As a leader, as a writer, as a thinker, as a tinkerer, I perform many roles, just like we all do.

The chameleon, the pleaser, the hater, the lover, the fearful, the fearless, the wonderer, the doer, the wanderer, the sitter, the sane, the psychopath, the peacenik, the warmonger, the nothing, the everything…

Conscious of who I am, sometimes conscious of who I’m trying to be when I’m not trying to be anything.

Aware that censorship is an integral part of who we are but also part of us we don’t need to nurture in every situation.

Perfectly imperfect.

We pick and choose our personality traits.

I love my subculture for what it gives people but it doesn’t give me everything I want, need, desire, pine for, resist, admire, or other cultural symbols we call words which represent ideas or meme sets.

For instance, there is the “Jenn,” a set of states of energy that morphs into meme sets we can call the dance instructor, sibling, student, Scentsy sales consultant and propulsion specialist, to name but a few.

When my wife and I are taking lessons and Jenn is instructing, an image pops into my head, something like this:

We may hide behind our costumes and masks but we can’t hide the fact we’re members of the same species, with all that entails.

It doesn’t matter if we live somewhere between Erie and Pittsburgh, PA, or on the roof of a stone hut in the middle of a metropolis.

In the latest incarnation of a consistent, coherent set of states of energy as “self,” I wonder if there is a correlation between the concept of being an adult and reacting to socially-approved news outlets yelling for my attention.

Is it more or less grownup to see that being an adult reacting to advert-driven corporations wanting my reaction and thus my focus on products/services that companies want to sell, spending some of their labour/investment credit to buy space next to information reportedly “fresh” and worth my moments analysing their value, both news and parallel product/service placement, is not in my best interest?

We can look together at the statement “without advertising, nothing happens,” and stir up dust from old volumes of thoughts, burning our eyes, drying our mouths and making us cough up informed opinions on the matter.

Or we can move on.

Not only is the universe infinite from our point of view but so are our opinions.  The more I look, the more I see that spending [any of] my time reacting to the output of news outlets, which, when I was a kid, was the only official source of information, is severely limiting my definition of self.

Sure, I can pretend to be sane in saying that I join others in the public square of ideas, shaping the dialogue, sharing the concept of being an adult/grownup leader of people who may or may not care what I have to say but must follow the rules I set forth for their participation in culture at large, despite (or in spite of) their subcultural beliefs.

Or I cannot.

Neither is this an either/or proposition.

I exist somewhere in-between.

Return to the example of Jenn.

Is she just a dance instructor?  No, of course not.  There is no such thing as “just a dance instructor” anywhere in this universe.  We are not one-purpose robots designed to physically represent a simple algorithm with one input, one calculation (or state change) and one output.

We are not a set of infinite states of energy, either.

We are all somewhere past 0, between 1 and ∞ (infinity).

Thus, it is time for me to move on past this blog to a place where I don’t have to appear sane; that is, no longer writing one symbol/word after another into a coherent string of symbols you interpret as phrases that fit into the structure of a sentence that, together with other sentence-like symbol sets, builds into paragraphs and wraps a bow around a new concept or idea per blog entry, sometimes in reaction to official news headlines, sometimes in reaction to other blogs, sometimes in reaction to and observation of sets of states of energy (birds, plants, raccoons) in the surrounding environment.

I want to pretend to be the happy, insane hermit in the woods, doing nothing practical or useful to the casual observer.

It is my right, giving permission to myself to step off the narrow path of life we designate as subcultural normality, an average I no longer want to perpetuate.

My happiness is not your happiness.

Pleasing others’ idea of self at the expense of being myself is no longer worth the cost.

The chameleon wants to take off his disguise, discard his mask, his costume and let himself go into the realm of the impossible, or at least stretch as far as he can to reach the event horizon and dissolve the self, merging with whatever is there that seems infinitely improbable, although mathematically computable and definitely not profitable.

At least for a little while, as long as I can perpetuate the belief in the self’s ability to nurture its social needs from within the universe of impossible ideas the self contains, including other selves that form a self-enclosed social structure, the perpetual motion machine of self-independence, leaving space for interface with other selves when the need for food, clothing, and shelter arises.

Just like the rest of us.