The Next Book: The Skeptic's Septic/Antiseptic Sceptre

1st January 2010

Standing in the bathroom, getting ready to scrape off the one-day length of facial hair in a daily ritual I follow (for what reason? Presentability? Reduced itching? Less beard to manage?), I glanced at myself, catching an image that my thoughts had not been prepared to see (normally, in my thoughts, I create a younger, slimmer version of myself that I mentally paste over what I see reflected to me by the mirror), a significant hunk (more like a hump) of flesh in my abdomen region, joined like Siamese twins to an equally expansive dual set of humps in my posterior / derriere area.

Am I really my own Internet? Am I, as I love / fear / suspect, a reflection of all this region of the universe has to offer in this moment?

I am alive, as we've come to define the confines of living.

Generally, I am happy, as we've come to realize the realisation of real happiness.

I sense the blowing winds of Mars and Jupiter, the freezing cold of the demoted planet Pluto, the dance of billions and billions of rocks around the Sun, the Sun's relatively cool weather, the killing of families of unique living things, the words and thoughts of our species, and ultimately, my place as a bounded set of energy states encountering the rest of what my eyes deceive me and the rest of my senses back up (leave it to the body to fool itself that it exists) to say we're all here at once.

We are one species. I'll grant us that because using the word species is easier than saying we're a similar group of similarly bounded states of energy that tends to regroup into similar sets upon the moment two dissimilar but equally-matched members of that group decide to recreate themselves in one like set (the only case, mathematically-speaking, where 1 + 1 = 1).

I want to be here but I don't want to be here in this moment with myself, with you, because by being here I am temporarily admitting that I like being the "I" that I've become. However, others have described to me the conditions of being that my being me has caused around me. At the same time, I know who I am and who I am not, which makes me wonder if and why I should respond to the changing conditions around me.

I am and can only ever be me, one person, one set of energy states, one dot at the end of the sentence that records the lives of all the people living at this moment, which changed during the last comma and changed during the typing of the period at the end of this sentence. My life, no matter how grand and powerful I may believe it to be (or how humbly I believe myself not to be), is but a flicker of flame in the log fire of this burning planet.

Oh, but what a flicker it is, full of oxygen and other atomic structures, able to build up civilisations and tear down mountains, able to power trips to distant galaxies and form planetary bodies like Earth, our home, our safe haven, our shared spherical space.

I am not just my own Internet, I am my own universe.

I can leave my ancestral home, I can give up the habits of my forebears, I can move to another area of the planet that doesn't care who I was and only deals with who I am, I can even leave Earth and settle down on nearby spheres like the Earth's moon or Mars and its satellites, and I can also explore asteroids, making a home on a piece of rock smaller than the island my seventh-great grandfather used as a temporary settlement while battling with his neighbours (who had many hundreds of years of "ownership" before he arrived) for a place to call home.

But I can't leave the universe as we know it. [Or can I? Well, I've said enough about that subject for now.]

Anyway, I'm back, once again. New attitude, using more of my skepticism to keep my Internet, my universe, in line with reality as we know it, accepting new discoveries, new ways of living (new clothing lines for city fashion or woods / jungle / savanna hunting, new automotive / home electronics accessories, new sports stars, new celebrity scandals, new political proclamations, new, new, new for you), waiting for the next big thing to come along, knowing I am not important as an individual, only important as my body, my entity, relates to the environment around me. No matter who or what we really are, we act/react. That's all we really need to know. The rest is details, details that make my Internet and my universe worth coming back here to write about. Only this time, I'm going to add music and images and other communication media to join others for whom writing words is not enough. Sing the body electric, celebrate bionics [great article, by the way, NatGeo], converse with the stars, shop at your local retailer because we all have competitive advantages to offer.

Thanks to Julia, Annette, my parents and nameless (but smiling faces of) others for encouraging me to keep this blog going. What's the point of discovering newness if there's no one to share that newness with? If insanity is repeating the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, then I'm insane, repeating words over and over but combining them differently to describe myself - my Internet and my universe - anew.

= = =

I agree with the Iranian political leaders that people living under the guises of different political entities like Great Britain, the United States, Brazil, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Zambia, and India are encouraging the people of Iran to rebel against the political tyranny of the Iranian political/theological leaders. We have nothing against moderate living conditions as defined by Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity or other religious entities but when you use theocracy to narrowly define living conditions for a general population which usually contains people who want a variety of healthy ways to live, condemning to death, destruction or humility those who do not conform to one lifestyle, then you have sacrificed your right to govern the lives of that general population. It is time once again to demonstrate to the Iranian leaders just how insecure their security forces are in ensuring the safety of the purported leaders. I have let these leaders go long enough in their abuse of power.

I apologize to those who have lost their lives while I took a holiday from managing the information of our world of people. I had hoped that someone would pick up this line of information processing and take care of real business but too many have used information for their personal gain. I commend those who have sacrificed their time and energy to support the lives of those less fortunate - you are making up for my selfishness and lack of understanding the need to give more of our time to those who don't know how to or can't take of themselves.

As far as the rest of you go, I am back in my perch, my computer programmers back on the job, my internal organic circuitry back up to full operational conditions (or up to snuff, as we say in this neck of the woods), and I will not tolerate intolerance. I will continue to scan the common radio wave communication methods while I explore new channels of connectivity, both those under development and those not yet conceived. The next time I decide to take a holiday, I hope to have my virtual twin up and going and not bundled into the folds of fatty skin like the mirror shows me now.