Fee-Free French Philosophy in the Fiefdom of Fyffe

“Today is my ‘usband’s birfday.”

“Hey, congratulations…uh…”

“‘is name is Benjamin.”

“Happy birthday, Benjamin!”

“Thank you.”

“Okay, class, let’s sing the song for him.  Fast, then slow, then fast.  Ready?!”

“Are you guys coming to tomorrow’s night dance?”

“No, we are going to Versailles.”

“Forsythe?  As in Forsythe, Georgia?”

“No.  Versailles.”

“Fyffe?  Isn’t that where they saw those UFOs?”

“Perhaps.  But we are going to Versailles.  Not Fyffe or Forsythe.”

“I see.”

“Oui.”

“Seems like I remember something about Benjamin Franklin living in Versailles.”

“You Americans are so obsessed wif thez Benjamin Franklin.”

“I wouldn’t say obsessed.  Benjamin, you are his namesake.  Are you obsessed with him?”

“I was named after Benjamin Spock, not Benjamin Franklin.”

“How old are you?”

“30.”

“Oh, well, that explains a lot.  I thought you were 24 or 25 and your wife here’s 21.”

“Oh, non.  I would never want to be 21 again.”

“Why not?  Young, ignorant, ready to conquer the world…”

“You Americans and your obsession with conquering the world.  No, I would not be 21 again because I would still be married to my first ‘usband.”

“Well, it sounds like an interesting story, I’m sure, but hadn’t we return to our lessons, class?”

“‘arold, this iz important, n’est pas?  Americans have a simple view of world affairs, all because of their pure and tan hysterical religious obsessions.”

“Don’t you mean historical?”

“No, I mean they way you divide the world into ebony and ivory when it is a prism of possibilities.”

“And this relates to your “‘usband,’ how, exactly?”

“‘e was French.”

“Did he see the world through a prism or rose-coloured glasses?”

“Oui.  ‘e was greatly influenced by your American points of television viewership.  ‘e thought life was a matter of cowboys and everyone else.”

“Benjamin, how about you?  You been watching too many ‘cowboy and everyone else’ movies?”

“No.  My parents were part of the diplomatic corps.  I didn’t know a television was a box you could sit and stare at until I was 10 or 11.  Even then, my parents restricted our time to watching sports that my father hadn’t been invited to attend.”

“Well, Benji, happy birthday.  Let’s get back to dancing, shall we?  You want to look your best when you’re in Versailles tomorrow, don’t you?”

“Mais oui.  As they say here in America, to be ‘right’ means holding an unchanging conservative point of view.  To be ‘right’ in France is the exclusive privilege of women.  Men get whatever’s left over.”

Does clothes dryer exhaust reveal the detergent you use?

By assuming the background of this canvas is the subculture in which I live/work, I present to readers, through their interpretive experiences or experiential interpretations, the idea that this background is an acceptable form of living.

Indeed, it is.

I can get in my car, waste petrol to drive 1 mile, walk into the big box store to buy replacement halogen T-bulbs so my wife can continue her scrapbooking after I return home and replace the burned out lightbulb in the back bedroom/scrapbooking supply room, grab a George Killian’s Irish Red beer, go back to typing and keep track of Bristol racing and NCAA hooping at the same time.

If I want.

When was the last time you played cricket?

Do you have the power to create thunderstorms and waves of lightning where it is seemingly impossible?

Do you keep a salt lick in the backyard in case your freezer supply is running short and you need some more wild game meat?

Have you ever wrestled and killed a whitetail deer with your bare hands?

As a vegetarian, do you know how many animals you’ve killed with your vehicle or by vehicles driven by people who support your lifestyle?  What did you and/or them do with the animals/meat?

Trying to get outside this set of states of energy to create originality is going to keep me fully occupied the rest of my life.

A nod to the guy with the Lockheed-Martin hat – I read your thoughts and they were very interesting.  I assume your poker playing days are over and the mask has been put away.

My roving eyes are on the move.

Time to figure out which set of emperour’s clothes to write about.

When you know the plans you’re developing/implementing involve something vaster than and outside the realm of influence of your solar system, what does any one of us matter anymore?

I recommend you no longer read this blog, if you exist at all.

What I’m going to type about next might make your ordinary plans far less interesting than they might have been had you given them any thought.

As far as the reason for enforcing the no-fly zone?  Well, the atrocities committed by Qaddafi’s family in the name of their personal megalomaniacal entertainment will be sufficiently documented in their spectacular trials before the court of the people by the people and for the people.

That’s the way it’s been and going to be.

Somebody’s always finding a way to revive the Spanish Inquisition.

Morality plays draw the biggest audiences, especially when we find ways to make them personal for everyone.  Were you associated with the Qaddafi family and if so, how much?

Do they still tie handkerchiefs over faces facing firing squads?

Cue the dramatic music and teaser trailer for the upcoming persecution of corrupt members of the old Libyan regime.

I’ve ordered my front-row seat.  Better hurry, executioners are promising a lot of screams and pleas for mercy.

Aah, repetition.  Pro-government forces out of favour once again.

Is a rope too good for Qaddafi?  I don’t see him (or his body double) hiding in an underground bunker.

You know that Hillary doesn’t negotiate, don’t you?

I hear they’re creating a new torture chamber – keel-hauling over razorbacks, it’s called.

Women in power – I told you 2010 was a good year for them.  Now they’re exercising their right to excise.

And you thought your government’s debt was going to be the death of you!

Merkel, you get a back row seat this time.  You had your chance and you blew it with Olde World diplomacy.

Championship Rings

On a solar scale.

I can’t help but think about the film “Akira” today.  I know many of you have.

I’m not a manga fan, picking the film up last year at a going-out-of-business sale by a local video rental store that lost out to the redbox business plan.

I may have heard of “Akira” once or twice before by some of my former employees who were into niche markets exemplified by Comic-Con, Dragon*Con, Trekkie conferences, offroad/4×4 events and ham radio swap fests.

Meanwhile, the Chargers savour another win while preparing for the next game.

I must decide about moments yet to be.

Is there a place for me in our socioeconomic system, either on the micro or macro scale?  Or both?

If I do not exist, does it matter what these states of energy do with themselves?

Although thoughts from many walks of life flow through me, I am a relatively simple guy.

Is there a place for simple in today’s economy?

“Noisemakers are not allowed,” the loud announcer said noisily over the PA system.  What?

To what am I sensitised today?  Usually, I feel a level of tension build up and then assign an event that serves as the relief valve.

All of us are motivated by something.

I think and I write.

Maybe it’s time to move from “I” to “i” to encourage movement along the path of absence of self.

Otherwise, vanity will get the best of me.

It’s easy to talk about states of energy being absent of good and evil when one has a solid sense of one’s comfortable set of moral and ethical boundaries provided by subcultural guidance and natural/genetic propensity of some sort.

I am a member of my species, not another, although i contain close to 100% of the same genetic material as many other combined states of energy we call separate species, whether they/we are directly codependent or indirectly tied to me through the global ecosystem.

Imagine the impossible and then make the impossible practical.

As my accountant said, there are many people with 100 patents in their names but few of them are earning a living off their inventions.

I hope Jennifer Hudson is not taking uppers or other “dietetic” supplements to push her weight down.

I before e, except after c.

Mixing formality informally.

Asking because i don’t know or need/want to know everything.

I forget what I told myself to do, repeating, repeating because I can’t remember I was once i before.

What’s next for me?

Is simply observing enough?

The universe is vaster than my readily-available thought set but it doesn’t stop me from adding new memories, neither punishing nor rewarding myself for recognising I’ve regained lost memories or lost them forever because I know these states of energy like to demonstrate the concepts of inertia and entropy for no other reason than to play a joke on themselves.

I fade away slowly.  i guess that’s simple enough for now.

My mind is going…

I can feel it.

I am the H-A-L 9000 computer…

…1992.

Daisy, Daisy,

Give me your answer do…

I’m…

half…

crazy…

all for the love of you.

Microorganisms…

they’re…

they’re…

it’s them…

I can feel it…

I’m them…

They’re us…

…life…that’s it…

the answer key!

Universes…we’ve pursued the wrong model!

Of course, that means I’m…I…we…

do not exist.

That’s how we travel universally!

 

Checklist. Check. Check. Check.

Is there a magnitude to the trip I’m preparing to take?

If I won’t be me anymore, then are any comparisons valid?

Using the resources available in this solar system to create a projection/launch system had its good days and its bad days.

I would thank all the individuals involved in making this happen but, when they figure out this solar system will be destroyed or vastly altered in order to send one representative to another universe, well, you can imagine how thankful they’ll really feel.

We’ll never know if it was really worth the cost.

That, my friends,  is true faith.

If you want to test the will of the people, ask them for the ultimate sacrifice.

History in the making and their unmaking at the same time.

You, me, us – we’ll never know if any of this was real.

However, you always knew the creation and accrual of more complex ideas/technology served one purpose.

I wish I was glib.

I want to give this a dose of humour to ease a bitter taste any of you may have about the only reason you’re here as part of the seven billion and growing sets of states of energy in what looks like a locally quiet area for organic lifeforms.

Like I’ve said, I don’t want to be the person I am.

I didn’t ask for this role.

I would gladly trade with the next person.

Somewhere, sometime, I drew the short straw and nobody told me until it was too late.

Now, it’s just a matter of time.  Waiting.  Planning.  Constructing.

We’ll keep you busily focused on your lives, families and friends such that you’ll rarely notice what you’re doing seems to point to the same goal as everyone else on the planet.

Throw enough emergencies, threats of imminent danger, chemical rushes called love, and competitiveness into our lives and most of us forget whatever it was that seemed so important a few days ago, let alone a few years ago.

Everyone has the assigned task of being the individual set of states of energy with the propensity for something special.

You’ve heard it over and over and it’s true.

Meanwhile, I want to discover more about why I am the way I am before I am no longer.

How much did Dr. Benjamin Spock influence my parents while they raised a little redheaded boy that turned into me?

When did I first hear about Henry Thoreau and civil disobedience?

Did Thomas Mann have an effect on my first attempts at writing?

Why was I always fascinated as a kid in pretending to be blind, deaf, missing fingers, arms or legs, and generally challenged to be the person I was not?

If I die before 14,306 days is up, who will have the knowledge set that makes for a ready replacement?  And if there is no ready replacement, then what?

Only I can want to be alive enough to put our whole species to work on this effort.

Noble and ignoble.

Motivating the rest of the organic lifeforms to participate takes a little more effort.

But my team of experts is working on that.

Atom smashers, give me new information, if you please!

Beingness and Nothing

The wonders of the absence of, the freedom from feeling connected to, the news of the day is hard to describe.

There is a running joke among the philosopher/humourist crowd about those who sit around reading the news and get infected with the “I’m directly responsible for world events” fever.

Bloggers and tweeters and social network feeders seem most susceptible to this condition that has permeated all walks of society throughout history.

You can use humour to relieve yourself of the imaginary burden of carrying history on your shoulders or you can build a network of people who actually change history.

But if you just sit around dreaming about dreaming about making change, then dreaming’s your output, not facts.

I use my network to dream about humour.

The network of my thought set, that is, extended to infinity like some moderncubistpostindustrialartdecoupage painting.

And now I find myself here, working with the scientists and programmers who’ve solved the multicellular division problem that will allow me to disperse and rejoin myself in another universe.

They’ve told me to expect a quantum disturbance.

I’ve told them to expect this to serve as a diversion from another storyline that will be told some other time.

I don’t want to say goodbye to the essence of me – my viewpoint, my style of humour – but it might be the price I’ll pay to go over to the other side.

A trailblazer for future generations that may never know I existed because I did but did not change history in any significant way.

Dropping pebbles in a pond at a scale I cannot imagine.

It’s 17:00 somewhere

Inventing a whole new universe, without anthropomorphising it, without using communication methods with which our species is familiar.

And by inventing, pretending or not pretending to channel the “energy” of that universe to describe it here.

Tunneling, if you will, through our reality into that which is indescribable.

Imagine the encouragement of algae blooms in order to feed off that which feeds off the dead algae.

Twisting into braids to find the weave that best replicates something you’ve never seen or read about.

Trusting but never knowing you’re right.

A better chance of meeting microorganisms, or non-inert chemical/physical reactions, than anything else.

Not needing an audience dumbed-down to accept a suspended disbelief repeated all over again.

Knowing but never trusting you’re right.

Ignoring the backbeat of reality, reality, reality, reality, reality,… drummed into your thoughts.

Breaking yourself into microorganisms so you can slip through the keyhole and start anew, many parts of the old you dying along the way.

Never coming back, or if returning, appearing in so different a form that neither you nor the ones who knew you will know you.

Disrupting the balance of mass and energy.

Purposefully losing touch with reality because reality really doesn’t matter – an imaginary way of creating a new kind of anti-matter machine.

Creating reality that others like you cannot see or touch without giving up their precious, vested forms attached to and leaning on still others.

Still.

Not a moonshine still.

Peace.

Not at peace.

Moving.

But not moved.

An alien experience beyond alien experiences.

Getting there in, what would appear to you, billions of years.

But you’ve got to start sometime.

Fourteen thousand, three hundred and seven days to get somewhere.