Chocolate-covered cicadas – not bad – a delicacy I’d enjoy, say, once every thirteen to seventeen years.

Looking through my 2011 spring-summer catalog of aee (association of energy engineers (R)) energy books, I wonder – should I get the handbook of web based energy information and control systems or the guide to microturbines?

Considering the recent adverse weather conditions, how about “DISASTER & RECOVERY PLANNING: A GUIDE FOR FACILITY MANAGERS”?

Does Johnson & Johnson use Johnson Controls and did anyone there read a report by Masters & Johnson while attending the Masters?

I’m told some numerologists have used an unreliable text written and rewritten by politically-motivated power brokers to predict an end to the world as we know it on 21st May of this year.

My species…what would I do without it?

But seriously, what could I do without having to take our species into account? How much farther could I stretch the finite resources of this tiny orb to extend my dominance of the solar system and eventually an arm of the galaxy?

The Committee is still here in the background, reminding me that I may want to forget about them but they haven’t forgotten about me.

My network keeps plotting futures against which they compare the Book of the Future and the crystal ball. A few other tricks up my mojo bag of a sleeve protect the real purpose of the predictions we openly share with you.

Sunshine laws and transparency are not normal business practices. Steve Jobs is not Obama. Political entities – municipalities, states/provinces and countries – do not operate in a noncompetitive vacuum.

I don’t believe in Destiny as some forecast from the past.

Instead, adaptation to the everchanging moment brings about the best chance for successfully reaching the next moment and the next.

The collection of sensations that we call wisdom in middle age causes me to imagine patterns that permeate the chaotically intertwined fabric of our social lives.

That’s why separating the individual from the individual’s factually verifiable goals is a hard, carved in planetary systems, requirement of membership in the group that controls the group that controls the Committee’s advisors to the MORTIE network.

And why separating the species from our planet’s goal to perpetuate its forms of planetary existence by the fractal spinoff of a galaxy called life looks like a Destiny rather than a Consequence of Good Fortune.

We will spread life, as this planet knows it, onto other satellites of the Sun, feeling proud of our technical achievements and intellectual independence from what we see as the basic hand-to-mouth, eat-and-be-eaten cycle of nature, only half-aware, if that, we fulfill the imaginary destiny of nature’s (or the universe’s) larger cycle.

Trees, roads, earthquakes, farms, factories, glaciers, volcanoes – all the familiar labels we choose to compartmentalise the local states of energy of the universe as we know it, including ourselves – have led to this moment, when we realise we are, despite character flaws and perceived environmental missteps/corrections, right on a true and straight course, preserving life in our vainglourious attempt to advance and spread our species.

In the long run, because I have no children, I care not whether our species or some other travels to another star system. Only your descendants will know for sure.

The Book of the Future says much about the subject.

We can discuss it another day, when many a child with a learner’s permit drives the family vehicle to raise funds through magic of the adult breadwinner’s traveling sales closing methods.

Let’s dance!