Torch / Flashlight / Lanthorn

As a writer who lives the life of the middle-aged country/suburban/housing estate frugal millionaire next door, I have the luxury to know I do not have to spend any money on the latest thing. I do not have to impress my neighbours. I do not have to own the technical gizmo to end all gizmos that will be replaced by the next gizmo tomorrow. I can survey the world around me, including members of my species and objects made by my species, and create the next story/blog entry. I follow the "storyline" created by my species in the telling of its daily existence in activities tied to news headlines and see into the future by looking back into the past stories that we tend to repeat over and over. I can consult ancient texts for fabricated storylines. I can see that the major themes are always about the upper classes of society, with the middle and lower classes getting their moment in the sun but rarely permanent places in the history books.

As a business person, I encourage my friends to get their inventions ready for production and their startup businesses ready for the next leap in product volume sales.

I watch the flow of the stream of social progress, occasionally sticking my foot out to see how the flow reacts, gauging the temperature and other aspects of the current state of state affairs. I drop a pebble in the pond, as they say, and watch how waves add together or cancel each other out. I flip on my portable pocket light and watch the roaches flee into the darkness.

I arbitrarily pick times to repeat these actions because, like the weather, I don't want to be completely predictable. I only want information to use for my next story, my next record of myself as a member of my species, the interplay of states of energy at the local level.

A creative writer uses all the tools available, including one's imagination, to craft a story, employing colloquial language, detailed descriptive scenes, raw emotions, and personal anecdotes to make the story writing interesting enough to keep writing. Some use formulaic writing to guarantee readers the same style story with different plot twists to make every story unique. Some use whatever comes along to throw into the pile of words, disregarding the potential for a potential audience.

Because I am generally happy and live in a sanitized, sheltered world, I do not include the deepest, darkest characters in my stories. In fact, I don't believe they exist. I see that all of us have reasons to live and what is an insane, incoherent life to one is a well-planned, rational life to another. People kill for a reason. People die for a reason. A nuclear scientist can be either a bomb maker or a curer of cancer, depending on how you want to write the story (or skew the headlines).

Some days, I don't like who I am. I honestly don't like being a writer. It's not the writing (or my "hack job" as I love to call my textual output, pretentious in my nonpretentiousness as I am). It's the thoughts that go into the writing. I am not a writer at all, in fact. I am a person of random thoughts, a person who sees the joy of making juxtapositions, who knows all there's ever going to be and knows all that ever was, not in exact details but in the way we say that elements react to one another, mixing and matching, flipping and spinning, theories abounding about boundless energy states. Once you see life as that "Matrix"-like social/visual mask over existence, you know all there is to know. The rest is details.

Do you believe the universe exists? Can you imagine more than you can imagine anyone else has imagined?

I believe in a positive future for our species because I know that our past has always been positive, negative headlines aside. We will accomplish more than we can possibly imagine at this moment. We will discover ways to manipulate energy states that will make our species both necessary and obsolete. We will go beyond what we think is the limit of the understanding of the universe as we know it.

In the meantime, we will struggle with the definition of what it means to be a member of our species. We will always struggle with the definition. We will always find ways to say that the past was better than today because the dead can't talk about the details about why the past wasn't always so great all the time (or at least not as great as the people in the present want to make the past out to be).

This moment is all I've got. In this moment, I have good neighbours who have no negative intentions on my life, a blue sky with a few thin clouds and a lot of sunshine, and my good health. I have a wife who loves me, a family who cares for me and who I care for them, a global economy that's seen as somewhat gloomy (but actually giving many of us more time to spend on what we love to do) and you.

I am a thinker, not a deep thinker, not a creative inventor or a mad scientist. Just this guy who was born of two members of my species in the hospital of a small town, growing up under regular, unexceptional conditions, reaching maturity slowly, finding happiness in his thoughts and glad to be alive. The majority of us are glad to be alive, with current conditions rarely optimal but sufficient for us to believe this moment and the next one will give us the opportunity to find other ways to be glad we're alive. We don't have to be happy all the time. In fact, we can be just the opposite, finding gladness in our misery.

I write because I am. I am because I write. We are the same set of interconnected energy states so I write about you when I write about me and vice versa.

I am sad because we haven't frozen the bank accounts of Iranian governmental leaders while they let legitimate opposition leaders in their country get killed. There is more here than meets my eye, of course, but solutions are available to take care of business, protecting the intelligent assets of a piece of Persia for future prosperity. Freedom and the responsibility to protect freedom is not chaos although others will lead you to believe so. What little we have learned, we primates, in these thousands of years we have called history-recording civilisation. How much we have forgotten!

Silence is my friend today, the cool, bright day my companion. Talk to you tomorrow.