I Might Like to Be Her Again

So we had some issues with our internet, well it kept going in and out of service. At first we just went through the usual shit, basically asking, “Was there an outage in our area?”, but there wasn’t, no outages were happening so it was just us. Turning everything off and on, unplugging and reinserting cords would bring it back but that was getting to be a lot of trouble. We figured then there was something wrong with our connection and this resulted in getting a new wifi box. They sent us the latest model, the best, but that didn’t fix it. Then they came out again and redid all the lines and some other shit, the box that was outside the house was now inside the house. My phone was working great. It was fast as shit, but my computer now actually sucks some ass. On the last visit, the technician tried to tell me that it wasn’t the internet that was causing my issue, my computer was just old. Well, I told him, that’s kind of strange since I’ve never had a problem with it connecting to the internet…until now. And it’s still doing this shit. It doesn’t want to load or if it does it’s more like dial up now. Sometimes it almost seems like normal, for a few minutes, and then we’re back to either some type of dial up speed or it’s just not going to load at all. Maybe that’s a sign, just get your ass off the internet, there’s nothing for you or anyone else on there, it’s all just a bunch of mind numbing bullshit. I don’t really doubt it. I think I tell myself, yeah it’s just a form of entertainment, so why not enjoy it but then there’s always the sense that it’s a time wasting endeavor that never actually takes you anywhere but round and around in some sort of endless circles. The endless futile mind machine robs you of your actual life.

I’ve been thinking about something else lately as well. I’ve been wondering about the awakening movement itself and whether or not that is some type of trap. It gives you these grand ideas that life is going take you up the ranks of the enlightened people, but then it slams you to the ground since, there really aren’t any enlightened people, and even if you are living from some outer ledge of reality, who the fuck cares? It’s not only why don’t you care, but why on earth should anyone else give two fucks about how you see anything? What could it possibly matter to them what you are looking at? This whole idea is actually inverted in some way, the image of the guru can’t actually be separate from you so you are just looking at a facet of your own matrix while simultaneously wresting with how this guy is different from you, maybe you should even worship him and what he is. And that would actually just be the same as worshiping what you really are, just in a convoluted sort of way, that quite frankly, I don’t think is helpful at all.

When one of the internet guys was here fixing our equipment he made mention to me in some small talk we were having, “There was a time no one had any of this stuff.” I said, “Oh don’t I know it. When I grew up there was no such thing as even a cell phone. The only TV we had was basically soap operas and maybe news but I didn’t watch that. As a young girl I loved to get engrossed in the glamorous and romantic love triangles of the soaps.” This got me to thinking then how just watching these shows maybe changed me. It showed me a world that was very different from my own, but it did more than that, it created a longing in me to live in the fantasy world that was created there, and to simultaneously shun my actual life because to compare the two, mine was sorely lacking in glamor or excitement. Romantic love triangles were basically non existent. No one was fighting over or for me, that’s for sure. It occurred to me that around the time of the creation of these shows, women suddenly became a lot more unsatisfied with their own situations. They wanted their men to be more romantic then or to make more money. Probably the men, who didn’t really tend to watch these shows didn’t even know what the fuck happened to their own wives. Of course, what was left out of the shows, was the nitty gritty shit of life itself. You never saw the characters with indigestion, you rarely saw them cooking or doing dishes, or spending an entire afternoon doing laundry. If they got sick it was usually with some dramatic life ending illness. No one ever saw these characters trying to figure out their bank accounts or car payments, actually they didn’t really show them driving around because it just magically showed them going from one scene to the other without a single moment of travel time in between. But by high lighting certain dramatic features of life in the fantasy world of course, it had another effect, it downplayed all the ordinary parts of life, basically rendering the biggest portion of a day meaningless or totally insignificant. We learned to look for the big events, like meeting a love mate, getting a big promotion, or going to a high society party. There was also the sense that these characters we watched every day five days a week for an hour, were actually living while we were not, we were having to live vicariously through them, while our own lives stagnated in front of the boob tube. Eventually as more and more films were created we spent more and more time sitting on our asses just watching them. Did our lives get more glamorous? I mean if you stare at something enough, things tend to show up. The world around us has gotten increasingly more sophisticated, and our relationships, maybe. Maybe we really do live more dramatic lives. It sure seems like it because these days everything a drama. As a species we’re basically addicted to speed and things happening. Maybe a lot of problems came with this, but you can’t say it’s necessarily a bad thing. I think the real problem with technology is that we use it to live vicariously through the images on the screen. We’re content to watch movies instead of making up our own but invariably our minds become dull this way. Movement, true movement is missing, for instance it’s not enough to be emotionally mature if you’re stuck in a body that no longer works the way it was designed to. Stagnation on any level breeds sickness. Even migration on some level is a response to stagnation, it’s the impulse, the urge to change shit up, let’s go see what’s over there. I have to admit it, I long for a type of migration myself, I just don’t want to do it in abject poverty because I’ve done, I’ve tried it that way before and it doesn’t work. You won’t be assimilated into some new place, you’ll just be an added feature to it that no one notices or if they do, they have nothing to do with. I would say even the advent of something like a casino is an artificial attempt at drama or excitement but losing your money is the risk. Those entities that provide said entertainment aren’t doing it for free or out of the goodness of their hearts, no they are in the business of extraction. Without the participation of the customers or those seeking distraction, there’s no big buildings going up. Perhaps since humanity learned to get their stimulation through images on the screen, they stopped seeking it from themselves, most for sure didn’t or don’t even know they have this feature of adventure in them, but as the screens became more dominate using those features also increased the complicated way you’d have to navigate with in them. The screens were extracting the energy required for movement, and as they still continue to do this, the mind which always seeks a type of equilibrium will be moved into a type of unconscious reaction to events that not only aren’t even real but are totally only within a type of simulation. No real movement occurs then, instead it fosters a type of madness, the type of which we are seeing all around us in these times. Well, there’s a rabbit hole for you. I had no idea my mind would be taking me here today but I guess it did. It does what it wants now. I just record what that is. I guess I have to take my own movement of mind where I can, and this is the output of it.

Anyway, where to now? I’m just sitting here after work. After I restarted my computer which is what I have to do now if I want to use the internet in any substantial way, I watched this one guy traveling through Guatemala. Well, I happen to like this YouTuber, he’s super adventurous, always goes off the beaten path, in this video he just went out to the countryside and walked something like 6 hours between two towns basically having no clue what he’d encounter. I think it’s his inner attitude that keeps him out of trouble, he’s very personable to all the people he meets and speaks a lot of languages although I guess once he got accused of being a spy and thrown into a Russian prison, but hey at least they let him go I think after a couple weeks, maybe a month. He admits that sucked and he probably will never go back. He has a huge following though and really if you watch him he’s not all that great, not ugly, but not super handsome, he doesn’t know very much about the places he goes, he just looks up a few facts online and sometimes relates them, but all in all his message is kind of this: You should travel. You should go on an adventure and get out of your comfort zone. In all his videos, he always just wings it, he doesn’t plan, he just looks at the map when he gets there and maybe thinks you know what I think we’ll go there but he generally stays clear of most of the tourist spots if there are some. I just think to myself sometimes, fuck I should do that, that would be so much more fun than this life I’m living now but then I think, yeah, I’d still have to get somewhere first, not like I could just walk out my door and call it interesting. America is just not interesting to me at all. I suppose I could actually make videos pointing out how ugly it is here, because that’s actually interesting to me, how the fuck we wound up with this?

You know when we first moved into this neighborhood I guess a few totally nutty people just painted their front doors either a bright pink, or red or turquoise, and I remember thinking how odd that was, like why just paint the front door, why not go all out? Well, there’s a homeowner’s association that charges everyone $200 a year, to make sure that everyone follows some rules and apparently even painting your door another color was breaking them. I don’t know if some of them got together and fought back against the machine of shared conformity or what but I still see a few bizarrely colored front doors around here. Some houses have really gone all out and developed some unique landscaping as well, like the house at the end of my street has a sort of jungle as a front yard. My daughter said she could see through their back fence that the grass was maybe 6 to 7 feet tall, yeah, they just left it I guess. On one level it kind of seems like a type of neglect but then on another it seems like a small sort of rebellion, neglect can be a rebellion too. Mainly if it is, it wouldn’t be conscious, it’d maybe be some people who were too worn out to keep up appearances, maybe they look into their backyard and every time they do, they themselves feel horrified by the state of it. I guess a true act of rebellion really needs to be a deliberate act, like the doors, painting them was a deliberate act, keeping them that color is intentional. Personally, I wouldn’t do it because I don’t like to draw attention to myself. I prefer to blend in just because I think I am strange and this way no one really knows how strange I am.

I didn’t really think of it but when the internet guys were here, on the last visit there were two of them, and since I was trying to show them how my computer wasn’t working I had to show them my bedroom. It only dawned on me later how strange they probably thought I was after that since I’ve basically got a shrine on the wall with a picture of Ramana Maharshi, my computer wall paper is Nisargadatta, there’s a sort of Buddhist figure on a lotus flower tapestry that covers one entire wall, another cloth hanging of the beach and ocean from somewhere basically covers the windows, and numerous books, little posters with non dual sayings on them throughout, I mean for Oklahoma, a mainly Christian state, I’m guessing I probably seemed like a true whacko. The strangest thing of all is I don’t think they even noticed like people are so enveloped in themselves these days, they don’t actually notice what’s around them at all. Maybe they figured me for some type of New Age Buddhist, I’m not really sure and don’t even care. My point is I don’t have one yet, I’m still looking for it, but I can say this, back in the day, I wouldn’t have questioned anything I saw, like I didn’t look at cities or structures and pay attention to anything about them. If they were there they just were, better people then me had probably built them. I never actually thought about any of it. I just accepted whatever I saw as being completely normal because it was the same, all alike in some way, this is what it was, but now I look very closely, I look at shit and think how is that there? Or why this and not something else? It’s a totally different way of looking.

Interestingly enough a couple nights ago I was dealing a poker game with a doctor on it. How did I know he was a doctor, well, he announced it along with a very weird story. He was telling the whole table that back about twenty years ago, himself and three other of his doctor friends came to Oklahoma because one of them had a dog that died and the wife who was from Oklahoma wanted it buried here. Apparently all these guys were from Arkansas, but ever since they all got together to bury a dead dog somewhere in these parts, they’ve taken the same trip every year together I’m guessing without a deceased dog on ice. The story he said gets wild because they stopped at the casino to gamble, before burying the dog and they put the dog under the truck they were driving. I’m guessing it was in some sort of cooler. So then he says that the authorities thought it was a bomb and homeland security and all the rest were called to the scene but since they were all doctors once they explained their situations, they let them all go and bury the dog. They didn’t know where to bury the dog though so they basically trespassed on some land, dug a hole, and threw it in. I mean I’m just standing there dealing thinking this is the most fucked up story I’ve ever heard and a good reason not to actually think that doctors are some superior type of character in which you can blindly put your trust. Then to my surprise, all three of the guys on the table started talking about the women they lost to breast cancer. Let me tell you I was getting very suspicious at this point that I had inadvertently wandered into some weird dream niche. And of course, I had, because it’s all a dream and it’s only that no one actually notices how it is. There may however be weird compartments to this dream and depending on your dreamt functioning, perhaps whatever emanation you are accessing, let’s just say this, you can see the same things for instance be in a place you’ve been to hundreds of times and have it present itself in a totally crazy fucking way. Things are not what you think they are, and once you see how weird this place you live in actually fucking is, you basically never fucking forget it. The stories can obviously become pretty insane and from your perspective you can never know when they will do it. While I was on the table with these guys I had the thought then that doctors never tip which in my sum total experience of dealing games to doctors, they don’t. Then the doctor guy put a bet up for me. It lost so he didn’t actually tip me but that was more than any of the rest of them had ever done, so I gave this character one point in the right direction, away from selfishness which is just something I believe to be a common character trait for doctors in general. To my mind, I think anyone can be trained in any skill and they may perform that skill very well, but that has nothing to do with what’s living that life. The ego shell of a doctor can be as convoluted as any other being, since status or even some type of enormous success in our world doesn’t equate to anything in the real deal. Suffice it to say that I’m not really sure but depending on your actual physical location on the so called “map” shit can be weirder then other places. It’s hard to tell when your own house seems as normal as ever because shit actually makes sense when nothing else does.

Of course, there’s also a twist here, if everything is just a dream, and your mind is the instrument dreaming it, then your beliefs about everything are coloring the way you’d experience said world. So if I believe doctors are as a rule all generally just as insane as every other being around, it tends to conform to your belief, sometimes it surprises you though if you’re open to it, you deliberately remember you’re only in a dream, so the character you see is but a figment of your imagination, then and only then, they can turn out to be completely different than whatever common belief you hold about them. I sometimes think I have these weird experiences as a way of reminding me that I can basically decide how I’ll see everything, so if I wanted to I could turn every character into a type of friend, not something to shun, judge, or like or dislike.

On some level, it sometimes seems hard, knowing so much about knowing so little. I think in the end you sort of come to a “who cares” type of attitude, to stay lucid you almost have to otherwise you could even freak yourself out, which is not much fun, shit why do that? I can’t really find a reason. There’s too many reasons alive and well in this dreamt up place already. There’s a reason for this and a reason for that and quite frankly once you dissect a good portion of them, it all comes down to one reason, ego’s fear, like all roads of the mind circle around to one small point, that never actually makes its point but ends up fucking up one more thing, basically everything can be corrupted from what might have been its beautiful original form, basically something born of pure impulse, into some other shit, that’s basically not of our true nature.

I had a lot of young people on my tables tonight, mostly just twenty one, just old enough to drink and gamble. Our youth of today are just as much of a fucked up bunch of humans as was my own generation, I guess it never changes, but even if that’s what I see, is that how it is? These guys were kind of drunk, and very bad gamblers that lost a bunch of money, but there was something else about them, they were having fun, they were doing what they wanted to do, at least it looked that way to me. One kid, the one that lost the most, called me “baby”, and I just said, “Did you just call me baby? That is very wrong, wrong on too many levels kid.” Everyone laughed, I was laughing too. The kid that called me this was too drunk to even notice what I said I think because if he heard me he pretended not too. He was cussing a lot as well, which I totally understand since he was a scrawny, huge nosed type that was never getting the girl unless she was so drunk she forgot who she was and his friends were all cute and coupled up. That’s got to suck I thought. At one point, he walked off to get more money and they all started talking about him, about how bad he was getting lately, and how they should really look into doing something about it. They apologized to me about his use of the F bomb word, but I just said, “No worries, it’s actually one of my favorite words.: I said, “Once you really have a look around at the world and how humans are living, it’s basically the only word that fits”. They all agreed with me there but I don’t think their worlds were really all that bad since they weren’t homeless and they had each other. It was kind of cool how there was this group dynamic going on. Of course, whatever was actually going on within each one wasn’t really visible, since you’d never be honest with yourself while you were in a group, and once you start drinking, you can forget most of the shit you are trying to forget and actual remembering is next to impossible. Even so, on some level, I decided that these kids were actually living better than I was, they were still alive to the illusion, and I was dead to it. I think once you get past the inner suffering part, when that’s basically gone, all that’s left to do, is to find your way back into the illusion. Now you wish you could forget, you wish you could suspend your disbelief that any of it is real, and just pretend it is again. Maybe that’s the price you pay. I’m not really sure if you can ever go back but I might try. I really might. I think now that I was a pretty cool character before, and I might like to be her again one day. Here's a song that popped up here. I think she would have really liked it.