I’m gonna give you my love

I received some feedback about my post from yesterday and it seems that everyone feels the same way I do that we all need one another and everyone impacts on everyone else.

Makes no difference what you do or where you live, we all impact on those around us without realising it. We come into contact with so many people, some are with us briefly others become friends or acquaintances and we touch each other for weeks, months or even years. Then suddenly they are gone and we are “alone” in our bubble again.

Everyone stays as long as we need them, some remain with us for years and others for a season. We need others to survive as left alone we will wither and lose hope for humanity and ourselves.

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, push yourself to the limits and we can all benefit from your achievements. There’s nothing you can see that isn’t shown and some have the ability to see beyond the possible and strive for the impossible which they will achieve and push human achievement to new heights and push back the boundaries.

Whether or not you believe that we landed on the moon in 1969 the advances in computing have improved so far that the computers around in 1969 took up entire rooms and warehouses and had less memory than we have on modern phones. They used tapes where now we use digital hard drives. Mankind has moved so quickly in the last 50 years that things we take for granted today had not even been thought of 50 years ago.

In my lifetime I have seen vinyl give way to cassette tapes as they were easier to store although just as prone to damage. Then came cd and digital music. Now we have returned to vinyl, although it is more expensive than digital music on cd or download some say it is much better than it used to be as the vinyl used today is sturdier and not as thin as it was before the advent of cassette and cd.

Technology isn’t the only change I have seen in my lifetime. When I was born there was racism and victimisation of anyone different to the norm. I never understood this since we are all human and if we are cut we will bleed and the blood is red. I wanted an end to segregation in the USA and South Africa and that has come to pass. There are still ignorant people who will victimise women, blacks, and anyone else who dares to be different.

I was called queer at school and took this as a compliment since we are all unique. I have also been called weird but again this I take as a compliment. Some even called me nigger lover (no apologies for the n word as that was what I was called) and I accepted they knew I loved everyone. The n word has been outlawed yet it is making a comeback among blacks in America. It is a word which means absolutely nothing, it is made up like Kike, Wop, Paddy and other made up names to denigrate human beings.

If we refuse to allow it to denigrate then we show we are more powerful than those idiots who use made up words to put people down. People are people and it makes no difference if they are black, white, yellow, brown, red or purple with red spots. If you allow yourself to be put down (I did and I realised eventually that the idiots doing it were just that – idiots) then you give credence to those idiots.

We should remember that we all have the power to hurt and the power to love. What is the most powerful to use? If we hurt someone then we invite them to hurt us back, if we love someone even though they are trying to hurt us, we remove their power from them and become more powerful than they will ever be.

Today’s music is taken from the era when all four Beatles were still together and alive, showcasing new advances in recording techniques and a heavier sound (although the Beatles showed they could be just as heavy). Led Zeppelin II started Side 1 with Whole Lotta Love so here it is from YouTube and the copyright isn’t owned by me.

Back then long time ago when grass was green

I’ve been thinking now for a long time about the reason why we’re all here. Surely it’s not to live in pain and fear? There’s too many people trying to get as much as they can, taking and stealing from their fellow man. So why not sit down, have a drink and let’s try to understand what we’re doing here my dear reader.

I try not to think of people in terms of black or white as that isn’t how the world works, it’s all shades of grey. Skin colour, gender, sexual preferences, who we love, who we let go, all shades of grey.

Take for an example a friend of mine, he was a good friend at school, we hung out and did things after school and before school. At dinner time and breaks we would disappear out of sight of the school and roll up then smoke a couple of joints. Last I heard he was getting himself straight, he’d got a good job, lovely partner and he was happy. I was pleased for him and remembered the good times we had at school. I don’t know if it is him or not but I just read an obituary about someone with the same name and approximately my age who died suddenly following a heart attack.

We are all mortal, sooner or later we are all going to die. I only have one regret in my life and that is that I didn’t travel when I left school but I didn’t have the guts to go to the other side of the planet on my own. My friend and I had talked about going to work in Australia for a couple of years after we left school, then other people were going to come with us, we even knew where there was work we could get and, although the work was hard it was well paid. We kept this talk going for about 3 years and more and more people were going to come with us both. Then one by one they dropped out until it was only my friend and I who were left when he told me he had got a girl pregnant and was going to do the right thing and get married to her.

That left me, alone, with the dream of going to another country to work for a couple of years and earn a fortune doing it. I started thinking about the distance I would be away from family and friends. I thought about not knowing anyone over there. I thought about getting home sick and wanting to travel home. In the end I decided not to go. I regretted that ever since. My friend’s marriage fell apart 2 years after his son was born. He moved away to Edinburgh and that was the last place I saw him, he moved there just after I did.

Would we have lasted 2 years in the middle of nowhere where everything was trying to kill us? Who knows, we never got there. Anyway the thing I’m trying to say is, we rarely regret things we do. Usually it’s things we don’t do. I’m determined that I’m going to live the remainder of my life doing things that I want to do. I want to live and have fun, sod the pain I can up the painkillers and try to live in the moment.

Life is too short and we all need to seize the day and remember that every day could be your last so live it to the full, grab the bull by the horns and get out there, meet people and, if you can, give them a helping hand. If you can’t help them at least try to lighten their load by sharing a smile with them. Smiling makes others feel positive and it makes us feel good.

On a different note I heard about a man in Nashville who went into a waffle shop and started shooting when a young man stood up and disarmed him, no thought for his own safety he just didn’t want anyone dying while he could do something to stop it. People are recognising this man as a hero, and he is, but we can all do this. Someone with a gun expects people to run away from him (or her). Take them by surprise and run at them and they will panic. You may get shot but isn’t it better to be shot while trying to protect others? This man has a lot of love in his life and his heart, we should learn from him but only if we think we can make a difference. In my case it would be to distract him and make him focus on me to give others a chance to get out.

If we see someone hurting another, trying to kill others, don’t we owe it to ourselves to try and protect them from harm? If enough people stand up and shout Enough! Then we surely can turn the hatred that is so rife these days into something resembling love for each other and help our fellow human beings to feel safe anywhere on this planet.

The music today is from one of the two heroes of mine who are no longer with us yet both wished me a happy birthday on 27/04/2018 when I turned 64 (an age celebrated by the other 2 of the group remembered in this song).

What the holy bigwigs failed to mention: spirituality’s missing ingredient

This makes more sense than the God who leaves children in dangerous situations.

Pam Grout

“Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence everything is alright forever and forever and forever.”—Jack Kerouac

The God most of us believe in is an invention of man, fabricated for the sake of convenience. We accept this human-made God as an indisputable fact. But it makes no sense. If God is love, if God is perfect and if God is all the other beneficent descriptions we ascribe to him, why would he toss anyone into a lion’s den?

And pardon me for being cheeky, but why would anyone in their right mind want to hook up with a capricious and unjust god who gets his jollies from punishing them?

ACIM Lesson 103 is another attempt to set the record straight. It tells us that joy is what we should expect from God. It tells us that perfect happiness…

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I’m talking all about how to give They don’t act with much honesty

Funny how time seems to slip away when we have so much to do. Then when we can have some time to ourselves we tend to use it selfishly. One of the reasons I chose the song for this weeks post is the thoughts running through this week is that I will soon be off to New York and one of the sights I want to see is Strawberry Field, the tribute spot to John Lennon in Central Park. I also want to visit the 911 memorial and museum just to pay my respects to those who died that sad day when we all became Americans and I lost touch with quite a few people who I had been chatting to online and playing games with.

The death toll never tells the full story as some of those I lost touch with I think I would have lost touch with anyway, others may have been caught up in the tragedy and lost family in the devastation. Anyway, going back to my upcoming travels I have never been to NY before, in fact I have only once before been to the USA and that was to Anaheim CA, I also visited Santa Monica and other coastal areas before heading home again. That was two wives and three decades ago. I enjoyed the day trip to San Diego and the visit to Sea World, I know we have a Sea World near here but there aren’t the same attractions although the price is comparable to enter both.

I have not been to the Northern States before so this is not only the first East Coast visit it is also the first North visit. There are still more States and places I would like to visit, such as Seattle in Washington, Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit. I will just have to wait and see how money and time can manage to come together so that I may make further trips to the US.

So go away and leave me alone Don’t bother me

Well, here we are again, another Sunday evening and the panic is beginning to set in. If there was more support at work for dealing with the aftermath of some of our calls it wouldn’t be too bad. However, all the manager cares about is us hitting our target of 28 calls per day with an average call time of 15 minutes or less.

This call target is set on the proviso that we transfer 2 calls a day to the GC team so that will take 2 calls to 2 minutes and means the others can be slightly longer than 15 minutes to average out. I’ve started having counselling to deal with the stress of having to take call after call especially with some of the calls I deal with daily.

I hate the fact that we can’t discuss things with colleagues but then when everyone takes call after call there’s no time outside breaks and at break times we share our area with those coming for counselling, food bank clients and staff so there is no peace to discuss things. Management also don’t care what they promise, if your face fits you can get away with murder but if your face doesn’t fit then you get away with nothing. There are team meetings which some people never attend while others can’t even escape when they are ill. If you get a 1-2-1 meeting and ask for training to enable you to apply for other jobs internally and stand a chance of getting it then it will be offered at a “convenient time” which will never arrive – unless you are one of those who never do any wrong, even sitting in write-up for the last 15-20 minutes to force others to take the last call out of the queue so they can leave at 5 and not miss their early metro.

As you can imagine there is a lot of bad feeling within the team towards those few who never take the last call unless it is to get the team meeting started and finished earlier. Not that anyone enjoys the team meeting as we never find anything out at the meetings. We can find more information by talking to colleagues than is normally passed on via the team meetings and so they are a waste of everyone’s time.

He who knows does not speak He who speaks does not know And I go round in circles

Wow, Morgan Rice is a fabulous author. Her characters leap off the written page and become real. The stories are never straightforward there are twists and turns all the time. She merges heroes and villains with every twist and turn adding to the thrill of her writing. I have just finished the final book in the series “Of Crowns and Glory” and it gripped me so much I haven’t done anything else while reading it other than wanting to return to it and see how the main characters lives were intertwined and how things would pan out.

Some of the characters names were familiar (Thanos from the Marvel Guardians Of The Galaxy and Ceres from the (almost) name of a nearby town where I grew up). There was also a queen called Athena (familiar no doubt to any scholars), Claudius and Lucious. However, the story telling was absolutely brilliant and I recommend this series to anyone who enjoys action tales, heroic sagas and anyone who just enjoys a well written series of novels showing the dangers of keeping things going because of tradition.

Everything about Morgan Rice’s novels just flows and this series was not any different. Her characters are believable and the stories unfold in a manner that makes sense. She is self-published but don’t let that put you off as she is as good a story teller as anyone who has a publisher. Maybe not in the same league as Stephen King (the horror is believable but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of her stories). She writes as well as Jo Rowling and her characters are no less fascinating than others.

If I could write as well as Morgan I would be very happy indeed, yes there are one or two errors in the writing which may have been picked up by an editor but this shows how human she is. If you like fantasy novels, good characters and strong story lines with the characters intertwined all the way through the tale then give this lady a read.

Music as always is from youtube and isn’t mine, another George Harrison track written in 1968 but not recorded and issued until Gone Troppo in 1982.

I want a short haired girl Who sometimes wears it twice as long

If you were lucky/unlucky enough to wake to the white stuff falling from the sky again this morning I hope it didn’t lie where you are any more than it did here where I am. This afternoon the sleet turned to rain and the ground was wet and really slippy this afternoon when I went out to put our bins out (mine and the one for downstairs) it was also really cold so I thought the rain was going to turn back into either sleet or snow. Don’t know if it did either as I was so cold when I came back in that I sat snuggled on the sofa with a hot drink and wrapped up warm with the heating on.

I have started getting a lot of tweets in my timeline with pictures of beautiful asian women wearing sari’s and it got me thinking (again) of what it is that turns us on and attracts us to others. The first thing has to be looks as that is the most obvious first thing we notice. But what if you were blind, what would take the place of that initial aspect? Of course we are all different and no two people will be attracted in the exact same way to the same people. Not every two people will automatically be attracted to each other either. What is attraction, if we could work that out and bottle it we could make a fortune.

Is anyone aware of what it is they are looking for in a partner? Are they looking for something long term or just a brief fling? Is the person they are attracted to feeling attracted to them or just being friendly? Why do human beings flirt with each other? Is it just us or do some other animals flirt as well?

I have more questions than answers and that is probably normal when contemplating the intricacies of human relationships. There are people we can see every day at work and never give them a second thought as to whether or not they would make a good partner, long or short term. There are other people we can see once (just in passing on the street, bus, train or taxi queue) and find them occupying our thoughts for the remainder of that day, without fully understanding why this should be.

I find women attractive and love the smell of them, their perfume and their natural odour which could be the thing a blind man would notice when he can’t see the beauty on show. Any way, if anyone can offer any insight into attraction and why one person is attractive and not another when they are similar sizes, shapes and have almost the same hair colour please let me know in the usual manner.

Video this time is the Beatles original Old Brown Shoe which was a George Harrison B-Side. I don’t own the copyright to this song but feel free to listen and I hope you enjoy it.