Inspiration

Many of you have been hold up in houses and apartments, trailers and cabins, working or not, but certainly not participating in life, not giving, growing or prospering within yourself; really just letting life pass you by for lack of inspiration.  Many of you have not been inspired in a very long time.  

For some, too long to even remember. 

One of the ways to be inspired, I’ve learned over the years, is to inspire somebody else; a friend, a stranger, a husband or wife, a parent, a son or daughter, a grandchild.

We are all creators. 

We are all blessed with the capacity for creation, whether it be physical, intellectual, or even social.  I want to encourage you to find your muse.

If you’re a musician pick up your instrument and make some new music.

If you’re a singer, raise your voice again.

If you’re a writer, put your pen to paper.

If you’re a painter throw some color on a blank canvas.

If you’re a sculptor wet your clay and dig your fingers in.

If you have a story to tell find somebody to tell it to.

If you just enjoy being outside, plant a garden.

But find your talent once again, or even for the first time.

Find some inspiration.

And inspire someone else along the way.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Pride, lust, anger, gluttony, greed, envy, and sloth.

Deadly, but not necessarily deadly in the literal sense of the word.  Only in that the participation in these behaviors over time erodes the spiritual, psychic, and emotional condition of an individual. 

Death of sorts, without a doubt. 

When is the last time you engaged in any of these mind-sets, or behaviors and felt good about it?  

Or about yourself?  Doesn’t happen, unless your sense of balance has already been severely compromised.

With religion not being a very popular idea these days, we’ve been drifting away from the core principals that enable human beings to live in a place of personal equilibrium, a place free of the encumbrance and entanglement of self-indulgence, and the inevitability of personal deterioration.  

Yes, the soul and spirit of a person deteriorates just the same as the body does when its basic maintenance is overlooked, or deliberately ignored.

The Seven Deadly Sins are different from the Ten Commandments, which, obviously, are also dismissed these days right along with most religious dogma.  The problem with wholesale dismissal of principals is that you end up throwing out the wheat with the chaff, the fruit with the rind.  

The Ten Commandments are not just a list of do’s and dont’s that someone said ‘you better pay attention to’.  They are principals to live by if you want to live well.  To live outside of their influence 

is to live with the certainty of personal corrosion, erosion and decline. 

The Seven Deadly Sins all involve emotions, and are quite likely 
to inflict ugly scars on the lives 

of those who engage with them.  They are potholes in a sense. 

If you avoid potholes on the road, you save a lot of damage
to your cars suspension. 

If you avoid The Seven Deadly Sins you avoid the damage to your own 

psychic/emotional/spiritual suspension.  

Someone was good enough to identify The Seven Deadly Sins 
for us, much like how a road maintenance crew will spray-paint a 
circle on the pavement around a pothole to indicate its need 
for repair, and to warn the driver of its location 
so that it can be avoided. 

No one is required to disengage from them, but it doesn’t make
a lot of sense to inflict unnecessary damage on one’s self, though.  
Does it?

Here are basic definitions, but I won’t expound on each of the seven.  

If you’re interested you can research them for yourself.
Best I not do the work for you.

Pride – A haughty attitude shown by people who believe 
that they are better than others.

Lust -  The strong physical desire to have sex with somebody 
without associated feelings of love or affection.

Anger  -  A feeling of extreme annoyance.

Gluttony -  Eating and drinking to excess.

Greed -  An overwhelming desire to have more of something, 
such as money, than is actually needed.

Envy – The resentful feeling of wanting somebody else’s success, 
good fortune, personal qualities or possessions.­

Sloth -  A disdain of work or of physical exertion.

Appointed, Not Anointed

The government; yes I’m sorry to say, the government, that paragon of virtue, has become nothing more than a curse in the lives of most of the American people these days.  It finds its way into our daily lives most inappropriately, and at the most inopportune time.   New laws, taxes, fees, regulations, requirements of every kind.  Listening in on us, tracking our every keyboard stroke or smart phone transaction.  Millionaires, most of them, they party, and cavort unabashedly, with the Hollywood elite, Hip-hop, rock and pop stars, and CEO’s of the largest corporations on the planet (Facebook, Google, etc.).  They exempt themselves from indignities that common Americans are faced with (drug testing, Obamacare), and crimes that you or I would be imprisoned for.  They pass bills that they have never read which contain laws that threaten our freedom, but not their own.  

We must remind these ‘public servants’ that they have been appointed by the people, and not anointed by some holy one as they would like to believe.  

Besides being way too big (all-encompassing, really), the main problem with government is that the politicians actually believe their own fiction.  They are as deluded as the general population of most mental institutions, and yet hold court as if they were anointed, rather than appointed.  They consider themselves to be loyal, moral and ethical pillars of the country working hard on our behalf, and yet they wallow in their own self-importance stroking themselves, and each other, for gratification, all the while thinking that we see them as they see themselves.

The truth is, we can see them, for who they actually are.

But we don’t care.

And that, my friends, is the real tragedy.

Ideology

 It sickens me how so many have a need to label others as liberal or conservative, right wing or left wing, with the attendant name calling, perpetuating the revulsion of one side for the other.  It is not an intelligent perspective; it is not conducive to any kind of personal dignity, and it does not advance the position of any of us as brothers and sisters, neighbors, and fellow travelers on this planet. It only divides.  It only separates.  It only tears down, and tears away from the good of the whole.  If truth be told, we all have some liberal in us, and we all have some conservative.  That we are afraid to recognize in ourselves the side we wish not to be known as, and only recognize in others the side that we wish to demean says even more about our own inadequacy than it does about our ideology.

Can we stop blaming others for our own unhappiness, and begin to find some common ground for agreement for a change?  There is no honest dialogue anymore because there is no longer a wish for common ground.  There is only the need to be right.  And it has proven to be devastating to the psyche of our families, our communities, and our country.

When is the last time you heard someone say, "Y'know, you may be right?"  When is the last time you said those words to someone else?

Pop Star Strippers

There is a dearth of soul in the music that is being foisted upon us today, and with the female vocalists in particular. 

The highly produced music that is being popularized by the likes of Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Shakira, and other supposed superstars, simply pretends at being important; it masquerades as original, and presents itself as being from the soul of some iconic goddess.

But there is no soul there.  There is no originality, and there is nothing of importance.  The mega productions strip the songs of their already own faux worthiness.  The computer-programmed digital arrangements and pitch-enhanced vocals ensure that no actual organic sound will ever grace the ears of the listener.  Perfection, rather than authenticity, is the overriding purpose.  Inspiration is subjugated to electronic predictability.  There is no intrinsic musical accountability.  Effect takes precedence over the honesty of intention.  And it is all about the money.

Have you noticed how most of the popular female singers have also become little more than celebrity strippers performing to those bloated arrangements, and, more often than not, lip-syncing to their own recordings?  Back-up vocals are thickly layered over the lead vocal like multiple frostings on a packaged, stale, and then frozen cake.  With trite lyrics, shallow motivation, and overblown staging is it any wonder that the public performances reduce themselves to the stadium equivalent of private strip clubs?  When money and fame are the primary motivation, would you really expect any other eventuality?

I have no problem with strip clubs, except, of course, that the dancers exploit already attention-starved men.  I know, you probably think the men are exploiting the dancers, but hey, if you’re an adult you pay your money and get what you get.  And, if I’m not mistaken, they don’t yet let kids into those kinds of clubs.  Not so with these concerts.  All the male horn-dogs, adult goddess-wannabe’s, and star-struck little adolescent girls trip over themselves to be at the shows, dreaming of becoming pop-star strippers themselves.

Even entertainers who do not need to become strippers have jumped willingly, and enthusiastically, into these personally demeaning performances.  Pink (Alicia Beth Moore), one of the most supremely talented artists on the world stage today, still takes her concerts to the depths of self-loathing, as well as reverse misogyny, as if stripping is the pinnacle of success.  As if the exploitation of one’s own body and psyche is the measure by which a woman can consider herself to be liberated.  Troubling to be sure.

Taylor Swift, the anorexic country-pop star, who, by the way, should keep her clothes on, if for no other reason than to not frighten the children, has stooped to the same level of exhibitionism as well.  But, as just another shill for the entertainment business puppet masters, she sells records, and she sells out shows.  Now Hannah Montana, I mean Miley Cyrus, has become what former mousketeer Brittany Spears had once become, who had become what Madonna had become before her.  And now even the young Justin Bieber has become the male-child-stripper equivalent of all of these forgettable females.

Support authentic music folks; music with purpose, music with artistry, music with soul.

           

I dream of Janis Joplin. 

I Chewed Through My Own Tongue

I know that many of you have been wondering why I haven't posted any new Coyote Tracks lately.

Well, to explain things the best I can, the PC police came to my house in the mountains and tortured me for thirty days and thirty-five nights.  Without my permission, I might add.  They strapped me to a mauve lawn chair in the basement and force-fed me cream of wheat with sprinkles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and for midnight snack, washed down with a mix of Red Bull and Mountain Dew.  They also made me watch reruns of Oprah, Ellen, Pierce, and The View until I screamed for mercy, begged them for relief, and promised that I would never criticize these sacred intellectuals again; even if it meant chewing through my own tongue.

Well, I did chew through my own tongue while I was busy biting it.

And, as a result of my compromised condition I've recently been going through stem-cell therapy at a secret Oregon location in hopes of regenerating a new tongue, and reclaiming the courage to use it.

Oh, and I’ve also been busy working on a couple of other projects which have been taking the lions share of my time.  But I hope to be finished with them in two or three weeks, and back to giving you more of the kind of oblivious illumination you’ve come to depend on me for.

Hang with me.

It Matters Who You Are

It doesn’t matter who you were.  It matters who you are.

Likewise, it doesn’t matter what you did.  It matters what you’re doing.

And it doesn’t matter where you’ve been.  It matters where you’re going.

Some people are crippled by their past, the mistakes they made, and the failures they’ve been unable to come to grips with.  It leaves them frozen in place, restricted in their development as people.  Others live the same dynamic, but because of past success, a success that causes them to feel as if they’ve arrived, as if they’ve reached the top of the mountain.  They become as paralyzed, and as stunted in their growth, as those whose failure has caused their own inhibition.

Each day can be an opportunity to move away from the paralysis, to inch forward, if even with unremarkable effect.  Effort is something each one of us can engage in, and experience as progress, no matter the degree; like the sensation one might have when trying to walk across the room after one’s legs have gone to sleep from lack of circulation.  It’s not easy, but the effort alone will help to bring the legs back to life.  Effort cannot disguise itself as apathy.  It is the antithesis of that.  One can feel honest effort within one’s self.  And one can take heart in knowing that movement comes with that effort, whether the movement is easily measured or not.  Results are sometimes very difficult to see, but can often be illuminated by looking back, by observing the tracks connecting where we are with where we’ve been, not unlike the trail a snail leaves on the ground behind its own advancement.  And, lets face it, sometimes our personal movement, our progress if you will, is little more than a snails pace; but at least it’s movement.

And that’s what counts.  

It doesn’t matter who you were.  It matters who you are.

Likewise, it doesn’t matter what you did.  It matters what you’re doing.

And it doesn’t matter where you’ve been.  It matters where you’re going.

Passwords

You didn’t used to have to have a password to conduct your daily life.  I remember you had to have a combination for the lock on your gym locker for P.E., and for the lock on your bicycle if you didn’t want it to get stolen.  You also had to have a key for the front door of your house.  Oh, and when you got older you needed a key for the car, but as well as starting your car, it also unlocked the car door.  But that was about it.  Life was as simple as that.  You didn’t need to protect your bank account, your social networking sites, your credit card information or your identity.

But it’s not like that anymore.  It hasn’t been that way for a long time.  Now you have to have a password for anything you try and do; and let’s face it, a good percentage of our lives are conducted online, on a laptop or on a smartphone.  But just because the phone is smarter than we are doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s really all that smart.  After all, some of us are not so smart.  If we were we’d probably not be conducting our lives on a smartphone, an ipad, or a laptop where the government can monitor our affairs so easily.  We’d probably be out there doing our business in person, actually interacting with other people and places where we don’t need a password, just a drivers license so somebody can look at our picture.  It does, however, occur to me that a smartphone is smart enough to ask us for a password, and that’s where I begin to feel inferior, and discouraged.  I can never seem to remember mine, any of my passwords really, and sometimes I wish the damn phone, or the website, or whatever, would just forget to ask me. 

Now I’m not trying to disparage anybody, or the way of life that has evolved so conspicuously around us, but I can’t help being dispirited by all the security it requires of us to get through a typical day these days.  I mean I need a password to log into my email account just to see if somebody has something nasty to say about something I’ve written. 

I don’t need a password to open my mailbox at the foot of my driveway.

And I like that better.

Invisibility

OK, enough time has gone by since the latest school shooting (Sandy Hook) for all of us to get a little perspective on the larger issue.  Not the families of the victims, of course, or the others who were personally involved, but the rest of us.  Unfortunately, that has not happened, and most likely it won’t.  These incidents are so grief and anger laden that it is very difficult to step outside that realm to allow deductive reasoning to rule over the raw emotion that envelops us like a fog.  I do not blame anybody for letting emotion have its way after such a horrific incident, and especially when it involves children.  They were not my children, but they are in the greater sense that if we are all Gods children, then the elders among us are all Gods children’s parents.  I grieve for those children, but I grieve for the shooter as well.  He was also somebody’s child.

Where did we fail, both the victims and the shooter?

Blame the guns if you must, but in doing so you would have to exclude the signs and root causes that most, if not all, of these incidents have in common.  The incidents, historically, have been perpetrated primarily by young men who have been marginalized, in some way or another, by a culture, and greater society, that does not value them as it does the social achiever, the athlete, the handsome, and the well-connected.  Most are isolated loners who have been driven into private worlds by bullying and its accompanying social ostracization, or by the invisibility that accompanies their own social inhibition.  Many parents fall short in their ability to meet the needs of the child, and many doctors fail the patient in their quick-fix practice of prescribing psychotropic medications to mollify the concern and mask the symptoms of a greater psychiatric challenge.  Shame on them.

Blame the guns if you must, but we live in a culture where we begin medicating our children as soon as they enter school, leaving them unattended in Grammar school, and left completely to their own devices in Jr. High, and High School.  We feed them movies and video games to keep them entertained and occupied so that we do not have to expend our precious energy actually parenting them.  Of course, as they grow older, and even more isolated, they naturally gravitate to more violent movies and interactive video games; ‘games’ that enable the powerless to experience a sense of power, as anti-social, and de-humanizing as that power might actually be.

Do you see the politicians stumbling over each other to keep the kids off of these medications, and to get standards of decency enacted with the movie and video game industries?  I think not.  The gun lobbies, as powerful as they are, are somewhat held at bay by the ideological division within the government; but the pharmaceutical lobbies, to this day, run unchecked in the halls of congress like a bitter wind fueling a high-desert wildfire.  The politicians owe the pharmaceutical companies their own re-elections, and are not about to work against their own political interests and ambitions. 

And we all know about the governments relationship to Hollywood.

Pathetic, at best.   

Blame the guns if you must, but there is an even more glaring, and egregious, connection to these horrific incidents than even the social isolation, the medications, and the violent video game indulgences.  The primary motivator, I believe, is actually the acute realization that a maladjusted social outcast comes to have; the understanding that it is no longer necessary for him to remain invisible in his own powerless little world.  The media’s spotlight on the many previous incidents has thoroughly enabled that understanding for him.  The exploitation of the events and the people involved, for purposes both financial and political, serve very well to create, and perpetuate, the very incidents they so righteously purport to be outraged by.

The shooter is identified, his picture sent around the world to find its way onto the front pages of every newspaper and media website imaginable.  His face, and history are broadcast over every television station in the country, and much of the world.  The shooter, even though he’d taken his own life, is no longer invisible, but now has an international obituary, and a life examined by all.  He has finally achieved his goal of visibility in the world.  He knew before hand that it would happen.  

I can assure you that if the media would agree to no longer publish the name, picture, history, or motivation of a shooter, there would be few to none of these incidents to have to report on in the future.  There would no longer be any payoff for the perpetrator.  These young men do not want to kill children.  If they knew their own invisibility would just continue, they would find a more acceptable way to gain the attention they so desperately need. 

But that’s not going to happen with how things are today. 

Of that you can be assured.

The demonization of guns is the political objective, and media-ratings is the financial one, for the predictable exploitation of these horrendous incidents; not to mention the exposure and notoriety that the individual reporters and so-called ‘journalists’ are sure to receive for their self-serving efforts. 

You can blame the guns if you must, but you will help facilitate the guns being taken out of the hands of stable and responsible Americans, people who won’t be there to protect you when you’re being threatened by the criminal element, or the deranged.  When the good guys don’t have guns, only the government and the bad guys will have them.  How would you feel about that?

Take the politically correct, programmed ideology, out of the equation, and how would you honestly feel about that?

Yes, blame the guns if you must, but I wish I could have been at Sandy Hook to save the children with a concealed weapon of my own.  And more likely than not, you’ve wished the same thing about yourself, or somebody else. 

Before that, however, I wish I could have been there in the shooters life to help save that troubled young man from himself.

That is where it needs to begin.

Like A Tiger On Fresh Meat

Words on a page.

What are they but the fleeting thoughts of one human being capturing a moment in time for the eyes, and minds, of another? 

We are judged today, not so much by the way we treat others, but by the things we say.  And even more so by the words we put on a page.  They live on beyond us, and apart from us.  A writers words can be used against him, to indict him, to judge the entirety of his, or her, life by a few brief thoughts, whether they be well thought out conclusions, or meaningless frivolity inadvertently tossed about like scraps of bread to the birds.  It doesn’t matter.  They are given equal weight by the aberrant, and abhorrent, arbiters of righteousness; and by the pseudo-intellectual, infernal purveyors of social media, and other similar smut. 

Same difference I suppose.   

And those words on a page?  They are used against the writer as often as not.  That’s the way it is with some whose main objective is to satiate their own need for superiority.  They are quick to dismiss the thoughts of those who actually think them, those who have put time and reasoning into them, those who quite often have something of lasting value to say.  Ideas critics would not have even entertained, or had the courage to express had they ever had such profound, significant, or beautiful thoughts themselves.

It takes a certain courage to write.  The words are always written with indelible ink.  No getting around that.  Like spoken words, there is no taking them back.  But the written word is perpetual, eternal if you will.  They outlive the writer and the critic alike.  A writers primary intention will often be misunderstood, exaggerated, compromised, skewed and skewered by the reader.  But still he writes.  The writer stands naked, vulnerable to the slings and arrows, the nefarious intentions, of both the aggrieved and the egregious.  But still he writes.  The more passive-aggressive critics diminish the author with a snide and arrogant dismissal, as if his thoughts, even, were beneath their own bogus dignity. 

But still he writes,

while they are afraid to. 

Some critics don’t even bother to absorb and analyze the meaning of a piece any more.  They just scan until they can pick out what they believe to be a certain ideology of the writer.  They tailor their comments more to the perceived ideology than to the actual entirety of the authors expression.  They drool at the mouth when given the opportunity to judge a person by a snippet of their writing, something (anything really) that can be pounced on like a tiger on fresh meat.  But their assessment usually amounts to nothing more than the intellectual equivalent of spitting on the sidewalk.  It rarely adds to the discourse, or to the collective intelligence.

And I say to them, “If you have something to say, write something beyond your usual 140 characters, or less.  And if you have nothing of value to say, well then, continue to do like you do, and just criticize somebody who does.”