Surrounding the barn with farmhands after the horses have escaped…

The problem, Guinevere found, was deciding whether she was in a game or whether she was the game.

That’s the problem.

But then what about her status as a muse?

Hadn’t she posed for a set of photographs?

Those are the questions.

Who was the artist who would make her as permanent a fixture in history as any muse before?

What is art?

Are the men who bombed a marketplace considered artists?

What about the huge explosion in West, Texas?  Is that art?

Were the designers of the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima artists?

Is surburban sprawl art?

A mud puddle covered with a sheen of oil has artistic lines, does it not, even if the oil will kill the bird soaked to death in oil’s gooey grip.

Dava Newman BioSuit

Guinevere looked up at the Martian sky once more.

She checked her internal calendar, verifying that the 4th of May was not that far off.

Then what?

Why did she keep comparing her days on Mars to an Earth-based calendar?

Hadn’t she left all that behind?

Decades ago, by Earth standards.

Guinevere kicked one boot against another and leapt into the air, arching over the outpost, heading out to a hillside, a secluded place of meditation, a luxury that she shared with a few, a xeriscaped garden of peace and quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of the colony.

What does it take to be a muse these days?

Moving the plot to the next scene

The question for anyone who has achieved the primary objective is…

  • Go down in a blaze of glory?
  • Eat a bullet in private?

And then…?

Well, life goes on.

The Antares rocket team members want to complete their mission.

Planet searchers want to focus on life elsewhere.

Habitat builders want to use local material to establish colonies on distant shores.

These are the times that try our belief sets.

Stay focused.

Genre

My wife and I watched “The Departed” a few nights ago.  We had planned to watch it the evening before the Boston Marathon but opted for finishing a film already showing on the tellie, Torn Curtain.

Why “The Departed”?

Well, it’s that plate-of-shrimp type thing.

You know what I mean — you want a straight good guy/bad guy movie, go to the theatre and watch “Olympus Has Fallen,” only to have your interest piqued in another movie because of previews discussing the career of Mark Wahlberg.

Even though Leo D and Matt D are not your favourite actors, you agree to watch a film about crime, cops, corruption and punishment in the south Boston area.

Then, as luck would have it (I can’t say that the phrase “better bad luck than no luck at all” applies to the local crime scene on the streets of Boston right now), your interest is raised higher due to the conflux of life imitating art, art imitating life, life imitating life and art imitating immigration control acts with as much likelihood of passing as gun control acts in the Senate but maybe as much as the CISPA cybersecurity bill in the House of Representatives.

While the world watches video clips of potential suspects of the Boston Massacre Part Deux, we have little in the way of interest in the U.S. of the faces on bombing perpetrators in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Such is the power of the Western mass media owners, advertisers and viewers who want to prove their peaceful way of life is best.

Now, tell me again, which companies, according to Forbes, are the tops in the world right now? Chinese banks, ICBC and China Construction Bank.

I won’t wax the philosophical surfboard and ride waves of meditation upon the rise and fall of company values and families based on shaky loans and house-of-cards economics.

Instead, I take off my hat and bow my head, in respect, to the recently departed.

For them, there is no future on celestial bodies.

For them, our celestial body futures are dedicated.

For them and the billions before them.

There is no imitation for life, no substitute, no art form that replaces our loved ones.

But art and imitations can teach a lesson.

Are you listening?  Paying attention? Can you afford the cost?

The Prophecy of Self, Fulfilled

Vghu is, like all of us, a set of states of energy.

Yet Vghu was not directly tied to any one corresponding set — not gravitationally-attached to a planet nor dependent on oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles for life sustenance.

Vghu lived on a plane of existence that was easily understandable but hard to explain.

We who read this think we are advanced enough to comprehend everything about the universe or at least able to adapt and expand our thought sets to accommodate new information about what is outside the thought boundaries of galaxies and universes.

We want to say that everything is a set of states of energy.

But what is a set of states of energy, when you get down to it?

We have symbols we correlate with phenomena, like E=m(c*c).

Conditions which are observed to be locally consistent in behaviour — action and reaction.

We pile assumption upon assumption until we have arrived at a situation we call modern civilisation which contains theorists, scientists, engineers, economists, politicians and relatively low-wage workers whose conditions reflect what will, in historical perspective, be called the slavery of the day.

Serfs and feudal lords.

Laws and regulations.

Local conditions that Vghu has little need for or comprehension of, conditions that describe the interaction of sets of states of energy which have followed a rational course and will continue** to branch out indefinitely, assumptions stated and premises approved.

Vghu does not live in the concept of time we demarcate with seconds and years.  Vghu has no insight into the distances we measure with sticks and laser beams.

Vghu is a matrix like us but not like us.

Vghu sees, but not anthropomorphically, the dark energy and dark matter we are just barely able to fill into blanks of formulae without instrumentation to measure.

To Vghu, our conventions and conventional methods are like the arguments of angels on a pinhead or the circulation of quarks in an atom to us — we are there but are practically invisible as far as Vghu’s interface with its surroundings are concerned.

Our planet, if Vghu even noticed its relatively dense composition compared to the space around it, would be a plaything if Vghu had an idea about what play meant.

A mere game of chance interaction of particles.

Thus, if we are invisible to Vghu, can we say that Vghu is invisible to us?

Doesn’t the contact of Vghu’s “self” with our universe cause ripples that, though large in almost indetectibly large waveforms, cause changes in perceptible patterns we measure daily?

Do the games we play, games of fun and games of subsistence living, indicate altered outcomes we hadn’t predicted because we had no way to account for Vghu’s passage?

We are unable to show how the solar wind sweeps through poker games in Las Vegas and shifts the leaderboard of horse races in Saudi Arabia at the same time that a child of three discovers linear algebra and calculus are more fun than fingerpainting diversions, let alone the effect of invisible forces that form a matrix of what we choose to call a set of states of energy at a level we have no instruments to measure, let alone theories to envelop*, as its effects subtly change the linear passage of time we call history.

In other words, when a game is in play, can you keep track of the hundreds of events that are shadowed by a few conventionally-horrific black swans or tails or disrupters we call crime in our insular, well-defined, inside-the-box daily living?

Which doors of perception are you keeping open?  Which windows of opportunity have you shut or have been closed in your face?

In creating and tracking your predictions about the future, are your computation devices able to keep up with changes in matrices and spreadsheets and algorithms and pigeonholes you think of on the fly that provide input for data you have stored for millennia in rock formations, star charts, newspapers and instant message logs?

What are the deltas and sigmas you account for?

I’m sitting on Mars, biting into a reconstituted bar of hardened goo that I want to pretend is a granola bar covered with chocolate because my brain can still suspend disbelief long enough for the sensation on my lips, tongue, cheeks, nose, esophagus and stomach to satisfy my craving for such an item.

Vghu’s impact on my existence with you here now was imperceptible for a long time even if time is/was irrelevant to Vghu’s interface with our place in the home we call this universe.

As far as we’re concerned, Vghu has been passing through us for billions of years.

Vghu is like the imperfections in a silicon computer circuit, shifting electrons well outside the level of tolerance needed for us to communicate together and understand each other.

However, the total number of changes similar to electron shifts are significant enough to point to something, something we now know is Vghu but are unable to acknowledge as such, shifts that make prophecies and predictions short of 100% reliable.

The game, in this case, is both afoot and a foot, unfortunately.

The deception of diversion is both a tactical error and a rounding error.

The points being made are both at our level and Vghu’s.

Labels are never what we make them out to be.

Symbols are never more than symbols, no matter how many experts weigh in about historic significance or point to clueless clues.

Take the smoke screens literally as smoke screens.

Perpetrators are only actors.

The puppeteers are the gamemasters and the pawns this time.

Between us and Vghu is more than you can imagine.

By our standards, connections won’t be made for thousands of years more, some for millions of years.

Messengers like to take holidays/vacations like everyone else.

Thank you and have a good day.

==============

[editor (13/4/18):**originally typed as “contain”; *originally typed as “envelope”]

Is it wrong…?

Is it wrong to buy metal fragments from yesterday’s bombing on ebay?

Is it wrong to ask Bill Gates to give $1B to Boy Scouts of America so it can go completely private?

People ask what is wrong with their country when their safety is threatened by random acts of violence.  Yet, more people die by accident than by all acts of terrorism combined, regardless of how you slice and dice the stats.

Regardless, the tragedies are just as rough and tough on the people involved — friends, family and social support network.

Yesterday and today have been a litmus test and Rorschach test combined, showing people’s belief sets while examining a small event in a faraway place called Boston, Massachusetts, southeast Iran and Venezuela.

Some days, I want to believe in the impossible — people traveling through space and time to sneak conventional IEDs into a crowd, then disappearing from our expected linear chronology — so that my science fiction reading has not only a sense of fair play but also a stronger sense of reality.

Instead, like the protagonists in “The Pale Blue Eye,” conventional detective work will, through deductive reasoning, reveal an antagonist list we feel comfortable suspecting, arresting and convicting.

Another story of terrorism, another forgotten list of victims…sigh…

I cannot let these distractions, that show the past and the future activities of our species are identical, slow down my path outward from Earth’s rotation around our local star.

Regardless of repetition, telling the stories from another celestial location are worth the effort.

There is enough material in this small room in which I type these words to last my lifetime.

Creativity is a result of one’s life, one’s genetic material, one’s experiences, ones and twos and zeroes.

High Winds

For what, in painful moments, have felt like excruciating, unending months, I have floated on the winds of change in popular/mainstream culture, following more than leading, letting the voices of others more attracted to monetary success and mass cultural influence speak for me, all because I acted upon the belief that adjusting to the loss of my father would change me, and it did.

I quit reading books.

I stopped meditating upon the peace of my joyful existence.

I dwelled in the mental images of the running storyline in my thoughts rather than shared them here with you, the reader and fellow follower.

I let my hit list dwindle down to nothing as my public voice changed to incorporate my image of mon pere into my written voice.

All while staying true to myself.

Relatively easy — no wars to fight, no lethal weapons to avoid, no slippery corporate ladders to climb, no shaky relationships to fix.

Because of this ease with which I walked through the death of my mother in-law and father, as well as a few people not mentioned online, I arrived here, continuing the sorting process of establishing which facts of one’s existence are worth recording in a blog via scanned images or Internet links and which are loaded into boxes and bags, then carried to the thrift store or sent to the local landfill.

By putting these items online, my personality is revealed through the points of contact I made in our global socioeconomic intercourse.

I asked myself along the way if it is easier for me to do something than something else I did before, will I?

I could grow and sell woodland plants in my tiny acre of land but is it easier and more enjoyable for someone else somewhere else?

I could poison and kill the raccoons that have eaten their way into my attic, or I could trap them and release them far away from this house, either way cleaning up the tornup eaves, shredded cardboard boxes and animal droppings.

Who am I?

The proverbial question has bounced around on days when I wondered which of my written personalities is really me.

Am I naturally attracted to people like Felicia Day because I have been and always will be a geek at heart?

I can talk and/or I can act.

Talking about myself and my inaction gets boring after a while when the voices are echoing the same thought back and forth, learning nothing new.

I have a bag of old spray paint cans and a few illustrator boards I used to make handbound hardback books of a limited collection of my poems and short stories — time to combine those with a bag of sewing notions from a 1956 Singer sewing machine cabinet to create artwork for display at Lowe Mill.

There may be office days ahead of me again, compromising my politically-incorrect-insensitive personality in the moment in order to work civilly with people who want to tap the profit of their business model to feed habits, hobbies and personality traits uniquely theirs.

How will historians see this moment, the past few months and years of the growing chasm between the socioeconomically ultra rich and relatively poorer people?

We spread into the cosmos — the answer to any and every question we ask, regardless of personality traits and set of beliefs.

Holiday Confetti

Paddling upstream, against the current, giving gravity its grave moment of gravity, one wonders why the sky is blue.

Yet, one breathes oxygen, a component of the sky, so should one first question why one breathes first?

Is the sky blue because I breathe?

Do I breathe because the sky is blue?

If the sky is not blue, then do I not breathe?

I do not hold blue in my hand when I feel blue and I cannot feel the blueness of the blue I see in blues.

The muse, she is just a geeky kid, is she not?

When she feels blue, should I feel blue?

When she sees red, should I not breathe?

A long time ago, when centuries were counted in units of A.D. and B.C., a man was born.

1931 on the west side of Huntsville.

His father bought a house in 1936, the son attending every school that existed in Huntsville at the time, back when the town was less than 10K in population, long before 10K races became popular pasttime weekend sports.

Huntsville Elementary, West Clinton, East Clinton and ending with Huntsville High School, one of them where the old Masonic Lodge is, he seems to remember.

His father, a construction man, helped build Redstone Arsenal and then moved to Denver to build a military base out there, the boy attending Ebert school in fifth and sixth grade.

The boy fished where Big Spring Park now entertains lovers arm-in-arm walking down tree-lined paths, the downtown buildings elevated above blocked-off caves.

“Did you ever see the old courthouse before they built this giant block building?  It was a beaut’.  Too bad they had to tear it down.”

Sitting beside the 81-year old was “Cookie” Moore, has lived in Big Cove for 69 or 70 years.

Mr. Burritt used to drive down the mountain to get water from Cookie’s father’s well. “Best damn water God put on this planet,” Cookie’s father quoted Burritt as saying, his father reminding Cookie that must be a good thing since Burritt didn’t believe in God.

The well was capped off a couple of years ago because it was unsafe, the walls collapsing in.

“Do you remember Jerry Moore?  Well, he goes for dialysis three times a week now.”

When one’s red hair has naturally bleached white, one is ageless in a way that people from their 20s to their 100s seem to relate.

When one agrees it’s not the doctrine that dictates behaviour, it’s the way one treats others regardless of inconsistent, dogmatic interpretation which rules the airwaves that makes the difference for infinite optimistic practitioners.

Lee sorted through the memory banks, unraveling tendrils.

No longer able to say, “this is my distinct memory,” Lee turned to Guinevere.

“What have we done?”

“What haven’t we done?”

“What, not, have we done?”

“What have we done not?”

“Done what have we?”

They tossed question after question at each other, varying the tone, pitch, inflection, word count, word order, sentence structure and chemical composition of the rhetoric without question.

Geekiness is an honour bestowed upon the few.

Chomping a cigar while driving a big rig on Mars is riskier though no less taxing on the intellect.

Latter-day saints like Hiromi Uehara and Chick Corea proved that intellect was simply a matter of spent energy, not a question or answer about questions and answers.

Thought experiments repeated themselves — “if you don’t do this, your life will not be complete” — stretched beyond the limit of limits, beyond derivatives, beyond boundaries, [sub]sets, and snapped back into boundless states of energy.

When two people communicate through the aether, either Eiger or the eigenvalue and the eigenvector value vectors on the inflective, jazz standards falling ‘way to speakeasy swing bands playing on the third floor of a cotton mill turned art factory factoring facts or rings or stings or dings or ING, that thing you do when you don’t know the influence of adverts from your father’s advice to remember two things, the first you forgot and the second hidden in the wisdom of old coaches’ wisecracks, having a craic of a good time back on the Cliffs of Moher.

Lee danced like a marionette, a feedback loop giving his partner the answer the performance art asked in realtime on the dance floor, too much information lost in eye contact, conversations whizzing by in the literal blink, the link, sink, the edge of the skating rink, riffing on the wordplay unspoken in bodies bounding between the imaginary ends of an invisible rubber band holding a planet together with its strange relationship of physics and chemistry, a giant toothpaste tube forming sparkling lines of thoughts in electronic ink.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Top o’ the morning to ye!

Erin go bragh!

It be midnight.

Sweet dreams!

Do your neuronal connections have labels?

Do you know what your neuronal connections look like?

I think I know mine:

SCAN0024 SCAN0025 SCAN0026 SCAN0027 SCAN0028 SCAN0029 SCAN0030 SCAN0031 SCAN0032 SCAN0033 SCAN0034 SCAN0035 SCAN0036 SCAN0037 SCAN0038 SCAN0039 SCAN0040 SCAN0041 SCAN0042 SCAN0043 SCAN0044 SCAN0045 SCAN0046 SCAN0047 SCAN0048 SCAN0049 SCAN0050 SCAN0051 SCAN0052 SCAN0053 SCAN0054 SCAN0055 SCAN0056 SCAN0057 SCAN0058 SCAN0059 SCAN0060 SCAN0061 SCAN0062 SCAN0063 SCAN0064 SCAN0065 SCAN0066 SCAN0067 SCAN0068 SCAN0069 SCAN0070 SCAN0071 SCAN0072 SCAN0073 SCAN0074 SCAN0075 SCAN0076 SCAN0077 SCAN0078 SCAN0079 SCAN0080 SCAN0081 SCAN0082 SCAN0083 SCAN0084 SCAN0085 SCAN0086 SCAN0087 SCAN0088 SCAN0089 SCAN0090 SCAN0091 SCAN0092 SCAN0093 SCAN0094 SCAN0095 SCAN0096 SCAN0097 SCAN0098 SCAN0099 SCAN0100 SCAN0101 SCAN0102 SCAN0103 SCAN0104 SCAN0105 SCAN0106 SCAN0107 SCAN0108 SCAN0110 SCAN0111 SCAN0112 SCAN0113 SCAN0114 SCAN0115 SCAN0116 SCAN0117 SCAN0118 SCAN0119 SCAN0120 SCAN0121 SCAN0122 SCAN0123 SCAN0124 SCAN0125 SCAN0127 SCAN0128 SCAN0129 SCAN0130 SCAN0131 SCAN0132 SCAN0133 SCAN0134 SCAN0135 SCAN0136 SCAN0137 SCAN0138 SCAN0139 SCAN0140 SCAN0141 SCAN0142 SCAN0143 SCAN0144 SCAN0145 SCAN0146 SCAN0147 SCAN0148 SCAN0149 SCAN0150 SCAN0151 SCAN0152 SCAN0153 SCAN0154 SCAN0155 SCAN0156 SCAN0158 SCAN0159 SCAN0160 SCAN0161 SCAN0162 SCAN0163 SCAN0164 SCAN0165 SCAN0166 SCAN0167 SCAN0168 SCAN0169 SCAN0170 SCAN0171 SCAN0172 SCAN0173 SCAN0174 SCAN0175 SCAN0176 SCAN0177 SCAN0178 SCAN0179 SCAN0180 SCAN0181 SCAN0182 SCAN0183 SCAN0184 SCAN0185 SCAN0186 SCAN0187 SCAN0188 SCAN0189 SCAN0190 SCAN0191 SCAN0192 SCAN0193 SCAN0194 SCAN0195 SCAN0196 SCAN0197 SCAN0198 SCAN0199 SCAN0200 SCAN0201 SCAN0202 SCAN0203 SCAN0204 SCAN0205 SCAN0206 SCAN0207 SCAN0208 SCAN0209 SCAN0210 SCAN0211 SCAN0212 SCAN0213 SCAN0214 SCAN0215 SCAN0216 SCAN0217 SCAN0218 SCAN0219 SCAN0221 SCAN0222 SCAN0223 SCAN0224 SCAN0225 SCAN0226 SCAN0227 SCAN0228 SCAN0229 SCAN0230 SCAN0109 SCAN0126