Author: thegraymaniac

I have been watching screens for the majority of my life. Television came of age when I was a very small child and my life, most of all our lives in Western society at any point, became intricately intertwined with the things which were being broadcast upon that little screen.

Even at first, although the “programming” was mostly innocuous, it was influential. How I tied a towel around my neck and pretended to be “Superman” and jumped off my porch and sprained my ankle terrible, because no matter what I had seen, I could not fly. I could not…fly…

I had my cowboy guns like Hoppalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers, and I went outside and put caps in my guns (my ammo) and shot the bad guys. All of us little kids did the same thing. It was our right to have our guns and imitate our heroes, wasn’t it? And so we did.

And the screens progressed. They got bigger. They went from black and white to living color. The “programming” became more complex. The news became an integral part of the screen.

I spent more time playing outside than a lot of kids. I spent a lot of time by myself playing, thinking, and formulating ideas. I read voraciously. The televisions screen was mostly a nighttime thing. My Dad limited our time watching it. It was a “privilege” and a lot of times that privilege was taken away as punishment for misbehaving. We weren’t allowed unlimited access. It was probably a good thing.

Throughout the years these information screens, whether you call them a television, a computer, a pad, a phone, whatever you might want to call them…these screens have come to do more and more of our thinking for us. They tell use what is “right or wrong”. They sway our opinions of other people and other things. This “social” media which has been created to play itself out in the virtual “over the screen” world, has come to be so influential, that “comments” and “posts” made using it, can make enemies of friend and family who we have known and loved all of our lives, while at the same time making us “friends” with people we have never known. Never has it been more apparent about this negative/positive media, then over the past year.

As I can continue to see hate and division spill across this screen, the TV screen, the phone screen, and any other type of screen that I look at, I begin to feel very tainted by it all. I want to divest myself totally from all of it….but continue to get pulled into the fray almost every time I look at a screen. It’s a powerful, almost irresistible pull.

I’m trying very hard, trying very hard. I’m devoting some time every day to reading, to thinking, to meditating, to praying. I hope to increase that time, and decrease this time. I hope to go back to mostly “family” kind of things like pictures and prayers, and sharing memories online. I hope I can do a “flip flop” and I also hope I can keep my attention away from the things which are divisive that are being posted by many, many people.

I may probably start tomorrow by keeping all my screens turned off, or at least keeping the sound turned down.

I have jumped off of the high porch again, and have found that I cannot fly…..I cannot fly…and I have hurt myself terribly…..

I leave you with the words of Paul Simon:

“and the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

And the sign flashed out its warning,

In the words that it was forming

And the signs said,

“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls

And whisper’d in the sounds of silence”

It’s hard to practice what you “preach” I find that out on a daily basis when I find myself judging someone because of their appearance, some incomplete information, or something which they have said in haste. I personally think that not judging others is one of the hardest tasks we are called upon to accomplish as human beings. The fact that I catch myself, hopefully means I am developing a mechanism within myself with our creator’s help, to defeat this shortcoming. I know nothing of what a stranger is experiencing.

I love pockets, I have always loved them. The need for pockets came about during the Middle Ages when people had a need to keep their coins somewhere. At first they started putting them in bags and hanging them around their necks. They wasn’t good, because it was easy for some “cut purse” with a sharp knife to cut the string and steal your money. Then people started carrying their “purses” inside their pants so the thieves couldn’t get to them. Problem with that was when you went to pay for something you just about had to take your pants off. People started cutting slits in their pants so they could get to their purses…and from there some smart person figured out that “sewn in” purses or “pockets” would be a dandy idea. This was sometime in the 1700’s. This was a great invention!

I recollect being about 4 the first time I realized I had pockets. I was out in the front yard around the porch and noticed the little bugs we used to call “rolly-pollys” I had caught a double handful of them and having no other place to put them…I shoved some down in my pockets. Of course, I didn’t get them all out…so I heard from Momma on that one! From then on though, pockets were for everything.

I have pockets full of rocks, marbles, worms, crickets, bugs, arrowheads, marbles, coins, clover, grass, lightning bugs, and just about anything else you could get into a pocket. If I go to buy a pair of jeans, or pants I’m going to wear every day the first thing I will check out is the depth of the pockets. I don’t like shallow pockets. You sit down on the couch, or in a chair and lean back a little bit and when you get up there will be a bunch of stuff there that has “oozed “out of your pocket. I don’t like losing my stuff, so I check my pants out really well before I purchase.

I have had some important things in my pockets before too. I put mine and Paula’s wedding rings, which were in those little black ring boxes, one in each pocket. I have carried an old pocket knife which Dad gave me in my pocket, before I put it up because I was afraid I was going to lose it. (I put a tiny piece of marble from Greece in my pocket and I can’t tell you what famous building up on top of a hill from whence it came…so shhhhh.) There have been other things…

I’ve also, at times gotten holes in my pockets and have lost things…mostly change. I’ve lost a ring or two that I had put in my pocket and they just slipped right out, and down my leg and into the grass of “neverwhere” where they probably remain today. But I’m pretty careful.

I worked with a man over in Calhoun, named Max who I never, ever saw wear anything but overalls. He loved those pockets and had something specific for each of them. He passed away unexpectedly one year while I was still there and they buried him in his overalls with a John Deere hat on. I think it was one of the most appropriate uses of clothing I have ever seen. He would have loved it.

Well, just to show you that I do “practice what I preach” in this case, I dumped out the content of my pocket and posted it along with this little story. As you can see, I had just a few things squirreled away in there. Whenever I go to the Drs. Office and they weigh me, I always mentally knock off ten pounds for “pocket contents and clothing” I guess when I quit carrying stuff in my pockets it’ll be a sad day

3.8 billion years ago here on Earth, life was just getting started. It was at that critical time in a sector of space which is 3.8 billion light years away a catastrophic event occurred.

NPR reported on it last week, and said that the occurrence…which was 500 million times brighter than our sun, was the brightest event ever recorded since our ability to reach out into the Universe with telescopes. They don’t even know what it was, or what caused it.

Perhaps since the start of life on Earth coincided with this enormous flash of light, the two are somehow cosmically connected. Probably not though. Somehow it makes me feel rather small, insignificant, and lacking in knowledge, to even think logically about such things.

We think so highly of ourselves, our race, and our superior intellect…when we are so lacking. Compared to what’s actually ” out there” we know nothing.

Can one second last an eternity? I think it can.

Could our Universe fit on the head of a straight pin. I think it might could.

For you see, relativity is everything.

What we think we know, and what is truth, are probably polar opposites.

Mostly because we are not open to thinking…. past “what’s for dinner tonight?” We take the easy answers as the gospel.

To find truth is like being a gold prospector.

Every great once in a while, one may find a small nugget laying on top of the ground….but most of the time, the gold has to be sought after with singular focus, and with hard, backbreaking work. Digging, uncovering, carefully looking, spading through tons of muck and nastiness until finally the main vein is located.

Truth is like gold. Actually it’s much more precious.

I pick up my guitar and strum a few chords. Try to come up with a melody or a run of chords which makes sense or sounds good. I don’t devote as much time to musical pursuits now as I used to, perhaps as I should. Time’s not my friend in this arena. I think back to my Grandpa at times.

He had arthritis in his hands as far back as I can remember. Being born in 1893, he was 57 years old when I was born…67 in 1960 where my memories of his banjo playing start. The arthritis hampered his playing but I remember some of the tunes: “Cripple Creek” “Home Sweet Home” “Swanee River” many more. I tried the banjo, but it never made sense to me…I was lucky to be able to learn to play the guitar. Grandpa wrote songs too. He had two hymns published and I have the songbooks where they are sitting there on the page in black and white. I’ve never sang them, but I should. Mom always wanted me too, but for some reason I never got around to it. I regret that.

Grandpa was a talented, but strange man. I don’t ever remember him wearing anything but overalls except on Sundays. He kept his wallet in the top center pocket and would get it out and count his money at least once a day. He had his pocket watch in the “watch” pocket of those overalls and checked it quite often. It was a good watch….I’m sure one of my kin got it, but I don’t know who. At one time he owned a lot of land up where he lived at, but by the time he died, he owned practically nothing and didn’t know who or where he was. He gave me the greatest gift that I could ever receive though, right there out on his clapboard front porch, and that was the gift of music….the gift of the love of music.

It was not only the times I watched him sing and play, and the times I sang with him, but the sheer amount of time he would listen to his little AM radio. It was the times he would take our his hymnals and practice for the upcoming Sunday for hours. I had nothing to do on rainy days at his house. No TV, just the books and the radio. So I listened to a lot of hymns and a lot of country music. I think I cut my teeth on one of his hymnals…literally..as I lived at Grandpa and Grandma’s house until I was past two years old. Chewed one of them up I was told.

A lot of times when I get inspired to sing, or play the guitar or write a line of a song I can hear in the background deep down in my brain:

“Goin’ up t’ Cripple Creek, goin’ on the run

Goin’ up t’ Cripple Creek t’ have a little fun

Goin’ up t’ Cripple Creek, goin in a whirl

Goin’ up t’ Cripple Creek t’ see my girl”

Read more: Bill Monroe – Cripple Creek Lyrics | MetroLyrics

One of my very first memories is bright sunshine and the smell of bleach. The warm spring wind is blowing and my Mom is hanging sheets out on a clothes line. I’m sitting on the red brick steps leading out from the little four room house in which we live into the back yard. I know we had a washing machine, one of those with the wringer on the top to run the clothes through….but no dryer. I was probably four years old…the spring of 1955. I’m not sure what else I did and didn’t do on that warm spring day. Someone took a photo of Mom and me though. It’s around somewhere, I don’t know where though. I have the memory, and that’s better than a snapshot because I can still feel the heat from the sun, and the smell of clover in the soft wind. I can still see the fresh, clean sheets flapping in the wind. I look up at the blue sky, so much more deep and dark blue then it is now. The world itself was so new, so exciting. Everything I loved and wanted back then was so close that I could reach out and touch it, and I had a perfect sense of security.

People lose a lot of things in their lives. We lose our innocence and we lose our money. We lose our car keys and our sunglasses. Sometimes we lose our dogs and cats…though I hope not too often. Sometimes we lose our car in the parking lots. I’ve had to use my little “beeper” by hitting lock over and over so I could find my cars a lot of times. Wally world parking lots are big and when I go in, I’m not thinking to good sometimes. Losing humans is a totally different matter.

When you lose a person, a loved one, the security of your life takes a huge blow. The sky darkens and the blue is hidden. When the fresh smell of life turns into the cloying odor you smell when you walk into a funeral home you realize that you should have touched them more, talked to them more, and said I love you more.

But then, every day when we wake up we have another chance. Another chance at the sunshine and warmth of spring. Another chance to smell the flowers, taste the food, and see the sky. We have another chance, because most of us still have loved ones, we have another chance to do all the things with them and for them that we might have liked to do with those who are now gone. I loved the moon tonight through the trees, shining so brightly and crystal clear. The moon encompassing the souls of all those who have gone before us…saying “I understand”

Sometimes when you dream, you wake up wondering why you dreamed what you did. There are all kinds of scientific explanations about what dreams are; about what causes them.

I have on some occasions been having a dream, got up and gone to the bathroom, or something else, and lay back down and resumed that very same dream. I wonder how that is possible? I suppose with the human mind, many things are possible that we do not even imagine.

I think as humans age, they dream more and more….perhaps because they actually sleep more, but perhaps, it’s because they are transitioning. The body and the mind seem to be “unlinking” somehow. Sometimes the dreams are due to diseases which attack the brain. My Daddy had Lewy Body dementia, which causes very vivid and (to the person with the disease) realistic dreams. They swear things which they dream have really happened.

Scientific explanations aside…..I wonder if our dreams are somehow a pathway to a place beyond where we are now?

I used to sit up with sick people back in the day, some of them who were on death’s door. They all dreamed throughout the night. Many of them told me of dreaming about people who had gone on before them, or about sweet dreams of pleasant things.

One man with whom I had worked in the Weave room at Trion, fixed looms all night long in his sleep, including the hand and arm motions involved. I asked him once when he woke up if he remembered what he had dreamed. “I dreamed about going home.” he said. “I dreamed about going home” A couple of weeks later, he did.

I can only remember two dreams from my early childhood. This was in the days when we lived over on the end of Simmons street in Trion. We moved there early in 1955 and moved out in the summer of 1962.

Both of them were very vivid and real to me.

In one of them, we had walked out the front door into the front yard and heard a great din of sound from above us. I looked up, and the sky was filled with every size and shape of space ship or flying saucer imaginable. “They have come to get us.” my Dad said. Then I woke up. Mind you, this was somewhere around 1960 or 61 when I had this dream. Long before “Star Wars” or “Star Trek”

“They have come to get us….”

In the other dream, we went out the back door to our neighbors fence. It was a very intricately made fence, kind of a “woven” effect. There was a great multitude of people standing out there, starting from just outside our door, and stretching as far as the eye could see. Sitting on the top of that intricate fence was God….in flowing robes and long white beard, and people were approaching one at a time for their judgement. Some were going through a gate in the fence, (which was never there in real life) while others were being zapped by God with his staff. I figured that the ones going through the gate were headed to heaven. The others…well…I woke up before it was my turn. I expect this dream was the oldest of the two.

So, here I sit wondering about dreams. I’ve been thinking about dreams all day.

I wonder if I’ll be going home, or if I’ll be picked up by aliens, or if the judgement of God awaits. Perhaps none of the three, perhaps all of the three.

Probably something totally different and unexpected that nobody…nobody…dreams of….

I’m sure I’ll dream again tonight and maybe I’ll remember what I dream. Maybe not.

As for ya’ll my friends….pleasant dreams.

I wanted to be a poet. I had remembered riding in the 1960 Ford that my Daddy owned down through Summerville back when I was in the eighth grade. I had a little green notebook, wire bound at the top, and I was writing poems as we drove along.

I was unusual at that age, I suppose, because I could do anything in the back seat of a car without getting “car sick”. I used to read comic books in the back seat on the long rides out and back to Blue Ridge. There were some pretty curvy roads along that journey back then. Most of the time we had to go over to Chatsworth and cross Fort Mountain, and coast down the steep roads into Ellijay praying that the brakes wouldn’t overheat and catch on fire.

Once when I was very young, we got caught in a snow storm going up Fort mountain, and Daddy had to walk back down into Chatsworth to buy a set of chains for the tires on his ’53 Pontiac, so we could even make it back down off the mountain. My Mom was deathly scared of crossing that mountain anyway, and thereafter was even more terrified of it.

I remembered the huge, beautiful snowflakes which covered up the mountain that day, and wrote a poem about it in that green notebook those few years later. I saved the notebook, and continued to write some poems from time to time in it.

When our High School started a literary magazine in 1967, my junior year, they had a contest for the best poem turned in to be published in “The Sampler” which was what they called it. I reworked my snow poem and turned it in, not expecting it to even be published…..but was shocked when I won first place! The prize was a painting by my classmate Wayne Greene, who was using the name “Gerald Johns” back then.

At some point over the ensuing years, I lost that little green notebook. I did manage to keep a copy of that Sampler though, and I’ve also still got that futuristic green monster of a painting that Wayne did, squirreled away somewhere in my storage building.

Great days, wonderful memories.

I grew up in the fifties in America. I was a great time. The middle class was growing. Most of our little families in the mill town where I live were able to buy the houses which had been duplex apartments owned by the company and convert them into nice little single family homes. My Dad was able to buy his first new car in 1966. A Ford fairlane. It was a pretty good little car. Had a 289, 8 cylinder motor. We ate more hamburgers by 1967, where we had ea…ten pinto beans and corn bread back in 1958. I think we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat out for the first time in the late sixties. I was able to buy two comic books a week for a quarter a piece in the late sixties, where I had only gotten one per week back in the fifties, even though they were cheaper. I found some friends who had been collecting since the early fifties and was able to catch up on some of the series I had been wanting to read, but couldn’t afford.