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!”

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.

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

GRANDMA’S ADVICE

Grandma’s Advice

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 ruled and guided my life, and through 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, half full …..but, of something, that might  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 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 competed with grandma.

He once wrote ;”Be who you are and say what you think, because those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind, don’t matter!”

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; ” 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; 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.”

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

“I am very sorry.”

I reminded her 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.

“I never told you that.” …

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

“Germs”, she said.

“Oy, 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.

“That advice, I ALWAYS told you.”

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

“Oy,” 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 what people could do to you, I had always reasoned.

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

Two marriages and a dozen influenzae later, I had realized her truth too late.