The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Writer’s Block – It’s an Illusion

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[reprinted with permission from CopyDragon.com webwriters]

Some people think they have nothing to say. Some people believe they cannot express themselves.

These are illusions.

Your “Helpful” Friend, the Unconscious Mind

These illusions, these thoughts, are caused by the unconscious mind’s automatic learning. It learns something, usually in childhood, and quite often these “solutions” are brilliant, given the resources you have at the time. Unfortunately, like how to tie your shoes, these solutions are re-generated automatically below consciousness ever after, and sometimes they fit, but oft-times these solutions suck!

These beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and automatic reactions are a part of you, operating below consciousness, but they are illusions. (In which we are sometimes as trapped, and blind, as fish are to the water.)

(If you want to learn more about how the unconscious mind both helps and sometimes harms you, in its effort to promote your survival, pick up my free book at http://beinghappytoday.com. You can one-click unsub the newsletter if you wish.)

How to Make Writing Flow Easily

Let’s talk about how to make writing, and self-expression … easy.

[Read more…]

A Voice From the Past

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ghost in the machine
nameless, timeless … speed of light
and when is a loss?

July 1, 2003, San Jose, California: Although I am seated at my desk in San Anselmo, right now in San Jose hundreds of my 800-numbers are being fitted into a seven-foot cabinet inside the switching room of a long distance company.

It has been a very techno day; and to my shock I have just heard from my very techno friend Harvey, who died several years ago.

Moving those telephone lines was the final step of the Bloggard Migration Strategy (BMS).

Why migrate? Marin County, where we live, is perhaps the most expensive place in California. To buy the modest house we rent would cost over $700,000. In Montana or even a hundred miles north of here, this house would cost perhaps $150,000. So we decided to move.

In preparation, I consolidated all my local voicemail and 800-number voicemail lines into one place. Because their machine-support will no longer require my personal touch, Adrienne and I are now free to relocate, because I can operate my voicemail office, and my megatar workshop, anywhere.

As I tested telephone lines, I found one I’d forgotten. Some years previously, shortly before he died, my techno friend Harvey Warnke got a voicemail account from me.

Harvey was a unique spirit. Self-educated, he’d learned electronics working in the planetarium, then learned to design the light shows that appeared in the early days of Haight Ashbury psychedelic rock shows. He worked on movies, too.

If you’ve seen the remake of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, in one of the later scenes there is the meow of a cat; that was Harvey’s cat, whom he named Shi*ty Kitty.

If you saw the movie War Games, in the final war-room scene you saw the huge screens that show missiles launching all over the world; It was Harvey who made those huge screens with their flashing images.

Long ago, he and I traded a project. He designed relays and sensors for the Line Seizer device I built for Network Answering Service, and I in turn did the software programming his Counter Intelligence device, which counted frames of film on a film-editing table for splicing movies. It was a grand time. Harvey was a brilliant engineer, who drove a turbo-charged motorcycle at vast speeds. He was always laughing, always fun.

He was a part of life, a part of my life, and it was a good time.

But his death came suddenly.

He’d contracted some kind of virus, and the virus, invading his heart, made his heart very large and very weak. And then one day, his heart stopped.

At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to delete the voice mailbox with the recording of his voice. I forgot it was there, until now.

Sitting here at my desk in San Anselmo, calling into the machine, suddenly I hear my friend talking.

“Hi, this is Harvey,” he says, “I’m not here right now. Leave me a message, and I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

His voice has survived the years and the equipment changes. He promises to return calls, but he will not.

His voice remains, in the machine.

And you know what?

I still can’t erase it.

Buddha Next Door

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495 Third Avenue #8, San Francisco, 1975: Reading a lot of metaphysical books, I studied astral projection and conscious dreaming. Success was limited, but on this particular night the dream-like experience was clear.

I was lying down and deeply relaxing, in the evening, and mentally I left my body. I rose and floated outside, finding myself now walking the sidewalk. In this vision, it was daytime, and in crossing the street, I found myself wading through a heaving mass of alligators.

When I made it across the street, there was something odd about the door of the house on the corner.

This door was now painted red, and upon it a paper notice fluttered. I climbed their stair to read it, but once there, the door was open, and I stepped into the dim hallway. A dark stair led to the floor above, and to the left an open door revealed a lighted room, with rows of folding chairs, like a classroom.

I took a seat, and perhaps others were there. A monk in a brown robe entered, and at the blackboard he drew a large circle, with a hub and spokes, using many-colored chalk.

As I watched, this diagram began to spin, growing larger in my vision until it became a vast wheel, spinning in space, blurring at incredible speed, and yet ponderous, revolving as slowly as the aeons.

In this vision, I thought, “The Wheel of Dharma.”

At the time, I didn’t know what Dharma was. I still don’t know what Dharma is. But what happened the next week was real enough.

This corner house in my vision was a real house. It was just across the street. From my windows, it looked like any San Francisco flat, meaning no yard around, of two stories and touching the neighbor house to either side. Except, this was a corner house, and the long side faced my windows. Painted white like others on the street. Nothing notable.

That is, until the moving van began unloading the strange crates.

Some of these were huge, and all were labelled with symbols in a foreign alphabet. Please note, I’m speaking not of any vision, but of what occurred outside my second-floor apartment the following week. Huge wooden crates with strange symbols in some foreign language.

Somehow I was not surprised when, the next day, thin monks in brown robes began to come and go around that house, and a few days later, towards the evening, when lights went on inside, I discovered that my window looked down and directly into a long room in that house.

There, at the end of the room, a huge statue of the seated Buddha, pale white, in the bliss of contemplation.

Carrie Street Station

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St. Louis, Winter 1967: I was saving up my money, so I got two jobs.

Days: Yard clerk at the Rock Island Railroad.

Nights: Night Manager at the Hilton Inn.

With different days off, only three days had me working both jobs. At night from eleven, until seven in the morning, I ran the front desk at the Airport Hilton Inn. (Usually pretty quiet, except that time the Stones arrived). In the wee hours, I balanced the NCR 1600 bookeeping machine, and in the morning …

I walked through the halls and past the aviary — a large cage with the tiniest, quickest tropical birds, bright as a paint kit, and full of song so early, with cheery quick eyes askance — onward, to the Olde Weste Coffee Shoppe for my free breakfast. Oh, that was grand!

Then, piloting the volkswagen home to my unheated trailor, just off the end of the jet runway at St. Louis International Airport. Though the planes were very loud, I slept soundly.

A quick sleep it was, as needs be I’m up and dressed in Sears insulated underwear, thick roustabout clothes, and big brogan-style boots. Off to the Rock Island Railroad, Carrie Street station.

Not a passenger stop, no. A rough-looking switchyard in a rough part of town. Here’s how it works:

There is a local railroad called the Terminal Railroad. Their only job is to go around St. Louis, to the real railroads: Southern Pacific, Santa Fe, Rock Island. Railroads hand off cars to other railroads, and Carrie Street was the Rock Island switching station.

When the Terminal Railroad showed up, I stood beside the track. They have 54 cars for the Rock, that’s us. Our switch foreman, Danny, would tell them to put the cars into our switching tracks 7, 8, and 9. As they backed the cars into these tracks, I stood alongside and wrote down the cars and their numbers, as fast as I could. (If I could write them as the cars passed me, then I didn’t have to walk up and down the tracks writing them down.)

The conductor on the Terminal Railroad would give a thick wad of the “Bills of Lading” to the Bill Clerk. These are forms that show where the cars are going, and what’s been laeded into them, laddie.

The Rock Island Line

Me and the bill clerk sorted them, to discover we had sixteen cars for Kansas City, fourteen for Oakland, and so on. The switch foreman Danny figured how to move these long strings of cars around so as to get all the Kansas City ones together. It took most of the day.

Then, our train took off to Kansas City and points west. I think that, on the other shift, some of those cars went back east, but I never saw them, and for all I know there are thousands stranded somewhere out west.

Danny, the switch foreman, was a young fellow, and acted very sour. I think it helped him control his tough-guy crew. So I would often annoy him by striding through the bitter cold, along the track outside the switch shanty (while they huddled around the coal stove). I’d swing my arms wide, taking big strides.

In a loud voice, I sang, “Oh, the Rock Island line is a mighty fine line! Oh, the Rock Island line is the road to ride! Oh, the Rock Island line is a mighty fine line! If you want to ride, you gotta ride it like you find it, get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island line!”

Sometimes my voice cracked, but it was never less than completely chipper and enthusiastic. And loud.

This goober act never failed to amaze Danny and the switch crew, and they pretended disgust with such cheerfulness, while I in turn pretended not to notice nor comprehend in any way.

Just before eleven each night, in the office bathroom, I’d change into my suit and black shoes. Then off to the Hilton Inn, to balance those books.

In the St. Louis winter, daylight comes late and night falls early. Some cold and snowy days there were when the sun hardly showed. During one stretch it had been over a week since I saw the sun, and snow fell heavy that day.

That evening, trudging across the yard toward the office, underneath the yard’s lamps high on their poles, I noticed that all the falling snow ahead of me, and the snow upon the ground ahead, glittered in sharp bright points, so beautiful they were, glittering.

Glittering before me like gold.

The Thumbtack Bugle

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San Francisco, 1976: You have dialed (415) 751-4022. A click, and one of those new answering machines begins speaking. It says …

“Hello! You have reached the lejurious office of the Thumbtack Bugle, high atop Third Avenue. Right now, we’re out on motorcycles, putting up posters all over town, but this machine would be as happy as a machine ever gets to take any short message you might care to leave. I’m now going to make a beeping sound by magic. Behold!”

And then a beeping sound. Another thrilling chapter of …

The Thumbtack Bugle — We distribute your posters to bulletin boards all over town!

When I was very young, perhaps 9, I was visiting at my grandparents farm, 8 miles north of Henrietta, Texas. Two-storied, white with a red roof, it stood atop a hill with a wreath of tall trees around it.

“Unless you toot your own horn, same horn shall not be tooteth!”

With my grandmother in her cool, shady kitchen, I chattered. The conversation must have related to taking credit for one’s accomplishments, because she said, “Unless you toot your own horn, same horn shall not be tooteth!”

Honest, those were the exact words she used. She didn’t talk like that all the time. She was making a joke. And, at the time, I thought it hilariously funny. I laughed and laughed. It was so funny that, here 50 years later, I can quote her words exactly.

So perhaps it was fated …

In the days when I’d started my first business, Simple Simon Bookkeeping, my first client was Phil Groves who had just set up his ice-cream shop, Raskin-Flakkers, in the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco.

About a year later, I had several bookkeeping clients, and my daily hours (1-4pm Monday-Friday) had begun to seem busy! On many days, I actually got several calls!

This particular day, it was Phil Groves calling, and he’d got a motorcycle. He had therefore decided to start an advertising leaflet, a single printed page called the “Thumbtack Bugle”, containing short classified ads, and he would tack this leaflet on all the bulletin boards all around San Francisco.

Since I had regular telephone hours, he wanted to know if I could handle the telephone communications? We made some arrangement, and I was the marketing front-end for the Bugle.

He sold darn few classified ads. It took an eternity to put up all the flyers. Even carrying other folks posters along for ten dollars didn’t make it worth-while. Therefore he attempted to hire two half-wits to do the job. They lasted about two weeks, and the Bugle went into mothballs.

A year later, and one night I had a dream. In the dream, I’d been to Marin County, to look at an apartment, and was driving back across the Golden Gate bridge in an open, red convertible. The sun was glorious, the air clean, and in this dream I thought to myself, “Now that Paul (my younger brother back in Texas) has gone off to college, he’s not using his dirt-bike motorcycle any more. If I had him ship it, I could start up the Bugle again!”

I woke up, and began making my plans. I called Phil Groves and made a deal, then figured out how to change the rates, the route, and to focus on carrying posters for other folks.

I made a logo. It was a bugle on a cord, held up by a big thumbtack. From the bell of the bugle came the large word: “Toot!”

With this logo at the top, I designed a new poster, a big one, that said “We distribute your posters to bulletin boards all across town.” While I was laying it out, a phone call interrupted.

It was a religious group, calling long-distance from Nevada City, California. They had a poster to go up. Was this the Thumbtack Bugle? Were we still in business?

“We are,” I said.

 
 

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