Translation: The answer is a flower yet to bloom

How can one find words when words are not words? How can you see two points on two sides of one sphere? How are the English sounds bubbly and babble not like the Indian sound Babli? When is touching not a touch? When are questions not enough?

जवाब एक फूल अभी तक खिला

एक शब्द कैसे पा सकते हैं जब शब्द शब्द नहीं हैं? आप एक क्षेत्र के दो पहलू पर दो अंक कैसे देख सकता है? कैसे अंग्रेजी हैं bubbly लगता है और नहीं भारतीय ध्वनि बबली जैसे प्रलाप? जब एक हाथ छू नहीं है? जब सवालों का पर्याप्त नहीं हैं?

Room Odor Eliminator

23^rd November 2009, 12:30

The playful twist twixt tween the scenes inside the words outside the lines. Since I know I'm not anywhere else but here in this body, place and time. Since I know life is not my body, place and time. Since. Because. Although. Often. However. Given that.

The power of not using power. The backwards glance while tripping forward on one's feet. Pinching oneself to assure the moment you're there.

Intelligence a definition not defined intelligently.

Wading into deeper waters to lose touch with the ground, all while taking a stroll with professional sharks.

Innocent as you please.

Discarding a pack of playing cards. Drawing an ace of UAV air battles, instead.

87,650 times 13,579 plus 1@$24. Remainders not bargained for.

Because I am you, you are a diarist, a journalist, a documentarian of dryptic doodling who makes no valid points except in the moment where you didn't exist.

Saving a whale from the attacks of hungry retired greyhounds and abused Rottweilers.

Schooled in sculling schooled fish from a skulking schooner.

Celebratory moments documented by you and completely missed by me, no “us” with which to share the moment.

Is a talent unused a talent wasted?

The pain, confusion and history of getting from here to there. The means and the ends. If you already know the answer to a problem, do you need to work out the details of how to get there? Is there a shortcut from one historical moment to the next?

Do you measure yourself in absolute terms or in comparison to those who know you, or those you think you know and have read/heard about? Yes, that question is cheating. Of course it's rhetorical. Absolutes do not exist. Everything is viewed as measured against something else. Interpositoriallianismishful.

Do you see the nuances that separate a gang of thugs from a group of determined business leaders? Again, the difference seen in the power of not using one's power. Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is a paving medium for pouring the pathway to wisdom. Power is wisdom. A wise leader keeps the scabbard sheathed, the flash of jewels on one's belt sufficient to get the message across.

A thug, on the other sleeve, exercises power with no need for wisdom. The power of the moment outside of time. Another way to meditate on the now, now, now, now, now.

Exercise your time in the moment and play with the height and width. See one dimension or two or three or four or more.

I am you. These words have no meaning. You are me. We are not each other. My goal is getting our species past seeing us as a species by first seeing us as one species so we can get off this planet and on to more important matters. I happen to use one language for the most part with an imperfect combination of words and grammar rules that reflect my upbringing in several overlapping subcultures but I do not promote those subcultures over others intentionally. However, I know I am of my species in place and time. My wisdom – limited, insignificant, unsubstantial but powerful – does not include clear views of future cultural markers or memes. I know what I know without wanting to exercise my power to know more.

Power for the sake of power is petty. Wealth for the sake of wealth is a waste. The future is in your hands. Build the future wisely.

See-oh, too

22 Nov 2009, 2300

How do you accommodate a whole world full of people who don't want to accommodate a whole world full of people?

Just a few generations between any two major military conflicts – on a global scale, that is. Otherwise, our species constantly battles itself some place all the time.

So what? Facts are facts. I look for truth. You want to dare me. We both face the consequences.

Ran into a management/supervisory type person today. She expressed a common sentiment, “Fake it until you make it.”

How do I tell you the truth without using these words? How do I tell you the truth by only using these words, in any language or any symbolic form?

We all live, and by living we demonstrate or show some form of the truth.

De monster. Demonstrable.

Holding one planet and seven billion people in your hand does not the truth make. That's what I'm here talking to myself about. That's what I've been talking to myself about for years.

I have been telling myself the truth, using one language for the most part, using one species all the time, walking the same path over and over, beating my head against invisible walls, racing to the tops of mountains and tumbling back down into the valleys, counting trees in the middle of the tangled jungle.

Words, words, words. All this obsession with text and textbooks, believing that text existing before my time was text that existed before all time.

T-r-u-t-h. Trees in the forest surrounding a glen. Rocks and ice on a mountaintop surrounding a bald.

Again, just a sound in my thoughts, a bunch of electroneurochemical sensations passing whispered secrets in a circle, the truth going in one end and these words coming out the other.

Why hadn't I seen this? Why haven't I seen this before? To have and to be. To behave. To have bees.

But then again, the truth is what it is. Many of you already know the truth. We all live the truth, here in plain sight for anyone and everyone to see.

I think of myself as just one person. At the same time, I think of myself as yours, seven billion pieces of myself in you and seven billion of you in me. All this time, I had focused on the me/you, yin/yang, death/life duality, with the truth staring me in the face, a blank expression like camouflage hiding the truth at the tip of my nose.

Let's see, I've lived over 47.5 years, clearly making claim to a middle-aged body, having reached the age when previous societies would have considered me a wise elder, past the average age of death in some cultures today.

I see you and through you I see me. I depend on my sight, either literally through my eyes or figuratively through the expression of my thoughts on this page. And yet my sight has blinded me to the truth.

Didn't I tell you I repeat the words of those before, during and after me? Don't you know I'm not the only one to know the truth behind the facts under the superficial layers of daily living?

Are you meant to live on the superficial layers? Do you care about anything other than what's before you? Do you question the reality of reality? Did you “wake up” in the crib and see a world that those around you couldn't comprehend or no longer cared to see?

I have fooled myself with my body. I have not fooled myself with my body. I didn't know that I'd fake it until I'd make it.

I am not who I thought I was. I am not who I am. Who am I? I am the truth. You are the truth. We are the truth. We are beyond the beyond.

We are not these words but these words are us.

People have tried to tell me, using people tools, about life outside the people life but my natural use of anthropomorphism has turned me back to looking at non-people life as though it was another version of people life.

Let's look at an example. Those who stare at the cosmos know that large waveform patterns show the underlying undulating “weather” of the universe. Our comprehension of this “weather” is limited because of our people-powered concept of time. Another one. We say we need bigger instruments to peer into the distant reaches of space to find the state of the universe ten billion years ago but can we see the same thing when considering we're the state of the universe as if it had been scooped into a tube, frozen and then pushed out the other end of the tube like cake icing?

Two examples of superficial, people tool views of existence.

But really, does any of this matter? I am one person on the superficial level. I act as if I'm one person on the superficial level and have made a comfortable life for myself in that regard. In other words, I faked the life of a member of my species and I made it.

Of course, it matters. I, that is, my body, will die. “I” will end. The ripples of who I was will bounce back and forth and lose their shape among those who use people tools, absorbed into the bigger wave patterns of this part of the universe, which will lose their shape with time, too.

I have only my life to look back on and see my thoughts on which I reflect the life I thought I lived. I will not create waves big enough to stop wars or starvation. I create small waves to give me momentum which aids in my journey through uncharted territory.

But again, these are superficial sentiments. I am not me and I am not the small waves I make. “I” does not exist.

How do I describe the truth to me (to you) using these words when the truth is not in these words?

I see you. You see me. We look at each other using our carefully-trained cultural magnifying glasses looking for clues about our use of people tools.

The truth is not in tools. Thus, tools will not reveal the truth. Being me, I cannot see the truth.

I have sat here for many years – at least since I was ten – using words to describe the part of the truth I know, to keep me focused on the truth I see outside of the superficial layers my species creates in our inspiration to see cultural growth as progress toward what we think our clever use of tools will reveal about the truth, knowing the truth is outside of being my species.

But you already know that. Like I said, I am yours. I am repeating what you've already heard over and over and over again. The truth is in the core of your being, partially reflected in your DNA but beyond even your/our understanding of our place in the universe, and especially our seeing the universe as if it will reveal something to us through people tools.

To repeat words stated earlier, I am not spouting pseudoscience, touting a new religion or laying down some riff that I heard in my dreams after a previous evening of eating spicy tofu mixed into a delectable curry sauce.

I am, to use cultural terms, deprogramming myself. I am tuning out my species to see what's around me as if I'm not me. I am discarding the emperor's new clothes that everyone sees everyone else wear because no one wants to say there's nothing there to see.

And I'm attempting to deprogram myself using the people tools which programmed me. Impossible? Yes!

That's why I say these words are not the truth. These words don't point to the truth. They don't even hint at the truth. These words are my enjoyment. They are my playthings. I am having fun in every single moment, even when my fun is not fun for everyone around me, knowing that the pebble of my fun will cause disruptive ripples somewhere else in some other time. I treat myself as if I will live no other life than in this moment with you because these words guarantee such a condition.

The truth is not out there. The truth is not in here. The truth is just a word. The idea of the truth is a people tool.

I am not the pied piper. I am not the royal jester. I am not a soothsayer or a wise elder (if I cease exercising, I will become a wide elder, however).

I know the truth. So do you. I cannot convince you otherwise. The truth is outside of being a member of our species. Can you know the truth without being able to see it?

Duality is life as we know it. The truth is free of duality. Life is not truth but truth is life.

I am not here to sell you something. I am not here to coerce you to accept my opinion over your opinion of how to live life. I found success in this life without knowing the truth. Or I should say that I knew the truth but found success without putting the truth to use in this life.

You can succeed using the facts that our superficial layers of life provide. In fact, that's probably the only way you'll succeed here. But you can succeed in another way that includes more than the life of one species. More than life as we know it in any form.

Truth has no emotions, truth has no pain or pleasure, truth has no thoughts or awareness of what we think of as thoughts, awareness, self, pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, life, or death. Truth is more than universal but truth is seeing the universal in seeing our species' creation of an ecumenopolis on one orbiting spherical blob.

When you see the truth that is usually just out of reach or around the corner, glimpsed in your peripheral vision or hidden in plain sight, you know what I knew when I opened my eyes and saw this world is not here to be understood by me, why I don't need riches or titles or accolades as this body I think of as me.

I once wanted to say the truth is wonderful but the truth is indescribable. The truth is also horrible, depending on one's view (just like someone said hell is seeing the version of you if you had taken all the risks you avoided and became immensely successful). The truth requires no money. The truth requires no sacrifices. The truth is unaware of us as our species in anything we do or say or wish.

Why have I spent time here repeating myself and others in using words to describe the indescribable? I don't know. I know the truth won't set you free. You'll still be your body if you see what you cannot see. You'll have been born, you will live and you will die whether you discovered the truth right there in front of you or you didn't even know there was truth at all.

I am here because I believe in myself. I believe in myself because I know I don't know the truth. I only think I know the truth that is there beyond what my body senses or what my body interprets of people tools that sense what my body cannot.

I cannot escape my body. I will always see the world and my species through the training that my species provided.

Despite my repetition, I am making progress. I use humour to disperse the fog that being a member of my species creates. Clarity is brief. I see what I already saw once before and forget it again. Then the next moment arrives and I'm back to where I was, just past where I started, sometimes farther along, sometimes further back. Usually aware that these words are meaningless once the truth is revealed to me again.

Don't pay for what you already know. Pay for what you want to put into practice to succeed in the superficial layers of life with our species. I pay for my thoughts by writing these words for me/you to read later on, practicing what I believe, believing in me, pointing out the truth that we can't point to or talk about but already know so that's why these words are meaningless.

You know what I'm talking about, I'm sure. I saw it in your smile just now and heard it in your thoughts I can't see. If not, soon enough you'll see it again for the very first time. That's what the truth is all about.

How you interpret the truth is up to you. Don't quote me on that. I'm repeating someone else's words that didn't have any meaning to begin with. Time to stop this blog entry and forget what I just said.

Meanwhile, in world news...

While I've been off pondering my navel oranges, shocking, latebreaking news has been making its way around our ecumenopolis. I'll try to get it straight in this blog entry:

• The Obama administration announced it had brokered the sale of India to China. In addition, China had annexed both Pakistan and Afghanistan to expand its manufacturing base.

• Oprah announced her retirement from her television career so that she and Sarah Palin could form the New Woman Today political party. To counter the early popular surge of the Oprah/Palin ticket in the runup to the 2012 election, Lou Dobbs and Rudolph Giuliani have joined forces and started the Yesterday's Old Guys political party.

• The Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom have flooded their streets in an attempt to siphon off some of Venice's tourist trade, trying to take advantage of the negative press surrounding the Vatican's attempt to draw in Anglicans excited about Italy since Berlusconi has turned off a large segment of female tourists to his country.

• Sports referees everywhere have become the new enemies of the state, requiring them to hide in secret caves in the mountains of their countries during periods between games. Security companies are making a fortune protecting the referees and their families from fans who've diverted their hooligan hatred from their rivals and onto the so-called neutral judges of their team's play. Bets are being taken to see how long it will be before Osama bin Laden changes his allegiance and becomes the official spokesperson for referees, umpires and sports judges.

• Japan revealed that its government and business leaders have all been replaced with robots, guaranteeing stability in the hopes that foreign investors will look upon the land of the rising sun as a solid investment in comparison to its east Asian neighbours.

• Australia has declared itself the official permanent headquarters of the Olympic flame, being able to find fire anywhere in the country - outback, housing estates or urban area - anytime of the year; that is, unless red dust storms become the norm. In that case, they'll build a giant tower on Ayers Rock that will hold the Olympic flame high enough for folks in the space station to see.

• Fish of the world have banded together and are said to be on the hunt for humans. The sudden increase in volcanic and earthquake activity has some people speculating that fishes' ire has raised the spectres of Poseidon and Varuna who will destroy any one of our species found crossing the seas. Having already anticipated this turn of events, Warren Buffett has merged his train business with Tata Motors to design rail and road systems that can safely and speedily transport goods from one land mass to another without using water. Qantas Airlines is said to be in negotiations to merge with the Batafett company. FedEx and UPS are considering merging, too...well, you already know that one, don't you? [Answer: FedUp]

• In even more latebreaking news, Martha Stewart and Rachael Ray have settled their differences and announced they're getting married. They've asked Heidi Klum to serve as their fashion consultant. To expand their home consulting business, they plan to marry in Cuba, hold their wedding reception in Venezuela and split their honeymoon between Iran and North Korea, donating all profits of the sales of their high-def progressive marriage reality mini-series to feed the poor.

• Peru has banned the export, import and sales of cosmetics until it has solved the issues around the murder-for-fat crime syndicate. The United States plans to investigate weight loss programs in its country to determine if tranquilizers are being used to sedate people and suck out their fat at night. The IRS is reviewing the tax returns of liposuction surgeons to see if they're hiding the profits of the sale of their customer's fat. The FDA and DEA are looking into fast-food companies for any illegal use or trade of human fat for deep vat fryers.

• And last but not least, college students around the world have staged a walkout, protesting the increase in the price of their access to the right to download free music, movies and plagiarised term papers. Jo Lin Ran, Valdim Hrusiki and Debbie Sawertyu quickly took advantage of the situation and have released software that allows students to freely educate themselves as well as receive all the free electronic goodies they want, including recent computer games, bestselling novels, and desktop software, with every download counting toward college credits, creating the first completely open source and free, accredited college degree program. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are already competing in negotiations to buy the company. Analysts expect this to be the first trillion-dollar company to be formed and sold out in one day - online scam companies are chomping at the bit to post their ads in this rich source of disposable income.
  

That's all the news not fit to print but likely to become reality outside of the satirical romp through the unlikely lives of celebrity. Until next time, gullible readers!

We Are, Not Alone

Have you sat on a cliff overlooking an ocean or a sea and thought about the massive size of our planet in relation to your body, how the waves that'll knock you over if you were standing on shore look like tiny, almost imperceptible ripples on the surface of the water? The inertia behind the particles of water? The inertia behind the spinning of the planet on its axis and its orbit around the Sun?

We call one revolution around the Sun 365 days because of the planet's axis spin. Have you ever set a gyroscope in motion and counted its number of revolutions around the axis? How many revolutions does the gyroscope take before it perceptibly slows down and then topples over?

The finite.

Counting votes. Counting vessels. Charting maps. Mapping family histories.

Tonight, I float, tethered to the planet but not strongly connected to any one feeling or issue associated with my species. I call this condition "freedom" despite my brain and upper body coordinating to stay within one set of grammar rules to document this moment on an electronic typewriter.

I believe with all my heart and soul that this is my planet, here for my nourishment and entertainment. I have no place else to go. So, while I sit here and think about my interactions in moments yet to be, I ask myself how I want to be nourished and entertained.

Does a population fully connected and productive in the global economy add or subtract to my image of the perfect world for me? Are war and poverty chronic conditions of our species? If we are like drops of water in the ocean of us, are we leftover waves from unseen pebbles dropped in another section of us, so complicated in our wave pattern interaction that we can never truly reset the whole globe into one set of beliefs or mutually beneficial actions?

What am I missing in my complete understanding of the myriad motivations of our species that make naysayers and doomsday predictors so popular? Do we simply bury and forget the innate sight of our ending, extending death of self to catastrophic proportions for our family, group, culture and/or species? I know I have asked these questions already. I know I have answered them. I know I am like my species and mercifully forget what I already know so that I don't know how much I repeat myself.

Time to get past this repetitious philosophy again and bring humour back out, a cycle I thankfully repeat when my philosophy starts looking down into the abyss, the bottomless pit of impossibly probable answers to questions I know better than to ask myself.

The Book of the Future sits here beside me, opened to the next chapter. I know where we're headed. I know the happiness and joy we'll find. I know the things we'll repeat that I didn't bother to keep up with the last time we repeated them. Why look at the future with dread? Why the dire predictions? We know we're going to repeat ourselves. Why not look at the fun and meaningful insight we'll gain?

We are not alone. We are our own aliens. We are our own angels and devils and gods and goddesses. We have this grand universe here before us and we let this wonderful gift to ourselves go to waste by arguing over who gets the last peanut or grain of rice when there's a field to be planted. We talk about how other people let us down as if we expected something different to happen with the next person we elevated to the status of perfection. Everything in front of us is fantastically imperfect, the flaws and dents and scratches there for us to thoroughly enjoy.

I float here in the moment, my back ache and overweight belly telling me I'm here in a particular place in time. I call this moment ecstasy, an epiphany of grandeur that I would not trade for the riches of the world. I celebrate my imperfection and say the world is mine because I am yours. My eyesight worsens, my memory leaks, my skin wrinkles and my fascination grows closer to infinity.

I am thankful for all of you, wherever you live, whatever you do, whomever you call your image of perfection. We are all imperfect and by our imperfections we depend on one another for creating this moment that will lead us to the next stupendous moment that will open us up to opportunities we couldn't have had the moment before.

In my thoughts I am standing on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher looking west toward the setting sun, individual drops of ocean water impossible to detect, waves barely visible. In my thoughts I am riding in the space shuttle looking down at the globe spinning beneath me, political borders impossible to detect. Our planet is not perfectly round and it wobbles sideways on its axis - because of that, we live. We are here because the universe is imperfect. Understand that and you'll understand your perfect place in the universe. Contradictory? No, just a matter of semantics. The truth, as they say, is outside these words which are an imperfect set of symbols describing what we're doing in the moment.

To know what's going on you have to get away from these words. Whether you figure out what's going on with people around you or away from other people depends on who you are. I know people in both thought patterns. Some find themselves, who they are, in groups. Some find themselves in quiet places alone. Some of you already know which one you are. Some of you will have to spend a long time experimenting to find out. Either way, accept the moment and what's going on with you at the time. The discovery's in the journey just as much as in the destination, if not more so.

How much does an ocean wave "enjoy" its travels before it hits the shore? It is. It does not know how else to be so there is nothing to enjoy in its being what it is. We are the same, are we not? Don't think about being you. Just be. Then you'll see. You are, not alone.

Anthropomorphosis

A friend of mine told me about a person who put his eccentric showmanship to commercial use and wrote the book, "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage," a tale of modern technology at work (author's name: Clifford Stoll). The writer also carried his fame into public presentations, accentuating his seemingly exceptionally bizarre behaviour, even in front of so-called stern, straight-laced, top military brass.

Evangelising is not just a quasi-religious style of living. We look up to modern icons because of their ability to evangelise themselves through their strong personalities and/or the strong personalities of those around them (such as family, friends, colleagues, agents, producers, fans and foes alike). As you know, history is really just the retelling of instant fame and fortune in the moment. Doesn't matter if you were famous or infamous, notorious or inglorious, as long as you got noticed.

Some people get fame. Some people get fortunes. Some people get both when they only sought one. Most of us get neither.

Because we are who we are - people, members of one species - we communicate no other way but person-to-person. Can you see that we anthropomorphise everything, then?

I live in the realm of our species. I do not expect to wake up and quack like a duck one day, seeking grass to eat and a pond to paddle across while keeping my eyes out for land and water predators. My innate duty is self-preservation and then preservation of our species. By default, my life is focused on the life of us.

Do we all see that? I don't know. Some people focus on themselves to the exclusion of the rest of the living things on this planet. Some people see us as just one more species on this planet that the universe can give or take.

How do we pay homage to ourselves as bipedal primates and see ourselves as equal to all parts of the universe at the same time? How do I pay attention to my bodily needs, my social desires, the needs/desires of people around me, the needs/desires of people I can't or will never see, the needs/desires of other living things on this planet and the existence of other parts of the universe that don't qualify as living systems?

In other words, I don't seek fame or fortune. I expect to find sufficient food, clothing, shelter and adventures to fill my bodily needs and brain's social desires. In that old, classic psychology description, I have fulfilled my self. In the same vein, I have seen wonders of the universe beyond normal comprehension and thus consider myself self-actualised. I exist on the superficial level of social/civil life and find other levels just as easy to place my existence, if I want to believe they exist (e.g., a swirling set of atoms/molecules like a tornado/hurricane/typhoon that spins up and dies off, unnamed by the universe except by our anthropomorphic habits). I do not understand everything I see but I have reached a state in my life where I trust others who say they do understand what I do not. I have seen the universe for what it is and can let go of my having to have a historical place in it.

I live in the moment. I live in the moment with you. You have needs/desires different than mine. Because my needs/desires are met, I can pick and choose your needs/desires I want to help you meet or achieve.

Thus, I walk the path that others have walked before me. My behaviour may or may not be unique in the moment between us, but ultimately any one of my behaviours is repetitive, either by me or someone before, during or after me. I have reached the state of my life where I want to help others regardless of personal gain in the form of fame or fortune.

A few friends of mine have asked me to help them find a way to be more financially successful than they are right now. I see a path of success for them and their needs/desires. I also see the path is wide enough for others to join. The path contributes to what I see as an idea that integrates preservation of me, my species and the living/nonliving things around us. As one of my friends said, he does not want to wrap his hands around the whole world because such a person stretches too thin and can be easily crushed. Instead, find a small crack and, like a fungus, squeeze in the space and fill it. Blend in with the environment instead of trying to smother it. Grow with the space instead of trying to overwhelm it. You may not seek fame and fortune in the process. If, however, the process is successful for everyone and everything around you, fame and fortune may follow. There's nothing wrong with that. In that case, people will accept your eccentricities and perceived personality quirks - they may even reward you for them!

Never put yourself down for who you are. Congratulate yourself for being the only person in the world who is exactly, accurately, precisely like you all the time. You don't have to be famous or wealthy to be you. Fill your needs and desires - if they match the needs and desires of others, fame and fortune will find you. Take care of you and you take care of your species. Take care of your species and your species will take care of you. Try it and see. I might be right!

My blog may be interesting or boring, correct or wrong, but my blog is me. I believe in who I am and have gotten all the success I've ever wanted. Time to share my success with you. Some day I'll get you circling the Moon on a cruise ship. We get closer to our launch date moment by moment. There goes another moment. Have you booked your ticket yet? Won't be long now!

Quick Cel

Some recent movies I watched and from which I gained interesting social commentaries:

• Mon oncle d'Amérique (starring Gérard Depardieu)
  
• On The Beach (starring Gregory Peck)
• The Castle (starring Michael Caton)
• Siu nin Wong Fei Hung ji: Tit Ma Lau, a/k/a Iron Monkey (starring Rongguang Yu)

Time to prepare my students' final exam with which they will demonstrate their memorisation capabilities in relation to the subject of Linux server administration.

= = =

Re-reading my last few blog entries and recalling my difficulty getting a full night's sleep the last few nights tell me I'm more interesting to myself in my writing when I've had long stretches of/for REM brain activity. Otherwise, I make frequent typos and language rule errors unintentionally. Which is more important - live for the moment in observation mode and write about it later on, OR live for the moment with full gusto and only have time to take a breather before living the next moment, letting someone else worry about writing down what happens to just another member of my species on another given day? I've spent a lot of time in the former. Time to experience the latter for a while, eh, Rick?

Druscilla Penny

How do you describe worker productivity? Do you look at earnings? Profits? Tasks? Projects?

Do you say, "Well, I know my employees have spare time that they use for social networking, either intraoffice (gatherings at the water cooler, hallway, bathroom, carpark, etc.) or via electronic devices. Since I pay for that time, I'm going to reduce my technology repair/update overhead and get my employees to become part-time technology experts."

Do you prevent or minimize the number of meetings that take place in which only one or two employees actively participate and make decisions while the other 90% could be effective somewhere else?

Do you increase the so-called multitasking that employees perform, knowing that some types of multitasking are actually counterproductive?

Do you require employees to take training classes during offhours, such as before/after work hours, or during work breaks such as lunch?

Do you push decisionmaking down the hierarchical chart, empowering employees to be more effective?

Do you cross-train employees so they can learn to do 1.25 and then 1.5 jobs at once, increasing productivity while monitoring their health, making sure you have exercise and counseling available to maximize employee use, without detrimentally affecting their usefulness or decreasing your profitability with too many health monitoring services?

Do you see yourself as having the privilege of your employees working for you, or do you think your employees see their jobs as their right to be employed and you're the lucky dog who gets to deal with them?

Knowing you take attrition into account as part of the cost of retraining, and ultimately a drag on worker productivity, how do you measure worker satisfaction? Do you take preventative measures or do you react to worker negativity? Do you encourage creativity or do you beat your employees until morale improves?

Do you own your own company or does your company own you? Do you think you are your own company, standing on your two feet, or do you think you carry a bunch of people on your shoulders?

Do you look at a statistic like worker productivity and automatically think of a spreadsheet containing numbers and formulas you can manipulate with time? Or do you see individual faces and capabilities which indicate limits you can stretch with training or have to work around?

Do you think in macroeconomic terms or do you worry about the next sale or project deadline?

Are you a puppet master pulling the strings or a ventriloquist with your hand inside a dummy's head?

Is ignorance bliss or dread to you? Or a challenge for your next round of personal continuous education/training?

If you knew the truth behind worker productivity, would you believe it, or do you see worker productivity as a completely imaginary number with no meaning whatsoever?

Our social structures blanket us with terms and definitions. Which ones do you ignore? Which ones can you not ignore? Do you seek out more peaks and valleys of the unknown terrain of new social structures, or are you so overwhelmed with what you've got to take care of that you're trying to filter out and reduce the amount of information you're already receiving? Does the phrase "worker productivity" cover either one of those situations for you? Should it? What about a tribe deep in the Amazon rainforest or a self-sufficient family hidden in the Appalachian mountains?

May we define "person productivity" to account for all conditions of our species' members? If so, then employment is not a defining factor for our usefulness as persons. Think about it...

Celtic Crossing

Have you ever hunted orchids in Borneo or kayaked through bioluminescent water in Puerto Rico? Have you ever attended Protestant services in Ireland? How about all three? Throw in skydiving over Antarctica and you've got some stories to tell, I'm sure.

Tonight, upon the invitation of my Alabama-bred nephew, my wife and I attended an evening service associated with the 187th annual meeting of the Alabama Baptist State Convention at Whitesburg Baptist Church in Huntsville.

At the service, we watched the singing performance of the secondary school church choir and a Irish-born couple called The Gettys (of course, their being Protestant, you can guess they grew up near Belfast, not Dublin) and their Irish-style band.

Through the years, my wife and I have sat at the church and watched our niece and nephew in various church-related activities (my wife and I are not members of the church but her deceased brother was and his family still are). The church's main seating area, the sanctuary, can accommodate several thousand people. Like many large sanctuaries, the church includes projection screens, videographers, professional sound system, orchestra pit area and other refinements tuned to the needs and desires of today's religious audiences/congregations.

Many years ago, in the same venue we saw a concert by a group centered on the singing performance and celebrity of Lisa Whelchel, a child star from the TV show, "The Facts of Life." We've seen several versions of the church's annual summertime show based on patriotic themes.

In other words, we're used to seeing the room as much for its role as a concert hall as a place for religious worship.

I've mentioned being in a small singing group called Sing Out Kingsport when I was a secondary school student, haven't I? You know, the one based on the international traveling singing group(s) called Up With People. Well, tonight I watched a 30-year slide in time, as if Up With People still existed but had hidden itself in the student body of a local church. The same upbeat music, the same rock band ensemble, everything including the sensitive choir director who had to compete with the kids watching themselves on the big screen instead of watching his hand movement for tempo and volume control.

What is the purpose of religion? You tell me your version - I'll seek first to understand, then try to be understood. Okay, I'm listening...I'm listening...oh well, sorry, you're taking too long. I'll listen to the rest of what you have to say later on. Anyway, religion, as my wife and I constantly discuss, is a way to develop a moral compass for people so they can agree with the social direction their subculture is headed and can turn nearby, interested people around who are headed in a different direction.

The youth singing group tonight sang songs and performed a skit to demonstrate their well-developed moral compass. I'm sure many, if not most of them, will carry on the traditions of their parents and their peers in this subculture. In fact, I'm more than sure. I know they will. All cultures train their members to comfortably conform to and comply with cultural standards, including religious practice. Barring major disasters or wars, cultural offspring carry on the habits of their ancestors. Well, then there's that other annoying inconvenience for cultures wanting to perpetuate themselves - the competing subcultures around the offspring.

I believe all cultures that promote positive reinforcement of our species are equal. I'm just as willing to review events tied to this Southern Baptist tradition as I am to sit and watch Inuits or Hindus or football worshipers (a late happy birthday nod to Nehru, by the way). By discussing them here, I realize there's the chance that those I discuss appear to get a level of higher importance than the ones I haven't discussed yet. I cannot control your impression but if you hang out here long enough, you'll catch me covering an ultrawideband variety of events about people interested in preserving our species for future generations.

After the youth choir finished, the main stars, Keith and Kristyn Getty and their backup band, performed.

Some of you may be familiar with a phenomenon known as Celtic Woman, an ensemble of five Irish women singing soft lullabies and other tunes you could imagine the "greatest singer in all the world" (at least so I'm told), Celine Dion, belt out on stage. Well, Kristyn and her crew are to the Christian music entertainment scene what Celtic Woman is to PBS/NPR fundraisers - a sure moneymaker and a fun evening of singing, handclapping and general joy.

I'll be honest with you here, whatever that means (probably that I want to throw in a side comment that contradicts what I know to be a generally well-liked something or other). I'm not a big church kind of guy. In fact, I don't attend many events tied to large numbers of people (except for American football, as many of you know) - not musical ones, anyway. I like intimate musical settings where you can see and hear and smell musicians passionate about their performance. I don't want to have to squint to see the performers' faces or join in singing a single melodic line for lyrics projected on a wall.

Thus, I find myself fighting against my cynical self to stay focused on the positive elements of tonight's performance, which was designed for people who like to gather in large groups and celebrate life. After all, they are what my goal for our species is all about, choosing lifestyles that may run counter to mine but point our species to one of many safe, reliable methods to ensure our future survival.

In this country, we have what we call retirement centers, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other euphemisms for places where people who cannot or do not want to live independently are housed together. In these locations, you find people from all walks of life. They may be mentally challenged from birth. They may have been well-known CEOs, military veterans, housewives, or religious leaders. However, they all share the same life, with community activities geared to keep them as mentally and physically active as possible.

When I was in Sing Out Kingsport, we sang at these senior citizen housing units. We also sang at small churches, including pentecostal churches where no one was allowed to leave until everyone had stepped forward, confessed sins and declared an eternal love for Jesus. We performed at shopping malls. We stood on top of a flatbed trailer and sang in holiday parades passing through downtown urban centers.

They say that youth is wasted on the young. I disagree. After having been both a young singer in a youth group and an audience member watching young people sing their hearts out tonight, I believe that youth is what you make of it. You can spend your youth practicing sports skills, developing scientific knowledge sets, caring for the sick and the elderly, and putting your public singing/acting abilities to social use. You can also spend your youth playing video games and texting - socialising with your peers, in other words.

It's true what they say - you're only young once. You can be young at heart your whole life.

Tonight, I wanted to write a review of the Gettys. They were both entertaining and emotionally moving (after the show, we ended up buying and had them autograph three CDs of theirs) but in my thoughts they were overshadowed this evening by the youth choir I watched and heard.

I've focused my belief in moving our species forward mainly on the adults of this world. However, I've missed a large part of how a species' goal is accomplished - the future of our species belongs to the young.

I'm already middle-aged. My generation is running this country and flying from this country into space. We are the flag bearers carrying the standards of our youth. We are also the inspiration for tomorrow's leaders.

The 1960s and 1970s produced the folk rock music that created Up With People and groups like Sing Out Kingsport. Today, many religious groups are using that folk rock music style to attract young people to develop their moral compasses. What will the music and thought set of today's multimedia leaders generate 30, 40 or 50 years from now? I don't know but I sure would like to find out. I'd like to see the great accomplishments of the smiling faces of today's youth when they're middle-aged and leading their generation's political, industrial and multimedia machines of tomorrow. Some, like the ones tonight, will get there by following the moral compass of their ancestors. Some, like my wife and me, will get there by creating their own automatic robotic drum machine to develop a unique beat of their own. We can have a lot of fun along the way.

The fun's in the adventure of getting there. The adventure's in you.

Living In Style

Do you know how many people are murdered every day? I don't. I see a few animals/insects eat other animals/insects most everyday, though.

Do you hold an opinion, weak or strong, about the phrase "global warming"? I don't. I see local and global phenomena related to temperature differentials, though.

Right now, a migrating flock of birds flies back and forth from the same tree. Smaller groups of them fly away and fly back. Finally, they all disappear from my view.

I'm told that swans and Canada geese mate for life, indicating monogamy is a good survival trait for species, I suppose.

What or who is a writer? Some storytellers are writers. Some writers are financially compensated for their writing. All of us write the stories of our lives, with no time or ability to edit and rewrite the past the way we lived it (although most will remember the past in a selective manner but memories are not the stories of our lives).

Today, I think out loud on electronic paper, repeating the words and thoughts of billions. Reflecting but not a reflection. Inflection. Detection. Sounding out my thoughts in the banged-together thought process called the English language, an amalgam of mangled symbols from many cultures, past and present.

So let's say that the average age of a member of our species before dying continues to go up and our average age of conception ability goes down but our average age of last conception stays about the same. At the same time, the cultural training of our species goes up, requiring longer and longer (and/or more intense) sessions in formal situations to ensure we educate our species' children to function anywhere in our global economy. Thus, our children can have children at a younger age, all of whom will live longer, but to succeed anywhere in our ecumenopolis they must spend longer time in education. Does that mean anything? I don't know. Foods full of stimulants and leftover growth products in animals/vegetables, delayed entry into the workforce, and pills for longevity, I suppose.

Do you think you have a purpose for living? If so, then you must know that the world is full of people with other purposes for living besides yours. No matter what we call a purpose, we live. We breathe, eat and exist with others. Rich, poor, leisure, labour, pain, pleasure, happy, sad.

I'm not going anywhere with this. I'm thinking through a line of reasoning in my thoughts to see where our species should be headed next. I don't exist outside of this time I'm in, so I can only imagine what our species will be doing a hundred or a thousand years from now, or more importantly, a thousand generations from now. What we do today sets us one step closer to the next generation's perceived destiny/purpose. Do we want future generations to have the same purpose for living as ours? I don't know.

What I do know is that the general condition of a member of our species will be about the same - born, live, die. How any one member will live in style, I do not know. Despite what I don't know, my existence and what I do while I live here in this time determines what will happen to or what will be available for future generations. People in the future will study our behaviour as if we knew what we were doing and what we were doing to ensure the success of future generations.

I live in the moment. That's all I have. One moment followed by the next one, ad infinitum (my set of moments are limited, I know, but moments as a concept are infinite). I have already experienced the transition of knowledge between trained to believe I'm uniquely special to discovering I'm unique just like everybody else. I have survived to this point in my life without being murdered and eaten or adversely affected by concepts like global warming, able to write about my experiences of living in the moment. I am the result of generations past and the influence, known and unknown, on generations in the future.

I have one life to live here as a member of our species. I see myself as a person in the moment who deals with those around me and our give-and-take, back-and-forth flow of personality influences. I also see myself as a general member of our species, representing us as if I'm at the front of the group of all of us heading blind into the future. In both cases, life in the moment is an experience and an experiment on seven billion different current reasons to live (albeit generally categorisable).

We exist. Our existence gives us the right to whine and complain and celebrate about, with fight for or flight from, others' influence on our right to believe in our purpose for living. We can say what we want in a public forum as long as we realize our influence on others and are willing to face the consequences of our free speech in the moment and on future generations. Certainly, we are free to be or say what we want, wherever and whenever we want, but woe to those who exercise that freedom when others strongly disagree - no doubt, the consequences will make themselves clear in the next moment - the balance of nature exhibited in the behaviour of our species in action, not just words.

I live freely but I also live at the mercy of those around me. We live together in this moment, not a previous or future moment. We can push our purpose for living on others. We can announce our purpose for living and others will follow along or fight against our purpose. We can live quiet, unassuming lives that barely get the attention of others around us, purpose or no purpose standing out. In all these cases (and more!) we determine the set of conditions for ourselves and others in future moments. This moment affects the next moment, ad infinitum (hopefully, not ad nauseum!).

Have I discovered anything new in this blog entry? I don't know. I feel like there's something just out of sight, like sensing the flock of birds somewhere else in the environment right now. I live in the moment. I have the Book of the Future. We live in an ecumenopolis. We're prepared to move our species onto other planetary bodies. We are on the verge of seeing the universe in a whole new light, just like every generation before us has seen the universe in a whole new light, backwards in time ad infinitum.

My gut says I'm working with others to see education as a solution, not a problem; unemployment as a solution, not a problem; the separation of political entities as a problem, not a solution; mass starvation as a problem, not a solution; universal health care as both a problem and a solution. All while allowing seven billion different opinions on what life's all about.

Imagine you have the world in your hand. You know why the world's atmosphere changes and you know what the atmosphere will be like over the next 20,000 years, plus or minus a few variations along the timeline. You have all the information you need to categorise individual members of our species into interlinked groups, subgroups, cultures and subcultures. You know from birth a person's susceptibility to known diseases, propensity for social behaviour types and possible cultural importance. You want every person to provide positive reinforcement for the species so you foster their growth to meet their potential, regardless of what you think of any one individual's potential. You may know one person who will be a psychotic killer, another person an expert surgeon and another person who will wander from one place to another almost randomly despite strong potential for one characteristic or behaviour at birth. At all times, you maintain your goal of positive reinforcement toward long-term survival of your species, allowing flexibility in the changes to individuals as their timelines decrease because randomness is also part of your plan.

Of course, you don't have to imagine holding the world in your hand. You already do. When you can see yourself on one spot on this planet while also holding the whole planet, then you understand why you're important in the moment.

I hold the world in my hand. I see every one of you. I don't force my opinion down your throat. I find those who agree with my goal of getting our species extraterrestrial while allowing the rest of you to live the lives you want, directly or indirectly contributing to my goal which also includes the general care and maintenance of our species. Some of you will get in my way. I'll get in the way of some of you. When that happens, we'll see who has to move around whom or what in the next moment.

Well, what do you know? Here's the next moment. Talk to you again soon. Thanks for all the letters, gift, emails, text and other means of communication between us. Life is what it is. I wouldn't have it any other way in this moment.

Our Cabin In The Woods

Our humble cabin in the woods is available for view as part of photo documentation of the north Alabama winter storm of 1988:

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/hun/events/Jan1988snow/WINTERHS.JPG

Civilian Supercomputer Shatters Nuke Simulator

Civilian Supercomputer Shatters Nuke Simulator’s Speed Record

Posted using ShareThis

Using Social Media Effectively

Guess it's time to dive into the deep end and see if social networking can perform extreme commercial makeover success:

http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/socia-media-entrepreneurs/

More as the frog flies...

Riverview Flat

In the summer of 1984, I enjoyed my freedom. I was in the last break before what should have been my senior year in university. I had changed college majors many times, most of them discussed here, I believe, and was ready to move out on my own. A friend of mine, Amy Easter, agreed to share a two-bedroom flat with me on the other side of the river from the campus of UTK.

Oftentimes, life imitates art because we like to appear in art form ironically.

The manager of the Riverview Flat Complex told me his name was Casey. Casey stood about 5'8", his shoulders wide and upper body muscular. We chatted a few times while I moved furniture into the flat.

Casey had worked as a bouncer, earning the nickname "Casey at the Bat" for his use of a stick of wood to smack disruly patrons out the front door. Before his bouncer job, he had been a gymnastics instructor but gave up that job because he was getting too old to throw and catch out-of-control athletic bodies that flung themselves at him.

I had saved up enough money to pay the first month's rent as well as half the deposit. Amy was supposed to come up with the other half but she had lost her job and wanted to negotiate with me to cover the cost of both moving in and possibly future full payments of rent until she found a job.

By 1984, I had decided I was a writer. I did not qualify my writing ability and did not judge myself against a perfect model although I had writing heroes I looked up to, including Orwell, Burroughs, Tolkien, Poe and Plath. Little did I know of James Agee or Cormac McCarthy.

I had sought publication in two literary magazines, one at ETSU and one at UTK, getting my first rejection slips. I read the editions that could have contained what I had written - the literary magazine poetry/prose selections were no better or worse than mine. I decided that I had been right to start my own underground publication at ETSU called Swashbuckler. With the little money I had, I managed to publish a few issues of the Swashbuckler, including submissions by anonymous donors who had sent work to my student mailbox posted in the publisher section.

In Knoxville, Rus Harper, an experimental/punk musician, ran his own underground rag and I had little desire or money to compete against him so I supported his work.

By my second month in the flat, I realized I could not afford to support Amy's and my lifestyles. She was not my girlfriend so there was no incentive of long-lasting love to keep us together. On top of that, an infestation of fleas in the flat had reached a level I never thought possible, considering I barely had money for food, let alone flea killer insecticide power to cancel the circus act of my jumping and flipping around to avoid the nearly invisible acrobats nibbling any of my body parts they could get a hold of.

Given the choice of either roaches or fleas, I'll take roaches. At least they have the decency to avoid you when they share a flat with you.

But wait, that's not all! My bank account was overdrawn, I had no credit cards to charge my rent on, my flatmate had decided I was no fun since I wouldn't pay her half of the rent and provide us food, and my job at Steak&Ale restaurant was getting way too serious for me.

I had taken a job at Steak&Ale because my hours at Taco Bell were insufficient to provide a living wage. There were so many available workers from around the UTK campus that the Taco Bell management on the Strip could keep our weekly hours low, getting a full staff whenever they wished, making those of us with unusual school hours get lousy paychecks in the process.

But I had decided to quit school for a while. I had spent several years drifting from one institute of higher learning to another, switching majors like underwear, and was building a student loan I thought I'd never repay (probably around $4k to $6k at the time).

My job at Steak&Ale was simple - wash dishes, bus tables and put garnish on dinner plates, with occasional forays into the salad bar area to refill rabbit food containers. I liked the simplicity of the job but the management team saw I was too well organized, turning the dishwashing assignment into an efficient minifactory of clean utensils and other items that'll fit into a square, shiny-metal steam box, anticipating which plates, knives, forks and cooking gear needed to be ready next. Hey, is there anything the matter with taking pride in doing your job, no matter what it may be? Of course not.

That is, unless you don't want to get the attention of management. Since I was no longer in school, the general manager thought he'd put my natural "work ethic" initiative to work by training me to be a bartender and bookkeeper for Steak&Ale. After all, he said, most of his employees were either current or former college students and none of them showed the drive to perfect their jobs like me.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not bragging about being a dishwasher, busboy or salad bar tender. I just don't like hearing people being upset or disappointed about my interaction with them. You know what I mean. I dislike rejection of any kind.

So I carried the bar recipe book with me and studied the restaurant's accounting books - daily receipts, food expenses, etc. I worked at the bar a little so I could get used to the atmosphere and expectations of the bar patrons. If you've ever tended bar, you know the organizational mindset it takes to pretend like you're just some fun-loving goofy person who knows how to mix a few drinks and entertain those who want to watch you put on a show for good tips.

Meanwhile, because I was training for a new job, my per-hour pay was reduced to a training salary, making it completely impossible for me to pay the next month's rent.

I drove back to the Riverview complex and was prepared to tell Casey I was going to miss the next month's payment but could make it up with increased pay I expected to get with my accounting and bartending jobs in the coming months.

Have I ever told you this story? Probably not. As I said and you know, life imitates art. That afternoon, I walked up the flight of stairs to my flat and saw Casey drag a guy out of the adjacent flat. He held the guy's arm like a twig and literally threw the guy down another flight of stairs. When the guy came up the stairs to fight back, Casey grabbed a baseball bat off the ground and swung a few times in the air. They cussed at each other for a minute or so, long enough for me to get my key in the door.

Casey turned to see me walking into my flat. He asked if I had resolved my lack of funds issue with Amy. I told him I had not. He laughed. I looked at the bat in his hand. He saw my consternation and set the bat back down, explaining to me that the guy he'd kicked out had not paid rent for a few months but always seemed to have enough money for dope.

I asked Casey what would happen if I missed a month's rent. He laughed again. He said he liked me 'cause I always stopped to say hello to him when he was around so he considered me a friend and could let a month's rent slip every now and then. Except maybe not the next month because a lot of people were skipping their rent and he was getting heat from the owner for being too soft. Thus justifying the loud display with my neighbour just now so everyone in the complex could hear Casey was getting serious about rent collection.

After Casey left, I hurried across the carpet into the kitchen to avoid feeding the fleas. The fridge was empty. The hidden bag of potato crisps was gone, presumably eaten by Amy and/or her boyfriend. All I had was the bar recipe book, my car key and a glass of warm water to drink.

I turned on the radio, listening to 90.3, WUTK, an alternative rock station at the time, playing some typical college rock and Reggae but also punk and other "noise" to calm us wild ones down.

I sat down and wrote a few poems that interlaced the Casey scenes with a broken love story. I thought about my girlfriend who was about to finish up her last quarter at Tennessee Tech, two hours' drive away from my forlorn location.

Quite frankly, I felt trapped and had thoughts of ending it all. I had failed miserably as a college student because I couldn't find a subject that interested me long enough to say it was something I wanted to do the rest of my life. I was working a job as a dishwasher training to be a bartender who couldn't pay the rent on a cheap flat because my flatmate had ditched me when I wouldn't take sexual favours in exchange for rent payments (her number and variation on a theme of sexual partners make "Sex and the City" look like amateur hour - I didn't know which or how many STDs she was carrying; best be broke than too poor to get fixed!).

I weighed my options. Face Casey and his bat in a few weeks. Quit my job and go back to school fulltime. Kill myself. Hit up my friends for money.

Finally, I decided to go see my girlfriend the next day.

I drove to Tennessee Tech and visited with my girlfriend for a while. By the way I said goodbye to her, she knew something was up (I think I said "Fair well" instead of "See you later"). I drove to Nashville, going to the Vanderbilt library to look at maps (I chose Vanderbilt because it was one of two places, including Georgia Tech, where I had I received full college scholarship offers when I was a senior in secondary school). I looked at all the places in the United States to visit. I thought about the storybook ending of driving off a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway so I wrote down the names of interstate freeways I could travel to get there.

I decided I would drive to Seattle, Washington, and, if I hadn't decided to kill myself by then, I'd drive down to Pasadena to visit one of my childhood best friends majoring in Applied Science and Literature at Cal Tech.

Why am I telling you this right now? Because earlier today I was driving around north Alabama, enjoying the sunshine and scenery except for the glare of the dashboard reflecting in the windscreen. The midday glare reminded me of the long drive from Nashville to Seattle and the daily glare of the setting sun on the dashboard of the station wagon as I drove west from dawn to dusk in late September 1984.

I call the drive out west my Disneyland tour of the United States, riding past famous landmarks and vistas as if I sat on a monorail, stopping for nothing but petrol along the way. [The trip and the mini-adventures are ripe for telling another time.]

Hard to believe 25 years have passed by since I found myself in a nearly impossible situation, but I wouldn't (and can't) trade a minute of it. Nothing in my life up to then had been sufficient to stop my perpetual motion in one direction.

Casey at the Bat. A metaphor. A euphemism. A tired cliché. A cultural literary landmark. A legend of sports and Western society.

I could mask and twist and turn my adventure into an ironic or satirical farce that hides the facts and truth in some hilarious road trip or scary movie. Or I can let life plainly imitate art and share a slice of my life with you to let you know that I've been there with those of you whose lives didn't lead them where they or their families thought they should.

Like they say, failure is not an option. You make choices and then you make more choices. That's all we do. We choose to do whatever we want to do, even when we feel we're trapped and can't do anything we want.

Despite early setbacks, I retired comfortably at 45 to practice my writing more thoroughly. I've enjoyed this long, strange trip of the first half of my life through highs and lows and comedy and tragedy. Most of it's been fun. It's been one adventure after another, that's for sure. This midlife adventure of writing everyday has been a blast but it's time for my next adventure, which may take away from my daily writing.

With time, I'll let you know more. I'm interested in a small startup that should help create a few jobs in this economy of relatively high unemployment. Some of you I know will be perfect to help get this startup moving fast. Let's make it a success while we're having a blast and a good time. Life's too short not to enjoy what you're doing. I'll see you when you see me.

UTK

My family has multiple connections to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, including alumni/graduates and office workers (I did my time there but didn't graduate). Factoid of the moment: tonight's NBC SNF game starring UTK grad/player Peyton Manning playing QB for Colts vs. Jerod Mayo playing LB for Patriots. Later this week, the U.S. space shuttle launch will put UTK grads in space, including Pilot Barry E. 'Butch' Wilmore (with a nod to his TTU degrees) and Spacewalker Randolph J. Bresnik. A shoutout to Mission specialist Leland D. Melvin for his brief NFL career cut short in training camp.

It's a small world, isn't it? We're one big team - I won't let you forget it, will I? ;^)

Out Of The Way

When you know that you know what you know, knowing that what you know will not change what people will do because you know they're going to act upon what they think they know, do you pretend to make an effort to stop them? Or do you let them do what you know they're going to do anyway?

Holding a copy of the Book of the Future, no matter how frail and temporary it may be, I solidly know what people will do. I don't have tea leaves or astrology or Nostradamus or woolly worms or any other method to divine the future. I simply have the simple facts of what people will do with the limited resources and options available to them. We tend to stay within our lanes of forward motion. In other words, we do not do what we do not know how to do.

Take all of our thoughts and skills and actions and plot them out through a pencil sharpener and you get the condensed version of what we'll do with who we are and what we have.

From the reactions of stageplay audiences to the announcements at global summits, we reveal who we were meant to be. Take old newspapers, cut out the names and places of the past and you can bet you can almost randomly stick in new names and places and see the newspaper articles or website headlines reappear in tomorrow's news.

The perspective of age and the wisdom of insight make one sigh with the comfort of knowing all is well with the world. We reinvent ourselves over and over, with our short lifetimes making us believe we are the next, new, bright, resourceful generation, the best that ever was.

Roving gangs of murderers change their titles but they don't change. Peaceniks find new causes to call their own. Causes of death vary by population habits but people still die on a regular basis. Our anatomy, our genetic makeup, our vessels for living evolve no matter what we believe about evolution.

From that, I navigate my way through life, knowing where most of the shoreline, shifting sandbars, thunderstorms and Murphy's Law popups will occur. Probability and statistics. I consult fancier and fancier versions of the typical switchboard operator who connects me to party lines so I can listen in on clandestine conversations between global leaders not meant for public dissemination.

Some people bet on their knowledge of the future. Natural risk-takers. Extrovertive exhibitionists. Showoffs. Gamblers. Braggadocios. The quiet, introvertive, millionaire next-door. Movers and shakers and benchsitters.

What do you do if you have the future in your hand? I sit back and relax, seeing that what I want to say about what people will or can do rarely changes their actions. A shopper may switch from buying a red shirt to a blue one because someone said blue is the next red but to the shirtmaker, that shopper is still buying a shirt. I may see people driving a government-issued vehicle on the weekend who charge their weekend use of their vehicle to their weekday job and then I decide to report those persons for misuse of government funds, stopping their source of secondary income, but they will probably find another way to make money from their job that I can't see. We may run into obstacles but we continue our habits in one form or another.

How do you see the future? You can do it just like me. Put aside any ethical or moral rose-coloured glasses that you wear. Observe people's habits. Get to know their available resources. Experiment once in a while by dropping a big stone in their path and see how they react (keeping in mind that the "stone" may be an action of yours that contradicts your set of beliefs and habits). Work with a set of computer programmers, with whom no one can connect you, to devise a massively-complex set of scenarios for tracking a large number of the members of our species. Get unsuspecting people to participate in fleshing out the details of one of the scenarios by calling it a game or social networking software. Figure out those who will not participate and set up observation posts to collect information on them, sometimes able to get those who will not participate in computer scenarios to "spy" on each other for you in the analog world.

Again, sit back and relax. Drink a pint of beer or a glass of wine. Treat life as if you're on one long holiday. Get out your pencil sharpener. Grind down a few pencils. Pull out the shavings and glue them together. Place the glued pieces over random newspaper articles from the past. Voila! You have the Book of the Future.

You don't have to believe me. I don't have to believe myself. I'm not trying to get rich from you by selling some snake oil or natural remedy cookbook that the medical authorities don't want you to know about. I'm just a good ol' boy from the hills of east Tennessee who grew up in suburban housing estates. I'm a firm believer in the placebo effect. I like natural opioids. A pile of cash in a hidden offshore account is certainly exhilarating to own but I get my thrills from looking at the changing seasons in the trees outside my window.

People rarely move outside their comfort zones. You can bank on that. Look for those who have insight into the power of crowd manipulation and get to know them so you will have a heads-up where trends are headed. Expect a certain percentage of rising stars to burn out early and fall back. Expect the occasional shooting star to come out of nowhere because you can't see in all directions at once.

That's it. Sit back and relax. Enjoy the show. Every now and then, catch a ride with the circus passing through town and then hitchhike back to your domicile, if you want; some of you will have fun and never go back. Don't forget to take your pencil sharpener, glue, a pair of scissors and a stack of old newspapers with you wherever you go.

See why I don't want to make money off you? I'm telling you the same story told over and over and over again, everyday, all the time. Some of you will be willing to pay a lot of money to believe you're hearing a new story for the very first time (look up P.T. Barnum for why people like that are too vulnerable for me). I don't want your money. I want you to find ways to enjoy yourself without spending your fortune on creating expensive urine or an emperor's new clothes. There are plenty of people out there who want your money - feel free to give them what they want; if that's what you want, then that's what you'll do, with or without me being here telling you the future.

I live in the moment. I can see the future but I can't live there. I reconstruct what I call the past because that's what I was trained to call selective memory but I don't live there, either. One moment at a time. That's all we've got. Either we're happy in the moment or we're not. And now it's the next moment. If you weren't happy before, you can be happy right now, knowing you're you and no one else, free to act with the resources available to you to be who you are meant to be in the moment.

People can change even if they tend not to. You can break the trends of what you were and where you're heading but first see yourself for who you are right now in this moment. You're you, with whatever you're capable of. You can take this moment to decide what to do with your capabilities right now, which change what your capabilities will be in the next moment. And so on.

I've spent the previous moment with you. Time to spend this next moment with my wife, cleaning the roof of fall leaves in preparation to hang winter holiday decorations, a form of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) lighting, if you will. Global leaders will pretend to have control of their countries' destinies even if they have no choice in what they do in this ecumenopolis. When do we stop pretending we're independent countries? Oh well, I already know that answer, don't I, here in the Book of the Future? I call it like I see it. I'm stepping out of the way to let you continue being you, who is part of me who is part of you. Huomiseen!

Prawn Shop Special

R&B. Rhythm and blues. Flies and lobsters and Episcopalians. Brass candlesticks. Isodora jewelry. In the moment in the moment. Foot pedal loops. Beats. Riffs. Traffic cones. Projection TV. Book sale. A lobsterfest of a support team. Guitar box or cigar box? Electrified strings. In, in the, in, the in, in the moment, mo...mo...moment. Microwave Dave in solo heaven, preaching with chords, not rosary beads.

Repeat.

Bake sale. Silent auction. The guru, the wunderkinder, the kind gardener, tending the frets, leading and following himself in some farout place with all of the ritual and none of the guilt. We freely bow to someone's freedom to be, the master of his universe, Europe can't have him, he's our hometown hero.

Cut and paste.

Bake sale. Silent auction, he's our hometown hero. The guru, the wunderkinder, R&B. Flies and lobsters and Isodora jewelry and none of the guilt. Foot pedal loops. Beats. Riffs. Europe can't have him, traffic cones lobsterfest of a support team. Guitar box or cigar box Episcopalians? Electrified strings in the moment. In, in, the in, in the we freely bow to someone's freedom to be in the moment, mo...mo...moment. Microwave Dave in solo heaven, not rosary beads. Book sale. The kind gardener, projection TV. Rhythm and blues tending the frets, brass candlesticks leading and following himself in some farout place with all of the ritual, the master of his universe preaching with chords in the moment.

Repeat and rewind. Peter and winder.

= = =

Blue chicory curtains. Another blues set, a variation on "White Christmas," the musical, the Alabama premiere.

Rewind 30 years. I was president of the secondary school drama club my junior and senior years. I was not the best singer or the best actor. I was funny enough to be popular enough to get elected to an honorary title of an office. Some people looked up to me. I looked out for humour. I oversaw an eclectic group of troubadours and cast and crew (a/k/a the troublemakers).

Fast-forward 30 years. I have a nephew who'll direct a comedy opera at his magnet school in 2010. In 2009, on the 14th of November, I joined my wife and friends for a musical performance at a magnet secondary school whose coordinator is a friend of ours.

Two approaches to a critical review. One, write an alternative view, riffing on the actors' performance as if their show was a satirical riff on the play within the play (first, figure out what riff is - the word sounds interesting but holds no meaning to me other than its sound). Second, hold the actors' capabilities and performances to the highest standards and judge them accordingly, throwing in side comments about such observations as the costumers admiring their work during the intermission ("will the white vests appear in the second act?").

Lee Lyric Theatre. New director. New direction. How do you get the players to feel the words of their memorized lines instead of speaking them? How do you make them absorb their characters and project their lines as if they're ad-libbing in the moment?

When I wrote for the Huntsville Times newspaper for a season or two of secondary school sports back in the mid-1990s working for John F. and Chris W., the point was made that we never say one team was trounced, smashed, beaten or in any negative form should we state that they lost. The other team won. Focus on the positive. Get a quote from the winning coach. Include key stats of the game and comments about the plays of the best players.

Think about this situation for a moment. I have covered secondary school sports, including football, baseball, and basketball. I covered college and professional hockey. I reported on the college women's national basketball championship for a weekly publication. I was a member of the Alabama sports writers association so I got to vote for the Alabama secondary school and professional player of the year. Now I sit here looking over a similar set of notes from another secondary school event.

Secondary school students spend their waking hours thinking about other secondary school students. They also find time to study school assignments and devote their thoughts to extracurricular activities.

A stageplay. A musical. Memorizing dialog. Blocking. Dancing. Singing. Entrances. Exits. Costume fittings. Auditions. Rehearsals. Face makeup.

Just like an American football or international basketball game. Drama. Teamwork.

Some of these students will continue their studies. They will take their new skills to the next level. Which one? Jacobi Hall, the Bing Crosby crooner? Thomas Najjar, the Danny Kaye character? Anna Quirk and Julia Erwin, the Haynes sisters? Chris Sebastian, the modern twist on a modern major general? Forest Bonner, the Martha Washington of Joan Rivers' take on Martha Watson? Lauren Bakke, playing little Susie? Toryn Washington, the real estate agent turned TV producer?

Flashback. I remember sitting in the green room 30 years ago. Flirting backstage while waiting for my next scene, quietly whispering sweet nothings and other carrying on. Turning my back so fellow actors who happened to be female could make quick costume changes. The hard work by the stage manager and the propmakers. The repeated rehearsals by the pit orchestra.

Where is everybody now? One of the orchestra members is the Microwave Dave of my hometown, performing gigs at blues clubs and running website info for the local newspaper, writing his own column, too. The main female leads are both teachers. One of the male leads is a television news anchor. Another male lead is a singer/songwriter in Nashville, having appeared on the TV show Star Search hosted by Ed McMahon. Most of us lead lives in which musical performance or stageplays are ancillary to what we mainly do - church choirs, community theater, occasional cruise ship gigs.

Back to the future. Tonight's performers will find themselves in similar situations. Rare is the sports figure in secondary school who plays professional ball. Just as rare is the secondary school stage star who becomes a movie icon or Broadway legend. Instead, we live for the moment, pushing past who we are to be who we are not.

Outstanding moments tonight:... Anna Quirk in a stunning dress, Gossip Girl style, in the Regency Room scene. Anna and Jacobi Hall reprising "How Deep is the Ocean." Thomas Najjar, Julia Erwin and the chorus in their tap-dancing vests for "I Love a Piano," smiles all around. Anna, Julia and Forest Bonner in their trio singing "Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun." Scooter (Justin Jordan?) and his wig dancing at the piano. Jacobi and Thomas singing "Sisters." Everybody in the scene singing/dancing "Blue Skies." Forest in just about any scene. Lauren Bakke being cute without being too cute. Christina Crutcher and Emily Bannister strutting their stuff. Jonathan Long doing his best impression of "Hi, I'm Larry. This is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl," from the Bob Newhart TV show. Jessica Jones shining in her roles. Others whose faces I can't put with names - you were still enjoyable to watch. The orchestra being clear and crisp and not too loud.

Of course, what is this production without the audience joining in singing the signature song while snow falls in the picturesque scene on stage?

Did the ensemble score a touchdown or sink a three-pointer from half court tonight? No, because this wasn't a sports competition. Even so, they won astoundingly. They competed against their worst fears and stage fright and miscues that the audience will never know about and made us smile and laugh and sing along.

= = =

I will happily fall asleep humming "Blue Skies" to myself and call this a successful day, bookended by the intricacies of Microwave Dave playing against and with his thoughts in musical form; secondary school students, production staff and professional pit orchestra cooperating to lay down another set of memorable tracks later on, a blend of other adventures in between. I put my hands together and bow in thankful peace. Today was a moment in the moment worth remembering. Thanks, y'all. G'night.

......

A prisoner of time, resolute in the belief of the doubt of one's belief, drawing with one hand on a chalkboard the image of one's self in motion while erasing the image with the other hand.

Moths on the run, hiding from birds on the move. Broken wings. Missing feathers. No philosophy for philosophy's sake. Eat while you can fly and see and peck and swallow. Live and hide and fly to keep from being eaten before reproducing.

A curtain of falling leaves tuned to the rhythm of a Glass piece.

A hand position that says halt, a hand position that says come forward. Frozen in a tub of gelatin.

Letting thoughts go on by without stopping to say hello to their flashing frenzy.

Less exposure to the universe than a cosmic ray. Planet's albedo just as dim from a distance.

Searching for one word. Not serendipity. Not kismet. Not fate. Not destiny. The momentary intersection of local phenomena that reflects the infinite, happening because it happened, over with because it's past. Moment not good enough to describe a moment good enough to remember but knowing you can't keep.

If someone wants comforting imagery, then keep my observations to myself. I only see what I think I believe I want to see that I think I just saw. We know the facts and the truth are just words. The unidentified species of the flying object that just grabbed the other smaller flying object with its hard, pointed pair of clamping objects and flew off is just an image in my thoughts of what I think is a bird eating a moth. How much do I know and how much have I been taught to say I know?

If we knew that the universe is not the universe as we think we know the universe, what would we know? We say we are a water-based, oxygen-breathing set of unique organisms because that's what we want to say we know we believe. What will we know when we believe we know we say otherwise?

I know that someone(s) or some group will want to say they were the first to know they knew the knowledge of what we didn't know before but that's still just following the knowledge of the old paradigm ["still just," a phrase used lazily to replace more thought-out, thoughtful idioms].

I am what I believe to be one person whose life was transformed by knowledge that is not mine. I was trained to believe I am part of one species able to distinguish itself from others on the same planet because of its ability to adapt to all environments on one planet. I was taught that there are planets and solar systems and galaxies and super clusters and other temporary confluences in a nearly infinite complex called the universe.

Who am I to see that I should not believe what I doubt I was taught to believe? The roots of a potted tree will twist back around on themselves while seeking life until they choke the tree to death. We say it is a tree. We say it is a potted tree. We say the potted tree has roots. Where does the tree get life? Where does the tree give life? What do we say we know we believe is life? What do we believe? What do we know? What do we believe we know?

I sought and I found. I found what I did not know I knew or would believe. What I know is not important because I can erase myself as I go along without disrupting those around me who know what they know and believe. The beauty of freedom, of a kismet-like moment, is the freedom not to be who we said we knew we believed to be a moment ago. These are "still just" words. Those are "still just" trees shedding their leaves. That is "still just" a bird eating a moth. Perhaps the kismet-like moment is "still just"? What do you think?

Back To The I

I decided to stop teaching at the local technical institute. Obviously, being a person, my reasons are personal. However, the personal reasons are not private.

Why have I decided to stop teaching even though I enjoyed sharing my life with those willing to pay me to learn? Because I did not want to compete with the thoughts and words which taught me more than I can give back, including those from my philosophy/logic teacher at Walters State Community College, Gary Acquaviva:

http://www.valueviva.com/

I write this blog believing I am the only one who reads this. Thus, I am sitting here talking with myself via a computer keyboard, every word an instant feedback to my bodily thought process, a condensed version of all the input/output of the environment surrounding me and this electronic machine.

I stopped teaching because I am a wanderer awed by the wonders of the world around me. I see without having a reason to systematically catalog and categorize a worldview except for these words that show to myself I existed outside this moment I'm in.

Teaching in a formalized classroom structure using someone else's classroom instructional material is always reconstructing the past for someone else's vision, view and hope for seeing how quickly students learn and adapt. I value my students' time in the moment too much to try to adapt my life in the moment to seeing how students adapt to material which is not mine.

My time here is limited, down to 14,783 days or so, if I take care of myself as a body. I care about my species but I am also a selfish person. I have goals that conflict with trying to outshine my previous professional professors/instructors/teachers. I do not want to compete with the images in my thoughts of the ones who taught me more than the classroom material they had to work with in the time we had to spend together in a classroom setting.

My hat's off to those who teach, who give their all to their instructional style, who see into the thoughts of their students individually and tailor their teaching to maximize the value and quality of time together with every one.

My journey takes me to farther fields to study further. My comprehension of my place on this planet and our place in the universe absorbs all the time I have. So far, my understanding of the languages of our species tells me we have a lot to learn and you have tons to teach me. We feel like we have accomplished much in our science and technology but we know so little that amazement still wakes me up in the morning to discover more.

Most importantly, I have learned I do not need to feel rushed in my attempt to grasp what's in front of me. The bombardment of stimuli will increase faster and faster. Thus, I risk missing more and more. However, our population grows and people specialise more and more everyday. Therefore, I can trust specialists to answer my questions or query for knowledge to aid my learning, building our knowledge sets in blogs and online databases for all to search, with pockets of secrets and intellectual property waiting to be revealed in some future moment I may never see.

A nod to every teacher, every aide, every instructor, every professor who agreed to work with me in the world of education so we could enjoy some time together. Formality brought us together. Informality made us friends. Insight made me full of wonder. I give thanks to you for being you so we could become us. This blog reflects who I am because of you.

I am not an island. I am a project under construction which has seen the light of day but has not completed its transformation into a fully-working product. I am the drop of rain which becomes an ocean wave that becomes a tidal pool which evaporates, becomes clouds which turn back into rain. One day I was a project manager. One day I was a retired person. One day I was a business owner. One day I was an instructor. Tomorrow I will be..? Well, I will be me just as I am me in this moment. I wander forward in wonder, always ready for who's next to be me.

Camping in Campuchea

Here. Ici. Sketching the outlines of the portrait of this moment using words. Beams. Welds. Pencil lines. Musical notation. Coloured lighting. Motions of a mechanical clock. The planet imperceptibly spinning. Tidal pools draining. Breathing. Mentally walking a friend's flat where every step, every motion is a living Tesla coil of exploding light and sound, a telharmonium wrapped around a theremin looped into holographic homemade commercial adverts for imaginary products in a prehistoric future lost in a space warp folded in on itself.

Being and unbeing. Olfactory nerve in overdrive from artificial flavour factories sensing scents, flaring nostrils and changing colour palettes stuck on retinal images of desktop wallpaper. Dusty, musty book covers mixed with cigarette residue favourable to chemical engineers familiar with prefixes and subprefixes and postsuffixes filling stuffy dictionaries. Digging deeper, past Eco's lists listing to one side of the Louvre. Past the Big Kahuna leaning right in ironman contests or three kings staring at goats like Jedi nightfalls.

Post. Posit. After the irony. Filtering out the satire. When modern is antique, antiquated, quaint, nostalgic.

Beyond the beyond. Myst in the mist. Fantasy sports free but costly.

Stripping away the layers, the Formica no longer cool, retro, glued particles pressed pressure pushing cushioned falls down.

Take off the hood, lift off the mask, peel away the skin, crack open the skull, look through the looks, no more gestures, no more jesting, jest in pun not punny where the sun doesn't shine shiny, no node, no personality, no feelings, no emptiness, no void, no universe. No mirrors oN. Madam I'm Adam.

Without these words, without this structure, without this brain, without this, without, with, out. Old world games. Old words.

Beyond asking. Beyond seeking. The answers behind us. The solutions in play, satisfying, soothing, comforting, calming, sleepy, sleeping, asleep, dreaming.

The moment, this moment, wondering. If not why now, then what now? If not what, then why? If not the sketch of this moment, then what is this moment unsketched? When did we say we had to be more than be in the moment?

Be. To exist. Is. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. In this place. In this time. No other place. No other time. No other person but you in the now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now. Monotonal pitch. Monocolour sketch. Peace? Contentment? Freedom? Breath. Heartbeat. Incomplete thoughts. Slower breath. Slower heartbeat. No thoughts. No moment. No time. No place. Nothing, not even nothing. Wordless. Absent of canvas. Nothing to sketch nothing. The moment yours and nobody's. Never remembered, never forgotten. No body, no concerns. You in motion with the universe for one long, endless moment.

Call it prayer. Call it meditation. Call it relaxing. Call it what you like and the way you see it. Anyway way you are, be it.

Rethinking the Box

As we contemplate life off this orb, we can rethink life on it. For instance, do you live in a box in a fixed location or one which is portable? If the latter, what about something like these:

• http://dornob.com/elegant-modern-prefab-homes-defy-portable-house-type/
• http://dornob.com/small-mobile-homes-bike-trailers-shopping-cart-campers/
• http://www.trailerwrap.net/

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by organic gardening methods, having watched demonstrations at county agricultural extension offices and the annual county fair. Here's an updated oldie but goodie on the subject of organic gardening:

• http://www.organicgardening.com/feature/0,7518,s1-65-70-1814,00.html

Translation: How can I take that which is not mine...

How can I take that which is not mine, already in my possession, which owns the world and which owns me? We have but we do not own - our thoughts of the possibilities of tomorrow, always promising, never fulfilled.

The Fantasy We Prefer

Spider webs between the limbs, ancient telegraph lines, the telegraph operators feeling for taps, vibrations, listening for signs of life, of death, a bite to eat, a siesta, a place to meet, mate and spend winter fiesta.

She looks at her daughter texting her friends while sitting in front of the television and computer, one ear to the phone. We have no time to ourselves anymore. We give our time away freely, our friends, our acquaintances throwing their lives into the community money pot, pulling out rumours and helpful hints, looking for the moment to give or get support.

When did we have time to learn new tasks when we were younger? Did we have fewer tasks to learn and took our time? Did we have fewer important details to memorize? Are we just filling in the slow minutes, the empty gaps of our childhood, mother to daughter?

Can her daughter cook any better than she can or her mother did? Her mother had the telephone to while away the time. She had the telephone and the television. Now her daughter has a smartphone, a computer and the television. Is life any better or worse than before?

Distances have gotten shorter. A blogger in a hard-to-pronounce country posting a recipe similar to the one her great-grandmother had written down, passed to her and she had lost in her early marriage years. Passing the recipe to her daughter, a legacy by proxy.

We grow too soon old and too late smart. Her daughter thinks she's wise, able to recall memories of a quieter childhood, where times seemed simpler and decisions easier to make. Simpler times and less affluence, darning socks and mending hand-me-downs, memories her daughter doesn't need to know.

She looks at the online calendar shared by her family and friends. Too many birthdays to remember. Thank goodness for automatic reminders.

She kisses her daughter on the forehead, picks up her crafting material and walks out to the garage.

Time for quilting class tonight. She'd read the instructions emailed to her by the teacher and should be able to pick up the hobby her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had picked up before her. She found some old quilt squares in the cedar chest at the foot of the bed and would show them to the class. The teacher said they were going to learn more modern patterns to quilt so they could enter a regional quilting contest. She just wanted something to give her daughter that was hers and hers alone. But quilting's a community effort, something she would decide if she'd learn to appreciate.

She looked up at the spider webs in the corner of the garage. She wondered about the female spider sewing and resewing a new bed and food trap every night, needing no other spider to help. Where is the lesson in that web, timeless and temporary, the past and the future interchangeable? An automatic response. Was she quilting because she wanted to, or following an ancient, innate trait like the spider?

She pulled out her phone and read a message that the teacher was running late. She started the car and drove slowly, looking at the houses and the lives passing by. How many of them are just like her, socially well-connected and loved but looking for something personal to call their own?

Snapshot of a Pre-WWII Childhood/Post-WWII Adulthood

A few days ago I received a set of books from the childhood of two family relations of mine. In order of pulling them out of the cardboard box:

• The Illustrated Bible Story Book by Seymour Loveland, (c) 1935 by Rand McNally, edition of 1938
• Harbrace College Handbook by John C. Hodges (The University of Tennessee), (c) 1941, 1946 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
• The Yeats Country - a guide to the places in the West of Ireland associated with the life and writings of William Butler Yeats, (c) 1962, 1963 the Dolmen Press
• "Survival Under Atomic Attack," February 1951, Department of the Army Pamphlet No. 20-111
• Walk In His Ways by Marian Black, given on 17th July 1943
• The Story Road by Gertrude Hildreth (Teachers College Columbia University), (c) 1952 by The John C. Winston Company
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Illustrated by E.A. Wilson, (c) 1941 special contents of this edition by the Limited Editions Club, Inc., given on Christmas 1945
• So That's The Reason (Bobby and the Old Professor, Book I) by R. Ray Baker, Photographic Illustrations by E.N. Stanger, (c) 1939 by The Reilly & Lee Co.
• Housekeeping in Old Virginia, Edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, (c) 1879 by John P. Morton and Company, a reprint of the Original (c) MCMLXV, Favorite Recipes Press, Inc.
• Song and Service Book for Ship and Field, Army and Navy, Edited by Ivan L. Bennett, Chairman of the Editorial Committee, (c) 1941 by A.S. Barnes and Company, Inc.
• The Fields of Home by Ralph Moody, Illustrated by Tran Mawicke, (c) 1962 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., (c) 1953 by Ralph Moody
• Poems to Inspire by Nick Kenny, (c) 1959 by T.S. Denison & Company, Inc.
• One Hundred and One Famous Poems With a Prose Supplement (Revised Edition), An Anthology Compiled by Roy J. Cook, (c) 1958 by Contemporary Books, Inc.
• Reading-For-Men, (c) 1958 by Nelson Doubleday, Inc., given on 19th December 1958

Two bluejays in the trees, a female jogger and her canine companion passing by on the street, a moment alone with my thoughts, a warrior for peace, contemplating and connecting with others to secure ships to shore during an economic maelstrom and still find ways to conduct commerce to keep violent dissidence at bay. Foment revolutions of innovation rather than chaos and anarchy.

You, me - we have all the problems here before us. We have solutions hidden in attics and vaults, used and reused and resold and repackaged. We can repeat ourselves without knowing when, how or why and feel we've accomplished something new.

A name is not an answer. A symbol is not the thing it stands for. We approach the situation and apply salve rather than rub salt in the wounds unless smelling salts are required and then consciousness is raised for all.

Is Afghanistan South Africa, with Soweto and Swaziland coming and going as independent states within a state? Are protectorates an answer? Should self-rule include division of territories or complete reconfiguration? Permanent nomadic tribal zones? A Somali war zone? The semi-permeable, porous membranes between Syria and Iraq and between the U.S.A. and Mexico are not solutions, unless you want the feel-good measures of failed policies of the past.

How do you, in times like these, when people will work for any company that pays for their standard of living standards, let the apple cart seller keep pushing the military-industrial complex down the cobblestone street offering wares to anyone with ready cash so that small-scale, regional conflicts do not escalate into disruption on the global scale, every country getting a piece of the apple pie cooked up by unseen chefs that everyone knows about? How do you declare war on an enemy who does not exist? How do you avoid giving legitimacy to a group of people who want to declare you as their sworn enemy? How do you give them the inch they want without giving them the itch to take the next mile?

A people is faceless. A person has a face, a voice, a dream, a wish, a past, a present and a future in thoughts and action. How do you give the person the power for self-sufficiency? A person is a node in a social network. Which do you feed first, the node or the network?

A soldier given orders to find a perp will follow orders until ordered otherwise. What if the technology and business of soldiering was poured into farming and villaging, fighting famine and poverty? Could we still justify the government expense of such an endeavour? Could we overcome tribal resistance to interference in the hills of Kentucky and the Afghan terrain by applying new technology to improve the lives of tribes and clans without disrupting the life they want of being left alone? Could we find profitable crops to replace marijuana and poppies? Or do we legitimise the illicit drug trade by authorising growing zones, knowing a portion of the global population is susceptible to drug experimentation and abuse, no matter how much we teach abstinence? Is there an approach that satisfies liberals, moderates and conservatives in all walks of life at one point in time? One solution with many faceted applications?

Are we finally past fighting wars on grounds of religion or religious grounds? Can we get past using personal beliefs to mass bodies against one another? Or is that the only way to do so?

Millions of people out of work looking for help without wanting to resort to government aid. How do you spend a dollar somewhere else to generate four over here? How do you play with exchange rates to put debts into play? The EUBRICUSASEAN alliance cooperating on/competing for setting up an alternative/green power/Internet grid in Afghanistan? If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. Another alternative, with Afghan tribes like native American (American Indian) reservations building gambling casinos in the middle of the U.S.A., sharing the profits with professional developers. If the so-called Christian West can condone taking money from gambling heathens then can't the Muslim East take money from gambling infidels?

I don't know. I'm just asking questions I'm digging up from a box of old books. The solutions are up to all of us to work together and figure out.

मैं कैसे ले जा सकते हैं, जो मेरा नहीं है

मैं कैसे ले जो कि पहले से ही मेरे पास है, जो दुनिया का मालिक है और जो मेरे मालिक में मेरा नहीं है, कर सकते हैं? हम है, लेकिन हम खुद नहीं - कल की संभावनाओं के हमारे विचार, हमेशा वादा कभी नहीं निभाया.

Jamocha Tapioca Pudding from Jamaica

What is beauty? A word. An idea. Mixing Debussy and Grand Master Flash over one another, a dove on a branch outside more concerned about keeping warm than keeping the beat. Does it ever seem odd to you that we'd give atmospheric phenomena personal names?

Young people today, with relatively high unemployment, have a world of possibilities ahead of them. Someone coined the phrase that it's easier to get into Harvard than to get a job. Yet, what's a job? Painting eyes on a plastic doll to be shipped to the other side of the world for holiday gift-giving? Cooking and mashing beans to put inside a rolled-up tortilla? Looking at photos and deciding how to set the fashion industry abuzz with your new accessory arrangement? Designing software applications for people to socialise online?

Friends of mine, from Frances to Estella, from Charline to Gary, use their waking hours for socialising, being productive the way they want to be known, some in conventional jobs and some not.

We are beautiful. We have jobs: we are ourselves. We define ourselves by how we act and react.

When we are raised to believe that working and consuming are our primary purposes for being, we set ourselves up for disappointment when those tasks are nearly impossible to achieve. A new friend of mine, Earle B., has lived a long, happy life not by defining who he is by what he consumes but by being there to support others who search for who they are to be.

Of course, we want to eat. We want to have safety and shelter. We are fascinated by new colours and sounds. We are driven to increase our self-worth by comparing ourselves to others in a social environment.

A whole generation experiencing unemployment levels of the Great Depression. An experiment at the ready. A chance to redefine the goals of our ecumenopolis. Someone said we can't just start over, we have too much invested in the current system. I wonder...

I fall in love with everyone I meet. I see the life within every person just wanting to scream and shout and enjoy life to the fullest, life a definition with no clear definition. In viewing that reaching out for life, I see what life has been for every person. History that will rarely find its way into the history books.

I know that life is not fair. Life rarely gives us a treat for very long, with pits inside peaches and sunburns in tropical paradises. But we know that already, unless we get carried away from our balanced view of life. Perspective makes us speculate and listen to speculators selling spectacular spectacles. Placebo pills that'll cure every ill. Instant gratification consumables that'll last forever. Blah, blah, blah. Blah. Bland when consumed over and over for too long, right?

Can we reset our pace to enjoy the pastoral life? Can the pastoral life give food, safety, shelter and sufficient enjoyment to seven billion of us?

In this moment, this break from the recent past of increased consumption, can we think outside this box, this internetworked world, and find viable solutions that cut off the tops and bottoms of the highs and lows of economic boom and bust cycles? Okay, look, I know we don't live in a fantasy world where leprechauns have pots of golds hidden at the end of every passing thunderstorm that'll get us out of this economic slump, international stimulus fund efforts to the contrary. But we can reset our expectations, can we not?

I am the children of migrants. My family has migrated from one place to another for generations, never settling down on one plot of land for very long. I have read about, researched and watched the effects of migration on our ecumenopolis. We call it world history, do we not? We are a wandering people, our species producing too many offspring to take care of the same place over and over so we tend to spread out.

Our numbers increase. Our population grows bigger. Older people live longer and younger people die less frequently. Prosperity has brought us medical marvels and clean drinking water in many places.

In our grasp is the definition of what success means to the generation that's coming into its own, just behind mine. My generation, the Me generation, the backside of the baby boomers, holds the key to the secret to life hidden in a box. We unlocked and have looked inside the box, slowly comprehending the meaning of life, our views vastly transformed by the discovery of success that transcends material wealth. We know we are the keepers of ourselves a thousand generations from now. We want to hold the key a bit longer because the power of knowledge is too vast, we think, to give to others. But time marches on. We will give the key to the keepers of ourselves 999 generations from now.

My sister and I talked on the phone last night. We tried to recall our views of life in the early 1980s when we were stepping out from our protected secondary school years into the world of relatively high unemployment in a prosperous capitalist-market based society. My sister worked at McDonald's. I worked at Montgomery Ward. We both attended university. We remember being told that we should be thankful we had jobs in the 1981/1982 economic slump, with teachers having to work at McDonald's and PhDs pumping gas once again.

What is beauty? It's Rihanna and Taylor Swift singing a duet in a movie starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Beauty is musical, its rhythm set to our heartbeats and our thought patterns. We don't need jobs to be beautiful. We let our beauty shine and our lives unfold as if by magic, revealing ways to prosper we'd never imagined.

How do we emulate the pastoral life of balance with the land on which we live, seasonal, cyclical, sprinkling manure to grow food, fallowing one field while increasing the productivity of another, sharing the harvest effectively and fairly, migrants feeding migrants, taking turns tending the soil, generation-to-generation and intergenerational, knowing we'll always have those who think they live in a novel like Animal Farm or Lord of the Flies, greed a matter of degrees, sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold, and yes, can you believe it, sometimes just right?

We listen to ourselves. We see the beauty within and let it out. We let ourselves fall in love with each other's beauty. We see we live on the only planet we've got right now, a giant pastoral farm, if you will. We can't trade it in for a new model, or move wholescale to a new one. We see our imperfections and lean on each other during lean times. We share our flats with friends out of work, and when we're out of work we help clean and cook for our friends whose flats we share. We redefine prosperity and remember that truth is beauty. And then we go from there.

A Platform for Enhancing Performance

Part of me will always be part of me. I will always carry the tearer-apart, the see-what's-inside, the test-until-it-breaks geek in me. Thus, when I buy a new high-tech toy, I try it with something not originally made for it, such as open source software in closed hardware architecture. Link O' The Day for those who like to experiment.

Time for a lunch of home-delivered dinner, a Monday Night Football favourite filler, a rainy Tuesday leftover. Today's a good day for rugby, a real romp in the muddy rough.

A Nod to Motivation

I am not a motivational speaker. I live a life of the moment, which may or may not motivate others. However, I understand the need to hear the voice(s) of those who want to enhance the thoughts of their listeners. A facebook friend of mine, Johnny Roberts, is such a person.

I missed adding a reference to the last blog post, the list of sovereign states. Here is one such list from multiple websites:

• http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/countries_of_the_world.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states
• http://www.listofcountriesoftheworld.com/
• http://www.un.org/en/members/index.shtml

Foursome

Of course, you're familiar with the exercise of hitting a round object with a stick so I needn't smack my knee 'gainst your funny bone or tickle your nose hairs 'bout golf. Like asking a blonde/blond if s/he's heard a joke about hair colour or asking a duck in the rain if the sound of a tree falling in a forest rolls off its back.

Four titles: "Henry V," "Falling Down," "Stranded," "Survival Under Atomic Attack"

Can you imagine a group of people perpetually maintaining the illusion of a superiour group that is outside time and not subject to any one subject except that its subjects take turns subjecting subjects to subjective analysis and rule? Yeah, then there's all the parts about them creating enmity for enemies to justify the enemy-fighting forces. Why be Don King when you can be donned king? Or chained to Cheney's LBJ-like rise to master Chen style tai chi chuan, Jack Ryan minus the Hollywood hairstyle.

A mask is still a mask. A Department of the Army pamphlet, No. 20-111, dated February 1951, is still just as informational:

"To be more specific, a modern atomic bomb can do heavy damage to houses and buildings roughly 2 miles away. But doubling its power will extend the range of damage to only about 2-1/2 miles. In the same way, if there were a bomb 100 times as powerful, it would reach out only a little more than 4-1/2, not 100 times as far.

"And remember: All these calculations of your chances of survival assume that you have absolutely no advance warning of the attack.

"Just like fire bombs and ordinary high explosives, atomic weapons cause most of their death and damage by blast and heat. So first let's look at a few things you can do to escape these two dangers."

Some people call golf a good walk spoiled. Well, you can see many a situation that'll spoil a good walk. A person with a personal agenda that's unfriendly. A leader who wants to throw bodies into a bottomless pit of a firefight. A leaking spacesuit on Mars.

When I was a small boy, my parents took me to visit my grandparents down in south Florida. We'd spend part of the time with them going to an amusement park up the road. I remember the amusement park for its packet of tickets with an alphabetic order my parents'd use in conjunction with our good behaviour, rewarding us with E-ticket rides. My favourite ride was the Haunted Mansion. I was fascinated by the special effects and the thoughts of hidden passages and ways to make things that go bump in the night.

We visited the park many times in my youth and we kids'd collect souvenirs during our trips. My alltime favourite souvenir was a secret panel chest with parquet-style inlaid wood. Because of that souvenir, I collect small wooden boxes with sliding drawers visibly hidden by woodgrain cuts. I had lost the WDW chest long ago and guess I've collected the boxes in a way we all try to relive our youth, Rosebud-style.

Outside, the atmospheric turbulence of HRH Ida plays one of my favourite rusted gutter tunes. You've heard me play it once - drip, plop, pour, drop - since I'm not a musician, I won't repeat myself. I trust your imagination for recreating a cool rain, leftover yellow leaves and bare redbud limbs.

I immersed myself in the local culture to see the effect of global-level decisionmaking. I wanted to hold a multicultural plan for the people in one hand and shake the hand of someone I know who's not able to put food on the table with the other. I admit it's a matter of trust. It's the tale of "pass the whisper" at a children's party that teaches me the distrust I hold for being at the top of an ivory tower or inside a warroom and knowing what's going on.

We all come from somewhere. We're all going somewhere. We can't count to seven billion fast enough to capture all the people alive in a single moment. Death and birth crashing onto the sandy shore too fast too see the reshaped sand grain and the shifting sand dunes in one eye.

Despite what we believe, we are an ecumenopolis. We always have been. We always will be here on this planet. We effect one another and affect one another all the time. We'll continue to be who we are because we don't change overnight. Not very easily. We're social creatures who don't always socialise well enough to be socially acceptable or responsible socially.

Fear of the unknown and the thrill of danger make haunted mansions popular and titles like "Henry V," "Falling Down," "Stranded," and "Survival Under Atomic Attack" possible. Every member of our species practices life uniquely although within macrosystem categories.

We want those who can translate one style of life into subcategories without blinking an eye or revealing why. Those who practice their subcategory to perfection do not want or need to know the existence of their subcategory's translation to other lifestyles, unless we want to prevent detrimental behaviours between two subgroups (which can be within the same subcategory, two different subcategories or crossed between major categories, etc., and so on, with more complex-sounding gobbledygook/claptrap here to sound official. [insert smiley face]).

How does one take life seriously and laugh at life at the same time? One laughs at life and takes death seriously at the same time. Comedy and Tragedy. Life and Death. Friend and Enemy. Yin and Yang. Positive and negative. Health and sickness. Opposites with no opposites because opposites attract.

I hold the universe on one flake of skin on the end of my last finger. On the next finger, the Milky Way galaxy. On the next finger, the solar system. On the forefinger, the planet Earth. On my thumb, my thumbprint. I hold my hand up and make the universal sign of nonthreatening peace. I roll my fingers up and make a fist. Power. Strength. The universe connected to my oily thumbprint.

What's the old saying about it's hard to make a fist when you're shaking someone's hand? If Iran wants to try three hikers as spies, then I can find ways to retaliate without bringing the news media into the picture. If you really want to trade the lives of three people for what I have to give you, then I won't stop you. But it's a path I don't want to take. Reality is only seven letters. The truth is whatever we want to write about. I want my easy-to-transport, cheap grapes from Chile available at the local market in winter for those on a limited budget. I don't care about nuclear capabilities in part of Persia because I trust that those I trust will take care of that responsibility well while recognizing the complexities of an ecumenopolis that treats all members of our species as members of our species.

If you teach hate or practice hatred you get what you want on a personal level you never imagined. I won't tolerate your homemade megalomania. I'm not after your family or your colleagues. They have their own chance for species' preservation talk/response. One person suggested we take all those who teach hate, give them lobotomies and put them on display like the old days of empires that put their enemies' head on pikes. I'm not an eye-for-an-eye practitioner. I'm willing to see you change your ways toward getting us to other planets and galaxies as good citizens of the universe.

My goal is not specific to one subculture. My goal is specific to our species. Our species is dependent on this planet. I'll tolerate a lot to see us see the same thing. But I'm not immortal. I'm impatient even though I know my goal is relatively eternal. I trust those who'll live after I'm gone to keep us moving on. I may not reach my goal in my lifetime but my goal is not my goal. It's really yours that I'm taking care of while I'm here.

A nuclear weapon is the result of concentrated juice in the form of engineering and science. We have tested nuclear weaponry and we have put nuclear weaponry to use in times of war. Nuclear power is a diplomatic tool used wisely. How many of us are wise enough to put the power of a nuclear bomb in our thumbprint? Answer: not a single one of us. We ALL own the nuclear weaponry of our species. The responsibility belongs to the person scraping a dry desert for seeds or water. The responsibility belongs to the leader loved by billions all over the world.

And then there's those persons or that group with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on nuclear weaponry but no land-based political entity to hold them to responsibility or fear of reprisal. The barrier to market entry is a curious phenomenon. The "too big to fail" organizations want high artificial barriers to protect their turf. We've argued and made fun of the barrier to enter the nuclear arms race.

I'm not worried about weapons of mass destruction. We've had them in one form or another all our lives. Masses of archers and flamethrowers, to name a two. I concern myself with the trigger finger owner(s).

Do you know how to play golf? Do you know anyone who's hit a hole in one? Can you figure out the percentage of hooks and slices you've made versus perfect shots down the middle of the fairway? Can you now imagine every ball you hit was the intended aim of the diplomatic policy of owning a nuclear weapon arsenal? Increasing ground troop numbers because you can't just drop an H-bomb on Afghanistan and call it a day. Sacrificing three people because you don't want to use alleged spies as playing cards in the game of who gets to claim the status of a nuclear weapon class country. Willing to play along with North Korea because China's making more profits in the commercial world.

It's okay to lose sleep playing video games because someone else is losing sleep playing simultaneous games of Life, Monopoly, poker and chess, the special "football" and security codes nearby.

We're a young species only once. We have thousands of generations to go to grow up. Sure, we have one life to live on this planet, but when you look at what we've dug up and built out of the origins of our species and truly understand that your life only matters when your species does, your importance to yourself and others grows in leaps and bounds. I'm just beginning to understand and I'm amazed at the immense difference it's made in my life. My life in one hand, including aches and pains and mistakes and triumphs, the rearrangement of a piece of the universe. The rest of the universe in the other hand, with a universe-wide, nearly-infinite time of history to be seen. I'm glad to say I've been a part of it with you.

Warm Weather Wren

Maple leaves the colour of bananas. A wren a few feet from my head building a nest in the garage. Tree limbs trimmed to a uniform height as if by deer.

Linear thinking. Imagining a product design while walking to the other side of the box, hidden in the box walls' shadows. Feature creep. Perfecting the design.

Sweeping the driveway of dry leaves, fingers of a hurricane not too far away. Not too far? As opposed to what? Compared to whom?

An unknown bird, like a large black swallow, a few trees away from a redheaded woodpecker. My version of twitter much more appealing - titmouse tweets.

Sitting in Big River last night, using a beer coaster to play with their logo - "Rib Giver, Grilling and Brewing Workers Since 1994" - Vanessa and her CV in play. Five years to settle a car smashup lawsuit. Had to repeat her ten-grand vacation (i.e., finishing her college degree in the second round). More of a college veteran than a college alumna. Decided life in the cubicle next to those having heart attacks was not the last view of life she wanted to have. I'm there with you, sister. You've got what it takes to see life outside the box. But more on that later...

Overheard conversations on the weekend:

• A group of folks faking a conversation about who had spent more time in jail
• A young woman deciding to completely change her MySpace page
• A young man who eats Krispy Kreme doughnuts in two big bites
• A homeless man bumming money from bar patrons in order to buy a beer but refused service because of his patron-bugging habits
• A set of Firestones and nice rims in hell instead of hellfire and brimstone - a comic street preacher

I miss the sounds of the train whistle and the rumbling vibrations in the air of boxcars on the railroad tracks in my old neighbourhood, their late-night passages my cure for insomnia. Distant highway vehicle traffic not the same.

Sentences outside of metronomic rhythms. Inside the box. Thinking... nonalliteratively. Iteratively.

We know the politics of dancing. We see the slate of our dance cards. We scan the dance floor for partners even if we don't dance. Chickadees and finches sharing the same trees. Us sharing the same roads.

Creative thinking is not thinking creatively. Discovering fire is not inventing the fireplace.

Leaves falling in bunches like bananas. Leaves the colour of...what? Not red. Not orange. Not peach. Not salmon. Not, not, not! The opposite of not what? Burnt orange? Close. Light rust? Maybe. A colour repeated over and over, fall to fall to fall.

How many times have I been "bitten" by a mosquito, tick or spider and turned into an agar-filled petri dish for bloody parasites?

How many times have I seen the solution to one problem while contemplating a problem somewhere else? Why do people not write poems and odes to poison ivy leaves in fall?

Business consultants should work, at least partly, on commission, their "guaranteed solutions" dependent on their customers' success. Politicians should not be financially rewarded for seeking or achieving election, their income dependent on society's success, success a matter of public whim.

The sound of squirrels chasing each other through the leaves. The click of a mimosa leaf falling apart when it hits the ground. My belly sticking out from typing too much and not exercising enough.

Holding a chunk of agate and seeing the volcanic history of our land. Knowing at once what you see through your eyes as I see what you see with my thoughts. History is not the formation and the reformation of political entities. History is outside our time. Being a millionaire or billionaire (by dollar standards) is nothing. Being a potentate or president is temporary and forgotten in another era. Knowing, in full conscious action, that what you do is all you've got, robber baron, monopoly winner or factory worker.

A chipmunk at my feet, being chased by another. More unknown birds migrating nearby. If you aren't successful right now in this very moment, you're never successful, no matter what you say or what or who you say you own.

Vanessa got my business attention because she sees life with no box. She is alive in the moment. She sells without selling because she gives without receiving and gets back more than she can repay. A provincial life is providential when one moves in deliberate steps unknowingly. Monica taught me that. Ann-Marie is reteaching me. Babli is teaching me anew. Julia and Jennifer use poetry and thankfulness to express the same thought. JJ keeps my moral compass pointed at a right angle because solutions are rarely straight ahead.

What is the wasp digging into the leaves beside me for?

I just gave you the solution to a problem. It's not a riddle. There's no rhyme or reason. You hold it in your hand when you hold out your palm. The squirrel and the chipmunk and the wasp and woodpecker already know what's going on.

We want the housecat to think inside the box within the box. How many of us are housecats thinking we're mustangs? A maverick with a saddle or tethered to a carriage? How many of us are headed to the glue factory before we ever started our lives?

We don't live in a box. We live on the outside of a teetering sphere. Teetotaling and totaling tees. I'm successful because of you. I'm successful in this moment because we can think outside of the realm of influence that ties us down. Providing solutions rather than adding to problems.

Of course, we do whatever we want to do, comfort zone or demilitarised zone. Freedom is what the moment is all about. Freedom to be and free to be with others as we please. I freely choose to spend my free time with you. Wanna be free with me? You already are. You're you. See you when you see me.

Ceremonial Ceramic

Sitting on the concrete futon. Watching accelerators. Feeling the crowd. Back in my hometown, cigars and cigarettes, trucks and SUVs, racecars and teenage drivers.

There's much to be said about not saying much. Avoiding versions of "to be." Asking what got me here and made me me. Who made me? Who's been made?

Hot dogs and hamburgers. Stadium seats and caramel-coloured sodas. 3/8ths of a mile in 15 seconds or so, around and around, bumping and scraping, pushing and smashing. Yellow light. Caution. Restarts and passes.

I was born not far from the smell of accelerant. Intoxicating. Invigorating. Inhabiting my bones. My DNA an engine for engines.

Joyce's "Dubliners" and Agee's scruffy little city. Me and the Model City. Infinitely shaken and shook, chasing the tail of Moebius, that side of Reedy Creek, men and women and their flying machines storming barns and looping reservoirs, flights by the pound long before Pal's made people LEAN in their business machinations.

Faces covered with soot and rubber marbles. Seven years of silence giving us the itch. Vines and bird droppings. Parking spaces and spaces for parking.

Two spots, two arenas. Local and international. FBS winners and UARA stars. Up in smoke and up in the air.

Fly from one to the other, one a parade of cars, another a band on parade T-ing up for the team, topping the rocky start for the season with a tiger-whipping.

J.C. (no, not that one), nearly perfect, whose mother thinks he IS a saint, hitting on all cylinders, like they say (but not like Larry's son setting records in the other K-town), putting up numbers that'll soon have agents calling secretly and offering their services. Stack the line and the missives and missiles permissively fly.

G.J. and other scout hunters grab the fruit flies, turf-tapping their way 'round the West-pressed bodies in disarray.

All's quiet on the front. A far-off refrain of "Mr.Grinch" frets the frets, $200 big ones riding hopes of fading, flickering images on the wall, grainy, grim tidings of humming bugs past Stewart's patrician, Shakespearean, Dickensian tale, or Scott's Georgian performance a farthing too pinched.

How do you stop protests? You feed the hungry. No, take that back. You stuff their mouths until their plump pusses purr with content of feline ferocity. Catnip and scratching posts and balls of yarn to keep them occupied, while you stuff your pockets with their debtors' credit card interest rates. Get them all in houses with mortgages not too heavy to break their backs but heavy enough to strap them to job-seeking occupations for office occupiers, manufacturing offshored and labored laws loosely-fitting the clothesmaking clothesless. Equalising capitalism for the masses. Those who hold a bag of coins in their hands rarely hold protest signs.

Don't ask for much and you don't get mulch. Words are not ovens and text not a scythe.

Joke about dying and die about joking. Laugh at prosperity and prosper at posterity. Give away all you've got so you can give away more. The more you give, the more you receive. The more you live in the moment, the more the moment lives in you.

The race to the moon is on but the Moon's not racing to you. In the meantime, plenty of races hold my attention while I hold yours - racecars and football and basketball - on track for winners all around. All aboard!

C'est, what have you heard?

Mais oui. Mais non. Je ne sais pas.

I've been reading a text by Victor Hugo, the account, fictionalised, of the events of the period after the French Revolution. Names, names, and mo' names.

A simple account with many ledger entries. Guillotin and Robespierre closer friends than one would have imagined. Marat. Many others. Louis XVI a head of his time.

When one has given one's life, one has no debt to pay. Others may rummage through one's chest for more, or pull pages from one's family tree. Pourquoi? Or a pourquoi story?

Emptiness. Empty nest. Elliott Ness. Just a pile of sounds. Maintenant. Maintenance. Not even close. Paris and Moscow on better terms than Estonia and Leningrad?

You can't tell the people that their rising unemployment is part of the numbers racket called economic cycles. They can't buy theories when they want gas for their guzzler to go buy bread with their bread. If you rob Peter to pay Paul, Mary won't be around to sing harmony.

But these are superficial observations. I'm looking at what you're not. I'm seeing what I can't hear.

Sashimi at noon? Maybe later, the sushi orders backing up. Mo' tea. I'm floating. While my miso so settling, I talk to a pardner about rustling up some business on the range.

I see Putin hold a tank of natural gas in his hand and ask what can I do to help get that on a tanker truck or shooting down a pipe when really I need to ask what's the alternative. Sleight of hand. Look at a data center and see an orange grove in Brasil. Look at an asphalt paving crew and see a sewing factory in Malaysia. Je m'appelle Rick. Et vous?

The desert, an island and a deck of cards. Eurovision. A watch. A ceramic cup.

My goal is getting people on board an orbiting hotel. Their goal is getting tickets for a revolution.

I write because I have words that sprout from the end of my fingers. I make no cents so I make no sense. I value Babli even though I don't know if she's real. We take the virtual for granite and don't have our marbles.

Blow sand in people's eyes and see what they do. Put up a smoke screen and watch from around the screen door. There's where you find what you ought to do with what they automatically do first.

I'm just an observer, giving words a thrill ride for the sake of the species I call our own. I detour off the bypass to find the entrance to the exit for the shortcut. Then, the destination is behind me and I know where I'm going. It's what the Book of the Future told me to do yesterday when I was still looking for tomorrow. Every moment is the history of the past and the future. Only when you live only in the moment will you only know only. Be providential. Be colloquial. Be wrong. Be right.

Scatter, collect and then read the I Ching. You are the fable of you. You are the untruth, the fib, the lie of what you were. We live in the moment. There is no past. There is no future. There is what we do. I am doing this right now but not what I did a sentence ago.

I enjoy being here because I believe I am the only one writing this although facts to the contrary tell me otherwise in the past. Right now, I am the only one reading this. Is there a line that separates my writing this from my reading this in the moment? Where in my thoughts does the writing take place? Where in my time does the reading take place?

Why do I write a lot of nonsense when there's work to be done to move our species to the next moment? I write nonsense to scatter the wind, to tear down the walls of previously painted moments, to shred the fabric of time which does not exist. Then, I live in the moment.

Therefore, my moments are tearing down the past and building up the future and living as if the moment is all I have. I am not who I was so I don't need to feed the thoughts of a previous self or selves or ancestors or descendants or debts/credits on a ledger. This moment is all I've got. And now this next moment is all I've got. We see moments like "Memento" or other savage chicken jokes and almost see what we're supposed to not see that we're looking at. I almost get what I'm saying but the blinders haven't completely fallen off and I'm still chomping at the bit.

I am the only one who has to get me and live in my moment. I live in our moment so I'm trying to get you while I live with the rest of us for our species. Escher and Marquez, Suzuki and Porsche. Sentimental sentiment sentimentality sediment. Stretch your thoughts and Silly Putty laughs back.

When I can write sonic nonsense in more than a dozen languages that uses phonics and memes and inside jokes that read backwards and forwards and sideways and all about, I will have found the person I'm looking into the past at my mirror image for. And then our species will be the Book of the Future's Book of the Future in the moment. Humour is serious business. That's what I just figured out. And now I'm in the next moment, free of the past.

Inspiro and Furry Lease

How do you get from hear to they're? Do you synonymise your weigh around? Maybe your antonym, your mother's sister, has an answer, two?

I have used a variety of keyboards to make myself heard. 88 ivory keys. Three-octave plastic keys. Matias half-keyboard. The basic rows of QWERTY chicklets. Do you find yourself drawn to a particular type? Have you fallen in love with your thumbing so much that you bought a thumbing keyboard for your PC or laptop?

I don't think outside the box. I riff on the tissue box called my head. The landscape thinks for me and I write down its rhythms. Spiro Agnew. Wynton Marsalis. Lorca. Mao. Paine. Nancy. Soros. Beethoven. L'il Abner. Little Orphan Annie. Oprah. McNamara. Drew.

The web of life has no filaments, no silk threads. Plants don't see the breeze that spreads their pollen.

What if the Pope and the Dalai Lama toured China together? What if Warren Buffett and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad toured Israel together?

The magnifying glass of these "modern" times focuses a beam of light on a dry leaf. I can't stay on one spot for too long or else the leaf will smolder and burn. The pages of history are tinder to the touch.

Language-specific jokes don't translate well. Thus, I wander in and out of these hieroglyph remnants, posing questions, posing and posturing. Suppose. Support hose.

Denying doesn't stop the past from existing. Recording doesn't stop the past from being distorted. Thus, I wander in and out of time, history no placeholder for this ambulatory book.

In business, I see connections in "Working Girl," WSJ, FT, Pollution Engineering, T. Ferriss, Atatürk, Tata, Slim, Dubai and Shanghai. Rely on devoted hobbyists to tell the true story. Not experts expert in retaining their titles, no matter who confers them.

The web between my thumb and forefinger. The web between my eyes and keyboard. The web blowing in the breeze, building vacuums under the eaves. Invisible. In plain sight.

We connect because we want to connect. We run into each other because we're running.

I don't buy because you sell. I try because I want to see what it does. Is what it does what it is? Is a working stiff stiff from working or dead on its feet? Will Marsalis premiere a piece like John Adams' Chamber Symphony or George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue? Will rail traffic transform because of Buffett's interest or will Buffett's fortunes change because of commercial transportation transformations?

I have a new box of pencils. Time to read more adventures in the Book of the Future!

Herniated Innards

"Pa, why come we ain't taking no visitors?"

"Son, we got here, didn't we?"

"Ma, what's Pa talking about?"

"Boy, you better not be sassing your Pa."

"No'm. I'm just mighty confused, that's all."

"Son, some things ain't meant for us to know. We got here and now we ain't taking no visitors on account of there ain't no visitors for us to take in."

"Pa, that make no sense. We seen plenty of folks on the way here."

"Brother, them folks was being et by feller eaters. Remember?"

"I know, but if there's some folks being eaten, there's plenty of folks like us who ain't. Right, Pa?"

"Mama, you got an answer for them boys? I's tired of talking."

"Boys, your Pa knows plenty of things. But some things ain't worth saying. We is here and that's what counts. Now I know you want to play and all but we's got to spend some time sorting through this mess we're all in."

"What mess is that, Ma?"

"Young man, I knows you is a smart boy. I have been learning you a long time on what I knows and you have outdone me plenty of times, from shooting to sewing. We ain't got the education of some of them others but you seen what that got most of them."

"What's that, Ma?"

"A session with them feller eaters. Learning is what turns your brain into a machine, just like our wagon. Only them well-learned machines forgets how to run regular-like. They spends too much time computing and not enough time doing. By the time they put they's wheels in motion, they done been et."

"Ma, I don't wanna be et by no feller eaters."

"Boy, it ain't going to happen when I'm around."

"'At's right, Mama. You boys is lucky I married your Ma. She's more learned than most folks who made fun of us on account of us not worrying about what words you supposed to say when. We put you boys first and foremost in our thoughts and that put food and clothing and learning on the top of our list."

"Your Pa is right. You is our moral compass and we is your moral compass."

"Ma, what is a moral compass?"

"It's one of them things that points you down the straight and narrow, son. You can see the whole wide world of things that you can and cannot do but the moral compass straightens out what you is supposed to do with who you is."

"Who I is?"

"'At's right, son."

"Who is I?"

"Well, son, you is who you is."

"I know that, Pa."

"And that's on account of us telling you."

"Yessir. I love you, Ma and Pa. And I love you, brother."

"We love you, too, son."

"But I still wants somebody else besides my brother to play with."

"Son, we caint hep you there. It's out of our hands."

"Is it in the hands of the moral compass what's going to point me to who's going to play with me?"

"Son, it sure is. That's why we don't know."

"So if I have this moral compass up here in my head, then I knows what I's supposed to do."

"'At's right, son."

"In that case, I's going to go out and find us some new friends to play with. I knows how to handle them feller eaters and I knows how to avoid them."

"Well, son, we's opposed to your idea but we believe in you. If you's set on this, we'll support you."

"Brother, you stay here with Pa and Ma. Your moral compass ain't rightly formed yet."

"But, brother, who will I play with when you's gone?"

"Pa and Ma will give you more regular learning like they did me."

"If you say so, brother."

"Young man, we is proud of you. We ain't never told you but your moral compass has been ready a long time. We hoped you'd stay with us here in Ma's old stomping grounds but we knows you knows when you's got to go."

"Yes'm. Well, I best be going while there's sun in the sky."

"Son, we have many things we ain't told you. You will see folks who don't know who or what you is. Remember, you is you. They don't know nothing about who you is. You stay who you are and you is going to be just fine."

"Yessir. Goodbye, Ma and Pa. Goodbye, brother."

"Goodbye, son."

"Goodbye, brother."

"Mama, is that the last we seen of our first son?"

"Ez, you know it ain't. We have the gift of sight."

"I know that, Mama. I just don't like what we see."

"Ez, it's our second son who we got to concentrate on now."

"Mama, it's our second son what's got me worried. He's got in him all of us combined."

"But, Ez, he don't know that yet and we caint tell him, neither."

"A shame, ain't it? All that knowledge of the world in his head and he don't know it yet."

"When he do, we'll be ready."

"Won't we ever?! And all this death and destruction on account of him?! Hoo boy, I never figured we'd be the ones who'd..."

"Shush up, Ez. The boy's not out of earshot."

"Yes'm. I's quiet as a honeybee, just buzzing in the midst of them pretty flowers of yours."

"You quit tickling me, Ez. The boy can see you."

"'Bout time that he did, Mama. He's gonna learn soon enough."

Do or Do Not

The... There it is again. That word. Starting a new sentence. Nebulae and dark matter surrounding us and stuck on one word. A rift in an African continent, a million years away from forming a new sea, and one word blocks progress.

The...

Usual start. Breath exhaled. Word typed. Oxygen and nerve impulses putting thoughts in motion.

The...

Like a tired stutter, repeating a sound that skips and falls back on itself.

The...

One more time, hoping another start will jump off a curb, join racing bodies charging toward any finish line.

The...

Not again! Again, why? More to this than meets the eye. Would a handwritten note flow more freely?

The...

Sigh...slow down. Take a step back. Set hands on armrest and relax. Meditation and inspiration will provide another word.

The glance from a buffet line, a look of expectation, a moment of searching, hoping, seeking, waiting, nodding, smiling. Is he/she the one? Two sets of eyes, colour unimportant from a distance, facial expression and body posture the thing. One sitting and one standing. Chopsticks in one hand and plate in another. Thought bubbles floating to the ceiling. Food labels signposts for keeping one in line.

The story. Forgetfulness. Conversations off track nearby. Confusing one type of hernia for another. BIST versus POST versus software versus hardware versus who determines its specs and when will they get written, how versus what.

Another look. Another millisecond wondering. Which one? Is there one here? Who wrote what when and how come?

Post-haste. Pre-haste. Verb. Noun. Adjective. Consult Emily Brewster, lexicographer and bar owner, co-. Consult Emily Post. Heloise's hints. Abby's descendant. John Qwerty...strike that, John Dvorak. Not sure Bill France can still get it done.

Reach inside, pull out a thumb with a plum eating a blackbird eating crow with its foot in its mouth.

Happiness is having it all and knowing you can get more. Another railroad, boardwalk or park place, letting others worry about jail or passing Go. Playing Go, if need be. Mahjong or jai alai, depending on your stance. Happiness is your infrastructure. Electric two-seater or jetset timezone jumper.

The... I said the once, where are thee now? The. Thee. These. Same word. Same thought. Deer versus deer. Wordplay. Taking a break. Looking around. Rolling thoughts like baoding iron spheres, a jingle and a jangle, a bangle and the...

Hands clasped in meditative prayer, absent of idols and symbols. When you're there, you know you are. When you aren't, you don't. Do or do not. The moment's all we've got. The moment is all. We have got the...? These words are neither symbols nor idols.

I found one moment in Cat's Lowe Mill. Another in Soos' nature center. In the words of Ann Marie's writing in 1979. The latest in Babli's poetry. Yin and yang. Gender balance. Prakriti and Purusha. Neutrality and happiness through the view of both. From that symmetry, I find the next step to take in the world of commerce. Humour in a subtle key, syncopated and written in bars. Tune in and listen. David C. may be playing your song or John A. turning it into a show tune. We are who we are and what we do. Those who don't, aren't.

Thirty Minutes

Have you ever watched a tree limb lose its weight in leaves, rising higher to the sky as winter approaches? Sunlight in the yard warms brighter than yesterday and brighter than a month ago, the canopy of summer leaves sewing fall quilts on the ground.

Why do I think of tulips at a time like this? Every step is like...?

Twenty-seven minutes to look out the window.

The initials HHI written by tree trunks and horizontal limbs.

Vehicles passing the house, the drivers in a hurry, their motivations left to my imagination.

A smiling face beside a credit card machine.

A, an article, like the, statements that more will follow. Le. El.

And...? Twenty-three minutes to look out the window.

Gender. Pollen. Bees. Seedpods. Ram's horns. Finch feathers.

Sixteen minutes to go.

Time dripping off the trees. Time in a passing wasp.

A moment measured by a digital clock, LED seven-segment displays wired for time. Hexadecimal not available, except through imaginary letters seen right-side up and upside-down.

Ten minutes and time to pack up this entry. Time to enjoy a few breaths of fresh air before the world of time takes over.

Time to join the imaginary lives of hurried drivers. Time to see the world behind the steering wheel of an automobile. It's time.

C-ring

Freedom from the moment. The chemical smell of prêt-à-porter clothing. The slow crunch of plate tectonics. A friend's wishful kiss from 30 years ago. The kiss of a great-grandchild 30 years from now. Liver spots. Acne. Bald infant. Bald elder. The paunch of middle age. The pounce of an infant.

Love. Romance. A lingering look. A flirtatious glance. A flower petal. A secret note. A dance in moonlight. A sunlight stroll.

Fixing gutters. Inflating tyres. Reinstalling laptop software. Washing dirty clothes.

Everyday. Ordinary. Love hidden in the mundane. The ironed shirt. The polished minivan.

Exciting. Thrilling.

Burning. Passion.

Dinner for six. Party of one.

Brevity. Bravery. Bright. Brought. Breathless.

Soft. Velvet. Light touch.

The shape of a mouth by the turn of the teeth. Natural. Luminescent.

Serene. Quaint. Whispers.

A sentence of spaces. A plethora of periods.

Dot. Dot. Dot. Dote.

Zanzibar. Excalibur. Shangri La. Atlantis.

Insomnia. Ammonia. Onomatopoeia.

Those eyes. Those eyes. Those eyes. That smile. Those eyes.

Muscles. Tissue. Cells. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. That face. That look.

Your persona.

The equational linguistical equatorial linguiniful questionunfull believable. Sounds you hear.

One. Two. Two. One. One life. Two. Count. Days filled. Thoughts filled. Sepia toned. Dusty road. City. Country. Name a century. Set the mood. You and him. You and her. You and you. Her and him. You. Him. Her.

Waltz. Iambic pentameter. Carol of the Bells.

Flip-flop. OR. NOT. AND. Clock. UNIX epoch. Belle Époque.

And. Still. Only. Words.

Words are not the same as emotions. A wrinkle speaks louder than words.

Madame Curie. A. G. Bell. H. G. Wells. Chiang Kai-shek.

Can you remember your piano recital from fifth grade? Your best friend's favorite music at the time? Your favorite shirt? Your mother's favorite birthday present? Your father's shaving preference? The eye colour of the boy or girl who had a crush on you?

Do you see the future of transportation? Do you see the next stock you'll sell? The next deal you'll close? The average growth of your investment portfolio?

Do you preach what you practice? Do you sow what you reap? Do you take care of your combine? Do you safely store your seeds? Do you drink rice or eat it? Do you bake wheat or ferment it?

Do you count off for misspelled words or credit the student for creative sentence structure?

Do you swallow your food or take the bus? Do you find freedom from the moment?

Do you?

If a ring implies a circle, what is a C-ring?

An imagined, unfulfilled romance lasts longer than this poem. More elegant. More elastic. More elegiac. More mores. A perfect endless line drawn by a radius. A PNP transistor that never fails. Free of words. Free of the moment. Everlasting. Infinite.

A Pause for Refreshment - Sain De La Peau

Have you ever held a catalpa leaf, a paulownia leaf and a redbud leaf in your hand? Have you ever watched a moving comet, asteroid or meteor in a telescope? Have you ever sat for a single day and watched the shadow of a sundial count the hours?

One student of mine told me his boss is paying him, since real work is limited right now, to help build a house for Habitat for Humanity, wanting to keep the work crew together and employed, their skills finely tuned to what the boss needs when the economy picks back up. Great news! Because of that, a friend of mine wants to employ those folks in house construction to do work around his house in recognition of another entrepreneur's actions to put people in the right place during an economic downturn.

Another student of mine has started her own company and should be overwhelmed by all that's going on in her life - selling her home, buying a new home, moving her house furnishings and her business, taking care of a grandchild and going to school - but she is happily tired. Her desire to run her own business drives her to joy.

Other students look forward to better employment days ahead. How do I inspire them to see they have the knowledge and skills to start their own businesses and be successful, even in these times? They can use many available laws and opportunities in the medical, education and government sectors at this very moment.

Is Ralph Hood the Flying Humourist still around? Folks like him have poked holes in my funny bone through the years. Just like ol' Jerry Clower and his tales of the Ledbetter family. Finding the universal in the local. Seemingly simple humour that makes you think and smile. Intellectual satire is not the only audible, suborbital oracle in town.

The tufted titmouse birds are upset with me today. They really expect me to go out and fill the feeders in the backyard. The woodpeckers had tapped their Morsel code to me earlier today. I still haven't gotten in my head that investment profits can be used for consumables. Instead, I find salary to buy my celery and tasty treats for pillorying aviary chatterboxes.

Smiles at lunch today on the faces of Tai Pan employees/owners. I feel like the whole world is smiling back. Smiles lead to conversation and laughter, new memories to talk about again next time. Circles and spirals. Fall leaves and meteorites. Woodpeckers instead of turkeys. Nature's tale, no storyline or punchline needed.

The older I get, more pieces of the blinders fall away from my eyes, revealing the world, the universe around me. Above. Behind. Below. Beside. The more I see and sense, the more I see and sense I am not separate from any of it. We all see and sense we are the same but somehow, for some reason, we tell ourselves and others we are separate.

I do not change the world solely by telling you we are the same. I change the world by treating myself and others the same, active in the social connections around us, honest in expressing my emotions and thoughts so we can see and hear we all have happiness, joys, fears and doubts we think are our own.

We can celebrate our heritage, our history, our past while others do the same and have love, happiness and fun for everyone to enjoy. Find the real reason to give special thanks for political and/or military victories and leave behind the momentary buildup of hatred of the enemy of the time. Will we rewrite history in the process? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? No. Our ancestors are still our ancestors and worth remembering now and forever more, realising they were just like us, with emotions and thoughts that contradicted those of their neighbours but they loved their neighbours anyway. So can we.

Time to enjoy the outdoors free of this electronic tether for a while. Have a thoughtful day!

Melbourne Toast

Have you ever seen "The Dish"? The movie pokes fun at two societies engaged in the outer space business. I have met people from those Apollo-era days, humour a side effect, not a cause. I've worked with people Up Top and Down Under, almost moving to Melbourne for a sewer flow monitoring contract by ADS Environmental Services. Folks from the sticks outside Sydney traveled to the U.S. for training, marveling at the choices of salad dressing, like French, Italian, Russian; wondering about the types of animals the U.S. has, with Australia having its own share of unusual creatures, looking at a U.S. restaurant menu offering chicken fingers and Buffalo wings.

A friend of mine, Ganesh S., is a big fan of a U.S. university football team. He grew up in Mobile, Alabama, so some of you will know his team. If not, I'll tell you a quick story.

Ganesh and I were working in an office outside Seattle, Washington. My wife and I had bought Ganesh and his wife a collection of items covered with logos of his favorite college team that I brought with me to Seattle just for Ganesh. Another colleague, Ann P., stepped up and asked if this was more of the stuff from his Red Tide team.

Ganesh replied. "It is not the Red Tide. It is the Cr-r-rimson Tide. Red tide kills fish. Cr-r-rimson Tide wins football games."

We have laughed about that over and over. Ann is not a football fan. She has hiked many mountains, one of her favorites being Mt. Kilimanjaro while there was still ice on top, with 40 porters carrying gear and singing songs along the trail.

Of course, Ganesh's team is doing better than usual these days. Were it not for a big boy acting like a snow plough in winter pushing through a glacier, my team would have beaten Ganesh's over a week ago. We'll remedy that situation next year.

Meanwhile, a 15-year old ficus tree grows in our living room, a 1990s-era gift from a work colleague in Sydney, a thank you for the late-night technical support calls I gave, being half a world away and willing to give up some sleep to diagnose problems related to the software we designed in-house.

We forget how small this world is, I think. In my country, isolationists want to segregate people again. My wife and I ask where are the moderate integrationists like us going to go? We have conservative fiscal beliefs but progressive social beliefs, too. It's good to remember parts of the past and celebrate the good parts, as long as we remember how much history pastes over the bad parts. The last time I looked, the words united and union are inclusive, not restrictive. Sure, we can stretch the term "politically correct" to ludicrous lengths but there's value in rationally discussing fixes to any ridiculous looking solution.

Time to focus my thoughts on two startup companies, one with a product for sale and one with a product under development. A tale of two reciprocities. A place to employ those with talents but no income?

A nod to an Internet friend, Babli, who writes a blog from Australia. Your poetry is more than music to the ears, more like sweet curry to one's thoughts, the taste delightful and the after-taste insightful. I don't know everything about your life but friends like Ganesh, Rajen and Beena have shown me part of your world, both ancient and new.

...And You Know It, Clap Your Hands

A nod to Rachael for the big T-Day dinner offering. One meal's a fish. Let's hope someone sees your offering and can hand out a rod and reel or start a new fishing industry for a lifeline of meals.

Triangle

Yesterday, gulped down a pint of Shakespeare Stout at the bar in Aubrey's (thanks goes out to Lana, who looks like Lea Thompson from "Back To The Future"), joined me wife at the table and then spent the afternoon chatting with my wife, cousin and cousin's granddaughter* while eating lunch. During the conversation, we watched the Talledega NASCAR race and the Colts NFL win. Our server, Amy, filled our tea glasses - great dimply smile and blue eyes!

*My first cousin, second removed, showed me mobile phone pics of her fellow 12-year old friend's deer kills - a 10-pointer and a 7-point buck. She talked about being a member of the bass fishing club in seventh grade and her preparation for the SAT test because of her invitation from the Duke Talent Identification Program to take either the SAT or ACT early. She recited pi to 30 decimal places, despite her blonde hair.

Drove home with wife beside me, listening to Patricia Cornwell's "Book of the Dead" on audio CD. Ate dinner at Shoney's in the shadow of the Tennessee-Alabama fireworks megasign. Tammy, the server, very efficient. Talked with the manager afterward about the types of messes that customers leave in the bathroom - makes me question what's the definition of adult behaviour.

Someone asked me about my last blog entry and the types of behaviour I exhibit at ballgames. In other words, what's the definition of an angry fan?

Good question. An angry fan feels the hurt from the last loss, ready to gear up excitement and cheer for the team. An angry fan is a person who gets frustrated about bonehead plays. An angry fan is different than a rabid fanatic, who foams at the mouth and screams like a dying banshee, wanting to go down on the field and show the players what the burning desire to win means. An angry fan asks what the coaches were thinking calling a play that seemed so obvious to the other team and went nowhere. An angry fan high-fives all those in the vicinity when a play goes the way you want to see a play go - interception, fumble recovery, first down, long pass/run, touchdown and the elusive, nonblocked field goal. Most importantly, an angry fan remembers to kiss his spouse after every score by the favorite team - in that case, the angry fan becomes the happy enthusiast, despite clothes soaked by a steady, cold rain in the dark.

Like the guy beside me, another angry fan, said, you don't have to worry about making field goals if the team scores touchdowns. You can keep your frustration to a minimum if you're outscoring your opponents that way.

Anger on the field of play is easy because your opponent is standing in front of you wearing a uniform that is easy to distinguish from yours. You outcompete your opponent in every moment. In the stands, anger is usually directed at the field but when a nearby fan wears the opponent's colours, you lightheartedly outcompete the fan in shouting for your team. Some people get the humour in shouting funny comebacks. Some don't. Thank goodness, the kids below us and above us had fun in such a shouting contest Saturday night. They're regular angry fans, not drunk or belligerent like some we've encountered at opponents' venues I won't name here. An angry fan is not a hooligan. It's all right to be a hooligan with your pals but leave alone the fighting and weapons (sticks, cups, stadium seats) when having a go at others in the arena. The fight's on the field, not in the stands.

I'm an old fellow now but when I was young, back in the early 1980s, I hung out with some real punks. Shaved heads. I wore a big can opener as an earring. Skateboard to a dark alley - we carried brass knuckles, socks full of lead and rocks - have a fist fight, no guns or knives allowed (knives and guns were for sissies who didn't have the courage or charisma (machismo - nix the alliteration!) to face a mano e mano fight between two unpadded bodies). None of us were much into the university sports fan scene at the time, although we fought within blocks of the university's stadium. We were our own fight club (long before fight clubs were cool, maybe somewhere between Rumble Fish and Boys and the Hood), based loosely around rival punk rock bands. Groupies were the cheerleaders/fans. Shoving and punching each other.

In those days, my smiling face was disconcerting to my opponents. Why did I smile when they were grimacing? Why did I laugh when they landed a good punch? Why? Because I had played organized football as a younger kid and had taken hits a lot harder on the football field. I had run at my football opponents from 50 yards away and rammed into them at full speed. A fist fight in the alley was like powder puff football to me.

I'm not condoning my behaviour one way or the other, alleyway hooligan or hollering stadium fan. I'm just stating facts, describing what it was like to be an example of someone like me, at peace with the world because I'm alive every moment to enjoy whatever happens, happy, sad, good, bad, up, down, turned around.

In this economic downturn, when many people are unemployed and looking for workable solutions, anger can get out of hand. Perspective is difficult to change. I begin and end my moments feeling what it is like to be alive in the moment, happy to be aware of myself being aware in the moment, regardless of emotional state. I change as I get older, tolerating incompetence less and less, time becoming a longer measuring stick but also more precious as my time on Earth winds down (14795 days, plus or minus).

Yesterday, I enjoyed spending time with extended family, knowing that every one of us is important, no matter our age or station in life. Every person has a lesson to teach us and every moment is an opportunity to learn. One day, I hope to completely understand the idea that if to me, I feel I'm not important because everyone around me is more important than me, then everyone else feels the same way; therefore, we are more important than we can possibly know and should never take advantage of the key links of you/me/us that form the triangle of life.

Ever seen an ant bridge, bodies of ants holding each other up over a crevice so the rest of the ants can cross over and forage for the colony? Inherent trust in the strength of the whole. You may have that trust already. I have a mix of that trust and a bit of skepticism thrown in for double-checking purposes. It's not that I don't trust you. It's just that I don't know the person who trusts the person who trusts the person that you trust. We may have motivations at cross-purposes. Recently, right now, in the near future, I'm figuring out if I should just go with the trust and not worry about cross-purposes. From another galaxy, a few cross-purposes within one species seem irrelevant. Time will tell the teller.

Poor Agincourt

History repeats itself. We're revising the victory at Agincourt to reflect the more likely number of assailants. Pretty soon, we'll realize that rarely do the facts line up with the facts. All victories were strength and power over poor planning rather than the bravery of the few against the massive size of the complacent.

So that's the answer to all my problems? Gather an army of like-minded folks and take on the status quo? C'est vrai! Mais oui!

Yesterday, while munching on a salmon sandwich at the 50s diner in Lamar Alexander's hometown (our server, Ashley A, with eyes the colour of a full bottle of Lea&Perrins worcestershire sauce), where you're liable to seeing Scots fighting in the field on a fall day, I looked at the wall coverings. Old vehicle licence plates and other memorandumabilia. Thought about the song on the jukebox, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

Victory in the Lion's Den. A soft jazz quintet at the Donors' club BBQ luncheon. Cheerleaders with names like Bruce Pearl jazzing up the crowd. Rain, drizzle, rain, memories of Bill Murray in Caddyshack, "I believe the worst is over." When was the last time two fullbacks scored TDs in the General's house? High-fiving new fans around us during the 31-13 shellacking of the Evil Genius on the 31st.

And finally, hungry for more, we stopped at Shoney's midnight breakfast bar and enjoyed Kristen's hot chocolate, glad that she's been with the company for ten years, ever since she was 16, having enjoyed the days of an employee-owned franchise before selling out to the Nashville group, her loyalty higher than stock value, her dedication to us tired fans more than we can ask for, assisted by T. Boudre with the post-game rush of folks wanting some way to celebrate taking the Gamecocks down a notch.

The universe is bigger than I can imagine, my being able to write the word light-year but have no clue how many tanks of gas it takes to drive that distance, assuming an infinity of life to drive it. Thus, for me, Kiffin and his crew put life in perspective, sharing the ups and downs of a first year college-level football coach's career, proving that Agincourt was no fluke. It might not have been David and Goliath but it was a giant of a win, anyway. If we can conquer our fears, we can conquer the distance between here and wherever we want to go, spooky halftime Southland thriller shows, included.

Glad that Peyton, Dallas and Jeff can joke about their complete ignorance when it comes to Sunday football. Glad that fans of all makes and models can enjoy el fútbol americano / अमेरिकी फुटबॉल / 아메리칸 풋볼 together, overlooking Shields-Watkins Field. I am always surprised by those who congregate for sports and glad to be surprised. Hope my new friends around me at the game didn't mind meeting the other side of me, who turns on his aggressive, angry fan mode for a few hours a week, now that I'm too old to body-slam opponents during industrial league football games, coed softball games, or church league volleyball games.

[No time for proofreading/editing this entry. 'Tis what what what iiit is. Real life interrupts with other plans.]

When Latin Ruled The World

A blimp of a change, the inclusion of other language character sets for addresses/destinations in virtual space on electronic computing systems. Can you convert your keyboard quickly enough to jump between domains? Can you read what you're typing? Can we stay connected with one another despite language barriers?

I watched the blades of a ceiling fan for hours in the dark hours of the early morning, patterns emerging and disappearing, looking at tangents, seeing the near perfect circle drawn in the air, rapidly blinking my eyelids to see snapshots of the fan in motion. I heard the pattern, the pitter-patter, of words in my thoughts. I couldn't believe I used the phrase "inner being" in a recent blog post.

I got up and wrote in my pocket moleskine:

What bothers me about the business of education, the business of healthcare, the business of business, for that matter, and our seeing life in terms of economic conditions like democratic capitalism or communist socialism (or is it socialist communism? I can never remember) is this:

Life is not working for a living. Life is getting paid to learn, to earn our way to self-actualisation, market viability of our inviolable right to live.

Are we looking at the wrong paradigm for educating ourselves? Should children be taught problem solving skills from the very beginning, encouraging them to seek out alphabets and number systems through cooperation with each other to figure out how to give/get food, clothing, shelter and other social goods/services?

I happily stared at the ceiling fan thinking about this. I have thought about this issue for many years, especially as a person managing others in an office work environment or as a worker in the sewer business. As a person making lunch at Taco Bell, looking at the adults beside me and asking, "Is this what 12 years of public education gives back to society?"

We separate ourselves into age categories for many reasons. Pediatrics. Geriatrics. However, learning is a lifelong process. Should we have mandatory mass education for people of a certain age anymore? Should we develop a new system of learning, where the student and the teacher are the same, on the job and in the classroom at the same time, solving problems and managing projects with others regardless of age?

Alternative education is a hot topic right now as many public schools face the issues of failing to provide sustainable skills to youth. As a person who grew up in the public school system, whose family was/is/will be intimately involved in the public education process, I wonder what increased value I would have received had society used a different model to turn me into a useful interdependent being.

I look at the teachers who meant the most to me and remember them for their encouragement to see life outside the textbook and classroom.

I look at the friends with whom I congregated and realize we tend to gather in herds of like personalities. The teachers/administrators/coaches who encouraged us to socialize outside our herds were the ones who impressed me most.

I recently decided to leave my role as an instructor in the adult education system as exemplified by the for-profit model I worked for because I believe that education is integral to the workplace. I always paid my employees to learn on the job, using cross-training to encourage my employees to learn what their coworkers were doing. People shouldn't pay to get an education. We should pay people to solve problems and guide them, education being part of the solution, not part of their problem repaying debt.

I ought to know. I learned just as much, if not more, spending time with my friends experimenting with breadboards and diodes and homemade power supplies in our basements and bedrooms than I did in formal education settings. I learned more about my physical capabilities playing street ball and backyard football than in little leagues. I was a Vikings, Dolphins, Redskins, Falcons, Cubs, Reds, Braves, Hawks and Volunteers fan long before I knew about dangling modifiers or differential equations. I read Mad magazine as much as I read classical literature. I fought with my friends and verbally sparred with adults.

I have more to think about this education situation as faced by developed nations and developing nations. I believe it's tied to healthcare. Essentially any universal service, those which we consider the rights of our species, should be integral to what we do everyday. Physical and mental training is who we are.

No solution is perfect. The solutions we have do good jobs. I know that business concepts like process improvement are no panacea but they provide examples with which to soak in a pot of spaghetti noodles, pull out and throw at the dartboard to see if they stick to the bullseye. Mixed metaphors are useful sometimes, too.

More as the film develops color distortions in the rusting canister. I want to stew on what matters to me most, building a team of people who thrive on constant learning, no matter what their innate capabilities may be. Nothing in life is guaranteed. I want people around me who want more than an insurance policy to protect them from catastrophe - I want people who find solutions to problems before they exist.

Going Pains

How connected do you feel to your surroundings? According to the ol' seven effects of habitual people, we go through three stages - dependence, independence and interdependence. Makes me think of Depends. Which takes me to the adverts which point out men's need to release bladder contents on frequent occasions. Do any of you find yourself desiring to pee more often after seeing those actors looking for the nearest toilette?

Speaking of affective habits, are you a leader, a coach, a mentor, a manager, a supervisor, a parent, an innovator, an inventor, or a visionary?

Do you encourage people to overcome adversity or do you throw obstacles in people's way? Do you try to accomplish one with the other?

I have one life to live here on this planet with you. I don't have time to waste on timewasters or busy work. I don't like assigning homework for homework's sake or officework to fill empty spaces in a schedule. I look at another person and ask myself what it takes to improve that person's interaction with me and/or others. Then, and only then, do I decide as the person in charge how to address the use of time between us.

Do I know what's best for us? No. Do I make wild guesses sometimes? No. I make wild guesses most of the time. But I base my guesses on what I deem to be beneficial for us.

Leadership is easy. You put yourself on a pedestal to see what's going on and then put everyone on a higher pedestal than you. You lead for their sakes, not yours, but you don't put your life aside. You lead for the whole group, including yourself. There's time for every individual to make valuable input in the workplace, sports team, group of friends, family, crowd, political gathering, you name it.

And sometimes, you decide to walk away from the situation. You realize you are not the leader the group needs to succeed. You put your personality aside and say you will lead a team to victory somewhere else. A decision easier said than done. I know. I've only done it two or three times in my life and it hurt my pride every time.

We're influenced by adverts subliminally. We catch ourselves going to the toilet two or three times in the middle of the night when we don't have the urge or don't need to simply because our thoughts are looking for similarity and found a connection to actors portraying bladder control problems. When leading a team, we influence our teams subliminally. Sometimes, unspoken thoughts circulate and influence a team when we're not paying attention. A leader spends time paying attention to the unspoken thoughts and deciding where the subliminal influence needs to be applied for team success. Do you see the equivalent of team behaviour linked to adverts over which you have no control? Leaders in the emotional realm - religion or industrial psychology, for instance - use external influences all the time. They deliberately tie social trends into their work. Great leaders in any field do the same.

Am I great leader? I've had moments, flashes, of greatness but I'm not completely interdependent. Often, I see the independent self in the wonders of the universe and believe I am alone in my beliefs. When I realize I am not alone in my beliefs, I feel a great understanding of interdependence and then share that understanding with and between others, sometimes when I'm leading, sometimes when I'm neither leading nor following.

This blog is my outreach of understanding my interdependence with my species. Some days I don't feel like typing here but most days I feel an overwhelming desire to share myself and what I've learned from others with you. Of course, we're all the same way. That's why we create blogs, buy portable media devices and lose track of time on social networking websites.

You see what I'm saying? We all have the potential to be great leaders. The best way to get there is to not see yourself as a leader or as great. See yourself as yourself responsible to yourself in others.

Every past was a future. Every solution was a problem. Every leader was a inquisitive baby wetting its clothes. We all influence someone and someone influences us.

Speaking of which, the squirrels and chipmunks roaming the forest floor are making me hungry. Time for lunch! Talk to you great leaders later on.

A Tree or an Obelisk?

Today, I sit in my place of sanctuary, my temple, my meditation center, my moment to be me and not me. The floor beneath my feet smooth concrete. The window onto the world an open, double-width garage door. Ambient temperature near 20 deg C.

Dozens of trees in near view. Hundreds behind those. I am not a painter so the colour of the landscape takes the form of leaves and branches and trunks and vines and pieces and parts built by my species.

Deciduous trees pulling back into themselves for winter, their suncatchers sealing off at the base, losing their breath, their purpose changing, waving at me one more time before their trip in the fall.

Am I a tree or an obelisk? Do I sway with the wind but hold my place because of strong roots, or do I hold my position because of massive weight and size, rootless?

Metaphors and similes. Which is more athletic? Which is more academic? Can I run faster or push you over? You know what I'm saying.

The grass is in the ground because of the tree overhead. The rotting tree feeds both and doesn't know it doesn't exist.

If ten generations of chickadees have fed at my feeders and I don't feed the eleventh, why does the twelfth stop by and ask for food? Are feeders a universal chickadee food sign?

My friend, the maple tree, stands next to the dead cedar tree, perpendicular to the ground and straight as a compass needle. North is not important but the Earth's core is. Maybe. I think. At least that's what I've been told.

I've never heard a tree laugh. But I've seen a satisfied one. "Ooh! Aah! Feel the sun heat my fluids. Grow leaves, grow!" A sugar maple I could tap and boil its fluids for sweet syrup to pour over breakfast foods or dessert. But I don't. I let it and the wisteria have their twisted relationship on the edge of the suburban forest.

Whispering oaks loom over us all. The mimosa sneaks into a lit corner and displays the last of its clawlike leaves.

These trees are under my protection. I choose to let them be, having trimmed a few branches to keep them from scraping my car but otherwise letting them grow as high as they please. Do they care? Of course not. When a strong enough wind blows, many of these trees would crash down on my car, my house, my driveway, my gate to the backyard garden. They would not uproot and run away from all this to protect me. In the meantime, their shade in summer keeps my house cool. Their leaves in winter provide food for grass and cover for squirrel food. Birds use their branches to find seeds and grubs and hide from predators. An equal bargain? Perhaps. But we don't keep count.

And what of the obelisk in which I sit? What makes this edifice of sticks and nails sit in place, impervious to breezes and thunderstorms? A solid base? Hardly. The ground beneath us shifts and moves, its idea of time different than mine.

If I am not the trees in front of me or the obelisk around me, what am I?

I am these questions. I am the space between the trees and the obelisk. I am the breath of the trees and the meaning to this obelisk. I am filler. I am paste. I am action. I am noise. I am what they are and what they are not.

We say that time slows down in a garden but the leaves here are constantly moving, measurable down to nano- and pico-scales if we choose. We mean the plants in front of us are not a group of people whose faces and actions we scan at a people pace. I can yell at a tree and it won't be offended but I can't ask a tree for immediate help in an emergency. I can climb its branches or chop it up for firewood.

This obelisk is made of trees in its framework and skin so trees braced together form an obelisk.

I find myself by my place in the environment around me. At times, I prefer the environment of people; at times, I prefer the environment of trees. Trees may be obelisks and obelisks may be people but trees can't be people but people and trees can give each other breath and life.

I live in this time. I live nowhere else. I live with the trees and the people. We measure time in different ways - sunshine, seasons, calendars, clocks. We eat and we feed. We live and we die. We are. We be. Timeless and well-placed.

The Latest of the Early Wearable Computing Years

Early happy b'day to Mark M. I was more of a Rypien fan myself but without you Rypien would have been Capitol carpet, eh? A connection via Riggs was one factor in keeping up with you guys, not to mention the Honorable Heath.

While new players get circulation systems for their outfits and communications devices in their headgear, we get HUDs in other uniforms for those with more firepower. What's next?

In an old copy of "Heavy Metal" magazine, a comic detailed the firefight between two infantry divisions. Hard-fought battle. At the end, a soldier removes his exoskeletal gear and looks at the gear of his opponent, discovering his opponent is completely robotic. That '80s era scifi foretold today. What tells us of tomorrow?

What will semi-pro (i.e., college) and pro players wear on the fields of battle? When will robotic body parts become normal, like the videogames of old when robotic football players faced each other on their wheeled parts? Will players see their routes on HUDs, removing the confusion in huddles of loud stadiums? Will player body stats get displayed on trainers' laptop screens? Will nanoscale drug capsules get released when pain relief or adrenaline doses are needed? Will smart padding absorb and spread contact pressure, preventing concussions and broken bones?

Will football fields become electronically active and track the 3D position of footballs? Will players and balls be able to switch between live slo-mo and accelerated action? Will 3D advert placement become part of every piece of the field, including players, refs, yard markers, coaches, field goals, etc., like wearable electronic art?

Will fans get to have football helmet cams to track like NASCAR car cams, following their favorite players on iPhones during the game, with pay per view allowing expletives and body slamming to be heard in 7.1 sound?

Will players work with their agents to franchise their images for robotic leagues? Multiple Peyton Mannings at quarterback? Adrian Peterson at RB? Mean Joe Green coming back from "retirement"? Reggie White coming back from the dead?

Semi-pro (sorry, college) players will share the rights of their robotic images with their teams, trading revenue for college credits in such classes as "Branding Entrepreneurship" and "Image Capitalisation." Fans can take the robotic role of their favorite players during off weekends, filling stadiums many times during the year, not just for home games, playing anybody from any year against the other team's mix of players and eras, in the FRC (Football Robotic Championship level, of course). DARPA will use information from these college/university performances to tweak their robotic fighting forces, a version of Robocop just a hard metal step around the corner.

Bookmakers learn the names and capabilities of FRC design engineering students and professors just like college football players today. They track the professional careers of robot designers. New revenue streams appear in the hacking of robot players to fix games.

And that's when terrorists will take over Antarctica, using clandestine robotic units to set up robot factories, training camps and synthetic drug manufacturing facilities where few will tread. Submarines to transport e-army units and drug shipments around the planet (submarines disguised as whales, of course, taking down both Japanese whaling vessels and Greenpeace ships that get in their path).

The future is a fun place to play. Anything is possible. Some things appear just as predicted. Surprises surface and steer the future in a whole new direction.

Too bad the Hokies ran out of gas. I don't want to see another opponent's field goals for a while! Night, y'all. More international info on the morrow. A big hint. While the news focuses on "Muslim extremists" (if that's not profiling/stereotyping/hate crime material, what is?), I look at cartels for more interesting futures. Power is not in being seen, it's being invisible that gets you into places nobody's looking. Once you're in, nobody's paying attention because you're one of them/us. After that? Just because someone's no longer demonising you doesn't mean you've stopped reciting history to yourself and your cohorts. You can draw the rest of the picture by now, right? No? Like I said, later on, dude.

Yet More Stuff Again

Good to see solar power and smart power grids get a boost by the U.S. president. Has someone asked the guys in cowboy hats what they were there for?

On the other side of the pond, two bits of news:

1. Finland ranked most prosperous country
2. Work too hard for most

What price prosperity, eh? Maybe it helps to get someone to financially help share the load.

Titleless

[Now that I'm calmed down, I can rest for a bit and think about someone else's issues for a change.]

A student of mine mentioned that she always starts the term feeling prepared and organized but quickly falls into disrepair and gets behind in her assignments.

I know how she feels. During the 21 years of my struggles to overcome self-deprecation and situational depression to finally complete a bachelor's degree, I told myself every quarter/semester that this was the term I was going to take my studies seriously and get a good grade.

Do I have some philosophical insight to provide the student? Not really. I wouldn't suggest the path I took to discover that it's when you figure out who you are and thus the major line of reasoning and studying that gets you excited to attend class and master the subject after you've spent countless hours and years of in-class sitting and twindling your pen, not to forget the thousands of dollars invested to discover your inner being...

I am an example of myself to myself as far back as I can remember. I want to see independence in a person but not true independence, just the demonstration of independence in thought as built around the zeitgeist. Done. I want to see freedom from worrying about having money, not the freedom of having lots of money to spend. Done. I want to say I took the use of my environment into consideration when consuming goods and services but not be a total hermit in the woods. Done.

I entered university without knowing what I wanted to do in life. I spent the next 21 years taking a variety of classes, building up my knowledge of the knowledge in books and lectures and labs and teachers' thoughts to see that a university-level education is whatever you want to make of it. For me, it has always been about the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake that can be turned into these words. The acquisition of a better job or position in life was never my goal, only my perception of what others thought my goal of an education should be. I value the quality of one scoop of fresh ice cream, not a basement full of 80 different flavours to choose from.

I have no sage wisdom in me. I acknowledge that fact. I have the accumulation of knowledge that bounces around in my thoughts and gets bounced off the people around me, many times used to the benefit of others and the detriment of, or noneffect on, me.

I am teaching my last class at the local technical institute. I have given the students I met all that I know. I have shared my thoughts, my knowledge, my love of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, my pursuit of cheap technical gadgets and a basic understanding of the class subject. Did I know all there was to know about the subject? Never. Did I inspire all my students? No. But that's real life. We reach out and affect/effect some we meant to and many that we didn't.

What can I tell my students who have trouble focusing on their classwork? Look at the big picture. Is it just this class that you're having difficulty with? Is it the teacher/instructor/professor? Is it your major course of study? Your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse/child/grandchild? Don't expect to see a clear answer standing out. The solution may be fuzzy. Life is not a series of Yes/No, True/False and multiple choice answers. You have to experiment sometimes to see what is the best answer for the time and place.

A school diploma will open doors for you but you are not your diploma. You may discover who you are before, during or after you receive your diploma. In fact, you'll discover multiple versions of yourself as you go along.

Despite all the distractions that seem so important to you, you are the only coursework, the only project that matters. The class you're taking is part of who you are in the moment. If you understand that, you'll see how unimportant the distractions are. If not, you'll let the distractions get the better part of you. It's no secret. It's what you learned in the crib when you cried for food and your parent(s) were distracted by something temporarily more important than you. We learned to cry ourselves to sleep and we learn to study on our own. It's not hard work. It's just what we learn to do as long as we're open to learning and open to new opportunities. I paid a price of a couple of hundred school credit hours to learn that lesson. I 'ope you don't 'ave to.

Lost In Allemagne

Mad, Hopeful, Dazed, Depressed, Contented, Ashamed, Famished, Cranky, Stressed. The many moods of mes chats mâles.

A day of contemplating life through another's eyes.

Meanwhile, on the battlefront...

David McWilliams: Rich get richer as rest of us pay for their mistakes

Kierkegaard on the Couch

The Mismeasure of Woman

= & =

A day of contemplating nothing and nothingness, happiness a stranger in a strange land somewhere. What's the point of using ASCII or binary if the text won't type itself since today's not a day for one to be typing one's thoughts? :^(

The recession over and less than 90 percent of the people fully employed. Should the remaining folks jump for joy? Best be quiet, eh? Guess I should be a good bloke and eat me fish and chips and drink me draught. Daft, I say. Here's my fully Monty to those who put us in this mess, guilty and charged up. Maybe there's something numbing on the telly to take my mind off me. A couple of mouse hunters my companions for the day.

Link O' The Day

What do we do with what we know and how do we apply resources effectively?:

http://www.good.is/post/how-might-we-measure-what%e2%80%99s-most-meaningful/

Clinical Chill

When writing the types of stories I write, I look at the junction of wordplay and madness. Deep in the bowels of the bowels, bacteria gather to feed on our discarded youth. In the bacteria gather other goodies.

Condensed versions of what matters.

In the meantime, small rubber cylinders spin incessantly, grinding rock upon rock in hopes of creating polished gifts to give out at the end of the year, the muddy goop poured off the front deck onto the roots of azaleas which may or may not add colour beneath the redbud tree in spring.

Bach concertos on earpieces.

When in class at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in the early 1980s, I listened to a professor discuss the issues of death and dying, the majority of my classmates nurses who dealt with the elderly or terminally ill. I the oddity. I the curious. I obsessed with mortality in my second decade of hesitating, halting living writing. A comment from the teacher: "Those who've thought about self have thought about self's death. Those who step into the abyss find desire to go back, some taking the permanent route. Some put off self's death until their 50s, waiting for something stronger than the abyss to keep them on this side." Studied Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and other authors. Don't go into the light, etc., because the light's not real, just the decrease of oxygen to body parts, including the aerobic bacteria fending off the anaerobic bacteria in our guts.

A year before our 30th.

Within a calendar year, two secondary schoolmates have taken their lives from the rest of us. Snuffed. Eliminated. Subtracted. Of my ~477 classmates, how many others have ended their lives with their own means?

Depression in a depression.

Or a recession. Words have no meaning except when you're facing yourself in a mirror asking why, why, why. Where are the answers? Reactive reagents. Organic or inorganic chemistry. Beakers. Stopcocks. Microscales. Notebooks.

I know that mirror. I've stared at my face looking for answers. Whose face am I? My long-lost grandfather? My parents? My...what? Temper tantrums as a child. Red hair. Scandinavian rage. Scandals. Scandalise. Vandalise. Valise. Valet. Anger and nowhere to release because no one upon whom berserkers should attack.

I know the questions. When will it end? What's the point? Why bother? What's the difference? We all know them. We've asked them or asked them of others.

Alone but not lonely. Lonely but not alone. Any time, any place. All the time. No place. With or without words. Chemicals pumping through our bodies, driving us insane. Artificial chemicals - drugs - a plaster mask over a crumbling wall. The abyss, known or unknown, desired beyond rational responsible logical 40238tmnF)$MDS_$

Meaningless meaningful mean meanings means

Can...not...wait...five...more...minutes...of...life...

Two-stepping, two-timing or twelve steps. Don't give a damn. It's just another fucking minute on this planet that can do without me.

And never at a convenient time. Pounding headaches. Unbearable silence. Screaming without mercy. Can hell be any worse?

These moments curl around us like a boa constrictor that hasn't eaten in a month. We're but little mice in the vice.

If this is madness, where's the line that divides us from genius? Why can't we choose? Why be normal if the cycle's going to hit the mountain trail and sling mud and rocks into our sore spots over and over and over and send red rover to simple simon's clotheslined the pieman and got the cobbler nailing the little old lady in the shoe?

Where are the signs that help others help those who think that help is forever out of reach?

I lost two classmates recently, both who took their lives. They thought what they thought and did what they did because of who they were. In my stories, I see the reflection of those with whom I've spent my life. My life is not yet spent. I still have breath. Where in my stories are my classmates whose lives are spent? What can I learn? What have my characters learned? Is there a lesson in what we call clinical depression, bipolar personalities, or other mental twists and turns that make normalcy a bad joke we never get? I don't know. I have a normal life. I have normal friends and normal family. Of course, normality is a statistical mean to which none of us wholly belongs, according to John Weightman.

Statistics. Sadistics. Permutations. Connotations. Mathematics for masochists.

Today, I am sad. Happiness will have to wait its turn tomorrow. I miss my dead classmates. I miss my fellow secondary schoolmates who are still alive. In the depths of our depressions - real, imagined, temporary or permanent - we miss ourselves, too. A good comforting thought or relief valve of a funny joke is out of my sight right now. I am p-p-p-pefdurhitdaqwty perplexed.

We cannot solve the world's problems by ourselves. It takes time and effort to see what's really going on. We may never figure out what's wrong with ourselves but we move forward and try anyway. Trial and error. Fall down and get back up. Two steps forward and one step back. No, it's not easy. No, it's not hard. It is what it is. Some of us will choose to kill ourselves and there's nothing we can do to stop the action. From another galaxy, I can't see if that's what we should expect of a growing population of one species getting more and more crowded but that's what population studies show. Murder, violence, depression, suicide. The other side of longer lifespans and healthier birthrates on less and less arable land.

I like to write. What I write is not always what I like. I don't like this blog entry but it's one I want to write down and observe. I have met the clinically depressed. I have met schizophrenics, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive and manic-depressive types. I have met the disenfranchised and the despondents. I have met those who feel they have no hope left. Drug addicts. Suicidal loners. People who've found a way to live despite their desire to die. All of us alive, breathing, kicking and screaming our way through the next minute, five minutes, hour, morning, afternoon, evening, night, day, week, month, year...

Every moment is not a blessing. Every moment is not happiness, joy, peace and quiet. Every moment is whatever we do to get through the moment.

Can we get through the moment? We just did. We will again right after this next one. Can we save our schoolmates, coworkers, family and friends from killing themselves? We hope so. We may not be able to. In the moment when we lose one or more, we face ourselves and what we feel we might have done. Why? What if...? The answers never appear. Or do they? We're left with ourselves. You see, that's the answer, don't you? We're left with ourselves. We're the ones who go forward with each other, looking at the remaining questions to be answered and working together for solutions.

No matter the reason or what we believe, every body dies. We had our lives and lived them, no matter how short or long. We interacted with those around us the best way our bodies could, good or bad.

The past few days, I've tried to maintain a happy demeanor but I've been sad. The older I get, the more I become a sympathetic old fool. I lost a classmate to suicide and there's not a thing I could have done to stop her. Her life was hers to do with as she chose. I want to blame the knuckleheads who created this economic downturn but I know that's just the Viking in me who wants some bloodletting to feel better. I want to grab someone by the collar and punch as hard as I can but who's at cause? Too many chemical-laden instant meals? Too much breathing industrial pollution? Clinical depression is a disease beyond my comprehension, a label I know little about.

One less person in the world. One less smile. One less tear. One less hug.

Tomorrow's another day. Tonight's a long time, sleep far away. I don't have enough arms, smiles or soothing words to reach out to all my classmates at once and tell them they're more important than anyone else in the world. If you can read this, whoever you are, I love you. You are important to me. I need you more than you can possibly imagine. I don't care what you look like or what you think. We may be worlds apart in thought but we're brother and sister in fact. Look in the mirror and imagine someone(s) beside you or behind you smiling at you smiling back at them.

Some moments are tough to handle by ourselves. If nothing else, the Internet's here to help us see we're not alone. We can share our problems anonymously, if we have to, to find creative solutions from online strangers when we feel we can't turn to immediate friends and family.

I wish you a good night, my friends. Here is my virtual handshake or reassuring pat on the back. You'll have to pardon my emotional outburst here. I'll get back to my humourous ways soon enough. I want to feel every emotion, even sadness and depression, when the moment for one arrives. Why else live? Why not live? There's always tomorrow. Procrastination is a good thing!

The Spirit and Influence of Giving

Two movies yesterday - "Mon Oncle D'Amerique" and "Race to Witch Mountain." Two generations of moviemakers, multiple movie generations between the release of the movies. Messages and culture markers. Theories. Entertainment.

On this part of the planet, a dose of water falling from the sky.

Tithes and offerings. Forced offerings/sacrifices via government taxes and income redistribution.

We have one voice, one life, one moment.

I see this moment a thousand years from now, when our time is reduced to a few sentences that summarize the general mood and outcome of this century. My thoughts will be long forgotten, these words paved over by a million million blogs and whatever else comes next, including brain-to-brain synapse/thought sharing, people having mosh pit sessions of thought bashing, smashing, ripping into each other's brainwaves at raves and virtual jam sessions. Cutups for cutups.

I forget how time filters out noise. I forget how noise filters out time. I forget I can take a timeout from all this and be noise-free.

Owning the Book of the Future, I already know where these words fit into the scheme of this century, no scheming involved, just a flow of symbols temporarily taking up space in a computer storage system somewhere I don't know, one keyclick away from being deleted forever, assuming places like archive.org don't archive these words.

And then what happens?

A thousand years in the future. A simple statement. A few words. Lives upon lives leading to more lives and yet? Yeti? SETI? Our imaginations running away from us. Discovering aesthetics is not universal. Real life is being integrated into the planets we're on, not separated from them.

I want to believe I'm singular. But I've been taught to believe I want to believe I'm singular, which makes me part of the plural, which wants to believe it's plural when it's really singular, part of the whole one.

I won't live to see one thousand years from now except reading about it. By reading about it, I live it. By living it, I am it. I exist now and forever without doing anything about it. My ancestor planted one extra seed and I'm alive because of it. I write one extra word and someone reads what I didn't write because of it.

I hold up one hand and say, "This is my hand." What is a hand but a section of the environment interacting with itself?

Concepts easy to see and play with. What of emotions? What of heartbeats?

One person kills others in a marketplace, maximizing the number of deaths. Maiming. Creating orphans. Another person kills a family in a jealous rage. Is a reason necessary? A thousand years from now, no one will remember. Can we live today like we'll be seen one thousand years from now? Can we even see tomorrow?

Do you give more than you receive? Do you resolve more problems than you complain about?

These are words. They've never been more than words. They appear to represent symbols greater or less than they are but they are not.

I look for novelty. I look at myself one thousand years from now and ask if I did something different every day that I had to live and breathe. That's all I do. Because I'm a member of a group that sees itself as unique, I think about myself representing that group in what I do differently every day, assuming our group will be here to talk about itself one thousand years from now, talk being a concept that I have no idea how it will be represented at that time. In thinking about differences between now and then, I imagine ideas that could make our group's history more meaningful to folks one thousand years from now, instead of repeating the same historical petty squabbles we play up as epic battles, wars and revolutions, with heroes on one side and villains on the other.

I'm just one person. I'm not a historian. I don't plan to invent a better mousetrap. I plan to live today and the next today and the next today after that. I know all about the mislaid plans of mice and men but I live anyway. Novelty and happiness are my guide. I look for others like me but never place too much hope that I'll find someone like me every moment because I know we get caught up in ideas that take control of our unique lives and twist our emotions and thoughts into tight circles that we can't get out of very easily. I am an example of myself and an example of others to myself and others. The pebble, the pond and the waves all at once.

I don't live to make others happy. I make others happy by living a happy life. I live a happy life by seeing myself one thousand years from now, most of my actions inconsequential and nothing to get riled up about. If my actions won't matter, I can be free to do what I want. There are no rules because the rules of today don't apply one thousand years from now. Concepts easy to see and play with, don't you think?

Continuing Saga of the Pioneer Family

"Pa, how come our mobile phones don't work out here?"

"Boy, it's on account of them swindlers."

"Swindlers?"

"Yeah, that swindler sickness 'bout wiped everyone out."

"No, Ez, it weren't no swindler sickness. It were the heinous virus that wiped them out."

"Mama, I ain't talking about that thing. I'm talking 'bout afore that happened."

"But, Pa and Ma, is my phone ain't working 'cause it's ill?"

"Young man, you watch your mouth. Ain't nobody or nothing ill 'round here."

"But my brother..."

"He's just got a bit of fever 'cause he drank what he shouldn't've. You sit back there with your brother and play another game."

"But Ma, our batteries've run out."

"Well, son, as soon as your Pa figures out what makes them batteries work, we'll get it fixed. Meantime, you play the counting game with your brother."

"Aw, Ma, it's boring."

"Look, now, boy, you listen to your Ma. Play that counting game but play it quietly. I's got a headache from listening to you flap your jaws so much."

"Oh, okay. Brother, it's your turn to count."

"Is it? Well, I see one, two, five, ten, fifteen dead electric wagons on this side of the road. How about your side?"

"I see five, ten, fifteen, twenty dead horseless carriages and ten, twenty dead electric wagons!"

"You win this round."

"And there's some of them feller eaters over there."

"You sure about that?"

"Yeah, they're eating some fellers."

"Lawdy may, they sure is. Pa, we got some feller eaters in the area."

"Well, son, they's plenty of fellers in them dead wagons to eat so we're doing just fine."

"Yessir. Pa, when do we get to a place where there's some kids to play with? I'm tired of all them dead wagons and such."

"Boy, ain't mine to say. We're heading to where your Mama's family gots some land. We's hoping there's some folks still up and around in them parts there."

"Yessir."

"Whyn't you boys count vultures for a change? They's different than regular feller eaters but not tasty like regular fowl."

"Yessir."

"Yessir."

"Ez, I sure hope you know what you're doing."

"Mama, if you've got a better idea, I's listening 'cause I still ain't used to the stench of dead folks."

"Don't know, Ez. I's just glad we had nothing to do with them swindlers and hope we ain't got nothing to do with the heinous virus."

"'At's right, Mama. We done the right thing all the time. You, me and the boys'll do just fine. And you know I know all 'bout them batteries. I's just teaching the boys how to wean off of them things. Won't be needing them things no longer, the way I figure it."

"I know, Ez. But I gotta give 'em hope 'til we find something else for them to do."

"Hope's 'bout all we got, Mama."

"Hope and each other."

"'At's right."

Fall: Between Yellow and Brown

Outside the window, sunlight and shadows form a crisscross pattern on a yellow redbud leaf full of holes. Brown leaves fall to the ground in a timed dance, flipping and spinning toward Earth's core, stopped by the woven vines and roots that feed off of last year's crop of tree leaves, dust and other former living material.

An invisible breeze passes through, indicated by waving branches.

The cycles of this patch of planet vary but repeat, tied to the tilt, spin and rotation around the Sun.

I cannot tell you if there is a Who or who, Them or them tied to the creation of this planet and its inhabitants. That is for you to know and believe. I wander aimlessly, my body what it is, what it was and what it might be. I support those who support others but I seek no support for myself. I observe and report, tied to my nurture and nature, no matter what else you know and believe I might be tied to.

Your belief is wonderful. Your happiness shows on your face and in the joy you share with others. Your gifts are not just self-sacrificing, they're life-enhancing. I've tried to be you but my vanity and my vices get in the way. That's why I support what you do, believing the world of our species is better served by you than by me.

I'm a crotchety old fool, fooled by his folly. You are the salt of the earth and the honey of the beehive. I'm a beer drinker and sports enthusiast who cusses like a sailor when he's angry. I seek resolutions that will make our species more successful - sometimes a resolution requires "adjustments" that make me uncomfortable in the moment but I look at the big picture and try to shake off what I know I just approved to be done that I don't like. I don't seek forgiveness or acceptance of my actions. I accept what has to be done that will get happiness later on.

The leaves on the tree outside the window...some of them still have shades of green but yellow and brown are the dominant theme now, here in late October in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere of this planet.

I happily sing songs from my childhood spent in summer camps and youth retreats. I enjoyed my time in the choir, singing four-part harmony, trying my best to stay in tune before tinnitus took away my ability to hear myself sing in a group. I'm a middle-aged guy now, subject to chronic aches and pains I didn't know when I was younger except when I played sports and took a few days to heal from wounds. Happiness is knowing the aches and pains and my off-key singing mean I'm alive.

I admire those who adhere to religious practices, no matter what you say in prayers. I understand what you seek but I do not ask myself for the same. I respect one sacrosanct ceremony - the wedding vow - and seek only the same of others. My wife is my angel, my saint, my partner, my companion, my eternal joy. Everything else that I do and think relates to that one belief, monogamy. Others have different ways to celebrate monogamy, different rules, different beliefs. My sight is limited - I do not know what is right or wrong and will not judge others' behaviour, no matter what I personally feel about their practices.

I celebrate me. I celebrate you. Life is the key to living. Our planet is tiny, tiny, tiny. We forget sometimes how small our world is because we live in isolated pockets most of our lives and think the world must be gigantic in comparison.

I am just one person but we are seven billion strong. The more we focus on our strengths the less we have to let our weaknesses get in our way.

What is one leaf worth? It can become food for plants, or warmth and shelter for a gray squirrel's nest. In a few weeks, the leaf in front of me will be gone. The bare branch of the redbud tree in winter will face me for a few months, its seedpods hanging until Earth's axis points the Northern Hemisphere toward the Sun again, bringing out new redbud blooms and fresh seedpods.

Happiness is being at peace with myself. Peace is knowing you have found the life you seek. Let me share my life with you from here, knowing you're sharing your life with others in more direct ways in the moment, no matter whether you're in a church, temple, synagogue, mosque or other formal religious gathering place.

Five Million Miles Away From Home

First item on the agenda: rumour of the day. Now that the fire ant nest has been disrupted, the fire ants are busy cleaning house and then they're on the march, looking not for hostages to take home but for vengeance. Killings home and abroad. Prisons are meant to keep people in so how many people does it take to break people out, especially along the border, to show that power is as mobile as the Peacekeeper or other intercontinental treaty trickers? I learned a long time ago that you don't stuff your mattress full of dough because the doughboys want all 200+ pieces of your pie. Best invest. Anybody want an overpriced piece of "art" now that the Windy City deal went bust as predicted?

Who sings the old song best, The Brothers Four, Bobby Bare, the Hooters, Nick Cave, or a different take by the Proclaimers?

Today's a popular day for allegories among the poplars. The Story of the Falling Tree Seed. The Time that Lightning Felled the Old Oak up the Hill. The Gully Washer of the Ages.

Folk songs. Easy lyrics. Simple melodies. On a bright, sunny morning, everyone sitting around the campfire, waiting on the breakfast to warm up, we sing a few tunes appropriate for the day. Kumbaya. Sing 'til the power of the Lord comes down. Scarborough Fair. He's Got the Whole World. Blowing in the Wind. Day by Day. Michael Row the Boat Ashore. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Waltzing Matilda. It's a Small World. Make New Friends. Gaelic Blessing.

One day we'll be sitting on Mars, gathered around the solar-powered heating system, eating our flavoured algae breakfast. Will we look up at the sky and shout with joy? Will be reminisce about the good ol' days on Earth? Will someone sing a revised version of being 500 miles away from home?

A journey of over 500 days begins with the thought that you're one of the chosen few to take the long ride across the chasm, no wagon trail, no dual carriageway, just you and a few companions. I would like to be one of you but I won't be. Envy is my companion. I'll sing a campfire song or two in your honour, whoever you end up being, whenever you decide to sign up for the adventure. The military forces of my country are always advertising their Earthbound adventures. Wouldn't it be more exciting to say you went where no one has gone before? Or even to have been a technician who worked on the equipment that went where our species had never laid foot?

Back in the 1980s, I worked on a contract for a company called Rocketdyne (I was a subcontractor working directly for a firm named Bizbing Enterprises/Butler Services). My job description included working on a CAD system because of my recent associate's degree that had an emphasis on CAD (this is back in the days of AutoCAD 1.o on desktop PCs, meaning my work at Rocketdyne in the basement of a Marshall Space Flight Center building was actually in a cold room on an Intergraph system loaded on a DEC mainframe VAX computer).

At the time, Rocketdyne was analysing the logic of the code in the space shuttle main engine controller because of the recent catastrophic accident of the Challenger and every company's scrutiny of their possible contribution to the accident. My job was relatively simple: take the handwritten logic flow diagrams from the engineers and draw them in CAD. Based on the skill set developed during my days with my secondary schoolmate when we handbuilt computers in our basement using the Intel 8080/8085 and RCA 1802 CPUs in the 1970s, I personally reviewed the logic as I drew the logic blocks, pointing out to the engineering manager the places where the logic didn't make sense to me. Also, because of my quick typing skills, I typed up engineering reports of the analysis, making grammar and formatting changes on the fly, leaving the concepts and ideas in place.

Have I ever flown on the space shuttle? Of course not. I'm not a pilot or a mission specialist. I'm just this regular guy who grew up in the suburban mazes of the southeastern portion of a political entity called the United States of America. Somewhere in the code in the box attached near the main engine of the space shuttle there might still remain the equivalent of an if...then statement I drew or pointed out was misplaced. That code has orbited the Earth countless times. My workmates designed the box for space hardness and wrote the code to control valves.

Happiness is what you make of what you do or have done. I am not a genius. I am not a trendsetter. I am me. I am happy to see the sunshine today and feel the solar heat on this cool day. I am happy to smell the burning wood of a campfire. I am happy to eat burnt toast and runny breakfast goo. I am happy to know I'll have a stiff neck and back from sleeping on the ground.

Somebody out there wants to be part of the space program, somebody in the Mongolian desert, somebody in the Australian outback, somebody in the Amazon forest, African plains, European forests and American suburbs. Life is about working together to accomplish goals beyond what any one of us can do.

I challenge anyone who might run into this blog to think about what you're doing. Are you caught up in the political gossip or rumourmonging or are you reaching outside of your insular life and asking others what we're doing?

Our species has accomplished goals unimaginable a century ago. We have so much more to accomplish than border squabbles or drug wars. But it takes every single one of us to make progress. Learn to laugh off your troubles. Or pray for guidance, if you need to. Whatever it takes to see we're the same species with a wide variety of individual lifestyles.

A part of me, in one form or the other, has circled the planet in near-Earth orbit. I hope that many of you get to see yourselves reach destinations that I can barely imagine, just like those who worked on the Voyager spacecraft never hoped their work would take them to the outer limits of the solar system.

According to associates...

According to associates, I need to pare down the pear I'm peeling and watch where my core is. Dripping juice leaves trails. Seeds sprout where they shouldn't. Pardon my Scandinavian fervor but fuck you, associates. If freedom is quantifiable, we've lost our journey into space where political parties have no place to hold conventions or bar protesters. I call it like I see it, not the way I want it all the time, because I know I'm not always right. Sometimes I have to put words down to hear what I'm saying and see what others are reading. A switchboard operator doesn't say, "Sorry, I can't connect you to the requested party - you two aren't meant for each other."

Time to watch football and drink beer, a quantifiable good time!

I like my associates but if they get in my way, they're... hmm... how do I word this with legal aplomb? They're no longer in my way later on. I smile on the outside and figure out on the inside where the weak spots on the flanks are to be exploited while I hold your attention. I get what I want using input from others all the time to see if what I want profits just me or my whole species. I aim for the latter but sometimes hit the former on the head.

Style Points

In a dream last night...

Last night, a dream, in...

A last night, dreamin'...

I spin the tiny rock in my hands and remember the theme park song about the size of this planet. Rubicon. Rubik's cube. Pros and cons. Political debate. The click and tock of phonemes.

The first grunts. The expanding vocabularies of sights and sounds. Who gets to name the object in front of us? Whose vocal utterings are the official mental lists? Why do we keep breaking down the image in front of us into smaller chunks?

We aim to please, our precision and accuracy like archery class. The more we seek unity, the more we find disparity.

The rock has no boundaries, just a continuous spherical surface, smoother than a billiard ball. But no one cares about those comparisons.

We want more descriptive details. We want delineation. We want categories.

Big government rolls down a hill, gathering no moss and crushing tiny stones, smoothing all in its path. Plurality has a single personality.

The issue at hand, what to do with artificial boundaries, issues proclamations to protect the right of sovereignty to govern others.

We watched tribes grow to the size of municipalities and feudal lords into kings and queens. We watched monarchy give way to democracy and communism. We'll watch the ecumenopolis turn democracy and communism into...?

I had a dream last night. Dreams are what they are, my brain with little external stimuli to play with. In my dream, I walked around a theme park with a former classmate of mine. We met other former classmates and eventually lost track of our current families, just the two of us walking through the park, looking for a way to get to the other side, finding a tram to take us up and over. I had other dreams, too. I value my dreams for their insight into my personality and the changes I seek to make my days more eventful and fulfilling. But my dreams are not secret visions or gifts from the other side. They are the result of my earlier interaction with the environment and lack thereof in the moment.

I am one person watching all of you, interacting with many nearby. Like the kids who walked into my yard to find a lost cat. Or the woman who wants my wife and me to attend local weekly religious services.

Local, regional, global. I have opinions and dreams about what to do with perceived conflict between the regional factions in Afghanistan. But I don't have a clear picture. Do we declare groups in the area VNSAs (violent non-state actors) or belligerent forces? Do encounters with FARC, the Red Brigades, the IRA and other fighting forces teach us valuable lessons to apply in the Afghan hills and Indus valley? What is the definition of a benevolent government and is there such a thing in existence? Does unity or disparity make better diplomatic policy in situations like this?

In Britain, a separatist got major airtime to talk about insular views. Is there a place for British separatists and Afghan separatists? Should there be? If the planet knows no bounds, should we recognize others' desires for homelands? If separation is granted, should international support be taken away?

In becoming an ecumenopolis, we face the question of who we are. Are we one species and two genders? Are we one species with multiple cultures but not necessarily multicultural, or a little of both? I don't have the right answers. I have opinions and dreams. I depend on my fellow members of our species to come up with a variety of answers, situational and timely, to solve problems iteratively because we're perpetually changing.

Change is constant. Change is pain and joy. Thus, we face constant pain and joy. Easy? Never. Eventful? A most resounding "YES!" We can see square pegs and round holes. We can pound a screw with a hammer. The choices are many. The solutions are few.

You can choose where you want to live. Your life is now subject to international scrutiny. Can you live a separatist life that is acceptable in an ecumenopolis? Absolutely. The right of a member of our species to perpetuate a subculture is guaranteed at birth. How hard you're willing to fight to protect your subculture against those who want to be where you live is up to you, not me. Cooperation and coordination 'midst competition - that's where I'll meet you and see if your subculture is worth promoting on the international stage. As always, we don't have to like each other, just agree that we're one species. The rest of our lives are opinions and dreams to do with as we see fit.

Subbaculcha

A parent co-creates. A parent nurtures. A child survives childhood. And when childhood is over...?

Senioritis. A feeling of accomplishment. The red carpet awaits. The world at the doorstep.

And what does a senior get?

Recognition for participation. A flower. An announcement. A walk with one's parent(s) across a football field.

Parents get what...?

Recognition for participation? Thank goodness, yes. A feeling of accomplishment? Affirmative. The red carpet awaits? Maybe a vacuum cleaner waits to be used. The world at the doorstep? A pile of bills and a day off before the work world starts all over again.

Wins and losses fade with time. Family remains important. Like traveling all the way from Saratoga, NY, to Hazel Green, AL, to see your sister's niece as a cheerleader. Like taking pictures of your friends' son, #46 on the football team, while they travel.

Moments will stand out but the score, 14-42, will be forgotten. The rest of the school year will not wait. Friends will go hunting and fishing and dating and studying together.

As the senior year winds down, the exit gets closer, the door to adulthood opens wider and the moment of truth arrives. Soon you'll discover just how prepared you are to handle everyday life as your own parent - waking yourself up in the morning, preparing your own breakfast, making your own household budget, handling unanticipated emergency situations. The next few months make the difference between successfully leaping out of the secondary school student life and being pushed out.

One night on the football field showed you life as a game winner. Another night on the football field showed you life as a graduating senior surrounded by supportive friends and family, the game's outcome important but not critical. In other words, life, just as real as it gets.

What's the old saying? You never get time to study for life's quizzes? Life is always preparing for the wrong test? Sayings aside, your senior year is about you and about your parents/guardians. They want you to succeed in life and you want to be independent. Independence and success are linked to the social contract your parents signed when they conceived you. Society is yours and yours for the taking as long as you learn to give back.

One day (and that day is sooner than you think) you'll sit in the stands with other parents, yelling for your child who may be carrying the flag on the field, cheering on the sideline, tackling between the yard markers or performing in the band at halftime. Between now and then, the world waits to see what you have to offer. The better you prepare yourself now, the more relaxing and fun will be that day when you're the parent who's holding the flower after walking your child across the football field as a senior. It won't seem important now but it will.

So listen to yourself for a moment. Hear what you have to say. See what your parents are trying to instill in you before you graduate. You are the most important person in the world. Learn to act like you are. When you're important, so is everyone else. When everyone is important, you own the world and the world can't wait to accept you with open arms.

Your growth began when you were born and ends when you die. Make the most of your growth while you're young and have the world in your hands. We want you to succeed because we know you'll be one of us soon. Your success is our success. And soon your success will be your child's success.

A loss is never fun but we learn from the loss and move on. Tonight you were winners in the bigger picture. Take the win that is your parents' pride in seeing you reach your senior year and celebrate. This night and the rest of your senior year is a party that all your schoolmates are invited to. Make it an event no one will ever forget. You are the graduating class of 2k10! Your success begins now.

Pentagon Orders Troops: No More YouTube Ghost Rides!

Pentagon Orders Troops: No More YouTube Ghost Rides!

Posted using ShareThis

Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook

When is censorship not censorship? That's a question I do not answer because I see open communication as necessary as breathing, fraught with risks. Here's one reason for preventing open communication from use by professional nation preservers/protectors:

Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook

Posted using ShareThis

Speculated Speckled Pickled Eggs

[Personal note for myself. Feel free to skip.] I have no idea what's going on. I see and do not believe. I feel and make no record of my skin contact. People have wants and needs and I cannot discern their logical connections. Logic makes no sense to me. The sun does not shine. Clouds do not exist. Yet, I define my day by the water falling from the sky that blocks the sunshine.

I am me. I have no capability to be more than one person. Better yet, I do not want to be more than one person. I actually want to be me. I like being me. I like me who likes the person who likes being me.

RNA is ribonucleic acid. A right turn is a coordinated series of actions determined by a football coach who teaches the staff to teach the players to stand in place until the play caller takes a ball and turns to hand the ball to the person willing to run and get hit. Recombinatorial, or some such.

People are willing to ski and play tennis. Physical coordination.

A large number of living beings have the same set of genetic material that is turned off or turned on in a particular sequence. God's blueprint or random observation by the current species to which I belong? Both? We see what we believe. We believe what we believe we see. Plate of shrimp. Pine-scented car freshener.

I belong to nothing. I am not nothing. Therefore, I don't belong to nothing. Absent is not the same as present somewhere else.

A drop of water flows along a pine needle hanging from the gutter. The drop stops at the end, formed by surface tension and stretched by gravity. Another drop flows along and pushes the first drop off. Nothing is as I just described it. A drop of water does not exist. A pine needle does not exist. A gutter does not exist. Gravity is in my imagination. Instead, I just saw a spherical magnifying glass, a solar energy collector and a trough for collecting debris to grow tree seeds, all in the recesses of my brain.

Sober, sanity and madness. Like diving into a mountain stream in winter with no way to get warm. Idiocy for idiots.

I stand alone by myself, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of my species, words my clothes, paragraphs my floor, away from here and nailed into my shoes. "Mommy! Mommy! Why am I going around in circles?" "Shut up or I'll nail the other foot to the floor."

A worker at an eyeglasses factory fell into a vat of molten glass. He made a spectacle of himself, didn't he?

I am one person. I am happy being one person. How important is my happiness? Does happiness exist or have I made myself believe in happiness?

Somewhere I read where religious belief is directly tied to one's brain and the need for deep social interaction. Social intercourse, if you will.

If I have learned the steps to complete a task, excel at repeating the task, should I perform the task again and again? The pursuit of perfection? Not for me. I am looking for novelty.

This universe is not just about my species but my species is all I know. If I ask questions and get answers from the universe that run counter to the existence of my species, where does that put me if I will never be other than a member of my species? Should I avoid the questions if I don't have an idea what the answers could be? The absence of self is close to the absence of selfishness which is close to the absence of my species, is it not?

I do not exist. If I do not exist, who or what is writing these words and seeing the intensity of light vary with the passing of dark shapes in the sky above me?

I choose to ask questions because I want to see myself from another angle, even an angle that includes the absence of me or the non-necessity of my existence. Like bashing my head with a rock or flogging my back with a whip. Only less messy.

I am me. I will always be me. I am also you but today I need to see myself as only one person so I can see the parts separate from the whole and better determine how to strengthen the power of the whole through the belief in the presence and the absence of the self.

I don't enjoy keeping quiet. I like transparency so that when a thought occurs to me I let it go out into the world without thought of impact like it bouncing back to me in some other form hours, weeks, months or years from now. If I have a thought, someone else had the same thought. If I express my thoughts in words or speech, others will hear what they thought they thought but may not have thought or spoken.

We get so wrapped up in our day-to-day activities, which we believe with conviction are what we're supposed to do, to hell with others who might have better things for us to do, that we lose sight of where we are. No matter how much I think I see our species from the right angles, I miss what I should see or should do. I'm not out to change the world. I'm here to see what our species could do if we changed our points of view. I don't care which particular points of view others have - they may be right or wrong for their time and place. I don't ask that they look at my point of view. I can only see what one person sees. I'll always be me.

I like me. I like who I am. I like my species. I like what my species likes. I don't like what my species dislikes but I'm willing to see the point of view of a disliking person because only then can I see if there's a like hidden in dislike that I should like.

These words do not exist. These are just electric, magnetic, particle-wave-speculated, speckled pickled eggs laid by a drop of rain splattering on a bed of wet tree leaves. Everything else is in your imagination.

Quick Nod

Another quick nod, this time to the person who pointed out I should have used the words "netizen" and "avatar" in a recent post. I won't go back to edit the post in question because I haven't.

The Great Yippie-Kai War

Every now and then, with its worn covers staring me in the face, the Book of the Future taunts me to turn a few pages and see what's going on outside this moment. Now, the Book of the Future is a a funny creature (yes, that's right - it's a living document, always sneaking in changes like repagination and outline formatting to fool with me).

The Book of the Future is a misnomer. The book is just a bundle of pages stuck inside an electric pencil sharpener. To read the pages, I have to find a certain kind of wood used to make a wraparound for sticks of graphite. Then, I push the pencil into the sharpener and pull out the reels of shaven wood. There, written in the woodgrain, are the messages that the book delivers.

The book belongs to someone else. I found the book in a ditch when I was biking through my childhood neighbourhood, not far from the house of an eccentric old lady who made me mow her lawn with an electric lawnmower.

Inside the book, instructions detailed how to create more pages to the story. You make the pencil shavings and then glue them together using the glue formula found on page 123. At first, I couldn't find page 123 and then I realized there was no page 123. I had to create it! But that's a story for another time.

Today, I've flipped open the book and gone back to the pages that someone else had written. There, between pages delta-x 47 and adhmad mór, I found the following short chapter:

Scientists from the Astronomy Sector of Silicon Woods, the southeastern housing estate bordering the dark side of the Moon, reported a signal trace of familiar origins. According to the scientists' calculations, the signal, a broadcast sent sometime in the seventh millennium of the modern era, appears to have bounced back from the edge of our universe.

Amateur astronomers are encouraged to point their radio antennae to the same spot in the sky to help further define the edge of space.

If what they see is correct, our universe is part of a oil drop floating along the gutter in a rainfall event in the local township on a planet in a larger universe. But that's just speculation, scientists' theories driven by their reading of pulp science fiction. You can rest assured we will dispel this theory in no time.

In further news, scientists have finally unlocked the secrets of space travel hidden in beer. For those willing to become lab subjects, more research is available. Stop at your local pub to become volunteers.

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

Posted using ShareThis

Wagon Trail

Sitting around a campfire, a pioneer family talked about the day's trip across the prairie.

"Mama, tell them boys of yours the troubles we've seen."

"Well, Ez, seems like when we wuz kids, the snows piled up to the rooftop."

"'At's right, Mama. So you boys better think twice afore complaining about our trek through these lands."

"But, Pa, there's nothing to do out here. Back when we lived in town, there was plenty of kids our age to play with. Now, all we do is sit on the wagon most of the day and then set up camp at night."

"Boy, I oughta smack you up side the head for that kind of back talk!"

"Ma, what's he talking about? I ain't never back talked him."

"Young man, you mind your father. If he says you back talked him, you agree with him."

"Yes'm."

"And you, young feller. Don't you put that smirk on your face. I know what you're thinking."

"What'd I do?"

"You're thinking your older brother's taking the troubles off of your back. You're still in trouble from yesterday."

"Ah, Ma, I always get in trouble for nothing."

"Ain't nothing. You've been going on about when we're getting to our next stop when I told you to take care of business afore we get back in the wagon."

"Mama, leave the boy alone. He's got smaller parts'n the rest of us."

"Ez, that ain't no excuse for knowing you're going to have to stop sooner than if you'd paid a mind to yo'self."

"Reckon you're right about that'n, Mama. Young man, you mind your ma. If she tells you to step over to them bushes afore we leave in the morning, you do as she says."

"Yessir."

"Well, whose turn is it to tell a good story? Mama?"

"The older boy told one last night. Why'nt you tell one tonight, Ez?"

"I'd be obliged. A long time ago, long afore any of us wuz born, there wuz only this wilderness. Not a soul in sight. Just hilltops and treetops and fields of prairie grass. There were large stretches of them pretty flowers that your Mama liked. And plenty of wild fowl for hunting, if there'd been any of us around. 'Cept there ain't. Or weren't, that is."

"How'd you know that, Pa, if there weren't any of us around to know?"

"Boy, this is my story. You just shut your trap and listen. I'll get to the good parts soon enough. Now, in those times, wagons hadn't been invented yet so animals didn't have no good trails to tell them how to get from one place to another. They just went from one patch of grass to one watering hole, day after day, sometimes crossing their own paths many times a day. They weren't in no hurry, neither, so they might spent most parts of a day in one spot.

"Well, one day, these group of animals, they..."

"What kind, Pa?"

"What kind of what, son?"

"What kind of animals were they?"

"They were them grasseating kinds, that's what they wuz."

"Uh-huh."

"Don't you 'uh-huh' me, boy."

"Yessir."

"Anyway, these prairie grass grazers were thinking to themselves, 'All we ever do is eat grass and drink water. Ain't there something else more to do?' Well, you know how they get. One sight of our wagon from far off and they skitter and scatter like...well, like themselves. So, without wagons around, they didn't have nothing to mozy them on up the way. They kept eating and drinking and thinking.

"Well, it weren't long afore they figured out this sort of same thing day after day was not awful but just regular ol' mind-numbing. It was no wonder they did the same thing because there weren't nothing to get them to change their minds. Think about it, boys. If you had the best tasting grass to eat every day and you didn't have no hunters or wagons around, you'd be just as pleased as...well, as yourselves, wouldn't ya?"

"Yessir."

"Yessir."

"Well, one day, this feller was walking across them plains and he saw them grasseaters and told himself, 'Now, if I wuz them, what would I be doing out here?' He watched them from afar and..."

"From a what?"

"From afar."

"Pa, you didn't say nothing 'bout no far."

"I didn't because there ain't no far. That feller ain't seen far 'cept by lightning. Now let me get back to the story. So he watching from a great distance and sees them animals is doing the same thing over and over again. What do you reckon he did?"

"Dunno."

"Well, he figured he'd have himself a little fun. He crawled in the grass until he got right next to them animals and he stands up and hollers at the top of his lungs. Them animals runs as far as their breath'd let 'em. And still some of them run some more. They run until it got dark and then they went back to their ways and sat down to sleep. The next morning, they wake up and go right back to what they wuz doing, eating grass and drinking water. Afore they know it, that feller showed up again and tried to scare 'em. But they was keen on him and weren't falling for the trick a second time. Instead, they ran up on the feller and they ate him!"

"They ate him? Every part of him?"

"That's right, son. They ate his head and his fingers and his toes. Everything!"

"What happened next?"

"Well, them animals, they weren't no longer just grasseaters. They wuz feller eaters. They got a taste for folks and they weren't going back to just walking around eating grass and drinking water. So now, any time a feller walks through them plains, there's them feller eaters not far behind."

"You mean...you mean, out here?"

"That's right."

"Pa, I'm scared."

"Well, boy, now you sees why we stay in this wagon all day. It's not in account of you ain't got no friends to play with out here, it's account of them feller eaters."

"Ma, I don't want to use them bushes in the morning. I'm afraid them feller eaters is out there."

"You don't worry about them feller eaters, young man. They ain't gonna bother you when you're doing your business. They's only interested in you when you're taking off by yourself through them prairie grasses."

"Pa?"

"Yes, boy?"

"How long we got afore we get out of these prairies?"

"Could be a while, son."

"You reckon them feller eaters is looking at us right now?"

"No, son. They go to sleep when the sun goes down. Which is about time for us, too."

"Pa, how come we ain't never seen no feller eaters out here?"

"'Cause you never knew to look for one until now."

"Ez, you scared up the boys enough as it is. Boys, you get up in that wagon and go to sleep yo'self. We'll be with you shortly."

Weedy Decision

As a frugal spender, I look for ways to conserve spending. If it also conserves resources, so be it. Here's another person's take on one area to conserve:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/21/DDS51A378K.DTL

My lawn is not a meadow but the edge of a suburban forest. My lawn mowers, including a hand-pushed reel mower, hand-pushed motorised mower and a small tractor, have sat idle for years - I could sell them but then it means I'm promoting someone else's lawnmowing. Anybody have a creative use for former grasscutting machines?

Time for lunch and class prep - have a great day!

"The Numbers Don't Add Up"

While one set of people face long-term unemployment, another set is investing and reinvesting in the climbing stock market value. An intersecting subset is paying more attention to investment portfolios without employment income to work with.

Some people are selling their second yacht or fourth retirement property. Some are having their first home taken away. Some are scooping up cheap assets for later profitable resale.

On whom do I focus?

Experts, analysts and other questionable words float in the open marketplace of ideas. Ideas. Hmm... What is an idea? And no, not the dictionary or wikipedia definition. What is an idea to you?

I don't know the diets of the lifeforms whose daily habits take them across the patch of ground on which my house was deeded. As an experiment, I throw bits of food next to the driveway to see what happens. Apples quickly disappear. Oranges and grapefruits are never consumed by large lifeforms, their round shapes shrinking with the growth of mold. Today, I threw a few stale doughnuts out and will check on them later. Birdseed is almost instantly consumed.

I try not to distinguish one lifeform's needs from another in what I choose to toss into the yard. That way, I get to see a variety of responses to my application of the "trickle down" food cycle. You remember the "trickle down" theory, don't you? A person who's eating a large, juicy sandwich will have some drops of nutritional liquid drip off the chin and onto the ground for other lifeforms to feed on. That's not the "trickle down" theory, you say? Are you sure?

While we google our memories of the "trickle down" theory, let's think for a moment. Did you take an economics class in school, primary, secondary or collegiate? Do you remember the theories of supply and demand, the iterative value of currency, or how the banking system is supposed to work? Do you know how to write a check? [Those of you who've only used credit/debit cards your whole life, or even your mobile phone to pay for goods, are excused from answering that last question.]

At one point I thought about majoring in economics or accounting in my college studies, especially since beer consumption and football watching weren't offered in college curricula. Somewhere between chemical engineering, foreign languages, religious studies, computer science and IT management, that is. Meanwhile, my college loans piled up.

If I have no personal belief in the power of money, should I speak from a monetary point of view? If I only see life in the moment, should I talk about the value of compounding interest?

Questions today...questions...sigh...what to say, what to do...

In my family, participation in the exchange of goods and services vary. Some live on the minimum monthly payment plan. Some live frugally and pay cash for major purchases. Some invest heavily and make major gains in their personal wealth. Risk and reward. Comfort zone. Playgrounds.

I don't know what money is other than an idea. I see pieces of paper and bits of stamped metal and hear about the comparative value of one version versus another but it makes no sense to me. Money. What is it? Barter converter. Murder incentive. War inciter. Peace initiative. Health provider.

Suggestions pour in on how to make our economy strong again, from isolationist policies to single global currency, from free market to centralized control, from high risk rogue investors to highly-regulated / scrutinized market management teams.

And still, I have no internal concept of money. It's like a void in my mind, the center of a hurricane / typhoon, alive but empty, surrounded by bustling activity.

No matter what I say or believe, people will use their definitions of money to take risks or do nothing with their money. No matter what we think, the future is undefined and full of risks - there are no surefire definitions of safety and security. We act and the rest of the universe reacts, seen mainly on the local scale.

For instance, decades after the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts, war and pestilence have killed millions of people, yet these tiny boxes of metal parts keep moving outward from the center of our solar system. Like beams of energy reaching us from across the universe, the Voyager units represent us at a point in time that no longer exists. We took many risks using vast sums of money to create those spacecraft, money that could have been spent on any number of ideas but we chose to learn more about our solar system and thus more about our place in it, including the risks facing the survival of our species in this area of the galaxy.

Where is real growth occurring in our economy? What is truth? What is reality? What is money but this shirt on my back and the laptop computer under my fingertips?

I tell myself I am the only person writing and reading this blog so that I can be free to say what I think and feel, not tied to emotions between myself and others or economically linked to others who might give me motives to speak or keep quiet. Sometimes I believe what I tell myself and other times I see myself not saying enough because of fear of offending others.

While those versed in the ways of making money more valuable (and thus more likely to be loaned, spent or invested) express their opinions or use their actions to put money in motion, I sit here and look at our planet from the edge of the solar system, as if I'm a vulnerable set of technology long past accomplishing its stated goals, and even past its imagined value as a precursor to "V'ger."

I have no use for money. I only have use for my species. To see value in what the two have in common, I pull away from all the voices who are trying to make money by talking about the value of money and imagine a time and place where the current value of money is unimportant. If I talk about a time 10,000 years from now, I might as well write a science fiction story. If I talk about a time a few months or a few years from now, I might as well become an economic policy expert.

I imagine a time in the near future - could be tomorrow or could be fifty years from now - most likely, a time where we're still repeating ourselves over and over while pretending that our new discoveries, new technologies and new genetic changes make us a better species. I don't mind the repetition because repetition is like the food I throw into the yard, giving us ongoing experiments to see which changes we make will lead to more innovative beneficial changes.

In this near future:

• We've rewritten the laws governing advertising and marketing - we can no longer over-promise the benefits of goods and services - we must give messages that demonstrate the real benefits and detriments of products, including product life of average enjoyment/usefulness and environmental impact, with links to forums discussing the products/services.
• Community service is a required set of skills/classes taught to children throughout their school years and has monetary value which can be exchanged for goods and services, useful during times of economic downturns when those who are less actively employed, both children and adults, can put their skills and hobbies to use for the community and still have economic purchasing power.
• We fuse fantasy and reality where we can don imaginary lives that are viewable by others wearing similar augmented reality gear - no longer do you have to use limited resources for your wardrobe or lifestyle - you can create, lease or buy your own AR life and change it at will, making mandatory school/office dress codes obsolete. On the Internet and in real life, nobody sees you as a dog.
  
• Office hours become completely useless as labor laws recognize the blend of work and private life into one - we get paid for completed projects, not hours worked, freeing us to do what we want when we want as long as we stay on schedule (schedule being a flexible definition using time, cost and resources creatively).
• Poverty still plagues society due to war, pestilence, mental challenges and drug abuse. However, voluntary poverty becomes fashionable as people try and stay in the "no impact" lifestyle. Governments grapple with the concept of low-tax zones to encourage more people to live in low-stress, low-overhead areas, asking if such citizens must demonstrate higher community involvement to qualify or if being just plain "we don't trust and don't want a government" folks can live there, too.
• The digital divide raises the barrier higher and higher that separates the educated from the uneducated, continuing to spark inventions to connect those who want to be digital citizens but don't have the means or understanding to get connected. Political revolutions are led by digital citizens pretending to be members of the nondigital proletariats.
• Greenland becomes a major tourist destination when people flood to the island to bathe in the curative cold waters of melting glaciers.
• Antarctica becomes the next major battleground for terrorist groups to control.
• A child of parents of Taoist/Buddhist Han, Muslim Uyghur, Hindu Indian and Ainu heritage is born in space.
  

Poiuytrew

I looked at two sets of eyes today - deep-brown, almost black irises. Too dark to see if pupils were expanding or contracting. I looked at other facial movements for clues about the two people. We have seen each other many times but I still look for reassurance of our connectedness. Why?

I exist in this moment - well-established fact. I find what I want in this moment - self-assured fact. I want to give my share of this moment away - curious fact. Why?

I want to know you but do you want me to know you? By knowing you, I write down what I observe about you from my perspective. My perspective, though, has many moods and styles of writing. I may use humour, criticism, fiction, or some mix of the three.

I look at one face and see the profile of Mayan royalty. I look at the other face and see Asian beauty. Each with a history, personal and cultural. Each with a set of daily problems and solutions.

I look for a smile but if I won't get a smile will I be happy with what I get? What if a smile is not the personal/cultural recognition sign from the other? What if a smile is preserved for close friends only, in order to maintain a shell of indifference, a shield against the rest of the world of faces?

I live in this moment. Today's earlier moments are gone. I cannot retrieve the previous moments but I can remember them in this moment. In reliving a moment in my thoughts, I take away from my ability to learn a new task like writing a new song, or seeing a new view of the outside world.

To some degree, I value wandering and aimlessness so I can keep my sense of wonder alive. Wandering and aimlessness mean forgetting previous moments so the current moment is all I've got, free from planning for the future. When free of time, I have only myself to give, no external gifts I've made or future to offer. I'm just plain me, with all my freckles and wrinkles, not an athletic star or academic giant. When I'm me outside of time, I don't know who I am except through you. If I get no indication from you who I am, I am not me. When I'm free of time and no longer me, I am a clear pane of glass, devoid and null. Not even a chameleon or a mirror.

To be devoid and null means no concentration, no focus, no exertion of my will. A little scary at times, keeping all but my physical appearance out of the picture, subject to your interpretation without commentary from me. Comparable to showing a photograph of a friend to someone who seems unimpressed and adding, "Oh, he's got great charm and personality. He's just not photogenic." What if you don't say anything and the person doesn't say anything back? You're both standing there looking at a photograph, a static image, a time-based capture that doesn't represent the friend except in one moment.

That's what it feels like when you don't smile back.

Time to review some of the feedback I've gotten in regards to reviving the loan/credit business...

Who's Not Paying Their Taxes?

Now, I'm not here to accuse any particular legislator but have you ever noticed the number of legislators that get caught not paying their taxes or having workers for whom they don't pay employee taxes? Or the fact that in this tough economy, with all the talk about the economic slowdown and reduction in collection of taxes, we haven't had a push by legislators to take a pay cut, lower their expense accounts, or reduce their support staff?

Not that I should be the one talking. I haven't reduced my support staff during this economic downturn, either. The same squirrels, birds and insects are free to feed off my land as when the economy was growing rapidly.

Well, folks, time to hitch up this wagon and hit the road. Peddle my wares in the next town. Yippie-kai-yay, Mister Falcon.

Once More Into The Breach

Last night, I sat with my wife and watched an hour of "Almost The Truth, The Lawyer's Cut," a series of interviews with comedians, writers, and others involved with or inspired by the Monty Python comedy team. I felt like I was watching the Discovery Channel about a series of excavations or True Hollywood Story about a cartoonish movie icon. It would be like finding out Alexander the Great didn't intend to conquer the known world - he just happened to go for a walk and a bunch of angry, fighting soldiers followed him around.

Meanwhile, in our TV viewing room, an American football game progressed along. With no guarantee of a victory, making every play essential, Moreno charged into the middle of the pile on 3rd and 1 in the second half of the ballgame, achieving his goal of reaching the first down marker, joining his teammates in their drive for success.

Two paragraphs - two means for adults to make names for themselves.

I think about the group of friends with whom I spent my childhood and the group of friends from my adulthood. How have we made names for ourselves? Did we mean to? Do we take turns charging forward to conquer our foes? Will we have the luxury to look back at ourselves and recount our victories for admirers?

Do you want to be talked about? More than likely. But who is your intended audience or set of admirers? An arena full of screaming fans? A kitchen full of loving family? A comfortable group of friends?

As my grandfather used to say, success is not the size of the wheelbarrow, but rather if you finished digging out the hole, no matter how big or small.

Who'da Thunk It?

I think back to the jobs I've had and wonder where I'd be if I knew where I would go. Mowing one lawn after another while working for myself. Scraping varnish off upright pianos in the heat of summer for a piano tuner/refinisher. Squeezing the juice out of ground beef at Taco Bell. Punching holes in tubs of rising pizza dough as a kitchen cook at Chicago Dough Company. Typing up military contract proposals at GE. Wading in sewage up to my hips in large sewer pipes for ADS Environmental Services. Setting up computer networks for Microsoft WHQL tests at Conexant Systems. Managing a test lab and traveling to Europe as a program manager for Avocent. Teaching classes at ITT Technical Institute.

Where will I be in 15 years? What work will I have performed? I have no idea.

Motivational speakers encourage their listeners to break the mold and seek out new horizons, quitting your job, if you have to, so you can become the real you you're meant to be. They sell their success stories as part of the marketing/branding of themselves, sometimes seen as motivation for motivation's sake, like selling a book on how to sell books that promote selling your own book.

What is success? I ask myself that question every morning after I wake up. What do I want to do today that will make me happy to wake up the next morning and look back at my previous day's accomplishments as motivation for that day's accomplishments? Sometimes I'm happy to say I did nothing more significant than watched the Sun trace a path across the sky. Sometimes I'm not happy enough, having expected more of myself than I gave the previous day, motivating me to move a little faster/smarter during my waking hours.

Success is felt in the moment. I am living my life only in the moment and can find success nowhere else. My previous accomplishments may demonstrate success or lack thereof, but what I do in the current moment determines what success means to me, not the past or expectations of the future.

Like I said, job titles and the activities involved with work have little meaning to me. They indicate my social/economic interactions, not who I am. I am me, here and now, not who I was or what I did with others.

Sitting here now, I contemplate what I will think when I wake up tomorrow. Will I feel happy? Yes. What will I feel motivated to do? I don't know. I plan to meet a friend/business associate for lunch but other than that I have no concrete plans. I will talk about and think about my next set of social/economic interactions but I will not know with certainty who I will be. What kind of success is that? Wonderful.

If a boy on a fully-funded Navy ROTC academic scholarship at Georgia Tech as a chemical engineering student who left after three quarters because of poor academic performance to find himself making pizzas a year or so later can end up where I'm sitting today, then anything is possible. Happiness is seeing the lessons learned (e.g., learn to study before you take "weeding out" courses like chemistry, physics and calculus while being in the ROTC jazz band and football marching band at a place like Georgia Tech) and moving on (put aside distractions and complete classes to get an associate's and a bachelor's degree years later).

I have collected a set of experiences in life that have made my 47 trips around the Sun successfully entertaining and happy. I discovered along the way that when I seek my definition of happiness and not the definitions others want to impose on me I am much more successful.

How did I get here, retired at 45? I learned to laugh. I taught others the value of making fun of yourself. I found a life partner at age 12 whom I married 12 years later. I valued my mistakes, no matter how painful they felt at the time, and found ways to apply corrective action for success.

For some, success is having their faces and bodies snipped and tucked. For others, success is traveling to Central America to heal the sick. For many, success is having children who have children.

I didn't plan and follow a perfect path of success to get here today. Long ago, I thought that I'd like to be a millionaire by age 45 and retire but I did not create a spreadsheet and manage my funds every day to accomplish the task. Instead, I meandered. I wandered and wondered. I listened to the advice of others (especially my wife's advice to avoid the trap of "buyer's remorse") and followed advice when it made sense to me, sometimes working out and sometimes not. I emotionally leaned on my friends and family when times got too tough for one person to handle. Always, I laughed and joked around.

I have taught classes for three quarters in the local classrooms of a technical institute. I have learned a better way to teach, one that is as old as our species: motivate others to enjoy life and nurture their natural curiosity and capacity to adapt. Teaching is not rote memorization. Teaching is encouraging others to desire to learn and count success as the grasp of a school subject, including concepts and jargon/vocabulary. I've learned more than I expected on the night I showed up at the technical institute as a guest speaker last winter. Time to take that learning and move on to the next social/economic interaction called a job or occupation, my definition of continual success as a wandering wonderer.

Sunrise Through The Trees

I couldn't sleep last night because of you. Who are you? You are the parents who insist their children get a narrow point of view while being raised. You are the child who's known only one point of view while growing up but senses there's more to life. You are those who want more and those who want less.

Over the past few days, while watching a few spectacles centered on sports arenas broadcast to television screens, I paid attention to the adverts which pay, in part, for my viewing. Many of them told me about the money I'd save by spending money, often in the $500-$1000 range and sometimes in the $3000-$5000 range, depending on products being advertised. Overall, I felt a nostalgic touch, as if the adverts were still aimed toward the mass consumption audience, even in adverts for alcoholic beverages ("drink more because we've packed fewer calories," "drink lots because we added two more drops of artificial flavoring!").

Earlier this morning, while I stared at the ceiling in near-darkness and imagined little insects crawling around that farted glow-in-the-dark gas which my optic nerve was trying its darnedest to detect, I thought about you and I thought about those adverts. I thought about what defines us.

Before I retired a few years ago from a day job, I managed several small projects, totaling in the tens of millions of dollars. Saving $500 a year would have gotten me fired. My company wanted savings in the X to XX million dollar range, or significant sales increases to compensate for lack of savings while a new technology hit the market.

Therefore, I am of two minds here. I enjoy watching sports but sitting in front of a small box, even one close to 60" diagonal, and letting myself get exposed to adverts for savings of small change tells me that I am not the demographic the product companies are after. At the same time, the cost to go to to the same sporting events and watch them live is cost-prohibitive to my frugal budget.

As the Earth turns and the view of the Sun comes close to my eyes, the landscape slowly breaks into individual items out of the general dim silhouette moments ago. So, too, my understanding of the universe slowly wakes up and brightens my view of life.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? My generation now runs the executive branch of the U.S. government. The U.S. president is 10 months older than I am. Those of our age actually have control of the world. We have come of age, as they say, after making significant progress in our growing-up stage. Wise, we depend on those of many ages and backgrounds to run the machines that make our lives better - political, financial, industrial, academic, religious, etc.

I no longer sit back and let the older generation tell me what to do because I am now in charge of my life. I am me because of you so I am in charge of your life and you in charge of mine.

I have 14,809 days to keep learning. In some number of days less than that time, my generation will pass the torch that keeps the lamp of our species burning bright.

I did not vote for Barack Obama and do not support many Democratic ideals (especially since I am a fiscal conservative at heart) but I will not let detractors stop my generation from having its day in the sun! We will go after the detractors until our last breath, if necessary, to shape our species up and prepare us for the next tens of thousands of years of growing up we still have to do. We will hunt down the cowardly suicide bomber trainers and do what we have to do with them to better our species. We will not rest. We don't care what your colour is, how you dress, how you speak, what you do or who you hang out with. We spent our youth discovering we are all the same and we will not waste our training on backwards thinking.

Because I could not sleep last night, I had several hours to contemplate the future of our species. I saw that we make progress when we put aside insignificant differences, which accounts for most of what we do everyday, and work together to improve our living conditions. I don't have time to waste on vegetating in front of a TV any longer if I want our generation to make a difference in where our species will be 10 or 20 years from now when we finally relinquish our responsibilities to the next generation.

I'm not out to make our planet a peace fest or a love nest. I'm out to save us from ourselves and get us on the path to a prosperous future, starting now. As usual, I'll keep using humour but my days of sitting on the sofa are over. Time to return to the workforce and push us a little harder in the right direction, one company and one industry at a time. If I'm lucky, in my lifetime I'll see us having an interplanetary broadcast system that, instead of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, will actively beam intergalactic broadcasts of what our species has accomplished to points all over the universe (sure, we don't know the risks or rewards for such a scenario but we're already noisy now).

I'll start today by seeing how we can convert or retrain our war profiteering into space research and exploration. How do we train kids that the path to heaven includes building rockets to the Moon instead of strapping bombs to our chests? How do you say that the rigours of space are equivalent to infidels? How do we coordinate our navies into solely stopping pirates instead of chasing after each other? How do we turn our armies and air forces into profitable means of both protecting good governments and getting us onto other planets? Do beauty pageants and racecar events fit into this scheme?

My future started over 47 years ago and it's happening today. How about yours?

A Moment Alone Together

Felt like I visited a hippie commune tonight, complete with '60s-era interpersonal communications issues enhanced by frequent drug use, a common theme of movies from my childhood in the '60s. In other words, my wife and I saw "Where The Wild Things Are." When the hero is a child psychologist, or rather a child pretending to be a group leader, then the monster in the closet is the ego, not blood dripping off teeth or coat buttons reflecting like flesh-eating dragon's eyes. I credit the acting and CG facial effects of the Wild Things for giving the movie the sort of depth "Pan's Labyrinth" showed that "Labyrinth" didn't.

Afterward, we ate a late dinner at Tony's Little Italy restaurant. Our server, Elizah P, shared my love of two main courses - lobster-stuffed ravioli and Italian sausage and peppers - and the rum-soaked cake for dessert. At the table next to us a mother hugged and rocked her son sitting on her lap. She leaned over to get bites of bread while her husband seemed to sit there as if his brain was in another time zone, totally disinterested. After while, the boy went to an empty table and was king of the feast, eating fried potato strips from a large red McDonald's cardboard box. The boy played funny faces with his mother.

I chose the lobster ravioli, splitting a cup of olives with my wife while drinking a glass of house Chianti; she ate baked ziti with meatballs (for my dessert, rum cake; for hers, chocolate-covered cannoli). At another table, a young couple drank diet Pepsi and Mr. Pibb, the woman ordering a grilled chicken salad.

We debated the ceiling light fixture covers. To me, they look like glass punch bowls in the colour of 1930s pressed glass. To my wife, they looked like upside-down sunny-side up fried eggs with glass door knob finials stuck in the middle.

We have one life here to share with each other. Tonight, the young mother with the French fry boy, her long hair a mix of blonde and brunette down to the bottom of her shoulder blades, wearing a black-and-white striped sweater over a svelte, small frame, kept glancing my way but never making eye contact with me until the moment her husband had taken their son to the toilet.

A smile. A quiet, shared moment. Never long enough. And never longer than you want it to be. We know these moments when we reveal our beings, prepared to share our weaknesses, dropping the masks as if to say, "I do not know who I look like to you. I wish that all the problems of my life and that of yours is forgotten in this moment we give each other." Romance novels hover over scenes like this, page after suspense-filled page. Serial soap opera TV shows freeze camera shots on these looks just before going to commercial breaks. We get one shot. We give one shot. Like a photograph or woodcut engraved in our memories.

I always wish there was more time; time to mold the image of the face, the shape of the nose, the curve of the eyebrows, the variation of the eye colours, the upturned smiling lips; time to read and write thoughts by facial expression only; time to breathe in the aromas of the room, the tomato sauce, the garlic salad dressing, the olive oil, the perfume; and time to savour thoughts like these in the moment.

Tonight, I had the time and shared it with the woman who loves her son with all her heart and wants her husband to give her just a few minutes' attention at dinner, a hug with her son a joy but not the same as hugging the man with whom she brought her son into the world. Yes, that's what her smile told me - "give me what I seek: recognition" - that she begged and demanded at the same time.

In our rush we forget ourselves. By forgetting ourselves we forget those around us who are themselves because of us. We forget that our problems are there to be shared with empathy for those listening empathetically. I love my wife and sometimes we forget each other even when one is talking and the other hearing but not listening. We have the ability to listen and think at the same time but it takes patience to slow down our thought process to listen to others. When we take time to listen, the love between us feels infinite.

The more I love my wife by telling her that I love her, both privately and publicly, the more I love those around me and the better I can listen, talk and think. Thanks goes out to the woman sitting nearby who listened to the conversation between my wife, the server and me and heard me tell the server how much I love my wife by the compliments I gave my life partner through what I said to Elizah.

A shared look is a look of love and an appreciation for one another. I appreciate my wife, and the mother next to us tonight appreciates her husband and son. Together, with a moment of infinity captured in one look, the young mother and I shared our appreciation for one another that we share with the ones we love.

I read that a globally popular musician wrote that she was a geek in primary and secondary school. I don't know what else she said but I know what she means. One's dedication to one's life begins at an early age. We drive ourselves forward and the harder/faster we drive, the farther we get. How far we get depends on factors outside our determination, including luck/fate/god's(gods') will, but if we aren't driving ourselves we'll probably get nowhere fast. I look at all sorts of people who've reached great heights in our societies - Madonna, Peyton Manning, Hu Jintao, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, to name a few - and know that they are where they are because of their drive, determination and willingness to share with others, giving everyone they meet the feeling that the moment they shared together was special.

Tonight's movie shared a similar message but not as direct - be yourself, unselfishly. I hope Elizah and the mother at the next table saw the same message from me. Don't wait to be yourself - when you are yourself and when you share yourself, give wholeheartedly, knowing that your love is infinite when you give unselfishly.

Where is I, Stan?

In global news today, the cartography business is taking off after the announcements of the Stans - Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, as well as Iran and Iraq - that they were officially joining together to form two new states, Sunnistan and Shi'iteistan. They released notes of their secret meeting to form one country, Islamistan, which detailed the continuing fight over the "right" destiny of the Muslims, paralleling the long struggle of the Jewish people to form one state, which in turn showed the internal struggle of all countries to define themselves in one form.

Immediately, the United States condemned the move, saying that it will make the polarisation of its country more pronounced. However, one cartographer pointed out that the left-leaning East and West coasts of the U.S. could not become one country separated by the right-leaning middle. Another cartographer pointed out the ability of Canada to hold itself together despite the French-speaking province of Quebec. Northern Irish residents cheered the move, approving land separation based on minor religious differences.

Analysts have flooded the airwaves. Is this good for our world? Is it bad? Where will the price of oil go? How will the military-industrial complex respond to this threat to their marketing campaign that had turned the whole area into a profitable battleground? Will FIFA have new locations from which to choose future World Cups? Should the 2016 Olympics be taken from Rio and split between the two new countries? Will there be an upswing in the price of Persian rugs?

Russia, India and China are expected to announce an upcoming set of joint military exercises along the borders of Sunnistan and Shi'iteistan.

Further details will be released by the new governments, including the proposal that the two countries will share one seat in the United Nations, showing solidarity.

Meanwhile, Kuwait is sweating bricks, looking at its lonely place between Saudi Arabia and these new nations. Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE will release statements in the next day. Nations of the African continent are said to be in talks to reconfigure their borders and perhaps declare themselves one nation, should Sunnistan and Shi'iteistan create regional peace and prosperity.

The Texture of Yellow-Green

Bright, sunny day - the hickory tree leaves, redbud leaves, and oak leaves find their warm, temperate zone days drop from a boil to a simmer on the pot of Earth's crust. Photosynthesis and chlorophyll fade in level of importance. Dormancy soon dominates. Life in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere turns to thoughts of winter.

Outside my window, redbud seeds hang signs of hope, unaware of themselves waiting for a strong wind to release them from their storage boxes and become themselves anew.

= = =

I am myself today, which means I am aware of myself as you in all our forms, in all our locations. I see the guys with long locks of hair, Ted Nugent style, moving from seat to seat at a college football game. I see the father in his National Guard jacket escorting his beautiful daughter to the football field. I see the men in stripes, whose jobs they take seriously, requiring them to memorize a book-sized set of rules and endure the anger of players, coaches and fans, all to maintain a balanced sense of fair play on the field of battle that life rarely grants us - I salute your neutrality, grit and determination. I see the mothers cheering their sons knocking each other down to help their team win. I see the police officers and security guards directing traffic and pulling aside raucous, inebriated fans, all to ensure the safety of a community in movement. I see commerce in action, too, from the hand-painted adverts on fence walls to zeppelins floating overhead, talking heads with microphones on the sideline and in the media booth facing camera operators all tuned to the hidden voice in their ears talking from the producer's or director's command post (a nod, as well, to the IT folks behind the scenes, running cables and setting up information networks in today's Internet world - how else would we get our instant handheld media device updates?).

= = =

Today, I look at the colour streaming through the trees, visible particle-waves bouncing off my eyeballs, and feel the colour yellow-green. Not silky smooth. Not sandpaper rough. A slight resistance when I rub the colour between my fingers. Velour. Velveteen. Sometimes this side of yellow. Sometimes that side of green. The colour of a deciduous leaf about to fall to the ground. I hold the colour in my head, a concept I still find amazing many decades after I said my first word and recognized my first fellow member of our species.

They say that science is destroying the sense of wonder of our place in the universe, turning our millennial-long development of religion and god(s) into an atheist mindset. I disagree. No matter what we believe, or which god(s) we devote our lives to, every waking moment is a miracle and every thought/sensation a new discovery, regardless of our scientific community's desire to dissect minutiae down to slices of infinitesimally-small bits of iota.

I smile. I relax my shoulder muscles. I am alive. I may have been created by a god or may be a god for all I know. What I know doesn't matter. Knowledge is not all. A tree cannot see me. A tree cannot prevent me from knocking it down or understand my knowledge of xylem and phloem. A tree and I don't have to have that knowledge. We exist.

Last night, while I let my thoughts wander and my body slip into a sleep state, a thought bounced around, humourous but insightful. What's in a label? Local inhabitants of this area where I live have been called American Indians and native Americans but they are neither. They never knew Amerigo Vespucci - they owed no allegiance to the European leaders of their time. They, we, are of one species. We are not Americans. We are Earth-bonded creatures. The land does not owe us anything. We are not riveted into one place (although private ownership laws allow us to claim a place on land for a set period of time). Thus, we can wander wherever we want and toss labels aside like a combine cutting wheat.

I am just one person. I happen to be male. I happen to have a low amount of melanin in my skin. I can choose to reinforce stereotype labels associated with melanin levels and I can choose not to reinforce stereotypes. I choose the latter. What I reinforce is others' behaviour, the only sure thing I know via what I see, hear, feel, taste and smell, recombined by what I process in my thoughts. I know it's not always easy to overcome stereotypes, especially ones where feelings of superiority or inferiority have formed one's personality, but we can toss aside these feelings if we choose to believe we're truly free and truly one species on one planet set to explore the rest of the universe together.

The Sweet Smell of Victory

Birdland. Trojan band. Fireworks. Complete game plan. The streak is over! Long live the streak.

Tonight, I celebrate the first win in how many games? 27? 28? But I celebrate not for myself or my wife, both of us licking our lips after munching fresh, hot doughnuts from the fountain of youthful delights up the road that we call Krispy Kreme. While slowly sipping a large cup of robust brew, I sit back and blink my red, tired eyes.

What did I see tonight?

Homecoming. Trojans vs. Hornets. Red vs. Blue. Girls in dresses sporting mums. Fathers with matching flowers hanging on their lapels. A tiara. Mothers and aunts hugging their debutantes waiting for their makeup to shine. A father and daughter flashing the rock-and-roll sign with fist pumping outstretched forefinger and pinkie. Students standing and cheering their mates on the field. About 45 deg F. Metal seating - stands - for the