Our Fortunes and the 3 Faces of Everyone.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

May your noses always be cold and wet.

The last Visible Origami was our 500th posting at this blog.

A lot of strange things happen around here. Take this morning. I get this bizarre email from someone who says that I offended them some months ago and they're not happy about it. They say they challenged me, which I assume means baited or taunted me and I guess I responded in kind and now the person's going on and on about it. They included quotes from me but I couldn't actually see any injury in any of them, so it's a bit of a mystery to me. In the last letter, I'm told by this person, “I have ephemeral friends who will lick your ass and I will taste it”. WTF? That sounded positively pornographic.

The thing is that I look at things like this and it looks to me like what you see outside of your window when you're driving from town to town, on your way somewhere. It's scenery and the scenery is always changing. I'm not one of those people who keeps thinking of some town I went through miles back, when I happen to be going through another town at that very moment. For me, resentments, real and imagined offenses, are some kind of metaphorical, empty strip mall, whose dimensions I can no longer remember, along with the signs about whatever the store used to hold, or even what town it might have been in. There's no gain or profit in any of that. It's like envy and jealousy. I never got those. They seem pointless and cumbersome. It makes me think of jumping into the ocean with jogging weights around my ankles.

Of course, I have shortcomings, sometimes I'm impatient, or I get annoyed for about two minutes and... the magnetism of certain attractions still affects me, although I don't do anything about them now and that's an improvement, I guess, because I used to do something about them. It's not for lack of capacity, it's more like a burnt out case, or as B.B., puts it, “the thrill is gone”. Well, obviously the thrill is not gone but I understand a lot more about botany and zoology than I used to and the dynamics of the ease with which one can get entangled and the degree of difficulty in getting disentangled is not lost on me. It also goes back to my personal theory about The Three Faces of Everyone. I came up with this a long time ago and I've mentioned it here before but I will explain it again for the newcomer. The first face is the face we present people with when we first meet them. It's the face we want them to see and believe as being true about us. One day, of course, it will be ...and possibly ever so much more but... not today (grin). Then there is the face that appears over time and which includes all those parts of ourselves that we would rather people not see. Finally, there is the face that appears when real danger threatens, or one comes into extreme adversity and has to call on those he/she imagined were his/her friends. I've seen all of these faces more times than I can remember. The third face can be real wake-up and most people fail miserably.

There's a tangential relationship between the second and third face and people with more money than they know what to do with. In some cases I am talking tens of millions of dollars. When I used to live in Woodstock, I knew some amount of these people. I also knew some amount of them from DC, where you could meet the heirs (in the circles I ran in) of all kinds of household names; meaning products, or people who are always in the news and so on. Back in those days I was trying to get somewhere with my art and occasionally I might ask one of these people to invest in me, to become my patron, like it used to be back in the Italy of a few hundred years ago and other places too. Without exception, nearly all of the time (that would mean there might have been an exception but I can't remember it), their money was 'tied up' and they couldn't get to it. I think that is part of some code that rich people adhere to and talk about among themselves.

I met a lot of strange people through these strange people. There was one guy, the heir to Hong Kong Shirts. He had a place on Fifth Avenue, just up from the park. He was a junkie. Heck, I can remember his name, Stanley Glick. He had one room in his vast and capacious apartment that was lined in mink. The rest of the walls of the apartment were papered with soft deer skin. I used to hang out there on occasion and the very unpleasant Alice Cooper would show up and who knows who else. There was one fellow named Austin, an occasional guitar player and someone who hung out with name musicians, though he wasn't one. I was around him in several periods of extremity for him and helped him out well beyond the call. I didn't see him then for awhile and then one day I did. I come to find out that his mother was one of the richest ladies in Connecticut. She was not enamored of his coke-infused, alcohol accompanied life style, so he didn't have much while she was alive. Then she was gone and he came into a serious fortune. He had no time for me then, even though I didn't ask him for any and even though he wouldn't have noticed the absence. Most rich people are cheap, which is why they are rich, except when they want to show off. What they don't know and what they find out, like people who waste food and always leave a lot of it on their plate, is that the time will come when they will experience the deepest kind of want in the afflicted area because, THAT'S HOW IT WORKS.

Now, I don't have much (in the material sense) and I never did and I know there's a good reason for that, just as I know that will change at some point, once I have passed through these last difficulties of awareness expansion. However, I will wager that I am generally happier and more content than any of them will ever be and certainly our end game differs in outcome. It always impresses me how people ignore that Biblical truism, “Cast your bread upon the waters and it will return to you tenfold”. That is a real law of the universe. It unfailingly delivers, as some number of people have proven to themselves. Another truism, is the one about the talents and what happened to the people who didn't do the right thing by them. We are given things to see what we will do with them and that means, money, fortunes of birth, fame, connections, various abilities and degrees of inspiration. If you don't max out on these things, in a good way, they will leave you in a bad way. These are absolutes. You can get scientific and ingeniously creative, in the attempt to get around the laws of the cosmos and Nature but, good luck with that, cause you won't.

I see rich people going their indifferent and selfish ways and I see a long term, terminally homeless and desperate person up around the bend. I see pretty people and I think, well that's very definitely a temporary currency. I see people with certain creative abilities, who abuse them in any number of ways and poof! They don't have them anymore. I see people with sudden fame, just as suddenly gone and I note how they behaved before, during and after. For some inexplicable reason, people don't pay attention to the most basic things, concerning any kind of success and fortune, both good and bad. Things change. Change is the cornerstone of existence; why the I Ching is around in the first place, though I'm not one for oracles, rather trusting in what is sent off to me by the invisible, each and every day. We've all got ships out there, just beyond the horizon line, sooner or later they come into port and the longer it takes, the more laden down they are.

It can be a curse to be well off when you are young (cause it might not be there later on) and often a substantial blessing when you are older. Death can be a fantastic event, or the opposite and that is why it gets saved for last. In a life lived for all the right reasons, death is a liberation and in some cases doesn't come at all. It depends on how asleep you are as to how the process affects you.

People despair of their existence. They get cranky and curmudgeonly. They develop serious health problems because of the chronic condition of their mental and emotional bodies and then they spend all that money they kept hoarding for whatever reason, in the last year of their life. That's also the time when the TV and radio is on 24 hours a day. The whole medical and pharmaceutical industry is set up to milk this phenomenon and they encourage poor diet and many attendant ills because it's a cash crop. Most people don't realize how diabolically cynical and sinister these corporations and 'professionals' are in general. They see cancer, they rub their hands together with glee. Cancer wasn't anything like it is today in earlier times and there are very good, or actually, very bad reasons for that.

The most essential thing about the world, which escapes most people, is that its entire reason for being is as a distraction from the primary point of greatest importance. You can tell people this all day long but they will not get it, until they have been reduced or traumatized to the point where it can be accepted as so. It's only at that time that life begins in any real sense. Prior to that it is just a dream, ♫row, row, row your boat♫ The mysteries of life are all delineated in fairy tales and fables, which have one interpretation on the surface and another below it. Children know all that needs to be known- or they did until recent times- and the rest of life, until the exit for the recycling plant comes up on the freeway, is all about whether you can get to that awareness, where the magic of childhood reawakens in the adult mind and renews it. Everything else we chase after, weep over the loss of, occupy our thoughts with, is irrelevant and unimportant and they will stay right here when you go.

It's a mystery and a riddle. It's an enigma, this cognitive dissonance, which pursues us through our lives, until it's done its job on us. I'll leave you on a positive note. Where there's life there's hope. As long as there is breath, there is opportunity for transformation and... “success is speedy for the energetic”.


End Transmission.......

Visible and The Critical List: ♫ Big God and Mr. Fate ♫
'Big God and Mr. Fate' is track no. 3 of 12 on Visible and The Critical List's 1987 album
'Not Politically Correct'