Am I alive?

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While I wait for my new LCD monitor with HDMI connection to arrive, thus turning my smartphone into my desktop/laptop PC at home and Internet phablet on the road, I shall write here once more.

That, and the overwhelming reader response to ending this blog, as usual.

This afternoon, I attended the funeral of a 98-year old man, met his widow, and am friends with two of his children, one who is a girlfriend of a longtime friend of mine from our college days in Knoxville.

I also saw some familiar faces from my time here in this community — 27 years or thereabouts — people like Peggy Sammon and Butch Damson.

Ninety-eight years young…

I cannot imagine living so long.

Meanwhile, a house wren hops up and down the window screen, looking for food, digging through the debris in the old, broken, rusted gutter hanging off the rotting eave.

I did not know the man who was buried today.

I felt like a fifth wheel, a stranger inserting myself into the graveside mourning of others.

So, to hide my face from the crowd, I stood behind a pocket camera snapping pics for the daughter and friends in Germany who could not be there while we who were gathered recited prayers together for the deceased.

I am of the walking dead myself, but my friends say Jesus loves me, this I [should] know…

Sorry, that last bit slipped out, a verse from a children’s song.

I did not know the man who was buried today but I was able to join his family and a group of strangers, sharing a subculture full of familiar songs, poems, prayers and rituals.

It was a window opening up the sounds and sights of my childhood.

It was a window of opportunity, listening to the stories about Rudi Schlidt from his closest friends and relatives.

Of course, I can’t hear so well so I’m not sure what anybody said, using their body language and voice inflection to tell me when I was supposed to smile, laugh, cry or do nothing but listen attentively.

Rudi was nearly twice my age when he died.

He made important contributions to the advances of rocket science.  He, like many in this town, could easily say, “As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist/engineer.”

His wife was secretary to Wernher von Braun, who may or may not be familiar to you.  Today, her face still shines with beauty at 91 years of age.

There is more and less than meets the eye, to be sure, but today I simply let the sights suffice to register my presence on this planet another day, amidst those who registered the absence of a friend, [(great)grand]father, coworker and fellow member of the community.

Am I alive?  I don’t know.  I explore the universe from atop this tiny planet of ours and wonder.  That’s all I care to know.  The rest is none of my business.  Gott behüte.

Auf wiedersehen, Herr Schlidt.  From the crowd at your graveside service today, know that you are/were loved.  Gott liebt dich.  Gott segne.

Hypersimplificationalisms

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It took a warning from my email system to make me realise that I had been making my life more socially complex than I had intended when I retired from working in an office environment several years ago.

Dozens of blogs I found myself following, filling my email inbox.

Hundreds of friends and family on social networking sites I found I had accumulated, creating a constantly-flowing social “news” stream.

Thousands of websites I found I was tracking.

Billions of people I found I had written about.

It took an interview with an author on the der spiegel website to make me realise that seeking social connections is one of the aspects of being a member of our species.

Instead of simplifying my life, I have jumped right back in to social connections, albeit mostly virtual ones.

Back to simplifying my thought sets so I can return to contemplating the vast universe of which we are a tiny part that we rarely see through the cloud of socialising that normally defines us.

To the dozens of fellow blog writers and hundreds of social network friends, I thank you for your hospitality and kindness.  However, I bow gracefully and exit from your lives.

I have other pursuits, none as important as friends and family, but ones I want to look for, nonetheless.

I had used this blog as a means of safely storing my written thoughts.  However, with my smartphone I have a new means of storing my thoughts without having to put them out here for everyone to read, allowing me to explore thought patterns I have kept to myself in order to avoid offending any of my friends and family who might see themselves in this continuous satirical viewpoint through a serial book of parallel lives.

Have, have, have…there I go again, sending Morse code to the universe!

This blog has come to an end.

More proof of my unoriginal invisibility as a magnifying glass

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My statements/questions answered by visiting just one website – why do I bother writing at all?:

Time for some booze to lose myself for the day…

Children’s shows

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I don’t have children so I don’t know the latest trends in children’s audivisual programming.

Have they started recording online game sequences and editing them down to 22-minute segments for Saturday morning cartoon shows?

Wouldn’t that be a hoot, knowing that gamers — people who could be your neighbours, schoolmates and/or coworkers — were now the actors behind the scenes of the shows you enjoyed as a kid?

Isn’t that where the intersection of fantasy and reality is going to be?

Feel free to carry this thought further.  I’m bored.

Making the story fit the crime

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Do you ever get bored, the same person, the same planet, day after day after day?

Do you feel the need to brag about yourself because no one else will?

As a meditative person, I spend most of my time staring at the back of my eyelids, followed closely by staring at the woods around my house.

With billions of people to imagine, both living and dead, I can creative a thought set that manipulates my next set of thoughts to imagine I create my own future, manipulating and being manipulated by the people around me in concentric circles of influence.

Ideas come and go.

Watch a remake of a twist on Oedipus Rex for the umpteen millionth time, this time in the guise of “Looper,” and I accept the fact that originality and newness is the illusion of forgetfulness and ignorance.

I am a tired old man, waiting to die, simple as that, have been since I was five and figured out that for the rest of my life I’d be surrounded by stupidity masquerading as wisdom.

I attempt to entertain myself by putting my nose into other people’s business and observe their shortsightedness, sometimes able to predict where they’ll stumble upon yet another remix that has been forgotten and will be forgotten again.

Sigh…forever remaking ourselves in our own funhouse mirror images…

Is there nothing more?

I’m just glad that this blog isn’t real, that it influences no one else’s thought patterns, just a remix of the news passing through my thought sets in order to shade my eyes from my reflection in the mirror that long ago became a magnifying glass reflecting nothing.

Forty-five years of invisibility…

I am tired of this game.

I want a new universe, a new set of rules, a new body, a new set of “thought patterns,” even if they’re aren’t thoughts at all and “I” is a fiction that no longer exists…

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

Ethics at the local level

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Here I have a whole universe to consider and yet the gnat in the ointment is nagging me.  Hope it ain’t a mosquito with West Nile virus.

This is the story so far:

  • My next-door neighbour, Ann, died recently.
  • Within a short period of time after Ann’s death, her husband contracted with a real estate agent, put their house up for sale at $10k less than its appraised value (historically, the appraised value, set by our local (county) government, is less than market value), an incredibly low $80k.  Keep in mind that the house on the other side of us sold for $437,500 on 13th August 13 2010, but its appraised value that year was $309,800.
  • The real estate agency was Keller Williams.
  • The house sold in three days, according to another neighbour down the street.
  • The buyer, I discover, is also a real estate agent for Keller Williams, named Alice Battle.
  • Today, my wife and I paid a courtesy visit to meet our new neighbour.
  • A building contractor greeted us, told us Alice doesn’t live there but, instead, is having the place remodeled because Alice, who lives in the city, plans to use the house as a weekend retreat for her and her friends.
  • The building contractor said he wished Alice had been there [to justify her reasons for buying the house] but, and he didn’t want to speak for her, told us anyway that Alice “just fell in love with the house right away” and had to have it.

Well, who wouldn’t at that price?  Is it even ethical to buy from a “friend” working for the same real estate agency who low-balled the price of the house?

I’m collecting more information.  Having been a newspaper reporter, the investigative side of me wants to get to the bottom of this.

Questions I have to answer are:

  • Are there ethical implications here?
  • Is this a common practice in real estate?
  • Is this a violation of any laws?
  • Is this a “tip of the iceberg” moment that might reveal more about why the real estate business was such a disastrous financial bomb dropped in the middle of the global economy?
  • Are we setting ourselves up nationally for another real estate catastrophe?

I guess I need to consult my friends in the legal department to see how I should pursue this matter.  We might have a situation that is worth calling in the big dogs of the newspaper business and coordinating our investigations across the country.

I can’t wait to hear what Alice has to say for herself because she represents not only herself here but also Keller Williams and the real estate business in general, as well as potentially putting Huntsville in national news and Huntsville needs more newspaper exposure like UAH needs another Amy Bishop on their professorial staff.

I feel like a hound dog that’s found a strong scent and wants to tree a varmint.

More as it develops…

The Metrics of Success

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Tonight, after our private dance lesson with Joe at KCDC, I joined my wife at the Jackson Center to celebrate her new company’s 10th anniversary in business.

Of all the stats they named, one stood out the most — combined charitable giving, between the company (~$400k) and employees (~$1.1M), has been around 1.6-million American dollars to the community.

I learned a long time ago never to lecture people about their responsibilities for charitable contributions.

We develop our own habits of helping others — sometimes a simple smile or pat on the shoulder, sometimes a 100-million dollar university endowment.

Or we may scowl at the whole world and return to our solitary meditation in Quonset huts deep in the wilderness.

I give away my ideas for consumption/contemplation by the whole species — a gift with no value or debt attached.

For instance, movie aficionados question the quality of remakes because the originals were just so hard to match.

Well, there’s at least one film that was so bad to begin with that investors are urging Ben Affleck, on the chance his new movie, “Argo,” will be a hit, to let a director take a shot at
remaking “Gigli.”

Rumours say that Amanda Bynes has been terrorising fellow drivers on the streets of LA to prove she’s tough enough to act the J-Lo part in the remake.  Several Indian actors have hinted they are rough enough to reprise the role of Gigli.

We’ll see.

Meanwhile, for a brief moment of semi-sanity, American football fans applauded the return of the “zebras,” better known as nearsighted field referees, to the NFL.

The Atlanta Braves, an all-American baseball team, hope the magic of “Trouble With The Curve” will propel them deep into the postseason playoffs this year.

Can Sarah Brightman sing her way to heights that Felix Baumgartner can only dream of?

I have neglected our scientists glued to their desks in the subterranean b-b-basement chambers for too long.

Let us visit them and see if they have answer to the question, “When does a set of smartphone users with their portable handheld computers disguised as telecommunication instruments allow the use of the networked devices as a virtual supercomputer during idle CPU cycles?”

Me, with my Bluetooth keyboard and large LCD monitor, I’ve just about given up the use of a desktop/laptop PC, carrying my equivalent of an OQO in the Samsung Galaxy SIII.

Next on the list: synching the smartphone to my brain interface for better multitasking, spinning off calculations to the dedicated hardware device that displays results in my third eye, an audiovisual hybrid developed just for this new me who had to train myself to respond to a new “language” that doesn’t interfere with my normal functions within polite society.

Rewiring myself from the “reptile” brain on up has been a tiring task but one well worth all the risks so far.

Duplicating this reconfiguration via genetic code remapping will be the greatest challenge with the personal stem cells my scientists created for me to play god (note the lowercase).

Creating a genetic one-off experiment of self is the safest route at this point in our knowledge base.

Well, that’s all for now.  Time for a chemical bath to wash off all the symbiotic “germs” and see how a “virgin” self responds to the environment.

Then take “Looper” for a spin on a Möbius strip.

Questions up for debate

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We can imagine the U.S. presidential debates to contain questions like these:

  • Do you consider the sense of global cooperation higher or lower than when you took office four years ago?  Examples: Middle Eastern countries considering formation of their own Internet after U.S. insult of historical religious figure; China/Japan/Taiwan tension; European economic/political unrest; a war in Syria that threatens peace in Turkey, one of our friends; al Qaeda still strong enough to surprise a consulate and kill our own…
  • You say you are for the people.  Which people?  For instance, were Wall Street banker bonuses smaller or larger after the bailout?  Who has benefited the most during your term in office?  Hasn’t it been the very same people you blame Bush for the recession?  What has fundamentally changed?
  • Reagan didn’t blame the economy on Jimmy Carter four years later.  Why do you keep blaming your predecessor four years later?  Doesn’t that mean you admit you don’t have the power base to make the fundamental changes this country needs other than plugging a few holes in a dam that’s still losing a lot of water on your watch four years later?
  • How many more Solyndras do we need until we can see your administration’s track record on picking winners is no better than throwing darts in the dark?
  • I am financially independent enough that I can make my own decisions.  You are a pure politician who has not united our government, let alone the real world.  Which one of us has the real global power to make the U.S. economically strong again?
  • They say you’re a quick thinker.  Okay, try this.  A preacher, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar.  Finish the joke, making sure a Buddhist priest says the punchline…

Having politicians to play with is like herding cats — open a can of food and watch ’em come running to eat, despite whatever else they thought they were doing that was important enough to pretend to ignore you.