Author Archives: mandala56

Old Jules, why do some relationships work and last a long time, and others fail after just a short time?

Marriage is an agreement of a man and a woman to attempt to live together in harmony. It can work by accident, or it can work by explicit communications between the two parties involved. If each has explicitly defined what’s expected of the other and each has agreed to march to the drum of the expectations of the other in precise detail it can help. It can also help if each agrees to confine the expectations to those communicated and agreed to, as opposed to allowing them to take root and grow in the background without anything being communicated except through sulking, hand-wringing, tears, and
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!”
“No. I can tell something’s wrong. What is it?”
“Nothing.”

Old Jules, why don’t most elders accept that the new generation is a better engineered/evolved product than they are? Instead they want to prove to the young that they are the more intelligent.

I’m probably an elder. So far as I can tell there’s not much difference in the new generation and the previous two when they were the age of the one now.

The other two were abysmally stupid at that time of their lives, same as this one.

So probably the reason elders don’t accept what you say is they know better in ways you can’t even imagine:  the experience of been there, done that.

Old Jules, how do you get people to stop believing nonsense? Someone I know believes in something wrong, so how can I get them to see the truth?

First you have to get over the notion you’re able to recognize nonsense when you see it. A lot of people never manage it. After that you can try looking after your own affairs and quit worrying yourself about what other people believe.

Or maybe you can do both at the same time if you’re able to walk and chew gum simultaneously.

Old Jules, what is the most important value you have for you to live your life by?

Courage and loyalty. I know what I respect in a human being and I intend to respect myself. Every value I have comes out of that faucet.

Jack wrote this in April, 2005:

Okay. What’s been on your mind this morning, the readership asks, me adroitly putting the words into the communal mouth.

In between working on my lottery numbers for coming Wednesday night, I’ve been thinking about Discussion Boards and Chat Rooms. What is it about those things? What’s the appeal to us? Why do they so frequently erode into acid exchanges between the users? How do complete strangers come to have such a rancor for one another?  And how to otherwise, probably nice enough people (they have to be… someone would have taught them manners if they behaved that way offline) come to have such nasty streaks when they wear a mask of anonymity?

I’ve seen discussion boards and participated in a few previously. A couple of prospector/treasure hunter boards during the mid-90s when I published the forerunners to The Lost Adams Diggings – Myth, Mystery and Madness.

In those days a few people were still doing non-spectator things outdoors. Enough were, at least, to keep sites of that sort in business selling metal detectors, gold pans, books, sluice boxes, dry-washers and whatnot. That’s when I first noticed this discussion board spinoff phenomenon I eventually came to think of as the snake pit.

People would come to the boards to learn about prospecting, about a particular lost mine, about some piece of equipment or other. But on any site there’d come a time when a specific group of individuals would just sort of hang out there. They weren’t there to learn, and they obviously weren’t there to share information. Mostly, they were just wasting time, disparaging people who asked questions, disparaging the attempts others made to answer. The snake pit.

These weren’t just trolls. They were men who knew the subjects the board was created to discuss. But treasure hunters and prospectors have never been long on the information sharing business. So instead, these guys hung around blustering at one another, arguing which had the most skill with a metal detector, which detector brand was best. Online acquaintances who frequently hated one another and everyone else, but still hung around.

Mid-1998, I became convinced Y2K was an actual threat. That belief led me to another type of chat room. A place where people who believed similarly hung around to talk about TEOLAWKI (the end of life as we know it) and exchange information about Y2K preparedness. At least, that’s how it began.

Before too long we all discovered that, while we each believed Y2K was going to happen, to one degree or another, we had some serious rifts in the other aspects of our lives. Some were born again Christians who wanted to ask one another and answer one another whether this was going to be the Rapture, and if so, when it would begin, and what it would be like, both for themselves, and for the non-believers who’d be left behind to suffer it out on the ground.

That sort of thing. That, and just how bad would things get, post-Y2K. And how much a person should bet that it would happen at all. Attempts at risk analysis, though most of us didn’t know a lot about computers.

From mid-’98 until I departed for my woods-retreat mid-’99, I watched the Y2K chatroom with a measure of awe, disgust, concern and wonderment. I watched those people who came to the chatroom to learn become experts after a few visits (the fundamentals of preparedness were, after all, relatively simple). I watched the competition among the new survival experts when `newbies’ came to the chat room. people who’d just heard about Y2K and wanted to know more. The poor old newbies found themselves swarmed by all the old-timers who were, themselves, newbies a couple of weeks earlier. Everyone wanted to demonstrate his knowledge by telling some newby about it all.

Meanwhile, the rancor, the snapping and snarling, the pro-gun/anti-gun, born-again/non-religious wars raged among those folks who came there first to just learn, who all had the same reason for their original visits. And, of course, the romances.

The snake pit.

So. How do strangers who have no reason to give a hoot in hell what one another think come to such a pass? What is it about discussion boards and chat rooms that draws people so closely into one another that they wish to apply pain, sarcasm, poison? That they actually allow the poison being spewed by the malignant random stranger to pierce their feelings.

It’s a study. I’ll swear it is.

Jack

There’s a place you don’t want to miss if you are on Hwy. 117 going south off of I-40 in New Mexico. It’s called the Sandstone Bluffs, and it’s spectacular. The view from the bluffs is over the lava flow. Pictures don’t do it justice, but I always try to get some good ones when I’m heading towards my property. The one below I took on my very first trip to NM in 1999 when Jack was showing off his favorite places.

There is a nice parking area with picnic tables and it’s easy to explore all around the bluffs. It’s nerve-wracking if you have kids along, though, it’s a very sheer drop from the edge to the lava below.

I took time to stop both on the way and on the way back. The road to the parking lot is about a mile and there’s a great little ruin along the way, too.


Father down 117 is another stop one mile off the road, to the Lava Falls. This trailhead goes all the way across the lava flow and again, there is a little parking area and a picnic table. This trail is only marked by cairns. You head towards one cairn, look for the next one, head to it, look for the next one, etc. I followed it early one morning for about about ten minutes in. It was a bit chilly (turned out it was 29 degrees!) so I didn’t stay long. Jack told me he had hiked across it and left stashes of water in various places for a return trip, but never made it back to collect them.

There’s a drop off to the right side of this picture, so I didn’t get too close to it.

It was really lovely early in the morning light and the only other sign of life was an animal with a very bushy tail that ran into the trees as I approached driving in. Probably a coyote.

This last photo is on my property, a different kind of cairn that Jack built with my boys when we were staying there in 2000. He carved the sheep on the top from sandstone in the style of a Zuni “dream sheep” fetish. We keep the statue inside when we are away, and bring it out when we arrive to show we are “home.” This picture was taken in 2015 on our last visit to NM together. Our stay at my cabin lasted about 45 minutes because Jack’s blood oxygen level dropped so much due to his limited lung function that we had to leave the high altitude (it was also a very hot day, which probably did not help matters any). He had asked his dr. if there would be any problems going to a high altitude, but they didn’t predict any difficulties. In Albuquerque (above 5,000 ft.) he was fine, but the property is at 7,400 ft. So we left very shortly after I took this picture.

Here’s another photo of it that I took on my recent trip. I’m so thankful to have this place to sit!

I left some of Jack’s ashes at each of these places. My plan is to go visit some other of his favorite places in the future and leave some wherever it feels right. He didn’t leave me any precise requests about that, but thought it would be cool if I left some on one side of the Great Divide, and some on the other side of the Great Divide. These are pretty close to the Divide.

As far as cleaning out the pack rat poop and closing up the access holes in my cabin, that didn’t go real well. I may have slowed them down some, but I ran out of foam insulation right before I found the last hole. And everything inside was damaged, so that will take another visit to start hauling out trash. I’ll see what it’s like next spring. But it was a very good visit in perfect weather, so it was worth the long drive and short time to be there.

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In 2005, Jack was intent on finding a way to beat the lottery, and was a member of an online group to discuss it with others who were interested. This post was written on that site.

Today, 12:29 pm Some worthy craziness to fritter away 180 million bucks

Mood: Pretty good, about the same as usual

Now Playing: Gregorian chants

Of course, it’s not really 180 million, the Powerball illusion.

Probably more like 90 million before the feds take their cut to help finance the various wars, pavement repairs, mind control, salaries, bad neighborhoods (such as Washington DC), copshop grants for more tools to keep people from going 5 miles over the speed limits and kevlar suits to make a smaller window of opportunity when they kick down the doors of the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

But I digress.  I’d suppose the 90 million will find itself losing a lot of weight, once the feds take what’s due them, maybe bring it down to $45 million.  Then the State will nibble a bit, maybe bringing it down to what?  $30 million?

Still a pretty fair hunk of change for your average person who used to dream about someday getting a fancy 2-story mobile home with pink flamingos and ceramic elves prancing around the front yard, a living room full of television and plenty of candies and plastic monsters for the brats to make every day into Christmas.  Lots of booze and maybe some nose candy would sneak into the equation just so’s to assure the great American success story manages to run the whole gamut.

On the other hand, a person might begin by buying a piece of remote real estate surrounded by public lands, build a Zen Temple on one hilltop, a Hindu Temple on another, and fill in the space in between with cabins and comfortable meeting areas invisible to one another…. cabins where people so inclined could come meditate between sessions of learning a different way to look at reality, meeting rooms where they could spend their days learning Silva…. a miniature Robert Monroe facility…. Zen…. Reiki….. Remote Viewing…. spiritual healing and psychic surgery, all rolled up in a place so remote and inspiring as to make it impossible to spend time there without having an earthquake in the spiritual well, just for the price of a person wanting to do it.  Drive the money changers out of the temple, you might say.

Cool thing about that, aside from the mere fact of it, is that most of that could qualify as a religion by almost any definition.  Tax attrition of the 180 million might hang a hard left and skid to a stop, narrowly avoiding a collision with the First Baptist Church of the Latter Day Scientists or whatnot.

One of you folks here on the site are bound to win that 180.  How could it be otherwise.  What’s it going to be?  A fancy two-story mobile home, or a Zen temple with tentacles into OBE and Silva?

Something to consider.

Jack

From the files, written by Jack in May 2005:

Hi again, Mike:

I’ve been thinking more about your dreams about work, thinking about places a young man might go to get away from things, ways a man might spend some time and be glad later that he did.  Places he might discover young while he has good knees instead of waiting until he’s abused his body so badly as to cause his joy of discovery to be mitigated by the pain of doing it.

Not all these are outright mystical, but in a sense they might be if you keep your ear to the ground for the mystical.

First off, the first time I discovered Yucatan, I recall having the passionate wish that I’d gone there at a younger time.  A person can probably still take a plane to Merida, rent a vehicle and run the entire road through the jungle east to west, or take a bus if you have the heart for it.  Get off at Chichen Itza, climb the pyramids, meander around in the ruins, look at the black sinkhole, sacrificial alter with the blood gutters, consider all those thousands of people who had the living hearts yanked out of their bodies there by priests covered with matted blood and do some serious backtracking on your thinking about how reality is for you.  When you return you won’t be dreaming about your job.  It’s a certainty.

You might take a plane ride across the Atlantic and wander around Wales a couple of weeks, climbing around abandoned castles, thinking about what they mean, what they say about us, about all the wars they represent, all the humans who knew they needed such places to have any hope of filling out their obligation to live until they died of something besides a spear or battle axe.

Spend a few days in the British Museum looking at all the relics the generations of Englishmen stole from their conquered countries and carried home with them to educate and edify unborn generations of carping, persnickety other Englishmen after they got runned home from their empire.  Wander around in Hampton Court and take a look at all the antlers old Henry VIII had the time to take when he wasn’t lopping the heads off his wifeys.

Take a long look at the Crusader Museum in Winchester, at Stonehenge, at Salsbury Cathedral.  Consider the guy who spent eleven years under there in a diving suit digging out the wooden foundations and replacing them with concrete.  All the men in armor buried under the floor.  Scratch your head over a crop circle, or three.  Get into the lines of Englishmen grumbling at one another as they stare with vacant eyes at the Roman ruins at Bath.

Or, you could spend a week or two in a Zen Monastary or Silva Mind Control course.  Or, say, at the Monroe Institute.

Any or all of which will leave you with a complete void of dreams about your job.

Think on it, amigo.  Life’s entirely too short to spend the nights dreaming about any job.

Jack

Jack wrote this in October of 2006:

SEPTUAGENARIAN SCANDAL:

Sister Silvia Gomes De Sousa, 39, has been  charged with threatening to murder and with arson after allegedly setting fire to the house of the village priest in Roccalumera, Sicily,  Italy.

Why?

She stopped by the house where Fr. Carmelo Mantarro, 70,   lives and “I just flipped when I came to the house and caught him in  bed with another woman who is married,” she testified in a court  proceeding.

“We had been together four years and I had even had two abortions because of him.”

(London Daily Mail)

The burning question:  Who takes her confession?

Okay.  Let’s see if there’s a novel in here somewhere.

• Nun and priest consumate out-of-wedlock affirmation of holy vows.
• Nun gets a couple of abortions ‘because of him’.  (He evidently believes in abortion, forces her by threatening her with her job if she doesn’t get one?  Israeli prez in penguin threads)
• Married woman insinuates herself between them trying to become a homebreaker of sorts.
• Nun sets his house afire and tries to kill him during a fit of anger.

Score card:

Deadly sins, lust and anger?  Only two?  Hmmm.  Maybe a person could squeeze envy and greed in there…. The nun envied the married woman and didn’t want to share.

Commandments, adultery and for a Catholic, homicide of a fetus.  Covetousness.. married woman wanted what the nun felt was hers.  I count three Commandments.

Throw in a little something on the side involving vows nuns and priests take and you’re as close as priests and nuns are ever going to get to sticking up banks and boosting cars.

I’m not a Christian and I’m about to turn 63.  If life gets boring during the next few years I think I’ll convert to the Mother Church.

Jack

Old Jules, what objects can we use as symbols to teach us truths?

A mirror to help you remember that no matter how others might see you it’s  you, knowing what’s behind the face, who has to recognize what’s back there that you don’t love and respect.

A mirror to help you remember truth is what’s really beyond what you see in the mirror and you are the only one who knows it.

A mirror to remind you what’s visible to you is the only person you own, the only person you can demand anything from and expect to get it, the only person you can change.

A mirror to remind you what you think of that person and why you think it is the most important facet of your life.

Old Jules, does packaging design affect your choice in what to buy?

I buy everything in thrift stores, flea markets, farmers markets and garage sales if I can. Every stitch of clothing I wear comes from those from my hat to my boot heels except what I have to buy at a grocery store or feed store.

My cats insist I buy them Purina because of the design on the bag, most likely. My chickens don’t care about the design of the bags unless they contain whole corn, which they won’t touch.

I suppose if those folks running the places where I buy things other people didn’t want packaged them, I might form an opinion about the design and packaging. Thus far it hasn’t come to that.

I’m personally fond of the design of onions (clever way to put together a legume, thinks I), sweet potatoes (aesthetic), potatoes (functional), celery (I like that cove for putting cheese and peanut butter into), and carrots (I like the color).

Old Jules, can an effect be greater then its cause?

• Consider gunpowder. It had been in China for several hundred years and was used for entertainment and primitive weaponry. It was not responsible for creating nor stopping any particular changes.

Trade and curiosity ’caused’ it to migrate to Europe, where within a relatively short while it changed the entire face of the continent and eventually the world.

Charcoal, saltpetre and sulfur – individually nothing special. Mixed in the proper measures, contained in a sealed vessel, ignited, the energy released is countless times the sum of the individual parts.

Old Jules, my boyfriend plays World of Warcraft on the computer  all the time, what should I do? I’m feeling ignored because he spends hours playing it and we don’t do stuff together like we used to.

Form your thoughts carefully in your mind, tap him on the shoulder and when he shrugs and says, “Hold on a minute,” reach over and unplug the computer. When he turns around tell him politely and calmly exactly what you’ve said here.

If he goes into a rage or continues doing it you’re a damned sight better off without him. He’s not going to change. If he listens you can have a discussion and work out an accommodation to allow both of you to get what you need out of the relationship.

Jack wrote this in November of 2006:

Morning blogsters:

Beeeeeeeyouuuuuutiful moon this morning.

I see where some guy, Steve Howards,  in Beaver Creek, CO, was taking his grandson to town and saw some guy Dick Cheney hanging around kissing babies.  Howards always wanted to tell a high ranking stinkier in government what he thought.

“I think your policies are reprehensible,” he says to Cheney and walks on.  Secret Services people hand cuffs him and takes him off to the slammer, as is right and just.

This ain’t the time to be thinking there’s still a US Constitution and Bill of Rights.  The sooner you get that through your heads the easier it will be for you in the short run.

In the long run, probably not much will help, but the short run’s been the important thing too long to change now, most likely.

Jack

Jack wrote this in February, 2006:

Morning blogsters:

That old full hunter moon changed back to the usual, merely spectacular color this night.  Looks as though it’s planning to wait until after dawn to drop behind the mesa.

Coyotes are taking advantage, getting in some last-minute chasing of some unlucky rabbit before they trot off to their dens for a bit of shuteye.

It’s always amazing to me how three, maybe four coyotes can sound like fifty when they’re on their involved in a smash and grab operation.  Same when they’re just yapping and howling their gratitude affirmations to the Universe for allowing them to be coyotes.

Moon’s bright enough to fool someone’s hen house down in the village.  A rooster’s stretching his wings down there, announcing he made it through the night without an owl, skunk, civet cat, dog, coyote, not even some microorganism sneaked in and put his lights out while he was asleep.

The cats are prowling, anxious to get outdoors, but I dasn’t let them out until dawn on a night such as this one.  Far too much potential for that old owl hooting in the pecan tree out back dropping down and having them for breakfast, as he’s done with neighbor cats of late.

Then there’s me.

Thank you, Universe, for allowing me to be me this lifetime.  Thank you for every pain, every stumble, every fall and stubbed toe I’ve given myself without intending to during this 62 times around the sun.

Thanks, Universe, for everything that’s happened to me in this life.

Thanks for what’s happening now, this cold dawn, in all those threads and tentacles threading out there through this reality that are building to cause me pain and joy.

Thank you, Universe, for everything that’s going to happen between now and when I exit this vehicle.

Okay blogsters.  Back to writing a blog entry.

Jack