Zippers, More Crap from China, More Crap from the World of Politics and Asherah

Another zipper snapped off in my hand ... this one on my green Newport hoodie, made in (you guessed it!) China.  Only had it for a year, which should surprise exactly ... no one who has any familiarity with the absolute junk China foisters on us with the full support of every politician out there, may they all burn and rot in the bowels of ... so anyway, I found an Amazon entry for a replacement full zipper hoodie ... called Joe’s USA! ... except for the small print that whispered that  Joe USA's entire product line was, I then learned, made in Honduras.  “Joe’s USA”, my un-American ass.

It’s been a struggle, opening Facebook every morning and reading nothing but non-stop crap.  I don’t care what side people are on, I just keep reading more and more insane political crap that stopped making sense a year ago.  I finally found some “safe” Facebook pages to park on when I’m chatting with a friend, so as to ignore all of it.

Example:  I have learned more about space travel, post-modernism and “Aviation Technology” in the last six months than I had in the last 20 years – can actually give you the names of different airliners; discovered that the symbol of Egypt Air is actually Horus.  (I absolutely love it - Who knew?  Yay, Horus!!)  ANYTHING but American politics.

No, not even politics, it’s just non-stop juvenile, brain-dead insanity.  And now, I don’t care what side you’re on – nothing you say at any point will change anybody’s minds, so just GROW UP and SHUT UP!  Everything you post is either a deliberate or unintentional lie, so you are perpetuating this 3-ring circus that the 2016 election has turned into.  In fact, this entire country needs an intervention, at this point.  The days until this insane campaign is over can’t pass fast enough.  Thus ends my 2016 Election rant for the day.

And Fall has set in. Any hope we had for a warmer fall to make up for the chilly May and June has wrapped itself in hoodies, flannel sweatpants, woolen knee socks and left town.  I have this sullen determination not to turn the furnace on ... so, as I sit here with my teeth chattering, grumbling at my perverse stubbornness ...

I would have changed the title from “The Changing Heart” to the “Watchful Heart”, but that’s just me.  (Woke up to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents program; that’s what was airing at the time).

Have just begun Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, Saul M. Olyan, Society of Biblical Literature, Monograph Series,  (#34),  Scholars Press, Atlanta, Georgia,  1988.

What I like:  he doesn’t start out like a Judeo-Christian-Islamic defense lawyer (“Impossible!  Blasphemy!  There is no other god except ...!”), which is very refreshing.  Instead, he starts out with the various (and conflicting) interpretations of Asherah and her relation first to Baal and to El and to Yahweh.  What I’ve learned:  much like the christians swearing their Paulian version of their cult is the only correct one; the Torah went through much the same process of being politics-driven as opposed to anything spiritual.  Most christians have little or no knowledge of the numerous variations of christianity that existed until Rome took control and ruthlessly slaughtered adherents of the other versions.  Had nothing to do with whether there might have been any truth in those other beliefs – as always, it was a matter of who swung a meaner sword.  Since no one likes to look at the truth that their “correct” religious beliefs only came about by means of grotesque slaughtering of entire towns ... christians now believe their version is the only “correct” one for spiritual reasons.

Same was true of the Torah – Olyan makes a point of which schools of thought influenced which passages he quotes.  Christianity follows their political choice, the Paulian sword – and Judaism, for the most part, adopted the Deuteronomistic versions of the Torah, which were re-written after each tragedy (the fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonian exile, etc.) to explain past history.  The exile, as an example – much of the blather about their one god being a “jealous” one came after they had been exiled, by way of explaining why such a horrible episode had happened to them.  You get together a bunch of pissed-off guys who had just been driven from their homeland, and who buy and sell women like cattle, and what else is their version of the Torah going to sound like?  The Queen of Heaven disappeared from early judeo-christian-islamic books.  They still don’t believe She ever actually existed in their belief system.  But She did.

This really isn’t contributing much to “C’era una volta”, and the origins of the Big Bad ... but for that I’m reading The Gnostic Gospels: Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan by Elaine H. Pagels (New York : Vintage Books, 1989, c1988), but I was in the habit of reading that, unfortunately, when I was laying on the beach, relaxing to the sound of the waves against the shore.  Fall comes around ... I have to change my reading habits.

So how do you resolve the issue of fallen versus not fallen in the matter of heavenly beings? If you go by the edicts of the medieval church, the only angels who are to be considered legitimate and not fallen are those three archangels whose names appear specifically in the Bible: Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael.

Of course, conspicuously, these three also appear specifically by name within the sacred texts of another culture entirely. In the Sumerian tale of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld, Michael, Gabriel, and associates stand guard at each of the gates of hell. Those three beings who would later be adopted as archangels into Jewish myth appear as guardians who exact payment from the goddess before she may pass through the various levels of the underworld in her attempt to reach the throne of her sister, Ereshkigal.

The weird and wacky history of earth’s bizarre religious traditions continues ...

Winner of the “Most Obtuse Review of the Day” Award

“In the perfectly stirring stories of  Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, Sequoia Nagamatsu constructs a cartography of eye-stinging wonder with his fleet of wobbly wabi-sabi GPS syntax-spinning satellites. These fictions plot asymmetrically the raw terrain of the wasabi slathered human heart, leaving us lost in all our findings, the stunned state of boketto, empty yet teeming with that taste of awful awe.”

— Michael Martone

Things that make you go, “*duh* - what?” ... but on the other hand, after months of reading nothing but the depravity of the American condition and complete failure of the national educational system at its most fundamental level (i.e., politics on Facebook, when you realize that there are lots of people out there who cannot spell basic words, or employ rudimentary logic and yet are given access to a voting booth), I’d forgotten that there are a few people out there whose brains function occasionally.  Which is heartening.

Not THIS guy, no – (I suspect he had possibly just chopped a lot of onions – or perhaps couldn’t handle the wasabi – his eyes were definitely stinging, no disputing that one, before he wrote that) – but I ordered the book anyway because, despite the unintelligible and incomprehensible review, it sounded creative and interesting.  Along with a blender, and there may be some subliminal message in that too ... except I needed the blender.  Like every other blender in the USA, it was made in China, so I expect it to fall apart and stop working after a month.  Get out your stopwatches.

Speaking of which ... ah, the fun of watching the entire world fall apart at the seams ... Nice, Turkey, Dallas, Orlando, Brexit, Kansas City, BLM triggering police murdering squads, Germans being knifed and axed on trains, the world’s worst U.S. election of all time, Trump blurting out more and more insane nonsense ... all except for the election pretty much within one month’s time... feels like World War III is on the verge of exploding.  Well, at least I’ll have some reading material to enjoy before I go.  And maybe one frozen margarita, courtesy of China, before the blender falls apart.

It’s impossible, trying to make sense of this 2016 election.  It’s like a circus ... no other way to describe it.  As I write this, Trump’s “spokeswoman” (someone named Katrina Pierson, who appears to be a convicted shoplifter from Texas) has just blamed President Obama for something that happened 4 years before he was even elected in 2008 ... resulting in a Facebook and Twitter explosion of ridicule at her idiocy ... and you think, “Why would Trump pick a shoplifter as a spokesperson?”  Makes no sense.  Meanwhile a senator in CA just demanded that Trump be forced to submit to a psyche exam.  But that is the way this election is going – something like a massive April Fool’s Day prank or something.  You just give up and stare at the three-ring circus in amazement, unable to make much sense of it.

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.