Betting; to Win, Place or Show?

(A few points;

Sometimes you answer a post or you send me an email. I’m not real sure of all the details but- If you answer in a post, unless you reference the post and if it isn’t the immediate post then I have no way of knowing where you contacted me from unless you tell me. I get an alert which includes what you had to say but it doesn’t say from where. If you email me make sure your email address is in the email.

I get some very nice responses; both in threads and in emails. Yesterday, from what I understand, someone mentioned me in a post somewhere else. As a result I heard from a few people; one was from a highly articulate person who mentioned in passing that they had thought of emailing me but didn’t want to lean on me. Others have mentioned that they know I am busy and don’t want to provoke me into having to respond. Let me be very clear about something. All I do is write these pieces, compose music or work on my books. Well, I also sit in the sun a lot, take walks and follow certain disciplines which I enjoy. I don’t have a job in the sense that people understand that to mean. This is my job. I don’t have children to raise except the ones inside me. I don’t have a social life. I’m just here. So no one is bothering me and if you don’t mind waiting now and then, you’ll hear back from me.

No one is or will be leaning on me. I’m already leaning on something else. We would both be leaning on the same thing. Of course I’m not in a position to work out the details of anyone’s life, nor will I help orchestrate minutiae. It’s not cause I’m standoffish, lazy or selfish; although I could be a little of all of them (smile). The fact is you can get all the help you need from the same place I do. Unless you know this everything else is only going to confuse your efforts and your progress. But I’m glad to hear from people so don’t let any of that stop you. You have to take a number to annoy me, that room’s already full and I’m candid enough not to get into any enabling or faux supportive routines. Knowing with full certainty that there is a god makes it impossible for me to take myself seriously; knowing a little about myself makes it impossible for me to get the idea that I’m any kind of superior individual. The absolute and certain fact is that we are all the same person at different points along the same route. It could be that I can see something a little better than you just by virtue of not having the same concern at the same time. It’s also a given that you see some things better than I do. Alright, let’s see what there is to talk about today.)


Betting to Win, Place or Show

I like sports. When I was a kid they were the only life I had besides books and punishment. I played everything I could get to. I don’t like soccer though and golf is not a sport. I mostly played Baseball, Football and Basketball in that order. I also played tennis and bowled. I love ping pong and I’d better stop now or this will be a grocery list. And yeah, ping pong is a sport; you can sweat right through your shoes if you’re full at it for awhile. Bowling is actually a complete sport (pot bellies aside). I’ve heard it said it exercises every muscle in the body just like swimming, it’s just not aerobic.

I don’t get to play sports much any more. I don’t have any companions. So I work out at various martial arts disciplines and the odd this and that which I can do alone. I guess it stands to reason that I know something about professional sports; who the teams are, their strengths and the less obvious factors like home field, crowds and turf, rivalries and the ‘who’s your daddy’ feature that showed up yesterday between The Patriots and The Colts. I was pretty sure The Patriots would win because I study the thing. I’ll admit I wanted The Patriots to win but if I thought it was going the other way I would have called it that way. I knew the Eagles would convincingly beat Minnesota. The next two are harder to call, especially the Steeler game coming up. I think you can figure out where I think it will all wind up though and, yes, I’ve been wrong but I do run about an 11-4 weekly ratio. That’s pretty good.

I don’t get to watch sports much any more although I do get the playoff and series games on the internet if I happen to be at home when they’re happening. Good streaming internet can be problematic on the road.

Of course, I’m not going to go on about sports here. Some say that life is a game. It’s certain that people get gamed all the time. Sometimes they get gamed en masse. It stands to reason that if a magician can go on stage and fool you; usually with smoke and mirrors but often with misdirection as well- it stands to reason that if someone can entertain you by deceiving you (and they’re just getting paid for doing their job) that someone with vastly more power and vastly more at stake can also deceive you, though whether they entertain you is a matter for debate.

For a time my education required me to spend some time in jails and prisons and high security mental institutions. I could write a book about the characters I met and the things I saw and heard about. I know about Murphy and Badger cons, variations on The Spanish Prisoner and a host of things from Three Card Monte on up. All of these are based on the never ending abundance of human stupidity and greed. They say you can’t cheat an honest man. You also can’t con somebody who doesn’t want what you are selling; who isn’t interested the possibility of a dicey payoff, who knows about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Mowgli’s tale of the elephant goad and all the phony Las Vegas mirages winking in a real desert.

I’m incomplete in some ways and have my crosses to bear. I’ve also got some talents. A spiritual master once paid me a wonderful compliment. He said to someone who knew me, following a conversation I had had with him that, “you can’t bullshit that guy.” I got a detector and it goes off immediately when I hear bullshit. Let me clue you. I mostly hear bullshit. Most of it is innocuous or has to do with the way people misunderstand themselves. Often it has to do with laziness.

I never thought the Paris Hilton sex tape came out by accident, nor do I think she has half the talent of Pauly Shore. I usually don’t buy what I’m told about most of what I hear. It’s not that everybody is evil or a liar. Sometimes they believe what they are telling you.

I don’t think either The Colts or The Vikings threw the game. I believe that under the right circumstances they could have won. At that level and at that part of the season between gifted teams it comes down to coaching. All the coaching in the world won’t win for a bad team though. You have to be at a certain level to compete, otherwise you have to cheat.

When you look at the recent presidential election and the preceding one, you might think election fraud was the deciding factor. You might think dirty tricks were the factor. You might even think bush won. The latter is the least likely. What you probably don’t think is that Kerry was a stalking horse. You probably don’t think it was engineered from the gitgo. Of course fraud and tricks was a feature but if you were watching then you could see the more hidden features at work.

You might think that the point of my writing this is to point this out. You might think I feel the occasional need to get into this kind of thing; bring it up, keep it fresh. Actually that isn’t the case. My point is that things like this are going on all the time. Maybe you saw where bush says that the election justifies everything he did, that he has a mandate now and that he don’t have to explain nuthin any more.

Maybe you thought about why the democrats would nominate and support a candidate from the most problematic state in the union. Maybe you thought about the gay marriage thing and the enormous backlash from the majority of the country. Although most people are okay about the gay thing, a huge majority oppose mainstreaming it. You can’t mainstream fringe anyway. The gay issue was the nail in the coffin. But way before that was the engineering job. The Swift Boat liars could have been nailed many a time. I personally could have engineered a commercial campaign that would have ousted bush. I know about his many vulnerabilities. It is interesting how the Rather thing has developed. What is more interesting is that everything Rather said was true. What is true about bush is much, much worse than anything that has come out.

We have three basic levels of consciousness; Self Consciousness, Sub Consciousness and Super Consciousness. The argument of Creationism and Evolution is an amusing conundrum. Actually they are both correct. But let me give you a new twist on The Garden of Eden. Adam was God. He divided and became Eve too to create the basic relationship out of which everything has followed. God makes everything out of his own substance. He becomes it. The serpent was God just as is the Messiah. God came into manifestation and everything that has followed is God playing hide and seek, doping dress up and acting out.

We mistake logical sequences for causal sequences. What happens in our life is we are pulled by the future, not pushed by the past. God is behind everything and God knows where he’s going. God is in the past present and future at all times. Our problem is that we have difficulty being led. “Unless ye become as little children…” The fix is in and has been. You think things are happening, you think you do things, but you are being set up all the time. The future is assured. You suffer because you don’t hear or react properly. This is what we are learning. It is very hard due to the simplicity of it. Everything that happens in your life, everything is some aspect of God dealing with your soul; everything down to the tiniest most insignificant seeming detail. Believe it. You can make this a lot easier but you can’t change the basic reality. You are stuck with that. You have to play the game according to the rules. It is the rules that make the game. Free will is your ability to go along willingly or to oppose. You make it hard and you make it soft; or rather God does in the process of leading you... but yeah, you do it to. You are dancing with God. Is it a waltz? Are you down in the mosh pit? When you can’t understand why something happens to you it is because you haven’t gotten to the reason yet. If what happened was hard it is because you didn’t catch the gentler nudge.

The minds that think they are orchestrating events are themselves being orchestrated. God is indeed leading bush, just not to where, or in the way, he thinks. Everybody setting up the con is being conned. Everyone orchestrating is being orchestrated, to ends other than the ones they imagine. Don’t try to extrapolate this into football, don’t go there.

There is no diminishment of women in my previous illustration. Man and woman are roles. We play them both. And we are all female to God. I don’t bet on games. I don’t wish and hope. I don’t know why I haven’t gotten to do the things I thought I was here for in the way I thought I was supposed to. You probably don’t either. But the movie isn’t over yet and I doubt I could write the ending half as good as God.