I guess my brother has not written my off after all, although his silence of recent years appears more justified than I would have ever guessed. When my sister informed him that I was ill, he emailed and the path to communication has been begun upon.

Lady, lady, never start
Conversation toward your heart;
Keep your pretty words serene;
Never murmur what you mean.
Show yourself, by word and look,
Swift and shallow as a brook.
Be as cool and quick to go
As a drop of April snow;
Be as delicate and gay
As a cherry flower in May.
Lady, lady, never speak
Of the tears that burn your cheek-
She will never win him, whose
Words had shown she feared to lose.
Be you wise and never sad,
You will get your lovely lad.
Never serious be, nor true,
And your wish will come to you-
And if that makes you happy, kid,
You'll be the first it ever did.

                                 Dorothy Parker

There has been a lot of dishonesty in my life, mostly stories from psychic days designed to more fine tune what I was sensing. The words were more important than the truth for that task. Secrecy also sprang from that same well, most of my life I've kept a great deal of secrets - my own - and for reasons unknown hundreds for others as well. I think because I don't talk a lot everyone confides in me.

Anyway, the point is that I've pouring a lot of honesty into this site (although it still feels like I've barely scratched the first few atoms on the surface of the skin of my life) which was easy when this site was just read by me, but now the search engines have grabbed and family and friends, new and old are discovering. And I find I no longer have the luxury of discussing what I am prepared to deal with. A lot of communication is now going on beyond these pages, and not all of it is easy.

While almost all the secrets revealed have yielded positive, or at least not negative, results, I still find each one uniquely difficult. Even this entry is really mostly a procrastination from an email I know I must write to Tracy today.

A line from Farscape:

"Fear accompanies the possibility of death. Calm shepherds its certainty."

I've found this to be true.

Megacon was this weekend, so many of my old friends and coworkers were in the area. My reflexes and timing were pretty off this week so I didn't think I should be driving, so I didn't get to get down there to see most of them. But I made arrangements for John to visit afterward. Mary K was supposed to visit before hand for an exchange of information. I was going to teach her Photoshop and she was going to teach me menu making. But her plans got pushed forward and she and Joe Bob ended up here after the convention as well.

MK and JB have been unbelievably helpful to me since I quit the conventions (and before as well), and I'm not sure exactly how I would be surviving now without their selfless help. This trip they went above and beyond and essentially gave me duplicates of all their creations. This should make it possible for me to pull out of the financial down spiral I am in with a confrontable amount of effort.

Besides my sister, John was one of the few people left that didn't know I was ill. No reason not to tell him really, I just kept avoiding it. John and I go way back to the early eighties, and I've noticed that a lot of people change when I tell them. They either that distancing themselves (which I can't blame them, I suspect this would be my reaction) or treating me as if I'm fragile and take special care when talking with me. As someone that always wanted the extra crap of social customs stripped away, that is especially grating.

John is very overweight, and lives on grease and starch. Yet his blood-work (sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure) come back in normal ranges. I use to tease him that I refused to die until he did. That my dying first would be just too ironic. He reminded me of this at dinner, and joked that he would have to hurry up for me. 

John stayed John, and I am so grateful for that. I tried to tell him but couldn't find the words. I hope he reads this some day.

Funny that the last thought I entered on here relates to what I was about to write about.

When Lorne came to visit he convinced me my sister, his mother, that I was dying. I was worried that it would be too much for her. He made convincing arguments that I was wrong. I resolved to tell her when she came visit, which is next weekend. In an email Lorne put expressed that he thought that keeping my secret is why my Mother wasn't talking to Jia. That made no sense to me then and still makes no sense to me now. However it turns out to be correct. When I told mom I was telling Jia, she expressed relief and said that that was part of why she was talking to Jia.

It's a strange world, and I use to be able to understand it's workings, now apparently I can't even when it is explained to me.

Quite some time ago my mother stopped talking to my sister. I only recently found about this. At one time or another my mother has written each of us kids off for protracted periods of time. Jia says this is the first time it has happened to her. I find that hard but not impossible to believe. My mother won't talk about, and I have always have trouble deciphering facts from my sister. My mother's silence speaks volumes about the blame or logic of argument but is short on actual information.

One nice side-effect of this is that since Jia can not call mom every Sunday for hours, as had been her custom, she now calls me. As calls from Jia used to be very rare, this is a very pleasant treat.

Nadia died last week. My brother called my sister, my mother and Lorne but not me. I guess he truly is done with me. Once again, I was not imagining things.

I've got a college reunion coming up at the end of March. When the reunion was in the planning stages, I assumed that it would be in the summer and that it would be near the college. Turns out I was wrong on both counts. I'm not all that eager to trudge up to New England in the dead of winter. I was interested in seeing the old place again, but they (whoever they are) have decided to hold it in Sturbridge, MA. While there are a couple of  friends going that I would like to see, and my mind insists on reminding me that I won't have a shot at another college reunion, I find myself resistant to going through all the bother the trip would in tale.

Fred has eliminated some of the cost by offering to pay for the plane ticket and offering up one of his rental cars. Of course that means more time away from home.

It also brings me within a hard hours drive of Kelly, who I invited, but haven't heard from in a week or so. The reunion is practically on top of her midterms, and she is struggling this semester so I would understand if she couldn't make it.

I don't remember being this indecisive in quite sometime. I'll probably sit on the fence until the chance for reservations has passed.

Christmas 2005 is officially over and I'm oddly wide awake at 12:43am. While digging through a box looking for a booklet I found a staggering amount of letters, and various materials from College and slightly after. Like this last week hasn't been enough of a walk down memory lane. At least now, it didn't have to rely on my memory. There were also a bunch photographs. I was surprised at how much my heart leaped at the picture of Becky McCrellis (who will always be Noodles to me - and no, no need to go back, I haven't mentioned her yet.)

I'm going to have to hook up the scanner, so I can add faces to some of these names. Also weird little doodads that I'll probably never be able to make relevant.

I'm trying to sign up for Google's AdSense. Not to spam you (although it would be nice if this site generated the $12 a year it takes to keep it going, that way it could actually run for ever <g>), but I just have to see what kind of content the contextual ad parser will generate for this random assemblage of ideas. I can't even imagine.

They have to approve the application and since they only ask for the opening page which only contains a hidden link to the real site (it's not ready to be public yet by a long shot) they might not approve me. If so I'll have to try again later, when this directly linkable. But I'm really curious.

As part of my policy of experiencing new things I spent a bit of time today looking through Craigslist. That lead me to Meetup.com. I have signed up for a Poi meeting (I did not even know the word, let alone anything about it. It appears to have something to do with fire spinning.) on Jan 2nd. I look forward to watching, if at all possible, being introduced to this experience firsthand.

I also signed up to host a Buffy Discussion Group on Jan 19th (2006 for those of you reading this in the future (on of my pet peeves is website scribblers that forget that this stuff lives on away from the here and now.)) I don't know anything about running a group (despite my ongoing attempts at starting a support group) and I'm not the most outgoing amongst strangers, but Buffy people are talkers and can hopefully carry the conversation while I get to know them and get comfortable with their presence.

You'll be the second to know how it goes.

I saw an ugly woman in a Santa Hat today. It made me realize something I think I've always known but never really thought about. I'm turned on by women in Santa Hats. So that makes, Santa Hats, Pigtails and Japanese School Girl Uniforms. Which one of these doesn't belong?

Darn, forgot about painters overalls without a shirt underneath. Spoils the mental assemblage I had going.

Wasn't quite thinking about food when I said "Do one thing each week I have never done before" but last night I had Kobe beef. It was extremely good, but I don't know if it was $90 good. Admittedly I have spent $90 on many things not nearly as good. I think I need to try this again, but at Ruth's Chris's or a restaurant in that range.

Mangled metaphor for the day: I'm so horny my back teeth are floating.

So with last years lessons in mind, I set about designing goals for 2006.

This year I am of a vastly different mindset. Last year was about getting my affairs in order so I could enjoy my last few years.

Well this year has taught me the folly of that approach.

So this year I will try to balance enjoying myself with getting my affairs in order.

• Buy the massage chair that I have been wanting forever (admitted they've made it even better over the years)

• Buy a Jacuzzi

• Pay off the credits cards

• Import a worker to expand the business. A protégé of sorts.

• Begin the shift to more legal products

• Do one thing each week I have never done before

• Travel at least twice (tentatively one trip to Arizona to see two groups of friends, and drive down to the keys as I have always wanted to drive the bridge.)

• Develop a small support group of friends

Important differences in this list over last years goals: it is a bigger list. It will much harder to fail all of them if I spread it out a little bit. In my thinking, I have pretty much decided on, that this is my last 4 years and the last one might not be all that viable. They can hold out the carrot of research hope, but I am not counting on it any more. Thus some quality of life/enjoyment items appear right at the beginning. I am going to make this year more enjoyable for me. If I fail I will have had some fun first.

The end of 2005 is at hand and at the final reckoning this year has to be summed up as a failure.

I had three goals for this year:

• Pay off the credit cards.

• Set up a second satellite office, so I would have some positive cash flow that I wasn't directly working for.

• Get my family together for Christmas.

All three goals failed miserably.

The first goal rested in large part on the second goal. I started the year with a 35 grand debt (largely from trying to take a risky short cut to make my final years ones I could enjoy without losing time to working), and I managed to cut that down to 14. So I don't feel that that was a complete loss. Putting together a satellite office required relying on someone else. And this being Florida, there in lay the destruction factor. You just can't find any kind of work ethic down here. That blew up without notice and I went into a funk that cost me a couple of months where I should have been more productive.

The third goal should have been the easiest. It only had two parts, get the family together, and get someone to watch the operation while I was gone.

Thanks to my mother and a rich woman's cat, we  have access to a very nice house on Martha's Vineyard for a week each side of Christmas. Suddenly my mother was not talking to my sister (as far back as I can remember my mother has almost always not been talking to one of us (me, my brother or sister.) Apparently it was my sisters time. This made my Nephew's wife (Niece-in-Law? that doesn't sound right), who grew up in a very disturbed childhood, not want to expose her children to that kind of tension. And slowly it all unraveled, and no amount of blackmail on my part seemed able to bring it back together.

Then as a final capper, the helper I had hired and trained to watch over things in the 2 weeks I would be gone, suddenly quit without warning, three days before I was supposed to get on the plane. Her mother lied straight to my face (actually over the phone) and said her daughter thought she was just helping me out a little. The signed contract spelling out her exact duties, work schedule and the reason for it, says otherwise, but what's done is done. It just reinforces the lesson learned this year. Don't hire Floridians.

That reminds me; on my tombstone:

• At the top along the curve: www.garthbigelow.com

• Below the name and dates: "The Ultimate End to the Path of least Resistance"

I don't know when the idea of a tombstone became important to me. I'm not spiritual, I don't believe that there is anything more after the body fails (although I have seen enough in life to believe quite strongly that there is some force out there, beyond our understanding. But I also firmly believe that we have no possible way of knowing what it's intentions are, if in fact it has any.) and in fact I'll be very pissed and probably screwed if there does turn out to be some kind if afterlife.

But somewhere the idea that something should mark that I existed, has become important to me.

I leave no kids behind, my relationships have died or moved on to other greater loves, and of my family only Lorne will be around to occasionally tell the censored tale of his crazy Uncle Garth.

Ultimate Universe (perhaps my biggest mark on this planet) is already slowly turning into a Mecca of bad links in Google.

That is the idea behind this website. That I can present myself in a thousand little snippets of memory, and other things that together make a hint of me. That with a little planning it can be setup to exist as long as the internet (This presents some challenges - but it's my kind of challenge - and if I fail I won't be around to know about it <g>).

So the tombstone as physical marker and pointer to the website; the final receptacle of that which is me.

My brother's wife is dying. We've known about it for, I think, about six months now. Lorne speculates, that like me, they've known for awhile and have been hiding it from the family. Have known possibly since their wedding. While this is conjecture it does make some sense of the sudden decision to get married after living together happy for many years.

I have yet to call or write Brad or Nadia. They've made this easy as they have made this "we'll call you when we want you to visit policy." But mostly that is an excuse, as I could easily circumvent that and at least email Brad if I wanted to.

Out of a sense of decency if nothing else, I feel guilt about not forcing myself to contact him.

Several factors are in play here:

• I have a lot of trouble dealing with death (except it seems my own). Death always sinks me back into those terrible years after Crystal died. That screwed me up for so long. That is something I would do differently given the chance (people that say "I wouldn't change anything" are in my opinion liars, but that may say more about me than them). I would have gotten some professional help back them, as that has colored my entire life since then (and yet again - something I kept from my family.)

• Brad and I have not been close for a long time. Cordial enough at the few family events that we are both at, but very shallow interaction at best.

• Nadia has always been sweet and nice to me, but it has always felt false, insincere. I feel some guilt in writing that, but I never felt comfortable around her, or believed that she wanted to have anything to do with the me or the rest of the family. There is some ancillary evidence to back up this hypothesis.

And as is most often the case I will take the path of least resistance, and avoid the situation until something (most likely the funeral) forces me into action.

On my CDS site (www.dyingnotdead.com) I had joked about the insanity of placing an honest personal ad for myself.

But in the spirit of my new declaration of both not caring what people think (there should be some freedom in dying, it's high time I started reveling in that at least) and in striving to enjoy myself more, I did just that last night. I placed a personal ad on Craigslist. Completely honest. I put it in the Platonic section. Even linked in the CDS site. Haven't gotten a response yet (and honestly who would answer an ad like that?) but suddenly the site has tripled its hits. So at the very least, this might be a way (with a little modification) to promote the support group.

Either way, I'm proud of myself for putting myself out there.

I had a dream last night. In a lot of my dreams I am not present. Psychologically this worries me. Most likely it means I watch too much TV, but it could just as easily say something about my sense of self.

Anyway, at least I was in this dream. I was in the audience of a comedy club, a rather quiet and seedy one. On stage was an overweight slovenly elder women, cigarette in one hand, microphone and beer in the other. She told quiet a few jokes. One stayed in my mind upon waking and I quickly wrote it down before it faded.

"You can think of the body Politic as a real body. The quality of what goes in will effect the state of the body itself only. Regardless, what comes out will always be shit."

I don't know whether I heard this somewhere and it lodged in my subconscious, but until proven otherwise I will claim this to be my own.

I started on romance earlier and got side-tracked. The reason I brought it up was a cyber-ship had broken out slowly between myself and girl named Kelly. She works the same vein of eBay that I do, and our communication paths crossed that way. She's had a rough life and she's very wary of people. She has three kids, her first two (twins) she had at age 15. Her dad has been in prison for a while and just got out.. As I do with most people, I did my best to help her out with the trials and tribulations of eBay. Fairly quickly a friendship grew. I was pretty up front out my romantic limitations as was she. It seemed that something approaching long distant intimacy was building. When Christmas blew up, one of the bigger let downs was that I was not going to see her.

I'd met her once before, but that was early on, and pretty much all business and a very short meeting.

I wrote her, telling her that I was hurting, pissed and frustrated. I got a response that, to boil down and paraphrase, went something like this: "Here is a problem I'm having. Can you help? Will get back you on your email soon." Two days pass and I get a cryptic email: "Is this the right email address?"

I get a bit hurt, and feel a bit used, and I start to stew. I had previously promised her I would not do this (meaning stew quietly without writing. I tend to withdraw when upset), so I email her, stewing out loud.

No response to date. No idea what happened.

Can this holiday season, continue to suck more?

Turns out it can. Not to the same level, but cumulatively it's getting pretty bad. I have three accounts currently on eBay. The big one I shutdown for a while, thinking I was going away for 3 weeks. Yesterday, one of them gets suspended out of the blue. Not unheard of in my field, but what is unprecedented is that I had no warnings. Three, you ALWAYS get at least three. None. That rips away what little security I felt in this business.

Then, last night the computer hooked up to the final account had a hard drive failure. Mike is fixing it right now. Now, I'm still not glad that I'm not home for Christmas, but considering that the account being kicked and the computer dying would have occurred while I was in the air, it would have been chaos trying to fix all this remotely. And poor Jen would have had a melt down.

I hope the universe has gotten it out of its system. I always get a bit paranoid when I'm happy that the shoe is now going to drop. People made fun of me last week when I was grinning and smiling at the same time that I was wondering where the bullet was going to come from. And then when I thought I was home free, sure enough, the universe had set me up again. Will I ever learn? Maybe next time they won't think I'm paranoid.

There are some people that really drag out the comedian in me. I become very quick witted, and seem to come up with great one-liners, quips and comebacks. Most people would be very surprised to learn that. In a questionnaire, Tracy once responded to the question: Is your boyfriend funny? with "Not really."

I've tried to figure out what qualities in a person bring that side of me to the forefront. Being a good audience definitely helps. Carol Huff comes to the head of the list in my mind when I think people that make me funny, and she was a great audience. I could get her laughing endlessly, and it came so easily. But it wasn't always cheap laughs; she made me comical. Next on the list is my late nephew Lance. I once devoted a Thanksgiving at my Grandma's to trying to make sure that Lance eat nothing (both ironic and mean given that he was a beanpole and I was a round ball.) The moment something went in his mouth, I'd make him laugh. Ever see Cranberry sauce come out someone's nose? I have.

Which brings us to Lorne, and the reason for this short walk down memory lane. Lorne (and the connection I skipped is that Lorne is Lance's brother and very high on the list of people that make me become funny) is coming to visit in January. It's a bit of pity visit, as I have been in a foul, self-pitying mood ever since my Christmas plans got all screwed up. But however it has come to be, it will be great to see Lorne. He is more like a brother to me, than my real brother is. Due to my coming along much later than my siblings, Lance and Lorne were much closer in age to me. I was more like an abusive older brother that wasn't around that much. Lorne is by far my favorite relative.

This started as the tail of the section above, but Lloyd deserves more than seven words.

My cousin Lloyd is very high up there on my list of favorite relatives. But there is a work to being with Lloyd. He is very smart, and has seen and done so much. He makes me feel like I should have been so much more than I became. That I wasted the potential I had. I can't even blame upbringing or circumstance as his family life was hell on a level I both can't and don't want to contemplate. I am intellectually lazy, I can acknowledge and even be comfortable with that - except when I am with Lloyd. Which is not to say, he does anything to foster that feeling. That all comes from me, and I cherish his much too infrequent visits and emails.

Lloyd is currently a translator in Iraq. It is weird to get direct information that is so at odds with my own views, and so at odds with news I get from directly from email from some troops themselves. It is part of the wonder that is Lloyd that he can do even that in a way that isn't abrasive. Truly a rare skill.

I got myself added to his email list some time back (though come to think of it, there haven't been many emails lately) and with each one I keep wanting to write. Oddly I can think of nothing worthy of saying. I wonder if this what they mean when they talk of putting someone on a pedestal.

Romance is pretty tough, when A) you know you have a limited lifespan, and B) your brain erupts in an explosion of pain if you try to have sex.

I was thinking yesterday of Tracy. One of the things she said in the week it took us to officially break up, was that she didn't like how sad she made me. And this is the line that really hurt, she didn't like who she was becoming around me.

While it is true that subconsciously she went to great pains to try to sabotage our relationship, it is also true that I never felt happier, more at peace than when I was around her. And I REALLY liked who I was around her. I wasn't a mass of ideas and beliefs without purpose or action. I was braver, nobler, stronger in my convictions. When put to the test, I usually made the right choices.

I used to be really quite good at being alone, I can't seem to get back to the comfort of that state.

Zen saying (I stole it from Darma and Greg so it might not be a Zen saying at all but it sounds like one):

"Never get mad at a pig for having a shorter neck than a giraffe."

Words to live by.

I throw this out there for any one that is listening. and I will preface it with a little self-praise. I have always had a fascination with economics and social interaction. I find these to be the two most interestingly complex puzzles in existence, and I love unanswerable puzzles. I spend a lot of effort into thinking about how various changes in law, social attitude and global events will effect the various economies of the world. I especially love predictions, as an indicator of how well you are on track. I predicted the stock market crash of 1987 to the month. The crash of 2000 I had predicted for 1997 and was off on the severity as well (In both cases I had underestimated the speed and depth at which the internet would effect world financial dynamics). On the flip side, I completely missed the hyperinflation of Mexican peso in the mid 90s and to this day do not understand what caused either its beginning or its easing.

So short term (and therefore simpler) predictions:

• Gasoline will be $3.50 a gallon by end of May, 2007.

• The cost of steel, concrete and wood will continue to climb, doubling in price from the start of 2004 to the end of 2007 (I think that is conservative but I want to be right so you'll believe this next one)

• 2016 to 2018 will bring about the biggest, hardest stock market crash this country has ever seen. This will be the watershed moment when the government will not longer be able to simply push the problem forward. I have several thoughts on what will happen then, but I am not nearly as accurate when it comes to predicting human reaction so I will keep them to myself.

Speaking of predictions. Completely off the wall prediction with no math or science to back up. This is merely a "what I would do in their shoes" hypothesis, but it's fun to play with.

China's GDP is 11.4 trillion this year. At it's current rate of growth (and personally I think the rate of growth will accelerate) they will pass our GDP in 6 years. Already we are having difficulty obtaining the 25% of the worlds resources that we are used to using up, since China's population is so much more massive than ours and they are expanding so fast.

Already China is showing signs of beginning to flex its muscles. Switching basing it's oil transactions from US dollars to Euros was more than a smart business move, it was also a strong signal to the US to back off. In other words signally to us, that they are fully aware of the financial power they wield. Largely they are being nice, because they still need us both as a supplier and a buyer. They used to need us as an educator, but we've dismantled that problem for them.

This rant has gone a bit off track. Here is China's problem, their power is coming from growing capitalism, but their government is communistic. Now look to their North. Russia, recently communistic is enjoying freedom but also economic upheaval.  Many of it's people probably are looking back with rose colored glasses at the happy days of communism, when at least there was a sense of security. In typical human manner the bulk will forget the worst of the past and remember that parts that are better than the moment. Which is not to say that they are willing to give up the parts that are currently better. If the Chinese government can come up with a doctrine of capitalism that also embraces a totalitarian style government (make what you want, give us a fair share to keep you safe or orderly), China and Russia's people (not it's leaders) could merge. This would give them a country of unimaginable size and resources. The population alone, would sway global markets on a whim.

Just food for thought.

Here's another food for thought. Tort reform.

The problem: The cost of legal awards, and abuse of the legal system are crushing businesses and destroying the US ability to compete globally.

The other problem. Legal awards are basically the conscience of a corporation, that otherwise has a legal obligation to do what is best for its stockholders.

So what's the answer? My idea is to separate people and lawyers from the punitive damage awards.

A corporation, business or entity, could still be sued just as today, no caps. That keeps the conscience of business intact. The fraudulent and frivolous lawsuits are reduced by not allowing the punitive damages to be awarded to the plaintiffs and their lawyers. They still get all their other damages, so that their needs are covered and their lawyers get paid. But the big bucks, the money that is supposedly to teach business a lesson and make it unprofitable to pull the crap they sometimes do, that money goes to a charity. The plaintiff could decide what charity from a government approved (and very public) list. Without the profit motive, the wheel of justice, would most likely only be used when actual injustice had occurred.  The conscience of business would be preserved, the cost of frivolous lawsuits would dry up almost overnight, and the charities could sure use the boost.

Much like the replacement of the Federal Income Tax with a Federal Sales Tax, it will never happen as long as the lawyers make the laws.