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.
Showing posts with label past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label past. Show all posts
2010-08-26
Picture Stand
Alone with myself for the most part of the day going on three years now. Recalling memories more than making them.
This morning, I hang in mid-air, my tinnitus acting like an antigravity medium or viscous fluid with me colloidally suspended.
I remember, because of an audiocassette tape labelled "POWER DIVISION SALES PRESENTATION (c) 1983," the summer I visited Abraham Lincoln's law office in Springfield, IL, with future lawyer Rodney Pillsbury; walked alone through Hannibal, Missouri, home of memories belonging to Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens.
Other names: Og Mandino, Dave Dean and Zig Ziglar. Nashville. Iowa. St. Louis.
Farm fields. Subdivisions. Rivers. Towns. A flat tire. Sleeping in basements or attics to save money. Killing a jackrabbit with my car.
Lonely elderly ladies wanting to talk for hours about their dogs or African violets.
Country roads. No. Closed door. No. No soliciting. Not interested. We don't take kindly to strangers in these parts.
These memories come back to me through my brain, I suppose. I don't think muscle memory recalls walking door-to-door in the summer heat, my jaws clacking while I recited a sales pitch in hopes of getting a person interested in a two-volume "encyclopedia."
I'm getting older, my mental dictionary growing yet shrinking, suddenly realising that I meant "droves," not "troves," in a previous blog entry (although troves gave the sentence another meaning just as interesting).
And I had such high hopes for "Inception," expecting more than "Jacob's Ladder II." Maybe we need another Ring Cycle from a great composer/director to tell all there is to tell in the telling.
If you told me that the conservative right-wing political movement popular in my part of the world was led in part by a woman who quit her high-profile political job to pursue a selfish career in public speaking and has a daughter who conceived a child out of wedlock, I'd think I was in some sort of Inception deception, that's for sure.
And this is the real world, right?
High drama. Low-brow comedy. We...
I remind myself to say I don't know anything. I am a robot whose only function is to encourage us to get a small population of our re-engineered species off the planet.
Just because reality appears to beat any comedian in acting out a great farce doesn't mean I should write skits for the sideshow acts, does it?
If I already know what's going to happen next, then anything I do or say should not have an effect on the outcome. But I know that's not true. The world isn't draining the U.S. of its resources in order to drive it into a downward-spiralling depression - this country's economic input/output is essential to global commerce, is it not? Surely we're past the days of national-level revenge, when the new bullies on the block got to push has-beens around for fun and increased earnings?
My colleagues tell me to be quiet, that I talk too much. Their investments are much more important than my humorous musings.
I don't know what to say. I wanted to say that I value the idea of freedom that this country once represented. But if a court of judges in our country can declare that only the rich have the right to privacy in their own yard/driveway, then where can I turn to declare our species has the natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?
This is no longer my country. It was taken over by conspiracy theorists and overzealous defenders against global terrorism long ago. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin not so much.
Why work my brain over to discover new ways to combine words if we assign corporations and governments the right to control our societies? What happened to the right of the individual, innocent until proven guilty and all the other ideals handed to me in my youth? Why my struggle to defend our species against ourselves for little or no reason, a hand trowel trying to hold back a tsunami wave? Why not just hand over my whole body to be plugged into the "anything you say, I'll do" machine and get it over with?
I'm tired. I'm older in thought than I thought possible. I live only in this moment and this moment is so twisted out of shape, I'm afraid I can't find my way out.
Now that's comedy worth writing, an endless loop of endless loops of improbable contradictions, expressed not so much visually but in all states of energy at once in a single moment, revealing the levels that my colleagues don't think the mass-hypnotised masses are ready to see yet.
I wonder if this audiocassette tape still works. Maybe there's a worthwhile message in it that I've forgotten.
This morning, I hang in mid-air, my tinnitus acting like an antigravity medium or viscous fluid with me colloidally suspended.
I remember, because of an audiocassette tape labelled "POWER DIVISION SALES PRESENTATION (c) 1983," the summer I visited Abraham Lincoln's law office in Springfield, IL, with future lawyer Rodney Pillsbury; walked alone through Hannibal, Missouri, home of memories belonging to Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens.
Other names: Og Mandino, Dave Dean and Zig Ziglar. Nashville. Iowa. St. Louis.
Farm fields. Subdivisions. Rivers. Towns. A flat tire. Sleeping in basements or attics to save money. Killing a jackrabbit with my car.
Lonely elderly ladies wanting to talk for hours about their dogs or African violets.
Country roads. No. Closed door. No. No soliciting. Not interested. We don't take kindly to strangers in these parts.
These memories come back to me through my brain, I suppose. I don't think muscle memory recalls walking door-to-door in the summer heat, my jaws clacking while I recited a sales pitch in hopes of getting a person interested in a two-volume "encyclopedia."
I'm getting older, my mental dictionary growing yet shrinking, suddenly realising that I meant "droves," not "troves," in a previous blog entry (although troves gave the sentence another meaning just as interesting).
And I had such high hopes for "Inception," expecting more than "Jacob's Ladder II." Maybe we need another Ring Cycle from a great composer/director to tell all there is to tell in the telling.
If you told me that the conservative right-wing political movement popular in my part of the world was led in part by a woman who quit her high-profile political job to pursue a selfish career in public speaking and has a daughter who conceived a child out of wedlock, I'd think I was in some sort of Inception deception, that's for sure.
And this is the real world, right?
High drama. Low-brow comedy. We...
I remind myself to say I don't know anything. I am a robot whose only function is to encourage us to get a small population of our re-engineered species off the planet.
Just because reality appears to beat any comedian in acting out a great farce doesn't mean I should write skits for the sideshow acts, does it?
If I already know what's going to happen next, then anything I do or say should not have an effect on the outcome. But I know that's not true. The world isn't draining the U.S. of its resources in order to drive it into a downward-spiralling depression - this country's economic input/output is essential to global commerce, is it not? Surely we're past the days of national-level revenge, when the new bullies on the block got to push has-beens around for fun and increased earnings?
My colleagues tell me to be quiet, that I talk too much. Their investments are much more important than my humorous musings.
I don't know what to say. I wanted to say that I value the idea of freedom that this country once represented. But if a court of judges in our country can declare that only the rich have the right to privacy in their own yard/driveway, then where can I turn to declare our species has the natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?
This is no longer my country. It was taken over by conspiracy theorists and overzealous defenders against global terrorism long ago. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin not so much.
Why work my brain over to discover new ways to combine words if we assign corporations and governments the right to control our societies? What happened to the right of the individual, innocent until proven guilty and all the other ideals handed to me in my youth? Why my struggle to defend our species against ourselves for little or no reason, a hand trowel trying to hold back a tsunami wave? Why not just hand over my whole body to be plugged into the "anything you say, I'll do" machine and get it over with?
I'm tired. I'm older in thought than I thought possible. I live only in this moment and this moment is so twisted out of shape, I'm afraid I can't find my way out.
Now that's comedy worth writing, an endless loop of endless loops of improbable contradictions, expressed not so much visually but in all states of energy at once in a single moment, revealing the levels that my colleagues don't think the mass-hypnotised masses are ready to see yet.
I wonder if this audiocassette tape still works. Maybe there's a worthwhile message in it that I've forgotten.
2010-08-13
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.
2010-08-11
Modular Emotion System
Pardon my delay in responding to some of your inquiries - recent airplane travel required the removal of my brain implant. Reinstallation took longer than usual to reacquire normative parameter settings.
Question: if a commander does not support his senior enlisted staff, should he re-educate himself or receive reprimands? Surely, he is not insuperordinate? Don't make me call out lack of respect in the chain of command.
If a worker is credited for work she did not perform, should her superiours' superiours receive detailed reports suggesting appropriate action to save a critical project from imploding due to low morale and high stress amongst her coworkers?
In my father's youth, he was told that the horse owned by his Granddad (Frank E.) had race horse blood (i.e., bloodline). He would not let another horse-drawn vehicle pass him. He would speed up on his own to prevent that. That must have been the "hot-rodding" of the day. My father's grandmother (Mamaw) was known as a fast driver of the "horse and buggy" and the Model T Ford that succeeded the horse, so fast driving must be in our blood as well! Horse and Model T were gone before my father's birth. In the post-Depression and WWII days, they walked!
If you could eat regolith to feed your metallic liquid "blood" system based on redesigned DNA, would you? If you no longer had to breathe, what would your sense of time feel like?
More as it develops... but then again, who's using camera film these days? You are if you don't want electronic records.
Question: if a commander does not support his senior enlisted staff, should he re-educate himself or receive reprimands? Surely, he is not insuperordinate? Don't make me call out lack of respect in the chain of command.
If a worker is credited for work she did not perform, should her superiours' superiours receive detailed reports suggesting appropriate action to save a critical project from imploding due to low morale and high stress amongst her coworkers?
In my father's youth, he was told that the horse owned by his Granddad (Frank E.) had race horse blood (i.e., bloodline). He would not let another horse-drawn vehicle pass him. He would speed up on his own to prevent that. That must have been the "hot-rodding" of the day. My father's grandmother (Mamaw) was known as a fast driver of the "horse and buggy" and the Model T Ford that succeeded the horse, so fast driving must be in our blood as well! Horse and Model T were gone before my father's birth. In the post-Depression and WWII days, they walked!
If you could eat regolith to feed your metallic liquid "blood" system based on redesigned DNA, would you? If you no longer had to breathe, what would your sense of time feel like?
More as it develops... but then again, who's using camera film these days? You are if you don't want electronic records.
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