harold_maude's journal

..To observe the obvious so that you might see more than meets the eye.
Learning to observe and note what you see.

More than the obvious. The details and clues that will open doors that you could not see before.

If you had never seen a sailing ship before and you were out walking on the beach looking for shells and other unique things and you looked up and saw something but thought maybe it was just your immagination, would you just go back to what you were doing and just ignore what you "thought" you saw?

How well do you know yourself? Do you trust yourself? Do you know what your favorite color is?

All of these questions seem so obvious. But if you think about the question and your immeadate answer and then think about the answer and be able to understand why you answer the question the way you do, you will begin to understand the concept of observing the obvious and seeing something more than meets the eye.

There is an addage that goes this way: Know thy self. And still another: Seize the day.

Two very obvious things. But as we study what we understand about them and how we know what they mean, they begin to show us more about who we are, and how we value time, and how we value who we are and the things we are capable of, and our limitations, both physical ones and moral and emotional ones.

Here are some things that each of them extend out to for me...kind of like a band of clouds that start far away and then as we watch they fill more and more of the sky.

As to "know thy self" there is the obvious, that we should know what we will do in any given situation.
Then there is this, know your heart, for it will lead you to where the truth is about who you are.
Then there is this, the knowledge of your preferences carries with it the power to say yes or no, and not feel like you have to jusitify your choice.
Then there is this, what you believe in your heart is what you truely own. There is no possion which can surpass the deepest loves and hates which hold us, and take us to either the greatest heights or deepest depths of the human condition and our place in this world.
Then there is this, our motivations for doing things.
And there is more, but I would like to address the other, seize the day for a bit now.

Seize the day. The obvious thing is to grab hold of the day and live it to the fullest extent.
Then there is this, no time like the present to do what you could put off till tomorrow. (only tomorrow is always over there and you are here and the truth is that when you put off until tomorrow what you can do now is that a person is either terrified because they fear they will fail, or suceed or look like a stupid fool doing what ever)
Then there is this, this may be the only chance you get.
Then there is this, time is short, live. Don't die where you are, but go forward and live.
Then there is this, Each day is a new adventure, and new time, and what you need to fix you get this day to start doing it.
Then there is this, life is like a banquet, and you have a choice, you can starve or be well fed.

Here is another obvious thing that if studied and observed more is how you eat. And yet another, the leaves on a tree, and still another, how you see the world.

So many thoughts tonight about so many things. For a very long time I have been able to see below the surface of people, and it is a normal thing for me, but I haven't met alot of other people who see this way too.
I have thought long and hard about this, and have written many other thoughts on this, and have come to some understanding about it, but I suspect that I won't ever get to see the big picture. Only bits and peices of it.

I've eccepted that this is normal for me. And I don't think it makes me any different from other people.
But I do know that most people really arn't listening to anyone but themselves.
When they hear someone talking, much of the time they are busy thinking about what they are going to say next, only it isn't viewed in the understanding that way. It's just this flow that happens.
And no one is actually listening to anyone else.
So arguments ensue.

I've come to understand that I can't convince anyone of anything.
And that doesn't matter either. The only thing I know that matters is what I'm doing in this world and what I leave behind me.
That's the only thing I have to work with, and the ablity to change in someway.

Not everyone understands why I feel and think the way I do, and why so many things don't get me livid.
To me if something needs to be done, I don't care who jumps in to do it, just as long as it gets done.
And if it's me most of the time, that dosen't matter.
The only thing that matters is that it gets done.

I'm finding there is little or not bitterness that exists when I look at things from this perspective. It's all just hours in a day.
And things go on. And good and bad and happy and sad things happen. And when they do, it's good to be in the moment.
To allow your self the honest experience of emotions.
And to not feel guilty about what you feel. Sometimes it's ok to go crazy with things.
Sometimes you have to find a safe way to express things, especially when your feeling anger to the point when it becomes rage.
But what I've found with this understanding as it grows, is that as you allow yourself to feel your emotions and become an observer to yourself while your in the mist of how intense things are, it becomes easier to direct where things go and what you do. It takes practice with some things, but like everything else new, there is a learning time and a learning curve with every person.

Well, I think I drained out some of the over load in my thoughts, so I'm going to close for the night.

To make a pizza and not get throughly tired of the thought of eating the stuff, takes some doing.
I've been working in a pizzarea for almost two months now and I've gotten to the point where the very thought of eating the stuff makes me almost sick.
I've made so many pizzas now that I could do it in my sleep....
take a dough ball...flatten it...add sauce...toppings and into the oven.
8 slices for a medium, 12 to 16 for a large.

And in doing this repetive work, I've also thought about the perfect pizza. (the moon comes in here)
Take some really exoitc cheese, and make a great wild tasty sauce, gotta be outta the ordinary, and add the following:
Crab meat, black russian tomatoes, fresh roasted garlic chopped fine, green onions, some freshly cooked itallian sausage, and maybe on top of a mixture of cream cheese, a touch of fresh rosemary and a hint of lemmon....
then sprinkle on a mixture of sharp new york white cheddar, mild cheddar and a touch of swiss or gouda or edam cheese...

When it comes out of the oven let it sit a bit, grab a bottle of your favorite wine and spread a blanket under the stars and a full moon with someone you want to get to know better, that can be your spouse which you have missed the company of because your both working like crazy people to make ends meet...or a lover that you don't get to spend alotta time with...or your best friend, and enjoy a perfect evening.

Take the time to really enjoy what your eating and the company your with.
Laugh, and forget about pressing problems for the evening.
Take the time to enjoy the food as well...
It will be wonderful, I promise.

And if my ingredients arn't to your liking, then go for what your hearts perfect pizza is and enjoy.

Life is short, and the bills won't get stale from one evening off, but your heart and head might get more weary if you don't take a break and just enjoy a few hours of the good life...
just a side note here, I'm not sure it would feel like love if the moon hit your eye like a big pizza pie....

:)

It's Thursday morning and somewhere along the way I've already had a full day.
I could go back to sleep right now and when I woke up have another day in just a few hours.
Which brings me to the subject of how time is viewed, and how much of life is spent running by a clock.

I was watching some of the cats this morning, and few random bunnies in the grass eating. They know the day as dark and light.
How beautiful and simple that is. Not to have to think about how to balance what is required to keep a roof over their head, or if they need to go to the grocery store, or if they have clean clothes for work.
They just live. In perfect harmony with each day.

A while ago, a couple of years actually, I was in a place where there were no working clocks. The house we were staying in had no electricty, so along with being without several modern convineces, like being able to turn on a lightswitch and having refigeration and a stove where we could cook without much thought, the clocks in the house were run also on electricty.
We did have water and a toilet that flushed for which I was very greatful.

At first it was maddening. We had to come up with ways of dealing with the lack. There were problems to say the least.
Cold showers on hot days isn't bad, but when the weather began to get cold, that was a different matter.
We made candles so we could see at night.
We did have one modern convience that we came to charish greatly, a radio.
We listened to national public radio alot. Mostly because nothing else would come in very clear, but I think even if we could have gotten other stations to come in clear, the calmness of public radio was like an sail through days that seemed difficult, and sometimes almost impossible to get through.
Depression was never far away.
And then there was the sense of bordom and hopelessness that was a problem too. But it got less and less as the days passed.

After awhile, I noticed a change in how I viewed time. It lost it's secondhand and minuet face and became this rythem of light and dark.
We spent our days heating water over a fire pit so we could do a couple of things, wash a few clothes or take luke warm showers, and occasionally cook a frozen pizza or two in a pan.
Yes, you can cook pizza over a fire. The best way to do it is to have two pizzas and put them face together so you can turn them and they won't get burned or loose their stuff. We did some other normal over the fire cooking.
Trying to make cinnamon rolls is a little harder. It's hard to find the right height above the fire so they don't get burned black on the bottom.
If that does happen just eat the part that's cooked and throw the burned parts into the fire.

We learned that eating out of cans was a nessity since there was an overload of mice in the house. But you get used to those things.
I got to the point where going to see people who couldn't make the return effort to come see us where we were at, frustrating and it became clear that they didn't really care that we came to visit at all.
We talked more, and spent time sitting on the porch watching wildlife do their thing.
On occasion we would walk the few blocks to the local park and watch the wildlife there.
Going into town were we were was a few blocks further.
Durring the several occasions where we had flat tires from driving over country roads that the amish also shared and lost nails and those nails in turn would end up finding our tires,
we would take walks and talk about the different houses and dogs we saw, as well as the lady who had so many cats that we wondered if she had any room left to move around in with out stepping on one or two.

Durring this time, I slowly forgot about minuets, and second hands and scheduals and everything else that goes with clocks.
It just all became this flow, and every detail became something worth noticing.
I miss that.
Even with all the modern convinences we didn't have, I believe we got way more than we lost.

And I really wouldn't mind if we had to do it again.
I like days without clocks. It's more pressure free. And more peaceful.
It's something I would love to do again infact. I'd do a few things differently, like have a big strainer and some pot lids so ash wouldn't get in the water, and more clothes line, and a wash tub instead of just a sink to wash clothes in.
And less mice. :)

This post was edited by harold_maude on Jul 21, 2005.

Last night I caught part of nightline. Something I haven't done in a very long time, due to the disgust with most of what I see connected with any "news show".

But this was different. It was about the problem with global warming. The alarm bells have been sounding from the scientific world for a very long time. If we keep doing what we are doing, staying this road and keep doing as we have been we are going to loose big time.

The reason the G-8 summet was so important is because this lovely blue-green planet we call home is in trouble.
Tempratures have been on the rise for several years and the polar ice caps are melting faster than they should.
Glaicer national park is loosing it's glaciers and rain forests are suffering.

What does this have to do with you and me? Alot. Frogs, and other speices of animals and plants are the indicators of the health of the planet.
And because of our human activites that include burning lots and lots of fossil fuels and surrounding ourselves with lots and lots of plastic we are doing great damage.

Yesterday when I went to check my e-mail I read through the news headlines on the main page.
There was an article about unborn babies having toxic pollutiants.
And then the revelation that the gasses given off by decaying plastic causing girls to go into physical maturity sooner.
Which means that it's possible for girls to have babies earlier.
Isn't that just a lovely thought?
Babies having babies.

The food that most of get from the local supermarket is dead.
It's been so genetically altered that there is nothing viable about it.
Chickens, turkeies and other animals are fed so much artifical crap that they grow too large to support their own weight.
And what really sucks is that sometimes they explode inside before they go to the slaughter house.

And beef...well, that's another horror story altogether.
Here in the midwest the beef and pigs are raised in feed lots.
Until I moved here to this part of the country I had never seen a feed lot and really had no idea what it was.
I was horrified when I found out.
Cattle are fed growth hormones and live and spend their lives in these pen type places which means they shit in the same place they eat...on a daily basis.
Yummy...

I'm sure that most people have heard of mad cow disease..well you wanna know how that happens?
They take these diseased animals like sheep and cattle and butcher them and grind them up and put it in the food they feed cattle.
Cattle are herbavors, which means they are designed to eat grass, not meat.

If you know all of this and think fish is a safe way to go, well here in the midwest the fish are toxic.
There is so much run off from feed lots and chemical laiden farms that when the snow melts the rivers produce this strange foam.
Kind of looks like someone poured soap in the water.

They have found prozac in the oceans....

Boys and Girls we are fast approaching the time of soylant green..if your wondering what that is, check out the movie...
We are distroying the earth.

And the really sad part is that the president of this country has said publicly that he will not support enviormental change here in the us. In fact he's fighting it.
And his reasoning...that the american public won't be willing to give up their cars and change their life style.

Now with all this bad news, here are some thoughts that may help:
One person changing the choices of where they buy the food they eat, oh say an organic farmer, and choosing to use glass instead of plastic, and using cloth bags when they go shopping..all small changes, a person can start changing their corner of the world.
Change takes one person at a time.
We still have some time to change some things, and stop the madness.
Get educated about things, and make informed decisions instead of listening to what the adds say on T.V.
This isn't the other guys problem, it's ours. It's our world, and we are just stewards here.
With each generation that adds to the problem instead of being part of the soultion we condem the next generation to more death.
Think about that if you have children or grandchildren or ever want to have kids.
What you do today does make a difference. One way or another it does.

My father for all he wasn't, was an extrodinary business man.
Working for him was the first paid job I ever had.

I walked away from that experience with the understanding of his view of being in business, competion and the like.
He had this saying that he ran his business by, they can always go down the street.

That idea seems to have been lost somewhere among the mentality of fast food, chain department stores and supper stores that are overloaded on so many levels that a person can get lost going in circles.

It would seem that customer service is now something you only find in upper eceschalant places where the price tag of the product refelects that.

Something went wrong somewhere. I've seen over the last few years attempts to reinstate great customer service at places like wallyworld, by employeing older people as greeters and why?
Because they remember that businesses used to be based on awesome customer service and a time when you knew your customers personally.
There was a sense of loyalty about it all.

But that went out the window with the invention of the chain store and mega cities where no one is connected for very long anymore.
Customer service is something that many people I've met in my travels have very little idea about.
Most people working today are interested in one thing, the paycheck.
And the vast majority of these same people are butt heads when they are on the customer end of things.
So the cycle goes.

It's not just a job you work at. If it is and it's nothing more than a paycheck maybe it's time to think about doing something you can care about.
Take pride in because what you do when your there for how many hours is a huge indicator to you of what your willing to spend chunks of your life doing.

Granted there are times in life you just gotta do what you gotta do to get by.
But when you go for that new job, or want to feel different about the job your in now, realizing that what you do or don't do shows people what your made of in certian arenas.

And yes, I know there are bosses and managers out there that should be put out to pasture or sea or removed from the job because they make your job harder than it has to be.
I've worked for several that fall into that catagory.

What I've found is that great customer service goes along way in garenteeing a long running business.
And that is hard to find unless your willing to pay through the nose for it.
And it shouldn't be that way.

If you think about what you like when you go shopping anywhere what are the things that make you return again and again to the same store.

There are someplaces that I frequent due to one thing, how they make me feel when I'm there.
The prices are relativly the same and even cheaper somewhere else in these places.
And I could always go to the place where the stuff I want is cheaper.
For me how an employee treats me tells me whether or not the buiness is worth my going to.
The employee is that helps me is the embasetor for the business I'm giving my money to.
So why would I go someplace where the employees don't give a shit about anything but their paycheck?

For that reason there are big name places I don't set foot into.
For that reason there are little businesses that don't get my business.

We live in a time when no matter where you are you can get pretty much anything you want or need.
The one thing that that makes the difference and has been lost and is needed so badly is employees who understand the simple truth my dad ran his business by, they can always go down the street.

This post was edited by harold_maude on Jul 11, 2005.

Last night, after I dragged my ass home from work, to a house where there was more work staring at me, and that work, from past experience, tells me will not get done until I do it, I tried to rest.

I took part of a muscle relaxant and hoped that it would help me fall into a deep sleep. It didn't. I got about 4 hours of sleep last night and those were fitful, and anxious hours with weird immages running through my head.

I woke up as tired and in as much pain as when I came home.
Only this morning, everything in my body feels swollen and tight.
Like I went 20 rounds with someone last night and my muscles are blown up from having the crap beat out of them.
I know why I can't relax.
There is no one who will just step in and take care of shit so I can really and truely relax.

I'm a citizen of the state of exaustion. And now there is a room mate comming into the house who because of an old injury in their life, they are a quadraplageic, and there will be no time to sleep or relax and what little there is, will be shredded in the wind by the other needy people around here.

I find myself praying for a tornado so I can jump into it. Knowing how things go I would probably survive without a scratch so that I would be back at taking care of other people....
I just want to lay my head down on someone's lap and know they will take care of me, even just long enough so I can really and truely sleep...