ellenspictures

Author: Hope Never Vanishes

  • compelled to write…

    compelled to write…

    Putting up the holiday decorations…

    Each year, this is frankly my least favorite activity.  But, I am compelled to get this done before my birthday, before I find myself well into January, looking at this chore.  It will make me feel better to get all of this completed!

    A mixmaster of memories – good, bad, traumatic, joyful, sad, happy, bittersweet – each ornament seemingly drives something from my inventory of emotions – something that might be perilous but also might bring lots of thoughts about funny and happy times – by this time, however, it’s decades over decades of these, overlain onto one another –

    Some of these ornaments are very old – depression era – even older than that – and I worry about being the guardian of these – for future generations – does anyone care these days?

    My older relatives, not that there are that many left, have not exactly held that feeling of importance, about keeping the antiquities – they have downsized efficiently over the last few years – thinking that ten years ago, they were just a little older than I am now, and they were downsizing then – and yes, I know it is time to downsize – clean up – pare down – sort, slice, dice, and whatever it takes to keep people from having to do the work that we are doing to “get rid of shit” that we really do not care that much about, or we do, but one or the other of us finds that the accumulation is annoying and it causes issues beyond just having the stuff occupy space.

    In consideration of all that, I likely need to think about this when I am “accumulating” – i.e., stop – and begin the progression of paring down activities – not unlike recycling, it is conscious effort to take up the habit of doing so.

    Here We Are In The Years.  Neil Young said in his song, years ago – “Now that the holidays have come – They can relax and watch the sun – Rise above all of the beautiful things they’ve done… Time itself is bought and sold – The spreading fear of growing old – Contains a thousand foolish games that we play – While people planning trips to stars – Allow another boulevard to claim a quiet country lane – It’s insane”  From October 2, 1968.

    Yes, it is.  Each year, it seems that these words ring true even more than the year before.  Holidays or no, soon I will be marking another trip around the sun, one more time.

    My quest?  Find more joy in the world – how can we do that?  It’s an edgy place.  Thinking of taking down my Facebook account.  Saving all the data.  Starting all over.  It’s an idea.  Not thinking that the experiment has worked out so well…

  • Thanksgiving 2017

    Thanksgiving 2017

    I really do not want to dwell on the past year’s historic mindblowing state of affairs, nor do I want to dwell on the personal bombshells that have hit our family.   So, I won’t.

    Thanksgiving is about being thankful – grateful for what we do have.

    I have family.  For this, I am most grateful.  My husband, my son, my grandson, my uncle and aunt, my cousins – and my family in-laws, present and past, who are extremely wonderful and gracious to me.  For this is a beautiful thing and family is one gift of being human – especially if family relationships are good.

    I have relative health compared to some.  OK, aging does mean that you are still here on the planet, but it poses challenges as parts are wearing out on you, or becoming defective, you have to deal with it.  So, I can’t go on that run today, as I normally do – but, I am not bedridden, I can walk without assistance, I can climb stairs, and probably, if I went out right now and got on it, I could ride my bicycle.  Injuries are hopefully temporary.

    I made 2 pies and one dessert, yesterday, with an aging oven.  It was a challenge, but guess what?  We have pies and a dessert.  I hope that they are tasty.

    I did the baking without copious amounts of wine as I had to rely upon last year during our unfolding family crises.  It got worse before it began to stabilize.  I was proud that I did Christmas and steeled up in the storm, with all of the uncertainty.  I am certain that this took it’s toll on my mental health and potentially, on my physical health.

    This year, I am grateful that things began to stabilize, last spring, but we are not ever going to be back where we were.  Forever changed by one person, never anticipated, it is how life is to have these unexpected turns.

    Turkey and trimmings.  Friends.  Fellowship.  The good weather we are now having after the crazy weather we suffered at the turn of the seasons… Knowing that holidays are difficult for some large number of people this year due to that crazy weather, we pray for their recoveries – each of them.  We pray for the state of the world, as it is in peril right now.  We pray for stability.  We pray for healing.  We pray for the lonely and those who are alone today.  We pray for hope.  We pray for a future for my grandson that will not prove difficult for him to live a good life.

    Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for what we have and it is for praying for the future of the world that includes everyone and everything in it.  Peace be with the world.

     

  • hackers and whackers

    hackers and whackers

    This hacking stuff really does your head in.  You would think that these people have something better to do.

    Stephen King.  He has a theory that ties to basic good-evil, yin-yang, whatever one your 31 flavors of the dark-light nature of human beings enables you to select at the moment.. well, we see this in all of these behavioral demonstrations of “Pinky and The Brain” chasing for world domination.  The Donald vs. Kim.  The POTWG’s vs. everyone else…  King had his Dark Tower series, and The Stand… and others of his works, where “good v. evil” is always the pervasive underlying theme.

    My question is this:  If you succeed at World Domination, what are you going to do then?  Don’t go there…

    Right now, the latest “hack du jour” is a spammer who is taking a warning message from my security software and re-routing it through an email from (supposedly) Twitter.  Really?  Why?  Go figure.  Is it just a show of “See what I can do to make you feel really confused???”

    So, it is either (a) phishing, (b) spoofing, (c) something more 3v1L.  Things that make you go “Hmmm….”

    Just yesterday, my OTHER anti-malware anti-virus anti-evil software kept finding a trojan horse in my Outlook executables.  Well, isn’t that s-p-e-c-i-a-l ????

    Why me?  Just messin’ with the old lady…

    “Ass-clowns!!!”, as my son who is no longer with us would say.  I say, why for God’s sake are you messin’ with me?

    The answer is “because that is what we do – we “mess with people”  – that is our goal in life is to just “mess with people”.  Yessir, I guess that is what they view as a valid goal in life…  as good a mission as anything that they can think of…

    It’s not my belief system, and as I endear the phrase, “not my circus, not my monkeys…”  BUT, guess what?  These monkeys get out and get into your stuff… unfortunately, this is when they do become “your monkeys” to face and figure out a way to make them back-off.

    Poor upbringing by people who either did not care about instilling what is right-vs-wrong in their kid’s brain at the right age – or were too stupid or too destitute or too tired or let’s see what else… Again.  Don’t go there.  Child abuse?  Too permissive?

    Too many reasons to count – some that are not even imaginable by some – what does that sound like?  So those excuses – of poverty, of torturous upbringings, of lives of living in that unreal world of not having parents, of not having anyone to guide you – those are the susceptible who become the disenfranchised.

    So.  That leads us to why this might be.  Well, it could be… POTWG!  Agggghhhh!

    The Planet of the White Guys, AKA those crazies out there that have been within the lifestream forever – If I were a bettin’ woman…  One day, there will be a discovery that all of this POTWG stuff is in the D’NAah…

    It’s likely some itty-bitty teeny-tiny bit on the chromosome blah-di-blah that causes this belief system tendency and the susceptibility towards subscribing to it.

    It takes a special combination of (1) being chronically pissed off, (2) not taking responsibility for whatever it is that ended up making you pissed off and making you generalize the responsibility out to someone who you can just target and throw all that angry energy towards… right?  (3) seeking out some old crap passed from gen to gen that you can point to (the Confederacy, or any you-name-it rationalization for racism, bigotry, and whatever fear-based behavior that you have, then (4) beginning this evil insanity of rounding up and hurting those who live within your delusional belief system to satisfy yourself that you are “doing something about this perceived problem” using whatever vehicle you can, might be literal or figurative or both.. like “the top Idiot”, for instance.  He is an “enabler” – stroked by the admiration rah-rah in his narcissistic neurotic addiction to it – being a blow-hard bully, one of his favorite pastimes which feeds into what these horrid people take as affirmation.

    Its a perfect hurricane!  Wow-za Wow-za – and the news it generates just adds fuel to the fire… Missing Chet Huntley and David Brinkley right about now in their calm collected demeanor of not being too excitable, so as not to cause UTTER FRIGGIN ‘PANIC…

    I know, I know… you think I sound like some kind of nut!  But guess what?  I have lived over six decades!  I actually have lived through some days where we have been there, done that more than once!  We have seen wars and witnessed divisions, and watched people try to heal these — and yet, there it is — it pops up again, just like WACKAMOLE!  It is something that in my “wisdom”, I am beginning to realize is a fact of life…

    The question is, can we, once again get back to the point of where we might be able to avert disaster?  One step forward, a thousand steps back, it seems…

    Disappointing.  Depressing.  Simultaneously, events are occurring that lead you to go out and read Revelations and Nostradamus and anything else you can get your hands on, because you are looking for hope, not doom.

    Even Stephen Hawking is now revising his forecasts, and that is something sad.  100 years, he says.  That is down from the prior most recent of 1000 years to planet extinction.  Do the math.  In his next one, it might be 0 – because from 1000 down to 100 in a short period of time is a very difficult number to accept.

    Some of my relatives just try not to play the game, but you know what?  It’s hard in the modern world to NOT have an email address.  It is hard to not have to participate and remember logins and passwords.  It just is that type of situation today, where you just have issues if you don’t at least play minimally… News is so fast.  Sigh.

    Poor old people who never educated themselves and those who refuse, today… but maybe they are lucky or not.  They may become innocent victims of all of this nonsense…  The cellphone that has a picture of a man, and a woman for dialing up the mom or dad… or son or daughter… same thing, different decade.

    Remember, that if this continues, your pleasant view out your window might drastically change to something that you would rather pull the shades down and shut out.

    What can you do?  What can one person do?

    Sit back and drink up that Bombay Gin with the double-alcohol that you didn’t take back to the store?  What the hey?  If it is all going to go up in “flames and fury” – might as well go out without feeling it!  How did I get to be so cynical?

    I quit newspapers a long time ago – then slowly, I felt out of touch, so now I read at least three or five… And articles, and listen to NPR, sometimes…

    You can’t miss a thing.  You can’t make this stuff up…

    ‘Gosh, Kiddo, your grandma didn’t want you to ever read this… It is just too dark.’