My letter to President Jim Yong Kim of DartmouthCollege
Dear President Jim Yong Kim
28 December 2009
Best of luck in what portends to be a brilliant and long tenure riding herd on the Earth Ox that is DartmouthCollege. I have every assurance from reading your press and my strong intuition that your presidency will not be a public relations, internecine, and financial disaster like that of your predecessor James Wright who, among other things, turned the Dartmouth investment portfolio into a conventionally contrived hedge fund.[1]
The most enduring of my many distinctions in my association with DartmouthCollege might be receiving my degree in 1993 twenty-nine years after my original class of 1964 graduated – a record as far as I know. This eclipsed my father Wayne’s [class of 1937] record for the 16 lb. hammer throw which stood for twenty-five years. I was also, in real life, if there is such a thing, the person responsible for the ‘Deltas’ – Alpha Delta Phi – being put on double secret probation by then Dean Thaddeus Seymour.
Rants aside, I am writing to tell you that my Dartmouth education, despite being severely marred by an acute drinking problem, has enabled me to lead an incredible life, which, to my knowledge, does not appear to be diminishing. Among other things;
1. I entered the computer business in 1962 after being expelled for two years by Dean Seymour. After leaving Dartmouth in 1966 having completed my four years but not being granted a degree, I worked on the Apollo moon landing project in Houston and Cape Kennedy and continued working as a computer data communications consultant for almost twenty years.
2. It was my good fortune to stop my drinking addiction at age thirty-one in 1973 and as a by-product suffered an overwhelming spiritual conversion experience.
3. I stopped any regular employment at age thirty-nine. Over the past many years I have been to India, where I had a guru, fourteen times and the Mt.Everest area eight times, including two weeks in June 2009 at age sixty-seven.
4. About a year ago I moved to Los Angeles as I had no where else to go. Since then I have gone broke, landed a speaking part on a large IBM commercial, gone to Nepal for a month, camped with my dog for six weeks at Lake Tahoe, the Sierras, and Death Valley, and am now looking for more work as an actor.
5. Strangely, as a survivor of a severe case of bulbar polio at age fourteen and much later Lyme’s disease, and barely able to walk for ten years due to a worn out hip joint which only got replaced two years ago by Medicare, I am now able to consider attempting to become the oldest American to summit Everest.
My creative genius was greatly furthered by my liberal education at Dartmouth – although a chemistry major I excelled in art and classics courses. In LA now my life appears to be totally about my body – how I ‘look’ at auditions, my weight, etc. – it’s a joke. I think I should be addressing myself to writing a new constitution for the United States of North America but I keep getting interrupted to audition and hike thirty to fifty miles a week to stay in shape.
Get a hold of me if you come to LA – we can schmooze.
Dartmouth's endowment is overseen carefully and very capably by Chief Investment Officer David Russ. Over the past years, returns have been excellent, with gains in every asset class. The College is not immune to the current upheavals in national and global markets. No one is.
Sincerely,
James Wright
………………………………………………………………..
Sir:
I demand that 50% of Dartmouth’s endowment be parceled out over a small range of independent creative financial managers. There are many who have done well in the very – not tough – CREATIVE investment environment that has been long predicted by many savvy followers of the markets.
Some of the managers who come to mind include;
George Soros
Roy Niederhoffer
John Paulson
Jim Rogers
If you are unable to locate these people or the funds they operate let me know.
I learned to think creatively, critically and, most importantly, independently, while at Dartmouth, something the financial overseers at the Little Green have failed at abysmally.
Carlos Ballantyne
………………………………………………………………..
12/28 addendum:
I additionally fault the involvement of many of the Board of Trustees who work in the ‘investment’ business particularly the Chairman who I would tell, given the opportunity, right to his face he is malfeasant.
I also refuse to contribute one penny to DartmouthCollege until it razes that monstrosity Webster Hall which has been transmogrified into a ‘library’ by a misguidedly accepted donation. The symmetry of the Baker Library and the whole green is set askew by this granite blight.
Early one morning as Gurujii and I were returning from our usual morning walk a typically scantily clad man came running up to us. He was very distraught and spoke a few rapid sentences in Hindi to Gurujii before bursting into tears. Gurujii turned to me and said, “His guru has died.” ”Where?” I asked. Gurujii pointed at a small white temple halfway up the slight hill from the now dry Ganges riverbed.
This entire area of the Ganges riverbank is a jumble of temples and ashrams of all sizes that have been built over the past fifty years. The British built a successively higher and larger dike during their years of occupation attempting to thwart the mighty Ganges from flooding the nearby city of Allahabad during the rainy season. The dike or bandh was now 50 feet high and 400 feet wide and began at the ancient fort with 75 foot high sandstone walls located on the river bank right at the intersection of the Ganges and Jumna. The bandh ran for about 2 miles into the small village of Daraganj which stood on a natural bluff overlooking the river.
The now three of us walked slowly up the hill. I asked Gurujii the name of the dead swami. “Paramanand”, he replied. At Paramanand’s temple we went through the wrought iron gate to a small courtyard. Gurujii and Paramanand’s disciple removed their shoes and stooping entered the low ceiling temple. Gurujii soon came back to the doorway and motioned me over with his hand. “Do you want to see the dead body?” “Okay.” Slipping out of the unlaced tennis shoes that I slopped around in, I crawled through the doorway onto the black and white marble floor of the temple.
The air had the sweet smell of temples everywhere, a humid mix of incense, flowers and the accumulated prayers of countless supplicants. Up against the front wall was the usual statuary, flowers and urns and alongside the altar, propped up in the corner in a slumped cross legged pose was Paramanand. Paramanand’s body was small and thin and his disciple explained that the first thing he had done in the early morning upon finding the body was to fold it into the traditional meditation pose before rigor mortis set in. The distraught disciple was very relieved to have Gurujii to consult about the traditions to follow upon a swami’s death. At that time, in the mid 1980’s, Gurujii was one of the two longest lived inhabitants of the bandh area and he had lived in his ashram for over fifty years. Gurujii told Paramanand’s disciple to sprinkle eucalyptus oil on Paramanand’s robes, presumably so there would be no smell of decay. I never detected that this was done. Gurujii is very fussy about odors of any kind and keeps a small piece of camphor with him at all times in one of the small pockets of his orange robes.
By now several of Paramanand’s devotees had arrived at the temple to pay brief homage on their way homeward from a morning bath in the Ganges. We all gathered outside and Gurujii gave orders to some to go off to the city to summon Paramanand’s followers and to others he gave directions for the ceremony itself which was to be burial in the Ganges.
Hindus traditionally burn the bodies of all who have reached puberty to quickly liberate the soul from its encasement in the flesh. I am certain also that the tradition of cremation developed for health and space considerations, as there is abundant firewood. The Hindu tradition for children who have not yet reached puberty is that their bodies may be thrown directly into the Ganges as children are considered pure and undefiled by carnal desires. Snakebite victims, of which there are many in India, may be thrown directly into the river as its ever pure and sacred waters have reputedly miraculously revived some of these corpses. Although the corpses of swamis are frequently burned, burial in either earth or water, especially the Ganges, is another option. The bodies of the orange robed are considered pure and free from desires. The tangerine orange color of the robes symbolically represents the color of the inner fires of renunciation through which those initiated into the swami order have passed.
With Paramanand’s devotees going off in all directions throughout the city reporting his demise, Gurujii and I completed our walk up the hill and down the dike road the short distance to Gurujii’s small ashram enclave. Since the burial wasn’t scheduled until 2 PM I went about my usual and lengthy morning ritual of meditation, exercises and picking through the dhal removing small stones and then setting it to cook while I stood on my head for a half hour or longer. Just as I finished eating Gurujii came up announcing that the death ceremony was soon to take place. As this was several hours before the previously announced time I wondered if many of Paramanand’s followers would miss the ceremony. When Gurujii, Swami Sevanand, Gurujii’s cook and personal attendant for many years, and I arrived at Paramanand’s small temple only a small crowd of perhaps ten or so had gathered. I presumed a large crowd would be here for the ceremony.
Paramanand’s body was tied at the feet, waist and chest into a large high back wooden chair with strips of orange cloth. Long bamboo poles were lashed to the chair legs. We set off on the two mile walk toward the Ganges with Paramanand sitting almost five feet off the ground in the chair borne by four men. Gurujii soon ordered us all to stop as Paramanand’s head was bobbing around. The chair was brought back down to the ground and a strip of cloth was tied around Paramanand’s neck and then around the back of the chair. We set off again. As I walked along in the warm February sun slightly behind the bier I suddenly heard scuffling and shouting behind me. Looking back I saw a young boy carrying a large water bucket full of 5 and 10 paise coins. The boy would periodically take a handful of coins and scatter them on the ground behind the procession like grass seed. This had created a long comet shaped throng of young boys and ambulatory beggars following behind us much increasing the apparent number of mourners.
Reaching the riverbank after about 45 minutes we negotiated for a large flat bottomed boat to take us all out to the exact meeting place of the muddy Ganges and the clear blue Yamuna rivers. This spot is called Tribeni. Here it is said the unseen river Saraswati surges up from the bottom and these three together create or are absorbed by the mighty Ganges which passes onward to the east to Benares, Calcutta and finally the Bay of Bengal.
About ten of us got into the boat with Swami Paramanand’s chair placed amid ship facing forward, a silent tangerine robed captain. We were rowed the several hundred yards downstream and out to the deepest part of the confluence. At Gurujii’s direction we untied Paramanand’s body from the chair and balanced it on the wood plank boat seat and then we tied bricks into the hem of Paramanand’s robe. With two people holding the bricks in the hem and two others holding the body over the side of the boat and others balancing the boat upright on the opposite gunwale, we all let loose at the same time. The body quickly sank out of sight but for a brief unforgettable moment the loose hem of his orange robes flickered in the sunlit muddy water like a large goldfish. Then nothing.
We ordered the boatman to take us in closer to shore where the water was only knee deep. We tied into the many other boats and everyone except Gurujii and me stripped down to skivvies and jumped overboard to bathe in the river. Gurujii didn’t bathe in the Ganges at all anymore. He was then 83 and hadn’t bathed in the river for some years as it was too cold for him. Sevanand yelled at me in Hindi and Gurujii translated, “He wants to know why you are not bathing in the river.” “Too cold”, I replied. Actually, I was still sick and feverish from my last bout of the recurring illness to which all Westerners in India are subject. I asked Gurujii about bathing right here at the confluence and he said it was the holiest spot and that Hindus believe that to bathe here was to be liberated from the necessity to be reborn. I had a sudden insight and asked Gurujii, “How much water does it take to be saved?” He reflected for a while before giving what I later saw was the only possible answer, “One drop is sufficient.” So I leaned over the side and scooped a little water in my hand and poured it over my head letting it dribble down my face. We rowed back to the riverbank and walked back to our respective ashrams and homes.
The next time I was to take a boat out to the confluence was four years later when six of us took a clay pot filled with the still smoldering ashes of Sevanand
and sank it in the sacred Tribeni. I did bathe in the river that time. Gurujii was so upset he wasn’t able to come with us. He just sat bolt upright for weeks in his high back wooden chair looking straight ahead.
From the Adventures of a Knight Errant
Gurujii – Swami Vishnudevanand Saraswati
reprinted from BIM16, December 1996 with added photographs
KundeHospital and Khumbu/Pharack Health care system is a non-profit organization staffed with a permanent Nepali physician along with an overseas volunteer physician with objective of providing medical care to the local Sherpa and Nepali community in this remote region. Any donations are deeply appreciated and the medications constantly used up here are as follows;
Antibiotic:
1. Ceftriaxone IM/TV
2. Cefotaxime IV/IM/PO
3. Cephalexin PO
4. Augmentin PO/IV/IM
5. Amoxicillin PO/IM
6. Cloxacillin PO/IV/IM
7. Zithromax PO
8. Penicillin PO
9. Clarithromycin
Analgesics:
1. Paracetamol (acetaminophen)
2. Dextropropoxyphene
Non-steriodal:
1. Ibuprofen PO
2. Cox-2 inhibitors any type
3. Diclofenac PO/Gel
4. Diclofenac tablet
Cardiac drugs
1. Enalapril
2. Atenolol
3. Hydrochlorothiazide 50/25 mg.
4. Aspirin 50/100 mg.
GI Drugs
1. Omeprazole
2. Ranitidine PO/IV/IM
3. Pantoprazole
Dermatology
1. Hydrocortisone crème
2. Antifungal drugs any type
3. Antiviral crème
4. Anusol preparations (herorroids)
Others:
1. Multistick urine test
2. Pregnancy test
3. Surgical gloves – Sterile/non-sterile Medium size
4. Plastic apron
5. Casting materials
6. Pulse/Oximetry units
Thank You – KundeHospital - Dr. Kami Temba Sherpa ktsherpafamily@gmail.com
-----------------------------------------
Trekker’s notes – I got this list from the attending physician in Kunde on my trek to Khumbu, the Mt.Everest region of Nepal, in June 2009. I brought up some left-over prescription medications from around the house and a few other things that are difficult to get in Nepal such as Tylenol PM. If you Google up the medical names on this list you will see that they are largely common prescription and in many cases, over the counter, medications such as Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, Darvon, Vasotec, etc. All donations must be hand-carried directly to the hospital – any mail or other parcel system does not work. Please re-Tweet or pass on this list or the link to it to anyone you know heading out to the Everest area or to trekking companies. Thank you. Carlos carlosjii at gmail dot com
Ryan Detrick (rdetrick@sir-inc.com) 7/9/2004 3:08 PM ET
Looking back at the past one hundred years of stock market history, one thing stands out more than anything else. The Dow Jones Industrial Average moves in very long patterns that are known as secular moves. In the simplest terms, a secular bull market is an extended time frame (between 10 and 20 years) where prices increase. On the other hand, a secular bear market is an extended time frame where prices move sideways to down. Examining past bull and bear markets, there is a very good chance that we have entered another secular bear market that potentially won't find its ultimate bottom until May 2017.
Below is data that I was able to compile from our quantitative analysis database. I only examined the Dow because it is the only exchange that has been around since 1906.
I determined how long the secular market lasted by finding the Dow's ultimate daily closing low and the ultimate closing high (or vice-versa for a bear market). It is obvious by looking at the results that buying and holding would have made you a lot of money in bull times, but you would have been better off in cash during bear times.
The average bull market lasted 168 months or exactly 14 years. Indexing, buying, and holding blue chips would have been a very good strategy during one of these periods. All you had to do was buy, wait a decade or so, and watch the gains come into your portfolio.
Unfortunately, accompanying every bull market was a bear market. The average bear market from top to bottom lasted 208 months or 17 years and 4 months. From this we can conclude that the ultimate bottom may not occur in the Dow until May 2017.
There is no way of knowing whether history will hold true this time around or not, but I think it is a very important concept of which the average investor needs to be aware. The most recent bull market has brain washed investors into thinking that if you "buy and hold" blue-chip stocks then you will come out ahead in the end. While this statement may currently be true, it could take decades to realize a profit.
I realize that during these secular moves we will see counter moves (called cyclical moves) that will usually last a year or two. If we are in a new secular bear market, then the October 2002 to February 2004 rally is a classic example of a cyclical bull market within a secular bear market. Here at Schaeffer's we were able to recognize this trend. That is why we were bullish on technology, autos, and gold throughout 2003, garnering some monster returns from those sectors. Turning to this year, we see the masses quickly turning bullish, predicting wonderful returns in the markets for a second straight year. Being contrarians, we moved opposite of the crowd and said that 2004 would be a down year for U.S. stock markets. But this doesn't mean that gains in certain sectors aren't possible if you looked hard enough. We recommended investing in autos, energy companies, some exposure to gold as insurance, and keeping a healthy amount in cash. All but gold have performed extremely well so far year-to-date. However, the yellow metal has begun to show signs of life recently as the U.S. dollar, which trades inversely with gold, is beginning to look top heavy.
Turning to the major index returns so far this year, the Nasdaq, S&P 500 Index, and Dow were all negative for the year as of this morning. In other words, after listening to all of the experts telling you how high the market averages would soar this year, you would have been better off keeping your portfolios in cash the first six and a half months of 2004. Here at Schaeffer's, we consider the upcoming earnings season and how stock's react to it as being the deciding factor for the rest of the year's performance. If the first-half of the year couldn't rally stocks after very strong earnings and positive economic news, you have to wonder what can.
In conclusion, it is important to realize that we may see sideways to negative returns for quite sometime, with several pockets of strength thrown into the mix. History tells us that we had better be on the lookout for alternative investment strategies, rather than simply "buying and holding," if we want to see gains in our portfolios.
BRACE FOR BANK SHUTDOWN
//www.freebuck. com/articles/ jwillie/090716jw illie.htmb
Harry Schultz and Bob Chapman have revealed some harsh plans for temporary
US bank system shutdown on or about September 2009. The story has been
promoted by Peter Brimelow on MarketWatch for further publicity and
legitimacy (CLICK HERE
<http://www.marketwa tch.com/story/ schultz-paints- bleak-picture- of-future>).
See "Latest Schultz Shock: a Bank Holiday" which explains the US State Dept
tipoff to the many US Embassies. The July Hat Trick Letter cites multiple
confirmations solicited and given. My analysis goes on about speculation as
to the motive, implementation, cover for criminal activity, and market
impact. The USDollar would likely suffer a sudden quantum drop devaluation,
followed by incredible pressure to avert USTreasury default. Despite the
mockery in my email inbox for over two years, this inevitable inexorable
disaster of upcoming USTreasury default is unfolding like a path growing
more narrow and treacherous, with marauders on the hillsides lobbing Paulson
Cocktails (ala Molotov) from strategic high ground. The creditors will show
their strength very soon, very soon indeed! The unintended consequences
would be endless, not the least of which might be final declaration of state
of emergency state by state, or martial law nationally. Attempts at capital
controls should be on the table of discussion soon, but that comes with a
monumental backfire waiting to happen, as implementation seems next to
impossible in less than two years time. Look for implementation of numerous
plans to be circumvented by the reality of market forces, like elimination
of the IRS-enforced income taxes in favor of a Value Added Tax
nationally.. ..
==================
I am adding the following coincident links and stories
His predictions coincide with mine using astrology.
My predictions are here – if the email above is correct my prediction of not being able to buy either gold or silver for periods of time – perhaps long periods – with US dollars will definitely come to pass.
The US dollar has fallen through important technical support on the charts in the past week
The last Treasury auction essentially failed – for the first time that we know of.
I could spend the time and re-vamp my own predictions but, frankly, I don’t think anyone out here in The Heartland of America cares. Everyone is rather blithely clunking along presuming everything will continue the way it has for the past 100 years with the US being the top dog and the economy having ups and downs. We are, in fact, at the END of the American Empire.
The US and the military that will be patrolling our own streets soon have significantly ramped up their losing strategies in the Graveyard of Empires. The US has been bankrupted by its military which has FAILED TO PREVAIL in all three of the major conflicts it has had since ‘The Greatest Generation’ won WW 2. These conflicts are Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan. The economic consequences of these losses are facing us now.
$120 per usable image for headshots. That’s about my cost to finally arrive at a set of usable headshots for posting at on-line casting sites. This does NOT INCLUDE ANY PRINTING - ‘Errr - that would be extra Sir ’.
Oh, let’s mention here we are not talking about what it takes to get good photographs. We are talking about GREAT photography. There is a huge difference getting that last 10%. EVERYONE can get the first 80-90%.
So. Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I was in Newport Beach. Vox clamantis in deserto.
AN INVITATION TO EMPTINESS
Life is ultimately empty and beyond meaning and meaninglessness. There are no good deeds we can ever do which will bring us any favor from God and no bad deeds which will ever cause anything other than God's love to shine upon us. God has created this universe as His play and the sagest of all prayers is "God, thou hast created us against our wills. Free us!"
Most of us resist emptiness by doing things, being things, and having things. This resistance to emptiness can produce marvelous worldly results. Some of us begin to see that we are embracing only one side of the dualities of creation. True seekers persistently embrace the opposites in which we are immersed and in this embrace the opposites collapse into nothingness. To maintain this embrace is to come to the presence of emptiness and it is to this presence I strongly invite you and through which I will support you.
EMPTINESS PRACTICALLY CONSIDERED
It occurs to me many will think these writings are a fine exposition but don't apply. I pass on to you some practices of emptiness. See what happens. It can't possibly be worse than what is happening now. No one can practice for you.
.Don't eat or drink anything for three days
.OK. Just don't eat for three days and drink water
.Too long for you? Try it for one day
As a result of this practice I no longer believe I need to eat to live. Many things happened to me during the time I was practicing this. Have times of your own.
. Take a long period of time, by your definition, and travel without any particular destination in mind. See what happens.
I could tell many stories of my experiences doing this. This, in fact, may be my favorite practice. The word fakir in Sanskrit describes a type of wandering ascetic in India. The actual practice of a fakir is to stay no longer than three days in any one place because they will inevitably begin to become attached to things.
The first time I went camping as an adult I took $2200 and put it in my pocket and went to the airport and flew to San Jose from Newark, N.J. I was headed for Yosemite which I had heard of but never been to. I had no idea how to get there so as we began the descent I got out the California map and began to conjure. The fellows next to me in the aisle borrowed the map and I managed to get a ride with them all the way to Merced. Many adventures followed and when it came time to leave I went to the gas station at the Tuolumne Meadows campground and the first person I asked for a ride took me and the car full of Girl Scouts she was shepherding all the way to the San Jose airport. I was headed for Vancouver. I had a friend there and knew the name of the place he was staying but nothing else. I ended up living at a Chinese Buddhist temple for two weeks before traveling on to other adventures.
. Walk, hitchhike, bicycle, bum rides or take the bus everywhere you go for a week.
. Make a commitment to meditate for one hour a day for one week and keep it.
. Take a moment to ponder your emptiness each day for a while. "How am I doing on my emptiness?"
. Throw away, sell or give away everything you haven't used in the past year.
. Move. Just for the heck of it.
Back when I was a computer consultant I kept extensive files from periodicals on new developments because the field moved so quickly that was the only way to keep current. This was the idea base that I brought to the next job. I finally threw all this 'stuff' away and was forced to create or recreate what I then needed. I acknowledge anyone who is willing to operate in these lands of not knowing because I know the courage it takes. I will support you in travel to these places. I might even buy you a ticket.
. Stop helping other people - especially people who haven't asked for help.
. Don't talk to anyone for 24 hours.
. Engage three strangers a day in conversation.
One thing I discovered somewhere along in these practices is that my desire to be free was interfering with my freedom. I saw that I was free but was bound by my desire to be free. All I had to do was to be free because I was and stop desiring it. Wanting and having are two different things. Stop wanting what you want. You can never get enough of what you don't really want. Stop wanting and start having.
DON'T ATTACH MEANING TO EMPTINESS
Its important to distinguish emptiness from other things and this is best done by not attaching meaning to emptiness. The power of emptiness comes from simply nonjudgmentally allowing it to be, acknowledging it and standing before it. To label emptiness depression or aloneness or even feelings of suicide disempowers emptiness. Be empty.
CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
Arise! Awake! Oh brothers and sisters of immortality. Think not that God exists in one place more than any other place.
All the Gods and Goddesses that ever were live now in the core of your heart as your very own Self.
They, as us, were never born and will never die.
Give birth, therefore, to this knowing of your own immortality.
The Mount Everest of Philosophical and Spiritual Publications
An oracle for the wise
Vox clamatis in deserto
Interminable subscriptions $25 and up – the more you send the more you get!
"The best philosophers are useless to the world, but that is the fault of the world, not of philosophy." Plato
Skin Cancer
Lately I’ve run into several people my age and older who’ve had basal and squamous cell carcinomas removed. Since I’m in heavy sun a lot due to my long hikes in the mountains I’ve ramped up my sun protection a lot. I am currently using SPF 70 Neutrogena sun block in a waterproof cream and a convenient spray. I am particularly careful to put lots on my nose – where the two people had ops, and my ears, where one friend has had a topical chemotherapy done. The ear is so thin that if conventional chemo is done it frequently burns holes. Be warned.
Let me remind you that the world class dermatologist I once worked for thought aloe was one of the absolute best healers for the skin. He grew his own aloe in the yard, ran it through a juicer and froze the untreated juice. This was then used directly on the skin of patients who had had dermabrasions and heavy chemical peels. I have been using an aloe vera based moisturizing lotion for 35 years. I usually lather on bunches of it every morning and let it soak in. The best real aloe you can purchase may be this.
My girlfriend, who was educated at all Catholic schools in the NY area in the 50’s and 60’s, has reported that the girls she met who went to the Ursuline high school in the Bronx, send email to each other in Latin. Given the current dumbing down of America, Latin is probably as good as the best of NSA’s codes.
I know, it’s more of my radical ideas and to my knowledge no one has alleged this BUT it seems clear to me the LA basin was created by a meteor strike. It became obvious to me a week ago or so as I hiked to LA through the mountains and descended into Brentwood. I have a sweeping view of the LA coastline from Santa Monica south to the Palos Verges peninsula. Clearly, the bay is round. And I was suddenly struck with remembering that the LA basin has lots of oil. In my opinion, or theory, oil has been created by meteorstrikes[1].
Don’t believe the BS by media types who deride Twitter. I was going to write this up earlier but demurred thinking even my subscribers might not be able to wrap themselves around the concept due to stodgy thinking. Increasing hype on the general uselessness of Twitter abounds in the recent press. All these commentators are older than 40. I first heard of Twitter 2 years ago when there were protests by bicyclists in NY and the NY Times article mentioned the pole-isse couldn’t keep up with the organization of the ‘mob’ who were following protest orders on something called Twitter. Twitter allows one to post short messages to one’s Twitter account. BUT if you have a Twitter account you can FOLLOW other people – get their posts sent to your account stream AND you can have posts from selected people you follow sent directly to your cell phone. Here are some example uses;
A reverse 911 that actually works. You have a photo shoot with maybe 50 staff and cast members. The director sends tweets to the film’s account which everyone on the set is following.
You have a family of 5 – you and 4 kids. You all have cell phones – RIGHT? Everyone follows everyone else in the family account so everyone knows when the soccer practices end etc.
You have a small company with 200 employees. …..get it.
I am in the TV commercial and theatrical acting business in LA. That’s how I am going to Mt.Everest! Variety magazine and all the other entertainment rags have been supplanted by Nikke Finkes blog on Hollywood. It is HUGE news that the Endeavor agency has merged with the Wm. Morris agency. Endeavor was started by Ari Emanuel – who is huge in the ‘Wood – AND he is Rahm Emanuel’s brother. Is this important? No – not unless you want to make predictions about how the entire film and TV markets are going. I follow Nikke on Twitter, getting cell phone updates when she tweets. She tweets stubs to recent blog posts of import.
As an inducement, people who are following my Twitter stream can make requests for ‘stuff’ from Kathmandu on this trip I’m about to take. You can make the request by direct email if you have my address, as a tweet, or by email to the name on my Twitter account at gmail dot com.
The above was written in May 2009. Clearly recent events show how important Twitter can be. Don’t be as dumb ass like Hillary –"I wouldn't know a Twitter from a tweeter," said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "but apparently, it is very important." Geometry was hard also. Just because you’re older does not mean that you are somehow absolved from having to learn new things.
The Tenth Trip of a Lifetime
I mentioned to one person at a meeting I was on the waitlist for Kathmandu. Her comment was, “Oh, a trip of a lifetime.” True – but this will be my 10th trip of a lifetime to Kathmandu.
At a very important conference on Elderhood a few years ago one of the seminarians suggested that her most important contribution to other people, especially children, was ‘the creation of significant memories’. If that is true, then the most important function I can perform for myself is the same – even if it does not always feel comfortable.
Here’s a compendium of tweets from the twip.
·I’m back – if there is such a place. It implies there’s an ‘away’ which, if the world is your home, doesn’t exist. Jun 18th
·I’m outta Kathmandu today – taxis are running - God is the travel agent – air here pregnant with revolt Jun 15th
·Where there is a will there is a Tweet – Maoist bandh (closure) in Kathmandu today Waited Inet shop for 10 mins and – joila Maybe fly manana Jun 14th
·I’m dizzy from reading the Upanishads and then just returning from Swayambhu – the Monkey Templehttp://bit.ly/17WgGf3:26 AM Jun 13th
·Soooo if my pharts are air now I MUST be well from the trots here in Kathmandu – thanks ayurveda green pills - found new veg restaurant!!!! Jun 12th
·There is no joy in the finite, only in the Infinite is there joy - Chandogya Upanishad - Here in the finite I am twiddling around KathmanduJun 11th
·early AM flight from Lukla – 10 days in the land of the Sherpa - Honored guest at big wedding - taxi direct to http://mikesbreakfast.com/Jun 9th
·Oh yeah – God is the travel agent! Jun 9th
·Lukla waiting flight to Kathmandu 7 manana. 2 weeks in Himalayas – Namche, big Sherpa wedding in Phakding. Maoist protest shut flights today Jun 9th
·tweet from Namche -huge problem of how to get a wedding cake down 4000’ and 5 hour walk to Phakding – rescue heli overhead as we tweet Jun 4th
·clouds lifted in Namche - Tibetan next to me at breakfast wood blocking prayer flags - got wish list Kunde hospital meds will post later Jun 3rd
·Hand sanitizer works great under my arms! even better than Listerine. End of the trail in Namche – food is too good. Day hiking from here Jun 2nd
·the cloudless day has changed to slight rain and mist - a few wild Tibetans have stopped by - all watching a music video w/Sherpas Jun 2nd
·Cloudless day in Namche. Taking a rest day to acclimate at Zamling Hotel Jun 1st
· “Eternity is made up of todays. Glorify the hour.” Christopher Ruess
Travel tips for Asia
Water purifier – I have not yet gotten sick purifying my own water in India or Nepal. The only real alternative is to buy bottled water or drink boiled water. At 10000’ altitude water boils at 193.6 degrees – not high enough to knock out all bad stuff. At all altitudes boiling water is energy consumptive. The filter I use is a First Need XL. Even in 5 star hotels I purchase a bottle of water or many times bring my own. I just had a bout of stomach upset drinking one glass of some kind of ‘filtered’ water with dinner at a 5 star hotel in Kathmandu. Also, NEVER brush your teeth under tap water – even at 5 star hotels. What I do is take the water the locals drink and then purify/filter that. I usually keep two or three liters of good water in my hotel room at all times.
I have a special Indian anti-dysenteric ayurvedic medicine I cannot be without – either overseas or in the US. June 2008 I contracted a case of that salmonella virus from tomatoes that hit the US. I knocked mine out in hours with my magic green pills. As I am attempting to get FDA approval to import these I don’t want to give my source. If you think you need or want some let me know. I have had about 25 successive full recoveries from diarrhea and dysentery with these with NO failures in 20 years. The best thing is there are no side-effects such as knocking out all your intestinal flora. I could never travel to all the destinations I go to without these pills.
Listerine is a very strong anti-fungal, anti-odor, disinfectant, and a superb hand sanitizer. At a minimum you can splash some under your arms if you haven’t been able to bathe for a while. Only the original works, not the CVS and other knock-offs. Great for taking the smell out of latrines. I put it into a spray bottle. Sample usage – I have a 40 oz. stainless steel water bottle. One of the bottle’s uses is to fill it at night with hot water and put it into my sleeping bag. I was at a Sherpa lodge for a few days and the bathroom was outside and far away. At night I peed into the s/s bottle, emptying it in the morning. Before using it again for drinking water I rinsed it out several times with Listerine.
My girlfriend works as a nurse R.N. in one of the US’s most prestigious hospitals. She reports that most of the infectious problems in the hospital are from not washing hands by hospital staff – including doctors. This trip I took with me several small bottles of CVS hand sanitizer and used them a lot, especially before eating.
I have a theory that oil was created on our planet by asteroid strikes not the supposed decomposition of organic matter as is commonly and unthinkingly purported. I haven’t looked over the geography of oil in detail but most of the large fields occur in areas that are clearly shaped like huge circular depressions – like the Gulf of Mexico. There is a recent theory that the dinosaurs became extinct due to a large strike that created the Gulf of Mexico and drastically changed the earth’s weather. I note that the significant deposits in Texas, Oklahoma and Venezuela and the huge reserves in the Gulf could all be the result of this strike. I have not thought yet about the geo-alchemy that could directly create huge hydro-carbon deposits underground from the extreme conditions that would exist upon a meteor or asteroid striking the earth. from BIM40, 2005
The Origins of Oil and Gas
Happily, I can report the ready furtherance of my theory that the origins of oil
and gas on the planet come from meteor and asteroid strikes. Significant
corroboration has come to me in the past month as I have explored the Red
Desert Basin here in Wyoming. The basin appears totally the result of a strike
and is a 100-mile in diameter depression loaded with natural gas whose
extraction the conservationists here in Wyoming are attempting to limit. Without
having looked closely at the map, I suggest that the large asteroid strike that
created the Gulf of Mexico and caused a global cooling from the immense dust
cloud killing the dinosaurs, had large fragments that struck ‘nearby’ such as here
in Wyoming and also the PermianBasin in West Texas, site of huge hydro-carbon
Abstract: The ancient I Ching is a set of 64 hexagrams which are all the possible unique combinations of the binary numbers 0 and 1 taken as sets of 6. I have renumbered the hexagrams using an octal numbering system. Instead of the classical decimal numbering 1 through 64, the hexagrams are numbered 0 through 77 in the octal numbering system. Since the hexagrams take their new octal numbers from the binary, and octal, digits of which they are comprised, the actual make-up of any hexagram can be ascertained by its octal number alone.
Brief Introduction:
Each six line or binary digit hexagram is composed of two, three line trigrams;
_____
_____
_____
(7)
____
____
____
(0)
____
____
_____
(4)
____
_____
____
(2)
_____
____
____
(1)
_____
_____
____
(3)
_____
____
_____
(5)
____
_____
_____
(6)
each line of which can be represented by the numbers 0 and 1, where _____ is 1, and ____ is 0.
The binary representation of each octal number is;
0, 0, 0 = 0
0, 0, 1 = 1
0, 1, 0 = 2
0, 1, 1 = 3
1, 0, 0 = 4
1, 0, 1 = 5
1, 1, 0 = 6
1, 1, 1 = 7
Because the lines of I Ching hexagrams are constructed from the bottom up to the top line, the numbers beneath the trigrams above are the octal digit of that trigram.
Table of hexagrams
legend –
the number in the upper left of each square denotes the octal number of that hexagram. These numbers are 0-7, 10-17, 20-27, 30-37, 40-47, 50-57, 60-67, 70-77
the number in the lower right of each square denotes the ancient and still used decimal number of that hexagram
The text in each square gives the English name for the hexagram along with the ancient Chinese name
The lower legend gives the hexagrams lowertrigramfor the vertical column of hexagrams
The left side legend gives the upper trigram for that horizontal row of hexagrams
The octal numbers of the hexagrams are constructed from the binary digits from the bottom up in the same way the coins or yarrow sticks are thrown in the classic method of determining each 3 binary digit, octal digit, or trigram.
A few examples;
The lower left hexagram Standstill, Stagnation, P’i, ancient number 12 above has the octal number 07. It is comprised of the following lines;
_____
_____
_____
____
____
____
where _____ is one and ____ is zero. From bottom to top the binary digits of this hexagram are 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1. Octally, that is, arranging each set of 3 binary digits as one octal number, the octal number of this hexagram is, therefore, 07.
In the lower left the hexagram octal 07, Standstill, Stagnation, P’i, ancient number 12.
Further study;
Marie-Louise von Franz, in 1968, was the first to publish that the mathematical structure of DNA is analogous to that of the I Ching. She cites the reference to the publication in an expanded essay Symbols of the Unus Mundus, published in her book Psyche and Matter. --Marie-Louise von Franz Psyche and Matter (Shambhala, 1992) p.39-62. The reference is cited on page 44; she cites the reference as number 16 of the article: Dialog über den Menschen: Eine Fetschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von Wilhelm Bitter (Klett. Stuttgart, 1968).
I have the thought that because the Chinese language is pictographic and because the I Ching isa set of binary, or octally based diagrams that study of the I Ching might elucidate the seemingly different brain functioning of the classical Oriental mind.
If there is no relatively direct use of or numerological significance of the classical I Ching hexagram decimal numbers an octal numbering scheme presented is much more easily workable.
The Mount Everest of Spiritual and Philosophical journals
An oracle for the wise
Subscriptions $25 or more – the more you send the more you get. Available only by email .pdf
An inter-episodal recovery
I am at present unable to work much on BIMming so I thought I’d so a short wrap and send it out with just a small amount of accumulated stuff. LA’s creative forces seem to have entangled my malleable personality – the part that has the whim of iron. I’m finishing up my book, auditioning for some screen work, and publishing photos in the most accessible form I can find for sale – Picasa 3 by Google. By a multiple set of inter-locking flukes I have a commercial acting/modeling agent who told me face to face I am, mostly due to my age, in demand for screen work.
So what actually happened??????? I was 4 months behind in my storage locker fees so I was just going to abandon it and let the stuff go to auction. I talked to my main psychic advisor and she said borrow the money, sell the one thing I grieved losing as it seemed to be of value, my panoramic slide of Mt. Everest, and then pay back the moola. So I got my stuff out of hock, sold enough valuable trinkets on eBay to pay back the fees and have posted the Everest and all the other saleable photos I can readily come up with on this new Picassa program, which appears to obsolete all the photo agencies out there. I currently get 50% of the commission on photographs I have posted with an online agency that is somewhat hard to work with.
I still have the problem of the one scumbag in Laguna who sells my work as his own – he re-photographed a large photograph I sold him. Problem is – I am subject to legal fees, for starters.
I’ve also taken to blogging some here. It’s possible my newsletter of 20 years may become a blog although the enforced coherence of editing smoothes out my thoughts some instead of caffeine inspired blog blitzes, like this one.
It appears on-line publishing is the wave of the future, as is online movie downloads, so I’m doing both. To use Kay Jameson’s phrase – I appear to having a full inter-episodal recovery[1]. LOL
I am acting out my interpretation of est technology – KEEP CREATING NEW PROBLEMS FOR YOURSELF [or you will become subject to old problems over and over again]. So - I need new headshots!
Many people seem shocked by ‘the economy’. Get over it – this are going to get MUCH worse. Although it’s a bit like talking about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, the best single reference I’ve found is Naked Capitalism. Some of its commenters are right in the middle of the decision making process and others carry the frustrated brilliance of those deeply involved in the financial industry who rue their golden handcuffs. I know, I used to meet them, went to prep and Ivy League schools with them, AND I hear the frustration of the seemingly secure and excessively normality filled lifestyles I long ago left behind. Most of the truthful economic information now comes from blogs.
Some of the more memorable recent posts or references include this, this, although many others are worthy of reading or perusing – if you like following the economy or preserving your purchasing power. I know a number of typical real estate investors who, like most Americans over the past 60 years are used to a slowly and persistently inflating economy. Many have 401-Ks down 50% in the past 12 months. What is one to say – sell all your real estate NOW and buy silver, any kind of silver – coins, bullion [if you can find any], put it in your closet or store it in Dubai or Singapore.
If I get a large managed account, a possibility as I keep getting questions, I’d probably fly to Singapore and open an account there. The two accounts I now manage now are in non-US gold and silver. It’s likely the US will seize the gold and silver in the two large funds open to investors – GLD and SLV.
You’ll know when we are getting close to, not at, market bottoms when the price of an ounce of gold equals the DOW. Think maybe 5000 from my current vantage point. This, if you believe the historic means, SHOULD have investment consequences for you.
The US is in the beginning stages of an epochal Depression and the main problem is it has no way to EARN its way out of this one. The current situation is a reaction to the Panic of 1907, as I’ve noted in my Astro Alert. When I get a round tuit I’ll look further into the astrology of the end of the American Empire, especially the possibility of a large military defeat. America has staked ALL its projections of imperial power on the aircraft carrier, an outmoded, WW 2-ish strategy, that in turn came from about 1900. History has proved that real dominance can only come from boots-on-the-ground. The US has an armed force of maybe 300,000, most of whom are support – China 2.7 million. Recall also the strategic ineptitude of the US since WW 2 – it has FAILED TO PREVAIL in ALL THREE of its large scale military ventures. If you’re having a hot flash, I used the word STRATEGIC – our mostly capable individual soldiers are TACTICAL forces, unfortunately increasing subject to the micro-management of draft dodging mental midgets like George W. Bush and septuagenarian jerk offs [I have never been able to arrive at the correct plural] like Donald Rumsfeld. By my classification though, the single most destructive influence to America, and the world, has been Alan Greenspan.
Do I sound angry here? Not really. It’s just that I vowed to no longer be an active supporter of the US government when I got a 7 year IRS tax audit 3 weeks after writing a letter to the then head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, complaining about not prosecuting their sharpshooter who gunned down an unarmed woman. I had no tax liability but a variety of nefarious things were done by the IRS. During this time I wrote to Sen. Arlen Specter and was somewhat the impetus for the famous IRS Senate hearings. More recently I wrote to then Chmn. of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, about the lack of progress in Iraq and a few weeks later found my name on some kind of website which I suppose to be a construct by some part of our government to justify further monitoring or legalized harassment. My assessment was correct in that Pace was the only CJCS in recent memory to not be nominated for a second term. I also have a case of one of my trading accounts begin accessed in a way the on-line broker could not duplicate.
Our founding fathers suggested that liberty can only be secured with eternal vigilance – and we all have failed at that. Then again, this is the historic progress of the rise and fall of empires. If I had the time I’d write up my now more coalesced thoughts on the progress of human nature and that the fractal which describes it is a torus. Some time ago I wrote an introduction to the mathematics of chaos[2]. The chaos and turbulence we will experience is normal for the healthy unfoldment of the human conscious – in the long term. In the shorter term, I’m waiting for the desert to warm up so I can escape.
"No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart." Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit from http://www.janemac.net/
My Amazon review of Evangeline Adams – “Merely America’s greatest astrologer
Probably her best book. The section on the mythology of the planets is particularly good. The example horoscopes are now a bit dated – who knows the personality of Samuel Gompers or Rudolph Spreckels?
The prediction section using the rulership of the Sun sign decants should be mastered by anyone with more than a newspaper - make that Internet - column interest in astrology. Learn the alphabet of astrology here.”
". . . his gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered." Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, also from Jane above
The SEC is in the position of the old British Foreign Service official who after a career spanning 1903-1950 recalled, "Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice." Rich Lowry in the NY Post
"That's what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there's food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is not time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be." from Nation, by Terry Pratchett
‘While all human personality is probably, at bottom, in a kind of chaos, and only compelled into coherence by the necessity to act in the outer world, it has been the tradition of biography, in all its forms to impose a, more or less, Newtonian pattern of linear intelligibility on this turmoil of an individual’s nature.’ Jesse, the biography of Jesse Jackson by Marshall Frady
“It was by far the most content I’ve ever been,” he said. “My bike was a piece of junk. I had nowhere to go, no place to be. Didn’t have anyone telling me what to do. If I felt like lying on the side of the road, I did.” Svein TuftCanadian Rider Has Made Unorthodox Climb to the Tophttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/sports/othersports/08cycling.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
“Climb the mountains and get their glad tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and storms their energy, while cares will drop like autumn leaves.” John Muir, 1898
The disease which the experience of death cures is the rage to live. pg. 71
Until the soul gets what it wants it must fall ill again and another iatrogenic[3] vicious circle of recurrent illness begins.
For it is not the therapist or any actual person whatever who is the keeper of my soul beyond all betrayals, but the archetypal persons of the gods to whom the anima acts as bridge. The shaping of her amorphous moods, sulphuric passions, bitter resentments, and bubbles of distraction into distinct personalities is the main work of therapeutic analysis or soul-making. pg. 86-87
Projections occur between parts of the psyche, not only outside into the world.
Neither trust nor forgiveness could be fully realized without betrayal. pg. 281
Lately, I most like the Dalai Lama’s suggestion we should fall at the feet of our enemies and bless them as our enemies reveal parts of ourselves we could never otherwise see. This has caused me to think that beyond forgiveness should be gratitude. Gratitude that we experienced the betrayal in the first place as not only did it cause us our induction into forgiveness and re-contextualizing our concepts of trust, BUT ALSO the realization that the seeds of our experiences of betrayal lie within us. Those who we experience as betraying us, in fact, act out parts in our own psyche’s carefully scripted drama for our soul’s development.
Due to a variety of factors currently not fully under my control, LOL, I have a mean and fractious streak. I have come to believe that beyond gratitude is NOT CARING or forgetting. That is, the betrayer who has led us to forgiveness, trust then gratitude becomes like everyone else.
“Forgetting, that marvel of the old mind, may actually be the truest form of forgiveness, and a blessing.” Hillman, Force of Character, pg. 93
Simplistically then – FOUGEDABOWDIT
A vertical person in a horizontal world
The puer therefore, understands little of what is gained by repetition and consistency, that is, by work…in proceeding step by step through the labrynthine complexity of the horizontal world. These teachings but cripple its winged heels, for there, from below and behind, it is particularly vulnerable. It is not meant to walk, but to fly. pg. 228
Lately, I’ve been hiking up to 25 miles a week here in LA. I recently found a new hiking shoe which is the best I’ve worn in 35 years of extensive walking and trekking – Salomon XA Pro 3D Ultra Shoes. The main attraction is they come in an optional wide width which I need. For years I have been wearing shoes and boots up to two sizes larger than I actually need in and then putting on two pair of socks to accommodate the problems of getting my feet comfortable in the shoes. I bought my first pair of Salomons 2 sizes larger and they worked great but my feet were moving around a lot in the shoe. On my second pair I am now down to one size over and was able to wear them for a 12 mile hike right out of the box – no break in – with only one light pair of CoolMax socks. These shoes are available at REI and, hence, are subject to periodic large discounts, like the 20% twice a year member’s discount.
The only other sort of berserker hiker I know in LA, a lesbian friend who hikes 5 to 12 miles a week to relive the stress in her life, also wears this identical shoe. I am doing about 20 miles a week, walking from Sherman Oaks all the way down to Santa Monica on fire roads. I came about one foot away from being bitten by a large black rattlesnake on my last hike as I was daydreaming meandered off to the side of the trail where the snake was coiled in the grass.
Dear Mr. President
Are you going to be locking us up in the camps Bush constructed when we riot in the streets over YOU stealing our wealth??????????????????
David Axelrod was right. You have sold out to those Wall Street sons-of-bitches. All this economic posturing and purposeful obfuscation is a transfer of wealth from the taxpayer and average citizen to ‘the banking interests’. You’ve blown it listening to those assholes like Ben Bernanke and that misogynist Larry Summers. God save us from a bunch of academic know-nothings who have never been short a contract of soybeans in their lives but suck up the public teat. Congress which has voted itself the most generous health care plan in the US and an over-the-top retirement package.
I have yet to see the political contributions FNM and FRE made to Congress published – my 2 ‘senators’ refuse to release them to me citing …….
Read the Naked Capitalism blog if you want to know what’s really going on economically instead of those assholes in YOUR administration who are lining the pockets of GS, AIG, MS et. al.
People are just beginning to understand why I began saying years ago that Hank Paulson, Frank Raines, Hank Greenberg, Sandy Weill and others belong in jail.
Carlos Ballantyne
I posted this on my blog and got the following comment - OOOOH! I HAVE NOT SEEN OR HEARD YOU SO EXCITED? OR ANGRY? HARLEY
to which I replied whith another post
Thanks for the comment.
Thanks for the comment. My highly intentioned letters sent to the right persons have effected MANY changes. I can only estimate each of my carefully thought out and carefully addressed letters expressing my strongly held opinions has the effect of 100,000 or more opinions equally strongly held but not effectively expressed. When you see me envision a swath of 100,000 ardent, involved citizenry.
My opinions about the bailout stem from my belief that the current economic crisis is still in the beginning stages, and that the US, due largely to the malfeasance of Congress and the lack of vigilance of the American citizenry, will experience its first real economic collapse. Don’t forget, looking at the broad sweep of history, the USA is a very young nation. This is why other nations, with longer histories, attempted to act much more conservatively during the bubbles Alan Greenspan created. It is not just a random oddity that conservative Islam disallows usury – paying dividends on loans. Simplistically, interest leads to fractional reserve banking, paper money and eventual economic collapse.
“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value ---- zero.” Voltaire (1694-1778)
One of my recent campaigns has been to expose the pay-to-play financial hookups between Congress and the Federal mortgage giants FNM and FRE. Essentially, FNM/FRE made large numbers of campaign donations to Congress members in return for continually watered down oversight provisions. I personally had a number of prospective financial management clients some years ago who were seemingly safely invested in FMN stock which traded as high as $70 a few years ago and paid a seemingly safe and reliably conservative dividend. JUST YESTERDAY it was revealed that Rahm Emanuel Was Director Of Freddie Mac During Scandal. Both Sens. Barb Boxer and Diane Feinstein have refused to reveal to me campaign contribution received in the past 7 years from FNM and FRE despite my repeated direct requests.
I still cannot believe there is no outrage that Franklin Raines, CEO of FNM before and during its implosion, has managed to keep his huge performance bonii AND lives on a $120,000/month FNM pension, largely outside the US financial jurisdictions, in Bermuda.
1. My letter about 6 years ago to the head of the California State Tourism Dept. proposing a Tour of California bicycle race suggesting that since there was so much controversy over drug use in the Tour de France, that many of the top riders were Americans, and California has an international allure, such a race was a sure winner perhaps capable of equaling or supplanting the original Tour in importance.
2. My letter to Senator Arlen Specter about the IRS which contributed to the huge televised hearings about 12 years ago. One of the phrases from my letter was quoted directly by Specter during the hearings.
3. I have had a long running controversy with Citibank ever since they treated me badly as a computer networking design consultant some time ago. I wrote a letter to the head of one of their then largest shareholders, a hedge find in Greenwich, CT suggesting Charles Prince was acting incompetently as CEO and further suggesting the bank had laid off one of their most competent strategists, Louise Yamada, whose advice, if they had followed it, would have extricated them from much of the financial stress they were in. C stock began seriously tanking soon after I wrote this hedge fund.
4. In a campaign lasting MANY years I contributed to the ascendancy of true democracy in Nepal. The problem has been that the US militarily supported the now deposed corrupt former king of Nepal and his army and for many years, suppressing democratic and economic reforms in my fav little country. I attempted for years to get the US to stop this aid. During the Clinton administration Joe Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations committee directly supported Colin Powell’s large $12M military aid package to Nepal. This military aid to Nepal led to the pro-democracy protestors on the streets of Kathmandu being shot with AMERICAN M-16s.
FINALLY, I wrote to Sec. of State Rice suggesting the US was impeding true democracy in Nepal and that the US had the power to bring the factions to the table. This seemed to happen. During the last presidential campaign I wrote to McCain, on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, speaking once again about stopping American military aid to Nepal and it has apparently stopped. What most people do not know is that the US has a number of military training arrangements with Nepal. The Nepalese are part of the little military go-fers the US military uses for its ‘missions’ around the world.
5. I have written a number of other letters about a variety of things I should not talk about due to the possibility of retribution. I am now listed as a contributor to a mid-East aid organization here after writing a letter to the Chmn. of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military. Among my several comments was that the US, since it began keeping a standing military force after WW 2 has failed to prevail in the three major conflicts in which it has been involved. Interesting, soon afterward, Gen P. Pace was not re-nominated for a second term as CJS – a first in recent history.
I’m off to my next adventure for the day and could say more, I have many stories to tell and could have written this better given more time.
I suspect Mr. President and David Axelrod were reading or discussing my letter at the time I scared up the rattlesnake. LOL
Joseph Stiglitz’s Op-ed in the NYT 4/1/09 greatly simplifies the purposely complicated ‘recovery’ package. “But Americans are likely to lose even more than these calculations suggest”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/opinion/01stiglitz.html
Sure, go ahead, sit around and do nothing – it’s YOUR money.
SAGed
or the inter-episodal recovery continues!
My agent gave me a bunch of papers to sign and demanded I sign up on a variety of casting related websites as a requisite for actually signing a contract with me. The paperwork finally bubbled up to the top of my stack, I did everything AND THEN studied astrology to ascertain an auspicious time in which to sign the contract. I determined the moment and drove over to the office un-announced about an hour before. They waylaid me, as I expected, since I didn’t have an appointment, and the LA ‘thing’ is all that sort of stuff. At almost the exact minute I determined I signed the paperwork.
A day later I get a hurried call and a text message to go for an audition. I go in - the casting director likes me immediately as I’m different than the other guys. “Where are you from”, he asks. “Ecuador”, I reply. LOL I say a few lines and leave. Later that day a hurried call from my agency – “they booked you” – meaning they want me for a part in a huge corporate commercial. I get another call. “Since the production company is union we have to Taft-Hartley you into SAG.” That means I am, due to unique qualifications, made eligible to join he Screen Actors Guild, an otherwise laborious process of 3 paying gigs, etc.
The shoot itself was quite remarkable – huge set in downtown LA at a mostly closed shopping complex, most highly acclaimed commercial director of all time, hair and makeup, etc. I scoped out the LA subway system the day before as there was a station right at the location. I finally go in front of the camera. The volatile director begins yelling at me about my lines. This goes on for some time. We get through that, I have to change my wardrobe during the shoot as it’s incorrect. We go on. The director says “Beautiful” a couple of times to my later lines. As far as I know, my pieces will be used in a continuing set of commercials for one of the world’s largest corporations. Apparently I get residuals every time my part appears on TV.
One of my psychic friends says I’ll be cast for an upcoming large commercial campaign and ‘my face will become known all over America’.
On the problem of headshots - “Don’t take out a single line. I paid for each one.” Anna Magnani as quoted in ‘The Force of Character’, James Hillman, Random House.
[1] manic depression is characterized by “excessive involvement in pleasurable activities.” “full inter-episodal recoveries” Diagnostic and Statistical manualDSM IV, from An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
Sounds sort of like me in that brackish time between adventures. Jamisondescribed diffidently going to the head of her department at JohnsHopkinsMedicalSchool to reveal her treated manic depressive condition and he said, “My God, Kay. I know you are manic depressive. If we got rid of all the manic depressives on the faculty here we’d have a much smaller school and, I would say, a much more boring one.” I really like that one though. Imagine! “So how are you?” “Oh, I’m having a full inter-episodal recovery, thank you.”
D. Preliminary Conclusions and Intermediate Thoughts
It is not easy for me to share with you what appear to me to be unorganized and sometimes disjoint thoughts. It offends my sense of order. I think a better purpose is served by ignoring my inner resistance.
TRIBAL CONSCIOUSNESS
We human beings are at the end of a long age of tribal consciousness. Ever since mankind began he gathered in familial and tribal groups for protection and to further the species as represented by that group. In time, this consciousness led to inter-tribal warfare that is still with us in the form of seemingly senseless conflicts between tribes, countries, regions and races.
The paradigm shift that will occur is that soon we are to become ONE tribe as it were. I see (literally, at times) the flux of human consciousness coalescing into a single unified stream. It is as though rivers of different colored water commingle and thoroughly mix into another larger stream of a single color and consistency. Thinking about the human consciousness in this way makes for use of the mathematics of chaotic systems.
I liken the shift in consciousness from tribal to universal as being like the quick evolution of a point to the opposite side of a strange attractor. Thinking about the human consciousness in this way may lead to conclusions about what human being will be like after the shift. Then, perhaps, I can better make inquiries into or better, design a schema for, the spiritual consciousness of humankind. I mean, you don't want it to just be random, do you?
SYMBOLS
The study of symbols is useful because symbols are the projections of our consciousness. Therefore, it seems to me that if the consciousness of human beings is going to change then its symbols will change also. So I'm thinking about what some of the new symbols of mankind might be in order to better ascertain the nature of that consciousness.
Fractals may be a good possible candidate for a new type of symbol. Fractals have non-integer or fractional dimensionality. A point has 1 dimension, a line, 2 and a cube, 3. A fractal, however, has dimensions like 2.3, 3.5.
So, using the ideas of mathematics some questions I have come up with are; What is the fractal of the human consciousness? In other words, what are some of the bounds to which human beings will be confined over a large period of time? Or again, what is the shape that contains all that human being can ever be? Knowing that shape it might be possible to predict where human being is going in the future.
WAVES
I think it is useful to think about waves in the human consciousness. I see that species have many of the properties of solitons such as stability and capacity for self-organization. See, for example, Arguelles’s definition of consciousness.
Medons look interesting also. I am daymaring about things like what happens when strange attractors cross or coincide. Could one jump from one strange attractor to another? Would it hurt to go from dimension 2.3 to 3.2? Could WW II be viewed as a medon? If our civilization encountered another civilization would that be like our strange attractor intersecting another strange attractor? If the universe were viewed as a wave then would the astronomical bodies be seen as medons or coalesced vortices of energy expressed as matter?
E. A Few Quotes
James 1:5 - If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, ... and it shall be given him.
James 4:14 - Whereas ye know not what will be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appearth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) - Oh, how many of them there are in the fields. But each flower in its own way. In this is the highest achievement of a flower.
Mandala - Consciousness is the power of an organism to order, integrate and transform itself.
Mandala - Man is a transition, an agent of transformation as well as the material to be transformed. This transformative operation can only occur through the focusing power of some new symbol or image of the whole process in which man now finds himself involved.
C. Jung - That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.
C Jung - It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensating function of the unconscious works with entire success. The more civilized ... and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, and the collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind.
Tucci - Thus, even when the worlds at last are consumed in the cosmic fire, the force of karma, the sum of the individual experiences, acts as though thrust forward for the creation of a new universe. The latter then is not initiated ex novo but conforms itself according to the predisposition which survive destruction, so that it begins where the old world ends and inherits from it all its characters and possibilities.
M. Planck - A new truth does not triumph from convincing opponents and showing them the light but thanks to the fact that opponents are dying off and a new generation matures within the surroundings of the new truth.
Kellert - Recent investigations ... indicate that aperiodic or chaotic dynamics are typical of the healthy functioning of the human neurological and metabolic systems.
F. Bibliography
Mandala, Jose and Miriam Arguelles, Shambala, Boston
The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, With Special Reference to the Modern Psychology of the Subconscious, G. Tucci, Rider, London
Man and His Symbols, C. Jung, Aldus Pub.
Scientific Genius - A Psychology of Science, Simonton, CambridgeU. Press
In the Wake of Chaos, Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems, Kellert, U. of Chicago Press
Solitons, A.S. Davydov,
Chaos, From Theory to Application, A. Tsonis, Plenum Press
Does God Play Dice - The Mathematics of Chaos, Blackwell, OxfordU. Press
[3] The terms iatrogenesis and iatrogenic artifact refer to adverse effects or complications caused by or resulting from medical treatment or advice. In addition to harmful consequences of actions by physicians, iatrogenesis can also refer to actions by other healthcare professionals, such as psychologists, therapists, pharmacists, nurses, dentists, and others. Iatrogenisis is not restricted to conventional medicine and can also result from complementary and alternative medicine treatments.
The Mount Everest of Philosophical and Spiritual Journals
BIM is a subscription publication -- $20 on up for an inspired period. The more you send, the more you get! Lagniappes in the past have included photographs, books, Tibetan incense burners, turquoise, sage.
“Listen, this jerk can barely speak English. Drop the anger and treat this as a creative problem!” I said to myself as the swarthy at the copy center refused to redo BIM16 as two sided copies. I don’t have a strong pusher anyway. He had to eat 250 Christmas cards from the previous customer, a Laguna cop, who had NOT wanted her name printed on the cards. So I’m easy, at least overtly. I do much better at covert anger when I’m totally in control. Yeah, yeah, I know. F it. At my age Forgive has had to become the F word in my life. I can’t afford to mail out 18 pages! What to do. It takes me 6 hours to figure it out. Half my subscribers are in and around Laguna. Deliver them, and any cards I have done, on my bicycle by hand, and then worry about the rest of the BIMs later. Brilliant. I did about 20 miles on my bike in full sun. After I finished I was cycling back down the canyon and someone passes me blowing the horn like crazy. She pulls in front of me. I delivered a card to her a few hours ago. We watch the sun set from Dietrich’s Coffee house, she with her latte and me with my Starbuck’s coffee. I refuse to drink anything except Starbuck’s coffee so I walked over there and got a grande and then brought it back to Dietrich’s.
Goin’ Too Far
“The unconscious always tries to produce an impossible situation in order to force the individual to bring out his very best. Otherwise one stops short of one’s best, one is not complete, one does not realize oneself. What is needed is an impossible situation where one has to renounce one’s own will and one’s own wit and do nothing but trust to the impersonal power of growth and developments.”
C. Jung, Jung and the Tarot by Sallie Nichols
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what’s next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never actually knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”Agnes de Mille, as quoted in ‘The Artist’s Way’
I wound up like Ewell Blackwell, the sidearm throwing pitcher on the New York Yankees in the 1950’s except I was throwing the car keys and SHE wasn’t at bat. She had gone way too far telling me she would drop me off at a coffee shop and pick me up in 2 hours instead of letting me use her daughter’s truck to browse around Sport Chalet when I had been driving it around all afternoon. The wrangling started at dinner at the Chinese restaurant. This is my current favorite place serving real down-home mountain Chinese food like the Tibetans in Nepal eat, almost. They don’t have water buffalo dumplings or yak stew but lots of other stuff. Anyway, I think the restaurant people were perturbed as her voice got louder and louder and then she started swearing at me, in English. I could see the waitresses looking at us with pained looks on their faces.
So here we are in the church parking lot wrangling over the keys. I wrest the car keys out of the ignition and jump out. “Oh, so you are going to trap me over here.” That’s when I wound up my throwing arm, my left, the same as Ewell’s, and adjusted down in mid-throw so as to not hit the window. She was behind the door of the truck. The keys thwacked into the door. In a flash I set off at my normal 4 mile an hour flat ground walking pace heading for Laguna. I walked several hundred yards before I began to think I had gone too far; Laguna was about 11 miles away. I didn’t slow me one bit as I diagonaled across the lawn of the adjacent church and then headed up Newport Coast Drive. Shit. It would take me 3 or 4 hours to walk home and she would beat me there, which would piss me off immensely. I was determined to get there first and take her suitcase and anything else lying around the house and put it all outside before she got there.
I settled into a fast pace in the cool clear night air. It was beautiful out. I began hitchhiking as cars went by. I have NEVER seen anybody walking on Newport Coast except way up on the top near all the new housing, never here on the middle of nowhere especially at night. No one hitchhikes in Newport Beach. As Gurujii used to say, “Here in America, even the beggars have cars.” I took off my marathoner's hat thinking I’d look a bit more respectable. I had to get one up on HER and get there first! I walked and walked and thumbed and thumbed. I was pissed. I had the thought I should stop being pissed off in order to better accomplish my immediate objective, which was to get a ride. I forced a big smile and exuded respectability. The next car stopped -- a good ¼ mile past me. I began to jog toward it thinking they might be jerking me around waiting for me to get close so they could take off. I walked and jogged up to the open window of the new gray Acura with her hand beckoning me in. I stood back non-intrusively and said, “I’m going to Laguna Beach.” “Okay.” I got in and had just fully plunked myself into the beautiful gray leather seat when she asked, “You don’t have a gun, do you?” “Oh, no. I used to have guns when I was a kid but no, no.” I said, shaking my palms in the air. I thanked her and she asked me what had happened. “Oh my truck broke down," I lied. I hated having to lie as I presumed all hitchhikers did, but I was sure it wouldn’t sound good if I said, “Oh my girlfriend ditched me in Irvine.” “Oh, was that your truck parked by the side of the road with the flashers on?” “No, mine is at the church down on BonitaCanyon.” “I never do this," she said, “pick up hitchhikers, but I figured who’s ever truck that was was in trouble. Sorry I stopped so far past you but I was doing 80 and it was hard to see you with that dark jacket on.” “Where are you going in Laguna?”I asked. “BluebirdCanyon.” “Oh my God, I live only a few blocks from there!” I told her right where it was. She knew the house and drove past it every day. I told her over and over again it was a miracle she had stopped. She worked at a bank. When I asked her where she lived in BluebirdCanyon she said “Actually off the canyon proper….” I interrupted her exact directions and said “Oh my God, I lived right there at the corner for 3 months last year. “Oh, you mean d….’s house?” she asked. “Right!”, I said. Yeah, right, d…., the red headed maniac, the head warden of Solemom prison.
Gerry, my benefactor, and I totally relaxed. I told her of all my bank work back in New York and that I now write and photograph. I gave her my card and told her to E-mail me. It had taken me only 35 minutes to get from throwing the keys to stepping in my front door. I heard HER later from my bed on the phone with Dave and then later when she came to get her stuff. She shouldn’t have called me a conehead a week ago either!
The next day I had too much to do, lots of errands, Xmas mailing then a 14 mile hike. I did all the mail at the SilveradoCanyon post office. It's the size of the Laguna Beach post office and no one is ever in there. Well, there was one person in there ahead of me about 4 years ago in the summertime. She and the postmistress were mulling over what to take to the next day’s pot luck luncheon. They talked and talked while I waited and waited.Finally I loudly interjected, “Why don’t you fix gazpatcho?” a cold fresh vegetable soup. That stopped them cold and I was soon served.
I didn’t get hiking until 1:01. Still with remnants of the flu. I wouldn’t be back until 5:30 or later in total darkness. I headed out. It was arduous and slow going; I didn’t make it to the big orange wind sock until 2:50. I was wiped. I tussled with whether to continue or go back down the way I came up and be reasonable. I almost went over to lie down in the sun when I thought, “No. You need to go too far! Over the edge. Go for it. So what if you have to walk out the last hour in total darkness.” I set off on the final 8 miles of the walk along a sun-drenched ridge from which I could see Catalina, LA downtown, Ontario airport, Mt.Baldy and the San Bernardino mountains. I had only gone 200 yards when I heard someone coming. I pulled my vest down over the knife in my waistband, stuck out my thumb and the guy in the big white 4 wheel drive Suburban stopped with his passenger window rolled down. “I’m going over to the Corona road," I said. “Okay, just tell me where to let you off.” He didn’t ask me if I had a gun and I couldn’t tell if he had seen the knife. Guys don’t really care if other guys have guns anyway. The half hour ride cut at least an hour out of the hike but none of the 1000’ additional vertical feet of climbing. My driver worked all over as a communication consultant and I told him to take a possible project he had in Malaysia as Kuala Lumpur, the capital, was a great place. As I came down the final stretch to the parking lot I could clearly see the sun setting over a silvery ocean behind Catalina.
I got to the Chinese restaurant right about 6; this was the third time in three days I had eaten there. I ordered 3 different appetizers and then asked the waitress about a dish I had seen a customer across from me eating last night that looked like beans or peanuts. I show her the last joint of my little finger. “Peanut, bean?” she said in very broken English. “No. There nothing on menu like that.” I asked her if there is something on the Chinese menu that isn’t on the English menu. “No, only one item. Rice soup.” I hear her and her cohorts talking about me in Chinese in the back. I sense they’re miffed about the scene SHE threw in the restaurant last night. Lost face or something. Little do they know I am the original ugly American having thrown fits all over Asia if things don’t go my way with the petty thieves, rickshaw drivers, yak herders, hotel owners and anyone else who I think is screwing me around! The waitress brings me a small dish of what looks like dog meat, actually shredded tofu. “Maybe this it.” “Maybe," I say thinking my vision is failing. Next time I’m going right over to any strange food and photograph it or something. I don’t care if I look like some barbarian westerner anyway. The hell with it. I want what I want and I want it now!
I begin to eat. Two minutes later she delivers a small dish of bean like things to the table across from me. I immediately call her over. “That! What’s that?” “Ohhh, that peanut," she says. “I’ll take some.” When she brings me the boiled peanuts I ask, “Is this on the menu somewhere?” “No, solly.” I decide not to inquire further into this oriental inscrutability but leave only $7 for a $6.35 bill, far less than my normal one dollar tip AND I walked right up to the register to pay not waiting for my check.
I drive over to Mother’s Health Foods to get some carob chips, my current favorite binge food now that I’m totally off sugar forever, once again. Three Buddhist monks in gray robes enter right before me speaking the usual strange language and they end up standing right in front of the carob chip bin. I try to read their minds. Does God not want me to have carob chips today? Two of the monks are women and one is an older man. I wonder if he can see that my crown chakra is real open and the top of my head is hot? Finally, not able to contain myself any longer, I go up to the man and ask him, “What country are you from?” He gives me a ‘I got no gun’ double palm shaking saying nothing. I go to check out thinking I’ll have to use my ATM card. The pound of carob chips rings up on the brand new computerized register as 21 cents.I say nothing and give the cashier the change. I am certain the monk ‘did something’, carob chip-wise. I get home at 10 after a church meeting.
I call my mother to thank her for a Christmas check she sent and, wonder of wonders, after 10 years she thanks me for finding the managed care facility she is in in Florida and how well it has worked out for her and she thanked me for cleaning up her affairs. Ten years.
Three days later Loretta comes over for dinner and then we do an exercise of letting our inner child journal about Christmas. In response to the question, ‘Can you remember a happy Christmas?’ I write “NO! Everyone always dies around Christmas," remembering my two sisters. Later that night I am at the computer and hear a noise out back. It's HER standing there in a formal evening dress and heels. She is just getting back from a dance and wants to use the phone. “Sure.” She said she had a message from her sister whom she never talks to. SHE starts falling apart. “I wonder if it’s my Mom?” I offer to dial her sister for her, as her calling card no longer works. She bursts into tears and sobs uncontrollably. Her mother has died hours before. She stays and talks and cries for a half hour before leaving. She hasn’t spoken to her mother for months. I had tried to get her to call only a while ago to get her correct birth time.
I become deathly sick in the middle of the night, diarrhea and vomiting, as I’ve been poisoned. I cannot move from bed the next morning. SHE calls at 10:30 and wants a ride to Newport; she’s too upset to drive. I barely roll out of bed, slip on my sheepskin boots, grab my yoga headstand mat and the Bible and shuffle out the door. I leave on the running shorts I sleep in, actually pair number two as I had run in pair number one that night. We get to Newport at noon. I am so wan I don’t say a word the whole way. I meditate and do yoga on the lawn in the bright sun then stand on my head in a full lotus for ½ hour leaning against a big green dumpster while reading the book of James. A few people see me but no one comes close. This is Newport Beach. As we drive back to Laguna past NewportCoast I spot a Christmas tree in the bike lane. I stop. “You wanna tree?” “No, my daughter’s place is too small.” I back the car up and inspect the tree. I’m sure it won’t last long here. The tree is perfect, about 7 feet tall and probably cost a $125 if bought at Roger’s Gardens in Newport. I don’t think I need it but take it anyway. As I drive off part of me brightens considerably. I suspect it’s my inner child. SHE knows of no one who needs a tree. I haven’t had one for 14 years. I suddenly realize I can start new traditions at any time! I can keep the tree for myself! It’s here now filling the house with a lovely pine scent. The top of the tree misses the ceiling by an inch. SHE said God gave me the tree for being of service to her.
Dave comes in just after the tree is up. “Did you cut off a little bit of the stump first?” I think for a minute, “No, in my family we had a tradition of never cutting the stumps of Christmas trees.” There is uproarious laughter. I speculate aloud about taking a Tylenol Sinus as a rectal suppository. SHE cries and dozes for almost two hours then asks me to take her to her daughter’s house. Today I notice she left a scarf and a headband here so I put them on the tree with all my Christmas cards. SHE’s on my machine when I get home, crying. I can’t reach her.
I once took an unbelievable trip to Mexico with a friend when I was 19. I had been kicked out of Dartmouth for a variety of excesses and at my father’s suggestion had enrolled in the Marine Corps reserves and was to be inducted to go off to boot camp. However, the Sunday I was to be sworn in I had a funny feeling this was not such a good idea and I didn’t go. The sergeant called up when I didn’t show and I told him I wasn’t coming. He was pissed but I was safely miles away and knew I had made the right decision. No cannon fodder I. My parents were tweaked, mostly because it didn’t look good to have the U.S. Marines pissed at the Ballantyne’s. My father simply said he didn’t want me commuting to work in Manhattan on the same train with him every morning so I went and packed up a suitcase and the next day entrained for Washington where two of my best high school drinking buddies had set up ‘home’. One was working and the other was independently wealthy from both his parent’s deaths and was meandering through school half-heartedly. So, we became a reasonably happy threesome.
Many, many hilarious incidents ensued over the next two years fueled mostly by alcohol in any number of imbibable forms. Fly acquired his nickname by climbing drunk right up the side of a 2 story apartment building gripping only the decorative bricks that protruded ½” from the corners of the walls. His climb was so we could get into some girl’s apartment who were so horrified at our shenanigans they tried to lock us out. As I recall these girls had come over to the apartment and Fly and Berger had gotten drunk so the girls wanted to go home. Berger and Fly refused to drive them and demanded they walk the five or so miles. I magnanimously told them I’d drive them and got Berger’s keys. He worked for the Buick regional office so we were always driving around in brand new cars and Fly had a new Stingray, the first of the modern Corvettes. His would do about 150 mph, I recall him doing 135 past the apartment building one night and he was easily able to outrun the New JerseyState troopers who then drove those big Chryslers that would do a good 130 if the troopers weren’t too chicken thinking of their homes and loved ones. Anyway, the two girls got into the wagon and I got on the road back to DC and put the accelerator to the floor and didn’t let up. The wagon rolled up to about 110 or so, the girls were screaming at their supposed savior and I was keeping a very drunk straight poker face. After the girls ran into their building yelling at me that I was crazy, Fly and Berger rolled up in the Corvette and Fly climbed up the wall of the building onto their balcony and knocked on the slider, totally freaking them out when they thought they were safe from us. Berger and I were on the lawn yelling up at him, “Hey, the human fly! Get ‘em Fly!”
I got a menial job for $85 per week wrapping paper in a printer’s mailroom. This printer did a lot, as in millions of dollars, of printing for my father’s corporation and Wayne, my father, awarded the contracts. I’m still not sure how it happened but the three of us got drunk one night and decided to go to Mexico for ‘a while’. Berger had to work so Fly and I took off in the Stingray. I told Berger to call my work and tell them I wouldn’t be in as I was having my stomach pumped. He did and I guess the general manager of the printer called up every hospital in the Washington area trying to find me before calling my father in New York telling him I had disappeared. No one knew where I was for weeks. Anyway, Fly and I drove and drank for about 6 glorious sunny days before arriving in Monterey, Mexico where we parked the Stingray in a fancy hotel parking garage and drank for a few days. I can vividly recall pulling into a gas station in Biloxi, Mississippi and opening the door of the low slung ‘Vette and empty Jax beer cans falling out, clattering to the ground. I LOVEthat drive along the Gulf coast, the Florida panhandle, Mobile, Biloxi, Baton Rouge.
Six years ago I was driving cross country with one Elizabeth, who foolishly thought she would like to move to Laguna Beach with me. She had spent a week camping with me in the Sierras the summer I lived in my tent and a friend of mine up in the desert had done a remarkable healing on Elizabeth’s cancer. We were driving her Honda and I drove straight through from West Palm Beach, Florida to Houston, Texas. I was 49 years old at the time and she was 34. I thought nothing of driving like that, like Fly and I had driven. Elizabeth was wrecked. Her back hurt. I told her to lie on top of the luggage and sleep. She slept through the one stop I made at a huge truck stop diner in Baton Rouge. I went in and ordered three bowls of grits, mixed in my own raisins, 4 or 5 pats of foiled butter and ate it all. Then I went into the parking lot and did a little yoga and off I went. The sun was just coming up as we blasted across the Mississippi River with me happy as a clam to be out on the open road. Elizabeth became more and more furious. When we got to Houston I slept for about 12 hours straight in an easy chair I sat down in. When I got up Elizabeth was threatening to return to New Jersey and her Mom’s house and leave me stranded in Houston. Her cousin, with whom we were staying, was a prison guard and had left his 9 millimeter Beretta automatic pistol on the kitchen counter. I had the fleeting thought that I should either shoot Elizabeth or shoot myself. Instead, I called a friend long distance in California and a few minutes later I was OK. Elizabeth flipped again when all the cousins had a Texas style barbecue for us and I opened a can of garbanzo beans at the dinner table and ate them as I am a total vegetarian. Elizabeth and I only made it to Albuquerque before she turned back. A friend later suggested that I should have weaned Elizabeth away from her mother a little at a time by taking her away for two weeks first, then three. Two years later I visited this friend several times in the OrangeCounty jail where he had been put by HIS girlfriend. TWICE. All charges got dropped but he was in for months until it got settled. So much for good advice and so much for the Gulf coast.
Fly and I were considered minor celebs wherever we went as Route 66 was then popular on TV and the Stingray model of the Corvette was brand new and Fly’s was the first seen in person by everyone. I still recall floating slowly past this little Mexican kid in Laredo having just crossed the border and his eyes getting real big and he looks at us go by and says, “Hey! Stingray!.” From this and a fewnon-automotive related incidents Fly got that as another nickname. This was 1963 and down south it was to be almost another 10 years before the 1955 Chevy was no longer the most popular single car on the road AND they all wanted to race the ‘Ray. As I recall, the ‘Ray was never beaten on the open road or the streets of Washington including the 427 Ford we drag raced right through the middle of downtown one night.
Anyway, Monterey was fun. We stayed a few days in a nice hotel. I found a great bar a block away and drank there all night. The urinal was a tiled trough right in the barroom so when you had to pee you just walked over to the wall. It was real homey for me as Animal House at Dartmouth had a big drain around the perimeter of the basement bar where most of us peed and threw up. In my favorite place back home in upper middle class suburbia, Foley’s Bar and Grill in Pleasantville, NY, sometimes I’d just stay at my barstool and piss on the floor. What did I care. Foley’s is where I met my now ex-wife. Carol and her sister Margaret were drinking shots of tequila with Lowenbrau chasers when I ambled over and introduced myself. This was one of the few drinking contests I ever lost. Back to Monterey.It was about 7 AM when I finally finished up drinking one fine weekday morning and I recall Mexicans in busses going to work looking in disgust at me, the ugly Americano, barfing on the sidewalk. We left town after lunch one day. We were having a respectable lunch in the hotel and Fly had ordered arroz con pollo, chicken and rice. He didn’t want much of it so I convinced him to take it with him so he shoved the rice and pieces of chicken into the pocket of the Army field jacket he was wearing. We went out on the street and hailed a cab and I directed the cabby to take us to the edge of town. We got out and proceeded to hitchhike 1440 miles to Acapulco. It was a blast.
Fly and I found a great hotel in Acapulco for about $1.50 a day and spent 2 weeks there eating, drinking and going to the beach. The hotel owner began to bug us to pay our bill after 2 weeks so I called home collect from Acapulco and asked my parents to wire me $300 so Fly and I could continue vacationing and get out of the country. I still recall the “Oh! Oh! Wayne, Wayne come here” from my mother when the operator asked if she would accept a collect call from Acapulco, Mexico. We left a few days later and, feeling flush, flew to Monterey. The pilot finally landed the ancient DC-4 on the third pass after coming within 50 feet of the ground twice and then applying full power and climbing up again, for no reason ever explained to anyone. You should have heard all these grown men saying their prayers in Spanish.
More driving, driving, driving and Fly and I arrive back in DC and one day I float back into work to wrap paper and printed matter again as though nothing had happened. No one ever said a word to me about being away. Codependent wimps. A few weeks later the entire company staff was given an aptitude test for computers, one of the first commercial applications in the world. I passed, at the top, of course, and so began my career as a computer programmer and systems designer. I was able to drive up to New York and bring my motorcycle down to DC in one of Berger’s station wagons. Then the wild stuff really began. I still recall shortly before getting kicked out of the apartment complex testing my motorcycle in the parking lot and cramming the throttle full on while fiddling with the carburetor. I looked up and a woman had thrown her twobags of groceries into the air and just jumped out of my way. I passed the groceries eye level in midair on their way down and within a few inches of the woman. I fixed whatever the problem with the carburetor was though. Fly and I found a rooming house across the street from the zoo in DC proper for $20 a week for a nice big room with private bath and we began much more genteel drinking in Georgetown and upper Connecticut avenue.
I rode my motorcycle day and night, winter and summer.Frequently, I was so drunk I could barely walk, but I could always ride. Once, I sort of passed out after kicking the Gold Star. It didn’t start and I came down on the seat and sat there immobilized as the bike slowly fell over. I hit the pavement full on with my left elbow, pulled myself out from under, righted the bike and tried again. I usually closed the bars at 2 AM and then rode over to one of those diner type places to eat. These were the type of places that made omelets by whizzing eggs in HamiltonBeach malted milk mixers then pouring the mess on a greasy grill. Sometimes we’d go over to the black section of town, safer then than now, and eat scrapple and Taylor ham and chitllins and eggs. Fly’s late night favorite was one of those cheap hamburger joints, 10 for a dollar at one time. We called ‘em deathballs and they were about the size of silver dollars. Remember them? Before Lyndon Johnson devalued our currency to fight the Viet Cong. One time the landlady had put Fly in another room as he had been away traveling for some weeks. This pissed us off so one night when Fly and I came back drunk to the rooming house we went into this kids room with Fly’s 30-30 rifle and put it to his head and told him he had to change rooms. We were just screwing around but this kid, Alvin, I think, from West Virginia was so scared he moved out totally the next day and didn’t say a word. I recall us telling him we’d ‘get’ him if he ever said anything to the Burn’s, the landlords.
The Burn’s tolerated me even though I was always wetting my bed. I hadn’t always been a bed wetter; I started when I was 18 and ‘Dump truck’, the president of Animal House, had beaten me up on the Friday night of the Dartmouth Winter carnival, or carnivoral, as I called it. I was pissing in the gutter of the bar while ‘Truck’ was talking to the weekend’s chaperones nearby, the parents of one of our fraternity brothers. I came back to the fraternity later with a dagger I had in my room and tried to knife him. ‘Truck’ foolishly held up his hands and said “OK, go ahead.” A campus police auxiliary told me to go home, so I did. That was the first time I ever wet my bed. I continued until I was 31 and finally stopped drinking. Anyway, the Burns used to write me notes about my ‘personal habits’, I would frequently have to sleep on the box spring for days at a time while my mattress was on its side near the window drying out and finally the Burns put a plastic sheet on my bed. I assuaged the 70 year old black maid we had by giving her a huge 25 pound fresh turkey at Thanksgiving from the owner of the printing company’s farm. Anna never complained about us again.We also began to leave Anna money which Mrs. Burns didn’t like as she paid her so little. Fly left for overseas, the Army, and a girlfriend from a Catholic school nearby whom he ended up marrying. I ended up at Burn’s by myself for another almost year, drinking up a storm at the Oxford Tavern right across from the zoo, living with an older guy from Scranton, Pa who stopped going to work and finally he ended up living in RockCreekPark. I got a girlfriend, my first, as I had never had time for such stuff before while drinking. She got pregnant 3 times in the year or so we were together. She had one abortion at 5 or 6 months and psychics frequently tell me the kid’s spirit is still around me. She never told me about this until long afterwards as I was in the Army and didn’t know. We had gone to New York City for a party and on the way home to my parent’s house in the NY suburbs she mentioned it and said the fetus had been old enough to bury. She refused to tell me the kid’s name so I told Betsy I was going to kill her and sped the car up to 100 or so and then jammed on the brakes. I had to do this 3 times before she finally told me. Peter. This was before seat belts.
I eventually had to go on active duty for 6 months in the Reserves to avoid Vietnam and some time after that got back into Dartmouth to continue my education after an exciting two years growing up in Washington, DC. I didn’t drink for about 3 months after I got back to college, went back for my senior year, didn’t graduate as expected, for a variety of excesses, a week before my parents arrived for my father’s 30th reunion - and he was the class president. I showed them. I finally did get my degree in 1993, 29 years after I was originally supposed to. I appealed to the college’s president but had to wait until all the professors in the chemistry department who remembered me had not only retired but also died! F’ em.
If you bring forth what is within you
What is within you will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you
What you do not bring forth will destroy you.
The Gospel of Thomas as quoted in ‘Conscious Dreaming’ by Robert Moss
‘He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”Mt 10:39
When Things Get Worse
One of the basic laws of the Unifying Principle (of feng shui - Chinese geomancy, the art of the integration of people and things in space-time) tells us that, at the extremes, everything changes to its opposite. A balloon will expand continuously until it bursts. A country's power will grow until it collapses. As we approach the end of a long cycle of change, things may get a bit worse before they begin to get better. .....A rejection notice will look better in hindsight if the next publisher accepts your poetry and wants you to sign a contract for more money. Missing a boat that sinks is a blessing, although it is hard to see that when you are stranded at the dock.
After a while, if things are clearly not improving despite your best efforts, look within.
In World War II, on a particular site in Russia, a bomb dropped by the Allies hit an orphanage, instantly ending the lives of hundreds of innocent children. Following this tragic event, the space was never 'cleared', nor did anyone perform any type of ritual in order to free the area of the presence of 'spirits' or energies trapped in this world of vibration. Years later, the government used this site to build an important structure that would provide the region with electricity. It is known as Chernobyl
Nathan Fink is a brilliant tax attorney practicing in Oradell, New Jersey. My favorite story is of one of Nate’s clients who called up saying he was selling one of his companies. Nate said, “Wait. Move to Florida for six months and establish residency, then sell the company and move back if you want. You’ll avoid several million dollars in New YorkState taxes.” The client moved to Boca Raton, sold the company and never moved back, managing his entire business from there ever since. I recommend Nate to anyone. (201) 967-9116
I kept quiet, mailed everything off to Nathan, my attorney, and after New Years, when the cold dreary of New York winter really sets in, called a cab one day and went off to JFK airport and on to India without telling a soul. Some weeks after I left a process server came to seek me out and was horrified to find my house apparently abandoned and broken in to. Nathan always brightened up considerably in the ensuing years telling the story of my wife’s attorney calling him up and yelling, “Nathan, do you know where your client is?” “No, he doesn’t tell me where he’s going.” “Nathan, he’s in India! I’m going to have him put in jail when he gets back!”“Oh no you’re not, I’ll have him declared incompetent first.” Nathan said that stopped her cold. Besides, she knew that he could have. Hell, I wouldn’t have resisted, I did whatever Nathan said. Carlos Ballantyne, ‘The Adventures of a Knight Errant’
Fax to Nathan, September1996
Dear Nathan,
Sorry to have gotten you involved in this pesky IRS problem I have created for myself. My real underlying concern is that the problem may have been precipitated by the last of several letters I wrote to Janet Reno and Larry Freeh, the head of the FBI demanding murder indictments on the FBI sharpshooters who killed Randy Weaver’s wife in the Ruby Ridge killing in 1992 and signed the last of my letters telling Larry to go fuck himself. The IRS began inquiring about me shortly thereafter so I am wondering that although my total income over the past 10 years has been nil that these dudes may have some agenda of putting me behind bars as I presume the laws are convoluted to do so even for my seemingly trivial case.
Other than that concern, of can and will they actually try to send me away, as you may recall that yenta, my ex-wife’s lawyer thought of, the last time I was an active client, if its just a question of money to the IRS and you really don’t want to hassle with either this case or me I don’t want to aggravate you especially when I have $3.78 in the bank and can only promise to pay you when my book becomes a best seller. I can only presume that my jawboning with these guys on my own here in Laguna Niguel at their fortress will cost me a lot more than if you managed this for me. Incidentally, if you were willing to sell it I want to repurchase that ruby you bought from me when I get some money again in my life. My Hindu astrologer in Kathmandu, Nepal who told me I could write more prolifically by wearing it around my neck recommended it to me……………….
Fax to Nathan, December 1996
Dear Nathan,
Thanks again for your work on my behalf in this pesky tax matter. Basically, I totally dropped out of society at the time of my divorce in 1981 when I had my last regular job of any sort. Since that time I have lived here and there with friends in all manner of places including a year, for example, at a Hindu temple in Spring Valley, New York in 1985 and 1986 where I paid no rent. I then lived with a girlfriend for 2 years, the ex wife of a doctor before going off to India and returning here to California in May of 1989.
Regarding 2, my non-taxable means of support since the proceeds from my small inheritance ran out in 1991;
·I have not paid rent since December of 1990 when I left for a 5 month trip to India.
·In the last 6 years I have lived with girlfriends and other friends never paying any rent. For example, I spent last winter living an unheated storage room of a friend’s house for 5 months sleeping in my sleeping bag. I have moved an average of 5 times a year during this time. In the summer of 1991 I lived in my tent in the Sierras for 3 months.
·I haven’t owned a car since 1991 when I sold an old Jeep I had purchased with inheritance funds.
·My mother sends me, via her money manager (the Fly!), about $1500 per year at birthdays and Christmas.
·I occasionally make small amounts from my photography of the Himalayas, all of which I have filed in returns in the past 2 years.
·Surprisingly to myself, I am considered eccentric even by my eccentric friends here in one of the nexii of artistic living on the west coast.
I don’t know if this provides any reasonable explanation regarding ‘non-taxable’ means of support. At the encouragement of friends I have recently completed a book about the last 20 years of my life but am as yet unable to find a publisher.
Letter to publishers
Dear Ms. Davis,
Bet on a sure thing! Four psychics have assured me my just completed autobiographical sketch of the last twenty years of my life, The Adventures of a Knight Errant, will sell well.
“You will write many books which will sell heavily.” (palmist in India)
“I see it on tables and shelves in bookstores before Christmas ’97.”
“Your book will be a best seller.”
“You are going to make money from this book.”
My 115,000 word spiritual odyssey is some combination of The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, A Search in Secret India by Paul Brunton, Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrar and The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.
I was born in Ecuador to American parents, moved to the U.S. when I was two and settled finally in the New York suburbs. I graduated from Tninity-PawlingSchool and DartmouthCollege with a degree in Chemistry and then worked for many years as a computer networking consultant before retiring at 39. I traveled to India 7 times for spiritual studies and trekked extensively in the Nepal Himalayas.I now mountain climb regularly in California and recently day hiked Mt.Whitney for the 4th time. An accomplished photographer, I have a unique portfolio of panoramic images of the Himalayas which sell regularly. Ballantyne’s Inspired Musings, a philosophical and spiritual newsletter of my latest ardent doings, has an enthusiastic subscriber following.
I look forward to and enclose a SASE for your speedy response and request for all or some portion of this compuscript which I wrote using Microsoft Word 7.0 on a PC. I know this book is going to sell! Thank you for your time and attention to my query.
God, thou hast created us against our wills; free us!Paramahansa Yogananda
The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.Tao Te Ching
A man is truly free, even here in this embodied state, if he knows that God is the true agent and he by himself is powerless to do anything.Sri Ramakrishna
All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.Swami Vivekananda
The awakening mind should be understood to be of two types: the mind that aspires to awaken - and the mind that ventures to do so.Shantideva
People who are face to face with God are people who have deeply grieved
‘For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’Ecc 1:18
Reality brings grief. Grief redeems the losses in out lives. Sorrow is the emotional state that goes with grief. Grief is harder if the person grieved is alive.
Grief is letting go of what you cannot keep in order to get what you cannot lose.
Grieving people are learning people. People who cannot grieve stay stuck in their cycles. Grief is saying yes to reality.
Stages of grief
1.Ambivalence - feel the sadness and the love at the same time. Value the lost person. Don’t split, feel the love and caring. Set boundaries. Good people leave good people. The more we devalue the person grieved the more we are stuck with them.
2.Loss of characterloss of loveloss of freedom -Let go of the fact that you can impress me.
3.Catastrophic or traumatic - Split off and forgotten. Controversial healing modalities.
4.Existential grief - sadness of the world
A lot of depression is unfelt loss
Problems in grieving
1.Forgiveness - we hold someone else to blame and don’t fully grieve
2.Emotional isolation - don’t isolate, let people in first, then grieve. Mercy is given to the merciful.
3.Defensive hope - this will put your life on hold, lot of omnipotent control here as we hope the situation or person will return. Control what you can control; grieve what you cannot. (other people, other people, other people) Defensive hope blocks comfort which maintains grief.
If you need something from someone who can’t give it to you, you are in spiritual bondage.
1.Fresca’s - Lake Forest Road at the corner of Muirlands.Great Mexican food, clean, inexpensive, great salsa bar, no lard, very pleasant help, the best chili rellanos anywhere.
2.India Sweets and Spices - on the west side of Rockfield Road between El Toro and Lake Forest Roads in the shopping center next to the big Salvation Army store. Spicy Indian food just like the streets of New Delhi. Lunch specials $2.98. Ask for help ordering. All Hindu vegetarian. Try masala dosas, the hot dogs of India.I also noticed an interesting Peruvian restaurant next door to the Indian place and only looked at the menu, mostly fish and rice.
3.A & J Restaurant - ArborShopping center, NW corner of Jeffrey and Walnut in Irvine. Authentic mountain Chinese food. I almost never see other Caucasians in here. Lots of vegetarian items. My favorite place. Puck Wolfgang Puck’s, I’ll take steamed vegetarian dumplings, homemade noodles like Marco Polo brought back to Italy with hot sesame sauce, pan fried buns, garlic and spiced seaweed with bean sprouts, spicy cucumber, etc. etc. etc..
4.99 Ranch Market - The last time I was at A & J a customer told me about 99 Ranch Market, a Chinese supermarket at the corner of Culver and Irvine Center Drive. No more packing up the AK47 and driving to Little Saigon in Garden Grove for oriental groceries. The least expensive seaweed and tofu I’ve ever found. Great kid watching.
5.Afghan Market - Raymond Way off El Toro Road just east of Rockfield in the little shopping center on the mountain or east side, next to a large consignment shop. A 10 foot wide cacophony of spices, carpets, videos, fresh meat, Afghan bread and of course bags of Basmati rice. Probably the least expensive spices in OrangeCounty. Lovely carpets. Remember these are the people who kicked the Russian’s butts helped greatly by U.S. made Stinger hand held surface-to-air missiles the CIA smuggled into the country.
BIM11:You ought to pack up and get your but down here
‘If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.’Yogi Berra
“I used to get all dolled up to go out thinking I had platinum ovaries.”
“When I would show up at her door in the morning she could always tell what I had been doing the night before depending on whether the sand was stuck to the toes of my shoes or the back of the heels. She’d ask me if I wanted a screwdriver or a bloody Mary.”
“I do not like so much the blah, blah, blah.”Monique from France
I ran into a nutritionist at a health food store and had a long chat about a few of my favorite supplements.
·MCT by Twin Labs – medium chain triglycerides in a water soluble form, non-carbohydrate fuel for aerobic (vs. anaerobic, or sugar burning) performance. She told me this stuff is EXCELLENT and is now given to premature infants as it is so easily digested.
·Coenzyme Q10 – She says it is in and used by every cell in the body to produce energy and suggested that more IS better and that I try going from 30 milligrams a day to 100, if I could afford it. She has had excellent results with her clients including a cured irregular heartbeat.
·Vitamin E – She suggested I should be taking as much as 800 units a day due to the pollution we live in. I currently don’t take any Vit E.
·Water – The nutritionist does not believe in distilled water and thinks it strips the minerals out of our bodies.
·Stevia – She recommended stevia as a sugar substitute noting it is used in Europe in Coca-Cola and restricted here by the FDA to use only as a supplement. The nutritionist said information about stevia is available on the Internet.
The nutritionist is a great advocate of individual differences and thinks, for example, that some people need to eat meat and shouldn’t attempt to be vegetarian. She is against blanket treatment given to all patients due to these individual differences, such as treating all cancer patients with raw vegetable juice regimens. The nutritionist is an advocate of the oriental system of classifying people into different dispositional types. I noted that the nutritionist appeared to be about 60 years old, had many liver spots on her hands, an indication, I think, of lack of oxygen getting into the system, and she appeared to me to be about 40 lb. overweight. What do I know? Maybe she’s actually 85 and doing great. She had great skin, complexion, disposition and energy. She said she was unable to take on new clients due to her current workload and that she consulted for a supplement manufacturer and traveled to Japan and China.
My Maxim
I have had for some years a theory I call my maxim which is -- We humans all do in the world the thing we can’t do for ourselves. I know it is true because if carried to the limit, which is getting to a state where there is nothing we can’t do for ourselves, we don’t need to be here any more. We are complete. I came upon this maxim listening to a fireman speak about going into burning buildings and having them collapse on him and I had a flash picture of it really representing his inner process. I turned to the woman sitting next to me at the fireman’s talk and asked her what work she did. She said she was a waitress. I asked her if she was able to serve herself and she got very upset, on the verge of tears. From what I’ve seen almost all body workers desperately need nurturing. The age of death of the average American doctor is something like 58, I believe. I have tried to do as little as possible in life so that no one can get a handle on my incompletions. It is much easier to see other people’s stuff than our own. Who wants to look within?
‘The life which is not examined is not worth living.’Plato
It is a difficult thing, Goddess, for a mortal man to know you at sight, even a man of experience; you turn yourself into all sorts of shapes. Odysseus to Athena in Homer’s Odyssey
I first saw her a few days after I returned from five months in India and Bali and was still going around telling people I was God. Someone a while ago said of her at that time that she looked like an angel. She had shoulder length red hair and moved, almost flowed, like a sylph. When she left the living room I asked who she was and was told she was living with someone.
I left her because of the madness. “Madness …. most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its erratic moods.”An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
manic depression is characterized by “excessive involvement in pleasurable activities.” “full inter-episodal recoveries” Diagnostic and Statistical manualDSM IV, from An Unquiet Mind. Sounds sort of like me in that brackish time between adventures. Jamisondescribed diffidently going to the head of her department at JohnsHopkinsMedicalSchool to reveal her treated manic depressive condition and he said, “My God, Kay. I know you are manic depressive. If we got rid of all the manic depressives on the faculty here we’d have a much smaller school and, I would say, a much more boring one.” I really like that one though. Imagine! “So how are you?” “Oh, I’m having a full inter-episodal recovery, thank you.”
Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson
I felt a cleaving in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, - you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
‘While all human personality is probably, at bottom, in a kind of chaos, and only compelled into coherence by the necessity to act in the outer world, it has been the tradition of biography, in all its forms to impose a, more or less, Newtonian pattern of linear intelligibility on this turmoil of an individual’s nature.’ Jesse, the biography of Jesse Jackson by Marshall Frady
I usually carry half my stash in cash, $100 bills and the other half in American Express travelers checks. I’m having thoughts of carrying Swiss francs or Deutchmarks instead of the US dollars. Why? I don’t like play money!
Credit cards work everywhere
When I pack I put my backpack and carryon on one side of the room and everything I want to take on the other and throw things in priority order toward the luggage, periodically going over and packing it. When the luggage is full, that’s it.
Most everything else you could ever want, and lots you wouldn’t but might purchase anyway is available ‘over there’. Bring few clothes. For me, one pair of long pants, a couple of shirts, and lots of tee shirts and long underwear tops is best. Lots of great clothes to buy or have made overseas.
Best outfitters;
New York - Tents and Trails, Park Row downtown Manhattan
New Jersey - Campmor, Paramus, NJ and mail order 800-525-4784
California - Adventure 16, Sport Chalet
[1] Unless you can be sure you will never have to carry your own bag make sure you get a nice large comfortable pack.
[2] I use a medium size rock climber’s backpack for carryon. I once had 34 lb. in this bag leaving the Himalayas in a Twin Otter as I wasn’t about to put $5000 of cameras in my checked luggage.
[3] Take it empty with you. Useful for knocking around. You’ll need to carry at least your own water bottle with you where ever you go.
[4] Good to take a duffel empty in your luggage to bring stuff back in or to ship it back from ‘over there’. Remember the object is to get to where there is no here or there anywhere.
[5] I have a Western Mountaineering ultra light bag I paid $250 for that I have LIVED in for months and months at a time. The finest down bags made in the US. WM rebuilt my entire bag for me for free when it was ten years old and I ripped it in the washing machine and down went everywhere! In San Jose 408-287-8944Bargains on seconds. Consider a sleeping bag liner.
[6] Takes a sleeping bag down to the size of a grapefruit
[7] The secret to packing light is to layer. This first layer is crucial. This is the layer I sleep in and change every few days or so when away from clean clothes for 2 weeks. I use Patagonia lightweight Capilene tee shirts; warm, breathable and they dry quickly.
[8] Consider REAL outdoor pants that you can remove without having to take your boots off first. Why? Guess!
[9] THE cachet outfit of the American Everest climbers until they actually head up the glaciers is Patagonia long underwear bottoms and Patagonia Baggies™ shorts over them. Too Cool!
[10] I love to have shirts made up or modified with a sun glass pocket on the sleeves
[11] For passport and money carried as unobtrusively as possible. For me a layer I wear every day and layer under and over.
[12] No its not for swimming, it’s for when you get diarrhea. You line the suit with Bounty paper towel so you don’t dirty all your clean underwear in one night and the nylon suit cleans readily.
[13] I separate each sheet, fold it into thirds, then thirds again, pack the squares into freezer bags
[14] Pack almost everything in freezer bags, the heavy duty 2.7 mil ones. My luggage upon departure is bags of freezer bags of ‘stuff’.
[15] A capful is enough to hand wash two weeks of dirty clothes by hand in the shower in Kathmandu or in the cold stream running through to middle of Namche Bazaar
[16] 2 drops for each armpit, 2 more for your face and you’re DONE
[17] Don’t drink ANY water overseas you haven’t purified yourself. First Need filters are OK and the least expensive. Don’t use Katadyn. Too $$ and too slow.
[18] Tanya had an aluminum canteen she would fill with hot water at night and put into her sleeping bag an hour before bed
[19] I have used HiTec Sierra Lites, 1 size over with 2 pair of socks
[21] I’ve worn Birkenstocks for miles, the new sport sandals are good
[22] A face mask is nice to have if it gets really cold. Mostly I’ve worn mine in my sleeping bag at night.
[23] Lately I use Coolmax socks, ankle high. I even sleep in them. Pull the hiking socks on over them. You only have to wash the liners then, never the hiking socks
[24] Useful for getting to the bathroom at night. I have a little one I leave around my neck at night while sleeping.
[25] Many opinions here. I always shoot slides, throw most away keeping only the very best. Fuji Provia or Sensia is probably best. Buy mail order from B&H Photo in NY (800-221-5662) with Kodak processing included. Half the price of any other method. Take more film than you think you’ll ever shoot.
[26] Anything from a baseball type to a cowboy hat depending on sun sensitivity
[27] “You’re going to eat with THAT?”, I like to carry my own
[28] I don’t like these as I never want to expose my valuables like this
"God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living; the generative forces of the world are wholesome and there is no destructive poison in them
A few stories from BIMs past
HighDesert Haiku
A letter from Wyoming to a friend
And my light reading while Ohm-ing in WY has lately been Yoel Hoffman’s
‘Japanese Death Poems’ written by Zen monks and haiku poets on the verge of
death. My 7thDay Adventist friends used the word verge to describe food from
their restaurant that was ‘on the verge of’ having to be thrown out – thus –
‘vergy’. So, in addition to my usual adventuring I like to think of myself as being
ever vergy. LOL I wrote the 2 below and remain - to my knowledge - well.
On an autumn morning
The yak’s breath
Blows to the west
The empty cicada
Flies to
The western moon.
As Hoffman allows himself some commentary so will I. The west implies the pure
land of nirvana to Buddhists. Haiku-ish poetry is supposed to be structured so
that the season is mentioned – even if obliquely. And I have always liked the
time after the full moon when it is sets in the morning.
I was once perusing a book on famous bombers – airplanes - and came across
the following I have seen nowhere else.
Dear Mother,
I am an empty dream. Like snow left on a mountain in summer. I feel my warm
blood moving inside of me and I am reminded that I am living. My Soul will have
its home in the rising of the Sun. If you feel sad look at the dawn with all of it’s
beauty. You will find me there. The last letter home of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot
And my personal favorite bomber has always been George Metesky.
More haiku
The hoop of my life
chases the rising Sun
Rolling to the western Moon
Daymares fleet before me
Hooves flashing
Hot desert sand sticks in my eyes
I took a trip to a remote badlands desert in Wyoming, a section of a large area
called the RedDesert, and came upon a herd of wild horses. The horses began
running from far to the right of me directly across in front of my truck. I was
mesmerized and could only concentrate on the flashing hooves stirring the sand.
When they had passed all that remained vivid in my memory was the hooves and
flashing sand.
In the late 1980’s the Sweetwater County, WY sheriff’s department deduced that
terrorism would be an unanticipated threat to law enforcement agencies in the
future and put on a seminar about the subject. No one signed up to participate so
the Sheriff decided that if they could get an Israeli general to be the keynote
speaker they could get more participation. A general was secured and as the
American-Israeli who invited him was driving him the hundreds of miles from
Cheyenne, WY to Rock Springs, WY, the SweetwaterCounty seat, they entered
the area of the RedDesert. Wild horses began running alongside the car. The
General asked in amazement what they were. “Wild horses.” “Who owns them?”
“No one.” Can I have one?” “No.”
Again the Israeli General speaks.”My God, this is like Sinai. This is the type of
land that produces Gods and prophets.”
Incidentally, Israel is about the size of Sweetwater County, WY.
When one happens to see a beautiful sunset or lovely flower, for instance, one is
often so delighted that one merely stands still. This state of mind might be called
“ah-ness,” for the beholder can only give one breath-long exclamation of delight:
“Ah!” The object has seized him and he is aware only of the shapes, the colors,
the shadows…There is no time or place explicitly for reflection for judgments, or
for the observer’s feelings…To render such a moment is the intent of all haiku
and the discipline of the form. Hoffman, pg 24, from The Japanese Haiku,
Kenneth Yasuda, Charles E. Tuttle (Rutland and Tokyo), 1957, 30-31
Had I not known that I was dead already
I would have mourned my loss of life.
Ota Dokan, 1432-86, written after being stabbed while bathing. He expired after
writing.
The Gold Star
I was always real partial to Gold Stars, the special 500 cc single cylinder motorcycles made by BSA of England and once owned 3 of them at one time. The best of them was the black 1963 Clubman I bought from a friend in 1965. It would do an honest 120 miles per hour and I got it up there several times while drunk out of my mind in the middle of the night. Always a solitary drinker, I took to leaving the bars in the New York City suburbs of WestchesterCounty an hour before they closed at 3 AM and riding the Gold Star down to Greenwich Village where the bars didn’t close until 4 AM. My record was 42 minutes for the 45 mile trip from Foley’s Bar and Grille in Chappaqua to the no name tavern at the corner of Hudson and Jane streets in the WestVillage. I set a personal record on one of these trips by going 105 miles an hour past the UN garage on the East Side drive. Almost fifteen years later and sober for some years I tried to duplicate this feat with my last motorcycle, a highly tuned Suzuki that had been a drag racer and vaguely set up for the street. The most I dared push the ungodly fast Suzuki to on the potholed and dark tunneled road past the UN was about 85. I had become a woos in my later years. A chicken shit.
I loved the no name because they served Ballantine Ale on tap and I was a Ballantine Ale man for all of my formative drinking years. It was the best. I especially liked those big green glass quart bottles. There was a nickel deposit on these bottles and once a week or so when I would clean them out of the back of my old Chevy I would have enough deposit money for a couple more quarts which would be the start of my next toot. I knew no one at the no name and simply reveled in the ale and the excitement of the ride down and the adventures of the night.
Closing up the no name I would head down to the tip of Manhattan and ride the Staten Island ferry for 5 cents across lower New York harbor and back and then go get something to eat at Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston St. or a small terrible diner on the west side or go over into Chinatown and have some wor sew op, duck, or some such. Then I would head down to Wall Street, deserted on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 6 or 7, and run up and down the streets listening to the crescendo of the full racing exhaust of the Gold Star bouncing off the buildings. I still have fond memories of stopping in the middle of Wall Street astride the Gold Star opposite the courthouse steps where George Washington was inaugurated.
Prospero Ends the Revels
Our revels now are ended, these our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits
And are melted into air, thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
as dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare
And so, at last, around 7 or 8, exhausted, shall we say, from a night of carousing that had begun some 12 hours before, I would head the Gold Star homeward up the West Side highway, back across 10 cent bridge, through the Bronx, and then up the Saw Mill River Parkway to upper middle class suburbia. And the next night I might cool it a little, staying around home and simply closing the bars at home at 3 then heading to one of the local diners to eat.
I had the Gold Star up at Dartmouth for a while and made one fantastic trip on it from Hanover, New Hampshire down to the Central Bar and Grille, about 250 miles, in 3 and ½ hours. I cruised upper Route 22 in New York State for mile after mile at well over 100 mph on a memorable bright sunny June afternoon slowing slightly going through the little towns and reaching back and covering the full open racing exhaust megaphone with my right foot to quiet it a little. The English call it riding at over a ton.
Wanderlust
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped of pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove’s door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!
Emily Dickinson
this poem was last seen in the long suppressed BIM1
56 Lu / The Wanderer
_________aboveLIThe Clinging, Fire
______
_________
_________belowKeeping Still, Mountain
______
______
The mountain, Ken, stands still; above it fire, Li, flames up and does not tarry. Therefore the two trigrams do not stay together. Strange lands and separation are the wanderer's lot.
The Judgment
The wanderer. Success through smallness. Perseverance brings good fortune to the wanderer.
When a man is a wanderer and stranger; he should not be gruff nor overbearing. He has no large circle of acquaintances, therefore he should not give himself airs. He must be cautious and reserved; in this way he protects himself from evil. If he is obliging toward others, he wins success.
A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road. Therefore he must take care to remain upright and steadfast, so that he sojourns only in the proper places, associating only with good people. Then he has good fortune and can go his way unmolested.
The Image
Fire in the mountain:
The image of the wanderer.
Thus the superior man is clear-minded and cautious
In imposing penalties,
And protracts no lawsuits.
When grass on a mountain takes fire, there is bright light. However, the fire does not linger in one place, but travels on to new fuel. It is a phenomenon of short duration. This is what penalties and lawsuits should be like. They should be a quickly passing matter, and must not be dragged out indefinitely. Prisons ought to be places where people are lodged only temporarily, as guests are. They must not become dwelling places. From ‘The I Ching -- the Book of Changes’, Translated by Richard Wilhelm, foreword by C.G. Jung, Bolligen Series, Princeton University Press, 3rd edition 1967
Ballantyne's Inspired Musings #26
It is admirable to have an undisturbed mind, praiseworthy to be without worldly talent and knowledge. The same can be said of a homeless wanderer, but leading a life so liberated requires an iron will. Basho
“The deeper we penetrated into the Sahara, the more time slowed down for me; it even threatened to move backward.” Pg 240, K. Jung, ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’
Like the desire for drink or drugs, the craving for mountains is not easily overcome, but a mountaineering debauch, such as six months in the Himalaya, is followed by no remorse….Having once tasted the pleasure of living in high, solitary places with few spirits, European or Sherpa, I could not give it up. The prospect of what is euphemistically termed “settling down,” like mud to the bottom of a pond, might perhaps be faced when it became inevitable, but not yet awhile. H. W. Tilman, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’
I felt like I could go on like this forever, that life had little better to offer than to march day after day in unknown country to an unattainable goal.
H. W. Tilman, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’
It would be futile to describe the region, for in exclusively mountainous countries every beauty is too extreme to be conveyed by any words that I might choose. None of the books or photographs studied before leaving home had even slightly prepared me for such majesty. Truly, this is something that does have to be seen to be believed, and that once seen must be continually yearned for when left behind, becoming as incurable a fever of the spirit as malaria is to the body.Dervla Murphy, ‘The WaitingLand’
Leaving Tatopani, Prakash and I traveled for several days through some of the most beautiful mountain scenery on earth. Steadily climbing all the while we spent the next night in a lovely inn in the village of Ghasa. Climbing more we got up into the cooler apple country of Nepal. Lunch the next day was at Kalopani, a small valley almost totally ringed by mountains going up over 26,000’. On one side was Dhaulighiri and on the other was the AnnapurnaRange. I was relaxing more and more into an almost trance like state. The scenery and the walking were intoxicating. All sense of time vanished. For the first time in my life I truly began to enjoy myself. I developed more a feeling that everything was going to be all right, that I did not need to worry or even think about what would happen in the future, either hours or days or weeks away. Kalopani is the single most beautiful place I have ever been in. As soon as we left Kalopani we climbed up out of the river valley to land that is geologically part of the Tibetan plateau. We crossed the headwaters of the Kali Ghandaki river that flows down through Tatopani, now some 7000’ in elevation below us. On to our lodge in Tuche, a desolate group of lodges very Tibetan in character in vivid contrast to the Hindu Nepali feel of our lunch stop only hours before. Carlos Ballantyne, The Adventures of a Knight Errant
Whence this creation arose, whether it created itself or whether it did not? He who looks upon it from the highest space, he surely knows. Or maybe He knows not.Rig Veda X.129 (the Hindu scriptures)
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.Zen saying
“Expect nothing,” Eido Roshi had warned me on the day I left. And I had meant to go lightly into the light and silence of the Himalaya, without ambition of attainment. Now I am spent. The path I followed breathlessly has faded among stones; in spiritual ambition, I have neglected my children and done myself harm, and there is no way back. Nor has anything changed; I am still beset by the same old lusts and ego and emotions, the endless nagging details and irritations -- that aching gap between what I know and what I am. I have lost the flow of things and gone awry, sticking out from the unwinding spiral of my life like a bent spring. For all the exhilaration, splendor and “success” of the journey to the CrystalMountain, a great chance has been missed and I have failed. I will perform the motions of parenthood, my work, my friendships, my Zen practice, but all hopes, acts, and travels have been blighted. I look forward to nothing.Peter Mattiessen, ‘The Snow Leopard’
Nothing seems too exciting to me much anymore. I have been living from day to day reasonably happily with my major solace in life being the frequent rigorous hiking trips I take up the local 5000’ peak in the area, Saddleback. I especially like going up there in the winter when I can climb up into the clouds and walk for miles alone only able to see fifty feet in front of me. It reminds me of the Himalayas and some of the climbs I took up into the clouds and up out the top into the bright sun again. I haven’t yet pierced the clouds here in California.Carlos Ballantyne, ‘The Adventures of a Knight Errant’
“Do you know why a Sheikh breathes in the ear of a newly born child? Of course you do not! You put it down to magic, primitive symbols representing life, but the practical reason, the deadly serious business of nourishing the inner consciousness, passes you by.”A Sufi sheikh, from ‘The Snow Leopard’
“Happiness depends on the taste, and not on the thing, and it is by having what we like, that we are made happy and not by having what others consider likable.” La Rochefoucauld from Dervla Murphy
“The springs of enchantment lie within ourselves: they arise from our sense of wonder, that most precious of gifts, the birthright of every child.”Eric Shipton, one of the great mountaineers and adventurers of the last century.
Shipton’s LostValley, by Martin Moran
`…all of a sudden the fog rolled away from us and we found ourselves looking down into the immense depths of a cloud-filled valley at our feet. The glacier descended in a steep icefall for about a thousand feet, then flattened out into a fairly level stretch of ice before it heeled over for its final colossal plunge into the gloom of the gorge six thousand feet below us. ‘Eric Shipton (Nanda Devi 1935).
Ever since my first reading 15 years ago I had been enthralled by Shipton’s account of his crossing of the Badrinath-Kedarnath [in the Indian Himalaya] watershed with Bill Tilman and three Sherpas in 1934. Their lightweight attempt to prove a direct link between these two great Hindu shrines over the mountains of the Chaukhamba range captured all I had ever regarded as romantic and daring in mountain exploration. The commitment to cross an unknown and heavily glaciated 18,000 ft pass in rank monsoon weather had an epic denouement when they became trapped without food in dense bamboo forest on the far side. Their ensuing battle for survival, fording dangerously swollen torrents and competing with black bears for the supply of edible bamboo shoots was, to me, a model of courage and endeavor against the odds. Moran’s Amazon.com review of Shipton’s book
The closest I actually came to flying through the air was in ’89 on my first trek to the Everest region of the Himalayas in Nepal. I was peering over a sheer 2000 foot drop off watching the birds gliding 1000 feet below and I thought of just stepping off and gliding myself. And five years later Gurujii did throw me up into heaven. Carlos, The Adventures of a Knight Errant
‘First the word, then the plant, lastly the knife.’Aesculapius of Thassaly, c. 1200 B.C., considered to be the first surgeon. I think word should probably be capitalized, as in Word, probably from the Greek logos, as in, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’
Polio
I had polio once. Not many people know that. Even I have forgotten pretty much about it but I’ve had to really dredge around for stories for Jane. Surprisingly, I keep finding them, all buried beneath a muck of later happenings. Anyway, it all started because I got pissed off. Pissed off at my parents for sending me to Boy Scout camp in the Adirondacks instead of the lovely and expensive summer camp I had gone to in Maine for two summers. The kids who went to THAT camp were all wealthy. A couple of the Rockefeller kids went there. I had a few bathroom problems at camp in Maine. It wasn’t until thirty years later I ever figured out what the heck that was all about. Other than the bathroom problems I did spectacularly well at camp. I was voted the best camper of my age group each summer I attended. No one ever said anything to me about that except the other kids at the camp who knew what an honor it was. They, all of them, were not only rich, but also smart. I am sure many of them are lawyers, doctors and magnates of all kinds now as are my many classmates from Dartmouth.
I got to be the best camper because I was so all around competent, especially at canoeing, camping and shooting. I was the only one who didn’t have a counselor in my canoe with me on canoe trips, as I was such a strong paddler even though I had never been in a canoe before my first time at camp. I recall when I was eleven we all took a big trip along the Maine coast and the weather began to come up so we paddled to an island with a house on it. The counselors broke into the house and put as many kids as they could inside. I set up my jungle hammock outside and climbed in. I set it up just like they said for rain but lowered the top way down so it completely covered me. It began raining in the night and the counselors came to get all the rest of the kids into the house because their bedding was all getting wet. And me, I was so sound asleep and dry they had to shake my hammock for minutes in the pouring rain to awaken me. I was totally dry and angry they made me get up and go into the house with all of them. I won lots of NRA awards for my shooting at camp also. I have been a gun nut all my life until recently.
So here I am thirteen years old and bored stiff out of my mind and my parents figure they can’t afford to send me to Maine for camp for two months but instead send me to Boy Scout camp for one month with a bunch of nerds and black kids. I hated the Boy Scouts. I was a tenderfoot for 3 years in the Boy Scouts; me, the best 9 and 11 year old camper. As it turned out, it would have been a lot less expensive if my parents had sent me to Maine. I think I got polio from a black kid who had a real high fever. He was wandering around delirious and no one would pay any attention to him. The nurses didn’t like the black kids because they would all get hard ons whenever they would go to get shots or whatever at the infirmary. The doctor would take his little red rubber mallet and hit these guys right at the base of the hard on making it go down immediately. The doctor had to be in the infirmary all the time. Anyway, I took this kid by the arm and put him to bed and got him some water and made him feel comfortable, which he very much appreciated. I could see it in his eyes. I began to get a fever myself the next day but thought nothing of it. I returned home from camp a few days later and seemed to have a cold or something. I had been quite sickly as a child, colds, earaches, etc.
Soon though I began talking like Donald Duck. My mother made an appointment with our family doctor who immediately sent me over to an ear, eye, nose and throat specialist. This guy said I had polio. Ah, polio, schmolio. A big stupid ambulance came to the house a few days later and carted me away to the huge Westchester County (NY) hospital, called Grasslands, where a special polio ward was set up in what had been the solarium. The place was filled with kids. I loved it and I loved being out of the house. My condition deteriorated. I had bulbar polio, the kind that paralyzes your throat and goes down into your lungs and eventually your diaphragm, which when paralyzed puts you in an iron lung. My paralysis progressed down my throat so that I had to use a suction tube to remove saliva from my mouth and eventually I wasn’t able to eat at all. Thank God nothing was forced upon me. Well, that’s not quite true. I was given a spinal tap so they could check my spinal fluids. The problem was they let a student nurse give me the tap and she played around with a needle in my back for at least fifteen minutes not getting any fluid while I was held forcibly in the fetal position by about 4 big nurses. Finally, the head nurse grabbed the needle and swiftly tapped my spine but I had nerve damage to my spine and a bad back that lasted for almost 30 years until I applied some very intense non-traditional healing remedies to my back, healing it totally. So totally, for a lark, and somewhat by chance, I spent one summer in the moving business when I was 50 years old. I moved 6 apartments and houses full of furniture and belongings with a Mexican guy I found. I was the one who lifted up the ends of the piano while they rolled the dolly underneath. My guy’s 10 year old son, Carlos, always came with us. They jokingly called him Carlos and called me Carlitos, the diminutive. What a panic. That was the name I had been called at home until I was about 6 or 7 and by some of my parent’s South American friends until I was well into my 20’s.
This was the very end of the non-heroic period of medicine, right before doctors began to intervene severely in the progress of illnesses, killing many patients like me who needed to be sick and get well on our own.
‘First, do no harm.’Hippocrates, precepts
I was not able to eat for about three weeks and my weight went from 175 down to 113 lb. I spent my 14th birthday in the hospital. The new and radical treatment for polio was hot compresses. I was wrapped twice a day in what seemed to be pieces of Army blankets that had been steamed and heated. The nurses and this one doctor on crutches who had had polio himself would wrap me totally in these horrible scratchy woolens and then wrap all that in more blankets greatly raising my body temperature. I think what really worked though was the congregation at our local church praying for me. I was the only kid in the congregation with polio and one of only 2 kids in town who had polio so the prayers were pretty concentrated. I had been an altar boy and crucifer at the church and the rest of the family was pretty involved too. I could feel everyone’s prayer, that’s how strong the energy was.
After two weeks of treatment I began to get better. I had come in with one of the worst cases in the ward and here I was the first, and really only, one to respond well to treatment. I have a theory that the enforced fasting was crucial in my recovery. Back then prisoners from the county jail managed an extensive orchard and garden on the hospital grounds and I began to be able to down fresh peach milkshakes. I began participating in the surreptitious wheelchair races we kids began having. It was great as visitors, including, or maybe especially, parents, could only come a couple of times a week. I was the first one to go home. I cried when they told me I had to go; I wanted to stay in the hospital. I could never figure why everyone was so upset about this polio thing anyway. I had told everyone all along that I would be ice skating by wintertime. I simply ignored all of their patronizing glances and I could see that they had convinced themselves and my parents I had a long recovery ahead of me. I got back to school a month or so late for the 6th grade. I was a minor celebrity for only about 2 days; you know how 14 year olds are. After a month or so I began to hate taking the school bus every morning with all those nerds so I began walking and hitchhiking to school, about 4 miles. I did it for the whole school year and the next year too. Of course, I was skating that winter; I ice skated the whole winter. No one ever messed around with me when I wanted something or wanted to go somewhere. They discovered the polio vaccine about six months later. I vowed to myself to never again get sick like this and to stop being sickly, as I had been all my life and also to not be sick to get back at my parents.
“But above all things my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation.”James 5:12
Having recovered, I stopped going to church and proceeded to my next illness, alcoholism, which lasted a lot longer than the polio. No hot compress cure there!
Unless I tell them, no one who knows me now notices the slight paralysis I have in my face; it shows when I’m tired sometimes. I’ve wondered in later years if perhaps I have residual effects from the polio. My psychic advisor always thought so, especially when I contracted Lyme’s disease at 45, some 30 years after having polio. It’s one of the dualities I live with, hyperactivity and paralysis. Everybody has them, dualities that is. It’s always much easier to see other people’s dualities than our own. Much.
Desert Dogs
or
A phantasmagoric confluence of Jeeped souls in the summer desert
I once took a surreal Jeep trip to a remote desert hot spring in the middle of the summer. I traveled for 60 miles or so on dirt roads into an immense valley with a salt lake. The tremendous heat made it scary. I knew I couldn’t last long if anything happened. It was 118 degrees that day. I had good directions but was alone and had never been here before. My drinking water was hot. This is the type of heat you wear long pant and shirts in like the Arabs. I understood the meaning of being saved when I first spotted the large palm that marked the spring in the middle of this immense dry country. It was a true oasis. There was another old Jeep parked at the spring! Richard and his girlfriend had come cross country from the semi ghost town where they lived in Nevada. I knew immediately he could read my soul. We talked for hours. He told me about his wife who had died and some secrets of finding water in the desert. Richard also told me about the barely marked trail I was to take the next day through a seldom seen mountain range and how, for a few days in the spring, the hills were filled with wildflowers. He told me where there was a remote dark canyon that you had to walk a mile or so in to and then you would come upon a small stream that created a misty waterfall down to a lovely pool. Since he talked in pictures I could see it all even though I’ve yet to go there. I marked it on my map and I know where the inland sea is. Richard showed me his poetry. The heat was so unrelenting we got into the hot spring to cool off. I went to sleep completely naked on the grass of the oasis lying on top of my blue Tibetan carpet. It actually rained for a minute or two in the middle of the night and then stopped. The water evaporated immediately, cooling me. I knew I was safe from any rattlesnakes because Richard was traveling with five dogs who were lying all around on the grass.
The Song of the Nightingale
Could I love you again
In a different time in place
Where hearts merge to hope
and yield one face
In a land so strange
A dream can be
Where waterfall mist
Floats to an inland sea
Where flowers don’t end
And the sky bend low
Where nightingales give birth
To a song we know
Richard Watkins
From my newsletter Ballantyne’s Inspired Musings, 4 May 1993. This is an unembellished true adventure from my life as are all the stories in BIM.
I visited Richard a couple of times in Goldpoint, NV and then he married a girl from Oregon who he met through the Rural Electric Coop magazine personals using a picture of himself I took. A couple of years ago I headed for Goldfield on a whim to see Richard and was stuck for miles behind a pickup carrying plumbing supplies. The pickup pulled into Goldfield and I flagged them down and asked where Richard’s house was as I couldn’t remember. They pointed it out and told me they lived there now having bought the house a few years before from Richards’s widow who had gone back to Oregon.
Mystics such as Richard have a hard time being here in the world, the dross of civilization much alleviated, even in the middle of the summer, by trips to ‘The Soaks’.
Drunk Stories
Cocktails With Newk
Newk came down from Connecticut to visit a friend in Pound Ridge so we arranged to go out drinking down my way one night. Newk and I were a little close and he and his sister, Gail, who went to Smith, had given me rides home from Dartmouth a couple of times. Gail was very nice. Newk and I were in Animal House, the real original animal house. Our fraternity brother Chris, nicknamed Pinto, had written the original story for the Lampoon and then the movie script. The goings on at Animal House were much grosser, unspeakably so at times, and could never have been put into ANY movie. Macabre. I much appreciated going to Dartmouth and being a fraternity brother at Animal House, Alpha Delt, as it enabled me to keep up the high level of excitement I demanded in my life. My name around the house was Seal because I was sleek. So said Magpie who named me. I acquired a few other names as times went on, my favorite being the Phantom. I got this one because for a while I took to going down to the house to eat at around 9 PM when the sandwich man came by. My digestion had gotten so bad from my drinking and other upsets in my life such as organic chemistry that I couldn’t hold much down and would very quietly barf up my food. As I was too lazy to go upstairs to the bathroom and didn’t live in the fraternity, I would go off and barf quietly in a corner on the floor behind an easy chair or sofa. After doing this several times everyone, at the insistence of the janitor, Al, began keeping an eye out for the Phantom Barfer. I took even greater pleasure in barfing here and there surreptitiously for the next several weeks. Everyone was eyeing everyone trying to unmask for once and all the Phantom. It was pretty much concluded that a member of one of our rival fraternities was sneaking in somehow but no one could figure out how. I finally got caught.
My last name was the Mustard Man and the incidents surrounding the acquisition of that one gave rise to the scene in the movie where John Belushi pours mustard on himself. I thought it a clever disguise at the time.
Anyway, Newk and I began drinking at the Willow Inn, the bar I first started at when a few friends had taken me out on my 14th birthday. I don’t remember how it started but one thing led to another and by 4 AM Newk and I were in White Plains filling up all the quart beer bottles in my car with gasoline at an all night gas station. The attendant helped us twist up paper windshield cleaning towels and push them into the narrow necks of the bottles creating, of course, Molotov cocktails. Newk got so taken by all this he was sneaking up the back stoops of houses near the gas station stealing milk bottles and anything else he could find in the garbage that would work until we had about a dozen of these suckers. I drove north into the suburbs and stopped at Kensico Dam where we began throwing the cocktails creating huge walls of fire on the 300 foot high face of the dam. We threw a few elsewhere also and then I began to head toward Pound Ridge to take Newk home to his friend’s. Newk had one more cocktail and lit the wick in the car as he was sitting there. I told him to get rid of it as it scared me so Newk waited until a car was coming towards us and lobbed the cocktail up over my car. It came down and ignited the entire road in flames right behind me. I waited to see the brake lights of the other car in my mirror and never did until they must have been right on the wall of flame. I knew they skidded to a stop as I only saw one brake light meaning he had fishtailed. I figured the guy driving was a drunk. Who else would be out at this hour and not see a twenty foot high wall of flame in the middle of the road until he was right on top of it. Drunks.
Newk made the mistake of eating while we were out drinking and had barfed out the window of my car painting the whole door with flecks of a Stewart electric roast beef sandwich. Y
