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.
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