Today

This is Don a friend from Uptown Bill's. Some people say he is handicapped. He does not see it that way. He is simply someone who is trying to become more healthy. That is what Don has taught me today. I would tell you what he taught me yesterday but I think this site may be censored.

Mental

Sometimes life is very difficult. Sometimes it is not. Life seems to be just what it is. The perceptions of it are mine. I anticipate a great improvement in my perceptive abilities as soon as I have some coffee.

With assistance from my psychiatrist I am weaning myself off my medication for manic depression/temporal lobe seizures and schizoaffective disorder. I believe that the combination of congnitive-behavioral therapy, electro-convulsive-therapy and psychotropic medication have allowed me to develop skills for coping with my disease. I want to see if the skills I have developed are sufficient by themselves to allow me to manage things without medication. I am into the fourth week of an eleven week process for weaning myself off of the medication. Things are going well.

The trick seems to be to guide my behavior by two principles:

1. Try to act with love and kindness toward all things (animate and inanimate).
2. Do a continual inventory of my actions and ask myself, "Is this going to help keep me away from or push me toward the mental hospital?".

Wait a second... There is a third principle - Never eat your boogers in public. This is frowned on by most people and could lead them to think that you are not "quite right".

Rick for President

This is my friend Rick Chacone from Uptown Bill's. He is not a politician. He is superman - you can tell by the T-Shirt he is wearing.

Unfortunately our president is a politician. He is not superman. He does not have the right T-Shirt.

Our president is also a poet. The following poem is made up of actual quotes by our President. You can verify this by checking on http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/piehigher.asp

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER

by George W. Bush

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

Food for Katrina Victims

Good to see our President taking action to alleviate the suffering of Katrina victims. What can you expect from the son of Barbara Bush who had this to say about those who lost everything to Katrina:

"Almost everyone I've talked to says, 'We're going to move to Houston.' What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them. "

The above quote was taken from a transcript of the September 5 show of Marketplace on NPR.

Katrina Leadership

I took this shot when I visited DC last spring. I wonder if Lincoln would have handled the Katrina disaster differently? Would he have waited to be called up by "local officials" before acting? Would he have hired others to speak for him? Or would he have simply provided leadership and sorted out the details later? Some Lincoln sayings our current president could benefit from:

"Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way."

"Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel and invastion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose and you allow him to to do whenever he may choose to day he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure."

And last but not least, Mr. Bush please remember:

"You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."