The Faithful Old One

During an emergency tribal council meeting today, we listened to many voices, both here and from the Great Beyond.

One voice stood out more than others.

The Faithful Old One.

The Faithful Old One has watched hundreds of full moons.

The Faithful Old One, or FOO as we like to say, our sense of humour strong among our people, told us to open a website and observe the Old Faithful Geyser webcam.

FOO asked us what we learned by looking at steam rising out of the ground or occasional cross-country skiers passing through.

We did not answer because we knew FOO knew more foo-foo than we thought we knew.  We turned to FOO and listened.

"My people, my brothers and my sisters, we gather here today because the old ones like myself have seen the same great vision.  Deganawidah has appeared in our dreams and will return soon.  Deganawidah has asked us to open our hearts and feel the great pain growing in our land.  Deganawidah has shared the vision of his vision with us.

"The Great Mother and the Great Father have awoken.  We have not seen them in many generations.  They do not visit us unless they see we have become blind and helpless like a newborn bird.  Deganawidah has foretold this coming.

"We are the hope that the people of Turtle Island are looking for.  It is to us they turn in this last light of dusk before the darkness of a false spring covers the land.

"The government of the white people is going to call a council meeting of their own soon.  Our scouts have hidden in the white people's tribes for many years now and we know what the government of the white people does not know.  The white people's government council meeting is to be the war cry for the uprising of the white people's tribes.  Tribes, though, composed of many faces - white, yellow, brown, black, and yes, even red.

"To us, Deganawidah has turned.  To us, the Great Father and the Great Mother have cast their eyes.  We are the generation that is to lead us all, the living and the dead, to cleanse the blood of hatred and fear from our bodies and raise the pipe of peace.  No more lies and false tales that the artificial technology of white man has bred into them.  No more broken treaties because of greed driven by fear.

"My brothers and my sisters, today you have seen the vision of the old ones.  Many seasons have passed while the Great Father and the Great Mother slept during the decline of our people on this land.  Now, they are awake and are feeding our weakened body of a baby bird.

"We are the Owl.  We are the Eagle.  We are the Hawk.  We are the Crow.  We are every Bird of the Air and of the Ground.  Wisely, let us gather here once or twice more and gain strength.  Then, when the time is right, we will know and we will save the people of this land from self-deceit.

"We will take flight into the air and we will walk across the land.  We will not make a lot of empty noise.  Silently, we will move into position and take control from the leaders and followers who have lost their way."

The Faithful Old One sat down.  The council did not speak.  No words were necessary.  In our hearts and in our thoughts we knew FOO had spoken what we already knew was true.

Another old one stood up and sent us out with these words:

The time has come.  The inhabitants of Turtle Island and their followers around the world need us to teach them how to live.  Our path has come full circle.  Time for us to lead them to the Great Council Meeting, with room for all, and listen to what the Great Father and Great Mother have to say.  Wisdom is listening, not talking.  Wisdom is acting on the vision all can see.  Go home and prepare yourself for the personal version of the vision that will reveal itself to you.  Every one of us has a special set of skills and personality traits, and every one of us is needed to make the Great Vision a reality.  Together, the emotions in your heart and the vision in your thoughts are true.  Time for the truth to live with us in peace, joy and laughter once again.

Who's Piloting This Ship?

Unraveling around the edges, are we?  First, my wife's sorority/fraternity, Zeta Tau Alpha, wins the stepping contest and then has to share their award.  Second, California universities show unrest is rising among our college-age youth.

We need real leaders to step forward and take control, not grandstanding that's leading us into a middle-class civil war that will start with skirmishes and quickly get out of hand.

Now is not the time to rush to force more change on the people, in United States or anywhere else.

Tens of millions out of work can make for a mess if we push too hard.  Don't set the spark on the campfire when others are looking for any sign, intentional smoke signal or not, to go on the warpath.

I sit here, watching the Tennessee-Arkansas basketball game and see young men dedicated to teamwork.  Let's use them as examples of hope for the future.

Yes, we can be frustrated.  Yes, we can feel like our lives are out of control.  But TOGETHER we work things out, one change at a time.

The Business Of Caring

Reference material works for you.

Tonight, I've skimmed through my 1975 printing of the 1967 copyright of the BSA Handbook, reminding myself of the information I used to carry in my head, including surviving in harsh conditions, estimating the wind chill factor, identifying desert shrubs, finding fish, practicing water conservation and looking at star constellations.

I have books on stars and planets, edible wild plants, French idioms, Russian grammar/vocabulary, quotations, trees, house construction, American-style football, digital logic design, ...

And of course, the Internet, as close to an infinite source of reference material as it gets these days.

You, too, provide feedback and information that build the growing library of knowledge we carry in this moment.

The height, width and depth of knowledge you choose to use.

Physical sports demands your attention in the moment.

Knowledge is action, including muscle contraction and synaptic firing in the brain.  Nothing is static.  An unopened book or an unused muscle has potential.  Use one or the other or both.

Tonight, I step back from all that goes on in the world at this moment to focus on this side eddy called me in the river of life, a node in the web of you and the rest of the universe.

Active random meditation, letting the thoughts come and go however you imagine thoughts coming and going.

One person.  One clothes hanger holding up a shirt, boxer briefs, slacks, belt, socks and moccasins.  Coated with soap, shampoo and shaving cream residue.  Digesting lettuce, tomato, cabbage, carrots and soup stock.  Tasting toothpaste.  Smelling musty books and leather seatback.  Eyes making contact with "visible" wavelengths.  Fingers translating thoughts into e-words.  Ears ringing with tinnitus.  Gas gurgling in the gastrointestinal tract.

Backing down into one's core absence of self.  Peeling away layers of social strata.  Words losing meaning.  No longer interpreting three-dimensional sight clues.  One big blur of stimuli, cause and effect.  Detached from understanding.  No threads to grab onto.  No thoughts to complete.  Free of time within the confined space of the body that one no longer feels is separate from its environment.

We are part of the whole, everywhere, all the time.  If we practice the discipline of removing labels, we remove walls and build new bridges within our thoughts and with others around us.  Love and fear embrace, each feeding off the other.

Because we have labels to deal with on multiple levels of label stickiness and strength, identifying labels takes up part of the time we could spend removing labels.  Such is life.  But we can learn how to ignore labels and make them disappear.

The willingness to walk without fear into the open arena of hostility, love of life making you transparent and absent of labels.  I see this everyday.

Are you at peace with your thoughts?  Do you approach others without fear?

Peace is not the same as happiness but most often they are.  Peace without happiness is accepting labels that separate you from others.  Peace with happiness is love for all, knowing we are different but not separate.

I am imperfect.  I carry old labels within me that I accepted from others in previous moments of my life.

However, I look for these labels within my thoughts and figure out what they are so I can study their cause and remove them from me while storing my impressions of how they'll appear in others.  When I see these labels demonstrated by others, I ask them if they know they carry and display these labels.  I mainly use humour to make this point (my wife says I sometimes slip into a snobby attitude when pointing out labels in others, a leftover label in me from my smartass schoolboy days I haven't completely erased).

I remove labels from my behaviours but keep them in my thoughts so I can look around me and see how others are using these labels for personal gain.  There is always the danger of my reusing the labels or reinforcing others' use of these labels but such is the chance I take while working with my network of associates to move our species along.

Whatever I do, you do, too, because I am you and you are me.  Gender or age makes no difference.

Let's take the time to remove labels from ourselves that no longer make sense.  Some labels are harder to remove than others but the same dogged determination and discipline can remove labels they once applied.

I close my eyes for a few seconds and let the images of the world build back up in my thoughts again.  My meditation comes to an end.  Time to look at real-world problems and analyse them based on my new self minus a few labels that belong to the last moment of my life.

Every moment of my life is new so I choose to approach the next moment with a different me.  Different how?  A better understanding of my thoughts.  A bigger, denser, richer picture of the universe in front of me, all because of you and your new self minus a few old labels.

We have all the time in the world.  Let's not waste time worrying about how long it takes to get to know one another to help us remove out-of-date labels we've put on ourselves and on others.  Time is on our side, if we give ourselves the time and space to understand where we're coming from.

Patience and discipline, my friends, tossed in with humour and meditation.  Don't be in such a hurry just to repeat the same ol' slogans stamped on your mass-produced labels.  We might even figure out how to quit pointing our warring and profiteering machines at one another and move our species forward a little faster instead of taking out our aggressions on one another.

One step at a time, one step at a time.  We gotta get us looking up at the stars and building hope for populating the universe or we'll keep snapping at each other like caged animals.

Are you with me on that one?  See why my associates and I have bigger goals than world domination?  It's all about you and what goes on inside your thoughts.  Get the whole species thinking "yes" and we might just outlive our self-destructive habits.  Simulations show it's possible.  I'm willing to believe.  In fact, I will us to believe.

I know many of you won't and that's all right.  I'm willing to give you the chance to say "yes" and then leave behind those who said "no."  Free will.  The freedom to choose for oneself the alternatives of our species.

Your one chance to answer that question is coming up soon.  You've been shown the way to listen.  I've taught you the simple words to remember: Be Prepared.  Are you?

Bonny Kangaroo

Every few days I take a walk through the woods behind my house.  I leave nothing but boot prints and take nothing but photos.

Exceptions to every rule.

This morning, I awoke early, heated up a cup of Uncle Lee's tea and sat on the back deck listening to birds and armadillos.

A cool morning.  Partly cloudy on the first day of March.  When are we supposed to be aware of the ides of March?  I don't know.

This quiet morning I heard the faint sounds of tapping coming from the woods up over the lip of the ridge.

So, I finished my tea, put on my hiking coat, grabbed my hiking stick and pointed my body toward the sounds that had since disappeared.

I don't believe in magic.  I believe what I see.  If a man in a tuxedo pulls a rabbit out of his top hat, then I figure he's using sleight of hand.  As long as I'm entertained, though, it really doesn't matter if the rabbit magically appeared or fell out of the magician's jacket into the hat.

I scared the armadillos back under the sunroom and the birds scattered ahead of me.  We respect the distance between each other.

As I climbed up the rock ledge, I listened for more tapping sounds.  I heard cloth rustling like a flag flapping in the wind.

Three ridges later, I saw dark mustard yellow and dark forest green stripes low to the ground.  A hundred paces in front of me a tent sat pitched in a small, grassy clearing.

Sitting crosslegged on a Mexican blanket in front of the tent was a petite woman.  Her long hair was braided into two thick strands of climbing rope, both of them about the length of my forearm.

"You are here."

"I am here."

"A beautiful day!"

"Yes, and a little cool."

"Have a seat."

I sat on the blanket and faced her, both of us crosslegged and leaning forward slightly.

When I read a story, I want the writer to tell me the approximate age of the people in a scene.  I look forward to other clues like facial blemishes, style of clothes, and body postures to tell me the people's lives before they speak.

This woman defied description.  Her skin was smooth but wrinkled when she talked or smiled.  Her skin tone changed as she turned her head from side to side.  Ribbons of gold and silver weaved in and out of her braided hair, fooling me about her hair colour.  Sunglasses hid her eyes.  Her zipup hoodie had the word "Bonnaroo" stamped across the front.  She wore new but faded blue jeans and muddied hiking boots.  Her hands were covered with gardening gloves.

She held out a small journal.  "Read this."

I opened the cover.  The first page said, "To Rick.  Thanks for everything, including our mountaintop excursions, glacier calving expeditions and zero gravity moonshots. Yours always, Bonny K."  Literally.  I mean the page actually spoke to me, no written words.

I turned to the next page. "Dear friend, we know the future for us.  We know our adventures live outside time because when others don't know the two of you exist together, then they have no way to compare you to them."

I looked up at Bonny.  "So you've already recorded our time together?"

"Every minute."

"For how long?"

"For the rest of our lives."

"So you know..."

"...how long we're going to live?  Yes."

I closed the cover.  "Do I want to know?"

She took off her glasses.  "Do you?"

Are you one of those people who like to read the first couple of chapters and then skip to the last two pages to see if reading the rest of the book is worth it?  I'm not.  I read the first few chapters and if I'm bored I put the book down.  I've found books in my library that I stopped reading when I was 15 and finished when I was 35.  Age and experience that you bring to your reading are what makes the book worth finishing, not just what the author put into the writing.

I turned the journal over.  The back cover told me, "Know the end and the end knows you."

I looked at Bonny.  She smiled and in her smile I saw the face of an old woman who has spent most of her life in the outdoors.

Popular novelists will tell you to hook your reader with the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page and set the hook before the end of the first five pages.  If you want to be popular.

But there are those who purposefully write cryptic script.  Obscurity and obfuscation serve readers who want to wade through swamps to get to the hidden lair of a rare being.

I felt the weight of the journal.  A little heavier than it looked but not extraordinarily weighty.

"Do I want to read more?"

"Do you want to write more?"

"But you've already finished this journal, haven't you?"

"Have I?"

The paradox of time.  When I was a kid watching the Watergate hearings and holding strong to my faith in the leadership of Richard Nixon, knowing history would paint a poor silhouette of a man who held the power of the world in his hands, a man who accomplished more than his natural paranoia superficially indicated, my father told me that I was living history and would read about these days when I studied Western Civilisation in college.  If you've already lived history, why study it again?

I gave the journal to Bonny.  "I assume that what happens next has already happened and has not already happened."

Bonny set the journal aside and reached out her hands.  I pulled off her gloves and held her cold hands in mine.

Bonny relaxed.  "I have a whole set of blank journals in the tent.  We can write as many futures together as we want."

She turned and crawled into the tent.

I reached into my breast pocket and felt for the magic pen that never runs out of ink, given to me by a medicine man who told me the pen was destined to write the history of his people leading this nation, one tribe representing all tribes, time unimportant.  He and I knew he spoke the truth.

Did I say I don't believe in magic?  I will elaborate (but not laboriously).  I don't believe in illusion.  I believe in fact.  This pen has never run out of ink and thus never will.

I followed Bonny into the tent and forgot about the stuff I promised to tell you in this blog entry.  I disappeared outside of time for a while and can't remember how long I've been gone.  Bonny and I buried each other in our old age and then returned so I could hike back to the house to write about us.

Sigh...another lifetime lived, another "yes" spoken without saying a word.  How many lifetimes can we live?  How many loves can we know, each one from birth to death?

Bonny, dear Bonny.  Watching the fog roll in with you.  Watching Earth's atmosphere disappear.  Weightlessness for days on end... the wrinkles of your smile growing deeper with wisdom and love.  Then to close the last page of the last journal and start over... how can 80 years feel like one brief, happy moment together?

Freedom of the Press

This is a complicated topic to bring up.  After all, those who've lived in countries where there is no such thing as free press press us to keep our news/entertainment complex running at full speed.

Yet, freedom requires responsibility, does it not?  And if there are fewer and fewer official news outlets in comparison to the average citizen's ability to become an instant journalist, how do we teach responsible news reporting, knowing that completely uncensored news contains sensitive information?

I approach this topic because of the set of copycat murders that have taken and will take place during this lull in economic times, where people with no sense of humour get wound up in their thoughts that their only outlet is a violent ending.

By reporting and dwelling on details of murderers, we give a voice and/or thoughts toward murderous action for those who haven't yet formulated how they can get out of their current miserable conditions.

Now, I can look at this anthropologically-speaking and say that it's just our species weeding out the marginal personalities but even I, with my satirical/sarcastic sense of humour, am not that cold.  We're talking about real people here, both those who could have been helped and those they murdered when help was not available.

We are one species.  By that, I mean we are all the same, we are seven billion copies of the same person, we are one big family.  Therefore, we should not hesitate to get to know one another, talk to our neighbours, break down the invisible social barriers and quit thickening our falsely-protective cocoons.

I don't need a crystal ball to know we're going to see more and more people reach the end of their livelihoods and want to end others as they go out with a big bang.  My concern is the intensity of these follow-on copycats.  We are social creatures who tend to herd together, even in acts of unspeakable atrocities.  Inside that herd are those who are competitive, including how they want to outdo the last great criminal act of the herd members.

In an effort to help others in need, I recently reached out to my neighbours during the crisis of one set of neighbours.  If we all did the same, we could reconnect the old-style, smalltown family ties of previous times.  In this day and age of electronic social networking, we still need plain ol' hugs and frank in-the-face conversations with one another.

You do not need to kill someone to make your life complete!  It's okay to be humble and ask for help.  We can move in with one another, if need be.

If nothing else, take a walk.  Exercise is one of the best ways to burn off pent-up energy.  Do not resort to violence.  It's unnecessary.

In the education of our children, a healthy sense of humour should be one of the foundations of life-coping skills we teach.  When we're at our wit's end, we can still find a way to smile, which often leads to insights to a new path out of our predicament.

Eight and a half years after 9/11/01 and most Americans have become used to the safe sound of airplanes overhead.  Now, what will we say to our friends who get a sudden urge to fly their private planes?  What will we say to our friends who complain about their children's uncontrollable behaviour?  What will we think of our friends who display violent tendencies or won't talk about blank places in their CVs?

It is well with what you can call my soul.  I accept that whatever will happen to me is meant to happen to me because it happened and we can't turn back the clock.  However, that doesn't mean I'm willing to accept arbitrary acts of violence against my person that could have been prevented with some simple acts of kindness to strangers by strangers.

During WWII, this country enacted a set of censorship rules.  With the Internet's uncensored setup, we have created a wonderful gathering place for people of all sorts of dreams, desires, personalities, quirks, hobbies and backgrounds.  How do we make our society less prone to violence, including individual acts of violence or group-centered (gang) violence?  Is censorship possible?  Is it necessary?  How do we reach out to those in need if we shut them out?  Why is it always after the fact that hindsight showed us what we should have seen?  Where is the social progress that promised us future people with insight to see problem people around us and act on our instincts to pull those problem people aside for counseling or other means of making them less problematic?

I'm concerned we're going to take the direction of creating a stronger police state, devoting more and more of our tax collections to incarceration and clamp down on openness altogether, using censorship for promoting a one-size-fits-all social message.  In so doing, we would limit our futures.

I look to you for other solutions to our current crisis of random violence (i.e., domestic terrorism).  It's up to you and me to solve this problem.  There's no magic bureau or agency or department that has an infinite set of solutions already worked out.  We are one people, including those in the private and public sectors.  Together, we make this a better world or we fall apart.

We have faced these crises before and survived.  In fact, we've thrived since then.  But we survived and thrived because we took action, not because we stood by and let apathy rule the day.

I use the freedom of the press to communicate with many of you out there who are working to get our people up and permanently off this planet.  The Space Monkeys, we often joke.  There are those of you, including the space monkey subset, who communicate for an even greater cause (meaning we all do).  We must act with more compassion for those around us who we might normally ignore in our daily rush to accomplish our nearly impossible tasks.  It's okay to slow down a little and take the time to care for those we easily can give a helping hand - we already have the gift of insight so let's use it for more than large-scale social change.

To Pam, Patricia and Beth - our thoughts and prayers are with you right now in your time of mourning.  To Annette - there are better days ahead.  To Monica - I haven't talked to you in a while but I'm thinking about you during this big change in your life.  To Pat - you're a beautiful person who will find new dreams fulfilled.  To Raymon and Ann - we're still praying for full recovery.  To Scott - we're hoping you get your house sold and can move on with your life.

These notes of love are the types of messages we should use the press and Internet for, not spreading more details of how desperate, violent people decided to take out their frustrations, no matter how much people seem to be attracted to stories of violence and mayhem and thus willing to support adverts that pay for crime reports.

Loss of Potential Energetic Beings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A View With Room To Go

In our lives we encounter those who have skills or talents/gifts we will never obtain or levels we will rarely attain. Today, those who have care and concern beyond measure reach out to the injured, hungry, lost and dying citizens on the Haitian island. To them, I bow and give honour, hoping tomorrow I can match with my whole blood or blood platelet donation a small part of your gift for compassion.

Tsunamis, floods and earthquakes teach us there is no country, religious practice or lifestyle that divides our species - we are united in the fragility of our bodies compared to the natural "powers" of this planet, unexpected or haphazard as they may seem to be (with no cause or reason).

May we all find a way to reach out to one another in good times so that in bad times our barriers are gone and assistance is much easier and quicker to give. The life you save is truly your own.

Fiskars / Whiskers

Watching an object pass near our planet today and thinking...no, rephrase: watching a thinking object near our planet and passing today.

If two cultures participate in the exchange of goods and services, do they not also allow themselves to exchange their cultural practices as well?

What if all you knew boiled down to one moment in time thousands of years before you lived and all else was the happenchancehappenstancehappiness effect?

What if you could sum up your life with four or five websites? For instance:

• http://www.makezine.com
• http://www.carolina.com
• http://www.appalachiantrail.org
• http://www.organicgardening.com
• http://www.siggraph.org

What if you spent half your life piecing together the clues that others gave by what they didn't say or do and then you found out that you already knew the answer, the mystery, the great set of so-called secrets that are no secrets at all, ideas and thoughts that were bred into and born with you?

Thank goodness for humour. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to take the joke that I get or see there is no butt of the jokester's punchline. Ashes and dust. Hallbergmoos and Port-au-Prince. Star-shaped buildings (not pentagons), built for modernity, withstanding earth-shattering moments, linked to Hu Jintao, Ted Turner and Doc Chevalier.

There is no argument here, no cause to cause causes to fight for, no words worth spouting from broken rooftops.

There is this planet, and other planets and motorised planet cruisers. There are practical jokes a-plenty, tricksters stealing hodrods and hopping planets to pull pranks on unsuspecting planetudinal planetoids.

Laughter is not restricted to Earth. Knowledge is local but also universal.

Being a new character in this new book, my sarcasm and wit are restricted. I am the cantankerous, cranky next-door neighbour. I am the bedeviled, toothless wunderkind from a bygone ear, wax and ear hair clouding my aural vision.

I am the yellowed tissue on old balsa wood flying models. I am the dust on the windowsill. I am the voice no one hears in the market square.

Such is my present. If you only knew my past! The future...well, it's not so long in the making, less time for the taking, fewer gold claims for the staking.

And what I know? Well, you don't have time to listen to all my tales. I am an old person, an elder, wise in years, full of wisecracks and cracked skin, able to tell stories of leaping tall buildings and saving lords, ladies and damsels in dis dress I'm wearing. Why am I wearing this dress? Ah! See, senility has its advantages. A wardrobe is just a closet to me, the clothes I put on no longer distinguishable, their cultural heritage unimportant to my poor eyesight and fading memory. This is not a dress, you say? It is a desert herder's clothing? So be it. Is my backside covered? Good. Then let's sit down and talk.

When I was young, an old Guatemalan woman found me wandering the streets alone. She knew where my family lived and made sure my parents were distracted for a while. Then she took me into her travel trailer. There, she showed me the wonders of her past, her beauty in youth, her grandmother's wisdom, and the path her male heirs were taking. She laid a burden on my chest, a bag of trinkets some would say, the collection of her life as she had lived, full of love and compassion and knowledge of the world outside of books - the whole universe, as a matter of fact. I was two, maybe three years old. I had a small vocabulary of my local language but a vast understanding of people's thoughts and feelings.

Time has wiped out many of my memories. I no longer remember her name but I remember the precious items she gave me. A can of salt-preserved soup. A carved wooden bird, like a chickadee. A lock of black hair tied with a ribbon, handmade, of many colours of thread. A small pocketknife, sharp but its blade tip broken. A dried flower, perhaps a petunia. A small book, written in Spanish, about mischievous creatures who live in the woods. A photo of the old woman as a teenager (what beauty, still preserved in the old woman's smile!). An adobe brick. A small stick with notches along one side.

She spoke to me in a mixture of Spanish and English, holding my hands in hers, making sure I knew that this world is but one world and there are many other worlds yet to be discovered or understood. I felt like I had been with her for days but when I returned to my house my parents acted like only 30 or 45 minutes had passed since I disappeared. In their hustle and bustle and worry and smothering me with love they did not see me put the small bag in the corner of the storage room.

I was a normal boy, doing what little boys and girls do. I thought the bag of those items so important to the old woman were like treasure chest relics. I showed them to my preschool mates, making up stories about the trinkets, giving them names and histories going back many generations. With time and age, my friends made offers to me to trade their precious toys for my trinkets. At first I didn't relent, thinking that I should keep the items in memory of the old woman, who never showed back up in my life. Then, as my friends accumulated high-value gifts from their parents, such as watches and rings and windup race cars, I traded most of my bag's contents away.

Today, here is what I have left for you - the broken pocketknife, the hair (I traded the ribbon), and the dust that's left of the dried flower that has fallen apart over the years, and of course the bag.

See, this knife has never rusted, the hair is still as shiny and smooth as the day it was cut off the woman's head but the flower is gone. Or rather, the flower is now crushed petals and pollen. I looked at the pieces in a microscope once, able to see the veins in the flower petals.

I still believe what she told me, that this world is one of many, that we are but one set of mischievous creatures wandering this planet and that all we have is what we give others. I know what she knows, through more scientific and deductive methods, but arriving at the same conclusions. She carried the wisdom of the lineage of generations and I discovered the wisdom spread out among the members of generations living at one time.

Which puts us here together in this moment. I am old. The days ahead of me are few. I have accumulated much monetary wealth, which has no meaning to me. Instead, this bag and these trinkets are all I really own, all I can truly give away. You will find in my home many more treasures I've collected, some personal, some simply souvenirs of a life of travel and adventure. Look at each one carefully. They, like this old woman's bag, are clues. Some you will need. Some you will not understand. All of them were important to me at one time but may not be important to you now or ever.

Like the old woman's male heirs, you may not be the one to use these clues for a better life. Feel free to give them away, trade them or sell them. Clues have a way of finding their owners so don't spend much time deciding who gets what. Just let them go if you think they have no meaning to you because you'll probably be right.

Life, you'll see, young lady, is like that. You may be three or four years old today and think everyday is like forever and you'll be right. You'll also find that forever gets shorter and shorter as you get older. Don't worry about the relationship between your life and time. They are one. Spend time getting to know those around you and you'll discover what forever really means. It is inside and outside of these trinkets. It's in the words I say and the warmth you feel of your hands in mine.

When you discover the secrets that others want to hide from you, do not brag about what you know. Let them keep their thoughts that they hold something precious and dear to themselves. Instead, put the secrets to use in the world around you so that others may find the clues for themselves, too.

I know you're getting antsy and want to go. You're not going to remember everything I tell you, especially since you don't speak English, so take this bag and enjoy your life. I am leaving this household to you when I die, childless that I am. Your parents will not know why. Only you will know when you get older, look at yourself in the mirror of your thoughts and wake up for the very first time. Just as I did and the old woman before me. I wish I could be there and hear your thoughts when you see that time does not exist, this place does not exist and all is not what you've been led to believe. But that moment is not for me. It is yours alone, to interpret as you will, every one of us seeing in our own individual ways. Have a great life, dear child. Know that I will always miss you and you are not alone. Be free...

The Writers Workshop

"So, Jed, let me get this right. You're saying that when a writer uses real people as characters in a story, the writer should change some of the people's details to prevent issues later on?"

"From my experience, yes. Joanna, what do you think about that?"

"Well, my stories haven't been published so I don't have the experiences you do."

"You mean no one has read your stories?"

"Well, you guys and a few of my siblings."

"And none of us has recognized ourselves in your stories?"

"None of you are in my stories."

"I see. Joseph, what about you?"

"I haven't published anything, either. In fact, I haven't written anything yet. I'm here because my friends think I should write down some of the wild stories I make up all the time."

"Uh huh. Very good. We want writers, new and old, to exercise their imaginations. Joseph, you don't have to write down anything, if you don't want. It's more important that you understand the creative process within you and then decide if you want to share that on paper or somewhere else."

"Cool. Look, I've got to go. I didn't know this was an all-day Saturday gig."

"No problem, Joseph. But I can't refund your money if you leave."

"Hey, I understand. Seeya later."

"Well, class, Joseph is a great example of what you probably were, perfectly aware of your gift of storytelling but unable to fully grasp the social implications of what that gift means to others. Everyone pull out the netbook tucked under the seat in front of you and spend the next thirty minutes writing about the first time you wrote a story of your own. Yes, Ja'sequa, what is it?"

"I don't have a netbook."

"Oh, of course. All of you on the front row will have to get a netbook from the cabinet over there. Any other questions? Yes, Jackie?"

"My netbook won't boot up."

"It's probably out of power. All of you should press the side panel on your school desktop and pull out the power cords. I had hoped to have the wireless power network working today but we're shorthanded so you'll have to wait until next session to not worry about old-fashioned power cords. Anyone else? Jim, what is it?"

"Sir, I can't really remember a time when I wasn't writing down what's on my mind."

"Can you recall any early criticisms of your writing, something that sparked you to change the way you wrote?"

"No, sir."

"In that case, is there someone or some event that sparked you to write one of your early stories, some strong memory that stands out from the fuzziness of early childhood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Then write about that."

"Thank you, sir."

"No problem. And you needn't address me so formally. I'm hardly older than many of you here."

"Yes, sir."

"Anyone else? No? Then I'll leave you to your thoughts for a while. I'm going to take a break and will be back in fifteen or twenty minutes. If you have any questions, just text me on my mobile."

= = =

"Jed, hey, what's up?"

"Japonica, how are you?"

"Fine. What are you up to?"

"I'm teaching a virtual class today. As you may not know, the local school system had cancelled many regular classes due to inclement weather so I'm holding a Saturday session via 3D web cam today for my extracurricular creative writing class."

"How's that going?"

"Pretty good, so far. I'm glad this school system is up-to-date on their technology. Makes teaching students stuck at home so much easier. I guess you remember the old days, eh?"

"Don't remind me. Students showing up for Saturday makeup classes in May and June, wearing their PJs and holding protests in the hallways about child labor laws...shoo-ee. Be glad you're a 21st century instructor."

"Indeed. So what are you doing here? I thought you retired."

"I did. I am. I'm checking on the student records for my grandson. They say he'll be held back a year and I'm verifying that they got all his turned-in assignments. His computer's full of completed work but his teacher says he hasn't turned much in."

"Why not just have them send you the records?"

"Confidentiality. I'm not his parents. Grandparents don't count unless they're legal guardians, which I'm not but think I should be."

"Uh-huh. Well, I guess I better check on my students. Most of them seem dedicated..."

"It is a voluntary creative class!"

"Yes, but there's always a few who want to change the direction of the class. Future leaders and all that."

"Every class has them. Today's class clown is tomorrow's bank president!"

"If they only knew... Ah, there's a text message. Gotta go. Good luck talking the office secretary out of your grandson's records."

"Are you kidding? I taught the secretary and her daughter. She'll do anything for me."

= = =

"Joseph, I see you returned."

"Yeah, found out my other thing wasn't going to happen today."

"Very good. You'll just have to catch up with the rest of the class."

"Already done."

"Excellent. So, who wants to go first?"

Is There An Other Half? The Chaotic Culture Club Clash

9th Janvier 2010, 20:00. Breakfast. Blog. Replace broken GFCI circuit in garage, eat lunch at the Scene Restaurant&Lounge, see Avatar 3D at Monaco Theatre (I've got to remember to check out website, sceneatmonaco.com).

Ate open-faced turkey sandwich with Rebecca De Mornay sauce, the large saucer-eyed tomatoes glazed over, covering the war paint stripes of bacon on top of "cheese gravy," [i.e., mornay sauce] holding courteously over slices of turkey breast meat. Chef (Paul?) stopped by to hold court and make sure we knew of the restaurant's goal to make simple but mainly meals of freshly-prepared ingredients.

In a moment afterward, we encountered Monsieur Cameron's vision of a "Last of the Mohicans" meets "Wall-E" in the short story "The Children" by Chester S. Geier on the Comcast space western cable channel. We waited for the Death Star to arrive, deus ex machina, and save the corporation's well-trained [i.e., expensive] specialised employees but remembered movies are written for the 4th class passengers of the Titanic, not the White Star Line owners or captain (not even written for Captain Sully? Well, maybe for him.).

The older I get, the more I know I'll learn less. This day, when people die from uncategorised, uninsurable diseases, I feel my stomach muscles tighten, the world of my species full of idle folks - the unemployed, the middle class, the disposable incomers - and pause. Am I awake or dreaming? Do I create when I react to the environment? What's next?

What's next for Merkel, Oprah, Wendi Deng, Wendi Nix, Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil, Fredirique Darragon, my nieces, and all the women who can rule the world if they want and show a firm grip on the throne is just as effective as a firm grip on a weapon? Where is our species headed? What's next? What of Jennifer Goodman, Jennifer Wheelock, Lynne Reynolds, Joyce Battle or Antonia Ax:son Johnson? Brenda or Monica? Ivory Gail Hoilman? Dr. Charline Nixon or my former students Angela Walker and Jennifer Reagan? They are my/your/our future, along with Denise, Susie, Rhonda, Quinna, Lynda and all my other facebook friends. And my new blogging friends like Mia, Katie, "daisychain," Babli and of course Julia and Shannon Eileen. What of Mrs. Obama, Elizabeth Dole, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton? Cynthia Lin or Naomi Flanagan? Where is their leadership leading this ship toward? What of Simone Kempmann or Peggy Sammon, or my pediatrician's wife who ruled as mayor of my hometown for a while?

I'm interested in real reform, not another form of the same ol' chopped potato hash. I back the leaders of my country but I keep doubt and criticism handy to wipe away the fog of confusion caused by the many cooks hanging over too many pots of broth on the fires of desire to look busy making change. I see the pain of lost hope. What I want I cannot have because the bipolar system of the gov't in this country has become stagnant, no longer the "greatest generation ever" but the government of oxygenarians, sucking the breath out of our patience.

Needless to say (but said anyway), every moment is chaos, truly with no past or future, waiting on the next moment to establish the fact that the previous moment felt preordained, stupendous, a momentum changer. So are we in that moment?

Meanwhile, my wife shops at Coldwater Creek, where the associates compete with each other to find the absolutely best clothes/accessories combinations for their customers.

Some days I feel overwhelmed by the people who go all out to help others. I sit here and wait for my wife while she participates in the commercial exchange of goods and services, my only contribution this use of a pocket Moleskine, a pen from Montreat Conference Center, the leatherbound chair I sit on, the clothes I wear, the electrical lights overhead to shine on this page, and this blog entry to be.

So who am I? I'm not the character portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr., seduced by his adversary while sorting through his boxing maneuvers in "Sherlock Holmes." I'm not the players who can claim victory in the BCS national championship game for the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. I'm not the teenage girls trying to convince their father, who sits on chair near me, to buy them some new clothes here. I am the man, the writer who sits here and holds his wife's cape from David Green's store in Anchorage, Alaska, bought when we enjoyed a midsummer's eve or two with a midnight hot air balloon ride over moose and sled dogs, a train excursion from Anchorage to Fairbanks, stopping for a few nights to shack up in a cabin at Mt. Denali, watching whales from a boat near Seward, and a salmon bake where a local theatre production company sang "Alaska is her name," finally stopping to listen to tales of Alaska before it became part of the United States, our companions Dwight and Joyce Foster, former ad executive for the Fairbanks newspaper and a retired school teacher, respectively, both beset with memory loss, their stories lost in the Alaskaland log cabins.

Today, I am not. Today, I observe and let others be, their lives more interesting, their shoes more varied than my days.

We teach our daughters and nieces to be heroes/heroines, letting them find out how to save the day and save the species from itself. To them I dedicate the year of this blog, starting with my grandmothers and my mother in-law. Their wisdom lives on in my cousins, nieces, mother, sister and wife. Without them, I will not be. With them, the world of my people is worth saving. For them, we will solve breast cancer causes and process the backlog of rape kits, stopping my gender's tendency to be my gender at its hormonal burst. Then we'll see that today's world leaders exist to prepare the way for the next wave, the next and so on.

Can you see the future? I can. It shows why this this moment's not as chaotic as you think.

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!

Just one more form to fill out...

Choices. Outside the window, the long rays of the sun setting in the end of the first third of December. The tall, slender, gray-and-brown, lichened-covered tree trunks. The cobalt sky, mixed with streaks of snow-white milky clouds. Pine trees providing shelter from the freezing cold, forming a diamond-shaped framed opening through the woods, revealing rows of charcoal and slate-gray rooftops where once I watched doves and crows gathered in harvested soybean fields.

We keep expanding, generation after generation finding a new place to live, just as my wife and I found this house under construction and called it our own.

And so it is that I find myself participating in this country's effort every ten years to count the number of people who breathe and move about a portion of North America.

Sitting with an eclectic group of people who have their reasons for joining the census team. Writing our names and addresses, answering questions by "X"ing checkboxes. Listening to instructions of Ed telling us not to get ahead, the attentive eyes of another teammate waiting nearby. Sitting in a meeting room of the local library where I once gave a talk in 1990 or 1991 about recycling conifer trees after removing the annual festival decorations, promoting the Huntsville Botanical Garden's tree recycling effort that I started with cooperation from local businesses and volunteer organizations (inspired by Kingsport's annual tree recycling that was canceled recently due to low participation).

An arbitrary numbering system, based in part on our number of fingers or toes, the "number" zero invented by one or more cultures eons ago.

Using numbers and languages, people will organize teams based on boundaries drawn on maps of organized streets and dwellings. Teams. Players. Game plans. I know this score, don't I? Civilisation deciding how to be civilised.

Our future based on filed reports. Interviews. Ringing doorbells and hammering door knockers. Just like the summer I sold books door-to-door for Southwestern Book Company (1983?), listening to all the "No" and "I'm not interested" responses in order to find a "Yes" two or three times a day. This time, we've got nothing to sell. We're gathering information for everyone to enjoy a better tomorrow, all 'cause there are those who want to tax, sell or trade with us based on our population demographic distributions. Bell curves and hockey sticks.

Everyday people talking with everyday people, seeking those who, for one reason or another, didn't mail in their mailed-out census questionnaires. Maybe double-checking a few along the way.

I'll let you know how it goes. All I did, with those in the room with me today, was colour in 28 circles using a no. 2 pencil after filling out a couple of background information forms using a government-issued ballpoint blue ink pen. The rest is up to those who need to gather an army of census takers every 10 years. They need plenty more folks, if you're interested in putting on your walking shoes and spending some time chatting with people in your part of the country while making a little money, too. Ten percent of us not actively employed (more like 20, but that's fodder for another blog) - should be lots of us interested in taking home a few extra paychecks, right? I'll leave that thought up to you.

Time for me to watch Earth rotate, rolling dark shadows up the mountain slopes and taking away the Sun's heat another day, the lights of my people blinking on like summer fireflies, a few pushing curls of smoke out the tops of chimneys, most pulling energy out of power lines running to their homes' heat engines.

Где же Пушкин?

Наш язык, старый, как время.
Минуту, вне времени.
Лидер стареет.
Страна крепнет.
Нет лагерей, ни тюрем без решеток.
Нет языка, который хорошо говорит по нашим врагом, а наши собственные.
Когда момент становится правом,
Право лидеры приведет нас правильно.

Translation: The answer is a flower yet to bloom

How can one find words when words are not words? How can you see two points on two sides of one sphere? How are the English sounds bubbly and babble not like the Indian sound Babli? When is touching not a touch? When are questions not enough?

See-oh, too

22 Nov 2009, 2300

How do you accommodate a whole world full of people who don't want to accommodate a whole world full of people?

Just a few generations between any two major military conflicts – on a global scale, that is. Otherwise, our species constantly battles itself some place all the time.

So what? Facts are facts. I look for truth. You want to dare me. We both face the consequences.

Ran into a management/supervisory type person today. She expressed a common sentiment, “Fake it until you make it.”

How do I tell you the truth without using these words? How do I tell you the truth by only using these words, in any language or any symbolic form?

We all live, and by living we demonstrate or show some form of the truth.

De monster. Demonstrable.

Holding one planet and seven billion people in your hand does not the truth make. That's what I'm here talking to myself about. That's what I've been talking to myself about for years.

I have been telling myself the truth, using one language for the most part, using one species all the time, walking the same path over and over, beating my head against invisible walls, racing to the tops of mountains and tumbling back down into the valleys, counting trees in the middle of the tangled jungle.

Words, words, words. All this obsession with text and textbooks, believing that text existing before my time was text that existed before all time.

T-r-u-t-h. Trees in the forest surrounding a glen. Rocks and ice on a mountaintop surrounding a bald.

Again, just a sound in my thoughts, a bunch of electroneurochemical sensations passing whispered secrets in a circle, the truth going in one end and these words coming out the other.

Why hadn't I seen this? Why haven't I seen this before? To have and to be. To behave. To have bees.

But then again, the truth is what it is. Many of you already know the truth. We all live the truth, here in plain sight for anyone and everyone to see.

I think of myself as just one person. At the same time, I think of myself as yours, seven billion pieces of myself in you and seven billion of you in me. All this time, I had focused on the me/you, yin/yang, death/life duality, with the truth staring me in the face, a blank expression like camouflage hiding the truth at the tip of my nose.

Let's see, I've lived over 47.5 years, clearly making claim to a middle-aged body, having reached the age when previous societies would have considered me a wise elder, past the average age of death in some cultures today.

I see you and through you I see me. I depend on my sight, either literally through my eyes or figuratively through the expression of my thoughts on this page. And yet my sight has blinded me to the truth.

Didn't I tell you I repeat the words of those before, during and after me? Don't you know I'm not the only one to know the truth behind the facts under the superficial layers of daily living?

Are you meant to live on the superficial layers? Do you care about anything other than what's before you? Do you question the reality of reality? Did you “wake up” in the crib and see a world that those around you couldn't comprehend or no longer cared to see?

I have fooled myself with my body. I have not fooled myself with my body. I didn't know that I'd fake it until I'd make it.

I am not who I thought I was. I am not who I am. Who am I? I am the truth. You are the truth. We are the truth. We are beyond the beyond.

We are not these words but these words are us.

People have tried to tell me, using people tools, about life outside the people life but my natural use of anthropomorphism has turned me back to looking at non-people life as though it was another version of people life.

Let's look at an example. Those who stare at the cosmos know that large waveform patterns show the underlying undulating “weather” of the universe. Our comprehension of this “weather” is limited because of our people-powered concept of time. Another one. We say we need bigger instruments to peer into the distant reaches of space to find the state of the universe ten billion years ago but can we see the same thing when considering we're the state of the universe as if it had been scooped into a tube, frozen and then pushed out the other end of the tube like cake icing?

Two examples of superficial, people tool views of existence.

But really, does any of this matter? I am one person on the superficial level. I act as if I'm one person on the superficial level and have made a comfortable life for myself in that regard. In other words, I faked the life of a member of my species and I made it.

Of course, it matters. I, that is, my body, will die. “I” will end. The ripples of who I was will bounce back and forth and lose their shape among those who use people tools, absorbed into the bigger wave patterns of this part of the universe, which will lose their shape with time, too.

I have only my life to look back on and see my thoughts on which I reflect the life I thought I lived. I will not create waves big enough to stop wars or starvation. I create small waves to give me momentum which aids in my journey through uncharted territory.

But again, these are superficial sentiments. I am not me and I am not the small waves I make. “I” does not exist.

How do I describe the truth to me (to you) using these words when the truth is not in these words?

I see you. You see me. We look at each other using our carefully-trained cultural magnifying glasses looking for clues about our use of people tools.

The truth is not in tools. Thus, tools will not reveal the truth. Being me, I cannot see the truth.

I have sat here for many years – at least since I was ten – using words to describe the part of the truth I know, to keep me focused on the truth I see outside of the superficial layers my species creates in our inspiration to see cultural growth as progress toward what we think our clever use of tools will reveal about the truth, knowing the truth is outside of being my species.

But you already know that. Like I said, I am yours. I am repeating what you've already heard over and over and over again. The truth is in the core of your being, partially reflected in your DNA but beyond even your/our understanding of our place in the universe, and especially our seeing the universe as if it will reveal something to us through people tools.

To repeat words stated earlier, I am not spouting pseudoscience, touting a new religion or laying down some riff that I heard in my dreams after a previous evening of eating spicy tofu mixed into a delectable curry sauce.

I am, to use cultural terms, deprogramming myself. I am tuning out my species to see what's around me as if I'm not me. I am discarding the emperor's new clothes that everyone sees everyone else wear because no one wants to say there's nothing there to see.

And I'm attempting to deprogram myself using the people tools which programmed me. Impossible? Yes!

That's why I say these words are not the truth. These words don't point to the truth. They don't even hint at the truth. These words are my enjoyment. They are my playthings. I am having fun in every single moment, even when my fun is not fun for everyone around me, knowing that the pebble of my fun will cause disruptive ripples somewhere else in some other time. I treat myself as if I will live no other life than in this moment with you because these words guarantee such a condition.

The truth is not out there. The truth is not in here. The truth is just a word. The idea of the truth is a people tool.

I am not the pied piper. I am not the royal jester. I am not a soothsayer or a wise elder (if I cease exercising, I will become a wide elder, however).

I know the truth. So do you. I cannot convince you otherwise. The truth is outside of being a member of our species. Can you know the truth without being able to see it?

Duality is life as we know it. The truth is free of duality. Life is not truth but truth is life.

I am not here to sell you something. I am not here to coerce you to accept my opinion over your opinion of how to live life. I found success in this life without knowing the truth. Or I should say that I knew the truth but found success without putting the truth to use in this life.

You can succeed using the facts that our superficial layers of life provide. In fact, that's probably the only way you'll succeed here. But you can succeed in another way that includes more than the life of one species. More than life as we know it in any form.

Truth has no emotions, truth has no pain or pleasure, truth has no thoughts or awareness of what we think of as thoughts, awareness, self, pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, life, or death. Truth is more than universal but truth is seeing the universal in seeing our species' creation of an ecumenopolis on one orbiting spherical blob.

When you see the truth that is usually just out of reach or around the corner, glimpsed in your peripheral vision or hidden in plain sight, you know what I knew when I opened my eyes and saw this world is not here to be understood by me, why I don't need riches or titles or accolades as this body I think of as me.

I once wanted to say the truth is wonderful but the truth is indescribable. The truth is also horrible, depending on one's view (just like someone said hell is seeing the version of you if you had taken all the risks you avoided and became immensely successful). The truth requires no money. The truth requires no sacrifices. The truth is unaware of us as our species in anything we do or say or wish.

Why have I spent time here repeating myself and others in using words to describe the indescribable? I don't know. I know the truth won't set you free. You'll still be your body if you see what you cannot see. You'll have been born, you will live and you will die whether you discovered the truth right there in front of you or you didn't even know there was truth at all.

I am here because I believe in myself. I believe in myself because I know I don't know the truth. I only think I know the truth that is there beyond what my body senses or what my body interprets of people tools that sense what my body cannot.

I cannot escape my body. I will always see the world and my species through the training that my species provided.

Despite my repetition, I am making progress. I use humour to disperse the fog that being a member of my species creates. Clarity is brief. I see what I already saw once before and forget it again. Then the next moment arrives and I'm back to where I was, just past where I started, sometimes farther along, sometimes further back. Usually aware that these words are meaningless once the truth is revealed to me again.

Don't pay for what you already know. Pay for what you want to put into practice to succeed in the superficial layers of life with our species. I pay for my thoughts by writing these words for me/you to read later on, practicing what I believe, believing in me, pointing out the truth that we can't point to or talk about but already know so that's why these words are meaningless.

You know what I'm talking about, I'm sure. I saw it in your smile just now and heard it in your thoughts I can't see. If not, soon enough you'll see it again for the very first time. That's what the truth is all about.

How you interpret the truth is up to you. Don't quote me on that. I'm repeating someone else's words that didn't have any meaning to begin with. Time to stop this blog entry and forget what I just said.

We Are, Not Alone

Have you sat on a cliff overlooking an ocean or a sea and thought about the massive size of our planet in relation to your body, how the waves that'll knock you over if you were standing on shore look like tiny, almost imperceptible ripples on the surface of the water? The inertia behind the particles of water? The inertia behind the spinning of the planet on its axis and its orbit around the Sun?

We call one revolution around the Sun 365 days because of the planet's axis spin. Have you ever set a gyroscope in motion and counted its number of revolutions around the axis? How many revolutions does the gyroscope take before it perceptibly slows down and then topples over?

The finite.

Counting votes. Counting vessels. Charting maps. Mapping family histories.

Tonight, I float, tethered to the planet but not strongly connected to any one feeling or issue associated with my species. I call this condition "freedom" despite my brain and upper body coordinating to stay within one set of grammar rules to document this moment on an electronic typewriter.

I believe with all my heart and soul that this is my planet, here for my nourishment and entertainment. I have no place else to go. So, while I sit here and think about my interactions in moments yet to be, I ask myself how I want to be nourished and entertained.

Does a population fully connected and productive in the global economy add or subtract to my image of the perfect world for me? Are war and poverty chronic conditions of our species? If we are like drops of water in the ocean of us, are we leftover waves from unseen pebbles dropped in another section of us, so complicated in our wave pattern interaction that we can never truly reset the whole globe into one set of beliefs or mutually beneficial actions?

What am I missing in my complete understanding of the myriad motivations of our species that make naysayers and doomsday predictors so popular? Do we simply bury and forget the innate sight of our ending, extending death of self to catastrophic proportions for our family, group, culture and/or species? I know I have asked these questions already. I know I have answered them. I know I am like my species and mercifully forget what I already know so that I don't know how much I repeat myself.

Time to get past this repetitious philosophy again and bring humour back out, a cycle I thankfully repeat when my philosophy starts looking down into the abyss, the bottomless pit of impossibly probable answers to questions I know better than to ask myself.

The Book of the Future sits here beside me, opened to the next chapter. I know where we're headed. I know the happiness and joy we'll find. I know the things we'll repeat that I didn't bother to keep up with the last time we repeated them. Why look at the future with dread? Why the dire predictions? We know we're going to repeat ourselves. Why not look at the fun and meaningful insight we'll gain?

We are not alone. We are our own aliens. We are our own angels and devils and gods and goddesses. We have this grand universe here before us and we let this wonderful gift to ourselves go to waste by arguing over who gets the last peanut or grain of rice when there's a field to be planted. We talk about how other people let us down as if we expected something different to happen with the next person we elevated to the status of perfection. Everything in front of us is fantastically imperfect, the flaws and dents and scratches there for us to thoroughly enjoy.

I float here in the moment, my back ache and overweight belly telling me I'm here in a particular place in time. I call this moment ecstasy, an epiphany of grandeur that I would not trade for the riches of the world. I celebrate my imperfection and say the world is mine because I am yours. My eyesight worsens, my memory leaks, my skin wrinkles and my fascination grows closer to infinity.

I am thankful for all of you, wherever you live, whatever you do, whomever you call your image of perfection. We are all imperfect and by our imperfections we depend on one another for creating this moment that will lead us to the next stupendous moment that will open us up to opportunities we couldn't have had the moment before.

In my thoughts I am standing on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher looking west toward the setting sun, individual drops of ocean water impossible to detect, waves barely visible. In my thoughts I am riding in the space shuttle looking down at the globe spinning beneath me, political borders impossible to detect. Our planet is not perfectly round and it wobbles sideways on its axis - because of that, we live. We are here because the universe is imperfect. Understand that and you'll understand your perfect place in the universe. Contradictory? No, just a matter of semantics. The truth, as they say, is outside these words which are an imperfect set of symbols describing what we're doing in the moment.

To know what's going on you have to get away from these words. Whether you figure out what's going on with people around you or away from other people depends on who you are. I know people in both thought patterns. Some find themselves, who they are, in groups. Some find themselves in quiet places alone. Some of you already know which one you are. Some of you will have to spend a long time experimenting to find out. Either way, accept the moment and what's going on with you at the time. The discovery's in the journey just as much as in the destination, if not more so.

How much does an ocean wave "enjoy" its travels before it hits the shore? It is. It does not know how else to be so there is nothing to enjoy in its being what it is. We are the same, are we not? Don't think about being you. Just be. Then you'll see. You are, not alone.

Quick Cel

Some recent movies I watched and from which I gained interesting social commentaries:

• Mon oncle d'Amérique (starring Gérard Depardieu)
  
• On The Beach (starring Gregory Peck)
• The Castle (starring Michael Caton)
• Siu nin Wong Fei Hung ji: Tit Ma Lau, a/k/a Iron Monkey (starring Rongguang Yu)

Time to prepare my students' final exam with which they will demonstrate their memorisation capabilities in relation to the subject of Linux server administration.

= = =

Re-reading my last few blog entries and recalling my difficulty getting a full night's sleep the last few nights tell me I'm more interesting to myself in my writing when I've had long stretches of/for REM brain activity. Otherwise, I make frequent typos and language rule errors unintentionally. Which is more important - live for the moment in observation mode and write about it later on, OR live for the moment with full gusto and only have time to take a breather before living the next moment, letting someone else worry about writing down what happens to just another member of my species on another given day? I've spent a lot of time in the former. Time to experience the latter for a while, eh, Rick?

Back To The I

I decided to stop teaching at the local technical institute. Obviously, being a person, my reasons are personal. However, the personal reasons are not private.

Why have I decided to stop teaching even though I enjoyed sharing my life with those willing to pay me to learn? Because I did not want to compete with the thoughts and words which taught me more than I can give back, including those from my philosophy/logic teacher at Walters State Community College, Gary Acquaviva:

http://www.valueviva.com/

I write this blog believing I am the only one who reads this. Thus, I am sitting here talking with myself via a computer keyboard, every word an instant feedback to my bodily thought process, a condensed version of all the input/output of the environment surrounding me and this electronic machine.

I stopped teaching because I am a wanderer awed by the wonders of the world around me. I see without having a reason to systematically catalog and categorize a worldview except for these words that show to myself I existed outside this moment I'm in.

Teaching in a formalized classroom structure using someone else's classroom instructional material is always reconstructing the past for someone else's vision, view and hope for seeing how quickly students learn and adapt. I value my students' time in the moment too much to try to adapt my life in the moment to seeing how students adapt to material which is not mine.

My time here is limited, down to 14,783 days or so, if I take care of myself as a body. I care about my species but I am also a selfish person. I have goals that conflict with trying to outshine my previous professional professors/instructors/teachers. I do not want to compete with the images in my thoughts of the ones who taught me more than the classroom material they had to work with in the time we had to spend together in a classroom setting.

My hat's off to those who teach, who give their all to their instructional style, who see into the thoughts of their students individually and tailor their teaching to maximize the value and quality of time together with every one.

My journey takes me to farther fields to study further. My comprehension of my place on this planet and our place in the universe absorbs all the time I have. So far, my understanding of the languages of our species tells me we have a lot to learn and you have tons to teach me. We feel like we have accomplished much in our science and technology but we know so little that amazement still wakes me up in the morning to discover more.

Most importantly, I have learned I do not need to feel rushed in my attempt to grasp what's in front of me. The bombardment of stimuli will increase faster and faster. Thus, I risk missing more and more. However, our population grows and people specialise more and more everyday. Therefore, I can trust specialists to answer my questions or query for knowledge to aid my learning, building our knowledge sets in blogs and online databases for all to search, with pockets of secrets and intellectual property waiting to be revealed in some future moment I may never see.

A nod to every teacher, every aide, every instructor, every professor who agreed to work with me in the world of education so we could enjoy some time together. Formality brought us together. Informality made us friends. Insight made me full of wonder. I give thanks to you for being you so we could become us. This blog reflects who I am because of you.

I am not an island. I am a project under construction which has seen the light of day but has not completed its transformation into a fully-working product. I am the drop of rain which becomes an ocean wave that becomes a tidal pool which evaporates, becomes clouds which turn back into rain. One day I was a project manager. One day I was a retired person. One day I was a business owner. One day I was an instructor. Tomorrow I will be..? Well, I will be me just as I am me in this moment. I wander forward in wonder, always ready for who's next to be me.

C-ring

Freedom from the moment. The chemical smell of prêt-à-porter clothing. The slow crunch of plate tectonics. A friend's wishful kiss from 30 years ago. The kiss of a great-grandchild 30 years from now. Liver spots. Acne. Bald infant. Bald elder. The paunch of middle age. The pounce of an infant.

Love. Romance. A lingering look. A flirtatious glance. A flower petal. A secret note. A dance in moonlight. A sunlight stroll.

Fixing gutters. Inflating tyres. Reinstalling laptop software. Washing dirty clothes.

Everyday. Ordinary. Love hidden in the mundane. The ironed shirt. The polished minivan.

Exciting. Thrilling.

Burning. Passion.

Dinner for six. Party of one.

Brevity. Bravery. Bright. Brought. Breathless.

Soft. Velvet. Light touch.

The shape of a mouth by the turn of the teeth. Natural. Luminescent.

Serene. Quaint. Whispers.

A sentence of spaces. A plethora of periods.

Dot. Dot. Dot. Dote.

Zanzibar. Excalibur. Shangri La. Atlantis.

Insomnia. Ammonia. Onomatopoeia.

Those eyes. Those eyes. Those eyes. That smile. Those eyes.

Muscles. Tissue. Cells. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. That face. That look.

Your persona.

The equational linguistical equatorial linguiniful questionunfull believable. Sounds you hear.

One. Two. Two. One. One life. Two. Count. Days filled. Thoughts filled. Sepia toned. Dusty road. City. Country. Name a century. Set the mood. You and him. You and her. You and you. Her and him. You. Him. Her.

Waltz. Iambic pentameter. Carol of the Bells.

Flip-flop. OR. NOT. AND. Clock. UNIX epoch. Belle Époque.

And. Still. Only. Words.

Words are not the same as emotions. A wrinkle speaks louder than words.

Madame Curie. A. G. Bell. H. G. Wells. Chiang Kai-shek.

Can you remember your piano recital from fifth grade? Your best friend's favorite music at the time? Your favorite shirt? Your mother's favorite birthday present? Your father's shaving preference? The eye colour of the boy or girl who had a crush on you?

Do you see the future of transportation? Do you see the next stock you'll sell? The next deal you'll close? The average growth of your investment portfolio?

Do you preach what you practice? Do you sow what you reap? Do you take care of your combine? Do you safely store your seeds? Do you drink rice or eat it? Do you bake wheat or ferment it?

Do you count off for misspelled words or credit the student for creative sentence structure?

Do you swallow your food or take the bus? Do you find freedom from the moment?

Do you?

If a ring implies a circle, what is a C-ring?

An imagined, unfulfilled romance lasts longer than this poem. More elegant. More elastic. More elegiac. More mores. A perfect endless line drawn by a radius. A PNP transistor that never fails. Free of words. Free of the moment. Everlasting. Infinite.