What’s worse, the majority of the bedding itself contains toxic substances-often polysyllabic petro-polymers derived from chemicals you’d rather not pronounce, let alone sleep on. These chemicals won’t just make you toss and turn…many of them have been tied organ and central nerve damage in addition to being highly carcinogenic.

The worst offender is mattress glue, and good luck finding a mattress without it. Since these cancer-causing molecules are suspended in water, they continually evaporate whenever your body heat rubs it the wrong way.

Many people are replacing their old box-spring bedding for a memory foam mattress but even many of the premium brands employ unsafe polymers which can cause asthma, heart and liver problems, and worse. Not only that, but to cover up the odor of polyurethane, synthetic memory foam manufacturers utilize perfumes and air fresheners which themselves contain unsavory ingredients.

Recently, we had the chance to stay at the house of a friend who sleeps on the clouds of Heaven. After a thorough cleansing, we were granted the privilege of a single night in a bed made entirely of natural latex foam . Our host slept in the hammock, and we were definitely in a better mood in the morning than he was. Fortunately, we’d done the dishes.

I was intrigued, so I got online and learned more about toxic beds than I ever wanted to know. Apparently we’d slept in a one-of-kind creation, which was not only the smoothest ride I’ve taken to dreamland in a long time, but the product of an environmentally friendly company as well.

In addition to manufacturing the most natural bedding this side of a pile of leaves, they have managed to produce them with 88 percent less waste. Essentia Mattresses offer more than comfort…they add their environmental dream of a cleaner and healthier planet to ours.

All three thumbs up from me!

Find other natural bedding:

War, environmental crisis, economic disaster-all things evil seem to go in and come out of that gas tank. Nevertheless, as prices climb and reserves plummet, the vast majority of motored vehicles continue to run on the costly and divisive toxic goo, much to the delight and profit of the multinational corporations still serving it up.

Of course, the friendly oil companies are there for us, leading the charge for alternative fuels. Those lovable humanitarians at Chevron even have an active website “promoting” energy options that would, if adopted, wipe the firm to the dustbins of bankruptcy. This generosity is as stunning as it is unconvincing.

Biofuels International Magazine

Well, one thing they could do is replace the bloody stuff they sell at the pump! While these fuel barons are diligently researching the methods by which they can continue to fleece us, a “grease-roots” movement has already emerged to free us from the petrochemical dependency the media always reminds us we have.

Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the synonymous engine, designed his creation to operate on pure peanut oil. And around the turn of the century, a group of enterprising hippies rediscovered what many farmers already knew: diesel engines will still operate on ordinary vegetable oil, with a few hundred dollars of modification, or on a plant-based blend known as biodiesel, with hardly any modification at all.

BioPro 380
Biodiesel Processor

Biodiesel is made by removing the glycerin from the vegetable oil, using lye and alcohol distillation. The “waste” products can be utilized completely, to make soap and to refertilize the fields where the base plant was grown. While biodiesel pumps are sprouting up more frequently across the country, many people perform this operation at home. There are various biodiesel processing units that can simplify the conversion process so that anyone can easily transform vegetable oil into biofuel.

Biofuels Refining and Performance

According to the website of Pacific Biodiesel, Inc., where we recently purchased a quality tank of biodiesel made from organic mustard seed, it has become more economical for pump trucks to deliver used restaurant oil to Pacific Biodiesel’s Maui processing plant than to dispose of it as waste, resulting in a landfill diversion total of over 40 tons of used cooking oil per month. This pilot project has the distinction of being the only fuel-processing plant worldwide able to boast 0% net emissions.

This issue is very near and dear for the author; in fact, this website is written and managed from a small bus where we work and live, powered by all-natural biodiesel for nearly two years. The very electricity powering this computer on which I write was generated by Herr Diesel’s brainchild in association with Mother Nature and the generous Sun. Today, all of the energy we use aboard our roadboat comes from above the ground rather than below.

Do It Yourself
Guide to Biodiesel

We examined the options, attending several symposiums to hear advocates. They made a compelling case; it was possible, with existing technology, to power every vehicle on Earth with either vegetable oil-even recycled frying oil-or ethyl alcohol distilled from virtually any plant matter or even waste.

And it could be done without having to scrap the vehicles currently on the road while better methods are developed. Unlike electric hybrids or hydrogen cells, this could be done with a twenty-year old used bus right now!

There were many reasons why we made the switch, but primarily it was opposition to U.S. foreign and environmental policies related to fossil fuels that inspired us to find and convert this little blue bus to alternative fuel. We were tired of being told that the war in Iraq was being fought for “us”. Using gasoline seemed incompatible with pacifism.

Biofuels for Transport

Lately, the biofuel solution has come under attack, even within the alternative community, as being impractical for a long-term energy source. Critics point out that vast acreage would have to be devoted to non-food crops, contributing to hunger, further deforestation and agriculture-related environmental damage.

No solution is perfect, and these points are valid to some extent. The most well-known use of biofuel to date is the 85% corn-based ethanol blend being used in several South American nations. Concern has recently been raised about the impact this has had on corn prices, and rightly so. Using food crops for fuel is a dead end.

Pro Future – Pro Biofuel Sticker

However, these criticisms are somewhat superficial and readily countered. The nature of biofuel is such that it can be manufactured from a wide variety of plants, including what we usually think of as weeds, on fallow land, and the waste, i.e. plant fiber, can be returned to the soil to make an excellent and entirely organic fertilizer!

Currently there are millions of acres, where farmers receive payments to grow nothing. Some of these payments are to prevent erosion runoffs and other effects of intensive food farming, but many times farmers are paid to sit the season out for price control. This program, subject to jokes since being immortalized in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, was intended to prevent grain surpluses which would have bankrupted farmers at the time. Today, that fallow land could be incentivized to produce energy crops, without affecting the price of food-grade grains in any way.

Corn is probably the weakest producer when it comes to biodiesel, yielding a measly 18 US gallons per acre. Soybean, which currently accounts for 90% of all biodiesel source, yields over two-and-a-half times that much, nearly fifty gallons per acre, but the best producers such as rapeseed (127 gallons/acre) or even avocados (282 gallons/acre) can’t match the prolificity of certain experimental crops.

Algae to be made into
Biofuel

Algae is the clear winner (over 800 gallons/acre); some optimistic estimates project that as much as 5000 gallons per acre could eventually be produced from this prolific non-food source. There are even plans in some areas to cultivate the ever abundant sewage algae as a sustainable source of fuel.

Diet for a
Small Planet

The food vs. fuel argument brings to light another potential source of biofuel- the land being culled for livestock feed and grazing. Currently nearly two-thirds of all agricultural lands are farmed for the overfeeding of cattle

As many vegetarian advocates have pointed out, this land would better be used for growing food for humans; but it could also be used for biofuel as part of a restorative process.

Challenges remain, but the plain fact is that the only obstacle to replacing petrochemicals with a variety of plant-based alternatives is political. The technology is as much the way of the past as the future.

Better quality version over here: The Art and Science Of Fiction

Surf Your Biowaves: Use Your Biorhythms to Ensure Greater Success

Biorhythm charts illustrate the physical, emotional, and intellectual cycles that we as humans go through.

Biorhythm cycle calculations were originally defined by Dr. Wilhelm Fliess through case studies of his patients after he observed certain universally corresponding rhythms. From these observations was derived the study and calculation of biowaves.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the study of these diagrams has brought great benefit, whether real or imagined, to subscribers of biorhythmics. A great deal of controversy has quite naturally raged over the value and accuracy of biorhythm theory, which to skeptical minds is grouped with practices such as astrology, palmistry, and the reading of tea leaves.

BioWriter Biorhythm software

Proponents of biochronometry point out that although this protoscience is still speculative in many facets, it is already an established interdisciplinary area of scientific study and practice. The effect that biorhythms have on humans is still being extensively studied, although experimental results generally cannot be replicated and are still inconclusive.

To calculate and view your personalized upcoming primary biorhythm cycles enter your birth date below.

The Biorhythm Kit: Plan for the ups and downs in your life

The three primary biorhythm cycles are:

Emotional: This cycle tracks the stability and energy of your psyche and general outlook on life, as well as your capacity to connect with other people. Emotions also affect communication and creativity. The emotional curve is a 28 day cycle.

Intellectual: This cycle tracks your verbal, mathematical, logical, and analytical abilities. The intellectual curve consists of a 33 day cycle.

Physical: This cycle tracks your coordination, strength, and well-being. The physical curve has a cycle of 23 days.

Keeping track of naturally recurring cycles is an effective method of optimize your energetic assets.

Plato’s Atlantis

Plato first began to write of a mythical continent called Atlantis around 355 BC. He believed that the land, which he described as being made of alternating rings of land and sea, lay near the Straits of Gibraltar in the Atlantic Ocean until it was destroyed 10,000 years earlier. Plato addresses Atlantis specifically in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias.

Edgar Cayce on Atlantis

Edgar Cayce described Atlantis as a vast continent, approximately equal in size to Europe. According to the seer’s florid vision, the Atlanteans were gifted with many advanced psychic abilities and technologies, and gave rise to the peculiarly similar civilizations of the ancient Egyptians and the pre-Columbian Americans. More books by & about Edgar Cayce

The ancient Egyptians, according to Critias, described Atlantis as an island stretching approximately 700 km across, made mostly of mountains along the shore and in the northern regions, and “extending in one direction three thousand stadia [about 600 km], but across the center inland it was two thousand stadia [about 400 km].”

Atlantis – A World Beyond Words

Speculations on the location of Atlantis range from the Eastern Indian Ocean to the Americas, though the most intriguing candidates, naturally, are islands, most notably Crete and Sri Lanka. The prevalence of Flood mythology in the annals of the all the world’s earliest literature suggests that cultures as diverse as the Maya and Incas of the New World and the legendary builders of the Nile and the Fertile Crescent, all were seeded from a thriving antediluvian people with powers we can only guess at today. Naturally, the speculation runs rampant: some popular ideas associate the Ancient Atlanteans with psychokinetic “technology” utilizing the power potential of crystals, an elemental theology of solar/lunar mythology and astrological genius, and a mastery of reincarnation.

We may never know which next stunning archeological find can be identified with Plato’s tale, but one thing appears likely: human kind has achieved high levels of advancement, possibly many times, long before what we commonly think of as “history” even began.

Learn more about Atlantis

~ * * * )))0((( * * * ~

By Indi Riverflow

“Where ya comin’ from?”

Our worldview is largely a function of our location. The range of what we can experience and imagine is bounded by the culture that spawned us, and the place that we hold within it. Transcending locality is key to comprehending quantum consciousness.

The dynamic opportunities offered by the two dimensions of a page are amplified infinitely, when a third dimension is perceived, making a book, or perhaps a library. Similarly, the more aware of the dimensions that compose our reality we become, the more mastery we can have over the paradoxes of perception.

Who we find ourselves to be has a great deal to do with where we’re coming from. We can describe this in terms of latitude, longitude, and altitude, but also in terms of duration (chronitude) and personality forming experience, realitude.

So some of us live in a dimension where spirits are in active constant contact; others experience no such thing and judge the first class to be insane. To form a consensus reality, it is not necessary to reproduce results for an instrument; the reality is whatever we collectively consider it to be. This is why heretics, simply by representing an alternate viewpoint, are so dangerous to systems which depend on agreeing to an unverifiable perception.

If a geometric point, which theoretically has no dimension, is added to another dimensionless point, a line is generated, in one dimension. If this line is curved about to form a circle, we have two. Bring it into three dimensions, and not only do we have a sphere with an infinite set of points on the surface, but if the camera backs up far enough, that sphere slowly reverts to our original dimensionless point.

Just as a page has not only length and width but also an infinitesimal degree of height, the three dimensions of space also have a slice of time running through them. Because we are within it, we are generally only able to move in a single direction through time, at the subjectively variable rate of one second per second.

The mind is more flexible; memories can track back along the trail of a lifetime, and, in past-life regression, beyond. Perceiving the future is more difficult, and less certain, because we come from a line, but are headed for a sphere.

Thus the multiverse theory of quantum entanglement. All possible events transpire in all conceivable combinations, and every outcome occurs in one dimension or another. So in magic, one is not so much remaking the world to bring about a specific outcome, but propelling consciousness through an act of will into a realm where this has already been accomplished.

Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

Shamanic traditions such as those described by Carlos Castaneda make good and deliberate use of this effect. According to Don Juan, our view of reality is fixed according to the position of an assemblage point in the middle of the spine, which approximates the heart chakra. To upset this fixation and induce a broader apprehension of the world, Don Juan strikes this spot, allowing Carlos to see the world of emanations.

So what is the ultimate validity of these supernatural visions? They have the validity we give to them. But our minds do not exist in isolation. For every intention, there is opposition. Magic is the art of defining intention in a way that transcends the frustration of it.

Understanding how we came to want this outcome in the first place is as important as expending energy to promote it. Even more important can be a careful consideration of hidden repercussions.

Otherwise, a spell for world peace could be manifested in the form of a catastrophe that leaves the world very quiet indeed.

Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs

Two monkeys from literature come to mind-appropriately enough, one dead and one alive. The Monkey’s Paw, by W.W. Jacobs, in which a wish-granting talisman results in the death of the protagonist’s family.

Hundredth Monkey Ken Keyes, Jr

The other is The Hundredth Monkey, by Ken Keyes, Jr. Living monkeys appear to spread evolutionary advancements between isolated populations by unknown means.

So perhaps the real question is, which monkey do ya wanna be?

~ * * * )))0((( * * * ~

The holistic health community is scrambling for autonomy, as pending FDA legislation proposes to regulate the nutritional supplement industry. This wide-sweeping measure likely will not fulfill the fears that alarmists project, but the attempt to hijack yet another basic liberty, under the banner of safety, highlights a trend that appropriates personal choices to medical review.

Smacking of globalism, the Trilateral Commission’s Codex is an ironic reversal of U.S. ideological imperialism: alternative remedies and health products could be redefined as restricted drugs, as part of an attempt to bring Uncle Sam in line with stricter guidelines across either border.

Substances with any physiological effect inside the body might be regarded as a “drug,” completing the absurdity which fails to distinguish between pharmaceutical products and the fruits of nature. Even water could theoretically fall under new strict regulations.

For that matter, why not air? Oxygen is an extremely addictive drug. To witness the tremendous changes air can cause in a body, simply do without it for a few minutes.

If we are to believe the very frightened folks organized against adopting the Anti-CAM guidelines, passage could lead to a prescription requirement for vitamins and enzyme therapy. Well, maybe the mainstream will be roused to protest.

Miscategorizing and restricting medicinal herbs is nothing new; enforcing arcane prohibitions against plants, such as cannabis, has made the Murican prison industry the envy of the world’s tyrannies. More recently, the Chinese herb Ma Huang, or ephedra, has fallen prey to the ban-happy FDA’s presumption of power, after over four thousand years’ use as a natural remedy for respiration-related illnesses and learning disabilities.

At work is a profound prejudice against those induced states of mind which have not been specifically authorized by the real drug dealers, who are content to spew out pharmacological tweaks, designed for every condition, from everyday anxiety, to a reduced inability to respond to the prospect of sex.

The medicalization of marijuana has always struck me as a mediocre half-measure for this very reason, despite being an irresistible sop to the decriminalization movement. Not because bringing healing herbs to the ill shouldn’t be a priority, but because equating herbs with synthetic chemicals begs the deeper constitutional, and even theological, questions about government domain, which come about when human beings deign to issue legislation against a plant.

As usual, the real motivation behind this power grab is to promote the pharmaceutical stranglehold on health care dollars. Ultimately, few serious freedoms are threatened if a couple of vitamin companies get elbowed off the shelves. The true risk is that the precedent will be advanced even further to attack freedom of thought.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court has been stacked to say, it ought to be obvious to any eighth grader that the Constitution does not extend dominion over nature to federal agencies.

So for those who stood still for the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, and the hysteria-filled removal of ephedra in 2004-they are coming for your Echinacea, your amino acids, your b-complex energy blend. Years of collective complacency are paying off for the corporate oligarchy that will someday own and license the very atmosphere we breathe.

Read On!
www.blues4kali.com

This article is available for reprint

Leave a comment | View Comments

The Congress of the United States has finally voted for troop withdrawal from Iraq, marking the first official recognition that the citizens of the U.S., as well as a majority of recently elected representatives, are ready and eager to end the illegal occupation of ancient Babylon by a more modern version.

Not always the opposite of Progress.

The Resident-in-Thief, predictably, has used his ill-gotten veto to flaunt the expressed will of the people, but a milestone has been passed for the peace movement. Reality has finally caught up with the imperialists, and by continuing the hostilities in defiance of the timeline, the Administration will be further exposed for a rogue regime operating in open violation of laws domestic and international.

The next step is to defiantly and unapologetically refuse to offer any additional war spending bill at all, letting the buck fall squarely in the lap of the paper tiger. Let history reflect that, in the end, Dubya himself vetoed the appropriation for his own pet vendetta.

The more gullible of us are expected to believe that disaster will ensue in the wake of troop withdrawal. Insurgents, and civil war, will tear apart the fragile fabric of the infantile Iraqi society.

What this really means is that the unpopular puppets and collaborators, whose power in Baghdad derives entirely from the barrels of American guns, will fall faster than Enron stock without our dupes to support them.

Hashing out a new government will doubtless be a struggle in Iraq. After all, practically everyone with experience in public service has been executed or arrested. But if democracy, instead of merely an Orwellian inversion of it, were ever to prevail in the Persian Gulf, we can be sure that expelling Dubya’s cronies would be the order of the day.

Who, exactly, is the enemy in Iraq? The invasion was originally mounted, in theory, to prevent the use of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Now that the dictator and most of his family has been wiped out, gangland-style, the question begs like a displaced refugee: why should sectarian violence erupt now, when the cause of all the land’s woe has been stuck in the ground?

Round and round, this circular speciosity goes. Withdrawing troops is tantamount to abandoning the locals to the violence that foreign presence inspires.

We are begged to give time for the troop surges to “work.” What would this mean? Escalating the raids and martial law to the point that partisans are too cowed to bomb Parliament?

Progressives who oppose the occupation but apologize for continuing it appear to be plagued by a sense of responsibility to the region, an obligation to clean up the mess we have made.

Indeed the responsibility is great. Will anyone support a budget which expends peacetime dollars in foreign aid to help an independent Iraq rebuild, at the rate that wartime funds ravaged it? Can any hawk be delusional enough to actually believe that invading forces are a stabilizing force, let alone the mealy-mouthed moderates who have let this travesty go on for over four years now?

We remember who has abided the war crimes, and who spoke out. Let us remember them well in 2008. The articles of impeachment have been filed; let us convene our Nuremburg.

This article is available for reprint
Read On!

Leave a comment | View Comments

In a phrase, it means whatever the hell you want it to.

Blues4Kali is written with deliberate disregard for certain conventions and trends that dominate the current vogues and marketing demands of the publishing industry, and for this reason, some readers may react with confusion, distress and outrage.

This is perfectly natural. Do not be alarmed.

In a way, all groundbreaking literature qualifies as “experimental metafiction,” until these techniques are adopted by a school of mainstream wordsmiths and enter the libraries en masse. Breaking the rules pushes the envelope, and makes the letter-stuffers of the literary world understandably nervous, for all the write reasons.

Satire, graphic language and symbolism, the irreverent treatment of taboos, and nonlinear story structure have an ancient and eternal place in the scriptures of all enduring cultural canons.

Nothing new about that.

With the ebbs and tides of fickle fate and fashion, the public rarely appreciates the avant-garde, being offended at the indecipherability and discontinuity of the text. Publishing companies, focusing on that bottom line, tend to favor mediocrity over innovation, formula over creativity, and production-line prefab plots to tales of exploration within the forbidden recesses of the mind and soul.

So this novel relies as heavily on “obsolete” techniques culled from the thorny side of social protest literature, as on questionable choices regarding structure and voice which venture beyond the traditional confines of modern Mcfiction.

The flexible first-person, present-tense stream-of-consciousness treatment of the narrative strikes me as the distinctive style feature which is likeliest to bother classicists, both professional and amateur.

Oh, well. Strict rules governing the creation and distribution of serious soulspeak annoys and bothers my Muses, and stern judgment has already been passed on the cowardly cretins running publishing companies into the ground and the reading public with them.

Hel awaits those who are relegating the fate of fiction to the mercies of a marketplace that made stupidity the number-one overseas export of the Murican economy. The parasites will pay. The question is: who? Certainly not the adventurous authors who go out on a limb to make the work of a lifetime mean more than next week’s Oprah segment.

To buy or not to buy. That is the driving meditation of these mind-deadening times. Shakespeare would shit bricks to see what they have turned his penny theater into. My mother, while beating me for role-playing as Shylock to my much wealthier goyicshe friends, once misquoted Polonius at me, as if the dark pronouncement were drawn from the Bible instead of the Bard.

What I mean to say is, she literally thought that, “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” was actually attributable to a commandment issued by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai, instead of a droning pile of unwanted advice issued by a pompous bore everyone mocks. Look it up. And this from someone who theoretically held a Master’s degree in education.

There is a legitimate push, among writers and audiences alike, for more comprehensible prose. The “reader response” school of literary criticism derives from common sense: what good is a book, if only the well-educated can grok it?

On the other hand, this play-to-the-Philistines attitude has created a twenty-first century that has already forgotten the dynamic twentieth. Cultural prejudice, social control, and censorship are back in high style, and many readers entertain the delusion that there is something more honest about reading “non-fiction,” (an account of an author’s opinions and impressions of verifiable events or ideas) than “fiction”(which is popularly identified with “lying”).

Metafiction theory transcends these artificial distinctions, emphasizing that truth, being subjective, can never be absolute. Observers can never truly comprehend the inner motives of others, no matter how skillful the analysis. So only through metaphor and example can the experience be justly portrayed, with no pretensions to truth or falsehood, but a steady diet alternating between them.

Just like life.

“Non-fiction” is itself an arrogant myth of frightening proportions, since the bulk of essayists and how-to technicians are expressing a private world view that is not only biased, but unabashedly so. Selecting a subject is the first decision that reveals an underlying motive, and if this motive is not merely money, then social or political change is generally the reason most of these works are ordered and delivered.

All art is essentially propagandistic, promoting the primacy of the author’s worldview, and this is true regardless of any ethic of objectivity that may delude the principals. We slant our perspective to accommodate our prejudices, unconsciously if not otherwise, and nothing could be more dishonest than denying this universal truism.

The modernist movement of realism is premised on this dogmatic and unsupportable theory, as put forth by Irish novelist James Joyce and his alter ego Stephen Daedalus: that art is and ought to be static, not kinetic. “Static” seems to me to be synonymous with “boring”. Witness the state of modern “literature”. Readers are obviously groping after something, and Left Behind ain’t it.

With all due respect to the original quantum surfer of literature, James Joyce’s Aquinas-loving ass can kiss my tuchus. What could be more useless than art which refuses to face the transformative nature of communicated experience? The world is never justly portrayed as eternal. Even genius, when drunk, proclaims self-deluded circular culture crap as the foundation of a New Age. Always has it been thus.

I boldly say, “bullshit.” All art is and ought to be dynamic, not static. Take that, you besotted whoremonger!

Time to revise the standards. Realism has played out, and the postrational revolution is Here. We’re just waiting for the public to notice. Quantum physics have made certainty a non sequitur. And Joyce himself would probably be right here saying so.

Every expression is opinion. No perception is verifiable to the satisfaction of a skeptic. And who cares? Proof is for those who lack faith. We can only agree to the truth of a proposition, we can never escape the taint of doubt.

So we must get on with the business of knowing, without being sure, just as we always have. Once again, we are called upon to take that Foolish leap off the cliff, in hopes that this time we will fly.

Verify this:

Poetry has already been widely dismissed in favor of song lyrics, and novels are steadily being reduced to cinema at a breakneck speed. The Faulkners and Plaths of this century are competing with the Aaron Spellings and Avril Levignes for the hearts and minds of a hypnotized public that places a priority on escape over enlightenment, and the effect of this narrowness is harrowing indeed for those who still attempt to think for ourselves.

Freedom of thought itself is on the line. Winston Smith is huddling over his diaries even now, penning sacred swords, bastard contemplations, defiant memories and declaring the primacy of Love. Big Brother is a fraternity prankster with a cruel sense of callous humor, who gets a big dick bigger watching us squirm under the gaze of his malicious voyeurism. Ha ha.

Twenty-two years later, what is most shocking is how well the Republicans followed Orwell’s script. He is not the only one violently tossing and turning in his grave.

Market economics has overtaken everything in our Kulture, so it ought come as no surprise that commercialism is dumbing down books as well. Plenty of fine writers are emerging in the recesses of underground poetry slams and all over the damn internet, but, as in music, the distribution network is terrorizing unknown talents, while corrupting the creative juices of those authors both talented and fortunate enough to have a package of stories able to attract the diminishing audience for truly original writing.

Even the greatest of these talents are suffering a steady decline, laboring under conditions that corrupt any artist. Second and third novels are being pumped out to satisfy contractual requirements, rather than artistic ones.

And fame is the game: to play we must subject ourselves to agents, slaving under the grueling itinerary formulated to exploit the fame and personality of an artistic community that traditionally values privacy and liberty from paparazzi nonsense more than our Hollywood opposite numbers can afford. Film, for all the virtues that medium contains, has been a devastating influence on budding novelists and readers alike.

Somehow, screenplay adaptability has become a literary virtue. Book club sales are more important than erudite reviews. And short stories, once again, amount to little more than promotional pap intended more to build a mighty name that will hopefully fill bookstores everywhere with Starbucks franchises and fan club meetings, than to provide a way for struggling writers to finance unprofitable artistic endeavors.

And with the advent of the personal computer, the field has gone from crowded to overrun. Mediocre half-assers are everywhere, and the occupation of “aspiring novelist” has a social approval rating somewhere between “porno actor” and “radical political revolutionary.”

As I say, for all the right reasons.

What a mess! My mother was right. I ought to have become an English teacher like she wanted. Too late now.

Blues4Kali was written to specifically avoid any compromises at all that address the unpalatability of printing books, like mine, which are ignored and suppressed solely due to unusual styles and subjects that represent radical departures from the mainstream. Deviance is the aesthetic premise of my work. Popularity is beside the point.

Therefore, to a critic who objects to inconsistent grammar, sentence fragments, unfleshed characters, and other crimes against convention, or decries the harshness of satirical pronouncements, or bemoans the use of “gimmicky” techniques, I can say only this: if you do not like these features, you do not understand them.

Feel free to disagree. I look forward to publicly burning your review and hanging you in effigy at my next black magic convention. My coven will haunt you. And you will eternally get what you deserve.

All seriousness aside,

Goddess go between you and harm in all the twisted caverns which lay ahead.

Indi Riverflow

Read at your own risk. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Blues4Kali- by Indi Riverflow

Leave a comment | View Comments

What will Winter Solstice bring in 2012?
…an instant of Karma? …an ethereal spiral dance of the collective soul? … cosmic judgment leveled against civilization’s expanse? …destruction of the world as we know it? …a chance for a new start? …the rise and the revenge of the Goddess? or simply another day in the life of paranoia?
These are the false prophesies that your pastor warned you about!

Reality Exchange Program
“the South side of time…”

Crazy Bear said there’d be days like this. As usual, no one believed him. Now, all I want to know is: where IS that lifeboat, and how DO I ditch this ship of fools, without any of these bliss ninnies noticing that I’m already gone?
Captain, my ass. We are equal in this sea of madness.
That iceberg is looking awfully big.
Amana Mission is on a quest to save the world, and the only problem is, she can’t remember why she got involved with such an obvious scam in the first place. Jesus saves. Christ. What a loser.
Kali kills first, and recycles later.
Hitchhikers, load up for a ride to the Other Side. You may wish you had gone Greyhound.

“What the…?”

• A cranky band of prankster peace warriors who absolutely cannot resist messing with each other’s minds, no matter the cost.
• Cocky alchemy-dabbling quantum surfers, navigating the Ethersphere with
  hand-held computers, seamlessly switching timelines to find a better party vibe
  and swap tips about the best temporary toilets for use as interdimensional
  portals.
• A burnt-out visionary hippie millionaire on a mission from Gaia to build a
  better “communitopia” by underwriting a convoy carrying busloads of telepathic
  priestesses.
• A wheelchair-bound mindpilot propelling a crystal-powered Seed Bank toward
  the post-Apocalyptic Garden, with psychic precision…and a predilection for
  high-velocity extreme driving.
• Hermaphrodite time-jumper fleeing a fate worse than death.
• Anarchist ghettoes where anything goes-except escape.
• Ancient Principals vying like sweatsoaked carpetbaggers for our loyalty as
  the Final Vote is tallied.
• Long-haired security patrols collecting a cannabis tribute tax from all
  pilgrims to the Valley of Fun.
• And an underground meat mafia bringing a black magic revival to a
  bloodless dreamworld gone bland.

All brought together by a secret psychedelic superdrug that tunes users in to reality through the eyes of another archetypal avatar inhabiting a different state of space and time. Mahayana made easy. Budding Buddha natures are running amuck on a virtual superhighway where all roads lead to the Bo tree and singularity.
Twenty-first century Tantra is about more than sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Confronting the Karma of every wasted breath is only the first step.
Welcome to the End Times. Kali awaits. She already knows who you are.
Do you?
The 21st century counterculture is even weirder than it appears on the surface. This is not your mommy’s MTV Road Rules.

Ride along on this mesmerizing, metaphor-packed bus trip toward ecstasy and enlightenment, as three real-time
guides-Amana, Sissy, and Deva, let you in on what they learned when they asked what It was really all about, after all.
Become them for a multilevel metafictional tour of infinity, and awaken yourself to the miracle-a-minute magic of mighty Mother Kali!

Pre-print preview at www.blues4kali.com

Experience the entire eBook! Download NOW at www.blues4kali.com

Leave a comment | View Comments