mindoverchatter.com

“The Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do…“  David Bowie

…Except….find my true purpose, maybe.  Laura

Some of us thoughtful human types are haunted by our search for true purpose. Searching passes the time, gives us the feeling we’re accomplishing something and makes the tough parts of life more endurable.

Finding your true purpose can set you apart from all the other true-purpose seekers out there, especially if you write a best selling true-purpose book and get paid to make speeches all over the world.

Speaking of which, I’ve read snatches of the true purpose books and listened to enough of the true purpose gurus to feel OK about what I’m going to say next: People who claim to know how to find true purpose are all saying the same thing—essentially, they’re just parroting each other.

Sometimes there’s better parroting going on than others, and oftentimes I’ve seen people get really excited by a particularly pretty bird. But when the squawking dies down, there’s not much excitement left to live on. To but it bluntly, passion and motivation grounded in nothingness further weakens people.

I’ve only found one person who actually deals with the concept of true purpose by strengthening people to find their own. Plus his method is actually applicable to your daily life in all its hum-drumness.

And his name is…drum roll…..! Dr. Kam Yuen! Dr. Yuen has practical information for achieving infinite human potential. True purpose is just a minor part of infinite human potential.

To paraphrase the Grandmaster, a ton of programmed gunk needs to be incinerated, or gotten out of the way first, before you can catch a glimpse of your true purpose.

Don’t be discouraged… or do be discouraged, it doesn’t change the fact that true purpose it still under the gunk, beeping away like a homing device in your body mind spirit. You just have to dig a little is all.

Books and motivational speeches might put you in touch with the fact that there is a ‘true purpose’, but talk is useless without a plan of action. That’s where Dr. Yuen shines above all others: He has a plan and it’s a damn good one. Plus he shows you where to start digging, ‘cause true purpose is well worth finding for yourself, your family, your community, your planet and your species: Once you have true purpose, you won’t have to force yourself to stay in your integrity any more.

BAWK! Polly want some true purpose?

Ooops. Did I just say ‘force yourself to stay in your integrity’? Yes, I did! Because, as humans driven by our nonconscious, it’s almost impossible for us to stay in our integrity. It just doesn’t come naturally at all.

Come on, now, admit it. Wouldn’t you much rather get even? Getting even comes naturally, especially to frontal lobe challenged young males.  There’s a reason the young men fight the wars! The fact is, folks, humans are born with hard core programming to get even. The combined threat of jail for the body and hell for the soul helps to contain the urge and is enough for most people to choose integrity, but it’s not a natural choice.

We learn to force ourselves to ignore the urge to get even.

I can hear the angry protests, even before I print this article. All you people who are suppressing, denying, repressing, overriding and forgetting your need to get even are angry, especially you people who are relying on ‘loving’. It’s been my experience that the very people who are using loving as a cover-up get the angriest when their loving method is questioned. That’s OK, though. Loving everybody and everything is a common ploy amongst ‘spiritual leaders’ who don’t know what else to do.

I’m still standing by what I said about getting even. I’m only speaking from my own experience. After learning Dr. Yuen’s method, I’ve seen too much success in myself and others to go back to the old ways of dealing with my painful life issues—Once upon a hippie time, I tried loving, forgetting, believing, meditating, affirming, suppressing, denying and the rest of those ‘ing’ words. It was OK for back then, just not enough for my whole life.

Speaking of which, Dr. Yuen is not parroting anybody.  He speaks from the experience of looking at hundreds of thousands of humans and other life forms. He hasn’t found one human life form that isn’t driven by the need to get rid of cause and effect programming. Generally speaking, this urge for resolution is the cause of  physical, spiritual and mental malfunctions.

I’m counting on some of you reading this to find out for yourselves, or at least try to prove me wrong You have absolutely nothing to lose and your real true purpose to gain.

Let’s go back and qualify the idea that we all here to get even—I’m talking about ‘even’ on both ends of the spectrum. In other words, every one of us is driven by subconscious and non conscious urges to get even for the pain we have inflicted on others, as well as to get even for the pain that was inflicted on us.

I don’t know who started this idea or who made this rule to begin with, plus I don’t think it’s cemented in stone for all eternity. I’m just saying that at this stage in the human body, mind, spirit evolvement, we seem to crave the resolution of all our cause and effect actions. The Indians call this karma, and it reminds me of a silly electronic game: We win by blasting all our karma to smithereens before we die or we have to come back and do it again.

There’s a tricky part to the coming back part of the resolution game, though. When it comes to remembering the past actions that have left us treading water in our karma, we fall short—we resort to suppression, repression, forgetting, denial etc as our preferred mode till we die—some of us painfully, some of us quite young and/or unexpectedly. (Remembering David Carradine and Michael Jackson)

It’s kind of pathetic, because most of us run around like amnesia victims with our heads cut off trying to resolve what we don’t even remember while incurring more memories to suppress the next time around.

Whether we consciously remember anything or not, though, we are still driven to win the karma game, and are, therefore, pawns to our subconscious and nonconscious drives or programming. All we mostly manage to do, though, is create more karma or more unevenness—Unevenness that we are driven to even out the next time around. (Remember I said we were all trying to get even.)

It can get worse, too, because a lot of us create additional mounds of gunk karma in the guise of calling it our true purpose. Yes, I’m finally back to true purpose. You see, I’m on the verge of getting a glimpse of my true purpose and it’s a weird state of being, because I’m feeling kind of like I woke up from a stupid dream.

Like I hinted earlier, I didn’t get a glimpse of my true purpose all by my lonesome. I found someone else who knew how to dig for it—Dr. Kam Yuen. He developed a method to dig true purpose out from under all the subconscious and nonconscious garbage that tends to drive us out of our integrity.

His method is pretty simple, all things considered. I didn’t have to do any exercises, abstain from certain foods, use any gadgets, meditate myself into an altered state, love everybody or even believe in anything. To get closer to evenness or karmic resolution, I only needed to delete the uneven programming—programming that weakened me and kept me in a state of forced integrity.

To find this programming, I only needed to distinguish between strong and weak. To feel the difference between strong and weak, I only needed to separate logic from intuition and feeling from emotion, plus get rid of some programming. After one, private coaching session with Dr. Yuen enough programming was gone to move forward. I knew that after just one session that the method worked because results were immediate—lasting too.

Next thing you know, I was hooked on learning how to do the method myself. Now, I’m 6 seminars down the road, Dr. Yuen’s understudy and life just keeps getting more engaging for me and everyone else around me.

You can’t beat these results. At this stage of the life game, passion and motivation are energy drains. It’s the results that I’m after and I get them when I  connect with Dr. Yuen.

Three ways to connect: You can join his membership club www.millionariehealer.com and get a teaching tele-seminar monthly, you can attend a physical seminar www.YMSeminars.com, or you can get a private consultation. It just takes a little action on your part, is all—nothing to lose and your true purpose to gain!

Wanna learn a thing or two about MMS? Another name for it is Stabilized Chlorine Dioxide.

Whatever you want to call it, though, the stuff is awesome!  MMS rips apart pathogens like no body’s business, killing them dead with no nasty side effects.  Pathogens just disintegrate and fall into the black holes of your body, folks.  Plus, less pathogens equals less pain.

If you didn’t know your body had black holes, though, you’d better join the millionariehealerclub.com or attend a Dr. Kam Yuen physical seminar.  (The next one is module 1 in Toronto, July 11-12, followed by module 2 in San Rafael, CA July 17-18 ).

Back to disintegrating pathogens. Malaria is a prime example.  When exposed to stabilized chlorine dioxide, malaria cannot survive.  Black mold is another life form that goes its harmless way after getting a dose of stabilized chlorine dioxide.

Just so we are clear.  Pathogens are harmfully infectious agents:  viruses, fungi, bacteria, molds, yeast, and who knows what other little buggers, as yet undetected by modern microscopic equipment.

Stabilized Chlorine Dioxide is your friend. (Repeat after me…”stabilized chlorine dioxide is my friend.”)

Seriously folks, It cruises through the body like a mini tornado sniffing for electrons to rip apart. By using MMS, you are helping your body rid itself of pathogens that wantonly colonize human tissue, bone and/or blood with no regard for your continued existence.  Don’t just sit there cringing! Paralysis won’t get you anywhere!

Do something right now about unwanted bacteria, fungi, molds, yeasts and viruses.  In other words, do something about the common cold, yeast infections and the Swine Flu:  Swallow a few drops of stabilized chlorine dioxide and feel the benefits throughout your entire body.  Feel it cruise through your cells like a mini tornado sniffing for pathogenic electrons to rip apart.

I’ll tell you another thing Dr. Yuen says:  When you rid your mouth of low level infections, other body cavities improve too.  Dr. Yuen talks about body cavities all the time—how they tend to mimic each other.  Once again, if you don’t know about body cavity mimicry, you’d best join Dr. Yuen’s Club.

Click www.Millionairehealer.com

Today I was talking to Dr. Yuen about a certain type of people—the ones who think ‘they’ve seen it all’,  he called them (with no judgmental attachment to his voice).

“Oh yea”, I agreed, “the ones who try to fit the Method into something they already know, as opposed to  those who leave room for something new to come along.”   (I like to explore human mindsets, you see.)

Pause to explore.

And now the question:  What type of person, do you think, learns the something new faster?  The one who thinks he’s seen it all, or the one who thinks there might be something new to see?  The one who has a been there/done that attitude, or the one who looks for something new to experience? The one who tries to fit the everchanging peg into the neverchanging hole or …..Time’s up!

If we try to fit the Yuen Method into the reality we’ve already structured for ourselves, a large part of its infinite potential is lost from the get-go.

Why can’t it be OK not to know everything about life?  What if someone else knows something more about it than we do?  We aren’t going to lose face or die, or lose the ability to think for ourselves, are we?…..Oh well, enough said.

I find that Dr. Yuen’s technique constantly changes and evolves, but thanks mostly to Dr. Yuen.   I truly believe that if it weren’t for his fearless, nonjudgmental approach to limitless existence that the whole method  would be more like a religion.

The first thing many of us do, consciously or unconsciously, when exposed to the Yuen Method is try to peg it—make it fit with what we already know.  It’s kind of a logical mind thing or a security issue we have with boundaryless states of existence.   Sad to say, most of us want our boundaries like a baby wants a pacifier.

Dr. Yuen’s approach to life , on the other hand, is limitless and, therefore, much more freaking fearless.  Thank goodness, too.  It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it—be nonjudgmental and fearless enough to connect with any and all of the answers out there.

Somebody has to be OK with not boxing up chunks of infinity.  Someone has to be open to everchanging questions, everchanging answers and the truth of infinite human potential, even if most of us can’t stand that approach—even if 99.999% of us want to put a box around life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention the afterlife.

Now that I’ve mentioned it, the afterlife, religions are notorious for putting a  box around what is possible and what isn’t, well into the afterlife.  OK, OK, sometimes the box is bigger, as in the case of Snake Handlers sometimes it’s smaller, as in the case of the Born-Agains, but there’s still a box. Let’s face it. Those dudes who head up religions have your afterlife in a box!

Here’s the bottom line, people. Let anyone who boxes up infinity dictate your life too much, and you’ll confine your search for answers to a structured box someone else made.  It’s a security thing or a karmic thing, or some other thing…but whatever the thing is, infinity gets severely affected.  Infinity is not meant to live inside a box.  It’s sacrilege!

The problem with Infinity is, it’s pretty much an impossible concept for our logical minds to deal with, and the poor logical mind wants logical answers.  Infinity just ain’t logical, but ((big but)) that’s where intuition comes in.

If we want to connect with all the answers for existence, we need to be able to access infinity.  If we want to access infinity, we need to use the Yuen Method.  The fact that the method pushes us toward destructuring reality as we know it might make us feel shaky at first…at second….at third.  But, just because it’s something new, shouldn’t stop us in our push towards limitless potential.  Try to put the Yuen Method into the box you already know and you’ve lost most of what’s available.  Just experience it!  just feel it!

Here’s some type of conclusion.  If we want to learn the Yuen Method faster, we open to the possibility that it is something new, something we’ve never run across before.   So we just shut our logical minds off, pretty much, especially when they start rampaging in a critical direction.

We let something new seep in, if no other reason, than just to see how it affects us.

Full speed ahead!

When people talk about the Canary Islands, they’re referring to seven main volcanic islands and several islets that form a chain extending for ~ 500 km across the Atlantic, its eastern edge being only 100 km from the NW African coast.

Everyone knows these islands were formed by volcanic eruptions, caused mostly by hotspots in the oceanic crust; but no one knows for certain why the lava erupted in this particular area of the Atlantic Ocean and when the land masses formed.  The actual origin of the magmatism in the Canaries and its complicated space-time relationships have been a subject of debate for many years.

Here is a link to some fine pictures of volcanic formations throughout the archipelago. Calderas and fissure vents (linear openings through which lava erupts) are abundant.

If you want some interesting historical data, present day statistics and/or tourism info, follow this link to Wikipedia.

Personally, I’m interested in the food aspect, and Wikipedia doesn’t say much about what’s to eat. After carefully combing the internet, I’ve found something that looks mighty tasty:  Canary Islands’ cuisine, I’m told, combines traditional Spanish recipes with African and Latin American influences.

A very simple and well-known Canary Island recipe, for example, is papas arrugadas: potatoes boiled in salt-water with their peelings on then served with mojo picon,a hot sauce of oil, garlic, chili-peppers and paprika. Yum, yum yum.  Click the above links for tried and true authentic recipes.  The local Canarian wine, a mellow flavored and not too sweet concoction from the Malvasia grape, compliments all the spiciness.

In addition to the divinely natural architecture, humans have created some fine masterpieces in the larger cities. There is everything from Moorish to Modern, the latter of which can be seen in the picture.

Wikipedia doesn’t tell you this, either, but Las Palmas is famous for its miracle cures.  Tourists have been frequenting the Canary islands for centuries in search of alternative health cures.  The natural beauty of this area, along with the temperate climate, make for a friendly, open thinking environment–one that is good for letting go of conventional ideas. (Hint Hint)

OK, I admit it.  I’m worried—worried that in spite of the ‘L’ word (landslide), John McCain and his McManiacs might still win.  Worried that traditional Republican swift-boating will once again undermine everything we’ve lived for these past eight years—this time with offensive mailers and cheap robocalls:

“Hello. I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home, and killed Americans.”

Can anyone blame me for worrying? Republicans know how to make terrorists out of loyal Americans and baby killers out of decent men, not to mention cowards out of heroes (Remembering John Kerry). And let’s never forget that the Supreme Court can decide elections (Remembering Bush v Gore).  How is this 2008 presidential election going to be different from the last two? Not to paraphrase Rod Stewart, but do we have enough reasons to believe?

Happy to say, I’ve found a few dozen and invite everyone to find more.  I’m sorry. I still need more. There’s strength in more.

Last night my friend Chris, who predicted an Obama landslide way back in July, asked me, “Is this one of those college basketball games that you can’t enjoy till the final second, even though your team is whipping butt?”  “Yea, it is,” I had to admit.

That’s why I’ve spent the whole day crawling the Web in search of why Senator Obama is gonna be our next President, no matter what happens. Face it, folks, he won’t win because it’s FAIR. If there’s any justice in this silly world, it happens over millenniums, and sometimes we’re just lucky enough to be alive during a fair stretch.

We’re just lucky that the ‘08 Democratic candidate is smarter, younger and cuter, ’cause that gets votes.  With Obama we can even throw in more honorable, along with a fearless ability to stay on-message while standing next to an enraged bull.

I mean, shouldn’t everyone want to have a beer with the dude who won’t fly off the handle and cause a ruckus?  Heck, folks, it’s pretty bad when a presidential candidate blasts a neutral debate moderator in the guts: “Not you, Tom”. (Remembering Tom Brokaw.)

I’ll tell you what I really like about Barack Obama—the tone of his voice, especially in comparison to that other one.  When Fox News had to admit that Barack Obama is the better speaker of the two, you know it’s got to be true.  Follow the link to a YouTube video called ‘McCain Leaves Fox Speechless’, for their impromptu assessment.  “Awful! Pathetic! Painful! Hopeless,” the mediabots cried.

Shouldn’t we feel sorry for McCain? We are liberals. My answer is a simple We don’t dare! The fact is, folks, the dude was so spoiled as a child that he would hold his breath to get his way—for which his family found the perfect solution—-they dunked him in ice water. No wonder he was against waterboarding before he was for it. (Remembering McCain and the torture bill.)

Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone calls McCain a Make-Believe Maverick and sheds some light on early childhood:  “Trailing his hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post, McCain didn’t play well with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty physique inspired a Napoleon complex: ‘My small stature motivated me to . . . fight the first kid who provoked me.’ ”

Which brings me back to another reason Obama should win besides the obvious.  Generally speaking, the taller candidate prevails, and John McCain at 5′6″ can’t look 6′1″ Obama in the eyes without a neck adjustment. Sad to say, we have only to think of John Kerry and that argument flies out the window.  There are some, however, who insist that Ohio’s electoral votes were stolen (Remembering Dennis Kucinich.)

That’s why the count for Obama has to be so far ahead in the first returns that any attempts at thievery will be a mute joke.  This time, the Democratic candidate has to be prepared for anything. This time, he needs to see where the Republicans are headed before they get there.

Maybe that’s what’s already happening. Witness the fact that the Democrats are calling for an investigation into the probability (correction inevitability) that the Bush Administration Justice Department is in league with John McCain’s campaign over the Acorn investigation.  Robert Bauer, chief counsel for the Obama campaign, is on it.  Doesn’t that prove that Democrats are smarter this time? (Remembering hope.)

The fact is folks, Obama should be smarter.  He was so better educated, plus nothing was ever handed to him.  And can remind everyone that he’s younger, peppier and way more elegant.  Saturday Night Live likened ‘town-hall’ McCain to some kind of decrepit nut-ball.

During Weekend Update, Seth Myers questioned John McCain’s sanity for wanting more town hall debates and yells out to McCain through the TV: “I mean you were lurching at people and walking around like you should have been wearing a hospital gown!”

It seems like there’s so many factors on our side. Could even the gasping Economy be playing into our hands? I’m pretty sure it is.  But at what cost?  Sad to say, there’s not much hope there.

Here’s what gives me the most joy:  The Republicans are divided! Yea, that’s what I said.  D I V I D E D!   When’s the last time we came across divided Republicans?

For a hint at the cause, check out this rather odd McCain Palin Photo circling the Internet. Almost everyone says that that one in the squatting position is the main reason for all the division. David Brooks called that one a “cancer on the Republican Party“.

Ooops, did I say everyone blames Palin?

Not the poor ’starburst’ deprived creature of National Review; not the former, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan—that old dude wants to be in John McCain’s shoes and says the economy is the only reason not to call her the best VP choice ever.

Here’s what the conservatives who truly put their country first say about the Sarah Palin choice:  Shall we start at the very beginning with Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy?  Checkout the link for a video of those two trashing the newly ensconced Palin while thinking they were off-camera.

Then there’s the conservative columnists like George Will and Kathleen Parker. Pulitzer Prize winner George Will blasts McCain in his article ‘McCain Loses His Head‘.  Parker begs Sarah Palin to resign:  “Do it for your country, Sarah,” she pleads.

Speaking of resigning, William F. Buckley Jr, had to resign from the very establishment  his own dad founded (National Review) because Junior posted his opinion in the Daily Beast—‘Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama‘.

Buckley Jr. artfully sums up many of our opinions in a nut-shell: Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So you see, folks, even the staunchest McCain supporters are jumping ship.  Last Saturday, Governor Crist of Florida, who gave his state to McCain in the primaries, skipped a McCain football rally. When questioned about this diss, Crist implied that a trip to Disney World was more important than helping McCain win the Presidency:  ”When I have time to help, I’ll try to do that,”Crist said.

The list of ship-jumpers is endless.  Follow this link and see for yourself. I am beside myself! Republicans with a conscience are giving me so much strength.

And so does this Late Breaking News!

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is siding with Ohio’s top elections official in a dispute with the state Republican Party over voter registrations.

The justices on Friday overruled a federal appeals court that had ordered Ohio’s top elections official to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, faced a deadline of Friday to set up a system to provide local officials with names of newly registered voters whose driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers on voter registration forms don’t match records in other government databases.

Ohio Republicans contended the information for counties would help prevent fraud. Brunner said the GOP is trying to disenfranchise voters.

Here’s what this means, folks. Two hundred thousand Ohio voters are safe! And essentially, this is the same Supreme Court that gave the election to Bush in 2000.  This is obviously what I’ve been waiting for!  A real sign that this time it’s gonna be different.

(Remembering an audible sigh of relief.)

Winter is sneaking up on us, folks.  It really is, ’cause our four-way irrigation thingy froze this weekend while we were out of town.  Water spewed all around the well for three days and two nights. I think there’s some irony here.  What if I told you the seminar’s focus was on energy conservation?

Say this ain’t so, too.  Old news now, but another $140 billion of porky stuff had to be included in that funky bailout plan before lawmakers could bring themselves to approve it.  Hey, what’s another 100 bill when the National Debt is topping 10 trillion as we speak (10.2 trillion).

How many billions are there in ten trillion (10,000,000,000,000)?  Sad to say, I think my brain needs updating.  Just like the National Debt Clock in New York City, both of us done run out of space.

It’s not my fault. Numbers once reserved for the distance between heavenly bodies are now part of our daily lingo.  I think it’s time we went to scientific notation for the National Debt.  Follow the link for a refresher course or better yet, here’s a quickie:

To write a number in scientific notation, put a decimal point behind the first digit, drop all the zeroes, then  count up the dropped amount and put that number up in the air real small behind x ten.

Like this:  10.2 x 10″   Hmmm, the National Debt still looks a bit unwieldy.  Maybe we need Astronomical Units.

An Astronomical Unit, or AU, is the distance from the Earth’s center to the Sun’s center—ninety-two million, nine hundred fifty-five thousand, eight hundred seven miles (92,955,807).  In other words, just one Astronmical Unit equals 92,955,807. If we divide our National Debt by this number, we should get the debt in Astronomical Units.  (Ooops, I bolded everything.)  The National Debt is 107,578 or let us just say 108,000 AU.  By the way, don’t try this with your hand-helds or even your adding machine calculators; I found out the hard way that they don’t go to ten trillion.

Happy to say, at 108,000 AU our National Debt gets us out of the solar system and beyond. From Mercury, it’s less than 1AU to Earth, from Venus a little over 1, and from Mars about 2.5.  Jupiter clocks in around 5 and Saturn a little over 10.  Uranus shoots above 19 with Neptune at 30 and Pluto 31.

No worries.  We’ll just go to light-years. One light-year equals 5.88 million million miles or ten trillion kilometers. And there it is, folks—the exact number we need for our National Debt which is now just a little over one light-year.

I’m already feeling a lot better about a National Debt of one light-year. Our closest star friend, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light-years from the Sun.  The Canis Major dwarf Galaxy is the nearest to our solar system and it’s 25,000 light-years away.  Astronomers who hazard a guess say that the whole universe is 79 billion light-years across.  I think I’ll stop there. (joke)

By the way, folks, one of the things I was supposed to learn at the seminar was how to change my perception on everyday things.  And judging from this calculated discourse on the National Debt, I do believe that idea took.

Just a while back, Chris and I were walking down a dry, overflow bed right next to the Shasta River. We were in search of a few good rocks to make a pathway but instead found a long shedded snakeskin!

Right away, he got really excited, but the sight of that long thing entwined around the rocks made my stomach queasy. Naturally, though, I made myself pick it up, just to prove that I’m a sensible female. But to tell the truth, it was really hard for me to touch the sloughed-off skin without cringing. So I just stood there, four feet of snakeskin draped over both arms. I couldn’t help but think of those weird, serpent-handling Pentecostal folk in the hills of Appalachia.

Why do they do that?  Drink strychnine and play with poisonous vipers?  Snakes don’t even like to be in the limelight, much less get man-handled.

As I understand it, Pentecostals believe Jesus Christ is inside them handling the serpents, using their hands and brains. Everything I’ve heard about Jesus, though, makes me think that he had better things to do than to play with snakes. Some of the temptation of this religious practice must be the ‘high’ the ‘anointed’ get from drinking rat poison, plus their addiction to endorphins. Let’s face it, folks, snake handlers have got to be flooded with the highest adrenalin counts imaginable. Follow the link for more info.

Getting back to the snakeskin we found, though: I didn’t know snakes had eyeball coverings. But there they were—intact and clear as could be, like perfect little cups. It was truly amazing to picture how the casings must have pealed off its eyes! When I checked the tail part, a much more unsettling thought popped into my brain— this might be a rattle snake’s sloughing.

So I immediately draped the whole thing around Chris’ neck and shoulders, just in case poisonous venom could still get to me in some unfathomable way. Being a curious boy, Chris is definitely more the serpent handling type.

Our next stop was the National Park Service, where this tan, outdoorsy dude told us our treasured snake-sloughing definitely came from a rattler, ‘cause the head was diamond shaped. Plus you could see where the tail part had peeled itself off with a hole instead of a point. Rattlesnakes don’t shed skin from their rattle tails—in fact, that’s how their tails are made. Another rattle adds itself to the stack every time they shed, which can be 3 or 4 times a year depending.

We also learned about the incredible heat sensing pit below and back of the rattler’s nostril that it uses to hone in on warm blooded prey. This sense organ just happens to be more sensitive than our nose and mouth combined. At this point, I was becoming very intrigued about this fine rattlesnake fellow that had left its skin in our path. I mean, when’s the last time humans honed in on some warm blooded prey? And when’s the last time we had to bite it to death in one try?

When a rattler finds its prey, the strike is over in less that 0.5 seconds, and if its targeting is a bit off, it merely repositions both fangs at the speed of light (a slight exaggeration). Unlike the Eastern Diamondback whose venom mostly paralyzes you, the Pacific Rattlesnake’s toxin acts in the bloodstream. If you happen to be one of the relative few thousands that gets bit every year by Rattlers, don’t succumb to the urge to take off running, just because your legs still work. That will only serve to pump the venom through your body faster.

Generally speaking, I’m not a snake person—one of those types who constantly goes out looking. That’s not to say I don’t admire and appreciate a good snake, especially one that keeps to itself while feasting on bothersome rodents.

Our National Forest Service says that one single rattlesnake can cut the rodent population in any given area by 25% per year. Without rattlesnakes, we’d be overrun in no time. I am happy, however, that rattlesnakes are the only poisonous snakes native to California. That’s not saying that some nitwit who keeps exotic pets in captivity won’t accidentally let a King Cobra get loose and start a family. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Speaking of bridges, I think I’ll finish up with a story about my Granddaddy Turner:

One summer’s day in rural Mississippi just a bit south of Memphis, he and my daddy, along with some buddies, were seining a bar-pit next to the Tallahatchie Bridge for some catfish bait (minnows and crawdads).

My daddy says a seine is a large fishing net with corks at the top and lead weights at the bottom that you drag through the water. Anyway, Granddaddy Turner happened to have his fingers dangling in the muddy water. They probably resembled a cluster of fat juicy worms, ‘cause all of a sudden he brought his hand straight out of the water like a torpedo with a long snake attached by its teeth to the middle two. That stubborn snake had no intention of letting go. …What in the world was he going to do?

Rather than rip-off part of his hand, Granddaddy plunged it back under water till the snake decided that air was more important than a mouthful of worms. Needless to say, everybody could see right away that the snake wasn’t a deadly watermoccasin, but they were still impressed with Granddaddy Turner’s quick thinking under duress.

There’s a moral here, though……if you can help it, don’t use your fingers as bait.

Because of close encounters like these, my daddy instilled in me a greatly needed respect for snakes. Cottonmouths and copperheads were everywhere in Mississippi, but Daddy said he never saw a Rattler.

So I’m having the Great Printer in Salt Lake print up and mail him a SendOutCard with Chris holding the rattlesnake next to a yardstick like a trophy fish. That ought to give him a good laugh.