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humanity i love you

(Dear Reader-If you are looking for an analysis of the humanity i love you poem, it follows the poem)

e.e.cummings

Humanity i love you because you would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both 

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

I offer this as possibly the best poem ever written. Its inner meaning is terribly deep and although it was written many decades ago, it reflects the American condition of present times. A perfect example of the theme of this poem is Monsanto.  This company has made a tremendous fortune from the poisoning and genetic rape of the entire ecosystem of the planet earth and all its plants, animals and peoples...”would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain”.  Dr. Joseph Mengele… you too.  

How callous some of us can be, how sociopathic, how psychopathic…madness married to technology.  Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely…just because so many “would rather black the boots of success than enquire…”  See where that leads?

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humanity i love you analysis

….”that you would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch chain”.  In other words, we fawn over the rich and famous, envy them, try to be them but never stop to consider what we corrupt within ourselves along the road of becoming.  The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is an interesting and excellent extension of this theme. Can anyone actually achieve great financial success without sacrificing their soul…and the souls of many others? Were we all not so willing to throw principles aside to achieve our personal “success”, this would be a much different and more beautiful world. Just ask Bernie Madoff, Hosni Mubarek or Kadafi…or maybe Bill Clinton, George Bush or Barak Obama… or Monsanto that poisons the entire world for their profits.  Just how many souls are dangling from those watch chains?

(all three poems appear under the “Great Poems” category link under “Topics List” to the right )

It was the chess match of the century, the eagle pitted against the bear, the tempermental and high strung American Bobby Fischer versus the formidable Russian grandmaster, Boris Spassky.

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I loved to play chess and had participated in many tournaments, so in the summer of 1972, I was glued to my TV watching Bruce Pandolfini run the play by play on my local public broadcasting station.  And now, Fischer pulls a daring rook takes pawn…ooooo my!

I chuckled to myself, noting Pandolfini’s long, wiry hair and blue jeans, not suspecting that I would be introduced to him in the near future.  Pandolfini was conforming to the counter culture’s non conformity.  From my point of view as a young female, he was a refreshing variation from the generally nerdy males that I encountered on the chess circuit.  Pandolfini was clearly a great player in his own right.  That historic Fischer-Spassky match took place in Iceland and made world news every evening as they see sawed back and forth…one day Fischer won, next day Spassky…on and on.  Finally, finally, Fischer took the match.  America had the final triumph at long last and Fischer took flight.

In early ’73, I moved to New York City from the Long Island nest that had sheltered me throughout my childhood, teens and college years.  It wasn’t long before I met Jeffrey Kastner at a chess exhibition at Macy’s.  He was already a chess master and only a few ranking  points from the coveted grandmaster title.  It was Jeffrey who introduced me to Bruce Pandolfini at the Marshall Chess Club.  A few months later, Jeffrey became President of the prestigious Manhattan Chess Club and he proudly invited me over to visit him in his new office.  I was only too happy to oblige.

Bobby Fisher had gone into hiding following his win over Spassky.  He was being sought by every media organization in the world but no one could find him.  His disappearing act was, in itself, big news at that time.  I arrived at the Manhattan Chess Club (Fischer was a member) and Jeffrey showed me around.  We went into his office where he smugly grinned at me and said “Nobody knows where Bobby is, but I do.  He gave me his address.”  I looked at him, smiled and said “I will bet you that I can tell you where he is.”  A bold statement, to be sure.

“Bullshit!”, he snorted.  ”Nobody knows except me and I haven’t told anyone!”  I smiled again, closed me eyes and began….slowly….”He is in the USA…west coast….California…Los Angeles…Wilshire Boulevard…10961…

I opened my eyes to see that all the color had drained from his face.  He was nervously reaching into the back  pocket of his jeans where he withdrew his wallet and pulled out a folded slip of paper.  ”Ha!”, he exclaimed.  ”You missed one of the numbers!”

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Wheel of Fortune and the Angel in the Casino

Throughout my life, from time to time, I have been graced by the presence of

An Angel

angels.  Mind you, I have never gotten to see them, but they have whispered to me.  Sometimes, the tickle of their breath against my ear has sent shivers down my spine.  One night, I heard them singing and I couldn’t get over the perfection of the harmony of their choir.  My bedroom window actually rattled with the lower notes.  There was no mistaking it for any hallucination.  It was spine tingling.  I could hear both the blended choir and each individual voice, simultaneously.  I told my mother about it the next morning, but she remained clearly skeptical of me.   Years later, as she drove home late at night on Sunrise Highway, she heard it too.  They were so loud that her car windows rattled.  It freaked her out, but I was forever vindicated when she shakily apologized to me for thinking me daft.

But what does this have to do with Roulette?  Or Hughes?

We were all quite broke, the four of us.  Richard Hughes called his adoptive parents who were living on social security and shamefully begged them for money.  The rent was overdue, the car payment was about to be due, and there was no food.  The money arrived the next day via Western Union.  Richard handed me the  crisp $100 bill and said “Here, take this to a casino and see if you can run it up.  If you lose it, it’s ok.”

Well, no, if I lost it, it wouldn’t be ok, not at all.  I reluctantly took hold of the bill and set out on my mission.  The other three remained at the apartment.

I decided to go to the Stardust (that will be important later) ….

I sat down in my favorite spot and cashed in the entire $100 requesting $5 chips which were pushed toward me in a neat stack.  I looked at my scrawny stash and I felt my heart sink; only twenty precious chips and no room for error.  The nearly crushing pressure of such overwhelming responsibility had me trembling with fear.  But I knew better than to play like that, so I fixed my stare on the spinning wheel, slowed my breathing down and silently asked to be given a number.  Getting myself to a level of deep relaxation was key.

Suddenly, I was out of my body, floating close to the ceiling, looking down at the wheel, the table, the lady to my left, the stacks of chips, ash trays and cocktail glasses, and other players at the far end of the table.  The dealer released the ball and it sped around the wheel.  Then the voice came in the usual soft whisper from my left side…”seven”, it told me. I willed my body to pluck a single, precious five dollar chip from my stack and placed it on seven…and seven it was.  Pay the lady….$5 x 35.  I watched myself reach out and take the chips.  Then the voice softly spoke the next roll…ten.  If only I had done what I saw Craig do…reinvest the bet…if only.  But instead,  I drew a single $5 chip and slid it over number 10…pay the lady, $5 x 35.

But then there came a silence, a terrible silence.  I was puzzled by the silence.  What is the number?  O or OO, no doubt.  I did not place a bet that roll and the number was OO.  Nobody had covered the zeros on that roll…house takes all.

The dealer swept the table with his arms and quickly gathered up all the chips and rapidly stacked them…but I had no chips among them, having withheld my bet.  And then the voice spoke to me one last time.  Again, I bet just a single $5 chip…and again, pay the lady.  But then, something dreadful happened.  The woman seated to my immediate left finally noticed that I was betting  just a single chip each roll and hitting every time.  She became excited and stretched to be ready to follow my next bet but as she stretched, her ample bosom knocked over my pool of stacked chips and the noise of the cascade broke my “float”.

I fell back into my body with a thud, turned and scowled at the woman, and then angrily demanded to cash out.  I was so angry!   But I knew that I had covered the rent and the car and that there would be plenty left to buy food for awhile.  My fury turned to gratitude by the time I reached the apartment.  That money brought such relief to everyone.

Boccaccio's Lady Fortune

Had I the utter, unshakable faith that Craig had, had I kept on reinvesting the bet, everything would have been different.  But I didn’t. Even heaven couldn’t save me from my own fear.  Mastering that lesson lay well in the future.  The universe just keeps handing you the same lesson over and over again until you conquer it, at which point it calls up the next big lesson and the game begins anew.

Ultimately, the only thing that any of us has the potential to control is our own personal consciousness, our own personal fears, and how we go about the business of our own personal growth.  The universe will always grab hold of our greatest fears and shove them in our face.  That, my friends, is the basic program that runs silently in the background as the wheel of life spins round and round.  What are your deepest fears and what will you do with them?  How will you play the hand that you are dealt?

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• Roulette Las Vegas Style (adriaen22.wordpress.com)

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Roulette Las Vegas Style

When I first moved to Las Vegas, I preferred playing Roulette at the Hilton.

Because I am so short, I take the second seat from the wheel whenever I can get it.  Chair number two affords me access to all the numbers without tipping my bottom to the world.  What I saw one night will stay with me until the day I die.

I was sipping on my Smith and Curran, betting the minimums, not doing poorly, and not doing well.   In the distance, a short, muscular square jawed man began to approach the wheel.  He was middle aged and really shouldn’t have been wearing his shirt quite so tight, nor with so many buttons undone.  Grayish chest hairs curled around a thick gold chain and a pendant of the number “32”.  He said his name was Craig and that he loved number 32.

He sat squarely on the chair at the foot of the board and I remember thinking that he’d have trouble placing bets up at the top end where I was.  He cashed in for $100 chips, two stacks of them. , and then he reached into his pants pocket and drew out a piece of green cloth which he placed squarely in front of him.  It was a section of old Roulette board felt of the number “32”.  He placed several $100 chips straight up on number 32…no other bets.  “Idiot”, I thought.  The ball began to spin around, around, around.  At last it began its decent toward the number wells….ping, ping, ping, plop….32, no way!  I watched the dealer counting up the considerable winnings, and then slide them over to Craig.  Craig threw back some of the black chips to the dealer, took back his original bet, and then stacked all the rest on 32.  In essence, Craig was letting it ride…insane.

Once again…around, around, ping, ping, plop, 32.  Bullshit!!! But once again, Craig was paid a fortune.  He tried to let it all ride again, but the pit boss was summoned.  The betting limit was explained to Craig, so he adjusted his wager…yeah, number 32…only number 32…and yes, it hit again.  By this point, I was in such a state of shock and disbelief that I was unable to calculate the odds against the number 32 coming up three times straight, much less the amount of money sitting in front of Craig.  They had stopped paying him in chips by that point (he had them all) and were giving him notes instead.

He bet the table limit on 32 once again, for the fourth time.  My entire being was trembling…what if 32 hits again?  It’s so damned unlikely.  But so were rolls one, two and three.  I had reached a critical point.  I was beginning to believe.   When 32 hit for the fourth time, Craig threw a pile of his blacks to the dealer and abruptly stood up to cash out.  He strode away, reeking with triumph.  I am sure that he marched straight to the cashier’s cage.  This experience taught me a big lesson about blind belief in odds.  And I swear that lesson has served me well ever since.  Nearly two years  later, I was destined to have my own Craig moment.

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Hughes Survived This

crash into a Beverly Hills neighborhood.  There are photos of the wreckage which impacted me (no pun intended)>  The crash occurred on July 7, 1946.http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/XF-11_crash_site.htm

Hughes finished his spectacular slide in the back of the house at 803 Whittier Dr as you will see from the map in the article.

Now, in 1985, I went to work for the magnetic and enigmatic Dennis Holt at Western In’l Media Corp.  Somewhere in the late 1980′s around the time that Dennis married my ex PGW co-worker, Brooks Oliver, he bought the house at 820 Whittier, a few doors down from the place where Hughes had crashed 40 years earlier.

I had worked with Brooks at PGW in the late 1970′s and she often mentioned that she wanted to live on Whittier Drive. When you wish upon a star…

Anyway, Media Director Jody Caldwell,  the woman who made behemoth Western In’l into what it was operationally, was in her late 60′s by the time I started working there.  She liked me quite a bit and one day when we were shooting the breeze in her office, she started telling me about her childhood and such. I was totally unprepared to hear her casually tell me that she had worked as Howard Hughes’ personal secretary on Romaine Street.  But she just went silent and would not respond to my excited questions. She just looked down at her desk and clamped her mouth shut.  Oops. It seems that Hughes’ command for secrecy extended well beyond the grave.  But then again, he wasn’t really dead yet, was he?

Hughes Headquarters

In the 50′s, Hughes lived in a house located on the property of the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas.  I am, by the oddest of odd coincidences, one of the few private citizens ever invited to stay in that house overnight.  This happened in the early 1980′s.  The television station that Hughes owned, KLAS-TV, was just a few yards away.  The history of the Hughes house can be read here: http://www.8newsnow.com/story/964897/history-of-the-klastv-howard-hughes-house

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I was sharing an apartment in Las Vegas with Richard

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Apparently, there is a Harry Hughes who also claims to be an illegitimate son of Howard Hughes who, like Richard, claims to have an implant near his eardrum that connects to a satellite.   Here is an interview with Harry. 

I will say that Richard was a great deal more grounded than this Harry fellow.  Richard was always measured, factual and specific as well as in possession of documents that supported his claims. It is Harry’s claim of having that satellite-linked implant that captures my attention.  Harry mentions Katherine Hepburn and rumors of her having a son which he surmises might be himself, but he bears no resemblance to her.  Richard, on the other hand, has her facial structure and complexion.

Katherine Hepburn

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Strange Universe

March 23, 1994 RIP

Ronald Opus

Synchronized Universe| The Strange Suicide of Ronald Opus

March 23, 1994

It was the habit of the old man, when in an argument with his old wife, to grab his shotgun and wave it at her in a threatening manner.  Sometimes, he even aimed it straight at her and pulled the trigger.  That’s why he never put any ammunition in it.

They lived together in an apartment on the ninth floor of a ten story building with a son who witnessed these shotgun shenanigans many, many times.  So when the old lady cut off the son’s financial support, and unbeknownst to the old man, the son loaded the shotgun and waited.   He hated them both; two birds with one stone.

So imagine the shock for the old man when six weeks later, there he was, for the millionth time, waving that shotgun at his wife.  She was running past of one of the windows as the old man raised the gun and aimed it at her, incoherently ranting and trembling with rage… for the millionth time.  But for the very first time, as he pulled the trigger, a burst of buckshot came exploding out from the muzzle.  It was only because he was trembling with fury that he missed her and the shot went straight out the window.

The old man stood frozen in place as his mind struggled to process all that had just happened.  He knew that gun had no ammo, but that was the least of his problems.  His mind was stuck on something else; that the body of a man had flown by the window just as the buckshot flew through it.   He ran to the window and looked down to see the lifeless body of an apparently young man caught by a safety net at the eighth floor level.  The net had been left in place by a window washing crew that was coming to finish up the next day.

Which is why the young man, who was intent on committing suicide that day in March ’94, did not know the futility of his attempt  and did not expect a net to be there and thus jumped from the floor above the old couple.  He died, not from falling, but from the shots that came through the window just as his head passed… that came from a gun which was thought to be unloaded, but was surreptitiously loaded by an enraged son trying to murder his mother by making good use of his father’s cartoon like behavior.

It was later learned that Ronald Opus, our deceased jumper, had attempted on multiple occasions to arrange the murder of his own mother, and having failed, decided to part from her the only way he could.  He would have survived but for the other young man trying to kill his mother and some exquisite synchronization in our universe.

The irony of this is simply overpowering.    But alas, dear reader, this story is just an urban legend. It did sound unlikely, did it not?

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/accidentsmishaps/ss/ronald_opus_7.htm

How often have you heard that truth is stranger than fiction?  There are so many bizarre true stories out there.  We think we understand reality, but we don’t.  There will be a collection of these true but stranger than fiction tales added over time, so take the RSS feed or add yourself to the subscribe list to receive email alerts as new articles roll out.  Enjoy-

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Today’s recommended site:
http://www.unknowncountry.com

Dr. Cyril Wecht recently completed an autopsy on the exhumed remains of Rebecca Zahau.  Dr. Wecht confirmed that all neck vertebrae were intact. The most important and glaring demystification of the evidence surrounding Rebecca Zahau’s death rests with this single, damning fact.  It is this one fact that brings the case to a razor like singularity-that Rebecca could not have leaped, rolled, nor slithered over a railing to her death from the height of a balcony because of one simple reason-all of these produce momentum and a force which becomes focused at the point where the rope engages the neck just under the jaw.  This kind of force crushes delicate neck vertebrae.

Imagine tying a 100 lb weight to the end of a rope and then dropping it over a rail, the other end tied to the leg of a bed.  There’s a pretty strong snap once the length of the rope is reached, then quite a bit of swinging.  The bones in the neck cannot sustain this force; they fracture, they crush.  In fact, this type of hanging from such a height can actually produce decapitation.  Rebecca had intact neck vertebrae…all of them.

Add to this the fact that a neighbor had heard a woman’s scream before midnight.  Rebecca was found with part of her shirt stuffed in her mouth.  Oh, that’s right…she screamed because it suddenly dawned on her that she was about to commit suicide in an impossible way so she had to stop everything, unbind her hands, hop around looking for a shirt to stuff in her mouth lest she scream again, rebind her hands and then go for it one last time. (The coroner had speculated that Rebecca thought she might scream, so she stuffed part of her shirt in her mouth to ensure that she wouldn’t)  But there was a scream.

So, ask yourself, why is the San Diego Coroner ruling this obvious murder a suicide?  There’s something really, really nasty lurking under the surface here.   There really is.

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