Some interesting quotes from these persons of note:
http://www.born-today.com/Today/02-27.htm
Showing posts with label irony. Show all posts
Showing posts with label irony. Show all posts
11 January 2010
05 January 2010
Mum Mummy Mummer
While watching the Mummers Parade, a New Year's celebratory march of outlandishly costumed street performers (imagine Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans meeting Rio's Carnival in downtown Philadelphia, PA), I flipped through some books I'd bought at the annual used reading material sale from our local library. As many of you know, libraries toss tonnes of texts into the garbage every year but some libraries try to make a little profit selling books, magazines and other physical goods in decent shape. These days, you can buy ex-library or remainder books online through resellers hanging their shingles on websites like amazon.co.uk or daedalusbooks.com.
But I'm not here to talk about books, purchased or otherwise (such as the free one I got from David Bach via email yesterday, "Start Over, Finish Rich," a reminder that you/us, the average investor, should not let short-term setbacks move you off the track of long-term financial success, a down economy means an up opportunity for you (e.g., find out more about your neighbours who need to move a house/condo quickly because of dire financial straits and scoop up a cheap rental property in the process), etc.). But maybe I am [reminder to self: write blog entry about when my newly-married, one income parents used their discretionary funds for housekeeping/au pair type services which, as empty-nesters, they now use to pay for high-speed Internet, mobile phone and cable television services - you don't need two incomes to survive in today's economy, you need wiser spending habits; teach your offspring and yourselves the value of opportunity costs].
You see, I found an interesting book. Old. Dusty. Ragged edges. The type of book that the H.P. Lovecrafts and Dan Browns of the world love to whisper about finding in sepulchral out-of-the-way digs. In other words, a book published in 2008 which never made it to the bestseller lists, ending up on piles in places like Mike's Merchandise or the local library sale.
No ISBN. No reference numbers of any kind. Presumably self-published. Donated to the library? Purchased by the library for a curious reader? I don't know.
"Dissidence and Dissonance" by Presonia La Fontaine. No picture of the author. No self-inflating biographical sketch of a home in the Hamptons and a Paris apartment where the author lives with a spouse, three children and two dogs when not traversing the planet spreading joy and happiness to others.
A slim volume. Less than 100 pages. Full of facts I haven't doublechecked and verified against what I always hope are reliable sources. Interesting reading, though, even if the facts aren't real.
You see, Presonia (guy or gal?) proposed that the world's great musical composers were or are members of a secret society dedicated to spreading the voice of freedom, seeking victories not in direct clashes with governmental authorities but through the subversive use of music to tell stories that contradict the official party lines told by their political leaders and teach others to interpret the text hidden in the musical notes.
The author ended the book with the question about whether other communication methods like spread spectrum technology are also subversive means of conversation for intelligentsia.
And now you know why I've become interested in writing musical compositions of my own. Presonia presented what s/he considered actual textual interpretations of classic music from sources all over the world, including tribal music from the Amazon, North America, Africa and Australia. Presonia also proposed that the music of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in China were specifically written to thwart government censorship there, following in the footsteps of great Russian composers before the fall of the Soviet Union, encouraging revolt not in physical attacks on the government but in dissident thinking. Presonia showed why the prepared piano was created and musical scores of John Cage were written for dissidents within the United States.
Presonia then wrote several chapters analysing the dissonance of modern music, from jazz and bebop to hip hop and rap, showing that the same symbols or "letters of the alphabet" can be found in all music, once one understands how one frequency can be both the stroke of the letter (in a chord) and a letter, too, and how rhythm has multiple purposes, like combining musical symbols onto a set of three-dimensional dice, where one has to know not only the symbol on the face of a die but also the symbols on the die's faces that you can't see and the supersymbol (or alphabetic letter) formed by the specific placement of dice in a song.
In the chapter where Presonia presented what s/he determined was the ultimate goal of music, to allow anarchy to disrupt the evil plans of world governments, I lost interest. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't see or care if there are ulterior motives of the people around me. I have no hidden agenda to achieve. My goals are announced for the world of people to see. Either you're with me or you're not with me. My purpose of seeing if Presonia's theories are true are to improve my means of communicating with those around me. If I can use music to achieve a richer, deeper sense of understanding what others are saying, then my current view of life is worth living in this moment. Otherwise, I'll find another view.
And while I investigate music as a sound-based hieroglyphic symbolic text-writing machine, I'll dig into the use of other seemingly arbitrary combinations of waveforms as more complex means of talking and thinking. I spent too much time in my youth seeing analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog chips as the only way to convert one energy state to another that I never gave much thought about analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital as the message-sending means. What if ultra-wideband is the medium and the message?
Makes me ponder the old saying, "Only the blind can truly see." I've spent and continue to spend too much time trying to believe what my eyes tell me that I forget we think and communicate using multiple methods already - voice, body language, touch, low-power "brain waves," hormones, etc.
Look at a map of the universe's gamma ray energy sources from Earth's point of view and you see why a single planet or solar system is a poor, low-resolution viewpoint of the universe around us. Like asking a jungle pygmy to describe the purpose of a nuclear power plant - the pygmy may be able to create a curative salve with the leaf of a rare orchid but could not, by looking at the nuclear plant, know how to compute the decay rate of radioactive material.
All these years I spent studying written languages, worrying myself about grammar and sentence structure, watching as linguists try to assemble the set of "original" words spoken by our species... and here in front of me has been the primary or aboriginal language all along: the sound waves themselves. For those who are already in the know, I ask your patience as I come up to speed. For those of you already using multiple waveforms to communicate, I commend you. For those of you who know the extrauniversal conversation tools, I look forward to meeting with you soon.
To know I am here only because you are / exist and I am not here because I do not exist, all while I discover ways of being me I never thought possible is really what my life is all about. And only a few days ago I thought these words were all I had! Instead, I see (blindly and lately) that how I talk to you, my friends, is just as important as what I say.
Have a great day!
But I'm not here to talk about books, purchased or otherwise (such as the free one I got from David Bach via email yesterday, "Start Over, Finish Rich," a reminder that you/us, the average investor, should not let short-term setbacks move you off the track of long-term financial success, a down economy means an up opportunity for you (e.g., find out more about your neighbours who need to move a house/condo quickly because of dire financial straits and scoop up a cheap rental property in the process), etc.). But maybe I am [reminder to self: write blog entry about when my newly-married, one income parents used their discretionary funds for housekeeping/au pair type services which, as empty-nesters, they now use to pay for high-speed Internet, mobile phone and cable television services - you don't need two incomes to survive in today's economy, you need wiser spending habits; teach your offspring and yourselves the value of opportunity costs].
You see, I found an interesting book. Old. Dusty. Ragged edges. The type of book that the H.P. Lovecrafts and Dan Browns of the world love to whisper about finding in sepulchral out-of-the-way digs. In other words, a book published in 2008 which never made it to the bestseller lists, ending up on piles in places like Mike's Merchandise or the local library sale.
No ISBN. No reference numbers of any kind. Presumably self-published. Donated to the library? Purchased by the library for a curious reader? I don't know.
"Dissidence and Dissonance" by Presonia La Fontaine. No picture of the author. No self-inflating biographical sketch of a home in the Hamptons and a Paris apartment where the author lives with a spouse, three children and two dogs when not traversing the planet spreading joy and happiness to others.
A slim volume. Less than 100 pages. Full of facts I haven't doublechecked and verified against what I always hope are reliable sources. Interesting reading, though, even if the facts aren't real.
You see, Presonia (guy or gal?) proposed that the world's great musical composers were or are members of a secret society dedicated to spreading the voice of freedom, seeking victories not in direct clashes with governmental authorities but through the subversive use of music to tell stories that contradict the official party lines told by their political leaders and teach others to interpret the text hidden in the musical notes.
The author ended the book with the question about whether other communication methods like spread spectrum technology are also subversive means of conversation for intelligentsia.
And now you know why I've become interested in writing musical compositions of my own. Presonia presented what s/he considered actual textual interpretations of classic music from sources all over the world, including tribal music from the Amazon, North America, Africa and Australia. Presonia also proposed that the music of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in China were specifically written to thwart government censorship there, following in the footsteps of great Russian composers before the fall of the Soviet Union, encouraging revolt not in physical attacks on the government but in dissident thinking. Presonia showed why the prepared piano was created and musical scores of John Cage were written for dissidents within the United States.
Presonia then wrote several chapters analysing the dissonance of modern music, from jazz and bebop to hip hop and rap, showing that the same symbols or "letters of the alphabet" can be found in all music, once one understands how one frequency can be both the stroke of the letter (in a chord) and a letter, too, and how rhythm has multiple purposes, like combining musical symbols onto a set of three-dimensional dice, where one has to know not only the symbol on the face of a die but also the symbols on the die's faces that you can't see and the supersymbol (or alphabetic letter) formed by the specific placement of dice in a song.
In the chapter where Presonia presented what s/he determined was the ultimate goal of music, to allow anarchy to disrupt the evil plans of world governments, I lost interest. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't see or care if there are ulterior motives of the people around me. I have no hidden agenda to achieve. My goals are announced for the world of people to see. Either you're with me or you're not with me. My purpose of seeing if Presonia's theories are true are to improve my means of communicating with those around me. If I can use music to achieve a richer, deeper sense of understanding what others are saying, then my current view of life is worth living in this moment. Otherwise, I'll find another view.
And while I investigate music as a sound-based hieroglyphic symbolic text-writing machine, I'll dig into the use of other seemingly arbitrary combinations of waveforms as more complex means of talking and thinking. I spent too much time in my youth seeing analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog chips as the only way to convert one energy state to another that I never gave much thought about analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital as the message-sending means. What if ultra-wideband is the medium and the message?
Makes me ponder the old saying, "Only the blind can truly see." I've spent and continue to spend too much time trying to believe what my eyes tell me that I forget we think and communicate using multiple methods already - voice, body language, touch, low-power "brain waves," hormones, etc.
Look at a map of the universe's gamma ray energy sources from Earth's point of view and you see why a single planet or solar system is a poor, low-resolution viewpoint of the universe around us. Like asking a jungle pygmy to describe the purpose of a nuclear power plant - the pygmy may be able to create a curative salve with the leaf of a rare orchid but could not, by looking at the nuclear plant, know how to compute the decay rate of radioactive material.
All these years I spent studying written languages, worrying myself about grammar and sentence structure, watching as linguists try to assemble the set of "original" words spoken by our species... and here in front of me has been the primary or aboriginal language all along: the sound waves themselves. For those who are already in the know, I ask your patience as I come up to speed. For those of you already using multiple waveforms to communicate, I commend you. For those of you who know the extrauniversal conversation tools, I look forward to meeting with you soon.
To know I am here only because you are / exist and I am not here because I do not exist, all while I discover ways of being me I never thought possible is really what my life is all about. And only a few days ago I thought these words were all I had! Instead, I see (blindly and lately) that how I talk to you, my friends, is just as important as what I say.
Have a great day!
11 December 2009
While you were away:
Water fell from the sky the other day - in torrents, sheets, downpours. The instantaneous, temporary rivulets and creeks picked up dry leaves and pushed forward sand, dirt and small rocks. Tree roots were bared and trees fell down. Insects drowned.
Possibly a 24-hour rainfall record for that calendar day.
The water has moved on, into underground reservoirs, ponds, lakes and seas.
Life moves on.
At this moment, nothing profound. No word sounds bouncing around in my thoughts, no diverse events to connect together for slights, slices, or slight bits of humour. Playfulness absent from my being.
Why?
Caught in the three-dimensional maze, the labyrinth of space-time, unable to see the big picture today.
Knowing the truth within the truth based on facts outside of words and no way to create a word sculpture to reveal the truth through panes of pained glass shards. I can look into the thoughts and motivations of others but that's just looking at the people world into which I was born and raised. I can look outside the people world and see more than I can comprehend but that's just toying with large objects so big I label them infinite.
I do not play computer games like Sims, Command and Conquer, or MMORPGs. I do not hold a seat in a legislative body like the League of Nations. I am one person, sitting here looking at the universe on my doorstep. For all I really know, the universe revolves around me. For all I really know, there is no me and there is no universe.
People will die of starvation today. Tons of jellyfish will reproduce themselves. My neighbour will use a petrol-powered leaf blower to push storm-piled leaves down the street and into his neighbours' ditches so that his property shows a plain of green grass in winter and hopefully looks good enough for potential buyers. This world full of creatures is alive with interaction, good, bad or indifferent.
Thus I find myself wondering if I should remove people-coloured glasses and see this world and the neighbouring parts of the universe as if the universe was absolutely neutral about the existence of our species. Not hostile. Not benevolent. Absent of thought. Interacting because our concentrated matter happens to bump into other neighbouring concentrated matter (or non-concentrated matter/antimatter, for that matter).
Equality. Freedom. Truth.
Are you prepared to explore other planetary bodies, and while doing so recognising the fact that Earth-based creatures are not the only creatures who get to live in this universe? If you're willing to excavate the graves of other cultures, living or extinct, while calling the gravesites of your culture sacred, will you treat off-Earth planetary fossilised records as sacred or simply a place where creatures died in another time and place? If you're willing to eat a species to extinction on Earth, would you be willing to eat the last species, the last living thing, on another planet, especially if it was a matter of personal/familial survival to you? Do you think you and your culture have a better idea how to take care of your place in this universe than any other? Do you really know what life is all about; in other words, what is a living thing to you?
I am one person. I have no absolute answers. I have more questions than solutions to problems or challenges to meet head-on.
I am of our species but that does not mean I am for or against our species. Our species will generally exist in its current form for a very long time but our species is one of many forms of the local state of the universe. Not the only one. I am not here to convince you your cultural upbringing teaches that you and your culture are the prime reason for existence, and I am not here to convince you the teaching is incorrect. My observations are my own, here for my edification and entertainment, repeating those of others who have seen the same thing.
More than once I have debated my thoughts about jumping off this hamster wheel of writing a daily blog entry and more than once I have taken a few days off to contemplate my debate. I return here because I cannot see a viable way to do something other than what I'm doing right now. Is this blog writing my form of meditation? No, it's my form of self-promotion, continuing my cultural practice of practicing self-importance. Can I set aside this laptop computer and perform other parlor tricks of language playfulness on paper? Perhaps I can and perhaps I should. By shutting off this computer, I shut off my connection to Internet news headlines, I disconnect myself from the artificial world of bits and bytes and I return to the non-people centered view of the universe that trees, rocks, lichen and meteor showers give me. Today, after writing this blog entry, I will close this laptop that contains a virtual desktop and move it off my real desktop. I will step outside and enjoy the crisp, cold air. I will take walks. I will talk to my neighbours, including people, plants and other animals. I will be one with the universe again, instead of being one with the people through electronic means. I will do what I enjoy, composing handwritten notes, drawing and sketching, whittling wooden creatures from dead tree limbs, determining which living things stay in my garden or get pulled up as weeds to be planted somewhere else, and changing my thought patterns to ones tied to a quiet life free of computing devices, networks and radio communication methods.
I am not a farmer or a rancher. I am a gardener. I imitate the life of an artist named Peter Sellers who very nearly perfected the role of Chance the Gardener, a.k.a. Chauncey Gardiner. That is what this blog has always been about. That is the truth behind the truth that this blog as a living book has always tried to reveal. Now that you know the truth, I hope you can find something else entertaining to read. This storybook blog has come to a happy conclusion. I am free to be me once again.
THE END. %^)
Possibly a 24-hour rainfall record for that calendar day.
The water has moved on, into underground reservoirs, ponds, lakes and seas.
Life moves on.
At this moment, nothing profound. No word sounds bouncing around in my thoughts, no diverse events to connect together for slights, slices, or slight bits of humour. Playfulness absent from my being.
Why?
Caught in the three-dimensional maze, the labyrinth of space-time, unable to see the big picture today.
Knowing the truth within the truth based on facts outside of words and no way to create a word sculpture to reveal the truth through panes of pained glass shards. I can look into the thoughts and motivations of others but that's just looking at the people world into which I was born and raised. I can look outside the people world and see more than I can comprehend but that's just toying with large objects so big I label them infinite.
I do not play computer games like Sims, Command and Conquer, or MMORPGs. I do not hold a seat in a legislative body like the League of Nations. I am one person, sitting here looking at the universe on my doorstep. For all I really know, the universe revolves around me. For all I really know, there is no me and there is no universe.
People will die of starvation today. Tons of jellyfish will reproduce themselves. My neighbour will use a petrol-powered leaf blower to push storm-piled leaves down the street and into his neighbours' ditches so that his property shows a plain of green grass in winter and hopefully looks good enough for potential buyers. This world full of creatures is alive with interaction, good, bad or indifferent.
Thus I find myself wondering if I should remove people-coloured glasses and see this world and the neighbouring parts of the universe as if the universe was absolutely neutral about the existence of our species. Not hostile. Not benevolent. Absent of thought. Interacting because our concentrated matter happens to bump into other neighbouring concentrated matter (or non-concentrated matter/antimatter, for that matter).
Equality. Freedom. Truth.
Are you prepared to explore other planetary bodies, and while doing so recognising the fact that Earth-based creatures are not the only creatures who get to live in this universe? If you're willing to excavate the graves of other cultures, living or extinct, while calling the gravesites of your culture sacred, will you treat off-Earth planetary fossilised records as sacred or simply a place where creatures died in another time and place? If you're willing to eat a species to extinction on Earth, would you be willing to eat the last species, the last living thing, on another planet, especially if it was a matter of personal/familial survival to you? Do you think you and your culture have a better idea how to take care of your place in this universe than any other? Do you really know what life is all about; in other words, what is a living thing to you?
I am one person. I have no absolute answers. I have more questions than solutions to problems or challenges to meet head-on.
I am of our species but that does not mean I am for or against our species. Our species will generally exist in its current form for a very long time but our species is one of many forms of the local state of the universe. Not the only one. I am not here to convince you your cultural upbringing teaches that you and your culture are the prime reason for existence, and I am not here to convince you the teaching is incorrect. My observations are my own, here for my edification and entertainment, repeating those of others who have seen the same thing.
More than once I have debated my thoughts about jumping off this hamster wheel of writing a daily blog entry and more than once I have taken a few days off to contemplate my debate. I return here because I cannot see a viable way to do something other than what I'm doing right now. Is this blog writing my form of meditation? No, it's my form of self-promotion, continuing my cultural practice of practicing self-importance. Can I set aside this laptop computer and perform other parlor tricks of language playfulness on paper? Perhaps I can and perhaps I should. By shutting off this computer, I shut off my connection to Internet news headlines, I disconnect myself from the artificial world of bits and bytes and I return to the non-people centered view of the universe that trees, rocks, lichen and meteor showers give me. Today, after writing this blog entry, I will close this laptop that contains a virtual desktop and move it off my real desktop. I will step outside and enjoy the crisp, cold air. I will take walks. I will talk to my neighbours, including people, plants and other animals. I will be one with the universe again, instead of being one with the people through electronic means. I will do what I enjoy, composing handwritten notes, drawing and sketching, whittling wooden creatures from dead tree limbs, determining which living things stay in my garden or get pulled up as weeds to be planted somewhere else, and changing my thought patterns to ones tied to a quiet life free of computing devices, networks and radio communication methods.
I am not a farmer or a rancher. I am a gardener. I imitate the life of an artist named Peter Sellers who very nearly perfected the role of Chance the Gardener, a.k.a. Chauncey Gardiner. That is what this blog has always been about. That is the truth behind the truth that this blog as a living book has always tried to reveal. Now that you know the truth, I hope you can find something else entertaining to read. This storybook blog has come to a happy conclusion. I am free to be me once again.
THE END. %^)
08 December 2009
End-around Flanking
Today the truth will be revealed. Somewhere. In a tiny corner of the galaxy in which we live. We buzz around this planet comfortably seated in our exoskeletons and move confidently forward, gravity our best friend and confidante.
I have let myself be fooled into thinking that sitting here is all there is to do because the movements on the cover of this piece of furniture are more stimulating than the static images around me.
We reveal our religious beliefs by the gods which hold our attention.
While I stand here on stage pulling a rabbit out of the hat, you won't notice all the little movements and noise going on behind the curtain, will you? Good. I'm not really standing here. I've paid my body double to take all the exposure shots for me while I do the real work, which is propping up the puppets behind stage to look busy to those who sneak into the back door looking to see what's really going on. I'm glad I already thought of putting wireless controls in the puppets who are actually robots operated from another location which I run from a software package that automatically operates a chain of these networked sites. I'm not really here. It's my thought control double who's doing all the work while I'm on holiday.
Have you ever stood at the edge of the solar system and looked back at all the empty space between our planets, wondering how in the world any one planet can attract so many comets, asteroids and meteors?
Do you really know what's causing our atmosphere to get warmer? Have you taken our advice and bought land in the upper regions of the Northern Hemisphere yet? Of course not. We tend to be happy as a meadowlark eating lemons playing basketball in the park signing autographs for our adoring fans, fooled into believing this moment will last forever.
Don't be fooled. These are just words, static images I created dynamically with my word sorting machine made out of spare pachinko parts.
You're still here? Well, let me give you a hint about the weather. It's going to get colder, wetter, warmer, drier where you are. What do we care about global warming in the middle of a mid-latitude blizzard? Weather is politics, always local. Like saying Arabic is the same as Farsi is the same as Persian is the same as cat fur rugs.
Do you know what it's like to live with your thoughts? Do your thoughts know what it's like to live with you? Do you see there is nothing real about the word thoughts (or the word "thoughts")? Can you write a computer program without using brackets or parentheses? [({Why does my brain process the phrase "parent thesis" everytime?})]
I wish I was as smart as I wish as I thought I was smart as I smart as I wish as.
The more a factory makes widgets, the more widgets are available to be used by widget users. But a widget is not always a widget. A teabag is an ear muffler. A bowling ball is an ink roller. A computer does not compute.
Sigh...a paradigm shift. A paradise shaft. A handful of silt. A silk hand grenade. Would we work together to make this a better place if there was no afterlife to dump our problems into? I, too, can have my dreams, despite knowing our atomic makeup depends on manual merging of material missing immensely important atomic connections.
[Free service for my friends. I walk through life and comment about what I've personally encountered, keeping a positive attitude and staying within what I perceive as the bounds of decency to share my thoughts with you. I do not gain personal wealth increases by what I mention because freedom (or my belief in my idea of the idea of personal freedom) means not taking money or any barter exchange equivalents for what I freely say. Thus, here are some words I've encountered that you can see for yourself their positive effect(s) on your lives: Synapse Wireless, Invetex and Hygenall. I am not a paid spokesperson for these companies/products/services but mention them because my friends like them and believe positively enough for me to mention them. Trust is believing what your friends say. I trust they're right.]
Did I just write that last paragraph? I guess I did. Trusting my friends enough to blindly mention their beliefs is a big step for me. I am not the kind of person who goes around with a megaphone hawking wares I haven't tried. Of course, since I believe no one reads this, then it doesn't matter what I say, right? I need a new word here besides paradoxical.
Have you experienced the truth that was revealed while I held your attention? Not yet? Hmm... let's see if this adding machine in the basement is working the way I paid the programmers to make it work... CLUNK! CHING! POW! There, that's better. I forget that the barrels of used motor oil which capture the sun's heat and circulate through the subsubflooring also feed into the betta fish tanks which give detritus to the earthworm and mushroom beds that energize the radon-trapping device. Too bad the local bait shops won't take my glow-in-the-dark worms and the local organic grocer won't let me sell the glow-in-the-dark fungus. Talk about a lost opportunity for a niche market! Reminds me of the time I tried to sell the frogs I captured near the nuclear-processing facility in Oak Ridge - no one was impressed about the frogs' effect on Geiger counters until I showed that eating frog legs cured abdominal cancer and then kazam!, sales skyrocketed faster than a ride on SpaceShipLeDeuxieme.
Okay, here comes the report I was looking for. "In 2012, nothing of significance will happen, unless you count the complete loss of tourists on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the fissure that opens up and swallows the Black Sea monster that migrated from Loch Ness." Wait, that's the wrong report. I wanted data for today, not jokes about cataphlegmatic events. Hang on a second. I'll just poke that guinea pig to run around its cage a little more and...oh, here it comes, the new report!
That's it for today. I've got to work on the ant farms built into the walls of my house and make sure they're providing enough food for the broad-headed skinks taking residence in my attic who serve as lookouts for me in my search for the ultimate balance between a people-purposed house and a home for all who want to live, eat and breathe here with me.
I have let myself be fooled into thinking that sitting here is all there is to do because the movements on the cover of this piece of furniture are more stimulating than the static images around me.
We reveal our religious beliefs by the gods which hold our attention.
While I stand here on stage pulling a rabbit out of the hat, you won't notice all the little movements and noise going on behind the curtain, will you? Good. I'm not really standing here. I've paid my body double to take all the exposure shots for me while I do the real work, which is propping up the puppets behind stage to look busy to those who sneak into the back door looking to see what's really going on. I'm glad I already thought of putting wireless controls in the puppets who are actually robots operated from another location which I run from a software package that automatically operates a chain of these networked sites. I'm not really here. It's my thought control double who's doing all the work while I'm on holiday.
Have you ever stood at the edge of the solar system and looked back at all the empty space between our planets, wondering how in the world any one planet can attract so many comets, asteroids and meteors?
Do you really know what's causing our atmosphere to get warmer? Have you taken our advice and bought land in the upper regions of the Northern Hemisphere yet? Of course not. We tend to be happy as a meadowlark eating lemons playing basketball in the park signing autographs for our adoring fans, fooled into believing this moment will last forever.
Don't be fooled. These are just words, static images I created dynamically with my word sorting machine made out of spare pachinko parts.
You're still here? Well, let me give you a hint about the weather. It's going to get colder, wetter, warmer, drier where you are. What do we care about global warming in the middle of a mid-latitude blizzard? Weather is politics, always local. Like saying Arabic is the same as Farsi is the same as Persian is the same as cat fur rugs.
Do you know what it's like to live with your thoughts? Do your thoughts know what it's like to live with you? Do you see there is nothing real about the word thoughts (or the word "thoughts")? Can you write a computer program without using brackets or parentheses? [({Why does my brain process the phrase "parent thesis" everytime?})]
I wish I was as smart as I wish as I thought I was smart as I smart as I wish as.
The more a factory makes widgets, the more widgets are available to be used by widget users. But a widget is not always a widget. A teabag is an ear muffler. A bowling ball is an ink roller. A computer does not compute.
Sigh...a paradigm shift. A paradise shaft. A handful of silt. A silk hand grenade. Would we work together to make this a better place if there was no afterlife to dump our problems into? I, too, can have my dreams, despite knowing our atomic makeup depends on manual merging of material missing immensely important atomic connections.
[Free service for my friends. I walk through life and comment about what I've personally encountered, keeping a positive attitude and staying within what I perceive as the bounds of decency to share my thoughts with you. I do not gain personal wealth increases by what I mention because freedom (or my belief in my idea of the idea of personal freedom) means not taking money or any barter exchange equivalents for what I freely say. Thus, here are some words I've encountered that you can see for yourself their positive effect(s) on your lives: Synapse Wireless, Invetex and Hygenall. I am not a paid spokesperson for these companies/products/services but mention them because my friends like them and believe positively enough for me to mention them. Trust is believing what your friends say. I trust they're right.]
Did I just write that last paragraph? I guess I did. Trusting my friends enough to blindly mention their beliefs is a big step for me. I am not the kind of person who goes around with a megaphone hawking wares I haven't tried. Of course, since I believe no one reads this, then it doesn't matter what I say, right? I need a new word here besides paradoxical.
Have you experienced the truth that was revealed while I held your attention? Not yet? Hmm... let's see if this adding machine in the basement is working the way I paid the programmers to make it work... CLUNK! CHING! POW! There, that's better. I forget that the barrels of used motor oil which capture the sun's heat and circulate through the subsubflooring also feed into the betta fish tanks which give detritus to the earthworm and mushroom beds that energize the radon-trapping device. Too bad the local bait shops won't take my glow-in-the-dark worms and the local organic grocer won't let me sell the glow-in-the-dark fungus. Talk about a lost opportunity for a niche market! Reminds me of the time I tried to sell the frogs I captured near the nuclear-processing facility in Oak Ridge - no one was impressed about the frogs' effect on Geiger counters until I showed that eating frog legs cured abdominal cancer and then kazam!, sales skyrocketed faster than a ride on SpaceShipLeDeuxieme.
Okay, here comes the report I was looking for. "In 2012, nothing of significance will happen, unless you count the complete loss of tourists on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the fissure that opens up and swallows the Black Sea monster that migrated from Loch Ness." Wait, that's the wrong report. I wanted data for today, not jokes about cataphlegmatic events. Hang on a second. I'll just poke that guinea pig to run around its cage a little more and...oh, here it comes, the new report!
In today's news, a solar event occurred. While insignificant in comparison to the self-important activities of one species on the third planet from the Sun, Venus reported a particulary nice warm glow on her beautiful skin, indicated by the light, dainty hot air floating around her body. Venus thought (in the way that planets think, totally foreign to our way of thinking) that Earth was coming along nicely in its transformation to a Venus-like look. One day soon they would both be free of meddling by those pesky little creatures crawling in and out of the planets' pores.
That's it for today. I've got to work on the ant farms built into the walls of my house and make sure they're providing enough food for the broad-headed skinks taking residence in my attic who serve as lookouts for me in my search for the ultimate balance between a people-purposed house and a home for all who want to live, eat and breathe here with me.
04 December 2009
Peace and Quiescence
14,763 more days, give or take. Meanwhile, the exchange of goods and services between members of my species slowly picking back up after the two-year shock in the awareness and negative effect of another overpriced set of emperor's new clothes thrown in the garbage bin. One more proof that not all the members of our species are well-meaning. Everyone looking for the next set of emperor's/empress' clothes to build an economy with. Futility versus utility. Form versus function.
Taking a different tack today. Looking at the life of a person who doesn't have to compete with others for the most number of interesting things to claim as definition of one's status.
Some call it frugal living. Some call it being environmentally-friendly.
I'm not ready to call it anything yet. I examine the life of one without things and wonder...
Repeating my thoughts to mull over them, picking through the scraps for any new insights.
Waste not, want not. Haste makes waste. A penny saved is a penny earned.
What state or condition of the body does such a life provide?
For years I have held up the idyllic life of the country gentleman as an escape, a dream, a fantasy, a way of life that is always there whenever I want to set myself completely free. A hermit who doesn't mind hosting the occasional visitor, regardless of species.
And yet here I am in that role, having slowly practiced the lines that my being this character requires.
But I still have things that use energy which requires payment to others to maintain and provide the energy source.
Do I eliminate the things or the outside energy source? If I kept the things and got off the grid, then what? Basement nuclear power plant? Rooftop solar panels? Intermittent wind turbine power? Creek-powered transformer? But all of these require a home and some land, don't they?
Is the nomadic life still possible? Can we carry our homes on our backs figuratively without having to pay for the privilege of living along the way?
==> bottom line: what is freedom? <==
I derive no pleasure from perpetuating a storyline today. My recent characterization has worn out its usefulness. I am not the person who will lead us to the realization that we are not individuals because I will not overcome our protests to the contrary due to our trained belief in freedom of thought and thus apparent existence of individuals. Just because I believe and know we are temporary vortices within a system of temporary vortices does not mean I have to convince people to join me in my belief. We tend to believe that the actions of our ancestors portend a future which builds upon the past because we usually do only what we know how to do and accidentally discover something new which becomes something old leading to others repeating what we did and discovering something new, etc.
These symbols, these words, these repetitions...do they provide any usefulness to me other than entertainment in the moment? I write for myself since I'm the only person I know who knows I exist and knows I don't exist at the same time. I have no past to overcome or future to achieve great accomplishments. I have this moment and this moment only. I enjoy this moment. I thrive in this moment. I am outside of time but firmly seated in place.
My thoughts are jumbled today. I am in a state of nearly pure meditation where thoughts and actions are unnecessary except to keep me focused on lining words one after the other across this imaginary page. I am without being but I am a being.
I have stood at the top of tall towers. I have watched tall towers fall down. I have looked at the ruins of towers of ancient civilisations that fell. Towers and civilisations inevitably fall. We repeat ourselves over and over, rediscover anew. Thus, what I do here will disappear, no matter if I find something new to say. I will repeat what others have said. Others will repeat what I have said. I am doing both now. I am doing both now.
I line words up with ease, sometimes harmoniously. I envy those who can pile up and line up musical notes into organized, harmonious sound sequences, their sense of wonder and invention beyond my comprehension.
There are no levels of being. There is no such thing as meditation. I am who I have always been; well, almost always, changing personalities slightly after an automobile accident at age 17 (amazing what a jarring blow to the head and 20 seconds of induced unconsciousness/coma/concussion does to one's understanding of the cosmos, waking up and asking, "Why am I here? Why am I on this treadmill of BORNMARRYHAVEKIDSDIE?").
I think out loud on this public electronic forum because it's a convenient place to store my written thoughts. By chance others will read these words. If I am to believe myself, to be true to myself, then I put these words down here without worry or concern about the pebble-in-the-pond effect because what I do does not matter. We will repeat ourselves in our personal beliefs and our civilisations will inevitably fall. We can build new societies and we can fall into anarchy. We can do both. My voice will be forgotten no matter how much I want to think my voice is worth hearing (if only to myself).
I state all of this seeing and being in awe of the wonders of the universe while having joy and happiness in this moment knowing I am a variation of a repetition of the temporary vortex I think of as a person in a species on a planet in the universe. The universe is my steady state, my foundation, my place of/for being. The universe is more than I can wrap my arms around or fully understand with my thoughts. In fact, the universe may not exist in the way I have been trained to think it exists but it doesn't matter. As a spinning top on the surface of this planet, I am all I know and all I need to know to exist.
At the end of this blog entry, it doesn't really matter what I do in the next moment but I will choose to do something that perpetuates my species' belief in manifest destiny because my set of atoms and molecules may be lined up to make me want to do something for my species while I want to believe I have not yet reached the point where I will fully disengage myself from the world of my species to exist in a permanent moment of meditation for the next 14,763 days.
I can find happiness in knowing that it doesn't matter what I do in the next moment just as much as knowing I am (you are) the most important person in the world that the world can't do without. The condition known as true freedom - being and not being, repeating and not repeating.
Taking a different tack today. Looking at the life of a person who doesn't have to compete with others for the most number of interesting things to claim as definition of one's status.
- No refrigerator.
- No automobile.
- No electric kitchen appliances.
- No battery-powered clocks.
- No central air heating/cooling system.
- No water heater.
- No house.
- No land.
- Not even this computer.
Some call it frugal living. Some call it being environmentally-friendly.
I'm not ready to call it anything yet. I examine the life of one without things and wonder...
Repeating my thoughts to mull over them, picking through the scraps for any new insights.
Waste not, want not. Haste makes waste. A penny saved is a penny earned.
What state or condition of the body does such a life provide?
For years I have held up the idyllic life of the country gentleman as an escape, a dream, a fantasy, a way of life that is always there whenever I want to set myself completely free. A hermit who doesn't mind hosting the occasional visitor, regardless of species.
And yet here I am in that role, having slowly practiced the lines that my being this character requires.
But I still have things that use energy which requires payment to others to maintain and provide the energy source.
Do I eliminate the things or the outside energy source? If I kept the things and got off the grid, then what? Basement nuclear power plant? Rooftop solar panels? Intermittent wind turbine power? Creek-powered transformer? But all of these require a home and some land, don't they?
Is the nomadic life still possible? Can we carry our homes on our backs figuratively without having to pay for the privilege of living along the way?
==> bottom line: what is freedom? <==
I derive no pleasure from perpetuating a storyline today. My recent characterization has worn out its usefulness. I am not the person who will lead us to the realization that we are not individuals because I will not overcome our protests to the contrary due to our trained belief in freedom of thought and thus apparent existence of individuals. Just because I believe and know we are temporary vortices within a system of temporary vortices does not mean I have to convince people to join me in my belief. We tend to believe that the actions of our ancestors portend a future which builds upon the past because we usually do only what we know how to do and accidentally discover something new which becomes something old leading to others repeating what we did and discovering something new, etc.
These symbols, these words, these repetitions...do they provide any usefulness to me other than entertainment in the moment? I write for myself since I'm the only person I know who knows I exist and knows I don't exist at the same time. I have no past to overcome or future to achieve great accomplishments. I have this moment and this moment only. I enjoy this moment. I thrive in this moment. I am outside of time but firmly seated in place.
My thoughts are jumbled today. I am in a state of nearly pure meditation where thoughts and actions are unnecessary except to keep me focused on lining words one after the other across this imaginary page. I am without being but I am a being.
I have stood at the top of tall towers. I have watched tall towers fall down. I have looked at the ruins of towers of ancient civilisations that fell. Towers and civilisations inevitably fall. We repeat ourselves over and over, rediscover anew. Thus, what I do here will disappear, no matter if I find something new to say. I will repeat what others have said. Others will repeat what I have said. I am doing both now. I am doing both now.
I line words up with ease, sometimes harmoniously. I envy those who can pile up and line up musical notes into organized, harmonious sound sequences, their sense of wonder and invention beyond my comprehension.
There are no levels of being. There is no such thing as meditation. I am who I have always been; well, almost always, changing personalities slightly after an automobile accident at age 17 (amazing what a jarring blow to the head and 20 seconds of induced unconsciousness/coma/concussion does to one's understanding of the cosmos, waking up and asking, "Why am I here? Why am I on this treadmill of BORNMARRYHAVEKIDSDIE?").
I think out loud on this public electronic forum because it's a convenient place to store my written thoughts. By chance others will read these words. If I am to believe myself, to be true to myself, then I put these words down here without worry or concern about the pebble-in-the-pond effect because what I do does not matter. We will repeat ourselves in our personal beliefs and our civilisations will inevitably fall. We can build new societies and we can fall into anarchy. We can do both. My voice will be forgotten no matter how much I want to think my voice is worth hearing (if only to myself).
I state all of this seeing and being in awe of the wonders of the universe while having joy and happiness in this moment knowing I am a variation of a repetition of the temporary vortex I think of as a person in a species on a planet in the universe. The universe is my steady state, my foundation, my place of/for being. The universe is more than I can wrap my arms around or fully understand with my thoughts. In fact, the universe may not exist in the way I have been trained to think it exists but it doesn't matter. As a spinning top on the surface of this planet, I am all I know and all I need to know to exist.
At the end of this blog entry, it doesn't really matter what I do in the next moment but I will choose to do something that perpetuates my species' belief in manifest destiny because my set of atoms and molecules may be lined up to make me want to do something for my species while I want to believe I have not yet reached the point where I will fully disengage myself from the world of my species to exist in a permanent moment of meditation for the next 14,763 days.
I can find happiness in knowing that it doesn't matter what I do in the next moment just as much as knowing I am (you are) the most important person in the world that the world can't do without. The condition known as true freedom - being and not being, repeating and not repeating.
02 December 2009
Street Urchin
Listening to the Spanish guitar tag radio on last.fm ... setting the mood... wrote the last few blog entries to put space between me and others so I can focus on my storyline.
When you've seen more than you planned to see, when you wandered your neighbourhood streets more than you wondered about them, you put together, you assemble, you draw, you conclude, you deduct, you infer.
I entertain because of who I've been. I think because of who I am. I multitask because I like to exercise my nervous system pathways.
I use self-referential pronouns because I only know how to be me.
If you knew the future, what would you do now? If you knew that your species will survive in one form or another for thousands of years but a reconfigured version of your species will take off and explore the rest of the universe without your version, what would you do tomorrow? What did you do yesterday knowing that you'd be here today?
If you knew that you didn't exist, what would you do about the concept of you? Would these words matter? Would you continue being you as you know you?
I am not these words, I tell myself, but I am these words as well as the radio waves going out from this laptop computer and the wind and rain blowing outside the window.
I don't see this planet as a living organism (e.g., gaia) but I do see the planet as part of a system of living systems. I see us looking for us as individual organisms on planetary systems in other parts of the galaxy. We talk about alien technology as if we've been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence and we talk about possibly being as highly intelligent as life has ever gotten in our galaxy (or maybe even in the universe), in both cases distinguishing individual accomplishments within social systems as a form of what we call intelligence.
But none of us is alone in achieving intelligent accomplishments. It is the system of living systems that changes itself within points/nodes of itself that we think of as signs of intelligence in individual species and individual members of species.
We are part of the environment around us, not separate from the planetary system on which we developed.
[Today, I can't get past being me to see where we will be when we aren't we. I can't imagine what it's like to compress a version of me into a set of serial/parallel cosmic ray communication channels or cloud set of neutrinos and decompress the new self-replicating, local-environment adapting version of me somewhere else.]
How do I take the future and backtrack to the present? How do I apply practical decisionmaking to get us to where I already know we'll be, especially when I know I'm going to do what I'm going to do, no matter how much I fret over what it is I think I should do next to get me away from seeing me as me?
The future is not guaranteed. Or, as we know, no one future is guaranteed. All futures are guaranteed to possibly occur until they don't occur.
I believe that life happens because life happens. People do what they do. We spend as much time in an accidental future as we do in a purposeful one. Many possible futures include us merging our individual lives into a generally-agreed planetary-focused future. Many possible futures include us battling over the changing dynamics of our planet's resources to ensure the distinct definition of individuals over the general survival of the species.
I sit here and know which futures I want to happen, which ones are going to get us moving outward in the universe. I also know that a lot of what I know will change by going in the direction of those futures. However, a lot of what I know will change in every future I plot out. Therefore, I toss out my concerns about change. My focus is on which changes benefit not me but my planet and my species as I currently know it. Science, not science fiction.
We are cogs in the wheels of the factory called Earth in the system of living systems we call our solar system in one spiral of the Milky Way galaxy. We are the current snapshot of constant change.
How are we going to change in the future? We are going to create a version of ourselves that can replicate itself iteratively and figuratively in order to adapt to the rigours of space travel. We've already partially done that in mechanical form, our umbilical cords of radio wave communications extending high-tech fingers into the solar system to maintain contact with those early prototypes. Next we, as extensions of Earth, grow arms and legs. Instead of dropping sweat or hair off our bodies when we now send probes from the planet, we'll figure out how to stretch out our limbs like amoebae and split, our duplicate bodies a similar version of ourselves but better adapted to local environments with each new regeneration.
With time, we won't recognize our new selves anymore. We may or may not be able to communicate with one another.
Like I keep saying, you don't have to believe me. I hardly believe myself and wouldn't, if it weren't for this Book of the Future I keep adding to its pages using newspaper headlines from the past that keep forecasting the future.
For instance, when we figure out how to send out high-power beams far enough into space that one of our signals hits an "alien" organism on another planet, causing the organism to mutate, we have extended ourselves. It happens here in our bodies from the Sun everyday. It happens when we reprogram computing systems on Mars. One day, we'll have our day to mutate extraplanetary bodies, too, creating new nodes/points in the web of life. Just you wait and see...
When you've seen more than you planned to see, when you wandered your neighbourhood streets more than you wondered about them, you put together, you assemble, you draw, you conclude, you deduct, you infer.
I entertain because of who I've been. I think because of who I am. I multitask because I like to exercise my nervous system pathways.
I use self-referential pronouns because I only know how to be me.
If you knew the future, what would you do now? If you knew that your species will survive in one form or another for thousands of years but a reconfigured version of your species will take off and explore the rest of the universe without your version, what would you do tomorrow? What did you do yesterday knowing that you'd be here today?
If you knew that you didn't exist, what would you do about the concept of you? Would these words matter? Would you continue being you as you know you?
I am not these words, I tell myself, but I am these words as well as the radio waves going out from this laptop computer and the wind and rain blowing outside the window.
I don't see this planet as a living organism (e.g., gaia) but I do see the planet as part of a system of living systems. I see us looking for us as individual organisms on planetary systems in other parts of the galaxy. We talk about alien technology as if we've been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence and we talk about possibly being as highly intelligent as life has ever gotten in our galaxy (or maybe even in the universe), in both cases distinguishing individual accomplishments within social systems as a form of what we call intelligence.
But none of us is alone in achieving intelligent accomplishments. It is the system of living systems that changes itself within points/nodes of itself that we think of as signs of intelligence in individual species and individual members of species.
We are part of the environment around us, not separate from the planetary system on which we developed.
[Today, I can't get past being me to see where we will be when we aren't we. I can't imagine what it's like to compress a version of me into a set of serial/parallel cosmic ray communication channels or cloud set of neutrinos and decompress the new self-replicating, local-environment adapting version of me somewhere else.]
How do I take the future and backtrack to the present? How do I apply practical decisionmaking to get us to where I already know we'll be, especially when I know I'm going to do what I'm going to do, no matter how much I fret over what it is I think I should do next to get me away from seeing me as me?
The future is not guaranteed. Or, as we know, no one future is guaranteed. All futures are guaranteed to possibly occur until they don't occur.
I believe that life happens because life happens. People do what they do. We spend as much time in an accidental future as we do in a purposeful one. Many possible futures include us merging our individual lives into a generally-agreed planetary-focused future. Many possible futures include us battling over the changing dynamics of our planet's resources to ensure the distinct definition of individuals over the general survival of the species.
I sit here and know which futures I want to happen, which ones are going to get us moving outward in the universe. I also know that a lot of what I know will change by going in the direction of those futures. However, a lot of what I know will change in every future I plot out. Therefore, I toss out my concerns about change. My focus is on which changes benefit not me but my planet and my species as I currently know it. Science, not science fiction.
We are cogs in the wheels of the factory called Earth in the system of living systems we call our solar system in one spiral of the Milky Way galaxy. We are the current snapshot of constant change.
How are we going to change in the future? We are going to create a version of ourselves that can replicate itself iteratively and figuratively in order to adapt to the rigours of space travel. We've already partially done that in mechanical form, our umbilical cords of radio wave communications extending high-tech fingers into the solar system to maintain contact with those early prototypes. Next we, as extensions of Earth, grow arms and legs. Instead of dropping sweat or hair off our bodies when we now send probes from the planet, we'll figure out how to stretch out our limbs like amoebae and split, our duplicate bodies a similar version of ourselves but better adapted to local environments with each new regeneration.
With time, we won't recognize our new selves anymore. We may or may not be able to communicate with one another.
Like I keep saying, you don't have to believe me. I hardly believe myself and wouldn't, if it weren't for this Book of the Future I keep adding to its pages using newspaper headlines from the past that keep forecasting the future.
For instance, when we figure out how to send out high-power beams far enough into space that one of our signals hits an "alien" organism on another planet, causing the organism to mutate, we have extended ourselves. It happens here in our bodies from the Sun everyday. It happens when we reprogram computing systems on Mars. One day, we'll have our day to mutate extraplanetary bodies, too, creating new nodes/points in the web of life. Just you wait and see...
24 November 2009
Room Odor Eliminator
23rd November 2009, 12:30
The playful twist twixt tween the scenes inside the words outside the lines. Since I know I'm not anywhere else but here in this body, place and time. Since I know life is not my body, place and time. Since. Because. Although. Often. However. Given that.
The power of not using power. The backwards glance while tripping forward on one's feet. Pinching oneself to assure the moment you're there.
Intelligence a definition not defined intelligently.
Wading into deeper waters to lose touch with the ground, all while taking a stroll with professional sharks.
Innocent as you please.
Discarding a pack of playing cards. Drawing an ace of UAV air battles, instead.
87,650 times 13,579 plus 1@$24. Remainders not bargained for.
Because I am you, you are a diarist, a journalist, a documentarian of dryptic doodling who makes no valid points except in the moment where you didn't exist.
Saving a whale from the attacks of hungry retired greyhounds and abused Rottweilers.
Schooled in sculling schooled fish from a skulking schooner.
Celebratory moments documented by you and completely missed by me, no “us” with which to share the moment.
Is a talent unused a talent wasted?
The pain, confusion and history of getting from here to there. The means and the ends. If you already know the answer to a problem, do you need to work out the details of how to get there? Is there a shortcut from one historical moment to the next?
Do you measure yourself in absolute terms or in comparison to those who know you, or those you think you know and have read/heard about? Yes, that question is cheating. Of course it's rhetorical. Absolutes do not exist. Everything is viewed as measured against something else. Interpositoriallianismishful.
Do you see the nuances that separate a gang of thugs from a group of determined business leaders? Again, the difference seen in the power of not using one's power. Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is a paving medium for pouring the pathway to wisdom. Power is wisdom. A wise leader keeps the scabbard sheathed, the flash of jewels on one's belt sufficient to get the message across.
A thug, on the other sleeve, exercises power with no need for wisdom. The power of the moment outside of time. Another way to meditate on the now, now, now, now, now.
Exercise your time in the moment and play with the height and width. See one dimension or two or three or four or more.
I am you. These words have no meaning. You are me. We are not each other. My goal is getting our species past seeing us as a species by first seeing us as one species so we can get off this planet and on to more important matters. I happen to use one language for the most part with an imperfect combination of words and grammar rules that reflect my upbringing in several overlapping subcultures but I do not promote those subcultures over others intentionally. However, I know I am of my species in place and time. My wisdom – limited, insignificant, unsubstantial but powerful – does not include clear views of future cultural markers or memes. I know what I know without wanting to exercise my power to know more.
Power for the sake of power is petty. Wealth for the sake of wealth is a waste. The future is in your hands. Build the future wisely.
20 November 2009
Meanwhile, in world news...
While I've been off pondering my navel oranges, shocking, latebreaking news has been making its way around our ecumenopolis. I'll try to get it straight in this blog entry:
- The Obama administration announced it had brokered the sale of India to China. In addition, China had annexed both Pakistan and Afghanistan to expand its manufacturing base.
- Oprah announced her retirement from her television career so that she and Sarah Palin could form the New Woman Today political party. To counter the early popular surge of the Oprah/Palin ticket in the runup to the 2012 election, Lou Dobbs and Rudolph Giuliani have joined forces and started the Yesterday's Old Guys political party.
- The Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom have flooded their streets in an attempt to siphon off some of Venice's tourist trade, trying to take advantage of the negative press surrounding the Vatican's attempt to draw in Anglicans excited about Italy since Berlusconi has turned off a large segment of female tourists to his country.
- Sports referees everywhere have become the new enemies of the state, requiring them to hide in secret caves in the mountains of their countries during periods between games. Security companies are making a fortune protecting the referees and their families from fans who've diverted their hooligan hatred from their rivals and onto the so-called neutral judges of their team's play. Bets are being taken to see how long it will be before Osama bin Laden changes his allegiance and becomes the official spokesperson for referees, umpires and sports judges.
- Japan revealed that its government and business leaders have all been replaced with robots, guaranteeing stability in the hopes that foreign investors will look upon the land of the rising sun as a solid investment in comparison to its east Asian neighbours.
- Australia has declared itself the official permanent headquarters of the Olympic flame, being able to find fire anywhere in the country - outback, housing estates or urban area - anytime of the year; that is, unless red dust storms become the norm. In that case, they'll build a giant tower on Ayers Rock that will hold the Olympic flame high enough for folks in the space station to see.
- Fish of the world have banded together and are said to be on the hunt for humans. The sudden increase in volcanic and earthquake activity has some people speculating that fishes' ire has raised the spectres of Poseidon and Varuna who will destroy any one of our species found crossing the seas. Having already anticipated this turn of events, Warren Buffett has merged his train business with Tata Motors to design rail and road systems that can safely and speedily transport goods from one land mass to another without using water. Qantas Airlines is said to be in negotiations to merge with the Batafett company. FedEx and UPS are considering merging, too...well, you already know that one, don't you? [Answer: FedUp]
- In even more latebreaking news, Martha Stewart and Rachael Ray have settled their differences and announced they're getting married. They've asked Heidi Klum to serve as their fashion consultant. To expand their home consulting business, they plan to marry in Cuba, hold their wedding reception in Venezuela and split their honeymoon between Iran and North Korea, donating all profits of the sales of their high-def progressive marriage reality mini-series to feed the poor.
- Peru has banned the export, import and sales of cosmetics until it has solved the issues around the murder-for-fat crime syndicate. The United States plans to investigate weight loss programs in its country to determine if tranquilizers are being used to sedate people and suck out their fat at night. The IRS is reviewing the tax returns of liposuction surgeons to see if they're hiding the profits of the sale of their customer's fat. The FDA and DEA are looking into fast-food companies for any illegal use or trade of human fat for deep vat fryers.
- And last but not least, college students around the world have staged a walkout, protesting the increase in the price of their access to the right to download free music, movies and plagiarised term papers. Jo Lin Ran, Valdim Hrusiki and Debbie Sawertyu quickly took advantage of the situation and have released software that allows students to freely educate themselves as well as receive all the free electronic goodies they want, including recent computer games, bestselling novels, and desktop software, with every download counting toward college credits, creating the first completely open source and free, accredited college degree program. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are already competing in negotiations to buy the company. Analysts expect this to be the first trillion-dollar company to be formed and sold out in one day - online scam companies are chomping at the bit to post their ads in this rich source of disposable income.
18 November 2009
Druscilla Penny
How do you describe worker productivity? Do you look at earnings? Profits? Tasks? Projects?
Do you say, "Well, I know my employees have spare time that they use for social networking, either intraoffice (gatherings at the water cooler, hallway, bathroom, carpark, etc.) or via electronic devices. Since I pay for that time, I'm going to reduce my technology repair/update overhead and get my employees to become part-time technology experts."
Do you prevent or minimize the number of meetings that take place in which only one or two employees actively participate and make decisions while the other 90% could be effective somewhere else?
Do you increase the so-called multitasking that employees perform, knowing that some types of multitasking are actually counterproductive?
Do you require employees to take training classes during offhours, such as before/after work hours, or during work breaks such as lunch?
Do you push decisionmaking down the hierarchical chart, empowering employees to be more effective?
Do you cross-train employees so they can learn to do 1.25 and then 1.5 jobs at once, increasing productivity while monitoring their health, making sure you have exercise and counseling available to maximize employee use, without detrimentally affecting their usefulness or decreasing your profitability with too many health monitoring services?
Do you see yourself as having the privilege of your employees working for you, or do you think your employees see their jobs as their right to be employed and you're the lucky dog who gets to deal with them?
Knowing you take attrition into account as part of the cost of retraining, and ultimately a drag on worker productivity, how do you measure worker satisfaction? Do you take preventative measures or do you react to worker negativity? Do you encourage creativity or do you beat your employees until morale improves?
Do you own your own company or does your company own you? Do you think you are your own company, standing on your two feet, or do you think you carry a bunch of people on your shoulders?
Do you look at a statistic like worker productivity and automatically think of a spreadsheet containing numbers and formulas you can manipulate with time? Or do you see individual faces and capabilities which indicate limits you can stretch with training or have to work around?
Do you think in macroeconomic terms or do you worry about the next sale or project deadline?
Are you a puppet master pulling the strings or a ventriloquist with your hand inside a dummy's head?
Is ignorance bliss or dread to you? Or a challenge for your next round of personal continuous education/training?
If you knew the truth behind worker productivity, would you believe it, or do you see worker productivity as a completely imaginary number with no meaning whatsoever?
Our social structures blanket us with terms and definitions. Which ones do you ignore? Which ones can you not ignore? Do you seek out more peaks and valleys of the unknown terrain of new social structures, or are you so overwhelmed with what you've got to take care of that you're trying to filter out and reduce the amount of information you're already receiving? Does the phrase "worker productivity" cover either one of those situations for you? Should it? What about a tribe deep in the Amazon rainforest or a self-sufficient family hidden in the Appalachian mountains?
May we define "person productivity" to account for all conditions of our species' members? If so, then employment is not a defining factor for our usefulness as persons. Think about it...
Do you say, "Well, I know my employees have spare time that they use for social networking, either intraoffice (gatherings at the water cooler, hallway, bathroom, carpark, etc.) or via electronic devices. Since I pay for that time, I'm going to reduce my technology repair/update overhead and get my employees to become part-time technology experts."
Do you prevent or minimize the number of meetings that take place in which only one or two employees actively participate and make decisions while the other 90% could be effective somewhere else?
Do you increase the so-called multitasking that employees perform, knowing that some types of multitasking are actually counterproductive?
Do you require employees to take training classes during offhours, such as before/after work hours, or during work breaks such as lunch?
Do you push decisionmaking down the hierarchical chart, empowering employees to be more effective?
Do you cross-train employees so they can learn to do 1.25 and then 1.5 jobs at once, increasing productivity while monitoring their health, making sure you have exercise and counseling available to maximize employee use, without detrimentally affecting their usefulness or decreasing your profitability with too many health monitoring services?
Do you see yourself as having the privilege of your employees working for you, or do you think your employees see their jobs as their right to be employed and you're the lucky dog who gets to deal with them?
Knowing you take attrition into account as part of the cost of retraining, and ultimately a drag on worker productivity, how do you measure worker satisfaction? Do you take preventative measures or do you react to worker negativity? Do you encourage creativity or do you beat your employees until morale improves?
Do you own your own company or does your company own you? Do you think you are your own company, standing on your two feet, or do you think you carry a bunch of people on your shoulders?
Do you look at a statistic like worker productivity and automatically think of a spreadsheet containing numbers and formulas you can manipulate with time? Or do you see individual faces and capabilities which indicate limits you can stretch with training or have to work around?
Do you think in macroeconomic terms or do you worry about the next sale or project deadline?
Are you a puppet master pulling the strings or a ventriloquist with your hand inside a dummy's head?
Is ignorance bliss or dread to you? Or a challenge for your next round of personal continuous education/training?
If you knew the truth behind worker productivity, would you believe it, or do you see worker productivity as a completely imaginary number with no meaning whatsoever?
Our social structures blanket us with terms and definitions. Which ones do you ignore? Which ones can you not ignore? Do you seek out more peaks and valleys of the unknown terrain of new social structures, or are you so overwhelmed with what you've got to take care of that you're trying to filter out and reduce the amount of information you're already receiving? Does the phrase "worker productivity" cover either one of those situations for you? Should it? What about a tribe deep in the Amazon rainforest or a self-sufficient family hidden in the Appalachian mountains?
May we define "person productivity" to account for all conditions of our species' members? If so, then employment is not a defining factor for our usefulness as persons. Think about it...
16 November 2009
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.
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.
13 November 2009
Camping in Campuchea
Here. Ici. Sketching the outlines of the portrait of this moment using words. Beams. Welds. Pencil lines. Musical notation. Coloured lighting. Motions of a mechanical clock. The planet imperceptibly spinning. Tidal pools draining. Breathing. Mentally walking a friend's flat where every step, every motion is a living Tesla coil of exploding light and sound, a telharmonium wrapped around a theremin looped into holographic homemade commercial adverts for imaginary products in a prehistoric future lost in a space warp folded in on itself.
Being and unbeing. Olfactory nerve in overdrive from artificial flavour factories sensing scents, flaring nostrils and changing colour palettes stuck on retinal images of desktop wallpaper. Dusty, musty book covers mixed with cigarette residue favourable to chemical engineers familiar with prefixes and subprefixes and postsuffixes filling stuffy dictionaries. Digging deeper, past Eco's lists listing to one side of the Louvre. Past the Big Kahuna leaning right in ironman contests or three kings staring at goats like Jedi nightfalls.
Post. Posit. After the irony. Filtering out the satire. When modern is antique, antiquated, quaint, nostalgic.
Beyond the beyond. Myst in the mist. Fantasy sports free but costly.
Stripping away the layers, the Formica no longer cool, retro, glued particles pressed pressure pushing cushioned falls down.
Take off the hood, lift off the mask, peel away the skin, crack open the skull, look through the looks, no more gestures, no more jesting, jest in pun not punny where the sun doesn't shine shiny, no node, no personality, no feelings, no emptiness, no void, no universe. No mirrors oN. Madam I'm Adam.
Without these words, without this structure, without this brain, without this, without, with, out. Old world games. Old words.
Beyond asking. Beyond seeking. The answers behind us. The solutions in play, satisfying, soothing, comforting, calming, sleepy, sleeping, asleep, dreaming.
The moment, this moment, wondering. If not why now, then what now? If not what, then why? If not the sketch of this moment, then what is this moment unsketched? When did we say we had to be more than be in the moment?
Be. To exist. Is. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. In this place. In this time. No other place. No other time. No other person but you in the now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now. Monotonal pitch. Monocolour sketch. Peace? Contentment? Freedom? Breath. Heartbeat. Incomplete thoughts. Slower breath. Slower heartbeat. No thoughts. No moment. No time. No place. Nothing, not even nothing. Wordless. Absent of canvas. Nothing to sketch nothing. The moment yours and nobody's. Never remembered, never forgotten. No body, no concerns. You in motion with the universe for one long, endless moment.
Call it prayer. Call it meditation. Call it relaxing. Call it what you like and the way you see it. Anyway way you are, be it.
Being and unbeing. Olfactory nerve in overdrive from artificial flavour factories sensing scents, flaring nostrils and changing colour palettes stuck on retinal images of desktop wallpaper. Dusty, musty book covers mixed with cigarette residue favourable to chemical engineers familiar with prefixes and subprefixes and postsuffixes filling stuffy dictionaries. Digging deeper, past Eco's lists listing to one side of the Louvre. Past the Big Kahuna leaning right in ironman contests or three kings staring at goats like Jedi nightfalls.
Post. Posit. After the irony. Filtering out the satire. When modern is antique, antiquated, quaint, nostalgic.
Beyond the beyond. Myst in the mist. Fantasy sports free but costly.
Stripping away the layers, the Formica no longer cool, retro, glued particles pressed pressure pushing cushioned falls down.
Take off the hood, lift off the mask, peel away the skin, crack open the skull, look through the looks, no more gestures, no more jesting, jest in pun not punny where the sun doesn't shine shiny, no node, no personality, no feelings, no emptiness, no void, no universe. No mirrors oN. Madam I'm Adam.
Without these words, without this structure, without this brain, without this, without, with, out. Old world games. Old words.
Beyond asking. Beyond seeking. The answers behind us. The solutions in play, satisfying, soothing, comforting, calming, sleepy, sleeping, asleep, dreaming.
The moment, this moment, wondering. If not why now, then what now? If not what, then why? If not the sketch of this moment, then what is this moment unsketched? When did we say we had to be more than be in the moment?
Be. To exist. Is. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. In this place. In this time. No other place. No other time. No other person but you in the now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now. Monotonal pitch. Monocolour sketch. Peace? Contentment? Freedom? Breath. Heartbeat. Incomplete thoughts. Slower breath. Slower heartbeat. No thoughts. No moment. No time. No place. Nothing, not even nothing. Wordless. Absent of canvas. Nothing to sketch nothing. The moment yours and nobody's. Never remembered, never forgotten. No body, no concerns. You in motion with the universe for one long, endless moment.
Call it prayer. Call it meditation. Call it relaxing. Call it what you like and the way you see it. Anyway way you are, be it.
29 October 2009
The Latest of the Early Wearable Computing Years
Early happy b'day to Mark M. I was more of a Rypien fan myself but without you Rypien would have been Capitol carpet, eh? A connection via Riggs was one factor in keeping up with you guys, not to mention the Honorable Heath.
While new players get circulation systems for their outfits and communications devices in their headgear, we get HUDs in other uniforms for those with more firepower. What's next?
In an old copy of "Heavy Metal" magazine, a comic detailed the firefight between two infantry divisions. Hard-fought battle. At the end, a soldier removes his exoskeletal gear and looks at the gear of his opponent, discovering his opponent is completely robotic. That '80s era scifi foretold today. What tells us of tomorrow?
What will semi-pro (i.e., college) and pro players wear on the fields of battle? When will robotic body parts become normal, like the videogames of old when robotic football players faced each other on their wheeled parts? Will players see their routes on HUDs, removing the confusion in huddles of loud stadiums? Will player body stats get displayed on trainers' laptop screens? Will nanoscale drug capsules get released when pain relief or adrenaline doses are needed? Will smart padding absorb and spread contact pressure, preventing concussions and broken bones?
Will football fields become electronically active and track the 3D position of footballs? Will players and balls be able to switch between live slo-mo and accelerated action? Will 3D advert placement become part of every piece of the field, including players, refs, yard markers, coaches, field goals, etc., like wearable electronic art?
Will fans get to have football helmet cams to track like NASCAR car cams, following their favorite players on iPhones during the game, with pay per view allowing expletives and body slamming to be heard in 7.1 sound?
Will players work with their agents to franchise their images for robotic leagues? Multiple Peyton Mannings at quarterback? Adrian Peterson at RB? Mean Joe Green coming back from "retirement"? Reggie White coming back from the dead?
Semi-pro (sorry, college) players will share the rights of their robotic images with their teams, trading revenue for college credits in such classes as "Branding Entrepreneurship" and "Image Capitalisation." Fans can take the robotic role of their favorite players during off weekends, filling stadiums many times during the year, not just for home games, playing anybody from any year against the other team's mix of players and eras, in the FRC (Football Robotic Championship level, of course). DARPA will use information from these college/university performances to tweak their robotic fighting forces, a version of Robocop just a hard metal step around the corner.
Bookmakers learn the names and capabilities of FRC design engineering students and professors just like college football players today. They track the professional careers of robot designers. New revenue streams appear in the hacking of robot players to fix games.
And that's when terrorists will take over Antarctica, using clandestine robotic units to set up robot factories, training camps and synthetic drug manufacturing facilities where few will tread. Submarines to transport e-army units and drug shipments around the planet (submarines disguised as whales, of course, taking down both Japanese whaling vessels and Greenpeace ships that get in their path).
The future is a fun place to play. Anything is possible. Some things appear just as predicted. Surprises surface and steer the future in a whole new direction.
Too bad the Hokies ran out of gas. I don't want to see another opponent's field goals for a while! Night, y'all. More international info on the morrow. A big hint. While the news focuses on "Muslim extremists" (if that's not profiling/stereotyping/hate crime material, what is?), I look at cartels for more interesting futures. Power is not in being seen, it's being invisible that gets you into places nobody's looking. Once you're in, nobody's paying attention because you're one of them/us. After that? Just because someone's no longer demonising you doesn't mean you've stopped reciting history to yourself and your cohorts. You can draw the rest of the picture by now, right? No? Like I said, later on, dude.
While new players get circulation systems for their outfits and communications devices in their headgear, we get HUDs in other uniforms for those with more firepower. What's next?
In an old copy of "Heavy Metal" magazine, a comic detailed the firefight between two infantry divisions. Hard-fought battle. At the end, a soldier removes his exoskeletal gear and looks at the gear of his opponent, discovering his opponent is completely robotic. That '80s era scifi foretold today. What tells us of tomorrow?
What will semi-pro (i.e., college) and pro players wear on the fields of battle? When will robotic body parts become normal, like the videogames of old when robotic football players faced each other on their wheeled parts? Will players see their routes on HUDs, removing the confusion in huddles of loud stadiums? Will player body stats get displayed on trainers' laptop screens? Will nanoscale drug capsules get released when pain relief or adrenaline doses are needed? Will smart padding absorb and spread contact pressure, preventing concussions and broken bones?
Will football fields become electronically active and track the 3D position of footballs? Will players and balls be able to switch between live slo-mo and accelerated action? Will 3D advert placement become part of every piece of the field, including players, refs, yard markers, coaches, field goals, etc., like wearable electronic art?
Will fans get to have football helmet cams to track like NASCAR car cams, following their favorite players on iPhones during the game, with pay per view allowing expletives and body slamming to be heard in 7.1 sound?
Will players work with their agents to franchise their images for robotic leagues? Multiple Peyton Mannings at quarterback? Adrian Peterson at RB? Mean Joe Green coming back from "retirement"? Reggie White coming back from the dead?
Semi-pro (sorry, college) players will share the rights of their robotic images with their teams, trading revenue for college credits in such classes as "Branding Entrepreneurship" and "Image Capitalisation." Fans can take the robotic role of their favorite players during off weekends, filling stadiums many times during the year, not just for home games, playing anybody from any year against the other team's mix of players and eras, in the FRC (Football Robotic Championship level, of course). DARPA will use information from these college/university performances to tweak their robotic fighting forces, a version of Robocop just a hard metal step around the corner.
Bookmakers learn the names and capabilities of FRC design engineering students and professors just like college football players today. They track the professional careers of robot designers. New revenue streams appear in the hacking of robot players to fix games.
And that's when terrorists will take over Antarctica, using clandestine robotic units to set up robot factories, training camps and synthetic drug manufacturing facilities where few will tread. Submarines to transport e-army units and drug shipments around the planet (submarines disguised as whales, of course, taking down both Japanese whaling vessels and Greenpeace ships that get in their path).
The future is a fun place to play. Anything is possible. Some things appear just as predicted. Surprises surface and steer the future in a whole new direction.
Too bad the Hokies ran out of gas. I don't want to see another opponent's field goals for a while! Night, y'all. More international info on the morrow. A big hint. While the news focuses on "Muslim extremists" (if that's not profiling/stereotyping/hate crime material, what is?), I look at cartels for more interesting futures. Power is not in being seen, it's being invisible that gets you into places nobody's looking. Once you're in, nobody's paying attention because you're one of them/us. After that? Just because someone's no longer demonising you doesn't mean you've stopped reciting history to yourself and your cohorts. You can draw the rest of the picture by now, right? No? Like I said, later on, dude.
23 October 2009
Speculated Speckled Pickled Eggs
[Personal note for myself. Feel free to skip.] I have no idea what's going on. I see and do not believe. I feel and make no record of my skin contact. People have wants and needs and I cannot discern their logical connections. Logic makes no sense to me. The sun does not shine. Clouds do not exist. Yet, I define my day by the water falling from the sky that blocks the sunshine.
I am me. I have no capability to be more than one person. Better yet, I do not want to be more than one person. I actually want to be me. I like being me. I like me who likes the person who likes being me.
RNA is ribonucleic acid. A right turn is a coordinated series of actions determined by a football coach who teaches the staff to teach the players to stand in place until the play caller takes a ball and turns to hand the ball to the person willing to run and get hit. Recombinatorial, or some such.
People are willing to ski and play tennis. Physical coordination.
A large number of living beings have the same set of genetic material that is turned off or turned on in a particular sequence. God's blueprint or random observation by the current species to which I belong? Both? We see what we believe. We believe what we believe we see. Plate of shrimp. Pine-scented car freshener.
I belong to nothing. I am not nothing. Therefore, I don't belong to nothing. Absent is not the same as present somewhere else.
A drop of water flows along a pine needle hanging from the gutter. The drop stops at the end, formed by surface tension and stretched by gravity. Another drop flows along and pushes the first drop off. Nothing is as I just described it. A drop of water does not exist. A pine needle does not exist. A gutter does not exist. Gravity is in my imagination. Instead, I just saw a spherical magnifying glass, a solar energy collector and a trough for collecting debris to grow tree seeds, all in the recesses of my brain.
Sober, sanity and madness. Like diving into a mountain stream in winter with no way to get warm. Idiocy for idiots.
I stand alone by myself, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of my species, words my clothes, paragraphs my floor, away from here and nailed into my shoes. "Mommy! Mommy! Why am I going around in circles?" "Shut up or I'll nail the other foot to the floor."
A worker at an eyeglasses factory fell into a vat of molten glass. He made a spectacle of himself, didn't he?
I am one person. I am happy being one person. How important is my happiness? Does happiness exist or have I made myself believe in happiness?
Somewhere I read where religious belief is directly tied to one's brain and the need for deep social interaction. Social intercourse, if you will.
If I have learned the steps to complete a task, excel at repeating the task, should I perform the task again and again? The pursuit of perfection? Not for me. I am looking for novelty.
This universe is not just about my species but my species is all I know. If I ask questions and get answers from the universe that run counter to the existence of my species, where does that put me if I will never be other than a member of my species? Should I avoid the questions if I don't have an idea what the answers could be? The absence of self is close to the absence of selfishness which is close to the absence of my species, is it not?
I do not exist. If I do not exist, who or what is writing these words and seeing the intensity of light vary with the passing of dark shapes in the sky above me?
I choose to ask questions because I want to see myself from another angle, even an angle that includes the absence of me or the non-necessity of my existence. Like bashing my head with a rock or flogging my back with a whip. Only less messy.
I am me. I will always be me. I am also you but today I need to see myself as only one person so I can see the parts separate from the whole and better determine how to strengthen the power of the whole through the belief in the presence and the absence of the self.
I don't enjoy keeping quiet. I like transparency so that when a thought occurs to me I let it go out into the world without thought of impact like it bouncing back to me in some other form hours, weeks, months or years from now. If I have a thought, someone else had the same thought. If I express my thoughts in words or speech, others will hear what they thought they thought but may not have thought or spoken.
We get so wrapped up in our day-to-day activities, which we believe with conviction are what we're supposed to do, to hell with others who might have better things for us to do, that we lose sight of where we are. No matter how much I think I see our species from the right angles, I miss what I should see or should do. I'm not out to change the world. I'm here to see what our species could do if we changed our points of view. I don't care which particular points of view others have - they may be right or wrong for their time and place. I don't ask that they look at my point of view. I can only see what one person sees. I'll always be me.
I like me. I like who I am. I like my species. I like what my species likes. I don't like what my species dislikes but I'm willing to see the point of view of a disliking person because only then can I see if there's a like hidden in dislike that I should like.
These words do not exist. These are just electric, magnetic, particle-wave-speculated, speckled pickled eggs laid by a drop of rain splattering on a bed of wet tree leaves. Everything else is in your imagination.
I am me. I have no capability to be more than one person. Better yet, I do not want to be more than one person. I actually want to be me. I like being me. I like me who likes the person who likes being me.
RNA is ribonucleic acid. A right turn is a coordinated series of actions determined by a football coach who teaches the staff to teach the players to stand in place until the play caller takes a ball and turns to hand the ball to the person willing to run and get hit. Recombinatorial, or some such.
People are willing to ski and play tennis. Physical coordination.
A large number of living beings have the same set of genetic material that is turned off or turned on in a particular sequence. God's blueprint or random observation by the current species to which I belong? Both? We see what we believe. We believe what we believe we see. Plate of shrimp. Pine-scented car freshener.
I belong to nothing. I am not nothing. Therefore, I don't belong to nothing. Absent is not the same as present somewhere else.
A drop of water flows along a pine needle hanging from the gutter. The drop stops at the end, formed by surface tension and stretched by gravity. Another drop flows along and pushes the first drop off. Nothing is as I just described it. A drop of water does not exist. A pine needle does not exist. A gutter does not exist. Gravity is in my imagination. Instead, I just saw a spherical magnifying glass, a solar energy collector and a trough for collecting debris to grow tree seeds, all in the recesses of my brain.
Sober, sanity and madness. Like diving into a mountain stream in winter with no way to get warm. Idiocy for idiots.
I stand alone by myself, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of my species, words my clothes, paragraphs my floor, away from here and nailed into my shoes. "Mommy! Mommy! Why am I going around in circles?" "Shut up or I'll nail the other foot to the floor."
A worker at an eyeglasses factory fell into a vat of molten glass. He made a spectacle of himself, didn't he?
I am one person. I am happy being one person. How important is my happiness? Does happiness exist or have I made myself believe in happiness?
Somewhere I read where religious belief is directly tied to one's brain and the need for deep social interaction. Social intercourse, if you will.
If I have learned the steps to complete a task, excel at repeating the task, should I perform the task again and again? The pursuit of perfection? Not for me. I am looking for novelty.
This universe is not just about my species but my species is all I know. If I ask questions and get answers from the universe that run counter to the existence of my species, where does that put me if I will never be other than a member of my species? Should I avoid the questions if I don't have an idea what the answers could be? The absence of self is close to the absence of selfishness which is close to the absence of my species, is it not?
I do not exist. If I do not exist, who or what is writing these words and seeing the intensity of light vary with the passing of dark shapes in the sky above me?
I choose to ask questions because I want to see myself from another angle, even an angle that includes the absence of me or the non-necessity of my existence. Like bashing my head with a rock or flogging my back with a whip. Only less messy.
I am me. I will always be me. I am also you but today I need to see myself as only one person so I can see the parts separate from the whole and better determine how to strengthen the power of the whole through the belief in the presence and the absence of the self.
I don't enjoy keeping quiet. I like transparency so that when a thought occurs to me I let it go out into the world without thought of impact like it bouncing back to me in some other form hours, weeks, months or years from now. If I have a thought, someone else had the same thought. If I express my thoughts in words or speech, others will hear what they thought they thought but may not have thought or spoken.
We get so wrapped up in our day-to-day activities, which we believe with conviction are what we're supposed to do, to hell with others who might have better things for us to do, that we lose sight of where we are. No matter how much I think I see our species from the right angles, I miss what I should see or should do. I'm not out to change the world. I'm here to see what our species could do if we changed our points of view. I don't care which particular points of view others have - they may be right or wrong for their time and place. I don't ask that they look at my point of view. I can only see what one person sees. I'll always be me.
I like me. I like who I am. I like my species. I like what my species likes. I don't like what my species dislikes but I'm willing to see the point of view of a disliking person because only then can I see if there's a like hidden in dislike that I should like.
These words do not exist. These are just electric, magnetic, particle-wave-speculated, speckled pickled eggs laid by a drop of rain splattering on a bed of wet tree leaves. Everything else is in your imagination.
14 October 2009
The Importance of a Speech Center
How important are your brain and vocal folds? Do you consider them ordinary tools? Do you treat every human utterance with reverence or acknowledging grunts? Are sound and writing significant?
For years, I treated books like delicate artwork, trying not to bend the pages, crease the binding and definitely not lining the margins with handwritten notes. Every book was a treasure to me (and still is) but now I feel free to write comments when they come to me, for use later on in understanding my interpretation of the work at a certain age and how the zeitgeist influenced me.
My life is my one and only life here and now. It is no less or more important than any other life. Every word I utter, every thought I make, every symbol I scratch make me who I am and who I will be looking back at who I was and will be.
My life is life as I know life, the conversion of matter into deliberate outputs of energy. When my life here is over, I will have no deliberations to make. My component parts will be liberated. I will be free in a completely new sense, my cells decomposing into free radicals of another sort. Molecules. Atoms. Alive in another deliberating life (or lives, really).
I have never existed. I've only been told I exist. The fact is we exist. We mold the mesh network that holds us together in what we tell each other is a species on what we tell each other is a planet.
Life is a mystery to me. I know what I've been told is supposed to be life and why I'm here but the fact remains I know nothing. I do not even know I exist. I see I exist through the response of the environment around me, including this unit I call myself the body.
Have you ever held a cloud in your hands? We are clouds. We are somewhat fixed in our shapes by the exterior protection we call skin wrapped about a skeletal form but we can exist in many forms and shapes, with and without appendages or other body parts.
To know I do not exist is a fallacy just like saying I exist without knowing why. In other words, I am using words, these symbols, to represent what I observe wordlessly, my thoughts organized around sounds set in sequential order, supported by my eyes and the artificial concept of time.
To exist and not exist at the same time has taken me on an interesting journey. There is me, the person with a socially-established identity, and not-me, the happenchance meeting of chemicals bouncing across the surface of a large mass slowly cooling down internally while spinning like a top around a hotter mass.
To understand both conditions means admitting understanding neither. Separating and connecting. Spreading and collecting.
Life is not sacred and life is not secular. Life is sacred and life is secular. Either. Both. Members of what we call our species will act with driven passion to firmly establish the existence of ourselves both sacredly and secularly. Loving. Killing. Reproducing. Cloning.
I do not control perception. I do not control reality. I, or it, lives. That's all I can and will do. Words and sounds exist without me. I emit and omit words and sounds that others emit and omit. My goal is not to be original because I have plenty of words and languages and sounds to repeat infinitely without repeating myself. My goal is to give what I see as similar representations of myself - my species - the opportunity to keep reproducing itself regardless of the words and sounds it reuses or invents, without me around eventually, my words and sounds lost in the noise of life in no time flat.
I am more important than anyone or anything, because without me I am not me. With me I am me and not me, but I will always not be me without me. I am me because of you so you are more important than anyone or anything, too. But am I not me because of you or not me not because of you? Perhaps not me because of not you? Thus, are you not you because of not me or not because of me?
Sounds and thoughts. Sacred and ridiculous, ludicrous and sublime. Sometimes good enough is enough good to suffice.
For years, I treated books like delicate artwork, trying not to bend the pages, crease the binding and definitely not lining the margins with handwritten notes. Every book was a treasure to me (and still is) but now I feel free to write comments when they come to me, for use later on in understanding my interpretation of the work at a certain age and how the zeitgeist influenced me.
My life is my one and only life here and now. It is no less or more important than any other life. Every word I utter, every thought I make, every symbol I scratch make me who I am and who I will be looking back at who I was and will be.
My life is life as I know life, the conversion of matter into deliberate outputs of energy. When my life here is over, I will have no deliberations to make. My component parts will be liberated. I will be free in a completely new sense, my cells decomposing into free radicals of another sort. Molecules. Atoms. Alive in another deliberating life (or lives, really).
I have never existed. I've only been told I exist. The fact is we exist. We mold the mesh network that holds us together in what we tell each other is a species on what we tell each other is a planet.
Life is a mystery to me. I know what I've been told is supposed to be life and why I'm here but the fact remains I know nothing. I do not even know I exist. I see I exist through the response of the environment around me, including this unit I call myself the body.
Have you ever held a cloud in your hands? We are clouds. We are somewhat fixed in our shapes by the exterior protection we call skin wrapped about a skeletal form but we can exist in many forms and shapes, with and without appendages or other body parts.
To know I do not exist is a fallacy just like saying I exist without knowing why. In other words, I am using words, these symbols, to represent what I observe wordlessly, my thoughts organized around sounds set in sequential order, supported by my eyes and the artificial concept of time.
To exist and not exist at the same time has taken me on an interesting journey. There is me, the person with a socially-established identity, and not-me, the happenchance meeting of chemicals bouncing across the surface of a large mass slowly cooling down internally while spinning like a top around a hotter mass.
To understand both conditions means admitting understanding neither. Separating and connecting. Spreading and collecting.
Life is not sacred and life is not secular. Life is sacred and life is secular. Either. Both. Members of what we call our species will act with driven passion to firmly establish the existence of ourselves both sacredly and secularly. Loving. Killing. Reproducing. Cloning.
I do not control perception. I do not control reality. I, or it, lives. That's all I can and will do. Words and sounds exist without me. I emit and omit words and sounds that others emit and omit. My goal is not to be original because I have plenty of words and languages and sounds to repeat infinitely without repeating myself. My goal is to give what I see as similar representations of myself - my species - the opportunity to keep reproducing itself regardless of the words and sounds it reuses or invents, without me around eventually, my words and sounds lost in the noise of life in no time flat.
I am more important than anyone or anything, because without me I am not me. With me I am me and not me, but I will always not be me without me. I am me because of you so you are more important than anyone or anything, too. But am I not me because of you or not me not because of you? Perhaps not me because of not you? Thus, are you not you because of not me or not because of me?
Sounds and thoughts. Sacred and ridiculous, ludicrous and sublime. Sometimes good enough is enough good to suffice.
13 October 2009
Another Look Back
In college, a friend of mine had a collection of humour on LP records, including those of Tom Lehrer, such as:
We often figure out we aren't saying anything new when we look back, which I hope encourages us to find new humour to get us out of our troubles today.
The sky's getting darker - there's rain ahead in the local forecast here. Are mosquitoes far behind when their bellies get fatter? Time for lunch and afternoon reading. G'day, mates!
National Brotherhood Week/When You Are Old and GrayMy parents had humour on LPs by Andy Griffith and Bob Newhart. I had humour by Cheech and Chong and Richard Pryor on LPs and 8-track tapes. Guess kids listen to humour on MP3s and mobile phone video links these days. What about tomorrow?
We often figure out we aren't saying anything new when we look back, which I hope encourages us to find new humour to get us out of our troubles today.
The sky's getting darker - there's rain ahead in the local forecast here. Are mosquitoes far behind when their bellies get fatter? Time for lunch and afternoon reading. G'day, mates!
08 October 2009
Humour?
What's the best way to get roaches and ants into your house? Buy and strategically place around your domicile the poison-laden traps designed to attract them. The more you get rid of, the more you get. Or so it may seem? lol
05 October 2009
Quit Pushing
"Have you ever heard of the Aristocrats?"
"Aristocats?"
"No, the Aristocrats?"
"Hmm...sounds familiar...are you referring to those who rule by fear and love, fear of their might and love of their lavish expenditures?"
"Could be...but have you heard of what they can do?"
"What can they do?"
"Is that the question?"
"I don't know...is it?"
"If you were called the Aristocrats, what would you do?"
"What would I do?"
"That's what I asked, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
"But what would you do?"
"What would you do?"
"If I were the Aristocrats?"
"What if you were the Aristocrats?"
"If I were the Aristocrats, what would I do?"
"Isn't that the question?"
"If I were the Aristocrats, what would you do?"
"What would I do?"
"What would I see?"
"If you were the Aristocrats?"
"If you were watching the Aristocrats, what would happen?"
"You mean, if you were watching the Aristocrats?"
"If I was performing as the Aristocrats watching the Aristocrats, what could possibly happen?"
"If I was watching the Aristocrats perform as the Aristocrats with me in and out of the performance, what would happen next?"
"But what would happen first?"
"Who are the Aristocrats?"
"Who are the Aristocrats?"
"Isn't that what I asked you?"
"But isn't that the question we're trying to answer?"
"Is it?"
"Is what?"
"Is that the purpose of the Aristocrats?"
"What is the purpose of the Aristocrats?"
"Isn't it?"
"Do you think so?"
"Do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Do you think the Aristocrats' performance is what their purpose is all about?"
"Isn't the purpose of the Aristocrats to question their performance?"
"No, isn't the performance the purpose of their purpose?"
"Is the purpose their performance of their purpose?"
"Yes, their purpose is to question their performance, isn't it?"
"But who are the Aristocrats?"
"Aren't you?"
"Aren't I what?"
"Aren't you who they are?"
"They are who?"
"The Aristocrats?"
"Why didn't you say so in the first place?"
"Why didn't you ask me?"
"The Aristocrats?"
"Very aristocratic, wouldn't you say?"
"Is it time for their performance?"
"Do you think we're ready for such a performance?"
"Do you?"
"Aristocats?"
"No, the Aristocrats?"
"Hmm...sounds familiar...are you referring to those who rule by fear and love, fear of their might and love of their lavish expenditures?"
"Could be...but have you heard of what they can do?"
"What can they do?"
"Is that the question?"
"I don't know...is it?"
"If you were called the Aristocrats, what would you do?"
"What would I do?"
"That's what I asked, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
"But what would you do?"
"What would you do?"
"If I were the Aristocrats?"
"What if you were the Aristocrats?"
"If I were the Aristocrats, what would I do?"
"Isn't that the question?"
"If I were the Aristocrats, what would you do?"
"What would I do?"
"What would I see?"
"If you were the Aristocrats?"
"If you were watching the Aristocrats, what would happen?"
"You mean, if you were watching the Aristocrats?"
"If I was performing as the Aristocrats watching the Aristocrats, what could possibly happen?"
"If I was watching the Aristocrats perform as the Aristocrats with me in and out of the performance, what would happen next?"
"But what would happen first?"
"Who are the Aristocrats?"
"Who are the Aristocrats?"
"Isn't that what I asked you?"
"But isn't that the question we're trying to answer?"
"Is it?"
"Is what?"
"Is that the purpose of the Aristocrats?"
"What is the purpose of the Aristocrats?"
"Isn't it?"
"Do you think so?"
"Do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Do you think the Aristocrats' performance is what their purpose is all about?"
"Isn't the purpose of the Aristocrats to question their performance?"
"No, isn't the performance the purpose of their purpose?"
"Is the purpose their performance of their purpose?"
"Yes, their purpose is to question their performance, isn't it?"
"But who are the Aristocrats?"
"Aren't you?"
"Aren't I what?"
"Aren't you who they are?"
"They are who?"
"The Aristocrats?"
"Why didn't you say so in the first place?"
"Why didn't you ask me?"
"The Aristocrats?"
"Very aristocratic, wouldn't you say?"
"Is it time for their performance?"
"Do you think we're ready for such a performance?"
"Do you?"
01 October 2009
A Title By Any Other Name
A friend of mine had a car window sticker with a phrase I had never heard before - "They Might Be Giants." I didn't know if he was referring to his automobiles (two Toyota RAV4s and an object under a car cover), parts of his life, his friends, the situation in Lilliput or the bacteria that lives in hairspray.
Turns out he was showing his enthusiasm for a musical performance group that makes comedic children artwork out of sound and videos.
One example: http://www.homestarrunner.com/ crystal.html
Here's an example of their style of humour:
Turns out he was showing his enthusiasm for a musical performance group that makes comedic children artwork out of sound and videos.
One example: http://www.homestarrunner.com/ crystal.html
Here's an example of their style of humour:
THE NEXT SIX DAYS FOR THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
DAY ONE. WEDNESDAY. SLEEP IN. WATCH MAD MEN ON LINE.
DAY TWO. THURSDAY. RETURN TO FLANSBURGH'S ANCESTRAL HOME OF ITHACA NEW YORK
TO ROCK OUT CORNELL AND BEYOND. LOOK AT EZRA CORNELL'S STATUE.
CELEBRATE OUR FIRST PERFORMANCE WITH
MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST RALPH CARNEY.
DAY THREE. FRIDAY. RETURN TO ALBANY'S ADAPTABLE INDELIBLE EGG FOR A SPECIAL FLOOD SHOW.
TAKE IN THE ARCHITECTURE.
DAY FOUR. SATURDAY. PERFORM FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE EGG AT A SPECIAL FAMILY SHOW.
VISIT THE STATE CAPITOL. DRIVE HOME.
DAY FIVE. SUNDAY. RETURN TO ONE OF THEIR FAVORITE MUSEUMS
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
PLAY TWO FAMILY SHOWS UNDER THE WHALE.
WONDER WHY THINGS ARE EVER FIRST COME FIRST SERVE.
WON'T SEE ANYTHING ABOUT THE MINI-T-REX THEY JUST WROTE ABOUT
IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, BUT WILL GROOVE ON THE DIORAMAS.
DAY SIX. MONDAY. SLEEP IN. PSYCHICALLY PREPARE OUR WARDROBE FOR JIMMY FALLON ON WEDNESDAY.
Redistricting
When is a country not a country? When the land is the people. I looked at a map of the world with my information technology students last night. We talked about Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other countries that have recently appeared in the national news of our country. We discussed why our current leader issues apologies instead of taking military action.
Political boundaries are artifices. People of all shapes and sizes populate almost every square inch of arable (and much unbearable) land.
In whose interest is keeping political boundaries the same? That's a question neither I nor my students could answer last night so we went back to how to set up and manage computer servers, all of us weighing the artificial boundaries that computer operating systems make and how we teach ourselves and others to communicate across those boundaries (e.g., Microsoft Windows and Linux hierarchical directory structures).
Political boundaries are artifices. People of all shapes and sizes populate almost every square inch of arable (and much unbearable) land.
In whose interest is keeping political boundaries the same? That's a question neither I nor my students could answer last night so we went back to how to set up and manage computer servers, all of us weighing the artificial boundaries that computer operating systems make and how we teach ourselves and others to communicate across those boundaries (e.g., Microsoft Windows and Linux hierarchical directory structures).
16 September 2009
Flower Power
An inspiration from my youth has gone to the Great Comedy Club of the Sky:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/lifestyle/people/comic-actor-henry-gibson-dies-20090917-fsas.html
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/lifestyle/people/comic-actor-henry-gibson-dies-20090917-fsas.html
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