Chapter excerpt -- Gus [for mature audiences only]

Hello, my name is Gus. Have I told you that already? I can’t remember. My memory is slipping past me in the checkout aisle. All I’ve got is this grocery cart full of miscellaneous items, like a box of floppy disks, a broken ceramic sculpture of a seated pipe musician, a stone mask from Mexico, a HotWheels Ferrari dealership, half-empty bottle of Stetson cologne, and a purple fish net. In front of me, two books about men whose ideas and writing greatly influenced my life. J.G. Ballard. Donald Barthelme.

“RE/Search No. 8/9: J.G. Ballard” Copyright © 1984
“Hiding Man: a biography of Donald Barthelme” Copyright © 2009

I am alive today because of them. I am dead today because of them.

The “Best of the Doobies” vinyl LP album spins on a record player, the sounds playing quietly through the needle like the thumping of an automobile audio system nearby, flexing my eardrum at the threshold of my thoughts while stopped for a red traffic light.

According to people who grew up with me during our years together attending primary school, my label was “nerd.” Despite my dislike of labels, people label me and each other anyway. I cannot change people’s perception of me from that time period.

I want to die. I did not plan to live this long. I do not plan to live this long. I have had enough of people and their labels. I have had enough of my labeling animals “people” just because they happen to look like me. I have had enough.

I have nothing left to contribute to this world. It will and does exist without me. I am not a megalomaniac. I do not need to rule any part of this world. I do not want to prey upon the fears and desires of others, even though that is essentially what I’ve done my whole life, in my own small way, from baby life onward to other lives and incarnations but never, I think, as a carnation.

I have tried but never succeeded in escaping the world of words. Instead, I perpetuate it.

Tonight, I’ll eat dinner with my wife and two of our friends. After dinner, the four of us will attend the traveling version of the musical, “In Recognition Of Your Achievement,” loosely based on the movie, “As A Member In Good Standing Through The Year.” I saw the Broadway version of the show in NYC back in February 2007. Two years ago this month, as a matter of fact. Tonight, I am reliving my personal private history, adding other humans to the memories of laughter, frowns, and boredom I experienced by myself for a $180 ticket to a Broadway show while on a week-long training session in the “art and nuance of creatively wasting people’s time unknowingly” at the Crowne Plaza during a New York winter, where I also experienced a taping of the ever-popular television show, “Laughing with Llamas,” down the street.

I have relived history my whole life, too. Speech and writing in itself is a reuse of our history of learning to talk, read and write. Damn. I guess there is no social human future that is absent of the past.

I don’t remember how old I was when I realized I was ambivalent and ambiguous but not ambitious about sexual orientation. I first understood the feelings when I was five or six, sensing that I was attracted to no particular person, regardless of gender. Then, as I grew older, when I reached the edge of the slide down into the sensual pool of sexual maturation, I knew what my body was saying even if the thoughts had not sufficiently been trained or developed to understand the chemical attraction I felt for no one. Once, seeing my behavior, my father asked me if I was a homosexual. I honestly answered no. I had no specific attraction to people of the same sex. Instead, I was attracted to neither sex but silently suppressed any personal desires to act upon my chemical needs, knowing that my successful participation in the suburban subculture of my hometown meant that I should maintain a general healthy sexual attitude toward others. Thus, throughout high school, I kissed two people – publicly displaying affection for a couple of months with a woman a year younger than me and privately sharing a kiss with a man a year older than me. Otherwise, I was celibate, sharing the majority of my years in primary school with a woman, Helen, who did not desire sexual relations with me so that I didn’t have to pretend to want to kiss, hug or otherwise feign sexual interest in her, which in turn let me suppress any sexual attention I knew I wanted to pay to no specific gender. I maintained my sanity by adopting a jovial attitude, perpetuated by my schoolmates even to this day.

My sister and others in primary school thus called me a “nerd.” Yeah, that’s right. Me, Gus!

When I started college at the Good Citizenship College, I had only one schoolmate from secondary/primary school upon whom I could depend to help me maintain my sanity and false self – Cambie, who was my roommate at the dorm during my freshman year in college. To shorten that story, I flunked out of school as my persona fell apart. Cambie was too interested in girls and not enough interested in school to pay much attention to his roommate’s sanity.

I returned to the subculture of my youth in an effort to reestablish my connections to a false sense of self, living at home with my parents. In that mode, I completed college-level courses at Flunkin University, left home to attend the Institute of Model Rocketry Appreciation (where I also reconnected with my female friend from primary school, Helen, who helped me once again fully function in a dysfunctional funk for a while, until I started spiraling downward) and finally, after running away from home on a 10-day route from my hometown to Seattle, WA, to Los Angeles, CA, and back in late September/early October 1984 and a detox visit to my grandmother at the end of that year, I returned home one more time and graduated from Questionable Character College, where, in the midst of taking classes, my first official mental breakdown occurred in 1985, followed by a short series of psychological counseling sessions. You should have seen the fuss they made over a guy named Gus. I did tell you my name is Gus, didn’t I?

So, by 1985, I had lost myself, found myself, realized myself was not myself and still had not accepted who I was. Well, what’s a guy to do but find the woman with whom he knew would not want children by him and marry her? In 1986, I married the one woman from my childhood who waited patiently on me to “grow up” and become a money-earning man. For many years, we stayed interested in each other sexually, diverting any nonmarital sexual attraction back to one another. Chemically, we were compatible (and still are, as far as I know). In our years of marriage, I have had only one full mental breakdown, in mid-1991, and one partial mental breakdown, in 2006. In the first one, I was able to stay employed with the aid of counseling to keep me within the bounds of my subcultural social upbringing. In the second one, I lost the desire to project my false self any longer. Since then, I have been essentially unemployable from a personal point of view. I leave the house occasionally, always fearful that others can see or have seen the real “me” and will label me incorrectly. I am not heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, androgynous, transsexual, or any other label of sexual orientation that I’m aware of. I prefer sex with myself, basic autoerotic notions of masturbation having satisfied my sexual needs my whole life, while I can think about anyone or anything I’ve seen in fantasies as a personal turn-on.

In other words, I do not need contact with others to satisfy me sexually. Is that the definition of a “nerd,” a person who is satisfied by one’s self and no other? If so, then I reached the limit of myself much too long ago. All else, this investigation, a so-called self-discovery, is for naught. But I’ve always known that, haven’t I?

In this cage of words that surrounds me, I limit myself, I know. But I have no other understanding of the world without words. I do not understand infinity although I know how to spell it. I see a rotating mass slowly cooling down and call it a planet, giving names to pieces and parts of it, claiming ownership of a section of thin crust that floats over the roiling magmatic core and call that piece of crust my home.

Did I tell you my name is Gus? I can’t remember. But I remember something. The temporary intransigence of others, who led me to believe one thing while I have led myself to believe another, makes me laugh. We try so hard to give permanence to that which does not exist in perpetuity. We want to save species whose end time may have come due to our population explosion but we cannot accept the inevitable wholesale elimination of creatures that found a way to survive on Earth’s crust for millennia before our species swept all before it. We especially cannot see that no species is permanent, including ours, but the magnification of a few thousand generations of us makes many believe in the concept of “forever.” So be it. Let the masses keep massing. They have and will do so without me. I have found me and now can let myself go on.

As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. Oops, sorry about that. Sometimes, these old records of mine skip a few times before I notice. Did I tell you my name is Gus?

A Carnival Setting

Saturday, 21 Feb 2009 – The Start of Carnival. My thoughts…what are thoughts? Oh boy, today is not a good day for me. Whatever thoughts are, perhaps the neurochemical firings of the synaptic endings inside an organ encased in a hard shell, they amount to junk.

So much flashing through these thoughts. Brief images. The increase of Latino gang activity in North America. The stock market plunge. Greed, greed and more greed. The detainment of Chinese dissidents during Hillary Clinton’s visit to discuss the triumph of economics over personal freedom. Brouhaha over a cartoon. The gangland murders inside Dublin pubs. The waste of energy to fight a “war” in Afghanistan that won’t ever be won (a few thousand years of history has proven that, in case you missed it). The continued reversal of investment in stock markets. Led Zeppelin songs on a record player. A “bill of rights” on facebook.

Today, I wish for a blank slate to begin new thoughts not influenced by mass media or pop records.

My wish is granted. Turned off the TV. No more surfing the ‘Net on general websites like google or yahoo that used to be an excuse to look for bargain stocks. Like my thoughts, the stock market is simply junk right now – I can wait a few weeks to buy or sell and probably won’t miss the bottom.

Instead, I’ll just sit and watch the bare trees swaying in the wind this afternoon. There’s always tomorrow. The luxury of not being human is not worrying about how to make money everyday or what to do about other mouths to feed. Today, the world can completely take care of itself without me. I just want to take care of myself, selfishly, deliciously so.

I’m going to enjoy Carnival by doing something I absolutely, positively enjoy more than anything I can think of – nothing!

No more journal/blog/facebook/twitter/plaxo/linkedin/comment entries for a while. Whenever I feel like getting back in front of this laptop computer, I’m going to work on a novel in progress. I put aside the novel to entertain others online, in the process ignoring me for too long. For now and a while longer, I’m disconnected from the online world, and will be kind to the one person who appreciates what I do, think, and see more than anyone else – me. I’ve spent too much time creating a surrogate “me” that I forgot the real “me” is here and needs his own special attention, especially from me. Call me a nerd, if you will, but I like me…a lot. And in my nonhuman world, “me” is all I’ve got!

Update on the startup I worked with

I was supposed to meet with a local business leader about his involvement in a potential startup. A couple of weeks have passed and I have not heard anything more about a meeting with him. Of course, he's a very busy man so it doesn't mean he's lost interest in the idea. In fact, from what I understand, he clearly saw that the idea is a good one and should be established in the market, especially as this economy gets ready to turn around, meaning that the startup team should strike while the iron is hot.

On a separate note, my life has taken a detour. After much consideration, I regretfully informed the startup team earlier today that I've decided I'm not the one who should act as general manager for their group. For the startup to work, I believe the person in charge should have a burning desire to achieve specific, concrete goals, including staying on top of the incremental successes of a small startup. I recently accepted a teaching position and feel that at this point in my career my skills are best applied to teaching others, as opposed to always looking for the next round of funding, going on the road to sell/demo the product, managing engineering design, overseeing the manufacturing process, etc., that a startup will require of a general manager/CEO/president/project manager for many months to come as it ramps up into a full-fledged company.

I thanked my colleagues for inviting me to join the well-rounded group of engineers - I've always been impressed by the combined engineering talent of the team. I know they will be successful and encouraged them to keep plugging along on the design work. In the meantime, I'll keep my eyes and ears open for an available, proven leader to step in and help them get a solid sales/marketing plan put together and full production started. A colleague suggested they periodically check the US PTO database to ensure no one else has received a patent in their market. I also said that as soon as they get the prototypes built, including a small trifold brochure describing the product's basic functions and potential applications, one of the team members should work with his contacts in the product's market to promote the prototype units. He can use the prototypes and word-of-mouth advertising to get the short-term funding they need from local investors.

Legally speaking, I told them the business plan I created for them is theirs to keep -- they can feel free to use and/or modify it as needed. Also, with the email I sent them I surrendered any agreed or implied ownership I may have had in their startup.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

I feel like my heart has been ripped out of my body, like I've lost a dear young friend who I deeply cared about. Although I look at life with a cheerful countenance, sometimes my decisions are painful. Today's decision was tough. As much as I like to think of myself as somewhat visionary and forward-thinking, I realize that my current actions might reflect a short-term attitude. Today I gave up a potential future of a pot of gold and a busy business life for a handful of change and a quiet academic life. Such is the mindset of a retired person with no more materialistic goals.

When your life goals have been met and quiet meditation is your daily existence, with self-actualization and a comfort zone fully established, you should not give in to the worldly temporary temptations of a past life you freely gave up to receive the bigger nonmaterialistic reward that now lasts indefinitely.

One Self Expression

18 February 2009 – Big Cove, Alabama. How many of us align our daily thoughts with our daily actions? How many of us, instead, live a life where thoughts and actions pushme/pullya in different directions?

I put myself in the category of the latter. Why?

Well, the subculture which nurtured my childhood did not provide the outlet I needed to discover I was not part of that subculture. Therefore, I spent years of the one life I have living subconsciously. “Years,” a word which designates time, of planets and solar systems in motion, hinting at the piles of moments constituting what amounts to “me.”

Did I excel in my childhood subculture? To an extent, yes, I did. But not totally, because the subconscious self – the real “me” that was suppressed in order for a particular style of “me” to be on display for my parental units and their society – hovered transparently overhead.

At the same time, I am all of me, no matter who I think I am, so when I achieved or did not achieve a goal set by me or someone other than me, even I can only go by my behavior. My behavior and the record of my behavior determine who I am to those around me, because whatever my thoughts may or may not have been were unrecordable during my childhood.

As those before me were limited in the expressions of themselves due to the tools available to them (or created by them), the expression of me has been limited to the tools at my disposal – crayon, pen, pencil, typewriter, 35mm film, digital camera, 8mm movie film, camcorder, computer and smart pen. In the future, others will create and re-create themselves using brain scanners, mating their actions with their exact thoughts and thought patterns to create masterpieces of what it’s like to be one particular human with specific, unique visions.

And yet, the goal of the human species, collectively and individually, is procreation. No matter how well or imperfectly I capture and express myself, the fact remains I have no offspring to call my own. At the end of my life, when I look at the collection of artifacts that chronicle my participation in life on this planet, nothing truly matters except the evidence of my genetic re-creation. Human subcultures may contain evidence of my business and artistic participation. In fact, some may have celebrated what I did. But none of them will matter in 200 years any more than any of my ancestors from 200 years ago really matter to me except as contributors to my DNA. For those ancillary ancestors, the aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews of generations ago who had no children, their influence on me amounts to nearly nothing, unless their nurturing behavior preserved a direct ancestor of mine.

So it is not the accolades of my life that determine who I am in human form, even if they boosted my ego and gave me a moment to enjoy. It is my gift of DNA that makes me human. Otherwise, if I have no children, then I might as well have been a computer or other machine, even if my nurturing behavior helps preserve a direct ancestor for a human offspring, because in this generation or the next, machines will nurture humans in a surrogate manner similar to the way people used to before the advent of computing machines, thus eliminating the excuse the childless have to call themselves human.

I accept the fact I may never be totally human, a fate I long ago determined while living in a subculture centered in the Appalachian mountain chain on the North American continent 37 years ago. In the interim, while I walk this planet, I will discover more of what it’s like to be the perfect embodiment of an animal that didn’t take the opportunity to reproduce itself when it had the chance. In the perspective of walking down the path of the second half of my life, I look up at a life clock I purchased nine years ago and placed on my desk to remind me to stay focused on my task of self-discovery (Internet version available here). According to its estimate, I have 15,052 days left of a natural life. In that timespan, I expect myself to contribute to the development of artificial human surrogates which mimic human thoughts and actions that will help the aging human population prepare a future for its offspring.

Imagine a “home companion” that reminds you of your significant other and can talk to you about your past while the two of you sit at home watching television or eating dinner together.

The home companion has collected all the bits of you:

• recorded in your years of living on the Internet (e.g., as a member of social networking sites (facebook, myspace, twitter, yahoo, aol, napster, amazon, baidu, etc.), Internet search results, web browser bookmarks, random comments you’ve left on websites, the games you’ve played, the activity of any IP address that can be linked to you),
• your TV channel selections through the years recorded at the offices of cable/satellite TV offices,
• the electronic files on your computing devices (computers, cell phones, DVRs, smart appliances, etc.),
• your shopping patterns indicated by the items you’ve purchased,
• electronic captures of your brain patterns,
• images of the objects around your domicile, and other daily living areas (office, school, etc.), and
• links to every other connected person who may share objects or life patterns with you.

That home companion exists today but you just don’t see it yet. And that is the contribution I am making to the success of your offspring. No need to thank me. I’m having fun doing this, including posts on facebook and the study of future cybernetic organisms – hope you’re having fun here, too!!

Taking a Break From Economic Analysis

[This post offers no advice, economic or otherwise, so feel free to skip it]

While I sorted my collection of old vinyl LP records recently, I found a set of albums that belonged to a schoolmate of mine. She and I had shared some good times together and presumably she left the records at my place because I had a stereo system on which to play them. In the 25 years that I've kept the records, I've lost track of why I was supposed to have them so I decided to believe she had loaned them to me until such time she could get them back.

I contacted my friend through facebook, copying her sister on my message, in case my friend was not a regular facebook user. Sure enough, her sister let me know that my friend rarely checks facebook (in fact, I think it was her daughter who set the account up for her). Therefore, the sister said she would gladly receive the albums instead of my friend.

So, to get the records back to my friend, or at least her family, yesterday I took the records with me to a local store that specializes in packing, boxing and shipping items. I have used the store in the past to ship items that I sold on ebay, with satisfactory results. I walked into the store on a Monday, a government holiday in the United States (Presidents Day or Washington's Birthday), not expecting to see anyone I knew.

Inevitably, when we're looking our worst or are in a mood for not talking to others, we run into someone we know. Wearing an old parka I picked up in Ireland a couple of years ago, I stood in line at the store and looked over to see a former work colleague, Don, who was dressed in nice casual business attire. Don had worked in marketing but as he looked at my ragged outfit, he told me he now has his own import business. I told him about Tree Trunk Productions while his eyes scoffed at me in Don's way of wearing his thoughts on his face (his face said, "He has his own website? Ha! Exactly what kind of website does a guy like that have?").

Don has an off-kilter sense of humor, sort of like Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison rolled into the suave character actor, David Niven. He bites your head off and spits it out, all while telling you how nice you are and how well he will always remember you as he hands your head back to you, wrapped in paper and stuffed in a nice hat box.

[We exchanged emails later in the day, using both of our humorous points of view to take joking stabs at each other. Hey, what are friends for, right?]

I returned home, picked up my wife and drove us to the theater to see the movie, "Coraline." After seeing the movie, my wife felt depressed the rest of the day. It didn't help that we went to a local Chili's restaurant afterward, sat for 10 minutes without receiving service and walked out to the protests of "Wait, wait" from the hostess (going instead to a new corner pub that opened a little over a mile from our house and serves good burgers).

To be sure, the storyline of the movie is not the most uplifting:

if your parents intentionally ignore you in order to pour their energy into their job (which, if their current project does not work out, means even less food on the table than the scraps you're eating now), turn to a fantasy world to relieve your boredom.

Perhaps the story is poignant in this economy. I enjoyed the movie more than my wife because I fully comprehend the importance of a fantasy world for one's creativity. Understandably, fantasies in and of themselves do not put food on the table, but the fantasies may result in your creating something that attracts the attention of people who like seeing or reading fantasies and who will pay you to share your fantasies with them. Even if you have no ability to turn your fantasies into a viable enterprise, having a creative escape mechanism can help you relieve the daily stresses and boredom that creep into your life.

I have lived a sheltered life, rarely bumping into the "underworld" of illegal activities we call 'crime' that some estimates say totals more than all government military budgets put together. So, while trillions of dollars are spent in the exchange of goods and services that don't get taxed, may include bribes, definitely include the exchange of free electronic copies of software, music, movies, and literature, I walk through the world expecting my colleagues to participate in the "up and up," buying and selling items for which we expect to pay government taxes and from whom the item was acquired legally, benefitting our society with this social framework of trust. I know, I know. Don't tell me. What kind of fantasy is that, especially in this economy?! ... lol ... At least I returned a set of albums to a friend of mine, which makes me feel good and costs nothing but packing and shipping.

The face of the future

First of all, I'm sorry that your company is losing such a valuable employee. However, these economic times catch people in jobs that have become superfluous to belt-tightening companies so it's not the employees who are missed so much as the company is glad to report reduced costs, no matter what the future circumstances may be. In other words, some layoffs are related to trimming dead wood -- this particular layoff looks more like strategic planning. I ate lunch with with a sales colleague the other day, and from what I gather, the OEM business is going through turmoil at your company right now. Guess you got caught in the crosshairs, to use a well-worn battle analogy.

In any case, wow! You're at a crossroads that I envy. The possibilities, though not endless, seem infinite nonetheless. The variety of skills, interests, resources, and mindsets you've built...I want to change your name to "THE BABEL TOWER OF POWER"! lol

As far as what you can do with what you've got...hmmm...that's an interesting one.

As you and I can clearly see, the global system of trade, quasi-capitalistic (certainly opportunistic, maybe too much so), is headed down a path toward more reductions in payrolls, more bankruptcies and more chaos at the macro- and microeconomic scale as small mom-and-pop businesses feel the pinch while their customers lose jobs at large factories and megacorporations. How far we keep spiraling down, I can't say. I know that I've lived through three recessions (about one per decade), including in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and now the fourth one in the late 2000s. The world hasn't come to an end during any of them. My mother in-law lived through the "Great Depression" while my parents were born during its late heyday in the mid-1930s, and they're still here to talk about economic cycles.

In every case, humans found not only a way to cope but a new way to live. My father in-law went from a life as a teacher/school principal to the life of a government inspector, then a radio DJ and finally the owner of a two-way radio installation/repair shop up until the year or so before he died. My grandfather spent 29 years in the Navy (1929 to 1959), and retired to the leisurely life of a security guard. My wife's aunt ran a florist shop. My great-uncle ran a post office and his wife was the secretary at a doctor's office.

In other words, in the work lives of many of my relatives, government employment helped them through the rough economic times, both during the Great Depression and WWII.

Hopefully, we aren't facing another major world war. What we are facing is a shift of the balance of economic strength from Europe/United States to Asia. China holds large reserves of purchased U.S. treasuries, as well as spent decades converting exported cheaply-manufactured goods into hordes of imported hard currency.

Therefore, on what does our long-term future rest? What, if I were you, would I consider the best place to invest my time and energy to ensure a healthy future for myself and my significant other(s)?

I'll recap your interests here for myself. You said you had reams of stuff ranging from books on business bios to fashion design, poetry, fiction, history, travel and marketing.

You've traveled more widely than I have and have more contacts in the Asian world, I surmise. Thus, I won't assume I know more than you do when it comes to both observing and imagining what the world will be like when Asian influences upon global mass media outshine the U.S.-centric "Western" mass media that we grew up with.

My discussions with Asian friends, employees and coworkers (mainly intellectual ones - I don't think I have a single "rural" Asian friend) has shown me that what I read in my youth about Indian and Chinese cultures incorporating other cultures as they travel, rather than overrunning them as Western culture tends to do, will reflect a future past replete with Western tones.

So, sitting here in my comfortable study, looking out the window where I can see wild Chinese privet (Ligustrum sinense) growing in the ditch of my wooded wild yard, populated with other non-native species like nandina (Nandina domestica), vinca (Vinca major), daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus), Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum) and untold others, I know that this planet is getting tinier every day.

If I were you, I'd study the next wave of human development, where the language of global business, English, will incorporate other pictographic symbols, such as Chinese characters for a logical numbering system that English does not have (for instance, note how our numbering system in the teens (eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc.) is different from the rest of the decade numbers (20s, 30s, etc. - decade+one (21), decade+two (22)), thus making English-speaking children waste time learning as archaic a numbering system as English money or American weights and measures). I would see if there is a university student exchange program that gives you a paid study time abroad, preferably in a large Chinese city (but studying in a small village has enlightened many of my friends who worked for the Peace Corps). I would use my skills of fashion, poetry and business to teach those around me about working holistically in the global marketplace, showing my new colleagues and fellow students that those who can absorb multiple cultures and find a way to combine the best of the cultures into valuable resources (like a computer system interface that is not slanted toward English but appeals to all humans' understanding of picture-words), will be the ones who define the "next great thing" like the intuitive interface on the iPhone, the image of a stadium as a bird's nest, a simple swoosh to define a product's marketing such as the ones that shoe manufacturers use, or any other method where storytelling and product sales meet elegantly.

I have always believed in your ability to see beyond your limitations. In some cultures, you are still "just a woman," good for having babies. To be sure, you are capable of and may desire to have children, but you will do more than that, too, I know.

Most importantly, the perspective of both sexes is necessary to move the world of humans fully into the 21st Century. The latest U.S. Presidential election showed us that gender and race have almost become a moot point. Almost. That's a word that worries me. When economic times get "bad," especially in the news, many people look back and declare the past as a better time, including old ideas that no longer make sense. If we want to keep moving forward to a truly better time, then you, a young, talented, ambitious businesswoman, are the reason we will do so.

No matter what you do, you will succeed. No question there. You'll have fun while learning and teaching others. Another no-brainer. I'm no wise guru or oracle but I'll pretend to be one for a moment and peer into the future. This crystal ball in front of me is a little dusty so pardon me while I wipe it clean. Okay, the haze inside the ball is clearing. I see an image of you 30 years from now. You've received some sort of accolades from your associates. You're standing in front of a virtual podium, from which you're broadcasting a 3D message to viewers and fans around the globe, both to people on the street and to people in online role-playing games. From your words, I gather that you've written a bestselling story that was turned into a 3D "movie" -- apparently, in the future, as we write stories, our text is instantly converted into animated "movies" so that we can see we're moving our characters in 3D space as we type, complete with hyperlinks and running commentaries from online collaborators who can watch and participate in our writing with us -- a combination of word processors and role playing games that you helped invent. I can hear from your talk that storytelling is a completely market-driven vocation, so that any mention of a place, an article of clothing, food, or even the characters that we create (who typically resemble real people we know or celebrities), automatically links to the rest of the real-world existence of these. You thank a bunch of people who helped you out, including your university friends who were on the cutting edge of software development in a village of unemployed intellectuals in 2009 and 2010. Your friends pop up in 3D broadcasts next to you as you mention them and thank you for their success, too. Your son surprises you and sticks his head in from his job as a manager of a space hotel, saying that without your foresight to establish a foundation for research into how to tap the "brainpower" of idle computing devices in people's homes and offices (including computers, UMPCs such as cell phones, and smart appliances), we might never have figured out how to eradicate major diseases, an effort that ultimately enabled him to overcome the paralyzing disease that made him a quadriplegic and later learn how to permanently work and live in space.

See, I'm excited for your future! I hope your boyfriend is, too. Next time he wants to meet you, remind him that you've got a space colony to establish so you can't diddle-daddle too long. lol

BTW, the classes I'm teaching as a part-time adjunct instructor are "Introduction to Computer Programming," using the Python language, and "Strategies for the Technical Professional," which is the first class that students have to take at ITT Tech, meaning I am the teacher/coach that ITT Tech students see as the "face" of ITT Tech. No pressure on me, huh?

Gotta go. Time for lunch. Tell your boyfriend, in case he doesn't know it already in his country, that Valentine's Day is the biggest holiday in the U.S., so he owes you something important (whatever it is that you think he can afford to give you, of course), since he knows you before you got famous and can take you some place nice without having to take your entourage with you, too.

Divvying Up Your Earnings

Making money is easy. Even in this economy. No matter where you find yourself, you can earn a wage using your own initiative. How you go about it is up to you.

I have seen people sitting in parking lots / carparks outside large box stores (Dunnes, Wal-Mart and the like) offering items for sale out of their vehicles. Although I declined to purchase the seller's "cheap" item that can be found at a higher price inside the big box store, including warranty and return policy, I have observed others buy an item from the trunk of a car without blinking an eye.

I can guess that some of those items for sale had walked out of a store on their own or "accidentally" fallen off the back of a delivery truck, couldn't you? But I'm not here to promote illegal sales. I'm only pointing out that people find ways to put food on their table without resorting to standing in line for unemployment benefits (or go on the dole, as they say).

So, if this economic downturn has put you on the street without a regular wage to call your own, what can you do?

I won't speak for everyone out there because the myriad ways one ends up without a living wage would require a book to describe how you ended up where you could sit and read this blog entry while wondering how you're going to pay your bills this month. Today, I will speak to those of you who've had the opportunity to earn a few years' wages and could have put a little money away for a rainy day.

Okay, so now it's a rainy day (as a matter of fact, right now the sky is falling outside my window as a rather large set of thunderstorms pass by overhead). You're sitting on the doorstep, deciding if you should hold your hand out while playing random tunes on a harmonica. [To be sure, you could earn a few coins an hour panhandling in that way and might even make yourself famous if you could park your body in front of a popular webcam. Never turn down the chance to make money and have fun at the same time.] What do you do?

Have you ever thought about an income based on company dividends? While all your friends are telling you to have a party because life sucks, look at the money you've put aside. Say, it's enough to pay a few months' rent. What do you do?

Well, I'm not your broker or your advisor, so don't expect me to have an insight into your financial goals. However, if I were you, I'd open a window on the Internet and see what my money could do for me. Perhaps I could start a small company, using the money to pay for fees and business licenses. Or I could buy a used van and put all my stuff inside, finding a free place to park down by the river. I could go down to the local bank and take out a loan using my money for collateral. Or I might just have to pay rent, after all. Certainly, I'd be looking for another job, calling up friend, coworkers and family to see what they had to offer. In the meantime, I suggest you look at your financial future.

This economic slump will not last forever, even if it will get worse. Therefore, now's the time to start looking at companies whose stock is very low yet they're stilling paying out quarterly dividends. Why should you care? Well, let's say that you and your friends all have the same amount of money to invest in your lives. Some of your friends will inevitably buy something to satisfy their need for instant gratification -- a boat, an RV, a second car, etc. In times like these, you can open the classified ads and find all sorts of bargain basement deals on motorbikes, SUVs and other items that looked good to someone when the economy was hopping but now are eating a hole in their wallet. So, while your friends are scrambling to find someone to buy their toys, what could you be doing? Instead of putting your money to instant use, why don't you invest your money in stocks that pay dividends? That way, once every three months, you have an income that you can use to buy more stocks or to pay household bills, instead of paying for a houseboat that you use a few months out of the year (of course, if your dividend income keeps growing, you could have both, but let's stick to the basics for a moment).

The point here is that you have a choice in what to do with your income -- before you find yourself on the street penniless, think about taking care of your future using today's paycheck. Sit down and determine what you're going to do with that 20% you promised you'd put aside every two weeks. Make sure some of it goes into dividend-paying company stocks. That way, when or if you end up without a regular paycheck, you have a little buffer built in that rewards you for your foresight. Then, when you're out of a job while sitting down looking at a small nest egg that will only cover a few months' rent, you know you can focus on the rent, and let your upcoming dividends pay for insurance or other bills you worked out to pay annually, semi-annually or quarterly. Better yet, if your dividends are working out well, you might even decide to take that nest egg and start your own Internet business.

Don't wait until you're out of work to say, "If only I saved up some money!" Your financial future starts now. Invest in it.

Making the most of a household budget

How many of us started our adult lives knowing the amount of money to budget toward our monthly cost of living? Not many, I suspect. If you were like me, you might have asked your parents and older friends what they paid for "utilities" (energy, sewage, water, recycling, etc.), rent/mortgage, and other miscellaneous costs, but you didn't realize what your out-of-pocket costs were like until you saw your savings depleted for deposits toward phone, apartment, insurance and utility usage, not to mention that first down payment for an automobile or later for a home mortgage.

As the months went by, you got a decent idea what your future monthly payments would be like, especially annual utility costs that cycled from season-to-season. Depending on your household and number of roommates (including friends, spouses, significant others, siblings, children and/or extended family), you pooled resources to pay bills, assuming that whatever was used the month before was going to be used in the same amount the next year.

But is that true?

In some parts of the world, droughts and water restrictions have driven the cost of water through the roof, forcing us to make changes to our water usage habits such as no more watering patches of lawn (brown is the new green) or washing the shaggy dog (shabby chic is still in, isn't it?).

What about our energy usage?

According to the U.S. Dept. of Energy and EPA, the following shows the average annual energy usage of a typical household in 2001:

• 49%, Heating and Cooling
  
• 13%, Water Heater
  
• 10%, Lighting
  
• 8%, Other (household products, including stoves, ovens, microwaves, and small appliances like coffee makers and dehumidifiers)
  
• 7%, Electronics
  
• 6%, Clothes Washer & Dryer
  
• 5%, Refrigerator
  
• 2%, Dishwasher
  

What does that mean, exactly?

Well, if you're paying an average of $500 per month for energy usage, then converting all of your lights to high-efficiency CFL bulbs or LED fixtures, reducing monthly lighting costs by 75% and 90%, respectively, you'll save $37.50/month with all CFL light bulbs or $45/month with all LED light fixtures. A decent monthly savings.

But is that enough to convince us to pay the higher initial costs of the CFL bulbs or LED light fixtures versus conventional incandescent bulbs? Tough call. Personally, my wife and I have switched out light bulbs from incandescent to CFL as the incandescent ones burn out. That way, we don't waste the incandescent light bulbs we bought. [I guess we could just remove the incandescent bulbs and store them as backups but we'd rather use them up and not worry about keeping track of the old bulbs. As you can see, I'd like to say we're an energy-efficient household but even as informed and educated as we are about the importance of reducing energy, we aren't true converts to the "cause" but we are making changes.]

More importantly, wouldn't reducing the other two items on the annual energy usage list make more sense economically on both the macroeconomic scale (you know, the part where experts say, "If everyone switched to GenX superefficient technology, we could power the whole Eastern seaboard for a year on just one flashlight!") and the average household scale (the one we really only care about)? The answer, of course, is yes.

But how do we remove or reduce that 62% of our monthly energy bill? In many cases, such as flats or apartment buildings, you can't remove or change the heating or cooling system yourself so your only choice is personal reduction. Say, like turning down the thermostat at night and throwing an extra blanket on the bed. If you own your home, you should consider switching to highly efficient heating / cooling systems like heat pumps (in temperate climates) or solar water heaters.

The important thing to keep in mind is the fact that unlike other bills that don't vary from month to month (car payments, housing rent, etc.), you have control over your monthly energy usage. And since you have control, it's important to know where to make the most impact with your changes. Washing dishes by hand versus using a dishwasher is not going to save you a lot of money (assuming you already have or own a dishwasher), because in both cases you'll use hot water and often you'll use more hot water washing dishes by hand. If your monthly usage is similar to the average household, even eliminating dishwashing altogether will only save you 2% of your $500 bill (or $10). In other words, don't tell your boyfriend that taking you out to eat is going to save him money because you won't have to wash dishes. Unless, of course, it's Valentine's Day or your birthday – in that case, he probably won't want to dispute the facts. ;^)

Elevator Pitch

I'm sure you've heard the expression, "elevator pitch." Basically, an elevator pitch is an extended version of a first impression. Imagine an aggressive young entrepreneur spying a wealthy old business owner stepping into an elevator (or lift, if you will). The entrepreneur jumps in, too, goes through a quick introduction, and starts a pitch about a product or business. The business owner holds up his hand and says, "Okay, I like your style, kid. I'm riding up to the 80th floor. You've got my attention until I step off."

We all make first impressions on each other, whether we intend to or not.

A reader went through my websites, read a lot of the material and asked me what I'm really all about because my writing is all over the place, from business discussions to esoteric philosophical posing. He wanted to know what my purpose was in getting involved in a startup.

Good question. Obviously, I haven't developed an elevator pitch and used it to narrowly define my presence in cyberspace.

Five or six years ago, I talked with a coworker, Ron, whose son was attending Georgia Tech. I reminisced with him about my freshman year at Georgia Tech and the decisions I made that led me away from the institute, hoping that his son would think through the effects the decisions he made would have on his future success. Ron laughed that I had a good story to tell and should think of myself serving as an example to others. In other words, I had started down a path determined for me by adults that would lead to their definition of success yet took another path that to the adults looked like failure but had led me to success all the same. Not everyone has such a story to tell.

I suppose he's right. In my latest adventure of reconnecting with primary school mates through online gathering places like facebook, myspace, and myyearbook, I have discovered that every one of us who has found the other via the Internet has made a success of his or her life, despite hardships and diversions from a predetermined path.

On the other hand, some of my schoolmates died long ago. Others either aren't jumping on the cybersocial network fadwagon or are just not available. Their level of success I cannot determine. I know one or two of them are too busy for casual surfing because of their successful position in society. But others? I can't say and won't guess.

So where does that leave those like me who don't have a vested interest in the future (i.e., no offspring to nurture)? I took a nap at lunch today and woke up with the remnants of a dream on the edge of my consciousness. From what I gather, the dream had to do with standing in front of a group of people of various ages. I asked the people to come back to class the next time with an elevator pitch. When one of the people asked me what an elevator pitch was, I then told them the story of my life and how it had led to my being there in front of them at that moment. The elevator pitch I gave them was this, or something like it:

"I imagine some of you have no idea what you want to do with your life but you're here because you want to find out. As you can see, I have been in your shoes. If you want to keep having fun while figuring out how to use your strengths and weaknesses to succeed in this world, this class is for you. Even if you don't want to succeed, this class is for you because we're going to have fun. In fact, I'm going to reward you everytime you show up for class [handed something out]. Before we continue, I'll let you in on a secret -- there's no such thing as failure, in this class or anywhere else. Life is just a series of events that you can learn from and the more you open yourself up to learning, the more fun you'll have getting ahead in this world. If you want to be here but for some reason can't make it, I'll do what I can to get you out of the ditch or out of a rut and back on the road to success. Just let me know why you can't make it so I can help you. I can't think for you, either, but I can help you learn how to focus your thinking on what works for you.

"I'm not here for my health. I'm here because I want to learn from you and know that you'll learn something from me. Once you figure this out, you'll see the world in a whole new way, that the world was built for you to do well and have fun doing it.

"You can't stop other people's opinions of you, positive or negative, but you will start taking care of your opinion of yourself. When you go to bed tonight, review the day's activities, ignoring the voice of any nagging naysayers you heard that day. Instead of rehashing what you have done over and over again, think about what you learned so that you don't have to repeat yourself again. We only repeat ourselves because we haven't taken the time to see the lesson we've learned over and over again. Okay, you've learned it! Go on! Tomorrow, the next brand-new day in your life, you'll find yourself waking up with a smile, ready for the next adventure."

I sit here with a smile, believing that I've found my elevator pitch. I hope you've found yours.

More about “Revolutionary Wealth”

As I leave the subject of what the futurists, Heidi and Alvin Toffler, have to say about the world economy, I'll quote a few passages of their book, "Revolutionary Wealth," that captured my attention enough that I dogeared the pages where I marked the passages for future re-reading. From the paperback printed in 2006 (ISBN: 978-0-385-52207-6):

Page 5

Tomorrow's economy, for example, will present significant business opportunities in fields like hyper-agriculture, neurostimulation, customized health care, nanoceuticals, bizarre new energy sources, streaming payment systems, smart transportation, flash markets, new forms of education, non-lethal weapons, desktop manufacturing, programmable money, risk management, privacy-invasion sensors that tell us when we're being observed – indeed, sensors of all kinds – plus a bewildering myriad of other goods, services and experiences.

Page 109

Beginning with our six billion-plus brains, and based on the rates at which they absorb information and how fast we forget it, Lesk roughly calculated that the "total memory of all the people now alive" is the equivalent of 1,200 petabytes of data. Since a petabyte is equal to 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, 1,200 sounds like a lot. But, Lesk nonchalantly assures us, "we can store digitally everything that everyone remembers. For any single person, this isn't even hard."

After all, he continues, "the average American spends 3,304 hours per year with one or another kind of media." Some 1,578 hours are spent watching TV, another 12 in front of movie screens – which adds up to about 11 million words. Another 354 hours are devoted to newspapers, magazines and books. The result, he suggests, is that "in 70 years of life you would be exposed to around six gigabytes of ASCII." Today, you can buy a 400-gigabyte disk drive for your personal computer.

Page 355

In the United States and most rich democracies, wave conflict is usually subtler than in the poor world. But it is there nonetheless. It appears at many different levels, ranging from energy policy and transportation to corporate regulation and, above all, education.

Industrial America was built on the back of cheap fossil fuels and an immense infrastructure for distributing energy around the country. Costly and overdependent on imported oil and gas, the American energy-distribution system includes 158,000 miles of electrical transmission lines and 2 million miles of oil pipelines that, because they are heavy fixed assets, are hard to alter in response to rapid change.

The United States is rushing to build an advanced knowledge-based economy but remains saddled with an industrial-age, legacy-energy system politically defended by some of the world's biggest and most influential corporations against a growing, growling public demand for fundamental change in the system. The conflict is not usually posed in these terms, but it is, in fact, an example of Second Wave vs. Third Wave warfare.

Page 356

The U.S. transportation system, on which most business enterprises directly or indirectly depend, is still gridlocked by a politically powerful triad of oil companies, car manufacturers and often corrupt highway-construction firms.

Thus, while America's communication system has introduced a dazzling succession of innovations, making it possible to distribute knowledge in ways never before possible, Americans are still denied energy and transport systems that would be more efficient, safer and cleaner. These key elements of America's infrastructure – and their component subsystems – are de-synchronized and fought over by vested industrial-age interests and breakthrough innovators advancing the knowledge-based wealth systems. Wave conflict again.

The Tofflers go on to show a few examples of similar issues in corporate business practices and mass education (the "factory-focused education system," as they call it). What I see here is opportunity. We will not get rid of the oil dependence infrastructure or interdependent massive road system anytime soon so how do we make use of these systems to take us out of the 20^th Century and place both feet in the 21^st Century? Obviously, the viability of alternative energy has a long way to rise up in the forefront of the national conscious before there's any kind of massive outcry for a personal solar/wind/geothermal power plant in every household. More people are using alternative energy than our last energy crisis in the 1970s but we haven't tipped the balance away from oil and coal just yet.

Therefore, while our elected officials debate the components of the megatron stimulus bill that will supposedly jumpstart our economy, I suggest every one of us look at our place in the economy and see what we can do to put food on the table while lowering our dependence on fossil fuels. Simple things that frugal shoppers have used for centuries like buying dry goods in bulk. More complicated things like switching low-level home lighting from house current to solar panel charged rechargeable batteries (e.g., solar lights in the walkway leading up the house or end table lamps using directional LED lights next to the bed (for those in either houses or apartments)). Some homes in desert/subtropical areas already use solar electrical panels or water heaters disguised as roof tiles. In other words, it doesn't take an act of Congress to change your habits to decrease your dependence on oil.

At the same time, let's encourage each other, as well as young people thinking about their careers, to look at non-traditional jobs, ones that may not have even been invented yet, in order to help build a new future for all of us. Maybe someone out there can create herself a "job" that simply means you're compiling what your network of workers/friends/family are doing online and find a way to build an instant market or product they can all use/buy simply by talking about it (e.g., pose a series of fun questions that invite marketing input on a line of potential Internet products, products that may save lives in a regional emergency ("5. In relation to question 4, if you knew that folks in New Orleans were about to experience another hurricane, how could your cell phone help?")). Based on what Lesk said in the Tofflers' book, it shouldn't take a big disk drive to store the data you've collected and you should be able to use a home computer to process it.

With the increased use in online applications like facebook and twitter, surely we can spend time not only remembering the good old days and chatting about our latest love interests but we can also open a dialogue with each other, asking difficult questions like, "What have you done to make your life better today? I've lost 13 pounds so far this year by asking myself these questions: 1) Did you eat one less doughnut? 2) Did you walk up-and-down the shopping center instead of drive from store-to-store?" Let's have fun but let's also find ways to enjoy our lives together responsibly.

A Phoenix with Nine Lives

Thursday, 5 February 2009. Eimear, I believe in the power of not believing. Do not put unnecessary expectations on the future so that what happens to you, no matter how wonderful, will surprise you.

As I told you earlier this week, Thursday (today) was going to be a day of decision-making. What the decision(s) would concern, I did not know and did not try to comprehend (Je ne comprends pas le futur, I suppose I could say, perhaps incorrectly, in the little French I remember from high school).

Yesterday was a day for good news. My family learned from the doctor that all is well for a family member. In addition, the dean of the local campus of a technical institute arranged an interview with me on Friday for an adjunct teaching position. I also got an email from a friend who wanted to talk about a business deal.

This morning, I woke up but could not concentrate because my thoughts were jumping from one good feeling to another. Even so, I thought back to my earlier plans to make today a special day for determining my future, in this case with the word "future" having more of an unsure feeling, as if I planned today to say goodbye to myself or at least get rid of my "self" as in the old "me," making way for the new "me" to take over what I've recently thought were the resources being hogged and wasted by the previous self.

Now, I sit here coming down from an adrenaline high. You've told me what brings you ultimate joy is the happiness you see in your daughter's laughter, which adds to your sense of wealth. I have no children so my sense of joy comes from what makes me go to sleep while trying not to build excitement of what I'll wake up to feeling in the first minutes and hours of the morning of the next day in unbridled anticipation of what the rest of the day will bring.

This morning, I only expected to shed the skin of my old self. I placed no other burdens on me, so that there would be no debts I felt the old self had left to pay off that would force me to keep perpetuating the old "me."

Now, how I purge my old selves has been a personal secret of mine, but certainly nothing new to the thoughts of other humans like me. I am not inventing something new here but simply applying age-old secrets of the phoenix to my life. I may yet share the secret with you. We'll see. hehe

My old selves have their stories to tell because they have existed in a cycle of birth, living, and death, every self giving an example of one person's way to deal with the stimuli s/he faced. Occupationally, the selves have served as a lawn boy, piano refinisher, fast food cook, store clerk, college student, baritone horn musician (Georgia Tech Navy ROTC marching/jazz band), fast food cashier, restaurant cook, door-to-door book salesman, telephone book deliverer, engineering assistant, technical typist, computer systems operator, computer graphics illustrator, control room specialist, data analyst, test engineer, engineering project manager, senior program manager, company owner/president and consultant. The common thread I see, the essence of all of these versions of me, is the part that records on "paper" the major and minor events of each self's existence, including language patterns in the form of verbalized thoughts, as well as physical whereabouts of a self such as attending the showing of a movie picture, consuming food in a public place, etc., and putting these recordings into stories. Basically what all humans have done from the dawn of time.

In recording these stories, I have created works of fiction I've told you about and posted on my website (http://www.treetrunkproductions.org) as well as works of nonfiction, such as school reports, guides to the use of hardware and software (called user manuals), test plans, program management plans, business plans, etc.

The works of fiction I have given to the world for free because they belong to everyone as my repayment for their participation in my life, even if marginally as a member of the species, Homo sapiens, who wanders anywhere on or near this planet.

The works of nonfiction have served as the barter I exchange for labor credits (i.e., money) I use to make a viable place for me to live with other humans in the social system we call the economy (the one you and I might see as naturally capitalistic because of our upbringing under the political system called the United States of America).

One of the works of nonfiction that I devoted a good bit of time to back in October 2008 was a business plan I put together for a group of inventors and investors who had come up with a product that has no market. In fact, their product creates the market. Therefore, my business plan had to include not only the usual financial incentives to entice investors (legal rigmarole) but also describe the product and its potential market in some detail. I shared the business plan with the team of inventors and they agreed that the plan described what they wanted to productize (after he suggested it, I added a nine-page product description written by one of the inventors that gave the product more clarity to an uninformed reader). The plan included either a way to form an S / C corporation or a limited liability corporation (LLC), depending on what the inventors and/or future investors wanted.

A week or so ago, I went to lunch with a former work colleague of mine whom I consider a great man. He and his wife have raised wonderful children while he has created for himself a good sales/marketing vocation, mainly at the company where I worked with him. He played hockey and tennis while growing up in Canada but has lived in the Huntsville area for over 20 years now and calls this area home. Through his sports and business connections, he has established a good network of friends he calls upon when he either needs to give or receive advice.

At lunch, where I just expected us to talk about what we'd done in the past few years, our conversation led to my interest in the business plan I'd developed in October. I bounced a high-level idea of the product and a general biography of the inventors off my friend to gauge his interest. He said he was willing to hear more so I got him to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), allowing me to disclose in full detail the product the inventor team had put together up to now.

During our phone conversation earlier today, my friend said he had looked over the business plan and is more than excited to get involved in the product's marketability. In fact, I was surprised at his enthusiasm. He was excited enough about the product that he had told a colleague highly placed in the Huntsville business world about the general principles of the product, seeing if his colleague would want to join him in making the product successful. More than that, he told his colleague that I would be the one to run the company!

Well, that got me shaking like a leaf. One of my dreams since childhood that I started nurturing in sixth grade as I sold stickers shaped like UT football helmets from my school locker, imagining myself an entrepreneur (making pure profit on the sale since I had gotten the stickers for free from local businesses in Kingsport and Knoxville), was to run my own company one day. That's why I now have my own consulting firm that I call Tree Trunk Productions so that I can be my own one-man CEO/President/owner of a company.

However, my recent work occupation/self was not a person who wanted to run a company of more than one person because he didn't want to serve at the whim of others. He had retired from the business world so he could be an independent person, free to follow whatever whims of his that would vary from day to day. That old self finally realized that what had first been a set of freely random actions had in fact become a patterned set of actions. Freedom was illusory, in that sense, because he had not given himself up to actually doing completely random things from moment to moment. He ended up finding a label to justify his limited set of actions and called himself a writer, even going so far as to find pride in that label and further call himself an author.

Isn't there a saying along the lines of "Pride goes before the fall"? [yes, it's an abridgement of Proverbs 16:18, according to my quick search on the Internet] Well, I knew that my pride of calling myself an author would doom me to end that author's life. In other words, by calling myself an author I had accomplished the goal that my desire to call myself an author had achieved. I did not desire to live the poor, lonely life of an author but only to call myself one. Mission accomplished! On to the next life.

So here I am, the new self, now ready to start my new life. I will interview tomorrow for a part-time teaching position that I may or may not get. Either way, I have offered my training services to another person in the training/education field and fulfilled my wish to present myself as a teacher/guru. Whether my other wish to live as a guru is fulfilled now or later in life matters not, because next week I will meet with business leaders higher up the food chain to determine my future as a company leader. Upon that I expect my future depends. What becomes of that future, I do not know, but that is what excites me today.

And now you see why I told you that patience has a payoff. For me, patiently waiting for what becomes of me has indeed been gratuitously rewarded in a way I had not expected! The new me was born today and like a newborn has this whole new world to get to know. What's more exciting than that?!

Je suis prêt à l'avenir. Le futur est maintenant!

Meanwhile, tonight we attend a funeral home visitation for a friend of my wife who died this week. Death and life are always intertwined. One should be prepared to accept both at once because one does not exist without the other ,so I say celebrate them as they do in New Orleans!!

More as it develops…

Just the Facts, not Opinions, Sir

All of us read, hear, and see discussions about the science of global weather patterns, including a phenomenon known as global warming. Political pundits argue for and against the need for the human species to take note of our contribution to changes in weather patterns, including global warming, and change our economic habits. Opinions on the subject of global warming vary like the colors in a paint store. If you don't have an opinion of your own, you can mix and match other opinions as you please.

Although I don't work as a scientist, I can observe the weather at a local level and make an informed opinion. I can research the weather reports and scientific studies available at my local library or those posted on the Internet and come up with a summarized view of global weather changes through history.

My observations at the local level tell me we don't seem to get as much snow in the northern reaches of the southeastern United States as we used to, which may imply the average temperature of storm systems passing through the area is higher than it used to be.

My reading of Internet reports shows that the average annual temperature of the planet is slowly increasing, and with it are increasing amounts of "greenhouse gases."

What I can't prove to myself is the total contribution that one species spread across the globe, Homo sapiens, is causing. To know that, I would have to know the total amount emitted by all species, including plant, animal, eubacteria and the like. I want to know what non-species' influence to include, like volcanoes. I would also have to know how much extraplanetary influence on weather comes from the Sun and the rest of the galaxy/universe.

Some of this information I can gather from the Internet. In my research, what little I've performed, I have come across interesting projections made by scientists who don't seem to be placing blame on the cause of global warming but merely pointing out potential effects. The most interesting effect I've seen so far came from an article titled "Sea level rise may be worse than expected" (accessed on 6 February 2009), with the following points making the most impact on me, especially the highlighted one:

• When an ice sheet melts, its gravitational pull on the ocean is reduced and water moves away from it. That means sea levels could fall near Antarctica and rise more than expected in the northern hemisphere.
• Antarctic bedrock that currently sits under the weight of the ice sheet will rebound from the weight, pushing some water out into the ocean.
• The melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet will cause the Earth's rotation axis to shift, potentially moving water northward.

Of all the reports I've read, none of them have talked about the shift in the Earth's rotation. Instead, they've pointed out that the melting of glaciers will remove weight pushing down on rocks and dirt, changing the dynamics of plate tectonics, and they've mentioned the possible change to the flow of ocean currents and the ocean's rise. All of these I understand and can see the possible effects, including more or less frequent earthquakes, volcano eruptions, flooding and severe weather changes.

I don't understand what the simple fact of the change in Earth's rotation will do. We know from the study of magnetic changes in bedrock that the Earth's magnetic poles have shifted in the past. We have analyzed the slight wobbling of the Earth and seen how it may have led to the periodic rise and fall of previous human civilizations.

But has anyone studied the change in Earth's rotation and fully understand the effects? I'm not an eternal optimist nor a doomsday downer, because in my life I've seen that every up has a down and every low point has a high point in a cycle. Therefore, if Earth's rotation shifts on its axis, there will positive effects for some people on this planet and negative effects for others. The question I want to answer is how soon will the shift start occurring (if it hasn't already) and what should I do to prepare myself and my family to be on the positive side of the shift. On a larger scale, how should we as a global population reduce the negative effects on our species' continued success on this planet (and can we)?

How Do You Measure Wealth?

When I was a child, I walked through a bookstore and saw a tome titled, "Future Shock." The title intrigued me, most probably because of the word, future. I leaned against the book display and read the future classic, skimming through the chapters and marveling at the adult world that the author, Alvin Toffler, told me was speeding by faster and faster. Yet, there I stood in the world of books, where piles of discount duds sat gathering dust, not moving at all. I could imagine what Toffler was talking about but I could not see it. In school, we still sat and listened to teachers lecture us about the material we were supposed to have read the night before, who would subsequently hand us a list of 10 or 20 incomplete items (T/F and multiple choice questions, for the most part) that required us to prove our retention of the information the teachers and accompanying text had imparted to us. The only shock we felt in the classroom was the occasional pop quiz or open-ended essay question for which we were unprepared. [To be sure, some students were shocked in general, having not mastered the skill of listening and studying, but that subject I will discuss another time (in a previous blog entry, I alluded to the KIPP schools, which serve as an example of what I think future schools should be like).]

Almost 40 years later, I sit here and read "Revolutionary Wealth" by Heidi and Alvin Toffler, published in 2006. How did the future play out compared to the predictions of the first book and how does the future look in the second? Well, it comes down to how you measure wealth, it appears.

How do you measure wealth? I suppose most of us think first of our monetary holdings (assets vs. liabilities) and then perhaps our health. We might even talk of the wealth we expect to inherit in this life or the next one.

The Tofflers look at wealth in another form, that of intangible wealth, such as time and knowledge.

As I read the futurists' vision of a world ruled not by limited land, building and manufacturing capability but by inexhaustible resources, I remember that the book, written between the dot-com bust and the leveraged mortgage burst, gives us an insight we should appreciate more than we probably do. I'm not saying that the Tofflers and their kind are the ultimate wise gurus to whom we must turn to save this planet from economic destruction. Instead, I believe we can compare their vision against reality and find a projected path upon which to base our investments for the future.

For instance, a Who's-Who of leaders recently met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Imagine the tribal leaders of old gathering in a circular ceremony to divine the future by reading the position of the stars in relation to the ashes of the fire and you get a clear idea of the value of our current leaders gathering to produce the documents that will tell the world how to recover from the current economic slump.

The Tofflers examined the role of knowledge (part of the trinity of data-information-knowledge, well discussed in many books and Internet articles) and prognosticated about the need for knowledge to be free. Well, most of this babble I read about in the late 1990s, during the dot-com rise, so nothing of this revealed anything new to me.

Instead, I came to realize that the Tofflers rehashing of the concept of prosumers continues to show where the future is headed.

In this current economic crisis, the world decries the inept spending habits of Americans, who mortgaged their futures in order to enjoy the present, driving economic frenzy on a worldwide scale to milk the mortgage market for all it was worth. No one denies the intangibles of the economy are like a house of cards or the invisible clothes that an emperor once wore to great ridicule. So why do we sit here and cry in our mortgaged milk that was spoiled by imaginary hands?

Think about it. You probably spend your day in one activity or another where you exchange your capabilities for nothing. Nothing, in this case, is a substance that we call money, love, or some other intangible thing that we all say clearly exists, even if you can't see it. In other words, you spend time at home raising your kids, watching their behavior and providing guidance to put their behavior into what you and others around you consider an acceptable range. From where is that range derived? Remember, the world is full of different ways to raise children, all of which provides good survival skills for them. Or you developed a set of skills that helped you acquire the right to sit in a building and display those skills in a something called a job, as if a job is something that has always existed. But our forebears, some of whom worked directly on a plot of land, did not have jobs. They subsisted on the land, doing what they had to do to feed themselves and their offspring. They may have gone days or weeks without any activity necessary to put food on the table because it had already been gathered and stored or hunted and dried. There was no job to speak of, such as something you could easily say had a time value (like an hourly wage or total subcontract worth).

For those who don't know what a prosumer is, I'll summarize the best I can – the combination of producer and consumer. I go to the kitchen, fix myself a PB&J sandwich and eat it. I am a prosumer of that sandwich. In that sense, all of our forebears who worked the land were prosumers. Sure, some of them sold excess food or animals, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Looking at the history of the human species, I think we can clearly say that the majority of our history involved consuming. We picked berries, ate wild grain, hunted animals, all of it "produced" by this planet. Over time, our brains developed the habit of prosuming to enhance our rate of survival. We picked up stones and broke off pieces to increase our killing capability. We wrapped animal skins around our bodies that we had cut off and cured. We learned how to sew animal skins together and later how to make cloth using our sewing skills. Along the way, we developed our first intangible skills, including language and writing (via pictographs).

And it is language that stays with us today. And where our prosuming will take us into the future.

For you see, while Americans are used to carrying the world on their backs, claiming the lead in technological developments and per capita consumption, a revolutionary change occurred. Their language, a derivation of English, will no longer dominate the language spoken on the Internet. There are now more Chinese-speaking people on the Internet than Americans. And their domination of the languages spoken on the Internet is catching up fast.

What does this mean for the future? If history teaches us anything, it appears to show us that humans have mastered the skill of prosuming and will continue to use that skill to great advantage, whether in the home or at the local/corporate/national/global level. The 20^th Century view of the world as having distinct populations divided into national territories will soon become obsolete if it hasn't completely done so already. Therefore, the intangible wealth of the future, as measured in the form of economic power, time management and knowledge prosuming, rests in the hands of those whose language facilitates prosuming.

If I sat at the World Economic Forum, I would propose that we modify the current language of world business, English, to incorporate the numbering system of Asian languages, which enables people to learn math at an earlier age and speak to each other no matter where they live, physically or virtually. We create a truely basic but extensible world language (we can add more characters or pictographs at any time). I would recommend that we empower those who desire to join the world economy – no matter how poor or rich – by issuing all of them both credit and assets, including a virtual mortgage they can borrow against but also pay interest on as well as ownership in a few global companies and NGOs that gives them a stake in the goings-on of their fellow humans all around the globe.

Knowledge seeks to be free but so does prosuming. If we free up people to produce and consume within a flexible framework of an ever-changing world economy, our intangible wealth will grow, every one of us building an inexhaustible surplus with which we can share or barter, as needed.

That's the kind of wealth I want. Don't you?

What’s a groundhog got to do with it?

2 February 2009, 11:32 a.m. – Two nights in a row with no sleep…am I supposed to see my shadow today? At my age, I know my moods, my body ailments, and my set of reactions to the familiar world around me. Once, I would attack the world like Don Quixote, jousting at monsters with relish, exhilarated in the extreme during the thrust and plunged into depression when the dragons of the world defeated me with laughter. The highs and lows have mellowed somewhat with age. I, I, I…it's not all about me. I have to keep telling myself that, reminding and repeating myself often, because as a selfish person I tend not to care about others. I just said this to myself and heard echoes in my thoughts of repeating even these set of words. The next thing I know I'll say is, "Yet, because I was raised to worry about what the neighbors think, a selfish person like me still doesn't exceed a limit of social decency that I wish did not exist."

I look at the words, phrases, and sentences I've written and exasperate myself with my attitude of "good enough" (as in "good enough for government work"), not taking the time to perfect my use of the rules and suggestions of the English language. Thus, I'll use too many commas or place a word with a similar but not quite precise meaning (e.g., "I see" versus "I comprehend").

I write for an unknown reader. Well, I write for myself first but myself as a person with a group of colleagues (including some imagined ones, such as other writers who had brains superior in calculation capability than mine but whose inspiration gives me hope for the value of my work), well-read colleagues who may not exist except in my imagination. Colleagues who enjoy reading dictionaries, plant identification books, philosophy, cartoons, economic analysis reports, sports headlines, milk cartons, random blogs, user manuals, billboards, handwritten letters from friends, LP liner notes, fortune cookie slips and literary fiction.

On a flight from one forgotten destination to another a few years ago, I read a book highly recommended to me titled, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." The friend who suggested the book to me majored in English in college and had more than a passing interest in the correct use of punctuation, even though her career had moved into computer equipment sales. I suppose our lives crossed paths for a reason (a reason, mind you, not a purpose). I reason that I wanted to major in language studies or literature but my upbringing pointed in the direction of the hard sciences such as chemistry, engineering or computer software design, thus my vocation would always clash with my avocation of reading and writing literature (literature in the form of poetry, short stories, novellas, skits, plays and novels; I hesitate adding the word "essays" to the list because the blogging world has taken over the world of the formal essay, where even a haiku becomes both blog and essay; I might add "graphic novel" one day should my artwork interest hold my attention for longer than a day of drawing). So literature becomes a joke about a panda that serves as a book title which mixes my life and my friend's life well.

You know the joke, don't you? A panda walks into a bar, sits on a stool, munches on some peanuts, kills the person sitting next to him with a gun and then calmly walks out of the bar. A patron turns to the bartender and asks, "What was that all about?" The bartender responds, "Don't you know that's a panda?" The bartender hands a poorly written children's alphabet animal book to the patron, who turns to the letter P and reads the definition of panda: "an animal, native to China, that eats, shoots, and leaves."

Today, literature as solely a written art form almost has no meaning. The Internet has invaded our thoughts and actions so pervasively and persuasively that we've become both creator and audience at once. The visual arts, including rap and hip-hop songs, take literature from the static written page into the three-dimensional realm from whence it originated. Our storytelling ancestors sitting in caves would understand us and our need to carry around Internet devices in the form of cell phones and other UMPCs.

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I watched the movie, "Inkheart," at a local theater. If you haven't seen the movie and plan to, then you should stop reading here because I'll soon discuss spoilers. As in right now. LOL Toward the end of the movie, the character played by Jim Broadbent (one of my favorite actors, by the way), the writer of "Inkheart," expressed his wish to move out of the regular, lonely world of writing and into the exciting world he created with his writing. I don't know how the third act of the movie jibed with the "Inkheart" book series on which the movie's based, but I was happy to see the writer character get his wish granted.

The night before, I slept in a fit of delirium. I tossed and turned, fighting the enemy who has stalked my dreams and wishes like the shadow from "Inkheart." I suppose all of us have seen such an enemy as mine, who works night and day to drain me of my true desire, waiting for the moment to suck the life blood out of me and turn me into a zombie, with which the shadow can play like pieces on a chess board or marionettes on a puppet stage, reducing me to the role of an automaton working in an office full of fellow robots. In the dreamlike state, I defeated the enemy because I surrounded myself with the love and support of those who believe with me that my creative talent is worth calling myself a writer. Or more than that, really…I'll take a deep breath here, look around me to make sure no one is looking, feel my heart beat in my throat before I speak and finally say, "I am an author."

After watching the movie, my wife and I returned home to watch the spectacle known as the Super Bowl. With a superlative like "super," we can automatically assume the bowl is anything but. However, I have accepted the conditioning of my society to cheer for or against the participants of the main event, grown men running around chasing an inflated bag of sewn pigskin (and if you ever want a humorous view of football, listen to Andy Griffith's comedy sketch "What It Was, Was Football," – even if you're not a fan of "The Andy Griffith Show," the skit is funny), whilst with bated breath we gaze at the screen for gleeful exposure to commercial advertising.

As the NFL game progressed, I glanced at the clock, mentally counting down the hours until the countdown ended for the opening of submission of works of fiction for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award at www.createspace.com/abna. When the game ended after 9 p.m. Central, I grabbed another bottle of Yuengling Black & Tan and headed to my study, where I could sit and listen to jazz on old vinyl LP albums and watch the countdown clock on a webpage. Tick. Tock. Or so my brain thought because the silent digital display simply showed the word, "Tonight," underneath was which a counter of hours, minutes and seconds. My blood pressure leapt when the numbers dropped from 01:00:00 to 00:59:59. Had I made any glaring mistakes in the work of fiction itself, much less the other text I had to submit for the contest, including an excerpt of less than 5,000 words, a pitch statement of less than 300 words, an anecdote, a biography and a description to be used for the novel should the contest judges deem my novel worthy of posting on amazon.com as a semifinalist in March?

Finally, as the hour shrank to ten minutes, I resigned myself to the fact that no matter how well my novel succeeded in capturing the attention of the editor(s) who reviewed first the pitch statement (to reduce the 10,000 entries down to 2,000) to create a reasonable set of good entries and then read my novel excerpt (to drop the entries down to 500, I believe), I had written an opus, though not perfect, which represented me, complete with poor punctuation – with ill-advised comma placement, or omission – and lack of precise word usage.

A groundhog does not determine the next six weeks of weather any more than a randomly selected judge determines the worth of my writing. At 23:11 (11:11 p.m. Central, or 12:11 Eastern time on 2^nd February 2009), I clicked the Submit button and received confirmation that my novel submission was completed and accepted for the 2009 ABNA contest.

HAPPY GROUNDHOG'S DAY, EVERYONE!

Love In The Time of Recession

I wrote a long note to a friend on facebook, hit the backspace key to correct the spelling of a word and the whole note disappeared. I know the first note was a work of genius so I'll try again...

Anytime I attempt to discuss the subject of love, I can't help sounding cheesy or sentimental but here I am, anyway.

I cannot say that I own my wife's love; she owns me. My love is like a debt I can never repay so instead of worrying about how much principal or interest I owe, I share that love with all my friends and family, telling them about what my wife has been for me, has done for me and what little I feel I give in return.

She and I became penpals when we were 12 years old. From that point on, I shared my deepest thoughts with her, never once worrying that she would make fun of me or use my thoughts against me. I accepted her for who she was, too, never criticizing her behavior, no matter how much different it seemed to my own.

As we've grown, we've learned to give the other room to discover new aspects of ourselves that didn't exist when we first got married. We did not marry preconceived notions of what the opposite sex should be like or a perfect image of a marriage partner. Other than our names, nothing else is the same as it was 22+ years ago.

That's the major secret to the success of our marriage.

We also agreed to basic financial rules to avoid the issues that drive wedges into many marriages -- money problems -- such as:

• Rule #1 - tell your spouse/mate when spending more than $50 for anything besides birthday/Christmas gifts for the other.
• Rule #2 - put aside 20% of our income toward retirement and do NOT touch it until retirement.
• Rule #3 - live beneath our means so we can save up to spend cash on vacations, cars, or other high-cost items, avoiding unnecessary bank loans or credit card debt.

I hope you find someone to share your secrets with and never have to worry about losing that person's trust, no matter what the two of you become as individuals. For those of you who have seen your spouse leave you for another, I sympathize. Humans should know they can fall in love with a pile of dirt, if they want to - isn't that what popular movies and books show us? It's the person who cares for you who counts, not some stranger who looks good for a few months and wants to take you away from the person who really matters. If anything, we should be angry at those who attempt to steal our love and NOT be attracted to them. Instead, we're temporarily blinded by "love" (lust in disguise, for the most part). Such is human folly!

As I told another friend on facebook, I hope you find the person you want to take your last breath with. I consider myself very lucky to have found mine at age 12, although I didn't know it then, which made discovering the fact so much more fun!

In these recessionary times, stress increases, putting pressure on our relationships. If we build a strong foundation, then we can weather these tough times. My wife and I have weathered three recessions and will continue to weather more because our love for each other includes respect in the form of simple financial responsibility. After all, love isn't rocket science. Put your partner before materialism and see what happens!