Tag Archives: history

Bass Ackwards

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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.

Books of my father

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While we continue to celebrate the holidays with my new friends and family, enjoying this morning’s early breakfast hospitality of my brother in-law’s folks and, later, dinner with mine, my sister and I reconcile our differences, strengthening old sibling bonds that run deeper than temporary political hot topics.

My mother, in the meantime, reconnects me with the early adult education of my father, exemplified by the following scanned book/calendar/flashcard titles:

Books-of-my-father 1956-Germany-calendar Books-of-my-father-2 Books-of-my-father-3

My brother in-law and I look through my father’s small collection of tools, from handmade ballpein hammers used in my great-grandfather’s metalsmithing days to brand-new circular blades still in their plastic packaging.

Let us remember the usefulness of what we have and worry less about what we don’t have.

A day without sunshine

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An incandescent bulb casts shadows, its light diffused by a lampshade, reflected off Christmas tree ornaments hanging off the conical shaped object we call the Christmas tree.

Shadows and diffused light.

Sadness and promises actualised.

The current calendar of the predominant culture in this area informs me today is Christmas.

At the North Pole today we have no sunshine.

At the South Pole we have plenty o’ sunshine.

On Mars this day is harder to comprehend, not being an essential part of a sol or a place in orbit around the Sun.

Without sunshine we have no crops — no grains, no vegetables, no fruit on the table. Nothing for animals to eat and us to eat them.

Life exists without sunshine but not without a solar system, as far as we know.

Earlier tonight, the remnants of the nuclear family — mother, son, daughter — sat on a church pew with son’s wife and daughter’s children to celebrate the birth of Jesus by listening to solo singers, brass ensemble, organist, choir, ministers, congregation and bell ringers, singing traditional Christmas music, and participating in the ritual that symbolises the Last Supper.

For the first time, without the paterfamilias.

On a damp, rainy day.

All of us in good health, with good clothes, good food, nice house, working motor vehicles and lacking for nothing important.

We suffer only the inability to form new memories with a living father.

Instead, we form new memories with the odd addition of electronic devices in our faces — mobile phones and tablet computers.

We are detached from each other, the fog of Internet connectivity clouding the old ways of communicating — playing card games, talking only amongst ourselves, the hum of television programs or radio/music machine in the background.

Can you believe that we used to allow the disruption of abacus practice and bookreading get in the way of a family get-together?!

The kids are too old for hide-n-seek or children’s board games. They don’t stay glued to the TV set watching cartoon shows.

All but my mother were well-trained, however, to sit here and use electromechanical audiovisual stimulation to rewire our brains.

I don’t miss my father as much as I did but his absence is present this Christmas season.

In his absence I don’t feel the need to extend love for every subculture out there, no reason to wish people “Happy Holidays!” to avoid accidentally making someone feel neglected because I didn’t specifically mention their [non]religious [sub]cultural ritualistic practices.

No apologies, no offense.

I can enjoy the habits of my childhood without feeling a need to defend my father’s imperfections to an imaginary set of critics looking to find a chink in my armour by comparing my personality traits to my father’s and saying, “Aha! We found a weakness in you that you knew came from your father but you didn’t overcome or correct.”

Yes, the ol’ internal critic raised its ugly head and I chopped it off tonight.

One less demonic voice in my thoughts that found faults in the tiniest behaviours.

Mourning and healing are emotional states for which I am grateful, able to distinguish myself from the cold, calculating combination of voltage states we call computing devices like this tablet PC.

There are other emotional states I want to face, including why I don’t want rock music or women leaders in the types of worship centres where I was raised — because both bring up sinful images for me, the sins of lust and gluttony.

So far, I have held up both the religious and secular meanings behind behaviours/traits because I write for a universe that contains mysteries explained and unknown.

A sin can lead to eternal damnation and to inefficient but effective social positioning.

By extension, what is guilt? Knowingly not aligned with expectations of your social peers, for instance?

It is 1:45 a.m. in the local time zone and I need to wake up at 6:30 a.m. for a long day of Christmas family activities so my delving into philosophical dissection of sin and guilt will wait until later.

It was a dark Christmas Eve without my father but we survived the ordeal and grew into different, perhaps even better, people in the process.

I want to devote some of my meditative mental activity on separating the subliminal threats, both physical and political, of the U.S. budget negotiations and determine how we unravel the domestic social fabric that has created an unsustainable network of government dependents and weave a new, flexible, sustainable web that’s compatible with the intricate operations of a global economy in transition from large-family based subsistence farming/ranching/shepherding to towering megapoli of decreasing populations dependently sucking up cheap rural resources nonstop.

What are the pitfalls and rewards from the 1000-year view?

What is the acceptable percentage of a global economy’s profit/harvest that we can dedicate to moving some of our eggs off this planet?

Let the 99-percent have their say in how they use their disposable income on infrastructure or playtoys.

Let the one-percent have their say in how they want life viewed from the top of the socioeconopolitical pyramid to look like 1000 years from now, as focused as they’ve been in playing the odds in the moment with a longterm winning view in mind (at the losing view of others in the one- and 99-percent, sometimes).

We win when our species leads the way for viable living options off this planet and out of this solar systems.

Otherwise, no ritual will make difference, no matter how much better we feel, healed and comforted by familiarity, for our descendants and their peers who inherit the handle that pumps the sustainable perpetuity of civilisation ultimately tied to our place in the natural environment of Earth, at least in the beginning…

The Old Man in the Cabin

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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.

What else do you see when you look in the mirror?

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Lee slipped into his disguise and entered the world of a subculture.

He was looking for the answer to a question: “Why do stories start with ‘A long time ago…,’ ‘In a galaxy far, far away…,’ etc.?”

He also wanted to know why subcultures store large number of weapons and never use them to protect themselves except in verbal defensive posturing positions (imagine two dominant members of a different species squaring off like peacocks strutting their feathers to prove their reproduction capabilities which have no value in defense against a hungry wolf) while their subcultures are slowly reduced by the onslaught of subcultures not like theirs, either intentionally or compressionally by the superiour sheer weight/size of neighbouring subcultures.

In modern parlance we call this détente, or mutually assured destruction when the weapons have seriously huge destructive capacity.

Lee looked at his disguise in the mirror but he didn’t feel like the character he was going to portray.

He needed to feel the character — the burning anger, the raging fear, the desire to grab the reins from polite, noncommitted leaders, refusing to negotiate their ongoing debate about the nuances of a truce with a perceived enemy, put the metal, the disguise, to the test and charge into battle.

The wind howled outside.

Water filled the trenches.

Battle-hardened foot soldiers looked at Lee wondering if he was the one to bare his chest to the enemy and dare them to light the fuse that would ignite the war the soldiers on both sides craved once more.

The courtiers and patsies of the king’s court had grown too soft living too long off the fat of the land and Lee knew they were outnumbered by the hungry and starving willing to die for a greater cause than feeding just another set of pigs running whatever version of Animal Farm they were selling to the highest bidder.

Lee adjusted the disguise.

Was it an actor’s costume?  A uniform?  The emperour’s new clothes?

With whom did Lee’s sympathies lie?

For whom would Lee lie, if necessary, to achieve the greater cause that made his efforts worth overthrowing yet another monarchy that cloaked itself in the power of the people, the tyranny of the majority, a supermajority of minorities this time?

The only way to know was to lose himself in the words and actions of the subculture.

Then, when completely immersed, lost in the crowd, rise up, climb the wall that separated the haves from the have-nots, and announce his intent.

Lee looked in the mirror.

He saw his parents’ and grandparents’ faces.

He saw the mannerisms and silent strength of his father, the wisdom of modest humbleness in his mother.

Lee walked to a hill behind his hut and practiced shouting, listening to the echoes around him.

He heard a few returned shouts as if they were mere reactions to his shouts but no echoing call for real battle.

Lee returned to the hut and contemplated what was next.

Many subcultures had claimed they saved, preserved and nurtured the links of civilisation for the next generation.

Several family members in Lee’s lineage had recorded their own facts that validated their rightful place, if modest, in the course of history.

Lee knew the judgment of his generation was not sufficient to determine if his future actions were justified.

Lee needed more, a longer view.

He called upon his advisors who used a variety of means to provide Lee cumulative wisdom upon which he could set a future course — supercomputers, online consensus of commentators both professional and amateur, crystal balls, ancient texts, divinations and mysterious methods shrouded from the light of day.

Lee pondered his advisors’ input.

Lee was a man of action.

Lee imagined he saw the impetus for the behaviour of his peers they could not fathom.

Lee not only dug deep within himself to feed a storyline, he also competed against his peers for the place of highest moral ground in history, knowing it would be civilisations hence, uncountable, unknowable, for whom he worked the puppet strings of characters in his lifetime.

Lee let the raw emotions of fear, love, hate, and compassion flow through his body unchecked.

Limbs flew across the yard, Lee unable to stop the wind.

Lee looked in the mirror, asking himself, “If I was the one who could stop the wind, what would I call this disguise I’m wearing?”

A Mound of Colourless Clay

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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?

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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

 

 

Tugged in two directions

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Two storylines wait to be written (note to self: lots of twos in blog entries lately, need to change number to something larger but not too large).

The first storyline is about the person who grow up in a suburban Christian home, singing in the children’s choir, visiting nursing homes on the weekends, serving the community as a Boy Scout throughout the week, who, as an adult, had strayed on to other lifestyles but, due to a recent horrible news event of which he had no direct connection, other than subculturally, he redirects his living back toward the stricter interpretation of the Bible, contradictions fully understood and prioritised, praising those who followed the stricter lifestyle while reaching out to others who have not seen the light, avoiding the condemnation and criticism of alternate lifestyles that others in the Christian faith were wont to do.

The second storyline shows yet another version of how subtle manipulation of the rise and fall of importance of subcultures in mass media/pop culture allows the use of subliminal forms of coercion to herd the masses rather than the overt methods of intimidation and public executions.

If you want to eliminate real, live, high-powered semi-automatic guns and rifles from the population, build up a heavy desire for them by advertising the ubiquitous sale of virtual shooting in games and simulations (“9.5 out of 10!” exclaims Computer Killing and Gratuitous Violence magazine), push passive-aggressiveness to a tipping point, give lone wolves the feeling they have no way out but to kill others rather than seek socially unacceptable counseling, watch the pot boil over and Voila! another gunman kills a bunch of people just in time to call for legislation/executive orders to limit the sale/ownership of real, live, high-powered semi-automatic guns and rifles by the population.

The four previous paragraphs demonstrate how you base future actions on living in the past.

But I live in the future.

I, as we know, is an artificial construct.

Space and time do not exist.

We can bypass the normal scientific theories and create our own as shortcuts between moving points.

“I” see that the coffee mug on the table is not sitting still, traveling through space at thousands of miles per hour while gravitationally held in place by the local sphere of molten metal and various spinoffs of sets of states of energy in motion (trees and gnats, for instance).

But all that “I” see is an illusion — to see the real deal “I” have to disintegrate, disappear, tear apart the comfortable surroundings that are here to support the fragile structure called “me.”

How few of the billions of “us” have been given the opportunity to step out of our beautiful cocoons and see any truth except what we believe to be the Truth?

We have created our origin stories, modified as our civilisations expand and die, supposedly growing more informed, more sophisticated, less ignorant, more inclined to be hypnotised by shiny new baubles we call the promise of new technological advances that will reveal a deeper, richer aspect of the Truth than we had never seen before (“buy our 3D glasses to see an imaginary world displayed on a flat surface when you already live in the real, free, three-dimensional world that’s much less fascinating!” [implication: you get what you pay for]).

You know what I mean, we were created by God(s) for their pleasure, the world is a stage and we are merely players, the universe is a computer simulation, et cetera and so forth, on and on until you wonder if your species will ever create anything really new.

Hucksters in the form of scientists, researchers, advertisers, marketers, parents, religious leaders and politicians, every last one of them in on the joke but unwilling to admit the punchline is us.

The first rule is there are no rules.

If you want a story that tells it like it is, then we have to remove “you” from the story as reader and imaginary participant.

There is no “you,” “me,” “us,” or “I.”

Easier said than [un]believed.

When you can let go of everything around you that is an accident of evolution — the ego for ego’s sake — you are ready to stop being you and become part of the story behind the story.

Otherwise, it’s the same ol’ thing over and over.

Are you willing to sacrifice your ego for the sake of a good story because that’s the only way you get to the future of space and time that does not exist?

You can be a solipsist or you can be nothing — there is no such thing as being tugged in two directions at once.