21 Questions Adhere To The Wall

Only 13,519 days to go.  Is that still the 6th of May 2050?

The backward science on this planet in the the second decade of what some call their 21st century frequently tries my patience.

Just like this momentary search for a map (found it!) and what it means (yet to be found) but tying it to the date given to me, the 6th of May 2050, makes some if not more sense.  Does the camel saddle in the bottom of the sea chest have a meaning?

Living in the zeitgeist is all we have, isn’t it, because somehow, some way, we are attached to the local environment in which our sets of states of energy prove the concept of the conservation of mass.

I borrowed six books from the library and have need to spend time reading them.  I will list their titles later today or in the week.

I am floating in the artificial cloud of happiness, content that, no matter the habits of fellow writers, I am me, having written well, poorly, or not at all.

Will it truly be 20-year old proven technology that ends up on the Moon and Mars for risktaking, adventurous pioneers and settlers to survive with/upon?  If not, what is the ultimate “firmware” that can be reprogrammed in realtime like Transformer bots that have no final, definite shape, form and function(s)?

How much pain are you willing to take to achieve your goal?

Looking at a map of planet Earth, Guinevere traced the ribbons, ellipses and circles of fresh water with her eyes.

Old riverbeds showed up unexpectedly.

Towns followed geographic terrain more often than not.

Military bases popped up in urban and sparse landscapes.

A single drop of water contained more living beings than could be counted in a single second.

Why does water cover the surface of the planet?

Why do we breathe air (low-humidity gas) instead of water?

Why is Russia such a large country and Africa a such a large continent of small countries?

So much water on one planet and practically none on another…sigh…

The blue orb of Earth shows little evidence of our species’ impact from the viewpoint of Mars.

Why did it take so long for us to get here, settling down to the business of putting Earth behind us and the galaxy ahead of us?

Just because of water?  That’s all?  That’s all there is to life?

Why is Greenland covered with so much frozen water?

Why is Mars not?

When did we learn to adapt dehydrated versions of ourselves to the Martian environment?

Doesn’t seem that long ago…

The drunk guy who wore a lamp shade as a hat to a fashion show and won

There are, in the course of a river of jokes, ways to misdirect your audience so that what they think is the punch line was actually a line to the hors d’oeuvres. Or a line to the bathroom.

At my age, I have played roles that featured in bad office Christmas parties (walking in on the guy who just vomited all over the hotel lobby bathroom floor) and business training videos (hosting an international meeting on my cell phone, making sure we were all respectful of cultural nuances in conversation, while I was sitting a few feet from the family waiting for me to join them for a sumptuous Christmas dinner).

What I have discovered is that…well, what have I discovered?

First, there was little reward besides a comfortably stuffy office environment, great healthcare coverage and worldwide travel expense accounts for working in an office job. I only had to pretend to be a serious grown up for a number of years to reap my reward.

But then I got bored with the ways of the Jedi boss adult.

Ultimately, I found the whole acting job just that — a big act.

The people I met in upper management were focused on goals I did not desire, such as bigger house/car/vacation/empire/recognition/influence. Some were moving along their paths of perceived destiny in the world playground, simply finding more interesting things to talk about, looking forward rather than repeating their past mistakes and triumphs.

If all of us are acting, then I am going to act the part of the laughing hermit who wasn’t good enough to die young and goes on talking to himself here to verify his theory that all else is illusion until my babbling becomes completely incoherent and I die at an old age of natural causes, everything being natural, of course.

Redacted, retracted, redux

I don’t know what it is that puts me in a mood like this, this feeling of smugness, this desire not to believe in myself, to always be wrong, always chasing the perfect 100 on a test score as if I’ll never get it, running from my mistakes, fleeing into the cosmos.

Why?

Because of both my faith in AND my fear of our species’ imperfections.

I do not want to be successful.

Instead, always vigilant, looking for the crack in the veneer, analysing the pinhole leak in the dam, contemplating the lack of understanding everything going on in a cubic centimeter of dirt.

Why?

Because we can make films about our mistakes, films which contain their own mistakes, and we learn from neither, or the lessons we learn and the solutions we apply solve a different set of problems because time is irrelevant, only relative.

That is why we seek perfection in our theosophical beliefs.

Otherwise, tarnish, rust and decay should be taken as normal aspects of our impermanence.

I am chasing my tail in an M.C. Escher print.

Freedom to think without an assigned theme or classroom score

Being here, with me, an Internet radio station and the sun-fed trees outside my window, I’m free to expand my thought patterns upon this blank canvas of an electronic writing pad.

Mixing metaphors if I choose.

If still waters run deep, why do oceans have waves?

Mixing media of varying density and thickness.

My father…a year ago, we were working with medical professionals to seek a path of better health for Dad, “better” being a term we wished for and hoped for more than knew was an illusive condition.

My typical reaction to “serious” situations, the result of turning nervous worry into positive joking action, constantly kept me on the edge of making comments my father, should he have been in a better mood/thought set, would not have approved.

Our senses of humour were not aligned.

I can ask myself why at this point, without tears or sadness seeping into my wonderment, why Dad did not understand or chose not to encourage my funny side.

He implied more than said that the man of laughter has a harder way to tread to the pinnacle of success than a man who treats everyone with seriousness and respect for their emotions/life conditions (i.e., the burdens they bear that are eased with sympathy and empathy).

That is, of course, my interpretation.

But I have heard others tell me that laughing at the wrong time or not taking adult responsibilities is not what my physical presence inspires others to encourage.

I have had plenty enough of what others expect.

Splitting into nearly schizophrenic thought sets to accommodate others and myself at the same time is not the set of states of energy I want to maintain and nourish.

After all, the self is a self-delusional illusion, a trick of chemical reactions that has brought nature to this point, with black pixels outlined on a white-light background, to examine itself, without reproductive needs being met, to spin in place while setting conditions for the next outburst of creativity that knows no ethical/moral boundaries, no positive or negative thought patterns, simply taking the sets of states of energy as is and moving on into the next imaginary moment/time period.

While our species holds public discussions about the subcultural struggles of how to treat the non-heterosexual members, how do other species behave?

I, for one, have seven billion friends to spend time with, some I have been conditioned to treat as equals and some I have been conditioned to hold at arm’s length for at least a brief period of time because our differences are sufficient to keep me from immediately understanding what makes us members of the same species.

We invoke the ancient writings of our ancestors to protect us from having to question or having to accept that subcultures rise and fall in popularity.

We rarely see that talking about our “enemies,” whether with good or bad word patterns, gives them validity.

Memes…

Symbols…

From the 10,000 year/mile distance, the memes and symbols merge into bigger patterns.

Tempests in the teapot of a planet, barely making waves in a solar system, practically invisible in a galaxy, hardly discernible in a supercluster.

Entertaining, nonetheless.

Because I am comfortable in the meaninglessness of my insignificance, the self a temporary confluence of states of energy, I have found the longer view a driving force in my writing, in my [non]existence, seeing 13528 days, rotations of Earth upon its tilted axis, into an imaginary future while having fun laughing about the tragedies of the moment, including my own.

It is, at the same time, a self-examination of one as a member of a species.

Is it not statistically normal to want to reproduce and provide shelter for one’s mammalian offspring, the majority of whom are right-handed, heterosexual, male, dark-haired and dark-eyed non-alpha primates?

I am left-handed, heterosexual, male, red/white-haired, green-eyed and non-alpha, without children.

Thus, statistically, not normal.  Abnormal.

Why, then, am I here recording my presence for the majority to, perhaps, read?

Why, indeed.

The confluence of states of energy, this “me” that “I” say does not exist, is the answer.

Avoiding the messy, daily adult responsibilities of an almost 51-year old man, that’s who and what.

Long ago mentally prepared to die at any time, having successfully achieved the goals of my childhood desire to be a published author.

The rest is an endless buffet of desserts filled with laughter and inappropriate humorous thoughts, thankful that the rest of the species is here to support me with characters and scenes to write during the remainder of my life.

Rogue traders can destroy a company in milliseconds — it only takes one of all three

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

Denial can blind.

It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.

Technology is both an end in itself and a means to other ends. When you figure something out and make it work, there is pleasure and excitement. Not just because the technology is going to do something, but because you created something with its own inherent beauty, like art, like literature, like music.

All art is in some fashion escape. It sucks you out of your own life. It absorbs you.

You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.

Satisfaction doesn’t come in moments but in periods of time.

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that’s a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn’t the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.

Take a bit of the future and make it your present.

Names: Melody, Autumn, Garrett, Candice.
Places. Nouns. Pronouns but no connouns yet yes connotations.
Seeing reactions with no desire to profit from them.
Laying crumbs along a trail, asking the birds to peck their way along behind, not the pied piper, recalling Latin lessons about silva and “p” words that trigger dim memories of pied (pronounced pee-ed rather than pie-uhd).
Conscious and unconscious at the same time again and again, seeing connections, sensing subconscious influences upon fleeting conversations, creating twists and turns on trails to hide going in a circle, corpuscle, corporal, corporate, cerebral cycle.
Trigger finger over the keyboard, waiting for the signal to press/type/click.
But with touchscreens, it’s press/swipe/touch.
Multifinger gestures.
Gestation, Guest station, Geriatric, Acrobatic, Aeronautic.
Cranking through the sausage maker, maker, maker, maker…
Imaginary rhythms, a wooden finger tacked to the wall, cough drops fall, that’s all.
Disjointed intersections of ceilings and floors.
Can a ceiling touch the floor?
Can a floor touch the sky?
What makes the sky “up”?
She sits
But she doesn’t sit for long
She waits for no one
Others wait for her
No time for her
Because time is meaningless
Words do not touch
The stirrings of her soul
She prepares each movement
Like a tai chi master in meditation
The turn of a wrist
Raising an eyebrow
Sitting in a chair
Listening for the silence between heartbeats
Music only she knows
Folds in her skin deepen
Aging finely maybe wisely
She sleeps
But she doesn’t sleep for long
Trumpets blaring ideas deep within her brain
Push her out of bed
Ideas scribbled on the napkins of last night’s mind
Fade too quickly for human use
Extraterrestrials passing by the planet
Record the thoughts for later dissemination
A purpose for being
Being not the purpose
She moves on
Like water from a fallen bamboo flute into a pond
Fish breathing her in
Exhaling her out
Discordant sounds of a Qinqiang
Playing up her strengths
The paper bird pales in the sun
And flies away.
— 10 Dec 2004, Rick Hill

Surrounding the barn with farmhands after the horses have escaped…

The problem, Guinevere found, was deciding whether she was in a game or whether she was the game.

That’s the problem.

But then what about her status as a muse?

Hadn’t she posed for a set of photographs?

Those are the questions.

Who was the artist who would make her as permanent a fixture in history as any muse before?

What is art?

Are the men who bombed a marketplace considered artists?

What about the huge explosion in West, Texas?  Is that art?

Were the designers of the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima artists?

Is surburban sprawl art?

A mud puddle covered with a sheen of oil has artistic lines, does it not, even if the oil will kill the bird soaked to death in oil’s gooey grip.

Dava Newman BioSuit

Guinevere looked up at the Martian sky once more.

She checked her internal calendar, verifying that the 4th of May was not that far off.

Then what?

Why did she keep comparing her days on Mars to an Earth-based calendar?

Hadn’t she left all that behind?

Decades ago, by Earth standards.

Guinevere kicked one boot against another and leapt into the air, arching over the outpost, heading out to a hillside, a secluded place of meditation, a luxury that she shared with a few, a xeriscaped garden of peace and quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of the colony.

What does it take to be a muse these days?

Do you listen to music when you write?

In a billionaire’s game, people are willing to be paid to die because, as we know, people are only so many mixtures of chemicals that, when you get down to it, are indistinguishable from the robots we are meeting in our rush toward godhood.

What if a robot volunteers to place a bomb on a crowded street?

Or intentionally programs a chemical factory to explode?

And when the robot follows orders from another robot which originated the idea, then what?

Can you define the phrase “inalienable rights” without looking it up?

Training a whole population to believe that its only hope for survival is to focus a large portion of its resource pool on space exploration is never straightforward.

Seven billion sets of thoughts divided into subsets in and out of your direct control.

Instead, focus on a planet within a solar system.

Egotistical personalities will want to claim they’re right.

Let them.

Use them.

But don’t abuse them unless the mob calls for their heads.

Assuming, of course, that the mob fell out of your control temporarily and you need scapegoats to realign the mob mentality in the direction where your invisible compass points.

Mix in a self-deprecating sense of humour.

Let random lyrics of songs seep into your speeches.

Pop culture is your friend, not a fiend, no matter how much the current trends are abhorrent to your sensibilities.

Let artists speak your subliminal messages, giving the people heroes, enemies and anti-heroes galore, creating new legends and myths as soon as the old ones fade in popularity.

The thin atmosphere of Earth is a poor shield to lean upon for too long.

The crust underneath our feet crumbles constantly.

Security is an illusion of time and space.

Take time to laugh, smile and love.  Hate and fear will find their own ways into the lives of your acquaintances and loved ones.

The Prophecy of Self, Fulfilled

Vghu is, like all of us, a set of states of energy.

Yet Vghu was not directly tied to any one corresponding set — not gravitationally-attached to a planet nor dependent on oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles for life sustenance.

Vghu lived on a plane of existence that was easily understandable but hard to explain.

We who read this think we are advanced enough to comprehend everything about the universe or at least able to adapt and expand our thought sets to accommodate new information about what is outside the thought boundaries of galaxies and universes.

We want to say that everything is a set of states of energy.

But what is a set of states of energy, when you get down to it?

We have symbols we correlate with phenomena, like E=m(c*c).

Conditions which are observed to be locally consistent in behaviour — action and reaction.

We pile assumption upon assumption until we have arrived at a situation we call modern civilisation which contains theorists, scientists, engineers, economists, politicians and relatively low-wage workers whose conditions reflect what will, in historical perspective, be called the slavery of the day.

Serfs and feudal lords.

Laws and regulations.

Local conditions that Vghu has little need for or comprehension of, conditions that describe the interaction of sets of states of energy which have followed a rational course and will continue** to branch out indefinitely, assumptions stated and premises approved.

Vghu does not live in the concept of time we demarcate with seconds and years.  Vghu has no insight into the distances we measure with sticks and laser beams.

Vghu is a matrix like us but not like us.

Vghu sees, but not anthropomorphically, the dark energy and dark matter we are just barely able to fill into blanks of formulae without instrumentation to measure.

To Vghu, our conventions and conventional methods are like the arguments of angels on a pinhead or the circulation of quarks in an atom to us — we are there but are practically invisible as far as Vghu’s interface with its surroundings are concerned.

Our planet, if Vghu even noticed its relatively dense composition compared to the space around it, would be a plaything if Vghu had an idea about what play meant.

A mere game of chance interaction of particles.

Thus, if we are invisible to Vghu, can we say that Vghu is invisible to us?

Doesn’t the contact of Vghu’s “self” with our universe cause ripples that, though large in almost indetectibly large waveforms, cause changes in perceptible patterns we measure daily?

Do the games we play, games of fun and games of subsistence living, indicate altered outcomes we hadn’t predicted because we had no way to account for Vghu’s passage?

We are unable to show how the solar wind sweeps through poker games in Las Vegas and shifts the leaderboard of horse races in Saudi Arabia at the same time that a child of three discovers linear algebra and calculus are more fun than fingerpainting diversions, let alone the effect of invisible forces that form a matrix of what we choose to call a set of states of energy at a level we have no instruments to measure, let alone theories to envelop*, as its effects subtly change the linear passage of time we call history.

In other words, when a game is in play, can you keep track of the hundreds of events that are shadowed by a few conventionally-horrific black swans or tails or disrupters we call crime in our insular, well-defined, inside-the-box daily living?

Which doors of perception are you keeping open?  Which windows of opportunity have you shut or have been closed in your face?

In creating and tracking your predictions about the future, are your computation devices able to keep up with changes in matrices and spreadsheets and algorithms and pigeonholes you think of on the fly that provide input for data you have stored for millennia in rock formations, star charts, newspapers and instant message logs?

What are the deltas and sigmas you account for?

I’m sitting on Mars, biting into a reconstituted bar of hardened goo that I want to pretend is a granola bar covered with chocolate because my brain can still suspend disbelief long enough for the sensation on my lips, tongue, cheeks, nose, esophagus and stomach to satisfy my craving for such an item.

Vghu’s impact on my existence with you here now was imperceptible for a long time even if time is/was irrelevant to Vghu’s interface with our place in the home we call this universe.

As far as we’re concerned, Vghu has been passing through us for billions of years.

Vghu is like the imperfections in a silicon computer circuit, shifting electrons well outside the level of tolerance needed for us to communicate together and understand each other.

However, the total number of changes similar to electron shifts are significant enough to point to something, something we now know is Vghu but are unable to acknowledge as such, shifts that make prophecies and predictions short of 100% reliable.

The game, in this case, is both afoot and a foot, unfortunately.

The deception of diversion is both a tactical error and a rounding error.

The points being made are both at our level and Vghu’s.

Labels are never what we make them out to be.

Symbols are never more than symbols, no matter how many experts weigh in about historic significance or point to clueless clues.

Take the smoke screens literally as smoke screens.

Perpetrators are only actors.

The puppeteers are the gamemasters and the pawns this time.

Between us and Vghu is more than you can imagine.

By our standards, connections won’t be made for thousands of years more, some for millions of years.

Messengers like to take holidays/vacations like everyone else.

Thank you and have a good day.

==============

[editor (13/4/18):**originally typed as “contain”; *originally typed as “envelope”]