Tag Archives: nature
It’s a ruse
Schooled
Connie Evingson sings “Si Tu Savais” on the Internet app.
A school of small fish move about the sandy shoals this Saturday afternoon while hundreds of miles away Tennessee plays Oregon and Texas A&M plays Alabama.
Moss grows between tree roots.
A mother, smoking a cigarette, walks with daughters behind me, enjoying the early fall day, their voices joined by their father, bearded, wearing an Auburn ball cap
A pin oak hits the river surface, attracting a striped fish.
Grass/reed patches grow along the river’s bend.
Dragonflies chase prey.
Casual bikers pass by, their heads barely visible behind the opposite river bank.
Do banks bank in the bank?
Does prey pray?
I suppose I ought to head on down the river trail, find my way back home to wife and college football on TV.
C’est la vie.
Surf’s Up!
Lee and Guin lay on their backs and looked up at the stars.
“We did it!”
“Yes, we did.”
“So many people have come and gone in your life. Do you ever wonder why you’re with somebody, wherever you are?”
“Hmm…” Guin rolled her head and looked at Lee’s right ear, barely visible in the near-darkness of the habitation module skyview room.
“I mean, here we are, light-minutes from Earth, making up new constellations to adjust for Mars’ orbit, giving Shadowgrass new myths to share on the ISSA Net…”
“Yes, it seemed impossible not so long ago.”
“Think of your dreams.”
“You mean antigravity?”
“Well, sure, that’s one of them. It seemed impossible not so long ago.”
“We were so stuck on the idea of the ‘anti’ that we forgot about the property of gravity waves, didn’t we?”
“We? It was you who made the discovery, not me or Shadowgrass. But, hey, if you want to include us…”
“Haha. Of course I do. Without you here, without your support, bouncing ideas off me, offering constructive criticism…”
She looked at the stars again.
They had another dance exposition to give the current round of tourists before they could go to Guin’s expanded lab and work out the details of her astounding new discovery about antigravity.
She wanted to concentrate on a few practical applications while Lee, ever the excessively creative type, using his humour to magnify the normal into the ridiculous, wanted to work out how to change Mars orbit using Guin’s mechanical engineering background and mathematical skills to work out how to “surf” Mars across gravity waves.
If her antigravity theory was correct, space travel would never be the same.
The dangers of planetary surface landing would diminish to practically zero — if so, think of all the energy credits she could bank on expanding her lab further!
Bridging the gap between generations
One day not so long ago my father and I took a trip through the country of our ancestors — the mountains and tidal basins of Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina.
Standing on a bridge overlooking a body of water I can’t remember, Dad asked me if I knew much about our family.
Being the smart-ass teenager that I was, I mumbled some remark that almost made my father keep his mouth shut.
Instead, determined to make me see how serious he was, that this moment, more than any of the others, was his reason for taking us hundreds of miles from home, Dad began to talk while the sun set behind us, the dark purple horizon over the water rising up into the sky as stars blinked into life.
We could not see each other’s faces so we both leaned against the railing of the bridge, our hands hanging over.
The details of the conversation have faded. Being a determined writer who likes catching conversation on paper, I wrote a few snippets down after we talked but lost or rather, threw away, a large portion of my writing sometime after that trip and don’t have a single note to reference, depending on my middle-aged memory to capture now what he said then.
We talked about the girls I was interested in at the time, including Monica, with whom I had attended several proms and spent a lot of time in various groups such as Sing Out Kingsport; Janeil, who I had stopped dating before the trip with Dad; Alice Ray Knapp, a girl from my calculus (or was it Accounting?) class; one or two others whose names escape me.
Dad told me that he had no issues with the girls I dated and figured I was smart enough to choose a woman with whom I would spend the rest of my life — he could give my approval if I asked but didn’t think it was absolutely necessary; in other words, if I wanted to elope with someone, he would support my decision.
But he was interested in more than my love life.
He used my dating scene as a kicking off point, leading us to imagery of why to have a family at all.
I was noncommittal about having children at that time. Dad didn’t push me to name a number of children but wanted me to think about the purpose of marriage in all its social context, including responsibility to go to church, belonging to the right social organisations, climbing the corporate ladder wherever I worked and devoting quality time/money toward family.
That, too, was still the opening act of our conversation.
With the sky pitch-black, the Milky Way galaxy clearly visible, Dad decided we had better find a restaurant in the seaside town we were in, wanting to avoid seafood because of his shellfish allergies.
We found a place that served burgers and steaks and settled into a corner booth so Dad could continue the conversation.
He let me order a beer to show he was treating me like a man.
At that point, I told Dad my opinion about having kids with the various girls we had discussed, the whys and why-nots.
He nodded his head the whole time, not once interrupting me or criticising my opinions, a rarity for conversations between us, so I knew there was more in his thoughts he wanted to share.
I remember the waiter giving us strange looks because Dad sort of shooed him away whenever he came up, a friendly guy who seemed to want to tell us what was going on in the area over the next few days.
After I finished talking, Dad sat back in the bench seat and paused for a minute or two.
I wasn’t sure what he was going to say. I had grown used to Dad’s passive-aggressive personality, attuned to changes in his emotional state but didn’t sense any buildup of anger about to explode, another rarity.
Dad leaned forward and told me about his childhood. I sure wish I had a copy of what he said — summarizing it does not do either one of us justice but it’s all I’ve got.
Basically, Dad tried to get me to see the difference between his childhood and mine, as well as what he understood about the difference between his mother’s childhood and his, knowing nothing about his father’s childhood nor wanting to.
He then told me about various ancestors of ours he knew or had been told about, putting together family stories as well as personality sketches that would fill more than a novel’s worth of interest to the general reader.
Seeing that I still looked interested, Dad talked about where we were, somewhere near the Virginia/North Carolina border, not far from the ocean, and asked me to mentally picture what this place must have been like 200 or so years ago.
There were no fast-food joints, no highways, no street lights or hotels.
There were villages, wild animals, deadly diseases, ports of call that might or might not have been friendly to our ancestors and living pretty close to whatever you could kill or grow yourself.
Dad wished that I could see his and my mother’s family weren’t that far removed from living off the land, meaning that they were closer to understanding what our ancestors were like than I, having grown up in the comfortable surroundings of suburbia.
He didn’t know what my kids would be like but he wanted me to know that I would probably have a conversation like this with my children and feel frustrated sometimes that a generation gap is not just a catchy phrase in mass media but also a real difference of opinion and priorities between parents and their offspring.
I have few regrets in life, this being one of them: after Dad finished talking, he asked if I had any questions. I really wanted to know more about the ancestors he’d described but, for some reason, my teenage self felt the question was stupid because I knew that he and I were tired and had to get up in the morning for a long drive to our next stop, my feeling like an adult making me choose the responsible adult path of saying “Naw. I’m getting tired,” and turning Dad off from any more discussion of this type for the rest of the trip; another regret is not asking Dad’s father (or stepfather, really — Lee Bruce Hill; Dad’s biological father was named James Horace Capps) about his adventures during 29 years in the U.S. Navy between 1929 and 1959.
Knowing what I know now, that my father is no longer here to be asked questions, I might have made a different decision or many of them.
I might have chosen to have kids so that I and them could ask Dad more questions.
But it didn’t happen that way.
So, here I am, again, writing to you, the invisible reader, closely related to the eternal nature, the omniscient, able-to-do-anything god figure unable to be described or pinned down.
These words are my children, my gifts to the world I give freely, unconditionally.
I have given more hugs and kissy-face time to our cats than to people but that has been changing lately as I learn to let go of old habits, good and bad, and allow myself to learn what actual human interaction is like, good and bad, opening myself up to falling in love with people again, exposing my emotions to the joys and sorrows of daily life.
It is good to discover I can love people without feeling that I have to owe them anything.
It is even better to discover that people love me back without expecting anything in return, willing to learn from me despite my internally-magnified flaws that come out as odd behaviour.
It was good to jog out to the greenway bridge over the Flint River tonight, looking at the stars in the darkness, surrounded by the sounds of nature and spark the memory of a trip with Dad sometime in the early 1980s.
I am not just a biological product of my father, which is weird enough in itself when men my father’s age who haven’t seen him in a while and don’t know he’s dead mistake me for my father. I am also a product of our ancestral history — it’s up to me to keep our history alive, uncensored, readily-available to our living descendants, relatives and friends.
The words and images of my novels, short stories, poems, journals, blog entries and online videos are all I’ve got to record the history.
It’s also reflected in my view of the future, detailed in short stories or chapters of the ongoing saga of Martian colonisation taking place in this blog.
The Flint
Based on the timeframe involved
I can safely say I stand on a manmade bridge
Over the Flint River,
The reversed-coloured glow of my smartphone
Blinding me,
Attracting tiny insects that land on the screen,
Squashed by my typing forefinger,
Flying up my nose,
An unseen large insect flying into my leg,
Making me stomp and dance in the dark
Under a half moon and familiar constellations.
I am in love with nature,
My eternal friend
Who talks to me
With insect wings and frog throats,
Distant internal combustion engines
And river water smoothing out rocks.
Colanders and strainers
Guin had spent four straight sols in the lab.
Although the ISSA Net allowed her to track the progress of her lab experiments from anywhere on Mars, she found a deep satisfaction in being present when her cyborg assistants, part of an integrated network of sensors and computing devices that saw itself as a single unit, reported the results.
For a while, Shadowgrass had fallen into the habit of naming Guin’s assistants Huey, Dewey and Louie, just like he named his appendages and any objects that naturally fell into a group of three.
Guin observed the metabolic rate of the latest algae strain.
She often liked to take unnecessary chances with her body while exploring Martian terrain well outside the rescue perimeters of the colony but when it came to her research she was overcautious, repeating experiments to eliminate any chances for black swans to appear out of nowhere, fully cognizant of mistakes that had taken place on Earth when a few nanoresearch experiments went out of control, escaping laboratory conditions, combining with GMO crops to wreak havoc in local ecosystems, killing off living organisms of all shapes and sizes indiscriminately.
She fed the algae to an artificial stomach that had been grown to simulate new Martians like her who depended on less water to convert matter into energy.
The stomach easily broke down the algae with no known toxic effects on the stomach’s cellular structures.
Guin reviewed xeriscaping research that had started on Earth and been split into experiments conducted simultaneously on Earth, the Moon and Mars.
Starving plants and animals to the point of death, seeing how body processes were slowed down, the bodies themselves experiencing longevity off the charts because of reduced metabolic rates.
Guin spent the next two sols moving the algae to the Mars enviromental simulator, watching for, hoping for signs that this strain would survive more than a few simulated seasonal cycles before decomposing.
Shadowgrass came to visit, sneaking a taste of the algae.
He wasn’t pleased but knew taste was of secondary concern at this point in the colony’s development. They could always use the 3D fast food printer to create a facsimile of food her parents had grown up with, sweet and salty to the tongue, palatable but not nutritious, providing a much-needed stimulus of the senses to keep their bodies mentally-energised.
Sometimes, Shadowgrass ate bits of Martian soil for variety.
Guin waved at Shadowgrass and asked him for his help, realising more and more that his analytical skills surpassed hers at any age.
“Shadowgrass, darling, have you made any effort to create your own terraforming life structures?”
“Yes, Mom, I have. They’re growing out by the greenhouse, if you want to see them. In fact, they’re almost exactly like this algae you’ve got here, but they’re growing awfully slowly. I think my water substitution algorithms didn’t account for the chemical structures correctly. I’d like your advice, if possible.”
“Sure. Give me two more sols, will you?”
“No problem! I’m going with Dad on an expedition so I’ll see you in three sols.”
“Be careful. Don’t do anything…”
“‘I would do.’ Yeah, I know. Don’t forget, though, that I’m much more easily repairable than you!”
They laughed together. She hugged him and pushed him out of the lab.
It’s a great big universe
Sobjectification
Sobjectification : (n) feeling sad that you feel bad about yourself for sexually objectifying people around you.
Lee’s body was shaking, his shoulders aching. He woke up at 2:12 a.m., feeling aroused and disappointed. Why had he objectified the women in his life yesterday, the old defense mechanism that almost went away but showed up again unannounced?
His body only shook like this when his set of states of energy were rattled severely — at the end of running a marathon on a 25 deg F day, the first time he kissed a woman and the first time he kissed a man, the first interview for a real desk job, the first time he made love to a married woman, standing in a funeral home parlour greeting friends and family of his dead brother in-law.
At his age, shaking could be the early signs of many neurological disorders, not just psychoemotional moments.
Lee’s chest felt like a tree trunk being struck by a hammer. He needed something to calm his nerves.
He turned to the script to check where in the current round of world politics his thoughts were supposed to be aligned…
23 November 1957. Open Letter to Eisenhower and Khrushchev by Bertrand Russell,” published in the New Statesman, followed by a response from Nikita Khruschev on 21 December 1957, with a reply on Eisenhower’s behalf by John Foster Dulles, published on 8 February 1958.
Lee’s shudders got worse. He wasn’t supposed to see he was stuck in an endless tape loop, the sound quality deteriorating playback by playback, his thoughts disintegrating into repetitious nonsense.
Shouldn’t he care where he stood on the alpha male hierarchy of his times? “To know is to do” he was told by the advice of history.
If the universe was here for Lee’s entertainment, why wasn’t his body as entertained as his pondered theories of social engineering?
Why did he revert to objectifying women’s bodies just when he was making a breakthrough?
Why did he let his wife’s withholding of her body for sexual activity influence him in any way, make him feel unwanted, unused, unworthy of attention by the opposite sex?
Was his body’s uncontrolled shivering related merely to caffeine withdrawal?
Yesterday, Lee was sitting in a room with his wife and two people interested in closing a deal to manage Lee’s finances for the rest of his life, taking his hard-earned millions and returning to him an annual “salary,” pension or annuity as a monetary security blanket to hold until he died, depositing his funds in a bank that contains the wealth of others in the entertainment business, from Hollywood to Nashville.
Money had no meaning to Lee. Never had, never will. He only understood purchasing power.
Money never bought Lee happiness. Lee was always happy in his pursuit of knowledge to aid his quest to reorder the words in his vocabulary, long ago knowing that something as mundane as the changing patterns of dust on a wall could entertain him for days.
Money bought Lee new knowledge — he could overwhelm his senses with knowledge or he could add to his knowledge base one coal pitch drop of tar at a time.
Nervousness had crept into Lee’s thoughts yesterday that he had shifted into the habit of sexual objectification to give himself the false impression he was above the petty feeling of being nervous, one of his passive-aggressive attitudes he wanted to change.
What if he had told the investors that he was nervous about his life’s fortune being managed by complete strangers and hadn’t turned to seeing one of the investors, who happened to be female, as sexually desirable at the very moment he needed to concentrate on third sigma distributions of financial risk management and Monte Carlo simulations?
What if he had told his dance partner, who complained of aching body parts, that he wanted to say he’d rub her foot if she’d rub his because his foot was really hurting but he was afraid admitting his foot hurt would sound like a weak excuse and worried, too, that the request to barter one foot rub for another due to his lack of cash fluidity would be mistaken as a sexual come-on because he couldn’t get the confusing sexual objectification out of the thoughts of the new Lee?
Self diagnosis of one’s thought patterns in the mental game of self therapy could or could not be as slow or fast as professional psychosocial therapy.
Lee was a cheapskate. His visions of life were not grand enough to include hoarding vast sums of institutional level financial security. He knew he had to depend on someone else’s financial expertise to keep him out of debtor’s prison but it didn’t mean he had to like the idea or be able to sleep fear-free at night.
How was Lee going to deprogram his sexual objectification when he was nervous?
He finished a mug of Earl Gray tea, never quite sure if the caffeine calmed his nerves, his writing calmed his nerves or if an unknown script writer gave the actor Patrick Stewart a character named Jean-Luc Picard who moved a lot of people to drink Earl Gray tea because they really believed that they themselves discovered it tasted better than other flavours of tea, coffee or sources with “natural” stimulants.
Lee mentally apologised to the women he saw yesterday, setting in motion his newly-minted curmudgeon self to tell the next woman he saw, “Look, I’m a bit nervous. Either I can share with you what’s really going on in my thoughts right now, which are really not socially-kosher at this moment, or I can stare at your boobs and ass. It’s your choice.”
Suddenly, an image of the J.K. Rowling character named Dobby riding a wrecking ball while nude and speaking Russian passed through Lee’s thoughts.
Lee smiled, the shaking subsided but not completely gone.
History may repeat itself but Lee was going to enjoy the ride, even if it meant he was going to throw up because he was dizzied by the scenery flashing so quickly through his thoughts.
Glass spherical atmospherical at most fear a gull
I don’t know what it is about the objects in this room but some of them have a life of their own.
The crystal ball, which is not really crystal but a thin layer of glass, hummed when I walked into the study this morning.
A 60-Hz hum, as if some unseen creature — a gnome, fairy, elf, dwarf or gremlin? — snuck in and plugged in the crystal ball’s AC power source.
Ah, yes. The crystal ball has electronic junk in its trunk.
For centuries, the crystal ball had relied on the magnetic alignment of layers of rock deposited for millions of years onto Earth’s crust as the planet’s magnetic poles flip-flopped.
But I wanted more power.
I wanted to make the future a reality, not just some foggy image forming out of the inside of a ether-filled dome.
Sing it! “Ee-thur, eye-thur, nee-thur, neye-thur,” ether-aether, “let’s call the whole thing off”-kilter.
Anyway, the crystal ball’s powered profundity projects onto the book covers, picture frames, walls, ceiling, overhead light fixture and my eyeballs a future where we ask ourselves why income inequality has become a buzzword domestically, imagined internationally but not universally.
A spinoff of Virgin Galactic, under a new shell corporation not directly tied to Sir Richard Branson in order to avoid confusion about mission statements, offers a higher boost into suborbital space for the terminally ill, taking their money but not promising them a flight in time before they die, that gives the passengers a longer time in the weightlessness of space and then an incendiary cremation upon reentry, the painlessness of sedatives a personal option, their ashes spread into the upper atmosphere of the only planet they got to know, sparking a new travel industry nicknamed “Your Final Exit” after a book written in the 20th century.
Discovering energy conversion that has nothing to do with atomic structures opened up planetary exploration and galactic travel, completely and forever changing our image and opinions of ourselves as the center of the universe — it’s not the energy level that counts, it’s how you use the paradigm shift to reinvent the way we model our sets of states of energy in the cosmos.
Spending more time nurturing our species’ children during their formative years offset our longterm investment in the spook business that tried to compensate for the messed-up mindsets of adults turned against society, which changed the way we perceived ourselves as [un]fairly-treated cogs in the wheels of the politicoeconomic conditions we used to define our place in society, including the reformation of the public/private education system that used to depend on a mix of caring/sadistic [un]tenured teaching staff and [non]motivated students.
Mapping the new global culture on top of centuries-old subcultures was as fluid as the ocean tidal currents, tide charts predictable but local tidal basins fluctuating minute-by-minute. Protesting the advent of global branding missed the natural evolution of a species in transition from multilocal to a global set of traits. Embracing the concept of optimising profits made the antiglobal movement an effective tool in strengthening our longterm economic sustainability — every person was encouraged to realise we are individually a laboratory of new ideas, making conformity, normality and mimicry as quaint as synergistic symmetry.
The crystal ball hummed louder and louder until I realised that the wallwart was overheating. Time to get a new transformer before the house burns down!
treetrunkdings 