We in the Northern Hemisphere have been anxiously awaiting the appearance of the comet Pan-STARRS.
Well, the little fellow has been elusive but we did get a view as it peeked from behind the cloudy horizon this evening!:
Tag Archives: nature
And you think sequestration is going to be bad!
And you think sequestration is going to be bad!:
While I’m here unprotected
While I’m here unprotected,
I’ll tell you what I think.
We are a social species,
Luckily held in place by a relatively stable solar system and
Species-specific planetary environment.
I can’t always account for our emotional outbursts,
But I can accept that the label “religion” applies to words like love and beauty,
So while the weather is in our favour,
Let’s accept us for our unacceptable differences,
Of sexual preference,
Of dress codes
And other external markers,
Saying we’re limited in our ability to understand
Such things as skirts, ties, pants and tattoos,
Giving each other room to express individuality without specific meaning…
Then looking at the perspective of time to determine the viability of individual lifestyles
In order to say such things as the Rock of Cashel are worth preserving…
As we explore the cosmic possibilities of Moon/Martian colonies…
Dividing our basket of eggs across celestial bodies as we go along.
Have you ever…?
Have you ever held your death in your hands?
Felt the weight of the Walther PPK?
Felt the weight of eyes watching you on the dance floor, counting your every step, anticipating your every move?
There is a story I want to tell, of uncounted dates, of unrecorded phone calls between persons unnamed.
The story of “what if…” recounted in late-night television shows of unmemorable acting.
Waiting for alcoholic breaths to taper off into snores of forgotten tales.
Of looks between sets of eyes.
Caribbean shores and exotic beaches.
Warm waters and hot decks.
Dance floors scuffed and beds untucked.
Monasteries swept cleaned and religious texts rubbed raw.
Emotions untouched by the day/night of time.
Have you ever counted the seconds of your life or the 13,596 days of your remaining breaths?
How many sunrises or sunsets have you left?
Have you ever imagined the number of kisses you’ll make before you die?
The hugs?
The times you’ll say “I love you”?
Or grammatical errors you’ll miss?
A lack of secrets is freedom?
Now that more and more evidence appears to show our subcultural leanings are tied to genetic differences, is it wrong of me to say that I’m glad to leave well enough alone, live and let live/die, try not to convince those comfortable in their subculture(s) to read/believe anything I have to say?
And, similarly, don’t put down or belittle those unlike me because we are who are we, thanks to our parents and our environment?
If a person wants to be in control, let that person lead?
If a person is a paranoid schizophrenic type, then let that person have delusions of adversarial conspiracies to play back in thoughts/mind?
If a person is happy shouting religious statements, let that person enjoy the euphoria, no rationalising necessary?
I have been an empty vessel, willing to breathe in a new personality for the sake of feeling that person’s life, expressing that person in words that simulate actions such a person might take, given a different scenario to play out in the future, based on our habits of repeating the past by redressing the old to make it new again.
The habit of mine of appearing here almost every day follows the habit of writing down records of my thoughts and actions from about age five, much of it thrown away in 1985 for reasons I say are due to an unhealthy lifestyle at the time.
Otherwise, I am at peace with myself, never wholly satisfied but such is the life of a person who is a body that demands food, sleep and social contact as long as it is alive and relatively pain-free.
I end this meditative prayer of a blog entry for today, no longer pretending to have secrets to share/hide, secret/shadow organisations to pretend to perpetuate, or storyline to stretch across this virtual piece of paper.
I have come to the point in my life where I am content sleeping most of the day and waking up to dreams too strange, weird and fantastic to spend my conscious time writing about.
When one’s dreams are more fascinating than reality, regardless of electronified augmentation, then one like me has reached his state of self-actualisation, out of reach of retail shopping therapy, all-day social engagements, enemies to fear and/or galactic territories to conquer.
A happy little boy once again, safe in the thoughts of the sheltered life his parents provided during his formative years.
Amen. Peace be with you.
The hacks, they keep on coming — are you a “one hack” wonder?
When you want honey, do you make the bees angry before you pull out a piece of the hive?
The universe is here because I am here just like a paper cone is only paper until it is a speaker and what is a speaker without an audience?
Take two groups:
- The first group believes in the open and honest discussion of scientific methods.
- The second group believes in the civil discourse of sly competitiveness.
Both groups believe in the betterment of their respective societies/[sub]cultures.
However, a little problem occurs when one group uses the other’s subcultural norms for advantages within their own group.
Is it miscommunication? Misappropriation?
How do they, together, benefit our whole species?
Because I believe the universe is here because I am here, I want, as long as I am happily able to think so, the species, our species, within our Earth-based ecosystem that has nurtured us for thousands, no, billions of years, to use this brief period of peaceful coexistence with the rest of the solar system to expand into the galaxy.
When I am gone, the universe is gone and none of this will matter to me because my set of states of energy as a recognizable entropic confluence will disperse but remain temporarily as memories in a small number of members of our species and even smaller number of members of other species, barely a footnote in the yellowed pages of old newspapers.
Does the universe make me happy as is?
I have learned that very few people change their behavioural patterns when allowed to wallow in their sorrow or anger, let alone convince other, happy, people to join them.
Yet, happiness for its own sake, like art and humour, does what, exactly?
If burning down a forest makes me happy, there will be a lot of people and members of other species who disagree, adamantly so.
If destroying an economy makes me happy, there will be a lot of people who agree as well as a lot who disagree.
What kind of happiness should we attain?
After all, we are a competitively cooperative species, sharing and hoarding, fighting and loving, all at the same time.
Our lives are short in length, some brighter and louder than others, some sadder, some happier, some kinder, some meaner, some in-betweeners.
Is there a shortcut to happiness that makes the universe beneficial to us all, regardless of our physical/mental condition(s)?
We are a nearly-fully connected species, the fractal spinoff of rudimentary central nervous systems, remodeling ourselves on bigger and bigger scales because we have no other workable model against which we positively compare ourselves within the known universe.
We talk about revolutionary and evolutionary changes in our socioeconomic activity on sub-sub-subcultural levels when the grand scheme hasn’t changed one iota: a species competing against itself because of a myopic view of the universe.
We realize, in rare glimpses, that we are part of the universe rather than living in an us-vs.-them scenario, “them” being you/self/God/universe/other.
Rather than bemoan, bedevil and punish people who hack computers/life/universe, let us look at the hacks from a species/universal perspective.
What am I gaining from those who circumvent my subcultural norms, the rules, both states and implied, that define me and the people happily living and perpetuating the subculture?
What am I losing, instead?
Can I turn the circumventers on their heads and reverse any damage they’ve caused?
How do I absorb the lessons they learned while they took/stole/[ab]used information from my open society?
Some people like clover honey and some people like sourwood honey.
How we get to the honey without disturbing the bees is the first step for any one of us to feed our wide variety of happy tastes and preferences.
Digging out the last century’s stuff
Southern Living, rediscovered
While excavating further into the bowels of the hoards of our house well-furnished with modern antiquities (sounds better than junk or trash), we found a box of Southern Living magazines from around the turn of the century. Here are a few scanned samples for storing in our electronic pile of “historical documents”:
Team hacks the universe, won’t share secrets — news at 11! [eom]
Who needs a wormhole when you’ve got….[garbled choking sound]
Meditative Moment
As the fresh, raw feelings of loss subside, more days between now and the death of my father than a week or a month ago, as I grow stronger because I savoured and relished the emotional states that passed through my body, I face the future in these words, more than in drawn images or recorded sounds.
As ethnicities spread across the planet and mix, their subcultures subsequently subsiding, the global culture defines itself spontaneously.
How do languages and their speakers survive in a homogenising dough machine, the yeast rising, the bread ready-to-make in the oven of a world in transition?
Do you like the flavours in an “everything” bagel full of wheat, pepper, curry, onions, potatoes, garlic and salt?
Where once the survival traits of one’s gene set ensured early death due to birth defects, lactose intolerance and gluten allergies, the current cultural fixation is to cure us of our genetic abnormalities when normality is a moving target on a Möbius strip of the toroid of life.
One may feel full of God’s love and empty at the same time — the louder one has to shout the words of one’s religion, the less one is believed to have internalised their meaning.
Thus, one may hate the world and love the world simultaneously.
The intersection of subsets of thoughts may clash but innovation and invention arise from the need to mate incongruities into harmonious patterns.
Humour is a single part of an artist’s palette if one is free to express oneself free of coercive commercial interests intent on generating more income than debt.
When a population is mostly freed from survivalistic needs, can the population long survive while pursuing selfish interests in opposition to population [re]generation?
Where are the protectors of the faith that the world is full of purveyors of the emperour’s new clothes that must be declared unsavoury and unhealthy to sustain a population which wants to be around thousands of years from now?
Humour for humour’s sake is a fool’s folly.
Art for art’s sake is a loser’s game.
An uninformed populace will obey the uniformed police without reasonable cause to question authority.
What are we producing to improve our future?
Every day, I wake up and ask myself, “What am I doing today that I’m here for because I didn’t die or kill myself yesterday?”
Some days, I don’t have a good answer so I research the reasons and ask again, knowing I’ll find the tiniest part of me that I improve that day to better answer the question tomorrow.
Some days, I state a plain ol’ platitude, let it sit for a day and look at it from a different perspective the next day, learning most often that I never know everything that I think I did the day before.
One day, I’ll die if I don’t kill myself first when I’m an old man whose tunnel vision prevents him from seeing the car heading into his path as he turns to drive across oncoming traffic on the way to his favourite watering hole, assuming I’ll be driving an antique automobile not retrofitted to stop me from making a traffic mistake in the first place.
There are a lot of days in-between to see how I, despite the errors of myself within the subcultural training I received along the way, can get from here to the Moon, Mars and beyond, one set of states of energy in a population of seven billion and growing.
Last night, my team of subsubsubbasement scientists showed me a new gun they had invented that senses the emotional wellbeing of the shooter and locks the trigger until one’s emotional state of misplaced anger has been subdued with neutralising pharmaceuticals embedded in the gun’s grip, thus preventing many murderous acts of passion by firearms.
treetrunkdings 