Rosenbush Cafe

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT contains surreal adult themes, a wee bit of profane language and drug references under the guise of leafy green spinach, ultimately.

ATT restored the ether connection earlier today, thanks to one caring and well-paid technician, after being deactivated early Saturday morning.

The Café will not join the u-verse; the Universe is still a much better deal.

Suffice, later this week, the ExNil post referred yesterday, will be an epic story of how telecommunication cannot communicate with itself. The center piece of a two-part essay exposing the rapid extinction of reasoning and how massive and treacherous corporations are leading many sentient beings towards a disturbing complacency; satiating their blind ignorance with whirring melodies and toys to keep the hands busy and the head oblivious. My shared conduit into serious, lively and profound mind filler.

Coming sometime in the future from beyond moments ago.

This weekend, in lieu of an Alabama-Penn State match-up, begins my October series of translucent nightmare imagery made flesh. My teaser is designed to feed hunger for dark humor and off-the-planet irrationality made sensible. Hmmm, like our fine three-foot breadsticks and home-churned butter.

While 100,000 people will be sardine-packaged into Bryant-Denny Stadium, standing in line for over-priced food and beverages, standing, knees together, in nice restroom lines, and having to hide alcoholic juices to mix drinks in the stands, I will sitting shoeless, in my office, working on far more pleasurable scripted-sensibilities that don’t require equipment, uniforms or concussions.

I actually once liked sardines.

My metaphor reminds me how innocence ends abruptly for some and lasts too long for others. We accept too much without advanced thinking. I am not phobic about being around crowds; however, in 1994, I watched Pink Floyd in Legion Field, in the Magic City, far-upper deck and was surrounded by illiterate jawing redneck pot-smoking torn-blue jean-wearing cretins that wouldn’t know “The Dark Side of the Moon” if they were posited into one, was not entertaining. I paid to see David Gilmour and company make me “Comfortably Numb” while not having to be careful …with that axe, Eugene, and enjoy myself. Although the experience did not prevent me from concert crowds it did make me more selective and aside from Leonard Cohen, in a comfortably reversal of 2,500 dignified fans, I shy from canned and mono-reprocessed for stereo via the digitally-enhanced hustle.

Ha, ha. All are in a hurry to drive, in reverse, towards a dead-end street…and willingly. Everyone is angry and worried about their milieu while rushing blamelessly into tunnel vision and never understanding why they are destined to crash.

Here is a taste:

What must have been an crucial error in cautionary cartoon lunacy occurred when Popeye, the Sailor erroneously accepted a can of Ultimate Spinach and now his head is reeling as he trips his ass off into the high seas. Dissolved mine fields of thoughts hybridized with wise and unconsidered ponderings of lost youth and found consciousness. It only took two lines of cocaine, off Olive Oil’s stringy left leg, to re-open Popeye’s closed peeper. Bluto was outside the bedroom window doing unspeakable acts, while crying and self flagellating himself with his Navy belt, and Wimpy stood nearby, eating a hamburger, for once with mushrooms, and channeling Sigmund Freud. Papa Popeye was trying to get a date with Betty Boop, who was involved in an affair with Anaïs Nin, and was making Stag Films for Walt Disney’s private movie viewing pleasure, with co-stars Mickey, Minnie the Moocher Mouse and Pluto.

Popeye’s pipe spun three sixties in his mouth and suddenly whisked upwards to become impaled into the ceiling light fixture, shattering the bulb followed by arcing electrical eccentricities, and ending with his utterance of signature exaltation that finally became appropriate:

“Well, blow me down.”

The decision to no longer cover Alabama Crimson Tide Football in 2010 was easy, thanks generously to ATT’s FUBAR business Saturday. I blogged about all games from 2007-2009; I begin removing them this week and they will be archived for personal files but no longer available. Old news and it’s the past…I am interested in the future.

With a flooding issue facing me and no assistance - sigh, again - from the city or uni the days of my businessman-cum-humble-nice fellow have ended.

The computer goes into the shop for extensive repairs and a borrowed laptop, with Mozilla-Firefox and other unfamiliar programs, has become more time-consuming but not insurmountable.

The ether connection getting deactivated prevented blogging activity from the RC kitchen and properly re-inverted my perspective about defeating any addiction to this technology. Hours have become reclaimed days and nights without the need to teleport into the ether. I am less enslaved to this infernal machine each day and it is not a frightening or lonely sensation; more like the uh sound after shrugging one’s shoulders in disbelief at best, disdain at worse.

I have 7 Face Book friends, all of whom are the core of genuine wonderful people and my ether camaraderie base, so there is no need to expand; I believe in quality always, quantity never.

If you wonder how I can write via this machine and have less concern about those many hours lost in the ether miasma: I am still reading books and enjoying the sensation of turning pages of paper, writing creatively for myself, washing clothes, paying bills, feeding and loving felines, conversing with tenants and their needs and generally being an individual happier oxygen breather - when you can find a fresh inhale of it - and only using the Internet for business, research and the blogging.

Imagine you reading this and flipping off the net to go hug someone or maybe even go outside and look at the sky. It’s up there waiting for your vision to refocus. Sit in the grass, take a walk, smile at a stranger and be courteous, mostly to those less so than yourself, and realize how good you feel.

Fortunately, or not, I intend to keep the blog fires burning and whether or not I am always entertaining I will always be honest and a tenacious homo-sap.

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT

Groovy

Feelin’ Groovy

Groovy, man

In the groove

I’m feelin’ groovy, man

In the 1850s it meant “highly stimulating” with merely groove + y, but by 1937 expanded to include marvelous, then wonderful, and through the hipness of the sixties, when groovin’ to music, free love, pharmaceuticals and Flower Power paved the golden brick roads with immense pleasing, finally found a home from Haight Ashbury to The Bronx. Those golden bricks were solid pounds of grass, often from Acapulco de Juárez but that is another story.

Long playing vinyl albums had grooves; the needle touched down and produced nearly 80 years of pleasure until in 1981 records finally went the way of the extinction express, although in recent years they have re-emerged, unfortunately all digitally enhanced, destroying the analog memories of truely groovy.

Viet Nam was a bummer.

Nothing groovy about WAR. The lost souls from America, and other countries, and the Southeast Asians who were left to unprotected face the Communist Khmer Rouge’s genocide solution and never allowed to enjoy the grooving experience, sadly.

Woodstock was a stoned groove.

Now that Stella has gotten her groove back we’ve returned from whence we came.

Only took 150 years.

Groovy, lady

reposted from July 31, 2008 when no one was around; additional thoughts added but the original post remains for purists.

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT examines SPAM communiqués with equal amounts of compassion and sarcasm and a wee bit of profanity.

Although I am devoting more time to personal writing, divided between business and house cleaning exploits, I still must clear the SPAM; that infuriating surfeit of indiscriminately unsolicited bulk messages electronically emailed at such low costs that advertisers have no risk in bombarding bloggers with illiterate and commercially unviable garbage. The deluge of poorly written, one suspects by the lazy ignorant or luminously impolite spammers. I generally am unaffected by their drooling incompetence; bulk deleting them with the same skillful pleasure as lancing a boil on a feral cat’s ass.

The feline is ecstatic; so am I. Everyone’s a winner.

The photo was taken after a falling rock from space nearly separated my intellect from my complacency with the unwashed illiterate milieu.

Self Portrait, May, 2010

Without naming the poor wearisome bastards and bitches, here are a select few, sans editing for semantic lucidity. It’s problematic that if ESL: English as a Second Language is not their mother tongue, whatever attempt at linguistic rapidity is lost in a miasma of idiotic idiom:

Can I make a suggestion? I feel youve got one thing very good right here. But what if you added a couple links to some page that backs up what youre stating? Or perhaps you could give us one thing to look at, anything that would connect what youre saying to something tangible? Just a suggestion.

(This was for a movie trailer promoting an upcoming feature film and was simply a fragment of elucidation.)

Three for the price of one; egad, me migraine be returning:

sorry for my english not so well, but me think that you are right too pointe. Me share video now.

Me English no well, but had to say me like what you say. Thank you from me. Me share video now of my country.

and

force to practice mi English as I required to say http://www.rosenbushcafe.com is my favorite blog in English. You share me, I share video.

(This one, with the pingback, was for a piece I wrote about receiving fragrances from a friend’s perfume company! One must suspect this writer will not be a customer; me English not so well but me need fragrances. No, me needs dictionary, thesauruses and common sense, and then order me colognes. Me share with you me a video of my metaphysical discontent.)

This really is among the most unbelievable blogs Ive read in the extremely lengthy time. The amount of facts in right here is breathtaking, like you practically authored the book around the subject. Your weblog is good for anybody who wants to understand this subject additional. Wonderful stuff; make sure you preserve it up!

(Wouldn’t you know this one accompanied yesterday’s ExNil where I waxed endlessly about bull-shitters, the lack of sanity and dare I say intelligence? The usage of unbelievable, with myriad possibilities: Astonishing, Mind-boggling, Implausible, Far-fetched, Fanciful and Unlikely leads me to the conclusion my blog is “Implausibly incredible!”)

Finally, since foreign-born individuals arrive at Ellis Island, designated as “Displaced Persons,” I offer my own SPAM BE DAMNED entry, culled from about two thousand SPAMs tied for tenth place in a race to language class with only room for nine students:

Me so hornee but love you long time for such entracaseas of useage informational stuff. me friends with many bloggies who wish to share since site bookmarked and stumbled upon, I’ll post a feedback on my site too.

You do that.

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.” — Anaïs Nin

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT continues the journey towards enlightenment with my typical flair for graphically profane nonconformity. Most of my ether connections, with the exception of this blog, have been deactivated and by September 3rd this will be the final place on earth to find me via the inter-connecting technology of computerized psychosis

Edited and updated, Friday the 27th, for clarity. Heh.

Disambiguation; a noun meant “to establish a single semantic or grammatical interpretation.” That is Merriam-Webster’s definition; however, take it one further path of nilhistic resonance: Dissociative Differentiation from what is thought or believed and accepted or rejected from what is known and unknown.

There is something disconcerting about the consciousness stream when it becomes polluted with back washes of stagnation. After I completed my ether addiction post I really began the arduous task of retrospection; not only of self but of self’s inevitable ending.

In American culture we are immediately, upon birth, introduced to a classic irrational syllogism:

humans are born to die
you are human
you will die

From the earliest age, through religious indoctrination and paranoia concerning what follows existence, we are force-fed propaganda and our experiences from that moment of birth delineate decay and death more rapidly than life. We begin to die so quickly that it becomes an ostentatious excuse to accept the inevitable end before the journey.

It took me thirty two years to decide heaven did not exist in the traditional sense; since I never believed in Hell, except in earthbound genocide ghettos, I am unafraid of an eternity of damnation. I have endured plenty of damnation while living; thank you. It’s like that phrase until the end of time that we hear far too often.

Do humans really think they have control over universal epochs? I doubt fruit flies and cicadas consider it in the same manner. There are over 3,000 species of cicadas and I hardly think they have time during their brief terrestrial lifecycles to ponder Heaven, Hell or Religion.

The number of people who have tried to save my soul without ever considering what the soul is or for what purpose saving strangers’ benefits them mystifies me as much as it disconcerts. Does a cicada, with a lifespan anywhere from 2 to 17 years, need its soul saved to instinctively return to the surface, sing their acoustic love songs, procreate and die?

It is unsurprising that my eXisTenTiaLNihLisT streams are rebellious, caustic, sarcastic, cynical, ironic, graphically profane and fueled by torment and antagonism towards myriad themes. My insurrectionary diatribes are meant to stimulate philosophical thought patterns among my minuscule readership at Rosenbush Café with hope that somewhere there will be someone who will be dissatisfied with the infinitesimal and engage others in conversations about healthier attitudes between the brain hemispheres.

I have been betrayed so frequently that I accept my deliberate evaporation from the ether; there is more for me to ponder and explore beyond this technological nightmarish world where subjectivity is more palpable than a gigabyte of obligatory comprehension.

Am I fooling myself?

Probably.

I will admit that I am a fool; aren’t we all?

I have been deceived and fooled, sometimes unexpectedly, but more often being a lucid thinker, predictably. I live in America, a country that is an entity that prides itself on freedoms that I have oft written about as phantoms and illusionary constructs. For all the purported sovereignty something else must always be surrendered.

Freedom of speech, for example, which I have the benefit of, by writing these words without instantaneous trepidation that I will be abducted from my café, taken away and executed for daring to speak what is in my intellectual brain pans is not without consequences.

Regrettably, for all that autonomy I am approximating from this tiny corner of Planet Earth and I am surrounded by manipulative, albeit, ineffective forces beyond control.

Freedom of Religion gave me the wondrous opportunity to decide, as an individual, that I did not agree with any of them on mere face value. I express disapproval at any group or individual who eulogizes that somehow they have all the answers to all the unanswerable questions posed by existence.

God Exists.
God Does Not Exist.
God Only Exists for some but not all.
God Exists for those chosen to be saved for ideals that are ludicrous.
God Exists as a representation of the human being.
God exists in alternate permutations depending on within what culture the believer lives.
God created everything.
God created nothingness.
God created unanswered uncertainty so that the carbon-based life cycle would fluently misinterpret utterly.

The argument never ends for the sheer audacity that the sentient mind is capable of accurate interpretations of cosmic creation, infinite space and time while searching, always unsuccessfully, for an ultimate answer to an ultimate question that, ultimately, never existed.

I was asked the other day a question I have been asked throughout my fifty six plus years:

“Does all the matter on earth since the beginning of this planet’s existence convert to a heavier Planet Earth?”

Archetypal bullshit.

“Is the circumference of the earth distorted by weight?”

I surmise only by the weight of idiocy and futility inquiries. They are made for deception, and, as a diversion for its entertainment significance is an unparalleled dollop of amusement; at least for me.

Everything that exists on earth can be transformed for one kind of matter into another. Sand can become glass; coal, diamonds; humans into insects; and mixtures of different elements obstinately become something else. The Periodic Table is just that; periodically transmogrified. Is it any different than some arrogant scientific mind deciding that Pluto is no longer a planet? From the viewpoint of Alpha Centauri, perhaps earth is, at best, an asteroid, or at worst not even a planet or celestial body but a space-time continuum hallucination.

Perspective is not an earthbound conceptualization; existing across billions of light years of limitless universes.

Bullshit, however, is still a fecal substance no matter from where it subsists.

I steadfastly argue that the amount of shit on this planet outweighs all other substances for it is a tangential essence.

Without it there is no pleasure.

When someone tells someone else something that is discernibly and artificially construed as factual we call it BULLSHIT.

I express sympathy for bulls and cows, out in their pastures, admiring the bucolic scenery, and consuming the green grass of fate, but injected with hormones and generally mistreated. Pity the Black Angus for their tastiness to the human palette. While we may dispute our carnivorous addictions we cannot, and indeed should not, challenge our intrinsic need to bullshit.

Hmmm, well, I had a wonderful argument recently that a ton of trees does not weigh the same as a ton of steel.

What the fuck?

My understanding is that a ton is a measurement of weight. One can easily enjoy the mystifying irony that its definition is different in the UK from the US and Canada. Long, short or metric tonnage is just a migraine of minutiae.

Weight deconstruction is no different than whether or not Christopher Columbus discovered he new world of America. Historically, I could care less than a fuck by whom or how it was discovered. North America was already flourishing without inhabitants from another portion of the planet making claims for thoughtless territoriality; destroying the eco-system and decimating the Native “Americans” already living here. Such a large country but just not enough room for the immigrants to share with others already living here peacefully. The Indians were at one with the environment while thenewcomers were at one with the destruction of life, liberty and landscape.

It wasn’t long ago that the masses believed the earth was flat, oceans filled with sea monsters, earth was the center of the universe (it isn’t even the center of this solar system) and that our heart was at the center of the body and controlled everything. Imagine the startling revelation of what brains were doing having to think about such bullshit?

What a confusing role we play.

Coca Cola once contained cocaine and I believe it is still a component; its makers have “secret ingredients” and so many people are addicted to the malevolent syrupy concoction. As with any addiction the more one thinks they like it the more they need it, even if it destroys vital organs and gives its users the hightened euphoria of a hummingbird on amphetamines.

Who has forgotten that doctors used leeches to extract the ‘bad blood’ from patients? Good blood….bad medical training. You’re insane, but if we drill holes in your head, attach electrodes or remove segments of your ‘bad brain’ we can make you well.

Uh huh.

Lobotomy was widely practiced, even in the fifties, and ther evidence supporting removing brain tissue seemed to go unquestioned. Why are these patients even more angry, depressed, forgetful and violent? Hmm, normally, we are born with an amount of gray matter that will die on its own at the cellular level but what the hell, let’s speed the process. It wasn’t medicine; it was control. The actress Frances Farmer was given electroc shock theraphy and later lobotomized because she was a free-spirited individual who pissed off her controlling mother.

Aaaah, science in the Dark Ages of the 20th and 21th Century must make the leech theory less far-fetched.

It’s disturbingly compelling to listen to a television commercial for any pharmaceutical cures since the side effects overshadow the remedies. It’s exacerbating to learn sleep and male enhancement aids can cause death. Stomach medications are notorious for inducing stomach pains, diarrhea. Ha, ha. It should be designated as dieherereally.

ExNil

I acknowledge, freely, my utterly defiant consignment that every kind of shit exists.

Agreement is not mandatory.

Freedom of thought is your only veritable choice in life.

I am unconcerned as to who, or why, someone would read my words and stop at any segment and close the page. That, too, is a freedom; free will to choose and not accept an attitude, especially when based on an unfamiliar philosophy.

Our world is replete with non acceptance.

Our bloodiest wars fought now, and for the totality of the history of humankind (how I hate that word; human…kind, such an oxymoron. Cruelkind is more accurate. Where else but in language could the word moron have such significance?), over belief and non belief, religion and politics, money and the lack thereof.

Late southern humorist Brother Dave Gardner said of politics: “Politics, Dog, ticks…it’s all parasitical.”

Now, that is NOT BULLSHIT. That is reality.

Rather than starting life and embracing the wonders of it too many people are predisposed to give up at the beginning and leave it along aside them on the journey. Maybe, they think, it’s

No, it is yours.

Is life sacrosanct?

Not to the terrorists of the world. They exist in every culture, religion and institution. You will find them in garden clubs, grocery stores, book stores, restaurants, behind the wheel of a Jaguar as easily as in a Chevrolet, in courtrooms, cloakrooms and Congress, and the preponderance of hatred, mistrust, disdain, disorder, fear and prejudice for one carbon-based breather for another is another freedom that goes unquestioned and unanswered.

Terrorism is intimidation. The violence that ensues continues in every region. If you do not understand the concept of intimidation all you have to do is watch televised news on cable or in the ether. We are terrorized by news of natural disasters, that the world is ending, new microscopic strains of cellular monsters and global bankruptcy. Is it not terrorism when a gay couple wants the same rights as heterosexuals? Life is brief and if two women, or men, love one another why should they be denied of happiness because some radical believer in opposing lifestyle choices is offended. Why are these same people not offended by spousal and cild abuse by heteros? The answer would only overflow the bullshit cauldron because there is no logic.

Why do we fill our hearts and minds with such much mean-spiritedness? Does one evil action in youth inevitably need to lead a life of chaos and anarchy?

As I continue my journey it has become more difficult for me to allow such heartlessness to define what I can, and will, accomplish as my numbered days draw to their unavoidable conclusion. I am not a painter, sculptor, singer or poet. I am a writer of words, interrelated to my emotions and I will continue to augment my consciousness stream with clear waters of thought and deed.

Will you join me on journeys beyond the capacity for unkindness?

You know where to find me…

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT explores ether addiction, dehumanization, the intentional dissolving of personal contact and contains adult themes and graphic language.

Sitting in lonely silence recently I pondered what life would be like without techology enslaving me, not as a Luddite, but only using the ether for and it suddenly struck me like heat lightning how much of my previous existence was wasted articulating angst to an audience of one.

One look at my off line life would tell a psychologist, even those who graduated in the bottom 90 percent, that I am obsessive, fixated, with an unfortunate direction towards the moribund, especially in the years leading up to and since my mother died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, and altogether now….addicted personality disordered.

My late aunt called me a “pack rat,” and she was genuinely concerned that I would never dispose of anything whether it is important or insignificant. I still have empty matchbook covers from shuttered businesses, newspaper stories from my past journalistic career – which ended in 1984 – and a myriad of magazines, books, inoperable old-fashioned technologies, i.e. 8-Track players, radios, tape decks and assorted electronic machinery, and clothing that neither fits nor is in style.

This is not to say I have not given much away to spouse abuse and abandoned children shelters but each time I have done so there was still too many objects that were not discarded.

It is not without a touch of irony, infused with black humor that as I remove superfluous possessions that I experience again the past fifty plus years of accumulation and find myself asking a wayward feline, “Why the fuck do I still have this shit?”

The feline mews, “I’m a cat, answer it for yourself.”

I know I am really asking myself what attraction any preponderance of chaos holds fascinating enough to remain cluttering the landscape of my mind, body and home.

At this point, any savvy reader is asking, especially those who are unafraid to be profane, “Henry, what the fuck does this have to do with ether addiction and what relevance will I find that will help me unlock the hand cuffs that have trapped me to the infernal contraptions of technology?”

Dear friends, I am never one to get to the point immediately, and that has cost me sanity, friendships, love and business associations throughout my entire adult life. There is a point to the ostensibly randomness of my preparatory acknowledgment:

We are all ensnared by something that is torturous to alleviation of the betterment of self. As for me, I am unashamed to admit that throughout my life I have been, at different moments, addicted to adult entertainment, marijuana, caffeine, chocolate, incessant verbal graphic profanity, dangerous driving behavior, tobacco and finally, the computer.

I will not try and convince anyone that fighting, and indeed, conquering addictions of any kind is unproblematic; it is not. One must first admit they have an addiction and then work towards finding out why and finally what is needed to reach transmogrification.

I am thankful that, for all my addictive personality traits, I have never been an abuser or people, alcohol or animals. The fact I have a dozen cats, not counting the dozens of feral felines I protect and provide nourishment for, have never physically mistreated women or children, and have an abhorrence for violent carbon-based life forms, gives me a clearly defined expertise into my own foibles and personal turmoil when it comes to what really has captivated me.

As an accomplished writer I use the internet for a more altruistic raison d’être function: research. In my many years of investigative rationale I still prefer books to anything the ether can offer. I am a tactile individual who would rather hold a three dimensional text in my hand than read the oft convoluted, perverted and polluted consciousness stream of misinformation that is offered under the pretense of factual data. If I learned anything as a newspaper reporter and editor it was to not accept anything on face value without intense exploration into accurateness. Truthfulness is a commodity that is sorrowfully lacking in today’s hyper-speeding societal concerns. One look at the innumerable websites that purport to report honesty is enough to make one bleed from every orifice.

Wikipedia, Google, You Tube, Twitter, Face Book, MySpace and other massively popular ether venues have positive uses; however, they are also dangerously addictive and pose intimidation to those unwary or unprepared for sinister usages.

When I purchased my first computer, a desktop Compaq Presario 4600 Series with 64 megabytes of RAM in 1998 I was a neophyte. Even with an A in a class on an Apple Computer at the local technical college – computers were coming into the Southern Miss Journalism Department in 1977 just before I graduate with my BS Degree in Journalism and English – I was ill-prepared for the countless frustrations of merely connecting through the 56 kbps dial up and “surfing the web.”
Surfing the web? What the fuck? Was I a surfer dude in Cali water sporting across an arachnid’s web? Even the jargon was dismaying. Oh, now I have to learn what “http” means? I just wanted to set up an email account, which took me months to successfully access.

Over the years, I went through plenty of personal computers by Sony, Toshiba and HP and was disappointed by all of them. Windows Operating Systems was another disturbing lesson in control: 95, 98, Millennium, 2000, on and on it went. If you believe the commercials, which I do not, Windows 7 finally has addressed all the concerns of Vista and previous versions which are all vulnerable to hackers and governmental intrusion.

If you are gullible enough to believe your system is safe because Bill Gates tells you then you deserve to be defenseless. If teenaged hackers can infiltrate NORAD or the FBI what protection does a college sophomore have against an incursion into their class projects?

If I learned anything during my 13 years of computer world it is that few are to be trusted when it comes to privacy. I have been hacked, had my identity stolen and endured personal attacks from strangers. I cannot number how often my computer has been violated or disabled, my cell phone neutralize and my privacy invaded, and not by intergalactic aliens, but by fellow sentient beings. Recently, my business files were accessed so I removed them from my hard drive – again – knowing that eventually I would be better served using graph paper and notebooks to keep my company records.

A few years ago I began networking and for a brief span of time it was a positive experience. Unfortunately, like any optimistic encounters it soon devolved into nightmarish consequences that ultimately led me to extreme decisions to unplug myself from the ether.

Anyone who knows me personally; who has seen me face to face, in the flesh, as an individual human being, or intimately, can straightforwardly confirm I am a sincere and caring person. The ether deprives individuality. People can, and do, lie about themselves; cyber stalking is rampant and for fewer than fifty dollars websites will allow the retrieval of Social Security information, find private telephone numbers and even addresses. Remember when you paid extra for unlisted telephone numbers? Those days are gone the extinction express, along with endangered species once only considered in the animal kingdom.

Privacy is like freedom, it is an illusion. We all need to awaken from complacency and accept there are no confidentiality clauses in the ether. Information is for sale and anyone with a credit card can find you.

I have never been interested in chat rooms. When I learned that older men were pretending, and succeeding, at being teenagers to lure unsuspecting underage girls towards dangerous liaisons I knew none of us were safe.

While law enforcement tries to capture these pedophiles it is more disturbing that laws to protect the innocent is perverse naivety. If you check out the FBI’s Cybercrime Website you’ll realize that reporting creative theft online is a pipedream. As most of us have learned, laws were never set up to protect us in the beginning. It is too late now with over half the planet hooked up to the internet.

I have a good friend who was cyber stalked and the bastard responsible is still out there unpunished. In the Middle Ages, anyone doing what he did would have been flayed, drawn and quartered and feed to vultures. Today, these sick fucks are fêted rather than castigated.

A former university friend’s ex-wife convinced me to join Face Book. I asked her, “What is a Face Book?” Rather than tell me she said I would have to join to find out.

I did not join immediately, but went to the site and looked at what it entailed and thought, timorously, what would I gain when I knew none of the people who were already members? Finally, I joined and for the first month had this lady as my only friend. A blogging friend had joined and I asked her if we could be “friends” and she accepted me. For a year I met all my new friends through her and eventually reached 20! Of the twenty people, however, only six were actually people who I began having philosophical friendships; they are all creative people: artists, poets, writers, photographers and authentically wonderful people.

For a while it was blissful. Each person became a genuine friend and we all exchanged our blogging sites and began commenting and offering support to one another’s inspiration. Unfortunately, for me, I spent far too much time commenting on my page on topics that ranged from my blogging to my moods. MySpace allows you to select an Emoticon, those little faces and symbols that define whether you are happy, sad, and angry, in love or, in extreme cases, demented!

Finally being truthful to myself I had to admit no one really wants to know if some solitary schmuck in West Ala is moody or sad or pissed off for some reason. I began to deleted comments, much to the annoyance of myself for ever having posted them. Did I really want a friend in Canada to know I was despondent?

Of course not.

But I did.

Over the course of several months I became really despondent because I had deluded myself thinking I was somehow more important than I really was and I began posting that I was going to leave the ether for a much needed hiatus.

I didn’t.

I missed the camaraderie.

For someone who didn’t care for the chat circuit I was enthralled with the Face Book esthetic; one could make a comment on a page on any subject and instantaneously receive a response! It was, at least for me, an imaginary mystique and many of the comment streams were insightful, hysterical, anarchic and graphically prescient.

When I finally decided to remove myself from the ether at the first of August I wondered if I had the courage and tenacity to succeed. While the half dozen true friends I met have all offered me their support I already miss them because they added to my life, as I did to theirs, and although we all have one another’s contact information I wonder if I will be missed. Not in a childishly arrogant way, because I know we all had more than an ether connection, even if none of us ever met in person, but in a personal reflective manner.

What really began turning me off to the ether was the sheer amount of animosity I encountered. Take away six beautiful souls and then re-examine the millions more who are bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic, mean-spirited bastards, capable of projecting menace through their unbearable ignorance and conniving personas and regrettably one is left with a vehement expose of the world of 2010. Politically-insane diatribes from soulless and inconceivably brainless wastes of oxygen pretending to be intellectuals when they are essentially boorish road kill.

For all the good that is achievable many choose the path of abnormality and inappropriateness in their belief they have a right to be extraordinarily cruel and thoughtless. I should be content since it gives me the opportunity to expose the misplaced and treacherous thought processes but it has finally reached the level of diminished conscientiousness.

I can only write so often about the unwashed and pessimism before the devolution of spirit irrevocably annihilates harmony.

There is no melancholy as I take a break from ether networking; the café will remain the focal point for my imagination. Upcoming posts won’t need an incendiary viewpoint since I have exhausted my certainty that the world of humanoids is in trouble. I no longer have to remind readers that the system is not breaking down because there is no system. No more ascertains that the world governments never listen to their citizenry. That many people care not a dollop to love and cherish their fellow women or men is unsurprising. One has to love themselves first and far too many people either never did or never will.