July 2005

Thursday, 7-21-5

Teresa was berated for 3 hours Tuesday night by associates of hers (her long-time family hairdresser Leslie and Leslie's friend whom Teresa didn't know) on how evil, wrong and unfit of a mother she was because of allowing Becca to participate in events at a clothing-optional facility. She was in the middle of getting her hair done so she was trapped and had to sit through it all.
"How dare you? Don't you know God hates nudists? Becca should be taught to be ashamed of her body, not proud of it. It says so in the bible." They assaulted her with tales of child-molestation, rape and pedophilia. Saying that just by seeing naked bodies people get turned on and aroused. Going to a nudist resort is just asking to get raped. I'm afraid of these ignorant people. These are the ones we should be watching out for. Sexually repressed and afraid of their own bodies. These are the type of people that shower with clothes on in the dark.
I choose to wear clothes 99% of the time I'm there because I know I'm no prize to look at but I have been known to walk to the showers with nothing but a towel over my shoulder. I am fairly certain that anyone unfortunate to get a glimpse at that was NOT turned on. All joking aside, I have seen some absolutely gorgeous nude people there and I can honestly say that there was no sexual reaction. It's amazing how I'm mollified with breasts in every-day life but when they're out there for all to see, it's not a big deal. It's not sexual, it's beautiful. Leslie and her friend have a lot to learn...
Leslie also said that because we let Becca wear high-heels and "act all sexy-like" at 4 years old and now she's seen naked people, she'll be pregnant by 13. And just which report are they reading? All the data I can find says just the opposite. Anything I can find and read says that children brought up in a atmosphere like this are more likely to spot "trouble adults" than other kids and are able to avoid dangerous sexual situations. They are also less prone to accidental pregnancy and diseases because they have learned to respect their bodies and themselves. But let's not confuse this conversation with facts shall we?
The way these people were talking to Teresa, I am actually afraid that DCF will make a visit to the house. Let them. I have all the Florida statutes and precedence ready to go. Becca is in no danger, unless you believe that thinking for yourself and respecting yourself is dangerous.

They really laid it on thick and made all kinds of incorrect assumptions about me and my family. Teresa doesn't like to argue about these kinds of things so she could only sit there and go, "uh-huh, wow, ok, I'll have to look into that." She is a very smart woman, she just doesn't have the confidence and speed to argue the points as they come up. That and the fact that she's just beginning to learn about other religions. She just doesn't have the knowledge base built up enough to rebuff their attacks with facts and figures. Do any of us really?

One of the greatest assumptions they made; they asked Teresa if I believe in or worship Satan. She didn't answer quick enough so they assumed I did. I don't. Satan is a Christian concept. I know there is a difference between rebellious youths claiming to worship Satan and true LaVeyan Theorists. Do they know the difference? Do they care that there is a difference? I believe in evil as much as I believe in good. But I don't believe in their personification of evil any more than I believe in their brand of god.

That was another good one. They said that I wasn't very smart and that I am only pretending to rebel against God because I only believed in good, not evil. Have these fucking people MET me? I can get about as dark as it gets at times. The tattoos on my back represent that very ideal. Animal and Angel. There can be no good without evil, there can be no evil without good. Dark/light, male/female, up/down. Balance. Where do these people get the assumption that all pagans only believe in good? Hollywood?
I think they're confusing paganism with Wicca. Wicca is pagan by definition, but not all pagans are Wiccan. Kind of like Baptists are Christian, but not all Christians are Baptist. That being said, Wicca has it's fair share of "fluffy bunnies" but they're not ALL like that. Most times you identify any group and use definitives like "all, none, every" you are probably talking out of your butt. Not all the time, but stereotyping can be dangerous. And even if they were ALL like that, how is that a bad thing? A room full of people trying to project nothing but good? Sounds cool to me man...

Oh, that's another thing. Because I swear a lot, specifically the "F-word", I am not a real pagan. Where do they come up with this stuff? Yeah, I could/should tone it down a little (ok, a LOT!!!), but how does my decision to include these words in my vocabulary reflect on my spiritual journey? Fucking weirdos.

Just a little side rant here, I'm sick of the "righteous" people claiming that the use of profanity is an indication of a stunted vocabulary. Does that make any sense at all? These people are excluding specific words from their vocabulary while I include them all. Who has the larger capacity for volume here?
If there were only 2000 words and you excluded seven of them, wouldn't your usage be reduced to 1993 words while I'm still up at 2000? Simple math here folks. Sure, I could go around saying "This is inversely proportional to the wind" but people tend to understand me better when I just say "This sucks".
OK, back to our regularly scheduled rant...

I really wish I was there because they asked another question that they never got around to explaining to her but I'd LOVE to hear the explanation on this one. They asked her if I had and Indian blood in me. WTF? How does that fit in there? Are these people really trying to say that all people with Native American blood are prone to paganism and therefore going to hell? I'll tell you, from what I can find in my lineage, I don't think I have any Native American in me. That is unfortunate because I have nothing but respect and at times awe for their traditions and paths. I only wish I did have a claim to that rich heritage. But, they never did explain why they asked that question so here I am making assumptions about them too.

Leslie's friend who claims to be a doctor of theology, kept calling me a "half-assed pagan" because I was only rebelling against God and not really thinking for myself. Their major concern was that Teresa was doomed to hell too because she'll follow me. Hey, Teresa may seem meek and mild but trust me, that woman thinks for herself. I can't force her to think one way or another any more than she could force me. We agree in most things but when we don't, it's usually a compromise in her favor, not mine. I did not marry a mindless automaton that does as I say. However, when we were married in a Christian church by a Christian preacher, he did try to say that the wife obeys the man and bows to all his wishes. Ohhhh man, that's another story for another time.... Remind me and I'll tell you later.
So which path is he thinking of when he says Teresa will follow me into hell? Paganism, that generally empowers the woman and elevates her to a goddess and in some cases, holds her higher than the male? Or Christianity, that generally tends to tell women to submit to the man?

Why do these people always pick these conversations when I'm not around? Like some other people in our lives, they see Teresa as weak. They mistake her quietness for weakness. They think because she'll hold it inside and not spit it back into their faces that she is weak and therefore an easy target. She's going through all this with another person in her life too. Someone who will attack her because they are upset with me. Why not attack me? Because she thinks she wins when she attacks Teresa. I actually think Teresa has more strength that I do. It takes strength and will to absorb all this crap. I just re-load and fire back. Sometimes I wish I were more like Teresa in that I should keep quiet more often than when I'm running my mouth.
I think I need to go in for a haircut. Hopefully, her friend will be there too. Ahh, why do I look for trouble...

Wednesday, 7-20-5

Teresa's new laptop has always given me trouble when I try to put it on-line. I could only get it to work when I had it running through the wireless router, and even then, I had to assign it a static IP address. I didn't understand why but we got it working and that was all I needed at the time.
Now that the router is toast, I can't get her computer to connect. My work laptop runs perfectly at the house and at work. Teresa's laptop runs perfectly at work, but not at the house... Weird. I tried all the settings I could find. It just won't recognize the internet at the house.
Finally, I called Dell Tech support hoping they could tell me what I was overlooking. After agonizing through a 10 minute voice menu, it gives me 4 options of what could be wrong. As soon as I said "internet" it told me to call my ISP and gave me the numbers for Earthlink and AOL. Then, it hung up on me.
So now I had to run through the 10 minute menu again. After finally getting a human I remembered that Dell moved all their tech support to India. It was surprised at how difficult it was to understand the techs through the accent. Maybe it's just my American egocentric attitude but I would have guessed that if you work all day on the phone with English speaking people (the 10 minute voice menu hell I endured was all in English) that you should be able to annunciate the language a little better than that.
I told him the problem, he told me to hang on and put me on hold. 5 minutes later, another tech picks up and runs me through all the standard stuff that I already tried. We finally get to trying new things and it turned out it was the Winsock Catalog that needed to be reset. Very cool, now it works. I thanked her and she asked for my e-mail address for the obligatory "How did we do?" survey. After giving it to her she asked if it was all lower case... I was surprised to hear this. Shouldn't a computer tech know that e-mail addresses aren't case-sensitive? Ha-ha, silly little tech person, you don't even know the simplest things do you? And I hung up feeling all special because I knew something she didn't.
Well, as usual, I was dead wrong. A simple search told me that case-sensitive e-mail addresses are actually quite common when you go outside of the easy, prepared and sterilized world of "end-user". You'll see it a lot with businesses internal e-mail systems. Programmers that use SMTP already know this and apparently, much of the world already knows this. It's just me back here in the stone age completely ignorant of all this stuff going on around me. I'm so tired of knowing things that turn out to be incorrect. I should hide these kinds of ignorant moments to myself instead of posting them up here for all to see but I don't think it's any secret that I really am getting dumber by the minute...

Monday, 7-18-5

We went out to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Friday night. We all liked it a lot. It was sufficiently dark but still kept it light enough to be liked by everyone... I need to watch the Gene Wilder version again so I have a real point of reference for this but I'm not too sure that this one was any darker... I remember there being a lot of sinister references in the 1971 version. I have a very selective memory though so I could be (and so often am) completely wrong.
I sometimes remember things that never happened. I'd be a terrible witness if I was ever needed. I remember some things clear as day, others, like mud. A great example is what I thought was my first memory.
I remember being at an event with my parents and my mother going into labor with my sister. The truth is that my mother went into labor with me at that event. I have seen the pictures and heard the stories so often that I can vividly remember something that I was not present for. Wow, I am so easily guided into false memories.
On the other hand, I can remember such little details about such mundane things from my childhood and I know them to be true. How is it decided what will be committed to memory and what is lost to imagination? Why am I so easily influenced by false memories? Or am I? Is the fact that I "busted" myself on this one years ago made me more vigilant in what I decide is true memories?

For those of you who saw the un-censored Karen Update, it has served it's purpose as a vent and has been replaced with a less inflammatory version.
Sometimes setting fires is the only way to clean out the darkest closets. Unfortunately, sometimes even that won't work. How do you solve a problem doesn't want to be solved? Everyone wants to put a band-aid on the wound before digging out the thorn. Nothing can heal while the irritant is still in the cut. It must be dug out and cleaned before any healing can begin. As it stands, with the "everything will go back to normal" stance everyone has taken, the wound has become infected and has been festering. Soon, I must get involved. I don't have the finesse to operate with a scalpel. I operate with a butcher knife. I will amputate an arm to cure a wounded finger. I know I am over-doing it a bit and that is why I have stayed out as much as is possible. But it has come to critical mass. Either I get involved, or Teresa blows up. Given that kind of choice is kind of like Darth Vader discussing the uncompleted Death Star and the Emperor's visit, "I hope so, for your sake Commander. You will find the Emperor is not as forgiving as I". I may be unpleasant, but Teresa is ready to unleash ugly all over the place. If this isn't defused soon, the fallout will be disastrous.

Thursday, 7-14-5

We took a major lightning hit last night. We went out into the storm to get some sushi. The storm was really strong and seemed ominous. We were dodging lightning getting into the car. When we got home, the first thing that tipped me off was the beeping alarm system. We've got all kinds of troubles there. Undercurrent, siren supervision, fire alarm, open zones and a communications failure. Fried alarm system.
We went through the house and so far we've found;
The alarm system, 1 VCR, 1 DVD, 1 CD burner, 1 stereo receiver, 2 routers, 1 cable modem, my computer, 2 phones (1 cordless, 1 answering machine) and the phone line is dead coming into the house.
Oh I'm feeling so sick, I'm desperately clinging to the hope of saving the hard drives on the computer. Not so much the 80G but I can't lose the 200G. So much music, so many pictures, so much writing. Oh the time it will take to reconstruct all of that.....
So, I'm on the phone with everyone trying to fix this. Comcast insists on having me troubleshoot from the house. I can't explain to her that I KNOW it is a bad cable modem. Watch me be wrong....
BellSouth didn't take my word for it that the line is dead coming from the pole. I tried to explain that I know what I'm doing but it's like these phone support people are reading from a script and their fragile little minds can't handle any deviation from the script.
The insurance company isn't answering the phone. I was 11th in line and then I heard a loud static blast and silence. Now the line is busy, for the last 45 minutes it's been busy.

Someone I admire recently wrote about non-activism and there was a line in there that rang out to me like a bell. How we have become over-dependant on our electronic gadgets and how it has turned into a vicious circle. We get the gadgets so we can save time and have more time to enjoy life (specifically in her example, become more of an activist) but then we spend more time working so that we can afford the gadgets that were supposed to save us time.
When I read that, it made so much sense. I've felt that way for a while but I do nothing about it. I sit here amidst all this smoked electronics and realize, most of it is time-waster stuff. Some of it has legitimate uses like the computer, but most of the time I'm not doing anything important on it. I consider my passions of music and writing to be legitimate uses of the computer. But when I'm not writing or compiling my music, I'm just screwing around on the web. And that's a lot of time and energy that I could be putting into something else.
I've been thinking about that since she wrote it. I've been thinking about doing something about it. But I know I'm too sedimentary and wouldn't have actually changed my ways. I guess it took her "rant" and a bolt of lightning to turn that little bulb on in my head. I can be rather dense at times.
So have I changed my ways? We'll see. I'll get the stuff replaced and I'm not renouncing technology, but I will be more vigilant that I don't waste as much time as I used to. Nothing happens overnight and only time will tell if I fall back into my lazy pattern of wasting time and then complaining that I have no time. Maybe I'll get some of the stuff that's been sitting in the "to-do" list done. Maybe I'll have more time to spend... anywhere. And that's a start.

Wednesday, 7-6-5

Went out to Club Christophers last night with Tracy. We still don't have a guitar player but the house bands have been playing with us. We keep going to these open mic nights trying to network and find someone to play but all we get are people who are already in a band or slackers who just want to hang out in a bar and play along. We need a guitar desperately!
Tracy insisted on a few songs that are more technical. I told him that until we get someone to play with, we'd have to play more "crowd friendly" music. Stuff the house band guitar player can play without notice. So in a compromise, we started out with the Beastie Boys "Fight For Your Right". The rest of the house band jumped up and sang with us and the crowd really got into it. See? Crowd pleaser music.
We went into Rage Against The Machine "Killing In The Name Of". I hadn't even heard that song before last week. There's a lot of changes and breaks in that song. I hit them all perfectly, even if no one else did. The guitar player had no idea what to play. Not so much a crowd pleaser when it sounds like a train wreck.
After that, we played the Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop". Once again, a very popular song, everyone got into it. When we finished, people were asking us to play "I Wanna Be Sedated"
But no, we ended up doing Primus "My Name Is Mud". Sounded great because there is so little guitar in the original but it sucked the life out of me. Long, droning song that just doesn't have any feel to it.
After we were done, the next band was coming up and Tracy hit the opening bars of Wild Cherry "Play That Funky Music" just before he unplugged. The women in the crowd actually tried to keep us from leaving the stage until we got back up there to play it through. But the next band was already set and ready to start. We promised them we'd do it next week.
First, we need a guitar. Then, I need to take a little more control in picking the songs. We need to do more lightweight "party music" until we can actually get some practice time in as a band.

Tuesday, 7-5-4

Friday night was the poker game, didn't do too badly. Being a holiday weekend, the turn out was light. Wade and Curtis showed up. We talked Jerry into playing too so we had a lot of fun.
Saturday we went to Mom and Dad's. Mike and Sherry were there so, it was good to get away, have some fun. Becca spent the whole time in the pool. Teresa got sunburned real bad, I got a little and Becca only darkened up. She never gets sunburned, she just gets a dark tan.
Monday we came home and stopped by a friend's party. We didn't expect to be in town for it and by the time we stopped in, almost everyone was gone. We stuck around for a while as the lightning danced around their house and then went home.
The neighborhood was lighting off some really good fireworks. It was nice to see all the explosions and not have to pay for them this time. I used to be the neighborhood show. I'd blow up $300-$400 and really have fun. I'd make a trip up to South Carolina and get the good stuff. Mortars and Shells, 100' rolls of firecrackers, really cool stuff. The whole neighborhood would come out to watch. The first year I didn't do it, they came over to see if I was alright. Now I see that the roadside stands (just outside of Duval County) are selling them. Everyone has the "Disney" fireworks now and I don't have to shell out the money. Cool!

Onward to August 2005 Back to Updates