Category: Uncategorized

People have to remember that there’s a LOT of Fake Facebook sites out there, especially ones concerning very sensitive issues with American voters. Just as an example, LifeAction. It’s a confirmed Russian site that has a .com and a .org address connected with it. These sites feed fake information, baby pictures, doctored videos, fake news stories to other Fake sites dealing with abortion. Their influence, and the influence of other fake Russian sites is massive, because Facebook will NOT do anything about them. All the owners of Facebook care about IS the money. The Russian sites want to continue to divide Americans.

Memes and stories with deceptive information are easy to share. Just hit the button and boom….it’s shared. It’s a free country, and I suppose people can share what they want to, fake or not, but it’s really easy to confirm sometimes, it just takes a few minutes. Remember if it’s something that plays heavily to your emotions or your beliefs, check it out before you post it. Mostly, if you feel strongly about something, do what I usually do and use your own words. Thanks.

WALKING THE ROPE

I feel like I have been on the tight rope lately. Balancing. We all are, to some extent. We balance on that narrow thin rope trying not to slip and fall. You can’t jump off because there’s no net. You are scared to slide your feet along the tight walk and move towards safety, because you might fall and you know…there is no net. So, that forestalls both quick action and careful action, doesn’t it? Mostly you just stand there. Balancing.

You stand there lightly, as lightly as you can and balance. Sweat pours off your forehead into your eyes, and you want to raise your arms up to wipe it off, but you can’t because you can’t let go of the pole and you might lose your balance. Eventually, we all do though. There’s no way you can last up there forever. And then we fall. We all fail.

It’s not as far as we think, and it doesn’t kill us. At least not this time. But, it hurts because there are no nets. And, the next time we go up, we will have to go higher. You can never go back to same level, you see. They always want you to go higher.

The only difference between any of us is how long it takes to heal, or to get our courage back. Some are more resilient than others. How long will it be before we are up on the narrow thin rope again? The ironic thing is, that it’s not our choice but the needs and wants of others, the spectators, that puts us up there. And, it’s our choices and our wants and needs as spectators instead of participants that put others up there. The higher you go, the more that is asked of you the next time you climb up.

I am going to be down off of rope before long. I have been balancing for a long, long time and I am not sure how much longer I can stay up. I know there are no nets, and it’s going to hurt if I fall, but it’s not going to kill me. I am still too strong for that. I may make to safety! I have been inching my way along, letting the sweat fall off and drop to the ground, and I have been ignoring the jeers and catcalls and even the cheers, and if I make it to the ladder I am coming down.

I have decided I am not going to let anyone else put me back up on the rope again, ever. I am not going back up on my on simply to go higher either. I don’t like the way it feels and after all it IS MY CHOICE whether I go or not. Even with all the pressure, it’s still my choice and no one else’s. I think I will just stay down this time and become a clown. I have been practicing juggling “things” in between falls and I found I kind of like it. The Lion taming ain’t too bad either. They are mostly just roar and no bite. With a strong enough chair, and you got it made.

I just hate the high wire. I also am not going to cause anyone else to have to walk the tight rope if I can help it. Heaven help me to help it. Nobody deserves to die from it.

We have all seen them. Beautiful Sunrises. Mornings when the light turns dozens of colors behind a scant screen of clouds. Everything from muted purples to magentas, to bright blood red. How does a beautiful Sunrise make you feel?

For me the beginning of the day, which is signified by that marvelous sunrise, symbolizes a daily rebirth. A new beginning, a time when everything is new again and all options for doing things wonderful, useful, loving, and kind are open. It renews my soul. It tells me in no uncertain terms that I am alive, and that I have been treated to the sight of some of the most beautiful colors on God’s own palette. I give thanks for life and the chance to live it. To experience other people, people who I love and who love me. To touch another person, even to simply shake hands or to brush back the hair of my daughter and sons, my granddaughters, or my wife from their foreheads…that is an experience that I will only get to enjoy once. Just once, that I will remember in any case.

I can taste food for another day and hear music. I don’t really even care what kind most of the time…I generally like it all. I get the privilege of talking and interacting with other people, most of the time in a positive manner. All of this starts with the beautiful Sunrise that I saw this morning.

Then the other night going to take my granddaughter to soccer practice, there was a stupendous Sunset. How does a gentle sunset make you feel?

The colors were a similar palette as was the Sunrise, but the feeling was different. Day was leaving. I felt peaceful. I felt content. My list of things to do for the day was done, and I was heading towards the house to rest. Headed towards my home, my familiar place, my territory. I had accomplished all I could during the day and I was satisfied. Maybe I should have tried to do more, I feel that way practically every day. But in the awesome light of that Sunset I felt happy, tired but happy. I knew I would be glad to get home, and see the ones that I love. My tasks that others would have me do were over. I would eventually lay down that night, and rest this body that the creator gave me, happy to have seen another day on this Earth.

Life and Death are like the sunrise and sunset.

Both are beautiful in their own way, similar, yet vastly different. It’s what happens in between, what WE make happen in between that forms the legacy of our lives. It’s the appreciation of getting to see the sunrises and sunsets of other people’s lives that hopefully will make us appreciate our own and be less afraid of the final sunset that we all must come to one day. Not melancholy, but happy to have shined and to have enjoyed being in the light. I know I am.

We all fear the unknown, and not knowing what’s on the other side of that sunset IS a bit scary. Even to those who are secure in their beliefs and solid in their convictions. I experience that tinge, we all probably do when we think about it. I experienced it heavily yesterday. But I believe the soul goes on, and we are meant to all be together again. I am thankful for that.

I’ve recently read where several “preachers” in Southern churches are calling for a “Civil War” if Donald Trump is impeached. A major league Umpire said the same thing. I’ve heard several people at places where I go, say the same thing.

Makes me wonder if a Civil War starts, how are they going to tell who to shoot? Are white “liberals” going to wear blue hats and the “conservatives” gonna wear Red hats. Are they just going to shoot people of color, or people of different religions? Are they going to gun down LBGTQ people? (Will the gay people wear rainbow hats)?

I personally wish people who have positions in which they are supposed to be positive role models, or are supposed to be leaders in a church would remember what a Jesus said in Matthew 26: 52-54-

But Jesus said to him, “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Or do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?“

Jesus never advocated violence to solve political problems. He told the Pharisees to render unto Caesar that which IS Caesar’s and unto God, that which is his. The only time I can remember Jesus getting mad was when he found people at church (the temple) cheating other church goers (the money changers). He turned their tables over:

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.”

The one time he got really mad….

While he was on the cross dying, he did not once even consider asking his Father to send those ten thousand angels to kill his enemies and save him….and believe me, they would have done just that.

We humans, we followers of Jesus need to try and be more like him, not more like corrupt politicians, no matter who they are.

Hello Larry,

I painted on layered glass during the 1960-70’s.  I created this technique and process and all the paintings were original works. It’s difficult to produce and could not be mass produced. 

I had a wonderful rep who, with his team, placed my work in stores throughout the United States and Canada. They were very popular and sold well.  Most of these were of flowers in sizes 4×4,” 6×8,” and 8×14”, painted on six layers of glass.  I painted just a handful of larger paintings (16×20″) like yours for special orders.  All of these larger paintings were of flowers painted on 6 layers.  You have the only scene.  It is one of a kind and I’m happy to see it again.

I have spent the rest of my career painting portraits of people.  (Including Santa which has also made me well known).  My glass art work is growing in value and I frequently get inquiries like yours.  I don’t have suggestions on what price to ask, but yours was painted on an expensive thin plexiglass and is lighter weight and less fragile.  The only glass is the picture glass on the top.

Your frame looks in great shape.  They can pull away at the corners – this one looks tight.

I hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Susan Comish

I think our lives and the way we live them are like reflecting pools. We see in others the good we want to see in ourselves…the good we have in ourselves, and we act accordingly with love.

Either that, or we look at others and see reflected back the hatred or dislike that we feel for ourselves, and act accordingly with something which is less than love.

All the qualities of love and hate are contained in each of us and what we see in the mirror, in our reflection, depends on what we are searching for.

While there are still libraries which are open to the public, and book stores where you can go to buy real physical books….while there are still vintage books at yard sales and flea markets, and while one can still buy said books online, I recommend that people get them. Especially young people.

I know a lot of people will say that we no longer need those “clunky” books because we can download them online and read them on our kindles and iPads. To that I would say…yes we can….for now. But, I foresee a time in the not too distant future when we will not be able to get what we want, but instead only get what those who control the information want us to have. It honestly wouldn’t be that hard to accomplish.

I beg people, especially young people, to start a collection of books. Buy classics, buy instruction manuals, buy medical guides, prescription guides, save all the old Mother Earth news magazines, buy poetry books, political books, for God’s sakes buy accurate history books too.

One day, if every copy of “David Copperfield” or Platos “Republic” or “The March of Folly” or “The Bible” are gone….one day if or when there are no physical copies to be found, anything can be put online representing any of those books, or the many millions more…and you will have to take their word for it. Or it could just be nothing except for meaningless propaganda.

I know….you think I’m crazy. Raving lunatic.

All I know is that all of human existence from the time humans discovered how to write, has been based on the ability to accurately transmit certain aspects of knowledge from one generation to another…via books. (Scrolls, tablets, etc., you get the point)

There were the dark ages….when not so many books were being written, and civilization was miserable…..but out of that period came the renaissance.

I hate to see humanity degrade into a permanent age of darkness, fueled online by only these tiny pixels we now take for granted as being the written word. They aren’t written, they are pecked. There’s a lot of difference.

Go to library book sales, and start your own private library. Please.

My Daddy once told me that unless a man had something useful to say, he should keep his mouth shut. As most of you realize if you know me, or have read my writing it’s obvious that I should keep my mouth shut most of the time. I just can’t help it though, useful or not I have to say what I think.

What I am opening my mouth (or keyboard literally) to talk about today is hope. That’s right, hope. I have to have it. It has to be there, like a piece of driftwood in the vast ocean when you are drowning. Something to grab hold of and stay afloat. My hope is for the future. The future in which I will be missing, but my children and grandchildren and whatever descendants that I may be blessed with (who will never know I existed,) will know.

Right now, it kind of looks bleak, and that is why I have to have hope. I don’t think there is any way that the members of my generation, the baby boomers, can fix the mess that we are in now. It’s not just one mess, but MANY different messes going on simultaneously which make things so complex.

There are the changing demographics of the entire world. People of different races and cultures are traveling far and wide in this day and age and settling in places their ancestors would never have imagined. As they do this, they become familiar with each other and one thing leads to another and you have relationships being built between these members of different races and cultures. Some still try to stick with their own cultures, but inevitably I believe will fail. The children of the future will all probably look like Tiger Woods and Mariah Carey. I think at some point there won’t be any black, yellow, red and white anymore. There will be one color and one international culture at some point. I don’t know how far in the future that this may occur, and I don’t know if mankind can keep from destroying each other first with nuclear weapons but if they can then that’s one thing I think will happen. It will be a huge challenge for our descendants who are at the “transitional” stage. (Or maybe that’s where we ARE now?) It could well be that the future inhabitants of this planet will “ease” into this situation so gradually that no one will ever know it’s happening until it’s upon them. I don’t think it will be a bad thing either. One of things that continually breeds discontent, distrust and war is the difference between people’s race and culture. If there IS not difference then they will have to find something else to fight about. Maybe they won’t be able to.

There is the quickly changing face of technology. I would have NEVER in my wildest dreams as a child imagined the world as it is today. There have been so many advances in the last 50 years that it makes the 1950’s seem like the Stone Ages. What we take for granted every day now, would have seemed like a trick of magic back then. Computers will continue to advance and now that robotics IS actually taking off like Isaac Asimov thought it would, our descendants can look forward to a world where the physical part of living will become easier and easier.

There will be issues that come up, ethical issues, which will challenge the very core of the morals of our society. What about a computer program that can store the “essence” of a person on a program, and come up with a “virtual” person who is exactly like the person who is dying. Anyone ever seen the movie “Freejack” with old Mick Jagger? That’s science fiction still, BUT so was Jules Verne back in the late 19th century. It may not be that a person’s “essence” can be stored on a computer and then put back into another person’s body. I am not sure it will ever get to that point. BUT to create a “virtual” person with the knowledge and character of a real live person is but a few steps away from becoming a reality. You can “store” Grandma or Grandpa on the handy dandy virtual person program, and pull them up to talk to any time you want. How would you like that? Kind of a spooky thought isn’t it? Yet, right now people who play the high tech computer games that generate “characters” to play through (the avatar type games) are already interacting in a very close knit way with these “quasi-people.” You can give them character traits, physical characteristics, and other things which make them “almost” seem human. It’s only a few steps away until you can do the same thing with your dear Uncle Bob, believe me. Soulless, yes. Interaction there will be. There could also be a use for this type of program to reduce overpopulation, in that people who are not allowed, or don’t want to have a “real” live child, can have a virtual child which they can “raise” from a baby all the way up through adulthood. The cost would be quite a bit cheaper to raise this type of “child” too.

Medically speaking, the people who can make it 20 or 30 more years are likely to be able to live practically as long as they want. With the research and discoveries in genetics that are now taking place, it won’t be long until the genes that cause “aging” as we know it, will be discovered and neutralized. People who are well off enough financially will be able to benefit from this expensive technology and beat “the system” Dick Cheney may actually still be here in the year 2100! Hmmm…?

I think that many diseases which afflict people such as cancer, heart disease, and all the big killers will be beaten. People will have to be run over by a Fire Truck in order to die. That’s about the only thing which will do it. However, I am sure there will be a lot of volunteers to be “uploaded” into the computer program which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. After all, who REALLY wants to live forever? And you probably will still have the old aches and pains that won’t go away. (Maybe not, they may have something for that too) Besides, you might be able to do things on that computer program you could NEVER do in real life, like fight dragons, or fly. That would be a hoot, right?

I wonder if people will still be able to go out and have a juicy steak or a lobster, or if everyone will have to eat those little pills like the one that Willy Wonka invented that turned Violet, well…purple I guess. Hopefully, he will have perfected them by then and we won’t have to go somewhere and have the juice squeeze out of us.

I kind of wonder too if space travel will advance to the point where we will be actually sending people out on missions to other galaxies. Will the episodes of Star Trek, The Next Generation be a reality or a near reality at least? If we can tear enough money away from the government’s efforts at exterminating people in other countries, we may be able to give some of it back to the space program and find out!

I heard on the radio last week about a scientist who was going around the Oceans of the world, and taking samples of the water and testing it for microorganisms. Turns out, he was finding thousands of new ones that nobody knew existed. (I have simplified this, if you want to read the complicated version go to NPR.org) You would probably not really be surprised by that, but at about the same time they announced they had discovered a new breed of big cat in the jungles of Borneo…a new kind of Leopard! Amazing!

If you can think about life itself, and you are NOT amazed, then I think something is wrong. I never CEASE to be amazed every day, and every night by the life all around me on this planet. My curiosity about whether or not there is life like what we have in other parts of the Universe is so high! I wish there was a way to find out.

To think that we live on a planet that abounds with SO much life, all the way from those tiny microorganisms to the beautiful deep jungle Leopards is mind boggling. We read and hear about how life IS endangered and will BE endangered by such things as human overpopulation, wars, Global warming, threats from interstellar disasters such a huge meteors and comets…and it sometimes makes it seem as if all life is going to cease to exist. But, I don’t think so. I think this planet; this Mother Earth is one of a kind.

I think that if we could somehow look a billion years into the future of our planet that there would still be life here. Life IS fragile, but for some reason THIS particular planet was created to foster and nurture life, like no other one. (That we know of anyway)

So, I think that life will find a way. I hope that it is HUMAN life that continues to find a way. I pray that we can grow past the point where we have to solve our problems through war, murder and all other types of bad ways that humanity has invented over the past ever how many thousands of years. If we can do this… perhaps when that billion year point comes, WE will be reaching out to those other stars and galaxies that we stand in awe of every night when we look up into the sky and WE can bring peaceful life to those places that don’t already have it.

That would be a wonderful thing wouldn’t it?

THE DAY THE SQUIRREL WENT BERSERK

Grandpa chopped down an old rotten Elm tree which was near the edge of his drive. The first frost had already fallen and it was a late September day, if my memory serves me right. The year was 1960 and I was nearing my tenth birthday. I was standing up on the front porch and watched as the big old tree fell down from a precisely placed last strike of the ax from Grandpa. There were no chain saws around back then, just the two person cross cut saw which my Dad had helped Grandpa with, and his sharp ax. That tree was going to become fodder for the old iron wood burning stove with the two eyes on top. That huge old glutton of wooden food could take five or six big logs and then turn orange red on the outside as it burned blazing hot in my Grandparent’s living room. You dare not touch it when it was freshly stoked or you would suffer a nasty burn. All of us grandchildren learned from an early age “not to touch the stove”

The tree came down and I noticed my Dad peering curiously into one of the sections of the tree and then reaching in and picking something up. He looked up at the porch and hollered for me to come down there. I came running and was amazed to see Dad holding a little squirming furry bundle. It was a baby squirrel. He gave it to me and told me to hold onto the squirmy little rodent. It appeared to be about half grown, and was pretty ambulatory and quite unhappy to have literally “fallen” into it’s current situation. Grandma happened to have a tall cardboard box at the house, so I ran up and put the little fur ball into it. It was too tiny to jump out the top, and so there it stayed in its first home away from its family. We were at my Grandparent’s house for a few more days and I played with that squirrel for hours every day. Much to my Grandpa and Dad’s surprise, the squirrel started to “tame up” and actually began to eat a variety of foods, including left over cornbread. Its little tummy would poke out after every meal.

On the way home in the car, I let the little rascal climb around inside my shirt. He didn’t offer to bite me, but those sharp little claws did more than just tickle on a couple of occasions.

Once we got him home, Dad acquired a metal cage from somebody. It was like a small chicken coop and the only way to keep the squirrel in securely was with a stretch spring which Daddy had gotten from the mill. That spring had to be pulled tight and latched on one of the crossbars of the cage every time we got the little rascal in and out of the cage. He always loved to run around inside my shirt and as the weeks went by, he learned to do it with just a tickle and without using those sharp little claws to “dig in” and hurt.

As he matured, our little pet gray squirrel became a true track star. He would run all over the house, up and down the furniture and jumping onto the light fixtures much to my Mom’s consternation. He was pretty tame with me, but he began to bite anyone else who tried to feed him. I got really attached to the little critter but it became apparent to even my ten year old self that he wasn’t really a happy camper. Wild animals like this just are not meant to be kept in a cage.

The end of his tenure at our house came abruptly. I was trying to hook the sharp ended spring into its place on the cage one day, and it slipped and raked across the meaty part of my hand causing a nasty cut. I hollered and bled for a while and Mom decided, against my protests that my furry friend had to go.

My Dad gave the squirrel and the cage to one of my cousins. A couple of months later Dad told me that the little feller had choked on a piece of orange (yep…it like fruit) and had died. I was heartbroken for a few days, but as children will do, I soon forgot my pet squirrel and started thinking about baseball cards, or comic books, or some other childish thing.

I have always liked squirrels since then, even though I know they are pesky little creatures who like to gobble up my bird food. I don’t begrudge them their bite though because I know those little dudes are voracious eaters. I look out the window at them jumping around like acrobats and I can sometimes still feel a little tickle inside my shirt. It was a short but worthwhile relationship between a nerdy kid and a furry rodent.