Ridiculous Contentions

Those people who say that Sarah Palin should not be Vice-President because the job would take her away from her responsibilities as a mother, "She should stay at home with those five kids, especially the baby with Down's Syndrome," let's be a little less insane in our outlook. For one thing, we could say that about any mother. If what you really want is for all mothers to stay at home and take care of their children, say that, don't somehow make this some kind of unique requirement for Sarah Palin who just happens to be running for office for a party that you are against. And anyway, she is already a Governor and she seems to function there just fine. Is Vice-President that much worse, or would take up that much more time? It might even be easier. Some Vice-Presidents have felt that they have very little to do. Honestly, I really wouldn't think that she would be any more over-worked than any of the rest of us (that is to say, those of us who ARE overworked).

And besides, other women in powerful positions have raised children. Margaret Thatcher, for example, had children. And Lady Di. Few women on Earth have had busier schedules than the much-beloved British Princess. Jackie Kennedy was a pretty busy First Lady (the way she handled being First Lady was like it was a very busy public office), yet everyone remembers how little John John was during President Kennedy's presidency, and Caroline wasn't that much older. Those are just a few names that pop into my head right now.

Anyway, isn't it up to Sarah Palin to decide for herself? One should judge her fitness for office on her character, background, and her stand on the issues, not whether someone thinks she should have a career at all, or not.

Next, regarding John McCain and some subtle hints I have been reading about concerning a potential "Swift Boating" of him concerning his POW years. The argument against him goes that since he was the son of a Naval Admiral whom they would have freed, yet he would not leave while others of his company remained prisoners, the Viet Cong went easy on in him and, in fact, he made a deal with them and betrayed his country by recording anti-American propaganda spots for the enemy and also shared so many American military secrets regarding bombing targets that the U.S. had to give up their bombing plans which had therefore been rendered ineffective.

They agreed to go easy on him? Have those who make this claim ever watched him give a speech? He can only with difficulty move his arms and it seems that he is unable to reach them up to even shoulder-level. This seems to indicate that rather than having had an easy time of it as a POW, his body was actually permanently damaged from the experience.

The Viet Cong's offer to set the son of an Admiral free...I wonder if he had accepted their offer, would they have actually gone through with it, or were they just messing with him? I think they figured he was probably their most valuable prisoner and they would go to any lengths to torture as much information out of him as they could. If he sometimes broke and actually revealed secrets, if he DID, who among us might have done better? Obama? Biden?

McCain seems to have the admiration of those other prisoners who were there with him. Surely if he had betrayed his country or his fellow prisoners, or in some other way dishonored himself, somebody by now would have stepped forward and revealed it, or have I somehow missed that? Instead what we hear is that McCain kept the prisoners' morale up and helped them get through to another day. That's what could be called "hope in action", which goes beyond hope in words.

Lao-tzu On Leaving The People Alone

The other day I was doing what I sometimes do when I feel I need an extra "oomph" or some hope and inspiration, picking a page at random from some important book or other in my library to see what it has to tell me. This time the book I chose was the Tao Te Ching, the Stephen Mitchell translation. Stephen Mitchell is a poet and a foreign language genius whom I have had the privilege of meeting. The Tao Te Ching, although rather short, is a book I have only taken piecemeal, perhaps because each selection in it requires a very great deal of contemplation in order to appreciate, so I an unable to run right through it like I might a light novel.

The selection that I opened to was number 57:

"If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes as common as grass."

Wow, that was written 2,500 years ago by one of the top four or five wisest men ever, and yet we STILL have to battle Marxism/Leninism and Fascism (which people still think are "new, enlightened" ideas), right here in the United States of America.

The Leader?

I really dislike the improper phrase, “the leader of the free world” when applied to the President of the United States and wish people would stop using it (as people often do when referring to McCain and Obama as potentially being), unless their agenda is to manipulate people into either assuming that we have a dictatorship or thinking that we ought to have a one-world government. This phrase indicates a failure to understand the United States Constitution, in which our federal government was designed with THREE EQUAL BRANCHES that provide checks and balances to each other, the Executive Branch (the President and his cabinet), the Legislative Branch (the two houses of Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate), and the Judicial Branch (the Supreme Court). No one branch is superior to the others, and therefore no one individual within one of the branches is superior to the others, and certainly not the President. The President is merely the lead administrator of the laws that Congress passes, and he also is supposed to serve as a sort of federal “host” to visiting foreign officials and serve as Commander and Chief of the military. The enumerated powers of the President are actually very few. (Americans really should carefully reread the Constitution). A person like President Bush expanded his powers WAY beyond what is constitutional, and therefore nothing of what he did along these lines is valid and actually may be legally ignored. Nothing unconstitutional is a valid law in the United States.

Also, in the United States the state is the sovereign, not the federal government, which means that as citizens of the United States, we are citizens of our individual state FIRST, and then the United States as a whole. The people of today, being generally weak and not self-reliant like the early Americans, tend to think in terms of monarchies or dictatorships (they’re always looking to somebody to rule them, which is why they trend toward centrally planned economies), do not fully understand the concept of the state being sovereign, but the point of the federation was to ease interstate trade and make more efficient our relationships with foreign countries, not to create a new country that overtook the power of the individual states. Not one state would have ratified the Constitution if by their doing so they had relinquished their sovereignty.

If any government executive should be more important to the individual citizen, it would be the governor of their state, not the President of the United States, but actually the governor is really not too different at the state level than the president is at the federal level.

In the United States, the PEOPLE are the true government, not those elected as our representatives. So if there are “leaders,” they are each one of us individually, and we really ought to take that role very seriously.

And what’s this idea of “the free world” that the President is supposedly the leader of? He certainly isn’t the leader of the United Kingdom or Australia or Germany or Japan, or any other “democratic” or similar country, many of which, by the way, are actually currently more free than the United States. They have their own leaders, chosen by them.

Among all the very serious problems that this country has, I would say that at the very bottom of it is people accepting, and using, this concept of the President as being the Leader of the Free World. Not only is that wrong, we better hope it never becomes true.

Heat Rises, Water Seeks Low

I’ve been saying for quite a while now that there is nothing like the death of your parents to bring home the idea of your own mortality. But now I have to rephrase that to “there is nothing like your own mortality to bring home your own mortality”, or I should say “nothing like getting a somewhat-sorta-maybe-but-probably-not-quite-yet death sentence”. However, let me quickly add for those who might happen to worry, what Mark Twain said, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” And I really do feel quite fine today in a way that I think is actually quite realistic.

So, what’s this all about? For those who just want the Cliff Notes, simply glance at this entry’s tags. But for those who’d like to read the story (especially those who may be of advanced age), which may or may not be interesting and telling, please read on.

“It all began,” I think, with a prayer, very sincerely asked and very truly wanting an answer, which was last Monday night. I had gotten all cozy under my covers and surrounded by several comforting pillows, when I called on God, Jesus, my Higher Self, or anyOne along those lines who would provide me with an answer. My question was on the order of “What is really wrong with me, why can’t I get anything done any more, why do I have no energy, why no matter what I eat, or how much, do I feel constantly ravenous, why do I have very little hope that anything will get better or why do I believe that I can’t do anything about my problems, please let me know, perhaps in a dream, but in whatever other way You know is best. Amen.”

Well, I did end up with a peculiar little dream, something I didn’t quite understand (not even now), but which somehow did seem important. I dreamt I was talking with a black woman who had known and marched alongside Martin Luther King. I said something to her that now seems extremely lame, but at the time (in the dream) felt like a revelation. I said, “I think the way to Martin Luther King’s heart was junk food.”

Instead of her slapping me or something, she said, “Well you know, he was on the road so much, marching or giving sermons or visiting local churches, and riding busses, that it was hard for him to get a decent meal in a hurry, little cafes wouldn’t serve black people, well, you can imagine how it was, so it seemed he lived on chips and Debbie Cakes and the like.”

Then I woke up. What the heck? However, it did humanize Martin Luther King and also made him seem like a good and dedicated man, to the extent of self-sacrifice. Why that would be important was that lately I had been reading so many various negative conspiracy theories of every stripe that it seemed to show that evil existed absolutely everywhere behind every historical event, and that virtually every person we think of as a hero was actually an agent of some demonic force or another, working to wreak our destruction.

The problem is that we don’t know, really, do we? I mean, if we weren’t there, we only have the word of historians, whose accounts conflict, sometimes diametrically. But what fascinates me is that there WERE people who KNEW, who WERE there, and something like a “universal knowledge field” has that actual information, if only we could tap into it. (It reminds me of when a house I had been renting had been burglarized and the sheriff came to search for fingerprints, he took a look at my dog who was sitting there wagging her tail and he said to her, “Who did this girl, huh?” We both KNEW that SHE knew who the burglar was, but unless we could accomplish a “Vulcan mind lock,” we’d have no way to get the information. But something in the Universe, be it human alive or dead, or animal, or even plant…KNOWS the truth about something!

For example, the concept that America didn’t have to enter into World War II, that it was only evil international financiers who wanted it and when they got their political puppet FDR into office, he manipulated events that caused the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor and then it all began. We could have actually stayed out of the war, because we otherwise weren’t any danger.

However, I remembered back to my father telling us of his life months prior to his death about how he was selected by the Navy to learn about and then set up a program of demagnetizing our ships so that enemy torpedoes wouldn’t have an easy homing to them. For one of his first experiments, he was working at a naval base in South Carolina and his work interrupted an exercise the commander of that naval base had planned. The commander was fuming, saying, “When I find the guy who did this to me, I’m gonna punch him in the nose!” However, the commander changed his tune when Dad’s tests revealed that the Germans had seeded Charleston Harbor with something like 40 mines! (Dad later ended up with a naval base of his own to command, on Okinawa, and his work continued to save the lives of countless American sailors.)

While this is a cute and proud story in our family’s history, I realized that it also showed that the United States had not been isolated from global events concerning this war. I don’t think we hear much about German submarines in the Atlantic coming so far as to mine an American harbor, but my father’s own history demonstrates, that as far as I was concerned, this was an actual attack on the U.S. on its EAST coast by Germans, so it wasn’t all about Pearl Harbor, and it seems that our entering into the war WAS based on truly being in danger, not due to the manipulation of financiers or a trick by FDR.

Now, regarding Martin Luther King whom I had the dream about, a dream about him might have been timely in that we had just recently had Martin Luther King day and the Internet is filled with articles about how King was a Communist and a womanizer who loved prostitutes, some of whom he was violent with, and that King never wrote a word that wasn’t plagiarized. Hum. One of the problems with all this is that even if it were true, as a symbol, Martin Luther King provides hope and self-esteem for a whole race of Americans and it may not be a good idea to destroy that symbol. However, I’m going to talk a little bit more about this later in this piece.

Tuesday afternoon, I had an appointment to see my doctor. All I wanted him to do was write a referral for me to have a colonoscopy, a test I never had had and didn’t really WANT to have, but which I finally had been convinced by friends at work that it would be beneficial for me to have.

However, my doctor said that he hadn’t seen me for several years, so since I was there, he wanted to do some blood work on me. Okay, some blood work wouldn’t hurt.

After the blood work, he said, “I think your blood pressure might be a little bit high, let me take your blood pressure again.” The nurse had taken my blood pressure when I first sat down, I think it was 128 over 90. My doctor said “90 is a little high, it ought to be between 70 and 80.” When he took it again, this time the lower figure was 82. Still slightly above normal, but not too bad.

Then he tried to take my pulse, but seemed to be having trouble with it. So then he put his stethoscope against my chest and listened for quite some time. When he finished, he said, “Your heart rate is irregular, you’re going to need an EKG.” So the nurse came back in and gave me an EKG.

I laid there calmly, thinking that the EKG wouldn’t really show anything bad, but once it was over, the doctor said that while it was serious and that I needed to be seen by a cardiologist, it wasn’t so serious that it was an emergency.

What? Not so serious that it was an emergency? But I felt fine, more or less, or at least I felt more fine before hearing this information than I felt afterward! Anyway, the doctor wrote out a referral slip for the colonoscopy that I had wanted-but-not-really-wanted, and then another one for a cardiologist that I really didn’t want. As for the reason I needed to see a cardiologist, he wrote down “atrial fibrillation,” which I quickly wrote down on a piece of paper for myself so that I could look it up later.

The nurse explained to me that the medical group had a new procedure regarding referrals—she was to fax them the referral slips, and then I would receive appointments by mail. Well, that seemed okay. Waiting for the colonoscopy was fine, and as far as the cardiologist goes, maybe this delay would give me some time for this thing to fix itself on its own.

I was eager to get back to work so that I could look up on the Internet just what an “atrial fibrillation” was. But as I drove up the freeway, I was thinking of the defibrillator that we have hanging on the wall in our building’s lobby, which both scared me (fibrillation is something dangerous enough that we bought an expensive emergency machine for), and gave me hope (this is something that maybe an electric jolt can fix instantly).

However, reading about it on the Internet did not put my mind at ease. An atrial fibrillation is a condition in which the upper two heart chambers do not pump the blood properly—the movement is out of sync with the normal heart rhythm and the blood, instead of being solidly pushed down into the lower chambers, kind of swirls around in mild turbulence in the upper chambers before finding its way down into the lower chambers. The main danger of this is that the blood can pool and then clot in the upper chambers, and then the clots might cause a stroke later. A person with an atrial fibrillation is seven times more likely to suffer a stroke.

A second danger is that the arrythmia will precipitate a heart attack.

So, while I was not necessarily in any immediate danger, I nevertheless now had a heightened risk of stroke or heart attack.

Okay, so how do they fix this thing?

This is where I didn’t think any of it sounded too good. Depending upon a variety of factors, the cardiologist may want to find out what the cause of this is (yeah, I am sure all the tests are horrible). However, none of the usual causes seemed to relate to me: recent heart surgery, smoking, alcoholism, a heart valve problem, cancer, or cardiovascular disease. Of course, I may have some sort of cancer, or cardiovascular disease, but somehow I kind of doubt it. The way I look at it, this is one of those conditions that could be caused by any number of things, including in a major way, STRESS, which also means that maybe I have a way I can fix it myself.

Other than working on whatever could be the cause of this (dealing with any cancer, for example), the major task is to reset the heart to a correct rhythm and to cut down on the danger of stroke from blood clots. Blood thinning medication is what they prescribe for cutting down on the blood clots…of course, this is systemic, which means that a major healing mechanism of the body will be messed with. (Don’t cut yourself while shaving!) Resetting the heart rhythm to normal is attempted by various methods, including the following:

Oral heart rhythm medication
Intraveinous administration of a heavy shock of medication while in a hospital
Electrical shock that stops the heart—like shown in the movies with the two external contacts (paddles)—and then it is hoped that it will start again in correct rhythm
A more focused electrical shock applied inside the heart via a device threaded through a vein starting near the groin

Of course, none of these intense rhythm-resetting methods (the shocks, and so on) will necessarily mean that the rhythm will stay rhythmic. So it is mostly expected that a person with this condition will be taking two different heart medications (blood thinning and rhythm regulation) for the rest of his life. One must note, however, that all of the choices of heart medications carry side effects and it is a matter of balancing the importance of the heart issue with the importance (or relative unimportance) of various other organs. In other words, the quality of life is going to be diminished in one way or another.

Then there is the matter of what happens in case the rhythm cannot be corrected by any of the above-mentioned methods. Then either a pacemaker or a defibrillator is installed into the body under the skin. Of these two options, the defibrillator is the worse, in that what it is doing is administering a periodic shock to the heart, which has been described as being like a kick in the chest periodically. How would you like going through life with that?

I’ve not read of any suffering coming from the pacemaker except for the fact that you would have this machine like an iPod nano inside of you clearly outlined underneath your skin (there goes any weak hope of ever regaining your youthful beauty, you’re clearly way over the hill now!) and sometimes in order for the pacemaker to work properly, the section of the heart that naturally tries to control the heart rhythm will have to be destroyed so that it doesn’t interfere with the work of the pacemaker, thus there would never be any more hope of a natural correction.

A pacemaker does require special care though (watch out for those “No Pacemakers Enter Here” signs!), plus you have to go in for outpatient surgery periodically to get the batteries changed. If you can emotionally get past the concept of this and think, “Wow, the amazing advances of medical science, what a cool machine,” your momentary elation can be let down by this frequently-seen sentence describing this heart condition, with pacemaker or without:

“People with this condition can live for several years.”

Several years, huh? How many are those? I remember as a kid thinking, “a couple means two, so ‘a few’ must mean three.” I guess “several” must mean four. I have four more years?

As I read all this stuff, I realized that the answer to my prayer of the previous night might be this, not the Martin Luther King dream, but I went into the office of my friend Kate to tell her about all this, including the prayer and the Martin Luther King dream, and she wisely pointed out that the dream combined the concepts of, well, “dream”, as in “I have a”, and “heart”, and maybe there was even a message in there about food, or nutrition, or all the things about loneliness, needing comfort, travel, freedom, heroism, discrimination, non-violent revolution, and other huge concepts. I thought that this observation was very wise and it has given me much food for thought.

I also went in to talk to my friend Monique, who is black, who said that gee, she had never had a dream with Martin Luther King, which reminded me of several decades ago when I had had an earth-shaking dream featuring Paramahansa Yogananda and I was telling a Yogananda devotee about this and she said, “I have never had a dream featuring Yogananda, you are surely blessed by the Master.”

But if I was blessed by Martin Luther King in this dream, I have also been blessed by a minister in an African Methodist Episcopalian church in North Carolina, who changed his whole sermon one Sunday morning when he saw me and my friend Steve (both of us white) sitting in church with Cleo (who was black), who had been my mother’s “nanny” (the word used back then was “nurse”) and whom Mom grew up loving as much she loved her own mother. I had told my mother that on a trip around the country I was taking with Steve (we ended up being gone for three months and traveled 15,000 miles around the U.S.), when we got to Asheville, I wanted to visit Cleo, what did my mother think, should we take her out to dinner? “No,” Mom said, “take her to church. She is too old to get there by herself, now, and that is something she will really love.” Mom’s idea was perfect, and not only did Cleo love it, so did the whole congregation, and the minister in his sermon used our presence as an example of how Martin Luther King’s dream was surely coming true.

I want to stop here right now for a moment and point out something in case it wasn’t obvious—think of the relationship between my mother as a little girl and my mother’s “nurse” Cleo. Cleo bathed and fed and put my mother to bed every night. Cleo listened to my mother’s prayers. Cleo held my mother’s hand every day when she walked to school, and it was Cleo who was waiting there at the school when Mom came out, to take her by the hand and walk her home after school. Of course my mother loved Cleo and of course Cleo loved my mother, but this was a little white girl and a black woman living in the South prior to the 1960s. How were they able to express their love, or even have any kind of equal relationship back then? This could only be a mutual yearning and something that it was hoped was understood, but never easily shared. It was stuff like this that was a pain of our country’s own version of apartheid that hurt both races.

So to me when we think about the work done by Martin Luther King, it really doesn’t matter if in his personal life he was a hero or not (although I am going to think that those “anti-King conspiracy theorists” aren’t really right), it was what he helped to accomplish that was the important thing, the essential thing, and that is where our focus needs to be.

As I drove home Tuesday night, wondering if I could die any minute, or were my remaining years to be years of suffering and effectively chained to the cardiological medical establishment (no, say, sailing around the world on an indefinite adventure like the traveling I had done so much on land), what I felt, instead, was love flowing through my heart, and I felt that no matter what this was all about, it was likely that part of God’s message to me in answer to my prayer was that I need to express love more and more; that I could be an imperfect channel (like Martin Luther King maybe was), and yet what comes through is what it is all about.

That instead of me making a list of all the things that I want to do before I die, now that time is diminishing, maybe what I need to do is to think of what that ONE thing is that I need to do and forget all the rest. So far, I feel that if I have to face God and explain what my accomplishments were in this life, I don’t have too much to say. I had to think a little bit about what I even could say, and what I came up with was, “Well, everywhere I went, with everyone I met, I tried to leave a little blessing, which might have only been a bright smile that said that I honored who they were, but I always tried to treat everyone with love if I could.” Would that be enough? That I think that it is not might be a partial cause of all the stress that I have been feeling lately; like I am simply wasting time, going through the motions of life, being a nice person, sure, but not getting done what I am really supposed to do.

I have often wondered if God, or my Higher Self, might simply take me out. “You’re not getting anywhere, you’re just a waste of breath.” Now it looks like the means to do so was easily there, and it was now up to me to decide whether I should relax into the route of death, or else counteract it making meaningful progress. My choice, die, or live.

When I got home, I searched on the Internet for a video of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which I easily found, since we just recently had had Martin Luther King day and Google would therefore take me straight to it. I hadn’t known the full length of that speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial as the keynote of the March on Washington…we are usually given only the last part of it. It was very wonderful to watch it in its entirety, every word of it true, and when he comes to the concluding “I have a dream” part of it, this man was not reading, this man could not have previously written this and then memorized it word for word, it seems so clear to me that Martin Luther King was channeling this, being a vessel of inspiration, speaking this straight from where all true wisdom comes from. And I needed to reconnect with that kind of communication.

That night before going to bed, I decided to listen to my heartbeat with a stethoscope that I have. I’m not sure if that was a good idea or not, but I guess I needed to hear it for myself, even though it was kind of scary.

I’ve heard my own heartbeat many times before, and before it was always a steady and clear “bump bump…bump bump…bump bump…”, something the miracle of which I was always so appreciative of but could not grasp what it is that makes such a thing happen, that this organ can continue to beat steadily like this without let-up for ones entire life. But this time, it was more of a weak, muddy, and confused beat that I couldn’t even take my own pulse, because I couldn’t determine where it began and where it ended. There were no beginning and ending demarcations, and there was no resting inbetween.

I put my hand over my heart and said to it, “Poor sweet thing, what has happened to you, and more importantly, what can we do to straighten you out or to give you what you need?” From hearing it, I was surprised that I could even be still alive, that on the outside I could get up, walk around, and feel normal. But then I realized that even a car whose timing is out of whack, with the cylinders operating a confused four-stroke pattern, can still lurch down the road. But not for very long, and not very far.

I blamed only myself for this crisis. Wasn’t I the one who had been saying for so long that (certain aspects of) “this job hurts my heart”, or “this apartment is killing me”? Wasn’t I the one who realized that I was suffering in so many significant areas of my life and needed to make some major changes, but had no idea what changes to make, or how to make them, or could not find the courage to make them? For so long my mind had been a turmoil of trapped indecision and now my heart was reflecting that very turmoil by swirling my life force in a whirlpool of ineffectual turbulence.

You sincerely ask God for an answer, and you will get it.

Obviously this week at work was a very tough one and just about the only value of it was my interaction with other people. Also, I kept thinking that as long as I was expressing some form of love and blessing to others, I would stay alive.

I don’t want to give the idea that I was being completely fearful of death. Instead, I thought more of my mother, who had suffered during the last several decades of her life, but somewhat prior to her death had revealed to my brother that she was thankful she had a heart condition, because now she had a “way out.” And, indeed, she did die peacefully in the night and despite all her very serious physical problems, it was, ultimately, her heart who had taken her out. So I felt that, like my mother, I now had my own “way out,” if I wanted it, but that it, itself, wasn’t going to be the agency making the choice.

I wonder if most people don’t really fear death, itself, but just fear having a painful death? If they could just close their eyes and drift away to a better world, that might be something that they would actually like, except for the fact that in this boxing match that we call life, they may not be quite ready to throw in the towel, but want to keep on fighting for a win that they have, after all, worked all their life for.

So that’s how I am viewing it.

Thursday or Friday morning, I woke up with what I think is a fantastic idea:

Acupuncture.

If we’re dealing with some kind of “electrical” forces that control the timing of the heartbeat, maybe stimulating certain acupuncture meridians is exactly what is called for. And a quick Internet check (I did a Google search on the key words “acupunture atrial fibrillation”) revealed that not only does acupuncture, itself, list among the maladies that it corrects heart arrhythmias, but that some western cardiologists have written articles stating that acupuncture has had success in resetting heart rhythms.

Now, while it had been several years between visits to my “regular” doctor, the doctor that I HAVE seen quite often (and who really has helped me every time) is who I call “My Chinese Doctor,” because he is both Chinese, and he practices Chinese Medicine.

Now there are some, of course, who would think of that as “quackery,” following the belief that ONLY in the realm of western “scientific” medicine are there any true answers, that all else is just placebo, mind games, superstition, or primitivism. But this is such an egocentric and maybe even xenophobic point of view, forgetting that a system like Chinese medicine rose up in a civilization that is far more ancient than our own and therefore its traditions have a validity on their own. Also, there is no such thing as “one condition, only one proper healing modality”; there are actually numerous healing methods that can and do work. I think it is severely limiting to follow only the “approved” medical course, especially when that “approved” medical course doesn’t offer you very much. And in my case, a lifetime of dangerous medicines that may help one organ while hurting several others doesn’t sound like the best course to follow if there are other options.

So I called my Chinese doctor, explained to him what was going on, and asked him if he thought acupuncture could help.

“Definitely, along with some herbs,” he said. So while I still hadn’t gotten my appointment from the cardiologist, my Chinese doctor was able to see me on Saturday.

It is interesting to go to him. He works out in Alhambra, where there is a quite a large Chinese population; in fact, I think the Chinese are the majority there. English is not his first language and when he does his examinations, he takes notes in Chinese. I think he probably doesn’t have a lot of patients who aren’t Chinese. Sometimes I have to work to interpret what he saying, which comes out almost like poetry, and by that I mean that I think Chinese is a very poetic language, which I base on how their written language is constructed. For example, the word for “autumn” is composed of the words “burning” and “season”. “China” is “center” “country” (duh…ones own place is at the center of the world). “Friendship” is “hand” “reaching” “moon”. And so on. I am assuming that their spoken language follows the same kind of construction.

I explained to him what I had learned about how western medicine handles atrial fibrillation, what it has to offer, and he shook his head and laughed, not derisively. “Western medicine is so drastic,” he said.

Where western medicine goes to one particular malady and works to correct THAT, quite often creating an imbalance in the rest of the organism, Chinese medicine works on the basis of creating a BALANCE in the system. My doctor told me that heart problems don’t arise all by themselves. For example, in my case, the kidneys are involved and it is necessary to work on those as well as the heart.

His examination consisted of his carefully taking my pulse on various sections of both wrists. His reading of the pulse on my left wrist made him say, “heart pump very weak.” His reading of the pulse on my right wrist made him say, “metabolism very slow.” Then he listened to my heart with a stethoscope, and he said “heart all floppy, starving, not pumping strong, malnourished, desperate, crying for help.” I said to him that what he said made me think of a fish that was taken out of the water and placed on the desk, “flopping around gulping for air, but in the case of my heart, it is gulping for nutrition”. He nodded, yes, that is a good explanation.

I reflected back on my original question to God about why I felt ravenous all the time, and the answer had something to do with “the way to Martin Luther King’s heart was through junk food,” which could be interpreted in a sort of Chinese language way as “loving heart not getting food it needs but taking weak comfort as substitute.” Something in my weary spirit was blocking the activity of my heart and I had been taking comfort in “escape” is how I read that.

Then my Chinese doctor examined my tongue and the first thing he said was “you didn’t eat breakfast?” Wow, he could see that? I told him that there is a coffee shop over in nearby San Marino that I wanted to treat myself to for breakfast, which I was going to do after my visit with him. I do NOT routinely skip breakfast…in fact, it is the one meal that I always insist that I get. I kind of hoped that he might pick up on the implications of that “treating myself to a breakfast there,” the meaning of which, underneath, was that I was not otherwise receiving a lot of love. Again, “the way to Martin Luther King’s heart” might be COMFORT FOOD (if he could get it). “Tongue very dry,” the doctor said.

He then asked me to curl my tongue up so that he could look underneath it. “Very dark blue,” he said, which he considered a very bad sign and confirmed for him the kidney connection.

In summary, Chinese Medicine style, he explained that I was imbalanced in my fire and water. “Fire rises,” he said, “water seeks to go low. In the body, like in nature.”

Okay, I got the idea that “heat rises,” and “water flows downhill to the low places.”

“Too much fire,” he said. “Water is prevented from going low.” I took this to mean that fluids in my body, such as my blood (but also could be lymph and other fluids) were having trouble circulating like they would like to and should, so things were sluggish in my metabolism, and not enough nutrients, oxygen, and the like, were being carried by the bloodstream into my heart at the rate they were needed, so the heart, which, of course, needs the benefits of what the blood brings as well as the rest of the body, was, itself suffering and therefore unable to do its job properly.

I gathered that this “water” problem was in the kidneys, and what the doctor wanted to do was “cool down the kidneys” as well as “clean up and purify the blood”, which would improve things all around. I asked him what would cause this problem in the kidneys, but he shrugged his shoulders and said “I don’t know, it just happens.” But rather than thinking that this was the hole in the Chinese Medicine system, I kind of chuckled and understood that yes, things DID happen. Maybe I wasn’t drinking enough water, or something (there’s never enough of doing that, it seems).

He then pulled around his “acupuncture man”, an ivory-looking statue of a man with all the acupuncture meridians drawn on it and each acupuncture point identified with a pair of Chinese characters. He showed me where he was going to stick the needles. The first place was in the center of the palm of the hand, where he said, “This is going to hurt.” Funny, for some reason, I hadn’t thought that acupuncture was actually going to hurt, otherwise I might not have thought it was such a good idea.

“But they’re sticking needles into you, what did you think!” (That’s some voice within me talking, not the doctor.)

He tried to explain to me in English the name of this and all the other points, but he just didn’t know enough English in order to do so. Well, looking at that statue covered with hundreds of points, I could well imagine that it would be impossible to translate them all into English…it would be like coming up with Chinese terms for every kind of IRS deduction or subtotal. You know words like “passive loss carryover” or “unearned income deduction” or whatever. They may not even HAVE English translations. I mean, after all, even our own medical terms aren’t really English, but various syllabic combinations of Greek, or maybe Latin.

Anyway, the palm of the hand starts the heart line, and then there were two points on the wrist that control the timing of the rhythm. On the forehead near the hairline were two or three points that he described as “the spirit,” which I took as meaning the genesis of the impulses that control the heart chambers. Then there were two or three points near the ankle that work on the kidney line (interestingly, that was right in line with the idea of “water seeks the low places”). Fortunately, the only point that he said would hurt was the one in the center of the palm.

He then took me into his acupuncture room and asked me to take off my shoes and socks and lie down on the table. I also took off my glasses and rolled up my sleeves.

He joked about how there was almost no room on the table for me, because my feet were right up against the wall. “For Chinese people,” he said, who are shorter, so it is entirely possible that I was the very first Caucasian he had ever had in there. I joked and said, “So you don’t get many basketball players…seven feet tall.” He shook his head, no, no basketball players.

Then, after swabbing the various locations with alcohol, came the needles. He was going to do this on both arms and both legs. He started with my right arm. The needles in the wrist area I could hardly feel. He asked me if they hurt and I said said “No.” Then I could feel that he was poised over my hand, and he said “This one will hurt.” And yes, it did, although the pain was quick and it was tolerable.

Then he reached over the left arm and, again, the wrist needles didn’t hurt. And again, he warned me when the needle for the palm of the hand was going to come, and YOW! That one made me shout out, oh BOY did that one hurt, like an electric shock! And it kept hurting for a while, but then calmed down. He said that that was very good, the pain showed that it was the right place and that it was working.

Then he went down to the ankles and warned that they would hurt, too, which they did, but differently. The kidney needles burned, but then the pain died down. He told me he would leave the needles in there for fifteen minutes, he set a timer, covered me with a warm blanket, turned off the light, and shut the door.

I lay there calmly with something like twelve needles in me and did not dare move. I can’t say that it was relaxing, but it was okay; fifteen minutes would be bearable.

After the timer rang, he came in and took out the needles (which didn’t really hurt, although I could feel them coming out). The area where the ankle needles had been itched a lot at first, which I told him, but he just nodded.

After I got my shoes back on, he gave me a bag of the herbal pills he was prescribing for me—one bottle was herbs for the kidneys, another was called “blood clots cleaner” and the third one was called “pulse resetter”). I was surprised, but happy, to see that the functions of those latter two herbs were similar to what a cardiologist would prescribe, but safe and with no side effects. So I felt that I was getting exactly what I needed.

He told me that the pills were a two-week supply, that I should come in and see him again in two weeks.

I asked him what his advice would be concerning my potential upcoming cardiologist appointment, should I go to it, or should I skip it?

He asked me when the appointment was going to be, but I said that I didn’t know, it was going to be mailed to me…it could be a week away, or maybe a couple of weeks away. He advised me to NOT go see the cardiologist until after I had seen HIM two weeks from now. “Then we will see,” he said.

Okay, that is fine with me. I really don’t want to get all started with the cardiologist if this Chinese Medicine treatment works.

I left his office feeling very good, and then went to breakfast at the Colonial Kitchen in San Marino. I ordered my “usual” for when I go there, which they call “The Titan” (so I think you imagine), and it was delicious, of course, but ended up being more food than I could possibly eat, which I took as a good sign. Ordinarily, I would have eaten the whole thing, but this time, I could only manage half of it. I hoped that meant that the acupuncture had already gotten some nutrients properly circulated around to the heart. Maybe that was wishful thinking, but there was no arguing with my sudden change in appetite.

Before hitting the road again, I went to the bathroom at the restaurant and while I was sitting on the toilet, I began to wonder if it would help to periodically massage the acupuncture point in the center of the palms of my hand, working on the heart line. As I massaged the palm with my hand, I suddenly realized with a shock that that was the point of the placement of Jesus’s crucifixion nails. The realization immediately brought tears to my eyes; for one thing, this was the point that HURT the most, but also, I thought that with the power of JESUS’S heart, the pain must have been immense. Then I thought how amazing that was symbolically and it seemed to tie together the disparate elements of the physical heart, the loving heart, Jesus, and acupuncture.

The Jesus connection didn’t die down, because I spied sitting on top of a pile of books at home a little volume called The Way Out, which caught my eye because its title was what my mother thought of her heart condition, “her way out,” but I knew that this book was a collection of four Christian essays. So I got comfortable and read the first one, and it really spoke to me about how my own negative self-talk could create the manifestation of this heart problem and also that the way out would be to realize that my struggles were failing to solve my problems, which led to this heart condition as a manifestation of my struggle, but that a surrender to God (and God’s guidance) would be the solution. Well, I certainly already knew and understood that, but it never hurts to be reminded of it, especially when you aren’t following it and that not following it gets you into serious trouble!

I thought that first essay was enough for me to chew on and practice for a while, so I have saved the other ones to read at a later time. Meanwhile, I felt that the rest of Saturday was a good time for me to read some things that a close friend of mine had given me a couple of weekends ago when I had gone to Palm Springs for the three-day Martin Luther King holiday.

I had started, but never finished, a post here about that weekend, but I will just say that this is a friend I have known since I was a freshman and he was a junior in college. I used to write to him quite a lot when we were much younger, quite notably during the summers between college years, and then after he graduated and entered into the Navy while I was at Berkeley, and then at other significant periods in our lives. He had saved all those letters, but now that he is retired, he decided to start getting rid of a lot of stuff and came across this collection of letters. He read them all once more, and then said to me that he can’t imagine why I am not a best-selling author today. Anyway, he thought that the letters were wonderful and figured I would love to have them back. Wow, yes, I sure would!

So I spent the rest of yesterday reading these letters and of all the things that I could have done, I can’t think of any better care for my heart than to have read these letters! For one thing, laughter is supposed to be good medicine for the heart, and I think these letters of mine made me laugh harder than anything I have ever seen in all my life, including I Love Lucy episodes or my favorite funny movie, What’s Up Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, and Madeline Kahn. But beyond all the laughter, I don’t know any other way to say it, I simply fell absolutely and utterly in love with this person whom I was oh so long ago, who was so sweet, so precious, so smart, so talented, so beautiful, so thoughtful, and SO FUNNY! Whatever happened to him? I want him back, I want to see him, to be him, to feel him back inside me. Surely the chafing of life and the rigors of aging are not enough of an explanation for the loss of that person, and maybe that is what, or whom, my heart has been yearning for all this time—me, my true self, whom I started out to be and whom I should be once again.

So please God, I surrender to you. Please let the water flow...down from you and through me.

Undercurrents of Evil...and Good

[Imbedded Practitioner of the Dark Arts]

I am really way behind in my reading (which means amount of reading desired and number of books purchased versus number of books I actually have time to read), so one of my resolutions is to schedule more time for catching up on that. But I am also way behind in my movie-viewing, which is sort of a subset of the above problem, so I have made a less-important resolution to schedule more time for that, as well.

Among “the above” is Harry Potter reading (which yes, I consider important); I haven’t had time to go beyond the third book. And last year, I didn’t even manage to go see the latest Harry Potter movie, The Order of the Phoenix (number 5, I think), but during this past Christmas season, I did buy the DVD, and last night I finally watched it.

Now, for reasons that I will explain in this blog, as the story of that movie unfolded, my dropped jaw nearly crashed a hole in the floor of my apartment. And it wasn’t due to Dumbledore’s kick ass battle against Valdemort that made Yoda’s heretofore kick ass fight at the end of Star Wars number III look in comparison like a little girl’s tea party, as wonderful as that scene with Dumbledore was! No, it was the basic PLOT, itself, that blew me away. But let me explain….

For the past couple of decades, I have been reading, first articles and then books, by John Taylor Gatto, and then later I was able to attend a lecture by him in person, and finally, I bought several audio tapes of his other lectures. I greatly admire the man (I’d put him the category of being one of my personal “gurus”) and have found him to be immensely inspirational, not just about children, but about how we all learn.

It was also mostly from John Taylor Gatto that I developed a profound appreciation for our country’s founders (especially Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington) and of their amazing wisdom and self-education, and wish I could emulate their example much more than I manage to. I had an appreciation of these men before, demonstrated right down to the fact that ever since I was in the sixth grade, I have abbreviated my first name in my signature the way that several early American heroes abbreviated that same first name when they signed the Declaration of Independence (a signature is a picture of one’s own image of self), but Gatto greatly deepened my appreciation of them for me.

And from working at a school as I do, I can verify one of the concepts that Mr. Gatto propounds, that children are voracious “learning machines”, you don’t have to “make” them want to learn, and, in fact, what happens in school, instead, is that the children’s energy gets diverted, derailed, imprisoned, and indoctrinated—in other words, seriously messed with until it is nearly destroyed (much less so, and in some cases not at all, in private school, because the Powers That Be realize that they need SOME people to be leaders of the masses). By the time kids are in high school, they hate school, and some even become murderous in that hate. What happened to that sweet, precious, learning-voracious child?

It was from Gatto that I first heard of the idea that state-run public schools were specifically designed to not educate children, but to mold them into docile subjects of that very same state, which had taken control of children away from their parents. This began, of course, in the most liberal and therefore most “big government” state in the union, Massachusetts, but it also quickly occurred in other similar controlling states (such as New York, naturally, where Gatto, himself, rebelliously taught for so long), but, fortunately, much less so in more education-freedom-oriented states.

For those who happen to be interested in this subject, here is where the states stand if you are interested in educational freedom for the parents and students and minimal control by the state (all this data comes from one of the most amazingly brilliant and useful books I have read in the past several years, Strategic Relocation, by Joel M. Skousen--THAT one, when it arrived a couple of weeks ago, I sat down and read from cover to cover at one sitting, and now I am studying it with a fine-tooth comb):

Most free, least educationally-controlling states:

Alaska
Idaho
Oklahoma
Texas
Missouri
Illinois
Indiana
Michigan
New Jersey (now that is a shock)
Connecticut
Rhode Island

Next best are those states that have very little state regulation of education:

California (believe it or not—but that is changing)
Nevada
Utah
Montana
Wyoming
Arizona
New Mexico
Nebraska
Kansas
Wisconsin
Kentucky
Mississippi
Alabama

Then come those states with a medium amount of regulation (which is too much):

Hawaii (huge hotbed of liberality)
Washington (ditto)
Oregon (ditto)
Colorado
South Dakota
Minnesota
Iowa
Arkansas
Louisiana
Ohio
Tennessee
Georgia
Florida
South Carolina
North Carolina
Virginia
West Virginia
Maryland
Vermont
Maine

And finally, the educational control Hall of Shame, states where based on this one issue alone, you shouldn’t live if you have school-age children you care about:

Massachusetts
New York
Pennsylvania (except for the Amish, who managed to secure a special dispensation)
Delaware
North Dakota

Seeing Delaware on that list, I had to nod my head in huge “well that certainly fits” agreement, because I have recently learned that in Delaware, that immense level of liberal state control has even moved into college. I read an article about a course (and there are several articles on the Internet about this) required in order to graduate at the University of Delaware that chilled me to the bone. It was about diversity and race relations and the principle it teaches is that white people (and ONLY white people) are inherently racist, and the cause of all the world’s problems stem from the actions and character of white people. At the University of Delaware, they teach this course on a “required outcomes” basis, a concept I also just recently learned about, which means that in order to pass the course (and if you do not, then you have to keep taking it until you do), you have to answer the test questions and write essays indicating your successful acceptance of the state’s approved indoctrination, that (if you are a white person) you accept your racism and historical culpability and present the steps you are taking to atone for and correct those self-deficiencies. Now if that isn’t standing at the threshold of 1984’s room 101, or Harry Potter having to write in his own blood several pages of “I will not tell lies” about something he factually knows is true , I don’t know what is.

I realized that if I even chose to stay at such a “university”, I would have understood that what I needed to do would have been to pretend and lie in my answers, the concept of which strongly goes against the grain of my being truthful in all of my communications and my lack of interest in wasting my time on games of mediocre conformity…in other words, my sense of personal integrity would have been seriously compromised.

But how much worse and self-damaging must it be to receive this level of indoctrination day in and day out by elementary school children, some of whom are hardly even old enough to be taken out of the arms of their mothers. And if these innocent babies fail to comply with destroying their individual truth, esteem, and integrity, they are in danger of being declared to have an attention deficit disorder or some such “defect” and prescribed a powerful mind-and-mood-altering drug like Ritalin.

[I accept the slight possibility that there may seriously be in some cases such a malady as ADHD, where drug intervention is required, but without a doubt, this diagnosis is way too frequently misapplied and the result of that more and more is Columbine-type school shooters (acting out) or else young adult suicides (acting in—thank you to Jungian analyst Alice Miller for the insight into these responses), such as the incredibly talented would-be comedian I became friends with when I did film work, who hung himself a couple of years ago and his parents and girlfriend informed us at the memorial we held in his honor that when he was a child, he had been put on a very heavy course of Ritalin medication.]

I watched the documentary, ”Who Controls Our Children” (which currently is posted on Google video, so you can watch it, too, if you are interested), put out by the Pennsylvania Parents Association (Johnstown, Pennsylvania), which explains what “outcomes based education” is and how it works, but not only in Pennsylvania, because it is a federal program (so how about that—instead of the local school board, or individual state controlling your child’s education, now the state can sign on to federal control of it). Well, this really rang a responsive chord within me, which meant that some more dots were connected in my understanding, because John Gatto had written that early industrialists were behind indoctrination-education for their own purposes, and now their foundations (such as the Ford Foundation or Rockefeller Foundation) and the lobbyists working for them are behind it. Gatto said that big steel-maker Carnegie wrote (and here happens to be that Pennsylvania connection) that big industry did not need free and critical thinking entrepreneurs (who would, after all, be competition to the big industrialists), but docile workers comprising a nation-wide hive of labor, and the schools had the power to create this kind of worker and that is now what outcome-based education is seeking to make. Incidentally, a docile populace is also what the state, itself wants, but let’s not forget who is behind the state (which is not a reality in and of itself, but is only a conceptual tool) and uses it for its own ends of police control.

I think there are students today who would even go along with this concept; that if school didn’t help prepare you for a job, what good is it? (This is actually appropriate for a vocational school and there is nothing wrong with that at all, but as a college student, I fell into this, myself, in a university, to my lifelong misfortune.) But the point is that you don’t want a job, you don’t want to be an employee or a wage slave, you want to be the master of your own fate, which is well within your ability if the genius self you were born with was allowed to be recognized, nurtured in its growth, and felt the freedom to manifest its creations in the outer world. This benefits us ALL as a society, by the way; we would have been so far beyond the stars right now if we weren’t hampered by this level of evil control of our spirit.

And make no mistake, it is evil, because it lessens the full majesty of the creation that you are.

And this evil apparently never ever really goes away, but bides its time for a while until the time is ripe for it come out and wreak its havoc on humanity once again, which, in more modern times, seems to happen when the next generation is finally comfortable and has let its guard down. But it is a very, very old and ancient evil…my favorite example of that level of ancient planning is the most recent version of the movie The War of the Worlds (directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise), in which the aliens had buried underground in the earth their tripod killing machines tens of thousands of years before there were even people on the planet in preparation for the eventual invasion of the earth for the purpose of colonizing and exploiting the blood and bodies of those future people. I don’t remember this particular “ancient” concept appearing in the original H.G. Wells novel, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, it was quite effectively presented in the Spielberg movie.

This is a very important concept, because people today wonder why it would be that industrialists would set up a program generations ago that would not benefit them personally, and that their heirs step by step continue with this work even thought it might not yet benefit THEM personally. And since this doesn't make sense, the average person rejects it as impossible.

Of course, in the Christian religion, this evil existed prior to God’s creation of the earth and the effort against humanity has been going on since the beginning of people.

War of the Worlds is cool, because it ends up that “God’s eternal plan” is greater than evil’s ancient plan.

After reading Joel Skousen’s book, there is a sense of “evil returning” once again in the form of Communism (now deeply infiltrated into the governments of the United States and Europe), which, according to the studies of Joel, never really went away anyway; that the “fall of the Soviet Union” was a planned ruse that successfully caused the American people to let its guard down. And, of course, it never even pretended to go away in China, despite how apparently “capitalist” they have become, the Communist party never let go of its totalitarian control. Of course, please realize that the yoke of socialistic principles is never for the rulers, anyway, or for their perverted puppets and lackeys, only for the bulk of the people (the “hive”). However, like all other all forms of evil, the dice are loaded against it…however, real people suffer terribly meanwhile. As an example, the Third Reich lasted only twelve years instead of the thousand years that it thought it would last, yet how many people suffered and died world-wide because of it?

I’ve always liked the Harry Potter books, because it is my belief that it resonates with children’s internal awareness of their own genius, not yet buried away or destroyed. While reading those books, they recognize that they are, themselves, “Wizards” in the midst of a society of Muggles, and maybe for a while this understanding will survive and maybe, just maybe NEVER fully go away. One can only hope that it will work this way, and I am very, very sure that it will, for some (there are those whose spirits somehow manage to get through this process at least somewhat intact).

So now we come to that amazing fifth movie in the series, The Order of the Phoenix, that I saw last night. Harry already KNOWS that the great evil of Lord Voldemort has returned, because Harry has seen him during the battle he had in the previous book and movie, and now also continues to experience him in his dream state and in his mind (which instead of demonstrating insanity, actually is a deeper level of knowledge). Harry’s friends believe him, because they trust in him, but also the great wizard, Dumbledore, Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Wizardry, understands that Voldemort has returned. However, the Ministry of Magic, which is the government of the Wizards, has instigated a campaign against Harry and Dumbledore, setting them up as the cognate of our present-day “Conspiracy Theorists” to be ridiculed and rejected out of hand, just as you reading this blog branded me the minute you saw me say that the Soviet Union never fell and that Communism had infiltrated our federal government. When I first heard of this myself, I didn’t doubt it, but saw, instead, how much it explained what was going on--suddenly the pieces began to come together. (If you want to pursue this further, you might want to investigate how President Clinton signed a presidential directive to the military that states that the U.S. will no longer launch nuclear missiles on the warning that Russia has launched theirs, but will absorb Russia’s first strike, and this directive has not been cancelled or rescinded by the Bush administration. Clinton’s directive ONLY applies to the former Soviet Union, not other nations. We apparently do reserve the right to launch a pre-emptive strike on, say, Iran.)

How incredible it was to see in this film that the Ministry not only created a constant media blitz to discredit those who knew the truth, but also set to work taking over Hogwarts school and sent there an Inquisitor whose mission was to get rid of all the free-thinking teachers and administrators, and who turned the school into an outcomes based institution, indoctrinating the students into the Ministry’s desired form of docility in the face of great and destructive evil. I hated that Inquisitor with every fiber of my being; it was fascinating how the actress’s portrayal of that character was so right on that it made my skin crawl right off my bones.

The Order of the Phoenix could not have done a better job of presenting a model of what is actually going on in the world today, to the extent that I almost think that J.K. Rowling, herself, is initiated into the true facts of what really is happening in the world--but to believe that is to at the same time minimize her artistic creation. I can only say with assurance that this is an outstanding example of how when one does enter into the artistic and creative realm, they truly are in touch with deep wisdom and truth. Which is why these books resonate so powerfully with so many children and open-minded adults. Spiritual truth is so much more powerful and compelling than temporary lies.

The Political Compass

Maybe it's just because I know more now that I did before, or maybe it's because I know less, but I think for most people, this upcoming election is going to be a confusing mess for most people and they will need some kind of framework to help them sort it out so that they can vote the way they really want in a way that will help them and will also help their society as a whole.

For example, I eat lunch almost every day with a friend at work who considers herself a died-in-the-wool Democrat. She is from Massachusetts, met and had lunch with Ted Kennedy when she was younger, and hates George Bush with every fiber of her being. If you were ask her who she is voting for for president in this upcoming election, she would say, "whomever the Democratic candidate is," because she feels that no matter what, she would never be able to vote for a Republican.

However, if you ask her what the two single most important ISSUES are, she would say the Iraq War, as in getting out it, and illegal immigration, as in getting the illegals who are now here deported, and making sure that no others can come in.

Why does she want us out of Iraq? Well, the most important thing is that she has two daughters of draftable age, and her feeling is that those girls are being sent to Iraq over her dead body. The draft hasn't been reinstated, of course, but the fear is that if the war continues much longer, we will have to have a draft.

Secondly, she views the Iraq War as Bush's war, so if it has anything to do with him and his ideas, then she doesn't want any part of it.

Why she wants illegal immigrants out of here is pretty easy to explain by the simple fact that she lives in Southern California. Actually, it doesn't even have to be Southern California any longer; I was so shocked to see the small city of Novato in Marin County (north of San Francisco) infested with hordes of illegal aliens at every street corner. You even had to shoo them away when you tried to get gasoline; there were some hovering around, sitting on the concrete curbs that surrounded the various gas pumps. They really were everywhere and, of course, this isn't even talking about you having to wait in the emergency room to get some medical attention, or have your kids try to find a desk in a public school.

So which Democratic candidate should she support based on these two select issues? See the problem?

For a long time, I've been aware as a voter how the one axis of decision,"left" versus "right", or how it normally turned out, Democrat versus Republican, was an inadequate scale by which to judge candidates.

But now I have learned of a system that uses two axes, The Political Compass, that helps bring it all more into focus.

The Political Compass still has as a horizontal axis, the familiar Left to Right opposition, which is the ECONOMIC LINE, with Socialism on the left and Laissez Faire Capitalism on the right. The more you agree with having a governmental system of taking care of people via diminished private property rights and enforced taxation and applying those funds to government-created welfare programs given out to the benefit of various select groups of people, then the more to the left you are. On the other hand, the more you believe in the right to private property and in having a free market where prices and the availability of resources are determined by supply and demand and efficient production by those who had taken on personal risk in hope of sufficient reward, without external interference, then the more to the right you are.

But there is a vertical axis, too, on the Political Compass, and that is the Authoritarian versus Personal Freedom SOCIAL LINE. Do people have the right to order their own affairs, or do they need the strong hand of an authority outside of themselves (such as a government) to keep them in line? I suppose at the most free point of the line the situation would be "the freedom to choose to do anything you want, even if it hurts YOU, so long as it doesn't hurt or interfere in the freedom of another." So if for example you want to take drugs (so long as you don't steal to obtain them, or drive a car or fly an airplane while on them), who else would have the right to say that you shouldn't be able to do so? Nobody would have that right, but you, yourself, to determine your own actions.

But if you feel that people could not, or should not control their own affairs, but require experts, or those who have a greater might, or feel that they have a superior moral standing, to make those determinations for them, then you stand on the Authority end of the axis.

Governments, of course, and the people who desire to hold office in them (and thus obtain greater personal power) tend to be on the side of AUTHORITY (so long as it is THEY who are the authority!).

Some of the problems we have today is that people can no longer imagine having no authority over them; they willingly subject themselves to such rule (and thus, slavery), because an opposing idea is inconceivable to them. Or if they think that they could handle that kind of freedom, they sure don't think their fellow man could, so they want there to be an authority to keep their neighbor in line, and if they, themselves, have to submit to that same authority, well, it's a small sacrifice to pay in order to keep the peace and to feel safe. Notice I said "feel" safe and not "be" safe. But I believe that to truly be safe, or at least safer, in the world, requires a self-reliant and mutually-cooperative populace of equals (equal opportunity, not equal outcome), not a horde of subjects who have given everything over to an external power to rule, protect, and save them (which it will ultimately fail to do). Benjamin Franklin, one of the main founding minds of our country, said that those who give up their freedom in order to gain a little safety will end up losing both. Isn't that happening to us, today?

So here, for our reference, is a graphic of this system:


There is a test you can take at the site linked above in order to get an idea where you might fit on this graph. Here is where I came out:


While it is not surprising to me how much on the SOCIAL freedom side I placed, I know that a year ago, I wouldn't have placed so far on the right, because I was like so many others; for so long we have swallowed the socialistic propaganda we have been fed, so that no longer can people think of "big oil companies" without thinking "greedy big oil companies". Despite their utter dependence on oil, people nevertheless want to hamper big oil companies by, for example, taxing their "windfall profits". But exploring, finding, drilling for, refining, bringing to market, and selling petroleum and its products is a hugely costly and risky business. It requires incredibly large investments and a long lead time before those investments begin to pay off. Well, these big oil companies have laid their money on the line and they are bringing in the product; do they not deserve to reap the benefit of their efforts? Of course they do, and some of that benefit will be used to keep the machinery going for some more. Throw a monkey wrench into that and you won't even be walking to work, you won't have a job, because your former employer couldn't function without petroleum, but maybe you will be able to plow with a mule a field you sharecrop.

Let's use a different arena...J.K. Rowling who struggled so long and lived so meagerly, wrote the first Harry Potter book by hand, at a cafe. This was her own creation, brought forth by the sweat of her brow and her steadfast discipline to bring this creation "to the market".

Where and how does J.K. Rowling stand, today? She is the second richest woman in England. Does she not deserve the full benefit of the risks and struggle she made, and the reward for her marvelous and well-loved creation that has brought joy to so many people and nearly single-handedly made children into readers again? Will the profits she will make on her most recent novel in the series be considered "windfall profits," deserving of increased taxation? I think not, and you shouldn't think it either, or else whatever raise you next get for some achievement at work that earned you a promotion, or the extra salary you earn due to that master's degree that you earned for yourself taking night classes while you worked full time should all be taxed away, too.

Maybe it isn't "greedy capitalists" against "the people". Maybe it is greedy lazy people against those who are actually doing the work and bringing home the bacon. Where does the government get the money it gives to the people on the welfare programs and to the entitlements? From other people who MADE the money. From you. Take a look at your final annual income statement--it's easy enough to find, the year 2007 only recently came to an end. What percentage of your total earnings did you give out in taxes? Federal, State, Social Security, Medicare, SDI, etc. Multiply that percentage by the number of months in the year and that's how many months you were WORKING FOR OTHER PEOPLE, strangers out there. Did you really choose to give that much of your labor away to others, or was it forced on you? Well, it was the politicians who forced it on you, and it was people who voted them in. Maybe even your votes contributed to it. (But maybe not any more!)

I think these quadrants are easier to understand when you can see some names on them:


And here are some leaders operating in the world today:


What I find it interesting are those people down in the southwest quadrant, the Gandi and Dalai Lama quadrant. Gee, shouldn't we be down there? Well, Gandi ran around in a loincloth; I guess he didn't care about property rights so much. And the Dalai Lama has no home; he and his people are living in India kind of like the Katrina victims who needed help getting out of New Orleans were welcomed by Houston. Maybe that's unfair, the Tibetans were "victims" (of the Chinese), but the socialist side of the economic line is FOR victims. But somebody has to pay the bills.

As far as I can see it, just about the only way you can have that southwest quadrant, which is sharing of property and assets without being forced to by authority, is to have some kind of commune or spiritual community with shared values. There haven't been too many of those that have been successful, but I can see how it could work out if everybody agreed. After all, one of the tenets of the FREEDOM axis is that people have the freedom to order their affairs any way they want, just so long as other people's freedoms aren't harmed, so if everybody agrees to live in a mutually beneficial socialistic system, then that is their right. I don't view Gandhi or the Dalai Lama as being, or having been, corrupt. This isn't rule by Stalin. Would it work in a country as large as the United States? Maybe, but it's hard to imagine. We might think we have a Gandhi, but end up with a Castro.

Okay, so now for the chart on where the CANDIDATES stand (if whoever put this together was accurate):


Wow, virtually all of them (except Kucinich and Gravel) are somewhere in the AUTHORITARIAN/CAPITALISTIC quadrant, EVEN Ron Paul, the freedom candidate, and even Hillary Clinton, whom I and others have blithely branded as a socialistic candidate. Fortunately, not a Hitler or a Stalin among them, which helps me to breathe a little bit easier. And notice that few of them are all that different from the much-disapproved-of President Bush. Maybe this is just a sign of how the powers that be simply WANT us to have that kind of a candidate ONLY, so that is all we get.

For me, coming out like Milton Freedman on the FREEDOM/CAPITALISM quadrant (the pure Libertarian quadrant), the closest candidate for me is Ron Paul, who the media continually crows has nothing but crackpots for supporters. Well, he does graphically show that he stands out from the bulk of them (again except for Kucinich and Gravel), but hardly "crackpot".

He, by the way, is who my friend at work should vote for, even though he is a REPUBLICAN. He says he will pull us out of Iraq IMMEDIATELY, and he also wants to clear out the illegal aliens (he's from Texas, so that makes him like us in California).

For me, the Iraq War isn't the big issue, because I have decided that I have absolutely NO idea what is going on down there, so I have little qualification for making a decision. Unlike many people, I don't get all my news from one or two sources (who have a definite agenda of manipulating the public). I get news from a huge diversity of sources, conservative and liberal, religious and athiest, domestic and foreign, and I have heard so many conflicting stories, from it's a total mess to we are actually accomplishing what President Bush set out to do, that I simply have to guess at the truth. And what I guess is (a) we got Saddam Hussein out of there, (b) there were no weapons of mass destruction after all, (c) our government has been so far successful in preventing any other serious terrorist attack, so they more or less can truly say "Mission Accomplished" based on the basic mission they presented regarding going in there. But to stay further, will further results be worth it?

I believe what Ron Paul says when he says that (a) the war was illegally declared Constitution-wise, (b) we are invaders in foreign soil which agitates terrorists against us (just as we would be, say, if we had been invaded by China...or let's say Japan, ha ha ha), (c) we can't afford it, our dollar is nearly collapsed as it is and we are now in debt up to our eyeballs, (d) the founders of our country warned against foreign entanglements, and (e) we can protect ourselves with our soldiers back at home and with a renewed, refreshed, and more efficient intelligence system. So all that sounds good to me.

To me the absolute most important issues are to prevent the steady enroachment of our civil liberties (so I want to pull toward the FREEDOM pole of the vertical axis, which is "south") AND to prevent the destruction of our FREE ECONOMY (so I want to pull toward the FREE CAPITALIST side of the ECONOMIC pole, which is "east"), so who on that chart is the most "southeastern" candidate running, but Ron Paul. And so that is what makes sense to me.

If Ron Paul does not get the nomination, who is next in line for me? I have to place a ruler on that chart at a diagonal from northeast to southwest, starting at the southeastern corner, and slowly move up to see who that line touches after Ron Paul. Surprising to me, who that ends up being is Hillary Clinton. She's closer to Ron Paul than I ever would have thought (but not THAT close!--she's just closer than the others). Hillary, good Lord, who woulda thunk it? (But she's corrupt, I think, which Ron Paul isn't; for Ron Paul to lose the nomination, which the media is doing its damnedest to make happen, would be a terrible loss.) After Hillary, it's kind of a crap shoot. The worst though, would be that awful Biden-Obama-Dodd-Richardson-Romney line. And horribly, both Obama and Romney are being pushed as really strong candidates. On the INTERNET, just like Ron Paul is strong, so is Obama, so THAT'S a bad sign.

Romney's the most AUTHORITARIAN of the bunch, so that is really bad. Edwards is the most SOCIALISTIC of the bunch (again excluding Kucinich and Gravel), which is also bad.

Anyway, if nothing else, it's all fascinating, and I still have to comfort myself by saying that despite where they stand, we can thankful we have no Hitlers or Stalins in there.

If you're somebody who never even considered Ron Paul (probably because of the media's hatchet job), here is a WEALTH of information. And once you see what the media is really doing, it will make you hopping mad.

And then if you want to REALLY get into it, please check out this INCREDIBLE ARCHIVE of Ron Paul writings. You will see that this brilliant and scholarly man has been around for quite a long time, and has been very prolific. He's certainly not new on the scene like that fraud Huckabee. I've known of Ron Paul for decades. It seems that whenever something bad happened in Congress (which was a lot), Ron Paul was always that lone individual who did what was RIGHT.

And by following the Constitution and trying to continue what the founders of this country carefully set up, you could hardly do wrong.

Christmas Diary

[Family Christmas 1973, taken by my brother, so he is missing in the photo]

8:30 A.M.

I woke up early (6:30), which I didn’t expect to, but I guess I’m still following childhood habits on Christmas morning! (The rest of the year, not so much.) It’s now 8:30 and I have made several trips downstairs to dump some garbage. I do believe that I am the only one in this building up, which is surprising. Of course, not everybody is here. I realize that this is the first Christmas morning I have ever been here, or even the days leading up to Christmas, and following it.

After I got up, I lit an angel candle for the apartment and a vanilla-cinnamon scented candle for the kitchen. Then I sat down on the couch with a wonderful cookbook that my friend Patty gave me, The Early American Cookbook, which is made up of the favorite recipes and dishes of famous men and women throughout America’s early history. I wanted to figure out special dish to cook for breakfast. I had bought enough staples yesterday that I probably had whatever ingredients I needed.

I selected a dish I had never made before, “Mrs. Jefferson’s Egg and Tomato Bake,” which I think is fitting in that Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite people in history. That dish is currently baking in the oven.

In order to even prepare that dish, I had to wash a couple of sink-loads of dishes. I won’t even tell you the condition of my kitchen (or the rest of the apartment); I’ll leave that your imagination. However, one of the projects I want to work on during this break is the apartment, so today is as good of a day as any to get a good start on it!

I also needed to throw away some garbage, thus the trips I made up and down the stairs. It was fresh and cool feeling outside, and very quiet, which is unusual for Hollywood. It had been extremely windy last night, and the evidence of that was shown by the large number of palm fronds that were all over the patio. The poor pool man is going to have quite a time when he comes to clean the pool! Even though the pool was covered with various palm tree detritus, the pool still looked inviting enough for a swim (but not this season!). Since I had used the pool so much in the summer, I wonder what the residents of would think if I went for chilly swim Christmas morning! (But I’m not that brave.)

The idea of maybe taking a nice walk later popped into my head, but meanwhile, I am getting my exercise by dumping this garbage—three trips up and down the three flights of stairs so far. And, sad to say, I’ve got several more trips of garbage-dumping yet to do! In fact, right now I’m going to do some more before my breakfast is done in the oven.

9:09 A.M.

The breakfast was good, although I think what made it was the fried bread crumbs and bacon topping, not the tomatoes and eggs. Of course, in a way, I may have lost all ability to correctly determine. While I was waiting for the eggs to bake, I was thinking of what to drink. I decided to follow our family’s “adult Christmas” pattern (which means that we who had once been children were now drinking adults...but there were still children present, in the form of my sister’s kids). We’d wake up, having something hugely sticky-sweet, such as a coffee cake or some kind of sweet rolls (something we wouldn’t normally have for breakfast 364 days out of the year) and coffee for those who want it. I decided to skip the coffee this Christmas morning.

Then, as we sat in the living room SURROUNDED by presents, we’d chow down on the coffee cake and Dad would place on the coffee table Dad’s punch (we know no other name for it), which really gets the present-opening party going, which will last all day until it is time for Christmas dinner.

We’d open our presents one-by-one, starting from the youngest in age and moving on up. I don’t want to open presents in any other way, because it is so much fun to see what everybody else is getting (we don’t just care about only ourselves) and, this is especially good if what somebody is opening is something that YOU gave them, which everybody else gets to see. As I think you can imagine, we were very careful and thoughtful gift-givers in our family, always working extremely hard to give amazingly wonderful gifts that were to be well-received, which they almost always were. Which is one reason why I am (kind of) glad to not be doing that right now, because I just don’t have that kind of energy this year. (But then again, here it is Christmas morning and I don’t have any presents to unwrap. Maybe I’m kind of stupid! I am also wishing that maybe I hadn’t opened Donna’s box of gifts so soon, as, other than a few people at work, she is the only person who gave me gifts this year.)

Huh, what’s that you say? You wanna hear about “Dad’s punch”? Well, glad you asked!

This is for sure a “crowd pleaser” no matter what your guests normally think about liquor. Dad says that this is his own version of a “French 75”, and I can see that is somewhat close…but no cigar. For one thing, Dad always liked to put in about five times the liquor than normally called for. I mean, Dad wanted the liquor! (Mom, too.)

I haven't made this in a long time and I think maybe I got one aspect wrong, but I already see that regardless, it has begun its desired effect. Now, this drink will send your brain right up to the stratosphere! It actually feels “spiritual” in a good and positive way, but I think maybe all it is is a very effective drunk.

Anyway, the way Dad makes it is in a large sterling silver punch bowl (because you are going to serve a crowd). I don’t have the silver punch bowl, so I just used a crystal pitcher, which even that is probably too much drink for this poor single body.

Pour in one whole bottle of champagne and one whole bottle of vodka, then add a certain portion of…well, for years Dad used frozen pink lemonade concentrate, but the past couple of years he used frozen limeade concentrate, which was a huge hit, so that is what I used this year. I don’t remember how much, I think one can of the frozen juice, but today I think I used too much. You repeat the above recipe, bottle-by-bottle of champagne and vodka and can of frozen juice concentrate until the punch bowl is nearly full. Then you fill the bowl with tons of ice (I think the ice is probably necessary to dilute all that liquor). This is a drink that will make you HAPPY very FAST!

I had made it one time (with the lemonade) for a party I gave when I was in law school and you wouldn’t BELIEVE the goings-on that happened that evening. [I mean, some guys took to walking around with their cock and balls hanging out of their unzipped pants which the girls seemed to enjoy instead of running away screaming, and one friend, whenever he had to take a whiz (which was often), simply used a handy wastebasket…he was having so much fun that he didn’t even want to “leave the party” for the time it took to go to the bathroom. Yet, even with all that, not one person vomited. It’s a high like you won’t believe, but it doesn’t make you sick.] All of which reminds me, I’ve got to get back to giving parties….

For myself here today, I used one split of champagne, which I poured into a measuring cup first to see how much a “split” was (it’s basically a cup), and then poured in a matching amount of vodka, which was kind of hard to do, because I am used to making drinks by the jigger, not by the CUP (by the 1½ ounce, not buy the 8 ounces)! But anyway, I poured it in, and then put in a cup’s worth of limeade concentrate and then filled the pitcher with ice cubes.

I think maybe I should have put in only half a cup of limeade; the “lime” in this mix is a bit too intense for me.

So far, I’ve had only one old fashioned tumbler full of the punch and already my head is a hot air balloon several thousand feet above my body. And during our adult Christmases, we would keep drinking this punch ALL DAY until the entire Universe was spinning and about the only way we could walk from one end of the room to the other was to lie down flat on our backs in the living room. Not that we were drunks or anything.

This really makes me miss Dad. He was sure some bartender, LOVING to mix drinks for guests, who loved to come visit and enjoy his drinks. This is part of the reason that after my parents got old enough that most of the friends of their own generation died, they merely moved down to the next generation and made friends. Of course, it was mostly due to the fact that they were cool, loving, and brilliant, but one can’t discount the positive effect of the liquor! Mom always said that it ISN’T a party without liquor, and to her, a “party” was two people sitting together in the same room.

Gosh, what great people they were!

[Dad at the bar, Christmas 1985]

2:00 P.M.

Well, I spent most of the morning looking for a particular cookbook out of which I wanted to make several dishes for my Christmas dinner. It’s the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Cross Creek cookbook, one of my favorites. I know it saw it around here somewhere a couple of weeks ago, but now it is nowhere to be found. I carefully looked on every bookshelf and restacked numerous stacks of books that I have no place to put, so they are all over the floor. I also have hundreds, if not thousands of books in boxes in storage in various locations. I can’t even imagine what books are in those boxes at this point, but I do know that the Cross Creek cookbook isn’t one of them. It really hurts my heart to have so many wonderful things that I not only can’t use, I can’t even find, or, worse than that, remember that I have. I somehow feel good about all that, though, for some reason. A solution will come, a decent place to move to, I can’t help but keep feeling that. It’s unreasonable to have to live this way and therefore there is a solution that I will be willing to take.

I wasn’t terribly set on those Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings recipes, anyway (pecan-stuffed chicken, cream of peanut soup, and so on), so found a recipe for stuffed whole chicken on the Internet that looked good (and it sure smells good cooking right now!), and I adapted an Adele Davis recipe on chestnut dressing so that I could use the pecans I had bought. I think it will all turn out okay, so I am happy.

When the Cross Creek cookbook finally does turn up (I will be happy to find out where it actually was!), I will laugh and then treat myself to recipes from it some other time. One of the things I really plan to do STARTING NOW is do a lot more cooking, and by that I don’t mean the simple, easy to do (diet) crap that I have been making lo these many years, but delicious, wonderful recipes that are a joy to prepare and even better to eat. Careful with the portions, though. But today, Christmas Day, to hell with the portions.

The whole time I was looking for the cookbook, and also doing some sorting and cleaning up while I was at it, I was, of course, enjoying Dad’s punch. I see that with more of the ice melting, the limeade isn’t too bad, so maybe I did make it right after all. It FEELS right, anyway.

While I was looking through stuff, I found a pile of papers that had been Dad’s, one of which was his top-level security clearance application he had filled out so that he could work on government contracts with the Atomic Energy Commission. It’s very cool in that it has a resume of all the schools he went to, and when, and all the jobs he ever had. It has every address where he lived ever since he got married, and the dates he and Mom lived there (and me, too, for most of that). I’m going to put those addresses and dates on a spreadsheet so that I can get a good picture of my personal history in that regard. Some of those moves were confusing to me when I was young and the memories have gotten distorted, so now I will understand their timing more.

5:00 P.M.

I got a “Merry Christmas” phone call from my friend Bob in Palm Springs. He was having a quiet day himself, too. He said the view from his apartment was glorious, the setting sun was reflecting gold on the snow-dusted mountains. He makes me feel thankful for the job that I have. For one thing, all this time off we get right now. He works at a Petco and worked yesterday and will work again tomorrow. I guess he was lucky he hadn’t had to work today, too!

He all but hates it. When I met him, he was office manager of a very small business in Beverly Hills. I worked there, too, for a while. The owner retired a couple of years ago and closed down the business, so Bob was out of a job. Bob took this as a good time to get the hell out of Dodge (L.A.), but Palm Springs, where he went, doesn’t have much of a job market. Bob’s biggest problem job-wise is that he never learned computers (they used typewriters in that office), which means that he is utterly unqualified for any office job, now. Thus, the retail sales job at Petco. Actually, retail wouldn’t be so bad for him, except he’d rather the product be a fine line of men’s clothing, something like that. But he enjoys being with the animals and pet accouterments, it’s just that he is lonely there. All the other sales people are “young kids” and he can’t relate. Also, the company is extremely badly managed.

But he was feeling hopeful in his phone call. The company brought in a new hotshot manager to “whip the store in shape for the essential holiday retail season”, some young female martinet whose abrasive attitude rubbed Bob the wrong way from the get-go. He had a meeting with her to let her know that her manner was not working with him (he really didn’t care if he got fired), but she was having none of his advice. “This is the only way I know how to be,” she said. Too bad.

So he wrote a letter of complaint about her to upper management and apparently so did several others. Perhaps most telling of all was that the store had its annual Christmas party and according to Bob, only two people showed up, and he sure wasn’t one of them. “Who were the two?,” I asked. “The new manager and the assistant manager,” he said. (He had been told this by the assistant manager.) I guess that party might have been fun for those two if they were into S&M and it took place in a dungeon. Anyway, this kind of thing is a strong indication to upper management that things aren’t good out there. Of course, their solution will probably be to fire all the sales staff, but Bob thinks they will actually get rid of the manager. Well, we’ll see.

6:30 P.M.

I guess I ought to give an honest review of my dinner, which seemed to take forever to cook (you know how the indicator on that meat thermometer seems to NEVER get up there to the top where the “poultry” temperatures are?). The chicken was okay; it wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t serve it to company. I think the recipe called for cooking temperatures that were way too high, but I am used to slow-cooking a whole chicken in the oven overnight (comes out tender and juicy beyond belief), which of course I didn’t do for this. The person who submitted the recipe said that her family never eats the skin. At first I took this as her telling us how holy she was (no matter what diet I am on, I detest the idea of throwing away the skin and therefore never do), but now I realize that with that recipe you CAN’T eat the skin, which dries up and turns into pork rinds or chicken jerky. The chicken inside the skin was okay, a little dry but at least not burned, but only merely acceptable. I guess if someone likes “extra crispy” when they get Kentucky Fried Chicken, this would be okay. But it could be that my oven runs hotter than it should.

The hybrid stuffing that I made was the best part. What was wrong with that, though, was that there was about a cup’s more of it than I could fit inside the chicken, so I put it on the baking pan all around the chicken on the outside. Big mistake. Although I think that was something I could do with the pecan stuffing recipe I had hoped to make, if only I had found the cookbook. However, being exposed like that (instead of safe inside the chicken), it all burned to charcoal and it looks like I I will have a horrible time cleaning out that pan! Also, it absorbed all the juices as they dripped during cooking, so I couldn’t baste properly. Instead, every so often, I sprayed olive oil on the chicken. I had never done that before, so maybe it was that that contributed to the crispy skin, I don’t know.

The cornbread came out good, though, although I can take virtually no credit for that as I took the easy way out and used a Marie Callender’s mix. So easy, pour the mix into a bowl, add water, stir, and then pour into a cornbread baking pan. Interestingly, mine came out better than the cornbread does in the restaurant. In the restaurant, the bread is crumbly and you can’t eat it with your hands, it just breaks apart, so I eat it with a fork like cake. The home version, though, hung together nicely.

I also went easy with vegetables and merely cooked up a frozen package of artichoke hearts, which I felt was different from the usual fare of peas, corn, broccoli, or various beans, that I eat every day. Ah, they were a bit too fibrous and not all that exciting. But that was my fault; I could have made something a little more interesting. (The recipe I was GOING to cook out of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings cookbook is a truly sinful “carrot soufflé”.)

Having enough starch with the bread crumbs in the stuffing and the cornbread, I decided against the other dishes I considered, some form of rice, or maybe garlic mashed potatoes. What I already had was enough, so that was it.

For dessert I had gotten a Sara Lee frozen pumpkin pie and some vanilla ice cream, but after all that dry and baked other stuff (and the ultimate result of a faint odor of "burnt" in the air), I couldn’t get into baking yet something else, and my palate craved something cold and creamy, so I just had the ice cream by itself.

9:00 P.M.

I suddenly got very sleepy and decided to lie down and take a nap. I woke up about a half hour ago and figured that maybe that pumpkin pie might be nice, now. So I put it in the oven along with an oven thermometer to check the accuracy of the oven’s thermostat. That will be ready in about another half hour. Meanwhile, I fixed myself an eggnog. Again, I took the easy route (remember, I still actually have the flu) and simply bought “store-bought” eggnog. For liquor, I put in a jigger of dark rum and a jigger of Crown Royal and dashed nutmeg on top. That went down so easy, I just might make another one to go with my pie. I do have more ice cream, but I think I had enough with Christmas dinner.

It looks like this holiday was more about drinking than anything else. I went through the pitcher I had made of Dad’s punch and enjoyed every drop. I knew with my first drink of the stuff that I wasn’t going to go driving anywhere today, Which is fine, I am perfectly content to stay home.

9:35 P.M.

The pie is ready, but I am supposed to let it sit and cool. The oven thermometer read a perfect 350, but the dial was set at 375, so it actually cooks a little LOWER.

10:30 P.M.

The pie was good enough that I had two pieces. And what the heck, it needed to have ice cream with it, so I succumbed to that. While I enjoyed my pie, I also enjoyed watching on my computer all my favorite music videos that I had bought from iTunes. I’ve long loved music videos and decried the decline of MTV. Now it looks like the iTunes store may be taking up some of the slack. It's a good thing I bought this iMac with the huge, wide-screen monitor!

Bedtime:

I’m writing this final section the day after the fact. Around 11:30 P.M., I got into bed, but read a couple of chapters out of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, which is the third or fourth book I have gotten in the “PIG” series, which I love. I hadn’t known before that the word “capitalism” was a pejorative devised by Karl Marx, capitalism’s gravest enemy. Prior to his coining of that word, it was known as “Free Enterprise.” However, free enterprisers willingly adopted Marx's word "capitalism", because they understood that capital, which you get when you don’t spend all your money but save for future productive investment, is a foundation of free enterprise. Those who agree with socialists somehow think that free enterprise is bad, but that’s because they didn’t have the foresight to save their money. Envious of those who did, they devised a method of stealing it (“'fair’ reallocation of assets”) from those who have it and giving to those who don’t (themselves). Isn’t there a fable about this? The grasshoppers and the ants, maybe? Is that really saying that socialists are a plague of locusts? Yes, I do think that is exactly what that is saying. But no wonder socialism is always a clock that gets wound once and then runs down and eventually stops. It’s run by people who don’t understand money, and when you systematically steal it from those who do, you remove their incentive to make more of it. So you kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Wow, I’m just now realizing how much economic sense exists in old fables!

Anyway, it was a quiet, but enjoyable Christmas. No complaints…just a non-frantic feeling of bliss.