I was clearing off a few shelves in my Atheneum and found some old sketch books that contained poetry, writing and more. As well as photo albums. I hope to scan the pictures and upload to my photo gallery.
No matter what you do, you can’t deny that your health, fitness and wellness effects every aspect of your life. From an early age your eating habits were formed. At grade school there were always playground activities for fitness. And wellness was never addressed until recently as being an integral part of ones life.
As older teens and young adults, many of our early childhood programing remained deeply embedded silently guiding our decisions at the subconscious level. With societies accelerated lifestyle sweeping our lives onto adulthood, we shed more of the core programming that once protected us and kept our health and well being in balance.
Early at the turn of the nineteenth century ushered in the industrial age and a mindset of values that shaped America. Little did we know that like sheep, keen businessmen with a grand agenda planted a veil of illusion of the American Dream. Using their leverage of economics, politics and media these business leaders created a nearly perfect foundation for national if not global dominance.
Now with the advent of technology and the finely tuned methodologies of psychological programming we are under the thumb of politics, government, media and marketing. Shaping our daily decisions of education, career and lifestyle as well as our children whom they trust us to guide them through their early years of development.
All of this reminds me of the book I read some years ago, Rule By Secrecy. While I try not to linger on conspiracy theories they do capture my interest. Although many in my mind are believable, what power do I have to change it?
More to come…
Yes the truth is out…. I’m an “Information Addict”. Yes I surf the net for all kinds of subjects. I tangent off on to uncharted realms. I look up words I question the meaning of which can lead me farther away from my intend query.
Even more, I subscribe to all kinds of email list, just to get the Freebie (who doesn’t?). Most of the time I’ll read the first page or two if I even get that far. While my intentions are well meaning probably 99% of the time I never even open, unzip or remember why I nabbed the dam thing in the first place. Although I do have a Download Folder full of the stuff I got for free.
Like the old saying goes…. So Many Things – So Little Time it applies to my life as an information addict. The downside of all of this is that I keep forgetting to un-subscribe to all those sites. My email box fills with relentless auto-responder mail in a vain attempt to sell me whatever….
Some morning I just spend time unsubscribing to all that junk. I figure that if I didn’t open it I really need to unsubscribe. However there are a few subscriptions that I hang on to. I skin the subject line for what catches my eye and then do a quick scan of the mail.
Well I know that I’m not alone out there… there are other who are caught up in the same never ending quest for more information. The question is for myself and possibly many of you is …. How Much Is Enough?
Last week I found a book that seems to describe this hunger for information and how to manage it. I found it while browsing Amazon and it is:
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There’s a tune in my head
That comes and goes
Like scarlet foliage
The pendulous love rose
J. MyOwn – 1980?
Years ago I would not have thought it could come to this. Far apart and only a wish. You see now how fun it is, to have your life like this. Never knowing that I need a kiss. Life like a picture, you are ready to paint, and all of a sudden it’s that glass you blew, a paper weight. But it is so fun to let your love come undone with understanding hearts. Here I am in the back of your mind, stored away till the end of time. But that is the price I have to pay when loving is lost, and eyes see through me.
J. MyOwn – 1980?
Take a few pills
For a thrill
Pour yourself a drink
To get out the kinks
What does it matter?
When you are at the top of the ladder
Spin your mind, at the thought of fortune
Just to see where the odds fall
The sound of crisp bills…
Does it make you feel tall?
Where does it take you?
Nowhere at all
You are just you
I can’t be more than me
So give it up for some peace of mind
You’ll like it so much you’d wish it’d be
This way all the time
Take a breath of air, amaze yourself
It’s a wonder how it all goes on
When it comes all undone
But all in all, I can hear the call
It’s in the air, it’s all in care
Won’t you listen to yourself?
J. MyOwn – 1980?
Away, away, I got to get away
Away from where? Away from here
I don’t care. Run away to get away
It really doesn’t matter where you
Go, or who will know now that
You are there, locked away out
Of sight surrounded by you stupid
Fright creeping, creeping in the
Night come the haunts of fright
Shiver and sake it lurks as a snake
Silent moves for the strike
To satisfy it’s mood-less bite
J. MyOwn – 1980?
In my home, I cherish many places. My bedroom is for rest and fantasies of the night; my bathroom, to cleanse and refresh my exercised body; my garage, to repair and create all that is mechanical; and my kitchen, to prepare gastronomic delights. However, there is a door to a room with an aging page, printed in color with large, bold type. Proudly, I have taped this sign to the upper third of the door, which states, “No food or drink allowed in here!” This is the one room, in which I take the most pride, my athenaeum, where I keep my books. Some call it a library. Others have reduced it to a shelf or two, and the indulgent devote an entire room to the very purpose of storing books. Nevertheless, in my mind, this place is my university, teacher and mentor, philosopher and interpreter, sage and friend. Silent icons of history, science, and dreams are the books I own.
Thirty-five years ago, or more, when I was young, I started gathering books. I started with storybooks having pictures and type so large that one could view them from across the room. Growing older, I collected classics of fairy tales, and young reader titles, such as The Boxcar Children, The Outsiders, and The Hardy Boys. All of these children’s stories helped me learn to read. These shelves accommodate The Encyclopedia of Britannica, twenty three to a set; The Books Of Knowledge, twenty plus in all; and Popular Mechanics: Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedia, to repair all that may break, and the yearbooks from all my high schools. The walls, eleven feet wide and seven feet tall, are filled with books on gardening and herbs, health and fitness, finance and business, philosophy and religion, occultism and mysticism. There are more reference books to serve me. I am constantly using thesauri and dictionaries for rhyming and slang. The guides for erotica, grammar, bad spelling, structure, scenes, and limericks help me to write in muse. Technical reference for my computer take a shelf or two, WordPerfect, Dos6, AutoCAD, and OS/2, ProComm Plus, Visual Basic3, dBase IV, Corel Draw to name a few. How can I leave out the Modem Reference, Quicken, Framework, Where is Carmen San Diego, Bryce2, NASCAR Racing, and clip art volumes? Hardware and software manuals are constantly in use. Moreover, what of the fiction? Those titles seem countless in number, yet they include authors like John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Jackie Collins, Steven King, James Mitchener, Michael Crichton, Nelson De Mille, and Robert Ludlum standing out in groups clustered shoulder to shoulder. Binders of photographs from over the years contain pictures I have taken that tell my life story. There is classic art of Monte and Da Vinci. More currently collected, is the art of Escher and Klimt, and my modern day favorites are Goldsworty and Archer. Included among these is a volume of drawings I have done. Articles from magazines an issue or two, school texts of physics, math, geometry, floriculture, and propagation I have kept to review.
On some of the shelves, I keep items that are not books or reference, but memorabilia. Atop one dusty shelf rests a weathered leather top hat, given by a friend. There are other memories that I have accumulated; a small bottle containing parts of a colorful green beetle, bottle caps, a short string of jute, and what looked like half of a peanut, that I collected from cleaning my weed. There is a stack of hard drives for my computer, which my cousin, Kurt, had given me. Binders of books on tape like of Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich, How to Listen Powerfully, Do It Now!, and other take a small space on the shelf. Occupying a shelf or two include a packing tape dispenser, laundry soap, cleansers, polishes, batteries and other Amway products that I store for sale. These oddities are remnants of a business that has fallen by the wayside to the more important necessities of family and job.
I spend hours in the place that I have come to call ‘my athenaeum’, my refuge from the sometimes tedious grind of life. Daily, the search for a particular book to benefit the task at hand leads me through the pressures of the world. So many familiar faces of titles standing ready for my call, spine out for saving space, I know them all. Here, represented on my shelves are books in all shapes, thick and thin, short and tall, wide and narrow. I can vouch for most of these volumes, but I borrowed some many years before. Their owners are widespread across this county, the USA, reminders of countless moves. From time to time, friends ask, “Do you have this book” Thinking of the title in question, I will say, “I know, just let me look”. As if a photographic memory had come to life, my eyes scan their faces one by one for clues that tell me this is the one.
In contrast to all the others books on my shelf, shiny, glossy surfaces depict newly acquired books. In contrast, the bleached, sun-faded editions quietly remain next to their cousins, aunts, and uncles. These relatives, I refer to as, ‘Used books,’ or older editions, as some call them, though I prefer the term ‘Old friends.’ Regrettably, I lack the time to clean the years of dust from these shelves of books. I am not sure how this grunge may draw the life from the delicate page edges. My only hope is that their spirit may endure such negligence on my part. Yet, there is a thrill as I occasionally stumble upon a book that I had forgotten I had, while searching for another. Yes, it is the reminder of a forgotten book, tightly squeezed between larger ones that halts my progress. Carefully I pull the top of its spine toward me, to get a better grip and remove it from the shelf. The snap or cracking sound as I break the aged sticky bond from it’s neighbors, tells me that it has been a very long time since I held it in my hands. Like the slight squeezing a bottle of fragrant perfume, the book permeates the air with the scent of time, seasoned paper, and binding aromas. My mind drifts bringing memories long forgotten of the last time I used this once familiar friend.
Walk, walk
The path you choose
Don’t get caught
In the blues..
J. MyOwn – 1980?
What defines a “Reliable Source”? Is it a publishing company or corporation, which supports an employee’s judgment of creditable reliability? Is it the consensus of the consumers, a group or a person that consults print and audio/video which decides weather of not what they perceive in the media presented is true of false? I am talking about intellectual skepticism. In today’s fast-paced informational age, we rely on these so-called “Reliable Sources” for literally everything that we do. And I do mean “Literally.” Do reliable sources really exist? I believe that these “Reliable Sources” are becoming harder to confirm.
It was just recently, when my English teacher instructed the class to use “Reliable Sources” for our research term paper that my quest began. This gradually struck a chord in my efforts to locate current information from these “Reliable Sources.” As my careful and calculated search for pertinent information progressed, at the local libraries, I found that half of the data collected was at least 30 years old. The other half, more relative to my controversial subject, seemed much more meager from the same library sources.
For several days after the official announcement of this next assignment and the required parameters, the “Reliable Sources” phrase played through my mind like an old 8-track tape. My brain started smoking, and then, like a motor without oil, it froze. I believed I had stumbled onto a new oxymoron, “Reliable Sources”, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, public safety, hot water heater, etc . . . I felt like George Carlin was taking over my mind.
The thinking wheels of my brain began to spin freely. There was no internal friction in my mind, as the pieces of relevant concepts started to fit together. The phrase, “Reliable Sources” started to become transparent, as if I could see through its tough outer shell, and into the innocent, frail truth, like a tree thousands of years old that had been felled, to examine its rings of history. Yeah, history, that was it! That is where I will solve this enigmatic statement about “Reliable Sources,” I will search for clues in antiquity.
Some of our greatest scientific and philosophic thinkers probably started out as “Unreliable Sources.” Imagine that. For example, what if some reporter had heard about Isaac Newton’s research. Let us assume he got an interview with Newton the day after his mind was seeded with the concept (of gravity, though it probably was not defined as such at that time), by the apple that fell on his head. This concept (gravity) was all Newton could talk about the day the reporter came for his interview, and therefore the reporter became convinced that he had an exclusive story. Later the story was printed. I am sure that other “respectable scientists,” among others, doubted the journalist’s source, not to mention his sanity.
Many other earnest men and women have been discredited because of society’s own personal lack of understanding. Columbus believed that the world was round, while at that time in history, the consensus of the population said that the world was flat. Going to the moon in a ship was thought to be insane at the time it was conceived, as was flight in general, but the Wright brothers proved all doubters wrong.
Fiction is really science, and it is just waiting to be proven to the rest of the world. Is the source un-credible in the beginning? I guess not. So during the last 200+ years, man’s creative mind has been on a roll. How many countless numbers of men and women have been imprisoned, excommunicated, tortured, or put to death because they were the “Reliable Sources”? How many of these discredited journalists along with their sources were there in the past?
One of the greatest books that has been cited a “Reliable Sources” is the Bible. Just how old is it? Well, we know that the New Testament is dated back just under 2,000 years. However, did the Apostles write in English? I don’t’ think so! What gets me is the Old Testament. This set of books starts with the reaction of many. Invariably, the question is, did man pop onto the earth knowing how to write? Just how was all that history correctly transferred over 10,000 years (which is a very controversial subject in its self)? As far as I know much of the Old Testament is transcribed from ancient Sumerian Cuneiform, which took years just to learn enough to translate. Much of the Old Testament was finally written down after generations word of mouth transfer.
There is a very good test of this word of mouth communication. A group of people are assembled, one person is whispered a statement clearly. Verbally it is passed person to person with no one person hearing it twice. At the end of the experiment, the last person to hear the statement announces to all what was told to him. In this test and many others like it, the last statement convieyed is not even close to the original statement given.
Presently our government has not been deemed a very “Reliable Source.” There is so much information pertaining to the truth that it is just waiting to be uncovered. At the end of the movie, “Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark”, you see government officials stashing the Ark away in some gigantic dusty warehouse along with countless numbers of other stuff that our government has deemed “Top Secret” and never intended to be made public. All the UFO data collected since the turn of the 19th century is most likely stashed right next to it. Just a year ago Hollywood released a blockbuster film “Men in Black.” Now I know that this film was intended to be a fantasy scenario, but was it really. Could it have been a clever political satire about the truth in which, the government does conspire to look the other way when “inquiring minds want to know”? It might explain a lot!
In the film “Conspiracy Theory,” Mel Gibson portrayed the part of a victim of government experimentation in mind control for the illicit use of political agendas. His mind was in a constant battle over the things that her read in what many call “Unreliable Sources” like, The National Inquirer, The Star and the like. How many of us read the headline of a nationally known newspaper, and automatically assume the bold type and incriminating color picture are closely related with the truth. This danger of such naive acceptance was never more evident than as conveyed in the latest James Bond movie, “Never Say Never.” The theme of this film revolved around a media mogul that was determined to “B.S.” the world into believing that governments were back-stabbing each other over such global issues as nuclear weapons. I know that you may say the movie was fiction. Unfortunately, this sounds like the same thing that newspaper mogul, Randolph Hurst did at the turn of this century.
Just because some guru-politician, scientist, or biologist has stated anything, the “Reliable Source” prints it, and then the world buys it, does not mean the truth came out. The scandals and conspiracies are intended to wrestle with the truth will remain as long as we are shameful about our actions as humans. What ever happened to “What if? Or that “Gut feeling? Next time you accept things seen, heard, or felt, as fact, think twice about which of these senses could be fooling you, and remember about what is the “Reliability of the Source.” The truth in published media is getting harder to prove. Just prove me wrong.
……. News Flash …….
Student mysteriously disappears after uncovering the truth about “Reliable Sources.” Authorities suspect alien abduction . . .
more at 11:00 . . .
Science Daily
