Waking up to Black Wings

Ahhh, the bugs are gone. Gone baby, gone.

There are the occasional pinpricks, but all in all, not a big deal. It's hot in New York. Very hot. I stay indoors, as you well know, on my laptop, which still seems to be going out on me often. I've devised a strategy to keep it working. Since the problem is no doubt heat related, I've turned on my Air Conditioner, and turned it down to 60 degrees in my room. The lowered environment temperature surrounding the laptop keeps it cooler than normal ambient temperature without it. She stays up much longer, and I can get some damn work done. The only problem is that I am always shivering, making typing somewhat difficult. Also, I am in a shirt, sweater and slacks all the time now, and also socks. You know though how I like to carouse around naked in my room, so this is a setback. I have got to get this laptop fixed.

I'm working on two books at one time now, and two short plays. One book I wrote between a book with my brother and my Sci-Fi book. It's a detective thriller with some amazing twists in it, if I should say so myself. I was just having fun one day, kinda like a chef would a potluck soup. I started tossing in ingredients just for the Hell of it. This is a no-no for a lot of authors. Some authors do not trust the characters that they create to function without a strict outline, so they themselves direct the story from beginning to end. This time, I wanted a more free-form, unrestricted story that could surprise me as much as the reader. So, I created the characters that I wanted, placed them in the environment I wanted, and then introduced, like barley stock in a soup, the conflict in the story. Then I just sat the fuck back and allowed the fireworks to fly.

And shit did they. The story is somewhat raggedy now. I left it for awhile and wrote the Sci-Fi story on a much more rigid outline. Still, I let the detective thriller cool off, boil down, so that it can be worked on. My mind moved away from the story, and upon returning to it a few days ago, I felt that it had merit to continue work on it. So I picked it up again and started kicking it's ass. I happened to always like detective thrillers. When I was young, I used to watch Mannix on television, and I loved him. Wow, what a detective. Detective thrillers always seemed to be on my menu for as far back as I can remember.

I awake and look around my room. What day is it? My mouth is dry. I haven't had a drink in a week. I can't say that I miss it though. I'm back on the NAL- TREXONE full speed. When I'm on that stuff I have absolutely no desire to drink. Weird, right? Doc. A. says that there are chemicals in my brain that thrive on the alcohol molecules, or something like that. NALTREXONE, substitutes itself for these molecules, and the brain is none the wiser. My brain thinks it's drinking heavily every fucking day. Stupid brain!! It gives me some freedom. A great deal of freedom. Hmmm, that's a word that we take for granted don't we?

I mean, we are aware of the freedoms that this country grants us, God bless it, but we are not free sometimes of the responsibilities and dreams that shackle us to our lives. Some of us have wives, some children, some elderly parents, some debts some demanding jobs. Some of us, like me, who are free of all those things, are not free in our on minds and ideas. I feel like my freedom of thought is constantly under assault. Assault by persons who have given up their individual freedom to think on their own, and want you to do the same. I have a friend of many years who used to debate with me often, and often his disagreements arose from some erudite observation. Something he read, something he was told by someone with a PHD, someone of authority, and he would feel that I should see things as he did, simply because he had the backing of all these studious types behind him in whatever form of media he received it in.

I used to always laugh at him when he would call me unenlight- ened and in a darkened, ignorant state and tell him: 'Well my scientists can beat up your scientists!" I think, at a formative age, I came into the technical age with an opened mind. I got my first computer when I was sixteen, and was on one every day of my life ever since. From then I started building them, then networking them, always amazed at how their computing power grew stronger and stronger every year. I remember when there weren't harddrives, but instead cassette tapes to save your computer data on. AND then a new age came upon us, many of us suddenly, others, not so much.

It even took Bill Gates by surprise. He was caught so fucking flat footed that he feared the collapse of Microsoft if they did not make what he called at the time, a 'Sea Change'. Others of us saw it coming, saw it growing by degrees, from a wonderful child to a precocious toddler. The ARPANET. It's funny, but the Pentagon, frightened by the Soviets foray into space, had an organization develop a computer network backbone that could allow their military computers to communicate between each other, even if one or more sites were destroyed. Possibly by nuclear attack. In time, the Pentagon lost interest in the network, and allowed the research community of this country, colleges, universities and the such, access to the technology to develop and use. The research community saw its benefits to the dissemination of information and used it greatly.

The Internet grew as other organ- izations, from medical uses, to almost any scientific endeavor in need of relevant, current information jumped on the bandwagon. The growth of this network exploded. Still it was difficult to use. Only character driven (No pictures), and very dry science. Hey, I'm going to stop this here...because I don't want to lose my point. The point I'm trying to make here, is that the Internet's first real world use was for the dissemination of papers, reports, essays, thesis, white papers, developmental ideas...information not controlled by some organization that tells you that it's the unbiased truth. When the truth is that ALL TRUTH is biased. Everything is slanted. We believe it if we choose to or not. If we run up against a story on the Internet that we feel is preposterous, we take it as so. But that may not happen to the next person, who may feel that it's a work of enlightenment.

What I'm getting at here is that, when I awoke to the information in the Internet I wondered what was TRUTH, what was believable or not. I came to the conclusion that, when it comes to the truth, we all have to make that call for ourselves, and actually dig as far down for what is perceived as truth as we feel we need to. If our curiosity doesn't take us to a place of enlightenment, the promise of the truth never will. For instance, you may be a student of hematology, and your friend maybe a student of evolution. Your friend has strong feelings about the origins of mankind. Over dinner one night you get into a discussion about evolution, and you don't happen to agree with his views. He tells you that his views are correct (aka, the truth), but strangely, he can't on his own, defend his position, instead he lists books and chapters for you to read, to understand where he is coming from. Don't you yourself know where you're coming from? Why do you need others to defend ideas that you have claimed your own? People like this don't seem to question that.

You are interested in Hematology ...hey, take a hiatus from what you are reading, from what you are interested in, just to help this guy prove his point, which you may not agree with to begin with. Why bother? Because you don't want to appear closed minded? I waive all accusations of my being closed minded just by listening to you. Why should I now have to read your source materials in something that I don't feel is the truth, whether I see it printed, on the television, on the Internet, or from a professional or not?

This behavior is closely aligned to conspiracy theorists, who can come up with tons of credible evidence to support their wacky ideas, but to you, it just doesn't ring true. The truth is, you cannot come to accept it, no matter the form it comes in. Steven Hawkins once said in A Brief Moment in Time, "If you can't debunk the science, then debunk the scientist." Or loosely quoted like that. I was talking to a friend of mine recently, showing her video clips of Criss Angel doing all sorts of magic in front of actual bystanders. He would do some amazing things that to the eye appeared to be real magic. To her, it HAD to be some trick. Something, somewhere, somehow, although she couldn't prove it, had to be employed to make logical sense of what was happening. Her mind just could not accept what her eyes could perceive as the truth. This visual evidence of magic simply was not accepted by her. On the other hand, many of the amazed and dumbfounded bystanders (and those on television) suspended their disbelief and catered, even in the slightest, that it was somehow uncanny.

But what this goes to show is that we form our own conclusions and dig as far as we personally want to go on certain subjects before we make up our minds. The technical name for it is: Sastisfiability. If someone tells you that all crows are black, and in your experience you have never seen a white crow you may accept that to be the truth. But this person, and neither you has never seen EVERY CROW ON EARTH. There could out there, somewhere, be an albino crow. You don't know, but as far as you are concerned, from the research you yourself have accepted, this is a true statement. You have reached Satisfiability on that subject. And psychologists prove that once you've reached that point, you've successfully "Made up your mind". This is then truth for you. This truth, as you have accepted it, to the degree that you have accepted it, is very difficult to supplant.

Mankind has always believed in things unseen fervently, and in fact we still do. But the REAL truth in this world can only come from ourselves, individually. Further, like my friend who would always call me unenlightened and ignorant because I refused to see things his way, no matter how many books he provided me from the library is the source of true ignorance. Take it from here, you find yourself a fervent believer in the Christ, and the Bible. A Muslim tells you that you should read the Koran instead to understand the nature of God. You disagree. He asserts that if you read this and that scripture in the Koran, or the entire Koran, you will see things from a different perspective. You claim the same about the Bible. He debunks the Bible, and you debunk the Koran. Instead of saying: "OK we agree that we dis-agree," one insults the other, by calling the other ignorant, stupid, closed minded. There other does the same, there is animosity, which then can escalate to dissension, persecution, war and death. Don't we see this on a worldwide scale from time immemorial?

Why can't a person accept the truth as he or her sees it, and be respected for their views? What's so wrong with not being right? Why is it so important to prove a point? Do we take our knowledge of some topic or event THAT personally? I have personally come to the conclusion, a long time ago, that the ultimate truth is what we personally believe it to be. Not what comes out of a book, or someone's mouth, the television or the Internet. It's what we choose, as individual human beings, to believe. We can fact check some things, we have faith in others.

Hey gang...I'm on a soap box here. Let me explain. My mind, my thinking, my goals and my aims have recently been set free. Yeah, I didn't believe it myself, but it's true. I was operating under the truth perceived by someone else. To make a long story short, I allowed myself to become a follower. Firstly, it was out of a logical necessity, but later, it was due to weakness. Fear of the big, scary world around me, at my age. Can you imagine that? Yet, in life, all things mature, and I did too. I reached the developmental stage where I didn't need a leader. I found that I could lead myself, which as you probably could guess, caused dissension, anger, bitterness to the person who perceived himself as my superior. I was basically accused of everything imaginable because I saw things differently. But I realized that my Truth was different from his, therefore making my Goals different from his. It had come time for us to part company.

Now here, here is where I find myself. Enjoying a strange sort of freedom, like I can't remember having before. This is the real Truth. How I feel RIGHT NOW, I perceive as being the real truth. I exist, therefore I am. It ends right there boys and girls. Right then and there. The rest of what our senses can perceive, is taken on faith. You see, when your lights go out...and you breathe your last breath on this earth, the real truth then will be the opposite of what the real truth is now. You will NOT exist, therefore you are not.

Hobobob