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?

Mediterranean Is Scary Laboratory of Ocean Futures

Anyone hungry for soylent green?:

Mediterranean Is Scary Laboratory of Ocean Futures

Posted using ShareThis

현실

그 순간, 조류의 날개,
그 한숨 있음, 꽃은 꽃잎,
그 표정, 무한, 있음
그 숨, 한 인생 있음.
봄, 여름, 가을, 겨울,
올해는 하나의 사랑, 하나의 행복.
영원을.

Scoring The Asphalt Ribbon

Have you ever killed and eaten living things? Birds, goats, wheat, rice, corn, fish, dogs, ants, bamboo shoots, scorpions... Before you killed them, did you take care of their growth from the very beginning? Does your regular source of barter exchange involve the care and feeding of living things?

I have raised fish. I have killed and cleaned fish I've eaten. I have met the animals that were later killed for my consumption. I have raised vegetables that I've killed, cleaned and eaten. I have eaten food caught and killed in the wild by me. In other words, I am part of this planet of eat and be eaten. I do not distinguish the types of organisms I consume by their brain function. Instead, I pay attention to the amount of nutrition they provide versus the waste they add to my body (paying attention does not mean I eat a healthy meal everytime). Another fact: my species has consumed my species throughout the course of its culinary history.

The day I decided to hit the road and escape the problems that weighed me down, I had very little money and no food. My plan - to drive to Seattle, Washington, and dive car bumper first into the Pacific Ocean - included no thought of food.

In the back of the station wagon, I had a bicycle, several empty Coke bottles, a stack of clothes and the material I studied to improve my job situation at Steak&Ale. I also had a small poster of the touring concert series by The Who.

At one point in time I thought about chronicling my monorail journey across the middle of the North American continent but decided that bookshelves are already crammed with tales of woe, whims, and wonders by more famous and perhaps better writers than humble ol' me. Although 25 years have passed since I drove west across the face of our planet, I recall many details but mainly strong impressions of my solo trek.

Crossing the muddy Mississippi River.

Reading speed limit signs and the explanation of monetary fines per increase in speeding over the legal limit.

The rolling hills of the open prairie.

Rows and rows (and rows (and rows (and rows))) of corn and wheat.

Using a petrol company credit card to pay for my motoring along the highways and freeways, wondering if there was a monthly or total limit to what I could charge.

Going days without eating food, drinking water from bathroom sinks in roadside parks and rest stops.

Picking up a couple of young hitchhikers who had been kicked out of a flat and were making their way to a family member's pad in hopes of starting over. Watching them pick dead grass out of their hair that had accumulated from them sleeping on a sheltered embankment the night before - their looking like a couple of primates picking insects out of each other's fur, telling me more about my place in the universe and the definition of true love than any song on the radio about love (i.e., lust) ever could. Giving them my last three dollars because I knew they needed it more than I did, especially after them wisely pointing out they were more messed up in their journey through life than I was.

Sleeping in the back of the station wagon for a couple of weeks, washing my clothes in the bathroom sinks from which I drank.

Using the concert poster and the training manuals to block the setting sun's reflection on the front dashboard from blinding me.

The kindness of strangers, instant kinship formed along the route, showing me the smartass, snobbish sarcasm of my youth was no longer useful in establishing myself in the moment.

Food deprivation causing me to whiteout while driving, giving me insight into the workings of one's body but also enlightening me that premature death was no solution, only an escape mechanism, that my destiny, if such existed, had already been decided when I met my girlfriend when she and I were 12 years old at a summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina (now my wife of 23+ years). I saw that she was the fellow primate I was willing to sleep on the side of the road with and pick straw out of her hair the next day.

I drove on, not ready to meet my fate, finally daring to ask a petrol station attendant if I could charge food to my credit card, eating a bag of potato crisps, drinking a bottle of orange juice and wolfing down some M&Ms after he said yes.

Seeing how far a tank of gas will last, pushing my luck a couple of times and making it to the next road exit on fumes.

The beauty of desolation.

The touristy glitz of Wall Drug.

Tumbleweeds.

The Black Hills.

Discussing the curse of modern technology (a Chevy 4x4) with a native American who wondered why a Tennessean wanted to drive through the small towns of Montana just to see Seattle.

Wondering if the station wagon would make it up the steep mountains without overheating or breaking down.

The oasis of Coeur D'Alene.

Spokane.

At last, Seattle, with houses, houses, and more houses packed between tall conifers. The rush hour traffic, people in a hurry, a far cry from what I imagined the Pacific Northwest to be. Feeling like my journey would not come to an end there after all. Finding a map to chart my trip down the Pacific coast to Pasadena - another story, another time.

Small details coming back in focus... Getting out of the station wagon in the middle of the night to pee, looking up at the sky and seeing our place in the Milky Way as clear as any people-prepared map. Waking up sometimes to hear noises and finding the car next to me the next day had its windows broken out and nobody around to claim ownership of the car. The enterprise of society at work in every town I passed through. Abandoned homesteads. Wondering when and if I'd get back home and what I would say, not wanting to use the phone to give away my whereabouts until I'd had more time to think through solutions to my dilemma, no deus ex machina waiting in the wings to save me. Solar-powered, no-water toilets in the middle of nowhere. The squeak of the car seat springs. Topping off the oil and losing the oilcap, only to find it down in the engine bay a couple of days and many hundreds of miles later. Getting used to a bicycle as a bedside companion. A person tapping on the back window, making sure I hadn't frozen to death in the mountains. Dirt tracks going across four lanes of the freeway, indicating to me a farmer or rancher traveling from one part to another of a land tract that was bisected by strips of asphalt ribbon. Getting up in the morning with the over-the-road, tractor trailer / lorry drivers, going from daybreak to dusk like migrating birds or caribou, or industrious ants.

Wondering when not looking back would turn into looking forward...

Street Urchin

Listening to the Spanish guitar tag radio on last.fm ... setting the mood... wrote the last few blog entries to put space between me and others so I can focus on my storyline.

When you've seen more than you planned to see, when you wandered your neighbourhood streets more than you wondered about them, you put together, you assemble, you draw, you conclude, you deduct, you infer.

I entertain because of who I've been. I think because of who I am. I multitask because I like to exercise my nervous system pathways.

I use self-referential pronouns because I only know how to be me.

If you knew the future, what would you do now? If you knew that your species will survive in one form or another for thousands of years but a reconfigured version of your species will take off and explore the rest of the universe without your version, what would you do tomorrow? What did you do yesterday knowing that you'd be here today?

If you knew that you didn't exist, what would you do about the concept of you? Would these words matter? Would you continue being you as you know you?

I am not these words, I tell myself, but I am these words as well as the radio waves going out from this laptop computer and the wind and rain blowing outside the window.

I don't see this planet as a living organism (e.g., gaia) but I do see the planet as part of a system of living systems. I see us looking for us as individual organisms on planetary systems in other parts of the galaxy. We talk about alien technology as if we've been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence and we talk about possibly being as highly intelligent as life has ever gotten in our galaxy (or maybe even in the universe), in both cases distinguishing individual accomplishments within social systems as a form of what we call intelligence.

But none of us is alone in achieving intelligent accomplishments. It is the system of living systems that changes itself within points/nodes of itself that we think of as signs of intelligence in individual species and individual members of species.

We are part of the environment around us, not separate from the planetary system on which we developed.

[Today, I can't get past being me to see where we will be when we aren't we. I can't imagine what it's like to compress a version of me into a set of serial/parallel cosmic ray communication channels or cloud set of neutrinos and decompress the new self-replicating, local-environment adapting version of me somewhere else.]

How do I take the future and backtrack to the present? How do I apply practical decisionmaking to get us to where I already know we'll be, especially when I know I'm going to do what I'm going to do, no matter how much I fret over what it is I think I should do next to get me away from seeing me as me?

The future is not guaranteed. Or, as we know, no one future is guaranteed. All futures are guaranteed to possibly occur until they don't occur.

I believe that life happens because life happens. People do what they do. We spend as much time in an accidental future as we do in a purposeful one. Many possible futures include us merging our individual lives into a generally-agreed planetary-focused future. Many possible futures include us battling over the changing dynamics of our planet's resources to ensure the distinct definition of individuals over the general survival of the species.

I sit here and know which futures I want to happen, which ones are going to get us moving outward in the universe. I also know that a lot of what I know will change by going in the direction of those futures. However, a lot of what I know will change in every future I plot out. Therefore, I toss out my concerns about change. My focus is on which changes benefit not me but my planet and my species as I currently know it. Science, not science fiction.

We are cogs in the wheels of the factory called Earth in the system of living systems we call our solar system in one spiral of the Milky Way galaxy. We are the current snapshot of constant change.

How are we going to change in the future? We are going to create a version of ourselves that can replicate itself iteratively and figuratively in order to adapt to the rigours of space travel. We've already partially done that in mechanical form, our umbilical cords of radio wave communications extending high-tech fingers into the solar system to maintain contact with those early prototypes. Next we, as extensions of Earth, grow arms and legs. Instead of dropping sweat or hair off our bodies when we now send probes from the planet, we'll figure out how to stretch out our limbs like amoebae and split, our duplicate bodies a similar version of ourselves but better adapted to local environments with each new regeneration.

With time, we won't recognize our new selves anymore. We may or may not be able to communicate with one another.

Like I keep saying, you don't have to believe me. I hardly believe myself and wouldn't, if it weren't for this Book of the Future I keep adding to its pages using newspaper headlines from the past that keep forecasting the future.

For instance, when we figure out how to send out high-power beams far enough into space that one of our signals hits an "alien" organism on another planet, causing the organism to mutate, we have extended ourselves. It happens here in our bodies from the Sun everyday. It happens when we reprogram computing systems on Mars. One day, we'll have our day to mutate extraplanetary bodies, too, creating new nodes/points in the web of life. Just you wait and see...

Room Odor Eliminator

23^rd November 2009, 12:30

The playful twist twixt tween the scenes inside the words outside the lines. Since I know I'm not anywhere else but here in this body, place and time. Since I know life is not my body, place and time. Since. Because. Although. Often. However. Given that.

The power of not using power. The backwards glance while tripping forward on one's feet. Pinching oneself to assure the moment you're there.

Intelligence a definition not defined intelligently.

Wading into deeper waters to lose touch with the ground, all while taking a stroll with professional sharks.

Innocent as you please.

Discarding a pack of playing cards. Drawing an ace of UAV air battles, instead.

87,650 times 13,579 plus 1@$24. Remainders not bargained for.

Because I am you, you are a diarist, a journalist, a documentarian of dryptic doodling who makes no valid points except in the moment where you didn't exist.

Saving a whale from the attacks of hungry retired greyhounds and abused Rottweilers.

Schooled in sculling schooled fish from a skulking schooner.

Celebratory moments documented by you and completely missed by me, no “us” with which to share the moment.

Is a talent unused a talent wasted?

The pain, confusion and history of getting from here to there. The means and the ends. If you already know the answer to a problem, do you need to work out the details of how to get there? Is there a shortcut from one historical moment to the next?

Do you measure yourself in absolute terms or in comparison to those who know you, or those you think you know and have read/heard about? Yes, that question is cheating. Of course it's rhetorical. Absolutes do not exist. Everything is viewed as measured against something else. Interpositoriallianismishful.

Do you see the nuances that separate a gang of thugs from a group of determined business leaders? Again, the difference seen in the power of not using one's power. Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is a paving medium for pouring the pathway to wisdom. Power is wisdom. A wise leader keeps the scabbard sheathed, the flash of jewels on one's belt sufficient to get the message across.

A thug, on the other sleeve, exercises power with no need for wisdom. The power of the moment outside of time. Another way to meditate on the now, now, now, now, now.

Exercise your time in the moment and play with the height and width. See one dimension or two or three or four or more.

I am you. These words have no meaning. You are me. We are not each other. My goal is getting our species past seeing us as a species by first seeing us as one species so we can get off this planet and on to more important matters. I happen to use one language for the most part with an imperfect combination of words and grammar rules that reflect my upbringing in several overlapping subcultures but I do not promote those subcultures over others intentionally. However, I know I am of my species in place and time. My wisdom – limited, insignificant, unsubstantial but powerful – does not include clear views of future cultural markers or memes. I know what I know without wanting to exercise my power to know more.

Power for the sake of power is petty. Wealth for the sake of wealth is a waste. The future is in your hands. Build the future wisely.

Riverview Flat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Latin Ruled The World

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

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

I got up and wrote in my pocket moleskine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link O' The Day

What do we do with what we know and how do we apply resources effectively?:

http://www.good.is/post/how-might-we-measure-what%e2%80%99s-most-meaningful/

Clinical Chill

When writing the types of stories I write, I look at the junction of wordplay and madness. Deep in the bowels of the bowels, bacteria gather to feed on our discarded youth. In the bacteria gather other goodies.

Condensed versions of what matters.

In the meantime, small rubber cylinders spin incessantly, grinding rock upon rock in hopes of creating polished gifts to give out at the end of the year, the muddy goop poured off the front deck onto the roots of azaleas which may or may not add colour beneath the redbud tree in spring.

Bach concertos on earpieces.

When in class at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in the early 1980s, I listened to a professor discuss the issues of death and dying, the majority of my classmates nurses who dealt with the elderly or terminally ill. I the oddity. I the curious. I obsessed with mortality in my second decade of hesitating, halting living writing. A comment from the teacher: "Those who've thought about self have thought about self's death. Those who step into the abyss find desire to go back, some taking the permanent route. Some put off self's death until their 50s, waiting for something stronger than the abyss to keep them on this side." Studied Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and other authors. Don't go into the light, etc., because the light's not real, just the decrease of oxygen to body parts, including the aerobic bacteria fending off the anaerobic bacteria in our guts.

A year before our 30th.

Within a calendar year, two secondary schoolmates have taken their lives from the rest of us. Snuffed. Eliminated. Subtracted. Of my ~477 classmates, how many others have ended their lives with their own means?

Depression in a depression.

Or a recession. Words have no meaning except when you're facing yourself in a mirror asking why, why, why. Where are the answers? Reactive reagents. Organic or inorganic chemistry. Beakers. Stopcocks. Microscales. Notebooks.

I know that mirror. I've stared at my face looking for answers. Whose face am I? My long-lost grandfather? My parents? My...what? Temper tantrums as a child. Red hair. Scandinavian rage. Scandals. Scandalise. Vandalise. Valise. Valet. Anger and nowhere to release because no one upon whom berserkers should attack.

I know the questions. When will it end? What's the point? Why bother? What's the difference? We all know them. We've asked them or asked them of others.

Alone but not lonely. Lonely but not alone. Any time, any place. All the time. No place. With or without words. Chemicals pumping through our bodies, driving us insane. Artificial chemicals - drugs - a plaster mask over a crumbling wall. The abyss, known or unknown, desired beyond rational responsible logical 40238tmnF)$MDS_$

Meaningless meaningful mean meanings means

Can...not...wait...five...more...minutes...of...life...

Two-stepping, two-timing or twelve steps. Don't give a damn. It's just another fucking minute on this planet that can do without me.

And never at a convenient time. Pounding headaches. Unbearable silence. Screaming without mercy. Can hell be any worse?

These moments curl around us like a boa constrictor that hasn't eaten in a month. We're but little mice in the vice.

If this is madness, where's the line that divides us from genius? Why can't we choose? Why be normal if the cycle's going to hit the mountain trail and sling mud and rocks into our sore spots over and over and over and send red rover to simple simon's clotheslined the pieman and got the cobbler nailing the little old lady in the shoe?

Where are the signs that help others help those who think that help is forever out of reach?

I lost two classmates recently, both who took their lives. They thought what they thought and did what they did because of who they were. In my stories, I see the reflection of those with whom I've spent my life. My life is not yet spent. I still have breath. Where in my stories are my classmates whose lives are spent? What can I learn? What have my characters learned? Is there a lesson in what we call clinical depression, bipolar personalities, or other mental twists and turns that make normalcy a bad joke we never get? I don't know. I have a normal life. I have normal friends and normal family. Of course, normality is a statistical mean to which none of us wholly belongs, according to John Weightman.

Statistics. Sadistics. Permutations. Connotations. Mathematics for masochists.

Today, I am sad. Happiness will have to wait its turn tomorrow. I miss my dead classmates. I miss my fellow secondary schoolmates who are still alive. In the depths of our depressions - real, imagined, temporary or permanent - we miss ourselves, too. A good comforting thought or relief valve of a funny joke is out of my sight right now. I am p-p-p-pefdurhitdaqwty perplexed.

We cannot solve the world's problems by ourselves. It takes time and effort to see what's really going on. We may never figure out what's wrong with ourselves but we move forward and try anyway. Trial and error. Fall down and get back up. Two steps forward and one step back. No, it's not easy. No, it's not hard. It is what it is. Some of us will choose to kill ourselves and there's nothing we can do to stop the action. From another galaxy, I can't see if that's what we should expect of a growing population of one species getting more and more crowded but that's what population studies show. Murder, violence, depression, suicide. The other side of longer lifespans and healthier birthrates on less and less arable land.

I like to write. What I write is not always what I like. I don't like this blog entry but it's one I want to write down and observe. I have met the clinically depressed. I have met schizophrenics, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive and manic-depressive types. I have met the disenfranchised and the despondents. I have met those who feel they have no hope left. Drug addicts. Suicidal loners. People who've found a way to live despite their desire to die. All of us alive, breathing, kicking and screaming our way through the next minute, five minutes, hour, morning, afternoon, evening, night, day, week, month, year...

Every moment is not a blessing. Every moment is not happiness, joy, peace and quiet. Every moment is whatever we do to get through the moment.

Can we get through the moment? We just did. We will again right after this next one. Can we save our schoolmates, coworkers, family and friends from killing themselves? We hope so. We may not be able to. In the moment when we lose one or more, we face ourselves and what we feel we might have done. Why? What if...? The answers never appear. Or do they? We're left with ourselves. You see, that's the answer, don't you? We're left with ourselves. We're the ones who go forward with each other, looking at the remaining questions to be answered and working together for solutions.

No matter the reason or what we believe, every body dies. We had our lives and lived them, no matter how short or long. We interacted with those around us the best way our bodies could, good or bad.

The past few days, I've tried to maintain a happy demeanor but I've been sad. The older I get, the more I become a sympathetic old fool. I lost a classmate to suicide and there's not a thing I could have done to stop her. Her life was hers to do with as she chose. I want to blame the knuckleheads who created this economic downturn but I know that's just the Viking in me who wants some bloodletting to feel better. I want to grab someone by the collar and punch as hard as I can but who's at cause? Too many chemical-laden instant meals? Too much breathing industrial pollution? Clinical depression is a disease beyond my comprehension, a label I know little about.

One less person in the world. One less smile. One less tear. One less hug.

Tomorrow's another day. Tonight's a long time, sleep far away. I don't have enough arms, smiles or soothing words to reach out to all my classmates at once and tell them they're more important than anyone else in the world. If you can read this, whoever you are, I love you. You are important to me. I need you more than you can possibly imagine. I don't care what you look like or what you think. We may be worlds apart in thought but we're brother and sister in fact. Look in the mirror and imagine someone(s) beside you or behind you smiling at you smiling back at them.

Some moments are tough to handle by ourselves. If nothing else, the Internet's here to help us see we're not alone. We can share our problems anonymously, if we have to, to find creative solutions from online strangers when we feel we can't turn to immediate friends and family.

I wish you a good night, my friends. Here is my virtual handshake or reassuring pat on the back. You'll have to pardon my emotional outburst here. I'll get back to my humourous ways soon enough. I want to feel every emotion, even sadness and depression, when the moment for one arrives. Why else live? Why not live? There's always tomorrow. Procrastination is a good thing!

Style Points

In a dream last night...

Last night, a dream, in...

A last night, dreamin'...

I spin the tiny rock in my hands and remember the theme park song about the size of this planet. Rubicon. Rubik's cube. Pros and cons. Political debate. The click and tock of phonemes.

The first grunts. The expanding vocabularies of sights and sounds. Who gets to name the object in front of us? Whose vocal utterings are the official mental lists? Why do we keep breaking down the image in front of us into smaller chunks?

We aim to please, our precision and accuracy like archery class. The more we seek unity, the more we find disparity.

The rock has no boundaries, just a continuous spherical surface, smoother than a billiard ball. But no one cares about those comparisons.

We want more descriptive details. We want delineation. We want categories.

Big government rolls down a hill, gathering no moss and crushing tiny stones, smoothing all in its path. Plurality has a single personality.

The issue at hand, what to do with artificial boundaries, issues proclamations to protect the right of sovereignty to govern others.

We watched tribes grow to the size of municipalities and feudal lords into kings and queens. We watched monarchy give way to democracy and communism. We'll watch the ecumenopolis turn democracy and communism into...?

I had a dream last night. Dreams are what they are, my brain with little external stimuli to play with. In my dream, I walked around a theme park with a former classmate of mine. We met other former classmates and eventually lost track of our current families, just the two of us walking through the park, looking for a way to get to the other side, finding a tram to take us up and over. I had other dreams, too. I value my dreams for their insight into my personality and the changes I seek to make my days more eventful and fulfilling. But my dreams are not secret visions or gifts from the other side. They are the result of my earlier interaction with the environment and lack thereof in the moment.

I am one person watching all of you, interacting with many nearby. Like the kids who walked into my yard to find a lost cat. Or the woman who wants my wife and me to attend local weekly religious services.

Local, regional, global. I have opinions and dreams about what to do with perceived conflict between the regional factions in Afghanistan. But I don't have a clear picture. Do we declare groups in the area VNSAs (violent non-state actors) or belligerent forces? Do encounters with FARC, the Red Brigades, the IRA and other fighting forces teach us valuable lessons to apply in the Afghan hills and Indus valley? What is the definition of a benevolent government and is there such a thing in existence? Does unity or disparity make better diplomatic policy in situations like this?

In Britain, a separatist got major airtime to talk about insular views. Is there a place for British separatists and Afghan separatists? Should there be? If the planet knows no bounds, should we recognize others' desires for homelands? If separation is granted, should international support be taken away?

In becoming an ecumenopolis, we face the question of who we are. Are we one species and two genders? Are we one species with multiple cultures but not necessarily multicultural, or a little of both? I don't have the right answers. I have opinions and dreams. I depend on my fellow members of our species to come up with a variety of answers, situational and timely, to solve problems iteratively because we're perpetually changing.

Change is constant. Change is pain and joy. Thus, we face constant pain and joy. Easy? Never. Eventful? A most resounding "YES!" We can see square pegs and round holes. We can pound a screw with a hammer. The choices are many. The solutions are few.

You can choose where you want to live. Your life is now subject to international scrutiny. Can you live a separatist life that is acceptable in an ecumenopolis? Absolutely. The right of a member of our species to perpetuate a subculture is guaranteed at birth. How hard you're willing to fight to protect your subculture against those who want to be where you live is up to you, not me. Cooperation and coordination 'midst competition - that's where I'll meet you and see if your subculture is worth promoting on the international stage. As always, we don't have to like each other, just agree that we're one species. The rest of our lives are opinions and dreams to do with as we see fit.

Wagon Trail

Sitting around a campfire, a pioneer family talked about the day's trip across the prairie.

"Mama, tell them boys of yours the troubles we've seen."

"Well, Ez, seems like when we wuz kids, the snows piled up to the rooftop."

"'At's right, Mama. So you boys better think twice afore complaining about our trek through these lands."

"But, Pa, there's nothing to do out here. Back when we lived in town, there was plenty of kids our age to play with. Now, all we do is sit on the wagon most of the day and then set up camp at night."

"Boy, I oughta smack you up side the head for that kind of back talk!"

"Ma, what's he talking about? I ain't never back talked him."

"Young man, you mind your father. If he says you back talked him, you agree with him."

"Yes'm."

"And you, young feller. Don't you put that smirk on your face. I know what you're thinking."

"What'd I do?"

"You're thinking your older brother's taking the troubles off of your back. You're still in trouble from yesterday."

"Ah, Ma, I always get in trouble for nothing."

"Ain't nothing. You've been going on about when we're getting to our next stop when I told you to take care of business afore we get back in the wagon."

"Mama, leave the boy alone. He's got smaller parts'n the rest of us."

"Ez, that ain't no excuse for knowing you're going to have to stop sooner than if you'd paid a mind to yo'self."

"Reckon you're right about that'n, Mama. Young man, you mind your ma. If she tells you to step over to them bushes afore we leave in the morning, you do as she says."

"Yessir."

"Well, whose turn is it to tell a good story? Mama?"

"The older boy told one last night. Why'nt you tell one tonight, Ez?"

"I'd be obliged. A long time ago, long afore any of us wuz born, there wuz only this wilderness. Not a soul in sight. Just hilltops and treetops and fields of prairie grass. There were large stretches of them pretty flowers that your Mama liked. And plenty of wild fowl for hunting, if there'd been any of us around. 'Cept there ain't. Or weren't, that is."

"How'd you know that, Pa, if there weren't any of us around to know?"

"Boy, this is my story. You just shut your trap and listen. I'll get to the good parts soon enough. Now, in those times, wagons hadn't been invented yet so animals didn't have no good trails to tell them how to get from one place to another. They just went from one patch of grass to one watering hole, day after day, sometimes crossing their own paths many times a day. They weren't in no hurry, neither, so they might spent most parts of a day in one spot.

"Well, one day, these group of animals, they..."

"What kind, Pa?"

"What kind of what, son?"

"What kind of animals were they?"

"They were them grasseating kinds, that's what they wuz."

"Uh-huh."

"Don't you 'uh-huh' me, boy."

"Yessir."

"Anyway, these prairie grass grazers were thinking to themselves, 'All we ever do is eat grass and drink water. Ain't there something else more to do?' Well, you know how they get. One sight of our wagon from far off and they skitter and scatter like...well, like themselves. So, without wagons around, they didn't have nothing to mozy them on up the way. They kept eating and drinking and thinking.

"Well, it weren't long afore they figured out this sort of same thing day after day was not awful but just regular ol' mind-numbing. It was no wonder they did the same thing because there weren't nothing to get them to change their minds. Think about it, boys. If you had the best tasting grass to eat every day and you didn't have no hunters or wagons around, you'd be just as pleased as...well, as yourselves, wouldn't ya?"

"Yessir."

"Yessir."

"Well, one day, this feller was walking across them plains and he saw them grasseaters and told himself, 'Now, if I wuz them, what would I be doing out here?' He watched them from afar and..."

"From a what?"

"From afar."

"Pa, you didn't say nothing 'bout no far."

"I didn't because there ain't no far. That feller ain't seen far 'cept by lightning. Now let me get back to the story. So he watching from a great distance and sees them animals is doing the same thing over and over again. What do you reckon he did?"

"Dunno."

"Well, he figured he'd have himself a little fun. He crawled in the grass until he got right next to them animals and he stands up and hollers at the top of his lungs. Them animals runs as far as their breath'd let 'em. And still some of them run some more. They run until it got dark and then they went back to their ways and sat down to sleep. The next morning, they wake up and go right back to what they wuz doing, eating grass and drinking water. Afore they know it, that feller showed up again and tried to scare 'em. But they was keen on him and weren't falling for the trick a second time. Instead, they ran up on the feller and they ate him!"

"They ate him? Every part of him?"

"That's right, son. They ate his head and his fingers and his toes. Everything!"

"What happened next?"

"Well, them animals, they weren't no longer just grasseaters. They wuz feller eaters. They got a taste for folks and they weren't going back to just walking around eating grass and drinking water. So now, any time a feller walks through them plains, there's them feller eaters not far behind."

"You mean...you mean, out here?"

"That's right."

"Pa, I'm scared."

"Well, boy, now you sees why we stay in this wagon all day. It's not in account of you ain't got no friends to play with out here, it's account of them feller eaters."

"Ma, I don't want to use them bushes in the morning. I'm afraid them feller eaters is out there."

"You don't worry about them feller eaters, young man. They ain't gonna bother you when you're doing your business. They's only interested in you when you're taking off by yourself through them prairie grasses."

"Pa?"

"Yes, boy?"

"How long we got afore we get out of these prairies?"

"Could be a while, son."

"You reckon them feller eaters is looking at us right now?"

"No, son. They go to sleep when the sun goes down. Which is about time for us, too."

"Pa, how come we ain't never seen no feller eaters out here?"

"'Cause you never knew to look for one until now."

"Ez, you scared up the boys enough as it is. Boys, you get up in that wagon and go to sleep yo'self. We'll be with you shortly."

"The Numbers Don't Add Up"

While one set of people face long-term unemployment, another set is investing and reinvesting in the climbing stock market value. An intersecting subset is paying more attention to investment portfolios without employment income to work with.

Some people are selling their second yacht or fourth retirement property. Some are having their first home taken away. Some are scooping up cheap assets for later profitable resale.

On whom do I focus?

Experts, analysts and other questionable words float in the open marketplace of ideas. Ideas. Hmm... What is an idea? And no, not the dictionary or wikipedia definition. What is an idea to you?

I don't know the diets of the lifeforms whose daily habits take them across the patch of ground on which my house was deeded. As an experiment, I throw bits of food next to the driveway to see what happens. Apples quickly disappear. Oranges and grapefruits are never consumed by large lifeforms, their round shapes shrinking with the growth of mold. Today, I threw a few stale doughnuts out and will check on them later. Birdseed is almost instantly consumed.

I try not to distinguish one lifeform's needs from another in what I choose to toss into the yard. That way, I get to see a variety of responses to my application of the "trickle down" food cycle. You remember the "trickle down" theory, don't you? A person who's eating a large, juicy sandwich will have some drops of nutritional liquid drip off the chin and onto the ground for other lifeforms to feed on. That's not the "trickle down" theory, you say? Are you sure?

While we google our memories of the "trickle down" theory, let's think for a moment. Did you take an economics class in school, primary, secondary or collegiate? Do you remember the theories of supply and demand, the iterative value of currency, or how the banking system is supposed to work? Do you know how to write a check? [Those of you who've only used credit/debit cards your whole life, or even your mobile phone to pay for goods, are excused from answering that last question.]

At one point I thought about majoring in economics or accounting in my college studies, especially since beer consumption and football watching weren't offered in college curricula. Somewhere between chemical engineering, foreign languages, religious studies, computer science and IT management, that is. Meanwhile, my college loans piled up.

If I have no personal belief in the power of money, should I speak from a monetary point of view? If I only see life in the moment, should I talk about the value of compounding interest?

Questions today...questions...sigh...what to say, what to do...

In my family, participation in the exchange of goods and services vary. Some live on the minimum monthly payment plan. Some live frugally and pay cash for major purchases. Some invest heavily and make major gains in their personal wealth. Risk and reward. Comfort zone. Playgrounds.

I don't know what money is other than an idea. I see pieces of paper and bits of stamped metal and hear about the comparative value of one version versus another but it makes no sense to me. Money. What is it? Barter converter. Murder incentive. War inciter. Peace initiative. Health provider.

Suggestions pour in on how to make our economy strong again, from isolationist policies to single global currency, from free market to centralized control, from high risk rogue investors to highly-regulated / scrutinized market management teams.

And still, I have no internal concept of money. It's like a void in my mind, the center of a hurricane / typhoon, alive but empty, surrounded by bustling activity.

No matter what I say or believe, people will use their definitions of money to take risks or do nothing with their money. No matter what we think, the future is undefined and full of risks - there are no surefire definitions of safety and security. We act and the rest of the universe reacts, seen mainly on the local scale.

For instance, decades after the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts, war and pestilence have killed millions of people, yet these tiny boxes of metal parts keep moving outward from the center of our solar system. Like beams of energy reaching us from across the universe, the Voyager units represent us at a point in time that no longer exists. We took many risks using vast sums of money to create those spacecraft, money that could have been spent on any number of ideas but we chose to learn more about our solar system and thus more about our place in it, including the risks facing the survival of our species in this area of the galaxy.

Where is real growth occurring in our economy? What is truth? What is reality? What is money but this shirt on my back and the laptop computer under my fingertips?

I tell myself I am the only person writing and reading this blog so that I can be free to say what I think and feel, not tied to emotions between myself and others or economically linked to others who might give me motives to speak or keep quiet. Sometimes I believe what I tell myself and other times I see myself not saying enough because of fear of offending others.

While those versed in the ways of making money more valuable (and thus more likely to be loaned, spent or invested) express their opinions or use their actions to put money in motion, I sit here and look at our planet from the edge of the solar system, as if I'm a vulnerable set of technology long past accomplishing its stated goals, and even past its imagined value as a precursor to "V'ger."

I have no use for money. I only have use for my species. To see value in what the two have in common, I pull away from all the voices who are trying to make money by talking about the value of money and imagine a time and place where the current value of money is unimportant. If I talk about a time 10,000 years from now, I might as well write a science fiction story. If I talk about a time a few months or a few years from now, I might as well become an economic policy expert.

I imagine a time in the near future - could be tomorrow or could be fifty years from now - most likely, a time where we're still repeating ourselves over and over while pretending that our new discoveries, new technologies and new genetic changes make us a better species. I don't mind the repetition because repetition is like the food I throw into the yard, giving us ongoing experiments to see which changes we make will lead to more innovative beneficial changes.

In this near future:

• We've rewritten the laws governing advertising and marketing - we can no longer over-promise the benefits of goods and services - we must give messages that demonstrate the real benefits and detriments of products, including product life of average enjoyment/usefulness and environmental impact, with links to forums discussing the products/services.
• Community service is a required set of skills/classes taught to children throughout their school years and has monetary value which can be exchanged for goods and services, useful during times of economic downturns when those who are less actively employed, both children and adults, can put their skills and hobbies to use for the community and still have economic purchasing power.
• We fuse fantasy and reality where we can don imaginary lives that are viewable by others wearing similar augmented reality gear - no longer do you have to use limited resources for your wardrobe or lifestyle - you can create, lease or buy your own AR life and change it at will, making mandatory school/office dress codes obsolete. On the Internet and in real life, nobody sees you as a dog.
  
• Office hours become completely useless as labor laws recognize the blend of work and private life into one - we get paid for completed projects, not hours worked, freeing us to do what we want when we want as long as we stay on schedule (schedule being a flexible definition using time, cost and resources creatively).
• Poverty still plagues society due to war, pestilence, mental challenges and drug abuse. However, voluntary poverty becomes fashionable as people try and stay in the "no impact" lifestyle. Governments grapple with the concept of low-tax zones to encourage more people to live in low-stress, low-overhead areas, asking if such citizens must demonstrate higher community involvement to qualify or if being just plain "we don't trust and don't want a government" folks can live there, too.
• The digital divide raises the barrier higher and higher that separates the educated from the uneducated, continuing to spark inventions to connect those who want to be digital citizens but don't have the means or understanding to get connected. Political revolutions are led by digital citizens pretending to be members of the nondigital proletariats.
• Greenland becomes a major tourist destination when people flood to the island to bathe in the curative cold waters of melting glaciers.
• Antarctica becomes the next major battleground for terrorist groups to control.
• A child of parents of Taoist/Buddhist Han, Muslim Uyghur, Hindu Indian and Ainu heritage is born in space.
  

Sunrise Through The Trees

I couldn't sleep last night because of you. Who are you? You are the parents who insist their children get a narrow point of view while being raised. You are the child who's known only one point of view while growing up but senses there's more to life. You are those who want more and those who want less.

Over the past few days, while watching a few spectacles centered on sports arenas broadcast to television screens, I paid attention to the adverts which pay, in part, for my viewing. Many of them told me about the money I'd save by spending money, often in the $500-$1000 range and sometimes in the $3000-$5000 range, depending on products being advertised. Overall, I felt a nostalgic touch, as if the adverts were still aimed toward the mass consumption audience, even in adverts for alcoholic beverages ("drink more because we've packed fewer calories," "drink lots because we added two more drops of artificial flavoring!").

Earlier this morning, while I stared at the ceiling in near-darkness and imagined little insects crawling around that farted glow-in-the-dark gas which my optic nerve was trying its darnedest to detect, I thought about you and I thought about those adverts. I thought about what defines us.

Before I retired a few years ago from a day job, I managed several small projects, totaling in the tens of millions of dollars. Saving $500 a year would have gotten me fired. My company wanted savings in the X to XX million dollar range, or significant sales increases to compensate for lack of savings while a new technology hit the market.

Therefore, I am of two minds here. I enjoy watching sports but sitting in front of a small box, even one close to 60" diagonal, and letting myself get exposed to adverts for savings of small change tells me that I am not the demographic the product companies are after. At the same time, the cost to go to to the same sporting events and watch them live is cost-prohibitive to my frugal budget.

As the Earth turns and the view of the Sun comes close to my eyes, the landscape slowly breaks into individual items out of the general dim silhouette moments ago. So, too, my understanding of the universe slowly wakes up and brightens my view of life.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? My generation now runs the executive branch of the U.S. government. The U.S. president is 10 months older than I am. Those of our age actually have control of the world. We have come of age, as they say, after making significant progress in our growing-up stage. Wise, we depend on those of many ages and backgrounds to run the machines that make our lives better - political, financial, industrial, academic, religious, etc.

I no longer sit back and let the older generation tell me what to do because I am now in charge of my life. I am me because of you so I am in charge of your life and you in charge of mine.

I have 14,809 days to keep learning. In some number of days less than that time, my generation will pass the torch that keeps the lamp of our species burning bright.

I did not vote for Barack Obama and do not support many Democratic ideals (especially since I am a fiscal conservative at heart) but I will not let detractors stop my generation from having its day in the sun! We will go after the detractors until our last breath, if necessary, to shape our species up and prepare us for the next tens of thousands of years of growing up we still have to do. We will hunt down the cowardly suicide bomber trainers and do what we have to do with them to better our species. We will not rest. We don't care what your colour is, how you dress, how you speak, what you do or who you hang out with. We spent our youth discovering we are all the same and we will not waste our training on backwards thinking.

Because I could not sleep last night, I had several hours to contemplate the future of our species. I saw that we make progress when we put aside insignificant differences, which accounts for most of what we do everyday, and work together to improve our living conditions. I don't have time to waste on vegetating in front of a TV any longer if I want our generation to make a difference in where our species will be 10 or 20 years from now when we finally relinquish our responsibilities to the next generation.

I'm not out to make our planet a peace fest or a love nest. I'm out to save us from ourselves and get us on the path to a prosperous future, starting now. As usual, I'll keep using humour but my days of sitting on the sofa are over. Time to return to the workforce and push us a little harder in the right direction, one company and one industry at a time. If I'm lucky, in my lifetime I'll see us having an interplanetary broadcast system that, instead of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, will actively beam intergalactic broadcasts of what our species has accomplished to points all over the universe (sure, we don't know the risks or rewards for such a scenario but we're already noisy now).

I'll start today by seeing how we can convert or retrain our war profiteering into space research and exploration. How do we train kids that the path to heaven includes building rockets to the Moon instead of strapping bombs to our chests? How do you say that the rigours of space are equivalent to infidels? How do we coordinate our navies into solely stopping pirates instead of chasing after each other? How do we turn our armies and air forces into profitable means of both protecting good governments and getting us onto other planets? Do beauty pageants and racecar events fit into this scheme?

My future started over 47 years ago and it's happening today. How about yours?

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.

Packing The Heat

You know what, in the midst of my foray into humour, part of me is burning mad. I'm tired of brothers and sisters bombing brothers and sisters in and around Pakistan. Time to take action. See you in a few days. These assholes with their desire to kill others have run out of time. No more monkeying around my funny bone. Kick the neighbourhood association into gear and flush out the geeks wiring up their explosive playtoys.

The planet is my backyard. You kill someone(s) with a bomb anywhere on this planet and you're messing with me and my associates. We take no prisoners. We listen to no excuses.

You got my attention. Now you get the attention you deserve. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place? You know why? You just struck out. Time to say goodbye.

Redux Revisited

Thanks to blue-eyed Alyssa at Taco Mac for the service the other night. You and your manager (Jerry?) made our fresh kettle chips enjoyable as an after-dinner appetizer. Stephanie was quiet at Carson's last night. I didn't catch the name of our server at Barley's on Saturday but congrats to you guys on the upgrade to two bars with two sets of 48 beer taps, one smoking and one nonsmoking, just in time for 31st October celebrations. Oh, and a late nod to Naomi at Dreamland BBQ in the Atlanta area - nothing like a familiar Alabama venue near ol' Terminus.

I. Adagio sostenuto, Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor for Piano, Op. 27, by Beethoven. Is the composition good, great or fantastic? I don't know. The music changes my mood, that much I can tell you. What about the other two movements? Right now, I can't remember.

Is it true that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is really a Douglas Adams' remake of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now? Or is the other way around? Right now, I can't remember.

Meanwhile, changes are shaking up at EU headquarters. Word comes to me that the way it was is the fear for the way it will be. War is always a good profitmaking venture to get one out of economic doldrums, especially when others feel all warm and fuzzy about peace breaking out across the globe. As much as I desire peace, peace tends to be a break between skirmishes and wars just as quiet is the parents' break between inner-fighting and authority-rebelling children. Is there a true balance between war and peace? Tolstoy never said. Did Joan of Arc prove otherwise?

We are one species. We can cooperate in peaceful competition or take our affairs onto the battlefield. We can do both and we can do neither. The planet doesn't care. Right now, I can't remember. Any way, I'm going to enjoy the changing colors of the light passing through the tree canopy this afternoon. Happiness is seeing lichen spread on wet tree bark just as much as seeing if there's water on the Moon in the dust cloud no one saw.

Simple Answers

Two solutions provided to me in support of getting our bodies back in motion: hard work and experimentation.

• Solution One: Hard Work

The first solution proposed to me is the simple mantra of "Rome wasn't built in a day." We get what we want when we put our thoughts in order, concentrate on one important task and perform all the smaller tasks necessary to complete the work. We don't get what we want by wishing it so. We gather together with those who are willing to dedicate themselves to the same task and work, not talk, put our feet in motion and place our hands on the tools that'll get the job done.

• Solution Two: Experimentation

The second solution proposed to me is the realization that we discover our goals are often well-intentioned but misguided only after we've started down the path to reach our goals. Sometimes our goals become unnecessary because of changing conditions. Sometimes we missed information that would have pointed us in a different, more accurate, direction to reach our goals. We solve problems by experimenting even if we strongly believe we know the actions we'll take to reach our goals (in other words, constantly question your assumptions).

• Conclusion

Are these solutions complementary or complimentary, contrasting or distracting? Either/or? Neither/nor? And/but? Not only/But also? Indications that it'll rain later today?

They're a good start. They are some of the ideas we need to keep in mind as we seek concrete tasks to work on. I'll keep posting your ideas as they come in.

Have a great day!

I Need Your Help

10 Oct 2009, 22:20

If I am you and you are me and we are millions and millions of unemployed people and growing, then I have a question for you/myself:

What are we doing?

We. That’s the word I’m concerned about. The value of the exchange of goods and services flows around the world in miniscule increments of time but nearly unimaginable bundles of wealth. We own the system we worked for, whether we know it or believe it or not. We have the solutions to the problems that make us feel trapped in the system. We own our behaviours. We are responsible for our actions and reactions. We have no one to blame for wherever we are or whatever we’re doing.

I, if I am you, look for the solution to the problem of what to do next, knowing as I do that I have unresolved issues that will remain with me while I solve the problem at hand. There is no perfect life but there are plenty of balanced lives with happiness a primary component of the life in balance.

The solution I seek is one where happiness meets peace while I’m in control of the life I own in the system I own with you. It’s seeing that instant gratification needs that are catered to by the marketing and advertising around you, both in straightforward business terms and in unintentional jealousy/envy terms (e.g., “keeping up with the Joneses”), can be overcome when we treat each other as responsible adults who seek viable solutions.

It’s not about being green or saving the environment. It’s not about giving up or sacrificing. It’s about you and your family. It’s about you. It’s about me.

The solution starts with an honest evaluation of your/our lives, our families, our backgrounds, our strengths, our weaknesses, our powers, our gifts, our humour, our sadness, our future.

The solution continues with believing we own the system and then figuring out how to put the system to valuable use in our lives in every moment, never once saying “it’s out of my hands” or “that’s not my job.”

The solution requires volunteers. The solution requires blood, sweat and tears. The solution includes setbacks. We’ll fall down BUT we’ll have each other to pick us up one at a time. We don’t have to have the right answer all the time because we can rely on our combined knowledge and capabilities to examine a problem and find the most viable solution, always keeping in mind that no one solution satisfies everyone all the time.

I need your help. I am looking at the problem of a jobless recovery [I don’t see a problem but I use the word to describe my analysis of the current situation in global economics]. As most of the major world economic centers get closer to reporting positive growth (as if “negative growth” is a real term! but who likes to use the word “shrinkage” or “contraction”?), many of us will still have no economic strength of our own in comparison to what we had or what we wanted. What we had or what we wanted is not necessarily what we have to have or have to want – it’s often what we allowed ourselves to believe because of the influence of those around us.

Therefore, here’s where I need your help. I need your help in redefining what it is that I really want. Do I really want a house full of items I rarely use? Do I really want a life where I’m running back and forth between activities that I don’t fully enjoy? Do I want to walk through life and ignore most of the people around me?

I’m standing at the edge of a ravine and can’t get to the other side. I can build a bridge halfway across the divide but need you to build the other half so we can connect the halves where I have what you need and you have what I need.

It doesn’t look easy but when we put our bodies into motion we make it easy with every movement in every moment.

I’m looking at the solutions we provide each other but I only have one pair of eyes connected to one brain that searches this giant computer system composed of seven billion people connected one way or the other. Our planet is small and sometimes our voices are very tiny. Someone out there has a piece of the puzzle that completes the image that describes the solution to unemployment. Actually, more than one person has a piece. Some of us have the same piece - when we combine our voices, we reach out to complete the solution like fans at a sporting event shouting the same name over and over.

Often, after burying my thoughts in the words of others, I see a solution that’s off-kilter, filtered through a funhouse prism. I haven’t found enough words about the constipated bank loan problem or the rising unemployment problem to give me a solution worth laughing about. I’ve only heard complaints that enough is not being done.

I don’t care that Bernanke or Summers or the IMF has firm control of the situation and is ready to take charge when things get worse. I want to hear from those who have put viable, positive solutions into place. I’m more interested in fire prevention than firefighting. I’m more interested in positive behavior reinforcement than crowd control. Action, not reaction.

I wish I had the solution to give you, but in this case the solution is in your hands and thoughts. You may be five years old or 105 years old. You may be an illiterate field worker or an academic superstar. You may have no expertise in the area of research you studied but you found a working solution.

The solution I offer is you. In doing so, I am exposing my greatest weakness, which is not wanting to admit I don’t have all the answers. It’s like admitting defeat, only I’m actually admitting you are my victory. My worst fear is my greatest triumph. I have felt mental pain and anguish these last few days because the solution, this blog entry, is the last thing I wanted to write. I’ve always been able to find a way out of a trap. In this case, I found out that you are the one who has to open the trap for me, no easy admission for a person who believes that self-sufficiency is the number one reason that life exists, due to self-preservation. Don’t know why that is since I rationally know that no one lives on an island and space is not a true vacuum.

Enough for now. I’ve got to mull on this a few more days and let you solve the problem(s) for me while I keep my mouth shut about them. You’ll find the solution(s) when you least expect them, like going to the market for bread and finding a delicious, nutritious fruit you’d never seen before, changing your diet forever and making your family stronger because you happened to glance in a different direction while talking with a neighbour at the bread booth.

Clasped Hands

In these moments of happiness, I take out the Book of the Future to look back upon this time and the next few years ahead.

What happens if there is not a superpower left to dictate world policy changes? What if many nations join together and abolish nationhood? Those with a clear vision to share with their followers will lead them into the new era, shedding old labels and adopting new ones.

I am a happy man. I have many friends, seen and unseen, known and unknown, upon whom I depend. They may use nonviolent protest, passive resistance, working within the system or other methods to change their place in the world. They may build businesses or break them down. They may give with no desire for receiving payment in kind. They may take without asking.

Happiness is understanding without thinking. Happiness is responsibility for no reason.

When one can enter a system with no other requirement than the ability to injure another person, the system perpetuates violent power. When overpopulation pushes nonviolence and violence together, which one survives? Happiness is seeing your potential and living up to it. If your potential involves overcoming nonviolence, then what's the matter with being happy?

I do not own the world. I see the world in which we live. Peace and happiness are mine, often joined like clasped hands. If I have to choose one or the other, which one survives? Do I want to be unhappily peaceful or happy without peace? The Book of the Future only tells me what will happen, not how I'll feel.

• When the new world currency emerges after 2018, what then?
• When the glaciers completely melt that feed the world's major rivers, then what?
• When fresh water and food production completely fall out of private hands, to whom do you turn for basic necessities?
• When corporations get governments to force you to pay fees for everything you do, where do you go to be free from your corporate citizens?

I love my species. I love my planet. But I don't have to love living with those who want what I have earned after I've paid my share of living with everyone else. If I drive a motorised vehicle, I expect to have to pay for operating it on public roads. But if I am alive, I don't expect to have to pay to be alive - health insurance companies in my country want citizens to pay heavy fines if they do not buy mandatory health insurance policies - I don't love corporate citizens who expect to stick their hands in my pocket for being alive. Such government legislation encourages me to live below the poverty line. It's as bad as asking corporate citizens to pay taxes for having employees, which encourages me not to hire employees.

My thoughts are incomplete right now. I have to look at the bigger picture before I can say what's really in my thoughts. Instead, in the interim I ponder democratic tax policies versus communist joint property ownership versus the bribe/fee system used by loose government associations.

Freedom is many things, including the right to private ownership. I own myself, to begin with. I own my children, as long as they'll have me, and they own me. I own at least enough belongings to shelter myself in public. After that, my private ownership freedoms encounter those of other persons/families; then, the inter-personal/familial agreement process picks up. Private land versus public land. Private education versus public education. Open source versus trademark/patent. Lending, borrowing, buying, selling, giving, receiving.

The future is full of old ideas and new. The future is today, tomorrow and yesteryear. The future is free of words and full of words. Family, religion, politics and sports will occupy us just as much tomorrow as it does today.

The future is about ownership. The future is about freedom. Individual freedom for seven billion and growing. Freedom for one species on one planet and expanding.

I value my freedom. I value my species. How important is my freedom in consideration of survival of my species? I laugh at the enormity of that question. People die every day answering that question, their lives no laughing matter.

You are my peace. You are my happiness. You are my future. You are my freedom. You are me and I am you - we own each other because we're one species, one family. If one of us or one million of us or one billion of us has to lose freedom, or even die, to save our species, which one of us will it be? We'll never know until it happens.

Peace. Happiness. Freedom. Ownership. The Book of the Future guarantees that you can't have all four of them - which one, two or three of them will you take, if someone will be willing to offer you the choice?