December 8, 2009 archive

60 Years of Denial

Star Trek, Stargate, ET, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Science fiction or science fact?  Or have I lost it completely.

Bob Dean along with several others in the projectcamelot community blend into a rich revealing of astounding proportions.  So good it just can’t be true and from another movie that line “You Can’t Handle The Truth”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

NASA, Never A Straight Answer.  

Overnight Caption Contest

Bright Lights, Big City

I’ve been thinking about disappointments.  And how to deal with them.  How to handle that bitter taste.  And the sadness.

You must know what I mean.  Relationships that wither.  Expectations that dessicate.  Hopes that die.  Plans that collapse. Love that fades away.  Friends who pass on.  Children who move away.  Parents who die.  Machines that rust and fall apart.  Treasures that rot.  Fabric eaten by moths.  Politicians who don’t deliver. The list is long.  And it’s inexhaustible.  It’s about what we want but cannot have.  It’s about what we want to get rid of but cannot shed.  The Buddha was right.  Our clinging makes us suffer.  And we cling.  Oh how we suffer.

Disappointment is just a particular form of sorrow, of suffering.  It’s everywhere and as common as dust.  It begins in expectations and ends in rubble.

I could get angry about this.  Many people do. But that doesn’t do any good.  I could yell about how unjust, unfair, improper, illegal, brutal and stupid it is.  I could want to fight and look for a brawl.  But that doesn’t matter.  The hurt remains.  It persists despite how I distract myself.

I could catalog my disappointments for you.  Disappointments in love.  And in politics, which might be the same thing.  Disappointments about health.  Disappointments about wealth, fame, esteem.  And in all of the other human areas in which I didn’t get what I wanted or expected or desired.  Or what I deserved.  I could give you, if I haven’t already done it in installments over the past few years, a long list of my many, many grievances.  But that’s not why I’m writing now.  No. I’m writing now because I want ever so slightly to shift our attention, to shift how we deal with our inevitable and pervasive and continual disappointments.

Which brings me to the blues.

Here’s the cardinal blues idea: things are disappointing and they hurt us in our hearts and souls.  We all have these profound hurts.  But, and this is the biggest but in the blues, if we’re going to keep our souls and our hearts and our passion and our humanity alive, we need to release these hurts and pound them out and scream them out and see them for the rich, beautiful, human feelings they are.  We want to embrace them in all their humanity.  We want to embrace that we love deeply and that, sadly, we’re disappointed.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a lover, or a friend, or a country, or a political party, or a group, or an idea.  None of that matters.

And it doesn’t matter how much it hurts.  Sometimes it really stings.  I just want to sing and dance the song of life one more day.  I want to celebrate that I’m alive, I’m human, and I feel it deeply, deeply in my heart.  Here’s what I mean:

 

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simulposted at The Dream Antilles  

Homeowners getting hit a second time

 You’re in debt up to your eyeballs. You can’t keep up with the mortgage and you are going to lose your home. It doesn’t get any worse than that, right? Wrong.

 Lawyers for troubled Staten Island homeowners say they are beginning to see examples of clients who go to the bank to take out money and find that their accounts have been frozen or wiped out by other banks or debt collectors — the entities holding second mortgages on houses already in default on the first and primary mortgage. Some are learning the lender or debt collector has already gone to court and secured a judgment to garnish paychecks.

   It’s a move more in line with the traditional debt collection industry, which typically targets credit card debt, and it’s dragging the house and what little cash reserves people often have into the foreclosure battleground. Experts say it’s an end-run by second lien holders around the traditional foreclosure process, which involves only the first mortgage holder and provides important legal protections for the homeowner.

 

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