TALK OVER COFFEE

the flow




Foggy, wet day. Steady drizzle all day. Caterpillar asks me to open the door, then stands in the open doorway looking out at the rain. After a few minutes, she turns around, seen enough, restless, wishing she could go out and look around, stand in the breeze, listen to the sounds of other critters, but it's wet and rain melts cats. In today's mail a box from amazon.com addressed to me with a cd by Ola Bell Reed in it, a new one from Smithsonian, Rising Sun Melodies. I had not ordered it. The invoice said it had been paid for by Amex, which I don't use. All I can think is that Old Time Herald had it sent to me to review it. I hope so. I'll enjoy writing about Ola Belle Reed. Always had enthusiastic response playing her on the radio show. A couple times I played an hour of Ola Belle Reed. Her banjo pickin and her singing sound so plain and simple, it's like anybody could do it. But she's the only one that's found the way.



It was wide-open conversation full-tilt at Selma's later. Todd the holistic chiropractor was there when I went in the door. Conversation started with him and Selma, and Beth O walked in later and took the conversation to a new place, explaining Sun bursts and what happens when they hit earth regarding electrical things like satellites, computers, and so on. Primarily our conversation circled around the year 2012 of the Mayan calendar, what the end of a cycle means and what the beginning of a new cycle means. My contribution was the day after Dec 31 is Jan 1. Often the two days are just alike. Several times seeing Jr on New Years day he would remark that Jan 1 was just like the day before. Beth was a fascinating documentary story teller. We all listened to her with alert ears, hearing every word she spoke. I can't repeat any of them, because my memory doesn't retain much, but I recall following her with complete interest, telling how the planets are lining up in a straight line with the black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, the big cycle and all the smaller cycles that operate within the big cycle. She was explaining the earth's magnetic grid in ways that made it comprehensible.



She brought up something that was going through my head a few days ago when I wrote about the near future on earth may see us humans moving underground, beginning with the rich, like the Waltons of Wal*Mart in Arkansas living underground a la Ayn Rand, the philosoph of the republican right. Beth was saying the rich are now buying old missile silos from the 50s and making them into undergound homes. We all had a good laugh remembering the movie 2012 we'd all seen, laughing at the intent to keep the world's wealthiest alive to seed whatever is next. What a great laugh. Once the ships dock on the side of some mountain that has been underwater long enough to kill everything on it that was living, plenty of people will have lighters, but few will know what to do with them. I'd guess all of them would be dead within a year of the ships landing. I give them that much time considering the few that could last awhile. There would be a lot of cannibalism in the beginning. They could only get by eating fish for a long, long time. Two generations and they're wearing hides, chucking spears and divided up by languages.



Not long after I was out of high school, Ayn Rand's tomes, Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, were getting attention as intellectual one thing or another. This was in the time when I was a beginning reader, weak in the comprehension department. I read both of them, plowed my way through page after incomprehensible page doing what I had to do to be an intellectual, read Ayn Rand, like I did with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag not many years later. Didn't get a great deal out of it. A bunch of extremely rich people with magnificent dwellings underground, vaults where they live among their expensive things with snipers in guard towers to keep the world away. The American Dream: buried with ALL your things. How Egyptian (pre-Christian, pagan) is that? Little did I know when reading Ayn Rand that her writing would turn out to be the Popul Vuh of the cabal Reaganista. I didn't even comprehend it very well, but it seemed ridiculous and I quit reading her after seeing the big deal is to be rich, move underground with your things and never see the peasant class again, but for servants.


The continuous proximity of family strikes me as the stuff of Greek tragedy. Priveleged, spoiled, self-centered people just a little bit too tired of each other. Perhaps that's the next greed of the people who have all the money, immortality by tragic death. Wouldn't even have to bury them. Seal up the garage door. That is if things continue to go in the direction we've seen them going over the last half century, at least. The fun part is that things will not continue along a certain track for very long. Things have a way of changing real fast.