Tag Archives: satire

Do we always imagine it’s someone else having more fun?

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

An evening again, the moon’s illumination competing with the banker’s lamp and the laptop computer screen.

I promised myself I would stay out here in the public eye because I have nothing to hide.

But I lied.

I’m hiding myself from myself, throwing up artificial barriers because I’m afraid of letting go of promises I made to former versions of myself (i.e., talking to myself in previous moments).

I don’t know if I’m afraid or if I’m so well trained I don’t want to ruin people’s personal cocoon of illusions that hides their unrestrained all-consuming love for life.

I would tell my social self to disappear except I don’t know what I’d do with the states of energy absent of the social self.

So, instead, I throw out thanks to folks like Greg Cook and his tax firm, Cook & Co., and the great tax preparer, Chris, for their ability to get us great refunds from the world’s superpower of a government bureaucracy.

And to Papa Dubi’s for the delicious Cajun food at dinner tonight.

The Rave for showing “Limitless”.

Why do I keep asking permission to be alive?

After all, I don’t exist.

Paradox or dilemma?

A vow of poverty and unable to depend on others to completely prop up the helpless me.

Take that back.  Dependent solely on my wife’s loving patience and monetary support to keep me alive and healthy enough to sit here and croak/groan/squeak/type because I can’t trust the system into which I was born to provide long-term sustenance for the species to which I belong.

Able to say anything I please here but using social courtesy to avoid the current version of seditious blasphemy which would permanently get me ostracised or worse.

Despite overwhelming evidence that tries to tell me I know more than I could possibly know, I refuse to believe I have more than the capability of assessing microtrends for entertainment purposes only.

This is all supposed to be a big joke, a grand illusion or comedy, isn’t it, Rick?

I’m pretty sure no one reads these words.  Surely, I make up a reading audience and comments/feedback in order to build a convincing storyline?

I only imagine in conversations that I catch glimpses of other people speaking phrases I’ve written that serendipitously line up with what I’m going to think next.

Living solely in the moment will do that to a person.

I am a monster devouring the old self.

That must be what it is.

A grotesque.

Pushing people away because I fear what I know I’ll see – my true self in the core of other states of energy like me.

That is, there is no core.

There truly only is the moment.

The past and the future really are illusions.

Time is irrelevant.

There is no me that lives or dies.

The power to lift a veil from the imaginary curtain rod of time reveals the absence of all that these states of energy have wound themselves up about.

Meshing/weaving wisdom as fast as one can to stay ahead of information overload.

Debrainwashing and removing false filters.

All for the purpose of repurposing repetitious nothingness.

This body is all I am.

I have nothing to give you, nothing to trade for your openness and kindness except platitudes and fake movie sets.

I am a prop in my own little drama.

Predicting the future is carrying forward seven billion thought trails multiplexed into a few dozen themes woven into the surrounding ecosystem that is just part of the galactic set of states of energy with less and less influence by short wavelengths and slightly more influence by longer wavelengths.

I don’t want to find a way to pay the bills with this knowledge.

I just want to be dead.

Until then, I fill the time between this moment and one set to occur 14,294 days from now.

I can keep lying to myself that long, maybe.

I shouldn’t be here in this mood because deep down I know I don’t like myself anymore, with no future to look forward to, nothing to do but rise up and please those around me when they lay out their dramas before me and ask me to play along.

I am the void.  Empty.  No walls to call a vessel.  Certainly not a vassal.

Tied to a past that doesn’t exist and promises me no future.

Thus, I am dead.

Gone.

As I said, the walking dead.

Another day closer to complete dissolution.

Caught in the trap of the false sense of security.

If the species doesn’t want to save itself from itself anymore than I do when I waste energy in a blog like this, substituting convenience for prudence, then how can I say it’s worth saving?

It’s not fun being me.  I would give these gifts of wordiness to anyone who could more quickly push our species toward whatever it is that my faulty personality is blocking us from reaching a more conscientious living in the moment.

But I don’t know how.

After all, these are just fingers or ends of the armlike extensions of my body playing along with the electrochemical pathways tuned to making pixels light up in stark opposition to shadows cast by the Moon’s reflection of the Sun’s states of energy doing what they do.

What is blocking my thoughts this time?

What am I sensing that I don’t want to let myself know I am blocking again?

Why this subterfuge of literary plot devices?

Why pretend anymore?

I can’t tell you what I know because I don’t know what it is that puts these words here except the culmination of in/formal education.

Lie down and let daydreams and sleep entertain me.

They may not be any more real than anything else but they’re all I have.

I apologise to a certain person for pushing her away but that’s all I know how to do with the strong personalities like you – my ability to hold clever conversations in person is severely limited by my illusion of objectification as a self-defense mechanism.

The training required to get over that illusion requires giving up the illusion that sticking with paradigms of the past is a requirement of my subcultural upbringing and thus a core part of the person called Rick who doesn’t really exist.

Paradox or dilemma?

Yes.

I also have to believe I’m the only one who knows what I’m saying here, aware of the thoughts that aren’t being expressed due to conflicting thought trails crossing over each other, and slower typing speed than pure thought expression will allow.

And the knowledge that no matter what I say, I’m repeating myself and the thought sets of billions of lives before, during and after mine, which at a smaller scale repeat the living patterns of all beings of our molecular makeup.

The same choices we all make.

So why choose?

Good question.  To bed, then!

Kentucky Borderline

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

A clean bill of a healthy state of mind.

Thoughts drifting.

Sitting on the elementary schoolyard swing set again, singing “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” with my two schoolmates, Renée and Rita, while we saw who could swing the highest without getting the teacher’s attention.

After recess, returning to the fourth grade classroom and hanging out with the guys who challenged everyone to memorisation games, using pulldown maps of countries, states and land features.

Talking about a new literature one of the guys had discovered, called “science fiction.”

Passing love notes to Renée in class, getting caught and reprimanded by Mrs. Tallman, who threatened to tell my mother, a first-grade teacher in the same school, down in the modern pod section where the open classroom concept was being tested on teachers and students, whether they wanted it or not.

Renée dead a year later from a blood disorder that I assume was leukemia.

Some thoughts repeat themselves, overshadowing memories that might have been important at one time, including spelling, grammar, math, history, social studies and geography.

How many politicians who want to make teaching a minimum-wage job with no benefits have children in public schools?

Could you be convinced to vote for a real person like yourself whose lifestyle matches most of the ones in your voting district and is not tempted by wealth?

That is, if you have the right and privilege to vote, which you exercise, seriously considering the ramifications of your decision.

If such a person would register as a candidate for public office.

Renée’s lively personality left my life when we were ten, 20.8% of my current life.

Now, news of friends’ parents dying is growing common.

In middle age, these are the days of my life.

My parents just called to inform me Mrs Abernathy had died.

John, Carol, Beth and Don – my thoughts and prayers are with you as you begin the grieving process for the death of your mother.  She was a sweet lady, the consummate Mom for all children, loving the neighbourhood kids, church kids, and school kids without showing favourites.

I sit here, remembering her influence on me as I grew up in Colonial Heights – hosting church youth socials in the backyard, supporting Sing Out Kingsport and school musicals – knowing Renée never had the attention from Mrs. Abernathy that I enjoyed throughout my teenage years.

Neither will I have been the type of parent to provide that community support for my children and their friends/schoolmates.

From one end of life to another, death is a constant.

Yet, as much as we know about the whys and wherefores…the loss, the end of forming new memories and absence of wisdom, love and insight from deceased family and friends, young or elderly, change our perspectives.

How does it change my perspective?

Renée has been gone almost 40 years.  Mrs. Abernathy just died.  Mr. Guinn died 10 days ago.  At least one of my schoolmates is dying of metastasised/terminal cancer.

Where is my sense of humour today?

It showed itself in the gift I made for and gave to Dr. Brown this morning, an electronic “Cat of the Year” calendar/video of our cat, Merlin, who has recovered from dental surgery, thanks to the professionalism and joy that Erin and her staff bring to their veterinary occupations.

Humour is an outlet for pain, among other expressions of relief from daily concerns, frustrations and ennui, including relief that pain/worry has ended.

Humour is what I pretend to believe that defines a separation of me from everything else (although I know I am a combination of everything that has passed through this dense set of states of energy called me in this moment).

Merlin ran out of the cage when we got home and looked for dry food to eat, the sign to me he was ready to get away from wet food after a week of healing sore gums.

Debbie and Neal plan to be grandparents in June.

Our oldest nephew marries in July.

Chestney graduates from high school soon.

Our days are numbered – we count up because we never know when to start the countdown.

Renée died at a point that I called 100% of my life up till then.  When I die, I will have lived 100% of my life.

Math.

I will have died somewhere.

Geography.

I will have lived with others in a specific time period.

History.

My name will be recorded in both official birth and death certificates.

Spelling.

I might get an obituary to go along with my birth announcement.

Grammar.

I contributed to sub/cultures during my life and learned from others’ sub/cultural clues.

Social studies.

That’s all I know.

All I need to know.

The rest is a joke waiting to be told from a curious perspective while walking down that Blue Highway I call my life.

Title? What title?

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Boom, boom, yeah...

The Joy of Socks!

Jameson and pistol tattoos - bam!

Neal, Ginger, Debbie, Janeil: Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Well, time for inventory, lads!

Jameson & ginger? Check!

Irish root beer? Check!

Irish car bomb (Irish-American version of a boilermaker)? Check!  Check! Check! Even one with Ginger.  Check!

Guinness? Check!

Free shots of Jameson, courtesy of the Jameson girls and the fellow who looks like a leprechaun and is losing more and more hair every year? Check!

Thanks to Team Apache and Southern Jamm Security.

Out at Mason’s Pub on a warm spring evening, even if the featured band played British tunes (Beatles?) on St. Paddy’s Day.

But Jocelyn took good care of us on a crowded night, looking herself like Andrea Corr of The Boys & Girls of County Clare.

What, with David Bjorne, Elizabeth Neely, Ginger (but not Maryanne) and Debbie and Neal Redmond adding friendly conversation, I felt like I was home.

Or maybe at Dromoland Castle with a company Christmas party back in 2005, a fellow company man and his beautiful girlfriend sharing a ciggy or fag on a night of drinking and dancing where what happens in Ireland stays in Ireland.  But now he’s permanently livin’ in the States.  Too bad the band tonight wasn’t playin’ Irish fiddle tunes again, eh?  I sure miss his girlfriend but the secret stays with me, doesn’t it?

The Greek invented everything, did they?  What of Duke’s Malibu?

Have you ever worn beer Jameson goggles glasses?

What if your six-year old looked like your hubby but acted like you, your four-year old looked like you but acted like your hubby, and your two-year old was in-between but seemed like one of her grandmothers?  Could I inspire Ginger and her hubby to have a fourth child?  At 40, my dear, you still look and act like you’re 21.  Your husband’s still a lucky man.

Just like Debbie looks like she’s 35 although she’s about to be a grandmother.  Neal, I’m envious.

And Michael of Booz Allen fame from the UCP event showing up again tonight.  Coincidence?

Top o’ the mornin’ to you.

…and the balance of the day to yourself…

I’ve me wife.  G’night.  Hope you had a good day wearin’ green.

Remember, Rick…

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , • Leave a comment

…this, like most others = “Nothing is Real” Day.

Makes everything straightforward and easier to explain to self.

And much funnier.

Turns rumourised interpretations of the news into an inside-out opposite sketch, letting people get rich or poor believing anything they want, without my unimpassioned insight.

Give professional comedians their say.

I’ll keep my jokes inside my head and smile knowingly.

I neither gain nor lose.

Labels.

States of energy.

Tag. You’re it once again.

You can’t catch something/one that doesn’t exist.

Happily waiting to die.

Amazing, what true freedom gives one.

Another Post-Aggression Depression Post

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Today, many people on this planet celebrate St. Patrick’s Day which, oddly enough, is day when drunk revellers imbibe in the name of a Catholic saint.

Are you willing to share your traditions with others who’ll shape the traditions to their whims, desires and traditions?

Hard to believe only 14,295 days are left and I want to spend this day in a cloud of oblivion, not eating, drinking or consuming more than moist air for my lungs.

Smelling the wind.  Feeling vibrations in my feet.

Looking at sweetgum tree buds.

Thinking about no time in particular.

Almost not caring about the arrangements of these words sdfps8′ 3ehp4nh’N#g;p3.

What do you do with yourself in a closed-loop system?

There is a stinkbug caught between the window screen and the window, finding a crack somewhere to get in but unable to find its way back out.

There are an unnumbered number of dead insects at the bottom of the window.

Some days I feel like the stinkbug, unaware that my time spent crawling on the screen, my antennae fully aware of familiar smells/vibrations but unable to get to them, is time spent not knowing I’m not going to get out alive.  Perhaps a spider hidden in a corner will find me and make use of me.

Otherwise…

Perfectly, happily, soberly aware I really know nothing.

My brain an Intel Celeron M running Microsoft Windows Vista Basic on a Compaq Presario C501NR Notebook PC, generations and magnitudes less complicated than the world’s fastest human-made supercomputer.

More than sitting on a horse and buggy counting on my fingers, in comparison, but comparison to what?

Who am I to deny any one of the seven billion of us the right to procreate?

Who am I to say billions of us will die for my benefit?

I’m not presumptuous.  I’m not the wealthiest or the poorest.

A racetrack or sports arena is more familiar to me as a place of worship than a place of worship.

If more people in the U.S. watch films and shows on the tellie than go to sporting events or participate in formal religious service, what does that say about what we call religion?  That is, how are we defining our definitions of morals and ethics for normal social interaction?

How does a child know the difference between fantasy and reality?

When did we start believing food comes in brightly-coloured bags and boxes, not out of farms and ranches?

When did we convince ourselves it’s all right to turn homes into chemical experiments on humans, plants, animals, insects and other living things?

What does it profit me to profit if I’m going to contract cancer from unintentional concoctions?

I’m going to die anyway, right?

Who or what entity is going to test whether the aerosols of chemical lawn fertilisers will mix with aerosols of underarm deodourant, hairspray, furniture deodouriser, kitchen surface disinfectant and cologne/perfume to create a force more invisibly deadly than anything dreamed up by military chemical warfare departments, because no one took into account the change to the microorganisms inhabiting our bodies and the poisons they’ve been, through no fault of any one person or entity, chemically genetically-modified to cover us and fill our pores with?

The Law of Unintended Consequences.

I didn’t get drunk today but, because I mentioned the phrase “St. Patrick’s Day,” someone reads these words and decides it’s okay to have one or two extra litres of beer to show he’s more manly than anyone in the room, stumbles out of the pub, trips on the curb and bangs his head, ending up in a hospital emergency room where he meets a nice nurse he decides to introduce to his forlorn son, their love convincing the father to give up drinking heavily because he can finally forgive himself for not taking good care of his wife while she was dying of cancer she got while visiting her sister’s family near a chemical waste dump they didn’t know existed behind their house that was built in the shape of a stinkbug on an idea an architect got from reading random blog entries one day.

We are an ignorant species so let’s keep looking for ways to increase our wisdom and not just our collections of esoteric information that we cleverly yell out while watching television trivia game shows.

If you knew exactly where a large chunk of galactic material was going to hit Earth’s atmosphere thousands or millions of years from now, would you figure out how to change Earth’s rotation ever so slightly to keep the resulting sonic boom and burning debris from hitting major centres of your species’ population, knowing the destruction of trillions of other microorganisms would have a small but not detrimental effect on your species thousands of years later?

How big a picture can you work with without resorting to using literary devices like magic, superpowers or time travel?

When the timescales of your species have little effect on galactic timescales at which you operate, what does one life matter?

Finding the humour in that scenario is the challenge of my lifetime.

14,295 days, as we call them, to get it right.

Championship Rings

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

On a solar scale.

I can’t help but think about the film “Akira” today.  I know many of you have.

I’m not a manga fan, picking the film up last year at a going-out-of-business sale by a local video rental store that lost out to the redbox business plan.

I may have heard of “Akira” once or twice before by some of my former employees who were into niche markets exemplified by Comic-Con, Dragon*Con, Trekkie conferences, offroad/4×4 events and ham radio swap fests.

Meanwhile, the Chargers savour another win while preparing for the next game.

I must decide about moments yet to be.

Is there a place for me in our socioeconomic system, either on the micro or macro scale?  Or both?

If I do not exist, does it matter what these states of energy do with themselves?

Although thoughts from many walks of life flow through me, I am a relatively simple guy.

Is there a place for simple in today’s economy?

“Noisemakers are not allowed,” the loud announcer said noisily over the PA system.  What?

To what am I sensitised today?  Usually, I feel a level of tension build up and then assign an event that serves as the relief valve.

All of us are motivated by something.

I think and I write.

Maybe it’s time to move from “I” to “i” to encourage movement along the path of absence of self.

Otherwise, vanity will get the best of me.

It’s easy to talk about states of energy being absent of good and evil when one has a solid sense of one’s comfortable set of moral and ethical boundaries provided by subcultural guidance and natural/genetic propensity of some sort.

I am a member of my species, not another, although i contain close to 100% of the same genetic material as many other combined states of energy we call separate species, whether they/we are directly codependent or indirectly tied to me through the global ecosystem.

Imagine the impossible and then make the impossible practical.

As my accountant said, there are many people with 100 patents in their names but few of them are earning a living off their inventions.

I hope Jennifer Hudson is not taking uppers or other “dietetic” supplements to push her weight down.

I before e, except after c.

Mixing formality informally.

Asking because i don’t know or need/want to know everything.

I forget what I told myself to do, repeating, repeating because I can’t remember I was once i before.

What’s next for me?

Is simply observing enough?

The universe is vaster than my readily-available thought set but it doesn’t stop me from adding new memories, neither punishing nor rewarding myself for recognising I’ve regained lost memories or lost them forever because I know these states of energy like to demonstrate the concepts of inertia and entropy for no other reason than to play a joke on themselves.

I fade away slowly.  i guess that’s simple enough for now.