I experimented with increasing readership through catchphrases and links to popular subjects.

Now that I have dropped both of those references, the readership for this particular blog has dropped significantly.

Freedom!

Now I know I have this space to myself again, with perhaps one or two occasional readers stopping by, but no target audience to compliment or percentages to massage for advertisers.

My personal quest can continue.

Independence is mine.

But independence and originality are not the same, are they?

I look around the study/junkroom and search for items that indicate originality or creativity on my part.

• A small stack of journals, short stories and poems
• A watercolour painting
• Some photographs stitched together

Hundreds of items in this room not included in that list were created by someone else(s).

Does a pile of books arranged in a particular order constitute originality or creativity?

Or computer equipment sorted by technology?

This time period between my 49th and 50th birthday, in the year 2011, I celebrate personal freedom and independence.

I no longer have to entertain others.

I can close my eyes to the wants and needs of people around me and give in to my wants and needs.

How will that affect my wife’s “battle” with her sister in-law for my wife’s mother’s attention?

How do I release the final thoughts associated with religious/political/social fantasies of those I don’t need to deal with, even in passing, knowing I am not financially better off now than I was four years ago?

As a lampoonist, how do I create an original work by lampooning my own original work?

Experimentation, of course, as always.

For starters, relieving myself of the burden of reading general news sites in order to remain topical.

No worries about finding a niche in which I’m a professional expert.

Back to writing in my journal knowing I have no one but myself looking at these words.

The sadness of childlessness and having no friends (other than my wife and our two cats) is also the freedom and joy of individuality.

Yes, I am a social being but I find social conversation boring, for the most part, because talking with another person about the least common denominator is burdensome.

That said, what does this social being do next?

As a writer and amateur thinker, what shall I think of and write a satirical response about?

Hmm…time to wander in my wondering once again, a new storyline to fabricate.

Today is Shirt-missing-a-button Day.

If removing one’s personality reveals the workings of the world, then silence is loud power.

I cannot hear the cicadas for the rain dancing on the sunroom roof.

An Oyama OY340 charges an iPod nano.

ARPA-E reportedly wants to reengineer natural photosynthesis for maximum solar conversion to chemical fuel.

Vast stretches of Russia sit empty of one species, looking mighty appealing to neighbours of that, our overpopulating species. The U.S. and former Soviet satellites fill up quickly.

The monastic life pays dividends for those relieving themselves of family obligations.

Two books:

1. “How the Scots invented the modern world: the true story of how western Europe’s poorest nation created our world & everything in it,” by Arthur Herman

2. “Frank R. Paul: father of science fiction art,” edited by Stephen D. Korshak

How did a planet of seven billion of us get in this state?

Feel free to add qualifiers, superlative or not, giving your personal meaning to the word, “state” or otherwise.

As a consumer, I clearly see my effect upon our world.

Do I produce anything worthwhile while worth whiles worthingly in the world at large?

Would Earth’s deep-cave organisms find edibility in the crevices and cracks of our Moon’s craters hidden on the dark side?

Is purposeful transportation of our planet’s biological diversity to other heavenly bodies worth the cost of anonymity?

Looking back 1,000 years from now, when nothing around will exist in its current form, I blink, and everything is no longer in its current form, having vectored off in its inertial direction once more.

When you sit and travel with your planet, solar system and galaxy, some changes are hard to perceive.

And of the ones we perceive, ones we call the history of our species?

History reimagines the past.

Living only in this moment, this body, these states of energy, lost in reductive history 1,000 years from now, pauses.

I pause to consider where others say we are going.

What are the stories you want to hear and the stories you don’t but will?

If you knew that the next story would be written for a new species, not ours, would you listen more intently to a bird’s song or a toadfish’s grunt?

Would you see the cover art of Wonder Stories Quarterly, Winter 1931, and question any originality in the movie, “2012”?

Do you see “Little Shop of Horrors” in the Wonder Stories October 1930 cover?

How many Doctor Who storylines could be guessed from similar classic scifi magazine covers?

Will your handheld computing device UI resemble retro illustrations or feature new figments of your imagination?

Do you know if your life is a manifestation of someone else’s scifi dream – poli-sci, sports-sci or home-ec-sci?

You are the one seven-billionth part of the story my network wrote about you in cave paintings millennia ago.

We draw the sketches in which you fill out the details for later verification by our computer programming test crew.

Some of you will become closet cultish peanutarians in response to the parents who insist whole school systems abolish peanuts because the parents’ precious, growing seedlings are allergic to underground nuts.

I see EPCOT Center in AMAZING STORIES, 1941, back cover painting.

What of the modern Asian, European or other modern regional cultural icons you say are inspired or are derived from the past but what we say we predicted you’d create in the distant future?

If I weren’t laughing so hard, I’d tell you what’s gonna happen next!

Time to search my Scottish roots for grubs that’ll soon write the next chapter of our supposed species’ history.

What does dripping rain sound like to a cicada?

Separating the person from the lifelong goals of the person.

The person is materially immaterial.

If a brain’s connections determine a person’s social aptitude, then how much is training worth reconfiguring/rerouting major neural pathways?

Why fight City Hall, which is full of people following/directing the will of the people?

I don’t want your money to pursue my art because I, and thus my art, do not exist.

Major atmospheric pressure differences do not meet here today.

Half-eaten cicadas feed ants on the ground. Did cardinals find them untasty?

Opportunists alight.

Smoke from an extinguished candle fills my lungs.

This is one of those days I would be okay not waking up tomorrow, my body’s accomplishments met, having jousted windmills and watched my dreams come alive.

The other goals live with or without me.

How many more days can I live in simple happiness, trying not to feel guilty about a middle-aged body being absent from serving out some sort of sense of social responsibility, despite knowing I have a brain not wired for constant in-person social contact with my species, a cat’s inconstant attention sufficient?

Je ne sais pas.

A pool ladder leans against a wood fence.

An RV/caravan windshield/windscreen reflects morning clouds cleaning the sky.

People recall the good ol’ days of working for “the Eastman.”

Resources receive reciprocity receding respitely.

Water from the outside flowing into a house is rarely covered by basic homeowners insurance damage claims.

A flag for the STS-75 mission stands motionless on a shelf holding up photo albums and picture frames containing captured moments of friends/family existence.

VHS tapes stack juxtaposingly next to a DVD player.

A wound-down clock predicts the time twice a day.

A sewing machine table helps a vase of silk pansies defy gravity.

Decades-old recliners wait for occupants who may never reappear.

Two space heaters, unplugged, make impressions in carpet, unnecessary while the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the Sun.

Rechargeable batteries rearrange electrons with the aid of solar cells, lighting the sidewalk after dusk.

An atomic clock tells the temperature, time, day and date.

Almost a century of lifetime memories hang in the air behind a set of French doors.

Fortunes flow liquidly, large groups feeding at the deepest pools.

Roofers follow insurance adjusters who followed a volley of hail.

Bank accounts drain appropriately.

What was once a $1500 job is now $9000, asphalt and metal not getting any cheaper.

The stray alley cat on a hot tin roof wanders obliviously, as usual, neither a seat of knowledge nor a pool of riches.