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!”

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..)

*******
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 .

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’…

“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.

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”

*******

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…

 

SUPERSTITIONS’ ETYMOLOGY AND NUMERICAL MAGIC

by Paul Schroeder

 Phantoms fill the air around us, electromagnetic energy fogs with memories and identity, and superstitions have arisen, as forms of protection against the evil unseen.

Numbers, as supernatural protection, intersect with paranormal magic when the intent of the person’s energy attaches to such numbers.

Seven has always been considered an exponentially lucky number used against that present yet unseen evil.

The Old Testament Bible is the original source that holds seven as a magic number:

-the seventh son of a seventh son,

-seven times around the walls of Jericho,

-the seven seas-

– the seven wonders of the world,

-seven years of good prosperity and seven years of famine,

-the seven ages of man,

-the seven deadly sins,

and culturally:

-seven years bad luck for breaking a silver mirror,

-seven lucky temples of the Arabians,

-seven as a winning throw in dice,

-seven ancient original planets (six and the sun as the seventh),

-seven stars in His hand (Revelations),

-seven days to create the Earth and Heaven, and rest

-seven Brethren to make a perfect lodge,

-and beyond the Bible:

– the seven dwarfs,

-the seven orders of architecture,

-the seven sisters of the Pleiades,

-The 7 Lucky Artifacts:

• wishbone
• rabbit’s foot
• white elephant charm
• key with heart-lock
• four-leaf clover
• swastika (the symbol is pre-Hitlerian)
• horseshoe,

-the Chinese seven valuables, and so on, ad infinitum.

Rabbit’s feet were always considered lucky and were carried in Ancient and Medieval pockets of garments as a guaranteed ward against bad luck.

Today, one can purchase a dyed novelty item rabbit’s foot for a key-chain, but it will be of a front paw, useless, as only a rabbit’s rear foot has value magically.

It was well known that wild rabbits will rapidly thump their hind foot as an approach signal of danger, to warn  other rabbits in their warren, in much the same way that beavers slap their tails onto the water to alert their families of approaching danger.

Remember ‘Thumper’, of Disney ilk?

So, too, it was thought in ancient times,  that if one carried the rear paw of a wild rabbit hidden in one’s garment or pocket, that the paw would ‘thump’ within, to apprise one of impending imminent or approaching danger, just as the paw did, in life.

However, the rabbit’s foot available today, is the front paw of a domestic rabbit and only a wild rabbit’s hind paw, will suffice as a ward against danger and bring one magical good luck. 

Knocking on wood originated in England with the people who built Stonehenge, the ancient Druids, who believed in human sacrifices and also that good spirits dwelled in Pine trees.

Their belief held that if such a Pine tree were brought into one’s home and ‘knocked on’, that the good spirits dwelling within it, would then be released into the home, thus bringing magical good luck.

Modern Christians on Christmas who bring Pine trees into the house and decorate them, are following this ancient pagan Druid’s rite which the Church tried unsuccessfully to extinguish.

This ancient Druid pagan holy day, was originally on December 25th.

The Church stole and supplanted this Druid holiday date in an attempt to substitute it and replace it with their own Holy Day of Christ’s Mass, (Christmas) symbolically representing December 25th as the date of the ‘birth of Christ’ instead of the pagan holy date.

 It is an a’ priori fact that nobody had known, has known, or ever will  know, the true date, of Our Savior’s birth for

 only uneducated, superstitious people, without historical knowledge, believe this birth of Christ date as fact.

Ancient Druids exchanged gifts with each other in their pagan celebration of that Roman agricultural holiday, on December 25th.

 Christians today exchange gifts, still following that pagan ritual, which has nothing to do with what the church tried hard to impose, as Christianity.

The church was patently unable to erase this gift giving Druid element of pagan celebration, despite prodigious efforts to punish those who did.

Mistletoe was revered by these ancient Druids such that it was never allowed to touch the floor and instead was hung from eves, above doorways, and from ceilings.

In their pagan rites, revered and valued mistletoe was used as an aphrodisiac,  a sexual stimulant, for under its horny influence hundreds of young Druid women and young Druid men would go into the fields (‘children of the corn’) to lasciviously and licentiously copulate in public in great numbers, to excite and thus encourage the ‘Gods’, to do likewise, a type of Godly pornography.

Druids believed that the rains which enriched the fields at this holiday time, which fell from the sky, were the ‘seeds of the Gods’, or God’s sperm, which fell down to earth from Godly sexual unions, and were essential in order to stimulate agricultural growth.

Christians who still hang mistletoe are displaying the vestigial remnants of this shameless sexual rite of the pagan Druids, as on Christmas, one can kiss anyone who stands under this herb, without owning guilt or shame.

 The Church was unable to extinguish this Druid magical pagan practice.

Outside of the Church, superstitions of magic also held innate spiritual truths, attached to them.

Black cats were  firmly believed to be  witches’ ‘familiars’, creatures possessed  by demons, evil inhuman creatures,  summoned into black  cats, to do evil; if a black cat crossed your path, it was no accident, but a curse.

Thus, black cats  were virtually exterminated from England.

Breaking a mirror, as a portent of bad luck, originated with prehistoric man, who held that his reflected image was not merely his image, but an actual picture of his spirit and  inner soul, itself.If such a primitive saw his reflection in a puddle or in a pond’s surface, it would cause certain bad luck or even likely death to disrupt that image, by tossing a pebble or stone into it causing ripples.

Interrupting the ‘image’, interrupted life, itself, and thus the mirror shattering superstition prevailed.

Certain African tribes, Middle Eastern as well as American Mennonites consider the taking of their picture with a photograph to be a ‘soul stealing’ intrusive  and unacceptable event.

The number 13, has long been considered bad luck for millennia;  today one will not likely see a number for a 13th airline flight or a designated 13th floor in a city skyscraper; one will likely see 12a or 12b as a utility floor, instead.

This fear of 13 as magical evil goes back into ancient history.

Prehistoric man counted with the only calculator that he had, his two hands with a total of ten fingers and his two feet, counted as not having ten toes, but as each foot being a single digit.

Twelve represented that which could be ‘known’ and

prehistoric man knew therefore that twelve was natural,

considered good and known, twelve months to a year, twelve people on a jury, and so on.

 Thirteen represented and symbolized that beyond which could be counted, or known and  thus , since

prehistoric man feared anything unknown, that number was considered magical and evil and still remains so.

The unknown has always been considered sinister and worthy of being feared.

This precedes the  myth notion that the Last Supper (a Jewish Passover dinner) had 12 disciples and that Judas who betrayed Him, was the unlucky 13th.

However, the number 13 is considered very lucky by the Chinese and Jewish cultures both of whom respectively have thirteen lunar months in their calendars.

The Chinese also have thirteen valuable talisman:  gold, silver, copper, bronze, jade, ivory, amber, wood, water, moon, fire, silk and ruby.

Superstitions’ magic in avoiding bad luck, reminds me of the quote,”I wondered why the baseball seemed to be growing so much larger in size, and then.. it hit me.”

Nine is good magic from the novena, the Catholic prayer that extends to nine days, as is three on a match, is considered bad luck ; from combat experience,  a sniper could on seeing an enemy’s distant flame, from the first smoker, to get aim, the second smoker, to get range and the third person lost his face and cigarette to a bullet.

Throwing things at people, is also considered magical, and

throwing certain things,  considered good luck.

Throwing rice at wedding was, from ancient times, considered a sign of good luck, as rice was so prolific, that tossing a handful into a puddle caused it to germinate within a few days.

Throwing rice, therefore, was thought to bring good marital reproductive luck,  to magically cause the bride to have many healthy babies.

If one doesn’t like the groom,  one may throw five pound bags of rice, in an attempt to seriously wound him.

Throwing coins into a wedding fountain accompanied by good wishes and throwing bridal bouquets also are both magically attributed with bringing good luck.

Throwing salt over one’s left shoulder, prevents evil from approaching, as salt is magical, absorbs negative energy and is reputed to kill witches.

It’s called the ‘spice of life’.

 Before refrigeration, salt was widely used to preserve any perishable food.

In Roman times, a soldier’s pay was given in bag measures of salt, (saline) instead of in coin money and thus the word,’ salary’ comes from the word ‘salt’, given as payment for military services rendered.

Salt that is blessed and left in a continuous line to encircle a house troubled with loathsome spirits, can create an effective ward or barrier to protect those inside from more harassment.

I know from personal experience, that this particular aspect of blessed salt is positively true, and not at all mere superstition. 

Salt is so valuable and so magical that if one spills salt accidentally, one is left unprotected by its magic, and evil ones approach at once over one’s left shoulder.

Throwing salt over one’s left shoulder into evil’s face reestablishes salt’s protection for your aural/astral energies, against evil ones.

The very word for ‘left’, in French is ‘gauche’ which literally means ‘wrong’.

A left handed handshake was always considered very sinister.

‘Right’, on the other hand, to coin a pun, is considered good; one seats one’s most favored guests at a wedding to the right of one on a dais and one’s ‘right hand man’ is more than one’s best friend.

In fact for the first 100 years of our country’s educational system children were forced to write with their right hand if they were naturally southpaws, as left handedness was then surely considered a sign of the devil.

One is still hard pressed to find any left handed desks for pupils to write with today in too many modern classrooms.

Directions aside, finally, magic exists in ladders.

If one leaves a high open ladder in evidence in the middle of a busy city street, many people will  avoid walking under it.

Walking under a ladder as a sign of bad luck originated in England in the 17th century, when pickpockets were hung from the neck  until death, from tall ladders,  publicly, capital punishment for the minor crime of being a pickpocket.

Pickpockets roamed and picked pockets, and worked those crowds who had assembled to witness such executions,  a grim reminder that capital punishment, as a deterrent, simply doesn’t ever work.

It was believed that should someone walk under that ladder, after the hanged criminal’s body was removed,  the ghostly spirit of the dead criminal lingering there would attach to and follow one home, to cause havoc and eventually spiritual possession, in an attempt  to continue to steal, but this time, the most valuable of assets, one’s soul.

Are these foolhardy assumptions, contrary to science or do they point towards remnants of lost spiritual truths, about how the Universe reacts to evil, bad luck and unseen sinister entities?

Science stumbles when the paranormal, magic or spirit is discussed, however,

the laws of the unseen all around us , extend within the paranormal and the mind’s superstitions mixed with the mind’s intent, can indeed often  protect against it.

EPILOGUE:

—=Additional superstitions that have defied my etymological research:

Put almonds in your pocket when you need to find something.

Scatter chili peppers around your house to break a curse.

Never blow out the first candle you lit before you blow out the others or bad luck will follow.

Throw rice in the air to make it rain.

Ask an orange a yes or no question and count the seeds. An even number of seeds means no and an odd number means yes.

In a photograph of three, the person in the middle will die first.

Walk through the branches of a maple tree to have a long life.

Carry peach wood to have a long life. Eat a peach to assist in making a tough decision.

Mix salt and pepper together and scatter it around your house to repel evil.

Do not whistle at night.

Eat mustard seed to ensure fertility.

Place chips of cedar wood in a box with some coins to draw money to you.

If you bite your tongue, someone is talking about you or thinking of you.

Hanging up a new calendar before the year is over will bring bad luck

HOW TO RECOGNIZE AND SURVIVE A SERIAL KILLER ENCOUNTER

 

 

How to Recognize and Survive the Approach of a Serial Killer

 

by Paul Schroeder

 

 

(“There are two kinds of serial killers as far as the victim is concerned: the kind that you

 

don’t see before they pounce on you and the kind you see and don’t expect to pounce on

you.

There are many more serial killers living outside the prison walls than inside.”

 

Pat Brown)

The expression,”serial killer”, denotes the word, ‘serial’, which means, successful killer .

Ted Bundy said that he often wore his arm in a sling to perfectly trap random

compassionate women, who traveled to his car door to assist him with his theatrical

‘struggle’ with packages.

These outgoing, caring women were brutally clubbed into his trunk for later torture.

Serial murderers who instead of passion, kill in ‘cold blood’, and  do not know their

victims, beforehand, for they kill randomly, purposefully moving from town to town, city

to city, without any remote tinge of latent regret or  accumulative  feelings of guilt.

Unlike a murder of marital or  organized crime Mafia passion, there is no plan for a pre-

dug grave or a methodical bother to dismember the corpse.

They make no attempt to hide the bodies of their victims.

They  stop on a deserted road and open the hood of their car to flag down a helpful

motorist to kill them with a gun.

Back into the victim’s stolen car, in the next town,

they  lure a child into a car by asking them to help find a lost puppy or by offering them a

kitten from a box of kittens, which disarms any child, and then  stab the child to death.

Later that night, they stop at a truck stop to pick up a prostitute to then strangle her

afterwards leaving her body on the side of the road.

They remember to be most careful to use a different method of murder, each time to

confuse police efforts from various jurisdictions, from establishing an M. O. pattern

 

that links random killings into a single silhouette, the  fingerprint of a singular serial murderer.

Interstate highways lend a unique anonymous isolation to the mentality that serial

killers love and use:

Truck-stops are high risk areas, as are truckers, themselves, and especially long off-

ramps are  over represented with highway murder deaths, a study of  murder statistics show.

A big, friendly, helpful smile, or a helpful assist from a total stranger, is the last thing one

will ever see and one will never see it coming, the guise of

serial killer psychopaths .

These serial killer psychopaths travel from state to state blithely killing random people,

leaving corpses on roadsides the way that we leave cigarette butts, without a single afterthought ,

psychopaths who from childhood, have had  their consciences, all of their lives, sit in the

corner, like a well trained German Shepard .

 

 

Serial killers enter

back into this harsh world without a written ‘blueprint’, without spirit helpers and

without  protecting angels and

do again return to become serial murderers, and

 

 they  manifest the

same three  signature traits of  Dark Force Entities:

 

sinister, predatory and self justifying.

 

It is good advice that one should avoid them, sidestep them, and never attempt to tackle them head on.

But one CAN recognize and survive an encounter with such a serial killer predator, by

taking careful notes from serial murderers who have explained their ‘trade-craft’

( from Internet unknown source):

” Trust your intuition:

Do not ignore your instincts or intuition.

You have likely recognized something indefinite that spells out danger, and your mind

has not caught up with your recognition – you do not yet perceive how to dissect it

logically.

This is intuition.

If something does not feel right, then it is not right.

Never ignore such inklings; do not be embarrassed to change your mind in front of a

stranger or have fear of being rude.

It’s better to be rude than dead.

Under no circumstances get into the Car:

Once victims get into the car, few return alive and are later found dead at a secondary

crime scene.

Whether you’re helping some stranger carry a package to the car, being offered a ride, or

having someone else near your car, they can all end with you being murdered.

The presence of a baby seat or children’s toys in the vehicle – or even children

themselves- are tools that a serial killer uses to mentally disarm victims.

The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, once returned to a body dump site to have sex

with the corpse of one of his victims while his son slept in the vehicle.

– Serial Killer Warning Signs of Entrapment-:

A Pretended injury/weakness:

The murderer makes a huge effort to let you know that he is physically weaker than you.

He may stumble and drop packages

“Please help me carry this to my car. Ever since my spine injury, I can hardly move.”

He may wear a cast or walk with a cane in the Ted Bundy method, to trap his victim.

Too much information:

The murderer will give you too much unnecessary, detailed information:

“My sister has a sweater just like that. She was living in California but she moved home

last year. Her boyfriend gave it to her for Christmas, but afterward they broke up …”

When such a serial murderer is telling a lie, though it sounds credible to you, he often

has little confidence in his talking-trap method and will tend to add too much detail,

more than necessary to support it.

This ruse of details makes a serial murderer seem less a stranger and appear more

familiar than he really is.

The un requested promise:

“Just one drink and then I will take you home, I swear!”, when you never asked him to

promise you anything.

Sudden unsolicited promises can be a sign of an underlying sinister agenda.

Friendly authority:

The stranger projects some kind of non threatening authority:

“I’m the security guard/ the park ranger/ a police officer.”

“You didn’t see the signs; this is closed. I’ll escort/drive you out of here.”

‘You shouldn’t be alone here; we are on the lookout for a serial killer in this

neighborhood. Get in and I’ll drive you out of here.”

No law enforcement official would tell you that there was a serial killer, for

they avoid giving outside knowledge TO  ANYONE of an ongoing case for media

avoidance purposes.

Some serial killers come tricked out with police identification and police-like vehicles.

Insist that he call a uniformed backup if you did nothing wrong but are being “arrested.”

Challenging your personality:

The killer labels you, in a critical way, hoping that you will attempt to prove them wrong,

“You’re too weak to help me lift this box into the back of my van.”

“You’re not frightened of me, are you?”

Teaming:

Often a killer will manipulate you to “team up” with him.

You and he instantly become a “we” – “I hate drinking alone, I know a great place we can

go to up the road.”

“I’m going there too, we can get there in my car.”

This attempt to bond with you is a way to quickly establish a familiarity.

Imposed obligation:

A serial killer will impose his help on you, hoping that you will feel obligated to help him back.

“Let me help you carry that to your car” will lead to “Can you give me a lift to the corner?”

You leave your home to find your tire flat.

“Let me change that flat tire for you” will be followed by “May I come inside to wash my

hands?”

But he WAS the one who punctured the tire in the first place.

Having already accepted his help, he hopes that you feel bad enough to refuse a request like that.

Once inside, you’re a murder victim.

An appeal to a feeling of being vulnerable:

“Help me find my lost puppy before it gets away too far.”

“I need to drop off this medicine to an elderly person upstairs, but I can’t legally park

here; just come and sit in my car while I run in for five minutes?”

“My little girl is missing, will you help find her?”

– Not taking,” no”, for an answer-A classic murderer’s tool.

No matter how many times you say, “That’s okay, I don’t need your help,” the stranger insists on helping you.

If you give some weak excuse or sound unsure, he will persist.

Do not be afraid to be loudly blunt and rude: “I said, NO! Go away! I do not want your

help!.”

Many are loquacious and charming, but it’s only a ‘tool’ to conceal a demonic intent:

“I’m the most cold-blooded sonofabitch you’ll ever meet,”  said Ted Bundy.

“I just liked to kill, I wanted to kill.”

The signature symptom of the psychopath is his inability to see others as worthy of

compassion.

Victims thus become dehumanized, “flattened into worthless objects in the murderer’s mind”.

John Gacy, who never showed an ounce of remorse, called his victims “worthless little

queers and punks,” while the “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe declared that he was

“cleaning up the streets” of ‘ human trash’

All of these killings were managed with an initial charming smile, a smile carefully

contrived, before a lethal knife or hammer fell.

Would YOU have easily fallen, do you suppose, for one of these “tricks of the trade”?

Would you have been naturally leery enough to survive such tactics or would you be

clearly very prone to an evil stranger’s charm and closeness, to become yet another murder victim?

And many rare victims who survived later said, “But, he was so sweet!”

Sweetness, is not the same as being sweet.

Sweetness can be used as a deadly manipulative tool.

A charming smile can mask the most evil intentions.

Once one is alerted to these uniform techniques employed by many

incarcerated successful, serial murderers, one can teach one’s spouse, one’s children,

one’s colleagues and one’s easily duped friends, to be much less trusting, to raise their

fence higher, around themselves, to prevent them  from becoming  the next victims of

a murderer.

One must teach one’s loved ones  to be immediately suspect, of any close-hand

encounter with a stranger, who pretends a stance of authoritarianism, need, or one

warmly disarmingly charming,  widely used  tactics that serial killers rely on.

An approaching car, one that passes close by you, while you are out walking late, in an

abandoned hour, or in an empty place like a deserted parking lot, could  easily spell such an unplanned

death.

They are everywhere and in transit through small towns; be wary, be aware, beware.

 

One must be taught, instead, to be poised to bolt, to be alarmed by any car’s or person’s

close proximity to one, in a lonely place and moment, and to lose one’s sense of blind

trust, of one’s presumed safety with a total stranger.

The suspicious always appears “ordinary”, until suddenly, it isn’t.

Can anything be done to change and redeem such serial killers’ dark minds and souls?

Capital punishment for such murderers is spiritually counter-intuitive, because after

physical death, they linger on this plane and join together with dark others, to

accomplish yet more evil than they ever could have done, when they were alive.

 

Only God can and will “shift” them, in His own time,

but until such time,

don’t talk to strangers..

SEX IN PUBLIC, OR SHALL WE DANCE, INSTEAD?

by

Paul Schroeder

 

“Sex isn’t the answer; sex, is the question; the answer is, “YES!” (Woody Allen)

Mark Twain once said, “No sane person dances”.

Must one be crazy to dance,

publicly ?

I thought long and hard about that statement, approached it from different angles of thought and pondered it.

Orthodox Hasidim Jews, believe that wild dance, ensemble, is a way to approach sublime Divine attainment, most tribal and ancient.

Is it the case that

those who were deaf, could not hear the music and thus thought the dancers insane?
What makes a person gyrate sexually in front of strangers? I finally accept that dancing is publicly symbolic sex, with the exception of Lambada, which IS sex, most graphic in public.

Lap dances and belly dances enthrall men as consummate sex fantasies unfurled, and these reside deep within our psyches.

Men who routinely go to “topless” bars to watch naked women dance, harbor a wild and degrading fantasy, an addictive stimulant, that seems just as unwholesome as public sexual gyrations to music.

But sex, in public?!

Sometimes, watching people dance, at weddings and parties, in, you’ll forgive the expression, “ballrooms”, I can see the symbolic give and take sex act in dance.

Waltzes and Tangos are elegantly choreographed and highly polished sexual moves in partner synchronicity and poised ‘give and take’.

I do also think that alcohol loosens inhibitions on the dance-floor as well as in dating.

Why do you think that men are so very willing to buy ladies drinks?!

“On-stage dance takes from sexuality practices “off-stage” and imaginatively stylizes them and possibly reinforces or challenges these practices that include expressions of sexual identity and attraction, flirtatiousness, friendliness, exhibitionism, eroticism, and love-making.”

(Hanna, Journal of Sex Research / March-June, 2010 )

Would one who is a Buddhist and contemplative, dance or would he resist the impulse as unabashed sexy exhibitionism?

After all, what is,”sanity”, if “no sane man dances”?

Drinking alcohol during a “cocktail hour”, before public dancing at such affairs may assist the temporary insanity inherent to very public sexual gyrations called dance.

Sexual unabashed exhibitionism?

I can often resist the impulse to publicly gyrate, or to circle dance or line dance amidst a large group of people by recalling Twain’s sentence.

But, if dance is truly symbolic sex, the horizontal mambo, then group dancing brings to mind another quote:

“Sex between two people can be a wonderful thing, among ten people, it’s just fabulous!”

(Woody Allen)

To me, having unabashed multiple polygamous sexual partners is demonstrated by line dancing.

Dancing in public, however symbolically obscene in its blatant sexual gyrations, is not likely to expose one to HIV or STDs.

For one like me who will not dance, I wonder about the biological absurdity of dance and of sex, for many species have dance-specific mating rituals wherein if the dance is wrong, the mating doesn’t happen..

 

There has to be a more dignified way of expressing your deep love and affection for another human being, because despite our spirituality,

the human body is a odd marvel, in that it has its waste disposal plant, immediately next to its amusement park.

But these days, older and more 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..

“Want to dance?”

Since public dance is blatantly sexual and thus, embarrassing, in public,

I and Twain, shall instead, sit this one out.

MILITARY COMBAT MEMORY OF MY FATHER

COMBAT AND MILITARY MEMORY OF MY FATHER : I COULD HAVE TOLD HIM THAT I LOVED HIM

Combat and Military Memory of my Father: I Could Have Told Him That I Loved Him

by Paul Schroeder

My father parachuted into Germany and was captured that same week; he and his

 company buddies were holed up in a farmhouse armed with machine

guns when a Tiger Tank rolled up to it and put its muzzle into a window and fired.

He recalled his ferocious gnawing hunger and told me that at the prisoner of war camp

at night, when he slept, mice would creep into his buttoned shirt vest pocket to steal the

few crumbs of bread he had hidden there before he could awaken and slap his pocket.

He weighed eighty-eight pounds when he was liberated.

At another time, on a work detail outside and beyond the barbed wire fence, he saw a

skeletal group of Jews, literally walking skeletons, and in abject pity he threw a piece of

his bread over a fence to them, which they all frantically scrambled for.

The supervising German sergeant of those doomed Jews saw him do this and walked

over to him and put a Luger into my father’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

The gun misfired.

Twice.

His mind and lifelong emotional mental state were never the same after that incident,

and for the rest of his life he remained tortured, an unhappy and mostly unpleasant

man.

He would, many years later, angrily retrieve moldy bread and brown wilted lettuce from

the trash, raging about ,’wasted food’, and we all learned that for our peace of mind, food

garbage had to be thrown into the incinerator, long before he came home, from work.

He told me that he witnessed the killings of women who had assisted anti-Nazi resistance

fighters, women who were hung from piano wires in a slow strangulation that delighted

and entertained the German Waffen S.S.

But he seemed calm telling me that it took some over an hour to die, in this fashion, from

this form of German murder, for the the slimmest, most lightweight women who were

hanged, struggled longer against their nooses.

The prisoner of war camp’s confinement had chafed his soul.

Even long after the war he could escape the inglorious restraints and confinements of

marriage and work , to seek the open ocean to fish for striped bass and bluefish.

He loved fishing more than anything or anyone, in his life, and ached for fishing, to be

free and alone on a landscape of waves, with only gulls for company.

He spent all of his spare time, nights and weekends, alone on the open Atlantic ocean, a

peaceful landscape of land escape, far from dangerous and murderous distant coastlines.

When he thought that I was old enough to be of assistance to him, he brought me into his

escapist world of fishing solitude, and far out on the waters of the Atlantic, far from any

constricting shore, told me his memories, of a horrific war. .

When I was young, eight, nine and ten years of age, my father woke me every Friday

night at 2:00 A.M. and by three fifteen A.M. we were out in the waters of Long Island, in

his boat, fishing for striped bass and bluefish until the sun came up and fish stopped

feeding and taking lures.

We watched the gulls; wherever they were raucous and feeding, we caught many large

fish, as schools were underneath, forcing the bait to the surface, which attracted the

birds. It was a foolproof technique.

After the sun came up, we sat and jigged the bottom for fluke and flounders, languid

bottom feeders, while we sat under the shade of the Marine Parkway Bridge.

Bereft of the engine’s roar and the slap of the waves against a speeding hull, we sat, and

he would speak to me of the horrors he had seen.

Every weekend of my youth was spent this way, catching large fish.

I was agog and seasick for days afterwards.

The pitched sickness of the waves, the sharp sour stink of fish, the stench of gasoline

from the engine, the foul pungent odor of the, ‘piss-can’ and his poignant recollections of

the horrors that he had seen during the war, combined to make me deathly ill, each time

that we fished together..

I envisioned deep trenches in the furrows of the waves, filled with sobbing, and doomed

families of Jews, as German Waffen S.S. driven bulldozers, pushed tons of soil atop them,

to bury them, alive.

Once, after listening to such tales, told in his low, monotone voice, I eventually noticed

that each time I netted and landed a fish into the boat, the water would swirl and splash

a few seconds afterwards, and I asked my father the cause of this bizarre occurrence.

He blithely told me, casting a lure from the boat, that the fish’s mate would break the

water, seeking his lost mate, following after, in a futile search.

In that moment, with the boat at my feet filled with flopping fish, jaws gaping in airy

suffocation, the horrors in his stories resurfaced:

dead children in the streets, who resembled dolls, their jaws and eyes open,

skeletal Jews with pleading eyes,

children murdered before their parents’ eyes,

of a Waffen S.S. who used his machine pistol to separate a close knit family, and of their

wails of separation, which years later, would ring in my father’s head.

I suddenly realized, in horror, that each swirl and splash of water, after I had pulled one

fish into the boat, was a mate and thus a broken heart, that fish were individuals, with

feelings, and not just mere products!

The horror of fish, dead and dying at my feet, of loved ones’ final, forceful separation, in

a frozen moment, broke my young heart, and I found and resolved, that I could no longer

bear to catch, or to ever again, eat fish.

Recalling these memories is not a freeing and therapeutic catharsis, instead I feel a sad

nostalgia, a morbid whimsy .

As a writer, it is difficult to capture the strained, forced familiarity of families’ troubled

interactions, governed by fruits of traumas, into words.

I have carefully locked the vault door against the worst recollections, the horrors of

living with him; he had absorbed the repeated brutality of his experiences.

Throughout life, he radiated the same heavy-handed violence to those all around him,

using fists, where a word, instead, might suffice.

Those recollections, if unlocked behind my mind’s protective vault doors, would make

these experiences, herein, pale, by comparison.

When I can hazard to open those vault doors, doors made of three feet of steel,

therapeutic and freeing might then ensue.

Debriefing combat troops, is still nonexistent; one arrives fresh from combat to San

Diego Airport or Kennedy International Airport.

The injuries that our most recent troops have sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan, unseen

and unmeasured injuries, are deep and painful scars on their souls;

many, after drug and alcohol addiction fails to assuage their grief, take their own lives, in

suicides suffering from combat angst beyond words.

I recall General Patton coming under criticism for slapping the face of and calling a

coward, a young soldier, in a field hospital, who was trembling, with severe shell shock.

Even the military fails to understand what happens to America’s young men who have

been taught all of their lives,”Thou shalt not kill”, after they are trained to be killing

machines and then aptly fill the job description for a tour of duty.

Americans must unite to reluctantly resolve to fight a broader world war with ISIS, for

though America does NOT want war, WAR wants America.

America, is NOT at war, for America is busy shopping in malls; our military, however, IS

at war.

Their souls are forever tainted, degraded and crippled by official legal murders.

How is one to understand?

Rather than wrongly judging that my father wallowed in these memories, he instead was

surely drowning, within a deeper struggle, far removed from self pity.

Though he never once told me, within the recollections of the circle of my life, that he

loved me, I found that I instead should have told him then, and often, that I loved him .

EPILOGUE:

Just before he died, at eighty-four, after a lifetime of no contact with him, I visited him at

the Saint Albans Veterans Hospital Facility.

How I learned that he was there, is a paranormal story beyond belief, but one reserved

for another time.

Even after a stroke and a heart attack, confined to a wheelchair, his bristling aggression

and smoldering anger had still radiated.

He had angrily cursed God, when I did mention God, to him; he had repeatedly cursed

God, saying that there was no God and as proof, offered me what he had seen, of the long

ago mass murders of Jewish infants and children, by Ukrainians and Nazi Waffen S.S.

troops.

He had repeated that because of raw evil allowed to run rampant, he was thus an atheist,

one who didn’t believe a single word about God and then, he had openly cursed God,

again.

I had chided him by saying that although God WAS all loving, that even God, might get

annoyed, to be cursed so.

As for wholesale murder of innocents I reminded him:

‘Church taught hatred of Jews, as murderers of Jesus Christ, fueled the Holocaust, the

Inquisition, pogroms, ghettos, and rabid antisemitism and NOBODY hates the Church,

more than Jews, nobody…’

Slowly, I had realized a more positive note, an element of rescue,  a spiritual coup de’

grace:

I had been driven by unseen forces, after twenty-five years of no contact,  to bring along

to his bedside, a spiritual message to deliver to him.

I said that he was wrong; that the proof of God only seemed so invisible because it was

too merged within our consciousness and within everything all around us, to be too

easily detected.

I had told him that I had, over years of learning, away from him, become psychic enough

to glean more:

that we are NOT people, having spiritual/ paranormal experiences, but are  undying

spirits, within a DNA nanotech-contrived housing, instead, having human experiences.

That we ‘step out of’ our bodies at death, as we do our cars and our clothing, in physical

life.

And we are no more our bodies, I had said, than we are our clothing, or our vehicles.

I had assured him that I had learned that our consciousness actually reincarnated often,

to learn spiritual lessons, that God gives us many lifetimes to refine our souls and to

learn lessons that we set out for ourselves.

With some pride, I had reminded him that his lifetime’s recollections of horrid war

experiences, revealed a braver and nobler inner spirit, than most, to have chosen such

harsh and horrid lessons.

He quietly listened, with no vague inkling of acceptance.

A week later, preparing to visit him, again, I got a phone call from the hospital that he

had passed in the night from a second and final heart attack.

Some months later, while I was playing my bass guitar, (playing music, much like sleep,

or hypnotic television watching seems to suppress my left brain’s blocking aspect, and

paranormal experiences occur) in my living room, his face suddenly loomed into my

mind’s eye and I suddenly felt his closeness.

Instead of an accompanying sad heaviness, his energy radiated a youthful joyous

presence.

Stunned, I psychically acknowledged him, with love, but also with great worry; I

cautiously admonished him for hazarding to linger so on this plane, and asked him to

quickly jump into the Light.

His accompanying joy, a mixture of freedom from worry, from bed-worn immobility,

from war-time sadness, with an element of love and thanks, thrilled me.

Perhaps, I had I had been sought to deliver that message, to him, in much needed time.

IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES, CAMOUFLAGE PREVAILS

IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES, CAMOUFLAGE PREVAILS

“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 often thought that women had it better ; if I were a woman, without any love, I’d be down at the docks,  no underwear, waiting for the fleet to come in, with my skirt pulled over my head.

But these days, older and more 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..

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.

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 shallower than one would imagine, and will as soon marry for breasts, as an inkling of love, an idea so shallow and childish, that it takes much head shaking, to comprehend.

Yet when men themselves, in later life themselves develop breasts, they chafe ingloriously,  upset about those fatty unmanly acquisitions.

                                                 

Are men more juvenile in their primitive sexual drives and emotional makeup, and are women, indeed, far better human beings than men, providential, sensitive, charitable, strong and beautiful?

This DNA primate difference can be demonstrated, at a very young age: if you place a group of five-year-old girls, in a room together, they sit, talk and relate to each other with civil chatter, sharing, and with often surprising wisdom.

 But, if instead, you place a group of five-year-old boys, in a room together, they will soon roll all over the floor, like shaved gorillas, lost in individual combative power fantasies.

Nevertheless, our lingering social notion is that men are more important, more apt and more likely to be leaders,  a hard social prejudice to quell.

Equality,  in passion, is immediately easy 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 is being made and HIStory, will eventually become HERstory..

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.

But women are still naive, and are not the least bit aware of men’s glandular functioning concepts towards women:

When men view a woman’s public, licentious exaggerated undulations, in dance, consummated sexual fantasies unfurl:

deep within men’s psyches, visualized fantasies/daydreams dominate, of private encounters, with these licentious, and actively lithe women.

For women, seen by men, rarely grasp that their public dancing, is clearly nothing but overt symbolic sex.

Is this why is it still a man’s world, and so much easier, in society, to BE a man?

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..

But, it’s easier to BE a man because, as 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, as a man,  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.

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 megalomaniac ‘types’ , highly-polished self-preening is also accompanied by bullying.

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, or worse,  tattooed eyebrows, I experience an anxious ‘turn off’  and a social warning of duplicity, and then, all of my antenna are up, and waving..

But, why are so many women who look like floss, patina and veneer, the very shallow types, who a man has to pay, for an intelligent conversation?

It is, In truth, 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.

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.

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 hormonal drive.

Thus, using men’s sex drive, 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”)

face foundation,

earrings,

tints of rouge blush,

sport uplift brassieres,

apply perfumes,

apply lipstick,

go for Botox or plastic surgery to erase facial wrinkles,

surgery for the installation of 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;

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 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 you work too hard to make the business of marriage work, you get tired, and when you’re tired , you get annoyed, and  arguments start, and when arguments start… you’re out of business ..'”

(George Burns)

I remember being stopped and asked once, at Disneyland, by a graying and aged couple to photograph them, for they admitted that 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 in divorce.

Marriage, for too many men,  is just like a tornado: in the beginning, there’s sucking and blowing , and later on … you lose the house.

Whatever happened to the woman and to the man who 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.

I returned the camera when he slowly made his way to me and 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

IF I DIDN’T HAVE BAD LUCK, I’D HAVE NO LUCK, AT ALL

“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..)

*******
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.

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”

*******