What is the alternative to alternative music?

Are you a situationist?

A reductionist?

A minimalist?

Would you rather make the news or tweet about the newsmakers?

Having been down this road before – dusty, tired, thirsty – Besseptby broke into a run.

She remembered when she was put in charge of PR for the Worldwide Mercenary Military, WWMM.

A week later, WWMM announced it had dissolved all political-based military units, mainly ones associated with national/state governments.

Her boss had speculated they’d send out an announcement along the lines of “Join or Die.”

Instead, their press release covered the mundane tasks of WWMM holding negotiations with governments that had not yet contracted out their military security to WWMM, detailing the countries that had long since turned over their military budgets to WWMM but maintained an image with their people that their government was still in charge of sovereign protection (at least in theory).

Besseptby had no interest in taking over her boss’ job, although he implied she’d be up for promotion after he retired in a couple of years.

Instead, she wanted to save up enough money to buy back her parents’ farm, which they had lost 100 years ago during the Great Cyclical Recession of the 2010s.

Besseptby hoped her children would find the same enjoyment she felt in the arduous but simple jobs of managing a farm without computer technology.

Farms were so rare these days, especially after WWMM’s parent company, Terraform Corp, had moved to outlaw private ownership of the means of automated food production, with only a few granted waivers – farms that could not sustain a family by manual means.

Besseptby just wanted a place to call her own, with nonnutritional trees and weeds she could teach her children to harvest for their decorative value.

A place of peace and meditation.

Thanks to WWMM’s generous investment benefits.

A few years of WWMM annual profitsharing bonuses and she could bid them adieu after buying the farm.

At least, that was her plan, until…

Too young to lead.

Fast tracked.

Repetitious phrases haunting old haunts.

Alexander the Great conquered the known world.

Et tu, Genghis Khan?

George Washington was 44 in 1776, battle-hardened and weary of tyranny.

They thrived on innovation.

What do you call a female preacher too old to lead? Pastor Prime.

Books are the same today as they were yesterday but what are readers of the future?

Marsha H’s manager lost his cool and now qualifies as a horrible boss.

The invisible slip in and out of society planting seeds of ideas in people’s thoughts.

Are Chinese engineers reliable, anymore? Would you ride a Chinese bullet train across a Chinese-designed and/or built bridge?

How about that smoking hot battery in your phone or iPad? Where did it come from?

Tweetsie RR lives on. Quality is Job One at Ford and a foreign concept at Chery, Huawei, etc.?

Would you rather have poke salad or a poke in the eye?

This year’s prize for most outstanding contribution to the advancement of our species goes to…

[electronic drum machine roll, please]

Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of the diabolical mad scientists concocting an animal/human DNA brew, attempting to perfect the ideal organism for a machine symbiant interface, a new species is born from the heated mix of antibiotics and probiotics fed to the scientists by the staff dietician.

“Dr. Echo, what’s that grumbling sound?”

“What, what, what, what…?”

“The watt meter, you say?”

“No, Dr. Douwt. I was stammering. I believe my GI tract is complaining about today’s lunch.”

“GI tract? Is that like a Bible tract?”

“Less elementary and more alimentary.”

“Less lute and more poot, too, I detect.”

“Brilliant deduction, Watt’s son.”

“You needn’t involve my father.”

“Too late. His offspring’s so bright, we call you son.”

“And like your cravat, very punny…knot!”

While the scientists debated the effects of gamma rays on long-term space travel, our two stowaways aboard the Loch Ness capsule secretly launched by a Scottish amateur rocket club wondered how long they’d survive with the small bag of rations they brought.

After they turned on their mobile phones and called the newspaper office back home, mass media outlets shouted, “THE SCOTS HEARD ROUNDING THE WORLD!”

May old acquaintance never be forgotten to pay back their debts to you, especially in these days of old lane signs.

Every day, a genie is let out of the bottle and we can’t go back to the previous day to put it back.

God-loving, God-fearing, gods-worshipping, agnostic, or atheist, there is a special subculture just for you.

Inner space or outer space, a positive self-esteem reinforces.

States of energy resolve themselves.

That’s the news on this day of the year 2754. Now, back to your imagination currently in progress.

Did you grow up drawing the interiour of battleships or the Star Trek’s Enterprise spaceship?

Will your son draw the interiour of a carved-out asteroid?

Do the children of JG Ballard remember a happy childhood?

Would you rather your child excel as a profitable purveyor of illegal mushrooms or an unpaid novelist?

What about your inner child?

Our purpose was to tear down national boundaries as we kept patriotism alive, losing citizens who couldn’t shake backward-thinking but sharing their taxed profits with the progressive populace.

Truth is no stranger to fiction.

Homemade balloon rides to the stars.

Beaming replicas, error-checking an afterthought.

Conversations as old-fashioned as cursive writing and keyboards.

Paper backed fantasies.

One voice as seven billion personalities weaving subplots like bubble memory storing bits of magnetic flux dangling from a loom.

Numbers – language as mathematical equations.

Volunteering to volunteer because no one waits for time to wait for no one.

The beauty of obscurity.

Rosin dust floating above strings.

The pain of waiting to join Club 27 plus one plus two plus three plus…

Self-expression a cause AND effect.

“To ask Buddha to come is the meaning of offering incense.” — Shunryn Suzuki-roshi

I, Symalttab, have traveled the ancient planet of my forebears.

I have stood in the gardens of Green Gulch Farm and seen the essence of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

I do not exist.

But I do not know how to reach you except through these words of nonself-as-self.

Perhaps the words of others will suffice:

1. “The Hiding Place” by Corrie ten Boom
2. “Blackwater: the rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army” by Jeremy Schahill
3. “The Natures of John and William Bartram” by Thomas P. Slaughter
4. “American On Purpose” by Craig Ferguson
5. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: an Indian history of the American west” by Dee Brown
6. “A Treasury of Philosophy,” edited by Dagobert D. Runes
7. “The New York Times Page One, 1851-2001, Special Commemorative Edition Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of ‘The New York Times'”

Symalttab, a collection of letters, labels, a description with which you identify an entity, a person – me.

You, the universe created out of my imagination, the entity that envelopes and defines my states of energy.

Together we foresaw the hindsight of cause-and-effect, the exhuming of a soldier, an officer, of war, leading to the exercise of one’s freedom to face the consequences of mass murder, genocide, but not geocide or suicide.

Almost fratricide.

Not gratitude.

Every entity a time bomb, some a timed bomb, marionette dolls tied to the visible cultural strings of virtual timeless timeliness.

One says a bomber/gunman was a victim of mass media, raised to go off in conjunction with the release of “Captain America.”

The Mask of the Red Death.

The shot heard ’round the world.

Forcing a hard reset of a social experiment out of control – the American Dream, brought to you by the United States of Europe, a fellow debtor entity.

But these are all just labels.

The work of an active imagination.

Seven billion imaginations at work, every single last one valid in its own way.

“Glennan, Ohio Educator, Named To Direct New U.S. Space Unit” (Ike’s choice for NASA head), listed under “NAUTILUS SAILS UNDER THE POLE AND 1,830 MILES OF ARCTIC ICECAP IN PACIFIC-TO-ATLANTIC PASSAGE” and”CHIEF OF U.N. GIVES A PLAN FOR MIDEAST.” New York, Saturday, August 9, 1958

Roosevelt put embargo on gold and called Congress, said the NYT on Monday, March 6, 1933.

Czar abdicated after start of revolution in Russia, said the NYT on Friday, March 16, 1917.

“G.O.P. POSES ISSUE FOR ’50 AS LIBERTY VERSUS SOCIALISM,” yelled the NYT on Tuesday, February 7, 1950. And in smaller text that day, “McCloy Warns the Germans Against a Revival of Nazism.”

Don’t forget the U.S. aides seeing a risk of meltdown at Pennsylvania nuclear plant after more radioactive gas released, remembered the NYT on Saturday, March 31, 1979.

Lastly, McVeigh sentenced to death for Oklahoma City bombing, wrote the NYT on Saturday, June 14, 1997.

One more: “Opposition builds to spending cuts in Bush’s budget, lobbyists are mobilized,” NYT, Monday, April 9, 2001.

Labels. Images. Ideas. Sleight-of-hand tricks.

The Victrolas belong to the spoiled.

More data analysis before calling the night “it.”

Parting is sushi, wheat, sore roe. ;(

Symalttab, the illusion, vanishes.

Merc armies.  Drones killing civilians.  Random acts of violence.  Mass starvation.  Heat waves.  Drug gangs.

Saturday picnics.  School homework assignments.  Digitised libraries.  Archaeological digs.

Hero worship.

Imaginary universes.

Political wrangling.

The future and the past look the same.

And yet…

How did we figure out the complicated task of accommodating seven billion growing into nine billion growing into…?

Expanding into the solar system.

Turning asteroids into traveling spaceships.

Captain America and Hello Kitty dolls in playrooms.

It was a challenge well worth remembering.

In the next chapter…