Saturday, August 28, 2010

Taking the scientific approach.

The previous post makes good sense. Time to build upon it.

There is nothing set in stone that says the Moses factor, by virtue of my having seen on a building the same fire Moses saw on a bush, requires that my enemy be my father and his supporters. It is up to me to determine who my enemy is. Once I have done that, I can then begin to relate it to why I saw the burning building. Fear is not a superior weapon. It is basically confusion, and not to be applied to a scientific enterprise. Though I have not been true to this view, and dealt out vague threats based on the connection to Moses, those are part of the learning curve. Not all of the effects of having a predecessor a few thousand years ago are inherently good. It is not easy for any successor to a role of much acclaim, including mantles that pass within the same generation. I hope that the way I have used the role of Moses does not prevent me from amending it. The fact that so little commitment has been made by me or others, with regard to the mantle of Moses, is certainly helpful in this regard. With science driving my interpretation of facts, there is some chance of success for me, and for my enterprises joined in, in some cases, by others who may also be reassured by the role I give to science.

This stance is broad. Many paths come to mind, but better to allow the land to settle.

Higher racism behind the rift between myself and my father.

There are countless points of disagreement between the supporters of my father, on one side, and myself, on the other.

This is not essentially a matter between my father and me. It concerns those who gave him counsel. The central point around which all others revolve is his statement to me early in 1969 that I was not going to get into Yale, said with both emphasis and certainty, but coming from someplace not previously so manifest. My immediate sense was that this was something he had gotten from someone else.

This sense was reinforced when I returned from my first year at Yale and he said he had gotten a report that I had taken sociology at Yale. I fail to see how this error served him. It could only have been intended to inject disorder into our family.

There is much to recommend the view that both comments were known by him to be false. However, that view is too easy. It also takes me as fool enough to be affected by these comments.

A more rational view is that someone was trying to sabotage me by, as I suggested, injecting disorder into the family. This purpose would consequently not have a motive in racial disharmony, since it plays fast and furious with such matters, and so hardly having any effect there.

Why would they cause my father such confusion if his racial position was the same as theirs? It seems to be not a matter of values, but of mating. Without parental support I was unable to put together a plan for marriage to any of the more than satisfactory females, including three perfect ones. This is perhaps yet a racial issue, but a much higher form of race understanding that has my father and me as unworthy ethnic stock.

Thus being accepted by Yale had a consequence of invoking some form of international power against me in such ways that my admission to Yale, known accurately to such a power, would invoke countermeasures that would follow me wherever I went, once they were certain I would get in. This power would have as much against my father as it had against me.

Such opposition would appear to have no solution other than unlimited conflict. I can't offer them anything else, as anything else would be a surrender.

I can only count on my deliberations being taken constructively by those who follow them.

My autobiography is now 200 pages.

I have uploaded a revision to my autobiography. It is now 200 pages. The previous version was 100 pages. I have increased the price from $5 to $10.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Thanks to blogcatalog.

One of the most valuable tips I have gotten concerning blogging came from material on Google.com. It was to register on the website, blogcatalog.com. This site seems to have been the source of a large number of references to my blogs, resulting in higher positioning of my blogs in searches.

Thanks, Google. Thanks, blogcatalog.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Santee event signals the notion of legend, not Christ.

The incident of me walking my bicycle on a highway in Santee, CA in the summer of 1986 might have seemed to the three pesons who witnessed it and lined up standing on the road shoulder for me to pass them as the appearance of the Christ because I put my arms out, but in fact it was not a Christ image but a legend, because I also put my legs out. This position formed a five-pointed star with my head. Although I cannot say it with certainty, I think of it as a legend, in the sense that it was a sign for use in understanding a map of the road.

Please do not think of me, for all my statements of outsize events in my life, as a Christ. I am not a teacher, though I may exhibit a lesson or two now and then. A teacher is lost in the diseconomies of lengthy proof, and anything worth learning needs a length of time to prove. I pursue economy, so that I can earn a decent dollar and provide a base on which my descendants can learn to do the same.

I apologize if I have left an unclear message regarding my view of the event of Santee, 1986. I may have reservations about even the term legend, but not nearly so much as for the term Christ. If other meanings of the term legend apply, including over time, as all legends grow over time, then I shall try to accommodate them. There was no name on that event, so if my name does come into prominence for some reason let it be known that reality is a strict logician, and that event will always be served by a strict logical truth. Christians who wait for a Christ are expecting something in particular. Any man who would accept that expectation as a stricture on his life would in my view be a very unwise man. As far as other religions also await a redeemer, and my understanding is that most religions do, then the same view of mine I would carry for them. I am a scientist, and an atheist. Nothing like a Christ could be farther from my intentions, and I hope this is clear.

Three eras of my relationship to blacks.

There are three eras in my life which bear on my relationship to black people.

1.) My junior year of high school.

2.) My freshman and sophomore years at Yale College.

3.) Starting with my homelessness in 1981 and ending with my writing of the poem, "Black Girl's Husband I".

In the first era, I was keenly aware of my mother's position, which was that intermarriage was the only solution to race relations in the United States. Then one day at school I was approached by my friend Norm Swett who invited me to join him and others in picketing the A&P food store in Glen Ellyn, our home town, because it had reneged on a written agreement to hire more black workers. I was not in the habit of verifying incendiary claims such as this, so to this day I don't know if it was valid. In any case, I trusted Norm and joined the picket line.

Before I did so I felt that I should give my father a chance to veto my decision to do this, since I was as keenly aware of his counter position to my mother's as I was aware of my mother's. Besides that, he paid the bills.

So I went to my father's beauty shop and presented him with my decision to picket. He kept his temper and made clear to me two things, one of which he didn't live up to. One was that he didn't want me to do it. This he did live up to. The other was that it was up to me to do or not do as I saw fit. This he was not able to follow through on even though he didn't stop me from picketing. He came home from work the day I picketed and was in a furious rage. He had gotten a report from a customer that I had gone ahead and done it.

Well, what was I to think of his word? He came off to me as a real unreliable testifier to his will. Moreover, he and my mother got into a huge argument over it, she defending my action. I didn't follow the argument long and I'm not sure how long it went. In any case, I was upstairs in my bedroom at some point and he came up and got down on his knees in front of me (the ceilings were angled because the roof was angled so maybe this was due to his height not fitting in the part of the room where I was sitting) and said, crying, that he was leaving because my mother had said they didn't communicate. Then he did leave. The divorce followed several years later. Clearly his marital problem was deeper than his race problem, or he wouldn't have quit being angry at me for the picketing, which he apparently did. He stated to me numerous times later than the divorce wasn't my fault.

The second era is important because it was my first public verbalization of my own particular feelings about race. At a three day event at the beginning of freshman year, sponsored by a New Haven Christian group, I was exposed to New Haven's black community and leaders. At a meeting with Willie Counsel, president of the Hill Parents Association, I and my coattendees were asked to go around in our circle and express our feelings about what he had said about what was going on in the Hill, a poor black neighborhood in New Haven. When my turn came I was in tears thinking about what I had to say, which was that I was actually a racist despite my thinking I was very sympathetic towards black people, and that's what I said. After we all spoke Mr. Counsel gave his reaction to each of us and when he got to me he said he thought I had a potential for doing a lot of good in the black community.

The next year I learned about a Yale work-study program in which if I found a community group to work for Yale would pay my wages.

My first thought was Willie Counsel and the Hill Parents Association. But when I met with Mr. Counsel he didn't seem to recognize me and made no mention of meeting me and speaking of me when I had visited him with the church group the previous year. I certainly didn't think it admirable for me to bring up that event with him myself, as it would have been terribly selfish. So when he asked me what I thought I could do for his organization I got the sense he didn't see that there was very much. I mumbled a little about some flakey notion of service and it made no impression on him. He didn't want me to work for him.

I finally ended up being a totally uninspired and unproductive employee of the Hill Neighborhood Corporation for sophomore year. I had no contact with anyone of authority and had no actual supervisor. Nominally my assignment was to start up a neighborhood newspaper. I had no budget. What was I to do? I went around in the Hill acting like a reporter investigating stories. That's all I did. I'm embarrassed to have billed Yale for it.

The next year I went back to visit my employer and met the man they hired full-time to start a newspaper. He impressed on me the fact that he loved comic books. He didn't say anything having to do with a newspaper. I don't know what his budget was.

The third era began in New Haven when I was homeless. I went often to a soup kitchen in an Episcopal Church, Christ Church as I recall, and there were a lot of blacks. I felt there was unnecessary crowding in the line to the food and I decided to make a stand of leaving plenty of space between myself and the person in front of me. The guy behind me would always complain and threaten me. I kept my stand. Something needed to be done. I was feeling a lot of pressure from blacks and I didn't like it. Too many stories to tell in a blog.

The era ends in about 2001 when I wrote a poem entitled, "Black Girl's Husband, I." It was fiction, but represented a form of truth about what was possible. It was a semi-finalist in an on-line poetry contest. When I tried to display it on the website I owned at the time, the system shut down and prevented me from doing so.

At about the same time I gave $20 to the United Negro College Fund. They asked me online if I wanted to inform anyone and I indicated Dorothy Jackson, the assistant administrator at my nursing home. They asked me if I wanted anyone else to be notified and I said no. Dorothy didn't mention getting notification and I didn't ask her about it. Better it remain our secret.

Another event within the third era was when I told the Chicago police I wanted to join the Mafia. I said then that I wanted to bring harmony between blacks and whites.

In 2006 I was the Republican candidate for state representative in the fourteenth district of Illinois. I didn't mention race.

In 2008 Barack Obama emerged from Illinois politics to become the president of the United States.

These two events were not within the three eras. They were the fruits of them, when taken together.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Pain and adulthood.

On the day I went into the hospital for what turned out to be a necrotic bladder I was writhing in abdominal pain and I became aware of overlords criticizing me for not ceasing my internal complaints. It was given a spin to the effect of "grow up!"

I had been working on my state lying in bed and had come to take a certain optimism about what was a solvable problem, both viscerally and ideally. This made me want to work on the abdominal pain even though it had an aspect of lengthy complaint reminiscent of youth. I ignored the criticism I felt as a result.

Shortly thereafter, in the course of my explorations of the pain, a sudden peace came upon me that I associated with modifications of my vertebral support attitudes. The pain went from a seven plus or minus two to a three plus or minus two, in a matter of less than two seconds plus or minus one.

Had I thought of it, I might have deduced from this evidence that I had a blood clot and managed to dislodge it.

The doctors at the hospital told me after the operation in which they removed part of my bladder that the only possible cause of a necrotic bowel is a blood clot in the abdomen.

Perhaps such a deduction as I could have made is of no value, since the doctors took care of the problem and told me essentially that I had had a clot anyway. But what of other issues of my internal body, and my abilities to affect and study them? But moreso is the fact that had I entered into exploration of my body earlier, before the necrosis began, I might very well have avoided the necrosis entirely. What drove me to explore was the pain. I delayed exploration because I applied normal diffidence to the earlier, slighter levels of pain, diffidence based on acceptance of pain.

So it seems evident I need more rejection of pain, not less, and the overlords stand as an obstacle to that.

I don't advocate childishness. I don't advocate crying. But it seems they're temporary measures buying time for science to displace folk wisdom, and in that children always have a better hand than adults, the kind that tell you to grow up.

Reelection of Mr. Obama.

It appears that fuel is increasing for there to be difficulty when President Obama enters the race for a second term. In reflecting on this it occurs to me that I may have contributed to this development by concentrating exclusively on getting him elected as a vehicle for racial harmony to the exclusion of the affairs of actually being in office.

After he was elected there was a certain ossification of the matter in consequence of the uncertainties of how his election was taken, by the various partisanships in the nation, as having been accomplished only contingent on my desire to harmonize black-white relations. While some of this uncertainty must stem from my ignorance of what my overlords have done to make known or make not known my role in the election, some probably stems from my struggle with my own striving with these partisanships, most importantly in the matter of the increase of my income to a level that would independently sustain myself, and ideally a wife and descendants. My failure at this point to succeed in this effort has led to numerous expressions of frustration which can only have had a negative effect on Mr. Obama's political fates.

I have noted elsewhere that greatness is an attribute which can be ascribed to Mr. Obama with some justification. I have not phrased it that way, but that is what it amounts to. We all have our own paths to tread and certainly Mr. Obama will win or lose another term on the merits of his own case as administered. A second term would be far more effective for racial harmony than otherwise. But the nation has other issues besides racial harmony and it may be felt by those who make the decision that economies and time constraints tend to dictate that another term weighs slighter than other considerations. This view can be seen as a blotch on the man, but if he is truely great we must remember that such men are rare and his service to the nation will need to be in a place of importance. No challenger came forward with a greater portent in the last election. If one does in the next it will be up to Mr. Obama to meet the challenge and find an even deeper reserve than any he previously has found. Such is the call upon great men, without exception.

This analysis relates to the election, but the present as always is momentous. I will seek solutions to these problems as always.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

WiFi up at Bryn Mawr Care.

Free WiFi at my nursing home, Bryn Mawr Care, has returned to service.

Now we will see how long it goes before shutting down again. If it lasts at least six months with no more than less than 24 hour downtimes I will issue an endorsement for the nursing home, as I have posted previously.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

truth and emotion in writing

Perching on the appearance of text that goes to the matter of any social service, commercial or charitable, a response of welling up of emotions cannot leave room for or otherwise cohabit with the specialized faculties of editing, which I know takes some work to get to a stage of development where deeper scales of effectiveness arise and invoke again the editing function, and this emotional response makes that impossible.

Effective prose differs from that which rouses emotions. The strength of a passage to point out truth is able to work well on any large audience, while one that rouses emotions takes many paths with no effect on understanding. Whether these many paths result in a net improvement in welfare is always hard to say.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

WiFi at Bryn Mawr Care down now for three months.

Bryn Mawr Care, the nursing home where I live, has installed free WiFi. However, its histroy has been mostly one of downtime, the current run of downtime being something like three or four months running.

The nursing home administrator says the people handling it say the problem is the router and that a new one will be much better than the old, including less downtime.

I am now spending out the window, in my small scale, to get WiFi access at a cafe.

If I find out who is responsible there will be hell to pay.