MM – HOW TO STAY FRESH

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YOU KNOW IT’S THE WRITE WAY

HOW TO STAY FRESH

Wash, for starters.
After all, you’re not fresh if you’re smelly. And don’t forget all those private bits – protect against fungi – especially between the …
… and let’s have a bit of anti-perspirant here, please. You’re the only one who loves your body odour. And how about squeezing those zits. No! Don’t aim.
And could your clothes do with a …
… disinfection? And what do you mean you don’t iron?

Well, that’s one way to stay fresh.

But there’s also another. Life so easily becomes boring, routine. And whilst there’s a lot going for a bit of routine in our lives, it can go too far.
Routine is good to provide stability. It’s a form of magic, especially your routine in a morning. It places the mind in equilibrium with the world, and things fall into place, proved by the fact that, if your routine is disturbed, your day usually ends in disaster.
But keep routine where it belongs. As for the rest of your life, try something new every day. It only has to be a little thing – nothing special. Just something to provide a fresh experience.
This gives you a fresh start every day, and you feel fulfilled because of it. It makes you feel alive, and able to grab life by the horns. It says, above all else, I exist!
After you’ve washed, of course.

© Anthony North, May 2008

REFRESH

Pictures of life on my computer exist,
full of experience that does persist;
sometimes it’s good, sometimes bad,
yet living, it is certainly had;
But what, if like the computer screen,
we could alter what has been?
Click ‘refresh’ and change it all,
stopping those things that make us fall?
What kind of witchcraft this would be,
refreshing life for you and me,
existing as we want to be,
and I would then,
be a deity

Anthony North, May 2008

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FRESH IDENTITY – Fiction

If only I’d known. If only I’d realized the errors of my ways. But we rarely do so before taking the plunge.
I suppose you could call me a fraudster. Computer banking and electronic records were my thing. Ah, the delights it offered for identity fraud. And once you’ve got your mark, you can create a whole fresh identity for yourself. And if you’re really lucky, finding a no hoper, with a life that went almost unrecognized, and found him dead, apparently having committed suicide, and no one knows …
Well, I managed to step into his shadow perfectly – after burying his body, of course.

Such a non-entity he had been.

No one ever recognized him, he had never been in debt, he had no family to become suspicious, and soon my fresh identity was building a new life for itself.
So you can imagine the shock when, six months into my fresh identity, armed police burst into my house, spread-eagled me on the floor, and rushed me in for questioning.
A little extreme, you may think, for simple identity fraud. Well, let this be a warning to all who think they can get away with it in the end. There is always a catch.
And what was mine?
Well, I have a lifetime in prison to ponder it – how total and absolute my success that no one would believe I wasn’t who I had claimed to be. And why, oh why, did I have to pick a murderer on the run?

© Anthony North, May 2008

THE ALIEN IN THE BOOK

You’re driving along and suddenly you’re abducted by aliens. It goes like this. You are ‘captured’ by a bright light. Your car experiences technical problems. Suddenly you find yourself on a table in an alien spacecraft.
Small, blubbery, bug eyes Greys are staring at you. Soon, they begin experimenting on your body. Finally, Zap! – and you’re back in your car, driving. But you have lost time, and you are many miles from your last recollection.

You may not realize what’s happened at first.

You just have strange dreams over the coming weeks. Finally, the whole experience is recounted during hypnosis. But is the alien abduction scenario a real event, or something else? How do we begin to understand the phenomenon?
To some, it IS a real event, to the point that they claim to have been impregnated, and over the following months, further abductions will occur until the point arrives that a human hybrid is removed.

Is this a space age interpretation of the phantom pregnancy?

No doubt many will think not. It is all just too real. But the reality is, such pregnancies are quite common, usually formed from a specific psychological event.
So maybe if we can provide a possibility for the initial abduction, the psychodrama that can follow is explained. And whilst the actual prompter for such an event may be specific to the person or circumstance, elements of the alien abduction may be understandable.

The similarity of the event could well be cultural.

Put simply, the idea of the alien abduction is so ingrained in our psyche today that, should we find ourselves driving on a strange road and we are tired, we can become fantasy-prone and conducive to such cultural input.
This said, the fact that abductees lose time and end up having covered ground is intriguing. Is there a known phenomenon that could account for this? In a much more innocuous way, there is.

You’re reading a book.

Suddenly your mind wanders. Eventually, your attention returns to the words, but wait a minute! You’ve continued to read and have to go back to where your mind wandered – AND, time has passed.
Is this a mind mechanism whereby a person could succumb to cultural input, fantasise an abduction event, and simply continue driving whilst it’s going on? Colin Wilson often writes about the ‘robot’ who often takes over his standard tasks.

I’m doing it myself as I’m sat here typing.

My mind is fantasizing on what I’m going to write. The fingers are operating on remote control. Physiology even offers the possibility of the left and right brain.
The one is the rationalist, the other the fantasist. And it seems they can often function independently. Of course, I’m not automatically saying, here, that the alien abduction is a purely personal, psychological fantasy.
For instance, on what level could aliens exist? If we have, say, a universal consciousness, do we continue to live in the ‘real’ world as contact is made within the mind?
We are a long way from an understanding of the alien abduction. But the reality of the duality and independence of body and mind does, in my view, give us a strong indicator of the road to further understanding.

© Anthony North, May 2008

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