"..But There's You and There's Me"

I love riding the Gaubus to work and back. The off-peak uncrowded, air-conditioned splendour affords me the opportunity to relax and listen to my own music while commuting through Joburg's northern suburbs. It's the perfect start and end to every work day - in the morning, swooshing through dark streets and hushed suburbs and in the afternoon, huffing along through the after-school traffic while seated far above it all. All this and an audio backdrop of Bowie, Supertramp, Gaia Consort and Resident AntiHero.

However, yesterday's reprise of Crime of the Century was - pretty rudely, I thought - interrupted by the acting out of some real-time cops and robbers a couple of meters from the golden flanks of the bus.

We were coming to a stop at the huge, complicated intersection of Main and William Nicol when the sharp reflection of flashing blue lights actually managed to catch my attention. By the roadside, mere feet away from the portside passengers on the bus, was slewed a really expensive-looking BMW - slewed right into the hard shoulder, that is, with a lighted SAPS vehicle right behind it. I'm assuming (and was told by another passenger, later) that there was an unmarked car cutting off the forward escape route, too.*

Even over my headphones - over Rick Davies declaring "Who are these men of lust, greed and glory? Rip off the mask and let's see"  I could hear the police loudhailer telling the occupants of the BMW to get out of the car and put their hands up, or they would be shot. And I'm not kidding, for from out of the SAPS van stalked a lean and fit young policewoman with what I can only call (in true peasant style) a "semi-automatic" gun cradled professionally and pointed (only temporarily, one readily assumed) at the ground.

My very first thought after removing my earphones was that I should perhaps be looking for something to duck behind. Not out of any gripping fear - it just seemed the sort of thing I should be doing in this fresh mini-playlet.

My fellow passengers, however, had all rushed to the left side of the bus, many waving smartphones at the spectacle of 5 men - 4 small, frightened-looking yellow-complected men and one much bigger dark-skinned Black man - getting out of the luxury vehicle, quite slowly and raising all their hands in the air.

We started babbling at one another, and a Sir Juice 200ml bottle rolled and bounced down the gangway as one young woman apparently lost control of her hands. The man who had been dozing in the well below me awoke and looked confused.The lady sitting behind me noted that the driver of the BMW looked guilty. I asked for someone to get the footage up on Twitter. Supertramp continued opining on corporate greed from my now-dangling earphones. Men stood around, meters from the Gaubus, with their hands in the air. A policewoman brandished an assault rifle in everyone's general direction....

And then the bus moved off, leaving a little tableau behind in the afternoon half-sun.

Image: Mises SA


*Addendum: I have since learned that the bus, after changing lanes to go around the SAPS van, then swung sharply inwards again, making an effective barrier to the supposed crooks. The bus is evidently in training as a superhero crime fighter.

Back To Work

Am I looking forward to going back to work tomorrow?

You bet I am.

The last 3 months have been very productive, in terms of getting house, garden and bakkie sorted out, but more important was the opportunity to rest and refresh my soul.

For the last few years at Osiris traumatised me more than I was aware of. It was not so much that I suffered from bad management in the Fraud department - indeed, I was treated relatively very well - but more the everyday abuse of my colleagues at the hands of one immature and control-ridden Wetiko manager which bit deep and left me tired and angry.

I've never, in 30 years in the workplace, seen such abuse and I don't expect to ever witness it firsthand again. I have learnt much from that close contact with mundane evil - which is, I believe, the point of everything we experience on this plane.

Duality. Good and Evil. Hierarchical forms in action. Materialism, lack of consciousness and the workings of the Wetiko culture.The reasons we keep on showing up down here, eon in, eon out. And the way Love, of course, includes and transcends it all.

On Monday I'm starting at NetCare as a Data Analyst and I'm happy about it, although since it has been over 11 years since I last started as the new girl, it's going to be an interesting day, I'll be bound.

And all the while, I haven't given up hope that my erstwhile colleagues will -each and every one - find their own way out of that particular living hell.

Pic: from Peoples Drawing People

Fish And Water

It's International Women's Day and here in South Africa, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every 8 hours. 

It's International Women's Day, and female scientists are still earning considerably less than their male peers.

It's International Women's Day, and women are being killed as "Witches" in higher numbers than ever before. Never mind the "Burning Times". We have a real, present holocaust on our hands here.

The reasons? Doubtless they are many, or could be presented as many by people far more qualified than I in social science matters. But, for my own curiosity, I have a one-word catchall answer to the why of it: the Patriarchy. You're stewing in it, and have been for thousands of years, so that you often don't see it for what it is.

The patriarchy: that ignoble structure which has its roots deep in the big monotheistic religions of today, as well as in agriculture, civilization and city-building, and of course the Wetiko disease.

The patriarchy: whose reign degrades and hurts men as well as simply killing women.

It's not going away any time soon. Not so long as most of us are as unaware of it as a fish is of water.

You Might Be A Wetiko If..

I've noted, and will continue to note, much on the Wetiko and the Wetiko culture we appear to be living within. But what, when we use that term, do we really mean by it?

In Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack Forbes describes the central characteristic of the Wetiko to be “that he consumes other human beings for profit, that is, he is a cannibal”.

I note the masculine pronoun used by Forbes, and heaven knows I've also gone on about how this culture is essentially patriarchal; but really, Wetiko knows no gender. Nor race, nor class nor religion or lack-of-religion. Much like HIV/AIDS, Wetiko is a disease, as well as a shortened form by which we describe all that is worst in humanity for around the last 6-10 thousand years.

I suppose, then, that the one thing we can say about Wetiko disease is that it does not appear to infect any forms of life apart from humankind. It's just possible that there exist non-3D life forms who are also carriers - we would call them demons, evil spirits, or dark forces I suppose.
I don't know, not having had much to do with those beings. And for today, I'd like to look at what some of the distinguishing marks of Wetiko are in humans.

Pstonie has offered his opinion that "..it all stems from unchecked fear" and I think that he's correct. But what is this all we speak of?

So, in the spirit of those ghastly internet memes we all love to groan over, I'm putting together a list of:

"You Might Be A Wetiko If.."

1) Humans, and only the right kind of humans at that, are the only forms of life you consider worthy of the description "living beings".

2) You believe - consciously or semi-consciously - that the amount of money an individual has access to is a direct measure of their worth.

3) Your actions show that you think the planet is here primarily to support human kind.

4) When it comes right down to it, preservation and/or advantage of yourself (or your kind) trumps those rights in every other living being.

5) You engage in retail therapy.

6) You are a firm believer in physical/mental evolution...for human beings only.

7) You propagate those tiresome dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest and it's-a-jungle-out-there memes as justification for your behaviour.

8) You hold up Richard Dawkins/the President of the United States/the super-successful athlete/the thrusting, confident business (wo)man as people to admire; just because of their worldly "achievements".

9) Television programs and Hollywood offerings have meaning in your life.

10) You believe that advertising in the last 50 years is not an unmitigated heap of shit designed to scare you into being a better consumer.

11) You don't see anything wrong with being labelled a consumer.

I'd like to add to this list, but these are just some ideas off the top of my head, for now.

Anyone got some more? Please feel free to append in the comments!

Pic: Wendigo, another name for Wetiko, by hellsama.

See How It Works?

I love synchronicity.

Having been attracted to The Sync Book originally because of its inclusion of Neil Kramer as one of its contributors, I found myself hooked, in a mild fashion, by Synchromysticism  and went on to purchase The Sync Book 2.

I only managed to start volume 2 yesterday, having been held up by finishing my twelve billionth re-reading of ChapterHouse: Dune , the last in the Dune Series actually written by Frank Herbert.

The opening essay in Sync 2 is a beautiful exposition on the nature of synchronicity by Paul Levy - author of Dispelling Wetiko. I read last night in that wondrous state where the author's words bore like little rotifer torches into your soul, igniting  fierce blazes of comprehension which lift you from the page even as you cannot tear your eyes from it.

This morning, I followed a link in my morning news to Reality Sandwich; an essay by Richard Smoley titled Does Prophecy Work? . Smoley delves into Jungian synchronicity here, so I found myself seriously considering the nature of the Sync once again; and was thereby encouraged (a trait of a good sync) to revisit Levy's Wetiko work.

I shall definitely have to get hold of a copy of this book. And meanwhile, I'm thinking about what the exact characteristics of a Wetiko are. I'm not quite ready to list them here, yet - maybe tomorrow.

The second contribution in Sync 2 is by Robert Perry and puts forward his theory of CMPEs - Conjunctions of Meaningfully Parallel Events - as being those syncs with multiple correspondences, which support the idea that the stream we-are-currently-testing-the-water-of is correct for this time and place. Good syncs affirm us spiritually, in other words.

Perry is the author of An Introduction to A Course In Miracles, which I freely admit I've been avoiding like the plague on account of its title and my perception of it being too similar in content to that awful  The Secret nonsense. I may have to change my opinion. On Perry, not The Secret.

So really, just by reading the first 2 chapters of a particular book, I've been led into a commitment to buy 2 others. I wonder how long my to-read list will have become by the time I've finished Sync 2?

And as an aside, I can really recommend  Alan Abbadessa-Green and anything his new press puts out.

See how it works? Well, sometimes.

Update: Followed a tweet a few minutes ago to an article on personality types. Main modern foundations layed by Jung. As I'm reading, a pop-up announces that I might also like to read Carl Jung's Archetypes.Right, right, I think I've got it, dammit.

An Object Revolts

I don't watch a lot of films or very much television, and when the Aileen Wuornos show was hitting the media road I think I was mostly hanging on by my fingernails myself and so didn't notice it.
I was therefore both fascinated and horrified when I caught bits of Nick Broomfield's documentary on the confessed multiple killer the other day.

The thing which struck me forcefully was the utter hysteria surrounding this woman. A prostitute had killed some of her johns; you'd have thought, by the shrill calls for her death which resounded almost immediately the facts started to come to light, that mankind's bloody mobile phones had started rebelling. I mean, how dare she? A prostitute is there for the sole purpose of servicing (mostly) male people. When one of these comfort objects starts killing its users...well.Kill it. Kill it dead.

Being very poorly informed on everything about this case, I started with the Wikipedia article on Aileen.
Even from this poorly-regarded source I received an unmistakable chill of recognition. Maybe you could call it empathy. But I could imagine, quite easily, being in her shoes.

There's no question that little-girl Aileen was abused. I was not. But many things about her struck a chord in me, at some level. The full flight from consciousness. The dissolution of conscience. The half-self-articulated justifications. The anger - that anger found in many women in the Patriarchy, myself included. And at the end, that one over riding desire to just have done with it all.

My anger, although still present, still a part of me, is coming slowly into integration with the rest of who I am. Hers never had a chance.

Awaken In The Dream

Having taken a firm resolve to let the professionals fix our Legendary Car , Warren and I took it down to Safety Brake and Clutch this morning for the fitting of a new master brake cylinder.

We hiked up to the Sandwich Baron and bought a breakfast of cheese and bacon on French rolls, then walked back down to where we had left the car.

The wait was over four hours long - but damn, those people did the job properly!

While waiting I parked myself on a stone storm drain cover under a tree whose species I have yet to pin down - despite it being a pretty common planting in the new North of Joburg - and read chapters out of Tara Sanchez' The Temple of Hekate off my phone. When my eyes tired, I gazed at the people in the streets below me; coming and going and lounging around, people on foot and people behind the wheels of tons of fast-moving metal; people going to work and people hoping to find work. Human people being, in short, human people on a warm and windy Monday morning in Joburg.

I visually followed a couple of clean, neat guys who may - I thought at first - have been looking for work in this area of light industrial businesses. One was dressed in freshly laundered blue overalls, the other looked more like a pirate in his jailing jeans and bandanna. They stopped to hail a passing stranger, which was what drew my attention to them - but what kept my attention on them was my growing suspicion that they were fairly slick criminals casing various joints. I'm not sure even now why I thought this. But they must have felt my gimlet gaze upon them at some stage, for they turned around several times and looked around for the source of their discomfort.

Next I decided to play with the owner of a humongous Hummer vehicle parked in the Absa Bank lot. I waited, wondering what someone who would drive such a gas-guzzling, earth-destroying monster would look like. When he walked out of the bank and flashed his remote unlock, I saw a young-ish man in long shorts and baggy T shirt, his fish white arms and legs proclaiming him to be some kind of software programmer - just like me. I hated him on sight, of course. What did he need that much metal to be driving around in? Where was his consciousness that he apparently needed so many tons of metal alloy and large amounts of petroleum to take him to his local bank? What a tosser.

At more or less that moment, another customer of the brake centre ambled over to what I was rapidly considering to be my tree and sat down upon the stone drain cover. Much too close, I felt - but then I tend to wield a personal space about the size of a European country. I sidled away down the embankment, and then got very irritated when I had to climb past him to get to Warren when the car was ready.

I remember this flood of indignation, irritation and self righteousness. I remember thinking very clearly that all these monkeys were nothing like me. That I was so much better than them that I was practically another species, and that the reason I disliked them so much was that they were demonstrably not like me.

Uh-oh. Wetiko Disease attack.

When we start drawing out the perceived evil in everyone around us - everyone but ourselves, of course - then we are surely caught fast in the Wetiko Disease.

Those hateful ways of those people I'd just been other-ing were my own shadow, evoked and visible and appalling. It took a couple of hours before I could admit that truth to myself.

A couple of hours and a listen to Paul Levy on Red Ice Radio , talking about his new work, Dispelling Wetiko. 

Well, well, well. And are we finally ready to admit that we have a disease of insanity?

Yourself especially, Terri , as you are no different from any of those other humans out there.

This is very important for us all to remember. We are the only people to be actively crafting our suicide, and taking the rest of the living world with us. When Wetiko Disease has us pinned, we certainly do not see it, do not acknowledge it. And this is the pernicious nature of this sickness - we'll be feeling that Everything Is OK as we slide down into extinction, despite what the trees and the birds and our own domestic animal companions have been trying to tell us for the last 6000 years.

Please. Can we not awaken in the dream?

The Machine In Action

I sometimes wonder why I even open up the page at News 24.
The standard of original journalism - when it occurs at all - is low, sometimes only being beaten in the godsawful stakes by the comments section.

But seriously, people - what have we come to?
Over 34000 applicants for 90 trainee posts at the Traffic Department.

Of those, over 15000 got through to the next qualifying round - where 6 died of heat and exhaustion and one committed suicide following a physical fitness test.

I speak from experience when I say that being penniless, homeless, and hungry messes with your mind all right.

When you're in such a place, the need for survival is the over riding one. And you don’t really stop to think how you could be doing anything differently - you just play by the rules embedded in the culture.

Get a job. Earn some money. Buy the food/shelter/happiness you are being denied.

But there's something very, very screwed up with that when thousands apply for the most menial of jobs - and some of them die trying for that golden ring, which in the end doesn't even deliver on its nebulous promise.

There's a whole lot wrong when we don't even question how this system came to be the life-destroying, soul-shredding monster that it is.

The machinery of Wetiko culture, stomping, chewing up and spitting out the species which brought it into existence.

Colonised Mind

Dear Mr. President. Dear, dear dear Mr. President.

I don't often raise the energy to comment on the stuff which comes out of Jacob Zuma's mouth, anymore. Or I'd be here all day. But this latest piece of nonsense serves to highlight exactly where the president of South Africa's mind is sitting. And it's not a pretty place.

So, people who love dogs more than people have a lack of humanity, do they?

It seems to me that that was a giveaway statement all on its own. That there should be a hierarchy of love, that we can choose to love one species more than another. In my experience, that is not where people who are compassionate to non-human animals are coming from. They love fellow non-human creatures in the same way they love human creatures. If you love your canine companions, and spend time and money on them, does that mean that you don't love other humans? As if there were some limit on the amount we can love each other.

As if love for each other, for life, is a quantifiable commodity.

As if there were some scale of worthiness-to-be-loved, with humans on the top, naturally.

As if the local canine family members waited with loaded guns and malice a-thought to rob and brutalise others for their property.

Oh yes, I know how Zuma thinks of dogs - as property. It's very close to the way he thinks about women, actually.

This raising of humans above other creatures, this denigration of non-human life as less worthy of love, this commodifying of life, this is not Ubuntu.

Tell me: who truly has the colonised mind?

Pic: Found at Drinkalot.com

Free Again

My weird-ometer has been unusually sensitive these last couple of days: in common, I would guess, with most peoples' sense of the unusual at this time.

I went through a short period yesterday where it seemed I was stuck in a matrix glitch. I would pick up a shiny pebble - fallen off my beautifully wrapped leaving present - and put it away, only to return to the spot ten minutes later and find another pebble lying there. I would eat up half a biscuit laying forlorn on a plate, only to come back a little later to the same half-biscuit confronting me accusingly.

I stepped out into the back yard last night just in time to witness two great flaming orbs of orange-red sailing north-to-south in the eastern quadrant of the overcast sky. I'd never seen anything even faintly like them before, and I stood with my mouth hanging open, too stunned to get a camera. Although I did call Warren to see them.

Just before bed, I came over extremely dizzy.

So that appears to be that for the end-of-the-world-consciousness-shift for this baktun, anyway.

There's nothing here that cannot be explained in rational, 3D terms.

But this morning, preparing the ritual space for new grass seed, I trundled up the driveway hefting a rake, following Scylla and Taranis, in Indian file also walking the car-wheel rut of nine years' usage, who were in turn following Warren who was pushing a wheelbarrow.

And I snapped that picture in my mind, preserved forever. The beings I love, tending the land, in a time-between-times, free at last of the self-imposed shackles of Wetiko bondage.

Pic: Thanks to dreammclelland "Time Between Times"

Lunar Bombing Tonight

So, at about half an hour after midnight South African Standard Time tomorrow, we're going to sacrifice two Lunar Gravitational Orbiters.

By crashing them into the moon.

The two orbiters have outlived their usefulness  but will go down helping to validate our theoretical models of fuel consumption in such craft.

Part of me - a tiny, long-ago piece of me which thought it was the greatest achievement to be a Physicist - finds this really interesting and even commendable.Why waste the probes, after all? Let's get them to give us some last transmissions of data.

A larger part of me, however, is shocked and dismayed by this wanton, machine-culture desecration of a symbol of all that's numinous.

The moon is one of the greatest inducers of the mystical in the human - and has been so for as long as we've been walking upright, at least. Our sister planet, she has inspired us and conspired with us when we breathe the air of pneumos, spirit unbound.

What would I have us do differently? Nothing, I suppose. I just shudder at the culture which has bound us to such soulless effectiveness, most of the time.

Oh, and yes, this is not the first time we've done this. Or considered it.

Pic: Crater Goldschmidt, near the Moon;s North Pole, site of tonight's crash landings.

Update: We've named the crash site after the late Sally Ride.

Creators Or Hosts?

For most of us, growing up with the conventional paradigm of history, civilisation is something peculiarly human.

We learn about the dawn of agriculture and the rise of the nation-state as if these things are incontrovertible facts, not open for discussion. We are enculturated to believe that human civilisation - in particular, western civilisation - is something good, something to be proud of, something we humans can point to with a glow of satisfaction. Something ours. It sets us apart from the animals. And the plants, mycophites, bacteria, insects and viruses, too. Many of us really believe that human ingenuity, backed by human technology within the ordered structure of hierarchical civilisation, can truly set us free.

But who is this us? For civilisation as practised by homo sapiens not only expressly excludes, but also enslaves and murders non-human species in a breathtaking sweep of greed and consumerism, which sees the human being caught in the act of destroying the very planet which produced her..there's nowhere to run, when we've trashed, poisoned and made sterile or toxic the whole earth, with all her bio-systems.

So I was thinking - and this is just me at the very start of a good old ponder - is civilisation, or the control system to use another symbol-set, the product of human beings, or are we the product of civilisation?

Stay with me a minute. What I'm asking, as preposterous as it may seem at first, is this: did we create the system, or did the system take us over? Is Civ in fact some non-physical meta-entity which requires a conscious species to live off and which is possessing us, even unto our utter destruction?

Odd though the question is, I would really like to give it some head room over the next few days.

Is Civilisation Ours, or are We Civilisation's?

Scent Of Apples

Coming back into the bedroom this morning after my shower, my senses were hit by an overpowering scent of apples. Since my partner had not yet gotten out of bed, and since my soap certainly has no apple-smell component, and since the doors and windows were still firmly shut, I was at a loss as to where it was coming from...

...Corvus Albus flew over my head, wide and high, cawing loudly as he disappeared into the blue. My ally never makes a sound unless he wants to confirm something, so, OK, I'm doing something right...

...The web page opens up, and at the top of the page is an advert for a Programmer Analyst. Not in the Casino industry, thank the gods. I send them my CV..

..Yesterday, tired of the soul-deep dissonance of working in a corrupt and corruptible industry; tired of working under an insanely shallow tin-pot dictator of a manager; tired of how the lovely company I joined 11 years ago has degenerated into a corporate zombie - I tendered my notice of intent to resign.

No, I haven't got another position lined up as yet. And it doesn't worry me. I'm not even a little bit apprehensive. When I made this decision, I knew it for the right one by the sense of enormous peace which washed me. Then the affirming signs started appearing.

It is said - by folks who have been on the path longer then I - that the Universe approves of Big Steps, of hurling yourself over the cliff, going into freefall, and not knowing or particularly caring where or when you might touch down. I can say that right now, I feel the Cosmos looking out of my eyes: looking out at me, at you, at this sham of corporatist existence many around me are struggling within. And those who are not struggling are dead before they were ever alive.

Peaceful and fully alive, I await whatever my next steps will take me to with wonder, awe and ...great joy.

Namaste.

Pic: Found at this blog!

Blame Greed, Not Nature

One dead, 19 others injured at Linkin Park concert in Cape Town.

And so many people blaming "Mother Nature" for the tragedy.

Well, let's take a look. What was Lucozade - a face of Big Pharma GlaxoSmithKline, doing at the concert in the first place?

Linkin Park is a successful purveyor of popular music, and as such has been backed by the corporate music industry until the general populace is just about forced to like it. Me, I think their music is low-level garbage - but what do I know? - my musical tastes are not informed or coerced by huge media corporations.

So Lucozade leapt at the chance to increase their sales  improve their media coverage, to which end they had hired dozens of attractive temporary corporate shills salespeople and erected an enormous billboard upheld by (unanchored, an eyewitness testifies) pillars bearing their logo.

When, as is not uncommon in Cape Town, the winds reached gale force and people struggled to keep upright while walking, this whole structural edifice of low-level communication...fell over. Injuring 20 of the salespeople and killing one of them.

Big business wanting to increase their visibility by being seen at the cool gigs is not, in my anarchical outlook, forgivable at all. What it boils down to is greed. Which is what powers much of our culture. From popular music bands which I wouldn't listen to if you tied me down with a pair of earphones, to lifestyle consumables like the rabidly unhealthy "energy drinks" which wreck livers while allowing us to pretend that we're really cool, too, the whole system is run and maintained by corporate greed. Little men chasing the illusion of happiness through wealth and, they think, power.

It's all so damned transparent that it makes me howl with laughter. When I'm not weeping for their victims - every one of us - that is.

Lace Curtain Morality..

...that arises in the kind of mind which hangs lace curtains in their windows so that no-one can see in from the outside. From the inside, the lace curtains can be twitched aside..of course.

It's typically found among the bourgeoisie - the class I was brought up in and from which I have spent the last decade trying to purge myself.


There's a certain running-around anxiety involved in the central thought form: "What Will They Think?" .

I freely admit to having suffered from this clutching dread myself for many, many years.

I do understand the roots of it - the need for social cohesion, the fitting-in to the tribe so as not to be expelled as a dangerous freak.

But really, should it obtain today? Should our hearts and minds be so set upon putting up a good front, whatever the cost?

Especially when you know Who you are. And lace curtains are nowhere involved.

I have just witnessed a pretty hilarious form of this syndrome/morality here at my place of work.

On Tuesday evening we were told that Important Visitors were coming, so that we had to ensure our desks were spic and span (that's mine at the top of the post- but it always looks like this) .

A fever of activity - polishing, hoovering, taking down of notices - ensued around the office for the next couple of hours. Soon we were gleaming - and that's fairly unusual for the casually happy office environment I work in.

And we were also extremely uptight, like a schoolgirl with rigidly plaited hair, waiting against the wall at the Saturday night dance.

The neatest cherry on the top of this phoniness was an order not to "congregate on the smokers' balcony."

I went home and couldn't stop laughing for most of the night. I even woke up chuckling.

People - you are so funny.

Hey..

..don't mind me.

I'm just having a, you know, psychotic break, OK?

As you do.

The thing is, when you start seeing the Field in all (or at least some of) its glory, everywhere visible and invisible at once, and when you see the embedded Forms interacting within -or rather with - this Field..

..and when you go back to the office after 10 days doing nothing but training yourself to see the Field and its wonders everywhere -and nowhere - and you see the ligatures binding the human forms off from the Field...ties put there by the ego...well...you're in a hellish locus of Walking Dead.

Air conditioned, screen-glowing, coffee guzzling, keyboard pounding Hell.

So excuse me awhile as I go and scream in the corner.

Be back shortly.

Closure

On New Year's Eve of 2008, RSS Security shot and killed three of our canine companions - Charybdys, Chippie and Bart - under what we considered to be highly suspicious circumstances, and then proceeded to treat our concerns as if they were entirely inconsequential.

Warren and I set out to provide them with some consequences, and yesterday that road seemed to have come to an end at last.

We were taking them to the High Court, aided by an attorney and an advocate.
Our last attendance in Pretoria was just over a year ago, when the case was postponed as the defendants needed to change their defense. Our legal team told us there would be another date in about a year.

So we waited, and, hearing nothing from either Stef Guldenpfennig the advocate or Ferdi the attorney, assumed that everything was chugging along just as it should.

Then, three weeks ago, we get an email from another attorney, saying that our previous guy had left the company, and that the trial date was set for 2nd October. This was  Thipe Mothle, of Mothle, Jooma, Sabdia who seems to be leading a bit of a double life - which I commented on earlier. (He appears to be both Thipe Mothle and Peter Nyane.)

( I must add that the email correspondence, coming as it did from a presumably expensively educated attorney, left so much to be desired in the usage of English grammar and spelling that I wondered at the legitimacy of the correspondence.)

The email also inquired about payment. No problem. I have to do large money transfers through my bank branch, so, being busy at work, we asked them to wait until Saturday, two days from then.

The next day we received another email telling us that Stef the advocate had withdrawn from the case, after (quote) "you made numerous promises to pay". The attorneys were thus withdrawing as well.

Well I'll be damned, I thought. We go for almost a year hearing nothing and therefore trusting everything is OK, then out of the blue up pop these ill-educated people claiming we were not honouring our promises.
I did see red, briefly.

This left us not enough time to secure another attorney and advocate.So yesterday Warren and I went along to the offices of the attorney for the defense, and we settled.

Let me just say here that I have never, in a relatively long life so far, been the recipient of quite such dishonourable behaviour. Advocate Guldenpfennig and Thipe Mothle should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Yet I doubt that they are. Hard as it is to realise, there are people in this world who fit the bill of conscienceless parasites pretty damned well. After this little demonstration of bare-faced lying, I wondered for a while how either of them could actually sleep at night. And then I realised that they probably slept pretty well, thank you. For they seem to have lost their moral compass entirely when they contracted this disease called Wetiko syndrome.

But on the closure front, although Warren has been enjoined not to discuss the matter, no such stricture is binding upon me. So I can say that we did succeed in hitting RSS Security where it hurt; their market-share in this neck of the woods has noticeably dwindled (to just about nothing in our suburb), plus they were forced to spend money on advocates and attorneys - just as we were, conceded - something which I guarantee has hurt them more than it has hurt us.

 This was never about money. And, if I had the choice, I would certainly do it all - extravagant expenditure included - over again.

Rest well, my beloved friends.You have been avenged.

Pic: Chippy and Charybdys, Lughnasadh Eve 2008

Who Are You Really?

Mothle Joomla Sabadia: 

" Thipe Attwell Mothle obtained a B.Proc degree from the University of Durban Westville and went on to the University of Pretoria where he obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree as well as a diploma in Labour Law. He is also possessed of a Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety from the International Risk Control Academy. Thipe specialises in Personal Injury Law, Material Damages claims, Medical Negligence claims, Labour law, General litigation, Occupational Health and Safety Law and Insurance Law."

GreenBenneth:

"Peter Nyane obtained a B.Proc degree from the University of Durban Westville and went on to the University of Pretoria where he obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree as well as a diploma in Labour Law. He is also possessed of a Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety from the International Risk Control Academy. Peter specialises in Personal Injury Law, Material Damages claims, Medical Negligence claims, Labour law, General litigation, Occupational Health and Safety Law and Insurance Law."

Acknowledging Ownership

As much as I dislike the idea that humans must "control" and "manage" their environments - this being a distinguishing mark of the Wetiko culture we all live in - I have found that a certain amount of regency over one's own life is,well, desireable.

The night before last I dreamt, as I have before, of a yellow motorcycle whicih was my means of transport.
This seems to be my imagery for control over my self - or rather, over the 3D projection of my Self which lives and breathes on this plane. So, I dreamt of riding the yellow motorcycle (hey, it's an Enduro machine with a fairly large engine, don't knock it) and that I was also wearing a yellow helmet.
That last detail was true in "real" life also - I wore a yellow full face helmet for most of my motorcycling life.

Now, when I dream of travelling about in cars, I'm never the one driving the machine.
This is largely because, in real life, I do not drive a car. I never have - no car driver's licence.
The car I am presently transported around in is, technically, "mine", in that I bought it, but it is Warren who occupies the driver's seat.

So I was rather surprised to dream, last night, that I climbed into the car which I "own" but do not own, and started to drive it.
At first, I was a little fearful. All these pedals and levers and stuff! How would I ever manage? I was likely to crash the damned thing into the nearest kerb.
When riding a bike, one's body has a great influence on the control of the machine. After many years of riding it becomes like an extension of your flesh. I'm not so sure that this is true of driving a car, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, in this dream I quickly became more confident of my ability to drive the car. I realised that I had known all along how to do this, but had just never tried. Driving the car was soon as simple and smooth as riding a bike.

I guess I need to look at things I "own" but do not own in my life. it could be that I have always owned these things, but never acknowledged that ownership. ..On reflection, I'm starting to tie last night's dream in with the activity I undertook earlier that evening.

I was death-walking a colleague's beloved feline companion of 20 years, so I invoked my Shadow Totem - a black panther - to aid me.

The invocation was powerful indeed, and seems to have had fallout in my immediate environment.

"This Is Not Feminism"

"For our sisters, for all women, we need to say out loud that this is not feminism."

I'm re-blogging this, (or rather linking to it), because I think it has something important to say.

As readers of the news, it behooves us to be careful about swallowing stuff whole.