Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I need a small vacation
See you all later on


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Seriously

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Logic is not my strong suite.
Sort of a Christian Testimony.
I have not been to a Quaker meeting in years.
They vary from town to town. Some of them even have preachers.
But even the silent meetings are different.
I have been to meetings in Baltimore, Washington D.C. Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Louis Obispo, San Antonio.
But I only belonged to the meeting in Nashiville. Some bible believing protestnts do not consider Quakers to be Christians. What with the Quaker belief in baptism by fire. I am an ignorant child about Quaker belief and practice. Quakers say they do not have a dogma. But it seems like after four hundred years a little must have seeped in.
But I know less about The Religious Society of Friends than I do Judaism and I know next to nothing about the religion of the Jews.

Thank God for Nietzsche. If not for him I would now be a Jew for Jesus probably singing the Israeli national anthem at a prayer meeting.
Nothing wrong with that but my favorite national anthem is the one Mel Brooks sang in the 2000 Year Old Man. "All caves except cave 47 can go to hell."


A lot of power in the Name Of Jesus. I believe it. Better than saying SHAZAM. I have called out to Jesus so many times in vain.

I suppose I sound cynical. No I am just crazy. How can I be cool with the son but not the father. Wouldn't figure that God would resemble his son in having a human form? Beats me
It just beats the hell out of me.
Makes no sense to me.
Neither does quantum mechanics.



That is why I am no longer a Quaker or maybe I am still a Quaker. I have no idea. But it has been thirty years since that Nashville Meeting heard from me. I am probably dropped from the membership. That is ok.


I just wish I could have been buried in a Quaker cemetary. But my best bet would probably be Agudis Achiem here in san antonio. Or maybe Workmen's Circle in Baltimore. Why am I so finicky about it. Why should it matter what happens to this body I am using after I die?

Thinking about my mother's death. She was an inspiration to me. A very good death my momma showed me. Put my mind at ease. At peace with her God. The God of her mothers and fathers before her. I don't think I want to make peace with that God. But it was good for her. Suprised she did not have a Christian funeral. Here grandaughter witnessing to her about Jesus Rose nodding her head and smiling. Rose opted for an orthodox burial instead. Those plain wooden coffins are a good deal Her's only about seven hundred bucks. But they did have some beautiful wooden coffins too. Looked like mahogony one of them. I would have loved to put a mast on it and sail off into the sunset.

Yeah if I had my druthers let me have a funeral like my hero. Captain Slocum. Just sail off into the sunset in my ocean going sloop.


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Old TV shows
Firestone Tires
Casey Jones
Jackson Tennessee
Sudden death
No tomatoes again this year.
Other than that everything is peachy

Christ as metaphor. Maybe that is what is missing. I know I am not right. Christ as king of Mardi Gras. I have no idea of what that means. I heard it is ludicrous.

Funny what goes through ones mind when facing sudden death.

I blew out a front tire hammer down on interstate forty it took the steering wheel out of my hands and the truck veered across the median strip headed in the on coming traffic. I wasn't praying to nobody for nothing it happened so fast.

I thought that I was dead. That is the thought I heard so loudly not a voice but a thought. "I AM DEAD!". Then it was all visual. . Not my life flashing before my eyes but an episode of Rockford and sons. And then another loud thought, I AIN"T DEAD YET!" I grabbed the wheel and steered my ass off turning the truck away from the on coming traffic. When I finally got it stopped another driver came running over and told me to mark this day on my calender as my luckiest day.

I have heard it said, Spinoza's God helps those that helps themselves. I got everything I need. Except a metaphor for Jesus. And home grown tomatoes.

Nothing much ever happened to me. I have so little experience to write about other than work.

Geezerhood is a bitch, I wonder how many times I have wrote that snip about the blow out. Probably ten. repetition, each time a little differently.

As if my life ended when I got off the road. Nothing happens to me anymore. No wonder I am so focused on the world news. The illusion of freedom, virtual life, virtual motion, on the info highway.


Nothing happens here in geezerville. Nothing happens except death. People die and new people move in. Dorothy says: "My! People come and go so quickly here!"

I stopped by an old friend's house today. We got to talking about Jesus, of all the things... Christ! I muttered to myself as I was going out the door. I think I was under attack. Or maybe he felt that he was under attack and was just defending himself. Maybe all we did was the Devil's work for him and for free as usual. Let me say it's a hell of a lot easier to sit by a grave than it is to talk with the living.

Good morning James,

Just let me do this before it pops out of my head again, and I will get back to you.

Boiling Sulfuric acid (H2SO4)
Camus
The da y after my Rose of San Antonio's funeral(which was held before Sundown of the first day after her death
I was in Laredo Texas picking up a load of DDT dusted brocolli from across the border where DDT is still legal and where I have heard we get fifty percent of our frozen vegetables
So anyway I was on the dock waiting for my fork lift gu y to bring me my veggies when the dock foreman who was the biggest Mexican I have ever seen started talking to me like i was a white boy gringo human turd Yankee and then in his arrogance he turned his back on me and walked away. And all I had in my pocket was a little one inch blade that I used to cut the shrink wrap on the pallets of veggies. After that I stopped carrying a knife at all.

When I was in night school learning French I had a after school job working the grave yard shit in a chemical plant Eastern Rare Metals in Baltimore. The owner was an immigrant Jew so naturally he had figured out how to carve out a living here in the promised land. He bought the floor sweepings from wholesale jewelery companies and extracted the precious dust from the sweepings. Amazing how heavy a bar of gold
(the size of a paperback novel the size of Vonnegut's Mother Night ) is
He also started into another venture of making copper sulfate. Real easy money. All you need is a vat of boiling sulfuric acid the size of a back yard pool, maybe ten feet deep and about fifteen feet diameter and then some scrap copper wire. It was my job to monitor the process through the night and occasionally add some more scrap copper wire to the brew.
This was accomplished by placing a 55 gallon drum full of copper wire onto a pallet and then taking the old forklift and raising the the pallet to the rim of the vat of boiling sulfuric acid and then climb up onto the pallet and tip the drum over into the boiling acid. It was a very old fork lift and the hydraulics leaked so that the forks slowly went down if I took too long the pallet would catch on the lip of the vat of acid tip over iand tip me in. I have been wondering if my death in that boiling vat of acid was so painful that I have blocked out of my akashic memory. And at the moment of death as if by some quantum miracle I was instantly entangled in another parallel life where I did not die that night. Kind of like Schrodinger's cat, I may already be dead and not know it. The reason Camus comes to mind is we were translating The Stranger in French class. It was a very happy time in my life. A time when I was still repressing the memory of my rage against my mother.


Yeah tend to stand around and focus on His death. Some times I think Christianity started out as a Jewish death cult.

I have always been partial to the Book of Luke, I have heard that he was the only one of the dozen or so who was not a Jew. A Greek physician I think.
Jitterbug was the only person in my family hip enough to appreciate Luke The Drifter.

thanks for reading and commenting




I am on the beach.

I saw my mother's shell of a body some 20 minutes after she passed. Not the first time I've seen a dead body. They seem so empty... lifeless is appropriate. The body never really looks like the same body that carried life around for the number of years the person lived. It's like a mask taken off of life and tossed in a far away place where it doesn't want to be noticed. What good is a shell of a body if there's no life in it? I like the Hindu method of dealing with lifeless bodies... cremate them on floating rafts, a pyre lighting the way down the Ganges until it's out of sight... sweet and simple, no mess no fuss. Funeral homes make big $$$'s freaking out the survivors... guilt trips posed when one is at their lowest and most fragile.

I've compared bodily death with a light bulb that no longer can use electricity's current to light the filament... the electricity is still here, but the bulb is fini... gone is it's usefulness. So much like our own lives.. when our time is up, our time is over... such a short time compared to how long we die... that death of the ego and everyone goes spastic over the loss, at least for awhile. Life soon knocks and asks "what about me?" It's for the living, no matter how we look at it.

Let's live while we're here. We'll be there before we're ever ready.

The Spray

There was an old man from Nantuckett
Named Captain Joshua Slocum
sailed off into the sunrise.
a hundred years ago


Sail on My Captain Sail on.
What way to go.

If you can call this living
Then: I'm still living



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How is your computer doing with the videos?

I was with her at the instant of her death. I listened to her last breath.

I don't know what happens to people when they die. But she looked pretty grateful to me after she died. She died on thanksgiving day 1984. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite american holiday. Even if it does celebrate the native american catastrophe.

She did not want to die in the hospital so we brought her home. In fact she had already died in the hospital but in spite of her last request that she not be resuscitated they did. So we brought her home to die.


Happy holidays Cecil.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/nyreg ... or.html?hp

I saw the last expression on her face at the moment of her death she looked into the mirror that was on the wall opposite her death bed. It was a look of acceptance what ever she saw in that mirror it was as if she said "Oh that's ok" But for a few moments after her death I still felt her presence in the room with me. Then a sob tore out of me and the presence was gone. As if she was waiting for me to cry. I have always wondered why Jews covered the mirrors in a house that is in mourning. I got up and covered that mirror it was almost a reflex to her death.

Death Rattle an interesting phrase I now know what it sounds like.


I don't want to talk about this anymore.

Of all the times I broke her heart
she only broke mine twice

Once when she told me a girl was not good enough for me
and again when she told me I was not good enough for a girl
Serves me right for being a mama's boy.




For all the shitty diapers of mine she changed
I am grateful that I got to clean her shit up after she became incontinent.

Ah well
I am getting junk mail from adult diaper companies. One of the blessings of longevity.
I suppose.
I may have reaped the whirlwind. Yet all is well. I was born to drift. "Next of kin to the wayward wind"


I been getting a lot of advice lately. I suppose that is because of all my posts. Sooner or later I get on everyone's nerves.

I don't know why that movie "On The Beach" has been on my mind the last couple days maybe the talk about Iran and nuclear weapons.
No I think it was doreen's banner.

I woke up On The Beach
The band was playing Waltzing Mathilda
My Ferrari was blue

I think about the last night with my first true love, the feeling of her vagina holding me. And her saying no, me seeing that she meant it. And me pulling out of her. I tell you Janis, I was a good man to one woman for once in my life. I saw her again about a year later. She was pregnant, She told me that she still loved me. I smiled and walked away right into a plate glass window. Bonged my head on it hard. Made such a loud sound everyone looked around.

She asked me to marry her, but I said no, because my mother said there are plenty of fish in the sea. Nobody good enough for her baby boy. How can I blame my my mother for being a mama's boy.

But that is not where the rage came from. It was at my father's funeral that the fire was lit. Jesus Christ the way she shrieked and carried on, throwing herself on his coffin. But I did not know what her guilt was at the time. I did not know that she handed him a death sentence to protect her daughter.
Just that after all those years of her turning me against him to see her grieve like that. And that was about the time I started going to bed with a shotgun under my chin.