Which is a more compelling story, another NASCAR rain delay (with a side story about modern-day oldschool cheating) or “the same old politics” in the land of wind and Al Capone?
Time to dip into something that American beer tastes like: water.
A loss doesn’t make a season – a season makes up for a loss. Go Vols!
Can you burp your national anthem at 13, holding six guys at bay who want to date you but one is too short, the other doesn’t use acne cream and a few are possible candidates if they act right?
Does your moving company know you at 40 better than your family? In your constant relocations, do you leave boyfriends behind you like discarded furniture?
Would you put Optimus or Decepticon symbols on the background of your mobile phone screen?
In writing a book-sized story, where one wants to place an interesting character, would a muse inspire you with her minor in fluids and her major in propulsion systems for a master’s degree?
What about the blue-eyed dancer who saved a song for you on the parquet at the mill while you were enjoying a gravel dance floor with your wife next to an old gravel quarry?
Speaking of parquet, would your insurance company drop you after a claim against water-damaged wood flooring in your house, forcing you to buy expensive home insurance?
= = =
Every one of these questions is a good theme for a short story.
= = =
A name like Gabriella is enough to push one into writing a song for the ages. I’ll compose that melody soon.
= = =
How many people have met their second spouses at their twentieth secondary school graduation reunions?
= = =
Sometimes, one states the obvious and, sometimes, one writes on universal themes to allow room for wandering imaginations.
I wrote myself into my own novel, a wish that few are granted, and now that I want to get out, I can’t.
Some say that God is a loving god. I know better. God has a sense of humour that sometimes includes love. Occasionally, God is simply the mysteries of the universe yet to be described scientifically. Usually, God is a character in its own story that likes to grant wishes to others, no matter how mundane or bizarre.
Do you like to swing? Swing dance, that is?
Me, I’m a salsa dancer at heart. More intimate. Less flailing around. Like an exotic chocolate – rich, thick, memorable on the tongue.
Swing is the exercise that allows me to enjoy the calorie-heavy taste of the dessert on the dance floor called salsa.
= = =
Don’t call your government changes “austerity.” Euphemisms are free for the taking – use the ol’ positive mental attitude vocabulary words and call them “lifestyle enhancements” or some such, especially while you’re reorganising. Remember, it’s not “bankruptcy” anymore; it’s “debt consolidation.” They’re not creditors; they’re financial investors with a keen interest in your monetary wellbeing. Creative bookkeeping is a high art, not a low crime. Okay, maybe that last one is getting carried away. 😉
= = =
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people, including the bus drivers last night who transported us from the Huntsville Hospital carpark to the Moon Over Three Caves charity event; the Publix employee who cut up fruit into a bowl by request; Michael, Michelle, Connie and Shelby; Redstone Arsenal gate security personnel; and more this tired guy can’t remember easily on an early Sunday morning.
In the bathtub, a baby cave cricket this morning. A cabin in the woods gives me plenty of companions to play with and observe. The cricket jumped onto my hand, I placed the cricket on the lip of a bucket of tumbled rock debris, the cricket jumped into the web of a tiny hungry spider levitating inside the bucket.
Life goes on.
A jogger enjoys the cool morning air, moving past with ease.
At a Mexican restaurant, El Coyote, the server couldn’t find a bottle of Bohemia beer for me. Now, you know, a Mexican restaurant without Bohemia is a business establishment ripe for “accident” protection insurance provided by my business associates. However, the server offered me a couple of beers I hadn’t sampled before: Victoria and Pacifico. In honour of my honeymoon 25 years ago, I also drank a bottle of Tecate, a beer I first sampled on a bus from the airport to the “island” resort area of Cancun. At the time, I could have bought a six-pack for 600 pesos, 6/7 of a U.S. Dollar.
Time goes on.
Negra Modelo next time – a beer with a heavier bite, slight though it may be.
Is there a dominatrix in your diet? Is your soccer mom wife a tiger in disguise? Do you pretend to be in charge by driving the minivan/SUV to work and let your wife drive it back home in order to manage the household of which you’re only a budgetary asset provider?
I only live once.
Live and let argue over who’s in charge.
Let my wife own the dance floor fantasy, I her strong romance novel hero rescuing her from the doldrums by holding her firmly as we spin around the room.
My invisible friends are waiting for the next set of instructions, like some kinda vigilante justice league of their own.
In the old days, we relied on the James Bond types to accomplish our goals. Now, it’s the soccer moms, executive office managers, maids, and female rugby fans who fulfill requests by the Committee.
You mean, you didn’t know your ten-year old daughter was part of the hacker network? You thought the social networking she obsessed over was really just about who was breaking up with whom? Don’t you realise she’s training for a mission decades in the making?
Guys, you’re not forgotten. We’re adding males and females to our ranks. The more, the merrier. Strength in numbers.
Majority does not always rule but it makes them feel more secure in their conformity.
Time to close this entry. There’s a smug leader who needs a little comeuppance, show him that there’s no one around him loyal enough to guarantee his safety. Then, a picnic to attend. A college football team to cheer for. A charity event to support.
One fellow remembers, when he was a preschooler, dipping worms in food colouring, dropping the worms on paper and watching them wriggle original designs long before elephants made money painting masterpieces.
Baring memories in the bright lights of the dance floor in one’s middle years.
Renee celebrated her birthday.
A young woman in a red dress smiled.
A son, 27 years old, gets tired at nine o’clock after working more than a week of a fulltime job.
Another woman turns labels and stocks the shelves of a supermarket at night.
A new couple attends the Friday night get-together.
A pretty face wearing a tie (no, make that an ascot) at the drive-through/takeaway window said, “Thank you.”
Flashy eyelashes handed out caramel apple treats, too.
We are, rich and poor, simply us.
No matter who wears the pants in the relationship.
= = =
The Committee wants me to drop the “’I’m so poor…,’ ‘How poor are you?’” routine, saying they’d gladly turn me into an instant megamillionaire like so many others before me just to shut me up.
The temptation to take the money is a good feeling. I can’t deny the desire to feel wealthy is there.
But the absence of money makes me appreciate what little I have.
= = =
A young redhead talks about her class schedule, including psychology and anatomy, looking forward to dissecting a cat. Her brother pulls together his Harry Potter CD/audiocassette collection to share. Their father can’t get a RAV4 door to open, the lock mechanism disengaged somehow, but shares his old LP album collection to convert to MP3, scratches and all (Jason and the Scorchers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, X, David Bowie, Miles Davis, to name a few).
= = =
A new friend talks about helping film an apocalyptic movie in an old quarry. She’d worn a Star Trek NextGen costume and Princess Leia slave outfit at Dragon*Con, her boy friend enjoying the paranormal track but not the $800/night hotel cost.
= = =
How many of us remember the kindergarten mats we slept on? How many of us missed that privilege, having grown up on farms?
Me, I remember hatching an egg in an incubator in kindergarten class. My wife remembers collecting eggs from the chicken house on the family farm.
= = =
Linux found my old Windows Vista recovery partition but rstrui.exe doesn’t seem to work (or, rather, found no hard disk driver to use, or something like that).
= = =
Oh well, back to managing the rest of us seven billion. Being a humble leader is a hard job, let me tell you.
Hey, if I can do this with a supercomputer, the Book of the Future, a crystal ball, a network of hackers and my business associates, what do we need Geithner flying around Europe pretending that a Sinophile has answers for the EU that haven’t worked for the USA? Whatever we’re paying him, it’s too much. Obama, I have a suggestion for cutting the budget – start with the Treasury secretary!
And Putin, dude, what’s with all the he-man stuff? You’re beginning to look like Hemingway – we all know what that means.
A tiny red spider was crawling on the side of my writing desk this morning. Are they (is it) harmful? I can’t remember. If there’s one, should I expect more than one? On what do they feed?
Sitting here, all alone, I hear the chorus of a song, “I ain’t got nobody,” singing in my thoughts, competing with the tinnitus to block out residential sounds – bird chirps, dirt movers, tufted titmouse pecking, heat pump humming – while the word “Djibouti” resounds for no reason I’ve yet fathomed.
Yesterday, a bus passed by the house, stopped down the road and, minutes later, a young man walked by, his body weighed down by a large backpack.
Apparently, gravity has a direct effect on public education in this part of the world.
Birds are out in abundance today, scattering when vehicles motor down the lane.
A chipmunk scurries across from one side of the road to the other.
“Why did the chipmunk cross the road?”
“To get away from the noisy chicken.”
Inside jokes.
The birds are back, plucking insects and arachnids for midmorning meals.
What happens when a nation-sized entity goes into receivership? Or, in bankruptcy, can we experiment with reorganisation while maintaining the people’s national identity, if such still exists in a multinational mix?
I am a kid in a grownup’s body, waiting for permission from a real adult to tell me it’s okay to call myself an adult, too.
Where are the real adults?
Real to me, anyway.
Responsible, loving, not trying to get rich by lying/cheating/deception.
It’s easy to live in a fantasy world, neatly cocooned in the artificial constructs of a writing room/study/library/junk room.
Where real adults can live together in harmony, treating each other equally despite inequalities of physical/mental capabilities.
However, I’m not running for political office, negotiating a deal that’ll break the back of a competitor who underbid me in a previous business cycle, cutting off the arm of a man who accepted a shipment of illegal drugs from me but didn’t sell them, or desperately searching for medical help to heal a child with multiple health issues.
Instead, I’m writing an artificial story of real life, like a romance novel or war memoir.
We don’t live in perfect harmony.
We live because we live.
States of energy bouncing around the way they tend to bounce around in this part of the universe.
One reader calls this blog a technical manual with a storyline.
I agree (of course, I’m that reader!).
The thing about being invisible is being invisible.
When light passes through you, what are you?
It’s best to pretend to be completely insane and imagine none of what I see is real.
That way, when I’m asked, “Should we save these people or let them die?,” I can respond without feeling happiness or remorse.
Otherwise, I would go crazy.
Is that the secret to being a real adult, pretending nothing is real?
What about physical laws, mathematical formulae, and other observable/measurable phenomena of the universe that are computed and predicted precisely?
Is that not proof of reality?
What do I get in return for leadership of the Committee?
Is proof that my edicts are observable/measurable phenomena sufficient?
Is that all there is?
If so, then ruling the world is not all it’s purported to be.
Why must we fear a megalomaniac taking over the One World Order?
I keep coming back to these thoughts because I don’t understand the motivation of this character, the reluctant Committee leader.
What’s the character’s motivation?
Can altruism exist?
Can a person truly act unselfishly?
I look up at the plaques on the wall in front of me – Eagle Scout Award recognition in 1976, with 15-year membership in the National Eagle Scout Association; Eagle Scout recognition from the Colonial Heights Optimist Club; Outstanding Student Award in Creative Writing from Walters State Community College in 1985; 5-year employment appreciation from ADS Environmental Services, Inc. in 1996 – signposts of my life, obscured by stacks of books, obsolete computer equipment, artwork by Deena Haynes East/Rita Burkholder/others, and stuff like plastic car/airplane models mainly significant to me.
We are the same, you and I, with signposts, big and small, to show we existed, if only in the way we stirred up states of energy for the brief moment we lived.
If we are the same, though, why don’t I give you leadership of the Committee?
I don’t know why I don’t.
Actually, I do know why.
I can’t find anything else to do that’s worth living for.
In that, I am selfish.
I believe too strongly that expanding life into the cosmos is the most important activity we call uniquely our species’ to give the leadership to anyone else at this point in the story.
I don’t care who benefits along the way, who destroys the local environment or who exploits the weak – that’s your goal, not mine.
Well, I care only when it interferes with getting us or our representatives off this planet.
Meanwhile, I am unimportant, not wanting to participate in the personality cult that dominates much of what we call news, a chameleon that slips in and out of social situations with unease, keeping our species in balance, if not harmony, while diverting resources for transporting beings into the great unknown.
I am so humbly an imperfect person, it hurts to be, perfectly, me.
If describing the Committee leader’s personality for this storyline is all I accomplish in my life, I have lived, stirring up states of energy like everyone else, in whatever way we know how to try.
Otherwise, a quiet, simple life with my wife is all I ask for, two imperfect beings padding our nest, sharing it with other Earth-based lifeforms, no matter how big or small, beneficial or harmful they may be.
That’s about as real as it gets.
Dancing as if it doesn’t matter whether people are or are not watching.
What if this moment is the last one I will enjoy sitting here composing a chapter in the story of life?
Playing the part of the miser, the hermit in the woods, the pauper, selling nothing, talking to himself because no other reality exists except self.
That last word, “self”…tenuous, at best.
If you had read every word written, every idea expanded, every emotion evoked by us humans, would you still believe in a nonrepeatable future?
Reaching into the past, grabbing four or five things, squeezing them into a ball and saying, “Here, try this,” famous last words, is what we do.
So what?
So what?
So what?
What we do “best”?
Best: a comparison against something else.
Deconstruct and reconstruct.
Yet another this, yet another that.
Getting back to the innocence of youth.
Feeling new again.
Looking up at the giant adults around you.
Separating the wise from the confused.
Sensing the independent individuals.
Listening intently, feeling fresh ideas flow.
Just another seedling harvested by grownups.
Can trees fly?
A quiet, cool morning after overnight showers.
A deer walked through the woods below our house.
Leaves oscillate in the breeze.
In reality, I was once a young boy. In imagination, I am an old man.
Age, what is age?
Young and old describe divisions of time in a life.
Thinner and thinner slices get us closer to seeing states of energy changing instead of a person aging.
Today, I cannot see there is no empty space between me and the redbud leaf nearby.
A leaf that yellows in the cooling days of early autumn.
The image of the leaf presses against my optic nerve as if we are one.
I know that gravity fields and sunlight and gas molecules and radio waves fill a gap of a few feet between us but, then again, I don’t know.
I believe.
I accept the illusion of three-dimensional space because I have no alternative that speaks louder to me.
A young woman jogs on the road, passing our house.
Actions of my species seek an audience for my attention, asking for a tiny mention by me here.
Pebbles in a pond.
Prayers and meditation in a sacred space.
How, when and where do I reinforce old thoughts and reinvent new ones?
An example of myself to myself.
An example of our species to our species.
Saying the same things we’ll say again in the decades before and after this moment, ocean waves crashing on shore, shaping, shifting, scraping.
Picking and choosing from the imaginations of those who’ve thought before me.
Passing imaginative thoughts on to those who’ll think after me.
Paradigms, models and hypotheses taking root, growing, getting cut off, dying.
Facing the test of time.
Thump, ditty-thump, ditty-thumpthumpthump.
Which rhythms of the interaction of states of energy reverberate and amplify signals that live from moment to moment?
The age of the bubble of the universe that presses outward against unimaginable infinite space is nothing compared to the reality of the only life I’ll know.
No wonder I’m blind, not tuned to the greater rhythms of the universe that seem so slow, barely affecting my lifetime.
In the message that is billions of years old, I am a subatomic particle making an infinitesimally-small movement that pushes the message imperceptibly forward.
To understand that is all I need to know.
Direction is meaningless.
Movement is everything.
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…
My parents got the first 24 years of my life.
My wife got the next 25 years of my life.
Who, or what, gets what’s left?
Show, or tell?
Fortuneteller, philosopher, or storyteller?
Pack, hunt, and kill, or…
Shear wool, spin yarn, and knit a sweater?
What is the foundation, the base, upon which the future of this blog rests?
Global groupthink or individual imagination?
Random states of energy or predestined human history?
Drop the “and.”
Forget the “or.”
Release, let the thoughts flow.
From two in opposition to four in stasis.
From four to sixteen.
From two bent angles that imply a missing third, forming a triangle to…
The inference that infinity spreads out in all directions from the two bent angles.
From the simple social bonds of family to species-level connections far from simple.
TO HERE.
NOW.
The ego wants to bless others, mention specifics, giving meaning to lives looking for recognition naturally, social beings that we are.
Silent contemplation suffices.
The planet spins, the sunlight changes direction.
Today, that is more than enough.
“Peyton, I give you three options.”
“Yeah?”
“Coach, Commentator or U.S. President.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Not at all. You’ve got your whole life before you.”
“I see. So that’s it, then?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. That’s what I’m here for. I’ll be waiting.”
“So time soon, I hope.”
“Time is meaningless to me.”
treetrunkdings 