AndrewBrunelle.com

Well, it took me almost a year to make the leap from small time blogger to domain-owning blogger.  I have loved every step of the way.  Now that I own a domain name, there is so much more I can do with this site, things that will be beneficial to both the reader and the writer.  Here is what I have planned for this website and this list will ultimately be ever-changing as my state of mind changes constantly, but here are a few things I would like to do with this site:

• First of all, I plan on writing much more in-depth blogs about the very things that interest me, filled with pictures (maybe) and various links, which will allow more people to get a better benefit out of the site.
• I am going to put in a humorous stories section, most of them made up, some of them true to life, and the whole basis of these humorous stories is that they will alow you to take time away from the stressful, busy world and lighten up your day.
• I plan on adding an audio section, where I will have some clips from my stand-up act and it will show you the band of comedy I am most comfortable with.
• I am also planning to launch Google Adsense on this site as soon as I become comfortable with the technical skills needed to run the ads in the places I want them to be. 
• With the freedom I acquire from having my own website, I am now free to try almost anything and I believe this site will get better recognition, therefore becoming more popular.  So, I want you to enjoy this site even better.

So, what I am going to do in the next couple of weeks is figure out a way to link my original Wordpress blog to this one, using HTML, so that I do not have to keep posting full-text articles there, but just links to this blog.  So any new blog entries I write will still have a spot on the old site, but the blog entry will be a link to this site, as a way to get the ball rolling for web traffic.  I realize that many people who subscribe to this blog have the RSS feed on the old site, so they would have no idea if I wrote a post here, so putting a link to this site on the old site is probably a great idea. 

I know I will enjoy this process and through my joyful expression, I hope you benefit immensely from this transition.  I now leave you with high hopes and a feeling of serenity.

I feel as if this blog has somewhat strayed off its original concept, so I am planning on making a title change to the title blog site, at the top from Comedy and Humor blog to possibly something a little different.  I still am not sure exactly what the hell the common thread is with all my posts, or if they even share any common threads at all, so it will take some clever examining to try and figure out this one.  I need a catchy name, a name that will bring people in and let them know what this site is all about.  At the same time I would love to host my own website, but with my technical skills lagging behind, I often wonder if there is a way to get just a blog as an entire website, as that is mostly what I will be needing, and anything else will be an afterthought.

I know I still want comedy to have something to do with the site, but I believe it will be more spiritually and philosophically focused.  It will be getting into the mind, the spirit, the body, and tying it all together with homor as the string that holds it all together.  That, and figuring out how to get the blogging software on my domain name I purchased, those are challenges I am facing at this moment.  If anyone has any suggestions on how to get this damn blog on my domain site, because I have tried uploading it before, following the precise directions from Wordpress.org, and it did not work.  I just wish I had better skills when it comes to making websites.  I may have to try doing it again.  If you know how to do this, please let me know how.  I’d appreciate it.

 Major, Major Edit:  I will continue blogging on this website in addition to hosting the same blog at www.andrewbrunelle.com, my new domain site.  I do not want to inconvenience people who already go to this site, nor do I want to limit myself by just having a blog here, and not being able to expand.  So, I figured out what it was I needed to do, got it done, and now I shall have two blogs, but they will essentially be the same.  The only thing I need to figure out is how to get all these posts onto my domain name without having to repost them all.  Perhaps divine intervention??  I’ll look it up when I have the time.  Thank you!

Here’s some food for thought.  These are called lateral thinking puzzles.  I hope you enjoy them.  Just use them as a springboard for your creativity.

A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator — or if it was raining that day — he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his apartment.

Solution:  The man is a dwarf.  He can only reach the tenth floor button, except when someone is in the elevator with him or he has an umbrella to reach number 12.

A man is lying dead in a room. There is a large pile of gold and jewels on the floor, a chandelier attached to the ceiling, and a large open window.

Solution:  The room is the ballroom of an ocean liner which sank some time ago. The man ran out of air while diving in the wreck

    3.  A man and his wife raced through the streets. They stopped, and the husband got out of the car. When he came back, his wife was dead, and there was a stranger in the car.

Solution:  The wife was about to have a baby. They drove to the hospital. The husband left to get a wheelchair, but the baby was born in the meantime, and the wife didn’t survive the birth.

A body is discovered in a park in Chicago in the middle of summer. It has a fractured skull and many other broken bones, but the cause of death was hypothermia.

Solution: A poor peasant from somewhere in Europe desperately wants to come to the United States. Lacking money for airfare, he stows away in the landing gear compartment of a jet. He dies of hypothermia in mid-flight and falls out when the compartment opens as the plane makes its final approach.

A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out.

Solution: The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun.

A man is returning from Switzerland by train. If he had been in a non-smoking car he would have died.

Solution: The man used to be blind — he’s returning from an eye operation which restored his sight. He spent all his money on the operation, so when the train (which had no internal lighting) goes through a tunnel, he thinks he’s gone blind again and decides to kill himself. But before he could do it, he saw the light of the cigarettes people were smoking and realized he could still see.

A man is dead in a puddle of blood and water on the floor of an otherwise empty locked room.

Solution: The man stabbed himself with an icicle.

 These are just a few of the ones I found at a great website called Brain Food.  Some of them are so outlandish, you have to laugh, but most of them make quite a bit of sense.  I’ve decided to take a little break from writing, and to take some time exploring possibilities.  I’ll still post regularly, so keep coming to my site, but the posts will be more rich in nature.  I’m working on improving my craft of writing.  It’s a daunting task, using modes and modalities, metaphors and similes, and the whole host of literary tools at my disposal.  So enjoy these lateral thinking puzzles and I’ll be back with a new article.

I know on my last post I talked about my decision to not drink alcohol and cigarettes as they are toxins.  Well, today I stumbled upon a compelling speech by a doctor, not sure of what his name is, but the link is here, talking about the dangers of fluoride in our water, our totohpaste, and the likes.  I was already aware of this to some extent through Steve Pavlina’s website.  His article is located here.  It’s a chilling story about how fluoride is a toxic waste product from many cmeical and nuclear plants that is highly, highly toxic, just below mercury, and for some reason is put into our water supply and also our toothpaste.

 I don’t want to get too far into it, as I really am not passionate about this sort of thing, but it just gets to me how instead of disposing of these toxic chemicals in a safe way, in a desperate attempt to get rid of them, they hire a doctor paid to say that fluoride is safe in moderate quantities and would be a great addition to our water and tooth care supply. 

 You can watch the documentary I linked you to because I don’t want to say any more.  I didn’t watch the whole thing because I don’t have that kind of time right now.  But it is amazing how sometimes the people in charge, who are seeking control, will put dangeorus neurotoxins in our food and water supply to support the progressive “dumbing down of society.”  The only real way to fight it is through not using these products.  I know my spring water company does not fluoridate their water, or so they say.  You can never be sure.

The most disturbing thing I have ever seen with respect to fluoride after knowing about how poisonous it is was when I saw a woman buying something marketed as “baby water,” which contained extra fluoride.  Extra.  Imagine the havoc the fluoride could wreak on such a small, innocent child who has no idea of the dangers.  How can we let this go on.  Of course, I didn’t say anything to her because I did not want to offend her because I’m most certainly certain that she thinks fluoride is safe, as does most of our unsuspecting country. 

Am I surprised?  Not really.  I know what our government is capable of.  I understand how they manipulate us.  So even though we live in supposedly a great country, we’re not really free.  We think we’re free, but the government is taking many steps to control us.  Placing these toxins in our system is a great means to control us.  If they have us in a semi-healthy state, one in which we cannot think clearly, have nagging health problems, and are poisoned on a daily basis, we’ll be too distracted and too weak to rise up against them.  It’s not complicated.  They want to make sure the people in power stay in power because there will be no one smart enough to revolt, to figure all of this out. 

So what should you do about this?  It’s up to you.  I know in my heart that I could live in a community-based way of life, that is self-sufficient, providing food, water, and shelter for one another without the need for money, taxation without representation, brutal police forces, or fear-based media.  So, if you are into this as well, let me know.  Also, read the How to Save the World essay by Dave Pollard.  I really enjoyed it to the extent I comprehended it.  So let’s live in peace and harmony not contant control.  Peace to everyone.

I have been having these intensely vivid dreams lately, so vivd, so clear and crisp, they are seemingly real.  And my dream recall is becoming more and more exceptional, as I am frequently remembering three to four dreams per night in dreat detail, meaning each dream fills at least one printed page, single-spaced.  It doesn’t happen every night, but lately, for the last two weeks, it almost has been every night.  They are very odd combinations of things from my past and things that I am thinking now, not to mention some things that occur completely out of the blue, but it gets me wondering whether or not the dream world is an alternate plane, much like the astral plane, through which our consciousness goes while this body is unconscious.

Maybe most people neglect this plane completely, but ever since I became interested in having richer dreams, I have and going to sleep is hardly a burden on my productivity.  I have performed stand-up comedy in my dream several times, and even though the jokes got big laughs in the dream, most of the jokes I come up with in my dream are too abstract to really make an impact on reality, or so I think.  One joke I came up with in a dream was, “Sometimes I just wander around aimlessly for weeks, months, who knows? One day I ended up in Iowa.”  I have no idea why I thought that was funny in my dream, but it was to the dream audience.  I told it to a friend of mine upon waking and then I said, “Well, it was funny in my dream,” and then he started laughing, so I kept the joke with the premise I had a dream I told it. 

But I’m enjoying some of the absurdities in my dream, from boat rides to yacht clubs, from watching illuminated South Park episodes to running with a motorized car slung around my neck by a cord, while it keeps going into oncoming traffic, I have to swing it back to my left side.  This brings me to an interesting topic:

Is subjective reality real?  By the looks of my dreams, on how most of them stem from some sort of previous experience, and that dreams are only really interesting to the person who has them, and if life is sort of like a dream, then maybe subjective reality is real.  How can dreams not be real, to some extent?  And why is it so hard to believe the waking reality is also a dream?  I mean, I’ve had dreams within dreams before and also experienced what’s known as a “false awakening,” where you wake up in the dream from the dream that you had within that dream, you go to do something, like get ready for work, but then you wake up again, in “reality,” to find out you had to wake up twice to actually wake up.  So I can see how this reality could actually be a dream.  And when you’re sleeping, having a dream, reality is just a dream within a dream, but I’m not sure how to actualy wake up from this dream to realize my true nature. 

The best I can do is to become lucid in this dream, able to stretch the boundaries of regular reality where I’m making headway in every direction, messing with the laws of physics, not to mention other great things I would love to try:  flying, invisibility, telekinesis.  These are all possible if this is a dream, because I can actually do those things in my sleeping dreams, so why not in this one?  I just have to believe.

One problem I’m having with respect to sleeping dreams is lucid dreaming, as I’ve only done it maybe two or three times in almost a year, but I guess that’s more than most people, even though I am trying to have more but probably not hard enough.  I mean, it’s great to have them, I”m sure, because I want to try out flying and stuff to see how it works.  Once I master that skill in the dream world, in this dream world I should be able to master it as well.  But I thought I’d share how dreams play a significant part in my life, as they are my life, as are yours.

I found this great website called Living Foods.  It’s a website about an all-raw diet.  By raw, I man nothing is cooked whatosever.  It only makes sense because heat obviously destroys food to some extent, taking out some of the nutrients.  But the fact that food becomes slightly toxic when cooked is another factor that I am really looking intro.  After eating a gigantic Thanksgiving feast, I felt awfully tired afterwards, which is something I really shouldn’t feel after eating a meal.  I should feel energized and ready to rumble.  But I didn’t.  I felt more tired than I did before I ate at all.  So maybe this is not the optimal ways of eating.  Maybe raw is the way to go.

Some o the articles on Living Foods (see link above) were very persuasive, and I’m curious to try something like this, but it will not be easy in the place I live now.  I may have to wait a couple of years or I could just do it now for a little while and see how I feel on it.  As long as I make the primary foods vegetables and fruits, along with nuts and seeds.   I’ve heard so many accolades about how it’s an amazing diet from many people, some of which who aren’t part of the whole health promoting field, so it may be worth a shot if I can stick with it.  I’ll have to try it or something.

The main thing that people supposedly derive from such a diet is increased mental clairty, more energy, and they lose weight at an amazing pace.  It’s definitely a good benefits package and it seems as if it is optimal, except I may have to eat some animal fat or something to get Vitamin B12 because a diet like this is completely devoid of any sort of vitamin.  It’s something I’ll have to consider.  I don’t want to have to take supplements or anything.  That’s not how I roll.  Supplements are for the people who are health nuts.  I just want to get all my vitamins naturally…

If anyone has experienced this diet and would wish to comment on it, then go ahead.  I’m not stopping you.  Just give me some insight as to what it means to go raw and how you cope with an unraw society.  So let me know…  Thank you.