A Touch of Class

In this rift, this gap, this space between decision tree branches, when one (me) finds the time to contemplate the past and its affected future (the effect may affect or feign affection), the meditative moment blinds.

Is blinded.

Opens the drapes and pulls the blinds.

‘Tis what is.

Here.

Now.

My father’s breaths approaching their last.

At some point.

Sunrises and sunsets counted in ones.

One day at a time.

One hour.

One minute.

One second.

More thanks to make but they’ll have to wait.

I have my goodbyes to take.

An evening to meditate.

Mein Vater zu danken und zu verabschieden, um die unbekannten Welten können wir Ruhe und Gelassenheit …

…if only he could have the strength to correct my grammar one more time!

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?

Flashback – “Sanctum, Sanatorium”

Sanctum, Sanatorium

If we are our friends then are you eclectic?
No. Instead, you take after Saint Brendan —
The Irish monk from county Kerry —
Who through his travels saw
That small towns in which you are born
Bear little resemblance to who you are.
The struggle to free ourselves from forced labor,
And face the pile of words we have become,
Has driven me to wonder how you’ll read
When your last breath drops petals on the floor.
For now, you sit in Charles’ saintly town,
And peer through family-tinted, bridal eyes;
You wonder when you’ll venture off the porch
And wander into your verbal sentence.
Apostles, martyrs, matrons, widows, all,
Have widened paths for nothing more than
Wanting peace for ever more. Your path —
Peat moss, bluets, partridge berry, and
Soothing streams of sun’s delight —
Rolls out before the one and only,
The only one who’s never lonely.
When we are old (we’ll never say),
Will we look back and ask ourselves,
“On which page did I look my best?”
Will we recall angelic faces
From the sanctuary of paragraphs
Written in the city of brotherly love?
Heaven only knows.

– 5 December 1997

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?

Links of the day

Digital Illustrations by Rob Shields

They Have Arrived!!! Get Them Today!

Underwater Aliens by Ed “POPS” Centeno

Obsession Photoshoot

What I Find Attractive

Time After Time..

And the Answer is….

Potato Patch – A Proposal

Lexis

LANA BLACK

40 bags in 40 days Challenge

Santorum Speech in Tacoma, WA – 2/13/12 (Occupy Protest excerpt)

“San Pedro (St. Peter’s Square)” – Vatican City – Manolo Garcia – Featured Photographer

199

Justified: Thick as Mud

Göran

Sunny Beadz on Sunny Country Radio – The Band Perry snags some SWAG

INN MEMORIES- The little blue book of my grandfather.

Dear ========

BOOK REVIEW: UN ANNO DOPO (The Year That Follows) by SCOTT LASSER

The Legend of the Hummingbirds

Hope My Prof Likes My Newspaper Ads!

步步惊心 Scarlet Heart

Spacepaintings 1 minute quand tu veux

USA road-trip part 2: what would you like to see? polls are open

A Fitting Sendoff

The Elaborate Spinning Machine Is His Head

April Taylor’s Music

Post Ideas

Moses Melkonian – Beirut Lights

maze a day

Daily Health Boost Feel Good Tribe

Develop your conscious awareness

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!

Translating the Music in my Head into Words

A quiet, cool morning after overnight showers.

A deer walked through the woods below our house.

Leaves oscillate in the breeze.

In reality, I was once a young boy.  In imagination, I am an old man.

Age, what is age?

Young and old describe divisions of time in a life.

Thinner and thinner slices get us closer to seeing states of energy changing instead of a person aging.

Today, I cannot see there is no empty space between me and the redbud leaf nearby.

A leaf that yellows in the cooling days of early autumn.

The image of the leaf presses against my optic nerve as if we are one.

I know that gravity fields and sunlight and gas molecules and radio waves fill a gap of a few feet between us but, then again, I don’t know.

I believe.

I accept the illusion of three-dimensional space because I have no alternative that speaks louder to me.

A young woman jogs on the road, passing our house.

Actions of my species seek an audience for my attention, asking for a tiny mention by me here.

Pebbles in a pond.

Prayers and meditation in a sacred space.

How, when and where do I reinforce old thoughts and reinvent new ones?

An example of myself to myself.

An example of our species to our species.

Saying the same things we’ll say again in the decades before and after this moment, ocean waves crashing on shore, shaping, shifting, scraping.

Picking and choosing from the imaginations of those who’ve thought before me.

Passing imaginative thoughts on to those who’ll think after me.

Paradigms, models and hypotheses taking root, growing, getting cut off, dying.

Facing the test of time.

Thump, ditty-thump, ditty-thumpthumpthump.

Which rhythms of the interaction of states of energy reverberate and amplify signals that live from moment to moment?

The age of the bubble of the universe that presses outward against unimaginable infinite space is nothing compared to the reality of the only life I’ll know.

No wonder I’m blind, not tuned to the greater rhythms of the universe that seem so slow, barely affecting my lifetime.

In the message that is billions of years old, I am a subatomic particle making an infinitesimally-small movement that pushes the message imperceptibly forward.

To understand that is all I need to know.

Direction is meaningless.

Movement is everything.

Thai Tea: Another Rainy Day in Paradise

Two months of freedom.

No asking if you want a refill of iced water,

Dessert,
Hotness level,

Or the check.

While wealthy financial aristocrats pretend to know we know what we want,

We look across a room.

Eyes the colour of dark chocolate,

Mahogany,

Deeper than teakwood*,

Ready to travel back home in 10 days.

Thailand.

Comfort zone.

Native language.

Familiar sights and sounds.

Pinned-up hair in hot weather.

A life as if treading water,

Waiting for something to happen while waiting at a restaurant,

Here in the Deep South,

Home of commanded materiel,

Defended missiles,

Parked research,

Fielded cotton

and sprouted, sprawling suburban scenery.

While Hurricane Hype pounds the East Coast with tropical rain showers,

A wisp of pop music, “Come on, Irene,” whispering in quiet magnitudes,

An aftershock of culture shock,

Modernday earthquake of an equivalent, equalised, civilised tribe,

Osmotically, hypnotically, chaotically pounces on thoughts

Focused in stages of labeled words.

One step closer.

One step farther away.

Further.

Gathering.

Trekking.

Folded hands meditating.

Bowing.

More cannot be said without saying more.

“More.”

 

[*What is a native Thai tree? Don’t write a poem without access to the Internet, or an old set of encyclopedias.]

The Energy Cost Value of a Thought

[For J.N.]

The greatest novel ever to exist rolled out a string of words five hundred pages long explaining the reasons, examining the history, exploring the physical aspects and ruminating on the thoughts why the protagonist lifted a finger five centimetres.

Not pointing.

Not moving.

Lifting.

The rise and fall of civilisations.

Romances lost.

Skyscrapers erected.

Hypotheses proposed, proved and disproved.

Approved and disposed.

Deposed and posed.

Approached and discarded.

Carded and boozed.

Booed and cheered.

One finger.

Skin, hair, muscles, bone.

Wrinkles.

Scars.

Sweat.

Symbiotic relationships hiding in cells.

 

Read by no one.

Burnt after written.

Fading from memory.

Nearly…

soon…

forgotten.

 

Greatness is a comparison.

 

We’ll never know the gap between the greater and the greatest.

 

We surmise by what is missing from the zeitgeist.

A smell on the air of personal achievement.

Someone else will approximate –

dividing, slicing, calculating derivations –

“close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, atomic bombs and drive-in movies.”

 

One ten-thousandth of a microgram away from perfection.

 

Five or six sigma, if necessary.

 

What is a boson compared to a universe?

What is a universe compared to a multiverse?

What is a single verse compared to a poem, sonnet, ballad or book?

 

Dimming, darkening, slowing down.

The pace of a snail, the speed of a bullet train, the gap between heartbeats.

The life of a star system.

Importance is relative.

Relatives are important.

 

In the second book, the finger sat back down.

The last volume in the trilogy hinted about the frequency at which the finger tapped.

 

The rhythm was the unsolved mystery.

 

The mystery of life’s rhythm, of course.

 

The next generation solved another clue: the change in frequency.

 

Generations would pass before the volume of tapping was distinguished from general, noisy background sounds.

 

Let a drop of oil fall into a cup of water and film the event at high speed, trillions of frames per second.

Then play it back at a speed of 10 frames per second.

While watching, imagine you’re seeing a thought pass through a synaptic gap, or the universe expanding and contracting like a soap bubble next to millions of other soap bubbles in the bathtub.

Or a baby’s cry hitting a mother’s eardrum.

A tear falling from a dying man.

The first raindrop ending a thousand-year old drought.

 

The greatest novel never read is lived every day.