a tome of a poem about community

I wrote a poem about community that’s called “Community Autopsy” —pronounce it like psychology because the poem goes on about that, and justice, and our abilities to make life good.

a tome of a poem about community.

This image is a screen grab. Tthe poem itself is so-o-o- long it’s too long for a blog post. 

 

Blogs are dead, long live blogs

Look at history ruthlessly choosing itself, as if the entity known as Time is sculpting earth and we are mere ingredients, no more cognizant of ‘what’s happening’ than flour understands bread. We could realize that history is our first job, first duty, our first purpose. We could invent ourselves, and forcefully. But we barely recognize self determination.

History threw blogs away, for example. The first personal publishing platform, the first opportunity for a solitary voice to participate in large scale distribution. Before I grew disgusted with the effort, this domain brianhayes.com according to the Quantcast Audience Profile reached approximately 6,176 U.S. monthly people in the summer of 2009, generally attracting a 50+ and very slightly male biased, more educated audience.

And that’s that.

your mind when it matters

Your brain uses only milliseconds to make its choices. 
…the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing.
plural noun: milliseconds !
 
We proceed in bursts, bursts of less than 200 milliseconds. One decision proceeds to the next. Left foot here. See that smile? Hand in pocket. Yes, a smile. There it is. Wonderfully warm flutter in my heart. Oh, there it is. Left foot there. Oh no, that’s not a smile. Right foot stops. 
 
These words fail to explain. They force us into a robotic ladder of mundane maneuvers. Life along an axis. Forty steps ‘x’, Fifty steps ‘y’. We’re not that. We must be more than a cyber-centipede of linked instructions.
 
And yet, we must admit our mind operates stunningly fast. We rarely sense more than a blur. As one thought follows another, are we tumbling and cascading along or can we learn to see ourselves operating in real time, in milliseconds? There’s a terrific frontier!
 
Deric Bownds once more:
It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing. It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering – or at least inhibiting – self limiting behaviors. It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed.
 

our challenges of earth

WATER & SANITATION
2 billion people don’t have access to safe clean water. 3 billion don’t have access to toilets. Bottom of the Pyramid market = $32 billion.

SAFETY
317 million on the job accidents = 2.3 million deaths per year. Road traffic injuries cause 3500 deaths every day.

ENERGY
25% of people live without electricity. Solid fuel air pollution causes 4 million deaths per year. BoP market = $317 billion (Electricity = $137 billion).

ENVIRONMENT
By 2050 we will need 3 earths. GHGs increased 50% since 1990. Natural assets are 26% of emerging economy wealth.

AGRICULTURE & FOOD
World needs to produce 50% more food to meet demand. 70% of the world’s rural poor rely on agriculture for income. Food = half of BoP spending.

ECONOMY & COMMUNITY
2.5 billion people live on less than $2/day. 4 billion are without basic goods & services. Wealthiest 5% earn the same as the poorest 80%.

HEALTH & NUTRITION
870 million are undernourished. 1 billion people lack access to health care. 15 million die yearly from preventable infectious diseases.

EDUCATION
124 million young people globally don’t have access to education. Only 49% of children attend secondary school. BoP Market = $193 billion.

[Source: ASME Innovation Showcase, link: https://thisishardware.org]

the author updates

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 1:09 AM, Gary wrote:
“I hope that you are healthy and enjoying life.”

Can’t say I’m unhappy. My inner world is calm and often cheery. That’s a sad irony though, because pain in my body often stops me in my tracks.

And lately a new twist appears. You can find me grimacing in the grocery aisle holding onto the shelving with both arms trying to stretch out massive cramps that suddenly attack my thighs and back. The pain is so damn hot. Muscles tighten up, clamped stiff, and so damn gripping painful. When do I say “off the scale”?

I put a bar across the bathroom doorway and rush to hang off it as soon as I feel a ‘cramp session’ arriving. Writhing in a doorway. Nuts, I say to myself. Hanging off a bar, twisting and stretching my legs and body parts as far as I can into the air or across the floor in a lame effort to stop the cramping. My back, abdomen, legs, feet are on fire. My face is twisted. Heavy cramping pain attacks me. Day to day is different, yet several times over 24 hours smothering pain can hit hard. No photo. Can’t film it. Too ugly. Within three, four, five minutes, as if a switch somewhere in the vast snarl of cellular proteins, calm returns to these rabid muscles. My mind clears, no longer in a damn cauldron. Pain goes down. I can stand up.

I try to put away my utter confusion about the last 2-3 years. What kind of disease is this? I remind myself I have university ties. Half dozen known and renowned docs and neurologists well-versed in the sour academy of pain. Dozens of vials of blood show me healthy. Tests show I’m a healthy guy. Ultrasound and CT scans show me healthy. Not even a speck of cholesterol; “Not a speck.” Pelvic, thoracic, neck and brain MRI; hours in that clackity-clack tube show I’m healthy. Doctors shrug their shoulders and say, (oh it’s terrible to hear it), “There’s nothing I can do. You’re one of the tough ones.”

I’m not anxious or compulsive or blue, although any amount of morphine seems to bugger decision making. I try to get out, to walk half a block, drive to a deli; can’t sit through a movie, can’t eat out in public. Pain cycles up and down and will hit so hard there’s no chance of a movie or a meal. Almost all day every day I’m reclined, switching TV channels, cruising the Internet, or drifting off in morphine somnolence. Sold the Honda scooter. Put disability plates on my truck. I can hobble for an hour or so. Buy my own groceries. Pick up a pizza.

There’s three implants in my body for pain. First, a neurostimulator tries to confuse pain signals picked up by my brain. Two, a pain pump dribbles a recipe of opioids directly onto my spinal cord. A third implant is a pacemaker so the dope won’t slow my heart too much. (Worried about being unable to stay awake, I drove to the ER two months ago to find my heart beating less than 30 times per minute. They installed a pacemaker. “Three implants,” I tell ’em in the waiting room, “and room for more!”

I’m hovering at the lonely ends of the Bell Curve. Hot chainmail wraps my feet and legs with pain. Drugs barely cut the peaks or spread out the boilings. Tortured and there’s no cure. No other word for it. C’mon? Any suggestions? Pain is constant. It’s generally 3-4-5 on the pain scale. Regularly jumps to 6-7-8 pain on the scale of pain. As if a bomb, ‘curling-up’ pain drops onto me unannounced 24 total-disability hours a day.

There’s rain in California. The cows across the street are calm. The boxer dog at the gate waits for a treat. Refrigerator is cold. I’ll always miss my wife. I’m sixty-seven this January and except for this nuts serious Peripheral Neuropathy, I bet I’m younger than many my age.

After it’s all been said and done as they say, all in all as they say, I am enjoying life.”


bundling posts about pain
phooey on populating my blog with malady

chronic is a dirty word
first lamented 2/4/16
feeling blue, that classic warm chesty type of blue, hit me like a boulder this morning, there was one particular trigger, there’s always a trigger for this kind of blue… the billpay portal at the pain clinic kicked me off, called their tech services, they don’t know why, looking into it, they’ll call me back… it’s the patient’s obligation to make sure the bill is paid… and a’that

getting co-pay’d to death… no longer merely a nuisance fee… multiple weekly appointments… call-ins… sent to specialists… brand-name prescriptions… all the stuff to be grateful for… yes, overall, this is high-tech medicine, access to world-grade services, their practice overhead costs are enormous, practitioner obligations for licenses, liability, employees, multiple offices, their education, always their education… costs are enormous, so who the hell is this guy with the co-pay?

and around the country co-pay has become a political matter, co-pay piles up… we’re not supposed to notice tiny burdens, we ask for a service and pay the co-pay, makes so much good sense… we all agree to the moral underpinning of co-pay… request a medical service, the doctor is ‘co-payed’, the world goes on… wo0t

what about when the doctor says “I need to see you Monday for this and Thursday for that” and the year grinds into another year and what about sending me to new doctors, “I need you to see Doctor This and go see Doctor That”?

chronic is a dirty word

in more ways than one 
http://www.medicaldaily.com/chronic-pain-immune-system-371332
chronic pain buggers our DNA


pain is strange
typed on March 11, 2016 
Why do some people get pain meds and some people don’t?

We shouldn’t let sweeping bias against opiates control medical decision makers. 

Pain can rule your life making the daily tasks of life insurmountable. I don’t normally tell stories of pain and seldom describe pain at it’s worst. It’s too ugly. People don’t like ugly. It’s better to protect others from the weight of it. And mercy is the last thing to want. I’m using a blog to report a reaction to pain that surprised me and to encourage common sense around the issue of pain meds.

A. By late afternoon yesterday I found myself sobbing in grief. A storm of cramps hit hard. I was on the floor shaking and twitching and helplessly moaning. Nowhere to run. 

B. By today I’d already forgotten about yesterday. I think that’s extraordinary, and that’s also why I’m writing this post. 

People living with pain are probably familiar with tricks our brain will use to protect us, can’t be only me. They also must be experiencing new and interesting ways of coping. For example, pain yesterday put me in a sobbing puddle of squirming and pleading out loud for relief, I was stunned such massive red hot pain can be put into a human body, yet only a day later I’d already forgotten about this new benchmark.

I awoke, made coffee, checked the news and weather as if an average life. It was late the following day when I remembered my life’s worst pain. How dare my brain forget something so terrible? Normal folks wouldn’t forget the greatest pain of their life, greater than any pain they felt before. Their ‘personal peak pain’ would tattoo their memory. 

It seems my brain is learning to edit trauma, to erase it. I’m intrigued how easily I shoveled away such a terrible event. 

Neuroplasticity in so many forms. 

Pain attacks me. I’m an older fellow with no illness except severe and permanent pain without a known cause. My heart is healthy, blood flow is excellent; “Not a speck of cholesterol,” the cardiologist reports; no tumors, not diabetic, weight is good. If I can walk and be active, I’m eager to do it. But peripheral neuropathy arrived in my life about three years ago.

Pain is always. Never goes away. It began as a feeling of cramp in the front of my right foot while helping a neighbor build a fence. I walked home limping ouch to ouch. The first doctor’s advice was tonic water for the quinine. By the third or fourth appointment, pain was rising and falling as if a thousand nails were driven into the bones of both legs.

Life became grimacing. Only exhaustion let me sleep. I’d squirm in bed until I passed out. Pain would wake me in an hour or two… cycle, repeat. I stood to try to stretch it away or hung from the trim of a doorway to try to twist it away. Or push ups off a chair or walk barefoot on the cold 4AM driveway or try a hot epsom bath or try a cold epsom bath or re-read Advil bleeding and death rate warnings until too tired to stand up, return to bed, squirm in bed, pass out until pain wakes me. Rarely out of the house, I mean rarely, maybe two trips to the supermarket in a month, mailbox every second day, the next appointment might blow off another several weeks.

It’s hard to comprehend how I endured it. After neurology tests confirmed nerve disease, the prescription changed to a real pain killer. Nine months of agony before some hyrodcodone. Nuts. I’ve never used oxy. Still don’t understand the differences.

Damn Damn Damn Pain Pain Pain

I now have three implants to help deal with pain. A neurostimulator implant cuts away peaks of boiling hot pain and gives the chance to walk around a bit; drive for groceries, appointments. The second implant pumps pain meds directly onto the spinal cord. I can now walk through a supermarket without grimacing or leaning on the shelving through an attack. Less dope in my blood lets me feel more awake. Seemingly unrelated to a pain condition, the third device is a pacemaker to boost signals of misfiring nerves that have let my pulse drop, luckily in the ER, to as low as 19 beats per minute, a beat or two away from dead. I tease doctors and staff there’s room for extra implants too. 

Pain is always. Never goes away. But it’s half what it used to be. Pain management and pain implants have helped. I now sleep when I’m tired rather than when I pass out after too many hours merely enduring… cycle in and out… repeat day after day. Rather than a thousand nails hammered into my bones, for several months I’m somewhat mobile. Levels of pain range from a medium headache to wearing scalding knee socks and increasingly there’s spaces in an hour when pain disappears. With less pain I can be busy, active, doing something, fixing something, cooking, reading, watching movies, fathoming the web, doing enough to ignore it; favors and fun.

When pain is too great, when more meds will either daze me or kill me, when the implants or calming or ignoring or stretching fail to defeat pain, sadly yesterday when I swear the attack was higher than the ten point chart, well, that’s just outright nuts.

Pain is nuts and nobody knows what to do about that. Except, maybe, my own brain might bump into more pleasant pathway for signals, (neuroplasticity in so many forms).

When will my brain or your brain become adept enough to forget pain while it occurs? Never. And I wouldn’t wish the experiments on you. 

close to the coast, so few bugs

And boy oh boy, that’s something good. It surprises me there’s few articles or documentaries or blog posts or tweets about the bloody misery of mosquito clouds or black fly swarms or gnat attacks, i.e. Alaska, Canada. Worldwide, I shudder to imagine how people cope. I roped a metal bucket over my shoulder and lit a tiny smoldering fire of twigs, grabbing green branches to stoke the smoke billowing around me as I walked down the trail… what a sight to behold. So this gizmo must outright gotta be fun… fer darn sure.

[link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOVzFaEpuk]

you are a computerized mask

“In ancient Rome, the word persona had two meanings: a mask, and a full citizen. A person online, however, is de facto not a full citizen….” Computers track your habits and your friends. You must govern automated decisions about your job, loans, your health, shopping… Civil Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data Technological progress should bring greater safety, economic opportunity, and convenience to everyone. Plus the collection of new types of data is essential for documenting persistent inequality and discrimination. At the same time, as new technologies allow companies and government to gain greater insight into our lives, it is vitally important that these technologies be designed and used in ways that respect the values of equal opportunity and equal justice:

  1. Stop High-Tech Profiling. New surveillance tools and data gathering techniques that can assemble detailed information about any person or group create a heightened risk of profiling and discrimination. Clear limitations and robust audit mechanisms are necessary to make sure that if these tools are used it is in a responsible and equitable way.
  2. Ensure Fairness in Automated Decisions. Computerized decision-making in areas such as employment, health, education, and lending must be judged by its impact on real people, must operate fairly for all communities, and in particular must protect the interests of those that are disadvantaged or that have historically been the subject of discrimination. Systems that are blind to the preexisting disparities faced by such communities can easily reach decisions that reinforce existing inequities. Independent review and other remedies may be necessary to assure that a system works fairly.
  3. Preserve Constitutional Principles. Search warrants and other independent oversight of law enforcement are particularly important for communities of color and for religious and ethnic minorities, who often face disproportionate scrutiny. Government databases must not be allowed to undermine core legal protections, including those of privacy and freedom of association.
  4. Enhance Individual Control of Personal Information. Personal information that is known to a corporation — such as the moment-to-moment record of a person’s movements or communications — can easily be used by companies and the government against vulnerable populations, including women, the formerly incarcerated, immigrants, religious minorities, the LGBT community, and young people. Individuals should have meaningful, flexible control over how a corporation gathers data from them, and how it uses and shares that data. Non-public information should not be disclosed to the government without judicial process.
  5. Protect People from Inaccurate Data. Government and corporate databases must allow everyone — including the urban and rural poor, people with disabilities, seniors, and people who lack access to the Internet — to appropriately ensure the accuracy of personal information that is used to make important decisions about them. This requires disclosure of the underlying data, and the right to correct it when inaccurate.

Silicon Valley and Wall Street abuses: black-box-societyFrank Pasquale’s Black Box Society takes a closer look at how your life is swept up and published. “Here’s one paradox I’m trying to resolve: even as economic change seems to accelerate, existing hierarchies of power and wealth seem ever more ossified, stable, secure. “I trace this problem to two, mutually reinforcing trends: the financialization of data, and the data-fication of finance.” Current law fails to regulate data.

too fast for myself

hedgerow“Going too fast for myself I missed  more than I think I can remember almost everything it seems sometimes and yet there are chances that I did not notice when they stood where I could have reached out and touched them this morning the black shepherd dog still young looking up and saying…
Are you ready this time” – W. S. Merwin

we come, we go

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

– Alexander Pope, “Ode on Solitude”

honesty, with breadth

There are plenty of schemes that could federate or safely encrypt our data, plenty of ways we could regain privacy and make our computers work better by default. It isn’t happening now because we haven’t demanded that it should, not because no one is clever enough to make that happen.

bewilderment for sale

“I sometimes think US politicians don’t know which way is up.”

you’ve known this since you were a kid
looming change is your blood
struggling in a shit pile to fix it
and now you’re tired
call it reverence if you must
it’s real exhaustion
relief and more relief
powerful youth could fix it
wouldn’t it be nice to do it over?

what happens isn’t the whole story
you’ve been waiting more than a heart can bear
nonsense month after month after month
hooked into a parade of chains
breathing isn’t what it used to be
you’re stuck with that
stop and you cripple yourself

sad, mad, or inspired?

Ladies & Gentlemen, what are we allowing History to do to us?
Princeton study reports the majority, that’s you and me lost at sea, have a “minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

Perspectives on Politics!  We are minuscule! 
Minuscule near-zero statistically non-significant… Lord Almighty, sad to my core.

don’t stand there and cry

her flat just to the right of the lobby. Stoessinger arranged for a neighbor to accompany me. It was decided that I might make a better impression if I were introduced as a musician rather than a journalist, because Herz-Sommer can find journalists tiring. The tactic misfired somewhat. When I was introduced, she commanded, “Play something,” in her richly accented, Central European voice. I sat reluctantly at the upright and stumbled through the first theme of Schubert’s great B-Flat-Major Sonata. She stopped me and said, “Now tell me your real profession.” I confessed that I was a writer, whereupon she looked a bit sad. Nonetheless, we had a lively chat. I had the impression that she was no longer greatly interested in the past, but she was alert to the present, to comings and goings in her building, to news of recent performances. She spoke fondly of her son, the cellist Raphael Sommer, who died in 2001. But she does not spend her time grieving. In her conversations with Stoessinger, she paraphrased Spinoza: “Don’t stand there and cry. Understand.”

of thee bits thyself coin

Yes, the precious human being so bombarded, it’s just the times and that’s all, awhile ago it was stooking wheat to nag you, now it’s penetrating broadcasters all over the place, well so what, it’s not so much of a big deal to get a grip, sourpuss isn’t based on much, anybody can be a sourpuss and say anything they want, following along with Universal NaySay, it’s harmful to the precious human being, honest care is required, pull away, don’t eat the garnish… pants-on-foxthere’s true danger and crisis out there sometimes, we can be deeply grateful we live in pretty good regions, but there’s baloney danger out there which is vast sails of caustic opinions flying by, 99% nonsense and mood that’s so unnecessary to ingest, the precious human being, poor thing, we want to select away, walk away, see and think without abrasion, endless carney, points-of-view, phooey, 1000s of products per day built on flame and intrigue… everything our poor human brain is wired to pay attention to, we are wary creatures, and in these modern times broadcasters fill us with high alert, breaking breaking, latest latest, it’s the old Extra Extra Read All About It… frenzy of sales merchandizing all the way to kitchen table rabbles on the NaySay Channel, it’s about views, let’s count ’em on our domain report, phooey, these bits don’t say a word in a broadband of noise, they charge fees for the pipe, the TV pipe, the Phone pipe the Internet pipe, it’s a lot of money these days, per person, out of our pockets, well holy cow, it rains down, rains through the spectrum we own but we rent every month, explosion of our spectrum is fantastic, we’re blind to it, the flickering going by to suit our mood, our point of view, well, there we are again buying ourselves to please ourselves, precious human being, gripped in all that pipe dump, hits of anybody and their business plan, on wonder awe curiosity learning, protect ourselves with civility and proof [too many words, too sleepy to fix]

extincting ourselves

reticent tissue, that is the issue,
as time goes by, scratching vast mirrors,
the knitwork network

network to matrix and matrix to node, to coin a modern ode
the synthesis of reliable organisms from unreliable components
the relationship resource in the curiosity of breathing

ol’ english chorus, the metal of anarchy in the monolith of despots,
the analysts of share, incessant wet of relative deprivation,
competitive hostilities pummeling fulfillment

along the way from plankton to pulsar,
the executive HQ of the milieux

you got you goin’ on

“We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.” Adam Phillips: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives):the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason–and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find the reason–they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a mourning, a tantrum, the lives we were unable to live. But what we missed and suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are. As we know more now than ever before about the kinds of lives it is possible to live–and affluence has allowed more people than ever before to think of their lives in terms of choices and options–we are haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. Often in “The ways we miss our lives,” we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be.

…the roads untraveled, what we missed, our human identity as a constant looking back upon the lives we have chosen not to live–or the lives that we have failed to live–or the lives that, much to our frustration, have always eluded us.

We are as much a measure of the selves we aren’t as the self we happen to be facing in the mirror today. What about the one we used to love, or the one we picture ourselves loving someday? What about the job we longed for and never got? Or the job we got, but it could be in ten years? before-they-pass-away As photographer Jimmy Nelson reports, “The purity of humanity exists. It is there in the mountains, the ice fields, the jungle, along the rivers and in the valleys… the world must never forget the way things were.” These are the lives we are.  

follow the bullies

“Robert Altemeyer, a psychology professor, outlined a series of dysfunctions linked to his extensive study of Right Wing Authoritarians, including being

more punitive,
more likely to make incorrect inferences,
more hostile towards feminists,
more fearful of a dangerous world;
being hypocrites,
more likely to inflame intergroup conflict,
avoid learning about their personal feelings;
being self-righteous,
less supportive of liberty and
being mean-spirited.

It sounds like people with RWA are a curse on our society.

“Scholars argue that these are the individuals who support oppressive dictatorships. In fact, dictators need such individuals to help them remove the rights of people seen as deviant. Individuals high in RWA are conceptualized as aggressive individuals submitting to tyrannical leaders as long as those leaders support conventional norms and punish society’s deviants.

Research on those with RWA generally asserts that religious and political conservatives have this vice. In fact, Altermeyer claimed that he searched for ‘left-wing authoritarians’ but was unable to find a single one.

domain is not third-party

Our rare and robust claim to make a treasure of ourselves.

Ask not.
Take everything.
Even my poverty.

To fly among the future with our heart intact.

we are so many hurt

…an instance of horror can become a trauma, such a tough issue, releasing/erasing, agony revolving day and night, needles inside a skull, ay, it comes to society to be responsible for trauma, it is so often a third-party matter, justice is too rare, all of us are managing the squirm whirling inside the brain… “simple psychological techniques” may reduce hospital claims and jail terms, oy vey, there are so few tools except teaching to watch our mind, to slap our brain around a wee bit, to pay attention to milliseconds, to bugger our triggers, to insert new messaging, to learn mindfulness, breathing, posture, to make a treasure of ourselves, our rare and robust claim for sovereign health… a child here, an adult there, and too seldom put the cause on the community.

heh heh
https://brainhq.positscience.com/
these folks should develop a ‘trauma app’
perhaps help the brain tease away rotten imprint 200 milliseconds at a time
that’s about how long it takes to wound a mind
and may also be how a mind is healed

[snippet below]

It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing.

It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering – or at least inhibiting – self limiting behaviors.

It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed.

Here we are talking mechanics during the time period is when all the limbic and other routines that result from life script, self image, temperament, etc., actually can start-up. 

The suggestion is that you can short circuit some of this process if you bring awareness to the level of observing the moments during which a reaction or behavior is becoming resident, and can sometimes say “I don’t think so, I think I’ll do something else instead.”

name one generation ain’t fools

we are mistakes generations see
patience, dear ones, we are teaching foolishness to each other

tho’ I’m inclined to look for peaks and valleys in human striving,
let’s just say our ol’ earth stumps us every time so I tend to stick with ‘nuts’

MTV Reality Star responded to my craigslist ad to sell my ’54 5-Window GMC

sell-the-truck

came to the house, affable mid 30s, eager to complete restoration, deciding to drive or tow or trailer to his LA home

wife came by later, mid 30s Latina, smiling, warm, envelope of cash, they both drove by the house 2 or 3 days later with a cake and gratitude, they called a few weeks later asking if I was traveling south, to visit, said no

a few weeks later I was driving into Pasadena, phone them, c’mon over
we went out to dinner, talking collector car markets, restoration costs,
he went on and on about MTV and LA TV, so Los Angelees
he went on about gold treks into Baja, the next TV series,
she was integrity, warmth, courtesy, water for my dog Lucky

slept on a wide mattress, family blankeys and Lucky at my feet
awoke about 5AM, some noise, some wall thunder, hitting, strikes
I slammed my bedroom door and attacked down the hallway
I chased him to his fleeing car, ran back to the house

punk sociopath didn’t return,
I stayed to protect a few days
coffee, coffee, some reality therapy, some brutality counsel, steps to divorce,
she went on and on and on about the money in yucca tea imports, gold in Baja,
much relentless income, her data mining, striving is worth a punch or two

years of ambush won’t be solved, punk sociopath pays her bills,
my dog and I went to the beach, drove to the mountains, calming the miles

we are mistakes generations see,
patience, dear ones, we are teaching foolishness to each other