harold_maude's journal

Last night a few of us got into an intersting disgussion. The Roman Empire and the similaity of the United States to the Roman Empire when it fell.

The middle class had disapeared, the morals of the women were gone, and only the rich and the poor existed.
The roman empire was at that time in the process of trying to take over the world, and the state of focus was on pleasure.
The economic structure was failing.
It's amazing the similarities.

It seems that every major society that has suffered a collapse has gone through similar events in the process.
Last night wasn't the first time that someone has brought up the subject.
It won't be the last I'm sure.

The difference is how far away from being hunter-gathers each society has been when the collaps occured.
The romans were about two steps away.
We are light years away.
Our technology is so advanced in terms of our being dependant on things rather than on ourselves to survive.
We suffer from a sever lack of patients. Nearly everything is based on how fast it gets to us, and if it goes beyond a certian time frame, then frustration ensues.

When the collaps comes it will be far more devistating than any other collapse before it.
We have basicly put ourselves in a place that the things that will help us survive have become lost to several generations.

A prime example of this is the organic farm. Many, many years ago to farm with out the aid of chemicals or gentics people planted seed, and when it was time to harvest they did.
They had learned how to preserve the harvest from their parents and so it was something that was just part of life.
Today, the organic farm is somewhat of a unique thing, and most people arn't quite sure what the term organicly grown means.

Many children in this country believe that the only place to get real food is from the supermarket or some fast food place.
They have no idea that it comes out of the ground on a farm, and it goes to a processing plant and has things added to it to make it taste a certian way, and if it doesn't taste a certian way, then it's not good to eat.

If their parents grow a garden, and they have to pull weeds they see that as some terrible thing, some kind of punishment.
And would rather be spending their time doing more usefull things like playing video games or going to the mall or riding their bikes, or watching t.v.
For several generations the children growing up have had less and less direction, more and more access to serogate activites and end up as adults asking themselves at one point or another, is this all there is.
We are a nation that is saturated in bordom, and in a constant battle to keep ourselves entertained in one way or another.
We have lost the ablity to survive.

The people who have the most knowledge of survival are the thoes who live in rural areas, and the homeless. We have enslaved ourselves to money.
One way or another it rules this society. And thoes who choose to walk away and live delibertly are an odity.

One of the things that came up last night was a study done by an anthropologist who went into a village to study the habbits of a certian tribe of people.
They hunted, ate, played drums and spent hours laying in hammocs just looking up.
He asked one of the men if they ever got bored. The man had no idea what bordom was.
It was a foriegn idea to the people of the tribe.
They lived life, and knew what their life was and it was good.
Simple.

Bordom drives alot of people to find things to fill their lives because there is an empty space and they can't figure out why.
We've lost our ablity to survive and exchanged knowing who we are for a wandering state of discontent.

When this society collapes, there will be a kind of madness that the world has only seen in smaller degrees.
People will head for the larger cities where they have come to expect food and jobs are, and no one living in thoes cities will be safe.

When it comes, I want to be as far away from the populated areas as I can. I know some other people who feel the same way.
Maybe we will become a tribe. And once again gain what we've lost.

I don't know how soon it will occur, but it reminds me of Mt. Rainer, it's not a matter of if it will blow, it's a matter of when.

Things have a way of repeating themselves. The patterns may take on different colorings, but the underlaying pattern is still there.

Sometimes it's hard to reconize the familiar pattern at first because how it looks may be unfamiliar, but what tips you off that it's something familiar is the reconizable feelings that come with it.

Behaivor is a good example of this. If you've ever been observant of people that you know for a while, you can begin to reconize things that are part of a type of signiture of that person.
You can after awhile tell just by looking at them what they are looking for, or if their angry or sad or excited.

And if you continue to observe them you begin to notice even more subtle things that they keep doing over and over.
Like getting excited when they know that someone they like is comming to visit, or if something is comming up they really don't want to do.

It soon feels to that person like you can read their mind, that your on the same wave length as they are.
When in reality they were an object of deep study by you.
This happens between people when one is attracted to another person.

It's often not ment in a harmful way, and very often if the person who does this every time they meet someone they like it becomes a habbit that can be almost impossible to break.
And when that happens it can and sometimes does cause problems.

I've watched people for a long time. It's part of what I've done over the years. It's helped me be more aware of people around me and when someone is angry I can then give them space so that they can be angry as long as they need to and I don't end up in the middle of that anger.

It's also kept me for a long time from letting people too close. Now that doesn't mean that there arn't people I'm close to but I'm very careful as to who I let close.
Too many emotions comming at you can really mess with your life.
It's easier to watch from a distance and keep a clear perspective.

It's been hard too because I can see things that will attract themselves to certian type of people who tend to go looking for the same things over and over again and often with out realizing they are.

I can honestly say that I've ended up in more pain this way, than by all the stupid things I've ever done in my life.
Stupid things I can deal with. I know I did something stupid and now I have to face what the result is. It's simple.
I deal with thoes feelings in a different way than I do if I'm watching someone else doing stupid stuff and no matter what you try to do or say you know their going to do it all over again.
They don't listen, even though they ask everyone they know the age old question "Why do I keep doing this?"

The answer to that and many other puzzling life questions is this if you don't know yourself very well your gonna keep doing the same old things over and over again.

I've accused myself of talking too much, and so to alieveate the problem I have kept journals for several years now.
But how do you deal with too many thoughts?

I guess journal alot for that too.
The only problem is the end result is the same.
The words are still there, the thoughts are still there having ended up in the same place.

The really nice things about journals is that the person reading or listening can always walk away with out hurting anyone's feelings.
It's not so clean when the preson is right there in person.
It's awkward and people get that I've spent ten minuets here too long, now if the conversation were about something that interested me, than I could go on for hours...kind of look in their eye and body mannerisms.

I know I talk and think to much. And I know that I have my journals, so even when I get sick of the sound of my voice and I still need to get rid of the overflow I can come and write and then walk away in to sweet silence away from myself and all the overload I live alot of my life in.

I'm greatful for a place to dump it all. And no one ever has to read it or listen to me ever again, even me.

October is almost half over. The mad rush has begun. The crazed shopping has begun.
Events both large and small have begun to fill calandars everywhere and the race to find a parking spot will now commence.

This is the general condition of your local mall, wether mini or the massive grotesque collections of groups of stores crammed into a rather unique sudo art structure.

First comes halloween: candy, the perfect costume, feathers, glitter, foam rubber, glow in the dark lipstick, body paint, nail polish, rubber masks, fantasy to your hearts content.
Pumpkins disapear out of bins and off of stacks everywhere,
faster than they come in, at least for a little while. The prices drop and then after the day is over, you'll find bits and parts and peices of the fleshy orange critters strewn about.
Part of the festivities.

Then there is a bit of a lull on the shopper's front, not much though, because the early bird shoppers for christmas are on the look out for gifts. Tons and tons of gifts. The decorating hounds are on the look out for just the right look for thanksgiving, and the prices on turkies drop like rocks. If you like turkey meat it's a good time to stock up. 7 or 8 birds outta do you for a while.
Cans of cranberry sauce, and canned pumpkin disapear off grocery store shelves in a quickened pace, and it gets faster as thanksgiving approaches.

"Do we have enough? You remember last year, we ran out of this or that long before the turkey was done, and we need more pies!"
The clean-up after dinner is a nightmear, and considering that alot of people are on the verge of falling asleep because they've eaten more on this one day than most of them do durring the entire week before, the idea that someone has to do the dishes is not a subject of popluar disgussion at this point.
"Is there another pumpkin pie? There's a great movie comming on and I'm in the mood for desert. I can't move, but desert sounds great. The dishes arn't going anywhere"

The morning after feels a little groggy, and maybe a little like a hangover, a food hangover.

But wait, the biggest shopping day of the year is at hand! All thoes sales! Everything is on sale! Buy! Buy! Buy! It's the time of the year to max out the credit cards! But we don't care, we have the next 12 months to get them paid off so we can do it all again.

Stuff, things, gagets, candy, jewerly, clothes, books...more stuff, the perfect gift for some realtive you've been informed will becomming to your house for christmas and they've decited to come and see you because they haven't seen you since you were this tall, and on and on and on.

There are shoppers everywhere. It makes one wonder where all these people were stashed durring the rest of the year.
Do they only come out after thanksgiving?
Shelves are cleared out faster than you can think, and there is an overload of people getting crabbier and crabbier as the big day approaces.

Then there are the parties, and school vacations to think about.
If you have children, when it comes time for vacation to begin, you'll have these people in different degrees of shortness who are more excited than you can deal with, sleeping less and less the closer it gets.
The activities planned at this time of year for them may include driving arround the local neighborhood or downtown to look at all the lights.

Ah yes the lights. So many lights in so many varities that it looks a little surreal.
And going and visiting, and hoping you can keep the yonger ones from becomming little monsters who need a nap!
You need a nap most of the time, because this is more excitment than the rest of the year combined.

Then there is the post office visit. The fine art of getting thoes cards which weigh a ton and packages from your car to the over tired worker at the counter who looks half crazed and yet so composed most of the time.
But the festive dressings and trappings of your surroundings not to mention the music of the season which has been going on since thanksgiving is something to help take your mind off the fact that your arms are aching by the time you reach the counter to get your packages off and into the mail.

It gets worse if you are among the thousands who wait until the last minuet to take care of this holiday tradition...

The big day approaches, the children haven't slept for days, the kitchen is something of a constant disaster area as well as where ever you've been wrapping gifts and there are pine needles that will have to be contended with for the next six months if you have carpet.

It desends. And desends. And desends. The food, the unwrapping of gifts, paper everywhere, bits and peices and children who by this time are long past on over load, and you.

There is one more holiday that comes new year's day, and the party the night before...almost an after thought after all of this.

There is so much that is lost in the process of all of this.
So much that isn't considered. These days set aside to celebrate something important in our history, and culture, and many others as well from many other countries should be more than the trappings.
They should be....they are, but it's so easy to get caught up in all the stuff so much that we forget, there are thoughts given to thoes things as we go on our merry way.

And then there are the thousands who have so very little as they watch the holidays come and go, and the people who are alone. Depression desends on them.
And sometimes it gets the best of some of them, and sucides is the result.

Every year we have a choice as to how we spend the time before us. Thoes days comming up and all the stuff that goes with them are comming up too.
How we choose to celebrate them is up to us.

I love each of the holidays, but the madness that comes with them...no, I don't love that.
It makes people forget what's really important. People go into debt for things that will get broken and lost and exchanged for a bigger better toy.
And for what? For why?
It shouldn't be the only time of the year that we remember to love and care about people...that should be all year long.
There is far too much emphasis on gifts and parties and food.
And this year, it seems that many of thoes we love will be overseas in a war torn country, doing what they've been told is an important thing.

Many won't be home for any of the up comming holidays. Many will die.

The hearts and souls of many will bare the scars of loss for the rest of their lives.

Yes it's that time of year again, only this year it won't be the same. And after the upcomming election it won't be the same. It could end up being worse.

It doesn't really matter who gets elected after all. They will face the mess that this administration has created, and if the country chooses the same administration my fear is that it will only get worse, a reflection of viet nam just in time for the holidays.
Just in time for the rest of our lives...

I woke up early again this morning, thinking about the year ahead, and this next week.

It was sort of a mix that pushed me out of a deep sleep I think because the feeling of being overwhelmed by the idea of what's next or what now and is this going to be all there is seemed to be playing in my head like some kind of record with a huge scratch where the needle got stuck and no one bothered to stop it, or turn it off.

Last Monday as I finsihed my work day I thought, I've got two days off, and then one on and then one off, and made plans of how I wanted to spend the time and what I wanted to accomplish.
I should have made some kind of list, because nothing I planned to do got done.
Tuesday, I got called into work to fill in because someone who just got hiered where I work quit.

On my days off I it seems that I end up just passing time, and then wishing I had been more productive.
My ambition up and left sometime ago.

I had goals of things I wanted to accomplish, but most of the time I end up sidetracked from accomplishing them. And this being the start of another year for me I woke up with this feeling.
And it felt like it was going to soffocate me.

My personal new year begins with the day after my birthday, and each year as the end apporaches I tend to think about the past 12 months and try to see what I've accomplished.
I did alot last year. But goal accomplishing wasn't high on the list.

One of my life goals has been to make a living off my art. It's been one of the things that has always been there, and I've been working tord that one for a long time.
But I'm not any closer to it than I was a year ago, or even two years ago.

The short term goals I accomplished last year were these:
I got to see both my kids graduate, one from highschool, one from university, thoes were a month apart.

To escape from one of the most emotionally devistating places on earth with my sanity in tact.

Getting a job, so that living on the streets or staying somewhere with no options or means of changing things wouldn't be how each day started.

Two other things that happened that weren't goals, but good things were the two one woman art shows that I ended up having that were very sucessful.
The work was well recieved and that too me by surprise completely.
Until three years ago I viewed my art as nothing more than glorified refrigerator art.

That's it.
But each of thoes was huge to me. Each of them ment that I was more than what everyone in my past told me and believed I was capable of.

This year. I don't know. I have things I would like to accomplish, but have no ambition or drive right now.
The dreans that used to drive me and feed my soul seem to have gone to sleep.
I hope they wake up because I don't want this to be all there is.
Making it through two weeks and then getting a paycheck, and putting the money tord bills and hoping that I've my part of things covered.
I don't want the rest of my life to be just this.

I have started painting again. That, over the last 10 months has been speratic at best.
I've been approached about when I'm going to do my next show, and I can't give any answer. I don't have enough new work done to have enough to put one together.

Even though I love painting, and creating art, it's something essential to my existance, I have no ambition even for that.
I keep thinking that I feel so bruised inside and so disconnected and so disorganized that making goals and accomplishing them is going to be an impossible task.
Like trying to sort socks in a mountian of socks.
And even if you get a few pairs together, by the time you've got thoes done, there is another mountian waiting for you to start on.

I want to do more than just one day at a time, and be satisfied with getting through the day. That's not enough. The problem arises with the thought of what to set as a goal.
There isn't anyone that I can sit down with and bounce things off of.
Everyone around me is living their lives, however they've chosen to, and what I do or don't do, doesn't change anything they do or don't do.

This last week I got two job offersm out of the blue. I sought people out for advise. I needed help sorting through everything that what ever choice I was going to make involved.
The only answer I got back, with one exception, was that I needed to do what was best for me.
It hit me. I don't have a clue. I realized that I've spent the majority of my life doing what's best for someone else.
What's best for me never entered my thoughts or affected my actions.
I've done most of what I've done in my life becuase of someone else.
The one thing I did last year that was baised on what was best for me was getting out of the place that was killing me inside, and threatened to distroy everything sane about me.

I've never been in a place where I was given so many options, and was being persued because someone thought I had some kind of value, other than what I could do for them.

I really don't know what's best for me. How do you make goals when your life has been focused on what's best for everyone else and you've just gone with that?

No wonder I'm feeling overwhelmed. To me my life has very little value when I'm not doing something that makes life a little easier for someone else.
I know it's possible to change how a person does things, or why they do them at any point in life, but to think about what's best for me, that's just plain weird from my perspective.
It feels kind of like being amputated from what I was created for.
And what makes it worse, is that no matter what I will choose from now on, it won't make a difference one way or the other.
I don't know how to see it from any other perspective.
It's something I never learned how to do for myself.

Life lessons like this are ususally very painful.
The only thing I do know, is that I don't know if I'm ready for this.

The bigger, better more wide open, have more stuff, obtain..to wit, to be a more complete individual.
Or so it would seem.
To expand, to open, to take on and then step back and consider the experience.

That's what gateways are about. The things we participate in that lead us to more.
A bigger vista, or in some cases, a wider variety of things.

Anything can be a gateway. I think what defines something as a gateway would be the question does it make us want more.

We have this friend who loves tuna fish. The stuff that comes in a can. He said that the fresh stuff is too rich, and so he went back to the tuna in a can.
He would eat it several times a week.
One day while he was eating and we had been talking about the movie "reefer madness" and all the laws concerning industral hemp, and how it used to be leagal and the farmers in the midwest were encouraged to grow it durrning world war 2, I decited that tuna was a gateway fish.

And told him so. We laughed at the idea that tuna could be looked at that way, and even thought that it would make a great t-shirt.
I would wear one, and on the back it would say something like,
tuna leads to other fish, or this is your mind, this is your mind on tuna, and have a frying pan and then one with a can of tuna in the pan right next to it.

Sort of poking fun at all the hysteria put out there by our goverment.
Things that don't work, such as DARE. It was intended as a drug intervention education program, but all the people that I know who went through it said that all it did for them was show them what the drugs they eventually ended up trying looked like.

There was some disgussion as to what the best deterant might be to keep kids drug free, and the general concenses was to have them watch "Requiem for a Dream"
That show the reality of what happens to people who use drugs and get hooked. It's pretty intense, but the message is clear.
And effective.
I know that it had a huge impact on me, and everyone who has seen it has been greatly distrubed by it, and if they were thinking about thoes drugs, it made them walk away from the idea.

The thing about gateways is that there is only desire involved, for more, that's why they are gateways. And to close the door to the gateway, the end result must be seen, not the tools to get through the gateway.

The desire to have what others have can be a gateway as well.
I think about all the recient posts I've read that have to do with relationships, and it occured to me that if one were to watch the end results of the relationships around them, and then make a choice based not on peer pressure, but rather the end result, there might not be so many people getting disapointed and hurt.
just a thought.

I'm not sure how I feel about gateways. It's a mix I guess.
I think what determines how I feel about a particular one is whether it's something good or not.
But then learning lessons obtained by walking through gateways arn't a bad thing...so you see my delemia in all of this.

I guess you could say, to gateway or not to gateway, that is the quandery of the moment.

I was reading the back of a package of cheese snacks and the list of indgredients was amazing. Most cheese type snacks have msg to preserve the flavor and enhance it.

For some who have an intollerence for the stuff it can be like a bad hangover almost immeadately.

This cheesy stuff didn't have msg, which was nice. One less chemical to deal with. There is enough additives as it is in most of the food that is bought and consumed in any grocery store to fill a really good chemestry set. Minus the microscope of course.

Now I'm rather partical to cheese and there is very few cheeses I've met that I didn't like.
Some of the one's that made the "This is pukey don't make me eat this" list are as follows:

Brie. This has no taste, initally. But then it hits, the flavor of old musty house. And it doesn't get any better.
I know why people drink wine with this cheese. It's so that the after taste won't be noticed.

Raw Blue cheese. In salad dressing it's amazing. Just the right amount of tang to keep any kisser smiling while they crunch their way through the undercoating of food.
But by it's self. Wow! Talk about a pungant punch in the kisser!
It was too much. Now I like sharp cheese but man, this stuff is too much.

Limbburger. Enough said. This should be kept away from anything that will pick up odor.
I have tried several times to get past that smell to try some, but no luck so far. Maybe sometime when I have a really bad cold I'll give it a whirl. After I'm good and drunk too.

Munster. It's far too bland. Not bad when it's got something to help it out.

Cheese is an interesting thing. It's a mold, but when it goes bad it gets mold and you have to cut the mold off the mold.

When it gets hard it cracks, but the kind with holes you eat and that cheese, being swiss, goes great with turkey and mustard on lots o' grain bread.

There are cheese wheels. I could see that on a car...when your driving cross country and get hungry, you just stop and eat at the wheel...no pun intended there.

There are wedges, slices, bits, spreads, logs, chunks, and it comes grated, shredded and sometimes dried.

We eat it on pizza, salads, sandwhiches, by it's self, on apples on toast, with meat or with out. It's very versitile.
Kind of like having a peice of clothing in your closet that goes with a lot of other stuff.

I wonder what it looks like under a microscope. I wonder if the little cheese atoms are slower because of how solid cheese is.
It's high in fat, and protine, and makes an excellent additive to snack foods. Like the one I was looking at the back of the bag of.