Mama Cass' Carcasses

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

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

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

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

Life under the canopy of suburban woods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I live - I'm a fan of everything.

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

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

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

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

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

How many caves have you explored?

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

Do you know the definition of risk?

Do you know the definition of life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pick A Dilly Of A Dalliance, Mrs. Dalloway

Let the dead die intravenously.  Let them soak in their solace alone.  Let the lives of those who wander the planet with nothing in the way of commercially-viable victual-earning credits worry about weather or whether the ether will either let them live or weather their bones to nothing.

More books on the loan shelf:

• In Praise of Idleness and other essays by Bertrand Russell
• The Way: An Anthology of American Indian Literature, edited by Witt & Steiner
• British Women Writing Fiction, edited by Abby H. P. Werlock
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• History as a System and other essays toward a philosophy of history by José Ortega y Gasset
• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

 We whittle our blocks of wood, we crochet our coils of yarns, we carve our symbols onto stone, and yet...

Yet, where are we going?  What's it all about?

A CD:

• Cikada String Quartet, in due tempi

More books:

• "And Another Thing... Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Part Six of Three" by Eoin Colfer
• "A History of Pi" by Petr Beckmann
• "Eats, Shites and Leaves, Crap English and How to Use It" by A. Parody
• "Bathroom Reader [22nd Edition]"

Piles of pylons piling up in the writings of Ernie Pyle.  Studying humour across the hummus-eating bodies of our species.  Reading much but little into what we write.  Seeing even less in who wins or loses a match, much less a match for the ages.  Getting just as much meaning out of the temperamental changes in our cyclical weather changes as what the plants in my yard say about what's going to happen next summer, knowing they really only reflect what happened in previous seasons past but recording their forecasts for fun's sake along with a small bottle of saké.

The movements are not mine to make or take away.  The movements to observe are yours to own and make anew.

So England beats Wales and Ireland wins while the Colts falter in the land of Little Cuba and the Saints go marching back to a perfect storm of a tickertape Mardi Gras parade that leads to Lent and then St. Valentine's Day.  What of cricket for India, Pakistan, and Australia this year?  What of the worldwide gathering of futbol players in South Africa?  Is there still a good chocolate shop in Vancouver to recover one's wishes for health and happiness after a poor showing in the mountainous Olympic mismatches nearby?  What day is it, again?

Why did Avocent accept a ~$25/share bid by Emerson and APC let itself go by the wayside for Schneider Electric?  Why was I not able to exercise options above $35?  Lack of vision.  Lack of clarity.  Leadership wanting someone else to lead for a while.  Forgotten deals and forgotten feelings.  Does anyone remember the cost of the Boer Wars?  Does anyone have an accurate count of the bodies thrown aside to create the empires of Russia, India, China and the United States.  Is anyone keeping count of the back-and-forth slaughter on the African continent?  Why is there no one left to speak for the people of Machu Pikchu?

Did I tell you about the time I worked for General Electric in their Aerospace Division where we designed test equipment (acronym: CASS) for the Navy?  Do you know why I have a jaded sense of trust of government contracts in general?  Because of the way the CASS contract was [wink-wink] agreed to, with the government paying GE for writing so many lines of code per deliverable, no matter whether the code worked reliably, made sense or not, guaranteeing that GE would get follow-on contracts to fix the bad code its employees wrote.

Would you buy a product you knew wasn't going to work right the first time?  The government did, for a while, until it got wise to the schedule slips and cost overruns.  Sounds familiar to you, doesn't it?  It happens every day, somewhere, between one government and one private enterprise all the time.  It happens with the commercial software you use, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on your relationship with the software manufacturer.  Part of it is built into our genes, because we aren't perfect and can't anticipate all the causes and effects of software algorithms and GUIs.  Part of it is intentionally messy.

That's where your smarts come into play.  If the deal smells too rotten or too sweet, then you know you're on one side or the other of a product design that's probably not going to look good in the light of day.  Either take your money and run or make sure the blame rolls uphill/downhill past your doorstop.  Or be like me and never put your money where your work is.  I call it freedom.  You call it whatever you like as long as I pocket the profit and can choose how to spend my untaxed earnings.

Time for a dry/wry philosophical story and let love linger in your thoughts for a more detailed tale of descriptive, contemplative, offscreen rendezvous later in your/our future...

When Noise Is Information

Have you ever devised a letter-for-letter swap (c=a, e=b, etc.), creating a secret code with your friends? Have you ever listened to the wind passing between two rocks, creating a pulsating whistling sound? Have you ever looked at a colour-coded representation of sound waves bouncing back and forth in a room?

Have you ever listened to Kaija Saariaho, industrial music or experimental avant-garde anything? Have you ever looked at a loom and watched the weaving of coloured/textured threads, thinking about punch cards and Pareto charts? The last time you passed by a big bridge in the city, did you notice the same group of people standing along one side of the bridge and appearing in different positions once a day (say, around lunch time), sending semaphore messages to a person standing with a video-recording mobile phone at an elevated subway train platform?

Have you entered a room of a house, its contents looking haphazardly stacked, noting with great attention to detail the exact placement of every item, returning every day to note changes in the items' positions, and then going back to your computer to decipher the three-dimensional message being recorded by a friend for you? What if the person who lived in the flat across the alleyway from you opened her blinds for a few minutes each day for just such a purpose? Would you be willing to spend the rest of your life writing down the once-daily scripted text, just to discover at the end of your life that the message was part 1 of a three-part message meant for someone two generations after yours?

Do you believe what you see with your eyes? Do you know all the scents your body gives off? Can a robot's skin blush? Some people have dry skin. Some people have oily skin. Some people have a combination of dry, scaly and oily skin. Which one should an artificially-skinned android emulate? What should s/he smell like? One overall scent? A variety of scents? Scents that change with temperature, time and social situations?

Have you ever listened to white or pink noise? Would you recognize and differentiate random serial tones from ones which require a special filter to hear patterned sound or music?

Would you recognize a spaceship if you were born on it thousands of your species' generations after the spaceship was created, the details and nuances of the spaceship's creators' language/culture forgotten in the dust and noise of living daily on the new vessel?

If you know what you're doing, you can do whatever you want in plain sight of those who do not know what you're doing and who do not want you to do what you do. The idea is to blend seamlessly into their world while you carry your world with you.

One person's annoyance at the sound of a loud leaf blower is another person's saxophone/horn sending out beautiful avant-garde music to those who see that a leaf blower operator is a gift from the gods, sent to test your understanding of the desire of one person to magically/artfully move leaves, dirt, cigarette butts and tree seeds without touching them. We all are artists using our bodies as paint brushes and the universe as our canvas, our movements like musical notes written in an invisible score on stage and in the arena with ballet dancers and ball players.

This is my world, my canvas, completely full of every one of you, my art creations, perfection personified. I am excited to know you, to see you, to not see you, to sense you when you're not here, to know you're the face of one of the dice I've just rattled in the cup of a game of Yahtzee.

You are my friend Joey, who, when as young teenagers about the same age (12 or 13), introduced me to the book, "The Search for Joseph Tully," and taught me that who we think we are is not what others think or act upon. You are my friend David N. who made me envious when you got a greenhouse when we were in secondary school and whose work in the chemistry field still makes me envious of your genius.

You are my coworkers Ron, Frank, Henry and Tommy who taught me that it takes a team of dedicated designers to create a masterpiece. We never know what we had until it's gone and in the hands of marketers and technically-savvy hackers who turn a simple high-speed data transmission device into a portable server/client system. We learn that our customers are often better at extracting a product's worth than what our BOMs and profit margins say, that it makes more sense to get a product out the door with obvious flaws that we ask our customers to help us fix/improve than it is to imagine what perfection is supposed to be.

Without my friends, I am no one. I am noise without a filter, post-industrial music with no appreciative listener. It's not about who I am - you is the only it that matters. Settling into a subdivision/housing estate in Latvia is only important if Latvia's where it's at for you, know what I mean? Otherwise, if/when "They" decide to cut off your natural gas supply in winter, then it's not where you want to be at, is it? Makes me wonder what's going on in Minsk or other Belarus ruses. Just when you thought Chechnya is under control, you have to pay attention to the chilies in Chile, do you not? See why I pay attention to the music? All messages are not hidden in the noise of JPG photos. Some noise is in plain sight, just like me and my three-dimensional towers of powerful "tunes." Encrypted computer hard drives are for weenies to decode. Low-tech is still worthy of consideration. Sigh...why do I tell you what you should already know? I guess because I know that the espionage folks have made their thoughts into a business/industry, perpetuating and expanding bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake, eating each other's tails for breakfast and regrowing them in the afternoon, never knowing they're consuming the same thing the next day and the next day and the next... Remember, never be a member of a club that you don't agree with or understand - otherwise, you'll find yourself justifying your membership to your friends who know better and wonder when you started believing your own lies. "Look, Mommy, there's an airplane up in the sky." [Quick! Pick their pockets while everyone's looking up!]

Distraction. That's the key to understanding what these words are all about. Maybe we can pick up this lesson another day when you're ignoring the superficial message of these words and listening to the sound waves they produce. YAWN! Time for my afternoon nap and then I'll look at the data I collected to see the interference patterns caused by my microwave oven while I'm sending data across my WiFi link - then maybe I can figure out the effect of microwave radiation on the radishes growing next to the radicchio to see why they're turning into pomme de terres of another sort.

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!

Eve of Deletion

The day next to the day that I will write the last entry for the blog "Life In The Cove." Many random thoughts to put down before I close this out and move on to the next adventure:

1. I never finished the tale of the trip in the fall of 1984 when I spread the love and joy that only a petrol company credit card can. The cliched image of the majestic beauty of a plume of snow, a faint white feather, arching over the top of Mt. Shasta. Before that, running into an auto body shop to get a leaking tyre fixed, the mechanic offering to repair the tyre if I explained to his satisfaction, his Oregon common sense, what a Tennessee Volunteer is - right or wrong, I told him it was a nickname given for the irregulars who volunteered to fight in the War of 1812 - he accepted my ready answer and sent me on my way after also replacing a broken headlight. Stopping at the California state line for emissions testing and discovering that the emissions tester was from Johnson City, Tennessee, and couldn't believe I was from Kingsport and had attended ETSU (main campus in Johnson City) - she admitted she missed east Tennessee but loved her California lifestyle. Not finding my hometown friend, Joey, a CalTech student, at the last known address I had for him on Wilshire Boulevard, with no forwarding address to help me so I drove out of the LA basin, stopped in the desert outside of town for a few hours and contemplated what to do. I'd driven from Nashville to Seattle, from Seattle to LA, and now from LA to...? Before I left southern California, I stopped in the east LA area because I'd run low on petrol. Off the freeway, I found the neighbourhood I was in contained folks who spoke no English. My 1st, 2nd, and 7th grade Spanish language lessons had faded, leaving me with the basic hello/goodbye/my name is expressions, which help little when asking if there is a petrol station that would accept my credit card or a place for me to exchange my Coke glass bottles for cash. Eventually, an older Asian lady told me she'd accept some of my Coke bottles for $2 worth of petrol but I had to leave the neighbourhood and get on the freeway because I was in a nrighbourhood in which I didn't belong. Back in the desert, I found that a plugged tyre loses air quickly, forcing me off the road late one evening. I found a small town with two petrol stations - stopping at one, I asked if I could purchase a used tyre with my credit card. The young man (more like a boy in his early teens) said that he couldn't fix or replace my tyre but his twin brother running the other petrol station could replace the tyre and let me charge the repair to the this petrol station. [I wish I could make this kind of stuff up but it's true, a small town with twin boys running the town's only petrol stations for their father - is that normal for small towns? I don't know.] At the other petrol station, the twin brother showed me where the mechanic who no longer worked there (due to a head injury which happened because he) had accidentally inflated a tyre with the tyre iron still stuck between the new tyre and the rim, shooting the tyre iron up into the roof of the metal mechanic shop roof. Both twins quizzed me about my trip around the country, wondering if they were any different or more special than anyone I'd met along the way. Normal in their appearance and behaviour, the fact they were 12 years old and operating two petrol stations on their own was unique enough that I told them they were the most different guys I'd met. Then, back on the straight shot east, painted deserts, pueblos and roadrunners racing past the monorail windows. Showing up back at the parental units' home, the phoenix rising from ashes, the prodigal son returned. The start or renewal of writing for myself, using the world of text, history, data, and wisdom to layer my life within pages of modern hieroglyphs.

2. Remembering the financial panic that struck not long after Andrew Jackson served in the timeframe of the 1830s as chief executive administrator of the largest political entity on this continent. Cycles. Decisions. The hindsight of hindsight. The species of species. Thanks to John Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House) for the insightful history lesson. Looking for similar info from Saawariya and Dostoevsky.

3. The number of relatively young people listed in the obituary section of my hometown newspaper, their common cause of death cited as "died unexpectedly." Is it my imagination or does there seem to be a higher number of these deaths than in years past?

4. Signs that the global economy is picking up, with increased backorders for electronic parts.

5. Seeing how much time children spend teaching and disciplining their parents, as much if not more than the other way around. If you're of reading age, I recommend you research ways to better educate your parents.

6. Turning the compositions of Orlando Gibbons into new tunes, each note a word, each chord a scent, each musical phrase an image, then breaking that down into a very ultrawideband broadcast (exactly how many wavelengths can you send and receive?), using latent time passages to re-broadcast the composition, now jumbled out of sequence and reassembling itself according to a mathematical formula that "sees" multiple dimensions at once, the x, y, and z of three-dimensional space a simple starting place. We're geared to hear music in the 20 to 20,000 Hz soundwave range or so we've been led to believe. What if you knew you heard and felt more? What if life as you know it was a symphonic tour de force? Can you place all seven billion of us in that musical score? Can you hear the triumphant and tragic melodic phrases that the air you breathe makes in its intermixing with the rest of the local features of the universe? Are you ready to sing more than a few chorus lines?

7. Slowing down and listening to the echoes of the environment around me, the expressions of the universe that never quite get formulated in my thoughts. Looking at and not seeing the people patterns my life has made so comfortably easy to see. For instance, microwave oven radiation and wireless radio communication signals don't mix well.

8. One more day before I close this chapter of the book of life.

9. One more day before we discover the door that unlocks a brand-new future for our species, before we discover we are not a species, before we make the leap across the chasm that divides the repetitious behaviours of ones on this planetary body from a fascinating superset of stimuli and step into a new way to live, Earth's gravitational pull more a thought, a faded memory, than anything we can call reality. We put distractions away, grow into new shells, new combinations of energy levels and become that which we can barely dream possible. We are, or will be, no longer we.

10. Circadian rhythms. Light therapy. Body part replacement techniques. Creation science versus evolutionary science. Ancient history. Time to let go of time. No room for commercial enterprises. No place for political debates. And then this blog disappears to make way for the next new thing(s). Can you see the future?

Seasonal Measurements

Heard this song long ago, sung by the Irish crooner Danny Doyle in a pub in New Orleans, later personified by the movie, Joyeux Noël. Here are the lyrics, which serves as today's blog entry, two days away from ending this blog:

Christmas in the Trenches
by John McCutcheon

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, "Now listen up, me boys!" each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singing bloody well, you know!" my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was "Stille Nacht." "Tis 'Silent Night'," says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
"There's someone coming toward us!" the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's Land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
"Whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same

© 1984 John McCutcheon - All rights reserved

Positive Affects

If you believe in the condition called an emotional state, then you probably believe in happiness. How do you measure happiness? Well, a website called facebook has data engineers like Adam K discussing and measuring happiness.

Maybe you can draw happiness on odosketch? [thanks to a fellow blogger I follow for suggesting that one]

Today, I sang happiness with others - friends like Leon and Flo and David - in our recitation of seasonal songs. We listened to Hal's opening line of jokes which led to a brief, but serious, dissertation on a series of repetitive ancient texts, reminding us that no matter what we think, we're just the keepers of this planet for the next round of folks who're coming up behind us.

Repetition is not bad in and of itself, as long as we keep finding something new while repeating - hearing a new song or an old song for the very first time, feeling a new emotion or an old emotion more deeply, discovering a new idea, or warmly holding/hugging a new appreciation for our lifelong friends.

My niece, a nurse, taught me a new phrase, "hospital psychosis," a condition where a patient/client becomes disoriented while in the care of an institution of healing. Not all affects are positive. Negative affects can help us learn but avoid too much repetition. Everything in moderation, including institutionalised healing.

We received a surprise holiday email from the folks at Munster Rugby - we return our holiday greetings to you with well wishes and many memorable victories in the New Year! Although college/pro American-style football dominates the news here (not to mention our watching the last-second victory by the Steelers a little while ago, which reminds me that I haven't been to a J. Buck's in a while, before Schneider bought APC, as a matter of fact), we still cheer for those who give their all with no time for advert-based breaks in the action. Who is that puny Perpignan, anyway? Final score, Munster 37 - Perpignan 14.

Another day closer to opening a gift that contains a portable Yamaha...well, shouldn't state what I know I'll be opening yet, should I? Look surprised, I will! Gift-receiving emotional outbursts of joy are just as important as gift-giving, if not more so.

Another day closer to ending this book of a blog, the World Wide art of Writing, Science, Fashion, Math, Music, Politics, Sports and Finance. Another day closer to opening the universal intranet that ties our solar system closer together and puts our galaxy a time warp, just a jump to the left and then a step to the right, away.

Time to sit back and think about the flavourful sushi appetizer and tofu curry main dish I ate at Surin earlier today. Double scoop of coconut ice cream...mmm... Speaking of which, another nod to Amanda at the Main Dish - we'll keep coming back for more, including that Louisiana tabasco sauce and maybe a slice of Black Forest cake. Guess I need to get a copy of my niece's husband's book, the Navy SEAL Physical Fitness Guide, if I want this body of mine to be able to continue to walk under its own happy weight!

Glad that new friends and old friends stay in touch.

Stacking The Deck, Cheating The Future

While I wait a few more days to open my gift of lyrical soundmaking, I see the past.

Waiting... Waiting? Not waiting! Planning. Preparing. Listening. Dancing in the middoe of stores to music from hidden speakers o'erhead.

How often do you lean against a fence post and watch the young calves or kids dancing in the field? Do you compare the children's behaviour to that of their parents who methodically eat and chew, eat and chew, eat and chew and poop?

Do you ever see adult cows or goats dancing on new feet? Should you? Would you expect to see such a sight?

Tonight, my wife and I wandered through the menagerie of the import/export business as exemplified by a chain of stores called Pier 1 Imports. We gazed at the shiny baubles, played with the sparkly bangles and stared at the shiny beads. We also snapped our fingers and jiggled our bodies to the rhythm of seasonal songs.

And then in came the past, a group of teenagers dressed in the latest fun fashions, including faux fur lumberjack hat, who turned on the mimeograph machine in my head, pulled out the slide projector in my skeleton closet and flipped the transparencies of my yout'. There was I 30 years ago, skinny and young and having fun again for the very first time.

What is time? Ask the inventors of chess. Ask the king of kings, the ancient shahs of the Iranian regions of Persia. The rulers of India. Ask the emperors of Asia, Europe and Mexico. Seek out the meaning of time where time has no meaning on Mars.

I know the future. I know the past. I know some parts of this moment that was the future, now the moment, now the past. I know I will make wonderful music together. I will experiment and make sound combinations that have meaning only to dust devils on alien soils.

Tonight, I saw the past and the future and the future and the past. Thirty-year increments at a time.

Tonight, the shock of time that does not exist shook me, the person who does not exist.

I saw myself 30 years ago and didn't know what to tell me. I mean, after all, what's there to say that hasn't been said in any number of tales, both ancient and new? What could I possibly say to the person who hasn't yet lived the life that others dream and wish for that person to fulfill, both in their fantasies and the fantasies of that person who's full of promise and potential?

"Hey, look at me! I'm you 30 years from now. Is this what you want? Is this what you dream about?"

A slice of time that 30 years ago I and my friends called FHMS (Fort Henry Mall Syndrome). Now I know that FHMS is universal but back then I didn't. Back then I had ideals that guided me and my interaction with friends. Back then I thought that I lived on a rare mountaintop, a life paved with gold and lined with low-hanging fruit. I can now say I know better. FHMS is life but I hadn't live life to know that then.

So what if I lived a sheltered life in my teens? I can't go back. I can only look forward. Where in the crowd is me 30 years from now, looking back at myself in my late 40s and saying, "WOW! If I only knew then what I know now!"

In a few days I'll capture thoughts like these with musical notes and fragrant oils, with computer bits and bytes and lyrical pieces, climbing the vertical ladder of life from rung to rung, swinging back and forth, caught in Earth's gravitational pull for the moment but 30 years from now?

As I accept the fact that everything I think is a combination of everything that's been thought, then I can think about what hasn't been combined by groups of people who are thinking thoughts that have already been thought. I'm not trying to escape the world of people. I'm getting the world of people to stop thinking of themselves as living on one world, while at the same time believing I'm the only person reading what I write, because I am one person in one species on one planet in one solar system. What I can do and think, anyone else can. What anyone else can do and think, so can I.

Have you ever smelled the Sun rise over the moons of Saturn? Have you ever heard a comet crash into Jupiter's atmosphere? Have you ever shaken moon dust out of your spacesuit? Some of you will. Thirty years from now we'll laugh at how simple everything seemed as this calendar year ended and the next one began. I'm planning for that future right now. Aren't you?

Page two...

The Last Laugh?

An image worth remembering: college dorm rooms then versus now. And a thanks to Abdul along with all the others who helped at the Holiday Inn (some for years now!) during the annual marathon - only a week ago this year?

While thinking about the direction to take after this winter's solstice (a/k/a New Year (a/k/a choose your favorite people-picked calendricalifictitious counting method)), I have decided to get out of the arts-and-crafts scribbling, scratching, typing writing mode for a while and focus my thoughts on musical and scent notation.

Meanwhile, I watch the world of people spin past my eyes again and again until I've gotten dizzy with repetition, myself in the middle of the blizzard of stirred-up dust and flurries of activity we call being busy, the cartoonish Tasmanian devil or other fantasy flickster in a whirlwind of tumbleweeds escaping escarpments and fences. History, mystery and headlines jumbled together in a 1,000,000,000,moo,000,000,000-piece 3D jigsaw puzzle, self-assembling and falling apart night after night to the tune of clicking keys in typewriter factories and paddleboat/steamboat excursions. I can either flatten myself onto the snowball gaining mass rolling ahead of the avalanche sliding off the melting glacier or I can step aside and gather moss on my own timescale. The former was fun for a while. Time is later for the latter, but not too late.

For those who will share their lives with me in the moment, I thank you ahead of time for taking time out of your busy schedule to smile, being kind and gracious to a middle-aged guy like me. You are my reason for being - otherwise, I'd hightail it to the woods and be a hermit eating nuts and grubs, whistling along with the wind tickling the tree leaves, the limbs creaking to no special beat and the insects singing love songs while hiding from the birds singing whatever comes to mind.

My next adventure will tell its tale through musical instruments, melodies and harmonies influenced by minimalism, nature, experimentation and whatever these hands, eyes, ears and nose (using trees (like cedar) and herbs (like garlic chives) from my yard) can fit together in and out of the world of "music." Time to put my thoughts into a place where words and peopled historical patterns make less sense. One more celebration of true freedom, another step toward understanding if freedom is a word, an idea, or an approximation of the unobtainable. One being on one planet being alive. Feeling alone in my loneliness of feeling like I'm the first one repeating the journey, trailblazing a path overgrown since it was last tread by many before me long ago - knowing full well that my atoms and molecules, my genetic makeup, allow me to compose my own version of recombinant DNA at the macro-, social-organism level.

Thus, I don't know if we'll meet in this blog again. In other words, if I want to put images, sounds, smells, and tastes together into a new experience, how do I project this experience onto the Internet and thus have it available for download by you? Describing such an experience with words is not enough. Putting a description and soundtrack together is closer but still farther from the "truth" of the experience. This Internet is such a young, incomplete (and often immature) communication medium, is it not? Superimposing the Internet on real life (augmenting reality) is not a goal I seek. I want to superimpose real life on the Internet. Being there, all our warts, freckles, smells, imperfections and thoughts intact, with the Internet as we know it today simply a catalog or extended memory space supplementing, not supplanting reality. Why? So that when one of us circles the Moon on an outer space spa trip, all of us can go along if we want. The question to you is which one do you want to be, the traveler who creates the experience or the one who experiences the traveler's trip?

In other words, we'll meet again soon. It's simply a question of how, not where and when.

Glossary

A - Attention. A word meant to focus others on you. [See "Cry Wolf"]

B - Bear. A large, furry creature meant to test the "Darwin theory" about survival of the fittest, especially when two or more drunk people encounter a grizzly bear in the woods (remember, you don't have to be the fastest runner, just faster than your buddy).

C - Cry Wolf. A situation where one has overused a phrase overused a phrase overused a phrase and lost the attention of one's intended audience [See "Typical skit endings of SNL"]

D - Darwin Theory. The proposition that an isolated pocket of humanoid bipeds will, given enough time and space, evolve into social class structures similar to but distinct from other isolated social class structures; when any two isolated social class structures meet, the one that guarantees the best return for the investments of the newly-combined social class leaders will be the one that survives. [See "Bear" for alternative explanation]

E - Ending. Where one appears to know when one should put a period at the end of a sentence at the end of the paragraph at the end of the chapter at the end of the book. Assuming one has found the end.

F - Final Try. This blog entry wraps up this blog by proposing to crossbreed the privet bush with a nutritious berry bush and overpopulate the banks of local creeks and rivers with delicious bird food bushes so that local volunteers can spend their time not worrying about nonnative nonnutritious foliage. A set of nods to Flo (who is seeing Robert, beer aficionado), Esther (and her son's reference to Buckhorn Beer), Tom (a barkeep at 801 Franklin), Rick the chef and the servers at Around Your Table restaurant (a nice secret inexpensive eatery in Big Cove/Hampton Cove), the cashier at Mike's Merchandise (hope the Goody's powder did the trick), the security guard in the garden department at Wal-Mart (thanks for the stories about sneaky customers - just when you thought you'd heard them all!), the folks at Art Etc. (who created two wonderful framed wall art pieces for us) and last (but by no means least!), Margo at Publix (did you get to enjoy the new garden pasta?).

G - Great walk in the woods yesterday:

17th Dec 2009, 13:45. Sitting on a lichen-covered rock, a natural bench. Strands of barbed-wire fencing snaking across the ground of leaves and twigs, growing out of the middle of tree trunks as if by magic. Walking the property behind my house. The fence line probably denotes property purchases through the years. People marks of long ago.

Thin layer of clouds overhead. White, tinged with stainless steel gray, the sun a washed-out yellow blotch just setting over the hilltop.

People sounds - airplanes, two helicopters, motor vehicles (road-based) - making their presence known over my hissing ears.

Leafcup alive and doing well. Frost-damaged grass, like miniature swamp bamboo. A buzzard circling to the NW. Gray squirrel on gray rocks. A cool, gray day.

Power towers nearby. Bleached snail shells. A crow calling to friends. Robins in a cedar tree. Prickly pear, bloomin' sedum and ferns on rock pedestals atop the rocky bald. Deer prints in the dirt.

All the comfort and familiarity of one's home woods in the suburban jungle.




Above, a video capturing images from yesterday's sojourn atop Little Mountain, set to the guitar music of Andrés Segovia, playing Suite for solo cello no. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007: Prelude by J.S. Bach, and the piano music of Youri Egorov, playing Estampes: Soirée Dans Grenade by Claude Debussy. Images frozen in place by the Elph (Canon PowerShot SD1000), a handy pocket cam for those like me who don't have an all-in-one Swiss Army mobile phone that slices / dices julienne fries and happens to make international phone calls while filing your nails and working out your horoscope to 20 decimal places to help you decide if your new boy/girlfriend will dump you just before the holidays to save money on gift giving.

[Glossary to be continued because this book of a blog just won't end...]

Random Mantric Tricks

Last night watching a field general shed tears of being blessed with good health despite the other side declaring victory in battle on turf in downtown Atlanta...

Yesterday afternoon watching the smile of an art consultant in Big Cove feeling glad that her clients were finding a suitable frame for some space shuttle prints after the original frame pattern was found to be unavailable...

Friday evening stretching one's back muscles after the best deep tissue massage ever received in upper back area at the Westin Spa in Huntsville (thanks to a gift certificate from an office party giveaway)...

Thinking back to the radio announcer who compared a football moment to Leonard Nimoy...

Knowing that our species maintains separate cultures which all build belief in their versions of living waters...

Realizing how much I miss the mountains of home, the Tri-Cities area of upper east Tennessee, where Andreas has opened his new restaurant, Freiberg's, in Johnson City, and I still enjoy a good pizza at one of my Kingsport employers (now called Rush Street, then called Chicago Dough Company (and before that, a Pizza Inn in Richton Park)) where Jerry reminded me how much he loves the east TN mountains, too; going with my father to see his professorial office at ETSU and remembering my student days there; helping my father and his colleagues unload trees to sell in support of the Colonial Heights Optimist Club which supports youth; where my mother always finds tree ornaments at Colonial Heights Pharmacy, near where my wife took her mother to see the winter light display at the Bristol Motor Speedway, not far from where my wife's hometown religious center hosts an interim speaker, Earle B., who encouraged me to write this paragraph (whose ancestor, like mine, fought at the Battle of King's Mountain) and an established restaurant in Kingsport, Cheddar's, is opening a store in Huntsville...

Tossing back a hefeweizen brewski courtesy of our hometown brewer, Old Towne, at Bearegard's, to balance the habanero sauce...

Thinking about supporting the 2010 population census to understand how accurately we count, categorize and store data on people of this section of the North American continent and nearby land areas...

Recalling how world travel and immersing oneself in local cultures teaches you that there is no one way to live a good, healthy life, and that IP addresses are filtering points for maintaining sets of cultural memes, distorting reality...

Listening to the recording of a pianist like MMW and marveling at the ability of one who can repeat long stretches of typing on a set of 88 keys, making me wonder how many of us could do the same thing on a computer keyboard, practicing something like this blog entry over and over and over again and be able to repeat it with our eyes closed, speeding up and slowing down, typing softer and louder to give the words emotional meaning, even though the typing here would be a sequence of single "notes" instead of chords. Why is it we can hear a combination of musical notes and sense both their individual tones and the total harmony but we can't hear a combination of seemingly unsung words the same way? Well, leave that to the thought/brain dissectors to answer, I suppose...

When I type while listening to others' music, I suppress the music in my head which would normally come out in my word combinations, turning these words and phrases into dry deserts of ideas instead of expressing myself as purely as I think thought symphonies. In other words, I am entertaining my brain with someone else's music instead of entertaining me/you with my musical-like typing. A tough choice, listening to the wonders of the universe as discovered by musicians or creating my version of the universe in all the wonders I sense and feel when typing as if I'm totally alone, a solitary node in the web of life...

These past few weeks I have enjoyed my happiness, freedom more than an idea to me. I have known about the turmoil in the world of my species, from discotheque fires in Russia to camo/colour showdowns in the halls of Chesterfield secondary schools, but have released myself from feeling responsible for what others choose to do to represent our species on this planet. I represent our species one person at a time, in one time and one place, limited to just so many dozens of years. I take responsibility for my expression of freedom in seeing us as one species destined for more than we can imagine, growing outwardly in the definition of one species while repeating much of what we've already done, cycles within cycles, interlaced, interlocking, concentric, syncopated circles. The rest is up to you. Represent us well.

The Value of Independent Values

She looked at her bank balance. Enough money to pay one of three outstanding bills. Which one...?

She set down her smartphone and walked over to a window at the end of the corridor.

A pigeon pacing back and forth on the window ledge.

A leaf falling down between two buildings.

She fogged up a portion of the window with her breath and drew two hearts, one hers and one a love she wished she had.

She was neither woman nor womyn, neither female nor feminine. She was. In fact, she was not she. She did not think, "She is." She thought, "I am. My name is Temqap."

Temqap leaned forward and looked up the side of the building on the other side of the alleyway. Windows and more windows.

Temqap walked back to the chair and picked up an acoustic guitar, practicing "Soledad" one more time before heading outside. Temqap would delay the bill-paying decision until later in the evening. Now was time to feel the love Temqap did not have through playing the guitar with longing, the space between chords speaking of emptiness that would wait another day to be filled.

Celtic Crossing

Have you ever hunted orchids in Borneo or kayaked through bioluminescent water in Puerto Rico? Have you ever attended Protestant services in Ireland? How about all three? Throw in skydiving over Antarctica and you've got some stories to tell, I'm sure.

Tonight, upon the invitation of my Alabama-bred nephew, my wife and I attended an evening service associated with the 187th annual meeting of the Alabama Baptist State Convention at Whitesburg Baptist Church in Huntsville.

At the service, we watched the singing performance of the secondary school church choir and a Irish-born couple called The Gettys (of course, their being Protestant, you can guess they grew up near Belfast, not Dublin) and their Irish-style band.

Through the years, my wife and I have sat at the church and watched our niece and nephew in various church-related activities (my wife and I are not members of the church but her deceased brother was and his family still are). The church's main seating area, the sanctuary, can accommodate several thousand people. Like many large sanctuaries, the church includes projection screens, videographers, professional sound system, orchestra pit area and other refinements tuned to the needs and desires of today's religious audiences/congregations.

Many years ago, in the same venue we saw a concert by a group centered on the singing performance and celebrity of Lisa Whelchel, a child star from the TV show, "The Facts of Life." We've seen several versions of the church's annual summertime show based on patriotic themes.

In other words, we're used to seeing the room as much for its role as a concert hall as a place for religious worship.

I've mentioned being in a small singing group called Sing Out Kingsport when I was a secondary school student, haven't I? You know, the one based on the international traveling singing group(s) called Up With People. Well, tonight I watched a 30-year slide in time, as if Up With People still existed but had hidden itself in the student body of a local church. The same upbeat music, the same rock band ensemble, everything including the sensitive choir director who had to compete with the kids watching themselves on the big screen instead of watching his hand movement for tempo and volume control.

What is the purpose of religion? You tell me your version - I'll seek first to understand, then try to be understood. Okay, I'm listening...I'm listening...oh well, sorry, you're taking too long. I'll listen to the rest of what you have to say later on. Anyway, religion, as my wife and I constantly discuss, is a way to develop a moral compass for people so they can agree with the social direction their subculture is headed and can turn nearby, interested people around who are headed in a different direction.

The youth singing group tonight sang songs and performed a skit to demonstrate their well-developed moral compass. I'm sure many, if not most of them, will carry on the traditions of their parents and their peers in this subculture. In fact, I'm more than sure. I know they will. All cultures train their members to comfortably conform to and comply with cultural standards, including religious practice. Barring major disasters or wars, cultural offspring carry on the habits of their ancestors. Well, then there's that other annoying inconvenience for cultures wanting to perpetuate themselves - the competing subcultures around the offspring.

I believe all cultures that promote positive reinforcement of our species are equal. I'm just as willing to review events tied to this Southern Baptist tradition as I am to sit and watch Inuits or Hindus or football worshipers (a late happy birthday nod to Nehru, by the way). By discussing them here, I realize there's the chance that those I discuss appear to get a level of higher importance than the ones I haven't discussed yet. I cannot control your impression but if you hang out here long enough, you'll catch me covering an ultrawideband variety of events about people interested in preserving our species for future generations.

After the youth choir finished, the main stars, Keith and Kristyn Getty and their backup band, performed.

Some of you may be familiar with a phenomenon known as Celtic Woman, an ensemble of five Irish women singing soft lullabies and other tunes you could imagine the "greatest singer in all the world" (at least so I'm told), Celine Dion, belt out on stage. Well, Kristyn and her crew are to the Christian music entertainment scene what Celtic Woman is to PBS/NPR fundraisers - a sure moneymaker and a fun evening of singing, handclapping and general joy.

I'll be honest with you here, whatever that means (probably that I want to throw in a side comment that contradicts what I know to be a generally well-liked something or other). I'm not a big church kind of guy. In fact, I don't attend many events tied to large numbers of people (except for American football, as many of you know) - not musical ones, anyway. I like intimate musical settings where you can see and hear and smell musicians passionate about their performance. I don't want to have to squint to see the performers' faces or join in singing a single melodic line for lyrics projected on a wall.

Thus, I find myself fighting against my cynical self to stay focused on the positive elements of tonight's performance, which was designed for people who like to gather in large groups and celebrate life. After all, they are what my goal for our species is all about, choosing lifestyles that may run counter to mine but point our species to one of many safe, reliable methods to ensure our future survival.

In this country, we have what we call retirement centers, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other euphemisms for places where people who cannot or do not want to live independently are housed together. In these locations, you find people from all walks of life. They may be mentally challenged from birth. They may have been well-known CEOs, military veterans, housewives, or religious leaders. However, they all share the same life, with community activities geared to keep them as mentally and physically active as possible.

When I was in Sing Out Kingsport, we sang at these senior citizen housing units. We also sang at small churches, including pentecostal churches where no one was allowed to leave until everyone had stepped forward, confessed sins and declared an eternal love for Jesus. We performed at shopping malls. We stood on top of a flatbed trailer and sang in holiday parades passing through downtown urban centers.

They say that youth is wasted on the young. I disagree. After having been both a young singer in a youth group and an audience member watching young people sing their hearts out tonight, I believe that youth is what you make of it. You can spend your youth practicing sports skills, developing scientific knowledge sets, caring for the sick and the elderly, and putting your public singing/acting abilities to social use. You can also spend your youth playing video games and texting - socialising with your peers, in other words.

It's true what they say - you're only young once. You can be young at heart your whole life.

Tonight, I wanted to write a review of the Gettys. They were both entertaining and emotionally moving (after the show, we ended up buying and had them autograph three CDs of theirs) but in my thoughts they were overshadowed this evening by the youth choir I watched and heard.

I've focused my belief in moving our species forward mainly on the adults of this world. However, I've missed a large part of how a species' goal is accomplished - the future of our species belongs to the young.

I'm already middle-aged. My generation is running this country and flying from this country into space. We are the flag bearers carrying the standards of our youth. We are also the inspiration for tomorrow's leaders.

The 1960s and 1970s produced the folk rock music that created Up With People and groups like Sing Out Kingsport. Today, many religious groups are using that folk rock music style to attract young people to develop their moral compasses. What will the music and thought set of today's multimedia leaders generate 30, 40 or 50 years from now? I don't know but I sure would like to find out. I'd like to see the great accomplishments of the smiling faces of today's youth when they're middle-aged and leading their generation's political, industrial and multimedia machines of tomorrow. Some, like the ones tonight, will get there by following the moral compass of their ancestors. Some, like my wife and me, will get there by creating their own automatic robotic drum machine to develop a unique beat of their own. We can have a lot of fun along the way.

The fun's in the adventure of getting there. The adventure's in you.

Prawn Shop Special

R&B. Rhythm and blues. Flies and lobsters and Episcopalians. Brass candlesticks. Isodora jewelry. In the moment in the moment. Foot pedal loops. Beats. Riffs. Traffic cones. Projection TV. Book sale. A lobsterfest of a support team. Guitar box or cigar box? Electrified strings. In, in the, in, the in, in the moment, mo...mo...moment. Microwave Dave in solo heaven, preaching with chords, not rosary beads.

Repeat.

Bake sale. Silent auction. The guru, the wunderkinder, the kind gardener, tending the frets, leading and following himself in some farout place with all of the ritual and none of the guilt. We freely bow to someone's freedom to be, the master of his universe, Europe can't have him, he's our hometown hero.

Cut and paste.

Bake sale. Silent auction, he's our hometown hero. The guru, the wunderkinder, R&B. Flies and lobsters and Isodora jewelry and none of the guilt. Foot pedal loops. Beats. Riffs. Europe can't have him, traffic cones lobsterfest of a support team. Guitar box or cigar box Episcopalians? Electrified strings in the moment. In, in, the in, in the we freely bow to someone's freedom to be in the moment, mo...mo...moment. Microwave Dave in solo heaven, not rosary beads. Book sale. The kind gardener, projection TV. Rhythm and blues tending the frets, brass candlesticks leading and following himself in some farout place with all of the ritual, the master of his universe preaching with chords in the moment.

Repeat and rewind. Peter and winder.

= = =

Blue chicory curtains. Another blues set, a variation on "White Christmas," the musical, the Alabama premiere.

Rewind 30 years. I was president of the secondary school drama club my junior and senior years. I was not the best singer or the best actor. I was funny enough to be popular enough to get elected to an honorary title of an office. Some people looked up to me. I looked out for humour. I oversaw an eclectic group of troubadours and cast and crew (a/k/a the troublemakers).

Fast-forward 30 years. I have a nephew who'll direct a comedy opera at his magnet school in 2010. In 2009, on the 14th of November, I joined my wife and friends for a musical performance at a magnet secondary school whose coordinator is a friend of ours.

Two approaches to a critical review. One, write an alternative view, riffing on the actors' performance as if their show was a satirical riff on the play within the play (first, figure out what riff is - the word sounds interesting but holds no meaning to me other than its sound). Second, hold the actors' capabilities and performances to the highest standards and judge them accordingly, throwing in side comments about such observations as the costumers admiring their work during the intermission ("will the white vests appear in the second act?").

Lee Lyric Theatre. New director. New direction. How do you get the players to feel the words of their memorized lines instead of speaking them? How do you make them absorb their characters and project their lines as if they're ad-libbing in the moment?

When I wrote for the Huntsville Times newspaper for a season or two of secondary school sports back in the mid-1990s working for John F. and Chris W., the point was made that we never say one team was trounced, smashed, beaten or in any negative form should we state that they lost. The other team won. Focus on the positive. Get a quote from the winning coach. Include key stats of the game and comments about the plays of the best players.

Think about this situation for a moment. I have covered secondary school sports, including football, baseball, and basketball. I covered college and professional hockey. I reported on the college women's national basketball championship for a weekly publication. I was a member of the Alabama sports writers association so I got to vote for the Alabama secondary school and professional player of the year. Now I sit here looking over a similar set of notes from another secondary school event.

Secondary school students spend their waking hours thinking about other secondary school students. They also find time to study school assignments and devote their thoughts to extracurricular activities.

A stageplay. A musical. Memorizing dialog. Blocking. Dancing. Singing. Entrances. Exits. Costume fittings. Auditions. Rehearsals. Face makeup.

Just like an American football or international basketball game. Drama. Teamwork.

Some of these students will continue their studies. They will take their new skills to the next level. Which one? Jacobi Hall, the Bing Crosby crooner? Thomas Najjar, the Danny Kaye character? Anna Quirk and Julia Erwin, the Haynes sisters? Chris Sebastian, the modern twist on a modern major general? Forest Bonner, the Martha Washington of Joan Rivers' take on Martha Watson? Lauren Bakke, playing little Susie? Toryn Washington, the real estate agent turned TV producer?

Flashback. I remember sitting in the green room 30 years ago. Flirting backstage while waiting for my next scene, quietly whispering sweet nothings and other carrying on. Turning my back so fellow actors who happened to be female could make quick costume changes. The hard work by the stage manager and the propmakers. The repeated rehearsals by the pit orchestra.

Where is everybody now? One of the orchestra members is the Microwave Dave of my hometown, performing gigs at blues clubs and running website info for the local newspaper, writing his own column, too. The main female leads are both teachers. One of the male leads is a television news anchor. Another male lead is a singer/songwriter in Nashville, having appeared on the TV show Star Search hosted by Ed McMahon. Most of us lead lives in which musical performance or stageplays are ancillary to what we mainly do - church choirs, community theater, occasional cruise ship gigs.

Back to the future. Tonight's performers will find themselves in similar situations. Rare is the sports figure in secondary school who plays professional ball. Just as rare is the secondary school stage star who becomes a movie icon or Broadway legend. Instead, we live for the moment, pushing past who we are to be who we are not.

Outstanding moments tonight:... Anna Quirk in a stunning dress, Gossip Girl style, in the Regency Room scene. Anna and Jacobi Hall reprising "How Deep is the Ocean." Thomas Najjar, Julia Erwin and the chorus in their tap-dancing vests for "I Love a Piano," smiles all around. Anna, Julia and Forest Bonner in their trio singing "Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun." Scooter (Justin Jordan?) and his wig dancing at the piano. Jacobi and Thomas singing "Sisters." Everybody in the scene singing/dancing "Blue Skies." Forest in just about any scene. Lauren Bakke being cute without being too cute. Christina Crutcher and Emily Bannister strutting their stuff. Jonathan Long doing his best impression of "Hi, I'm Larry. This is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl," from the Bob Newhart TV show. Jessica Jones shining in her roles. Others whose faces I can't put with names - you were still enjoyable to watch. The orchestra being clear and crisp and not too loud.

Of course, what is this production without the audience joining in singing the signature song while snow falls in the picturesque scene on stage?

Did the ensemble score a touchdown or sink a three-pointer from half court tonight? No, because this wasn't a sports competition. Even so, they won astoundingly. They competed against their worst fears and stage fright and miscues that the audience will never know about and made us smile and laugh and sing along.

= = =

I will happily fall asleep humming "Blue Skies" to myself and call this a successful day, bookended by the intricacies of Microwave Dave playing against and with his thoughts in musical form; secondary school students, production staff and professional pit orchestra cooperating to lay down another set of memorable tracks later on, a blend of other adventures in between. I put my hands together and bow in thankful peace. Today was a moment in the moment worth remembering. Thanks, y'all. G'night.

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.

Five Million Miles Away From Home

First item on the agenda: rumour of the day. Now that the fire ant nest has been disrupted, the fire ants are busy cleaning house and then they're on the march, looking not for hostages to take home but for vengeance. Killings home and abroad. Prisons are meant to keep people in so how many people does it take to break people out, especially along the border, to show that power is as mobile as the Peacekeeper or other intercontinental treaty trickers? I learned a long time ago that you don't stuff your mattress full of dough because the doughboys want all 200+ pieces of your pie. Best invest. Anybody want an overpriced piece of "art" now that the Windy City deal went bust as predicted?

Who sings the old song best, The Brothers Four, Bobby Bare, the Hooters, Nick Cave, or a different take by the Proclaimers?

Today's a popular day for allegories among the poplars. The Story of the Falling Tree Seed. The Time that Lightning Felled the Old Oak up the Hill. The Gully Washer of the Ages.

Folk songs. Easy lyrics. Simple melodies. On a bright, sunny morning, everyone sitting around the campfire, waiting on the breakfast to warm up, we sing a few tunes appropriate for the day. Kumbaya. Sing 'til the power of the Lord comes down. Scarborough Fair. He's Got the Whole World. Blowing in the Wind. Day by Day. Michael Row the Boat Ashore. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Waltzing Matilda. It's a Small World. Make New Friends. Gaelic Blessing.

One day we'll be sitting on Mars, gathered around the solar-powered heating system, eating our flavoured algae breakfast. Will we look up at the sky and shout with joy? Will be reminisce about the good ol' days on Earth? Will someone sing a revised version of being 500 miles away from home?

A journey of over 500 days begins with the thought that you're one of the chosen few to take the long ride across the chasm, no wagon trail, no dual carriageway, just you and a few companions. I would like to be one of you but I won't be. Envy is my companion. I'll sing a campfire song or two in your honour, whoever you end up being, whenever you decide to sign up for the adventure. The military forces of my country are always advertising their Earthbound adventures. Wouldn't it be more exciting to say you went where no one has gone before? Or even to have been a technician who worked on the equipment that went where our species had never laid foot?

Back in the 1980s, I worked on a contract for a company called Rocketdyne (I was a subcontractor working directly for a firm named Bizbing Enterprises/Butler Services). My job description included working on a CAD system because of my recent associate's degree that had an emphasis on CAD (this is back in the days of AutoCAD 1.o on desktop PCs, meaning my work at Rocketdyne in the basement of a Marshall Space Flight Center building was actually in a cold room on an Intergraph system loaded on a DEC mainframe VAX computer).

At the time, Rocketdyne was analysing the logic of the code in the space shuttle main engine controller because of the recent catastrophic accident of the Challenger and every company's scrutiny of their possible contribution to the accident. My job was relatively simple: take the handwritten logic flow diagrams from the engineers and draw them in CAD. Based on the skill set developed during my days with my secondary schoolmate when we handbuilt computers in our basement using the Intel 8080/8085 and RCA 1802 CPUs in the 1970s, I personally reviewed the logic as I drew the logic blocks, pointing out to the engineering manager the places where the logic didn't make sense to me. Also, because of my quick typing skills, I typed up engineering reports of the analysis, making grammar and formatting changes on the fly, leaving the concepts and ideas in place.

Have I ever flown on the space shuttle? Of course not. I'm not a pilot or a mission specialist. I'm just this regular guy who grew up in the suburban mazes of the southeastern portion of a political entity called the United States of America. Somewhere in the code in the box attached near the main engine of the space shuttle there might still remain the equivalent of an if...then statement I drew or pointed out was misplaced. That code has orbited the Earth countless times. My workmates designed the box for space hardness and wrote the code to control valves.

Happiness is what you make of what you do or have done. I am not a genius. I am not a trendsetter. I am me. I am happy to see the sunshine today and feel the solar heat on this cool day. I am happy to smell the burning wood of a campfire. I am happy to eat burnt toast and runny breakfast goo. I am happy to know I'll have a stiff neck and back from sleeping on the ground.

Somebody out there wants to be part of the space program, somebody in the Mongolian desert, somebody in the Australian outback, somebody in the Amazon forest, African plains, European forests and American suburbs. Life is about working together to accomplish goals beyond what any one of us can do.

I challenge anyone who might run into this blog to think about what you're doing. Are you caught up in the political gossip or rumourmonging or are you reaching outside of your insular life and asking others what we're doing?

Our species has accomplished goals unimaginable a century ago. We have so much more to accomplish than border squabbles or drug wars. But it takes every single one of us to make progress. Learn to laugh off your troubles. Or pray for guidance, if you need to. Whatever it takes to see we're the same species with a wide variety of individual lifestyles.

A part of me, in one form or the other, has circled the planet in near-Earth orbit. I hope that many of you get to see yourselves reach destinations that I can barely imagine, just like those who worked on the Voyager spacecraft never hoped their work would take them to the outer limits of the solar system.

A Moment Alone Together

Felt like I visited a hippie commune tonight, complete with '60s-era interpersonal communications issues enhanced by frequent drug use, a common theme of movies from my childhood in the '60s. In other words, my wife and I saw "Where The Wild Things Are." When the hero is a child psychologist, or rather a child pretending to be a group leader, then the monster in the closet is the ego, not blood dripping off teeth or coat buttons reflecting like flesh-eating dragon's eyes. I credit the acting and CG facial effects of the Wild Things for giving the movie the sort of depth "Pan's Labyrinth" showed that "Labyrinth" didn't.

Afterward, we ate a late dinner at Tony's Little Italy restaurant. Our server, Elizah P, shared my love of two main courses - lobster-stuffed ravioli and Italian sausage and peppers - and the rum-soaked cake for dessert. At the table next to us a mother hugged and rocked her son sitting on her lap. She leaned over to get bites of bread while her husband seemed to sit there as if his brain was in another time zone, totally disinterested. After while, the boy went to an empty table and was king of the feast, eating fried potato strips from a large red McDonald's cardboard box. The boy played funny faces with his mother.

I chose the lobster ravioli, splitting a cup of olives with my wife while drinking a glass of house Chianti; she ate baked ziti with meatballs (for my dessert, rum cake; for hers, chocolate-covered cannoli). At another table, a young couple drank diet Pepsi and Mr. Pibb, the woman ordering a grilled chicken salad.

We debated the ceiling light fixture covers. To me, they look like glass punch bowls in the colour of 1930s pressed glass. To my wife, they looked like upside-down sunny-side up fried eggs with glass door knob finials stuck in the middle.

We have one life here to share with each other. Tonight, the young mother with the French fry boy, her long hair a mix of blonde and brunette down to the bottom of her shoulder blades, wearing a black-and-white striped sweater over a svelte, small frame, kept glancing my way but never making eye contact with me until the moment her husband had taken their son to the toilet.

A smile. A quiet, shared moment. Never long enough. And never longer than you want it to be. We know these moments when we reveal our beings, prepared to share our weaknesses, dropping the masks as if to say, "I do not know who I look like to you. I wish that all the problems of my life and that of yours is forgotten in this moment we give each other." Romance novels hover over scenes like this, page after suspense-filled page. Serial soap opera TV shows freeze camera shots on these looks just before going to commercial breaks. We get one shot. We give one shot. Like a photograph or woodcut engraved in our memories.

I always wish there was more time; time to mold the image of the face, the shape of the nose, the curve of the eyebrows, the variation of the eye colours, the upturned smiling lips; time to read and write thoughts by facial expression only; time to breathe in the aromas of the room, the tomato sauce, the garlic salad dressing, the olive oil, the perfume; and time to savour thoughts like these in the moment.

Tonight, I had the time and shared it with the woman who loves her son with all her heart and wants her husband to give her just a few minutes' attention at dinner, a hug with her son a joy but not the same as hugging the man with whom she brought her son into the world. Yes, that's what her smile told me - "give me what I seek: recognition" - that she begged and demanded at the same time.

In our rush we forget ourselves. By forgetting ourselves we forget those around us who are themselves because of us. We forget that our problems are there to be shared with empathy for those listening empathetically. I love my wife and sometimes we forget each other even when one is talking and the other hearing but not listening. We have the ability to listen and think at the same time but it takes patience to slow down our thought process to listen to others. When we take time to listen, the love between us feels infinite.

The more I love my wife by telling her that I love her, both privately and publicly, the more I love those around me and the better I can listen, talk and think. Thanks goes out to the woman sitting nearby who listened to the conversation between my wife, the server and me and heard me tell the server how much I love my wife by the compliments I gave my life partner through what I said to Elizah.

A shared look is a look of love and an appreciation for one another. I appreciate my wife, and the mother next to us tonight appreciates her husband and son. Together, with a moment of infinity captured in one look, the young mother and I shared our appreciation for one another that we share with the ones we love.

I read that a globally popular musician wrote that she was a geek in primary and secondary school. I don't know what else she said but I know what she means. One's dedication to one's life begins at an early age. We drive ourselves forward and the harder/faster we drive, the farther we get. How far we get depends on factors outside our determination, including luck/fate/god's(gods') will, but if we aren't driving ourselves we'll probably get nowhere fast. I look at all sorts of people who've reached great heights in our societies - Madonna, Peyton Manning, Hu Jintao, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, to name a few - and know that they are where they are because of their drive, determination and willingness to share with others, giving everyone they meet the feeling that the moment they shared together was special.

Tonight's movie shared a similar message but not as direct - be yourself, unselfishly. I hope Elizah and the mother at the next table saw the same message from me. Don't wait to be yourself - when you are yourself and when you share yourself, give wholeheartedly, knowing that your love is infinite when you give unselfishly.

Another Look Back

In college, a friend of mine had a collection of humour on LP records, including those of Tom Lehrer, such as:

National Brotherhood Week/When You Are Old and Gray

My 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!

Piano Hero

We have new electronic toy games for guitars and drums. What about one called Piano Hero? Let's start with this guy's interpretation of a classic:

Perahia Plays Beethoven

Return to Form

Deciduous forest. Calm. Falling leaves. "Island" from Glassworks by Philip Glass. A stack of books to read during this week's staycation:

• Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo
• Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• Lysistrata by Aristophanes
• The Birds by Aristophanes
• The Random House Book of Science Fiction Stories

Back to happiness again, my anger at two events, the death of a fellow Eagle Scout (né fed. gov't. census worker) in rural Kentucky and the declaration of an Alabama youth to join a foreign fighting force, finally subsiding.

Meanwhile, I assess Iran's missile capabilities. Others may want to isolate Iran and North Korea - I look for positive achievements. The people of Iran and North Korea need to eat and work just like anybody else. What regular work or skills can we exchange with one another to improve our lives? I don't pay attention to the overt threats or fears of the Iranian or North Korean governments, knowing that all governments must by nature prove their strength to themselves, their people and their neighbours. If an Iranian or North Korean can design, build and launch a missile-based weapon, can the same person help design, build and launch a vessel for our species to populate the Moon and Mars, joining India, United States, Europe, Brazil, Japan, China and South Korea in the new quest for outer space habitation? We need a lot of people to get a few people exploring new frontiers, especially since the horizon is no longer just an ocean separating two pieces of arable land.

As a group of goldfinches flies through the woods, I wonder about a paradigm shift. We see the Moon and Mars as barren and unable to support life when we really mean that it can't support life as we know it, expecting an atmosphere rich in oxygen, nitrogen and other pertinent gases, not to mention water.

Other people wise in the ways of nutrient production have pondered this question just like there are those who say we can build silica-based housing on the Moon using native material and not have to transport all our structures with us. In other words, instead of populating other planetary bodies with us first, should we send robotic miners and builders ahead of us to construct housing and grow/create nutrient-based input for our soon-to-arrive bodies? Maybe have contests between robotic crews on speed/quality of construction to attract regular viewers for advertising revenue to fund further development?