GROUNDED

jenny nibbles afternoon grain

                                       Now that my ladder's gone,
          I must lie down where all the ladders start
          in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. 

                                                            ~WB Yeats
                           from Circus Animals Desertion

Saw a news headline today, a flood in the capital of Georgia. I hadn't heard of a flood in Atlanta, then realized it was Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, the country between Russia to the north and Turkey to the south, the Black Sea to the west and Azerbaijan to the east. It is one of the poorest countries in the Western world, a consequence of its history and geography. The Tbilisi flood set loose the animals from the zoo, and they needed rounding up. How do you catch zoo animals in a flooded city? I saw a Georgian film last month, In Bloom, a beautifully made film, a peep-hole view into post-Soviet life, a picture of how a couple of families live their everyday lives, two teenage girls in school. It is my only experience of Georgia, other than seeing it on a map. Stalin was born in Gori, Georgia, a city about forty miles by highway from Tbilisi. He gave Georgia a kind of status in Soviet times, though post-Soviet, he's not much of a tourist draw. 

jack nibbles afternoon grain

I read the brief article about the zoo animals in Tbilisi and WB Yeat's poem, Circus Animals Desertion, came to mind, one of my top favorite poems of all time, all places. I googled the title, found the poem and read it. Came to the end and there it was, a purpose in my destiny, the place I set to start my new life in the mountains, the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, my own interior stuff, the bottom of the ladder, on the ground. At the beginning of my new life, I worked a farm with 22 head of beef cows and one bull. Sent the calves to market every fall. Cleared some land with a bush axe of saplings and young trees grown up the first several weeks, working self into shape. Hard labor and solitude. Tom gave me the job to see if I could take it. If I couldn't do it, he'd be rid of me from the start and not have to fool with a simpleton on the farm. I took it for boot camp, focused working the body into shape. I wanted to come down out of mind, self-image, everything false about my motivations and wants. Hypothesized hard labor and standing on the ground the best place to start, living simply on the edge of the woods, farm on three sides, a gravel road and one neighbor on it. 

jack and butterfly

I'd separated self from a host of habit patterns like on a chopping block. It was an extreme move. I knew, making the decision, there would be no turning back. This is it. Figure it out. My prayer had been that I would like to go someplace with a living culture where English is spoken. Appalachian culture came up with an opening. I thought, if this isn't answer to prayer, it's awfully coincidental. It was difficult in the early years, coming from an absence of culture, initially, then a decade in Southern culture, enough to see it going away, being swallowed by the anti-culture, anti-community wave sweeping the land with set determination. Mountain culture continued. It would last at least long enough to provide a taste of a way of life, albeit one on its way out. I have not totally adopted mountain culture for my own, because then I'd be conforming to codes not my own. I came here to find my own codes. I have adopted many of the mountain codes for my own for their practical application to everyday life, like Confucianisms. I never play education one-upmanship with any of the hillbilly people I know. And they know it. It's part of my name. Also, I don't make apologies for my education. I did it because I wanted it for my own self, for my own development. You're not apologizing for quitting after the seventh grade and I'm not apologizing for sticking with it. I had to prove to the people around me I was not looking down on them by not looking down on them. It was easy. I never looked down on any of them from the beginning. 

jenny

I can't talk down to anybody. One of the first things I learned in my first year is I aint got nothin on no hillbilly in the entire Appalachian chain. I found them such intelligent people they humbled me. First maxim I gave self was never attempt to fool anybody of these mountains for any reason. It will not work. It may for a minute or two, but when it stops working, you'll never see a sign of it. They just pay less attention to what you say. Ralph Stanley, speaking of the mountains was also speaking of mountain culture when he said, "They keep you humble, they put you in your place." I had found my place among a people I respected. I learned respect from hillbillies. I asked my friend Jr Maxwell when he was into his late seventies, who he had looked up to along the way. He said he looked up to everybody. It was all he said. It needed no amending. At the moment, I took it for somewhat self-serving, but learned as years went by it was a concise statement of fact. I understood why so many people looked up to Jr. He looked up to them first. He was decidedly the most humble man I'd ever known. He was so deeply humble within himself that he never needed to show it the way people do pretending. It was simply who he was. I threw my ladder away when I left the world of commerce. I have preferred to remain on the ground throughout my stay. I like what Joseph Campbell said about ladders. We spend our lives climbing a ladder and when we reach the top, alas, it was the wrong ladder. I'll stay on the ground, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, and not concern myself with ladders. Ladders deceive. I could not have donkeys on a ladder. 

jack

*

A RHYTHM OF PEACE

I've fallen into a continuum of being awake, being asleep, days go by and from time to time I need to know the date. This is what calendars are for. I keep one with big numbers on the kitchen wall to consult when I suddenly need to know the date. It becomes a nuisance to look up the date and a bigger nuisance to keep up with it. It seems like there comes a place where alternating states of awake and asleep make a rhythm of their own and it's all one nameless stretch. Awake and asleep become like waves on the beach; water advances, water recedes. I like this rhythm. It feels like the rhythm of the old-time days, working on the farm, working by seasons and daylight. The calendar has its place on the wall, a document that keeps us in sync with everyone around us by way of agreed upon time. The Atomic Clock is civilization's official time keeper, gives us divisions of the earth's rotation so we can coordinate time in a way that is agreed upon all the way around the globe. The clock is the closest device we have to being able to see time, as far as I know. Like gravity, time is invisible. Gravity is measured in weights. Time is the spinning of the earth spiraling around the sun, the moon going around the earth, and the bigger transit of the sun spiraling in the Milky Way galaxy. Hence, astrology, given that cosmic arrangements of planets are in a continuum of change, never two nanoseconds the same. As in our lives where change is the nature of the continuum. Like cigarette smoke rising into spirals, the spirals in turbulence, the spirals in water flow. Another vision of as-above-so-below. 

My friend Carole and I have come into a place of living by light, dark, weather. When things are going my way and I have no appointments in town, I like the rhythm of awake awhile, asleep awhile. I sleep when I feel like it, night or day, am awake night or day as I feel like it. It's not very ambitious living. It separates me from the rhythms in everybody I know. Add to the list television that separates me conceptually from everyone around me, given exceptions. I can go with the core of the religion around me, but not the trappings. That I have to swear to believe immaculate conception, I cannot. I don't care. I don't care if Jesus was born biologically or mythologically. His life is more important to me than his death. His message of love is the only reason to know about Jesus. That he walked on both land and water is cool, but love was his only reason for being. The trappings make the followers into a herd of sheep. Love frees one from the herd and sets the seeker on one's own pilgrimage, whatever form or path it takes. Each one is unique, leaving no room for s'posed-to, and no being held back by a committee. I see a headline about Joe the Plumber saying Obama girls are promoting gangs. It doesn't annoy me anymore that ignorance is front and center. When I look at the progression of American public education and the progression of American politics, I'm surprised by no extreme degree of ignorance. Our politicians are corporate stooges. They are not put in place for any reason but their ignorance, they truly do not know right from wrong, people easily told what to do and eager to go along, fame and money, glitz and glamour, face-lifts, looking like a mummy in old age. 

My purpose leaving the world of commerce and committing to rural life on a remote road in the mountains was to find a way to live "in the world, not of it." First thing, I had to define for self what is meant by "the world," which took some years. Finding the place to draw the line between world and not-world gets subtle and at once obvious. I gradually came to The World is the world created by human mind, the not-natural world. This includes everything from architecture to music to religion to spiritualism to art to getting up in the morning. Everything. Duality. Ok, this is the world I want to live in, but not of. I can see I'm in it, the playing field. Then I had to figure out what OF meant. Attachment comes to me first. Ego. It's ego that wants to attach to things, ideas, agendas, purposes, and again, everything. I took it that letting go of attachments is a way to not be of the world. I didn't know why it was important to me, but that it is universally said to be the way, the path. I had no idea of why, except figuring there must be something to it. By now after years of mentating on the issue and allowing the super-conscious to search on its own while mind is distracted by the world of commerce, getting basic bills paid, I feel like I have some insight, a little bit. It's about inner peace. Attachments of my past have fallen away due to waning interest. Turns out attachments worry the mind. 

I used to want stuff for myself, paintings on the walls, books, music. Now I have more than I want. I want to get rid of stuff, wants of the past. Like I want to keep a copy of Pinocchio in the house, knowing I'll never read it again, but love it so much as a story I like seeing the spine of the book on the shelf. It's a reminder of the story within. I like seeing the spines of books on shelves, titles I've read and remember in a nanosecond my feeling about the content. I see the poetry of WB Yeats and feel a soft glow in the heart. Three months in London in 1972, I carried a paperback of Yeats poetry in a pocket, reading in it every day on "the tube." In that way, a book is, indeed, a friend. I want now to keep the donkeys comfortable, Caterpillar comfortable, and want the well-being of my friends, want them all to have a good life on their own terms. I have to pull back from wanting a reasonable government. That hope is over. Learning from the nature of the world to step back and let it go by, the world of treachery and me-first, I let the people that want to partake of it have at it. I see news about police brutality, killings and mayhem in general, and look out the windows at the green world, the birds, the squirrels, the donkeys, the meadow, thinking, this is peace. I see the occasional car go by on Waterfall Road out the windows, the road of peace. I tell myself none of the nonsense in DC applies here, nor do the Koch brothers, except in destructive ways that apply to the future. As long as they're not bombing Waterfall Road and a SWAT team isn't breaking down my door with guns blazing, the wrong address for a meth lab, I live in peace. Waterfall Road can exist in a condition of peace because the road, like the country Costa Rica, has nothing of value to corporate mind.  

*

   

UNCOVERING DESTINY

In recent weeks and months I find self assessing the past in new ways from how I saw a time when it was present. I see a pattern the details fit into, when before, I saw the details like puzzle pieces strewn on a tabletop to be gone through looking for interlocking parts. I could not see the patterns or the flow that ran through the progression to make the completed image. I don't remember a time when I wasn't curious in the back of my mind what my destiny might  be. By now, I have lived my destiny, whatever it is. To find out what it is, I can look at now. I am living it. From here, it looks like the one desire that has run through my whole life has been to live quietly and peaceably, not have somebody telling me how wrong I am, I need to make more money and live in a suburb. I look at the life I have as the life I created for myself by my own will, determination, letting go and allowing "chance." In this time of the life I have found my flow. When I allow the flow, things work out, timing works sometimes perfectly. Possibly, this has been  my destiny, to find my flow. It's been my destiny to live in a mountain holler in the Blue Ridge, the mountains I remember seeing in National Geographics, blue with orange sky. I've seen those mountains many times by now. I am in the blue mountains. When I saw pictures of the Blue Ridge in childhood, I was seeing my destiny unawares. One great motivation along the way has been to contribute the very least possible to the Military Industrial Complex, the corporate world, the belief system that money is number One. I don't know where it came from, possibly past lives, but I have never wanted to train myself to be an automaton just to have money and a country club membership. I'd rather drive off the end of the earth like Thelma and Louise.   

I suspect that basically my motivation was to get away, away from where I am. I wanted to get away from Wichita, from Kansas. The momentum stuck and there came a time I wanted to get away from Charleston and South Carolina. Came to North Carolina mountains and spent several years wanting to get away from here. Finally, I caught on that the wanting to get away momentum was about wanting to get away from parents, their ongoing passive-aggressive war with each other and overtly-aggressive war on the kid. Their example made me vow to self I will never marry, will never live like they live, will not allow myself to be a corporate pawn. I would live in a peaceable atmosphere without television. All the time living in Charleston I had a longing for the mountains with no idea of why. I wanted to write about the mountains, but had no experience. I like to read accounts of Himalayan climbers. I read about them with no desire to try it. I accept it is something I could never do this lifetime physically, and have no interest in doing mentally. I have no desire to climb to the "top of the world," mainly because it is not. There's no oxygen. I can go to a place I can't breathe in a swimming pool. The people that climb those mountains have their own motivations. My motivation has been to live quietly in peace, frugally, alone with a few pets. I came to the mountains on my spiritual path or pilgrim path, whatever. I think of it simply as my life path. By spiritual path, I mean living by the way of the spirit, the Tao, the flow, in tune with my interior life. I could not live seeing one way on the inside and conforming to another way on the outside. A lot of people can do that. It's the path to money. A lot of people cannot do it. These are the people where I find my friends. Birds of a feather, a universal law. 

I've never wanted to make my way walking over the backs of the working people. I came to the mountains with some lines from WB Yeats in my mind from his poem, Among School Children, where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. The foul rag and bone shop of the heart is where I have wanted to live my life. It is one way of looking at my destiny. It is what I have wanted for myself. Another way of saying it, I want to live close to the bone, simply, very simply. More and more simple has been my goal. By now, it's about as simple as it can get without living in a tent. My momentum in this lifetime has not been so much toward something, but away from. I went away like an arrow pulled back as far as the length of the arrow allows, and let go. It's actually somewhat difficult to live in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Now that we the people are in the cross hairs of police state, I'm all the more glad to be outside society. At the same time, rural America is an awfully vulnerable place to live. In economic downturns, the new tv word for Depressions, rural America goes under first and stays under. It's somewhat difficult to live with, but rurally, people take care of each other in hard times. Community comes together in hard times. So I've taken myself off the ladder to any kind of ambition or success at the start, have never stepped on the first rung. In the Navy, I never made one step in advancement. I wanted to come out the same rank I went in. It was my way of saying no to fascism, militarism. They could force my body, but not my mind. Childish? Maybe. It was serious business at the time. I was already done with authoritarian rule by threats. By the time the Navy was over, I had completed my debts to society. Got married and served my country. Got unmarried and out of the Navy, and I was done. From this moment on, I was on my own, made my own decisions, nobody telling me what I'm gonna and not-gonna do, except the boss at work. 

That weekend between the Friday of leaving the Navy and Monday of starting school on my own was the chopping block moment. All that went before, ended that weekend. All that went after, started that weekend. It's been my attitude toward work that an employer holds over me and operates with the right to fire me. He often doesn't realize I have the right to fire him. I worked for a surveyor for a time who took it to be his right to berate and talk down to me, like he did everybody who ever worked for him. I told him I took that shit when I was a kid. I don't take it now. And walked away. I didn't need his minimum wage. I could work for minimum wage someplace else. When somebody with power over me thinks it's time to give me a cussing to nail their power into place, they'd best go into it intending it be the last time they see me. That's the moment they lose the power I gave them the illusion of for minimum wage. Minimum wage does not buy a whole lot of power-over. I'm a stubborn Taurus, I'm happy to say. My stubborn ways have kept me out of a lot of entanglements I don't want for myself. My spiritual path is my everyday life. I have learned that the spiritual path is more about being a benefit to others than going to church. I mean by being a benefit to others, being spontaneously available when someone near at hand suddenly has a need I can help do something about. Mountain people are generous when it comes to helping ones in need. I take all my relationships with friends to be spiritual relationships. The people I know have a great deal of value for me. I automatically, can't help but see everyone who comes into view a soul in a body and mind. I never see their clothes as anything but a costume like a benign Halloween costume, a costume of style and rank. I interact with the person inside the costume, body and mind. Seeing the people around me so, retains them as a part of the path, weaves them into my experience of my path. It's in relation to others that we have either a good life or a rotten life. How I treat others is how they treat me. That, too, is part of my path. 

meher baba

*

A POEM FOR TODAY FROM 1919 BY WB YEATS

the sphinx in snow last winter

     THE SECOND COMING


     Turning and turning in the widening gyre

     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

     Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

     The ceremony of innocence was drowned;

     The best lack all conviction, while the worst

     Are full of passionate intensity.


     Surely some revelation is at hand;

     Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

     The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

     When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

     Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

     A shape with a lion body and the head of a man.

     A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

     Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

     Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

     The darkness drops again; but now I know

     That twenty centuries of stony sleep

     Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

     And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

     Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?


                                       ---WB Yeats, 1865-1939

pyramids in snow last winter

*

THINGS FALL APART

Going by reports I've seen, the march on Washington, the 50th anniversary gathering, amounted to not much but another reason we did not want police state. I found a video of Al Sharpton talking there, but turned it off after half a minute. He grates my nerves. At least he followed some sound counsel on changing his hairdo. He's impossible for me to take seriously after the Tawana Brawley non-incident that occurred several years ago. Young black girl had shit smeared on her and claimed she'd been raped. Sharpton was in on the ruse. Sharpton and his zealots made it up, set the whole thing up and made a big racial issue of it, accusing and ranting. A preacher. I'm surprised to see he evidently has enough credibility for a tv network to pay him to be a news commentator, and he was given a slot to talk at the Washington civil rights march 2013. The police presence was all the way up to military, taking hand-held signs from people handing them out, threatening them with arrest. The first civil rights march in 1963 made a great wave in the ocean of collective human consciousness. This memorial half a century after was not even a ripple in a virtual pond. The reports I read indicated that the speakers only had two or three minutes apiece. Then I saw Al Sharpton had 20 minutes. Whatever.

In Raleigh this weekend, some people who had been feeding the homeless on weekends were told to stop it or be arrested by police. No citing the law or statute or reason. Stop it or you're arrested. Another reason we did not want police state. Our national government is telling third world countries to allow peaceful demonstrations if they want to go on receiving billions in aid from USA. Occupy has been shut down. The people peacefully protesting in North Carolina and Wisconsin are arrested routinely for peaceable protesting. It's on international tv and no one seems to get it. Enforcing democracy on destitute countries while arresting demonstrators in USA acting out democracy makes the same kind of sense as locking up "whistleblowers" while calling this a free society. All I know of that's free about it is the polluted air to breathe. Next we'll be sold oxygen like in Tokyo. We've become like a literal herd of sheep controlled by television, believing uncritically whatever we're told, because we're supposed to. In every herd is one that stays off to itself. It is with the herd, a member of the herd, stays with the herd, but stays apart from the herd to itself. I've been the one to stay off to itself in every herd I've been associated with. I'm with the herd, but like a little space around me.

Because I don't have a head full of commercials and sitcom canned laughter, I don't believe it is necessary to make my life a pipeline between Walmart and the landfill. It's actually kinda creepy being the only one, but for less than a handful of the people of my world who does not partake of the daily propaganda ingestion. I don't mean just political propaganda, though there's plenty of that too. In my lifetime I have seen it shorten the American attention span down to nothing. I remember years ago being alarmed when I saw the people around me had an attention span of a cat. By now, it's not even that. It's nonexistent. Zombies, the living dead, are popular entertainment. In my case, it doesn't matter that I don't watch tv, because the entire culture I live in, the larger American culture, our way of thinking is created by television. I don't mean this show or that commercial. I mean the steady flow of flash, both visual and auditory, vey little of it, if any, anything more than flash, devoid of content except to sell something subliminally. It seems like the people who watch television the most have become televisions. I've known a few people that I think of as televisions.

 

The US Navy took me outside my life for two years. I resented that about the draft. I am not soldier or sailor anything but fodder. The first six months living in barracks broke my television habit cold turkey. My head would clear of television images when the ship was at sea, and then I'd have another extended spell on land with television. At sea, the television images would gradually drift out of my head. On the ship I read as much as I could to use the time for something beneficial to myself since I was bound by involuntary servitude for being born a boy in a militarist society, a militarist civilization, a universal militarist mind set. In childhood I wanted to escape to Tibet where they lived in peace. Then Chinese militarism put an end to that. Who gave a shit? Some did. Some gave a great deal of shit, but not enough to stop the oppression of a people unable to defend themselves militarily. It's like what happened in USA, Australia and Latin America; when the outsiders move in by military or economic force, the local people become the outsiders in their own land. The Tibetans staying behind are regarded by the Chinese like the Indians are regarded on Turtle Island in this time. What's to be done? Go to India, the last place where peaceable people have a chance. India has nukes, and India has military. And India is engaged in perpetual terrorist war with Pakistan like Israel with the entire Arab world.

In the late 1980s, Independence attorney Lorne Campbell would comment on the news from time to time, "It's time to move higher up the mountain." Hearing the news in this time, yesterday, today, tomorrow, gives one a visual and a story that brings to mind a working out of the WB Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, the center does not hold. We don't seem to have a center in this time.

     Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
     the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
     Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, at the end of WW1. Here it is again. The center is not holding any longer and things are falling apart. It's a cycle we're going through again. America had it's center in being white dominant middle class in the Fifties, Ozzie and Harriet, whose rock star son died in a plane crash free-basing cocaine. We have on the one hand a television fantasy, and on the other hand the in-person version steps out into our world in a plane crash. The Yeats poem is a  beautifully composed vision of the time around the Second Coming. It tells a cycle so well it reads like prophecy. You can find it googling yeats second coming.  I go about thinking much of the time the center does not hold. Like Campbell, I say to myself, Time to move higher up the mountain. I'm already as high up the mountain as I can go, so that's kinda redundant. My center seems to be holding. Every day I look at the green world outside in gratitude to God that I am not caught up in television mind manipulated unconsciously. I pay attention to current events not by tv news, but by newspaper and magazine articles. I'm not Noam Chomsky. I couldn't read it all, due to not being that interested. I like to follow threads of the unwinding of the world as we knew it and see / witness / observe the new world coming on. It's a head game, totally a head game.   

 

 

*

 

NO WORRIES

red ring



Mortality was with me much of the time today, my own, questioning a lot of things. I got with myself and asked why I would want to go on. The answer for that question was I've recently come into a new way of seeing and it's fun. I'd like to enjoy it awhile. Then I thought of Jean who came into a new place and she went on out. I'm not worried over dying because I have a belief that it's as quick as a scene change in a movie, one frame to the next. A few friends have mentioned legacy along the way. What legacy? I ask. Dead is dead. So what. It's a shame somebody has to find the corpse and deal with it. But what's that to me? I don't like leaving my friends.



I was thinking I have just a few years left, if that, so why not enjoy them, let them be fun, have an attitude of allowing, no need to be judging to the bad as well as to the good, but allowing events and others to be themselves without need to be controlled or judged by me. Don't worry, be happy. Let it be. Don't worry over the news, over politics, over other people's business, over our country's downhill run since the corporate take-over of our government, November 22, 1963. Let all of it rest. The way I see things is for myself, not necessarily for someone else. Someone else has their own way of seeing things. There are so many generation gaps between mine and the present that I don't even try to understand any more what the high school and college age youngsters are taking seriously, or anything. There is the golden thread that is humanity; it runs between all of us making it possible to span generation gaps, nationality and language gaps, political gaps, gender gaps, belief gaps.



WB Yeats' poem THE SECOND COMING stays with me, the opening words especially,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
...

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


In the formation years of the growing USofA there was a center that held everyone together, the New World, the new democracy, independence from foreign rule. The sense was everywhere of building a nation. Now the nation is built. We've become collectively comfortable, even the working class and the black people. Television keeps everyone passive. We watch the channels of our choices. We listen to the music of our choices. We don't rally to the idea of the nation we're building. Now that it's built, it's turning out that the people don't want democracy any more. Requires paying attention. Americans don't pay attention any more. Half a century of television and it's television that holds everything together, that is American culture everywhere from rural to urban, every subculture. Television has wiped out subcultures like Walmart wiped out small towns.



The only center now is money and television. Mammon is the god of money and television is his instrument that is all about money, encouraging belief that money is the high and the mighty. The ceremony of innocence is drowned. We've been noticing for decades that kids don't have a childhood anymore. The period of innocence is much briefer than it used to be, drowned in a world of adult thinking, growth hormones in corporate burgers, television--even the kid shows are made by adults. I have actually sat in the home of friends around 20 years ago when the kids were around 5 and 7. Kids on the floor in front of the tv, parents sitting watching tv, me there too. A man and a woman get out of their clothes and proceed making babies on top of the covers in an episode the camera never left until it was over. The parents seriously opposed to the kids seeing sex on the tv. The kids weren't 2 feet from the tv. Parents watching it and not even noticing. It's what I call unconscious.



My resolution for the rest of my life is to have fun every day. I do what I do in the spirit of fun. I do what I want to do, not what I don't want to do. Other people's expectations will always be disappointed.