If vegetables had eyes…

Chocolate-covered cicadas – not bad – a delicacy I’d enjoy, say, once every thirteen to seventeen years.

Looking through my 2011 spring-summer catalog of aee (association of energy engineers (R)) energy books, I wonder – should I get the handbook of web based energy information and control systems or the guide to microturbines?

Considering the recent adverse weather conditions, how about “DISASTER & RECOVERY PLANNING: A GUIDE FOR FACILITY MANAGERS”?

Does Johnson & Johnson use Johnson Controls and did anyone there read a report by Masters & Johnson while attending the Masters?

I’m told some numerologists have used an unreliable text written and rewritten by politically-motivated power brokers to predict an end to the world as we know it on 21st May of this year.

My species…what would I do without it?

But seriously, what could I do without having to take our species into account? How much farther could I stretch the finite resources of this tiny orb to extend my dominance of the solar system and eventually an arm of the galaxy?

The Committee is still here in the background, reminding me that I may want to forget about them but they haven’t forgotten about me.

My network keeps plotting futures against which they compare the Book of the Future and the crystal ball. A few other tricks up my mojo bag of a sleeve protect the real purpose of the predictions we openly share with you.

Sunshine laws and transparency are not normal business practices. Steve Jobs is not Obama. Political entities – municipalities, states/provinces and countries – do not operate in a noncompetitive vacuum.

I don’t believe in Destiny as some forecast from the past.

Instead, adaptation to the everchanging moment brings about the best chance for successfully reaching the next moment and the next.

The collection of sensations that we call wisdom in middle age causes me to imagine patterns that permeate the chaotically intertwined fabric of our social lives.

That’s why separating the individual from the individual’s factually verifiable goals is a hard, carved in planetary systems, requirement of membership in the group that controls the group that controls the Committee’s advisors to the MORTIE network.

And why separating the species from our planet’s goal to perpetuate its forms of planetary existence by the fractal spinoff of a galaxy called life looks like a Destiny rather than a Consequence of Good Fortune.

We will spread life, as this planet knows it, onto other satellites of the Sun, feeling proud of our technical achievements and intellectual independence from what we see as the basic hand-to-mouth, eat-and-be-eaten cycle of nature, only half-aware, if that, we fulfill the imaginary destiny of nature’s (or the universe’s) larger cycle.

Trees, roads, earthquakes, farms, factories, glaciers, volcanoes – all the familiar labels we choose to compartmentalise the local states of energy of the universe as we know it, including ourselves – have led to this moment, when we realise we are, despite character flaws and perceived environmental missteps/corrections, right on a true and straight course, preserving life in our vainglourious attempt to advance and spread our species.

In the long run, because I have no children, I care not whether our species or some other travels to another star system. Only your descendants will know for sure.

The Book of the Future says much about the subject.

We can discuss it another day, when many a child with a learner’s permit drives the family vehicle to raise funds through magic of the adult breadwinner’s traveling sales closing methods.

Let’s dance!

Oyama usted

Today is Shirt-missing-a-button Day.

If removing one’s personality reveals the workings of the world, then silence is loud power.

I cannot hear the cicadas for the rain dancing on the sunroom roof.

An Oyama OY340 charges an iPod nano.

ARPA-E reportedly wants to reengineer natural photosynthesis for maximum solar conversion to chemical fuel.

Vast stretches of Russia sit empty of one species, looking mighty appealing to neighbours of that, our overpopulating species. The U.S. and former Soviet satellites fill up quickly.

The monastic life pays dividends for those relieving themselves of family obligations.

Two books:

1. “How the Scots invented the modern world: the true story of how western Europe’s poorest nation created our world & everything in it,” by Arthur Herman

2. “Frank R. Paul: father of science fiction art,” edited by Stephen D. Korshak

How did a planet of seven billion of us get in this state?

Feel free to add qualifiers, superlative or not, giving your personal meaning to the word, “state” or otherwise.

As a consumer, I clearly see my effect upon our world.

Do I produce anything worthwhile while worth whiles worthingly in the world at large?

Would Earth’s deep-cave organisms find edibility in the crevices and cracks of our Moon’s craters hidden on the dark side?

Is purposeful transportation of our planet’s biological diversity to other heavenly bodies worth the cost of anonymity?

Looking back 1,000 years from now, when nothing around will exist in its current form, I blink, and everything is no longer in its current form, having vectored off in its inertial direction once more.

When you sit and travel with your planet, solar system and galaxy, some changes are hard to perceive.

And of the ones we perceive, ones we call the history of our species?

History reimagines the past.

Living only in this moment, this body, these states of energy, lost in reductive history 1,000 years from now, pauses.

I pause to consider where others say we are going.

What are the stories you want to hear and the stories you don’t but will?

If you knew that the next story would be written for a new species, not ours, would you listen more intently to a bird’s song or a toadfish’s grunt?

Would you see the cover art of Wonder Stories Quarterly, Winter 1931, and question any originality in the movie, “2012”?

Do you see “Little Shop of Horrors” in the Wonder Stories October 1930 cover?

How many Doctor Who storylines could be guessed from similar classic scifi magazine covers?

Will your handheld computing device UI resemble retro illustrations or feature new figments of your imagination?

Do you know if your life is a manifestation of someone else’s scifi dream – poli-sci, sports-sci or home-ec-sci?

You are the one seven-billionth part of the story my network wrote about you in cave paintings millennia ago.

We draw the sketches in which you fill out the details for later verification by our computer programming test crew.

Some of you will become closet cultish peanutarians in response to the parents who insist whole school systems abolish peanuts because the parents’ precious, growing seedlings are allergic to underground nuts.

I see EPCOT Center in AMAZING STORIES, 1941, back cover painting.

What of the modern Asian, European or other modern regional cultural icons you say are inspired or are derived from the past but what we say we predicted you’d create in the distant future?

If I weren’t laughing so hard, I’d tell you what’s gonna happen next!

Time to search my Scottish roots for grubs that’ll soon write the next chapter of our supposed species’ history.

What does dripping rain sound like to a cicada?

The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers

You take a Democrat and a Republican and you keep them both out of office, and I bet you they will turn out to be good friends and make useful citizens, and devote their time to some work instead of ‘lectioneering all the time. — 11th November 1923

Once a man is President, he is just as hard to pry out of there as a Senator, or a town constable, or any political officer. — 29th May 1932

Diplomats write notes, because they wouldn’t have the nerve to tell the same thing to each other’s face. — 9th June 1928

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with nowadays. — 28th June 1931

We just have to get used to charging so much off to graft, just like you have to charge off so much for insurance, taxes, or depreciation. It’s part of our national existence that we just have become accustomed to. — 25th November 1934

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke, when it used to be vice versa. — 22nd November 1932

The Republicans want a man that will lend dignity to the office, and the Democrats want a man that will lend some money. — 11th July 1930

About the only thing you can safely say is that both parties stand for re-election! — 21st September 1928

I see by the papers this morning that each political party has some plan of relieving the unemployed.
They have been unemployed for three years, and nobody paid any attention to ’em. But now, both parties discovered that [although] they are not working, there’s nothing in the Constitution to prevent them from voting. — 6th June 1932

Thank goodness there will be no more wars. Now you tell one. — 6th January 1927

Does College pay? It does if you are a good open field runner! — Notes, 1926

No sir, they can all knock education that want, but it’s the college men that carry on, and fill the jobs, and work for the ignorant men that own the business. — “How to be Funny”

The more you know, the more you think somebody owes you a living. — 4th September 1931

I interviewed Al Capone once, but I never did write the story. There was no way I could write it and not make a hero out of him.
What’s the matter with us when our biggest gangster is our greatest national interest? — Notes

Just to be rich and nothing else is practically a disgrace nowadays. — 11th June 1929

If a bank fails in China, they behead the man at the head of it that was responsible. If one fails over here, we write the men up in the magazines, as how they started poor, worked hard, took advantage of their opportunities (and depositors), and today are rated as “up in the millions.”
If we beheaded all of ours that were responsible for failures, we wouldn’t have enough people left to bury the heads. — 6th February 1927

After reading the casualty list every Fifth of July morning, one learns that we have killed more people celebrating our independence than we lost fighting for it. — 22nd July 1923

Wouldn’t it be great if Mexico started electing by the ballot instead of by the bullet, and us electing by the ballot instead of by the bullion. — 2nd September 1928

The difference between a Bandit and a Patriot is a good Press Agent. — 30th April 1930

Japan has found out that any door is open to those that have the best product at the cheapest money. — 30th April 1932

…we found that [the Chinese] had some things to sell cheaper than the rest of the world, so that, naturally made them a problem. — 2nd April 1932

I did not die in my sleep last night

Cicadas fly up off the ground into the trees, their iridescent wings little cathedral windows seeking refuge for mating.

Their lives what we call a series of stagecraft – pupils, largesse, and adultery, or something like that.

My youth spent studying botany and biology shrouded in decades of shredded adulthood.

A black-and-blue butterfly bakes in the sunlight.

Why do people want to find meaning in fulfilling prophecies of their predecessors?

Should a child’s unprotected ears be exposed to the unmuffled sounds of a lawnmower?

What value do you place in the future of your child’s life?

Do you judge your child’s future by referencing your childhood of the past?

Cicadas play bumper cars with the sunroom windows.

Their “singing” matches the rhythmic humming of my tinnitus.

I, like my ancestors and living relatives, am going deaf.

When space and time are bent, what is up?

Cicadas never stay in one stage long enough to need hearing aids.

They don’t need e-dating websites, temporary nests we call houses/flats/huts/tents, shopping malls or sports arenas.

Some days, I think our species has outlived its usefulness.

Some days, I’m thoroughly entertained by what my species calls progress.

“They want meaning or a purpose given by my royal edict?” she asked. “Let them eat cake! Unless citizens are true royalty, their only purpose is to serve me and my whims. No matter how ridiculous they look, my hats will find a ribald buyer with too much money. When reproduction is no longer their only goal, the people will fall for any ruse that’ll make me richer!”

When silence is no longer an option, what is up? Satire, of course.

To the enlightened childless hermit, it is the Only True Way.

The rest is trickery and tomfoolery disguising your simple need to perpetuate the species, an image I dimly see while going blind in thought as well as deaf.

Today, I serve myself, the only action I truly understand in perpetuating the false image of self.

The Invisible Hermit is just one more set of states of energy, after all.

Do flying cicadas eat before they sing, mate and die?

100% Real Chocolate

While Internet protocols proliferate, they won’t last forever.  Who is developing the next set(s) of communications protocols, what are they and when will they start spreading, reaching critical mass?

No surprise here.

Learn to live longer.

We’ve all worked with a clueless coworker.

It’s never too early to start planning your late retirement.

Cardinals and Cicadas

Separating the person from the lifelong goals of the person.

The person is materially immaterial.

If a brain’s connections determine a person’s social aptitude, then how much is training worth reconfiguring/rerouting major neural pathways?

Why fight City Hall, which is full of people following/directing the will of the people?

I don’t want your money to pursue my art because I, and thus my art, do not exist.

Major atmospheric pressure differences do not meet here today.

Half-eaten cicadas feed ants on the ground. Did cardinals find them untasty?

Opportunists alight.

Smoke from an extinguished candle fills my lungs.

This is one of those days I would be okay not waking up tomorrow, my body’s accomplishments met, having jousted windmills and watched my dreams come alive.

The other goals live with or without me.

How many more days can I live in simple happiness, trying not to feel guilty about a middle-aged body being absent from serving out some sort of sense of social responsibility, despite knowing I have a brain not wired for constant in-person social contact with my species, a cat’s inconstant attention sufficient?

Je ne sais pas.

A Non-know-no-sense Day

A spider, similar to last year’s sunroom occupant, walks crablike across the ceiling.

Erin catches a catnap while the skylight points sunshine at a chair.

Gnostic is not the same as Coptic.

Caustic.

Satire spreads on headlines like warm corn syrup.

Public opinion rolls downhill like a Purple Cow onion, not dissimilar to Vidaliate.

The WRGS logo sails on mechanised carts.

Doctored photos don’t pass the Hypocritical Oath.

Haven’t seen an Eastern scorpion in the house recently.

A magic marker speck of a spider hangs five or six feet from the ceiling – what happened to the other two or three feet?

When you’re 93 and eating anything leads directly to incontinence, why eat?

How much of your labour credit or investment income do you spend on perpetuating family/sub/cultural myths?

Which sub/urban legends are vital to your beliefs?

Middle-age ennui. Tired of small talk.

Which is more important to you: your children’s education, your children’s health or optimally operational public sanitary sewers? You only get to choose one.

How do you identify yourself?

I’m out of here!

Doing nothing is more vitally important to me than talking to myself via chiclet keys today.

Pulling Up Shingles

A pool ladder leans against a wood fence.

An RV/caravan windshield/windscreen reflects morning clouds cleaning the sky.

People recall the good ol’ days of working for “the Eastman.”

Resources receive reciprocity receding respitely.

Water from the outside flowing into a house is rarely covered by basic homeowners insurance damage claims.

A flag for the STS-75 mission stands motionless on a shelf holding up photo albums and picture frames containing captured moments of friends/family existence.

VHS tapes stack juxtaposingly next to a DVD player.

A wound-down clock predicts the time twice a day.

A sewing machine table helps a vase of silk pansies defy gravity.

Decades-old recliners wait for occupants who may never reappear.

Two space heaters, unplugged, make impressions in carpet, unnecessary while the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the Sun.

Rechargeable batteries rearrange electrons with the aid of solar cells, lighting the sidewalk after dusk.

An atomic clock tells the temperature, time, day and date.

Almost a century of lifetime memories hang in the air behind a set of French doors.

Fortunes flow liquidly, large groups feeding at the deepest pools.

Roofers follow insurance adjusters who followed a volley of hail.

Bank accounts drain appropriately.

What was once a $1500 job is now $9000, asphalt and metal not getting any cheaper.

The stray alley cat on a hot tin roof wanders obliviously, as usual, neither a seat of knowledge nor a pool of riches.

Glass of Banfi Chianti

I get paid to observe and one day I’ll spend my savings.

Last night, while adults courted at Guiseppe’s Italian Dining & Cafe, Chad M told me about Maria Marinelli, a niece of the owner, Mike or Raffaele Misciagna.

Earlier in the day, an Air Force veteran and her business associate arranged some flowers at their establishment, the Petal Pusher.

Linda at Kohl’s had brushed her hair and looked 15 years younger.

At Miss Bea’s, sweet tea and pulled candy sat while the workers stood and talked with us away from washing dishes.

Melissa delivered flowers to my mother in-law’s room. Myra, Elizabeth, Debbie, Pauline and Bellamina smiled while they kept patients healthy.

Immigration legal status is a matter of perspective. Feeling invited or welcome is a matter of community generosity.

A whooping crane, whale or leatherback turtle cannot be sentenced, fined and jailed.

I played with children in my neighbourhood when I was a child allowed to go outside and play.

What of the children whose parents discouraged unsupervised neighbourhood gatherings of youth?

What are those grownup boxed-in kids doing today?

Do they discourage unlawful migration of children to more prosperous opportunities to play?

What do you hold sacred?

Do you preserve history at all costs even when you know history is a fable written about the few for the masses?

A candle on a birthday cupcake from Gigi’s given to me by my wife, the two of us celebrating quietly, she lit the candle while she listened on the mobile phone, whispering to me a line from “Happy Birthday,” and I blew out the candle, eating the little cake alone.

The hermit’s life is here and now. My fabled history is completed.

The rest is happy silence, watching my species compete/cooperate for personal space.