Month: November 2021

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NightWare Review Part Four

It’s not working for me. But you should try it in case it helps you. $7,000 but if it is life or death, well . . .

NightWare Review – Part One (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Two (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

Unedited transcript:

0:00:02.090]
Hi, this is Thomas Farley. I hope you are well, or at least getting better. My nightmares are definitely back fullblown. They never really went away. I continued to wake up scared, extremely stressful dreams just not with the imagery of the past.

[00:00:24.140]
But again, the nightmares have always come back no matter what medicine is applied. So it’s very hard to tell day to day, week to week. Sometimes. Are they away permanently or are they coming back? And obviously I would wake up very scared.

[00:00:43.040]
There has been some horrible imagery, but not violent. But I’d look at the device and my heart rate is normal. And so it’s obviously not activating on events that are incredibly murderously devastating to me, especially still not able to activate it doesn’t do one of these so called interventions within the first 30 minutes of going to sleep. And that continues to be a big problem. And the company, as I’ve said in times past, refused to modify anything without FDA approval.

[00:01:23.110]
Or at least they say that they can’t do anything about their program unless they get FDA approval. I did try to attempt suicide about ten days ago. You can read it on my blog. I don’t know what went wrong. I’m still trying to figure out my place in this world.

[00:01:40.330]
Of course, if you are suicidal, if you’ve been going through this for decades, you just have to try this NightWare program. You don’t have any choice. Get the money and try it. As for me, I don’t know my place in the world anymore, so I’m just wandering around again with my interest in hobbies and just miserable sleep. The suppression of the nightmares.

[00:02:07.730]
If anything did happen, I certainly didn’t do anything to improve my sleep. You would think that with the suppression or elimination for a while that my sleep would improve. It’s gotten worse and I doubt I’m getting more than 6 hours of sleep, but total doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s horrible.

[00:02:28.050]
It’s fractured, it’s just beat up. It’s filled with these bad dreams. So again, I don’t know. The psychiatrist recommends. I’ve asked for a sleep physiologist to talk to.

[00:02:42.660]
Next step. She again talks about medicine, but I want to get off this medicine treadmill. They just put you on one after another, and whenever they fail, it’s increased dosage or decreased dosage or in combination with other medicines. It goes on and on and on, and we have to get somebody honest about saying maybe this is terminal, it’s chronic. It’s over.

[00:03:07.130]
That’s it. But nobody’s saying that I included that really on my own. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore other than just complaining, and that makes me sick. So I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t.

[00:03:24.470]
If you’ve got something worth hanging in for, definitely do that.

[00:03:30.050]
No, I can’t manage your life. I don’t know you’ll. All I can do is feel sorry for you. And I’m really hopeful that things get better for you and I don’t know it’s definitely not working? That’s the bottom line.

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Desert Tarantula Sighting Today in the Resting Springs WA

Music by Henry Mancini.

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editing writing Poetry

Wallace Stevens (Revised)

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

These are quotes and verses from another dead white guy with a classical Western education. I doubt he is studied anymore and that makes this a poorer world.

Can you equal any of these lines? Especially this first quote? Just 13 words. You could write an entire book based on these 13 words. This line defies an intellectual explanation yet we intuitively know that the thought is perfect and correct:

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
—
A poem should be part of one’s sense of life.
—
A poem is a meteor.
—
The world is a force, not a presence.
—
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose by Wallace Stevens, edited by Milton J. Bates, 1990.

Picasso’s painting The Blue Guitar

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
—
Poetry is the subject of the poem.

“The Man With The Blue Guitar” University of Pennsylvania page – excerpts (external link)
—
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” Poetry Foundation (external link)

Editor’s note. Look at the German mystic and poet Rilke if you liked Blackbird (internal link)
—

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

“Domination of Black” PoemHunter.com (external link)

Editor’s note. Look to the master translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry Kenneth Rexroth if you liked Domination of Black. (internal link)
—
The death of one god is the death of all.
—
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.

“Notes to A Supreme Fiction” Genius.com -annotated –(external link)

—


—
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No Progress in Forty Years (Update)

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder contended in Lost in Math that no fundamental progress has been made in physics in the last forty years.

Instead of advancing an understanding of the building blocks of the universe, we are simply working out the details of what we already know.

Chris Rock in 1999 chided the medical community for a similar lack of progress. The rise in autism in children and our lack of understanding COVID suggests medicine has become as baffling as physics.

“Same diseases as when I was hanging out as a kid.

What’s the last shit a doctor cured? Polio! Do you know how long ago polio was? That was like the first season of Lucy. Shit. Fred had an Afro with finger waves.

Have you ever met anybody with polio? Anybody feel a little polio around you? No, that’s right. They don’t cure shit. Same diseases have been hanging out since I was a kid.

Sickle cell anemia, bronchitis, cancer. Jerry’s Kids still limping around. I’ve been watching a Jerry Lewis telethon for probably about 15, 16, years now. Not one stitch of progress whatsoever. C’mon, man, lie to me Jerry, lie to me!”

—

I mention all of this because the effort to cure mental illnesses is as slow as our efforts to resolve major physical ailments. No progress. With autism, we’re going backwards.

Unlike Chris, I’m old enough to have known someone who limped because of polio as a child. And I once met Dr. Salk who was kind enough to answer a few questions for me when I was editor of my Junior High school newspaper. If you want to know why we’re losing the fight against COVID, look at Dr. Fauci and the people around him. They would not have been able to conquer polio. Not in forty years.

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The Parable of the Madman (repost)

It’s been a while since I read this. I know God exists so Nietzsche’s view does not bother me.

Beyond this rolling prose, which is actually poetry, I find the arrogance and the audaciousness of his vision to be inspiring and thought provoking. Like those 1950’s proposals to use nuclear bombs to blast out a new Panama Canal. Or draining the Mediterranean to merge Africa and Europe. Think big. Write big.

And the attitude. Uh, Frederick, you do know you are writing about God? Hunter Thompson wasn’t worried either. “You better take care of me Lord, if you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.”

Parable of the Madman

THE MADMAN—-Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo.* Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]

*Editor’s note. The requiem aeternam deo is a prayer centered on the departed realizing Heaven, the resurrection of the dead, or the final judgment.

From: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/nietzsche-madman.asp (external link)

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AEnema by Tool (Edited)

And on the Eighth Day, God created Tool.

AEnema by Tool (Edited)

Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this

Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your Prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car

It’s a
Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Some say a comet will fall from the sky
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves
Followed by fault lines that cannot sit still
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits

And some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this

Stupid shit, silly shit, stupid shit

One great big festering neon distraction,
I’ve a suggestion to keep you all occupied

Learn to swim, learn to swim, learn to swim

Mom’s gonna fix it all soon
Mom’s comin’ ’round to put it back the way it ought to be

Learn to swim

Fuck L Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones
Fuck all those gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes

Learn to swim

Fuck retro anything
Fuck your tattoos
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memory

Learn to swim

Fuck smiley glad-hands
With hidden agendas
Fuck these dysfunctional
Insecure actresses

Learn to swim

‘Cause I’m praying for rain
And I’m praying for tidal waves
I wanna see the ground give way
I wanna watch it all go down
Mom please flush it all away
I wanna see it go right in and down
I wanna watch it go right in
Watch you flush it all away

Time to bring it down again
Don’t just call me pessimist
Try and read between the lines

I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t
Welcome any change, my friend

I wanna see it come down
Burn it down
Suck it down
Flush it down

—

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My First Suicide Attempt

What went wrong was like seeing gravity stop working. I had read dozens of stories of carbon monoxide poisoning working in fairly short order. It didn’t happen. Far from it. I am baffled and perplexed and discouraged. I wish you peace. With much love and caring.

 

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Newspaper article non-fiction writing Photography rocks and lapidary southwestrockhounding.com Uncategorized video

Goldfield Lays Town Father Bryan Smalley to Rest

August 31, 2022 UPDATE

A ten minute video about Bryan can be viewed here. It’s a short film the family asked me to do.

https://vimeo.com/thewritingrockhound/videoforbryan

Original Article Follows:

Bryan Smalley died in Goldfield on October 30, 2021. He was 61 years old. The family does not wish to disclose the cause of death. His Pahrump Valley Times written obituary is here: –> Obituary of Bryan Smalley (external link)

Goldfield Lays a Town Father to Rest

By: Thomas Farley / thomasfarley@fastmail.com

More than a hundred people attended Bryan Smalley’s funeral on Saturday (11/06/2021) in Goldfield’s historic cemetery. Those included town folk, family, close friends, and members of Bryan’s church.

Notable was law enforcement from Esmeralda and Nye County as well as fire and ambulance services. They all remembered and honored Bryan’s twenty years as a deputy sheriff of Esmeralda County. Deputies helped lower the casket into his grave while a strong wind whipped the cemetery and the sage covered hills. An officer designated as an honor guard made sure a carefully folded United States flag was placed on Bryan’s coffin with quiet ceremony and solemnity.

Family friend Randy Wilson conducted the service, observing that Bryan had carved many of the cemeteries’ crosses and headstones surrounding the mourners. A close friend of Bryan’s, Sharon Artlip, later said that he never charged for that work and that, “Bryan would have preferred to build his own coffin and to carve his own headstone.”

Folding the flag before presenting. / Click image to enlarge

Artlip owns Goldfield Art and Business in Goldfield at the center of town and collaborated with Bryan on many projects. She said, “Bryan was my friend. He owned Hidden Treasure in town which is a rock shop. He was a partner with my sister Nadia and I with the Gemfield Gem claims that we own outside of town. He helped me do my porch on my building. He helped people with their businesses. And he always promoted Goldfield and had the best in mind for everybody in Goldfield. But most importantly, he was my friend.”

Lowering Bryan’s coffin into the grave. / Click image to enlarge.

Stacey Smalley is a younger brother. He talked about how Bryan got Hidden Treasure going even before he retired from the sheriff’s department. It was a love of rocks and the land. “He was always, always into rocks and minerals. And he just loved this area. He loved Nevada and he loved Goldfield.”

Some of the mourners. / Click image to enlarge.

After the funeral, the day’s event moved to the high school auditorium in downtown Goldfield for a community get-together and a pot-luck lunch. An appropriate venue since Bryan did a great deal for the local school district. Stores were shuttered throughout town with perhaps half of Goldfield’s residents in attendance. Everyone was exchanging their favorite stories about Bryan. Erma Greegh said she met Bryan in 1993 and that he didn’t like wearing shoes in restaurants. “Always had to kick them off.” And if you needed a sign made for any cause, Bryan would carve or paint one for you.

The grave awaiting a headstone. / Click image to enlarge.

Some people traveled hours to get to the funeral since Bryan’s help extended far beyond Goldfield. Many rocks in the Mineral County Museum, for example, were donated by Bryan years ago. Further north of Hawthorne by Walker lake is Schruz, Nevada, home to the RockChuck Gem and Mineral Gallery, owned by Chelsea and John Keady. Bryan affectionately referred to the couple as the “kids.” I talked to John Keady who was there with his wife and young son after a two and a half hour trip.

Overall picture of the Goldfield Cemetery. / Click image to enlarge.

”Bryan was really helpful to Chelsea and I. When I was learning to flint knap, Bryan would stop in every time he passed by to show me a few new tricks. He taught me how to complete the edge of my knives so that the blade would be centered. He would just grab the obsidian from me that I was working on and start chipping. And pretty soon his hand would be bleeding all over the place, and he would just keep on going, never skipping a beat. He told his customers to check out our store on their way to Reno. Just a great guy. When my wife was pregnant, he brought us a dozen donuts on every visit. When he heard I needed help with my saw blade, he gave me new blades. We’ll never forget him.”

Bryan in 2019 at the counter of one of three shop buildings he built himself.. These formed the  best rock shop in Nevada. / Click on image to enlarge.

Bryan’s love of people, place, and helping shone through most vividly with what twenty-three year Esmeralda County Sheriff Kenneth Elgan told me at the cemetery. He said, “To be successful you have to have good people behind you. Bryan would do anything at any time to help. He was with every search and rescue operation we conducted and he knew every road in the county. With the large area that we serve, everyone in my department especially relies on each other. Bryan typified that. Bryan was also a pillar of the community and he will be missed.”

While Goldfield may now be missing some gold in human form, Bryan Smalley certainly left golden memories for friends, family, law enforcement, and town folk to cherish forever.

–end of article–

Bryan shown here in June, 2020 cutting some of this writer’s copper in quartzite from the Striped Hills of Nye County near Lathrop Wells, Nevada.

The jewelry room with Bryan at the end of the video along with a guest appearance by Fred the Dog.  Bryan told me that  a few customers once saw Fred on my Instagram post and knew him by name when they visited.

 

More Bryan Smalley links here

Extra 1 (internal link)

Extra 2 (internal link)

Extra 3 (internal link)

Extra 4 (internal link)

Extra 5 (internal link)

–30–

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And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

I’m more and more convinced that PTSD and other traumatic events can break down the brain’s normal ability to protect a person from unconscious thoughts and dreams.

For the last few weeks I have had a minor cough. A few times a day, a few seconds each time. No big deal. The other night I had a dream in which I was in a class room with young college students. One person started coughing. And then another. And another until the whole class was coughing. I then woke up. Coughing. Want to figure that out?

That’s a direct connection between the world awake and the world asleep. No more wall. I’ve frequently backed down the driveway in my truck to run an errand or to do some banking, only to pause at a certain point. When I realize I don’t need to go anywhere. The errand was instead needed in last night’s dream. The night carried forward.

I’ve long thought that the incident I had triggered a firestorm of activity in my brain which has burned out any circuit holding my lifelong anxiety to my waking life. Now, my anxiety can hit me at night when I am helpless. No more wall to protect me when I go to sleep. The front line is everywhere.

Some PTSD suffer intense flashbacks during the day. Again, that is the traumatic memory breaking through into the waking hours.

People don’t believe me when I say that getting murdered in a dream or coming out of anesthesia after ECT feels like the real thing. Nonsense they say.  In their world, I’m either lying or they somehow know what I am experiencing better than myself. In either case, they are wrong.

Most people draw a clear distinction between the conscious and unconscious. For us nightmare suffers, that border or wall is broken, at least in part. And I don’t know how that breach can be fixed.

My ECT sessions were a last try at establishing new electrical pathways for my brain to follow, sort of like building a new wall instead of repairing an old wall. Didn’t work.

How do you fix a broken eggshell? Or can you? I don’t see a way.

 

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NightWare™ Review Part Three

NB: My psychiatrists (and all of the medical people I have dealt with) our obsessed with knowing how much sleep I am getting. How many hours? It doesn’t matter! Not if you go to sleep three or four times a day and have rotten, disturbing sleep each time. Never refreshing, never feel good sleep. The quality of sleep is what’s most important but they don’t want to assess that because there is nothing they can do about it and because they don’t want to admit that.

NightWare Review – Part One (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Two (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Four (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

My first suicide attempt (internal link)

ROUGH, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Hi, this is Thomas Farley again about talking about the new NightWare™ system. This is the third video — we are at November 10, 2021. I’m I am seeing less visual disturbances, less crippling, violent imagery.

[00:00:26.390]
It’s difficult for me to tell because if this is a reduction because sometimes I’ll have two or three nightmares in a night, sometimes only two or three in a week, and then they disappear for a while. They always come back. I’m still waking up scared, though, from things I can’t recall. I check my heart rate. It doesn’t register as anything but normal.

[00:00:52.970]
I continue to get sound offs that are from either going to the bathroom, moving around in bed or actually just lying in bed, staring ahead, thinking about things. I’m still getting alerting. I think it’s not learning yet on many things, and for all I know, some of this is spontaneous remission or whatever they call it. I continue to go forward. On Friday, I have a psychiatrist meeting.

[00:01:21.950]
She’s going to try to go through the data. I’m averaging 6.4 hours of sleep, so at least it’s keeping track of that. So I will continue with this. I’m just disturbed that it’s not learning.

[00:01:40.850]
It shows these interventions on a graph, but with the number of false alerts, I don’t have the confidence to say what is happening right now.

[00:01:56.130]
So we’ll proceed and at least I’m working on something right. And if you’re having sufferers again, this is my send off to you. I really hope that you have a good night and that you sleep well. I really hope that for you and that you find some peace. Good luck.