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Now Can be Better Than Ever

I am in fact waiting on something that I already have, these good qualities I already have in abundance are the very qualities I' waiting for or procrastinating on and I am involved in a contradiction of my own making. The positive side to this is your trying to earn a pass when you already have a free pass. I already have a ticket to ride and I spend all my time waiting on line for a ticket. I might be working so hard for something when I already have a free pass.

What I did in that situation is I injected more volatility into the the possible scenarios. Because one outcome was put in the highest priority, the weight of the situation became greater and seemed more volatile to me. I then pushed the lever of procrastination so the situation would seem to weight less to me. The cost wasn’t as high because I will delay.

Or it could be anything I think is going to make me worthy. If I first do this, I am good or I am worthy, and then I can allow myself to be present to the now. By thinking in this fashion, we are putting the whatever it is that I think will make me worthy not only first but as a must. Again, I am putting more than just being my first choice, it is a first and only route to the now and therefore makes the weight of what I am putting first as more than a preference I might choose and maybe more of an actual hurdle than I needed to make it. In actuality, there is no second choice, because if I don’t make it to my first choice, I am not worthy for any other choices. If I don’t bring my first choice into the now, then there will be no other choices of significance coming into the now. There is no revisionist thinking here and no rudder that I can adjust.

Of course, some of the basic contingencies should be there but the list can become onerous and dictatorial to my interests. I give up the now because one or several things I say have to be in place before I do anything just aren’t in place so I give up on everything because my contingencies just aren’t met. The demands I make aren’t met so no deal is cut. I can’t set my sails unless I first have an easterly breeze of at least 15 knots. This demand might limit my willingness or ability to experience the now. Then I can consider whether these demands are set up as the excuse. I set up this set of demands, as an excuse not to get going now. I’ll golf I say when I can first shoot below an 80. How am I going to get my score below an 80 from where I am now which is in the 90’s without continuing to play the game? What happens then is that I don’t go golfing. I set up an actual catch 22 about my golfing game because I can’t get the necessary improvement without additional game practice. One-way to get into the present is to lower or lessen my demands at times so at the least I can continue on. I can operate on the highest levels yes, but also I can operate on lower levels in terms of my higher golf scores. I can accept different levels of performance. I don’t have to have full thrust on my every effort every time out.

We might continue to squander the present not by overdoing and extravagance, but by the opposite, just putting a discount on the now, which we estimate isn’t worth as much as the future, and we push it away for those golden days ahead, for another day, month, year, or decade. If now was a person, you would probably show him or her out of the way and say I’ve got to follow the gold rush so go get out of my way. I’m on my way out to find gold. When I look at the gardens of the now, I need maybe even to first see if I have my own permission to do this. Convergence or divergence often is a matter of permission. If you diverge, you may not have had that secret permission to branch away. But sometimes divergence is smart. But then maybe you are not permitted to converge either. I will consider neither the convergent nor the divergent view. So either way I can’t lose. However, due consideration was never made, that court was never held, I got the escape hatch and closed it behind me. Procrastination often just an unwillingness to sift through the remaining arguments pro and con and finally bring whatever weight you choose to assign to each of the arguments to the table.

I might indeed be waiting for all the variables to be in place. The law student expects that once the variable that’s in place of the law degree he will be able to impress members of the opposite sex. But in fact in may be another variable that will appeal the most to a given girl. He might have all the variables in place for a given girl now absent the law degree. He doesn’t need the law degree for this girl because that’s not what matters to this girl. Her now variable is something else she wants which is an athletic person. Her wish list is different from what you assumed it was. Realizing also, that everybody has a slightly different wish list for anything.

The variable or trait that might most appeal to any given women might be a certain look. Or a certain interest such as in athletics or international events that varies with an individual, which he himself may or may not already have now. And then he might get the variable in place that he thinks is most important only later to find that something else was most important to a given women and he already had that variable back then. Or he finds that he gets the variable of the law degree and it doesn’t matter to this girl now because is was some other variable that she wanted that he hasn’t got now. The idea is that we have to review not only for which are the variables we think we need later, but what are the variables that are already in place now that relate to what I am trying to do. Also, consider which variables are most important to a negotiation or situation now and whether these variables are being looked at in their proper proportion and weights especially when we are dealing with other people or outside forces where they might weigh or consider those variables in a different fashion then we might have assumed. What carries weight with one person may not be what carries weight in that degree with another person. People do weigh things differently. What is going to matter most in a given situation I can’t always be sure of.

While we are looking for additional variables, also look for variables that we already have that we can capitalize on and capture right now.

When someone starts to drive, they are given a learners permit. They are given permission to drive with a fellow licensed driver, as a learner’s permission. I will never get to drive, which is a common mode of transportation, if there has been no permission granted.

Of course we want our permission to have some future resonance that gets me a proper reward. For example, I am a doctor and I’m working on cloning which society is apparently not willing to accept in the foreseen future, I may want to find a path that is more allowable and permissive in terms of it’s fruitions in the near future, so maybe I should seek another scientific project that could be rewarding.

Or maybe you had one bad experience, you gave a lousy speech, so you removed permission from yourself ever to be a public speaker, that possible relationship with the future audience was severed forever to protect yourself from a similar experience. I do this while pondering other protective mechanisms I have formed that keep me from investigating anything from the present that I could have tried to expand with. On the other hand, you get divorced, and you then take away permission to get into that realm of relating again, even though future opportunities sometimes appear again in the now.

You had a bad hamburger at McDonald’s. You tell yourself, I’ll never go there again. Permission is granted you have permission not to go. And maybe that’s good. But permission can work both ways. Why not give yourself permission to go either way in the future, to be or not to be, as Shakespeare said. I will never go to McDonald’s I said, I have my own permission or I could change my mind, after reviewing updated facts on the food, I might find the particular McDonald’s may not be representative of them all, the particular hamburger I had is not representative of every hamburger I could still have. So I can choose again, depending, along with the issuance of new information, on that which I can permit myself to consider, either sometime now or sometime later, in changing my mind. One experience is not every experience and I can maybe get on that horse of going to McDonald's again, despite my one fall. Or maybe it is true, one experience is every experience. But I might not get you to believe that either.

We seem to give permission to ourselves to expect the dismal and the abysmal. I hear the bad news and I permit myself to believe it. Why not give ourselves permission to accept or even begin to see that something good might yet happen, however improbable, and least put some percentage chance on the good. A low chance in not the same as no chance. There might be a 10 or 20 percent or some percentage chance it would come your way.

We seem to give ourselves permission to constantly turn the channel on TV, but in so many other ways we are locked forever, our thoughts are set in everlasting stone, unalterable to any of the new, those prior patterns will prevail and the sails I already set go with me and course along with the same outline and with our prior beliefs intact, when in fact new patterns are forming and we need magnetic and magic thoughts and we can go where new ideas might be found. We haven’t given ourselves permission to have new, different, and more determined ways of thinking. Putting it simply can I think about something else or determine that I can think about something else? This view, which digresses from the known and familiar, is in fact a view, which might be the one that somehow gets us humming. If you can find some good ideas, follow or trail along with the logic of those good ideas. I don’t have to search out only for what I believe is the best view I can get. If I don’t find the best view, I don’t have to say I want no view, I can look at the views that are in between or outside the familiar circle.

There is something lacking but I can’t pinpoint it. Can I find that something else. I might be trying to pinpoint, allocate, and find a precision point and on top of that put it on a time line. In doing this, I might be missing out real present time options and chances. Part of the cause of this is the mathematic part of the education process, which gives equations, and formulas that can be followed forward to a precise answer. But the situations I might be involved with or hope to be involved with might not operate in a similar fashion. Indeed I might not be able to pinpoint when, where and how, and by looking to do this I might further aggravate my search process and might get myself involved in even more procrastination. I can contemplate weather a neat approach should be taking or whether I might just as well abandon the search for a neat, ordered process and just go forward without it. Even if I do find at the moment a neat, ordered process, I can still be aware that this might be interrupted by outer events of a more global nature.

Some people continually look for dating partners while having preset criteria. I will only permit myself to talk with someone, of a certain height. Or the rich man thinks he should only talk wealthy counterparts, foregoing conversations with the plebian masses. But the variables and intersections, can not be completely known in advance, territories are not in fact neatly defined or static, they might be more like a gushing river. I find no matter how much I have going for me, I am subject to operating in the same chaos as anyone else. These territories, may not even remain in their current form, each moment really is newly forming territory, even very separate from the past. Just because this girl isn’t a model doesn’t mean she isn’t attractive, so we can’t always look for a true dichotomy, a true split. All diamonds aren’t the same. So I procrastinate because I don’t know, how things will converge together, so I forget about it all together, foregoing the now, the coming together never happens, so we will never know what might have been. Had we been willing to take in another view. The coming together of ideas, of people, of what could yet be is passed over. In part due to the dim perceptions of some if not all of us now. Two people both have the variable of liking each other, but they never follow through towards a friendship.

It might be better to make one or two of our coinciding variables definite and let the rest be moving or changeable variables. If I make too many of my coinciding variables definite, it could leave me out of now. I could make only say one variable definite. I definitely want at least x amount of money with me as I travel through Europe as these two needed and wanted variables work together. But do I also want the political conditions to be definite, the weather patterns to be definite in the various countries I intend to travel? I want to date someone with blue eyes. I could make this variable definite but leave some of the other variables open. Then, how many coinciding variables do I want to get going as I attempt to march them together. What variables are really most important here as far as having side by side implications?

I could appreciate say reading a book I enjoy the show as much as anyone, even the King. I might have an intrinsic feeling and thought that reaches towards the highest levels. So although I may seem to be less perfect than the next person, my level of appreciation shows good capacities. That ability to appreciate in and of itself can reach new and great heights. My facility to engage to a great lecture, a great movie, and a good course of dialogue, might be as high for me as the person who seems to have so much more on the surface of things or I am indeed at a close level to perfection in terms of my appreciations. The ability to appreciate is another type of vision and sight that I can begin to rely upon or refer to now. The appreciation I am finding within is a form of sight for me now.

In addition, think about the word vote that seems to give permission and says yes now. When you are talking at length with a friend, you are voting yes, yes I give my consent to this endeavor, yes it is worthwhile to some degree. A girl says she will go with you to the movie, that right there is a yes vote, you might as well run for office.

The reverse can take place the regular guy gets some interest from the supermodel. Like in the movie Notting Hill. Julia Roberts in the end, playing herself really, finds her happiness in the character played by Hugh Grant, the man minding the bookstore in Notting Hill. Find your Notting Hill. The rich and famous might want the regular. The guy dismisses the supermodel as not being interested in him, foregoing a now opportunity, not even giving her a chance to consider things from her side of the table. So the dismissive statement, she’s out of my league, leaves her view out of the equation and doesn’t permit further review and consideration. The easy no prevails, rather than the more risky maybe that leaves some consideration on both sides of the table. But I didn’t have my own permission anyway I couldn’t allow myself to date a rich, supermodel. All this portrays how there are many views to consider, not just your own that can affect things now.

It’s almost like we are waiting for someone to give us permission to get going now. I didn’t pass somebody’s test on this, so where is the permission?

With the procrastination, I have for the time being withdrawn permission and I need to obtain that permission back.

Part of this is we are so used to taking tests that we think we need to take and pass a test to have permission to do things now. Tests are seen as permission that gave the floor to walk on. After school, we feel we still need to take a test and pass it before we can move on to another course. It could be a moral test, a goodness test, a competence test, a know how test, an aptitude test or any other test we feel we need to pass to validate our entree into the now. So why don’t I just give you a test, if you pass the test, you’ll feel better and you will feel like you can proceed and go ahead now.

Permission could be a way of having a looser hold on our goals. I will pursue my goal, but I will permit the unknown variables to operate in that I can only monitor them at best and I cannot affect them at all times in ways that I can know or find out about. I will charter the unknown and unsheltered course, and brave the elements going across the plains to the West without knowing what fully is out there in the West.

I feel good about golf when I play, but I feel vaguely guilty about going to the golf course, because I don’t have a six-figure income, or seven-figure income yet. There are no absolute requirements as to what I need to have to enjoy myself. I need to shelter my time towards this one goal. When I get the dough, I can relax and go to the course and enjoy the game of golf. But when I check reality firmly, I find I can go to the golf course now and enjoy it now because I am good at the game now. I talk well with various golf partners now, and I can do this now, without keeping and preserving that artificial barrier I have superimposed upon my seaway of time, where I had segmented myself away from the game, foregoing what can be a respite and break for me now. I don’t need to sequester, I can walk the land with despite my pockets being relatively empty, basking in the sunshine of the now, because I can do this now. All I need now is the shirt on my back and I do have that shirt. And maybe you would get the next idea that would propel you to the higher income on the golf course, lightning strikes on the golf course as well and you can listen for the thunder there. You can fight your wars on the golf course. Wherever you can have a chance. You can commune with all of your interests under the open sky, strategizing on the move. Not knowing all the variables or what will actually beckon and when, I might try to control my outer environment, I fight to find the variables, I try to reduce my landscape and horizons to the controlling process, as I try to deny on some ends to control for the wanted variables on other ends. Where and how the variables will pop in and pop out I just don’t know. The control factor itself may be off. Can I control for the weather by mowing my lawn. Those factors may have no relationship. Can I control for world peace by giving my full attention to the news? Can I control for a higher grade by only studying more where only issues might sometimes come in. I might have to relinquish some control to the forces of chance to further find myself in the present. Maybe the variable that most applies in a particular case is finding an instructor with a more liberal grading policy. I go to a social event, what are the variables I need to control to have a good time? What are the variables making up the blend? Indeed those valued variables might be out of reach on all fronts, but do we know this now? So we look around and begin to give ourselves a more permissive landscape, not letting go of the script but start to ad lib a bit on it, realizing the script we having given to ourselves might be sanctimonious with stratospheric flying above the sanctimonious waters that I wanted to trough. So we can modify, abate, brushing aside or even scraping our highly charged script or have it flow to a lighter current. At least I started with some script. But I can work a revised script off any previous script. Then bonding again with the now in other ways, and giving permission to ourselves as if we could ever capture some of the now, and finally experiencing it as it is, bordering on new heights and other measures of greatness, or at least coming and running closer to the real in the now. And those variables can come at us with highly charged expectations, with a greater intensity that we had previously thought, so we don’t even know the force of the intersections and how strong each of the variables will be. There might be collisions of unknown proportions. When someone is running with the football, it assumed they will finally get tackled most of the time, absent of a touchdown, but it can be with a full charge of members from the other team, rather than just a trip up. The variable of the tackle can have varying degrees of intensity.

Can the closeness bring us real focus, with some tightening of the lens, the anchor might yet hold. If the sighting of land is actually possible as it finally was for Columbus, indeed we may be just on the border of finally getting there, because we never gave up on what we really wanted, and recognized it finally in the now, and finally did not brush away the paintings of our desire, with the water drops of the fierce rains.

Am I in the right location now? I am in the right state, the right country, the right century? Am I reading the right book now? Am I thinking the right thoughts now? I don’t know for sure. What happens is I fill in that void of not knowing with something negative as a proxy for decision-making material? However, I am using material that doesn’t have the proper substance to the situation. I really just don’t know and I shouldn’t fill that void in with presumed negativity. Those wide gaps in knowing that we are all subject to should be left open rather than filled with the negative. Don’t try and close the gap of not knowing with negativity, just say don’t know. Most of us do need a coach or somehow find a coach to help us recognize what could become now.

So close in the now, yet still so far away. To actualize on something, we may have to get a bit closer to it. You can’t shake a persons hand a million miles away. You can’t see a person with the naked eye a thousand miles away, unless you have Superman’s astounding eyesight. Just like you can’t see 1000 miles away, you can’t see 1000 days ahead. Neither sight affords you a view you just aren’t close enough. Of course, you don’t necessarily want the absolute closest view of the cliff either. You can get close to the now of reading a book if you actually open it, and turn your eyes from the TV or the ocean or anything else and actually look at a page. You can get closer the now of being at the game, if you get on the line for the ticket and stop circling the stadium. You can get closer to the pitchers mound, it you work on your curveball.

You can get closer to the now of hitting a jump shot, if you actually pick up a basketball and shoot it at the hoop. You might get closer to knowing another person in you have an actual conversation with them, taking that previously forbidden path. You can get closer to the sunrise of today, if you don’t let yourself sleep through that early alarm, and stop dreaming of the next century.

Well then, when is the waiting going to be over? When is the party going to begin? When can I start, when can you start. Patience is good but we can wait forever. I might be on a patient progression that will land me at the door of success in 2050. In the meantime, all sorts of doors closed behind me. I could have been progressing on several fronts at the same time and maybe one or some of them might have found a landing point in some present time. If we really want something, we can help ourselves out of the waiting mode at times, and this can help bring us to the now. Help yourself to a cookie now. I might be waiting for the next eclipse of the sun, the next appearance of the ice age, the reappearance of the dinosaurs, my next tour of space, but in the meantime, I could have seen the movie. Again, what I am going to do with the open spaces in between all those great events. I can do other things while I am waiting. We may be so used to waiting for our ship, that when it finally appears, I can’t make the move to get on it. The Nina, Pinto, and Santa Maria finally show up, but hey it’s 1992 not 1492 and it’s just too late. I was so set in my ways, that I was actually patiently frozen in my tracks, my tracks of disappointment, my tracks of unmet expectations, my tracks of lost vision and hope. In the meantime, I was waiting for that ship, I said no, not now, my ship is coming, while a limousine was coming to pick me up to take me to the private jet. Yeah, I walked away from the biggest storm, but I missed everything else that great sea offered me, from those who welcomed me right up front, from the appearances of those who were on the upcoming horizon for me, from them I turned away.

I might have waited out the winter but somehow all the seasons passed me by, I never saw the blooming of the seasons. I was looking for an exact season when other seasons where there for me. As I wasted away on a winter’s landscape, never even seeing the patches of the possible I totally closed my eyes, waiting words to wasting worlds. Spring I never met I never met her now she would have liked me.

I just went to a friend’s birthday party he was at the decade mark, which we celebrated. We all left, the host said he would have a party in 10 years, for the next decade mark, we would meet together in 2011. Humorous yes, it was not a joke, just a representation of the truth, those ten years between would be the forgotten grains in the woodwork, so much a part of what is a landscape for scant gatherings of the brotherhood.

So let’s not do it now, but make it ten years, let’s wait a year, why not 10, why not 20. I’ll trade for Mike Piazza in 2012. Let’s make a deal. The golden boy will still be golden, right? What is the rush? But how do we know that the variables, the intersections, the open doorways, might also be as unknown then as they are now. If I am dealing with unknowns now, why will everything be so certain later on? One thing is certain, uncertain conditions will prevail and the elements I am dealing with carry with them uncertainty in the far future. We may never get the script we first wanted, not now, or not later, so lets see what we can do with the now, allowing for secondary scripts to form. Acting on some parts of another script, actually catching some of today’s waves, while hoping for the good surf of tomorrow, remembering no matter what our good fortune and recompense may be tomorrow, I can’t reach my hand back into today, finding what I gave up for tomorrow. Lot ’s of good opportunities can be found on secondary paths . This opportunity in this day will be gone forever for everybody, not just me. Another chance will come around that hill, over that bend, but this glance is over. I might have given up this forever. We might still be able to keep an open mind towards the future, but also keep one of those open eyes on your present, even if you wear the pirates eye patch. One thing is certain and that is as I travel down this coast time is traveling with me Also don’t expect to be able to say, I’ll be more sure of this in the land of tomorrow, when we aren’t even sure footed about the path we do see. I can see now, I can hear now, and yet this road I’m on now is still uncertain.. My very next step might be in quicksand or put me over the cliff, which would you prefer. 20 percent certainty isn’t going to convert to 90 percent certainty even if there are better conditions tomorrow. I might be waiting for a conversion I am not going to get. Is this particular variable going to convert itself into a more known quantity? I have a 50 percent chance of getting a reliable weather prediction two days in advance, is this going to convert to 90 percent in the near future? So knowing the uncertainty factor will substantially remain with us going into that future, we don’t have to wait for certainty to do something now, because that certainty we want is never coming our way even though we might deserve it, or at least in the percentages we want, to the degree we want. It is just as likely percentage wise that the uncertainty for us will increase into the future, as it would likely decrease.

We categorically know the uncertainty remains, because the variables we are dealing with have uncertainty attached to them. If want to swim, I’ll have to go into the sea. If I could somehow be certain as to what the current will be and what each wave is like, and even then, other variables could impinge against the certainty I have obtained currently. The shark might like this surf as well, representing the third variable, and come and join you for a swim. And you thought you didn’t have any friends. Often, not now, not later, not before, not after, will I ever know the whole truth of what happened, what could have happened for I’m not going to find out later what really went wrong now. I’ll never know for sure what might have been on that road not taken it might have been great but the road just wasn’t taken so I didn’t get to see. If some of the elements are agreeable now , maybe we can take a chance, give it a go. If I can’t find all, maybe I can find some. Maybe at least the water is warm and friendly that way. Take those welcoming waters and put that surfboard to work. Listen to the tunes of the Beach Boys once more. Some tunes are still left against those lost and forgotten days against the landscape of what was once possible. So maybe I find I can still hit a home run , I can still run the bases. It doesn’t get better than this, one more wave, just for me. The waves say yes, permission is granted, ride those seas to heights once more.

Another reason to involve yourself now, to do it now, it to find out what you have going for you earlier, what your assets are, start to ring up that cash register early. There are high school, and grade school kids that could write a great novel right now but they are supposed to properly qualified to do this. You see some are child actors and already capitalizing on acting ability, which is currently present. To pick up a baseball bat at 40 and hit the ball 600 feet is something that you might have wanted to find out about earlier given the baseball contracts. You have your first slice of pizza at 99 and you like it. There have been pizza stores all over the place for the last 100 years, and you could have pursued this all along. But pizza has been absent from my life all this time and I could have been enjoying this many times over. So there is an argument for a least looking into or delving into something enough to where we can find out what the story is earlier rather than later. I can think about what I feel is absent from my life that I could have incorporated previously and taken with me as I went along . Try the different things now and see it you can take it and keep it going all the way along the coast. I can also say if I can find out earlier that I don’t like this, I would let go of the idea earlier, and create space that is more open now for something else. So exploration can be a valid reason for doing something now, even if you want to read in a different or unfamiliar genre, that is not going to give you direct financial gain, you could still justify the course by trying to find out now if you like say science fiction readings. So you can get into this interest throughout rather than at some further point down the road that is more of an endpoint. The testing process is something we agree to when we take many courses, which have this aspect. Why not allow ourselves to test our interests like we allow ourselves to be tested in a course, sooner rather than later and find out what we enjoy and would like to incorporate as we go along. Test for enjoyment, for fun, for good times, for fulfillment. If we don’t like it, we can drop the idea earlier rather than later, although no firm conclusions always need to be made, we can get the preliminary readings and data and a situational feel on potential courses and roads that we could journey. If I enjoy the prelim that can act as a sign on my road as I travel along. Even if you like a certain food for example, or a certain show, you would have to try it once to ascertain that. Give the situation a chance.

Another reason to consider the now is just remember how much time has already washed over the falls. Think of that trip you took ten or twenty years ago, the memories don’t seem as distant in time as the time really was, so this can have a sobering and not soothing effect on how quickly things move and why the presence of the now is significant. We can have reunions not only with people but also with interests, ideas, things we liked but didn’t pursue further in the past. One of the people we might have missed today was ourselves.

Another consideration to ponder is when we think of ownership, I may own a home, a boat, a collection of art, a wine cellar, or other tangible things. You lose your wallet and you say you lost something you owned. But how about this day being lost. If it’s not your day, then whose day is it to lose? It is not the day of the ancient Romans, or the Atlanteans in the lost kingdoms of Plato writings, or those knights from the roundtable in the Middle Ages. It is not the day of those future people that just aren’t here yet. This is the day you breath in, it’s yours and you should claim ownership to it if anyone does just like you own your material possessions .

I look over the vast and lovely brine, I ponder what still might be possible, if I can believe and heed the welcoming seas of today and tomorrow. As I travel along with the ship of time, that all my hopes aren’t pinned on uncertain futures, that I can begin to look at today’s shorelines as possible for me.

Some will say by sacrificing today, not partaking today, we might get more tomorrow. But present denial doesn’t always equate with a future payoff. Why and how did I firmly establish this equivalency? Why is not having something today equivalent to having it in the future. You automatically assumed this and didn’t think about what also had up front payoffs and rewards for now. Why do I automatically assume the worst, when there are several takes on the situation? Take your paycheck today and take it tomorrow. Open the coffers today. Good things might build on themselves. I can prosper today and I can prosper tomorrow. Today’s prosperity can contribute to tomorrow’s prosperity. I am trying to spread out my assets over time, budgeting what I can do now into an unseen and unknown future that might not arrive in the way I expect. Even if you are doing this, sowing for the future, spread out and sow something in the present. Does the one who sows just sow one little spot in this case being one little spot of time? Bring some of that Bell shaped curve into the present. Ponder the asset and ask yourself, is this asset usable in the present. If it has sales value now, then I should either sell it or keep it and use it. I can’t sell my athletic ability necessarily but maybe I should put a sales value on it just to help me realize it is worth something now. Why spread it thin to the future if only then and only when. If any of these days or any of those moments are going to be for you, why not this day and this moment?

Then sometimes we are waiting for now because we feel we need more preparation, more time, more money, or more of something that relates to the situation. But thinking of things globally, if I wanted to go from America to Europe in 1910 I wouldn’t say I’d wait until they have cross Atlantic flights. I wouldn’t wait for the invention of the telephone in 1810 if I wanted to talk to someone then. We have to make do with less if we have to and if we don’t have certain advantages, we might want to proceed without them. I can only work with so many tools of preparation and even those tools change over time and in the future. Then sometimes it is advantageous to see how you can do with less preparation. I give a speech ad lib and that can tell me something about my ability to give a speech ad lib. I can see how I can do without the props. Can I do well on a more spontaneous level in a specific instance and in a more generalized approach to living?

Then there can be many surprises coming our way that we can’t predict. Can we adjust to the surprises or did I just look for what I could find on the predictable road?

There is always some possibility of a big payoff as I mull along. What this big payoff is or could be would differ depending of what you want, but it could happen maybe anytime on the time line and come about in unexpected fashion. They will say, there is a pay off in the end, but is it only at the end, maybe it's at the middle and you can find the middle right away and get some pay off right away. But it is mistaken that you have total control over payoffs and how and when they might happen so you need to be somewhat alert to possibilities of that happening in the present.

Thinking about what makes someone qualified whether it be partially or fully qualified to do something can have implications for procrastination. I might not feel I qualify for this and I just delay on down that road. For example this person is considering whether to teach. She has the degrees and might just need a couple of courses on teaching. But what would make her feel qualified. Probably besides the courses the native interest, intelligence, and aptitude for the subject matters as well as an ability to impart it to others. But she might not totally feel this unless she actually taught for a stretch, and went ahead into the situation. Then she can cross check her own qualifications by observing already practiced teachers and see how she fits in with that group in terms of potential and performance.

This year I am hitting over .300 on my batting average half way through the season and I am hitting well in the clutch. This year I find the sun is up on my batting average and my clutch hitting. However, my fielding has been spotty and my home runs haven’t been consistent either. The key is that I try to improve in those other areas without unsettling and compromising say my swing so that I might swing only for the fences while disturbing my average, which is already there. In addition, I need to work on improving my fielding without having it affect the rest of my game. However, I need to separate each category in my thinking and continue to realize where the sun is up for me, which is my hitting for average.

Time might be traveling like a river who’s exact speed I cannot ascertain until maybe I am too far down the river to make the adjustments I wanted to make to the speed of the river. I could have gotten into proper flow earlier and thereby enjoyed this earlier.

To go forward I might want to have a drop down position, which still keeps me in the same area or arena I want to be in or stay in. I want to play basketball professionally but I don’t catch on with an NBA team then maybe I could drop down and play in Europe where I am still playing professionally. I want to climb Mt. Everest but the peak is more than what I am capable off right now so I drop down and find a peak that is still high but not quite as high or I just go three quarters of the way on the slopes of Everest. I am still climbing high peaks even in my drop down position. My drop down position might involve a new era in my life, or in the times around me. A newfound sense of maturity and vision can lead not only to greater heights, but also to a drop down position where contentment is found in areas that may have seemed foreign to my personal vision previously.

To go forward, this might involve levels of trust that I need to look towards. I’ll be all set if I get this, trusting that you’ll be able to proceed into it, that certain mechanisms will be in place. In some cases, getting into the present involves a restoration of trust or the beginnings of a new trust at new levels. I am starting to believe this and that is another basis of a new found trust that I can do this.

We don’t have to do this now, but if we are going to consider this in the future, why not give some consideration towards this right here and right now? You could at least consider now. You can still put consideration on anything for the future, while realizing, the tendency is that I’ll consider this later. You don't want to totally divorce yourself from consideration because this is the practice you want to keep. Do keep things under consideration and don’t outright say this is no longer under consideration unless you want this to be the case.

We have a tendency to put things into tiers. I’ll see you on the next tier. I have plenty of opportunities now on this tier but I want to get to the next tier or stage before I consider the opportunities on this stage. Or I think the opportunities will only be on the next tier and will only be better on the next stage. But a piece of pie is a piece of pie whether I get it here or there, or anywhere. Then I might have an audience now, on this stage. An audience that might appreciate me for some good reason right now, right then and right there. But the next tier if it comes the bend, will be later, so how do I get to the now if I am always ahead of myself? Moreover, some summits could be found on the first tier.

We have ourselves grounded maybe to never take off again. Part of the problem is we are in the movie, we aren’t actually watching the movie. Realistically most of us need a personal coach. If you watch a movie you can speculate on the character development but you are in the watchful eye of the observer. It is easy to see what the character should do as you see more of the big picture. But we who are in the movie are not seeing the bigger picture and we miss out on now opportunities for a lack of vision. I am too close to the story. And who I am in this movie, doesn’t tell me about who I could be in another movie. Look at some of the actors who always played the part of the villain, stereotyped into one role forever, however good they were at that role. Get yourself in another frame and see how that goes.

We might get so busy that some real opportunities that never get picture framed as now. The busyness can serve as well as a built in excuse not to explore the new and unfamiliar now. The busyness box becomes like a blinding storm, blotting out real options and desires that I could have addressed, had I been able to spot them in the windswept chaos. And they told me to think outside the box sometimes. And that's another things, pick some of your ideas off the canvas and do something with one or some of them.

We might want to introduce something new to the present that we might feel good about. We can take an optimistic approach to that something as new and exciting. Think of your favorite hobby, one that might consume a lot of your time and interests. Perhaps you could introduce something new that you could optimistically find as interesting and as exciting as your favorite hobby. Say your long-standing hobby has been baseball or painting, imagine introducing something new that could be just as exciting and interesting for you, really an equivalent hobby, and maybe just as long standing and long lasting from now on. It could be say writing fiction. It becomes another favorite hobby. You can find something new that has big meaning for you and catches on for you. You then have another major hobby to look to and that has real equivalency to what you already had and might still have but now you are retaining more self positive interests.

What am I looking at now? Your lawyer says, you are looking at 3 to 5. The judge comes back with 6 to 10. All the sudden, you are looking at a something different.

What else do you have going for you that you could associate with now? By not making the association, I am leaving out part of a bigger picture or another part of the picture of another picture. If I go to the museum, I can of course look at one part of a great painting, but there are and were other parts to the picture I can easily overlook that might have had real pertinence for me.

What happens also is that things tend to snowball of prior scenarios and scenes. You might have been in the wrong scene for you but the tendency is to fall back on the prior scenes. I can imagine not only forward but backwards so that I can play off the way I could have been which might be closer to the truth of who I am anyway. I put the better case scenarios not only in front of me but also behind me. Because indeed I would feel better about moving forward if I was working from better scenarios in the past. I can then inject those better than scenarios into my past meanderings, and if they have a ring of truth in that it could have possibly been that way, I can then move forward with more confidence into the future. But what happens is we get stuck on what actually happened, as opposed to what might have happened. We play of the limited scenes from our past that could have been different in so many ways. So because of that lock in effect of those past scenes, they affect how we move into the future. If I can make believe that yesterday was a great day, even though it wasn’t, just to get movement towards another scene today that seems less plausible now because I am still under the grip of yesterday's missteps, or it still works somewhat of a hold on me and this hold is not for my betterment now. I can rewrite the past in a way that gets me more hopeful towards today’s chances, thereby giving me more of an impetus to act on these chances in a beneficial way to all concerned. Even if I didn't make that leap then, maybe I could have and would have and then I WOULD feel differently now. Whatever I want to do or accomplish, I can imagine that I have been doing this in some form all along. For some, this kind of mental gymnastics might be useful is getting past the stuck phase and actually moving into the wanted areas of exploration.

What happens is that sometimes we don’t get our associations right and we don’t associate this with having anything to do with now. A personal example for me is that when I have thought about China I always thought of the big population that speaks a language I could never understand. I walked into a Chinese restaurant and they had a huge picture on the wall of just a beautiful scene in China with groups of people by lush mountainous terrain in a beautiful setting by a river with rich mansions in view of this relaxed setting. I never really pictured people in China relaxing to great scenery. I had never made the association.

What is going to get you on track with this now? For example, I want to get on track with running a marathon. I will set aside a half hour a week for the training. Is this setup going to get me on track to successfully running a marathon? I want to get into socializing and meet some new people. I’ll go out once a month. This might work but it might fall short of my hopes. I might need to widen the track I want to get on. I might want to then leave once a week for socializing and I might want to widen the track for the marathon goal and train an appropriate number of miles per week to correlate my training to the distance of the marathon. I am not going to get on track with some things unless I have a roomier track. Going to the gym once every six weeks is not necessarily going to get me muscle bound. Looking at the travel channel on TV is not necessarily going to get me Europe bound unless I look into some action on this.

What is nearly present, or almost here? Just because it’s almost here, nearly present, doesn’t mean we are going to get there if we continue to hold off.

What is the first order of the day? Can you really want and why can’t that be now? If you continually ask that question what is the first order of the moment, the day this week, this year I can begin to juggle my priorities so what I really want comes into the front at least some of the time.

What is the next step on the train? What will be the next stop on the train? Maybe I made my first stop on the train, which was to read some books, but my next stop was to read fiction and I never got there.

When am I going to begin to unravel some of the mysteries of the present? The mysteries of my most heartfelt desires, my grandest visions, my ever-changing but most present view. I can unravel some of these gifts, talents, ideas, and forward adventures that have ignored and kept unwrapped for some distant days that I can’t even begin to see now and I can claim rightful ownership to this day, even if it isn't what I envisioned isn't it still my day, your day? . Can I unravel my fears of the unknown and begin a new adventure in the present.

Whistle while you work. You can strategize while you are on the move. You don’t have to be in a standstill position to strategize. I can think of new ideas while I am working out in the gym or running through the forest. I can give the present more of a proper inspection if I will be willing to go ahead now in some form or shape that can be had. By first meeting with the present, you can dialogue with it and make the appropriate adjustments as you feel your way through. Just like it is easier to have a discussion with someone who is close by rather than shouting in the distance, it is easier to dialogue with your opportunities if you bring them at little closer.

Why does everything I seem to want to do seem to be so far?

Why is your devotion always to the future or some past meanderings at the expense of now? So you got lost then, luckily it wasn't even worse and to a degree now your back. Welcome to you and I’m glad you are back right with us in the present. The better day always seems to take precedence but even the bad day can have something or contain something of real importance to me.

Within this mixed message, what happens is that the present or the now becomes crowded out, partly due to the information explosion. Things get so crowded, that the now gets pushed aside. There is so much on the plate and standing at the gate ready to rush in, that I don't even know which race I'm in, how can it all fit into the now format? I might have crowded out what was best for me. Then I need to see why I agree with crowding out the present. I am trying to avoid some sort of confrontation with a part of me I would rather see show up sometime in the far future or maybe never?

Working so hard isn’t always going to get me into the particular flow I really want. I have to look at more than just working hard and consider what is representative of flow and what that flow could be.

You are given ten years in which to play baseball. You can play baseball from year one. However, you decide to play baseball in year ten and find you are really enjoying it. Then, you ask yourself, why didn’t I start playing baseball years earlier and I wish I had more time left to play baseball. But your ten year time frame is just about to end so you all you can do is just get in as many games as you can now, while indeed realizing you could have been doing this all along and some of that wish fulfillment could have happened earlier and I could have had a longer run at this.

You can examine your different levels of willingness. You might have partial willingness towards something and at the same time that might serve as an audition towards a further willingness. If you have an inkling you can investigate what that really means.

You could meet your dream girl while walking past this garbage heap, and then bring her to the next tier, a Broadway play.

You might never get the full achievement you first wanted. But there still might be half achievement or a third achievement that still might be actually obtainable if you go forward now. Even if you don't fully achieve your goals, you can get some of way on them without trashing them because you didn't get the full result or outcome you had wanted.

You might not feel you are at the best branch out point but people branch out from many different positions, not everyone arrived on the same train.

A lot of getting into the present relates to self-giving. Can I give myself something today? Despite my troubles and disappointments yesterday and even today which seem to continually cloud my way, do I have to let this take away this day away too, or can I give myself some of this today in a way that may still matter and may still make me happy, and give this day just a little chance on the podium? Can I give a green light to the present despite so many red lights on my roadway that had caused a pileup of my dreams? On the roadway of what I wanted?

A lot of what can be positive right now for you and me might require some real adjustments on our part. We need to first see that we are in need of an adjustment to meet with this present chance and then see how and if we can adjust. This could be a great opportunity, if I can ever adjust to it and make it happen that way, by adjusting or by reminding yourself that proper adjustments might need to be made and even that if is their it will actually require an adjustment.

A person of the opposite sex walks by and gives you their cell phone number. You call them back in the next century and at this point people are taking vacations in outer space and this particular person since met someone else. Why didn’t you make the association that this phone number has something to do with a possible call back in this century? You never made that association that this had something to do with sometime in the now. If you had made an association with the present, then this would also carry with it some permission. Because this is associated in some way with now, I must be permitted to make the association into the present and see it that way. If I’m associating with something even in small ways, I have to ask what is on the permissive landscape of this. I have a minor association with say hiking, surely I am permitted to hike with the outline of reasonable safety precautions.

Whatever associations I am presently finding, can I begin to anticipate not only their pretended or bona fide value in the future but can I also anticipate some of the present value of these associations and grant some permission to these present associations. This association may in fact have pretext for the future, but it has to be brought forth at some point for this pretext to take place and that point is somewhat artificially determined, as permission is there now therefore other factors are determinative not the permission factor.

A sports example might be if I go to a block of ten baseball games and I study the players, I could see how these players made out years later. If I go to a country to tour or visit, I will always have that frame of reference as to when I read about that country in the future. By proceeding, there is a chance that I will generate a new interest that I can follow up again at another time with the added perspective that I have obtained. I might spark a continued interest but either way I have preceded into something that gives me background for the future. This can be done in school by writing a paper on an unfamiliar topic which you will need to research for the paper. Years later you will have some background on the subject from this research paper and you can see what did happen since and compare to your previous research.

How long have you been off the river on what you want to do? I might have been off the river on riding a bicycle, traveling to other states, attending musical concerts or going to plays for a number of years at this point.

An example is I get terrible news. I assimilate myself to this and ready myself to deal with the consequences. Then the good news comes and I think I can automatically just adjust back to it and be happy about it. But sometimes people have difficulty doing this, they have readied for the storm that didn’t come but they can’t steady themselves for the sunshine.

An example is, I’ll only socialize when I’m finally in that higher income class, that next tier that is going to be so great when I get there. Assuming I don’t stumble again in some ways when I get there. When I get to the next tier, I might realize I let options and opportunities to socialize I really did have back in the first tier go by the wasteland as that first tier ended for me. If I was going to delay, at least I could have done so in a way that preserved some of my options all the way through and preservation doesn't always work as sometimes I am in a flowing river. I had to get to this tier, everything else was outside of this wanted tier, as barren to me as the distant planets landscape on that first tier, which actually could have been fruitful land for me then. Then even on the second tier, I might be pushing things off into yet another tier, the third tier and I repeat the process. I cycle my way into a continuous round of cycles that doesn’t find anything worthwhile in the present. So now becomes compromised away again, because I didn’t reach the tier I think I must go to no matter what. I keep seeing my opportunities as being on some other tier that I haven’t gotten to yet and interestingly is always seemingly out of reach at the moment. Then I am so used to things being just out of reach, that is when they become within reach, it just isn’t their proper place and I put them just out of reach again, because that is where everything is supposed to be and then how can I strive for things out of reach when they aren’t out of reach anymore and can be had rather easily now? Somewhere over the rainbow, skies will be blue. But I can’t even find the rainbow, as it remained elusive. I followed the yellow brick road but I never quite make it to Oz. I let the wicked witch win because I was too focused on the future and I let the wicked witch claim the present and I missed that wonderful walk with Dorothy and friends.

An example of this could be the crowded stadium, where the chance of meeting up with any one person now becomes crowded out into a low probability range. For example, now those have cable TV with 300 channels so that some of the individual shows have to get lost in the crowd, drowned out in that channel surf. Maybe I am letting some individual and personal plans I have get lost in the crowd of what is out there. I throw my own hopes out there and let them get lost in the cross fire of all else or someone else’s vision that I can't get my own eyes behind.

Another example is I want to write a novel. What qualifies me for this? I know the language, I can read, and I do have an imagination that can be operative in greater or lesser degree. I know how to type and I have a pen I can write with on paper as well. Well, I could start to write a novel and by also reading novels I can see whether my own beginnings at writing is in somebody’s ballpark as I check out the scene not by procrastinating but in moving into the area in several fashions, by both reading other peoples work and exploring my own ideas. I can bring myself into an new arena. I might see that I am doing as well as some other people from what I can discern and that seems to qualify me to continue writing my own novel. By both reading novels and writing my own, I am moving forward within this area and lessening the procrastination. At the same time, I can better reference my own qualifications towards this endeavor by this forward look.

Another thing I might think is that I see things as available monopolies that can’t be broken. Somebody and some people have all of this and I have none of this. Then I even extend this idea to luck. Someone else has all the luck. All these good things are out there, but I can’t get in the club. But a second look might show that maybe the landscape is a bit more dispersed and all these good things aren’t necessarily well fortified as monopolies. An example might be that the single population is dispersed after college. I need to find ways to see availability of what I want. I might actually secretly wish that these things are blocked by monopolies and then I have my excuse when in fact my road is open and I can go in this direction now.

I might want to work within a narrow band at times. I can feel I can read every book known to humanity but for now, I will concentrate on this book or round of books. I would love to be at every beach on the coast but for the next few days, I’ll concentrate on getting to this particular beach. What I am doing is trying not to procrastinate within my narrow band. I can open up the band wider whenever I want, but I am artificially limiting it in my thinking just to get moving in a particular direction or area of concern. This can backfire if I keep doing this and that narrow band becomes not artificial but real to me and I end up limiting myself that way, but this can be useful to get me out of immediate procrastination.

Say I am looking for ten times the money right about now. This might involve subjecting to forces of the market which aren't often up to me and my say in the matter. However, without subjecting myself to the forces of the market, I might be able to get ten times the creativity, ten times the intellectual stimulation, ten times the affect of new scenery and unfamiliar surroundings right about now. I can get ten times the excitement of adventure right now. I can get that ten times right now in some key areas. Some areas might be readily affable or agreeable to my seeking ten times.

I might also have the problem of being overly dedicated. It is good to be determined but I might be so dedicated to this idea, this course, this way of doing this, that I end up holding off on other approaches or my determination itself gets me tangled up as I can’t just sift through things on the basis of determination only. For example, I want to travel to an exotic country. The particular country I want to travel to is involved in political unrest and there is a current ban on traveling to this country. I will wait patiently for my next chance to travel to this country, when in the meantime other available countries that will offer me exotic scenery right now, and I have the means to get there now.

Applications are important. Where does this apply? How does this apply? With whom does this apply? No matter what question we can come up with, the second question that can be tacked on to the first, is when does this apply, or simply when? The applicability of something can be way off the mark. I am applying something in a fashion that is just not appropriate. I apply sunscreen on a torrentially rainy day.

What is going to lift the lid off the present? The question is, when?

About the Author

jesus calling devotional book

Reformed Christian books: unleash the perspective of new Christian era

Religion is a very important part of everyone’s life. In order to follow a religious path properly, it is essential to first identify what it is actually about, what the teachings and customs are. To help a person with these issues, EP, a non-profit organisation, provides Christian followers with a wide variety of books dealing with different concerns about the Christian religion. They provide Bibles, biblical studies, reformed Christian books and such. They have designed a website to make the process of purchase easier for the customers. The website www.epbooks.org was thus formulated so that the maximum number of people could easily get Christian books and correct biblical teaching. EP, earlier known as Evangelist Press, uses the money to hold seminars and conferences to promote Christian religion and impart biblical teachings.

Promoting reformed literature is the main aim of EP Books. They publish in English, French and Chinese and have books in over fifty languages at the moment. They give equal importance to all of their work, no matter what country or area it may be in. EP Books provides reformed Christian books as it is strongly dedicated to historical, evangelical and reformed faith. Reformed faith, also known as Calvinism, is a theological system created by theologians like Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli. But because of the influence of John Calvin on it and also due to his participation in the confessional debates of the 16th century, it often bears his name. It is the belief of this faith that humans are entirely at the mercy of god. It believes that mortals cannot do anything to obtain salvation and god alone provides them with it. This faith is also sometimes identified with Augustinianism its central issues were expressed by St. Augustine.

EP Books also reviews and publishes manuscripts from new authors as long as they are theological in all entireties. They accept manuscripts for devotional books, doctrines and theologies and also reformed Christian books. Apart from the website, there are many stores available from which customers can buy books. The question most commonly asked by followers is what is Reformed Theology? EP Books aims at providing readers with books that will make their understanding of religion better and also will help them grow as individuals and learn and accept the best teaching of reformed Christianity. It also provides hymn books, evangelist teachings, books on Christian life, books about the history of Christianity and churches and other media like CDs and DVDs. They have thousands of titles which are all available at their website and are delivered without delay to their customer’s doorstep. People all around the world trust them and their books.

Reformed Christian books deal with many aspects of the theology. The books are aimed at reaching as many people and touching as many lives as possible. The reformed theory was formed out of the theology of John Calvin and was reformed by the Puritans. Reformed Christian faith teaches that jesus christ is above all creation. All reformed Christian churches believe in the same. Usually, the reformed believers give much more importance to this fact than others Christians. A lot of emphasis is thus laid on imparting Christian education is this faith. EP also lays great emphasis on providing the right kind of teachings to its followers. It essential to give out correct knowledge and information and EP Books strives to improve itself day after day. Apart from at www.epbooks.org, reformed Christian books are easily available at many other dealers and at most shops due to its popularity. It has a lot of followers and thus reformed Christian books see a large market.

About the Author

Hi..m Christina i like to travel and read books...

st. patricks day socks

Tips To Pretty Up Your iPod

Is your iPod a wallflower? Maybe it is time you make it stand out in the crowd. Give it some pieces of flair. Make it unique. You don`t want your iPod to look like everyone else on the block. You`ve got to be able to differentiate your personal style from someone else`s. Give your iPod a personality. All iPods look the same until their owners pretty them up. There are many ways to jazz up your little buddy and they don`t require spending lots of cash either.

You can decorate your iPod using socks. They are fun and practical and are available in a variety of colors including green, purple, blue, orange, pink, and gray. These protect your iPod from scrapes and scuffs that occur in daily life. Keep your iPod in pristine condition and don`t let it look like your watches and rings do after years of use. Change out the colors as the seasons change. Put on a red one for Valentine`s Day & Christmas and a pastel color for Easter. Get a green sock for St. Patrick`s Day and an orange one for Halloween. Or you can have one for each month.

Dress up your iPod like you would dress up your poodle in dog sweaters. The options are endless. You can even decorate the sock with your own sewing addendums, like an embroidered design, your coat of arms, buttons, ribbons, or whatever way your creative juices take you.

Young kids and teens with iPods have been sporting stickers and other adhesives to their iPods to make them cuter and cooler. How cool is an iPod without puffy, stinky stickers? Not very. Kids are looking for ways to make their iPod different from everyone else`s and distinguishable in a crowd. They are able to express their personalities when decorating their iPods. They can put their school mascot sticker on it or a sticker from the clubs they are in at school. Change out stickers on a seasonal basis depending on the holidays. Almost like personalizing their folders for class, they can make their iPod a part of their fashion statement as well.

Colorware can paint your iPod in a range of hues for $64, making it stand out in the crowd. You can also put some tattoos on your iPod. HP`s removable stickers let you temporarily personalize your `Pod. If you bought an HP-branded iPod from certain stores you get a free, preprinted musical-artist Tattoo (with a Gwen Stefani or Maroon 5 design, for example), but the company also sells printable versions in packs of ten for $15. You can download Tattoo designs from HP or create your own, and then print them at home on your ink-jet printer. Each Tattoo should last about one month before the adhesive begins to dissolve (although you can remove them anytime without leaving residual goo).

Get a Podskinz which a more sturdier plastic shell for your pod. PodSkinz are thin, hard-plastic shells that cover and protect your iPod`s front white surface and rear chrome section. Decorations range from solids to prints, flowers and state and national flags. Or get a Graphic cling, for full size iPods, to wrap around your iPod for an added feature. PopTunes are removable stickers in an assortment of prints you can wrap around your iPod mini. PopTunes for the iPod mini are priced $9 each and available in eight great designs such as leopard and heartbeats. PopTunes for the iPod nano and shuffle come in a package of 12 different designs. iPod skins are like removable stickers in popular prints like Doublemint Gum, or Shufflement, and Juicy Fruit, or Juicy Tunes.

Jazz up your iPod with jewelry, stickers or other fun craft items. Put on some beads, feathers, pearls, coral, gemstones, whatever is not glued down. What iPod wouldn`t look great bedazzled? Pull out your craft box and add glitter, confetti, scrapbook stickers, punches, calligraphy, and anything you want to personalize your Ipod in your own way! Your iPod should be a reflection of your individuality and your style. Use your creativity and imagination to dress up your iPod. You will never lose your iPod in the crowd again.

About the Author

For several years now, Jason has been reviewing hundreds of online products and services. Many consider his reviews to be very insightful and reliable. Visit his website Best-MP3-Players-Online.com

easter outdoor

Outdoor Decor, Decorative Garden Items and Holiday Decorations

Berlin CT (USA). RusticaOrnamentals.com has recently updated their website with a NEW unique selection of holiday and garden decor including hand painted Christmas ornaments, custom Holiday decorations, outdoor Christmas decorations and unique attractive garden decor.

RusticaOrnamentals.com has a unique, and festive assortment of Christmas outdoor decorations, holiday accents, garden decor and personalized decor including outdoor Snowmen decorations, Victorian Christmas caroling silhouettes, rusty and painted Halloween decorations and distinct, original garden décor for all year long. Most of our yard decorations come in many size options and colors. We pride ourselves on making original items that aren’t like everyone else's.

RusticaOrnamentals.com specializes in creating unique and fun garden and outdoor décor. Most of our ornaments for the home and yard come in an assortment of sizes and colors. We also welcome custom orders, you design it and we will create it. We will basically design anything you can imagine or need from metal, copper, aluminum or tin — either from a drawing or an idea. Most custom projects from Rustica Ornamentals take around a week to complete, but some larger projects may take longer. Plus, if you like an item you see online, but want to change the color, that may be possible if you contact us.

All of our products are designed and made in Berlin Connecticut. The idea behind for Rustica Ornamentals is to create affordable attractive yard decor made in the USA that doesn't look pre fabricated and cheap. We want to make the yards of America beautiful with original decorative ornaments for both the home and garden. Our home and garden décor are mostly made of sturdy 20 - 24 gage steel basically guaranteeing that your yard or home ornament will last for many many years.

At Rustica we pride ourselves on making good qulity and attractive garden and home decor that one will love all year long. Please come see us for all your home and garden décor decoration needs including Christmas, valentines day, Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving.

Celebrate your home and garden in style with RusticaOrnamentals.com your outdoor décor, home decor and decorative garden item source.

Our Goal is to Make your World More Beautiful.

Come see us on the web at: www.RusticaOrnamentals.com

About the Author

christmas carol movie review

What Makes Playing the Piano Beneficial?

Anybody who is interested can learn to play the piano. Playing the piano can bring joy to the one playing it and the people who are listening. It can bring great pride to you, as well as to your family, just knowing how to play it. Playing the piano is a great skill to have in life and learning is fun.

So why are a lot of people interested in learning to play the piano? The piano is a beautiful instrument with a beautiful look and a beautiful sound. Learning to play the piano has several advantages. It can sharpen the mind and the body. And it can be very therapeutic. Also, there are many careers that may require piano skills.

The piano is also a very unique instrument. Unlike other instrument, the piano can be played using several notes at a time. It is polyphonic. You can also play pieces with complex and rich harmonies even when playing alone, becoming the piano a vibrant unaccompanied instrument. Simultaneously, the piano is more melodious when accompanied by other musical instrument. It also leaves the voice free to sing along unlike wind instruments. And unlike the violin, any notes that sound out of tune cannot be blamed on the performer. So long as you engage a piano tuner at least once a year, each note will always sound in tune, regardless of your skill.

Playing the piano also improves a high level of manual deftness. Though it would appear very easy to simply press the ivory keys, performing complicated musical scores with accuracy but putting emotion to the pieces takes time and a very human touch. Thus, when a human plays the piano, it is more beautiful than letting the computer play it.

The piano is also a staple of family sing along - whether you are singing Christmas carols or playing some favorite movie tunes. The very design of the piano lends in itself to groups of people gathered around, singing along. This is one of the most social of activities, where you can make some of your warmest and most treasured memories.

Research has also shown that children who learn the piano do far better scholastically than their fellow students. Thus, the student is not just artistic and has musical skills above the norm; he or she can also improve his or her language and mathematics skills. And many high schools are also acknowledging the attainments that kids make in piano and recompense them with high school credits when they outdo specific grade levels.

Pianist also gets basic concepts in proper position which can bring in vast rewards. For example, the basic position of hand when playing the piano is also the one being used when using a typewriter or a keyboard. With the importance and extensive use of computer these days, having this proper hand position allows you to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome that is plaguing modern offices today. And the basic theory of sitting properly will also help with basic posture and back pains.

But most importantly, the skill to play the piano and to convey one's personality with this instrument is very fit and beneficial. It can ease down stresses. What's more, the piano is constantly there, all set for you to empty out your soul.

About the Author

Want to get the best piano lessons online? Take a look at some
online piano courses
and read useful reviews such as
Piano by Pattern review
at learnpianoreview.com.

the christmas story dishes

Christmas - Festival of Love & Joy

Each year, it is traditional to give gifts at Christmas. Just as you give gifts to your loved ones, God is offering you a gift as well: the gift of complete forgiveness, freedom from sin, and eternal life with Him in heaven. Just like you must accept a Christmas gift for it to be yours, you must accept God’s gift of salvation. Here is how you can accept this free gift this Christmas:

The word Christmas comes from the early English phrase Christes Masse, which means Christmas Mass.

In Christmas people exchange Gifts and also decorate their Homes with Holly, Lights and the Christmas Trees. People also post in the Greeting Cards to their near ones and dear ones in Christmas. Initially these cards use to show religious pictures - Mary, Joseph and baby jesus, or other parts of the Christmas story. Today, pictures are often jokes, winter pictures, Father Christmas, or romantic scenes of life in past times.

Christmas is celebrated in different ways. It differs country wise. Earlier this was celebrated by going to the Church for prayers, remembering the Christ and cooking special dishes and enjoying with their family. But now the times have changed the tempo of celebrating Christmas has increased. People are now very keen spending ample amount on partying and sending expensive gifts. No one is bothered to go the Church and do the Prayers.

In schools also children get “Christmas Vacation” for 7 days. In schools children are being explained the importance of Christmas and also they make their Christmas Trees and Decorate them. Children are more excited for this Festival as they are being taught in this Festival Santa would come and would fulfill their wishes.

“Santa Claus” (’Father Christmas’), an old man with long white beard, red coat, and bag of toy. Children are taught he will bring Gifts for them. They would get it on the night before the Christmas. Children to a certain age believe this as true. It is being explained to the children that Santa Claus lives near the North Pole, and arrives through Sky on a snow cart pulled by a deer. It is being said that he comes down into the houses through the chimney at midnight and places presents for the children in socks or bags by their beds or in front of the family Christmas tree.

In shops or at children’s parties, someone will dress up as Father Christmas and give small presents to children, or ask them what gifts they want for Christmas. Christmas can be a time of magic and excitement for children. Parent to please their Kids would themselves put the Gift for them while they are sleeping and would pretend as if Santa came in and kept for them just to make their kids “HAPPY”.

People do hope to get something more from this apart from the Gifts. They want to return to their older days, where life was very simple and easy going. We feel sure that there must be some Key Message, Hope and Happiness behind celebrating Christmas.

About the Author

Bharat Peripleko recommending to buy Christmas Gifts and Christmas Gifts 2009 from GiftstoIndians.com

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jesus feeds 5000

Are You Recession Proof?

RECESSION is looming! Admitting it is not being negative. The signs are there. It may not be Nigeria’s worst ever recession. But the economy is slowing down all the same. Are you prepared for it? Are your defences up against it? Will you be able to cope when it starts to bite?

Asking –– and finding the right answers to these questions –– is the right exercise that anyone with at least a little sense should be engaged in at this time. Not to do so is to behave like the proverbial Ostrich.

This is no time for burying your head in the sand and pretending that nothing is going on; that you will wake up tomorrow and discover that everything is fine. That is sheer wishful thinking. And it will hurt you badly.

When King Pharaoh had a dream and the gates of the prison was opened for Joseph to interpret the dream, neither Pharaoh, who had the dream nor Joseph, who interpreted it, was being negative as the events that unfolded later proved.

GOD showed Pharaoh what was about to happen. And HE positioned Joseph to provide the solution to what would’ve been a calamitous event. Joseph pointedly told Pharaoh, seven years of plenty will be followed by seven years of famine. Make no mistake about that.

Pharaoh could’ve told his prison commander to take Joseph back to prison for talking nonsense. But he was smarter. Instead, he made Joseph his second-in-command and gave him the responsibility of putting a solid policy in place that guaranteed that enough harvest was preserved to make up for the shortage that would be occasioned by the famine that later followed.

Telling you about the looming recession and the dire consequences of it now is not an attempt to scare you. It’s a clarion call for you to be proactive and take decisions that will prevent you from being vulnerable to its brutal effects.

I may be a lone voice in the wilderness. That is understandable. Most experts talking about the state of the economy and what could be done to stabilize it usually channel their counsel towards the government.

I don’t have a problem with that. As a patriotic citizen and in obedience to the Word of GOD, I earnestly pray that the government will listen and that a lasting solution to the problem would be found.

But I know from experience that the dumbest thing anyone could do is to put all his hopes in government doing the right thing. Such a person is in for a rude shock. As a reader of SuccessDigest Extra! you should be smarter than that. That is why paying attention to what I’m saying to you now is so important.

This is the point: you must know what to do to limit the impact of the economic slow down on you and your family!

And now is the time to act. This is the time to start doing something about it. A moment’s delay can be fatal!

When Master Jesus found Himself on a mountain top with 5000 people to feed and there were no eateries around, the Bible tells us that He knew what He would do. See John 6: 1-12.

So you too must know what to do to escape the scourge of the impending economic depression. And the only viable solution –– the only solution that works all the time –– is for you to know what to do to command the flow of money into your bank account legitimately, without defrauding anyone.

Anything short of this will make you and your family vulnerable.

What you need is a sound knowledge of what will make you recession resistant. If you read my article in the Vol. 4 No 1 edition of SDE! dated Tuesday, February 17, 2009, I discussed the five different ways that money can flow to you.

Of the five ways that I mentioned through which money can come to you, the only one that you have absolute control over, the one that you can learn, is how to render a service to others and get them to pay you for it or sell a product that you created or the one created by someone else and earn commission from the sale.

What I’ve just placed in your hand is a vital key, a vital knowledge which you may or may not have known before now. That key, as vital as it is, only opens a door that leads to another vital knowledge which you must acquire.

And that is the knowledge of what service you can render or what product you can sell in order for you to exchange it for the money you want to channel into your bank account.

The answer to this question is a little bit complex. If you go to the marketplace, you’ll find hundreds of products and services that people are using to earn money. There are a whole gamut of business opportunities to choose from.

The problem here is that you either don’t know which of these wide ranging businesses you can do or you may not have what it takes to go for the one that appeals to you. Either way, you are stuck. So you need another key.

The key, this time, is get someone who knows to be your guide or buy information product that teaches you how to choose the business that is right for you.

This is where many people stumble. For some, when they get to this point, they simply give up. Making the effort it requires to acquire this vital key is just too much for them. They don’t want to pay the price.

For some others, even though they realize that they need that vital key and are prepared to pay the price, their problem is that they often fall into wrong hands; they become victims of fraudsters who take them to the cleaners.

Fortunately, I have a solution to both problems. The first solution is my manual, How To Avoid Scam And Choose The Business Opportunity That Is Right For You, Making Tons Of Money With It –– Guaranteed.

The manual not only exposes all the tricks that scammers use to dupe business opportunity seekers but more importantly it also shows you how to choose a particular business that is right for you and how to use that business to channel cash to flow into your bank account.

The second solution is my Information Marketing Business Workshop. This five-day course is without any doubt the best business in the world. It’s totally recession resistant.

It is inexpensive to start. The start-up capital could be anything as low as N5,000 plus, of course, the N7,500 you’ll pay to acquire the knowledge of doing it from me. And the course can be done by anyone who is smart enough to add two plus two and come up with four as the answer. It’s really that simple.

You can start it as small or as big as you want. The choice is really yours. But notwithstanding how you start it, what is guaranteed is that you will have money flowing into your bank account non-stop if you set it up the right way as I’ll teach you and operate it efficiently as you’ll be taught.

I couldn’t think of anything that anyone who has no other alternatives to protect himself from the scourge of recession can use to fortify his defences against it. In as little as four weeks after doing the course, you can begin to see money flow into your bank account.

That is what happened to those who did the course last year who promptly acted on what they were taught. Their testimonies would’ve sounded incredible if not for the fact that they are real and verifiable.

Jayne O., one of the beneficiaries of the course last year, has been sharing her testimony excitedly, how the course practically transformed her life within a very short time.

She came to the course with the hope of experiencing changes in her finances. She not only achieved that goal, she also had another dream fulfilled as a result of attending the course: she found her sweet heart and now she is happily married as well.

Jayne and at least FOUR other successful past graduates of IMBW, who have earned seven figures from their information marketing business, will make a guess appearance at my next workshop to tell attendees how the course has transformed their lives.

Just to give you an idea of how transformational the course is, one of them, who was sleeping in the SADC Hall during the course because he couldn’t afford to pay for hotel accommodation, did not only have cash streaming into his bank account less than FOUR short weeks after the course, but he is right now about to launch a business school in Aba.

Information Marketing Business is, indeed, one of GOD’s gifts to raise entrepreneurs on earth. I have no other way of describing it.

I mean, look at a young man like Akin Alabi. In just one promotion alone, he made in excess of N3,000,000 in just 12 days last year.

And while it’s possible that you missed his advert in SuccessDigest Extra! last year [see Vol 3 No 16 Page 31], Ibidapo Lawal displayed his Victoria Garden [VGC] flat in a full page advert in SDE! for all to see … another undeniable proof of what mastering information marketing business can do for you!

But don’t let us get too far away from the question I asked you at the beginning of this article: Are you recessionproof?

Maybe you don’t know the answer so let me help you out. If you receive a letter from your employer right now saying you’d been laid off, would you survive without another job? And considering that big companies, including banks, are already laying off staff and cutting salaries, what hope do you have of getting another job?

If you don’t have ready alternative if that were to become your lot this weekend, then you’re not recessionproof. Pure and simple.

Remember, saying GOD forbid is not a smart answer. GOD wants you to propser and be in health even as your soul propers. He expressly say so in 3 John 2. But He also tells you in at least two scriptures in the Bible, including in Hosea 6:4 that “my people are perished for lack of knowledge.”

So, to fortify yourself against the impending recession, you need to acquire the right knowledge. You’ve got to know what to do if the tide turns against you.

As an adult, I’ve seen the devastating impact of recession before. It started gradually back in the early eighties during the civilian government of President Shehu Shagari. From that time forward, it was downhill for the nation’s economy.

The interesting thing is that that was also the period when some Nigerians became super rich. The ones who became super rich where those who knew what to do; those who had the right knowledge. Those who had no clue suffered maximally from the scourge.

Our business was launched almost at the onset of the recession. My experience of growing a business during recession has opened my eyes to quite a few things. This experience can become your benefit if you choose to take advantage of it.

And that is why I’m recommending taking my Information Marketing Business course to you. If I knew about this business back in 1984, I would have started it first before venturing into publishing.

But never mind, you are fortunate to have the opportunity to learn it from me. I’ve set aside Monday, March 30th to Friday, April 3rd, 2009 to teach you everything you’ll ever need to prosper with your knowledge of the course. The venue is SADC, 28, Esuola Street, Off Ago Palace Way, Okota, Isolo, Lagos. And fee is N7,500 only. See Page == for clear instructions on how to register for this course.

Don’t miss this opportunity. Unless you have a viable alternative to cushioning the shame and reproach that a rampaging recession can bring to bear on you and your family, then you’ll regret it if you allow this opportunity to pass you by. Make no mistake about that.

So act now!

About the Author

Dr. Sunny Obazu-Ojeagbase is the publisher of the nationally acclaimed monthly magazine, SuccessDigest and founder of SuccessDigest Leaders' Club. His publications have helped thousands of people to launch their own successful businesses. To learn more about him and how you may profit from his wealth of experience visit http://sunnyojeagbase.com

my easter basket

Easter Fruit Bouquets and Gift baskets

Easter is the most important religious feast in the Christian liturgical year. Christians believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead three days after his crucifixion, and celebrate this resurrection on easter day, or easter sunday, two days after Good Friday. The year of his death and resurrection is variously estimated between the years 26 and 36 AD.
Easter as a holiday is the result of many different cultures and religions combined. The history of the Easter basket has a similar lineage. Some of the origins are from ancient pagan customs, some stem from a Judeo Christian background. Easter Gift baskets make great gifts because of their versatility. They can be personalized to each recipient's particular tastes, can be designed around particular themes, and their presentation makes them a delight to receive.

Easter baskets grew out of the more out of modern traditions and symbology of Christianity. To Christians, Easter represents the resurrection of Christ. Lent is the season that proceeds Easter and lasts for forty six days prior to Easter Sunday. This season of Lent is begun on Fat Tuesday. This is the last time to party before the season of lent. During the Lent season, Christians believe you must give up something and fast until after Easter. The fast can include giving up meat, eggs, and dairy. The custom of having a large Easter supper represents the end of the Lenten fast. In more ancient times, this large feast was brought to the church in large baskets, hence the connection to treats in Easter Fruit baskets today. This basket was blessed by the clergy much like the ancient Hebrews brought their first seedlings to the temple to be blessed.

About the Author

The author is a student and its hobbies are travelling, eating fruits, writings articles, and survey the country where he is travelled.

christmas story chinese restaurant scene

American Food in American Literature

 

The months between the cherries and the peaches

Are brimming cornucopias which spill

 

Fruits red and purple, somber-bloomed and black;

Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches

We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill

Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback.

—Elinor Wylie1

I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.

—Jack Kerouac2

  In October of 1998, Jiao-Tong, the literary editor of the China Times in Taipei, Taiwan, invited me to write an essay on American food in American literature for presentation at the first International Conference on Food and Literature that was held in Taipei in May of 1999.  I thought that I would find many secondary source books on this topic.  After extensive searches of the net and communications with several professors of American literature at universities in the United States and Canada, I was quite surprised to find no book in print on the topic.  Not only was there no book about it there was also no single article that directly addressed my topic.  The absence of secondary sources explains why most of the references in this essay are to primary sources.  The limitations on time and space for this writing further explain why I have limited my survey of American literature to novels, short stories and poetry.  I have tried to make a representative selection among novelists, short story writers and poets including writers from almost two hundred years of American literature, both genders and a variety of ethnic groups.  Because there are so many versions of primary works that I cite, I have limited those citations to author’s name, title of work and internal part such as verse, chapter, or section and omitted page numbers of the particular versions that I used.  Less well-known works, collections and anthologies receive standard citation format.

To bring some order to this vast quantity of material, I have created three themes around which I can weave what I have found about American food in American literature: continuity and discontinuity; purity and impurity; and, abundance and scarcity.  These three themes allow several important truths about the American experience through time to appear as preoccupations of its writers as well.  For example, the great changes wrought on the land and the indigenous peoples were accompanied by profound and lasting attachments to European food habits.  Also, the tremendous abundance of natural resources and artificial wealth in America has long coexisted with devastated land and utter poverty.  The greatest American writers, such as Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck, have repeatedly recognized and embodied these extremes in their plots and in their characters, much as they are embodied in the every day lives and personalities of Americans.

As an introductory frame for my presentation, I would like to offer some possible explanations for the lack of secondary sources.  First, I think that most of the famous and popular American foods, such as pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream are derivative from European foods.  The pizza came from Italy.  The hot dog is a version of the German sausage.  Hamburgers are reformed meatballs joined with bread that is as old as agricultural civilization itself.  And ice cream also has its counterparts in the cuisine of European nations.  So the first reason for the lack of secondary sources is that most American foods are derivative and not original to America.

An ironic counterexample in this context is the Chinese fortune cookie.  As a food item, it has very little nutrition, but as a part of the American idea of Chinese food it has become a necessity at American Chinese restaurants.  However, I have asked several owners, waiters and waitresses in American Chinese restaurants whether Chinese fortune cookies came from China.  All of them have told me that they did not.  They were invented in America and most likely, according to this oral history, in San Francisco.  This seems to me to be a credible history.  San Francisco grew as a city on the money generated by high-risk professions such as whaling, shipping, gold mining and offshore ocean fishing.  We can easily imagine an enterprising Chinese person noting how concerned the Americans in these professions were with their future good luck or bad luck, putting this understanding together with a well-established American liking for sweet desserts, and creating a sweet dessert that looked different and contained words of wisdom about the consumer’s fate.

 Second, until the last few decades, American literature and literary criticism were dominated by males whose worldview connected food with women and put them both in the kitchen and out of sight.  Most of the male writers whom I read for this essay used food and activities around food to highlight aspects of character or plot.  They did not present food gathering and preparation, cooking, serving, eating, drinking and cleaning up as activities that substantially reinforced aspects of their main characters, most of whom are men, or as events that substantially advanced the plot, story-line or themes of their writing. 

Indeed, a related topic could be included in this kind of study that has to do with care of the body generally.  For example, it is extremely rare for any American writer to mention such bodily functions as excretion or urination.  Different kinds of breathing are certainly associated with different kinds of emotional and physical conditions, such as fear, sorrow, fatigue, exertion or contemplation.  But like food, other bodily processes are usually ignored, taken for granted or glossed.  I mention this topic only in passing, and do not have the time or space here to dwell on it, but simply to point out that focusing on food as a topic in relation to literature is an important innovation that signifies a range of human activities whose presence or silence in literature would be an interesting expansion of this focus.     

Third, as an American, I feel that most Americans take food for granted.  We tend to view it as an unavoidable burden placed on our freedom of activity by the condition of having a physical body.  We tend, especially in the last decade of the 20th century, to try to minimize as much as possible the time and energy required for all phases of life connected with physical nourishment of our bodies.    The growth, popularity and power of the fast food industry in America reflect this disdain for the necessities of physical nourishment.

After the Allied victory in World War II, the US experienced unprecedented prosperity while applications of new technology allowed older tasks to be done with increasing speed.  The complete acceptance of free market competition, in an ideological, political and economic opposition to centralized, planned economies and societies, the tremendous success of rapid, large-scale mass production in support of military forces during the war, and the increasingly tense and complicated struggle between capitalism and communism began to change the values of American society from the slower, simpler values of agricultural life and rural living to the faster, more complicated values of industrial production and urban living.  Speed began its emergence as a paramount American value.  For example, in 1955, shortly before the experiences recorded in Kerouac's On the Road, the two fast food companies that are now the largest in America—McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken—were founded.  “By the early 1980s there were about 440 food franchising companies with a combined total of more than 70,000 retail outlets in the United States.”3  Americans from smaller, more congested living situations in Europe slowly adjusted to the scope of the American land and its resources.  Size, especially bigness, became a common value in all areas of American life.  With the advent of speed as a value, the American ideology for the remainder of the 20th century gained its primary outlines—the bigger the better, the faster the better.  From automobiles to hamburgers, this ideology began increasingly to govern how Americans thought about everything they did.  Both values play significant and signifying roles in the relationship between American food and American literature.   

Besides the social environment of European derivation, male dominance and indifference toward food, there is the traditional character of the successful American writer.  Most of America’s most famous writers were and continue to be male.  Most of these male writers, such as Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Poe, and Miller, continually placed their leading characters, most of whom were males, in positions that required the creation of a stable and meaningful life.  Like the first colonists, like the pioneers, like the immigrants, their characters are continually faced with challenges to their survival, their ability and their manhood where the latter is defined in terms of overt verbal and physical superiority rather than mutual, cooperative care or nurturing.  An ironic counter-example is Ayn Rand, a female writer who totally accepted the values of competition, personal power and rugged individualism. Her powerful male characters, such as the nearly godlike architect in Atlas Shrugged, are faced with problems and situations that demand forceful, individual creation and production on large scales. 

The fact that creation and production also consumed energy, resources, time and money was not a central concern until the beginnings of the environmental movement in the late 50’s and early 60’s.  The fact that creation and production often resulted in the emotional and physical deprivation of less independent beings, such as children, animals, women, the poor, and members of minority ethnic groups was also not a central concern of American writers or critics until the late 50’s and early 60’s.  The earlier writers felt driven to produce and reproduce the feelings, drives, imagery and characters of male-oriented, individualistic creation and production in their writings.  As a consequence, many of the facts of life, such as eating, drinking, digesting, excreting and nurturing were consistently absent, implied, glossed or ignored.

These are at least four reasons why there is such a scarcity of secondary sources on the topic of American food in American literature.  It is, in effect, a book waiting to be written.

Fortunately, however, there are many instances of food in American literature and they do show some interesting patterns and features.  I have created three themes to focus these patterns and features: continuity and discontinuity; purity and impurity; and, abundance and scarcity.  First I am going to briefly described the substance and justification of each theme and then proceed with the literary material that especially illustrates and is illuminated by each theme.

A.            Continuity and Discontinuity.  The first European colonists on the East Coast of America experienced several discontinuities and began creating others.  From crowded European cities and farmlands they came to vast, sparsely inhabited forests, mountains and valleys.  From the rigidly intolerant societies of many 16th and 17th century European countries they came to a land whose societies, those of the indigenous peoples, were completely strange and closed to them.  From lives of poverty and scarcity they came to a land that gradually disclosed resources and riches beyond their wildest dreams.  From old, settled areas in Europe that had long ago been tamed by the sword, the plow, the cross and the crown they came to wilderness that seemed indifferent to the grandeur and traditions of European civilization.

Within these discontinuities they also created discontinuities in the lives of the indigenous peoples, by war, trade and intermarriage.  In the natural life cycles of the new land, they also began creating discontinuities by the invasive activities of logging, farming, mining, urbanization, hunting and fishing.  The cultivation of extremes that have

become fixtures of American life began at this time.  There were Americans who loved the wilderness and the indigenous ways and shed as many of their European ways as possible.  There were Americans who loathed the wilderness and the native ways and strove either to change them or destroy them.  These latter among the early colonists insisted on the continuation of European religions and languages, official protocols, social forms and manners and whatever foods they could make in the new world, such as bread, or have shipped from Europe without spoilage, such as tea.

The indigenous people fell before the larger and larger waves of Europeans most of whom firmly believed that the best Indian was a dead Indian.  For example, it is estimated that in 1600 there were approximately 10,000,000 indigenous people living in many different groups, or tribes, across the American continent.  By 1900, under an official US government policy of extermination, that total had fallen to approximately 500,000.  The impact of the new inhabitants on the land has been no less powerful.  In 1600, most of the land east of the Mississippi River and west of the Rocky Mountains was covered with mixed hardwood and deciduous forests.  By 1990, less than 3% of the original trees remained standing.

Besides the clash of Europeans and indigenous peoples, the growing population of Americans cultivating land for crops, especially cotton and tobacco, sold to a growing population of consumers in Europe provided a market for human labor—slaves.  The slave trade, initiated by the Dutch and pursued by almost every Western European country with seafaring expertise, created extreme discontinuities in many aspects of African life that are beyond the scope of this essay.  But the importation of Africans as slaves created an entirely new stream of Americans, subjected for two hundred years to plantation conditions of near starvation, who invented and innovated with the meager edible material accessible to them.  Their creativity has contributed many different kinds of distinctively American foods, such as chitlins, greens, and an entire range of foods centered in the bayou area of Louisiana known as Cajun food.  Along with original contributions made by the indigenous peoples to the first colonists’ and pioneers’ diets such as corn, some of these food items that have lasted longer than the institution of slavery itself have also found places in American literature.

B.             Purity and Impurity.  The early colonists on the American East Coast brought with them a deep fear of hell and a deep desire to purify their lives of any elements that prevented the practice of true Christianity.  True Christianity meant for them a literal reading of the bible and a literal construction of human social life around the teachings and tenets of the bible.  Red, for them, was the color of the devil, the color of evil and the color of the indigenous people.  Pure black and pure white were their colors of choice.

Those Americans who loved the wilderness, however, quickly adopted the use of multi-colored animal skins for clothing and natural dyes for coloring cloth or their skin.  It was therefore no mere historical accident that the American cultural revolution of the 60’s adopted wildly colored clothing, vehicles, hair and language as an obvious and dramatic signifier against the dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and dark shoes of establishment figures.  It was no historical accident that the beatniks and hippies both reached out for foods that differed greatly in flavor, color, smell, taste and texture from white bread, roast beef, boiled potatoes, oatmeal, milk and tea.  It was also no historical accident that some of the most influential writers of this era, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, found deep and lasting inspiration from the literature and the food of lands and peoples far beyond the American shores.

C.            Abundance and Scarcity.  From 1895 to 1915, approximately 23,000,000 immigrants moved from Europe to the United States.  These people came from all parts of Europe.  They left living conditions characterized by poverty, political turmoil and oppression and lack of any kind of opportunity for improvement.  America was a land that promised to make their dreams of prosperity, wealth, abundance and freedom come true.  Many of those immigrants made their fortunes in America then returned with them to their families in Europe.  But many others stayed in America, had their families there and began contributing tastes, colors and flavors to an increasingly heterogeneous American scene.  This period of intense migration saw the beginnings of neighborhoods in major cities, such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. These were ethnic enclaves for Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews, as well as Blacks trying to find an alternative to the militarily defeated but still powerful racism of their former southern masters, or others whose strong sense of group identity always brought with it special foods that were amplified by the increasingly large scales of American life.

At the same time, the rapid growth of large-scale manufacturing, in factories employing tens of thousands of immigrants who were poorly paid and allowed only a minimal education beyond the background of their European origins, turned some of these neighborhoods into the first American slums and ghettos.  Extremely low wages, non-existent social services, waves of unemployment and the increasing pressure of large families and new arrivals frequently put many of these new Americans on the edges of malnutrition, hunger and even starvation. Abundance and scarcity began to appear as poles of a socioeconomic oscillation driven not by such obvious institutions as slavery but by beliefs, prejudices and attitudes about the superiority and inferiority of different kinds of peoples coupled with firmly established patterns of access and lack of access to resources.  The negative shock of World War I was followed by the positive euphoria of the roaring 20’s.  That decade of unprecedented prosperity and national expansion was followed by the great depression of the 30’s.  America was clearly moving into the vanguard of a world order whose extremes ranged from genocide to population explosion, from starvation to rotting surpluses and from worn feet in foul mud to toenail polish in satin slippers on polished marble. 

A first glimpse of the theme of continuity and discontinuity can be seen by comparing the two citations at the beginning of this essay. Elinor Wylie lived from 1885 to 1928.  Jack Kerouac lived from 1922 to 1969.  Ripe fruit appears as an edible food from the tree in Wylie’s poem and as an ingredient of pie in Kerouac’s novel.  Wylie’s cherries and peaches are closer to unprocessed nature than Kerouac’s baked apple pie.  Wylie’s poem signifies the rootedness of the early European colonists in a land that provided ample foodstuffs.  Kerouac’s novel signifies the restlessness of urban Americans for whom food had become an uninteresting necessity. 

Wylie’s poem signifies abundance and therefore the value of bigness without the addition of speed that played such an important role in the life of Kerouac’s main character, Dean Moriarty.

In fact, Dean Moriarty was based on the real man, Neal Cassady.  In 1964, I was living in Palo Alto, California, having dropped out of Stanford University to try my hand at writing fiction and poetry.     I met a lovely young woman who was a first year student at Stanford and invited her to a party.  The party was in a house in the east side of Palo Alto that was increasingly known as a suitable place for non-conformists and beatniks.  The party featured many people whom neither my friend nor I knew along with much wine.  It also featured some very unusual people.  At one point during the party we were drinking wine in the small, brightly-lit kitchen.  In a commotion of laughing, talking people, a young man with a brilliant smile and ringing laughter, whose feet seemed barely able to stay on the floor, floated and flew through the room while the man who had invited me to the party introduced him to me as Neal Cassady.  He acknowledged me and disappeared out another door.  I never saw him again but retain to this day the vivid impression of light and speed that he also seems to have given to Kerouac.

The continuity between Wylie’s poem and Kerouac’s novel is indicated by the American saying, “It’s as American as apple pie!”  Another kind of continuity appears, moreover, when the verse after the one quoted above from Wylie’s poem is considered:

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones

There’s something in this richness that I hate.

I love the look, austere, immaculate,

Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.

There’s something in my very blood that owns

Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,

A thread of water, churned to milky spate

Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.4

Taken together, this verse and the one quoted at the beginning of this essay dramatically display all three themes.  There is continuity and discontinuity between the doctrines of a European religious heritage, Puritanism, that emphasized great worldly achievements but as little worldly display as possible.  One of Max Weber’s most important contributions to our understanding of the modern Protestant viewpoint is his clear delineation of the conflict in early Protestantism between acquiring great wealth to signify being in god’s favor and displaying only humility to the rest of the world without the material ostentation that the Pietists, the Puritans, the Luddites and many other Protestant groups found so distasteful in Catholicism.

Weber argues, convincingly, I think, that the “Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man [sic] to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which it taught himself itself, against the emotions.”5   The goal of this action was to lead a certain kind of life “freed from all the temptations of the world and in all its details dictated by God’s will, and thus to be made certain of their own rebirth [in heaven after the last judgment] by external signs manifested in their daily conduct.”6 From the Bible as well as from all other religious literature, success in difficult tasks is a clear sign of God’s favor.  For Protestants, such signs do not guarantee salvation but they are the closest to a guarantee that a Protestant can get.  Indeed, that “God Himself blessed his chosen ones through the success of their labours was…undeniable…to the Puritans.”7  This doctrine that combined asceticism with success in worldly endeavors positioned Protestantism to be the driving religious force behind capitalism and the great creations and accumulations of material wealth that have occurred in modernity.  But it is no less true that this combination can be a rhythm, an oscillation, a confusion or conflict.  This combination clearly provides much of the historical substance for our themes of abundance and scarcity and purity and impurity.

A condensed example of the oscillation between abundance and the austerity of American Puritanism can be seen in a brief passage from the short story, The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-49).  This passage also underlines the way in which food and the activities surrounding food have been treated by many of America’s greatest male writers—as unavoidable but uninteresting necessities, even in a fictional setting:  “The table was superbly set out.  It was loaded with plate, and more than loaded with delicacies.  The profusion was absolutely barbaric.  There were enough meats to have feasted the Anakim.  Never, in all my life, had I witnessed so lavish, so wasteful an expenditure of the good things of life.”8

The tension between the narrator and his hosts in Poe’s tale is echoed by the tension between the narrator and the main character in On the Road.  The quote from Jack Kerouac is part of the first-person narration of the novel by Sal Paradise, the supporting, secondary character that is based on Kerouac himself.  For the duration of his cross-country hitchhiking trip, he lives on apple pie and ice cream.  This diet reflects not only Sal’s poverty, but also clearly situates the novel in a continuous American tradition that de-emphasizes the bodily, physical or material world.  A discontinuity, however, occurs between the naturalness of the fruits in Wylie’s poem and the impersonal, processed food that Sal Paradise ate.  A further discontinuity appears in the fact that Sal is taking his food on the road, on the run, at high speed, while Wylie is painting a picture of humans relating to trees that by their nature cannot move from where they are.

Wylie’s poetic picture is drawn from her life in New England.  Many of the first colonists stayed on or close to the coast because it allowed them to continue the seafaring lives and occupations they had practiced in Europe and because it provided an abundance of food.  However, their Puritan ideology often resulted in lives that were lived as far from that abundance as Wylie’s “cold silver on a sky of slate.”  Another American poetess, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), was born in Massachusetts and raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia, the eastern, seafaring Province of Canada. Her life partly overlapped Wylie’s and she also paints the spirit of that area specifically in terms of food but with an emphasis on the austerity of their diet:

From narrow provinces

of fish and bread and tea,

home of the long tides

where the bay leaves the sea

twice a day and takes

the herrings long rides,9

Moreover, the abundance that Wylie hates is also rejected by Kerouac in an off-hand, casual way as though the less time a man spent on something as mundane as food the better or higher quality a person he was.  However, the oscillation between abundance and scarcity appears in Kerouac’s novel in the contrast between Sal Paradise and the main character of On the Road, Dean Moriarty.

“…but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other, ‘so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,’ and ‘so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me?  I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!”—and off we’d rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, ‘It is your portion in the sun.’” (Ch. 1 (italics in original))

It is also certainly worth noticing in passing that in both writers, differentiated by gender, by background, and by time, there is a strong connection between religion and food.  This commonality and this continuity clearly occur in the traditional American feast days of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.  All three feature unusually large and lengthy meals as well as strong connections with the Christian, Protestant backgrounds of the early American colonists, settlers and pioneers.  As with the bodily functions mentioned before, bringing the topic of food and literature into the foreground also illuminates the strong presence of Judeo-Christianity in American life and literature.  Again, this innovative topic proves to be a powerful lens for viewing a wide range of signifiers that occur repeatedly and pervasively in American literature.

Indeed, the theological basis of Wylie’s hatred of “this richness” is the Puritan soul struggling for release from all of its attachments, involvements, entanglements and preoccupations to, with and in the material world.  Metaphysical battles are fought on empirical battlefields.  In this case, the metaphysical battle between the ontological powers of good and evil is fought on the empirical battlefield of the relationship between a poetess and edible, natural fruit.  The apple signifies the fall of man at the hand of woman.  The hatred of  “this richness” is therefore a self-hatred that drives the woman farther from impure nature and closer to the immaterial purity of the austere, unadorned Protestant soul.  The continuity of the human body with nature is displaced by the discontinuity of the immaterial soul with the body.  The abundance of human bodies and souls is displaced by the scarcity of the elect, those in Protestant doctrine chosen by God from the foundations of the world to survive the last judgment and live eternally in heaven.

Serious reflection on the relationship between food and literature brings us to a range of signifiers that underpins all literature, namely, religion.  Why?  Because writing originally served the purpose of passing on what is most valuable in the viewpoint and experience of the group.  The most valuable possession of all is that which most certainly promotes the survival of the group. All human groups discovered long ago that humans are dependent on greater powers for survival.  All humans need air, water, food, warmth and sleep.  The fear of, respect for, worship of and sacrifice to the powers that govern life, both visible and invisible, is the ancient substance of all religions.  The ancient truth and pervasive message of all religions is the dependency of humans on those powers, including the power of reproduction that is represented in ancestor worship.  Religion embodies, ritualizes and carries forward that fundamental truth of human dependency.  The denial of that dependency can lead to greatly innovative creativity and profoundly transformative spirituality as well as to self-destruction and madness.  Humans can imagine absolute freedom but to try to live it, as Nietzsche showed, leads only to self-destruction and madness.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) struggled with madness all her life and eventually ended her life by committing suicide.  The following poem opens with the kind of paean to natural abundance that we saw in Wylie’s poem and closes with a similar feeling of empty space and cold silver.  The contrast between the terms “nothing” and “blackberries” in the first line signifies the tension between abundance and emptiness.  This signifier in turn connects with the tension between purity and impurity through the signifier of nothingness as a desirable and advanced spiritual state and as the material condition of spiritual devotees on earth.  In this poem, these themes are again carried by concrete, local wild food and abstract, created imagery that moves the reader away from an abundant present to an absent but implied purity above or beyond the physical earth:

Blackberrying

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving.  Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices.  These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,

Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them.  A last hook brings me

To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.10

It is no accident, in this perspective, that Neal Cassady, the living person behind Kerouac’s character Dean Moriarty, died of a drug overdose on the hot, shining steel rails of a railroad track in central Mexico.  The use of drugs in all groups has traditionally been associated with personal and group alignment to the greater powers for the purpose of amplifying the ability of the group to survive.  Cut from their traditional moorings in religion, drugs have become a way to experiment with the physical, psychic and spiritual dimensions of absolute freedom.  The fact that many drugs, such as LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine and opium, make the user feel that they need no food or other natural supports for their existence, shows precisely how they fit into the attempt to deny dependency and achieve absolute freedom.  The discontinuity of the American experience in relation to older traditions, the abundance of material wealth and the usually unacknowledged background ideal of a pure, immaterial soul have worked together to produce in its literature characters like Dean Moriarty who make a life—and a death—of treading the edge between innovation and self-destruction.

Or, to condense our themes in the pithy and quintessentially American poetic language of William Carlos Williams:  “the pure products of America go mad” (from “On The Road To The Mental Hospital”)  

Apple pie and ice cream, moreover, also provide Kerouac with an opportunity to make a statement of value that clearly displays abundance as bigness:  “I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer.” (Ch. 3)  “Better,” “deeper,” “bigger,” and “richer,” work together to define a system of values that was both American—bigger is better—and Romantic—depth and richness.11

The theme of abundance can be found in all periods of American literature.  In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, Scarlet Letter, for example, a character who is the “father of the Custom House—the patriarch, not only of his little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States—was a certain permanent Inspector.”12  The Custom-House was the official federal government office responsible for inspecting all cargo coming into the country by ship and determining what if any duties had to be paid.  In the novel, this particular Custom-House is located on a wharf in the harbor of Salem, Massachusetts.  In this particular character, Hawthorne signifies one of the most important aspects of the American diet that also repeatedly appears in its literature—the consumption of large quantities of meat.  The Inspector had the unusual ability to remember in great detail

“the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat….to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster….it always satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher’s meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table.  His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey under one’s very nostrils….A tenderloin of beef, a hindquarter of veal, a sparerib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board…would be remembered….”13 

The dominance of meat in the American diet can be seen in several ways.  One is the following chart of specialty foods in the individual franchises of the top thirty fast-food companies in the US:

Type of Food Number of Franchises

Chicken 8,683

Hamburger/Hot Dog/Roast Beef           29,600

Pizza [usually served with a

meat topping]            11,593

Tacos [usually served with a

meat filler] 3,620

Seafood 2,630

Pancakes/Waffles [usually eaten

        with bacon,

        sausage or ham] 1,63014

Another view of this American food habit comes from considering the quantities of meat consumption and production in the United States.  For example,

“Americans spend about 25 percent of their food budget on red meat.  The per capita consumption of beef in the United States has increased steadily, while that of pork has declined….Only in Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina is per capita consumption higher than in the United States.  The United States normally produces about 27 percent of the world’s meat.” (Ibid., (13) 190)

From the United States Chamber of Commerce, the source of these statistics in Compton’s Encyclopedia and from the 19th century work of Hawthorne, we can move to the late 20th century.  In the late 1980’s, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, by a California writer, Fannie Flagg, was published.  In the first section of the novel, a reproduction of an article from the weekly newspaper in her fictional southern US town of Weems, Flagg describes the basic menu of the newly opened Whistle Stop Cafe:

…the breakfast hours are from 5:30 to 7:30, and you can get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red-eye gravy, and coffee….

For lunch and supper you can have:  fried chicken; pork chops and gravy; catfish, chicken and dumplings; or a barbecue plate; and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or cornbread, and your drink and dessert….

…the vegetables are:  creamed corn; fried green tomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyed peas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans.15

Later in the novel, the items in a particular meal served to a customer are described as “fried chicken, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes, cornbread, and iced tea."16

The fatness, abundance and purity of meat in the American diet have also been used by some writers as a counterfoil to other kinds of scarcity and impurity.  Sylvia Plath uses the tradition of a large meat meal on Sunday, as a once a week special gathering for American families, that often features a large, oven-roasted turkey, to give stark contrast to another kind of oven:

Mary’s Song

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.

The fat

Sacrifices its opacity…

A window, holy gold.

The fire makes it precious,

The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,

Ousting the Jews.

Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out

Germany,

They do not die.

Grey birds obsess my heart,

Mouth ash, ash of eye.

They settle.  On the high

Precipice

That emptied one man into space

The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,

This holocaust I walk in,

O golden child the world will kill and eat.17

One of America’s most gifted and enigmatic of contemporary poets, the Pulitzer Prize winner John Ashbery (1927-), turns America’s abundance into a counterfoil not of impurity but of scarcity as a lack of certainty:

Hardly anything grows here,

Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,

The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.

The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;

Birds darken the sky.  Is it enough

That the dish of milk is set out at night,

That we think of him sometimes,

Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?18

Besides the prominence and priority of meat, the Plath poem and the lists from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café foreground an important continuity and discontinuity in American food.  The important continuity stems from the fact that the early colonists and pioneers, trying to live in a strange land before it had been developed for agriculture, made their bread primarily from locally available grains, especially corn.  Wheat and other related grains were too hard to grind by hand and required a heavy, complicated mill that the early settlers could not carry with them.  Corn became a staple food as important to the early European colonizers as it already was to the indigenous people:

Young, ripe corn was eaten as roasting ears.  In winter the husks of the kernels were soaked off with lye to make hominy.  For breakfast and supper there was boiled corn-meal mush.  Sometimes the mush was fried and served with butter or pork drippings.  The most common dish, however, was hot corn bread.  Baked on a hoe blade before the fire, this was called hoecake.  Mixed with water into a stiff batter and covered with hot ashes, it was ash cake.  From the Dutch oven it emerged as corn pone or corn loaf.  Small cakes of corn pone were called corn dodgers.19

In the passage from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter both fish and turkey are mentioned along with pork and chicken.  The fish and turkey were most likely caught and shot in their natural habitats.  The pork and chicken were most likely raised and butchered in a domestic animal keep.  This combination of wild and domestic meat began with the first colonists and continues to the present day.  Indeed, the pioneers who traveled by foot, wagon and horse from the east westward on the American continent found a great abundance of wild game for meat.  Still they tried to carry enough familiar, nutritious foodstuffs to last them for the journey to their new homestead and to carry them through periods when wild game was unavailable.  A typical load for one adult traveling by oxen-drawn wagon westward was:

“…200 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of pilot bread, 75 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of rice, 5 pounds of coffee, 2 pounds of tea, 25 pounds of sugar, half bushel of dried beans, one bushel dried fruit, 2 pounds of baking soda, 10 pounds salt, half a bushel of cornmeal.  And it is well to have a half bushel of corn, parched and ground.  A small keg of vinegar should also be taken.”20

In many rural or sparsely inhabited parts of America the mixing of wild and domestic meats continues to this day.  In Alaska, for example, where I have lived for many years and which is one-third the area of the entire contiguous forty-eight states of the US, many people still rely on hunting for a large portion of their meat supply.  John Haines, past Poet Laureate of the State of Alaska and Alaska’s best known poet, began homesteading near Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1950’s.  I have known him personally for many years and read poetry with him on the stage of the Loussac Library in Anchorage in 1986.  His poetry clearly reflects how the dependence on wild meat can crystallize the themes of abundance and purity in an identification with the predator:

If the Owl Calls Again

at dusk

from the island in the river,

and it’s not too cold,

I’ll wait for the moon

to rise,

then take wing and glide

to meet him

We will not speak,

but hooded against the frost

soar above

the alder flats, searching.

with tawny eyes

And then we’ll sit

in the shadowy spruce and

pick the bones

of careless mice,

while the long moon drifts

toward Asia

and the river mutters

in its icy bed.

And when morning climbs

the limbs

we’ll part without a sound,

fulfilled, floating

homeward as

the cold world awakens.21

Long before Haines or any other European settled in Alaska, however, the indigenous  people had long lived on whatever meat animals they could kill and prepare.  In fact, when the first French explorers met and spent time with the indigenous people in the north of what is now Canada, they were so impressed by the predominance of uncooked meat in their diets that they called them “Esquimeaux,” which is French for “eaters of raw meat.”  Further down the coasts of Canada and Alaska, however, salmon run by the millions up the great rivers and are caught and used by the local people.  These Americans now eat their salmon after it has been smoked or cooked, as told in the following poem, “Subsistence #2” by Andrew Hope, III (1949-), of Sitka, Alaska:

Dog salmon colors

Glistening

Evening sun

Incoming tide

Washing the beach

Dog salmon shine

Silver purple flash

Reaching

Lifting a big one

By the tail

Incoming tide

Washing the beach

Time to eat

Fried dog salmon

For dinner22

There are five kinds of salmon that migrate into Alaskan fresh waters and are used there for food.  Each kind has its own name and some kinds have different names in different areas of Alaska.  Thus, discontinuities through time in preparation—from raw to cooked—have occurred along with discontinuities in time among practices of naming the same foodstuff.  Dog salmon are so-called because they were once used by the thousands to feed the many dogs upon which the indigenous Alaskan people relied for transportation during the long winters.  This kind of salmon, however, is perfectly fit for human consumption and now that many indigenous people in Alaska travel only by motorized vehicles in all seasons, dog salmon have become a staple of human nutrition.  

These discontinuities connect with the discontinuity signified by the meal ingredients in the first and second quotes from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café which is variation in regional foods.  Grits, for example, is a kind of cereal or mush made from corn or wheat that is coarsely ground.  Grits is considered by most Americans to be a food characteristic of the American South.  Its public presence in northern cities is usually the result of southerners moving north and opening restaurants that feature American Southern cuisine.  Other typical regional American foods are codfish associated with the northeastern seafood cuisine, key lime pie associated with the cuisine of the Florida Keys, tortillas and red beans associated with the southwest cuisine derived from America’s Hispanic heritage, and salmon associated with the northwest and Alaskan cuisines.

One of Alaska’s Native American poets, Charlie Blatchford, a Yupik Eskimo whom I knew personally and who is now deceased, stated the case for meat very simply in one of his few published poems:

Forgotten Words

Our language, of what I know,

has been prepared

with wisdom and grace.

The fine skin has been fleshed

and lies to one side.

The innards have carefully

been exposed.

Their sweet flesh

ready for feast.

Meat, the staple of life,

is consumed with satisfaction…

Sedating our need

for new words.23

In the hands of more contemporary poets who are not Native American, as Charlie Blatchford was, meat continues to signify substantial food and is often joined by a kind of substance that could serve as a separate topic alongside food—intoxicants such as alcohol and drugs.  In Whitman, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and many other writers, wine, beer and other kinds of mind-altering substances often accompany food and especially meat.  This range of consumable signifiers has a history in all literatures that is as ancient, as interesting and as important as that of meat and other foods.  Indeed, putting the light of interest on food has again brought into focus an important stream in the lives of all peoples that could well serve as a topic for extensive further research, discussion and writing.  In many poets, the connection between meat and wine is briefly made, as in the fourth verse of “Asylum” by Herman Fong (1963-):

At meals they barely feed her,

give her the smallest cuts of meat,

mostly fat, and a few red drops of wine.24

A concentration on the details of ordinary life characterizes the style of many American writers, both older and younger.  John Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate and one of the pre-eminent American literary voices of the 20th century, frequently drew for his characters and settings from the everyday lives of people in California.  Some of his best and most popular writings, novels such as Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, and the short story collection, The Long Valley, feature characters and settings in coastal, southern and central California.  Tortilla Flats features the lives of “paisanos” who lived near the central California coastal town of Monterey.  According to Steinbeck, a paisano was a “mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican and assorted Caucasian bloods” (Ch. 1).  The main character, Danny, and his friends hear about a ship that has been wrecked on the nearby coast.  They go to the beach and salvage flotsam from the wreck then sell it.  The sale puts five dollars into Danny’s possession, an unusually large amount of money:

The five dollars from the salvage had lain like fire in Danny’s pocket, but now he knew what to do with it.  He and Pilon went to the market and bought seven pounds of hamburger and a bag of onions and bread and a big paper of candy.  Pablo and Jesus Maria went to Torrelli’s for two gallons of wine, and not a drop did they drink on the way home, either. (Ch. 5)

Part of Steinbeck’s genius as a writer and one of the aspects of his stories that set them apart from other American writings is the deliberate use of food items and activities for characterization and plot development.    Tortilla Flats provides an example of his style as well as continuing to demonstrate the importance of meat in the American diet across all geographic regions and ethnic groups:

Danny’s business was fairly direct.  He went to the back door of a restaurant.  “Got any old bread I can give my dog?”  he asked the cook.  And while that gullible man was wrapping up the food, Danny stole two slices of ham, four eggs, a lamb chop and a fly swatter.

“I will pay you sometime,” he said.

“No need to pay for scraps.  I throw them away if you don’t take them.”

Danny felt better about the theft then.  If that was the way they felt, on the surface he was guiltless.  He went back to Torelli’s [the wine merchant], traded the four eggs, the lamb chop and the fly swatter for a water glass of grappa and retired toward the woods to cook his supper. (Ch.1)

The particular food item of onions appears in the first passage from Tortilla Flats as a small detail that signifies a range of regional foods in an American southwest first colonized by European settlers from Spain not from England.  Between hamburger and onions are both the continuity of easily prepared and consumed meat and the discontinuity of regional American cuisines.  Another great American literary voice, that of William Carlos Williams, also picked out this range of southwestern signifiers on his one and only trip to that part of America.  Besides a fine ear for the peculiarities that distinguish American English from all other kinds of English, Williams also had a keen eye for the small details of place that brought the reader in close to the object of Williams’ writing.  The following passage is from “The Desert Music” which was based on Williams’ trip to the American southwest and his sojourning in towns that, at that time, were far more Hispanic than Caucasian:

--paper flowers (para los santos)

baked red-clay utensils, daubed

with blue, silverware,

dried peppers, onions, print goods, children’s

clothing     .      the place deserted all but

for a few Indians squatted in the

booths, unnoticing (don’t you think it)

as though they slept there      .25

The use of activities around food to develop plot and character is also part of the style of another American novelist who received a Nobel Prize for literature, William Faulkner (1897-1962).  From the deserts and sparse valleys of the southwest to the lush forests, swamps and meadows of the deep south, American literature, like the perduring literature of every language, has consistently insisted that the physical place and its features are part of the story.  In the following passage from Light in August, Faulkner uses Mrs. McEachern’s attempt to nourish Joe as a reflector for both characters:

He was lying so, on his back, his hands crossed on his breast like a tomb effigy, when he heard again feet on the cramped stairs….

Without turning his head the boy heard Mrs. McEachern toil slowly up the stairs.  He heard her approach across the floor.  He did not look, though after a time her shadow came and fell upon the wall where he could see it, and he saw that she was carrying something.  It was a tray of food.  She set the tray on the bed.  He had not once looked at her.  He had not moved.  “Joe,” she said. He didn’t move.  “Joe,” she said.  She could see that his eyes were open.  She did not touch him.

“I aint hungry,” he said.

She didn’t move.  She stood, her hands folded into her apron.  She didn’t seem to be looking at him, either.  She seemed to be speaking to the wall beyond the bed. “I know what you think.  It aint that.  He never told me to bring it to you.  It was me that thought to do it.  He dont know.  It aint any food he sent you.”  He didn’t move.  His was calm as a graven face, looking up at the steep pitch of the plank ceiling.  “You haven’t eaten today.  Sit up and eat.  It wasn’t him that told me to bring it to you.  He dont know it.  I waited until he was gone and then I fixed it myself.”

He sat up then.  While she watched him he rose from the bed and took the tray and carried it to the corner and turned it upside down, dumping the dishes and the food and all onto the floor.  Then he returned to the bed, carrying the empty tray as though it were a monstrance and he the bearer, his surplice the cut down undergarment which had been bought for a man to wear.  She was watching him now, though she had not moved.  Her hands were still rolled into her apron.  He got back into bed and lay again on his back, his eyes wide and still upon the ceiling.  He could see her motionless shadow, shapeless, a little hunched.  Then it went away.  He did not look, but he could hear her kneel in the corner, gathering the broken dishes back into the tray.  Then she left the room. It was quite still then.26

Faulkner lived and wrote in the Bible Belt.  The Bible Belt signified the fact that most people in the south were fundamentalist Christian Protestants who girded themselves with the spirit of austerity and yearning for an otherworldly paradise of simplicity and peace articulated so strongly by New England writers such as Wylie and Bishop.  Although food occurs frequently in Faulkner’s work, it is rarely ample, elaborate or wasted.  Usually it serves to highlight the physical scarcity and tenuous moral condition of people who live on the edge of a society whose abundance seldom appears in his work:

And Judith.  She lived alone now.  Perhaps she had lived alone ever since that Christmas day last year and then year before last and then three years and then four years ago, since though Sutpen was gone now…she lived in anything but solitude, what with Ellen in bed in the shuttered room, requiring the unremitting attention of a child while she waited with that amazed and passive uncomprehension to die; and she (Judith) and Clytie making and keeping a kitchen garden of sorts to keep them alive; and Wash Jones, living in the abandoned and rotting fishing camp in the river bottom which Sutpen had built after the first woman—Ellen—entered his house and the last deer and bear hunter went out of it, where he now permitted Wash and his daughter and infant granddaughter to live, performing the heavy garden work and supplying Ellen and Judith and then Judith with fish and game now and then, even entering the house now, who until Sutpen went away, had never approached nearer than the scuppernong arbor behind the kitchen where on Sunday afternoons he and Sutpen would drink from the demi-john and the bucket of spring water which Wash fetched from almost a mile away….”27

Another indication of Faulkner’s genius is his ability to see in an event as ordinary as a young man ordering pie and coffee from a waitress with whom he secretly wants some kind of relationship the potential for fine, deep drama.  Faulkner’s preference for scant food and small food items continues to display the themes of scarcity and purity that were inescapable in his social and historical environment.  In the following passage, Faulkner describes Joe, the boy in the passage just presented, who has come to a restaurant to be served by the waitress, in terms that transparently bring into play the signifiers of purity as immaterial dimension and food as binding, burdensome material necessity:

He believed that the men at the back…were laughing at him.  So he sat quite still on the stool, looking down, the dime clutched in his palm.  He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight.  He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an apron and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen.  “Coffee and pie,” he said.

Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty.  “Lemon coconut chocolate.”

In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all.  “Yes,” Joe said.

The hands did not move.  The voice did not move.  “Lemon coconut chocolate.  Which kind.”  To the others they must have looked quite strange.  Facing one another across the dark, stained, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth counter, they must have looked a little like they were praying:  the youth countryfaced, in clean Spartan clothing, with an awkwardness which invested him with a quality unworldly and innocent; and the woman opposite him, downcast, still, waiting, who because of her smallness partook likewise of that quality of his, of something beyond flesh.  Her face was highboned, gaunt.  The flesh was taut across her

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