In business, as well as real life, we make decisions based on evidential test results.

In real life, we made decisions based on opinions, dreams, imaginations and occasionally facts.

So it is with grieving the loss of my father in the rest of my natural life.

He lives on here — in recorded memories and anecdotes, photos and videos, audio files and books — the cybersphere.

I mentally cried in my thoughts up until yesterday, making it…oh, about two and a half weeks of heart-wrenching solace and mourning.

Now, I live with him as a reminder, a silent, unspeaking totem on an imaginary column standing invisibly behind me.

The good and the bad, the kind-hearted elder and the stern disciplinarian wrapped in fading memories.

In other words, I personify the genetic and nurturing elements of a man toward his son, his eldest child.

My father’s influence upon others started at his birth, with most, if not all, who nurtured him now gone, too.  His best friend of 73 years still lives, his neighbourhood playmate, classroom buddy and adult confidant.  His wife of 55+ years — my mother — is quite much alive, although in mental pain as she reconciles the loss of a dear friend and husband, the father of her children.

I am no longer a child.  Bigger problems than the loss of a parent push in on my thoughts but they are not more important.

How do we tell readers that the situation in Syria is merely a place for the national production of weaponry to turn a tidy profit, loss of lives a necessary component of the process?

There’s always some hotbed of violence we can use to our species’ economic advantage.  More people die from person-to-person combat between people who know each other — gunshots, knife stabbings, choking, burning, poisoning — than all terrorist attacks combined.

After all, “terrorist” is a label we reserve for “them,” not amongst ourselves.

The brother who stabs me is not a terrorist — he’s just a close relative with an anger management issue and a drinking problem — unless he gets the attention of the media ahead of time and becomes notorious, shooting off his mouth about socially-unacceptable concepts and ideals.

But we know all that already.  New crops of journalists, editors and publishers seem not to — they just as easily fall prey to the idea of perpetuating extremist thinking for a profit that also divides the political opinions of the majority of Americans, for instance.

Anyway, I digress.

After a discussion with the Committee, I’ve decided to share with you more of the products coming out of our laboratory and into a grocer’s market near you:

• DNA tracking devices disguised as cereal flakes and coffee beans/grounds
• Chemical hypnotic material mixed into charcoal briquets that are released at high temperature, used at backyard BBQ events to turn whole crowds into well-organised mobs when the need arises
• Bacteria in ice cream and other products in the frozen goods department that activate at body temperature, lodging in people’s bodies at strategic locations; can be turned into cancerous growths with a certain level of mobile phone radio signal strength exposure.

Well, that’s all for now.  The use of comic literary devices is all about timing.  We’ll save the rest of the items for a more perfect moment.

Happy eating!