Forgive myself for all of my mistakes

[I originally wrote this June 9, 2006, not quite six years after my mother died suddenly, and not quite a year after my father died of cancer.  I'm offering this today very slightly edited.] 

Every Halloween we are treated to images of ghosts with rattling
chains.  In Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Mr. Scrooge is
confronted by the shade of his old business partner.  Marley's Ghost
is chained and burdened by cashboxes, coin purses, locks.  The things
that occupied Marley's thoughts are supposed to bind him to earth
after death.   

Bah, humbug!  The image may function for the plot of Dickens' ghost
story, but it hardly jives with my world-view, let alone my
"other-world"-view!   

In my dreams my mother walks without a limp.  In my dreams my father
is healthy, unworried, well-rested. 

No, I don't think it's the shades of those whom we have lost who bear
the chains.   

The chains are the ones I carry.  The chains are the burdens of
accumulated grieving, loss after loss.  The chains are the regrets and
second thoughts and wish-I-hads.  The chains are the freedom I dare
not grant myself -- perhaps the freedom to be angry at Dad.  Or
perhaps the freedom to create my own standard for being ME, a
standard that would not be always a comparison, a relative judgment
about me *as* son, or me *as* friend (or me *as* blogger).   

Are my chains, my burdens, ones I *choose* to carry?  Why should there
be something inescapable, something inevitable, about the burdens
*others* put upon us?  Oh, how I wish I knew the ins and outs of the
countless little habits I have developed over the years, habits for
making my chains seem normal, necessary, even *deserved*.
Many of the links in my chains are negative memories.  Some of the
locks are believing that I failed to meet expectations.  Here is a
coffer full of guilt.  Here is a cashbox filled with the coin of
resentments. 

Every relationship -- even the very best --  has challenges and
difficulties.  I keep saying that one of the principal tasks of grief
is to find a way to keep our love alive in spite of the fact that the
one we love is gone.  I am barely beginning to learn how to deal with
the fact  that the challenges and difficulties, the bumps and
barriers, have not gone away.   

But now the relationship is a bit single-sided, no?  If the bumps are
going to be smoothed, it is I who will have to do the smoothing.  

I know:  how 'bout if I work on forgiving ME for the failures and the messes?   

Mom would if Mom were here.  Dad would if Dad were here.   

There is a song by Aeone that says in part:

From a point of faith within my head 

I believe in all the choices I have made;

From a point of love within my heart

I forgive myself for all of my mistakes.

That would be nice, wouldn't it...  

Peace and happy dreams, 

--
Crowndot

Point of Faith - Aeone

Maximum Randomness Meets Its Match

Years ago when Ernő Rubik's Cube was a hot gift idea, the brother-in-law introduced me to the mathematical concept of maximum randomness.  Apparently there is a position of the colored pieces of Rubik's Cube from which ANY move takes you closer, not farther away from, the solution: the maximum order of a single color on each face of the cube.

Maximum chaos, or maximum randomness.

Like the sign in the hands of the panhandler says: "Anything would help."

An interesting math concept.  When brother-in-law handed me his mixed-up Rubik's Cube and announced that, for once, anything I did would help, I of course had to take it on faith.  He's a bright guy and takes his mathematics quite seriously, after all.

"Maximum chaos" has bounced around in my mind [I know: "Is he talking about the concept or the usual background noise in his brain now?" And how could I tell?] since the early 1980s.  But I'm not sure I ever really believed in the idea until last week.

I have met maximum randomness in the real world!  It's not pretty.

Opening a new box of blue nitrile gloves from my usual supplier, I beheld not 100 blue nitrile powdered gloves, size medium, lying flat and docile in a stack like Kleenex; I beheld a box packed with the shriveled carcasses of withered blue cocoons, a mass grave of blue nitrile prunes preserved clutching each other in their final agony, an expended and dessicated worm-orgy of rubber gloves packed, pressed, sealed at the factory in Thailand so I could save my delicate digits from the ravages of the industrial workplace.

The picture is a handful of gloves.  Six? Eight? Hard to tell.

How do you even put these on your hand?  There's no opening.

Somebody once said, "You must find the way."  Maybe it was Lao Tzu.  Maybe it was somebody who merely looked like Lao Tzu (which come to think of it is probably most of everybody, ever, on on the planet).

At this point maximum randomness is your friend.  Reach out and pinch a little piece of blue glove anywhere.  It doesn't matter where.  with your other hand pull the wad of wrinkly glove away from the pinch.  There.  You have introduced ORDER to the system.  You will now be able to see the glove shape, to find the opening, and to introduce your hand to the inner sanctum of industrial safety.

Why did I write this?  I figured, "Anything would help!"

Bücherverbrennung 10 May 1933

It might start with burning books, but it ends with piles of corpses.  It starts with "purification" of thought and speech, and ends up with secret police enforcing the will of the State.  It starts with the self-appointed cultural elite having the "correct" ideas, and becomes a death cult. 

On this day 85 years ago, 10 May 1933, the Deutsche Studentenschaft student group staged a massive book burning at the Opera Plaza in Berlin. 

[photo credit Liz Sheld's PJ Media Morning Briefing]

German Wikipedia pompously explains:

"On May 10, 1933, in National Socialist Germany, book burnings took place as part of an action against the non-German spirit of the German student body. Tens of thousands of books by Jewish, Marxist and pacifist writers were publicly confiscated and burned in 22 university towns, beginning with the Berlin Opera Square. In June 1933, and in the months thereafter, numerous other actions followed. The staging and the cult ritual, the systematics of performance have given this auto-da-fé the rank of uniqueness in the continuity of the historical series from antiquity to the most recent present." [thanks, google translate!]

Side note. The German wiki authors seem to be hedging their bets, striving to place the late National Socialist unpleasantness in a wider historical context. "Continuity of the historical series." See! Even St. Paul condoned burning the books of the pagan sorcerers! Yeah, Acts 19. Hmpf. The big difference, though? The Mages of Ephesus voluntarily converted and brought their own books for destruction.

One thing burning is good for: totalitarians. Kill the beast, cut off its head, burn it, grind the ash and flush it down the sewers.

As Gerard says,

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by bell, book, and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

Limericking

There is a reference in Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night to the man from Thermopylae who never did anything properly.  [Please remember this is Oxford, in order to be able to pronounce it proppalee!]

The original is attributed to Edward Lear; it was documented by one of his cartoons in 1872:

"There was an old man of Thermopylae,
Who never did anything properly;
But they said, "If you choose to boil eggs in your shoes,
You shall never remain in Thermopylae."

But I object to the repetition of Thermopylae.  Not a kosher Limerick.  Needs to be corrected:

There was an old man of Thermopylae,
Who never did anything properly;
But he said, "If I choose to boil eggs in my shoes,
For the method I'll have a monopoly.

There.  Much better.

When I was born... and so on

For perspective:

When I was born the President of the United States was Dwight David Eisenhower; the Vice President was Richard M. Nixon. 

When I was born the United States flag had 48 stars.

When I was born Fulgencio Batista was president of Cuba.

I watched the Moon Landing LIVE on TV. 

My first “word processor” was a manual Smith Corona typewriter. 

My first computer was an Osborne.

My first “real” job included producing custom reports by hacking COBOL code. On a Burroughs B20 and a keyboard that had the function buttons on the left.

I have made archival copies of computer files on 5-1/4″ floppies, 3-1/2″ floppies, 1/4″ tape drives, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives from 256Kb on up, SSDs, and “cloud.”

The “don’t be evil” might have ended when Google bought  Deja News.

Wet chemical photo processing -- remember?

Digital pictures put an end to the ubiquitous film processing kiosks and strip mall stores.  Now smartphones are doing away with digital cameras ("experts say"). While contemplating the vagaries of why I never have my camera when my 5 megapixel phone camera won't do, I remembered the heyday of Fotomat.

They weren't all bulldozed.  And the Libyans didn't plow into all of them, either.  Some have new life as caffeine filling stations. 

That means these sites are still doing a form of wet process chemical alchemy, after all.