Happiness is a warm gulp of humble pie

The day has arrived - the final entry in the blog "Life In The Cove." When I decided to start blogging many, many years ago, I found nothing of interest to write about; that is, I wondered why anyone, including me, would want to read what I had written electronically.

I grew up with No. 2 pencils and dotted lines on which we were to practice our language writing skills. I and my classmates "graduated" up to solid blue lines packed more closely together, using pencils, mechanical and wood-wrapped, along with pens to practice our skills at reciting more than alphabet soup icons. Some of us used typewriters at home and by our 9th year in formal schooling we were able to attend classes dedicated to the click and clack of mechanistic writing, pressing our fingers down in unison to learn how to express our primate intelligence without looking at what we pushed our fingers upon. In-school and home computing skills were limited to those of us with access to our parents' (primarily our fathers at that time) workplace electronic gizmos, including TTY machines and mainframe computer dummy terminals.

A few of us handbuilt computers in our parents' basements or garages while our contemporaries handbuilt jacked-up street racers or offroad trailblazers, all of us applying our burgeoning project management skills, multitasking before we knew what that meant.

As our experiments in the give-and-take of social intercourse progressed, we learned who we were and who we could become. We did not weave running commentaries into the fabric of life - we expressed our concerns in the moment, with both the concerns and the moment vanishing into the ether with nary a trace.

Therefore, when I first started a blog, it felt foreign to me, like swapping out my shoes for someone else's, mixing pairs and then putting a left-footed sandal on my right foot and a right-footed boot on my left foot. Why would I or someone else want to read about putting my stinky, old feet into those shoes of those who'd walked paths I knew not where?

Why? Good question. I am past the age of reason, the age of understanding, wandering through the age of wisdom trying to remember where I put the note that told me which ribbon I tied around my finger to remind me where I put the jacket that contains the digital notetaker on which I recorded where I last put the key to the door to get out of here.

Words and images painted with words. Pictures without pigment. Thoughts without electropopneurochemical traces connecting the lines of ink.

Asking a two-dimensional circle, triangle or square to imagine a three-dimensional world. Asking a cube to imagine a Mandelbrot set growing and shrinking with time.

We social creatures keep experimenting with our social circles, circling around each other like whirling dervishes. We mix and match our established food sources, we reinvent our exoskeletal coverings, we recombine molecule chains - we socialise in the moment momentarily momentous.

In other other words, we will blog for a while until the next new thing comes along. I'm moving on to that next new thing, blogging an interesting experiment in our experimentation but losing interest to me. I know we will socialise in another multidimensional manner soon.

Be the lead sled dog or the view doesn't change. I think that's the phrase someone posted long ago.

Data, information, knowledge, wisdom. You work with all of these in your life. Most of us find ways to generate labor credits or barter exchange chits with data, information, knowledge, and/or wisdom. Some of you will use and have used blog or bloglike states of being (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) to generate data, information, knowledge, and/or wisdom. Thus, you depend on others to generate your income source.

Others find their expanded understanding of the universe through electronic socialising via blogs - humourous tales, DIY instructions, relationship advice, home decorating tips, celebrity status updates, sporting event observations, scientific discoveries, political gossiping, etc.

Being here, I wandered in your shoes for a while. I saw the universe through your eyes. I felt the exclamations of wonderment, the thrill of victory, the announcements of new chemical substances, the insights into what life is really all about. The truth is not out there. The truth is in here and everywhere else at the same time.

"The truth." What a phrase. I've known the truth most of my life, starting (as I've said here more than once) around age five. Some of you knew the truth at a younger age. Our bodies tell us that we're bodies if we're tuned to the right body frequency and are listening. We live with this truth every moment, putting our knowledge of the truth into action in whatever way we want. Our atomic composition gears us for some sets of actions more easily than others.

My body is tuned for a set of actions that include this writing, easily exercised but not perfectly so. I am also tuned for other activities, activities that I am now ready to take, taking me away from this blog.

Writing (and in this instance, blogging) is a simple representation of what our bodies are doing in the moment. When you can break down the complex interaction of energy states that constitute writing and see the simple components that make up this moment, then you are ready for the next stage of living, weaving patterns that make writing look like drawing a simple straight line. At that point, writing (and/or blogging) becomes too simple a means of communicating with the rest of the universe around what you think of as you.

I am stopping this blog because I had let it feed my vanity, building up a sense of self that is not what (or who) I discovered I am when I discovered I am not. I am slipping out of this people space to enjoy merging with the much vaster superset of the universe that contains no dense energy states we call people. I will continue to walk this planet, eating other living beings - plant and animal, as we call them. I will converse with people and barter with them. At the same time, I will seek spaces where this "I", this "Rick," is unimportant in the moment, so that the bright, magnetic, moth-to-the-flame world of people becomes less attractive to me, allowing me to step out of the light pollution and see the dots of light of other suns in our galaxy and locally other living things or densely grouped states of energy on this planet.

Sure, I'm a social creature, designed to socialise with what I've been trained to think of as my fellow species. But we can also socialise with any part of the universe we want. Thanks for spending time with me here. I appreciate your interaction with me.

However, I'm ready to interact with as much of the rest of the universe as my time on this planet will allow, 14000+ days we'd say. I ensure I will move on by closing this blog and erasing my purposeful presence on the Internet, devoting my time and energy to other places. We'll communicate with each other using newer methods, I'm sure - just don't look for someone named TreeTrunkRick. Although he exists in person and will answer to someone calling out his common name, he's thinking about and acting on the next big thing in molecule-interaction techniques, years ahead to a time when blogging will be looked at like we look at our species in prehistoric times.

Meanwhile, I've got to fix the underground geothermal piping that keeps the automobile hydrogen battery charging systems running at full efficiency and see if our subway maglev travel channel network is completely operational so I can get from here to there more quickly - regular over-the-road travel is too antiquated for what I need to get accomplished and rocket motor-based air travel not yet ready.

This addendum to the book of life called "Life In The Cove" is officially wrapped up. Have a great day!

Eve of Deletion

The day next to the day that I will write the last entry for the blog "Life In The Cove." Many random thoughts to put down before I close this out and move on to the next adventure:

1. I never finished the tale of the trip in the fall of 1984 when I spread the love and joy that only a petrol company credit card can. The cliched image of the majestic beauty of a plume of snow, a faint white feather, arching over the top of Mt. Shasta. Before that, running into an auto body shop to get a leaking tyre fixed, the mechanic offering to repair the tyre if I explained to his satisfaction, his Oregon common sense, what a Tennessee Volunteer is - right or wrong, I told him it was a nickname given for the irregulars who volunteered to fight in the War of 1812 - he accepted my ready answer and sent me on my way after also replacing a broken headlight. Stopping at the California state line for emissions testing and discovering that the emissions tester was from Johnson City, Tennessee, and couldn't believe I was from Kingsport and had attended ETSU (main campus in Johnson City) - she admitted she missed east Tennessee but loved her California lifestyle. Not finding my hometown friend, Joey, a CalTech student, at the last known address I had for him on Wilshire Boulevard, with no forwarding address to help me so I drove out of the LA basin, stopped in the desert outside of town for a few hours and contemplated what to do. I'd driven from Nashville to Seattle, from Seattle to LA, and now from LA to...? Before I left southern California, I stopped in the east LA area because I'd run low on petrol. Off the freeway, I found the neighbourhood I was in contained folks who spoke no English. My 1st, 2nd, and 7th grade Spanish language lessons had faded, leaving me with the basic hello/goodbye/my name is expressions, which help little when asking if there is a petrol station that would accept my credit card or a place for me to exchange my Coke glass bottles for cash. Eventually, an older Asian lady told me she'd accept some of my Coke bottles for $2 worth of petrol but I had to leave the neighbourhood and get on the freeway because I was in a nrighbourhood in which I didn't belong. Back in the desert, I found that a plugged tyre loses air quickly, forcing me off the road late one evening. I found a small town with two petrol stations - stopping at one, I asked if I could purchase a used tyre with my credit card. The young man (more like a boy in his early teens) said that he couldn't fix or replace my tyre but his twin brother running the other petrol station could replace the tyre and let me charge the repair to the this petrol station. [I wish I could make this kind of stuff up but it's true, a small town with twin boys running the town's only petrol stations for their father - is that normal for small towns? I don't know.] At the other petrol station, the twin brother showed me where the mechanic who no longer worked there (due to a head injury which happened because he) had accidentally inflated a tyre with the tyre iron still stuck between the new tyre and the rim, shooting the tyre iron up into the roof of the metal mechanic shop roof. Both twins quizzed me about my trip around the country, wondering if they were any different or more special than anyone I'd met along the way. Normal in their appearance and behaviour, the fact they were 12 years old and operating two petrol stations on their own was unique enough that I told them they were the most different guys I'd met. Then, back on the straight shot east, painted deserts, pueblos and roadrunners racing past the monorail windows. Showing up back at the parental units' home, the phoenix rising from ashes, the prodigal son returned. The start or renewal of writing for myself, using the world of text, history, data, and wisdom to layer my life within pages of modern hieroglyphs.

2. Remembering the financial panic that struck not long after Andrew Jackson served in the timeframe of the 1830s as chief executive administrator of the largest political entity on this continent. Cycles. Decisions. The hindsight of hindsight. The species of species. Thanks to John Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House) for the insightful history lesson. Looking for similar info from Saawariya and Dostoevsky.

3. The number of relatively young people listed in the obituary section of my hometown newspaper, their common cause of death cited as "died unexpectedly." Is it my imagination or does there seem to be a higher number of these deaths than in years past?

4. Signs that the global economy is picking up, with increased backorders for electronic parts.

5. Seeing how much time children spend teaching and disciplining their parents, as much if not more than the other way around. If you're of reading age, I recommend you research ways to better educate your parents.

6. Turning the compositions of Orlando Gibbons into new tunes, each note a word, each chord a scent, each musical phrase an image, then breaking that down into a very ultrawideband broadcast (exactly how many wavelengths can you send and receive?), using latent time passages to re-broadcast the composition, now jumbled out of sequence and reassembling itself according to a mathematical formula that "sees" multiple dimensions at once, the x, y, and z of three-dimensional space a simple starting place. We're geared to hear music in the 20 to 20,000 Hz soundwave range or so we've been led to believe. What if you knew you heard and felt more? What if life as you know it was a symphonic tour de force? Can you place all seven billion of us in that musical score? Can you hear the triumphant and tragic melodic phrases that the air you breathe makes in its intermixing with the rest of the local features of the universe? Are you ready to sing more than a few chorus lines?

7. Slowing down and listening to the echoes of the environment around me, the expressions of the universe that never quite get formulated in my thoughts. Looking at and not seeing the people patterns my life has made so comfortably easy to see. For instance, microwave oven radiation and wireless radio communication signals don't mix well.

8. One more day before I close this chapter of the book of life.

9. One more day before we discover the door that unlocks a brand-new future for our species, before we discover we are not a species, before we make the leap across the chasm that divides the repetitious behaviours of ones on this planetary body from a fascinating superset of stimuli and step into a new way to live, Earth's gravitational pull more a thought, a faded memory, than anything we can call reality. We put distractions away, grow into new shells, new combinations of energy levels and become that which we can barely dream possible. We are, or will be, no longer we.

10. Circadian rhythms. Light therapy. Body part replacement techniques. Creation science versus evolutionary science. Ancient history. Time to let go of time. No room for commercial enterprises. No place for political debates. And then this blog disappears to make way for the next new thing(s). Can you see the future?

Seasonal Measurements

Heard this song long ago, sung by the Irish crooner Danny Doyle in a pub in New Orleans, later personified by the movie, Joyeux Noël. Here are the lyrics, which serves as today's blog entry, two days away from ending this blog:

Christmas in the Trenches
by John McCutcheon

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, "Now listen up, me boys!" each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singing bloody well, you know!" my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was "Stille Nacht." "Tis 'Silent Night'," says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
"There's someone coming toward us!" the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's Land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
"Whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same

© 1984 John McCutcheon - All rights reserved

Strange Mood A-Brewin'

While playing with computer settings yesterday (adjusting MTU and RWIN for a Windows XP box to increase its ADSL average throughput from 1.2 Mbps to 2.75 Mbps; also tweaking the configuration of an old Westell 2200 ADSL modem), a strange mood fell over me. Tripped, it did. Snagged its toe on my body and went flying.

From that moment until now, I have adjusted my own settings, getting ready for the increasing daylight that post-winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere brings.

I've washed the main house windows. I've raked leaves out of the wet weather creek bed in the side yard. I've cleaned my “junk” out of the sunroom and set up shelves for my wife's scrapbooking hobby. I hung Charlie the Red Cat framed prints in the back hallway. I folded clothes. I washed dishes. I put birdseed in the backyard feeders. I cleaned out the gutters. I wrapped holiday gifts. I washed the back of the '95 BMW.

I had memorable thoughts in what we call the dream state, seeing an Internet friend of mine, Kay, years from now, as a very old woman in a wheelchair, still cheerfully chatting away despite setbacks and hardships that would silence the strongest of us.

I thought about my former employees, including Kris, Charlie, Rod and others, happy to hear about their accomplishments (how many of us would travel to Haiti to set up wireless communications towers and spend time training locals to maintain the network?).

I enjoyed an evening at a photo shop named Portrait Innovations, where crowds of frantic families gathered for last-minute holiday photos and special package pricing. To get our pictures, my wife and I posed for and played with the photographer (Zac?) before he returned to the world of crying babies and playful kids. We returned 30 minutes later (after greeting Veronica at Zaxby's) to retrieve our packet of photographs to give as gifts to family and friends.

My new year starts today. Happy New Year to you, too. Here, the sun showed its face all day, birds sang in the trees, my across-the-street neighbour had a large fallen tree chopped up - scenting the neighbourhood with sawdust and broken evergreen limbs - and I watched a chipmunk zip across the street while a hawk circled overhead. All is well with my world. Time to prepare a little more for solar system / galaxy-level communications and put thoughts of this world behind me, secure in the belief that the people can take care of our world on their own.

Do you believe you can use a laser beam to build a “living” creature millions and millions of miles away? Do you see the possibility of building a creature that can replicate itself using local material? Do you see that, like Carl Sagan and others believed, we don't need people in place to build and plan for future arriving people? Do you see what will happen when self-replicating creatures reach a critical mass of replication for replication's sake, a la the Sorcerer's Apprentice? Do you have contingency plans in place to change the replication “programming” of the living creatures, “teaching” them that they'll have to take each other apart to build something bigger and better? Do you think you'll have the right answer when the first one asks “Why?”? What about when they (or some of them) resist their new programming? Do you destroy them, try a different method to reeducate them, or let them go off on their own and try something you hadn't planned for?

What is a strange mood? What is strange about any one mood? What is a mood to begin with? If we are but states of energy that simulate what we call mass, atoms and molecules, then a mood is a combination of states of energy, is it not? Of course it is. Then you can see that interplanetary communications is just a different form of strange mood.

Today, we discovered millions of new methods for living. We repeated methods that quadrillions have repeated over and over. The rise and fall, the expansion and contraction, of changing energy levels.

You may sit in a prison or stand in a cafe. You may hold your hands on a steering wheel, by yourself in a vehicle, or hold hands in a circle of people. You may see yourself as one person, or as truly, wonderfully nothing of the kind. We share the same planet and the same solar system - that's a fact we probably agree on. I want to say more but I'm not ready to speak about the next topic yet.

Instead, I'll work on the capillary action of the roof tiles to improve the solar heating and cooling system that acts like living sails/scales on the back of a certain extinct species I liked when I was a kid. Are the walls of your house inelastic but alive like your skin or are they dead and dry? My house is not alive in the conventional sense but it and I live in a symbiotic relationship, along with my wife, cats and other creatures crawling around this domestic setting. We are the examples we are trying to set for other planetary situations. If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere. New Earth, here we come!

Positive Affects

If you believe in the condition called an emotional state, then you probably believe in happiness. How do you measure happiness? Well, a website called facebook has data engineers like Adam K discussing and measuring happiness.

Maybe you can draw happiness on odosketch? [thanks to a fellow blogger I follow for suggesting that one]

Today, I sang happiness with others - friends like Leon and Flo and David - in our recitation of seasonal songs. We listened to Hal's opening line of jokes which led to a brief, but serious, dissertation on a series of repetitive ancient texts, reminding us that no matter what we think, we're just the keepers of this planet for the next round of folks who're coming up behind us.

Repetition is not bad in and of itself, as long as we keep finding something new while repeating - hearing a new song or an old song for the very first time, feeling a new emotion or an old emotion more deeply, discovering a new idea, or warmly holding/hugging a new appreciation for our lifelong friends.

My niece, a nurse, taught me a new phrase, "hospital psychosis," a condition where a patient/client becomes disoriented while in the care of an institution of healing. Not all affects are positive. Negative affects can help us learn but avoid too much repetition. Everything in moderation, including institutionalised healing.

We received a surprise holiday email from the folks at Munster Rugby - we return our holiday greetings to you with well wishes and many memorable victories in the New Year! Although college/pro American-style football dominates the news here (not to mention our watching the last-second victory by the Steelers a little while ago, which reminds me that I haven't been to a J. Buck's in a while, before Schneider bought APC, as a matter of fact), we still cheer for those who give their all with no time for advert-based breaks in the action. Who is that puny Perpignan, anyway? Final score, Munster 37 - Perpignan 14.

Another day closer to opening a gift that contains a portable Yamaha...well, shouldn't state what I know I'll be opening yet, should I? Look surprised, I will! Gift-receiving emotional outbursts of joy are just as important as gift-giving, if not more so.

Another day closer to ending this book of a blog, the World Wide art of Writing, Science, Fashion, Math, Music, Politics, Sports and Finance. Another day closer to opening the universal intranet that ties our solar system closer together and puts our galaxy a time warp, just a jump to the left and then a step to the right, away.

Time to sit back and think about the flavourful sushi appetizer and tofu curry main dish I ate at Surin earlier today. Double scoop of coconut ice cream...mmm... Speaking of which, another nod to Amanda at the Main Dish - we'll keep coming back for more, including that Louisiana tabasco sauce and maybe a slice of Black Forest cake. Guess I need to get a copy of my niece's husband's book, the Navy SEAL Physical Fitness Guide, if I want this body of mine to be able to continue to walk under its own happy weight!

Glad that new friends and old friends stay in touch.

Stacking The Deck, Cheating The Future

While I wait a few more days to open my gift of lyrical soundmaking, I see the past.

Waiting... Waiting? Not waiting! Planning. Preparing. Listening. Dancing in the middoe of stores to music from hidden speakers o'erhead.

How often do you lean against a fence post and watch the young calves or kids dancing in the field? Do you compare the children's behaviour to that of their parents who methodically eat and chew, eat and chew, eat and chew and poop?

Do you ever see adult cows or goats dancing on new feet? Should you? Would you expect to see such a sight?

Tonight, my wife and I wandered through the menagerie of the import/export business as exemplified by a chain of stores called Pier 1 Imports. We gazed at the shiny baubles, played with the sparkly bangles and stared at the shiny beads. We also snapped our fingers and jiggled our bodies to the rhythm of seasonal songs.

And then in came the past, a group of teenagers dressed in the latest fun fashions, including faux fur lumberjack hat, who turned on the mimeograph machine in my head, pulled out the slide projector in my skeleton closet and flipped the transparencies of my yout'. There was I 30 years ago, skinny and young and having fun again for the very first time.

What is time? Ask the inventors of chess. Ask the king of kings, the ancient shahs of the Iranian regions of Persia. The rulers of India. Ask the emperors of Asia, Europe and Mexico. Seek out the meaning of time where time has no meaning on Mars.

I know the future. I know the past. I know some parts of this moment that was the future, now the moment, now the past. I know I will make wonderful music together. I will experiment and make sound combinations that have meaning only to dust devils on alien soils.

Tonight, I saw the past and the future and the future and the past. Thirty-year increments at a time.

Tonight, the shock of time that does not exist shook me, the person who does not exist.

I saw myself 30 years ago and didn't know what to tell me. I mean, after all, what's there to say that hasn't been said in any number of tales, both ancient and new? What could I possibly say to the person who hasn't yet lived the life that others dream and wish for that person to fulfill, both in their fantasies and the fantasies of that person who's full of promise and potential?

"Hey, look at me! I'm you 30 years from now. Is this what you want? Is this what you dream about?"

A slice of time that 30 years ago I and my friends called FHMS (Fort Henry Mall Syndrome). Now I know that FHMS is universal but back then I didn't. Back then I had ideals that guided me and my interaction with friends. Back then I thought that I lived on a rare mountaintop, a life paved with gold and lined with low-hanging fruit. I can now say I know better. FHMS is life but I hadn't live life to know that then.

So what if I lived a sheltered life in my teens? I can't go back. I can only look forward. Where in the crowd is me 30 years from now, looking back at myself in my late 40s and saying, "WOW! If I only knew then what I know now!"

In a few days I'll capture thoughts like these with musical notes and fragrant oils, with computer bits and bytes and lyrical pieces, climbing the vertical ladder of life from rung to rung, swinging back and forth, caught in Earth's gravitational pull for the moment but 30 years from now?

As I accept the fact that everything I think is a combination of everything that's been thought, then I can think about what hasn't been combined by groups of people who are thinking thoughts that have already been thought. I'm not trying to escape the world of people. I'm getting the world of people to stop thinking of themselves as living on one world, while at the same time believing I'm the only person reading what I write, because I am one person in one species on one planet in one solar system. What I can do and think, anyone else can. What anyone else can do and think, so can I.

Have you ever smelled the Sun rise over the moons of Saturn? Have you ever heard a comet crash into Jupiter's atmosphere? Have you ever shaken moon dust out of your spacesuit? Some of you will. Thirty years from now we'll laugh at how simple everything seemed as this calendar year ended and the next one began. I'm planning for that future right now. Aren't you?

Page two...

The Last Laugh?

An image worth remembering: college dorm rooms then versus now. And a thanks to Abdul along with all the others who helped at the Holiday Inn (some for years now!) during the annual marathon - only a week ago this year?

While thinking about the direction to take after this winter's solstice (a/k/a New Year (a/k/a choose your favorite people-picked calendricalifictitious counting method)), I have decided to get out of the arts-and-crafts scribbling, scratching, typing writing mode for a while and focus my thoughts on musical and scent notation.

Meanwhile, I watch the world of people spin past my eyes again and again until I've gotten dizzy with repetition, myself in the middle of the blizzard of stirred-up dust and flurries of activity we call being busy, the cartoonish Tasmanian devil or other fantasy flickster in a whirlwind of tumbleweeds escaping escarpments and fences. History, mystery and headlines jumbled together in a 1,000,000,000,moo,000,000,000-piece 3D jigsaw puzzle, self-assembling and falling apart night after night to the tune of clicking keys in typewriter factories and paddleboat/steamboat excursions. I can either flatten myself onto the snowball gaining mass rolling ahead of the avalanche sliding off the melting glacier or I can step aside and gather moss on my own timescale. The former was fun for a while. Time is later for the latter, but not too late.

For those who will share their lives with me in the moment, I thank you ahead of time for taking time out of your busy schedule to smile, being kind and gracious to a middle-aged guy like me. You are my reason for being - otherwise, I'd hightail it to the woods and be a hermit eating nuts and grubs, whistling along with the wind tickling the tree leaves, the limbs creaking to no special beat and the insects singing love songs while hiding from the birds singing whatever comes to mind.

My next adventure will tell its tale through musical instruments, melodies and harmonies influenced by minimalism, nature, experimentation and whatever these hands, eyes, ears and nose (using trees (like cedar) and herbs (like garlic chives) from my yard) can fit together in and out of the world of "music." Time to put my thoughts into a place where words and peopled historical patterns make less sense. One more celebration of true freedom, another step toward understanding if freedom is a word, an idea, or an approximation of the unobtainable. One being on one planet being alive. Feeling alone in my loneliness of feeling like I'm the first one repeating the journey, trailblazing a path overgrown since it was last tread by many before me long ago - knowing full well that my atoms and molecules, my genetic makeup, allow me to compose my own version of recombinant DNA at the macro-, social-organism level.

Thus, I don't know if we'll meet in this blog again. In other words, if I want to put images, sounds, smells, and tastes together into a new experience, how do I project this experience onto the Internet and thus have it available for download by you? Describing such an experience with words is not enough. Putting a description and soundtrack together is closer but still farther from the "truth" of the experience. This Internet is such a young, incomplete (and often immature) communication medium, is it not? Superimposing the Internet on real life (augmenting reality) is not a goal I seek. I want to superimpose real life on the Internet. Being there, all our warts, freckles, smells, imperfections and thoughts intact, with the Internet as we know it today simply a catalog or extended memory space supplementing, not supplanting reality. Why? So that when one of us circles the Moon on an outer space spa trip, all of us can go along if we want. The question to you is which one do you want to be, the traveler who creates the experience or the one who experiences the traveler's trip?

In other words, we'll meet again soon. It's simply a question of how, not where and when.

Glossary

A - Attention. A word meant to focus others on you. [See "Cry Wolf"]

B - Bear. A large, furry creature meant to test the "Darwin theory" about survival of the fittest, especially when two or more drunk people encounter a grizzly bear in the woods (remember, you don't have to be the fastest runner, just faster than your buddy).

C - Cry Wolf. A situation where one has overused a phrase overused a phrase overused a phrase and lost the attention of one's intended audience [See "Typical skit endings of SNL"]

D - Darwin Theory. The proposition that an isolated pocket of humanoid bipeds will, given enough time and space, evolve into social class structures similar to but distinct from other isolated social class structures; when any two isolated social class structures meet, the one that guarantees the best return for the investments of the newly-combined social class leaders will be the one that survives. [See "Bear" for alternative explanation]

E - Ending. Where one appears to know when one should put a period at the end of a sentence at the end of the paragraph at the end of the chapter at the end of the book. Assuming one has found the end.

F - Final Try. This blog entry wraps up this blog by proposing to crossbreed the privet bush with a nutritious berry bush and overpopulate the banks of local creeks and rivers with delicious bird food bushes so that local volunteers can spend their time not worrying about nonnative nonnutritious foliage. A set of nods to Flo (who is seeing Robert, beer aficionado), Esther (and her son's reference to Buckhorn Beer), Tom (a barkeep at 801 Franklin), Rick the chef and the servers at Around Your Table restaurant (a nice secret inexpensive eatery in Big Cove/Hampton Cove), the cashier at Mike's Merchandise (hope the Goody's powder did the trick), the security guard in the garden department at Wal-Mart (thanks for the stories about sneaky customers - just when you thought you'd heard them all!), the folks at Art Etc. (who created two wonderful framed wall art pieces for us) and last (but by no means least!), Margo at Publix (did you get to enjoy the new garden pasta?).

G - Great walk in the woods yesterday:

17th Dec 2009, 13:45. Sitting on a lichen-covered rock, a natural bench. Strands of barbed-wire fencing snaking across the ground of leaves and twigs, growing out of the middle of tree trunks as if by magic. Walking the property behind my house. The fence line probably denotes property purchases through the years. People marks of long ago.

Thin layer of clouds overhead. White, tinged with stainless steel gray, the sun a washed-out yellow blotch just setting over the hilltop.

People sounds - airplanes, two helicopters, motor vehicles (road-based) - making their presence known over my hissing ears.

Leafcup alive and doing well. Frost-damaged grass, like miniature swamp bamboo. A buzzard circling to the NW. Gray squirrel on gray rocks. A cool, gray day.

Power towers nearby. Bleached snail shells. A crow calling to friends. Robins in a cedar tree. Prickly pear, bloomin' sedum and ferns on rock pedestals atop the rocky bald. Deer prints in the dirt.

All the comfort and familiarity of one's home woods in the suburban jungle.




Above, a video capturing images from yesterday's sojourn atop Little Mountain, set to the guitar music of Andrés Segovia, playing Suite for solo cello no. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007: Prelude by J.S. Bach, and the piano music of Youri Egorov, playing Estampes: Soirée Dans Grenade by Claude Debussy. Images frozen in place by the Elph (Canon PowerShot SD1000), a handy pocket cam for those like me who don't have an all-in-one Swiss Army mobile phone that slices / dices julienne fries and happens to make international phone calls while filing your nails and working out your horoscope to 20 decimal places to help you decide if your new boy/girlfriend will dump you just before the holidays to save money on gift giving.

[Glossary to be continued because this book of a blog just won't end...]

Epilogue Yule Log Catalog of Logged Logjams

Subtitle: Ode to Miranda, Who Took Care of Five Customers, Five Cheques

What is a day? A moment divided. A set of sensations. A series of situations. Smoky blue eyes. Happiness accounted for and noted.

I will start a new blog, a new attitude, a different opinion. This blog afterthought an afterthought, an aftertaste, a reaching out from the fog, a tap on the shoulder, a smile, an agreement, an "I'm not sure what I'm doing but I'm here in the typing phase of my existence away from the from a livescribe pen and notepad to let myself (yourself) know I am (we are) alive and doing well."

I pause, taking a sip from a cylindrical glass of wasser to say hello to you who may read this. Me, in other words, in this moment, in one thought, one idea, one expression of a person's thought(s).

I want to be more than I am. I am happy to be me who is who I am in this moment, my limited vocabulary limited by my typing skills, by my thoughts, by my experience(s) with you, lonely as we are now/then.

I see your eyes. I see the eyes of Miranda, the gray/blue, blue/gray reflections coming back to me as we conversed during your memorisation of my ordering from the restaurant menu, your knowing pretty much what the other regular patrons around me would tell you what they wanted to eat. And then there was Sarah this evening, an order taker joining me and others (including my constant companion, my cohort, my spare change, my lifesaver, my bedsharer, my spouse, my wife), who passed brown and clear bottles of brewed hops and grains (i.e., beer) at the BeerQuest in the Heritage Club in Huntsville for an evening of good times between those who wanted to gather downtown for privileged drinking, a few hours of hoppy fun.

We know our presidential leader, our national icon, smokes tobacco-filled cigarettes.

We accept what we cannot change. We know Tammy Harrington (Herrington?) [like my friend Ann-Marie in HHI], whose automobile license tag reads "WINEDIVA," or some such, kept track of the beer-tasting festivities tonight, recording which beers from which state outside of Alabama provided the tongue-tingling sensations (our tastebuds tickled by high-gravity fermentation) which we'll remember best. Harry and Laura say the Upland Nuthugger did the trick. Others picked other brews.

And what a list, too (do I dare try to name some, if not most, of them all?):

• Moosbacher Schwarze Weisse
• Dragonfly IPA
• Hog Heaven Barleywine by Avery
• Dogfish Raison D'etre
• Blackheart English-style IPA
• Bathbeer Nuezeller Blofter-Brau
• Boulevard Dry Stout
• Unibroue Dark Ale (Terrible?)
• Unibroue Trois Pistoles
• Stone Vertical
• Stone XI (11th) Anniversary
• Jefferson Bourbon Barrel Stout
• Dogfish Palo Santo Marron
• Sierra Nevada Harvest Fresh Southern Hemisphere Hop
• Midas Touch Ale
• Upland Nuthugger Brown Ale
• Upland Chocolate Ale

And so much more than I could write in my microjournal/minimoleskine while sampling...

Sarah (with an "h", with a smile, with...well, with her boyfriend Adam who finally showed up, Harry and his wife Laura providing a counterbalance). Laura, who couldn't sing, but who missed the boys' choir this year. Sarah, who grew up in a "holler" 10 miles south of the Tennessee border and 10 miles east of the Lawrence County line. Robert, who has shown up with 100 kinds of beer and who brought friends in times past who brought gallons of fresh brews for tasting / sampling / drinking / guzzling.

Anyone remember the Chicken Shack or the River Club? Anyone remember boilermakers?

Have you ever had 1/4 shot Jameson, 3/4 shot Bailey's, all dropped into a glass of Guinness?

And then the team who cleaned up after us, going to school, taking classes, wondering when they'd get to enjoy the festivities and/or have someone clean up after them.

Time for another blog. Another look at life. A new perspective. This epilogue accounted for and added up.

I enjoyed working with Glenn and Ryan and Janeil and Lawrence and Jim and others who piled and handed food to the 33rd Rocket City marathon runners/DNFs on Saturday. I met Eric Patterson (sp?), Carol (my wife's college roommate), Erin (a UTK alumnus/supporter) and many others whose faces smiled/flashed at me during the aftermath of sweaty/satisfied finishers passing through the food line.

I've seen faces in other places while looking at mobile phone providers who want my business. I still use my old-fashioned Nokia 3120 (old model) to answer calls and peruse a tiny screen for the occasional foray into the media mall world, not yet convinced to plunge into the 3G/GPS universe of Internet browsing, letting my spouse use her iPod touch to touch the worldwide web of YouTube and Google searching.

"Michelle, ma belle..", another song sung after a server served us at Chili's. "Tres bien ensemble." Built very well?

I know the faces, the smiles, the persons/people whose faces have recognised mine. Need we say more? Loneliness/alone, we know the looks. Time to find another space to share with you. Another time, perhaps? I'll post one more entry sometime to let you where I'll land. This epilogue has found its epic finish. Time to bid adieu. Adios. À bientôt. Friends from Dominican Republic to ROC, I say hello and farewell (or fair well, as the case may be). We face a new beginning, a new tomorrow, an old yesterday, a moment in forever where our paths will cross. Until then, I bow and say thanks for being my friend for the brief time we spent together. Lenier and Anita, I hope I got your names right because our friendships were right at the time...

While you were away:

Water fell from the sky the other day - in torrents, sheets, downpours. The instantaneous, temporary rivulets and creeks picked up dry leaves and pushed forward sand, dirt and small rocks. Tree roots were bared and trees fell down. Insects drowned.

Possibly a 24-hour rainfall record for that calendar day.

The water has moved on, into underground reservoirs, ponds, lakes and seas.

Life moves on.

At this moment, nothing profound. No word sounds bouncing around in my thoughts, no diverse events to connect together for slights, slices, or slight bits of humour. Playfulness absent from my being.

Why?

Caught in the three-dimensional maze, the labyrinth of space-time, unable to see the big picture today.

Knowing the truth within the truth based on facts outside of words and no way to create a word sculpture to reveal the truth through panes of pained glass shards. I can look into the thoughts and motivations of others but that's just looking at the people world into which I was born and raised. I can look outside the people world and see more than I can comprehend but that's just toying with large objects so big I label them infinite.

I do not play computer games like Sims, Command and Conquer, or MMORPGs. I do not hold a seat in a legislative body like the League of Nations. I am one person, sitting here looking at the universe on my doorstep. For all I really know, the universe revolves around me. For all I really know, there is no me and there is no universe.

People will die of starvation today. Tons of jellyfish will reproduce themselves. My neighbour will use a petrol-powered leaf blower to push storm-piled leaves down the street and into his neighbours' ditches so that his property shows a plain of green grass in winter and hopefully looks good enough for potential buyers. This world full of creatures is alive with interaction, good, bad or indifferent.

Thus I find myself wondering if I should remove people-coloured glasses and see this world and the neighbouring parts of the universe as if the universe was absolutely neutral about the existence of our species. Not hostile. Not benevolent. Absent of thought. Interacting because our concentrated matter happens to bump into other neighbouring concentrated matter (or non-concentrated matter/antimatter, for that matter).

Equality. Freedom. Truth.

Are you prepared to explore other planetary bodies, and while doing so recognising the fact that Earth-based creatures are not the only creatures who get to live in this universe? If you're willing to excavate the graves of other cultures, living or extinct, while calling the gravesites of your culture sacred, will you treat off-Earth planetary fossilised records as sacred or simply a place where creatures died in another time and place? If you're willing to eat a species to extinction on Earth, would you be willing to eat the last species, the last living thing, on another planet, especially if it was a matter of personal/familial survival to you? Do you think you and your culture have a better idea how to take care of your place in this universe than any other? Do you really know what life is all about; in other words, what is a living thing to you?

I am one person. I have no absolute answers. I have more questions than solutions to problems or challenges to meet head-on.

I am of our species but that does not mean I am for or against our species. Our species will generally exist in its current form for a very long time but our species is one of many forms of the local state of the universe. Not the only one. I am not here to convince you your cultural upbringing teaches that you and your culture are the prime reason for existence, and I am not here to convince you the teaching is incorrect. My observations are my own, here for my edification and entertainment, repeating those of others who have seen the same thing.

More than once I have debated my thoughts about jumping off this hamster wheel of writing a daily blog entry and more than once I have taken a few days off to contemplate my debate. I return here because I cannot see a viable way to do something other than what I'm doing right now. Is this blog writing my form of meditation? No, it's my form of self-promotion, continuing my cultural practice of practicing self-importance. Can I set aside this laptop computer and perform other parlor tricks of language playfulness on paper? Perhaps I can and perhaps I should. By shutting off this computer, I shut off my connection to Internet news headlines, I disconnect myself from the artificial world of bits and bytes and I return to the non-people centered view of the universe that trees, rocks, lichen and meteor showers give me. Today, after writing this blog entry, I will close this laptop that contains a virtual desktop and move it off my real desktop. I will step outside and enjoy the crisp, cold air. I will take walks. I will talk to my neighbours, including people, plants and other animals. I will be one with the universe again, instead of being one with the people through electronic means. I will do what I enjoy, composing handwritten notes, drawing and sketching, whittling wooden creatures from dead tree limbs, determining which living things stay in my garden or get pulled up as weeds to be planted somewhere else, and changing my thought patterns to ones tied to a quiet life free of computing devices, networks and radio communication methods.

I am not a farmer or a rancher. I am a gardener. I imitate the life of an artist named Peter Sellers who very nearly perfected the role of Chance the Gardener, a.k.a. Chauncey Gardiner. That is what this blog has always been about. That is the truth behind the truth that this blog as a living book has always tried to reveal. Now that you know the truth, I hope you can find something else entertaining to read. This storybook blog has come to a happy conclusion. I am free to be me once again.

THE END. %^)

Mediterranean Is Scary Laboratory of Ocean Futures

Anyone hungry for soylent green?:

Mediterranean Is Scary Laboratory of Ocean Futures

Posted using ShareThis

Just one more form to fill out...

Choices. Outside the window, the long rays of the sun setting in the end of the first third of December. The tall, slender, gray-and-brown, lichened-covered tree trunks. The cobalt sky, mixed with streaks of snow-white milky clouds. Pine trees providing shelter from the freezing cold, forming a diamond-shaped framed opening through the woods, revealing rows of charcoal and slate-gray rooftops where once I watched doves and crows gathered in harvested soybean fields.

We keep expanding, generation after generation finding a new place to live, just as my wife and I found this house under construction and called it our own.

And so it is that I find myself participating in this country's effort every ten years to count the number of people who breathe and move about a portion of North America.

Sitting with an eclectic group of people who have their reasons for joining the census team. Writing our names and addresses, answering questions by "X"ing checkboxes. Listening to instructions of Ed telling us not to get ahead, the attentive eyes of another teammate waiting nearby. Sitting in a meeting room of the local library where I once gave a talk in 1990 or 1991 about recycling conifer trees after removing the annual festival decorations, promoting the Huntsville Botanical Garden's tree recycling effort that I started with cooperation from local businesses and volunteer organizations (inspired by Kingsport's annual tree recycling that was canceled recently due to low participation).

An arbitrary numbering system, based in part on our number of fingers or toes, the "number" zero invented by one or more cultures eons ago.

Using numbers and languages, people will organize teams based on boundaries drawn on maps of organized streets and dwellings. Teams. Players. Game plans. I know this score, don't I? Civilisation deciding how to be civilised.

Our future based on filed reports. Interviews. Ringing doorbells and hammering door knockers. Just like the summer I sold books door-to-door for Southwestern Book Company (1983?), listening to all the "No" and "I'm not interested" responses in order to find a "Yes" two or three times a day. This time, we've got nothing to sell. We're gathering information for everyone to enjoy a better tomorrow, all 'cause there are those who want to tax, sell or trade with us based on our population demographic distributions. Bell curves and hockey sticks.

Everyday people talking with everyday people, seeking those who, for one reason or another, didn't mail in their mailed-out census questionnaires. Maybe double-checking a few along the way.

I'll let you know how it goes. All I did, with those in the room with me today, was colour in 28 circles using a no. 2 pencil after filling out a couple of background information forms using a government-issued ballpoint blue ink pen. The rest is up to those who need to gather an army of census takers every 10 years. They need plenty more folks, if you're interested in putting on your walking shoes and spending some time chatting with people in your part of the country while making a little money, too. Ten percent of us not actively employed (more like 20, but that's fodder for another blog) - should be lots of us interested in taking home a few extra paychecks, right? I'll leave that thought up to you.

Time for me to watch Earth rotate, rolling dark shadows up the mountain slopes and taking away the Sun's heat another day, the lights of my people blinking on like summer fireflies, a few pushing curls of smoke out the tops of chimneys, most pulling energy out of power lines running to their homes' heat engines.

मौन है

मौन है

के सौंदर्य को शांत का सामना करना पडेगा
बाह्य रेखा दिखलानेवाला चित्र की
आपकी मुस्कान की
रहती
एक देखना चाहिए
कुल मिलाकर बिना बातचीत शब्दों में व्यक्त किया

Approximate translation:

Silence.

The beauty of a quiet face.
The silhouette.
The smile.
Knowing.
A look.
A whole conversation without words.

If It Dries Like A Brick and Stacks Like A Brick...

Solidsolidsolidmatter - no room for spaces between letters but plenty of space between the lines of the letters. That's how you know what the other person(s) will do. You look for the space between what they say and who they think they are. Then you fill in the gap.

The speed of data processing is not the same as gaining more wisdom. Instant communication is not the same as insight. Trend analysis will not reveal what's trendy.

Mass. Energy. Time. Space. Higgs boson.

If you can use popular desktop software to find out what people are typing in real-time before they post their thoughts, you just gather foam where the waves hit the shore. Like having access to all the morgue stories ever written and knowing how to tweak popularity polls to pull a particular set of filed reports out of storage. Oh, but that's because you want to increase the flow of money? Gotcha. We're on different tracks here today. Sorry, I forget myself sometimes. We are the people, not robots or animals.

I am in pain today. I feel the weight of the world of inequity on my back, which strains my neck muscles considerably. In other words, I feel alone in the crowd of lonely people. We are lonely together, you and I (or some of you, at least).

So many of us with nothing particular to do, allowing entertaining distractions to pull us along...

I am trapped in the goings-on of my species, caught in the stirrups of a runaway horse, dragged through the mud and torn apart by thorny bushes, feeling the repetitions of 140 billion lives in their daily dallying, brains and bodies doing whatever living things find to do to live in the moment.

What is the attraction of the tragedies of others? In our forgetfulness, do we need the sadness and horror of others for a comparison to make us feel better in our actions of the moment, a moment that feels like it's been going on too numbingly long? A virtual pinch to see if we're still awake?

I hope no one reads this blog entry but I'm posting it anyway because I use these entries to pinch myself in moments outside this one, to track the trail of my pinball path through the game of life, my total score irrelevant, never able to use the bonus points or extra pinballs.

Do you spend your time finding ways to feel good or make yourself happy? Do you really believe that your life is all about you? It can be. Or it can be something else.

I do not exist. Time does not exist. The input I receive is not what I see. I choose to see myself as one species on a path to self-destruction with many individuals doomed to experience immature/premature death while many other individuals will enjoy their lives in ways beyond the hopes of their early dreams. I am swept up in the zeitgeist. I have nowhere else to be. I am having difficulty erasing the image of self to see around the translucent veil that barely reveals the truth. How can I get inside the thoughts of all seven billion of us and tell us that we have a place to live here without having to kill one another to make room? How do I correct the genetic anomalies that allow for variety and also eliminate our self-destructive tendencies? Would such a world be feasible and if so, livable? And in so asking, repeating, repeating, repeating myself and others.

I'm caught in an eddy, a whirlpool, a typhoon, a hurricane, a midlatitude cyclone. Swirling and swirling downward into the depths of the toilet bowl, knowing I'm going where I've been before, the discard and waste of our species gathering force and flowing with gravity to feed another part of the world on which we live.

In other words, not all of us live in the sunshine all of the time. We may not exist as solid beings but we act like solid beings. In our acts, we take many roles. The hero. The lover. The cad. The thief. The murderer. The god. The neutral observer. We are the spinoff TV series, the YouTube sensation, the viral video, the massive tweet of the planet at this moment. We cannot be otherwise because we've developed the concept of time and place through the supersurvival technique called language.

In other words, I'm overwhelmed by all the information flowing in today. I cannot filter out the noise from the noise. My programmers are on strike because they, unlike me, believe in the power of money and want the concepts of happiness and joy to surround them and treat them like royalty. Thus, they have turned off all the GUI selection buttons I've used to figure out what's going to happen next in our multicultural multiculture. I could call in the big dogs to show the programmers that money also pays for a different kind of security that doesn't need software but the programmers react to violence in ways that are subversively counterproductive. Then again, there are a lot of programmers available on the market right now. My previous programmers could find out about the special technique I developed in my punk rock brass knuckle days where one applies a small amount of pressure to the hyoid bone and snap! But I'm trying to be the kinder, gentler me these days. I am all about meditation and peace and seeing beyond us as a species.

Meanwhile, certain publications are withholding information about individuals who are leaning toward approving legislation that the publications' friends do not want. Tiger Woods' situation was just the warning shot over the bow. Do you know who your friends are?

End-around Flanking

Today the truth will be revealed. Somewhere. In a tiny corner of the galaxy in which we live. We buzz around this planet comfortably seated in our exoskeletons and move confidently forward, gravity our best friend and confidante.

I have let myself be fooled into thinking that sitting here is all there is to do because the movements on the cover of this piece of furniture are more stimulating than the static images around me.

We reveal our religious beliefs by the gods which hold our attention.

While I stand here on stage pulling a rabbit out of the hat, you won't notice all the little movements and noise going on behind the curtain, will you? Good. I'm not really standing here. I've paid my body double to take all the exposure shots for me while I do the real work, which is propping up the puppets behind stage to look busy to those who sneak into the back door looking to see what's really going on. I'm glad I already thought of putting wireless controls in the puppets who are actually robots operated from another location which I run from a software package that automatically operates a chain of these networked sites. I'm not really here. It's my thought control double who's doing all the work while I'm on holiday.

Have you ever stood at the edge of the solar system and looked back at all the empty space between our planets, wondering how in the world any one planet can attract so many comets, asteroids and meteors?

Do you really know what's causing our atmosphere to get warmer? Have you taken our advice and bought land in the upper regions of the Northern Hemisphere yet? Of course not. We tend to be happy as a meadowlark eating lemons playing basketball in the park signing autographs for our adoring fans, fooled into believing this moment will last forever.

Don't be fooled. These are just words, static images I created dynamically with my word sorting machine made out of spare pachinko parts.

You're still here? Well, let me give you a hint about the weather. It's going to get colder, wetter, warmer, drier where you are. What do we care about global warming in the middle of a mid-latitude blizzard? Weather is politics, always local. Like saying Arabic is the same as Farsi is the same as Persian is the same as cat fur rugs.

Do you know what it's like to live with your thoughts? Do your thoughts know what it's like to live with you? Do you see there is nothing real about the word thoughts (or the word "thoughts")? Can you write a computer program without using brackets or parentheses? [({Why does my brain process the phrase "parent thesis" everytime?})]

I wish I was as smart as I wish as I thought I was smart as I smart as I wish as.

The more a factory makes widgets, the more widgets are available to be used by widget users. But a widget is not always a widget. A teabag is an ear muffler. A bowling ball is an ink roller. A computer does not compute.

Sigh...a paradigm shift. A paradise shaft. A handful of silt. A silk hand grenade. Would we work together to make this a better place if there was no afterlife to dump our problems into? I, too, can have my dreams, despite knowing our atomic makeup depends on manual merging of material missing immensely important atomic connections.

[Free service for my friends. I walk through life and comment about what I've personally encountered, keeping a positive attitude and staying within what I perceive as the bounds of decency to share my thoughts with you. I do not gain personal wealth increases by what I mention because freedom (or my belief in my idea of the idea of personal freedom) means not taking money or any barter exchange equivalents for what I freely say. Thus, here are some words I've encountered that you can see for yourself their positive effect(s) on your lives: Synapse Wireless, Invetex and Hygenall. I am not a paid spokesperson for these companies/products/services but mention them because my friends like them and believe positively enough for me to mention them. Trust is believing what your friends say. I trust they're right.]

Did I just write that last paragraph? I guess I did. Trusting my friends enough to blindly mention their beliefs is a big step for me. I am not the kind of person who goes around with a megaphone hawking wares I haven't tried. Of course, since I believe no one reads this, then it doesn't matter what I say, right? I need a new word here besides paradoxical.

Have you experienced the truth that was revealed while I held your attention? Not yet? Hmm... let's see if this adding machine in the basement is working the way I paid the programmers to make it work... CLUNK! CHING! POW! There, that's better. I forget that the barrels of used motor oil which capture the sun's heat and circulate through the subsubflooring also feed into the betta fish tanks which give detritus to the earthworm and mushroom beds that energize the radon-trapping device. Too bad the local bait shops won't take my glow-in-the-dark worms and the local organic grocer won't let me sell the glow-in-the-dark fungus. Talk about a lost opportunity for a niche market! Reminds me of the time I tried to sell the frogs I captured near the nuclear-processing facility in Oak Ridge - no one was impressed about the frogs' effect on Geiger counters until I showed that eating frog legs cured abdominal cancer and then kazam!, sales skyrocketed faster than a ride on SpaceShipLeDeuxieme.

Okay, here comes the report I was looking for. "In 2012, nothing of significance will happen, unless you count the complete loss of tourists on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the fissure that opens up and swallows the Black Sea monster that migrated from Loch Ness." Wait, that's the wrong report. I wanted data for today, not jokes about cataphlegmatic events. Hang on a second. I'll just poke that guinea pig to run around its cage a little more and...oh, here it comes, the new report!

In today's news, a solar event occurred. While insignificant in comparison to the self-important activities of one species on the third planet from the Sun, Venus reported a particulary nice warm glow on her beautiful skin, indicated by the light, dainty hot air floating around her body. Venus thought (in the way that planets think, totally foreign to our way of thinking) that Earth was coming along nicely in its transformation to a Venus-like look. One day soon they would both be free of meddling by those pesky little creatures crawling in and out of the planets' pores.

That's it for today. I've got to work on the ant farms built into the walls of my house and make sure they're providing enough food for the broad-headed skinks taking residence in my attic who serve as lookouts for me in my search for the ultimate balance between a people-purposed house and a home for all who want to live, eat and breathe here with me.

Где же Пушкин?

Наш язык, старый, как время.
Минуту, вне времени.
Лидер стареет.
Страна крепнет.
Нет лагерей, ни тюрем без решеток.
Нет языка, который хорошо говорит по нашим врагом, а наши собственные.
Когда момент становится правом,
Право лидеры приведет нас правильно.

الإمبراطورية

صخرة. حجر. وهطول الأمطار من الزمن. جدار يصبح الرمل. الكثبان تنمو في الجبال. قوة تنمو من الصبر. الحقيقة يصبح حقيقة واقعة.

현실

그 순간, 조류의 날개,
그 한숨 있음, 꽃은 꽃잎,
그 표정, 무한, 있음
그 숨, 한 인생 있음.
봄, 여름, 가을, 겨울,
올해는 하나의 사랑, 하나의 행복.
영원을.

में एक विचार की आंखें.

एक औरत को जानते हैं कैसे?
एक औरत को देखता है कैसे?
एक औरत कहते हैं क्या?
खुशी खुशी और आँसू की एक नदी है.
कोहरे से शांति आती है.
एक औरत मुक्त, एक औरत मुक्त है स्वतंत्र होना,
एक औरत एक नया दृष्टिकोण देखता है.
प्यार एक सपना से अधिक है.

Scoring The Asphalt Ribbon

Have you ever killed and eaten living things? Birds, goats, wheat, rice, corn, fish, dogs, ants, bamboo shoots, scorpions... Before you killed them, did you take care of their growth from the very beginning? Does your regular source of barter exchange involve the care and feeding of living things?

I have raised fish. I have killed and cleaned fish I've eaten. I have met the animals that were later killed for my consumption. I have raised vegetables that I've killed, cleaned and eaten. I have eaten food caught and killed in the wild by me. In other words, I am part of this planet of eat and be eaten. I do not distinguish the types of organisms I consume by their brain function. Instead, I pay attention to the amount of nutrition they provide versus the waste they add to my body (paying attention does not mean I eat a healthy meal everytime). Another fact: my species has consumed my species throughout the course of its culinary history.

The day I decided to hit the road and escape the problems that weighed me down, I had very little money and no food. My plan - to drive to Seattle, Washington, and dive car bumper first into the Pacific Ocean - included no thought of food.

In the back of the station wagon, I had a bicycle, several empty Coke bottles, a stack of clothes and the material I studied to improve my job situation at Steak&Ale. I also had a small poster of the touring concert series by The Who.

At one point in time I thought about chronicling my monorail journey across the middle of the North American continent but decided that bookshelves are already crammed with tales of woe, whims, and wonders by more famous and perhaps better writers than humble ol' me. Although 25 years have passed since I drove west across the face of our planet, I recall many details but mainly strong impressions of my solo trek.

Crossing the muddy Mississippi River.

Reading speed limit signs and the explanation of monetary fines per increase in speeding over the legal limit.

The rolling hills of the open prairie.

Rows and rows (and rows (and rows (and rows))) of corn and wheat.

Using a petrol company credit card to pay for my motoring along the highways and freeways, wondering if there was a monthly or total limit to what I could charge.

Going days without eating food, drinking water from bathroom sinks in roadside parks and rest stops.

Picking up a couple of young hitchhikers who had been kicked out of a flat and were making their way to a family member's pad in hopes of starting over. Watching them pick dead grass out of their hair that had accumulated from them sleeping on a sheltered embankment the night before - their looking like a couple of primates picking insects out of each other's fur, telling me more about my place in the universe and the definition of true love than any song on the radio about love (i.e., lust) ever could. Giving them my last three dollars because I knew they needed it more than I did, especially after them wisely pointing out they were more messed up in their journey through life than I was.

Sleeping in the back of the station wagon for a couple of weeks, washing my clothes in the bathroom sinks from which I drank.

Using the concert poster and the training manuals to block the setting sun's reflection on the front dashboard from blinding me.

The kindness of strangers, instant kinship formed along the route, showing me the smartass, snobbish sarcasm of my youth was no longer useful in establishing myself in the moment.

Food deprivation causing me to whiteout while driving, giving me insight into the workings of one's body but also enlightening me that premature death was no solution, only an escape mechanism, that my destiny, if such existed, had already been decided when I met my girlfriend when she and I were 12 years old at a summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina (now my wife of 23+ years). I saw that she was the fellow primate I was willing to sleep on the side of the road with and pick straw out of her hair the next day.

I drove on, not ready to meet my fate, finally daring to ask a petrol station attendant if I could charge food to my credit card, eating a bag of potato crisps, drinking a bottle of orange juice and wolfing down some M&Ms after he said yes.

Seeing how far a tank of gas will last, pushing my luck a couple of times and making it to the next road exit on fumes.

The beauty of desolation.

The touristy glitz of Wall Drug.

Tumbleweeds.

The Black Hills.

Discussing the curse of modern technology (a Chevy 4x4) with a native American who wondered why a Tennessean wanted to drive through the small towns of Montana just to see Seattle.

Wondering if the station wagon would make it up the steep mountains without overheating or breaking down.

The oasis of Coeur D'Alene.

Spokane.

At last, Seattle, with houses, houses, and more houses packed between tall conifers. The rush hour traffic, people in a hurry, a far cry from what I imagined the Pacific Northwest to be. Feeling like my journey would not come to an end there after all. Finding a map to chart my trip down the Pacific coast to Pasadena - another story, another time.

Small details coming back in focus... Getting out of the station wagon in the middle of the night to pee, looking up at the sky and seeing our place in the Milky Way as clear as any people-prepared map. Waking up sometimes to hear noises and finding the car next to me the next day had its windows broken out and nobody around to claim ownership of the car. The enterprise of society at work in every town I passed through. Abandoned homesteads. Wondering when and if I'd get back home and what I would say, not wanting to use the phone to give away my whereabouts until I'd had more time to think through solutions to my dilemma, no deus ex machina waiting in the wings to save me. Solar-powered, no-water toilets in the middle of nowhere. The squeak of the car seat springs. Topping off the oil and losing the oilcap, only to find it down in the engine bay a couple of days and many hundreds of miles later. Getting used to a bicycle as a bedside companion. A person tapping on the back window, making sure I hadn't frozen to death in the mountains. Dirt tracks going across four lanes of the freeway, indicating to me a farmer or rancher traveling from one part to another of a land tract that was bisected by strips of asphalt ribbon. Getting up in the morning with the over-the-road, tractor trailer / lorry drivers, going from daybreak to dusk like migrating birds or caribou, or industrious ants.

Wondering when not looking back would turn into looking forward...

Random Mantric Tricks

Last night watching a field general shed tears of being blessed with good health despite the other side declaring victory in battle on turf in downtown Atlanta...

Yesterday afternoon watching the smile of an art consultant in Big Cove feeling glad that her clients were finding a suitable frame for some space shuttle prints after the original frame pattern was found to be unavailable...

Friday evening stretching one's back muscles after the best deep tissue massage ever received in upper back area at the Westin Spa in Huntsville (thanks to a gift certificate from an office party giveaway)...

Thinking back to the radio announcer who compared a football moment to Leonard Nimoy...

Knowing that our species maintains separate cultures which all build belief in their versions of living waters...

Realizing how much I miss the mountains of home, the Tri-Cities area of upper east Tennessee, where Andreas has opened his new restaurant, Freiberg's, in Johnson City, and I still enjoy a good pizza at one of my Kingsport employers (now called Rush Street, then called Chicago Dough Company (and before that, a Pizza Inn in Richton Park)) where Jerry reminded me how much he loves the east TN mountains, too; going with my father to see his professorial office at ETSU and remembering my student days there; helping my father and his colleagues unload trees to sell in support of the Colonial Heights Optimist Club which supports youth; where my mother always finds tree ornaments at Colonial Heights Pharmacy, near where my wife took her mother to see the winter light display at the Bristol Motor Speedway, not far from where my wife's hometown religious center hosts an interim speaker, Earle B., who encouraged me to write this paragraph (whose ancestor, like mine, fought at the Battle of King's Mountain) and an established restaurant in Kingsport, Cheddar's, is opening a store in Huntsville...

Tossing back a hefeweizen brewski courtesy of our hometown brewer, Old Towne, at Bearegard's, to balance the habanero sauce...

Thinking about supporting the 2010 population census to understand how accurately we count, categorize and store data on people of this section of the North American continent and nearby land areas...

Recalling how world travel and immersing oneself in local cultures teaches you that there is no one way to live a good, healthy life, and that IP addresses are filtering points for maintaining sets of cultural memes, distorting reality...

Listening to the recording of a pianist like MMW and marveling at the ability of one who can repeat long stretches of typing on a set of 88 keys, making me wonder how many of us could do the same thing on a computer keyboard, practicing something like this blog entry over and over and over again and be able to repeat it with our eyes closed, speeding up and slowing down, typing softer and louder to give the words emotional meaning, even though the typing here would be a sequence of single "notes" instead of chords. Why is it we can hear a combination of musical notes and sense both their individual tones and the total harmony but we can't hear a combination of seemingly unsung words the same way? Well, leave that to the thought/brain dissectors to answer, I suppose...

When I type while listening to others' music, I suppress the music in my head which would normally come out in my word combinations, turning these words and phrases into dry deserts of ideas instead of expressing myself as purely as I think thought symphonies. In other words, I am entertaining my brain with someone else's music instead of entertaining me/you with my musical-like typing. A tough choice, listening to the wonders of the universe as discovered by musicians or creating my version of the universe in all the wonders I sense and feel when typing as if I'm totally alone, a solitary node in the web of life...

These past few weeks I have enjoyed my happiness, freedom more than an idea to me. I have known about the turmoil in the world of my species, from discotheque fires in Russia to camo/colour showdowns in the halls of Chesterfield secondary schools, but have released myself from feeling responsible for what others choose to do to represent our species on this planet. I represent our species one person at a time, in one time and one place, limited to just so many dozens of years. I take responsibility for my expression of freedom in seeing us as one species destined for more than we can imagine, growing outwardly in the definition of one species while repeating much of what we've already done, cycles within cycles, interlaced, interlocking, concentric, syncopated circles. The rest is up to you. Represent us well.

और एक सपने से

आँखों - चॉकलेट, हरा, नीला. केश - सुनहरे बालों वाली, भूरे, लाल. विचार.यादें.चाहती है. क्या हो जाएगा कर सकते हैं. कल आज हो सकता है क्या होगा.

Peace and Quiescence

14,763 more days, give or take. Meanwhile, the exchange of goods and services between members of my species slowly picking back up after the two-year shock in the awareness and negative effect of another overpriced set of emperor's new clothes thrown in the garbage bin. One more proof that not all the members of our species are well-meaning. Everyone looking for the next set of emperor's/empress' clothes to build an economy with. Futility versus utility. Form versus function.

Taking a different tack today. Looking at the life of a person who doesn't have to compete with others for the most number of interesting things to claim as definition of one's status.

• No refrigerator.
• No automobile.
• No electric kitchen appliances.
• No battery-powered clocks.
• No central air heating/cooling system.
• No water heater.
• No house.
• No land.
• Not even this computer.

Affluence seen as what you don't have to tie you down instead of what you own - freedom of another sort.

Some call it frugal living. Some call it being environmentally-friendly.

I'm not ready to call it anything yet. I examine the life of one without things and wonder...

Repeating my thoughts to mull over them, picking through the scraps for any new insights.

Waste not, want not. Haste makes waste. A penny saved is a penny earned.

What state or condition of the body does such a life provide?

For years I have held up the idyllic life of the country gentleman as an escape, a dream, a fantasy, a way of life that is always there whenever I want to set myself completely free. A hermit who doesn't mind hosting the occasional visitor, regardless of species.

And yet here I am in that role, having slowly practiced the lines that my being this character requires.

But I still have things that use energy which requires payment to others to maintain and provide the energy source.

Do I eliminate the things or the outside energy source? If I kept the things and got off the grid, then what? Basement nuclear power plant? Rooftop solar panels? Intermittent wind turbine power? Creek-powered transformer? But all of these require a home and some land, don't they?

Is the nomadic life still possible? Can we carry our homes on our backs figuratively without having to pay for the privilege of living along the way?

==> bottom line: what is freedom? <==

I derive no pleasure from perpetuating a storyline today. My recent characterization has worn out its usefulness. I am not the person who will lead us to the realization that we are not individuals because I will not overcome our protests to the contrary due to our trained belief in freedom of thought and thus apparent existence of individuals. Just because I believe and know we are temporary vortices within a system of temporary vortices does not mean I have to convince people to join me in my belief. We tend to believe that the actions of our ancestors portend a future which builds upon the past because we usually do only what we know how to do and accidentally discover something new which becomes something old leading to others repeating what we did and discovering something new, etc.

These symbols, these words, these repetitions...do they provide any usefulness to me other than entertainment in the moment? I write for myself since I'm the only person I know who knows I exist and knows I don't exist at the same time. I have no past to overcome or future to achieve great accomplishments. I have this moment and this moment only. I enjoy this moment. I thrive in this moment. I am outside of time but firmly seated in place.

My thoughts are jumbled today. I am in a state of nearly pure meditation where thoughts and actions are unnecessary except to keep me focused on lining words one after the other across this imaginary page. I am without being but I am a being.

I have stood at the top of tall towers. I have watched tall towers fall down. I have looked at the ruins of towers of ancient civilisations that fell. Towers and civilisations inevitably fall. We repeat ourselves over and over, rediscover anew. Thus, what I do here will disappear, no matter if I find something new to say. I will repeat what others have said. Others will repeat what I have said. I am doing both now. I am doing both now.

I line words up with ease, sometimes harmoniously. I envy those who can pile up and line up musical notes into organized, harmonious sound sequences, their sense of wonder and invention beyond my comprehension.

There are no levels of being. There is no such thing as meditation. I am who I have always been; well, almost always, changing personalities slightly after an automobile accident at age 17 (amazing what a jarring blow to the head and 20 seconds of induced unconsciousness/coma/concussion does to one's understanding of the cosmos, waking up and asking, "Why am I here? Why am I on this treadmill of BORNMARRYHAVEKIDSDIE?").

I think out loud on this public electronic forum because it's a convenient place to store my written thoughts. By chance others will read these words. If I am to believe myself, to be true to myself, then I put these words down here without worry or concern about the pebble-in-the-pond effect because what I do does not matter. We will repeat ourselves in our personal beliefs and our civilisations will inevitably fall. We can build new societies and we can fall into anarchy. We can do both. My voice will be forgotten no matter how much I want to think my voice is worth hearing (if only to myself).

I state all of this seeing and being in awe of the wonders of the universe while having joy and happiness in this moment knowing I am a variation of a repetition of the temporary vortex I think of as a person in a species on a planet in the universe. The universe is my steady state, my foundation, my place of/for being. The universe is more than I can wrap my arms around or fully understand with my thoughts. In fact, the universe may not exist in the way I have been trained to think it exists but it doesn't matter. As a spinning top on the surface of this planet, I am all I know and all I need to know to exist.

At the end of this blog entry, it doesn't really matter what I do in the next moment but I will choose to do something that perpetuates my species' belief in manifest destiny because my set of atoms and molecules may be lined up to make me want to do something for my species while I want to believe I have not yet reached the point where I will fully disengage myself from the world of my species to exist in a permanent moment of meditation for the next 14,763 days.

I can find happiness in knowing that it doesn't matter what I do in the next moment just as much as knowing I am (you are) the most important person in the world that the world can't do without. The condition known as true freedom - being and not being, repeating and not repeating.

Reason # 14,539 why I love life...

Okay, like I say, I'm a regular guy just like all the other regular folks who live around here and in other parts of the world. My wife and I, after eating dinner at Thai Garden, decided to do some shopping at the world's largest small-mall-general-merchandise-department store, Wal-Mart. While looking for an electronics gift for a teenager, we asked the teenage daughter of a nearby couple shopping for a computer printer about her opinion concerning the utility of the gift. She gave us good advice.

Well, lo and behold, the young woman's parents happen to be regular folks, too, their daughter attending a local secondary school, where, incidentally, her older brother, Howard Cross, also attended, later making a name for himself as the longest playing New York Giants football player. Like Howard, his father attended the University of Alabama which will play in the national college football championship (a/k/a SEC championship) game this Saturday.

Social Goods

[Another blog entry of sorting through my thoughts while listening to classical guitar tag radio on last.fm. No useful storyline here...]

I am a sample of the snapshot of the condition of this planetary object on which I sit. The snapshot lives and breathes and changes conditions while I type this snapshot. Thus, I am free of being. I am part of the snapshot's frozen moving image, part foreground, part background.

Free of being, I am free of thought. Free of thought, I am free of comparing my condition to other conditions similar to mine. No comparisons, no conditions, no connections.

Being not-connected (as opposed to unconnected), I have no values. Not aware of being socially unaware.

Free to meditate.

Free to not be.

Being free, I am without ethics or morals. I have no social bearing, neither ill nor good.

Yet, I exist in perspective. Depth perception. This collection of atoms and molecules in constant motion.

I am part of you even when I say I want space to be me so I can change perspective in imagining I am not me.

To be AND not to be, that is the solution. I cannot say both that I am part of the environment and that the environment doesn't care whether I exist or not as person or species. By being a person and part of a species in the environment, the environment cares whether I and/or my species exist ("cares" in the sense that the environment changes because of the existence of one person/species). One and the same even though we want to say we are separate.

I may not talk about our worlds within worlds of social goods but they exist anyway and they care about my existence because we react to and interact with each other knowingly and unknowingly.

Thus, I look at monogamous relationships as one form of social goods/services built up into memes but also part of species-level preservation techniques exhibited by many living things in the realm of duality. I am part of duality and I am part of unity. I am part of social circles I see and part of social disjointedness I cannot see. Social celebrations and social taboos - all a matter of perspective.

How do I express my love for another person and have that love mean whatever that person wants it to mean while at the same time knowing that I physically restrict the celebration of my love for others because of the social contract I made in my subculture to ensure a lifetime monogamous physical relationship with one other?

My love for one is my love for all. Some see my all-encompassing love and interpret my openness in terms that I do not. I care and I do not care how others express their love, whether through words such as these or through physical intimacy - I have no ethical/moral judgments about their behaviour - there are many ways to express your love for ones you're with when you're not with the one you love.

How does a group of atoms and molecules - temporary energy states - show that its condition is compatible with a similar group without merging with that similar group? Or rather, in what form does the merger take place?

By putting down these groups of words, I am a writer of blogs and a former writer of novels, stories, poems, essays, skits, sketches, newspaper articles and other nefarious farces. By spending hours putting down these words, I make combinations that I like to share with others, others who I love because my love of life is too strong to keep to myself.

Are there real limitations to my love or imaginary ones? Of either, which part of the environment that I cannot see interacts with this love and finds its way back to me in some other form, in concert with or discordant to my environmentally-local, subcultural social contract?

The Value of Independent Values

She looked at her bank balance. Enough money to pay one of three outstanding bills. Which one...?

She set down her smartphone and walked over to a window at the end of the corridor.

A pigeon pacing back and forth on the window ledge.

A leaf falling down between two buildings.

She fogged up a portion of the window with her breath and drew two hearts, one hers and one a love she wished she had.

She was neither woman nor womyn, neither female nor feminine. She was. In fact, she was not she. She did not think, "She is." She thought, "I am. My name is Temqap."

Temqap leaned forward and looked up the side of the building on the other side of the alleyway. Windows and more windows.

Temqap walked back to the chair and picked up an acoustic guitar, practicing "Soledad" one more time before heading outside. Temqap would delay the bill-paying decision until later in the evening. Now was time to feel the love Temqap did not have through playing the guitar with longing, the space between chords speaking of emptiness that would wait another day to be filled.