Playing the system.
כ"ב סיון תשס"ח

בס"ד

All my life, at least since age 10, I have gotten by by playing the system. I was warned about it, "if you don't work now you won't make it in university." That didn't speak to me so much. I heard the same thing put differently recently: I would rather have you come home with D's having worked your hardest rather than straight A's and not having cracked a book.
When I learned to play the guitar I went for lessons and I really wanted to know how to play and the instructor even asked me, do you want to learn how to play or how to play a few songs, but in the end I just took a couple of lessons and learned a few tricks to get me by, but I haven't made any progress in guitar since probably the first year that I started playing.
Worse yet, saxophone and clarinet, I couldn't get to the point of improv, my teacher later said that if I had asked him he would have taught me, but I didn't even think to ask.
Worst of all, when I finally found Judaism right under my nose and I wanted to go all the way with it, I also managed only to play the system, I have not gone beyond, broken out, found the ultimate expression of myself through Torah.
But now, after the first brain surgery I thought that it would be efficient to heal up and get back to work right away and I was unclear about the lessons that I should take from the experience. So God let me have it again, this time worse, and not getting better, I have been housebound all week with a cough, itchiness from the drugs, bleh.
I keep reading about playing the system vs., well I'm not sure what right now, perhaps true growth through Torah.
I even got married by playing the system. I mean, it has all come out quite nicely, but it seems that God would like more out of me, for my sake.

Mm, mm. The Jewish organic farm. Collective or not, but a Jew cannot go off alone without a minyan and a mikve.

Potatoes, tomatoes, dates, peaches, grapes, cherries, watermelon, eggplant, hummous, zucchini, sweet potato, and a little patch of pot and 'shrooms. Shittake, amanita muscaria.

Drugs are outside of our over-legislated western society. The people on the bus in Israel can be loud, obnoxious, immodest, but, they are real, pushing and shoving, real. It is not really my preference in day to day interactions, but it is better than being dead to the world. There are those who are pro-drugs who are anti-legalization because the whole system works better the way it is.

There is a lot of stuff happening all at the same time in the world right now. I cannot say that I am a big student of history, so why should it mean that the end is near? But how long can an organic system spring back without sustaining long term damage. The larger, or the younger that an organic system is, the more flexible it is, but, well, the end is near. And where do you want to be when the lights go out?

The solution is quite simple; a Jewish organic farm.

Why? What? Do we lead or do we follow?

Johnny Cash - not famous for musicianship, rather, honest lyrics.

For those of you just tuning in, this is basically an electronic scratch pad, trying to get back into shape. Really I should be going back to pen and paper, or rock and chisel, in which case one must choose words very carefully indeed.

Santana - Abraxas

I had brain surgery. Yes. I did. Just out of nowhere. I mean, I had this thing growing inside my head for what could have been many years, over 30 years? No one could tell you. After the first surgery all I could say was that anything could happen to anyone at any time. All this means is that you should bless the new moon at the earliest possible time and that you should pray the afternoon prayer at the earliest possible time, neither of these things have I been able to put into practice. My wife claims that I was emotionally dulled out by the first surgery, I am skeptical, though the world has changed since the second surgery. Two for the price of one. Why? Infection. One of the doctors involved is infamous for losing pens. Heavy antibiotics. Bleh.

When I was lying in the hospital after that second surgery, loading up on the drugs, I couldn't move, I couldn't look at food, I had no energy, no intake, no output. People kept calling and visiting and I must have looked and sounded awful, I know that the folks back in the New Country were panicking, and Baruch Hashem, what I was going through was a temporary stage, but I understood a few things from that. You hear uplifting stories of people who fight debilitating diseases and their treatments with a will to live. Sitting at home with a headache this is not hard to imagine. However, two surgeries in two months, first of all, waking up in the ICU twice (it is familiar already the second time), but there is no time between the experiences. Coming in to the hospital in an ambulance twice in six weeks, how can a person pick himself up off the matt? Knocked out and knocked out again. And then comes the treatment which saps the last of a person's strength, and if that keeps on coming, every week, every month, even every few months, time is compacted, every treatment takes 110% of a person's strength and that is highly unlikely to be there.