Flashback, courtesy of my father, Dad

Real football -- no pads!

What do you see in a photo?

My father sees his 1966 Chrysler station wagon.

I see my racing bike which could leap over dirt ramps.

A doctor sees my broken wrist and cast.

Who sees the fashionable pants?

Who sees the helmet and cleated shoes?

The brick wall?

The potted plant?

The cracked sidewalk?

The jersey?

The window shutter?

The type of photo paper?

The date?

What else do you see in this nine-year old boy staring back at you, unable to play football because of a plaster-of-paris cast?

Found items under the watchful eyes of the scanner…

While my wife and I sorted between keepsakes and donation-worthy material in her mother’s house, we created a pile of items that fell somewhere in-between — interesting to look at but not worth adding to the piles of curiosities collecting dust in our house.

What to do with them…hmm…

What else?  Scan ’em and then give ’em away.

Examples below — more to follow, as time permits.

Levity in today’s hotly-debated political climate

An online email sent to my local national legislative member (a/k/a MC, Member of Congress, Congressman), named the 2011 Fighting Freshman of the Year

Congressman Brooks:

Recently, a dance instruction studio — Kinesthetic Cue Dance Club, located at 8006 Old Madison Pike in Madison, Alabama — celebrated its 13th birthday.

As customers, my wife and I would like, with the consent of the owner, Harold Renneberg III, to recognize this achievement.

Harold is a military veteran with a good sense of humor.

In today’s climate of political polarity, we would like you to sponsor a motion to declare the 1st of April “Male Pattern Baldness Awareness Day,” to which Harold Renneberg, going bald himself, is quite fond of saying he’s fully aware is much needed.

Not only would this give us men growing bald patches a moment to reflect on our shiny domed pates, it would show that military veterans ARE finding viable ways to be productive members of society by opening local businesses and creating much-needed jobs.

We thank you in advance for your assistance in promoting this day and honoring Harold on his business milestone.

We wish you well in the upcoming election and are glad you have represented our district with dignity and dedication.

Sincerely,
Richard L. Hill, II

P.S. For a recent magazine article about the dance studio, read here: http://www.kinestheticcue.com/misc/strictlyballroom.htm

A magnified view

Can you believe this is a magnified view of a subterranean (actually, submartiansurface? [ 😉 ]) ecosystem captured in a photograph by a secret Mars exploratory mission sent by the Committee several years ago and just now returning to Earth with valuable data for us to get started on negotiating mining operations that’ll destroy life on Mars we never got to know personally?:

Just wait until we try to sell you underground warm mineral springs timeshares on the red planet!

And if you can’t/won’t visit our celestial sister, we’ll rent our virtual Martian surrogates to give you the experience of living there in hourly/daily/weekly slots, able to print 3D surrogate versions of you in no time flat!

Give us a call!  Availability is limited!  The first 50 callers get a special bonus just by mentioning this advert!

Usted es un colombiano experto en SEO, ¿no? Por lo tanto, hermanos, os encomiendo.

Here lies an outlier

As we get to know more and more about each other, we will grow more comfortable accepting each other’s subcultural differences, appreciating how the definition of success can vary so widely that it almost seems impossible seven billion varieties point to the same thing: our species’ survival and growth.

Yes, it includes fear, crime, ecosystem disasters, economic failures and myriad ways in which the universe we live does not always point toward our survival and growth.

Dust particles — small fibers, short hair, unidentifiable tiny, twisted objects — seemingly oblivious to gravity, float through a beam of sunshine propped up between the writing desk and the dirty window.

A few days ago, I visited with some friends whose father recently died.  My friends and I had spent a few years together in primary and secondary school over 30 years ago.  One friend I hadn’t seen in at least 35 years.

Needless to say, we knew little about one another except what we have seen in the past couple of years while sharing space on a computer server farm spread across data centers around the world dedicated to an online social media website called facebook.

In other words, we had little to say to each other in person that we didn’t already know, or should have remembered seeing in our online personality profile.

The moment was there for comfort at the time of loss of the family patriarch.

Soothing words.

Fond memories of our youth spent under the guidance of a chemical research/sales engineer and literal/figurative father figure.

I cough, sending dust particles on a swirling dance out of and back into the sunlight, which then disappears with clouds passing overhead, reappearing a few minutes later at a new angle, attached to the bright, yellow glob amidst the blue-painted dome high above.

An airplane swoops and circles the patch of sky nearby, making the sounds of the television playing a movie called “The Longest Day” seem live and in real 3D viewing/listening closeness.

After visiting with the friends, my wife and I returned to her mother’s house, continued our sorting through physical reminders of my wife’s mother, father and brother, all deceased.

My wife’s nuclear family is no more, except in her memories.

Her brother’s widow and children still live.  She has cousins spread around the globe.  And her family by marriage — my blood relatives, including nuclear family (father, mother, sister), as well as extended family (nieces, nephew, cousins, aunt, uncle, etc.).

My friends’ father lived for 84 365-day, 24-hour cycles around our local star.

As the planet spun, my friends’ family influenced those they met, all of them tied to Earth by gravity, the curvature of spacetime, we surmise.

We can see the familial influence through the eyes of the intersection of sets of states of energy, adding meme upon meme, including the word “meme,” to build physical representations of ideas like “idea,” to arrive at the point where schoolmates meet 30+ years later to reminisce about a few years spent in growing up together toward adulthood.

Did any of the dust particles floating in the air at the church where, due to one death, we met to talk about good times in childhood attach themselves to me and then re-enter the airspace in the sunbeam not far from this computer?

What about the particles I can’t readily see, such as water molecules, bacteria, dead skin cells or other microscopically miniscule minutiae?

We are connected in ways we rarely take time to notice, if we can see the connections at all.

How do I explain a blog post composed only of pictures to a blind person who uses a Braille keyboard and automatic audible reader?

How do I explain wireless radio pathways between a notebook computer and wireless router to people who can’t feel or don’t communicate signals at a wavelength of 0.125 m or about 5 inches?

Although… you know, some people say they can feel 2.4 GHz radio waves and other phenomena they claim causes them radiowave/EMF sickness.

But let’s get back to the global story of our lives, where financial gurus want to prop up a system that is no longer a viable connection between the macro and microeconomic levels…

Gusset up the place

To be a part of the moment in which we are all a part of the moment…

To read reports written in opinionated manners that one has no interest in perpetuating, personally, but understanding that the flow of the river of life — especially the main channel — does not take into account individual water molecules electrically and/or chemically attracted to a deep pool off to the side…

Gravity a mystery and yet as obvious as a changing social form of the silent treatment, such as someone refusing to respond to emails or texts…

Accepting the fact that belief in one method of thought processing is primarily what we tend to do, who we tend to be…

A one-atom “transistor” — when we do create a subatomic version?  And what comes after that?

A poem, a short story, a nail, a truss — if all is humour to this author, except when everything is not, what is anything?

The word “supercomputer” will fade into another word after supercomputer becomes ubiquitous, commoditised, superfluous…

How many people are office workers, and of them, how many long for a viewbicle?

Are you rewriting language in your image, mashing up ideas into combined letters, words and phrases that only you can understand?

Or are you thinking more universally, writing for moments past, present and future?

While others, call them A-prime, perpetuate social constructs with which they feel most comfortable identifying themselves, I contemplate the social construct of me tied to A-prime with whom we live in our time here together and what it makes me, B-notB, if I am walking the path of the wanderer who lives inside and outside of time-based social constructs.

I am humbled that people who call themselves nonconforming individualists would want to link to me in modern online social circles but I have to be careful not to allow the part of me that is the chameleon personality to blend in with nonconforming social constructs (yes, the irony is obvious — “nonconforming” and “social” seem to contradict each other) that aren’t my own.

To compute trends that will not occur in my lifetime evokes, if not provokes, odd feelings.

To know the flow of social change is often slower than we perceive…sigh…

What of the person who thought thousands of years ago of another person walking the surface of our Moon?  And of the next person who wished to walk on the surface?  And the next one who dreamt of the method getting there?  And the one who wrote a plausible story about getting there?  The one who filmed a fantasy sequence of encounters on the surface? And finally the person who first stepped on our Moon’s surface?

Is computing the trends enough?  Do I have to experience them in the moment with everyone else to experience them in my thoughts?

And do I have to share them with you/us to make the trends happen or remain silent and let them happen without an iota of influence these words will have, spreading first into a network of nonconformers and out into the rest of our shared subcultures?

What if I hold the pebble in my hand and put it in my pocket instead of skipping it across the pond?

I once met a homeless person who said he regularly talked with God and that God had recently told him all people who declawed their animals, a desecration of God’s creatures, were doomed to hell.  I told a friend I consider a devout Christian this story and he told me that God gave us dominion over all of God’s creatures so he didn’t believe that the homeless person really had talked with God.

From the scenario, I discovered that we elevate ideas to the forefront of our thoughts to strengthen our social constructs.

The homeless person and my friend have valid points, depending on whether I believe God regularly talks to people or that God gave our species dominion over every species.

Or both.

Our subcultures are contradictory, by default.

And I, this set of states of energy, consider myself alive, which separates me from that which is not alive, whatever that means, because alive/unalive is a barrier not easily perceived in an ecosystem in which atoms mix and molecules reform constantly.

I am the Wondering Wanderer, the Wandering Wonderer, not here to convince others to align their thought patterns with mine or the trends I’ve computed.

I observe.  That’s who I am.

I see us, no matter where we are in cultural subsets, squarely in the middle of one subset or spread across many, and how we interact, which intuitively and computationally imply future moments of interaction we call trends.

Some trends I would like to see happen in my lifetime, some trends I know will happen but I wish they won’t, and some trends I hope happen regardless of the status of my set of states of energy as living or nonliving.

For instance, will a person sewing images in a gusset establish a trend of decorated gussets that spawns whole industries of underwear fashion and function?  And how will that affect international business relationships of the 2020s?

Will I return to stop referring to the words “politics” and “government,” letting them meld with the word “business,” as they should?

After all, government is just a business run on coercing, cajoling, encouraging a large group of people to jointly pay for services they want on large- and small-scale levels but wouldn’t normally pay for individually.  Kind of like business in general, n’est pas?