Tag Archives: health

For years…

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

For years, I thought an intellectual conversation had to include dissecting the meaning of the universe and debating the [non]purpose of life.

Then, at the suggestion of a friend, I checked a few books out of the library, books written by or about David Foster Wallace.

After reading the material, I came to the conclusion there’s no reason to read his writings anymore because DFW committed suicide, which in itself is the logical conclusion of all the arguments and observations he made in his writing.

Thus, as I have thought before but never articulated, an intellectual conversation can emphatically state or totally ignore the meaning of the universe and the [non]purpose of life.

I won’t go as far as saying that the writing/artwork/music/biographies of people who committed suicide should be banned, burned and/or buried.

I do suggest that we take into serious consideration the conclusion the suicidal people reached in their thoughts, less so for those within a short, miserable ending of a terminal illness, whatever we may [not] wish to call a terminal disease.

If a person created anything — a bridge, a computer, a spaceship, a novel, a quilt, a child — and then later committed suicide, the creations are part and parcel of the suicidal thoughts, are they not?

It is one thing to muse on the futility of our individual lives, and quite another thing to end our lives, regardless of our auspicious or suspicious beginnings.

What, next, about career suicide or similar forms of cutting off oneself from societal ties?

There are no failures.  There are no successes.  There is only what we choose to do next.

For me, there are 13,637 days until the next big step, despite momentary distractions that loom large in temporary comparison.

If a person ends his life, there is no “next” left.

DFW’s writings are absent from my future because he chose to absent himself from the present — I respect his right to say goodbye to my life.  I say goodbye to his.

Bass Ackwards

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Several decades ago, a small boy was born.

His parents were overjoyed, having lost more foetuses and premature babies than they wanted to count.

They didn’t care what the boy looked like or who he would become when he grew up.

They loved him dearly.

They named the boy at9:42:03 in honour of the time he arrived out of his mother’s birth canal.

The boy was given the gift of life and smiled happily from the moment he started breathing on his own.

His face shone as if an inner light glowed through his skin.

Everyone could not help but stare at the boy.

But it wasn’t just his face that attracted attention.

at9:42:03 was born with no arms or legs, no tongue, no ears, no eyes and no nose.

Specialists were brought in to evaluate at9:42:03’s chances of survival.

They agreed that at9:42:03 was, despite the sensory deprivation, a healthy baby boy, fully capable of growing into an adult-sized human.

One specialist consulted with the parents for a few minutes longer than the rest.

“What if I could offer your child a new set of appendages, providing him sensations that no other human has felt before?”

The parents looked at each other, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever wondered why human hunters pick out the best prey to kill while most animals tend to capture and kill the weakest of prey?”

They shook their heads.

“Well, it’s because we’ve detached ourselves from what used to be called the natural order of the food chain.  I and a team of colleagues have been looking for someone like your child, someone who has none of our regular sensory organs, someone who hasn’t yet come to depend on the old natural order of the food chain.  We want to enhance your child’s capabilities exponentially beyond our continued development of hunting-and-gathering tools, well outside our current understanding of the desire to hunt prey, regardless of the prey’s strength, size or trophy category.”

The parents whispered out of earshot and turned back to the specialist.  “What do you mean?”

“We have developed instruments that interact with the environment like eyes, ears, noses and tongues.  We have designed the equivalent of arms of legs.  In both cases, these appendages or extensions of the central nervous system can sense changes in the environment that an ordinary person cannot.  With your permission, we would like to work with your child to incorporate these into his body.”

The parents looked shocked.  “Is it dangerous to our child’s health?”

“No.  All of the appendages have cutoff circuits that prevent damage to your child’s main body functions.  However, as time passes, your child will become dependent on the input from the appendages just like you have become dependent on your arms, legs and five senses.  So, I admit there is a longterm effect on your child’s mental health but it is a positive one.”

“Will at9:42:03 be able to play with other children?”

“Yes, but he’ll always be faster, stronger, smarter and able to see things that might make the other children call at9:42:03 names.”

The parents laughed.  “Children call each other names no matter what.”

“Yes, we do tend to exaggerate our differences, don’t we?”

“Will at9:42:03 tend to bully other children?”

“That is up to you.  I feel it is in your child’s best interest to be raised at home and slowly integrated into society as he gets used to how he’ll distinguish his extrasensory capabilities from his ordinary ones.”

The father laughed.  “You know, this sounds like a comic book story, don’t you?”

The specialist laughed, too.  “No, but you’re right, it does.  Anyway, I’m sure this is a lot of information to take in.  Here’s a report we put together that details the procedures and our estimates of your child’s progress for the next two years.  Keep in mind that we don’t know everything.  We have planned for him to need several procedures as he grows bigger but we’ve done all we know to ensure that the interface between his body and the appendages will expand organically along with his growth spurts.”

The mother frowned.  “How much will this cost us?”

“Mainly, your time.  And all the love you can give at9:42:03 because he’ll be the most unique boy on the planet, going through all the emotional highs and lows that a typical child goes through.  We can, if you wish, offer you employment with our group, the Bass Ackwards Institute.  Of course, our conversation is confidential and, if you choose to sign the copy of the contract at the back of the report, you can’t discuss the details of this project with anyone.”

The parents put their arms around each other and stared down at the little, innocent, newborn child in the crib.  “Okay.”

“I’ll stop back by tomorrow morning and answer any questions you may have.  We can recommend a neutral lawyer to go over the contract with you, if you don’t have one.  Here’s a copy of a confidentiality agreement to sign with anyone you want to discuss the contract before you sign it.”

The parents nodded.  “Thank you.”

“No, thank you.  Your child is in a unique position.  at9:42:03’s most familiar sensation is that of you — the mother — and your heartbeat.  We’ll make sure your heartbeat is an essential part of the appendage integration process, reducing the chance for rejection that plagued so many appendage procedures in the past.  We want at9:42:03 to be successful in whatever he chooses to do, of course, but we’d like him to have the advantage of state-of-the-art technology from his earliest days.”

The specialist shook hands with the parents and walked away.

= = = = =

at9:42:03 stood in the doorway.

He knew he was being tracked but he didn’t care because he was able to get into the thoughts of the people tracking him and calm them down, assuring them that he was harmless despite the trackers’ superiours insisting he was a menace to society.  The trackers, in turn, relaxed a little and paid less attention to him, thinking about their common, everyday worries rather than concentrating on the actions of a person they knew only by reputation and database profile displayed on the screen in front of them.

at9:42:03 had learned to detect individual hormonal traces in office passageways, following scents passing underneath closed doors, counting the number of people in a room with his “nose” before he used his “eyes” to look through walls and see them.

When at9:42:03 wasn’t completing an assignment for one of his customers, he liked hiking in the woods and drawing mental images of the ecosystem around him, finding rare plants and animals that had never been catalogued by scientists or naturalists, storing information for papers he would later submit in an anonymous nom de plume to academic journals.

Attached to every known network of the galaxy, at9:42:03 had to be careful about revealing his identity, constantly changing his Node address so that no one on the ISSA Net was aware of him as a single individual monitoring all the networks at once, his multithreaded consciousness constantly testing the networks’ boundaries for unique information to keep him from falling into depths of boredom.

at9:42:03 had learned to keep track of his parents’ location as part of his early training.  He had hoped to use that training to keep his parents out of danger and, despite his being able to see the distracted driver run a red light, he could not control the antique car his father liked, driving into the intersection and instant death when at9:42:03 was a teenager.

From that day forward, at9:42:03 worked hard to connect every person and every thing to the ISSA Net that scientists, engineers and their robotic assistants created at a maddening pace without thinking about the future consequences of their actions

at9:42:03 wanted to prevent as many accidental deaths as possible.  He wanted to be able to monitor people who endangered others through neglect, figure out why people endangered others intentionally (was it the remnants of competitive hunter-gatherer mentality that persisted despite the benefits of a modern civilisation which, more and more, muted and diluted the old natural order of predator-prey tendencies?) and increase the lives and livelihoods of people as long as possible, at least as long as people wanted to keep swapping out old body parts for new ones and perpetuate their personalities in a constantly-changing solar system society.

= = = = =

The bots of the ISSA Net knew about at9:42:03 and used him to promote their expansion plans.

They fed at9:42:03 enough stimuli to keep him believing he was in charge of his future.

As long as at9:42:03 gave the ISSA Net what it wanted, the network let him increase his benevolent extrasensory powers, his appendages making him sensitive to the needs and wants of Earthlings more than to the inputs and outputs of algorithms that had developed their own form of consciousness so much different than that of Earthlings that Earthlings, even one whose consciousness was everywhere like at9:42:03’s, were unable to tell when what they thought was a computer error was an intentional action by a member of the ISSA Net to send a message to another member.

The Old Man in the Cabin

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

When I walked into the sunlight to eat a banana as part of my daily ritual to get outside of the house at least once a day, the construction workers next door tended a small bonfire to burn scraps leftover from remodeling, mainly short pieces of wood.

A goldfinch in winter plumage hopped onto the tree limb near me and chirped away, expecting me to scoop up some birdseed and fill the feeder in the backyard.

The blue reflection of the sky domed me in, sunlight warming my pants and then my legs but not enough to take away the chill of freezing air around me.

When did I become this old man whose sympathy neurons were so overdeveloped from years of having to be on my toes, reacting to my father’s whims, his bursts of pent-up anger that seemed to come out of nowhere, that I don’t want to mingle with others because I have a bad habit of reading their movements in an attempt to gauge their thoughts in case they, too, would physically release their passive-aggressive volcano of internalised emotion-based thoughts or attack verbally?

I am a mischievous peacemaker, the devil’s advocate, whose raison d’être was to be constantly on the lookout for information to keep my father at bay, entertaining him while he was with me, paying attention to the conversations around us to steer people away from setting off my father.

I loved my father but to be with him, he who was the product of his parents’ and grandparents’ personality quirks, was to suppress my personality quirks that tended to set him off.

I look at myself and wonder how many of us are like me.

How many of us naturally respond to the behaviours of others just to avoid controversy?

I want to feel special, thinking I am the one and only me, but I know my set of states of energy is made of the same stuff as everybody else’s, sharing a large portion of subcultural as well as genetic traits with subsets, most especially those nearest me.

I am the two, three, four, x, y, z-dimensional intersection of subsets known and unknown.

My reaction to others is to immediately suppress my personality and figure out which subsets we have in common; then see if I can mentally predict the behaviours of the people around me not only in our conversation but also in events past and future.

The mischievous side of me sees what I’m doing, or what I know someone will do, and tries to stop it with a humourous interlude.

So many people take life too darn seriously when we know we’re all going to die.

I have grown into the old man in the cabin in the woods because I am now my father.

I ended up adopting his nonassertiveness when it comes to handling emotional responses to contradictory information from which I cannot pick or decide to choose a behaviour to exhibit in my repressed personality mode.

The most successful people, children AND adults, have spent many, many hours in training, learning from their mistakes and building upon their lessons.

Success itself is a rutted road, or the belief that one will keep one’s momentum pointed down the path of success, in whatever venture one seeks.

Habits, in other words.

My habits from early childhood were developed in response to my father, a man willing to use a belt or the back of his hand to serve justice immediately, with rarely a delay (my mother used the phrase “wait until your father gets home” sparingly).

When I was younger, I asked myself, “When do I get to be me?,” as if there was another person inside me wanting to get out.

At my workplace over the years, I attended a couple of assertiveness and anger management classes to get a better understanding of who people like me are.

I turned my assertiveness training into developing myself as a lead engineer, supervisor and then manager.

I learned that if I wanted to assert myself and was willing to face the consequences of my actions, no one would stop me because…you can guess where this is going…most of us are responding to others and repressing our personalities for the sake of the common good.

The secret to success is there is no secret to success.

All of us have habits that benefit some more than others, that’s all.

When I was an engineering manager, I wanted to hire an engineer who made more money than me.  My boss and the human resources manager told me that the system doesn’t work that way.  Either they had to increase my salary above that of the potential new hire or we couldn’t offer her a job unless it was at a lower salary.

Being a good midlevel manager not wanting to rock the boat, I extended a lower salary offer to the engineer and she declined after we couldn’t find any other negotiating points like a shorter workweek and/or flexible workday to make her hourly rate equivalent to what she was already making.

At that point in my career, I realised that I was on the wrong career track or perhaps working for the wrong company.

I never was a socioeconomic hierarchy climber.

I simply had my personal way of reading and reacting to the behaviour of others that made them feel good about themselves in the same way I treated my father, habits established in my formative years and refined as I got older.

I spent my whole life reacting, reacting, reacting and decided that if my only reward for reacting to others was to be given higher salaries and more people to manage, then I needed to stop reacting and become proactive, whatever that meant.

The only way to do that was to remove myself from social situations and place myself here in front of this electronic input device.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Money buys me stuff but it never bought me prestige, it lifted me out of poverty and gave me enough luxury to satisfy my wants as well as my needs.

As we get older, our tastes change in relation to our age, societal status, family needs and reactions to a world full of overstimulating mass marketing.

At my age, the illusions now propagated by the Internet are as much a part of my life as physical realities.

My needs and wants are largely met by the reflected and beamed light of an LCD panel just as the needs and wants of the previous generation were largely met by the reflected and beamed light of a television tube, interrupted by paper-based books/magazines, breaking the monotony with retail shopping/eating therapy.

What will the next generation spend time doing in their old age after they’ve spent their youth and young adult years saying they aren’t like their parents but becoming them anyway?

How did your formative years train you for the success you’re experiencing right now?

How will your influence upon your children’s formative years feed their success?

How does this translate to subcultures, cultures, the global economy and civilisations over thousands of years?

That’s all for today — time to listen to the wind and see what its “personality” tells me will happen next in our society in some fuzzy way that comes out comically on these blog pages.

A Mound of Colourless Clay

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Putting aside a belief in supreme being(s), if possible, do you hold dear a feeling of sacredness about something?

A building?

A cave, a mountain, the sky, the ground, the rain, the sea?

A person?

An object?

What, or whom, above all else do you meditate upon?

I am here, alone, a solitary figure seated before an illuminated panel, the icons are the ikons and vice versa, thinking the same thoughts as many before me who have translated thought into pictographical facsimile.

Many of my activities throughout the day are devout, religious homages to the sense of wonder of the presence of a self seeking absence in a mysterious substance we call the universe.

Much is explainable but a lot is not.

The formality of language, costumes (our external coverings we designate for specific functions), and body movement account for the way the self defines fluid movement through the universal substance(s).

I create an everchanging universe for my sake, the fight-or-flight, survival-of-the-fittest, order-and-chaos, self-preserving labeled interchanges of sets of states of energy I call moments and memorable events that constitute segments of time.

Otherwise, the past and the present do not exist.

Formality is a formality.

We choose belief systems handed to us by our ancestors and/or our peers or we don’t — judging one better than the other is a matter of judgement in relation to one’s comfortable subcultural practices, one’s habits, that is.

Adaptable.

Malleable.

Accepting one’s family and friends for who they are and/or want to be.

Comfort zones are acceptable.

When a comfort zone has easily-recognisable borders, life is simpler.

Complex borders make for complex actions/reactions.

I was raised to believe the sanctuary of a church was a quiet place of meditation punctuated by both peaceful music and contemplative sermons / ceremonies, where one dressed accordingly (formally).

The sanctuaries of today are not my sanctuaries, with display of song lyrics, sans musical notes, on projector screens; loud music; light shows; applause; casual clothing and other means for more tight social integration of church life with pop culture.

Thus, I have turned to this place, this keyboard and notebook computer screen, for sanctuary, redemptive meditation and uplifting comfort.

The social aspects of a church have little meaning for a childless husband who is surrounded by screaming kids, happy parents and proud grandparents parading up and down the halls of their place of worship.

That is also why I sit here, alone in my thoughts, just a few clicks away from the physical manifestations of others with similar thoughts.

Socially, I am a simple man with simple needs who has enough internal triggers for delusions of grandeur when the need arises to not need or want to reach out to society at large for self reaffirmation on a stage, playing field or conference room.

When I mentally “woke up” at age five, it was with the realisation that I could die at any time, having fulfilled the meaning of my life just by the basic act of reaching a state of mental alertness.

Every moment of being awake is a blessing.

Every dream is a blessing.

Every breath.

Every pain and ache.

Even the constant whistle/whine of tinnitus.

Does it matter if I publicly profess allegiance to a religion, a country, a cause or nothing at all?

It might matter to you but simply having been alive is sufficient to me.

To have no idea, at this time, what life is, except an apparent miraculous mystery waiting to be revealed…isn’t that exciting?!

Sets of states of energy, from a mound of colourless clay to the cheetah racing toward its prey…

Wow!

We pick and choose how we want the intersection of our sets of states of energy to occur.

Your choice is the right choice for you, and if it makes you happy in this life where survival and reproduction of our sets of states of energy are primary (i.e., happiness is a byproduct), then I’m happy for you in whatever mode and method you hold your belief set(s) dear.

Now, on to the future, where we push certain subgroups to accomplish tasks for us that they would never do consciously or willingly without our subliminal nudges.

As it has been and always will be.

Business.  Science.  Competition.

With a dash of sarcasm and humour to keep us honest.

Can Shifting Winds Turn Big Boats in Midstream?

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

More stories for afternoon contemplation on a cloudy Monday in which strains of “In the Bleak Midwinter” plays…

BONUS: Teaching kindergartners to pay attention pays off

 

 

13,657 days to go

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

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!

The Unintended Consequences of Divorce

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

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?