Ahh…memories of my youth…
Time to repost the poster that adorned my college dorm walls loke (as opposed to Lo) so many years ago…
Sigh…time flies while flies time thyme growing next to drying paint…
Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
From out of the darkness
While subcultures, from the Ruralites to the Urbanskis, from the Entitlementists to the Independents, argued about who was to blame for society’s failure to prevent random acts of violence throughout history, the Presidential Council for Taking Advantage of Political Moments announced sweeping changes for public education:
One, all children must receive mandatory anger management classes, regardless of the outward appearance of their personalities.
Two, all children who appear tortured by their peers will be taken from public school and sent to Assertiveness Centres, private institutes of learning that simulate the warmth and comfort of home schooling, nurturing the happy leaders and followers of tomorrow whose parents couldn’t afford the luxury of safety for their kids from the violent chaos of bullies, sadistic teachers and pop culture cruelty.
Three, anyone who is mousy, compliant, bullying or uncooperative will have their psyches reprogrammed.
Four, all forms of sports will be banned from school, eliminating the chance that cliques of HGH-fueled students will wander the halls looking for someone to beat up.
Five, teachers will not be allowed to display favoritism, treating the weak and the strong, the learned and the unlearned, with equal cheer and neutral disinterest.
Six, all public officials must force their children to attend public schools, clean their own homes, drive their own cars and perform all the normal duties of the average citizen in order to eliminate the political-based class structure that has torn holes in the social fabric which, in turn, has created subclasses of passive-aggressive citizens who harbor ill will against others, carrying the primary phrase within their thoughts, “you will have to rip this gun out of my dead, cold fingers.”
13,657 days to go
While parents, friends and family grieve for their loved ones in a Connecticut small town, we move forward.
Dozens have died of violence all around the world today.
We want answers but there won’t always be ready explanations for the actions of our peers, our fellow members of the same species who seem so horrifically out-of-touch with reality that we want to label them monsters and freaks.
In a population of seven billion, we cover the gamut of life’s ups and downs.
We will and we must go on.
We live our lives in honour and memory of others.
We have stories to tell from the future that offer the same promises and loss that we feel today.
We look forward to the promises fulfilled, not so much the losses.
We can use the losses as inspiration, just as we have before.
Let us turn tragedies into triumph and losses into victories.
We can melt guns into plowshares but we can also melt them into rocket fins and spacecraft skins.
We will emerge victorious.
The facts remain.
Tomorrow is only hours away.
Onward and upward, my friends — the stars await!
Names worth mentioning
Thanks to Rick, Leslie, Bruce, Rich and the staff at Straight To Ale for serving the superb Unobtainium brew this evening; Nanci at Rite-Aid; Steve and Chris at Logan’s Steakhouse; Catherine, Debra, Joe and Harold at KCDC; psychiatric supporters of the families affected by the school shooting in Connecticut; those who face death and destruction every day in the name of freedom.
A special shout-out to Alex and Drew of .45 Surprise and the megaburger by the mobile gourmets No Brakes Bistro.
Our Value to Society – Should it be Quantified?
Where, in the space between our teenage years / postsecondary education and our senior citizen years, have we paid back society for raising us, supporting us in our productive years and then caring for us in our unproductive elderly years?
In other words, should the government which provides you infrastructure and self/private property protection require you to be economically feasible in your peak years? Or else?
If a citizen isn’t viable or useful to government, then can government refuse service to the citizen unless another citizen (or citizens) step(s) forward to make up the difference?
The wonders of the universe…
Here I sit, the Geminid meteor shower lighting the sky above me (counted 21 streaks in the last 30 minutes), and I’m slowly recovering from the loss of my father.
I don’t feel the pangs of pain every few minutes and then every hour or so like I did months ago.
The waves of loss crash against the shore of my ego, my personality, less frequently.
Instead, I feel the weight of responsibility of being the eldest male in Dad’s lineage pressing down on my shoulders.
Not repressively.
Just strong enough to remind me that I no longer depend on Dad for advice — it has to come from within or elsewhere.
How much of Dad’s subculture do I keep perpetuating?
What of his beliefs that aren’t mine do I want to carry on?
Meteor and comet dust turn into plasma as they vaporise.
Dad’s life had a meteoric rise, shining brightly, and then faded into ashes and dust.
Remembering him here and now is therapeutic.
No one will remember the meteor or comet dust I saw burn up in the sky.
I may have shared a view of them together with members of my species, some aware of the physics and chemistry involved, some wishing on a falling star, perhaps others seeing omens or other talismans of change.
In subcultural pockets are people who ask why saying “Merry Christmas” or referring to a decorated conifer as a “Christmas tree” is not as popular as it once was.
Instead of asking why, ask why not? Keep referencing the labels as often as you please, disregarding the beliefs of others, regardless of their sharing your view.
I loved and feared my father for who he was, not who I wanted him to be.
His power over me began when I was conceived, the result of a chain of events over which I had no control.
Same for the meteor shower tonight — all seven billion of us can think and believe away the meteors as hard as we want and they’ll just keep getting sucked into Earth’s gravitational pull or run into Earth as each follows its own path.
Our central nervous systems are capable of quite a lot.
We can imagine great skyscrapers in our dreams that become reality within years.
We can send satellites to the edge of our solar system within decades of conception.
Yet, we cannot stop the universe from existing around us.
The illusion of power that our social bonds create in the form of civilisations are hypnotic.
Shall I just live the rest of my life with the goal of having as much fun as I can, ignoring the social costs today and into the future, within my lifetime or for generations to come?
Can I survive on the luxuries that the profits I derived from living below my means for decades has provided?
I have, can and shall sit under the night sky and count meteor streaks.
I am not caring for the sick and lonely, instead.
I am the best example to myself of myself for myself that I choose to be.
I do not sacrifice myself for others — I am not a martyr for a cause.
I do not put the lives of overabundant animals or endangered species above that of my species.
The balance of nature is an illusion — or rather, sets of states of energy tend to move from areas of high density into areas of low density with lots of wiggle room in-between.
My father died, taking the unspoken nuances of his personal beliefs with him. All I have to work with are the physical manifestations — his behaviours and personal/public records — upon which to act.
The vacuum where his personality existed is getting filled, changing with the mix of subcultures that interchange at different ratios than when Dad was alive.
Same as it was for his father and his father’s father before him.
Same as it will be for my nieces and nephews, their children and grandchildren.
They, for now, have my living mother’s shared subcultural beliefs with my father upon whom they depend on modifying their personalities for the sake of establishing their offspring’s belief sets.
We look up at the night sky and interpret the annual Geminid meteor shower in our own way.
As it always has been and always will be.
I’ve lost count — how many meteors have I seen disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere tonight?
The Unintended Consequences of Divorce
Through the years, my wife and I have observed married couples get a divorce.
The reasons for the divorce vary but there seems to be one subcategory worth noting: the dependent wife whose husband left her for someone else.
We should never generalise or else we ASSUME (and some of you know what that means).
However, when several data points create a trend, then the trend is worth noting for analysis and critique.
For example, there are some divorced women who may not have had much of a soft heart for the suffering of others while they were married but afterward…?
Let’s stir the pot and see what we get.
What is it about a man’s crotch that leads him away from the comfortable confines of a marriage to a loyal wife and into the arms of another woman?
The reader can, through experience or questioning, find the answer to that question.
We see that the result frequently ends in an unamicable divorce, leaving a bitter attitude in the thoughts of the ex-wife.
From that bitterness, many changes occur.
One of them is the “woe is me, I miss my days of depending on a husband’s salary to support myself and my lifestyle (with or without kids),” which becomes a larger idea that if divorce agreements are unfair, we can make up for it by saving all the forgotten pets, children and other lost causes.
[I did say I was stirring the pot here, didn’t I? Maybe poking a hornet’s nest would be more appropriate.]
From that viewpoint, it leads to “On whom or what can I reliably depend when my ex-husband and his/my family won’t? The government, of course!”
But that’s just one viewpoint.
Others turn to rely more on themselves and their ingenuity to break away from a dependency mindset.
Some get revenge.
Some never look back, realising what caused the mistake that led to divorce, lesson learned, and grow into better people.
Some marriages were never meant to be.
Some don’t outlive their usefulness as a safe nest to incubate and raise the little chickadees until they leave the nest.
How many of us are [co]dependents, finding a mate we lean upon for our life sustenance, forever looking for means to feed our [co]dependence after divorce?
None of us is perfect. We do what we can with what we have to be whomever we wish.
Is [co]dependency innate or learned? In either case, how do we nurture an independent mindset that takes us away from believing that the Big Brother/Mother/Father of government has all the answers?
Do we have to?
In other words, what makes us believe in the public pooling of resources and public decisionmaking about the reprioritisation of resource allocation?
Who is responsible for taking care of widows and orphans? Or mentally-deranged military veterans?
Must the alphas and the strong care about the meek and the weak?
What divides forms of profit into social good and criminal intent?
What forces a person to work for another with little longterm benefit?
How does a government explain its policy of taking a small portion of a person’s earnings to provide the worker lifetime public services when the earnings are not a livable wage over the lifespan of the worker, meaning neither the government nor the worker can survive if the majority of workers have the same level of unlivable earnings and the government has no other income and/or cannot reallocate income to cover the expense of caring for the workers?
When does a government, like a marriage, outlive its usefulness? What happens to the [co]dependents afterward?
Congratulations or condemnation?
Tools are also weapons.
Just like rockets.
I first send my congratulations to the engineering/scientific team that designed, built and launched a multistage rocket from North Korea.
It is no easy feat, despite more and more groups launching hobby rockets from their backyards.
I have launched more than one multistage rocket but putting Estes model rocket tubes back to back is not the same as launching a satellite into low-Earth orbit.
We have come a long way from fireworks displays.
We certainly don’t need another atomic bomb dropped on a large population of humans.
Scud missiles are never a good idea as a weapon against the desire for freedom from tyranny.
Dare we go into the political ramifications of a hereditary dictatorship owning multistage missiles with nuclear warheads?
Can we feel the pulse of the finger on the trigger?
Why is China happy with having North Korea as a buffer zone between it and the capitalist/democratic country of South Korea?
Why are we using sanctions as a means of keeping North Korea in the socioeconomic past?
If Syria falls, what does that mean about relationships of North Korea and Iran with the rest of the world?
When Chavez is no longer in control of Venezuela, then what?
What is a repressive regime these days?
Who in charge of the economic and military might of a subculture has the right to protect that might against the desire of others to take their turn as King of the Hill?
How much can we trust an entertainer like PSY that previous anti-American views are no longer valid now that the entertainer is making money off the American people as a mainstream pop culture figure?
What does it take to forgive and forget?
My father hated Jane Fonda to the end of his life. Should I?
The Joy of Chemistry
How many of us have heard songs regaling us about the pitfalls and easiness with which we fall in love?
Every new person I meet is the next exciting story I could be writing about their wonderful lives — the best tales are the ones about people I instantly fall in love with.
What does that mean?
It means most people have the ability to make us feel better about ourselves.
We may feel better about our appearance, our opinions, our socioeconomic status, our [a]vocations…
If I believe I am a catalyst that accelerates people’s positive belief in themselves — whatever that belief may be — then I am the catalyst who feels better about himself when I see a smile on a person who sits up straighter or tries harder at a task I’ve found completely fascinating.
Kind of like the Hot Wheels accelerator (but not this one) or better yet, a power booster on steroids (not this one, obviously, because I gave my Hot Wheels collection to a fellow fifth grader when we were 10 (and he ended up in prison when he was 20, but that’s a tale for another day), moving on to other pursuits (mainly had to do with my first “real” girlfriend at age 10 having no interest in model cars but a lot of interest in me and my brainy jokes, which brings up back to…)).
We are all inspirations for someone — may be someone we know or someone we’ve never seen before.
The joy of chemistry that we sets of states of energy rarely observe but experience in that fuzzy realm we currently keep calling the subconscious…
I’m having fun learning to dance, using my jealousy of others’ hard work to inspire me to turn this excuse-for-fun-exercise (spinning with my wife on the parquet floor is a lot more fun than jogging on an elliptical trainer or running in cold weather with the spray of water from the tyres of passing cars freezing on my legs) into a slimmer body and healthier outlook.
And now, let us return to the future, where events in 1000 years were started by activities happening in the world around us as we write and read and write.
Gratitude, Attitude
Thanks to the following:
Jenn and Joe at KCDC; Shericka at Krispy Kreme; April, Hunter and Jonathan at Publix; Devante at Walmart; is that all I can remember right now? Wow, getting old has its privileges, including excusing one’s self for poor memory recall trick practice.
treetrunkdings 