Waiting For A Phone Call

While waiting to hear back from Euro Tech about getting my 325i serviced due to a crunching sound I can't identify, I ponder the universe and movies like "Reuben, Reuben," "Her Alibi," "Silent Movie," "Monks: The Transatlantic Flashback," and "Airplane!".

Are you Accidental, Occidental, Oriental or Confidential?

My wife and I like to listen to books on tape/CD during long automobile-based trips.  Lately, we listened to the 12-disc audio set of "A Tale of Two Cities," a sad but hopeful, triumphant but tragic story of regular lives caught in unusual times.

The narrator's voice, properly English, reminded me of the voice behind "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

In some ways, the stories are all the same: X vs. Y, taking Z into account.

Masks stacked up ready for charades.

I read war books as a child in order to study how to prevent them as an adult.

I read business philosophy books in order to study how unphilosophical we really are.

And always in the background, the steady flow of life.

I do not own the world.  The universe is but a parlor game of illusions.

These words do not exist, coming as they do out of electronic bits.

All is all.  And yet all is not as it appears.

People want a narrative, unevenly paced, exciting, tense, loving, romantic, deeply layered yet easy to understand, never sure about the ending but assured the ending indeed will occur assuredly.

Tom Swiftian in adverbial niceties.

Can a blog tell you what you cannot see in a blog?

Can the truth tell lies?

My only goal, despite appearances, is to set one word down after another to give the people what they want in batches of subcultural narratives tied into one big story about how we'll live to see another day in this forum or another form, for 'im or 'er.

Lift the blinders, unloose the leashes, release the chains, restore sanity where intolerable insanity has no place and get life as we know it moving off this planet toward the endless horizon of space in which our new forms of life will prosper in our stead.

We'll be like Sydney Carton and the young woman standing at the guillotine, giving our lives for others who will remember us in their own way.  Hopefully, our lives will end less violently but our lives will end all the same, making a little bit of room for the next lives here and yet to be.

Thus one generation thinks it lives for itself while living for all following generations, instead.

We live in this moment together, seven billion personal reasons to call this moment one's own.  Can we not see we live for one purpose only?: to ensure the states of energy we call ourselves find similarity in moments yet to be?

The religions of the world belong to all of us, whether we belong to them or not.  Our hobbies, our jobs, our businesses, our governments - all of them enhance our lives.

It is time to find out what the Book of the Future says we'll be doing in a few years hence.  Time to show you/me/us that trends trend up and trends trend down, with new trends trading places with old trends and old trends mixing with older trends to become new old-fashioned out-of-fashion fashionable trendlines.

Seven billion people are all members of the world government.  Globalisation is what our species has always been about.  Sure, we'd like superheroes to come flying in to save us from the less tolerable members of our species nearby but we've got ourselves to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

Use the power of the majority to protect the beliefs of the minorities because we're all part of one minority or another.

Keep laughing 'cause none of us get out of here alive.

Beans and Cole Slaw

Dry autumn day, chickadees looking for seeds or water where none exist.

I imagine I am one of seven billion, do I not? I have no proof otherwise, do I?

I sit here, literally surrounded by wood - in living trees, house siding, books and furniture.

The universe is not only about me.

With hundreds of languages available to me, I am running out of word combinations to make myself feel unique.

Why is the universe not about me? Because it will exist after this "I" with which I am familiar no longer exists.

What of me, this "I"?

Do I know what I think I know? I will only ever think so.

How can I take seriously what I know is what it is without qualification?

The birds are here because it is the time of day they choose to be here. Perhaps I should remove the empty bird feeders and make the birds spend their energy looking at actual food sources rather than dried-up hulls of thistle/nyger seed and dry bird baths.

No matter. They will leave soon as our planet rotates into and out of the light of our star.

I am unimportant. I have no talents or gifts to give my fellow species. My melancholy will end when I will be no more, my bonded energies free at last.

I am tired of spending every morning finding an excuse to be alive. Time has not healed the wounds of natural loss, only twisted them into creative output in outlets like this blog.

I already know the big picture. I know I will not pretend to aspire to dreams in my thoughts of taking trips around the moon in a travel cruiser. I am not enough of a megalomaniac-type to force/bend the world of my species to my will.

I am a simple man, with simple needs and an idle brain, happy to let others carry on, to bother with the pretense there is more here than meets the interaction of states of energy.

I am an amateur humourist reflecting the zeitgeist in inexact terms.

I have found no way out of the moment. History books, war books, fiction or nonfiction, are still books. Reality does not go away regardless of the promise of technology to get us away from it all.

In other words, time to get away from technology and enjoy the real world again. Feel dirt under my feet. See unusual lichen patterns. Listen to the crunch of the forest floor.

Pardon my silence. I want selfish time to myself - stop pretending that I have some important place in new social media - and breathe the dust and pollen of fall air.

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.

Moore's Law of More Notes to Self

I am transparent so I can write here and pretend no one but I/me/myself will read these words.

Network analysts interpret bandwidth variations.

I have crushed cockroaches that fell down the back of my work coveralls while I climbed down a sewer chimney.

I have never seen a king coronated.

Do you talk to yourself in relatively rarely-used conversational tools like mathematics or computer code?

Sometimes I do, subjecting my personality to bizarre subjugation.

Then I forget the rules of writing in this language (IF I ever knew them in the first place).

I maintain the mask of sanity for your sake. In reality, I have no rational bounds that define me as separate from you.

In my thoughts there are no rules, no common agreed-upon conditions that allow stored distinctions to recall later on.

There are no exceptions that create external versus internal politics.

Although species do not exist concretely, I'll play along with others to get the illusion known as us and our required ecosystem partners extended beyond the solar system.

The crucial discoveries made while developing entities like us that will represent us remotely tell me we will not exist much longer in serial recursive reiteration.

Autonomy = ...?

I keep coming back to the thought of "letting go" - let the unknown be the unknown.

This is my world on which I juggle jigsaw puzzle pieces as delicately as an enthusiastic ruffian like me can.

I want to but can't ignore the concepts of intelligence and emotion.

As many Europeans, Africans and native Americans desired the start of an autonomous political entity on this continent as didn't. The rest had no interest either way.

Mlodinow and Hawking share space on a book title. Is theoretical physics dead? Popular science books live in the marketplace of Ikeas. Is M really a reference to the head of a spy network?

Can we stop being a murderous species? Can we stop distracted vehicle operators from killing others? Can we eliminate the causes of diseases we know about without creating treatment-resistant causes we can't eliminate?

Can a solar system society create a living wage (above poverty) for all interplanetary citizens?

Hope and change for all seven billion of us - I was used to that idea the day I was born. Fear of the fear of the unknown keeps me from shedding my last transparent protective shell to show you how easy it is for us to get along.

Should I share with you the secret(s) others think you aren't ready to see as a whole species at the same time?

Chaos and misinterpretation happen all the time. Why worry that a few basic facts will make the situation any more or less confusing?

Glad I had this time to myself to let out some steam, get some weight off my shoulders, etc.

Sure, the truth will set you free but it also will...nope, my lips are sealed. I promised ones in power and ones who want to be in positions of power to keep quiet a little longer.

If you knew how much of what you were led to see as drastically different was really all the same, would you? Yes, you would. Yes, you can.

I hope you will. The window of opportunity is small but we can all squeeze through.

Atlas may have shrugged but I'm willing to hold the windowpane up as long as necessary for those who know what the future already is.

Ignore the labels. Use humour as a shield against, and eraser wiping out, the intolerances of the perceived past/present.

Expect us to take two steps forward and one step into a roundabout.

We are Devo, EVDO

Sitting next to Shannon, her husband Mike, and their son the other day, listening to the conversations wrapped around the collection of names, physical features and hometowns of players far below us on fancy artificial turf, I remembered the stats that counted the numbers, physical features and home areas of those involved in the events we call here the American Revolution.

I remembered the complaints/protests/strikes of those opposed to mechanisation during the long early years of the Industrial Revolution.

I saw the current day as if I was looking back 100 years later, all the small details available - in the form of archived emails, blogs, websites, texts, videos, games and ebooks - to historians wanting to tell contemporaries what we thought we knew we were doing in the moment we didn't know we were participating in historically.

Does anyone have a working 8-inch floppy disk drive or audiotape player so we can research the obscure research of the mid- to late-century that started the Electronic Revolution?

And then I woke up from the dream that was kicked off by the hypnotic primate training of my species.

I was no longer me in that brief respite/repose.

Reality is only what I focus upon. Hocus pocus.

Back to what I keep telling myself I was told to go back to.

It is not my place to sit here and tell you what we'll be remembered for in the next century. Prepositions and propositions are yours to arrange how you wish.

I'm plugged in but disconnected. Backing away from the houses and trees for personal edification. Stuck to paperbacks despite this ebook reader's convenience.

In the transition...from/where/to you'll never know for sure. It's a place from/to which I've gotta go on my own.

The fact is sometimes I feel I've still got something to prove to myself despite knowledge to the contrary. Ain't no big thang.

The Owl and the Hummingbird

How many dozens of automobile manufacturers directly fed innovations into the few surviving manufacturers' vehicles of today? How many rocket designers/manufacturers will provide one or two innovations for the space transportation systems of next century?

How many people do you think are being exploited while they think they're in better conditions than their family/peers?

We compare, are compared and justify our comparisons.

Owls call out in the woods this morning, reminiscent of tribal warriors signalling one another on the warpath.

Is your business so profitable you can pay someone to stand and open doors for incoming/outgoing customers? How many people can/want to earn a living wage engaged in the activity of being the "face" of your company?

Does your stomach ever say "Hello!" to you?

Give the people the "secret" information they suspect exists and they probably won't bother asking about levels of information they know nothing about. Always pretend the onion has more layers than any one person has access to.

States of energy. Can you deprogram/desensitise/untrain yourself to stop seeing layers and boundaries? Or are you so well conditioned that you'd rather seek the comfort of boxes and labels?

We have programs for both the former and latter cases. We'll guide you in the direction that best suits your temperament, some with Tommy gun in hand and some with pacifist tendencies in thoughts.

Elegant linguist or Liverpool lisper, we speak your language.

Create a world of familiarity and most remain transfixed, readily volunteering to consume Muzak and mushy baby food in order to preserve a sense of personal integrity, dignity and consistent connections to ancestors/ancestry.

The sun never rises, appearances to the contrary.

Hard to say retail therapy is not the best substitute for subsistence farming, is it?

The magic of hypnosis is not magic at all. Follow the bouncing ball because it's the only interesting object moving in your viewing range. Even the dyslexic blind can get scholarships to attend university tuition-free.

Do hummingbirds know that owls exist, praying mantises a more probable threat?

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...

Washing The Car

Today is the first day of the rest of my life in which I started off saying that I don't know anything. Best to agree that ignorance is bliss rather than go along with any of the invariable theories of life that have no basis in reality. Better to see that NASCAR is stuck with old France-approved marketing methods than hope for a radically improved racing product. Time to drown my insight in fermentation and forget all I thought I knew. What I know would kill most of us and I want to live a little while longer blissfully unaware of the facts again. In other words, I want my childhood pre-disillusionment back.

. .

One of those days when silence (indicative of a lack of action (perhaps even peace)) is sufficient.

[The/An] Experiment

When you raise science to the level of religion, the predictions/projections become faith-based desires leading to people seeking self-esteem through belief that science has confirmed their active part in creating the future, even if only in their thoughts and prayers, regardless of whether the expected future is dire or great. After all, randomnss* IS God's will, is it not? In other words, we do not practice religions in which we don't believe. We act on what we believe, not on what we don't know we don't know how to do. In the end, a fact is still a fact (but with endless beliefs and nonbeliefs).

*[sic]