The Adventures of Bloggard

Law 23 regarding Being, Doing, and Having

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

Doingness Goals can produce more Happiness than Beingness or Havingness Goals.

That’s it. In the physical universe, one must Be something, in order to Do something, with the result that one will Have something.

For example:

One chooses to be a surgeon, so one can do surgery, and then one will have the respect, money, and lifestyle of a surgeon.

One chooses to be a ditch-digger, so one can do the labor of digging ditches, and then one will have the muscles, money, and workday of a ditch-digger.

One chooses to be a car salesman, so one can do the selling of cars, and then one will have the wardrobe, commissions, and lifestyle of a car salesman.

Can you imagine somebody being a ditch-digger, so that he can do the selling of cars, so that he will then have the respect, money, and lifestyle of a surgeon?

Nope. Because it just doesn’t work that way.

And this knowledge leads us to something very, very useful …

In these examples, it’s clear that one could set a goal of any one of these things. For example, one could choose the goal of being a ditch-digger, or one could choose the goal of doing the digging of ditches. They’re not the same goal. In the first one you’re choosing who you are; in the second, you’re choosing something to do.

If you had a house and you wanted to dig some ditches around it, you could set the digging of some ditches as a doingness goal without your having to permanently become a ditch-digger. Or … you could choose the beingness goal of being a ditch-digger, and go through your whole life that way. It might be a little limiting, unless you really, really love the life of being a ditch-digger.

Similarly, you might choose the havingness goal of having a doctor’s office. Now you might be the surgeon, or you might be the landlord. Either way you could have a doctor’s office.

So you as a human get to choose your goals in life. And the goals you choose may be Beingness goals, or Doingness goals, or Havingness goals. But these three types of goals are not equal when it comes to providing you with a happy life.

When I went off to college, I first decided that I wanted to be an engineer. However, I’d not thought much ahead to what an engineer would do. And when I found myself studying engineering, I discovered at that moment that I didn’t enjoy doing what an engineer would do. The prospect of a lifetime doing those things was pretty boring to the wild guy I wanted to be at that time.

So the first thing we can do is to look past the Beingness goal to what we will be Doing, because that’s what’s going to fill up your life. Therefore, choosing Doingness goals may be generally wiser and more productive than choosing Beingness goals. Although Beingness is senior and probably more important than Doingness, the Doingness part determines whether you perform surgery or dig ditches or sell cars.

Now, if you listen to the television or if you read the advertisements online, you’ll notice that our world has the intent to ensnare you with Havingness goals. If you are to believe them, they claim you will be happy if you have this car to drive at illegal speeds down deserted roads, or you will be happy if you have that razor to make you handsome like the guy on television, or you will be happy if you have this bank to guard your financial affairs and make you wealthy when you are old and fat with white hair.

And you know that most of that is all baloney. This is our first clue about Havingness goals.

For you notice that they’re all Havingness goals. Are there any advertisements urging you to adopt a Doingness goal such as to save up $10,000, or to repair the storm drains of your house, or to practice dancing the tango? Not really. The closest they will come is to urge you to have a savings account at the bank, to have a power tool for the storm drain work, or to have lessons at Durango’s Dance Studio.

Always Havingness goals.

And let us ask the question: Do Havingness goals make you happy?

The answer is: Yes, they do, for about three minutes.

You may enjoy your new toaster for months, or even for years if you engage in the wise practice of gratitude. However, the flush of pleasure that comes when you first open the box and plug the toaster into the wall, and the flush of pleasure that comes with your first slice of toast will diminish rapidly. After a while, it’s just another slice of toast. A big ‘So What?’

But compare that to a Doingness goal.

Suppose that you really, really love dancing the tango, and you really, really enjoy teaching the tango to other people. You love the Doingness of dancing and teaching the Tango more than anything else in the world.

Now suppose you adopt the doingness goal of dancing and teaching the tango. And you start doing that.

How long will the pleasure last?

For the rest of your life.

You see, what happens in our world is that spirit or life (beingness) appears in the physical universe and does this and does that (doingness), thus bringing about the natural consequences or the inevitable effects (havingness) of such action.

Spirit –> Action –> Effect
Be –> Do –> Have

Life doesn’t really have to ponder much what it is being, just as you don’t have to ponder much what you are being when you focus on how you just love to dance and teach the tango. And you will have the natural consequences of the actions of a person dancing and teaching the tango.

The before and the after parts (being and having) are the premise and the natural consequence of the part in the middle (doing). The part in the middle is the part you most get to choose, and if you choose doing something that makes you happy, you can be happy your whole life long.

Now, within that, you can also make choices of whether you just get by, or whether you have riches untold while doing the thing you love. For example, you could squander your tango salary on red wine and drift from tango job to tango job, or you could own a national chain of Tango Studios and bring the joys of tango to the masses, or you could write startling and popular books on Tangercise and sell millions on television. So the havingness could vary tremendously. But in any of these cases, whether its the giddiness of red wine or the fame of Tangercise, you’d spend your life dancing and teaching the tango, and your entire life can be happy.

And the reason you can be happy for your entire life is that, when you choose Doingness goals, you are expressing what a spirit is designed to do in this physical universe.

You are fulfilling your destiny.

On This Day: Joe Bob Briggs Explains ‘Yee-HAW!’

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Mount Shasta, CA, December 31, 2006: Recently, when Adrienne was writing our Christmas cards, she asked me how to spell ‘Yee-HAW’. If you live in a foreign country and do not know, this is something that Texas people like to yell out; it connotes extreme enthusiasm. For example, in the movie Dr. Strangelove, when Slim Pickens rides the H-Bomb, he yells, “Yee-HAW! Yee-HAW! Yee-HAW!” This signifies his happiness in the moment.

Since Adrienne is from the East Coast, she didn’t know how to spell it, and so I told her. But that got me to thinking …

Where did Yee-HAW come from?

Where did ‘Yee-HAW’ come from? What is its origin? Did it come down to us through the ages, or was it just something that some cowboy yelled out one day while riding a wild horse, and somehow it caught on?

Naturally, these questions made me think of Joe Bob Briggs — the best drive-in movie reviewer in the greater Grapevine, Texas area — who is a veritable font of crucial information that we sorely need in these troubled times. If anybody would know, I reasoned, it would be Joe Bob Briggs, who is a close personal friend of mine. So I asked him.

Here is his answer …

“Yee-Haw derives from the Middle English “yee,” which became “ye” by the time of the King James Bible, a formal second-person pronoun normally used only in the singular but occasionally, when conjoined with qualifiers (“ye ungodly swine”), acceptable as an adjectival plural as part of an interjection.

“The word “Haw” was a borrowing from late 10th century Hungarian, a crude epithet used by soldiers to describe a rural imbecile (possibly a distant cousin of “harrow” or “harrower,” applied to those who till the soil, who were overwhelmingly illiterate in the Middle Ages).

“The words “yee” and “haw” were never used together until 1478, when a farrier in Long Sutton, among the eastern fens of Lincolnshire, was accosted by angry sugarbeet farmers whose draft animals had been quarantined by the Duke of Rutland upon pain of taxation necessary for the upkeep of Belvoir Castle. To defend himself from the angry mob, he quickly extracted iron bits from his furnace with a blacksmithing tong and hurled the fiery missiles at the luckless yeomen.

“When they began to scatter, the farrier execrated them with curses, including, at the point of his maximum excitement, “Yeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaawwww!” — the strict meaning of which would be something on the order of “you worthless lice-infested buffoons,” but of course given a sanguine connotation by the fact that the farrier was exultant and triumphant.”

“I thought everyone knew that.” — Joe Bob Briggs, www.joebobbriggs.com

Thank you, Joe Bob. As this year winds down, as a prediction for the new year coming in, I would add only this —

Yee-HAW!

So Long — How James Brown Wrote Those Songs

03.13.2011 by bloggard // 1 Comment

Cabana Hotel, Dallas, 1966: Sometimes I was a desk clerk, and twice a week I filled in for the night auditor. This is the cashier who works the midnight shift and balances the day’s charges for the rooms and restaurants and the bars in the hotel.

The Godfather of Soul It was a fancy hotel. Sometimes famous people stayed there. This particular night it was James Brown and his entire band, the Famous Flames. He came strutting through the lobby, looking just like he was ‘spozed to. No cape tonight. Disappeared into the elevators.

Later, lounging on the huge round sofa in the lobby, I had the opportunity to talk with a couple of the band members, who were relaxing after the gig.

“How does he write those songs?” I asked.

They told me.

James Brown had a system. It went like this —

First they’d rent a recording studio. Mr. Brown would have just the drummer and the bass player mess around until he heard a groove he liked. Then he’d ask them to lock in that groove.

Then they’d build up from the bass groove, just going up the frequency range. They’d add rhythm guitar atop the groove, and then Brown’s voice atop the rhythm guitar. And last they’d lay the high-pitched horns onto the very top. Listen to one of the songs; you’ll hear it.

He would mess with the rhythms and the harmonies, until he thought maybe they’d got it right.

But then, the test. It worked like this. They’d open the back door of the studio, and recruit a half-dozen kids age five to eleven, and they’d bring these kids into the studio. They gave the kids a dollar to “stand right there.” Then James Brown and the Famous Flames played the song.

If the kids, all on their own, started dancing, the song had made it. It would be recorded.

Apparently, every James Brown song you ever heard … made the kids dance.

What wonder then that it made us all want to dance? Because we are all kids.

Dying this week from pneumonia and congestive heart failure, in Augusta, Georgia at age 73, the Godfather of Soul is gone. Our world remains the richer for his time here. Whose life doesn’t have the flavor and the rhythm this man brought into our world?

Makes ya want to … break out … in a … cold sweat!

Hunh!

The Bloggardian Credits

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

“A Tiny History of Hurnville” — most of this information comes from a written manuscript left in family papers, dated 1959, and written by my grandfather, Frank Hurn.

“A Tiny History of Henrietta, Texas” — Aside from personal memories, the bulk of historical fact was, in proper scholarly fashion, stolen from the Handbook of Texas Online website. The historical summary there was written by Lisa C. Maxwell, who cites the Katherine Douthitt book “Romance and Dim Trails,” (1938), the St. Clair book “Little Towns of Texas,” (1982), and the William Taylor book “A History of Clay County,” (1972). Much additional information can be found in my Uncle Eugene Hurn’s book “A Pictoral History of Clay County,” which can be found in the Henrietta library, or through the Henrietta/Clay County Historical Society.

Law 23 regarding Being, Doing, and Having. I first encountered the interesting concepts of Be – Do – Have in the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, of Scientology fame, although I have since found them and their analogues in several other places. In Hubbard’s writings I also found the developed concept of ‘Havingness’ described in How to Pick Up Girls (Part 1).

A Tiny History of Henrietta, Texas

03.13.2011 by bloggard // 12 Comments

Henrietta, Texas: The Texas Department of Transportation took this photograph in 1939, but the Clay County courthouse was built in 1884, of red brick and sandstone.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the year being 1857, Clay County was separated out from Cooke County, and the new county seat was decreed to be renamed Henrietta. I don’t know what it was named before that. I wasn’t there, nor anyone else that I know. The accepted story when I was growing up was that the county seat was actually somewhere else, and cowboys roped the small, original courthouse building and dragged it to Henrietta.

The original courthouse had later become the original jail, and then it became the original library, and then it became … empty. When I was a child, one could see the tiny, one-room building where it sat, boards over the windows, beside the large and dank stone jailhouse. So this story must have been true, because you could see the building.

Henrietta sits along what is now U.S. Highway 287, twenty miles south of Wichita Falls. The name “Henrietta” is sometimes attributed to Henry Clay, after whom Clay County is named, but other folks claim that it was named for his wife, whose name was Lucretia. Makes no sense either way.

But way back then, by 1860, Henrietta had grown hugely, to ten houses and a general store, and there were 107 real people and two slaves. A Post Office opened in 1862, so that these folks living on the then far western edge of civilization could send and receive letters.

The pesky Civil War broke out.
Unfortunately, the pesky Civil War broke out, the soldiers withdrew, the letters stopped, and the pesky Indians found it much easier to kill the pesky white settlers. Soon the town was abandoned, with strange Indian signs scrawled upon the walls — an early form of grafitti — though soon after, the walls were burned to the ground.

After the Civil war, a Doctor Elderidge brought a small group of settlers to attempt to rebuild the ruins, but after several folks were killed, the rest gave it up. Then a Quaker named Goodleck Koozer — no, really. Goodleck Koozer — brought his family to Henrietta ruins in 1870. He didn’t carry weapons, and believed that the Indians would be kind to him if he treated them fairly.

Alas, he was sadly mistaken.

Whitehorse cared not a whit.
Later, when Clay County got organized, a grand jury was organized and indicted Whitehorse, who had killed Koozer, kidnapped his wife and daughter, and chased his son out of the county. But Whitehorse cared not a whit for the indictment, and faded into the wilderness, never to be seen again by them as lived in Henrietta.

In 1870, fifty soldiers and — the soldiers claimed — three hundred Kiowa Indians fought a battle in the ruins of Henrietta. As a child growing up there later, I never actually saw any sign of all this, but that’s what they said.

Afterward, settlers began to return to Henrietta, and in 1873 the forty voters held an election in a tent, and county officials were elected. There was only one candidate for each position, so the voting was orderly, and the results uncontested.

The next year saw the re-opening of the Post Office, and I would have thought they’d be pretty busy delivering all the letters that had stacked up. Plus, by then Sears and Roebuck had been invented, so maybe there were some packages.

The railroad comes to town.
In 1882 the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway reached Henrietta, and in 1887 the Gainesville, Henrietta and Western Railway was built through the town. This line later that same year became part of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas line, and was afterward called the MKT, or “Katy” line. The Katy railroad was still running when I was a child, though by high-school years, the train had vanished, and even the tracks and ties had somehow evaporated, leaving the long right-of-way running beside the fields, empty and strange.

In the 1880’s, several stagecoach lines had begun running westward from Henrietta. Travelers would take the train to Henrietta and then ride a stage to their destination. In that time the community had become a buffalo-hunting center. After purchasing supplies in Henrietta, the hunters would head out, to return with wagonloads of bones and hides, for shipping out on the train, the hides to make robes and rugs, and the bones to be ground into a type of fertilizer.

The watermelon capital of the world.
When mines developed in nearby Foard County, Henrietta became the shipping point for heavy equipment. At another time, Henrietta became the watermelon capital of the world, shipping watermelons out in boxcar after boxcar. Later I saw those watermelons growing on my grandparents’ farm, but somehow they’d stopped shipping them out. I don’t know why. They were perfectly good watermelons.

Henrietta was incorporated in 1881. I suppose this means that, as of that date, nobody is responsible for anything. And then the courthouse was built in 1884, and in the 1890’s the town had grown to 2100 real people, and no slaves, though the courthouse still had a separate bathroom marked “colored” for the persons who were not slaves but free and equal members of society at that time.

A 400-seat opera house.
In the 1890’s the town had several saloons and hotels, restaurants, and a 400-seat opera house — I cannot possibly imagine the people I knew there watching an opera; I found opera generally incomprehensible in San Francisco. Plus, opera is in Italian. Nobody in Henrietta speaks Italian; they cannot even correctly pronounce the word “Italian,” even today. Something’s fishy.

Henrietta had two banks, a photographer, a cigar-manufacturer, a school, a jail, plus two newspapers, five churches, a drugstore with soda fountain, and for two years, a college. I suppose everyone in town who could go to a college probably graduated, and that was that.

By the late 1930’s it had grown to slightly fewer folks, but ninety businesses were running strong, including two cotton gins which shipped out 13,000 bales of cotton in 1937, plus a cottonseed oil plant, an ice plant, a hotel, four rooming houses, and two boot and leather companies. Churches had increased to seven, and there were three schools: primary school, high school, and black school.

My mother and I moved to Henrietta.
In 1944 I was born in distant California, and when my mother’s marriage soon ended we moved to Henrietta, which had two movie theatres — the Dorothy and the Royal — along with two drugstores and two drygoods stores, and five grocery stores and a blacksmith, and the same courthouse, and two doctors — Dr. Greer, and my mother’s brother, Dr. Hurn, behind whose office my mother and I lived in a tiny apartment.

There and on my grandparents’ farm north of town we lived, and I grew and learned to run through the woods and to walk to school, and to read and write. And we moved once, and again into a little house of our own. And there were scandals and vandals, and hikes and bikes, and romance and fights, and rodeos and movie-shows and cars and a drive-in called the Lo’ Boy, and high school and away to colleges, and the world grew wide.

The new highway …
In the 1970’s, after I’d left, the population reached its high-water mark at 3,600, but then the new highway was run around the town instead of through it, and things dwindled. The businesses that remained manufactured travel trailers, windows, livestock feed, branding irons, and cowboy boots.

Every September the Clay County Pioneer Reunion and Rodeo is still held at Tex Rickard Stadium, named for boxing promoter George Lewis (Tex) Rickard, who was city marshal in Henrietta for many years.

Mitchell’s Truck Stop moved from the old location out onto the new highway.

I moved far away.

Things change.

On This Day: Fahrenheit Strikes while Iron is Hot

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Germany, December 22, 1714: The mercury thermometer was invented by Daniel Fahrenheit, a maker of scientific instruments. So as to be able to operate his new invention, he later worked out the Fahrenheit temperature scale in 1724. So during the ten years in between, people could see that it was hotter or colder, but they couldn’t really say how much. Join us now for a scene observed one summer afternoon in 1720 at Hans Heinrich’s Biergarten just outside the village of Hamberg, out on das patio:

First guy: “Say, mein pal, how hot is it?”

Other guy: “It is, vell, kind of hot, but maybe not so hot as was yesterday.”

First guy: “Oh? How hot it was yesterday?”

Other guy: “I dunno. Pretty hot.”

First guy: “Well, look at thermo-meter! It’s right there on das wall!”

Other guy: “I am looking! I am looking!”

First guy: “Say! You are trying to get smart mit me?”

Other guy: “Who vants to know, mister weiss guy?”

First guy: “Dot does it!”

[Fight breaks out. Finally, Mr. Fahrenheit works out some numbers for the thermo-meter, and peace returns to Hans Heinrich’s Biergarten.]

How to Break a Glass

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Some years ago, you probably saw that television advertisement for ‘Memorex’ brand recording tape, where the lady opera singer breaks a glass by singing a certain note. When you saw her doing that, you probably wanted to break a glass that way, too. I know I did.

Here’s how to do it …

First you get a glass. A fancy wine glass might be better than a jelly jar, but I’m not sure.

Next, you determine the ‘natural frequency of vibration’ of the glass. You do this by tapping on the glass with a little teensy thing, hard enough to make it sound a note, but not hard enough to break it. There is ‘spozed to be some special tool used for tapping bottles, but I’ve never seen such a tool.

Next, you must sing the exact same note that the glass made, and increase your volume to 130 decibels, and hold that note at that volume for a time. When you get this sound just right, the glass will begin to vibrate and then it will shatter, throwing glass all over the floor. This should be very satisfying.

If that doesn’t work, then just pick it up and throw it on the floor.

Bloggito, Ergo Sum

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

The Movie Finger, Having Writ, Movies On.

Bloggistry, noun, the artistry of blogging. From O.E. Blaugt, to fall into a well, yelling loudly, from Arch. Lat. Bloggum, to chew with one’s mouth open, in a loud and disgusting manner, showing one’s table-mates more than they wanted to see of the mastication process.

Earliest known quotation: “To bleaugh, to plough whyle burping, ’tis blaggy, blaggy dew. Bloggum, bloggum, all thee day long, ’tis not so naice of yew.” — from the Three Canticles of Clackmeyer mss., circa 1502.

reviews