High-Speed Connection

Yesterday, I stopped at Big Lots, a discount goods store, and bought a canvas wall art kit for $5 (included 8”x8” deep edge canvas, six 12ml acrylic paint tubes, Taklon brush plus paint color mixing guide). Last night, I used the acrylic paints, mixing a few colors together and created an abstract design on the canvas. Later today, I’ll use some seed packets I bought at Wal-Mart to decoupage a tribute to home gardening, including portions of a newspaper article about the growing trend of local farming cooperatives where people “rent” land/resources in order to grow their own organic food or pay someone else to do the farming for them. Kind of like a franchise on farmers markets. Get close to nature without getting your hands dirty.

Speaking of getting close, I hadn’t finished telling you about the train ride.

While I write this, my Internet connection (or rather, the wireless radio chipset in my laptop computer) doesn’t have enough power to stay tuned to the local 802.11g two-way radio station so I can’t see what I last wrote, which means I don’t know exactly where I left off in my retelling.

After Sommer and I finished our meal, we talked for a while. I asked Sommer for a special favor, knowing that I was stepping out of my comfort zone but willing to take the chance.

Sommer leaned closer.

“Would you be willing to pretend, for the next two hours, that we are alone together?”

Sommer raised her eyebrows, deepening the tiny creases of the future wrinkles on her forehead, without changing the expression on her face.

“What I mean is … let’s put the past behind us.”

Sommer smiled. “I don’t understand. We have no past together.”

“You’re right.” I smiled back. “But what if we had no worries for a couple of hours?”

“I am not worried. Are you?”

“About our meeting with the customer, yes. But not about this moment.”

“No worries, Rick.” Sommer looked out the window.

I glanced at the trees whizzing by. While Sommer continued to focus on the landscape, I looked at her right ear and the blemish-free area of her neck behind and below her ear. An empty palette. I wanted to paint a masterpiece on that neck.

Sommer looked back at me. “With you, I don’t worry.”

Why do people tell me I make them feel comfortable when I worry all the time, uncomfortable in the presence of any human, not sure who or what I am from moment to moment?

She reached a hand across the table and placed it on top of my hands, which were clasped together. “Are you worried?”

I took a mental inventory of my body, feeling the quickened pulse at my temples, the constricted blood vessels in my neck and the tightened shoulder muscles. Tense, tense, tense. But Sommer didn’t see that. Very few people did. They only saw my smile.

I unclasped my hands and placed a hand on Sommer’s. “Why should I be worried?”

Sommer nodded, squeezed my hand and let go. “I feel tired. If you want another beer, we can stay. Otherwise, let’s return to our seats.”

I tilted the glass back and swallowed down the last of the beer. The server took the glass away and brought it back in a bag for me. I gave him some money, generous with a tip.

Sommer made me walk in front of her on the way back to our seats. Having completed a marathon the previous year, my body was in good shape so I only hoped that something about my body appealed to Sommer the way hers did to me. I don’t know what she thought.

We sat down and both checked our cell phones for email messages, spending 5 or 10 minutes responding to “emergencies,” urgent requests for information about dire circumstances if customers weren’t updated on sales figures and technical support issues. In other words, the usual.

Sommer is shorter than I am, especially in torso height (length from hip to head). After we put away our phones, Sommer looked up at me.

“We have some time before we arrive in Augsburg. I am tired. Do you have any questions?”

Questions? I looked from Sommer to the nearby passengers. Many of them sat half-asleep, their heads bouncing up and down like daffodils in the wind. A few worked on laptop computers and some read newspapers, books or magazines. None of them seemed to pay any attention to me.

“Who are you?” I said out loud.

“Hmm?” Sommer placed a hand on my knee. “What?”

“Did I just say that?”

“What did you say?”

“’Who are you?’”

“Oh.” Sommer moved her hand to my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should get some sleep.”

“But…”

Sommer massaged my shoulder for a few seconds. “You are worried, aren’t you?”

I relaxed.

Sommer laid her head on my shoulder. “Here, we can both get some sleep. We will feel much better after a nap.”

I lifted my arm and Sommer’s head slid into my armpit. She snuggled up against me and placed a hand on my chest. I wrapped my arm around her and held her close to me. We fell asleep immediately.

I had a dream. In the dream, I smelled shampoo and body wash. I detected a slight scent of body odor, as if someone had been lightly exercising. I smelled old leather boots and airplane sanitizer. I kissed the top of my loved one’s head and pulled my arm tight up under her chest. She rubbed her nose on my neck. I had a flashback and remembered a similar scene from a camping trip with another woman. Then, like wheels spinning on a railroad track, scene after scene of similar events spun on a wheel in my thoughts. I felt like I was tripping. Either that, or I’d reached nirvana, where ecstasy is the eternal moment when the most pleasurable memories fill your thoughts for the rest of your days.

I breathed in deeply and smelled packaged snack chips. I heard the crinkling of plastic or celluloid wrapping and woke up. My mouth and nose were buried in someone’s hair. My arm was asleep, bent and crooked, wrapped around the body that belonged to the hair in my face. Where was I? Why was there an older woman and her husband eating a snack and smiling at me across the aisle of this train?

Train? Oh yeah. The smells in my dream. It was the scent of Sommer in Germany that I was just getting used to. I looked at my watch and made Sommer stir. I had been asleep for 30 to 45 minutes. Still another hour until we reached Augsburg.

Sommer patted me on the chest and lifted her head. “Do you feel better?”

I nodded.

“No more worries?”

I shook my head.

Sommer lifted against my arm and I did my best to unhook my dead limb and bring it back to life. Sommer sat up. She stretched her arms out.

I looked at her disheveled hair and ran my fingers through the back of it to straighten out the kinks at her collar.

Sommer turned to me and smiled. “Danke.”

“Bitte.”

She picked up her purse and excused herself to go to the public toilet.

I opened my laptop and jotted down a few quick notes, wanting to remember and savor this moment later on, finding the right time to share it with someone like you, who understands someone like me and what makes both of us tick. And I still have one more hour to tell you about. Another time, perhaps? I want to finish my new masterpiece first.

Kassel to Augsburg

I plan to leave for the education institute in an hour. In that span of time, how far from Kassel would I have gotten on the way to Augsburg? Ich weiß nicht.

You know what makes my world go around - interesting conversations with women - but I repeated it in case you forgot and in case you aren't interested.

Not so long ago, I had business in Germany (a/k/a Deutschland). [I recounted part of the visit in a story I wrote but I can't remember what I wrote so I may repeat myself, if you've read my books. Too bad!] I landed in Paderborn, a regional airport in the northern part of Germany, and was met by two lovely ladies, Fern, an American and Sommer, a German. I believe Fern now lives in Finland. I assume Sommer still lives in Germany.

In any case, Fern, Sommer and I left the airport in Sommer's BMW 318 wagon and drove on the autobahn to the customer's office for a meeting. We cut the meeting short so that Sommer and I could proceed to Kassel in order to catch the ICE train in Kassel for a trip to Augsburg to attend another customer meeting.

Sommer is a delightful person. She reminds me of Audrey Tautou, a fellow European, who some of you may remember from the movie, Amelie (or Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain), but Sommer is her own person and, because I don't have a photo of Sommer, I only give you the actress' name so you can get a general idea of her looks from googling the actress.

When I am alone with a person, regardless of gender, I quiz the person to get a good sketch of his/her biographical details and thus some insight into the person's motivations. Sommer was in sales, has a wonderful husband and children, and only wanted to be in sales for a while. It was not an ultimate career for her, although she enjoys being with people and getting paid for socializing.

I learned this from her while she and I traveled with Fawn to the first customer's office. I learned about Sommer's personality on the drive to the Kassel train station.

I like people's eyes. When two people look at each other, nothing else matters, or shouldn't. Sommer's eyes are kind. She holds up just the thinnest of masks when she looks at you, betraying a child's shyness without looking ridiculously innocent as an adult. I have a habit of falling into people's eyes, which gets me into all kinds of misunderstandings. Sommer didn't seem to mind.

In fact, Sommer smiled the more I looked at her. The more I looked at her, the more she held my gaze and would not turn away. I wasn't sure if it was a cultural difference that kept her eyes glued to mine after we got on the train.

Before we got on the train, we had rushed from the carpark (parking lot) into the train station, thinking we were late, quickly reading train schedules (Sommer in her fluent German and I in my halting Deutsch), hoping we'd bought the correct tickets as we fled down to the train platform. We arrived just as a train was taking off but Sommer assured me that although German trains are on schedule and the one that left had left at the time ours was supposed to, the train we wanted had not yet arrived. I checked the schedule anyway, asking her to explain to me the symbols and such on the train schedule posted in a glass case. She patiently obliged, repeatedly assuring me with her own questions that my questions about the train schedule did not mean we'd missed the train.

After we settled on the train for a few minutes, I thought about all the romantic European movies and novels involving train trips (and a few sinister ones). There we were, a little perspired and tousled, strangers on a mission. After a few minutes of sitting together, figuratively twiddling our thumbs, we simultaneously agreed to go eat a light meal since the dining car had just opened up.

Okay, yeah, I'm a guy, so as Sommer walked in front of me, I noticed her fit and shapely behind, with only a little jiggle indicating some age-related cellulite around her hips as we walked along the passageway. I kept my thoughts focused on something else, anything else, to remind myself that two business people on a three-hour train ride had plenty of business to discuss. As you can imagine, the movies, "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset," flashed across the projection screen of my thoughts.

Talk about a funny moment. Right now, "Autobahn" by Kraftwerk, is playing on the shuffled set of tunes on my iPod.

Anyway, I've only got 20 minutes left to write, edit and review this blog entry.

Sommer and I sat across from each other at the table. Because of my red hair, the server immediately spoke to me in English. Sommer responded in German to indicate he didn't have to use his limited English, if he didn't want to. So for the rest of the meal, the two of them challenged me to order or respond to the server in Deutsch. I passed with flying colors, they said. Sehr gut! [I should speak fluent German, if more often with my father I practiced, who does.]

At this moment, I'm drawing a blank about our conversation. I'll remember in a moment, but mainly I learned more about Sommer and vice versa. I enjoyed peaceful moments watching the countryside pass by. I sipped my König Ludwig Weiss bier (the server let me keep the glass, which sits in our kitchen window here at home).

Sommer smiled. She put her elbows on the table and sank her chin into the palms of her hands, giving me her full attention. I melted. If only my dessert had done the same!

For dessert, I ate some frozen gelatinous substance that I recall was supposed have a strawberry flavor. I shared it with Sommer. She assured me that German berries are much better when fresh. I agreed with the possibilities.

How long is three hours? Well, by now I'm almost a third of the way from Kassel to Augsburg, both in real time and in my thoughts. That leaves two more hours.

Summertime in Germany. Everyone has a favorite time of year. Fern likes wintertime in Munich but enjoys the late springtime, when alpine flowers start blooming in the lowlands and work their blooming schedules up the mountains, where she likes to hike (or used to, when she lived in Germany). I prefer summer. Or "sommer," in German.

Well, my time to write this blog entry is up. I'll have to finish writing down the rest of the memory in another blog entry. Gespräch zu Ihnen bald, or something like that.

Well Trained

A person commented about a previous blog where I mentioned being spoiled by the high level of education in Huntsville. The person asked me if that was really such a good thing. Good question.

I assume that specialized training has improved the human condition, generally speaking. But am I making an incorrect assumption?

I look at my brain as an example and feel my body for reactions to my well-trained brain. How much of what I am is due to excess education? Is my body in worse shape because of what I've learned?

I don't know. That's all I can say.

The public debate about global warming tells me we humans aren't sure how much education is good for us. We use belief and intuition as substitutes for dry, rational thinking, all of which is based on some type of education, whether institutionalized or self-taught.

I went to lunch with a friend who told me about an ongoing discussion concerning the number of trees in North America. According to his source (a celebrity radio personality, from what I gathered), there are more trees in the United States than there ever have been before. I had not heard about the debate surrounding forestation or deforestation of America. I had certainly read about the deforestation of rain forests and wondered if the radio talk show host was substituting one fact for another, in the appearance of rationality; i.e., a tree planted in the U.S. will offset a tree cut down in the Amazon, and thus make the process carbon-neutral.

I don't have the facts to argue the point about carbon neutrality. Instead, I stood in the forest behind my house yesterday, where all the trees are less than 70 years old, and told myself, "You know, Rick, someone or something has deforested this hill in the past 100 years. In the past 20 or 30 years someone cut down all the large cedar trees and removed the large trunks, leaving the small trunks and limbs behind. I can still see remnants of a forest road where someone used to drive through here, which someone probably used to cut down all or many of the trees. However, the largest trees all show signs of burning. Are they lightning-damaged or did maybe a forest fire wiped out the local ecosystem, instead?" The hill is typical of a lot of North American forests, young yet replenished with new plant and animal growth. Whatever was here before, I don't know and it doesn't matter because we can't go back in time. The same can be said about Central American jungles, the hills of Thailand and even parts of the Amazon.

My research tells me we humans have reshaped the surface of dry land many times over, which coincided with the collapse of local civilizations (pushed over the edge by our resource deplenishment and/or in connection with natural disasters). So now I know I am educated about human history and human trends/tendencies. Does that make my life any better or worse? Depends on how much I want to invest emotions, flooding my bloodstream with hormones and adrenaline, while thinking about current human activity in relation to our ignorance or knowledge of history.

You see, I'm just this hairy bipedal primate sitting here, trained to use a box to perform the equivalent of writing strokes in the sand, wiping ochre on cave walls or making marks in slabs of wet mud. I don't really know anything except what I've been told to know. I have no innate understanding of the universe. I feel the warm sun, smell the scents of spring and hear the sounds of birds. Everything else is just this stuff in my head and/or exhibited by my body. I can't say I even know what's in front of my face because my thought process was set almost before I knew how to think. I look out the window and think "tree, commonly called redbud, classified as Cercis canadensis, sprouting new leaves and seedpods after recently blooming," not "non-threatening, possibly edible or sheltering fellow living thingy." I have no insights. I only have observation and response techniques given to me by fellow humans.

While other fellow primates want to jump up and down, either figuratively or literally, and shout at each other about [changing or not changing] our behaviors because the world [is or is not] becoming uninhabitable due to [our contribution or natural changes] to the world climate, I sit here and wonder why I don't have a good response to some of my tribal mates' invitations to join them in their shouting match. Is it because of my education? Am I lacking some natural emotional attachment to thoughts?

Again, I don't know. I see reports that the Arctic ice cap and mountainous glaciers are melting but I haven't personally observed the melting process. I do see that local weather extremes are setting high and low temperature records. I enjoy biodiversity but never wandered "virgin" land, and probably never will, where humans have made no settlements in either prehistoric or recorded history so does it really matter to me if primeval wetlands are drained and ancient forests cut down for more human expansion?

I am a domesticated animal, trained to put more mental skills to work than physical ones. My mental faculties tell me, when I put rhetoric and entertainment aside, that the Earth is probably getting warmer, regardless of the cause. I have a good chance of living another 40 or 50 years, if I want to consume tiny, expensive, pharmaceutical meals throughout the day as I get older. All that really matters to me is finding a way to live comfortably in that span of time, with whomever I wish to spend that time. If the Earth gets too hot to sustain over seven billion humans and geoengineering doesn't cool the Earth (or causes some other unexpected ill effect), do I care if the human population will double in the next 20 or 30 years to 14 billion anyway and lead to the permanent collapse of the world economy? Not really. Or at least that's what my education has taught me.

You tell me whether being highly educated is a good thing. If you do, maybe I'll learn something. If you don't, maybe I'll finally figure something out for myself.

Pet Diary

Do they still have pet stores in shopping malls? I haven't been inside a mall in so long I've almost forgotten what they contain, except for pet shoppes and cookie eateries.

I'm a dog guy, myself. I grew up with dogs and like to rough-house with them. It's the only way I know how to be with a dog. I'm not a lap dog kind of guy. No yip-yip for me.

Funny thing is that I married a cat person. So, being the easy-going guy I am, I've lived with a woman and cats for the past 22+ years. The past 10 years the cats have been two males, with whom I like to rough-house, at least as much as you can with a cat. So today I have scars on my arms, chest and back from playing with the cats. I put on an adhesive bandage in the wee hours of the morning when I realized I was bleeding on my night shirt.

But I digress.

As I sat on the chair by the bedroom window while putting on socks and shoes a little while ago, I thought about the comfort that pets give us. They don't really talk, not with human language, anyway. But they do communicate with us, letting us know their basic needs and giving us their undivided attention (my cats are like dogs - they follow me around the house and want my attention, unlike cats you see in movies or comic strips that ignore their feeders/home providers). Pets are surrogate humans, no more or less human than computerized surrogate humans. I certainly get a lot of the human-type body-to-body need taken care of by playing with animals. I guess that's why nursing homes and other long-term assisted living facilities request the visit of animals, to provide the type of body contact and face time that an animal gives you without all the misread body signals that human-to-human contact brings.

I had a series of dreams last night. In one series, the face of an artist friend of mine appeared in front of my eyes like a mask, stepping into my personal space. I said, "Excuse me," and she said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I see you're busy. I can wait." And her face disappeared from my view. A few dreams later, I was standing inside the booth of part of an antique show that was visiting a shopping mall. I looked over to see the artist friend of mine patiently sitting on one of the tile walls that malls seem to have. I waved at her and she waved back, motioning me to ignore her and pay attention to some of my customers. I quickly forgot she was there. After some time passed, I felt someone standing next to me. I turned to see it was my artist friend. I apologized for forgetting about her and she acted like it was normal. She reached over and hugged me, thanking me for giving her unexpected attention lately. I hugged her back, feeling guilty that she more greatly appreciated me for what little time I had given her than I felt like I had gotten back. She patted me on the back. I hugged her tightly and then let her go. She walked away and disappeared.

I woke up feeling that the artist friend was like a pet, completely happy with the attention she gets, always happy to see me no matter what mood I'm in or how I behave in response.

I then woke up from waking up to wonder if I was the pet in the dream. Is that what my furry friends think? That they ignore us just as quickly as they notice us, wondering why we hug them and give them so much care and attention and suddenly disappear?

As usual, I completely woke up and realized my wife was asleep against my back, one cat was asleep in between us and one cat was asleep against my chest.

Meanwhile, I hear a few animals jumping around in the attic. Is it squirrels or raccoons who are playing with and chasing each other? Since birdseed has gotten too expensive for me to justify buying it, how long will suburban wildlife continue to live with us if they have to travel farther from here to forage for food?

I end this blog entry with these questions: How many of us are not only somebody's sex toy but also somebody's pet? And why do we act that way? Have we been conditioned to accept body love as the only attention that matters? Or are we simply just loving animals who happen to use our brains for idle thinking sometimes, and any kind of attention will do? Being social animals, what's the smallest amount of attention we can live with and be happy?

Two Hours In The Woods

Buckeye with full red blooms, shooting stars just past peak, Jack-in-the-pulpit rising up, caterpillars (inchworms) hanging by a thread, butterflies looking for woodland flowers, insectus unknownus everywhere, green stink bugs landing on my leg, barred owl calls in the distance ... common names and their influences on my life in the past two hours. Plus some plant whose flower stalk comes out of the ground and looks like an ear of corn. I wish you could have been with me when I came upon the long field of shooting stars in full bloom - the aroma! The sight of hanging white flowers as far along the ridge as I could see in the woods! Accented by the scorpionweed, mountain phlox and white star grass.

Ahh ... I sigh with satisfaction. One in nature, no other humans in sight (the distant sounds of house construction and commercial lawnmowing keeping me in reality, though). Yesterday was cold enough for a parka and today I hiked in shorts. Who would have or could have kept up with me?

Other images I remember - oxalis, dried fern fronds, pools of water, weather-worn rocks, a bat cave, deer tracks, a field of grass under a tree canopy, spider webs with little green or yellow spiders in the middle, trillium all over the forest floor, weathered cedar trees, old barbed wire fencing, blue sky, warm sun ... the hits keep on coming.

I can barely remember what troubled me before I left the house. I'll look at the short notes I jotted down before my hike.

• Carl Sagan visited Huntsville back in the 1980s. He promoted his idea of non-manned exploration of space, which didn't sit well with the NASA scientists and engineers in the audience. I guess that's why many of us showed up, to hear for ourselves what this man had to say. He responded to the fact we worked in the field of manned exploration to keep our jobs was that the scientists who worked for the Nazis said the same thing about their rote roles. If you want to be remembered, be argumentative!
• I can resist temptation only so long, especially if it'll be something interesting to write about afterward.
• When I went to a boy-girl party in fifth grade, I played spin the bottle with Renee W. She laughed that I didn't know what to do when we went into the closet to kiss, a mistake I quickly reacted to, not being used to having lack of knowledge. Later, when I crawled up under a table in embarrassment, why did the kids think I was just being cool and was under there to smoke a cigarette? At age 10, no less. Renee had her first child at 14 (8th grade). Life is full of missed opportunities ... I played doctor with another friend to make up for my ignorance but never attended another boy-girl party at Rocky's house (which was also home to some of the adult swinger parties in our neighborhood).
• Why did my father the professor stay in hotel rooms and have his own apartment while he taught college classes 30 miles out of town? He'll never tell me, I know, because of Mom.
• My father ended up with prostate cancer. Can an STD cause prostate cancer?
• Poetry = fucking with words
• The recent negative health/gun stories in the news will falsely lead the public to agree to government-issued health/gun control regulation, just like we're going along with the economic stimulus package with its bank nationalization/regulations; what's in it for me? If I don't get anything positive, what's the negative impact on me?
• A rocket has to pay the price of a heavy, quickly-dissipating fuel load while reaching escape velocity to leave Earth. What's the price to escape the pull of the easy life in suburbia? What's it like out there? Is there anything out there or, as I reckon, is it all just various aspects of the human condition and you basically learn the same lessons anywhere/everywhere? Do I want to know a life where literacy is an option, not a requirement, and deal with heavy doses of superstition and ignorance, on a scale worse than I did while growing up in east Tennessee and living here in north Alabama? Huntsville and its high level of educated citizens has spoiled me.

I had more to say but can't remember, thanks to the relaxing hike in the woods.

Control

Looking out the window, I see middle-aged folks taking walks or riding bicycles through my wooded neighborhood and wonder how many of them are the ones who live in the crowded neighborhoods nearby where there is no place for a tree to grow and they can practically shake hands with the neighbor next door by reaching out to each other through their windows. Later this afternoon, I'll take a walk myself, enjoying the woods that an acquaintance, Margaret Anne, owns with her children and inherited from her father. She owns or owned 16,000 acres that have mostly been turned into subdivisions (housing estates), my wooded neighborhood being one of the first developed by her father, and the untamed wooded area behind my house being one of the last exceptions.

I have enjoyed my life and reached all my goals. Now I get to sit back and observe others' lives, at least until I get bored with this mode of living, such as it is.

I have more tales of my wild days I could write about but I think I've written enough for now. I usually write such stories because of or to impress a Muse. I have no more muses in my life.

Some guys I've known have had mistresses while being married, enjoying sexual liaisons in clandestine meetings which heightened the thrill of sex for them and their partners (many who were also married). They encouraged me to do the same, trying to get me to be part of their secret boys' club of sexual trysts. Some told me about the mileage limits on their marriage licenses, with 300 or 500 miles being the extent of their license agreement. Some simply said that out-of-town meant freedom, no matter the distance from home. Others felt like the hometown pond was big enough for fishing and there was plenty to lure into bed because they knew that women of separate subcultures rarely mingle or simply that some women want to keep secrets, too, and vice versa. Some guys even hoped to get caught as an easy out from their current marriage.

I've always felt that if I kept the home fire burning strong enough, then I could satisfy my sexual desires with one woman and avoid the risk of sexual disease.

We humans are alike, no matter whether we're male or female. We are organic, living creatures, tuned to reproduce.

At 47 years of age, my time to reproduce soon draws to a close. My sperm, if it's not already damaged, is close to being too spoiled for producing good offspring. Thus, even if my sexual desires were not sated at home, the sole purpose of sexual pleasure has just about disappeared.

I am my body, which includes my thoughts. I am my thoughts, which include my body. I have no offspring but I have a mate. I have a mate who has no offspring.

I can't sexually satisfy any other woman but my wife. It's an interesting thought. It's not a matter of will or won't. It's just that I can't. And I'm getting concerned.

I mean, think about it. I don't like organized religion, where most of those gather who follow the act of monogamy that simulates my mindset (or at least, they profess to believe and follow that act). I get tired of hanging out with guys who brag about their sexual conquests. I get tired of guys who brag about their boy toys. I like flirting with women but get tired of not being able to take the conversation beyond words. I'm running out of interesting things to do and people to hang out with. Television is boring. Movies are getting old because I've seen almost every plot device ever thought up. I have no interest in helping other people reach their goals because I'm concerned about but not willing to investigate (only imagine) the impact their goals have on my future self.

People meet me and want me to participate in their lives and I'm just too polite to say no - even worse, my politeness is part the reason some people want me in their lives. Because I don't fucking care about them, my inaction implies to them that I do care about them.

I have to remind myself again that these are just words. I am not these words and these words are not me. I won't solve any problems by typing words. It's more than that.

For instance, I watched an adult female human staring at me with either a real or made-up look of desire in her eyes while she playfully stroked a highlighter pen in and out of her mouth. The previous sentence is just a string of words but describes what I think I saw. The first sentence in this paragraph tells me that I am barely keeping my sexual desires under control. I told myself in the moment of the experience of the first sentence that she was performing that action in order to make fun of me. It was the only way I could justify my existence in that moment and I made myself sick by twisting my thoughts around that way. The woman saw the look of sickness on my face and hid hers, no matter how she thought she understand what I was thinking (she had no idea that I had been seduced by a teacher when I was a teenager and how it shocked my teenage view of roles humans perform, which told me that roles (job titles, well-defined levels of responsibility (e.g., parents), etc.) have no meaning and thus life is essentially meaningless or only relatively meaningful, at best, which I have been slowly coming to grips with ever since).

I have only myself to call me myself. No one else is responsible for me. My parents long ago ended their obligation to set me up to succeed. I have been an adult longer than I was a child but it's the upbringing and thoughts of my childhood that determine in large part who I am.

I am running out of places to live. I am running out of places to hide. Other people's desires and games are theirs, not mine. Either I participate in human society and enjoy the fruits of my desires or I don't. I'm tired of playing the game with myself that I don't enjoy playing the games that people play, in order to keep myself under control.

I enjoy being human. In fact, I celebrate humanity because it's the only game in town and I know how to succeed in it. I've succeeded in every game I've chosen to play. I've made up my own games. Homo sapiens is a fucked-up species and I want to join the members of that species in fucking up their chance of survival as much as they do, but in my own terms and at my own pace. Our species is destined to destroy the environment in which it lives - it always has and always will. There are just too many of us blind to the consequences of our actions. There are even those who pretend to care about taking care of the environment because they know they can take advantage of those who really care by making and selling the caring ones some "environmentally-friendly" product that destroyed the environment in its production - how cool is that?

Again, these are just words. Words have no meaning. I typed these words while looking out the window of a domicile. Whether these words reflect the reality of living on this planet is meaningless. They do not live. I live. You live. The space between us lives. I have no clue what your life is all about. I'm barely keeping mine under control. Maybe I'll figure something out while taking a walk because these words don't mean anything to me except to keep my thoughts off of my thoughts about thinking and keep me from thinking too much. Thinking = inaction, a type of control. At least walking/hiking is some kind of action while I'm thinking, free of games, and thank goodness one where no one directly influences me and I directly influence no one else.

Deprivation

Have you ever watched the flight of a butterfly? I don't mean the butterfly itself but the path the butterfly has taken. I'm sure that philosophers and religious adherents have waxed their semantic surfboards and ridden waves of poetic phrases, sharing them with those whom they wished to enlighten. But that's not what I'm here for.

Instead, I'm thinking of the French word for butterfly, papillon. As in the movie. And its relation to the movie, "Gattaca," which I recently watched (I own DVD copies of both movies). And their artistic relation to the real world and the feeling of being made fun of.

Our civilization, as steady as it has been in the last few decades, has given many of us the opportunity both to plan a path toward a future goal and to obtain the goal. I grew up hearing over and over again about the American Dream and how people from all over the world flock to the United States to reach goals they couldn't get in their birth countries. Now, with the general world civilization enjoying a decade or so of stabilization, the same dreams are being realized in some people's home countries, including so-called developing nations.

Our dreams or goals, are they our own? Rhetorical question. There is no right answer. Perspective makes the difference in your definition of dreams and goals, including your own and that of those around you. Depends on whether you value your place in society or see society as squeezing you into a place you aren't sure you like.

Just like the idea of being made fun of. Do you feel included or excluded? Do you enjoy getting attention, no matter what kind, or do you wish to remain anonymous? Are you so focused on your dreams or goals that you don't care what other people think of you?

This is just a planet, nothing special. We are just one species, nothing unique. Perspective makes the redbud tree outside my window special because it's the only one I can see at this moment but millions of redbud trees grow all over the world, either as one particular species or similar ones. Its lineage as a tree or tall shrub is recorded in sacred cellular scrolls, not flattened pulp made from other trees. I am no different. The dust in my house is largely composed of dead skin, whether my own or from others. The dirt and dust outside my house is composed of dead plants and animals, including other humans. The space between two objects is not empty but my perspective seems to make it so, even though I know the sun's rays are flooding this whole area today, allowing me to see perspective with my eyes.

How badly do you want to reach your goals or dreams? What are you willing to do or risk to stay on your path of success? These questions are not rhetorical. We ask ourselves these questions every day and answer them in what we do.

These are just words. Words have no meaning in and of themselves. Words do not have lives. We refer to them as memes when we bunch them into groups, claiming that messages have lives of their own. But in the millions of blogs written in the moment, very few of them are read by more than the writer. I'll give you a better example. I can boot up one of my old computers and install a program to run that will write poetry from random phrases I feed it, or from the computer's own internal dictionary and set of grammar rules. If I leave the computer alone and let it run the poetry program until the hard drive crashes, the poetry it creates, no matter how insightful the text might make you feel, will affect no one.

Dreams and goals have the same meaning. They only make sense in perspective. I have no desire to make the best paper manila file folder on the market, but someone does. I don't want my house to be so spotless and clean that it looks like no one lives in it, but someone does.

At the same time, someone else is making fun of what you dream about. [And when I say "you," I mean "I," too.]

When I was young, I was aware of when others made fun of me. I typically sat at the front of the classroom (unaware (until I was older) that my doing so was mainly due to poor eyesight) and heard the snickers and saw the notes passed in class referring to me as a teacher's pet. I didn't care. I was told by my parents that my goal was to get the best grades I could, with the assumption that anything less than an A was not best. Being liked/loved by my classmates was not in my goals or dreams. If I had friends, so be it. If not, my family and pets provided all the comfort and companionship I needed. [My sister was more concerned about my peers' view of me than I was and she let me know that others called me geek or nerd, as if that was going to change my behaviour to her benefit, I suppose.]

I consider myself fortunate. I became a millionaire in 2006 because I avoided a lot of the distraction that comes with worrying about what others think about me. I didn't accumulate a lot of boy toys because I had to compete with my peers to avoid being made fun of. I didn't get the habit of smoking or drinking with others that could have eaten up my discretionary budget.

A colleague asked me if I felt deprived because I didn't pursue the big house and the big boat and the big vacation home like all of the rest of the people we know. I looked at him and wondered what he meant by deprivation. I started to make fun of his high mortgage and other outrageous costs that makes him work in a high-pressure job which obviously negatively affects his health. Then I reminded myself it's a matter of perspective. He doesn't see what he has as negative. He doesn't care if once untamed woods are paved to provide lots for vacation homes. He doesn't know if his big boat leaks oil into the local water source. So I just smiled at him and said, yeah, I guess I do, so that he would feel secure in his lifeview.

I don't gain anything by making fun of what people dream about or the goals they wish to reach. I don't have a vested interest in this world. The world belongs to someone else, not me. With that mindset, have I deprived myself of the randomness of a butterfly's flight path by being too focused on a dream or goal? No, I haven't. In fact, my life has had many joyous stops at unexpected bent joints on my path. Otherwise, I wouldn't have anything to write about. At other times, I have walked long miles in sameness.

But my life is not a movie. I can't take quick cuts from one scene to the next to get from one oasis to another. There will be times I have to take long walks through the desert. But I can always find unique moments in those desertlike times. Sand dunes change shape. Plants and animals find niches in desert environments. The stars shine brighter in areas with little light pollution. In my set of myths, Perspective and Opportunity are twin constellations. Let them ever guide me, no matter how lost I may feel at times. Perspective will tell me I'm on the right path. Opportunity will make me feel like I had something to do.

Ethical Responsibility

I'm sure many of you have attended an institute of learning, an institution which demanded your mandatory presence at least five days a week. We humans have convinced ourselves that our species' survival depends on cocooning our offspring for about 12-16 years of their lives in order to prepare them for participation in species preservation.

I cannot with certainty say that our offspring should be sequestered in order to develop ever more complex social structures. Of course, I have benefited my whole life from human complexity, and learned to desire products of our complex diversity (or is it diverse complexity? Semantics!).

At lunch today, I ran into a former professor of mine who taught me many years ago to appreciate the beauty of accounting, Dr. B. Dr. B retired this past year so I don't know who, if anyone, will be able to instill an understanding of the Truth found in accounting that goes beyond ethics and morality. Dr. B had a way of pulling aside the veil of numbers to show his students the universe of Symmetry. Ahh...I can still remember the moment when I saw his Vision. Up until that point in time, I wondered why anyone would get a PhD in accounting. Then the yin and yang of two jigsawed columns spoke to me and opened my eyes. The path to full Enlightenment only partially wanders through the poppy fields of Liberal Arts.

Life is not a theory. Life is practical. But you know we could not send humans and probes to other parts of the universe and expect them to return successfully without first understanding the principles which give us life. Mythical chariots do not carry the sun across the sky. We are not saved by the deus ex machina in Act 3 of our lives.

How much theory does one need to survive? We experiment with gravity when we're infants, conquering that invisible foe when we hold our heads up. "Gravity pulls me down while exercising my neck muscles for some period of time allows me to pull back against gravity," we might think. We see the theory of gravity in practice but very few of us can quote the mathematical theory of gravity.

Which takes us back to the doctor's examining room. Theory does not place my hand lightly over the NP's. Instead, theory puts a mental picture in my head like this one:

http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v8/n10/fig_tab/7401072_f1.html.


[from: http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v8/n10/full/7401072.html, accessed 7th April 2009]

While attending an institute of higher learning, I spent the break between winter and spring quarter at the home of an older, divorced woman with two boys living at home with her. Some of you know the story about Frances so I won't repeat it. However, I will say that in the week I lived with her, I learned about the behavioural responses from children of single, divorced women (at least one of them).

The older boy told me he wasn't going to call me "uncle." I told him that's okay because I was going to just call him by his first name and wanted to be treated the same way - two men sharing an interest in the same woman, but for two totally different reasons. The younger boy was happy to get attention from an adult male and didn't care about my status as temporary resident of their household.

Frances and I learned a lot from each other in that short week. Any two lovers will, if they care to pay attention to one another. At the end of the week, Frances realized that beneath my mask of openness and "free love," a layer of conservatism and close-mindedness blocked access to my inner thoughts. She had broken through similar layers of other guys by using sexual honesty, exposing their raw emotional states during acts of love. Because I took her to new levels of orgasmic understanding, she saw too late that my requirements for true interconnectedness went deeper than physical enlightenment. She was used to guys who saw making love as two to five minutes of body-to-body motion and had long ago set her mindset accordingly. My introduction to her of letting the woman have all the time she wanted/needed prevented her from seeing that sexual intercourse is one thing and giving yourself up to someone else is something else entirely.

So, there I was, sitting with the NP, weighing the ethics of uncertainty in my mind, mentally holding discrete data about spending a short period of time with a young single mother who had grown used to being a sex toy. I had also dated a married woman who had treated me as a sex toy, which added more data points to my practical understanding. I had only to decide whether risk or danger was the issue at hand.

Risk or danger. Is that really what I faced? No, it wasn't. What I faced was a woman to whom I trusted my medical history. My chart showed her that I was disease-free, liked to flirt, and had a relatively healthy body. As a medical professional, she recognized that I also listened to what she said, responding not only to her words but to the underlying emotions in her voice and body gestures. Her answer to my open, unguarded looks was an invitation to show how she would thank me for seeing her as a person, if I wanted.

I am sitting here now because of her invitation. I know who I am. I step out of the shower and see the nearly 47-year old body that my eyes perceive in the mirror's reflection before me. I am a man with a hairy chest, slightly muscular arms, a small spare tire around my midsection, and a wonderful smile. It is the same image that the medical professionals have seen and diagnosed. It is the same image that the older female server flirted with at lunch today in front of my wife.

Sadly, it is not me. And that's why I've given up the pretense to be someone I'm not.

I grew up with the hope that I would be the good-looking older guy holding a pipe in the ads of my father's Playboy magazines. I fancied myself as a sensitive lover who knew what women wanted - love not sex, appreciation not idolization. I wanted to be the guy women looked at and men talked about. These very words are the same black-on-white text I read in my youth about suave men who always had the right thing to say, being just as funny and insightful talking about sports as about women's fashion.

That's what I've become. I am the good-looking guy, unpretentious and approachable. I don't stand on other people's shoulders to get what I want. I don't think my shit smells sweeter than everybody else's. I know I am not better than the next person (although a bit of my intellectual snobbishness still shows, sometimes).

But that's not who I am. My thoughts are not permeated with the same thoughts people have of what my thoughts should be. I can be a good listening lover, showing a small subset of heterosexual women what they aren't getting from their husbands or boyfriends. But I'm not. So why pretend to be?

It goes back to my retraining/re-understanding of the flirting process after the auto accident when I was 16 (and back to the first training/understanding of the flirting process after my girlfriend died in fifth grade). What is the point? Are we just peacocks, strutting our stuff in front of men and women alike, getting more complex in our poses, no longer satisfied with showing off erect or swollen genitalia but now must also show our sympathies for the others' thought processes?

A friend of mine, Jim, used to talk about the simple fact of paying attention to one's spouse/mate as the cure for infidelity. It takes 10% of the effort to satisfy the needs of your compatible mate as it does to lure and satisfy a new lover while you're still with your mate because you don't have to worry about covering up and lying to your mate about the time spent with your lover [I'm referring to my culture with its left-over Puritanical tendencies, not ones in which bigamy or extramarital lovers are the norm].

I work out with a weight set every morning. I eat a healthy breakfast. Occasionally, I take a hike/walk or jog to raise my metabolism and keep excess weight from accumulating on my body. Now I wonder why I bother. I'm not the man I planned to be. I am not a Casanova or Don Juan. Physically, I am capable of being a loving, comforting man for a free woman who desires someone like me. I have been that man in my younger days. Nothing prevents me from being that man again except my promise to stay married to the one woman I call my wife and call her my only lover for the rest of my life.

These are not ethical or moral decisions I'm making here. It's a practical one, one that I concluded when I was 10 years old while watching filmstrips and 8mm films about sexually transmitted diseases. If I wanted to avoid life-threatening STDs my whole life, then I needed to find one woman to call my wife and not have sex with anyone else. Turns out I met her the following summer. I had a few lovers along the way before I married, letting my testosterone and curiosity overcome my desire to avoid the risk/danger issue of keeping my body disease-free.

That's why I've been sad lately. I only recently became fully aware of the fact that the path people think I've been joyously walking is completely out of step with the decision I made 37 years ago. I have been meeting people's expectations, listening to their advice to keep myself physically fit (especially from the NP and another nurse), thinking they had the best intentions for me when in fact it was them they were thinking about all along.

I should have known better. The evolved human has created a sense of self that typically puts self-interest first (abnormality aside). I am just such a human. Guess I lost sight of the forest for all the trees.

In my search for enlightenment, I will encounter contradictory thoughts. I will see a woman who wants to make love to me in the only way she knows how, and I think I can give her more than she ever imagined because I believe I have done so. In the same moment, I will know that I will never give her anything but disappointment because ultimately I will reject her requests, no matter how overt or subtle they may be. I will be human and not human in my thoughts.

There is nothing except what is before me. Ethics, morals, physics -- words, only words! My being is not just thoughts and not just the black-on-white electronic ink stains on this screen. I am not the universe and the universe is not me. I have all of my body functions, give or take some age-related bone loss, tissue degeneration, hair color change and muscle mass reduction. Thus, there is nothing that prevents me from being human.

I have a positive influence on most everyone I meet, especially when I throw off the messy layers of culture I wear with discomfort or out of habit, because I know we all suffer the same human conditions and there's nothing or no one else we can be.

My exterior does not match my interior so why do I perpetuate my current image to others? Because it's my "EZPass through life" (I'm paraphrasing someone I can't remember). But the perpetuation is killing me, trapping me into hormonal responses that raise my blood pressure and prepare my body for actions I will not take.

How do I prepare myself for the next level of enlightenment, shedding my cultural trappings for one that is neutral, neither appealing nor distracting to others? Remember, enlightenment is only a word and not a place or a destination. It's a crutch as much as anything. A shield. A barrier, like my marriage is to free love.

I know who I am. I know who I am not. I don't know who I'll be or who I was.

I pretended not to hear what the NP was saying and told her to wish her husband good luck on his overseas trip. The NP slipped back into her NP role and hasn't spoken to me again. I gave her nothing to worry about because she never really said anything, and as a professional I know she does not worry, assuming I'm a professional, too, who's going to keep his mouth shut, unaware that as a writer, who take words more seriously than they deserve, I'll treat my time with the NP amateurishly and write about it for all the world to see. What kind of ethical responsibility is that? If the people who run into my life only knew!

Writers make a living doing this but I don't want to make a living as a writer. Another contradiction to sort out in the next 15,004 days ... sigh ... it's like having all the money in the world and nothing to spend it on. The clock next to me says 3:35. Upside down, it's SEE. At 3:37, it's LEE. At 3:38, it's BEE. And at 3:39, it's GEE. 15,004 more days of this? What's the point? Oh well, it's time to grade the institute papers of others who are trying to do something different with their lives. Maybe I'll step out of my comfort zone tomorrow. People do it every day. Can't be any more painful or pointless than sitting here, can it?

A quick fix

Finished reading a book yesterday (or was it Sunday? I can't remember and it doesn't matter). Some quotes from the book:

"In a television interview in 1976, a professional football player was asked by the talk-show host if it was embarrassing for football players to be together in the locker room with no clothes on. His immediate response: "We strut! No embarrassment at all. It's as if we're saying to each other, 'Let's see what you got, man!' - except for a few, like the specialty team members and the water boy.""

"There is some evidence that poetry is partly a right-hemisphere function; in some cases the patient begins to write poetry for the first time in his life after a lesion in the left hemisphere has left him aphasic. But this would perhaps be, in Dryden's words, "mere poetry." Also, the right hemisphere is apparently unable to rhyme."

"Also, lateralization is found in the behavior of young children. They are better able to understand verbal material with the right ear and nonverbal material with the left, a regularity also found in adults."

"for example, could a computer in a conversation like this raise a new topic"


"The only objection I have ever heard to the widespread use of pocket calculators and small computers is that, if introduced to children too early, they preempt the learning of arithmetic, trigonometry and other mathematical tasks that the machine is able to perform faster and more accurately than the student. This debate has occurred before [in Plato's Phaedrus, in reference to written language]:

"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without its reality."

Recently, while being examined by a nurse practitioner who was checking my heart and breathing with a stethoscope pressed against my chest, I received a proposition. The NP told me that her husband would be out of town (out of the country, as a matter of fact) for the next three weeks and she would be alone by herself. She asked me my plans the following week. Upon my inquiry, she reconfirmed that she had two infants but she planned to drop them at her parents. Now, I'm always on the alert for opportunities, business or otherwise, but this was the first time a medical professional had pressed her case for playing doctor during a home visit.

I looked the NP in the eye and she placed on a hand on my knee as she leaned further in, blocking any other parts of the office from my view.

I have not dated that many women with dark chocolate or ebony irises. The NP's eyes were deep, dark brown. I don't have a palette of colors in my head because I'm shape-oriented so I can't readily tell you the shade of brown of her eyes. What I can tell you is that the eyes were the most friendly, warm, honest and open brown eyes I had seen in a long time.

The NP is cute. And I'm just this middle-aged guy, retired and loving life as I've told you many times before. Why would I be more interesting to this gorgeous brunette than her world-traveling husband and father of two?

I'm also an amateur philosopher, always asking why? Thoughts before action!

So there I was, reading the hieroglyphs in the tiny lines of the NP's face, in the shininess of her open mouth, the squeeze of her hand on my thigh, and asking myself what the meaning of the word "is" is. What IS cheating? What is the difference between providing comfort to a lonely woman and taking a medical examination at an NP's house? What, in my mind, can I place in a category that fits in with my philosophy of keeping up a barrier against allowing sexual diseases into my marriage?

More in another blog entry. I realize this is published globally and have to ask myself how honest I can be in a public forum where I'm the one sharing and you're the one taking all this in (in other words, I don't know who reads this and what they can do with what I write, especially when it's on the thin ice of ethical uncertainty). And besides, which ear are you using to listen to this? Are you really listening to what I'm saying or do you just think you do?

Sonic acoustic accusationalism

The next few days and the day or two before this one occupy a place in my psyche that I cannot categorize nor want to.

My thoughts are clouded by fear and inhibitions today. Apathy keeps me within my comfort zone. Nowhere to go because there's no desire to go anywhere or do anything.

No place for me in society in my condition.

Technology I let go ahead of me, leaving me behind, glad to step out of the fast lane, to give others my place in the race. Libido ran dry, brain is full, life was lived. No more viable alternatives.

Sadness overwhelms my body, loosens my joints, turns my muscles and thoughts into a ragdoll. I hang over my desk, motionless for hours, finally find myself looking at a blank mirror and wish for a reflection. Thus I'm here. Will care about these words at a later date, in a moment of lucidity, clarity or forgetfulness.

Look down at my hands and realize my skin is thinning, the underlying features more prominent than before, despite increasing freckles and "liver spots." Not yet onion paper. Maybe parchment paper thin. Translucent and never quite transparent. Ever apparent? Never a parent.

What biochemical rhythms rule me? Why these phases of a desire not to die and not to live? Sleep no quick fix. Dreamless states in all conditions. Rejuvenation a buzzword I spit on, if I had the oomph to collect saliva.

Enough. Let silence rule again. I may be back. I always was before. I will be. Even if I don't feel like I am.

[Remember to look up ACTH and vasopressin as memory enhancers; new words for today, aphasia and alexia, from Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden"]

Every Trend Has Its Day

Literacy, we're told, separates the haves from the have-nots. The more people who know how to read and write, the more people who become eligible for computer literacy and thus able to create and maintain blogs. Lots of idle chatter. Lots of electronic power and digital data. Where are we going with all these blogs? In times past, we might have kept diaries and journals on a desk or in a drawer at home. Now, many of us gladly share our thoughts and stories on this public forum.

Blogging is both elitist and proletarian. Blogging is a private function on a social stage. I'm sitting here typing by myself knowing that the text I post is available to the World Wide Web.

In my experience with facebook, I found myself quickly getting bored reading about the minute iota of other people's moment-by-moment snapshots of their lives. I know the feeling is mutual. I tried twitter for a while but was overwhelmed by the inanity. Self-importance is fine. I understand our need for a bit of vanity - "look at me," "look at my wonderful offspring," "look at the impact that I've had on the people around me," etc. However, I saw this socializing behavior when I was a child and found it unnecessary to enhance my daily habits.

Our electronic networking methods vary, from SMS to twitter to email to facebook to blogs to ... what else? All the other similar stuff like myspace, baidu, video-posting sites, etc. Even plain ol' websites and electronic message/bulletin boards.

What's next? The VCs of the world are always looking for the Next Big Thing in electronic social networking. Everyone wants that billionaire to cling to.

What about the have-nots? Cell phones seem to level the playing field somewhat, offering SMS and texting services, as well as some Web browsing, as long as someone has a few dollars to spend every month.

What about the want-nots? Part of the human population, whether literate or illiterate, has no interest in any electronic communication forms.

I'm looking for a simple, non-monetized solution. I see trends that shy away from mass merging into commercial viability. Like meditating in a garden. Or Tai Chi sessions with a group of strangers. Or biking on a trail with acquaintances. Quietly fishing from the edge of a creek.

In other words, self-rejuvenation, alone or with others.

I can depend on capitalist/communist interests to keep pumping money into my portfolio. I know that others want to make lots of money. But I don't have to spend lots of money myself, giving me a net worth higher than the person beside me who gets drawn into the earn-and-spend, gotta have more, mindset. To be sure, I participate in the local marketplace, buying goods at retail prices (usually discounted, of course, so I feel like I'm getting a bargain) or shopping at used-goods outlets like the Goodwill Industries store, the Unclaimed Baggage Center or Mike's Merchandise (a damaged goods store).

As much as I enjoy spending a day by myself, wandering the unpaved and untrodden woods, I find happiness in seeking simple solutions that I can share with others. The human population will continue to grow. I don't care how much it ultimately changes the environment in this current round of expansion because I know that the global ecosystem always changes, neutral to the effects caused to a specific species. As a species, we want to believe we have control of our future but our species will eventually disappear. In the near-term, though, we can enjoy ourselves on this ride through time and space on planet Earth.

Unfortunately, the trends I see before me tell me that humans will continue to build walls around their thoughts, giving groups of people the secure feeling of exclusivity. Our warlike battle with nature that propeled humans into the forefront of their local environs has turned us against each other as our world seems to close in on itself. We still carry the feeling within us that we're only one step away from catastrophic disaster, threatening our survival in the next moment. We tend toward complexity rather than simplicity. We cannot transcend our animal tendencies, despite the extragenetic creations before us like this blog. We collectively rush forward into the next moment without stopping to think what we're doing, assuming that weekly planning substitutes for thoughtful consideration of doing nothing for once.

Today, in my local culture, millions of people climb into metal-and-plastic boxes, apply power to internal combustion machines, and transport themselves along flattened tar-and-rock paths to large brick or metal structures where they gather and discuss practical applications of the written words and actions of people from thousands of years ago. Some of these people will be killed or permanently injured before they reach the large buildings. All of these people will gladly justify to you their use of millions (if not billions) of tons/gallons of fossil fuels for this gathering, proudly declaring their celebration of Palm Sunday. Tens of thousands of trees will have been harvested to produce papers on which weekly lessons and church bulletins have been printed. The cumulative trash thrown away today and picked up in the next few days would easily fill a small town. The majority of these millions of people will tell you that they consider today's activities part of their self-rejuvenation.

I cannot instantly change people's perceptions of themselves. I don't expect others to instantly change my perception of myself. We are who we are, and change at our own pace.

As a person who finally convinced himself to become a habitual blogger (reducing the entries in my paper journals), I wonder about the next social trend I will follow. Not every trend fits me like a glove. Tweeting on twitter and gabbing on facebook were not my things.

In a moment of vanity disguised as social responsibility (looking for something to justify my existence while I had nothing to do except build my retirement portfolio and live off my wife's income), I posted dozens of pictures from my primary/secondary schooldays for former schoolmates to let them enjoy on facebook. But my days of forced socializing with them ended long ago. While looking at their facebook profiles, I saw my former schoolmates tended to create adult lives that aligned with the personalities of their teenage years. Most of them did not maintain friendships with me over the years and now I can see why. Their lives, important as they are to their friends and family (as well as for capitalist/communist barons to build their empires upon), have little to no immediate impact on my life. They never really did. We just filled seats in schoolrooms and walked the hallways to meet the demands of our community. We were experiments for educators looking at the effects of forced social interaction between young people classified by age. We did not associate with each other by choice but we did divide up into cliques or groups after we were forced together agewise.

As my schoolmates now post pictures on facebook of their children during their primary/ secondary school years, I see the same cliqueishness emerge. Of course, we are a reflection of our upbringing, a combination of nature and nurture. The FHMS trends of my youth continue on to the next generation. Proms. Socials. Band concerts. Sporting events. We perpetuate these sorts of things for many reasons - tradition and such. I even hear parents brag about the level of achievement their children reached in these events ("best-looking dress," "fastest swimmer," "first chair oboe," ...)

No matter how much I abhor these trends, I sit here and find myself talking about them, thus giving them importance, do I not? Well, I know that I was a product of these events and the kids of the next generation are products of the same events, no matter whether their memories of the events will be tied to digital cell phone pics as opposed to 110 camera film pics of my day.

So, as the human animals climb back into their horseless carriages and fan out on the road, looking for watering holes or returning to their permanent huts to devour slabs of slaughtered animals, what to make of all this?

I don't rightly know. I have no vested interest in the future of humans so I've given up my concern about preserving wild spaces for the next generation. Even more so, if those with children don't care about their children's environmental future and show it by flooding the roads by the millions for weekly rituals, then I'm going to stop worrying about saving the possibly rare sedum and stop mourning the future loss of the field of wild shooting stars on the hill behind me. Human history has shown me we as a species don't care about plant and animal diversity.

I come to the part of my life as a blogger where I question what I'm doing here and why. I sit here because I enjoy the comfort of the keyboard as a convenient means to record my thoughts in hieroglyphic/alphabetic form. I know that posting these thoughts in a blog gives me nearly universal access to them whenever I want to read them again. It also preserves them as a backup, whereas if I posted them in a Word file on my local hard drive, I give myself one point of failure if the hard drive stopped working, unless I devoted more time to backing up my local electronic data.

Therefore, I'm here because I'm literate in writing/reading and computer technology comprehension, and I like the convenience of the Internet for portable access and data preservation. These are the trends in which I participate gladly. Writing is a form of self-rejuvenation, my religion of the self (I am the only One who matters, because without me, there is no you or You or Her or Him or Us), a trend that many are adopting, as we find massive trancelike gatherings unnecessary and wasteful when we understand that the self is all and it only takes 10,000 hours to make yourself an expert as long as you know your limits so most of us are able to have kids and take care of our family when we devote time to ourselves and not somebody else's desire for our time/money.

When did I become wealthy? When I freed myself from petty human materialism and peer pressure, stopped doubting why I grew up in social conventionalism but have no need to belong, and learned to enjoy me. I'll throw one of these social conventions out - "Je pense donc je suis" or "Cogito, ergo sum" - and decide to stop writing blog entries. I have written all I have to say and all the rest is just repetition of repetition to infinity. I retired from work. I have cut all my previous words free. Time to cut myself free from words and free from time. You sit still for a day and watch the leaves of a maple tree grow out of their buds - you'll free yourself from time, too, and see why words no longer suffice. Whether you try it or not, I don't care - I'm free of trends. Time to retire from social interaction. Adios. Adieu. Adeus. Auf Wiedersehen. до свидания. 再見. さようなら.

Bythoughts

Characters that ignited and sparked in spotaneity while I meditated in the garden for an hour:

• Shagbark hickories are my totem poles, with faces, images, and other anthropomorphic bits making themselves known from lichen, shadows and arbitrary shapes.
• The pain of contradictory thoughts. How to stop my brain from seeking harmonious consensus in every thought?
• With the demise of newspapers comes the demise of daily paper comic strips -- what effect does this have on mass social psyche? -- have we replaced paper comics (humor, serial drama, social commentary, and general distraction from daily news) with viral video/text via youtube, facebook, twitter, etc.?
• Need to check Huntsville Event magazine for a vanity shot of me at the United Cerebral Palsy annual event, the 2009 "An Irish Evening" [note: found it here]
• Want to turn my teaching stint into a story but how many times has it been done already, including the latest movie, "The Class"? However, I'm more interested in an allegorical version, examining the role of the corporation in brainwashing students to be good corporate citizens. "Walk into the light, be one with the universe, seek a good social role for yourself and thus your place in the collective...ommm...." Ergo, corporate education as modern religious training.
• The purple dogwood exceeds its own beauty second by second. I can't tell its moments apart.

Wrinkles

{You. Yes, you. Over here a minute. I'm wondering what you're doing, sitting there without pressing your fingers down. I'm your computer screen, waiting for you to put me to use. Hey, thanks for finally typing. I have energy flowing from the input (keyboard) to the CPU to the output (me).}

At 15:11, I sit here. In bed at night and in the morning before I get up, I look over at the LED clock and see words because the clock is nearly upside-down in my view. In this minute, 15:11 become IIE (3:11), either an acronym or a type of scream.

My finances keep growing. The skin on my body loses its elasticity and wrinkles with time. All actions occur as I expect them to. Moments begin to blend together seamlessly.

Superficial observations.

When one has achieved all external goals and seeks peace, should one continue writing a blog? These words - electronic noise - upset the balance, do they not? Yes, they do. My existence has no need for typed words, even if my thoughts organize in the moment while typing.

I have found myself once again trapped in vanity, speaking to an audience of faceless beings in virtual space, getting sucked into some social strata. "I" has taken precedence over "not I." I have fooled myself into believing I am important because I can string together words. Writing and thinking equal actions with no moment to call their own.

I have set all my words free into the ether. I have cut the tether. I am neither nor either. I have almost achieved transparency. Translucency will suffice. Freedom in light, detailed or otherwise.

The eternal moment is at hand, where words cease to last. Thoughts wrap themselves into Möbius strips, endless loops with no past, present or future.

Peace, the absence of time in one's thoughts. Wrinkles, the only clock on one's wrist. Nothing to say and nothing to do. Success.

The Spirits of Spring

Recently, an animal under my care gave up the ghost. The black-and-white tetra (Gymnocorymbus ternetzi), a small fish all by itself for many years in my 55-gallon, algae-filled aquarium, died after eight years with me (thankfully before I filled the attic with pesticide aerosols). I have no idea the longest such a fish has lived, but as the aquarium shopkeeper told me, tetras are feeder fish in the wild, usually living a year or less, maybe two if they're lucky. In any case, my aquarium is ready for a little cleaning now that it's empty of fish. I won't sanitize it because it's in good balance, replicating the bottom of a creek or lake with both green and brown algae but I would like to clean a little bit of the algae off the front of the glass so I can actually see the fish - maybe create some "portholes" for fun effect - and put a working light bulb in one of the holders so I can brighten up one end of the aquarium.

The local campus of ITT Tech canceled classes last night due to the inclement weather. Tornadoes touched down near the homes of a few friends and colleagues. I don't believe anyone I know was personally affected or effected. I left ITT Tech early, driving through water-covered roads to the happy safety of home. Perhaps my état d'esprit was an esprit de vivre (part of my complete joie de vivre)!

I mentioned the change in my world view after the auto accident. This morning, I recalled the moment when I sat in church on the first Sunday after the accident and had a sudden urge to write. I grabbed one of the prayer request forms and wrote in tiny scribbles questioning the need for makeup or other applications of body adornment and wondered why we humans go to such wasteful measures to impress each other and conform with one another. For instance, when did we convince ourselves to throw away a few cents a day on odor and perspiration control? Why are we hiding our natural scents? Why are we covering our natural beauty, including all the wonderful blemishes that distinguish us? Why the worry about symmetry when by now we've discovered that asymmetry is more beautiful?

As these thoughts re-occurred this morning, I also contemplated the role of the artist. Images of an artist I know flashed through my mind, her artwork passing by my mind's eye like a slideshow. Her photography and found-piece beeswax canvas works ask me what do I know about the female form. The rolling gray north Alabama mountain silhouettes in the distance want to know the same thing - what do I know that can be expressed in more than mere words?

I respond that I don't know. Je ne comprends pas. Je ne te connais pas. To comprehend something means to be part of it. I am not part of you. I am not part of the artist in you. The gap between here and there cannot be filled with adornments, however much we try. I want to know you, to see what you see, to hear colors, to feel scents, to get beyond these stark symbols. But I will not. I will try. You will try. We all try.

Somewhere within in 20 miles of this computer, there are people who are picking up the pieces of their lives, sorting out the pink cotton-candy insulation from the artifacts, amateur archaeologists digging for what is truly and only important in the wreckage of what used to be called home. Their spirits, if they have to put words to their tenderized emotional thoughts, do not celebrate the beauty of spring today. They do not question the influence of commercial advertising that adds to their daily spending habits. They would gladly find a tube of lipstick or a stick of antiperspirant that belonged to a quieter lifestyle yesterday.

We live in chaos. Perhaps we compensate by creating habits with no necessary meaning. I don't have to put on clothes when I'm alone at home but I do. In fact, I spend a few minutes each morning thinking about the possible events that will occur and dress accordingly, even though I know that the chance of any one event not occurring is 100%, despite my mental assurances that everything I plan will happen.

In the same thought, I long ago realized that my having a novel achieve popularity is close to nil. I write for people who don't buy Kindles or e-readers but then again they might. I don't write for anyone but myself, or people like me, anyway. I write for and about chaos. I don't want order/formula to put expectations in a base of readers. I use what I have - a limited vocabulary of mostly European words - to put my thoughts down, or the spoken/written thoughts of others, and into characters based on people I know. That's all I can do. It's a limit I can live with, despite frustrating moments when my limits appear as cage walls in my imagination.

I did not progress as far in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest as in last year's. I did not expect to. I only wanted professional ("expert") constructive reviews of my writing, which I achieved. I post the two reviews I received of an excerpt of my novel, "A Space, A Period, And A Capital," to pique the interest of those who like my writing, as quirky as it may be:

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Reviews

ABNA Expert Reviewer:

This is well written. The excerpt jumps around a lot, and there is a touch of paranoia, but in light of who the main character is, that fits well with the reality of what is going on in this story. Lee seems like a nice enough guy. A hard worker, has a loving wife, it sounds as if he has a nice home, but something is going on. Some sort of internal struggle. From what is written it could be an affair, perhaps he knows something about someone having an affair, or maybe he is just tired of keeping everyone's secret. Whatever it is, Lee is not happy. In fact Lee is so unhappy Lee wants to die. If we weren't told that Lee was checking himself into an inpatient Psych ward, this excerpt would have seemed scattered, messy, and rambling. However, because we are given that information right from the start we are given a small idea of how Lee's mind works. We don't know what is torturing him, but we know it is something big. Or perhaps it is just a lot of small things that are eating away at him. What exactly it is, we don't know, but because of the care the author took to set the scene, I sure want to find out.

I want Karen to get her husband back. I want Lee to give up the gun and let the pain go. But most of all, I want to know what the big secret it. I want the answer to the riddle.



ABNA Expert Reviewer:

"A Space, A Period, and A Capital" starts with Lee, the protagonist, and his wife sitting in a hospital waiting room, where they are waiting for Lee to be admitted to the psychiatric ward. Lee has just tried to commit suicide again, so he's checking in. Lee then proceeds to take the reader on a roundabout assessment of his life, his job, and why he is suicidal. The excerpt ends with Lee being admitted, and him being paranoid that the hospital is already watching him.

"A Space, A Period, and A Capital" is too jumpy for a non-crazy reader. I realize that the narrative style is trying to imitate the world of a mentally ill person, but I really had a hard time getting into the story because it shifted gears so fast and so often. I would suggest that the author tone down the random stream of consciousness style. I think some stream of consciousness would be okay, but the author just needs to stay with one topic a little bit longer.

This story could be really interesting if the narrative quirk is worked out, particularly since "The Big Layoff" at Lee's firm is a relevant topic with the current state of the economy and the massive layoffs. I think examining what a layoff does to the psyche is interesting, and this narrative has an interesting perspective on it.

Again, the novel is temporarily available for free download, at:

A Space, A Period, And A Capital: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056261

Thanks again to those of you who have already downloaded the novel and sent me comments. I will try to respond to each comment you made, but if I didn't, don't worry. I'm probably contemplating how to include your comments in my next novel or blog entry.

= = =

Now I've got to figure out the fish species to put in glass walls in my house for the rest of their lives. We know that gods do not exist but don't tell the fish in my little glass godbox - they'll gladly call me god as long as I feed them and keep them free of predators. ahahaha (attempt at diabolical laugh). I wonder - how many fish do you think escape into local waterways after their owners' homes are destroyed by tornadoes?

A Collection for Beginners

What are you doing here? That's a question I frequently ask myself, along with "Where are you going?" and "What's it all about?"

Growing up to about the age of 16, I remember hearing people say, "Question everything!" and "Question authority," and I would think those people were a little off their rocker but I would laugh at their insightful comments. Then, I was literally hit on the head and my whole world view changed.

What are you doing here? Well, you're here because I was in an automobile accident in 1979, placing me around my 17th birthday but I believe I was still 16 at the time. Up until that point, I was a good conformist who kept a neat room, managed his finances since he was 10, and accepted whatever he was told was the best truth applicable to the success of his life. Sure, I had deep thoughts that told me I was not like those around me but there was never any internal motivation to do anything about my thoughts. I honestly believed I had no choice.

A small concussion changed all that. I suppose many of us are the same in this regard. After all, industrial, highway, and home accident rates ensure that head injuries affect a significant portion of the human population, including the injured and their caretakers.

I know who I am. I am a person who has spent the last 30 years in a type of reparation mode, working around the rattled parts of my brain. In the process, I have learned more about human thinking than I thought possible. More importantly, I have seen and responded to the world in a completely new manner.

Keep in mind that I have always been a creative person, bucking authority with joy and happiness in my small way for as long as I can remember. The automobile smashup did not change my personality, only my world view.

Before I drove my forehead into the carseat in front of me as the car abruptly stopped while my body was still going 55-60 MPH, I accepted the fact that we owed a debt of gratitude to our nation-states. After I scarred my face (ever so slightly, perfectly in line with my left eyebrow), I found out that I am a full-fledged member of nothing. I am solely a human animal living on an obscure planet, looking for a way to put food in its mouth. I went from a sense of semi-belonging to a tight network of human beings to a wondrous sense of being quietly alone with myself, where I have lived ever since, but ready to change the world, if needed, so I can keep my quiet to myself.

Every morning I wake up and ask myself who will I pretend to be that day, which is a corollary to the questions I mentioned previously. I know I cannot change the fact that I am a bipedal hairy primate with a false sense of security and a brain full of nonsense. Other than that, I have a wide range of choices. Loving husband. Happy teacher. Sluggish jogger. Wondering wanderer. Wandering wonderer. Other choices I've tried but cannot maintain for long, such as Angry Guy and Marathon Runner.

Across the street from me lives a nice couple whose children have grown up and left the house. The man has a job that allows him to work from home. His wife apparently likes to have shrubbery planted under the shade of trees. Thus, the husband spends a few days a year planting and replanting small bushes. I take off my social glasses and look at him from the perspective of an uninformed observer. The bipedal primate across the street seems to attack the ground, pushing in and pulling out plants for no reason of survival that I can see. He doesn't eat the plants. In fact, he seems to spend excessive amounts of energy attacking tree limbs above the plants and doesn't do anything useful with the limbs that he removes. He piles the dead bushes and excised limbs on the edge of a raised passageway between our two domiciles.

The previous paragraph describes how I most often see the world. Usually, I can make no sense of what I see. I spend my time gathering clues about the world views of those around me to understand their motivations so that I can help them achieve their goals while in my thoughts I am just as happy to do nothing as long as I get fed, clothed and have a decent shelter in which to spend the night. For the most part, happiness to me is being alone with my thoughts.

Before I began this blog entry, I opened a drawer of my desk that I haven't used in years. Inside it are a few dozen U.S. pennies that I collected. I have a plastic bag with coins from countries around the world, including Mexico, Argentina, Italy, China and the UK, that someone brought me from their world travels. I have a set of decorative seals of the U.S. Presidents. I also have a United Nations Postal Administration Stamp Set "A", a collection for beginners, with a note that states, "United Nations stamps are the first stamps in history to be issued by an international organization." I also have stamp sets from Hungary and Panama. I have an embossed gold seal of the State of Tennessee. I have a corroded 9V battery which is corroding some pennies. There are a couple of locks, one with a key and one with a combination dial. I have some keys that go to locks I no longer have. I put those items in my desk drawer in the early 1970s and have removed them only a few times since then, including today. They are part of who I am (of course, you know I am no longer who I was because the past does not exist, only this moment - a memory is a thought, not an actual past moment we can recreate; the items in my desk drawer are real, available to all moments of my life as long as they're there, but not part of the past, only part of a new moment which includes my thoughts I think are the past).

What are you doing here? I don't know.

Those of you who've emailed me have told me your reasons for reading this blog. I understand that some of you desire to see me write about you in this blog, or see something that indicates I have recognized your influence upon me in a particular moment. I do what I can not to write blog entries just for the individual entertainment of some of you (with a few requested exceptions) to keep my writing on a path I have chosen.

I have my life to live. You have yours. We all have our personal space that we maintain, whose depth is determined culturally. If you want to step into my personal space and influence me directly, we can do so outside of this word set. Words do not make us us. Words make you you.

You can be you without me. I may or may not write about you in a moment that has not existed. I may have written about you and you didn't know it. If you allow the moments to be, to flow freely through this world without anticipation, you will find wonders that words cannot provide.

I would rather lose you as a reader because you discovered the simple wonders of the world more fascinating than electronic words, or because I lost some sort of mysteriousness that attracts a small group of the readers here, if that's what it takes to get people to see beyond the restrictions of a nation-state or united nations (i.e., artificial human social inventions). I hope you don't need a bump on the head to see it. But hey, maybe you could've bumped your head and had a V8, instead*.

[*Uggh. A humourous nod to crass commercialism; where do these things come from?!]

In the comprehension of what my life is all about, I am just a beginner, an amateur, not even a dilettante. I can only see the wonders of the universe. I do not know what to do with them. I have 15,008 days left. Maybe, just maybe, I'll figure it all out before the end, one moment at a time, of course. You can stay along for the meander on this unmarked path, if you want. But as the popular saying goes, walk beside me - don't follow me and don't expect me to follow you. I care more about your freedom than you think.

In fact, I'm going to go stare at the sky for a while and enjoy the quiet passage of clouds over my head as a line of storms approaches. Give it a try. You might discover that you don't want to see me later. After all, I do know something - the joy of you is what your life is all about. Don't miss this moment to enjoy you!

A single smile

What a gorgeous day! Stood in the yard and counted 46 blooms on the hybrid purple dogwood (Cornus florida (perhaps 'Purple Glory'?)) - a new record for our 10+ year-old tree. Took a walk for a while. Then my legs got the better part of me and decided to take me for a short jog. Huff, huff...wheeze... Pardon me while I catch my breath.

Poets have described a smile to you so I won't get all mushy and sentimental about muscles that turn up one's lips.

In my day off between two weekdays of teaching, I wanted to pick up an old book of mine to re-read after resting from my walk-jog.

I guess old age has caught up with me and erased the fresh memories of my favorite insightful writers because I look at the titles in front of me in my study and can barely remember some of the story outlines. There's "The Trial" by Kafka, "The Tin Drum" by Grass, "A Discourse on Method" by Descartes, "Bored of the Rings" by Harvard Lampoon, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" by Kesey, "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson, a collection of short stories by Nin, "Naked Lunch" by Burroughs and many others. I almost picked out "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley since it had been suggested to me by the broomstraw gal but I don't want to think about her today. My constant companion from high school and college once recommended "Another Roadside Attraction" by Tom Robbins because she thought the book was my kind of vermiculture (yes, I'm stuck on "v" words the past two blog entries - must be my brain turning "April Fools" into "après vous" for some reason) but Robbins is a mood, not a novel, in which I'm not right now.

During the jogging, I paced myself on the sidewalk, assuming in the early afternoon that the slabs of concrete were all mine. Upon further observation, I noticed small insects, pollen and seeds sharing the roadside with me. After jogging a while, I also came upon an approaching subject, a young woman of medium height, slim build, dark hair and sunglasses, walking in the opposite direction.

As we passed, she flashed a quick smile at me. Almost as if she was a child who knew a camera was pointed in her direction. "Give us a big smile, honey!" Just as quickly, she moved on behind me.

I have two books sitting on the desk beside me now, "The Dragons of Eden" and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." I picked these books not for their storyline but for their author's writing style. I know I am a chameleon, substituting someone else's writing style in place of my own when I am reading someone else's work and writing within consecutive or nearly concurrent moments. Therefore, after I finish this blog entry, I'll sit down and read. I'll let you decide which book I chose.

What, if anything, does the young woman I saw today read? Her looks appear to reveal similar cultural upbringing. What put her out walking around 13:15 - baby asleep at home? Exercising after lunch? What kind of character would she make, should I sketch her with these words? Healthy body. Young. Living in a neighborhood of relatively new homes. Gathers with other new mothers for child-rearing tips. Keeps a clean house, relatively speaking. Earned a degree in mathematics in college but deferred career due to planned parenthood. Husband working in town, a promising business/engineering career ladder ahead of him. Glad the economy hasn't hurt their budget (yet). A future mapped out in front of her. Sees boredom, accepts boredom as part of regular middle-class values and finds simple ways to keep boredom from overtaking her thoughts.

Yesterday, a middle-aged door-to-door salesman named "Hunter" stopped by my house to sell ADT security systems. I hadn't seen a door-to-door salesman in so long, I was surprised they still existed. We talked briefly on the front deck while I listened to see how well he had memorized his sales pitch. He seemed a bit intimidated and never fully jumped at the opportunities I gave him, except one. That's the problem with being a former door-to-door salesman - my ear for the steps to a sale. I avoided the open-ended questions and steered him toward asking me yes/no questions like "What about theft?" and "What about fire?" The conversation quickly ended with my telling him that we're just poor country folk trying to get by (when I repeated the story last night, my wife reminded me that statement didn't match my BMW sitting in the driveway - so be it). I didn't give him a chance to work on closing the sale (actually, a "free" demonstration that started with, "Hi, we're looking for two neighbors we can stick ADT signs in their yard. In return, we'll install and demonstrate a $1500 security system for free." Oh, and that fine print about monthly service fees is conveniently left out of the opening statement, but I'm sure Hunter would have gotten to that later.).

I don't know the Willy Loman or Suzy Homemaker who bumped into my personal space. I only know what I saw. In both cases, they flashed smiles at me, smiles one doesn't usually see from strangers on busy city sidewalks or front stoops.

Perhaps in my reading, I'll understand what they mean to me, if anything. We're humans. That's certain. A smile is just a set of muscles controlled by the brain. It means whatever the brain wants it to mean. In the meaning is the story. In the story is where I live.

Vernacular, Vehicular, Ventricular

Interesting to read that the world leaders officially announced today that a permanent committee of centralized planners is going to run the world from now on. I was really surprised that they would make such a bold and obvious statement. I expected them to ease into it, first going to a truly global currency by way of necessity and then moving to centralized planning as the final solution to fix the global crisis. At first, I thought I was watching the movie, "1984," and although I flipped past it, I confirmed that it was the regular world news I was watching (and followed up with reading about it on the Internet). The scary part was seeing the parallels continue in that the major world governments had announced a set of border zones where wars are to be officially conducted for the next five to twenty years, depending on public opinion. The wars have themes, too, such as the war on drugs, the war on global terrorism and the war on rogue leaders.

Meanwhile, activists are officially being allowed to ransack businesses, letting them wage their personal peace on war and vent their frustration publicly so the covert activist trackers can keep tabs on them, and by indirect route, sending a message to capitalists that governments want to reassert their control of the world. And all of this before I finished my first cup of tea this morning! I was surprised that we didn't get the usual dose of Greenpeace battling the Somalians for control of the high seas but maybe that broadcast is being saved for tomorrow's news.

I spoke to an Indian friend of mine who had just finished blessing the purchase of his new Nano (the car AND the iPod, a cool pair of geek gadgets for a high-tech, middle-class Indian). He talked of the promise of the future, when Indians will control the finances (a/k/a purse strings) of most major political groups in many parts of the world and will have to face the economic strength of China in control of the world economy. The question of whether Gandhi or Confucius wins the hearts and minds of the people will finally be answered. I wonder.

A student of mine from the U.S./Mexico border expressed concern about his relatives literally caught in the crossfire of the cartel drug trade war. He wishes that the U.S. would legalize illicit drugs. I assured him that the illegal drug business lines the pockets of too many politicians who like high profit and high risk - until a good replacement comes along that funnels greenbacks into the money laundering business, nothing will be done except the show of big guns on the border, making life worse for his friends and relatives. The only choice they have is to move further north, like he did.

A Brazilian colleague recently emailed me and asked me how the job market here is going. He was contemplating joining an organization to unite the poor and show solidarity with his compadres in Venezuela, but didn't want to get too carried away with the idea if he could get his high-paying technical job back with the American distributor. I reminded him that this recession is giving people many opportunities for changing their lives. Only he could decide what was better for him. We cracked jokes that the Brazilian rain forest might be a great place for many of us to wander in the wilderness for a few years until all this blows over.

I haven't heard from my Australian friends lately. I assume that the fires didn't wipe them out but I can't remember which suburbs they lived in. I reckon they're eating cane toad and kangaroo about now, if nothing else.

Oh well, I can't control the rest of the world. All I can do is enjoy my part of it. The air is full of flying insects today, the sun is shining, and birds flit from tree to tree getting their supply of free energy. Think I'll put aside writing today and soak up some rays for myself.

But first, this being the day of fools, I think I'll fool around (not that kind) and post all my novels for free for a few weeks. You can go to the link below only one time and download a copy of the novel(s) of your choice. Be a fool if you want, or choose wisely, but remember to download the novel on your one visit per novel - otherwise, you'll miss out, foolishly:

A Space, A Period, And A Capital: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056261

Are You With The Program?: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056262

Sticks To Lying: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056263

Helen of Kosciusko: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056264

Milk Chocolate: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056265