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”]

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.

Fuelage, mileage, silage, signage

According to the keyring that came with my rental car agreement, I have been driving a 2013 Nissan Altima 2-door, black paint car since the 22nd of March.

I figured, since I have no vested interest in this car or the manufacturer, to investigate the car’s road worthiness.

At highway speeds, the bonnet or hood/engine cover rattles visibly.

There is relatively no difference in MPG results using either premium (91/93 octane) or regular (87 octane) graded fuel.

Examples:

Odometer reading/miles driven(City/Highway)/gallons fuel(Premium/Regular)/MPG

1003/304.6(cityC)/13.469(P)22.61
1350/346.2(H)/11.854(P)/29.2
????/498.1(H)/16.084(P)/30.97
2077/229.6(C)/10.651(R)/21.56
2477/397.2(H)/14.645(R)/27.1
2875/400.5(H)/13.718(R)/29.2

At speeds greater than 70 mph, the car tended to drift off the centerline constantly, requiring more attention than I like to give a car as a driver cruising on flat freeways.

On a positive note, the driver’s seat was quite comfortable throughout the two weeks I’ve driven the car, including the 14 hours yesterday.

Plus, I packed a whole closet and two suitcases in the trunk and backseat.

More as it develops…