My Rorschach World

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SOMETIMES ON A DOG WALK, I wonder what’s happened to my dogs.  We walk in a wilderness place that they know well, so they take off for while and I’m all alone on the path.  When I stand outside myself, or float a few hundred feet in the air, I look down at me and ask, “What’s that guy doing, the only soul in sight?”  And then I smile at the answer, “He’s walking his dogs.”

Yesterday after they abandoned me, I had a chance to notice the last of the snow on the ground, scattered patterns here and there.  This patch looked like a lion, that like a spaceship, that like an angel with three wings.

I laughed when I noticed that I was using the snow for my personal Rorschach test.

Then I wondered; instead of ink-blots or snow-blots, what if I use the world around me for my test?  This stack of massive logs, I saw it first as a barrier, an obstacle, “Don’t Go Here!”  then shifted it to be a ladder, easy to climb for a clearer view of my landscape.

The path itself, does it represent my own path, I wondered, hard going up hillsides sometimes, curving later around peaceful glades?  Why of course it does…that path is my life!  I’d been walking the same physical road for years, unaware that it stands for my destiny, whenever I choose to see it that way.  Rocks, trees, sky, city, cars, people — the physical expressions, they’re pictures of my mental and spiritual surroundings, as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time the pups came dashing back to join me, I saw them as travelers with me along our way, not talking but setting an example: what’s wrong with running your path sometimes instead of walking, what’s wrong with letting the destination take care of itself and simply _being,_ for a while?

Pretend every so-called external thing stands for something internal, and what all of a sudden do we understand about ourselves and about our spiritual choice to visit this planet?

If the pups could talk, I’d ask them.  Yet if they could talk, they’d probably say nothing and let me figure it out for myself.

 

To Whom Cares: Forum’s Working!

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HERE’S A YOU-CAN-COLLAPSE-AND-SLEEP-NOW delicious name-your-favorite celebration cake for Chris our Webmaster! The forum’s up under “Community” on the menu bar effective now.

No rules for anybody except post something inappropriate and I’ll delete it and shut down your access. You’ve found what “inappropriate” means after you’ve been deleted.

Since I am fairly prim on coarse language and low-class ideas, assume I’m spring-loaded to the REJECT position, don’t mess with me and everything will be fine. Here’s a guide: so far there hasn’t been a single post on the site that I’ve found less that positive and thoughtful and appropriate for discussion.

Let me or Chris know any problems you have with the forum/discussion pages should you decide to play there and run into trouble.

You can pick up the title of any journal entries from the beginning of the site, if you feel like developing those ideas. Be careful about disagreeing with me, though. I shall allow only a hundred, that is, a single hundred disagreements on any one topic before I’ll begin to consider I might have said something wrong.

— Richard

Truthful Arguments

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HER HUSBAND WAS UPSET.  ”I can’t believe you forgot our anniversary!  And you never remember, last year it was the same thing!  I’ve got to admit, you’re just plain thoughtless, you know how important this day is to me, and you don’t care one bit how I feel…I’d swear you go out of your way to hurt me!”

She listened.  When he paused, frustrated, she said, “Jack, I love you.  Your truthful argument, please?”

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Suicide Sin?

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DON’T KNOW HOW I got on the subject, but I found myself Startpaging “suicide sin” on the Internet.  Looks as if it is.  Quite a few arguments by folks who care about sin, declaring that God doesn’t want us to kill ourselves except, I’m guessing, if we let the infidels do it for us in a holy war.

Then it occurred to me, that Jesus the Christ is the first major celebrity suicide that comes swiftly to mind, after Socrates.  If Jesus killed himself, why is it a sin for me to do the same?  Is Jesus a sinner?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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If You Build It, It Will Fly

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YOU CAN HAVE the world’s best toolkit, but when there’s no patience there, you’re probably not going to build anything that makes you much happy.

For this reason, and although I wanted to build an airplane, I knew it wouldn’t happen.  Wouldn’t, that is, until the ultralight flying machines came on the market.

They seemed so simple!  Simple aluminum tubes, simple steel cables, you pop some fabric on the wings, wheels on axles, engine on mount, you’re done!

That’s pretty well the way it worked out.  I don’t remember how many hours it took to assemble my Pterodactyl Ascender, but it didn’t feel like a whole lot.  One day it lay in brown cardboard boxes, long coffins on the garage floor, the next day the boxes were gone and there was a great deal of unrecognizable odd parts on the floor.

Next day it was all still there, me at the kitchen table reading the manual of how it was all supposed to fit together.  Before I knew it, I had finished reading the first chapter of the manual.  The parts were still on the floor.  They stayed there as I began Section Two, “Assembling the Wing.”

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Normally I Wouldn’t Fly

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THIS CLOSE TO a wilderness mountain ridge.

I can see the smile of my first flight instructor, all cool and unconcerned, pulling the throttle to idle and saying, “By the way, where do you plan to land when the engine quits… as it just did?”

“I guess we’ll have to put ‘er down on the little pointy white place,” I’d say.

But really, between you and me, and if you tilt your computer screen just right, you can see the valley beyond and a field down there that’d be not so hard to slip into and land, get out and stretch our legs, rest a bit from flying.

Like so many threats in our lives, a ferocious foreground distracts from our background security .  It’s fun to be scared, sometimes, but never to fear that our true life can be lost, nor in the slightest danger.

The Lasting Benefit of Early Starvings

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I DISCOVERED THIS in the days when Kraft Dinner was fifteen cents the box and there weren’t many boxes in the pantry.

No I am not here complaining I am celebrating.  Because one day back then, as I was surveying the last of the ice cream and it looked as if I wouldn’t be seeing any such thing for the next decade, I thought,

I wonder if I can extend this a bit, before they turn off the electricity.

It was in such a mood of scientific experimentation, willing to lose everything, that I moved as though in trance, set the ice cream container under the water faucet and ran a little hydrogen hydroxide directly over what was left in the container — chocolate, as I recall.

I was cautious, so allowed much less water than ice cream.  For a few seconds after I did this, it looked as though someone had poured water on the ice cream.  Which wasn’t all that successful looking, so I reached down with a spoon and squashed it together, liquid and solid, stirred it, tentatively.  Then I added just a bit more water, stirring, not shaking.

I’ll bet you’re thinking it looked like melted ice cream, but…  Well, it did look like melted ice cream, but listen to this:  It wasn’t!

When ice cream melts it does one thing: it melts.

But when ice cream is thinned with water it does something else, it freezes the dihydrogen monoxide into tiny crystals which are then stirred into a non-melted result which I call, “Water in Ice Cream,” or, “Water in Sherbet.”

Waitresses, when I order this dish today, or ask for a milk shake made with water, do not believe about the crystals, but they bring me the result if I pay them to do it..

Even now, you’re curious about this, aren’t you?  You don’t believe me, or can’t imagine that common hydroxic acid behaves in such a delicious way when stirred coldly into a dish of I.C. or India Charlie as we say in aviation.

Yes, it stretches the basic supply by some fifteen percent, but more, it tastes really cool.

You think I’m kidding, don’t you?

The Kid

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I REMEMBER HIM, I remember that kid in the fighter-bomber, photo taken Spring of 1962, Chaumont Air Base, France.  It wasn’t even my airplane, the one I spent weekends polishing.  It was the closest plane on the flight line that day, and I was the closest pilot, and the Information Officer said we need a photo for the base newspaper, Lieutenant, would you mind hopping up into the cockpit and sort of pretending you’re going to fly?

I looked around, there was no other pilot on the line.  ”Sure.  You want it with a hat, I guess, if I’m going to fly?”

“A hat?”

“A flying helmet…a crash helmet.  We don’t really fly unless we’ve got a hat…”

“Yes, please.”

I went and got my hat, and hopped up into the cockpit and fastened the oxygen mask and pulled the visor down.

“Could you leave the rubber thing loose, and the glass up?  We want to see…otherwise you’re a…”

machine, I thought.  Otherwise you’re a faceless machine.  I raised the visor, squinted a bit in the sunlight, unsnapped the oxygen mask.

“That’s good.  Could you don’t look at the camera?  Like you’re about to take off.”

“If I were about to take off, I’d close the canopy,” I said.  And I’d have the mask on and the visor down and I’d pull the safety pins out of the landing gear and if I really wanted to fly I’d probably start the engine.

“No, leave the hatch open.  Maybe look over about there, please?  Good.  A little more to the left.”

In a minute he said thank you and he and the photographer walked away.  When I got down from the airplane I didn’t think I’d be back to visit me 50 years later and I’d be calling me Kid.

I flew some training mission that afternoon, then went home to the barracks and typed a chapter that night that I didn’t know would be published, under I title I hadn’t thought of: Stranger to the Ground.

Forgot about the photo, didn’t realize that hundredth of a second would caption my military career and the career of every other fighter pilot in history: Force.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Boxers Train for Boxing, Soldiers Train for War

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IT WAS A BIT OF A CHALLENGE, I remember, to watch poor Sylvester Stallone get himself pummeled nearly to death on screen in the first Rocky motion picture.

[ INSERT PHOTO OF BLOODY WRECKED ROCKY THAT I DON'T HAVE THE COURAGE TO POST ALTHOUGH THE PICTURE IS IMPORTANT TO MY STORY SO PLEASE IMAGINE IT HERE AND CLICK CONTINUE READING]

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