Cover Your Assignments

Before I completely wrap this up, I'll leave a few more observations.

"Wall Street 2" does look like a remake of "Working Girl," doesn't it, main characters being about the same, all of them talking heads on a stick?

What does green really mean? Walking Lahinch or driving an electric car?

It doesn't matter who's in charge, somebody still has to do the work.

If you put on the uniform, you commit to the task the uniform requires, taking the consequences in stride.

It's not always fun to be alive but at least you have a choice of emotions to exercise. I choose to be glad to be alive, pains and aches a temporary diversion.

It takes a lot of support to keep a team undistracted while planning and implementing deep space missions.

Can you manage to maximise discount points in equipment/support purchases and make sure projects complete within narrow constraints without stirring a feather or making your presence felt to those who don't want to know you're there for them?

Can you toot your horn by not making a sound?

Where are negotiations best made - the golf course or the office putting green?

How do you define species preservation - the LHC, the motorway network, crop fertilisation, mass inoculation, or mandatory education?

I focus on clearing a path whereby a future version of ourselves finds many ways to make living spaces across the universe as we know it, learning to "share the road" (appropriate to the situation, of course).

Won't you join me?

Note the leadership changes in places like Brasil, North Korea and the United States. What does the unrest in Ecuador and the EU tell us? Who owns the gold controls seed production, water rights and, thus, food prices.

Look to the future with gladness and a smile on your face. The wealth of difference will astound your friends and family.

Whose Sari Now?

Orange camo outfit on the lower deck and orange sari on the upper.

Native American dress in the streets and dancing on the field.

Never give up. Never surrender.

Some days the defenders win, offensive units not fully united as one.

How much Moore can you catch? How many groups can you thank in one invocation? When the name Reveiz is a better tackler than a kicker (has a Reveiz missed five in a row of anything?), then you Poole your resources, rest your aching muscles, remember you're an academic student as well as an athlete and represent yourself well.

After watching the new faces of the marching band, I rest assured that our planet's future rests comfortably in the hands of the next generation, as competent, inexperienced and young as it is.

We old fogeys had our moment to shine. Our days are tarnished, covered with the dents and dings of protecting ourselves from ourselves. Let us step aside and serve as protective guides.

We will not live forever. Our vanity, our attempts at pretending to extend our youth, what do they accomplish? Can we celebrate the wisdom and looks of old age while sharing the spotlight with the younger we're training to take over the world while they grow old, too?

I am not perfect. I am the example of myself to myself who looks down upon those who use plastic surgery and other superficial tricks to make themselves look younger than they are.

I am not wise. I simply have a bunch of experiences and knowledge at my discretion to reference when I don't understand what I seem to perceive.

While moving aside to help discover the forms/shapes we'll need to take to discover new worlds, I pass the last pages of the Book of the Future [of this world] to those who want to discover it for themselves.

I cannot be sensitive to the needs, wants, desires and demands of seven billion people while crafting a new type of "people" who will populate the solar system and galaxy in the trillions (using 3D printers and beams of energy to replicate quickly, for example (sound familiar?)).

The resources of the local environment are all we have. Wisely learn what they are and you'll use them wisely.

My "children" will make planetary conquests* look like collecting a bag of marbles.

Time to close this blog and open a new window on unfamiliar territory.

= = =
* not a carefully thought-out word. Is there any way to make benign contact with the unknown? Guess we're going to find out!

Felt Pads, Wires, and Fjords of the Lies

What do Wynton Marsalis and Chet Atkins have in common?  What about the new menu at Beauregard's and the regard for New Woman political candidates?

Or the movies "God Forgives, I Don't," "Bullets, Blood and a Fistful," and "The Point Men"; or the shows "Glee" and "The Choir: Unsung Town"?

Who do you like better: Eileen Ivers or Natalie MacMaster?  Claire Lynch or Rhonda Vincent?

Spiders slowly turn our cathedral-ceilinged living room into a crisscrossed, dustcollecting magical piano or harp in the sky.

Should you feed woodpeckers by letting mud-daubing wasps nest on the side of your house?

To be alive in this time (when I, as I am, can be alive in no other) is a question I cannot answer.

Are leaders leaders because of the luck of their birthday?  Are birthdays real?

Do people have a real sense of humour or do they only laugh the way they're socially-programmed to react?

Finding new ways to insightfully poke fun at what we adults call progress in order to make children think for themselves what progress will be called when they're grown up is more difficult than my trainers told me they'd be.

Amazingly we have, for the most part, the ability to take our time and consider the repercussions of our actions and the locaglobal effect on the future of this moment but we rarely do.  We enjoy being ourselves too much in the moment to consider others in moments we may or may not spend with them.

I ought to know.  I cheer for the hare more often than for the tortoise.

Therefore, let us consider the species as a momentary occurrence.

We will not live as long as a star.  We can harvest starpower but not the star's power.

What am I doing today for which I want to remember myself tomorrow?

What is happening in this moment that does not include an identity known as me to which I gladly contribute anonymously?

Can the United States become a national multiparty political system?  Can we have a permanent Comedy Party headed by the likes of the Paulsens/Colberts of the humour scene, a permanent Independent Party headed by the Palins of the nontraditional scene, and the usual extreme right/left parties trying to splinter the middle class - every one of them pulling a significant number of votes during locanational elections?

If we can't be nonpartisan, can we be a real plurality, requiring real cooperation to accomplish national goals?

Oh, wait, in this parallel universe blog, nations and corporations do not exist, being merely labels for temporary states of existence.

Be concerned that you can poke fun at your former rival/enemy without repercussion because it means the new rival/enemy taking the old one's place may be worse, less easy to convince, more willing to act unilaterally and/or more subtle in its dominance/manipulation of you.

This is such a small planet, a tiny fraction of the active universe.  To rule it was a goal for our species the previous xxxx thousand years and now that it's no longer a limiting factor, ruling it feels like being a big fish in a small pond.

Even so, we live nowhere else (yet).  However, I [(have thought/acted)(will think/act)] as if we already populate a wider expanse in our galaxy than one or two rocks stuck circulating around a star.

I have pointed my microtelescope at this planet for too many months now.  Time to look back out at the stars and ponder a future greater than what we've lived so far.

Does string theory have a place in a future outside the spider webs of my house?  Hmm...

Sassafras and Deer Heads

In what way is your body a temple?  Do your tattoos tell a whole story?

A group of scientifically-minded friends of mine gave up on their antigravity machine.  Instead, they are taking recent data collected from a very expensive instrument to attempt to build an antimass machine.

They had successfully gotten their antigravity machine to work but it kept pushing away Earth and attracting the Moon, messing with tides and centripetal storm forces, rather than allowing my friends to float freely wherever they wished to go.

To know I do not exist is not an easy task to maintain, pretending as I do to participate in the mass hypnosis we call our culture of subcultures.  However, I cannot get to where being nonexistent is without giving up the fun of the hypnosis.

In any case, 'tis fun to have fun with the truth in plain view of those who do not know the truth and wouldn't know how to handle the truth so let them keep pretending and I'll play along 'cause I'm well-trained and easy to get along with in these conditions.

Meanwhile, the seduction of our youth in the game of who gets to claim the greatest influence of them moves forward.

Cycles within cycles neverending.

Imagine, for the sake of hypothesis, an extraterrestrial existence (EE) that encounters Earth.  The EE doesn't need our resources, finds our definition of intelligence/enlightenment hardly worth considering any different than the survival techniques developed by the other states of energy we call forms of life and thus puts us down as just another planetary example of how the universe swirls up little eddies of different but uninteresting quanta.

Perhaps you've already imagined or read of others' imaginations to that effect.

Point being we are not the center of our known universe, let alone the center of the sum total of existence of the states of energy as we know them now.

So far this morning, a chipmunk and granddaddy longlegs have darted under my chair and a hummingbird has buzzed my ears, the nearby background filled with trees, insects and chirping birds.  No more sound of private aeroplanes in the sky - a lost sound of independence.

If TV channels give way to Internet apps, what becomes of independent thinkers who want no gated communities of the thought process blocking their meandering wonderment?

And no, capitalism does not cause poverty.  The ways people quench their hunger vary considerably.  Personalities take up space comfortably in a large range of sizes.  Some are satisfied with a piece of bread and some are not satisfied with a whole planet of wheat fields and bakeries.

Labels are easy to apply and not so easy to remove.  Do not confuse capitalism and communism as distinct features of how we live.  We barter our way through life - always have and always will.  How we barter is a matter of changing tastes and survival techniques.  Our skill sets seem to change but don't - we use our bodies and the stuff around us to transform ourselves constantly.

Do you force, coerce and/or encourage those around you to increase their activity, whether "physical" or "mental," in order to increase the means of barter for you and those who you consider your personal friends, colleagues, associates and family?  How do you define the increase?: "improved productivity," "pleasing God in more ways everyday," "serving the people more efficiently," "making me richer in your honour"?

How you wish to present the emperor's new clothes to others is up to you but always, always, always be aware that not everyone is fooled.

These are ancient times.  We still live like barbarians, slaughtering each other to get ahead, cutting off deer heads to claim superiourity, and boiling sassafras roots to cure ills we know little about.

Never assume this is the age to end all ages.  Tens of hundreds of thousands of years will we continue to carve niches to call our own.

As we move into the moment when we discover we are not the center of the universe, let us pause to consider the points of view of extraterrestrial existence that knows us and the EE that doesn't.  When we successfully see those views (and we never completely will, any more than we completely know another person), we'll see ourselves in a brighter light, too.

Is our species prepared to realign its goals to show we are a totally cooperative, non self-centered species rather than a warring, cannibalistic species?

Words are meaningless, ultimately.  Thoughts are fleeting fantasies with no connection to reality.

Are you ready to have everything you know - all the plants, animals, buildings, social networks and history - change in what will feel like an instant but actually taken a longer time than you'll comparatively remember?

I do not exist.  My name and face have no place, being only a placeholder, a mirage, an image representing states of energy.

I do not own the world but this world is mine to give away or save as I please.  I choose to save the world because, although I find so much that is wrong with the way we treat one another and the other forms of life on this planet, there is so much more that is right about us and the way states of energy like us have found to exist.

How will you react when you find we are not alone?  Will you form a defensive posture?  Will you feel guilty?  Will you welcome all the unknowns, including the benign "virus" that could reconfigure all of life as we know it?  Would you accept that "alien" states of energy have flowed through us since the beginning of time, that there was never a moment we were not all part of the same universe-within-a-universe-outside-a-universe-within-...?

And if thinking was not part of what we'll do when we encounter that which we did not consciously know existed before?

What if we find our daily lives change very little by new information?  Will we feel lesser or greater, better or worse, because we aren't the only things wiggling about in space?

We want the familiar.  We want to interact the way we've been taught to interact through our socially-acceptable upbringing (according to local subcultural standards, of course), even if our interaction is considered counter- or antisocial.

These words do not exist and you might be able to see that it is so/not so.

States of energy influencing other states of energy, ad infinitum, with no end in sight.

We want levels of influence to keep increasing in order to provide our children bigger goals than the ones we accomplished in our finite lives.

What if the levels our children seek are so outside our realm of understanding we'll never appreciate what they're trying to accomplish while we're alive?

They already are.

Sir, you only gave us twenty-seven dollars.

Restocking my shelves with old stock from my childhood library (transferring books from my parents' house to my house, in other words), exposing my eyes to words and images I may or may not want to see again, due to the knowledge of their pebble-in-the-pond effect stirring up settled matters.

Eighty-one portable thought sets rambling on subjective objectives from military to business to religious to geographical to Scouting.

Details in another place and time?

Thanks to Angie and other smiling faces like a Turkish server in Colonial Heights. Did I mention Neel or Stan?

The silence speaks voluminous yawnings. Should I listen or snooze?

Patience, Rick. Let ignorance and superstition fade without offering resistance or excuses for the defensive supportive posture. I am one in a long line of deliverers of a partial message. I don't know the message I string along to those who will also attempt to decipher the indecipherable.

Fall, Fall, Fall

Talked with friends at the U-Save pharmacy yesterday while medication information was computerised.

Learned that end-stage lung cancer does not end a mother's love of life and concern for her children.

Heard that in times past you could just tell the local Ford dealer you were ready to take delivery of whatever the latest model is that's equivalent to the last one you bought; they'd drive the new car to your house and take a check, no stack of paperwork or six-month waiting list for factory order required.

Local "boys," long since retired, sitting on a bench in the town square, remembered my 93-year young mother in-law teaching them a sixth grade subject in 1954. They were curious as to her dietary secret (no alcohol, no tobacco, small meals, no heavy stress on the musculoskeletal system, weekly bridge club, active religious life (multiple daily readings of familiar religious text, lots of praying and no worries)).

Times change. The perspective of better or worse belongs to those who think perspectively.

The faces of small towns change, often imperceptibly. Relatively quick changes cause consternation when seen as incomprehensible.

I can't go back to another time, not only because it's impossible but also because it never existed the way I imagined it did. All I want are the happy conveniences that we shared, modernised, of course.

We're locavores because we eat food off this planet, nourished for the most part by our local star.

I have the highest expectations for our youngest generation because they're lucky enough to live in the best of times and the worst of times during their formative years (or close thereafter).

How many of you have a 100, 500, or 1000 year plan? I'm telling you it's about time you did. Then you'd see that a 10,000 or 100,000 year plan is not that impossible to imagine setting up and implementing.

Landfills are gold mines, my friends. Nuclear waste is unharvested energy. Solar flares are reset buttons. Getting a living idea of us away from this solar system (and surviving) will take all of our coordinated efforts. Hindsight is time wasted regretting lost opportunities.

Prove to me you see the bigger picture, no matter who you are, and I'll support you. Otherwise, you're a pawn willing to be used in the game of life played by others looking for short-term profits taken at your expense. Either way, all of us equally important and taken into account.

Life doesn't change but your perspective can.

A Disaster Full Of Headlines

Formulaic. That's what she wanted me to believe she saw in the patterns outside the portal.

For weeks we'd argue about the meaning of one word, all the while creat8ng log entries of our thoughts.

Curry. Celticism. One well-discussed word per maintenance cycle.

We are the new breed, skinless yet skinned.

Our reports will reach you 6000 years from now. Will you know what our communication method, our language, intended?

Probably not. Give yourself another 6000 years to figure out.

We did. We will. We're the relay runners for a team you and we remember nothing about.

Designed Destiny Destination

Cicadas replaced by crickets, katydids and grasshoppers in the cool-but-warm, warm-but-cool August night. Never more than a few feet from a spider.

Many I have not thanked in passing or remembered when they passed from this social life.

The ancient ways are still with us in our soon-to-be old-fashioned modern world.

Gone are Sean O'Casey and Marilyn Monroe. Icons and inspirations. Enigmas.

We call out the name of Great Spirits in every culture.

To them in their memelike states do I write this blog, at peace with my lack of knowledge, my ignorance, that which makes me incomplete. Not knowing is all I have seen.

Others prove their manhood through action. My manhood is here in these simple humble words. I sacrifice displays of testosterone-tempered headbutting for better understanding all states of energy equally.

I am the hermit in the woods connected to those who still see forest spirits and those who only see what scientific inquiry reveals rationally.

I doubt everything, questioning. I accept everything without question.

I exist until I die. I will never not be.

How many entertainers from pre-Vaudeville days can you name? What was the most popular sport before baseball/cricket/futbol became the national pastime?

Can you name who invented the club or sewing needle?

I am an old man, these words all I have left to give.

All that I see in this moment I also see has disappeared 1000 years from now.

Everything will be gone but all is not lost.

Newly-discovered pulsars and ocean-launched rocketships. Asteroid dust and stolen spacesuits. Stutz Bearcats and raccoon coats. Terrestrial orchids and ATV trails.

Condensing our lives like bidirectional lines connected to a DSLAM attached to the Internet. All our dermal receptors, rods and cones, cochlear cilia, tastebuds, synapses and the rest of what makes us Skin and Bones.

Are you listening? Can you smell the wind?

Who will become wealthy from developing the de facto litmus test that measures gradients from deadly meth to a good "safe" batch?

While times get tougher, the rough-and-tumble create new markets wherever possible. Steinbeck and Okies become popular again. Hobo packs become de rigueur.

And always the question: when is the time to topple the old regime that no longer serves the majority, the "people"? Often only after the common soldiery and palace guards no longer get nutrition from their government-issued I.O.U.s. and the rich find a new revenue stream in funding a sporty overthrow. Decommission in troves without ample salary compensation and watch debrainwashing explode.

So much for not getting involved. My programmers say some new outputs require my immediate analysis. IS there a regime about ready to implode?

Until next time, my little chickadees!

A Running Bucket

Despite not knowing the value of validity, the thought experiment persists: would I be surprised to know no one reads this blog because I really don't exist?

The tall, thin stalks around me are not tree rings. The absence of direct sunlight in the middle of the day is not clouds. Labels exist, representing nothing.

What, then, do I represent?

Small thoughts. Medium-sized thoughts. Large thoughts. The watery reflection of sunlight dancing on the underside of a fig leaf. Are they not all the same?

States of energy.

Yet pain feels real. Healing takes time.

I cannot absent self from self. There is no way for this intersection of states of energy to exist outside the moment.

To reorganise the unstructured...to see that seeing creates the illusory importance of seeing...

The earthworm is as destructive a force in reducing ecosystem diversity as we are, no more aware of its unintended consequences eating dirt than I am writing these words.

To speak the language of the stars, one loses all sense of self, no longer tied to translating the indecipherable into a species' limited means of communicating.

States of energy.

When we learn more, when we create a space traveler which is us (a thinker) and yet not us (different materialistic composition), we have accomplished more than we'll ever know.

The space traveler will create its own missions, duties, and sense of destiny, and we'll hope but never know if any likeness/memory of us goes along with it to encounter that which we've dreamed of from our prehistoric days of seeking - permanent fertile land (for it, in that case, not for us).

What of us? We'll still find ways to travel in our current forms, tearing down and rebuilding civilisations for the sake of variety (as the cast of characters constantly changes). Over long stretches of time, the ecosphere will absorb our changes, changing us as we keep changing it.

Every moment is a point of no return, the tipping point from which we roll over into the next moment.

Time to join my feline friends in a nonpurposeful, unscheduled catnap and dream of what our new form will be like when we're no longer us in a moment I may not live to see. A beam of invisible light is as much a form as a body...zzzzz...

We Are Living In A Satirical World

Tree bark... mobo.  Redbud pods.  4-40 screws.  Glue sticks.  Tea bags.  RCA plugs.  Sunlight.  Horizontal blinds.  Drop cords.  Nails.  Picture frames.  Wall studs.  Culverts.  River rocks.  Arm hair.  Awnings.  Slogans.  Storage.  Model rockets.  Velcro wallets.

Talking through my fingertips.  Listening to the wind blow through the woods.  Walked through the neighbourhood. Smelled fresh-cut pine boards in unfinished house and dead pine limbs piled in the ditch.  Late summer.  Roadkill squirrel on the road surrounded by flies.

Misplaced modifiers echoing humour of the dry variety.

We participate in our illogical, unexplainable social gatherings, unaware of no purpose whatsoever.

The Internet is the novel that never ends.  [Who said that already?]

On whom do you depend to tell you how to best spend your disposable income?

To whom do you turn to provide you guidance in areas of life that are fuzzy and make no sense?

These are not my words.  I didn't invent them or reinvent them.  I merely show my well-trained youth in how I put these words together, training I received in both formal and informal settings.

And yet I think I continue my education, even though I, like everyone else, it appears, am, barring major damage to my body/psyche, spending my life reaffirming the personality that was formed by the time I was five.

Do I need confirmation that my image of self is surprisingly reflected somewhere in the anonymous masses?  Is it not obvious that I am a member of my species?

Blow, wind, blow.  Feel the hot air virtually pouring onto this electronic paper.

It doesn't matter who I am.  It matters.  What is "it"?  It is us, you, we, them, her, him, me.

Our species will spin around itself in subcultural swirls in time immemorial.  We'll say the same things over and over, climbing over the pile of the bodies of the subcultures we overcame that overcame our subcultures that we'll overcome that will overcome our subcultures again and again.

I can spend my moments here satirising those subcultures. Or...

I can spend my moments everywhere making sure we focus enough of our species' resources to open up channels to the stars upon which waves of our mixed subcultures flow outward.

I'm not a technical wizard.  I am not a programming genius.  Otherwise, I'd gather with friends in the international community and help build our own launchpads and liveable space habitats, knowing some of us would end up like Bruce Dern and the crew in "Silent Running," at odds with one another over the primary mission, thus requiring multiple launches to ensure one or more crews succeeded in exiting this solar system.

Where would we go?  In some ways, it wouldn't matter, as long as we ventured outward, serving as extraterrestrial guinea pigs and shining beacons for our species.

Instead of...

Instead of, like, for sure, spending our time, you know, on, like, more stuff we can buy with, like, our, you know, our, uh... disposable income.

Eventually we'll find a viable extrasolar landing spot ("invading species" ethics aside), having reinvented ourselves many times over on the way there.

Meanwhile, I'm mired in the leftover detritus of our disposable stuff, wondering why I'm here, caught in a satire of a satire of the satirical world I imagined at age five.  If the joke's on me, who's laughing?

Being happy and melancholy is my lot in life, joyously so.  Writing is my hobby, given to me by my ancestors.  Observing the universe, the only way I know how/where to live, is my comic relief.

If anyone happens to come upon this blog and reads it, don't take what I say seriously.  I'm uncomfortable with where certain parts of our species are headed and thus use this blog to subvert my discomfort through the use of parody.  It is what I do with who I am.  I mean no harm.  I plan no revolution.  You, not I, decide how you want to live your lives.

Remember, history books record massive changes in our species' actions, not the regular, normal activities we create to reproduce and preserve our species and the ecosystems in which we live our daily lives.  Regular folks like me don't want to foment revolutions - we just want to find a relatively easy place to settle down and take care of family, our names and faces unknown to friendly nameless and faceless people on the other side of the planet.  Peace is about sharing, war is about taking away.

Be wary of people who seek the limelight.  On the flip side, idle idol worship is even an odd game to play.

Not everything has to make sense.  Can we teach our children to live successful lives every day without fostering a heavy belief in heroes/heroines?

Another day full of questions.  I'm glad I write this to myself in the belief I'm the only one who reads this.  I can be me, transparent and free.

Time to step away from this technological portal and watch the world silently, another day of my life spent doing nothing much important, a life no more or less important in the grand scheme of things.

You can figure out for yourselves how to live together with your neighbours and family.  It's not easy.  It's not hard.  It just is.

Copper Kettle

Does anyone call an officer of the law a "copper" anymore? What does it take to create your own institute of higher learning and give yourself postsecondary degrees, freely, of course? In other words, how do we break the out-of-proportion business of higher education? By not conforming to historical precedents that confer greatness on CVs stuffed with formal educational accomplishments. Either you are or are not capable of performing roles you take on or are assigned to you. If you are not, you take the initiative to learn new skills. Academic gatekeepers become contractual consultants like everybody else. JIT OJT keeps us primed, plum, happy and optimally functional. Complexity breeds exclusivity breeds jealous happily-ignorant but desperately-starving barbarians putting ever-increasing pressure on the dammed/jammed gates. Seams weaken and fail, contorting, twisting, falling. BURST! BUSTED! And then...? We start all over again.

Minimal Energy In The Visible Light Range

So, while our forces are gathering, with volunteers appearing out of nowhere - poor, broke, hungry, disillusioned, no longer affiliating with one political party or another, desiring no government support whatsoever - tactical attacks are tacked on wall plans.

All levels have been infiltrated - that much has been told to both enemy and friend.

Defensive and offensive systems have been tested repeatedly, clearly delineating the incumbent leaders' expected responses when the crises are initiated and chaos unfolds.

More volunteers will step forward when the mass moves.

No one is safe, including me who did not exist in the first place.

We are game pieces played by faceless patrons.

The ancient tribal leaders met last night and decided now is the time to put the next phase into action.


Worried looks will show on crowded streets.  Uncertainty will rule the airwaves.

The forward wave will move in like invisible ninjas carrying out orders, unwritten in thoughts and thus unable to be drawn out through coercion, when some will be unavoidably captured, tortured and killed.

There is no escape from planet Earth while the interplanetary coalition takes temporary control.

Don't call it war or revolution.  Call it transition.

Either you are a cooperative member of the family or you're an unnecessary obstacle to progress.  Either you contribute your all to family or you are selfish waste of valuable resources.

Social media participation has given us the indisputable evidence of how you live your lives, every last one of you.

Those who gave up trusted public leadership positions to seek personal gain, those who give/take kickbacks, and those who show corrupt tendencies of any kind have been tagged and will be accounted for in the second wave.

Only a few will be selected to explore.  The rest will be left to fight over diminishing resources, hoping their family lines survive the widely varying environmental conditions that will take over.

Why do we recruit the hungry?  Because they're willing to do for the cause what they would never ask of themselves.  They will go to great lengths to receive the tiniest reward for their efforts to keep up their self-respect.  Many will achieve more than their combined states of energy imply is possible.

How far are you willing to go to break the imaginary chains that bind you?  Would you sacrifice your family for the sake of the species?

These are the types of situations and questions we will soon face.  We live in the moment and moments like these make or break whole generations.

I'm just this guy, a part-time writer, who smells the air whenever he gets out of bed.  I'm not the leader you're looking for.  The leaders are somewhere you are not looking, with resources available to them to make possible the dreamed-up scenarios I've detailed above, based on their input and observations of their test plans in action.  During their trial runs, I've learned to stay out of their way when they get angry, which occurred more frequently as the deadline for this first wave approached.

It's up to you to read this as fantasy or reality.  It's up to you to see if that look of familiarity passing across the faces of two strangers in a store is actually a signal between members of a local chapter of the interplanetary planning commission.  It's up to you to decide if you accept an invitation to join a group you never heard of, sometimes disguised as an opportunity to taste a free morsel at your grocer's market or a friendly driver letting you pull out of a side street ahead of him/her.

After all, what is family?  Who do you trust in a city full of people when the power goes out at night?  Open your door to someone you've never met - it could mean the difference between life and death when the first wave is over and the second wave is fully under way.

As the Year of the Woman winds down and we near the start of the Year of the Interplanetary Citizen, you will be held to account for your previous actions.  The youngest generation will be given the authority to decide what to do with you.

Are you ready to be treated like just another free life in a video game, easily expendable and replaced by another?  Would you think that being unfriended means being completely eliminated and recycled to get the precious water you carry in you?

Be prepared.  I am.  Are you?