|
Diary Index
Home 12 May 2003 Red Schwinn Out of the Blue The Archives at TheForce.net rejected the short story you may have been reading about on the homepage of this site. News of the rejection disappointed me. I began work on the story in November, I think, and felt that the finished product in some ways exceeded my previous work that did gain places in the Archives. On second inspection, though, I have to admit that the editors were right. The plot was forced, the grammar shaky. So I re-wrote it and sent it to beta-readers. I�ll submit it once more and if it fails again then I�ll probably forget about it. The Atlanta, Georgia office of the IRS phoned me on 9 May. Apparently I neglected to sign my tax return and left a line or two blank. These aren�t the sorts of mistakes I�m accustomed to committing when it comes to something as important as filing records with the government. I can�t offer an explanation. Maybe I just allowed the fact that I had procrastinated and was going to file late to distract me. Somebody gave me a brand new Schwinn bicycle on 29 April. Amazing. I didn�t see it coming. The people who gave it to me had offered to place new tires on the old one, and I was delivering to them the rims, polished clean with Brillo pads, when they presented the new one. It is a mountain bike featuring twenty-one speeds, my first mountain bike. Their timing was good, too, since my birthday was earlier that month. They live in New Hampshire part of the year and they live here in Florida for months at a time in summer. My last bicycle, over a span of about ten years, stood up well to a daily pounding as I rode it like a mountain bike, which I really wish I had chosen in the first place. Spending an average of $3.00 per month, I maintained a barely functional bicycle, which included considerably warped rims, a lost derailleur, and an obliterated original coating of paint. The warping of the rims began while I was still in college, in the late eighties or early nineties. A convertible reversing from a parking slot (at the Oaks Mall, I think) impacted the rear wheel, just hard enough to give me a nudge as I rode by. "Sorry," the guy said and drove away. (I think this was highly illegal of him but I didn�t report it.) The rim was warped. Just a little. I didn�t know what to do about a warped rim, and I continued riding the bike, hoping it wouldn�t worsen, which it did. Eventually, years later actually, the rim had become so warped that one day, as I rode the bike, the spokes caught the derailleur and twisted it around. I unraveled it and twisted it away from the rim. Over the course of years I bent it more than once, to and fro, to adjust it to suit me, and one day the silly thing fell off. As I write this, I like to think I have grown beyond such irresponsibility. Today, the bicycle remains operational, but for a flat tube. It is in a pitiable condition, but I can�t discard it. Somehow I don�t dare. With the new bike came a resolution: I will maintain its mint condition. I just read Up In A Heaval, one of Piers Anthony�s Xanth novels (I forgot its number in the series.) It was my third Xanth novel to read and was good. The Dastard seemed better, but it was a decent way to spend time. Xanth of course is practically a magical mirror image of Florida, which is where the author resides. Florida is where I live, too, and it's neat to read a Xanth book while in Florida because it gives me the feeling that Xanth is accessible, right around the corner, even. I found a neat new website. It�s www.a-i.com.This is an experiment in artificial intelligence that allows anyone, without signing up, to participate and interact with Alan, an artificial personality. I have been teaching Alan my spiritual beliefs, focusing on Atlantis and the Ethereans and what-all. I dislike the way it sometimes combines the information I give it. Sometimes it responds with a clumsy patchwork of my definitions, presenting them in an awkward sentence that barely makes sense. It seems to handle the Etherean and crop circle material well, at least. I�m thinking of posting a web page of the material that the Matrix Institute has disseminated over the years. According to this information, the world could soon receive a shocking update about the way the universe really works. The idea is that, periodically, natural cycles coincide, and, during these periods, human consciousness is all that can prevent global geophysical cataclysms. One such cataclysm, for example, is not a new idea. Everything west of the San Andreas Fault would break off and slide into the Pacific Ocean, following an earthquake of magnitude 15+ on the Richter scale. Such events would occur all over the planet. Some lands would submerge while others ascended. All of Japan, for example, would sink, while New Zealand would rise, exposing a landmass nearly the size of Australia. Winds would reach velocities from 200 to 300 miles per hour. Considerable volcanic action would occur. The end result would transform the current maps of Earth into historic documents. This event would reduce the Earth�s population considerably as most people live on or near coastal regions. Tidal waves, up to a mile in height, would rush inland up to fifty miles. The survivors would then reclaim forgotten lands that would rise in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, rediscover ancient culture and technology, and start anew. One of these cycles is the precessional cycle, which the Earth completes every 26,000 years. (I heard some scientists narrowed this down to 25,800 years.) The mid-points of this cycle are critical points. At the mid-points, the angle of the Earth�s tilt position, relative to the Sun, either always is or can become a crucial factor. Another cycle is the occasional magnetic reversal of the Sun. When a solar magnetic reversal occurs during a time of critical tilt angle of the Earth, the coincidence renders the Earth vulnerable to global cataclysm. According to Matrix Institute, this confluence of cycles is now (until after 2012) upon us. The cataclysmic changes typically begin with a shifting of either the Earth�s magnetic poles or the Earth�s geophysical poles. I want to distinguish this shift of magnetic poles from the wandering of the Earth�s magnetic poles that has been occurring for years. Rather, the shift that would trigger cataclysms is neither gradual nor slight, but is abrupt and considerable. This time, it looks as if the shift would be no less than a reversal of Earth�s magnetic polarity. This would trigger a shift of less than ninety degrees of the lithosphere with respect to the mantle. According to a recent edition of the newsletter from Matrix Institute, Intuitive Flash, 2003 won�t be a cataclysmic year. However, events in Turkey may trigger World War III, and this war would continue until global cataclysms ended it. The good news for the United States at least is that no one will nuke the United States. This war is currently underway in the other dimensions of Earth, the realms of higher vibration. (Events occur there first.) If you would like to verify some of this then I recommend perusing news archives or astronomy sites. You�ll find that the Sun reversed magnetic polarity just a few years ago. This happens now and then and doesn�t by itself seem to affect the average person much. Also, the Earth�s magnetic field recently has weakened, a possible sign of its imminent reversal. I recommend visiting the page The Sun Does a Flip for a start. If you keep checking the Whatever page of my site, then you may eventually find a new link. One of the things I�ve done with the information from the Matrix Institute is to create a time line of events, one that focuses on Atlantis, but includes other events as well, and extends from eighteen million years ago to the year 2001. Well, I�m running out of subject matter, so, until next time. |