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!

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.

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.

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.

Janeth and Julio watching over Melissa's place

Oh where, oh where, can Underdog be?

Another house, another flat, on another block...

Are these the memories that life is made of?

If I could tell you what I have seen, what we will hear, what could have happened if only...

I saw Fin again a few years later.  Just as he predicted, four years passed until the next significant event occurred.

He spoke to me in Russian, hoping that it would trigger the Finnish phrases told to me when I was a young boy.

I am, if nothing else, an honest man.  I will not tell a lie unless it feeds the seed of a good joke.

Thus, I will not tell you exactly what transpired between Fin and me in 1986.  The events of that year are easy for you to research, if you know which one(s) led to this moment that you and I share.

Otherwise, I will act as if this is the only moment we have.  After all, can you prove that 1986 existed?

Some of you will say you were born in 1986 but you miss the point.  The year 1986 never existed.

Listen to the echo of what I just said.  Time does not exist.

If time does not exist, do you think anyone is safe?  If time does not exist, time travel does not exist, right?

Fin gave me a set of instructions that I was more willing to memorise than when I was a frat boy focused on functions.

Fin helped me remember my Scouting days - the times I learned orienteering and other useful arts of appearing and disappearing.

Would you believe you are a set of ideas and that any part of you can be transported anywhere with the tiniest thought?

And you know what thoughts are, don't you?  I hope so.  We've gone over thoughts until my fingertips are smooth as glassy sandpaper.

Thus, you see that time does not exist and the best way to understand how all seven billion of us are and are not part of the same open secret organisation, right?

No?  Come on!  It's easy.  States of energy.  At least that's the simple definition most of us can use to communicate this idea.

Wardriving.  Texting.  Turning your domicile into a three-dimensional communication tool.  Using your five senses to get past your five senses and into the core means of delivering messages.

If you are to join the interplanetary members in moving forward off this planet, you've got to let go of conventionality.

Leave the daily issues of this world behind.  Believe me when I say we'll have plenty more issues to resolve on our way through this galaxy.

How many times have you seen a group of people standing around a box of corn while deciding how to divide it up, acting like it's the last food on Earth, and then you notice a whole field of fresh corn behind them ready to be picked and eaten?

Such is the journey our species is taking.  There are fields aplenty out there if you know what you're looking for.  Don't go for the obvious.  Think proverbially, outside the box.

I don't know how much longer I will live.  The DeathClock says 14606 days but that's just an estimate.  In any case, not very long.  I'm in no rush.  I'm not getting up at 4 o'clock every morning making plans that others have to follow because I say so.  Instead, I daydream until 4, sleep late and make those plans at my own pace.

Lead, follow or get out of the way.  That's all we have to do, this network of seven billion intimately connected to the web of ecosystems in which we live.

Some rule using the openness of peace, purposefully vulnerable.  I rule with a stern hand gripping the wheel driven by unseen hands for the sake of the species.

The decisions I make are not always easy and, although painful, hurt me far less than they hurt others.

I am unimportant.  When I die or live only matters in how the schedule gets completed.  Time does not matter to me because for me time does not exist.  However, the workings of the universe, the interplay of states of energy, will make a difference in our chance for survival should we delay too long.

I don't have to be right or wrong because I won't live to see much of what I know will happen.  If none of what I've seen occurs, then something else has happened that I know has the chance of happening.

All moments are possible.  The ideas of us live before and after our existences.

Some of you are actively involved, as you know.  Many of you do not know what you do to get involved.

As I've said, don't worry.  Your subculture is there for you to perpetuate as long as you stay away from intolerance.  If you behave intolerably, then MORTIE and other organisations will divert resources to respond accordingly.

I do not exist.  These words are illusions.  Pretend you were never here and the answer to the question you aren't asking appears as if by magic.  At least, that's what the Book of the Future said.  But you know how reliable it is.