ET and Baldness.

As you know ET was hairless, at least the bits of him caught on film. Likewise NASA’s secret internet extraterrestrials. There are even ancient myths that the extraordinary evolution of the human race is in some way a result of extraterrestrial contact. Being staunchly working class I lean towards the baldness explanation. Imagine you are an ape, a monkey or Orangeman covered in hair happily picking nits from your other family members and popping them in your mouth for extra nutrition. You’re warm and good-looking according to the social norms of all the other hairy apes. And then one fateful day there’s an outbreak of alopecia. Bam! overnight you’re all hairless, not only cold you feel ashamed in glossy coated company. You develop a massive inferiority complex. In desperation you slink away and seek a fire to keep warm then figure out how to keep it going and eventually make it. This necessity becomes the mother of an inventive mind. Pretty soon you’re making tools and roller skates and stuff and finding a new use for the skins of all the animals you’ve eaten. After the initial shock this isn’t turning out too bad but you’re still holding a grudge against all those little shites who made fun of you. You progress. You begin to look down on all the animals that haven’t had that necessity thrust upon them and haven’t upgraded to your new outlook on life. You domesticate them, cage them but somewhere deep inside you wish you weren’t an outcast, you wish you could still be in your natural place. You evolve to solve every conceivable puzzle, find the answers to everything, but at every turn that inferiority complex bugs you. It’s summed up in the Eagles lyric, “Who will form the grand design, of what is yours and what is mine?”  I’m looking forward to the day we lose it. Oh and I may be wrong about the roller skates. 

Lime Plaster.

Did you know cement, gypsum plaster and acrylic paints cause damp in older houses? And that lime mortar and plaster, clay and linseed based paints solve a damp problem, and there’s no such thing as ‘rising damp’? My beliefs were re-written last night after a short read. Apparently the first lot create a barrier to moisture, which my poor understanding figured was a good thing, and the second lot are permeable. This permeability allows moisture to breath in and out of walls naturally whereas an impermeable barrier causes moisture to build up behind it. Being stuck there with no means of escape it causes damp. The expert who wrote the article was quite exercised by a whole industry created to ‘solve’ damp problems by these widely held misunderstandings. Excessive water ingress as with my current problem will cause damp but these are usually obvious structural faults often easily fixed. My father in law had three builders fail to overcome damp when it was obvious it was caused by a broken down pipe, a half hour job to fix, and their remedies, using concrete, gypsum plaster and an injection DPC might actually add to the problem. As I struggle to relate this to Donald Trump all I can come up with is that democracy must be allowed to breath and his administration shows all the signs of creating an impermeable layer and the US is getting damper by the week. 

DT Transcript.

Hello I’m Julie. Obviously I know your public persona but here you have a chance to be simply Donald. Is that OK? / nod / Does that possibility excite you? / Look they told me to come see you. They think you might .. / Go on / … / Well ‘they’re not here and I don’t change people. What do you, Donald, want to get from this? / Me? What do I want? Hell I’ve got all I want, money, beautiful wife and now I’m P.. / but behind all those acquisitions, what does that Donald want? Your internal dialogue if you will / Well all the things I’ve got. Julie I got all those things, I deserve them, and they loved me on Apprentice, I was like a king on that show and … / and now you are it’s all different / Right, exactly / Why do you think that is? / You know I’ve always been able to get people to do what I want, it’s a natural ability. Ever since I was a kid, my parents, my school. I got all the girls you know, I was real handsome back then, then starting out in business and all the way through to the Apprentice people did what I wanted. I wanted the Presidency, I got it / Do you see any pattern there? / Of course, it’s obvious / No a different pattern. If I may you’ve always started out with the power over people. Your parents because they wanted the best for you, girls because you were handsome, boys because you could beat them up, business partners because you had the money and the Apprentice because; well it’s in the script. And now you’re dealing with people you don’t have power over. Is that right? / What are you saying? / Well I’m asking you do you have any experience of dealing with people who you didn’t have some natural, some might say privileged advantage over? Imagine you meet a complete stranger and for some reason you have to spend a week with them in a log cabin somewhere. How would it go? / You mean a nobody, an average Jo / OK / I’d shmooze him and if he didn’t come round I’d kick the crap out of him / Lets say he’s a linebacker for the Patriots, a black Muslim and really intelligent and he really doesn’t like you / Seriously? / nod / I’d find what he’s afraid of, work on his him and sell him a condo / Good. So it’s all about manipulating him to get a result, is that right? OK so he has no fears and he tries to befriend you, he’s a nice guy / Where are you going with this? / Donald I guess I’m trying to see how you would react to a situation ordinary people would see as ‘normal’ / But Julie I’m not normal now am I? / And you say that with a sort of pride right? / Of course / You take pride in being abnormal / Just better / And that ‘better’, that disdain cuts you off from being normal? And now you’ve achieved the ultimate position, the ultimate power, you’re finding the lack of empathy you have for ‘normal’ is somehow causing you sadness. You’ve come to the end of the road you’ve chosen and there’s no satisfaction there. You’ve found your special gift, your feeling of superiority is in fact your Achilles heal / … / How does that feel? / Look I just came here so you’d tell me I’m fine / And are you? 

Trump the Marvellous.

I marvel at Trump. Notice how he says things twice. Every policy statement he made in his speech he said twice. It’s like once consciously out loud and once as an echo of his own internal dialogue. Somehow it becomes more convincing, not because it’s twice but because one feels in the repeat one’s hearing his real thoughts; it’s not just empty rhetoric. Then by defaming everyone important he shows he’s fearless and powerful, and as such he knows things we don’t. And then he openly shows all the tricks he’s pulled in his campaign. Somehow this honesty makes him even more believable. Like a magician who’s duped his audience with some slight of hand and explained it it deserves twice the applause. He appears thus frank, honest, fearless, powerful and knowing; what more could you want in your leader? On the other hand he employs cheap verbal tricks, he shoots off at the mouth without consideration, shows no honouring of others and just says what you want to hear without any thought of achieving it. He will simply retract it later when he’s got what he wants. If he’s written the book on manipulation he’s almost certainly manipulating me so he must be the worst leader one can imagine. Such is the American divide. One side must come to terms with their own gullibility, the other with their own vacuity. Since the fifties our watching of entertainment has increase from 2 hours per week to forty plus, an increase of 2,000%. It’s no wonder we view reality as entertainment. But in reality when we stop liking the program we can’t just lean forward and turn it off. 

Open Sensitive Receiver.

Last night, 11.45pm, I snuggled into bed and turned on my little radio. Three women are describing how sleep depravation is ruining their lies. That’s the equivalent of watching an episode Bear Grills before embarking on a weekend’s camping in the Lake District. I’m sure it’ll be fine, no really it will be, trust me, snakebites and frostbite are rare in Ambleside. So I turned off the radio and employed my trusty method of entering the wonderful kingdom of nod. In the dark with one’s eyes closed one might assume one sees perfect blackness. Not so, after acclimatising to the near black one begins to perceive ever-changing shades and shapes. They’re probably remnants of nondescript mental activity. Anyway I begin to watch avidly for something meaningful or at least recognisable as one might an avant-garde art house movie. As a sound track I focus on the sound of my breath. With complete focus conscious deliberations are purged as if by a conscientious cinema usher with a flashlight. The screen shifts, a swirl, a shape, they meld, merge, separate and reshape. Often I see a face then more faces melding one to another but no one I recognise. And so it goes on until I can only presume I enter the realm of Nodsville. Once whilst camping I saw a vivid picture of flames coming from a rectangle, so vivid and specific I got up and looked for a fire believing it a possible premonition. Nothing. I rejoined my friend Liz who explained she’d just stopped a young guy pouring firelighter fluid into the hot rectangular mouth of a giant wood burning stove and preventing a nasty accident. What I’d seen was Liz’s imaginary picture of what could have happened. Spooky but I digress. I guess it’s all an arty version of counting sheep. But I’m left with, ‘how did Liz’s startled imagination transmit itself into my technicolour image some 40 meters away, half asleep and behind a tent?’ Could the dim faces, scenes and brief movies be weaker signals from other people? After that vivid example I think so. That would mean we’re all mind connected, however dimly in the normal run of things. It doesn’t seem much use to be honest except to realise the conditions necessary for one to be an open sensitive receiver. 

My Sexual Abuse.

Before I start did you hear of the US woman getting allergic to her husband in the same room? Tobacco smoke half a mile, pizza a 100 yds etc. The poor woman came up in life threatening hives if he touched her. It’s a rare oodly doodly disease. No it’s not, it’s a psychosomatic allergic reaction. An expert NLPer would cure it in an hour. I hope she finds one. Anyway I was fourteen in a skiffle band. We won a competition and appeared on TV briefly but due to me our blues number had a vaguely Chinese intro. Nevertheless I’m proud if of it. A guy around forty offered to be our manager and the use of his empty factory in the evenings to practice. Once there he invited us one at a time, I think three of us, to join him in a small room where he had thoughtfully spread newspaper on the floor. After a brief chat about not telling anyone he wanked us off. Takes all sorts. Maybe he was Reichian. Wanking was not unknown to us fourteen year olds and coming was its usual pleasure. Nevertheless it didn’t feel right so as there were three of us we compared notes and told him to shove it after two or three times. So what exactly was the sexual abuse? I presume it would be seen as such. Coercion by an adult but no force and coming was its usual pleasure. But it was secret and outside that transparent wall of secrecy he had created it would be transformed into something distasteful. That was the abuse, a form of bonding behind closed doors. He had lured us into holding a shameful secret that’s taken near sixty years to tell. Basically I just want to be on trend. But seriously it was that transition from secrecy that was the abuse by creating a sort of either/or discontinuity with my ordinary life. The wanking was neither here nor there. Since then I won’t be coerced into anything secret I can’t proudly share with anyone. Luckily the lasting effects are minimal; just don’t spread newspapers on the floor. 

The Divine Doesn’t Care.

Don’t worry it’s really not as bad as it sounds. If like me you have or had parents you know the relationship. At best they support you, give you advice and want you to do well. At worst they chastise you for your faults, what you’ve done badly or not at all. They care. So it’s likely we’ll conceive of our chosen God as a deity that cares about us, especially if we refer to it as ‘he’ and ‘father.’ If we do we're back seeking parental support, love and direction. But what if the divine is even better than that? What if the divine says, “You have been given the earth, a veritable Garden of Eden, and you are free to do as you wish. But there are laws that make life better or worse. Do as you wish and I hope you live well”? No guidance, no protective care, no preferential treatment, no direct line, simply do as you wish. This is the wisest divinity, for without the freedom to make mistakes there is no learning and without learning we will not come to know the laws or our choices to follow them. When we do we will come to know the nature of the divine. Until then we will create our own godly messages; how he hates gay marriage and non-Muslims (or Muslims), how he provokes us kill and fight in his name, how he has a long list of right and wrong. Truth be told the divine doesn’t care, but hopes we learn to experience it.