the first time

I cried as my dad pushed me down the slope…. But a six year old is allowed to cry… right?

When we went to the ski shop and tried on boots it seemed like fun, as I borrowed mom’s gloves... I couldn’t find mine, the adventure waited, but stepping into the ski bindings … even though I practiced at home it took four tries...barely able to stand up, skis slide around… it was too much, I didn’t want to do it any more, but dad bought me all that stuff, and mom was watching… he pushed

I glided…tears stopped

Later the whole family went to what we called Aomari… Snow cats were driving straight up mountains and people were skiing straight off of cliffs…

My brother was blond and Japanese people were universally in love with him, a snow cat driver wanted to take him for a drive and I got to go along. Who knew that machines could defy gravity, we drove in snow that was over my head up a mountain that I couldn’t have climbed on foot.

But at the mountain… I was not allowed to ski down most of the runs, but it seemed so easy, stop left, stop right stop left... easy

Being the middle of six kids, the youngest skiing, it was easy for me to disappear. My 15 year old brother saw me on the run that he thought too dangerous… and Mom tried to find me… they had to stop the lift for her because the “lift tips” sign was in Japanese so she didn’t... and never got on a lift again.

back in the mountains...

The days don't all melt together... the nights are not cold... but the stars always seem new.

installing windows in a house is usually a quick and dirty affair, wrap the opening in bitchathane (yea that is what it is called) and nail it into the hole. But today and yesterday...dangling from rope in a harness was more like a day climbing, hanging our over a precipice working hard to get to the top... no... it was work.

and Eden is making his famous chocolate waffles

"they" say that simplest is best

southern Turkey… edge of town, a mosque… Kites made out of letter paper and thread.

i wish i could remember how they folded them

a christmas swim

Amy I were crashing a fancy corporate Christmas party at the Provo Park Hotel , we’d heard that it was going to be a formal yet “wild “event... fancy was tuxedo print tee shirts and floral dresses. And wild... an MC telling office stories... As we were leaving with a load of mangos and pineapples from the center pieces we passed a sign “pool 3rd floor”…. We detoured


Found a door marked weight room and pool, it was locked ... a janitor walked by and I muttered “Damn it I left the key with John and Becky” the janitor opened to door and we walked in behind him, he checked the trash and left.

Beyond the empty weight room was another door then the pool and hot tub, a woman was just drying off. When the two of us were alone we fully undressed and got in the hot tub . After a few minutes Amy pointed to the far wall and a small camera.

We both got up and dove into the pool swam a couple of laps and got out.

While we were drying off and getting dressed a man and a woman in hotel uniforms came through the door.

“uh, did you see the camera?”

“Yes”

“we do not allow that here”

They left just ahead of us.

phoenix

Only out of deep experience af love, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, high and low, heaven and hell, only out of deep experience of pain and pleasure through love does one become aware. They are needed to make you aware

Bhagwan Shree Hajneesh

Jamie, Jamsie?

I was called Jamie by my family until I rebelled against the girl like name, my Mom Dad and sister Genie never caught on to the change, James it has been ever since.

Several times i've made half hearted attempts to reinstated Jamie, never to catch on...

half a year ago Jenna started calling me Jamie because i told her the above, then independently Estelle started calling me Jamsie, then I noticed that Troy calls me Jamsie...

two days ago at the Apple genius bar the woman helping me with called me Jamie... Jamie? what did you call me? she looked embarrassed and and glanced at her computer screen, uh, uh James? I told her that I was delighted.

Do I deserve it all? Happiness? I think that I finally understand where it resides, and how to get it, so the question remaining is can I keep it. Today it involved preening, yesterday, riding in the rain... Stuck in traffic, tomorrow building walls, and I'm not sure what will bring happiness the next day. Strange but the happiness of days past involves pain and even the desire for death, but those life changing events make the happiness of today even possible.

In this moment it is all about pie

What do I deserve?

I figure it has taken me taken me about twenty extra years to catch up socially with people I went to high school with. I think I finally get it, all the social posturing, friendship, dancing, and dating... I think I get it... but if I would've understood beer back then maybe i'd of gotten it all sooner.

Don't be nice to me...

In my quest to be happy I realized that I do not want people to be nice to me... I do not want anyone to do anything for me that does not make them happy.

It gives me great joy to see those around me enjoying themselves and I want to feel that joy.

I feel happy when those around me are happy, and I want to be happy.

But if I do something for another with just the goal of their happiness then I'm not seeing to my needs...

Be sensitive to me, if my hair cut is bad don't say " you are ugly" but do tell me that you do not like it, and if you could offer a suggestion I'd really appreciate it, but please do not tell me that you like it, or say something that would lead me to believe that you approve, do not be nice, sensitive yes but not nice.

if you do not like me do not act like you do...

if you do not want too... then don't

"selfless" actions are a trap, because if you are not taking care of yourself then you can not take care of anyone else

take care of you and if that works for me then let me be the judge of that, I will do the same.

Again with the dog and the monkey?

We are born then we die, but what of the part in between
I want to be happy, and think that all people want that too. but deciding what this state called happiness really is is the big question.
It seems that happiness is simply a drug induced state where our own bodies produce drugs in response to external stimuli that history has proven has the highest probability of producing offspring for homosapians and pre civilization humans. But because of our human state of consciousness that our species currently finds itself in many of these responses do not really serve us very well.

We like all other animals are motivated by three things, food, physical safety and procreation (sustenance, safety and sex or SSS) and ultimately all decisions are motivates by these three things. Modern neuroscience has learned that all the logical conscious decisions we think that we make happen about six seconds before we are aware that we made them, I'm not going into the actual experiments that show this but it is true and I can point you to the papers if you want. So yea we make choices then we become aware of the choices but since we are not really aware of the choices that we make when we make them it stands to reason that we that we can't really know why we make them and the best we can do is to guess.

It's like this... We are just pack animals, like dogs, that happen to have thumbs and the cognitive ability to build rocket-ships but that really we are just simple animals trying to get our simple needs met (SSS) but because we are so smart and can build rocket-ships we make complex assumptions about what we are doing when in fact we are just trying to get our needs met.

It's like we are dogs running around who happen to have literate drunk monkeys riding around on our shoulders who think that they are controlling the dog... The dog turns left to get safety sustenance or sex and the monkey thinks it made the dog turn and makes up a reason why the turn happened, the monkey uses all of its skills of logic and reason but really it is just guessing.

The dog turns left or right because of its needs but really it is just looking for those shots of drugs it calls happiness.

who am i really?

can the sun see that spot I need to visit on the mountain top?

does it exists?

accidents

like most things in my life i did not plan my first freight train trip, it just sort of happened. A guy tapped me on a the shoulder and said "I understand that you ride trains" some one had told him that I would hop a freight and he took that to mean that I had experience. A week later i learned that cardboard is a better sleeping mat then a thermarest, or at least that was what i was thinking as I watched my thermarest blow off a train.

That trip didn't change my life but it did give me new things to look at and think about. A homeless man who told me that if others knew how great his life was they would quit their jobs and live like him. A couple walked out of a restaurant and gave me a meal, i wasn't asking or even hungry. A train crew man warned me the i needed to be careful and not get beaten up the FTRA.

on and on but mostly i realized that i was an Anthropologist.

all good things in my life are accidents that i chose to embrace

Born Again

By my memory, the first birth was the least dramatic and quickest

there have been six since

they always feel like death

but that's probably what the first one felt like too

and now i know it's not, it's just being born again

hallelujah, praise be

Carma

Since I can't drive two vehicles at the same time and I need to get another I hitchhiked down the mountian, it's a good feeling walking away from ones car placing trust in strangers with transport.

I flipped off the car that honked as they passed, and felt sorry for the fearful live of all those with room who gave me wide birth.

After an hour of walking down a car stopped and in it a kid who i gave a ride too a month earlier.

I'm on the bus now, and no one gets any carma for this ride, but I might lose some because I did not have to pay

The first crisis

At around age six I woke one night with a problem, where does it all end, or start 'cause it was the same thing, start, is there a wall, I envisioned brick, that goes up forever, then what is on the other side. My parents just told me to not think about it, so I didn't.

In the mission field I tried to not think about it, decided that thinking about it would get me nowhere, how could one stand to lose their family.

But later when my girlfriend asked I had to answer honestly. And now it is little but questions, and real answers.

I refuse

The sky looked bruised, but I had to watch,
It really doesn't get to chose what happens
And I think what I'm seeing means that tomorrow will be beautiful

where I live

My home is right here, now it is here and in a moment it will be over there but by then it will be here too

My lawn and pool are taken care of by then selves

Food comes when it may

And what is is

McDonalds

Bonnie Jean from the shoe area of REI gave me her phone number... she wanted to take a freight train journey, I thought she was beautiful. As we got kicked out of the train yard in SLC we were told " trains cut peoples legs off"

In Ogden we hid in a boxcar and waited, in Pocatello we used the Amtrak waiting and bathrooms. In Portland, we cleaned up in a McDonald's bathroom and learned that we we were not in Seattle .

the last time I saw her she was pregnant, she promised her husband that she would never hitchhike again.

dropped off a cornice and out of view

Sometimes skiing uphill is more satisfying than skiing down, I never would’ve guessed that, but then again for most of my skiing life I did not even know that skiing up hill was much of a possibility.

But going up hill gets one to the top, and you get to choose the route and the speed then once you get there you get to keep going, and going… or not.

Yesterday was a perfect day on a mountain… mountains… Up and down, untracked snow.

straight razor shave

In the movie My Name Is Nobody, a scruffy cowboy (Henry Fonda) rides into a hot and dusty town, gets off his horse and goes into a barber shop that has 3 dangerous looking guys, one in a barbers smock, hangs is guns on a hook “I’d like a shave” we can just see, out of sight of our hero, someone tied up in a back room, it looks like a barber, the cowboy sits, gets all lathered up and lifts his chin fully exposing his neck, making himself perfectly vulnerable, just as the imposture barber lifts a straight razor to his neck we hear a click and see what looks like the barrel of a gun poke through the apron covering the cowboy’s lap, the barber gulps and shaves the neck, the barber is sweating and the cowboy looks calm… eventually the cowboy walks out and the three men are dead….

I was about ten when i saw the movie, but I wanted a shave, to raise my chin and expose my neck.

While riding a bus in southern China, I do not remember the name of the city, I saw a man on the side of the road sitting in a chair another man had a straight and was giving him a shave. It was cold and nowhere had heat so I was cherishing my beard, but two weeks later when I was much further south and it was getting very warm I went out to find a shave.

Through a doorway not much different from the one Henry Fonda walked through, a man was cutting hair. I walked in and waited my turn. Sat and gestured that I wanted all my hair cut...all of it from neck to top of my head, all off.

The barber quickly dispatched most of my hair with an electric razor that was plugged into the overhead light, then pulled out a straight razor to finish the job. He wiped my face down with a warm cloth then started pulling out each hair on my face… ok he wasn’t actually doing that but it’s what it felt like. At this point, under the light of the single bulb plus the light from the cracks in the wood slat walls I noticed that he had a mole on his chin with a long hair sticking out, and a few longish whiskers under his nose and I wondered if he had never shaved his own face...

My next straight razor shave was much better.

hitching again

I left my bike across town yesterday so today it was back to hitchhiking. As I was making my way, a truck driver made eye contact and shrugged his shoulders as he passed, and the next driver coming down the road did the same thing. What did they mean? Could they not know what I was doing? Could they both… as I was actively musing about this the first truck came back up the road and flipped a U’y and I had my ride.

Bernie, had to make a stop on the way but took me right to my destination.

birth

I came out into the world and pee'd, the doctor said, "it's a boy and his plumbing works." but I do not remember that, I do remember being breast fed though, and my Grandmother standing over my crib, she died when I was a year old.

the mission to get my bike

now that i returned from Boston I can drive my house around but i don't really want to, so yesterday i set out across town on foot but with my thumb i, on a journey to get my bike from the Urban Forrester homestead. i bet i walked about a half mile... and about 20 cars passed before someone stopped. I used to get kinda angry when guys in empty pick up trucks didn't stop. I could understand when little old ladies, families, or unaccompanied women don't give me a ride, but walking down a remote road and a empty truck and guys in the front and they just drive by.... but not anymore, walking is good, but getting a ride and meeting a new person is better.

Several years ago i interviewed a man who walked highways, never asked for rides (with his thumb or other ways) at first he would get so angry and he claimed that it made him crazy, (i'm sure he was crazy before though) then one day he stopped even asking and his life was instantly better because he stopped worrying about something that he could do nothing about.

I'm not much for heros, but maybe i can make an exception

yea

it is all coming together right now
many people understand
it's simple
live

the secret

I think I get it,

but I know that's what all mad people think,

that we have the "secret to life" all worked out

not that we can live/do it

how can one know

can't

love?

How do I love thee?
let me count the ways...

four,

drugs

dopamine, norepinephrine, phenylethylamine and oxytocin
released into our system,

and it feels so perfect, eternal, real.

like this is the one true chance at happiness.

all caused by a person who can't or won't stay

and we want to die

'til we are weened off the drugs

room to sleep

My knees hang off the couch
but pile on a body that I like and I and sleep is much nicer
I swear that my heart beats slower
except when I explode.

Teachers? really!

Paul Quilter... I do not remember the names of any other of my co workers from Sundance when I was 15, not the born again christian who I would talk about religion with and gave me that big stack of anti mormon literature, not the performer who wore those little glasses and was so concerned after my car accident who scars i'm so proud of. Paul Quilter who was always running out of gas because "I can only ever afford to put five dollars of gas in my truck" always running out of gas, twice a week, always running out of gas.

My eighth mission companion.... " I'm very humble", no irony, I fell down laughing .

My last mission companion who did not know where Georgia was... we were in Georgia and yet he could not find it on a map...he could not find Utah either.

Chad Bailey.... from my second summer in New Jersey, "My greatest quality is my self knowledge" this from a guy who really knew nothing about him self...

HM a business partner who chastised me for spending to much money on bottled water (buying a $2 bottle instead of the a $12 for 10 pack, even though we only need one bottle) and yet could not account for $150,000 that he had spent in the last 6 months

Teachers all. No, not professional teachers, but people who taught me very important things

a day about eggs

At River Diner, I ordered a western omelet home fries and toast, dad ordered his eggs sunny side up. I don't usually order omelets but the one I got bore little resemblance to what i think of as an "omelet" and I was pleased, the home fries? again nothing like what I think of,and they were tasty too.

The man at the table next got sunny side up eggs, he had ordered over easy, the waitress noticed the error as she was setting the plate down, but the man looked kind of excited and said "I'll give it a try" like it was an adventure.

we drove over the river, parked by the museum and wandered a bit, past Mastodons, which we learned are not really very related to Wooly Mammoths, through a strangely sparse indoor farmers market, that had a Mennonite couple (I can see the appeal his hat and beard were so cool), and to the escalator into the Egg. the information lady had to call some one else to to find out how to get upstairs and too the Egg.

The Elevators didn't work, but the emergency exit? a word to the wise, nearly deaf people do not sneak very well,

Albany New York. A museum seemingly devoted to New York City and skyscrapers. A big one and four smaller ones, the Empire State Plaza. They stick up alone.
so glad I brought the big yellow fluffy down coat, it’s cold here.

a 12 step program to overcome

1 Know that you are likely blind to your own strengths and weaknesses and that the way that you see yourself is probably not fully accurate

2 Understand that you can never fully understand yourself but that you can be happy and healthy

3 Accept input about who you are and what you do and understand that others opinions are always helpful even if they are critical or even wrong

4 Make a searching and fearless personal inventory

5 See that your feelings and emotions are internally generated

6 Accept that you are a Human Animal and that being a Human Animal is good

7 Humbly accept who you are

8 Make a list of elements of who you are

9 Burn that list because it might be right but it is most likely it isn’t. Self knowledge is nearly impossible

10 Continue to take personal inventory

11 Use logic and reason to understand the world you live in

12 Be happy

All those people that believe that is is going to end in 2012 are sadly fooled.

The world will end on May 21, 2011

Don't believe me? All the facts point to it and the bible isn't more clear about anything.

You see the Bible was dictated by God and every word and number carries a spiritual significance.

The number 5, equals atonement. Ten is completeness. Seventeen means heaven.

Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D., Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years.

multiply 1,978 by 365.2422 days - the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

(5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story, It's the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you're completely saved.

I tell ya, I fell off my chair when I realized all this.