To thine own self be true

A new birth changes everything. Learning to walk, feed oneself, and go to the bathroom by oneself changes everything. Gaining new siblings changes everything. Having a new pet changes everything. Moving to a new family house/location changes everything. Parental divorce changes everything. Getting a driver’s license and one’s own car changes everything. Moving out from home changes everything. Graduating from high school and post-secondary changes everything. Getting a ‘permanent job changes everything. Settling with a long-term live-in companion or spouse changes everything. Having kids changes everything. Buying/owning a house changes everything. Going on a memorable trip or special extended holiday changes everything. Retiring changes everything. Having grandkids changes everything. A death of someone close changes everything.

“Pootie”–3-year-old term for computer.
Watch what you whisper in a low voice. The words will be repeated back to you by 3-year-olds. They are always listening to adults in a room even when they appear to be playing or focused on something else. (Something which should be a concern if adults swear freely.)
When children are overtired, they will not behave normally and still have lots of crazy energy. If they don’t respond to various adult requests, then they will ‘party’ till they crash suddenly, often within minutes, magically.
There comes a point for reading toddlers where they will read many books in a row that are essentially word-picture identification books, rapidly increasing their vocabularies.
3-year-olds can be incredibly wilful and fussy. “I don’t like that” gets uttered before seeing or trying a lot of things.

3-year-olds challenge, test, and push/extend the limits of the most (limited) adults. They can be very exhausting after a few hours of supervision. They are quite demanding and require many typically unused or dormant inner resources and energies of adults. In return, the depths and rich inner lives of adults can enrich and extend usually receptive small children in return. Three-year-olds’ empathy, love, intelligence, humor, irony, and reflectiveness can be truly delightful and amazing.

Dog kibbles always taste better eaten out of a human hand that opens up revealing the pieces.
A guest dog, regardless of how small it is, will always spring into action and bark when there is a perceived threat.
Small dogs would prefer to sleep by human feet on a couch if such is available.
Dogs live perpetually in hope. Their spirits will brighten instantaneously if they see a leash brandished at a door and their name is called, or the W-word is used.
Small dogs are very low maintenance compared with three-year-olds who need 24/7 watching when awake.
Dogs take their cues from human masters. They are always watching human masters and living in hopes of food or walks.

Dogs, even guest ones, are boundless reservoirs of loyalty and love. They haven’t a dishonest bone in their bodies.

In glorious black and white playing a go-between character with Orson Welles as a 40ish, somewhat slimmed-down money-backer of pool hustlers and Paul Newman as Fast Eddie revisited. Newman claimed to me he was ready for the big game/con, suggesting he could do some fancy pool trick-shots.

Welles was upstairs at the hall being ‘courted’ by many down-and-outs, wanna-be hustlers when I convinced him Newman was ready to play. We descended to the hall where Newman was waiting. As Newman was getting ready, I told him, privately, how impressed I was that he and his real-life wife Joanne Woodward had fox terriers for pets, and that my favorite movie of his was The Verdict in which he played a sympathetic alcoholic loser-lawyer–a role for which he was snubbed by the Academy Awards. He set aside $2 in a hiding place before the bet.

Welles, reminiscent of Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats in size and general appearance, waited to bet on each of ‘Eddie’s’ shots. Predictably, he sank every one, winning Welles’ character thousands. I whispered in Welles’ ear that he should stop betting when Newman blew his first shot. And of course, he did not believe that Eddie’s luck could change so dramatically and kept betting on him, losing much of the money he had won.

I have had many dreams about meeting famous singers (recorded elsewhere in this blog–Dylan, Cohen, Joni Mitchell–long before her recent medical problems–and others) and actors. On a good night, these experiences are strange wish-fulfillments that seemingly emerge all on their own. Newman I have not thought of for some time, though I have been interested enough in him to own such oddities as a signed cookbook by him and a rare CD collection of him and Woodward reading from the novel that was adapted as the Mr. and Mrs. Bridge movie (as pictured above), an interesting risk for both of them. Possibly the subconscious trigger for his presence came yesterday when I saw a cute fox terrier on a calendar page. (c.f. fox terrier reference above)

Re. Welles–I saw a well-done documentary on him about a week ago (reviewed here). He and his remarkable career have long held a fascination for me. Welles was the Great Movie Maverick rejected by Hollywood after his masterpiece Citizen Kane. Possibly this event was another latent trigger for my nightly free-and-roaming mind in deep sleep. I guess these two departed actors had quite an influence on me as did the famous Hustler movie and the three of us ‘just had to get together’. No, you never know, relative to life’s possibilities, even in night dreaming.

“I am large; I contain multitudes.”–Walt Whitman

See also my notes on George Berkeley re. perception and reality (something W.O. Mitchell mentions in Who Has Seen the Wind, incidentally) in the previous blog entry “Part 2–Agreements with Specific Philosophers”, Mar. 15/2014.

(Safe Read-Only site–ignore any security warnings when opening pix. Open any one picture and they all open when you click backward 2x.)

All living things have time limits and are essentially, transitory with expiry dates. For them, nothing is permanent. The term ‘permanent’ is better applied to such elements as water, land, and space. And to man-made structures such as the Great Pyramids or Michelangelo’s “David’. The above five will outlive us all unless a comet hits the planet.

Thus, we should have no illusions about permanency, accepting that relative briefness and transitoriness are basic conditions of human life. As the Existentialists and Viktor Frankl pointed out, this is why our choices are so precious and special. Humans can make things, make things happen, make ourselves, becoming the auteurs of our lives, creating to some extent, our own fates and destinies. Put simply, choices define us, who we are.

Thus, we can change our lives, our minds, our attitudes, our beliefs, and values in order to create whatever worlds and leave our marks on others. That remains the best and most of what an individual human being can do in a limited amount of forever-ticking time, within a very limited sphere of influence.

Like all flowers, seasons, and whatever cellular life, we simply manage and try to live as long as we can. Notwithstanding that, it is only our choices and characters that denote our uniqueness and individual identities in the neverending process of Time.

is now perfectly acceptable in society if I say it’s so. If I’m green and I want to be purple, then there’s nothing wrong, crazy, irrational, or absurd about that because I am just being me, what I feel and choose. I’m right and everybody else is wrong. Total subjective reality and unlimited wish-fulfillment. ‘Being me’ has reached the double-thinking pinnacle of its blinkered ascent in Western society.

1. One cannot be honest and speak the truth anymore without being pilloried by political correctionists and personal/political agendaists.

2.There seems to be a total lack of perspective in areas of life where political correctionists and personal/political agendaists have ‘staked out their cause or turf’.

3. Common sense doesn’t count or live here anymore.

The hacker group Anonymous takes down the Canadian government.

“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new e-world that has such people in’t!” (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

And so you who knew him long ago in the past, you who remember him as wild, free-souled, and somewhat careless in matters of the heart. Would you have guessed he would leave the 1960s glory that was Winnipeg? Would you believe that he had studied and actually worked hard in university to become a 30-year-high-school-English teacher?

Perhaps that he would go on to musically entertain thousands on many stages? That he would write hundreds of poems and songs and lead several bands of musical friends playing the pop catalogue of the 1950s to 90s? That he would marry and have two fine kids and would be married for over 40 years to the same special woman from 1967? Would that have been remotely predictable then, in our shared youth of the 1950s and ’60s?

Did you know that he had worked as a nursing orderly in a hospital, as a letter-carrier for Canada Post, and as a film classifier for Alberta? And what about his other lives as a happy grandfather, as a literary historian for his country’s literature, or his career as a textbook author, writing and editing books that your children used in high school, regardless of where you now live in Canada? Did you have a clue that he would go on to write for and educate millions of young teenagers across the land? Did you know that he would become a successful writer with over 60 educational book publications? That he would still be standing up in front of audiences at age 66 to read from his work? (66 seemed so far away once upon our time.)

Could you have foreseen  that he would speak to thousands of teachers, too, over a 30-year-period, about how to teach different aspects of high school English or that he would reinvent himself in the digital age to write thousands of blog entries about personal consciousness, his life, and his love and knowledge of Canadian literature?

Yes, that same strange, wild boy, Room 42`s `most promising playboy`, that poor, overly-confident, but blissfully ignorant boy and teen. That kid who lived the crazy possibilities of all he dreamt of along the pike. That ‘neat guy’, that obvious nonconformist, that blatant show-off. That uninhibited youth who lived on nothing but hopes and dreams still lives on today, still remembers, still connects, but now accepts, understands, and appreciates how dumb-lucky he was that so much went well, that he had had more than his share of lucky breaks and fortunate flukes, and that he went as far as he could go.

Well, did you? You didn’t? Well, he didn’t either.

Today he looks back and wonders about your changes and fate. And whether you acquired a comparable knowledge, awareness, fulfillment, self-actualization, success and relative happiness after all this time between us. And what stories would you tell? Would you as surprised as he is, looking back at what he once was, what you were, and what we all were so long ago way back then?

is playing with a three-year-old.

One test for senility or to check whether you’ve ‘lost it’ is to check and see if you’re wearing your briefs or panties inside out or not, and recognizing the difference.