Tag Archives: history

Truly Disillusioned

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[Personal notes — feel free to skip]

I sit and stare at the computer screen while the antivirus software performs a “quick scan” of the hard disk drive after the IE10 web browser software on my evaluation copy of Windows 8 acted funny.

Not that I trust the antivirus software to find anything amiss.

These days, when flood/drought cycles flow over land and our species has a short-term memory problem about scientifically-tested ecological history, I am not as easy to hypnotise into believing that the bits and bytes that comprise the virtual world I pretend exists in order to add electronic words to the pile make any sense.

Better to believe I am insane than believe I can see through solid sheets of molten sand called windows.

Two more tenets of my belief set:

  1. Don’t take myself seriously.
  2. Don’t take myself seriously that I don’t take myself seriously.
  3. Jokes are almost always better in threes.
  4. Time is an illusion.

The quick scan has almost finished running — the antivirus popup/miniwindow shows 94% progress.

Needless to say, I am not chewing my nails or suffering anxiety about the pending results of the quick scan.

Yet, hickory nuts are pounding the roof loudly, waterlogged from an overnight rain event, seeking a closer relationship with Earth, sharing a gravitational love with each other.

What if there is a connection between the house roof, the hickory nuts and the antivirus software?

What if there isn’t?

By asking questions about which item does not belong in a list, can I show myself if I am sane?

Was it sane to wait and watch, having an ounce of belief that Obama might have made a difference, seeing that his two best accomplishments were the Affordable Care Act and institutionalised drone killing?

This is progress?

This is why tens of thousands of soldiers died in the American Civil War 150 years ago?

Meanwhile, Chinese military experts expect a sea-based conflict to protect Chinese economic interests because Chinese authorities believe they don’t have to anticipate land-based military skirmishes with their Russian neighbour?

Thank goodness, the antivirus software declared “NO THREAT FOUND.”

I can relax.

Technology has come to save the day, so I can now let autoupdate install the iTunes 10.7 software that flashes me a message via the User Account Control function before making my computer compatible with devices running iOS 6.

It was good to relieve some domestic tension and give Obama his four years to show that skin colour alone does not determine a person’s qualifications.

For that, we have the events of the American Civil War and its eventual outcome to thank.

However, now that we’ve accomplished that goal, let’s look at other more important issues such as defining for a large part of the disillusioned world what their subcultures can contribute to world history better than being crushed by homogenising muliculturalism.

Me, I’m still getting used to the fact that some of my childhood friends from 30+ years ago were/are gay/lesbian/transgender/bisexual, let alone the fact that the U.S. president was “outed” by his VP to support gay marriage.

Force-feeding multiculturalism on the general population has unintended consequences that, if I am to understand our species correctly, leads to battles between us over how we believe we fit into the role our sets of states of energy play in the [un]observable universe.

Another four years with Obama at the helm shows scenarios that I’m not comfortable with — more suppression of groups opposed to government oppression of longstanding subcultural beliefs, including overt mockery of Mormonism, which means a reduction in the economic strength of the people who have lost their viability/trustability as productive members of society.

The U.S. has a large population of unemployed, underemployed, and incarcerated citizens who are quickly losing their belief in the American Dream, a net drag on our place in international worth.

I care about the lost opportunities we have here, right now, that the current U.S. president has been unable to address: those who bought into Obama’s hope and those who didn’t, both having no hope for their futures, many worse off than their ancestors.

Ultimately, we may not be able to address these issues domestically because we are fighting an uphill battle against the negatively growing sine wave of economic history.

However, I love change.  Obama was a change.  Romney will be change.  Nader would have been a great change, too.

The candidate who admits he’s willing to improve our nation’s education/economic status while keeping an eye on ecological sustainability without forcing us to compromise our beliefs is the one I want to support.

The Illusion of Power

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You fans of “The Art of War” know where part of this storyline is going, don’t you?

Yeah, I thought so.

That’s why I was going to label this blog entry “The War to End All Wars” but I knew you already had it figured out.

You see, some of my male friends think that giving women power makes us weaker overall, citing the decline of companies like HP and the weakening of the U.S. in the eyes of Islamic countries that have no respect for Hillary Clinton.

Well, there’s only one way to show them if their theory is correct.

Put Clinton to the test.

In other words, is she or is she not a puppet of the Saudis, the Israelis, the Chinese, the Indians and/or the Russians?

Or simply a corporate spokesperson?

Is she her own woman?

Can she stand up to a world turning against the U.S., which is quickly becoming an ignorant banana republic?

If not…?

Well, my male friends are only partially right to begin with because there are plenty of examples of women who’ve been successful, including the Australian (Gillard) and UK (Thatcher) PMs in politics (whether Rousseff, the president of Brazil, will be successful remains to be seen), not to forget others around the world like Indira Gandhi of India.

Meanwhile, the male-dominated societies in Muslim countries will be watching closely to see if the U.S. Secretary of State is for or against them and, thus, whether they should spread the word to their American colleagues in the U.S. to vote for Romney, who understands the needs of real men.

A student of history stirring the melting pot

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After observing the past, present and future, I have decided, in case it’s my last chance to vote for a white, heterosexual, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestant candidate for U.S. President, to cast my ballot in November for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

I don’t agree with all of their politics but, as a student of history, I see that there’s still a place in international business for the voices of white males having Northern European ancestry who made positive contributions to the idea of a democratic republic with capitalistic tendencies (i.e., the United States) and demand more of the working class than a fallback position on publicly-funded social support programs in tough times.

It is also my way of honouring my parents, whom my mother reminded me this weekend have been Republican supporters since the days of Dwight Eisenhower.

The best way to reform a group is from within, less so from the position of the fringe groups or political parties I’ve supported in the past.

A corporation is not a citizen but a citizen doesn’t always know what’s right for competitive business practices, either.

There is a thin line between predation and competition to define more clearly.

As the world absorbs and reflects the principles espoused by dead white male European philosophers regarding capitalism and communism, I will support positions of whomever is popularly elected as long as those leaders understand the basic premise that a set of states of energy which has found a way to build stronger bonds with states of energy around it will also stumble upon a method to recreate a version of itself which competes against other sets for building stronger bonds, regardless of one’s preferred set of anthropomorphic origin stories.

My slogan: “Business. Science. Competition.”

I am competing against a version of me 1000 years from now that doesn’t care about characterisations or labels like white, heterosexual, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestant candidate for U.S. President.

By voting for Romney, I realise I support the concern that establishing a stable population dependent on government support is anathema to the future where I need cooperative competition in the marketplace for resources to get our species off its collective hindends and heading out into the cosmos.

I cringe to think about a version of myself sitting at home, unemployed, receiving government funds, unconcerned about efficient distribution/competition, and serving as an anchor holding down progress while buying the cheapest, if not the highest-qualty goods available, because of limited income, lack of employable skills/education and/or no motivation.

Our species on this planet has a window of opportunity for active exploration and settlement of other celestial spheres but do we really need a social safety net to maintain and expand that window opening?

What is a social safety net?  Governmental organisations like NASA?  Department of Defense? Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid? Department of Education? Department of Health and Human Services? Department of Transportation? A government with three separate branches of power — judicial, legislative and executive? How about a bare-minimum government that provides “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?

By voting for Romney, I’ll give the Romney/Ryan Republican Party ticket one more chance to get the balance between the private and government sectors right, preventing U.S. business from creating its own downfall, and protecting it from international versions of financial nuclear bombs without drowning U.S.-based businesses in noncompetitive laws, rules and regulations.  If Obama is reelected, I expect the same from his administration working in cooperation with other government public business entities around the globe.

Then, I’ll return to voting for the Nader-type candidates for U.S. President, to keep both major U.S political parties semi/quasi honest (or at least hope to get them to incorporate nonpopulist planks), as impossible as it sounds, because I know that corporations and other nongovernmental organisations for whom we work, or which we hopefully create ourselves, are fueling the engine of our economy now as much as ever, so voting for a national political party to represent my corporal self, no matter the candidate’s racial heritage, is participating in nostalgic belief in the good ol’ days when “we’re the government and we’re here to help” had positive rather than negative connotations, whatever we choose to believe the good ol’ days to have been.

A strong national military defense is certainly a deterrent globally but I’ll take a little more, stronger, defense of my financial nest egg these days, now that I’m closer to retirement age than I am to my first year of earning a decent wage.

All while wishing that our species has better longterm goals than mine — putting Earth-based lifeforms on spacecraft while we still have a locally-stable sector of the galaxy to travel, populate and set up tourist traps.

At the end of the day, do I care about any of what I’m writing here in this blog entry if I am childless, spend most of my day with two aging cats, have no legacy to protect and only philosophical issues to turn into short stories via a habit of blogging daily to entertain myself while staving off the boredom of a 50-year old man who has seen enough of life to know there are fewer surprises to expect and less he wants to put up with?

What motivations do I have left if the only thing to excite me today is the thought of turning on or turning off readers by saying the flavour of ice cream I eat every four years makes more of a superficial difference than a deeply meaningful one to a person who’s tasted all the flavours and concluded they’re pretty much the same, separated by varying patterns on the ice cream cone to break the monotony?

Does it matter if in my thoughts I have a singular vision of what Earth-based lifeforms will look like in 1000 years that makes all of our concerns today seem miniscule by comparison?

Oh well, enough talking to myself here today.  Time to roll the rubbish bin back to the house, eat lunch and take a nap.

Quite frankly, on days like today, at 50+ years of age on a beautiful, sunny, warm Monday in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, it is difficult to motivate myself to care about anything more than finding a comfortable place in the house to plop down my body and escape into a dream world uninterrupted by feline companions, one day closer to the end of the set of states of energy known as me, the world of my youth practically gone (or on reruns in TVLand rebroadcast on media streaming devices) and thus me as an adult expansion of my youth-built core almost gone with it, leaving those who care about living to divide up Earth’s resources amongst themselves.

Today, I disappear into the dot at the end of a sentence and that is sufficient to say I was once here as thoughts recreated in electronic bits represented as words in a blog entry formed by pressing fingers on a wireless keyboard communicating with a desktop computer attached to an ADSL line talking to a DSLAM connected to the Internet (which itself is a network of routers, servers, and switches, wires/fibers passing/storing energy states we label 0 or 1, also known as bits – the circles, cycles and spirals never stop, do they?).

Zzzzzz…time to talk to myself in my sleep.

Fifty years until the next generation of real innovation?

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I’m floating in a thought set of two Thai teas right now so my ability to pull memories out of the nether reaches of the brain is muddled.

What is the difference between idol worshipers and the idolised?

What makes groups of people find true innovation?

Imagine the following conversation…

= = = = =

Today, we have brought together some of the brilliant geniuses of the past (as opposed to the non-brilliant ones, that is) — Tesla, Eastman, Marconi, Edison, Nakamatsu, Einstein, Khayyám, Curie — in order to find out their thoughts about today’s revolution in technology.

Moderator: “Gentlemen and lady, welcome.”

All: “Thank you.”

Moderator: “During this time of year, technology vendors tell us about their latest offerings in the open market.  We’d like your opinions about their engineering achievements.”

Curie: “I am a scientist, not an engineer.”

Einstein: “Me, too.”

Moderator: “No problem.  We only want your opinion about the practical applications of research you performed in your lifetimes.”

Curie: “Please proceed, Monsieur.”

Moderator: “Thank you.  Over the past few days, we have seen many devices demonstrated by company executives that are meant to simplify…”

Eastman: “Are you saying that executives themselves are simplifying something?”

Moderator: “No.  Let me finish and you see what I am trying to say.”

Edison:  “As both inventor and company man, I can tell you that simplifying your work for the public is no easy challenge.  Why, look at Tesla here.  Does anyone remember who he is.  I bet Westinghouse would have a thing or two to add if he were he.  By the way, where is he?”

Moderator: “Well, we put out a call for him but instead, strangely enough, we received an RSVP from a musical act calling itself AC/DC.”

Edison: “Very interesting.  Yet, you also invited me.  Were you trying to send a message?”

Marconi: “Who, me?”

Moderator: “No.  Please let me continue…”

Curie: “Gentlemen.  Let our moderator finish what he had to say.”

Moderator: “Thank you.  Anyway, we have a lot of devices to talk about so I’ll get right to it.  We have placed on the table in front of you several of the latest products — some of them still in the prototype stage — that we would like you to comment upon.  Let’s start with this one, the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD.  Who would like to comment first?”

Tesla: “Okay, I will bite.  What is this interesting toy?”

Moderator: “This is a mobile phone.”

Tesla:  “A phone, you say?  Where is the receiver?”

Moderator: “Well, that’s the thing, sir.  You see, it is the receiver.”

Tesla: “A-ha.  I see this is like a tiny television, is it not?”

Moderator: “Yes.  Good analogy.  You’ll also be glad to know that it uses wireless technology to send and receive radio signals…”

Marconi:  “A wireless?  Why didn’t you say so?  How do you power this device?”

Moderator: “With a battery.”

Edison: “AC or DC current?”

Moderator: “DC.”

Edison: “Very exciting.  I can see why Westinghouse chose not to show up.  What about this musical act, AC/DC?  Did they finally decline the invitation?”

Moderator: “No, they decided to show up by proxy.  Here, let me show you.  Mr. Marconi, if you will hand me the phone…?”

Marconi: “Certainly.”

Moderator: “I’ll just bring up the music app…”

Eastman: “‘Music app’?”

Moderator: “Oh, sorry.  This phone has its own built-in memory…uh, well, not unlike camera film…”

Eastman: “Really?”

Moderator: “No…I mean…well, Ms. Curie, your research into radioactivity, combined with Einstein’s work on relativity, has opened up many engineering and science fields, including work on erasable memory.”

Tesla: “You can erase memories now?  Fascinating…”

Moderator: “Well, not human memories, I mean…”

Tesla: “Oh?  Well, that’s too bad.  Imagine being able to erase ordinary memories from your mind so you could create more room for important research…”

Moderator: “Anyway, let’s get back on schedule.  Inside this phone, like most of the devices we’ll review today, are miniaturised computing and memory units, not unlike the analog computers some of you are familiar with.  Back to the demo!  Here is what the rock band AC/DC sounds like…” [plays “Back in Black” by AC/DC]

Einstein: “Very interesting use of distortion…”

Moderator: “Yes, these are electrified instruments.  If you gather closer, you can see the band performing.”

Curie:  “Looks like that young man is wearing his pants a little short, n’est pas?”

Einstein: “I am impressed that the men can see what they’re playing with their hair so long.”

Moderator: “Yes, I understand what you mean.  Anyway, let’s move on.  Here is the next device, the Nokia Lumia 920.”

Tesla: “Why is it sitting on that little hot plate?”

Moderator: “Well, sir, this is exactly the sort of thing I thought you’d appreciate.  The ‘hot plate,’ as you call it, is a wireless charger for the battery.”

Tesla: “Wireless electricity?!  If I was still alive, I would be sainted for this, wouldn’t I?”

Moderator: “Yes, sir.  In fact, there is a movement to do just that.”

Tesla:  “All those years in isolation, fearing that no one would understand me in this or any century, let alone on this planet…”

Moderator: “And for you, Mr. Eastman, this phone has a camera.”

Eastman: “What do you mean?”

Moderator: “In fact, there are two cameras, one that faces away from you and one that faces you, which detects your face and will turn off if you stop looking at it.”

Eastman: “Amazing.  But this is all it can do?”

Moderator: “We have more product offerings to show you from manufacturers such as LG, HTC, Amazon and Apple…we can get to those later.  So far, what do you think about our incredible technical achievements?”

Einstein: “I don’t know.  I mean, we had telephones and cameras in my day…”

Tesla: “And I demonstrated wireless radio so long ago…”

Marconi: “No, I did.”

Tesla: “Whatever you choose to believe is up to you…”

Curie: “But what do they do, exactly?”

Moderator: “Madame, these devices — the smartphones and tablets, as we call them — allow scientists and doctors from around the world to gather together in realtime.”

Eastman: “So you have solved the problem of teleportation?”

Edison: “Yes, has the ultimate goal that us scientists, engineers and inventors kept from the public — traveling through space and time — reached fruition?”

Moderator: “Not exactly.  Check this out.  You can see one another’s faces and hear your voices nearly instantaneously, though.”

Tesla: “And all this takes place wirelessly?”

Moderator: “Yes.”

Tesla: “This is all you have achieved in the decades since I’ve been gone?”

Moderator: “Well, not exactly.  We have sent men to the moon…”

Curie: “No women?”

Moderator: “That’s right.  But more than one woman has gone into outer space…”

Curie: “…and cured cancer by now, I imagine.”

Moderator: “Not exactly.”

Together: A collective sigh.

Tesla: “So what you’re saying is that the work we’ve done is just being worked and reworked all over again, combining and recombining the hard years of research for which we sacrificed our lives, our reputations, our…”

Einstein: “Precisely my thoughts.  I suppose by now someone has absolutely proved or, God forbid, disproved my theories and moved on to more important science?”

Moderator: “Not exactly.”

Einstein: “I see.”

Nakamatsu: “You may think that these are unimportant achievements but I can tell you that the research does not progress as fast as you think it does.  Just like in your day, there is so much competition that a lot of redundancy prevents inventors like us from making significant progress.”

Khayyám: “These smartphones, as you call them.  What else can they do?  The tablets appear to be a magic slate of some kind.”

Moderator: “Yes, sir.  Let me show something that you might find interesting, as simple as it seems to us today — the graphing calculator function.  You just plug in the formula here…and a graph of the formula, or function, is displayed there.”

Khayyám: “Wonderful, wonderful.  It is poetry in motion!”

Tesla: “The more I see these things, the more I ask myself whether you have carried my research to its conclusion.  Can you control minds with these smartphones?  Is there a universal mind behind them?”

Moderator: “Sort of.  Some people call it the web browser-based search engine.  Others call it wikipedia, baidu or google.”

Khayyám: “‘Google’?  Is that a mathematical term?”

Moderator: “In a way, yes.  Some say it is an intentional misspelling of the word ‘googol,’ one followed by 100 zeroes.”

Khayyám: “So the universal mind is truly mathematical?  It is just as I thought.  I can return to my eternal meditation upon the true meaning of the philosophical poet who dabbles in mathematics.”

Moderator: “Well, that’s about all the time we have.  What I’m gathering from you is an intriguing mix of disappointment and satisfaction.”

Tesla: “Yes, your devices are fun to look at.  However, where are the brilliant minds of today?  Have they not advanced science any further?  Are they just building upon our old research?”

Einstein: “I suppose the atomic bomb is a thing of the past by now, given what you’ve shown us, opening up young people across the world to break down barriers of ignorance and connecting together their joy and vigour, ridding the world of unnecessary violence.  No, wait, don’t say it!”

Moderator and Einstein in unison: “Not exactly.”

Moderator: “Thanks again for joining us.  Since it seems I have not completely impressed you with our ‘all-in-one’ devices, let’s reconvene in…let’s say, oh, another 100 years and see if I can’t knock your socks off, as the saying goes.”

Curie: “Don’t call me until you’ve found a cure for radiation poisoning.”

Tesla: “Don’t bother me until they’ve found more practical applications for my inventions like mind control or creating earthquakes to move mountains.”

Khayyám: “Call me anytime but give me more time to wake up from my meditative sleep, next time.”

Einstein: “Hey, if you don’t have to put me back to sleep right now, I won’t complain.”

Nakamatsu: “Wasn’t the floppy disk a great invention?  I thought so.  The tiny memory card there is not so different, is it?  Let me show you what I think it’ll turn into next…”

Edison: “I want to know one thing.  How many iterations will it take until those things are so tiny they’ll fit inside your ear where DC power is the only way to go?  Take that, Westinghouse, wherever you are!”

Marconi: “I’m with Tesla on this one, despite our previous differences.”

Tesla: “It’s about time…”

Moderator: “Yes, the concept of time is still something we share in common.  Until next time, dear readers!”

 

Yet Another Workday

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She sat down with her friends.  “We are Womyn — hear us roar!!!” she proclaimed to the rushing waters of the river in the bottom of the canyon below them.

They rested for a moment, some taking swigs from their collapsible, BPA-free drinking jugs, some chewing on energy bars and some photographing their friends.

Palatia looked at her mobile phone.  “Does anyone have a recent photo of Ellen?  This ol’ talk show still photo doesn’t do her justice.”

The tinest piece of lint floated out of a space between Palatia’s thumb and her mobile phone.

The lint followed the invisible, random path of static electricity, air currents, solar radiation and macromolecules suspended in the dry air.

None of the day hikers knew what the lint was doing there, let alone why.

The lint had no discernible thought patterns to speak of.

But the lint was the most important link between that moment and a moment hundreds of years later.

Palatia pushed earbuds millimetres from her eardrums, cranked up some retro k.d. lang tune on her mobile phone and stood up.  “Bag your trash!  Pack your gear!  Let’s roll!”

The lint was dragged along with the hikers for a while before a cool breeze from the valley pushed up over the canyon rim and turned the lint in another direction.

History was in the making.

Palatia was a key component of the cogs and wheels of social change on the day she decided to call in sick and skip her shift at the fast food factory labeled “Grab-n-Go Burgers, 24/7.”

The deliverer of a piece of lint.

Lint that carried a genetic message.

A message intended for someone not yet “born,” the culmination of years of research, a being not quite any one species, neither completely organic nor completely electromechanical.

The lint didn’t earn a wage, didn’t pay taxes, didn’t travel roads or depend on national defense to perform its function.

The lint didn’t breathe, it didn’t eat, it didn’t earn an education, it didn’t produce heirs and it didn’t vote.

Yet the lint was more important than all the billions of people who earn a wage, pay taxes, travel roads, depend on national defense to perform their function, breathe, eat, earn an education, produce heirs and vote.

Events millions of years later in a single galaxy were traced to the piece of lint.

The lint, though inanimate, was analysed, idolised and denigrated as if it was once alive.

What if a cloud had obscured the Sun from a group of hikers one day?

What if it had rained?

More than one “if” fills volumes of historic pondering about a piece of lint.

We call them genetic markers.

The lint called itself nothing.

Yet here it is, studied as if it had intent in at least one “if.”

All because a worker in a minimum-wage job decided to tell her shift supervisor “fuck you” and take the day off, absolutely no thought about changing the course of galactic history.

Simple scenario, you ask, too simple?

The truth is plainer than you think it is.

Pithy quote from slate.com

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From Alan Lightman’s intricate 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams; set in Berne in 1905:

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

From:

“I’m Not Fighting or Battling Cancer—It’s Fighting Me.”
The “unpublished jottings” of Christopher Hitchens from his posthumous book, Mortality.
By Christopher Hitchens and David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2012, at 2:13 PM ET

The Dream of an ice-free Arctic Ocean/Sea shipping zone is soon upon us!

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We may debate the current/future detrimental effects of climate change many call global warming, but let us remember that opportunity arises from adversity like necessity is the mother of invention.

Look how much closer we are getting to an ice-free Arctic Ocean/Sea in the summertime:

[from: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png%5D

Will the shipping industry find significant cost savings with permanently open shipping lanes at northern latitudes?

Will the savings, in turn, correlate to reduced use of greenhouse gases?

Meanwhile, as Greenland ice masses melt further, how will our shopping/shipping habits change in relation to our ecosystem adjustments while shorelines recede and deserts grow?

At the end of the day, who benefits and who suffers depends a lot on our species’ classic characteristics of pecking order — alpha males/females, etc.

 

Overheard in a theatre

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Sadly, I guess the times of my passive-aggressive father are over.  In his day, I doubt we would have heard someone make such a bold, impolite, immoral statement as, “Well, yes, Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, but he was the U.S. President, for Christ’s sake.  Of course, it makes sense that he still represents the Democratic Party.  ‘W’ was a whore man himself before he conveniently found Jesus and cooperated with the Muslim Saudis in selling out American oil interests.  He ‘conveniently’ still represents the Republican Party, too.”

So many cynical observations about promiscuous politicians and teachers, so little time to tell them.  Thank goodness, the film “The Campaign” was enough to tie me over for a while and fill in for such a bleak political election campaign season here in the ol’ US of A, where neither of the two primary candidates for U.S. President can talk about why the American economy is doing so poorly due to their being owned by the same worldwide corporate lobbying interests.

The last two paragraphs are examples of the influences on my youth, which I am trying hard to remove from my set of operational memories.

It is while we prepare the storyline to ease over to another planet (thanks, in part, to the friendly folks at Need Another Seven Astronauts (NASA)), where we will talk about life in the universe that does not center on our species, as puny as it is in comparison to the history of helium or cilia or syphilis/gonorrhea.

I am in a mischievous mood, wanting to make fun of others for the sake of making fun of others with no purpose in mind other than to entertain myself here, rather than in my thoughts alone.

Have you ever sat in a dark theatre, felt a constriction in your chest, the left side of your body going numb for just the briefest of moments, and wondered, “Is this it?”

I can feel it again right now.  Maybe it’s just a muscle twitching after I swept the driveway yesterday.  Or indigestion.

I hope so.

I really would like to sit and laugh quietly for many days longer.

If not…well, it was a good ride.

“It.”  Hmm…

“It” is nothing more than my life, a diversion for other sets of states of energy programmed to reproduce.

I never reproduced.

Scientific studies indicate that reproducing at my age is a recipe for heightened risk of autistic children who would drink out of plastic bottles made with BPA and filled with high fructose corn syrup, take antibiotics and become obese, and, finally, succumb to the onerous labels of “BIG” — BIG farms, BIG Pharma, BIG…you get the picture, if you subscribe to the notion that it’s an “us vs. them” world.

I never met BIG.  I don’t know “them.”  They are just words to me, diversions from a goal one gazillion years in the making, looking back 1000 years from now to see what we’ve accomplished.

Milestones, not accusations.

Actions, not passive disagreement.

A colleague of my father jokingly called my dad an imaginary engineer because of his master’s degree in industrial engineering (even saying so to my father a few days before he died), which always irritated my father.  Now, an industrial engineer is in charge of the largest company in the U.S. by stock value — Apple.  Who gets the last laugh?

That’s the thing.  If this moment is my last one, do I want to have my last thoughts focused on a clever joke or expanding the life of this planet into the cosmos?

I don’t want to spin a passive-aggressive take on a reworked warmed-over punchline.

I sure don’t want to be remembered for simply being clever.

I don’t want to be remembered at all.

This universe is it, all I’ve got, the only verifiable theory of life as I know it.

If I don’t give my minute/tiny/invisible/forgettable place in life a serious thought, who will?

If I don’t have my father around to argue with that the world is not falling to the Nazis and Communists all over again, to whom do I direct my attempt to make peace with my father and our generational gap?

If I don’t have my mother in-law around to convince that the United States is not about to go into another Great Depression (or worse) because a man who is too young (and black) is the U.S. President, to whom do I say that it’s not just white people and old people who care about the American Dream of [democracy and/or capitalism] and freedom for all?

It was a tough decision to say I would never vote again because I care about the higher ideals of our country and our world.  The everyday arguments of this time, of my generation, are perennial — that’s why I don’t care about them.

My visions are hundreds and thousands of years in the making, carrying on a long tradition passed on to me by others, regardless of the current form our organisation of life (i.e., civilisation) may look like.

War and the desire for peace are perennial.

Using available resources until they are depleted and worrying about the consequences are perennial.

That’s why I don’t care about them or the ways we beat our chests like good primates in unison about our alignment with issues such as these.

In the big picture, our species is unimportant.

We aren’t going to agree with the big picture until something else comes along to change that view.

Even then, we’ll argue that our ancestors — the keepers of our origin stories — were right and we’re the center of the universe.

So be it.

You can keep perpetuating those stories in whatever form you like, if it makes you feel better as you procreate.

As long as you keep in the wee spot at the back of your thoughts that you’re working for a larger cause than our species.

I use “cause” cautiously and facetiously because it implies more than what a single blog entry in a continuous storyline is supposed to be about, bringing up imagery of the influences upon my youth again, when this is solely about the way the universe works non-anthropomorphically.

Enough for now in this chapter.

More as it develops…

A stack of DVDs on the sofa, crickets chirping and hotrods burping outside

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While installing the “Complete New Yorker” on my old laptop PC, I performed a search for a recently-deceased comedienne.  Some cartoon results:

  • Frank Modell, Dec. 13, 1969 — “No, we would not like to hear the same line as delivered by Phyllis Diller.” (Teacher, surrounded by children dressed for a Nativity play, to a little girl costumed as an angel.)
  • Whitney Darrow, Jr., Aug. 4, 1975 — “Guess what I dreamed last night. I dreamed I was at a dinner where Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Alan King, Flip Wilson, and Henny Youngman were roasting me.” (Woman talking to her husband as they eat breakfast.)

Other snippets:

  • Talk of the Town, James Lardner, Sept. 3, 1984 — “[Dr. Albert Lowry, “America’s most interviewed real-estate educator,” at the New York Penta Hotel] told about some of the deals he had made, one involving some property that he had bought from Phyllis Diller. He traced most of the financial failures of the real estate field to a tendency to forget the old maxim “Caveat emptor.” Dr. Lowry is the author of the best-seller “How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate.” He offers further advice in a two-day seminar that costs $495. Many of those in the audience of the free lecture swarmed to the registration table with their checkbooks at the ready.”
  • Talk of the Town, William McKibben, Sept. 17, 1984: “…the Amazing Kreskin, a mentalist who has made nearly 300 appearances on the Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin & Johnny Carson shows. Phyllis Diller once called him ‘a male witch who should be burned at the stake.'”