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?

Do you listen to music when you write?

In a billionaire’s game, people are willing to be paid to die because, as we know, people are only so many mixtures of chemicals that, when you get down to it, are indistinguishable from the robots we are meeting in our rush toward godhood.

What if a robot volunteers to place a bomb on a crowded street?

Or intentionally programs a chemical factory to explode?

And when the robot follows orders from another robot which originated the idea, then what?

Can you define the phrase “inalienable rights” without looking it up?

Training a whole population to believe that its only hope for survival is to focus a large portion of its resource pool on space exploration is never straightforward.

Seven billion sets of thoughts divided into subsets in and out of your direct control.

Instead, focus on a planet within a solar system.

Egotistical personalities will want to claim they’re right.

Let them.

Use them.

But don’t abuse them unless the mob calls for their heads.

Assuming, of course, that the mob fell out of your control temporarily and you need scapegoats to realign the mob mentality in the direction where your invisible compass points.

Mix in a self-deprecating sense of humour.

Let random lyrics of songs seep into your speeches.

Pop culture is your friend, not a fiend, no matter how much the current trends are abhorrent to your sensibilities.

Let artists speak your subliminal messages, giving the people heroes, enemies and anti-heroes galore, creating new legends and myths as soon as the old ones fade in popularity.

The thin atmosphere of Earth is a poor shield to lean upon for too long.

The crust underneath our feet crumbles constantly.

Security is an illusion of time and space.

Take time to laugh, smile and love.  Hate and fear will find their own ways into the lives of your acquaintances and loved ones.

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”]

Holiday Confetti

Paddling upstream, against the current, giving gravity its grave moment of gravity, one wonders why the sky is blue.

Yet, one breathes oxygen, a component of the sky, so should one first question why one breathes first?

Is the sky blue because I breathe?

Do I breathe because the sky is blue?

If the sky is not blue, then do I not breathe?

I do not hold blue in my hand when I feel blue and I cannot feel the blueness of the blue I see in blues.

The muse, she is just a geeky kid, is she not?

When she feels blue, should I feel blue?

When she sees red, should I not breathe?

A long time ago, when centuries were counted in units of A.D. and B.C., a man was born.

1931 on the west side of Huntsville.

His father bought a house in 1936, the son attending every school that existed in Huntsville at the time, back when the town was less than 10K in population, long before 10K races became popular pasttime weekend sports.

Huntsville Elementary, West Clinton, East Clinton and ending with Huntsville High School, one of them where the old Masonic Lodge is, he seems to remember.

His father, a construction man, helped build Redstone Arsenal and then moved to Denver to build a military base out there, the boy attending Ebert school in fifth and sixth grade.

The boy fished where Big Spring Park now entertains lovers arm-in-arm walking down tree-lined paths, the downtown buildings elevated above blocked-off caves.

“Did you ever see the old courthouse before they built this giant block building?  It was a beaut’.  Too bad they had to tear it down.”

Sitting beside the 81-year old was “Cookie” Moore, has lived in Big Cove for 69 or 70 years.

Mr. Burritt used to drive down the mountain to get water from Cookie’s father’s well. “Best damn water God put on this planet,” Cookie’s father quoted Burritt as saying, his father reminding Cookie that must be a good thing since Burritt didn’t believe in God.

The well was capped off a couple of years ago because it was unsafe, the walls collapsing in.

“Do you remember Jerry Moore?  Well, he goes for dialysis three times a week now.”

When one’s red hair has naturally bleached white, one is ageless in a way that people from their 20s to their 100s seem to relate.

When one agrees it’s not the doctrine that dictates behaviour, it’s the way one treats others regardless of inconsistent, dogmatic interpretation which rules the airwaves that makes the difference for infinite optimistic practitioners.

Lee sorted through the memory banks, unraveling tendrils.

No longer able to say, “this is my distinct memory,” Lee turned to Guinevere.

“What have we done?”

“What haven’t we done?”

“What, not, have we done?”

“What have we done not?”

“Done what have we?”

They tossed question after question at each other, varying the tone, pitch, inflection, word count, word order, sentence structure and chemical composition of the rhetoric without question.

Geekiness is an honour bestowed upon the few.

Chomping a cigar while driving a big rig on Mars is riskier though no less taxing on the intellect.

Latter-day saints like Hiromi Uehara and Chick Corea proved that intellect was simply a matter of spent energy, not a question or answer about questions and answers.

Thought experiments repeated themselves — “if you don’t do this, your life will not be complete” — stretched beyond the limit of limits, beyond derivatives, beyond boundaries, [sub]sets, and snapped back into boundless states of energy.

When two people communicate through the aether, either Eiger or the eigenvalue and the eigenvector value vectors on the inflective, jazz standards falling ‘way to speakeasy swing bands playing on the third floor of a cotton mill turned art factory factoring facts or rings or stings or dings or ING, that thing you do when you don’t know the influence of adverts from your father’s advice to remember two things, the first you forgot and the second hidden in the wisdom of old coaches’ wisecracks, having a craic of a good time back on the Cliffs of Moher.

Lee danced like a marionette, a feedback loop giving his partner the answer the performance art asked in realtime on the dance floor, too much information lost in eye contact, conversations whizzing by in the literal blink, the link, sink, the edge of the skating rink, riffing on the wordplay unspoken in bodies bounding between the imaginary ends of an invisible rubber band holding a planet together with its strange relationship of physics and chemistry, a giant toothpaste tube forming sparkling lines of thoughts in electronic ink.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Top o’ the morning to ye!

Erin go bragh!

It be midnight.

Sweet dreams!

Survival kit for today’s world of business, technology, politics and space exploration, all rolled into one, of course!

Ever wondered how to survive on the road from new employee on the bottom of the totem pole to top dog leading the sled?

Well, these book titles may point you in the right direction:

University-days-0000a University-days-0000b University-days-0000c University-days-0000d University-days-0033 University-days-0052 University-days-0053 University-days-0054 University-days-0055 University-school-books-0000 University-school-books-0002 University-school-books-0008 University-school-books-0012 University-school-books-0015 University-school-books-0018 University-school-books-0020 University-school-books-0021 University-school-books-0022 University-school-books-0023 University-school-books-0026 University-school-books-0029 University-school-books-0030 University-school-books-0034 University-school-books-0035 University-school-books-0036 University-school-books-0037 University-school-books-0037a University-school-books-0038 University-school-books-0039 University-school-books-0040 University-school-books-0041

A thinker with a drinking problem…

…or the other way around?

This is one of the hardest blog entries to write, a passel/gaggle of beer, Unobtanium style, wallowing in my stomach juices, leading the way.

There is, in this moment after watching “seeking a friend for the end of the world,” another moment within a moment, when cold medicine leads the way toward a tunnel vision where honesty meets the highway, the Internet highway (Al Gore not included with the likes of Vincent Cerf or others of cyber-hyper byways), that is, Celtic flutes warning me of moments stepping off the road, where in this silent moment of movie soundtracks I find myself leaning against a notebook PC writing words that’ll haunt me forever and a day afterward.

There is a muse, a dancing muse, by the name of Guinevere, who follows Thrush and Monica and Karen (a/k/a Janeil) along with Sarah/Sara and names that’ve paved a highway, pre-Internet (or post, depending on date of invention of the snippet of an idea of an inventor in someone’s womb), where sounds make no difference except in a language, or a discipline of savings, where neither Mandarin or any other makes any difference when one is focused on making, rather than spending, one’s labour/investment credits in a single species’ definition of survival traits on an indifferent planet in an unsensing solar system in a galaxy of possibilities of fermented improbabilities that Edgar Allan Poe would declare a likely story of insensibilities about lost loves and pickled livers.

There is, if memory serves, also Monasha, Sheree, Stacey and others at a diner in the burgh of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, who serve their customers with kindness without reserve.

Deeper still, there is this moment of silent contemplation, where a niece, Jana, and her deacon-ordained husband, Brian, celebrate the discovery of a gender we assign to newborne babes climbing out of wombs and into the worldwide web of the solar system beset by asteroids, solar flares, and traffic incidents recorded by friends such as Nathan who sees perps in every person who displays abnormal behaviour attributed to personality quirks unassigned to basic training in police procedures on policies approved by popularly-elected politicians.

All written in the fog of war.

Or sequestration.

Let me set the record straight.  I see the repetition of a species in competition with itself, in companies vying for limited government resources, who shall get the post-reductorio oratoria of the fat lady singing the swan song of uncompetitive companies incapable of getting the last brass ring of a merry-go-round and round and round of diminishing returns on the global scale of middle-class salesmenpeople telling you what’s best for your family as government coffers compete with private companies for your undivided attention.

As spinning/talking heads babble on unceasingly — baubles, bangles and beads [you know the melody] — one more time we’ll give you the mondo-rhythm, the hidden beat in the religious upbeat of a Bible/Bhagavad Gita/Islam oldtime religion (ignoring the new religion of Darwinism/global “One World Order” business) — let us divert ourselves one more time from our prime directives and tell it like it is.

A muse.

Amusing.

A Spanish dancer, a rocket guidance system expert, a missile thrust enthusiast, an Appalachian Trail hiker, a food lover (if not a liver player), a flautist, a Singapore Sling, a duck pond inhabitant, a person of independent means…

The list goes on and on.

We return to the story once again for the very first time, neither handwriting nor typewriting nor electronic interface getting in the way…

The cave stains leaving a mark immemorial…

Silence adds a break in the musical score for emphasis.

PDQ Bach, specifically.

Turning bad dancing into satire for fun’s sake.

In the light of the sun.

On a pretzel bun.

With mustard.

And extra salt.

Wax paper not included.

Rinse and repeat.

If you can follow the words, you’ve arrived here.

If not, avast virus database has been updated.

You are now back at the beginning.

AOL email and Amazon Kindle Singularity subscriptions not included.

Return to your dream, uninterrupted.

Good night!

The hacks, they keep on coming — are you a “one hack” wonder?

When you want honey, do you make the bees angry before you pull out a piece of the hive?

The universe is here because I am here just like a paper cone is only paper until it is a speaker and what is a speaker without an audience?

Take two groups:

  1. The first group believes in the open and honest discussion of scientific methods.
  2. The second group believes in the civil discourse of sly competitiveness.

Both groups believe in the betterment of their respective societies/[sub]cultures.

However, a little problem occurs when one group uses the other’s subcultural norms for advantages within their own group.

Is it miscommunication?  Misappropriation?

How do they, together, benefit our whole species?

Because I believe the universe is here because I am here, I want, as long as I am happily able to think so, the species, our species, within our Earth-based ecosystem that has nurtured us for thousands, no, billions of years, to use this brief period of peaceful coexistence with the rest of the solar system to expand into the galaxy.

When I am gone, the universe is gone and none of this will matter to me because my set of states of energy as a recognizable entropic confluence will disperse but remain temporarily as memories in a small number of members of our species and even smaller number of members of other species, barely a footnote in the yellowed pages of old newspapers.

Does the universe make me happy as is?

I have learned that very few people change their behavioural patterns when allowed to wallow in their sorrow or anger, let alone convince other, happy, people to join them.

Yet, happiness for its own sake, like art and humour, does what, exactly?

If burning down a forest makes me happy, there will be a lot of people and members of other species who disagree, adamantly so.

If destroying an economy makes me happy, there will be a lot of people who agree as well as a lot who disagree.

What kind of happiness should we attain?

After all, we are a competitively cooperative species, sharing and hoarding, fighting and loving, all at the same time.

Our lives are short in length, some brighter and louder than others, some sadder, some happier, some kinder, some meaner, some in-betweeners.

Is there a shortcut to happiness that makes the universe beneficial to us all, regardless of our physical/mental condition(s)?

We are a nearly-fully connected species, the fractal spinoff of rudimentary central nervous systems, remodeling ourselves on bigger and bigger scales because we have no other workable model against which we positively compare ourselves within the known universe.

We talk about revolutionary and evolutionary changes in our socioeconomic activity on sub-sub-subcultural levels when the grand scheme hasn’t changed one iota: a species competing against itself because of a myopic view of the universe.

We realize, in rare glimpses, that we are part of the universe rather than living in an us-vs.-them scenario, “them” being you/self/God/universe/other.

Rather than bemoan, bedevil and punish people who hack computers/life/universe, let us look at the hacks from a species/universal perspective.

What am I gaining from those who circumvent my subcultural norms, the rules, both states and implied, that define me and the people happily living and perpetuating the subculture?

What am I losing, instead?

Can I turn the circumventers on their heads and reverse any damage they’ve caused?

How do I absorb the lessons they learned while they took/stole/[ab]used information from my open society?

Some people like clover honey and some people like sourwood honey.

How we get to the honey without disturbing the bees is the first step for any one of us to feed our wide variety of happy tastes and preferences.