Other refinements

The biker chick: she looks perfect when she's out on wall - just a cute young underclassman. Her pink top and pants turn bikerish when we're in the former bathroom together, and she gets rougher and tougher looking the closer together we get - never to the point of revulsion, she's still good-looking, but tough. I suppose I should mention that, like the later scene in reverse, when I found we didn't need coverings, we didn't have them. I speak this way because there are others in the room (now, while I'm typing) and I don't want any words jumping off the screen at them.

The coverings returned when others entered the area. The longing to get back to this occurred in the transitions between scenes, when I was doing the "task" of each scene I was concentrating on that. Did I mention that the area emptied whenever I was involved in a task. It's like the appearance of others was the signal to move on. They'd get me started on some task, clear out and come back when it was time to go somewhere else.

Unfinished Dream

I'm walking along, apparently in Switzerland and/or France, lots of modern buildings around. I enter a doork, at my old college, UM-Duluth - actually, I walk up to the door, the one on the end of Griggs Hall. There is a cute blond girl sitting on a retaining wall by the door. She follows me in. She's kind of a Euro-biker chick, medium tall, kind of tough looking. We end up in a dingy, dirty former bathroom with all the fixtures removed. "Something good" is about to happen, but other people come in and we leave. We're not scared, we just leave.

Wanting to get back to this scene permeates the rest of the dream.

Then I'm walking down a residential street; I go into this picnic shelter (big square tent-type thing in somebody's yard) where my brother and sisters are preparing to spend the night. There are a lot of people coming and going, siblings, cousins, my wife and kids. Whenever I look at somebody they've been replaced by somebody else. This is also a constant theme throughout the dream.

The tent has obviously been there a while, the floor is dirt, and there are sleeping pallets around the edges, the front is folded up and the side farthest from the street is apparently open, people keep coming and going that way. There's a sort of room in the back where there are bunks. A small opening in the back wall leads in there. As younger kids we visited some cousins who had a club house like that. I hesitate to say it, but I think it was a converted pig shed or chicken coop. It didn't stink at all.

There was a square box in the middle with juice and something to eat on it. There are a bunch of those bugs that you see when you pick up a board that's been on the ground too long, clustered on the lower left corner of the box I see sitting down to eat on the entrance side. And, of course, there are more as I peel up the loose ply to look at this. They seem to be contending for something sticky on the middle of that side with a mass of ants who are swarming up from the bottom.

At first I want to just let them kill each other, but then I decide to speed up the process by squishing them with the loose ply, except that doesn't get them all and I use a napkin and my bare fingers to squish the rest. The ants are easy to kill but the other bugs are bigger and harder shelled.

When I quit, I know they'll be back...or, rather, there'll be more to take their place.

I get up to go wash my hands, walking behind the tent into somebody else's somewhat unkempt yard, with lots of trees and bushes, where I'm attacked by a vine with a leafy end. The vine is a parasite growing out of a tall cedar, like the ones that grew around our yard at the "old house," from the crotch of the first branch which rises out to the left from eye level down to the ground and out about six feet. The vine acts a lot like any one of the Schnauzers we went to see Sunday afternoon, though I interpreted their actions as playful and affectionate, whereas the vine was protecting itself and its territory; whenever you came near it, it would "attack," though, other than startling the hell out of me the first time, and unnervingly jumping right up into my face a couple of times, it had no way to harm anyone.

By the way, the word "crotch" is just used as a descriptor here. There was nothing about the tree that suggested sexuality in any way. Although...

Someone was standing in my way as I tried to get out of reach of the thing - I would have had to do something rude to get past him (or her - it seemed to alternate between my wife, my older stepson and my cousin Tim, all of whom are well-known [by me] to do such things). S/he wanted to converse a bit about this oddity, but then I picked up a stick and started destroying it. I wished (non-verbally) that I had a better too for the job, and the stick turned into this steel bar I have in my garage. I've toyed with the notion of pounding that par into a sword, and, for a moment or two, when this challenge was resembling a battle, the bar was a sword.

I felt a bit concerned about how the heck I was supposed to snuff out this thing's consciousness or whatever. Was it at the end cluster of leaves or what? Anyway, striking it there seemed to quiet it enough that I could hold it and shred it with the bar. When I had shredded the vine back to about two feet up the trunk and I was thinking about putting the bar away, I think it turned back into a stick and I just dropped it and went on. I was a bit worried that the vine would grow back leaving that much, but I wasn't prepared to get that picky about somebody else's problem.

More later.
____________
Sorry about that. I forgot I had to take the older girl to dance class.

Anyway...

I walked up to the stoop of a long, one-story house with light gray asphalt siding - very run down. You see a lot of houses like it in Oklahoma, where I've spent a lot of time. The stoop has a gable over it with pillars, but it's just a stoop. I go into a living room with polished, brown, stone tiles and sort of a sidewalk running from the door to the kitchen. After the fact, it reminds me of my aunt's place that she rented after divorcing my uncle. Her son, my cousin Tim, invited me to stay there for a couple days when he got out of the army and I was coming back from a summer of working in the oil fields of West Texas between my Junior and Senior years in college.

There was a little blond kid, about 2 or 3 playing on the couch there. I thought somebody should be watching him, so I kind of stood there until he went to sleep on the floor. I was tired, so I lay down on the sidewalk-y part of the floor with my head next to his feet. I guess it was night. Oh, yeah! It got dark while I was killing the weed. People, of course, were wandering in and out all night - relatives and their friends. They were quiet, but...

The kid got up and left in the morning. I looked where his feet had been. There were a bunch of eighth-inch long, squiggly, brown worms there. I got up and checked to see if I had any on me. Of course. So I brushed off the ones on my clothes, my arms and my face... I could feel them in my hair and inside my clothes... I don't think I had a beard. I was picking them out of the hairs on my arms and squishing them with my fingers as I walked down toward the river (river?) to see if Mom or somebody knew what to do about this. (Mom's a nurse.) My sister met me and was leading me there when the alarm went off.

So,...basically a bunch of shit happened to me and I either wasn't able to complete anything I started or complete it to my own satisfaction. Lotta bugs, lotta relatives, lotta walking. Any guesses what it all means?

Later thought: The path Lisa was leading me down was very light and sandy, well-traveled - like the path to the Johnny T. bluff in Tenkiller State Park. It went through the woods just like that.

Every time clue I see in the dream points to things I did in my 20s. I also don't remember actually walking through a door or even looking at a door. The street in the residential neighborhood was curvy, not straight. I could never see very far ahead.

I take all this to mean that I am what and where I am due to a complete lack of long-range planning. It has all led to a frustrating existence. I do work that plunks itself down right in front of me, but otherwise, it ain't my problem.

My unconscious mind is telling me exactly the same thing my conscious mind is. Thanks for the freakin' help, pal.

Ooh, that's - that frustration - is a bug that needs squishing. Well, let's see. Are there any signs of something I'm passionate about here? Cute blond biker chicks, of course. Any way to make a living out of that passion? I mean, legally?

I have to do an

Individual Development Plan at work. It's driving me nuts. I decided it'd be easier - and maybe would unfreeze my brain blockage - to do my Fourth Step inventory. Right at the moment I'm blocked on actually writing something down about a harm I did to someone, so I'll just blog instead.

I don't think I'm going to get to run the TCM this year. Money's tight. But I'm thinking, maybe I'll volunteer for the race. You know, pass out water or whatever. I'm running now, so I think I'll train for the distance and run it the day before.

Anybody want to run with me?

Since we were talking about drug gangs

I thought it would be good to bring in what the philosopher I'm studying now has to say (beginning at the bottom of page 110):

It is very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that already has overpowered us. It is similar to the statist argument about private monopolies – that citizens should create a governmental monopoly because they are afraid of private monopolies. It does not take keen vision to see through such nonsense.

What is the evidence for the view that decentralized and competing powers promotes peace? In other words, are there any facts that we can draw on to support the idea that a balance of power is the only chance that the individual has for freedom?

Organized crime does not provide many good examples, since gangs so regularly corrupt, manipulate and use the power of the government police to enforce their rule, and so such gangs cannot be said to be operating in a state of nature. Also, criminal gangs profit enormously by supplying legally-banned substances or services, and so also flourish largely due to state policies.

A more useful example is the fact that no leader has ever declared war on another leader who possesses nuclear weapons. In the past, when leaders felt themselves immune from personal retaliation, they were more than willing to kill off their own populations by waging war. Now that they are themselves subject to annihilation, they are only willing to attack countries that cannot fight back.

This is an instructive lesson on why such men require disarmed and dependent populations – and a good example of how the fear of reprisal inherent in a balanced system of decentralized and competing powers is the only proven method of securing and maintaining personal liberty.

Fleeing from imaginary devils into the protective prisons of governments only ensures the destruction of the very liberties that make life worth living.

On the emphases, the italics are his, the bold is mine and not his. My emphasis, not my thought.

MAD is a personal philosophy. Take it personally.

And a little Fred:

the WOD is a fraud. In America the drug racket is a mildly disreputable business, tightly integrated into the economy, running smoothly, employing countless federal cops, prison guards, ineffectual rehab centers and equally ineffectual psychotherapists, and providing bribes to officials and huge deposits of laundered money to banks. Narcos in the US do not engage in pitched battles with the army because they have no reason to. The government barely inconveniences them.

So why should Mexico fight this war for Washington?

In a column, Pat Buchanan addresses the violence in Mexico, and asks:
“Which is the greater evil? Legalized narcotics for America's young or a failed state of 110,000 million on our southern border? Some choice. Some country we've become.”

Some country indeed, on many grounds. And the WOD might be a good idea if it did anything beyond keeping the price of drugs up. But it doesn’t. I suggest two things to Pat:
First, Mexico suffers narco-violence only because Washington expects Mexico to do what Washington won’t. Failed state? Take away the narco wars and Mexico is a reasonably successful upper-third-world nation. If it fails, it will be because we pushed it into failure.

Second, America’s young already have almost unlimited access to drugs. Many students experiment with them. Few become addicts. Why? Because they don’t want to. How is that for simple?

I tried pot, hash, 'shrooms and coke. I got addicted to cheap, strong, legal beer and chewing tobacco. The combination gives the buzz I like, which includes the taste. If you take vitamin E, you don't have to worry much about hangovers.

I say I'm an addict because I can't stop once I start. There is no such thing as moderate use, I either do none or I drink until I pass out. As near as I can tell, that lack of ability to moderate one's consumption of intoxicants isn't caused by the consumption of the substance, but by a psychological reaction/response to the buzz. That's why treatment is mostly about imbibing right ideas, not drugs.

The problem with the US is that we're imbibing too many bad ideas...about morality, psychology, politics, religion, philosophy... Am I missing anything?

Amen

There is an authentic and stark difference between non-interventionism and isolationism. Isolationism as a political philosophy or political strategy is not only impractical but probably suicidal. In a global economy, no industrialized nation can successfully sustain itself on the resources that it controls. Isolationism is a political philosophy that discourages relations with other countries. Alternatively, non-interventionism maintains that foreign relations should be encouraged, but that nations should not become so involved with each other’s affairs that they become entangled with each other. Non-interventionists assert that intervention into the affairs of counterpart nations all too often results in unintended deleterious consequences and blowback, such as the U.S. learned when it intervened in the Middle East.

Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism
by Rich Rubino, April 17, 2009

Never acknowledge or try to repair a mistake. That's our policy.

The Tax Code delenda est

The wife handed me the tax forms last night, all filled out, and wanted me to e-file them. So, I'm going through them line by line and I discover several things she missed - she assumed she should write down one number in one place instead of going through the worksheet and finding out that the number you get to write down on the main form is $2000 less... I ended up reading that whole ugly, boring booklet cover to cover, plus the TOS for the e-filing company.

So, basically, I ended up going to bed at 2:30 AM, p***ed off at the government.

Glad I found out they owe us $400 more than she thought.

Now for the state taxes.

Oh, crap! One of the errors in on the state form.

How 'bout that Obama, eh?

He went and killed those pirates! Good for him!

I hear the remaining pirates are really pissed. Big whoop! Arm the sailors, so they can defend themselves.

You wonder why I don't comment on current affairs anymore.

D___ it!

Lost my train of thought!

The wife came home from shopping; I read the kid a story; watched Letterman for a bit...

Sump'm about Harry Browne.

Molyneux did a eulogy of Browne in podcast 123 [yes, I've listen to all of them up to that one - OCD, they call it], which led me to Browne's eulogy of Peter McWilliams from 2000 and...

Browne's... what do you call those things? A forerunner, or whatever of How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World called A Gift to My Daughter that he wrote on Christmas, 1962.

You know I'm gonna quote it, don't you? Here you go:

No one owes you anything.

Go see how he develops that theme.

Media Alert

!!!

In brief Editor Sheldon Richman is a guest on the Glenn Beck Show today. The topic is “Fascism v Socialism”. Sheldon will be at the top of the show, which commences at 5:00 pm Eastern time on Fox News.

!!!

Here's FEE's blog.

Osama bin Laden Reported Dead

Big whoop. What's he done for me lately?

Here's the link.