The World Cup, Flying Dutchmen, Synchronicity and Seesaws

A bit distracted at the moment:  the World Cup is in progress, of course.  I just watched the replay of Spain vs. Netherlands and Robin van Persie’s awesome airborne first goal ... (they’re now calling him “The Flying Dutchman”) ... and Italy is playing right now; the U.S. doesn’t make an appearance until Monday.

It was a truly astonishing game.  Spain, the reigning world champions, were annihilated by the Dutch, 5-1, thanks in part to goals like this.

The entire world – excepting the United States, who remain almost uniformly oblivious to important matters, preferring to giggle like little girls over non-beings like the Kardashians, deliberate pedophile magnets like Taylor Swift and irrelevant sports games like beach badminton – is talking about it.  The U.S. is truly embarrassing in their inexplicable and prideful xenophobia, most of the time.  Americans are only going to slowly turn their creaky, dusty  heads and watch if the U.S. makes it to the round of 16.

Give me a sport that the entire rest of the world gets truly excited about, any day of the year.

But back to Italy.  In honor of that great nation I’m sipping delicately ... okay, I’m noisily slurping ... on a wine I purchased in honor of the late, great and much lamented Peanutter-Butter – my baby, my black cat – Gato Negro, a Malbec from ... er, Argentina (sorry, Italy) ... although I’m cheering loudly for Italy – or I was, until England just equalized.  Argh.  No offense to either country, but at the moment, the game definitely lacks the excitement of Netherlands and Spain.

Onward.

Synchronicity – two more references to “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven.  But my race is of  Heaven.  This you know yourselves.  And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish.  Give me quickly the cold water flowing forth from the lake of Memory.”

I heard it again in either “DaVinci’s Code” or “Angels and Demons” (the Tom Hanks film, I forget which one, I watched a few days ago; the reference was to Mary Magdalene resting beneath the Starry Heavens, I think, but the full text was quoted) and then read it again just this morning in The God Who Comes: Dionysian Mysteries Revisited (Rosemarie Taylor-Perry, 2003, Algora Publishing).  Her version of this – same source, the Petalia Tablet – is that it is “meant to be carried in the psyches of the initiates – not only throughout the remainder of their initiated lifetimes, but into the afterlife realm, and possibly even into succeeding lifetimes ...” (page 100, emphasis mine).

I loved the very idea!  Naturally, my first thought:  did I participate in this in the past?  The only “student” life I remember was in that same geographical area – I was thinking Thrace or Macedonia or somewhere – and I was being taught about the concept of infinity at the time – but I was so young, just a young boy at the time.  DID children that young participate in any of these mysteries? (Friday March 21)  Perhaps they began teaching children basic spiritual concepts at that age and then later would encourage them to participate in the full Mysteries.  Bottom line:  I have no idea!  But I was discussing the Petalia Tablet and these words there, too.

Ahh, life is strange and wonderful sometimes.

I learned that not only do my memories link wonderful and horrible things together, I link things in my life that way, too.  And I’m not at all sure how to fix it.  Must be some spell, some incantation, some mental projection, something I can use.  I had set aside this morning on my calendar to get my New Hampshire Driver’s License.  Was trying to make sense of the maps I was looking at – the road that the DMV is on in Dover didn’t seem to be linked with anything else, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to get to it.  Finally, I tried the Google Earth ground level view, and after a good thirty minutes of playing around with it, figured out how it would PROBABLY work.  I later learned that New Hampshire had changed an entrance/exit ramp from a local parkway and never updated their maps to reflect the new exit.  Luckily, the ground view worked well.

In Massachusetts I never would have tried this.  The Massachusetts street and directional signs are so horrendous you can get completely lost a block from your home.  I suspected that New Hampshire was more user-friendly for people on the roads.  So, expecting to have en entire morning consumed by the utter ineptitude and disinterest of the motor vehicles office (like every other DMV office in the country), I brought along the usual accoutrements to keep me from getting bored while I waited:  books, magazines, a few movies on my i-phone, wine coolers, picnic blankets, an inflatable tent, food and water to last 5 days, a change of underwear – the usual – and took off.

The Good:  I made it, did not get lost once!
The Bad:  no sooner had I turned out of my driveway a downpour to rival all downpours fell, flailing and screaming, out of the sky.  No one could see past their front bumpers and the wind was blowing most of us sideways.  This was the moment when the universal phenomenon known as “The Stupid Soccer Mom in Her Phallic SUV and Not a Single Brain Cell in Her Empty Head” unleashed itself on the rest of us.
The Good:  One truly nauseating specimen of that species, who actually pulled into oncoming traffic to speed like a bat out of hell around a line of people going an intelligently cautious 5 miles below the speed limit was immediately pulled over by a New Hampshire policeman.
      He was probably so pissed at having to be out in the rainstorm saving the rest of humanity from that idiot that he made her get out of the car to produce her paperwork off on the side of the road.  No umbrella?   Awww, too bad!  The stupid woman had THAT coming.  She looked like a drowned rat.
The Bad:  Every time I arrived at a critical juncture of the trip, it was blocked off by road construction.  Nothing like trying frantically to unravel an unexpected maze when you can’t see anything.
The Good:  I had all of my paperwork in order, and it took all of 5 minutes to get waited on,  I’ll repeat that:  FIVE MINUTES.  I’d never had such a terrific experience with a DMV office in my entire life.  They were organized, efficient and actually pleasant, cheerful human beings.  I can’t praise them enough.  Way to go, New Hampshire!!!!  Every other State in the Union could learn something from those people. The Bad:  Opening my zippered handbag to get my car keys, the zipper tab broke.  Zipper still worked (good), but you had to scrape the zipper open and closed with one fingernail (bad).  Cursed out the entire country of China for making more cheap, shoddy crap Americans get saddled with.

Now, true, none of these were exalted or nightmarish, as far as moments in my life went, but I noticed the see-sawing of my reactions.  “Yay!  Damn!  Yay!  Damn!” throughout the entire morning.  Recognized the similarity to the issue I’d had with memories of my past.

Still can’t figure out what to do about it.

Fake Commenters Must Die, Part II

I will repeat:  I will not post any comments that include your non-relevant website on it.  Nobody comes on here to read about your websites for car parts, drugs, Japanese doodads, Russian booze, penis enlargers, hot models for hire (and if any guy is dumb enough to fall for that one, he hasn’t understood a word I’ve said since I started this blog and deserves to be ignored on general principle) and whatever else you’re hawking.  They will be deleted.  They will not see the light of day, I don’t care how much flattery you stick on the front end (“This is the greatest blog I’ve ever read!  You’re so witty!  You’re so intelligent!  I read you every day, I live for your stupendous insight into issues that mean the world to me and I weep with gratitude!  Oh by the way, I sell drugs from third world countries that could easily kill you thanks to our lack of hygiene, here’s my website!”).

Comments that are actually relevant or in response to something specific are more than welcome.  Now go away!!!!  (Not you, average reader; you have no idea how many fake comments I had to delete this morning.)

I’ve been spending the last few days saying “WTF?” a lot.  Big things, little things.  E-mailed the handyman guy last Wednesday – who has been terrific (so far)  - to ask about his schedule, I needed to clear the bags of packing material and broken-down boxes out of the front room.  He said Friday; I said “Cool!” ... little bit of a short notice, but okay.  I planned to come home Thursday night, pick up some final boxes from the storage shed, unpack those, and move all of the stuff that needed to be cleared away in one end of the room; move the plastic bins to the other end, because I wanted to use those to pack things I didn’t have room for in the storage shed again.

Came home Thursday night with the boxes to unpack, opened the front door and said, “WTF!?”

Instead of Friday, he had come on Thursday during the day, and cleared out everything ... including the stuff I actually needed.  I’m not saying I lost anything valuable; just things that I needed to get organized.  All of the bags of packing material that hadn’t been moved into the front room were still where I had left them.  I just sat down on the floor with a moan and tried to take stock.  Why people tell you one thing and then do another, after you’ve re-arranged your schedule to accommodate them, and made plans, and carried heavy boxes in the rain, and everything else ... I am desperately trying to release my anger before saying anything to him.  He meant well ... I guess.  But ... WTF?

Because of THAT screw-up, I hadn’t picked up my mail.  I actually needed the mail because TD Bank was sending me ... something ... having to do with the new account I was forced against my better judgment to open with them.  I had populated the account with my business trip refund check – with which I intended to buy a portable air conditioner, because I DIE in here when the temperature soars.  When I had a few more bucks, I would start looking at central air options.  It’s extremely difficult to get to the UPS mailbox before it closes on weekdays.

Drove to the UPS Seabrook store ... stood outside screaming “WTF???!!!”  Sign on the door.  Gee golly whiz great gosh awmighty, he was really sorry for the inconvenience but he had decided to close on Saturday, tra-la-la, oh well, tough titties on you, customahs!!!  Inconvenience?  INCONVENIENCE???!!!???  Fucking prick.  Well, that’s UPS for you.  Up with the middle finger at everyone who depends on them for things like, OH I DON’T KNOW, checks, bills, information, vitally important things like that.

In a thoroughly foul mood now, I went over to Market Basket.  “WTF???”  San Pellegrino in glass bottles not the unbreakable ones I use when I carry the bottles to work.

Went looking for mozzarella cheese.  “WTF?”  Sargento, those faux Italians who try to pretend they know from cheese, had actually printed “CUT FROM THE BLOCK” on their shredded mozzarella cheese.  Really.  “BLOCK”.  Anybody from Italy out there?  How often do they sell you real mozzarella cheese in blocks???  Mozzarella cheese doesn’t come in blocks – it comes in balls, Sargento, preserved in liquid to keep it moist.  Blocks.  WTF?

I came home in high heat, laughing hysterically, unable to buy an air conditioner without my mail, utterly miserable.  It was too late in the morning to go to the beach because I’d fry like a lobster – remember last year?

Trying to get ahold of myself, I figured, okay.  Since the front room was now cleared of everything else, I would try to` put my dining room table together on the large, newly available floor space.  Stood there for about 45 minutes, muttering “WTF?”, as none of the pieces seemed to fit.  There was no way the heavy table top could be screwed into the base.  I gave up, unhappily.  Have no idea how I’m going to get that thing together, and I’m still annoyed at the handyman guy, so don’t even WANT to call him, right now.

Finally, I dragged a long card table into the room; the intent was to set up a seed starter table. I had planned to get it going a long time ago, like March or something, not anticipating that it would take this long to get into the house. Went to open the box of seed starter equipment and materials, and it was  stapled so tightly that when I finally was able to pull the ends of the box free, I did it with such force that I literally punched myself in the mouth.  Not just a bump.  Not a slap.  I punched myself in the mouth, staggered backwards with my eyes watering and my upper lip already starting to swell.  Couldn’t even pronounce “WTF?” that time.

The next morning, I finally got the seed starter equipment together and went looking for my chest of seeds.  This was the fun part – deciding which seeds to start growing, planning where in the new garden they would go, what their requirements were.  WTF?  No seed chest.  In fact, I hadn’t seen it since I moved.  I went from room to room, looking in closets, drawers ... this was a gorgeous antique chest, now missing.  I had to have packed it somewhere ... didn’t I?  But where????

I shuffled over to the storage room in Salisbury in high heat and rifled through the remaining boxes and bins.  Nothing.  WTF happened to my seed chest???

I went to Lowe’s and bought two larger containers to re-pot the Salvia and North Korean Lilac that had been sitting out back in their original containers.  Filled both full of potting soil and repotted the plants.  WTF???  One of the containers was lopsided when it was full of potting soil ... and the poor Lilac was poking out of the container at a lopsided angle.

Needless to say, I gave up entirely,  came back inside, poured myself a juicy Malbec and got tearfully soused.

WTF indeed.

But at least Il Volo is having a better time of it – presently performing up and down the West Coast (just sold out the Greek Theater a few nights ago), and is still celebrating their Latin Grammy for Best Album.

At least I can be happy for somebody!

Bad Colds, Meeting Spirit Guides and Strange Memory Patterns

Bit of an absence there, while I moved, took a business trip, caught a horribly intense cold I still haven’t quite recovered from – after 7 long weeks! -  and had another class.

So, in class, we’re in a guided meditation to find our personal guide beside Yggdrasil, the World Tree.  Keep in mind that I’m still recovering from this horrible cold, which makes me break out into rib-cracking coughing without warning, and has made my nose run like a waterfall.  I also have been too sick to really practice anything at home the way I should have been, even if you don’t take into account the complete chaos I’m living in, until I get fully unpacked.  So I am not as easily able to follow along as I normally do.  We had already tried astral projection and I couldn’t see anything – all I could focus on was trying not to cough or drip anything unsightly out of my nose.  I’m already feeling bad about how I’m doing in general.

But I manage to envision searching around Yggdrasil’s massive trunk.  The picture I have in my mind of Yggdrasil, by the way, is the massive tree in the movie “Avatar”.  I’m wandering around it and eventually encounter a man who sorta reminds me of Z, with the exception that he’s wearing pastel blue and not red clasped around his shoulders.  He looks like a Roman centurion, in a way.  Like he was sitting there waiting patiently for me to meander my way around the tree.  I say,

“Hello?”

He nods pleasantly in greeting, so I pose the questions I’m supposed to ask:  I ask him his name, and ask him what I am supposed to be learning from him.  He answers, “Gregory” with an accent that sounds almost Russian, and answers, “Peace.  And focus.”  Actually, as soon as he said “peace”, I completely forgot all about my bad cold and felt extraordinarily peaceful.

The facilitator now asks us to return to normal consciousness (my first thought:  “Nooo!  I want to stay here longer and talk to him!”) but things are already fading.  I blame myself for envisioning Yggdrasil with such a huge trunk.  Took me forever and a day to get around it, when I could have been chatting with this guy.

When the class describes their individual experiences, I relate what I’ve just related, and tried to pronounce the name exactly as he did, with a slight Russian accent.  The facilitator asks, “Did he say ‘Gregory’ or ‘Grigori’?  Some angels are called ‘Grigori’.”

I’m momentarily stumped by the question, and know that I look like a deer in headlights.  Truthfully, I can’t remember WHAT he said.   I also – and this is what amazes me – have completely forgotten that I was already familiar with the word “Grigori”.  Back in December of 2012.  On this blog.  I’m listing the Watchers – from the Book of Enoch – and have copied the alternate description for the “Watchers” into my blog several times:  “Grigori”.  And, consciously anyway, I had completely forgotten about that until I went and looked up “Grigori” after class, and gasped, “Holy [bleep!]!  I completely forgot!”

How perfect for me would THAT be!  To have a personal guide from the Grigori!   Actually, I’m still not sure whether he said “Gregory” or “Grigori”, but I will definitely go looking for him again and this time pay closer attention.

Meanwhile, I later made an amazing discovery about myself.  I know, I know – who cares?  Really.  Although .... I have discovered now and again that as soon as someone says, “The most amazing thing happened to me!”, an entire football stadium’s worth of people immediately announce, “That happened to me, too!” – which immediately puts an end to the self-aggrandizing drama you’ve woven around yourself - so here’s hoping that there’s someone out there who figured out how to solve this.

I was reading Brain Magick:  Exercises in Meta-Magick and Invocation by Philip H. Farber (Llewellyn Publications, 2011).  The book has a lot of exercises you can do that are designed to limber up your brain to perform magick.  One of them was to pull up from the deep recesses of your memory banks the most peaceful and contented experience you ever had, so that you could analyze the physical sensations of the experience and then recreate them with a trigger.

So here was the mental process I went through:

Me:    Oh, I know!  What about that time I ...

[Pause while memory surfaces]

Me:    That was nice.  But it reminds me of [fill in the blank with a horrible, embarrassing, shameful moment that came on the heels of the happy one]

Me:    [cringing]  Oh no!  Forget THAT one!

And this went on and on ad infinitum until the “eureka” light bulb went on over my head.  A pattern seemed to be emerging here:  I had developed a habit of connecting great memories with horrible ones, and I had no idea why I did that.

An example:  my family, sitting together in our living room at christmas season, when I was a child.  Not that I was overly fond of christmas, I just loved how my mother decorated the living room during the holidays.  Sparkling lights, silver balls in crystal vases, the (fake) tree all decorated and covered with lights and reflective balls, a lifetime’s worth of meaningful decorations and bubble lights.  Then my father would dim the light switches and get a fire burning in the fireplace and put the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on his awesome turntable, and we would curl up on the couches and chairs, mesmerized by the lights and the sounds:  the crackling log in the fireplace, the choir with their resonant soft crackles in the speakers – people who grew up in the digital age have no idea how nice that sounded!

Then the peaceful loving memory quickly shifted to another christmas when, as an obnoxious teenager, I had a screaming argument with my mother and pissed her off so badly she nearly pulled hair out of my head.  When that memory surfaced, on the heels of the nice one, I was completely overwhelmed with guilt at having behaved so horribly in my teenage years that I’d sent my normally calm, placid mother into an uncharacteristic rage.  And believe me when I tell you:  I had a mouth on me you wouldn’t believe.  Or – maybe you would!

Thus ended THAT wonderful memory.  And, may I add:  WTF?

Why couldn’t I allow a happy memory to exist on its own, and not immediately cancel it with a horrible one?  Especially since I’d apologized to my parents repeatedly as an adult for my teenage behavior, and had been forgiven for it by both of them a long, long time ago.  They certainly never held a grudge – why did I hold one against myself?

This came on the heels of Gregory – or Grigori – telling me he was guiding me to a new sense of peace.  He never said it would be an easy road, but I found at least one tendency that I needed to work on, within myself.

Next up on the list of things to add to the chaos:  making astral travel incense.  I’m still not sure what ingredients I have in my boxes ... I cannot wait until I’m fully unpacked!