BAD LUCK ISN’T BAD KARMA

“IF I DIDN’T HAVE BAD LUCK, I WOULDN’T HAVE NO LUCK AT ALL”

By Paul Schroeder

 

(Author’s note:  the title is  from a Rodney Dangerfield routine..)

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You have certainly heard it said, that in our lives’ destinies, “All IS WRITTEN”? 

According to  reputable and gifted psychics, our lives are carefully planned by our spirits, beforehand, that we assemble spirit helpers and spirit guides, in Heaven,  to accompany us, long  before we jump into another womb’s prenatal body,  for yet another lifetime.

Life,  they assure us, is a series of pre-programmed events staged with proscribed boons and travails, specifically designed to grow us spiritually closer towards God, a God who gives us myriad  incarnations, to hone and perfect us.

Earth is our ‘school’.

Even a ‘deja vu’, a moment haunting in its odd feeling, that we’ve ‘ been ‘there’, before’,   psychics say, is precisely such a specially pre-inserted moment, in our blueprint,  a small  odd- feeling- ‘bump’, in time, designed to remind us, unconsciously, that we are assessed perfectly aligned, with our  pre-planned spiritual lessons, in that moment.

How, then, is one to understand spates of bad luck, that stubbornly seem to follow one throughout?

For some of us, and that includes me, day after day, week after week, awful little and large things happen in  doses that nag at us, and seem to resist  greater meaning.

The title’s male comedian, once complained:

“I have the worst luck all of the time; I have no luck at all.

If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all!”:
I miss buses and oversleep appointments lose my wallet and keys, stub my toes,  step in dog poo and bang my head underneath cabinets.

“Just yesterday, I woke up, got dressed, and a button fell off; I  reached for a closet door and the knob came off!

I grabbed my suitcase, and the handle came off;…

I was afraid,… to go to the bathroom!…”

 

If  it’s true, that “all is written”, how does one explain annoying and troubling
‘nothing is going right’ periods, that persist?

Many gifted psychics, privately affirm that since  ,’all IS written’, awful bad luck events happen, by no  accidents; aligned with spirit, bad luck, in a continuous line, is commonly backstage- orchestrated.

Large and small bad luck occurrences will happen everywhere, all at once, in one’s life, as a spiritual “sign”, an alert that one is sadly far from one’s prearranged spiritual path.

When one has strayed too far away from one’s Heavenly, towards God,  pre-planned ‘blueprint’, self delineated in intricate fashion,  bad luck will stubbornly continue to manifest.

Then, It’s no coincidence that you lost your wallet, spilled the coffee on the computer keyboard, stepped on the cat, had a bathroom pipe leak down onto the kitchen ceiling, got a flat tire and missed the train and that was only Tuesday!

“Nothing is going right!”, life malfunctions, reveal that something else LARGER at stake, down a long hallway, and somewhere else behind our ‘curtains’, is ALSO not right.

Bad luck in series, is the tyrannical effort of Heaven, specifically,
our spirit guides and spirit helpers, who are more than  just trying to get our attention.

I can actually, at this point hear the known cynics and pernicious doubters yet again exclaim,”Your thesis, to me, personally, is just nonsense!”

What about those people who have one good luck event, after another good luck event follow them?

When one is on one’s correct preplanned blueprint’s spiritual path, ‘everything just seems to go right’?

Yes.

If we are progressing correctly, according to “plan”, then all of the little confluences and connections in our life begin to seem to work, and series of fortuitous coincidences occur like perfect magic:

We catch the bus, right on time, we meet that person we were hoping to see, we gain hope and guidance automatically, from kind strangers,  we find that misplaced thing we searched for, garner the needed finances that we sought ;

wonderful coincidences gather like flies at our mustaches.

Only when one is much too far from one’s self-set goals, does all Hell seem to break loose, everywhere and all at once, repeatedly.

Chronic and persistent ‘bad luck’ isn’t the ‘disease’ itself, but is instead an emergent ‘symptom’, of a disease.

But, can it be all that simple?

After learning this, minor constant misfortunes that never seem to end, rather than blindly depress you, will enlighten and cheer you, because it confirms that our path, is indeed a pre-planned path, and that, “Yes, Virginia, there really IS a Santa Claus,”

on ‘stage’, and ‘behind our curtains’.

Consistent negative synchronicities, are messages and bad luck events, now alert us that we are NOT up on our spiritual ‘toes’.

Ask oneself:

Am I being helpful to others or self-consumed and impish?

Am I forgiving, or nurturing grudges?

Am I consoling someone who needs consoling or am I, not wanting to ‘engage’,  avoiding them?

Am I offering charity to someone in need, or cautiously sidestepping involvement?

Am I being supportive or judgmental?

Am I being loving or impatient?

The cessation of bad luck troubles, relies and depends on one’s spiritual shift- of -perspective, a recognition that will appeal to your spirit helpers and spirit guides.

Be calm.

Listen to something emotionally releasing, like taped wholesome standup comedy; laughing can reset brain chemical imbalances from angst and is a wholesome therapy, instrumental in stopping deepening fugue, about persistent bad luck events..

Large doses of laughter can jump start and stir the cheer of one’s lagging soul .

Essentially, one must recognize those backstage  spiritual influences; a prayer for guidance and enlightenment is now tantamount.

Pray, IN THANKS to your spirit helpers and angels, who do a mostly thankless job, most often, and then, ask them for spiritual assistance.

Prayer, to be put back on the ‘right path’  will suffice, and  then all at once, as though in answer, the confluent series of ‘ bad luck’ events will suddenly abate.

Then, be sure to react with love to the situations that next present themselves, to you.

“Why me?!” is always the wrong question.

“Why NOW?” is more apt.

Bad luck in a series of repeated events means that
we have missed the inner signposts of mercy and patience and forgiveness and are indeed far from our set spiritual goals at that moment in time.

Series of bad luck incidents in our lives are NO accidents .

“All is written” may sound facile and glib, but one’s spirit helpers can and will reach from behind the curtains of Heaven and appear almost tyrannical, as they attempt to fast turn one into another direction, like adjusting a human skillet frying pan by grabbing one roughly, by the handle…..

For we are not humans having spiritual experiences, but spirits, having human experiences.

In school, we get the lesson, and then the test ; in spiritual life, we get the test, and then, the lesson..

The ‘spiritual tests’, come in many forms and are daily, weekly and monthly ‘pop-quizzes’ , life-involved, around key moments that internally/spiritually test for one’s :

charity, honesty, modesty, rescue, compassion, or.. sharing;

I usually recognize them, only in retrospect and then also decide that I likely, ‘failed’….

 

“Bad karma”,  emanates from spite, jealousy, anger, revenge, theft, greed and manifests in ‘unfinished spiritual lessons’ scenarios around those themes, throughout future incarnations.

THAT , is ‘bad karma’…

But, how to quickly end spates of bad luck incidents?

Prayer, with feelings only of gratitude, strongly helps to bring a message for the cessation of travails, until one’s head is re-screwed on, properly, to extend love, in all endeavors, to others..

“I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm”

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Alien DNA

DNA AS ALIEN NANO-TECH : DARWIN COULD NOT IMAGINE ALIENS

by Paul Schroeder

God is responsible for the spiritual entities within our bodies, and there’s a harsh truth to face : aliens are the most likely candidates for the geniuses behind the amazing nanotech DNA which designs our life form physical bodies; there is no argument required.

The alien silhouette fingerprints, within our DNA, point to evidence that we were not ordained to this planet, by God, but by aliens , a newly revealed history and destiny for us, in this universe.

God, is true enough, but the O.T. Bible as a touchstone of “HIM”, with its myths and tales has no place in this DNA amended raised human consciousness, for cruel and deceptive reptilian aliens masqueraded as God, in ancient times.

The moon, much evidence suggests, was purposefully placed, on this reptilian preserve so as to minimize extremes in what-we-call- Earth’s climate, and seems to have actually been an ancient alien “craft”, now used as a base to ‘harvest’ and ‘trade’ humans, their seed and embryos, throughout the galaxy.

This ‘truth’ ,is down a long hall and somewhere else, far from what one might otherwise surmise..

The full truth is out there, and that is that we are not, nor have we ever been, the top of the food-chain.

These best games-keepers never let we animals within, suspect that Earth is , a preserve.

Biblical ‘dietary laws’ now reveal its owners’ tactics and true purposes, to harvest physically and spiritually, a better tasting and safer to eat harvest of humanity.After this horrid alien realization, any informed UFO researcher, must needs then become a vegetarian, for any moral and philosophical traction..

God, when not sabotaged by demonic or alien theft and recycling of life forces, imbues all physical DNA contrived sentient life with sparks of His spirit.

There are, however, many predominant planets whose entire intelligent life forms are spiritual entities,  and no physical DNA is required to house their spirit beings.

Our physical world is, amazingly, an anomaly, by virtue of the sheer numbers of many such non-corporeal worlds, by comparison.

Does human DNA reflect a computer code, of proteins and time-release enzymes, an alien nano-tech, and thus a no longer hidden fingerprint, of our “Creator”?

Scientists have found that our genetic code has all of these key computer code elements.

“The coding regions of DNA,” expostulates Dr. Stephen Meyer, “have exactly the same relevant properties as a computer code or language” (quoted by Strobel, p. 237, The Case for a Creator, 2004)

“Whose mind or what entity could shrink and miniaturize such information and place our DNA’s enormous number of ‘letters’ in their correct sequence as a genetic building block instruction manual?

Could evolution in itself have progressively come up with a nano-tech system like this?

It is difficult to fathom, but the quantum of information in our human DNA is roughly comparably equal to 12 sets of The Encyclopedia Britannica-an amazing 384 volumes worth of detailed data that would fill 48 feet long of required library shelves .”

“Yet in their precise size-only two millionths of a millimeter thick-a teaspoon of DNA, according to molecular biologist Michael Denton, has “all the information needed to build the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived on the earth, and there would still be enough room left for all the information in every book ever written” (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1996, p. 334).

                           Intelligent Design of our Human DNA

As scientists began to unravel and decode the human DNA molecule, they found something amazingly unexpected : a computer programmer’s exquisite ‘language’ composed of some 3 billion genetic letters.

“One of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century,” says Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., “was that DNA actually stores information-the detailed instructions for assembling proteins-in the form of a four-character digital code” (quoted by Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 2004, p. 224).

As George Williams explains it: “The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene.

But the DNA molecule is the medium, it’s not the message”

(quoted by Johnson, p. 70).

  Design from an intelligent source

To any discerning mind, this type of nano-tech high-level information originates only from a technologically advanced intelligent source.

As Lee Strobel explains: “The data at the core of life is not disorganized, it’s not simply orderly like salt crystals, but it’s complex and specific information that can accomplish a bewildering task-the building of biological machines that far outstrip human technological capabilities” (p. 244).

“For example, the precise nature of this genetic language is such that the average error that is not caught turns out to be one error per 10 billion letters.

If an error occurs in one of the most important parts of the code, in the genes, it causes diseases such as sickle-cell anemia. Yet even the best and most apt typist in the world couldn’t come close to making only one mistake per 10 billion letters-far from it.”

Michael Behe, a biochemist and professor at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University, explains that DNA genetic data is primarily an instruction manual.

He reasons: “Consider a step-by-step list of [genetic] instructions. A mutation is a change in one of the lines of instructions.

So instead of saying, “Take a 1/4-inch nut,” a mutation might say, “Take a 3/8-inch nut.” Or instead of “Place the round peg in the round hole,” we might get “Place the round peg in the square hole” . . .

What a mutation cannot do is change all the instructions in one step-say, [providing instructions] to build a fax machine instead of a radio”.

(Darwin’s Black Box, 1996, p. 41).

We therefore have, in our human genetic code, a complex instruction manual eloquently designed by a more highly intelligent source than even the genius of human beings.

The God agnostic and recently deceased Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, after decades of work deciphering it, admitted that:

“an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” .

(Life Itself, 1981, p. 88, emphasis added).

Dean Kenyon, a biology professor who repudiated his earlier book on Darwinian evolution-because of discoveries of information found in DNA-states:

 “This new realm of molecular genetics (is) where we see the most compelling evidence of design on the Earth” (ibid., p. 221).

As well, one of the world’s most famous atheists, Professor Antony Flew, admitted that he couldn’t explain how DNA was created and developed through evolution.

He now sees the demanding need for an intelligent source to have been involved in the making of our human DNA code.

“What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements together,” he said (quoted by Richard Ostling, “Leading Atheist Now Believes in God,” Associated Press report, Dec. 9, 2004).

” I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made . .”

 Written some thousands of years ago, King David’s words about our alien constructed human bodies seems most true.

He wrote: “For You formed my inward parts, You covered me in my mother’s womb.

I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made . . . My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought. . .” (Psalm 139:13-15, ).

Where does all this deposit the theory of evolution?

Michael Denton, an agnostic scientist, concludes:

“Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century” (Denton, p. 358).

Thus we are left like a precipitate out of a solution with an astounding Creator nano-tech design that every life-form on Earth carries,” a similar and related genetic code programmned by our extraterrestrial maker and that evolution is hardly what we deduce that it is it .”

This discovery shall shake our roots of humanity and confirm or deny our beliefs, both in our concept of a Creator as well as in our own concept of our destiny.

Within this  paradigm, all forms of life farmed throughout the Universe can be seen as an enormous molecular nanotech creation by a intelligent Creator using amino acid thoughts, expressed mathematically.

Crick, DNA’s discoverer, perhaps, said it best:

“Life did not evolve first on Earth, a highly advanced civilization became threatened so they devised a way to pass on their existence.”

“They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria or meteorites with the hope that it would collide with another planet. It did, and that’s why we’re here.”

“The DNA molecule is the most efficient information storage system in the entire universe.

The immensity of complex, coded and precisely sequenced information is absolutely staggering. “

“The DNA evidence speaks of intelligent, information-bearing design.

Complex DNA coding would have been necessary for even the hypothetical first ‘so-called’ simple cell(s).

Our DNA was encoded with messages from that other civilization.”

“They programmed the molecules so that when we reached a certain level of intelligence, we would be able to access their information, and they could therefore “teach” us about ourselves, and how to progress. For life to form by chance is mathematically virtually impossible.”

AN ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE : A SPIRITUAL MESSAGE

by Paul Schroeder

A spiritual message, in a time of need, illuminated a larger life path:

“The Spell of the Yukon”

               By Robert W. Service

“I wanted the gold, and I sought it;

   I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;

   I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold, and I got it—

   Came out with a fortune last fall,—

Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,

   And somehow the gold isn’t all…”

I rarely ever worked overtime, or sought spare part- time jobs to make more

money, seeking blue skies above to doing work indoors, and I relished my poorer beer

pockets without ever developing or resenting the absence of a richer champagne taste.

Those ambitious lads of my childhood who entered finance, medicine or law,  worked 24-7 towards a salaried lifestyle that flew them first class, overseas to luncheon meetings

and purchased them mansions in the  glass sky towers of Manhattan.

Effete, they would confess,”Those who say that money can’t buy you everything, don’t know where to shop!”

I  became a college instructor teacher who received a meager pittance, but though  I

relished my bankers’ hours’ 9 to 3  job, I deeply longed for the respite of work, each

academic year, within a ten week vacation, over the summer.

During academic semesters I recklessly ate up all of my sick days and personal days,

taking escapes in the sun at the beach, and landscaped land escapes in three and four

day weekends, at mountain lakes’ sites to hike in virgin woods alone.

Others in Higher Education had instead garnered many days, ‘in their bank’, saved

up jealously, to trade for cash, losing one day for every two saved, upon retirement.

To me, counter intuitively, non providentially, time away to think was worth more, as an

escape valve,  than half of some obscure future money.

Work was onerous and exacting, and freedom was a hiking-in-the-woods- relief, from

fluorescent overhead lights, and the grinding grading of incessant exams and papers.

For release,  the best part of my chosen vocation, I lectured and pontificated, teaching

American and English Literature, in a large lecture hall,  chain-smoking unfiltered

cigarettes, during class instructions, throughout, to self medicate.

I am presently retired, thirty-five years in teaching, and have a modest lovely home and

property, and as for wanderlust, I  have long found that armchair travel is the cheapest

kind of travel, content to read brochures, than take inoculations, to explore the world.

Money aversion- ennui got worse as I grew older.

 I soon preferred the sidelines of copious earnings, a spent man, seeking  to relax and to

write.

Why was I, so different, to care little for “success”, measured in hard work towards

riches?

I wasn’t remotely money excited, as a child, dimly knowing on a subliminal level, that

God didn’t place us here, on Earth,  on a special mission,  to make money.

A spiritual message experience, I received, as a teenager, a homeless runaway at

seventeen, running from a divorced household of violence and police- being -called -by-

the -neighbors,

became a core influence for my slant on monied life, a purposeful one of just getting by,

instead of working hard towards earning luxuries.

It was Christmas time in New York City and I was seventeen years old, homeless

penniless,  and wandering.

I had exited  the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West, where I had feasted

for hours, on museum eye -candy, but my stomach  had rumbled with hunger.

And now back on the street, I found that it had been and was now, snowing heavily.

I wondered worriedly where I would sleep, that night.

 A local movie manager,  a friend, Paul Gary, said that I could, when in Brooklyn, sleep in

a little used old loft room in his movie theatre, the Loews Oriental, in Bath Beach,

Brooklyn, in a dusty, haunted costume property room.

I was the inhabiting spirit.

The smell of freshly roasted chestnuts,  sold to passersby from a kiosk wagon, near to the

museum’s stone steps, in a blizzard of snow, wafted my way and roused me.

I had no money in my pockets; I salivated at the  sweet nutty perfume.

 Chestnuts were a seasonal treat I had  enjoyed, at this very museum’s site, when I had a

bountiful existence within my cantankerous parents’ marriage’s deep pockets’ circle of

influence.

I would ask my parents,  they’d  fish for loose change and I would relish the sweet flavor

of fire roasted hot chestnuts, now a new symbol of want and the faded memory of childhood .

I was alone upon the streets of Manhattan, hungry and had no money.

The  snow covered shoulders and face of the man who stood behind the kiosk wagon,

were wrapped in steam; he was small and dark, wearing mittens with holes for the

fingers.

The snow fell heavily in sheets that made a city of asphalt shock look gentler.

I  came close enough to  inhale the dark aroma of roasted chestnuts,  a childhood

memory token, an olfactory solace for my pangs of hunger.

 I  noticed that on one side of his kiosk wagon hung a large piece of grey cardboard with

a blue magic marker message upon it, his philosophy of the moment, but on an

unconscious level, one  for the rest of my adult life.

A raised consciousness was sparked.

It read:

“I really don’t like making money;

I don’t want to conquer the world,

and I don’t wish to ever be rich;

I don’t even want to set the world, on fire;

 I just want to keep my nuts warm.”

A spiritual message, in a time of need, illuminated a larger life path.

IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES, CAMOUFLAGE PREVAILS

 by Paul Schroeder

“Sex is not the answer.

Sex is the question.

The answer, is ‘YES’!”

(Woody Allen)

Since sex is less than five or ten percent of a marriage, those who marry just for sex, find

 

imposing reasons later on in the relationship, to not confine sex, within the parameters

 

of their marriage, but remain as faithful, as their options and opportunities.

 

After all, man DOES need woman for the artistry and complexity of friendship, for filial

fun, cute socializing, profound partnering, and deep soul intimacy, but they may not ALL

BE with the SAME woman.

Women wander sexually, as well, as statistics reveal, that every other wife strays to

 

another’s arms, for love making.

 

I  thought that women had it better than men and that if I were a woman, without

 

any love, that I’d be down at the docks, with no underwear, waiting for the fleet to come in, my skirt pulled over my head.

But, today, much older and jaded, I’m a cheap date, for myself, and even after sexy-self-

love, I don’t even take myself out to dinner or to a movie..

More and more women today, say aloud, that they “don’t need any man, anymore, even

 

for sex, but that they DO need men , sometimes, but then, ONLY, to lift and move, heavy things around…

 

There surely HAS to be some more dignified way of expressing desire and passionate

love for another human being, because the human body is a sad marvel, with its waste

disposal plant, immediately adjoining its amusement park area.

Sex, is forever something that parents are loathe to discuss with their children; when I

 

was a child of seven, they mentioned the fearful danger of sex, saying, “not to play

 

around with sex, because it was,”playing with fire.”

 

At seven years old, I recall thinking:

 

“Well, I HAVE a hose…

But one who marries, just for sex, is buying a 747 jet, just for the little bag of peanuts.

Surely, there’s other ways to get peanuts, if that’s all that you really want.

 

Yes, men are more shallow than one would imagine, and will as soon marry for

sumptuous breasts, than for love, an idea so repulsive and childish, that it takes much

head shaking, to comprehend,  because spiritual

love is appreciating, sharing, empathy and giving, quite bereft of the pangs of lust.

Yet, for all men’s fascination with women’s breasts, should men themselves,  overweight

develop breasts, they  do chafe ingloriously, upset about those unmanly acquisitions.

                                                 

Men are more juvenile in primitive sexual drives and emotional makeup, and women

 

are indeed, far better human beings, providential, sensitive, charitable, strong and beautiful.

 

This DNA primate difference can be demonstrated.

 

At a very young age, place a group of five-year-old girls, in a room together, and they will

sit, talk and relate to each other with civil chatter, sharing, and often with surprising

wisdom.

 But, place a group of five-year-old boys in a room together,  and soon they will roll all

over the floor, like shaved gorillas, lost in individual and mutual combative power

fantasies.

Our lingering social notion  that men are more important, more apt and more likely to be

leaders, is still a hard social prejudice to quell.

But, in emotional and spiritual essence, marked hormonal differences loom: women

generally speaking, need love, and are willing to give sex to achieve love, but men want

sex, and are willing to give love, to achieve sex.

Equality, in mutual passion, is easier to demonstrate:

 

When a cop on the beat encounters a young couple making love in the tall grass, in a

 

park, he does NOT tap their shoes with his nightstick to angrily demand:

 

” All right, now, WHO’S in charge, here ?!”

Progress will eventually turn HIStory, into HERstory.

 

Women remain naive and not the least bit aware of men’s glandular functioning

 

concepts towards all women.

 

At a party or wedding,

 

men view a woman’s public, licentious exaggerated undulations in dance as her being

naked,  and sexual fantasies unfurl

deep within men’s psyches.

 

Dance becomes sex in visualized fantasies of private encounters with these licentious,

and actively lithe women on the dance floor.

For women,  few rarely grasp that their public dancing, is clearly nothing but public,

 

overt, symbolic sex.

Most cultures associate ” beauty”, with a simple more precise symmetry, of the face,

 

where perfection is a mirror image of both sides of the face.

We equate physical beauty with inner goodness, which has allowed nice-featured  and

 

handsome psychopaths like Ted Bundy and Jefferey Dalmer to serial (successful) murder

so many duped women and duped so many gay men .

 

Men are suckers for a pretty (merely perfectly symmetrical) face and will sacrifice

marriage, family and children for a dalliance with one..

 

 

Perhaps this makeup makes it still a man’s world, because it’s much easier, in society, to BE a man:

Each solitary, individual feature on your face always stays its birth shade and original color.

 

Methinks, that If men wore makeup, most would be disconcertingly prettier than many women.

 

If a man chooses, he might, perhaps, consider a cosmetic shave, but ONLY to some parts

of his face and neck.

You can always wear shorts despite how awful your legs do look.

 

Your last name, regardless of marital -legal battles, stays put.

 

People do not ever stare at your breasts and your nipples when you’re happily chatting with them.

 

You are genetically and socially blind to any but the biggest wrinkles in your clothing.

Calorie intake and belly size are never a crucial consideration.

 

You always have the consummate and total freedom of choice about the growing of a mustache.

 

You don’t have to remove all of your clothes just to pee.

 

You can wake up just as attractive as you were when you went to bed, rather than have

your beauty somehow deteriorate, during the night.

 

You can more easily, socially, defend your space, with knee-jerk displays of violence.

Woman, as the pretty sex, is a relatively new idea:

 

Pirates who wore the perfumes, jewelry, silks and frills echoed this olden concept of

male beauty; a classical nude in statue, was almost ALWAYS male, historically, in ancient

Greece and Rome.

This classic maleness model of beauty oddly reversed itself in the eighteenth century and

women became the “pretty sex”, instead.

Throughout the animal world, whether it flies or swims, the male is STILL the colorful

 

sex, the female, the drab one.

 

But since the eighteenth century, sexual and cultural reversals have oddly persisted in

 

human affairs, and women instead have become the pretty sex.

But “pretty” means, slim and skinny, as fashion dictates.

 

Today, women who carry a few extra pounds, live longer than the men, who mention it…

Straight men, do not adorn themselves towards being highly polished- exceptions exist

for politicians, actors, sports-stars, head gangsters, and police detectives, for within these

 

men, narcissism, a sinful sense of entitlement, and monumental ego all loom.

 

In those egomaniac ‘types’ , highly-polished, self-preening is always accompanied by bullying others.

But the question remains, for the sake of guile and deceit: how curried and airbrushed is

too curried and airbrushed?

The first thing I look at, when I see a polished, curried woman, is her eyebrows; if they’re

natural, it’s a blast of honest sexuality that curls my toes.

If they’ve been removed and severe Groucho-Klingon brows, of crayola, at odd sharp

angles, or worse,  tattooed on, I experience an anxious ‘turn off’, a social warning of

duplicity, and all of my ‘antenna’ are up, and waving..

 Women’s eyebrow severity alerts me to that woman’s emotional instability , and the

more Klingon-Groucho -severe that her eyebrows are, correctly predicts more craziness.

Women with long lustrous hair have always been sought as mates, because hair grows

slowly and vividly reflects one’s general health, so mating was preferred with shiny,

long-haired lasses, who were lax with lasciviousness …

But the rub, is that many women who look like floss, patina and veneer, are mostly

shallow types who a man has to pay, for an intelligent conversation, because

 they have long cared ONLY about their outsides, and not ever about, their ‘insides’.

‘Beauty’ television commercials and ‘beauty’ magazine ads feature graphics of highly

 

curried women, extolling Western society’s virtues of vacuous, narcissistic women, who

 

gaze back at us, made over into a man’s surreal vision of what ‘beauty’ should look like..

 

In Maine, at a lobster restaurant, I went to the register to pay and behind the counter,

 

opening the register, was a tall, strikingly handsome, buxom woman, in a formal

 

ballgown who sported a large handlebar mustache.

 

Her startling visage has stayed with me, for many years, resplendent and role

indigestible..

It’s a cultural facade and mirage of the sadly discarded true value of beauty, which

always comes from within.

 A man in our culture says,”You’re beautiful”, before he says, “I love you”, and thus a

woman is wrongly taught , that if beauty fades, then love must also fade.

Again, most cultures associate ” beauty”, with a simple more precise symmetry, of the

face, where perfection is a mirror image of both sides of the face.

Poorly informed, desperately seeking love, she runs scared to the beauty parlor, nail

salon, hair stylist, cosmetic facial and breast implant surgeons, willing to suffer to

maintain an airbrushed, curried, artificial “beauty” , so that “love” will not also vanish.

Men perpetrate this hoax until they themselves believe it.

 

In truth, a woman is as sexy in bed as that woman was interesting, before bed, and interesting, after bed.

(“No man ever reached up a woman’s skirt, looking for her library card”)

Joan Rivers

 

But, for many non-self-respecting men, it’s all  just  about  a woman’s exterior patina, and veneer towards sex.

 

Men admit that they LOVE women who look hot and who act hot;  homespun, often

unwilling women, by comparison, are like radiators, men have to keep touching, to see if

the heat’s coming up.

Yes, men are more shallow than one would imagine, more vain than women and more

 

duplicitous in satisfying their overwhelming hormonal drives.

Women thus feel that loss of beauty means loss of love, and then rush off to plastic

 

surgeons, for tits and ass augmentation, nose jobs and liposuction, mascara and eyeliner

 

alert, to avoid NOT being a love object..

REAL beauty emanates ONLY from within, something not taught in our culture, where

 

women spend very much time on their outsides and little or no time spent, on their ‘insides’…

 

Women at an early age learn what dizzying effects their bodies have on men, and men’s

 

sex drive,  and use THAT against them ; women culturally have been taught guile and

 

deceit from a tender age, to ‘trap a man’, by using their physical, sexual allure:

 

They shave armpits,

 

shave legs and mustaches,

 

dye their hair,

 

use eye-liner,

 

mascara and false eyelashes,

face makeup,

 

(“Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald

head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy”)

 

 foundation-makeup,

 

earrings,

 

tints of rouge blush,

 

sport uplift brassieres,

 

apply perfumes,

 

apply lipstick,

go for Botox or plastic surgery to erase facial wrinkles,

 

 install Hershey-kiss silicone fake breasts,

 

wear high heels,

 

designer fingernails,

 

contact lenses,

 

  paint fingers and toes.

They put on things, to make them look bigger, and things that make them look smaller, but

then, they meet a man,

and  they want, …

“HONESTY!!”

Man, refuses to accept that makeup glamour fools the eye and deludes the heart, until he

first awakens after the wedding, to see his bride without any makeup, and in shock

thinks,

“WHO is THAT?!”

Can such preoccupation with sexual camouflage avoid extra-marital diversion , and

 

allow longevity and truthfulness towards a meaningful marriage?

 

Many couples who have lasted together forever, don’t have to work hard,  to get along  in marriage’.

 

When George Burns and Gracie Allen were asked how they remained so in love after sixty years, he said:

 

 

‘Marriage is a business.

When you work too hard to make the business of marriage work, you get tired, and when you’re tired , you get annoyed, and when you’re annoyed,  arguments start, and when arguments start…then, you’re OUT of business’ .

I remember once being stopped and asked at Disneyland by a graying and aged couple,

to “photograph them”, for it was none other than their “fiftieth anniversary”.

 

I saw the way he held her hand and how they hugged and kissed as I struggled to find

and frame the picture.

I wondered what wisdom and marital advice they might share, for too many, marriages end sadly in divorce.

 

These too many short-term marriages, for too many men, seemed to me,  just like a tornado:

 

in the beginning, there’s a lot of sucking and blowing , and later on … you lose the house.

 

Whatever happened to the romantic woman and to the romantic man who said that they

could not live without each other?

 

He went East, and she went West… and they both lived.

My wife went over to speak with his wife to comment on how sweet they looked

 

together, but when

 

I returned the camera as he made his way  over to me,  I asked him the $500,000 lulu question:

 

“What’s the secret to being married, so successfully, for so long?”

 

He looked confidential and wise and peeked to see if his wife was engaged in

conversation before he spoke:

 

“You gotta cheat”, he whispered.

Men are like linoleum floors. Lay ’em right and you can walk all over them for thirty years. ~ Betsy Salkind

POSTSCRIPT:

A young couple making love in a car, on a hot steamy Summer night, decided that the

cool stones of a cemetery across the street afforded comfort, and they made love there,

all night long on the cool stones.

But next morning, her back was killing her from those rocks, so she went to an

orthopedic doctor and after a brief checkup he sounded worried and tentatively asked :

“Besides your back’s pain, how do you REALLY feel?”

She at once got scared and asked: ” Why!?”

And he said:

“Well, according to your ass, you died, in 1923!”

THE RESCUE OF STRAY CATS : NUDNIK, IS A NUDNIK

Rescue of Stray Cats

by Paul Schroeder

My  cats who live with me, are only two I have brought inside, of dozens of kittens I have rescued from my backyard and handed over,  to willing others over the years.

Dozens of cats are born on the farm next to me.

The Queens Museum Farm, an historic twenty acre working farm, in New York, has

greenhouses, flocks of chickens, a yard of pigs, several cows , two dogs, many cats, noisy

guard-dog-like peacocks, a large victory garden, several llamas, donkeys, horses and a half-dozen sheep.

Cows give low moos, aching to be milked, at dawn, singing birds chirp and warble in clouds of

wings that fill the trees, and at dusk and dawn, roosters ca-ca-doodle-do in

its fenced perimeter, less than one hundred feet from my backyard.

In the tall grass fields, among goats, sheep and cows grazing, feral feline queens  drop

litters of four to six kittens, every seven weeks, and sooner or later show them  my backdoor

which always sports a bowl of water, and a plate of cat-food.

 A frail black kitten who cried on and off all day, abandoned under a nearby woodpile on

a rainy day,  was left by his mother and not returned for.

It took my son and me over an hour to  first locate the cries and  then to remove the

virtual ton of lumber precariously perched ,  under which his mother had left him.

He had cried plaintively for hours, wet, cold and frightened but hidden too cleverly to

easily reach.

He was so hungry still not weaned, that he bit off the rubber nipples on the small kitten

bottles I fed him with, swallowing rubber that made me rush him to the vet .

He was barely four weeks old,  but I held him on my warm chest for him to hear the

familiar solace of a heartbeat, and I talked to him, at great lengths; he was one I didn’t

succeed, though I tried,  to give away,  but he was instead lovingly cared for, hand raised.

This frail kitten evolved into a Daffy- Duck- difficult- to- live- with-nature, a ‘lid off the Id’,

feline nightmare who  grew to monstrous proportions, who bites and scratches at the slightest wrongly perceived provocation.

He was symbolically difficult from the very beginning; it took us almost an hour to

unload that large teetering stack of planking woodpile, behind a neighbor’s shed, to

finally locate him in pouring rain.

Though unseen, he’d been heard for hours, well-hidden, to cry and cry and cry..

His mother, well within sight and earshot, patently refused to come to him, to comfort or

retrieve him, from where she had carried and hid him, and for a good reason.

Male cats were marauding nearby and she knew that by feline male nature, they’d

slaughter  the kittens, and then wait for her dugs to grow dry of milk, and go back, into heat.

Then, they would mate with her, assured that the next litter would be theirs, a sperm

war of jungle DNA mentality.,

She had cleverly hidden them all, everywhere,  so that marauding  toms, couldn’t get at them.

I weaned him, doctored  his ailments and assuaged his angst.

I rocked him to sleep, on my chest, accompanied with lullabies, three times a day for years.

Now, in his seventh year  as  a twenty-two pound neutered black tomcat , he has earned his name, Nudnick.

Though he grew into a cat of monstrous proportions with an aggressive ilk, he  loudly and

plaintively  insists on being ‘tucked in’,  like a young child, requiring  squeezes with hugs

and kisses ,

before he will settle in to sleep.

(Nudnick, is Russian, for an annoying, boring, persisting and irritating pain in the

derriere, personality. )

He is  tall and large boned, an enormous pure alpha male with a huge square head who

affectionately and jealously loves our family with his head banging,  deeply jealous of my

other cat, a doddering senior female, of tiny physical proportions, who hates him.

Squeaky, is the oldest rescue cat I ever found deserted: feeble, senile, on antibiotics,   a

twenty-two year old ailing but purring,  shriveled feline,

 tiny,  under five pounds, with glazed over eyes ,

who walks in  lost circles of dementia,

 an elder cat without teeth or claws, unable in any way to fight back, against Nudnick,  a

jealous  aggressor.

When Nudnik  sees Squeaky getting required medication with commensurate

affection, consumed with  jealousy,-(he has core abandonment issues)-, he  feels compelled to jump onto her to bite her.

You can see his eyes grow large with pain, when he sees that she is being cared for.

Because of  jealousy, Nudnik tortures her and this, in turn infuriates me, which only fuels

his jealousy.

She walked into my living room  from my back garden years ago, to claim us, a  stray lost

and she rolled around on the floor in grateful pleasure and sat perched in our laps  to

thank us.

Now,   she’s a twenty-two year old, frail, striped tabby, who faces an unsettled old age ,

because an adopted kitten  ballooned  into a vengeful King Kong.

 Since, she like a vocal chord altered cat from a laboratory,  could muster only a high

pitched chirp, I had named her, Squeaky.

  I wondered who had lost her  and what quantum of love had been lost.

The vet volunteered to euthanize her,  for she was old and in bad shape,

but I said that we would mend and adopt her, instead.

It seemed a betrayal, for she had shown a poignant gratefulness, a recognition of her own self-rescue.

Nudnik  tackles and torpedoes her mercilessly, whenever she tries to move from

her bed to the litter box, and makes her transit anywhere,  Hellish .

I had  caged him for periods, when we were out and about,  to insure her safety.

No emotional nor copying bonding ever occurred between them.

She had survived for a long time in the elements, but now rescued, seem to age quickly.

It was an ungraceful, dreadful old age retirement for her, because of Nudnik, who

 Frustrated,

I have admonished a thousands times, but  he is truly, a Nudnik.

Once a nudnik , always a nudnik.

He  exhibits his nudnick nature when he tries to steal a  leather recliner chair from

under me,

(“One cat, leads to another” (Ernest Hemingway)

 when I am comfortably perched within its embrace.

He will jump up, get behind me on the chair, and bully me,  physically nudge and push

me,  followed up with bites to my arms  to force me out of the chair.

I  shake my head disapprovingly and tell him, ” Forget about it!” , firmly,

When that fails, he leaves the room and  knocks something loudly to the floor in an

adjacent room, to get me up to investigate, and when I do, he then runs into my chair.

Should that fail to work

he will then leave the room, and cry repeatedly, from a nearby room,  plaintively.

When I am halfway there, he runs in at full tilt, or slowly swaggers in,  a form of cat

smugness, jumps up to steal my chair, supplants me,  and stretches out in the warmth

imparted by my body.

One can see some logical deviousness in his methods ; he has worked this out in his big headed little mind.

I have never before hand raised a cat, from a tiny kitten,

and He, alone, has given me more trouble than any collection, ensemble of cats , combined, that I have ever  rescued.

His cat rules:

‘

• Always give generously. A small bird or rodent left on the bed tells them, I care.
• 
• Climb your way to the top. That’s why the drapes are there.
• Curiosity never killed anything except maybe a few hours.
• 
• Find your place in the sun. Especially if it happens to be on that nice pile of warm, clean laundry.
• 
• If you’re not receiving enough attention, try knocking over several expensive antique lamps.
• 
• Life is hard, then you nap.
• Make your mark in the world.
• Or at least spray in each corner.
• 
• Never sleep alone when you can sleep on someone’s face.’
• There’s no denying the splendidness of felines:
• I recall a graphic in the “New Yorker”, where a well-dressed,  neatly groomed man,
• stands over a litter box, arms akimbo, to directly  address a cat nearby his feet and
• the caption read:
• ” Never, EVER think , outside the box!”

EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE- RELIGIOUS RIGHT

by Paul Schroeder

Evolution is still touted as the Devil’s tool, debated and refused as required curriculum in science classrooms by religious fundamentalists who refute scientific findings.

Bacterial strains, now able to resist antibiotics, only fifty years in use, and malaria’s total resistance to any of the last fifteen years’ known cures, surely both illustrate and represent evolution, in its clearest sense.

Such minds assert and retort that the Devil plants dinosaur bones to confound us and that our Earth, as the Bible states, is merely 6,000 years old- Carbon 14 dating be damned- that man coexisted, lived with dinosaurs.

What can science do to deter such minds who deny the fossil record and who see, “The Flintstones”, as a documentary?

---

Family Of Man: Evolution and The Human Genome Project

---

‘Surprisingly, they may find it hard to deny DNA research findings.

Why?

Because even if they will not admit science into their classrooms or churches, they will admit it into their living rooms!

Through television crime stories, they’re well acquainted with how DNA mirrors an individual’s unique identity and now from genome research we also know it reflects how closely related we all really are to one another and to all Earth life.

The Human Genome Experiment Research Project has determined that the DNA relationships among ALL of Earth’s organisms, are almost as alike as we are to all other humans.’

Be it Old Testament God, or E.T.s in UFOs, who are our creators, we are still ‘looking up’, for divine, celestial help.

‘DNA, Deoxyribonucleic acid, the building tool of living tissues and all of  their functions, has molecular codes that regulate the output of genes, the timing and extent of protein-making, and these are remarkably identical and alike in almost all aspects from the oak tree to a human being, from a whale to a worm, with only negligible differences.

Despite the fact that we LOOK different, from each other, all over the world, or seem different from a tree or a whale, we, all of life, are a family almost exactly identical in our DNA!

The genetic difference between individual humans today is minuscule – about 0.1%, on average.

What about being a “monkey’s uncle”?

Darwin never imagined E.T.s.

(graphic: Earthfiles.com)

Was Darwin onto something?

Surprisingly, the species of African great apes, including humans, has a closer kinship bond with one another than the African apes have with orangutans or other primates.

DNA research cemented that fact.

““If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.” Judith Hayes”

The scientific surmise and prediction that was made in 1871 – that human evolution began in Africa, has been upheld by DNA research, as well.

Intelligent design theorists persist and flourish.

 

Because of many billions of years of constant evolution, humans share genes with each other and all living Earth organisms.

The raw percentage of genes or DNA that organisms share, records their similarities.

Of course, we share more genes with organisms that are more closely related to us, but only a smidgen more.

Today’s humans belong to the unique biological group known as Primates, and are classified with the great apes, one of the larger groups of the primate evolutionary tree.

Besides our distinct similarities in anatomy and behavior, our close biological brotherhood with other primate species is clearly indicated by DNA research evidence.

It clearly confirms that our closest living biological relatives are indeed chimpanzees with whom we share many common traits.

However,we did not evolve directly from any of the primates living today.’

Why do religious right folks use the Old Testament, so much?

 

Preachers, at revival meetings get, “AMEN!” when they hollar from the pulpit:

“Iff’en evolution is a happen’en, why don’cha see monkeys STILL a changin’ to people, these a days!?”

As well as common-sense scientific data ignored, larger

spiritual truths, are also widely biblical neglected.

‘

‘DNA evidence from research clearly shows that our species and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor species that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago.

Also, the terminal, last common ancestor of monkeys and apes lived about 25 million years ago.

Our species’ almost negligible genetic DNA variation reveals a common African root for all people living today.

The movement of humans, the permanent migration dispersal to other continents, from Africa, began only a mere 60,000 years ago.’

The Bible relates an intervention of a demanding, rule-insistent “God”, whom ancient man saw “descending from the Heavens”.

‘Human beings differ widely in skin color and other facile, superficial features, but these characteristics occur as gradients, not as separate geographic clusters; the pygmy and tall Nordic basketball player are closest DNA brothers.

Research into ancient DNA reveals amazing insights about ancient forms of mankind before Homo Sapiens.

Ancient DNA has been found, recovered and analyzed in Neanderthal fossil remains.

These ancient preserved  DNA molecules disclose the status of Neanderthals as a separate species, some characteristics of Neanderthal physical appearance, their likely speech capabilities, and population structure.

One species of humankind, living worldwide, is my family of mankind,
an amazingly adaptable creature, Homo sapiens; written into our genes, and into the fossil and behavioral evidence, is our Family Story.’

Whom the truth authors of our beings are and were is still controversial.

Evolution’s rudiments, can be proved and explained remarkably easily, to any open mind: Ontology recapitulates Phylogeny. It’s that simple.

That is, the stages of development of an embryo, from a unicellular entity, to a fishlike

 

entity with gills, to an amphibean-like entity, to a primate with a tail, within utero,

 

mirror and reflect all the stages of evolution from our beginnings in the oceans, to our upright status now, as developing, evolving creatures.

I just heard you say,”Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!”

All forms of life farmed throughout the Universe may well be seen as an enormous

 

molecular nanotech creation by a intelligent Creator using amino- acid -thoughts, expressed mathematically.

Crick, DNA’s discoverer, perhaps, said it best:

“Life did not evolve first on Earth, a highly advanced civilization became threatened so they devised a way to pass on their existence.

They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria or meteorites with the hope that it would collide with another planet.

It did, and that’s why we’re here.

The DNA molecule is the most efficient information storage system in the entire universe.

The immensity of complex, coded and precisely sequenced information is absolutely staggering.

 

The DNA evidence speaks of intelligent, information-bearing design.

Complex DNA coding would have been necessary for even the hypothetical first ‘so-called’ simple cell(s).

Our DNA was encoded with messages from that other civilization.

 

They programmed the molecules so that when we reached a certain level of intelligence, we would be able to access their information, and they could therefore “teach” us about ourselves, and how to progress.

(graphic: Earthfiles.com)

For life to form by chance is mathematically virtually impossible.”
(Crick)

QUOTES

“The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.”
Conklin, Edward

Bookmark quote

“Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.”
Ehrenreich, Barbara

“Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.”
Gilbert, W. S.

“The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.”
Hoffer, Eric

“I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.”
Twain, Mark

“We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.”
Wald, George

GHOSTS AND CATS OF BLOCK ISLAND

by Paul Schroeder

Block Island, an oasis off the coast of Rhode Island, is where I have spent  time musing and walking.

 

Ghosts, seen on Block Island are only part of the paranormal show, in town.

One late September,  almost October, I and my wife stayed at the hotel 1661 INN at Old Harbor on Block Island for a week to celebrate a vacation where

we enjoyed an island off season, bereft of tourists from the mainland to watch an island gear down from summer and close up in preparation for the winter.

Only a few bird watchers clubs frequented the island then, for the weather was windy, cold, blustery and rainy,

storms which added to our desire to stay close to the inn and in each other’s close company.

One stormy and windy evening at  ten o’clock in the evening, I went out to the backyard of the inn, tacitly to watch the view of whitecaps roiling on Old Harbor and to socialize with a pair of goats, which roamed freely on the property.

Out on the harbor,  a quarter of a mile from the shore among the rolling whitecaps, I saw a flickering, blue triangular light that vanished and then reappeared a short distance from where it had been.

At first glance, it looked like the angular sail and mast of a middle sized sailing craft, a craft in distress that struggled to make headway in the stormy waters, except that this sail radiated a surreal phosphorescent light, a glow that ebbed and waned like a dying flame .

The bluish sail’s color glowed in a purplish light and then vanished completely, only to reappear another short distance from where it was last sighted.

 

 

I initially surmised it to be a flame above the waves from ignited methane from the ocean floor.

I watched in  wonder as its shifting movements  made it jump from one location to another location every few seconds; its odd flickering flame glowing in a surreal sailboat triangular form, was something I’d never seen before.

It vanished completely, after a few minutes among the stormy waves, as though it had finally capsized .

The image of that strange vessel has haunted my memory for many years,

a famous Block Island ghost ship seen often in stormy weathers, by many others before and after me.

However, not until recently, some years later,  having read “Livermore’s History of Block Island”, did I realize that the book’s description of an oddly lit and shifting Palatine Ghost Ship seen off Block Island is precisely  what I caught and observed that windy white capped and rain swept evening.

Other ghostly goings-on prevail, there.

A woman seen carrying a clock, and observed talking to herself, is another famous full bodied apparition; she seemingly ignores the greetings of a rare tourist, on a deserted stretch of road at the  far end of the island, and then, clock in hand, she suddenly vanishes.

Even odder, some Block Island ghost stories are still in the making.

(from a communique from a friend):

“I was fishing off Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island in 1995. I was in a boat, and we watched a big cloud of smoke appear off Block Island in the distance.

What  happened was that an airplane crashed into a restaurant.”

It appears that a young child, a wife and a doctor and his mother all perished en route,

in a small aircraft just before landing at Westerly Airport on Block Island.

The small plane hit a restaurant taking an additional islander life;

one small airstrip lay 500 feet parallel to a line of three coastal restaurants.

Block Island, an off-season haunt for me, now has the addition of these ghosts,  for the dead often remain at the site of their violent death, ghostly additions to  a place already  most assuredly  haunted.

There is resident talk of ghosts seen on the island, especially those spirits restless and active at the Old Town Inn, a hotel location, geographically central to the island.

I would often prefer to stay at the Old Town Inn, inspired by the stories of its often seen ghosts.

History indeed confirms that a State Senator who lived there in the early 1800’s, faced charges that he murdered his ailing mother for his inheritance, by throwing her down the long narrow stairway, a stairway still in evidence.

I surmise that he was acquitted.

But the staircase and basement area judge fate and history differently.

The owner told me that he had seen the bare bulb in the basement often spin of its own accord; it kept him and mainland workmen away from that basement.

Most locals were too leery an ilk to spend any real, required time down there, doing some essential repairs.

When restorations had initially begun, it had been noticed that all interior doors had been removed; when the new owners had queried contractors why this had been done, a disturbing answer had been returned.

The many doors’ constant opening and closing by themselves had unnerved, distracted and unsettled the mainland workmen.

They had removed the doors, and erased these house symptoms, but touched not the disease, itself.

Guests have asked the front desk about a ghostly woman, seen from their upstairs windows,  a spectre who has walked in the deeper shadows of the garden at night, in a pink, long, flowing gown, who has carried a pink parasol.

She can be  seen in the back garden, under a full moon, late at night, when weather conditions are perfect.

I would stay here on Block Island, despite its ghosts, because it was far from  scenic views of the harbor, and from crowds of daily ferried tourists.

This central location on Block Island allowed me to be more reclusive in my wanderings, far from people, which was my nature.

I wandered among persimmon trees, apple and wild plum, across vacant meadows and fields whose scattered vestigial remnants of ancient  stone foundation fragments revealed where houses once stood.

On one such long walk, a deer froze in a field to then bolt from view and

on my return to the Inn, on that same cold, windy afternoon, I saw a cat

quickly scurry under the foundation of the hotel, a cat as orange in color as the drifting early October Maple leaves.

Only the feral cats who roam the streets of Block Island know its ghosts as permanent residents,  lost and not yet found.

Block Island’s feral cats, independent and grateful creatures, like solitary ghosts, have astonished me in the oddest ways.

Whenever New York City snow drifts high enough to seal all the doors and windows of February, I conjure an image of frozen kittens cuddling in the Rhode Island icy snow.

That image haunts me,  though I’ve never seen it.

I was informed when I inquired at the inn, that she was feral and would have to over winter on the island alone, that she belonged to no one and had recently had a litter somewhere under the cellar.

The staff, who took pity on her and who fed her, would soon leave by early November.

The hotel wouldn’t re-open until mid April; in deep winter snows, with a new litter of kittens, she would be on her own.

I was moved to go into town to buy some canned cat food and these I presented to the kitchen staff who cared for her.

I was told that I could

feed her myself, as she was just outside the kitchen, awaiting a handout..

I opened two cans and spoke to her, watched her as she fed.

I wondered aloud to the kitchen staff what fate might bring to those kittens when heavy winter snow lay against the outside of those abandoned

kitchen doors, all winter long.

Later, about ten o’clock in the evening, I heard a knock on my door that stopped my writing and upon opening the door, I found the chef outside, smiling warmly.

He asked me if I could follow him down to the kitchen.

She had, he said, been grateful to me and had brought me a ‘thank you’ gift, in eloquent cat artistry.

A large, dead marsh rat lay by the back kitchen door, fully displayed, on the welcome mat.

Puffed up and very proud, she paraded back and forth over it, purring and repeatedly making eye contact with me.

She had caught it and then she had brought it to me,  as thanks, but also as a token.

It had somewhat assuaged my anxieties about her and her broods’  chances of survival, facing an icy cruel winter, with no food,  alone on the island with only ghosts, as her company..

I recall that cat’s unflawed nature, uncomplaining and noble and hershow of gratitude and
courageous

resiliency,  unfurling her fearlessness.

 

Ghosts and cats who roam Block Island would wander alone in the coming ice storms,

and she, bereft of food,

with new and hungry kittens to feed,  would face a winter

of killing blizzards.

GRANDMA’S RUSSIAN ADVICE

Grandma’s Advice

by Paul Schroeder

Just before my grandmother on my mother’s side died at the age of 95, I whispered a kiss in her ear and thanked her for her wisdom.​

One odd piece of advice, that she had taught me when I was a child, I had carried close to my inner ear, all of my life.

It had been an Independence Day warning, borne of a distant Russian wisdom, one that

she had whispered to me four decades ago, when I was nine or ten years old,

impressionable and the apple of her eye.

The imprecation that I got from her, the warning whispered in my small rapt ear when I

was nine or ten years old had been an odd warning that had ruled and had guided my life, and through raw angst, had come to define a larger part, of what I called my soul.

Her ‘Russian optimism’ for the world, was childhood overwhelming for me.

For her, life was always a cup of optimism, half filled ….. but, with something, that could  likely kill you.

Now, she at ninety-five was far from that woman who in giving advice could be ironic and poetical.

She had used lipstick as a rouge to color her cheeks and then decided that her whole face was of a pallor that also needed color, rubbed lipstick all over her face.

She was quite a shock when I got onto the seventh floor of the retirement home and

turned the corner and saw her sitting in a wheelchair, as though apparently waiting for me.

 

She still had her sense of humor.

She earnestly asked with a childlike innocence if I could bring her some new makeup

and some big diamond jewelry for her to wear to dress herself up, when I visited her next?

Cautiously, I had asked her, skeptically dubious ;”What type of diamond jewelry?” She had said;

“Expensive, fancy jewelry.”

She labored under the delusion that she was in a hotel in Miami, one that slouched in basic standards;

“The meals at this hotel are terrible, but what is a person to do?”

She did not ever surmise herself to be in a nursing home near the beach in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

 

A person’s senior mind can lend a type of psychic anesthesia that acts in many ways to

protect it from uncompromising and painful truths. .

Now I was an odd adult.

I wanted her to know that I loved her, how her whisper had returned years later as my gratitude.

I had loved to cherish ideas; a rare few philosophers had touched my early soul .

Dr. Seuss had barely competed with grandma.

But, he  wrote :

 

“Be who you are and say what you think, because those who matter don’t

mind, and those who mind, don’t matter!”

 

But grandma didn’t recall her similar advice or the small pleasures and agonies of our past.

 

My other odd philosopher was sitting here in her wheelchair, armed and propped with a

pillow/ alarm that would audibly alert nurses in the retirement home if she pitched

forward and left her chair’s upright fixed position.

She was different the next time I saw her, the way she used to be ;

” Hello, Paul; sharp as a matzoh and twice as crummy!”

“How come you don’t call your grandma more often? Humph!!”

“Humph;You going to wait until I’m in the cemetery and THEN you’ll visit me?”

“I’m sorry, that you’ll be sorry, but THEN it’ll be too late!”

This was the same verbatim greeting that I had gotten from her over the years over the

telephone .  I presumed that I was calloused to it all.

 

It always deeply riddled me with guilt but I never let her know, but instead I saw it

 

rather as a good sign that she was still feeling feisty.

When she successfully aimed ring-toss-Velcro-guilt in my direction, I rationalized, she

 

must be feeling much better.

I quickly tried to change the subject to refocus her mind.

” Grandma, I remember that boardwalk, we can see

 

here in Brighton Beach from a time when you were fifty years old and I was about nine

years old, on the Fourth of July fireworks and I still remember the good advice that you

 

gave me, back then.”

“What advice did I give you?”

I told her.

It had stayed with me for many years as a token of her wisdom.

 

“You brought me to you on a bench on that boardwalk, in Coney Island, on a hot 4th of

 

July afternoon, when the whole family was there suddenly hugging and kissing each other,

 

happy for once, to be all together and happy seeing the fireworks, and then you whispered it in my ear:

“Don’t get too close to people; you’ll catch their dreams,” You told me.

“What?”, she said, so I told her again;

“Don’t get too close to people; you’ll catch their dreams.”

 

“OH!”, she said,”I am VERY sorry, if I ever told you that!.”

 

“I AM very sorry.”

I reminded her, however, what an impact she’d had on me then.

“That whisper, as a recommended life philosophy, was both poetry and  true and that,

your advice, really stayed deeply with me.”

 

Taken to heart, it had allowed me to remain aloof and separate from everyone, as a type

 

of self protection,  to preserve my OWN dream.

 

She looked at me as though I were some stranger in a dream.

I said it, again;

“Don’t get too close to people, you’ll catch their dreams.”

She was thoughtful and then looked worried.

 

She looked into my eyes., her eyes now clear and sharp.

“I never told you THAT.” …

 

“You shouldn’t get too close, because…”

“Germs”, she said.

” I said that you’ll catch their GERMS.”

“I told you and your sister MANY times;

“Don’t get too close to people, ’cause you’ll catch their GERMS.” she said, again.

 

“And YOU’RE supposed to be the SMART one?!”

“Oh,” she groaned in pain.

“Take me over to the dining room; it’s still too early for the lunch, but I want to get there

anyway, early.”

That wrong belief had overshadowed every relationship in my life with an ambivalence

and a craving to just be left alone.

If one was alone, one was safe from the awful things that loving people could do to you, I

had always reasoned.

 

But, I had been running away from my own shadow.

One marriage and a dozen influenza later, I had realized her truth, too late.

 

POSTSCRIPT:

 

In school, first the lesson, then the test;

in life, first the test, then the lesson…

 

NAKED IN A PUBLIC COLLEGE

                                  Naked, in a Public College

by Paul Schroeder

I used to be in the habit of not wearing underwear, to “want my ‘boys’ to move and float freely”.

When I purchased a fine suit of clothing, and was asked by the tailor,”which side I wore it on”, I  would reply,”It moves like a flag in the wind!”

However, that fashionable quirk once caused a serious’ costume malfunction’ that backfired to  jeopardize my career and my  life.

One day, as a college faculty member who taught and lectured Comparative World Religion,  I  discovered, after the  bell had rung,  that my pants had  ripped on a nail from my chair..

I approached and peevishly asked another colleague, a sweet disposition sewing teacher, who had a sewing class next door to my classroom, if she could possibly repair it, while I waited?

She smiled and said that it would take her only a moment, to fix it.

She was a tiny and sweet old lady, with her hair done up in a white bun, whose classroom clattered with sewing machines,closely attended by an all girl population.

She had smiled and had agreed and had told me to remove my pants, and to wait inside the  men’s teacher’s bathroom, around the corner from my classroom.

  I was to surrender those pants to her monitor, outside of the bathroom door and she would retrieve them to me, repaired, “in a nonce”.

Two minutes after I had done  that, however, bells everywhere clanged loudly in a rhythmic series of ‘threes’.

As I stood there half naked,  clangs of the fire drill bell rang out, and in profound shock, I heard the muted sounds of all students lining up, en -masse to exit the building!

The silence of the building, now emptied, chilled me to the marrow; I waited, semi naked and alone, grieving, for seven long minutes and slowly,

I began to panic with the nightmarish  truth, that I had NOT that morning worn underwear!

Alone, in an empty  school, half naked,  I  felt forgotten, left behind in a third floor faculty bathroom, during a fire drill, forgotten like a package left under a theater seat,

standing around in a faculty men’s room with no pants or underwear on!

Grief and self pity weighed upon me, heavily.

Long minutes passed but

no staff entered the lounge bathroom.

and frightened about my present condition such that I could scarcely breathe,  suspiciously

aware of larger and  sinister forces of the Universe,  at work behind my ‘life’s

curtains’..

After  seven or eight minutes of  more utter silence, I marinated in  fretful agony, but now heard  the herd multitude sound of 3200 shuffling pairs of shoes, returning.

More time passed, but there still was no friendly knock at the door,  and STILL no kept promise of my repaired pants.

Half naked,  hamstrung , unable to make my way back around the corner of the hallway to the sewing room to investigate, I was  without pants AND in agony,   without  underwear!

As time progressed, I more so began to panic.

A cold chill and then a bitter warmth of

 horror  suffused throughout me.

 I could have covered my grommets with my removed shirt, but

 I had surrendered to

heart-pounding panic.

 Common sense melted, and submerged, inaccessible, to me.

There were  young college teenage girls chatting audibly everywhere, beyond the faculty

men’s bathroom door.

The nightmare of naked genital scandal paralyzed me.

I poked my head out of the bathroom door.

As a talking head,  I managed to call out to a random passing male pupil, and asked if he PLEASE, “could assist me.”

Would he “please go to the sewing room, just around the corner from the bathroom and call on the sewing  teacher to return to my rescue, with my sewn pants?!”

After  a long minute, the unknown Good Samaritan pupil returned to me.
He said  that “he’d be late to class, but that the room was dark and empty.”

“And that the program posted on the door, announced that the sewing room’s teacher was at a scheduled break, for lunch!”, he said

She had forgotten all about me; the fire drill had distracted and scattered her thoughts!

I  began to imagine what would happen to me, if after lunch, she had then punched out and left for the day!

 Fear resolved into the righteous anger of indignation, but more

plaintively,  still a talking head from a faculty restroom, I begged this unknown pupil to NOT continue on to his approaching class and that

I would give him a note to excuse his lateness,  as a service to me,  begged:

” Please, in God’s name, run down  the three floors to the basement to the teacher’s cafeteria,  and find and relay my panic stricken message to the sewing teacher!?”

I began, in enabling anger, to quietly curse that little M.I.A. sweet old sewing teacher lady, for

.

the raw cruelty of

her  broken promise had left me nightmarish naked, cruelly  exposed, within a

vengeful universe that now sought my ruin,  to crush me.

An innocuous,  mindless woman,  was now a laser focus of evil intent upon my soul .

What reactions, if I had bolted down the hallway, would my  students

have had?

 Spiritual retribution loomed  with terror and

 mind numbing shock, a jeopardy experience of a lecturer cringing, naked and

hiding in a faculty bathroom, a gruesome naked and nightmarish predicament.

Staff  laughingly later told me, that she was good natured, but she was notoriously  forgetful.

Wish I’d known that.

I  surely died a thousand private deaths, for

as I waited

my career’s professional life swam before my eyes.

What if there HAD been a REAL fire?!

After many more horrified minutes, suddenly, there she was , knocking on the teacher’s bathroom door, embarrassed but holding my returned and repaired pants up to me and

she apologized profusely , for “having forgotten all about you!”

 

She likely never recounted this horror tale to anyone, afterwards, as it likely also

vanished soon to fade into the amnesia recesses of her mind, but

I never, after that experience, left my house for any reason whatsoever, without underwear securely on.

(“I was arrested once in Germany for public nudity. I thought it was a topless beach – it was. . . . .a shipyard”

Madonna)

A CHILD’S WONDER : TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR: A CHILD’S WONDER

by Paul Schroeder

“Daddy? What’s “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, mean?

Every night, was another question, one that was sometimes designed to delay bedtime, but every so often one of a childlike philosophical cosmology.

“So, it’s twinkle, twinkle, is it?” I asked her to recite it to me, and she did.

“How I wonder, what you are, huh?”

“Get ready for bed and I’ll tell you.”

” My child, listen, carefully, and you shall know, what very few children or even many adults, don’t know.”

“Are you under the blanket?”

“Ready?”

 Because this is something, that most people do not think about, or even know, but here’s

an answer, that you must remember.”

“Do you especially want to be really smart?”

A nod of a head, with a thumb inserted.

“We are on a ball , called a ‘planet’, one that is traveling more than 1,000 miles an hour,

as it revolves and turns , and we are also on this planet, traveling 67,000 miles an hour,

straight forward, into space, around our sun.”

“Why, daddy?”

“So that we stay stuck on the planet’s surface, like water in a pail, that you swing

overhead, water that stays in the pail, so you, like the water, don’t float up and away, into space, from your bed.”

“Children who are under their blankets and tucked in, are much too safe and too heavy

to fly away like that; are you tucked in, well?”

“You’re not really afraid that you’ll float away into space?”

A nod of the head then followed by three shakes, and a mumbled response from a thumb

in her mouth:

“I’m not scared.”

A settled scramble of pillow and blankets.

“Tell me, daddy.”

“The stars in your eyes, the ones that twinkle, overhead are, my child, an illusion, a

make-believe trick of the eye, because you’re really seeing the far dim past, the way the

Universe used to appear, many, many eons ago, light-years’ gone long ago, stars whose

lights are likely since extinguished, winked out, only now, invisible ghosts, in the

blackness of space. “

“Very many, that you see, now, are no longer there.”

“But their lights, sent out before them, yet still travel, to now reach us.”

 

“Twinkling stars above, which likely no longer exist, but, which we still see, happen as a

 

trick of the Universe, because their lights are much slower, just still reaching us, so

 

instead, we look up to see a window clear photo of the skies, the way they, the skies,

 

looked, many, big dinosaur eons ago.”

“Sleepy child?”

“Huh, daddy?”

Do you think you can remember what answer I gave to your bedtime question?”

A shake of the head, no, then fast followed, by a nod, yes.

“Always try look behind things, that you see, to get at real answers, or more real reasons,

whether it’s a dream, a broken car engine, about God from religion, or even the stars that

shine in our Universe, for illusions and wrong ideas fill our lives and we pass those

wrong ideas onto others.”

“This planet that we call Earth, is not ‘too far out in the galaxy boonies’, for space people,

aliens to visit, but is really both their own animal preserve, and a major crossroad, for

many alien beings, and we have a place in this equation.”

“Twinkle, twinkle’s poem, is also a most beautiful  question, because  curiosity and

wonder are almost everything, to a mind’s life.”

“Because grownups, mostly lose their wonder,” I said.

“Nobody really understands dreaming, or how to overcome gravity even though its

power is no more than that of a nine volt battery , or even the sequence of chemical

energy events that happen, when a simple matchstick is lit.”

 “My child, but most of all remember to always have wonder, about illusions, that might

seem real, but  only point to another more real,  different reality.”

Now, your mind will never dim, unlike a star, when you grow into a super smart citizen

of the Universe.”

“Sleep well, and get up well.”

“You, too, daddy”

“Now, like a star…LIGHTS OUT, and dream about puppies..”

Author’s note:

My own childhood family wasn’t  cuddly, warm, or closely knit, but more resembled a poorly organized tour group, one with secrets..