Letting my thoughts flow randomly, from a puppet movie starring Anthony Hopkins to the latest personal revelations by Oscar de la Hoya to my friends on facebook who constantly quote their favourite Bible verses to the difference between workers who don’t want to know the truth about how business really works and company owners/employers who’ll lie, cheat, steal and refuse to pay bills/taxes to keep their dream alive to understanding that conservative heterosexuals want exclusive dominion over their political affiliation even though there are nonheterosexuals who are more conservative fiscally than their heterosexual counterparts, thus better representing the true meaning of the party’s stated declarations – limited government, fewer rules and regulations, simpler tax code, etc. – rather than the implied social behaviours (marriage is only between a man and woman, extramarital sex is verboten, etc.).

For me, the jealous firstborn child of a heterosexual marriage, life is just about numbers.

Being a child raised on the Bible, Playboy, National Geographic, Time and Mad magazines, my needs, both social and sexual, are met in myriad yet normal subcultural manners.

Life as a human being is a thought experiment.

Everything else is whatever you want it to be, choosing how you want to live your life, establishing the parameters of your thought experiment, raising kids within stated bounds and seeing how they turn out, if you wish.

For instance, after my mother in-law’s son died, she has little interest in her daughter in-law and grandchildren but she loves them, anyway, even if she doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with them in the “mother in-law”/”grandmother” role.  She depends on her daughter and son in-law (me) to care for and transport her but it’s not something she wants to depend on.

After all, she is a human being, who wants to keep her thought experiment as a peer to women her age going in her hometown, not in the town where her son died and her daughter lives or in the artificial constructs of an assisted living community.

Here she is, a woman on oxygen, willing to move in with her best friend, a woman who smokes.

Ahh…smalltown life.

There is a whole universe to explore yet most of us are content to live within the confines of our comfortable subcultures.

I am no exception.

After 25 years of marriage to one person, I can look backward and forward at this point in my life, knowing I lived 49 years, not knowing if I’ll live another year or another 49 years.

Before that, a gap of six years preceded by eighteen years under my parents’ tutelage.  My meal ticket, housing, and clothing allotment bought and paid for by them in that timeframe.  Society covered the rest of the cost of creating the adult me.

I am part of my time, influencing others whether I want to or not.

So, while I explore the possibilities of my life, in theory and in practice, turning tiny thoughts into book-sized stories, I am dropping pebbles in the pond all over the place, stirring up sediment and disrupting the peace and quiet my meditative self seeks at any moment, in an instant.

I dislike seeing giant majority subcultures destroying helpless minority subcultures that held an equilibrium of sorts within its group members, no matter how harmful or helpful the major tenets  of the majority and minority subcultures have been.

However, the spread of global social connections forces us into a bicultural mode, maintaining two thought sets: our subculture and our shared culture of subcultures.

These thoughts cover old ground here, I know, but I am not accessing my library or the Internet to quote some pithy author, statesman, actor or athlete in order to look well-educated or, at the very least, a decent research tool user, to demonstrate our shared culture of subcultures.

These words serve as their own example of subcultures clashing and combining through the millennia.

From any early age, when I observed my parents change the devotion of their undying love for me to another – my sister – I realised I was part of something else.

I had to be.

I spent years figuring out that the universe was the answer.

Sure, you can call it God, or gods, or whatever else you understand to be an anthropomorphised version of your ultimate extended family.

I was alive as a local fractal spinoff of pebbles spinning in the “pond” of a large celestial sphere.

And here I am.

Humble, imperfect, aging me.

As likely to get interested in a college football game in the [UTK] Neyland Stadium as “The Science of Sleep” via Amazon Prime on an LCD computer monitor.

While my species pits its members against one another in a battle of subculture protectionism, I wonder what’s the point of my wanting to colonise another world where subculture protectionism will continue infinitely.

Which, of course, is simply an extension of atoms, molecules, RNA/DNA, cells, and microorganisms battling for self-protection.

But, of course, “battle” is a human word.

From a distance, it’s just a view of energy states interacting the way they naturally will, the components of my species no greater or lesser than any other organised component-filled systems.

How the members of my species want to interact, loving or battling at will, is up to them.

I just happened to live with you in this time period.

We are the result of our interaction together.

Morals, ethics, means, ends – these are words we use to describe parts of our thought experiments.

Only I can practice what I believe my thought experiment is all about.

Your observance of my behaviour is the only clue you have to what my thought experiment is supposed to be about.

Disparaging others, when the inner child in me feels the pain of abandonment, the envy and jealousy associated with the firstborn losing attention to the secondborn, is a habit I’ve slowly lost.

These words are here to remind me I was thinking and writing at this moment in time.  They do not affect or effect the movement of the planets.  They do not stop gamma ray bursts from hitting our planet.  They are the result of the use of tools of our current technology.

That’s all they are.

Isn’t that enough?