Thanks to Rick, Leslie, Bruce, Rich and the staff at Straight To Ale for serving the superb Unobtainium brew this evening; Nanci at Rite-Aid; Steve and Chris at Logan’s Steakhouse; Catherine, Debra, Joe and Harold at KCDC; psychiatric supporters of the families affected by the school shooting in Connecticut; those who face death and destruction every day in the name of freedom.
A special shout-out to Alex and Drew of .45 Surprise and the megaburger by the mobile gourmets No Brakes Bistro.
Where, in the space between our teenage years / postsecondary education and our senior citizen years, have we paid back society for raising us, supporting us in our productive years and then caring for us in our unproductive elderly years?
In other words, should the government which provides you infrastructure and self/private property protection require you to be economically feasible in your peak years? Or else?
If a citizen isn’t viable or useful to government, then can government refuse service to the citizen unless another citizen (or citizens) step(s) forward to make up the difference?
Here I sit, the Geminid meteor shower lighting the sky above me (counted 21 streaks in the last 30 minutes), and I’m slowly recovering from the loss of my father.
I don’t feel the pangs of pain every few minutes and then every hour or so like I did months ago.
The waves of loss crash against the shore of my ego, my personality, less frequently.
Instead, I feel the weight of responsibility of being the eldest male in Dad’s lineage pressing down on my shoulders.
Not repressively.
Just strong enough to remind me that I no longer depend on Dad for advice — it has to come from within or elsewhere.
How much of Dad’s subculture do I keep perpetuating?
What of his beliefs that aren’t mine do I want to carry on?
Meteor and comet dust turn into plasma as they vaporise.
Dad’s life had a meteoric rise, shining brightly, and then faded into ashes and dust.
Remembering him here and now is therapeutic.
No one will remember the meteor or comet dust I saw burn up in the sky.
I may have shared a view of them together with members of my species, some aware of the physics and chemistry involved, some wishing on a falling star, perhaps others seeing omens or other talismans of change.
In subcultural pockets are people who ask why saying “Merry Christmas” or referring to a decorated conifer as a “Christmas tree” is not as popular as it once was.
Instead of asking why, ask why not? Keep referencing the labels as often as you please, disregarding the beliefs of others, regardless of their sharing your view.
I loved and feared my father for who he was, not who I wanted him to be.
His power over me began when I was conceived, the result of a chain of events over which I had no control.
Same for the meteor shower tonight — all seven billion of us can think and believe away the meteors as hard as we want and they’ll just keep getting sucked into Earth’s gravitational pull or run into Earth as each follows its own path.
Our central nervous systems are capable of quite a lot.
We can imagine great skyscrapers in our dreams that become reality within years.
We can send satellites to the edge of our solar system within decades of conception.
Yet, we cannot stop the universe from existing around us.
The illusion of power that our social bonds create in the form of civilisations are hypnotic.
Shall I just live the rest of my life with the goal of having as much fun as I can, ignoring the social costs today and into the future, within my lifetime or for generations to come?
Can I survive on the luxuries that the profits I derived from living below my means for decades has provided?
I have, can and shall sit under the night sky and count meteor streaks.
I am not caring for the sick and lonely, instead.
I am the best example to myself of myself for myself that I choose to be.
I do not sacrifice myself for others — I am not a martyr for a cause.
I do not put the lives of overabundant animals or endangered species above that of my species.
The balance of nature is an illusion — or rather, sets of states of energy tend to move from areas of high density into areas of low density with lots of wiggle room in-between.
My father died, taking the unspoken nuances of his personal beliefs with him. All I have to work with are the physical manifestations — his behaviours and personal/public records — upon which to act.
The vacuum where his personality existed is getting filled, changing with the mix of subcultures that interchange at different ratios than when Dad was alive.
Same as it was for his father and his father’s father before him.
Same as it will be for my nieces and nephews, their children and grandchildren.
They, for now, have my living mother’s shared subcultural beliefs with my father upon whom they depend on modifying their personalities for the sake of establishing their offspring’s belief sets.
We look up at the night sky and interpret the annual Geminid meteor shower in our own way.
As it always has been and always will be.
I’ve lost count — how many meteors have I seen disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere tonight?
Through the years, my wife and I have observed married couples get a divorce.
The reasons for the divorce vary but there seems to be one subcategory worth noting: the dependent wife whose husband left her for someone else.
We should never generalise or else we ASSUME (and some of you know what that means).
However, when several data points create a trend, then the trend is worth noting for analysis and critique.
For example, there are some divorced women who may not have had much of a soft heart for the suffering of others while they were married but afterward…?
Let’s stir the pot and see what we get.
What is it about a man’s crotch that leads him away from the comfortable confines of a marriage to a loyal wife and into the arms of another woman?
The reader can, through experience or questioning, find the answer to that question.
We see that the result frequently ends in an unamicable divorce, leaving a bitter attitude in the thoughts of the ex-wife.
From that bitterness, many changes occur.
One of them is the “woe is me, I miss my days of depending on a husband’s salary to support myself and my lifestyle (with or without kids),” which becomes a larger idea that if divorce agreements are unfair, we can make up for it by saving all the forgotten pets, children and other lost causes.
[I did say I was stirring the pot here, didn’t I? Maybe poking a hornet’s nest would be more appropriate.]
From that viewpoint, it leads to “On whom or what can I reliably depend when my ex-husband and his/my family won’t? The government, of course!”
But that’s just one viewpoint.
Others turn to rely more on themselves and their ingenuity to break away from a dependency mindset.
Some get revenge.
Some never look back, realising what caused the mistake that led to divorce, lesson learned, and grow into better people.
Some marriages were never meant to be.
Some don’t outlive their usefulness as a safe nest to incubate and raise the little chickadees until they leave the nest.
How many of us are [co]dependents, finding a mate we lean upon for our life sustenance, forever looking for means to feed our [co]dependence after divorce?
None of us is perfect. We do what we can with what we have to be whomever we wish.
Is [co]dependency innate or learned? In either case, how do we nurture an independent mindset that takes us away from believing that the Big Brother/Mother/Father of government has all the answers?
Do we have to?
In other words, what makes us believe in the public pooling of resources and public decisionmaking about the reprioritisation of resource allocation?
Who is responsible for taking care of widows and orphans? Or mentally-deranged military veterans?
Must the alphas and the strong care about the meek and the weak?
What divides forms of profit into social good and criminal intent?
What forces a person to work for another with little longterm benefit?
How does a government explain its policy of taking a small portion of a person’s earnings to provide the worker lifetime public services when the earnings are not a livable wage over the lifespan of the worker, meaning neither the government nor the worker can survive if the majority of workers have the same level of unlivable earnings and the government has no other income and/or cannot reallocate income to cover the expense of caring for the workers?
When does a government, like a marriage, outlive its usefulness? What happens to the [co]dependents afterward?
Tools are also weapons.
Just like rockets.
I first send my congratulations to the engineering/scientific team that designed, built and launched a multistage rocket from North Korea.
It is no easy feat, despite more and more groups launching hobby rockets from their backyards.
I have launched more than one multistage rocket but putting Estes model rocket tubes back to back is not the same as launching a satellite into low-Earth orbit.
We have come a long way from fireworks displays.
We certainly don’t need another atomic bomb dropped on a large population of humans.
Scud missiles are never a good idea as a weapon against the desire for freedom from tyranny.
Dare we go into the political ramifications of a hereditary dictatorship owning multistage missiles with nuclear warheads?
Can we feel the pulse of the finger on the trigger?
Why is China happy with having North Korea as a buffer zone between it and the capitalist/democratic country of South Korea?
Why are we using sanctions as a means of keeping North Korea in the socioeconomic past?
If Syria falls, what does that mean about relationships of North Korea and Iran with the rest of the world?
When Chavez is no longer in control of Venezuela, then what?
What is a repressive regime these days?
Who in charge of the economic and military might of a subculture has the right to protect that might against the desire of others to take their turn as King of the Hill?
How much can we trust an entertainer like PSY that previous anti-American views are no longer valid now that the entertainer is making money off the American people as a mainstream pop culture figure?
What does it take to forgive and forget?
My father hated Jane Fonda to the end of his life. Should I?
How many of us have heard songs regaling us about the pitfalls and easiness with which we fall in love?
Every new person I meet is the next exciting story I could be writing about their wonderful lives — the best tales are the ones about people I instantly fall in love with.
What does that mean?
It means most people have the ability to make us feel better about ourselves.
We may feel better about our appearance, our opinions, our socioeconomic status, our [a]vocations…
If I believe I am a catalyst that accelerates people’s positive belief in themselves — whatever that belief may be — then I am the catalyst who feels better about himself when I see a smile on a person who sits up straighter or tries harder at a task I’ve found completely fascinating.
Kind of like the Hot Wheels accelerator (but not this one) or better yet, a power booster on steroids (not this one, obviously, because I gave my Hot Wheels collection to a fellow fifth grader when we were 10 (and he ended up in prison when he was 20, but that’s a tale for another day), moving on to other pursuits (mainly had to do with my first “real” girlfriend at age 10 having no interest in model cars but a lot of interest in me and my brainy jokes, which brings up back to…)).
We are all inspirations for someone — may be someone we know or someone we’ve never seen before.
The joy of chemistry that we sets of states of energy rarely observe but experience in that fuzzy realm we currently keep calling the subconscious…
I’m having fun learning to dance, using my jealousy of others’ hard work to inspire me to turn this excuse-for-fun-exercise (spinning with my wife on the parquet floor is a lot more fun than jogging on an elliptical trainer or running in cold weather with the spray of water from the tyres of passing cars freezing on my legs) into a slimmer body and healthier outlook.
And now, let us return to the future, where events in 1000 years were started by activities happening in the world around us as we write and read and write.
Thanks to the following:
Jenn and Joe at KCDC; Shericka at Krispy Kreme; April, Hunter and Jonathan at Publix; Devante at Walmart; is that all I can remember right now? Wow, getting old has its privileges, including excusing one’s self for poor memory recall trick practice.
Time to load some website URLs for safekeeping:
http://www.treetrunkrings.blogspot.com/
http://www.treetrunktricks.blogspot.com/
Where were you when that thing happened at 12:12:20.12 on 12/12/2012?
In which time zone?
With whom?
A dozen friends’ dozen friends with 2012 strangers?
Will 11/12/13 be lucky or unlucky for you? How about 2013 in general?
What does 3/7/13 have in store for gamblers?
Does 3/10/13 make sense or cents to astrologers? Or should you pay more attention to 10/3/13? 6/7/13? 7/6/13?
Roll a six on 5/2/13 to win it all!
Avoid shooting snake eyes on days that equal 11.
Go for boxcars on days that equal 2.
January 1st is an especially good day for activities that equal 11, however don’t wear the same shoes on both feet or look at a double mirror reflection of yourself.
Walk backwards on 3/1/13 or face your enemy’s victory in spades and shovels in the 13th hour on the 31st.
Ones and threes are pivot points all next year so be ready for many twists and turns.
Give assistance to three people in need and one will return the favour three times over.
Caution will warn you only once for troubles that will plague you three times next year.
Those who circle the planet 13 times in 2013 count as friends only in a clockwise direction where latitudes and longitudes balance each other.
Be kind to animals with 13 toes.
Avoid the stare of a spider with 13 eyes.
On New Year’s Eve, begin the countdown to 2013 at 13 or your family will suffer countless maladies until 2031.
Happiness will fill the lives of people who have 13 close relatives, more so if at least one friend has 13 close relatives with at least two aged in 13-year increments.
Treat your 13-year old children like royalty next year for the way you treat them will come back to you 13-fold for the next 13 generations.
Thirteen-year old triplets of single mothers are a special treat for those who know or meet them next year.
Anyone 26 or 39 years old should think twice or three times about matrimonial bonds in 2013.
Someone with 13 stitches will make noise — listen carefully to the number of syllables spoken — the first, third and thirteenth will tell you your fortune for the next 13 seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years.
Multiply 13 by 13 and someone will die.
Thirteen leaders will fail — the 14th will succeed.
Use the full set of letters in the alphabet to double your wishes.
Make no important decisions at 20:13 all year long.
Your 13th blessing will be your best next year so be thankful for the first 12.
The 13th item in a stack will come as a surprise when you least expect it, but most often when your thoughts have wandered 13 times.
A list with 13 points is a curse.
Your 13th online social connection will reveal a clue about you.
Count to 13 when you want to feel special but never after the 13th meal of the same food in a row.
Thirteen cubed has power over three entities one time.
Ruralites know that once your farm is sold off, no matter in one fell swoop or in patches, the magical wealth you had in land is gone and your ties to nature cut off, turning you into a semi-robotic member of the Urbanskis, forever dependent on the hard work of others, an abomination rather than a wholly natural independent original member of our land-based species.
treetrunkdings 