I hate complaining like this. I’m afraid people will think I am just trying to get sympathy. But that is the last thing I want. I don’t need people’s sympathy; it does me no good; it doesn’t change the pain. The only thing I can do is put on another fentanyl patch, take another lyric, and chew up some more ms-contain, smoke another cigarette.

Fuck; I’m tired of this.

Last week I found out that I’ve worn out my left hip joint. If they had looked I’m sure we would have found the same on my right hip. My doctor said that if I wasn’t on so many pain killers already I would have felt the pain long ago. It’s like all my bodily systems have decided to fail, all in a short period of time. Sometimes I think that it has to stop because I don’t have any more systems to lose but it’s kind of like thinking I’ve filled up all available space for more tattoo’s, but when I attended a dharma Punx retreat in Oregon last year I saw just how much blank space I still have. No fear about running out of space for new tattoo’s.

I guess there’ no fear about running out of bodily systems I can lose either. I’m just not sure how many more systems I am willing to put up with losing. I’m afraid of becoming what my mother was before she died… a bitter old woman who took out her feelings on everyone around her. That possibility is not acceptable in any even remotely possible way. I will not become what my mother was. Yeah, I know, I can’t become a bitter old woman, but you know what I mean… whoever you are. I was writing this for myself, but I’ll put it up on burningelectrons.org so maybe someone out there will read this. Either writing this has had some therapeutic affect, or the last patch is kicking in because the pain seems to have lessened a bit. Either way, I’ll take the relief. Finally. I just hope I can get a few hours out of pain.

On another even more disturbing note, I got a notification that somebody is using one of the pictures I posted on one of the Internet sharing boards. I was curious, even a little proud that someone would think one of my shots was worth using. So I went online to see which picture he was using and I was completely grossed out to find out that some deviant jerk was using a picture I took when i was in South Africa of an engorged elephant penis. He put it on a page with similar engorged animal penises. Whatever prurient interest this guy has in animal penises, I don’t want one of my pictures to be used by him. I took the shot because I had never been that close to an aroused elephant before. I must have only been five meters away from him in the Addo National Park. I never meant for that picture to find it’s way online, it must have been uploaded as part of a Adobe Lightroom upload.

Now I have to find out how to pull that picture back in and erase it from any online service it might be stored in. I’ll let to know you know how that turns out. And no, I am not going to slip a copy of the picture in here.

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Dear Sangha,

The prayer requests have already gone out, so I’m writing to make a special request.

children in the story?

Please take a moment to pray for the expedient recovery of Ann Farley. This tragedy just happened today…

She nearly died and might not make it through the night, as she risked her life to save a young girl (my little cousin’s) life…

Ann is a very sweet lady and the Stepmother of my little cousins; 13-year-old Destiny and her 6-year-old sister Saige.

She took them out to the beach in Maine and Destiny, who swam out too far (as she has a tendency to do) got caught by a riptide and started to drown…

Ann went in to save her and got caught up in the riptide herself, but managed to save Destiny’s life…

She had cardiac arrest, and at first rescuers pronounced her dead, but then they were able to resuscitate her…

& she’s now “hanging on by a thread” in critical care and they’re not sure if she’s going to make it

Destiny (who is severely autistic) is said to be completely hysterical and has “totally lost it”

and both of the girls are in extreme trauma

Please lend any strength that you can in hopes that they pull through… Om Tare Tutare Ture Svaha

Thank you so much~ in much appreciation…

(and thank you Susan for your kindness in taking over the prayer requests for us, and to Josh…)

Sincerely,

Janelle

Right now it looks like I’ve finally found a browser I like. Now, if Apple would only implement support for flash.

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Comet and Duke relaxing

Favorite positions.

responsible for his death, but on further consideration and consultation with the vet, we decided that it was more likely that Buster had some cryptic heart problem that manifested itself in a massive myocardial infarction and death.  So he probably died in his sleep, or very close to his being asleep.  Just the way I would like to go (not by heart attack, but painlessly and quickly).

I miss Buster, but Comet missed him more.  Every morning, when we would come back from our walk, Comet would run up to the corner and look around expecting Buster to be there, waiting for us.  He needed a friend, and we don’t see Susan’s dogs often enough for them to fill that void.  I figured, this time, that instead of getting a cat and having to put up with all the problems of finding a dog friendly cat, that I would get a cat-sized dog to take Buster’s place.

I googled pet rescue and found Ginger’s Death Row rescue here in Seattle.  Ginger (or whoever) goes to one of several pounds in California, and brings dogs who are scheduled to be euthanized (sic) within a few days up to Seattle.  They are pets who just couldn’t find a home.  That kind of set off alarms because I didn’t want an asocial animal, but I decided to check them out.  When I got to the pet store where they do Gingers adoptions, the dog I was going to look at was already adopted.  But they had this little reddish brown wire hair Warwick terrier mix named Duke, who had a lot of potential.  He kind of hung  back in this cage and was a little standaoffish to begin with, but he started to warm up when I took him for a walk outside.  I thought he could be the dog.  But I couldn’t adopt a pet unless Comet approved of my choice so I drove home and picked up Comet so he could meet Duke and see if he liked him too.  I also picked up Susan because I trust her judgment more than I trust my own in these matters.    She  and Comet both liked Duke right away.  Comet immediately started playing with Duke the same way he played with Buster, but Duke could give a little more back in return.  I mean, Buster had formidable claws, but he was loath to use them, thankfully.  I always thought that Comet was playing a little to rough with Buster, but he played at least as rough with Duke, and Duke would come right back and instigate more attacks by his big brother. They wear each other out, which is good.

Duke

So, they are cool together.  Most of the day they sleep on the couch, but when they decide to play, they chase each other around my living room, through the halls and through the dining room and back to the living room, in a big circle, crashing in to walls as they go (it was raining yesterday so they couldn’t do all that outside).

Duke has surprisingly few problems. His major shortcoming is that he is just learning to not poop in the dining room.  Its taking a while because the weather has been bad so taking him out into the yard after he eats has been a problem, but he’s learning, slowly.  He has already learned what meditating is, and while he might not meditate himself, he leaves me alone when I am  on the cushion.

I still have a lot to learn about lap dogs (hes only 12 lbs).  I think he would like to get in my lap a little more than I let him, but we will work out an accomodation as we get used to each other.

I think that I lucked out again in my choice of dogs.  Comet was (is) the Perfect Puppy and Duke fits right in with Comet and me.  Comet shows a little jealousy sometimes;  he’s still my main dog and always will be, but Duke has already bonded with me and with Comet and with the house.  He even gets to walk with Comet off-leash for their first walk in the morning, around 5:30.  There are no other people around and no traffic at that time, so as long as the dogs stay on the same side of the street, I have no problem with their running freely.  Duke really reminds me of George when he chases after his big brother, Comet.  He has this big dog attitude, like when he is walking down the street he kind of struts with his head held high and that makes the ends of his ears flap as we walks, similar to the way George’s hair flopped.  Duke is cool. and I think that Comet is happy that I got him.  I know I am.

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Well, I was planning to go somewhere on my motorcycle yesterday, but it was raining and I’m a fair weather rider now.  So I spent the day fighting the pain.  It was bad yesterday.  So bad, it led me putting on a second patch for Friday.  The first one went on at about 5:30AM, the second wasn’t until noon.  I walked up and down in my living room, instead of going in circles as usual, because I could go  straight back and forth much faster, and the full about turn felt better.  Within 30 minutes the  second patch was taking effect, so I sat down to read about the life of Marpa.  The last thing I remember was that he was being sent to Maitripa to learn Mahajnapita(sic, or something like that),and suddenly it was 4pm. I’m lucky I woke up when I did, because I had too much drug on, or so I thought.  So Fri 2 got ripped off immediately.

I had sat trying to work for about 30 minutes (unsuccessfully), when the sentences finally started making sense again, and I could think, with little pain for a while at least.  I had planned on taking a ride, but sure enough, it was still raining.  At about that point I notice that Buster had been sleeping on hie ottoman for a long time.  Since it was near supper time, I reached over to wake him up.  But he was not here anymore.  He was dead. I went to wake him up, because it was time to eat.  I normally didn’t need to wake him up.  But when I touched him, he was cold.  It registered immediately, but that was not what I wanted to have happen, so I tried to pretend I didn’t feel that he was cold, and shook him again, but this time I noticed some mucus coming from his nose and  that the was in rigor already.  He must have died in his sleep.  I hope so anyway. That’s Buster, by the way, sitting on the steps of the back porch with Comet. Buster’s death has thrown me off. Comet too.  We both (Comet and I) still look around corners expecting to see him where he is supposed to be.  I find myself still giving his whistle when I come along 80th street at 27th.  Three single tone tweets.  Over and over, and he comes running out from under whatever plant he is trying to stay dry under today.  And meets us at the front gate, where he demands on a head scratch or he will be in a bad mood all day, no matter how many things I have in my hands at the time.

Image via Wikipedia

What a bummer.  Now, what do you do with a body of someone you used to love?  I don’t have enough wood for a pyre, nor do I have a place to do a real pyre.  I know when I die, whoever has my body can just toss it in the trash.  I am done with it, so, what difference does it make what you do with it.  Just toss it out in whatever manner is the cheapest, easiest way to get rid of it.  But before putting Buster in the trash, I called Susan to give her the news, and she would not hear about me putting him in the trash, She said to bury him.  I guess that is right, You shouldn’t just put a dead cat in the trash,  So I wrapped him in one of the blankets he used to sleep on, so it smelled familiar, and buried him under the plum tree at the back left of my property.  Between the tree and the fence.  I will need to find some medium sized rocks to pile on top of his grave, and figure out some way to keep them there, so they don’t roll away,  And then I was going to scratch something appropriate on the wood fence above his head.  That should do it.

I did go to my shrine room and say a ph’owa ceremony for his first day in the between.  I will try to incorporate some of the Phowa into each days meditation and one the 49th day do a full ceremony, asking that his mind fuse with Amitabha and reach his pure land where he can become a Buddha in one lifetime. It really is a bummer that he died.  Buster and Comet were really close friends and I really liked the way he used to curl up next to me every night while I was reading.  I miss that.  And I miss George.  It still makes me cry when I think of the two of them being gone.  Buster showed no symptoms.  There was no reason for him to die.  I hope that it was nothing that I left around.  I went through my memories of when and where I put on and took off my patches, and I think I accounted for all of them, I know that they had been flushed down the toilet.  And I’ve never see Comet drink from the Toilet.  It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t any other dog, so what was it?  I don’t think Judy could be mad at me enought to kill an innocent animal, but she is really pissed off at me.  I sure hope it wasn’t something she did,  That would be so bad.  That would be enough bad Karma to ensure rebirth in the lowest hells for a very long time,  Sure hope it wasn’t her

Two good friends gone.  IF I don’t get really attached to Susans new dogs, I only have one friend left, Comet, and it he were to die, I don’t think I would want to go on anymore myself..  But, he is healthy and there is no reason to suspect that he will be anything else than healthy. I just don’t think that I could take loosing one more friend  right now.  Plus, I think Comet is lonely, himself.  Next week he won’t be lonely. because Susans dogs are coming over for a week.  But after that, I think I will start looking a rescue dog to adopt.  Maybe a Jack Russell terrrier, or a Westie or even another Wheaton mix,  I just met a need wheaton terried this monrning and I will find out where he came from.  I jsut don’t want to get another dog that I will love more than Comet.  THat would really hurt him  and I don’t want to hurt him, I just want to give him a friend to hand out with.  That’s why I was thinking about a smaller dog.  Oh well.

I really want to try to type into this blog daily, its as good as writing in a journal, but it doesn’t give the sensual/tactical experience or writing witth a pen.  I think I will start my 1 year to live over again, and stop smoking this week.  I went to work out Friday morning and could smell cigarettes on my clothes.  Disgusting.  I finally put on another patch, in the eveneing, and it seemed to work ok.  I finally could read, at least I could read with one eye open, because of the double vision, and I went to sleep around midnight.

This morning when I got up and took Comet for his walk, at 5:30.  I automatically expected that Buster would follow us on our way out, but of course, Buster isn’t there so Comet and I went by our selves.  YEah, I think I need to start doing the One Year to Live practice again.

To: Barack Obama,

Listen, all that good rhetoric that Amnesty International says follows
what I really want to say. Listen! you need to just tell that MF that
you are going to put the detainees, the ones with evidence against
them that can be used in court, in the prison that is closest to his
back yard, and if he doesn’t like it, he should go take a flying leap
into the cesspool that he and GW Bush left this country in.

Listen! you have 60 senators. Tell the republicans to get real. What
they say doesn’t matter in the least because they are stupid, mean,
cruel people whose hearts ( if they have them) are not in the right
place. Listen! Tell them that you get more flies with honey than
vinegar, and they have been pushing vinegar on the people of the US
for long enough. We have learned our lesson. If what they stand for is
what Christianity is all about, we should become a Buddhist nation.

Listen! There is no other way to say it; Just tell them to fuck off.

There, I’ve said it. I managed to find compassion for Bush in the last
days of his term, it took a lot of meditation to do that. I could
never find that compassion for Cheney. He is a mean person. Tell him
to go live in China. He would fit in well there. (On the other hand, I
would have loved to see what would have happened to him during the
cultural revolution… reeducation time, baby!).

Oh… and close gitmo right now!

But wait, there is more…

I want you to investigate and prosecute those responsible for torture.

According to the bipartisan Senate Armed Services
Committee report, the previous administration’s Office of Legal
Counsel “distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws” and
“rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody.”

Please help establish and support a non-partisan, independent
commission of distinguished Americans to examine, and provide a
comprehensive report on policies and actions related to the
detention, treatment, and transfer of detainees after 9/11 and the
consequences of those actions, and to make recommendations for future
policy in this area. Such a commission needs to be independent, backed
by the full force of law, and adequately funded.

The U.S. government has a legal obligation to prosecute grave breaches
of the Geneva Conventions. I ask that you help establish this
commission of inquiry to live up to obligations and to help hold
perpetrators of abuse accountable. Moreover, I ask that you ask
Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a criminal investigation into
abuses and hold those responsible for violations accountable.

Finally, I would like you to ensure that the Administration produces
and publishes all remaining relevant policy memos that argued for,
documented, and established the basis for coercive interrogation,
detainee treatment and policy in the last administration. It is
important that we expose the truth about the abuses that were
committed in our name and hold the guilty responsible so that these
abuses do not happen again. Please let me know of your actions to hold
abusers accountable, and to uphold our obligations under law.

And in addition…

You need to go after the CEO’s and CFO’s and bankers and all those guys who caused this economic meltdown just so they could line their own pockets with filthy lucre.  What they did shows the real intention of the previous administrations lack of compassion for the common folk who live and work in the USA.  And you need to pay special attention to all those guys who floated housing securities and then bet against them; like Goldman Sachs and their partners.  They created the market and then bet that it would fail, talk about playing both ends. It didn’t cost them their houses, in fact, they made millions on shorting the market that they created in the first place.  They knew it was easy to take advantage of people who can’t keep up with the money boys, its like selling encyclopedias; every salesmen knows that they can sell more in a poor neighborhood than in an upper middle class one because there are people there who are trying to climb out of a hole that someone else put them in, and they want to give their kids any advantage they can give them. Or at least that’s the way it was before the internet and Wikipedia.

THey need to pay for what they did.  They need to give back those millions or billions and then pay a penalty on top of that.  Maybe they would have a little more compassion if they were forced into the same wealth class as the rest of us.

We have to make people know that greed is a bad thing, that it hurts people who are just trying to live a good American life with the hope that their kids will have a better world to live in than they had growing up.  That is the American dream and we have lost it because of the Bushes and Rayguns and Cheney’s.  Kids today know that it is unlikely that they will do better than their parents, and in fact, they are probably right in that, but you have to make sure that know who caused this problem because Fox news (sic) is going to tell them that you caused it and that the Bushes ruled over the golden years.

Get out there and fight dirty.  Make sure you point the finger at the right people, the ones on top.  Do something!

Sincerely

Stephen R Lasky

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and soon at Picasa (I like the association with maps on Picasa). I’ve gone through the catalog of passable pictures and re-massaged them with Curves and crops so they concentrate more on the places that we visited. Not that you can tell where we were, but I decided that I spent too much time concentrating on faces and didn’t spend enough time on the physical surroundings that we found ourselves in.

While I was reevaluting the images, I found a lot of shots of the Taj Mahal.  Thats the building (right), not the singer (left).  That must be the most photographed building in the world.  Part of the reason there are so many is that I finally hit a spot in the golden hour when the sun was shining.  I hadn’t had that opportunity anywhere else during our travels.  Or at least, this was the first time that I was at a photogenic site when the conditions were right.

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This is a test to see what I have to do to share videos online.  Nope, ran into the 100 meg limitation again.  This time with a file that had been exported to iTunes. The file is about 250 megs.

I have no idea when the last time I saw some without double vision unless I close one eye.  I can even see what I am typing here without db vision making it hard to see whether what I type makes sense. Bummer.

I ordered my iPad.  Got the  best you could get; 64 gigs of storage space and 3G + wifi. That the best you can get at this time.  I will have to sign up for this with ATT even though I already have it for my iPhone.  I figure I will just add the 3G when I know that I will be out of range of a wifi connection.  Its going to be sooo coool.

utube says the address that I uploaded this video to (despite the fact that its too long… I’ve seen other long vids on Utube, like the IPL (that is the Indian Premier League.. Cricket… for those of you who don’t know).  videos… the URL is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrdQe3TWgEo

This is a short discussion of Ashoka’s Pillar by Stephen Batchelor with the Sangha on the Footsteps pilgrimage, although we weren’t a sangha yet when this was filmed.

Hmm, filmed, it wasn’t filmed, it was recorded on digital video.  Filmed… that whole term may be becoming obsolete.  Its pretty amazing how fast things are changing now.  The digital revolution is not only here, if you don’t watch out, it will just pass you by, its moving so fast.  All the old geezer’s are going to get left in the dust (I don’t include myself in that old geezer catagory this time).

/As soon as I figure out a quick way to make ten minute segments of  the teachings that I recorded on the pilgrimage, I will get them up on UTube or on picassa or both.

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