Consumer Goes Insane When Mop Breaks - Film at 11

So because I’m NOT a member of the Entitlement Generation who think they’re so important they can’t even demean themselves long enough to, oh say, mop a kitchen floor ... there I was mopping the kitchen floor.  (*Crack*!)  A piece of the mop splintered off, and skittered across the floor.  I had owned the mop for maybe 2 months.  TWO MONTHS.  Not 20 years.  2 months.  I picked it up and looked at it.  Yup! 

As I expected:  “Made in China”.  Yet another piece of complete and utter CRAP foistered on every single one of us.  Other examples:  you buy a shirt and the button falls off the first time you put it on.  You buy a ceramic bowl with “Dishwasher Safe” printed on it just to eat your soup, and it neglects to add, “For only one cycle; after that it cracks, splinters, falls apart and leaves shards of ceramic all over your clean dishes.”

In fact, now that I think about it, I can’t recall a single piece of anything that had “Made in China” on it that made me exclaim, “Wow, this is really well made!”  The last time I said that, the item was a treasure of a cast iron pan that far exceeded any other pan in the kitchen – and had the imprint “Made in the USA” on it.  Still have it.  Have had it for years.

You may think that a mop breaking after two months isn’t that big a deal.  That’s because you’re feeble-minded, and feel free to confess that sad truth to everyone who knows you.

The only explanation I can think of for the complete lack of respect every single member of the House, the Senate, the Executive Branch has had for the entire population of the United States for decades (not to mention the utter disdain and disrespect dumped on your head by every single business owner from coast to coast who has already outsourced everything they produce) is:  none of them actually do any work!  They don’t mop floor like the rest of the country, they don’t do anything.  They hire illegal aliens to do their manual labor for them, stand up and pontificate about the evil of illegal aliens, and at the same time know you’re so stupid you’ll honestly think they know what you’re going through.  NEWS FLASH FOLKS!  They don’t know &*^&.  They don’t give a &*^& what you’re going through.  Do you honestly think they care that the Acme Mop Company outsourced all of their work to China, so that they could save the big $$$s they might have spent on a decent product in order to pay their treasonous CEO the equivalent of the national debt?  They’re not the ones who have no choice but to replace the complete and utter crap foisted on us by China every 2 months – YOU are.  They hire illegal aliens to mop their floors, and if you haven’t figured that out by now, you’re too stupid to vote.

And now if you'll excuse me, I hear the men with the white coats knocking on the door.  I'm sure they're imported from China, too.

 

The Debacle That Is the 2016 Election

Are you a Democrat?  The leaders of your party think most of you are stupid!!  Are you a Republican?  The leaders of your party think most of YOU are stupid!  Independent?  Green Party?  Communist Party?  Tea Party?  Coffee Party?  Log Cabin Party?  (Fill in the blank) Party?  Ditto!  Ditto!  Ditto!  Ditto!  Ditto!  All of Congress thinks most of you are stupid.  And you know what?  THEY’RE RIGHT!

And do you know why they’re right?  Because this is what most of you  do – constantly.  You’re on Facebook.  You see a post meander its way through your feed.  You agree with it.  Yup, fits right into your World View!  Ha!  Vindication!  Justification!  Has to be true, right?  You pass it along without a second thought.

The problem is:  what you’ve just passed along so self-righteously was a bald-faced lie.  Anyone who does a modicum of fact checking knows it’s a bald-faced lie, I don't care what side you're on.  You’re as virulent a liar as you claim the other side is.  You are no better than the people whose views you don’t share and therefore despise.  You are no better than the people you're so "offended" by.  You are no better than the people you sneer at and call (depending on which side you’re on):  “Libtards” or “Republi-pukes”.  Read that again:  you are no better than the people you despise.  You like to think you are, but you’re not.  You are every bit as disgusting as they are.  Maybe even worse, because you’re also a hypocritical slug with a cavern where your brain stem was supposed to be.  You are nothing.  You are less than nothing.

Of course it was bull.  The leaders of your party knew you’d fall all over yourself like a gullible idiot, passing this false story around to everyone you knew, and everyone you hated, because they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were stupid!  “See?  I was right and you were wrong  Nyah!  Nyah!”  They counted on it!  Do you enjoy knowing that so many people actually count on your appalling stupidity?  Are you PROUD of that?  Anybody with a working brain wouldn’t be.

Critical thinking used to be valued in this country.  Hell, I remember high school history classes where we were taught how to vet sources.  Is it a legitimate source?  Did this source have an agenda that might twist his or her interpretation of something, even if you agreed with it?  The moment you read something that is so astonishing you’re flabbergasted ... why isn’t your first reaction to say, “Wait.  Is this actually true?” 

And yet ... with very few exceptions, no one does.  You all click “share”, “share, “share”, “share” without a moment’s thought.  With a sick, twisted smirk on your smug face, you perpetuate lies so ugly, you might as well work for the other side – you’re always claiming THEY’RE liars, right?  Look in the mirror, people  You are no different than the people you despise.  Live with it.  Swallow that truth down with your morning coffee.  Republicans, you are no better than “libtards”.  Democrats, you’re no better than “Republi-pukes”.  Ditto to the rest of the fools who do the exact same thing.

For the record:  I am so sick of this pitiful excuse for an election I could throw up.

Wow.  And here I thought no one read this thing.

Apparently, they did.  My one big mistake in life (apparently) was posting something about a singer I had a crush on, back in my pre-teen years.  Who knew he had a sick, mentally deranged stalker, who took such vile exception to my post to the point where I was stalked, right along with him?  Death threats, the whole nine yards.  Having now deleted all of that – and having turned her in gleefully to the proper authorities – I’m back.  If you thought my respect for women in general was disturbingly low, you would have given my “respect” level more credit than it deserved.

“Oh, don’t hate women because of HER ...” someone out there is cooing.  “She’s obviously mentally ill!”  Well, *duh*! - thank you, Captain Obvious in a skanky Victoria’s Secret  bra.  I figured that out pretty quickly ... which didn’t make it any easier to combat.

She changes nothing.  Another example:

To the Women at Planet Fitness:

SHUT UP!!!!  GET HELP!!!  GET EXORCISED!!!!

Picture it:  Planet Fitness.  Morning.  Filled with people trying their damndest to count their own repetitions, listen to their own music, whatever.  Instead, every single last one of us is subjected to a loud, shrill inane conversation between two women that was actually somehow louder than the sound turned up to full volume on people’s headsets and earbuds.

And no matter how many people turned around and glared at them, the two biddies just kept on babbling inanities at the top of their lungs as they plodded along slowly on the treadmill, barely expending enough calories to, oh say, keep a birthday candle going for 2/100ths of a second.

Inanities.  How much produce cost at Hannaford’s as opposed to Market Basket.  Their grandchildren’s brilliance at running headlong into trees.  Their own mindlessly boring plans for the day, for the week, for the year.  Inanities.  Mindless, boring idiocy, which is the only manner of mind-numbing conversation most women can dredge up out of the depths of themselves.

SHUT UP!!!  SHUT UP!!!  SHUT UP!!!  SHUT UP!!!  SHUT UP!!!

Banishing and Recovering

All the world’s roads lead to the heart of the Warrior;

she plunges unhesitatingly into the river of passions

always flowing through her life.

The warrior knows that she is free to choose her desires

and she makes these decisions with

courage, detachment and – sometimes

with just a  touch of madness.

She embraces her passions and enjoys them intensely.

She knows that there is no no need to renounce the pleasures

of conquest; they are part of life

and bring joy to all those

who participate in them.

But she never loses sight of things that last

or of the strong bonds forged over time.

A Warrior can distinguish between

the transient

and the enduring.

Warrior of the Light:  A Manual, Paulo Coelho, Harper One Publishers, 2003, pg. 2

Magick:   spent one entire afternoon in mid-August banishing things ... this was the night of the new moon of August; no better a time for banishing things.  Impediments, blockages, everything.  What a day it had been ... I could not seem to regain my wits, or my peace of mind, at all.  I have a friend who had to sit through all the agony and the tears and the self-recrimination (although, as good friends do, she held him completely accountable for everything and called him every name in the book).  Then around 5:30 at night, these appeared.  No, not from the heartbreaker, from her ... just because she felt so bad for me.  What are friends for?  They were a “Happy Anniversary” bouquet, so naturally, I said, “Huh?  Anniversary of what?”  The card read, “Happy Anniversary a year early, to you and to the wonderful man who knocks Bozo the Clown off his pedestal.”  I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing.  Like I said ... and I did appreciate the sentiment.

The August new moon – in Virgo – set the scene for the banishment of some things, the call for the growth of others.  I began the meditation not quite in any frame of mind to seek out anyone else in the love sphere ... as this was one of those “once in a lifetime” loves you don’t get over all that easily ... but I did ask for aid in healing the shattered heart I was dealing with, because boy, did I need it.

Then I remembered something:  I had a lot of mystical training behind me.  That’s how upended I was – I’d forgotten that in the the hysteria of the heartbreak.  Yes, I’d forgotten I had power.  I didn’t have to be the victim of happenstance; I had more power than that.

Did a lot of research on rituals that didn’t involve forcing him to do something against his will.    I mean, really, how much fun is forcing someone to love you against their will?  Not much.

I finally decided on 3 of them, all performed over time ... giving him the opportunity to rethink what HE was doing; not forcing him to think anything he normally wouldn’t.  Not forcing him to feel things he didn’t feel.  None of that interfering with him ... what I did was re-open the channel of communication between us and keep it open.

And it worked.  Boy and howdy did it work.  This time I did not forget to thank all deities, spirits and powers for their help ... I definitely forgot to do that the last time ... but he reached back out to me ... and I learned anew what love was:  forgiveness, courage, understanding, empathy ... all good things.  The part of our relationship that needed a little tweak was the erotic side of it ... so I reminded him of that ever so gently, and let him respond in his own fashion:  hungry, longing, aching.  I fell head over heels in love with him all over again, a little wiser and more patient this time.

I realized that this man is going to need a lot of encouragement ... a lot of not assuming he knows what I mean when I say something; a lot of clear speaking, clear writing, clear communicating, telling him what I want and letting him roll that around in his libido when he awakens in the morning, horny and hungry.

Valuable lesson learned:  if you’re being trained in something, don’t forget all your lessons when your heart is broken.  Remember who you are and what you’ve been trained to do.  And then do it.

Back to the Biography of Satan (Kersey Graves, 1924).  You’ll recall when we last left this work (July 2), I was rather annoyed at the quotation of the infamous “Rev. Mr. D ----“ and his “fit of inspirational turgescence and mental explosion ...”.  However, Graves, despite forcing readers to meander their way through miles of formal gardens planted with his own flowery prose, does make a few good points – or he has thus far.  There’s only so much flowery prose I can stand before setting it aside for a while.  Most importantly, if you look at the initial “bad deeds” performed by various humans in the early pages of the christian bible, at no point do you read of any of them being tossed into a fiery pit overseen by a nasty dude with horns and a pitchfork.

Good examples:  Adam & Eve, Cain murdering Abel, everyone on the planet except for Noah and his arkful of inhabitants.  In fact, Eve’s big punishment for supposedly getting all of humanity tossed out of Eden was having cramps in childbirth, Cain was sentenced to be a vagabond ... and in Noah’s case?  A lot of people drowned, supposedly – but there was no mention of any of them being roasted in any fiery pits for having committed sins so grievous than the whole world had to be drowned as a result.

Moses never makes mention of either concept in those ten commandments of his.  Graves makes a good point with this – if this concept were intact from the very start of judeo-christian beliefs, you would have thunk that these major crimes would have earned these beings a visit to a fiery pit somewhere ... but it didn’t.  The reason:  this concept didn’t exist at the times these tales were recorded.  So, if I’m looking at Paradise Lost, at which point did the fall of an angel named Lucifer come into the picture?  Because it sure wasn’t in the original story of the banishment from Eden.  Eve spoke to a serpent, the traditional symbol of wisdom and healing, not some fiery fallen angel with a bad temper.  And, Graves reasoned, if humanity had managed to survive without the presence of “The Big Bad” for four thousand years, what did the introduction of such a being actually accomplish?  Has humanity improved in any measurable capacity with the introduction of this being into the belief system?

Gullibility, Irony and Karma

Everything has been upended ... I can’t concentrate enough to work on C’era una volta, I can’t concentrate enough to finish Beautiful Beige, I can’t concentrate on anything, truthfully.

And I have been learning valuable lessons about gullibility.  I know, what a boring topic.  I would agree, had it not just had it hit me squarely between the eyes with the force of a bullet, taking me completely by surprise.

I usually don’t spend a lot of energy on gullibility or even trust, or at least I never thought I did.  I just realized why that was – I didn’t care enough.  Isn’t that a horrible lesson to learn?

Your heart is so lacking in ... whatever emotion most people have that makes them care about “the other” that you don’t really care whether or not they feel anything for you ... some poor schmuck falls head over heels in love with you, and after a time they could spend an hour screaming that you’re the most heartless so-and-so they ever had the misfortune of encountering, and you just regard them as something of a curious insect, because you didn’t share whatever emotion they were feeling.  And yes, that has happened a lot.  I’m not saying it happens every single day of my life – just that it tends to happen more often than it doesn’t.  I seem to have always gotten myself tangled up in uneven relationships ... and 9 times out of 10 that imbalance comes from me not feeling anywhere as much about him as he did about me.

And then – the gods of irony decided it was time for me to learn a valuable lesson – and I fell head over heels in love with the one person even more uninvested than I was.  I think when I regain my wits, I might even see the humor or the irony in it ... perhaps what some might call “karma”.  For the moment, though – I’m completely upended.

I had no familiarity with the other side, or very little of it.  As I said, when it hit me, it didn’t just brush by me and disappear, it hit me with the force of a bullet, and I was left utterly floundering.  It felt like I had just died inside.

I Heard the Trees Scream As They Fell
A clearing, bright as daylight, a body
laying upon the dry leaves, entrails strewn
in crackling tinder, her dried heart bloodied
once torn, silent, accusing and immune

from life’s dim vagaries now, you look down
at the face once animated and young
she says I saw the image, heard the sound
of trees ripped from the roots to which they clung

I heard the trees scream in pain as they fell
Or was it my own cry that I heard,
he lied, he lied, he lied, I know too well
when you are no longer bound to the earth

now falling behind you, anguish so sweet
even the birds are stilled in reverence,
his last endearment, brief as a heartbeat,
my only now forgotten recompense.
© Me, 2015, Snake’s Trail

So there you go, I thought, when I finished with that pitiful ode to my misery.  Stick that on my urn.

Right after that, I started sorting through everything ... it began as clearing out a flash drive, and evolved into a deeper dive into progression.  Actually, it started as a cleaning everything out activity, because I think part of me expected to die. 

Oh, not that I was planning on off’ing myself – hardly.  I’m too big a coward for that.  No, I assumed the Universe was doing it for me.  Wait until the very end and shatter her heart into a million pieces for the proverbial swan song.  Pure entertainment for the Sky Sadist.  When you’ve loved someone that long and that passionately, to have them slide themselves disinterestedly out from under you – where are you going to go but down?  I mean, sure if you had a crush that lasted a week, maybe it stings but you survive.  But all these years?  When they're all tangled up in your head and heart with everything from music to poetry to your own art and your own writing and your own self image to the clothes in your closet to the perfume on your body?  No, you don’t survive that.  I expected to die, because there was nowhere else to go, after that.

So I set about planning on selling everything off, which seemed a worthwhile – and fortunately distracting – activity after the day or so leading up to that poem.  Yes, I had just had my heart shattered into a million irretrievable miniscule pieces, little atomies now spreading out into empty space, alone and isolated - but with what little energy there was left in me, I thought maybe I should start clearing out the rest of me.  Life wasn't all that fun anymore.

Then, for lack of anything else to do, I went to the gym and tried to give myself a heart attack and die (went way over maximum heart rate, running; didn’t work.  All I did was sweat like a pig and stagger home, still not dead but doing my damnedest to get there.)  Looked like it was going to storm out there.  I looked it up.  Yup.  Scattered thunderstorms, starting at 9:15 a.m.  Cheered up briefly.  Maybe I’ll get hit by lightening.  Or hydroplane off the road.  Something!  Anything!  Just take me out of this pain!  Of course not.  The sun came out and stayed out.  Not a storm cloud in sight.  Sure, maybe I’ll hydroplane off the bone dry road in bright sunshine!  Got home safe from a bunch of pointless errands, safe, sound and miserable.

I had learned learned through experience that sometimes things can change in a heartbeat.  Look at the “Miracle Oil” moment.   I say “miracle” although it wasn’t, really – apparently, people have known it was great for muscle stiffness and pain for eons ... no one bothered to tell me, though, until Mr. Spirit Guide got tired of my whining and moaning and decided to slap me upside the head with it:  “Use THIS, you numbskull!”

All I had to do was “google” it, and there it was:  my “miracle oil”.  So I went from relentless leg spasms to very few of them.  Sure, I stink like the fragrant bush the oil is made from, but I can live with that – as long as my legs were no longer twisting themselves into knots.  And that changed in 3/10ths of a second!  So obviously, things can and do change very quickly.

But this time ... no, this time was different.  This time it hurt down into the core of my bones and even further than that – maybe down into my cells, and maybe further than that ... into my quantum self, if such a thing were possible.

I came home and dove into my own past ... for reasons I couldn’t even begin to explain, I was obsessively looking for my mother’s recipe for Rosemary Chicken, astounded because I couldn’t find it.  I had been carrying around our collection of recipe cards since I was a child and naïvely believed I could collect all of the recipes in the world ... handwriting and typing them onto index cards and filing them into categories ... and I had started with my mother’s collection.  She added to it over the years, so I found scores of cards and recipes in her handwriting, as well as her mother’s and grandmother’s handwriting.  So much of it I would never – ever – prepare or eat, but I couldn’t bring myself to cull any of it.  But no Rosemary Chicken.  I sprayed the inside of the box with Liquid Gold ... I hadn’t made any effort to preserve the beauty of the wooden box with its little clasp since I inherited it ... and then started looking through external and flash drives to see if I had captured it anywhere else.

This is when I began sorting through everything.  Temporarily forgot about the Rosemary Chicken and started looking at my own recent past ... after the Carbonite disaster, that is; before that, I had nothing, unless I’d fortuitously printed it out like I had the 1993 journal.  Found the history of disinterest on my part.  Found that I had even questioned it on numerous occasions:  will I ever know what love is?  Will I ever care about anyone?  Why is my heart so cold?  Why was my heart made this way?  Why haven’t I found anyone to love?

Then I burst into tears.  Non ce la faccio, mi arrendo.  I can’t do it; I give up.  I went back to Paradise Lost, because it fit.   This wasn’t where I was expecting to go with Paradise Lost; I was expecting to countermand it; instead, I agreed with it.  Even the First Duality can finally shatter into nothing, huh?  Never saw THAT coming ...