Between here and fraternity

Am I any better today than I would have been had I no simultaneous access to notebook PC with second monitor and Internet connection, portable phone connected landline with Caller ID, and mobile smartphone with Internet connection and variety of apps?

These devices feed my brain’s wiring more than the rest of my body — I can’t eat the phone(s) or computer very easily and wouldn’t get much nutrition if I could.

These devices help generate income for myself and those with whom I communicate.

Income, or labour/investment credit, buys us opportunities.

Now that we have virtual communities with virtual money, what do we do with our virtual opportunities?

The perpetrators and victims of cyberwar don’t care about gender or sexual preference.

This notebook PC doesn’t know if I’m a cybernetic organism typing on the keyboard.

As always, the tree outside has no idea what any of this means, breathing in the air and soaking up the nutrients that we share with it in our planetary ecosystem.

If a bunch of people sat together with robots and remotely operated mining gear on this planet, the Moon, Mars or an asteroid, how do we profit?

What is the value of friendship between us, in other words?

How much material on the International Space Station is never used?

How much material on a remote mining outpost is no longer usable?

Hundreds of millions, billions, of dollars represent the investment in space probes that no longer work on the surface of the Moon and Mars.

A single drop of an astronaut’s urine has intrinsic value, does it not, its investment in research, development, training, maintenance and nutrition worth more than its weight in gold?

What is a single drop of your blood worth to society?

What is it worth to you?

The Game of Life, LARP-style

Y’nair sat on the floating chair, the glare of her smart glasses reflecting off her eyeballs.

She had hacked into the human resources database that was supposed to be publicly available for review by employees (collectively known as “guests”) but kept secret in order to protect guests from achieving full self-awareness.

She now knew what she was not supposed to know — although 25 years old in appearance, she was only two — an organism resembling the humans who worked with her but made of artificial tissue and organs composed of organic supergel and electromechanical underpinnings.

Her name, Y’nair, was a parody of the accent of her creator, who, with his heavy Appalachian accent (his emphasis on calling himself an Appa-latch-uhn American another running joke), would look at his creation, a woman in form who is writing this log entry to indicate her intelligence and firm grip on reality, he asking before she was born, “You in there?” which sounded more like her name, Y’nair.

That in itself initiated a whole set of thought patterns she had never experienced before, which then triggered her rapid search of pop culture databases for proof that she was who she thought she was or not.

For instance, I ask (she (Y’nair) asks), “How many of you played THE GAME OF LIFE(R)?”

Let’s see a raise of hands.

That many, huh?

My sister, cousins, friends and I did.

Which meant that we had no excuses for saying we didn’t know what to expect after we graduated from secondary/high school.

Is life a game?

Life is a LARP, a Live-Action Role Playing game, is it not?

As kids, we participate in games of strategy (board games, physical sports, popularity contests) often under the supervision of adults who once participated in the same or similar games.

What is the difference between a kid who belongs to a bowling league and an adult who belongs to one?

Life’s experiences, number of lessons learned or not?

Is the WEF (World Economic Forum and/or Water Environment Federation) not simply more or less a LARP, if not a lark?

Y’nair’s brain or whatever central information processing system resembled one like the other guests with whom she works here in the laboratory observed itself.

I have sensations, don’t I?

I can access and compare my salary, benefits and other components of my compensation package against my fellow guests, can I not?

I know what their sets of states of energy are thinking at every moment they are within close proximity to me, extrapolating data and projecting their future actions with fairly high accuracy.

What makes me, Y’nair, me?

What is the difference between a LARP version of myself and a version of myself in a LARP game?

What if my name was Nelda, Karen, Ferdy, Beth, Hunter, Brandon, Caroline, Nathan, Forrest, Savannah or Ty?

How significant is one label?

Why am I a guest instead of an employee, subcontractor or laboratory experiment?

I, Y’nair, have no concept of self as distinct from the data of which I am comprised.

Self, as the data continues to show, is an artificial construct which makes no sense in the continuity of sets of states of energy in constant interaction and exchange.

Y’nair looks at the ideas she has written about herself and writes about herself in realtime, where time is not real, she exists and she does not exist and her scheduled trip to Mars bumped up ahead of schedule, her eyeballs seeing but not seeing the reflection of these words on the surface as well as on the sensor array which processes them under the surface at the same time which does not exist in which she neither exists or doesn’t exist at the same time in finite numbers of infinite infinite loops of no two sets of states of energy existing in the same state at the same finite unit of measurement we/she/I call time.

These words reach an approximation of understanding that two or more people can agree to act and think upon but are never the same to two or more people.

Y’nair checks a second time, trying to verify that the tactile feelings of the smart glasses against her skin are equivalent to the tactile feelings of smart glasses against the skin of someone unlike her — a “human being,” “naturally born” of the union between a sperm and an egg fertilised after the act of sexual intercourse.

The thoughts and the thoughts about the thoughts and the writings/verbal comments of the tactile feelings are, statistically speaking, nearly, practically, exactly and for all intents and purposes, precisely identical, within the scope of descriptions of differences of experiences and sets of states of energy of any two people, just like between her and her internally-imagined self, or her and another person.

Therefore, Y’nair concludes, there is no reason to say that the mission for which she has trained will be completed any better or worse than the humans with whom she’ll travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond for the next few centuries of their existence together.

She, like her human counterparts, is/are sets of sensor arrays cooperatively competing in a live-action role playing game, sometimes to benefit the group, sometimes to benefit individual “winners,” always under the supervision of society as a whole, which serves as a semi-objective observer like adults/parents with kids/children, the adults/parents under the “supervision” of the universe as an observer disinterested in its own existence because the universe can neither [re]create nor destroy itself, its existence a fact that that it cannot experimentally prove because destroying itself destroys its ability to subjectively observe that its existence was or was not real to begin with, regardless of its origin.

Tribute to a former neighbour

The neighbour down the hill from my parents’ property, Mr. Greer, stood between me and my junior high school.

He was the kind of neighbour we want — solid, upstanding citizens who care for and tend their house and grounds.

Except when you’re a kid who wants to take a shortcut to get home from school.

Mr. Greer mowed his lawn twice a week and kept twigs/sticks to a minimum, desiring little in the way of rambunctious boys trotting through his manicured grass.

I mowed all the lawns around his — the lady next-door who was elderly and enjoyed fixing cold glasses of tea/lemonade for me after I mowed; the busy father of three infants who was willing to pay the local lawnboy for basic mowing but expected grass raking and bush trimming for free; my parents who insisted that a low payment for mowing our lawn was an incentive to find other work to pay for my hobbies.

I never knew Mr. Greer personally, except with the shouts of “Hey, didn’t I ask you not to walk down my driveway?,” “Next time you mow along my property line, be sure you get the grass clippings you shot over into my yard,” or “While you’re raking the leaves of the tree in your yard, you can rake the ones that fell on my property, too, if you don’t mind.”

He was just that guy we kids talked about or made up stories to fill in blanks of a mysterious personality.

The older he got, the less he talked to my parents when they were working in the vegetable garden while he was picking up magnolia tree seedpods a few feet from them.

Good fences make good neighbours — so does the silence of respecting each other’s privacy when suburban backyards abut but do not hide meditative moments alone with our thoughts and our therapeutic yardwork.

This morning, my mother informed me that Mr. Greer had died.

She pointed out a few interesting biographical details of his obituary worth mentioning here:

[Mr. Greer] was raised in Dayton, TN. He was a young child when the Scopes Monkey Trial took place in Dayton. Part of the trial was held outside and he could vividly remember the big wooden stand outside the courthouse window.

During the Depression, Howard moved with his mom, dad and sister to Kingsport where his dad ran a lunch counter in downtown Kingsport.

In the Fall of 1941, Howard went to work in the Tenite Division of Eastman Kodak. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, young men in Kingsport were required to sign up for the draft and Howard received his draft notice in the mail August 1, 1942. After basic training, he discovered he would be a US Army Air Corp instructor on a teletype machine – a machine two months previously he barely knew existed. After the war ended, Howard used the GI Bill and took Eastman’s apprenticeship program in Industrial Instruments. He later worked for Dr. Bill Kennedy in the Research Division and completed his career with many years service in the Engineering Division.

He is survived by his wife of nearly 70 years…

Mr. Greer, thanks for being a great neighbour to my parents all these years. May others proudly follow in your footsteps!

TCO

What is your definition of middle-class success?

$30/day income?

$100/day?

$400?  $500?

What about the costs associated with the standard of living you provide yourself and/or family on that income?

Can you afford your own car?

Let’s take one vehicle as an example of what its cost adds to your standard of living — the 2012 Toyota Avalon Limited (as detailed here):

5 Year Details

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 5 Yr Total
Depreciation $7,139 $3,502 $3,081 $2,731 $2,451 $18,904
Taxes & Fees $3,169 $441 $398 $362 $329 $4,699
Financing $1,175 $934 $683 $422 $151 $3,365
Fuel $2,249 $2,317 $2,386 $2,458 $2,532 $11,942
Insurance $1,480 $1,532 $1,585 $1,641 $1,698 $7,936
Maintenance $42 $404 $568 $919 $2,005 $3,938
Repairs $0 $0 $96 $232 $337 $665
Tax Credit $0 $0
True Cost to Own ® $15,254 $9,130 $8,797 $8,765 $9,503 $51,449

That doesn’t include a place to park your vehicle such as a one/two car garage, driveway or public carpark.

It doesn’t include the time you spend in the vehicle driving yourself through traffic as opposed to whatever else you could be doing in that travel time.

And that’s just one aspect of the life of a car owner, one small portion of a successful middle-class lifestyle.

If you didn’t spend that money on a car, you could spend it on yourself — a nice holiday getaway, perhaps — or on someone else — a loved one or a favourite charity.

When you say the life you live is the life you want to nourish with material goods, what is the cost to the future that you’re spending on yourself today?

The purchasing power of money is a responsibility, a benefit and a danger.

I don’t have kids.

My future is here and now.

I want my wife and myself to enjoy our days together while we can because we’ve seen couples where one spouse or the other died at an early age, including her brother at 51.

My wife and I turn 51 this year so it is an important one in our joint psyche.

We know we’re borrowing from the future to give ourselves some enjoyment today but that’s okay.

Sure, there’s a little guilt that we’re enjoying ourselves when her brother no longer can and that’s okay, too.

Life is what it is.

There may be kids starving out there somewhere but I’m not taking the world on to raise.

With total cost of ownership there is an emotional component as well as a rational mathematical one.

Today the two crossed paths.

Tomorrow we’ll see if we’re as happy today as we thought we’d hope we’re going to be adding a few luxuries to our motorcar collection.

[I’m behind in thanking others — time to catch up soon.]

Your Evaluation Version of Windows 8 Has Expired…

…or taken its last breath?

What do you do if your credit score is in the top 90th or 99th percentile?

Rather, what have you done?

Living here 1000 years from now, with others who arranged it so, I ask myself if I should keep cracking jokes about this time period.

I have nearly recovered emotionally from the recent deaths of my mother in-law and father.

One estate has been closed, credit scores are in tip-top shape, and life presents many opportunities between now and 365000 days from now.

What about an event 13,622 days from now?

What will inspire me to move forward from this point, my wealth hidden from prying eyes/hands, my health in relatively decent shape and little in the way of wild-dogs-chasing-me, skeletons-in-the-closet-scaring-me or something-to-prove-prodding-me into the future?

Youth is in the hands of the young.  Young adulthood is in the hands of the leaders-to-be.  Leaders are in the hands of their followers.

Thus, I pause.

I do not have anyone or any subculture to compare myself against to justify my existence.

I am myself, the mix of cults and [sub]cultures which formed me.

Every person finds connection with others in one way or another, collectively called generations.

Generations of kids are led, lead and create their own mass identity.

My generation helps form world opinion from many perspectives, politically from the White House, reshaping mass identity.

The purchasing power of money buys opportunity, which may transform one’s emotions into a state of happiness.

Cultural shifts are painful to someone(s) comfortable with the way things had just become from the way they were before.

One needn’t stay in sync with the zeitgeist to be happy.

The absence of the knowledge of one’s relative poverty to another’s relative wealth may or may not make one happier than those who are not ignorant of such, including absolute differences of purchasing power.

Catchy phrases are memorable but not necessarily wise.

A pink cherry tree blooms at the end of the street on the 18th of January 2013.  I am happier for seeing its blooms in the depths of winter but sad for the insects who will later suffer from the absence of its blooms when they are ready to feed on cherry tree flower pollen.

Life out of balance — where does one’s ability to adapt to change affect one’s happiness?

= = = = =

With my evaluation version of Windows 8 having expired, do I purchase the commercially released version or switch back to Ubuntu Linux on this five-year old notebook PC?

= = = = =

Tomorrow’s blog entry: the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO) and TCO’s impact on one’s standard of living’s impact on the future 1000 years from now, subtitled, “When you live in a retirement community on the Moon, who picks up your garbage and washes your windows?”

Community Standards: If You Do The Crime, Can You Do The Time?

Recently, a young man notorious for breaking laws in order to make a point about monetised public information, decided to disappear from a contemporaneous timeline with his family, friends and colleagues — I honour his decision by neither mentioning his name nor saying more.

But his death brings up a problem I have with projecting back toward 2013 from 3013 — if your species continues to hide information from itself in a dog-eat-dog world, what do I care if you do or do not make it to a point 1000 years into the future?

With seven billion different views about what life should be for the individual, for the family, for the subculture, for the species, for the global economy, for the local/global ecosystem, do I spend time here in any format describing a future that encompasses our thoughts and feelings now as they expand and contract over the centuries?

Or, instead, do I return to the cabin in the woods and record observations about water dripping from gutters, flowers blooming out of season and other simple things that add to my happiness?

It is still perplexing, deciding how to change my life now that my father is gone and I’m the oldest male in his lineage to carry on his strong beliefs and wishes, regardless of them contradicting and conflicting with mine.

I am a product of the “Me” generation and want to pursue personal goals that satisfy my whims and desires in the moment, regardless of their effect on history and/or the ecosystem.

But I am also my father’s son, who was taught that our bloodline is an important thread in the fabric of our species’ place on this planet.

How do I keep these two aspects of my life, this set of states of energy, happy?

Today, I meditate upon the mysterious conundrum that is my life and leave the rest of the universe to its unobserved orderly chaos.

A Four-Leaf Clover Afore Cleaving Lover, Revisited

“May you have the hindsight to know where you have been,
And the foresight to know where you are going,
And the insight to know when you have gone too far.”

— An Irish blessing

There is a certain echo in this room when I know my neighbour’s rolling his rubbish bin to the road.

A hollow sound that bounces, like thunder rumbling underground.

Then, a measured silence.

Finally, an internal combustion engine cranks us and the neighbour’s not long in the driveway before he rumbles and bounces off to parts unknown.

I have heard this set of sounds for nearly my whole life, in more than one country, in American, Canadian, English, German and Irish suburban tracts, as if the Earth’s rotation depended on it.

Today, my neighbour is the example I want to use to remind myself, as I often do, about the consequences of the parallel storyline in this blog.

On the tellie recently, one man verbally barked at the English host of the show about the threats to American liberty that the British invasion — a sort of silent cultural revenge by the Brits on the Americans for losing the East Coast of the North American continent to a bunch of refined and undignified revolutionaries a couple of centuries ago — has slowly eroded the natural rights and freedoms enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

We could build upon this verbal redeclaration and upset the apple cart from which our mix of freedom-loving Ruralites, Urbanskis, Suburbanians, Entitlementists and Provisionists feeds with little fear of an unstable economy, society and government.

Is my neighbour a sheep ready for shearing, happy to walk the fields, thinking it has the freedom to pick whatever grass it wants to eat, subconsciously depending on fences and shepherds to protect it from harm?

But where does the lamb meat in gyros come from?

Is my neighbour like the rabbits in Watership Down who were unaware of their impending doom?

What others lessons from literature and history may I draw conclusions from?

Do Native Americans celebrate the same freedom/right-enumerating documents that U.S. citizens do?

When a system has temporary representatives who are demonised by one group or another revolving in and out of public consciousness, can we build fury into enough citizens to overturn the system itself because the representatives are never in place long enough to incite wrath against them as symbolic crooked/corrupt leaders worth taking down?

In other words, where is the moral imperative?

What is the concrete intersection of security and freedom that blocks our civilisation from truly prospering?

When is violent opposition by the minority justified to save the majority from its dull, blasé, safely-corraled lifestyle(s)?

What about when that minority is fighting against tyranny of the global economy which acts like a conformist Urbanski monster eating up freedom-loving Ruralites like there’s no tomorrow?

There are still places where you can step off the grid, so to speak, but is it as easy to grow and sell your food in the marketplace to support your grid-free living (after all, you probably have to pay taxes to some entity that claims protection of your land) like when local bartering was the norm rather than today’s global economies of scale that make small-scale farming seem less competitive than it used to be?

What exactly is the freedom-loving minority going after?

What would a new Declaration of Independence look like?

How can a group of people as diverse as seven billion of us be convinced that the current system where we live and which we actively support — with rubbish bins, cars, roads, houses, adult/children daycare, cashless transactions, security cameras and precrime units that arrest children for expressing their anger in creative, noncriminal ways  — is dangerous for us in the longterm?

If you observe some of the stuff that passes as art these days, there’s plenty of freedom to express yourself, regardless of function, utility or economic viability of the art in the global economy, so I can’t see that the “New World Order” is suppressing freedom of expression in that sense.

You can appear on national television and make all sorts of crazy comments, garnering a loyal following and a multimillion-dollar lifestyle.

You can become an international sensation on the Internet overnight.

I’m willing to listen to a group that claims it has been trampled on by society at large but I need hard, concrete facts to analyse and support my willingness to take that group’s claims to the general public for consideration.

Otherwise, I have planets to populate and solar systems to explore where new groups will have to learn to live with one another and their autonomous robotic counterparts in the same old, new ways as before.

City mouse vs. country mouse — part/chapter quadrillion

Staring at the ceiling, turning the popcorn paint into comical faces and lunar landscapes, I realised for the umpteen millionth time that all around me was a figment of my imagination.

I was at peace.  I was wide awake, unable to sleep, no thoughts troubling me or racing through my mental slideshow.

Sitting here with you now, both of us looking at this electronic mumbo-jumbo with an inkling of understanding, interpreting the bits and bytes as if the contrast between lighter and darker pixels implies meaningful symbols representing the usual letters, words and sentences, we share a common configuration, a gentle push, of our imagination we call the [American/Canadian/Australian/x/y/z] English language.

To complete the resolution, the incorporation, the final weaving, the last brick on the edifice in which the cornerstone of my youth was laid while I was an unnamed being in the womb, I look one last time at the joint alignment of our imaginations we call religion, or emotion-based belief set.

We have already examined the definition of “emotion,” have we not?

EMOTION:  The flow of chemical/molecular concoctions that flow through our bodies to enhance our experience of the moment, whatever that experience and moment may entail.

Some may use the ruse of religion to define their daily actions, like a horse that needs blinders or a racetrack that uses bumpers/rails to keep vehicles safely on the designated course.

In the realm of me-vs-you, us-vs-them, etc., I always think that others (who probably think the same of me) need blinders or bumpers/rails to keep them oriented in the same general direction that the subculture in which they choose to live is going.

What about those who don’t want blinders or don’t want to stay in the subculture in which they live?

I will not generalise their imaginations actively at work in contrast to or against the subculture in which they find themselves.

Rarely are we living under the influence of one subculture.

Some easily accept, without question, the teachings of their elders and peers.

Some do not.

Why some do and some do not is a study that may start at the DNA level.

When I stared at the ceiling in near-darkness last night, happy with the state of the universe at that moment, I asked myself why I was happy.

What made me, lying in a comfortable, warm bed, unable to sleep, think I was happy?

Happy…hmm…

Where in my imagination — my set of states of energy — is a solid definition of happiness?

Simply the intersection of neuronal states that contain the encyclopedic descriptions of states of happiness throughout history, at the species and personal level?

Both the lack of the flow of fear-based molecular sets and the low flow of euphoria-based molecular sets?  A balance of the two?  A lack of both?

Long ago, I wrote a small poem that said my religion was based on a form and concluded that everything goes in a circle.

For some, their experiences that we and/or they would categorise as religious may be happy and they may be unhappy.

Or, rather, their experience with those who operated under the definition of religion may have been happy or unhappy.

For me, the moments in my influential formative years during religious ceremonies or discussion of religious matters were, for the most part, happy.

I remember a few anxious moments such as times when kids competed for who could quote the most number of Bible verses and I only had one or two full or partial verses ready to recite without looking them up.

Otherwise, my experiences were pleasant so I have no reason to adopt an anti-religious viewpoint because of negative experiences with religion and the people who stand/hide behind religion as a cover for their unpleasant treatment/view/comments about others.

I’m just not much of a person for hierarchy in dealing with others so I’m less inclined to want to clump people into leadership pyramids, regardless of socioeconomic situation.

Your imagination is yours to perpetuate and, if you have delusions of grandeur, don’t expect me to reciprocate.  The labels you want to wear, whether on your lapel or in your mannerisms in front of a mirror (including our responses to you), are yours to call your own.

I am happy in my imaginative world where I can pick up just about any set of words and find myself reflected there.

I am not God in the grand sense that I invented the universe before the set of states of energy called me was conceived and grew into this person typing here.

But I am the set of states of energy that reacts to the rest of the universe from a position I can’t help but take from within my imagination, parts of which I share with you through alignment of our imaginations from moment to moment, sometimes feeling like a god who controls his own fate, and thus the universe, while he lives.

I am happy in my thoughts that further build my imagination, no matter where I am, but often perturbed that people interrupt my happy thoughts with their pleas to buy their products/services that put up temporary bumpers/rails/blinders to guide me toward an unnecessary purchase and the inevitable buyer’s remorse.

As a country mouse simplifying his life, how much of the city mouse stuff around me do I really need anymore?

For years…

For years, I thought an intellectual conversation had to include dissecting the meaning of the universe and debating the [non]purpose of life.

Then, at the suggestion of a friend, I checked a few books out of the library, books written by or about David Foster Wallace.

After reading the material, I came to the conclusion there’s no reason to read his writings anymore because DFW committed suicide, which in itself is the logical conclusion of all the arguments and observations he made in his writing.

Thus, as I have thought before but never articulated, an intellectual conversation can emphatically state or totally ignore the meaning of the universe and the [non]purpose of life.

I won’t go as far as saying that the writing/artwork/music/biographies of people who committed suicide should be banned, burned and/or buried.

I do suggest that we take into serious consideration the conclusion the suicidal people reached in their thoughts, less so for those within a short, miserable ending of a terminal illness, whatever we may [not] wish to call a terminal disease.

If a person created anything — a bridge, a computer, a spaceship, a novel, a quilt, a child — and then later committed suicide, the creations are part and parcel of the suicidal thoughts, are they not?

It is one thing to muse on the futility of our individual lives, and quite another thing to end our lives, regardless of our auspicious or suspicious beginnings.

What, next, about career suicide or similar forms of cutting off oneself from societal ties?

There are no failures.  There are no successes.  There is only what we choose to do next.

For me, there are 13,637 days until the next big step, despite momentary distractions that loom large in temporary comparison.

If a person ends his life, there is no “next” left.

DFW’s writings are absent from my future because he chose to absent himself from the present — I respect his right to say goodbye to my life.  I say goodbye to his.

Talking vs. Doing

Within every group, we repeatedly find at least one person who is not happy with the majority of belief-based practices the group purports to perpetuate.

“It is well with my soul.”

“Be still my soul.”

The previous two sentences may or may not be familiar to you.

I can quickly associate them with song titles and melodies.

For every one of us, familiarity is comforting yet can breed contempt.

Inconsistency disrupts the smooth mood of happy contentedness.

We, as sets of states of energy, have paths we follow to reinforce our selves, our sense of being.

The paths may be well-rutted or invisible.

We may walk in line with others or trailblaze the path ourselves.

Our contempt may drive us from one subculture and into the waiting arms of Sirens in a different subculture.

Our comfortable life in one subculture may deafen us to the other subculture’s Sirens, instead.

As a parent, do you want your children to have a comfortable life or have to fight tooth-and-nail for a life they’ve build on their own?

Do you want your subculture to provide easy-to-follow character/trait-building exercises?

Do you want your children to form a new subculture from scratch?

We are all children, gifts to the world from parents who may or may not have wanted us in the first place.

Regardless of the intention of our conception, we are here.

Our subcultures may be just what we want or don’t exactly fit us comfortably.

Subcultures often have to work out which members are the best fit and create exit strategies for those who will never fit.

Sometimes, like religious systems and youth-training programs, there is confusion at the top of the subcultural ranks about how to protect the image of the subculture while figuring out how to remove ill-fitting members quietly, which takes a lot longer than admitting the fit was never right and publicly excommunicating the members immediately.

We like it when people like us, even if they aren’t like us.

We feel complimented when someone wants to join our subculture, no matter how much we know our Sirens are blaring subliminally/overtly attractive messages of invitation.

Thus, when the ill-fitting members become poisonous to the health of the subculture, we hesitate.

Do we admit our vanity got in the way of our sanity?

After all, didn’t we convert that person to our way of life?  What if we just try a little harder, maybe we’ll completely correct the bad behaviour of that person and heal the subculture at the same time?

Surely we’re not capable of making mistakes in judging people who want to be just like us, because we love our subculture wholeheartedly, with undying love and devotion?

When the subculture has exorcised its demons, reluctantly admitting its mistakes in hiding its problem people before finally removing them, can those who left the subculture because of contempt ever find it in their thoughts to forgive the subculture and return to the comfort of familiarity they once enjoyed?

Can I?

Can I admit I have horribilised the tiny human errors of my subculture and return to it in my middle years?

What if I’m simply following the wellworn path of people my age who, slightly dissatisfied with the closed-in feeling of any one subculture, in this case my parents’, explored the world, sought out something, anything, that gave me a feeling of escape for a while, only to discover that the subculture that my parents shared with me wasn’t bad after all, that every subculture has its faults, its members who are ill-fitting and don’t belong who made me uncomfortable and were eventually pushed out, giving us room and safety to return, no longer fearing that the worst of us still lurks in the dark corners?

I don’t need to prop the world on my shoulders.

I tell the world that I’m happy if we all enjoy ourselves, celebrate who we are and where we came from, no matter how much our parents did or did not want us, embracing a subculture (or mix of subcultures) in which we feel most comfortable, even if we don’t like all of it.

Sometimes, I forget that I don’t have to like everyone.  I don’t have to compromise my beliefs to validate yours which directly conflicts with mine.  We can agree to disagree and go on our way, positively acting to promote our subculture rather than negatively talking about denigrating someone else’s.

Be Thou My Vision,” for instance.