An American from England in Texas

Hi dude! Glad to hear you're having fun back home. I hope all your folks are well. ...with an abundance of gun stores! Mutate and SurvivePS; Aleph has been kicking ass!

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hiya Granny!Glad to hear Aleph is doing well. I'll eagerly seek updates upon my return hehe. I welcome any updates about psionic strategies that may have been developed during the ongoing evolution of my character It feels really weird to be back here. I'm sorta seeing things from the other side again... i.e. i've been in England for so long that things HERE seem odd now.I've been sitting outside at night a lot on a laptop as the temperature is just so amenable.I love this place but England calls to me again hehe.I bought The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins at the airport. I'm on my second reading now. The other day I passed out for a kip after reading a bit and fell into a dream. I met Richard Dawkins on a bus (lol) and he was really cool and willing to chat. I followed him back to his place where he introduced me to a half dozen puppies that he took care of hehehehe. So... in my dreams I have stroked Richard Dawkins' puppies. Freudian analysis? lol.

Lived in Big Spring for 13 and counting. The locals here must be more sophisticated, occasionally they discuss the weather.Reminds me of a story about Schopenhauer. Purportedly he regularly dined in an English restaurant where he had this ritual of placing a gold piece on the table before every meal and then placing it in his pocket once finished. When a waitress finally had the courage to ask him what that was all about, he replied that he did it to show that he would drop the coin into the poorbox the minute the English officers present spoke of anything other than women, horses, or dogs.

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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman RushdieThis rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. - the character Rorschach in Watchmen

Hehehe. Some of my relatives here speak with a level of sophistication, but in the same breath will resort to the supernatural.I've heard three ghost stories in my two week visit, each told by an (otherwise) intelligent and reasonable person.A family member describes hearing his late father's voice speak to him on the golf course, six feet from the bench they traditionally shared when playing there together.Another family member describes seeing our deceased uncles walking together at a distance during one of their funerals.A friend describes being approached in his back yard, late in the night, by a fox. He claims to have felt an overwhelming feeling that the fox was his late father, somehow given a chance to see his son again by looking through the eyes of the fox.I'm sure that each of these three separate storytellers would have varying degrees of scepticism about what they experienced, but each of them clearly felt some sense of awe or mystery with regard to these incidents, and none of them seemed prepared to attribute them to hallucination, or to put it more mildly, "tricks of the mind".It seems to me (and this is probably a known phenomenon of some sort) that certain groups of people, through some sort of social conditioning, have become inclined to see, hear, and perhaps even feel things that simply aren't there. Their varying degrees of scepticism notwithstanding, it seems that some people are simply more prone to entertain supernatural explanations.