NOBODY GOING NOWHERE

vada by cheyanne

I don't know if the answer is ignorance, or if it is far-seeing foresight, or if it is trained into us over centuries and millennia, or if it is from feeling powerless without a voice, or maybe from collective experience, but the question is why do we lay about and hope a benevolent force will come to us from outside to rescue us from ourselves? The hope that flying saucers would rescue us from hard-edged absence of caring has been with us since the Fifties. A website, paoweb, has "updates by Sheldon Niddle," purportedly channeled from galactic federation wise counsel. I've looked at it occasionally over the last several years to find over and over that "first contact," when a mass landing will announce we are being watched over by beings more intelligent than we; they're just around the corner, any day now, soon now, coming to set us up in an ideal society under the galactic federation. Whatever. A few years ago, a definite date was announced. The date came and went. Oh, well, no problem. Some things were not in place they thought were in place and it turned out the timing wasn't right. Sounds like Fundamentalists announcing the end of the world and then it doesn't happen. There was a bunch in southern California some years ago who poisoned themselves because a comet was passing by and it was here to collect their souls. Sometimes I need some input like this to remind self that our inept government is not the only dysfunction going around. It galls me to think the people in DC actually represent us. They do not represent our interests, but they do represent the greed, the I'd-rather-be-watching-tv mind, readiness to lie to get what we want, the way we look up the ladder not down, our style of looking the other way when we see somebody down and out, our self-centered focus that says all for me, screw everybody else. In that way, they are a mirror to American motivations.

 

vada by cheyanne

 

Sparta has been down and out since the year 2000. It was limping along before, but since 2000, businesses go away, new businesses start up and go away. For awhile the talk was tourism, get people to come in here from other places to save us because we can't save ourselves. And factories. Maybe a factory will come here and save us. How much of that mind that we cannot save ourselves comes from religion, a totally different kind of "salvation?" An old joke came to mind. A man fell overboard from a cruise ship. He's in the water praying to God to save him. Somebody threw him a floating ring, but he wouldn't touch it, God's going to save him. He drowned and went to heaven. He asked God why God didn't save him when he was calling for help. God said, I threw you a floating ring and you wouldn't have it. I take it to mean an element of self-help and accepting help is part of the deal. Seems like if we take care of ourselves, the desperate prayer to God to fix us may not have to be so desperate. I like to live my belief that God's counsel, scriptures, are here to help me make my own decisions more in line with the reality of the moment and not feel the need for the Unknown to hurry up and save me from the results of my own dim-witted decisions. I believe that in this time, historically in the evolution of consciousness, the mental exercise of making decisions is important in the soul's growth and the brain's development. I never learned about decision making until I was away from parents who permitted no decision making. I came out of the experience dreading, afraid of making decisions, not having experience. Right away I made some disastrous decisions for myself because I did not know how to decide, how to be impartial. Up to age 23 I was ruled from outside myself; parents, marriage, military. The next 5 years after leaving parents were taken up by forces outside myself making my decisions. I gave myself to them. By the time I left the Navy and marriage at the same time, I was suddenly able to start thinking about making my own decisions, and became jealous of making my decisions. Nobody makes my decisions without my permission. Anyway, that was the dream. In this time of the life, looking back, I was then, and am able now, to hang on to original purpose.   

vada by cheyanne

I can't say I've always made the best decisions or even rational decisions, even sensible decisions, but somehow I've made it to today. I started college on my own, making decisions for myself. I was not aware in that time of the importance of decision making. This is hindsight talking about the importance of decisions. Then, I dreaded having to make any decision. Didn't know what to do. I was on my own first time like a dog that had lived on a chain since a puppy set free. The dog runs heedlessly in any direction chosen at random. It just runs. Inevitably, like a bird that escapes a cage does not know defensive flying and gets nailed by a hawk first day, the dog runs across the road in front of a car first day. I was determined not to be heedless with my freedom, which allows me to be sitting here today writing about it; otherwise, I'd have gone the way of the bird and the dog. Made some decisions I would not make today, explaining why I have a little bit of peace of mind in this time of the life. For one thing, I tried to learn how to be social, how to be charming at a cocktail party, how to be seen with the right set, shit like that. It never took. Never found comfort in a cocktail party. Then, I knew people I would totally stay away from now. Also, the other side of the coin, found a handful of the best friends of my life unto death do us part. Knew some wonderful people, too, people I recollect with warm feeling in the heart. It doesn't do to get in touch with people I have not seen since that time. They've gone to careers, families and new cars, bought the package. I've gone hillbilly, live on a back road with a cat, two donkeys, and drive a twenty year old car with rust places. I'm really at an ideal place in the life. I've lived the ideal that I don't want to impress anybody. I'm there. Nobody going nowhere. I don't impress anybody who lives by the way of "the world," the human mind. I need the freedom to let go and let God, as they say, let things around me happen their own natural way with the least of my interference. It may not be good husbandry, but it is how I'm comfortable.

vada by cheyanne

I have, I actually have held as a guiding light for self, to be somebody who does not impress anybody. I don't want people looking at me with the I'm-impressed look, or sucking up to me because I have power and influence, or wanting to rub elbows because I have more money than they do, or introducing me to people I don't want to meet, a great big expanse of expectations I don't want to pretend to live up to. I want the world of commerce and whatever else they do out there, that whole system of taking other people's money legally, I want them not even to know my name. I want them to see me the way they saw old man Sherman Scott who drove to town on his red-belly Ford tractor and wore his bib overalls and work boots to church. Just an old nuisance nobody much knows, he sees just a few people and stays to hisself, not looking for nothing but to live in harmony with neighbors, friends and the people he knows. Articulating it like this, in retrospect, I've made it. I spend my own time studying, learning, not in a structured, academic way. Like, for some reason I start wondering what is going on in China. What news we get about China is propaganda. So I start at zero. I know nothing about China. I found some contemporary Chinese films through netflix, found Chinese fiction and poetry through amazon, then wanted to read a history of China. Came upon the time of Genghis Khan. Two pages. All I knew about him was cliché stuff. He seemed awfully interesting in those two pages. I put the marker in the Chinese history and found a biography, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Found him much like King David; genocidal warlord, brilliant mind, a heart as big as Mongolia, became the Founding Father of the nation that formerly had been continually warring tribes. He really was a great man. This was a man who could jump on a wild horse and ride, only rode wild horses. This is how my study is done my way. A little bit at a time over several years, I'm familiar now with how people live in China. This just one of many veins I follow with no purpose but the guiding light of curiosity.  

cheyanne selfie

 

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MAKING MY OWN DECISIONS

bradley walker tomlin

Talking with my friend Kathryn, the subject of the feminine came up. I noted that I had a thought a few days ago about next lifetime. Would I want a female lifetime? Answer came back: NO. Why? The vulnerability. I'm perhaps over-sensitive to being vulnerable. The degree of my sensitivity to the vulnerable equals how much I don't like it. In one sense, it means I embrace being grounded. I like the ground. When somebody tells me about a new discovery that we can leave our bodies by way of certain meditations or medications, I'm not interested. I may be interested to hear about it, but I'm not willing to attempt it. Leaving the body strikes me as dangerous as swimming after eating. My first apprehension is what if I can't find my way back to the body? For such a trip, I would need the guidance of an experienced shaman. I would not do it as a parlor game because it is too vulnerable a situation. A major reason I don't ride motorcycles. An emergency room nurse convinced me that apprehension about motorcycles is good sense. Everyone I know who rides motorcycles has wipe-out stories. I don't want to wreck in a car, certainly not a motorcycle. I don't like to do anything that has a risk factor. Even starting a new painting with a blank canvas feels like risk, but it does not have emergency room potential. It's like stage fright. I've learned long ago I have no luck gambling. None. I realize my luck factor is less than 50-50. I don't ever take a chance anymore that has luck involved. I'm like the country song, if it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at all. I'm not one who can shake dice in my hand, blow a mojo on them, and roll the number I want. Say four people are playing a board game that involves dice, any four people, any game. I lose. I can go into it with positive thinking, right intent, a lucky charm, a prayer. I lose. I know by this time in the life to stay away from anything involving chance where life decisions are concerned. I like chance aesthetically, but not for practical matters that require decisions. Even then, I don't like to shut it out, would rather be open to it.

 

bradley walker tomlin

 

In my childhood I was not allowed to make decisions for myself. Leaving parents, decision making was new and I made some really ignorant decisions that followed me for several years. Parents were not decision makers either. They went to a church that made decisions for them. First thing I did, cut loose in the world, was look for somebody to make decisions for me. That was the biggest disaster of all. It took several years to bear down on it and, first, recognize I was unable to make an intelligent decision. By parent and church example I only knew how to react, not how to respond. I had the Billy Budd disease. Assaulted verbally, I could not defend myself or stand up for myself. I could only be silent and churn like a whirlwind of fire inside. What I wanted to say would have got me killed. I suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for several years. Still have it pretty bad. It's more mental now. Before, it controlled my movements, everything. I left their influence seething so deeply in hatred that one day age 27 I got with myself, told myself from conscious mind to subconscious mind, it's time to let go of the hatred. The source of the hatred was over a thousand miles away. I'd seethed with that hatred in my heart until I couldn't stand it anymore. One day I threw it off, said I'm not living in hate anymore. I've found forgiveness difficult unto impossible, such that I don't care anymore. Wanting "to be a better person," I looked for ways to set forgiveness in motion, but couldn't do it. Finally, I said, Live with it---to hell with trying to deal with it any more---let it rest, accept it---I really don't want to forgive, so let that be the end of it. And it was the end of it. I let it go. It continues with me in a box in a closet, and that's ok by me. I can't deal with it, so in the box is the best place for it. I've never had a worse enemy. This one I had no defenses against, and no recourse, making the kid hate it all the more. It made the kid determined that in adult life no individual will take charge of my decision making. Nobody but me will make my decisions.

bradley walker tomlin

I've kept it that way ever since. Somebody wants to take over my decision making for myself, it ends in a squabble of some sort, because I don't allow it, the other gets mad, I get mad, and inside myself I make my definitive decision and that's it, it's over. When somebody makes the first bid to take over my decision making, telling me what I must do, it goes no further than that. The one thing I hold to jealously is making my own decisions. I've been called independent and arrogant. Lines from an early song Bob Dylan composed would come to mind, "Call me anything you like, I will never deny it... Farewell Angelina, I must go where it's quiet." The funny part was when I finally caught on how to stop others from telling me what decisions to make for myself, the whole phenomenon ended. It was the end of people getting in my face telling me what to do. It was like until I made the decision within, something in me invited being told what to do. I was sending out invitations to tell me what to do, then rejecting the counsel for telling me what to do. I think that's called something like a double-bind. In a hell-if-you-do-hell-if-you-don't situation, I go with what I want to do. In conversation with an old-time preacher years ago, I said to him, "If everything is a sin, I'm free. I can do anything." He said, "No, you're not." I said, "If everything is a sin, then nothing is a sin." He said, "No, it's not." I didn't take it any further. We were coming from different cosmologies. He was pre-Copernicus, I was post-Darwin. He couldn't accept round earth, and sure as hell couldn't accept evolution, a word equivalent to atheist, the same thing as a communist. It made no difference to me that he didn't get an understanding of heavenly bodies in school, nor did it matter that he didn't believe he came from a monkey.

bradley walker tomlin

I couldn't explain round earth or evolution in ways he could understand, because I didn't understand either well enough to articulate it simply without going off into conceptual mind. An attempt to convince somebody that what they believe is not the case only drives them deeper into believing it is the case. I remind myself that anything outside myself is no concern of mine. It is not my place to correct somebody else's vision to make it conform to mine, which I'm not sure of anyway, and have a hard time articulating. Different consciousness, different experience, different information make a canyon between some people. I believe there was such a canyon between the old preacher and me. We were of different cultures, different cosmologies, different visions of God. We got along good over a lot of years until the time he started telling me I was going to do what I was not going to do, telling it with the authority of a man who makes my decisions. He made it clear that I did not have the right to my own decisions. I said I did and he never saw me again for several years. I was given the blame. I took the blame and shrugged it off. He'd crossed the line and there was no going back. He would never accept he did not have the right to control me, and I would never accept that he did. I think it's called a Mexican Standoff, two men with guns drawn on each other, hammers cocked. He would not accept my right as an independent individual and I would not accept his belief he had the right to make my decisions. Of course it's my fault. Call me anything you like, I will never deny it. We both regretted we couldn't get back together after that, but he was not relenting his belief he had the right to make my decisions and gave me no choice but to show him I don't see it that way.

bradley walker tomlin himself  

WANNA VS OUGHTA

cosmic moment

Wet rainy day, 60 degrees, makes me want to sleep all day. Took a good nap awhile ago. Caterpillar napping all day. Fiddler's convention coming up tonight. I feel drawn to it by oughta and should, and not at all by wanna. I don't feel any wanna. When I get right down with myself about why, it comes back that I just don't care. I have never liked competitions from childhood on to now. I don't like participating in competitions whether I win or lose. A win I take for nothing and a loss I take for nothing. Judging at a fiddler's convention, like judging any art form, painting, photography, poetry, quilt making, what have you, is totally subjective with some basic objective principles some judges adhere to and some do not. I don't question their decisions, because I don't have the ear or the experience for it. It would be foolish to let me be a judge. Usually it's musicians who are the judges. I've never found argument with fiddler's convention judging because it's a mystery how they can distinguish between the top 10 enough to scale them 1 thru 10. I've got to where I consider a top 10 placement the same as #1.



It's enjoyable to hear the music. There's no two ways about that. A band comes onstage, plays two tunes as wound up and tight as they can get, then it's over and they leave the stage. The next band comes up when everybody gets rounded up and does the same thing. It feels unnatural to me. It doesn't feel invalid by any means, just unnatural. I'd prefer to hear the bands at someplace like the Jubilee in Sparta, or the Floyd Country Store, Applewood in Cana, Rex Theater in Galax, The Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, where the bands play for the people that love their music. And I like hearing them at home on cd about the best. When I get right down to the core of it, it's that I don't like to get out in a crowd of people. That's something else I've had from childhood. Maybe I got it from daddy who hated standing in line so much (WW2 Marine) we'd go to movies in the middle and sit through the cartoons and previews and the blank space between movies, then watch the first half and leave. It taught me to go by clues in the second half of a movie to figure out the first half. I have never done it since I've had a choice, but still think it an interesting way to see a movie.



I prefer my visits with other people in small numbers, less than a handful numbers. I tend to want to talk WITH whoever it is I'm talking with, not be practicing the art of running my mouth as fast as breathlessly possible to say nothing in the largest number of words. When I'm at a fiddler's convention I feel like I'm doing what is expected of me and wish I had stayed home because of it. Like when I stopped smoking for ten years, then started smoking again because I didn't like being identified a non-smoker. I don't like the smug manner of non-smokers that look down on smokers. Makes me want to smoke-smoke-smoke that cigarette. That's about as far as my inner rebel goes. Don't count on me to carry a gun for some dumb-ass rebel leader who is all about ego. No chance of getting caught in an FBI sting operation because money has no value for me. They'll never be able to set me up to receive a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills in a motel room on camera. Not a playa. That's all in the money game I don't play. Just watch it in movies.



A large part of what I like about this curmudgeon phase I'm enjoying so much is that I'm only doing things I like doing and only seeing people I like seeing. I'm truly grateful for the inner calm of this time when I give myself permission to go where I want to go because I want to for my own aesthetic interest, not what's expected of me because I used to have a radio show of mountain music. I have to confess, too, that a lot of the oughta, should, needta is self-generated. When I stop paying attention to it, I do what I really want to do and have a good time all the time. I'd rather go to Selma's for coffee and a visit with whoever I run into there. That just about says it, doesn't it. I don't wanna go.



Just now went to the kitchen, got a beer and said out loud, "I'm not going." Good. That's settled. I've heard two weather forecasts, one 20%, the other 80%. I guess I have to admit to myself I miss nearly all the fiddler's conventions because I don't enjoy them. I love the music, but it doesn't turn me on hearing the musicians so tight with a chance to only play two songs. Not enough time to warm up and get in the music groove and let it flow. No time at all for that. Of course, I understand studio recordings are made that way too. The real deal is that I don't like going out with hundreds or thousands of people around. It's why I prefer the small town to the city, Sparta traffic to Charlotte traffic. I always went to small schools. Could not go to a mega university. They wouldn't accept me anyway.


It disturbs my mind somewhat to see how much in the past I adhered to oughta, gotta, should, needta. That, I think I got from mother, school, church, television, and everybody in my life. Paying attention to it came from school where I'm told all the time it's this way and not that way, true or false, multiple choice, this not that, time-saving tests to grade since our educational system is more about form than function. It should be this way, not that way. This way over here is correct, that way over there is not. I felt in my experience like k-6 was real schooling, and 7-12 factory schooling. My college I felt was real schooling, again, to a degree. Going from 6th grade to 7th grade was a serious shock. I wasn't ready for factory life, had no idea that's what it would be. Largely, I find myself bewildered like everyone around me by the continuing changes in civilization, in belief systems, in approval, until I want to stay in peace at home where I seldom play music any more because I like the quiet so much. I don't think I'm like a snail pulling into its shell, which I'm ok with, but more like a homing pigeon that found its way home.

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FINDING MY OWN POWER

alexander seton, hand-carved marble, 2011

je suis comme je suis

je suis faite comme ca

     --jacques prevert

Justin came by today to pick up the 24 foot ladder I'd told him to come and get. He's wanting to start painting the outside of his house. I'm of an age where ladders have become the enemy. I hear of people my age falling off them, hospital, serious damage. I don't have any desire to hit my head on rock falling off a ladder. No interest in ladders anymore. Justin married with a house needs a good extension ladder. I'm glad to get it out of here and into the hands of someone I want to have it. I won't be tempted to climb the ladder now in case of any reason. I used to be very comfortable on a ladder, but am not always comfortable standing on the ground anymore. I enjoy giving things I don't need to Justin and Crystal when they can put the various objects to use or sell them, whatever. When I give them something, I forget about it. I don't ever want to be one who says some time in the future, 'Well, I gave you....' I'll never say anything like that. If I do, I'll be the first one to hit myself. And it will be hard. I remember the time I heard myself start a sentence, 'The kids these days....' I got with myself so seriously, it never happened again.



In the teen years, I felt like a sailboat with a broken mast riding a storm. I left my teen years like escaping from prison. Let me outta here! I was somebody at sea in a boat that went in circles and never got anywhere, had no destination, no idea of what to do, only a long list of what not to do. My head was twisted in a knot from conflicting influences coming at me from all directions. I wasn't able to make decisions for myself. Church didn't allow making decisions for myself. Parents didn't allow it. Neither did school. Nowhere in my early education did I learn anything about the importance of making practical decisions. When it came to decisions I made for myself, they were not so intelligent, because I had so little experience. Anybody who impressed me with a big mouth that bragged a lot could direct me like a sheep. Mother telling me what not to do, daddy daring me to do anything, just make a move, like a skeet shooter, school telling me information is knowledge, church telling me that to live my life as a human being is wrong.



At age 23, when all the obligatory forces that controlled my life came to an end, I set out taking my first footsteps as myself by my own decisions. First thing: education. I knew I was a functional idiot, unable to read with comprehension, believing other people knew more what was right for me than I did. Everybody was saying, you needta, you oughta, you should, you gotta, and it all conflicted. It took years before I learned that other people do not know better than I do what's right for me on my path. If I don't know, that means nobody knows. Somebody whose path is working in a bookstore gets told by somebody who races motorcycles he needs to get a motorcycle. Not necessarily. How long it took before I could turn a deaf ear to sentences that start, you oughta. What a liberation it was when I got it. Lost some friends over my liberation. Somebody who wants to control me is not my friend.



I left God as one of the obligations that inhibited decision making. I needed the freedom to think for myself, whatever that meant. I needed the mental space to find out what it meant. Two years on a ship in the Navy, the last of the major obligations on the checklist, I used to learn how to read. I read the books the senior English class in high school read, the course I didn't dare take. I discovered Albert Camus', L'etranger, The Stranger, then at the base library found more Camus. I started reading people he wrote about, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, serious existentialist philosophers who wrote their philosophy into novels of the French resistance during WW2. I read several of the novels, quite a lot of their plays. Existentialism fit my way of thinking at the time in a perfect synchronicity. I understood existentialism in my life, my dull, bland, boring life in a city in Kansas where 50s television was the closest thing I ever saw to art. Certainly had no notion of the abstract expressionists in New York at the time breaking new ground every day.



On my own, out of the Navy, into school, into a good part time job, an attic apartment that was my own space, I was suddenly curious about everything I didn't know about, contemporary art, contemporary writing, film, theater, all art expressions. Art has been my only interest in my adult life. What can you do with an interest in art in America? Not much. A few aggressive people can. But I've never been aggressive, nor have I ever enjoyed competition. I see it a good learning experience, but not a good way to live. I can't live my life in aggressive competition. I hear on NPR talk about getting corporate jobs, resumes, giving self over to the corporation for absolute control, learning to be a robot for good pay that, alas, goes into robot living in a suburb and watching tv with 300 channels. I need more than money and status in my life. I think of WB Yeats's father, the painter Jack Yeats, saying he would not talk about money or sex, both of them too boring as subjects of conversation. When I saw that the first time, it registered I knew what he was saying, so I talk of neither subject. They really are too boring in conversation. They're only exciting when desire is involved.

Looking backward in hindsight where we have close to 20/20 vision, the Charleston years, the years I lived under my own power, were the years of breaking down all that went before, in my time of decisions made by everyone but me, picking apart what was real from all the unreal. What do I call real and unreal? It's real when it has to do with who I am. It's unreal when it glosses over who I am with what I am. That's my meaning when I use this language. I've spent my adult life looking to go with the real and let the unreal go its own way. Best not to fight the unreal or react to it. Just let it flow by like a muddy old river. There is enough that's real in myself and around me that I don't need the unreal. I have no false friends, no fake people in my life. I really love that. No money and no status means nobody sucking up to me for something I have, not who I am. No buzzards circling my funeral. Nobody bullshitting me about something I have no interest in. Nobody trying to sell themselves to me. No reason to try to sell myself. I am as I am. I was made that way.

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