Hey, check out this little critter:



That's a species of spider called Bagheera kiplingi and it's a VEGETARIAN!!

It is a jumping spider that, instead of pouncing upon ants and consuming them, pounces on them and steals their food.

BBC news has this story featuring some actual cam footage of the spider in action.

US News has a more in depth article on how the whole relationship between the spider and the ants goes on.

Apparently the spider is not, as was originally thought, completely vegetarian. It occasionally snacks on an ant or larvae but its diet does seem mainly to be the acacia plants that the ants try to guard.

Also, I'd like to raise my hand as having been one of those who looked at the name of this spider and caught the reference. It was named after the friendly jaguar in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, which I actually did read many years ago.

The Christian Science Monitor has this article talking about the spider but also talks about zombie spiders:

"The Bagheera kiplingi is cool. But in terms of arachnid news over the past decade, it’s No. 2 on my list.

The top of the list is more gruesome (you’ve been warned). Plesiometa Argyra is a fairly common fly and mosquito catching spider in Costa Rica. Every day of its life it weaves a flimsy circular web to catch its prey - unless it gets stung by a Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga wasp. That’s where this spider’s life gets, well, very interesting.

The wasp sting briefly paralyzes the spider and eventually turns it into a zombie.

The parasitic wasp lays an egg on the belly of the spider. When the spider awakes, it carries on as if nothing happened for a few weeks, even as the attached larva hatches and begins to feed on its blood. Then, when the larva has had its fill and is ready to cocoon, it takes over the mind of the spider by injecting it with chemicals that circumvent its web-building routine.

Rather than the circular, disposable web the spider has made every day of its life, it weaves a thick, highly simplified cocoon platform, then placidly settles down in the middle of it to allow the wasp larva to finish eating it. His meal finished, the larva spins its cocoon, suspended on sticky spider silk far from marauding ants or other creatures that might want to eat it, waiting to emerge as a wasp and begin the dance again."

Oh, and last but not least, while I was googling around to get more info about Bagheera kiplingi, I found this blog site which lists "The Top Ten Coolest Spiders", many of them very unusual. Good read if you can handle those close ups without getting creeped out.

I just got a summons for jury duty on November 13th. This is new.

And it kind of creeps me out.

On one hand, part of me has always wondered what it would be like to sit in a court room and be a part of a case (NOT as a defendant, of course...and really...not as a prosecutor either). But the more I think about this, the more it creates a gross feeling in my stomach.

The jury has to be unanimous in their decision, right?

I'd hate to be the one person who either has to stand up to the rest of my jurors or have to choose sides based on really complicated evidence.

I don't want to do this.

Of course, I realize I must so I shall go.

But I'm recently mohawked again. Let's hope that and my tattoos will spring a prejudice in the attorneys and I'll be dismissed.

Plus...only $10 a day? If I get selected and that trial goes on any longer than a week, I'm not going to have money for rent from the work I miss. WTF? Do my civic duty and get evicted because I can't pay? Surely that's not the way it works?

Fuck.

Lost another friend.

This time...not by disagreement. GregStevensTX had lost interest in his LJ about a year ago. I wondered if he would come back. I checked my user info yesterday and saw that he finally deleted his LJ entirely as his name is crossed out.

He was one of my faves. I had so many great conversations with him.

I'm coming to understand something: I apparently take the Internet just a bit more seriously than most other people do. At least as far as Live Journal goes.

See...once upon a time, before Internet, people sometimes had what they called penpals, friends they wrote to and got to know mostly or entirely through letters. I tend to see my blog as partially replacing that. So I take most of my friends here pretty seriously. I don't shrug shit off and go "Whatever. It's just the Internet."

I guess...other people don't.

Or maybe it's just that Facebook is so much more glamorous than Live Journal. Everyone is on Facebook. Except me. I'm not on that shit roster. What I'm hoping is that Live Journal will make a comback. Think of it this way: Friendster came and went. MySpace came and went. Facebook came and will hopefully go too. And folks who abandoned LJ will start coming back. After their fads lose flavor like so much old chewing gum, they'll spit them out and return to their good old homes at LJ.

Maybe. I hope.



So...no more Greg. That really bums me out.

I discovered an interesting website that those of you who are concerned about the state of things might want to bookmark:

Planet Money.


Granted, I regard NPR with some skepticism. They like to tout how they offer a more balanced view of things, presenting all sides of an issue and with deeper insights. In reality, NPR just has a more liberal/socialist angle and they make a point to present things in a calm, rational manner. The voices you hear do articulate well and do not sound furious or paranoid or otherwise hysterical, but rather confident and well-composed. So this creates the illusion of being more intelligent and informed. It's soothing. It makes you feel smart to listen to NPR. But I've listened to it long enough to know that they do NOT always present all sides and when they do, they frequently do NOT give both sides equal air time or consideration. Rather, the liberal/socialist view is given more thought and debate, while a libertarian/conservative view is given less.

And they give NO air time to an anarchist view like mine.

Nevertheless, if you can listen carefully, use critical thinking skills and not buy into everything being said, you can learn a lot. This blog does seem to take economics somewhat more seriously.

Reading two books at the same time, sorta. I mean, I read one and then put it down for a while and then read the other. I can't imagine anyone actually holding two open books, one in each hand and just reading back and forth from one to the other, although I suppose someone out there does that.

Anyway, still slogging through 2010. A little over halfway through it. Perhaps the math buffs can explain to me the significance of the 1;4;9 quadratic formula of the monoliths? Clark sort of explained it but I didn't get it. Anyone who understands this can walk me through it?

I have a longstanding tradition of occasionally reading a book that I already know I am going to disagree with. I'm not sure how, exactly, to explain why, except insofar as to say that part of me wants to keep my mind somewhat limber on vastly differing perspectives on the world we live in.

So the book I'm reading now is L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. I don't have much to say except that, in attempting to read the book straight through, I encountered one major obstacle: it's really BORING. I kept falling asleep. So I'm cheating by flipping through and reading various chapters that seem more interesting. Right now, I'm at the part where he explains "the analytical mind", after which he will explain "the reactive mind."

It's fascinating, in a way. Most of what he's written is just rehash of previous psychology and philosophy. His analytical vs. reactive mind model seems to parallel Freud's normal vs. neurotic personality model. This is something I already knew about Hubbard. He didn't just make all this shit up from the top of his head. He's well studied in philosophy and psychology so he knows how to steal from the traditional findings and twist it around to make it seem like this is some great new discovery. He justifies all kinds of ideas with totally hypothetical situations...not actual case scenarios, but he presents them as though they were case scenarios and the reader who is not careful may not catch that.

I thought I'd mention now, other books I've read that I knew I would disagree with:

-Andrea Dworkin. I can't remember the name of the book I read anymore, it was so long ago, but we all know that stereotype of the man-hating feminist who wants to chop off our balls and eat them for dinner. Well, there she is. Dworkin's work blames men for absolutely everything and women are nothing but victims. Men are all potential rapists, even the men of the past, like Ghandi and Christ (Robert Anton Wilson makes fun of her in one of his books, explaining how a potential exists only as long as a person is still alive). She's actually very compelling in her writing.

-Machiavelli's The Prince. This is the book on how to rule people and the author who says plainly that the end justifies the means and that it is better to be feared than loved. This is a book that I don't think I finished because the writing was not very compelling to me and I got bored with it.

-Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. I'm beginning to like Rand more and more because I think she's funny. She's someone who I generally disagree with for the most part, yet find myself agreeing every now and then. Her philosophy revolves around taking certain key words, like "sacrifice" and "altruism" and redefining them so that they seem unnatural. She then forges her entire Objectivist theories from that standpoint. They make good sense actually. But ONLY as long as you adhere to her definitions of those certain words. If you look those words up in a standard dictionary, you find a different definition and when applying her views to those definitions, it all falls apart. So much for Objectivism. Also, Rand's support of capitalism is idealistic. I support capitalism, but on a more pragmatic level. That is to say, she sees this golden morality guiding the economic system, based on rugged individualism...very much like social Darwinism. Market competition will cause the best to emerge and provide the most benefit to mankind. In reality, this doesn't always happen. I support capitalism because it is simple and has the fewest and most easily solved problems (you have to compare the various central planning ideas that have been put in motion in the past to understand this).

-Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. I admit, I could not finish this book as it just seemed loonier and loonier as it went along. I was surprised at his tone. I thought he would present his ideas very clearly and calmly, but the book starts out pretty dramatic, in fact, with open declarations against the bourgeoisie. He and Rand agree that there is no God but totally disagree on everything else.

-The Marquis De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. I admit, I did not finish this book either. I must be the only person in the world who actually found it extremely funny. It has to do with the way he wrote it. The villains in the story are so extreme as to be outlandish and ridiculous. When he tries to describe a character with fist sized hemorrhoids hanging out of his ass and a 1 inch thick pad of shit encrusted around his penis...I'm sorry but I can't take that seriously. I'm laughing even now as I write this. Sade's way of writing was so flowery that, to me anyway, it gave an almost Monty Python-like feeling to this stuff.

-Dennis Cooper's Try and then later on My Loose Thread. Now this work is disturbing. Cooper takes you into worlds you really don't want to think about, and don't want to believe exist. Worlds where people do shitty things to each other and then justify it and live in bizarre denial. I experienced real anger and frustration reading his books and, while Try left me feeling depressed at the end, My Loose Thread left me relieved that this was finally over. These worlds he depicts are particularly threatening to gay men. This is the kind of work that you hope the Christian Right never gets wind of, because they could so easily use it for political leveraging. He explores the dark side of homosexuality, the way in which older men exploit younger ones, how closet cases buddy up with the wrong types of friends and express their sexuality in inappropriate ways. Very challenging stuff. Part of me thinks Cooper is just revolting and another part of me appreciates that he would confront us on some ugly things.

-The 48 Laws of Power. I can't remember the author but this book is fairly engaging and fascinating. The author is persuasive in getting you to reexamine your ethics and actually consider giving them up, in favor of raw self determination and expediency. He gives an almost airtight argument against the value of honesty, saying it really doesn't exist as a continuum of behavior, but only as a tool of expediency and that those who claim the loudest to be honest are usually the most dishonest. I insist, however, that anyone who decides to live his life according to those 48 laws will condemn himself to a life of unceasing paranoia. This book, I think, does a better job of describing the psychology of power and how to rule people better than Machiavelli's book does. It is amoral and rather scary.

-Rational Recovery by...Jack Tempsey, I think. I read this book near the tail end of my six months in 12 Step. I was getting a little overloaded with 12 Step propaganda and decided I wanted to hear a different story. Unfortunately, this book is actually MORE fucked up. The author takes every opportunity to grind his axe on 12 Step and then starts illustrating a method this either mimics 12 Step or takes the same bizarre inside-out logic that I'm sort of getting from Dianetics. He's also just flat out rude and obnoxious in many places.

-The Natural Superiority of Women. Again, I cannot remember the author's name but I do recall that it was a man. His book was advertised in Playgirl magazine. The book was all about broad generalizations (pun not intended) with a lot of stuff being rather vague and not much in the way of actual case studies verifying anything in particular. I almost wondered if he was a very calculating womanizer. That by claiming women were physically and intellectually superior to men, he was essentially appealing to their egos and could use that to seduce them.

Also, in my earlier twenties, I read a number of books, including an assassin's manual, a poisoner's manual and a book on physical interrogation techniques. I didn't actually disagree with them at the time, but in retrospect, I find them to be the kind of books that sober you up about who you are. Many people often tend to imagine that, though their bodies be vulnerable, their will power is STRONG and they could not be broken down, conditioned or trained. Those books talk in depth about how vulnerable the human being, as a whole, actually is. Anyone can be trained or conditioned. Those who claim themselves to be the hardest to break are probably the easiest, unfortunately, because they likely do not know what kinds of tricks a determined oppressor can use.

I'm trying to identify conflicts in my psyche. I see two in particular that really create a problem.

1. Politics: Sorry but...I know I'm right. It isn't about knowledge or education, but how you examine the problem. I examine politics the same way I examine everything else: existentially. I pay attention to the terms we are using and how we use them. If I catch a snag, I go back over the argument and make sure I have a clear understanding of the terms and how they are being used and what relevance they have. Since I'm just a dude who works for a living and I'm discussing these things with other people who either work for a living or maybe own a business...not uber rich tycoons or government officials...I tend to focus on what we ordinary people actually CAN do that will be effective. I ask the question, "What do any of us truly have control over and what DON'T we have control over?" Most political conversations I read or hear are so far in abstraction as to give me a headache. I get cranky as soon as I hear the phrase "We need to..." in reference to something that someone thinks government needs to do. That goddamned illusion that we have some sort of control over government again! Every time I hammer out the hard questions and get people to think in concrete terms, I get told that "maybe I'm right" or...in some cases, like a totally insane socialist, outright refusal to discuss the matter any further. I certainly don't get much in the way of serious discussion.

Let's face it. We LOVE the conveniences that the corporate system has given to us, including the luxury of broadcasting our lives and opinions on an Internet blog site and going to see really cool movies, being able to listen to awesome music by simply sticking a 4" silver disk into a machine, or watching a movie by doing the same. Most of us are so involved with this kind of crap that we have to be reminded that someone ELSE installed the sewage disposal system we use, so we don't have to go to an outhouse to take a shit, and we don't have to heat up water on the stove and pour it into a tub. And we don't have to light candles or oil lamps for light. But amidst all this, we are aware that the corporate system is crumbling...slowly?...or is it quickening?...hard to tell sometimes. And it makes us uncomfortable. Yet some of us, like me, want to usher it in anyway.

But that's not really my point. My point is that, while most people I know have had their minds made up about politics, I actually went through a good 15 years constantly questioning seeking out different views and even changing my own views radically. I can say now that none of you knew me when I was a socialist. Most of you met me when my libertarian ideas were dawning. Now I'm some bizarre flavor of anarchist for which I cannot rightly find a catchy word. I have arrived here because I continually look for the concrete and refuse to wallow around in the abstractions. And because I focus on the individual control and influence. And because my method is systematic, rather than speculative. But because the vast majority of people do not even think this way, I end up in endless annoying conversations that go nowhere because, in order to fully realize the truth of it, the person would have to spend intensive time with me, allowing me to show them how to think this way.

In other words, discussing politics has become a total waste of my time.

And yet, when I see people discussing a political subject and both of them are talking in terms of pure abstract and that the conversation is entirely too ridiculous, some part of me feels that if I stand there and say nothing, I am, in fact, contributing to ignorance and stupidity. Not many people have learned to examined things the way I have. Not many people ever notice that when they start talking and saying "We need to..." and "The problem is we just don't..." their actual definition of the word "we" shifts from one sentence to another. One minute, "we" means the government, the next, "we" means people governed, next again "we" means an entire country as a whole, and then after that "we" means certain segments of the population and finally, "we" means the whole damned human race. Over and over, I see this shifting around and people are totally oblivious to what they're doing. And when your words are shifting around like that, you are simply NOT having a meaningful and productive conversation. It is not grounded or focused. It is not organized. You are just engaging in cerebral masturbation. You are talking noise.

And the "shoulds". Nobody seems to grasp that every time you use the word "should" you are talking in ideology, not concrete reality. What's more, you are posing as an authority that nobody granted you. Again...it's just more noise.

So...if I get involved, I have to control my temper and even when I do, I often walk away feeling pissy. But if I don't get involved, I feel like a piece of valuable information COULD have been passed on...and I didn't do it. How can I complain about ignorance if I, myself, am not contributing to education?

So there's the first conflict: my feeling of social obligation to offer people what I honestly do think is a clearer and more organized and objective perspective so they may learn from it versus my need to protect my own, rather sensitive psyche in order to keep me in a positive mode. Getting angry is fine. Wallowing around in perpetual anger is not. And when I say "positive", I don't just mean all smiley and happy. I mean focusing on solutions and clarity FIRST and then acting in accordance with that. Consistency in thought and action. More often than not, political discussions make me feel like I was Charlie Brown and Lucy got me to try and kick that fucking football AGAIN and I ended up falling down on my ass AGAIN. SUCKER!!



2. Science and spirituality: In my mind, there is no need for one to go against the other, but I keep finding that it seems like science has become a kind of fad. It's "cool" to be all into science. Especially physics. And likewise, if you are spiritual, then that means you're ignorant and fucked up and a throwback to Medieval times. You know, there was a time when I had started having a moment of silent appreciation for every meal I ate before I ate it. Sort of like prayer, except I didn't put my hands together and say "Thank you, God for this meal." I just sat and looked at it, acknowledged that today is a day that I get to eat and the food will taste good. But...many times, I've been gotten glared at or criticized or made fun of because I want to take a moment to feel gratitude for having food, instead of just chowing down like a fucking pig. And so I have gradually stopped doing this. I stopped doing it in public and then the practice just stopped in private as well. And I feel...unsettled by this. I can honestly say that the more I try to focus on gratitude, the more empowered and enraptured I feel and it honestly does change what's going on in my world. Nearly all of August and the first week of September, I was in an almost perpetual state of rapture. And everywhere I went, people smiled at me in public. Seriously! I got warm, genuine smiles every time I went out. And it was like, WOW! There really are a lot of people with at least a fair amount of love to show and give!! And I'm smiling back. And I feel great!

But many times, when science is being discussed, and I say many times...not ALL of the time and certainly not MOST of the time, it seems like there's something really self-absorbed going on there. Like two or more people gloating over how big their brains are. "We're so cool. We talk about brainy stuff." Sometimes it's very subtle, other times, not so much so. It certainly becomes obvious when science is suddenly compared to religion. Then the ego REALLY comes out.

I keep thinking about how many disorders we have in our society these days: bipolar, hypertension, ADHD, chronic fatigue, OCD, and all those different styles of autism...and all those people who are taking medications to offset it. I keep thinking about how those conditions are nearly nonexistent in places like Christian and Buddhist monasteries and the Amish communities, where the spiritual life is the prime devotion and that it involves community.

I only learned a vague outline of Einstein's theory of relativity and I want to learn it in detail. But I am repeatedly confounded by how venerated his is by the scientific community, and yet, he was such a deeply spiritual man, moved by mystical experiences and setting his mind to work on interpreting them.

By contrast, those who have no such experiences of rapture, or of the mystical, seem to be entrenched in judgments and cynicism. So much of their egos rest on how smart they think they are or how cool they think they are. The self-parodying hipster seems to be the culmination of this. Look how cool and hip I am. HA! HA! What a joke! No, I'm really a dork! But because I confess to being a dork, I rise to a higher, more sophisticated level of cool and hip. And I only stay there as long as I keep being ironic about it.

Something about that is really revolting to me. Just...fucking gross. It's not so much that I don't want to be around those kinds of people. It's that I don't want to BE that kind of person. There's something...dishonest about it. I fear falling into that mindset.

Yet, I also fear that if I keep on this spiritual path, I may lose my critical thinking skills and I don't want that either.

I love praying. And yet, I do it in private because I feel like I'm going to be ridiculed by other people if I do it in public. And I ask myself, is this a matter of courage? Or is it a matter of "not casting pearls before swine"?

Some of my friends are spiritually devoted and some are not. I feel more relaxed around those who are. Around those who are not, I feel like I have to cover up, be a different person.

I miss my moment of silence before my meals and I feel violated by officious and cynical people who can't respect it. It brings out ugly emotions...makes me want to see humanity just get wiped out. I am appalled at the lack of appreciation and respect in society, the showcasing of intellectual egos, the sneering humor. It makes me feel dirty and contaminated.

And I even see this spilling over into politics as well. Occasionally, I see people from other countries criticize the US, saying we will never get a Universal Health Care system because we Americans are just too damned selfish and don't have any sense of "collective consciousness". My view is that I believe in a personal duty to help and give to others...hence my desire to do volunteer work...I feel called to this. My Guiding Spirit is saying, It's time you realize it's not all about you. Start doing more for others. That's been like a nagging at my psyche. BUT...I don't believe in sticking a gun to someone else's head to make HIM help and give to others. That is the critical difference. A lot of Europeans don't seem to understand this. This idea of mandating social responsibility...does it REALLY make you a better person?...being forced to do this? And does it REALLY benefit society that much more?


Anyway, these are the main two conflicts I am dealing with and I'm trying to figure out how to resolve them.

More and more, I am getting the understanding that this invocation is like inviting an important guest over for dinner and dancing and some good times. I'm very nervous about getting everything right and I have to keep telling myself to just do the best I can.

I am going by a principle to not serve the Baron anything I myself would not want. So, even though the Baron prefers fiery rums, if I, myself, am afraid to drink it, then it is not wise for me to serve it to him.

As a matter of fact, I have an awesome rum. The brand is called Cruzan Black Strap Rum and it says "Origin of St. Croix" on it. Since the cross is a symbol important to Baron Samedi, I thought this would be good. That and the fact that the rum is actually BLACK. Or at least such a dark brown as to appear black at first glance. I took a tiny sip just to see what this was like. A very distinct molasses taste. Yummy! I decided to add some grated ginger and have let it sit for some two weeks now, then I strained the larger bits out. I took another sip. Really fucking YUMMY!! This is actually good enough for me to want to drink all by myself!

I'm going to buy another bottle of this and marinate the chicken in it when the time comes.

Also, when I couldn't find an appropriate walking stick, I decided to make one. It's going to be black, with a purple knob, and with a purple tiger snake skin wrapped around it.

Music: It sort of...came to me...that the Baron would enjoy some Alien Sex Fiend, in addition to Skinny Puppy. In fact, ASF is really more his style: wild and crazy, irreverent. I'm being very choosy about which Skinny Puppy songs to compile onto a CD. For some reason, it's the vocals that make the difference. The really strong, growling, skeletal sounding voices. Plus a really catchy dance rhythm.

I'm also taking the attitude that the dance has already begun. Already, the Baron and I are communicating. He has visited my dreams a few times over the last couple weeks although I can't remember details too terribly well. In the one I remember the most, I was with my mother and her husbund and we were driving through some city that none of us knew anything about, looking for a movie theater to see some movie. I kept seeing skulls with glowing eyes everywhere. On sidewalks. On billboards. People carrying skulls like it was no big deal. I even saw a stone sculpture of a skull at the center of a fountain. And I had the feeling that I was the only one who could see these skulls. And that it meant the Baron was always there. That he was with me wherever I went. And I was not intimidated by this, but excited, glad and a little amused. This is very much aligned with what I'm seeking to achieve with this invocation.

So, I've lost a friend today. Because I informed him of my view on a situation.

I'm sorry but, when you say you have a crush on someone, and you even acknowledge that this person has a disorder like autism, and then you start making fun of him behind his back because you got hurt...I don't think that's funny. I think that's a shitty thing to do.

This friend brags a lot about being "real". Well, I took this matter to a private post between us and he refused to engage conversation, but just silently unfriended me. How "real" is that? Someone has some growing up to do. And if he doesn't do it, then he's going to be very lonely for a long time.

And, for the record, I don't think this person is a loser or a douchebag. He's got some great qualities and I actually do like him and wanted a genuine friendship. But he's shown me that he doesn't respect me, and I'm wasting my time trying to keep a friendship going. So I suppose this is for the better. I invested some energy into him so I'm hurt by this situation. And disappointed. And a little pissed off.

This brings me to bring up some ideas on what I consider being a friend is. I don't like the term "calling you on your bullshit" because I've heard that term from way too many people who exhibit a gross lack of sensitivity and also cannot handle being on the receiving end of it. I don't like the term "tell it like it is" because nobody does. We are all individuals and we tell it according to our individual view.

At the same time, kissing someone's ass all the time isn't a very good friend quality either.

There is a fine line here...it's the path of diplomacy and it's swiftly becoming extinct. You speak your truth. YOUR truth. And you make the effort to let them know that that is how you see it. You take responsibility for your view. I did my best to tell him what I thought of the situation. When these uncomfortable situations come up, I really do try to focus on that balance between what I feel needs to be said, and how to say it so it isn't mean-spirited or degrading. I've failed a few times in the past but I keep note of those failures and try to learn from them.

Retrospectively, I get a feeling this person has never really respected me at all and only tolerated me, even though, after meeting him in person, I liked him and had a lot of respect for him and wanted to continue a real friendship. He's kept me at arm's length and, I think, has been simply waiting for the opportunity to just shove me out completely. And this was it.

So we go our separate ways now. There can't be a friendship if he doesn't want one and won't put any effort into one.

I was very tired last night when I wrote that second half and wanted to get the memoir completed, and in my haste, I think I left out some important details. So here, I want to go through those:

First, one of the things the Forum Leader talked about was problems. People have problems. We all have problems. But he made a very interesting point: most of us view problems as a problem and we want to live lives WITHOUT problems and so we are constantly trying to REDUCE our problems. But a look at history shows that some of the truly great people in this world, the people who made significant changes, the people we sometimes quote...those people took on GREATER problems.

This was a significant factor in my own breakthrough because, if we remember, I walked into the Forum feeling like this fucked up faggot...no future, body full of disease, constantly living under the great hard rock of depression, and trying to escape through drugs. And there was that wonderful world of well-adjusted, happy and successful people, the married bourgeoisie, the people I silently sneered at as "the middle class mediocrities" as my own way of evading my thought that they had accomplished what I never thought I could and therefore lived "that good life".

In the Forum, I saw one ordinary, bourgeois married person after another go up to the Forum Leader and talk about how their marriage had fallen apart. They had cheated. Or wanted to cheat. Or even if cheating wasn't there, they weren't getting any more sex. Or...at bottom line, they just felt like they were living with and sharing a bed with...a stranger. They no longer knew their spouses. And they were lonely. They didn't even KNOW they were lonely because their minds were conditioned to believe that only single people get lonely. Married or partnered people don't. This was the institution that they'd always been taught was the "norm", was what you were supposed to do, was what gave you happiness. And it wasn't working for them. And so they had just shut down.

Moreover, many of them were also crushed in spirit by financial worries. Living in perpetual debt. Paying and paying and paying. Get up, get dressed, drag your ass to work, do you ritual toil so you can earn that money to PAY, and then go home and dump yourself on the couch and watch TV until it's time to go to bed. Any energy you have left gets spent yelling at the kids or arguing with the husband or wife. In many cases, no energy is left for that.

These people were miserable, living in quiet desperation and just "going through the motions" instead of really LIVING a true, vibrant life!! And there are STILL thousands more people in this sophisticated, post-industrial world living JUST LIKE THAT!! Perhaps...millions?

Seeing all these people in this state really shook me out of my own world of problems. And so...it was this view into other people's...um...pardon me for saying so judgmentally but...their sorry, pathetic, little lives...that made me realize I wasn't doing that bad after all.

I also forgot to mention that I was not the only person there who was sitting through the whole thing with a feeling of suspicion slowly growing. I mentioned that I had to do the exercise of sharing a secret of shame or guilt with another, and I did with that woman and she didn't take it well. We also had to do another exercise where we shared our Forum goal with someone else. At that point, I had been sitting in another seat, next to this older, married man. I shared my Forum goal (to feel like my life wasn't so bad after all, to be free and to feel good about life again). When it was time for him to share, he said, "Oh I didn't do that. No, I'm just here out of curiosity." I asked what he thought about the Forum and he said, "It's an interesting mix of various psychologies and philosophies. I'm familiar with most of it. But they're presenting these ideas as if they thought it all up themselves and that's dishonest. And I think this program is way too expensive." I got the feeling he was holding back in his opinion. The way he said it...it was as though he, himself didn't mind paying $375 for this, but he noted that the Forum seemed to be targeting the middle class and soaking it.

This man was the quiet observer, perhaps in the same way that some Shakespeare plays have a character who acts as an observer. He points out the critical problems or crises going on. He is right there in it, yet remains unaffected by it.

So...it wasn't just that a little scarab appeared coincidentally after I walked out that I feel I had a genuine transformation. It was the whole process of watching how the Forum unfolded for everyone else, the metaphorical value of the Forum Leader at the podium, resembling my father, the hollering preacher, the fact that I followed enough of what he was saying to see the sinister business side of it, and, as I stated in a comment already, how all of this fit together with the 7 of Disks card in my weekly reading. That card meaning "Failure". I didn't technically finish the Forum. One could say I failed. And yet, it was my only rational choice. There was no way for me to return to a rational state otherwise. I spent over an hour, more like two hours, seething with rage. People need to get that anger out, one way or another. You cannot expect someone to settle down in an situation like that. Anger is pressure. When pressure builds up, some sort of valve needs to open to let it out, or the container will explode. In the past, I have endured extremely angering situations because I felt I "should". I did not respect my own psyche and self worth enough to realize that I needed to set a boundary and act accordingly. But in the Forum...I did. How else can I explain the gushing wave of serenity that flooded my soul once I got out of that building? Should I not have felt guilty or ashamed that I couldn't "handle it"? No, I felt nothing of the sort. I felt good. Right. I did what needed to be done. And that was my breakthrough. The scarab was just my Guiding Spirit's little gift in the material world to make that clear to me.

I wonder if there's any kind of cocktail that has Nyquil as an ingredient.

...as continued from part 1...

But now we come to the dark side of it all. Many people kept wondering whether Landmark was another business scheme like...Amway? I had never heard of Amway but that name got brought up several times. And Scientology got brought up a few times too.

There was another word that the Forum Leader used, which got in the way of everything else. That word was "enrollment". As he started in on convincing people to call their spouses or parents or children or siblings or whoever else, he referred to these as "enrollment conversations". As a real smash motivator, he encouraged people to "be unreasonable". He stated that being reasonable was what kept them in their state of stagnation, their quiet desperation. So...to make that breakthrough...to really transform their lives...they had to "be unreasonable."

He was very clever about his use of the word "enrollment". He did not bother to actually define the word "enrollment" as he had with some of those words like "authentic" or "transform". He neither confirmed, nor denied the proper use of the word, but merely stated that his use of this word was different from what "people normally associate with the word". But see, when I got home from Saturday night's session, I looked up the word "enrollment", just to put a little perspective on what I was hearing.

According to the dictionary, the word enrollment means "to register, or to enter in a list, catalog, or roll; to prepare a final perfect copy in a written or printed form."

Over and over, he used the term "enrollment conversation" and, after looking that word up, I kept thinking that his improper use of this word was...inauthentic. I suddenly remembered that, at the very, very beginning of the Forum, on Friday morning, he had, indeed, informed everyone that the Landmark Education Forum was, in fact, a business. I wondered how many other people remembered this. He kept encouraging people to be "authentic", yet it seemed to me that if he was truly authentic, he would have stated plainly that the Forum relied upon people who took the course to be the advertisement, to persuade others to also take the course, and that the authenticity and integrity of the Forum would be verified by the enrollee's own experiences.

Now, in checking my notes, (I have an entry in my private journal that I've been using to help recall as much of what happened as I can), I remember that I wasn't just going through issues with my mother and with women, but also recalling two separate situations in my past, when I had been gaybashed. Once, I took a man home to have sex and he tried to strangle me. Then, the second time, I went to the baths in Portland and met a black guy named Tapestry Ashton, who was one of the Radical Faeries and whom I had originally known in San Francisco at those hot tub parties. We left the baths and walked to his place, and on our way there, two guys who were clearly tweeking hard, pulled up in a car, got out of the car, zeroed in on me and began to harass me. They totally ignored Tapestry. Tapestry told me to run. I, unfortunately, was stoned so this sudden confrontation left me in a state of almost childlike confusion. Then one of them punched me in the face and Tapestry actually shouted at me to run. So I ran. I ran for some four blocks, crossed the street and then hid inside an alcove in the old church where the City Nightclub used to be behind. I waited. They didn't follow. Eventually, I saw Tapestry walking up and I came out and he asked me if I was okay. He said after I had run, they simply got back into their car and drove off.

We continued to his place and...sort of had sex but I wasn't really into it, as I was very shaken up by the experience. Also, he had...I can remember three elaborate altars in his apartment. One to Bast, one to Ganesh and one to...Kali. I remember seeing a dead snake, preserved in liquid in a jar on that altar. That altar totally creeped me out and for some reason, I made a connection between what happened to me and his worship of Kali. Perhaps that was just my fear. But despite the fact that we traded phone numbers, when I left Tapestry's place the next day, I felt very relieved and made a very solid decision NOT to ever call him and even avoid him if I could. I have no rational explanation for this. Just that it strikes me as so very odd that, when I was with him, these two drugged out lunatics jumped out of a car and accosted me...and me alone. Between the two of us, he looked far more extreme and unusual (a black guy with long, silvery white dredlocks). All I can say is that, in retrospect, my feeling was that I would have been better to simply stay at the baths and cruise someone else.

Since I'm on this subject, and since these are memoirs about my past, I might as well go deeper into it. We want to believe that we are strong. We all have a sense of dignity. To find myself confronted with TWO psychos, not knowing how to fight and feeling as though even if I did, being stoned would have hindered my abilities...ultimately, having to RUN...this was very humiliating. Let me repeat that. It was VERY humiliating. I even wished I had not reconciled with Tapestry after having run. I wish I had kept running and turned a few blocks and just forgotten about him and either returned to the baths or made my way home.

And the man who tried to strangle me in my own home. This was when I was living in that old haunted house, but AFTER the naked people had moved out and black trenchcoated boys had moved in and all the bedroom doors started sprouting padlocks on them. Granted, they were shitty roommates, but just having them there helped. He knew I had roommates. I had told him and he was nervous about that. He had exhibited several behaviors that would put up red flags in most people, but I guess I was drawn to what I perceived as rough, masculinity...that I see now as blatent hostility. So when he pounced on me, held me down, put his hands around my neck and began to squeeze, saying "ISN'T THIS FUN? THIS IS THE KIND OF FUN I LIKE TO HAVE!", he was also trying to cover my mouth. I got my mouth free for just a split moment and screamed as loud as I could. And then we both heard thumping and rustling about in the bedrooms right above us. He jumped off of me and said, "I don't like you. You scream too much." I told him to leave and he said he was going to finish his beer. I said no, he needed to leave now and I rushed to the door and opened it. He put on his coat and left quickly and made it out the door just before my roommates came downstairs in pajamas and underwear, Dave holding his shotgun. I told them what happened.

Later on, Dave had a conversation with me. He told me I needed to seriously re-evaluate what kind of men I was attracted to. He mentioned that sometimes when we were walking out in public, I would point out men I thought was hot and he was rather disturbed because they seemed dangerous and fucked up to him. I am glad he had that conversation with me, because I listened to him and did, indeed, begin consciously assess what was attractive in a man. I will say now that I see other gay men finding the same things attractive that I used to. Certain types of walks...the stomp, leading with the shoulders, and the "tough" look, which I now see is the look of anger and hostility. Many gay men interpret this as "butch". I see it differently now.

Anyway, all this was being called up during my Saturday session at Landmark, and this is not the kind of thing that I could confront in the way the Forum Leader was commanding us to. I couldn't call up those psychos and confess something and invite them to the Forum...not that I wanted to. These issues were outside of what the Forum was addressing and I didn't know what to do about them.

So when Sunday came around, I found myself just hoping things would get better. And they didn't. I started getting extremely angry just listening to the Forum Leader go on and on. More and more, he was looking like my father, as I remembered him standing at his podium, arrogantly preaching and bullying people around. It wasn't calling up any issues, other than than sense of someone conducting an ugly stage play of an event from my childhood as some kind of sick joke. I suppose he wasn't bullying. But it seemed that way. In my state of anger, I saw everything he said in a different light. I saw it as bullying and he was making people cry.

And to this day, I can honestly say that I have no memory of anything he actually said for all of Sunday...except for occasional mention of people's rackets and that term "enrollment conversation" and his constant encouraging to "be unreasonable".

I finally decided that now was the time for me to take my stand. I'd had enough. He demanded we be unreasonable? Fine. I would be unreasonable. I would go up there and erase everything on his chalkboard and write FUCK THIS SHIT! on it and see what he had to say about that. I was ready to explain to him how inauthentic it was to use the term "enrollment" out of context, to repeat it over and over so as to become subliminal suggestion. I was going to confront him. It took up some nerve. I wasn't sure I could do it. But I told myself that if worse came to worse, I could just walk out of that fucking place. So I raised my hand to be called on.

He didn't call on me.

He called on someone else and that person went up to the microphone and wailed out his problem and the Forum Leader addressed it. Then he asked for someone else. I raised my hand again.

Again, he didn't call on me.

This went on for some four or five rounds. He even looked right at me and then passed me up and called on someone else raising his hand a couple rows back.

It had taken me some two hours to work up the nerve to confront this man, to do everything I could to temper my anger and clear my head and focus on what I needed to say and do. I had to keep steeling myself up. I was going to start by saying, "Well, you're encouraging us to be unreasonable so..." and then I would walk up and write FUCK THIS SHIT on that chalkboard. I was going to do it! I would not back down! YES! I was going to make a big, fucking ugly scene.

But he never called on me. And somehow, that blew the whole thing out of whack. I didn't know what to do. I sat there fuming. And fuming.

I could not think of anything else to do. What I would have liked to do was just step out and think for a bit and then re-enter, but their policy was that once you step out, you can't come back in. You have to STAY IN and endure the situation until the next break. You could not even step out to go to the bathroom!!

I realized the longer I stayed, the angrier I would get. Everything this man was saying was pissing me off. And suddenly jumping up and having an outburst didn't seem to have...quite the same impact I wanted as being called on and then stepping up.

This was the point of no return. I had only one choice. Because I simply COULD...NOT...CALM...DOWN...as long as I had to sit there listening to him go on and on and make other people cry.

So I gathered my things, got up, and quietly walked out.

I opened the doors and walked out into the hall. Some stupid bitch with a big fake smile on her face approached me tried to say something to me but I looked her in the eyes, then looked right past her and kept walking. I took my name tag off and threw it into the garbage.

It was a beautiful day outside. Warm and sunny. And as I kept walking, I just felt better and better. I felt this deep, wonderful peace wash over me. I could not think of anything except how beautiful the day was. This, incidentally, was in the Fremont district of Seattle and I was approaching one of the streets with neat little shops on them. I spotted an antique store and decided, what the hell? I'll do a bit of shopping.

I went in and wandered around. Most everything was way too expensive. But then my eye caught something: a metal scarab with a small loop at the top, so that it could be put on a chain and worn as a pendant around the neck. It was about three quarters of an inch long. Only $12.00. So I bought it. And I felt good.

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

All that happened in the early afternoon. I went home and did some writing. At that time, I had a functioning printer so I wrote about the event and printed it out and pasted it into my private journal. Sometime later in the afternoon, I checked my voice-mail and some woman from the Forum left a message asking me to call her. I didn't bother. And I never heard from them again.

I was still friends with Mark Hunter at this time. The following Wednesday, he stopped by to say hello and asked how I was doing. I told him about the Forum. He became interested and asked for details so I really laid out the whole story, right up to where I walked out. I mentioned that I had a lot of mixed feelings about the whole thing. I felt like I had failed, but I wasn't sure how. I had noted that my tarot reading had included the Death card and also the 7 of disks: FAILURE. Yet, something about the whole situation seemed fucked up to me and I just could not figure out what else I could possibly do!

Hunter asked me a very interesting question: "What did your hair look like?"

I told him it looked like it did then. At that time my hair was bleached blonde and it conflicted severely with my dark eyebrows and, at that time, I also had a dark, chinstrap beard, -so it was obvious I was not a natural blonde.

"And what were you wearing?"

I told him I was wearing the same long sleeved, button down rayon shirt...except I was also wearing my black, leather blazer.

He asked, "Did you see anyone else looking similar being called on?"

Come to think of it...NO!! And there were some other guys with leather jackets or piercings or had some other "alternative" look about them in the Forum. I can't remember if any of them raised their hands. I know a couple did not. But if any of them did, they didn't get called on.

"See...you're going against your natural hair color. That's often viewed as a kind of rebellion. And black leather is even more so. So he didn't call on you because he probably sensed from your appearance that you would cause trouble like that. He was probably making a point to pick people who looked easily dominated. And if you were angry, it probably showed in the way you sat in your chair and stared at him, like you were demanding that he call on you with your eyes."

And you know, I have been around so many people with tattoos and mohawks and other eccentric or alternative ways of dressing...I have totally forgotten the impact it has on..."those other people" I suppose. It's part of who I am. It's natural to me.

Then I mentioned the scarab pendant and showed it to him. I asked if he knew what it symbolized because I knew he was fairly well educated in Egyptian mysticism.

He said, "It symbolizes death, rebirth and transformation."


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


So...in looking back on it all...yes, I got my breakthrough. I got my transformation. I was raised in an environment in which the adults screamed and yelled at each other and called each other names. Every little thing became a power struggle. And I wanted to express my anger to the Forum Leader by doing something that would induce a power struggle. And instead, I learned to just...walk away. I had the choice to enroll and I did. I took that chance. And I DID learn a great deal!! But when the pressure was on, I realized I still had the choice to just get out of there. I didn't have to stay. Nobody was forcing me to and I realized that my choice was the right one.

Perhaps the Forum Leader wasn't really bullying people around. And, perhaps that woman who tried to talk to me was not really a stupid bitch and maybe her smile was not fake. But that was how it seemed to me. So that was..."my story".

I reported the whole thing to Roscoe and he had a different take.

"You didn't do the Forum," he said, "You were there, but you didn't participate. You didn't do it." I listened to his reasoning and thought about it. But, as much as I love that man...we do disagree from time to time, as everyone does. And this time, he was wrong. I did the Forum. And I got what I needed. It just happened in a totally different way than I expected or he expected, or even as THEY had it planned out.

Was it worth it?

Yes, it was.

Would I recommend it to other people?

Eh...depends on the person.

One last thing: This is written on October 2nd, 2009.

My card reading for this week, using the De Es Philosopher's Stone deck, was:

# 15: Insight

# 7: Breakthrough

# 6: Confrontation



I still have the scarab too.

During my thirties, I attended three different programs, all of which I consider having contributed to my spiritual development. The first of these was the Landmark Education Forum. This was a three day workshop, or seminar...whatever.

Roscoe had done this workshop and invited me into it. So I first attended an introductory lecture. I don't remember much about that lecture in general, other than that there was a lot of vague talk about "becoming more human". What I do remember was that after the initial lecture, we were separated into different groups, with those groups adjourning to separate rooms. Here we got another lecture, albeit a shorter one, about the nature of complaints, what it means to complain and what it accomplishes. The group leader handed out paper and pens and asked everyone to think of a complaint. She encouraged us to find one that really bothered us, something that we think about at least somewhat frequently. Then we were to write down the complaint. I believe my complaint was something along the lines of "I hate that people are so driven by money and materialism and don't seem to want to live for the experience of life." The group leader asked us to share our complaints with the group. Suddenly, I felt vulnerable, but I went ahead and raised my hand and she called on me and I recited my complaint. She made a strange, sarcastic remark: "Of course. All we care about is money and a brand new TV." She said it offhandedly and quickly and then called on someone else, thus not allowing me time to respond. In doing so, I have to admit though that I had a moment of enlightenment because I listened to some other person's complaint and it sounded ridiculous to me. She answered his complaint with a similar sarcastic answer, one I rather agreed with. And it went on like this. I had a glimpse of myself in other people. I saw how I piss and moan about things, just like other people do.

She had us draw a line down the middle of the paper, dividing it into two columns. The first column would then be called "Payback" and the second column would be called "Cost". So she asked us to list some paybacks for the complaint. We were all a bit confused so she explained some more that, believe it or not, we all get a payback from our complaints. Up until this point, she was being what I would consider somewhat authoritarian and coldhearted in her approach. But then she sort of softened up and said, "This is a serious exercise. I'm asking you to dig deep. You're going to find some things that show us that...sometimes we're not very good people." It is difficult to describe but, in seeing her face, her body language, her use of the word "we" instead of "you", the fact that she was asking, that she had suddenly dropped the hardline attitude and seemed to be reaching out to us, and that very gentle way of saying "...sometimes we're not very good people," I found myself opening up a bit more and other people did too.

Someone raised her hand and meekly said, "I get to be a victim."

"Yes," the group leader said, still gently, and wrote it on the chalkboard behind her, which paralleled our papers. More paybacks came through: get to look down on others, get to feel superior, get obsess over other people's problems instead of addressing our own, get to feel entitled, get to hold grudges.

"Now let's examine the costs," she said and we did some thinking and wrote stuff down. When time came to share out loud, I raised my hand and said something like "I stay angry." She nodded and wrote it down. Other costs: close people out, dwell on the negative, loss of happiness, feel powerless, "go through the motions" of socializing instead of really being present, and the ultimately, the complaint seemed to give birth to other complaints.

She talked about how so many people live their lives with all of these complaints. They get all of "this", (pointing at the payback column), and sacrifice all of "this" (pointing at the cost column). She explained that this mentality actually molds your entire perception of reality and thus...your life. And she explained that the Landmark Education Forum's design, purpose and goal was to help people break out of this and become empowered, to make their lives really work for them.

The meeting was finished, we were handed little folders with information and a kind of application of sorts and people filed out and reconciled with the people who had invited them in (like the way Roscoe had invited me in). I had a brief conversation with an old lady who was part of the Forum. I was having difficulty with the application because it was asking for a goal...what did I want from the Forum? And I was not sure how to put it into words. The old lady asked me some questions and I told her that I basically felt like my life was really fucked up and that I was a failure and that I felt trapped. I explained a bit about BCTI scam that left me paying on a student loan for a worthless "education" and how I just didn't feel like my life was going the way I wanted it to go, that I was stuck in some sort of socially commanded lifestyle. I wanted to feel like I was an okay individual, and not a total fuck up. "You want to be free," she said and I nodded. She seemed like she understood and, oddly enough, she did not try to push the Forum on me, but just said to think about it carefully, because it was an intense workshop. In retrospect, I think she sold me on it by way of reverse psychology. Had she said, "We can help! We can show you the way!" I would have been skeptical and maybe passed on this.

There was a problem with cost. The workshop cost some $375. I discussed it with Roscoe and he offered to pay the $375 up front, with an agreement that if I did the program and got something out of it, then I would pay him back. If it didn't work for me, I owed him nothing. So I enrolled.


---------


I attended the three day workshop at the end of April in 2002. First, worth mentioning was that my three card tarot reading for that week was:

Atu VII: The Chariot

Atu XIII: Death

7 of Disks: Failure

I'm pretty sure I was using the Thoth deck at this time.

I had an idea that the Forum would be a course in applied existentialism, and I was correct, for the most part. The Forum presented many conceptual elements of Zen Buddhism, western occultism and existentialism. However, I should add that Scientology also contains variations on these conceptual elements. I have occasionally referred to Scientology as "a cult for people who think they are too smart to get sucked into a cult"...which is to say that because Scientology derives from some of those things I mentioned, it is a very intelligently crafted cult. Your average trailer trash or ghetto resident would not get Scientology...too far over their heads. But its method appeals to the college intellectual. And I mention this because I think that the Landmark Education Forum is somewhat like the Church of Scientology, with a noted exception that, instead of advertising as a religion, it advertises as education. Yes, very clever. Nevertheless, I walked into the Forum with as open a mind as I could.

As I said, the Forum's workshop lasted three days. Each day was a session starting at 9AM and going on until almost midnight, with three half hour breaks and an hour and a half lunch. This is a long time to be all cooped up in a room, sitting on rather uncomfortable chairs amidst a crowd of people you don't know, listening to a speaker.

The Forum Leader looked a lot like my father and that immediately made me uncomfortable. I can see now, in retrospect, the synchronistic confrontation involved there. And I also got an uneasy sense in my gut when, just as the Forum was starting, the Leader spotted a man sitting on a pillow on the floor at one end of the audience. The Forum Leader asked him to sit in a chair. The fellow said something about being Native American and that it was traditional for him to sit on the floor and that he was perfectly comfortable this way. The Forum Leader insisted that he sit in a chair and held up the Forum until the man became embarrassed and found a chair to sit in. I interpreted this as an authoritarian leverage for conformity.

The Forum Leader then started with a question: "Are you coachable?" This to mean, are you willing to lay down what you already think you know, and allow someone else to guide you? It is interesting to me, to note how often the wrong questions are asked and for what purpose. For instance, when interviewing at BCTI, I kept asking the recruiter the wrong questions...questions that usually required a "yes" or "no" answer. I always got a "yes". I should have asked something more like "What things does BCTI teach that would help me start my own business?" Likewise, more responsible questions at the Forum would be "How coachable are you?" or "How willing are you to be guided?". But he simply asked "Are you coachable?" and, knowing now what I didn't know at that outset, he was addressing a great number of people who were unhappy with their lives and really wanted some serious changes for the better, but didn't know how to make that happen. They were there because they WANTED to be coached. So, of course, they all nod their heads. The Forum Leader re-emphasized the question and made suggestions about how intense the situation could get and then continued asking "Are you coachable?"

The idea here was to get people to let their guards down and really open up. Which is good. And not so good.

He started a lecture on what we "know". More specifically, what we know that we know. Then what we know that we DON'T know. A brief word to what we don't know that we know, and finally, the emphasis on what we don't know that we don't know. He drew a circle on the chalkboard and made it into a pie chart showing the rough estimates of what we know that we know, what we know we don't know, and on and on, with "what we don't know that we don't know" encompassing a very large part of the pie. All this to sort of say, "See? You ain't so smart. So get over yourself about how smart you think you are."

He explained what the Forum was all about in an almost riddle-like manner, so that you suddenly realized that the Forum had already started and you were participating, even before you understood it. From there, he introduced many different ideas, which I would call linguistic restructuring. That's my term, not theirs. What is important here is to understand that a word is only a word. It symbolizes a thing. It is not the thing itself. Thus, as Robert Anton Wilson has said in his books, "the map is not the territory." But we don't just use words. We don't just speak them. We think them. We think in the language we speak and we get used to the symbols having a certain meaning and then attribute that meaning on a fairly regular basis. So a big part of the Landmark Education Forum, at least as far as that workshop went, was to cancel out certain words and replace them with others so that you're entire thinking begins to change and you see your reality from a similar, yet somewhat different perspective.

Two great examples: the Forum Leader introduced the words transform and breakthrough. He talked about how everyone was unhappy and wanted to change things in their lives and he discarded that. "You are not going to change anything," he said. Then he introduced the idea that we could transform our reality. He talked at length about transformation. And all this made sense to me, except that I kept thinking...the word "transform" simply means "change". And "breakthrough" also refers to change. Those two words are particularly important because I have two cards in my Osho Zen deck that are called Transformation and Breakthrough...AND, my tarot reading, for that week included the Death card, which usually means "change" or "transformation".

But the word "transformation" has a certain emotional content. It is dramatic and exciting. It stirs up energy in a way that the word "change" does not. So here we have the linguistic restructuring taking effect. Simply by using the word "transform", people already begin to feel more empowered to make certain critical changes in their lives. Again, having read Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising, I was familiar with these ideas, but I had read those books back in my early twenties, and, despite my suspicions, I was actually enjoying the fact that I was having some of these concepts re-introduced into my mind...sort of dust out the cobwebs and reinvigorate great, powerful ideas. For other people, this sort of applied existentialism was brand new and so they were really having a great experience with the whole thing.

Another good example was the Forum Leader's doing away with the ideas of "good and bad" or "right and wrong" and replacing them with the ideas of "what works and what does not work." This I particularly liked. Focusing on what works or does not work has been a big part of my politics, in addition to my personal thinking. Notice that "works" and "does not work" are actual verbs, whereas "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" are merely adjectives. This separates abstractions from concrete phenomena, turns an idea in your mind into something that can be realized in action on the material world.

But existentialism has another key element in it, and element that separates it from postmodernism. And that is the insistence that you are responsible for your thoughts and interpretations. And it was here that the Forum became more intense. The Forum Leader started to talk about "what happened" and then "your story". He gave several theoretical examples. "What happened" refers to the actual events in a situation. "Your story" refers to your own opinions, projections, feelings, theories, motives. This was where he invited people to come up to a microphone and talk to him and tell them what was going on in their lives and he would help them sort it out. I heard all kinds of stories about crumbling marriages and falling outs between people and their parents. The Forum Leader would listen to what they said, and then say, "That's your story. Now here's what happened." and he would reduce the entire thing down to actions, with the addition of the person's own motives and feelings. The person would then start in with "But she thinks..." or "But he just doesn't understand..." and the Forum Leader would correct them, pointing out that they don't necessarily know what the other person thinks or understands, except insofar as what was actually said.

Next on the list was the "racket". A racket is a sleazy deal. A con. A swindle. The Forum Leader explained that most people do the things they do to look good. We always want to look good. We don't want to face the fact that sometimes...as that group leader once said, "We're not very good people." What's more, we get so caught up in notions of "good and bad" or "right and wrong" that we forget that we sometimes do shitty things AND good things. We neglect to see the humanity. In fact, we may come to see humanity itself as "inherently good" or "inherently evil". So everyone is running a racket. Everyone is using his story to make himself look good and someone else look like a cad. You're either a victim or a martyr...not a person who neglected to set and enforce boundaries or to stand up for what you believe in and not the person who's being held responsible for saying unkind things to someone. You're a righteous crusader, "telling the truth"...not a gossip or a backstabber. Everything you do is the right thing to do...even if it all blows up in your face. When that happens, it's the other person's fault...or the world's fault. You're now the victim. You're never the villain. You're never the coward. You're never the flake. You're always the hero. You're always the do-gooder. You're always the responsible one. Right? This is the racket that the Forum Leader was talking about. How we use our words to make ourselves look good and how those words mold our thinking so that...we actually are believing our own lies.

Another term: "authentic". He discarded the word "honesty" and replaced it with "authentic". The difference? Ever meet someone who brags about being "brutally honest"? In my experience, such people deliberately make the truth hurt, and then shrug innocently, stating that they just "tell it like it is". But if we're all interpreting things differently, then nobody ever really tells anything "like it is". This "brutal honesty" business is a racket. The proof here is that these kinds of people don't like having someone "tell it like it is" to them. I've experienced this double standard in the vast majority of "tell it like it is" types. They can't take it, but they dish it out in great quantities. What's more, they make a point to be brutally honest in order to keep the other parties on the defense. As long as you're telling him what he's about, chances are, he's now on the defense and has no chance to tell you what you're about. Like the old saying goes, "The best defense is a good offense." So you speak a little louder and a little more abrasively and don't have to worry about someone else challenging you. By being confrontational, you avoid being confronted. And that may be "honest" but not authentic. See how that works? And all this is justified by the insistence on "telling the truth". Notice the use of the word "the". THE truth. Not your truth. Not truth as you see it. But THE truth. Because you have clear vision and you can see THE truth where others can't. Right? That's your racket, your sleazy maneuver to make you look better than other people.

So..."authentic" means you don't just "tell the truth" but that you take responsibility for your choice of words and your intention behind it. "Authentic" means you are honest with yourself. That you present yourself honestly, as a real person, who sometimes doesn't do the right thing, or does the right thing for the wrong reasons. Not the do-gooder, not the victim of everyone else's dishonesty, or everyone else's "inability to deal with your honesty." You are a human being who runs a racket, just like everyone else does.

Of course, I noted a certain irony. Here was the Forum Leader lambasting "honesty" in favor of "authenticity", yet he was accusing people of being sleazy, using the same "brutal honesty" that he condemned. As people continued to walk up and describe certain things in their lives that bothered them, and tried to spin their "innocence" on the matter, the Forum Leader would just outright tell them, "You're lying!" and then explain the story back to them according to facts and explain the racket they ran. It got very intense. Brutal. People protested and he ran them down. He exposed them. And it hurt. It was brutal.

But then again, we all made a choice to enroll in the Landmark Education Forum. We all took that chance. And what he was doing wasn't so terribly crooked. Zen Masters do their own spin to break down the ego. We wanted the transformation. The whole idea here is that if you want a transformation, then you must be ready and willing to be broken down. This is reprogramming, using linguistic restructuring. And when we take this chance, all we have to cling to is trust. Trust that this person is going to build us back up into a better person. Even as I use the term "reprogramming", I can feel the negative connotation it involves. We like ourselves to some degree. We want to hold on to what we like. Even if we want to become another kind of person, possibly a better person...we are wary of trusting another person to make us into that. And the Forum Leader addressed that to some degree. He kept reminding us, "Are you coachable?" Are you willing to be guided? Are you willing to be reprogrammed? If you are unhappy with certain things in your life, only YOU can change them, but you can't if you stay with the same programming. So is reprogramming really all that bad?

For the record, "reprogramming" is a term used in Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising and it was never used in the Landmark Education Forum.

And I can also understand that, in order to really breakthrough, as they put it, to transform yourself, or to "create possibilities" (another term the Forum Leader threw at us), you may have to reverse the polarity in yourself. You stop with the BS about what a great person you are, what a do-gooder, and what a victim, and you throw yourself into the Abyss, you face all your shitty deeds. You take responsibility for your actions, without labeling yourself either good or bad, but simply human, and you forgive yourself, and you start dealing with people on a different level.

Now, I was not just sitting there going "Mm hmm...yes, I'm familiar with this." I was busy examining myself as he told us we needed to. Despite the fact that the Forum Leader looked like my father, that didn't become an issue for me. But what did become an issue was my mother. I felt that she didn't accept me for who I really was, was always trying to mold me into something more suitable to her tastes, and I felt she didn't allow me to be angry. She criticized me for being angry. Now that last statement was an actual event. My mother DID make statements like "You're so angry all the time." with a tone of blame...like I had no reason to be angry, like there was something wrong with me because I was angry. Hearing her chastise me for being angry made me more angry. And as a result, I was growing to hate her and then...I was projecting that hate onto other women. I was turning into a misogynist. It seemed to me, that all women were manipulating bitches. I kept "seeing" all the strange and different ways that women play themselves off as victims in order to leverage control over men. I kept thinking how gloriously lucky I was to be a fag, because I don't have to deal with women so I could fuck them. Being attracted to men, I could write women off in a way that a straight dude could not. But I felt my mother had her talons sunk into me. I felt like "a Momma's boy" or that she wanted to keep me that way. That she kept me weak and sissy-ish. That she made sure I would never be a "real man".

And actually, this fits in with the father issue as well for me because there has been some research done on the business with single mothers...particularly raising boys. Boys raised by single mothers tend to grow up a bit maladjusted. They either overidentify with the female or they go the opposite. Young men who were raised by single mothers are more prone to violent crime. It's a hard call because...what are the single mothers to do? If the father is a deadbeat or an abuser, he has to be removed for the sake of the child. On the other hand, I also know that courts tend to rule in favor of the mother in custody cases, even where the mother is clearly less capable than the father of caring for the children. I've seen a few cases personally in which the father was more stable and could easily care for the child, male or female, than the mother, but the courts gave custody to the mother anyway. And in my case, I may have turned out somewhat maladjusted, but I would have preferred to be put with my mother than my father. After all...HE was the one who thought I was possessed by Satan every time a stove electrocuted me.

So we had to do an exercise. We had to confess a dirty secret to the person next to us. Something that really bothered us. Something that the Forum itself was bringing up to the surface. Well, it just so happened that I was sitting next to an older woman, who was married. So here I had to confess this to her and she had to confess her thing to me. She went first and I don't remember much of her confession. I think it had something to do with her marriage, that she took her husbund for granted and didn't really pay much attention to him anymore and yet, imagined that their marriage had become estranged because of him. I think that was it. Might have been more. I was, quite honestly, not really listening to her confession because I was feeling the anxiety over mine. So then came time for mine. It was VERY uncomfortable to look that woman in the eyes and say, "I hate women. I hate them because I hate my mother and I know I project what I perceive in her onto other women."

And to be honest, when I was done, neither of us really felt that much better. I didn't get a sympathetic look from her. She was not the warm, understanding female who would see beyond this and know the "goodness" in me. She was an ordinary woman with her own problems, most likely not used to dealing with a gay guy who hated women and she offered nothing to me. My confession disturbed her and I could tell from the way she pulled herself in very slightly afterwords, that she did not want to be next to me. And we had to keep sitting next to each other for another hour or so.

The next step was to actually call the person we had a problem with and make our confessions. This was now the end of the second day and it was after midnight. So lots of people were calling their parents or spouses and then standing in corners or in hallways or even outside the building, and sobbing and confessing over their cellphones. Some waited until they went home to call and confess.

I did not call my mother to confess. Why? I told myself that it was because she would not understand what all I was going through, this whole Landmark Education Forum thing. But I think more because I wasn't ready to forgive her for her part in it. Despite what I could see in myself, I still had some realization that she too played a role in the dysfunction. I needed her to be okay with me being angry. I needed her to listen to me, to try and understand my anger and to realize I may have a right to some of it. I didn't feel she was ready for that. I may have been wrong. Or I may have been right. Who know? But I was still angry at her and I could not confess in that state of anger. It felt...humiliating...to even think of it. In recall, I can say that, this was way back in 2002 and since then, my mother and I have worked a lot out together. I have forgiven her and have even come to realize I was wrong in a few assumptions, and she even still feels guilty for things that don't even bother me, things she wished she could have done differently.

And in recall, I am actually glad I didn't call my mother at 1am to confess. Because my mother absolutely HATES to have her sleep interrupted and I really doubt that she would have appreciated what I had to say, in light of me interrupting her sleep.

The Forum Leader had also lectured on the illusory nature of the word "is". How we use that word to establish an innate essence or quality of something, rather than describing its properties. For example, we say "Martin is a thief" instead of "Martin stole a bottle of booze last Friday." See the difference? If Martin only stole that one bottle and never steals anything else again, IS he still a thief? If we say, "Judy IS a liar," because we caught Judy lying about something, could that not imply that Judy lies all the time, even though we may witness her telling the truth about other things? Again, Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology tackles the problem of the word "is" in much greater detail than I care to do here.

He lectured on the number 2, what it means philosophically. Our logical minds divide things up between this and that. He was outlining the philosophy of dualism, and then followed it up with non-dualism, which could be said to provoke the mind into action better than monism. Crowley talks about this in his chapter on the 0=2 equation in Magick Without Tears.

So again, more concepts I was familiar with, yet being re-introduced to them through a different means and a different language...linguistic restructuring. In case I haven't made it clear thus far, I rather enjoy linguistic restructuring and, in fact, I think it's a necessary tool for keeping us in a state of genuine understanding, rather than the degraded state of "knowing". The former remains vibrant and active in the mind. The latter stagnates and begins to fuse the symbol to the object symbolized until the mind no longer perceives the difference.


...to be continued

My mother emailed me back to say, "One other thing you can do for me is to just stay in touch a little more. I LOVE to hear from you. Even if it's just mundane stuff."

Hey, no problem. Her wish is my command. I'll make a point to send AT LEAST one email a week and call more often too.

When you decide you want to be there for other people, give a little more, help a little more, it really fucking ROCKS when you find that they only ask for small things that require very little effort on your behalf and that those small things really do make them very happy!!

It finally happened.

Bitches got me sick.

I don't know who but...someone gave it to me. Not sure yet whether it's flu or cold.

In any case, I decided to make some chicken soup, because even if it doesn't actually help, it just makes me feel good to eat it when I'm sick. So here's the recipe. As usual, I don't bother listing amounts, as I figure, you put them in as you see fit:

Some chicken
Water
Soy Sauce
Worcestershire Sauce
Diced Onion
Grated Ginger
Salt, Pepper and Garlic
Diced Apple
Top Ramen, chicken flavor

I threw all that in the crockpot and cooked on High for three hours.

Just tasted it now. Mmmm! Not bad. More ginger next time. And more soy and worcestershire.

Oh, and if you follow this recipe, don't be surprised if you see the apple bits floating on the top. They are snobs and refuse to mingle with the rest of the party.

I just thought I'd mention this in passing, for everyone's benefit.

In the vast majority of cases, when your debt is sold to a collection agency, consider it paid off and continue with your life.

Collection agencies can't do shit to you. They have no legal contract with you. The company that sold your contract to them was not legally permitted to do so without your consent. That's THE LAW!! So if you didn't give them express permission to sell the debt to a collection agency...or even DISCUSS IT WITH THEM, and they did, then they violated the law and the collection agency is STUPID because they just paid someone's debt and can only hope to get their money back by trying to intimidate.

I say "the vast majority of cases" because, from what I've been reading up on the government websites, concerning the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act, I'm not sure there are any exceptions at all. It doesn't look like it. In reading between the lines, what I gather is that any organization that has a legal contract with you and that you owe money to, can get it by going through the courts and having your wages garnished. Of course, that costs money, so if the cost is more than your debt, then they sell it to the collection agency just to get some money back. If the debt is more than the court costs, then they will simply go through the courts. And if the debt is more than the court costs, but they sell it to a collection agency anyway, then it wasn't a LEGAL debt in the first place. See how that works?

So the collection agency calls you and makes threats to take legal action. These threats are empty. They can't take any legal action. This is where you get to have fun being an asshole. Tell them to hold while you "go get the person" and then leave the phone off the hook for however long it takes until you hear the dial tone again. Take the opportunity to practice your skill at talking dirty. Repeat everything they say right back to them until it pisses them off. Recite some bad poetry to them. Tell them an off-color joke. Demand to know their names, job titles, phone numbers, supervisors and their phone numbers, address, and whatever else you can think of that makes it look like they are the ones in trouble and not you. Whatever. Just don't comply. Don't let them lead the conversation.

See, if everyone understood this, collection agencies would go out of business. It is only because people are ignorant of the law that they are bullied into paying money to someone they don't owe it to. Collection agencies are just paper tigers.

My mother HATES to have her sleep interrupted. HATES it! H...A...T...E...S it!! It pisses her off something fierce!! Few things really bring out the dragon in her than being woken up in the middle of the night for something that isn't particularly important.

This is because she used to be a respiratory therapist and often had to be on call. And at any given time, her beeper would go off in the middle of the night and she would have to get up, put on uniform and rush down to the ER to help someone breathe or keep the heart going whilst surgeons did whatever they needed to do.

This is why I didn't want to call her last night. But I re-checked the time after leaving that entry and decided to go ahead and try to call, as she might still be up. And she was. So we had a good conversation. The first ten minutes, I had a hard time articulating because I was crying. But she did the talking and I quickly noticed that she was more confident than I expected, and so our two hour conversation went well and even did the usual thing of wandering from one subject to another.

She has a good chance of recovery because they found the cancer during "phase 2", which is a "safe" phase, (phase 3 is more precarious and phase 4 is nearly too late). She has confidence in her doctor...who is not only very good but also has excellent bedside manner, very warm and friendly and reassuring.

My ma has Fibromyalgia (sic?)...a condition I don't rightly understand, except that it means the body has become unnaturally sensitive. A pinch to the skin hurts a LOT! A scary movie can really terrify the viewer. Loud noises are nearly deafening and can leave the person shaking. So...it's this that bothers me. This is why I worry that she might die from chemo. I told her my fear and she acknowledged calmly. She doesn't seem too concerned about that. In fact, as far as chemo goes, she seemed to be thinking more about what kind of wig to wear since she will lose her hair. Her main concern was if she had to get a mastectomy. And even that is not so big of a deal. She explained that there is now a Federal law which states that if a breast has to be removed, then an implant has to be made and it either has to be adjusted to look like the healthy breast, or the healthy one adjusted to look like it, so that both breasts look equal and healthy. Insurance will not cover a willful cosmetic surgery but in a case of breast cancer, it becomes mandated so the insurance will cover it. So my mother's husbund is happy to know that this might resolve possibly in her having a nicer set of boobs.

I feel better today. Knowing my mother is confident makes me feel confident. And I'm glad I took the chance and called her last night, risking possible wrath of interrupted sleep, because otherwise, I might have slept pretty fitfully myself.

So it's not that things are all hunkydory. But the situation is definitely better than I thought.

My mother has breast cancer.

The specific type is called Invasive Duct Carcinoma.

She's an old woman these days. Only in her 60's but life has taken a toll on her so she's, perhaps, a little closer to 80 or 85, in terms of how delicate her body is. If she has to go through chemo, I am afraid she will not survive.

I feel so powerless.

There isn't anything I can do about this except talk to her (too late tonight. I'll have to call her tomorrow) and pray for her. I wish I could...step in and fight somehow. But I have no choice but to sit on the sidelines and watch and hope for the best.

I had made a decision to continue my memoirs in reference to my spiritual journey in private. I've changed my mind on that. Granted, I will say that I have a few people on my friends list who I don't think really deserve to see or know some of what I describe here, because I think their opinions are more important to them than understanding real people and the realities they face and what they do and their reasoning for doing it. But I realized that, for some reason, just knowing I have an audience, no matter how cold or critical, somehow motivates me to carry on, to keep examining. Writing with the knowledge that someone will read what I write changes something in my style and my perspective. I consider the change productive. So I will be writing the rest in public after all.

And I start with this entry, which was previously locked, and now unlocked.

So, that's the end of that.


Any time I give notice, it always just gets really weird on that last day of work. I guess some part of me expects it to be momentous and it's not. The night was like any other. Nothing particularly eventful happened. I just worked my shift and then went home, with the only difference being that I left my uniform and time card in the locker and then turned in my locker key at the desk.

And, to be honest, I would still not be against working in a bathhouse again. Just not Steamworks. The situation there is way too fucked up. Corporate morons who don't know how to run a business properly and don't understand their customer base and who haven't even got the Goddamned sense to take a gander at the competition to see how they fare.

I just feel sad that it turned out the way it did.

But that's the big, soul-sucking obstacle out of the way now. The way is clear for better things to come.

Also, lately I've noticed that my reading material has some kind of bizarre synchronicity with what's going on in my life. I had started reading 2001: A Space Odyssey last week because an argument had me upset and I wanted something uplifting to help keep me aligned. Stories about aliens influencing human evolution always make me happy. And since 2010 is coming up, I thought I'd read the whole Space Odyssey series. Anyway, I finished the book tonight, on shift. Just feels strange to read those last three or four chapters, where David Bowman passes through the monolith and becomes the Star-Child, as I'm passing through this shift, knowing that when I walk out that door, I won't be coming back.

I realized at Steamworks tonight that I've been experiencing this bitchy backlash from the YouthCare orientation I went to last week.

See, it's like this: I've known Roscoe for almost 11 years now and during that time, he has occasionally pointed out that I can be a rather self centered individual and sometimes very gently tried to nudge me towards being not so much so. Also, my friend Orry is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and so does a lot of volunteer fundraising. I happen to know the Sisters do other, more intense work than just fundraising. For instance, many people do not know that the Sisters designed the very first safe sex pamphlet (now you know). Safe sex pamphlets are so common these days that nobody stops to think that at one time, they weren't around and then someone...the Sisters...came up with this rather novel idea! But even that doesn't really qualify as the more intense work that I'm thinking of. Some of their work in organizing the AIDS quilt to be shown and, most of all, the Sisters would seek out men who were dying of AIDS in hospitals and visit them. They often found that these patients, particularly the ones in worse condition, were not only abandoned by family, but even their friends had stopped coming around to visit, either because they weren't such good friends and didn't care, or watching their friend slowly waste away was too hard on them so they chickened out. In either case, these men were left to die alone in a hospital room. So in came the Sisters, full of flowers and gifts and jokes and they performed little skits and even flirted with the patients. I remember hearing about how they did this. Their policy was not to show any sadness or pity. They were to be cheerful and funny because they were doing this FOR the patient. The object was to bring some laughs and smiles to these lonely and miserable individuals. The Sister who told me about this said that even though they were to maintain this uplifting attitude all the way until they got out of the hospital, they often found they couldn't keep the smile after they left the room. It was hard work. It was a lot of serious energy being given. And it was heartbreaking to see what was happening to this person's humanity in that little hospital.

Orry hasn't done that kind of work but he wants to. He's currently excited to be training as a nurse so he can care for the elderly.

Roscoe isn't doing so much volunteering these days but he's done a lot in the past and he is still a giver. I see...something different in both of these men. It's so hard to describe that subtle difference, but it's there. And then I think of others who do this kind of stuff and I see this same difference in them too.

So I decided back in late July to take the plunge and I had been thinking of Orion Youth Center, mainly because it was close to where I live and I'd like the chance to work with kids. I will admit very plainly that, since I've been treated like a younger brother who needs to be taken under the wing by so many people in the past, and have gotten very sick and tired of it, for the last year or two, I have been feeling something in me...this desire to be looked up to, to be someone who inspires others and who can maybe offer some wisdom and understanding. I don't feel confident enough to be an actual mentor, but...close to that.

I got an email in August, thanking me for my interest and stating that I needed to attend an orientation. I couldn't make the orientation dates in August but I made the one last week in this month, as I already reported. I was tired and just a bit cranky when I went in there. But when I got out, I was totally all fired up. The coordinator was just going on and on about what these kids go through and what the YouthCare program offers them. I thought it just offered shelter, food and some clothing but it's much more than that. They actually have various stage programs the kids can go through to get job skills, then jobs, then learn how to pay bills and taxes, and finally to actually do it...to get themselves an apartment and become self sufficient. This orientation really opened up my options about how I can be involved, and boosted my confidence.

For instance, she mentioned that a few volunteers get so interested that they want to spend more time volunteering, but of course, they only have so much time, so they make up for it by donating things...like socks. Homeless kids go through socks like you wouldn't believe. Man, I just wanted to bolt out of the building and find some shop and buy a bunch of packages of socks to donate right there and then!! I loved that I could get involved on very simplistic levels..."safe" levels. Volunteering in areas where I wouldn't have to worry about qualifications or long time commitments. All kinds of small, simple ways to help out.

But then, at the end, we had to fill out a document authorizing a background check and, while I think my check will do okay, it's been a week since I've heard from them.

And I realized tonight, that I've been getting impatient. And even bitchy.

See, just that one orientation gave me a taste of what this was all about. I felt good about just attending to learn more and finding that after learning more, I wanted to plunge right in.

A couple times, I have prayed to my Guiding Spirit and asked for more positive, empowering people to come into my life. Both times, I have gotten this answer:

Be a more positive, empowering person yourself, and they will appear.

So...since I've thought about this so much, and since I've taken these initial steps, I feel like I'm at this edge, this precipice, this doorway between two different worlds. And I want to pass. I want a breakthrough. I want to get OUT of that world where everyone sits around shooting their mouths off about what they think they know, and their little opinions about the world and the people in it. I want to jump INTO this larger, new world, where people actually do things to contribute to a better environment. I want to feel that, be a part of that.

But this wait...it's been grinding on my psyche. So I'm suddenly catapulted into this nightmarish world where I see selfishness everywhere my beady little eyes look. A hard one is when I'm at the Paramount Theater and I get assigned to do gum check duty, which means I have to wander around the theater staring at the floor, looking for blotches of gum. And when I find one, I spray this stuff on it to soften it up and dissolve it, and then use a scraping tool to chisel it up off the floor and then throw it in one of the beaver bags. I get annoyed doing this because I think of all thse careless fuckers who have to have something in their mouths, like cows chewing cud, and they can't be bothered to wrap it up and throw it away, so no, they just throw it on the floor or stick it under the seat or the armrest. Fucking pisses me off!

Same with smokers. When they're done with it, they just throw the still burning butt on the sidewalk and keep walking. Or if they're really "cool", they flick it at a building or a tree. I'll say it now: You're not cool, Mr. Buttflicker. You're a shitbag.

Here again, I have to bring up Roscoe. He smokes. But he lets his butt drop to the sidewalk, steps on it to put the cherry out, and then picks it back up and puts it into his pocket until he finds a trash can and then deposits it there. I don't know anyone else who does this.

My mother was talking of the time she met him. She and her husbund were coming up to visit me for my birthday and offered to take me out to dinner. She specified a nice place with good food. Roscoe had already offered and I wanted him to meet my mother, so we had this big dinner at Beppo's (that's an Italian restaurant, for those of you non-Seattleites). So we ordered our food. Just before it was served, a family was seated at the table next to ours, a family with two giggling teenage girls. When we got our food and started eating, Roscoe noticed the girls were checking out his food. So he said, "You want to try some of this?" They blushed but said yes and so he said, "Give me your forks." They gave him their forks and he put a big, heaping sample on each and gave it back. The girls ate it and liked it so much they agreed one would order it and the other something else and they'd share their plates. Their parents beamed at him. My mother was awestruck. She told me, "I knew he was a good man when I watched him do that." Oddly enough, it barely registered with me, partly because I am used to seeing him do this kind of thing, and partly because I'm a rather self centered person.

He does this stuff all the time. All kinds of little things to show that he is conscious and aware of other people and his environment. Always giving and sharing. See? There is a reason why this man is my best friend and why I look up to him and want to be like him.

And Orry. Another wonderful, generous, caring person. And Purple Mark is very generous too (all these people are Leos, by the way...see why I like Leos?)

So...I'm ready. And I look more now for opportunities to help other people out. And it feels great when I can!!

But I want to go further in and this waiting...fuck, it's driving me crazy!! I feel like I'm stuck in Selfish World, like the claws of selfishness are trying to hold on to me, keep me back. I see apathetic and careless behavior everywhere and I'm feeling very hypersensitive to it. I'm trying to hack away at those claws, shouting, "NO!! Let me go! I want to evolve! I want to transform! I want to contribute! I want to be a part of!" And it's just making me really bitchy and nasty.

Some drunks hit me up for money on my way to the store tonight. I said no. But then, after leaving the store, I gave them some and they were more grateful than I expected. So...I felt a little better. Yes, they'll probably spend it on an Old English 40oz and forget about it tomorrow, when they're hungover. I don't care. It just felt a little better than walking past them, with both of us knowing I had a buck or two to spare.