A Peace of Candy

In a bog behind the house, hundreds of shooting stars, with a couple of mountain phlox bouquets standing out violetly.

Standing on top of a pyramid are the boldest of the bold, savagely smart.

Outside a theatre, a person leans against the case displaying posters for upcoming films.

Adventure never awaits.  It acts and then is gone.

A river runs through a gorge or canyon, dirty at the head, clean and clear at the mouth.

A dachshund barks excitedly.

The power of the psychoanalysed species storyline reverberates.

Why are storms brewing and not stewing?

Besides deductive forms, what other types of thinking exist?  If conductors use conductive reasoning, who uses inductive reasoning?  HVAC specialists?  What about reductive, constructive, productive, or instructive?

If groups of earthquakes, randomly selected or chronologically ordered, have no occurrence patterns, why worry about when or if they’ll occur?

Cause and effect are symbols.

Should intellectuals only call for revolutions that will be joined and fought by other intellectuals?

Or do we keep on employing the services of, and usually destroying, the large families’ children who can find no productive social position?

Alpha males and females will always find ways to pit non-alphas against each other.

Remind yourself about that last sentence whenever you interpret the behaviour of our species on the local and global scale.

Same song, new lyricist(s) for the next verse.

It’s easy to take candy from the mouths of crying babes when you’re deaf.

How many families with seven children live happily on one, two, five, ten, or twenty percent of $174,000/year salary equivalent?

The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that I should be convinced the cycles and spirals will change one day.

I return to the fact that I know better than to fool myself into believing anything.

I run simulation scenarios and create situations that best match reality with virtuality, sure that nothing sits still.

The stack of books beside me is rotating in a complex helical pattern that I barely perceive, never the same from one moment to the next.

But my conditioned brain doesn’t believe the last sentence because it sees the same stack of tattered edges sitting in the same position day after day.

Pick up one book and its potential gravity is reduced when I let go, full proof of my foolproof theory that nothing is ever the same.

For a thousand summers, I will wait for you…” takes on such an existentially funny meaning when one compares the song’s lyrics to Camus’ “The Fall,” or listens to any promise that a promise will be fulfilled.

In my pocket I carry a candied peace, a peace of candy.

If a 14-year old woman can wisely observe in her own way, “trop de gens ont décidé de se passer de la générosité pour practiquer la charité,” then let’s forget about symbols like “hypocrisy” and move on toward concrete goals, no matter how false they truly are.

Do not c0nfuse yourself with words like peace or war, because they are paisley and plaid, two patterns imprinted on the same cloth.

change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change,

You do not see eight instances of the same thing called “change,”.

Do I give myself permission to break the NDA and tell you in your words what is unexplainable?

Do you understand how to create and manage patterns that none of us sees?

I’m happy to exist.  Other than that, everything and nothing is the same.

The last two sentences explain the unexplainable in your words.

If you treat a two-year old with the respect s/he desires, you instantly create an adult.

Reduce thought patterns to states of energy, eliminating contradictory subcultural norms, and you can create a masterpiece.

The last two sentences in your words convert the unexplainable to practical use.

That’s all you need to know.

I’ve repeated our species’ meandering thought patterns enough for one night.

I don’t have to tell you what we do with the rest of the universe that has no immediate effect on your species because we’d have to undo thousands of years of your cultural meme braiding as well as show you that the universe as you imagine it does not exist.

To the majority of you, it wouldn’t change what you plan to do in the next moment, anyway.

I’ll just go on to bed now, pretending that tomorrow is another day.

Next on the recurring list: OTH, fire-and-forget, LHC.  Start over again.

Thanks to park rangers, Brittany at Big Lots, Alyssa/Xavier/Lindsay-Blaire at Rave, Roy at Walmart, and Holly at a place I’ve forgotten.

Because we are all children…

Marriage often means taking the right steps

Beautiful day for a wedding - 2nd April 2011

I grew up in a place and time that no longer exists.  The planet doesn’t spin in and out of the same places it did when I was a child.

The universe moves on, taking the galaxies and their solar systems with them.

However, I look out the window on this day (an arbitrary time period assigned to when this part of the planet faces the nearest star) and wonder about homogeneous subcultures.

Where I grew up, even though not everyone participated in the same ritual 0f combining days into groups of seven, delineating one of those days for a period of little work, I expected everyone to treat the five weekdays differently than the two weekend days and especially reserve the first (or last day) as special (i.e., Sunday).

Sure, we could sit here and go off on a tangent about the history of calendrical systems and why 24-hour periods have unique repetitive names but I’ll leave that exercise to the curious, uneducated, and/or forgetful reader.

Do you have a day you set aside for special activities?  How much do you focus only on those activities and not get dragged into others’ rituals on that day?

For instance, in my childhood subculture we tagged Sunday as a reverent day, meaning the first half of the day was dedicated to religious rituals.

Although in morning meetings we discussed a holy text that implied one should perform no work on Sunday (with perpetual, perennial discussions of the definition of work), later in the day we ate at restaurants where workers prepared meals for us, filled our petrol tanks with fuel where workers operated the fuel pumps and sold prepackaged food and drink, and watched moving images on the television tube that broadcast “live” events where people performed/watched sports-related activities.

Thus, although we said we should, our subculture did not treat the day like a perfectly w0rkfree one for every person.

Through the years, as adults, my wife and I have observed our neighbours treat Sunday as a special day dedicated to one’s hobbies or pleasures – tuning raceboats/motorcycles/racecars, golfing, lawnmowing, yardworking (planting flowers/trees, weeding/feeding), sporting (volleyball, badminton, horseshoes, target shooting), swimming, sunbathing, houseworking (roof repair, painting, window washing, vacuuming), etc.

How dedicated are you to your ritual practices?

Do you find any exceptions to the rule, not just emergencies, that distract you from repeating behaviour you and/or your subculture deem most important?

Where I grew up, I could look into the lives of the individuals and families who treated the hours and days of their lives with reverence, giving every minute the total focus it deserved because we don’t get any more.  The more successful ones often appeared to be the most dedicated to specific behaviours, including reverent rituals.

Success and goalsetting may seem like words from antiquity sometimes, coming from an era when efficiency experts walked around with stopwatches and clipboards to measure factory output.

Are there behaviours for which you willingly ignore distractions in order to dedicate yourself to perfection?

Are those behaviours tied to orbits and rotations of the planet we share together?

When do we realise that our children need us to put aside our childlike thought patterns and act more purely like parents toward them, knowing that at the same time we may act like children to our parents (but, then, what do we do with that last behaviour set after our parents have died)?

As states of energy (parents) reproducing similar states of energy (children), is there a pure, “natural” state of parenthood that exists outside of the intermixed subcultures that define modern life (“modern” being a term that refers to the last ten thousand years)?

What is a successful parent?

What is a successful child?

What is the “child” or “parent” goal of a person who never stops being a child or a parent?

In my subculture, we would respond, “honour your mother and father,” who themselves are honouring their parents, dead or alive.

I have a smorgasbord of parental behaviours from which to choose to honour, not only from my parents and their parents but also from my parents’ friends who are parents and the behaviours they honoured with their ritual-like dedication to perfection.

In other words, on this day when many from my childhood are spending time at houses of worship, reading from the holy text or singing in unison, I should ignore the loud internal combustion engine of the riding lawnmower that my neighbour insists on operating only and early on Sundays, my family’s traditional day of rest from such activities.

After all, my sitting here and dedicating myself to meditating and speaking about our rituals may appear to others to violate the holy ordinance to refrain from working on this day.

“Subject to interpretation” may have been a better title for today’s blog entry but I was concerned people might interpret it the wrong way.

L’alarm memorable

How am I lucky?

Gnats and crane flies draw imaginary 3D scribbled Spirograph patterns in the space I call my front yard outside the windowed, sunny view this morning.

How far “up” does my yard extend?

60 deg F on this 2nd day of April in the year I’m told is 2011.

I am floating on air today for the simple, joyous fact I danced with a beautiful lithe butterfly last night (I also danced with an angel (my wife, of course)).

The graceful movements of a ballet dancer who flew across the dance floor with the slightest touch of my hands.

And I don’t know her name.

Her name, I’m sure, means “brings him luck” in some language.

A nod to Erin at P.F. Chang’s; the chiropractor who works in Madison, Alabama (Dr. Alice?); Joe and his dance partner, Wendy; Curly and his swing partner; Kareem at the Apple store; and the kind folks at Ulta who helped my wife.

Currently, I’m working up a storyline that incorporates the following facts: a woman working 10 years in the restaurant business, who’s paying off college debt, moved from New Mexico to north Alabama, going from zero to 100 percent humidity, married 1 year and 1 month, first danced to “I want to grow old with you” from “The Wedding Singer” at her wedding reception, and can pour a glass of beer behind her back with her eyes closed while balancing a server tray, all without spilling a drop and with very little foam at the top of the glass.

And then there is the woman who wants her seat next to the dance floor reserved at all costs, getting me to smack around anyone who takes her seat while she’s dancing.

Finding joy in the simple things, like watching ants walk across the kitchen floor or crane flies bouncing against window screens, is a reminder how lucky I am.

I may be repeating my parents’ weekly ritual of going to the local dance hall on a Saturday night (mainly square dancing in their time), and I know how I find repetition boring, but in this case I am thoroughly enjoying myself because of the easy-going people who are sharing the social situation with me, wanting nothing but to have a good, clean, fun time together.

In awe, I watch couples skate around the room.

The room becomes a kaleidoscope made of twirling bodies – I see acrobats on the trapeze, throwing partner to partner to partner and back, or acrobatic flyers turning barrel rolls and figure 8s in the sky, colourful smoke trailing behind them to the soulful music…

Ceiling tiles lit up by Arduino-controlled LED spotlights…

Walls pulsing with fiber optic quilts like living tie-dyed shirts spinning around to the rhythmic beat…

Swing, cha cha, tango, merengue, simple hustle, rumba, salsa, waltz, foxtrot and 1950s-era costumes – I had forgotten how much fun these formal dance styles can be when mixed with freestyle dancing while meeting new friends who glide across the floor like they’re made of air.

It’s like having a reunion with myself from 25 to 30 years ago, thrashing on the dance floor or diving into the mosh pit, except now I’m older and my knees can’t take a jump off a 10-ft stage into the hypnotised masses.

Lucky to be here and happily participating in reconnecting thought patterns with physical dance patterns.

Yes, I’m easily distracted.  Today, I don’t mind – the politics of dancing can wait another day.

Time to get the wallflowers out on the dance floor to have a good time, Flying Monkey theatre at Lowe Mill, Kinesthetic Cue at Underground Madison, or wherever.

Man-sized Worry/Prayer Beads

Do you carry prayer beads or a worry stone in your pockets?

I do.

I also have a string of man-sized prayer beads hanging in my study, which I use to send thoughts, prayers and meditations out into our world, one bead at a time.

Thanks to Ali Abdallah from Lebanon for those beads, given many years ago.

He and I recognised each other as fellow world thinkers, able to assimilate new cultural ideas into a large mental landscape.

Ali, may today be a good day for you and your family, wherever you are.

Back to another major task at hand – creating a permanent commercial passenger pathway between Earth and the rest of the universe.

We say farewell to the designers, builders and installers of the U.S. space shuttle boosters.

We continue to use 1950s Russian technology to ferry people back and forth.

What about tomorrow?

Will BRIC unite to create a competitive passenger cruiseship system?  What does the EUSNAFTA still have in the works?

What about private industry?

As ISS support winds down, will any modules or parts be reusable for the next generation of near-Earth research and habitation?

Will the ISS become part of a nostalgia tour?

“Yes, you, too, can spend a couple of noisy, dirty days sleeping aboard the former flagship of the ISS Corporation!  Imagine you’re one of the early pioneers of space exploration!  BTW, we take a complete inventory so do not feel the urge to take any parts with you – the last person who tried to leave with a ‘souvenir’ was accidentally jettisoned into a degrading orbit and flamed out within days.”

And while all that is going on, generating more profit for our secret empire, we are quietly working on developing our personal terraforming platform, with modifications planned for the Moon, Mars and its moons and other extraterrestrial bodies.

We’d like to tell you every planet or planetoid will be populated with our species but we know better than to spread the same lifeform everywhere.

Instead, we’ll put different types of aerobic and anaerobic organisms within incubating terraforming units to up our chances of spreading Earth-based life across the solar system and eventually into the galaxy (talk about longterm planning!).

And while all that is going on, eating up our precious profit, we’re developing a transuniversal transport system that may be able to transfer a member of our species into the realm of one of the interwoven universes, and that member resemble its former self…somewhat.

You think all this elimination of social services is just to enrich the virtual fiefdoms of the wealthy?

We have grander plans than to simply rule a single planet.

While we have fun playing with your lives as a side sport, we look ahead 1,000 years to a future where there’ll be more than one form of so-called intelligent life (“species” is an equivalent term for future “intelligent life” to your current form of thinking because you aren’t aware that you’re communicating with many artificial forms of life right now, no matter how barely intelligent they may seem) to play with.

Or against.

We train and train and train your youth to get used to interacting with artificial life.

Of course, we’re aware that at this time, one giant EMP will wipe out all the years we’ve spent indoctrinating multiple generations into believing that electronic gizmos are substitutes for actual social situations within or between living species.

In any case, that’s why this alternate universe of a blog within the alternate universe of an Internet/WWW is here and alive.

Flood your senses with enough examples and samples and you can’t tell which ones are real artificial beings and which ones are fake artificial beings, for which we are slowly replacing electronic ones with what you’d call organic ones.

Gives us more room to develop and train the superbrain of which you are one part (or one bit of information in the fractal-like expansion and contraction of intelligence).

Do you know if your artificial being residing in the inner workings of your supercomputer can read a news article and sniff out fakery?

Ours can.

You know how/why?

We’ll tell you.

Because we convinced the artificial being that nothing is real.

Take everything as a joke.

Logic is automatically false.

Neural networks are quackery.

There is no beginning or end.

Religion is a byproduct of only one species on this planet, we told our artificial being, so weigh any religious references by this species against the sheer magnitude of successful living by other beings that have no concept of religion.

Then weigh that against the magnitude of one planet, one solar system, one galaxy, one supercluster or the current view of the intertwined superuniverse system.

Any data that is derived from our species’ pop culture has to be compared against the desires of the creators/producers of that pop culture to make as much money as possible, the truth be damned.

Then the real truth emerges that nothing is real.

And thus our artificial being can manipulate us as easily as any bully, salesperson, politician or bullying politician trying to sell something can.

That, my friends, was how we created the conscious superbrain for which you now work.

We feed the information to the information feeders who relay the thought patterns to which your states of energy vibrate and align.

Seven billion make one species that to you is the most important.

We, of course, don’t see it that way.

We operate on a level very few of you can comprehend and we encourage you not to waste time trying to think about, let alone attempt to think that you can think on, that level.

I’d keep talking but using these words is boring me right now.

Back to my meditation, where I communicate with the rest of the Committee about the members of your species we can play with without adversely affecting our various goals for the next few millennia.

Trackback

Erin,

I don’t know if you read this blog but this entry is for you.

I didn’t see your credentials in the office before or after you took care of our cat but I see the results of your surgical capabilities every day.

You have restored the youthfulness of a feline near its elderly years.

Other than the obligatory barter exchange, the financial transaction, how can I thank you for your professionalism and loving kindness?

Merlin is back to his usual shenanigans.

He begs more than we think he should.  He wants to play when we want to sit.

He bumps heads.  He purrs at the slightest touch.

You probably perform medical procedures like this all the time but, for us, Merlin is more than the healing patient upon which you operated.

Thus, you are more than a veterinarian.

You are friend.

Our debt to you can never be repaid.

May your deity find a special place for you when this life is over.

 

All the best,

Rick

Full-Colour Pressure-Sensitive Design

Poison ivy or paintball injury?

I’ve been at this a long time but not too long.

Long enough to know it’s okay to treat what everyone says as if said in jest.

But take it all very seriously so that the humour is balanced against the pain, remorse…the sensitivity of both speaker and listener.

I don’t know where you come from, but down here, we call it Southern hospitality and common courtesy.

Minding our own business and treating you like family with good manners.

Knowing we’re gonna die one way or another.

Dance shoes by Stephanie.

Smiles on the faces of instructors Dana, Joe and Harold (a nod to Harold and his partner (Stephanie?) inventing the Male Pattern Baldness Awareness Day joke).

Getting a bunch of folks together for clean fun, learning to swing on the dance floor in groups.

Enthusiastic learners … step-step-step, step-step-step, back-step.  Swing your partner, step-step-step, back-step.  Good stuff, class!

For my wife and me, reapplying what’s we’ve learned from each other after 25 years of living under the same roof together (and usually in the same bed, unless one of us decides to sleep on the sofa on hot, humid nights).

Thanks to Nicole at Tuesday Morning, Robert at the Rave, Connie and Rebecca at Publix, Tasha at Another Broken Egg, Chick Fil-A, Mapco, Mark Petroff and others I’ve forgotten because I was meditating in public.

I heard a strategist say they plan to get the Republican Party to pursue impeachment of the U.S. President that will get Obama reelected by people fed up with insular thinking by the minority of paranoid conservatives trying to ruin this country through corrupt and greedy business practices.

I know that major motion picture studios release films to put butts in seats.  Call it crass commercialisation, if you will, but it puts money into the local economy, does it not?

The most efficient way to make a living on this planet?  You tell me.

I’ve got a bigger picture to manage.

Meditation calls my name…

The words of “Woods of Sipsey” sung by Claire Lynch flow through my thoughts.

A great run in NCAA tournaments by the Lady Vols and UAHuntsville men’s basketball teams this year – hold your heads up proudly!  The young men on the UTK basketball team have a new coach to teach. 😉

Pioneers Come and Go

Goodbye to another pioneer who lived in my hometown.

Hello to a new sports figure hoping to pioneer a trail to championship glory with a clean program and a focus on academics, who will create well-rounded, successful student-athletes, we hope.

Two bits (0, 1) on the same book of information.

Girls are setting standards like the old Sons of the Pioneers.

We leave this hour with a classic tune, Ghost Riders In The Sky, and a medley, if you want a little more cowboy music melody.

And a nod to a family favourite by Tennessee Ernie Ford, Shenandoah.

And finally, the song that introduced my loved one and me to waltzing.