Sadly, I guess the times of my passive-aggressive father are over.  In his day, I doubt we would have heard someone make such a bold, impolite, immoral statement as, “Well, yes, Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, but he was the U.S. President, for Christ’s sake.  Of course, it makes sense that he still represents the Democratic Party.  ‘W’ was a whore man himself before he conveniently found Jesus and cooperated with the Muslim Saudis in selling out American oil interests.  He ‘conveniently’ still represents the Republican Party, too.”

So many cynical observations about promiscuous politicians and teachers, so little time to tell them.  Thank goodness, the film “The Campaign” was enough to tie me over for a while and fill in for such a bleak political election campaign season here in the ol’ US of A, where neither of the two primary candidates for U.S. President can talk about why the American economy is doing so poorly due to their being owned by the same worldwide corporate lobbying interests.

The last two paragraphs are examples of the influences on my youth, which I am trying hard to remove from my set of operational memories.

It is while we prepare the storyline to ease over to another planet (thanks, in part, to the friendly folks at Need Another Seven Astronauts (NASA)), where we will talk about life in the universe that does not center on our species, as puny as it is in comparison to the history of helium or cilia or syphilis/gonorrhea.

I am in a mischievous mood, wanting to make fun of others for the sake of making fun of others with no purpose in mind other than to entertain myself here, rather than in my thoughts alone.

Have you ever sat in a dark theatre, felt a constriction in your chest, the left side of your body going numb for just the briefest of moments, and wondered, “Is this it?”

I can feel it again right now.  Maybe it’s just a muscle twitching after I swept the driveway yesterday.  Or indigestion.

I hope so.

I really would like to sit and laugh quietly for many days longer.

If not…well, it was a good ride.

“It.”  Hmm…

“It” is nothing more than my life, a diversion for other sets of states of energy programmed to reproduce.

I never reproduced.

Scientific studies indicate that reproducing at my age is a recipe for heightened risk of autistic children who would drink out of plastic bottles made with BPA and filled with high fructose corn syrup, take antibiotics and become obese, and, finally, succumb to the onerous labels of “BIG” — BIG farms, BIG Pharma, BIG…you get the picture, if you subscribe to the notion that it’s an “us vs. them” world.

I never met BIG.  I don’t know “them.”  They are just words to me, diversions from a goal one gazillion years in the making, looking back 1000 years from now to see what we’ve accomplished.

Milestones, not accusations.

Actions, not passive disagreement.

A colleague of my father jokingly called my dad an imaginary engineer because of his master’s degree in industrial engineering (even saying so to my father a few days before he died), which always irritated my father.  Now, an industrial engineer is in charge of the largest company in the U.S. by stock value — Apple.  Who gets the last laugh?

That’s the thing.  If this moment is my last one, do I want to have my last thoughts focused on a clever joke or expanding the life of this planet into the cosmos?

I don’t want to spin a passive-aggressive take on a reworked warmed-over punchline.

I sure don’t want to be remembered for simply being clever.

I don’t want to be remembered at all.

This universe is it, all I’ve got, the only verifiable theory of life as I know it.

If I don’t give my minute/tiny/invisible/forgettable place in life a serious thought, who will?

If I don’t have my father around to argue with that the world is not falling to the Nazis and Communists all over again, to whom do I direct my attempt to make peace with my father and our generational gap?

If I don’t have my mother in-law around to convince that the United States is not about to go into another Great Depression (or worse) because a man who is too young (and black) is the U.S. President, to whom do I say that it’s not just white people and old people who care about the American Dream of [democracy and/or capitalism] and freedom for all?

It was a tough decision to say I would never vote again because I care about the higher ideals of our country and our world.  The everyday arguments of this time, of my generation, are perennial — that’s why I don’t care about them.

My visions are hundreds and thousands of years in the making, carrying on a long tradition passed on to me by others, regardless of the current form our organisation of life (i.e., civilisation) may look like.

War and the desire for peace are perennial.

Using available resources until they are depleted and worrying about the consequences are perennial.

That’s why I don’t care about them or the ways we beat our chests like good primates in unison about our alignment with issues such as these.

In the big picture, our species is unimportant.

We aren’t going to agree with the big picture until something else comes along to change that view.

Even then, we’ll argue that our ancestors — the keepers of our origin stories — were right and we’re the center of the universe.

So be it.

You can keep perpetuating those stories in whatever form you like, if it makes you feel better as you procreate.

As long as you keep in the wee spot at the back of your thoughts that you’re working for a larger cause than our species.

I use “cause” cautiously and facetiously because it implies more than what a single blog entry in a continuous storyline is supposed to be about, bringing up imagery of the influences upon my youth again, when this is solely about the way the universe works non-anthropomorphically.

Enough for now in this chapter.

More as it develops…