The trees in front of me don't ask that question. The ant climbing up the folding chair and the spider dangling from underneath the travel desk don't, either.
Movies in recent viewing:
- "The Ox-Bow Incident," 1943
- "The Fourth Protocol," 1987
- "Shortcut to Heaven," 2004
- "Voyager," 1991
- "Clue," 1985
- "The Man With One Red Shoe," 1985
- "Grand Prix," 1966
I stayed awake from 2 to 4 pondering peopled trends. Gloucester and Greenwich, Worcestershire sauce on sandwiches. Hornets and horse flies. Witches and itches.
Witch hunts to restore faith in the American dream.
Japanese painted ferns. Deep brown-red tomatoes from the Black Sea of Russia. 'Marilyn Monroe' hostas. Creeping fig and heuchera.
Sunni and Shiite Muslims proving that no religion serves the needs of one people satisfactorily. Gnostics and Zionists, Taoists and Zens.
Watching a county get plowed, suburbanised and urbanised. Home to Cherokee hunting ground, Civil War skirmish and German rocketry.
When the last German is gone who well remembered Von Braun, who is the new dreamer, who will inspire flights of science fiction fantasy to put ideas in young people's thoughts in this county? Other parts of the world have their Gagarins, Rutans and Liweis.
Yesterday, an Old Rasputin beer. Today, a Bell's Two Hearted brew.
Every one of us is important to me - rich, poor, politically active, politically unaware, technically savvy, mentally challenged.
I grew up in a relatively open-minded conservative home, where we were taught to worry about what the neighbours think or see you doing.
Open-minded AND conservative? Yes. Am I sure? Positively so.
How can that be? Well, we were taught to think for ourselves but to understand the actions we take in response to our thoughts have consequences in general society, with repercussions felt most strongly at the local level. Social responsibility begins at home.
Brush your teeth. Wash your hair. Wear clean clothes. Speak kindly. Treat older people with respect and your peers with honesty. Consumption of fermented beverages is okay, especially in locations where water sanitation is suspect, but do not drink to get drunk. Treat everyone like a parent, sibling, customer, employee, and employer all wrapped into one person - remember the golden rule. A person with learning disabilities is no different than a person who can solve calculus problems by thought only - all of us contribute to the growth and change of society but can't always say why or how.
Protecting core family values by encouraging children to see other views and knowing you provided a strong, solid base for them to stand on when they have questions about conflicting issues that send their heads spinning.
Seeing us as both self-directed beings with free will and simply the result of single-cell organisms finding a way to better ensure their survival. Accepting that both views still mean I have to eat, sleep and live on this planet with others.
My view is not everyone's view.
Do you eat to fish or fish to eat?
What is social progress? Are your views naturally limited or does someone use tactics to limit your views for you?
I don't have a cellar full of expensive wines and drive a Bugatti but I can appreciate the density of experiencing them. I've owned domestic and foreign automobiles, all of them providing different thoughts about transportation from point A to point B. I have consumed cheap wine (basically, grape juice with alcohol) and wine that tested my tongue with five or six different savoury aftertastes.
Today, I sit in a two-car garage listening to a neighbour mowing, birds calling and wind passing through suburban woods. I have sat here many times hearing fighter jets and military helicopters flying past. I have heard the boom of missile tests and weapon destruction. I have wondered about the lives of people being transported by medical helicopters chopping the air on the way to the hospital. Garbage trucks, meter readers and delivery trucks have stopped at the end of the driveway countless times.
Crows, cowbirds and cardinals have no concept of property lines, using my yard as a portion of their feeding and mating territory.
These are tiny landscape drawings of the world in which I live. Nothing here is right or wrong. Here is here and there and there. They be. It is.
I do not want to control what you want to tell your children about the ways of the world. I have no children of my own. The two cats in the house that my wife and I raised will not have to live in the peopled world and make decisions about who lives or who dies because of money or moral matters.
But I know you and your children think for yourselves using the limited set of resources available to you, such as food, water, and social training.
As always, I write this blog assuming no one reads it except me so that I can assume I am not using this blog for my personal gain at someone else's expense. I have the luxury of sitting here randomly typing connected ideas while people kill each other somewhere else, my only concern a hornet that's interested in an object nearby and my being allergic to hornet venom (hopefully not deathly so).
I celebrate my freedom to exist within my limited means. I do not participate in all possible expressions of personal freedom such as anarchy, totalitarianism or racking up unmanageable personal credit card debt.
I have the luxury that middle-class, suburban living gives me while others risk their lives and wealth to provide the means for me to live this safe, quiet, responsible, limited lifestyle comfortably.
For almost three years, I have enjoyed the increased safety that the reduced exposure to the risk of daily road fatalities and workplace accidents provides a retired person living mainly at home.
I became part of the blogging, chattering class before I knew what it was.
Are these blog entries more than a combination of words? I don't know. All I know is that I'm just as important as anyone else.
Does my importance change if I stop typing in this space (the virtual world of blogging as well as this physical world of the garage)? It shouldn't. I'm still one person, whether I type here or not.
Thus, I ask myself, do I want to continue to report here what I see in the Book of the Future if I truly believe I am the only one who reads this blog?
When I watch generation after generation of politicians who claim they're part of the common people who control their own destinies in their districts and then discover the real world of politics that shows more than a little volcano eruption how interconnected we are ...
When I contemplate the voices of those who talk about a one-party system and the fine points of whether Obama or Palin best represent Hitlerian leadership ...
When I watch a crane fly and a beetle within inches but oblivious of each other ...
The turning point of middle age, when I'm ready to hand to someone(s) else the network that determines the output of the Book of the Future ... sigh ... especially when I already know my future so there are few if any surprises left for me ...
Planting thyme in the garden time and time again only to be dug up by a raccoon and die every time.
If I gain nothing by being here, why am I here? Why do I occupy my time with pushing my fingers against raised rectangles of plastic? This is not real life, this is just my record of living next to an electronic typing machine while thinking about the lives of others.
Time to close this blog down and think in some other way, perhaps deleting my facebook, linkedin and other online profiles, too. The world of people may be going electronic but this old boy is finding more and more ways to enjoy the outdoor life free of electronic gizmos and noisemakers before he gets too old and senile to know the difference between the real world and the virtual world. Recording the moment does not make the moment any better or worse - the richness and density of the moment will be forgotten, anyway.
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