She came to me in a dream this morning. It was a pleasant summer day much as it is today. We were living in I suppose a small house on a quiet street is a small town.
We were lounging in comfortable lawn chairs, reading and talking. The shade was cool and the sun was comfortable. What we were talking about didn’t matter, we were talking and laughing about nothing and everything. Thats how it is with your other half. It does not matter what it is you’re talking about. All that matters is that you are talking. Talking with that other half of who you are. It’s strange that way.

When I returned to the dream we were making love, yes again. Making love with someone your this close to is like taking communion, the holy sacrament. There is no shame no hesitation no selfish desire.
Like wrestling with God. You’re naked before them and they before you. You wrestle, play, pass looks of don’t you dare, giving care and attention as well as recievng.
And like communion there is alway’s the epiphany.

The little death, “peu de morts”. And then the resurrection into that basking summer afternoon love that just leaves you spent, sprawled and exposed to the day and the rest of your life.

I can remember every mole, every scar, every scent, the glow of her red curls in the summer sunlight thru the window. Oh and the look of complete trust complete contentment.
I once joked at the expressions she had while making love and she was mock insulted, and I smiled and said why? You get to hear me whimper and sigh?

And life has been good, life has been perfect. To have been given such a gift to know someone so well, my other, such a perfect part of myself.

When you find yourself a widower one of the things that you realize eventually is that if you are going to proceed in life in functional manner your going to have to figure out who you are as a individual. No longer are you Bruce the Husband of Francie. Eventually as you go about your life you recognize that who you were and what you were about no longer are a functioning paradigm in the living world as you go about your day.

Nothing fits…… you might find yourself just stalled out after so long no longer knowing what you should do. What you would like to do, who you would like to be, It’s almost as if your out of phase with life because all the things that you spent a lifetime habituating yourself to. Out of love for another or necessity have no claim or are available to you.

And that is when i began to understand how it is that people came to believe in ghost.
Her life, her passion, her storms were all still present and tangible in this dimension I remain in.
What the hell do you do with that? Do you spin it into some neurological trick of your mind. Or do you validate it as something as a real metaphysical event where she somehow slipped the bonds of death and came to visit me. Even if for no other reason than to read me the riot act.

In the end I decided it was real it was her ghost coming to me in my dreams if for no other reason than to let me know I wasn’t alone.

Several weeks later in another lucid dream I found myself with her in our kitchen and we’re making dinner together. It was exactly like when we were younger and she was strong and had the energy to enjoy the good things……
I was slicing a piece of beef and she was making biscuits. We were talking about my previous dream where she was railing about what I did with her stuff.
As I’m telling her about how dream went. Shes laughing at the whole thing, about how she was raising hell and how I’m just bowled over and bewildered.
We laughed and laughed, bumping hips. I can smell her hair it lasted an eternity, lt lasted long enough.
It was perfect, we both knew that the first dream was exactly how she would have acted. And we are just laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing because it was real in this upside down world we were in.

My last lucid dream was in the morning as well and we were together again, this time in bed together.
It was morning and I’ve woken to realize she is back again, with me, I can feel her warmth. Smell her scent, her hair is tickling my face. I can feel how our body’s are molded together. I can feel her small feet shifting around my feet trying to steal some heat from mine, saying hello.
As I’m leaving my subconscious and waking to realize she returned to visit me one more time. I begin to run my hand across her arms her thigh. Abruptly again I am an awake and she gone. I repeat this sleep wake process a couple of times. Each time waking to realize that I can’t have her in this world again.

But I can still smell her and feel the warmth of where she was next to me in bed.

So yes i believe in ghost. Are they simply a construction of my subconscious playing with my conscious mind. I don’t know and honestly don’t really care. The impact of these encounters gave me the freedom to relish what we were. The fire, the joyful abandon of naked honesty, and the passion, the playfulness.

That these things are impressions on my soul, they are real and they will never die. They are eternal and still exist in time and space. Also it was her telling me. That is was ok, that she knows for now I am alone in life and that I will now need to remake myself into a new person who is not defined as Bruce the husband of Francie.

and that’s ok…… it is as it should be

So I have chosen to go by what has always been my first name. The name of my Great Grandfather.
Oliver

Being born plays tricks on us. We come into the world already attached to an Identity, family, culture, religion, town and country.  I have often wondered of the impact it has on each of us.  We all have our troubles and road blocks to what life has for us.  Being born last I was benefited by timing and cursed by it.  I was always following someone. My father, an older brother and nearer brother.  everyone pointed to what he did, admonished to not do what he did. And you know you just don’t have the makeup to do what he does.

It’s curious thing following another.  sometimes it can be good and sometimes it can be bad.  A deer will dart out across the road in front of you depending on if they are following an other in their clan who has already crossed the road successfully.  With a deer fight or flight is not an option, it is always flight.  Speed and familiarity of terrain are hard wired into their gene pool.  If one has already crossed the road then going forward when spooked is always the right choice.  The coast is clear and follow the leader rules the night.  So if mother made it across the road that is safe harbor and off I go to a grisly death.

Problem is evolution did not anticipate inanimate objects barreling through the night oblivious and disinterested in the deer.  To a deer’s mind your car is more like a bolt of lightening blasting through the night than what time has told them to watch for and fear.

Technology has the same effect on modern men today as well.  Everything we have been ingrained with to guide us in life betrays us just like a car does does for a deer on the side of the road at night. What in resent years past used to be a generational problem has now become a sub-generational  issue.  What worked for the 20 somethings of the nineties can no more work for the class of 2015 than what had worked for the boomers.

Today I hear of 20 somethings writing there own future with technology and unimagined new frontiers of communication and connectedness. In practice though all I observe are people trying to be something they are not on various Facebook like platforms.  Their parent do it on Linkedin in or something like that as well. I receive almost weekly updated linkedin request from high school friends who’s job will have no impact by who they have connected with on the internet.  The same old rules apply.  Does you boss or prospective boss like you, do they think you can do they the job and is there no one else the know or like better to give the job to.

Seems like even with the world wide open to young people today and the choices before them broader than they have ever been but the same old basic question applies.  Who do they follow.

I set my mind to follow my older brother, he made something of himself, and he really did. Not to follow my father, which I did in part,  because he lived in fear like a deer and always seemed to be running back into the brush and his same old habits.  I ended up following my closest brother to some degree which was a mistake because he really can do things I could never do.

So it seems like here I am just over the hump of life, I guess you might call it Thursday morning for me and I am deciding if I am going to cross the road again, duck in the brush behind me or to say the hell with it and keep eating and walk down the road and find my own pasture.  I guess it is a very good thing that I have the choice. Many times in recent months I have felt played out and worn out.  My bodies is failing me to some degree and I can no longer do the work that once sustained me.  At first I saw this as a cruel joke because it had never even occurred to me that this would happen to me this soon in life.

Now I think it may be a gift to get me off the beaten path and look harder for a better road to cross at least for me.  Can you tell that I lived in Walden’s pond for many of a season, I guess I still live there today.

I believe it is safe to say my daughters would agree that while raising them I always taught them to look for the good in people and to have Faith in God.  I think it was safe to say that my faith was color blind and always looking outward to other cultures as just different people looking for the same thing. At least I hope it is so.

I grew up on the tail end of the boomer generation,  never fully vested in the causes of the boomers and I awoke as an adult during the Reagan years.  I had no misconceptions about Iran Contra affair.  I didn’t care then and I don’t care today, Realpolitik is what it is and no matter what culture or system the exercise of power is the same it is just how skilled you are at exercising it.

Over the years literally I have seen leaders make good and bad choses, it is what it is.  I disliked Clintons cavalier attitude towards morality not just in practice but in how he defined it, never the less he was a good politician.  He got things done that were good for both sides of the isle. Not everything mind you but he could work with in the system and get something done with some form of consensus.  His morals, at least public, however for ever changed America.  I can remember railing during the Lewinsky affair it wasn’t what he had done with a 19 year old paige that pissed me off.  It was his lying and belittling the affair.  As Harrison Ford said in Clear and Present Danger, “no use diffusing a bomb after it had gone off”.

It was the redefining of what was acceptable moral behavior in public and private that would for ever alter America. “we didn’t really have sex he said, how would you define sex, well I never penetrated her, maybe my cigar-but never copulation by the strict definition of the act”  I said then that in ten years we would have a generation of young girls and boys who didn’t really see anything wrong with oral sex, after all it wasn’t really having sex, more like advanced necking!

He was a good politician who got some things done worked across the isle and took advantage of two previous presidents economic policies.  I’ll never forgive him for what he did to the recent culture though. I’m no fool to think that sex didn’t go on between teenagers.  I learned way to early and though  I have never regretted the girls I chose to lay down with I do for ever regret is laying with them.  They were not the one and it was not the time.

Today we have legalized marriage of the same sex no matter what the people of that state vote.  On the horizon is polymorphous relationships were multiple partners of what ever mixture of gender will be legal and mandated to be accepted and not spoken ill of (hate speech). Polygamy and child brides next, lastly will come pederasty.  All will be acceptable and required education and laws to protect the individuals preferred behavior no matter what the cost or age involved. Dare I mention “man boy love” at this juncture.

Society and by that I mean a nation is a fragile thing if the moors of the society are ripped from the shores of history and tradition the nation drifts aimlessly.  Drifting aimlessly gets you no where fast.

“If A nations plumbing is as leaky as its philosophy then it foundations and structure are doomed” anon

Churchill once said I believe “that  a young person who wasn’t a liberal had no heart, a middle age person who wasn’t a conservative had no brain.”   In part I believe he came up with that belief to justify his shift to conservatism in his latter years.  Realpolitik stepped up to the plate and said this is what it is going to take to survive the future as a nation and culture.

Are we as a nation going to step up and call it dog crap when we see it in front of us or are we going to define it anew and give it political status so that particular pile of crap and every other pile of crap we walk upon is forever inshrined in a political stasis protected by courts and legislatures that the founders never had any intention of protecting with with the Bill of Rights?

I was recently ask to be a Groomsman  at a freinds wedding. It threatend to be a cool windy day in a park preserve located in the Mississippi River bottom, at least for October. Bow season had been in for 3 full days and the topic of conversation among all the younger males in the wedding party were the about the deer that had already walk by or the ones they had already bagged for the cooler.  Beer flowed like rain before the ceremony.  My wife commented on the way home how we live In a different generation. The groom wore his camo sunglasses and rumpled felt hat through the wedding and the bride read her vows from her cell phone. What a juxtaposition of cultures.

After spending the night before with groom and a fellow groomsman and listening to their phones go off incessantly I took care to remind us all to at least mute our phones prior to the march. It wasn’t necessary though. The brides mother warned me we might hear such and such uncle’s alert go off to I believe Jimmy Hendrix.  So I was expecting a chorus of Lynard Skinard to ZZ Top through the ceremony.  The 16 mph wind coming down the river valley spared us all that although in reality it wouldn’t have mattered.

Life was perfect this day.  I was reminded of a celebration from medieval times where town folk celebrated with abandon, and very little inhibitions.  This was very good thing also because apparently the DNR had removed the out houses for the season for which we all agreed was dumb. It was the hunting season and where were hunters to go bathroom not to mention us.  No problem the park we were at had ample supply of trees and wooded areas to sneak off to which we all did so frequently.  I even took my wife for a stroll so she could moon the dry oak tree swamp. Life is good and life is simple if you let it be.

I am fairly certain that no one in attendance had great amount of money or owned more than a modest house. Most rented and worked for little more than minimum wage.  Many of the older men where on  disability for actual broken bodies after a lifetime of hard repetitive laborer. One older veteran celebrated finally getting his VA retirement and three years back pay.  He did a little dance

These are do what they can, do what they have to people – who show up after a full days work and help you move or fix something broken at your house type people.  Salt of the earth really does apply here and I use it with out shame.

Short of my own daughters wedding and my own wedding it was the most joyous wedding I had ever been too.  There were some hurt family feelings floating around, I’m not blind and stupid. And a few teetotalers floating around but they were not to have the day. Like an inefficient preacher they could not influence or smother the celebration.  This was the joining of two people in marriage, and it was a celebration as well as standing before God and Christ asking for his blessing upon their life.

Celebration without pretense without inhibitions or limitations.  I left early because of  my own pain but I am sure that there were Rebel Yells echoing through the rented hall before the night was over and all made it home safe and the couple began the first day of the rest of their life.

Si vis pacem, para bellum – Vegetius

If you want peace prepare for war. How many times has this been uttered and not heeded, how many people and nations have been subjected to violence and subjugation because they failed to heed this admonishment.

Sivis pacem, para bellum. Why are the lessons of history always lost to the forgotten past? There are no particular reason this or any other lesson is forgotten other than willful blindness. Nor does length of time seem to play a roll in what is forgotten and what is remembered. How many times have we watched a family member or friend wade back into a destructive relationship and no amount of advice or counsel can sway them from repeating history? Lessons learned about history either from a book, antidote or personal experience always seem relegated to the trash heap of well intentioned all be it misplaced advice. People in the singular and the plural might recognize circumstances approaching that ring the caution bells of alarm but history is almost always ignored and actions and steps are taken that follow in the pig mire of mistakes that have predated the current set of circumstance and the same mistakes and outcomes are repeated yet again with the same predictable out comes.

It is never that the repetitive circumstances are so different in make up and actors that the point is hidden in the dusty examples of history. Nor are the actor’s motives and intention’s ever that different from one age to the next. Lust for power, fear, pride and searching for control are the same today as they were in the first millennium.

A horse will always act like a horse; an abusive man will always act the abusive man. A nation cornered will always either accept poor terms of capitulation or will lash out in foolish military maneuver.

A nation that forgets where they have come from and what fortitude it took to build the nation is always doomed to decline

For the last fifty years we in America have heard the caution that the state of our country is mirroring and progressing down a very similar road as what was the Roman Empire. No debate or defense will be given to the strengths and morality of the Roman Empire nor will they be given for the strengths and morality of the American nation other than to say simply this. After the fall of Rome Europe entered the feudal period of the dark ages and knowledge and any form of predictable justice was gone from the face of Europe for a millennial.

We have entered into a point in history where our social, economic, and political decision making has become so lazy and inept that the mistakes needed to guarantee we have chosen to follow Rome into oblivion are already virtually sealed.   Does this mean that the Visigoths are at the northern frontier and we must surrender the gates of our country and be subjected to a menacing foe? Not hardly but just like the Decline and Fall of Rome we will see saw back and forth a few more years.

Liberty is the virtuous application of informed judgment of each and every circumstance we come to face in our day-to-day life. Whether it be civil, spiritual, or business. Above all it was not a license to do and say whatever suited there momentary fancy.
Paraphrased
John Milton

originally written 2010

Building upon a lifetime of observations and learning I have come to believe that a significant collapse of the economy and the social stability that this economic system has supported is in jeopardy.
Virtually all of the social structure we enjoy has been built upon mortgaged promises to the future. I am not saying that this process is an evil or faulty practice. In truth it is a reasonable way to build upon a society at a greater rate than might otherwise be achieved through the slow process of developing natural resources and material skills naturally. The danger that we are now in is that for the last 50 years we have been ever increasing the social contract of guaranteed stability and results output to the point that our national and world system can no longer support that inflation it has promised.
Many of us have been promised the world vis-a-vie our union membership, our educational acheivment, our public service employment and lastly our participation in investment options that reach all around the world.
I would say that in theory this was not a bad system but that it has been compromised. We have been promised more than can be paid. Just as we say portfoilios diminish into thin air a few years ago. Now unions are seeing their clout and bankroll diminish. In the near future I believe we will see the promises to the public sector break down into insolvency.
Everyone is clamoring to scratch up their share of the pie and the truth is the pie is not nearly big enough to support it all and now everyone knows it. They might not say it and they might not react to it out of fear and unbelief, but deep down they know it. Their only hope is that by some slim chance we might elect a group of individuals that will have the courage and intelligence to save us from going over the brink.

The closer we approach this horizon the less chance we have of electing reprecentatives who are able to turn us around or at least away from social economic collapse. It is an exponential problem from this point on. The closer we come to it the greater the insolvance becomes. All the while the pubic anger grows and public faith clouds over like war clouds. Talk to the normal housewife and they will tell you to hell with gas prices where were you guys for the last three years when food prices went through the roof.

15 years ago we watched Bosnia fall apart into civil war and ethnic cleansing, while we all forgot that just a few short years before that Sarajevo was the new Paris and the home to the winter Olimpics.

War and tragedy are always only a few steps away for any civilization.
In changing directions just a bit only for the purposes to make a point consider this. What do you think was the goal Bin Laden had when he waged war on America? Did he actually think he would be able so subdue us to the point that he could send Jihadist to this continent and possess our resources. I don’t think for a moment this was his purpose. His purpose was to injure us enough by any means possible that we would no longer have the power or will to interfere with them in the subcontinent.