Dumb

   Watching track and field on tv is good. It is exciting to see the test their best. They focus on the goal and give it everything they've got, making us feel like we are there and that we are the entrants. As they run around the field we see their form, the way they hold their bodies moving their arms and legs smoothly. Leo Monzano, the smallest person on the track, beating legs, the other runners had twice or it seemed like twice the length of leg than he, and he, as he said, "it was a struggle".

  When the race was completed, without giving the guy a chance to breathe, some announcer was in his face, expecting conversation. The guy, Leo(the lion) gasping for air, gasping between words. You see his chest heaving as his lungs grasped every breath to reguveniate his lungs and body with oxygen. The question is: Why must the news media force themselves on entrants at the end of a race or competition, and not give the athlete an opportunity to compose themselves. Why don't they interview them after a shower, when they are capable of communicating. Especially getting ready for olympic competition, these people should have the right to take care of themselves first, then, give more of their time, to their fans. Is it not enought to watch these people compete, stripped to the barest, and tested to the limit, then sweating, sucking in fuel to restore themselves, and then, with camera and interviewer stuck in their face. How about a little respect, or regard. Let them do their job, keeping themselves safe is part of their job, after competing give them some room, to ponder their performance, to get their breath.

  Or, does the media want us to see how much of the individual has been spent in competition, do they want us to see the bodies struggle to repair and replace its self. To see the muscles expand and contract into normal mode. Like when the runner with a face that is poised to exhaustion with overhelming pain as the legs collapse and the runner drops to the floor crying in pain as the muscles become rigid. What do they want? 

wHY

Why do you not have pride in what you are doing?It's a dumb job.
Why don't you quit?
I need the money.
Then why don't you do a good job?
I just mow the dumb lawn.
But, why do you not take pride in what you are doing?
I want to do something else.
So why don't you do something else?
There are no other jobs, this is the only thing I could get.
Then why do you spend your time doing a mediocre job?
They don't pay me enough.
So you are doing a job you do not like, for less money than you think the job is worth, and you are doing a lousy job of it.
Yeah, so what of it?
Should you not be doing a good job of it, mowing the lawn.
Why?
Because you said you would.
No I didn't. I just said I would mow.
OK, then, why do you spend your time making garbage?
What do you mean garbage, I'm mowing the lawn.
Yeah, but you are missing plenty of spots.
So, what if I am.
So, how does that make you feel about yourself?
Fine, how else should I feel about myself?
Cheap for one.
Who you calling cheap?
I didn't call you cheap, I just said you should feel cheap because you are not doing your best.
How do you know I am not doing my best?
You do not look like you feel good about yourself.
Me? I feel fine.
Oh, you like wasting your time doing less than your best, letting people see how little you think of yourself by not doing your very best all the time. If you always spend your time doing less than your best you get into the habit of doing less than your best and become sloppy all the time.
Says who?
Look in the mirror, see your hair is a mess and your shirt has stains on it.
I am mowing the lawn, I get dirty mowing the lawn.
If you say so.
Hey, what is it to you anyway?
I don't like to see a lawn that is not kept well, it offends my sense of art and beauty.
You're crazy.
If you say so. But, I do not have the look on my face that you have. And I can look everyone in the eye. You have not looked me in the eye. You can not look me in the eye. You must be hiding something or are ashamed. I am at peace with myself, I feel good about myself and I do my best all that time. I have no regrets about my day, and am pleased about how I spend the little time I have. If you think about it, all you have is time, and how you spend the time you have, is all you have to feel good about yourself. If you do less than your best you are cheating yourself.
What are you talking about?
Time is all you have. As the days go by and the time you have had begins to add up you look back on the years and ask yourself, what have I done with the time I have had. Have I made the most of my days, have I done my best, can I  say I have done every thing I wanted to do? Have I done everything I could do? Can I look myself in the eye and say I have not wasted any of my time and with what I have been given I have done as much as I could have done. Without all the ifs; if I had a better education, if I had money, if i was better looking etc.
With eveytHing I have I have done the most and the best I can do. Maybe for some it is not good enough, but for me, I have done my very best all the time, and that is all I can ever do.
You're CRAZY!

gone

   Gone are the days of investment. The days when corporations sunk dollars into research and development, when discovery was the goal of every board. Derivatives, the tool advertised on wall street to skim money from the investment arena has changed the weather in the world. No one saves for a rainy day or tomorrow or the new toaster given away by the savings bank. When was the last time you heard of a savings bank, 1950? Yes, no one has any money to save, the cost of everything has skyrocketed to the moon, maybe that is why Mr Gingrich wants to go there. Information technology has advanced and fallen backwards, television is no longer king, it has fallen by the wayside, it has wasted it's arena on trite dribble aimed at the vapid empty heads. It is a shame, it was  the perfect venue to educate and amuse the masses, now all it does is give headaches. Noise is its song.
   Radio was king for a very long time, then the radio stations and its advertisers stopped spending money on its listeners. Stories on the radio was the greatest venue for the mind. The Shadow was a radio program that was fascinating. That was in the day when people listened with their ears. They would hear the sound effects and be transported into the world of imagination, The minds eye would paint the picture from the words. It was a very personal experience, every minds eye would imagine the scenery the players and the story. Children in their beds would listen quietly to every creak of a footstep or door, they would imagine the weight of the foot or the shoe as it landed on each step and they would design the door that closed, designed even the doorknob that turned. Now on the radio ...
  Maybe it is simply, there is no longer an investment in beauty, it is only grab what you can while you can. Maybe it has to do with overpopulation, people being less important because there are now so many of us, we are down to the utility of it all, back to basics even though the markets are flooded with everything imaginable to entertain and amuse us, we no longer amuse ourselves. Fewer people whistle or play the harmonica, tap dancing is becoming a lost art. Storytelling is mostly written books or kindle.
  Ed Sullivan was a great entertainer. He gave us a little bit of everything, dancing, singing, acrobatics, clowns, comedians, animal acts, musicians, variety. He educated us all to the charms of the rest of the world. Now on tv it is fragmented, programs are twenty minutes of advertising and forty minutes of the same thing. Except the news, the news never shows us what is going on in the world they tell us what is going on, from an editorial point of view. They do the thinking for us and tell us how to feel about the story they are reporting. Some of their favorite adjectives are: scary, terrible, horrible, frightening.
  Yes, there is no longer any investment in the future. No one has given us any tools to learn how to imagine a future, one that we might want to live in, and we have not any idea how to design one for ourselves, so we are grabbing what we can, before it is all gone.

eyes

  If you look into my eyes you will see my soul.
Not the soul I was born with, but the one that has been wrought by many years of tears. You will see the hurt caused by injustice or malice. There is also the scar of abuse and the wounds of neglect. And the bruises from dominance and repression. Then there are the marks made by the whips of jealousy from the peers who thought my life was better than theirs.
  Look closely and the sea of troubles roars to the shore washing away the youth leaving behind the age of wisdom preferring ignorance to the harms. The sea is gone but the waves have eroded every instance of whimsy and humor. The jokes laughed at are the sarcasms of the dungeon of despair, the days and nights left to the shell of who I was. There is no more to look forward to, there is no night in shining armour to rescue me, the battle has been fought, the war ended , the bruises healed, the wounds disappeared, the life lived, the last of the life left to live, the time growing short. Days they are numbered, little more to do, little left to do it with. Life has been here, has trampled the path, worn ruts into the road wasting away the foundation, the sparkle the glitter, the enthusiasm. Little is left, but to watch the time go by, sit in the chair and remember, and forget, the life that was here, now going there.

History Channel Titanic at 100

So they call this a documentary and mix in fantasy. Most of the ten minutes I saw was not the Titanic but the people who did the work, the problems they had and the obstacles. False advertising personified, sensational erroneous work. If they had made a different title for the program, say, working towards Titanic, or the men who went for the Titanic.But instead they show make believe and call it documentary. They mention passengers and make up stories about what these people might have done. Then they show holographic design pieces of what these pieces look like and where they belong. If they say they are going to show us the Titanic, then , show us the Titanic. Lies don't work. They have garnered more ill will with their misrepresentation. Roger Mudd would not approve. The music also added to the tension. They turned me off so I turned them off.

The mystique of the Titanic, those persons perishing into the frozen waters all washed away by the History Channel and the insulting performance they attempted to pass among the people. If you are not angry you should be. You should be sick and tired of all the hoaxes trying to be perpetrated upon us. Too bad package deals are made for the channels, it, the History Channel, deserves to be dropped for this program. Misrepresentation is the same as lies. Ginger and MaryAnn made stars with fake representations of what might have been. Someone should be fired, without pay, and History Channel you should be ashamed, you have lost your credibility. 

LIES

Politicians lie all the time, they make promises they can not deliver and no one holds them accountable except to not elect them. They say that when they are elected they will do this and they will do that. And when they get into office they find out the reality of the job, the en bedded cronies that run the machines of government that tell them what they can and can not do, or who has to be paid to get what. Or whose palm has to be brushed to get something.

And we the public know this, yet we elect candidates based upon the lies we prefer to hear. I will fix this or I will fix that or  i will eliminate that. Seldom do we hear the truth. The government of the United States is based upon a system of compromise. A politician will vote for another politician's bill if the other politician will do something for the other politician in return. They are all making deals for their constituents, as well as for themselves. It is at scandal proportion now, the wealth en massed by the politicians in office, while the infrastructure of America is failing and the populace is in the throes of poverty, with millions unemployed, and more millions underemployed, and more mouths hungry leads us to nightmares.

America is more a third world country, brought to it's knees by greed and fear. Politicians robbing the populace and external forces scaring them to ignorance and fantasy. There are more people praying for salvation that there are thinking people. They are praying for solutions instead of educating themselves. They are burying themselves in the dark ages of hocus pocus magic. It is no longer the land of the free and the brave. We have become slaves to ignorance and fear controlled by greed and want. A perfect potion for danger and volatile weather.

Let's blame. Let's blame anyone, instead of taking responsibility for ourselves and our environment. It is easy that way. It is not my fault. It is your fault. And that will solve everything. And then we will be back to when this was a land of plenty of opportunity. Helpful isn't it, the pass the buck mentality to solving the ills of the world.

Everybody is right, nobody is wrong and yet nothing is getting better. The world is more populated , as opposed to saying that the world is getting smaller. All these people have different ideas and wants and dreams, and some of us will have our dreams come true, and the illusion is that  we have the right to pursue our happiness. Without the tools there is no road to utopia. Lies don't work, and when politicians and people realize that, things will be a little better for all of us.

We are  grown ups who can handle the truth and would much prefer truth, like  Hal in "2001 A Space Odyssey" lies don't work.

She hurried down the hall rushing to the door, seeing not, she stumbled, face hitting the floor.

fatigue

Ever notice all the mistakes made when tired, they seem to be simple faux pas' that should have been caught by the naked eye. But the eye is dulled by the dreams of slumber and the  mind continues to wander through the thoughts of the day or the task at hand. Some can control the mind to stop before the eye blinks into dream land, for others the eye drifts to the shores of another design, planning and scheming what should be, transposing numbers omitting letters and skipping pages. Reading is grand, the minds eye sees, the lips whisper and the image disappears before it opens the door to be filed in the brain, yet we continue reading, oft times, for pages, before the shutters slam the lids closed.

There was a guy who walked in his sleep, eyes wide open. He would always travel the same route. From his bed to the next bedroom to stand before the window, gazing into nowhere seeing nothing, then after a time return to whence he came. Upon waking in the morning and hearing of his nightly travels would laugh in disbelief and accuse his speakers of falsehood.

Then there was the woman who for three nights dreamt of a man who entered here home. Each morning she would wake in sweats, the home safe. Until, one day she entered her apartment when returning from work, to find it had been broken into and the little she had, was taken from her.

Another woman, aggrieved after the sudden loss of her lover, saw him at the door in her apartment, standing tall. Again she saw him at his funeral, seated behind his friend.

Then there are the times when seated, exhausted, so tired you can not sleep, but too tired to do anything you just sit there in a stupor, eyes open, seeing nothing, doing nothing. Not awake, not asleep, in a limbo between the two worlds.

You have undoubtedly seen the child fall asleep eating, the immediate shut down when enough fuel has been consumed, moving the body on to the next need.

There was a woman who once fell asleep standing up holding the strap on a crowded subway train, with the jostling motion and the shrill screech of the the metal wheels dragged along the metal tracks.

How about the person asleep with eyes open, that is a strange one. You carry on a conversation and there is no one there listening.

What about the dream you think is reality. The task though about the night before is dreamt about during the night and the disappointment upon arising to find the task undone, to be done anew.

It begs one to wonder, in fact are they all dreams, it is all the minds sorting during slumber that leads us to think we are awake when in fact we are walking in our sleep.

Do you know if you are awake. Is this really a dream. Can this be real. Pinch me.  No matter how hard you look, will you ever know, what is unreal, and what is real. Many a criminal has been set free, for we know not exactly what we see.

Getting Old

This is getting old
The fingers stiff
The legs unsure
The memory missing
The teeth missing
The eyesight fading
The hearing waning
The bowels sluggish
The bladder overactive
The skin is dry
The nails brittle
The hair thinning
The muscles weakening

When young we look forward
When old we look backward

The time goes by so quickly?
It was only yesterday, when we thought of ourself as a spry chicken, when full of energy, ready and able to do everything. When everything was easy.

The balloon is filled with air, it is secured shut, yet, drip drip drip, the balloon begins to sag. It grows smaller and smaller. Nothing has changed, except time. Drip Drip, the balloon again becomes the skin with no air within.

And such is life, it inflates and it expands, the mind ever expanding with data, the body willing, able and agile.

Perhaps, it is simply a game of musical chairs, we each get a chance to seat, and once the music again begins, we each get a chance to lose to seat.