I Feel A Rant Coming On

As I have said a number of times, when I was 40 I thought I knew pretty nearly everything........now, not only do I feel like I know nothing, but, worse yet, I understand nothing.  I have kept my mouth shut mostly about my total bafflement about lots of things, but particularly about the young celebrities in the news and plastered all over everything.  Vapid blondes with faces as distinctive as a bowl of unflavored yogurt; young men so undistinguished looking that you almost miss them when you are looking right at a picture of them, or so weird looking that you find that, if your life depended on making a choice between the two types, you would have such  a helluva time deciding that maybe you would actually prefer  the odd ones. At least with odd and ugly, you would have a chance of recognizing them and being able to pick them out of a crowd (solely to be able to avoid them). 


Sorry if my ranting here ends up spoiling what might have been a nice movie experience......I just couldn't keep my mouth shut any longer.  I really hate to be an old curmudgeon and name names , but last night I watched a movie on TV (The Ides Of March) which featured one of my favorite actors and favorite faces in the whole universe, George Clooney, but actually starred a young man whose name I have seen here and there but have never actually SEEN, if you know what I mean and whom I felt I had still not seen, despite watching him for an hour and  a half.  And I found myself in a puddle of befuddlement as the closing credits rolled.  I had to quickly go back and check the cast to get his name......it seems to be  Ryan Gosling.......a rather interesting name for the most innocuous, indeterminate non-face I have ever tried to look at.   Please understand, I know nothing about this person as a person.  He may be the salt of the earth, kind to animals and children a paragon of virtue.......a prospective Saint even.  I am not talking about his entity.......I am talking about his appearance and this performance as an actor.....some of the main things that  usually figure into hiring an actor to be in your movie. 

Holy moly, if I were married to that guy for 5 years I would still be unable to pick him out of a lineup much less a crowd.  It would have been necessary for me to bonk him on the chin or cheekbone with some blunt object on our Honeymoon, thereby creating a definitive scar which I could recognize.  I do not know what would have made me notice him in the first place much less marry him......I would have to think about that.  I suspect I would have had to go through our relationship calling him "whatshisname" even though his name is more distintive than his visage.  I will briefly comment on his skill as an actor.......I cannot tell  if he has any.  
 I realize how much I depend on facial characteristics and expressions and even voice and subtle vocal intonations to establish acting talent and, to my eye and ear,  there just ain't anything there.  I am not even saying he is a terrible actor......he is just a nearly invisible one. 

 I am baffled about what the movie moguls and the public see in this young man that I have missed.  And I am using him as a symbol of all of the bland young things who dominate our entertainment world and who can hardly be distinguished visually, one from the other. Can anyone out there help me.?

By the way, the movie itself was OK.....George  Clooney and Philip Seymour Hoffman (both of whom have gorgeous recognizable faces) give good performances and, thank heaven, they have faces that enable me to tell one of them from the other. The plot is Philosophically sound and it did grip me occasionally though it made me sad when virtue did not really triumph.  (Reality, especially political reality sucks.)  I do think it might have been improved by a leading man whom I would have been able to recognize from scene to scene but then.....hell.....what do I know?   Nuthin'

Zen Wisdom / Jewish Wisdom - A Few Of My Favorite Things

I had intended to blog about one of the Zen precepts.........Be in the moment.....Be here now.  It is the lesson I am working on right now and it is damned hard.........maybe impossible  But before I go there I must share with you one of my favorite things.  I do not know who to give credit to for the following gem.  I received it years ago in an email and it has held an honored place on my wall ever since.  Let me see if I can conjure it up out of my mysterious often un-accessible goody files.  Oh shit.  It is too tiny to read no matter how I tried to enlarge it.  I may have to retype select portions of it for you.  Aaaarrrrgggghhh.


                         WORDS OF WISDOM


Zen is not easy.  It takes effort to attain nothingness.  
            and thenwhat do you have?   Bupkis.


The Tao does not speak.  The Tao does not blame.  The Tao does not take sides.   The Tao has no expectations.  The Tao demands nothing of others.      The Tao is not Jewish.

Wherever you go there you are.    Your luggage is another story.

Breathe in, Breathe out, Breathe in, Breathe out.  Forget this and attaining enlightenment will be the least of your worries. 

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Be aware of your body.  Be aware of your perceptions.  Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of terminal illness.

There is no escaping Karma.  In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited.....and whose fault was that?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy.

Drink tea and nourish life;  with the first sip, joy;  with the second sip, satisfaction;  with the third sip, peace;   with the fourth a Danish.


Accept misfortune as a blessing.  Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.,....what would you talk about?


Let your mind be as a floating cloud.  Let your stillness be as a wooded glen.  And sit up straight.....you'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.


                            and my personal favorite


Be here now.  Be somewhere else later.  Is that so complicated?
                                     ***************************


As I was saying, that last one is the one I am working on.  And yes,  dammit, it is complicated.    Having found that all of my magic tools for coping which have kept the world, the Demons and reality at bay for lo these many years are no longer working for me  I am indeed up shit creek without a paddle.  .  Disaster has struck.  When the pains of living descend upon me I can no longer vanquish them with my old tried and trusty "just do something nice for someone and you and they will both feel better" Sword.  Doesn't work any more and I do not know why.  What I do know is that losing that weapon leaves a person at the mercy of everything.  

We all live most of our lives safely within our little castle stronghold....with walls and fortifications and a moat filled with crocodiles (or is it alligators?)  and relatives and friends gathered 
close by and available as needed.  When attacks come at us we lift the drawbridge and huddle together, hurl a few stones or burning embers over the walls and wait till the attackers retreat in frustration.  As long as we are able to continue to feel good by doing nice things for each other and can entertain ourselves and our loved ones by reminiscing about the good old days  we can continue to delude ourselves that we have everything under control.


However, I just happened to look behind me recently and instead of seeing a rolling landscape with my path leading back into the distance of the good old days I suddenly realized that the small patch of ground on which I am standing at this moment is really all there is. There is nothing visible behind me except in my mind.  And there is nothing clearly visible ahead of me except for one small patch of terrain just ahead of where my feet stand now.....a place for me to step forward into the next moment.  Everything else is a figment of my imagination or a stored memory.  It is a fascinating (and really scary) concept, but it has enabled me to finally grasp the premise of living in and savoring the moment as being the only reality.  I am flabbergasted at how hard it is to keep from drifting off into thoughts of yesterday or tomorrow neither of which is touchable, tasteable or tangible.   And while yesterday and all of our thousands of lovely or awful yesterdays were probably fact, tomorrow isn't even that  .....   and may never be.    It reminds me of one of my favorite Nat King Cole songs called "For All We Know". ( I wish I were skilled enough to include an excerpt for you to listen to because it is gorgeous).  But the lyrics are so sweet and so profound......

....."for all we know, this may only be a dream.......we come and go like the ripples on a stream......so love me tonite.....tomorrow was made for some.....tomorrow may never come, for all we know....."


Since I have elected to NOT let my tribe put me on an ice floe and push me gently out to sea, I find that I must construct a new way to see and deal with the world from the perspective of this advanced age.  Right now, it looks to me like living in the moment may be my solution...........if the moment happens to include that the cat just threw up on my bed, well, that is what I must deal with right now and that takes care of this moment  As for the next one and the one after that.....I think I can't worry about them in this moment which is taken up with the results of  kitty hairballs.  Not my favorite thing, but do-able.

As for the next moment..........we'll see what that brings.  (as long as it is not wanton kitty poop )   Sigh.  I must keep repeating...."Be here now.....be somewhere else later......"

On Cheering Up ......or Exploring the Farthest Outposts of Insanity

Before I maunder on about my current attack of total Madness I want to tell all of you how touched, comforted and impressed I am at your sweet efforts to help me through my perplexities.  Thanks to Messyminny for suggesting how I can solve my font size problem.......I will try it out on this very post....(yes, it worked!)...if it works you should  be reading this in comfort....,if it doesn;t work, get out your magnifying glasses.  And bless all of you for commiserating with me.....you will all get an extra  star in your crowns for your good deeds.

I am still in a strange state of disconnectedness.  In my bio I tell of having led several different lives.....I am beginning to suspect I have moved on into yet a third one .......I have no name or description for it yet.  

Looking back down the long path of my life I find myself seeing it in a variety of different ways........in one I am the hero and blessed being of my bio.....in another I am a monumental failure, fuckup and fool and I can make a good case for that one being true.  I find that it hardly matters though......that is the past......and here I am, relatively healthy, with who knows how many years still to go and without a clue about how to get through them.  No wonder I am depressed.

I must utter  a quick squeal of delight and thanks to a friend who sent me an email to cheer me up today.....believe it or not it did cheer me up a bit.  You will laugh when I tell you how come........she warned me to brace myself for the absolute worst......the possibility that the idiot, Romney might actually be elected.  Believe it or not, I have already accepted that as fact and have resigned myself to it, adjusted to accepting total chaos reigning from then on.  Having accepted that, I realize that I cannot possibly sink any lower into feeling bad so I think I am actually feeling a bit better.    

I have decided not to worry about stuff which may not happen within my lifetime..........like the total Decline and fall of the United States of America due to rampant  STUPIDITY.  Unless.......horrors....this is like Hamlet when he contemplates ending it all and then is brought up short by, ...."perhance to dream......ay, there's the rub"...........Unless, I am instantly, and without a moment to rest or catch my breath, reassigned to a new lifetime here  on earth (could that be what they have been calling Hell??) in which case, I am not sure what I will do....I have not made plans for that.......gosh....I wonder if one has any rights of refusal and, if so, how many before one is forced to accept the obviously already  blighted lifetime you are being forced to accept.....hmmmmmm....hell and  damn......something I never thought of to worry about......sigh.


I did a really weird thing yesterday and it put me into a state of I don;t know what.  In order to explain this one I must take you back with me to High School where I was snatched from the relative comfort of my dear old childhood friends in Philly and thrust, alone, fat, ugly and friendless into a hell on earth 3000 miles away.......high school here in LA.  The only way I got thru those years was to develop a wild, impassioned, secret crush on the school hero, star of the football team and fella handsome as all getout. Needless to say, we never even met nor spoke, but  the passion at least tethered me to earth during those awful years and kept me from drifting away from the world, ending up entangled in branches and doomed to slowly deflate and expire in some prickly tree on another equally hostile planet.  I have thought of him often in the years since and wondered if he were still alive and yesterday, dammit,  Google made it possible for me to satisfy my curiosity.  I found his obituary from 2007 (which answered my question directly), and learned that he made it to the age of 80, left a wife of 60 years and 4 assorted children.  Damn.  I suddenly realized that I had no chance left to ever corner him in a dark alley and seduce him.....not that that was my best fantasy, but the first that came to mind.  So here I am.....another dream shattered.  There really is nothing left for me since, for some reason, even Mark Harmon has recently lost his charm and appeal and can thank his lucky stars that he is no longer in danger of being stalked by a crazy 85 year old fan in an electric gocart.   He will probably never know how lucky he is unless one of you tell on me (just as my high school crush never knew how in danger he was of being accosted in some dark alley and smothered in sloppy kisses behind the dumpsters.((I didn't know much then beyond huge hugs and sloppy kisses)).

So here I am, really without a dream to call my own and only the joy of blogging and the blessed folk of the blogosphere  to light my way.  Don't worry......you are all safe from being dragged into a dark alley and smothered in sloppy kisses......In BlogLand I am really quite harmless, honest.

What D'You Do If The Glass Is Neither Half Empty Nor Half Full......It Is Bone Dry

Ugh, ugh, I know I should blog, I really do want to blog......actually I think I have to blog or I will forget how....or worse yet..... people will lose the will to check in on me from time to time.  So what does a person do when there is not a crumb of thought in the so-called brain that is worthy of being cast out there for human consumption?

(Omigawd, I notice that I just cast my beloved folllowers in the role of a flock of Mrs. Moon's chickens......scratching in the dirt for worms and grubs, etc.....I swear that is NOT the way I think of you.....honest.......what a dreadful choice of metaphors.....aaarrrggh.  You should be able to tell from that what a low and pitiful state I am in.  Please forgive.)


I just did get a workable idea.  Perhaps I can use this opportunity to ask for help in solving a puzzle that has  been perplexing me for lo these many weeks........how in the hell do you enlarge the blog font permanently, or at least till you change your mind down the road?  One of the reasons I do not  blog more frequently is because it has become a monumental chore since I decided that the type size was too small and needed  to be bumped up.  Yes, yes, I do click on the font size icon and it obeys......briefly. Then, the minute my back is turned or my attention is distracted it sneakily restores the old font size.  If I happen to be scrutinizing the words I type that is not so bad...I can catch it in the act, but if I am gazing at the ceiling in a frenzy of deep concentration while my fingers are flying wildly across the keys it can be disaster.  Whole paragraphs have to be scratched and rewritten and  ooooooh......I hate it when that happens.


I know most of you out there have the answer to this one so please don't trample one another in giving me the answer.  But you have no idea how grateful I will be to get it.........I might just offer a prize for the first or the best answer.......or would that be disgustingly low class?  Anyway, while I decide on that conundrum  for myself and ponder what I might have to give that anyone would want, hasten your words of enlightenment for this poor soul who continues to be at the mercy of the Formatting Tyrant.

On other fronts, I can report a further state of befuddlement which is threatening the very foundation of my belief system.  As some of you may remember, about 6 or 8 months ago I flung myself into the shark infested waters of the Stock & Options Market.  Until this past April I was considering myself a pretty smart cookie as I watched my manipulations increase the balance in my account and somewhat smugly planned on what I would do with my ill gotten gains.   Then, suddenly and without much warning (though it should have been obvious to me that such good fortune could not continue indefinitely) the market tanked and sank about 6% taking with it most of my lovely profits.  I remembered, too late, the rule...."don't forget to periodically take some of your profits off the table."  After a bit of hand wringing I bravely sucked it up, studied some more and began to approach things from the bear market side.  
That theory was sound, except that it took a while to learn  the proportions of things from that angle and, my maneuvers were not robust enough to counteract the continued deluge to the downside.

  I did capitulate a bit and took some of my losses, just to get rid of some of that red ink which offended my delicate sensibilities and resigned myself to waiting out the down move before giving up on my brash plan.  Recently, I have noticed a strange phenomenon..... when I do almost nothing the situation seems to improve.  At the moment, I am close to being back even and am now torn between closing out all my positions tomorrow and considering myself a lucky damned fool, or cautiously proceed with what I continue to learn to see what the next few months bring.  I can hear all of you out there screaming, "get out....get out" the way the audience used to do in the old movie thrillers.  The trouble with that is,  what else is there in the world that could get me out of bed at 6 am or at all for that matter, and what in the hell am I going to do with all the time I now put in studying and learning some of the intricacies of this new world........ and worse yet......what in the hell am I to do with my new vocabulary of strangles, straddles,bull put spreads and iron condors.......oh, the pity and perplexity of it all.  I guess until I find some other path to stimulate my interest I may just hang around here stubbornlystudying candlestick charts and identifying  dojis, haramis, shooting stars, inverted hammers and hangman symbols.


At least, you must agree, it keeps me off the streets......

Psssst ! Shhhhh ! If anyone asks, You Don't Even Know Me.....

Be Advised.......I am going into hiding, so, if you love me, don't let them find me and take me away.


The men in the white coats, that is........


I totally lost it today, in front of witnesses, no less.   And one of the people who saw me actually beating my head against the wall (the truth is she is the one who drove me to it)  happens to be an OCD neighbor who is relentless in taking action when she decides something is amiss.  For instance, for the past 2 years or so, she has been keeping a written log of all of the hangups and/or heavy breathing phone calls she  has received (sometimes as many as 6 a day she claims) convinced that the culprit is another neighbor down the street who once  made the mistake of using a naughty word in casual conversation with her.   (No, it was not even the "F" word, but no matter.) and even more damning, he has a scraggly beard and obviously is not to be trusted.    After collecting what she felt was enough evidence ( ? ) she has finally taken necessary action and reported these offenses, verbally and  in writing (longhand) , to both the phone company and the Police, causing the totally innocent but suspicious looking (to her) neighbor to be visited and grilled by a  Detective from the Vice Squad (or Special Victims Unit or something).


After dealing with my neighbor for 40 years you would think I would have  better sense than to expose myself to the risk of being labelled "Dangerously Insane" and reported  to the Authorities.  I realize I screwed up badly this time.   I have been secretly beating my head against the wall for most of those 40 years after each encounter of unspeakable frustration with said neighbor and today I just could not restrain myself till  she left and I was safely alone.    Oh, the shame and horror of it all.  The worst part is,  there was another witness.....my caregiver, Florence, who tends to accept my madness and strange  behavior as part of the job but would find it hard to deny, under oath,  that she did, indeed, witness me muttering darkly and banging my head loudly against the kitchen corner post for at least a full minute before I regained some modicum of control.   So, if said neighbor (whom we will call "X") pursues her merciless course I am sure she can have them issue a subpoena which will force Flo to testify against me, unwilling, but helpless in the face of legal machinery grinding away........groan....

I can already visualize  the men in the white coats coming up the walk carrying cattle prods and strait jackets.  There is not a moment to lose..........I would not do well in an Asylum........I have packed Gussie and a spare T-shirt into a cat carrier and am going underground.  

I will write when it is safe.  And remember, if anyone asks, you don't even know me ........

I Could Never Top This So I Am Plagarizing

  I have been trying to think of some cheery bit to post today but have failed miserably so far.   However, the funniest post on the web  belongs to Dr. Grumpy  today so the  best favor I can do you is to send you over there.........I am still holding my sides and wiping away the tears.

Enjoy.

 

 

Great office moments

posted by Grumpy, M.D. at Doctor Grumpy in the House - 8 hours ago 

 

www.drgrumpyinthehouse.blogspot.com

NothingCheers You Up like When a Pain Goes Away

To all you faithful followers I am happy to report that the cats and I have a crawled out of the deep black pit...at least for the moment.  
Tenks Gott.

The miseries I have been suffering from this week have finally subsided and most of my gut-pains have gone away.  The same is true of my guilt and horror when I feared I had acquired Salmonella from noshing some of raw egg mixture when I was making matzoh balls for my chicken soup)  

Of course, this remission did not just happen....I had to take extreme measures (aside from lots of Pepto Bismol and  herb teas) To really effect a home cure it was requisite that I  make an appointment to see the doctor.  As soon as my innards heard that.....well......like your car when you go to the mechanic, they decided to shape up ASAP.   

......to make a long boring story much shorter, by the time I saw the doctor I was nearly well and did not even scream very loudly in protest when, after checking me out, he declared with great honesty, that he did not know for sure what was wrong with me.  ( I was thrilled when he said he doubted very much if the raw matzoh balls were the culprit and blamed it all on a probable attack of my IBS.)

But, the best part has been, with the reduction of the pain and agony, my depression has lifted.....it feels so good to not be hurting so bad that I had to banish my depression,.....at least for a little while.   

Maybe one day soon I can even publish a decent, cheery blog....keep your fingers crossed, but don't hold your breath. 

Love you all.