Citizen

In addition to avoiding general news websites, some proponents of the secret to success recommend rationing your intake of other nefarious input, including emails and SMS (i.e., texts). For instance, stay focused on your goals and maybe check once a week on your Inbox. Of course, some of you will say that you'd lose your job if you ignored your emails or IM. I will not comment about the value of what you receive. If nothing else, you know yourself better than anyone else so the decision about how to reach your state of bliss is yours to make, not mine.

Our duty to ourselves is our duty to society. We differ in our duties by how we perceive society. This is not a test. There is no right answer.

I had stayed away from the news for a while so I could clear my thoughts of unimportant matters. Yesterday, while eating a late lunch, I turned on the TV to let my eyes wander across some scenes from an old movie, "The Last Married Couple in America," a morality play, a period piece set in the late 1970s (the disco age to you young'ns), a favorite movie of mine because of its comments about marriage and middle age that I knew I would encounter 30 years or so later. And now here I am, still married to the same woman in part because of that movie! Amazing, huh?

While the movie played, I turned on the computer in the living room so I could look up information about cutting ailerons out of a foam airplane I'd purchased at Hobby Lobby for less than six dollars, wanting to modify the hand-launched plane ("on a calm day, this plane can fly 30 feet!") with a DC-powered motor and turning capability for 10-15 minute flights. Upon bootup, my computer automatically launched my email program; there, in front of my peripheral vision, popped up an email from a person making angry remarks about a political agenda I have spent too much time making fun of as it is and was ready to put behind me.

As George Segal and Natalie Wood (Q: "What kind of wood doesn't float?" A: "Natalie Wood"), the foils in the foibled lives of their fabled friends, resolved their marriage woes, I wondered why perfectly rational friends of mine would get riled up about nothing.

Then it dawned on me. I was watching the wrong movie. I should have picked "Citizen Kane," a tale much more appropriate for the type of maligned, malicious, yellow journalism taking place right now, with the media magnate Murdoch replacing Orson Welles (aka William Randolph Hearst) in the quest to once again increase the value of his holdings by getting people to watch, read, and talk about one of his news outlets.

The more things change, the more they pocket the change, right? In other words, instead of joining in the brouhaha about who's going to care about Rosemary's Baby when she's qualified for a role in Harold and Maude or Cocoon, I'm going to look at my investments and see if there's room for growth in the shrinking media industry. When what passed for serious journalism now assumes the lead role in the fight cage, do roller-skating daddies and mommas don boxing gloves and yell the headlines at each other while clubbing each other to bloody bits and pieces?

A mole jumped up onto the garage floor from the hole in the ground where chipmunks used to live. It scurries about looking lost and exposed, seeing me (sort of), and heads for the pile of junk against the garage wall. I see a pink nose and dark fur stick out from beside the stack of wood, disappear and then reappear on the other side of the sheets of glass I bought to build a greenhouse over 20 years ago. A bluejay and a mourning dove talk to the forest, enjoying the relative cool after an overnight shower. Spider webs hang like bedsheets drying on the clothesline, flexing and showing the invisible waveforms of the saturated breeze.

A cardinal crashed into the plate glass window at the front of the house and flopped down on the front deck. I picked it up, assuming it joined the list of birds who hadn't seen their end coming. The head rolled around for a moment, the bird disoriented, not dead. Finally, the female fluffed her feathers and flew off.

My world has no need for human rules. No quest for what's right or wrong. The neighbourhood dogs howl along with a passing ambulance, their song serenading me as the emergency crew heads toward some perilous predicament.

The universe is emotionless, neutral, unaware of me. My environment is here because I am here, neither needing nor wanting me but changing with me.

What does my species want to change? If we truly own nothing, belong to no one, are simply the incidental ebb and flow of glowing minerals, then...well, actually, unequivocally, with every doubt and certainty, I have arrived at my location, my stopoff station. We yell at each other because we have nothing better to do. Once again, the Role of Uncertainty Rules. Not a rule, mind you. Just the role of a rule with a ruler involved. A measuring stick for the inchworm. Meter by meter we make our way, mindful of the meter maid.

Long ago, I realized I announced my death the moment I was born, tagging two events in the list of moments we species like to recognize. Along the thread that ties the two events together, I make myself known, like the millipede that glides across the algae-covered path where I park my car, seen and heard and not very tasty. If you don't have a product people want, find a new line of work; at least, realize your value.

I wait for no one to tell me what I'm worth. I listen to myself before giving others the time of day because a clock is not what I'm wound up about. Someone once told me that, assuming a normal healthy body, the length of our lives is largely determined by the number of heartbeats we make in a minute because our heart muscle is good for only so many contractions. That, my dear friends, is why the news and your emails should not concern you. Let the birth of your new child or the wonders of the universe race your heart, not someone's invitation to a fight. Oh, and one other small little thing hardly worth mentioning -- put your income and investments in an untouchable offshore account, where local government matters are not your concern and yours not theirs. You'll breathe a lot easier knowing you can put your money where your mouth is and not have to listen to someone else jaw theirs. ;^)