Trouble in Candy-Land, Chapter 1

Chapter 1.         The state of affairs here in America

Well, I want you all to know that I am so happy the Great Hall of Mini- Economics sent me to the United States from my hometown of Nottingham, England (or Snotingham as our critics used to call it).

The great mini-hall has sent me over the pond to the mid-west part of the American republic to report on the cultural gestalt here in this state of Michigan.  And I have been employed to write stories about my life here and report back to the Great Hall on politics, the taste of food and beverages and just the over-all mood of the living here in Michigan and probably I will build stories around just what people have on their minds here in Michigan or even stories about what ever words should fall out of their mouths.

And from the moment the lovely Rita and I first set foot in our new home here in America it became very clear that all sorts ofpolitics were brewing here in Michigan and it became clear to me that my first report back to the Great Hall was going to be a political observation story and I am here to report that the presidential election of 2012 is the backdrop for my first report on the cultural gestalt here, in a mini-economical sort of way, and the Great Hall has sent me over here in America to write about the cultural mood of the mid-west part of the country politically, you know, out here and yes it struck me that onecould positively begin to imagine that a national election on this large of a scale and in this great nation of America had thepotential to make things better for everyone and you would certainly expect that this big of an election effort would reflect a positive difference afterwards to the citizens, you know, once the election was concluded and really for god's sake you would expect that there would be some small satisfaction for the people of the US especially after all of the money that was spent by everyone for everything that you could ever imagine in an American election And you would think that after all of this time and effort and money spent by the American political culture that the outcome of the election would make some sort of positive difference in a country as wonderful as the United States and it seems that that didn't really seem to have happened in the election of 2012.  And people have been telling me, ever since, that the same old political faces and even some new old faces seem to be perfectly satisfied stoking the dissatisfaction in America and these talking heads seem to be perfectly content in consistently dividing Americans even further from each other. 

I do find it culturally fascinating, being English and all, that Americans who have so much are so dissatisfied with their lives and I began to think about what satisfies me in this life and I look around and I have to say that Americans seem to have a lot of what the rest of the world is looking for and I don't really understand this grandiose American sense of discontent with the present moment.  It seems that half of the Americans want to go backwards in time to a more perfect time for them and the other half of America is ready to bound into the future and make a better world for all.  Well guess what?  The people going backwards don't want to pay for the people going forward and the people going forward think the people going backwards to a more perfect time are kind of backward people in general. 

So hence the rub and the sense of dissatisfaction that I find in America these days and I have to agree with the current President that America is pretty great right now.  I could go on about that, and who really wants to listen to me, but really my job is to observe and report and not to pontificate.  I understand that a lot of us have to overcome a real difficult journey to get opportunities in this life and racism and stupid people litter the path to a better life both socially and economically and don't forget the religious persecution stuff too.  

And I know we would all like to have more money and be treated fairly by everyone and no one should have to live with hate of any kind and we have got to work on that stuff really hard but hey really people in America really don't you understand how lucky you are to be alive and living in America and not in Syria or the South Sudan and I could go on naming horrible places like 1938 fascist Germany or in Russia under Stalin or maybe just living in the path of Genghis Khan (I almost forgot to mention living with Chairman Mao).

Well anyway, I'm here to say that for a guy who is from Nottingham, America is ok to me.  I do understand that I'm English and white but my last name set the kids off laughing at me in middle school and I've been really poor before and it really didn't feel so good and I am quite aware of what a dead end life is like with no one but yourself to help you go forward and I know America is rough around the edges sometimes and in the middle too and I guess all around, from time to time, as well, but I'll take it any day over living one day in North Korea.

I know my examples of a hard place to live in are kind of extreme and I'm sure if your people were in charge America would be greater than now but from where I sit I'm not so sure about that.  Listen to me and I can't even vote.

And as I said before all of these political faces on the TV appear to only be making things seem even worse than they really are in America and truly all of this negativity and being disgruntled seems to be representative, politically of course, of all these Americans that I live amongst here in Michigan and all of this disunity in America seems to be representative of the dissatisfying difference all Americans seem to want to enjoy or not to enjoy in their country right now. This dissatisfaction is feltby all the people and be they the people on the right or peoplebeing to the left kind of people or people who are just right up the middle of all this crazy we live with and what is it that all these people in America really want any way, you know, what do they want from this crazy world we live in?  I'll bet they are all fixated on that golden time, when all will be better, either a time in the past or a time in the future and the conservatives are hoping that going back in time will be a lot less expensive than going forward with the futurists because probably the future is simply more expensive than the past especially when the past is really past. 

And it seems to me, as your mini-economist type of reporter that the next coming presidential election, in the great old US, in the next year (2016), will only make things seem even more apparently worse or at least as worse as the politicians want us all to believe that things are bad and getting worse and in this regard and also in the aftermath of this coming election when it does happens in that not so distant now and in that not so distant future after this next coming election and I do hope all Americans are ready to suffer even more dissatisfaction among the factions than they are now and I hope Americans are ready for that.  And this time I think that who-ever loses, either the back-warders or the for-warders, that they will express even more kinds of dissatisfaction than we have seen in a long time.

And I certainly am not prepared for this inevitability of more dissatisfaction but I am a foreigner in this land and this is my excuse and I feel a bit strange in this land and I hope to be a stranger here no more someday in the future because I am already missing my hometown even after only a few weeks.  

And what I am really truly saying right now, with the heart of an admiring observer, is that I just hope for the best, politically speaking of course, for all of us in America now and in the future down the road kind of way and that is what I am truly saying to you and really what I want to share with you right now is this hope for the best and maybe I want to really share this hope with the gods as well if they are in the right kind of mood to be sharing with me and if they really do care to hear from me.

And of course, I am sounding pretty much like a middle of the road kind of guy because I am an English mini-economist with a lot of Scottish blood and we are definitely middle of the road kind of people and sometimes we people find ourselves stranded out there in the middle of the road with no where to go for cover.

So to end this piece about American politics I just have one thing to say and that Americans need to prepare themselves on how to deal with this onslaught of never-ending dissatisfaction because Americans are speeding down that highway of dissatisfaction pretty fast and someday that road will close andsome bodies are going to have to pay the price for re-opening the bridge.

-- JP

Trouble in Candy-Land: How Did That Happen

How Did That Happen

My Life Here in Candy-Land wasn't always like this.  I think there were a couple of days when the Woodcocks first moved into the Moon Stone Development that were filled with harmony and bliss but then we met the orthodox neighbors and subsequently found out they were a little different from us and at first I over-looked the oddness around me and even though I had read about co-housing and I knew a little about it I was not prepared for the in-depth reality of the cohousing arrangement but really I couldn't really begin to believe that my neighbors actually took this idea of co-housing very seriously and they have rules and regulations on how to talk to each other and protocol for behavior in their relationships and really who, on the out-side, would ever believe that co-housing is taken seriously by the co-housers and it did seem to me that these people were educated and all but I guess I never thought about what might have happened to their heads when they were done with the education part of their life and grew up and lived in the world and I guess they all figured out that life was a lot tougher than they thought and maybe we should band together with some other crazy people here and share our crazy skills with them and we can all build more crazy together and that is how the orthodox co-ho's all more or less landed here I believe, if I am not mistaken, but then again I could very well be mistaken.

And the Mrs. and I have made some great friends here at Moon Stone and there are friends here representing the solid cottage industries of knitting and spinning and wool dying and weaving and these friends have become very good friends for Mrs. Woodcock.  And we have friends who are Buddhists and Anarchists and teachers of college religion classes and teachers of high school students and sailors and a Reichian therapist who lives somewhere nearby and this therapist has a little old lady inside of him who is desperate to get out And these are the people who live on the edges of co-housing within the compound and I guess that's where I am going to live as well within this co-housing thing and we all get along pretty fine and we have had some great times and good food and good laughs and its wonderful to live so close to people you can kind of identify with in this crazy mixed-up place called Moonstone and in this place that is my place.  And like I said, "How did this happen?" 

I seem to have unlimited anger towards the co-housers now and its hard to deal with this anger of mine over the co-ho's messing with my home and putting my home in the balance of their little club inquisition of the Woodcock's personal life and the orthodox co-ho's  just knew this would upset me greatly to have to go through this process with all of you fiendish persons and all of you people who are the keepers of the clubs desire to get back at me for mistakenly trying to bring reality into the lives of the co-ho's and the club might have well just said really, Mr. and Mrs. Woodcock, all of this inquisition of the club members is because we need to balance out your past bad behavior towards the club with more structured meetings on how to develop your future more positive behavior Mr. Woodcock, you know, and they said this to us in a thinly vieled Pavlovian sort of way. 

And I thought about this anger I had towards these people and this anger got very sophisticated and complicated and I even have a strategy for exacting revenge from each individual of the three board members who hit the Mrs. and I with their little horseshit during our architectural review and I have decided on a different strategy of revenge for each one of them separately because you know I really believe in divide and conquer and again my 12^th century warrior Scottish man is woken up by these three cohort keepers of the co-houser flame and its because the coho's brought this flame to my home that I am blindly angered and enraged by them and that is what I wanted to tell them, before my lawyer suggested I stop yelling at them, and what I really wanted to tell them is that the co-ho club members can use their co-housing speak on whether or not to run a bake sale or how to seriously debate how to put a trapeze up in the barn against all odds of reason and they can even put their protocol to use when they all have to agree on how to take advantage of each other in oh so many different ways and ways known and unknown and in so many instances .

BUT please, I wanted to tell them right before I stopped talking to them, and please for the sake of god, (and probably for the sake of the law as well) and please take this happy co-housing horseshit away from my home and please take this passive aggressive process away from my home and please take this message as an aggressive aggressive message to never come back to my home and please stay away from my door.

And while I stewed in my crazy juices and I continually creepd myself out over how much my crazy juices were creeping out and most of all I was creeped out by how much I wanted share my crazy with the co-ho's and I wanted to punish the co-ho's for being interminable and intolerable negotiators and I really wanted them to know that I was pretty sure they knew nothing at all about how to conduct an architectural review and really I was so upset I would have agreed to almost anything that meant I wouldn't have to ever hear another word come out of one of the three evil mouths of the people on the board  ever again and these were the three co-ho's I directed most of my crazy special attention to you know my revenge crazy crazy and these were the people who I was so angered with over and over with and over in my place, you know, my place at moon stone and my place is #17.

So while I stewed in my crazy I knew I needed to calm down and take a good look at how my crazy had developed here in the co-housing place and I started to reflect on the sequence of nutty and comical events and the events of highly personally charged transgression towards the Woodcock's in #17 and this transgression was coordinated by the co-ho's towards #17. 

And how did this happen and that is what my granddaughter would want to know. 

So I started to reflect on how did this transgressing happening happen here at Moon Stone and how did this transgression happen to the Woodcock's And I remembered back to when it all began here at Moon Stone for us and I thought about the past and I remembered that back when we first arrived we had a few wonderful days in our new home and we were so grateful to have a new home and the great mini-hall was so happy with my new found journalist skills and they were paying me to bee happy in this mid-west sort of place and the magazine that hired Mrs. Woodcock to write about the state of health here in the Americas was so happy with the Mrs. and they gave her a big raise because her articles were so fantastic and yes the Woodcocks were having a wonderful time being gracious and kind to everyone within our reach and reaching out to those who were out of reach.

And, Anyway the Woodcocks had a few days of complete wonder in their new home and we were so happy and in love with this place and hopefully we were in love with each other as well and in love with life itself and we wanted to grow roses to express our love and to express our belief in life and I dreamt of a classic Rose Trellis with a hint of Asian sensibility and the roses would drape themselves about the Trellis with the sun glowing on the roses and the yard was facing the south and this Trellis would bee of a good sensible design and I designed it by stealing the design from another trellis of an accepted design across the street here at Moon stone and I built the Trellis with the help of a good friend who had a sensible  Scottish building background and I thought the trellis was a fabulous trellis when it was finished and I was so happy and the mrs. was so happy and we were also new grandparents and my son in the English Service had had a daughter in West Equatorial Africa with his wife of course and sometimes they had no water and sometimes no electricity and while this was a problem for the grandparents but what Mrs. Woodcock hated most of all was the spotty internet service they had there in Africa and god I didn't even know they had the internet in equatorial Africa. 

And now I am remembering that we were so happy at our new home and life seemed to be taking the right turn for us and then one day I found this cranky woman out In front of my house standing in our doorway and she's telling me that she hates my fence and she is going to make me take down the fence and after I assured her that it wasn't a fence but rather the garden feature she was referring to was a trellis and yes that is with two l's if you want to spell it right and she tells me and no I am not going to bee spelling trellis anytime soon but you are going to be taking the trellis down real soon because I might be moving in next door in a few weeks and that fence bothers the hell out of me and just look at that monstrosity it clearly blocks my view.  And I asked her how certain it was that she was to bee our neighbor and she said it was a done deal and I am buying this house and I hate the damn fence and I began to brace myself for the inevitability of this cranky person living next door to me and it really doesn't seem like we are getting off on the right foot, neighborly you know, and the Mrs. and I accepted this lady becoming our neighbor in our minds but under no uncertain terms were the Woodcock's going to be taking down the Trellis in our minds and we began to plant climbing roses to grow on the trellis and I climbed all around our little yard and I dug all around this little limited common area of a yard we have here at Moon Stone and I designed and built a garden room for the Mrs. and I to live in outdoors in the back-yard and a beautiful perennial garden with tulips and daffodils and peonies and oriental lilies and crocosmias and dahlias with gazebo garden cosmos in white and pink sprinkled all around and there is blue larkspur and jeweled colored nasturtiums and miniature roses that offer up red and yellow and coral in their blooms and most glorious of all are the princely blue delphiniums and all of these wonderful flowers are in the perennial garden in the front yard and on the other side of the concrete walk-way  to our home is a spectacular rose garden and William Shakespeare himself lives there along with some other roses which are……...

And Mr. and Mrs. Woodcock really enjoy looking at these flowers in the front and back yard and so to do the co-ho's as well enjoy the flowers as they slowly walk by and we enjoy looking at these gorgeous flowers and this fabulous garden setting that the Mrs. and I have designed together you know and everyone living at Moon Stone seems to enjoy our garden but I think this enjoyment of our garden setting and our glorious flowers is the only thing that the Mrs. and I share with the orthodox co-houser's eye to eye you know.

And the spring turned into summer and the cranky lady wouldn't go away and she went door to door to the other neighbors nearby and she told them how horrible my trellis was and how horrible I was and really she asked all the neighbors to unite with her to make the smart ass English guy in #17 have to do something for me and have to do something that will bring an improvement to her life and there is a co-housing board member that keeps telling me that it is good ole Woodcock's duty to make my dreams come true and I dream about the fence getting blown up in the here and now and will you other neighbors please unite with me to take the Woodcock's down a step to my level.

And with the threat of the cranky lady making me take down my trellis other-wise known as the heart of my desire to grow roses on to show my love to the universe and to my new life and especially to show love to Mrs. Woodcock and I started to study the by-laws of this place of co-housing and I read their book of agreements and I soon understood that the rules didn't mean anything to the co-ho's and it was more about how they felt about the rules and they made up new urban legend rules that were a part of their spoken legend rules all of the time and they created these legends to deal with the old written rules and the collected minds of the co-housers were not very happy with me because I had upset their shared little apple-cart of understanding and #17 asked them to govern by the rules of the place and guess what you don't have any written rules against trellis' Mr. and Mrs. Co-Housing and you just have made up ideas about trellis' and no it isn't a fence and please just leave me alone and anyway don't you all feel kind of foolish about the effort you have made chasing me around about this trellis and then the cranky lady never moves in next door and the Woodcock's mentioned this many times to the co-ho's that really the cranky lady doesn't live here yet and hey let's talk about this issue when the lady does become our blessed neighbor but no the co-housers had to keep going on about the trellis with meetings and discussions and they called it their "great un-resolved issue" and of course they did this because that's what Mrs. Woodcock said they would do and the Mrs. said that's because meddling is the only thing they know how to do and they are perfectly happy with their nose in your business because they don't have any other business up their nose. 

And our trellis really seemed to be gathering steam as a way to bother the co-ho's and they were all talking about it and walking by to examine the trellis and offering up their own opinions of the trellis and one gentleman came by and told me straight to my face that yes it's kind of a nice garden feature but I don't know if I could look at that thing all day long because the trellis has wrong written all over it.  And the community was putting themselves into a stir over our trellis and one day this anger awakening stir  among the co-housers prompted their self-appointed property manager to come by late one June night and he came by in a stir and maybe someone else was feeding his mind with lies about me and he probably turned to other things that night that probably made him forget himself that night but he swore out loud to the Woodcocks that we had to give over control of our backyard to him because he was the head of the Building & Infrastructure committee and he owns our backyard and we don't want you planting any of this cut-up turf you or anything else in your backyard because you are going to cause a flood by blocking up the drainage of this area and this will cause flooding for all of your neighbors next door and we are going to charge you with a major lawsuit for doing this and I'm not talking about a normal rainfall type year my friend I am talking about when it will rain for 100 years and the Lord will return type kind of rain and it came as no surprise that we started yelling at each other and I threw pieces of the turf out onto the gravel road and I really wanted to throw the pieces of green turf right at his face and I yelled at the other committee member with a clipboard of paper and a pen in his hand who came by with the property manager and this other co-hoer had an astonished look on his face and I think he was afraid that good old Woodcock was going crazy and might do something crazy and I yelled at him to write down everything the property manager and I are saying to each other because I wanted the property manager to remember what I was saying to him and the property manager got me feeling like a 12^th century Scottish warrior and I wanted to find a big stick to hit him over the head with and then my 21^st century man inside of myself said JP that wouldn't be so good for your current self if your former viscous self would act so violently in this present moment so I just told the property manager to get the hell off my property and he laughed and said I'm glad I have got this problem taken care of because I am retiring from this job in three hours and needless to say both Mr. and Mrs. Woodcock were unhappy about this event for nearly a month and we have sort of gotten over it now because we understand that the property manager has bigger problems than we can visibly see and it seems like he has been working on these problems since he stopped yelling at me and he should probably keep working on these problems of his for a long time and he does seem determined in a goofy collective sort of way to be taking a stab at solving everyone else's problems as well now and let's hope no one gets hurt with all of this stabbing.

And I begin to search in my mind about how this co-ho place has gone so far astray from a healthy human reality sort of place and I have started to examine why the sane people here call this place of Moonstone Candy Land.

And I know that everything and all actions come back to us in this short life and I know that I could be creating massive karmic problems for myself down the road for me by being such a smart aleck with these pilgrims that I am surrounded by and I guess I am willing to take that edgy karmic risk with my nasty actions towards these co-housers and please don't tell my mother about what a jerk I am beeing here in Moon Stone and please don't tell my Mother up there in heaven about my beeing so bad down here on earth because she would probably cuff me on the neck and tell me to cut it out the next time she sees me in heaven but I think I will take the risk with this edgy behavior because I am pretty sure that god won't count this bad behavior against me and he might think I am be-having in the only way a sane and normal Woodcock could behave just now.

And I am working on this mid-west piece with a single-minded purpose and and I am surprised about just how nasty a person I can be when pressed.  I will never be able to come back to the Moon Stone housing association once this story gets published so I had better get out of here soon or live with the expectation that torch carrying neighbors will show up with pitchforks in hand and they will arrive in the middle of the night and try to catch me in my underwear and they will make me pay over and over for my expression of the truth or as they would like to say my mis-representation of the truth and really JP that is only how you saw it happen and what we want to think happened is far more like what happened for sure and really JP what are you thinking about and you know reality is on our side or at least obscured by our side and it is shadowy on our side and we will avoid facing reality on our side and at all costs if it threatens our little world and we will fight anything that is less than shady in our world. 

And in my mind they have me locked in the wooden stockade out in the middle of the brick piazza in this co-housing association and while I am locked up out there and writhing in pain from the rusty old shackles of the club cutting into my wrists and the trees in the piazza are weeping with me while I am out there in the hot roasting sun or out there on the bitter cold winter evenings or out there in the life threatening lightning and thunder storms on June nights and the super heroes of the co-housing club and the evil vixens and the broken down old socialists of the club will saunter by me while I am strapped into the stockade and these other people will walk by and expect me to say hello to them and I won't and I will look the other way no matter how great the pain is and they will just tighten up the shackles on my wrists and they will tell me that the next time they walk by I should smile and say hello to them and this had better happen or I might find my next punishment at the bottom of our little lake if they are not satisfied with my salutation or my re-worked smile the next time they sneak up on me out here in the stockade. 

And then Mrs. Woodcock announces to me, one Saturday morning while I was reeling with all of this pain, and the Mrs. tells me that she loves to garden in Michigan and she likes the lakes in Michigan and she loves the rocks in Michigan and the Mrs. says that she really loves the rocks in Petoskey Michigan and the Mrs. wants to keep Petoskey in her life.  And I look forward to going there on some hot summer afternoon in July and look again for Petoskey stones with the Mrs. there on a beach there behind a local grocery store that has a parking lot looking out at the bay and I will stand on that beach and marvel at how spectacular Lake Michigan really is I will be happy I am in Michigan and away from Candy-Land.  

And really I had better work on this attitude of mine because in the end all of this effort of mine to inflict revenge on this collective co-we and after all my efforts to just get them to think clearly I should think clearer about this demand of mine and all of this revengeful inflicting upon the coho's might just come back on me too hard and not be worth my effort to be real with them in this reality of our collective here and now and maybe I should give up on beeing real with them in these moments we share.

Ah, and already I miss the fragrance of the tropical flowers and the heroic adventures and all the heroes in the last book I just read you know the Lucca and Malphi story that just came out by that Grimes guy and I just loved all of the expressive and fabulous music in the book and I can still vaguely smell the great food in Lucca and Malphi and why again am I living with the co-housers and why am I sharing all of this pain with you.

And totally someday I will have to read the sequel to the Lucca & Malphi story that I just finished last week and laid face down on my bed stand and I will have to read another Lucca & Malphi story in order to feel the Venus effect again.  And just like falling in love everyday over and over again feeling the Venus effect would be good for me and not bad for me like so many of my current neighbors are bad for me.

And yes what can cure me of my bad behavior is more Venus effect behavior.  And I will write to the great mini-hall of economics tonight to see if I can take a new assignment on the island of Malta and I will see if I can get assigned to the Mediterranean bureau there in Malta

And report on the new coming mini-economic crisis, you know, the bottoming out of the Greece that we have all come to know in the present and write about how really the problem with the Greeks is that the Greeks just don't have any money anymore and really a bunch of greedy governments in Europe just stupidly gave the Greeks a lot of money a few years ago and guess what they don't have it anymore because guess what they spent it already and guess what the Germans are going to have to finally pay the Greeks back for all the trouble they gave the Greeks in the last world war and that is the only way this not enough money problem is going to go away in Greece and maybe the English could pay the Greeks back for some of the great museum attractions that bring in a lot of money they have in London as well that guess what were stolen from the Greeks and if any of the other European states want to face reality and pay the Greeks back for a lot of stolen goods they seem to enjoy on a daily basis then the money thing would be a lot better thing for the Greeks but then again I guess we can all count on this payback thing not happening.  

But at least this might bee my way out of this remote eastern mid-west sort of real estate quagmire that I live in and I will have to write to the great mini-hall tonight.

And the last few days have been exciting at Moon Stone and really I don't make this stuff up and really the co-ho's just keep giving me more stories to write about without trying very hard at all to say and do ridiculous things and now their has been an announcement that the orthodox co-ho's are going to have a gathering of the minds down at the local fire-pit and they are going to share their mutual support for each other and the causes they hold deal and a man of great sustainability is going to tell stories about the mythic early days of Sunward when super hero giants roamed the sub-division with great mutual dis-satisfaction with each other and I hope the co-hoers don't drink to much down by the fire pit because you never know they might want to roast the Woodcocks on this fire-pit to finish off a perfectly wonderful night and I guess I will get it one-way or another with this coming fire-pit night as the smoke from the fire-pit comes directly into #17 and I think the orthodox co-ho's take please in that and the co-hoer's are hoping the fire gets real smoky that night.  I told the lady who was sponsoring this heroic event that she needed to remind all of the co-ho's to tell each other just how fantastic they all are but she didn't get my ironic little joke and she just said well I guess you are right about that.

And there has been a lot of conversation lately about some of the co-hoer's not taking care of their front and back yards and there is a sort of hill billy element taking shape here at Moon Stone and letters have gone out about people beginning to respect their investments in their homes and hey this isn't the Kentucky back-woods people and many of the neighbors have responded with beautiful gardens this year in the front of their homes with Lupines, and lilies and more and more Hollyhocks and poppies and I must say I have even told some of the neighbors that it's killing me how nice their place looks but there is one poor soul who I think is tormented in his isolation from reality in a landscaping sort of way and this soul is the man I told you about before who is a driven over-gatherer and his name is Borges.

And Borges lives just a couple doors down from the Mrs. and I, and he lives in the ultra revisionist co-ho club wacko section of our development along with me and some people call it orthodox candy land and the approach Borges has used to landscape his back-yard has mystified so many people in the development and there is growing concern that Borges needs to take care of his landscaping in a more pleasing way and the neighbors talk about the ultra ugly carpets that Borges has spread out on his back limited common area on all of the lawn there in order to keep the weeds down and the neighbors smirk and point at the carpets and there is a large pile of broken concrete slabs spread out on the lawn as well and while most people just hate this landscaping of Borges, but  after much careful study I am quite certain, and also after much keen observation, I have determined that Borges back yard is certainly a landing spot for inter-continental aliens in cone shaped space ships, and somehow Borges is related to these inter-continental space aliens, and they land their ships on top of Borges concrete pile to re-charge their special batteries on the broken concrete rubble type pile and only the most highly trained eye can notice that this concrete pile is shaped into a primitive pyramid there in his back-yard and the concrete pile is connected with a deep shaft of energy coming from the earth that recharges space alien batteries and the aliens can easily find his back yard, from outer space, and they can find Borges pyramid for their very important battery re-charging needs by the many funny old carpets he has laid out on his lawn and these carpets are easily spotted from outer space because they are just so ugly that they can't be missed even by aliens in desperate need of a battery charge for their spaceship.  And I think the alien in Borges communicates with the ever circling space aliens out in the outer-space around us And the alien in Borges brings the space aliens to Moon Stone and no one notices, not even I, because the space aliens fit right in with the rest of the crowd.

And speaking of recent spectacular events happening here at Candy-Land And just today, if you can believe it, a neighbor just down the way who you know as the dancer guy and this dancing neighbor down the street has had more girl friends in the three years I have known him than any American guy is allowed to have in this place in the mid-west and I am always amazed by how beautiful these girls are and how they all seem to love the dancer guy and I just shake my head and wonder how does that happen and this dancer guy has a serious co-ho living and breathing women room mate living with him already and she's kind of a policy maker type co-ho and she is kind of a political ringer type person and the candy –landers made her an associate partner and now she goes around making policy and making it stick here at Moonstone and she is making a lot of policy but I don't think the dancer guy is on the receiving end of any of that policy making co-housing stuff happening at his home and anyway the two room-mates are going to take in a couple of acrobat friends, into their townhouse, for a few weeks while the friends get themselves grounded on the planet earth again and the dancer guy's place is all set up as a sort of re-entry to earth place and he seems to have guests all of the time and these friends of the dancer guy are going to vibe with the dancer guy at the dancer guys place which is also JP Woodcocks place, theoretically speaking, and these karmic friends of the dancer guy will stay across the street from me until they are able to get out again and to get out onto the earth again and venture out into the world around us again and these friends of the dancer guy arrived today and the Mrs. told me all about their moving in day at Moon Stone and the Mr. had been at work late that day, and the Mrs. told me that when these new friends of the dancer arrived it was just like the circus had come to town and the Mrs. waved her hands around in such an illustrative way speaking to me and she described the silly patterned pants the new yoga instructor acrobat friend of the dancer was wearing and these pants are kind of outrageously crazy looking if you just think about it and he was wearing a threadbare cotton plaid shirt with a well-worn t-shirt underneath it and he had acrobatic hoops of copper around his neck hanging down past his waist and she wore a torn summer dress with long dangly earrings and hair down to her knees and a big floppy hat and she was barefoot and these people and these friends of the dancer guy had traveled around the world like this and god can you imagine how difficult it would be to travel around the world with such burdens as these people had and you know it's the burden of not having to work in this life and the burden of growing up rich in this life and having your head on backwards because of that entitlement and this entitlement causes people a lot of problems in this life and I think there are a lot of alienated people here who were on the receiving end of this entitlement thing and they really want to stick you with the other end of this entitlement stick as well and the candy-landers talk about a lot of stuff and they get under your skin when they talk about you and you are extremely perplexed sometimes by the candy-landers because these people are off in another kind of world it seems and thank god all the candy-landers seem to be capable of is talking about doing such and such because they really never really do anything other than talk about doing it with one very evident exception and that exception is that they make sure that the candy-landers are also really good at coming after the Woodcock's and the Woodcock's mis-guided idea that they are wanted here in  Candy-Land and what the candy-land group is really saying to the Woodcock's, in a veiled threat sort of way, is please take your business elsewhere and really you people in #17 make us nervous.

And somehow the Woodcocks will find a way to go on here at Candy-Land and when we leave Candy-Land will go on with out us.  And really I do hope you get to know some of the nice people here at Moon Stone and who knows they might even open their hearts to you but probably you won't get that chance.

And what-ever you do if you should travel to Candy-Land please don't let on that you know the Woodcocks in #17 because that could lead to your receiving some unpleasantness from my neighbors and probably more unpleasantness than a just a frown.

J.P. Woodcock

Ann Arbor 2015

More "Trouble in Candy-Land"

And one of my all time favorite players at moonstone is a beaten down old socialist named Sven Wantsom and Sven thinks he is Che Guevara's cousin or something and he is deceptively intelligent and he is a lanky lurchy type of Scandinavian guy and he espouses platitudes of racial equality and he regales against white people and their privileged attitudes and I believe that how Sven makes his money now is by beeing a slum landlord or something like that somewhere near Detroit and Sven would be a bigger player at Moon Stone except he only lives here in the warm weather and he spends most of his time living the high life in Mexico where as he says, "life is cheap." 

And once again, as in the past with my relationships here at moonstone with the people there-in, I made an effort to get to know Sven in the our collective past together because Sven was a neighbor and I like neighbors for the most part or at least I did until I moved into the orthodox section of candy-land you know my neighborhood and I did make an attempt to bee friendly with Sven and overlook Sven's bombastic self-centered socialist ways that just start to flatter Sven when he talks above the noise of the crowd and I even told him straight up that he would get to heaven easier because he grew these vibrant and lustful yellow hollyhocks just down the street from me and I was in love with the yellow hollyhocks and I told Sven every time I saw him that he was a chosen one of the gods because of these Yellow Hollyhocks but I guess Sven wasn't listening because when he caught wind of the Woodcocks wanting to build out a bedroom at #17 Sven sent the most eviscerating emails a person could ever imagine, all the way from his Mexican hacienda, about the Woodcocks and how we were such lousy neighbors and we didn't deserve to have our architectural review passed because J.P. himself was a rotten person who didn't mind speaking his mind about the reality around him and therefore Sven wanted the Woodcocks punished for being such lousy people and really why doesn't Candy-Land just make the Woodcocks suffer for being so lousy. 

And this made Mrs. Woodcock so angry that I was worried that she would roast Mr. Wantsom if she had the opportunity and I talked her down by saying that we should just feel sorry for someone who is such a nut job as Mr. Wantsom but when Sven sent a second email out to the community about what a lousy person J.P. Woodcock was and then I J.P. Woodcock my-self wanted to tell Mr. Wantsom to do the nasty to himself and preferably far away from #17 and tell me Sven how soon is it that you leave for Mexico again. 

And once, in the past, Sven Wantsom did open up to me and he told me a detailed and elaborate story about how, in his youth, his high school shop teacher grabbed his weeny and this bothered Sven very much and Sven still thinks about this event even today and I can't wait now until I get the chance to tell Sven that he should have this weeny pulling event by his teacher checked out by an emotional therapist because really something is truly messing up his head and probably his weeny as well.  And I'll feel a whole lot better after that.

And what bothered me the most about Sven's emails was not the bitterness that I was on the receiving end of but what bothered me the most, upon reflection of the matter, was that the local co-ho clubbers who are so skilled now after they have all taken the same old class on non-violent and non-racisit communication a hundred times and after all of this wonderful awareness that the co-ho's seem to put themselves through year after year and after all of this awareness that these co-housers have stroven for not one person from the club bothered to say I do apologize for Sven's email and you know you just have take what Sven says with a grain of salt or something like that and that would be nice you know and the clubbers could show some appreciation for what the Woodcocks are going through there in #17 .  And You know something as simple as, let's see hmmmm, you know you aren't all alone here Mr. & Mrs. Woodcock and it's ok to be you and I hope you know the rest of us like you and I guess since not one of the clubbers bothered to say anything about these eviscerating emails sent from Sven Wantsom to the Woodcocks And it makes me ponder that maybe yes this proves that the Woodcocks are alone with the clubbers and it doesn't feel very good to bee all alone with the co-ho clubbers all by yourself you know. 

And just a few days ago a stray cat found it's way onto the Moon Stone property and there must have been twelve or fifth teen very important emails going back and forth among the co-ho club members and they all sounded very invested in that stray cat getting his best interests served here at Moon Stone and this caused me to stop and compare our situation with the stray cat's situation early one morning while driving into work and I was thinking that yes that stray cat seems far more important to the co-ho clubbers than their neighbors the Woodcocks living in #17 and the clubbers didn't seem to care about what the Woodcocks just went through with at the wicked hands of the super-hero king and the evil queen and it seems that the evil queen took her vacations with Sven Wantsom and maybe the evil queen egged on Sven and got his weeny excited and he felt empowered to blast J.P. Woodcock in 17.

AND I thought about this stray cat situation some more and I took comfort and humor in that the cat wherewithal was al lot more important to the co-housing clubbers than the Woodcocks and their suffering and it let me know very clearly that I am not like the co-ho clubbers at all and for the most part we are not aligned on any subject except for the fact that all of the co-ho's are, for the most part, a very quiet people out-doors and they hardly ever come out-side and the Woodcocks are always out-side, weather permitting of course, and this makes beeing out-side for the Woodcocks at Moon Stone very much more pleasurable indeed. 

Trouble in Candy-Land: Mona Controna

Mona Controna

First of all there is the crown ice-princess of candy-land Mona Controna and Mona is always super busy, out in the front of her home, loading up materials and supplies and provisions in a hand cart in order to trot off well supplied to her nature loving classes with crazy forest people and she is off somewhere because the princess has a primal urge to teach the willing how to live off the bounty of the forest and she teaches people how to eat bugs and ferns and hopefully not each other and she wants to make her students comfortable in the depths of nature and personally, and besides the point, the depths of nature make me feel very uncomfortable.  And Mona dresses like she just got off the set of Grizzly Adams and she wears these misshapen wool pullover sweaters in the winter and long dresses in the summer that look like they came from some prairie lifestyle catalog and Mona dries deerskin on her front porch and she makes such a huge effort to appear to really care about others and truly and under-cover she is really the Machiavellian princess of candy-land and Mona is always plotting how to use the advantage of the many over the unsuspecting few and for her own benefit, of course, and if you aren't wary of her every move, or is that weary of her every move, and oh yes you will find yourself with the short end of the walking stick when you are friends with Mona and spending time with Mona you can begin to wonder how did this happen to me.  And as Mona would say herself she likes to facilitate the needs of the community and move the agenda along except truly what she is doing is manipulating the needs of the community to her personal advantage and really Mona is the force behind the throne of the evil queen and probably the super hero king as well and Mona is a believer in the candy-land way because Candy-Land really works for Mona. 

Mona lives across the street from #17 and she has a front garden that looks like a theatrical setting for "Rapunzel Lives in a Townhouse" and Mona has a modern life in a co-ho sort of way but what brings Mona alive is that:

Mona Contrara has a little homestead out in the woods behind Moon Stone and it's a mystical place or so that's Mona's intention and the place is complete with a little fire pit and a round hut made out of woodsy sort of things including a neighbors old outdoor Christmas wreaths and the Christmas wreaths sort of stand out to me and the wreaths just didn't seem that woodsy to me and Mona probably didn't try to pass any sort of architectural review for nature wigwams with her abandoned Christmas wreaths  and really no one seemed to care at all that Mona had set up what looked like a homeless persons campground behind Moon Stone and in our woods and really Mona just does what she wants around her because she is so precious and kinda icey cold too and some people get pretty tired of this and they tell Mona off but Mona is a trooper and she is so earnest about deflecting their barbs and really she would like to have peace but just her way really and she wears people's resistance down with her strategy and the Mrs. and I began to wonder what was really going on in that wigwam of Mona's and it seemed like a lot of women were hanging around in the nature center and are women and nature equal and maybe that's why I am afraid of nature.

And the stated purpose for this little troll like sort of campground place was so that the place was to become Mona's nature learning center and just past the Wigwam is a ratty old tarp stretched out between the trees to give shelter to the students as they study about nature and they learn how to eat bugs and hopefully not how to bite each other and the students seem to keep Mona Controna busy all of the time and daily she rushes off from the front porch of her townhome with supplies for her learning center and Mona has hauled so many carts full of supplies out to her car or out to the woods or out to teach her students somewhere that it would make a city boy's head spin and the stated purpose of this pretty much disheveled camp is to teach the students how to survive out in nature and frankly that frightens me as I see nature as this god like environment that will take me away, it seems, at any given moment and I have to be on guard about nature and protect myself in nature and cover myself in human beliefs in order to protect myself from nature and all of its ruins and I am a collected sort of Scottish-English Man and I am also a little uncomfortable around Mona Controna because I know her people back in the old country have been tormenting my people for generations and Mona Controna is always lying in wait, behind a tree, to destroy me and I tried to be friends with her but while we were talking about her being my friend Mona was also double crossing me with the club's under-cover secret business and Mona Controna told the world that I was the source for all that was bad and unsettling here at Moonstone and I had just moved in and I was kind of confused by this but it became very clear very quickly that Mona Controna was a double agent for the club and she was out to get the Woodcocks because it was also in her blood to sabotage J.P. Woodcock and I can just feel the family feud in our 21^st century blood lines and I can now see now that whatever Mona Controna is doing she is very much calculating how to rid Moon Stone of the Woodcocks and how quickly can this be done she thinks to herself that making the Woodcocks move would be a wonderful unstated sort of goal for her and after many confrontations with the ICE Princess and her court I told the princess herself to stay on her side of the line and I will stay on my side and please Mona don't ever cross over onto my side and for the most part now we don't snarl at each other anymore when our paths cross on the walkways but once when it was the dead of winter and it was last winter and I was driving through the parking lot very slowly heading out to the street and the parking lot had so much ice on it that I thought I was driving on a large skating rink and this one-time of primal urge Mona Controna and one-time on that cold winter morning Mona decided to back out straight from her parking spot without looking just in order to ram my car and ram me into the wind-shied and just because she wanted to but somehow she missed me and I avoided that planned punishment by the gods and I really do try to avoid whatever she is talking about now and I have learned it is sunnier on my side of the street if I don't see too much of Mona Controna.   

Borges in Candyland

You know, when you first meet my neighbor Borges you wouldn't expect he would bee a bomb making kind of guy and he is a compact sort of guy and he gets around town on his own two feet and that's kind of cool but after a couple of weeks of watching him furiously walk around town and all around your neighborhood carrying multiple re-usable bags and these bags are always filled with recycling treasures and found trashy treasures and Borges really works at this collecting of his and sometimes you'll find him inside of our roll-on recycling dumpster as well.  And At first I was a bit worried about Borges when I first found himself inside the dumpster and I was worried because I knew what would make me crazy enough in this life to find myself inside of a dumpster and I was worried that these terrible things had happened to Borges and no it wasn't anything like that at all for Borges you know and he was perfectly happy to be up to his chest in the dumpster surrounded by paper and cardboard and some of my neighbors have told me they have also seen his back side showing up in the dumpsters behind some of the finest happening restaurants in town and his back was right out in the open for them and for everyone else as well to see and all my friends just laughed about this. 

And I was ok with Borges manic collecting until one day while I watched Borges scurrying about the development like a large rabbit with his multiple bags of thrown away goods grasped in both of his hands and it finally dawned upon me to ask myself where is all of this stuff going and then a few moments later it dawned and then set upon me that all of this material was going into his townhouse and good lord how long has this been going on and someone said at least fifth teen years and oh my god I exclaimed to myself, because no one else would listen to me, oh my god I thought to myself Borges is building a giant incendiary bomb right there almost across the street from me and that townhouse will go up like a rocket and maybe this is Borges crude attempt to send himself out into outer space and god doesn't anyone else have any concerns about Borges building this bomb right next to them and another neighbor across the street from me and who shares a common wall with Borges and this neighbor across the street paused for a moment after I asked him that question and in a true co-ho sort of way he said maybe someday we should have a meeting about this subject of bomb making by the club members and I think the problem can wait until then and I thought ok you have got about another three years till the place is completely full dry tinder ready to ignite and I hope you can get your meeting together about the impending menace of a bomb being built right next to you before then and you know sometimes town-homes in New York city have blown up because the people  inside of the town-homes were busy making bombs and the town-house is blown to smithereens by the mistakes of the bomb making activity going on inside by the very different kind of residents on the inside of the townhouse.

And Borges lives just a couple doors down from the Mrs. and I, and he lives in the ultra revisionist co-ho club wacko section of our development and some people call it the candy land neighborhood and the approach Borges has used to landscape his back-yard mystifies so many people in the development and the neighbors talk about the ultra ugly carpets that Borges has spread out on his back lawn and the neighbors smirk and point their fingers at the threadbare and filthy carpets and there is a large pile of broken concrete slabs spread out on the lawn as well and while most people just hate this landscaping of Borges,   I am quite certain, after much keen observation, that Borges back yard is certainly a landing spot for inter-continental aliens in cone shaped space ships, and somehow Borges is related to these inter-continental space aliens, and they land their ships on top of Borges concrete pile to re-charge their special batteries on the broken concrete rubble type pile and only the trained eye can notice that concrete pile and the pile is shaped into a primitive pyramid there in his back-yard and the concrete pile is connected with a deep shaft of energy coming from the earth that recharges space alien batteries and the aliens can easily find his back yard, from outer space, and they can find Borges pyramid for their very important battery re-charging needs because of the many funny old carpets he has laid out on his lawn and these carpets are easily spotted from outer space because they are just so ugly that they can't be missed even by aliens in desperate need of a battery charge for their spaceship.  And I think the alien in Borges communicates with the ever circling space aliens out in the outer-space around us And the alien in Borges brings the space aliens to Moon Stone and no one notices, not even I, because the space aliens fit right in with the rest of the crowd. 

Living In The Remote Midwest

Hello JP Woodcock here: Well, as you might remember, back some time ago in the not so distant past, and you might remember how it was back then that I was sent to the United States by the great mini-hall of economics in my hometown of Nottingham, England or Snotingham as our critics used to call it and the great mini-hall sent me over the pond to the mid-west part of the American republic back then and they employed me to report back to them on the presidential election of 2012 in a mini-economical sort of way and they sent me out here to write about the mood of the mid-west part of the country politically now and out here and yes it struck me at that time that one could positively begin to imagine that a national election on this large of a scale and in this great nation of America would make things better and you would certainly expect that this big of an election effort would reflect a positive difference afterwards to the citizens, you know, once the election was concluded and really for god's sake you would expect that there would be some small satisfaction for the people of the US especially after all of the money that was spent by everyone for everything that you could ever imagine in an American election sort of way and you would think that after all of this time and effort and money spent that the outcome of the election would make some sort of positive difference in a country as wonderful as the United States and it seems that that didn't really seem to have happened and the same old faces and some new old faces seem to be perfectly satisfied in America to only be making things seem even worse than they really are in America and truly all of this negativity and beeing disgruntled seems to be representative, politically of course, of all these Americans that I live amongst and all of this disunity in America seems to be representative of the dissatisfying difference all Americans seem to want to enjoy or not to enjoy in their country right now and this dissatisfaction is felt by all the people and bee they the people on the right or people beeing to the left kind of people or just people who are just right up the middle of all this crazy we live with and what is it that all these people really want any way, you know, out in this crazy world we live in. And it seems to me as your mini-economist type of reporter that the next coming presidential election, in the great old US, in the next year will only make things seem even more apparently worse or at least as worse as the politicians want us all to believe that things are bad and getting worse and in this regard and also in the aftermath of this coming election when it does happens in that not so distant now in that not so distant future and after this next election I hope all Americans are ready to suffer even more dissatisfaction among the factions and I hope Americans are ready for that. And I certainly am not prepared for this inevitability of more dissatisfaction but I am a foreigner in this land and this is my excuse and I feel a bit strange in this land and I hope to be a stranger here no more someday in the future because I am working my way back to my real home in Nottingham and I want to bee home once again at the great hall of mini-economics and with any luck that will happen and what I am really saying right now is that I just hope for the best, politically speaking of course, for all of us in America now and in the future down the road kind of way and that is what I am truly saying to you and really what I want to share with you right now is this hope for the best and maybe I want to really share this hope with the gods as well if they are in the right kind of mood to be sharing with me and if they really do care to hear from me. And yet in the midst of all of this political controversy and social misunderstanding we continue to put one foot forward in front of the other and we continue to bee alive and I must report that yes Mr. Woodcock is alive in this present moment and some might even say Woodcock is thriving in this moment, but of course I know better than that because I am a glass half empty sort of guy, or at least I was one this past week, and I have taken up residence, for now, in the former remote eastern mid-west and in a city that is advertised as a cultural oasis with lots of cool things to do but really it is too damn cold here for half of the year to enjoy yourself fully and I am living amongst an odd collection of pilgrims, here in this cultural oasis, in a very strange property ownership arrangement, known as the Co-Housing sort of way, and by the way this way always seems to put everybody here out of sorts and out of joint in the nose you know and I live in a very strange over committed community arrangement sort of way intertwined with each other's need for drama or space or the co-housing clubs need for punishment of bad interpersonal relationships therein among the club members and if you like it you could call co-ho all of those things almost all of the time and really most of the time. And the co-housing club is a property ownership arrangement where 40 households own their real property collectively and un-democratically and uncharacteristically differently for me than ever before in my short life and whoever thought up this doosey of a real estate scam, you know the housing association sort of plan, and whoever thought this up and really please get me their names because I need to talk to them about this kind of collective crazy and really this originator of condo ownership in collusion with co-housing principles should be arrested and maybe imprisoned for a very long time and severely punished daily with drubbings of the will for the crime of seducing the collected investors in the co-housing housing association into believing this idea of theirs that the owners can yes have more than they deserve, in this life, if they just sort out how to take advantage of each other in a collective pilgrim and revisionist Quaker sort of way and I am not sure of the correctness of my decision to live here and I doubt my decision to live here almost every day now and in my mind now I want to leave here but I have been living here since the last presidential election, you know, in a big time college town America sort of way and living here without beeing under court order or house arrest all of this time and I could probably leave here anytime really but I don't and I live here amidst a most extreme and rare sort of left wing new age fascist believers that believe group behavior is a better sort of way and what is good for the group believers nut job association is really good for them and I live here with these people who have this very arcane arrangement of complicated oral history and cabals of politicians and their secret meetings in gluten free rooms and in modestly decorated rooms of inequity and rooms with cooks cooking freshly picked forest grown edibles that may or may not choke you and medium-sized meetings filled with religious zealot types who are greatly disillusioned that the world hasn't changed quickly enough for them only these zealots live without the religion sort of thing complicating things but yet co-housing has become, over the years, even more disillusioning and complicated than the religion sort of thing really ever was and this organization I live in is still living and breathing life into itself with my oxygen and I must admit that I have wasted a lot of my breath speaking to some of these people and the Mrs. and I are living in an almost alive sort of way in this mid-west sort of place and I am suspended in this sort of mediocre left wing sort of world place that is the place that I currently reside in now, you know, some-where in the mid-west and we are south-east of Chicago and flat in the middle and who knows where our little world really stops and begins and the trees are without leaves for so long but really lets get back to the people I have been living with in this mid-west sort of place and in this red neck on the edges sort of place and it is in this place that I share an un-common status with and an un-equal status with these pilgrims and seekers and takers and not-so-much givers, unless they really don't want it anymore and this place calls itself co-housing and this place is my present in this life, you know, and this place now seems to be an in-escapable sort of reality, for me , and yes I am living here now because the only way I can sort out my problems with these seekers seems to bee leaving these people and seek a new place to live in without them and we all know that moving seems to be far more difficult, at least in my mind, than living with the awkward stupidity and comical flare-ups of emotions and put up with the ill advised decision making attempts that are exhibited by so many of the club members that surround me here and who always try to smother my opinions of them and their behavior with their complex methods of communication and subterfuge and then there is their enabling of dependency by all for the many to depend on the few for relief or at least someone else should do relieve them or they will help each other find someone else to bee responsible for making their lives work for them or maybe these people are just dependent on the suffering of someone else to make their day go by just a little bit smoother or go by with just a little more pep and to put a little smile on their glum and ever so serious faces and what is most obvious to me is that I am feeling kind of pressed in here in the middle, in this place, and also from all around the perimeter of this kind of place. And I forgot to tell you that I have become addicted to writing stories since I have moved to this remote corner of the earth and I guess that yes that is my story exactly but then again maybe I am just escaping into my story to find my spiritual reality and I would be ok with that but really I am writing these stories so that you can enjoy yourself reading my stories and maybe you will enjoy reading these stories as well with me and we could all sit around like the ancient Greeks and read our collective stories together and really all of us could be seated together in a stone hemisphere or is it amphitheatre and yes we could all just sit around under the stars some nights on these stone rows of benches enjoying ourselves with each other's company and we could gather at other times of the day as well and we could convene together earlier in the day with tall stalks of wheat waving in the background nearby on the hills behind us and the sun will tell us it is late afternoon and the earth will be alive under our feet and in our ears and in our eyes and yes we can all sit around and tell our own individual stories of tragedy or of lively comedy or of our tales of woe about man's own special brand of brutality to his self and to other selves and hopefully not too many eyes are poked out or bronze knives have slit too many throats in our story telling so that most of the time we can collectively concentrate on beeing in love and open our hearts more and learn to worship the earth with more commitment and hey don't forget running out the funny looking frogs out on stage and staging that out there on our stage and in our theatre and we could even collaborate on each other's stories without punishment by one artist to the other artist for their mis-guided plot structure and even worse for the silly writer disease of using weak verbs in their sentence structure. And beautiful people will bee out on the stage out there and who knows maybe we are all beautiful people ourselves out there in the audience and out there in our homes and after all we are all beautiful people and most of all we should all worship more and pray more for the wonder of beeing alive and pray for the wonder of beeing grateful for beeing alive. But don't count on it Mr. J.P Woodcock and that is what Mrs. Woodcock said to me just this morning and just as well I also told the Mrs. myself this morning that yes indeed the Woodcock's do seem to have a lot of experiences with not counting on this sort of human sharing in the moment sort of thing showing up and counting in their present sort of life and this never seems to happen to any of us Woodcock's and probably yes I know more about this as much as anyone really because trouble, and its sidekick fear, seem to follow me around wherever I go these days and I am really and totally and truthfully telling you my friends that I am like the nice good kid on the block, you know the kid all the parents liked when you were kids but now these parents are creped out by you and they wonder what happened to that kid and he's kind of a smart ass now and isn't he kind of a difficult gruff now and really and truly I never go looking for trouble in my life and other people don't seem to really understand my troubles or my problems and the co-ho neighbors nearby wonder what in the world has happened to that Woodcock guy and it's easy to see that this situation of living with co-ho pressure is getting worse for me from the way things seem to bee going lately and it seems to me that I'd have to say that if I really wanted to look for trouble here at moonstone as well as just ever so naturally find trial and trouble wherever I seem to frequent and I am sure that if I really wanted to look for trouble here as well as walking right into trouble here I would then find my name enshrined somewhere on a tall grey masonry trouble stone wall of fame here and you would find white mortar, with a greenish sheen on the mortar and in between the edges of the grey masonry bricks in the wall and the copper plaque of my enshrinement would be prominently framed on the trouble wall and the patina-ed plaque is all glistening in the light rain and the partial sunlight now and very especially thorny and complicated yellow roses would be growing around the plaque and climbing over the trouble wall and twining all about it and the plaque would say that yes this man was tested sufficiently and yes I could then say that yes our lives are complicated jig-saw puzzles and really and truly we are the ones who have to learn how to put our own puzzle together, with a little help from our friends of course, and sometimes we don't like the way the pieces came together but we still need to learn how to thrive in these difficulties, once you start breathing again from the last difficulty, and we are the ones who have to stand up and not allow ourselves to submit to the repressession of the dreaded other people who only know punishment as a method for growing their consciousness and really power to those who know about art and how to bee with god and these very same people are the real heroes and the ones who know others are clearly the big problem and that sort of thinking, right there, could become another sort of problem for me now that I kind of think about it and I had better really start thinking about this frame of mind I seem to enjoy right now in this co-housing place right now and taking the time to think about this mind frame of mine might be a good idea for me because this type of consciousness framing might be a frame up and to go on thinking like this about other people might just end up causing me way too much pain in the end you know and totally this sad and twisted bet by me against the hope for the best in people sort of thing might blow up in my face and you know that I would lose that bet sort of thing if it really came down to the bet against hope sort of thing in my present place of beeing. And this question of framing really becomes an existential Buddhist type question for myself to frame doesn't it and maybe the Buddhist are wrong and really it's ok to go around beeing pissed off and dis-satisfied and maybe you get something out of beeing pissed off but I really don't know if you do or don't but beeing pissed off is kind of fun sometimes and especially if you really dislike the people you are pissed off at and really they are such easy targets to bee pissed off at because they live way too close to me and by the way they are kind of dysfunctional goofs living so close to you and waiting for you to cross their path on the sidewalk or they walk by you out in the parking lot with a twisted and turned around frowning kind of smile on their face and they kind of sneer at you while saying hello or they meet you by your mailbox and peek out from under their winter coat and tell you that it's your job to make another little old tyrant ladies dream come true and you are pretty sure it's not your job to make other people's dreams come true and you tell this to the lady in the mail room and this old lady is really stuffed into her winter coat that day and you tell that old lady just what you were thinking about and she doesn't like the way you tell her that and she doesn't like the way that you say that to her as well and all you really want to do is to bee left alone but then you and the Mrs. talk yourself into wanting something the co-housing club controls, like getting the club ok to build another bedroom on to your home so that the Woodcocks can go on living here in moonstone and the club controls this plan of yours while you are still planning and they control your process with their little club rules and you submit to this unsavory game of up-man-ship with their back and forth between the co-housers to get their approval and you think It's all about submitting your construction plans to the housing association for architectural review and really what you find out after weeks of negotiations and delays and the collapsing of time lines and you find out that all these poor people really know how to do is to conduct inquisition's of each other's inter-personal behavior and wasn't this supposed to be about making my home a better place to live in and sub sequentially pay the co-housers more housing fees on top of everything else that you pay to the housing association and hey my brother don't these people on the review board have any responsibility towards the goal of the Woodcock's to improve their home and their investment and really let's just let the Woodcock's be All-American and let them invest in their home and make our housing association a bit more desirable and then after many delayed times that the timelines of the review are delayed and after weeks of Mr. & Mrs. Woodcocks life, that we will never have back, and after weeks of delay on the architectural approval of our plans we find out that guess what this whole process is not really about the building project at all but rather all the co-housers really want to do with you and their time is to bee co-ho dominatrix's and be co-ho super heroes of the club and this delay enables all the co-ho players to go straight to inquisition mode and forget about the architecture and the enabling of the interpersonal inquisition allows the co-ho's to go on with their inept program management and what all of them really want is to be given a clear mission to dig around in other people's lives for their purposeful work or their work commitment or whatever and what they are really telling you is to move on and go away from here because you are such a lousy person anyway and hey JP Woodcock would like to say why don't these super heroes and women villains just get a life themselves and maybe find another way to entertain themselves somewhere else than our home and Mr. Woodcock would greatly appreciate them for doing this and he would really appreciate them staying away from Mr. and Mrs. Woodcock while they are doing this other form of entertainment and stay away from the Woodcock's for a very long time and a perfectly wonderful long time, I am positive, would be had by the Woodcock's after all at their home in #17. And Namaste to you too Mister.

The Me That i Simply Me

J.P. Woodcock here. I have looked inside myself this week and found, to my discomfort, that I am in exile from myself. How can this be you might ask? Well I am quite sure that modern psychology should have explanations for this estrangement from myself.

How long have you felt this way J.P.? Well it seems this imbalance in my demeanor began at an early age. As I reflect upon this concern I have realized, I am quite sure, that the me that is simply me drifted apart from the me that you interact with as early as ego and id and super ego began to shape me for public consumption.

How much more simple it would have been to be myself in a straight line than going through all of this fabrication of persona and then deconstruction of said fabrication of fabricated persona to reach this same age of construction less self that I am now striving for. I guess being circuitous is part of our curious post modern life or maybe we humans, as evolutionary beings, find this fabrication and subsequent deconstruction of our public self necessary to escape some wild tiger loping towards us in the openness of the brilliant sunlit savannah.

For the most part I would rather be left alone with my id. This is the real me. The me that has joy and relishes the coming light of day. I have come to realize that I have spent my entire life entertaining myself rather than concerning myself with the needs of the ego. Thus it must be the id that is the me that is simply me. I listen to music that I like and I only read books that I enjoy. I eat sleep and drink only what I like. I have pursued me, within myself, as much as I possibly can. But therein lies the problem.

In this life I have no problems with the concerns of the super-ego. One always has a good sense of when we have made mistakes or gotten caught with our hands in the cookie jar. Even age conspires to inform you of right and wrong.

No, what has caused my estrangement for the me that is simply me is the breakdown of my ego. Ego is not holding up the bargain. Ego has weakened with time and is no longer playing it’s part in this psychological apparatus that me, J.P. Woodcock, has constructed to be the me that is simply me.

Just exactly what do we do to engage the ego to rise from the depths, of late, of it’s uneven performance and make life safe for being the me that is simply me.