NICABM 2008

The first year I came here I signed up for one of the dinner groups that had no stated purpose other than meeting people.  There was one other guy and 4 women.  Of course, the first item of business was to introduce ourselves.  I am extremely shy and sat there soaked in sweat until it was my turn to talk.  I had no idea what to say after my name but stammered out, “I guess I’m a fifty-five? year old juvenile delinquent.  The group broke into laughter and I realized that everyone else had been in the same situation and what I said had broken the ice.  I don’t know what happened to the other guy but I had dinner with the four women every night that week.  One of them was a consultant teaching reflexology to corporate managers and she gave us a class in reflexology.  I had driven here that year and brought some drums with me and we had a drumming circle one evening.  I corresponded with them for a year or so but none of them ever came back.

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Over the past few years I seem to have become some kind of healer.  Distance seems to be irrelevant and it seems to work with dogs and cats and, I guess, other organisms.  I don’t charge anything but do accept donations.  I am interested in finding more people to try the healing.  I’ve written a handout with my information.  There are some on the bulletin board and you can just ask me for one.

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A few years ago I bought a GPS contraption for the car.  Before using it you have to hook it up to a computer and initialize it — download the maps and so forth from some web site into the GPS equipment.  I kept having trouble with that and finally said some thing like, “God Damn this thing.”  The computer turned off and wouldn’t restart.  The surge protector hadn’t shut down and everything else connected to it worked just fine.

My local computer wizard determined that the power supply had burned out and fried the mother board meaning I had to buy a new computer.  He also told me there was nothing other than a power surge that could have done the damage since there was nothing in the equipment to generate sufficient voltage to do the damage.  He also said that in all the years and all the computers he has seen he\s never seen anything like that.

I don’t know what happened but I try even harder than I did before to avoid becoming irritated with anything that matters, especially people.

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What follows are comments and poems expressing my amusement with my life and with the institutions of my society.  I never do anything today that I can put off until tomorrow.  This was mostly written last night between about 7 and 9.
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Differences

When I was 10 or so
I began to fear that I would die from
The dread disease, Lackanookie;
When I was 65 or so I began to realize that
I had never heard of anyone dying from
Lackanookie
And some part of me relaxed
Into a centeredness that allowed me to marvel at,
Rather than striving to conquer, the differences between
Men and women and the reasons why I had quit at
Two strikes in marriage rather than continuing on
To strike out altogether.

In the years since I was 10 or so
And during most of those years,
No matter what I thought I was thinking about
It was always in addition to thinking about
Women;
And now that I am 73 I can look back
And marvel at
The insanity of the path that hormones
And lack of information
Carve through the years allotted to one
Before moving on to some other mode
Of existence
And marvel even more
At the fact that it continues yet,
Albeit accompanied by growing insight
And driven by less intensity,
At least, most of the time.

Forrest Jewell

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Why does that ignorance exist?

Unless a child has siblings of the other sex, our society – most societies, I guess — has no provision for them to have anything like an intimate relationship with people of the other sex.  This means that children grow up with their eventual mates being, effectively, an alien race.  The society provides no reliable way for young people to learn anything meaningful or useful about sex meaning they will marry – or whatever they do – knowing nothing about how to accept, live with, please, be pleased by, honor, be honored by, or enjoy their partner.

The model marriage in our society is between two virgins who are expected to have some innate understanding of everything required to maintain a marriage.  In my generation the woman has been programmed to perform wifely duties and resent them while the man has been trained to perform husbandly duties and resent them.  It’s long been a mystery to me how any marriage lasts more than a year or two and the constant yammering of our politicians about returning to traditional family values is ridiculous because they never existed.

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Raising Kids

Three Stooges movies show life
A lot like my home life as a child;
Those movies mirror lots of things;
For instance
I can’t see the difference between
A Three Stooges movie
And a football game.

Given that my childhood
And the Super Bowl
Are indistinguishable from
A Three Stooges movie
It became very difficult for me
To take life seriously
And eventually I gave up trying.
I look at a baseball game
And see a lot of people
Most of whom must have a high tolerance
For boredom
Ane whose role consists primarily of
Standing around watching
While two others contrive an art form
Out of playing catch
And another tries desperately
To interfere with their game of catch
So as to disturb the boredom
Of the others
By hitting the ball with a club —
That’s a lot like being home waiting for Dad to arrive.

In the life of a child
Schools play a large role –
Sometimes good, I suppose, but
Often not so good;
I started school a couple of months shy
Of my sixth birthday
And had already read
Robin Hood and Treasure Island and
Part of Canterbury Tales
So the school presented me with
Dick and Jane and Mother and Father
And Spot and the cat – Puff, maybe –
And a family situation totally outside my experience –
And began the process of destroying
My desire to be in school
And my ability to learn
Anything there …
Reinforcing
My growing discomfort
In being around people.

So Effective was the school
In consort with my parents
That, at fifteen,
With an IQ (tested when I was in my forties)
Of over 160
I flunked out of high school.

Forrest Jewell

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I never have any idea how long any of this is taking so just tell me when to stop.

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How Comes Suicide

There is a small but growing consensus
Of opinion
Around the notion
That people choose/create their own lives
And then change them
More-or-less
At will.

My first response to that was
HOGWASH
Supposedly
I fought with a bunch of other souls
To live my childhood?
To be a child who couldn’t
Fit into what was supposedly
The best school system
In the United States?
And, as a little boy,
Found solace
In cuddling with my pet
Nanny goat
To avoid the havoc in the house —
Why would anyone do that?

Given that
I was fool enough
To compete for
That childhood
I can understand how
I could create a lot of the rest of my life.

In meditation I’ve encountered
What I think of
As past lives
And I also think I can see how
They have affected this life
And, in that way,
I have created parts of my current life
Out of past lives.

This life is a constant stream of events and thoughs
And relating and learning
And all that a person does
So that, based upon what I came with
And what has occurred since I came
I have created a lot of my life.

A kid can be frustrated with school
And with his parents
And then hold a pistol to his head
And create a whole new life for himself
But I’m still not comfortable
That he has done that alone;
He has taken the information supplied
By those around him,
Come to see himself
As a worthless impediment
And sought to remove the obstacle
He presents
From the lives of those to whom
He feels worthless and some of whom
He desperately loves
And who seem to me to have failed
To encourage in him a sense of sufficient
Self-worth to help him
Fight for his life.

I’ve struggle with the concept of life creation
Since 1977
When my son shot himself in the head
And didn’t die
But he did change his life for the rest of his life
And
The event changed
My life,
My wife’s life,
His mother’s life,
His sister’s life,
……..AND…..
I still don’t know
Who changed what;

Forrest Jewell

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Disease Creation and Management

Our society operates in a cycle
Of disease creation and
Disease management.
The disease creation portion
Is the marketing of food
Or
What passes for food
And the manipulation of people’s weaknesses
By huge corporations
Selling products
And dreating beliefs
Concerning food and diet
Trading the environment and
The public health
For profit so that
For example
I think the most frequently eaten food is
French Fries.

The disease management portion
Of the cycle
Is what we call the
Health care system
Which has little to do
With either health or caring.
It is created primarily by
Drug companies and
Operated through insurance companies
Which turn would-be healers
Into clerks
Serving a decreasing percentage
Of the population
And, even then,
Treating symptoms with chemicals so that
People can continue destroying themselves
Rather than working to remove the causes
Of the symptoms.

Forrest Jewell

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