Jack Spratt

120926 14:57 ordinary life

Day follows night seamless; I follow the Buddhist Master's; "Sleep when tired, eat when hungry." Napping during the daylight hours: I sleep like the dead and nothing can awaken me. Living on a local shortcut between two thoroughfares gleans many kids on motorcycles without mufflers and children screaming in playful joy only noted when I am awake.

I love this place where I live.

Breakfast at 02:30

Lunch at 07:30

Supper at 13:00

And I cannot remember when the last meal of my day is consumed. As stated: seamless are my days. I do sleep approximately one to two hours at a time awakening and cleaning house, grooming Annie's litter box and writing. Awakening remembering a dream or dialog and then the usual routine . . . .
Has changed from collecting quotes seeking answers to dreams or what's up Doc!?

Since retiring from Hospice work. Where I had presumed I would have continued until I could no longer do so. Never anticipating the conflict over my copyrighted material. Oh well . . . I'm okay, they're okay and life and death goes on; nothing unusual just the ordinary of, what has become, extraordinary: my life.

I travel easily between cultures and can fool around with even the most violent gangsters; immune. Why? I'll never know.

There are, even now, "days of Obligation:" water aerobics, grocery shopping and I will of need do the laundry idle since last February -- don't be concerned I have days of the year underwear. Sheets however are another matter.

Then there is M my joy in whose presence silent I've known more pleasure than anything I've ever seen in a television or moving picture show. And for whom I'd crawl naked over broken glass through fire just to see and maybe, maybe not, hear her voice.

Dangerous of association and impossible to live with for the ferocity of my lust and love am i. However I did in previously idle moments wish I had something to do that did not require the authority of The New York Times, Playboy or Time Magazine to do . . . oddly having been around the world so many times I simply refuse to encase myself in an aluminum coffin and go anywhere now.

Preferring instead to enter eternity within my mind, soul and heart; vastly rewarding it is, more tears, laughter and joy than I ever assumed myself capable of.

I haven't told you anything you do not already know of or about me yet I've had the pleasure of touching the keys and seeing the characters copulate becoming sentences convicted that I must stay awake another few hours to fulfill a previous engagement: pre rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, wedding and whatever follows--the most arduous work I'll ever do with a camera. Weddings for friends who abused my free gift by stealing my copyright claiming; "well I just charged the for my time getting your stuff printed." And she was a 'fellow artist' whose living depended on her craft.

The last tendril of my association with Hospice is a wedding I volunteered to do for zip to keep a friendly custodian from having to spend money for a wedding photographer. And I hope I don't expire on the job; the hardest work I've every done with a camera.

He, his family, and community are the remnant of what has become blurred here. Boundaries between Native American, Franciscan, whites like me, Mexicans, blacks, Asian Indians, etc. . . . by intermarriage the kids are glorious.

The last tendril. I knew it was always possible that they would have discovered me doing things I was unqualified for. There was no one else to pick up patients off the floor. Wipe their sit downs etc. I knew it was a privilege, not a right to be there, and so finally they kicked me to the curb over copyrights? I have arthritis in my hands, bad, shoulders, back and neck, getting worse each attack and so the professional grade Canon Cameras had to go. I couldn't hold them with one hand and do the things I did that would have resulted in my being asked to leave anyway. I replaced the entire system without promise of paying for it from reserves held back in case of medical emergency. Roughly thirteen thousand dollars lost; I should have just given them the money instead.

Life is ugly in America now. Civil strife between the have and have not. I pray it remains nonviolent.
Whatever
I remain joyful and able to arise from sleep and greet the next session of writing nonsense. It gives me a joy I never knew possible and more so each day, daily growing better and more conscientious about editing and rewrite before rushing . . . there are no more deadlines and I'm stress free. So I'll live another day or so concerned about M who may not.

Just another ordinary day. In an ordinary life. i ain't nothing special and nothing to see; pardon me while i disappear.

120927 00:57

I said and did all the wrong things for the right (to me now) reasons. Is that rationalization?

Were I Hitler in front of The JUDGE what would I say, what could I do?
a. God looks nothing like you or me
b. Jerusalem the 'city of peace' who named it?
(note please: I didn't start this; it began last night at a little semi-humble real adobe Franciscan Church where:Ray & Family: Bertha and four daughters who called themselves "#1, #2, #3 & #4 . . . all lovely and none looked like one or the other . . . thinking post man, milk man, baker, banker????
c. Father Dom who knew Cardinal Bernadin as I did, conversationally, never showed up? What was I there for? . . . .Well let me tell you I was in bliss (weeping now) the moon kissed the clouds peeking at us visible 3/4 of it and the light, oh Dear God The Light! Was it #3 or #1? Who said; "Yeah the sunset was good too" . . . looking west. I hadn't noticed as I wandered around where I was six years ago on The Holy Mother's birthday and the natives dancing ferociously ecstatic. Curious . . . i'm always curious . . . especially about all the Children of God . . . I've always been -- and yeah when I talk to myself I get answers. No. I'm not crazy I'm just in love with God . . . and . . . All God's Children . . . get you mind out of your pants Jack.

On second thought leave it in your knickers. I mean those short legged pants to play golf in not the British version of panties . . . you know the short legged pants to show off your Argyle socks and fancy pointy spiked shoes (laughter)

. . . God doesn't really change us. Metaphorically God makes us, like Hitler, see all the why's, wherefores . . . poor Adolph. I once viewed an "Illustrated Novel" (read Comic Book!) Hitler strapped into a chair eye lids propped open head affixed to a posing brace -- See Mathew Bradley etc. -- time exposure photography listening to and viewing his speeches: ALL OF THEM FOREVER ON A TRIP TO NOWHERE

is that hell?

Well if it is; this what I'm doing at the moment; is hell too two to 2 in a tutu and I f#*!ing love it. (M said; "I delete at first sight the "F" word! . . . is there such a character as a Half Exclamation point? I hate being scolded by beautiful, intelligent, kind, women, whom I love, worship and adore. Meaning I know when they are excited and out of control. Oh Boy oh boy do I remember the few times Susan was so! Sexual I didn't know her but enjoyed it. Making love to or with a (for me only women) is fantastic! Even if it is merely practice. . . . and oh man Rae is a happy dude. . . . & Bertha, #1-2-3-4 have special names for him slyly smerking and him, aw shucks, pawing the pavement looking down at his shoes . . . now I know why I was there . . . I loved him, love him so because he was he and I was i in hospice.

. . . i'll stop here. I have to. God is not in charge of me; i am. I feel like one of those inflated toys suspended above the madding throng on Thanksgiving in NY,NY what is now called Macy's Parade and I simply must deflate myself before I float away defying the laws of nature and physics . . . it is not time for me to return home. not yet anyway.

Religion is a portal to God. It is about -- but not God. We are we, or what we are; and God is simply God. Always Thou. And like M I am helplessly in love with BOTH! As I was with Susan, then Randy, and Johanna and Jodi but I've lost them all and . . . found or been found by God

120927 02:27

You are very special to me, not merely those few who read what I write, but all of the world filled with life. At that. I am helpless to do anything dramatic. And were I able it wouldn't matter. There are too many of us to sustain and the world . . . is going down.

Worn out?
Don't think so since were it not for us the world would be just fine. But then we wouldn't be here would we?

You, including those of you who attempt to control or flee from the "Madding Throng" are loved by God and thus me. You like me are nothing special, just another form of life like wolves and butterflies. There is one small difference, not my faith in or love affair with God, it is merely that in the Carnival Mirror Maze I've broken most of them to bits and cleaned out the vast floor of . . . the ground of my being and now in line skate freely upon the vast plain of eternity knowing myself as 'other' than what you say i am. As reflected in the mirrors surrounding me here on my in line roller blades chortling and skating doing figure eights.

I've long held a theory that Jesus was resurrected as is Mary via the Holy Spirit or something like that within all forms of life. Merely conjecture for and about which I have no affirmations from God . . . I've come to adore God's silence as well as God's 'speaking' not to me alone of course . . . but to all of us and that's why I write. This is a personal journal of how I came to be conscious in a time of unconsciousness. A time of fear, anxiety and, let me very plain: terrorism.

U ain't seen nothing yet! It is going to get, rapidly, worse: wars over water, air, arable land and it is not exactly "Global Warming." But maybe -- maybe not -- that plus a host of other issues.

Sex is fun as well as procreation. Without television, the Internet, etc. What's a man and woman, boy and girl, boy & boy, girl & girl going to do on cold winter nights? U got it! Whether ecstatic, by the numbers, boring as wheat paste; it is part of life like; birth-life-then death: part and parcel.

Yesterday I deleted all my pornography sites from Opera my, next to Chrome, favorite browser. Remembering M's affirmation of my doing so once before. (Odd, or not so odd, last evening exhausted I returned from the adobe church were the Indians pray . . . singing silently to me and Our Lady of Guadeloupe whose Cathedral in Mexico City called to me, to kneel, and knee walk to her walls & kiss her then grimy stones . . . True. I didn't but remember, remembering at the church in Mesilla wanting to and I so adore The Virgin Mary . . . i'm starting to cry. I realize that I saw her face yesterday in all the women I then met in reality and I'm weeping more now for the joy of seeing what I saw = see/saw & yeah looking into the Emerald Green Eyed Sphinx is for me similar just hadn't recognized it yet until writing it out.) Pornography is one of America's greatest profit makers and exports. Do you now wonder why Muslems want to thrawrt our 'progress?' I don't really know, but judging by my experience, sex to them is a sacrament about which no image can be worshiped. Yet in American, I cannot deny my complicity in it, pornography is a product. Yes 'Virgina' I masturbate lots, at least I did getting no, Susan my love forgive me, satisfaction.

That one life should be destroyed, whether Diplomat or peasant, boy, girl or dog . . . They're all equal in value to God. Yet Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin killed people by the millions. Why? Ideology become idolatry.

It is not what I, or God, or you want . . . it is They who profit from war. Were there a tithe, a gleaning, the lesser part of all the money spend on destroying life . . . life and love would be more possible for the rest of us. Retiring from hospice, and sincerely praying for a sundry reasons and roles causing it, I've come to recognize, without rationalization, it was very simply time to move on.

I did it. Not God or "The Devil."

& what?

I'm out of the closet: decisive versus indecisiveness; my former name.

I am not a lot of things I could name and don't want to be anything but a retired photojournalist who has seen what I didn't want to see. When I told Denis of my sorrow at losing a woman I'd fed for three years because she couldn't. He said, quietly: "i know."

In that simple exchange I realized the agony of Jesus, not on the Cross, but all those he couldn't heal because they said; "No way" or "Go away you bore me." Or, Or, Or.

. . . Susan became an Episcopal Priest and I happily didn't. Clerics are a reprise of Jesus driven out into the desert to die alone. He didn't, obviously. Scapegoat -- means covered with the sins of others they wish to no longer know about . . . how do I know this? From experience since I too did the same thing with her.

M said, loosely transliterated, to me, cryptically: "heal." When I later on asked 'who, why, when and were?' She said; "you will."

I have tried to editorialize my opinions making myself ridiculous to myself let alone you who have read me. It is not all the cats who don't get stuck up trees that make the "News!" but all the cats that don't go near trees. Cats know how to get down, their human companions don't know or have forgotten that.

Sufi's talk to me drawing the child who reads them into conspiracy with love. Buddha et al make it simple how to read life but Sufi's live it . . . and the one who evaporates me making me air or water is Rumi.

Helpless to heal her. Knowing I can't have her. I know better the humility of being a child of god. I have God no more or less than any living thing -- well actually all the elements of life and being -- than either you or M . . . I do not love Rumi the poet but who he wrote to. Add to which the who writes back U won't know that until you look inward as M implied . . . it is not she but God who replies.

In closing: I took a notion to buy some ice cream, it is really bad for me -- triglycerides-- yet waiting to check out this little girl in a pink top started unloading her families cart beside me. I turned to the cashiers, a woman of indeterminate age and asked; "Would you like to be her?"

"No. I did that and don't want to go back." What The Buddha said upon his death bed. That's why I'm a Christian because in death Jesus said; "forgive them they know not what they do."

And i, nothing, want to join that small chorus of those who care and give versus those who take.

# 6. Thou shalt not kill: from my notes -- The Ten Commandments

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved