Are you ready to improve your education?

Have you considered a career in Slope, Terrain and Elevation Management (STEM)?

In today’s world, there’s always another hill to climb, another mountain to conquer, another variation in topography that’s getting in the way of progress.

In STEM school, we’ll teach you how to navigate inclines on the way to creating a plateau of easy living, where even ground allows you to set the foundation for your future factory.

Don’t hesitate!  Call now!  Lorry drivers are crowding the registration office wanting to get in on this exciting career of mudslinging and offroad fun!

Photo courtesy of Ned Jilton II (njilton@timesnews.net)

Hair on the skin of a planet

Have you ever been a breeze, running your invisible fingers over the tops of trees like running your fingers over the hairs of your arm?

Have you ever run your fingers over the stubble of a shaved face like feeling the stumps after a field of trees was cut down for lumber?

Lain down on a rock, a beach, a meadow like a sheet of rain or a blanket of snow?

Squirrels and birds hop from limb to limb in the wet forest this morning.  They feed on seeds and insects.  They will feed others soon — their offspring, their predators, and the tiny organisms they carry throughout their lives that will feed on their carriers after they die, inviting flies and more beings that adapt and find feeding niches in their lifecycles.

The terms “war” and “peace” are like that, adapting to changing circumstances like street slang.

We cannot see ourselves as sets of states of energy in flux.

In a recent test of an augmented reality app for a company designing a combined hearing aid and smart sensor eyeglasses set, our team was surprised at the fun we found in watching data of passersby flash on the imaginary screen in front of us, giving us instant access to walking biographies, real or made-up.

I can’t say I’m interested in knowing the person sashaying in front of me cuts her toenails with kitchen shears or cries during wrestling matches because her father died in the ring when she was five years old.

But somebody does…a future lover, a merchandiser, an author, or a rival.

Do you know how many people live more in an imaginary world than in the real world around them?  How few don’t?

What is your definition of a hero?  A villain?  A person at peace?  Someone who is successful?

What is success?  Can you lead the world from a cabin in the woods or must you live in an opulent palace surrounded by guards and courtiers?

When a planet is conducive to a comfortable lifestyle, why leave?  Why not?

It’s Hip to be Square

I smell cat food on my fingers and popcorn on my breath.
I see squiggly lines in front of me and hear the heat pump hum.

How long does it take to recover from mourning the death of my father’s mind?

Minds do not exist, in the classic sense.

It’s a game of cat-and-mouse.

Dagger and cloak.

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer…

For whom the bell tolls.

My father served in the 4th Infantry, long before this 1970 report summarised lessons learned.

He is alive and yet not alive.

That is, he who was he is not he any longer.

Him who was is no more, but not nevermore.

‘Tis memories I relive in my current/future living.

There are memories to be made, observations to make, medical diagnoses to contemplate.

And/but yet.

Edgar Allan Poe went to West Point.  He died at 40 years of age.

Soon, I will be 50 years young, halfway to 100, where life starts all over again.

Like a paper folded in two.

Or a projectile at the top of its trajectory.

My father is one pathway of my life 27 years from now.

One way the past is the future all over again.

A paddled cruise down the Sipsey River, for instance — same places, new water, new trees, new wildlife.

Heard a barred owl in the woods behind the house this evening while Merlin (the cat) snoozed on my lap in the sunroom.

How many generations of owls and cats have passed in 50 years?

Or 77?

How many more in 100?

Global Branding Enigma of the Day

Currently residing about 80 miles from the Helen Keller Birthplace in Ivy Green, Alabama, I found this global branding of sunglasses using a blind person’s name an interesting enigma: how many people in China know who Helen Keller is?

Do you?

You should.

But is she more important a phenomenon than tardigrade egg survival in the rigours of space travel?

Time to read through my daily list of friends’ blog postings for other gems.  Example:

Friday the thirteenth

by effimai

I’m planning to stay in the house today as I’m not saying I’m superstitious BUT I had enough bad luck last year without adding black-cat-walking-under-ladders-breaking-mirrors shit aswell.

I don’t want to believe in it, and on a normal day if I stubbed my toe while rushing round to get ready I would silently swear every swear word I knew and then get on with my day. But if it was Friday the thirteenth, earlier when I did just that, it was just so so typical and expected because it was this day that it happened.

I don’t really understand the whole superstition thing especially with salt. If you spill the salt you have to spill it more by throwing it over your shoulder. Therefore making a lot more mess. Also you’re not meant to put new shoes on a table. I often, very often buy new shoes but I don’t have a table so its all ok now. The black cat thing I don’t believe in, because if you’re driving a car at 70mph and a cat crosses the road, the cat will be dead. So it will be the cat’s bad luck.

One of my friends when we were younger was walking to school with me and she avoided stepping on every crack in the pavement the whole mile walk. There was a couple of paving slabs that were so broken she had to jump over them. While jumping over them she fell and broke her ankle in two places. So obviously has the worst luck ever.

SO today I am going to avoid the outside world (And not JUST because i’m hungover, really hungover) but because bad things may happen. But the good luck charms are always worth looking for. Grab a four leaf clover, try and get a seven year warranty on a mirror and travel back in time to meet a chimney sweep.

The Truth About Handles

Across the street, an azalea bush blooms, the sign that this blog is soon coming to its inevitable end.

Before I go, I will share with you the truth about handles.

If you are familiar with literary devices, all the better.

I had a handle as a kid.

Well, now that I think about the subject, I had many handles — a handle on my lunchbox, a handle on my money box, a handle on my boom box — but boxes are more than handles and handles are more than accessories for boxes.

The lawnmowers I pushed across tiny fields of grass that neighbours called lawns and I called my independently owned taxfree business as a minor had handles.

I followed my father’s hobby of using a CB (citizens band) radio and created the handle (not a nom de plume, closer to a nom de guerre) of Tree Trunk.  My father was [Tennessee] Ridge Runner.

You can see the similarly between father’s handle and his son’s so I needn’t wax poetic on alliterative comparisons, need I?

But some of you know all this[,] already[,] so why’m I repeating myself?

‘Tis the curse of the tall tale teller but not Guillaume Tell, Pen and Teller nor the bank teller who robs the till creatively.

Creativity is the key word, here, though.

The story of the Committee resides in the truth about handles.

Can you imagine swirls of sets of states of energy spinning into tighter and tighter circles simply as a cosmic artistic display?

Can you imagine “life” as a seed planted to create a planetary absurdist art exhibit (or absurdest, depending on your point of view)?

From what I gather, my job here is done.  I have observed and reported.  I have served as the reluctant leader.  I have carried on the duties of the invisible museum curator.

That’s it.  That’s the truth about handles.

The rest is your participation in life as art for imaginary viewers “out there” or whatever literary device you call your own — personal or shared.

This blog is now closed.  I am returning to writing tall tales in the comfort of my thoughts, which may or may not find a space on paper, a computer hard drive in my study or somewhere in the stacks of racks we currently label the “cloud.”

Euphemisms — what would we do without the creative reuse and recycle of words?

Some call this time in one’s life retirement.  I call it returning to the earlier time in my life when I wasn’t forced by my subculture to squeeze my thought patterns out into homework assignments and job duties.  Somewhere around the age of five, give or take a year.  😉

You can handle the truth in your own imaginative way, too.

Every story has a conclusion written into the subplots that naturally end while more subplots pick up the pace, leading to the next story written by the same and/or other authors (or Authors, if you believe).

THE END

P.S. Have fun!

Flashback – “Sanctum, Sanatorium”

Sanctum, Sanatorium

If we are our friends then are you eclectic?
No. Instead, you take after Saint Brendan —
The Irish monk from county Kerry —
Who through his travels saw
That small towns in which you are born
Bear little resemblance to who you are.
The struggle to free ourselves from forced labor,
And face the pile of words we have become,
Has driven me to wonder how you’ll read
When your last breath drops petals on the floor.
For now, you sit in Charles’ saintly town,
And peer through family-tinted, bridal eyes;
You wonder when you’ll venture off the porch
And wander into your verbal sentence.
Apostles, martyrs, matrons, widows, all,
Have widened paths for nothing more than
Wanting peace for ever more. Your path —
Peat moss, bluets, partridge berry, and
Soothing streams of sun’s delight —
Rolls out before the one and only,
The only one who’s never lonely.
When we are old (we’ll never say),
Will we look back and ask ourselves,
“On which page did I look my best?”
Will we recall angelic faces
From the sanctuary of paragraphs
Written in the city of brotherly love?
Heaven only knows.

– 5 December 1997

Mixing hobbies

For the next project, taking an Arduino starter set, a box of servos from my old RC airplane hobby, and a robotic hand kit I received on my birthday to create…something to go along with my space buddies, E-stache and E-crab (wasn’t that their names? hmm…memory lapse due to sugar high from eating a handful of candy cane Hershey kisses…mmm…), adding more to their “family.”

Coming soon!

= = = = =

A shoutout to the road crew guys who cleaned out the drainage ditch pipes in the front yard earlier today:

BTW, Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), vinca (Vinca major) and marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) are blooming at the same time this year:

You can see berries of the nandina (Nandina domestica) and leaves of the surprise lily (Lycoris squamigera) in this photo: