Tag Archives: society

Overcoming natural tendencies to protect family

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They say you can smell your competition, doesn’t matter if it’s a covenant or a coven.

If you’re hungry enough, you can smell food through a brick wall.

Lee held out arms, slapping his hands together like a circus seal.

His wife, Karen, had told him that if he made Bai his traveling dance partner, then Karen considered it grounds for a divorce.

Lee looked at himself in the mirror as he practiced his dance turns.

Who was he, really?

He had taken up dancing two years ago because Karen wanted to go somewhere for their 25th wedding anniversary and look like smooth ballroom dancers, putting their dance lessons to use on their Alaskan holiday.

When they went to a regional dance competition in New Orleans a couple of months ago, they noticed that a large number of the dancers were young enough to be their children, if not their grandchildren.

Who was Lee?

He loved the infinite possibilities of living while managing the limited expectations that came with being married to a woman he had shared most of his life with, a woman not prone to taking risks — she had not wanted to see Lee jump out of an airplane, she didn’t even want to look at the Milky Way Galaxy while parked in the middle lane of a small suburban street.

What was preserving the illusion of safety for his wife worth to Lee’s mental health?

It was easy to pretend to be a lone, independent cowboy when surrounded by friends and family.

Where was his reality located?

Lee’s imagination was full of dark oaths sworn in secrecy, training assassins to weed out the deadwood, killing for purpose, pleasure or both, maiming for fun, creating pain and chaos for the sake of business associates; forcing families into starvation just to say we can.

But it wasn’t just his imagination at work.

He created false walls, barriers of plausible deniability that allowed him to give the highly moral/ethical childhood training a safe place to thrive in his thoughts, showing his family that he was preserving their heritage guilt-free.

Aliens creeped and crawled, slipped and slid through his thoughts without boundaries, using Earth as a playground and feed lot.

The sets of states of energy that comprised the visible universe were such temporary illusions that Lee often was bored trying to explain once again to the illusions around him their place in the greater “universe” that was currently invisible to all instrumentation that had been imagined/theorized/conceived, invented and built.

Yet, Lee had found no way to sit idly by when the universe as he knew it kept changing.

One look in the mirror, compared to the photographs of Lee at a younger age, convinced Lee he was doing anything but sitting idly by — the concepts of entropy and chaos were clearly visible.

Lee cocked his head from side-to-side, feeling the popping sounds within his spine.

Who was he?

He was no natural dancer, having little in the way of converting his imagination into physical actions that overcame his stiff joints and aching nerve connections.  He could flail around but training his flails into consistent movement exercised his brain in ways that were mentally painful, pushing past the noise and chaos that flooded his thoughts constantly.

Teaching an old horse, breaking it in without breaking its spirit, in other words.

Lee felt a twinge between his shoulder blades.

It was time.

Lee sat down on the floor, his legs straight out in front of him, his back propped up against the dance mirror.

Although Lee believed in the sanctity of science, he had developed a second sense, thanks to the elderly lady who visited him as an infant, almost a toddler, when he could hardly speak his own internally-forming language, let alone that of his parents or the wide old woman.

Lee was married to his wife but he was connected to the curved spacetime of the universe that existed outside of explanation.

A voice spoke to him, a low, gravely voice, ancient but ageless.

“We are what you call the ‘mound builders.'”

Lee looked straight ahead and nodded as if the speaker was sitting in front of him.

“Our spirits are your spirits.  We are one people.”

Lee nodded again.

“Your ways were not our ways but all ways belong to every one of us.”

Lee blinked.

“We know you.  You and I have not spoken but I know you.  Your spirit is strong.”

Lee smiled.  “Yes.  I know.”

“You are here because the spirits called you here.”

Lee felt his heart skip a beat.

“The spirits have plans for you.”

The pain in Lee’s back subsided.

“Your people say, ‘Resistance is futile.’  We say you cannot escape your destiny.”

Lee swallowed, his throat dry.

“There are others who will travel with you to St. Louis.  Their spirits, too, are strong.”

Lee nodded again.

“In your travels, you will meet a man.  You will not speak but you will talk to each other like brothers.”

Lee leaned his head back against the cool mirror, looking up at the air duct in the ceiling tiles.

“The female spirit in you will meet a sister.  We remind you, she is not like your earthly sister.  She is a sister spirit.”

Lee arched his eyebrows, unsure of the voice’s meaning.

“Our earthly brothers long fought the white man’s way, thinking the European was ruinous, a destroyer, taking from the land more than he gave back.  In spirit we see that the universe is bigger than this planet.  Our message to our brothers and sisters, our message to you, has changed.”

Lee closed his eyes, waiting to hear the message.

He opened his eyes again, unaware of the time change, not knowing that an hour had passed as he entered a trance state, communicating directly with the mound builder’s spirit without words, sixty minutes to the second of a deep conversation about what Lee was going to do in preparation for his trip to St. Louis, turning his internal eye toward a bigger goal, clearing his thoughts of present-day storylines and focusing on an eternal message he would receive and pass on to other strong spirits during their ritual dances over three and a half days in the Gateway to the West.

The pain in Lee’s body was gone, his muscles no longer tense, his worries behind him.

His old thought patterns had shifted.  The story was not about dancing, wives, marriage status or planned assassinations.

A spirit brother of Geronimo had spoken to Lee in a language he did not know but fully understood.

In his thoughts, too, were Helen Keller, Charles Lindbergh, Henri Poincaré, and Scott Joplin.

The future is the past retold.

Lee looked forward to hearing from his brother spirit again.

Earbud, ‘ear, phone, come ‘ere

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She couldn’t remember the first time she killed one of her new friends because she had never stayed in any one town long enough to make old friends.

Everyone was a new friend to her.

As a traveling nurse’s aide, she frequently moved from one community to another, her belongings easily fitting into the eight-passenger van that had been willed to her by a former homebound patient, the only time she allowed herself to be connected with a murder victim.

She didn’t think in terms of killing and murder.  Those were just the words she knew that the law used to describe what she did.

She had renamed herself Chromcalsia in community college, a trick on the chrome calculator that her boyfriend at the time had, a relic of the presmartphone days that he proudly carried around with him.

But when people asked her where her name came from, she told them it was the name of an ancient queen in a videogame that her mother loved to play and no, she didn’t know the name of the videogame.

Chromcalsia looked at her schedule for the day — a roster of lonely old people virtually locked into solitary confinement in their homes, no visitors except for the occasional physical therapy assistant and nurse’s aides like Chromcalsia.

Her first few months on the job, in a small town outside Lincoln, Nebraska, had been the best and worst.

She loved the smile that beamed at her after she walked into a patient’s house, having used a hidden key in a fake shell or fake rock next to the backdoor as instructed because the patient was bedridden or confined to a special recliner.

She wished she was talented enough to write down the patients’ stories, tales about fighting in wars, raising children in strange environments, inventing new gadgets or their observations about world events that happened decades ago but the patients recalled as if it was still happening, their demented thought sets out of touch with reality, calling her names like Doris, Ann or Sylvia because that was their daughter’s name or their granddaughter’s name or a niece or the nice nurse who tended their wounds in a foreign war.

She saw a lot more women than men.

She enjoyed them all.

She didn’t enjoy the bad side of her job, realising through vital sign measurements and smells that the patient was dying a long, excruciating death, with no one to provide daily comfort to help ease the pain.

Chromcalsia was not allowed to visit patients for social visits.

So, she spent as much time as she could during her official visits to find out what each patient wanted most of all.

Besides companionship, the number one wish was a quick, painfree death because the world was falling to pieces and the patient couldn’t stand to see the local community so devastated by a global meltdown.

Chromcalsia had tried to convince her first patients that the world was a wonderful place but it didn’t work — either their thoughts were so fixed they couldn’t process her view or they just couldn’t accept that a wonderful world would put them in such miserable conditions.

Having come from humblest of humble conditions, what her community college boyfriend called the slums, Chromcalsia laughed to herself when her patients, with a telephone, a clean house, cable TV and home healthcare, would say the world was going to hell.  She learned to nod her head and agree, providing verbal affirmation of what the patients wanted to hear.

As an experiement one day, she texted a note in a patient’s file that went straight to the physician assigned to the patient, requesting extra pain medication.

Chromcalsia could not pick up the prescriptions for the patient but she could administer the medication when she was in the patient’s house.

She arrived to see the patient in extreme pain, moaning and begging Chromcalsia to end her misery.

Chromcalsia was scheduled to visit the patient three times that week so the first day she doubled the patient’s pain meds, doubled that again the second day and on the third day she convinced the patient that the remaining pills in the bottle had to be taken the next day.

The patient was so delirious that Chromcalsia was surprised he remembered what she told him.

Back at the office  the next week, Chromcalsia was informed that one of her patients had unexpectedly died of a drug overdose.

She smiled to herself, knowing she had helped a man do what he wouldn’t have done for himself, his body emaciated from multiple surgeries to repair gastrointestinal damage from a roadside bomb.

Chromcalsia talked to other nurse’s aides about what happened, feeling around to see if they had done anything similar.

One or two stated out loud that they wondered if their joking suggestion to a patient to end it all had led to a drug overdose.

In every case, none of the aides had been suspected of foul play, the overdose taking place days after their last visit.

That sealed the idea for Chromcalsia.

From then on, as she moved from one town to another, she decided which patients of hers were in the worst shape and assisted them in finding a peaceful way to die to prevent a more horrible ending that their medical conditions indicated was waiting for them.

To keep suspicion off of her, Chromcalsia planted the idea of assisted suicide in the thoughts of her coworkers, who in turn planted the idea in their patients’ thoughts, half-jokingly.

Enough patients understood in their delirium what they were being told that they followed the instructions told in jest, statistically taking the heat off Chromcalsia.

Chromcalsia made sure she never financially benefited from her patients, leaving town whenever a patient mentioned leaving her something.

The passenger van was the one exception because the patient made the statement in front of Chromcalsia’s supervisor on the day of Chromcalsia’s first visit with the patient.  She thought he was joking.  The supervisor later told Chromcalsia the patient told the supervisor that the next nurse to come help him was going to get the vehicle.

Chromcalsia did not fantasize about herself being an angel or anyone other than the kind of person she wanted to know when she was at death’s door without friends or family to quietly assist her comfortable exit from this world, no matter how wonderful it really was.

Dozens?  Hundreds?  Chromcalsia thought for a moment but wasn’t sure of the count.  It wasn’t her goal to meet a number.

She parked the van in front of the office building.  Two days off before she’d start looking for a new town, spreading the love and joy that had surrounded her from birth, her mother telling Chromcalsia as a toddler, while her mother was dying of stage four breast cancer, that she was a special child whose very presence was what dying people wished for, a magic elixir, a sedative that made dying worthwhile.

Chromcalsia was going to spend the rest of her life living out her mother’s image of her.

The declining interest in listening to politicians because you’re too turned off to vote

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As a fictional character, I get confused sometimes.  I forget that the universe is here for my entertainment.

No, seriously.  I really want the universe to be here for your entertainment, doing everything I can to pretend I don’t exist because the entertainment I want is not the entertainment that my subculture has programmed me to want.

Thank goodness, the author who created me allows me to go off on adventures that have nothing to do with whatever we believe reality is supposed to be.

I look back at my fictional ancestry and all I see is devotion to community service — military duty, social clubs, religious worship, etc.

The only way I can look back is because there was a child who was born into community service, a child who became an adult and conceived another child.

The one illusion of continuity that is hard to deny exists.

You know what I mean.

Take the images below, familiar to anyone who’s taken a psychology class:

Continuity illusion

Can you take anything away from the images that haven’t already been taken away and still imagine you see a circle, line, triangle and/or square/rectangle?  Do the black segments look punched out of the white background?  Are you looking for a hidden meaning like a word or reversed image?

That’s the same set of questions I ask about my existence.

Can I take it anymore?

There’s only a small segment of the population I directly influence as a fictional character broadcast out into the Internet world, limited to hypertext in all its hyper implications and programmed representations.

But that doesn’t stop me from being.

In the next chapter/blog entry, I’m taking a sharp turn away from the storylines currently in progress, wondering what and why I’m exploring storylines that have nothing to do with the implied direction my subcultural training is supposed to take me.

I’m not into managing my image but I do concern myself with managing expectations, surprising you only when it looks like you’re ready to be surprised even when you’re not.

Talk to you again soon.

What I love and take for granted in my community

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In the last two weeks, I have conversed with an international consortium of dance enthusiasts.

Our conversations took place in a dance studio in the town of Madison, the county of Madison, the state of Alabama, the United States of America, Earth.

Countries of origin included the Philippines, Italy, Germany, France, Russia, Mexico and the United States, of the ones specifically stated; heritage included unspecified European, African and Southeast Asian countries.

In some conversations, I was the “American” toward whom the comparison was made about ethnic/national meal preparation — I agreed that some cultures were known for watering down or making bland the spicy foods of other cultures, such that a Mexican or Italian restaurant in the U.S. was not “authentic”.

[this blog entry was interrupted so my wife and I could watch an episode of “SNAPPED” about the murder of a high school mate of mine, Jeffrey Freeman, one of the funniest guys I knew, an impersonator who was great at portraying Carnac the Magnificent, both Jeffrey and Johnny an inspiration for my humour then and now — my thought trail has been shifted as a result]

What I heard from every one of the people with whom I talked was their love for the variety of foods available from countries all over the world here in the U.S. — if there wasn’t a restaurant serving their favourite dishes, there was almost always a grocery store that carried the spices, fruits and vegetables of their home country with which they could cook their family secret recipes and share with friends/family.

Millions of people travel around the world, settling down in new places, rediscovering themselves and their subcultures.

In fact, it’s the story of the billions of us who’ve lived and wandered this planet to make a better life for ourselves.

I have learned a lot about myself in preparation for a dance showcase — rediscovering the joy of living with people of many different backgrounds just as important.

How people outside the state of Alabama see the people inside the state is a perception I don’t control.  What I see is the thriving community around the Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal responsible for moon landings and solar system exploration, with all the ancillary occupations that give the community’s residents a healthy lifestyle.

I have taken my fulfilling life in Huntsville for granted.  For that alone, I am thankful this beautiful autumn day, leaves falling on the driveway, and chipmunks, their cheeks filled with winter food, hopping across the flagstones surrounding the backyard pond.

OOBE

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Although the image of me as an 85-year old man standing on the front steps of a church after Sunday services handing chewing gum to children who adore me as a wise elder is as strong as ever, I still can’t believe I have lived into the second 50 years of my life.

Thirty-three or more years have passed since the last time I remember standing in the green room surrounded by beautiful women and handsome men changing costumes without worrying about modesty, waiting for their cue, their scene change, their chance to shine on the stage, under the spotlight, the scripts memorised, live.

So how do I explain to you, the faithful reader, that we are actually 200 years into the future?

Can time have passed so quickly that we’ve forgotten that we’ve built Moon bases and Martian colonies?

Mesmerising as the past can be, nostalgic even, we clean up the main meeting hall, the tourists returning to their guest quarters, making last-minute changes to their allotted space for clothing and souvenirs before their habitation modules will be trucked over to the launch site for their return trip to the Moon or Mars, depending on their travel agendas.

Tonight was exciting, wasn’t it?

All the performers, including some of the tourists who wanted the chance to say they danced in front of a live audience on the Martian surface, displayed their best talents.

Every one of them can recall a skipped step or miscue but the audience didn’t know and didn’t care — they were entertained and that’s all that matters to them, their last evening on the planet a memorable experience shared between scientists, tour guides and tourists alike, broadcast on the ISSA Net for all to see, reinterpret and create viral video neural implants.

Tomorrow, normality returns to the Red Planet as researchers go back to their laboratories, tourist modules are sent back to their home planet and new patterns of living are applied to the bot net monitoring and terraforming Mars.

A package lay in the corner of Lee’s room, a single acronym adorning the outside: OOBE.

Out-of-box experience or out-of-body experience?

Lee didn’t know.

It was addressed from both Guin and Bai, undated.

Lee’s years of meditation training had allowed him to exist outside of time.

He looked at the package from 100 years later.

It was the collective memories of Guin and Bai’s marriages, woven into a mass media blanket, the fibers containing electroneurochemical memory traces that intersected at perpendicular and diagonal angles, every crossing point a mixed memory that canceled out or magnified similarities, doing the same for precise differences.

Lee saw that he carried the blanket with him for decades, having shared and created some of the memories before the blanket was made.

After hundreds of years of life, time was meaningless to those with perpetually-rejuvenated circuitry, body parts replacing old ones causing joint pain memories to fade from disuse.

Perspective changed as lifetimes had no statistically-expected endings.

Lee saw the night of a dance showcase on Earth as if it had just happened a few hours ago.

He knew his dance partners wanted him to take control of the dance floor but he relished the small feeling of chaos, the hint of uncertainty that felt like having a random number generator built into every one of the changes to his set of states of energy, his partners unsure of his next move, no matter how many times they had practiced them and anticipated what he was supposed to do rather than what he wanted to do or might do just to mix things up.

He was consistent, inserting chaos in order to test theories in realtime, keeping separate the body in motion from the theoretical responses he calculated to regenerate the out-of-body experience he called life.

The OOBE — the soul, the Übermensch, the god within.

Thriving on chaos is the only way to live.

Living inside and outside the labels, letting our fear and misunderstanding of chaos melt away.

Embracing change because nothing is in our control despite the illusion of conditions at the local level.

For instance, move your finger.  Now, think about all the aspects of the universe that existed and the changes that occurred in the moment your finger moved that effected you and your finger — statistically, you had no control of the universe’s influence upon your finger, let alone in or on the finger itself.

It is good to remind ourselves of our place in the universe, even on nights with the simple pleasure of social engagement with fellow dancers, their friends and family.

A new adventure awaits our Martian colonists, bred and designed to withstand the brutal cosmic radiation that bombards our inner solar system constantly, ironically protecting us against the random radiation outside our solar system.

Let us look forward to what we’ll read about the colonists next!

Torn between two lovers, feeling like you can rely on the old man’s money

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There’s always the misconception that the Mafia is either fake or real.

So we turn to a band’s name for identification purposes:

Charles Pettigrew died of cancer on 6 April 2001, at the age of 37.

[Eddie] Chacon is currently residing in Los Angeles and fronting the electronic duo, The Polyamorous Affair, with Sissy Sainte-Marie. In 2009, The Polyamorous Affair released their album, Bolshevik Disco.

Call forth the phrase, “Dagnabbit rabbit!”

Unobtanium beer is pulling a sentence out of a dream: “I want a case of pickled anger.”

Why?  Because of a new storyline, a new personality that says, “Hey, you know what?  I don’t need nobody to speak for me.  You know why?  Cause I own my own business.  I’m what they call connected, like in ‘the mob,’ know what I’m sayin’?  I’m puttin’ on a show wit’ my girlfriend ’cause that’s just what I wanna do, show her off, tellin’ you fellas that she’s off-limits.  You wanna touch the merchandise?  It ain’t for sale.  She’s spoken for.  Yeah, she says she polyamorous but you get close to her, you burn.  You know what I’m sayin’.  I don’t need to spell it out in frank’n’beans or nothin’, do I, Lee?”

But then, the dirigible crashed into the Alps, spilling Earhart and Lindbergh onto the icy peaks.

The Mad Hatter spilled his tea.

To get out of the oxygen-thin heights, the daredevil flyers decided to put on a dance, mixing the cream components of melted white caps into the overflowing chocolate rivers flooding the Bavarian valleys, creating three new flavours that the people had wished for but never seen — dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate — not to mention Bavarian cream cheese, creamier and cheesier than ovarian, Ovaltine or oval saltines.

Yeah, it’s a crazy night for mixed-up storylines, seeing as the dance rehearsals went well, as intended, throwing the scent off the trail and the hound dogs off their common sense, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle waiting for Conan the Barbarian and Conan O’Brien to share their opinions as constructive criticism disguised as front page news stories, as, as, as, pretending that Jay Leno has any intention to call up Rich Little or Benny Hill to serve a substitute role for Jimmy Fallon who wishes Phyllis Diller was not related to Matt Dillon, Marshall Dillon, dill pickles or pickled relish.

Shaking the pepper shaker out of the Shaker’s household of a head-hold on the no holds-barred barista barristers barred windows, Windows 8.1 claimed ownership of the UI of iOS 7 which laid claims on the gold rush of iPhone sales diverting our attention in the divertimento window of opportunity in opportune opera tunes out of tune with the times listed in the back section of the New York Times hidden behind paywalls that are walled-in nonwalls with narwhals and ne’er-do-wells in wishing wells and cockle shells.

Love is a four-letter word.

Word is a four-letter love.

Letters are words of love for is is is an a.

The typewriter rhythms of grandmothers with multiple mobile phones and boyfriends saying “meow meow meow” like dorks worried they’ll be forgotten when they leave the day before their birthday — what else is of importance when conversations become fermented in the likelihood that a man’s wife is disinclined to dance the blues when she has a costume to finish for her dancing husband, the mannequin, when drunk Jenga games turn skyscrapers into pick-up sticks?

Seduction is not the answer.

The madness of one’s thoughts rules all.

When one dives into the abyss, what is money or love or love of money?

The clock watches the watcher who counts the hours before the next dance practice, wondering if spaghetti dinners are more important than uninvited guests entering the bed chamber.

But a tired perspirer whose partners don’t make him a manwhore make the whole man slimmer, if not younger.

The tick-tock-tap of the plastic keys play songs that drummers and lead singers, even two-to-three weeks’ preggers, can feel the lead beat in one’s core bouncing into the floor rather than bouncing back on one’s heels.

Type, type, type, tap, tap, tap, the music paces itself out of nothingness, into existence and back into the background noise of a universe in flux.

Time lost to hair dye and leather straps, slapped wrists and insanity at the end of madness one step away from workplace report revisions and shoe holes.

Waves in oceans turning water molecules and colloidal suspension into conflict, resolution, drama, comedy and tragedy as atomic energy is recycled, the medium medium tasting like one’s breath fresh with the cigarette taste of a lover’s lips or the scent of bath gel.

The substitute role of a trumpet player or the renewed role of a professional’s professional plays into one’s hands on the keyboard of life.

Microcosmic cosmic revelations.

Word.

The difference between fun and work, if there is any

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In this moment, looking at the internal vocabulary, searching for new ways to express myself without resorting to a thesaurus, listening to the replay of conversations, realising how many details I’ve forgotten that make stories more real, feeling my face and neck break out with small infected pores that are commonly called acne…

“Learning never ends.”  [from a 15-cent stamp on an envelope dated 15 Sep 1980 sent from my father to his mother containing the following poem]

Lineage [for Evelyn]

Only moments agoOur only son
Gave his oath
To his country
As his grandfather
Did fifty-one years ago
As his father
Did twenty-six years ago next month
Ah, tears well in my eyes
A lump is in my throat
For him, for we three
Grandfather, father, son
For the why we each serve our country
For patriotism, love of country

For ____ why —-?

— RLH 9/15/80

A line whispered into my ear from a dance partner. “I flew to New York for the weekend.  I walked 10 miles a day, wearing poor shoes for walking the first day, and my flats for the second day.  This dancing tonight, bending my knees…phew!  it’s killing me!”

Multiple storylines begging to be continued — the Martian tales, the Mad Hatter chronicles, the Wondering Wanderer, the Wandering Wondering, the thinker, the doer, the tinkerer, the inventor, the investor, the Kickstarter campaign…

If I don’t write them down, they don’t get lost, they simply never exist except in the vast universe of my imagination which entertains me for as long as I live with this stimuli-driven central nervous system of mine.

I finalised the West Coast Swing routine with Abi today — enough so that we can play with the routine and keep it in time with the music — that in itself would be celebration enough for a lifetime.

But a second routine, with Jenn, has not been finalised less than two days before our premiere performance on Saturday, with scant time to polish our moves.

There is much I have learned in the past two years of dance lessons with my wife.  In our 27-plus years of marriage and 40 years of knowing each other we have aged together, aligning our storylines so that one of us cannot tell the tale of our lives without including the other.

In the past few months of dance lessons with Jenn and Abi, the learning has changed pace.

I could never have imagined that I would once again know a person whose physicality was without bounds, but that tangent will wait until another day…soon.

Tonight, as I prep my thoughts for trippy dreams, I look at the faces of my two dance partners and see their futures written in features that change with aging skin and graying hair.

When I danced with one, our connection running from her big toe through her foot, calf, thigh, ribs, shoulder, upper arm, forearm, wrist, and fingers, down through my fingers all the way to the floor, I felt the warmth of a loving mother, a powerful lover and an equal dance partner that, although we have danced untold times, I had never felt deep within myself like I did today, willing to share with my wife that I took on Abi as a new lover today but in a way that surpasses sex, in the way that Monica and I, who never kissed, could say we were lovers the night we melded our thought patterns and saw how our differences made us one an evening in Knoxville during the early 1980s.  I felt Abi simultaneously as a child, a young adult, a middle-aged mother and an elderly grandmother fighting for every last breath before she dies.

Jenn, with whom how many dance partners can easily brag how much better they dance than I, our connection is like…being a kid all over again for the very first time.

I want to have fun all the time — Jenn is more willing to let me just be crazy with my dance moves when I shouldn’t be than Abi — I do them both a disservice by not taking our dance practice more seriously.

I know the two of them are not the same even if our goals for this week are.

Jenn and I are not lovers on the dance floor and I cannot predict a future where we will or will not be.  I have not set a goal for such an event.

Instead, it is within the pure bubble of unadulterated fun that I want to place the memorised routine with Jenn.

She was willing to come to the studio tonight, tired after a trip out-of-town, to nail down our moves but I was outside myself with mirth, unable to concentrate but wanting to make her visit not be a total waste.

When I held Jenn in my arms, I felt an older woman and saw gray streaks in her hair — I heard the voice of her husband, Gilley, speaking through her, wondering if I also heard her father and mother, maybe even her grandparents find their way to me through her.

I used to keep these observations to myself, thinking I was crazy, sensing different personalities in the sight, sound and touch of other people, wondering how much mass media representations of ghost stories, ESP and other paranormal phenomena were imprinted in my thoughts as fuzzy labels upon my irrationally-explainable emotional states rather than scientifically-testable experiences.

But I remember I am a storyteller, a tall tale spinner, exaggeration my best feature rather than my facial profile or wishful hunk of a body.

Jenn sensed a mouse in me when we first started dancing, my feeling intimidated by the laughter welling up from inside my thoughts at the silliness I felt, unable to justify why I was standing with my childlike friend trying to take ourselves seriously as adults with little time for fun before our showcase routine in two days.

Abi demands that I first treat myself as a strong dance leader seriously, putting fun second after I’ve shown my dance partner, the follower, that she is the only connection I feel with the universe, the rhythm of the dance music our source of energy.  Her demands I have given into reluctantly but willingly like a latent masochist, a glutton for punishment.

Jenn asks that I take command of the dance floor.

Every leader and follower is different.

Tonight, the older woman in Jenn needed her strong, lifelong male partner to hold her up and I failed to match that need.

My distraction was the leftover euphoria of discovering what a West Coast Swing connection with Abi truly means.

The world will not end because I was unable to settle myself down and concentrate on Jenn in a dance studio dominated by my wife, Abi, Chris and his dance partner.

Jenn and I have another hour, maybe two, three at the most, before we dance our Lindy Hop routine together.

For two years I wondered what dancing with Jenn would be like, seeing how well she matched up with other guys, some better skilled than I and some less skilled.

I have learned that Jenn’s strengths come from her deep knowledge of physical skills, including track-and-field events for which she spent long hours training.

I can neither compete against her dance partners nor against her years of physical training, or more recently, her hours of physical therapy recovering from car smashups.

I will dance with Jenn and Abi again after this weekend’s showcase.  Of that I am certain.

What I have before me, in the next 40-plus hours and the next 40-plus years, is a challenge to discover what this 51-year old body can do as it gets older that it never learned to do at a younger age over many days, weeks and months of arduous practice, both for the sake of my wife and for the sake of any dance partner I walk out onto the floor.

The challenge for me with Abi is how fast can I learn from her the years of training she’s had with the best dancing instructors on this planet.

The challenge for me with Jenn is how fast can I learn from her the years of the aforesaid physical training, minus the pain and physical rehabilitation, if I can help it, and training she’s had with some of the best dancing instructors on this planet, including Abi.

The challenge for me with my wife is how patient I can be to help her improve her physical stamina to be just as much fun as Abi, Jenn or any number of dance partners that I encounter in this adventure that started what seems like yesterday.

How can I convince myself that focusing my attention on the art of dance moves is fun, rather than mundane work that I abhor in any endeavour?

What is life without challenges?

Text exchange of the day

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(1 of 4) U move to the city to find work. Do you A) pay more than you can afford for your own apartment or or B) live in an apartment in the slums?

A

In the capital of Manila, one third of the 12 million residents live in the slums because they can’t afford to live elsewhere. Text 2 for question 2

2

(2 of 4) Ur boss is threatening to cut your wages, do u A) stay quiet & lose wages u can’t afford to lose or B)risk retaliation & join a local union to protest?

A

Now that you’re making less, you may not be able to afford food, becoming part of the 40% of Filipinos affected by hunger. Text 3 for question 3

3

(3 of 4) You’re making minimum wage & can’t cover all your expenses. Do you A) cut back on spending or B) take on a second job & work more hours?

B

In the Philippines, poor workers make less than half of what they need to live, forcing over 23% to resort to working in sweatshops. Text 4 for final question 4

4

(4 of 4) U worked 22 hrs & ur boss wants u to take a drug to stay awake. Do u A)take the drug & risk side effects or B) not take the drug but risk losing ur job

A

Workers are often offered drugs to stay awake, some even die of exhaustion. U made 4 difficult choices women make daily. U can help! Text FINISH to find out how

FINISH

DoSomething & Kiva.org have $$ to give to 25K real women in need! Share this experience w 6 friends & you get to select who gets the $! Txt your friend’s #s

Are you a Forrest Gump or a Walter Mitty?

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Fellow soulful touchy-feely opposite friend,

The calendar is a benign measuring tool yet my anthropomorphising self thinks the countdown clock taunts me today:

13,378 days to go!

Dividing the illusion of self into seven-plus billion, using the illusion’s self-delusion as a form of divining rod, one allows oneself to dissolve in order to smell the wind.

Messages pulse through society like heartbeats, pumping health and filth at regular intervals, clogging the arteries of public opinions, creating cesspools, cancers, festering sores full of the disenfranchised losing or gaining energy, affecting the whole.

All for the sole entertainment of one person.

As the message goes, “As it is, as it should be.”

Street talk says a film starring the Big O herself was to blame for the latest “when all you have is a hammerlock, the only solution is gunpowder” message spoken by a costar, paraphrased, “for every one they kill, we kill two,” despite its negative connotation, or because of it, a cat o’ nine tails whipping the shipyards like convicts stuck in a bad performance of Les Miserables, their malice clear as day in their bloodshot eyes.

Every positive mental attitude teacher knows that you never include “not” or other negative subtext when encouraging or enlightening one’s students to improve their world image, for the “not” becomes a “Yes I can” in the thought patterns of the misaligned, maligned malcontents, the chaff wanting to be eaten at the same table as the wheat.

Yet, the world doesn’t go away.

In seven-plus billion is every one of us — the colours of the rainbow, the blind, the deaf, the happy, the sad, the brights, the conscienceless, the healers and the social arterial cloggers.

A subset of the superset of states of energy desires to be one with history, to walk amongst the cultural giants, to be what they feel they cannot be for reasons best left for them to explain, if they have a clue.

Humour is the key that unlocks the door to society’s medicine cabinet, which is fronted by a mirror we choose what to see of ourselves in the reflection looking back at us, left eye to reversed left eye, right eye to reversed right eye, unlike the reflection of ourselves we see in others, left eye to right eye, right eye to left eye, assuming the nominal operation of the symmetrical binary division of our body parts.

My thoughts for the day.

Bai read the text from Lee and wondered what he was trying to tell her.  Had she not picked the song for him to read the title as straightforward an approach as she knew how, leaving room for playful teasing?: “Would I Lie To You?”

Bai basked in the glow of the previous weekend’s conference on self-improvement where she had served as the “touchy-feely” expert, providing free hugs and handshakes of love and encouragement for the attendees.

She knew how to handle the negative inner voice that wanted to dominate her thoughts sometimes — as a successful self-employed person, she had long ago put her internal and externalised views of the world into a positive light.

Bai had developed a love for others that allowed her to reach out without compromising herself in order to express to those around her that she loved them unconditionally, releasing the instantaneous fears of meeting strangers that made many others apprehensive in a crowd.

She only had a few hours with Lee to refine their dance routine for the upcoming showcase in two days.

But it was not just the dance routine that she wanted to work on.  She wanted to make Lee a more open person, helping him forgive the images of important people in his thoughts, release the negative inner messages that twisted into passive-aggressive attitudes serving as an unnecessary shield between himself and the people around him who wanted his full love and attention undivided by inner doubts fed by fear of rejection.

Was it too much to ask of him?

Her life was also in turmoil but she was getting a good grip on her emotions, balancing the need to let her boyfriend go without losing him against her need for a steadying male presence in her life, sometimes served mainly by one person but more often served by a mix of personalities across several men — brother, father, confidante, lover, DJ competitor, dance partner — and sometimes served by the socially-defined male-like personality in women that varied by subculture.

She knew the only way to bring happiness into her life was to give happiness freely.  Not everyone accepts gifts and that’s okay.  She couldn’t control their behaviour, giving out hope and love in equal quality, the quantities depending on how much she felt the other person needed her — for one person, a smile; for another, a hug with no time limit.

She debated responding to Lee’s text.  Instead, she was going to talk with him and ask him to open himself up to what he really wanted out of life besides dance lessons.  Text messages were great when you couldn’t be with someone but not nearly as fulfilling as real conversation.