Amanda Peterson, the discombobulation of one's self

Amanda Peterson, the discombobulation of one's self

fiction
edward w pritchard


Next time please stay in the sunlight Amanda Peterson. It's so sad that all those dark things had to happen to you.

I just found out that you have passed and that the image you played in " can't buy me love" wasn't all there was to you. I always liked that movie, a light romantic comedy. Why do us, the audience, always fall for it every time?  It being that movies, the stage and that everyone's life we don't really know is just an illusion.

So now you are gone Amanda. It's so sad all those dark things had to happen to you. If you can read wherever you are at now here's something I wrote about the discombobulation of one's self. Maybe you can reap some comfort, but is there more Amanda?

MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2014

a sense of belonging; I am he but there is no me/ part 2

a sense of belonging; I am he but there is no me/ part 2

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


David Hume says that there is no me, it's just a collection of properties. Eye brows, toe nails and memories of the time I got robbed at gunpoint. Some Buddhists agree with Hume for other reasons; there is no self.

We discussed the ship of Theseus, the Ancient Greek idea that if a ship is totally reconstructed with new materials is it the same ship?

Ego, famous people have 1000 pictures of themselves over a life time on Google images but they are not them.

Go to the art museum and look at the Greek vase with the painted soldiers on the side. The vase is 2500 years old. Is the picture of the soldier- himself?

Let go your ego and sense of self and you are on the path to enlightenment say the Buddhists.

Can you forgo your sense of self? If there is no self how can there be souls?

If there is no self and no soul what is there?

Metaphysical speculation. Is a person and an apple both just a collection of properties that came together and are gone?

The ancient Egyptians thought a person was made up of five properties. Two physical, the name and shadow and three invisible properties, the Ka- the life force, the ba, the personality, and akh, the spirit. The Egyptians believed in an after life and spent considerable effort to prepare for it.

Atheism and metaphysical speculation; is a person and an apple both just a collection of properties that came together and are soon gone?

I don't know but I suspect there is more.

sick Mother in Law

sick Mother in Law

fiction
edward w pritchard


Oh how they loved us all originally as the hyper talented and genius baby. Doting on our every smile and seeing the purpose of the universe in the movement of our hands. We conquered something new every day that first year of our life and we were the center of attention, a miracle to behold.

Then three quarters of a century plus five years raced by and all are old and functioning poorly. Our strength is gone and we are no longer ourselves. Perhaps we have lost the ability to communicate the mystery of death and non being that we are imminently facing. It happens to us all given enough years; protracted life is protracted woe sayeth the Greek tragic poet.

Thinking of  end of life issues for a sick friend

student demonstrations the zeitgeist of my youth/ part 2 fear of reality

student demonstrations the zeitgeist of my youth/ part 2 fear of reality

fiction
edward w pritchard


All this writing of Kent State shootings 1970 has me reflecting on my continuing case of the fear of reality.

Babies are born handicapped and take a immense amount of care by silent long suffering victims of randomness, Native Americans lose their country to conquest and Manifest destiny and sit listless subdued by alcohol and poverty meanwhile cherished friends greet you as a stranger, and high powered rifles are always center stage in accounts of atrocities be the motivation terrorism, vengeance or religious xenophobia. An endless barrage of sickening reports of horrible news over whelms the senses like a continual leaking facet interrupts a sleeping babies afternoon nap.

Why can't I just accept the impermanence of being and realize that whatever happens is as it is and just deal with it without judgment or remorse? Live in day tight compartments, not strain to listen to the serene music of birds in the re-examined life and not feel what is beyond my control and thereby have no need to suffer for the misfortune of others which is random and to be expected given enough outputs being received from the hostile world.

It's time to celebrate our Countries birthday again. What random atrocious event will become hot news and pry it's way into my World tomorrow, July 04, 2016?  When will this endless progression of endless birth and rebirths stop?

student demonstrations the zeitgeist of my youth

student demonstrations the zeitgeist of my youth

fiction
edward w pritchard

I picked up a copy of a book last week on the Kent State University massacre " the Kent affair" a compilation of essays and snippets of editorials on the May 04, 1970 shootings of four college students by the Ohio national guard.

The shootings had a profound effect on me back when I was 18 that Spring of May 1970. Nixon had just announced on national TV that Thursday before the Monday of the shootings that he was expanding the War into Cambodia. Using charts and slogans Nixon our hated President glibly explained why it was necessary to contain the communist menace by sending in more troops. I and others hated Nixon because although a high school senior on the track team that Spring I was now draft age and faced the imminent possibility of fighting in a war I was opposed to. As editor of the school news paper I had written on the injustice of that far off war in Asia that was killing American boys of who I might soon be one.

The Kent shootings occurred on a Monday and I heard about  a girl being shoot three times in the back by an M-1 fired and shot by a guardsman at 2 PM in my journalism class sitting with a group budding high school intellectuals and hippies to be. At 2:30 PM I was driving my track coaches old 1964 Dodge up to Kenmore stadium to set up the hurdles and as I drove I listened to the radio about the chaos and rioting occurring at the Kent campus becoming so upset I pulled the car over and listened to the radio station 1590 WAKR news report of the unsettling events for the next hour. Kent was about fifteen miles from where I sat then under a tree on a back street in coach's car that warm Monday and I had been up there to the bars a time or two recently because in those days low powered 3.2 beer was legal and Kent was a good party town.

Part of the reason I was so upset over the shootings by the guardsmen was because I had had a brief unsettling run-in with the Ohio National Guard myself that May 01, 1970 during the Ohio teamsters strike outside of the PIE trucking terminal in Richfield, Ohio. My friend's father was a truck driver and a teamster coming in from a cross county run and we were attempting to drive across the picket line. Teamsters were shooting and said to be throwing bricks and the Ohio guardsmen wore helmets and carried rifles. The guards man who stopped us there at the gate had his rifle sort of pointed at us as he not too friendly like interrogated us about why were were there in my friend's old blue convertible. We talked our way through things and a few minutes later my friend's tired Father took the wheel of the convertible and we got home safely.

Several times I have sat on the Hill there at Kent State where the shooting occurred that resulted in four unarmed students being shot by high powered rifles. Sitting there at Kent once years later I remembered my uncle down in West Virginia when he took us hunting patiently telling us teenage boys to be careful where we shot our rifles as a good rifle could fire up to a mile in those days.

Despite the violence on the campuses back in the 1960's those were more innocent times. Many of the students interviewed in the book I bought recently, " The Kent affair" expressed surprise the soldiers would be armed with live ammo in a confrontation with American Civilians. Those were more innocent times then and the Zeitgeist of those days is pretty much gone now. Not too many people remember student demonstrations or rioting at all here where I sit not twenty miles from Kent State campus.

Me, I am still sorry that somebody would shoot an unarmed girl in the back with a high powered rifle but now it seems so long before, before, back when we drove around in an old blue convertible and leaned out the open window to stop and talk to pretty girls with thick auburn hair and a green army jacket with a faded peace sign on the shoulder that matched her sparking eyes.

Brexit in American English in 60 words or less

Brexit in American English in 60 words or less

fiction
edward w pritchard


It's Democracy run a muck, the uneducated rabble have the majority again and the factional irrational voting mistakes that American President James Madison feared in the " Federalist paper" # 10 have occurred; what's next the nihilist vote electing Donald Trump to end the World as we know it?

Haven't we learned anything from The Greek city state's experiences with Demokratia?

alienation and the big celebration about winning the basketball championship

alienation and the big celebration about winning the basketball championship

fiction
edward w pritchard


Alienation is a hollow chest and a missing heart. No one hands a dripping umbrella to you after a sudden spring rainstorm and leaning shining jet black umbrellas never leave glistening slick puddles of welcoming warm rainfall across villages near the tributaries of fertile river valleys. The flowers don't grow at night and the vines that hang over a hundred foot from the leaning collapsing trees were born by spontaneous generation beginning  to droop and die before they were randomly created.

Alienation is over a million people not going to the big celebration about winning the basketball championship and no one buying to save the memorial newspaper about the once in the lifetime victory over the up state rivals.

Alienation is a hollow heart and a whirlwind inside the chest from the sound of raindrops at four AM on the rusting car. Alienation is no blanket across the shoulders during a freezing Spring while watching the buffalo disappear and the iron horse race coast to coast after the time is gone and the Place is missing. Alienation is holes in the barb wire fences that tear and scar delicate skin and jolt the forgetting of unrecorded occurrences by unknown descendants.

facing a dying nation

facing a dying nation

fiction
edward w pritchard


"Hair, let the sunshine" in the Broadway play was a sort of anthem for the baby boomers, at least it was for a while then in 1969 when Treat Williams marching in the Broadway play dressed as a soldier in an endless row of Men in green military uniform sang about "facing a dying nation" and the real possibility of dying before your allotted time in the Vietnam War seemed pressing, absurd and senseless. Now a half century later 75 million baby boomers face the certainly of dying in the next 30 years. That's  a quarter of the US population who will be passed on within moderate period of time.

Tonight the Moon is nearly full and the red planet Mars is near the Moon in the sky. One feels looking up at the Moon and Mars that one has witnessed the two Heavenly bodies before a few hundred life times ago. The Moon going to full in the night sky is one of those racial memories that is just out of the reach of our collective recollection.

Our sojourn on Earth is so brief. It's over before we become fully oriented in Time and space.

Clutch your possessions tightly to your side tonight under the nearly full Moon. What do you believe in and where did your allotted Time go?