Tag Archives: humour

Guest post

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

SUNDAY POEM
The Poet with His Face in His Hands
You want to cry aloud for your

mistakes. But to tell the truth the world

doesn’t need anymore of that sound.
So if you’re going to do it and can’t

stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t

hold it in, at least go by yourself across
the forty fields and the forty dark inclines

of rocks and water to the place where

the falls are flinging out their white sheets
like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that

jubilation and water fun and you can

stand there, under it, and roar all you
want and nothing will be disturbed; you can

drip with despair all afternoon and still,

on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched
by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,

puffing out its spotted breast, will sing

of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.
by Mary Oliver

from The New Yorker

How many blogs? How many Facebook accounts?

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

How many social media entities does it take to spread one out over our species?

I am limited, having just five main email addresses I use actively, and maybe half a dozen blogs I maintain, only three Facebook profiles I update, not to forget the Pinterest and other social media sites that are updated automagically.

In the midst of that, I live and breathe.

What makes a greenhouse a living space or vice versa?

Can the word “punk” and the phrase “Waffle House” exist together? Yes, at Aretha Frankenstein’s in Chattanooga.

I say I want to be a hermit but I easily let a friend (well, not just any friend (the friend (she knows who she is))) get me back on social media with the only hesitation a five-hour daytime sleeping period to keep me on schedule with my night shift job, even on summer holiday.

I look down at my hands, observing the thinning skin, the early knotted knuckle signs of arthritis, the freckles and sunspots, wondering: will I live to 6th May 2050?

My thought structure passes through many phase shifts and subsets, pausing in Venn diagrams of interconnectedness, looking in all directions, asking myself: why am I asking myself questions, as if I’m not here with myself seeing me ask questions for which I already know the answers or already know I don’t know the answers?

Why do I pretend there is an Other/Not-Me which needs to see I already know the answers or already know I don’t know the answers?

Who am I? Who are we?

No, really.

When we know everything is grounded in reality but believe in magic/miracles/the unexplainable anyway…

Why?

We carry forward the successful thought patterns of our ancestors, regardless of its practical application today.

Sometimes as history (lest we forget the lessons our ancestors learned), sometimes as fairy tales/fantasy (as entertainment), sometimes as integral parts of our thought sets (because what worked in the past still works in the present/near future).

And if we could prove that thoughts do not exist in a vacuum, then what?

How do we extinguish the illusion of an independent person having independent thoughts?

How do we show that every one of us is just/miraculously a localised spinoff of stardust in motion?

How often should we tell, rather than show?

How long will it take for everyone to see the obvious?

And for/to what purpose?

Saving the species from/for itself, even if species is a concept that should lose it illusion powers?

What does a benign universe provide itself in the localised forms taken in our shapes?

Other than randomness?

We are random, no worries, there, because we also do not exist, despite ancestral teaching to the contrary.

It is here that a good joke is inserted to take our thought trails in a lighthearted direction:

Charles Schulz — “My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?”

Adding core workouts to my physical therapy

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

Time to add core body workouts to my physical therapy?  You mean, other than sleep, eat, and breathe? Lol

I think I’m ready!

Here ya go:

“3 exercises for the core developed by Dr. Stuart McGill, that will increase your endurance and protect your back: modified curl-up, side bridge, and bird dog, collectively known as ‘the big three’.

“1. Modified Curl-Up

“Lie your back with one knee bent and one knee straight, this puts your pelvis in a neutral position and the muscles of your core in an optimal alignment of pull to avoid strain on the low back. Place your hands under the arch of your low back and ensure that this arch is maintained throughout the curl-up. Start by bracing your abdomen; this is different from flexing your abs, bear down through your belly. Now make sure you can take a breath in and a breath out while maintaining this brace. If you cannot, stop there and practice doing just that until you’ve got it mastered! Now, pretend that your spine in your neck and your upper back are cemented together and do not move independently. Pick a spot on the ceiling and focus your gaze there, lift your shoulder blades about 30° off the floor and slowly return to the start position. Take note of your neck, and ensure that your chin isn’t poking forward when you do a curl up. If you’re struggling with that, focus on making a double chin. Perform 3 sets of 10-12.

“2. Side Bridge

“Lie on your side and prop yourself up on your elbow. Ensure that your elbow is directly under your shoulder to avoid any unnecessary strain through your shoulder joint. With your legs straight, place your top foot on the ground in front of your bottom foot. Place your top hand on your bottom shoulder. While maintaining the natural curve of your spine, that is to say, be sure that your upper body isn’t twisted or leaning forward, brace your abdomen, squeeze through your gluteals (clench your bum), and lift your hips up off the ground. Don’t forget to breathe! Hold for 8-10 seconds, repeat 3 times. As the exercise becomes easier, increase the number of repetitions as opposed to the length of time. There are a number of ways to modify this exercise in order to increase or decrease the difficulty such as the example below on the right. If it’s not challenging enough, try putting that top hand on your top hip, or straight up in the air, but again, be sure your body stays straight!

“3. Bird Dog

“Start on your hands and knees with your hands shoulder width apart directly under your shoulders, and knees hip width apart directly under your hips. Maintain a neutral spine. Brace through your abdomen and squeeze your gluteals. Ensure you can maintain this while you take a breath in and out. Lift your right arm in front until it’s level with your shoulder, squeezing the muscles between your shoulder blades as you do so. At the same time, extend your left leg straight back until it is level with your hips, squeezing your gluteals, and keeping your hips square to the floor. Return to the starting position in a slow and controlled manner, and perform the same action with the left arm and right leg. That is one repetition. Perform 3 sets of 8-10 repetitions. As this exercise becomes easy, focus on co-contracting the muscles of your forearm and arms while you extend, the same goes for the muscles of your legs. For an additional challenge, instead of putting your hand and knee back down on the ground between reps, try just sweeping the floor and performing the next rep right away, or draw a square with your arm and leg and then sweep the floor.”

Wisdom is what wisdom gives, often takes

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

In a world of humour — working with, hanging out with younger people — I want my jokes within blog posts and my likes within social media to prevent them from repeating what I’ve done if they can learn it faster some other way.

[Instead of telling them what to do or preaching to them…]

My nephew’s accomplishments are a prime example — figuring out international relations without working in business for 25 years — excerpt below:

“This was my first time to visit the UN. Actually, my first time in New York City.  Working with the United Nations has been a dream of mine since I was a young boy. 

. . .

“Now I understand people, not documents, protect human rights.  International governance works when purveyor of rights–people–are vigilant and unrelenting in the protection of their dignity.  For those who may not have the opportunity to self-advocate, such as persons with disabilities, we must not put words in their mouths or patronizingly speak for them.  They can speak for themselves. We, the able-bodied population, must offer our louder megaphones to them to ensure their voices find expression.  The UN works when we, the global community, work with institutions of all levels–local, regional, national, and international–to ensure “no one is left behind” in the pursuit of a world enshrining human dignity and respect.  The UN is indeed an ideal but people have the real power.  Realistic idealism, in this regard, may be the optimal method to promote and protect human rights.  We, the people, owe it to all members of society to remain vigilant, purposeful, and passionate in our advocacy. The tireless self-advocacy of persons with disabilities at the 10th anniversary of the CRPD is a poignant reminder that apathy and indifference has no home in even the most marginalized populations.  As a student of human rights and a global citizen at large, this experience changed me for the better.”

Too repetitious?

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

“Certain subjects begin to repeat themselves: dogs chase the Google Street View car in Peru and Russia, while a dog in Chile just stares as the car goes by; workers by the side of the road wear bright orange uniforms in one country, bright orange ones in another.” [ from the New Yorker, An Agoraphobic Photographer’s Virtual Travels, on Google Street View, by Andrea Denhoed]

Coffee, power, breakfast 

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

Arms and shoulders tired, sitting in a sunny cafe, waiting for breakfast to energise my morning physical therapy…

Brain is relaxed, thoughts moving slowly…

Should this writer expect more than a day’s pay for a day’s work, or can one invest one part of one’s earnings to build a personal trust fund which gives one a life after one’s useful working years are over?

What value does one place on instant gratification?

What is peace?

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

Once again, I have made peace with the world.

What is peace?

Peace, of course, is a concept, a label, a symbol, all of that.

I do not exist, therefore a nonexistent entity making something called “peace” is all imaginary.

The world is easy enough to grasp as both an entity and a concept.

At a multicellular level, I am not at peace, my body always fighting entropy, battling bacteria and viruses floating around in my system, breathed in and pooped out on a regular basis.

So what, then, is peace?

It means I have let go of the parts of me that in my youth wanted to explore the universe off of this planet.

I am no longer 5, 15, 25, 35 or even 50.

To be sure, age is just a number and more than one person my age or older has traveled to the International Space Station orbiting Earth but I am not them.

I am me.

It is in my personal best interest, healthwise, to fold up the circus tent under which I was entertaining people around me and return to the meditation platform in the woods where I can rest during the day whilst quietly spending half of the night shift working alone preparing blood product inventory for delivery to hospitals.

I am contented, not necessarily happy, but able to enjoy myself and no longer fill my thoughts with the lives of others who, although they gave me a level of exuberant happiness, also left me feeling old, unable to keep up with their busy lives, as busy as I was when I was their age 25-30 years ago.

I unattach myself from the surface of others whose lives I mimicked as a chameleon.

I am happiest here, writing, wherever my butt is seated and my hands have a keyboard or pen and paper on which I compose these ditties.

Peace is simplicity and frugality.

Peace is my thought set devoid of a running commentary justifying its existence, shouting for attention, and seeking quick thrills.

Delta, Dawn, Dune

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

Connections.

Networking.

Talking Sister Rosetta Tharpe with one friend, capacitors with another, and how to properly brew Piper & Leaf branded tea with a third.

All within the greater community connection that is dancing.

Yes, dancing has connected me to the following, at the least:

  • Cosplay/Dragon*Con
  • Oil change discounts
  • Barcode readers
  • Weekly social gatherings
  • Outdoor photography with friends
  • LGBT rights
  • Rocket/missile engineering/engineering in general
  • Juggling multiple jobs
  • Local Maker movements
  • Online roleplaying/multiplayer gaming
  • Massage/physical therapy
  • Haunted buildings/locations
  • Multiple emotional/mental conditions (depression/bipolar/dissociative/schizophrenic, etc.)
  • Traveling for weekend dance competitions (not unlike car racing, gymnastics, tennis, etc.)
  • Recruiting
  • Promoting/marketing
  • Local art communities
  • Municipal growth planning
  • Extraterrestrial exploration/colonisation
  • Greater exposure to different music genres
  • Polyamorous relationship management skills
  • Watching young people expand their talents into other fields
  • Watching people 40 and older rediscover the simple joys of living
  • The international language of dance overcoming all socioeconomic sub/cultural barriers
  • Myself

In times past, I spent Sunday mornings meditating on a subject or two, often asking more questions than reaching conclusions, setting up thought trails to explore the rest of the artificial seven-day block we call a week (trying living without a watch or calendar and see if you recognise a week; you might tune yourself into periods of a day and a lunar month but will you feel a week go by if there are no specific days you need to do anything?).

My latest electronic project has turned into the next evolution of the personal care chair, a seating device that senses your posture, wrapping itself around your torso and gently correcting your posture, working pressure points to ease muscle/ligament/tendon pain, keeping you alert when you need it and reminding you to relax occasionally, as well as push you up to exercise your body, tied as it is to your fitness tracking device (smartwatch, phone, wristworn activity tracker, etc.).

I started physical therapy recently to work my upper body, hoping to build muscle and bone mass in an effort to stop the bouts of vertigo my general practitioner/primary care physician believes is caused by pinched nerves in my neck/spinal column.

One of the physical therapists I also met through dancing.

Is there anything anymore in my life that isn’t related to dancing?

We live on a small planet, third cooling molten rock mass from the Sun, so I know better than to feel or act shocked that we humans connect through common interests.

Yet the child in me enjoys amazement and awe.

The teenage boy in me enjoys his own amazement and awe that is kept at bay for no other reason than I am what I am, an awkward nerd whose looks, age and ability to deflect people away from the real me through the art of conversation gets tiring after a while.

Sometimes I wonder why I carry an eclectic set of social data in my thoughts from which I can parse sentence structure and make sense in general conversation whether I know what I’m talking about or just am interesting enough that people ignore my ignorance, inferring from the few words I blurt/write that I know more than I do.

The wisdom of aging has its advantages.

Time was when I wished I was wise enough to seek wealth.

Then the training of my youth kicked in, driving me back to the monkhood for which I was destined.

I don’t know how to live in two worlds and the confusion has clouded my weekly meditative writing.

Two worlds, one which is the monkhood with my marriage that I gladly enjoyed for ten years, the second is the sexual attraction infused in dancing that counteracts my celibate marriage and draws me to see human bodies in a way that constantly confuses me since the nerd in me has no experience seeking out sexual relationships with others.

The denial of sex with others has fueled my creativity for decades, including writing and electronic gadget construction.

Dancing fuels my writing but takes away from my laboratory time.

At my age, 55+ years, and in semi-retirement, working for a local nonprofit, what or who am I?

Does anything matter anymore — labels, symbols, philosophical stances, subcultural beliefs?

The child in me and the future geriatric self wait for an answer that may not exist.

I return to the mantra that I do not exist, therefore I am not important.

I am at peace in my thoughts.

That much I know.

At my age, that’s all that matters.

I spend the day with my wife, give her the attention she seeks from her life partner, a person who lets me be me as long as she feels important (the primary person in my life), a person who feeds me and clothes me, for the most part taking care of me and my health.

What else am I to do because I don’t know how to care for myself?

I sit here and write, that much I know about feeling peaceful.

Everything else is just random interaction in the connectedness of the dance world.

I need not find patterns where they don’t exist.

I need not project the future in hopes of saving our species from global destruction.

I will die soon enough, might as well remain as peaceful as I have in the past, enjoy the ride and not question the beneficial/detrimental effects of the transportation device.

I no longer struggle with who I am.

My actions speak louder than words.

No need to be confused.

Breathe, eat, sleep.

A set of states of energy in motion which needs no overlay of symbols to justify its existence; i.e., the secret to happiness.

Live and let others live/die as they please, interference from me unnecessary.

[On a side note, I wonder if the Meclizine and ondansetron, combined with physical therapy easing decades of pain, have led to this new calmness in my thoughts…certainly, uncertainty about my vertigo and the piercing pain in my neck for 40 years have made me feel like I’ve always been running away from something; now that I have a solution, I don’t need to run away anymore, no need to pretend to be someone else in order to hide the real physical pain that has defined me since high school, from which I used to think there was no escape.]

Metal hinge

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

I was a teenage script kiddie.

Go ahead, laugh at me, I can take it.

Motivated by love for a friend of mine, a future computer engineering genius, I emulated his coding skills, mimicked his sense of humour in programming comments, hoping he’d approve of my own cleverness.

He never did, ridiculing my lack of originality, accusing me of merely being an engineer whilst he was the true scientist exploring uncharted territory through scientific experimentation.

He saw me as his assistant, the comic sidekick who was good-looking, able to score funding from parents and friends via my charm and personality.

In other words, he couldn’t live without me for a couple of years.

He wouldn’t admit he loved me, too.

Fraternal love, is it different than romantic love?

Do plant roots love rain?  Can they distinguish water falling from the sky, which has collected minerals in the air in its gravitational journey toward the center of our planet, from river water? Do they understand concepts of inflow and infiltration?

Every time I work on electronic equipment, in the back of my thoughts I think of Joey and the joy we shared building our first CPU-based systems, having “graduated” from single transistor and R/C/D (resistor/capacitor/diode) based systems. 

I say I build these systems now for Guin and Shelmi.

And I do.

But I also honour older relationships.

It is who I am, connected to sets of states of energy which no longer exist, knowing as we do that friends we had 40 years ago are not the same persons whose names they keep perpetuating.

The electronic dance partner taking shape in my laboratory will remain essentially the same throughout its period of utility.

Do we see what that means in how we define living systems?

Rate of change.

Labels.

Sets and subsets.

Summer solstice — would entities on other planetary systems understand that phrase?

Do I?

Time to let go of me (again)

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

Back in the laboratory where I feel most comfortable, where the only person I entertain is me.

I started a new life a few weeks ago, switching to the night shift at work, thinking I would free up my days and evenings to spend more time with people.

After a few weeks of this newfound freedom, I find myself back here in the home creative workspace where inventing new friends from electronic parts gives me a kind of joy that is spread out over a long stretch of time, unlike the quick roller coaster rides of joy on the dance floor that addictively attract me to those with whom I’ve danced.

I am at heart a solitary person who likes romantic walks under the stars with himself writing poems to imaginary people, sharing my writing with real people who most closely match my imagination.

Do I know what love is?  Not really.  I understand what working relationships are, where we pay attention to the needs of our fellow human beings, selflessly exchanging goods and services (including time) to meet the needs of others.

Otherwise, I don’t know what love is.

I don’t even know if I love myself.

I pause here in my life, taking a break from having fun imagining what it’s like to have fun with others, to let go of my selfish pursuit of friendships and look at these electromechanical parts in front of me, figuring out what I can uniquely do with them that I haven’t seen someone else assemble from their imagination.

Woz is right — motivation is better than knowledge in the realm of human endeavours.

I love to dance, love the people who love to dance.

I also love being alone.

I am not alone in this feeling of balancing social life vs. personal alone time, so sitting here alone in the workshop on dance night is not unique in itself.

It is 21:39, an hour and a half away from when I should leave the house and head toward my night shift job doing my part in the healthcare business to save lives.

I heard from “Helen” on social media.  We are still connected to each other although we haven’t seen each other in decades.  The short years we spent together in high school and college seemed like forever at the time.  The nearly fatal motorcar smashup which gave us both head concussions and shoulder/neck injuries almost 40 years ago still plague us today.

From that car wreck, my brain’s neural network changed, instantly forcing me to question the reality of everything I see.

I equate what I felt in the 30 seconds of regaining consciousness in the backseat of a car after the concussion to the dissociative characteristics of hallucinogenic entheogens.

I see everything differently, more so than when I was five years old and woke up to see brainwashing aspects of social training.

It does not make me any more different than others.

I have talked to myself in sufficient quantity tonight.

Talk to you again soon, Rick!

Maybe you’ll shake off this dull edge of lack of sleep and find happiness.

As your wife told you the other day, you haven’t truly laughed in pure joy in a long damn time.

Are you ever going to laugh and have fun again?

Does trying to have friends, trying to understand what they’re saying, when you can even hear them, require such hard work that it’s not fun anymore?

Right now, sadly, it seems so.

Boo hoo, the luxury of middle class, midlife bourgeois quasicrises! Ha ha ha ha ha! rofl

Close this self pity party blog entry and get back to work, you slob! Your future self will thank you!