 'interesting' event....the acrid smoke screen, from which uniformed, armed men in helmets emerge to 'break this up".......History has shown that 'crazy people'....like Thoth (and his wife), Moondog, Captain Beefheart, Buckethead, St. EOm, and Alice Cooper have Auras that separate them from All, excepting the Willing Watchers, that view them as 'relatively harmless' Amusements....[if they were observed as 'Real' or 'Subversive', they'd have been hauled off in leg irons and handcuffs, into paddy wagons....] Clown outfits are the best disguises, because few humans ever want to look into the eyes of Reality, when they can 'laugh it off'.......That's why so many wear dark glasses on cloudy days.......'Who? Me?'.........

The Calm Block Keeps The Devil In The Hole........

REGENERATION

It's April of 1965 and I was not yet 21......had just entered a pre-med Program at Vanderbilt University......thinking I would become either an experimental psychologist or a psychiatrist.....eventually.....Having spent the previous 2 summers working as a Spam Card Data Entry 'Person' for The Army Ballistics Administration, then...the next summer....as a courier for Nasa's Aero-Astrophysics Laboratory.....I had been 'primed' for a 'career' either as a Technical Writer or "Human Factors' engineer......But spent most of my 'free' time writing and drawing......even some 'mechanical' drawing.....but was hardly a 'Leonardo'.....The Cast of Characters.....aging Agrarian poets and novelists began to reward me for my writing, which led me farther and further from numbers, statistics and Science as I leaned closer and closer to words and pictures....without graphs, equations or formulas.......'safe' places.....into the 'terrible' world of Art and Literature.... I dug this old, decomposing sheet of cheap paper that I had typed out 'my poem' with my ancient Underwood Typewriter.....the one with round keys and fading 'characters' covered with yellowing plastic....at the bottom, was all the encouragement that I needed to change course, completely.....two words, 'your best', written by Dr. John Aden or Alan Tate or John Crowe Ransom or Robert Penn Warren.....I don't remember which......The next day, I 'dropped' Physics for Engineering Students (!) and Statistics & Probabilities II....just in time to substitute History Of The English Language and History of Modern Art.......An overdose of sleeping pills, washed down with a glass of Jack Daniels, may have been another catalyst in this Evolution.....the Drawing and Painting 'Lab' was far more satisfying than the Cat dissection Lab......This poem is certainly no 'masterpiece', but it was far better than my performance in that 'dropped' Statistics Class! I would have missed making those "drawings from the microscope" in Dr. Nunnaly's Genetics, Morphology & Embryology Class, however......I stuck 'that one' out.......Then, it was 'catch up' time.....21 semester hours for 2 years.......of plays, novels and poetry......to get my 'useless' degree, with a 'specialty area of concentration' in 17th Century Metaphysical Poetry......The 'Diploma' is hanging on a nail in the basement, next to a set of Tibetan Bells........go figure!

Not any sillier than Miss Universe....is it?

Hmmm......Pigs feet are a delicacy item.....Kids 'raised' in total Oblivion about the Carnage that they believe must be their Food Source......

Vacuum-Lover Bailey: An Old Man Trapped in an 8-Year-Old's Body - Little...

Coffee and Cleaning Fixation.......I can relate to this, having had at least 30 'vacuum cleaners' during my Life.......Dust balls of animal dander, dead bugs and carpet 'stuff' has always turned me 'OFF'....so I turn the Machines "ON".....And, don't neglect to move the furniture....

The Young Pope – The Prime Minister of Greenland visits Vatican

Cheryl Lowe Ferguson Ransijn.......

I met Cheryl Lowe in 1963, when I was a student in Nashville... Her brother Johnny and I became friends on the first day of 'orientation', when we discovered that we shared a love for contract bridge, classical piano music and 19th C. Novels.....Johnny 'took me home' to meet his parents, grandmother, two brothers and his sister, Cheryl...then, a high school majorette, in love with a Spanish-speaking teenager, her age....(she seemed attracted to men who spoke 'other languages')......After high school, she moved to Atlanta to study Political Science at Emory University, where she met a man that I'd attended University with, and that was now in Emory Medical School.....Cheryl's brother, Johnny, corralled her into marrying the 'Doctor', that he had a crush on!.....and she did...even though I thought the marriage would be a disaster, since I'd known her new 'love' during my college days, years before......Cheryl supported her marriage, working as a legal aid or something like that, and later moved to Soest Holland with her new husband, while he was interning at the American Air Force Base there...After Cheryl informed me that she was pregnant, and knowing about some difficulties that her mother, 'Bird' had experienced during her pregnancies....losing a few fetuses.....I flew to Holland and stayed with Cheryl during the last month or so of her pregnancy, and was with her in the delivery room when she, too, lost her child during birthing......Afterwards, having separated from her husband, she moved to Amsterdam to get a Doctorate....and, there, met a young student, Hans and fell in love with a man who actually loved her, too......A single photograph brings so much to mind...so many associations.........Here, Cheryl...looking happy.....with her new boyfriend, Hans, whom she later married......There's a 'Book' in our history together.......Chapter 6 of the manuscript that I tossed into the back of the garbage truck a few years ago........Now, I'm 'working' from even vaguer memory modules, stored for half a century in some seldom-called upon neurons that are 'firing' right now.....

A Man's a MAN, whatever 'that' 'IS".......

the 'compromise' long earring.......after being 'called out' for my 'lobe decor' at a conservative party..........just some more 'gender bias'.... I remember, well, being sent to the Store Manager's office for wearing a simple diamond ear stud while employed by Saks 5th Avenue....almost a half century ago.....and sent to 'the Principal's office' in 1962, for wearing a 3mm gold 'ball' in my left lobe...... I asked the Principal if he would have sent Marilyn Monroe 'home' for wearing a big earring!......"But she's a 'woman'" he shouted at me!.....I called a cab and went home! What about Burt Lancaster!!!?? what about those Maharajahs? "We're Americans!" I was told "So...what is Marilyn Monroe?", I thought.....

close your eyes....then open them.....sometimes, a second was a decade....

'then' and 'now' photos...........you have to have been and be to understand the brain's default to nostalgia.....in Youth, the brain looks 'forward', in anticipation.....in Old Age....well....that's not so much fun...is it? The 'sight back' forestalls the harbinger......butterflies are most beautiful...just as their wings dry in the breezes and the nectar is sweet as Spring....