Blog number six-tee one 17 Nov 2006
'Ja ever have one of those times when "funny" things happen? Funny things that are as personal as dreams which no one else can fully comprehend since they weren't there so that if you tell them about these strange things, you will set them to wondering why an extremely intelligent man such as yourself is wasting valuable time and vocalization techniques, or in this case, writing techniques, that could better be used for something interesting or important?
The story that follows is one of those.
Get rrready.
A few days ago I'm walking to the post office - about a mile away. In front of me is an old man walking in the same direction. I follow him a little ways when he suddenly makes a right turn and walks across the street towards a six foot high wall fronted by those bushy cacti that if you look at them cross-eyed they will attach themselves to your skin and you have a new appendage that hurts you very much.
Now most people, walking along a roadway, if they want to go to the other side, will make a forty-five degree turn, not a ninety degree one. So he made an unusual move toward a harmful milieu. An unusual goal.
I figured that maybe he was nervous having a stranger walking behind him. No big deal. But where he was going and the turn he made engendered a curiosity in me. So I turned around to see where he went. He was gone. Disappeared. Huh. That's odd.
On the way back I carefully observe the wall that surrounds a trailer park to see if there is maybe an opening that he could have went through. There is not.
Today I'm walking back from the post office and at about the place where the man made his move, I see a pair of shoes neatly set by the side of the sidewalk, the soles on the ground, the heels touching the sidewalk. Who's walking around in the desert in their stocking feet? Why lose the shoes? They were of soft leather - a lot like a moccasin. I don't imagine they were hurting his feet. Never in my seventy five years of traveling the streets have I ever seen a pair of shoes lying in the street. But here...
I'm thinking maybe the rapture has started in this area and this guy was one of the first to go.
As I'm thinking this about the rapture, I hear, on my earphone radio, that the upcoming song is "(something) capture"
"Rapture capture," I think.
See? You think that an entirely uninteresting and not unusual event to be writing about. I told you you would, but you wouldn't listen. Oh, no. You know better. Next time pay attention to what I'm telling you.
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We used to live out in the country near Sacramento. The land was divided into two acre lots, so the neighbors we had didn't live that close together.
One night my wife and I were out walking and I noticed her looking in an un-shaded window. I said to her, "Teresa! Don't look in people's windows."
She said, "If they don't want people to look into their windows, they should draw their blinds.
Fast forward to five or six years later and Teresa and I were again walking the neighborhood street, only this time downtown. I looked into an un-shaded window and Teresa exclaimed, "Don! Don't look into people's windows.
I replied, "If they didn't want people looking in their windows, they should pull the shades."
We switched ethics, you see. I learned from her, her ethics, she learned from me, my ethics. I think that this is a common way that ethics and ideas is transmitted. I don't think we two were all that unusual. One other thing -- neither of us realized at the time that we had learned from the other. To both of us, it seemed like our own ideas.
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In 1941, during the "Great Patriotic War" between Germany and Russia, The Germans captured many Russian weapons that were superior to the Wehrmacht's weapons. They took them back to Germany and copied many of them, including the vastly superior tank, the Russian T-34.
The Allies knew in 1939 that the Germans had a superior antiaircraft gun that was also the ultimate tank destroyer as well as an artillery piece in support of the infantry. A devestating weapon for infantry.
We called it "the 88 mm," or more properly, simply "The 88."
Mobile and easily deployed, it was far superior to anything the allies had all through the war, yet never was any attempt made to duplicate this deadly weapon by either Briton or America. Why was that? I have never seen this explained.
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In my search for God, I visited many churches as well as cults. I once attended a service at a Four Square Church -- founded by one Amie McPherson in 1917. Right in the middle of the services, the small congregation stopped in order to pay homage to the minister and his wife, giving them an award.
For excellence in preaching.
It was here that I realized that in Christian churches, except for hymns and prayers, God is never mentioned. Just Jesus.
Well, maybe not never, but rarely anyhow.
It was also at this same church -- could have been the same service, I don't remember, a woman took her fourteen year old son to three of the church elders for a laying on of hands in order to chase the devil out of him. I thought the whole thing a bit like a secret boy's club ritual. It looked very amateurish -- as if each of the layer-on-of-handers were looking to each other for guidance on the proper method of driving out devils. I don't think there are text books on the practice.
I thought it strange that a boy so young would want to be a party to such a farce, but as the ritual finished and the mother and boy turned around to walk back up the aisle, the boy looked at me and rolled his eyes. I immediately understood that none of it was his idea -- it was his crazy mother's idea.
"Don't blame me," he seemed to be saying.
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