Shielded Cable Tie Wrap Sandwiches

Competition for my attention  – AOL Radio on iPad, RedBox at Walmart, free Amazon movie/TV rentals for prime members on PC, my wife’s Angry Birds playing, Destination Truth in Ireland “Live” on SyFy TV, our sick cat.

Sit down with a tall shot of Bushmills and think in this space.

Allow distractions/diversions in small quantities.

Perform to myself at my own pace.

Bela Fleck in Africa and Moody Blues in America playing in my thoughts.

Do I give volume to the voices of everyday life, like the server with 25 years of waiting experience who wouldn’t step foot in Cracker Barrel again because eating one biscuit there marks a worker as a thief, their profit margin model is screwed down so tight?  Or CC who rides a blowup plastic walker on her 50th?

If we’re willing to be victims of circumstance, can I forgive myself for creating circumstantial victims?

Can I be envious and jealous of everyone and no one?

Ten million comedians out of work – no need for me to be wise or crack a joke, eh?

Did you have a creative imagination as a child that was encouraged or discouraged by family/friends?

Are you perfectly aware of the influences upon your thoughts?

Do we have any thoughts at all?

Are we but electroidneurochemical junctures?

Does plagiarism exist?

I’ve never expected anyone to follow these thought trails because they are but the superficial evidence of my existence.

Nary an original thought in this noggin.

Circles and spirals conspiring and cooperating.

An ant lion waiting to catch a moray eel.

Are you sympathetic or hostile to a lifestyle because you lived and grew up in it?

Free of all but the desire to be free?

When you’ve tasted them all and none are tasty but life with your wife is the best comfort food, settle down for a lifelong meal.

Nothing exists, including me.

This is the only illusion I can verify its falsity.

No need to build moneymaking vanity-inflating fantasies.

Domesticated.

Beware the caged roar of the declawed beast.

I’m told it’s called happiness.  I have no comparison to verify its veracity.

I can sit down and listen/watch the imagination play out in my thoughts.

It’s who I’ve always been.

The hermit lost in his thoughts.

Who I’m meant to be.

Slightly rough around the edges.

A soft heart.

Hard of hearing.

Aging, if not aging well.

Well-aged.

Comma,s whos, and whoms losing significance.

Language an artificial construct that’s unnecessary for an active thought set.

Free to dream.

No extra charge.

Preposthistoric.

The bag of tricks spilt, no crying for tears bored out of the head.

Follow along if you like, but don’t be surprised if the path disappears in front of you.

I challenge you to make the most of yourself because I know you can.

Like I’ve said, these words are stage props, not crutches to prop you up.

I don’t need a cent from you to tell you what you already know about yourself – get your retail therapy fix from someone else more moneyminded than me.

Checklist. Check. Check. Check.

Is there a magnitude to the trip I’m preparing to take?

If I won’t be me anymore, then are any comparisons valid?

Using the resources available in this solar system to create a projection/launch system had its good days and its bad days.

I would thank all the individuals involved in making this happen but, when they figure out this solar system will be destroyed or vastly altered in order to send one representative to another universe, well, you can imagine how thankful they’ll really feel.

We’ll never know if it was really worth the cost.

That, my friends,  is true faith.

If you want to test the will of the people, ask them for the ultimate sacrifice.

History in the making and their unmaking at the same time.

You, me, us – we’ll never know if any of this was real.

However, you always knew the creation and accrual of more complex ideas/technology served one purpose.

I wish I was glib.

I want to give this a dose of humour to ease a bitter taste any of you may have about the only reason you’re here as part of the seven billion and growing sets of states of energy in what looks like a locally quiet area for organic lifeforms.

Like I’ve said, I don’t want to be the person I am.

I didn’t ask for this role.

I would gladly trade with the next person.

Somewhere, sometime, I drew the short straw and nobody told me until it was too late.

Now, it’s just a matter of time.  Waiting.  Planning.  Constructing.

We’ll keep you busily focused on your lives, families and friends such that you’ll rarely notice what you’re doing seems to point to the same goal as everyone else on the planet.

Throw enough emergencies, threats of imminent danger, chemical rushes called love, and competitiveness into our lives and most of us forget whatever it was that seemed so important a few days ago, let alone a few years ago.

Everyone has the assigned task of being the individual set of states of energy with the propensity for something special.

You’ve heard it over and over and it’s true.

Meanwhile, I want to discover more about why I am the way I am before I am no longer.

How much did Dr. Benjamin Spock influence my parents while they raised a little redheaded boy that turned into me?

When did I first hear about Henry Thoreau and civil disobedience?

Did Thomas Mann have an effect on my first attempts at writing?

Why was I always fascinated as a kid in pretending to be blind, deaf, missing fingers, arms or legs, and generally challenged to be the person I was not?

If I die before 14,306 days is up, who will have the knowledge set that makes for a ready replacement?  And if there is no ready replacement, then what?

Only I can want to be alive enough to put our whole species to work on this effort.

Noble and ignoble.

Motivating the rest of the organic lifeforms to participate takes a little more effort.

But my team of experts is working on that.

Atom smashers, give me new information, if you please!

Guttural

The difference between a vision and a visionary…like the difference between hindsight giving the illusion of a life that was intended to happen and foresight giving direction to a life not yet lived.

I ask myself the same question – which am I, a vision or a visionary?

I, I, I…’tis nice to say that word and know I really mean it.

Do I stay in the imperfect colloquial mode or present a new language that is still only an approximation of a communication system that exists outside these states of energy?

Stuck in the same mode for a few days – making fun of myself to prevent hardening of the arterial channels of my thought set – as I ease into another habit.

That is, if I can form a new habit.

Water pours out of the rusted gutter.  Rain batters leaves of the spindly tree.

Patterns repeating themselves.

I can give in to these repeating patterns and call them my true comfort zone, or not.  Two of many choices.

Neither either/or nor not either/or, neither [nigh-ther ee-ther/or nor not eye-ther/or, nee-ther].

Freedom to be me, no more taking notes in public, letting opportunities of my species pass me by as I slip into obscurity once again (if I was ever really obscure – globally-speaking, yes, locally, no).

It was fun entertaining the masses without making a dime in the process.  I lived the life I always imagined and enjoyed many parts of it.

But the millennia of repetition bogged me down.

I want something new, or at least new for myself.

Diane Prosser and Brenda Craig traveled the world and told me about their adventures, a few I imitated like a good social, mimicking primate.

I want something else.

Even if I can’t have what I want.

I’ll give myself credit for trying because there are no hard-and-fast rules or grading system to label my efforts.

Find a way to fill the gap between birth and death of this version of the states of energy I know (at least partially) as me.

No matter what I do, the gap will be closed one way or another, with or without my help.

Thanks goes to Christina Aguilera for playing along with the old me and the game of pretending to predict the future.  The same for Trevor Bayne and Jeff Gordon and all the others along the way, including Hillary Clinton – basically, the people I don’t know exist except through news headlines because I can’t say with firm facts that they really exist, although I think I can say I saw Jeff Gordon from a distance once, or perhaps a person wearing a helmet with that name.

So much of my life is a matter of imagination, meaning the same applies to other states of energy like myself.

In that vein of thought, a bird and a moth have no concept of a window pane.

If I’m going to die like everyone else, why the interest in self?

Because creating a nearly self-contained universe is the goal I seek.

But not self-sufficiency.

Just like everyone else.

Trying to hide the repetition from myself as much as possible.

And then die.

Life completed.

Happily or not.

A Change of Scenery

If one moves the people, one moves aside and lets them pass by.

One intends neither to lead nor to hide, simply to be.

Word counts don’t count.

Counts don’t count words.

The satirical self is tucked away.

Time to take one seriously for one’s own sake and not to placate one’s vanity.

I’ve humoured the people long enough – time to put self first and see where this goes, storing words in a public space in another corner of the narcissistic blogosphere, free of fear of letting people down or not entertaining people enough to keep their interest.

What about me?

That’s what I intend to find out.

Beingness and Nothing

The wonders of the absence of, the freedom from feeling connected to, the news of the day is hard to describe.

There is a running joke among the philosopher/humourist crowd about those who sit around reading the news and get infected with the “I’m directly responsible for world events” fever.

Bloggers and tweeters and social network feeders seem most susceptible to this condition that has permeated all walks of society throughout history.

You can use humour to relieve yourself of the imaginary burden of carrying history on your shoulders or you can build a network of people who actually change history.

But if you just sit around dreaming about dreaming about making change, then dreaming’s your output, not facts.

I use my network to dream about humour.

The network of my thought set, that is, extended to infinity like some moderncubistpostindustrialartdecoupage painting.

And now I find myself here, working with the scientists and programmers who’ve solved the multicellular division problem that will allow me to disperse and rejoin myself in another universe.

They’ve told me to expect a quantum disturbance.

I’ve told them to expect this to serve as a diversion from another storyline that will be told some other time.

I don’t want to say goodbye to the essence of me – my viewpoint, my style of humour – but it might be the price I’ll pay to go over to the other side.

A trailblazer for future generations that may never know I existed because I did but did not change history in any significant way.

Dropping pebbles in a pond at a scale I cannot imagine.

It’s 17:00 somewhere

Inventing a whole new universe, without anthropomorphising it, without using communication methods with which our species is familiar.

And by inventing, pretending or not pretending to channel the “energy” of that universe to describe it here.

Tunneling, if you will, through our reality into that which is indescribable.

Imagine the encouragement of algae blooms in order to feed off that which feeds off the dead algae.

Twisting into braids to find the weave that best replicates something you’ve never seen or read about.

Trusting but never knowing you’re right.

A better chance of meeting microorganisms, or non-inert chemical/physical reactions, than anything else.

Not needing an audience dumbed-down to accept a suspended disbelief repeated all over again.

Knowing but never trusting you’re right.

Ignoring the backbeat of reality, reality, reality, reality, reality,… drummed into your thoughts.

Breaking yourself into microorganisms so you can slip through the keyhole and start anew, many parts of the old you dying along the way.

Never coming back, or if returning, appearing in so different a form that neither you nor the ones who knew you will know you.

Disrupting the balance of mass and energy.

Purposefully losing touch with reality because reality really doesn’t matter – an imaginary way of creating a new kind of anti-matter machine.

Creating reality that others like you cannot see or touch without giving up their precious, vested forms attached to and leaning on still others.

Still.

Not a moonshine still.

Peace.

Not at peace.

Moving.

But not moved.

An alien experience beyond alien experiences.

Getting there in, what would appear to you, billions of years.

But you’ve got to start sometime.

Fourteen thousand, three hundred and seven days to get somewhere.

Via de la Via

Back to my book reading, including four biographies – Dr. Spock, Henry Thoreau, Thomas Mann, and a blind scientist – in order to learn more about myself and my place in the universe as I know it at this point in our species history.