Breadcrumbs
This is a Breadcrumbs sampler. For the full monty from 2015 on, see the Breadcrumbs blog links below.
PDF’s for each year are available in the Preface sections of each blog.
Breadcrumbs 2015
Bits and Pieces from a Dream of Time
https://breadcrumbs2015.blogspot.com/
Breadcrumbs 2018
Bits and Pieces from a Dream of Time
https://breadcrumbs2018.blogspot.com/
Breadcrumbs 2019
Bits and Pieces from a Dream of Time
https://breadcrumbs2019.blogspot.com/
Breadcrumbs 2020
Bits and Pieces from a Dream of Time
https://breadcrumbs2020yajekim.blogspot.com/
Breadcrumbs 2021
Bits and Pieces from a Dream of Time
https://breadcrumbs2021.blogspot.com/
Breadcrumbs 2022
Bits and Pieces from a Dream of Time
https://breadcrumbs2022.blogspot.com/
All these thoughts are but a few decades worth of babble
That came to mind during the wandering from one adventure to the next,
Reflections of an unsought existence born of the choiceless repast of the genetic lottery,
In an inexplicable mystery too infinitely unfathomable to claim any knowing.
* * * *
This is the thesis I would have liked to have had available early on in this life,
And hope is still floating about if perchance I am required to one day begin anew.
If there is a deity of the supreme variety, hopefully he/she/it will not be so malicious
As to fling me back into this often hellish dream of gratuitous suffering and angst.
* * * *
There is always a chance that some of these many ditties have been poorly written,
Or that there is a grammatical, spelling, punctuation, or other semantic error.
Never hesitate to cross the t’s and dot the i’s with your own intuition.
After all, that is really all you have to go by in this quest for truth.
* * * *
Bit by bit, ditty after ditty, one ditty at a time.
Who knows how many have been written, and more than that,
But for those so many lost by unbidden chance and inattentive happenstance.
The fate, the fates, oh what destiny do they reckon before time’s end?
* * * *
These many thoughts are left for humankind’s unfolding reverie,
Written by a witness, a seer, who was born in 1953 A.D.
To what duration he cannot at this writing say.
Geographically, it was called Northern California
During the agricultural-industrial-technological epoch
Of the United States of America, a nation-state
In what seemed the zenith and early decline
Of civilization as he elected to perceive it.
But history knows many such epochs
So the accuracy of all predictions in time
Is for future scholars to ponder and pontificate
As they always have, and undoubtedly always will.
* * * *
This is how these many aphoristic observations came to be:
One by one bubbling up in the daily wander.
Pen and paper ever in hand.
None sought.
No stories to be told.
No fame, no fortune, no power.
The life of a peasant in an extraordinary time,
In which so many things were easily achieved, easily experienced,
And the arrogance of humankind approached its zenith.
* * * *
Why spend so much time penning all this rather meaningless silliness, you might well ask.
Well, the woeful truth is this aging mortal container can only carouse
So many hours of these winter daze, anymore.
And what remains is philosophy.
The title of the next book might well be:
The Hedonist’s Guide to Higher Consciousness.
* * * *
I am a liar, I am a cheat, I am a thief, and I plot murder and mayhem daily.
But I am only a hypocrite when given moments of vanity force my hand.
But I am only a hypocrite when given moments of vanity force my hand.
* * * *
Once upon a time I thought I knew something.
It took a long time to realize I was mistaken.
* * * *
I think, therefore I think I am.
* * * *
I watch, I taste, I smell, I listen, I feel,
And then I scribble whatever comes to mind.
Quite a thing to experience, of that you can be sure.
* * * *
Didn't ask to be here, ain't prayin' to be stayin'.
* * * *
Herein is what these eyes have seen,
Given freely for time to do with it what it will
In whatever way the theater of consciousness dictates
In its unparalleled experiment of free will.
* * * *
Without pen and paper in hand,
Yet another aphoristic witty
Goes swish in the wind.
Easy come, easy go.
* * * *
What more can be said?
Apparently a great deal.
* * * *
Ah, alas, this poor body.
Having to contain a Soul seeker,
A god-mind in the making,
Is rarely ever easy.
* * * *
I am not Buddha, nor Jesus, nor Lao Tzu,
Nor any other of the countless ones
Come so many times before.
I am Michael, but any name will do,
For we are all in reality the same one as you.
* * * *
Trial by fucking fire, I calls it.
* * * *
Not interested in anything requiring a middleman with his/her hand out.
* * * *
A mystical Quixote if ever there was one.
* * * *
Vanity so great that the audacity to scribe all these thoughts only grew in time.
* * * *
Mission accomplished.
* * * *
Epiphanies unending,
Each a spontaneous twinkle of insight
Punctuating one streaming contemplation after another.
* * * *
Do not see this human drama
Going any direction I need to see,
Much less one in which I want to be.
* * * *
Caught in a mind too easily given over to the world.
A vamp for seemingly every sort of novel experience.
* * * *
Never need to meet anyone or anything again.
* * * *
Off in the timeless zone yet again.
Would that it were not so easy to stay there.
We likes our busy-busy mind, don’t we, my precious?
* * * *
A chatty antichrist, are I not?
* * * *
Thoughts of every variety written for a relatively small audience,
And who they are, or where they are, entirely unknowable.
Ergo, the Johnny Appleseed scatter-it-about approach.
And if nothing comes of it in the dreamtime to come, so be it.
* * * *
He who was, no longer is.
At least some of the time.
* * * *
A scribe, nothing more.
* * * *
Considering the seeds of your beginning, what a truly amazing journey it has been.
* * * *
Alas, not given the mind to write great narratives.
Stuck in an aphoristic mode that will likely
Not see the light of too many daze.
* * * *
Thousands and thousands of hours of babbling away
About something that will likely die on the vine.
What a waste of a perfectly good existence.
* * * *
Another satisfying ditty moment followed my many hence.
* * * *
Leaving the dreamtime these thoughts to do with whatever it pleases.
* * * *
Do not for a second believe all these thoughts are in the order they were written.
* * * *
Be sure to realize there is a very precise, almost legalistic use of words in all this.
* * * *
How often these little ditties, when they do not come out practically camera-ready,
End up transmuting into something very-if-not-entirely different,
As they stream from eternity into time.
* * * *
Odds are, the further down the road you are, the less impact you will have.
* * * *
He enjoyed writing. he enjoyed the words.
He enjoyed the definitions, the spelling, the grammar.
He enjoyed the word processing, the spellcheck that saved him,
The thesaurus that catapulted the many thoughts many unexpected directions.
And most of all he enjoyed the many reveries that inspired it all.
* * * *
Yes, I am Buddha, though sometimes I forget, and must wander about for a bit,
Until I eventually remember who-what-where-when-why-how I truly am.
And no, not into saffron robes this round, and no followers, either.
To much bothersome confusion the far too common result.
* * * *
The tension of existence, it will not be missed.
* * * *
Not even a smidgen of interest in setting up some roadshow-sideshow
Marketed into something all shiny and bright and new
In the nothing-new-under-the-sun file.
* * * *
I got mine.
Up to you to find yours.
* * * *
A dues-paying member of the food chain since 1953.
* * * *
And to the Reaper he said, “What took you so long?”
* * * *
A mind that explores anything and everything to the gist degree.
* * * *
Lordy, what would I do without spellcheck and a thesaurus?
* * * *
I might think someone is a villain, an idiot, a fool,
But I more than likely will not execute them for it.
* * * *
Pfft, I say, pfft.
* * * *
Just finishing out a life sentence without concern or fanfare.
* * * *
A prophet of oblivion.
* * * *
Veni, Vidi, Scritti.
I came, I saw, I wrote.
* * * *
The agenda daily diminishes.
* * * *
Sometimes the mind is very still, and sometimes, obviously, it is not.
* * * *
Got a hankering for the Great Nada, a yearning for some quantum oblivion.
* * * *
All these words count for nothing.
* * * *
These brief thoughts are all you need
To go where no mortal can go.
They are sincere and true
From one who sees it all as you.
* * * *
A paucity of words, what would that be like?
* * * *
What is left to question, to ponder, to wonder, to gorge, to drink?
Surely, this hodgepodge is more than enough for any wayfarer.
* * * *
These many thoughts come from where everything comes:
The mystery, the enigma, the unknown; call it whatever you will,
You impromptu players, you jazz cats of the eternal stage.
* * * *
This is the work I would hope to find were I ever come back to the is fine mess.
* * * *
A cantankerous old fart who has lived far too long to ever be missed.
* * * *
Yet another mortal player penning endless absurdities about nothing much ado.
* * * *
The scribe is just as mad as everyone else in this asylum.
Just another inmate, another monkey-mind in the jungle of Eden.
The only nuance of a difference is a somewhat rational, introspective eye,
For some reason inclined to explore the observer and observed within and without.
* * * *
What a prison the body can become as it loses its wellbeing,
Especially to a spirit no longer intoxicated with the vanity of existence,
Incarcerated in the space and time of a mind, of a body, of a world, of a universe,
Playing an infinitesimal function in a ephemeral dream for which there is no longer appetite.
* * * *
In all honesty, I am just another god-damned fucking monkey,
Often weary of acting out a mind so incredibly steeped in balderdash.
Just doing the so-it-goes as long as the going is not too painfully intolerable.
* * * *
Seemingly mortal, yet not all the time.
Seemingly carefree, yet not all the time.
Seemingly arrogant, yet not all the time.
Seemingly egocentric, yet not all the time.
Seemingly narcissistic, yet not all the time.
Seemingly sociopathic, yet not all the time.
Seemingly psychopathic, yet not all the time.
Seemingly courageous, yet not all the time.
Seemingly intelligent, yet not all the time.
Seemingly attached, yet not all the time.
Seemingly relaxed, yet not all the time.
Seemingly intense, yet not all the time.
Seemingly foolish, yet not all the time.
Seemingly this or that, yet not all the time.
Seemingly so many things, yet not all the time.
* * * *
Many things were done, many things were undone.
These many thoughts, many insightful, many foolish,
Are the mind’s harvest of this life’s many adventures.
* * * *
What new trial will today’s wander inflict upon this poor body?
He wondered with a sigh as he set stepped gingerly out the door.
* * * *
Biding my time, making the best of this perdition.
Not at all interested in being a human being ever again.
Have experienced far more that would have ever been imagined.
Existence is no longer necessary in any dimension.
The quantum singularity beckons.
* * * *
The only Gaia that could call me back
To another voluntary existence
Would be the one before fire was harnessed,
The one before humankind began its cancerous ascension.
But, alas, that garden, that Eden, is long since spent, long since played out,
And no time machine, no portal, no wormhole, but imagination, at the ready at this reckoning.
* * * *
The dream can do whatever it wants with these many words.
They came to mind in their own effortless way,
And it was an enjoyable process
Putting pen to paper.
* * * *
Would that it were so easy to be as impersonal as Mister Spock.
* * * *
A rich life on the edge of a dime.
* * * *
Makes my head spin, too.
* * * *
And everything written by this hand
May well be completely off-base.
Could be just a lot of wasted existence
That could have been better spent elsewhere.
* * * *
No creed, no dress code, no edifice, no heaven, no hell, no groupthink.
Just a few too many thoughts with which you are welcome to spend time or not.
Oblivion beckons if you can hear the soundless and taste the tasteless.
* * * *
Mister Just-in-Case.
* * * *
Some callings do not earn a paycheck.
* * * *
These thoughts come to mind of their own accord.
An effort effortlessly composing its Self.
To what end, if any, unknown.
* * * *
Another day in a weary, achy, aging body.
The life sentence in purgatory marches on.
* * * *
Still here, still collecting that statistical sample
On what it is to dream a very human dream.
* * * *
A happy fate it is to be all but ignored.
To wander, witness to it all, anonymous.
* * * *
What to do when the favorite time of day
Becomes the oblivion of dreamless sleep.
* * * *
These many thoughts, well, they are sort of a long-view-Johnny-Appleseed thing.
Good old vanity playing out the delayed gratification that history offers the dead.
* * * *
Woke up again this morning.
Back for more of what I never really wanted or needed in the first place.
Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.
* * * *
Most of the original small spiral notebooks and sundry scraps of paper
Are in landfills near Chico and Turlock in Northern California.
There is an ever-growing corpus of blank index cards
From some of the more recent dittyfesting.
* * * *
So many staring into the screens of technological absurdity,
Mother Nature all but abandoned, little more than a resource.
What’s to come of it all but a mystic philosopher’s musing.
* * * *
A little something for those who will endure the dystopian now
The mind of humankind hath blindly wrought upon paradise.
* * * *
Somebody had to think it, write it, say it,
And it looks like you got the short straw.
* * * *
One slightly younger friend once remarked:
“You are either the craziest person I know, or the sanest, I’m not sure which.”
The essence of the fabled Catch-22, to be sure.
* * * *
Woke up again this morning, and it ain’t over yet.
Pass the peas, Mildred.
* * * *
My thread, my raison d'etre.
* * * *
Can you feel that meme’s dull, rusty blade sawing through your trachea,
Down through the artery while your screams turn into a frothy gurgle.
* * * *
These many thoughts redundant? Well, of course they are redundant.
The entire human drama is redundant to an absurd degree,
And not likely to be any less so anytime soon.
* * * *
I think I have nothing to say as well as anybody.
* * * *
In a race never run, a dark horse, indeed.
* * * *
Brought to you in a Joe Everyman form.
* * * *
Another inexplicable post from oblivion.
* * * *
Creating things for a future about which I can only shake my head.
* * * *
First, I gave you my mind, then, I left it.
* * * *
God wakes up every night in a cold sweat
Knowing what is going to happen
When I am done here.
* * * *
Quantum jester.
* * * *
Word association, ain’t it fun.
* * * *
No one should die or suffer for anything I have ever said or written.
These myriad thoughts should never be taken dogmatically.
They are but a reflective process of Self-discovery.
Passing time, jousting with words, if you will.
Discern your own way; mimic no one.
* * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * *
Breadcrumbs
© Michael J. Holshouser 2015
World Rights Reserved