Windmills Of Your Mind

Today, I am alive.  Is that enough?

The trees in front of me don't ask that question.  The ant climbing up the folding chair and the spider dangling from underneath the travel desk don't, either.

Movies in recent viewing:

• "The Ox-Bow Incident," 1943
• "The Fourth Protocol," 1987
• "Shortcut to Heaven," 2004
• "Voyager," 1991
• "Clue," 1985
• "The Man With One Red Shoe," 1985
• "Grand Prix," 1966

The missus woke me up around 2 a.m., hearing a noise outside our window.  Rooting among last fall's leaves was a Hoover hog.

I stayed awake from 2 to 4 pondering peopled trends.  Gloucester and Greenwich, Worcestershire sauce on sandwiches.  Hornets and horse flies.  Witches and itches.

Witch hunts to restore faith in the American dream.

Japanese painted ferns.  Deep brown-red tomatoes from the Black Sea of Russia.  'Marilyn Monroe' hostas.  Creeping fig and heuchera.

Sunni and Shiite Muslims proving that no religion serves the needs of one people satisfactorily.  Gnostics and Zionists, Taoists and Zens.

Watching a county get plowed, suburbanised and urbanised.  Home to Cherokee hunting ground, Civil War skirmish and German rocketry.

When the last German is gone who well remembered Von Braun, who is the new dreamer, who will inspire flights of science fiction fantasy to put ideas in young people's thoughts in this county?  Other parts of the world have their Gagarins, Rutans and Liweis.

Yesterday, an Old Rasputin beer.  Today, a Bell's Two Hearted brew.

Every one of us is important to me - rich, poor, politically active, politically unaware, technically savvy, mentally challenged.

I grew up in a relatively open-minded conservative home, where we were taught to worry about what the neighbours think or see you doing.

Open-minded AND conservative?  Yes.  Am I sure?  Positively so.

How can that be?  Well, we were taught to think for ourselves but to understand the actions we take in response to our thoughts have consequences in general society, with repercussions felt most strongly at the local level.  Social responsibility begins at home.

Brush your teeth.  Wash your hair.  Wear clean clothes.  Speak kindly.  Treat older people with respect and your peers with honesty.  Consumption of fermented beverages is okay, especially in locations where water sanitation is suspect, but do not drink to get drunk.  Treat everyone like a parent, sibling, customer, employee, and employer all wrapped into one person - remember the golden rule.  A person with learning disabilities is no different than a person who can solve calculus problems by thought only - all of us contribute to the growth and change of society but can't always say why or how.

Protecting core family values by encouraging children to see other views and knowing you provided a strong, solid base for them to stand on when they have questions about conflicting issues that send their heads spinning.

Seeing us as both self-directed beings with free will and simply the result of single-cell organisms finding a way to better ensure their survival.  Accepting that both views still mean I have to eat, sleep and live on this planet with others.

My view is not everyone's view.

Do you eat to fish or fish to eat?

What is social progress?  Are your views naturally limited or does someone use tactics to limit your views for you?

I don't have a cellar full of expensive wines and drive a Bugatti but I can appreciate the density of experiencing them.  I've owned domestic and foreign automobiles, all of them providing different thoughts about transportation from point A to point B.  I have consumed cheap wine (basically, grape juice with alcohol) and wine that tested my tongue with five or six different savoury aftertastes.

Today, I sit in a two-car garage listening to a neighbour mowing, birds calling and wind passing through suburban woods.  I have sat here many times hearing fighter jets and military helicopters flying past.  I have heard the boom of missile tests and weapon destruction.  I have wondered about the lives of people being transported by medical helicopters chopping the air on the way to the hospital.  Garbage trucks, meter readers and delivery trucks have stopped at the end of the driveway countless times.

Crows, cowbirds and cardinals have no concept of property lines, using my yard as a portion of their feeding and mating territory.

These are tiny landscape drawings of the world in which I live.  Nothing here is right or wrong.  Here is here and there and there.  They be.  It is.

I do not want to control what you want to tell your children about the ways of the world.  I have no children of my own.  The two cats in the house that my wife and I raised will not have to live in the peopled world and make decisions about who lives or who dies because of money or moral matters.

But I know you and your children think for yourselves using the limited set of resources available to you, such as food, water, and social training.

As always, I write this blog assuming no one reads it except me so that I can assume I am not using this blog for my personal gain at someone else's expense.  I have the luxury of sitting here randomly typing connected ideas while people kill each other somewhere else, my only concern a hornet that's interested in an object nearby and my being allergic to hornet venom (hopefully not deathly so).

I celebrate my freedom to exist within my limited means.  I do not participate in all possible expressions of personal freedom such as anarchy, totalitarianism or racking up unmanageable personal credit card debt.

I have the luxury that middle-class, suburban living gives me while others risk their lives and wealth to provide the means for me to live this safe, quiet, responsible, limited lifestyle comfortably.

For almost three years, I have enjoyed the increased safety that the reduced exposure to the risk of daily road fatalities and workplace accidents provides a retired person living mainly at home.

I became part of the blogging, chattering class before I knew what it was.

Are these blog entries more than a combination of words?  I don't know.  All I know is that I'm just as important as anyone else.

Does my importance change if I stop typing in this space (the virtual world of blogging as well as this physical world of the garage)?  It shouldn't.  I'm still one person, whether I type here or not.

Thus, I ask myself, do I want to continue to report here what I see in the Book of the Future if I truly believe I am the only one who reads this blog?

When I watch generation after generation of politicians who claim they're part of the common people who control their own destinies in their districts and then discover the real world of politics that shows more than a little volcano eruption how interconnected we are ...

When I contemplate the voices of those who talk about a one-party system and the fine points of whether Obama or Palin best represent Hitlerian leadership ...

When I watch a crane fly and a beetle within inches but oblivious of each other ...

The turning point of middle age, when I'm ready to hand to someone(s) else the network that determines the output of the Book of the Future ... sigh ... especially when I already know my future so there are few if any surprises left for me ...

Planting thyme in the garden time and time again only to be dug up by a raccoon and die every time.

If I gain nothing by being here, why am I here?  Why do I occupy my time with pushing my fingers against raised rectangles of plastic?  This is not real life, this is just my record of living next to an electronic typing machine while thinking about the lives of others.

Time to close this blog down and think in some other way, perhaps deleting my facebook, linkedin and other online profiles, too.  The world of people may be going electronic but this old boy is finding more and more ways to enjoy the outdoor life free of electronic gizmos and noisemakers before he gets too old and senile to know the difference between the real world and the virtual world.  Recording the moment does not make the moment any better or worse - the richness and density of the moment will be forgotten, anyway.

Do Not Install In Radiant Heat Ceilings

After Oliver Fontaine died, two friends of mine, Deena Ramos and James "Hardhat" White, had tattoos put on their skin.

Deena's tattoo was a 12-inch tall female Klingon warrior with an honourific message about Oliver written in the Klingon language (Deena at one time spoke fluent Klingon (a fictional language associated with the TV series "Star Trek" and its spinoffs), taught at the Klingon language school and was featured in the New York Times magazine in her Klingon garb).

Hardhat's tattoo was a spewing raised manhole (or confined space entry chimney, perhaps) with "In Memory of Oliver" written in English.

If I remember correctly, Jay Hereford took over some of Oliver's duties at work.  Jay is one of the most laidback people I know, transitioning from one position in life to another like he already knew what's coming next.

We all have fond memories of one sort or another.  Memories of my coworkers like Jay, Deena and Hardhat, as well as Joyce Battle, Dennis "Catdaddy" McPhearson, Janet Burns and many others, made the sewer flow monitoring business well worth working in and recalling.  Moments like the time Alan Petroff pointed out to me the influence of ocean tide inflow on a sewer outfall (in Dania or Hollywood, Florida?).

With those thoughts floating in my head, I headed out to the local fishing spots on the Flint River today.

Since the Flint is a public waterway, I can't expect to conduct experiments in complete privacy, can I?

Sometime after 13:00 I was working with some colleagues to see if a Livescribe electronic pen could communicate with an electronic fishing rod leaned against a tree and send signals to a group of fish with organic circuits in their bodies.

Just as I was about to reverify our lab results, a couple of kids on an ATV drove up and panicked the fish, which darted away and swam upstream automatically.

After the kids drove by, I packed up my fishing gear and followed the fish upstream to the collection point.

I don't know what was happening but the fish seemed to get close to the collection box and then dart away at the last minute, as if their tiny fish brains were telling the fish that although they were strongly attracted to the entryway of the box they should not swim into the box because it was unnatural.  That's not what they were supposed to do, my scientist friends told me.

That's why I always insist on proving technology in the field rather than claiming success in the lab.

After watching the fish for a few seconds, I decided to abort the test.  I activated a circuit in the fish that caused the organic circuitry to dissolve into the surrounding fish tissue (or "self-destruct," in popular vocabulary), carried my fishing gear to the car and grabbed a bite to eat from Amber at the Sonic drive-thru.  I would have preferred a butterscotch shake and burger from Inez's old place, Mountain View Restaurant, but the doors have long since been locked and the windows papered over, another local eatery lost to franchised fast-food chains.

At least while I conducted today's experiment, I chomped on a cigar and drank a beer in the midday sun while watching natural nature in all its midspring naturalness.  A brief moment of peace in the great outdoors, despite the loud sounds of traffic on the nearby highway.

Have you ever watched someone roped off with carabiners and surfing the surface of a large sewer flow, feet planted on a 2x4, a makeshift surfboard?  Have you ever watched soap suds from an upstream "one-hour Martinizing" dry cleaning business clean the crud off your waders while you're measuring the depth and peak speed of the flow through the sewer pipe?  Or choke on an illegal dump of flammable liquids from a local smash repair shop, carefully exiting the chamber full of toxic fumes and hoping not to cause a spark that would ignite the gases and send you up into the sky like a living cannonball at a circus?

Life is about seeing all there is to see in this moment, not just sitting in an office all day and wondering what's out there.

Time for this ol' fellow to ponder the inside of his eyelids and take a nap!

Parallel Parable Parallaxisms

I promised myself not to open the Book of the Future this week.  I wanted surprises to greet me should I hear or read about what's going on in the world.

Surprises ... if I want surprises, I should open a dictionary in a language I don't know.  Is that a surprise, though?

The past few days I have let my thoughts drift more than usual.  I have pondered world news and wondered why I see the same accusations / responses / behaviours all over again.

I have put myself in the place of some of the countries as if a nation has a personality.

I have asked myself in what way is an accused or insulted nation like myself.

Then, a personal issue that has crept along the periphery of my thoughts came forward.

Many weeks ago, I felt happy to say I was down to 222 pounds in body weight (you can estimate the stones or kilograms on that one for yourself).

An event - a personal issue - occurred afterward that has pushed my weight back up to 238 pounds.

My wife and I ran into a colleague of mine, Dr. N, a department chair at a local for-profit career college.  Dr. N asked me if I was interested in teaching a class for her on Saturday.  I said yes and agreed to stop by her office to meet the new academic dean.

During my meeting with the dean, I discovered she is originally from Connecticut but her husband is from the South - she ended up getting her academic degree down here.

Further into our conversation, I found out that the dean considered me a "bench player" because, although I had excellent feedback from the students in the classes I had taught there, I was up against newer instructors with more advanced degrees and longer time in the postsecondary education business.  Plus, the dean said, I should consider getting a more advanced postsecondary degree (presumably in education) in order to "broaden my horizon."

Thus, although the department chair had wanted me to teach a Saturday class for her, I was being put into a substitute instructor position while they brought in someone from a local university to teach the class because the class had been moved to Thursday and the new instructor could teach that day (Saturday is a holy day for the new instructor, I was told).

So, here I found myself in an odd position.  I had decided to stop teaching at ITT Tech several months back,  came back to the local campus at the invitation of my former department chair and then was told, in a sense, that they didn't really need me after all.

I felt like I had been invited to my own birthday party just to be insulted by my friend.

It's an emotion, in retirement at middle age, not to be wished for, I can tell you.

With the memories of that emotion strong right now, with my weight pushing my belly up and over my belt, I step into the shoes of a nation.

Pick a nation that has publicly proclaimed it has been insulted lately - Iran, Israel, China, United States, Cypriot (Turkish or Greek), Korea (North or South) - and I am there.  Pick a nation's leader, a religion, a religious leader, a corporation or corporate leader who has been picked on and I am there.

I do not know what the Book of the Future says about what will happen next in the international business of nuclear weapon proliferation.  I do not know who will be the next Supreme Court Justice of the United States, Prime Minister of the UK or leader of Iraq.  I do not know how we will convert people who don't give a rat's ass about the environment to care about recycling or the "green" movement in general.

I sit here in complete ignorance, my emotional state a mixture of depression, boredom and happiness.

Not a cloud in the sky, the light streaming into the room casting bright green shadows.  And yet, Mr. Positive, Enthusiastic Optimism feels a dark weight pressing down on his shoulder blades.

I am a person.  I feel aches and pains in my body and emotions in my brain and glands like everybody else.

Most days, I ignore my bodily self as a byproduct of the thought process I was born into.

This week, I am paying more attention to myself as a body to see what being a real, complete person is all about, putting aside thoughts of the impermanence of the self or other ideas that a thoughtless body is [probably] barely aware of.

Have you been told you're a "bench player," a second-teamer, a substitute when or if the rest of the team thinks you're needed?

The [non]proliferation of nuclear weaponry.  The sovereign right to decide how the people will be ruled.  The product mix you know the customer will buy versus what the marketing department says the customer wants, the board of directors be damned.  Keeping the faith for billions while delicately handling how thousands have lost their faith through the misbehaviour of a few.  The international cooperation of space exploration, taking turns such that some will sense they are being left behind.

Changes.

Being honest with ourselves.

I'm one person.  I don't own much but I own a lot.  By world standards, I am a rich person, not wealthy or filthy rich, free to live a healthy life and spend money in most any way I please.  I am a product of two people and the result of billions more.

Because my name is common, having been used by a member of the U.S. Congress, an actor, an automobile dealership owner and many writers, to name but a very few, I am relatively anonymous.  I exist but I don't exist.

Half the week is gone.  Half a week of watching the world at work.  Half a week of watching life on this planet grow and consume itself over and over.  Half a week of knowing that the other half will pass by just as quickly.

In the world of for-profit postsecondary education, I am a bench player.  Although that world is part of my past, what does it say about my future?  How, in the world of highly effective people, should I sharpen my saw?  Have I slipped into the world of the chattering class?

You're only as relevant as you believe yourself to be and act on that belief in the moment.

I have control of the food I consume and the exercise I put into my daily habits to burn off the excess calories I consumed knowingly/unknowingly.  I decide how I'm going to react to others no matter in what temporary emotional states I may find myself.

I am also every one of you, you being a person, a people, and/or a group.  We have control of our lives.  We consume more than we need but we have the ability to control both our consumption (including our reactions to others that cause emotion-based changes to our consumption) and how we exercise to burn off excess consumption and increase our strength/health.

I can guess what the Book of the Future says we're going to do next if we keep drawing lines in the sand and insulting each other like children in a playground.  Instead, are we not adults?  Do we not have wisdom upon which to draw mutually-agreeable conclusions?

Don't wait until next week to see what the Book of the Future says you're going to do next.  Be the first on your block to take the initiative to step over the line and see life from another perspective.  Perhaps you'll find that both sides are insulting each other for no reason.  Then, you can put aside the old ways of insulting and kicking sand and sit down to talk like reasonable adults.

A few more days of peaceful ignorance and then I'll look at what my colleagues, associates, insect farms, computer programmers and stack of pencils have to say about the future.  Until then, I'm going to enjoy being me, with all my wonderful imperfections, insect bites and personal issues I couldn't see because I blinded myself emotionally from living freely in the moment.

A Eulogy, A Memory, A Celebration Of A Former Coworker

The Wonderful World of Oliver Fontaine

These simple words cannot express
The joy he brought and happiness
That filled our lives and made us glad;
To all of us he was a dad
Who'd listen and then offer up
Nonjudgmental words of love.

With glasses perched upon his nose
He struck the perfect "wise man" pose,
For deep within that furrowed brow
He'd learned to live life here and now;
Short in stature but tall on life
He found the highs amidst the strife.

What would he say if he were here
To see on every face a tear?
Perhaps he'd put his arm around
Our burdened shoulders, then turn our frown
Into a smile of love that said
His love was from the heart, not head.

Although he's gone, he hasn't left,
For deep within each sorrowed breast
He placed an ever-burning light
That shows the knowledge and insight –
Unselfish, trusting giving love –
He knew we're blessed from One above.

So let's not mourn or fret for long
Or sing his praises in a song;
Let's take his joy, not our remorse,
And focus on a cheerful course;
Support logistics can, you see,
Live out our main man's legacy.

[from: "Of Friends, Neighbors, Lovers and Miscellaneous Passers-by", 1992, published by Tree Trunk Productions]

Are We [Only/Really Just] Background For Something Else?

One B.C. *

I climb down into the darkness while the water seeping from the cracks between bricks drips around me into the rushing wastewater below. Each step, every rung, I take, I grasp, leads, no, carries me away from Their realities. The snake I see in the mirror slithers deeper into the sewer where a feast of rats waits to be eaten.

The bricks sweat under the strain of a torrential downpour.

Roaches, unsure of my intent, scatter into the shadows.

I reach the bottom of the manhole and peer into the upstream pipe to see your ego flooding toward me. I should have known the clouds of doubt hanging over my head earlier in the day formed not from my doubts but from yours of me.

My place of meditation, my Mecca, my manhole, takes a sepulchral form instead and the universe of realities that is you-and-me is no more as your ego washes over me and floods the chamber.

Moral: Friendships and eternity only last as long as someone remembers.

_______________________________________
* One year after knowing Brenda Craig.

[from: “Of Friends, Neighbors, Lovers and Miscellaneous Passers-by”, 1992, published by Tree Trunk Productions]

Volume/Displacement

After much searching, top-secret astronomers discovered where the future government's time machine ended up.

Turns out that a time machine is a timespace machine, placing the traveler(s) and the machine in the exact location of space where that time occurred, taking into account the expansion of space, the natural movement of galaxies, stars, planets, etc., as well as a previously undiscovered change in subatomic makeup (you know, that whole dark matter/energy thing).

Top-secret medical advisors think this might be a way to cure diseases, by sending people to a different place in timespace (as opposed to the conventional spacetime, a minor difference but significant), rearranging their subatomic structures such that "modern" diseases can't form.

Now, how do we communicate with the timespace travelers and figure out how to tow them back to our spacetime location?

Past Fishing Expositions

How do you sneak your people into other countries under the cover of open daylight?  Easily!

What kind of fish are you going to catch today?  Do you catch, photograph, identify and release?

No Fish For Old Men

How can a mushroom identification expert, a person who made a bat dieoff map, a cattle rancher and a crowd of Earth Day celebrants believe what they don't see?  How can they believe what they see?

Sometimes I forget that I'm dealing with regular citizens of the local population.

Especially when my holiday is interrupted for another so-called important message.

Do you know how easy it is to transmit infrared information from one set of sunglasses to another under the shade of nature preserve trees?

I promise you I am unimportant.  I am like the the air you breathe, the gravity that holds you down on the roads you travel and the sunshine you feel.  I am nothing you can hold in your hands and readily see.  Truly, I do not exist.

Yet, all sorts of people want my attention.  My associates.  My colleagues.  Family.  Friends.

There is nothing the matter with being an ordinary anonymous guy living an ordinary life in an ordinary neighbourhood living.  At least I'd like to think so.  Not today, though.

What was the message this time that stopped me from acting like an ordinary citizen on a quiet Saturday called Earth Day?

A secret revelation about a plot to assassinate the leader of a faction dedicated to preserving the revolution?

A merger to end all mergers?

The breakup of a conglomerate's charismatic executive and the executive's cinema superstar spouse?

The design of a superefficient energy production machine made with technology hundreds of years ahead of its time?

The discovery that intelligent extraterrestrial beings steer clear of our solar system because we haven't yet figured out the purpose/nonpurpose of our evolution/intelligent design?

I would accept any or all of those answers to justify a disruption of my inaction.

Instead, what do I get?

I get ... or rather, I got a message that told me billions of people have no idea how to live their lives.

I'm a nice guy.  I like to please everyone I meet.

Why?

Well, because I know that no one, absolutely not one single person, has a clue what life is all about.  I think I've told you this more than once, haven't I?

Someone hasn't read the memorandum detailing the explanation that I'm ahead of most of you on this subject.  In fact, I'm ahead of myself here.  I already know what I'm about to say.

Next time, I'm paying the gravestone carver to cut an email message in granite that says, "Rick does not want to be disturbed while on holiday."

Then, the first person in my organisation who attempts to get my attention while I'm tuned out will receive a giant chunk of rock to the head.

Do you know how many people working as spies and counterspies are looking for a kink in the armour?  They want to report a report up the chain of command that proves opposition spy networks really exist.  Not only that, but they want to show the opposition has a competitive advantage which drives up the cost of spying (HINT: budgetary increase the next year, with big, fat bonuses for everyone!).

Anyway, today's message was a repeat of old information I learned when I was sprawled on my back in the hospital as a newborn!  Pooping in my diapers, no doubt.  And drooling happily.

But that was a message from my network.

It was a message I intercepted from another network that draws me to this computer blog during my two-week holiday from technology.

Have you learned the ways of the mimeograph?  Are you an expert in the mathematical distribution of symbols within a given language?

You see, the average set of text in any language has a probability distribution for every symbol within that set.  Most of us read sets of symbols by words or groups of words. For instance, in the English language we see sentences and paragraphs.  We do not see the number of times the letter "a" or "t" appears on a page.

Today, while absentmindedly meandering through the glen at the Hays Natures Preserve, I noticed a few people evenly spaced apart who were picking up stapled packages of photocopies from vendors.  They caught my attention because they also skipped the exact same set of vendors with photocopies they didn't pick up.  I mentally noted the vendor booths where these people stopped by and then I innocently stopped to talk with vendors and passersby while I picked up the stapled packages of photocopies in the same order as people I saw earlier.

Some of the photocopy collectors were parents.  Some of them were single.  Some young.  Some old.  A well-planned meeting of associates from a rival network.

A few of them I knew but the rest I hadn't seen before.  One of them belongs to my organisation.

Like I said, it's a free world.  We can do what we want when we want how we want where we want.  To what extent is up to you.

I sat down with the photocopies and scanned them into my pattern matching machine, a matrix of ants who move eggs from one cubby hole to another based on the type of fungus data the machine feeds them.

Based on the ants' activity, I have concluded Chinese leaders are giving Tibet a little room to negotiate the appearance of the freedom of secession because the leaders did not move emergency services into Tibet with the best efficiency to secure the lives of their Tibetan citizens after the recent earthquake.  Why Hu and Wen allowed this to happen, I do not know.

To better understand why my rivals would be discussing this among themselves, I stopped at a favourite spot where they leave messages out in the open for one another in the arrangement of "surplus" items at Mike's Merchandise.  Here's what I found, a set of books placed at intervals that matched the distribution of English letters in the photocopies they collected today:

• "Mao's China and the Cold War" by Chen Jian
• "Reclaiming Conservatism" by Mickey Edwards
• "The Color of Our Future" by Farai Chideya
• "America, 1908" by Jim Rasenberger

The message they passed in pages marked in the books indicated their interest in someone named Clegg and the rise of anti-Putin protesters that has a false ring to it.

If my rivals know what I know - that we don't know what we're doing but go forth pretending with strong convictions - then what are they up to?

You understand what I'm saying, don't you?  You see, I have THE Book of the Future whereas they have the Books of the Future.

It's a sort of standoff.  I'm not supposed to have THE Book of the Future.  I'm not the one who has the ultimate set of skills to read the many levels and layers embedded in the pencil shavings I create.  However, I've already opened the book.  It's in my hands.  The book is in my possession and no one wants to take it away from me because they know what the book does to those who see their own futures.

Why do all tales point to the same core storyline?  Why do all civilisations form almost exactly the same hierarchies?

All from all.  None from none.

Any one of you can find one of the Books of the Future lying around.  It might be a hidden spring of cold water in a dense thicket in your neighbourhood forest.  It might be the set of turnstiles at a subway/metro station.  All of those pattern generating formations will tell you what's going to happen in the future ... except for one thing.  They won't tell you your future.

Actually, they will tell you your future.  They'll tell you the future you want to hear/read.

THE Book of the Future tells the possessor only one future.  You will have no future.  You do not exist.  You are anonymous and disappear.

I just wanted to be an average storyteller who entertained a few people along the way.  I was willing to study the history of our people to see the kind of stories that interested readers.

Then, as I've told you, I stumbled upon a few people who saw my storytelling dreams and views of the general ignorance of the population as an invitation to train me in the way of reading the future.

Do I have to tell you what a high pollen count foretells?

Do I have to detail the ripple effect of shifting plate tectonics?

Will you accept a child with three parents as easily as you'll eat the genetically-perfected organism that has a lineage tied to your family - part fish, part plant and part human that has familial body likenesses?

THE Book of the Future is not really a book.  It's not really a computer program.  It's not anything you can put your hands on.  It's the culmination of our social progress feeding upon itself and propagated by a group of people who are trained to keep the self-food-filling propagation moving along automatically and autonomously.  I don't call it prophecy but some do.  I don't call it predestination but some will.  I don't call it inevitable but many see it that way.  It's like magic, only it's not, but neither one of us can tell the difference so it doesn't matter what we call it because it predicts what will happen anyway.

Right now, all I want to do is drink beer and try to fool some fish into setting a metal hook into their jaws.  I don't care about the future.  I don't want to know what's going to happen next.  I'm keeping the book under wraps for a few days.

Your future is happening before you can do anything to stop it.  Oh, sure, some of you will commit suicide and think that you're stopping your future.  Of course, you're wrong.  You're just following orders.  Our species has the odd habit of putting a portion of itself to death in order to preserve the species (now you can see why any extraterrestrial beings would want to steer clear of a specific form of being that has developed a method of exterminating portions of itself willingly instead of seeking to maximise its self-replication at the cost of eliminating other "life" around it - how can you trust a population that hasn't perfected self-interest at both the species and the individual level?).

I'm sure you'll find other ways to get my attention during my holiday.  However, let me reassure you that I know you don't know what's really going on but there are those who do and "have your back," as they say, 24 hours a day (not exactly 24 but you know what I mean).

The last I looked at the future, an island nation will soon have something important to say and a female scientist makes a startling discovery that requires several linked laboratories to verify her test results.

Now, for the last time, leave me alone to be the anonymous person I'm destined to become.  I'm just a guy whose smile disarmed him before he knew what he looked like.  I'm no Buddhist priest or bloodthirsty berserker (I have people to handle those duties).  There will be plenty of time to deal with the politicians, religious leaders, business executives and crime lords who get in the way of a prosperous future.  Give me another week to enjoy the peace and quiet of mosquito bites and lost lures.

Should I use worms, crickets, grasshoppers, chopped shad, hotdogs or dough balls on my next fishing foray?

If you're a vegetarian, don't worry.  More people die on public roadways at the action/inaction of themselves and other people than I've killed and/or eaten fish ... and the world's just as wonderful as it's ever been!

For My Friends in High-Speed Internet ['Broadband'] Development/Sales

My Friends/Colleagues,

Remember talking about charts like these and the opportunities they represented?:

Verizon's preferred way of looking at the broadband penetration data [from: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/fact-checking-verizons-ceo-on-us-broadband-awesomeness.ars]

You still working on closing the gap between X and 100% market penetration/saturation?  Wasn't building the South Korean market fun?!  Think we could recreate that success all over again somewhere else?

Those were heady days, with compatibility tests at UNH and other locations around the globe.  Remember the ice hockey game in Huntsville that shocked DSL development engineers from Fremont/San Jose, Taiwan and Israel who couldn't believe there was ice hockey in the South?  Anyone know where the great Mr. James Infusino resides now?  Sure miss the lobster and beer at Newick's or the chef-prepared meals at Il Fornaio in Palo Alto.  Maybe Jerry could retell his story about the underground bar in Tokyo (or was that in Taipei or Seoul?).

Great memories on Earth Day!  Time to get outdoors.  Y'all stop back by now, y'hear!

Navigable Waters

While looking in the house a couple of nights ago for a book called "What is Form Criticism?" by Edgar V. McKnight (c) 1967 from a university class on early Christianity, I pulled aside a plastic bag full of books from another era - my late childhood.  A few titles stand out:

• "Programmer's Guide To The 1802 (With An Assembler For Your Machine)" by Tom Swan
• intel Component Data Catalog (c) 1978 ["Four Dollars and Ninety-Five Cents"], Radio Shack part no. 62-1379
• "Profiles In Courage" by President John F. Kennedy
• as well as several books dedicated to the ZX-81/Timex-Sinclair 1000 and hypertext programming

All while biding time until my next fishing expedition.  Today, a little more research on the fishes of Alabama, a discovery that our current view of an expanding universe may be wrong, and then off to another fishing spot.

Swallows nesting.  Hundreds of thousands of maple helicopter seed pods racing, paced, on the river's surface.

Had partially blocked a farm field path when I parked off the road this morning.  The farmer appeared out of the field with his large CASE tractor and disc plow, ready to close the gate and plow another field, so I moved the car for him.  He thanked me and drove on.

Minnows in the shallows.  Water striders jumping around.

The stripped carcass of an 18-inch sucker catfish feeding flies and filling the air with a pungent punch.

The tweet of baby birds begging from a nest in a scrub tree overlooking the water.

The river crossing of a paved country road, the bridge and its concrete piers pockmarked (shooting practice?), with dried mud floodlines up to the top of the piers and the yellow-and-black striped painted water depth markers faded and chipped.

Find a few places to cast out into the middle channel and slowly reel the plastic worm toward shore into a deep eddy.  Around noon here under the bridge's cool shadows and no fish going after the artificial lure.  Can see them darting around the river bottom uninterested.  Time for live bait next time.

Reflections of sunlight, like European discotheque after hours, dancing on the bridge's underbelly.

Midday peace.  Dragonflies.  Green bottle flies feeding on old fish bait.  The chirp of cardinals feeding along the river's edge.  A butterfly bound for nowhere in a hurry.

Swamp bamboo.  Open channel flow.  A few river rapids within view.

The "spray" of sand and gravel, into the river and onto me, from a heavy construction truck riding across the bridge, the bridge I-beam girders bending and bouncing, tiny pieces of rust released in the breeze.

Swallows come back all at once, their chitter-chattering matching their swift movements as they sweep under the bridge, stop momentarily at their nests (to feed babies?) and swoop back up into the warm blue sky for food and play.

Some sticks stuck on the shoreline - leftover handmade catfish fishing poles?  Wads of fishing line and beer containers thrown up into the underbrush.

Drink the rest of my one bottle of beer.  Contemplate lighting a cigar just as a truck pulls up.  Looks like a guy and a gal want some privacy.  Time to pack up and move on.

Back on the road, the ol' Doc McKinney Grocery, reminding me of a friend whose father's farm here in north Alabama used to have a small Cherokee village at the back.  The old Cherokees slowly died off and the village disappeared with their local way of life largely forgotten.  I am an Eagle Scout of a long-since defunct Boy Scout troop, our Scouting ways well documented but our personal trials and trails through Scouting fading with middle age.  Best to remember few will remember us long after we're gone so live for the moment and not some future we don't know we'll see.

Sends me back in time when a couple of guys used to pick up the trash in the evening at my office 12 years ago.  Neither one knew the other but they both fished the local waterways and kept trying to convince me to drop what I was doing (a lot of unpaid after-hours data analysis, at the time), pick up a pole and enjoy life as our forefathers lived, depending on the land for food and happiness.  A coworker got the clue and used to take off to fish the Elk River every chance he got.  I missed the opportunity then.

However, never too late to live the old ways, peel off the layers of civilisation and feel yourself solidly in place with the rest of the natural living things around you.  Your personality fades, conversation loses significance and the problems of the people world barely show up ... for at least one sunny day in mid-spring in the Northern Hemisphere of a small planet circling a yellow star.

Ever watched life spring up on an asteroid passing near the Sun and then fade away for a few hundred years of a cold elliptical path?  Ever watched life on a riverbank, time a measure of shadows and sunlight, every moment an irreplaceable snapshot of life on Earth?

Living waters is a phrase with many meanings - to me, the simple pleasure of sitting silently with algae, minnows, turtles, trees, snakes, grass, spiders, flowers, flies and birds.  Wondering if I'll catch a fish but not caring.  No memories.  No ledger accounts.  Life and death.  Eat, breed and be eaten.

The Peppermint Patty Calypso Ska Reggae Band Is Back!

Another hero passes this way no more.  Nick Russin, one of the leaders and members of my hometown church choir, gone to the great Harmonious Sky:

Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Charles Russin, 88, of Kingsport, passed away Wednesday, April the 14th, at his home with his family.

Nick was born on February 6, 1922, in Butler, PA, and has been a resident of Kingsport since accepting a job as research chemist with Tennessee Eastman Company in 1950 where he worked until retiring in 1985. He began violin lessons at the age of five and made his violin debut in Pittsburg's Carnegie Hall at the age of seven. He graduated from Washington and Jefferson with Phi Beta Kappa honors and earned his master and doctor of science degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He also attended UCLA during the beginning of WWII to learn to determine the weather on Naval ships in the south Pacific, serving on the USS Midway.

Nick was a talented athlete, and played baseball at UCLA where he struck out twenty batters in one game as a pitcher. He was offered a minor league contract with the Cincinnati Reds, but joined the Navy instead and was in the south Pacific the latter part of World War II.

He was a longtime member of Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church and was a deacon, elder, choir member and/or director for over forty four years, and a Johnson Memorial Sunday School teacher for many years. Other memberships he enjoyed were the VFW, the Lions, the American Legion, and the Elks. Nick was past Worshipful Master of the Kingsport Masonic Lodge and was a member for over fifty years. Nick was a Sullivan County Commissioner. He was also a violinist for over thirty years in the Kingsport Symphony Orchestra as well as past president and board member.

 Men and women like Nick demonstrated to me that dedication to a better life only the experience of a true, loving family can give you.

Thanks for sharing your life with us, Nick!  You're gonna be missed.  You and others like you who made Kingsport and Oak Ridge special places to live make me glad I live in Huntsville where great minds think alike - your greatness and pursuit of perfection rub off on the rest of us mere mortals.

Straw Hat, Fishing Rod and Real Life

Can a man not have a quiet afternoon casting his sinkers and lures into brambles and vines?

I'd just stepped off the cement trail down to the dirt path to find a spot to park my folding chair and tackle box when a "Hi! How ya doing?" barked out of a tree hanging over the river.

Two young men were joining their efforts to extract a rope swing trailing in slow-moving water on a hot spring day, near 85 deg F or thereabouts in north Alabama (Ali Baba, alakazam, alakazoo!).

Growing in the New Balance/Reebok/Redwing tread-stamped trail were spring beauty and starry chickweed, their blooms communicating to me their desire to feed insects in large numbers.

I nodded my John Deere woven head covering at them and found a meadowed spot hundreds of feet downstream of the fellows.

I'm no secret agent or sorcerer.  However, under my employ, men and women compete against one another to provide me resources with which my associates and I can readily exchange information.  The young swimmers up the way were a sign I was supposed to expect an unexpected report.

How old this gets.  I set out the chair, opened the tackle box, found an alluring lure for those lurking ichthyology subjects in the deep pool of water beside a fallen log hosting muck and a much-missed soccer ball, set the top of the pole between the wild grape vine and the water and cast the artificial bait downstream.

That is, I attempted to cast the bait.

Instead, I wrapped the line around the trunk of a small sycamore.

I gently pulled on the line, unwrapped the tree, recast and watched a few fish follow the lure upstream toward my location.

Then a message buzzed in my hand.  Those inventors!

My design team had rigged the fishing pole as an antenna to receive radio signals through the river water and transmit them to the organic circuitry installed in my palm.

I pointed the pole at the water and circled the bait just out of reach of the four- to six-inch shallow water swimmers while listening to a report from my associates.

All I asked for was a couple of weeks of letting the computer program run on its own set of binary digits!

And I'd get what I wanted if there was more cooperation.  Now I'm hearing that the cartels are getting a little machismo in their morning cappucino and think they can muscle in on the action that ain't theirs for the taking.

Look, fellows, I told you it's share and share alike.  You can't keep raking in all that profit and expect to keep it all to yourselves.

We're a family and when a family member disappoints me, I get angry.  I don't get revenge.  I don't get mad.  I don't get even.  I just let the family know it's all a matter of perspective as I demonstrate how business is business.  Get cocky and you sink with a South Korean ship or Russian-made airplane ... or worse.  Sorry, once it's done you can't bribe your way out of death.

I've asked my associates to take care of this business while I'm taking a few days off to fish.  If my ears buzz again, I won't be happy.  I won't laugh.  And neither will you, you understand?

I carry a pocket paper journal where I keep coded ledgers that track those of you still living in the dark ages before the invention of the abacus, batch cards and automatons.  After I received the radio message, I sat down with a beer and checked some notes in the journal.

Some of you are behind in your duties.  If I see you aren't interested in balancing things up the way they should be, then, again my associates have the authority to open a few closed doors and disclose a few so-called secrets that won't be secret anymore.

The Book of the Future is under lock and key.  You don't need to know what's going to happen next.  After all, the future's your business and nobody else's so why should I have to spell out what you're going to do in this public forum?

Take care of business, willya?  It's not like I'm asking you to solve world hunger, treat factory workers fairly or bring doubleknit polyester pantsuits back into fashion.

Now, back to my holiday.  Once again, a quick thanks to all you folks who're doing what the future said you would be doing anyway.  There's nothing in writing that says you have to do what you have to do.  You can change the future at any time, if you know who you are not and that you don't exist, of course.  A big if, but it can be done.

Look at a luna moth and ask yourself why such a big creature lives such a short time.  When you know the answer, you know the future.

See, I told you it's all simple, right there in front of your eyes.  Why you don't believe me, I can't say.  Why all this desire for proof?  You don't want a bunch of fireballs shaking the ground and scorching Earth, do you?  Well, most of you don't.

I haven't asked my scientists to run simulations of what it would take to change the ocean currents unnaturally but I think it's time to work out the details.  We've got the ability to create hundreds of millions of tonnes of nanotechnology that can reproduce itself radically and chaotically.  But why would we want to change the ocean currents?  I'll let you think about that one for a while.

Brash Brass Bash

While researching some fishing tips online, listening to the Mexicana Music Choice channel on Comcast this morning, a nod to the Latina beauty at Great Clips yesterday who stood nearby while Shirley cut my hair, giving me the early bird $4 off special for arriving before 10 a.m.

Then, a nice, quiet evening with the missus eating Taco Bell drive-thru/takeaway convenience food while sitting on the sofa and watching the picture box.

Domesticity and suburbia have their blissful moments, do they not?

Enjoy your end of the week - if you're reading this, you're alive to think and act on your impulses, actions and plans.

Enough for now.  See you in a few weeks - my associates will have to take care of business without my input on how well the automatic program is working.  They'll let me know if any people/organisations reach the intolerable stage and need my advice on how to manually "persuade" convincingly.

What does the 15th of April mean to you?

One more post for ya afore I go on to somethin' else besides ticklin' my fingers on keys.  Tomorrow has special meaning to me and the missus.

• Her interest: Spring Plant Sale ('Members Only' Day)
• My interest: Fishing the Flint River in Alabama, North America Native Fishes Association

I've got me fishin' licence and just need some bait.  Have a great 15th, whatever and wherever you are!

A few films for those who'll be sittin' indoors:

• Fermat's Room [La habitación de Fermat] (2007)
• Gregory's Girl (1981)
• Stormy Weather (1943)

Should I buy a boat and name it Pitagoras or Pull Dubh ("Black Hole" in Irish, not far from "black pool" - i.e., linn dubh or as we call it now, Dublin; could call it Cailín Bhaile Átha Cliath ("Dublin's Girl"), instead)?

Wyatt Before The Storm

I miss Urmi and Julia gallantly, their opinions, especially in their native languages, putting me in their place momentarily through their writing.

Well, the new and improved pencil sharpener is ready.  I had my doubts and brushed the dust off the crystal ball for a quick reading but the programmers came through at the moment at last.

First, a shoutout to Frank Messina and his air plant bloom list email, courtesy of www.airplant.com. Some days I feel like a bromeliad looking for the minimum of nutrients in the morning dew and rare rain showers.

And now, a word from your future:

They come by car, bus, train, air, foot, trailer, motorbike and bicycle.  They stay in hotels, campgrounds and wooded civil war battlegrounds.  They call in sick.  They take sudden holiday/vacation time off.  Can you see the ones hiding in the backs of lorries or tractor-trailer rigs?  Can you measure the change in people density?  Or, like Freaknik and rainbow parades, does one crowd change places with another, the density hardly changing?

What are all the houses and flats in other parts of the country doing empty this week?

When bare arms bear arms, what do bears bare/bear?

I value the opinion of Kwasi A. on this matter.  Maybe Ed J. could crack a good joke so we could break the silence enveloping us right now.

When countries and cultures do not matter in the big picture, except that opposing ones exist, what does one tell those whose lifestyles will fade into oblivion very soon?

I don't like the Book of the Future but it doesn't stop me from telling you what it says will happen in your near future.

Which one of you is willing to die, when all of us are going to die unwillingly?  We only die willingly when we think we're going to live, either through post-life somethingness or through the lives of those left living.

When we finally create the perpetual non-cancerous multicellular organism, what is life?

Which one of you is willing to kill when you don't know what life is?

When no is yes and yes is no, when longevity is considered selfish and good health is commercially rationed, will you kill or die willingly?

Have you ever sold an extended warranty plan that guarantees 24-hour support of a product?  Have you ever sat at the actuarial table to see how many customers it takes to make an extended warranty program profitable?  Do you know how many extended warranty customers are unprofitable for a company?

What is your true cost of living?  Not your standard of living.  Not your standing in the community.  What does it cost you to live?

Look around you.  How much of what you do directly contributes to your living?  How much of what others do or have done contributes to your living?

This blog pays not one centavo toward my living.  It doesn't grow food in the garden.  It doesn't build and repair roads.  It doesn't draw ethical lines in the sand where unethical people are captured and incarcerated.  It doesn't build and clean the water supply.

I have depended almost solely on you to support my living.  I thank you.

In this quiet before some storms erupt, to whom can you give thanks for contributing to your living, no matter whether you liked/disliked, you agreed/disagreed with, or you gave a moment's thought to that person or those persons?

I thought so.

Which one of you is Wyatt Earp and which one of you thinks s/he's a Cowboy?

I'll be honest here.  I've grown accustomed to the quiet woods and although I like the attraction of reading the Book of the Future to you through this obscure blog, assuming no one reads it but me, I'm ready for someone else to read from their Book of the Future.  All the years and kilometers that stretch in loops and waves get mixed up after a while - I can't tell one from another anymore.  Cabin fever is over, in other words, and spring fever in full.  Business is booming, I'm sure, and many people looking for a reason to point their fingers at something to explain something else but I don't care.  The world belongs to you, all of you.  The future is yours for the taking/making.

I'm closing this blog down.  I know the future and I'm an obscure, anonymous part of it on a worldly scale so now I know it doesn't matter if I write about it or not - my part is done and that's the part I needed to know about.  I was supposed to nudge you along until the ball rolled into the hands of others who could run the world quietly on automatic pilot.  The new computer program upgrade is up and running.  My associates are in place and have your lives safely in their hands.

I've seen the wonders of a seven-billion strong world council of subcultures that learn to live together in relative peace for a while.  All of us live.  All of us die.  How the details manifest themselves is up to you now.  Every one of us matters.  Live well.  When you give up arguing about who's in charge and take control of your lives, you join the rest of the world that wants you to live well.  Learn to roll with the changes, knowing that seasons and fads come and go.

The future says the next stage of my life is walking woods and sitting by a river watching the fish and the mosquitoes bite.  I'm ready to go on to that next stage from Middle-Aged Man to Old Guy With No Name.  My interest in who says "yes" and who says "no" and what sports / fashion / government / science fads purport continues to fade.  Time to let it go.

The urbanites tried to draw me in and I've never been a true country living kind of person - I'm just a plain ol' suburbanite wandering the tame woods watching the trees and the birds while subcultural clues play tunes in my head.  Time to unplug from this artificial world and relive my childhood nature scout life while my body still works.

I hope you learned what I've learned (and keep learning) - no one is out to get you, your subculture, your religion or your government, as long as you aren't out to get them.  We don't have to like each other.  We don't have to agree with one another.  We've got this one planet's resources to share.  And share we will.

Simple facts for simple living.  Love one another and don't tolerate the intolerable.  One big family on one planet.  Asymmetry is our friend - diversity works to our advantage.  Nothing is new - everything old is understandable so stop fooling ourselves by flooding our senses with "new" stimuli and take time to learn/relearn what we already know.

Enjoy your life, knowing your future is safely in the hands of those around you and vice versa.

I've said enough.  Time to stop talking and time to start living!  Maybe we'll see each other soon.

When Old News Is Good News

How long can you sit or stand and look up at trees?  The simple, guilty pleasures of living a suburban life where food grows in grocer's markets and security is provided by unseen forces.  Ahh ...

A dry spring so far on this part of the world.

Flat pencils.

A, are you ready to replace Andie in a fully-scripted, better-paced version of a Cornwell novel?  Or is it time to turn Patricia's writing into roleplaying video games?

Valerie Bertinelli - you sure make me want to spend money getting slimmer (Jason Alexander, not so much).  How long ago did we have crushes on your TV character?

So who came up with the theory about blackmailed pilots, artificial fog and electronic jamming equipment to make it look like the final approach confused IFR-rated flight crews?  When you don't know, go with the simpler explanation.  Ri-i-ght!

Same for black holes and wormholes.  Look at historical comments:

• Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
• Marcello Truzi: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
• Pierre-Simon Laplace: "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."

We may live in a Vedic world, a First Nations world, or a skeptical scientist's posit that worlds don't really exist but we can make sense of enough of this experience called life to establish simple rules for living.

Twenty amino acids, for instance.  Run your permutations and combinations to figure out if a two-dimensional x-y acre or hectare with an infinite z converging to Earth's core and diverging into space contains organisms with only 20 amino acids.

Diversity, not sameness.  Varying densities, not one thickness.

Time to get down to business and show where tea/coffee party piñatas can be purchased.  We're not here to threaten your sense of place.  We want to strengthen your belief in selfhood while broadening your belief in new experiences.

Save that thought for the next blog entry.  This middle-aged fool wants to take a moment to light a candle in memory of all the organisms that have died this week - famous, infamous, notorious, heroic and unknown - a simple act to honour the memories of those who no longer create their own memories and depend on us to remember them for the simple fact that they lived, no matter what they did.

Bad Vlad Broods Good Mood?

Any coincidence that farming games are popular in China and on facebook right now?

Nostalgia.

Organic cat food.

The taste of beer on a boat in warm weather.

Fish scales caught in arm hair.

Flies.  Ants.

Cutting back privet to see the road - the damn hedge grows like the free weed it is.

Violent abandoned adopted babies - spanked? - and young bicyclists in the breeze.

Should black boxes be trusted to the fox guarding the hen house full of blackened Poles?

Smelling the wind for new signs now that the Cherokee mama is hunting higher grounds.

Being used to being used but sad and depressed about being used any which ol' way.

Looking at the diversions, as always.  What does the magician hand to the assistant in plain sight?

Have you ever lived under a glass ceiling for very long?

When facts become facts, who are your true friends?

Half of one is also half of the other.

Are droughts contagious?

If you're full of distrust, do you trust your distrust?

Order in the court.  Here comes de judge.  Ladies and gents, Laugh-In looks at the news.  Love, American-style, truer than the red, white and blue ... it's me and you.  Sock it to me.

Carol Burnett in Sacramento raisin country.

Sharpening a new pencil ... the pine tar gumming up the pencil sharpener ... here comes the future, baby!

In BBC news today, it was announced that factory figures had figured nicely this time around, except for the fact the figures were rigged to scaffolding around an empty warehouse rigged to look full of rigs.

In BBC, news today revealed the rags-to-riches story of the Untouchables, tax auditors who'd taken bribes to help companies get back on their feet through creative bookkeeping.  Beekeepers were kept out of the pot of honey this time.

In BBC news, today a well-placed executive gave his assistant a pretty bauble for keeping their babble secret between them.  The assistant sold the bauble to pay for a trip for her boyfriend to pay a visit to the executive's wife for a little bubbly in a bubble bath for two.

Today, the BBC news showed it was incapable of maintaining the farce of neutrality due to the infiltration of former writers for Punch who insisted on skewing the news toward sarcasm and wry British humour.  Evidence: the prime minister was shown eating a piece of Arctic-grown cheese.  A total lack of culture on both parts.

China raised its quota for American immigrants in order to secure laborers to complete the high-speed rail between all major Chinese cities.  The American qulī workers must provide their own pick axes and lunchboxes.

Poland has secured permission from NATO to randomly take down a Russian airliner flying into NATO territory in the "fog."  The Kyrgyzstan government has volunteered its two military airports to show solidarity with both the West and Russia in support of resolving this issue.

To play a trick, the Himalayas shrank several metres overnight to mess with China's and Nepal's official height of Mt. Everest.

The increased production of biomass fuel in Brazil has caused a shift in Earth's rotation due to the amount of non-flatulence based methane released into the atmosphere.  Scientists have proposed releasing a secret supply of methane-eating chemical bombs over South America to prevent Earth's orbit from collapsing.  Taiwan and South Korea have denied any connection to the production of the chemical weapons.  North Korea has taken credit but no nation has recognised their ability to make such sophisticated weapons at this time.  Iran has claimed it has harnessed anti-methane technology and could, if it wanted to, produce such weapons but it is a country of peace, not war, and thus has modified the technology for cleaning the air of restaurants where too much fiber and roughage is consumed.

The conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories was thought up by a woman working at a travel agency early this morning.  By the time she finished texting her theory, an invisible group of cyberwarfare ninjas stepped invisibly out of her phone and took the travel agent to an undisclosed location.  Throughout the day, the agent has suffered through a series of tests to ensure her theory is in fact a theory and not the tip of a tip from a lover / acquaintance / associate that prompted her to think up the theory from the hint of a tip of a fact she knows nothing about.  Meanwhile, a cybernetic copy of the travel agent continues to fill travel orders at the office, her coworkers unaware of the difference between the real her and the robotic her, she having lived a quiet life sharing superficial conversations with the people nearest her.

Unknown to the cyberwarfare ninjas, they are third generation copies of their cybernetic selves.

Unknown to the travel agent, she is still sitting at her desk filling travel orders, with only her thought patterns kidnapped and carried off to a secure location for interrogation.  Her coworkers only think they detect a change in her wan demeanor today, a few pondering the possibility that she is either an alien or a robot.

I have taken the day off and left this blog entry for my computer programmers to write using a new automatic text-generation software package to replace the one I had been using for the past few months.

My body is sitting at home staring at the flickering images of a box across the room after working in the sun-filled yard earlier today while my thought patterns have been sent to a "cleaning house" for repairs and updates, wiping out dead-end trails of thoughts that have weighed down my overall adventure-seeking life of adventure wrapped in adverts.  A bottle of Samuel Adams Noble Pils is lying while laying its lies on its side and dripping drops onto the carpet beside my moccasined feet.

Are you a "yes" or a "no"?  Do you think you know but still want to find out?  Do you invent your own carrots or do you depend on carrots others have dangled in front of you?

My computer programmers think they have worked out the bugs in the upgrade they released yesterday so we should have the new predictions programmed into the electric pencil sharpener for me to grind out a few answers tomorrow.  The shavings they scanned today made no sense.

But then again, as you know, even mistakes are part of the future.  So what do the pencil shavings really mean?  Are we really going to create a new council of panels containing those permanently-assigned and those who rotate in and out via popular vote?  Will we finally abolish trade barriers in order to take full advantage of local areas of expertise that leverage cooperative (rather than competitive) advantage instead of leveraged buyouts?  Are we going to train all citizens for self-empowerment?

Good thing for the upgrade.  The last version of the program had spun off into a utopian cycle.  A lot of nice ideas but they were being spun up too fast for subcultures to implement.  Glad we have a secret set of manually-derived versions of the future, including a few control experiments, to test against the seven-billion strong superorganism's Book of the Future prediction subroutines.

Time for me to unplug from the picture box and see if the upgrade will fully function by tomorrow's blog entry.  Okay, you programmers, show me what you've written for a blog entry today!

Mama Cass' Carcasses

Small, gnat-sized insects tap the surface of the backyard pond.  Hard to believe a few weeks ago I could see the sky through the bare branches of the trees now nearly fully leaved.

Mountain phlox and mayapple blooms peak up out of the underbrush.

The purple dogwood has seven blooms this year.  Last year several dozen.

The hawk finds a spot to perch above a feeding squirrel.

Life under the canopy of suburban woods.

The more efficient the automation, the faster the response time of the superorganism.

Ears buzzing so loud these days, I can't hear a clock alarm or a cat purr.

How deep is black?  When you can't tell the difference between real life and a book of fiction.  Can Elvis Cole solve this one?  A peaceful overthrow in one piece, one fell swoop, for once.

How depressingly funny or mildly humourously depressing can a flick be?  When it feels like a cross between others you've seen, mixing a last married couple scenario, an out-of-towners out-of-water feel, a touch of Soho after hours and an adult adventure in babysitting called Date Night.  A bird on a wire and all those others, too.

The cure for the blues?  Seeing chocolate bunnies at the Chocolate Crocodile after drowning one's liver in a tall mug of Guinness with a Red Robin because P. F. Chang's was full.

One day soon I'll be deaf.  What kind of bionic ear should I wish for, since LASIK has worked so well for my sight about six years now?

Do I want to read the Book of the Future today?  Not really.

Kenny Chesney, Dolly Parton and Megan Fox - entertainment products of east Tennessee birth.

When was the last time you sat next to Mandy Moore at a UFC event?

In which/what world do I live?  Am I an IndyCar/NASCAR/F1/Rally fan, a Lowe Mill fan, a pop cinema fan, a woodlands/jungle hike fan, a football/rugby fan or ... any and all of the above?

I live - I'm a fan of everything.

Seduced by my senses, unaware of what's really around me.  What do I don't know I know I almost know?

When the superorganism is ready, will it rip the fabric of spacetime space and step across the threshold?  Can it solve the puzzle of why no other superorganisms are visible in this universe?

Why can some people find simple pleasure in repetitive tasks and weekend backyard BBQ parties while others will not be happy until this planet's creatures are safely ensconced in another spot outside of this universe?

How many times can we laugh at the barbarians who show their primate selves in the fearmongering about one-world government?  Can we not see we're one people already?

If you feel out of control of the situation, admit the fact and go on.

How many caves have you explored?

Can you tell the difference between a person who has killed another person and one who has not?

Do you know the definition of risk?

Do you know the definition of life?

The Book of the Future ... the crystal ball ... the bag of other tricks yet unused ...

Don't worry about one-world governments forcing you to change your lifestyle/culture.  We need you to maintain your subcultures so that dichotomies occur all along the borders between "pure" subcultures for change to happen seemingly spontaneously.  From discord, confusion and conflict rise unique solutions to problems that haven't been invented yet.

The Balance of Power.  We know what's going to happen next because you predict your own unpredictability predictably.  Like tuning an engine.  When all aspects of living are known and your unique limited combination of aspects observed and recorded, the world of our species within the well-studied ecosystem of this planet provide measurable parameters upon which one can depend reliably.

The "mysteries" of life are slowly revealed to you for proper dissemination and absorption by the subpopulations of the superorganism.  Pockets of resistance are natural responses by the environment and expected (although never welcomed by purists in the field of efficiency expertise).

You accomplish so much more when you trust the future's already been formed for you.  Quit seeing it in hindsight and let your foresight be your guide.

If we think we have to wait for a Contact-like moment, a deus ex machina, to rescue us from ourselves, then we'll keep waiting.  We are our own alien species, so to speak, with the ignorance of knowledge about the future already in us.

What's next?  Hmm ... to know that I know what I'm going to see in the Book of the Future before I look at it is the sign that I'm believing the message of this fictional blog too much.

In one hand, fiction.  In the other hand, nonfiction.  In one's knowledge, the knowledge that others fulfill futures presented to them as if they're assignments and by others subconsciously through the power of subtle persuasion.  Thus, are the futures fact or fiction or both and when were they one, the other or both?

The Book of the Future doesn't say because the Book of the Future is its own self-referential conflict, spirals within spirals looping back and forth within and out of themselves with no discernible beginning or end in sight of our localised lives.

Time to step out of the local culture again and show what the Book of the Future says about other subcultures in the superculture/superorganism called us, our species, our one-world self governing body, if you will accept that definition gladly (or at least without wincing).  You might just find out if you're a "Yes" or a "No" and why.

Degas Degauss de Gaulle Degausser

Stood outside.  Couldn't separate the life of a tree from the life of an ant or a woodpecker.  Saw a whippet tail of a Mandelbrot mandala spread out into the arm of a slightly-dense part of this spreading part of the universe, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing along with a glass of 2003 Cynthiana ruby vino.

How many times have I been here before or will I be here after that moment?

Cycles and repetitions happen with or without me.

Dim, poor, nonreassuring reminders ... sigh ...

Some alternative bands put the "emo deli" in remodeling.

To know you're here to leave a portion of a message for someone (or something) hundreds or thousands of years from now takes the patience and anonymity of a seed tick.

Do you see yourself as part of a red algae bloom?  How about a rain event or a lightning storm?

Slicing the block of cheese into slivers into shavings into cultured cells ...

What does a bumblebee "see" in its memories?

Reach puberty, give birth and die - what else can a living thing ask for?

If milk of our species could be produced in large quantities via genetic modification, creating a new trans-species not quite human, would you rather consume the "dairy" product of the trans-species (which ensured an optimally high nutritional value) or a pure cow or goat species (which provided the current marginal nutritional value we've culturally taught ourselves to enjoy)?

Breaking down the barriers of cost/benefit analyses for all types of living.

What is a cultural taboo?

Living off the "fat" of the land - if a planet's moon was abundantly covered in a substance or form of living organism which only became food for us after we made major genetic modifications to ourselves living on that moon, would you move there knowing the genetic modification was a one-way change?

Would you continue to explore the universe with electromechanical devices to lower the overhead cost of space exploration associated with the life support systems needed to keep our non space-hardened bodies alive?  How many such robotic "beachheads" will you establish before enough wealthy people would pay to risk their lives to visit some of these space exploration outposts without exceptional costs to the general public (i.e., without government funding)?

In other words, where do you put your profits?  Are you a locavore or a planetary explorer?  How much money do your local leaders spend on monuments to themselves, including both "pure" statuary and community development projects?

Dogs barking at a person riding a horse slowly trotting down the country lane.  Words used to describe a scene without using proper nouns.  The dogs, the person, the horse, and the country lane are not heroes, megalomaniacs or narcissists.

Do you value vanity or altruism?

If language/symbolism got us here, should we use language/symbolism to get us there?

Did a person named Haley see a comet named after Halley?

How many ways can we use the plastic, malleable central nervous system that includes our brains?  How many ways will we emulate and surpass the uses of that system?

To deprogram oneself after absorbing all that this planetary ecosystem has to offer, one seeks a nonduality with multiple angles that creates the self-vs-nonself duality anyway.  So, should we train ourselves to not have a self in the first place so that all is nonself?

Good to hear private planes in the air again.

Should one celebrate having no more metallic tooth cavity fillings?

When the tilt and wobble of one's home planet causes the variation of trees sprouting/shedding leaves and plants blooming/dying on different parts of the world, can we convince/assure ourselves that asymmetry causes life so we can quit bothering to conform to one another's pressure to conform with each other's behavioural patterns that we think leads to higher survival chances?

A few more days of letting change happen before opening the Book of the Future again.  The future happens whether we know about it or not.  The inertia of life speaks for itself in many forms, a tiny part of which we call social patterns of our species.

How long before automatic software analysis programs see problems in the real world and write programs and/or create electromechanical devices to solve them automatically/autonomously?  The software programmers working for me see that day getting closer and closer as they automate more and more of their software development and testing routines while they increase their financial holdings with investment software that gets automatically more sophisticated everyday.

Where do I put my profits?  Well, what does 10% unemployment mean to me?  It means that automation has made 25% - 50% of our species redundant.  Do I invest in reducing the redundancy through retraining or invest in raising chaos that will cause another world war (or increased regional skirmishes) and reduce the redundancy through war casualties and collateral damage?  I'll let you in on a hint to the answer: I peeked ahead in the Book of the Future to find out: I remain anonymous while my profits create changes that a lot of people won't be happy with.

For those of you who have their own Books of the Future, let's tell the others the facts.  If you have a job that you think is boring, then using a person to perform your job duties is unnecessary so we're going to automate your job.  You can either change your lifestyle habits to squeeze profit out of your wages while you still have your boring job and invest in automation, or you can become redundant and live at the mercy of constant retraining / war attrition / despondency.

As always, the choice is yours.  Some of you will ride rockets into space and some of you will decrease your standards of living to comfortably and quietly live anonymous lives off the slivers and fat of the land.

Blue Tail Flies

Silence is a killer.  We stepped back and let the system run by itself without our input, watching and waiting.

Phrases on the computer screen:

• "Dewey and his crew at Trent Remodeling put the mod in remodeling."
• "Aaron is a smartass away from the Acropolis."
• "My ... name ... is ... Melinda ... on a clear day ... and ... Theresa ... when ... I ... can't fix your problem."
• "Developing for China, the world's largest market - what will their consumer products exported to the U.S. look like?  Will we recognize a reworked version of 'Anne of Green Gables' when we see it?"

Do you actively seed discord and discontent in order to stir up anti-nation nationalism?  Or are you interested in fads and fashions in order to stir up advertising revenue?

We listened to the SSDs stir up trouble in their neighbour's room-sized post-"meeting" shower room filled with STDs.  Anyone have an SUD or SVD to spare?

Analysis and backwash produce culture.

There's no final outcome when running a planet full of seven billion people.  No final reward.  No closing the books on the game and starting a new game.  The play is perpetual.  Sometimes the back room operators get bored when the game of life is the only game in town.

We sat in silence and didn't tweak any settings, letting new players show themselves.

"My name is Candy."

"My name is Sandy."

We placed a few tracking devices on the submersible sailing vessels.  The desktop icons refreshed automatically.

How do you compare a nation-state to sleeper cells?  Follow the ideology spoken at the "fresh breath" mint factory.

How many tens, dozens or fourteens are willing to die to maintain a revolution?  Depends on how dire the count, wouldn't you say?

We saw the players playing.  We have little to compare the management of a quadrillion to a few hundreds in our pocket.  Do they?

Do we open the Book of the Future together this time?  Us?

Millions of military personnel indoctrinated to fight for the homeland(s) and defeat the enem(y/ies).  How quickly can we reprogram the indoctrination?  How many will see during the transitional, transitory retraining that the enemy is them and rebel against themselves?

What's the difference between an SLA and the SLAC?

How many use an AK47 instead of an AK74?

We will not touch the automatic controls for a while and let the system run its course until a major course correction is needed.  For us, peace and war are the same thing - change.  See you a few moments from now (or to your senses, see you after many minor/major changes have occurred).

Remember, clouds do not exist - they're all figments of your cultural indoctrination.

Viruses/Viral

How did you first get involved in technology?  For me, it was a friend, Joe Francis, who introduced me to the RCA 1802 microprocessor, a space-hardened version of which resides in the Voyager spacecraft and later the Intel 8080/8085 CPU family.  For others, it was the Altair:

Honoring the Father of the PC

Most of us are familiar with the term "computer virus," but do you think about real viruses that could prevent the use of blood to save lives?:

Potential Risk to Blood Supply Probed 

What makes a wombat mad, a Tasmanian devil bedeviled with disease and a coal ship marooned on a barrier reef?  I couldn't find the answer in Der Spiegel, the speakeasy or Mongolian desert winds.  Maybe Nigerian radioactive dirt and water will burn the Ntera image for me.  Munster and Butler know what it's like to be "that close" to knowing, too.  Can't show favoritism in despotic nepotistic depositories.

If there's dirt and gravel in your water supply, are you looking for a sinkhole to fill in the future?  I'll ask the future mayor, AMA in HHI, to find out.

Faceless Elasticity

Friends of mine give the moments of their lives to the enjoyment and enrichment of neigbourliness via social interaction - religious school training, community singing groups, professional philosophical advice for professional military leaders - and they expect no extra payment for their giving.  They treat praise and silent appreciation equally.

One friend, Joe, looks out from a church choir to see the smiling, singing faces of a congregation looking back at him and knows there is no price for such social engagement other than a nod or a word or two of conversation in his driveway a few days later when receiving a yellowed newspaper clipping announcing his and his wife's wedding 50 years ago.  And no, he wouldn't trade his classic green 1960s Ford Mustang for the clipping.

While "modernising" my mother in-law's house interiour (new paint/door handles on kitchen cabinets, new power outlets/switches, new bathroom faucets, new ceiling lights, and other "honey-do" items) in a phase of spring renewal (what else can you do for a 92-year young woman who has all she's ever wanted or needed?), I pause and feel the pleasure of the simple pleasures of small town life ...

Meeting old friends who like to help my mother in-law fix up her house - new water heater, new walk-in shower - who find their days filled with too much work to fish idly.

Watching two planets in the evening sky, wondering at the vastness of our solar system, seeing two planets on opposite sides of the Sun, and unable to fathom what a light-year really means to tiny bipeds on a small planet in an unimaginably huge galaxy.

All the myths and legends about the photon streams we choose to call stars like our sun.

Jennifer with her cheerful smile at the local Wal-Mart.

Needing to stop at Henard's, Liberty or the local electrical supply store for solid copper wire to fix an old in-wall electric heater.

Oblivious to the major changes taking place in other parts of the world.

While individuals and nations debate the merits of freedom, we exercise the freedom to live our lives within socially-acceptable community standards that are vaguely/barely touched on by outside societies.

Happiness is a community that glosses over historical mistakes and treats those living together in the present with respect for our cordiality and desire to do right without resorting to high ideals, useless labels or petty namecalling to put space between us.

Hugs and handshakes.  Smiles and nods.  No language necessary.

In my head I carry dozens of cultures/subcultures/communities.  I do not understand why some people live the lives they choose (for instance, I couldn't imagine having protrusions embedded in my skull or go on life-threatening pilgrimages) but I understand we express individual freedom individually.

Social experimentation at the single person level.  That's where it begins.

You have the freedom to put the past behind you while learning about history at the same time.  Every moment is a new moment, completely free of the moment previous to the previous one.  Rare is the person who can completely change from one moment to another to another continuously but you can change from one moment to the next if you choose.

I've stepped out of the mainstream of consciousness for a few days to see life from the local perspective.  If I can't live in the local environment, I can't live anywhere.

I must admit I like it here.  I like the peace and quiet of local life, with local issues and local politics.

We should all see life on the local level, frequently, instead of getting caught up in large social movements that may or may not involve us at a personal level but make us feel temporarily part of something bigger than ourselves.

No matter whether you consider yourself a citizen of a corporation, a nation-state, or the globe, you live in a local community.

Keeping it real, as someone said.  That's what it's all about.

Reaching out to friends across the street and across the virtual universe.  I ask nothing more of you than that.

Working Wonders

How much do you drink?  Do you have enough?:

• Severe Drought Hits Southwest China

 How should you live?:

• Jacqueline Novogratz invests in sustainable small business solutions for world’s poor

Venus and Mercury Don't Know Their Names

While the Great Mother and the Great Father put forward the continuous conversation of the ancient ones, I turned my head to hear a noise.

A sound.

"My name is Sherry," she said.

I closed my eyes to see the sound without visual stimuli.

We run our editing machines without noticing what we cut out.

The rumble in my bones of a train passing by.

Tinnitus.

We are one planet of people ... still ... listen.

The flow of centripetal/centrifugal/Coriolis forces.

Wind.

Magma.

States of energy.

Intersecting undulating wave patterns disguised as particles.

We eat.  We drink.

We consume.

Local.  Global.  Universal. -al.

Contumely.

The reflection of the sun - albedo.

Many neighbours visible right now - Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury - the eye unaided by magnifying lenses.

The continuous conversation continues ...

Assume everything reduces to sand and dust.

Assume this life is the only life in which you get to be you.

Assume you assume nothing.

You live because others want you to live.  Others live because you want them to live.

Life is life - think and act simply.

Breathe deeply - the air is free.

Who puts food in the mouth of the person who puts food in the mouth of the person who puts food in your mouth?

What is the food you put in your mouth?  Where did the food come from?

Civilisation is one simple source of food depending on another.

What do I give the next generation to put civilisation in perspective?  The latest sports/fashion/music/technology trend will find its way here with or without me.  The hardest working man in show biz and the Japanese anime superstar rise on their own merits.

Do I put aside retirement and dive into the trendsetter world again, where Shanghai and Sao Paolo become realistic dots in my rods and cones that expand into street players and factory designers who appear on tomorrow's headline news?  In retirement, I watch how people train their dragons in animated cinema and how BBQ is prepared at Charlie's.

How many languages and dialects do you speak?  What jargonese dominates your vocabulary?  Are you fabless or are you fabulous?  Can you tell agar from a jar?  Can you smoothly transition from chemistry to physics to biology to psychology to public speaking to sports to family matters to nuclear medicine to forensic pathology to politics to astronomy to business to fashion to speechwriting to fishing in the same sentence?

Do you have a universal theory of everything just waiting to be heard and verified by the experts?

The more outlandish, the more crazy your idea sounds, the more it needs to be heard.  That's why seven billion voices count.  Every person has a vision, a dream, that differs from the next person's ever so slightly.  That slight difference makes all the difference between a species that survives and a species that excels.

Make your difference visible.

There are no right answers.  There are questions that no longer mattered after the next set of questions were asked.

So far, the only ones listening to us as we are are people - only we fully understand our emotions, our languages, our cultures. 

However, on this planet we are surrounded by organisms with many nonpeople ways to live and understand one another.

Listen to the wind.

Feel the rumble through your feet.

Wisdom is all around you in the simplicity of daily living.  Remove complications to see what is really before you.

Look at the person standing near you hunched over a rectangular-shaped object and ask yourself if you're looking at a mirror image of yourself reading something like this blog or responding to IM/SMS/facebook posts.  Who is that person and what else could that person do?

Levels of civilisation - eating, talking, texting, thinking - all reduce down to how you live your life in the moment.  Value the moment and you will see how you can help others make their moments more valuable.

After all, Venus and Mercury are labels which have nothing to do with the reflective spheres baking in solar radiation and Earth is no longer the center of the universe.  What new insight will you provide us with your crazy idea like heliocentrism or adding no holds barred cage fighting and motorbike roller derby as Olympic events?