Some Gave All

Taps Memorial

As soon as Taps was first sounded in July 1862, words were put with the music. As the years went on many more versions were created. There are no official words, but here are some of the more popular verses:

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lake,
From the sky.
All is well, safely rest,
God is nigh.

Go to sleep, peaceful sleep,
May the soldier or sailor,
God keep.
On the land or the deep,
Safe in sleep.

Love, good night, Must thou go,
When the day, And the night
Need thee so?
All is well. Speedeth all
To their rest.

Fades the light; And afar
Goeth day, And the stars
Shineth bright,
Fare thee well; Day has gone,
Night is on.

Thanks and praise, For our days,
'Neath the sun, 'Neath the stars,
'Neath the sky,
As we go, This we know,
God is nigh.

Conundrum

I want the comfort, but I need the magic. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Found on the internet; source not known.

Distorted Thinking?

The following thoughts and actions are generally considered distorted thinking, but they are an astonishingly accurate view into my brain.

Filtering: I take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.
Polarized Thinking: Things are black or white, good or bad. I have to be perfect or I'm a failure. There is no middle ground.
Overgeneralization: I come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once I expect it to happen over and over again.
Mind Reading:  Without their saying so, I know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, I'm able to determine how people are feeling toward me.
Castastrophizing: I expect disaster. "What if tragedy strikes? What if it happens to me?"
Personalization: I think that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to me. I also compare myself to others, seeing that they are smarter, better looking, etc.
Control Fallacies: I'm responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around me.
Blaming: I blame myself for every problem or reversal.
Should: I have a set of ironclad rules about how I should act. I feel guilty if I violate the rules.
Emotional Reasoning: I believe that what I feel must be true. If I feel stupid and boring, then I must be stupid and boring.

Adapted from a behavioral therapy website on retraining thought patterns.

Witch's Garbage

One of the many roommates in my life (I stopped counting at 26) was a young woman named Teri. Teri was one of my college roommates and she was a terrific role model. She, too, was majoring in English and was a creative writer, so we had much in common. I owe Teri for introducing me to author Richard Brautigan and his witch's garbage. The year was 1980.

The book Teri handed to me was a slim, lime green paperback with a black and white photo on the front. It was called Revenge of the Lawn. I remember exactly where we were standing in our room when I first took the book into my hands as she then turned the pages to number 19: a short-short story called "1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel."

I gave Teri a questioning look, and she said, "Just read." So I did. After the first two sentences, I sank down onto my bed. And I kept reading.

This is how the story begins. "O 1939 Tacoma Washington witch, where are you now that I am growing toward you? Once my body occupied a child's space and doors had a large meaning to them and were almost human. Opening a door meant something in 1939 and the children used to make fun of you because you were crazy and lived by yourself in an attic across the street from where we sat in the gutter like two slum sparrows. We were four years old."

The premise of the story is a familiar one. One child dares another child to go up to the witch's attic apartment and wave down at him from the window.

"'You've got guts,' my friend said. I can't remember his name now. The decades have filed it off my memory, leaving a small empty place where his name should be.

"There were some garbage cans at the bottom of the stairs. I wondered what garbage can was the witch's. I lifted up one garbage can lid and looked inside to see if there was any witch's garbage in the can. There wasn't."

He then went on to look in the other two cans; all the garbage looked alike.

When he opens the door to the witch's house and looks around, his heart beats faster. "Her garbage had lied to me."

You'll have to read the story. But here are a few random sentences from other stories in the book:

"I spent the rest of the day not making coffee. It was a comfort."

"The bathroom sink, even though the water was off, broke out into tears."

"I let the old woman get on first and trailed behind in classic medieval tradition with castle floors following me onto the bus."

"Do ghosts burn wood? I guess it's up to them, but the wood was the color of years."

Teri and Richard changed the way I thought about writing, they changed my reading tastes, and they changed my writing style. The bar had been raised.

Brautigan had a tragic life. He was raised in abject poverty, and he was a paranoid schizophrenic with clinical depression. He had electroconvulsive therapy a dozen times. He shot himself to death in September of 1984 and was found about a month later. He's remembered for inventive metaphors and a remarkable imagination.

Soon after I dropped out of college in 1980, I lost track of Teri. I know she married a man named Randy and moved to Chico, California, but I can't remember Randy's last name. I'd love to find Teri again. I was in awe of her and her creative talent. And she was a genuine friend.

Teri, I remember you.

And Richard Brautigan, sir, I remember you.

This is a Some Day

Some days I just can't.

Brief Creative Moments

Watercolor paint and pencils on Yupo paper

by Reed Morgan, 2009.

In the Well

"But I am so angry with myself now because I cannot do what I should like to do, and at such a moment one feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless...I cannot hide...that I am overcome by a feeling of great anxiety, depression, a je ne sais quoi of discouragement and despair more than I can tell. And if I cannot find comfort, it will be too overwhelming." -Vincent Van Gogh, from letters to his brother

Still Here . . .

Yesterday was a sad day for Christians. Not because the infamous "end-of-the-world" prediction was wrong, although we do hope each day could be the day we'll join the Lord in the air. No. We're sad because atheists rejoice, agnostics remain complacent, and thousands of people around the entire world may lose their faith in God. The positive aspect is that people are talking about Jesus and about eternity. God does work in mysterious ways.

According to Harold Camping, a Christian radio host from California, the long-awaited Rapture of the Saints was scheduled for May 21, 2011. He stated with certainty that approximately 3% of the world's population would be lifted to Heaven at 6:00 p.m. local time; that is, the Rapture would not happen in an instant but would roll around the earth, so to speak. Then massive earthquakes, greater in magnitude than the recent devastating Japanese earthquake, would begin on the Pacific Rim at 6:00 p.m. local time and would hit New York City at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time. The actual annihilation of the earth, of the entire universe, would take place six months later, on October 21, 2011.

This is the web site of Family Radio as it appeared yesterday:

This is the web site of Family Radio as it appears today:

 

Various news outlets state that Camping cannot be located for comment.

Camping has made a Rapture prediction before, in a 1992 self-published book titled 1994? which set the date in September of that year. When nothing happened, Camping said he must have made a mathematical error.

A civil engineer, Camping has always been fascinated with numbers. His premise was based on the appearance of numbers in the Bible, stating that God would only have included various numbers for a purpose. He has studied the Bible for decades to develop his equations and to be certain his calculations are correct.

Pure hubris. The Bible is clear. Documented in Matthew 24: 36 (King James Version), Jesus states, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Didn't Camping see that verse during all his years of study?

I have no doubt that Harold Camping genuinely believed his prediction and believed that he was doing the work of God: warning non-Christians that the end is near.

Well, folks, he certainly got that right. The end is near. The day is at hand. As documented in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 (KJV),

 ¹⁶For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:

 ¹⁷Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

...and also documented in Matthew 24:30-31 (KJV), 

³⁰And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. 

 ³¹And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Will you be left behind?

God's Plan of Salvation 

Thanks to Wikipedia for information on Harold Camping

One Smart Blonde!

A blonde walks into a bank in New York City and asks for the loan officer. She says she’s going to Europe on business for two weeks and needs to borrow $5,000. The bank officer says the bank will need some kind of security for the loan, so the blonde hands over the keys to a new Rolls Royce. The car is parked on the street in front of the bank; she has the title, and everything checks out. The bank agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan. The bank’s president and its officers all enjoy a good laugh at the blonde for using a $250,000 Rolls as collateral against a $5,000 loan. An employee of the bank then drives the Rolls into the bank’s underground garage and parks it there. Two weeks later, the blonde returns and repays the $5,000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41. The loan officer says, “Miss, we are very happy to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very nicely; but we are a little puzzled. We checked you out and found that you are a multimillionaire. What puzzles us is - why would you bother to borrow $5,000?” The blonde replies…..”Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41 and expect it to be there when I return?”

from the blog of Afternoon Snooze Button