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