Survival kit for today’s world of business, technology, politics and space exploration, all rolled into one, of course!

Ever wondered how to survive on the road from new employee on the bottom of the totem pole to top dog leading the sled?

Well, these book titles may point you in the right direction:

University-days-0000a University-days-0000b University-days-0000c University-days-0000d University-days-0033 University-days-0052 University-days-0053 University-days-0054 University-days-0055 University-school-books-0000 University-school-books-0002 University-school-books-0008 University-school-books-0012 University-school-books-0015 University-school-books-0018 University-school-books-0020 University-school-books-0021 University-school-books-0022 University-school-books-0023 University-school-books-0026 University-school-books-0029 University-school-books-0030 University-school-books-0034 University-school-books-0035 University-school-books-0036 University-school-books-0037 University-school-books-0037a University-school-books-0038 University-school-books-0039 University-school-books-0040 University-school-books-0041

Do Sikhs eat meat?

How many of us do something against our wishes because it’s our “job”?

How many of us go against the wishes of others because it’s our destiny?

Yesterday evening, my wife and I drove to a food store chain called “Cheeburger Cheeburger” because a day or so before we had listened to “50s on 5,” a satellite radio station dedicated to the popular American rock’n’roll music of the 1950s, which put me in the mood for a ’50s style eatery.

Delayed gratification had us sitting at a two-topper, recently cleaned off by Russell.

Courtney took our food order and Mayra brought us our food.

As we were close to finishing our delicious ground-up cow meat patties on buns and basket of frings (sliced/fried onions/potato), a large group of teenagers entered all cheery, bright-eyed and photo-happy, obviously not having eaten at this particular fine dining establishment before.

Of the group of 27, four young lads sat next to us, one wearing a T-shirt with the words “KEEP CALM I’M THE DOCTOR” emblazoned below the emblem of a old telephone booth, affectionately known as the time machine called the Tardis to fans of an internationally-popular show on the tellie called “Doctor Who.”

The young gentlemen were quite polite, informing my wife, upon her inquiries, that they haled from across the Big Pond in a small burgh called Birmingham (pronounced BIRM’ing-hum as opposed to our local town we call Birmin-HAM’).

They and their pals had enjoyed a good time at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center before being whisked off to the local shopping extravaganza known as the Madison Square Mall.

In like fashion to my wife’s curiosity, satisfying us that they were interested in a future career of engineering when they entered university (one favouring mechanical engineering and the other civil engineering), they pressed us for our favourite fast food joint.

As we hemmed and hawed, they informed us that they had the international fast food chains such as McDonald’s in Great Britain but not ones like Wendy’s.

I told them I believed my favourite place is Steak ‘n Shake, similar to Cheeburger Cheeburger but without the one-pound special, closer in style to my alltime favourite, Pal’s, which was too small for them to know about.  My wife believed her favourite is In-N-Out Burgers, which is concentrated on the West Coast.

The young men told us they were still in secondary school and that one of their chaperones, a woman with pink stripes in her hair, was their physics teacher whose specialty is astrophysics.

We wished them well and told them we hoped to meet them on the International Space Station one day, imagining these guys and their friends the future of space exploration and settlement.

After all, the enthusiastic pursuits of our youth often encourage us to expand our horizons.

These young men, some of them wearing what I believe to be the head gear of the Sikh religion, are part of our future, going on into fields of science and engineering along with their colleagues of many races, religions, genders and backgrounds, inventing new ways of observing our universe that we hardly imagine possible today.

I am happy that our ancestors put us on the path for Americans and Brits to meet at a small restaurant tucked into a shopping centre in the south part of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth.

Even as early as 25 years ago, I would not have thought it possible for us to meet like that.

Fifty years ago, not long after I was born, it was practically impossible.

Can you see how much progress we’ve made, how much farther we’ll go in 25 and 50 years from now?

Can you see why I don’t believe in secret societies and never chose to belong to one, even though I know they still exist and contribute in part to my being here today?

Keep The Dream Alive…

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.

A thinker with a drinking problem…

…or the other way around?

This is one of the hardest blog entries to write, a passel/gaggle of beer, Unobtanium style, wallowing in my stomach juices, leading the way.

There is, in this moment after watching “seeking a friend for the end of the world,” another moment within a moment, when cold medicine leads the way toward a tunnel vision where honesty meets the highway, the Internet highway (Al Gore not included with the likes of Vincent Cerf or others of cyber-hyper byways), that is, Celtic flutes warning me of moments stepping off the road, where in this silent moment of movie soundtracks I find myself leaning against a notebook PC writing words that’ll haunt me forever and a day afterward.

There is a muse, a dancing muse, by the name of Guinevere, who follows Thrush and Monica and Karen (a/k/a Janeil) along with Sarah/Sara and names that’ve paved a highway, pre-Internet (or post, depending on date of invention of the snippet of an idea of an inventor in someone’s womb), where sounds make no difference except in a language, or a discipline of savings, where neither Mandarin or any other makes any difference when one is focused on making, rather than spending, one’s labour/investment credits in a single species’ definition of survival traits on an indifferent planet in an unsensing solar system in a galaxy of possibilities of fermented improbabilities that Edgar Allan Poe would declare a likely story of insensibilities about lost loves and pickled livers.

There is, if memory serves, also Monasha, Sheree, Stacey and others at a diner in the burgh of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, who serve their customers with kindness without reserve.

Deeper still, there is this moment of silent contemplation, where a niece, Jana, and her deacon-ordained husband, Brian, celebrate the discovery of a gender we assign to newborne babes climbing out of wombs and into the worldwide web of the solar system beset by asteroids, solar flares, and traffic incidents recorded by friends such as Nathan who sees perps in every person who displays abnormal behaviour attributed to personality quirks unassigned to basic training in police procedures on policies approved by popularly-elected politicians.

All written in the fog of war.

Or sequestration.

Let me set the record straight.  I see the repetition of a species in competition with itself, in companies vying for limited government resources, who shall get the post-reductorio oratoria of the fat lady singing the swan song of uncompetitive companies incapable of getting the last brass ring of a merry-go-round and round and round of diminishing returns on the global scale of middle-class salesmenpeople telling you what’s best for your family as government coffers compete with private companies for your undivided attention.

As spinning/talking heads babble on unceasingly — baubles, bangles and beads [you know the melody] — one more time we’ll give you the mondo-rhythm, the hidden beat in the religious upbeat of a Bible/Bhagavad Gita/Islam oldtime religion (ignoring the new religion of Darwinism/global “One World Order” business) — let us divert ourselves one more time from our prime directives and tell it like it is.

A muse.

Amusing.

A Spanish dancer, a rocket guidance system expert, a missile thrust enthusiast, an Appalachian Trail hiker, a food lover (if not a liver player), a flautist, a Singapore Sling, a duck pond inhabitant, a person of independent means…

The list goes on and on.

We return to the story once again for the very first time, neither handwriting nor typewriting nor electronic interface getting in the way…

The cave stains leaving a mark immemorial…

Silence adds a break in the musical score for emphasis.

PDQ Bach, specifically.

Turning bad dancing into satire for fun’s sake.

In the light of the sun.

On a pretzel bun.

With mustard.

And extra salt.

Wax paper not included.

Rinse and repeat.

If you can follow the words, you’ve arrived here.

If not, avast virus database has been updated.

You are now back at the beginning.

AOL email and Amazon Kindle Singularity subscriptions not included.

Return to your dream, uninterrupted.

Good night!

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:

  1. The first group believes in the open and honest discussion of scientific methods.
  2. 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.