Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta 1895

Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta 1895 - One of the Liberty Bell's travels in its day to various points in the USA - Atlanta school children pose with historic icon, back when you were allowed to touch it.


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FB Feb 26 1:20 PM

"Hopefully you will not need our services for years to come..." so starts the mass mailing letter (reduced postage) from a Cemetery group selling burial plots in and around Woodbridge NJ. "1/2 price preneed in-ground service". My first such received advertising letter. lol?


Run into the school on his stick horse! "Bang" "bang" "bang" went his powerful little finger to the Bad guys with guns. "Whooo Pony! Whooo!"


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"The Cathedral Spaces of my Mind"- World Trade Center One - Lobby April 4, 1973

"The Cathedral Spaces of my Mind"- World Trade Center One - Lobby April 4, 1973


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Zu Asche, Zu Staub - Babylon Berlin

Babylon Berlin, this 16 part German production on Netflix is slow moving at times, (losing something sometimes in translation I think with both dubbed over in English and occasional written translations at bottom of screen) but totally great in period sets, dress and historic timeline focus.

Showing the corruption, political chaos and decadence of Berlin in last days of the Weimar Republic.

A drug addicted vice cop (suffering from PTSD from WWI) from Cologne on special assignment in Berlin on a mission to find blackmail material (porn) placing politics of that distant city under a sword in an upcoming election  (and the city government of Konrad Adenauer there). 

And the deep state, industrialists (planning a coup to restore the Kaiser), Russian factions (a fortune in Czarist gold hidden on a freight train with traveling papers from Leningrad to Istanbul presumably for a waiting exiled Trotsky) and spies and underworld gangsters carrying out other nefarious deeds to thicken the plot.

An underlying theme of forgiveness and personal redemption in the final scenes. 

Not surprising that someone like Hitler could take over in the economic mess caused by the Depression. More to that story and not known in the west btw. 

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Fresh Kills _ End - Day 40

End - Day 40

The end?

Mental relief at last?

Graduation?

Tests?

No.

Pass/fail?

No.

What is next?

Where to?

?

I go on.

On.

?

I am.

On.

Not off.

On.

Fresh Kills _ Perception - Day 39

Perception - Day 39

We each build our own reality amid a stark universal background.

What came before came before. Only the present, the now, seems to matter most.

The culture surrounding us - instinct and mother's milk - sustains us or we drift to other perceptions of reality.

How big or small the universe is perceived relates to how we see our place in the scheme of things. The size of the building blocks of reality does or does not matter. It all depends on the individual to determine the measure.

Recognition and comfort with self flows into and out of cosmic tides, like our breath keeping time with the heartbeat of THE ALL! It is so easy to miss a beat.

We all live our lives in canyons of sorts - small walled off areas with a small view of the world.  The total picture.

Sometimes the water is in a difficult place to reach within our little canyons. Sometimes the water is within reach. How difficult sometimes to perceive, to see, to reach or to touch.

If we travel away from the canyon and into another canyon we keep on seeing the first canyon in our brains since most canyons tend to look alike.

Some can see beyond the personal prejudice that states that all canyons look alike. While others, no matter where they travel, only see the one canyon.

We all build our own reality. Nobody really knows what is inside the next guy.

Go with social flow or get jettisoned into the storm.

Wash up on a deserted beach and start all over again.

And what might we find there?

New perceptions?

New faith?

New realities?

Fresh Kills _ Clarity - Day 38

Clarity - Day 38

The old man reconciled himself to himself in the context of his living his life.

What was next would be generation upon generation of the things he believed in more or less. Some of which had already been passed to him.

Somewhere in the context of the hidden subplot of the clan, a subculture of the global, would be a family mission statement added onto and deleted from as time goes on. The family is the building block of all society.

We each contribute to the minor and the major aspects of the local and global culture.

The majority of his descendants may have an innate sense that all things close should be important and something like the sustainable and the edible and the real but within a category of shelter and comfort.

Life is a soup of many cultural and ancestral things. And perhaps too many cooks spoil any broth.  There also is a time to reform, let go, reassemble the game plan of living. Holding onto dogma is death.  Death of the brain, the heart and the spirit.

Never be afraid to stop and rethink your actions and game plan. George Washington won a war by knowing when and how to retreat with style and rather than call it defeat.

Life of the soul reborn in the womb of limbo can also be an unborn soul in the past for that for some others perhaps could have been reborn anywhere, anytime on any part of that timeline past, present or future. 

For many the path is a long path to travel and it connects with many different worlds.

The energy of the birth of an idea can become the unity of all thoughts and ideas and the context of any civilization. 

Fresh Kills _ Poison Tree - Day 37

Poison Tree - Day 37

Her grandfather, who had raised her, was exclaiming something loud in the back garden as we toured all the structures that now were built on the once empty patch of land.

The old man had been allotted this fairly large lot by the state. It had been sold to him very cheaply. I estimated the original lot to be about three quarters of an acre.

On that lush tropical landscape had once been many more trees than were now present and situated in between structures. Even so, the existing species of large trees grew avocados, mangoes and bananas. These had helped feed a large family on a state road worker's salary.

The main house was plain. Large dormitory like rooms were where the boys and girls had sleep. There was a common room or living room and a small kitchen. This structure had been built wall by wall, room by room, over the years. Extra savings went into concrete blocks on a regular basis.

The back of the property had once housed a large pig sty. Pork had been the cash crop that supplemented tropical fruits and the staple rice and beans diet. Pork had helped purchase the blocks. Piglets had been temporary play companions to poor children.

In fact, she had told me that as a child, the only dolls she played with were homemade things made of corn husks, the corn of which had fed the pigs. Corn silks adorned the corn husk dolls as hair.

The old man was quite animated.

The land now held five houses where at one time stood one.

As the nearby town grew outward, modest houses started to dot the countryside. Streets were paved. Second generations built a second story onto parents' houses.

Zoning laws changed in the expanded town. No pigs could be raised within the new city limits. Now only a few old hens pecked at the ground and made the occasional stew.

I asked for a translation. What was the old man shouting about?

Her cousin had inherited a one room house on the back of the property. He had recently married and his new bride had planted some shrubs to decorate this desolate corner of the original lot.

The literal translation of the bride's plantings came to words translated as "poison tree".

"It is a poison tree!" was what he repeated over and over again in Spanish.

The old man was upset. Everything on his property in terms of plants had been always been edible. Now, a stranger, the wife of a grandson was planting a decorative plant and not an edible one.

The old man's bubble had burst. The world outside his front porch could have changed in some measurable way over the years but it somehow had not touched a chord.

His sons had gone to college. One daughter was a registered nurse. The ones who had emigrated to the mainland had their own measure of material success in the post-World War II boom in America.

He had at least thirty grandchildren and umpteen great grandchildren. All the changes over the last half a century registered in some proportion that matched the land that he stood on and owned.

Now, on this day, paradise seemed corrupted and lost. The people on the land now did not understand his vision for the land. The land must feed his family. A tree from the outside world had invaded.

The seeds of the destruction were planted. His vision, his temporary footprint in the scheme of things, was disappearing before his eyes. So he shouted in his own way.

His time had passed. Now he knew and recognized that fact.

This he expressed with great passion.

Fresh Kills _ Baptism - Day 36

Baptism - Day 36

While I wait to graduate from this place, while I anticipate a merger with light and perhaps a greater perception of truth, a greater swifter balance between the yin and yang of the whole thing, I, realizing that this whole place fixates itself on the last thought and or thoughts at that last moment of life.

I am anxious to return, a visit in disguise perhaps to visit my son, whose face still eludes me here.

But I can see his face as a toddler at his baptism.

We had visited to my wife’s home town on the island and what I remember on Sunday morning is being rudely awoken by the sound of a very loud speaker but at some distance, like half a mile away. It is the loud speaker in the town, on the roof of an adobe church on a hill, broadcasting the mass to all who did not bother attend the service. Am I in United States territory?

Well anyway, it is like ninety-five degrees on an October Sunday afternoon and there is like a mass baptism going on with ceiling fans and open doors and windows in the tropics.

Thirty infants and toddlers were all assembled in their white uniforms and christening clothes.  That is the Prot in me calling them christening clothes. Sounds like mom-mom talking. Christening is what they do to ships, don’t you know.

Well the whole thing was going to be one long affair I could tell.  A basic dialogue with priest and congregation with the basic words of renouncing Satan whoever that is really and then one by one the kid and his or her godparents and parents and relatives approach the baptismal font for a sprinkle of water.

Just as the ceremony was about to begin, some little bastard in midst of the thirty to be baptized lets out a yell, cry, tears and then like wide fire it spread to each and every one through the ranks of babies and toddlers in the crowd.  And none of then stopped till we got out of that hellhole some two hours later.  Is that what hell is supposed to be like, hearing thirty infants and toddlers screaming their fear and disgust. Mixed with sweat and sticky clothing.

One pushes one primordial button and they all tap into that fear of the Yung uncatalogued data. What a mess is the concept of salvation.

Who is the kid that day that started the first scream of discomfort and primal fear? That Satan guy no doubt.  We have met the enemy and the enemy is we.

Welcome to the real world son.

Fresh Kills _ Anticipation - Day 35

Anticipation - Day 35

The tent is raised. The lights are on. I am ready to go.

I am ready to move on.

I am ready to play a ghost for a moment or two.  Share something with some loved ones in dreams.  Whisper a prayer, or a hope and maybe even a winning lottery number.

I am pumped.

I am ready to go.

Death caught me unexpectedly and I thought it was unfair.

In the overall balanced scheme of things, they happen with a reason and a purpose as much as they happen by chance.

Yin.

Yang.

Live.

Breath.

Learn.

Love.

Be.

Be.

I await by the door, the gateway, at the end of the path, my path.

I am ready but there is a timed lock on the door.

Everything within its time.

Everything within its full purpose.

Fresh Kills _ Black Stone – Day 34

Black Stone – Day 34

Which leads me to a more personal ending, my name I believe carved in stone somewhere not unlike the phantom fiancée of my mother.

I read the thoughts of another here who briefly glimpsed into my vision of the end on 911…

I had what I think was a prophetic dream in the seventies. Although I never quite understood all the images and voices in that singular vision, I wrote about them and put them away for decades.  I begin to understand some of them now, after parts of the dream seem to unfold before all the rest of us.

While I can’t date that vision, I now date it 4-4-73, April 4, 1973, which is the official dedication date of the old World Trade Center.

I ran into the sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick some few weeks ago for the first time through his fascination and biblical like vision(s) related to all things labeled 3-4-74 which in his case relates to March through April 1974.

In any case I somehow feel that if the whole world kept meticulous diaries in the past maybe we could see a similar vein of prophecy all over the planet on similar dates everywhere.

Which makes me think that the Internet may in fact be a critical stepping stone in our species' progress into the future, when in a scientific format, we will be able to document John of Patmos type visions and have a wider range of interpretations everywhere in every culture and all belief systems.

On that day perhaps we will perhaps begin a dialogue with the creator on this plane of existence with the first few true universal words through a man-made universal translator. Bizarre! Possible?

In my own case, the vision of a great destruction was right in front of me but did not recognize it until it happened.  Which leads me to repeat my distrust of all things in the Book of Revelation. One interpretation for seven billions of people's perceptions is wholly inadequate if in fact it was a true vision.

We won’t see any of it coming until it hits us four-square between the eyes in our third eye/chakra. Period.

The image of a father kneeling, paying loving homage to his dead son sparks into focus some of the last lines of my small personal vision of the future.

When “the beginning and the end are equal…”, “when the more is the less.”, when “the water of life flows to all nations from one source…”...

Albeit to say that the black stone surrounding the present Memorial Fountains at the WTC represents markers and gravestone remembrances of those who died there, and have no other official grave sites.

With that said and without revealing all of my own treasured wordings or images of my particular vision of the World Trade Center 4-4-73, I can say this.

While you can say that these two fountains represent a perception of a deceased north tower and deceased south tower, if you look on the map, you can see and perceive the present a little bit differently – you might see two fountains – one orientated east and one orientated west with a common north south axis.

Perhaps the Memorial Fountains will in time be renamed in another age, the future, and be called the World Peace Fountains.

“…Here marks the beginning of a new human race which God did see fit to begin here in this place.”

Fresh Kills _ White Stone - Day 33

White Stone - Day 33

Mention of Rome brings into memory energy of concrete.

As such, the inventors or perfecters of the concrete thing that built an empire, the concrete thing is being assembled somewhere in the future.

In fact slabs of white concrete are being attached to some steel frame.

I step back and see an obelisk like structure thirty to forty feet high being constructed on the Fresh Kills Landfill.

It is my, our tombstone, that exists nowhere else for some.

In a way, what is left of the trash of generations of New Yorkers is also now considered sacred hallowed ground.

They are painting the concrete with a phosphorous based paint.  The obelisk will glow at night with a little help of some light.

There are no names carved here. This is a monument to all the unknown souls who perished that day 911.

Friends, relatives, historians are invited to paint and add graffiti to the base of the monument up to ten feet.

The other twenty to thirty feet of the monolith will be seen from the nearby highway and also by some planes landing day or night at Newark.

It is a gravestone of sorts on the physical parts of me.

Body gone, at rest in sight of white stone.  The image that has haunted me is in focus.

On the body thing – finally some closure.

Fresh Kills _ Merger - Day 32

Merger - Day 32

It occurs to me that when in some recent day of existence I heard the term “war zone”, I am also too I am lately filtering in another term “ground zero”.

 “Ground Zero” on a map was the name of the snack stand in the middle of the Pentagon’s courtyard back in the days of the cold war which the working class won by sacrificing national healthcare for the sake of financing that titanic struggle against the satanic forces of communism.

Are we at war? With whom?

Ourselves? I joke and laugh to myself.

National healthcare will have to wait again until we defeat this new Satan in this new war?

Sacrifice.  That is what me and my ancestors, generation after generation, have been doing since they got off the boat to fight Mr. Lincoln’s corporate war with the Evil South.

In a way, at the moment of my death and splattering all over creation, I must have checked out about thirty ten thousandths of a second before the pilot and co-pilot of Run-a-muck Airlines flight number whatever.

And if my final seconds merged the last thoughts of life and things closest to me, my family, and things immediate like death, and things theorized like after death, there must have been a lot of energies of thought going on at the same time and all focused on my point of death on a timeline.

In a way since I am quite the agnostic, perhaps my thoughts of my deist god merged too with that pilot or co-pilot’s thoughts or definitions at the end of one’s personal timeline into that unexplored region of life aka death.

I have to wonder if the end of one’s timeline on earth is a metaphor for God, then perhaps my thoughts of God merged with, I assume the pilot is a he, his thoughts of God at the same moment.

I shared that common thought, common moment in a dream about Mecca?

Oh well.

Are the Arabs and or the Muslims my, not mine, I am dead, my country’s enemy now. How did they become the enemy?

What did we do to provoke them?  What evil leaders lied about the great and holy United States and convinced them that we eat babies and bomb innocent civilians on a scale not unlike the unfair propaganda about the average CEO drunk on the blood of downsized, outsourced employees and their eliminated salaries, benefits, pensions in dollar values going directly into the next quarterly bonus.

I sound bitter. Best to rid myself of the final bile here in step one to eternity or whatever.

The sharks at the top in their feeding frenzy, the ruling class and their war on the middle classes consumes an infinite number of victims, morsels in the pyramid below.

The problem with any Ponzi scam is that sooner or later the bottom is too weak to support the top of the food chain and or pyramid.  The Egyptians had many a literal pyramid collapse in the middle of construction.  They kept at it until they had the perfect formula and then guess what? Nature gave out.  No floods, no agricultural bounty, no taxes.  The system collapsed.

Guess what? They never built one of those stone pyramids again. Why? Too many got burned in the scam.  New Pharaoh comes along and wants to play “build that pyramid”.  No way Jose.

New game on.

This whole demonization of other cultures is not unique to either the east or the west.

But if I have to comment on demonization I can probably speak about the west and the way the Roman of Roman empire fame set up the system to grow and collapse and start all over again?

I guess I really, really, don’t like Rome and its collateral damage. Somehow in spite of beautiful public buildings and roads and profits, too many at the bottom of that Ponzi scam rests on the shoulders of the poor, exploited, victimized and slaves.

It is like this Jesus character got victimized by everything that was evil in the Roman system and then three centuries later they resurrect this Jewish holy man and make victimization a good thing, a stepping stone to heaven.

In a way the founder of the church thing was a Roman general who murdered anybody in his pathway to his power.  That he used his own son to conquer one last worthy opponent, a strong Christian general, and then eliminated his own son as the only potential enemy left.  That he had to wait a year until he felt comfortable in this task of murdering his son after he gave a lot of public buildings away to a lot of bishops in order to gain their support against popular uprisings should the mob turn on him once he killed his son. Propaganda and the fear of a new god to bring the angry mobs into check.

That the crucifixion execution of Constantine’s heir Crispus got merged on the same timeline, mythline, spec movie script treatment line with the crucifixion execution of Cristus and or Christ. That Constantine built a global chantry for the whole world to pray forever for his megalomaniac mega-god ambitious soul along with other pretentions and guilt connected with the murder of his son.  Sound familiar?

In a way the Christ myth parallels the Constantine story very closely. Filicide seems to be a core principle of “monotheism”. Does not matter.  Not to me.  So much useless baggage accumulated in life and left behind at the last station stop.  Me, this train is bound for glory.

Coming from generation after generation of victims in the feeding chain and a so-called democracy, one gets the feeling that the fix is in, regarding life and even more so in life if they can so easily sell you the so-called fix after death.

Who is my enemy?

What is the difference between General Moses, General Constantine and General Mohammed?

None.

They all founded religions of peace.

Enough said and done.

(Meme Green)

What is a meme?

Have I been here more forty days, forty months or even forty years?

Was there a world war? Is there nothing left for me to visit on my old timeline?

Had mankind dug itself into preparation for another dark nuclear winter, another dark age?

I know nothing!  I am in limbo!

Don’t mistake later memes on the timeline - I tell myself.  Don’t insult Jews or early Christians with the lording over the animals in a wrong way now, as opposed to original context in Genesis. The environment is real.

Nature and balance are real.  Imbalance, even on a spreadsheet, spells disaster.

One of the themes I have come to in some vibes back there on that other place was that the Roman Empire was not Green.  Rome, unlike many other empires, besides its eternal war on humanity, was also at war with nature.

Rome hated nature as evidenced by its military, numbers only, Julian calendar that abandoned the moon and or feminine (balanced) concept connected to nature.

If west is to survive, it must go to its pre-Constantine roots and adore the abundance of gifts of a loving God to her children and abandon the chaos and natural imbalance caused by the reptilian Roman military mind.

Fresh Kills _ Back to Earth - Day 31

Back to Earth - Day 31

I am becoming aware, awaring, of my ability to put off the unpleasant and or in this case the  surprising.

“I know you” rings in my ears and that look in the eyes of her crystalizing a thought.

“I know you.  You are Stanley”.

“Who? What?”

“You remind me of Stanley. You look like him.  You sound like him”

“Um”

“How old are you…Stanley was born in April 1943, he was adopted out of Philly.  His mother was Irish…”

From that and a little more discussion, a closure with many of the open ended questions of my mother’s life seemed to fall into place, even if I had not had time in the almost a year since I had heard this story, to check out the facts.

In fact in my anal retentive PC way of looking of the whole matter, if my mother had had a child out of wedlock, she certainly wasn’t the only Irish girl in Philly.

“You look just like him. You sound the same too…”

In the confusion of the moment, I missed some of his background like maybe he studied to be a rabbi.  Was he a rabbi now?

“He sells cell phones and contracts.  He can get you a good deal…”

I hadn’t followed up.  My wife and her friend drifted apart when my wife changed jobs, got a better paying one in the city once I had arrived back in New York.  Everything here had gotten tremendously expensive, especially housing.  I could look back to the late seventies when Manhattan was still an American city.  Now it had become a global city like Hong Kong.

It was on the thoughts of Stanley and mom I was giving a few moments of thought to when the plane hit and interrupted the energy of my thoughts.

It is perhaps that unbalanced, incomplete energy, on which I was jettisoned here and now survive.  It is perhaps in forty days of incubation I can mutate that energy and take it with me.  Until then I am stuck in Palooka Ville.

In a way, I had read stories over the years about adopted people who sought out their natural parents. I was no doubt good filler human interest newspaper stuff.  But I did not want to climb a mountain of bureaucratic paperwork to find a person who only sounded like he might be a ten year older half-brother version of myself.

But I have not repeated the background information to myself that made this possible half-brother (that’s a weird term, so tridentine, so constantinian, so mercantile and so religious). Marriage is after all just a property contract. That the rich and royalty needed for centuries and it was not until the rise of the middle classes, that the peasants wanted property contracts, marriage, just like their betters. How bourgeois.

My last thoughts were of the energy of mom’s complicated, many compartmentalized sections of life.

Another quick tangent. 

This all started when I went to visit an uncle in western Pennsylvania who was dying of lung cancer.  That uncle was the husband of mom’s only sister. When aunt May started to relate the facts of her life to me to refresh our acquaintance after many years of absent separation, she mentioned Ed.

Ed was mom’s fiancé during world war two. There was the story that he went down to the local draft board, same place I had originally registered at, in Kensington and volunteered for the draft after Pearl Harbor.  He went on with his civilian life waiting to be called up.  After about a year he went back to the draft board and asked why nobody had contacted him.  They looked up his records and he was listed as dead in those records?

“Dead. I am not dead.”

They corrected the records, inducted him shortly thereafter to be a mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Corp.  He went off to war and was killed on a famous Philly ship, the U.S.S. Morrison, the ship of the Four Chaplains. A lot of Philly boys died on that troop ship that went down at the statistical height of German U-Boat activity in the Atlantic. 

The Four Chaplains made a good war human interest and or war department propaganda story in that four chaplains, two Prots, one Pape and one Rabbi, who gave up their life jackets to service men and went down with the ship. Sad story all around.

Well anyway, there had always been an animosity between mom and her sister, her only sibling.  There was that air of love hate between these two sisters and there was a love hate thing with her parents too.  In retrospect it just might have been the poverty of her youth that she hated her parents for.  And the sisterly rival between the older poverty princess of the family and mom being the youngest and the one who got stuck with all the dirty tasks around the house.

I saw a clipping of mom’s picture in the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 5, 1934.  She had the previous day been dressed up as George Washington in a Four of July celebration in North Philly.  Mom was tall for her age but in a way she had somehow been talked or been brow beaten into dressing up as a man and she did not like the way I think she felt that life in general had seemed to make a victim out of her every step of the way.  It is all attitude. But jeez.

Ed as it turned out had been my dying uncle’s best friend before the war which is how he met mom through my aunt’s dating Ed’s best friend, my uncle by marriage.

In terms of the open facts and open dialogues that sometimes flowed over in family discussions or situations, I had always thought that the tension between herself and her sister was the fact that Aunt May was lucky enough to get and keep what she wanted most in her husband.  Mom got screwed.

That she might have been pregnant and maybe waiting to get married to her soldier I do not know. That there was no D.N.A. testing back when, that she had no property contract, marriage, to the dead service boy, meant that she was shit out of luck regarding an insurance policy made out to his parents.

That single motherhood was possible but it held that low class caste stigma of sans marriage. That adoption for a child born out of wedlock was a possible option and source of tension with her parents who being the poor whites in the slums, somehow thought that they were not that low to allow unmarried motherhood into their poverty digs.

It all made sense in some strange kind of energy way.  I was wondering then and now if on a psychic energy level, I always knew the truth. Or did I?

Sitting there across from her in Arizona on one of our lunches together, I knew about Ed as a fiancée, I did not know about him as a possible lover and father of a possible half-brother.  I did know that in Battery Park, he did have his name carved on a monument, on the waterfront, dedicated by JFK back when.

In a way I was trying to give her some closure on Ed, the man who might have been my father.  But in reality, if he lived, the basic me would never have come into existence. Strange thoughts. Strange energies.

No closure on the Ed I knew.  Now no closure on the Ed I might have known through a possible unknown sibling.

I have often wondered why the system in Arizona passed mom onto a Jewish home.  Was it the tyranny of chance?

Or was there that weird human energy of Jewish son who wondered about his birth mom through the years and was somehow connected to her in some unseen dimension on a mortal plane?

Whatever.

Fresh Kills _ New Years - Day 29, _ Hold that Thought – Day 30

New Years - Day 29

We had gotten separated for a time on out trek back east.  My wife and son moved back first and stayed with some her of relatives. I spent some months waiting for a job to end, a merger that would likely end another thin economy job. I also put the house on the market.  I would be moving back once the house was sold, job ending or not.

In the meantime, my wife had made a friend in a job she found at the Mall.  I did not meet this friend until maybe six months after I got back to NYC and or the fifth wheel borough.

Her friend was Jewish and she invited us and many other people to celebrate Jewish New Year at her condo near the mall.

She met us at the car and we unloaded some edibles or drinkables that we were contributing to the feast.

She was middle aged and then she gave me the strangest stare not unlike I used to get from some middle-aged Midwesterner retired in Arizona and wondering what this New Yorker, fish out of water, elder from the church was all about.

She made some chit chat on the way up to her front door and they she says to me. “I know you”.

Hold that thought. What the hell was she was talking about.  She didn’t know me.

Hold that Thought – Day 30

What is it?  I am going back and thinking that maybe everything here at this level of post life is an examination around the last moments of life.

That I have not dwelled on the who killed me kind of thing. It does not matter.

And it killed me. A big ugly out of control jet. Beyond those thoughts of intent, pilot mistakes, mechanical difficulties do not matter.

The big slam into me as part of the energy of the bee hive where I labored was all that I am going to examine here.  Just as well.  In terms of death, the whole of life can be indicted here in the kangaroo court of the hereafter.

I am getting closer to that end zone of this game, these forty days, forty eons – God, will earth still be there when I can out of here and get a weekend pass as visitor as a ghost for some other level of analysis and reconciliation?

Anyway, I am in an interior decorator, no Hollywood film set decorator frame of mind. What do I find at the other side of door number one with another possible six doors to enter? 

Perhaps you don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.

Maybe I can just stay put for a few eons and rest.

As a basic nontrinitarian agnostic, I am also areligionist – without religion and dogma.  I lived my life day to day existence with Jesus’ basic golden rule and am too what could you call it, a cultural Catholic and or cultural Christian.

Too many cooks have spoiled the broth on the perception end of what heaven and or paradise looks like, it infrastructure, its basic and real purpose etc. I pull out a cosmic cigar and light up, and watch the smoke, do the basic shaman thing.

If I were going to paint a picture, design a set for the living level I would have to go for the happy hunting ground theme of my hunter gatherer ancestors. Throw out the electric lights and tapestries of urban living and just go camping outdoors under a cover of stars at night…

... first man and first woman were infused with the spirit of the universe.

At their beginning, their eyes saw the marvels that their ancestors had ridden as a flow.

With eyes first opening came a knowledge of before the beginning of first man and first woman.

After the beginning, first man and first woman could no longer ride a flow of energy – a flow of nature.

Eyes first opened made for hearts saddened. Something was lost with the gain of eyes first opened.

The parent of first man and first woman – nature – was still nature but somehow apart.

Knowledge of the great divide – before the beginning and the chaos afterward –

Opened an inner voice.

We are –

but who are we in relation to the all –

the universe?

Smoke. Puff. Puff.

More smoke.

Go with the flow…

Fresh Kills _ Arizona - Day 28

Arizona - Day 28

Where was I? Oh yes. Arizona. Another version of hell.

I guess whatever I learned in eastcoast-ese about the way things worked, I saw the world turned upside down in Arizona.

Going out there for a few months to catch up on the family duty thing, caused us to fall into an economic pit.  In other words, for many reasons, non-important here in retrospect, financially, we got stuck there for several years.

Not to say it is not a pleasant enough place, but you can’t drink the water and you cannot get a decent slice of pizza parlor pizza anywhere.  Whatever.

Against that background, I was dealing on my few visits with mom with a woman that had grown “organically retarded” as a medical term I believe because of some brain infection and her allergies to antibiotics.  Something I did not inherit.

Well, in many ways a child grows up and in many ways the growth in body mind and spirit is a learning curve.  And somewhere along that learning curve there is an intersecting line on a curve of your life and learning curve going upward and an aging parent’s life curve descending, coming down for a landing at death.

At that intersecting point of the live of parent and child there is I think for the majority of humanity, a realization, reconciliation, a closure of sorts between the past and the present.  That never happened between me and mom.

Somewhere along my timeline is a ten or so year gap when they west out west, my mother and my siblings and they fell off the edge of the earth, when letters and or Christmas cards are marked – “return to sender – no forwarding address” etc.  That and disconnected phone numbers and a blank.

Somewhere along the timeline I took time off from being a workaholic to trace them down and they were willing to be found, a listed phone number etc.

In that gap of time, mom had had her brain infection and the result was talking to someone being ten or twelve in focus and less so in memory.

That being said, I could complete the puzzle thing about the why of my being, after time with shrink and reassemble the past to better understand it through talking to mom on a normal adult, parent, child level.

It is here where she needed to be in adult care and lived for many years in some Jewish home that she got put into by the state.

It was a wonderfully clean, professional and polite place with its staff and inmates.  It was here that I would sometimes come to sign her out and take her to lunch or shopping and not be able to communicate beyond the basic thing that many parents in a politically correct way of saying it, have to deal with in a relationship with a special needs child/adult.

My mind wanders. 

Wanders away from Arizona and the heat and frustration to me of non-communication.

It was along the timeline, now I can remember, that I have a wife and a son.

The thing about Arizona for all its simplicity in lifestyle and economies, it is a place in a desert.  It is a place where that religion thing got born in a desert thing too.  It was here that we wanted our child to be in a better school than a public school.  There’s that old dad’s prejudice against public school thing.

We found a church school of a mainstream sect that we could afford.

One thing led to another and I joined that church and eventually ended up being an elder or more like elder in training.

It is amazing, looking back from death, how unsophisticated I was in my social skills especially in dealing with people.  And I was dealing too with an older crowd of people who I was supposed to be available to in terms as a go between with a member and a pastor.

I was irritated that I could not be as kind, intelligent, patient as I thought I was, and to strangers.  In a way, even if mom were of normal body and mind at that stage, I probably would have done or settled with a half-assed reconciliation or closure with the past – just gone through the motions, like so many others in the rat race of life.

Here, in retrospect and in anticipation to maybe make some afterlife reconciliation with a wife and child once I get out of this limbo, it will not be real, only imagined I fear.  Kind of like watching the whole thing through glass – a TV program.

The whole universe at times seems to be poetry and beauty and light. And at other times the whole universe seems like just a soap opera with a side order of Madison Avenue commercial break in total value.

Must be getting depressed.  The subject is mom.  Well over the years since dad’s death I have had the occasional dream about dad when in life.

Mom seemed to be tuned out in death the same way she tuned out later in life. Life is not fair.

Let’s leave Arizona.  Let’s travel back to Staten Island. And a Jewish New Year.