Am I alive?

While I wait for my new LCD monitor with HDMI connection to arrive, thus turning my smartphone into my desktop/laptop PC at home and Internet phablet on the road, I shall write here once more.

That, and the overwhelming reader response to ending this blog, as usual.

This afternoon, I attended the funeral of a 98-year old man, met his widow, and am friends with two of his children, one who is a girlfriend of a longtime friend of mine from our college days in Knoxville.

I also saw some familiar faces from my time here in this community — 27 years or thereabouts — people like Peggy Sammon and Butch Damson.

Ninety-eight years young…

I cannot imagine living so long.

Meanwhile, a house wren hops up and down the window screen, looking for food, digging through the debris in the old, broken, rusted gutter hanging off the rotting eave.

I did not know the man who was buried today.

I felt like a fifth wheel, a stranger inserting myself into the graveside mourning of others.

So, to hide my face from the crowd, I stood behind a pocket camera snapping pics for the daughter and friends in Germany who could not be there while we who were gathered recited prayers together for the deceased.

I am of the walking dead myself, but my friends say Jesus loves me, this I [should] know…

Sorry, that last bit slipped out, a verse from a children’s song.

I did not know the man who was buried today but I was able to join his family and a group of strangers, sharing a subculture full of familiar songs, poems, prayers and rituals.

It was a window opening up the sounds and sights of my childhood.

It was a window of opportunity, listening to the stories about Rudi Schlidt from his closest friends and relatives.

Of course, I can’t hear so well so I’m not sure what anybody said, using their body language and voice inflection to tell me when I was supposed to smile, laugh, cry or do nothing but listen attentively.

Rudi was nearly twice my age when he died.

He made important contributions to the advances of rocket science.  He, like many in this town, could easily say, “As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist/engineer.”

His wife was secretary to Wernher von Braun, who may or may not be familiar to you.  Today, her face still shines with beauty at 91 years of age.

There is more and less than meets the eye, to be sure, but today I simply let the sights suffice to register my presence on this planet another day, amidst those who registered the absence of a friend, [(great)grand]father, coworker and fellow member of the community.

Am I alive?  I don’t know.  I explore the universe from atop this tiny planet of ours and wonder.  That’s all I care to know.  The rest is none of my business.  Gott behüte.

Auf wiedersehen, Herr Schlidt.  From the crowd at your graveside service today, know that you are/were loved.  Gott liebt dich.  Gott segne.

Hypersimplificationalisms

It took a warning from my email system to make me realise that I had been making my life more socially complex than I had intended when I retired from working in an office environment several years ago.

Dozens of blogs I found myself following, filling my email inbox.

Hundreds of friends and family on social networking sites I found I had accumulated, creating a constantly-flowing social “news” stream.

Thousands of websites I found I was tracking.

Billions of people I found I had written about.

It took an interview with an author on the der spiegel website to make me realise that seeking social connections is one of the aspects of being a member of our species.

Instead of simplifying my life, I have jumped right back in to social connections, albeit mostly virtual ones.

Back to simplifying my thought sets so I can return to contemplating the vast universe of which we are a tiny part that we rarely see through the cloud of socialising that normally defines us.

To the dozens of fellow blog writers and hundreds of social network friends, I thank you for your hospitality and kindness.  However, I bow gracefully and exit from your lives.

I have other pursuits, none as important as friends and family, but ones I want to look for, nonetheless.

I had used this blog as a means of safely storing my written thoughts.  However, with my smartphone I have a new means of storing my thoughts without having to put them out here for everyone to read, allowing me to explore thought patterns I have kept to myself in order to avoid offending any of my friends and family who might see themselves in this continuous satirical viewpoint through a serial book of parallel lives.

Have, have, have…there I go again, sending Morse code to the universe!

This blog has come to an end.

Buy our clothes and help support anorexia

Designers at the Milan Fashion Week runway shows begged customers to buy their clothes in an effort to support anorexia — the Anorexia Automaton Army is about to take over the world with your help:

Meanwhile, mobile phones are eating us for lunch but keeping us from being bored at the same time.  Go figure!

It’s probably the same reason our antiquated telecom system means that as more and more Americans seek citizenship abroad, we had better start to speak Chinese if we’re going to understand what the majority of Internet citizens are gossiping to each other in their costly relief of boredom.

A Virtual Nation Hidden Amongst You

For years now, with the near-ubiquity of the Internet, our virtual nation has collected the company charters and business contracts to make a legitimate alternative to land-based countries.

In addition, our advantages allow us to circumvent the usual necessities — a standing army, a bloated government, etc. — that hinder real progress.

The zombie computer in your technology-illiterate relative’s spare bedroom may well be one of our minions, processing bank transactions, serving B2B support roles and generally keeping our network of millionaires and billionaires off the books of cash-strapped governments looking to leech onto successes.

You are well aware that some of our businesses are [in]directly subsidised by the goverments to which you swear loyalty and, naturally, you expect us to share our wealth.

You are wrong.

Just because you have been suckered into giving away your hard-earned income/investments for the social good, don’t think we are like you.  We competed for those subsidies fair and square, just like all our other secret business deals you aren’t aware of.

Look at yourselves.  You talk about freedom yet you easily give up your freedoms for job security.

It’s the same thing here.

You talk about openness and honesty yet you readily buy your goods from our companies when you know we required nondisclosure agreements, secret R&D labs, and security guards to protect us from the openness and honesty you want that would put us out of business in a heartbeat.

Talk about a schizophrenic, shortsighted subculture!

Look at the companies you give your personal data for free: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like.

Every single one of those companies run their businesses out of view of the public eye, earning gazillions from the sale of your personal data, yet you know next to nothing about them.

We just took that concept to the next level.

We millionaires and billionaires have been cooking books since our ancestors discovered fire.

We’ll keep feeding you ledgers and financial spreadsheets from which we’ll pay our pittance of a tax burden to lead your eyes away from our virtual nation and its coffers.

The Chinese are some of our best customers.  In fact, they have insisted that we keep our current U.S. president on board because he and his staff are easiest to manipulate into toeing the line and pretending to serve the people although their secret stashes are larger than most.

That is why I take no salary for my work here because I know I am taken care of.

We do this for your own good.

How? You continue to show us you don’t know what’s good for you by buying the frivolous products we manufacture that are dangerous for your health.

Until the day comes when the majority of you realise your unhealthy lifestyles and do something to stop supporting us, who are employing you to desire, design, manufacture and buy the goods that are destroying you (a great feedback loop if we ever saw one), we’re going to keep profiting on your ignorance from now until time immemorial.

Our virtual nation will continue to fund the ultimate project — getting some of us and/or our biotech representatives off this planet  — because we know you, collectively, just aren’t smart and disciplined enough to stay focused on such a longterm goal.

This blog entry may seem like a reverse method for encouraging you to listen to our hypnotists but it has worked for thousands of years and will continue to do so.  Just in case, let’s reword it — repeat after me:

  • I am important.
  • There’s a unique place in society for my quirky personality.
  • My talents are not always obvious but my subculture depends on my contributions, anyway.
  • Some days it feels like unseen hands guide me — I will let my elders tell me what that means.
  • These instant food packets that contain nothing which resembles the animals or plants from whom they are supposed to have been derived are good for me.

Please ignore the last one — we have assigned that statement to our staff of advertising/marketing hypnotists to make it much more appealing to the false sense of personal tastes and preferences we ingrained in you during your formative years.

Deconstructionist

To see that I exist, that there is a set of states of energy that can be traced back to the union of two sets of states of energy, one still living…

This “I” cannot justify its existence after playing with a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, updating an Apple iPad 2 to iOS 6, adding contacts to a Samsung Galaxy SIII and asking if I, all references to “It’s A Wonderful Life” aside, have made sufficient contributions to say I deserve calling myself my father’s son, Richard Lee Hill II.

There are brief moments like these when I ask myself if my blue-eyed, red-haired, freckly-skinned genetic material goes to the grave without any attempt to reproduce myself, then why did I live at all?

Silence follows accusingly, guilt-ridden, mocking, watching others who do and do not reproduce themselves build legacies that live…

Why am I here if nothing matters?

I have accumulated and continue to accumulate toys in an attempt to fill in the gaps of my life where [grand]children should be.

The massive waste in our species’ endeavours that we dedicate to the excess time our social network has given us outside our basic childrearing tasks is phenomenal.

We have become the emperour’s clothes.

I am a prime example.

I should be dead yet I still live, the personification of self-preservation, a set of states of energy perpetuating itself as long as it can.

Devoid of meaning.

A transparent being.

Time to dull my brain with alcohol, a legal means of escape from the torture of living with myself, happy in my comfortably suburban misery with no motivation to escape from the multiculturalism that is smothering me, who is the son of a father who thought that pot-smoking hippies like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are giving our country away.

Dad, what can I do to make things right?  Legalise the recreational use of substances like marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD to raise them up to the legally-destructive level of alcohol, tobacco and prescription medication?  Show secret videos we have recorded of private speeches that Hillary/Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have given over the years that will destroy international relationships, let alone upset the balance of voters’ opinions?

Dad, I tried to support Mitt Romney, I really did.

But without a child of my own to say that I have preserved the genetic heritage of which you were so proud, having descended from one of the American Revolutionary War heroes, it’s difficult to swallow the bitter aftertaste of the two-headed monster we call the duopoly of the Republican/Democratic political machine that promotes two people I can barely distinguish from one another, Obama and Romney.

Dad, I never supported Bill Clinton.  But I never supported George W. Bush, either.

Our political system has become such a convoluted, commercialised, nondemocratic system that I’ve given up fighting it — we’re just one, big, international conglomeration of interdependent business functions now, a group of nations in name only.

The dogs of war are eating the scraps and I can’t stand the stench of income inequality that our nation has dissolved into, despite it appearing better than many political systems around the world.

I agree the “haves” should not be taxed when they have competed to earn their gains for themselves and their heirs but many of them have become too greedy, driven mad by the spectre of recession/depression hanging over them and the lifestyles to which they’ve grown accustomed.

Look at me, living in the lap of relative luxury, surrounded by piles of useless crap that demonstrates the excess our society generates for our childrearing-free moments.

Has the Great Recession taught the upcoming generation to appreciate life without gizmos just as the Great Depression and WWII taught your mother and yourself to appreciate enriching the mind through education that enhances one’s family rather than mind-numbing distractions that turn us into technological zombies?

Dad, I’m sorry I never gave you a grandchild from me, your older, sole male heir, a son you almost lost when he got dragged into the muck of pop culture for a while as he tried to define/find himself out from under the shadow of your strong personality.

There’s nothing I can do about it now.

All I can do is make sure your wife of 55 years, my mother, is taken care of the rest of her life, however she wishes to live it, until one of us dies first, as I give my wife the time she deserves with me.

It’s not enough but it’s all I have to offer in a country that had grown too druggy, multicultural and unpatriotic for you.

Otherwise, I’d prove the real balance of power by encouraging our nation to go to war with nations that are ill-prepared to handle our massive firepower, economic and popular culture power be damned, while I sit back and enjoy the show on all my useless gizmos, before those nations complete their detente arsenals and ruin the fun we closet warhawks truly enjoy.

Dad, maybe that’s the idea.  Should I use the transition of leadership in China and the discord in the U.S. as well as the turmoil in the old Ottoman Empire to start a good, old-fashioned, patriotic ass-whooping of a war?  I’ve got enough profiteers on my side around the world to make it interesting and a savvy business investment, besides.

We’ll see…

When ifs are won wheat is fun

Hmm…predictive texting…when ifs are won what is fun?  Wheat sounds better, though, doesn’t it?

If your country was facing a potential economic crisis and your leadership was in transition, wouldn’t you want to find an external enemy to conjure up for the masses to pay attention to?  I would, if I was a Chinese political or business leader or even someone doing business with China.

A cornered rat is a cornered rat, a rodent that is rarely loved, just trying to make its way in the world.

Yeah, that’s the way we can feel sometimes.

Me, I’ve figured out that I never enter a room, especially one with corners.

I find a way to challenge everyone to perform at their best, whatever they imagine their best to be, by holding up a funhouse mirror to them and let them see themselves in an alternate world of strange shapes, sizes and colours.

Artists are the same way around the world.  A musician from Trinidad, Nicki Minaj, has shown support for Mitt Romney in her song lyrics.  So, too, in a way, Randy Newman and his song, “I’m Dreaming of a White President.” And, finally, Marvel Comics shows us an alternate universe where Captain America is president of the U.S.

What these artists don’t realise is they are endorsing the very opposite of the satire they create.

It is the sole intent of the opposite sketch to get people to think outside their way of thinking, causing many to ask, “What if…”

That’s why I’ve never mentioned certain pop culture figures in my blog, because mentioning their names, even in the most obvious satire possible, endorses their place in my alternate universe as well as promotes them in the universe we share together.

That’s why we in the popular press no longer talk about certain former political candidates or political officeholders.

As for me, my goal is to make everyone richer in the lives we share together in this moment, getting some of you to promote people you’d never mention in normal conversation.

Satire is making fun of all of us, including the satirist.

Why do I not have a problem with Mormonism when I don’t actively practice a set of beliefs outside of the new slogan, “Business. Science. Competition.”?

Because I am my own god of this blog, a god whose power is Comedy, whose strength is Tragedy, who lives outside of space and time, no different than anyone else who feels strongly enough about one’s self to take charge of one’s thought patterns and align them for self-preservation in a neutral universe.

A god inside a blog does not darken the Sun that holds the solar system together in which the blog resides.  A god inside a blog is a literary device but any religion, including Mormonism, Islam, and others, is a literary device, isn’t it?

Speaking of gods inside their thoughts, it is fun watching the purveyors of mass media scramble to tell stories that support their points of view when they claim to be insensitive to the needs of viewers/watchers/listeners.

How often do we hear stories sympathetic to the aches and pains of world leaders who’ve been labeled cruel, vicious, dictatorial and destructive?  Very rarely.  We’d rather hear about sufferers of terrible treatments.

What about those who like to be dominated as along as they’re provided a narrow pathway on which they walk in fear, their plates and bellies full?  Rarer still.  We’d rather promote people who don’t want to live in fear.

Am I wrong to want people to have true freedom, including the freedom not to hear about lifestyles they deny are real because they take the phrase, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” to mean staying away from those who don’t pursue the same things, no matter how repressive they want for themselves or don’t want for others?

Should cable/satellite/Internet TV companies offer packages geared toward specific lifestyles, rather than a smorgasbord that appeals to some, offends others and is of little interest to the rest?  Do people have to even see the names of channels they want blocked or haven’t paid for when they flip open the online guide?

This is all old territory I’m covering, where we get to peek into the lives of those holed up in private communities (e.g., simply escape to their one-room flats; personal privacy is not just for gated communities), preventing their families from seeing practitioners of lifestyles they do not condone.

The United States of America and similar countries are not just physical states, they are states of thought sets, too, a magical place where we can be whomever we wish to be, imagining a populace with leaders sympathetic to our joys, sorrows, plights and accomplishments, or fighting against them, the populace and/or leaders, in perennial cycles.

Today, I overcame my aversion to entering a house of worship for political purposes in order to cast a ballot against a state initiative to once again play funny money game with tax revenues.  Knowing the conservative nature of the state of Alabama, I’m assuming the initiative will pass but I’ve been wrong before.

Well, the political satire related blog entries come to a close with this one.  I joined major artists in giving the Romney/Paul ticket a backhanded compliment and will let the ball roll on its own from now until the election is over.  It was fun.  Time to look at places farther along the spacetime continuum, talk about how we’ll get there and what it looks like from an anthropomorphic futurist’s point of view.

= = =

Thanks to George, Joyce and Minnie at the voting booth today; Margaret and coworkers at the Marketplace Cafe (hope the wedding goes well on Friday!); Steak-Out; Google Play.

If…

If, in this parallel universe of a blog, we are to start a world war on “global culture homogeneity disguised as a global economy for the benefit of all” beginning at the grassroots level, what is the post capitalist/communist consumption/production model going to morph into?

Are we simply preparing the species for a war to clear excess on our usual endless cycle of economic booms/busts? Can we, instead, look ahead past or even possibly skip war altogether?

Creating an alternate reality/realty to test theories is not only the province of fiction writers but also policy makers, bookmakers, farmers, hunters and quilters.

While we prime the pump for a test of the vitality of angry mob mania on the edge of economic collapse in this space, let us examine the world in a few months/years/decades.

The momentum of high tech development may slow but the relative elitism of the high tech mavens creates its own weather system which sucks in and destroys during the act of recreating its image as states of energy are wont to do in what we call a narcissistic house of mirrors continuum.

Disregard the labels we use like capitalism or communism or any similar officially-sanctioned state function.

Let us look beyond the labels and look at the condition/effect of technology for technology’s sake.

Better yet, let us continue to use the paradigm of sets of states of energy without regard to hierarchy other than the tendency of energy states bonding at multiple macro levels.

How will states of energy change their bonding structures when encountering a counter wave of resistance to commercialized rapid waves of change labeled progress that occur repeatedly in the area of study we call history that fictionalises how we got to this point where we share a moment together understanding the same sets of symbols for which our sets of states of energy were aligned in reaction to previous rapid waves of change we currently see as a normalized part of us?

Who benefits and who does not?

Who is prepared for a global reset?

Many enjoy the freedom of multiculturalism and many do not.

How will this blog introduce the vision of a “passive” solar system with us seeing ourselves as central intelligent units to one that turned itself into an active, living system independent of our species, viewing us as merely one small beneficial part of a growing whole expanding into the galaxy?

We like the distractions that make us seem more important than the planet on which we’ve thrived; however, view us over the course of history of the next 1000 years and today’s debates about global economy changes logged in everyday news fade quickly, just another link in the chain of events of a galaxy creating “consciousness” on the edge of one of its “arms,” much like our Olympian/ordinary cyborgs today have machine intelligence in their prosthetic appendages that are fast becoming more rapid processors than equivalent parts of our congenital nervous system driven bodies.

More ifs as they develop…

The liberal arts of chemistry (i.e., a set of states of energy tries to talk)

Next best comment attributed to a salon.com news article responder:

I agree with many of your arguments as written, but to be fair, I think it is more complex than that. Other contributing factors include the following:

– The “two cultures” of the arts vs. (not and) the sciences is a major issue. For various reasons, our society takes sciences more seriously than the arts. (Just look at the reward sizes of typical NSF vs NEA grants, or salaries and employment rates of graduates of science vs. arts programs, or who we give H1 visas to and for what.) The wedge between the arts and sciences–which is epistemological and political and waged from both sides–makes them “separate but equal” in the historical sense of that phrase (i.e., not at all equal!).

– While the sciences make an obvious case for their own state support (technological innovation, etc.), the humanities have not been as successful since the 1960s. It used to be that people believed that teaching Great Books made us model citizens. But the humanities were among the first to deconstruct that argument as ideological. And they were right: there is a problem with only reading dead white men. But if we don’t teach dead white men, then what can we teach that the public will agree should be taught? Multiculturalism and grand theory have been two answers proffered since the 60s, but (I’m stating a fact, not advocating for it) these have not achieved consensus in the way that dead white men had in the past.

I also think that the humanities themselves have their more recent origins (since the 19th century) in upper class culture. If only well to do men could go to college, then all that Latin and TS Eliot and critical thinking was another way they could demonstrate their fitness for their white collar professional jobs over everyone else. But with college becoming more accessible since the 1950s, the class alignment has changed, and people have become more specialized in order to be competitive. It’s not enough to be smart any more, you also need to know C++. (Of course, now knowing C++ seems to excuse one from being smart, which is a problem.)

Of course a concerted cross-generational conservative political attack on critical thinking and the humanities hasn’t helped. But neither has the hard turn to postmodern theories that to the public just sound crazy (like Baudrillard–and I am not saying he was crazy, well maybe a little bit, but very few outside of comp lit departments really understood what he was trying to do) so it just seemed like a waste of public resources–not saying I agree!

Anyway, my point is that we humanists need to make our own case for public support of what we can offer–and this is a slow and long-term commitment. Critical thinking is a very good argument and I agree with it. I think we can strengthen that argument with a more compelling rapprochement with scientists and technologists than humanists and scientists/technologists have collectively done so far (it’s a two-way street).

The best comment attached to the same news article:

I’m dismayed to see that you are equating the liberal arts with the humanities. The liberal arts include the social sciences and the natural sciences. Chemistry is a liberal art. Music is a liberal art. Psychology is a liberal art. So while I agree with your analysis, this article is itself a symptom of the decline of the liberal arts amongst those who think they’re defending them. Which is the saddest part of this all.

Repeat after me:

The Emperor Ming: Klytus, I’m bored. What plaything can you offer me today?

Klytus: An obscure body in the S-K System, your majesty. The inhabitants refer to it as the planet Earth.