Volume/Displacement

After much searching, top-secret astronomers discovered where the future government's time machine ended up.

Turns out that a time machine is a timespace machine, placing the traveler(s) and the machine in the exact location of space where that time occurred, taking into account the expansion of space, the natural movement of galaxies, stars, planets, etc., as well as a previously undiscovered change in subatomic makeup (you know, that whole dark matter/energy thing).

Top-secret medical advisors think this might be a way to cure diseases, by sending people to a different place in timespace (as opposed to the conventional spacetime, a minor difference but significant), rearranging their subatomic structures such that "modern" diseases can't form.

Now, how do we communicate with the timespace travelers and figure out how to tow them back to our spacetime location?

No Fish For Old Men

How can a mushroom identification expert, a person who made a bat dieoff map, a cattle rancher and a crowd of Earth Day celebrants believe what they don't see?  How can they believe what they see?

Sometimes I forget that I'm dealing with regular citizens of the local population.

Especially when my holiday is interrupted for another so-called important message.

Do you know how easy it is to transmit infrared information from one set of sunglasses to another under the shade of nature preserve trees?

I promise you I am unimportant.  I am like the the air you breathe, the gravity that holds you down on the roads you travel and the sunshine you feel.  I am nothing you can hold in your hands and readily see.  Truly, I do not exist.

Yet, all sorts of people want my attention.  My associates.  My colleagues.  Family.  Friends.

There is nothing the matter with being an ordinary anonymous guy living an ordinary life in an ordinary neighbourhood living.  At least I'd like to think so.  Not today, though.

What was the message this time that stopped me from acting like an ordinary citizen on a quiet Saturday called Earth Day?

A secret revelation about a plot to assassinate the leader of a faction dedicated to preserving the revolution?

A merger to end all mergers?

The breakup of a conglomerate's charismatic executive and the executive's cinema superstar spouse?

The design of a superefficient energy production machine made with technology hundreds of years ahead of its time?

The discovery that intelligent extraterrestrial beings steer clear of our solar system because we haven't yet figured out the purpose/nonpurpose of our evolution/intelligent design?

I would accept any or all of those answers to justify a disruption of my inaction.

Instead, what do I get?

I get ... or rather, I got a message that told me billions of people have no idea how to live their lives.

I'm a nice guy.  I like to please everyone I meet.

Why?

Well, because I know that no one, absolutely not one single person, has a clue what life is all about.  I think I've told you this more than once, haven't I?

Someone hasn't read the memorandum detailing the explanation that I'm ahead of most of you on this subject.  In fact, I'm ahead of myself here.  I already know what I'm about to say.

Next time, I'm paying the gravestone carver to cut an email message in granite that says, "Rick does not want to be disturbed while on holiday."

Then, the first person in my organisation who attempts to get my attention while I'm tuned out will receive a giant chunk of rock to the head.

Do you know how many people working as spies and counterspies are looking for a kink in the armour?  They want to report a report up the chain of command that proves opposition spy networks really exist.  Not only that, but they want to show the opposition has a competitive advantage which drives up the cost of spying (HINT: budgetary increase the next year, with big, fat bonuses for everyone!).

Anyway, today's message was a repeat of old information I learned when I was sprawled on my back in the hospital as a newborn!  Pooping in my diapers, no doubt.  And drooling happily.

But that was a message from my network.

It was a message I intercepted from another network that draws me to this computer blog during my two-week holiday from technology.

Have you learned the ways of the mimeograph?  Are you an expert in the mathematical distribution of symbols within a given language?

You see, the average set of text in any language has a probability distribution for every symbol within that set.  Most of us read sets of symbols by words or groups of words. For instance, in the English language we see sentences and paragraphs.  We do not see the number of times the letter "a" or "t" appears on a page.

Today, while absentmindedly meandering through the glen at the Hays Natures Preserve, I noticed a few people evenly spaced apart who were picking up stapled packages of photocopies from vendors.  They caught my attention because they also skipped the exact same set of vendors with photocopies they didn't pick up.  I mentally noted the vendor booths where these people stopped by and then I innocently stopped to talk with vendors and passersby while I picked up the stapled packages of photocopies in the same order as people I saw earlier.

Some of the photocopy collectors were parents.  Some of them were single.  Some young.  Some old.  A well-planned meeting of associates from a rival network.

A few of them I knew but the rest I hadn't seen before.  One of them belongs to my organisation.

Like I said, it's a free world.  We can do what we want when we want how we want where we want.  To what extent is up to you.

I sat down with the photocopies and scanned them into my pattern matching machine, a matrix of ants who move eggs from one cubby hole to another based on the type of fungus data the machine feeds them.

Based on the ants' activity, I have concluded Chinese leaders are giving Tibet a little room to negotiate the appearance of the freedom of secession because the leaders did not move emergency services into Tibet with the best efficiency to secure the lives of their Tibetan citizens after the recent earthquake.  Why Hu and Wen allowed this to happen, I do not know.

To better understand why my rivals would be discussing this among themselves, I stopped at a favourite spot where they leave messages out in the open for one another in the arrangement of "surplus" items at Mike's Merchandise.  Here's what I found, a set of books placed at intervals that matched the distribution of English letters in the photocopies they collected today:

• "Mao's China and the Cold War" by Chen Jian
• "Reclaiming Conservatism" by Mickey Edwards
• "The Color of Our Future" by Farai Chideya
• "America, 1908" by Jim Rasenberger

The message they passed in pages marked in the books indicated their interest in someone named Clegg and the rise of anti-Putin protesters that has a false ring to it.

If my rivals know what I know - that we don't know what we're doing but go forth pretending with strong convictions - then what are they up to?

You understand what I'm saying, don't you?  You see, I have THE Book of the Future whereas they have the Books of the Future.

It's a sort of standoff.  I'm not supposed to have THE Book of the Future.  I'm not the one who has the ultimate set of skills to read the many levels and layers embedded in the pencil shavings I create.  However, I've already opened the book.  It's in my hands.  The book is in my possession and no one wants to take it away from me because they know what the book does to those who see their own futures.

Why do all tales point to the same core storyline?  Why do all civilisations form almost exactly the same hierarchies?

All from all.  None from none.

Any one of you can find one of the Books of the Future lying around.  It might be a hidden spring of cold water in a dense thicket in your neighbourhood forest.  It might be the set of turnstiles at a subway/metro station.  All of those pattern generating formations will tell you what's going to happen in the future ... except for one thing.  They won't tell you your future.

Actually, they will tell you your future.  They'll tell you the future you want to hear/read.

THE Book of the Future tells the possessor only one future.  You will have no future.  You do not exist.  You are anonymous and disappear.

I just wanted to be an average storyteller who entertained a few people along the way.  I was willing to study the history of our people to see the kind of stories that interested readers.

Then, as I've told you, I stumbled upon a few people who saw my storytelling dreams and views of the general ignorance of the population as an invitation to train me in the way of reading the future.

Do I have to tell you what a high pollen count foretells?

Do I have to detail the ripple effect of shifting plate tectonics?

Will you accept a child with three parents as easily as you'll eat the genetically-perfected organism that has a lineage tied to your family - part fish, part plant and part human that has familial body likenesses?

THE Book of the Future is not really a book.  It's not really a computer program.  It's not anything you can put your hands on.  It's the culmination of our social progress feeding upon itself and propagated by a group of people who are trained to keep the self-food-filling propagation moving along automatically and autonomously.  I don't call it prophecy but some do.  I don't call it predestination but some will.  I don't call it inevitable but many see it that way.  It's like magic, only it's not, but neither one of us can tell the difference so it doesn't matter what we call it because it predicts what will happen anyway.

Right now, all I want to do is drink beer and try to fool some fish into setting a metal hook into their jaws.  I don't care about the future.  I don't want to know what's going to happen next.  I'm keeping the book under wraps for a few days.

Your future is happening before you can do anything to stop it.  Oh, sure, some of you will commit suicide and think that you're stopping your future.  Of course, you're wrong.  You're just following orders.  Our species has the odd habit of putting a portion of itself to death in order to preserve the species (now you can see why any extraterrestrial beings would want to steer clear of a specific form of being that has developed a method of exterminating portions of itself willingly instead of seeking to maximise its self-replication at the cost of eliminating other "life" around it - how can you trust a population that hasn't perfected self-interest at both the species and the individual level?).

I'm sure you'll find other ways to get my attention during my holiday.  However, let me reassure you that I know you don't know what's really going on but there are those who do and "have your back," as they say, 24 hours a day (not exactly 24 but you know what I mean).

The last I looked at the future, an island nation will soon have something important to say and a female scientist makes a startling discovery that requires several linked laboratories to verify her test results.

Now, for the last time, leave me alone to be the anonymous person I'm destined to become.  I'm just a guy whose smile disarmed him before he knew what he looked like.  I'm no Buddhist priest or bloodthirsty berserker (I have people to handle those duties).  There will be plenty of time to deal with the politicians, religious leaders, business executives and crime lords who get in the way of a prosperous future.  Give me another week to enjoy the peace and quiet of mosquito bites and lost lures.

Should I use worms, crickets, grasshoppers, chopped shad, hotdogs or dough balls on my next fishing foray?

If you're a vegetarian, don't worry.  More people die on public roadways at the action/inaction of themselves and other people than I've killed and/or eaten fish ... and the world's just as wonderful as it's ever been!

Straw Hat, Fishing Rod and Real Life

Can a man not have a quiet afternoon casting his sinkers and lures into brambles and vines?

I'd just stepped off the cement trail down to the dirt path to find a spot to park my folding chair and tackle box when a "Hi! How ya doing?" barked out of a tree hanging over the river.

Two young men were joining their efforts to extract a rope swing trailing in slow-moving water on a hot spring day, near 85 deg F or thereabouts in north Alabama (Ali Baba, alakazam, alakazoo!).

Growing in the New Balance/Reebok/Redwing tread-stamped trail were spring beauty and starry chickweed, their blooms communicating to me their desire to feed insects in large numbers.

I nodded my John Deere woven head covering at them and found a meadowed spot hundreds of feet downstream of the fellows.

I'm no secret agent or sorcerer.  However, under my employ, men and women compete against one another to provide me resources with which my associates and I can readily exchange information.  The young swimmers up the way were a sign I was supposed to expect an unexpected report.

How old this gets.  I set out the chair, opened the tackle box, found an alluring lure for those lurking ichthyology subjects in the deep pool of water beside a fallen log hosting muck and a much-missed soccer ball, set the top of the pole between the wild grape vine and the water and cast the artificial bait downstream.

That is, I attempted to cast the bait.

Instead, I wrapped the line around the trunk of a small sycamore.

I gently pulled on the line, unwrapped the tree, recast and watched a few fish follow the lure upstream toward my location.

Then a message buzzed in my hand.  Those inventors!

My design team had rigged the fishing pole as an antenna to receive radio signals through the river water and transmit them to the organic circuitry installed in my palm.

I pointed the pole at the water and circled the bait just out of reach of the four- to six-inch shallow water swimmers while listening to a report from my associates.

All I asked for was a couple of weeks of letting the computer program run on its own set of binary digits!

And I'd get what I wanted if there was more cooperation.  Now I'm hearing that the cartels are getting a little machismo in their morning cappucino and think they can muscle in on the action that ain't theirs for the taking.

Look, fellows, I told you it's share and share alike.  You can't keep raking in all that profit and expect to keep it all to yourselves.

We're a family and when a family member disappoints me, I get angry.  I don't get revenge.  I don't get mad.  I don't get even.  I just let the family know it's all a matter of perspective as I demonstrate how business is business.  Get cocky and you sink with a South Korean ship or Russian-made airplane ... or worse.  Sorry, once it's done you can't bribe your way out of death.

I've asked my associates to take care of this business while I'm taking a few days off to fish.  If my ears buzz again, I won't be happy.  I won't laugh.  And neither will you, you understand?

I carry a pocket paper journal where I keep coded ledgers that track those of you still living in the dark ages before the invention of the abacus, batch cards and automatons.  After I received the radio message, I sat down with a beer and checked some notes in the journal.

Some of you are behind in your duties.  If I see you aren't interested in balancing things up the way they should be, then, again my associates have the authority to open a few closed doors and disclose a few so-called secrets that won't be secret anymore.

The Book of the Future is under lock and key.  You don't need to know what's going to happen next.  After all, the future's your business and nobody else's so why should I have to spell out what you're going to do in this public forum?

Take care of business, willya?  It's not like I'm asking you to solve world hunger, treat factory workers fairly or bring doubleknit polyester pantsuits back into fashion.

Now, back to my holiday.  Once again, a quick thanks to all you folks who're doing what the future said you would be doing anyway.  There's nothing in writing that says you have to do what you have to do.  You can change the future at any time, if you know who you are not and that you don't exist, of course.  A big if, but it can be done.

Look at a luna moth and ask yourself why such a big creature lives such a short time.  When you know the answer, you know the future.

See, I told you it's all simple, right there in front of your eyes.  Why you don't believe me, I can't say.  Why all this desire for proof?  You don't want a bunch of fireballs shaking the ground and scorching Earth, do you?  Well, most of you don't.

I haven't asked my scientists to run simulations of what it would take to change the ocean currents unnaturally but I think it's time to work out the details.  We've got the ability to create hundreds of millions of tonnes of nanotechnology that can reproduce itself radically and chaotically.  But why would we want to change the ocean currents?  I'll let you think about that one for a while.

Wyatt Before The Storm

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

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

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

And now, a word from your future:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Vlad Broods Good Mood?

Any coincidence that farming games are popular in China and on facebook right now?

Nostalgia.

Organic cat food.

The taste of beer on a boat in warm weather.

Fish scales caught in arm hair.

Flies.  Ants.

Cutting back privet to see the road - the damn hedge grows like the free weed it is.

Violent abandoned adopted babies - spanked? - and young bicyclists in the breeze.

Should black boxes be trusted to the fox guarding the hen house full of blackened Poles?

Smelling the wind for new signs now that the Cherokee mama is hunting higher grounds.

Being used to being used but sad and depressed about being used any which ol' way.

Looking at the diversions, as always.  What does the magician hand to the assistant in plain sight?

Have you ever lived under a glass ceiling for very long?

When facts become facts, who are your true friends?

Half of one is also half of the other.

Are droughts contagious?

If you're full of distrust, do you trust your distrust?

Order in the court.  Here comes de judge.  Ladies and gents, Laugh-In looks at the news.  Love, American-style, truer than the red, white and blue ... it's me and you.  Sock it to me.

Carol Burnett in Sacramento raisin country.

Sharpening a new pencil ... the pine tar gumming up the pencil sharpener ... here comes the future, baby!

In BBC news today, it was announced that factory figures had figured nicely this time around, except for the fact the figures were rigged to scaffolding around an empty warehouse rigged to look full of rigs.

In BBC, news today revealed the rags-to-riches story of the Untouchables, tax auditors who'd taken bribes to help companies get back on their feet through creative bookkeeping.  Beekeepers were kept out of the pot of honey this time.

In BBC news, today a well-placed executive gave his assistant a pretty bauble for keeping their babble secret between them.  The assistant sold the bauble to pay for a trip for her boyfriend to pay a visit to the executive's wife for a little bubbly in a bubble bath for two.

Today, the BBC news showed it was incapable of maintaining the farce of neutrality due to the infiltration of former writers for Punch who insisted on skewing the news toward sarcasm and wry British humour.  Evidence: the prime minister was shown eating a piece of Arctic-grown cheese.  A total lack of culture on both parts.

China raised its quota for American immigrants in order to secure laborers to complete the high-speed rail between all major Chinese cities.  The American qulī workers must provide their own pick axes and lunchboxes.

Poland has secured permission from NATO to randomly take down a Russian airliner flying into NATO territory in the "fog."  The Kyrgyzstan government has volunteered its two military airports to show solidarity with both the West and Russia in support of resolving this issue.

To play a trick, the Himalayas shrank several metres overnight to mess with China's and Nepal's official height of Mt. Everest.

The increased production of biomass fuel in Brazil has caused a shift in Earth's rotation due to the amount of non-flatulence based methane released into the atmosphere.  Scientists have proposed releasing a secret supply of methane-eating chemical bombs over South America to prevent Earth's orbit from collapsing.  Taiwan and South Korea have denied any connection to the production of the chemical weapons.  North Korea has taken credit but no nation has recognised their ability to make such sophisticated weapons at this time.  Iran has claimed it has harnessed anti-methane technology and could, if it wanted to, produce such weapons but it is a country of peace, not war, and thus has modified the technology for cleaning the air of restaurants where too much fiber and roughage is consumed.

The conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories was thought up by a woman working at a travel agency early this morning.  By the time she finished texting her theory, an invisible group of cyberwarfare ninjas stepped invisibly out of her phone and took the travel agent to an undisclosed location.  Throughout the day, the agent has suffered through a series of tests to ensure her theory is in fact a theory and not the tip of a tip from a lover / acquaintance / associate that prompted her to think up the theory from the hint of a tip of a fact she knows nothing about.  Meanwhile, a cybernetic copy of the travel agent continues to fill travel orders at the office, her coworkers unaware of the difference between the real her and the robotic her, she having lived a quiet life sharing superficial conversations with the people nearest her.

Unknown to the cyberwarfare ninjas, they are third generation copies of their cybernetic selves.

Unknown to the travel agent, she is still sitting at her desk filling travel orders, with only her thought patterns kidnapped and carried off to a secure location for interrogation.  Her coworkers only think they detect a change in her wan demeanor today, a few pondering the possibility that she is either an alien or a robot.

I have taken the day off and left this blog entry for my computer programmers to write using a new automatic text-generation software package to replace the one I had been using for the past few months.

My body is sitting at home staring at the flickering images of a box across the room after working in the sun-filled yard earlier today while my thought patterns have been sent to a "cleaning house" for repairs and updates, wiping out dead-end trails of thoughts that have weighed down my overall adventure-seeking life of adventure wrapped in adverts.  A bottle of Samuel Adams Noble Pils is lying while laying its lies on its side and dripping drops onto the carpet beside my moccasined feet.

Are you a "yes" or a "no"?  Do you think you know but still want to find out?  Do you invent your own carrots or do you depend on carrots others have dangled in front of you?

My computer programmers think they have worked out the bugs in the upgrade they released yesterday so we should have the new predictions programmed into the electric pencil sharpener for me to grind out a few answers tomorrow.  The shavings they scanned today made no sense.

But then again, as you know, even mistakes are part of the future.  So what do the pencil shavings really mean?  Are we really going to create a new council of panels containing those permanently-assigned and those who rotate in and out via popular vote?  Will we finally abolish trade barriers in order to take full advantage of local areas of expertise that leverage cooperative (rather than competitive) advantage instead of leveraged buyouts?  Are we going to train all citizens for self-empowerment?

Good thing for the upgrade.  The last version of the program had spun off into a utopian cycle.  A lot of nice ideas but they were being spun up too fast for subcultures to implement.  Glad we have a secret set of manually-derived versions of the future, including a few control experiments, to test against the seven-billion strong superorganism's Book of the Future prediction subroutines.

Time for me to unplug from the picture box and see if the upgrade will fully function by tomorrow's blog entry.  Okay, you programmers, show me what you've written for a blog entry today!

Mama Cass' Carcasses

Small, gnat-sized insects tap the surface of the backyard pond.  Hard to believe a few weeks ago I could see the sky through the bare branches of the trees now nearly fully leaved.

Mountain phlox and mayapple blooms peak up out of the underbrush.

The purple dogwood has seven blooms this year.  Last year several dozen.

The hawk finds a spot to perch above a feeding squirrel.

Life under the canopy of suburban woods.

The more efficient the automation, the faster the response time of the superorganism.

Ears buzzing so loud these days, I can't hear a clock alarm or a cat purr.

How deep is black?  When you can't tell the difference between real life and a book of fiction.  Can Elvis Cole solve this one?  A peaceful overthrow in one piece, one fell swoop, for once.

How depressingly funny or mildly humourously depressing can a flick be?  When it feels like a cross between others you've seen, mixing a last married couple scenario, an out-of-towners out-of-water feel, a touch of Soho after hours and an adult adventure in babysitting called Date Night.  A bird on a wire and all those others, too.

The cure for the blues?  Seeing chocolate bunnies at the Chocolate Crocodile after drowning one's liver in a tall mug of Guinness with a Red Robin because P. F. Chang's was full.

One day soon I'll be deaf.  What kind of bionic ear should I wish for, since LASIK has worked so well for my sight about six years now?

Do I want to read the Book of the Future today?  Not really.

Kenny Chesney, Dolly Parton and Megan Fox - entertainment products of east Tennessee birth.

When was the last time you sat next to Mandy Moore at a UFC event?

In which/what world do I live?  Am I an IndyCar/NASCAR/F1/Rally fan, a Lowe Mill fan, a pop cinema fan, a woodlands/jungle hike fan, a football/rugby fan or ... any and all of the above?

I live - I'm a fan of everything.

Seduced by my senses, unaware of what's really around me.  What do I don't know I know I almost know?

When the superorganism is ready, will it rip the fabric of spacetime space and step across the threshold?  Can it solve the puzzle of why no other superorganisms are visible in this universe?

Why can some people find simple pleasure in repetitive tasks and weekend backyard BBQ parties while others will not be happy until this planet's creatures are safely ensconced in another spot outside of this universe?

How many times can we laugh at the barbarians who show their primate selves in the fearmongering about one-world government?  Can we not see we're one people already?

If you feel out of control of the situation, admit the fact and go on.

How many caves have you explored?

Can you tell the difference between a person who has killed another person and one who has not?

Do you know the definition of risk?

Do you know the definition of life?

The Book of the Future ... the crystal ball ... the bag of other tricks yet unused ...

Don't worry about one-world governments forcing you to change your lifestyle/culture.  We need you to maintain your subcultures so that dichotomies occur all along the borders between "pure" subcultures for change to happen seemingly spontaneously.  From discord, confusion and conflict rise unique solutions to problems that haven't been invented yet.

The Balance of Power.  We know what's going to happen next because you predict your own unpredictability predictably.  Like tuning an engine.  When all aspects of living are known and your unique limited combination of aspects observed and recorded, the world of our species within the well-studied ecosystem of this planet provide measurable parameters upon which one can depend reliably.

The "mysteries" of life are slowly revealed to you for proper dissemination and absorption by the subpopulations of the superorganism.  Pockets of resistance are natural responses by the environment and expected (although never welcomed by purists in the field of efficiency expertise).

You accomplish so much more when you trust the future's already been formed for you.  Quit seeing it in hindsight and let your foresight be your guide.

If we think we have to wait for a Contact-like moment, a deus ex machina, to rescue us from ourselves, then we'll keep waiting.  We are our own alien species, so to speak, with the ignorance of knowledge about the future already in us.

What's next?  Hmm ... to know that I know what I'm going to see in the Book of the Future before I look at it is the sign that I'm believing the message of this fictional blog too much.

In one hand, fiction.  In the other hand, nonfiction.  In one's knowledge, the knowledge that others fulfill futures presented to them as if they're assignments and by others subconsciously through the power of subtle persuasion.  Thus, are the futures fact or fiction or both and when were they one, the other or both?

The Book of the Future doesn't say because the Book of the Future is its own self-referential conflict, spirals within spirals looping back and forth within and out of themselves with no discernible beginning or end in sight of our localised lives.

Time to step out of the local culture again and show what the Book of the Future says about other subcultures in the superculture/superorganism called us, our species, our one-world self governing body, if you will accept that definition gladly (or at least without wincing).  You might just find out if you're a "Yes" or a "No" and why.

Degas Degauss de Gaulle Degausser

Stood outside.  Couldn't separate the life of a tree from the life of an ant or a woodpecker.  Saw a whippet tail of a Mandelbrot mandala spread out into the arm of a slightly-dense part of this spreading part of the universe, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing along with a glass of 2003 Cynthiana ruby vino.

How many times have I been here before or will I be here after that moment?

Cycles and repetitions happen with or without me.

Dim, poor, nonreassuring reminders ... sigh ...

Some alternative bands put the "emo deli" in remodeling.

To know you're here to leave a portion of a message for someone (or something) hundreds or thousands of years from now takes the patience and anonymity of a seed tick.

Do you see yourself as part of a red algae bloom?  How about a rain event or a lightning storm?

Slicing the block of cheese into slivers into shavings into cultured cells ...

What does a bumblebee "see" in its memories?

Reach puberty, give birth and die - what else can a living thing ask for?

If milk of our species could be produced in large quantities via genetic modification, creating a new trans-species not quite human, would you rather consume the "dairy" product of the trans-species (which ensured an optimally high nutritional value) or a pure cow or goat species (which provided the current marginal nutritional value we've culturally taught ourselves to enjoy)?

Breaking down the barriers of cost/benefit analyses for all types of living.

What is a cultural taboo?

Living off the "fat" of the land - if a planet's moon was abundantly covered in a substance or form of living organism which only became food for us after we made major genetic modifications to ourselves living on that moon, would you move there knowing the genetic modification was a one-way change?

Would you continue to explore the universe with electromechanical devices to lower the overhead cost of space exploration associated with the life support systems needed to keep our non space-hardened bodies alive?  How many such robotic "beachheads" will you establish before enough wealthy people would pay to risk their lives to visit some of these space exploration outposts without exceptional costs to the general public (i.e., without government funding)?

In other words, where do you put your profits?  Are you a locavore or a planetary explorer?  How much money do your local leaders spend on monuments to themselves, including both "pure" statuary and community development projects?

Dogs barking at a person riding a horse slowly trotting down the country lane.  Words used to describe a scene without using proper nouns.  The dogs, the person, the horse, and the country lane are not heroes, megalomaniacs or narcissists.

Do you value vanity or altruism?

If language/symbolism got us here, should we use language/symbolism to get us there?

Did a person named Haley see a comet named after Halley?

How many ways can we use the plastic, malleable central nervous system that includes our brains?  How many ways will we emulate and surpass the uses of that system?

To deprogram oneself after absorbing all that this planetary ecosystem has to offer, one seeks a nonduality with multiple angles that creates the self-vs-nonself duality anyway.  So, should we train ourselves to not have a self in the first place so that all is nonself?

Good to hear private planes in the air again.

Should one celebrate having no more metallic tooth cavity fillings?

When the tilt and wobble of one's home planet causes the variation of trees sprouting/shedding leaves and plants blooming/dying on different parts of the world, can we convince/assure ourselves that asymmetry causes life so we can quit bothering to conform to one another's pressure to conform with each other's behavioural patterns that we think leads to higher survival chances?

A few more days of letting change happen before opening the Book of the Future again.  The future happens whether we know about it or not.  The inertia of life speaks for itself in many forms, a tiny part of which we call social patterns of our species.

How long before automatic software analysis programs see problems in the real world and write programs and/or create electromechanical devices to solve them automatically/autonomously?  The software programmers working for me see that day getting closer and closer as they automate more and more of their software development and testing routines while they increase their financial holdings with investment software that gets automatically more sophisticated everyday.

Where do I put my profits?  Well, what does 10% unemployment mean to me?  It means that automation has made 25% - 50% of our species redundant.  Do I invest in reducing the redundancy through retraining or invest in raising chaos that will cause another world war (or increased regional skirmishes) and reduce the redundancy through war casualties and collateral damage?  I'll let you in on a hint to the answer: I peeked ahead in the Book of the Future to find out: I remain anonymous while my profits create changes that a lot of people won't be happy with.

For those of you who have their own Books of the Future, let's tell the others the facts.  If you have a job that you think is boring, then using a person to perform your job duties is unnecessary so we're going to automate your job.  You can either change your lifestyle habits to squeeze profit out of your wages while you still have your boring job and invest in automation, or you can become redundant and live at the mercy of constant retraining / war attrition / despondency.

As always, the choice is yours.  Some of you will ride rockets into space and some of you will decrease your standards of living to comfortably and quietly live anonymous lives off the slivers and fat of the land.

Blue Tail Flies

Silence is a killer.  We stepped back and let the system run by itself without our input, watching and waiting.

Phrases on the computer screen:

• "Dewey and his crew at Trent Remodeling put the mod in remodeling."
• "Aaron is a smartass away from the Acropolis."
• "My ... name ... is ... Melinda ... on a clear day ... and ... Theresa ... when ... I ... can't fix your problem."
• "Developing for China, the world's largest market - what will their consumer products exported to the U.S. look like?  Will we recognize a reworked version of 'Anne of Green Gables' when we see it?"

Do you actively seed discord and discontent in order to stir up anti-nation nationalism?  Or are you interested in fads and fashions in order to stir up advertising revenue?

We listened to the SSDs stir up trouble in their neighbour's room-sized post-"meeting" shower room filled with STDs.  Anyone have an SUD or SVD to spare?

Analysis and backwash produce culture.

There's no final outcome when running a planet full of seven billion people.  No final reward.  No closing the books on the game and starting a new game.  The play is perpetual.  Sometimes the back room operators get bored when the game of life is the only game in town.

We sat in silence and didn't tweak any settings, letting new players show themselves.

"My name is Candy."

"My name is Sandy."

We placed a few tracking devices on the submersible sailing vessels.  The desktop icons refreshed automatically.

How do you compare a nation-state to sleeper cells?  Follow the ideology spoken at the "fresh breath" mint factory.

How many tens, dozens or fourteens are willing to die to maintain a revolution?  Depends on how dire the count, wouldn't you say?

We saw the players playing.  We have little to compare the management of a quadrillion to a few hundreds in our pocket.  Do they?

Do we open the Book of the Future together this time?  Us?

Millions of military personnel indoctrinated to fight for the homeland(s) and defeat the enem(y/ies).  How quickly can we reprogram the indoctrination?  How many will see during the transitional, transitory retraining that the enemy is them and rebel against themselves?

What's the difference between an SLA and the SLAC?

How many use an AK47 instead of an AK74?

We will not touch the automatic controls for a while and let the system run its course until a major course correction is needed.  For us, peace and war are the same thing - change.  See you a few moments from now (or to your senses, see you after many minor/major changes have occurred).

Remember, clouds do not exist - they're all figments of your cultural indoctrination.

Where is Qaddafi when you need him? [Not written for the little ones]

Twelve years in captivity - is that a moment worth rewarding?  An ark or a fark or an aardvark?

Talking with a couple of new friends about a family relation living in Hawaii and Tommy's son, Brian, who moved from Hawaii to the mainland and Stella still at the gas company.  Meanwhile, John and his blue-eyed beauty working a sale for friends whose trading post business suffered an inconvenient fire.

Do you place more importance on party funds or money to educate your kids?

Do you retrain yourself constantly so there is no such thing as future shock on the job?

Janice at the checkout line.

Vickie, Jade or Adam?

Oh, Henry, O Henry or Oh Henry's?

Henri?

Common tally view?

How long should a $325.99 electronic typing device last?  I can't remember the difference between obsequy and obsolescence.

I've lost touch with my inventive friends.  Tell me, my friends, what's next in what's next?

What is the next automated process that will put all automated processes out of business?

Pardon my American but I want to kick some ass.  Who appears to be in my way this time?  Ah yes, I forgot.  I am unimportant.  Who is in the way of someone important and deserves a good lesson in getting out of the way?  Humour me.

To write about nothing requires something to make nothing about.  Or is it nothing to make something about?

I do not compete.  I complete sentences.  Your sentence is not my sentence.

I am a peacemaker who finds a roundabout way to get around to making peace.  There's the whole bloody issue of dealing with the whole population and seven billion wants and needs, a few dealing with peace, the rest dealing with dealing with making deals.

A vehicle slowly passing by the house is so obvious about the driver's sneakiness.  Why do we think a 3000-pound automobile has anything to do with stealth?

You have no idea, do you, why you're really here?  If you only knew ... but you don't get to find out so there's no difference between acting on what you pretend to know and not knowing what you're doing.  Inaction is action so quit fucking around and do something, willya?

To work through the phases of temporary knowledge about all knowledge is peanuts.  If there is no point in knowing everything, then there's no point to make but it's not pointless to have the knowledge to point the way temporarily.

A switchboard operator whose job has been automated by a little box.  My point is to ask you, "How do I become a little box myself?"  How does an oracle rewrite itself in perpetuity via automated means, names and faces and fame no longer necessary?

When the future is automated, then what do you do with your idea of freedom?

If your opposition to the status quo is accurately predicted, how do you fight the facts that you're part of a larger status quo you don't readily see?

Remember, no future is guaranteed because all futures will happen.

When your child perfects an art or craft for which you have no skill, talent or drive, to whom do you credit (or blame) the child's lack of carrying on the parental habits?

If you accept your place in the bigger picture, regardless of how large or small your role in this planet-sized ecosystem may appear, then another world of possibilities opens up to you.

Server # 7 at Pal's is just as important at the 7th richest person in the world.  Really.  Take my word for it.  The world is the world because of both of them.  Misery, happiness, health, disease - every person feels these in equal measure but we rarely have the insight that shows us our equality.

The next generation comes into play, pushing aside the Pixies, Dinosaur, Jr, Alice In Chains, Rage Against The Machine, the Judybats, and classic hiphop hipsters.  What will you do with the post-facebook universe?  Who in your generation will found the company that replaces Google?  When you reinvent what it means to be a person, what is your definition of being personal?  If all your social media connections say all there is to say about you, how to make a deeper connection with someone?  When social media software automatically connects you to people like you who want to be around people like you or people you like or mutually dislike with disdain, then what's next?

When predictive software predetermines your predictive social patterns, including your new friends, new places, new foods and all the so-called private personal discoveries you think you make, can you or will you break the patterns?

How much of what you do is new now, perfect predictive social pattern software not yet perfected?

This is a small planet.  There are only so many choices we can make in our lives that haven't been thought about, discovered, commercialised and packaged for you to choose.

So, what to do ... what to do?

Embrace your place or feel miserable about who you really are?

Choose the first, knowing full well that your talents and skills you've developed, no matter how predictable they seem, are YOURS!  Just because being unique is predictable takes nothing away from you being uniquely you.

Billions and billions of cells that have differentiated in order to create one person.  Billions and billions of people who have differentiated in order to create one thriving species.  Billions and billions upon billions of organisms that have differentiated in order to create this living planet.

The next generation grows up with everyone naturally looking into the lives of everyone else, changing the definition of privacy which changes the definition of what it's like to be unique.  Every lifestyle choice, every body strength/weakness, and every training path that leads to special skills or highly-developed talent will be available for view by all of us (many predict we'll next "download" any one of these into a body instantaneously).

Therefore, this generation gets to peel the onion some more, find out where closed-door meetings take place and "sunshine law" breakers reside.

When competitive advantages are exposed to the light, what is the time and place scale that creates the next set of competitive advantages?  Is it a final shift in patterns where we say "cooperative advantage," instead?  Then, the best competitors will be the ones who operate out in the open and the coolness factor of an Apple iPad is overrun by the uncoolness of an Apple that uses manufacturers who abuse people to make products convenient for others who now know better than to support supply chains with hidden problems?

Will the next generation demand products that provide holistic social solutions?  Guess what the Book of the Future predicts about that one.

A Paper April's Fool Moon

While digging through some old magazines, I found a reference to Nature, which reminded me of the old Omni magazine, Insight, and others that wound up in a refuse bin and perhaps in a landfill somewhere.  Now, we have e-mags and nearly instant cross-references, where this becomes that and we spread the news to blogs and pollywogs and frogs and pigtails.  I eat my wasabi peas listening to "Celtic" music thinking about water fleas and ant colonies moving from one potted tree in our house to another and then into the cereus pot (cereus, not serious or Sirius, not serial or cereal, either).

Redbuds blooming, Cornish Rex grooming.

On this day when a group sent me a message via an April Fool's Day joke, which they wanted to imply says what the real reason an ancient library was destroyed (to hide the prehistoric evidence of prehistoric evidence, evidently), I thumb through Harry Moore's Miocene musings called "The Bone Hunters," looking for the real clue to the next adventure our species is about to take.

Beyond automatic colour tracing...

Beyond the quad cube...

How do you demonstrate strength in weakness?

How do you turn play money into real prizes?

How does a wasp make a nest?

In this country, we don't make national heroes out of self-proclaimed martyrs - instead, we honour those who die in selfless service to society in general (police, firefighters, medical workers, military, etc.). 

However, you can't just shove that kind of social status down the throats of those in a different society. 

Figure out how to honour the dead in two opposing societies and you figure out how the living can live together, finally aligning two sets of youth training toward reaching one goal of the greater good for all, allowing dissident voices to argue about spinoff goals that might help us find even better goals one day.

A praying mantis, a spider, a hummingbird and a moth - what does a hawk want with these?  How important is the lichen, moss or mosquito to them?

If you sell chemical fertilizer, you value green lawns with few insects or weeds.  If you sell fruits and vegetables, you value the honeybee.  How do both sellers compromise and agree to a goal of the greater good for all?

Subcultures.  They're everywhere.

Will you be ready when we activate your sleeper cell for the greater good?  Can you see it might be something as simple as asking you to turn on your television set and watch a popular program that your whole family will enjoy?  Can you see it might be something as complex as accepting new job training and moving to a different part of the world where you don't speak the dominant local language?  Would you give up your chemical sales job to become a beekeeper?  Would you give up your vegetable farming to become a chemical engineer?

According to another message I received yesterday (via the arrangement of catfood cans in a pet store), some of you animal breeders will set up a communications network via read/write ID chips embedded in pedigree pets, using the pet owners' own WiFi networks to spy on them and their lifestyle habits in order to strengthen future sales of high-end pets (the strength in weakness demonstration, perhaps?).  Nothing like seeing your customer from your product's (pet's) perspective!

Time to listen to the Great Mother and the Great Father for a while.  They've been bugging me to go deeper into the meaning of life on this planet so I can see the grand vision intended for those who will first communicate with life on another celestial body.  They tell me it has little to do with intelligence as we see it and more to do with chemistry and low-power wavelength alignment.  They also tell me that we will learn to put aside superiourity and respect the sovereignty of unique lifeforms or we will never learn to survive on other worlds.  More after I meditate on what they told me and what others have thought about many times before I arrived here in my temporary cellular form.

And yes, my computer programming friends - Czech, Russian, Chinese, et al - I am looking at the data you put together for me.  Of course, the virtual world is important but it's not the only situation I'm situated in.  There are some offworld issues to assess so I can decide which countries will be toppled in years to come to align the past, present and future in this instant.  Nothing is permanent, my friends, including our valuable friendships - everything transforms.

Famosa Restaurant El Rey Sol en la Avenida

Looking into the Book of the Future sends shocks through my system every so often.

First, there was the revelation that Japan, Great Britain, Spain and France owned large stretches of North America (the Book of the Future shows the past, too, because present time is irrelevant).

Next, I saw that countries do not exist because people control governments through cooperation and/or coercion.

Then, I saw my old body decomposing after death. [Should that shock me?  Not normally, but today it did.]

I flipped page after page and watched the rise and fall of piles of money as negotiations went back and forth.  I lost count of the countries, businesses, individuals and groups who faced each other from atop equally-high stacks of cash and then faded away.

And then I saw the whole Book of the Future the way it really exists - devoid of people, absent of their temporary self-importance and others' idols to worship.

I saw us as we really are - background.

Right now, I'm numb.

To say I don't exist is an exercise in symbol arrangement.  To see none of us exists, which makes me and all that is around me while I type this nonexistent, has caught me off-guard/offguard/off guard.

Am I off my rocker?  Am I touched?  Do I really think I exist to say I don't exist when I really don't exist to think I exist?

We cannot imagine life without life, a universe without some beings from Earth around.  We believe we have this slight comfort in knowing that a few metallic objects drifting away from Earth will represent us should we destroy ourselves here.  We cannot see a supernova wiping out our solar system along with all evidence of our civilised existence.

I don't know what to tell you.  The Book of the Future told me today that we're all in the past and what I'm typing now no longer exists.

I am stunned.

Between now and then, we accomplish much.  As a species, we keep advancing the state-of-the-art, but in one timeline we don't figure out how to move enough of us thousands of light-years away to save any type of Earthlings, people or otherwise, from total annihilation.

The future is not guaranteed.  It's only probabilistic trajectories in all directions from all points of space and time.

I'm stepping away from the computer and the Book of the Future for a few days.  Today, seeing that all that is around me will not exist in living form in one probable future has made me dizzy from spinning in a loop of unbelievable improbability.

You keep playing games with one another - I'm too dazed and confused to play along.  I'm going to enjoy the sunshine at the regular speed of light, about eight minutes and nineteen seconds "old."  Why do I feel so much older all of a sudden?  Almost 48 and I think and feel like I'm 98.  Words have lost their significance in this 24-hour period.  Think I'll spend some time drifting in and out of crowds, enjoying people in all their wonderful shapes and sizes who are happily ignorant of the future, barely aware of governments interpreting modern-day Enigma machines and knowingly letting their enemies kill government citizens so the governments don't give away what they know.

I miss the innocence of ignorance.  Some say they get sad watching their family members succumb to memory loss.  I'm not so sure.  Tasting the freedom of absolute power, invincibility and immortality - sort of like Icarus touching the sun - is wished by many and survived by few.  Omnipotence and omniscience - be careful what you ask for - if you know what you're doing, you'll drive yourself insane trying to run day-to-day operations while completely aware of the permanence of the future's impact on the present.

I'm taking a break.  See you in a new timeline where I hope we figure out how to meld our hundreds of sovereignties together like one big brain and solve the problem of how to create a self-sufficient planetlike transportation device to get some of us (in new semihuman form) and many of our non-people Earthlings on a trajectory where we're not at the mercy of our neighbours in this part of the galaxy.  If only I'd live to see the solution!  Some of you will (I hope) - I envy you, when (or if) you do (if I read enough of the Book of the Future before I pass it on, I'm sure I'll see the future where you absolutely will; I'll just have to depend on faith and belief for now, eh?).

In Defence of Jane

Are you keeping track of the ASBM?  Are you a regular reader of Jane's news?

I'm sad about the actions in Moscow but more worried about bigger dirty problems not as easy to clean up, coming up through radioactive rocky hotels of the Kajik metal-toothed poor and Phillipines' pine-forested potbellied birds.  How many of ADM's foodgrade rolling barrels are tasty addictive HFCS button poppers and how many are filling station containers?  Are Cancer and Capricorn tropical or topical?  Why all these words from the wordless one?  Latitudes and longitudes and chocolate orange slices make winter freezes turn out refreshingly tasty tomatoes.  One tasty tomato you won't find in Grainger County this year - she says she's this century's Tokyo Rose.  Another bitter pill to swallow?  No she won't!

The bliss of ignorance, where are you?

Are you signing petitions at petrol stations asking for the reduction of debit/credit card fees?

I love my brewskis, micro and macro, but if there's any one thing to put in prayer, thank God for Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme!  Don't go well with Bushmills or Redbreast but there's a time and a place for every taste.  Some like Jack and Coke.  Some don't know Jack.  Can you play Dark Castle on an iPad?  How does Duke Nukem like his doughnuts - Old Style, White Castle or Sears Tower?

What to do with aviation blue news?  Have the Russians learned not to fly over Scottish territory again or do I have to tell another tale worth splashing some single malt whiskey that tastes like pure charcoal?  Push buttons and buttons pop.  Pop goes the weasel!

This afternoon's worth sipping some expensive, rare whiskey in your honour, your Honour.  Then another readin' o' the Book o' the Future about ya.  Are you ready for another round?  Wink-wink, nod-nod, nudge-nudge - how about a Blackmail sketch replay?  Pop culture references are past-present-future participative.  Can you take a joke over a cup of java, Joe?

Who's driving the digital motor home?  Who's selling access to the secret network that's darpafree and internetlike and exafast?  Who doesn't have to pay?  What do Indian medical mall entrepreneurs have to say?

Who was in that white van going past?  Did that get the info that was sent to them on radio wave signal pathways?

The World Did Not End Today ... Now What?

Kudos to Pelosi and Merkel for keeping their positions relevant in today's economy.

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[ Now back to your regularly scheduled blog entry ]

Some colleagues of mine have sent me their setups on several game boards - Monopoly, Risk, Life, Go, chess, D&D, Stratego, Chutes & Ladders, Operation - and asked me to guess the outcome.  Every colleague stressed the seriousness of the game, comparing it to Jumanji or Zathura in the influence the game's moves have on real life.  My colleagues want me to prove to them that the Book of the Future predicts not only the final outcome but the changes to this part of the universe every game piece movement makes.

As you know, the universe operates according to my wishes but not my demands.  Being a retired individual, not actively involved in swaying public opinion or stock market manipulation, I view this universe of mine with a sly twinkle in my eye, allowing humourous diversions to cause occasional irregularity in the form of temporary layoffs, good times, and micro-anarchic chaos.

Disposable credit card numbers, fake caller ID, disposable phone numbers, counterfeit passports, lack of a real home address - all these add up to shuffling game pieces around the globe invisibly.  What you see on the game board, as we've seen, is never what the game is all about.  We've been here before, haven't we?

But colleagues still want to know the answers I've already given them.  They're caught in a loop of unbelievability.  They cannot accept the fact that their game-changing shots are statistically insignificant when the future is already known.

That's why I tell you I'm neutral when it comes to seeing and telling you what the Book of the Future has laid out for us.

For instance, I support my buddies who say they don't believe in government handouts.  At the same time, I've built my financial portfolio on paychecks tied to government contracts and investments in government-backed securities which exist to support those who receive government handouts and use them in the marketplace to churn the value of labor units over and over.  I know that government bureaucracies rarely shrink in size but then again they feed a lot of people on this planet, keeping them happily employed and willing to buy products developed/built in part by many people who received free primary/secondary public education and postsecondary education subsidised by the government.

We live in a complex society that's not easily represented by any single board game.  Who are the pawns?  Where is Boardwalk?  Can you really pass Go when you play Go with Play-doh?  D'oh!

I'm not a liberal.  I'm not a neocon.  I'm not a conservative.  I'm neutral and independent.  My only focus is our species in total, which represents life on this planet that can spread out into the universe regardless of moral, ethical or environmental concerns, because most everything comes out of the wash looking clean.

Did I not tell you that the Book of the Future said that Obama would come out smelling like a winner?  I did not vote for him or his predecessor.  I do not care, but others do, who holds the office of the U.S. presidency.  I understand the political hierarchy necessary to keep any government system running so I vote for independents to allow myself the freedom to observe our political-industrial complex in action without any personal vested interests.

Tomorrow, the chief executive representing one of the three branches of government established by U.S. constitutional law will sign into law a set of financial constraints tied to the institution of medical health care.  The Book of the Future indicates this is only one of several goals that must be met to prevent debt-crushing blows to another world power.

Politicians and mass media criers who want to represent the emotional buildup of opposition to the political party in power will play up the failings sensed in any change to the status quo.  So be it.  The larger the perceived change, the louder the opposition yells.  Let us celebrate our pendulum-swinging political process with joy.  After all, it works well, both historically into the past and historically into the future!

While elected public officials hit the campaign fund trail to shore up support for upcoming elections, let's pause a moment and look at other issues that will make government policies lose their immediacy and become another historic moment for schoolchildren to memorise later on.

Let's consider the role of the individual: YOU.

Are you willing to insert/embed electronic equipment in your body to vastly improve your ability to communicate with others?  Are you willing to have a disposable identity that does away with any worries about identity theft because we're all temporary placeholders for personal identification information, including fingerprints and other genetic anomalies?

Can you imagine a scenario where you have no social goals tied to a name or group because, although you may experience and apply intense social-climbing skills, you have been trained to believe your ascendancy is for the benefit of our species and not for individually-named glory?  In this scenario, you still have your independence, including guaranteed freedoms like uncensored speech, but in this particular freedom case your speech would be crowdsourced with the voices of others and blended with the rest of our species' freedoms quasi-anonymously.

The Book of the Future long ago told us about these scenarios that predicted the species-wide broadband initiative we're slowly implementing to tie our thoughts and actions together 24-hours a day.

The Power of You.  I told you this blog is only about you.  Every single one of you/me/us.

When our lives are transparent, what is a "community standard" we expect others to follow?  That's the main issue we have to address that will make all other government decisions fade in importance - the hierarchy of family, community and species' standards.  Do e-citizens have community standards separate from digital illiterates?  Can a tribe be allowed to maintain its traditional ways and slaughter the last remaining specimens of a species, even if it means the end of the tribe members' traditions/livelihood?

We have reached the point where groups like the United Nations no longer represent our species well.  We must look to something more meaningful - a world council made of all of us - the complete expansion of the Internet, where tribes, corporations, nations, civic groups and independent thinkers have equal say in our mixed-mode hierarchy of daily living.

Your Voice Rules.  We know the future laid out for us.  We know we will raise the standards of living for all of us, not just socioeconomically, but also in respect to respect for one another's existence/opinion.

For instance, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM and others have the power to empower unemployed Americans using government-backed retraining/retooling to replace the supply chain stranglehold in China and build high-tech manufacturing expertise on this continent while China builds its domestic market and stops complaining about its currency pricefixing.  Tata Motors can compete globally.  Ireland can rebuild, one website at a time.  Baidu and Google can become partners rather than competitors.  And I can rest assured that our species has plans to train a new generation of space explorers.

After all, those of us with a view of the future already know what's going to happen - how we choose to freely participate in the moment is up to us because we know life takes first priority and everything else gets seconds.

See you at the spaceport soon!

Let Level Heads Prevail

While secret organisations prepare to call their troops to actions, I hope we have our national guard on duty in this country, focused on keeping us focused on the big picture and not on local slices of time that are always full of change and thus full of strong emotional pull.  Don't get trapped into getting provoked.  Folks hold flint and steel and cotton balls, ready to set the spark of chaotic controversy for their personal gain, not yours.

I want the ability to shop for fresh fruit and vegetables without worrying about if I'm carrying the politically-correct paperwork while passing through armoured checkpoints.  I have friends who have lived in such situations and are lucky to be alive to tell me about them.

We choose our futures in the thoughts and actions of this moment.  Consider your next move carefully.  Our future depends on what you say or do right now.

Some people have already revealed what they're going to do next and their leaders are telling them to hold off until the sign is given to everyone in their groups to proceed in a coordinated maneuver.

I'm neutral about what's going to happen next.  The Book of the Future has already prepared me for the best and the worst that can happen.  Either way, I made my peace with the world the day my brother in-law died in 2006.  I am not him but I'm prepared by my Eagle Boy Scout training to do the right thing by him.

I will not let this country fail or falter in the face of global competition.  This country represents hope for the world in the realm of free speech and freedom of religious practice - immigrants keep pouring in who know what other countries' leaders and their organisations do not represent well: government of the people, by the people and for the people.  It's not just about money, although money helps us pay for those who protect the freedoms we love dearly.

Have mercy on your neighbour - you do not know what s/he has gone through to get where s/he is in life right now.

If you start a class war, be prepared to face the consequences of your actions.  Heroes and enemies are just words.  The pen is mightier than a sword and deadlier than a bullet in the heat of battle.  Have you considered the counter-counter-counter-counter-counter attacks already prepared against you?

Unemployment is high and unrest is growing.  GDP and gross domestic emotional stability are not directly proportional.  Do you want to be the one who helped social scientists develop the correct formula?

I close this blog entry in order to enjoy domestic tranquility with my wife and our two cats - my ultimate moment of meditation no one interrupts without consequence.

This blog is about you and your future.  I am unimportant.  If you read these words, consider their meaning carefully.  Your life is in your hands, not mine.  This moment's all I've got and I choose to spend it with my life partner.  Maybe you should, too.  There's always a chance it's the last moment any of us have together but I sure hope not.  I've got a moon cruise to catch one day soon - who else but my wife to spend it with!

Roaches and Cyclones

With my house openly tethered to the underground and secretly connected to the world's largest computing system, I gain access to more accessless data than I can possibly use.

Possibly.

Instead, I've employed the natural environment, including the ants, spiders, roaches, and varmints that hang out in my home.  In exchange for food, including dust (including my skin (including skin parasites))), the organisms crunch the data for me, creating information and knowledge.  From that, I extract and create wisdom.

Then, and only then, do I compare the processed data to the Book of the Future.

They say you should never buy a house in good weather.  Buy the house when rain is falling and the yard is full of poodles swimming in puddles.  That's why shoppers are flooding to North Dakota right now - whatever is not under water will keep you safe, dry and fully employed, statistically-speaking.

So here I have a handful of pencils, ready to read the Book of the Future to make sure the wood roach on the ceiling is doing its job.  Otherwise, I won't be crunching data in my next round of data reduction.

Are the cyclones spinning over land masses and large bodies of water larger or smaller, faster or slower, more or less intense, taller or shorter than average, than the past few years, than the next few years, ever, or never?

I had unplugged myself from the local environment in order to feel the effect of the total universe on my person.  But now, it's now to feel the power.  Here goes ...

Trench warfare in a new form.  Bacterial factorials.  Mr. Trousdale in a dale wearing trousers fishing for trout.  Training the nouveau riche to live frugally, enjoying the power of giving empowerment.  Iran becoming a protectorate of the east Asian bloc, India and Russia holding the balance beam on blocks.

Popularity no longer posh.  Relative obscurity the new strength in Roman numerals.

Trading Patagonia clothes for Patagonia clothes.

NASCAR 100-lap demolition derbies, complete with teams trying to wreck others teams to the hard beat of music and dancing beauty queen acrobatic cheerleader squads during "halftime" of NASCAR 500-lap snoozer races.

Professional golf tournaments will turn into judged events, with golfers' scores based on twitter buzz built on sex-crazed versus family-friendly advertising campaigns.

Twitter will fund the development of a device that connects directly to the brain stem, bypassing the upper brain functionality and passing messages via basic instincts.

The rest of the world will weigh an us-vs-them attitude that restricts trade with east Asia until the renminbi is destroyed.  In retaliation, east Asian countries will no longer process raw materials for companies within countries outside east Asia.

A submarine will "accidentally" sink a ship belonging to a neutral nation instead of launching another stealth sickness bomb on unsuspecting cruise ships.

Cuba and Haiti will unite, becoming the immigration destination for many Americans seeking a safe tax shelter haven without extradition treaties with other countries.

Guyana and Guyane will declare Suriname a jointly-owned subset of their countries, leading to Brazil completely taking over South America to preserve peace and get Venezuela out of the publicly-owned/state enterprise business so that tourism will increase.  In turn, the Falkland Islands declare war on América do Sul.  Great Britain tells the Falklanders they're on their own this time - Gordon Brown is no Margaret Thatcher.

Icelanders decide to change their country's name to Volcanoland, freeing up Greenland to change its name to Iceland and set the record straight on who has the most ice and thus the strongest influence on the fate of the civilised world.

Russia annexes Mongolia.  While its back is turned focused on keeping China at bay, Russia misses the fact that Finland had annexed Saint Petersburg.

A set of scientifically-minded dairy farmers prove that molded moon dust really does makes some good-tasting green cheese, finally showing that the flat-Earth people are wrong and our moon is a separate sphere floating in the Sky Ocean above us next to the tiny dots of light that are actually glowing globs of bioluminescent bacteria, not stars, setting back astronomical physics 2000 years.  Astrologists declare their charts are still accurate.

What looks to us like a strange shadow will, in fact, represent an infinitely-large roach that will step on our universe 500 years from now and crush all our theories and postulations about science, creation and anything that we used to justify our belief the oil drop we live in is the only thing that exists.  The roach will lick its leg and swallow the portion of the drop in which we live.  What's left of us and our universe will lodge in the stomach lining of the roach for the next 20,000 years of our existence, leading us to develop new civilisations based on revamped theories of the megauniverse we see from inside an insect's body.

Oh, one last observation from the Book of the Future.  Healthcare costs will keep rising.  Corporations will purposefully bankrupt every country, one by one, and turn all of us into happy servants of the system who eat get-well pills while making money off one another gladly.  We will joyously watch the Earth Company, Conglomerated, come into existence and tell us what to do with our lives.

Wait.  What am I saying?  That's the prediction 200 years ago about today.  Sorry, wrong page.

'ere we go.  The rise of the global citizen will empower us to take control of our lives, crowdsourcing our decisions with our fellow connected e-citizens and creating a permanent underclass of non-e campesinos relegated to working the farms, factories and soft/support/retail jobs without healthcare or financial security support.  Black market sales will overtake legitimate sales as more and more people develop the habit of bartering rather than paying the overhead of retail shopping, further driving down high-tech profit margins, forcing more and more companies to move their manufacturing to unregulated labor markets.  "B-market shopping therapy" becomes the phrase du jour while Africa overtakes China and India as the next great manufacturing/tech center.

Living In A Stranger's House

I woke up a few minutes ago and looked around me.

The house seemed familiar, like I was staying at the home of a family relation - my grandparents, my great-uncle and great-aunt - the smells were new but old.  The sweet, musty scent of urine, like the aroma that hangs in the air of a rest home or nursing home from long ago.  Cedar tree from a linen trunk.  Body odour of a person who no longer uses deodourant daily.

Where was I?

I lifted the covers on the bed, making sure not to disturb my wife or the cats.  I walked to the cedar chest, put on a pair of sweat pants, slipped my feet into a pair of moccasins and listened to the creaking of the floorboards while I made my way across the house to the study so I could sit and write about this moment, all the while wondering whose house I'd entered.

Is this my home?

All these years I've been a stranger in my own house.  After 22+ years in this same domicile as one of the two original occupants (the dog that slept here during construction doesn't count), can I say I am the owner?

Do I own anything?

Who am I?

Is this another dream?

We are all dreamers within dreams within dreams.  Is this the dream from which one never wakes up?  Is this the dream that provides a brief view of reality before the clouds move in and the window shades close?

For a moment tonight, I saw myself as I really am and now I don't know which person I'm supposed to be.

Levels upon levels of labels from which to choose.

In all levels, on all labels, a happy person for whom the universe lives according to his wishes and desires.  No beginning and no end to time; thus, time does not exist for me; thus, I don't exist; thus, you don't exist; thus, we are all one.

These words do not exist.  The smells of a middle-aged man in his 22+-year old house do not exist.  This house does not exist.  The reflection of the desk lamp light from all the objects around me does not exist.

To see I don't exist and to see I exist to say I don't exist takes waking up within a dream outside a dream within a dream in and out of reality.

A brief moment of insight.

The world's problems do not exist but they won't go away.  Thus, a world of solutions waits to be found in waves of brief moments of insight to all of us at different times and at the same time, IF we're prepared to be unprepared for the moment the insight arrives unexpectedly.

Years of preparation for the moment(s) you never can anticipate.

Flashes of insight that tell you when to deal harshly with some and patiently with others (patiently and harshly with yourself, especially).

Pace yourself.  The race is long although our lives are short - we are relay runners all too happy to carry the baton for an instant of time.

We may be Maya in Uruguay or Wen in Beijing or Warren channeling Axl but we're all the same here, representing ourselves as examples of ourselves to ourselves and others.

Patience, my friends - we'll always be here tomorrow, in one form or another.  Look at life as if you'll be here another ten thousand years from now after having lived ten thousand years before.  What's the hurry?  Life is long.

I am a stranger in this house because in this dream I don't exist.  I will wake up in another dream in which I am familiar with this house.  The whispers bouncing off the walls are mine from the ghost of me who no longer exists.  The shadows passing by are from the me who hasn't yet fully entered this world from the future.  We pass one another in the hall and smile, out of sequence and in tune with the fact none of us exists all at the same time.

The perspective of middle age - seeing the baby you once were and the old person you may become, all at once, while your body reminds you that sleep is still a useful tool to get ready for the next day.

G'night and good morning!  May this day find the solutions you seek for yesterday's problems!

Q: How Does A Retiree Go On Holiday?

A: By taking a fun temp job - http://2010.census.gov/2010censusjobs/a-job-for-you/retirees.php:

Census Taking Is a Great Opportunity for Retirees!

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As a census taker, you receive good pay on a weekly basis. Additionally, you gain the satisfaction of knowing that you are performing an important service for your community and the nation.

Become a census taker by contacting your Local Census Office or by calling toll-free 1-866-861-2010.

Comic Book Adverts

Do people still subscribe to magazines?  I don't know.  My wife and I gave up magazine subscriptions many years ago in order to conserve paper and cut down our discretionary monthly expenses (one of the secrets to becoming a quiet millionaire next-door).

Without those folded, stapled and glued stacks of paper to review, I have lost contact with an old way of life - reading the adverts/marketplace section in the back of a magazine.

Do people still try to sell you secrets the medical industry is hiding from you?  Can you start your own moneymaking metalcutting shop at home?  Have you built an experimental helicopter in your backyard from plans you bought?

When I was a kid, I received a personalised letter that told me if I could solve a "word find" puzzle and send in the completed puzzle along with $1, I would receive a special prize and qualify for a more difficult puzzle.  I asked my parents and they warned me it was a scam but for one dollar it was worth my finding out.

Sure enough, I sent in the dollar and the puzzle and received a newer puzzle and a packet of seeds with a request for $5 to qualify for the grand prize.  My parents discouraged me from sending in $5 so I never found out if I qualified for the grand prize.

Instead, I planted the packet of seeds in a backyard flowerbed.  I think a few of the seeds turned into plants but I can't remember if they were supposed to grow into vegetables or flowers.  Spring had arrived by then so I was more interested in shooting hoops on the backyard cement patio or wading creeks with friends and looking for crawdads.

As an aquarist, I've read my share of aquarium magazines and once sent a few dollars to receive a hand-drawn set of plans for a DIY wet/dry aquarium filter system.

In the case of the prize seed packet and the hand-drawn filter system, I feel like I got my money's worth.

What is the price of information?

Looking out the window, seeing insects flying past on this sunny spring day and the neighbour's dogs barking happily as kids on spring break bicycle by, I think about all the information we receive freely and the information for which we insist on paying cash.

Because we can't remember all the complex interactions that took place to get us from embryo to adult, we tend to simplify what it takes to be a person.  Thus, we easily accept as "truth" someone selling us a secret about the miraculous curative effects of a plant.  We believe that soaking in special salts will make us wealthy (well, maybe the salt seller gets rich, right?).

We don't take the time to think about the massive construction projects and agricultural techniques on one side of the planet that affect the health of our species all across the planet.  We'd rather believe our poor health is tied to being a bad person who needs exorcism or dietary tricks "as seen on TV" or cheap exercise equipment we'll never use.

I learned long ago the secret to being me - there is no secret.  I can be fat, skinny, happy, sad, rich or poor or any other condition I choose.  I have chosen to live several conditions simultaneously, at odds or in harmony with each other at the same time.

Don't let others tell you what you have to do to be you.  Take time to know yourself first.  Understand why you walk or laugh a certain way - do you reflect your parents, your siblings, your friends or strangers you've never met (e.g., celebrities)?  If there's something about yourself in those reflections that you don't like, tell yourself it's okay to not like that one aspect and change or eliminate it, if you want.  Or keep disliking that part of you and don't change, if you like.

No matter whether there's seven billion of us or seven hundred billion of us, every one of us is a unique bundle of states of energy.  We have the ability to actively change our states of energy without paying for information someone else says will make us wealthier, prettier, wiser or stronger.

You control your own future.  Get to know and appreciate yourself in this moment so you can see the next moment belongs to you and those with whom you choose to spend your valuable time.  Don't wait for someone else to tell you you're the most special person in the world - you already know you are.  You don't need me or anyone else to tell you - that information is already in your head, if you take the time to see yourself as you are and not as others think or say they want you to be.

I appreciate your uniqueness.  In fact, I know my life depends on you.  I hope you take the time to know why your unique qualities make you the most important person in the world.

In our one big family, all of us are interconnected.  Let's act like we know we're a family instead of attacking one another as if we're predator and prey species.  We own our emotions - let's spend them wisely.