The names of so many people pop into my head like the flash of face cards when someone sprays a deck into the air playing fifty-two pickup. Some of them are still around but many of the old playmates have gone. Get your mind back on track. I'm not talking about playmates of the month. Do they still have those? Seems like Playboy magazine is tame now compared to what we thought about it in the good old days. The difference is that I'm tame now no matter what is available. Do people still read magazines with all the porn sites on the internet these days? Speaking of porn, did you see Lars and the Real Girl? Okay, okay, it's not porn but it does have a life sized sex doll in it. She's a main character. It's a great film. At least I thought it was. Very touching. No, not in that way you perv! No wonder I've been gone so long.

I think that's all I have to say now. Not much after the pregnant pause of nine months. Just sticking my toe in the water to see what it's like. I'm guessing much has changed around here and nothing's really changed much. Oh, other than I don't know anything about all the new stuff they've added to make your blogging experience orgasmic. Woo hoo!

Oh, one other thing. I do miss some of you and wonder how things are going for you but really don't want to get back on the xanga wheel, so I don't. It's not that I've forgotten you or stopped caring for you. It's a personal thing about the kinds of changes I needed to make and the impact that might have on casual readers. Now, I have no casual readers or people who read out of a misplaced sense of loyalty or comment exchange or whatever. That works better for me. Take good care and thank you for everything over the years.

Moving is a good bit easier if it's done slowly, over time rather than distance. We hardly notice a move like that. One day you look in the mirror and notice you've moved. The realization begins to dawn, if you're paying attention, that you aren't interested in doing the things you were interested in doing a while ago. The police look like they're still in high school and your parents, if they're still alive, look more your age than ever they did. Of course, that changes quickly too as parents progress in age. At either end of life we seem to move quite quickly. When we're born we grow pretty fast compared with the years of adulthood. Then, when we get to the other end of life, we seem to age pretty fast compared with the years we seemed to be kind of frozen in time. The thing got me thinking about this is that I've been around xanga nearly seven years. Not a long time compared to how long I've been around earth but a long time in dog years. What I've noticed is that I've moved. You noticed it too. At least as much as anyone really notices anything around here. If we make the change slowly it doesn't make many ripples in the pond. Lower a pebble into the pond and hardly anyone will notice. It's the splash, plop that gets people's attention. But some folks look around one day and notice that someone who used to sit on that rock isn't on that rock any longer. I guess you could say I'm not on that rock any longer. I write other things now and post them somewhere else or I write things that get posted nowhere else. Life is good but I think I've moved.

The next bit simply left me scratching my thick and stupid head. Also, separating the alchemical work from your own particular theological views is important. I feel like the caveman in the Geico commercial. Wha? Why would anyone care about my particular theological views? They are, quite frankly, beyond my own understanding. To separate myself from them, whatever they may be, would be incredibly time consuming at this point. First, I'd have to define them. Since they are almost constantly changing that would be an ongoing process. At which particular point in time would I pin the tail on the donkey, as it were? The donkey keeps moving, the pin won't stay put and my hand is a mass of swirling subatomic particles that randomly appear and disappear. Yikes! Is it any wonder I'm confused? Perhaps this is why people feel the need to advise me. It's like seeing a homeless man on the street who doesn't even have the sense to ask you for a dollar when you pass. He clearly needs a bath, a meal and clothes but he's so far gone he's beyond caring about any of his external needs. Could it be that I've meditated so much that my brain has finally gone soft? If I could remember I'm sure I'd remember that I got some free advice about that at some point in time. That if I meditated too much I'd get too detached from the physical world and become worthless. But then I'm not even sure what worthless means. It seems so subjective. If the earth were made of gold a man would die for a handful of dirt. What determines worth or value? Is it simply scarcity? Please, if you feel the need to advise me remember that you're going to have to put it in terms I might be able to understand. Okay, I'm going to go now. Thanks for reading.

An opportunity to transform into something other than what we take as a normal or common human existence is fascinating to me. Yes, we are selfish, greedy, arrogant and violent. But that's not all there is to us. We can get beyond much of that by making the right kind of effort. I don't pretend that everyone can. It's clear that some people are incapable of even generating the desire to be something other than hedonists. That doesn't mean everyone is held by the same limitation. Even gravity can be transcended if one is willing to make right effort. Rather than moan about what we can't do I choose to press the envelop of what we may be able to do. We have models. People, like us in that they too had animal bodies dragging them in the direction of natural evolution. But they took a different path and led others, not too unlike ourselves, to make great strides on that path. They couldn't do it for us though we'd love to believe they could. Their early students understood we must each breath, eat and drink for ourselves. Somehow over the span of time which seems to separate us we have screwed up nearly everything they ever tried to show us. Much the same way great art and people are lost or destroyed in the periodic global madness we call war that plagues our species. What we may achieve is far more encouraging than what we have destroyed. Perhaps it's all a fantasy but I think not. Individuals have progressed even while the body of humanity we call people has regressed. Yes, I think we can go either backward or forward. Just because time passed doesn't mean we got better. But just because most don't get better doesn't mean some can't. Optimism or fantasy? Hell, I don't know but I'd like to take a shot at the transformation and talk as many others into the trip as I'm able.

As I've matured my tastes have changed. There's a sexual taboo about older people being in relationships with people many years younger. Think about dirty old men for a minute and you'll get the idea. Of course, now we've got a rash of female high school and junior high school teachers having sexual trysts with their students. It's a little more okay for an older woman to have sex with a younger male. Women don't seem to appear as predatory in the collective unconscious of America. How many people think twice about talking to little boys and little girls in stores these days because of the perception that adults are sexually preying on children? I'm not arguing for or against what people feel they need to do to protect their children in our society. I'm speaking of the differences I've noted over the years. More people appear to be more uptight than once they did. Of course I'm speaking in general as it's pretty silly to try to be specific about a population as large as that of the United States of America. Advertisers target age groups. We've got Dennis Hopper pitching my generation about investments and retirement. Cadillac plays music of the sixties in one of their car ads aimed at the Baby Boomers.
It's no secret cereal and game makers pitch the younger crowd. It's a multi-billion dollar market and we're all about the money.

Turning sixty recently found me noticing how much I'd diminished in the eyes of the majority of Americans. I'm an old guy for sure now. And yes, I feel marginalized. It's okay for a guy in his fifties to have a midlife crisis and run off with some chick half his age but it's not okay for the blue pill people. Though if you believe the drug companies it appears men are encouraged to start thinking about male performance sometime just after twenty or so. My whole idea about male performance and making love has been transformed. eHarmony.com makes me laugh out loud. But not quite as much as the idea that someone would be willing to pay ten dollars for a Viagra tablet. All my life I've enjoyed a good relationship with the elderly. My paternal grandfather was a great friend and hero from my earliest recollection. I loved spending time with him, listening to stories and marinating in his loving wisdom. Perhaps I'm a treasure hunter at heart. But my interest isn't in gold but rather the wisdom and gentleness that can come with maturity if one does it properly. Come to think about it I'm probably about the age my grandfather was when I fell in love with him. I love him still. I learned more good from him than I ever did from his son and remain grateful to this day. The elderly rock!

Because thinking takes up less time and space than writing I find I'm running out of space here and I've only begun thinking about the question. Allow me to fast forward down a road that makes sense to me based on my observations of myself and my universe. A soul may be a kind of second body. The first body, the one we all recognize because we can verify its existence via the five senses, we're given by life. If we stay with it it matures, gets sick and dies. Would the second body be fed and cultivated too if it is to mature the way the first body does? Since it's not physical what kind of food would we need to feed it? Where would we get this food? What about training, education? Would there be a second education for the second body? Could this second body survive the death of the first body? How long could it survive? Would it too eventually die? What would it's life expectancy be? Could there be a third or fourth body? How would one become aware of such a body? Where would it live after the first body died? Is there a space or dimension for it as there is for the first body? Of what is it made? What kind of material? Could there be a thought body and an emotional body made up of habitual thoughts and feelings? Is this something people might call a soul? Whew. As you can see there are a lot of questions on this little sea of thought. But I'm okay with that. I've got my little sail boat and I've learned how to steer it with a little rudder. If the winds of desire stop blowing I'm okay with going for a swim or taking a nap or just hanging out and looking at the clouds for a while. It's a good life.

What scares me is the consistency of some comments people leave when I write something. Like, I agree to a certain degree and I think your perspective is interesting and good to a certain point and I think we agree on a number of things. Or like this, I think people may get annoyed because they dont like or agree with what you may of said. Here's the scary part. Why would anyone want to agree with me? Of the billions of intelligent beings who have lived or currently live on this planet why would anyone waste their time and energy agreeing or disagreeing with anything I might happen to write? I am, literally, no one. Nothing on this planet has my name on it or ever will. No one on this planet owes me anything. Yet I am a debtor to hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom I've never even met. The people who grew my food, made my clothes, built the cars I've driven, carry away the waste I make, etc. I'm nobody and I've done nothing. See, the thing is, I'm really okay with being nobody.

At this point I hope you're interested in knowing what I opened my mouth to say because I'm going to tell you. I looked at him and said, Bob, (because that's his name) the problem isn't that they think they're like us. The problem is that we think we're not like them. We think we're more aware, more conscious, more alert, more intelligent. But we're not. Actually, that's what they think about themselves. The truth is we're all pretty much alike on this planet. Oh, there are some differences, but they're not important enough to make a big distinction between us and them. Well, Bob got a look on his face. So, I asked him if I'd annoyed him. He said it wasn't exactly annoyed but he hadn't thought about it like that before. Or at least not in a long time. Bob didn't have a lot of resistance to the idea that we were all pretty much the same here. That's unusual in my experience because mostly we're an extremely arrogant species. But if you were standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon looking down at a group of people on the floor of the Canyon, the difference in their height wouldn't amount to a hill of beans from up there. You couldn't really tell if they were young or old, male or female, short or tall, fat or skinny from that vantage point. My point is that we're all so much alike here it's just plain silly to get annoyed with one another because of some extremely minor differences in manifestation. Some folks are light and some are darker. Some boys like boys, some boys like girls and some boys like peaches. Really, there's not a lot about which to get annoyed, upset, angry or deadly. Yet we do. We get downright deadly with one another about these little differences between us and them.

So, what is it I'm suggesting? That it's okay for people to molest children or peaches? Nope. What I'm suggesting is that we don't have to get so upset about it. It's not going to change anything. In fact, the historical evidence suggests it only makes matters worse. Aberrant behavior has been with us for a very long time and will likely be with us for many years to come. There are some things we can do about it and then there's all the rest. Most of it falls into the all the rest category. Perhaps creating the force of understanding within ourselves would help us to do something about it that would actually work. Maybe not. But really, think about it. Wouldn't it be better for everyone if we took a little more time to try to understand each other rather than spend so much time picking out the differences between us and them? Can we not see that when we do that they always come up on the short end of the stick? Has that kind of thinking and the resultant behavior ever led to good things for our species? Of course, there are going to be exceptions, but in general, isn't that kind of habitual, automatic thinking problematic? I'm suggesting that by thinking more about the us and them mindset we might be able to create a bit more understanding in ourselves and thereby give us the opportunity to make a contribution to solving the problem rather than just pointing it out and moaning about it. Sound like too much trouble? Well, it probably is a lot of trouble, but it just might be with the effort.