Fantastic Flight

It seems I spend a ridiculous amount of time playing Bejeweled. If there's a trick to that game, I'll be danged if I can find it. I don't even know if it's possible to win the game. And, it's also pretty mindless. While playing it, my mind just flows. Sometimes these flows are productive and creative. Sometimes they are just flights of fancy. Sometimes I can catch the productive, creative flow before I start playing that game, do some research and solidify my idea. Sometimes, the research itself sets off a flight of fancy.

The latter is a good description of my flight today. I had a good thought ruminating that I wanted to develop; something light and positive. So, I fired up Wikipedia and typed in the term I use to describe the concept, and came up blank. I tried one of the related, suggested terms, and stumbled onto an entry I was interested in that was also a source of a quote I knew of and hoped to find in the entry so I could document it. No, it wasn't a quote related to the idea I set out to research today. But, in this entry, there are references to a few things in Tibetan Buddhism and the Ancient Wisdom, so I followed those links to those entries.

Long story short, what I landed on in the end was a very long entry on L. Ron Hubbard. It is bizarre to find a link from Buddhism to Hubbard, who claimed to be the current incarnation of the Maitreya! I read through the Wikipedia entry and found no reference to that claim, a relief. Interest didn't wane though: My father was in the process of reading his book, "Dianetics", when he suddenly died of atherosclerosis, something that if diagnosed a by-pass would have cured. Reading through the entry was no less fantastic than reading that Mr. Hubbard thought he looked like the Maitreya so therefore must be his incarnation. (Do you see a resemblance?) I came away thinking that the man must've never slept in order to fail so miserably at so many things while succeeding at just as many others. It appears that his self-help theory of purging painful memories that he called "Dianetics" was lucrative enough for him to invest more time and energy than was his usual, so he built a business around it. It failed eventually as well, and he lost the copyright on the term "Dianetics" when his corporation declared bankruptcy. He then came up with Scientology because he felt the fastest way to become really rich was to invent a religion! His "Dianetics" book is now referred to as "Book One", and putting a volcano on the cover was his idea that the imagery would induce purchase in an inevitable, irresistible way, bringing more people and their money into his Church of Scientology. To me and my racing mind, this stuff is so "out there" that I began to think that if my father was buying into his theory, then he might have believed in the theory's claim that purging memories led to physical healing and didn't go to the doctor when he was feeling poorly.

"Whoa," I yelled to myself. My father wasn't gullible, only read half the book, nor would it be possible to prove even if he did delay seeking medical attention. "Hmm," I thought, "what an interesting way to meet Tom Cruise" if I went ahead and sued Scientology for my father's untimely death. What a hoot! I once went to a Star Trek convention and met the actor that played Chekhov in the original series. Even with my whopping 5'3 stature, I looked down to meet his eyes. For the life of me, I find it difficult to relate shortness with stardom. What if ol' Tom is that short too?

So then I think to myself, "If you can't say something good, then don't say anything at all." Oops. OK, then, "If you can't find something good to say, maybe there's something good to say about some part of it." I've got it! Here it is: I'll never know if Tom Cruise is short or not! Whew, I feel better now.

Now, back to my game...

(My father died November 11, 1989. I love him and miss him - still. He'd get a chuckle out of reading this.)