Wyatt Before The Storm

I miss Urmi and Julia gallantly, their opinions, especially in their native languages, putting me in their place momentarily through their writing.

Well, the new and improved pencil sharpener is ready.  I had my doubts and brushed the dust off the crystal ball for a quick reading but the programmers came through at the moment at last.

First, a shoutout to Frank Messina and his air plant bloom list email, courtesy of www.airplant.com. Some days I feel like a bromeliad looking for the minimum of nutrients in the morning dew and rare rain showers.

And now, a word from your future:

They come by car, bus, train, air, foot, trailer, motorbike and bicycle.  They stay in hotels, campgrounds and wooded civil war battlegrounds.  They call in sick.  They take sudden holiday/vacation time off.  Can you see the ones hiding in the backs of lorries or tractor-trailer rigs?  Can you measure the change in people density?  Or, like Freaknik and rainbow parades, does one crowd change places with another, the density hardly changing?

What are all the houses and flats in other parts of the country doing empty this week?

When bare arms bear arms, what do bears bare/bear?

I value the opinion of Kwasi A. on this matter.  Maybe Ed J. could crack a good joke so we could break the silence enveloping us right now.

When countries and cultures do not matter in the big picture, except that opposing ones exist, what does one tell those whose lifestyles will fade into oblivion very soon?

I don't like the Book of the Future but it doesn't stop me from telling you what it says will happen in your near future.

Which one of you is willing to die, when all of us are going to die unwillingly?  We only die willingly when we think we're going to live, either through post-life somethingness or through the lives of those left living.

When we finally create the perpetual non-cancerous multicellular organism, what is life?

Which one of you is willing to kill when you don't know what life is?

When no is yes and yes is no, when longevity is considered selfish and good health is commercially rationed, will you kill or die willingly?

Have you ever sold an extended warranty plan that guarantees 24-hour support of a product?  Have you ever sat at the actuarial table to see how many customers it takes to make an extended warranty program profitable?  Do you know how many extended warranty customers are unprofitable for a company?

What is your true cost of living?  Not your standard of living.  Not your standing in the community.  What does it cost you to live?

Look around you.  How much of what you do directly contributes to your living?  How much of what others do or have done contributes to your living?

This blog pays not one centavo toward my living.  It doesn't grow food in the garden.  It doesn't build and repair roads.  It doesn't draw ethical lines in the sand where unethical people are captured and incarcerated.  It doesn't build and clean the water supply.

I have depended almost solely on you to support my living.  I thank you.

In this quiet before some storms erupt, to whom can you give thanks for contributing to your living, no matter whether you liked/disliked, you agreed/disagreed with, or you gave a moment's thought to that person or those persons?

I thought so.

Which one of you is Wyatt Earp and which one of you thinks s/he's a Cowboy?

I'll be honest here.  I've grown accustomed to the quiet woods and although I like the attraction of reading the Book of the Future to you through this obscure blog, assuming no one reads it but me, I'm ready for someone else to read from their Book of the Future.  All the years and kilometers that stretch in loops and waves get mixed up after a while - I can't tell one from another anymore.  Cabin fever is over, in other words, and spring fever in full.  Business is booming, I'm sure, and many people looking for a reason to point their fingers at something to explain something else but I don't care.  The world belongs to you, all of you.  The future is yours for the taking/making.

I'm closing this blog down.  I know the future and I'm an obscure, anonymous part of it on a worldly scale so now I know it doesn't matter if I write about it or not - my part is done and that's the part I needed to know about.  I was supposed to nudge you along until the ball rolled into the hands of others who could run the world quietly on automatic pilot.  The new computer program upgrade is up and running.  My associates are in place and have your lives safely in their hands.

I've seen the wonders of a seven-billion strong world council of subcultures that learn to live together in relative peace for a while.  All of us live.  All of us die.  How the details manifest themselves is up to you now.  Every one of us matters.  Live well.  When you give up arguing about who's in charge and take control of your lives, you join the rest of the world that wants you to live well.  Learn to roll with the changes, knowing that seasons and fads come and go.

The future says the next stage of my life is walking woods and sitting by a river watching the fish and the mosquitoes bite.  I'm ready to go on to that next stage from Middle-Aged Man to Old Guy With No Name.  My interest in who says "yes" and who says "no" and what sports / fashion / government / science fads purport continues to fade.  Time to let it go.

The urbanites tried to draw me in and I've never been a true country living kind of person - I'm just a plain ol' suburbanite wandering the tame woods watching the trees and the birds while subcultural clues play tunes in my head.  Time to unplug from this artificial world and relive my childhood nature scout life while my body still works.

I hope you learned what I've learned (and keep learning) - no one is out to get you, your subculture, your religion or your government, as long as you aren't out to get them.  We don't have to like each other.  We don't have to agree with one another.  We've got this one planet's resources to share.  And share we will.

Simple facts for simple living.  Love one another and don't tolerate the intolerable.  One big family on one planet.  Asymmetry is our friend - diversity works to our advantage.  Nothing is new - everything old is understandable so stop fooling ourselves by flooding our senses with "new" stimuli and take time to learn/relearn what we already know.

Enjoy your life, knowing your future is safely in the hands of those around you and vice versa.

I've said enough.  Time to stop talking and time to start living!  Maybe we'll see each other soon.