G. Michael Vasey's Blog: The Wacky World of Dr. Vasey, page 72

Utterly Overwhelmed and Angry

I know that I have written about this before but I really am now totally overwhelmed by US taxes as I think are many overseas US citizens. US citizens living overseas are treated like criminals by the USA and heavily penalized in the form of a growing web of complex rules and reporting requirements that even the IRS doesn’t actually seem to understand and that now required specialist tax assistance (i.e expensive). When you add to that filing in the Czech Republic – which is actually relatively simple – it is just too much.

Tomorrow, I head to Prague where I will review and file tax returns for each year from 2009 – 2013. I will also file a whole array of other special tax forms and reports to the Treasury due to to FACTA and FBAR reporting. Actually, all was going quite well but was very expensive and burdensome until I discovered that my offshore UK pension scheme that contains just a small amount of money from the first 6-years of employment in my life actually isn’t considered a pension by the IRS at all but rather an investment scheme. At the same time, I also discovered that my Czech pension/life insurance also is problematic. Now I am sorry but I really do not understand the issue despite repeated attempts to explain it to me. After all, the UK pension predates my even becoming a US citizen by a decade. That apparently doesn’t matter and to avoid vicious penalties and even worse, I was advised to refile everything and file all the special reports and waivers required for the two offending pensions that are not pensions according to the IRS.

So, now bogged down in a forest of paperwork, I am told I owe taxes on this but … the penalties are waived apparently because I was a good boy and reported this. However, lets not forget I have to pay a specialist UK-based tax attorney and my own accountant for preparing several years of refiles…. my guess is the total cost will be 20,000USD including the taxes.

Mad, I am livid. US citizenship isn’t worth this hassle, aggravation and cost.

It’s All Fantasy

It’s proven, so it has to be true

And now there’s not a thing that we can do

Yet another litany of lies

Pulled off in front of our very eyes

It’s a free show though

So we mustn’t complain

Hollywood in real-life

Actors showing grief and pain

The news isn’t so good

And we are all so afraid

Pulled in so many directions

Playing out this dark charade

Lies become truth become lies

Who the hell can really tell?

Stories and often, just rumors

Everything merges simply so well

But amongst all these sleepers

One or two still think and question

Suspect that they smell a rat

Don’t swallow that suggestion

Remaining single-minded

Looking inwards and deeply

Ignoring all this bloody nonsense

Staying true; the free me

It’s pretty hard to do

When the information

Becomes disinformation

Packaged lies for easy consumption

Easy meat and quite a treat

For the controlling factor

The Matrix men hidden deep

While humanity is still asleep

Who Am I?

Try so very hard to be me

The one you think that you know

A persona imagined passively

Minor differences in take

Patterns in my speech

It’s not about the things you make

But about the who that you are

And doesn’t that vary, be wary

I can be anyone I want to be

I can be anyone that you want to see

Image is like clothing for the ego

Nothing is certain in make believe

Nothing has real solidity

Floating variations in psyche

Revolving interpretations inside me

I project and you receive

But the me that I want to be

May not be the one that you perceive

Am I real then?

And are you?

Imagined shadows hurtling

Through some forgotten plane

Like some silly

Computer game

I digress

Regress

A kernel of truth

Remains aloof

My higher self.

Keeping Everyone Happy

Last week in London, we pulled off our first conference. Pulling together something like a conference is a real feat of organization and hard work I can tell you! It also has a lot of stakeholders who all want something different from the event. The attendees, the sponsors, the exhibitors and so on. Pleasing them all is really tough to do and none of them really care much about how complex everything is or how difficult it is to pull off a complex event like this – they just want you to meet their objectives. To be honest, it reminded me a little of life!

In life, I think it is exactly the same way. People expect things from you and they are not actually in possession of the facts of how life is for you. I often read wise statements on Facebook about this and it is entirely true – when you criticize someone you do so without much if any knowledge of what sort of a day they are having, what’s on their minds and what challenges they are facing. In many respects, we have higher standards for others than we do for ourselves….

One lesson I have learned is to say NO. It is hard for someone like me to say no as I am naturally and have been raised to be someone who will do things for others. I am not praising myself here just being realistic that, in life, my biggest mistakes have been made by not having the guts to say No. Like everyone else more or less I often miss signals and/or am selfish in my outlook on life and do not do the things I should but if I am asked to do something or to take on a role then I do it to the best of my ability.

I think there came a time in the last 10 to 15-years when I suddenly realized that I had no life of my own. I was so busy helping make sure that everyone else’s around me was good that somehow mine seemed to have gone by the wayside.  Money, brains, time and other assets and attributes were freely given and I discovered the more I gave of these things the more I was expected to give and the less thanks I received. I was being used and abused in many respects.

Polarity come into play here and trying to find the balance between the two poles of being there for everyone – abused and under appreciated – versus being there for no one by being so self-absorbed that no one else matters. Finding that balance isn’t easy though and I suppose some might even argue that one should be completely selfless and absorbed in helping others. I disagree because unless you find the balance, the value of what you are able to offer other people is eroded. So I started to push back. at first, this was ignored or even laughed at as if I were joking but eventually after shock, dismay, argument and so on, balance was restored. I still do have a habit of giving too much – smothering people in what they want to the point they get sick and tired of it, but it’s not as bad as it used to be.

The person to keep happy and to love is actually yourself for unless you are loved and happy, you really cannot help others anyway.

So back to that Conference. It went very well in the end but there were one or two moans as always. You can’t make everyone happy and these days, I think my attitude is that I won’t get upset by that. If I did my best then really, that’s all I can do. It also makes me think just a tad more about what others may be going through before complaining myself…..

Duty Free?

I have been traveling quite a bit recently and indeed, I am just back from London. Me being me, I couldn’t help wondering why we still call the shops in airports duty free? Plainly, they are not or if they are, something else is wrong. I ended up asking the manager of one such store why, if the store was duty free, could I buy Maltesers much cheaper in the High St.? He didn’t seem to know so I asked about cigarettes – same price as the High St. Well, inside the EU apparently, duty free isn’t duty free anymore. It is my friends a con and I counted several items in a duty free that were more than 20% more expensive than the corner store near my Hotel in central London.

I also asked in WH Smiths why I needed to furnish my boarding pass to buy sweets? They didn’t seem to know but they agreed that their store was NOT duty free. I made a little bit of a scene to be honest and in the end was told that there was no requirement whatsoever to show the boarding pass as it was used by them to track who bought what…..

So there you go. Duty free isn’t and your boarding pass is only required to help them market to you….

Partner

Long distance feelings felt out

Flesh crawls with searing self-doubt

Dust pillows where shadows sat

Does she, can she smell a rat?

And what would it smell like anyway?

Not like the dirty smelly tearaway

From the bottom of our dead end cul de sac?

Perhaps defense is better than art attack?

Dying here all alone

Throw me a bone

Tell me that it was all worth something

Take this golden life ring

Place it on that finger

Be the solid standing pillar

I needed you to be

While it’s certain I wanna be free

Only with you by my side

Can I face this dirty lonely ride

From warm and womb-like security

Gradually losing my purity

As I grow older and older

My sins growing ever bolder

Be the one who saves me from myself

Be the one who maintains my soulful health

Until the day I die

And say that final bye bye

A Pain in the Neck

Today, I woke up with a pain in my neck and upper back which rapidly became a headache to boot. I wish there were chiropractors in the Czech Republic but there are not so I make do with a heat patch and two headache tablets. I know that the heat patch will probably do the trick and that the headache pills will not. It’s bizarre really but I had this problem for about 15-years now and it must be related to the way I have slept. My chiropractor in The Woodlands could fix it with a quick twist of the neck! He always told me I had knocked a vertebrae out of alignment high up in my neck most likely by hanging my head off of the back of the pillow. I think he was right as last night I awoke semi-paralyzed with my head hanging off the back of the pillow and it took a while to move it.

Actually, the whole incident reminded me that just recently, I have been having some strange dream-like experiences again. Not where I cannot move my head but where I simply cannot move at all and always coming out of a nightmare where something unseen is throwing me around and that unseen something follows me out of the dream. I think this has a name – sleep paralysis or better still The Old Hag. In fact, I have suffered from this phenomenon on and off since childhood when it used to terrify me. Now, I actually find myself panicking a bit and then even in that state realizing what it is and waiting patiently for it to end. While there are medical and psychological explanations for this I also think that it has something to do with leaving the body also and waking up before all the bits have synched back again (Astral and physical or whatever terminology you prefer to use).

I have commented about the dream before on the blog. It is usually a normal dream. I am walking around a house or castle or somewhere and gradually become aware of a terrifying presence. The presence then is able to throw me around unseen. I sometimes will at that point be dug in the ribs and woken up as I often scream or shout out and wake everyone in the house up but, if there is no one to wake me, I end up in the Old Hag situation.

Interestingly enough, a week or so ago, I was in Amsterdam on business and staying at a hotel there. I experienced both nights a variation of this whole experience that still has me puzzled partly because I cannot recall all of the details despite telling myself in the dream that I should do so. i.e. I remember me telling me remember this but don’t remember what it was I was supposed to recall…. wonderful. However, I seemed to be hovering just above my bed thinking I was asleep yet marveling at how light it was and that it would soon be time to get up. I kept blacking out or falling back asleep but then experiencing this same condition which seemed also timeless. The whole effect was to believe that the night – both of them, were pretty endless. It was quite bizarre and all I can think of is that I was out of body but didn’t know it? Perhaps I did and that is what I wanted to recall – who knows? The strange thing is that I was also aware of the presence in this situation similar to the Old Hag.

It’s situations like these that make me believe that not everything is as we think it is. There are plainly mental states and/or planes of being achievable in meditation, trance and sleep that extend the known universe some distance. I just wish I had the ability to fully and properly explore them. But, based on this illustration, it’s quite easy to see how I get a pain in the neck!

Rock Hound

Back when I was a kid, I became fascinated by geology. In part, my father was responsible for he was also fascinated and together, we would walk up and down beaches at every opportunity, hands clasped at our backs, eyes peeled and a slightly bent back, searching for the one stone or rock that might be special. Many a time, people would watch us puzzled and ask, what it was we were looking for. Pretty stones really was the answer.

My dad polished, ground and sliced stones in the garage, made them into jewelry and sold them on the side back in the 70’s you see. Stones that we found were the special ones amongst the tigers eye, rose quartz, agate, amethyst and other purchased semi-precious stones.

I was lucky enough to go to a school that actually had a geology teacher too. Mr. Hilary Douglas was his name and he doubled as the environmental studies teacher and school bus driver. He liked his beer and his cigarettes did Mr. Douglas. So I was able to do an O level in geology at school. Being the bus driver, we also went on quite a few trips too and living in Yorkshire, you didn’t have to go far to see some superb geology. O level turned to A level and even a special paper. Mr. Douglas had never has a student do a special paper before and he was quite fussed about it. Needless to say, I got an A with distinction in the subject I loved. Shame I didn’t enjoy Maths as much really….

From there I went to the University of Aston in Birmingham to study Geological Sciences. There was a moment at the end of the first year when I almost opted to switch to Metals and Materials Science which I also enjoyed but in the end, I stuck to my one true love back then – Geology. The six weeks that I spent on the Island of Eigg doing my field mapping project counts amongst the best of my life. I graduated with a first class honours degree and won the department prize for the best field mapping project.

While almost tempted to the gold mines of Africa, in the end, I opted for the Ph.D.. I first went to Leeds and spent a year with the British Geological Survey before finishing with another 2-years at Strathclyde University. I also managed to get three – yes three! – transatlantic 6 to 8 week trips funded as well. Two by the BGS and UK Dept. of Education and 1 by the University College of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. I had published 10 or so papers before I submitted my thesis and as such, the Ph. D. was more or less guaranteed.  For those interested, here is the last paper I wrote a couple of years after gaining the Ph.D. This one is one of my first published works while so far as I know, this one is the very first published article I ever wrote.

I was lucky enough to be accepted into BP as a geologist in Aberdeen where I did my stint as a rig geologist for a couple of years. I learned two things – I hated helicopters and working as a geologist was no fun at all – it was all paper and no rocks! I was promoted into a specialist role at the Sunbury research centre for BP doing plate tectonics research and for a while, I was having fun again. I knew though that eventually I would be going back to working with paper as an Exploration Geologist and to me that was a fate as bad as death. I was fortunate enough to develop an interest in IT and data modeling at Sunbury and managed a move into the BP IS department. A couple of years later, I was a consultant at Price Waterhouse and my career in the love of my life – Geology was over.

It is funny how things change. For many years, not a thought about Geology entered my head. I think I have forgotten more Geology than you could possibly imagine. It seems like another world to me now. But today, I once again packed my hammer in the field and beat the crap out of a few rocks as I introduced my daughter to Geology. To the art and science of understanding Mother Earth; her processes and the miracles she makes almost every day. It felt good. I will shortly do it again and I am sure, so will my daughter.

Here is a photo of her today beating rocks…. as I post this I realize that I do not have a single photo of me in action. They all got left in Houston a long time ago….

If Only…..

These days I find myself reminiscing a lot. Usually its music that takes me back.

A song on the radio, one played while I work or perhaps that tune that suddenly haunts my mind and will not go away. The problem is I have caught myself questioning a lot of things like I would never have imagined myself doing in the past. I have even caught myself thinking it might be nice just to be dead. I wonder, is this what all mid-50’s people think? You get up and you feel the aches and pains and then you look in the mirror and this wrinkled, rumpled, worn out and overweight looking creature stares back and you think – Who the fuck is that? Of course, you know it’s you……. and that it is only going to get worse.

I tend to think about how simple life used to be. No mobile phones, no internet, no need for passwords and vigilance about security. Travel was fun because you really had time to get somewhere and back again. Now its all just a blur of another flight and airport and everyone of them feels and looks the same. I also think about the opportunities I have had, the people I knew and encountered and wonder why I didn’t find the time to keep up with them all. I think about the women I met and the potential for love that I turned down due to some weird misconceptions about sex, love and everything. I wonder why I didn’t take the opportunities that passed me by because I was too afraid to fail, look silly or because I was simply too lazy. I also think about how time used to seem plentiful and abundant whereas now it feels limited and gone in an instant.

I look at the kids as well and I think youth is wasted on them. I know it sounds weird but if I could be their age knowing what I know now….. good God I would take such advantage of all the opportunities they don’t even see. And people everywhere are wrapped up in nonsense thinking it is important when it is not….

It’s not that I wish myself dead or anything. I fully expect to live and live hard a while yet. It’s just this feeling that somehow, somewhere my life slipped like sand grains between my fingers.

I have changed inside as well as outside and here is the problem. My center of being has shifted and the rules I lived by no longer apply. I look back on myself and wonder what would it have been like if I could have known this then?

Recently, I heard myself say to my partner that I am successful at anything I turn my mind to. I expect to be successful and I know I will succeed. I had to catch myself at that moment and contrast it with the 18-year old me that had so little confidence that he wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

For some reason though, rather than spending all my time looking forward to something like I did back then, I now sit on the fulcrum of my life and seem to spend time looking out in both directions wishing I had the power equally to change the past as I know I can change the future. The funny thing is, many of the things I thought mattered do not matter at all and many of the things I took for granted now seem critical. I wonder how I will feel in 30-years time?

Did I have any impact?

Did I make a difference?

Did I work a little inner gold?

Who knows.

A Growing Collection

I have written ‘poetry’ since I was an angst ridden teen. Much of what was reasonable out of all of that material was published back in 2006 as Weird Tales. I recall reading sheet after sheet of yellowed foolscap paper with my scrawl and doodles all over them. Occasionally, I had typed out the poem using a typewriter I had been bought for a birthday or Xmas (anyone remember typewriters?). Many of the poems were well embarrassingly bad but they did bring memories flooding back of 1972 – 1981.

Having published that collection it seemed reasonable that I would keep publishing new poetry. Four more poetry books have followed (Poems for the Little Room, Astral Messages, Moon Whispers and Best Laid Plans) and I do think my poetry has gotten better as the years have gone by. Certainly, the subject matter has changed from teen impressions of a different world in the 70’s to much deeper and brooding material about reality, life and everything. I also tried different formats to make it all the more interesting. In Poems for the Little Room, I interspersed poetry with photographs taken by my better half and in Astral Messages I paired poems with blog articles from Asteroth’s Domain. For the last two, I stuck to verse.

I still feel the need to write poetry – to play with words and use sounds to create effects that resonate with whatever is going on in my heart, mind and soul at the time. It does me good to throw it up and out onto the page. It is almost as if I am exteriorizing issues and flaws within me. Whether that makes for readable content is for you to be the judge but its ceratinly a tonic for me.

Give one of the books a try – they are all available on Kindle as well as in paperback form from Amazon or me….

They are -

Weird Tales – Otherworld Poetry – 2006

Poems for the Little Room – republished 2013

Astral Messages – 2013

Moon whispers – 2014

Best Laid Plans – 2014