[Personal notes – feel free to skip]

Having written and published several books, a few that actually made me money, I enjoy reading about the lives of  authors/novelists, what motivates them and got them started.

Take this fellow, “Americana,” for instance.

Like so many others before him, he is discovering the joy of dropping out of the rat race.

Leisure time.

How many young people, not just including trust fund babies, have fostered a luxury of life without the noise and haste of mass media?

Can you think of a book you read that talked about getting away from it all?

Isn’t this idea an odd thought, that one has gotten out of the hustle and bustle of daily living only to return to the life by proxy through writing about it?

What about those who live the life but don’t write about it?

Look around you.  Do you live amongst those who aren’t spending their time constantly connected and checking their online community?

I look at me.  Most days, the majority of conversation I have with any beings takes place between my wife and me in the mornings and evenings, the rest of the day spent sitting here or feeding/petting the cats, if I’m not taking a walk in the woods or riding a bicycle along a local river trail.

Close this notebook computer and I’m virtually cut off from the rest of the world.

Just me and my books and cats warming my lap.

In other words, happiness.

I was like the writer, Steve Tuttle, not too long ago — in meetings, on the phone, checking emails, creating/modifying spreadsheets, traveling across the globe, on a constant lookout for the latest breaking news in state-of-the-art technological advances that would enhance or greatly disrupt the business models which increased my personal wealth.

Then one day it hit me.  I was no longer working for myself.  I was working for a system of beliefs which were not my own but were given to me to accept as my own through years of primary/secondary/postsecondary education.

I was not interested in buying ever more expensive cars, eating in more luxurious restaurants or negotiating bigger and bigger deals.

I was interested in nurturing me.

But at the same time, I was interested in eliminating the expanding personality of me.

By stepping out of the need to participate in the social network of our species, I have stepped into a zone where one can observe patterns and predict trends because most of us follow a script we wrote together as a society a long time ago, are rewriting every day, in fact.

Which reminds me, how do empty-nesters feel after their lives, which were so wrapped around raising their little chickadees, suddenly end when the chicks grow wings and fly away?  Is it freedom or torture or just sheer boredom?

Just 13959 days until an event occurs that is chronicled in this blog.

Reality is only seven letters.  Which seven letters do you want to be?

As a funhouse mirror, I reflect both the good and bad in us, trying to make us think about the seeds we’re planting today for the trends we’ll follow tomorrow.

For instance, is there a possible resurgence in ultraleftwingism, followers of a group similar to the Socialist Party of old, workers who no longer feel “loved” by the corporate owners/leaders that employ them and rake in a lot more money through legislative-friendly policies that border on the exploitative?

Or, will this, solving the good business generation gap, be the new trend?

Finally, are states starting to see the light and will remove more nonviolent criminals from the prison system?

I’m willing to look backward and forward to find the trends that make my life of participating in the online community worth perpetuating.

Otherwise, the repetition of repetition gets repetitive, creating/mashing up offensive and nonoffensive jokes/observations/storylines to fend off ennui, all in the simple hope that we’ll see through the repetition and make a concentrated effort where/when our species will be the one to establish a colony of sustainable Earth-based lifeforms out of this planetary system.

It doesn’t matter to me what the people look like who inhabit the offworld colony or even if they’re totally “human” in today’s sense of the world, including cyborgs who live amongst us.  The goal is the same: hedging our bets, taking one egg out of the basket and placing it in a surrogate nest as far away from Earth as possible.

Everything else is recycling Earth’s resources over and over, no matter how much fun or interesting it may be, including this blog, the books I’ve written and the retail establishments I visit (and have visited, for which I owe a debt of gratitude to pay with mentioning them here again soon).

And if we determine that a lifeform different than us, such as a simple one-celled organism, has a higher chance of survival, especially when we’ve searched a celestial body and found no lifeform that we may endanger with ours or any other we bring, then I’m willing to “plant” that organism in hopes that it will seed the solar system.

Call me a farmer whose field is this local area of the galaxy, hoping that in the current 200-million-year window of opportunity, we can hop, skip and jump our way, in one form or another, to the next safe agricultural zone.

In the meantime, there’s the matter of dark matter to resolve, a whole field, a vast tract of land, on which we haven’t broken ground yet.