Tag Archives: happiness

meine Mutter mir geschrieben, ein Buch, nicht eine Rakete

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Lee stood at the foot of the bridge, listening to Guin’s thoughts directedcto him.

“Shadowgrass does not know what city traffic is like. He doesn’t comprehend why cars used to smash into each other.”

Lee watched a mosquito fly up through his exhaled breath into his nose.

He thought back to her. “Yes.  I wonder how many people have said, like me, how proud I am of your progress.  To watch you grow back into your old personality again has been a privilege, knowing, as I do, how we lean on and absorb the personalities of others to fill in the new empty places in our thought patterns.”

They looked up at the stars together, hand-in-hand, in childlike amazement of the universe they knew so little about.

“You danced amazingly well last night.”

He heard her smile in her voiced thoughts.

“You, too. But more than that…you were a gray-eyed angel, my friend outside of time. Our minute and thirty seconds is, was an eternity. I can remember every look on your face, every turn you made and every handhold down to the last bow.  You are the embodiment of the infinite well of happy laughter that feeds my thoughts.”

They stood in the greenhouse silently listening to the insects hatched from precious cargo brought to Mars.

The starlit sky rotated slowly.

What I love and take for granted in my community

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In the last two weeks, I have conversed with an international consortium of dance enthusiasts.

Our conversations took place in a dance studio in the town of Madison, the county of Madison, the state of Alabama, the United States of America, Earth.

Countries of origin included the Philippines, Italy, Germany, France, Russia, Mexico and the United States, of the ones specifically stated; heritage included unspecified European, African and Southeast Asian countries.

In some conversations, I was the “American” toward whom the comparison was made about ethnic/national meal preparation — I agreed that some cultures were known for watering down or making bland the spicy foods of other cultures, such that a Mexican or Italian restaurant in the U.S. was not “authentic”.

[this blog entry was interrupted so my wife and I could watch an episode of “SNAPPED” about the murder of a high school mate of mine, Jeffrey Freeman, one of the funniest guys I knew, an impersonator who was great at portraying Carnac the Magnificent, both Jeffrey and Johnny an inspiration for my humour then and now — my thought trail has been shifted as a result]

What I heard from every one of the people with whom I talked was their love for the variety of foods available from countries all over the world here in the U.S. — if there wasn’t a restaurant serving their favourite dishes, there was almost always a grocery store that carried the spices, fruits and vegetables of their home country with which they could cook their family secret recipes and share with friends/family.

Millions of people travel around the world, settling down in new places, rediscovering themselves and their subcultures.

In fact, it’s the story of the billions of us who’ve lived and wandered this planet to make a better life for ourselves.

I have learned a lot about myself in preparation for a dance showcase — rediscovering the joy of living with people of many different backgrounds just as important.

How people outside the state of Alabama see the people inside the state is a perception I don’t control.  What I see is the thriving community around the Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal responsible for moon landings and solar system exploration, with all the ancillary occupations that give the community’s residents a healthy lifestyle.

I have taken my fulfilling life in Huntsville for granted.  For that alone, I am thankful this beautiful autumn day, leaves falling on the driveway, and chipmunks, their cheeks filled with winter food, hopping across the flagstones surrounding the backyard pond.

OOBE

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Although the image of me as an 85-year old man standing on the front steps of a church after Sunday services handing chewing gum to children who adore me as a wise elder is as strong as ever, I still can’t believe I have lived into the second 50 years of my life.

Thirty-three or more years have passed since the last time I remember standing in the green room surrounded by beautiful women and handsome men changing costumes without worrying about modesty, waiting for their cue, their scene change, their chance to shine on the stage, under the spotlight, the scripts memorised, live.

So how do I explain to you, the faithful reader, that we are actually 200 years into the future?

Can time have passed so quickly that we’ve forgotten that we’ve built Moon bases and Martian colonies?

Mesmerising as the past can be, nostalgic even, we clean up the main meeting hall, the tourists returning to their guest quarters, making last-minute changes to their allotted space for clothing and souvenirs before their habitation modules will be trucked over to the launch site for their return trip to the Moon or Mars, depending on their travel agendas.

Tonight was exciting, wasn’t it?

All the performers, including some of the tourists who wanted the chance to say they danced in front of a live audience on the Martian surface, displayed their best talents.

Every one of them can recall a skipped step or miscue but the audience didn’t know and didn’t care — they were entertained and that’s all that matters to them, their last evening on the planet a memorable experience shared between scientists, tour guides and tourists alike, broadcast on the ISSA Net for all to see, reinterpret and create viral video neural implants.

Tomorrow, normality returns to the Red Planet as researchers go back to their laboratories, tourist modules are sent back to their home planet and new patterns of living are applied to the bot net monitoring and terraforming Mars.

A package lay in the corner of Lee’s room, a single acronym adorning the outside: OOBE.

Out-of-box experience or out-of-body experience?

Lee didn’t know.

It was addressed from both Guin and Bai, undated.

Lee’s years of meditation training had allowed him to exist outside of time.

He looked at the package from 100 years later.

It was the collective memories of Guin and Bai’s marriages, woven into a mass media blanket, the fibers containing electroneurochemical memory traces that intersected at perpendicular and diagonal angles, every crossing point a mixed memory that canceled out or magnified similarities, doing the same for precise differences.

Lee saw that he carried the blanket with him for decades, having shared and created some of the memories before the blanket was made.

After hundreds of years of life, time was meaningless to those with perpetually-rejuvenated circuitry, body parts replacing old ones causing joint pain memories to fade from disuse.

Perspective changed as lifetimes had no statistically-expected endings.

Lee saw the night of a dance showcase on Earth as if it had just happened a few hours ago.

He knew his dance partners wanted him to take control of the dance floor but he relished the small feeling of chaos, the hint of uncertainty that felt like having a random number generator built into every one of the changes to his set of states of energy, his partners unsure of his next move, no matter how many times they had practiced them and anticipated what he was supposed to do rather than what he wanted to do or might do just to mix things up.

He was consistent, inserting chaos in order to test theories in realtime, keeping separate the body in motion from the theoretical responses he calculated to regenerate the out-of-body experience he called life.

The OOBE — the soul, the Übermensch, the god within.

Thriving on chaos is the only way to live.

Living inside and outside the labels, letting our fear and misunderstanding of chaos melt away.

Embracing change because nothing is in our control despite the illusion of conditions at the local level.

For instance, move your finger.  Now, think about all the aspects of the universe that existed and the changes that occurred in the moment your finger moved that effected you and your finger — statistically, you had no control of the universe’s influence upon your finger, let alone in or on the finger itself.

It is good to remind ourselves of our place in the universe, even on nights with the simple pleasure of social engagement with fellow dancers, their friends and family.

A new adventure awaits our Martian colonists, bred and designed to withstand the brutal cosmic radiation that bombards our inner solar system constantly, ironically protecting us against the random radiation outside our solar system.

Let us look forward to what we’ll read about the colonists next!

Torn between two lovers, feeling like you can rely on the old man’s money

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There’s always the misconception that the Mafia is either fake or real.

So we turn to a band’s name for identification purposes:

Charles Pettigrew died of cancer on 6 April 2001, at the age of 37.

[Eddie] Chacon is currently residing in Los Angeles and fronting the electronic duo, The Polyamorous Affair, with Sissy Sainte-Marie. In 2009, The Polyamorous Affair released their album, Bolshevik Disco.

Call forth the phrase, “Dagnabbit rabbit!”

Unobtanium beer is pulling a sentence out of a dream: “I want a case of pickled anger.”

Why?  Because of a new storyline, a new personality that says, “Hey, you know what?  I don’t need nobody to speak for me.  You know why?  Cause I own my own business.  I’m what they call connected, like in ‘the mob,’ know what I’m sayin’?  I’m puttin’ on a show wit’ my girlfriend ’cause that’s just what I wanna do, show her off, tellin’ you fellas that she’s off-limits.  You wanna touch the merchandise?  It ain’t for sale.  She’s spoken for.  Yeah, she says she polyamorous but you get close to her, you burn.  You know what I’m sayin’.  I don’t need to spell it out in frank’n’beans or nothin’, do I, Lee?”

But then, the dirigible crashed into the Alps, spilling Earhart and Lindbergh onto the icy peaks.

The Mad Hatter spilled his tea.

To get out of the oxygen-thin heights, the daredevil flyers decided to put on a dance, mixing the cream components of melted white caps into the overflowing chocolate rivers flooding the Bavarian valleys, creating three new flavours that the people had wished for but never seen — dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate — not to mention Bavarian cream cheese, creamier and cheesier than ovarian, Ovaltine or oval saltines.

Yeah, it’s a crazy night for mixed-up storylines, seeing as the dance rehearsals went well, as intended, throwing the scent off the trail and the hound dogs off their common sense, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle waiting for Conan the Barbarian and Conan O’Brien to share their opinions as constructive criticism disguised as front page news stories, as, as, as, pretending that Jay Leno has any intention to call up Rich Little or Benny Hill to serve a substitute role for Jimmy Fallon who wishes Phyllis Diller was not related to Matt Dillon, Marshall Dillon, dill pickles or pickled relish.

Shaking the pepper shaker out of the Shaker’s household of a head-hold on the no holds-barred barista barristers barred windows, Windows 8.1 claimed ownership of the UI of iOS 7 which laid claims on the gold rush of iPhone sales diverting our attention in the divertimento window of opportunity in opportune opera tunes out of tune with the times listed in the back section of the New York Times hidden behind paywalls that are walled-in nonwalls with narwhals and ne’er-do-wells in wishing wells and cockle shells.

Love is a four-letter word.

Word is a four-letter love.

Letters are words of love for is is is an a.

The typewriter rhythms of grandmothers with multiple mobile phones and boyfriends saying “meow meow meow” like dorks worried they’ll be forgotten when they leave the day before their birthday — what else is of importance when conversations become fermented in the likelihood that a man’s wife is disinclined to dance the blues when she has a costume to finish for her dancing husband, the mannequin, when drunk Jenga games turn skyscrapers into pick-up sticks?

Seduction is not the answer.

The madness of one’s thoughts rules all.

When one dives into the abyss, what is money or love or love of money?

The clock watches the watcher who counts the hours before the next dance practice, wondering if spaghetti dinners are more important than uninvited guests entering the bed chamber.

But a tired perspirer whose partners don’t make him a manwhore make the whole man slimmer, if not younger.

The tick-tock-tap of the plastic keys play songs that drummers and lead singers, even two-to-three weeks’ preggers, can feel the lead beat in one’s core bouncing into the floor rather than bouncing back on one’s heels.

Type, type, type, tap, tap, tap, the music paces itself out of nothingness, into existence and back into the background noise of a universe in flux.

Time lost to hair dye and leather straps, slapped wrists and insanity at the end of madness one step away from workplace report revisions and shoe holes.

Waves in oceans turning water molecules and colloidal suspension into conflict, resolution, drama, comedy and tragedy as atomic energy is recycled, the medium medium tasting like one’s breath fresh with the cigarette taste of a lover’s lips or the scent of bath gel.

The substitute role of a trumpet player or the renewed role of a professional’s professional plays into one’s hands on the keyboard of life.

Microcosmic cosmic revelations.

Word.