When Did Reagan REALLY Die?
What a day! The
CW death of Conservative hero Ronald Wilson Reagan has unleashed a plethora of prepared packages of old news footage and new statements by still-alive people who were
'THERE' at the revolution.
When Clinton became president, the horrible possibility that he would have to
PRESIDE over the death and
burial of dear Ronnie ever hovered over all our heads. I remember commenting on this, hoping
RR would hold on until the usurper was
GONE, and, lo and behold, it seems to have been so---to a
GREAT INFLECTION POINT.
Want to stretch your
conspiracy theories? What if
RR DID die, in
FACT,
before "W" became president, and the power elites managed to keep him, and the story,
ON ICE, until now? I know---that's
TOO FAR FETCHED. After all, some
DOCTOR surely had to take care of the guy, as he slipped into Alzheimer-hood.
However, maybe, behind all our
SCENES, the
anti-Liberals are more deft and cunning than we can imagine. Perhaps, given the historical playing out of elections, with known ballot-stuffing by
LEFTISTS, the top dogs, epitomized by dear Ronnie, decided to fight fire with fire.
After all, who,
exactly, has
SEEN the "Howard Hughes-like" recluse, and when was the last time? As for me, whether this conjecture is true or not---likely
NOT---it would serve
LEFTISTS "RIGHT"!
GOOD NEWS FOR BUSH!
No doubt I'm
'SPECIAL', since I'm a political junkie with plenty of free time, but it just seems to me that Bush has to get a huge
BUMP from all the clarifying
NOOSPHERIC wavelength plucking of the electromagnetic spectrum having to do with Reagan. I, myself, first read about the turn for the worst on Drudge. It was only when I turned on Fox news that I saw the permeating
1911-2004 time segment trying to contain Reagan, and this ineluctably led to furious channel flipping. Good old
C-Span FED ME, JACK, by re-playing all his most memorable
speeches.
God, how
"I" misses Reagan! Just remember the onslaught of
LEFTISTS since he "
died" = left office in 1988! What just came to mind is Hitler getting stopped by the Russian winter. Just as we've had to endure so many weenies who served Clinton, the last three years, on TV, it's
NOW TIME to really
RE-LIVE the 1980's, by trotting out all those true Reaganites who were there at the revolution. Never forget that his
REVOLUTION is far from over!
posted by James at 9:49 PM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com
Ah Wilderness---being the age of 12 when 62!
Yesterday, the very universe conspired to make me
Transcendentally HAPPY, by gifting me with a
PLAY-DAY subbing experience of a lifetime. Having become a realist, with less than a week to go for all school districts, except Ashland, when I ended the assignment the previous Friday, I expected not to be called anymore, while I hoped I'd get at least a 'crumb' or two. Sure enough, on Wednesday and Thursday, two different teachers had to take some time off, or lose it, so I grabbed a couple of 'cherries' in the afternoons. As for Ashland, I figured there'd be no chance of getting called, because the pool of available subs would be huge, and the 'preferred providers' set, itself does not include me. Even so, I was prepared to serve, if I was called. Also, knowing that Friday would be my last slim possibility, since it's a big day for subbing, after 9:30 P.M., when the sub-finder system stops calling out, I called it, myself, regularly.
Surprise PRIZE!
Around 10:30 P.M., the most incredible subbing day of my life was offered. When I heard it was the
Ashland Middle School, pure joy provoked a happy laugh, and when told it was for
sixth graders, said thrill was torqued even higher. Then, the teacher left specific plans, the hearing of which almost kept me from being able to fall asleep. All at once I was that child, who absolutely believes in Santa Claus, on Christmas Eve!
The PLAN, Stan!
Yesterday was to be divided into two parts, with a
track meet in the morning, then a short walk to a
beautiful park to take lunch, and lastly, an afternoon playing there, focused on the fine swimming pool.
Double "Trouble"
I didn't have much to
DO, except
BE THERE among the kids. There must have been six or more classes; so maybe 150-200 twelve year olds were gathered on the track on a warm and cloudless day---perfect weather for such an occurrence, and for
SUNBURN. We were supposed to stay in classes, but the 'herding cats' rule happily prevailed. As the specific events were rolled out, those who wanted to could simply gather at the starting line, and one by one, participate in the competition.
Unfortunately, since I didn't know any of the students, I couldn't really be a part of the action, such as when one class cheered on one of their members. Another problem for me was soon apparent. Paradoxically, the arrival of this subbing 'Christmas present', and the opening of it, quickly presented both a
bummer AND an
opportunity.
Time STOOD STILL
Remember how a day seemed to last
FOREVER when you were a
kid? I've long been quite cognizant of this, but the longer time has gone on---i.e. I've 'aged'---the more this becomes mostly a
mere memory and
NOT an
experience. Well, yesterday, as one race followed another one, I slowly
became a member of the twelve-year-old tribe. The shock of it simultaneously made me a clock-watcher, since I very early understood that I was in for a
LONG, LONG DAY, and I couldn't wait for it to end,
AND a reluctant participant with those particular students who related with me.
Gaming GAMUTS
Because my main job was not to
TEACH, but mostly just to
BE THERE, after taking roll, few words were spoken between me and my class of
22 twelve year-olds. I simply followed the teacher across the hall, and marched in our group to the field. However, there are always some students who want to relate with me, some who are available for a furtive exchange and some who eschew any connection. Too, keeping order was part of my job, so I had to talk to certain individuals, randomly. Mind,
ALL the kids were great, and
they enjoyed the
ENDLESS DAY immensely. There was the bookish girl who wanted to
not be part of the crowd, who glommed onto me from the get-go, and always seemed to be near me, especially when we walked to and fro the places of fun. As the track meet wore down, I was pleased to see her cheering on one of her friends. At the start of one 400-meter race, I closely watched the runners and chose one guy to bet on, based on his running form. I told a few of the spectators, also, and when he won, there were kudos for Mr. Crystal.
There was one guy with a soccer ball who was the first guy to seem to want to relate with me. He was a solid athletic type, very personable, and I saw him participate in a couple of races, doing pretty well. But, when the 800-meter race started, he ran like he had a pole up his butt, or like he had a painful rash between his buns. Of course, this got the attention of all his classmates, eliciting much wonderment and many laughs. Since it's a long run, though, on the first backstretch he stopped such silliness and jogged lazily along. On the second go round, he mimicked the first style, but in the last twenty yards or so, he totally went over the top by hopping on one foot towards the finish line. This caused the 'judge' to pull him off the track and disqualify him.
The buzz among his mates was high, and you can bet what he did will be what they remember the most about the day. Before he joined us, on the side of the hill where we watched from, somebody said he had been given $13 to lose every race! Eventually, I got to play Father Confessor, when he climbed up to be with us. It was all too funny! He claimed to have a bad knee, at the same time as he was proud of making so many of his friends laugh. When told of the rumor involving the $13, he was indignantly dismissive, wondering where such a story began. The truly humorous result was his concern about what his father would say and do, if/when he gets a referral for his actions.
BEING THERE, and SMILING
Talk is not all its cracked up to be. In fact, you could equate it with the FOG OF WAR in the noospheric realm. More than a couple of the students in my class asked why their regular teacher wasn't there. I could feel their hurt, since they couldn't understand how she could miss this very fun day to be with
THEM. This was just one more piquant example of the real
LOVE possible in a classroom, and I confess that all the classes I subbed for at this school epitomized this. For one thing, these sixth graders spent the whole year in
one class, except for a few electives, so it's not like high school---you really get to know each other,
and the teacher. This means for them, when a bald, gray-bearded old man is the replacement for their loved regular teacher, for a lot of them time is needed to be comfortable around him.
This is where
SILENCE and
SEEING trump mere spoken words. One of the assuaging habits I've discovered, unintentionally, has to do with taking roll. Knowing how many kids are in a class, to double check marking the absences, I count, one-by-one, the
'HEADS' in the room. This is a 'magical' way of being able to look into the eyes of my 'customers', if only for a fleeting few seconds.
Am besten, doing it twice heightens the connectivity, since we both get to view each other to confirm our
BEING THERE, which needs
NO words. In this regard, yesterday, since I got to spend from 9:00 A.M. until 3:00 P.M. in the whole collection of sixth graders, and most importantly, they got to see me over that
LONG TIME, in their experience, as the day wore on you could feel the relaxing of tensions due to a stranger
being THERE.
There were so many quickie vignettes, that a whole book could be written! On the walk back at the day's end, by chance the trio of girls included one who asked if I had anything she could eat, since she'd hardly eaten anything for three days. She said she didn't like eating! Mind, she was definitely
NOT bulimic, looking as healthy as the next girl. So, I told her I'd done many long fasts, and was a vegetarian, whipping out my bag of raw almonds and giving her a handful. She was very appreciative, mentioning that her brother and sister were also like me, eschewing meat.
In the PARK
It was after lunch under the trees on the grass that time almost stood still, for me. Everybody, except for 18 boys, or so, went swimming. They met on the baseball field and proceeded to manage to agree on playing---I decided to sit in the dugout and do my job thusly. What an
EXPERIENCE!
Lunch had ended at 12:30, and I'd filled time picking up the garbage they'd left after lunch, before starting to watch the game. Somehow, one o'clock finally arrived, and already so much had gone happened on the diamond, that when I looked at the time, I was
horrified! I had a pair of books along, so I tried to read in order for time to pass more quickly. My early job training has me ever desirous of
DOING SOMETHING, so just to sit and
WATCH the guys play ball,
AND socially interact, was a
timeless HELL. To boot, their incessant 'arguing' = working out of decisions, was too robust to ignore, disturbing my reading, so I
HAD TO pay attention to
THEM. Knowing there were ninety
LONG minutes until we were to leave the park really cut me to the quick.
Another factor is that I "
Hate" baseball, in and of itself, since it's such a boring game. But a funny thing happened on the way to the
2:30 FORUM. Even as I completely
suffered each interminable minute, starting about an hour into the track meet, around 11:00 A.M., my
knowing about subjective
TIME became the
re-
experiencing of it, through merging with each one of the players. How to put it?
Again, the
GAMUT of possibilities between the guys was amazing. For one thing, over the
LONG ninety minutes especially, there was a turnover, as some quit to go swimming, and some swimmers decided to play some long ball. It was
RAMPANT ENERGY on display. This is why
TIME went so slow when I was a kid, because physically in my youth, each minute included the
maximum amount of enjoyable
PLAYFUL ACTION. Another aspect of
BEING THERE was the
ETERNAL RETURN expressed as each inning came to an end. With piqued attention requiring input, the interplay between each player who repetitively batted, say, including their
SPOKEN WORDS, was like taking in the entire electromagnetic spectrum in one
SHOT---I think you're going to like this picture! That is, there was this guy, who
NEVER said a word, and there was this other guy who was one of the centers of the
VERBAL ACTION, and everything in between.
The Answer to "Why a FIGHT"?
A week ago Wednesday, I broke up a fight at Ashland High School. In the back of my mind was the wondering about why the two guys developed a grudge. And, here I was at the very same Ashland Middle School, where as little boys, they may have 'crossed swords', and never resolved it! Well, there was this one skinny guy playing baseball, yesterday, who was a terrible hitter. He seemed to be well enough liked and a part of the group, as he did his share of talking, a lot of which had to do with explaining that he didn't know how to play baseball. Having to spend so many hours watching these kids, specifically the boys, allowed me to notice the standouts, who are surely going to be some of the future varsity team members when they reach High School. The competition was intense, mostly having to do with lawyerly debating about what to do, and who's batting after whom, etc. As the day came to an end, the side with the skinny bad hitter was up to bat. While they waited in line to hit, one of the 'athletes' slapped the skinny guy, over some indiscernible comment, and it wasn't a playful slap. I yelled out, "Hey, stop that!" The slapper instantly gently gave a love tap to his friend, and the slappee remained unflappable. It wasn't much of a problem, actually, as you could see the competitive spirit in the over-excited hitter. It was like he was ready for
SOME FOOTBALL, all psyched up, with the need to hit somebody. Even so, I wondered if something like this was what formed the feud fought out, last week.
When the day finally ended, I
KNEW I had lived something very special. By the way, I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised at the elongation of subjective time, because
every class I sub for seems to last forever. Even when in situations filled with focused activities, such as watching a video on volcanoes for sixty minutes, as on Thursday afternoon, maybe because I'm in the midst of so many young people who are
ALWAYS experiencing stretched time, the swing of the second hand seems to make each minute as slow as possible, much slower than when I'm alone at home, doing my own thing.
posted by James at 10:12 AM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com
Of Hugs and Thugs
Well, it looks like we've made it through another closing school cycle. It's my opinion that it's the
WEATHER that leads 'stupid' humans by the 'good or bad' nose, and as usual, America is ahead of all tribal packs. Forget about all the ongoing divisive problems with public education, such as the recent Brown verses Board of Education 50-year celebration,
AND the horrible state of so many of the urban schools.
Compare service in the military to servitude in schools.
When there was a requirement for males to register for the draft, which led to most of them actually joining up for at least two years, for those who came out alive, one of the most definitive gains was the
'seeing the world' aspect. That is to say, whether leaving the states or not, every soldier, sailor and Marine
DID leave their home and spent a long time with people, and in places, he'd never otherwise experience. Being forced to take orders, for example, from a person you'd consider your racial or intellectual inferior, and to live among members of the melting pot of America, certainly had to make a major impact on one.
Just so wrt public schooling, which goes on for so many of the most impressionable years of growing up. No doubt, quite a few of the power elite send their meant-to-rule offspring to
PRIVATE institutions, and these days
home schooling is on the rise for them as well.
However, it's the
yearly CYCLE that may be at the deepest core of each of our up-bringing. The four big
SEASONS provide the spice of
LIFE! Each one of them has something going for it, and each person can like one more than the other. Hence a Rush Limbaugh can proudly proclaim he prefers autumn because he's a huge football fan. Of course, throughout each person's life, as the body-mind ages and hopefully matures, in the big
SEASONING this spanning
HUMAN BEING can be, big changes can come about in preferences.
School's out FOREVER!
Being
FREE is the
BIG one. Hence, I believe after some thirteen years, from the age of five until eighteen, of constantly more onerous school days, when the end of each year's 'jail time', in June, comes around, everybody is totally
HAPPY and relieved. To have a full
SUMMER of good
WEATHER in which to
PLAY, with few
DEMANDS, has to be like heaven on earth.
Free at LAST!
A good way to comprehend this is to consider the entire range in
WEATHER for places that people do live. Even an
Alaskan gets to enjoy a very
FEW days of summertime
WEATHER, with which to contrast the very
MANY days of extreme cold. Then you have places like
Hawaii and
Fiji, where it's
SUMMER all the time. So, for most people, the yearly
CYCLE of escaping the school prison and then enjoying the best
WEATHER of the year just has to be one of the most basic programs hard-wired into their habits.
As a sub, for me there's no doubt about it. I've been playing my
PLAN ever since January, this
CYCLE, and when last Friday ended, the open expanse of a
SUNNY and FREE SUMMER opened my heart in joy. Another couple of feelings always seem to occur, though. The most cutting is the wonderment, as I leave any school, of whether this may be the last time I sub there. This also brings the sadness of loss, since I'll never get to play with the kids again.
Ending with a HUG and a THUG
Last week proved to be the perfect capper for an exceptional year, in my experience subbing. I got called every day, and each class was wonderful. The best were three days for the same class, at the top school in my area, for a teacher whose wife had a baby. It was quite a thrill to be with so many go-getter students, who are still seriously working, despite the end being in sight.
On Tuesday I had to break up a fight.
At lunch, I spied these two large, muscular guys get it on. They were walking along, one in front of the other, when the first one turned around. He pushed, the other pushed back, and instantly they were wrestling in a death grip, and trying to pound the other fellow. Having spent quite a few days in middle schools, at first I thought it was typical play, but right away I knew they were
NOT playing. There were a lot of students around them who did nothing. I quickly loped over and told them to break it up. Nobody got in any blows, because they
HUGGED each other as they tried to throw their opponent to the ground. A few reversals did happen, and when I got there one guy had a vice grip on top of the other. The whole fight lasted about five seconds. It took only a second or two before the winner let the loser up, and they stopped. The guy on the bottom complained that his left arm was dislocated, and he was indeed in a lot of pain. I took him to the nurse, and the other guy to the office. It turns out these guys have
not LIKED each other for some time. It all made me wonder why. Did something happen back in fourth grade, say, and a feud ensued?
On Friday I got a HUG or two or three.
As a cautious 'old man', I never touch anybody. So, except for a handful of guys who showed me how to be sociable, throughout the year, by introducing themselves and shaking my hand, any skin-to-skin physicality was missing---until last Friday. I got to end the year with a class I'd had about five times at a middle school. The last one was seventh-graders, who got to go to a play. When they got back, this girl grabbed me and tried to
HUG me! I was so surprised! Of course, I pushed her away with my arms, but she tried to grab me a couple of times more! Ah, the purity of the growing feeling of love, in thirteen-year-old girls! As I contemplated the entire
contretemps with this sweetie, after school, a profound sorrow swept me away, since I had to admit to myself that in a perfect world,
every person I subbed for would freely and happily get a big
HUG from me! Every class would start with a
BODY HUG, one by one, including the boys----hey, maybe we'd spend the first fifteen minutes with
everybody HUGGING everybody, in all the permutations! In that case, those two guys who fought would have gotten to know each other, and the reason to fight would have evaporated.
What is a HUG?
There must be
A reality and all of its
CW rules, however. So I'm perfectly at
HOME = OM with the
PC paths of today, in America. But when you go to
infinity with this
HUGGING 'MUGGING',
transcendental smiles must come about. Are your senses
OPEN for
BUSINESS? Do you
SEE 'IT-ALL'? Can you
FEEL anything? Are you
AWARE of anything? All of that is
HUGGING reality, itself. Indeed, flip out consciousness and
BE the
UN-
YOU. At every instant of
SPACE-TIME, as you take yourself to be the
BODY-MIND (you
'know', the apparently well-defined collection of elements that is stuck behind the epidermis and weighs so many pounds), what else can be said about
IT-ALL that is
NOT you, except that
IT-ALL is HUGGING you, constantly!
The naked
BODY-MIND is ever loved, as a hand in a glove is surrounded, by the atmosphere and the very earth itself! In fact, it's even possible to get the
INSIDE story by merging the
BODY-MIND with the
not-
BODY-MIND and Realize the watery flow of stuff in the bloodstream, for example, is
ALSO HUGGING 'YOU'!
Got a headache? More
HUGS! High on
DRUGS?
HUGS! A bullet ripping through your
BODY-MIND? Speedy
HUGS!
What is a THUG?
Maybe a
THUG is made by not getting enough
HUGS and too many
THUDS. A Hitler who was beaten daily by his father comes to mind.
I wonder how the play between THUGS and HUGS will unfold.
posted by James at 11:17 AM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com
