If a large entity took all your money unfairly and then demanded “fair” conditions to give you your money back, how would you respond?

If you had declared you were removing your military because peace seemed to settle in, and then, conveniently, an attack on your troops meant you “had” to maintain presence militarily, indefinitely, how would your people see this situation?  Blindly?  Skeptically?

Are you a member of the imaginary gender conflict formerly known as the “Battle of the Sexes”?

If inflation is not a problem, then why aren’t you spreading money around like candy?

Are people unemployed because they can’t find work or they don’t want to work to support the current economic model anymore?

After installing Ubuntu v. 11.10, do you get an application problem with “gnome-settings-daemon,” “oosplash.bin,” “jockey[?]-text” and the message, “Sorry, Ubuntu Software Center closed unexpectedly”?  Do you know what the phrase “ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase” means?

How finely can we split the hairs that define social networking?

= = =

All [of] these words connect the author to this moment, the economy, the ecosystem, and moments we imagine, remember, that led to this moment.

= = =

Of the moments yet to be, what shall we see?

I am just an average guy with an average guy’s set of anxieties.  Why must I lead the Committee?

Why must I decide who lives, who dies, who pretends to lead and who pretends to follow?

Without tension, without tugs, taps and shoves from some seven billion of us squirming around on this cooling sphere, I am disintegrating quietly.

I want 2011 to end quickly.

This is the year of discontent, disquietude, disconnections, dish antennae, and disque golf.

Just another circle around the local star, though, n’est pas?

…sigh…

I compete with the thoughts in my thoughts given to me by species-centric stimuli.

D’accord.

C’est la vie.

EUSA languages dominating.

To get at gold and coal and oil and water, we shear off mountaintops and empty fissures, rearranging the mysterious force we call life that throbs in beings all over our planet but is relatively precious in our solar system, it appears.  Perhaps in the galaxy, too.

Jake Butcher built an empire that partially funded the 1982 World’s Fair and ended up raking leaves in a state park.  His father was ashamed of what his sons, including Jake, did to his banking business.

There are lessons in our lives, in the land, in the air we can breathe, if we can breathe it.

Cooperation instead of condemnation.

Choice instead of coercion.

Do not take my mental holiday – a few days of meditation – as weakness.

All seven billion of us are connected, erecting artificial barriers we label too easily – family, business, farm, store, ship, tribe, house, mansion, country – just as easily taken away when the Committee wants to entertain itself with your lives in a light game of 3D chess.

On what do you float when the permafrost melts?  Is your skyscraper a ship on land, able to toss and turn with the changing seasons?  Can your roads stretch like fabric (permanent press or latex/rubber, anyone?) and your railroad tracks self-level?

What about your carbon-based lifeform?  Your oxygen/water needs?  Are they necessary or can you build a body better suited for life off this planet?

While we search for Martian life, petrified and/or living, have you analysed chemical composition and constructed a computer model of what a Martian microbe could be like and how it would survive?

And then, have you boosted the microbial reproduction cycle sufficiently such that someone like you could live on – that is, eat – its offspring?  Sunlight + Martian soil + ??? = sustenance…

Try reading “Matterhorn,” listening to “Tuesdays with Morrie” on audiocassette and watching the movie “Russian Dolls” on the same weekend that parts of our species commemorated lives lost during the tenth anniversary of a morning of airliners divebombing buildings, flown by suicidal pilots.

Then, sit down with the rest of the 7.5 members of an invisible group to amorally decide how to keep this planet moving along its path of repopulating the galaxy.

At times, monotonous, repetitive, boring, feeding the same stories over and over to newborns, toddlers, teenagers and adults to keep them believing the tales and legends that reinvent themselves from generation to generation.

Reviving subcultures while converting everyone to belief in the superculture they deny or accept individually.

The mouse sneaks in and out of the file cabinet, nibbling sugar-coated candy hidden behind manila folders full of old legal contracts, kitchen appliance user manuals and mimeographed jokes.  In a few days, one of the cats will catch the mouse and leave its half-eaten carcass in the middle of the back hallway for a human to find on the way to the bathroom, who will toss the leftover mouse into the trashcan which is hauled to the end of the street once a week.

Will the interactions of lives like that exist on Mars or the Moon?

Will you?

14,114 days to go…