The Beretta is cold in my pocket.
The hatred is hot in my heart.
My enemy soon will be cooling.
My God, how did this ever start?

I have travelled too far and too fast on this road
To turn back or to even slow down.
How much degradation can one hombre take?
How long will he grin like a clown?

* * *
The brothers might think it was business,
Or simply a piece gone astray.
The mothers, I think will know better–
Vendettas, they’ve seen in the day.

The family never will find me,
For I know where to go when I run.
The pain in her heart now has ended,
The pain in my own, just begun.



Author’s Notes: I love this thing. I got the idea as I was going to work yesterday, and was carrying my Beretta in my pants pocket, having sold my usual sidearm a few days previously, and I noticed how cool it felt. The phrase “the Beretta is cold in my pocket” just popped into mind, and the rest sort of wrote itself.

I am especially pleased with the parallel constructions, the alliteration, the internal rhymes, and all the other literary merit stuff. Most of all, I like the mystery and ambiguity.

One of the more annoying aspects of modern media is the tendency to editorialize everything.  An event isn’t just an event–it is “shocking” or “upsetting” or “terrible.”  I really like Brian Williams–the CBS anchor–but I am sick to death of hearing him apologize for the “awful” news about the economy,.  But I digress.

One of the most egregious examples of this tendency is that everyone  who has a disease, it seems, “suffers” from it.  This is not only sloppy usage, but  presumptuous.  How the heck do they know how someone with a disease feels about it?  They imply that suffering is mandatory–it is not.  Pain may be mandatory–suffering is optional.

For instance, I am afflicted with ME/CFIS.  (I know, “afflicted” has overtones of Tiny  Tim and his wee crutch, but the word is far more accurate than “suffers from”).  It is a complicated affair, with a raft of symptoms–in brief, my moving parts don’t always work, and often hurt.  Sometimes I wake up in the small hours with such pain I get out of bed and take some Aleve.  Other times, I will be out and about and a sudden spasm of pain will make me draw up short, grimace, and limp and gimp out to my car using my shopping cart as a walker–this is inconvenient.  But I refuse to “suffer” from it.  I endure it–not always with a lot of grace, admittedly, but I endure.

I got  a crash course in the subject of pain vs suffering a few years ago.  I was on my way home from town, in a hurry to open up my stand (which involves taking folding tables  and heavy boxes of merchandise out of the back of my vehicle), and as I was getting into my car after my last shopping stop, I slammed the car door shut on my left index finger.  The pain was  so sudden and intense that tears sprang into my eyes, and I felt dizzy, disoriented and nauseated.  Pain?  Oh yeah–but I didn’t suffer.  My thought ran thusly “Wow!  What a rush!  I have got to learn to be more careful!  Gee, I wonder if my fingernail will turn interesting colors and/or fall off.”

I could easily have chosen to suffer by thinking this way–”You fool!  You idiot!  How could you be so stupid?  God, I hope I didn’t break the darn thing, I don’t have health insurance.  God, it is so awful to be poor.  Oh no, what if I can’t open my stand because of a broken finger!!  Boo hoo, poor me.” Buit I didn’t.

Thing is, when we choose to suffer, we often do so by failing to live in the moment–by making rash assumptions of future pain or disability, or by labelling us or the situation.  When we experience pain, for any reason, we often focus on the idea of the pain–which makes it more intense–rather than simply focussing on the pain itself–which lessens it.

Bottom line–we create our own reality.  One way we do this is by putting labels on what happens, and by failing to live in the moment.

By living fully in the moment, and by accepting everything that happens to us, we can minimize pain and eliminate suffering completely.

Pain is mandatory; suffering is optional.

black and white kitten
romping, bopping ‘cross the floor–
dit dit dit dit dit.

(Author’s note–I have a new crop of kittens in the cabin and one of the black and white ones, named Zorro, is the most intrepid–first out of the nest box, first to venture out the door onto the porch. I saw him just bopping along the floor this morning and the above just popped into my head, dits and all–with some re-writing after the fact.)  

Here is some advice to guys on what women to avoid, based on some fifty years experience.

1.  Clothing is a good clue.  Avoid women wearing t-shirts that say things like “death to the penis-wielders,” “testosterone sucks,” or “condom-free blow jobs, $20.”

2.  Hygiene is important.  Avoid a women whose nose ring is dripping green pus.

3.  Avoid a woman carrying a sword, unless you are at a D & D con, or an SCA event.

4.  Breast-feeding an infant in public is a good sign.  It means she is nurturing, and may be a desperate single mom.  Avoid a woman who is breast-feeding another woman, or a pet.

5.  Avoid a woman with a swastika tattooed on her forehead especially if you are Jewish, UNLESS you are a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. 

6.  Avoid women with webbed hands, especially if they have matching gills.

7.  Avoid a woman wearing camo and carrying a gun, UNLESS A) you are also wearing camo and carrying a bigger gun or B) you are in Alaska.

8.  Avoid a woman who has a beard, UNLESS A) the circus is in town or B) you are in Alaska.

9.  Avoid women who pay too much attention to the wrong things, like a women who has braided her arm-pit hair.

Finally, never have sex with a shemale who has a bigger penis than you do.  This may lead to  all sorts of unexpected complications–like finding out you are gay.

As you now know, totse is no more.  I assume the link to zoklet.net is still up; this community is growing rapidly and evolving.  I post there under my real name, Greyfox and moderate “Metaphysics”–the forum for religion–and “Paranormal”–the forum for, well, the paranormal.  In general, “Metaphysics” is more about theory, while “Paranormal” is more about practice.

Also, I still offer free psychic readings.

You saved my life, but that was just a start.
You taught me how to go through cruel to kind.
You healed the indignation in my heart
So savage, ‘fore it overthrew my mind.

Perhaps your most unique and trusty role
Is alpha dog in our eccentric pack.
In this you may not have great depth of soul,
But I know you’ll always have my back.

But long before the canid came the Cat,
Pussy-footing down the halls of time.
I followed you, as stealthy as a Rat,
Once more your lover, partnering in crime.

As so upon this consecrated day,
I thank you, dear, for showing me the Way.

Author’s notes:  English majors will recognize the poem as a classical Shakespearean sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet, iambic pentameter.  I got most of the free verse  poetry out of my system in college, one example of which got an Honorable mention in the Atlantic Monthly College Writing Competition (he added modestly).  To me, writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.

It is quite personal and idiosyncratic.  The first quatrain has a Shakespearean allusion (I think), plus a reference to Jonathon Swift’s epitaph.  The second refers to our multi-species household– a dog, many  cats and  three domesticated primates–and Susu is the alpha animal, the pack leader for sure.  The third refers to one of our past lives–I hope she will say something about that.

In the couplet, “Way” is capitalized as a punning reference to the Tao.

People deeply engaged with the paranormal or metaphysics are sometimes viewed as dimwitted, deranged, or dishonest.  This is partly because some of us are in fact, dimwitted, deranged, or dishonest.  But there is more to it than that–largely, IMHO,  this is due to the way we use, and misuse, language.

Take jargon.  Every specialized field has its own.  For instance, if I say to a crystal worker that in my experience, calcite has similar vibratory properties to quartz, but at a lower octave, the person will know exactly what I mean–even if or he or she disagrees.  Someone who does not speak the language will think it is gibberish, not knowing that we use the word “vibrations” differently from someone talking about tuning forks.  Similarly, when I speak of shamanic soul retrieval, the word “soul” in that context means something quite different from the word “soul” in virtually every other context.  So why even use this jargon in the first place?  For the same reason that construction workers call a spade a spade,. and not “a manually operated tool for manifesting minor earthmoving operations”– brevity.  If there is an element of shibbolethness in this, well, so be it.

Much of what we say is more metaphor than fact, more poetry than prose.  “Vibrations” is one of those words so often misused and/or misunderstood.  No less an authority than Stephen Gaskin has stated this, in very plain and unmistakable terms.  But many of us speak as if there is really something vibrating, giving materialists the opening to challenge us to somehow measure those vibrations.  “Energy” is another.  When meditating, it is not unusual to feel  AS IF there are large amounts of energy being generated in the extremities.  This is illusory, a makyo–but many people in the field seem not to grok this, and continue to speak quite literally of manipulating energy.  On the other, hand, some people do seem to be able to manipulate “chi,” a sort of bodily energy.

Another problematic factor is that some of us are in ecstatic states when we write, and are literally out of our minds.   It shows. This is not new–read some of the writings of St. Teresa of Avila.  A more recent (and highly regarded, and bestselling) author comes to mind–Neale Donald Walsch.  I owe him a great debt of gratitude for the inspiration and insight I have gained from his writings, but sometimes he comes off sounding, well, on the verge of hysteria.  This tends not to convince the skeptic.

And take channeled material.   Please.  I have read a lot of it, from the Urantia Book, channeled back in the 1930s, to the slightly more recent Course in Miracles, to stuff published last year.  Much of it sounds–to me–pretentious, stilted, pompous, and almost opaque.  Years ago, when I first started being exposed to it, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and would ask my sweety to translate into standard English.  She did, and I’d be like “Oh–is that all there is to it?”  Most channeled material is pretty much in line with the Perennial Philosophy, the vast body of wisdom promulgated by the Vedas, Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Sufi mystics, St. John of the Cross, George Fox,  Meister Eckhart,  Aldous Huxley, Deepak Chopra, and a host of modern writers and teachers.  Why it comes out sounding so odd and often off-putting, I don’t know.  Why some authors attribute this venerable and earthly wisdom to “eighth-density beings” from the planet Zarkon, I don’t know.

Finally, there is the simple but hard fact that words fail–the menu is not the meal, nor is the map the territory.  Verily was it written so long ago–”Those who know, do not speak”–not because they have been struck dumb, but because words are the language of the mind–feelings are the language of the soul. 

Lately I have been having  car trouble, so I have been hitch hiking a lot–yesterday, I set out to the library to use the comp in 2 F above zero weather.  Geez, you’d think this was Alaska or something.  But I digress. 

My spiritual growth is the most important thing in my life.  I spend a lot of time in prayer and meditation,  and reading uplifting stuff–everything from the Bible  and A Course in Miracles to Stephen Gaskin to  Deepak Chopra to Aldous Huxley.  This does not make me special or superior  in any way–one of my core beliefs is that no one is better or worse than everyone else.  What’s more, we are all on the road to sainthood–spiritual progress is not only essential, but also inevitable.  So what has all this to do with hitching, you may well ask.

I have been taught, and accept as true, the the end and goal of life is to achieve unitive knowledge of the Ground of being.  Chopra would call this achieving seventh level consciousness; Buddhists would call this attaining enlightenment; Christians would  call it attaining a state of grace (I think so anyway–who knows what Christians think these days?).  Furthermore, to attain this state of gnosis–since knowledge is a function of being–one must needs be poor in spirit and pure in heart.  This means, among other things, being modest, humble and grateful.

I contend that there are few things in everyday life more modest and humble than a hitch hiker, standing out there exposed to the elements and literally depending on the kindness of strangers.  Even someone driving the most hideous junker has a more elevated status.

And grateful?  Let me tell you, when it is so bloody cold your fingers and nose are numb and your breath is freezing into your beard, when you get a ride–you are deeply and sincerely grateful.

So the next time you see a hitch hiker–assuming he isn’t carrying an axe dripping blood, or otherwise giving off unattractive vibes–give him or her a ride.  It may well benefit both of you. 

Verily is it written “Do unto others as you would have it done unto you.”