G. Michael Vasey's Blog: The Wacky World of Dr. Vasey, page 48

Murder by Social Media

Perhaps I am going to run the risk of getting the wrong side of the PC crowd with this one, but as I often say, someone has to say it.

This last week, two news stories caught my attention because they were two sides of the same coin and in my opinion, both wrong. The first story is of the mountain climbers in Malaysia. OK, when in Rome and all that and tourists need to consider where they are and take responsibility for their actions and all of that – yes, I agree. But, good grief, how to get worked up over a non-event. Apparently, it was offensive to God that these people got naked for a photo. Really? Which God would that be then? The one that created them – NAKED. How on Earth would God be offended by being presented with its creation as he created them?

The second is the story about the 70-year old male Nobel scientist forced to resign and live the rest of his life being hounded by PC people because he dared to make a joke about women in the lab. Again, yes I know, tip of the iceberg, permeates a culture and so on ad nauseam. People – he was joking. He is 70 and he made the mistake of joking about sexism. What a crime that is to be crucified by every global media outlet and twitter account on the planet. Derek and Clive must be turning in their graves. PC at its worst and most heinous…. Get a life people. Give the man a break – its hardly as if he has a track record of abusing women is it?

I pick on these two events because to my mind their are similarities. In both instances, a party somewhat innocuously and innocently without malice or premeditation, did something that people with a religious or social axe to grind then crucified them for. Global and social media took it up and before you know it, they are being blamed for deaths from earthquakes and other such nonsense.

It’s time we grew up on this planet. It’s time people respected each other again and gave each other some room to manoeuvre. People make mistakes, they say silly things, they do even sillier things. Since when was that a crime deserving of more global malice than what is going on in Syria, Iraq, and other such places everyday? I ask you?

Finally, as a magician, that malice and anger that is whipped up and directed at these poor people is real. It has an existence and it is almost like cursing that individual. There are two concerns here. The first is that level of spiritual energy is bound to affect the person concerned and secondly, there will be a karmic consequence for that on the perpetrator…..

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Erosion

How can you say you love me?

And yet not really know me?

How can you know me?

Yet tell me that I lie?

All I ever wanted

Was to be understood

Yet how can I expect that from you if

I don’t understand myself!

But couldn’t you take an interest

In something more than

Every normal day life

Couldn’t you try to visit the places

That truly haunted me

Couldn’t you make the effort

Couldn’t you just take the time?

Its funny cos you think what you think

So confidently

Where do you get that?

What makes you actually believe

You know me?

I don’t think you have made the effort

I don’t think you could ever see

What it takes to be me

Just like I cannot know

What it takes to be you

I know that I am alone

I am an island, all alone

Not sure if there could be another way

Doesn’t matter what you say

I am an island

And you are the sea

And in the end

You are eroding me.

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Checkpoints

Once again I find myself sitting here sort of alone. I always seem to end up listening to music and drinking a glass or two of wine. The music these days will be Bush, Gavin Rossdale, Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, or one of his other projects…. maybe Riverside or Opeth. Whatever, the music seems to find its place within me and that place is invariably somewhere in the past. It isn’t that I don’t look forward to the future, I do and very much. No, it is simply that I now have 55 years of very precious memories, life’s lessons and many rambling and bizarre thoughts about how to make sense of it all.

I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my life. I have packed a couple or more lives in already and who knows? There may yet be much much more. I certainly think I have yet to have my 15 promised minutes of fame, for example. I remember very well Jack, my Dad’s best friend being taken aback by something I said as we visited an old Cornish tin mine. He was filling my head with how hard my life would have been a hundred or so years earlier especially if I had to work in such a place. Confidently and assertively I told him the equivalent of ‘Bullshit, I’d own the place!’ Jack tells me every time he sees me he always knew I would excel….

Well, I don’t own any tin mines. I don’t own much at all actually but I do OK and I have traveled, met, experienced, seen happiness, felt sadness, loved, hated, been loved, been hated and so much more. I have had missed chances and missed disasters. In short, I have had and hope to continue to have, a pretty interesting life. So why not sit here from time to time, glass in hand, music playing, reliving, rethinking, replaying my life.

When I look back, I do see moments that had real importance. It may have been nothing more than a feeling or a hint. I do wonder if that moment was like a wormhole that If had I chosen differently would have dragged me off kicking and screaming down a different path. Or perhaps, those strange moments with that strange feeling that I cannot truly describe were like checkpoints – moments that one can rapidly revisit in technicolour glory to re-explore in a different era, in a different mindset, from a parallel reality perhaps.That is what the poem I wrote tonight is about. The Way Back.

Is it only me that has such moments and wonders over them all of my life? I wish my Dad was still here – I would ask him.

Such moments transcend everything. They take on an importance of amazing proportions. The memory of them oscillates from forgotten to suddenly recalled with a sense of profound shock and awe (to borrow an awful expression). I like the checkpoint idea… as if at some point in time I press a button and say make this point easy to come back to from any other point in my life.

Another way to look at it is that time doesn’t exist at all. The sense of time passing is simply an illusion and these check points are there to let us know that all points in our life are always accessible.

Who knows?

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A Way Back?

The silver image flickers on screen

Moving stills still alive now dance

A home movie rerun has begun

A 1960’s sun hangs high above us

The surf churns and works the beach

Moments from a childhood now out of reach

Blisters painful on my reddened sunburned back

The drifting aromas of cuppa soup

Whispered and muted parental voices speak

The tent gently flutters in the night breeze

I shiver and roll and try to sleep

Imagined stirrings of a quantum leap

The grass sways in golden waves

The incessant buzz of insects grind

Dragonflies hover like silky silken copters

The heat envelopes us within a shimmer

A feeling creeps in – one of déjà vu

A crack in time that I might climb thro?

The surfboard rides and glides easily

And as I tumble over, it slices my chest

The sting of salty sea drops alerts me

The reddish tinge up on my skin

A connection with my future self

A scar fashioned in bloody youthful health

The searing heat of dune sand

Burns my peeling back

We roll and squirm and slide

Your scent masked in sun tan tones

And inside your pale blue eyes

I see everything my life implies

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Love Me or Hate Me?

The first review for How To Create Your Own Reality is up… Yes – its a 1-star review that says as its title ‘Awful’. I had to laugh. Hopefully, that won’t turn out to be the majority decision…..

I found myself remarking to a friend after seeing the review – ‘why me?’

The reason is that I seem to polarize my audience. Not for me are a bunch of 3 and 4 star ratings…. I seem to get a lot of 5-stars and a few 1-stars with not much in the middle. So my conclusion is that people either love or hate my work. This perception prompted the PhD in me to do some quick analysis…..

Well, I was wrong…… its actually a nicely skewed distribution towards 5-stars across 111 reviews on Amazon and amazon UK. There is a little loss of the shape at the 1 end so it does seem as if a a small minority hates what I do…..

I guess the truth is I don’t like 1-star reviews….. and they stick out to me like a sore thumb and as a result, I weight them more highly than other reviews…. What I am doing is exactly what I discuss in the book – I am creating my own conspiracy theory and seeing the evidence for it where there actually isn’t any. In turn, this colors my reality and impinges on my life in a way it should not……

I need to be more positive…..

Out Now – How To Create Your Reality – give it a read and leave your own review…..

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Memories of Long Ago

Recently a childhood friend passed away very suddenly however, I got to communicate with one of his newer friends on Facebook about our mutual pal and share a few stories. I told him how I had first met Andrew Wells who was out our next door but one neighbor and how we had learned to play guitar together. A band resulted that at first was called Brutus and later Nemo (latinized ‘No One’ – we always thought No one in concert quite funny). The band initially comprised of Andy on lead guitar, me on second guitar and vocals, our next door neighbor, Tim Pybus on Bass and mutual friend Mike Smith on Drums. One sunny afternoon, we assembled our kit in the back yard. Andy’s dad had made him and I speaker cabinets and we had rented a PA systems as well and wanted to see how it all looked and how it would be assembled before we actually played live a few days later.

Now I am going to be honest. I had totally forgotten about that afternoon. It had gone completely from my memory until I saw the photo in a video montage created to celebrate Andy’s life. Of course, as soon as I saw it, the memories came flooding back from wherever lost memories go…..

So there we all are so many many years ago…..

That’s me on the left – shirtless as it was a hot summer afternoon. My legs seem to go on forever – no wonder my parents called me hollow legs! Next to me is Andy Wells, then Tim Pybus and finally Mike Smith standing on a chair with his drumsticks. Sadly, Andy is now playing concerts in the big sky now, but I did see Tim a few years ago at my Fathers funeral. Mike Smith I have lost track of completely.

We did plug in and play that afternoon but being outdoors we had to try to keep it down. Almost certainly we would have played a song called Big Fat Mama by Status Quo as we all rather enjoyed that one.

Happy days….

Thanks to Cliff for sending me the photo and giving me a long lost memory of Andy and the lads…..

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6000 Miles To Texas

6000 miles

It’s a long way to fly

Soaring so high

6000 miles

It was a long jump then

Knowing when

The Atlantic tore us apart

Me and my new start

The three of you stayed

Don’t see you often I’m afraid

Texas seems so far

Cannot get there in my car

Trans Atlantic

Getting frantic

So close and yet so far

The grand ta ta

6000 miles

Endless smiles

Written in ink

Not in the pink

But never mind

In my heart there is no distance at all

No miles to travel

No short inconvenient phone call

No technology to baffle

See you there

See you soon

See you on the dark side of the Moon.

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Prostrates – Who Wants Them?

As many men my age will know, prostrate pain is very annoying. It is a low grade pain or soreness that grates on the nerves over time. It causes depression apparently and I can see why. I have suffered from this since my mid 30’s and it is progressively getting worse. The first time was in Houston and I recall being very nervous visiting the doctor but a month of very strong antibiotics sorted it. These days, I take all kinds of herbal remedies and only visit the doctor if it gets to the point it is today – feels like someone gave me a good kicking!

The problem with this little male gland is that its hard to know what is wrong with it. It is full of very small tubules and so an infection might not show up on any tests and antibiotics may never reach the desired point. In many cases, there is no actual infection and the medical people don’t seem to know what the issue actually is. In others the prostrate is enlarged and again, no one seems to know why.

So we suffer on without any real promise of help. We take the herbal supplements in the hope that they do work and we work on healing the gland in meditation. Occasionally, we take copious amounts of antibiotics for a month or more and get a couple of weeks relief. At times, it drives me nuts.

In my case, the prostrate pain is combined with lower back pain. I can tell as soon as I get up in a morning what kind of a day it will be based on the back pain. I have actually been told by one doctor that my prostrate isn’t involved but rather it is a nerve in my back and displaced pain. Yet, the last time I saw my Doctor, he prescribed antibiotics – what for a nerve in my back?

In the end, prostrate pain is something you simply put up with. Perhaps it is a contributing factor in making older men grouchy? It sure is in my case….

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Alone

I am alone

Sitting with my memories

Scenes of life pass me by

A tear wells in my eye

It is just me

Talking to me

No one cares

Distinct lack of interest

No one gives a shit

So here I sit

Alone

Talking to myself

Worried about my mental health

I am the performer

The audience too

I clap in tune to the song

That I am singing

Cos no one else cares

Its just me

Alone

Me

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Celebrity

I will tell you this

In a moment of honesty

I would love to be your celebrity

Come on you papparazzi

You can follow me

Snap your snaps and invade my privacy

Follow me around in your idiocy

I want to be wanted

I want to be liked

Most of all I want that life

Married to a famous wife

I’ll sign my autograph

Give it on a photograph

I wanna be a star

I wanna go far

I’ll happily be your celebrity

Smile with insincerity

Give my star studded opinion

I want to be in

the in crowd

Cool, I am ice

Even if I’m not so nice

Love me

Follow me

Scream and holler

Its no bother

Want to be your celebrity

Want you to follow me

Wouldn’t that be total fun

Forever on the run

Known everywhere

Eyes stare

Give it to me

I am celebrity

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