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.