Master and Commander: The Far Side Calendar Edition

“Grasshopper, what lesson have I taught you today?”

“That biting my fingernails is a sign.”

“And…?”

“That biting my toenails is also a sign, a sign of flexibility, but one need not always be flexible.”

“Very good.”

“Thank you, Master.”

“You are welcome.  It is time we look at broader subjects.  Have you ever heard me talk about our enemies?”

“No, Master.  You have told me one must never have enemies, only opportunities to learn from those whose beliefs complement one’s own.”

“Very good, Grasshopper.”

“Thank you, Master.”

“Remember, little one, I have told you many times to call me Mister.”

“Yes, Master Mister.”

“[Sigh.]  Very well.  I will not reinforce your habit of mastering your subjects, including me.  Let us proceed.”

“Yes, Mister Master Mister, Master.”

“As you recall from a previous lesson, we observed two people in opposition.  What did I tell you?”

“That one should adopt the best traits and best people, allowing others to demonise the remaining traits and remaining people so that one may concentrate on pure joy, happiness, and meditation of best-ness.”

“Indeed.  Grasshopper, you do well today.  But do not bite your toenails.  We are not animals.”

“But, Master, you bite your toenails.”

“Only after I have cut them from my toes do I use my toenails as ‘toothpicks’ when wood is unavailable to remove rice hulls from between my teeth.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Remember, one must be resourceful yet maintain one’s harmony with one’s true sense of self.”

“Yes, Master Mister Master Mister, Mister.”

“What else did you learn from that lesson?”

“By observing how one’s colleagues make enemies out of other people do we learn their true nature.”

“And…?”

“That pizza is a delicious late-night snack when meditating upon 24-hour sports network viewing.”

“Where did you get such an idea, Grasshopper?”

“From you, Master, Mister, Master.  You, yourself, have said your round belly of wisdom should be called the Pizza Palace of Peace.”

“You pay attention to too much of my humorous asides, Grasshopper.  Telling and understanding jokes is the deepest of wisdoms one attains through years of listening to others’ foolish behaviour.  One must not confuse wisecracks from wise observations.”

“Master, I do not understand, Mister.  Are they not both kernels of wisdom?”

“Very wise of you to say that, Grasshopper…”

“Do you not use my name, ‘Grasshopper,’ as both a serious reference to my body and as a joking reference to my impermanence, in addition to my insignificance as an insect in comparison to my body?”

“Yes, Grasshopper.  We have discussed this many times in your decades of training.  At 50 years of age, you are well past the time in one’s life when one should leave this training center and pursue one’s destiny.  So your name is both a reverent label and an irreverent joke about you overstaying your education.”

“But, Master.  You have never left these walls.  Are we not both trapping ourselves within imaginary walls around our true destiny?”

“Grasshopper, your wisdom is beyond your years and yet beneath you.  One must never say more than one feels.”

“But what does one feel about walls?  I have no emotional ties to the kiln-dried bricks and mortar.”

“Grasshopper, let us put off that lesson until tomorrow.  I am feeling tired and very, very old.”

“But, Master, you, Master Mister, are only five years old.  How can a Mister Master like you feel old?  This is the time when Masters like you usually feel playful.”

“Grasshopper, you know that wisdom is not measured in years.  Look at the golfers who play in the Masters.  Some master their skills at an early age and some do not find the master to hone their skills for them until they are much older.”

“Yes, Master.  We both need our rest.”

“Indeed.  And please, please, please, call me Mister, not Master, not Master Mister or Mister Master, or Master Mister Master, or Mister Master Mister, or…”

“But, Master, it is my joke I play on you.  Can you not see that?”

“Yes, Grasshopper. But like the lesson where we keep the best traits of our perceived enemies for ourselves, let us give the worst jokes or the jokes that have grown old to our perceived enemies, too.”

“Yes, Mast…err, I mean, Mister.”

“Thank you, Grasshopper.  You may return to your eight-hour duty of raking the autumn leaves that fall upon our gravel path.”

“The leaves never stop falling this time of year.”

“Yes.  A lesson you have taught yourself over and over for how long now?”

“Forty-eight years, Mister.”

“That’s right.  I forgot you were a late bloomer, two years old when you were brought here.”

“Yes, Mister.  That’s why I have not left.  My previous Master told me that blooming late is my specialty.”

“A wise Mister Master, indeed!”

Am I alive?

While I wait for my new LCD monitor with HDMI connection to arrive, thus turning my smartphone into my desktop/laptop PC at home and Internet phablet on the road, I shall write here once more.

That, and the overwhelming reader response to ending this blog, as usual.

This afternoon, I attended the funeral of a 98-year old man, met his widow, and am friends with two of his children, one who is a girlfriend of a longtime friend of mine from our college days in Knoxville.

I also saw some familiar faces from my time here in this community — 27 years or thereabouts — people like Peggy Sammon and Butch Damson.

Ninety-eight years young…

I cannot imagine living so long.

Meanwhile, a house wren hops up and down the window screen, looking for food, digging through the debris in the old, broken, rusted gutter hanging off the rotting eave.

I did not know the man who was buried today.

I felt like a fifth wheel, a stranger inserting myself into the graveside mourning of others.

So, to hide my face from the crowd, I stood behind a pocket camera snapping pics for the daughter and friends in Germany who could not be there while we who were gathered recited prayers together for the deceased.

I am of the walking dead myself, but my friends say Jesus loves me, this I [should] know…

Sorry, that last bit slipped out, a verse from a children’s song.

I did not know the man who was buried today but I was able to join his family and a group of strangers, sharing a subculture full of familiar songs, poems, prayers and rituals.

It was a window opening up the sounds and sights of my childhood.

It was a window of opportunity, listening to the stories about Rudi Schlidt from his closest friends and relatives.

Of course, I can’t hear so well so I’m not sure what anybody said, using their body language and voice inflection to tell me when I was supposed to smile, laugh, cry or do nothing but listen attentively.

Rudi was nearly twice my age when he died.

He made important contributions to the advances of rocket science.  He, like many in this town, could easily say, “As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist/engineer.”

His wife was secretary to Wernher von Braun, who may or may not be familiar to you.  Today, her face still shines with beauty at 91 years of age.

There is more and less than meets the eye, to be sure, but today I simply let the sights suffice to register my presence on this planet another day, amidst those who registered the absence of a friend, [(great)grand]father, coworker and fellow member of the community.

Am I alive?  I don’t know.  I explore the universe from atop this tiny planet of ours and wonder.  That’s all I care to know.  The rest is none of my business.  Gott behüte.

Auf wiedersehen, Herr Schlidt.  From the crowd at your graveside service today, know that you are/were loved.  Gott liebt dich.  Gott segne.

Making the story fit the crime

Do you ever get bored, the same person, the same planet, day after day after day?

Do you feel the need to brag about yourself because no one else will?

As a meditative person, I spend most of my time staring at the back of my eyelids, followed closely by staring at the woods around my house.

With billions of people to imagine, both living and dead, I can creative a thought set that manipulates my next set of thoughts to imagine I create my own future, manipulating and being manipulated by the people around me in concentric circles of influence.

Ideas come and go.

Watch a remake of a twist on Oedipus Rex for the umpteen millionth time, this time in the guise of “Looper,” and I accept the fact that originality and newness is the illusion of forgetfulness and ignorance.

I am a tired old man, waiting to die, simple as that, have been since I was five and figured out that for the rest of my life I’d be surrounded by stupidity masquerading as wisdom.

I attempt to entertain myself by putting my nose into other people’s business and observe their shortsightedness, sometimes able to predict where they’ll stumble upon yet another remix that has been forgotten and will be forgotten again.

Sigh…forever remaking ourselves in our own funhouse mirror images…

Is there nothing more?

I’m just glad that this blog isn’t real, that it influences no one else’s thought patterns, just a remix of the news passing through my thought sets in order to shade my eyes from my reflection in the mirror that long ago became a magnifying glass reflecting nothing.

Forty-five years of invisibility…

I am tired of this game.

I want a new universe, a new set of rules, a new body, a new set of “thought patterns,” even if they’re aren’t thoughts at all and “I” is a fiction that no longer exists…

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

Deconstructionist

To see that I exist, that there is a set of states of energy that can be traced back to the union of two sets of states of energy, one still living…

This “I” cannot justify its existence after playing with a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, updating an Apple iPad 2 to iOS 6, adding contacts to a Samsung Galaxy SIII and asking if I, all references to “It’s A Wonderful Life” aside, have made sufficient contributions to say I deserve calling myself my father’s son, Richard Lee Hill II.

There are brief moments like these when I ask myself if my blue-eyed, red-haired, freckly-skinned genetic material goes to the grave without any attempt to reproduce myself, then why did I live at all?

Silence follows accusingly, guilt-ridden, mocking, watching others who do and do not reproduce themselves build legacies that live…

Why am I here if nothing matters?

I have accumulated and continue to accumulate toys in an attempt to fill in the gaps of my life where [grand]children should be.

The massive waste in our species’ endeavours that we dedicate to the excess time our social network has given us outside our basic childrearing tasks is phenomenal.

We have become the emperour’s clothes.

I am a prime example.

I should be dead yet I still live, the personification of self-preservation, a set of states of energy perpetuating itself as long as it can.

Devoid of meaning.

A transparent being.

Time to dull my brain with alcohol, a legal means of escape from the torture of living with myself, happy in my comfortably suburban misery with no motivation to escape from the multiculturalism that is smothering me, who is the son of a father who thought that pot-smoking hippies like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are giving our country away.

Dad, what can I do to make things right?  Legalise the recreational use of substances like marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD to raise them up to the legally-destructive level of alcohol, tobacco and prescription medication?  Show secret videos we have recorded of private speeches that Hillary/Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have given over the years that will destroy international relationships, let alone upset the balance of voters’ opinions?

Dad, I tried to support Mitt Romney, I really did.

But without a child of my own to say that I have preserved the genetic heritage of which you were so proud, having descended from one of the American Revolutionary War heroes, it’s difficult to swallow the bitter aftertaste of the two-headed monster we call the duopoly of the Republican/Democratic political machine that promotes two people I can barely distinguish from one another, Obama and Romney.

Dad, I never supported Bill Clinton.  But I never supported George W. Bush, either.

Our political system has become such a convoluted, commercialised, nondemocratic system that I’ve given up fighting it — we’re just one, big, international conglomeration of interdependent business functions now, a group of nations in name only.

The dogs of war are eating the scraps and I can’t stand the stench of income inequality that our nation has dissolved into, despite it appearing better than many political systems around the world.

I agree the “haves” should not be taxed when they have competed to earn their gains for themselves and their heirs but many of them have become too greedy, driven mad by the spectre of recession/depression hanging over them and the lifestyles to which they’ve grown accustomed.

Look at me, living in the lap of relative luxury, surrounded by piles of useless crap that demonstrates the excess our society generates for our childrearing-free moments.

Has the Great Recession taught the upcoming generation to appreciate life without gizmos just as the Great Depression and WWII taught your mother and yourself to appreciate enriching the mind through education that enhances one’s family rather than mind-numbing distractions that turn us into technological zombies?

Dad, I’m sorry I never gave you a grandchild from me, your older, sole male heir, a son you almost lost when he got dragged into the muck of pop culture for a while as he tried to define/find himself out from under the shadow of your strong personality.

There’s nothing I can do about it now.

All I can do is make sure your wife of 55 years, my mother, is taken care of the rest of her life, however she wishes to live it, until one of us dies first, as I give my wife the time she deserves with me.

It’s not enough but it’s all I have to offer in a country that had grown too druggy, multicultural and unpatriotic for you.

Otherwise, I’d prove the real balance of power by encouraging our nation to go to war with nations that are ill-prepared to handle our massive firepower, economic and popular culture power be damned, while I sit back and enjoy the show on all my useless gizmos, before those nations complete their detente arsenals and ruin the fun we closet warhawks truly enjoy.

Dad, maybe that’s the idea.  Should I use the transition of leadership in China and the discord in the U.S. as well as the turmoil in the old Ottoman Empire to start a good, old-fashioned, patriotic ass-whooping of a war?  I’ve got enough profiteers on my side around the world to make it interesting and a savvy business investment, besides.

We’ll see…

Like money for donuts

The hickory trees had a good year producing offspring…don’t know if it’s the best year (that is, if it’s the biggest crop (that is, most number of nuts, or largest nuts)) but some of the nut casings almost fill my palm, which doesn’t often happen.

The squirrels are having a hay day, as we say.

The raccoons seem pleased, too.

None of the chickadees or titmouses seem to care.  We don’t have any other bird species large enough or with strong-enough beaks to treat hickory nuts as a major food source.

The peace and quiet of a cool, sunny, autumn morning in north Alabama is priceless.

The trees and the birds and all the other flora/fauna around me have thrived in the climate change despite period droughts and warmer winters.

What about the ones who haven’t thrived?

We had a few years where the tree frogs around here deafened us with their summer mating calls.

Now, not so many.

Armadillos swept through a few years ago, unable to establish a permanent colony in the woods around my house.

Same for the fire ants.

The ecosystem of a deciduous forest…sigh, this is my home.

Why?  I guess because I was born in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, even though I spent a couple of my formative years in the inner flatlands of southern Florida.

Primarily, though, I have lived within a few-hours drive of the Appalachian mountain range, which few people know stretches from Georgia all the way up the East Coast into Maine.

On a day like today, this is all I have to say and observe.  I have no need to perpetuate the thoughts and ideas of others wanting my attention.

I am, after all, happy being myself, and that is a word to the wise, which is sufficient.

Have a great day, my little chickadees!

A snake in the house

It’s so easy to get distracted by the simple moves in 3D chess.

It’s even easier to get distracted by the movement of electronic bits we would have once called a large sum of money.

Beauty is simplicity, itself, that’s all.

…the joy in finding symmetry within randomness.

…the fun in deflecting a direct hit in order to set in motion an event 13,750 days from now.

We, who write storylines, are trees bending in the wind, as always, converting solar energy into food for thought while setting roots that become seedlings blown into a directionless wind set in motion by a planet rotating on its axis around the Sun.

We can refer to fractal patterns or dark energy threads, bisons or bosons, frenemies or bromances, any pairs that are semi-related in symbology.

When walking in one’s home, stepping on a snake, what is the symmetry seen when the snake is released under power lines snaking through suburban tracts?

Can we not say that the patterns formed by what we don’t see are more harmonious than the obvious moves to sacrifice a pawn or crucify a bishop?

The ability for a chess piece to move outside space and time is a game worthy of partaking with your adversary, together with whom you face the accelerated changes in the Anthropocene era.

As has been documented in this storyline, millions, if not billions, of us are sacrificed for one purpose only — the rest is entertainment.

What is the purpose of practicing tai chi if one is never challenged to use the moves in a real defensive situation?

The storyline is greater than any one of us believes ourselves to be.

Life is the only game in town.

Our delusional illusions — our distractions — are merely the soundtrack of life finding its way off this planet.

Believe anything else you want, it’s okay, because we die with our last thoughts unspoken, giving us something to look forward to, a brief moment of peaceful reassurance that all we lived for is worth dying for.

Back to enjoying the show!!!

A student of history stirring the melting pot

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.

Just Another Gnome, Elf, Ogre, Dwarf or Fairy Tale

From watching a film titled “Monsters” that started in San Jose, Central America, to earthquakes that take place in San Jose, Costa Rica, we find instantaneous coincidental incidences that drive our storytelling off the charts.

Do you want your STEM experts/geniuses to gather their education on the spur-of-the-moment JIT (or JIT) need or do you want them to be SMEs or members of SMEs for SMEs on the spot, all the time?

Again, look at what South Korea is doing.

Business and wealth accumulation are just one of the many religions on this planet but not the only ones.

I have bowed to the gods of business — Dale Carnegie, Jack Welch, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — but I hesitate to bend over for any of them anymore, now that my pile of gold is big enough and tall enough to stand on its own and look me in the eye.

My newfound wealth is the joy of discovering life around me that has no ties to wealth accumulation — the joy of idleness.

There is peace in sitting still and listening to the sounds of the universe.

But I have no offspring to protect and nurture, no legacy to protect, I remind myself, so my goals, or lack of them, are not yours.

I have let the whirlwinds of your desire for power and wealth drag me into your business, which is indeed very entertaining and quite honestly a change from day after day of hours of meditation on the meaning of a piece of lint on another planet.

It is easy to see how managing a species of 7+ billion can be thrilling, even seductive.

My life is limited and slipping away, lost temporarily in your world of political maneuverings and power struggles.

I have watched the invention of the computer change very little in 50 years — going back and forth from one version of the dumb terminal

to another

ooh…look, honey, they’ve reduced a desktop computer down to the size of a handheld writing tablet with text too tiny to read with these middle-aged eyes!  And now it’s wireless!  Whoo-hoo!  Break out the moonshine — they’re calling ’em phablets now!!!  Why, afore you know it, they’ll figure out how to convert my blood straight to pure grain alcohol without the need o’ swallowin’ the dadgum rotgut to begin with.  Maybe even keep muh liver from picklin’, too!  Yee-haw!

Oh well, I’m just happy that there are young people today who care about formal education in moderation while keeping their eye on the big picture, whatever that means to them — advancing the field of pure science or working on the latest smartphone app for pure profit, or doing nothing at all, if they so please, living on the dole and telling each other tall tales (“Yes, I ran an ultramarathon in under 2 hours but the government wants to keep it a secret because I’m a special agent keeping you safe from invisible aliens.”).

What I went through with my mother in-law in 1997…

…I go through with my mother in 2012.

My mother in-law was 80 years of age when her husband died.  My mother was 78 when her husband died.

In both cases, as in any longterm relationship between two people, the survivor learns new forms of daily decisionmaking.

My mother in-law depended on her now-deceased son and living daughter (my wife) to help her make decisions after their father died.

My mother depends on my sister and me to help her make decisions after our father died.

When my father in-law died, my wife was almost 35.

When my father died, I was 50.

In between: fifteen years of wisdom gathered through life experiences, some shared between us, some accumulated individually.

Fifteen years of social changes/progress, including new technology (think about how much the Internet has changed in 15 years), new businesses, failed businesses, climate change, fashion cycles, pop music tastes, entertainment choices, medical science advances, etc.

Are we more or less tolerant of Iranian atheists/humanists?  Liberal Quakers?  Non-heterosexual relationships?  Physical/mental challenges?  The unemployed?  Cute cat videos?

Is there room in your life for a late night TV talk show host with a robotic skeleton and cloth-horse costumed actor(s)?

Would there have been such a creature 15 years ago?  Could he have been a reformed Scottish alcoholic comedian?  Do such creatures exist in real life today?

I learned a new phrase today: conformity to tomorrow (from book, “Without Apology: The Heroes, the Heritage, and the Hope of Liberal Quakerism” by Chuck Fager [which I read, quickly, in the book section of Unclaimed Baggage Center]):

“Conformity to tomorrow: …consists in a moderate opposition to the existing political power, together with the espousal of the ideas and doctrines of the most sensitive, the most visionary, the most appealing trend in society. This is a trend which, from the sociological point of view, is already dominant, and is the one which should normally be expected to win out….In this way, the political stand has the appearance of being independent, whereas in reality it is the expression of an avant-garde conformism.” (Jacques Ellul, a French Reformed theologian and sociologist, 1972A, p. 123.)

I would toss musical acts like Rage Against The Machine, political groups like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and economic movements like the EU handling of the PIIGS into the realm of avant-garde conformism, as well as most official social protest groups not included in terrorist lists for “wanted: dead or alive” drone attacks.

We always have to have enemies toward whom we formally direct our confusion/fear-based hatred.

But, as usual, I digress.

Earlier today, at a roadside restaurant called Carlile’s in Scottsboro, Alabama, a town where a plentiful plethora of people met for camaraderie and shopping bargains, my wife and I held a wonderful discussion with Autumn, mother of three boys aged 7, 6 and 2, the first taking the role of the responsible eldest (“Mom told you not to do that”), the second a quiet child who puts up with the physical shenanigans of his two brothers, and the youngest, the rowdiest one of the bunch.

Autumn, raised by her grandparents, lost them both nine months apart five years ago.  The emptiness inside is slowly, very slowly, wrapped up in new friendships and new experiences we call the passage of time.

When she wants to turn to her grandparents for guidance, they are not there and she feels an instant pang of pain.

Although she has a beautiful tattoo of a heart on her arm where every one of her three boys first rested and for whom she tattooed their names, she would never tattoo the names of her grandparents or the name of her husband on her body because the reminder of their losses, in plain ink visible under skin, would be too much to bear (beauty is not the only thing that’s skin-deep).

She, like all parents, believes deep down that her kids will outlive her, their futures bright.

To those who’ve lost their children to congenital conditions, I give you my sympathy.  No one wants to survive the death of offspring with a promising future.

My wife outlived her parents and her only sibling.

I have outlived my father but not my mother and my only sibling.

As this storyline grows more complicated, my life and the lives of my family members are intricately intertwined.

Not a loss, not a gain nor a zero-sum game is life.

The sets of states of energy are constantly in flux.

Every waking moment is an opportunity to learn.

Is new technology an enabler of your relatively expensive entertainment addictions or an avenue of opportunity for increased wealth?  Does it increase the credit or debit side of your account ledger?  In other words, do you go into debt to play games and watch videos?

These and other questions lead us to thought trails about the costs and benefits of a globally-connected economy, where plenty of leisure is available to the masses.

If this laptop computer and these blog entries are using up CPU cycles for the sole purpose of entertaining myself, is that okay?

What about the urgency to act, the desire to change our society significantly so that spare CPU cycles are used to ensure survival of Earth-based lifeforms here and elsewhere as long as potential energy states are available to support them in this part of the universe?

Does it matter if the majority of our species believes in self-centered activities?

What are a few decades compared to 1000 years?

What is 1000 years compared to 200 million?

Can we really know the future, no matter how much we bunch together to conform to one vision knowingly, unknowingly, voluntarily and/or coercively?

All for the sake of family, whatever that means to you/me/us?

Domestic quarrels

Domestically, how many entertainers whose salaries put them in a category called the 1% wrap themselves up in “Occupy Wall Street” symbology, bashing others for proudly showing and protecting their wealth, when the entertainers themselves have financial advisors and accountants setting up tax shelters and foundations to protect the entertainers’ wealth?

I watched a few minutes of…

Wait a minute.  I was about to comment about an entertainer whose whole purpose in life is to get rich riling up people as they watch his show on TV.

If I mention his name and what he said (making fun of another person’s body weight, one of the weakest attack methods in debating), then I promoted him and his show.

Instead, let me practice the method of “water on a duck’s back” and return to storytelling of my own, a time 1000 years from now when all of this, though entertaining to me in the moment, is forgotten.

…while watching my neighbours rush up and down our quiet suburban street in their motor vehicles like they’re running from a pack of rabid dogs.