The Wonderful World of Oliver Fontaine
These simple words cannot express
The joy he brought and happiness
That filled our lives and made us glad;
To all of us he was a dad
Who'd listen and then offer up
Nonjudgmental words of love.
With glasses perched upon his nose
He struck the perfect "wise man" pose,
For deep within that furrowed brow
He'd learned to live life here and now;
Short in stature but tall on life
He found the highs amidst the strife.
What would he say if he were here
To see on every face a tear?
Perhaps he'd put his arm around
Our burdened shoulders, then turn our frown
Into a smile of love that said
His love was from the heart, not head.
Although he's gone, he hasn't left,
For deep within each sorrowed breast
He placed an ever-burning light
That shows the knowledge and insight –
Unselfish, trusting giving love –
He knew we're blessed from One above.
So let's not mourn or fret for long
Or sing his praises in a song;
Let's take his joy, not our remorse,
And focus on a cheerful course;
Support logistics can, you see,
Live out our main man's legacy.
[from: "Of Friends, Neighbors, Lovers and Miscellaneous Passers-by", 1992, published by Tree Trunk Productions]
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
18 March 2010
A Marine's view of being an artist (in this case, a writer)
Excerpt from "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield:
"The Marine Corps teaches you to be miserable.
"This is invaluable for an artist.
"Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable.
"The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
"The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell."
01 March 2010
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?
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?
11 February 2010
Drone Wars
I promised myself that this new blog would be all about you and it is. Only thing, I have to share information with you about me in order for you to know more about you so here goes.
Do you have children? Do you know everything your children are doing all the time? Seriously? You really think so?
See, I know better. Let's take a walk in my shoes for a few minutes so you can learn all about what your children are doing. During this lesson I want you to think about your neighbours and your friends but most especially I want you to think about what you think you know about yourself when you look at yourself in the mirror or spend time reading a blog like this.
One day, when I was young and ignorant, I thought that the world was awful. My first girlfriend had died, my second girlfriend moved away and my third girlfriend broke up with me. I was just about ready to call it quits in the department of romantic relationships.
Then, I was introduced to the way the world really works. And I was told I could not reveal what I knew about the world until I had fulfilled some obligations that came with being introduced to the...well...sorry, you can't see me laughing but I'm remembering all the hilarious names people have given to what I'm about to tell you about. "Shadow government." "The Way." "The Star Chamber." "Gaia." You've heard them, too, I'm sure and probably most of you believe in one form or another of something that lines up with one of those phrases. And you'd be wrong. The world doesn't work the way you think, not even the way I still want to think the world works.
I'm losing my place in the story. Let me get back on track.
There I was, having a wonderful time at my invitations-only, one-person Pity Party. I thought about joining a monastery or building a cabin in the woods and getting away from it all.
Then, a young woman approached me. I hadn't seen her in school before. She wasn't in any of my classes but she seemed to know all about me and what I was doing in school. She also knew about my recent breakup.
Over the next couple of weeks, she and I met in parts of the community where we were least likely to be seen by others. State parks. Abandoned housing estates. Shutdown factories. Any place where this new friend of mine could explain to me the workings of the world.
I remember those days because of the intensity of the experiences we shared. From what she showed me, many of you out there have had the same experiences, some with training and some spontaneously. Some of you know what the experiences mean and some of you write off the experiences as related to your particular subculture.
For those of you who, through intense study and understanding, were given assignments to complete or general obligations to meet, you know what we've been through.
This young woman showed me my future, every last detail of it. By seeing my future, I saw your future, too. In our future, I was not to excel academically, keeping my study skills just below the radar of government and business interests. Instead, I was going to slide in and out of various job roles, gathering information, cataloging, documenting, assessing, analysing, and reporting my findings to others. I was asked to intentionally flunk many college courses along the way but pass enough of them to demonstrate I was planning to complete a college degree to those who showed any interest in what I was doing. I would communicate with some of you who were just like me but didn't know your personalities had been programmed to follow the same path unconsciously.
This woman asked me to read certain books (James Michener's "The Source," for instance) and learn certain archaic languages in addition to modern languages like French, Spanish, German, Farsi and Mandarin.
As time passed by in this life of mine in our global society, I have met people who were also given the task to communicate using multidimensional symbolism that changes from one encounter to the next, each set of symbols representing themselves but also pointing to how the next set of symbols will be "written," based on our copies of the multithreaded Books of the Future every one of us has in a different form, mine, as I've told you, coming from pencil shavings.
Keep in mind I am a storyteller. My task on this world is to create wild, outrageous, mildly innovative tales that contain both the truth and fabrications. Also keep in mind that there is no such thing as the truth because change happens. The only truth, if you want to think of it as such, is adaptation.
To quote Jack Nicholson's cinema character, "You can't handle the truth." Most of you can't, that is. So you follow or create a set of common tales.
As a storyteller with access to all sorts of interesting information, I get stuff that's hard to believe, even for me. These detailed brain scans from Bob Woodward and Dick Cheney, for instance, including copies of all their so-called secret files. Political mumbo-jumbo, mainly. I know some of you think it's all intriguing, the spy-vs.-spy stuff that Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy built their reputations upon, but let me tell you that most of Bob's and Dick's days are filled with boring meetings and long, drawnout discussions full of unnecessary compromises in order for them to meet their given objectives. You'll find, should you have access to all the world's thoughts, we are exactly the same. We use our bodies for essentially the same thing everyday. Eat, sleep, talk, think, act. Edith Head the Dress Doctor and Laura Chinchilla the Costa Rican president used/use their brains the same amount, albeit for different purposes.
One day, we'll watch movies of drone wars just like we watched movies about Richtofen and Brown and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. We'll keep making war and keeping making movies about war, all while those who want to spread peace, love and harmony will fight their own wars and claim their own victories.
But that's not why I'm here. I'm here to show you what our world is really all about, why some of us were given specific assignments that rarely make any sense.
Our future. Yes, we only live in the moment. Yes, we only imagine what the past was and the future will be. But it's our imaginations that I'm here to talk to you about.
We fully live in our imaginations. Every one of us. There is nothing else we do. Unless...
You can get out of your imaginary life if you're willing to give up life as you imagine it. You can keep your imaginary thoughts, if you want, but few are able to keep both their imaginary thoughts and something that has no thoughts, no life, no imagination at the same time. Believe me, I know. Without intensive training and some seriously messed-up setbacks, I wouldn't be here as I am. There are a few, a very few, who can do it all, switching in and out of everything all at once. But I'm not one of those.
Like I said, I'm just a good ol' boy with a little bit of knowledge and a lot of [blessed] ignorance. I'm part of the set of superset of systems that make up whatever you want to think you think you call the universe. I'm also not part of any of that. Neither are you.
I'm not trained to tap you on the shoulder and pull you out of the crowd to show you why you're not really who you think you. I'm only trained to write about those who do and those who have been tapped, like me.
Some days I feel like I'm writing the role of a really bad part in an awful movie. Some days I know I am. Some days I see why I am. Some days I just close my eyes and let my fingers fly across the keyboard or play tunes in my head that I'm still trying to figure out how to get down on paper or played on the Yamaha keyboard.
We see ourselves, generally, as one species. I see no reason to make you see otherwise. But you can. You may want to or you may not want to, but you can. Some of you are programmed to see nothing but that. Some of you are programmed to see anything but that.
Remember, this is just a blog entry. It's a story. It's not real. I do not support any theories of yours that you think describes the world around you but I'm willing to write about it if it makes a good story. That's all I do. What you choose to believe is up to you. I am not me. You are not me. Neither one of us is Barbara Taylor Bradford or Dabir A'zam Hosna, or at least there's a very small chance one of us is.
Be wise. See life outside your sphere of influence. You are not alone. The rest is in your imagination.
Do you have children? Do you know everything your children are doing all the time? Seriously? You really think so?
See, I know better. Let's take a walk in my shoes for a few minutes so you can learn all about what your children are doing. During this lesson I want you to think about your neighbours and your friends but most especially I want you to think about what you think you know about yourself when you look at yourself in the mirror or spend time reading a blog like this.
One day, when I was young and ignorant, I thought that the world was awful. My first girlfriend had died, my second girlfriend moved away and my third girlfriend broke up with me. I was just about ready to call it quits in the department of romantic relationships.
Then, I was introduced to the way the world really works. And I was told I could not reveal what I knew about the world until I had fulfilled some obligations that came with being introduced to the...well...sorry, you can't see me laughing but I'm remembering all the hilarious names people have given to what I'm about to tell you about. "Shadow government." "The Way." "The Star Chamber." "Gaia." You've heard them, too, I'm sure and probably most of you believe in one form or another of something that lines up with one of those phrases. And you'd be wrong. The world doesn't work the way you think, not even the way I still want to think the world works.
I'm losing my place in the story. Let me get back on track.
There I was, having a wonderful time at my invitations-only, one-person Pity Party. I thought about joining a monastery or building a cabin in the woods and getting away from it all.
Then, a young woman approached me. I hadn't seen her in school before. She wasn't in any of my classes but she seemed to know all about me and what I was doing in school. She also knew about my recent breakup.
Over the next couple of weeks, she and I met in parts of the community where we were least likely to be seen by others. State parks. Abandoned housing estates. Shutdown factories. Any place where this new friend of mine could explain to me the workings of the world.
I remember those days because of the intensity of the experiences we shared. From what she showed me, many of you out there have had the same experiences, some with training and some spontaneously. Some of you know what the experiences mean and some of you write off the experiences as related to your particular subculture.
For those of you who, through intense study and understanding, were given assignments to complete or general obligations to meet, you know what we've been through.
This young woman showed me my future, every last detail of it. By seeing my future, I saw your future, too. In our future, I was not to excel academically, keeping my study skills just below the radar of government and business interests. Instead, I was going to slide in and out of various job roles, gathering information, cataloging, documenting, assessing, analysing, and reporting my findings to others. I was asked to intentionally flunk many college courses along the way but pass enough of them to demonstrate I was planning to complete a college degree to those who showed any interest in what I was doing. I would communicate with some of you who were just like me but didn't know your personalities had been programmed to follow the same path unconsciously.
This woman asked me to read certain books (James Michener's "The Source," for instance) and learn certain archaic languages in addition to modern languages like French, Spanish, German, Farsi and Mandarin.
As time passed by in this life of mine in our global society, I have met people who were also given the task to communicate using multidimensional symbolism that changes from one encounter to the next, each set of symbols representing themselves but also pointing to how the next set of symbols will be "written," based on our copies of the multithreaded Books of the Future every one of us has in a different form, mine, as I've told you, coming from pencil shavings.
Keep in mind I am a storyteller. My task on this world is to create wild, outrageous, mildly innovative tales that contain both the truth and fabrications. Also keep in mind that there is no such thing as the truth because change happens. The only truth, if you want to think of it as such, is adaptation.
To quote Jack Nicholson's cinema character, "You can't handle the truth." Most of you can't, that is. So you follow or create a set of common tales.
As a storyteller with access to all sorts of interesting information, I get stuff that's hard to believe, even for me. These detailed brain scans from Bob Woodward and Dick Cheney, for instance, including copies of all their so-called secret files. Political mumbo-jumbo, mainly. I know some of you think it's all intriguing, the spy-vs.-spy stuff that Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy built their reputations upon, but let me tell you that most of Bob's and Dick's days are filled with boring meetings and long, drawnout discussions full of unnecessary compromises in order for them to meet their given objectives. You'll find, should you have access to all the world's thoughts, we are exactly the same. We use our bodies for essentially the same thing everyday. Eat, sleep, talk, think, act. Edith Head the Dress Doctor and Laura Chinchilla the Costa Rican president used/use their brains the same amount, albeit for different purposes.
One day, we'll watch movies of drone wars just like we watched movies about Richtofen and Brown and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. We'll keep making war and keeping making movies about war, all while those who want to spread peace, love and harmony will fight their own wars and claim their own victories.
But that's not why I'm here. I'm here to show you what our world is really all about, why some of us were given specific assignments that rarely make any sense.
Our future. Yes, we only live in the moment. Yes, we only imagine what the past was and the future will be. But it's our imaginations that I'm here to talk to you about.
We fully live in our imaginations. Every one of us. There is nothing else we do. Unless...
You can get out of your imaginary life if you're willing to give up life as you imagine it. You can keep your imaginary thoughts, if you want, but few are able to keep both their imaginary thoughts and something that has no thoughts, no life, no imagination at the same time. Believe me, I know. Without intensive training and some seriously messed-up setbacks, I wouldn't be here as I am. There are a few, a very few, who can do it all, switching in and out of everything all at once. But I'm not one of those.
Like I said, I'm just a good ol' boy with a little bit of knowledge and a lot of [blessed] ignorance. I'm part of the set of superset of systems that make up whatever you want to think you think you call the universe. I'm also not part of any of that. Neither are you.
I'm not trained to tap you on the shoulder and pull you out of the crowd to show you why you're not really who you think you. I'm only trained to write about those who do and those who have been tapped, like me.
Some days I feel like I'm writing the role of a really bad part in an awful movie. Some days I know I am. Some days I see why I am. Some days I just close my eyes and let my fingers fly across the keyboard or play tunes in my head that I'm still trying to figure out how to get down on paper or played on the Yamaha keyboard.
We see ourselves, generally, as one species. I see no reason to make you see otherwise. But you can. You may want to or you may not want to, but you can. Some of you are programmed to see nothing but that. Some of you are programmed to see anything but that.
Remember, this is just a blog entry. It's a story. It's not real. I do not support any theories of yours that you think describes the world around you but I'm willing to write about it if it makes a good story. That's all I do. What you choose to believe is up to you. I am not me. You are not me. Neither one of us is Barbara Taylor Bradford or Dabir A'zam Hosna, or at least there's a very small chance one of us is.
Be wise. See life outside your sphere of influence. You are not alone. The rest is in your imagination.
09 February 2010
Knowing Which Bookmarks To Keep
When writing a series of books that parallels the activities of us on our planet in our universe, tweaking just a little so that it resembles the real parallel universe interlaced with ours without giving away too much, I forget to write chapters that I'd invented or were given to me by others to put down. Such is the misfortune of living a spectral way of thinking, where everything is integrated together and one's thoughts look like one's activities and vice versa.
Thus, I cannot remember which is true. Did I just read that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will give a total of $10 billion to solve a subset of world problems or did I imagine they would follow in the philanthropic footsteps of others like the Rockefellers to write a chapter of history for themselves in a positive light? Either way, $10 billion seems like a big number to me, even after suffering the numbing effect of all the trillions of dollars that have been spent to prop up financial institutions to save the world economy from collapsing. Thanks, Bill and Melinda!
I still remember to ask these questions:
Thus, I cannot remember which is true. Did I just read that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will give a total of $10 billion to solve a subset of world problems or did I imagine they would follow in the philanthropic footsteps of others like the Rockefellers to write a chapter of history for themselves in a positive light? Either way, $10 billion seems like a big number to me, even after suffering the numbing effect of all the trillions of dollars that have been spent to prop up financial institutions to save the world economy from collapsing. Thanks, Bill and Melinda!
I still remember to ask these questions:
- How do Japanese and Korean auto workers live after retirement? On what do they depend to support food, housing, medical and other expenditures?
- How do Americans, like the older labourer named Danny I met in Wal-Mart, live after they stop actively working in the marketplace? If there is no viable social safety net, how do we find sustainable employment or other means of economic support for workers like Danny as they get older? Do we start sharing our underused homes with people who have no homes? What did we learn from the experiences of homeowners who opened up their houses to people displaced by Hurricane Katrina?
- So far, Obama has shown he is an eloquent speaker who likes to drum up positive support from his grassroots organization that helped get him elected. His wife and kids are playing the near-perfect support role of First Lady and First Daughters. With Obama's three years as U.S. President left in this term of office, what can Americans do to get their thoughts about industry and government moving in a more positive direction so that we put aside our differences and solve world problems even if we don't have $10 billion in our bank accounts?
- Isn't it time we all reread the Universal Declaration of People's [Human] Rights?
- One day, we will see the most dynamic leader from the universally-recognized most persecuted group on Earth (with the least emotional baggage of/with other groups) as our world leader. Some have seen Obama holding that role but he seems like a placeholder for someone more experienced politically and better connected (i.e., more real power) to come later. In my studies, including reviews of the indigenous peoples of this continent and examples of their influence such as the YMCA Indian Guides wooden box (made by my father) that contains a headdress, moccasins and paperwork from the late 1960s, I wonder if there is someone from a native tribe on this continent who will emerge in that role. Some would want the 14th Dalai Lama to fill that position but he has too much negative emotional baggage with the leaders of China. In years past, the United States promoted people of Scots-Irish descent into world leadership positions because they represented an oppressed/repressed and persecuted people who only mildly offended the British. Marx, Lenin and Mao have represented the oppressed proletariat in times past until they came to represent a new form of oppression. The name Gandhi stills maintains a positive image for much of the world (he also demonstrates the crossover of a popular person's world status and a near-religious godlike figure, reminding me to say that I am not including historic religious figures such as Mohammed, Buddha, or Jesus in this discussion). Who will rise from the lower socioeconomic class and be welcomed by the middle and upper classes as their spokesperson to lead us into the middle and later periods of this century? Who will have lived a simple but well-connected life and continue to shun the trappings of materialism while rising to power? Who will have recall of all the major philosophies of our people and be able to converse easily in other languages with no pretense of mental superiourity while talking with the least educated among us? Who will gather a group of leaders that desires to maintain a healthy balance between commercial enterprises and noncommercial interests, between local/national fervor and equal rights for all, between warmongers and peacemakers, between the haves and the have-nots, between the educated and the ignorant and between what we know is right and what we only guess is somewhat right for the moment? All this without becoming a cult figure who insists on leading us for a lifetime; instead, this person willingly "retires" to private life after passing the torch to those who may be as effective but not as dynamic. A leader/mentor/coach, not a bureaucrat. A person who has not had to make public political compromises along the way. A person who embraces all people, without making fun of those who disagree (because we know there is no such thing as 100% agreement with what we all individually believe). Does/can such a person exist who offends very few people?
- How do I reconcile my belief in social progress with my dislike of socialism as a political, bureaucratic institution because of the knowledge that socialism - really, any form of government with established bureaucracies (including large portions of Western democratic governments) - leads to more and more inefficiencies and ineffective economies of scale? Free market, laissez-faire "decisionmaking" versus centralised market planning is not the argument here, I don't believe, because we still walk blindly into the future no matter how well we think we planned for contingencies in the next moment. Do we just keep moving forward with our regional governments that run their own social experiments within the realm of changing tastes in the marketplace and cooperate with one another to prevent major wars and economic fallouts, letting social trends swing back and forth on small pendulums (countries, NGOs, cooperatives/communes, corporations, etc.) hanging off the end of one big imaginary/invisible pendulum so that we never really ever swing too far in any one direction globally? How much inefficiency is inherent in a large people-based system (or set of systems), making "social progress" (continually maximising our society's shape toward reaching the most, best-possible, 100% completely-satisfying socioeconomic freedom per person) a moot point?
08 February 2010
Why Write?
Here's a book that's in every library, is it not?:
http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/8/2010
http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/8/2010
12 January 2010
Torch / Flashlight / Lanthorn
As a writer who lives the life of the middle-aged country/suburban/housing estate frugal millionaire next door, I have the luxury to know I do not have to spend any money on the latest thing. I do not have to impress my neighbours. I do not have to own the technical gizmo to end all gizmos that will be replaced by the next gizmo tomorrow. I can survey the world around me, including members of my species and objects made by my species, and create the next story/blog entry. I follow the "storyline" created by my species in the telling of its daily existence in activities tied to news headlines and see into the future by looking back into the past stories that we tend to repeat over and over. I can consult ancient texts for fabricated storylines. I can see that the major themes are always about the upper classes of society, with the middle and lower classes getting their moment in the sun but rarely permanent places in the history books.
As a business person, I encourage my friends to get their inventions ready for production and their startup businesses ready for the next leap in product volume sales.
I watch the flow of the stream of social progress, occasionally sticking my foot out to see how the flow reacts, gauging the temperature and other aspects of the current state of state affairs. I drop a pebble in the pond, as they say, and watch how waves add together or cancel each other out. I flip on my portable pocket light and watch the roaches flee into the darkness.
I arbitrarily pick times to repeat these actions because, like the weather, I don't want to be completely predictable. I only want information to use for my next story, my next record of myself as a member of my species, the interplay of states of energy at the local level.
A creative writer uses all the tools available, including one's imagination, to craft a story, employing colloquial language, detailed descriptive scenes, raw emotions, and personal anecdotes to make the story writing interesting enough to keep writing. Some use formulaic writing to guarantee readers the same style story with different plot twists to make every story unique. Some use whatever comes along to throw into the pile of words, disregarding the potential for a potential audience.
Because I am generally happy and live in a sanitized, sheltered world, I do not include the deepest, darkest characters in my stories. In fact, I don't believe they exist. I see that all of us have reasons to live and what is an insane, incoherent life to one is a well-planned, rational life to another. People kill for a reason. People die for a reason. A nuclear scientist can be either a bomb maker or a curer of cancer, depending on how you want to write the story (or skew the headlines).
Some days, I don't like who I am. I honestly don't like being a writer. It's not the writing (or my "hack job" as I love to call my textual output, pretentious in my nonpretentiousness as I am). It's the thoughts that go into the writing. I am not a writer at all, in fact. I am a person of random thoughts, a person who sees the joy of making juxtapositions, who knows all there's ever going to be and knows all that ever was, not in exact details but in the way we say that elements react to one another, mixing and matching, flipping and spinning, theories abounding about boundless energy states. Once you see life as that "Matrix"-like social/visual mask over existence, you know all there is to know. The rest is details.
Do you believe the universe exists? Can you imagine more than you can imagine anyone else has imagined?
I believe in a positive future for our species because I know that our past has always been positive, negative headlines aside. We will accomplish more than we can possibly imagine at this moment. We will discover ways to manipulate energy states that will make our species both necessary and obsolete. We will go beyond what we think is the limit of the understanding of the universe as we know it.
In the meantime, we will struggle with the definition of what it means to be a member of our species. We will always struggle with the definition. We will always find ways to say that the past was better than today because the dead can't talk about the details about why the past wasn't always so great all the time (or at least not as great as the people in the present want to make the past out to be).
This moment is all I've got. In this moment, I have good neighbours who have no negative intentions on my life, a blue sky with a few thin clouds and a lot of sunshine, and my good health. I have a wife who loves me, a family who cares for me and who I care for them, a global economy that's seen as somewhat gloomy (but actually giving many of us more time to spend on what we love to do) and you.
I am a thinker, not a deep thinker, not a creative inventor or a mad scientist. Just this guy who was born of two members of my species in the hospital of a small town, growing up under regular, unexceptional conditions, reaching maturity slowly, finding happiness in his thoughts and glad to be alive. The majority of us are glad to be alive, with current conditions rarely optimal but sufficient for us to believe this moment and the next one will give us the opportunity to find other ways to be glad we're alive. We don't have to be happy all the time. In fact, we can be just the opposite, finding gladness in our misery.
I write because I am. I am because I write. We are the same set of interconnected energy states so I write about you when I write about me and vice versa.
I am sad because we haven't frozen the bank accounts of Iranian governmental leaders while they let legitimate opposition leaders in their country get killed. There is more here than meets my eye, of course, but solutions are available to take care of business, protecting the intelligent assets of a piece of Persia for future prosperity. Freedom and the responsibility to protect freedom is not chaos although others will lead you to believe so. What little we have learned, we primates, in these thousands of years we have called history-recording civilisation. How much we have forgotten!
Silence is my friend today, the cool, bright day my companion. Talk to you tomorrow.
As a business person, I encourage my friends to get their inventions ready for production and their startup businesses ready for the next leap in product volume sales.
I watch the flow of the stream of social progress, occasionally sticking my foot out to see how the flow reacts, gauging the temperature and other aspects of the current state of state affairs. I drop a pebble in the pond, as they say, and watch how waves add together or cancel each other out. I flip on my portable pocket light and watch the roaches flee into the darkness.
I arbitrarily pick times to repeat these actions because, like the weather, I don't want to be completely predictable. I only want information to use for my next story, my next record of myself as a member of my species, the interplay of states of energy at the local level.
A creative writer uses all the tools available, including one's imagination, to craft a story, employing colloquial language, detailed descriptive scenes, raw emotions, and personal anecdotes to make the story writing interesting enough to keep writing. Some use formulaic writing to guarantee readers the same style story with different plot twists to make every story unique. Some use whatever comes along to throw into the pile of words, disregarding the potential for a potential audience.
Because I am generally happy and live in a sanitized, sheltered world, I do not include the deepest, darkest characters in my stories. In fact, I don't believe they exist. I see that all of us have reasons to live and what is an insane, incoherent life to one is a well-planned, rational life to another. People kill for a reason. People die for a reason. A nuclear scientist can be either a bomb maker or a curer of cancer, depending on how you want to write the story (or skew the headlines).
Some days, I don't like who I am. I honestly don't like being a writer. It's not the writing (or my "hack job" as I love to call my textual output, pretentious in my nonpretentiousness as I am). It's the thoughts that go into the writing. I am not a writer at all, in fact. I am a person of random thoughts, a person who sees the joy of making juxtapositions, who knows all there's ever going to be and knows all that ever was, not in exact details but in the way we say that elements react to one another, mixing and matching, flipping and spinning, theories abounding about boundless energy states. Once you see life as that "Matrix"-like social/visual mask over existence, you know all there is to know. The rest is details.
Do you believe the universe exists? Can you imagine more than you can imagine anyone else has imagined?
I believe in a positive future for our species because I know that our past has always been positive, negative headlines aside. We will accomplish more than we can possibly imagine at this moment. We will discover ways to manipulate energy states that will make our species both necessary and obsolete. We will go beyond what we think is the limit of the understanding of the universe as we know it.
In the meantime, we will struggle with the definition of what it means to be a member of our species. We will always struggle with the definition. We will always find ways to say that the past was better than today because the dead can't talk about the details about why the past wasn't always so great all the time (or at least not as great as the people in the present want to make the past out to be).
This moment is all I've got. In this moment, I have good neighbours who have no negative intentions on my life, a blue sky with a few thin clouds and a lot of sunshine, and my good health. I have a wife who loves me, a family who cares for me and who I care for them, a global economy that's seen as somewhat gloomy (but actually giving many of us more time to spend on what we love to do) and you.
I am a thinker, not a deep thinker, not a creative inventor or a mad scientist. Just this guy who was born of two members of my species in the hospital of a small town, growing up under regular, unexceptional conditions, reaching maturity slowly, finding happiness in his thoughts and glad to be alive. The majority of us are glad to be alive, with current conditions rarely optimal but sufficient for us to believe this moment and the next one will give us the opportunity to find other ways to be glad we're alive. We don't have to be happy all the time. In fact, we can be just the opposite, finding gladness in our misery.
I write because I am. I am because I write. We are the same set of interconnected energy states so I write about you when I write about me and vice versa.
I am sad because we haven't frozen the bank accounts of Iranian governmental leaders while they let legitimate opposition leaders in their country get killed. There is more here than meets my eye, of course, but solutions are available to take care of business, protecting the intelligent assets of a piece of Persia for future prosperity. Freedom and the responsibility to protect freedom is not chaos although others will lead you to believe so. What little we have learned, we primates, in these thousands of years we have called history-recording civilisation. How much we have forgotten!
Silence is my friend today, the cool, bright day my companion. Talk to you tomorrow.
The Writers Workshop
"So, Jed, let me get this right. You're saying that when a writer uses real people as characters in a story, the writer should change some of the people's details to prevent issues later on?"
"From my experience, yes. Joanna, what do you think about that?"
"Well, my stories haven't been published so I don't have the experiences you do."
"You mean no one has read your stories?"
"Well, you guys and a few of my siblings."
"And none of us has recognized ourselves in your stories?"
"None of you are in my stories."
"I see. Joseph, what about you?"
"I haven't published anything, either. In fact, I haven't written anything yet. I'm here because my friends think I should write down some of the wild stories I make up all the time."
"Uh huh. Very good. We want writers, new and old, to exercise their imaginations. Joseph, you don't have to write down anything, if you don't want. It's more important that you understand the creative process within you and then decide if you want to share that on paper or somewhere else."
"Cool. Look, I've got to go. I didn't know this was an all-day Saturday gig."
"No problem, Joseph. But I can't refund your money if you leave."
"Hey, I understand. Seeya later."
"Well, class, Joseph is a great example of what you probably were, perfectly aware of your gift of storytelling but unable to fully grasp the social implications of what that gift means to others. Everyone pull out the netbook tucked under the seat in front of you and spend the next thirty minutes writing about the first time you wrote a story of your own. Yes, Ja'sequa, what is it?"
"I don't have a netbook."
"Oh, of course. All of you on the front row will have to get a netbook from the cabinet over there. Any other questions? Yes, Jackie?"
"My netbook won't boot up."
"It's probably out of power. All of you should press the side panel on your school desktop and pull out the power cords. I had hoped to have the wireless power network working today but we're shorthanded so you'll have to wait until next session to not worry about old-fashioned power cords. Anyone else? Jim, what is it?"
"Sir, I can't really remember a time when I wasn't writing down what's on my mind."
"Can you recall any early criticisms of your writing, something that sparked you to change the way you wrote?"
"No, sir."
"In that case, is there someone or some event that sparked you to write one of your early stories, some strong memory that stands out from the fuzziness of early childhood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Then write about that."
"Thank you, sir."
"No problem. And you needn't address me so formally. I'm hardly older than many of you here."
"Yes, sir."
"Anyone else? No? Then I'll leave you to your thoughts for a while. I'm going to take a break and will be back in fifteen or twenty minutes. If you have any questions, just text me on my mobile."
= = =
"Jed, hey, what's up?"
"Japonica, how are you?"
"Fine. What are you up to?"
"I'm teaching a virtual class today. As you may not know, the local school system had cancelled many regular classes due to inclement weather so I'm holding a Saturday session via 3D web cam today for my extracurricular creative writing class."
"How's that going?"
"Pretty good, so far. I'm glad this school system is up-to-date on their technology. Makes teaching students stuck at home so much easier. I guess you remember the old days, eh?"
"Don't remind me. Students showing up for Saturday makeup classes in May and June, wearing their PJs and holding protests in the hallways about child labor laws...shoo-ee. Be glad you're a 21st century instructor."
"Indeed. So what are you doing here? I thought you retired."
"I did. I am. I'm checking on the student records for my grandson. They say he'll be held back a year and I'm verifying that they got all his turned-in assignments. His computer's full of completed work but his teacher says he hasn't turned much in."
"Why not just have them send you the records?"
"Confidentiality. I'm not his parents. Grandparents don't count unless they're legal guardians, which I'm not but think I should be."
"Uh-huh. Well, I guess I better check on my students. Most of them seem dedicated..."
"It is a voluntary creative class!"
"Yes, but there's always a few who want to change the direction of the class. Future leaders and all that."
"Every class has them. Today's class clown is tomorrow's bank president!"
"If they only knew... Ah, there's a text message. Gotta go. Good luck talking the office secretary out of your grandson's records."
"Are you kidding? I taught the secretary and her daughter. She'll do anything for me."
= = =
"Joseph, I see you returned."
"Yeah, found out my other thing wasn't going to happen today."
"Very good. You'll just have to catch up with the rest of the class."
"Already done."
"Excellent. So, who wants to go first?"
"From my experience, yes. Joanna, what do you think about that?"
"Well, my stories haven't been published so I don't have the experiences you do."
"You mean no one has read your stories?"
"Well, you guys and a few of my siblings."
"And none of us has recognized ourselves in your stories?"
"None of you are in my stories."
"I see. Joseph, what about you?"
"I haven't published anything, either. In fact, I haven't written anything yet. I'm here because my friends think I should write down some of the wild stories I make up all the time."
"Uh huh. Very good. We want writers, new and old, to exercise their imaginations. Joseph, you don't have to write down anything, if you don't want. It's more important that you understand the creative process within you and then decide if you want to share that on paper or somewhere else."
"Cool. Look, I've got to go. I didn't know this was an all-day Saturday gig."
"No problem, Joseph. But I can't refund your money if you leave."
"Hey, I understand. Seeya later."
"Well, class, Joseph is a great example of what you probably were, perfectly aware of your gift of storytelling but unable to fully grasp the social implications of what that gift means to others. Everyone pull out the netbook tucked under the seat in front of you and spend the next thirty minutes writing about the first time you wrote a story of your own. Yes, Ja'sequa, what is it?"
"I don't have a netbook."
"Oh, of course. All of you on the front row will have to get a netbook from the cabinet over there. Any other questions? Yes, Jackie?"
"My netbook won't boot up."
"It's probably out of power. All of you should press the side panel on your school desktop and pull out the power cords. I had hoped to have the wireless power network working today but we're shorthanded so you'll have to wait until next session to not worry about old-fashioned power cords. Anyone else? Jim, what is it?"
"Sir, I can't really remember a time when I wasn't writing down what's on my mind."
"Can you recall any early criticisms of your writing, something that sparked you to change the way you wrote?"
"No, sir."
"In that case, is there someone or some event that sparked you to write one of your early stories, some strong memory that stands out from the fuzziness of early childhood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Then write about that."
"Thank you, sir."
"No problem. And you needn't address me so formally. I'm hardly older than many of you here."
"Yes, sir."
"Anyone else? No? Then I'll leave you to your thoughts for a while. I'm going to take a break and will be back in fifteen or twenty minutes. If you have any questions, just text me on my mobile."
= = =
"Jed, hey, what's up?"
"Japonica, how are you?"
"Fine. What are you up to?"
"I'm teaching a virtual class today. As you may not know, the local school system had cancelled many regular classes due to inclement weather so I'm holding a Saturday session via 3D web cam today for my extracurricular creative writing class."
"How's that going?"
"Pretty good, so far. I'm glad this school system is up-to-date on their technology. Makes teaching students stuck at home so much easier. I guess you remember the old days, eh?"
"Don't remind me. Students showing up for Saturday makeup classes in May and June, wearing their PJs and holding protests in the hallways about child labor laws...shoo-ee. Be glad you're a 21st century instructor."
"Indeed. So what are you doing here? I thought you retired."
"I did. I am. I'm checking on the student records for my grandson. They say he'll be held back a year and I'm verifying that they got all his turned-in assignments. His computer's full of completed work but his teacher says he hasn't turned much in."
"Why not just have them send you the records?"
"Confidentiality. I'm not his parents. Grandparents don't count unless they're legal guardians, which I'm not but think I should be."
"Uh-huh. Well, I guess I better check on my students. Most of them seem dedicated..."
"It is a voluntary creative class!"
"Yes, but there's always a few who want to change the direction of the class. Future leaders and all that."
"Every class has them. Today's class clown is tomorrow's bank president!"
"If they only knew... Ah, there's a text message. Gotta go. Good luck talking the office secretary out of your grandson's records."
"Are you kidding? I taught the secretary and her daughter. She'll do anything for me."
= = =
"Joseph, I see you returned."
"Yeah, found out my other thing wasn't going to happen today."
"Very good. You'll just have to catch up with the rest of the class."
"Already done."
"Excellent. So, who wants to go first?"
11 January 2010
Dunnes Stores NP/0879
Some days, while taking a walk through the trails and trials of my neighbourhood full of neighbours in their homes doing whatever neighbours do, I mentally move into the shoes of a person walking a different part of the planet; for instance, seeing myself and my friends walking the streets of Munich or Dublin, jogging around Lenexa or Ft. Lauderdale, exploring the towns within the towns of Toronto, sipping coconut milk in Ensenada.
Rare icicles hang from the gutter outside the window today, slender magnifying glasses or pipettes sending out drops of sunlight onto the ground out of sight.
Our nearly naked Cornish Rex cats huddle under the heated blanket in the master bedroom.
Meanwhile, people are dying, blind people are typing notes to their friends, and I check the weather conditions around the rest of this globular global glob in a blog.
Are you you or do you pretend to be the results of thousands of years of history by the people who died in your culture/family?
Do you have money to spend to influence those around you or do you depend on yourself and your culture/family to influence others?
On whom do you depend for food, clothing, shelter and leisure/happiness?
During the Internet/technology boom of the late 1990s, people created business cards with artistic designs and imaginary job titles. As I said, my title at the time was "Miracle Worker." I thought the time of unusual business cards was over until I recently received a business card with a fortune and lucky lottery number on the back. Now, I can spend my time focusing on my fortune, "Today you will receive a great surprise," and see if 4 7 12 23 26 34 -8- are my lucky numbers this week, bringing me a fortune.
A recent fortune at Tai Pan Palace told me that real estate is my future. I'm inclined to agree.
Reminds me that walking is a time for relaxing, letting my thoughts wander, playing with words and images to create fortunes for myself and others, sometimes coming up with hilarious juxtapositions that would probably not work in the real world, such as combining mandatory public education with prisons so that those students who do not perform well [cannot read] by third grade can be sent to work in the prison system and save our culture from agony and pain while dealing with the poor performers throughout the rest of their lives in public education and afterward. Would lower the cost of public education and prisons, perhaps? Don't take me seriously - just thoughts while slipping and sliding on ice this morning. Sorry, too much influence from reading the fiction of my youth, "Brave New World," "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, etc. Suppose I ought to go out to dosomething.org and make up for my non-bleedingheart thoughts (told you I'm not perfectly aligned socially - compassion is a relative value to me, knowing there are others who have loving and caring without end).
Imagine a neighbourhood where all the rooftops are painted with patterns and designs reflecting the personalities of the buildings' occupants, including adverts for those who run their own businesses, free from having to pay revenues to local governments for freedom of speech activities like this blog or a search site like Google.
When do the rights of those who live in self-sufficiency no longer matter to those who need others to depend on? I cannot say. I am not self-sufficient. Instead, I am dependent on a lot of people for me to be me right now. My investments depend on the growth of the economy. Every job I had depended on someone buying a product so that I could make a salary. I've never lived solely on the land and made my own tools, food, clothing and shelter. I am a social creature dependent on you, trusting that we make decisions that take all of us into account, increasing our opportunities to make money when people voluntarily purchase goods and services as opposed to increasing the amount of money we have to take from each other to live.
Which takes me to the next blog entry...
Rare icicles hang from the gutter outside the window today, slender magnifying glasses or pipettes sending out drops of sunlight onto the ground out of sight.
Our nearly naked Cornish Rex cats huddle under the heated blanket in the master bedroom.
Meanwhile, people are dying, blind people are typing notes to their friends, and I check the weather conditions around the rest of this globular global glob in a blog.
Are you you or do you pretend to be the results of thousands of years of history by the people who died in your culture/family?
Do you have money to spend to influence those around you or do you depend on yourself and your culture/family to influence others?
On whom do you depend for food, clothing, shelter and leisure/happiness?
During the Internet/technology boom of the late 1990s, people created business cards with artistic designs and imaginary job titles. As I said, my title at the time was "Miracle Worker." I thought the time of unusual business cards was over until I recently received a business card with a fortune and lucky lottery number on the back. Now, I can spend my time focusing on my fortune, "Today you will receive a great surprise," and see if 4 7 12 23 26 34 -8- are my lucky numbers this week, bringing me a fortune.
A recent fortune at Tai Pan Palace told me that real estate is my future. I'm inclined to agree.
Reminds me that walking is a time for relaxing, letting my thoughts wander, playing with words and images to create fortunes for myself and others, sometimes coming up with hilarious juxtapositions that would probably not work in the real world, such as combining mandatory public education with prisons so that those students who do not perform well [cannot read] by third grade can be sent to work in the prison system and save our culture from agony and pain while dealing with the poor performers throughout the rest of their lives in public education and afterward. Would lower the cost of public education and prisons, perhaps? Don't take me seriously - just thoughts while slipping and sliding on ice this morning. Sorry, too much influence from reading the fiction of my youth, "Brave New World," "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, etc. Suppose I ought to go out to dosomething.org and make up for my non-bleedingheart thoughts (told you I'm not perfectly aligned socially - compassion is a relative value to me, knowing there are others who have loving and caring without end).
Imagine a neighbourhood where all the rooftops are painted with patterns and designs reflecting the personalities of the buildings' occupants, including adverts for those who run their own businesses, free from having to pay revenues to local governments for freedom of speech activities like this blog or a search site like Google.
When do the rights of those who live in self-sufficiency no longer matter to those who need others to depend on? I cannot say. I am not self-sufficient. Instead, I am dependent on a lot of people for me to be me right now. My investments depend on the growth of the economy. Every job I had depended on someone buying a product so that I could make a salary. I've never lived solely on the land and made my own tools, food, clothing and shelter. I am a social creature dependent on you, trusting that we make decisions that take all of us into account, increasing our opportunities to make money when people voluntarily purchase goods and services as opposed to increasing the amount of money we have to take from each other to live.
Which takes me to the next blog entry...
05 January 2010
Mum Mummy Mummer
While watching the Mummers Parade, a New Year's celebratory march of outlandishly costumed street performers (imagine Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans meeting Rio's Carnival in downtown Philadelphia, PA), I flipped through some books I'd bought at the annual used reading material sale from our local library. As many of you know, libraries toss tonnes of texts into the garbage every year but some libraries try to make a little profit selling books, magazines and other physical goods in decent shape. These days, you can buy ex-library or remainder books online through resellers hanging their shingles on websites like amazon.co.uk or daedalusbooks.com.
But I'm not here to talk about books, purchased or otherwise (such as the free one I got from David Bach via email yesterday, "Start Over, Finish Rich," a reminder that you/us, the average investor, should not let short-term setbacks move you off the track of long-term financial success, a down economy means an up opportunity for you (e.g., find out more about your neighbours who need to move a house/condo quickly because of dire financial straits and scoop up a cheap rental property in the process), etc.). But maybe I am [reminder to self: write blog entry about when my newly-married, one income parents used their discretionary funds for housekeeping/au pair type services which, as empty-nesters, they now use to pay for high-speed Internet, mobile phone and cable television services - you don't need two incomes to survive in today's economy, you need wiser spending habits; teach your offspring and yourselves the value of opportunity costs].
You see, I found an interesting book. Old. Dusty. Ragged edges. The type of book that the H.P. Lovecrafts and Dan Browns of the world love to whisper about finding in sepulchral out-of-the-way digs. In other words, a book published in 2008 which never made it to the bestseller lists, ending up on piles in places like Mike's Merchandise or the local library sale.
No ISBN. No reference numbers of any kind. Presumably self-published. Donated to the library? Purchased by the library for a curious reader? I don't know.
"Dissidence and Dissonance" by Presonia La Fontaine. No picture of the author. No self-inflating biographical sketch of a home in the Hamptons and a Paris apartment where the author lives with a spouse, three children and two dogs when not traversing the planet spreading joy and happiness to others.
A slim volume. Less than 100 pages. Full of facts I haven't doublechecked and verified against what I always hope are reliable sources. Interesting reading, though, even if the facts aren't real.
You see, Presonia (guy or gal?) proposed that the world's great musical composers were or are members of a secret society dedicated to spreading the voice of freedom, seeking victories not in direct clashes with governmental authorities but through the subversive use of music to tell stories that contradict the official party lines told by their political leaders and teach others to interpret the text hidden in the musical notes.
The author ended the book with the question about whether other communication methods like spread spectrum technology are also subversive means of conversation for intelligentsia.
And now you know why I've become interested in writing musical compositions of my own. Presonia presented what s/he considered actual textual interpretations of classic music from sources all over the world, including tribal music from the Amazon, North America, Africa and Australia. Presonia also proposed that the music of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in China were specifically written to thwart government censorship there, following in the footsteps of great Russian composers before the fall of the Soviet Union, encouraging revolt not in physical attacks on the government but in dissident thinking. Presonia showed why the prepared piano was created and musical scores of John Cage were written for dissidents within the United States.
Presonia then wrote several chapters analysing the dissonance of modern music, from jazz and bebop to hip hop and rap, showing that the same symbols or "letters of the alphabet" can be found in all music, once one understands how one frequency can be both the stroke of the letter (in a chord) and a letter, too, and how rhythm has multiple purposes, like combining musical symbols onto a set of three-dimensional dice, where one has to know not only the symbol on the face of a die but also the symbols on the die's faces that you can't see and the supersymbol (or alphabetic letter) formed by the specific placement of dice in a song.
In the chapter where Presonia presented what s/he determined was the ultimate goal of music, to allow anarchy to disrupt the evil plans of world governments, I lost interest. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't see or care if there are ulterior motives of the people around me. I have no hidden agenda to achieve. My goals are announced for the world of people to see. Either you're with me or you're not with me. My purpose of seeing if Presonia's theories are true are to improve my means of communicating with those around me. If I can use music to achieve a richer, deeper sense of understanding what others are saying, then my current view of life is worth living in this moment. Otherwise, I'll find another view.
And while I investigate music as a sound-based hieroglyphic symbolic text-writing machine, I'll dig into the use of other seemingly arbitrary combinations of waveforms as more complex means of talking and thinking. I spent too much time in my youth seeing analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog chips as the only way to convert one energy state to another that I never gave much thought about analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital as the message-sending means. What if ultra-wideband is the medium and the message?
Makes me ponder the old saying, "Only the blind can truly see." I've spent and continue to spend too much time trying to believe what my eyes tell me that I forget we think and communicate using multiple methods already - voice, body language, touch, low-power "brain waves," hormones, etc.
Look at a map of the universe's gamma ray energy sources from Earth's point of view and you see why a single planet or solar system is a poor, low-resolution viewpoint of the universe around us. Like asking a jungle pygmy to describe the purpose of a nuclear power plant - the pygmy may be able to create a curative salve with the leaf of a rare orchid but could not, by looking at the nuclear plant, know how to compute the decay rate of radioactive material.
All these years I spent studying written languages, worrying myself about grammar and sentence structure, watching as linguists try to assemble the set of "original" words spoken by our species... and here in front of me has been the primary or aboriginal language all along: the sound waves themselves. For those who are already in the know, I ask your patience as I come up to speed. For those of you already using multiple waveforms to communicate, I commend you. For those of you who know the extrauniversal conversation tools, I look forward to meeting with you soon.
To know I am here only because you are / exist and I am not here because I do not exist, all while I discover ways of being me I never thought possible is really what my life is all about. And only a few days ago I thought these words were all I had! Instead, I see (blindly and lately) that how I talk to you, my friends, is just as important as what I say.
Have a great day!
But I'm not here to talk about books, purchased or otherwise (such as the free one I got from David Bach via email yesterday, "Start Over, Finish Rich," a reminder that you/us, the average investor, should not let short-term setbacks move you off the track of long-term financial success, a down economy means an up opportunity for you (e.g., find out more about your neighbours who need to move a house/condo quickly because of dire financial straits and scoop up a cheap rental property in the process), etc.). But maybe I am [reminder to self: write blog entry about when my newly-married, one income parents used their discretionary funds for housekeeping/au pair type services which, as empty-nesters, they now use to pay for high-speed Internet, mobile phone and cable television services - you don't need two incomes to survive in today's economy, you need wiser spending habits; teach your offspring and yourselves the value of opportunity costs].
You see, I found an interesting book. Old. Dusty. Ragged edges. The type of book that the H.P. Lovecrafts and Dan Browns of the world love to whisper about finding in sepulchral out-of-the-way digs. In other words, a book published in 2008 which never made it to the bestseller lists, ending up on piles in places like Mike's Merchandise or the local library sale.
No ISBN. No reference numbers of any kind. Presumably self-published. Donated to the library? Purchased by the library for a curious reader? I don't know.
"Dissidence and Dissonance" by Presonia La Fontaine. No picture of the author. No self-inflating biographical sketch of a home in the Hamptons and a Paris apartment where the author lives with a spouse, three children and two dogs when not traversing the planet spreading joy and happiness to others.
A slim volume. Less than 100 pages. Full of facts I haven't doublechecked and verified against what I always hope are reliable sources. Interesting reading, though, even if the facts aren't real.
You see, Presonia (guy or gal?) proposed that the world's great musical composers were or are members of a secret society dedicated to spreading the voice of freedom, seeking victories not in direct clashes with governmental authorities but through the subversive use of music to tell stories that contradict the official party lines told by their political leaders and teach others to interpret the text hidden in the musical notes.
The author ended the book with the question about whether other communication methods like spread spectrum technology are also subversive means of conversation for intelligentsia.
And now you know why I've become interested in writing musical compositions of my own. Presonia presented what s/he considered actual textual interpretations of classic music from sources all over the world, including tribal music from the Amazon, North America, Africa and Australia. Presonia also proposed that the music of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in China were specifically written to thwart government censorship there, following in the footsteps of great Russian composers before the fall of the Soviet Union, encouraging revolt not in physical attacks on the government but in dissident thinking. Presonia showed why the prepared piano was created and musical scores of John Cage were written for dissidents within the United States.
Presonia then wrote several chapters analysing the dissonance of modern music, from jazz and bebop to hip hop and rap, showing that the same symbols or "letters of the alphabet" can be found in all music, once one understands how one frequency can be both the stroke of the letter (in a chord) and a letter, too, and how rhythm has multiple purposes, like combining musical symbols onto a set of three-dimensional dice, where one has to know not only the symbol on the face of a die but also the symbols on the die's faces that you can't see and the supersymbol (or alphabetic letter) formed by the specific placement of dice in a song.
In the chapter where Presonia presented what s/he determined was the ultimate goal of music, to allow anarchy to disrupt the evil plans of world governments, I lost interest. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't see or care if there are ulterior motives of the people around me. I have no hidden agenda to achieve. My goals are announced for the world of people to see. Either you're with me or you're not with me. My purpose of seeing if Presonia's theories are true are to improve my means of communicating with those around me. If I can use music to achieve a richer, deeper sense of understanding what others are saying, then my current view of life is worth living in this moment. Otherwise, I'll find another view.
And while I investigate music as a sound-based hieroglyphic symbolic text-writing machine, I'll dig into the use of other seemingly arbitrary combinations of waveforms as more complex means of talking and thinking. I spent too much time in my youth seeing analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog chips as the only way to convert one energy state to another that I never gave much thought about analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital as the message-sending means. What if ultra-wideband is the medium and the message?
Makes me ponder the old saying, "Only the blind can truly see." I've spent and continue to spend too much time trying to believe what my eyes tell me that I forget we think and communicate using multiple methods already - voice, body language, touch, low-power "brain waves," hormones, etc.
Look at a map of the universe's gamma ray energy sources from Earth's point of view and you see why a single planet or solar system is a poor, low-resolution viewpoint of the universe around us. Like asking a jungle pygmy to describe the purpose of a nuclear power plant - the pygmy may be able to create a curative salve with the leaf of a rare orchid but could not, by looking at the nuclear plant, know how to compute the decay rate of radioactive material.
All these years I spent studying written languages, worrying myself about grammar and sentence structure, watching as linguists try to assemble the set of "original" words spoken by our species... and here in front of me has been the primary or aboriginal language all along: the sound waves themselves. For those who are already in the know, I ask your patience as I come up to speed. For those of you already using multiple waveforms to communicate, I commend you. For those of you who know the extrauniversal conversation tools, I look forward to meeting with you soon.
To know I am here only because you are / exist and I am not here because I do not exist, all while I discover ways of being me I never thought possible is really what my life is all about. And only a few days ago I thought these words were all I had! Instead, I see (blindly and lately) that how I talk to you, my friends, is just as important as what I say.
Have a great day!
25 December 2009
Happiness is a warm gulp of humble pie
The day has arrived - the final entry in the blog "Life In The Cove." When I decided to start blogging many, many years ago, I found nothing of interest to write about; that is, I wondered why anyone, including me, would want to read what I had written electronically.
I grew up with No. 2 pencils and dotted lines on which we were to practice our language writing skills. I and my classmates "graduated" up to solid blue lines packed more closely together, using pencils, mechanical and wood-wrapped, along with pens to practice our skills at reciting more than alphabet soup icons. Some of us used typewriters at home and by our 9th year in formal schooling we were able to attend classes dedicated to the click and clack of mechanistic writing, pressing our fingers down in unison to learn how to express our primate intelligence without looking at what we pushed our fingers upon. In-school and home computing skills were limited to those of us with access to our parents' (primarily our fathers at that time) workplace electronic gizmos, including TTY machines and mainframe computer dummy terminals.
A few of us handbuilt computers in our parents' basements or garages while our contemporaries handbuilt jacked-up street racers or offroad trailblazers, all of us applying our burgeoning project management skills, multitasking before we knew what that meant.
As our experiments in the give-and-take of social intercourse progressed, we learned who we were and who we could become. We did not weave running commentaries into the fabric of life - we expressed our concerns in the moment, with both the concerns and the moment vanishing into the ether with nary a trace.
Therefore, when I first started a blog, it felt foreign to me, like swapping out my shoes for someone else's, mixing pairs and then putting a left-footed sandal on my right foot and a right-footed boot on my left foot. Why would I or someone else want to read about putting my stinky, old feet into those shoes of those who'd walked paths I knew not where?
Why? Good question. I am past the age of reason, the age of understanding, wandering through the age of wisdom trying to remember where I put the note that told me which ribbon I tied around my finger to remind me where I put the jacket that contains the digital notetaker on which I recorded where I last put the key to the door to get out of here.
Words and images painted with words. Pictures without pigment. Thoughts without electropopneurochemical traces connecting the lines of ink.
Asking a two-dimensional circle, triangle or square to imagine a three-dimensional world. Asking a cube to imagine a Mandelbrot set growing and shrinking with time.
We social creatures keep experimenting with our social circles, circling around each other like whirling dervishes. We mix and match our established food sources, we reinvent our exoskeletal coverings, we recombine molecule chains - we socialise in the moment momentarily momentous.
In other other words, we will blog for a while until the next new thing comes along. I'm moving on to that next new thing, blogging an interesting experiment in our experimentation but losing interest to me. I know we will socialise in another multidimensional manner soon.
Be the lead sled dog or the view doesn't change. I think that's the phrase someone posted long ago.
Data, information, knowledge, wisdom. You work with all of these in your life. Most of us find ways to generate labor credits or barter exchange chits with data, information, knowledge, and/or wisdom. Some of you will use and have used blog or bloglike states of being (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) to generate data, information, knowledge, and/or wisdom. Thus, you depend on others to generate your income source.
Others find their expanded understanding of the universe through electronic socialising via blogs - humourous tales, DIY instructions, relationship advice, home decorating tips, celebrity status updates, sporting event observations, scientific discoveries, political gossiping, etc.
Being here, I wandered in your shoes for a while. I saw the universe through your eyes. I felt the exclamations of wonderment, the thrill of victory, the announcements of new chemical substances, the insights into what life is really all about. The truth is not out there. The truth is in here and everywhere else at the same time.
"The truth." What a phrase. I've known the truth most of my life, starting (as I've said here more than once) around age five. Some of you knew the truth at a younger age. Our bodies tell us that we're bodies if we're tuned to the right body frequency and are listening. We live with this truth every moment, putting our knowledge of the truth into action in whatever way we want. Our atomic composition gears us for some sets of actions more easily than others.
My body is tuned for a set of actions that include this writing, easily exercised but not perfectly so. I am also tuned for other activities, activities that I am now ready to take, taking me away from this blog.
Writing (and in this instance, blogging) is a simple representation of what our bodies are doing in the moment. When you can break down the complex interaction of energy states that constitute writing and see the simple components that make up this moment, then you are ready for the next stage of living, weaving patterns that make writing look like drawing a simple straight line. At that point, writing (and/or blogging) becomes too simple a means of communicating with the rest of the universe around what you think of as you.
I am stopping this blog because I had let it feed my vanity, building up a sense of self that is not what (or who) I discovered I am when I discovered I am not. I am slipping out of this people space to enjoy merging with the much vaster superset of the universe that contains no dense energy states we call people. I will continue to walk this planet, eating other living beings - plant and animal, as we call them. I will converse with people and barter with them. At the same time, I will seek spaces where this "I", this "Rick," is unimportant in the moment, so that the bright, magnetic, moth-to-the-flame world of people becomes less attractive to me, allowing me to step out of the light pollution and see the dots of light of other suns in our galaxy and locally other living things or densely grouped states of energy on this planet.
Sure, I'm a social creature, designed to socialise with what I've been trained to think of as my fellow species. But we can also socialise with any part of the universe we want. Thanks for spending time with me here. I appreciate your interaction with me.
However, I'm ready to interact with as much of the rest of the universe as my time on this planet will allow, 14000+ days we'd say. I ensure I will move on by closing this blog and erasing my purposeful presence on the Internet, devoting my time and energy to other places. We'll communicate with each other using newer methods, I'm sure - just don't look for someone named TreeTrunkRick. Although he exists in person and will answer to someone calling out his common name, he's thinking about and acting on the next big thing in molecule-interaction techniques, years ahead to a time when blogging will be looked at like we look at our species in prehistoric times.
Meanwhile, I've got to fix the underground geothermal piping that keeps the automobile hydrogen battery charging systems running at full efficiency and see if our subway maglev travel channel network is completely operational so I can get from here to there more quickly - regular over-the-road travel is too antiquated for what I need to get accomplished and rocket motor-based air travel not yet ready.
This addendum to the book of life called "Life In The Cove" is officially wrapped up. Have a great day!
I grew up with No. 2 pencils and dotted lines on which we were to practice our language writing skills. I and my classmates "graduated" up to solid blue lines packed more closely together, using pencils, mechanical and wood-wrapped, along with pens to practice our skills at reciting more than alphabet soup icons. Some of us used typewriters at home and by our 9th year in formal schooling we were able to attend classes dedicated to the click and clack of mechanistic writing, pressing our fingers down in unison to learn how to express our primate intelligence without looking at what we pushed our fingers upon. In-school and home computing skills were limited to those of us with access to our parents' (primarily our fathers at that time) workplace electronic gizmos, including TTY machines and mainframe computer dummy terminals.
A few of us handbuilt computers in our parents' basements or garages while our contemporaries handbuilt jacked-up street racers or offroad trailblazers, all of us applying our burgeoning project management skills, multitasking before we knew what that meant.
As our experiments in the give-and-take of social intercourse progressed, we learned who we were and who we could become. We did not weave running commentaries into the fabric of life - we expressed our concerns in the moment, with both the concerns and the moment vanishing into the ether with nary a trace.
Therefore, when I first started a blog, it felt foreign to me, like swapping out my shoes for someone else's, mixing pairs and then putting a left-footed sandal on my right foot and a right-footed boot on my left foot. Why would I or someone else want to read about putting my stinky, old feet into those shoes of those who'd walked paths I knew not where?
Why? Good question. I am past the age of reason, the age of understanding, wandering through the age of wisdom trying to remember where I put the note that told me which ribbon I tied around my finger to remind me where I put the jacket that contains the digital notetaker on which I recorded where I last put the key to the door to get out of here.
Words and images painted with words. Pictures without pigment. Thoughts without electropopneurochemical traces connecting the lines of ink.
Asking a two-dimensional circle, triangle or square to imagine a three-dimensional world. Asking a cube to imagine a Mandelbrot set growing and shrinking with time.
We social creatures keep experimenting with our social circles, circling around each other like whirling dervishes. We mix and match our established food sources, we reinvent our exoskeletal coverings, we recombine molecule chains - we socialise in the moment momentarily momentous.
In other other words, we will blog for a while until the next new thing comes along. I'm moving on to that next new thing, blogging an interesting experiment in our experimentation but losing interest to me. I know we will socialise in another multidimensional manner soon.
Be the lead sled dog or the view doesn't change. I think that's the phrase someone posted long ago.
Data, information, knowledge, wisdom. You work with all of these in your life. Most of us find ways to generate labor credits or barter exchange chits with data, information, knowledge, and/or wisdom. Some of you will use and have used blog or bloglike states of being (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) to generate data, information, knowledge, and/or wisdom. Thus, you depend on others to generate your income source.
Others find their expanded understanding of the universe through electronic socialising via blogs - humourous tales, DIY instructions, relationship advice, home decorating tips, celebrity status updates, sporting event observations, scientific discoveries, political gossiping, etc.
Being here, I wandered in your shoes for a while. I saw the universe through your eyes. I felt the exclamations of wonderment, the thrill of victory, the announcements of new chemical substances, the insights into what life is really all about. The truth is not out there. The truth is in here and everywhere else at the same time.
"The truth." What a phrase. I've known the truth most of my life, starting (as I've said here more than once) around age five. Some of you knew the truth at a younger age. Our bodies tell us that we're bodies if we're tuned to the right body frequency and are listening. We live with this truth every moment, putting our knowledge of the truth into action in whatever way we want. Our atomic composition gears us for some sets of actions more easily than others.
My body is tuned for a set of actions that include this writing, easily exercised but not perfectly so. I am also tuned for other activities, activities that I am now ready to take, taking me away from this blog.
Writing (and in this instance, blogging) is a simple representation of what our bodies are doing in the moment. When you can break down the complex interaction of energy states that constitute writing and see the simple components that make up this moment, then you are ready for the next stage of living, weaving patterns that make writing look like drawing a simple straight line. At that point, writing (and/or blogging) becomes too simple a means of communicating with the rest of the universe around what you think of as you.
I am stopping this blog because I had let it feed my vanity, building up a sense of self that is not what (or who) I discovered I am when I discovered I am not. I am slipping out of this people space to enjoy merging with the much vaster superset of the universe that contains no dense energy states we call people. I will continue to walk this planet, eating other living beings - plant and animal, as we call them. I will converse with people and barter with them. At the same time, I will seek spaces where this "I", this "Rick," is unimportant in the moment, so that the bright, magnetic, moth-to-the-flame world of people becomes less attractive to me, allowing me to step out of the light pollution and see the dots of light of other suns in our galaxy and locally other living things or densely grouped states of energy on this planet.
Sure, I'm a social creature, designed to socialise with what I've been trained to think of as my fellow species. But we can also socialise with any part of the universe we want. Thanks for spending time with me here. I appreciate your interaction with me.
However, I'm ready to interact with as much of the rest of the universe as my time on this planet will allow, 14000+ days we'd say. I ensure I will move on by closing this blog and erasing my purposeful presence on the Internet, devoting my time and energy to other places. We'll communicate with each other using newer methods, I'm sure - just don't look for someone named TreeTrunkRick. Although he exists in person and will answer to someone calling out his common name, he's thinking about and acting on the next big thing in molecule-interaction techniques, years ahead to a time when blogging will be looked at like we look at our species in prehistoric times.
Meanwhile, I've got to fix the underground geothermal piping that keeps the automobile hydrogen battery charging systems running at full efficiency and see if our subway maglev travel channel network is completely operational so I can get from here to there more quickly - regular over-the-road travel is too antiquated for what I need to get accomplished and rocket motor-based air travel not yet ready.
This addendum to the book of life called "Life In The Cove" is officially wrapped up. Have a great day!
25 November 2009
जवाब एक फूल अभी तक खिला
एक शब्द कैसे पा सकते हैं जब शब्द शब्द नहीं हैं? आप एक क्षेत्र के दो पहलू पर दो अंक कैसे देख सकता है? कैसे अंग्रेजी हैं bubbly लगता है और नहीं भारतीय ध्वनि बबली जैसे प्रलाप? जब एक हाथ छू नहीं है? जब सवालों का पर्याप्त नहीं हैं?
30 October 2009
Going Pains
How connected do you feel to your surroundings? According to the ol' seven effects of habitual people, we go through three stages - dependence, independence and interdependence. Makes me think of Depends. Which takes me to the adverts which point out men's need to release bladder contents on frequent occasions. Do any of you find yourself desiring to pee more often after seeing those actors looking for the nearest toilette?
Speaking of affective habits, are you a leader, a coach, a mentor, a manager, a supervisor, a parent, an innovator, an inventor, or a visionary?
Do you encourage people to overcome adversity or do you throw obstacles in people's way? Do you try to accomplish one with the other?
I have one life to live here on this planet with you. I don't have time to waste on timewasters or busy work. I don't like assigning homework for homework's sake or officework to fill empty spaces in a schedule. I look at another person and ask myself what it takes to improve that person's interaction with me and/or others. Then, and only then, do I decide as the person in charge how to address the use of time between us.
Do I know what's best for us? No. Do I make wild guesses sometimes? No. I make wild guesses most of the time. But I base my guesses on what I deem to be beneficial for us.
Leadership is easy. You put yourself on a pedestal to see what's going on and then put everyone on a higher pedestal than you. You lead for their sakes, not yours, but you don't put your life aside. You lead for the whole group, including yourself. There's time for every individual to make valuable input in the workplace, sports team, group of friends, family, crowd, political gathering, you name it.
And sometimes, you decide to walk away from the situation. You realize you are not the leader the group needs to succeed. You put your personality aside and say you will lead a team to victory somewhere else. A decision easier said than done. I know. I've only done it two or three times in my life and it hurt my pride every time.
We're influenced by adverts subliminally. We catch ourselves going to the toilet two or three times in the middle of the night when we don't have the urge or don't need to simply because our thoughts are looking for similarity and found a connection to actors portraying bladder control problems. When leading a team, we influence our teams subliminally. Sometimes, unspoken thoughts circulate and influence a team when we're not paying attention. A leader spends time paying attention to the unspoken thoughts and deciding where the subliminal influence needs to be applied for team success. Do you see the equivalent of team behaviour linked to adverts over which you have no control? Leaders in the emotional realm - religion or industrial psychology, for instance - use external influences all the time. They deliberately tie social trends into their work. Great leaders in any field do the same.
Am I great leader? I've had moments, flashes, of greatness but I'm not completely interdependent. Often, I see the independent self in the wonders of the universe and believe I am alone in my beliefs. When I realize I am not alone in my beliefs, I feel a great understanding of interdependence and then share that understanding with and between others, sometimes when I'm leading, sometimes when I'm neither leading nor following.
This blog is my outreach of understanding my interdependence with my species. Some days I don't feel like typing here but most days I feel an overwhelming desire to share myself and what I've learned from others with you. Of course, we're all the same way. That's why we create blogs, buy portable media devices and lose track of time on social networking websites.
You see what I'm saying? We all have the potential to be great leaders. The best way to get there is to not see yourself as a leader or as great. See yourself as yourself responsible to yourself in others.
Every past was a future. Every solution was a problem. Every leader was a inquisitive baby wetting its clothes. We all influence someone and someone influences us.
Speaking of which, the squirrels and chipmunks roaming the forest floor are making me hungry. Time for lunch! Talk to you great leaders later on.
Speaking of affective habits, are you a leader, a coach, a mentor, a manager, a supervisor, a parent, an innovator, an inventor, or a visionary?
Do you encourage people to overcome adversity or do you throw obstacles in people's way? Do you try to accomplish one with the other?
I have one life to live here on this planet with you. I don't have time to waste on timewasters or busy work. I don't like assigning homework for homework's sake or officework to fill empty spaces in a schedule. I look at another person and ask myself what it takes to improve that person's interaction with me and/or others. Then, and only then, do I decide as the person in charge how to address the use of time between us.
Do I know what's best for us? No. Do I make wild guesses sometimes? No. I make wild guesses most of the time. But I base my guesses on what I deem to be beneficial for us.
Leadership is easy. You put yourself on a pedestal to see what's going on and then put everyone on a higher pedestal than you. You lead for their sakes, not yours, but you don't put your life aside. You lead for the whole group, including yourself. There's time for every individual to make valuable input in the workplace, sports team, group of friends, family, crowd, political gathering, you name it.
And sometimes, you decide to walk away from the situation. You realize you are not the leader the group needs to succeed. You put your personality aside and say you will lead a team to victory somewhere else. A decision easier said than done. I know. I've only done it two or three times in my life and it hurt my pride every time.
We're influenced by adverts subliminally. We catch ourselves going to the toilet two or three times in the middle of the night when we don't have the urge or don't need to simply because our thoughts are looking for similarity and found a connection to actors portraying bladder control problems. When leading a team, we influence our teams subliminally. Sometimes, unspoken thoughts circulate and influence a team when we're not paying attention. A leader spends time paying attention to the unspoken thoughts and deciding where the subliminal influence needs to be applied for team success. Do you see the equivalent of team behaviour linked to adverts over which you have no control? Leaders in the emotional realm - religion or industrial psychology, for instance - use external influences all the time. They deliberately tie social trends into their work. Great leaders in any field do the same.
Am I great leader? I've had moments, flashes, of greatness but I'm not completely interdependent. Often, I see the independent self in the wonders of the universe and believe I am alone in my beliefs. When I realize I am not alone in my beliefs, I feel a great understanding of interdependence and then share that understanding with and between others, sometimes when I'm leading, sometimes when I'm neither leading nor following.
This blog is my outreach of understanding my interdependence with my species. Some days I don't feel like typing here but most days I feel an overwhelming desire to share myself and what I've learned from others with you. Of course, we're all the same way. That's why we create blogs, buy portable media devices and lose track of time on social networking websites.
You see what I'm saying? We all have the potential to be great leaders. The best way to get there is to not see yourself as a leader or as great. See yourself as yourself responsible to yourself in others.
Every past was a future. Every solution was a problem. Every leader was a inquisitive baby wetting its clothes. We all influence someone and someone influences us.
Speaking of which, the squirrels and chipmunks roaming the forest floor are making me hungry. Time for lunch! Talk to you great leaders later on.
01 October 2009
News You Can Use
Old words. Perspective. Change. Reality. Hope. For millions of years, mammals have roamed this planet, or so we understand our fossil history to tell us. For billions of years, life as we define it has occupied this planet. We do not know with certainty (that is, through the eyes of our species) so we let ourselves treat the record of the growth of this planet as an open debate, using doubt, logic, reason, emotion, belief and faith to move the debate forward.
I am a student of the past, especially of history that is useful to my existence today. Most of the information I need comes from observing living specimens but I also gather important data from recently dead members - those in the last few decades, centuries and millenniums (or millennia, if you prefer).
I accept that I will never know with certainty that I am a Being's personal plaything, part of a Being's belly button, or just a random output of the complexity of a universe unaware of the meaning of life. I do not need to know why I am here. I accept the fact that I am here and received ethical/moral training from others who held belief and faith in one reason why we're here.
My concern is what I'm going to do now that I'm here, when I will act upon information I have and where I will see the results of my actions reflected back to me.
Today was a work day for me. I replaced a set of leaking parts in a bathroom sink and used a hand scythe to cut down the overgrowth that blocks the view of our vehicles when leaving the driveway to enter the country road.
After finishing the work and eating a late lunch, I stood on the front porch and looked at the front yard. I kicked empty nut shells and watched insects flying in the air. An insect larva crawled across the handrail. I thought about my friends, family and business associates.
I realized that I will never be more than one person. I am not Superman. I am not able to split into multiple people and go around saving the world. I am me, happily so. But I am more than me. I am the people around me, the people I know and the history of the people I've studied. Thus I am Superspecies. Ubersapiens. Able to push over mountains and build skyscrapers in a single bound.
A friend of mine runs a plumbing repair and supply business for a couple of owners. He agonizes over whether he should take the leap and start his own business. We joked about the recent plumbing problems on the International Space Station and if there was a future for his business off-world. Plumbers In Space!! Crapman and Plunger Boy to the rescue.
We're only as strong as we think we are. Sometimes we're stronger than we think we are. I agonize over the suppression of those seeking liberty in the form of political democracy (Iran, Guinea, etc.). I know that change and hope are intertwined. I know that to succeed in the market you've got to upset the apple cart (emptying it through sales or emptying for something more beneficial to you and your customers). We overcome resistance to change by recognizing the change and its effects/affect on others, then moving to give beneficence to all involved, both the changers and the changed.
I have spent the last couple of weeks focused mainly on local inhabitants to see who I am and what I am capable of. I cannot build a story for characters to interact and succeed if I don't know what they/we are really made of.
I look at the world economy and wonder if our typical definition of economic strata - lower, middle and upper classes - is sufficient to get our species to the next level of success. If we continue to stress the differences, then we build exaggerated expectations for those moving between economic levels. I have lived and worked with people from one end of the economic spectrum to the other (although I have never personally lived long-term in extreme poverty or extreme wealth) - in all cases, I met people who had different motivations for living that were contrary to their economic and/or social structure.
We talk of envy and jealousy in relation to what we or others have. We will always have these characteristics in one form or another, integral to our genetic material as they are. If we define a perspective of perfection in how to live out the dreams of hope in our thoughts, treating ourselves and others with actions toward meeting that perfect image, then we can mute the effect that envy and jealousy have by sharing the successes our near-perfect actions achieve.
As our future plays out in front of us, we'll integrate our beliefs in one form or another, building pockets of resistance to change. My goals of perfection include looking for those pockets and seeing where resistance is necessary for our species to succeed and where resistance is detrimental to our success. I do not care what the pockets stand for or who lives in those pockets. Those people have their lives to lead. I love the people and accept they've found ways to live their lives with success for them in one form or another. I examine their successes and see if there's a way to spread the news of their success to the rest of our species. I examine their failures or negative aspects of their lives the same way.
My species is my species. We have have been here for millions of years or thousands of years but the fact is that we're here now, today, and tomorrow. History can teach us to move forward and history can hold us back. I get bored if I stand in place for too long. I want to move forward. I expect the characters in my stories will want the same thing. Time to pick up my story again and leave the local inhabitants to appear like product placement subplots/storylines woven into major shows on the tellie.
I am a student of the past, especially of history that is useful to my existence today. Most of the information I need comes from observing living specimens but I also gather important data from recently dead members - those in the last few decades, centuries and millenniums (or millennia, if you prefer).
I accept that I will never know with certainty that I am a Being's personal plaything, part of a Being's belly button, or just a random output of the complexity of a universe unaware of the meaning of life. I do not need to know why I am here. I accept the fact that I am here and received ethical/moral training from others who held belief and faith in one reason why we're here.
My concern is what I'm going to do now that I'm here, when I will act upon information I have and where I will see the results of my actions reflected back to me.
Today was a work day for me. I replaced a set of leaking parts in a bathroom sink and used a hand scythe to cut down the overgrowth that blocks the view of our vehicles when leaving the driveway to enter the country road.
After finishing the work and eating a late lunch, I stood on the front porch and looked at the front yard. I kicked empty nut shells and watched insects flying in the air. An insect larva crawled across the handrail. I thought about my friends, family and business associates.
I realized that I will never be more than one person. I am not Superman. I am not able to split into multiple people and go around saving the world. I am me, happily so. But I am more than me. I am the people around me, the people I know and the history of the people I've studied. Thus I am Superspecies. Ubersapiens. Able to push over mountains and build skyscrapers in a single bound.
A friend of mine runs a plumbing repair and supply business for a couple of owners. He agonizes over whether he should take the leap and start his own business. We joked about the recent plumbing problems on the International Space Station and if there was a future for his business off-world. Plumbers In Space!! Crapman and Plunger Boy to the rescue.
We're only as strong as we think we are. Sometimes we're stronger than we think we are. I agonize over the suppression of those seeking liberty in the form of political democracy (Iran, Guinea, etc.). I know that change and hope are intertwined. I know that to succeed in the market you've got to upset the apple cart (emptying it through sales or emptying for something more beneficial to you and your customers). We overcome resistance to change by recognizing the change and its effects/affect on others, then moving to give beneficence to all involved, both the changers and the changed.
I have spent the last couple of weeks focused mainly on local inhabitants to see who I am and what I am capable of. I cannot build a story for characters to interact and succeed if I don't know what they/we are really made of.
I look at the world economy and wonder if our typical definition of economic strata - lower, middle and upper classes - is sufficient to get our species to the next level of success. If we continue to stress the differences, then we build exaggerated expectations for those moving between economic levels. I have lived and worked with people from one end of the economic spectrum to the other (although I have never personally lived long-term in extreme poverty or extreme wealth) - in all cases, I met people who had different motivations for living that were contrary to their economic and/or social structure.
We talk of envy and jealousy in relation to what we or others have. We will always have these characteristics in one form or another, integral to our genetic material as they are. If we define a perspective of perfection in how to live out the dreams of hope in our thoughts, treating ourselves and others with actions toward meeting that perfect image, then we can mute the effect that envy and jealousy have by sharing the successes our near-perfect actions achieve.
As our future plays out in front of us, we'll integrate our beliefs in one form or another, building pockets of resistance to change. My goals of perfection include looking for those pockets and seeing where resistance is necessary for our species to succeed and where resistance is detrimental to our success. I do not care what the pockets stand for or who lives in those pockets. Those people have their lives to lead. I love the people and accept they've found ways to live their lives with success for them in one form or another. I examine their successes and see if there's a way to spread the news of their success to the rest of our species. I examine their failures or negative aspects of their lives the same way.
My species is my species. We have have been here for millions of years or thousands of years but the fact is that we're here now, today, and tomorrow. History can teach us to move forward and history can hold us back. I get bored if I stand in place for too long. I want to move forward. I expect the characters in my stories will want the same thing. Time to pick up my story again and leave the local inhabitants to appear like product placement subplots/storylines woven into major shows on the tellie.
27 September 2009
Let's Do The Time Warp Again
The only reason I'm here is you. I love you too much. You are me. I am you. We are each other. You've heard me say it once, twice, three times and lately...well, I love you.
I cannot live without you. I would hope to hear you say the same thing but I'm not conceited enough to believe such a hope. Instead, I act upon the belief.
I will shout it one more time. I LOVE YOU.
So quit acting like children and behave like reasonable members of our species who love one another. I'm not asking for a yippie hippie love fest. I'm talking about practical, everyday, repetitious sweat, toil, joy and giving without expectation of receipt in kind.
From the recent Pittsburgh slugfest and UN speech contest I've had enough words to want to wash my own mouth out with soap even though I didn't say anything bad or socially unacceptable.
I'm just a regular guy, with regular fears and doubts. I know this planet is big enough for billions of us. Big and small at the same time, just like all our fears and doubts.
I'm angry right now. I'm tired of playing games with certain ones of you who think there's a hidden agenda out there with people out to get you. Let me tell you a secret that you already know - if you believe in ghosts, you'll see ghosts. Quit seeing ghosts!
I wanted to write a satirical skit for the next blog entry. Over the past two days I watched our body gestures and heard our tones of voice to better understand how the world of our species is doing, listening to the undertone of normality that keeps us linked together. I skipped two days of writing to talk with people (but didn't skip the habit of recording their names and workplaces for later recognition here).
I had already picked up some information early last week that told me our leaders, some elected freely, some elected in questionable circumstances and some self-appointed, were going to publicly disagree with one another to serve their self-interests (self-interests both at the individual level and the country level).
Pardon my bluntness but fuck your self-interests. I will not tolerate that crap. You have no self-interests anymore. This is my planet as well as yours. Your personal problems are mine, too. If you have a problem in your country, then it's a problem with me and my associates. We have no more patience for your self-pity and whining!
I have no desire to topple governments because the resultant chaos is beyond my control. But I do have associates who are no longer standing by, who want to move this body electric into the next phase of our species, beyond the petty "my belt is bigger than your belt" locker room bragging.
You want to show patriotism? You want to have pride? Then put aside your differences for a moment and listen.
There are seven billion of us listening and watching each other. We have mouths to feed. We have jobs to fill. We have jobs to create. We have family to care for. We may think we have no one who cares for us. We are skin and fingernails and muscles and bones and blood and brain. Every single one of us. We may have unique characteristics. We may or may not have living relatives but we're alive. You are within less than a planet's distance from the other seven billion of you.
I did not want to come here tonight but I love you too much to let you keep arguing with each other. I will not accept blind patriotism or grandstanding.
Wherever you are - sitting, standing, walking, chewing, typing - tell someone nearby that you love that person. Use your comfortable means of saying it. For instance, if you're sitting at a restaurant, make eye contact with the server and sincerely thank the server for being there to serve your food. If you are alone, tell yourself you love yourself. If you feel uncomfortable expressing your love for the person near you, let yourself be uncomfortable. You may be ready to face an opponent on a sports field or the field of battle but tell the person facing you you love that person, anyway.
Love in this sense is not about liking the other person or accepting the other person's lifestyle. Love is saying we're the same species, sharing the same planet.
I do not like what some of my leaders say, or what leaders of other groups or countries say and do, but I am loving them because they are me. I want us to live. I want you to live. A simple kind of love.
Your life is not mine. You don't have to like me. You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to belief you love me. I don't care. I don't live your life. You don't live mine. But we are still the same species. Let's think together for a moment.
The amount of arable land on this planet is limited. The amount of fresh water on this planet is limited. We have to share this land and water together, not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow but today.
So quit with the hot air and empty promises. Stop calling each other names. Feel free to compete in the realm of trade (or the world of ideas, if you will) because we all need newness to feel alive.
No more saber rattling. No more barriers. No more "I know someone's out to do me wrong." Admit the truth. We have this one planet to share between us.
I know some of you want the world for yourselves. I know some of you want the biggest, the fastest, the greatest, the most unique [name your favorite hobby/pastime/desire]. These feelings will drive you to extreme behaviour in your quest to conquer these feelings. No matter what, we still live on this planet together right now.
Thus, let's see the world as one big rock we're standing or sitting on, not little islands or fiefdoms. The breath I take today may well be on the other side of this planet before you know it. The water I drink will exit my bladder, evaporate and rain somewhere else next week. Thus, you're breathing and pissing on me right now. That's the way it's always been and the way's it's going to be.
I love you. I wanted to spend two months away from this blog but dissatisfied with the semantics of the international leaders the past few days, with messages of malcontent, I decided I love you and if my leaders and your leaders are going to waste my breath with negative words, I wanted to break my silence and tell you I love you because I don't think we have time to waste on listening to misguided leaders.
You are more important to me than anyone else I know. My planet is your planet. I have no strength in myself. My strength is in you. I depend on you every second of every living day. I'm tired of hate-filled language and action. I can't lift all of you on my shoulders but we can lift each other up, one set of arms at a time. I just told my wife, the person nearest me, that I love her. Before that, I told her mother that I love her and before that I told my parents that I love them. I told people this weekend that I love them even though I didn't know them - I told them with my eyes and my actions in the best way I knew how in the moment. I felt vulnerable and out of sorts at times but I reached out of my comfort zone to tell them. I put aside social structures and stereotypes to talk to people around me.
I don't care about nuclear disarmament treaties, border wars or illegal substance distribution routes. I care about you. The only way we're going to overcome our destructive habits is to rise above ourselves and see us as one species. It's not going be easy. It isn't easy. We do it one moment at a time. Like this one, the moment when I wanted to concentrate on some used books I purchased and not think about computers or new technology for a few days, but comments from people I heard this weekend bothered me and piqued my curiosity to see why they were throwing out such strange ideas. A quick lookup on the Internet told me why - they were responding to the condensed soundbites of leaders' speeches.
Now you know why I dislike advert-driven news sources. In previous decades, that was the only large-scale, cost-effective means of getting information to the masses. Now, with tailored news and divided masses, people are getting news that fits their preconceived views, driven by narrower and narrower advertising revenue streams. News providers are screaming louder and building up false enemies at an alarming rate, all for bigger audiences and bigger paychecks. They cater hate like candy, oblivious to or unconcerned about the species at large.
I break my silence to call on others to help pull down the barriers these hucksters put up. Let's reach out and shake hands. Pick up a shovel and build a new community together. Share the planet, giving each other the space to be ourselves and celebrate our cultural and subcultural strengths. Accept positive reinforcement. If you must find an enemy, look for negative comments - fight to overcome negativity, don't kill people because of what you've been told about them. If people are happy in their cultural comfort zone and treating others outside their culture with care at the species level, let them be. If they're mistreating others, then get the word out so we can examine their lifestyles and find creative ways to work together with them for improving all our lives. If they insist on destructive lifestyles, such as killing each other or those not like them on a continuous basis, then that's where setting aside places for them and others like them makes sense - let them have a contained area for our species' self-destructive tendencies - after all, we need outlets for our fight-or-flight syndrome to be felt and worked out.
Love is being ourselves and recognizing ourselves for who we are. We can overcome diversity and still be ourselves without appealing to just one animal instinct all the time. Let's focus our strengths (fighting and caring) on preserving the species and focus our fears on the areas of fun, laughter, satire, and games.
I have dropped my thoughts on this blog here tonight because I am fighting mad, ignoring all the jokes in my head for the moment. I will find a way to ask us to preserve our species with every last word and breath I have, using every thought and emotion to get the point across that we're the same. I love you and will let you know that as often as I can. That's all I've done and all I'll ever do, using mainly satire to say I love you but I'll use anger, too, if that's what it takes. I may laugh at the world but it's the only world we've got to laugh at right now.
I cannot live without you. I would hope to hear you say the same thing but I'm not conceited enough to believe such a hope. Instead, I act upon the belief.
I will shout it one more time. I LOVE YOU.
So quit acting like children and behave like reasonable members of our species who love one another. I'm not asking for a yippie hippie love fest. I'm talking about practical, everyday, repetitious sweat, toil, joy and giving without expectation of receipt in kind.
From the recent Pittsburgh slugfest and UN speech contest I've had enough words to want to wash my own mouth out with soap even though I didn't say anything bad or socially unacceptable.
I'm just a regular guy, with regular fears and doubts. I know this planet is big enough for billions of us. Big and small at the same time, just like all our fears and doubts.
I'm angry right now. I'm tired of playing games with certain ones of you who think there's a hidden agenda out there with people out to get you. Let me tell you a secret that you already know - if you believe in ghosts, you'll see ghosts. Quit seeing ghosts!
I wanted to write a satirical skit for the next blog entry. Over the past two days I watched our body gestures and heard our tones of voice to better understand how the world of our species is doing, listening to the undertone of normality that keeps us linked together. I skipped two days of writing to talk with people (but didn't skip the habit of recording their names and workplaces for later recognition here).
I had already picked up some information early last week that told me our leaders, some elected freely, some elected in questionable circumstances and some self-appointed, were going to publicly disagree with one another to serve their self-interests (self-interests both at the individual level and the country level).
Pardon my bluntness but fuck your self-interests. I will not tolerate that crap. You have no self-interests anymore. This is my planet as well as yours. Your personal problems are mine, too. If you have a problem in your country, then it's a problem with me and my associates. We have no more patience for your self-pity and whining!
I have no desire to topple governments because the resultant chaos is beyond my control. But I do have associates who are no longer standing by, who want to move this body electric into the next phase of our species, beyond the petty "my belt is bigger than your belt" locker room bragging.
You want to show patriotism? You want to have pride? Then put aside your differences for a moment and listen.
There are seven billion of us listening and watching each other. We have mouths to feed. We have jobs to fill. We have jobs to create. We have family to care for. We may think we have no one who cares for us. We are skin and fingernails and muscles and bones and blood and brain. Every single one of us. We may have unique characteristics. We may or may not have living relatives but we're alive. You are within less than a planet's distance from the other seven billion of you.
I did not want to come here tonight but I love you too much to let you keep arguing with each other. I will not accept blind patriotism or grandstanding.
Wherever you are - sitting, standing, walking, chewing, typing - tell someone nearby that you love that person. Use your comfortable means of saying it. For instance, if you're sitting at a restaurant, make eye contact with the server and sincerely thank the server for being there to serve your food. If you are alone, tell yourself you love yourself. If you feel uncomfortable expressing your love for the person near you, let yourself be uncomfortable. You may be ready to face an opponent on a sports field or the field of battle but tell the person facing you you love that person, anyway.
Love in this sense is not about liking the other person or accepting the other person's lifestyle. Love is saying we're the same species, sharing the same planet.
I do not like what some of my leaders say, or what leaders of other groups or countries say and do, but I am loving them because they are me. I want us to live. I want you to live. A simple kind of love.
Your life is not mine. You don't have to like me. You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to belief you love me. I don't care. I don't live your life. You don't live mine. But we are still the same species. Let's think together for a moment.
The amount of arable land on this planet is limited. The amount of fresh water on this planet is limited. We have to share this land and water together, not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow but today.
So quit with the hot air and empty promises. Stop calling each other names. Feel free to compete in the realm of trade (or the world of ideas, if you will) because we all need newness to feel alive.
No more saber rattling. No more barriers. No more "I know someone's out to do me wrong." Admit the truth. We have this one planet to share between us.
I know some of you want the world for yourselves. I know some of you want the biggest, the fastest, the greatest, the most unique [name your favorite hobby/pastime/desire]. These feelings will drive you to extreme behaviour in your quest to conquer these feelings. No matter what, we still live on this planet together right now.
Thus, let's see the world as one big rock we're standing or sitting on, not little islands or fiefdoms. The breath I take today may well be on the other side of this planet before you know it. The water I drink will exit my bladder, evaporate and rain somewhere else next week. Thus, you're breathing and pissing on me right now. That's the way it's always been and the way's it's going to be.
I love you. I wanted to spend two months away from this blog but dissatisfied with the semantics of the international leaders the past few days, with messages of malcontent, I decided I love you and if my leaders and your leaders are going to waste my breath with negative words, I wanted to break my silence and tell you I love you because I don't think we have time to waste on listening to misguided leaders.
You are more important to me than anyone else I know. My planet is your planet. I have no strength in myself. My strength is in you. I depend on you every second of every living day. I'm tired of hate-filled language and action. I can't lift all of you on my shoulders but we can lift each other up, one set of arms at a time. I just told my wife, the person nearest me, that I love her. Before that, I told her mother that I love her and before that I told my parents that I love them. I told people this weekend that I love them even though I didn't know them - I told them with my eyes and my actions in the best way I knew how in the moment. I felt vulnerable and out of sorts at times but I reached out of my comfort zone to tell them. I put aside social structures and stereotypes to talk to people around me.
I don't care about nuclear disarmament treaties, border wars or illegal substance distribution routes. I care about you. The only way we're going to overcome our destructive habits is to rise above ourselves and see us as one species. It's not going be easy. It isn't easy. We do it one moment at a time. Like this one, the moment when I wanted to concentrate on some used books I purchased and not think about computers or new technology for a few days, but comments from people I heard this weekend bothered me and piqued my curiosity to see why they were throwing out such strange ideas. A quick lookup on the Internet told me why - they were responding to the condensed soundbites of leaders' speeches.
Now you know why I dislike advert-driven news sources. In previous decades, that was the only large-scale, cost-effective means of getting information to the masses. Now, with tailored news and divided masses, people are getting news that fits their preconceived views, driven by narrower and narrower advertising revenue streams. News providers are screaming louder and building up false enemies at an alarming rate, all for bigger audiences and bigger paychecks. They cater hate like candy, oblivious to or unconcerned about the species at large.
I break my silence to call on others to help pull down the barriers these hucksters put up. Let's reach out and shake hands. Pick up a shovel and build a new community together. Share the planet, giving each other the space to be ourselves and celebrate our cultural and subcultural strengths. Accept positive reinforcement. If you must find an enemy, look for negative comments - fight to overcome negativity, don't kill people because of what you've been told about them. If people are happy in their cultural comfort zone and treating others outside their culture with care at the species level, let them be. If they're mistreating others, then get the word out so we can examine their lifestyles and find creative ways to work together with them for improving all our lives. If they insist on destructive lifestyles, such as killing each other or those not like them on a continuous basis, then that's where setting aside places for them and others like them makes sense - let them have a contained area for our species' self-destructive tendencies - after all, we need outlets for our fight-or-flight syndrome to be felt and worked out.
Love is being ourselves and recognizing ourselves for who we are. We can overcome diversity and still be ourselves without appealing to just one animal instinct all the time. Let's focus our strengths (fighting and caring) on preserving the species and focus our fears on the areas of fun, laughter, satire, and games.
I have dropped my thoughts on this blog here tonight because I am fighting mad, ignoring all the jokes in my head for the moment. I will find a way to ask us to preserve our species with every last word and breath I have, using every thought and emotion to get the point across that we're the same. I love you and will let you know that as often as I can. That's all I've done and all I'll ever do, using mainly satire to say I love you but I'll use anger, too, if that's what it takes. I may laugh at the world but it's the only world we've got to laugh at right now.
21 September 2009
Fontaine Belle Eau
The wellspring of genius is madness, as many of us already know and nurture:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
...but only works when you avoid dogma and idolization. Your madness and your genius belong to each other and no one else's. You may inspire others or they inspire you but your visions and your ingenuity are mated for life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
...but only works when you avoid dogma and idolization. Your madness and your genius belong to each other and no one else's. You may inspire others or they inspire you but your visions and your ingenuity are mated for life.
10 September 2009
Pocket Full of Rocks
I ran into a former schoolmate of mine who, when we played together, always had off-the-wall comments to make. I never knew what he was going to say and I'm not really sure if he did, too. Time has been friendly to us, keeping us relatively healthy for two people who haven't been Charles Atlas or Jack LaLanne types our whole lives.
Although we were both upstanding young citizens of our community, we also had fake IDs that let us buy beer when we were underage. We knew it was okay to sneak a beer or two into a movie theatre or other venue without getting drunk and drawing attention. Other schoolmates were not able to control their behaviour and would often get caught inebriated because of their non-normal conditions, not having learned to experiment and set limits on what you consume in public situations.
Thus, I married a woman who is rational, kind, loving and every superlative I wanted in a lifelong mate. I married her in part because of who I am and in part because of who my friends are, reflecting each other.
I have started writing a new story. Don't know if it'll be book-sized but as usual I'll work out the ideas in this blog. Small details of my life will soak these electronic pages. I've already got a few characters sketched in my thoughts, some with a piece or two of people I know but whose actions do not correlate with the actions of those people I know. Some writers create complete fantasies (there's a word or phrase for what I'm about to describe - what is it?) that have no connection with their lives. In fact, some authors abhor the use of real life in their stories. I am not one of those authors. I like to write text-based caricatures. So if you think you see yourself in these words, you are more wrong than right. Every psychology student and every astute person knows that our species contains a limited number of archetypes. When I use particular quirks and phrases in my stories, they reflect my observation of the archetypes and not a specific person. Your behaviour may have stood out enough to catch my attention but your behaviour belongs to a generic class of others like you (just as mine does).
In other words, if you want to feel complimented or insulted by my writing, I won't stop you. I have a pocket full of rocks that I pull out and look at their unique flaws. Their shiny faces show a distorted view of my face back to me. That zit that looms so large in a regular mirror is hardly a drop of sweat on the back of a gnat when I look at the rocks. Think of my writing the same way.
Now, back to drawing my caricatures. Let's see...where was I...what if the unemployed of the world decided to stand behind a charismatic leader whose ideas were so out-of-line with reality, a normal person couldn't help but laugh?
Although we were both upstanding young citizens of our community, we also had fake IDs that let us buy beer when we were underage. We knew it was okay to sneak a beer or two into a movie theatre or other venue without getting drunk and drawing attention. Other schoolmates were not able to control their behaviour and would often get caught inebriated because of their non-normal conditions, not having learned to experiment and set limits on what you consume in public situations.
Thus, I married a woman who is rational, kind, loving and every superlative I wanted in a lifelong mate. I married her in part because of who I am and in part because of who my friends are, reflecting each other.
I have started writing a new story. Don't know if it'll be book-sized but as usual I'll work out the ideas in this blog. Small details of my life will soak these electronic pages. I've already got a few characters sketched in my thoughts, some with a piece or two of people I know but whose actions do not correlate with the actions of those people I know. Some writers create complete fantasies (there's a word or phrase for what I'm about to describe - what is it?) that have no connection with their lives. In fact, some authors abhor the use of real life in their stories. I am not one of those authors. I like to write text-based caricatures. So if you think you see yourself in these words, you are more wrong than right. Every psychology student and every astute person knows that our species contains a limited number of archetypes. When I use particular quirks and phrases in my stories, they reflect my observation of the archetypes and not a specific person. Your behaviour may have stood out enough to catch my attention but your behaviour belongs to a generic class of others like you (just as mine does).
In other words, if you want to feel complimented or insulted by my writing, I won't stop you. I have a pocket full of rocks that I pull out and look at their unique flaws. Their shiny faces show a distorted view of my face back to me. That zit that looms so large in a regular mirror is hardly a drop of sweat on the back of a gnat when I look at the rocks. Think of my writing the same way.
Now, back to drawing my caricatures. Let's see...where was I...what if the unemployed of the world decided to stand behind a charismatic leader whose ideas were so out-of-line with reality, a normal person couldn't help but laugh?
01 September 2009
Alternative Muzack
When a storyline reaches its peak, when the characters finally go their own ways, my thoughts deflate like helium balloons. The story's main theme swims through my thoughts, a Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) looking for its last mate, programmed to procreate, slowly running out of energy, giving up its elements to bacteria which'll turn up in something else worth writing into another tale of eat and be eaten. Meanwhile, I fast. I meditate. I gather material to start the next cook fire, my cave shelter from the rain but little comfort, shared as it is with bats, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, rats, hawks, doves, chipmunks, snails, spiders, crickets, ants, mites, fungus, bacteria, and dust, always dust. And more dust. The stuff of life. You. Me. Us. Youmeus dust. Let the momentary silence reign. I'll be back again. Alone but not lonely. Maybe next time I'll remember to turn the microscope around and get a better view - tired of seeing my magnified eyeball looking back at me!
On Tap
"MacAverty, what're you doing here so early?"
"The ol' prof! Whuzzer'onor 'ere?"
"He's chasing your chasers, 'sir.'"
"I see. So what's the deal, my man? Have you seen your ghost?"
"Aye. 'Twas in the book you gave me."
"I gave you no book."
"Did you not? HICCUP! Well, your 'sistant, then."
"My assistant? You mean Nahbi? I haven't seen him in weeks. When did you see him?"
"'Esterd'y."
"Was he all right, man? Did he look well to you?"
"Suppose. Your book. 'Tis cruel."
"He's been saying that all morning. What sort of book did you give him? He won't even look me in the eye. And you know how he likes to look at me!"
"MacAverty. Have you talked to McBride? Maybe he could talk some sense into you. I've given you no book. I gave no book to Nahbi."
"McBride's d'd."
"Dead? That's where you're wrong. I just saw him walking down the road. We said hello but didn't chat."
"'E's no McBride. 'Tis a variant."
"Variant? Where did you get that word?"
"'R booo-ook."
"And I tell you I wrote no book. I've only got notes. See, here's my briefcase. Here's my..." I usually kept my notes in a manila folder but the folder was gone. Did I leave it sitting next to the computer last night? Got to stop slipping into sleep with Bushmills on my belly.
"See, guv'na. Ya wrote't and dint know't."
"You want a pint, 'sir'?"
"Stop it, will you? I'm not your father."
"Old enough is good enough."
"But I will spank you again if you keep asking for it."
"Here's your pint. Punish yourself with that, for now, and liven up MacAverty. He's turnin' down the sunshine in this place. We can talk later."
"Promises..."
"...Are meant to be broken."
"Yes, yes. My reward for living the good life, eh? Have you seen Nahbi lately?"
"No, but he often comes in here without my noticin' him. Sometimes he studies over in the corner there and leaves without a word."
"I see. Well, I've got to get to the bottom of this, haven't I? Seems the both of you have the cards stacked against me. MacAverty, where's the book?"
"At 'ome."
"Can I get it from you?"
"Aye."
"Give me your keys. That's a good fellow. I'll see you later."
"No you won't."
"What?"
"The book's a murderer."
"MacAverty, I don't know what you're talking about. First, I didn't write that book. And second, even if I did, it's a book, not a person. Books don't kill people."
"You said it, yourself, prof. 'The pen's mightier 'an th'sword.'"
"An expression, man. I'll see you later. Barman, don't let him have another drop."
"Aye, aye, cap'n. Anything else we swabbies can git ye?" She rolled her eyes. One day he'd remember her name, and then...?
"The ol' prof! Whuzzer'onor 'ere?"
"He's chasing your chasers, 'sir.'"
"I see. So what's the deal, my man? Have you seen your ghost?"
"Aye. 'Twas in the book you gave me."
"I gave you no book."
"Did you not? HICCUP! Well, your 'sistant, then."
"My assistant? You mean Nahbi? I haven't seen him in weeks. When did you see him?"
"'Esterd'y."
"Was he all right, man? Did he look well to you?"
"Suppose. Your book. 'Tis cruel."
"He's been saying that all morning. What sort of book did you give him? He won't even look me in the eye. And you know how he likes to look at me!"
"MacAverty. Have you talked to McBride? Maybe he could talk some sense into you. I've given you no book. I gave no book to Nahbi."
"McBride's d'd."
"Dead? That's where you're wrong. I just saw him walking down the road. We said hello but didn't chat."
"'E's no McBride. 'Tis a variant."
"Variant? Where did you get that word?"
"'R booo-ook."
"And I tell you I wrote no book. I've only got notes. See, here's my briefcase. Here's my..." I usually kept my notes in a manila folder but the folder was gone. Did I leave it sitting next to the computer last night? Got to stop slipping into sleep with Bushmills on my belly.
"See, guv'na. Ya wrote't and dint know't."
"You want a pint, 'sir'?"
"Stop it, will you? I'm not your father."
"Old enough is good enough."
"But I will spank you again if you keep asking for it."
"Here's your pint. Punish yourself with that, for now, and liven up MacAverty. He's turnin' down the sunshine in this place. We can talk later."
"Promises..."
"...Are meant to be broken."
"Yes, yes. My reward for living the good life, eh? Have you seen Nahbi lately?"
"No, but he often comes in here without my noticin' him. Sometimes he studies over in the corner there and leaves without a word."
"I see. Well, I've got to get to the bottom of this, haven't I? Seems the both of you have the cards stacked against me. MacAverty, where's the book?"
"At 'ome."
"Can I get it from you?"
"Aye."
"Give me your keys. That's a good fellow. I'll see you later."
"No you won't."
"What?"
"The book's a murderer."
"MacAverty, I don't know what you're talking about. First, I didn't write that book. And second, even if I did, it's a book, not a person. Books don't kill people."
"You said it, yourself, prof. 'The pen's mightier 'an th'sword.'"
"An expression, man. I'll see you later. Barman, don't let him have another drop."
"Aye, aye, cap'n. Anything else we swabbies can git ye?" She rolled her eyes. One day he'd remember her name, and then...?
20 August 2009
Cogs
The move was quiet, like clockwork. The steps they took synchronized. They kept the time although they didn't know what they were doing. The French Foreign Legion. The Mossad. Others trained in soft-shoe dancing. Trust and obey. Decisive action.
Strokes of paint on a canvas painted by the elephant in the middle of the room hiding on a patty of butter.
Plain as the barndoor in the middle of your back.
Painful but required. Gave up their right to legislate. Forced to vote for an unpopular issue. Other forces at work puppeting their moves.
Don't you know you can't stop an ocean wave with a shovel?
The Internet enlightens the masses, too. Such was the sidelobe you missed when you wanted education for everyone. The truth is what it is. It's going to reveal what it does. Can't tell the people they have no choice even if they see it with their own eyes.
They know they'll work for foreign hands. They already buy foreign-made goods without batting an eye. Government agencies prepare war scenarios using computers built by those whom the scenarios target.
Stop selling the plan. Sell the reason for forcing the plan on the people. Honest Abe got you here. Show your knowledge of history. Being the first can also make you last if no one follows your lead.
Strokes of paint on a canvas painted by the elephant in the middle of the room hiding on a patty of butter.
Plain as the barndoor in the middle of your back.
Painful but required. Gave up their right to legislate. Forced to vote for an unpopular issue. Other forces at work puppeting their moves.
Don't you know you can't stop an ocean wave with a shovel?
The Internet enlightens the masses, too. Such was the sidelobe you missed when you wanted education for everyone. The truth is what it is. It's going to reveal what it does. Can't tell the people they have no choice even if they see it with their own eyes.
They know they'll work for foreign hands. They already buy foreign-made goods without batting an eye. Government agencies prepare war scenarios using computers built by those whom the scenarios target.
Stop selling the plan. Sell the reason for forcing the plan on the people. Honest Abe got you here. Show your knowledge of history. Being the first can also make you last if no one follows your lead.
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