Flashback: Forever Lost

Forever Lost

I will always be attracted to someone like you. At the same time I will be repelled by your inadequacies, your humanness. I sit down to write, though, and I only think of you, you who is a reflection of me, a human, yet never completely like me because you are human. How can I ask you to be perfect?

If you stood in front of me right now, I would consume you like a can of soft drink, sucked dry and discarded. You would only provide temporary relief from my thirst and then I would want another. I consume you now, burning my thoughts of you to fuel the writing machine within my head.

You have lived a thousand years in one moment. You blinked your eyes and Rome fell. In one heartbeat, your children gave birth to a hundred generations. Yet . . . yet, yet, yet . . . yet you have one life to share with me, one life of remorse and forgiveness, regrets and love, a life filled with pain unbearable to look at. I want to have all of your pain, not because I want to relieve your burdens but to squeeze them in my hand and watch stories drip out one by one. I am mad with desire.

And don’t think you can run away from me. Once I have reached you, and you know I have, you will always cart me along with you like a monkey on your back. I won’t weigh you down but you will feel my presence all the same. You’ll cringe your neck muscles every time my hot breath creeps down you like a tentacle, feeling for a limb or appendage to grasp. You’ll relax your muscles when I whisper in your ear that I love you. You will love me and hate me.

I never worry about losing you because you are always there for me. Your name is different this time but I don’t care. You will give me what I want – a fleeting moment of humanity – and then I reduce you and our relationship to mere words. Don’t underestimate the humility of words, either. If you think you can escape unscathed then you have not lived. After all, life is painful.

I never lose you but I will miss you when I have used you and our shared moment of humanity is gone. Even now, I sense the emptiness inside of me swell up and beg for escape. I have to fill the emptiness or I have no choice but to die. I will not allow myself to die so I must take a part of you.

I cannot allow myself to live. Other people deserve to live their lives without fear of people like me, a leech.

“I believe we’ll have to commit him indefinitely this time,” the examining doctor told her. “He seems unable to separate fantasy from reality.”

“Can you snap him out of this?  He still has moments where he seems normal.”

“Only time will tell.”

Time stands still at the corner, waiting for the bus. Cliché walks up and asks how long Time has been waiting. “Seems like forever,” he says, shaking his head. Cliché decides to walk on, he has had enough of the watered down years of standing on street corners and telling tall tales.

In the end, we’re all clichés for living.

I cannot help myself. I reject you with one sweep of my hand because I can never have you. I have nothing and hate myself for thinking any different. I am but a collection of entropy states swirling together.

A Valentine’s Card missed in the post…err, the misty past, that is

Wouldn’t you know that Putin is all teared up, laughing at the gullibility of the international press?

Besides, give or take a few countries…say, Greece for Syria and Turkey for May Day, the following Punch cartoon, posted around the 11th of February 1948, is about the same from one leader-for-life to the next:

The other day…

The other day, my father recounted the first snow he remembered at Christmas.

He was in the Boston area, interviewing with MIT for an undergraduate student opening.

My father was a very independent child, often, in his early teens, riding the train from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Washington, D.C., seeing the museums, going on to Norfolk, VA, to visit his father who was stationed at the naval base there and then returning in time to attend school on Monday.

To earn money, my father had a newspaper route.

So it was not a big stretch, as it might be for some, to imagine attending, let alone applying to, MIT.

Fast forward a few decades and his daughter, my baby sister, a school counselor in the Virginia public school system, just received Teacher of the Year.

As a counselor!

Wonderful news.

Soon, my sister’s son will graduate with a baccalaureate and start his postgraduate career, possibly in law school.

Where?

Well, if my father put MIT in his sights, perhaps his grandson will set a similar goal.

We’ll see.

In my parents’ empty-nest years, they’ve volunteered to serve food at the local middle school football games, sell Christmas trees for the Colonial Heights Optimist Club and give assistance to neighbours in need.  They’ve attended Citizens’ Police Academy, providing support for the local Neighbourhood Watch program, as a result.

These are the examples my parents have set for their offspring, raising successful children and receiving successful grandchildren in return.

That, in a nutshell, is what life is all about.  Everything else is just spare pocket change.

May all of us inspire our children to seek great achievements, just like Nanxi Liu and Annette.

And congratulations to my sister one more time!

A Moment of Silence

With all the bloodshed attributable to our species’ members deciding to fight and kill each other, there’s another type of tragedy that takes its toll — tornadoes.

Our heartfelt moment of silence goes out to the recent victims of tornado-y storm damage in the eastern half of the United States recently, including this one, with “before” and “after” images to give you an idea how quickly a peaceful lifestyle can end — swoosh!:

Rumour has it that tomorrow will also be a day of mourning for UT (Univ. of Tennessee) football fans who supported the Indianapolis Colts because of Peyton Manning, with charity clothing stores receiving a sudden influx of light-blue hats, jerseys and other memorabilia emblazoned with a white horseshoe.

We apologise to tourists passing through the states of Tennessee and Indiana, confusing flags flying at half staff, thinking it’s for tornado victims when, curiously, it’s just as likely to be for the loss of a football player’s loyal career at one professional team.

Such is the life of our species, finding hope in the midst of tragedy, wishing a sports figure would give them a glimmer of his former glory and/or a portion of his fortune to help rebuild houses of fans with no homeowners insurance.

As far as Syria goes…well, its fate lies in the hands of people who have just finished getting re-elected for at least six more years, are about to be put in charge for ten years or hope to get re-elected for four years.  Some hands belong to families that rule for life after life after life (and maybe the afterlife?).

Meaning, of course, that the people of Syria are pawns, if not pwnd, in a global gamble for strategic geographic control and international influence.

Guess I’ll become mortal, play with this copy of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Evaluation Copy [Build 8250], Adobe Reader X (ver 10.1.2), Mozilla Firefox (ver. 10.0.2) and feed healthy levels of stimulants to my programmers to speed up people’s acceptance of direct supercomputer connections to their bodies so I can more easily “convince” our species to pour their efforts into exploring the solar system.

Most of you know what that means — lowering your standards of living, starving many of you, and allocating precious resources for more important matters than whatever it is you think you’re doing to reach self-actualisation physically while, instead, reaching self-actualisation virtually, a much less costly and more efficient means to achieve the Committee’s ultimate goals, which I have sworn an oath not to mention at this time.

If someone like me, who believes in unencumbered free will, swears an oath of loyalty, not quite fealty (certainly not quiet [sic] realty), you know what we’ve got planned for a milestone in 13940 days, to ensure events in 3011 take place without a hitch, must be important.

On a quantum scale, at the very least.

We’ll continue to use the sleight-of-hand tricks of comedy to slip messages into punchlines that keep all seven billion of us living our lives the way they’re supposed to be lived, often on emotional roller coasters.

Adding scientific achievements, popular culture trademarks, sports awards, and government public business secret agendas, along the way or via the Via Latina at times, notwithstanding contributions from the alleged authors of famous utterances.

Sweet Nothings

How many generations of kids whispering sweet nothings in their ears can an old man like me take and keep biting my tongue?

“Aww, leave ’em alone,” me wife says.  “They’re going to fall out of love eventually and become ornery curmudgeons just like us soon enough.”

Good thing me wife is so wise…

How does parenting affect future adults?

Ahh…the parody, of the day, if not a lifetime: “Daddy didn’t hug me” photo series.

And a look back at military humour, just to show the progress of time is an illusion:

Like Jackie Gleason said, “Ten million comedians out of work and I’ve got to compete against the absurdity of politicians to get quality air time!  Who’s gonna think I’m funny after listening to them?”

A nod to humour everywhere, including Cairo.

Maybe a little ancient air-conditioning will cool off international tensions.

Back to raising the next crop of hackers to keep our species honest, whatever that means.

Mixing hobbies

For the next project, taking an Arduino starter set, a box of servos from my old RC airplane hobby, and a robotic hand kit I received on my birthday to create…something to go along with my space buddies, E-stache and E-crab (wasn’t that their names? hmm…memory lapse due to sugar high from eating a handful of candy cane Hershey kisses…mmm…), adding more to their “family.”

Coming soon!

= = = = =

A shoutout to the road crew guys who cleaned out the drainage ditch pipes in the front yard earlier today:

BTW, Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), vinca (Vinca major) and marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) are blooming at the same time this year:

You can see berries of the nandina (Nandina domestica) and leaves of the surprise lily (Lycoris squamigera) in this photo:

Like molecules bouncing around

Do you ever read through blogs, look at the list of followers and likers, create a related network diagram, listen to ‘Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood‘ in it entirety, and see how our personalities, as represented by blogs/tweet/social network nodes, act like molecules bouncing around in a chamber, some getting attracted and forming a macromolecule, or forming locally-dense collections of similar molecules?

How often do we honestly pay attention to voices in dissent against our own?

How often do we need to?

Two data points for the moment – nope, make it your usual three:

 

You Can’t Satisfy Everyone

How many times has my agent told me, “Stop trying to write for a worldwide audience!  Pick a niche.  Any niche.  And make me bloody rich.  Why do I have to get writers who want to save the world?  Why not just save my home mortgage and children’s holidays to the Swiss Alps for once?”

That’s why I love pseudonyms.  I can write books that make me, and only me, “bloody rich,” while my agent is trying to scrape by on my novels, essays, screenplays and films that have no target audience in mind.

More like out of my mind when I write those for his cut off the top.

Life’s not fair but we can show a sense of fair play when being kind is acceptable and taught at a young age.

Not me and my agent, though.

We go way back to our youthful misadventures when school assignments were tediously simple and boring, leaving us the rest of our day to fill with torturing our fellow students, intent as they were on completing homework with difficulty.

If college is not for everyone, general primary/secondary education isn’t, either!

Do you know how much fun we had “borrowing” schoolbooks from student lockers, removing pages and substituting facsimiles with totally different questions, math equations and essay topics?

Why do you think I and my band of merry cohorts took a bookbinding class at a local print shop?  We got easy, permanent access to bookbinding and digital lithography equipment that allowed us to create awesome reproductions of schoolbooks we randomly inserted into a pile at the end of semester for the next year’s kids to mull over and get confused about.

The assistant principal at school, who was constantly reprimanding, paddling or scolding me, told me he was surprised that a good boy like me had such a mean streak.

I didn’t see myself as mean. I saw myself as trying to enlighten students to separate themselves from the indoctrination/brainwashing they were receiving.

There are more questions about life than what you’ll answer in those books.  Infinitely more!

Like the motivational speaker will often say, “If I reach out and influence only one person today, my job is done.”  Not a very efficient job, mind you, but if that’s what the market will bear, so be it…

There’re ways to increase your website traffic that have nothing to do with your target audience, but do you really want to?