International Women’s Day

Most days, my agenda is filled with evaluating rocket fin designs or applying “think outside the fuselage” reasoning to assess the most cost-effective means of advancing our planetary lifeforms outward into the galaxy.

I pay advisors to tell me where to put my investments to give our group the most play money for building outer space travel toys.

In a few days, I’ll spend a few minutes with half my staff to evaluate any discrepancies we have concerning gender-neutral compensation.

We have a wide variety of people involved in running the organisation smoothly, from the least socially aware to the most brash, politically incorrect loudmouths.

Hey, when you manage seven billion people, the variations are nearly endless.

But not nearly enough.

Every other year, I ask one gender and then the other to review our employee policies and practices.

Because our subcultures are sometimes incompatible, I ask the people whose beliefs are separated the most from one another to meet and talk.

During these meetings, our supercomputers are listening, increasing the resolution of their intuition algorithms substantially.

Then, a panel composed of people and supercomputers is asked to evaluate the meet-and-greet session, resulting in a summary report that is sent out to all subcultures in formats they believe represent a view from their specific subcultural perspective.

I assign one of the Committee’s subcommittee ad hoc teams to rate the effectiveness of the absorption of every report into individual subcultures.

The reports with the lowest effectiveness score are sent to a new meet-and-greet team for discussion, which is, again, overheard by our supercomputers for error detection algorithm correction and fed into intuition algorithm automatic reprogramming routines.

In this week’s yearly event called International Women’s Day, we’ll ask the female gender to pull two “opposite” subcultures together for one of the meetings — female leaders of the porn industry, such as Lux Alptraum, and female adherents of celibate life, such as members of the Focolare Movement.

Because no two people are exactly alike, we prepare the participants, asking them to listen with respect, disagree passionately, do not compromise simply to avoid conflict, and find common ground that excludes the fact we are of the same species.

We expect members of the same subculture to share discordant opinions amongst themselves, let alone with people outside the subculture.

The Committee wants progress, even if movement in one direction appears to go backwards.

After all, the larger goal of culling the species for nearly ideal representatives to colonise and breed on nonEarth premises requires both conventional and nonconventional processes.

We need people who…sorry, sets of states of energy that can adapt and survive in the harshest conditions possible for what we’ll call living beings at this moment.

After a while, offworld colonists will no longer work to complete tasks assigned from Earth.

In the changes of the colonists’ agenda from external goals to local goals as the years pass, including reactions to adverse ambient environmental changes, the Committee wants to ensure our representatives will thrive.

As the current reluctant leader, my goal is to ensure the representatives can hold individual viewpoints that will adapt and grow together, even if the people pull apart, philosophically speaking, as all current models predict is inevitable.

The Committee advocates no specific subcultural belief.

We only believe in the capacity of our species to advance life out of the solar system while we have the means and window of opportunity to do so, holding to the basic philosophy of “leave the planet in better condition than when we got it” that each successive generation is taught.

We avoid words like mission or vision because we aren’t corporate entities that have to justify our existence although most of us depend on corporate entities interacting with each other to expand our budgetary constraints.

We make mistakes.  People will and must die to accomplish some of our major goals, and many will die accidentally.

All seven billion of us will die eventually but we empathise with those who feel individual losses, anyway.

However, at a global scale, we barely sympathise, partially composed, as we’ve told you, of supercomputers that are just learning to develop intuition algorithms and getting closer to acting like us on general subcultural levels that tend to gloss over the death of individuals, except those designated to represent the best or worst of us (e.g., ruthless dictators, popular entertainers, babies who died tragically, etc.), which the supercomputers simply assign as data points that may or may not designate significant changes to the subculture and are used as triggers for recording the conditions of the subcultural data sets for later comparison.

We hope you look forward to subcultural interaction reports containing gender-based information coming to a comfortable subcultural outlet near you, if you can recognise when we send them out and what they are.

You Can Do “Crazy,” Too — Uninhabit Your Inhibitions

What stops you from being you?

Go ahead and spin thoughts around the concept of “you” as you — the imaginary person inside the body that is you, and not a set of states of energy that creates the concept of “you” in order to best perpetuate the set’s successful habit of perpetuating itself.

How many of you feel bullied by the subculture(s) in which you spend the majority of your waking hours?

Recently, local news organisations have focused on the detrimental effect of bullying on a minority of students who feel unempowered to assert their egos above the noise of activity that interferes with the alleged goal of primary/secondary education to create well-rounded, socially-productive adults.

What is bullying?

Wasn’t my complicit act with teachers to walk around bragging about being intellectually superiour to most of my fellow students a form of bullying to those who felt intimidated by intellectual snobbery?

It wasn’t just the guys and gals who had no creative outlets for their inferiority complexes and resorted to physical intimidation we could call bullies.

Or maybe that’s all it is:

Competition against our worst fears of being less than something we would be if we could be left alone to be ourselves without interference from those who are competing against their worst fears and acting out aggressively against us.

The thousands of people I met while surviving the ordeal of public education taught me at least one thing per person (other than name or body type) — their concepts of self in relation to society.

In other words, none of us are normal, unless you want to stick to the definition of normal as the least common denominator that smooths out the highs and lows of individual personalities, creating an average goo to which none of us wholly sticks.

A sticky issue, is it not?

Where is the hard line that separates bullying from people expressing their personalities by competing against their peers?

What is the difference between a slave and an indentured servant?

What is the difference between an indentured servant and a person who signs a contract to pay a significant portion of salary for 30 years on a home mortgage, plus one or more automobile loans, credit card debt, etc.? [Easy answer: bankruptcy proceedings]

Where does freedom start and when does freedom end?

We would all be labeled eccentric if we were the selves we think we are in contrast to the compromises we often make in daily life to be understood.

“Why can’t everyone just speak my language?”

“Why do I have to talk in simple ‘layman’s terms’ to be understood?”

“Why do I have to repeat myself?  It’s obvious what I just said!”

Yeah, the guy driving by in his truck, towing his fishing boat, has an image of a jig that’s different from the Irish singer and completely incomprehensible to a person without training in assigning concepts to symbols we associate with the “English language,” itself an amalgam of cultural symbol sets.

Image

Only you can prevent bullying, by not empowering the fears/insecurities of the person who wants to intimidate you through feeding on your fears/insecurities.  To paraphrase:

Starve the bully, feed your strengths.

I don’t know how many times a guy wanted to physically intimidate me because I represented the strengths of educational prowess he was denied in classrooms by teachers who rewarded intelligence, parents who hadn’t instilled good study habits, test-taking handicaps not addressed by peers/adults and the myriad ways that a person who doesn’t conform to a systematic approach to generalised education of individuals is inadvertently punished.

I learned to tell that guy if he wants to feel more powerful than me, then feel it.  No need to get into a physical brawl just to show he was still acting dumber than me by getting into trouble with school authorities.  Believe in his strengths and don’t listen to people who prey on his weaknesses to make themselves feel better.

The school age version of how to win friends and influence people.

For example, imagine being an atheist Boy Scout in a troop sponsored by a church that brags its method of social conformity is the only way, with the largest number of missionaries in the world — one may assert one’s lack of need to depend on an invisible omnipotent/omniscient being that controls one’s life and get ostracised by both the church and Boy Scout organisation, a form of bullying that is socially acceptable in many subcultures around the world; or one may focus on the important tasks at hand — tying knots, practicing first aid techniques, picking up trash on the side of the road, acquiring leadership skills, assisting during ecological disasters, and learning to recognise 100 bird species — don’t feed the bully hidden in the social construct.

Water on a duck’s back.

Sometimes, simply follow the path of least resistance in a situation when you want to get what you want, knowing you won’t convert anyone to your way of thinking, rather than reinforce a subculture’s resistance to your ideas and prevent either one of you from making progress.

Be the example of yourself to yourself first.

If others want to follow, they will.  No need to bully them into submission.

Intellectual superiourity is a myth propagated by those who miss the point we’re the best we can be in the moment, intellectual superiourity merely a comparison to moments that no longer exist.

Only you can be you, no matter how uninhibited you may appear to others.

Enough self-motivational chitchat for the day.

Time to enjoy the sunshine and later return to words/images/sounds spread across the Internet where we express our individuality in ways that are easily misunderstood by someone who has developed the habit of bad-mouthing us through years of exposure to bullying behaviour, instead of self actualisation skills.

Life!  It’s free!  You get what you pay for!

Quintana Roo

Yesterday, I got an emergency call.

Eliza B Gentle, our field biologist, had just tracked down the last breeding site of the elusive Yucatan flying tree kangaroo.

Talk about ecstatic!  Or maybe the ex-static cling jacket I was wearing that repels excess charged particles from taking residence on my person.

The last time I had seen a Yucatan flying tree was…oh, I don’t know, scribbled on a torn page dangling from the molded, faded journal of Enrique Soulever Janemail I found at a trinket shop in Marrakesh when I was a midshipman aboard the trawler, King ‘Enry The 18th Man.

How these trees’ve evaded capture, let alone discovery, amazes me even more.

Looks like a walking stick with wings.

To avoid letting these half-plant/half-animal creatures fall into the wrong hands, biologists and others unable to handle working in an office environment (say, almost every scientist in existence, and most who’re dead tired of pushing up daisies), no Latin name has been assigned to these miraculous survivors of the early days of cross-species breeding.

In these cautious, late planetary maturity times, most species stick to their own kind.  But there were the glory days — call it Paradise, Eden, Shangri-La or any place but a modern, smog-filled metropolis we call Progress — when sets of states of energy intermixed without regard to genetic incompatibility.

Eliza contacted me via through our secret subwavelength network (if you eat a submarine sandwich at a certain pace, your mandible becomes an antenna that can broadcast signals through any medium (as long as the medium hasn’t been drinking too much laudanum filled with a flagellating paramecium or two — you’d be amazed how much media like the ocean, mantle or magma can drink!)).

I pulled the folding bicycle out of my backpack, turned a few screws, which transformed the bike into a one-person capacity autonomous drone, hopped aboard, pressed the energy transformation button which converted me and my stuff into a stream of dark matter that allowed me to pass through Earth from my location in Turkmenistan straight to Eliza’s undisclosed location in Quintana Roo.

And that’s how I got here, in this form, for all intents and purposes a direct relation of the Yucatan flying tree kangaroo.

Squirrelly being!

The kangaroo mimics the behaviour of the Yucatan flying tree in order to lure its prey to get close enough to be blasted into cosmic oblivion.

The kangaroo feeds off the energy as solids become liquids, liquids become solids and lipids join the incredible Mr. Limpet in a serenade to evolutionary deadends.

The kangaroo is not completely cruel, however.

It takes the leftover energy and does its best to reconstruct its prey into a unique combination of the prey’s self and a likeness of the Yucatan flying tree kangaroo, which has a God complex second only to members of Atheists for a Romney-Putin-Ahmadinejad Triumvirate Trifecta, mixed with a little Merkel, Singh, Gillard, Cameron, and Chavez for a spicy effect.

I’m thinking about becoming a runway fashion model, what with my sticklike legs, winglike arms and insectlike skeletal head, very much opposite of the puffy-faced effect Lindsay Lohan is going for in her appearance as Saturday Night Live hostess-with-the-mostess tonight.

Carlin would be proud — the Mass Media (an ephemeral, if not effeminate collection of prune-faced producers who were constantly made fun of as kids) has reinstituted the list of banned words in order to pretend to be a decent group of control freaks.  The new list:

  • slut
  • chink
  • bitch
  • employed
  • happy
  • optimistic
  • intelligent

Eliza wants to clarify that she is in no way related to the field reporter named Elizabeth Gentle who was credited with creating the “bed intruder” meme.

Time for me to hop on out of here.

Despite my many disguises, the Committee hasn’t forgotten about me and wants me back in charge of deciding the fate of a species on an obscure planet in a tiny solar system of the Milky Way — the countdown clock says we’ve only got 13943 days left!

An Incompetent Education

In case you missed it, the Association of Comglomerates announced today that, going forward, all newhires at any organisation — corporation, sports team, quilting club, stamp collectors, etc. — must sit through a viewing of the film, “About Schmidt,” and then write an essay about why life must go on despite one’s useless Sisyphean effort to make a difference.

As an alternative, one may appear in “Death of a Salesman” or interview a person standing on a bridge about to commit suicide.

Major universities around the world are contemplating adding curriculum as the capstone course to all university degree programs.

Card-losing members of Apathetics, Anonymous, are confused about the situation — why the fuss?

Nihilists are rejoicing that they’ve won the day and will announce the proclamation of “The World is Nothing Day” during this evening’s news broadcast.

The World Trade Organisation has refused to admit defeat and will continue to closely cooperate with financial institutions to put everyone and every institution under heavy loads of debt, thereby confirming the futility of life unknowingly.

Enjoying the new Caller ID app

How many of you have downloaded the new Caller ID app?

When I was a kid, the phone rang and we answered it.

Eventually, we got an answering machine that used small audiocassette tapes, one for the message a caller would hear and one to take messages from callers.  With time, we learned to let the answering machine accept the call so we could decide whether to pick up the phone or let the caller decide to leave a message.

Years later, Caller ID became widely available, meaning we could then look at a digital display of the incoming phone number and associated name, decide on that information whether to pick up the phone or let the answering machine, now also digital, take the call.

With the latest Caller ID app, oddly enough named TMI4U2Day2, uses a database that holds all possible phone combinations and searches the Internet constantly for relevant information associated with a phone number, including name, address, public profiles on popular social media, reviews (mainly for business phone numbers), legal info and other knowledge you might want to know about an incoming call, displaying a summary on the app front page when a call comes in on your smartphone, app-enabled deskphone, digital satellite television or Internet TV appliance.

My favourite part is the add-on, which allows you to use a voice recognition system to track down the anonymous identity of telemarketers.

The last couple of days have been fun, what with political-funded pollsters calling to get my opinion about news headlines where, within seconds, I can respond to the caller with his/her name, prompting many to hang up while I spout off their personal information such as recent marriage problems nuanced in family facebook support posts and rambling blog entries.

I want a business to call where I can surprise the person talking to me that s/he is part of a class action lawsuit that will ruin the reputation of anyone that has worked for the company and/or its affiliates.

I can’t wait until the next nonprofit organisation calls to get my undesired donation to help the International Ingrown Toenail Research Centre or Television Cooking Show Addicts.

“Hello?”

“Hi, there!  This is the International Ingrow…”

“Juhgitframnithwqa, is that you?”

“Huh?  How do you know my name?”

“Did you really just tell your boyfriend that his getting your sister preggers is going to put your marriage plans on hold?”

“Where did you get that information?”

“Wait.  Don’t you want to tell me the sad story about a lonely boy who’s afraid to go out into public because of his embarrassing ingrown toenails and…”

“Stop right there!  I want to know how you know me.”

“Oh, come on.  EVERYBODY knows what happened.  In fact, the United Nations is holding a referendum on your boyfriend problem this afternoon…”

CLICK!

Check your app store today.  And hurry!  Only the first 10 million downloads will include a free nonshareable version of TMI4U2Day2.  The rest of you will have to donate one of your kidneys to get this add-on that all your friends, real and virtual, will be blabbering on about in social media outlets in this solar system, making you look so, like, yesterday.

Re-versed Psychology

A black fly taunts me, buzzing in close, just long enough for me to take a mis-aimed swipe, and then flaps its little numb-brained membraned wings up into the hard-to-reach edge of the intersection of the two trapezoidal picture frame windows of our cathedral-ceilinged living room.

Translate that sentence into the language of the colonists in the depths of the ice lakes of Space Base 45Zed9Alpha.

They haven’t seen flies there in over 20,000,000 generations, or about two years to the rest of you reading this on Earth.

My parents and their clones singing for supper -- whoohoo!

You see, we populated this solar system so far back in time with energised molecules that you’ve come to believe either you evolved from dust clouds in the formation of the solar system or some Being-related faith-based system created you.

You just don’t get it, and through consultation with the “professional” couch-talk, tablet PC scribbling, overeducated psychological psychiatrists — supposedly fellow members of your species — I’ve come to the conclusion that you never will.

Look at it this way — you’re a beehive, God is dead, the European Space Agency is just as clueless about the EU as the rest of us, Wolfgang is a name (not a gang sign (or is it?)), and if I could just see one tree leaf blow across the Martian plains, I’d go for a walk looking for another, instead of sitting in this space habitat waiting for my parents to assign me a job to do in this kid-free exploratory zone.

Send a male and female to Mars without birth control technology and I am the result!

So much for your modern science.

Now where is that nuclear fusion experiment I invented last night and was playing with this morning…?

Time to obviously send messages in open secrets under broad daylight to members of my gang to cause another prominent person getting in the way of our agenda to die of a “natural” heart attack.

If only you fools knew who we were.  Hahahahahaha….

If only I knew how to tell you…sigh…

What I wouldn’t give to hear a single severe thunderstorm warning on this planet!

Fashion Forward

Our friends in the Mob like to fund motorsports events, equating the smoke-belching monster races to gladiator events of old.

They passed on the word this afternoon that they approve the following fashion statement and will hire the designers to handsew space uniforms with child labour to show the real company mergers the Mob has planned to keep the general population buying goods at rock-bottom, low-quality prices.

Fortunate Drawers

Sitting here in a café in a small Turkmenistan town, watching caravan after caravan go by (what you Americans might call tractor-trailer rigs), smelling jet fuel and gunpowder, I figure this is part of the forward base action I was expected to report to my superiours in a conference call later this afternoon.

At first, I complained about this satellite phone, looking like a geek at a debutante party, or rather the rich geek father depositing his little princess at her coming-out party (and yes, you can take that for all it’s worth, these days).

But looking at those guys across the street cradling their smartphones covered with acronyms trying to get a good signal, I say being the sore thumb at an M.C. Hammer hardware store is a good thing, for once.

Besides, I’ve got a friend who carries her lucky knickers just for me.

And I’ve got another friend, El Presidente, who thinks about nothing but al Qaeda and schooling in Sunday afternoon football smackdowns to keep my thoughts warm at night, too.

I wasn’t always like this, sipping stale coffee, spreading badly-worded rumours from underpaid government copywriters, but then maybe I was…we just called it primary school back then.

That’s okay.  It beats sitting at home, not making any money there, either, watching the television news or surfing the Internet for useless tidbits like every other secret organisation in the “business.”

Where was I?  Oh yeah, spiking my coffee with homemade hooch.

You see, in the hinterlands of the former Soviet Union, radioactive material is as easy to get as rabies from the raccoons I used to…well, let’s not go into boring details at this juncture in the punctuated story.

But hey, when a guy gets lonely…never mind.

Anyway, I was sitting on a crate of rotten eggs, unable to distinguish the smell of my ripe, unwashed body from that of chickens that’ll never live to see the light of day reflecting off a machete swinging toward their heads, when it hit me.

The kid down the street, always pestering me to call a tobacco shoppe down the street from his cousin in London and asking if they have Princess Edward in a can, looked at this blog I was texting with my calloused thumbs (calloused, mind you, from texting — what else did you think caused the callousness?  I mean, calloused hands.).

He asked if I had a more interesting writing style, after he’d thrown the uranium/plutonium ball at my noggin.

Hey, that reminds me.  Maybe I’ve got a gold mine at my feet.  Either that, or the pyrite the panhandler pretended to think was gold and sold it only to me, his best friend in the whole wide world, if not the block in which we both live, at a bargain basement we were using to brew the hooch I give out to unsuspecting tourists before I remove their overweight wallets.

Seriously, what have I got that you don’t?

All this nuclear fissable material.  No, that’s the Coke gurgling in my stomach that’s fissable.

It’s the fissionable stuff I’m dreaming about right now.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yeah, you know it.  Re-activating Project Orion.

We’ll just declare Turkmenistan off-limits and use it to launch the Mars mission my fellow members of the Committee are dreaming with me.

We’ll rename the country ChernobylTwo or something like that.

We can put this whole “war” to contain nuclear proliferation to a rest and just keep starving the Iranian people to death while their leaders bask in the personal glory of the sacrifice of their people to show them old episodes of “Who’s The Boss?

Can you think of worse torture than that?

Rumour has it the last thing that Andrew World’s-worst-job-as-overpaid-angry-man Breitbart saw before his heart acted up was Alyssa Milano pretending to act.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids.  Don’t get your hopes up.  And further more, don’t listen to a word your clueless parents have to say.  They were terrible students in school and the only reason they’re doing well is that their bosses were even worse so the whole adult scheme is to pretend that everyone is smarter than they really are.

Of course, you kids have no clue what I’m talking about because, as we’re supposed to know, genetic research proves that our species has actually gotten worse, our purity as animals watered down with talks about backyard BBQ parties, easy-to-hack security alarm systems and other ways we deny we’re overdressed members of the fight-or-flight club.

Almost time for the conference call.

Go back to looking at your cute kitten videos and sports scores.

I’ve got a nuclear bomb powered rocketship to promote!

Sometimes it pains me to become a character…

I, Rick, the author of this blog, am back.  I had become obsessed with getting to know a new character to introduce into this blog — the Curmudgeon — and before I could say stop in the name of love or finally find out what’s in Davy Jones locker, now that the Monkeys crooner is no longer around to safeguard the treasure chest, the character took over my thoughts, “forcing” me to give him full rein for a few days in a side blog I created just to let his voice be heard.

The life of a writer like me is rarely complex but it sure is tough on the days when I want to dive into a person I’m not, or not yet, or never will be, or…

In any case, if you’re interested in what the Curmudgeon had to say, read here:

Welcome to Curmudgeons Anonymous, The Twelve Angry Steps Program

Congrats to the UT Vols men’s basketball team on a great win last night — fun to watch an overtime game in which your alma mater puts a W in the record books.  At least no one jumped into the crowd and caused a Montoya-sized NASCAR fireball to halt the game for 2 hours.

You know what I’m saying: “My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die!

Now, back to global fun and games, where Hillary has bigger cajones (surely not cojones!) than Kim Jong-un…