Tag Archives: chapter excerpt

Confused about politics…

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Okay, so I was driving down the road when a news flash interrupted my meditative music.

Apparently, Public Radio International has claimed the top spot in the Mexican government, led by Enrique Pena Nieto.

As you can see, I’m confused.  Public Radio International, or PRI, is, according to wikipedia:

a Minneapolis-based American public radio organization, with locations in Boston, New York, London and Beijing. PRI’s tagline is “Hear a different voice.” PRI is a major public media content creator and also distributes programs from many sources, competing with National Public Radio and American Public Media to provide programming to public radio stations.[1] Additionally, the company is increasingly focused on fulfilling the unmet needs in global news and cultural perspectives, created and curated specifically for relevance for Americans.[2]Therefore its competitive set in the larger media and information landscape consists of organizations focused on creating, partnering and providing global news and cultural perspectives content.

PRI is the “managing partner” of American Public Radio, which provides satellite radio programing via Sirius XM Satellite Radio. APR is composed of PRI, Chicago Public Radio, WGBH (FM) in Boston, and WNYC in New York City.[3]

Am I to understand that the Mexican government is now in direction competition with Carlos Slim’s media empire?

What does that say about the drug cartels?

Who, at the end of the day, will rule the streets?

Will kids listen to the likes of Ahmad Jamal, Hey Rim Jeon, or Yomo Toro?  Does that mean the pop days are just about over for the dynamic duo, Justin Bieber and Paul McCartney?  Will Dolly Parton release an album inspired by the Tijuana Brass?

Do Australians celebrate Christmas in July?

Can someone give those idle folks in Mali something to do besides tearing down burial sites?  Don’t they have jobs or some other useful constructive occupation?

Will Microsoft copyright the phrase “Higgs boson” before it’s too late and the phrase becomes a common household name like “collaterized mortgage obligations” or “six degrees of freedom”, depriving the corporation of calling itself “The House that God’s Particle Built!”?

What does one do with a 32MB USB flash drive in a TB world?

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Got my 100GB camera today — don’t need a zoom lens any longer!

I installed the camera in the front grille of my wife’s Toyota Camry.

Inconspicuous.  Another family car in another family-friendly shopping district.

Let the camera take random photos.

After marveling at the sharp details of carparks and tyres, I set the supercomputer to analyse the photos for trends.

There, before my eyes, were animals adapting to human behaviour, habits that I’d seen a thousand times but never paid attention to.

For years, I’ve observed the ebb and flow of birds as the days get longer and the average ambient temperature rises.

But those were birds foraging in suburban forests.

Rarely do I sit in a carpark for days on end and see birds repeat seasonal patterns.

But a camera and computer can do for me what I wouldn’t do for myself.

This afternoon, I figured out that house sparrows not only scavenge carparks for discarded food, they look for cars dripping water from air conditioner tubing.

They hop from underneath one freshly parked car to another in summer, taking tiny sips of aitchtewoh, flapping their wings, biting and scratching insect infestations in the heat.

Birds breathe through their mouths in extreme heat, just like us.

All this time, I was wondering how to water the hanging baskets and concrete planters full of tropical trees, hostas, roses and annual flowers around our front entrance and there it was staring me in the face for years — the water drainage pipe for our heat pump!

Thank you, little sparrows, for your inspiration.

Now to hook the heat pump drainage pipe to a small reservoir, use a toilet repair kit as a depth sensor that triggers a small waterfall pump to cyclically move the reservoir water from the heat pump to the flower pots.

On/off topic, with this mega-gigapixel camera, my stack of 32-to-256 MB USB flash drives are practically useless to carry photos around.

Time to turn them into mini-OS drives for the picocomputer systems running dedicated, specialised subroutines that I’ll tell you about one day when I’m really bored and want to explain how trees and vines can become memory storage and arithmetic units if you know how to take advantage of their seasonal changes.  Chlorophyll-based batteries are the best for these low-energy, solar-powered minisuperpicocomputers.  Swaying branches generate some power but not consistently enough to keep the battery/capacitor packs charged.

Will your idea rise from the drawing board?

Can a tree leaf charge your spray-on battery?

Five Minutes Until Closing Time

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The situation is this: what do you want after the crisis in Syria is less violent in chaotic parts of that geopolitical zone?  How do you want the people suffering the worst economic conditions in the Eurozone to react?  If you don’t have to pay your medical bills, who’s going to determine if you got your money’s worth?

Tuned in to Pandora radio, picked the Soundgarden station and an advert for “Meet Singles in Your Area” popped up.  Switched to the Claire Lynch station and an advert for “Viagra” popped up.  Stayed up when Alison Kraus started playing.  Very punny.

Anyway, so we’ve got supply lines to regional energy sources which we want to stay open.

We’ve got people in the Middle East who claim that civilisation originated there.

We have people in China trying to prove the same thing.

Thing is, does it matter?

What is civilisation?  Violent suppression?  Censorship?  Surveillance?

And that’s just in the UK.

When is a revolution acceptable?

Who gets to choose when to participate in an uprising?

Is every wealthy person an “alpha?”

Is every person in a position of authority — in charge of military forces, that is — an “alpha” or a “beta?”

[Cue references to “Brave New World”]

What does it mean to be an American or a world citizen?

Can you claim membership in both groups?

I’m blending in with my surroundings, the chameleon nearly invisible, a reflection of the intersecting waves of social [in]justice, letting words, images, labels and such flow through and around me.

Some call it happiness.

I call it being me/not-me.

On Canada Day, I consider a visit to the country via Alaska, wondering if I should move to the land of depleting boreal forests, oil shale field fracking and old gold rushes.

I trust our species to use as much fossil fuel as is in-the-slightest-bit feasible to extract because alternative energy sources are expensive in comparison to…well, pick your chart, select your argument and present to a skeptical public the why’s and wherefore’s of the social/economic/ecological cost of running a modern-day civilisation.

Meanwhile, I’m slapping some money down on a trip to the land of Molson, moose and moist towelettes.

Trekking over tourist traps and snow country.

Working my network of associates and colleagues.

Wondering if monsters sleep under rusted truck cabs in desert conditions near tundras.

Or was that a deserted Tundra truck under seeping monster cabs in rusty conditions?

Maybe ol’ Dusty Rhodes’ll be singing a sad song on the way to the next WWE Hall of Fame induction.

Time for another hand-drawn animated satirical cartoon disguised as what?  The last time, a horror novel.  The next time…?

Stay tuned!

Alone on this lonesome highway, the Wandering Wonderer meditates on the universe that revolves around him solely for his lifetime entertainment, the illusions enjoyable, if tragic or funny in forgotten moments of timeless navelgazing.

This is my dream, my illusion — getting our states of energy, our living, breath bodies in one form or another, out into the solar system, not just our electronic, robotic companions escaping the heliosphere — carrying on the work of our species for millennia, using stories, humour and Earth’s resources to make my [adopted] dream a reality worth living for.

Everything else is just a game in your dreams and illusions.  I’ll play your games sometimes but I promise I soon get bored.  If the alphas and betas want to fight each other to the death, go for it — don’t let me stop your madness, battling over the same ground your ancestors wasted their time killing each other to claim again for the very first time.  If those kinds of games of yours are all there is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then end mine here.

No?  I’m still alive?  Good!  Time to explore new fields where resources and repurposed technology may make my dream come true…

The water sprinkler in the woods

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Yes, the new leader of the Committee is right.  I moved part of the supercomputer out of the sub-sub-subbasement and into the cave network stretched across parts of north Alabama, north Georgia, southeastern Tennessee and western North Carolina.

Some of my colleagues are investigating the feasibility of extending the network to subnetworks our subcommittees set up in Kentucky and Virginia centuries ago.

Just because I’m retired doesn’t mean I’m retired.  Although I am tired and losing my ability to maintain an understanding of this symbol set — the communication method you call the language of [American] English — to record these thoughts in the second decade of the 21st century.

I still keep in touch with my associates, of course.  After all, I have to eat and feed my family.

This very morning, I looked over some data analysis reports and found this tidbit of the future interesting.

A young boy, while watching “Real Steel,” came up with the idea of merging NASCAR, “The Last Starfighter,” “Real Steel,” and Google autonomous vehicles to give underutilised racetrack owners a way to make money when they aren’t hosting main events.

Without the need for human drivers and protective cages, racecars have taken on new shapes, much more interesting than the “win on Sunday, drive on Monday” models that have dominated the sport since its infancy.

Much more fun to watch, what with people sitting at home getting their fifteen seconds of driving their favourite car around the track, randomly picked throughout the race so that no viewer with special gaming equipment at home purchased just for this type of sport can leave the screen because anyone at any time can be picked to take over his or her (or its!) favourite car.

No one knows when other popular racecars have been taken over by autonomous software routines.

Seems like we have been here before, doesn’t it?

Didn’t Formula 1 already patent the invention of the robot driver called Michael Schumacher, discovering that even automatons like Mike deteriorate when pushed to the limit race after race, becoming less efficient, less successful, eventually?

Which brings us to the Olympics.  The sentient being we created for the U.S. Swim Team, Michael Phelps, is still performing well.  The early prototypes such as Muhammad Ali, Nadia Comăneci, and Lance Armstrong gave us trouble in the long run, but we learn from our construction projects no matter what they look like at the end.

How do we create these superstars of sports?

Easy.  We listen to the ignorance of the crowd.  Where they almost hit genius moments, like this writer, Jenna Wortham, who thinks interfaces with computing devices will only take place via our five senses.

Long ago, we learned how to put enhanced computing devices inside every part of the body, making individual body parts smarter, faster, cheaper.  Chemical, organic, undetectable — microorganisms that release designer molecules (phrases like “human growth hormone” are out of fashion, don’t you know?); microorganisms that clean up waste products such as urine, feces and sweat before they’re released from the body; microorganisms that attach to specific cells of the body (muscle tissue, for instance) without flooding the bloodstream with the appearance of banned substances.

Waiting for the slow feedback loop between our sensory organs and computing devices is just a plain waste of time and effort.

For now, we’ll let the populace believe their antiquated interface devices like mobile phones and tablet PCs are somehow making them more productive busybodies — not much better in retrospective than a group of Neanderthals sitting around the person who discovered fire, asking, “Okay, fine!  But can it cut up the meat for us afterward?” — because we know they don’t know better, and are stuck in this time period.

We’ll let dilettante comedians convince their audiences that they’re one step away from the great breakthrough, as long as you pay for their humour-filled advice.

After all, those who can’t see the future have only this moment in which to live.

Well, yes, I’ve told you you also only have this moment in which to live, but then that’s what I wanted you to believe at the moment I wrote it.

How else am I supposed to show you that every moment matters because no moment matters?

Anyway, I’ve an experiment to check.

If you put a water sprinkler in the woods and nobody noticed, would the birds that sipped water from dripping tree leaves have an effect on your future?

If I don’t humour myself, who will?  If I can’t humour myself, who can?

If a movie like “Into The Wild” is probably a false retelling of history, why tell it?

How can I find out?  Use an upcoming holiday trip to test the theories that supercomputers create to entertain themselves.

Repeating thoughts and news of natural events as a form of long-distance-over-time communication is more tiring than I first thought when I was invited to lead the Committee.  They hinted but didn’t tell me that a leader never stops leading.

Lucky me!

Back to my cup of hot tea on a day when 105 deg F is no big deal, watching a tick crawl up my leg and nestle into a break in my skin, releasing chemicals into my bloodstream that affect my immediate future, much less my future 1000 years from now.

When the Internet Ruled The WORLD!!!

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So, it looks like this is “What’s up with the World Wide Web” week here at the studios that brought you such creative creature features as “The Papercut That Wouldn’t Heal,” “The Class That Never Ended,” “The IT Department From Hell,” “The Recession That Wouldn’t Die” and “Plastic-toc!!!!”

Just one more instance of the imperfection of this virtual world:

And if the horror hasn’t sent chills up your spine with that one, try this [WARNING! Students are advised not to view the following information before taking an online test minutes before the deadline has passed]:

We cannot control your behaviour, only nudge you in the right direction.  If you wander off, you are on your own and out of the picture.

Just ask the last actor who wandered off the set, missing the wealth and riches the rest of the crew shared from their take of the residuals.

One more wrong web page and BAM!  there are more blog companies interested in giving away their services for free.

…you get what you pay for…

Mountain Retreat

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Bill Tewlast prided himself on his do-it-all workshop.

He had inherited his grandfather’s tools when Bill was a boy and spend most hours, when kids were playing outside, apprenticing himself on the intricacies of turning any kind of metal into useful items such as kitchenware, fireplace pokers, rakes, shovels and frames for racing go-karts.

By the time Bill graduated from secondary school, he had the smell of metal in his skin and on his breath.

For graduation, Bill’s parents bought the young, strong man a small place on the edge of town, a former full service petrol station complete with the latest in industrial-scale 3D model making equipment.

For the first few years, Bill worked on restoring antique automobiles, an easy craft for someone with his skill but also very lucrative.

When he couldn’t find a part he needed, or didn’t want to pay the price being asked, he simply forged his own.

As he became more familiar with the CNC functions, he realised his limitations and hired a couple of kids to create an automated, computer-controlled mind reader that could turn Bill’s thoughts directly into workable reality.

The kids had gotten their start in the DIY home modeling business, picking up some used 3D cutters from a Maker Faire.

Bored with their desktop versions of live chess pieces, they turned to the Internet and advertised their services.

Bill brought them on-board, promising to make them millionaires before they were 15.

They informed him they were already millionaires but couldn’t touch their money so they wanted to become billionaires and have that much more money they couldn’t touch, keeping them hungry and creative.

The kids, a twin brother and sister (but not twins to each other), Trynce and Gwythreun, were familiar with the feeling that someone was feeling what you were feeling, usually when you had an odd feeling, so they often dismissed Bill’s comments about feeling someone was reading his thoughts when he was feeling odd.

They explained that after you hook up to a human-machine interface, there is no going back — the more connected you are, the more integrated you feel, and thus it was perfectly normal to feel someone, not the actual machine that reads your thoughts, was reading your thoughts.

Anthropomorphism is as old as our species, and probably older, they explained, having received their PhDs in Anthropological Molecular Studies in Pathological Psychosis from an online university in Tajikistan when they were 12.

Bill nodded and went on to his work, rarely noticing that before he thought he needed a special tool, the tool would appear next to him and then disappear when its unique use was no longer necessary.

One night, Bill fell asleep on the old leather sofa in the office area of the workshop.  Despite his best efforts, he had never created a machine that could fabricate the perfect cup of artificial coffee.  The price of real coffee had shot up so high he decided he’d quit caffeine and try adrenaline for a while.

While he slept, he dreamt.

His dreams were run-of-the-mill fantasies that mixed snippets of reality with imaginary landscapes tied to Bill’s emotional states.  He rarely remembered his dreams and concentrated on his waking thoughts, instead, as profitable as they had been.

But this night, a creature walked into his dream that he had never imagined before, followed by one after another of flying creatures, some big and some small, some harmless and some worse than his worst childhood nightmares.

They congregated around an enormous building that resembled an architect’s version of a kid’s half-cathedral, half-castle cardboard cutout in the backyard.

Some of the flying creatures flapped their hairy wings and caught updrafts, perching on the lookout points and entranceways when they landed.

The creature that walked looked like nothing Bill had ever seen.

It was like a squid but not like a squid.

Its eyes stared at him and they stared at nothing.

Its flesh pulsed in iridescent waves.

It had arms that turned into tentacles, then spikes, next hooks and variations in-between.

It had a shape but then it didn’t have a shape.

It…could…read…his…thoughts!

It was real.

In his dream, he watched as the creature read the thoughts of his about operating the CNC equipment and the conversations he had with the kids about even better ways to use the CNC equipment to create a thinking, autonomous being that they nicknamed Golem of the Gorge.  The creature intrepreted Bill’s memory of the conversation and heard “Gorging Golem.”

Bill tried to wake up but he was held in a subconscious trance.  He wanted to warn the kids.

The creature had figured out that a lot of these CNC machines, both industrial-scale versions like Bill’s and the used MakerBot Thing-O-Matic like the kids had, were connected to the Internet.

The creature was now connected to the Internet.

The creature was upset about something and had one thing on its mind — mischief.

While Bill slept, gargoyles disguised as mailboxes, jewelery, castle/cathedral guardians and temple protectors awoke from the deep sleep of eternity.

They, too, found susceptible people asleep nearby and tapped into their dreams.

They, too, connected to the Internet or slipped past human-based security systems — motion detectors, eye/finger scanners, typewritten passwords — and turned on cutting machines around the world.

Over the next 24 hours, a new army of autonomous creatures entered the lives of Homo sapiens, opening the dawn of the age of {^#!*&”>, the unpronounceable name of the creature from another planet.

{^#!*&”> did not declare itself emperour or dictate new rules.  It simply went about the business of building itself a world focused solely on getting it off this world eventually.

As people woke up from their new nightmares, they scrambled to see what their machines had made.

They found nothing out of the ordinary.

Everything was as normal as the day before.

A few people, those who kept meticulous records of their inventory, noted a shift in the quantity of raw material, but when they investigated, the total inventory was well within tolerance of counting errors.  “To err is human…” they thought to themselves, forgetting the second half of the quote in the rush to solve the mystery of why one night in their lives, their dreams seem to have a life of their own.

{^#!*&”> was satisfied.  If it had a plan, the plan was on schedule.  If the schedule had a milestone, the milestone was a launch date.  There were 13,824 days to go until launch.

After Bill woke up, he decided he had to sell a copy of this CNC interface.  With a machine like this, one could stop running to the store for a rarely-needed tool, saving time, and when one was finished with the tool, the person would throw it into the pile of raw material for the next time a new tool, part or unique gift for that special someone was needed with no time to spare.  He’d call the machine/interface device the R-Cubed, short for Reduce/Reuse/Recycle, just in time to take advantage of the latest craze in sustainable engineering products for the home, office and business.

Trynce and Gwythreun called to say that somehow their Makerbot had reproduced and replaced itself with hidden features they only dreamed possible.

Bill felt a tickle at the edge of one of his thoughts, as if…

{^#!*&”> was smiling, if you could call its skin colour changes the equivalent of a smile, sitting behind the wheel of a truck, simulating a human truck driver in case anyone bothered to pay attention to a person’s hidden under a large sombrero.

Bill wanted to get an R-Cubed into everyone’s hands.  To some, its interface would resemble a mobile phone.  To others, a game controller or TV remote control.  To many more, a computer keyboard.  An R-Cubed interface to suit every taste, reading people’s thoughts, controlling Internet-connected CNC machines and adding to the hidden army of {^#!*&”>.

People would not notice the subjects of their conversations changing as more and more of them connected to the autonomous bots loyal, if such a word will suffice to explain an unbreakable bond between created and creator, to {^#!*&”>.

{^#!*&”> drove on into the heat of the day and throughout the heat of the night — it was taking over this world more quickly than it thought possible.

But then it knew everything is possible when one has a defenseless planet like this to call one’s own.

{^#!*&”> wanted to enjoy this new pleasure of hot wind in its face and strange, rhythmic sounds pouring out of the round objects mounted in doors and other spots of this inedible motorised transportation device.

After a couple of days picking up these beings that beckoned {^#!*&”> to stop, eating them and discharging the hard-to-digest parts, it was getting hungry for something tastier.

With no need to waste energy as a hermaphrodite, laying fertilised eggs in town after town, plenty of its little babies growing up and feeding upon the local livestock, disguised as coyotes, vultures and other native scavenging beasts, {^#!*&”> decided it was time to go into hiding for a while.

Let the plan take its course, with {^#!*&”> checking in by reading thoughts when it wanted, but otherwise acting like whatever beast or flower it felt like at the moment, feeding when it needed.

Hidden in plain view, its genetic and artificial offspring reshaping the world without a single rebellious thought amongst them.

{^#!*&”> liked his creations doing his bidding.

Decisions by committee was for creatures when there were too many of them and not enough resources to share or dominate easily.

Beings like {^#!*&”> took off, disappeared, found worlds to call their own when the danger of committeeism threatened to infect their ways of life.

Even now, {^#!*&”> sensed that thoughts of the dominant species of this planet were making headway into its thoughts.

What is a “committee”?

Eat and be eaten, that is all.

{^#!*&”> drove the truck over a cliff, climbed out of the wreckage and rested in the shade of the crushed cab.

Time is irrelevant.  {^#!*&”> lay there for ten years, hibernating.

Meanwhile, its offspring fought for control of the world, “technological versus organic” the main theme.

Hybrids formed an underground revolutionary movement to eliminate both the sentient machines and the ravenous beings that claimed they were descendants of the Pure One.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, isn’t it?

We haven’t lived in that future yet, have we?

Have we?

Ringtonia set down the recent auction winnings of her uncle, who had bought this paper edition, “History of Earth, 2000-2999,” in exchange for a few scenic vistas he had inherited here on Mars from his great-great-great…well, his 10th great-grandparent, the first of the approved GMOs, genetically modified organisms specially designed for life on Mars.

“Uncle, did we win?”

“Win?”

“Yes, was the Uprising our victory or theirs?”

“Ringtonia, nobody wins a war.  However, people are always paid to write history favourable to their ways of life.”

“Was this book written for us, then?”

“That, my dear, is a question, isn’t it?  May I have the book back now?”

Her uncle had grown good at blocking Ringtonia’s thoughts a few years ago.  She had pretended, since “birth,” to be him when she read his thoughts, his not being used to genetically-related material having closer access to his well-guarded thoughts than the general population.

This time, he let slip a thought that the war went in favour of an entity no longer around.  What did that mean?

Shadows at Noon

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Of my species, of our particular combination of states of energy, I know plenty.

In fact, I am no longer “I” but the illusion is hard to shake.

I don’t have a problem blaming this one on my parents, who made me the centre of attention plus the fact I was their firstborn.

Of these thoughts, I have retread.

I have followed and I have led.

My vocabulary access system tends to find like-sounds to connect the end of sentences and lines.

And now my thoughts wander, like characters in the film “Slacker,” off to internal conversations about a word I can’t remember that’s like synonym or antonym but means “sounds exactly alike,” similar to alliterative but not the same.

The poseable wooden mannequin on my desk has its head turned, as if watching what I’m typing.

How can pieces of a tree connected by metal hinges have the ability to observe me?

This day, I meditate upon the future that looks back at us, will reveal, to our interpretations, its wonders, its glories, its shockers and its disappointments.

The future has no feelings, no personality, no hopes or dreams.  It is.

We are.

And we are not.

Shadows do not exist.

Instead, look at photons of the Sun encountering a temporary confluence of states of energy that prevent the photons reaching through or around.

When I have nothing to say, no reason to extend the circle of influence of these states of energy outward, I cease to exist and let myself blend in with the environment around me, nearly anonymous.

The way all of us are seen from the Moon.

The way all of us are seen a million years from now.

The way we are meant to be, temporary temporal illusions to the contrary.

“But couldn’t I be a fossil or mummy that is discovered in the far future one day?”  A fossil may be what some entity labels the outline of a few mineral deposits that appear to form a cohesive object of some kind but it won’t be you.

To have two thoughts such as “I exist” and “I don’t exist” are simply sets of symbols stored on a computer, itself a set of symbols which are meaningless to most of us.

A way to notch a virtual piece of wood, slap paint on a cave wall, or erect an edifice in which our sets of states of energy scramble in and out of everyday.

I am not-me.

I have no shadows.

I simply block the rays of the Sun from passing all the way through me.

Neither I nor the Sun know(s) the other exists.

My set of states of energy is attracted to bulkier sets of states of energy nearby.

We flow in and out of one another without noticing.

That’s all the past told us.

All that happens in the present.

All the future will reveal.

All a shadow at noon is doing.

the deeper I talked, the worse I got into it

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Agirita splashed her feet in the warm waters of the fountain.

When the weather lady said it was supposed to reach 50 deg C, she was surprised.

She did not a cold front was moving through the area.

She tried drinking from the fountain but, as she suspected, it was ocean water pumped in, probably at night through a suspicious pipe she saw at the bottom.  Many of the villages in the city were sneaking ocean water rather than paying for city water to keep the City Manager’s mandate on tourist attraction in full force – “water fountains will operate from dawn to dusk, no expenses spared!.”

Drinking water was too expensive to buy at the market.

With no money, she had no option there.

So she tapped the squid on its “shoulders,” no longer pretending to be dead, and pointed toward her right shoulder.

The squid, or whatever it was, rolled toward her, stood up and set itself carefully into her arms.

It had told her everything but its name.

Where it came from, what is was doing here, why it was urging her to find water fountains.

Although she felt hungry and thirsty, the squid told her it was providing her nourishment as long it was getting fed.

She didn’t ask and it didn’t need to elaborate on what it was feeding.

She was not stupid, just preoccupied.

She had a reputation to keep and if word got out that she’d been responsible for the loss of a boat crew, she’d get no more jobs at the main fishing docks in town.

Others like her had the nearest docks to themselves, their reputations better or worse.

No longer concerned about selling the squid, she walked back out of town, into the suburbs, where the squid could feed unnoticed.

“Hey, señorita!”

Agirita turned to see a schoolmate driving his family’s new truck, covered with graphics and logos of the family business.

“Manuel! Com’ sta?”

“Muy bien.  ‘How you doin?'”

“Ahh…well…okay.”

“What is that?  Is it a rocket bike?”

The squid, while passing by a newsstand, saw a picture of a jet-powered bike and changed its shape, in so doing turning from a bright, metallic red, to chrome-coloured skin.

“Sort of…I found it on the side of the road and I’m trying to get it to a friend’s house out of town.”

“Let me give you a ride.  It’s the least I can do for you helping my cousin fill the security position on his fishing boat.”

“Muchas gracias.  I believe I can walk.”

“No, no, I insist.  My mother AND father would scold me severely if I didn’t offer a ride to an old friend of the family.”

She hesitated.  She really liked Manuel.  But she could feel that the squid was getting hungry again.  Besides, if Manuel was gone, no one could connect her to the boat.

“Okay.”

“I’ll help you with the…”

“No, that’s okay.  I can handle it myself.  You stay inside.”  She thought to herself, knowing the squid was listening, “Please wait until we are out of town to eat.”

Manuel opened the small window behind the driver’s seat and talked about his family business — buying fresh fish and turning them into coated, frozen sticks to sell to the English colony in the suburbs.

“You know, they say that most of the lowlands of Great Britain and Ireland are completely flooded now.”

Agirita nodded her head.  She did not feel like talking.  She said a silent prayer for Manuel, his wife and children.  She did not believe they deserved such a tragic end to Manuel’s life.

The squid was silent on the matter.

Little did she know the squid was weighing which one to eat, the one who had gotten the squid so far on foot without complaining until recently or the new one with the motorised transportation device.  The donkey cart had been okay but the donkey was too tempting to eat when the fish were all gone.

If the “squid” could figure out how to operate the vehicle itself…

The case of the cuckoo in the couscous cause

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There are two kinds of people: those who want an explanation…

Sensory overload is not the issue — stimuli stimulate us constantly.

The issue centers on filtering.

You don’t appreciate your humble beginnings until you’ve had a perspective that tells you who, what, or where you might have been.

Normality is a numbing sensation that blocks the extremes.

For instance, the feel of the plastic keys under my fingers is normal.  I do not know what I miss, such as carving letters in the rough bark of a tree, hammering titles into hard blocks of granite, or writing my name with quill on smooth vellum.

Thus my position — the sum total of my experiences that place this set of states of energy in this spot, spinning around a planet’s core and rotating around the local star — is normal.

I do not know what it’s like to drift far from the pull of gravity.

I pop the joints in my backbone, expecting vertebrae and cartilage to respond as they always have before, relieving the pain of misalignment from working in the overgrown front yard.

Now there’s a hackathon worth sweating over!  But it can wait (as it always does).

While my wife was out of town on travel, I stepped into the woods behind our house, making sure no one in the neighbourhood was casually looking (those who were spying I left to their imaginations and binoculars), grabbed the lip of what, to the casual onlooker would be a large, extremely heavy, impossible to lift boulder, and lifted.

Counterweight hinges are a godsend, let me tell you.

Hidden in the caves that snake through the hills of north Alabama are designated passageways.

Down here, time is measured in…well, we don’t measure time, we measure stalagmites and stalactites.

Our library is composed of crystal formations and cave crickets.

Human construction overhead destroys old libraries, wiping prehistory of our planet from the slate of time and replacing it with notes from the Anthropocene.

The universe is like that, energy moving in bunches, crowding in and taking over a virtual spot held for billions of years by grouped energy states that transform or move on.

[Actually, spots — three-dimensional fixed positions — do not exist but we’ll save that subject for another adventure.]

Moving as regular as clockwork.

Normal.

A few days ago I sat in the library and observed guano.  Honestly, I’d much rather watch an iguana or an igloo but I needed to complete research I’d assigned myself when I was the Reluctant Leader of the Committee planning for his retirement.

There was a bat that ate a bug (or was it an insect?  I dunno.), a bug that once lived in a rug, all snug (of course), with a slug.  Ugh!

I wanted to know if the bug (or insect) had nibbled on the edge of a bog.  A big bog.  Smaller than a bag.  But I’m not one to beg.

So I sat and watched.

Waited until dusk.

No place to busk.

Or bask.

So I waited.

One by one and then a few dozen at once, the bats flew out of the cave, leaving their droppings for my scientific analysis.

Luckily, the bog’s bugs (or insects) have a signature chemical composition that, in the right light, not a bright light (or a Lite Brite), gives away their place in the food chain.

I was looking for the missing link (but not the Missing Link (or Richard Linklater (but maybe later Art Linklater)) that would guide me to a gas that permeates the bog sublayer accidentally stepped on by a boy carrying a buoy (not David Bowie (or a Bowie knife)).

Patience is a virtue.  She’s also a patient at the Virtuous Mother Virgin Ob-Gyn Clinic sponsored by Clinique.

So after I waited, I waded through the guano, holding up the right light until I saw the bog gas’ signature signature.

The puzzle was completed, the last piece put into place.

I had solved the riddle of the case of the cuckoo in the couscous cause.

There are two kinds of people.  Which one are you?