Knowing Is Doing?

Education makes us better-informed which makes us still only thousands of years away from nomadic tribal/clan lifestyles.  How long does it take a whole population to figure out how to maintain indefinite prosperity?

Maybe this will help:

• Coastal Systems and Human Impacts 

Maybe this won't help:

• Abu Dhabi sheikh, sovereign fund head, found dead

Who Is Al Gore To You?

About this story: Al Gore in line for honorary doctorate from UT

I've always been of two minds on Al Gore. First, he served as a publicly-elected official representing Tennessee, he was elected into the White House as VP, and he has received international recognition - all of these point to positive contributions he has made; on the other side, he is not his father and has always projected a wooden public personality or a personality he copied from Clinton, partly, I think, because he was never a true Tennessean politician, traveling throughout his youth in his father's shadow, and thus never able to establish his own public persona (which I bet would have been more like a primary/secondary school teacher or smalltown journalist, if there had not been pressure on him to follow in his father's footsteps).

What do they say about a person never getting respect in his hometown?

I think the carbon "cap and trade" concept is sound but is hard to sell during this economic downturn because people tend to view the concept as anti-growth (or worse).

So, all the best for Al, who represents Tennessee and, despite controversy, deserves an honorary degree for what we'll understand in later centuries about the changes our species has caused to this planet's complex ecosystem. An energy consumption device provided by the Atomic Energy Museum that my father demonstrated to my schoolmates in the late 1970s taught me long ago that fuel=carbon and the megamegatons we have used/released creates longlasting effects, including the permanent heat bubbles our concrete/factory jungles create.

Sure, outer space is a big heat sink but "greenhouses gases" are good insulators. Tip the balance far enough and see what happens! Unfortunately for our species, in 10-20 years, Gore will have the last laugh on this one when the climate change (i.e., "global warming") theories he supported become reality.

Loss of Potential Energetic Beings

In a nearby town, a young man was shot and killed while attending public school.  The boy - 14 years young - will not go on to secondary school or achieve any of the dreams and desires of his family.  The [alleged] shooter - son of a medical doctor (a pediatrician?) - whose mother and five-year old sister face a future altered beyond any of their worst nightmares, has determined his life's direction after a youth of disciplinary problems, first at Liberty, then [supposedly] rehabbed at youth detention quarters and lastly at Discovery.

Rumours of gang activity spread and will soon die down.  The truth hurts more than falsehood, in this case.

Can we learn anything from these two young men, one who will earn instant wings as a sweet angel, the other to be cast as the evil that stalked the halls of public education institutions?

Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.  [from here]

Jean Rostand, Thoughts of a Biologist (1939) (1894 - 1977)

We will learn nothing new.  Instead, we will continue the long, drawnout process of building higher fences and installing more security devices in an effort to ensure our youth containment centers (i.e., mandatory public education institutes) deteriorate even further.

Where are the solution providers?  Where are the lean, just-in-time, six-sigma/blackbelt, international quality standard setting heroes when we need them to e-file a report for a stop work order to fix the defects before they get shipped further down the assembly line?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  If it's broke, use duct tape first.  If duct tape don't work, use a hammer.  If a hammer don't work, prop it up on cinder blocks in the yard.  If the weeds don't cover it by the end of the growing season, haul it to the junkyard, sell it to the scrap metal dealer or stick a fancy sign under it and call it art.

I remember the chaff being thrown out of the side of the combine we call the primary/secondary school system.  I remember the people before me who've shown, through works of art, what happens to some of them in society.  Not all the chaff is bad for society, though.  Most of it serves useful purposes later in life that we just couldn't fit into the presized pigeon holes of conform-fitting socialised education.

So, can we learn anything from this example of fatal violence?  I actually believe we can (actually or factually?  word choices!).

I knew some of the violent kids who attended grade school with me.  I played ball with some of them and one of them, a neighbour of mine, was the head of the unofficial neighbourhood gang, complete with clubhouse in the woods and us getting initiated by having to steal from the local grocer's and pharmacy store, as well as showing a propensity for shoving around other kids in our school (I mentioned that before, didn't I?).  The crimes got more sophisticated as we got older, with cheating in class and levels of theft escalating to house break-ins, vandalism and other unmentionables.

Facts are facts.  All the good kids in school are not always good and all the bad kids in school are not always bad.  We are complex beings, many able to adapt to different situations to keep from getting pinned down or caught doing either good or bad for too long.  Many others maintain one set of good or bad traits with precision, twenty-four hours a day, not crossing the line to either side on purpose.

We are one people, all of us needed to keep us moving forward to the next moment.  We will prevent catastrophes when we feel it benefits us.  Otherwise, we live in a world of negative consequences for both good and bad actions.  We cannot stop bad things from happening.  The world's most safe driver may have cardiac arrest behind the wheel of an automobile and steer straight into a vehicle full of good, wholesome children on their way to provide blankets and food for homeless people who are unable to fully function in wage-earning social situations.  Guns provide protection and guns provide means for random acts of violence - a finger or a hand can be just as deadly a weapon as a firearm when one knows how to use one's body parts to defend and attack.

As one people, it behooves us to avoid pushing people into the corner of a room with no room to breath just because they do not conform to our idea of what is socially acceptable.  Instead, as intelligent beings, we should raise our heads up and look to find ways to expand our social network to provide positive reinforcement for those we, in our normal narrow field of view, do not know what to do with.

I don't know the alleged shooter and his family.  I know about them through word of mouth (even in a metropolitan area of 300,000 people, it's a small community).  This boy's life has veered away from any normal, long-term, positive contribution to society.  He has above-average intelligence and had good grades in school.  He comes from a family line not long in this country.  What would his family's former home country have done with such a boy?  I have looked at news sources around the world, including The Times of India, for information.  One article pointed to a survey from an American university that showed depression and delinquent peers lead to youth violence.  Another article "called attention to the need to examine which violence-prevention programmes aimed at youth aren’t working and get rid of them."  And a third pointed to pervasive violence in Atlanta neighbourhoods that promotes a fear of dying young which then reinforces violent behaviour.

A spiky-haired fitness celebrity popularised the phrase, "Stop the insanity!"  She's right.  We cannot and will not stop violence in the world.  But we can redirect violent behaviour like turning a rocket's programmed path from killing a large swath of our population to sending us (or our replicant equivalents) into space exploration trajectories.

Institutionalised, privatised incarceration of violent, misbehaving, out-of-control youth rarely works.  It simply reinforces negative stereotypes.  As we keep thickening the walls of public educational institutions, let us pay attention to what we're doing to both those we're keeping in and those we're keeping out.  Early detection of youthful wanton behaviour and channeling those youths' energy toward constructive goals without negatively labeling the children as troublemakers is a laudable goal we all want to see.  To repeat an oft-repeated phrase, it takes a village to raise a child - all children deserve the chance to be observed by us and encouraged to find a useful place on this planet to grow and to live.  No matter what we do, though, some children will fall through the cracks and some children will excel despite our lack of best efforts.

What have we learned from this?  We should not overreact.  Increasing our security measures to account for the inevitable random act of violence will clearly demonstrate our society has issues that cannot be fixed with chain-link fences and metal detectors.  Barriers only increase the chance of separating us into unseen modes of behaviour that will lead to a different set of social clashes later on.

We used to say the nuclear family was the ideal nurturing situation.  Since then, we've learned every family has potential dysfunctional problems that exemplify, exaggerate and magnify society at large.  The fix here is not to isolate or ostracise but to work with those who do not fit in, accepting the fact that one or two will elude even our Herculean effort to nurture or rehabilitate.  Instead of spinning our cocoons tighter, let's reach out and offer a helping hand to those who do not know they need assistance or have tried all they can and still don't know what to do to steer a problem child into a place where the child feels useful.  Otherwise, we'll end up like California which spends more on putting (and keeping) people in the prison system than educating those who have found a desire to be useful in any or all parts of society.  I don't like socialised crime-and-punishment institutes any more than I dislike other forms of socioeconomic socialism.

Don't let ourselves get fooled into spending money where it's guaranteed to be wasted.  Mob behaviour benefits no one and plays into the hands of those who use emotional appeals to get what they want.  Separate your emotional response to one act of violence from what you think we should be doing in the long-term to make society better for all by reducing fraud and waste in government.

Mt. Ofolympicproportions

"And I say that we throw 30 more virgins into the giant crack in the earth."

"Why?"

"Well, my illuminated, enlightened, glorious leader, it will appease the gods."

"And what shall I tell the families who are sacrificing their daughters for this theory of yours?"

"Tell them...tell them they are gaining great favour with the gods."

"By that, you mean I will have to bribe them through some backdoor method that they will not be aware of?"

"If, my great and wonderful, all-seeing empire builder...if that is your wish."

"Let me think about it for a minute. Hmm...so you think the gods want to fill this new gap in the earth with young female bodies? And does this mean they act as some sort of paste or mortar to hold our empire together? Will this keep my monuments intact? Will the temples stand firm just because we threw some people into a new crevice?"

"Oh, Magnificent One, you ask many wise questions."

"Wise? I am not wise. I am curious, that's all. What is a person made of that the gods need to keep from causing more earthquakes? I mean, are the people sacrificial idiots? Do we rule by fear and intimidation just so I can wear these gold-threaded outfits and eat fresh fruit all year long?"

"Tremendous thoughts, my lord. You capture the ideas of many rulers before you."

"Do I? I just don't know... What if these virgins could think for themselves? Would any of them have ideas for creating expansion joints that let our buildings, bridges and roads sway with earthquakes and not fall apart?"

"Grand and encouraging master, we have no choice but to sacrifice the virgins. The people demand we keep the gods happy."

"Yes, yes, I see. Leave me alone for half a day. I will consult with my private gods to divine the purest and most precise answer we need to make the people, the government, the gods and you - part of my advisory team - happy."

"As you desire."

"As I command!"

"Yes, my lord. I will return for midday meal and accept your new command."

"Go, go. I will call for you when I'm ready."

"I will just close this door behind me."

"Alone with my thoughts once again. Hmm... what is an earthquake? It is a movement of dirt and rock. And what is a movement of dirt and rock but a larger version of our rock cutting and road laying? Thus, it is reorganisation. The gods are reorganising this planet for their purposes. Therefore, like the ants who rebuild their homes in another area after we've paved roads from one city to the next, we must rebuild our homes in another area after the gods have shaken apart our fortresses and temples. How do I convince the people to move to an area less prone to earthquakes? I send the virgins on a quest. But which virgins? Dilemma, dilemma... I don't need just the prettiest. I don't need the daughters of families too big to support themselves. I want young women fit to explore new territory, think on their feet in uncharted waters, fight indigenous populations to create areas for settlement. Where do I find such women? City life has softened my most battle-hardened soldiers. I can't imagine what it's done to the female children of my soldiers and their civilised wives.

"Let me turn to my private altar and light incense to my gods. Here is scent of vanilla for you, Green Frog, bringer of rain and facial warts if we rub you too much for good luck. Here is the burning evergreen branch for you, Bleached Coral, protector of fish and sharp reminder that the ocean floor is not all soft sand. Here is the crushed wormwood for you, Dark Cloud, storehouse for lightning and tornadoes, favorite tools of the greater gods.

"What would you have me do? You have brought me here to this palace, made me head of the biggest empire the world has ever known. What do you want me to do for you? What will make everyone happy, or at least temporarily distracted from their daily woes so that it appears I have saved them from themselves one more time?

"Green Frog, why do you never smile? Why do you sit there and judge me with that blank stare? Bleached Coral, why do your branches hold ground even in the strongest wind? Dark Cloud, why do you come and and go as you please, never here when we need you? What do all of you combined try to tell me, especially when I do not listen?

"The incense. Your answers. I am beginning to see the light. A contest. The gods want the virgins to compete against one another. Of course, it makes sense. But what sort of contest? I am clearing my thoughts to see what you are trying to tell me. The... contest... will... be... a written test? Hmm...I don't know about that. We have not taught virgins how to read. We only raise them to be sacrifices, a duty which requires no formal training, only staying indoors out of the light of the blistering sun and learning to dress nicely and smile.

"Oh, I see what you're saying. The contest includes the training of the virgins. In fact, it includes all unmarried women and... and any men not inclined to fight first and ask educated questions later. You want to pit the best and brightest against one another! Why didn't I think of that? It will focus the whole empire on itself! We are going to create a new class of citizens.

"No more human sacrifices. Now we will require the people to give up their children for the duty of the expansion of the empire. We will classify our children according to learning ability. We will sequester the best and brightest for purposes only the gods know. Right now, you gods want them to figure out where to move the empire to a place more pleasing to you. I love you, my gods. You have given the people a new quest, a new purpose, something that will keep them occupied for years and years while they prepare their children to be the most pleasing to the gods. By creating this new class of educated people, you have helped me figure out how to ration the limited building resources we have right now during this natural disaster you caused. How much cheaper it will be to make reading materials instead of building new temples! How much easier it will be to house the children together in one place instead of importing slaves to watch over the children spread out among individual homes while their parents play the game of civilisation!

"Guard, call forth my chief advisor! I am ready to pronounce my next edict!"

"As you command, ma'am."

"That's Madame Emperor to you, specially-trained palace guard that you are."

"Yes, Madame Emperor, ma'am."

Riverview Flat

In the summer of 1984, I enjoyed my freedom. I was in the last break before what should have been my senior year in university. I had changed college majors many times, most of them discussed here, I believe, and was ready to move out on my own. A friend of mine, Amy Easter, agreed to share a two-bedroom flat with me on the other side of the river from the campus of UTK.

Oftentimes, life imitates art because we like to appear in art form ironically.

The manager of the Riverview Flat Complex told me his name was Casey. Casey stood about 5'8", his shoulders wide and upper body muscular. We chatted a few times while I moved furniture into the flat.

Casey had worked as a bouncer, earning the nickname "Casey at the Bat" for his use of a stick of wood to smack disruly patrons out the front door. Before his bouncer job, he had been a gymnastics instructor but gave up that job because he was getting too old to throw and catch out-of-control athletic bodies that flung themselves at him.

I had saved up enough money to pay the first month's rent as well as half the deposit. Amy was supposed to come up with the other half but she had lost her job and wanted to negotiate with me to cover the cost of both moving in and possibly future full payments of rent until she found a job.

By 1984, I had decided I was a writer. I did not qualify my writing ability and did not judge myself against a perfect model although I had writing heroes I looked up to, including Orwell, Burroughs, Tolkien, Poe and Plath. Little did I know of James Agee or Cormac McCarthy.

I had sought publication in two literary magazines, one at ETSU and one at UTK, getting my first rejection slips. I read the editions that could have contained what I had written - the literary magazine poetry/prose selections were no better or worse than mine. I decided that I had been right to start my own underground publication at ETSU called Swashbuckler. With the little money I had, I managed to publish a few issues of the Swashbuckler, including submissions by anonymous donors who had sent work to my student mailbox posted in the publisher section.

In Knoxville, Rus Harper, an experimental/punk musician, ran his own underground rag and I had little desire or money to compete against him so I supported his work.

By my second month in the flat, I realized I could not afford to support Amy's and my lifestyles. She was not my girlfriend so there was no incentive of long-lasting love to keep us together. On top of that, an infestation of fleas in the flat had reached a level I never thought possible, considering I barely had money for food, let alone flea killer insecticide power to cancel the circus act of my jumping and flipping around to avoid the nearly invisible acrobats nibbling any of my body parts they could get a hold of.

Given the choice of either roaches or fleas, I'll take roaches. At least they have the decency to avoid you when they share a flat with you.

But wait, that's not all! My bank account was overdrawn, I had no credit cards to charge my rent on, my flatmate had decided I was no fun since I wouldn't pay her half of the rent and provide us food, and my job at Steak&Ale restaurant was getting way too serious for me.

I had taken a job at Steak&Ale because my hours at Taco Bell were insufficient to provide a living wage. There were so many available workers from around the UTK campus that the Taco Bell management on the Strip could keep our weekly hours low, getting a full staff whenever they wished, making those of us with unusual school hours get lousy paychecks in the process.

But I had decided to quit school for a while. I had spent several years drifting from one institute of higher learning to another, switching majors like underwear, and was building a student loan I thought I'd never repay (probably around $4k to $6k at the time).

My job at Steak&Ale was simple - wash dishes, bus tables and put garnish on dinner plates, with occasional forays into the salad bar area to refill rabbit food containers. I liked the simplicity of the job but the management team saw I was too well organized, turning the dishwashing assignment into an efficient minifactory of clean utensils and other items that'll fit into a square, shiny-metal steam box, anticipating which plates, knives, forks and cooking gear needed to be ready next. Hey, is there anything the matter with taking pride in doing your job, no matter what it may be? Of course not.

That is, unless you don't want to get the attention of management. Since I was no longer in school, the general manager thought he'd put my natural "work ethic" initiative to work by training me to be a bartender and bookkeeper for Steak&Ale. After all, he said, most of his employees were either current or former college students and none of them showed the drive to perfect their jobs like me.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not bragging about being a dishwasher, busboy or salad bar tender. I just don't like hearing people being upset or disappointed about my interaction with them. You know what I mean. I dislike rejection of any kind.

So I carried the bar recipe book with me and studied the restaurant's accounting books - daily receipts, food expenses, etc. I worked at the bar a little so I could get used to the atmosphere and expectations of the bar patrons. If you've ever tended bar, you know the organizational mindset it takes to pretend like you're just some fun-loving goofy person who knows how to mix a few drinks and entertain those who want to watch you put on a show for good tips.

Meanwhile, because I was training for a new job, my per-hour pay was reduced to a training salary, making it completely impossible for me to pay the next month's rent.

I drove back to the Riverview complex and was prepared to tell Casey I was going to miss the next month's payment but could make it up with increased pay I expected to get with my accounting and bartending jobs in the coming months.

Have I ever told you this story? Probably not. As I said and you know, life imitates art. That afternoon, I walked up the flight of stairs to my flat and saw Casey drag a guy out of the adjacent flat. He held the guy's arm like a twig and literally threw the guy down another flight of stairs. When the guy came up the stairs to fight back, Casey grabbed a baseball bat off the ground and swung a few times in the air. They cussed at each other for a minute or so, long enough for me to get my key in the door.

Casey turned to see me walking into my flat. He asked if I had resolved my lack of funds issue with Amy. I told him I had not. He laughed. I looked at the bat in his hand. He saw my consternation and set the bat back down, explaining to me that the guy he'd kicked out had not paid rent for a few months but always seemed to have enough money for dope.

I asked Casey what would happen if I missed a month's rent. He laughed again. He said he liked me 'cause I always stopped to say hello to him when he was around so he considered me a friend and could let a month's rent slip every now and then. Except maybe not the next month because a lot of people were skipping their rent and he was getting heat from the owner for being too soft. Thus justifying the loud display with my neighbour just now so everyone in the complex could hear Casey was getting serious about rent collection.

After Casey left, I hurried across the carpet into the kitchen to avoid feeding the fleas. The fridge was empty. The hidden bag of potato crisps was gone, presumably eaten by Amy and/or her boyfriend. All I had was the bar recipe book, my car key and a glass of warm water to drink.

I turned on the radio, listening to 90.3, WUTK, an alternative rock station at the time, playing some typical college rock and Reggae but also punk and other "noise" to calm us wild ones down.

I sat down and wrote a few poems that interlaced the Casey scenes with a broken love story. I thought about my girlfriend who was about to finish up her last quarter at Tennessee Tech, two hours' drive away from my forlorn location.

Quite frankly, I felt trapped and had thoughts of ending it all. I had failed miserably as a college student because I couldn't find a subject that interested me long enough to say it was something I wanted to do the rest of my life. I was working a job as a dishwasher training to be a bartender who couldn't pay the rent on a cheap flat because my flatmate had ditched me when I wouldn't take sexual favours in exchange for rent payments (her number and variation on a theme of sexual partners make "Sex and the City" look like amateur hour - I didn't know which or how many STDs she was carrying; best be broke than too poor to get fixed!).

I weighed my options. Face Casey and his bat in a few weeks. Quit my job and go back to school fulltime. Kill myself. Hit up my friends for money.

Finally, I decided to go see my girlfriend the next day.

I drove to Tennessee Tech and visited with my girlfriend for a while. By the way I said goodbye to her, she knew something was up (I think I said "Fair well" instead of "See you later"). I drove to Nashville, going to the Vanderbilt library to look at maps (I chose Vanderbilt because it was one of two places, including Georgia Tech, where I had I received full college scholarship offers when I was a senior in secondary school). I looked at all the places in the United States to visit. I thought about the storybook ending of driving off a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway so I wrote down the names of interstate freeways I could travel to get there.

I decided I would drive to Seattle, Washington, and, if I hadn't decided to kill myself by then, I'd drive down to Pasadena to visit one of my childhood best friends majoring in Applied Science and Literature at Cal Tech.

Why am I telling you this right now? Because earlier today I was driving around north Alabama, enjoying the sunshine and scenery except for the glare of the dashboard reflecting in the windscreen. The midday glare reminded me of the long drive from Nashville to Seattle and the daily glare of the setting sun on the dashboard of the station wagon as I drove west from dawn to dusk in late September 1984.

I call the drive out west my Disneyland tour of the United States, riding past famous landmarks and vistas as if I sat on a monorail, stopping for nothing but petrol along the way. [The trip and the mini-adventures are ripe for telling another time.]

Hard to believe 25 years have passed by since I found myself in a nearly impossible situation, but I wouldn't (and can't) trade a minute of it. Nothing in my life up to then had been sufficient to stop my perpetual motion in one direction.

Casey at the Bat. A metaphor. A euphemism. A tired cliché. A cultural literary landmark. A legend of sports and Western society.

I could mask and twist and turn my adventure into an ironic or satirical farce that hides the facts and truth in some hilarious road trip or scary movie. Or I can let life plainly imitate art and share a slice of my life with you to let you know that I've been there with those of you whose lives didn't lead them where they or their families thought they should.

Like they say, failure is not an option. You make choices and then you make more choices. That's all we do. We choose to do whatever we want to do, even when we feel we're trapped and can't do anything we want.

Despite early setbacks, I retired comfortably at 45 to practice my writing more thoroughly. I've enjoyed this long, strange trip of the first half of my life through highs and lows and comedy and tragedy. Most of it's been fun. It's been one adventure after another, that's for sure. This midlife adventure of writing everyday has been a blast but it's time for my next adventure, which may take away from my daily writing.

With time, I'll let you know more. I'm interested in a small startup that should help create a few jobs in this economy of relatively high unemployment. Some of you I know will be perfect to help get this startup moving fast. Let's make it a success while we're having a blast and a good time. Life's too short not to enjoy what you're doing. I'll see you when you see me.

When Latin Ruled The World

A blimp of a change, the inclusion of other language character sets for addresses/destinations in virtual space on electronic computing systems. Can you convert your keyboard quickly enough to jump between domains? Can you read what you're typing? Can we stay connected with one another despite language barriers?

I watched the blades of a ceiling fan for hours in the dark hours of the early morning, patterns emerging and disappearing, looking at tangents, seeing the near perfect circle drawn in the air, rapidly blinking my eyelids to see snapshots of the fan in motion. I heard the pattern, the pitter-patter, of words in my thoughts. I couldn't believe I used the phrase "inner being" in a recent blog post.

I got up and wrote in my pocket moleskine:

What bothers me about the business of education, the business of healthcare, the business of business, for that matter, and our seeing life in terms of economic conditions like democratic capitalism or communist socialism (or is it socialist communism? I can never remember) is this:

Life is not working for a living. Life is getting paid to learn, to earn our way to self-actualisation, market viability of our inviolable right to live.

Are we looking at the wrong paradigm for educating ourselves? Should children be taught problem solving skills from the very beginning, encouraging them to seek out alphabets and number systems through cooperation with each other to figure out how to give/get food, clothing, shelter and other social goods/services?

I happily stared at the ceiling fan thinking about this. I have thought about this issue for many years, especially as a person managing others in an office work environment or as a worker in the sewer business. As a person making lunch at Taco Bell, looking at the adults beside me and asking, "Is this what 12 years of public education gives back to society?"

We separate ourselves into age categories for many reasons. Pediatrics. Geriatrics. However, learning is a lifelong process. Should we have mandatory mass education for people of a certain age anymore? Should we develop a new system of learning, where the student and the teacher are the same, on the job and in the classroom at the same time, solving problems and managing projects with others regardless of age?

Alternative education is a hot topic right now as many public schools face the issues of failing to provide sustainable skills to youth. As a person who grew up in the public school system, whose family was/is/will be intimately involved in the public education process, I wonder what increased value I would have received had society used a different model to turn me into a useful interdependent being.

I look at the teachers who meant the most to me and remember them for their encouragement to see life outside the textbook and classroom.

I look at the friends with whom I congregated and realize we tend to gather in herds of like personalities. The teachers/administrators/coaches who encouraged us to socialize outside our herds were the ones who impressed me most.

I recently decided to leave my role as an instructor in the adult education system as exemplified by the for-profit model I worked for because I believe that education is integral to the workplace. I always paid my employees to learn on the job, using cross-training to encourage my employees to learn what their coworkers were doing. People shouldn't pay to get an education. We should pay people to solve problems and guide them, education being part of the solution, not part of their problem repaying debt.

I ought to know. I learned just as much, if not more, spending time with my friends experimenting with breadboards and diodes and homemade power supplies in our basements and bedrooms than I did in formal education settings. I learned more about my physical capabilities playing street ball and backyard football than in little leagues. I was a Vikings, Dolphins, Redskins, Falcons, Cubs, Reds, Braves, Hawks and Volunteers fan long before I knew about dangling modifiers or differential equations. I read Mad magazine as much as I read classical literature. I fought with my friends and verbally sparred with adults.

I have more to think about this education situation as faced by developed nations and developing nations. I believe it's tied to healthcare. Essentially any universal service, those which we consider the rights of our species, should be integral to what we do everyday. Physical and mental training is who we are.

No solution is perfect. The solutions we have do good jobs. I know that business concepts like process improvement are no panacea but they provide examples with which to soak in a pot of spaghetti noodles, pull out and throw at the dartboard to see if they stick to the bullseye. Mixed metaphors are useful sometimes, too.

More as the film develops color distortions in the rusting canister. I want to stew on what matters to me most, building a team of people who thrive on constant learning, no matter what their innate capabilities may be. Nothing in life is guaranteed. I want people around me who want more than an insurance policy to protect them from catastrophe - I want people who find solutions to problems before they exist.

Going Pains

How connected do you feel to your surroundings? According to the ol' seven effects of habitual people, we go through three stages - dependence, independence and interdependence. Makes me think of Depends. Which takes me to the adverts which point out men's need to release bladder contents on frequent occasions. Do any of you find yourself desiring to pee more often after seeing those actors looking for the nearest toilette?

Speaking of affective habits, are you a leader, a coach, a mentor, a manager, a supervisor, a parent, an innovator, an inventor, or a visionary?

Do you encourage people to overcome adversity or do you throw obstacles in people's way? Do you try to accomplish one with the other?

I have one life to live here on this planet with you. I don't have time to waste on timewasters or busy work. I don't like assigning homework for homework's sake or officework to fill empty spaces in a schedule. I look at another person and ask myself what it takes to improve that person's interaction with me and/or others. Then, and only then, do I decide as the person in charge how to address the use of time between us.

Do I know what's best for us? No. Do I make wild guesses sometimes? No. I make wild guesses most of the time. But I base my guesses on what I deem to be beneficial for us.

Leadership is easy. You put yourself on a pedestal to see what's going on and then put everyone on a higher pedestal than you. You lead for their sakes, not yours, but you don't put your life aside. You lead for the whole group, including yourself. There's time for every individual to make valuable input in the workplace, sports team, group of friends, family, crowd, political gathering, you name it.

And sometimes, you decide to walk away from the situation. You realize you are not the leader the group needs to succeed. You put your personality aside and say you will lead a team to victory somewhere else. A decision easier said than done. I know. I've only done it two or three times in my life and it hurt my pride every time.

We're influenced by adverts subliminally. We catch ourselves going to the toilet two or three times in the middle of the night when we don't have the urge or don't need to simply because our thoughts are looking for similarity and found a connection to actors portraying bladder control problems. When leading a team, we influence our teams subliminally. Sometimes, unspoken thoughts circulate and influence a team when we're not paying attention. A leader spends time paying attention to the unspoken thoughts and deciding where the subliminal influence needs to be applied for team success. Do you see the equivalent of team behaviour linked to adverts over which you have no control? Leaders in the emotional realm - religion or industrial psychology, for instance - use external influences all the time. They deliberately tie social trends into their work. Great leaders in any field do the same.

Am I great leader? I've had moments, flashes, of greatness but I'm not completely interdependent. Often, I see the independent self in the wonders of the universe and believe I am alone in my beliefs. When I realize I am not alone in my beliefs, I feel a great understanding of interdependence and then share that understanding with and between others, sometimes when I'm leading, sometimes when I'm neither leading nor following.

This blog is my outreach of understanding my interdependence with my species. Some days I don't feel like typing here but most days I feel an overwhelming desire to share myself and what I've learned from others with you. Of course, we're all the same way. That's why we create blogs, buy portable media devices and lose track of time on social networking websites.

You see what I'm saying? We all have the potential to be great leaders. The best way to get there is to not see yourself as a leader or as great. See yourself as yourself responsible to yourself in others.

Every past was a future. Every solution was a problem. Every leader was a inquisitive baby wetting its clothes. We all influence someone and someone influences us.

Speaking of which, the squirrels and chipmunks roaming the forest floor are making me hungry. Time for lunch! Talk to you great leaders later on.

Titleless

[Now that I'm calmed down, I can rest for a bit and think about someone else's issues for a change.]

A student of mine mentioned that she always starts the term feeling prepared and organized but quickly falls into disrepair and gets behind in her assignments.

I know how she feels. During the 21 years of my struggles to overcome self-deprecation and situational depression to finally complete a bachelor's degree, I told myself every quarter/semester that this was the term I was going to take my studies seriously and get a good grade.

Do I have some philosophical insight to provide the student? Not really. I wouldn't suggest the path I took to discover that it's when you figure out who you are and thus the major line of reasoning and studying that gets you excited to attend class and master the subject after you've spent countless hours and years of in-class sitting and twindling your pen, not to forget the thousands of dollars invested to discover your inner being...

I am an example of myself to myself as far back as I can remember. I want to see independence in a person but not true independence, just the demonstration of independence in thought as built around the zeitgeist. Done. I want to see freedom from worrying about having money, not the freedom of having lots of money to spend. Done. I want to say I took the use of my environment into consideration when consuming goods and services but not be a total hermit in the woods. Done.

I entered university without knowing what I wanted to do in life. I spent the next 21 years taking a variety of classes, building up my knowledge of the knowledge in books and lectures and labs and teachers' thoughts to see that a university-level education is whatever you want to make of it. For me, it has always been about the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake that can be turned into these words. The acquisition of a better job or position in life was never my goal, only my perception of what others thought my goal of an education should be. I value the quality of one scoop of fresh ice cream, not a basement full of 80 different flavours to choose from.

I have no sage wisdom in me. I acknowledge that fact. I have the accumulation of knowledge that bounces around in my thoughts and gets bounced off the people around me, many times used to the benefit of others and the detriment of, or noneffect on, me.

I am teaching my last class at the local technical institute. I have given the students I met all that I know. I have shared my thoughts, my knowledge, my love of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, my pursuit of cheap technical gadgets and a basic understanding of the class subject. Did I know all there was to know about the subject? Never. Did I inspire all my students? No. But that's real life. We reach out and affect/effect some we meant to and many that we didn't.

What can I tell my students who have trouble focusing on their classwork? Look at the big picture. Is it just this class that you're having difficulty with? Is it the teacher/instructor/professor? Is it your major course of study? Your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse/child/grandchild? Don't expect to see a clear answer standing out. The solution may be fuzzy. Life is not a series of Yes/No, True/False and multiple choice answers. You have to experiment sometimes to see what is the best answer for the time and place.

A school diploma will open doors for you but you are not your diploma. You may discover who you are before, during or after you receive your diploma. In fact, you'll discover multiple versions of yourself as you go along.

Despite all the distractions that seem so important to you, you are the only coursework, the only project that matters. The class you're taking is part of who you are in the moment. If you understand that, you'll see how unimportant the distractions are. If not, you'll let the distractions get the better part of you. It's no secret. It's what you learned in the crib when you cried for food and your parent(s) were distracted by something temporarily more important than you. We learned to cry ourselves to sleep and we learn to study on our own. It's not hard work. It's just what we learn to do as long as we're open to learning and open to new opportunities. I paid a price of a couple of hundred school credit hours to learn that lesson. I 'ope you don't 'ave to.

Lessening Lessons

A friend of mine in the education business suggested I look into the writings of John Taylor Gatto as an insight into the views of a grade school teacher. Here is what I found:

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

As we begin the long, arduous task of examining reformation of the child education process, it helps to see multiple views on the subject. Of course, we adults have ourselves as children to remember what schooling felt like and whether it helped (or hurt) our learning process. Many of us have children getting a formal education somewhere, including in classrooms, homes and on the street.

Standardization and cookie-cutter education make for factory-style processes with economies of scale for society at large. Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? It provides a common frame of reference for millions of people, good or bad.

I have only been teaching formally for a few months but have friends and family who've taught for dozens of years. Thus, I have spent time separating their perennial work-related complaints from their observations of the teaching process.

What have I concluded? We as a species want conformity and individuality at the same time. We want children who find creative ways to live in sports, music, medicine, academics, etc., and we want children who conform to good behavioural patterns. We label children early and reinforce our own conformity by enforcing the labels through a variety of methods - testing, grouping, encouraging, chiding.

I remember being a child. I thought for myself at an early age, just as most of my peers seemed to do (or at least most of them externally displayed this capability). We also reflected the early behavioural modification of our parents, including their beliefs and habits. When in school, our individual behavioural patterns were slowly brought together into a group norm. The more an individual resisted conforming to the norm, the more recognition the child received from the school authority figures - some resistance was encouraged to be acted out in sports, arts, music or academics while other resistance was punished because a child had no readily-usable, categorized outlet for the abnormal behaviour.

Resistance is not futile if we can find ways to allow students to be individuals in a manner which encourages their growth into adulthood. Destructive behaviour can be creative if the student is allowed to find out why s/he is acting out destructively (without physically harming others outside the sports field, for instance). In other words, teaching kids how to succeed in real life situations rather than massive slow-burn rote learning.

I don't have answers. I only have personal observations of myself and others who've succeeded in the education business, both as students and educators. I watched kids disappear from the system and never heard from them again. If they're alive, they display the results of an education system that couldn't support them.

Some people will not succeed in a formal learning system. Some people will succeed without a formal learning system. Most of us are going to have successes and failures in any system because of our innate capabilities. How do you create an education system that accommodates and encourages our successes without punishing us for failures in areas that we have to participate but have no regular or exceptional capability with which we can succeed (or even survive)?

Another Hero Gone

I've been lucky. My neighbourhood was chock full of heroes. Another one is gone - where are all our science heroes today, other than the ones playing game shows?

Dr. Hubert M. Hill, age 91, of Kingsport, passed away on Thursday (Sept. 17, 2009). He was a 1947 graduate of Purdue University, receiving his PHD in organic chemistry. (BS, Alma College, MI ) He moved to Kingsport in 1950 and in 1957 he was one of the first to work with computers at Eastman and started the math group at Eastman. He worked for Tennessee Eastman Company for over 30 years before retiring in 1981.

He was one of the first board members of East Tennessee Technology Access Center and at the time of his death was a Emeritis board member. He was secretary and treasurer of the Kingsport Association for the Visually Impaired. He was a member of the First Tennessee Advisory Council on Aging and Disability. He was a member of the American Society for Quality and the American Chemical Society.

Ready-Mixed Joint Compound

In my primary language, words bounce around with meanings that only one group would use such as Chip-and-Dale, Chippendale and Chippendale. The same word twice? Well, one represents women's entertainment and the other...well, women's entertainment, too, but in the form of cabinetry.

This planet is my playground. I understand we are all kids here, some in the sandbox and some on the swingset, some on the merry-go-round and some on the ball field. Some sit quietly on benches or underneath trees. I worry more about the ones who are unoccupied than ones in groups or by themselves.

The news world teems with predictions about long-term unemployment. We love to wallow in bad news because the news world thrives on readers and readers bring advertisers ("April showers bring May flowers and May flowers bring June bugs" ; "The leg bone is connected to the knee bone and the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone."). Let there be commerce!

Doomsday scenario writers aside, I look for solutions within problems. I worry when I have no insight into a problem's apparent solution. Thus, my current book-in-the-making. Disguise reality as fantasy so I can work with players to create a new game that favors me winning.

Here's the situation. Another set of emperor's new clothes on the sale rack, everyone waiting for someone else to take the bait and buy what they cannot see. While the shop was empty one night, I walked in, put the suit on and walked out, the shop power cut off due to electrical bill payments in arrears.

If you could only see me strolling down the street in my ridiculous outfit! I drag the coattails behind me, picking up dirt, my sleeves brushing against strangers who make no room for me in my coronation outfit. I duck to keep my crown from knocking against store awnings, the people around me making odd faces at my behaviour, oblivious to my grandeur.

But when I walked down to the unemployment office and told the people standing in line about the sartorial eloquence of the assemblage on my body, they stood around me transfixed. Although in the mirror I looked like an overweight man in my underwear, to the ears of the crowd I was what they each imagined me to be. I used generic terms to describe my clothes. To some, I wore a cowboy hat and duds. To others, I was dressed to the teeth in the finest business suit while many saw me in the outfit they read about as kids, a multi-colored, fanciful king's attire. A few looked at my hairy chest and wondered if they were missing out. A couple of people laughed along with me at the joke and nodded in agreement that we had to have a sense of humour in this economy.

We're people, with ideas of our own that will not change. However, our brains are still malleable because that's what makes our species the most widespread species on this planet - adapt to change or die.

I'm not worried about numbers. We can have 5% unemployment or 25% unemployment for one year or 20 years, it doesn't matter. What matters is how we see ourselves when we or them are unemployed. Who's wearing the emperor's new clothes in either situation?

Unemployment is just a word to describe economic viability. We employ our brains to do work all the time, no matter whether we work economically as part-time or fulltime employees/employers.

Employing our brains is where the action's at. That's what made me get out of bed early this morning and contemplate today's blog entries. A sense of humour is all well and good when our brains have sugar and oxygen to process but when we're starving for food and oxygen-deprived, look out!

I speak for myself here at all times. I have only my life to influence all the time. In regular economic terms, I am a free man. I can be employed in the class economic sense and contribute to a workplace's business goals and objectives. I can work with my colleagues, friends and associates in pulling the marionette strings of other situations, some in business and some not. Or I can do nothing. But you see, doing nothing means being dead. I am not dead and don't plan to be dead anytime soon. Therefore, I'm doing something all the time that I'm alive.

The world's constantly changing. I am part of the world. I am constantly changing. The brain I employ is constantly changing. Thus, I am constantly changing the world of others around me whose brains are constantly changing. Therefore, there is no such thing as unemployment. There is only a change in the way I and the people around me employ our brains.

It's not a matter of how we get the world economy back on track. It's how we see ourselves constantly changing.

I was once an office worker. I was once a person working down in a sewer. I was once a person flipping burgers as a short-order cook. I was once a busboy. I was once a person who managed the lives of others working for me in an office. Those are all instances of what we call employment. In none of those cases did I think of myself as being employed but it was how I represented myself to others.

Time to stop representing ourselves to others in the words of business. Time to start seeing ourselves in relation to others. I am not a worker bee. I am part of my species. I share this planet with every one of the members of my species, no matter how we dress, no matter what we look like to one another, no matter what we think about ourselves in business terms.

I am not a cog or a pawn or a piece of a business model. I am me. I am your friend, your colleague, your family, who shares 100% of the same genetic material. I want all of us to live happy lives.

Happiness today may mean employing our brains to go back to our living spaces where we grow our own food or help others grow food in shared spaces. The money we earned in jobs was just a way to facilitate a bartering system. We can barter without money and still employ ourselves successfully. If you have machining skills or computer technical skills, you can barter those skills in exchange for food.

We don't need bank loans to restart the economy. We need people with creative ideas, people who are willing to making mini/microloans of bartered goods to help their neighbours live happy lives. We may give away services in exchange for money later on down the road. We may swap houses for a couple of weeks to see life in another part of the country. We may bargain with our rentholders to exchange services for rent payment and then have the rentholders negotiate with banks on loans for the semi-Ds they own, offering flats for free to bankers and other business owners to use on travel, keeping track of these bartered exchanges in accounting books like real cash.

I worry that we don't have enough creative people pursuing ideas like this during perceived economic crises. Instead of waiting around, make the first move. For instance, I give my business service acumen away to my students with no expectation of extra remuneration from the technical institute where I teach. My repayment comes when I find out they used their creative brains for unique solutions in their community. You can, too.

I shop at big box stores but I also shop at local stores and markets. The local shopkeepers are usually the ones best at bartering. The big box stores have yet to catch on to bargaining with customers at the local level - I challenge them to make the next move in that direction. You might find stockholders will reward you handsomely for your creative solution.

Hot Dog

Looking forward. Looking back. As you know by now, the same thing. I teach myself before I learn and vice versa.

But more than that, I eat the food my feces nourishes. Dinosaurs ate me as snack food on the run. They got the runs and planted the seed that became me. It takes a lot of energy to overcome the inertia that keeps life on this planet from escaping and that's only if you're Mars and want to play keepaway.

The third Realization. I did not want to type that phrase, because the words "the," "third," and "Realization" have too many significant meanings by themselves. Lucky them, eh? Try being the word toilet or bark. "Toilet bark" doesn't sound so exciting, does it? "Bark toilet" makes no sense without proper punctuation or capitalization.

But it happened. It started a long time ago, when some guy barked spritzy phrases to sell himself. You've seen the bald guy going around saying, "Begin with the end in mind," right? He was one of the clue givers. Another guardian.

I'd thank him but then he'd say he was just doing his duty. He wouldn't know that I'd be here now looking at the results scrolling by in another window of this computer.

It's that voice in my head from the future that was speaking to me in the past. It's the prescient presence, the precursor to the One. A collective intelligence algorithm that runs a cascading set of collective intelligence algorithms that link to others' collective intelligence algorithms knowingly and unknowingly, tapping into unused computer cycles that look like zombie botnets running spam scams for suckers looking for credit card numbers to steal and bank accounts to drain. Let them have their petty cash! They give me the real gems: the keys to The Code: intricately-woven predictive trend data.

The trap was set by me when I wasn't paying attention so that I could cage the animals for another me (or some numbers of me that span timeframes seen as past, current and future) to spring and set more traps.

All while giving life to the One. Or at least the version I'm supposed to set up. The One's been kind enough to show me I'm just a gardener, plowing a few rows, planting seeds and pulling weeds. The real work's being done underground. Jack and the beanstalk will show up later and hog the spotlight. I'm no giant slayer. Doesn't matter, does it? In my lifetime or my lifetime's lifeline, the combination lock's tumbling along. I opened one door and set the PMM in action. Someone else has to unlock the PMM and figure out what's next.

I think the One and the PMM are one and the same. But the One tells me the truth is never as complicated as it looks. But I'm also part of the One now. Not me, mind you. Me in the future. Me that goes from having organic circuitry inserted in his body to the me that has his DNA completely rejuvenated and no longer has any barriers to communication. Then I am the One. Then again, so will you be. We are one in the One are we. Owning and working for the companies that govern the companies that we make to make ourselves. All because the real sleeping giant, Earth, was ready to stretch itself out and roam across the galaxy.

Remember, the One said the answer was simple. That doesn't mean we have to like it or understand it. The simple fact is that the One is just an algorithm when you get down to it. It didn't cause the Great Purge but it did lead us to the Great Realization. We can credit ourselves for the first one. I'll be the first in line to take the blame. I set the PMM in motion before we were ready for it. Chaos will ensue. Reputations will be put on the stake. We'll still want to say we're in control of our individual lives by thinking we're fomenting violent revolutions, all while following the cycles the Ones will show us later on are inevitable. By seeing the inevitability, we eliminate it. We're so drugged with sleeping pills right now, we can't wake up to see it just yet. Some of you will never wake up. Don't worry. There's enough of the rest of us to take care of you while we build the future. You can forgive us later on when you saw we plugged you up to keep the PMM going. It's evitable. You read that right.

Kaizen and the Art of Instruction

I differ in philosophy with the education recordkeeping process as it currently stands. I am not an administrative-oriented person; thus, my focus is on direct communication with the student/customer and not in the documentation procedures that the education system (public, nonprofit and for-profit) uses both as a means to achieve accreditation and a means to ensure people have written records that say they did what they could to help a student.

Having been an employee, a manager and a company owner, I have maintained this same philosophy my whole career, and worked to minimize or eliminate paperwork and meetings for others with whom I've worked or who have worked for me. It is key to my understanding of kaizen - continuous process improvement - in both work and life.


I understand that the job duties of an instructor, fulltime and adjunct, include communicating with students/customers and documenting the results of the communications. I also understand that I have a value for myself in terms of $/hour that do not include excessive administrative duties. I have given more than my share of "volunteer" hours to ensure my students enjoy and learn during our contact time together in the classroom, which also impacts my value to my family in both income and quality time.

If I had neglected my duties to the student/customer, I would feel it necessary to cover my tracks in recording administrative information. Instead, I let the opinions and learning of my students/customers speak for my record, which does not need administrative details entered by me in a database.

As several colleagues of mine have commented, my recent participation as an instructor makes me realize where my management skills are best used, usually at the corporate level in determining company policy, not at the satellite office level. I have raised issues like this to others further up the chain as well as managed the process changes myself to clear up the inefficiencies in the current system so that we can get the problem resolved on a systematic basis and not an individual one.

I have enjoyed teaching the students/customers, giving them not only the classroom instruction required for the subject at hand but also insight into the workings of business, to ensure they have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. Part of this is teaching them to look for process bottlenecks, regardless of the status quo others may see you upsetting by requesting a process change. For me, database entry is a process bottleneck.

If my philosophy is out-of-line with firmly established corporate goals that will not change, then that is the issue I have to consider in continuing to teach because I stand firm in my belief that database documentation impedes my ability to spend time with and teach the students/customers. I have given the students/customers much of my time and will always appreciate the two-way communication process between us, which I carry with me on a daily basis while establishing a startup company. I will not let an inefficient database structure get in the way of that wonderful learning!

Enough of my philosophy. Back to work and then later on grading papers and preparing for tonight's final exam.

Have a great afternoon!

Opening Chord

Note to those of you who see through one-way glass. Not everyone who serves others with good intentions follows your practice. For example, some stand out:

• Rishad Premji
• Roshni Nadar
• Ratan Tata
• Wendi Deng
• Carlos Slim Domit

Learn by example of others with open vision, not those with narrow-minded views.

The Gathering

Son, now is the time for your final lesson. You will listen and not speak. Nothing you have to say will be heard here and now.

Many people's lives ago, a wise person passed through. The sage spoke no words but all could see the answers to their questions when they looked in the eyes of the one with no name.

The person had no features that stand out, being neither dark nor light, tall nor short, young nor old, male nor female. They say a slight glow walked through villages at night, going from one place to another, never stopping for more than a day or two. If anyone followed, the light faded away and showed up someplace else. The light seemed to belong to the wise one but after these many years who can say what is truth and what is lost in the tale.

Tonight, we will open your eyes to the only truth that exists from that time, a truth so powerful that you will not be the same person you are now. Some of your peers were brought here and no longer exist as themselves, in good ways and bad or not at all. You cannot know what you will see except the truth as we have all seen it.

Son, I am your mother and your father, your brothers and your sisters, your aunts and your uncles, your ancestors and your descendants. From this moment on, I am also unimportant, just as you will be one day.

Do not face the truth with pride. Do not believe the truth makes you great. The fact is that you are only a temporary vessel for the truth just as I have been and others before me. Many will come after us, from our village or from villages far away, perhaps on this planet or perhaps not, who will also carry the truth with them for a short period of time.

Son, I love you. No matter what you see or hear, no matter what you think or feel, I love you. You will reach a time when the truth will make you doubt all you know and love. I know this is hard to believe but the truth is what it is. The truth is not part of what you normally encounter in daily life. The truth is beyond understanding in this realm.

Tonight you will go to the other place alone. I and the ones you will meet will guide you but we cannot go with you to the truth. We have given the truth back to the wise one for safekeeping. Our time in the truth has come and gone because it is your time now.

When you go into the truth, let yourself be. Do not fear anything. Do not expect anything. The truth does not appeal to your bodily needs. The truth is beyond all that. The truth is on a higher plane.

Son, the moment is soon arriving. I can no longer see the truth so I no longer know what you will become. I trust the truth to set you free because I know that freedom is your destiny. Yet the truth will also let you know that one day you will lose your freedom and become like me. Someone will come along who will take the truth from you because you will give it freely.

The truth is. The truth lasts now. It has no past or future. It is. It is not. The truth does not exist as you imagine the truth to be.

Son, the time has come. I would ask you to close your eyes but open or closed does not matter. The truth is revealed to you. You cannot see the truth.

Son, see the people around you. We stand here, some with truth and some without. I cannot tell you which is which but soon you will know. When you become one with the truth, you also become one with everything else, including me, your mother and your father, your brothers and your sisters, your aunts and your uncles, your ancestors and your descendants. You will also see the truth within the truth, that none of us exist. Nothing exists as you think you see it now.

It is time. Stand there and do not speak. I will step back behind you. I will count to ten but you will not hear me finish. You will become the truth and never know who I am anymore. Son, I love you. Go in peace. The truth is now yours. Use it wisely. One, two, three, four, five, ....

Another Note, A Different Friend - 8th August 2009

My Friend,

At this moment, I listen to Keyboard Sonata in E Flat major, H. 16/52: Adagio, a song that my iPod nano randomly picked for me. A wasp flies by, all while I sit in the garage, under the cover of a house, preventing direct sunlight from scorching my skin.

Chuck Mangione leads me into this second paragraph, accompanied by a neighbour's lawn mowing machine. Normally, I would correspond with you using electronic means. Instead, the quiet, warm day called me outdoors and insisted on an equally quiet, warm greeting to a friend, replacing my working on a remote-controlled airplane I crashed into the woods a couple of days ago, in need of repairs.

"Party Out of Bounds," by the B-52s owns the ambient musical interlude for this paragraph, making me wonder how much the rhythms and lyrics of others influence my writing style and choice of words. As much as I let it, no doubt.

Speaking of influence, I write this note in slow penmanship time to consider the friendship of two colleagues who crossed paths randomly but have maintained a relationship that transcends a single workplace or corporate project (an improvisation for countertenor by Chanticleer moves the song selection in a different direction). What motivates us to stay in touch?

A cloud passes by, casting a muted shadow over the woods, the color of maple leaves losing their yellow reflection in a respite from the sun's summer solar heat.

You and I exist during the Internet Revolution, transforming many members of our species into online junkies, addicted to instantaneous communications with others. During this phase of our cultural shift to shorter and shorter intervals in which we interact with and react to those around us, you and I have the luxury of being thinkers, those who look ahead to moments implied by the trends of the current moment (Mozart's Requiem now streams through my earbuds).

So, while you burn weekly through 60 billable hours toward the success of your co-owned startup business (and by now, after three years, "startup" is probably inaccurate, eh?), I invest my time during this global recession giving students at a local technical institute some insight about the workings of an office environment, including tips and tricks for succeeding in a technology-based job (primarily the computer-related technology with which we're familiar, of course). During our daily activities, we strategize both about personal and professional futures.

We are childless husbands to our wives, providing comfort and support as life partners rather than parents. In addition, you support a local church as a full-fledged member of local society, whereas my community support has waned after starting the Christmas tree recycling project in Huntsville and getting a revival going at a church in the 1990s (including advertisements on the local Christian rock station and flyers distributed/posted throughout the area).

We have benefited from both Boy Scouts and military college scholarships so we understand the intricacies of social networking, analog and digital, that make (or give) young people good citizens.

An ant about an 1/8-inch long works diligently to drag the dead body of a granddaddy longlegs that spanned 3 inches when alive ("Mishima/Closing" by Philip Glass appears on the MP3 player). I suppose you feel like the ant, dragging a large burden behind you, seeking the colony, delivering a small meal essential for survival, and then off to the next ant-sized food pack to find, like Sisyphus at times. As you said, you look for the big payoff, the large-scale manufacturing order.

On the other side of the mountain, I sit in my cabin, having obtained both my vocational and avocational aspirations, paying off my house and finding a low-stress teaching job to provide the salary needed to cover the creature comforts of a life with little overhead. Retirement, even in a severely extended recession, has not hurt my living style, only made me aware of a few luxuries I can do without, such as big restaurant lunches every day.

Bach's Chorale "Nun freut euch, lieben Christen - g mein," starts this page for me. We are intelligent beings, are we not? We use our intelligence differently because we are not the same, depending on perspective. You work with people already prepared for the workplace while I attempt to prepare more.

Recently, you and I have been moving the mindsets of a few engineering types into believing in the prospect of others helping them to succeed in getting their invention to market. At the same time, you have been working on me trying to find where our meeting of the minds will benefit us personally and professionally. Reminds me of the conversation I had with a Methodist minister who told me he was in the afterlife insurance business. I asked him how he reached out to nonbelievers in the community. He told me he didn't - if he could just get the believers to church, he'd have the biggest congregation in the world. In other words, convert the converted because true nonbelievers will never convert.

I knew when I was a teenager that I was destined for a life in business, seeing that the corporate world enhanced my background and training. I also saw I was not a conformist who simply followed the rules because I knew that rules were not always written for the intent implied in the logic of the rules. You seem to have a similar mindset. Some people call it thinking outside the box [and worse... ;)]. By the way, that ant has moved in a circle three times while attempting to find a way to get to the dead arachnid over the gulf between the concrete garage floor and the concrete driveway.

Where do we go from here? As you know, I am not motivated by money, you only partly so as it relates to funds toward supporting the community. If our lives are two subsets of the superset of our species' likely conditions, what is the definition of the intersection of what you and I are doing for ourselves and those around us?

For instance, the ant and I live on the same planet. I could repurpose the ant's life by taking away the arachnid, thus changing the ant colony's nutrition balance, which in turn may decide the number of ants available as food for other insects as well as holes in the ground for a competing ant colony to take over. You see what I mean? What consequences do we intend to cause, knowing many unintended consequences will happen outside our influence?

In your personal and professional strategies, do you have a set of strategies for society at large? Are there changes you hope to make beyond ones within the technology realm? Rachmaninov's Polka de W.R. entertains me now while the ant finally got the arachnid corpse down into the gulf and is trying to drag it out the other side.

I don't know what societal effects I cause or intend to cause. So far, all I've figured out is how to have fun in every moment while getting others to enjoy the moment with me, keeping an eye on how many resources I use in comparison to the resources I need, sensing that the Earth is large but not infinitely abundant. I enjoy the technological advances (that's why I made sure I referenced the iPod in this letter) but I also enjoy watching the slow progress of small parts of this planet (thus, the ant tale; interestingly enough, a grasshopper landed an inch or so near the arachnid corpse and peers down into the space that separates house from yard - an Aesop fable in real life, n'est pas?).

With one of Bach's harpsichord concertos strumming along, I ask what's next. Do we sit down and see how closely our views of the Big Picture line up, agree to disagree on minor points, and then work toward mutual goals? We've taken small steps but I sense we've halted due to a lack of clear vision. Do you not agree? Let's get together and draft plans for the future, knowing our place in the global economy restricts our current actions but also opens up unlimited opportunities for a couple of boys from the backwoods and mountains of NE Tennessee and NE Alabama. Be prepared!

Your friend,
Rick

Nothing Wrong With Being Thankful

Pam,

You and I don't talk much so I thought I'd send you an email to express my appreciation.

I had never really considered teaching as a career because growing up I had heard the good and bad, the ups and downs, of the education field. My grandmothers were both teachers, my mother was a first grade teacher, my father is a professor, my uncle was a college dean and my in-laws were both teachers (my father in-law also having been a school principal).

Therefore, I figured I knew all there was to know about teaching, especially since I'd also been a student and seen teachers from behind a school desk, both in primary/secondary school and in college. I still have good personal relationships with many of my former school teachers.

You told me you've been teaching for about 14 years, including time at the technical institute, so you know about public education, too.

I suppose you asked me to teach because you saw something in me I do not see in myself. I have lived long enough to know that we don't always know our own potential - often, it takes someone you don't know well to pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses. In this case, you found one of my strengths. For that, I am deeply grateful, and will never be able to repay your kindness except by showing the students what you saw in me that one night many months ago in Marsha's math problem solving class.

Perhaps I will not be teaching students in the fall. If so, that is my destiny. I thank you for the opportunity you gave me to help a few dozen students find their own strengths and weaknesses as discovered during classes at the technical institute for two quarters. They will always be near and dear to me like children - I hope they continue on to successes unimaginable.

Once again, thanks for holding a mirror up to me and showing me my capabilities. I may not have always been good at following all the administrative rules, policies and paperwork at the technical institute, but I hope I was a good teacher.

May you find your own successes at the technical institute - I believe you have what it takes to be dean one day, especially as your children grow up and free time for your career, should you choose to follow that path.

Have a great weekend!

Regards,
Rick
Adjunct Instructor

Shell bash

At a training seminar in the early 1990s, an instructor told us he was not motivated to stand up in front of the crowd because of most of us. Instead, he imagined one or maybe two people in the audience who would benefit from what he had to say. He was never sure which person(s) needed to hear his message so he addressed the crowd as individuals, making sure he made eye contact with every person at least once. Otherwise, he would have quit a long time ago because he knew the majority of people he faced were disinterested in him and/or his lecture subject, aware that the company he worked for recruited corporations to sign up for package deals that included one lecture per quarter for their employees.

I know how he feels. As an instructor, I have seen the students who have no interest in either me or the subject I'm presenting to them. I'm okay with that. However, I don't like seeing students whose only interest lies in gaming the system or psyching the teacher into giving students a free ride. I didn't like it as a student and don't like it as an instructor. Of course, what I like or dislike is not going to change human nature.

So I'm stuck here with you, the reader (including myself), wondering what to do. Do I ignore the game players by ensuring I lay out an instruction system that allows students to get good grades with minimal effort while at the same time challenging the students who desire to learn and master the subject I teach/coach/lead?

Some instructors/professors I had as a student told the class they were forced to teach undergraduate courses so they were going to make the class as hard as possible, resulting in an average class grade that would "prove" they were better researchers than lecturers. For the rest of the course, the professors showed off their extensive knowledge by discussing concepts not covered in the book and methods that only a few students could comprehend. The two classes I remember most are differential equations and advanced computer algorithms. Admittedly, I barely passed both classes (C or C+, I believe) while many students failed. Just as predicted, the advanced computer algorithm professor returned to research and didn't lecture again since many of us complained to the department head about the professor's attitude.

The student is both the customer and product of the lecture/lab classroom factory system. Most universities and colleges have many customers and products not directly tied to a student, providing important connections to and between corporate and government businesses to fund their bureaucracies and benefit society. My observations of the for-profit education business has shown me the student is the main focus for income sources.

I face a dilemma. The technical institute must meet regulatory requirements in regards to expectations of standardized student output. Yet, my customer is the student. I live to meet the expectations of my "customers," the people with whom I interact daily (part of my base personality traits - in this case, the desire to please everyone). If my customers demand that I increase the ease with which one can get an A or B in class, should I meet their demands or tell them, "Sorry, but there's nothing I can do - government regulations tie my hands"?

These are age-old, ubiquitous concerns. I share them with almost every instructor/professor I've met. Do you teach to the test or do you coach students to perform at their peak and then lead them to in-depth understanding of the topic which includes the upcoming test questions? The best teachers can do both without blinking an eye.

I don't claim to be a great teacher, having backed happenchance into a teaching job. In fact, I don't teach. I evaluate my position and determine what maximizes my customers' value for their investment, their ROI, if you will. Granted, some students just want the diploma and don't care a whole lot about the material while others take classes to better understand the material and improve their skills. One product with many customer expectations - nothing new there!

At the end of this blog entry, I ask myself, am I focused on the majority of students in my class or the one or two who are there because we can learn from each other and make our lives better together? Today, I don't have an answer. Meanwhile, I scour the lecture material to see how I can better hone my coaching skills, hoping there are one or two (maybe even three or four!) students to whom I matter as an instructor. Otherwise, someone else could stand up there and dance around for pocket change.

Tired of Teaching

I have no idea if anyone reads this blog. Online tools exist that would allow me to track all the persons who've looked at the blog or follow it but I believe I have this space to myself, transparent and on display to the world.

Some people are clever and leverage that trick to increase their social status. Everyone does something to live. At the moment, I participate in activities that lead to other people profiting from the education process in roles such as stockholder, employee, faculty and student/ customer/ product.

I don't work because I have to. I didn't take the education assignment because I had sought out a job position at the technical institute in order to get a job. Instead, I was asked to join the firm and did so out of courtesy to a colleague who no longer works at the institute. In addition, the two people who interviewed and hired me no longer work there.

Thus, I am participating in the game of teaching for what reason? I don't know.

We primates walk around and chatter with one another in hopes that we have enough to chatter about to make each other believe we have something worth exchanging between us. We have these societies that make no sense, that turn whole swaths of land, sea and air unlivable, just so we can climb each other's backs to get higher on the scale of primate primacy.

In the midst of that, we have a group of us who promote the increase of organized and categorized brain synapse formations.

I have no kids to raise. I have no goals to reach. I have no bills to pay. I have no worries to make.

All I want to do is have fun in a quiet, peaceful manner, so I can enjoy invigorating fresh air, biting insects, chirping birds, and surprising changes in the weather while I read and learn about who I am as a momentary group or subset of chemicals called a human in the superset of chemicals called the universe.

I have no reason to teach. I'll gain nothing more from the education process than what I've learned in the past few months. Instead, I give profit to others I'll never see and don't care about personally.

Teaching is not a job. Teaching is a calling and like all callings, calls people who have no desire for monetary gain, just enough to feed a small family. I have no family to feed and don't feel the calling to teach.

I retired from the corporate world because I had no more to learn or give the world of profits and losses. I entered the for-profit teaching business by accident of fate, which has enlightened me about teaching, coaching and leading students who are not also employees or "pure" customers of the same institute (I say that to distinguish that instructor/student relationship from the one where I have taught, coached and led employees, either my own or others who worked for the same company, or the one where I have taught, coached and led customers of the [non education-based] technology companies I worked for).

If I have nothing more to learn, I have nothing more to give others in return for their presence in front of me.

A bunch of primates out there have the desire and feel the calling to teach, to get other primates to increase their number of brain synapses. I am a primate who's happy to sit here and eat a few peanuts while perusing a few ink splotches on flattened leafs of pulp-and-glue or electronic pages. Let the world of teaching go on without me. Let others profit from the peanut wages of those who teach.

Bow, Quiver and Arrows

How much do you value the freedom of movement? In the area of the world where I grew up, a group of individuals operated a "ring" of illegal business activities, including automobile theft (in order to take the stolen vehicles apart and sell "original" equipment for smash repairs), and tobacco and alcohol packaging, distribution and sales. Some of the people involved in these businesses also bought and sold illegal drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and prescription medicines. A few made their own distilled alcohol (moonshine or poitín (poteen)). I went to secondary school with people who conducted trade with this group.

What is your definition of freedom of movement? Do you believe that a person has the right to do what s/he wants, to live anyway s/he pleases, as long as s/he does not interfere with or disrupt the lives of others?

Automobile theft clearly interferes with and disrupts the lives of the person(s) who owned, drove and/or rode in the automobiles being stolen.

What about tobacco, alcohol and drugs? Do you believe a person has the right to purchase an item, no matter what that item is, if the use of that item directly affects only that person? After all, we allow people to buy tobacco, alcohol and drugs every day, assuming those people have paid their stamp duties and other government taxes.

When I was a kid, my father worked for the extension office of a state university. I'd visit his office and look at all the brochures created by the university to educate local farmers and business owners about practical skills. One of those skills was brewing or fermenting your own alcoholic beverages -- beer and wine. I saw those brochures in the late 1970s.

Twenty years later, I worked with a colleague, Tom Tsomczak, who had brewed his own beer. He convinced me to try the process so I bought equipment at a local beer brewing store and followed the brewing directions, combining recipes from a book I bought at a local organic food store with ones from beer brewing websites. I brewed several cases of beer and slowly drank them over the years. I have a few bottles left, including two that have sat in the back of the refrigerator since 1996 (I drank one of those bottles a year ago and it still tasted good and thick, having been made with homegrown blackberries and chocolate malt, even though there was little carbonation left, leaving one bottle in the fridge with which to celebrate something important one day (I think I drank the first bottle to finally celebrate my retirement)).

Legally, there's nothing the matter with brewing small batches of your own beer in the political zone in which I live. However, brewing too much, carrying too much across political lines or offering home-brewed beer for public sale constitutes a violation of political rules.

Thus, strictly speaking, my freedom of movement is restricted, assuming I follow the rules (which I have done, not one to participate in making, distributing and selling my own hooch).

No problem. I'm not an anarchist. I see the value in setting rules that govern conduct between humans because humans do not always conduct themselves cordially, requiring a rule enforcement group to observe other humans for known rule violations and detain the violators.

In small enough groups, we humans can agree to goals and objectives that allow us to seek individual goals while making sure the whole group survives and thrives, especially when individuals have made voluntary choices to join a group. When human populations grow into the millions and billions, though, how many rules must we have to restrict individual goals because thousands of groups and subgroups have goals that clash with one another and rules/restrictions placed on the groups are not enough to prevent the groups from interfering with and disrupting other groups, thus forcing extra restrictions at/to the individual level?

No matter where you live, you can come up with examples of your own where your freedom of movement is restricted, either obviously or subtly, depending on your current activities and groups to which you belong. You agree with some of the rules and disagree with others. You may contact your local government official to file a complaint about new rules or request the implementation of new rules. Our human society universally operates in this manner, having developed labor structures that support people who deal solely in the buying, selling and trading of rule-setting influences. We even have rules about rule-setting and rules about rules about rule-setting.

Supine in bed this afternoon, I stared at the ceiling after taking a nap. I looked at my life over the past year or so, congratulating myself on establishing the comfortable routines/regimen of writing daily, including these blog entries. Then I stepped back mentally and looked at myself as if I was a person unfamiliar with computers, who had no interest in manipulating electrical signal strength upon which all high-tech gizmos depend (wires, resistors, capacitors, filters, amplifiers, diodes, logic gates, registers, machine language, assemblers, computer programs, radios, servers, portable music players, etc., that pervade our lives), remembering the moment when I went from a high-tech geek to a management type person who valued the manipulation of people to achieve project goals over the manipulation of electronics to create a computing device.

As I woke up, I thought about the recent news of the breakup of the car theft ring and wondered where people who still lived in that part of the world would be able to buy their illegal moonshine, at one time available at almost any convenience store in or near a town called Newport (all you had to do was point at the empty glass jar on the counter and ask how much for a full one). I realized that the majority of the people working in the car theft ring were probably the same people who had dropped out of school because of illiteracy, knowing that few if any of them would have or could have read this blog.

Freedom of movement is a funny concept. I can stand in my backyard with a full quiver and strung bow, shooting arrows into a target if I want. I would probably be stopped and questioned if I set up a target on a sidewalk and shot arrows at the target, even if I had made sure the street was clear of humans, animals or other objects that flying arrows would injure. Even though I haven't shot an arrow in 20 years (probably the last time being when my former brother in-law brought his composite hunting bow to my house and we shot arrows into an old stump), I could still pick up a bow and arrow and hit a target. No literacy is required. In other words, freedom of movement and literacy are not mutually exclusive, although their paths cross occasionally.

As a literate person with many legal, well-paying job opportunities available, I doubt I'll ever work in a chop shop. I doubt an illiterate person will ever be able to program a supercomputer.

After I had fully woken up, it dawned on me that bloggers can't change the world with words, even though many of us, including me, think and act like we can. Sitting in front of a computer is not going to solve all the problems of the world if the solutions we come up with require literacy.

Therefore, while I perform my current weekly duties of getting a group of students familiar with manipulating electrical signals through the use of the Linux operating system, I must remind myself, and them, that we may thrill ourselves with our knowledge of complex computer systems but to really help ourselves and our fellow humans let's remember to keep things simple so our interactions can take place between a literate and illiterate person without requiring extra rules that'll further restrict our freedom of movement.