It’s funny — I needed to save this image of the definition before bringing it into WordPress, and so I plopped it anywhere, but anywhere turned out to be into the image directory of a book that I’m working on. That book happens to be A Brief History Of Communism by Anatole Konstantin, and the pictures that appeared next to the thumbnails when I went to bring it in were those of Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and other devils whose number of murders are in the many, many millions of human beings. Talk about betrayal after trust. . . . The condition of the entire country remains treason, and will until that country repairs its past ethics condition and comes clean. The efforts of this author could be considered one man’s contribution toward that end.
The sins of commission tend to be the ones that world focuses on — “WHAT did you DO???!!!” The things one does in a ‘cope’ situation are ugly compared to a management style that sanely leads to victory and success for reason, but aren’t nearly as pervasive, regretful and damaging as no management at all. That’s what we’re talking about here.
I remember at one point in my life I wanted to go into the military specifically for the discipline. I wanted a manager because clearly, I wasn’t it. My mother was desperate to talk me out of it, and did, eliciting the help of an American Chinese medicine practitioner. They gently asserted that joining the Air Force would have been a moral bankruptcy, but underlying it were fears such as “What if I kill someone?” or “What if I’m killed??!”
Truth be known, these were my worries about it, too, but the possible overts I may have committed or may have been committed against me are slight compared to the omission of discipline from my life.
Ironically, the woman who talked me out of getting discipline was the woman who took it away to begin with. At 9 years old, clearly my mother was my manager, and when she left one cold October day with my brother, I stopped having a manager. My father wasn’t it outside of the routine of feeding us, hustling us off to school and the occasional drudgery of clothes shopping. All else was over to me. At 9.
I never rose above this condition of finding out where my footsteps were supposed to be (from someone else) and putting my feet in them. This was “being good” and 7 years later I eventually rebelled against it by smoking and then smoking dope.
There were a few points where I had passion. I wanted to have camping gear, so I learned to stitch and made it. Then I had camping gear. I took the journey that far, though I wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. Then I took all that gear up to my Mother’s house in the Adirondacks and went 1.7 miles up the road and camped and came back after spending the night and taking some pictures of my gear. It’s like I didn’t want to do any doingness, but rather just wanted the beingness.
Another passion point was when I HAD to be a magician. I was in the basement of a theater. My main part in the play was cancelled because the female lead was devastated that her lover, a married professor on another campus, dropped dead. The play with magic became just a magic show that I had an important offstage part in.
I was so burningly jealous of the magician that I was myself hysterical. THIS spurred me on to quickly develop a show, get birds, and go to Lake George to land an audition in 1981. I didn’t get it (due to my Mother’s error), then I didn’t get another audition (they were trying to scare the producer of the Ice Show, Ron Urban, into improvement by even seeing the audition) and then I became a cook at a restaurant. I had to promise the owner I wouldn’t quit during the season. THEN I got my own magic gig at the Magic Forest. That whole summer, I cooked breakfast, did 4 shows, then came in and cooked dinner. Kept my word.
Even in the telling, I notice, even now, that it’s all about the beingness for me.
More later.