Leaning against the cushion of pain

Should the interiour of spaceships invoke aesthetic design criteria or functional?

Yesterday, I wanted to take my wife to a nice, quiet, flat lawn to sit and watch a fireworks show to honour the anniversary of the traditional start of the United States of America.

How many of us have sat in meditative silence in “Rocket Park,” a display of rockets, missiles and other gear located in the back lot of the US Space & Rocket Museum in Huntsville, Alabama?

Why not, I thought, grab a couple of cheap lawn chairs, a good book to read and some cash, buy food and drink from street venders and wait for the sizzle-n-boom of pyrotechnic fantasies light up the sky while surrounded by aerodynamic monuments to science?

Me, my wife, and a few hundred people, it turned out.

Rocking to the music of the AMC band (courtesy of the U.S. Army Materiel Command).

I made it about halfway through Craig Ferguson’s “American On Purpose” when threatening thunderstorms dampened the mood (and the book), pushing us indoors until minutes before the Main Event.

All of us have our stories to tell, don’t we?

Earlier in the day, we’d shopped at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, where I dared myself to get back into reading books again, picking up copies of “You Laugh, I’ll Drive” by Jenny Herrick, “Everything Bad Is Good For You” by Steven Johnson, and “A Short History Of Progress” by Ronald Wright.

So, I started my foray back into the writing styles of ghostwriters by reading Jenny’s autobiography and ended with Craig’s.  But, strangely enough, not Jenny Craig’s.  Hmm…

We can weld and program computing devices that explore the outer reaches of the solar system, can’t we?

We can enjoy the explosive nature of gunpowder without anyone getting hurt.

Is there anything we can’t do?

Yesterday, I was sad, the first 4th of July without my father and my mother in-law.

But it’s who/what I have and what I can do that matter most.

Like having chronic back pain for so long you’re consciously unaware of the fact you lean against the pain for support.

 

How many Finns have finished fins päädyssä “le fin”?

While I wait for an inspiration to hit me or simply rub up against me and go, “Me now!,” I wait.

I wait for a style, a period, an influence, to work its magic upon my video clips of a trip to Alaska.

I have given up wanting a lead candidate to get my vote, now that the two leading candidates for U.S. President have declared themselves alike and equally adept at being either a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a sheep in wolf’s clothing as the situation requires.

C’est la vie.

I had given up reading books when my mother in-law got real sick and died.  I resigned myself to not reading a book again after my father got real sick and died.

The complexities that I wished to weave in brainwave pattern matching/synching/syncopating have dissipated.

My vocabulary shrinking.

My wry, sarcastic sense of humour intact, mild but biting.

My automatically-correcting grammatical radar falling into disuse.

‘Tis me, here, though, isn’t it?

Not another.

Time…time, time, time…time to consider new possibilities.

My country is no longer my own — it belongs and has always belonged to the wealthy alpha leaders.

My sights are set farther, out there in space and time.

I want to go further.

See a furrier.

Tell PETA, “Look, I slowly squeezed the main artery to the brain so that the animal went to sleep and died before I skinned it for my wife’s warm coat to wear to the opera, a more humane death than being eaten alive in the wild, or hearing your ranting chants.”

Look through my “complete” collections of National Geographic, MAD magazine, the New Yorker and other desk reference volumes.

Read my father’s copy of Pyle’s “THIS IS YOUR WAR.”

Stop thinking while this moment of memories with my father rushes through my endocrine system.

Stop feeling this pain.

Stop wanting to lash out and attack others for their successes, knowing death gets us all, no matter how far or short we got relative to fellow members of our species, dead or alive.

Your struggles and successes are not mine.

I slow down, soaking in the mixed emotions, the son standing here in place of his father, regardless of historical significance one may have or may not have had more than the other.

I cannot eat memories but they can eat me.

I can rewrite memories but not the events on which they are based.

The molecules, atoms and subatomic particles have moved on.

Why can’t I?

The animated graphic novel will have to wait.

So, too, the Alaskan travelogues, new and old.

I have only myself at the centre of this known universe in this current version of a dream/illusion/fantasy I try to get you to align with, just like everybody else.

How can I be different from and yet the same as you?

I wait for an inspiration.

Earth spins on its axis.

Our solar system spins around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

Toward or away from what are we expanding?

When time is meaningless, what are dreams about a future on another world?

I can crush the crystal ball with one hand, the shards opening fissures, wounds, tears in the fabric of spacetime.

We all know we have to eat.  Most of us reproduce.

The moments we spend in-between, here, there, any/every where, what are they?

…so this is what it’s like to float in weightlessness…how long can I stay here?…do I have to leave?…there is no waiting when there is neither time nor space that waits for the me that is not-me which does not exist…

Separating the amateurs from the pros from the cons

Well, back to the storyline that won’t go away quietly.

Turns out the Committee has issued its final opinion to settle the debate on what separates a professional athlete from an amateur athlete and either one from a convict.

Simple: the best body modification that money can buy.

Therefore, from this day forward, all professional sports association must allow players to use as many chemical concoctions and prosthetic additions as they and/or their sponsors can afford.

Amateur athletes must continue to refrain from enhancing their bodies in any way that requires more than basic nutrition to supplement a hard exercise regimen.

Of course, this puts pressure on the professional spectacle that used to be a competition between amateur athletes called the Olympics.

Because professional athletes can participate in the Olympics, all Olympic athletes may take whatever steps they, their family, their sponsors and/or their country deems necessary to win.

Or, as they like to say in scifi, may the best cyborg crush its opponent in glorious technicolour!

The starving barbarians at the gate will still be barred from entry until such time as they prove themselves civilised enough to behave like a normal doped-up athlete in the Olympic spotlight — sorry, no more grunting in front of a microphone and camera like a tennis player on the court — you must be able to speak in sentences longer than two words, even if your opponent is bleeding to death in the arena from your crushing blow to the head.

Five Minutes Until Closing Time

The situation is this: what do you want after the crisis in Syria is less violent in chaotic parts of that geopolitical zone?  How do you want the people suffering the worst economic conditions in the Eurozone to react?  If you don’t have to pay your medical bills, who’s going to determine if you got your money’s worth?

Tuned in to Pandora radio, picked the Soundgarden station and an advert for “Meet Singles in Your Area” popped up.  Switched to the Claire Lynch station and an advert for “Viagra” popped up.  Stayed up when Alison Kraus started playing.  Very punny.

Anyway, so we’ve got supply lines to regional energy sources which we want to stay open.

We’ve got people in the Middle East who claim that civilisation originated there.

We have people in China trying to prove the same thing.

Thing is, does it matter?

What is civilisation?  Violent suppression?  Censorship?  Surveillance?

And that’s just in the UK.

When is a revolution acceptable?

Who gets to choose when to participate in an uprising?

Is every wealthy person an “alpha?”

Is every person in a position of authority — in charge of military forces, that is — an “alpha” or a “beta?”

[Cue references to “Brave New World”]

What does it mean to be an American or a world citizen?

Can you claim membership in both groups?

I’m blending in with my surroundings, the chameleon nearly invisible, a reflection of the intersecting waves of social [in]justice, letting words, images, labels and such flow through and around me.

Some call it happiness.

I call it being me/not-me.

On Canada Day, I consider a visit to the country via Alaska, wondering if I should move to the land of depleting boreal forests, oil shale field fracking and old gold rushes.

I trust our species to use as much fossil fuel as is in-the-slightest-bit feasible to extract because alternative energy sources are expensive in comparison to…well, pick your chart, select your argument and present to a skeptical public the why’s and wherefore’s of the social/economic/ecological cost of running a modern-day civilisation.

Meanwhile, I’m slapping some money down on a trip to the land of Molson, moose and moist towelettes.

Trekking over tourist traps and snow country.

Working my network of associates and colleagues.

Wondering if monsters sleep under rusted truck cabs in desert conditions near tundras.

Or was that a deserted Tundra truck under seeping monster cabs in rusty conditions?

Maybe ol’ Dusty Rhodes’ll be singing a sad song on the way to the next WWE Hall of Fame induction.

Time for another hand-drawn animated satirical cartoon disguised as what?  The last time, a horror novel.  The next time…?

Stay tuned!

Alone on this lonesome highway, the Wandering Wonderer meditates on the universe that revolves around him solely for his lifetime entertainment, the illusions enjoyable, if tragic or funny in forgotten moments of timeless navelgazing.

This is my dream, my illusion — getting our states of energy, our living, breath bodies in one form or another, out into the solar system, not just our electronic, robotic companions escaping the heliosphere — carrying on the work of our species for millennia, using stories, humour and Earth’s resources to make my [adopted] dream a reality worth living for.

Everything else is just a game in your dreams and illusions.  I’ll play your games sometimes but I promise I soon get bored.  If the alphas and betas want to fight each other to the death, go for it — don’t let me stop your madness, battling over the same ground your ancestors wasted their time killing each other to claim again for the very first time.  If those kinds of games of yours are all there is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then end mine here.

No?  I’m still alive?  Good!  Time to explore new fields where resources and repurposed technology may make my dream come true…

The water sprinkler in the woods

Yes, the new leader of the Committee is right.  I moved part of the supercomputer out of the sub-sub-subbasement and into the cave network stretched across parts of north Alabama, north Georgia, southeastern Tennessee and western North Carolina.

Some of my colleagues are investigating the feasibility of extending the network to subnetworks our subcommittees set up in Kentucky and Virginia centuries ago.

Just because I’m retired doesn’t mean I’m retired.  Although I am tired and losing my ability to maintain an understanding of this symbol set — the communication method you call the language of [American] English — to record these thoughts in the second decade of the 21st century.

I still keep in touch with my associates, of course.  After all, I have to eat and feed my family.

This very morning, I looked over some data analysis reports and found this tidbit of the future interesting.

A young boy, while watching “Real Steel,” came up with the idea of merging NASCAR, “The Last Starfighter,” “Real Steel,” and Google autonomous vehicles to give underutilised racetrack owners a way to make money when they aren’t hosting main events.

Without the need for human drivers and protective cages, racecars have taken on new shapes, much more interesting than the “win on Sunday, drive on Monday” models that have dominated the sport since its infancy.

Much more fun to watch, what with people sitting at home getting their fifteen seconds of driving their favourite car around the track, randomly picked throughout the race so that no viewer with special gaming equipment at home purchased just for this type of sport can leave the screen because anyone at any time can be picked to take over his or her (or its!) favourite car.

No one knows when other popular racecars have been taken over by autonomous software routines.

Seems like we have been here before, doesn’t it?

Didn’t Formula 1 already patent the invention of the robot driver called Michael Schumacher, discovering that even automatons like Mike deteriorate when pushed to the limit race after race, becoming less efficient, less successful, eventually?

Which brings us to the Olympics.  The sentient being we created for the U.S. Swim Team, Michael Phelps, is still performing well.  The early prototypes such as Muhammad Ali, Nadia Comăneci, and Lance Armstrong gave us trouble in the long run, but we learn from our construction projects no matter what they look like at the end.

How do we create these superstars of sports?

Easy.  We listen to the ignorance of the crowd.  Where they almost hit genius moments, like this writer, Jenna Wortham, who thinks interfaces with computing devices will only take place via our five senses.

Long ago, we learned how to put enhanced computing devices inside every part of the body, making individual body parts smarter, faster, cheaper.  Chemical, organic, undetectable — microorganisms that release designer molecules (phrases like “human growth hormone” are out of fashion, don’t you know?); microorganisms that clean up waste products such as urine, feces and sweat before they’re released from the body; microorganisms that attach to specific cells of the body (muscle tissue, for instance) without flooding the bloodstream with the appearance of banned substances.

Waiting for the slow feedback loop between our sensory organs and computing devices is just a plain waste of time and effort.

For now, we’ll let the populace believe their antiquated interface devices like mobile phones and tablet PCs are somehow making them more productive busybodies — not much better in retrospective than a group of Neanderthals sitting around the person who discovered fire, asking, “Okay, fine!  But can it cut up the meat for us afterward?” — because we know they don’t know better, and are stuck in this time period.

We’ll let dilettante comedians convince their audiences that they’re one step away from the great breakthrough, as long as you pay for their humour-filled advice.

After all, those who can’t see the future have only this moment in which to live.

Well, yes, I’ve told you you also only have this moment in which to live, but then that’s what I wanted you to believe at the moment I wrote it.

How else am I supposed to show you that every moment matters because no moment matters?

Anyway, I’ve an experiment to check.

If you put a water sprinkler in the woods and nobody noticed, would the birds that sipped water from dripping tree leaves have an effect on your future?

If I don’t humour myself, who will?  If I can’t humour myself, who can?

If a movie like “Into The Wild” is probably a false retelling of history, why tell it?

How can I find out?  Use an upcoming holiday trip to test the theories that supercomputers create to entertain themselves.

Repeating thoughts and news of natural events as a form of long-distance-over-time communication is more tiring than I first thought when I was invited to lead the Committee.  They hinted but didn’t tell me that a leader never stops leading.

Lucky me!

Back to my cup of hot tea on a day when 105 deg F is no big deal, watching a tick crawl up my leg and nestle into a break in my skin, releasing chemicals into my bloodstream that affect my immediate future, much less my future 1000 years from now.

The case of the cuckoo in the couscous cause

There are two kinds of people: those who want an explanation…

Sensory overload is not the issue — stimuli stimulate us constantly.

The issue centers on filtering.

You don’t appreciate your humble beginnings until you’ve had a perspective that tells you who, what, or where you might have been.

Normality is a numbing sensation that blocks the extremes.

For instance, the feel of the plastic keys under my fingers is normal.  I do not know what I miss, such as carving letters in the rough bark of a tree, hammering titles into hard blocks of granite, or writing my name with quill on smooth vellum.

Thus my position — the sum total of my experiences that place this set of states of energy in this spot, spinning around a planet’s core and rotating around the local star — is normal.

I do not know what it’s like to drift far from the pull of gravity.

I pop the joints in my backbone, expecting vertebrae and cartilage to respond as they always have before, relieving the pain of misalignment from working in the overgrown front yard.

Now there’s a hackathon worth sweating over!  But it can wait (as it always does).

While my wife was out of town on travel, I stepped into the woods behind our house, making sure no one in the neighbourhood was casually looking (those who were spying I left to their imaginations and binoculars), grabbed the lip of what, to the casual onlooker would be a large, extremely heavy, impossible to lift boulder, and lifted.

Counterweight hinges are a godsend, let me tell you.

Hidden in the caves that snake through the hills of north Alabama are designated passageways.

Down here, time is measured in…well, we don’t measure time, we measure stalagmites and stalactites.

Our library is composed of crystal formations and cave crickets.

Human construction overhead destroys old libraries, wiping prehistory of our planet from the slate of time and replacing it with notes from the Anthropocene.

The universe is like that, energy moving in bunches, crowding in and taking over a virtual spot held for billions of years by grouped energy states that transform or move on.

[Actually, spots — three-dimensional fixed positions — do not exist but we’ll save that subject for another adventure.]

Moving as regular as clockwork.

Normal.

A few days ago I sat in the library and observed guano.  Honestly, I’d much rather watch an iguana or an igloo but I needed to complete research I’d assigned myself when I was the Reluctant Leader of the Committee planning for his retirement.

There was a bat that ate a bug (or was it an insect?  I dunno.), a bug that once lived in a rug, all snug (of course), with a slug.  Ugh!

I wanted to know if the bug (or insect) had nibbled on the edge of a bog.  A big bog.  Smaller than a bag.  But I’m not one to beg.

So I sat and watched.

Waited until dusk.

No place to busk.

Or bask.

So I waited.

One by one and then a few dozen at once, the bats flew out of the cave, leaving their droppings for my scientific analysis.

Luckily, the bog’s bugs (or insects) have a signature chemical composition that, in the right light, not a bright light (or a Lite Brite), gives away their place in the food chain.

I was looking for the missing link (but not the Missing Link (or Richard Linklater (but maybe later Art Linklater)) that would guide me to a gas that permeates the bog sublayer accidentally stepped on by a boy carrying a buoy (not David Bowie (or a Bowie knife)).

Patience is a virtue.  She’s also a patient at the Virtuous Mother Virgin Ob-Gyn Clinic sponsored by Clinique.

So after I waited, I waded through the guano, holding up the right light until I saw the bog gas’ signature signature.

The puzzle was completed, the last piece put into place.

I had solved the riddle of the case of the cuckoo in the couscous cause.

There are two kinds of people.  Which one are you?

Earthquake, cyclone, fire or flood

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost
=========================

Look at some of these pictures and decide for yourself (from: http://photos.denverpost.com/mediacenter/2012/06/photos-waldo-canyon-fire-near-garden-of-the-gods/38318/)

  •  click for full size:

My thoughts and prayers go the families whose homes are gone — although we can replace houses and their possessions, the loss of objects to which we’ve attached precious memories is often just as heartbreaking as the loss of someone close to us.

Ship’s log

17 June 1987, 17:53

I have entered a new adventure in learning (for which my wife and I have given one hundred and seventy-seven American dollars).  This adventure is entitled Sociology 480 – Society of the Future.  The other members of this adventure will share the ideas we bring to the class and the ideas of the members of the Worldwatch Institute who have issued “A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society,” entitled State of the World 1987.

= = = = = = = = = =

17 June 1987

Dr. Donald Tarter, instructor, Sociology of the Future

  • For the next 25 years, NOBODY CAN PREDICT THE FUTURE!!!
  • Doesn’t stop us from asking, “What if…?”  “What can happen?”
  • Some have made bold predictions in science, literature and behavioural studies:
    • Carl Sagan
    • Arthur Clarke
    • B.F. Skinner
  • For instance, Sagan predicts that survival over the next 100 years for endangered species is less than 10%.

Analyzing the Pressures of Population, especially ours:

  • Population factors such as growth rates, supply and demand for resources
  • Energy alternatives — availability of supplies
  • Mineral resources
  • Agricultural resources — can we grow enough?

= = = = = = = = = =

29 June 1987 20:20

A visit by Dr. Carl Sagan to Huntsville, Alabama, to discuss “Star Wars or Mars.”

Leaving this planet

  • Application of rocketry
    – developed by Chinese
    – developed into instruments of death and destruction by Europeans
    60,000 nuclear weapons
    1 submarine can destroy 192 cities
    “A central exchange” – ~200 million to 2 billion killed on tight nuclear winter — destruction of agriculture; starvation, destruction of ozone layer would bring about equivalent of large-scale AIDS
    You cannot trust estimates of probability of failure when the stakes are high
  • Solutions
    “Star Wars” a/k/a SDI (strategic defense initiative)
    Render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” — President Reagan
    If simultaneous deployment by both sides were possible then the shield would be feasible
  • Cons
    Porosity — one Senate group predicts 16% of Soviet weapons destroy
    10% getting through means 1000 Soviet weapons which would wipe out America
    U.S. is invaded daily by small aircraft carrying the weight but not the density of nuclear weapons
    Decoys and penetration aids, low flying (depressed) flight paths, increased number of warheads built by Soviets
    Computer program “battle management system” to detect and destroy the nuclear warheads would be too complex to design and debug
    If U.S. had first strike then Stars Wars could wipe out remaining Soviet nuclear weapons
    Would cost $2 trillion U.S. dollars
    Some scientists refusing to be involved in SDI — ~10,000 in number
    Estimated that $600M spent on SDI in Huntsville
    Not worth the cost even if money was available
    National security should be measured by wealth of economy, not by money spent on national defense
    Children should look forward to growing up
  • Alternative — bilateral decrease in strategic arms

Rocketry

  • Werner von Braun in Germany, Robert Goddard in U.S.
    After WWII in U.S., 1961-1978, the moment the human species (mainly the U.S.) explored all the planets known to the ancients
    Now many other nations have joined the exploration
  • Today, NASA is dis-spirited, in serious trouble
    Principle reason: NO GOAL
    IT NEEDS A GOAL AND ONE EXISTS:
    Systematic robotic exploration of Mars,
    followed by manned exploration of Mars around the turn of the century
  • If one or more nations combined, it could cost less than one strategic weapon
    Exploration could help show why the deterioration of the water on Mars…
    Send robots to Mars if science reason only
  • Should combine/cooperate with Soviets in some project on behalf of human species
    “Existence theorem” – high-tech cooperation is possible

    1. Cooperative unmanned exploration of Mars and its moons; Soviets plan to send six spacecraft to Mars 1988-2000
    2. Cooperate to build space station to build ships in space to make interplanetary travel for 9-month trip or longer
    3. Would capture the imagination of the human species that no other project would do!

    Same technology involved as in military

  • “It is as if God said, ‘Before you I set the tools of immense power to destroy yourselves or carry yourselves to the planets and the cosmos.'”
  • Governments make mistakes, lie, cheat and steal
    All citizens should have minimal understanding of science and engineering
    Reduction of nuclear arms — one problem at a time, other weapons reduced later
  • Reach minimum deterrence, not zero possession
    1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, Article VI, U.S. and USSR pledge to massively reduce their nuclear arsenals
  • “Testosterone poisoning” — men involved together too long in the act of killing
    Men are adapted to hunger-gatherers in East Africa but not to high-tech nuclear arms race today
  • Tortoise (them) and hare (us) effect with regards to space race — our government started out faster but quit…

= = = = = = = = = =

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THESE SHIP’S LOG ENTRIES WERE WRITTEN…

Where are the ideas discussed in today’s “sociology of the future” class going to take us another 25 years hence?

  • Will computer modeling look as quaint as some of Sagan’s ideas look today?
  • Will our integration with electronic technology so blur the line between a body and machine, we stop paying attention to the distinction?
  • Will space exploration and planetary settlement make us no longer an Earth-based lifeform?

Rick wants to come back and share with you the future 1000 years from now but he promised himself he’d retire from active management of our species and fulfill his destiny to become one with nature, whatever that means.  Don’t make him come out of retirement and tell you what he already knows you’re going to do.  Trust that words like “recession” and “depression” are purely labels used to reinforce our species’ overprocessed development of social engagement we call economics and has nothing to do with how well our species will adapt to ecological changes currently in progress, such as planetary warming that goes against what should be a cooling period.  The planet transforms, individual species dying away as species always do, ours doomed to eventually disappear in the grand scale of planetary history — doesn’t matter if it’s in thousands, millions or billions of years, does it?  Keep on keeping on.

Organisational Skill Assessment

Before I compose a hand-drawn animation sequence with the Bamboo Capture graphics tablet and fill my future with out-of-date electronic debris, I finish sorting through the piles of debris that constitute the bulk of written material which emanated from this set of states of energy called me.

Watched a commencement speech by Laurie Anderson [I thought, for a public performance multimedia artist, her acting was rather stilted], which has prompted me to click my way to a website and order a copy of the book, “How to be idle,” which in turn opened my eyes to the reams of office paperwork stacked in boxes around me.

Here’s one from 03/24/98:

Kiersey Temperament Sorter Results

Your Temperament is Idealist: NF
Your variant temperament is Healer: INFP

Any Personality Test, including the Sorter is just a rough indicator of temperament.
You might want to look at different temperament descriptions to verify the results and learn about other types of people for comparison.

I+6 N+16 F+12 P+14

David M. Keirsey
keirsey@mail.orci.com

At that time in my life, the department manager was all about fitting us into jobs that matched our personalities.

What she didn’t account for was a chameleon like me, a people pleaser who assesses the wants and desires of the people around him and blends in, hiding his personality behind layers and layers of masks, revealing himself to a select few.

I told the manager I’m not who she thinks I am and she responded that was a normal reaction to the test results from an INFP like me.

Later, I learned that she gave the same response to everyone who questioned the test results.

I wasn’t questioning the test results.  I just wanted her to know that the test results indicated my exteriour in relation to giving her the test results I thought she wanted to see.

For instance, let’s say I find out my college History professor is a dopehead and adherent to the philosophy of Timothy Leary… I make sure my term paper for the class, a review of a book about socialist utopias, contains plenty of illicit drug references and hippy religious conversations.

My goals are not your goals.  My goals are outside of the time and place in which we encounter one another, so it doesn’t matter to me about the profit targets you want to reach or the edifices you want to build in your names.

Ideas and images associated with temporal moral and ethical practices are imaginary, as far as I’m concerned.

We either reproduce our genetic material or we don’t.

Everything else is fiction about how we decide to protect our reproductive organs until we’ve produced progeny that need our protection.

Me, I have only these works of art — the sketches and writings that were birthed by me with your influence, a part of the universe, upon me.

I have no genetically-related or adopted children.  The closest I got were the nieces and nephews who [might have] looked up to me as an adult member of their clan/tribe.

They are adults now.  My influence upon them diminishes as they decide how to protect their reproductive organs until they’ve produced progeny that need their protection.

One of my hidden goals was to live long enough to be a great-uncle.

I held up my step-niece’s little one-month young girl in my arms, making me the great-uncle I wanted to be ever since I was a little boy and looked up to my childless great-uncle and great-aunt who seemed to have extra spending money my parents never had, despite the great-relatives’ middle-class wages as a postman and office secretary, respectively.

I have grown tireder as I’ve aged, exercised less and eaten minimally-nutritious chemically-treated foodstuff.  I no longer want to be a model for others or someone to look up to.

It’s time to slow down and concentrate on the dreams and desires of the personality behind all the masks…

The boy who saw macabre nightmares come to life when his favourite politician of all time, Richard Nixon, resigned.

The boy who looked down at his plate of spaghetti and thought he was eating a dish full of bleached worms covered with red sauce to hide their little heads screaming for mercy.

The boy who heard the grass talk to him.

The boy who sailed the universe at night when no one was looking.

The boy who knew that stone gargoyles and cast-iron mailboxes were like three-dimensional photographs of a reality hidden inside other people’s heads, finding an outlet, me wondering where they came from before they appeared in people’s thoughts.

The boy who earned his Eagle Scout badge and went on into Explorer Scouts, later to become a Unit Commissioner, an adult role in Scouting, because he never thought he had gained his father’s love and trust, constantly seeking, seeking, seeking approval up until he reached his adult age of 18 where he received a full college scholarship via the U.S. Navy ROTC program, accepted at both Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, but realising he no longer had to seek his father’s approval and flunked out on purpose.

I had become the man I never thought I’d be able to grow up to be.

I never was my father and never will be.

I am me.

My hidden visions, the alternate reality that I carry in my thoughts as I interact with people who seem to like to embrace the inconsistent reality of [sub/ex]urban lifestyles and belief systems, are crawling out of me and into the world in which we meet and greet one another cordially.

They are not perfect.

They are not commercialised, plastic products for mass production and insane profit margins.

I don’t even care if others steal, borrow or marginalise my work.

My work is not me but my work came from me so I associate myself with my work but I do not tie my self-worth to what I’ve written, drawn, danced, sang or sewn.

This is the only moment in which I live and I claim this moment as mine, declaring myself absolutely insane in comparison to the insanity of boxed stuff that we only call food because the pretty picture on the outside tells me it is.

Unlike Madison Avenue marketers, I don’t have to make money from my creative redefinition of ordinary life.

I can, have been and will be me, willing to use the excess capacity of our species’ social structure that produces a buffer zone outside of basic survival to express myself here and elsewhere, on paper, in blogs and wherever I feel I want to breathe what always has to be my last breath because the next one is not guaranteed.

On to the graphics tablet, building upon my first animation!!!

As an independent filmmaker said,

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
—Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming[

Swashbuckler, “the magazine for mad people”

While clearing off my desk to create space for a graphics tablet, I found a stack of some papers of a previous life (before marriage), including a laboratory book from an “Analytical Chemistry” class, notes from a computer programming class, material from a Sociology class and bunches of my writing, including the following copies of one of my underground magazines called Swashbuckler, a spoof of the ETSU college newspaper and poke at the ETSU literary magazine, with devoted fans from whom I accepted guest writing from time to time.

Swashbucker – Volume 2 – Number 1