Once Upon a Time in a Warehouse…

Ever watched a fire scatter homeless people?

Are there days of the week that homeless people make more money telling their stories and asking people to help them out?

What about the 24-hour period that some call Sunday?

The dilemma of managing a storyline 1000 years into your future is remembering the ambiance, the daily tricks of the trade, the parts of your society not bothered with car bombs, assassinations, sky drone monitoring or global warming.

Your planet seems so small in retrospect.

However, telling you about interplanetary transportation issues or galactic survey crews is like telling the founders of Angkor Wat about the printing press or steam-powered locomotives — you’d understand the concept of progress but not necessarily the technological details.

So it is with a random warehouse fire like this:

Typically, you’d get reports that galactic travel machines were burned to hide the evidence of a time twist, or that mobsters were settling a old score.

No doubt, you’ll hear that homeless military veterans were lighting up a big handrolled tobacco cigar and set trash on fire by accident.

Eyewitness reports will appear that show homeless people WERE in larger numbers in the Tri-Cities on the day of the fire.

However, there’s more to the story than meets the eye.

Look carefully:

Can you tell the difference between that photo and the following two:

No?

Let’s try it again.  Look at this photo and see if you can solve the mystery:

You may have to perform an analysis of the chlorophyll concentration, as well as figure out why a mother would pull her two small children out of a safe vehicle to walk toward a raging fire.

Getting warmer?

I thought so.  In 1000 years, we’ll use the space where the warehouse burned for a massive experiment of species overpopulation in absence of balancing predators.

We’ll demonstrate that the excess capacity of enclosed environments — office space, hotel rooms, concert halls, church school rooms, restaurants and public/private classrooms — was put to use toward housing the homeless and turning them into productive members of the Earth-based space travel preparation programs.

I need all seven billion of us to accomplish upcoming goals.

Every milestone is critical and even the tiniest talent, from designing hospital gowns for the prevention of the spread of Klebsiella pneumoniae, to losing $2 Billion, to begging for money on the street, is important.

We’ll keep you posted.

Thanks to Doug/Deanna at Walmart; Donna, Martha, Ronnie, Debbie and more at MHVAMC; Cootie Brown’s; Oh Henry’s; Pal’s; Col. Hts. Pres. Ch. participants; Valero; Mapco; Demetrice at Cupboard BP; Pete at the Chophouse; Home Depot; Rogersville Produce Market; to be continued…

Take it from a motorcycle driver

Have you driven down the road and noticed a change in the style of guardrail protecting you from leaving the roadway in case you lose control of your vehicle?

Let’s put the Law of Unintended Consequences to use today.

Take the cable barrier, for instance:

Let’s say you lose control of your vehicle and cause either yourself as a motorcycle driver or another person steering their iron horse to veer off the road and smash into a cables strung out to protect you.

In secondary school, a classmate was decapitated when he lost control of his motorcycle and his helmet was caught on the rim of a steel beam guardrail.

These days, if fate puts you in the hands of a cable guardrail, you may not lose your head but get limbs mangled and sliced off.

The choice is yours.

Hey, be careful out there!

I am going to walk outside and enjoy the sweet serenade of the Brood I cicada cycle, their flight paths less likely to put them in harm’s way of cable guardrails.  Maybe a few car grilles, instead.

Will catch up on thank-yous later this weekend.

Are you ready to improve your education?

Have you considered a career in Slope, Terrain and Elevation Management (STEM)?

In today’s world, there’s always another hill to climb, another mountain to conquer, another variation in topography that’s getting in the way of progress.

In STEM school, we’ll teach you how to navigate inclines on the way to creating a plateau of easy living, where even ground allows you to set the foundation for your future factory.

Don’t hesitate!  Call now!  Lorry drivers are crowding the registration office wanting to get in on this exciting career of mudslinging and offroad fun!

Photo courtesy of Ned Jilton II (njilton@timesnews.net)

Texting While Driving

If local laws ban texting while driving, how does that affect my habit of writing messages/journal entries in a notepad while I’m sitting behind the wheel aiming a two-tonne machine on tires powered by an internal combustion engine through traffic?

Depending on the part of the world/country in which you live, you might have a preconceived notion about the driver of the vehicle below:

I don’t.  I have seen men, women, boys, girls, Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, blacks, young and old behind the wheel of dubbed-up rim jobs like this rolling down the highway.  I’ve never seen a homeless type person or an Amazonian tribal member driving one, though.

Makes me wonder…

If we’ll spend fifteen thousand dollars on a set of wheels, would we spend fifteen large on annual healthcare or a ride 100 km above Earth’s surface?

I am a childless, dying person so I don’t have to worry about leaving a legacy behind.  I can say what I want and do what I want while deciding if I want to obey local traffic laws when scribbling personal observations and notes to remind myself to thank others for their kindness to me throughout the day.

There are 13,883 days to reach the next milestone.

Thanks to Shannon at Arby’s, Liz at Beauregard’s, Michelle at Dreamland BBQ, the busy staff at Gibson’s BBQ on the last free pie day of April, Nichelle at PVA, Joe and Jenn at KCDC, Irina and Julia, Hannah at Shaggy’s, Danny at Walmart, Jonathan at Anaheim Chili, Ian at the Rave, Lynn, Sarah and Dr. Pugh, and many more.

Pause for thought of the day.

On a personal side note, I’ve found that recent stress has greatly increased my desire for sex.  Very interesting as well as disruptive, as if I’m creating vast stores of testosterone in order to take on and conquer the world.  Makes me not want to look into a person’s eyes because I feel like all the lust inside of me is pouring out through my face.

Spending time on self-examination takes away from building scenarios for the story of our lives told in this blog.

For instance, my dreams have reached vivid proportions.

In last night’s dream, while my wife and I traveled through snowy country on a tandem bike, we topped an icy hill and were suddenly sitting in a car.  Topping the next hill, we happened upon a set of railroad tracks.

We stood by the tracks.  I was holding the reins of a rope harness attached to a cow.  The cow was pulling a set of railroad cars which had big wooden wheels like you see on a child’s playtoy set.

The cow was very tired.  It wanted to get into a hot tub.

I climbed into the hot tub with the cow so it could warm up its legs.  Sitting in the tub was a woman with orange hair and ivory-white skin covered with freckles.  She was a cow whisperer.

My wife asked the cow whisperer to interpret what the cow was saying.  The cow rubbed its head against me like a cat, making low mooing sounds like a cat’s purr.  The cow whisperer said the cow was weary of the ways of the world and wanted to quit pulling the railroad cars.

The cow, tub and whisperer disappeared.  I was standing by the railroad tracks with the rope in my hand.  My wife wanted to go on to the hotel/chalet where we had a reservation.  I pulled hard on the rope and finally got the railroad cars rolling in parallel with the railroad tracks.

We entered the chalet and walked the halls looking for our room.  I kept pulling the rope, wondering if the railroad cars would fit in the hallways and stairwells we walked and walked for a while.

Finally, we found our room.  Inside was a man who looked like the character of Mr. Ripley played by Matt Damon.  The man kept telling us one different story after another about why we had this particular room, including why I had the rope in my hand.  He promised to tell me if the railroad cars would fit in the chalet hallways when the phone rang.

I jerked awake.  The bedside phone rang, disturbing the cats sleeping next to me.  My wife had already left for work.

I answered the phone.  My mother was on the line giving me an update about my father’s stay at the VA.

My wife decided to interpret the images of my subconscious thought for me during dinner at Dreamland BBQ tonight:

  • The cow was my mother and the railroad cars were my father.
  • The man in the hotel room was my alternate egos.

While she told me her interpretation, TV screens around us featured talking heads analysing the recent suicidal death of Junior Seau, a former fearsome NFL player.

While I dreamt, a blind man proved he can change the course of history by standing between the governments of China and the U.S.

If a parrot can live longer than the average member of our species, then a dream can live longer than one civilisation cycle.

And texting while driving is a matter of interpretation.

Time to give my dreams impetus/motivation and transportation!

It’s Hip to be Square

I smell cat food on my fingers and popcorn on my breath.
I see squiggly lines in front of me and hear the heat pump hum.

How long does it take to recover from mourning the death of my father’s mind?

Minds do not exist, in the classic sense.

It’s a game of cat-and-mouse.

Dagger and cloak.

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer…

For whom the bell tolls.

My father served in the 4th Infantry, long before this 1970 report summarised lessons learned.

He is alive and yet not alive.

That is, he who was he is not he any longer.

Him who was is no more, but not nevermore.

‘Tis memories I relive in my current/future living.

There are memories to be made, observations to make, medical diagnoses to contemplate.

And/but yet.

Edgar Allan Poe went to West Point.  He died at 40 years of age.

Soon, I will be 50 years young, halfway to 100, where life starts all over again.

Like a paper folded in two.

Or a projectile at the top of its trajectory.

My father is one pathway of my life 27 years from now.

One way the past is the future all over again.

A paddled cruise down the Sipsey River, for instance — same places, new water, new trees, new wildlife.

Heard a barred owl in the woods behind the house this evening while Merlin (the cat) snoozed on my lap in the sunroom.

How many generations of owls and cats have passed in 50 years?

Or 77?

How many more in 100?

Two thoughts for your daily thoughtfulness

In an all-luring story that has rocked the boat of the sports fishing  industry, federal investigators, after years of infiltrating the deepest pockets of the business, were caught in a dragnet of controversy.

After spending millions of pounds/yuan/dollars in coordinating with international police authorities, our national team of crack crimestoppers, unwilling to let any criminal activity go unpunished, no matter how insignificant its effect on our general economy, finally revealed the information that freedom fighters have been requesting for decades.

Apparently, sponsors of major fishing tournament winners have long been paying locals to catch, raise and fatten prize fish, then releasing them just in time into secret spots that sponsors then suggested to their celebrity sports fishermen to call their own, thus ensuring their sponsorship money was not wasted and their winners won.

The shock that has rippled through the stream of the sport has turned many of the most diehard fans into temporary doubters, wondering if all that talk about the best bait and the most expensive, yet successful, fishing gear — including boats, sonar equipment, beer kegs and excuses to get away from family in order to catch edible foodstuff — has been in vain.

County, state and federal subcommittees have been called into emergency session to question fish and wildlife employees about fishery and hatchery practices.  Have they been reporting dead fish that were actually sold to locals?  Are they eating fish they killed and claimed as losses?  Are the stuffed and mounted fish on their trophy walls victims of “spoilage” reports filed in dusty government storage boxes?  How far up the government ladder does this go?  Did this cause the housing crisis in some obscure way that gets financial investment companies off the hook?

= = = = =

Quote for the day:

I hate to break it to you, but your $2,000 designer dog is a mutt.  Puppy stores and breeders have created these cute names like Morkipoos and Puggles, and now people are paying $2,000 for a dog they couldn’t give away at the pound ten years ago.  Whoever started the trend is a marketing genius.” — Dennis Leon, DVM (courtesy of Readers Digest, May 2012 issue)

= = = = =

Bonus puzzle of the day: I have a fellow secondary school alumnus who is a local state representative.  I have a fellow secondary schoolmate, an employee of a local newspaper, who endorsed a rival candidate running against the state representative.  One, should that affect my mental thought set about the two of them as friends/classmates?  Two, should newspaper (or any mass media) employees publicly endorse political candidates and if so, should they have to make it clear they speak for themselves and not the mass media company that employs them?

The Truth About Handles

Across the street, an azalea bush blooms, the sign that this blog is soon coming to its inevitable end.

Before I go, I will share with you the truth about handles.

If you are familiar with literary devices, all the better.

I had a handle as a kid.

Well, now that I think about the subject, I had many handles — a handle on my lunchbox, a handle on my money box, a handle on my boom box — but boxes are more than handles and handles are more than accessories for boxes.

The lawnmowers I pushed across tiny fields of grass that neighbours called lawns and I called my independently owned taxfree business as a minor had handles.

I followed my father’s hobby of using a CB (citizens band) radio and created the handle (not a nom de plume, closer to a nom de guerre) of Tree Trunk.  My father was [Tennessee] Ridge Runner.

You can see the similarly between father’s handle and his son’s so I needn’t wax poetic on alliterative comparisons, need I?

But some of you know all this[,] already[,] so why’m I repeating myself?

‘Tis the curse of the tall tale teller but not Guillaume Tell, Pen and Teller nor the bank teller who robs the till creatively.

Creativity is the key word, here, though.

The story of the Committee resides in the truth about handles.

Can you imagine swirls of sets of states of energy spinning into tighter and tighter circles simply as a cosmic artistic display?

Can you imagine “life” as a seed planted to create a planetary absurdist art exhibit (or absurdest, depending on your point of view)?

From what I gather, my job here is done.  I have observed and reported.  I have served as the reluctant leader.  I have carried on the duties of the invisible museum curator.

That’s it.  That’s the truth about handles.

The rest is your participation in life as art for imaginary viewers “out there” or whatever literary device you call your own — personal or shared.

This blog is now closed.  I am returning to writing tall tales in the comfort of my thoughts, which may or may not find a space on paper, a computer hard drive in my study or somewhere in the stacks of racks we currently label the “cloud.”

Euphemisms — what would we do without the creative reuse and recycle of words?

Some call this time in one’s life retirement.  I call it returning to the earlier time in my life when I wasn’t forced by my subculture to squeeze my thought patterns out into homework assignments and job duties.  Somewhere around the age of five, give or take a year.  😉

You can handle the truth in your own imaginative way, too.

Every story has a conclusion written into the subplots that naturally end while more subplots pick up the pace, leading to the next story written by the same and/or other authors (or Authors, if you believe).

THE END

P.S. Have fun!

[Copy to be inserted into e-brochure]

Welcome to the wonderful world of space travel.  The package you have selected includes the following itinerary:

Days 1-7: Orientation — physical fitness examination, G-force simulation routines, safety procedures

Days 8-9: Travel to first destination — launch from spaceport, short G-force experience followed by two days of weightlessness, sightseeing from viewing ports, preparation for docking

Day 10: International Space Station excursion — shuttles will take those who paid for this 8-hour tour of the ISS, starting with a quick Q&A session between you and the ISS crew members (subject to crew member availability; specific crew members requests cannot be made at this time), introduction to the features of at least two modules and more as time permits

Days 11-12: Travel to Bigelow Space Hotel — in-flight entertainment includes an acrobat show, singalongs and 3D roulette wheel gambling, not to forget the 24-hour freeze-dried food buffet!

Days 13-19: Your ultimate destination for luxury space accommodations, BIGELOW SPACE HOTEL!!!  During your stay, your personal assistant — programmed to look like the person of your choice, including a wide range of celebrities or a “friend” from your past — will provide anything and everything you want to make your stay the guaranteed most wonderful experience of this or any of your previous/next regenerated lifetimes!

Days 20-21: Return to Earth.

Days 22-24: Gently reintroducing you to the drudgeries of your daily life, including Earth’s painful gravitational pull, global warming and overcrowding, just enough incentive to get you to book your next trip with us very, very soon!  We guarantee it because we have your personality profile on immediate e-memory recall!

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:

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?