Perhaps I should address political correctness, too, while I'm in the neighborhood.  I don't know.  It's going to be quite a task to organize my thoughts and adequately cover the topics I have set for myself today.

But first, here's a little side note I want to share.  Yesterday morning I was expecting a visit from Greyfox, so I plowed through my web research early and went to work writing my entry on twenty-three-and-the-law-of-fives.  I had fun doing it, and was feeling the sort of satisfaction one gets from accomplishing a long-anticipated task.  News of the Virginia Tech spree killings was on the radio, but I hadn't even considering blogging about it.  It's neither my field of expertise, nor my main field of interest.  Enigmas and anomalies are more my cup of tea, and shooting sprees are all-too-common and comprehensible social phenomena.

After spinksy asked me to share my thoughts on the shooting, I ran through a succession of options:  I could dash off a quick expression of my reaction and message her with it.  I could leave the "23" piece on top to see if it got any interesting comments (We all know, don't we, that few of us read and even fewer comment any further down than the top entry on a blog page?), and blog about it this morning.  I could ignore the whole thing and try not to think about it.  (That's not going to happen, believe me, no matter how attractive the idea might be.)  Then, I quit waffling over it and set about getting as many of the known facts as I could find before I started writing down my thoughts on them.

Imagine the little mental fanfare that greeted my inner ear this morning when I pulled up Planet Blacksburg and read:  "
The individual has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, 23."  It's everywhere.

I don't question the motives of any of the sincere gun control advocates who want to make guns go away so that violence and violent crime will decrease.  Those are admirable motives.  I do question their intelligence, their sanity, and their understanding of history and human nature.  You don't just stuff the genie back in the bottle.  It isn't that simple.  This is a case where it seems obvious that the unintended consequences will far outweigh any productive results.

a)  Take guns away from law abiding people who use them for personal protection* and to procure food, as many of us in Alaska do, or for sport and defense* as most gun owners in the Lower 48 do, and you end up with an unarmed and defenseless population of upstanding citizens facing a few well-armed groups of organized criminals and a bigger, disorganized,  armed rabble of thugs, robbers, would-be warlords, methamphetamine manufacturers and other assorted dangerous types.

b)  Beef up police resources and institute house-to-house searches and random searches of vehicles and persons on the street to seize all the guns, and you'll have a police state run by military and paramilitary organizations with excellent armament and enough power to corrupt and madden even the sanest ones among them.  They won't only be taking guns away from everyone, but they'll arrest my family, my neighbors, and anyone else who tries to keep their guns, and since the prisons are already overflowing, they'll kill some of us just to get us out of the way, and they'll put the rest of us into work camps.  We might even get the old chain gang system back, and see prisoners rented out for hire.

c)  If our old explosive-propelled projectile weapons are no longer available to us, there are those among us who will devise new and superior weapons or improvise just any old thing with the materials at hand.  Insurgents in Iraq are doing far more horrific damage to our troops with their improvised explosive devices than the Viet Cong did with Chinese assault rifles.

I don't collect guns.  I own an AR-7 military survival rifle in .22 caliber.  Its barrel and action unscrew from the foam-filled plastic stock and fit inside it.  When sealed with the waterproof cap, the whole thing will float.  I used to carry it in my backpack when I was able to go hiking.  I shot a squirrel with it, and used it a few years later for more accurate shooting and more humane extermination of varmints that Greyfox had been shooting and wounding with his handgun.

When my ex-husband Charley moved out, almost as soon as he was gone I started to be pestered by local lodge rats who saw me as fair game.  After several of them had come knocking drunkenly on my door at night, I asked Charley what I could do to rid myself of the two-legged varmints.  He offered to lend me his stainless steel Ruger Security Six .357 magnum revolver with a four-inch barrel.  I said, "Charley, I don't want to shoot the assholes; I just want them to leave me alone."

He said, "Trust me," and since I did (still do), I went along with him.  We went to the gravel pit on Saturday when there was a good crowd at the lodge.  I burned a box of ammo on target practice, and the shooting was clearly audible down the road at the lodge.  When the ammo was used up we walked into the bar smelling of gunsmoke, with the .347 holstered on my hip.  As required by state law, but with maybe a little extra flourish not required by law, I handed my weapon over to the bartender for safe keeping.  Then Charley started bragging to everyone present about my uncanny accuracy with the handgun.  To this day, none of those varmints has bothered me, and I never even had to wing one.

I kept the .357 in the house until the winter before I met and married Greyfox.  That year the snow was deep and moose were stranded, starving and desperately mad, in the plowed roads and driveways.  I started carrying the revolver when I walked Doug to and from the school bus stop.  One day, when a moose charged me from a neighbor's driveway, a bullet from the .357 turned it aside and saved me from being maimed or killed beneath its hooves.  Charley and my other friend who had to track my wounded moose and finish it off, told me it was stupid to go up against a moose with a handgun, that what I needed was a 12-gauge pump shotgun. 

Some years later, Greyfox bought me one, and that completed my arsenal.  Charley used to tell me I should have a Barrett Light 50, because my farsighted vision and steady aim are wasted with the firearms I have, and the ArmsMerchant I'm married to now has often head-tripped about having various assault rifles in case the shit hits the fan, but I'm content with my guns and Doug's Marlin .22 rifle and the Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 mag. with which he shot the moose that was stomping Koji in our front yard.

Greyfox, the ArmsMerchant, works at several gun shows a year, mostly selling knives.  I don't go to many of the gun shows, for the same reason I don't go anywhere very often:  chronic fatigue.  I enjoy the gun shows I get to go to, mostly because a lot of the AGCA members are mellow and sexy older Alaskan types, oozing confidence and competence along with testosterone, and because there are always a few Second Amendment Sisters around to talk to.  Since I have an appreciation for efficient design and fine craftsmanship, some of the guns are pleasant to look at, too.
-----
*The difference between "protection" here and "defense" there, is that we're more likely to encounter bears or raging moose, and average urban/suburban Americans are more likely to be attacked or menaced by humans.

I was grateful last night to HomerTheBrave for helping me put into perspective the common mass reaction to the shootings.  After I posted my response to spinksy's request, I visited a few of the Xangans to whom I've subscribed.  Out of over a dozen, only three did not mention the shootings.  One of those who didn't write about it wasn't in the U.S., and one mentioned the incident only to say she wasn't going to blog about it.  Most of the people who wrote about the incident expressed horror, grief, and/or incomprehension.

Homer deplored the way the killings had become a political issue even before the corpses had cooled, and offered an astute analysis of the psycho-social dynamics at work.  The words that made all the difference for me were these:  "Death is scary."  I might have eventually reached that conclusion myself after I stopped to think about it, but I wasn't in stop-and-think mode.  I was clicking around, reading, and marveling at the reactions I was reading, which mostly ranged from emotional hysteria to maudlin sentimentality.

I know I'm different, that my attitudes toward death and a lot of other things are not shared by most people.  In childhood I had a lot of difficulty accepting that I wasn't normal.  Eventually I adjusted to it and learned to appreciate some of my abnormalities.  An IQ at the 99.94th percentile isn't hard to accept when you think about it, and having no fear of death seems almost heavenly if you really consider the ramifications, and the alternative.

It is not that I don't love life, nor do I unnecessarily risk dying.  I thought of an analogy this morning, something someone said, "There are two kinds of people -- those who love to win and those who hate to lose."  I love to win, and I take losing in my stride.  I love life but I do not fear death.

Possibly I could have come around to that attitude in a rational manner just through the realization that every life ends in death and it is pointless and destructive of happiness and peace of mind to go through life in fear of the inevitable.  Maybe I could have, or maybe not.  The fact is, that's not how I arrived at my serene acceptance of my eventual demise.

Truth is, I don't recall ever in my life having been afraid of dying.  I've been afraid of lots of things, but death isn't one of them.  When I learned that my pediatricians said I wouldn't live to grow up, any anxiety I felt wasn't about death or what might come after, it was all about things I wanted to do before I died.  My love of life was in place even then, before I ever started to school.

Maybe this is one of the attributes of an old soul.  My past-life memories were still all unconscious back then but they surely must have influenced my personality even so.  Now that those memories are available to me on a conscious level and I can recall having died in numerous different ways, the familiarity with the process might have something to do with my lack of fear.

Those things, as I say, might have something to do with it, but the thing that has had the greatest influence has been my conscious choice to transcend fear.  First time I ever heard Dick Sutphen say that the reason we are here is to transcend fear and practice unconditional love, the words had the ring of truth to them.  The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.  Even if it wasn't divinely ordained, it makes sense.  Working at it can't hurt, and succeeding at it has been sweet every step of the way.  I'm just glad I had sense enough to do it.

Years later when Neale Donald Walsch came along with Conversations with God and the message that each thing we do has one of two "sponsoring thoughts," either love or fear, it tied in beautifully with Sutphen's teaching about transcending fear and practicing love.  Any time I feel troubled or uncertain, I ask myself, "What would Love do?"  As time passes and I get more practice, there are ever fewer moments of uncertainty and a lot less trouble in my life.

Grief is not a loving thing.  Grief arises from fear.  Horror obviously is fear-based.  Anger and hatred, as well as the almost knee-jerk calls for gun control -- they are all motivated by fear.  "Misguided" is, I think, the kindest word I can use to describe the majority of the reactions I have seen to Cho Seung-Hui's campus rampage.  The mindset I have been observing in the aftermath of the shootings reminds me of a bunch of children telling ghost stories to rouse each other's fears.  It doesn't help that most people are in denial about their own motives and try to put a sympathetic face on it, pitying the families, dwelling on the losses.  I'm not blaming or trying to shame anyone, I'm only observing and commenting -- no blame, no shame.  I feel sympathy and sometimes pity for those who turn their own lives into hell by living in fear.  I know how that is, because I've been there.

Seung, as it turns out, had given out so many signals of his seething hatred that one classmate has said that when she heard about the shootings, she thought, "I bet it was Cho Seung-Hui."  A senior, and an English major, he left behind awkward unskilled writings that seem to have been produced by a young adolescent seeking to shock, appall, and repel readers.  His writings aroused sufficient concern with at least one teacher that he was referred for counseling.  There has been mention in news sources that he might have been on some sort of medication for depression.

Seung left a note in which he mentioned, "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful charlatans" on campus.  He disavowed responsibility, writing, "You made me do this."  He is described as a quiet loner, which is a cliché among those who are asked to describe the young men who commit crimes such as this.  Sources at VA Tech have told reporters that he had stalked several women, and that he had recently set a fire on campus.  A note containing a bomb threat was found yesterday near some of the victims, and there have been two recent bomb threats at the university, but whether they were made by Seung Cho is unknown.

I suppose there are still many people who find this young man's actions incomprehensible.  I find them pointless and senseless from a global perspective, but from that man's warped perspective they make sense and they got across the point he wanted to make.  His actions were obviously destructive, and certainly grandiose, but I don't understand what about them some other people find so hard to understand.  I just look at his picture and read his writings, and I understand what motivated him to end his life in such a flamboyant manner.   It wasn't love.  It had to be fear.

That the threat he posed was largely ignored is slightly less comprehensible, but such things are inherent in our culture.  Even when confronted with outpourings of the ugliness some of us carry around in our minds, others tend to turn away rather than to confront it.  Each such rejection adds to the load of anger and hatred.  Again, fear-born reactions gave birth to ever more things to be afraid of.  Life on this planet will go on in that manner unless and until the mass of us transcends fear and practices unconditional love.

Maybe I'll get to that later.  For now, I have no political pronouncements, just a suggestion.  Watch and listen.  Try to discern if anything you see and hear in the political arena is motivated by love, or if it is all coming from fear.

I was asked by spinksy for my thoughts on the latest campus killing spree, the most destructive one in U.S. history.  I was listening to NPR this morning and caught some early reports.  When Greyfox got here (brought us supplies to save me a trip to town, and got a beard trim to save himself from looking like Gabby Hayes) we checked Google News for info, but it was apparent that the central facts, such as the shooter's identity, wouldn't be immediately available, and his motive might never be known for certain.

After Greyfox left, I looked for more news, and found Planet Blacksburg, a website run by journalism students at VA Tech.  That is where I got most of the info I pieced together in the summary below, which I prepared so I could relay it to Greyfox when he calls me after 9 tonight.  As of  7 PM, this is what I had learned and a little bit of what I surmised from it:

My thoughts:

I'm about halfway with John McCain, who said the shooting
rampage at Virginia Tech University does not change his views on the
Second Amendment, "except to make sure that these kinds of weapons
don't fall into the hands of bad people."  "Bad people" is a facile, meaningless, weasely phrase, meant, I am sure, as a concession to gun-control advocates.  Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter, was an upstanding, respected veteran who just happened to have a brain tumor.  Let's make sure we keep guns out of the hands of folks with brain tumors, too.

A half dozen or more reports from universities across the country said that people on their campuses were frightened following the shooting spree.  I say that if they weren't frightened beforehand, they certainly have no more reason now to be scared.  Yes, it's possible that another jilted loser or two will be inspired to go gun people down, but they are just as likely to go looking for their girl friends' new lovers in insurance offices or banks as in college.  Let's all dive under our desks now, okay?

I more or less summarized my thoughts above as I gathered the data:  he went armed and prepared, he knew how to shoot and he took time to aim.  I might have more thoughts, or more relevant and to-the-point thoughts when I learn more details.  Did he find the people he was looking for, or did he come unglued and shoot everyone in sight out of frustration because he didn't find them?  Was that speculation about the girlfriend and her new boyfriend a false report?  My uppermost thought at this time is that I want to know more about the shooter and his motivations.

This is just one of many incidents.  It doesn't do anything to change my view of humanity.  It doesn't scare me or aggrieve me.  It interests me and it concerns me.  I think that we as a society can find better ways to deal with these incidents.  Is it a natural human trait to crave drama and to feed each other's fears and fascination with violence?  If so, it is not a universal trait.  It is an unevolved trait, and it is perpetuated and magnified by journalists who want to satisfy our curiosity while they increase their own ratings and circulation figures.

I won't prejudge today's shooter, and even after I learn whatever facts might come out about him and his reasons for his actions today, I will not judge him.  In my view Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren't evil.  Their actions were destructive and they destroyed themselves, and they were set upon their path by circumstances that might have been different had someone in their lives loved them better.  Charles Whitman wasn't evil.  His mind was disordered because his brain was diseased.  Nobody even knew he was ill until the autopsy. 

I just won't judge.  I won't judge, and I won't fear.  I won't give up my guns, either, not without a fight.  I consider them to be survival equipment, useful tools.  What I will do is love, everyone in general and most especially those with whom I come into contact.  That's the course that feels appropriate for me.

When I responded to BluePaNDoRa's request that I write about conspiracies and conspiracy theories, I decided to focus on Bohemian Grove at the time, because the Illuminati and the New World Order were topics too complex to cover briefly, and trying to lump them all together seemed absurd.  My online research for info on Bohemian Grove took several days.  I have been studying the Illuminati since the 1970s, and have recently been searching online for sources that I can quote.

In my mind, Illuminati are inextricably associated with the late, great Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy and The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, consisting of The Earth Will Shake, The Widow's Son, and Nature's God.  Of Illuminati, RAW said that by the time you figure out who they are, you're one of them.  Twenty-three and the Law of Fives figure prominently in all of RAW's Illuminatus! books.  I was primed for these books long before I opened the cover of the first one, before I'd ever heard of the Law of Fives or the mystical 23 skidoo.

"Illuminati," means "the illuminated ones," or the enlightened.  My name, Kathy, the short form of Katherine, I learned as a child, means, "the illuminated or enlightened one."  By the ancient occult Hebraic science of Gematria, my name, Kathy Lynn Douglass, reduces to the number 5.  To top it off, for I-don't-know-how-long before I picked up the first of RAW's Illuminatus! books, I had been seeing 23 everywhere, particularly on the display of digital clocks.  It wasn't that I was a clock watcher, but just about every time I glanced at a clock it was reading twenty-three minutes past some hour or other, even if the clock was running slow or fast.  It wasn't that some internal clock of mine was directing my attention to a clock at twenty-three past, but something somewhere was pulling my attention to clocks that displayed 23, regardless of the true time.

Twenty-three is the number of the Illuminati, or else it's the number of the Discordians, or the Illuminati and the Discordians are all the same.  These two organizations, or, more properly, disorganizations, are either involved in an ancient rivalry or an equally ancient conspiracy.  And please, for the sakes of us all, don't try to set me straight on which way it really is, because the ambiguity is built into the plot.  Hail Eris!  Keep the lasagna flying.

The '23 Enigma', as discovered by William S. Burroughs [the man with the gun here] presents itself as a good omen for some - disaster for others. Trying to convey the phenomenon to the uninitiated is as easy as describing the night sky to someone who has been blind from birth.

When Burroughs was in Tangiers, he knew a Captain Clark who ran a ferry over to Spain. One day, Clark told Burroughs that he had been doing the route for 23 years without an accident. That day, the ferry sank . . .that evening, while Burroughs was thinking about the incident, a radio bulletin announced the crash of Flight 23 on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark!

Burroughs began to keep a scrapbook of 23s. When writing about Dutch Shultz, he realized that when the New York City gangster had put a contract out on 23-year-old Vincent 'Mad Dog' Coll, who met his end on 23rd St. Shultz himself died on October 23rd, 1935. As Robert Anton Wilson writes in 'Cosmic Trigger', the same night, Marty Crompier, another gangster was shot, but not fatally. "It's got to be one of them coincidences," he told police.

Speaking of October 23rd, Seventeenth century scholar Archbishop Ussher reckoned that the earth was created on October 23rd, 4004 BC, while the Mayans believed the world will end on December 23rd, 2012.

Hexagram 23 in the 'I Ching' oracle means "break apart." 23 in telegrapher's code means "break the line." Aleister Crowley defined number 23 as "parting, removal, separation, joy, a thread, and life . . ."

Parents each donate 23 chromosomes to the fertilized egg . . .the human biorhythm cycle is generally 23 days, and it takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the human body.

And so on . . .

disinformation

E is the fifth letter of the alphabet, and also the most commonly used in the English language. W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet. Half of W is V, which is the roman numeral for 5. Once again, therefore, the inherent connection between 5 and 23 is proven. Relent ye skeptics!

The Order of the Arrow: a secret organization
within the Boy Scouts of America uses "WWW" as one of their
symbols. W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet. Hmmm... 'w w w' has
a ring to it.  [hmmmm, indeed... dubya has a familiar ring to it.]

Avogadro's number:  The number of atoms of an element in one mole (cf. Atomic Weight) is 6.022 x 10²³

The Templars had only 23 Grandmasters. Jacques de Molay was the 23rd and last of the Templar Grandmasters.

23 is the first prime number in which both digits are prime numbers and add up to another prime number.

Five related links:

Kerry Thornley
23-skidoo
Jim Fournier
fusionanomaly
Timothy Leary

That's what I get for having expectations.  Maybe I'll learn that little lesson someday.

Yesterday, being Saturday, Doug had the computer all day with his regular weekly online roleplaying session.  I wanted to write, but did not want to do it in longhand in a spiral notebook for later transcription into xTools.  Pardon me, but I'm spoiled. 

Several years ago, I did most of the work on my memoirs on our old laptop, saved it to diskette, and transferred it to this computer (actually to its predecessor - I keep forgetting that this is a "new" computer).  Then, piece by piece that old laptop failed.  We had named the thing Schpeedy Trackbawl when the trackball developed an addiction to frequent cleanings with rubbing alcohol.  Eventually, the trackball stopped working altogether.

I learned to use arrow keys and keyboard shortcuts and went on writing in Works for Windows until that software developed some fatal flaws.  After that, I was composing my blogs in Notepad.  The no-frills approach still beat the old manual typewriter on which I made my living doing psychic readings by mail during the late eighties and through most of the nineties, before we moved in here on the power grid and I got internet access.

Then one day the laptop just wouldn't boot up.  It told me it couldn't read from drive C.  A few times the push - the - button - again - when - that - push - doesn't - work method worked for me, but eventually even that technique failed and I put the laptop away.   A while after that, on a trip back to our old place across the highway, I found the set of replacement software that Compaq had sent me during the warranty period when the display overheated and there was a need to replace some hardware and all the software.  The box of diskettes had some water damage and mildew, so I wasn't sure the data was intact.

Yesterday, finally, I was motivated to try.  I reformatted ol' Schpeedy's hard drive, used the boot disk I'd made way back when we got the laptop (over ten years ago, not sure exactly, but the OS was MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1, if that's a clue), and inserted Setup disk 1.  With a little refresher course in DOS commands from Doug, I managed to get to 11% of the DOS setup before it said there was a disk read error.  By a combination of sticking the disks in the freezer for a while (little trick I learned from one of the geeks who hung out at the Astrological Center of Alaska back in '81 when I worked there) and a few applications of my personal ki - as in flicking my fingers at the disk and whispering "zap" while focusing on thoughts of success - I eventually completed the DOS setup.

When I tried the first of the Windows setup disks, it was no go.  It's probably just as well that all my efforts at setting up Windows failed.  Doug revealed to me the DOS text editor, and I set about setting down my blog for today, about beliefs and believing in things.  Right at the start, I typed in a few lines, saved them to disk, and interrupted Doug's game long enough to plug the disk in here and make sure everything worked compatibly.  No problem:  the Notepad on here opened the DOS text file and read it.  I was set.  That text editor is the basest of basic:  no text wrap, lines 256 characters long, slow scrolling and not much in the way of word processing tools, more like just text manipulation.

I had almost completed the piece I wanted to write when I lost power in the wall outlet I was using and lost my unsaved text, all but those first few lines of the test-shot.  The power loss was no surprise.  What had surprised me when I plugged Schpeedy's power supply into the outlet was that it had power.  We've been using heavy duty extension cords strung through the hallway from back bedrooms to power the front room for quite a while now because power to front room wall outlets is intermittent at best.  I fiddled, futzed, fussed and fixed it with a 3-way plug in the extension cord, and reconstructed what I'd lost, after a fashion.  I know it wasn't the same, but when it was done I was satisfied with it.

I stuck the disk in the storage case over here, and when I tried to load it on this machine this morning it wouldn't read.  If anyone is interested in my thoughts about belief and believing in things, that will have to wait until the inspiration hits again, if it ever does.  Meanwhile, there's the old thing I wrote for my KaiOaty site, called Flim-Flam, Hocus Pocus, Mumbo Jumbo and Gobbledygook.  I reread it today, fixed a broken link, and decided it has stood up to the test of time well enough.

Angie was partially responsible for my having started blogging my memoirs here on Xanga.  When she found me, she had asked me about her father, wanting to know if he'd been important to me, or maybe just a one-night stand.  He just happened to have been the love of my life, and the story of her conception, birth and surrender for adoption was a long one.  I wrote it out for her, and later on when I got onto Xanga having that story in the can, so to speak, ended up being the start of the memoir blogs.  Even if I hadn't written it, I'd consider it an excellent story.  If you want to read it, here are the links: 
part one 
part two 
part three
part four

These are not exactly recurring dreams.  I have had several series of recurring dreams at various times of my life.  In the earliest set I recall, during my childhood, I saw myself as a young woman in eighteenth century dress, searching for my father in the British West Indies.  Later on, I realized that those dreams were based on memories of a past life.

Other recurring dreams of mine have been the common sort that many people report having, such as finding oneself naked in public, or being late for class and unable to find the classroom.  I haven't had one of them in years.  A recurrent theme that haunted my sleep in the 1970s involved a post-apocalyptic cityscape and running firefights with automatic weapons.  Around the same time, another series had me walking through a warm autumn night in a midwestern city, being followed by lions and unable to find a door that would open to shelter me.  None of these has recurred for a couple of decades.

My dream life is still rich, colorful and interesting, but generally less violent and ominous than it used to be.  The notable exceptions to that are these dreams that don't seem like my dreams.  Not truly a recurring series, they are more like a continuing story that comes in episodes.  The scene changes with each dream, and circumstances change with the continuity of a serial story.

These are unlike any other dreams I have ever had.  The difference is not in the scenery, but in both the theme of the series of dreams and the feel of them, the sense I have upon waking that this wasn't my dream, but someone else's.  I don't mean that in the dream I seem to be a detached observer.  That "observer" mode is one I often experience in my dreams, as if I'm watching a movie, but in this series of dreams I am right in there, interacting with others, making decisions, and watching the action unfold through my own eyes.

What makes these dreams feel alien to me is something subtler, a "feel" that just isn't there in any of my other dreams.  My dreams, except for these, are generally comprehensible to me.  I can trace their triggers to events in my life (or lives), to my own hopes, fears, fantasies, experiences, attitudes, or philosophies.  Even in dreams that originate in my past lives, I recognize my self in the dream as myself.  The person I become in these dreams neither thinks nor behaves as I do.  She is somebody else entirely.

In the twenty-some years that I have been having these dreams, with a frequency of less than one a year -- maybe seven or eight episodes in all -- I have been following this woman through a moderately successful criminal career.  My own criminal career was a spotty and petty thing, an avocation at times, a subsistence lifestyle at others, but never a true career.  Her crimes, unlike mine, are strictly white-collar, and unlike anything in either my real life, my past lives, or my fantasy life.

This woman's life is centered on her crimes.  She plots big scores, and carries out her plans meticulously.  Then she disappears, adopts a new identity, and lives comfortably on her ill-gotten gains as she plans her next score.  She has no long-term or intimate relationships.  Her associates are casual or distant connections, and always transient, as she drifts from place to place one step ahead of the law.  If such a life had any attraction for me, I'd be doing it, not dreaming about it.  These dreams are nightmares to me.  I wake from each one with a sense of cold dread that evaporates as I realize with relief that it was only a dream.

In the time that I have been following her, she has developed and her crimes have changed with the times.  Back in the late 'seventies or early 'eighties, when the series started, she was running a check-kiting scam, profiting from bank float, building up her assets with scores of increasing magnitude.  Until I started having these dreams, I didn't know anything about float.  Curiosity about the dreams led me to ask some questions and follow some clues, and that's how I learned the little bit I know about bank fraud.

Each of the dreams in the series has had a flavor of fear and furtiveness.  Just now, a series of images from several dreams flashed through my mind.  They were street scenes from several cities.  The only one I thought I recognized was Alma, Oklahoma.  One of them appeared to be somewhere like Montana or Wyoming.  Another one might have been an eastern city because there were many large old buildings.  In all of them, she was in a state of high anxiety because she knew her crimes had been detected and the paper trails necessitated relocation and a new identity.

Recently, the woman in my dreams has gotten into identity theft.  She
has also formed an ongoing relationship with someone who electronically
watches her back.  Always, throughout the whole series, she was
continually looking over her shoulder, both literally and
figuratively.  She is paranoiac due to her lifestyle.  The man who now monitors her electronic backtrail is even more paranoid than she is.  They appear to be an effective team. 

In the latest dream, he was informing her that the Feds were onto her, and they were discussing the measures that each of them needed to take to cope with the situation.  She was more relaxed and at ease than I have ever seen her.  Her partner has taken a lot of the pressure off, which is ironic because they connected while he was hunting her.  He is a government agent.

This would make an interesting novel.

Now, there's a thought....  If I'm ever going to succeed as a fiction writer, it will have to be in some manner such as this, because I'm imagination-challenged, absolutely no good at making things up.

The thirteenth of the month is slightly more likely to be on a Friday than on any other day of the week.  Due to the Gregorian calendar's pattern of leap years, the entire pattern repeats every 400 years.

out of 400 years:

day     number of 13s     fraction

Sunday      687     14.31%
Monday     685     14.27%
Tuesday     685     14.27%
Wednesday       687        14.31%
Thursday     684     14.25%
Friday        688     14.33%
Saturday     684     14.25%

Eric Weisstein

 

Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro, and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen were
born on Friday the Thirteenth.
Hubert Humphrey and Tupac Shakur died
on Friday the Thirteenth.

The ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon mission was launched at 1313 hours Houston time, from pad 39 (13x3) and had to be aborted on April 13, 1970.

In Western cultures, particularly those that speak German, Portuguese, or English, there is a widespread belief that when a Friday falls on the 13th of any month, it is an unlucky day.  Some sources say it is the most widely believed superstition in the United States, but there are over twice as many Americans who claim not to believe in it as those who admit to being afraid of Friday the thirteenth.  Although many sources claim that this is an "ancient" superstition, the earliest known reference to it in print was in the late 1800s.

Fear of the number 13 is older than the fear of Friday the thirteenth, but it has never been universal.  In Chinese culture, for example, thirteen is considered a lucky number.  Early Egyptians associated thirteen with the afterlife, and some people believe it was that idea, corrupted into a fear of death rather than the joyful anticipation of life after death, which formed the basis for the fear of "unlucky 13".

According to about.com:

A study published in the British Medical Journal in 1993 entitled "Is Friday the 13th Bad for Your Health?"  With the aim of mapping "the relation between health, behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United Kingdom," its authors compared the ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th, over a period of years.

Incredibly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number of hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents was significantly higher than on "normal" Fridays.

Their conclusion:

"Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended."

----------------

It is said: If 13 people sit down to dinner
together, all will die within the year. The Turks so disliked the
number 13 that it was practically expunged from their vocabulary
(Brewer, 1894). Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue.
Many buildings don't have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your
name, you will have the devil's luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson,
Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters
in their names). There are 13 witches in a coven.

Though no one
can say for sure when and why human beings first associated the number
13 with misfortune, the belief is assumed to be quite old and there
exist any number of theories purporting to trace its origins to
antiquity and beyond.

It has been proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the number 13 are as ancient as the act of counting.

Primitive
man had only his 10 fingers and two feet to represent units, so he
could not count higher than 12, according to this explanation. What lay
beyond that --13 -- was an impenetrable mystery, hence an object of
superstition. Which has a lovely, didactic ring to it, but one is left
wondering: did primitive man not have toes?

thothweb

Besides the scary (for Christians) pagan association with the 13-member covens (twelve witches and the devil, according to some accounts), it is written that there were thirteen people present at the last supper before the crucifixion.  Then, too, the crucifixion was said to have occurred on Friday, Friday is the Muslim Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath starts at sunset on Friday, and that may have been enough to convince some Christians that Friday was an unlucky day, and if it fell on the thirteenth of the month, even worse.

Friday also apparently got an evil reputation because it was named for the Norse Goddess Frigg or Fricka, Odin's wife, whom some people confuse with Freya.  Both of them were associated with sex, marriage, love, and fertility and, along with the other love goddesses Venus and Aphrodite, were tainted by the Puritans' fear and rejection of fleshly pleasure and the Victorians' misguided Malthusian efforts to curtail overpopulation by inhibiting sexual relations.  Venus got such a bad rap that sexually transmitted diseases were long called "venereal" disease.

My favorite origin myth for the Friday the Thirteenth fear is favored by some Masonic historians.  It involves the French monarch Philip IV, known as Phillippe le Bel, and Pope Clement V.  On September 14, 1307, King Philip mailed sealed orders to all his seneschals and bailiffs, forbidding them under penalty of death to open the papers before Thursday
night, October 12.  The royal secret was kept, preserving the element of surprise.  Le Bel's orders were prefaced by these words:

"A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to think of and terrible to hear, a detestable crime, an execrable evil deed, an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing wholly inhuman, foreign to all humanity, has, thanks to the reports of several persons worthy of faith, reached our ears, not without striking us with great astonishment and causing us to tremble with violent horror, and, as we consider its gravity an immense pain rises in us, all the more cruelly because there is no doubt that the enormity of the crime overflows to the point of being an offence to the divine majesty, a shame for humanity, a pernicious example of evil and a universal scandal."

Source: grouchogandhi

   "When [Jacques] de Molay retired that night, there was no way he could have known that just before the dawn of the next day an event would occur of such shattering dimensions that the date, Friday the Thirteenth, would live for centuries in the minds of millions as the unluckiest day of the year."
    — Born in Blood:
    The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry,
    John J. Robinson

    "And so it was at dawn of the following day, Friday the Thirteenth in October of 1307, that almost every Templar knight, priest, sergeant, and servant in France was arrested and put in chains. The arresting party at the Paris Temple was led by the king's chancellor in person, probably to assure admittance. The date was ever after regarded as an ominous time, but although for the rest of the world it might have become an amusing superstition, for the Knights Templar that Friday the Thirteenth was the unluckiest day of that or any other year. Their torture began the same day."
    — Dungeon, Fire and Sword:
    The Knights Templar in the Crusades,
    John J. Robinson

 "[The Knights Templar], it must be remembered, was, with the sole exception of the Papacy, the most important, most powerful, most prestigious, most apparently unshakable institution of its age. At the time of [King] Philippe's attack, it was nearly two centuries old and regarded as one of the central pillars of Western Christendom. For most of it contemporaries, it seemed as immutable, as durable, as permanent as the Church herself. That such an edifice should be so summarily demolished rocked the foundation upon which rested the assumptions and beliefs of the epoch. Thus, for example, Dante, in the 'The Divine Comedy', expresses his shock and his sympathy for the persecuted 'White Mantles'. Indeed, the superstition which holds Friday the 13th to be a day of misfortune is believed to stem from Philippe's initial raids on Friday, 13 October 1307."
    — The Temple and the Lodge,
    Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh

In 1314 Grand Master Jacques De Molay, and leaders Hugh De Perault, and Godfrey De Goneville were burnt at the stake still loudly protesting their innocence. Soon after, a legend arose that Molay's last words were a curse on Philip and the weak-willed Pope who had allowed the trials, and that the deaths of both the King and the Pope within a year of the execution death were in fulfillment of that curse, and the date of Friday the thirteenth has been considered cursed ever since.

altreligion.about.com

It is said that Phillippe le Bel's grudge against the templars arose out of rejection, that after the king's wife died he had tried to join the Templars and was blackballed.  It is also likely that issues of power and greed were involved.

In 2002, a secret document [The Chinon Parchment] was unearthed in the Vatican archives. Dated August, 1308, and bearing Pope Clement's signature, the parchment officially absolved the Templar leadership of wrongdoing. Clement apparently did not have the fortitude to stand up for what he believed, however, and made no attempt to exonerate the Knights.

inrebus.com

In general, getting older has more advantages than disadvantages:  more experience, skill, confidence, etc.  As life goes on, we see many interesting new discoveries and useful innovations, too, but there is a bittersweet feeling for me as I watch the passing of some things I might have preferred to see stay around.

I was born during the Golden Age of Radio.  Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, and Amos and Andy were great popular entertainment for their time.  A lot of that material is gone now, lost if it was ever recorded at all.  Some of what survives has not held up well to the passage of time.  Jokes that were timely then just fall flat now, and the ones that were too racist or sexist for our time are embarrassing or outrageous.  Even so, I sometimes miss the old radio shows and am happy that radio endures and is being updated and upgraded by NPR.

I lived through the Golden Age of TV.  I tuned into Howdy Doody, American Bandstand, and Gunsmoke.  Along with the rest of America, I was bamboozled by cigarette commercials that made health claims for their products, and by rigged quiz shows like the $64,000 Question.  In the 1960s, I turned on to psychedelics, tuned in to higher consciousness, dropped out of the military-industrial complex, and turned off the TV.

Briefly, around 1980 and again around the turn of the millennium, I tuned back in long enough to enjoy Hill Street Blues and The West Wing, but the commercial hype and political propaganda that were rampant in the medium turned me off, and I tuned out again.  Even though I think America has over the years benefited from some loss of innocence and gullibility, my fellow Americans still appear eager to swallow way too much hype and disinformation.

I don't think many if any of us watching I Love Lucy or listening to One Man's Family thought of ourselves as taking part in a Golden Age.  For a while, it seemed that shows would just keep getting better, and we didn't realize that any program or the entire medium had jumped the shark or gone over the hill until the apex was past.  There is disagreement now regarding the Golden Age of Film, because some feel it has already passed and others believe that movies are better than ever.  History will have to make that judgment sometime.

I have been told by a few Xanga relics that I got here too late for Xanga's golden age, but you can't miss what you never had, and even with all the changes I have seen here in almost five years, Xanga is still golden for me.  I took part in the back-to-the-land movement a generation ago, watched it wane and then saw some of the best aspects of it resurge as "voluntary simplicity," so that's another golden age on which the jury is still out.  I've seen some other social trends come and go, and I suppose some of them may come back around again.  There is one of them whose passing I have been observing recently that I would really like to see revitalized:  consumer protection and consumer affairs.

For a while, local, state and federal governments were creating consumer protection agencies, hiring ombudsmen, and seeking to make it harder for businesses and industry to cheat customers or sell dangerous or defective products.  Then I began to hear complaints about the costs of litigation of consumer claims.  As lawyers and bean couters scrambled to cover their employers' asses, foodstuffs, cosmetics, tools and electronic devices began wearing warning labels that ranged from obvious to absurd.

 The Alaska State Attorney General's office used to have a Consumer Protection Section.  They closed it, and now the state recommends that consumers with complaints hire lawyers, go to small claims court, or contact the Better Business Bureau.

For a couple of decades, I could count on being able to contact the manufacturer or distributor if the count was short in a bottle of vitamins or the peas were mixed in with the brownie in a frozen meal.  Some of those consumer reps were so falsely solicitous and fulsomely apologetic that I almost gagged, but I held my nose and kept making the effort to get my money's worth.

It brought an occasional bonanza such as the time I wrote to Stagg to complain that their new turkey chili didn't taste like chili, but like some kind of sweet turkey tomato soup.  Not long after that, the UPS contractor out here delivered a big long box containing a row of cans - one each of every kind of chili they made, with a note suggesting that I might find some flavor more to my liking.  The Jalapeno Hot was best, and Steakhouse was okay if I added hot sauce.

For a while about fifteen years ago, the Banquet frozen foods company kept us supplied with what threatened to be an endless supply of nasty, barely-edible fried chicken.  Each time we complained about a package, they'd send us coupons for two free packages.  There were a couple of very lean winters for us during that time, and we ate a lot of stringy, greasy, overly salty fried chicken when we had little else to eat. 

Once our economic situation improved, though, we stopped redeeming those coupons.  A company standing behind its products is a fine concept, but I do question the policy of backing up inferior stuff with just more of the same.  Sometimes, it would seem appropriate to simply give a refund and stop pretending that the inferior product was some sort of temporary fluke or transient problem at the factory.

Lately, I have noticed that some packages no longer have consumer comment phone numbers.  Several times, when I have reported shortages or defects, I have received non-committal responses from the people I spoke to and there were no offers of replacement.  I have begun paying closer attention to printed guarantees and the presence or absence of consumer contact information.  The Coca Cola company solicits comments through a web form, but the response falls somewhere between defensive and indifferent.  They obviously aren't worried about losing an occasional customer.

Even when there is an 800 number to call, and a satisfaction guarantee, it's not always easy to get a satisfactory result.  We got an excellent sale price on four Fred Meyer frozen pizzas, for the convenience of Doug who likes to eat but doesn't like to take time away from his gaming or writing to cook good food.  They were all from the same lot, and the sauce on them was so watery that it ran off the pan when the pizzas were cut.  I called the number, was told to return the empty box to the local store, and the product would be replaced free of charge.

Greyfox returned the box from the first pizza before we had eaten the second one and discovered that it was the same way.  Each of the first four pizzas and some of the replacements had the same watery and tasteless sauce.  One-by-one, the boxes were returned to the store by either Greyfox or me.  Sometimes the replacements were given without any fuss or hassle, sometimes it was necessary to have a checker call a supervisor over to approve it, and one time even the shift supervisor refused to make the exchange.

That time, it was Greyfox who went through the hassle and delay of trying to deal with Doug's pizza problem, and I heard about it in agonizing detail during our nightly phone call.  I called the 800 number and explained the situation to the consumer rep who answered.  She made me repeat all the details, I suppose so that her supervisor could hear the story.  She apologized, assured me that the store should have made the exchange, took my contact information and suggested that we try again and call them if we were again refused.

Greyfox had kept the pizza box that nobody would accept, so he took it back in and that time the exchange was made.  A few weeks later, when I had nearly forgotten the incident, I was online when CallWave took a message from the local store's manager.  I could hear the embarrassed anxiety in his voice as he said that it seemed some of his "good employees had dropped the ball."  

He asked me to call him back to discuss the matter, but since the latest replacement attempt had succeeded and the latest pizza didn't run all over the countertop, I didn't bother.  I have been thinking about calling again, though, because it seems they solved the problem not by thickening and improving the sauce, but by using less of the original thin, insipid recipe.  Oh, well.... 

Some of the online journeys I take into various dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopediae end up being fun all the way, interesting, informative and enlightening.  Then there are the ones like today's.  If I recall correctly, this trip started with "paranoia." 

In my youth, as an avid reader of dictionaries, I thought I would be able to understand what was meant if I knew the dictionary definitions of the words used.  I also thought that if a given word was not in my dictionary I could get some sense of its meaning if I understood the etymology of the prefixes, syllables, and suffixes of which the word was composed.

If those ideas seem to you to make sense, it is time for you to get a clue.  For me, the clues kept piling up throughout my life until I could no longer deny that few people who use words know the dictionary definitions of the words they use, and etymology is a lot like entomology:  full of bugs.

Recently, I have been endeavoring to convey some notions of actual real-world occurrences and natural human abilities and have found myself hampered by the common terminology for these things.  I am coming to detest words such as, "parapsychology", "metaphysics", and "supernatural".  Like "psychic", "shaman", and "witch", they mean whatever the speaker or writer decides they mean.  Unless the person using the word is considerate enough to define his terms, someone reading or hearing it can make of it whatever he may.

I often feel frustrated by some of the responses to what I write.  Many times, my words are misconstrued or simply not understood.  Rather than use the dictionary search box I have provided on my site, people either move on and read someone whose vocabulary more nearly approximates their own, or they ask me what a word means.  Don't misunderstand me here -- asking is preferable to remaining in ignorance, and such questions often serve as a starting point for something I want to say.

What really wears me out is trying over and over to convey concepts that are to me fairly simple and straightforward, and then being misunderstood because I have no alternative but to use words that are new to the reader, words that have some quaint emotional load due to that person's having been misinformed or indoctrinated, or words that have widespread common connotations quite unrelated to the precise sense in which I use them.

Here is a sample (drawn from etymonline.com and m-w.com) of what I'm up against, what we are all up against if we desire to communicate about certain ideas:

Etymology is good for a few laughs.  Online dictionaries don't even make good doorstops. Words are worthless.  If you want to know what I'm thinking, tune into my thoughts.  I'm off to read a funny book and do a lot of laughing out loud.

Thanks for this to LuckyStars and her brother the Virgo who often tends to think a lot like I do.

"Those fools! Global warming from human causes? Dumb atheists. I found the real reason... those are FIRE-breathing dinosaurs."